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That's a velvet worm. You can see what happens when you poke it. It squirts slime all over to catch prey, fend off predators and poking fingers. A Chilean scientist studying at Harvard wondered weather the animal had a complicated way of controlling its slime spray. He started by looking at videos of the animal made in the wild, then he collected some specimens to study in the lab. Turns out, the velvet worm's squirt control is really simple. It has a big slime reservoir, and flexible spouts called "papillae." As it squeezes the reservoir, slime comes out faster until it makes the papillae wave around like a loose garden hose. The researchers made an artificial version, but they need to miniaturize it more. There's a whole world of microscopic manufacturing that could use such a simple, effective spraying system. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Just a few years ago, Crispr was a cipher something that sounded to most ears like a device for keeping lettuce fresh. Today, Crispr Cas9 is widely known as a powerful way to edit genes. Scientists are deploying it in promising experiments, and a number of companies are already using it to develop drugs to treat conditions ranging from cancer to sickle cell anemia. Yet there is still a lot of misunderstanding around it. Crispr describes a series of DNA sequences discovered in microbes, part of a system to defend against attacking viruses. Microbes make thousands of forms of Crispr, most of which are just starting to be investigated by scientists. If they can be harnessed, some may bring changes to medicine that we can barely imagine. On Thursday, in the journal Science, researchers demonstrated just how much is left to discover. They found that an ordinary mouth bacterium makes a form of Crispr that breaks apart not DNA, but RNA the molecular messenger used by cells to turn genes into proteins. If scientists can get this process to work in human cells, they may open up a new front in gene engineering, gaining the ability to precisely adjust the proteins in cells, for instance, or to target cancer cells. "The groundbreaking thing about this work is that it now opens up the RNA world to Crispr," said Oliver Rackham, a synthetic biologist at the University of Western Australia who was not involved in the study. Crispr was first discovered in 1987, but it took decades for scientists to figure out that microbes needed the system to recognize DNA from invading viruses and to chop it into pieces, stopping the infection. In 2012, a team of scientists led by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at Umea University in Sweden, discovered how to use this microbial defense as a gene editing tool that could potentially alter any piece of DNA. Most of that early work was carried out with Crispr molecules from a species of bacteria that lives in human skin called Streptococcus pyogenes. Once those molecules proved effective at reassembling human DNA, a number of scientists began looking at other species for Crispr systems that might be even better. Some researchers investigated familiar species that have been studied in labs for decades. But Eugene V. Koonin and his colleagues at the National Center for Biotechnology Information instead scoured databases containing hundreds of millions of genetic sequences for those that resembled Crispr genes. Once they discovered some candidates, they joined forces with Feng Zhang of M.I.T., who published one of the first studies on using Crispr to edit human DNA. One of the first candidates they looked at came from a species of bacteria that lives in the mouth, known as Leptotrichia shahii. It had a group of genes that looked like Crispr genes in some ways, but with stark differences. When the researchers equipped bacteria with these genes, which they called C2c2, they found that the organisms gained a defense that had never been seen. Many viruses do not contain DNA. Instead, their genetic information is encoded in RNA, DNA's single stranded cousin, which they use to hijack the genes of their hosts and cause them to make new viruses. Some of these RNA viruses, such as H.I.V. and poliovirus, attack our species. Many others attack bacteria. Previously discovered Crispr molecules are very good at whacking apart DNA but don't protect bacteria from an RNA virus. Dr. Zhang and his colleagues discovered that bacteria with C2c2 make molecules that can attack RNA and chop it up, destroying the invaders. The researchers also found that they could tailor these genes to cut any RNA molecule they wanted. Now they are tinkering with the process to try to get it to work in human cells. "There could be a lot of cool applications," Dr. Zhang said. He hopes, for example, that C2c2 molecules could be trained to destroy RNA made only in cancer cells. Those cells would be unable to make essential proteins and die. While it remains to be seen if these will become useful tools, Dr. Koonin said, the discovery has already revealed something important about the evolutionary history of these microbial defenses. Some parts of C2c2 genes share a common evolutionary origin with the defense systems seen in other bacterial species. Over billions of years, Dr. Koonin said, evolution has blindly tinkered with these genes in order to generate new ways to protect against viruses. Exploring this evolution is more productive for now than trying to design gene editing technology from scratch, Dr. Zhang said. "We're not quite smart enough yet," he added. In fact, some future advances in gene editing may even not be based on Crispr. Microbes have evolved several different lines of defense against viruses, some of which are only now coming to light. In recent years, for example, scientists have discovered that microbes can use another group of proteins, called Argonautes, to chop up viral DNA. Last month, a team of Chinese researchers announced that they were able to use Argonaute proteins to edit DNA in human cells. Paul S. Knoepfler, a cell biologist at the University of California, Davis, is taking a wait and see attitude about Argonaute proteins, but he said he would not be surprised if they quickly turned out to be yet another powerful gene editing tool. "This field seems to move in dog years," he said. "It feels like seven times faster than real time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The signature work of the second wave feminist artist Hannah Wilke has also been the source of its criti cism. In the 1960s, Ms. Wilke used vaginal imagery for empowerment, sculpting various materials into shapes that evoke the female anatomy; today, they can seem essentialist about gender. She also performed and posed nude, the radicalness of which was somewhat undercut by how conventionally attractive she was. These criticisms, although valid, fall away before her art. What struck me most in the exhibition "Force of Nature," which provides a two room overview of Ms. Wilke's career, was the range of emotions she elicited. She reveled in and grappled with pleasure, but always with a dose of humor, as in the famous "S.O.S. Starification Object Series" (1974 82), in which the artist, appearing topless with bits of vulva shaped gum stuck to her body and face, looks both seductive and ridiculous. And there's searing pain in "Intra Venus," made while Ms. Wilke was battling lymphoma. (She died of the disease in 1993 at the age 52 .) These final self portraits are excruciating. Yet, even in her depleted state, the artist retained her magnetism. Ms. Wilke's gaze is so direct and uncompromising, it turns her viewers into witnesses. The show is a testament to a career and life spent going as a text in the series "So Help Me Hannah" (1978) states "beyond the permissibly given." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In the past month, hundreds of students have dropped out of their fraternities and sororities at Vanderbilt University. They have gathered, digitally, using group run Instagram activist pages. They have written searing op eds condemning their own organizations for the student newspaper, The Vanderbilt Hustler. And they have petitioned the administration to ban Greek organizations from campus. The mass action, which has taken place while students have been away from the Nashville campus for the summer and isolated because of the pandemic, has been accelerated by a handful of racist incidents that have been surfaced in videos and on social media. But students said their real reasons have deeper roots: that Greek life is exclusionary, racist and misogynist, as well as resistant to reform because of the hierarchical nature of the national Greek organizations, which control local chapters. Similar "Abolish Greek Life" movements have sprung up at other universities around the country, including at the University of Richmond, Duke, Emory, American University, Northwestern and the University of North Carolina. Emma Heck, 21, a senior at Emory who recently dropped out of the Pi Beta Phi sorority, said, "The national organizations are always going to prohibit any real change." Max Ratelle, 21, a rising senior at Tufts, said he dropped out of his fraternity because reform felt futile. "We're just going to see history repeat itself over and over again," he said. On Wednesday, the governing panel of sororities at Tufts announced in a statement that rush (when students become acquainted with the different fraternities or sororities on campus) would not take place in the fall as they "decide what the best course of action is for Greek Life at Tufts" and continue to examine "the structurally and situationally problematic nature of Greek Life." The movement at Vanderbilt has been the biggest so far, with many students leaving several prominent fraternity and sorority chapters there, including Delta Tau Delta and Kappa Kappa Gamma. Both national organizations said that membership numbers remained healthy; Delta Tau Delta said that "approximately a third" of the Vanderbilt chapter had disaffiliated, and Kappa Kappa Gamma said "a majority of our women at Vanderbilt University remain members." In both cases, formal disaffiliation requires that each student submit paperwork; at Kappa Kappa Gamma, there is a waiting period of several weeks. Both organizations stated their commitment to supporting remaining members in efforts to address and reform issues within the Greek system and outside it. Taylor Thompson, 21, a rising senior at Vanderbilt University, was one of the first to leave the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority in late May, after the death of George Floyd in police custody. As protests flared around the country, Ms. Thompson, who is Black, said there were no efforts from her sorority sisters to discuss anti racist action. "Nothing was being talked about in our group chat except for, like, a trip to Vegas," Ms. Thompson said. She sent the chat a message expressing "disappointment that whenever something like this happens, I'm the first person to bring it up or another person of color is," she said, and urged her sisters, most of whom are white, to share resources and make donations related to the protests. At first, reception was positive. Lots of her sisters "liked" her comment, and the conversation flowed for an hour or so. But it soon fell off track. She and four other women of color decided to quit. "I didn't want to continue to have to spend all my time educating all the girls around me," Ms. Thompson said. "We've had countless, you know, diversity inclusion sessions and workshops, and everybody is, quote unquote, trying. But the fruits of that labor don't really show up when it means the most." Today, according to Vanderbilt, more than 35 percent of the nearly 7,000 undergraduates there belong to a Greek life organization, which are housed in 25 on campus buildings. But there is a historical precedent for students walking out of their fraternities and sororities. During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, students rejected Greek life as a bastion of reactionary politics and racism, and dropped their affiliation en masse. Some local chapters disbanded. In 1968, a group of student activists occupied a Columbia University administration building during a protest. According to the historian Paul Cronin, these students faced off in a violent clash with a counterrevolutionary group calling itself the Majority Coalition, which consisted mainly of conservative athletes and fraternity brothers. ("A row of clean shaven white men, mostly wearing jackets and ties, punched away as students and outsiders tried to bash through what they called the Jock Line," Mr. Cronin wrote in Politico.) One of those in the Majority Coalition is the current attorney general, William P. Barr, who belonged to the Sigma Nu fraternity. Attorney General Barr is far from the only powerful government figure with Greek ties. Eighteen United States presidents, both Democratic and Republican, have belonged to fraternities, along with scores of other politicians and titans of industry. Vanderbilt fraternity alumni include William Bain, the co founder of the consultancy giant Bain Company, the Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and the Democratic governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear. The promise of networking connections and camaraderie is a large part of the draw. At many schools, fraternities and sororities run the social scene and throw the biggest parties. Since 1984, when the drinking age rose to 21 nationwide, fraternities became the "unofficial bartenders" of many campuses, Mr. Hechinger said. But with the pandemic preventing many students from going back to campus in the fall, Greek organizations have less to offer in a social sense. Fraternity and sorority dues, about 50 percent of which often go to the national organizations, are harder to justify. Ms. Thompson helps run the Instagram account abolishvandyifcandpanhellenic, which urges students to drop their Greek affiliation and publishes anonymous and signed submissions from students about their negative experiences with Greek life. In early July someone sent her a video in which a white frat brother from Delta Kappa Epsilon yelled a racist slur at several white Kappa Alpha Theta sisters, one of whom was wearing what appeared to be a mock durag. Ms. Thompson published it on her own Instagram on July 3. Within hours, dozens of members of Kappa Alpha Theta began dropping their affiliation; some began calling for a vote to remove the organization's charter so that it could no longer operate on campus. The sorority soon received an email from the advisory board chair for its chapter, Mary Lee Bartlett, who graduated from Vanderbilt in 1985 and works as a liaison between the current students and the national organization. "PLEASE! Zip your lips on these topics!" Ms. Bartlett wrote in the email, the phrase highlighted in gold for emphasis. She urged the current sorority sisters not to speak to friends or family about either the video or "the interest members have expressed in either surrendering the Charter and/or individually resigning." Someone leaked Ms. Bartlett's email to Emma Pinto, a Vanderbilt senior who left Zeta Tau Alpha, and she posted that on Instagram as well. For many angry students, it was a clear cut example of the way the national organizations put their reputations ahead of accountability. (Neither Kappa Alpha Theta or Ms. Bartlett responded to requests for comment from The New York Times.) The email, Ms. Thompson said, made her and others "critically examine" why the organization would want to "put a gag order on the girls in that sorority." In the past, the national organizations have been a moderating force on Greek life, stepping in to limit hazing or try to prevent racist party themes, Mr. Hechinger said. Now, though, many students think the nationals are a barrier to reform. A rising senior at Vanderbilt, who was allowed to speak anonymously for privacy reasons, was, until late June, in a high ranking leadership position in the fraternity Delta Tau Delta. He said that a push for outright abolishment could have been avoided if the administration and national organizations had been more flexible about student concerns. He said that initially he felt it was his responsibility as a leader in his organization and "someone with bargaining chips with the administration" to push for reforms to Greek life on campus, rather than walking away completely. He and several other fraternity members wrote up a policy memo and arranged a meeting with Vanderbilt administrators, calling for reforms that included a ban on Greek social dues and for redistribution of campus resources. "I was asking them to sign off on a housing application that would allow Greek houses to be applied for by any campus organization," he said, in order to "redistribute some of the social capital on campus." The meeting, which happened on June 29 with Kristin Torrey, the director of Greek life at Vanderbilt, left several of the brothers feeling dismissed. "She just showed, like, total animosity and unwillingness to change," the senior recalled. Ms. Torrey did not respond to a request for comment from The Times. A spokeswoman for Vanderbilt said the school was "available to work with students as they navigate reforms, while respecting students' autonomy to create, sustain and lead various organizations as a part of the college experience." A week later, a group of students from Delta Tau Delta had a call with a representative from the national chapter, in which they expressed concerns about fraternity conduct and felt similarly dismissed. After that, many of the brothers, including all of its senior leadership, decided to quit the fraternity. Twenty seven of them signed a letter in The Vanderbilt Hustler, calling for the end of Greek life on campus. "Our genuine efforts towards meaningful reform have been met with systemic apathy and animosity," they wrote. "Because of our failed attempt at reform, those of us who have disaffiliated are adamant in our call for the abolition of historically white Greek Life. To all those harmed by Delta Tau Delta, we extend a sincere apology there is no reversing the damage we have caused." Jack Kreman, the chief executive officer of Delta Tau Delta International Fraternity, wrote in a statement that the national organization "believes calls to abolish fraternities fall short of truly dealing with campus wide cultural challenges," and reiterated its commitment "to working with the remaining members to address matters of concern." Hundreds of Vanderbilt students began talking in lengthy group chats and collaborating in Google Docs; according to Ms. Pinto, there is no designated leader among them. "This was collective organizing and collective action," she said. On July 7, three of the highest ranking fraternity brothers at Vanderbilt Callen DiGiovanni, who was the student president of the Interfraternity Council; Joshua Allen, who was the student attorney general; and Alex Snape, who was student vice president of housing wrote a Medium post resigning from their positions. "To the students and alumni who have been harmed by our organization, we sincerely apologize," they wrote. "We know that words don't erase the past, but hope that our action today will help this University move beyond this toxic culture." Most students who are members of historically Black fraternities and sororities have no plans to drop; at Vanderbilt and other schools, the Abolish Greek Life movement is targeted at historically white Greek life organizations, which fall into either the Interfraternity Council or the National Panhellenic Conference. (Most historically Black Greek organizations belong to the National Pan Hellenic Council.) For much of their history, fraternities and sororities were segregated; the charters of many organizations explicitly prohibited nonwhite non Christians from joining. Though white fraternities and sororities were officially desegregated by the end of the 1960s, many local chapters continued to informally prioritize new white members. In an interview, Shelby Hart, a Vanderbilt junior who belongs to the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, said that Black Greek life can provide a separation from the prejudice of white Greek life. "I have heard of many occurrences where even people of color within these organizations faced racism through other members using racial slurs," she said. "I know people who've been called the N word on campus by other students." "The university is doing a very strategic higher ed method that a lot of universities apply when there is some type of prejudice scandal that occurs on campus,' she said. "They say that this 'does not align with our values.'" This, she believes, is an attempt to dodge accountability and avoid substantive changes. "The rhetoric the university has used makes it seem as if these events are isolated, and that these events do not reflect Vanderbilt's culture," she said. "However, they do." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
, whose experience caring for his 3 year old son after the boy contracted chickenpox led him to develop a vaccine for the virus that is now used all over the world, died on Monday in Osaka, Japan. He was 85. The cause was heart failure, said his longtime secretary, Maki Fukui. In 1964 Dr. Takahashi, who had spent several years studying the measles and polio viruses in Japan, was on a research fellowship at Baylor Medical College in Houston when his son, Teruyuki, came down with a severe case of chickenpox after playing with a friend who had the virus. "My son developed a rash on his face that quickly spread across his body," Dr. Takahashi recalled in a 2011 interview with The Financial Times. "His symptoms progressed quickly and severely. His temperature shot up and he began to have trouble breathing. He was in a terrible way, and all my wife and I could do was to watch him day and night. We didn't sleep. He seemed so ill that I remember worrying about what would happen to him." "But gradually, the symptoms lessened and my son recovered," he added. "I realized then that I should use my knowledge of viruses to develop a chickenpox vaccine." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
SAN FRANCISCO Amazon quietly banned Adolf Hitler's manifesto "Mein Kampf" late last week, part of its accelerating efforts to remove Nazi and other hate filled material from its bookstore, before quickly reversing itself. The retailer, which controls the majority of the book market in the United States, is caught between two demands that cannot be reconciled. Amazon is under pressure to keep hate literature off its vast platform at a moment when extremist impulses seem on the rise. But the company does not want to be seen as the arbiter of what people are allowed to read, which is traditionally the hallmark of repressive regimes. Booksellers that sell on Amazon say the retailer has no coherent philosophy about what it decides to prohibit, and seems largely guided by public complaints. Over the last 18 months, it has dropped books by Nazis, the Nation of Islam and the American neo Nazis David Duke and George Lincoln Rockwell. But it has also allowed many equally offensive books to continue to be sold. An Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement on Tuesday that the platform provides "customers with access to a variety of viewpoints" and noted that "all retailers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
NORRISTOWN, Pa. Bill Cosby was supposed to be her mentor, Andrea Constand told a jury here Friday. But instead he became her attacker, she said, so unrelenting in his sexual pursuit even after she had rejected his advances that he drugged and molested her during a visit to his home in January 2004. "I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched," Ms. Constand said. "I was limp, and I could not fight him off." Ms. Constand was more composed and less emotional in giving her account on Friday than she had been last summer, when she first testified about her encounter with Mr. Cosby at his house near Philadelphia. A mistrial was declared in that first sexual assault case when the jury became deadlocked. This time, Mr. Cosby's defense team has taken a more aggressive stance toward Ms. Constand, describing her as a "con artist" who engaged in a consensual encounter and then concocted a story of assault to score a big payday. Ms. Constand sued Mr. Cosby in 2005 after prosecutors initially declined to charge Mr. Cosby, and received a 3.38 million settlement. Prosecutors on Friday seemed cognizant of the defense efforts to depict Ms. Constand in an unflattering light when they asked her why she had agreed to cooperate when they brought charges, even after securing a large financial settlement. "For justice," she replied. In more than two hours on the stand, led by Kristen Gibbons Feden, a special prosecutor, Ms. Constand described how an older man she respected, and who was a major source of career guidance, had taken advantage of her trust. She recalled meeting Mr. Cosby, a famous alumnus of Temple University, where she worked, during a basketball game in 2002. She was an administrator for the women's team, and she said he subsequently called her office and invited her to dinners at his homes in New York and Connecticut, which she attended. On two occasions, when they were alone, she said, she had rebuffed his advances. Only once did she pause in her testimony, and that was just before she provided a graphic, detailed accounting of what she said happened at the Cosby home near Philadelphia in January 2004. Mr. Cosby gave her three blue pills, she said. She testified that he said: "'Put 'em down. They will help you relax.'" "I began to see double vision," she continued. "I was very scared," she said. "I didn't know what was happening, why I was feeling that way." Her court appearance followed several days of testimony from five other women who said they, too, believed Mr. Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted them. As part of Mr. Cosby's defense, his lawyers have said they will bring forward an academic adviser at Temple, who said she had roomed with Ms. Constand during university basketball trips and that Ms. Constand had once told her before the incident with Mr. Cosby that she could fabricate a claim of sexual assault about a celebrity to get money. "I recognize the name," she said this time. But asked if she had ever roomed with Ms. Jackson, she said, "No." In recent days, the defense has worked to find holes in the other women's testimony, suggesting that their accounts were not credible and were probably motivated by a desire for money or media attention. Mr. Cosby, now 80, is not charged with assaulting the other five women who have testified, but prosecutors hoped to show a pattern of predatory behavior that eventually targeted Ms. Constand, now 45. At the first trial, prosecutors were allowed to introduce only one other accuser to bolster Ms. Constand's account. Mr. Cosby has denied any inappropriate behavior and said the sex with Ms. Constand was consensual. After the encounter, Ms. Constand said, she went to his house several weeks later to confront him. Mr. Cosby discussed the night a bit, suggesting he thought she had had an orgasm, but then evaded her questions, Ms. Constand testified. As Ms. Constand spoke, Mr. Cosby sometimes sat back in his chair at the defense table, listening carefully. At times, he stared at the ceiling as she spoke. Ms. Constand said she had feared retaliation from Mr. Cosby if she were to speak out, but nearly a year later she told her mother what happened. Together, they spoke to Mr. Cosby, who, she said, admitted to giving her pills, penetrating her with his fingers, and using her hand to masturbate himself. "After a very short time on the telephone with my mom there, he eventually apologized for doing what he did, but he would not tell us what he gave me," she said. "He said 'I don't know. I have to go check the prescription bottle.'" Mr. Cosby has said the pills were Benadryl. Under cross examination by Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, Ms. Constand was pressed to explain some discrepancies in her account, such as why she told Pennsylvania police that the encounter had occurred in March 2004, not January, as she had told Canadian authorities and has since insisted. "I was just trying to recall an enormous amount of information," she said. "I was nervous." In one deposition in the civil case, Mr. Mesereau said Ms. Constand had recounted lying on the bed in Mr. Cosby's room at the hotel of a Connecticut venue where he was performing. In court Friday she said she had not. "I was mistaken," Ms. Constand said. "I was just trying to piece it together." Mr. Mesereau suggested that Ms. Constand was the engine driving the relationship, that she flirted with him, accepted gifts of perfume and cashmere sweaters from Mr. Cosby, never asked about his wife and had a closer relationship with him than she was admitting, even visiting and calling him after what she had described as an assault. "You went back to the house with the person who assaulted you," he asked, "and after that you had your family go to the theater with him?" Ms. Constand has said she only went to the house to confront him. She has said she accompanied her family to the theater because her parents whom she still had not told of the encounter wanted to see Mr. Cosby perform. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times Before converting a set of handkerchiefs into a bra and panties that began a 40 year career for her and her best friend, Gale Epstein dabbled in many varieties of D.I.Y. "I had a lot of stuff from her," said Lida Orzeck, 70, Ms. Epstein's business partner and longtime friend. It was a cold afternoon in March, and she was seated next to Ms. Epstein, 71, at a long white table at the Park Avenue headquarters of Hanky Panky, the underwear company the two women founded in 1977. "You were getting jeans from vintage shops, then you sewed up the bottoms or something and made them into pocketbooks." "That was my denim period, yes," said Ms. Epstein, a Parsons School of Design graduate. "I had a suede period too. That was your first wedding dress. That was pre Hanky Panky, so that was suede and applique. The second was during Hanky Panky, so it was hand embroidered silk scarves that we were using in our line." "My wedding dresses are only two out of, what, 10?" Ms. Orzeck said. "Gale also has a lot of sisters and other friends." "They're not conventional dresses," Ms. Epstein said. "But anyway, I don't design conventionally." Conventional or not, Ms. Epstein's designs have certainly proven popular. The thong she created for Hanky Panky in 1986, known simply as 4811 and priced at about 20, is still a top selling item for the company, which counts Rihanna, Beyonce, Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, Emma Watson, Eva Longoria, Kim Kardashian West and many others as customers. Thongs, which Hanky Panky produces in a rainbow of hues and several styles, make up more than half of the company's 50 million business. The other half is made up of different types of stretchy, form fitting bottoms and lacy, colorful bras. The company's products have all been made in the United States primarily in the New York area since its founding, a considerable feat given that the number of manufacturing jobs in the city has been declining since the 1950s and significantly dropped after 9/11 as one apparel company after another has moved production overseas. In October, Hanky Panky's employees a significant portion of whom work at a 90,000 square foot multiuse warehouse in Queens discovered that they would soon be part owners of the company. At a party celebrating Hanky Panky's 40th birthday, Ms. Epstein and Ms. Orzeck announced that the company had established an employee stock ownership plan, which transfers the ownership of the company over to a trust for the benefit of its workers. One need not fear that the next Tanga panty's design will be crowdsourced. "I'm still the last word on fit," Ms. Epstein said. "Of course, we make all sizes and we have our in house focus group, but I'm still involved in the look and feel of everything that comes through the design room. I don't even trust models to give me exact feedback." At the company's warehouse last month, Rodney Yetter, Hanky Panky's quality control manager, explained how his team contributes to a customer return rate that is one tenth of 1 percent. "Any type of thing that goes wrong with these is the same type of thing," Mr. Yetter said. "Human error is easy to find if you know where to look for it. A lace with runoffs, a skipped stitch on a machine. If you're counting from the crotch area, it's easy to spot." He added: "Ninety percent of the returns are because of fit." Many of the thongs are "one size fits most" and fit sizes 2 to 14. In a world that requires endless size calibration, this is surely a relief to customers (petite and plus sizes are also available). "We offer an assortment of brands, but Hanky Panky continues to be a category leader," David Law, the chief merchant at Lord Taylor, wrote in an email. Lord Taylor was the first store to receive an order from Hanky Panky, in 1977, when Ms. Epstein and Ms. Orzeck personally delivered 144 tops and bottoms that Ms. Epstein had spent an entire weekend sewing. The design that had lured the store's buyer was a bra and bikini set that Ms. Epstein created from Victorian era handkerchiefs she found in a bridal shop and gave to Ms. Orzeck as a birthday gift. An original version of the set is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's permanent collection. Ms. Orzeck took the lead on sales, despite having little experience in the area. She had a doctorate from Columbia University in social psychology and her first job out of graduate school was assessing how the New York Police Department interacted with victims of sex crimes. "Boldly, as if I knew what I was doing, I called up stores, asked for buyers, made appointments," Ms. Orzeck said. "They all saw me. Because that's the way business was done then." The department stores were quick to place orders, but soon bigger companies began copying Ms. Epstein's designs. "We lost the department store business because they were looking for low price and high volume," Ms. Orzeck said. The Thong That Changed Everything In 1986, Ms. Epstein developed her version of the thong, a slightly more modest version of the "G string" that had long been worn only by strippers and prostitutes. "One of the reasons the thong became important in the 1970s and '80s is that more women were wearing pants, so the visible panty line became an issue," said Colleen Hill, the curator of costume and accessories at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "There was also more acceptance of the body. The fitness crazy in the '80s encouraged women to feel better about their bodies and show them off more." Many department stores balked at the idea of selling backless underwear, so Hanky Panky turned to boutiques. Over the next two decades or so, it steadily built a following but remained mostly under the radar. "They started out small and were always very focused on quality, which they still are," Ms. Hill said. Eventually, the company expanded to an additional floor of the building, hiring more than 100 new employees. "We have always grown, and we have lived through five recessions," Ms. Orzeck said. In fact, the economic downturn in 2008 is what allowed them the breathing room to enter e commerce, late in the game. "By 2009 every brand had a website, except for us," Ms. Orzeck said. "So the time was right. We had to convince the boutiques that they wouldn't lose business." In recent years, Ms. Epstein and Ms. Orzeck have scaled back their involvement in the company. "I'm not in the weeds the way I was the first 25 years," Ms. Orzeck said. Why shouldn't they take it a little bit easier after turning the thong into a classic cut, one that remains a staple in many drawers (despite what the millennials may have you believe)? But despite handing over some of their ownership, they have no plans to leave. "Why would I retire?" Ms. Orzeck said. "This is still our baby." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
What does it say about the state of contemporary ballet when a costume and set designer curates a program with more acumen and imagination than a star principal at the Royal Ballet? Maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise: A designer, like a director, has a visual point of view as well as the ability to grasp a theatrical world and not just, say, the beauty of the line of a leg. As the Joyce Theater wrapped up its ballet festival last week, it was the designer Jean Marc Puissant in truth, he is a former dancer who arranged an evening of intriguingly c ontrasting parts: a young female choreographer with a taste for restraint; a Maurice Bejart duet dusted off for a new generation; and a vintage work by Kenneth MacMillan, light in tone yet vibrant in appearance. Part of the festival overseen by Kevin O'Hare, the Royal's director, Mr. Puissant's program, Tuesday through Thursday, may have featured older works the Bejart and the MacMillan date to the 1970s but it felt fresh compared to the final program, which began Friday and was organized by the dancer Edward Watson. That made for an aimless night of solos and duets, including James Alsop's "Assume Form" for the former New York City Ballet principal Robbie Fairchild he arched and spun to the lyrics of the James Blake son g, pausing intermittently to flick his wrist up and down at nothing and Laila Diallo's gesture driven "All My Song" for Sarah Lamb of the Royal. The highlight of "3 With D," a duet by Javier de Frutos, was when Mr. Watson and Mr. Fairchild, embroiled in a difficult relationship with the help of two chairs, suddenly kissed : It, at least, had the virtue of being unexpected. The not so grand finale was Arthur Pita's three part "Cristaux." In moments, especially the first duet, it seemed less a dance than a commercial for Swarovski crystals. Here, Ms. Lamb, in a glittering tutu by Yann Seabra, twirled around the stage like a ballerina in a music box (she was underused all night), while Mr. Fairchild lay on the floor or darted around her. After a duet with the City Ballet principal Maria Kowroski heavy on spotlights and arms Mr. Watson returned to the stage alone; his face was covered with a crystal hood. He stretched and contorted his body like taffy until he took a seat on the lip of the stage, removed his covering and hopped down. Slowly, he retreated backward up an aisle to Frank Moon's arrangement of the adagio movement of Georges Bizet's "Symphony in C." This was the kind of dance that made you feel like you were backed into a corner, too : It was stifling. But Mr. Puissant's program was one to respect. Gemma Bond's "Then and Again," a work of choreographic intelligence set to Alfredo Piatti's "Twelve Caprices" for solo cello, highlighted the elegant scale of Stephanie Williams, a corps member at American Ballet Theater. And the bright charm of MacMillan's "Elite Syncopations" divertissement, a sweet concoction set to ragtime music, lit up the stage with Ian Spurling's unitards that made it look as though costumes with arrows, buttons and stars had been painted on the dancers' bodies. The somber and sentimental Bejart ballet "Song of a Wayfarer" falls into an uninspiring category: the not worst ballet by a hollow choreographer. Performed by Joseph Gordon and David Hallberg, it was more than worth seeing, even as it wavered between hokeyness and powerful gravity. Set to Mahler, the work is about a man (Mr. Gordon, of City Ballet) coming up against his destiny (Mr. Hallberg, of Ballet Theater and the Bolshoi Ballet). The more impressive moments could be credited to Mr. Gordon, a young principal who shows an unyielding commitment to whatever material he's dancing. Here he was taut and refined simple in the best sense while Mr. Hallberg was too labored, too self aware. This isn't a ballet that needs an extra lingering gaze. The choreography returned to a frequent pattern : A leg stretched forward and then to the side. A deep plie with the feet spread apart in second position followed, with one heel raised. That repeated movement phrase had a formal austerity, but it couldn't keep "Wayfarer" from succumbing to mawkishness: Mr. Hallberg took the hand of Mr. Gordon, whose body wilted; he was led into the darkness while he looked back and reached out an arm imploringly. The applause lasted long after the curtain fell. But was "Wayfarer" really so impressive, or was it the up close appeal of its star cast? This is generally the takeaway from the festival, now in its fifth season: No matter who's in charge, the choreography is little match for the dancers. And that does little to advance the cause of contemporary ballet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
BARCELONA, Spain In the last eight days, an era has ended, a dynasty has been dismantled, an aristocracy has crumbled and a balance of power that held for a decade has shifted. Change has swept through the Champions League. European soccer's landscape has been transformed. Not that it was easy to tell from Barcelona last night. Here, where the hosts thrashed Lyon, 5 1, on Wednesday, it all felt the same as ever. This has been a tumultuous week. The peak came right away: Real Madrid the team that had held this competition in its thrall, seemingly incapable of not winning it, its opponents apparently dazzled by the mythology of those bright white jerseys humbled, at home, by a young and vibrant and entirely dismissed Ajax. The next night, Paris St. Germain fell, the prize its Qatari backers covet more than any other once again proving elusive, despite the cushion provided by a two goal lead from the first leg and the insurance policy of a squad assembled at extravagant expense. And then, on Tuesday night, that other great cornerstone of European soccer Atletico Madrid's defense, so miserly and obdurate came unstuck. It was generally held to be inconceivable that a team as disciplined and well organized and gnarled as Diego Simeone's could contrive to throw away a two goal first leg lead, but contrive to it did. "It was not a lack of character," Simeone said in Turin. "Juventus was just better than us." He has not built his reputation on such acquiescence to defeat. Wednesday brought one more: Bayern Munich beaten comfortably on home territory by Liverpool, its players and coach, Niko Kovac, admitting that they had deserved no more. For the first time in 13 years, there will be no German teams present on Friday when the draw for the quarterfinals is made. There will be four representatives from the Premier League, for the first time in 10. No wonder, then, there is a sense that the guard is changing, that this will prove to be the season that bridges two distinct ages. The time of this incarnation of Real Madrid has passed, most obviously, but perhaps that can be said of others among the clutch of superclubs who have, for the last decade, dominated the latter stages of this competition, too. Bayern is gearing up to rejuvenate its squad. Atletico will lose the player that has best encapsulated its recent history the grizzled Uruguayan defender Diego Godin this summer. The Premier League is, at last, benefiting not only from its vast financial advantage over the rest of Europe, but from its decision belated, admittedly to spend a rather greater proportion of that on managers, rather than players. That is one reading of the situation, anyway. It is not the only one. The Champions League is about teams, of course, and about dynasties and eras and power bases and all of that, but more than anything, it is about players. Indeed, if the dominance of Real Madrid taught us anything, it was that, currently at least, this is a competition defined by individuals more than by systems. And those individuals have not changed at all. On Tuesday, it was Cristiano Ronaldo, scoring yet another hat trick to pull Juventus clear of Atletico, to send the Allianz Stadium into raptures, to deliver on the reputation that convinced the Italian champion to spend somewhere north of 100 million on a 33 year old forward last summer. And on Wednesday obviously it was Lionel Messi, scoring twice, creating twice, and orchestrating Barcelona's demolition of a courageous, fearless but utterly outgunned Lyon. For a while, the French visitor discomfited Barcelona; for a while, there was a gentle draft of change here, too, if not quite a full wind. Lyon defended valiantly, and counterattacked with zest, before Barcelona broke the deadlock a Messi penalty, deftly, almost thoughtlessly, chipped past Anthony Lopes. His second goal a delicate shot at the end of one of those mazy dribbles where the ball seems to fall completely, hopelessly under his spell effectively killed the game, before his two assists, for Gerard Pique and Ousmane Dembele, helped a victory bleed into a rout. But that is not what stood out. What makes Messi so captivating is that it is not just the killer blows that count, but all of the jabs and the thrusts and the parries. It is watching him dance around and skip over and ghost away from tackles. It is the precision of his passing, his unerring ability to make the right choice. Messi rarely tries the spectacular, the unlikely: he does not abuse his status, his talent. He just makes sure he does everything, almost everything, right. His gift has always been his simplicity; that is not fading, not at all, not yet. Eras do end, and times do change. Identifying when is not an exact science, of course: they tend to drift into each other; there are rarely clean breaks. But perhaps it is fair to say that Real Madrid's period of dominance is at an end, or that the age of the superclubs has been put on hiatus, or even that Spain's pre eminence in European competition (every Champions League title since 2014, and 7 of the last 10) is over. But it is equally possible that none of those eras existed in the first place, and that instead they were simply consequences of the age of Messi and of Ronaldo, their teams the beneficiaries of their greatness, their ability to decide games and define seasons. That has not changed. Their age is not over yet. Everything might look different. Messi and Ronaldo, though, are still the same. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LUCKY DAY (2019) Stream on Hulu; rent on iTunes. This film by Roger Avary, the director behind "Killing Zoe" who also co wrote "Pulp Fiction," was not well reviewed when it received a limited release last year. But anything that combines outrageously bad taste, well worn genre tropes and stylized, spectacular violence will likely find some fans. The story, such as it is, follows Red (Luke Bracey), a thief, as he acclimates to life with his wife, Chloe (Nina Dobrev), and their daughter, Beatrice, after serving two years in prison. Their reunion is spoiled by Luc (Crispin Glover), a twisted assassin looking to avenge his brother's death. THE TITAN GAMES 8 p.m. on NBC. By the end of the Season 2 finale, two contestants will have earned for themselves the title of "Titan Champion" and 100,000. The preceding episode wrapped up the regional competition with Will Sutton and Courtney Roselle advancing from the Eastern bracket to the final rounds. Now the six top competitors who managed to overcome professional athletes including the football player Joe Thomas and the snowboarder Hannah Teter will square off in a series of physical challenges for the chance to return to Mount Olympus, the show's most grueling gantlet. Only two men and two women will have the opportunity to fight for the grand prize. The actor and former professional wrestler Dwayne Johnson hosts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The 1990s have been resurgent of late, largely thanks to their somewhat ignoble contributions to contemporary life: reality television and "Baywatch"; White House scandal and congressional shutdown; and, of course, the introduction of Donald J. Trump as a pop culture tabloid star. Well, we all need something to blame. Why not a time period? That it also happened to be an era when fashion had a knowing, energetic immediacy worth celebrating has been mostly overlooked. But on Wednesday, with the opening show of the New York spring 2018 season, Tom Ford came along to remind us. Returning to New York with his first full on traditional runway show after seasons of flirting with alternate venues (London! L.A.!) and forms (video! dinner theater!) and some timeouts for films, Mr. Ford took a trip down his own glam cobblestoned memory lane. The 1990s, after all, were the heyday of his Gucci years he became its creative director in 1994, and left 10 years later when he burst onto the fashion scene, injecting the concept of postmodern irony into unabashed luxury, adding a dose of sex and making it cool. Just consider that his new collection was in part the opening act for his new fragrance: Alliteratively titled, using first a crude word for sexual congress, followed by "Fabulous." You fill in the blank. (That is honestly the name on the label.) Kind of, yes. In a millennial pink corridor the color perhaps a reference to the generation Mr. Ford needs to attract and which missed the clothes the first time around stretching through the Park Avenue Armory with lacquered walls and padded risers, in front of Chaka Khan, Helena Christensen, Cindy Crawford and Kim Kardashian West (among others), Mr. Ford sent out a series of sharp shouldered one button power jackets in pastel satins atop rolled hem shorts paired with sequined T shirts. There were blouson leather boy band jackets with matching leather sweatpants; glittering two tone T shirt dresses so short they looked more like shirts (maybe they were shirts, but if so they were sans bottoms) and aerobic instructor leotards cut waist high on the sides. Evening gowns were ruched net columns stretched peekaboo sheer over the rear with long, sequined sleeves for contrast. Fuchsia, lavender and beige mixed it up with orange and electric blue, plus the usual black and white. None of it was very complicated or challenging. It was fun. Mr. Ford shot to fame on his ability to walk the fine line between self serious, unabashed ambition and a willingness to mock himself for it; his clothes gave his consumers permission to strive and preen and roll their eyes at the same time, so they were not just in on the joke, but controlling it. Since starting his own brand, however, he has erred on the side of the pompous. Not this time. Guests exited the show through a line of male waiters clad only in athletic shorts and knee socks, bearing trays of Champagne. In the past, they would have been wearing Botox perfect tuxedos. As Donna Karan said after her Urban Zen presentation of round the world hobo deluxe shearlings, velvet and silk patchwork dresses, distressed explorers' leathers and embroidered tunics: "It's not just about dressing. It's about addressing." Perhaps that's why Mr. Ford was not the only designer thinking 1990s. Narciso Rodriguez, celebrating 20 years in business, also had his head in the decade. Eschewing a full on runway show for small presentations, he went back to his roots, revisiting pieces from his earliest collections beginning with his "new suit": a thin wool duo that replaced the jacket with a T shirt sculpted through seams. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Brands are using prison labor to provide inmates with jobs and training. But is it possible and ethical to build a profitable fashion business behind bars? In a lush valley surrounded by the Peruvian Andes past two sets of security gates, high fences, barbed wire and a rigorous pat down 13 women stood hard at work. They were weaving and knitting luxurious alpaca wool sweaters, deep pile roll necks and silky soft track pants, destined to be sold to wealthy shoppers with lives far away, and a far cry, from their own. All were prisoners at the women's penitentiary center in the city of Cusco, serving long sentences predominantly for drug related crimes as well as murder, human trafficking and robbery. They were also employees of Carcel, a Danish brand founded in 2016 specifically to provide incarcerated women with jobs, training and, possibly, a crime free future. More than two years into their program, both Carcel's founders and the Peruvian prison authorities say the project has been a measurable success. It's popular with prisoners and consumers alike and proof that the profitable and responsible production of luxury fashion can have a place behind bars. Peru is becoming something of a case study on the issue of aid versus exploitation. A little more than 5,000 women are currently incarcerated there, and over 50 percent are actively employed in producing leather goods, clothing and textiles, according to INPE, the national penitentiary institute. Yet questions around the ethics of prison labor and regulation have also made headlines of late. There have been reports of Muslims incarcerated in brutal Chinese internment camps producing sportswear apparel, and strikes against imposed labor for paltry wages in American prisons. This month, tensions flared on social media when Carcel introduced a new line of silk garments produced from women's jails in Thailand. "Companies are literally advertising that they use slave labor now as a reason you should buy their product," one person wrote on Twitter, prompting a chorus of outrage from hundreds. "Your 'sustainable business model' includes the need for women to be in prisons," another user wrote, followed by a slew of confused face emojis. The more Carcel posted explanations on its practices, payment models and prices, the angrier the online responses became. "On one hand, there are definitely well intentioned brands with rehabilitation programs in place doing some good work all over the world," he said. "On the other hand, there are big questions to be asked around whether inmates should ever form the mainstream production of a profit driven label, particularly given how many unacceptable cases of prisoner exploitation exist deep in the global fashion supply chain." Fashion has a long established history in prisons, dating back to the 1700s. Traditionally, most manufacturing programs in countries like the United States or Britain were run either by government bodies or correctional boards in order to mass produce low value items at scale, like military uniforms. Inmates received well below the minimum wage, if anything at all. In the 1990s, with a record number of people behind bars in many countries, there was a boom in private companies employing prisoners for tasks as varied as telemarketing, the manufacturing of circuit boards, and garment production for brands like Victoria's Secret and J.C. Penney. Today, in Britain, the average prisoner engaged in some kind of employment earns around PS10 a week, a government report from 2016 found. In the United States, the value of prison labor to the economy continues to add up though not for inmates. The Bureau of Prisons operates a program known as Federal Prison Industries that pays inmates roughly 90 cents an hour to produce mattresses, eyeglasses, road signs, body armor and other products for government agencies, earning 500 million in sales in 2016. One product subcategory in particular has been gaining international traction in recent years: small, street trend oriented brands selling clothing made by inmates, like Prison Blues in the United States, Stripes Clothing in the Netherlands and Pieta, another Peru based label. All claim they can create a profitable and sustainable business model while also providing new jobs and opportunities for prisoners. Pieta was founded in Lima in 2012 by Thomas Jacob, a Frenchman who had once worked for Chanel, and currently employs around 50 male and female inmates from some of the largest jails in Peru. Prisoners manufacture anti establishment logo T shirts, sweatshirts, hand knit sweaters, varsity jackets and high top sneakers using locally sourced materials. Prices range from 8 for tote bags to 120 for jewelry. "There are a lot of men and women in jail very far from the image you may have of inmates, who just want to get by, to learn a skill, to work, to earn money," said Mr. Jacob, who has opened five Pieta stores in the Peruvian capital and says he is considering an international expansion. "Of course there are major challenges, from security issues and logistics in a high security jail to brokering relationships with prison administrations and between inmates," he said. "But we are used to it all now." Inmates don't just make the clothes, he said on occasion they also contribute to his designs, giving them both a creative outlet and training. Often, they act as models for advertising campaigns and are paid a portion of the sale price for each unit of clothing they produce, providing income they can send home to their families. Upon release, former inmates can continue working with Pieta, or seek jobs at other companies with Pieta's recommendation and support. Louise van Hauen and Veronica D'Souza, the founders of Carcel (which means "prison" in Spanish), met while living and working in Kenya. The former was a creative manager at a leather bag company and the latter was the head of a social start up that made and distributed menstrual cups. Ms. D'Souza said a visit to a women's prison in Kenya in 2014 changed her thinking. "It became clear to me that virtually all of the inmates were mothers who were there because of poverty related crimes, be it theft or prostitution. The same applies here in Peru," she said. As part of the drug production chain in Latin America, cocaine paste must be transported from crop areas in remote parts of the country by drug mules. Many are women, and often, they are nonviolent, first time offenders. According to INPE, 85 percent have children to support at home. "Often these women get incarcerated, then released, but struggle to find ways to provide for their children, and the crime cycle would start all over again," Ms. D'Souza said. "The system was clearly broken. It got me thinking about how we could create a new model that might break the cycle." Ms. van Hauen said she wanted to start somewhere with proximity to high quality natural materials, where some of the skills required were already part of local culture. "As one of the world's largest alpaca wool exporters, and a country where knitting is a national pastime, Peru was perfect," she said. Instead of designing streetwear, though, she and Ms. D'Souza decided to focus on the luxury end of the market. "Historically, lots of brands have struggled to make a profit or scale because of the low quality of product or design," Ms. van Hauen said. By having inmates create goods of higher value, the thinking goes, the products have better retail viability and healthier profit margins and the women hone a more worthwhile skill set. Virginia Matamoros, the director of Cusco Female Penitentiary, said that the prison offered basic training in sewing, weaving, baking and gardening to all new inmates with the hope that they can then move on to working with companies that can prepare them for release. "We accepted Carcel because it is an organized, formal company that works with good salaries and which has subsequently pushed the other companies that operate here to improve their pay rates and work schedule," she said. Ms. Matamoros added that increased access to work opportunities could lessen the likelihood of recidivism. "More than anything, it is extremely positive for their self esteem," she said. 'I do this to overcome my past' In Cusco, the Carcel inmates are trained by more experienced weavers until they have developed the vocational skills to work a five hour shift, five days a week. They earn cash salaries of 650 to 1,100 Peruvian soles ( 180 to 329) per month, depending on their level of experience. Earnings in both Peru and Thailand are benchmarked against the national minimum wage. In Peru, this is 930 soles a month. "The women who work for us earn the same as an elementary schoolteacher here," Ms. D'Souza said. "We believe that a fair job inside of prison should be equal to a fair job outside of prison." The prison takes a 10 percent cut of inmates' wages. The workers keep a portion for living expenses like food and soap, and Carcel pays the rest into their families' bank accounts. Beyond the base salary, women can also receive bonuses for the quality of their work, good behavior and overtime. "When I got here eight years ago, this prison was a really sad place," said Teodomira Quispe Perez, 51, a widow and mother of six who has five more years to serve of a sentence for drug trafficking. She now oversees quality control in the Carcel workshop. "I am looking forward to getting out and buying my own machine. Working in this textile workshop takes me away from my imprisonment," she said, folding an order of 190 baby alpaca T shirts bound for Net a Porter. The luxury e commerce platform started to stock Carcel last summer. There is no question the work is selling. According to Elizabeth von der Goltz, the global buying director of Net a Porter, fashion brands with social purpose are increasingly popular with shoppers. "Nearly all our Carcel styles sold out globally in just the first two weeks of launch, while the baby alpaca T shirts are continuing to sell out week after week," she said. To meet demand, Carcel is now looking to double its staff base in the Peruvian prison. At the company's second production base in Thailand the country with the most female inmates in the world e banking accounts are being developed for some prisoners and their relatives to minimize siphoning from wardens or companies. Carcel said it hoped to operate in a further three to five countries within the next five years. Considerable challenges remain. This week, Carcel halted sales in America when it became aware of a federal law that bans the import of goods made by convicts. The company is now seeking a waiver; it pointed out that the United States is one of the few countries that did not ratify a 2014 International Labor Organization convention on forced labor, despite domestic prison labor being legal. Net a Porter confirmed Wednesday that it would suspend Carcel sales until the issue was resolved. "The I.L.O. states on its website: 'a good indication of whether prisoners freely consent to work is whether the conditions of employment approximate those of a free labor relationship ,' and that is what we root the principles of Carcel upon," Ms. D'Souza said from Copenhagen during a phone interview. "We treat them as employees of a company, not prisoners in a jail." Elizabeth Paton reported from London, and Andrea Zarate from Cusco, Peru. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Global health authorities on Tuesday declared the Americas free of endemic measles, the first region to be so certified. The hemisphere's last case of endemic measles meaning one that did not spring from an imported strain was in 2002. Normally, it takes three years without cases to declare a disease eradicated from a region, but in this instance it took 14 years. Experts at the Pan American Health Organization in Washington, D.C., where the announcement was made, cited several reasons for the delay: poor communication between local and national health departments in some countries, large numbers of unvaccinated mobile migrants in others, and parts of other countries that were unreachable because of fighting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
WASHINGTON The Trump White House sent a message to the media on Monday: Be nice. At his first formal briefing on Monday, Sean Spicer, the new White House press secretary, told reporters here that his administration sometimes does "the right thing," adding: "And it would be nice, once in a while, for someone just to report it straight up." It was an oddly plaintive appeal from an administration that tends to attack the press, not bemoan it. And it was a sharp contrast from Mr. Spicer's appearance 48 hours prior, when he blasted the news media as "shameful," made false claims about the attendance for Mr. Trump's inaugural and prompted speculation that his relationship with the White House press corps had been irreparably damaged after a single day. Those fears, at least, Mr. Spicer seemed to put to rest on Monday during a 90 minute briefing in which he was by turns calm, feisty and bantering, yet far from the hothead who appeared behind the lectern this weekend. He won praise from veteran press secretaries from both parties and some grudging acknowledgments from reporters that he had eased some of the tensions he prompted with his easily debunked assertions on Saturday. "I want to make sure that we have a healthy relationship," he told reporters, pledging "to be honest with the American people." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Joe Biden built his political career as the New Deal order came to an end, one of a generation of Democrats who sought to reconcile the Democratic Party to the Reagan revolution by placing distance between the party and the racial and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. His was a politics attuned to the worries and fears of suburban white voters, from busing and crime to guns and drugs. Now, of course, those politics are outdated. The Democratic Party has, in the decades since Biden first won office in 1972, come to rely on the groups that fueled those upheavals. The insurgents are the establishment, and Biden after eight years as vice president to a man who embodied the liberal, cosmopolitan shift in the Democratic Party has reconciled himself to the new reality. He is still a centrist, but that center is well to the left of where it was even a decade ago. The coronavirus pandemic and ensuing economic crisis have done even more to enlarge the scope of possibility, and Biden, always attuned to changing political winds, has adjusted himself accordingly. Instead of an Obama restoration, Gabriel Debenetti writes in New York magazine, the former vice president is planning a New Deal esque effort to save American society. "I think it's probably the biggest challenge in modern history, quite frankly. I think it may not dwarf but eclipse what F.D.R. faced," Biden told Chris Cuomo of CNN last month. "The blinders have been taken off because of this Covid crisis," he said to a group of 68 donors who gathered on Zoom for a fund raiser a few weeks later. "I think people are realizing, 'My Lord, look at what is possible,' looking at the institutional changes we can make, without us becoming a 'socialist country' or any of that malarkey." There is good reason to be skeptical of Biden. He is a creature of the Senate. He's a lifelong moderate. He's a deal maker. He prefers compromise. But let's say that Biden is serious, that he wants to bring the full weight of the federal government to bear on the crisis before us, that he wants to expand and revitalize the safety net for the next generation and that he wants to be a transformative president. If that's true, then he'll have to do more than talk about his goals; he'll have to build his administration with that task in mind. And if the first step in that process is choosing a vice president, then there's one contender who has thought (and thought creatively) about government in a way that will aid and enhance an F.D.R. style presidency: Elizabeth Warren. The case for Warren is straightforward. There are at least two major obstacles to broad, ambitious progressive reform. The first is political. You need a president who wants it, a Congress that wants it and a federal judiciary that won't stand in the way of it. If you can overcome these hurdles which, as you can imagine, would be incredibly difficult then you're left with the next obstacle: implementation. It simply isn't enough to write and pass a bill. You need experienced officials and agency heads, a fully staffed and well seasoned federal bureaucracy and skilled political leadership to manage the entire operation. You need a Congress ready to adjust programs as needed and lawmakers skilled in oversight. You need, in other words, state capacity the ability to actually deliver on plans and mandates. And if there's anyone in the Democratic Party who has thought deeply about the challenges of state capacity, administration and personnel, it's Warren. Exhibit A is her work as head of the congressional oversight panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, from which she was an aggressive critic of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, demonstrating her detailed knowledge of the federal bureaucracy while scrutinizing the Obama administration's handling of the bank bailouts. Exhibit C is Warren's aggressive effort to mold and shape a would be Hillary Clinton administration, beginning in 2014 and stretching into the 2016 election season itself, according to Politico magazine: As the Clinton transition team fielded ideas from senators in the final months of the campaign, Warren was treated as a "first among equals," according to a Clinton transition official. Warren's chief of staff, Dan Geldon, and Clinton senior staffer Jake Sullivan were in close contact and met repeatedly in the final months of the campaign. Warren was deep in the weeds on personnel and pushed the Clinton transition team to hire her allies like Rohit Chopra, a veteran of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren personally lobbied the Clinton transition team, spoke with the Clinton policy team ahead of her endorsement in June 2016, and had placed several allies among those responsible for staffing a second Clinton White House. Had Clinton won the election, Warren would have been among the most influential Democrats in the federal government, on account of her relentless focus on personnel. Warren has never served in executive office. But she has a powerful grasp on the power of the bureaucracy, of the influence of federal agencies and the reach of their authority, of what you can do by organizing and wielding that power effectively. If empowered (much as Biden was under President Barack Obama) a Vice President Warren would be an invaluable asset in directing and implementing a New Deal style program. Of course, before Warren can become vice president, Biden has to win the presidency. And the case for other vice presidential contenders like Senator Kamala Harris of California or Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 is that they will assist the ticket with African Americans and other groups in ways Warren cannot. But the research falls firmly against the idea that running mates play any substantial role in helping or harming the top of the ticket. "In order for a running mate to help a candidate on a national scale, he or she must be exceedingly popular," the political scientists Kyle C. Kopko and Christopher J. Devine wrote in 2016. "In order to hurt, the VP must be tremendously unpopular. By and large, neither happens." When it does, the effect isn't all that large. The most maligned vice presidential nominee in recent history, Sarah Palin, cost John McCain a modest 1.6 percentage points in his campaign against Obama. A better running mate might have left him five points behind, instead of around seven. At most, the right running mate can build partisan enthusiasm for a less than thrilling nominee. That's what Mike Pence did for the president's campaign in 2016, giving Donald Trump the conservative and evangelical bona fides he needed to unify the Republican Party. Not only is Warren more popular among Democratic primary voters than her competitors for the vice presidential nomination, she's just as popular and well liked as Biden, with a 77 percent favorability rating to his 76 percent. More important, Warren would help unify the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party; Bernie Sanders supporters, in particular, would be 61 percent more likely to back Biden for president against Trump if Warren were on the ticket, according to the left leaning group Data for Progress. Overall, 53 percent of Democrats as well as more than half of African Americans would be more likely to support Biden if Warren were his running mate, compared with 45 percent for Harris, 37 percent for Amy Klobuchar and 29 percent for Abrams. The November election will be a referendum on Trump, and Biden does not necessarily need any particular running mate to win. But Biden will need one to help him govern according to the terms he has set for himself. And if he intends to push a New Deal esque program, then he'll need a partner who can bring those plans to fruition. He'll need someone who, on day one, is ready to rebuild the state's capacity to act on behalf of the public, after four years of atrophy, neglect and attrition. Every vice presidential contender has her virtues, but for this task, there's no choice but Elizabeth Warren. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The final season of "Game of Thrones" arrives April 14. Before then, we're getting prepared by rewatching the first seven seasons. Sign up to get these straight to your inbox. This article contains spoilers for Seasons 1 7 of "Game of Thrones." It's 10 p.m. do you know where your dragons are? If not, we're here to help, as we wrap up Season 2 in our great rewatch. If you missed the first Season 2 installment on Monday, it's available here. If you have any burning questions you would like answered, send them to gameofthrones nytimes.com. Who Played the Game Best? Just as in our world, the tension between competing forms of mysticism and skepticism is a defining feature of "Game of Thrones." It is also a prominent theme of Season 2, beginning with the red comet that streaks through the sky in the first episode. The men in the North see it as a sign that Robb Stark will win the war. Others see it as a sign that the Lannisters will rule the Seven Kingdoms. Osha tells Bran of the latest hot takes before concluding, "Stars don't fall for men. The red comet means one thing, boy: dragons." It's possible. Or a comet could be just a comet. Everyone is certain that their interpretation is correct, just as they're certain that their god or gods are the right ones. As the pirate Salladhor Saan says: "I've been all over the world, my boy, and everywhere I go, people tell me about the 'true god.' They all think they've found the right one." Maester Luwin says that magic might have once been a mighty force, but not anymore: "The dragons are gone, the giants are dead and the Children of the Forest forgotten." But we've seen the dragons hatch, and we know that not everything that was thought to be extinct is really gone. Pyat Pree claims that magic has grown stronger in the world since the birth of Dany's dragons. Bran has prophetic dreams. "My dreams are different," he insists. "Mine are true." Dany has prophetic dreams, too. "I'm no ordinary woman," she insists. "My dreams come true." Like horoscopes, the dreams are easier to read in hindsight. Bran's vision of a sea coming to Winterfell and drowned men floating in the yard of course that's Theon Greyjoy's takeover! Dany's vision of snow (Snow?) on the Iron Throne in the House of the Undying? It could be a trick, a temptation we won't know if it's actually a prediction until, presumably, we learn how this story ends. And then we have this story's most self aggrandizing seer: Melisandre. She tells of a prophecy regarding her god and a reincarnated hero known as the Prince (or Princess) that was Promised, who had been sent to vanquish the Great Other. Some of that seems to be coming true. She tells Stannis that he is the Lord's chosen, and they base their battle strategies on this assumption. While Melisandre repeatedly demonstrates her magical abilities She can look younger and prettier! She can birth shadow babies! She can resurrect the dead! performing magic and reading prophecies are different powers. Besides, her actual intentions aren't entirely clear. She insists that Stannis will be king, but the more interesting prediction comes when she tells him that he will betray everything he once held dear. Is that really prophecy, or is she priming him with the power of suggestion? Much of what Melisandre does with Stannis is psychology and seduction, not magic. Even if we take what she says at face value, her beliefs don't line up with those of the Red Temple priests and priestesses we meet later they believe Dany is the Chosen One. Not Jon. And certainly not Stannis. So did Melisandre truly believe Stannis was the Chosen One and flock to his side? Or did she sell him on that idea solely out of self interest, perhaps hoping he would make the Red Temple's faith the state religion of Westeros? (It's hard to turn down a belief system in which you're the messiah). But shouldn't a fabled hero be able to draw his burning sword from the fire on his own, without a priestess essentially handing it to him? Fans love to try to decode these visions and prophecies, but we should be wary not to repeat Melisandre's mistakes. Prophecies are like propaganda they can be useful for propping someone up but they rarely tell the whole story, and believing in them can ensure your doom. In an interview seven years ago, George R.R. Martin addressed the traditional audience expectation that the hero "is the chosen one, and he is always protected by his destiny." Martin said he didn't want that to be the case in A Song of Ice and Fire. Or, as Tyrion says in the books, "Prophecy is like a half trained mule. It looks as though it might be useful, but the moment you trust in it, it kicks you in the head." Stannis, your prophecy awaits you. Believe at your own risk. A Few Words from the Departed Many characters in "Game of Thrones" live and die by the sword, but few expect to be stabbed in the heart by a magical shadow. We talked to the actor Gethin Anthony about King Renly's abbreviated reign in Season 2. (Adapted from an interview for an earlier article.) How did you find out about your character's death? While auditioning, I read the first and most of the second book. By the time I was called in to read for Renly, I was well aware of his grisly demise. It made the process feel more like a movie for me. I knew his beginning, middle and tragic end before stepping on set. It clarified in my mind what my approach should be. Did you read any of the fan reaction? I've heard some very nice things said about Renly. Whatever you can say about his naivete in dealing with Stannis and Melisandre, he had a good heart. People have told me they miss the character, which is just lovely. I think they miss seeing Renly and Loras together as well. I feel like it could be a whole spinoff! As preparation for Season 2, I wrote a little fan fiction for myself about Renly, Loras and the marriage of Margaery. I had all these visuals in my head for the end of Season 1, beginning of Season 2: What they did between the seasons. The nights they stole away together on the wedding night, Renly and Loras just went off to be by a lake under the trees. How did you feel about Brienne avenging Renly? Finally! She took some time. Watching Brienne kick ass with Stannis was a good thing. But Melisandre ... She's become this huge presence, this darkness in the show, and Brienne needs to sort it out. I think Melisandre represents the corruption that power brings. It's quite hard to fight these fantastical, supernatural forces. Keep training, keep up the sword fighting, but ultimately, get a powerful ally. What do you remember from your last day on set? We were doing a quick shot in Renly's camp on the beach at night with the wind blowing and huge lighting setups. Seeing all those hundreds of people working in these epic circumstances as I got to say goodbye really brought home what a privilege it was to be a part of this huge endeavor. Who had your favorite death and why? Viserys. I always thought the symbolism of him being burned to death with the gold he so coveted was a brilliant representation of what the books and the show were about. Where Are They Now? It also changed the reason Robb Stark throws away his alliance with the Freys, which, as we know, leads to all sorts of trouble for him and others. In "A Clash of Kings," a wounded Robb learns of Theon's purported execution of his younger brothers Bran and Rickon. In his anguish, Robb receives "comfort" (i.e. sex) from the young noblewoman tending his wounds at the castle he just conquered. This is perhaps an understandable lapse in judgment, because of his youth (he's even younger in the books), his grief and his state of mind (he's feverish and might have been given milk of the poppy). The problem is, Jeyne's not a prostitute or a commoner she's a lord's daughter. So Robb is honor bound to marry her. Robb faces an ethical dilemma. This is not a dating game, choosing between the possibly ugly Frey behind door No. 1 and the winsome Westerling behind door No. 2. It's actually a choice between protecting his own honor or protecting someone else's. Since he's Ned Stark's son, he tries to protect someone else, even though it could end in misery. And sure enough, book Robb makes a tragic mistake that leads to many deaths, including his own. TV Robb isn't facing an ethical dilemma he's disregarding honor entirely. He actively pursues this young woman, whom he finds beautiful and intriguing, even though he's already committed to an arranged marriage. He chooses to spend time with her when he could be sorting out troop movements, perusing battle plans or seeking counsel from his top lieutenant (a slight that Roose Bolton doesn't forget, and which leads to his participation in the Red Wedding). Even after Catelyn warns her son away from battlefield hookups when he's betrothed to another, Robb continues flirting with Talisa. Because this is all presented as a love story, we're supposed to root for the young lovers. And isn't Talisa a great catch smart, sassy, good with amputations? Best of all, she's not taking sides in this ugly war. In the books, Robb's marriage to Jeyne was a little more suspicious and, quite possibly, a setup. The Westerlings may not have been privy to the entirety of the Red Wedding plans, but they had some sort of an "understanding" with Tywin, which included making sure Robb did not conceive an heir with his new bride. Jeyne never got pregnant, did not attend the massacre and is still alive. Knowing the extent of the Westerling conspiracy to undermine and destroy the Starks, some book readers were understandably confused by the show's name and character swap between Jeyne and Talisa and the large deviation from the book plot. It didn't help that the character was originally listed as "Jeyne Westerling," until George R.R. Martin suggested to the showrunners that if they were going to change Robb's wife's back story to make her a citizen from Volantis, they should also give her a Volantene name. (Thus: "Talisa Maegyr.") Conspiracy theories naturally arose that Talisa must be a Lannister loyalist posing as a Volantene noblewoman, and had been sent to seduce Robb and spy on him in other words, she was still Jeyne, but with the rest of the Westerlings excised. After all, she keeps writing all these letters! This honey pot theory was debated throughout Seasons 2 and 3, and the issue wasn't settled until her death at the Red Wedding. It's possible the showrunners did intend this character to be a spy at one point, but then decided that would make the story too complicated. Or maybe they just wanted a simple, tragic love story. How Did You Get Your 'Game' On? In our last installment, we asked if you had any burning questions and boy, did you! Two readers asked related questions, which we've lighted edited for clarity: "Why did Littlefinger have Lysa kill her husband? What did Littlefinger have to gain in his death other than causing lots of chaos?" Teresa Prather Control. Instead of allowing Jon Arryn to run to King Robert with the twincest news, Petyr Baelish can manipulate the release of this valuable information, to his own benefit. Knocking Arryn off the board also creates two vacancies: Hand of the King and Lord of the Vale. Hand of the King, he can predict, will be filled by the more gullible Ned Stark (whose wife he's long desired). Leadership of the Vale would fall to Lysa (who is already in his thrall). Blaming the Lannisters for the murder sets them against the biggest power block (Houses Arryn, Tully, Stark and Baratheon), creating a feud in which he could play both sides. Even if one of Littlefinger's goals was lots of chaos, it's chaos with predictable outcomes a new king, hopefully one he can pick, and some lands and titles (and their attendant wealth) from whichever side wins. Plus the pleasure of pulling all the strings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Brian Kelly of East End Tick and Mosquito Control dragging for ticks. The company now routinely sprays lawns in addition to bushes because of the increased prevalence of more aggressive species of ticks. SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. This town is under siege from tiny invaders. A doctor at Southampton Hospital recently pulled a tick off a woman's eyeball. After a 10 minute walk outside, a mother reported finding a tick affixed to her 7 year old daughter's buttocks. Another mother called the hospital in a "hysterical state," according to the nurse who answered, because a tick had attached itself to her son's penis. Like many towns across the country, Southampton is seeing a tick population that is growing both in numbers and variety at a time when ticks are emerging as a significant public health danger. "Tick borne diseases are a very serious problem, and they're on the rise," said Rebecca Eisen, a research biologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Even though you may live in an area where you didn't have ticks in the past or your parents don't remember having ticks, the distribution is changing," she added. "More and more people are at risk." With the expansion of the suburbs and a push to conserve wooded areas, deer and mice populations are thriving. They provide ample blood meals for ticks and help spread the pests to new regions. Originally from the Southeast, the lone star tick, for example, is heading north; it can now be found in 1,300 counties in 39 states. The blacklegged tick, also called the deer tick, is expanding its territory, too. In a recent study, Dr. Eisen reported a nearly 45 percent increase since 1998 in the number of counties with blacklegged ticks. Thomas Mather, director of the University of Rhode Island's TickEncounter Resource Center, said it used to get reports of three or four lone star ticks in the greater Chicago area each year. Now, it is receiving up to 15. First, the species brings diseases from its original location. Second, the ticks pick up new pathogens from animals in their new ecosystem. Physicians and patients in a tick's new home may be less familiar with the diseases it carries. They can overlook symptoms or attribute them to a different cause, delaying effective treatment. The best known threat is Lyme disease. Cases in the United States increased from about 12,000 annually in 1995 to nearly 40,000 in 2015. Experts say the real number of infections is likely closer to 300,000. But scientists are finding ticks carry more than just Lyme: At least a third of known tick borne pathogens were found in the last 20 years. Heartland virus and Bourbon virus, which can prove fatal, were discovered in just the last five years. Powassan virus, a rare but dangerous pathogen that can cause permanent brain damage or death, can be passed from tick to human in just 15 minutes. It was discovered in 1958, and an average of seven cases are reported each year. Earlier this month, a resident of Saratoga County, N.Y., who had Powassan disease died. Dr. Gary Wormser, founder of the Lyme Disease Diagnostic Center at New York Medical College, said the most worrisome tick borne contagion he sees is babesiosis, which can cause malaria like symptoms and require hospitalization. A few of his patients have died from it; several required intensive care. Before 2001, babesiosis was not found in Westchester, N.Y. But Westchester Medical Center has diagnosed at least 21 cases in the past year. A study of babesiosis in Wisconsin found a 26 fold increase in the number of cases between 2001 to 2003, and 2012 to 2015. In places where the lone star tick is gaining prevalence, doctors also are seeing an increase in cases of alpha gal syndrome, a strange allergy to red meat induced by tick bites. Alpha gal is a sugar molecule carried by the lone star tick. When the tick bites a human, it activates the immune system, which starts producing alpha gal antibodies. The body becomes wired to fight alpha gal sugar molecules, which are abundant in red meat. Eating meat can trigger allergic reactions, from an itchy rash to anaphylactic shock. Dr. Erin McGintee, an allergist and immunologist at ENT and Allergy Associates in Southampton, sees two to three cases of alpha gal syndrome per week during tick season. Since diagnosing her first case in October 2010, she has seen more than 380 patients. "The cases are definitely increasing over time," she said. That is no surprise to Karen Wulffraat, administrative director of Southampton Hospital's Tick Borne Disease Resource Center. "People can walk across their lawn barefoot to get the newspaper and get a tick," he said. As human exposure to ticks continues to increase, it's likely that even the rarest infections they carry will become more common, Dr. Goddard said. "This really has a human toll that a lot of people don't recognize," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Rick Owens may be the only designer who could get his front row not to mention Courtney Love and Fergie to wear garbage bags. Or, O.K.: ponchos that looked like garbage bags. But there they were, neatly folded on every seat around the fountains in the back of the Palais de Tokyo. And there were the guests, putting them on atop their carefully choreographed outfits of the day, then eyeing one another to make sure they weren't the only ones looking silly. And then realizing, hell yeah, they all were doofuses together, and beginning to laugh. "I've been doing a lot of complaining and definitely romanticized doom in my work," Mr. Owens said backstage after the show. "And I just thought, 'Enough of that.' " It was time to, he added, "celebrate beauty, and hope." In Mr. Owens's hands this does not mean, of course, exactly what it might mean for most other people. It meant cirrocumulus constructions wrapped and folded and cowled and bunched around the body. It meant rich forest green and bags sprouting over the stomach (Mr. Owens called them "fertility bags."). It had to do with stoicism, and then hiking nuns (but the wimples didn't work), and looked kind of Grecian and sci fi at the same time. And it all somehow ended up with alien mother egg sacks: cotton stretched thin to form an undulating weblike chrysalis around the body, with various protrusions and lumps poking through (including the head) as if just on the verge of hatching. "Because that is hope," Mr. Owens said. And no: No one is expected to wear it. But marvel at its peculiar grace, and grin at the idea? Yes. Happiness is starting to be something of a theme this Paris Fashion Week. After a compellingly melodic Loewe show of long line traveling clothes in patchworks of washed linen, cotton and jersey, many of them grounded by suede sneakers with toes curling upward like a genie's sandals, the designer Jonathan Anderson shrugged. "They just made me smile," he said of the shoes. So did the clothes, an assured dance of volumes and mood, bohemia and urbanity, that included the best T shirt dress of the week: in stretch cotton, different pastel gingham appliques pieced together on the front to look like a tank dress. Also, hobo tapestries mixed up with navy tailoring; bias scarf dresses flashing a circle of hip at the side, right where a bag might hang (the bags themselves, by the way, crafty and cool, were very good), and an army prairie palette. Fashion is an industry subject to its own laws of physics, and every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This explains hemlines, if anyone is wondering. At Ann Demeulemeester, that erstwhile haven of soulful poetics, there was a reason Sebastien Meunier booked the band Warhaus to provide a live accompaniment to his silken layers of black and cream, ostrich feathers wafting at the neck, suits stenciled with the words "kids forever." You can sit in the dark and philosophize or you can dance it out under the klieg lights. That's the choice as fashion sees it. The majority is coming down on the boogie side. As the soundtrack said at Paco Rabanne, "Disco to the disco." Then Julien Dossena sent out a parade of suggestions on girls going as fast as they could to get there: paisley print chain mail slithering to the top of the thigh or poured over a catsuit; body conscious jersey tunics shirred up one side over skinny jersey trousers flared over the ankle; and silver slips shimmying yards of fringe. They were convincing. A lot, apparently. In a letter to his younger self, handed to attendees, Mr. Rousteing noted he was having his show at the Opera because it was there, in all its gilt and gilded glory, that he first began to dream his fashion dream. He had "come full circle," which, along with the unexpected (in a good way) graphic moment at the beginning, suggests that maybe he's reached the end of one stage and is about to embark on another. If so, perhaps he can leave behind the long dresses that harnessed the body, played peekaboo, and then exploded in a rosette of ruffles at the ankle so tightly that the models could not walk. There is nothing happy about a hobble skirt. Here's hoping this is the last we see of it. Now let's move this party on. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
What to Know About the Covid Antibody Drugs That Could Help Many None Two new antibody treatments have shown promise in keeping high risk Covid 19 patients out of the hospital. But despite getting a publicity boost from President Trump, who received the Regeneron treatment in October and praised it as a "cure," the drugs have not been widely used since being authorized for emergency use last month by the Food and Drug Administration. Now, federal and state health officials are urging patients and doctors to seek out the treatments. Here's what you need to know. The two treatments, by Eli Lilly and Regeneron, are the first drugs developed specifically for Covid 19 to be authorized by the F.D.A. They consist of artificially synthesized copies of the antibodies that people produce naturally when their immune system fights off infection. Eli Lilly's drug consists of one antibody. Regeneron's is a cocktail of two. Early data have shown they may prevent hospitalization in people at high risk for severe complications from the disease. Clinical trials are continuing. The treatments are believed to work by helping to shut down the virus soon after infection. Who do the treatments help? The treatments can be given to anyone who has tested positive for the coronavirus, is at high risk of developing a severe form of the disease, and is within 10 days of first developing symptoms. This includes people who are at least 65 years of age and those who are obese or have medical conditions like diabetes. The treatments are not authorized for people who have already been hospitalized, or who need oxygen, because studies in these groups have not shown that the drugs work well. How much do they cost? Under deals that each company struck with the federal government, the doses will be free of charge, although some patients, depending on their insurance coverage, may have to pay for administering the drug, which must be infused by a health care provider. In November, the federal government waived co payments for the cost of administering the treatment for people covered by Medicare. An updated list of potential treatments for Covid 19. Are these treatments widely available? Monoclonal antibody treatments are difficult and time consuming to manufacture, which has limited the number of doses the drug makers have produced. The federal government has purchased 950,000 doses from Eli Lilly and 300,000 doses from Regeneron. The drug companies have already delivered hundreds of thousands of those doses, with the rest expected by the end of January. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. How many people have received the treatments? No one knows, but many of the doses distributed so far have gone unused and sit in hospital refrigerators. While the federal government has on hand almost 532,000 doses of the two drugs, and nearly 291,000 doses have been shipped out, neither the government nor the drug companies have complete data on how many of those doses have been given to patients. The subset of hospitals reporting data to the government on the number of administered doses has used only 20 percent of their supply, on average, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Why are only some patients getting them? The drugs are being used unevenly across the country. Some hospitals can't get enough doses. Others haven't even used much of what they've gotten so far. Various factors have contributed to underutilization: Hospitals are overwhelmed by the virus surge and focused on giving the first vaccines. And they must find space in their crowded facilities where the treatments can be infused over a period of hours without spreading the virus to others. Some patients have been reluctant to venture out for the treatments, whether because they're not up to going into a clinic while they're feeling sick, they don't have transportation, or they perceive the drugs as being available only for well connected people. And the very scarcity of the treatments is contributing to their underuse, as some hospitals hold back supplies for fear of running out. How can I get them? There is no single hotline or website to help patients find a provider offering the treatments. Many health systems have set up ways to identify and contact eligible patients who test positive for the coronavirus at testing sites or doctor's offices. But these referral systems vary from community to community. Eli Lilly's support hotline for its treatment is 1 855 545 5921. A spokeswoman for Regeneron recommended that patients or doctors reach out to their state health department. Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, Eli Lilly's chief scientific officer, said he advises friends and family members to call the company's hotline. "If you're persistent and you qualify, you'll get it," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The Statue of Liberty Museum was conceived as a way to provide historical context to the millions of people who visit the monument each year. It opens to the public on Thursday. Each year about 4.5 million people shuffle off the ferries that service Liberty Island to see up close the famous torch wielding Roman goddess towering above them. But security concerns stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks led the National Park Service to restrict the number of people who could go inside the statue's massive stone pedestal, and up to the crown. The Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation wanted to offer something more for visitors who found the outdoor view less than satisfying: a stand alone museum on the island that would welcome everyone who wanted to hear the story behind Lady Liberty. On Thursday, the Statue of Liberty Museum opens on the island, offering details about how French workers constructed their 150 foot tall gift to America, as well as how the statue became a symbol of freedom across the world. Recognizing the need to focus on more than just the vague and often dubious ideal of American "liberty," the museum's designers highlight the doubts of black Americans and women who saw their personal liberties compromised on a daily basis in the 1880s, when the statue opened. They also spotlight a bit of history that is often forgotten: that the French creators intended the statue as a commemoration of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Museum visitors will learn that the man who originated the idea for the statue, the legal thinker Edouard Rene Lefebvre de Laboulaye, was also a staunch abolitionist who was known in the United States for his Civil War era pamphlets defending the Union cause. In an early model of the statue by the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi from 1870, Lady Liberty is depicted holding broken chains in her left hand, a clear reference to emancipation. Bartholdi based the statue on the Roman goddess Libertas, who is usually depicted wearing a Phrygian cap, traditionally worn by freed Roman slaves. In Bartholdi's final model, the broken chains in the statue's hand were replaced with a tablet that represented the rule of law. Bartholdi placed the broken shackle and chains beneath Lady Liberty's feet, making it nearly impossible for visitors to see at most angles. The statue opened with much fanfare on Oct. 28, 1886. That was six years before the government opened Ellis Island, the inspection site that more than 12 million immigrants would pass through in the decades to come. In an effort to raise money for the statue's pedestal, Emma Lazarus wrote the 1883 poem "The New Colossus," describing the statue welcoming the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." The poem wasn't affixed to the pedestal until 1903, after Lazarus's death. In the museum, visitors will hear recordings of immigrants remembering the moment they first caught sight of the statue on their way to the United States. "It's hard to believe for a while that you're really going to be in this country, but when you see the Statue of Liberty, you know it's there," one voice said. "It's thrilling." The museum doesn't shy away from the fact that this symbol of "universal liberty" was far from a reality for people of color and women during the late 19th century and for decades afterward. That point is highlighted by a quote taken from the African American owned Cleveland Gazette, which wrote one month after the statue's opening, "Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the 'liberty' of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed." It also quotes a suffragist pointing out the inconsistency of using a female figure as the face of political liberty when women did not yet have the right to vote. This skepticism toward the statue, which continued into the modern era, was notably missing from the previous experience of visiting the landmark, said Alan M. Kraut, an American University professor who chaired the museum's history advisory committee. While the museum is intended to celebrate the concept of liberty, Professor Kraut said, it also pokes holes in it. "It's an incomplete message in a lot of ways," he said. "Liberty was denied to many, many people when the statue was first being conceived." Each ferry pulling up to the island could be a floating United Nations. Of the millions of people traveling to see the Statue of Liberty each year, many are visiting the United States from other countries. As a result, the museum offers audio tours in 12 different languages. It also infuses its imagery with historical social justice movements throughout the world. The documentary at the beginning of the museum positions photographs of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela with throngs of supporters beside photographs depicting Women's Marches in the United States. In one photo, protesters at a disability rights rally in Germany displayed a model of Lady Liberty in a wheelchair. Another photo shows a plaster version of the statue at the 1989 pro democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. "Half of the people who come here are not Americans," said Stephen A. Briganti, the president of the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation, which funds the museum. "We're telling the American story for the world." Opens Thursday on Liberty Island. Access to the museum is free with the purchase of a ferry ticket to Liberty and Ellis Islands, with ferries departing from Battery Park in Manhattan and Liberty State Park in Jersey City, N.J. More details: statueoflibertymuseum.org, statuecruises.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A special prosecutor tasked with reinvestigating the case against Jussie Smollett has found that the Cook County state's attorney's office did not violate the law in its handling of the case but did abuse its discretion in deciding to drop charges and put out false or misleading public statements about why it did so. The findings, published in a news release on Monday, conclude the investigation by the special prosecutor, Dan K. Webb, who was appointed last year after a judge ruled that the state's attorney, Kim Foxx, had not properly handled the Smollett case the first time. In February, Mr. Webb announced that a grand jury had revived the criminal case against Mr. Smollett, indicting him on charges that he lied to the police in connection with an alleged hate crime attack against him. Another part of Mr. Webb's investigation involved determining whether any person or office engaged in wrongdoing while handling the case. In the news release, Mr. Webb's office said that it unearthed evidence that supports "substantial abuses of discretion and operational failures" by the state's attorney's office in prosecuting the initial case in 2019. Mr. Webb's office found that lawyers who work or had previously worked in the office's criminal division were "surprised" or "shocked" by the terms under which prosecutors dropped the charges against Mr. Smollett, just a month after his arrest. It also determined that prosecutors only informed the Chicago Police Department about the dismissal of the case minutes before a court hearing and did not consult with the department on the terms of the dismissal under which Mr. Smollett was required to complete community service and forfeit the 10,000 bond that had released him from jail. He was not required to plead guilty. The special prosecutor found that the state's attorney's office, in explaining its decision to drop the charges, "breached its obligations of honesty and transparency" by making false statements such as its claim that Mr. Smollett was just one of thousands of defendants whose case had been referred for alternative prosecution. The state's attorney's office could not identify any specific cases on which it relied in deciding to drop the case against Mr. Smollett, who had been accused of paying two acquaintances to attack him as part of a hoax, the special prosecutor said. The special prosecutor's office is asking a judge to allow it to release its full summary of its final conclusions. In a statement on Monday, the office led by Ms. Foxx, who is up for re election this fall, said that the findings put "to rest any implications of outside influence or criminal activity" on the part of its employees. But the office said that it "categorically rejects" the special prosecutor's assessment that it made "abuses of discretion" in its communications to the public. Any implication that the office made statements that were knowingly inaccurate is untrue, the statement said. Some of the statements that Mr. Webb described as false related to Ms. Foxx's decision to recuse herself from the Smollett case to avoid any perception that she had a conflict of interest after disclosing that she had communicated with Mr. Smollett's representatives when he was still considered a victim. Her decision to hand the case to her deputy rather than someone outside her office has been the subject of scrutiny by legal experts, and both Mr. Webb and the judge who appointed him determined it to be incorrect procedure. Mr. Webb's office found that Ms. Foxx also made a false public statement about her communication with Jurnee Smollett, Mr. Smollett's sister, who is also an actress. Ms. Foxx had said publicly that she had ceased communication with Ms. Smollett after she learned that Mr. Smollett had become a suspect, the special prosecutor's office said, but she continued to text Ms. Smollett and speak with her by phone for five days after that. Even after Ms. Foxx passed the case along to her deputy, the special prosecutor's office found that she was provided with frequent updates about the prosecution. The false statements that Mr. Webb says were disseminated by Ms. Foxx and her office could be ethical violations as established by an Illinois Supreme Court precedent, his office said. Mr. Webb's office clarified that it has no authority to determine whether the statements are violations but would be referring its findings to a disciplinary commission. A lawyer for Mr. Smollett, Mark Geragos, said that he believed that the timing of the announcement seemed "politically motivated" against Ms. Foxx, saying, "This is nothing more than an attempt to take down a young Black woman who doesn't fit in with the white power structure." Mr. Webb's office did not immediately respond to that allegation. The findings draw to a close another chapter of the legal proceedings that have resulted since Mr. Smollett reported to the police in January 2019 that two men had attacked him, poured bleach on him, called him racist and homophobic epithets and placed a noose around his neck. Mr. Smollett's acquaintances the brothers Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo had told the police that the actor had paid them 3,500 to orchestrate the attack. Mr. Smollett has maintained his innocence. Mr. Webb's office noted that while its investigation has concluded, Mr. Smollett will stand trial for the charges from February. The trial date has not yet been scheduled and will likely be delayed for months because of the coronavirus pandemic. In its news release, the special prosecutor's office said that it had focused its investigation on whether employees of the state's attorney's office might have violated criminal statutes and committed obstruction of justice, perjury or bribery. The office said it did not have evidence to bring such charges. Also at the center of the inquiry into Ms. Foxx's handling of the case was her communication with Ms. Smollett, as well as Tina Tchen, a former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, who had emailed Ms. Foxx saying that the actor's family had "concerns about the investigation." The Chicago Tribune reported that Ms. Foxx then told Ms. Tchen, and separately a member of Mr. Smollett's family, that she had asked the police superintendent to request that the F.B.I. take over. Although Mr. Webb's office determined that Ms. Foxx's conversations with these people as well as with Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund did lead her to request that the F.B.I. take over, it wrote that the request was "not improper" and did not substantively influence the prosecution. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In this photo from 2009, Julie Margaret Hogben's daughter Isabel runs to the real life Guzim. To Her, He Was More Than a Doorman In her 2015 Modern Love essay "When the Doorman Is Your Main Man," the writer Julie Margaret Hogben tells of a time in her life when she was dating in New York City and living in a building where the doorman, Guzim, felt obliged to protect her from men he deemed unsuitable. When an unexpected pregnancy sent her into crisis mode, Guzim became a close friend and confidant. I recently caught up with four writers whose essays inspired episodes in the new "Modern Love" television series on Amazon Prime Video. Below is my conversation with Ms. Hogben, whose episode stars Cristin Milioti and Laurentiu Possa. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Daniel Jones: You wrote about an unexpected pregnancy with a man you didn't love or intend to marry, and how your doorman, Guzim, helped you through that difficult time. How did you feel about writing and publishing a piece like that for such a big audience? Julie Margaret Hogben: Well, it's hard because it's a great story about a lovely friendship, but it's not the full story. It's only a 1,500 word essay. I think the essay makes it sound like I had no one and it was only Guzim who helped me. That's one truth that kind of gets lost in the essay. The other is that there was never really a question of whether or not I would go through with the pregnancy. It was just a question of how everything was going to unfold, and it was scary to be by myself and not in a relationship. And why was following through with the pregnancy never a question? Well, I'm Catholic, so it just wasn't. In the essay, the guy offered to marry you. But you could sense his reluctance? We were both reluctant. There was no way. Sign up for Love Letter, our weekly email. And catch up on all things Modern Love. How old was your daughter Isabel when you published your story? And has she read it? She must have been around 8? It was four years ago that I published the essay, and recently she turned 12. But I don't think she read it until about two weeks ago, and actually she didn't even read it then; she listened to Cecily Strong read it on the Modern Love podcast. She did that on her own? Or did you introduce her to it? She did it on her own. But we'd had conversations about the essay before that where I'd said, "You need to know that your dad, your biological father, and I both felt like this was completely in the cards and meant to be. We both felt like we were being moved around like chess pieces so this little girl could come into the world. Mistake, accident, surprise call it whatever you want, but you were meant to be." I wanted to ask a little bit about Guzim. Was he uneasy about being in the spotlight, both in the essay and being interviewed for the podcast episode? He didn't hesitate. I think he felt honored when he read the essay. I had asked him beforehand. I got his permission. He's kind of an unsung hero. He's so smart and deserves to be in the spotlight. Not many people recognize the contributions of people in those kinds of positions. I don't think he gets recognized for all the good he does. One surprising reaction to your story was the number of people who thought you were going to end up romantically with Guzim. Were you aware of that reaction? Yes, because actually a friend of mine said, "Why didn't you just marry Guzim?" And I was like, "O.K., really?" No, he was dating the same woman forever and he's also much older than me. Did it always feel like a protective, fatherly vibe? What's it like watching your episode? Is it emotional? Yeah, but it helps that it's been adapted and there are enough changes that it's far enough removed. Except that there are certain visuals where it looks like they took snapshots from my life. The lobby of the building. And the actress , with her glasses and the way she dresses. And the little girl. And Guzim in his uniform. That's a pretty classic New York City doorman look. So, yeah, it's really evocative, but I think enough has been changed that I don't feel like I'm watching my own life unfolding. I'm remembering that scene where the character, Maggie, first brings the baby back from the hospital and Guzim comes out to greet her and to help. And what he says then is straight out of your essay: "Good job. Beautiful." I'll never forget that moment. He opened the car door and took the car seat out. Did he ever take your daughter out to the American Museum of Natural History like in the episode? No, he never took her out anywhere. But he was always in the lobby for us. And it's New York City, so when you're 1 and a half in New York City, the lobby is your playroom. What in the episode felt most true to your experience? Well, like the opening whenever I was on a date, I would stop a couple blocks away because I never wanted to get close enough for Guzim to see us, for him to see me kiss anybody good night. In the show, Cristin is a little more courageous than I was about bringing men home. I would sneak in or make someone leave 15 minutes later than Guzim's shift so we wouldn't have to face the music of walking out past him. Also, in the episode I noticed he's on as a doorman all the time. It's like there are no other doormen in the building. Yeah, exactly. He had a shift probably six days a week. But he was the only one that had this sort of caretaking relationship with you? Yeah, there was one who used to lecture me about stuff all the time, and later Isabel and I would give each other looks. He was always teaching me how not to forget my keys, like, "You have to build a hook in your hallway." But I'm thinking, "I'm not looking for advice from you. Maybe from Guzim but not from you." What's your love life like now? I haven't had a relationship since my daughter was born. My daughter will occasionally open up an account for me. Three months ago she opened up a Bumble account and uploaded seven of my pictures and wrote me a little profile. That's so cute. She wants someone for you? And for herself. Because she's a tween and wants to hang out with her friends. So she wants a distraction for you? She wants a distraction for me and she thinks I should get a life, which I should. laughs So, yeah, I've got to get out there. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Joe Segal, who presented live jazz in Chicago under the Jazz Showcase banner for 70 years, making him one of the longest running music promoters in America, died on Aug. 10 in Chicago. He was 94. Stu Katz, a jazz pianist and vibraphonist who was a longtime friend of Mr. Segal's, confirmed the death, at AMITA Health Saint Joseph Hospital, but did not specify a cause. World War II was barely over when Mr. Segal started promoting weekly jam sessions and concerts in 1947 on the campus of Roosevelt University on South Michigan Avenue. He was enrolled there on the G.I. Bill, but as he told the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program in 2015, he used his student status as a cover to book musicians. "I was at Roosevelt for 10 years, and they finally said, 'Segal, the farce is over,'" he recalled. "Because I wasn't getting anything but C's and C pluses because I was hanging out all night." (In 2013, Roosevelt presented him with an honorary doctorate.) Mr. Segal booked a who's who of jazz legends over his long career, both early greats like Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and Charlie Parker, and contemporary standouts like Dee Dee Bridgewater and Joey DeFrancesco. He also hired the backing musicians, and in doing so discovered and supported numerous jazz artists over the years. In 2015 the National Endowment for the Arts elevated him into rarefied company, naming him an NEA Jazz Master. Charlie Parker's fast, jumpy saxophone soloing, and the style he pioneered known as bebop, left an especially deep impression on Mr. Segal, and after Parker's death in 1955, he organized Charlie Parker Month at the Showcase every August, the month of Parker's birth. For Mr. Segal, bebop was a religion and Parker his god. But more experimental styles, like the free jazz of Sun Ra or the mix of rock and jazz known as fusion that emerged in the late 1960s, could make him apoplectic. Lloyd Sachs, a writer who profiled Mr. Segal for The Chicago Sun Times in 1990, recalled a night when the saxophonist Wayne Shorter was booked at the Showcase. "Wayne was into fusion at the time," Mr. Sachs said in an interview. "Joe was pacing the lobby outside. He was livid. He kept saying, 'I told him to turn it down.'" Like Max Gordon, who owned the storied Village Vanguard in Manhattan, Mr. Segal was often referred to as a "jazz impresario." But unlike Mr. Gordon, Mr. Segal did not operate from a permanent location for many years. The Showcase was a movable feast. As The Chicago Tribune put it in 1989, Mr. Segal "presented live jazz in dozens of Chicago halls, theaters, schools, ballrooms, nightclubs, supper clubs, elegant joints, neighborhood joints and mere joints." "He's pretty much the guy who kept jazz alive in Chicago in terms of national touring acts," Mr. Sachs said. "He kept this club going in the face of all kinds of obstacles. Several times he got evicted or had to move. And he landed on his feet. He was a guy who carved out this audience for 70 years." Joseph Philip Segal was born on April 24, 1926, in Philadelphia to Irwin and Henrietta Segal. His mother, a switchboard operator, kicked his father out when she found him with another woman and raised her only child alone. It wasn't until his early teens that Mr. Segal reconnected with his father, who began taking him to the Earle Theater downtown. "That's when I fell in love with the big bands," Mr. Segal told the Smithsonian, recalling how the curtain would rise after the opening movie to reveal Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw and his orchestra on the bandstand. In 1944, at 18, Mr. Segal was drafted into the Army Air Corps and stationed in Champaign, Ill. From there, it was a short ride on the Illinois Central to Chicago and the jazz clubs then clustered along Randolph Street in the Loop. Mr. Segal had wanted to be a musician himself, first taking up the trombone like Tommy Dorsey. But as he told the National Endowment for the Arts, "I couldn't remember where anything went." He added, "I tried drums couldn't do that. Tried piano nothing. Too difficult. So I became an instigator instead." Mr. Segal later partnered with his son Wayne, who now owns the Showcase, and they built a successful home base in the venerable Dearborn Station building. But for decades being an instigator was not a commercially sensible lifestyle. For a time Mr. Segal lived with his wife, Helen, and five children in the Cabrini Green public houses, infamous for gang violence. And despite the world class artists he booked and Chicago's reputation as a music town, local audiences weren't always supportive of live jazz. Mr. Katz, the pianist, recalled a winter night some years back. The Showcase was based at the Blackstone Hotel at the time, and Mr. Segal had hired Mr. Katz to back the saxophonist Sonny Stitt. "I worked with Sonny in a quartet, and the band outnumbered the audience," Mr. Katz said. "That tells you in a nutshell how fickle the jazz impresario business is." If Mr. Segal took a financial hit on such evenings, he found a kind of compensation all the same. "I love it when a band comes in and is really cookin'," he once told The Sun Times. "There might only be three people in the house, and I'm happy." Mr. Segal's marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son, he is survived by two daughters, Latanya Segal and Julia Segal Adams, and several grandchildren. Mr. Katz said Mr. Segal had created a temple to hear jazz in its purest form. He didn't permit smoking during the shows, in part because he didn't want to impair the audience's vision of the stage. And he enforced a no talking rule during performances, showing particularly loud patrons to the door. Mr. Katz recalled another night at the Showcase, this one more triumphant than the Sonny Stitt gig, when Mr. Segal had booked a lineup of three nationally known saxophonists Gene Ammons, James Moody and Harold Land who played in the bebop style he loved. "I watched Joe's face as these musicians were playing," Mr. Katz said. "If it was a picture with a caption, the caption would have been: 'I'm in heaven.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
When Justin Peck unveiled "The Most Incredible Thing" in February, fans of this fast rising choreographer were eager to see his first story ballet. Mr. Peck, New York City Ballet's resident artist since 2014, has told subtle stories in his more abstract works for the company, through the inherent drama of form. But "Incredible" was his first adaptation of a narrative source, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of the same name, set in a kingdom where good forces meet evil. As it turns out, the lavish "Incredible," which returned to the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday along with its extravagant sets and costumes by the Canadian artist Marcel Dzama offers little in the way of a compelling story. In a kingdomwide contest to do "the most incredible thing" and win the hand of the Princess (Sterling Hyltin), a young Creator (Taylor Stanley) engineers a clock that yields lifelike figures dancing at the stroke of each hour. Incredible! His triumph is threatened by the sudden arrival of the Destroyer (Amar Ramasar), but magic prevails, as the clock's inhabitants, nearly defeated, rise up and destroy him back. It's hard to feel invested in the dancers as characters, despite vivid dancing from the cast of 56, in particular Ms. Hyltin, Mr. Stanley and, as the Cuckoo Bird, a fittingly skittish Tiler Peck (no relation to the choreographer). "Incredible" succeeds more as pure pageantry, a parade of Mr. Dzama's fantastical designs: feathered and winged concoctions for the Four Seasons; flat, bobbling, spiral emblazoned tutus for the Nine Muses; bulbous shimmering dresses for 11 children from the School of American Ballet. And let's not forget the mirror image armor for the creepily two headed King. Justin Peck, generally such a deft architect, keeps his choreography simpler than usual, relying heavily on unison and the exit strategy of running offstage. This draws even more attention to the costumes, which seem at times like autonomous creatures, dazzling performers in themselves. With an original score by Bryce Dessner of the band the National, "Incredible" shared Thursday's program with other works set to music by American composers: Peter Martins's "Barber Violin Concerto," to Samuel Barber, and Jerome Robbins's "N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz," to Robert Prince. These, along with the works on Friday's mixed bill "Bournonville Divertissments," Robbins's "Moves" and Balanchine's "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux" and "Symphony in Three Movements" held other kinds of stories, more ambiguous but with higher emotional stakes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Q. When a smartphone is advertised as waterproof, how do they verify that claim? A. When hawking the water worthiness of their products, most smartphone manufacturers cite the results of IP, or ingress protection, testing. Not to be confused with the popular augmented reality game, the "ingress" here comes from the Latin "ingressus" from the verb "ingredior" which means "go into or enter." So as you may expect by now, the IP standardized test is all about how much liquid and dust a device can keep out. Phone makers typically list a product's results as its IP rating under the International Electrotechnical Commission's 60529 standard. For its recent Galaxy devices, Samsung touts "an international standard rating of IP68" and says the Galaxy S7 and later models are "deemed fit enough to withstand dust, dirt and sand, and are resistant to submersion up to a maximum depth of 1.5 meters underwater for up to 30 minutes" which should protect it from the dreaded Toilet Drop. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Caroline Baumann, the director of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan, abruptly stepped down on Friday, a museum spokeswoman confirmed in an email. No reason was given for her departure. Dr. John Davis, the Smithsonian provost, will serve as interim director while a search is conducted for her replacement. Ms. Baumann did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment Friday night. Ms. Baumann, 53, joined the museum in 2001, having previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art, and was named director in 2013. During her tenure as director, she oversaw the 91 million renovation of the museum's home at Fifth Avenue and East 91st Street, which aimed to make its Gilded Age mansion more inviting to modern day visitors. "Baumann has been a passionate voice for design," said the museum in a statement, "and much has been accomplished during her tenure." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
PARIS "Body and Soul," Crystal Pite's new full length work for the Paris Opera Ballet, opens in sepulchral gloom, with two Beckettian figures obeying instructions ("right, left, right, left") from a disembodied voice. It ends with 40 black latex clad and masked dancers with insectlike prosthetic arms and protuberances, performing synchronized marches to a hard driving rock song by Teddy Geiger, while a hairy headed creature in gold sequined trousers gyrates wildly in the middle. "Body and Soul," which premiered at the Palais Garnier on Saturday , is Ms. Pite's second work for the Paris Opera Ballet. Her first, the 2016 "Seasons' Canon," was commissioned by Benjamin Millepied during his brief tenure as the company director, and established the Canadian Ms. Pite, almost unknown in France, as a new dance star here. Although "Body and Soul" isn't primarily focused on the rousing, rippling mass movement embraced in "Seasons' Canon" an aesthetic that Ms. Pite has brought to ballet companies over the last few years the audience seemed determined to love the new piece, applauding wildly at the end of each of its three sections. But "Body and Soul" is a puzzling and incoherent work, with dashes of inventiveness, brilliance and poetry offset by a pervasive tone of emotional angst, set in Stygian shadow (lighting is by Tom Visser), and a finale that seems schizophrenically unrelated to anything else we have seen. Part 1 is, initially, mildly intriguing. Who are these men in long black coats? What is their relationship to each other? Do the words we hear describe or compel the movement? A large group of identically garbed dancers enters (the costumes are by Nancy Bryant), echoing the soloists's movements. Do they represent onlookers, society, their inner selves? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
CARLISLE, England After this ancient fortress city was hit by a crippling flood in 2005, its residents could take some comfort in the fact that it was the kind of deluge that was supposed to happen about once every 200 years. But it happened again four years later. And again last winter, when Storm Desmond brought record breaking downpours that turned roads into rivers, fields into lakes, living rooms into ponds. "I really felt like we were in danger of death," said Jonathan Bryant, who scrambled out of his car helping his wife, Diane, their two children and a cat after they were hit by a wall of water and had to wade a quarter mile back to their house, through rushing torrents, pelting rain and 60 mile per hour wind in the pitch black. In many places, the threat of climate change can still feel distant, even theoretical. But not here, a city of about 74,000 in the far northwest corner of England, where one of its rivers swelled to about 30 times its normal volume last year. About 2,000 houses and 500 businesses were damaged or destroyed in the flooding, and by July, thousands of people still were not able to return to their homes. Some of the city's schools were flooded, and one of the biggest employers here, a McVitie's biscuit factory, closed for four months after taking on, by one estimate, about 10 million gallons of water. Residents worry that the factory will close for good if it is flooded again. And their fears may not be misplaced. Scientists have estimated that climate change has increased the chances of storms like Desmond by 40 percent in this part of Britain, though estimates are somewhat uncertain. "What we had in Carlisle frequent series of storms and superstorms are exactly what you would expect in a globally warming climate," said Colin Thorne, a river scientist at the University of Nottingham. "So we shouldn't be surprised that it happened." "Figuring out how to deal with storms and flooding cities is going to have to happen all over the world," he added. This working class city is particularly vulnerable because it was rainy to begin with, and it also sits at the meeting of three rivers, with many homes built on flood plains. Carlisle has tried a number of solutions. After the 2005 floods, the government raised and extended flood walls, and in some places planted willow trees to slow the water flow and stabilize the banks. But now, dozens of residents, furious and discouraged with their circumstances, have banded together to wrest control of their flood defenses from the government. They recently proposed that a new independent authority of experts, residents and government officials manage the rivers and watershed area. Government environmental officials said they understood the residents' frustration, but also contended that there was no way to eliminate every risk or protect against every flood. A major issue is cost. The national Environment Agency has allocated up to 25 million pounds, or about 33 million, for flood defenses in Carlisle, and PS43 million, or 58 million, for the county of Cumbria, out of about 919 million in emergency funding for all the areas affected by the recent flooding. Daniel Johns, the head of adaptation for the Committee on Climate Change, an independent British government advisory body, said spending on flood control was important, but not a solution. "Flood defenses will only ever provide a limited and now diminishing standard of protection," Mr. Johns said. Some flood victims say they wonder if it makes sense to live in Carlisle anymore, given the relentless flooding. "I don't want to go back," said Christine McBride, a longtime Carlisle resident who is living in a rented apartment while her home is being repaired. "But I will be going back," she added. "I have to." She put her home on the market, but recently took it off because the flood risk made it a tough sell. Ms. McBride's home was also flooded in 2005, she said, and she thought that government officials were being overly cautious when they told her to evacuate in December. When the water started bubbling into her home, her son urged her to leave. "People who have not been flooded think it's nice to get all new things, but it's not, and I do not sleep properly always thinking what to sort out next," she said. At a pub here, residents say they would like to get on with their lives, but are having trouble doing so. The pub, which reopened recently after flood repairs, is on Warwick Road, a street lined with large, yellow trash bins filled with tiles, insulation, mattresses, even refrigerators ruined in the flooding. The windows of homes vacated by flood victims are dusty and unlit. Blue ribbons had been tied six feet up the trunks of the street's stalwart oak trees, marking the high water level. Many displaced residents said they still felt depressed and discouraged about spending another night in a rental home. Several insurance companies sent some families to stay at the Crown Mitre Hotel in the center of the city. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Many top colleges are misleading applicants about the paperwork needed to seek financial aid, possibly violating federal law and costing students extra money, a congressman said on Monday. The Department of Education said it was reviewing the allegations by Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, based on an investigation by committee staff members. Under federal law, college students need to fill out just one form to apply for several kinds of aid from the federal government, including Pell grants and loans: the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as Fafsa. Before granting aid from their own coffers, hundreds of colleges require both Fafsa and a form created by the College Board, called the CSS/Financial Aid Profile. The College Board's form is much more complex than Fafsa, and unlike the Fafsa, it is not free, carrying a 25 fee for the first college a student sends it to and 16 for each additional one, though the fee can be waived for low income families. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
The annual consumer blitz that is Black Friday, has seeped into the wedding landscape, like smoke from Romeo y Julieta cigars, frequently given as groomsmen gifts. (They're 28 percent off at the Famous Smoke Shop.) The advertised deep discounts, offered by retailers beginning Friday, Nov. 29 , and that often continue through Cyber Monday, Dec. 2, can be found on a wide range of wedding products and services, both common and uncommon. Among the many bridal clothing retailers cutting prices, David's Bridal is offering 50 percent off some bridesmaids dresses on Black Friday and an extra 50 percent off all clearance dresses and other items on Cyber Monday. Bridesmaid for Hire, a New York company that peddles bridesmaid services like toast making, is also having a sale. All services from Black Friday through Cyber Monday are 20 percent off. Maid of honor speech writing packages that generally go for 400 will cost 320, said Jen Glantz, the founder of the five year old company. Bridesmaid services, which include wedding day errand running, wearing the bridesmaids' dress, toast making, walking down the aisle and general advice giving, normally about 2,500, will be on sale for 2,000. According to Ms. Glantz, Black Friday and Cyber Monday fall at the perfect time of year for brides and grooms looking to score serious savings on not just stuff, but services. "Right now it's the dead season" of the wedding calendar year, she said. "Wedding season was over in mid October, and engagement season is just around the corner." (Christmas, New Year's and Valentine's Day) The lull in between seasons, from the perspective of companies like hers, is crucial for drumming up business. "If I want my calendar to be full in 2020, I need to use this time to start getting bookings now," she said. Though hiring bridesmaids is probably not front of mind for most couples, Ms. Glantz may be among an upswing of more service oriented businesses coming up with incentives to attract clients before the flurry of holiday proposals. "A D.J. I work with consistently who is one of the most popular in our area has started doing a Black Friday special," said Christina Moore, the owner of Bella Giornata Events, a wedding planning service in Charlottesville, Va. "People are always surprised to hear that." Even event planning services like Ms. Moore's are getting in on the action. "For us, Black Friday is about offering add ons," said Laurie Hardman, the owner of Laurie D'Anne Events in Nashville. "For anyone filling out a contact form on Friday, they have two months to book with us." Couples who book on Black Friday will get complimentary vintage car service to pick them up after their wedding and a complimentary one night stay at the Dream Hotel in Nashville. Ms. Glantz, whose bridesmaid services include advising brides on all aspects of wedding planning, said couples should also capitalize on online travel deals for out of town wedding guests and honeymoon packages. (EF Ultimate Break, a travel company aimed at millennials, has a 20 percent off deal on an 11 day Greek Islands tour). Couples should also reach out to vendors who may seem indifferent to the weekend long shopping bonanza. "If you have a favorite vendor who doesn't advertise a sale whether it's a photographer, a florist, a D.J., a band or a wedding planner you should still reach out to them," she said. "You can say, 'I'd really like to work with you. Are you offering any competitive pricing for Black Friday or Cyber Monday?' Chances are they'll work with you." Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Buying services on Black Friday may not work for everyone. "You don't want a hastily bought Black Friday deal to complicate your day," said Susan Cordogan, the owner and founder of Big City Bride, an event planning firm in Chicago. "A favorite spa, hair salon or nail salon might not honor discounted services on a Saturday." A better idea, Ms. Cordogan said, is sticking to Black Friday's bedrock: retail stores. "Go to any of the big department stores for discounts on bridesmaids dresses or mother of the bride dresses," she said. "If you want to give all your bridesmaids a matching clutch they can carry on your wedding day, or if you want them to have matching earrings, those are all great things to buy on Black Friday at a discounted rate. And all the personalization sites, where you can get monogrammed gifts. You can certainly take advantage of that." Thinking beyond the wedding weekend can also be helpful. "You're going to need a dress for your shower or your welcome brunch," Ms. Cordogan said. Before then, you're going to need invitations. Minted offers 25 percent off save the date cards on Black Friday, Ms. Moore noted, and deals on thank you notes and invitations often pop up on the site throughout the weekend. Among the retail deals that excite her most, she said, are 30 percent off cupcake orders from Baked by Melissa. "Not as many people have cupcakes at their wedding as they should, and these are delicious and adorable and delivered fresh to your door," she said. Ms. Moore is also excited about discounted dresses by Bhldn, which has free shipping on all orders and 30 percent off all markdowns with a code throughout the weekend. "Brides should run, not walk, to their computers to order their bridesmaids dresses from Bhldn," she said. (And if they want to do so while wearing sparkly Kate Spade Keds, a popular choice for wedding reception footwear, they can get 30 percent off on Black Friday at Keds.com). Brides should think twice before sprinting to the keyboard to buy their own dresses though, Ms. Moore said, noting that oftentimes it's better to see the dress in person before making a purchase. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The men's and women's doubles draws at the United States Open this year are stacked with former Grand Slam doubles champions as well as new and exciting partnerships. While doubles may not have the same cachet as the singles tournaments among casual fans, there are still plenty of exciting players to watch some because they are paired up. Here are a few teams to watch out for as the week progresses: The two Colombians have paired together once again, and are going for their third Grand Slam doubles title after having won together at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 2019. Although both are in their early 30s, their success has only come in the last few years. The two did not play together for the Australian Open this year, after Farah tested positive for anabolic steroids and was suspended from tournament play. Farah argued against the charge, and the International Tennis Federation rescinded his ban earlier this year. Kubot and Melo each hold two Grand Slam titles, including one they share from a victory at Wimbledon in 2017, and others from previous partnerships. The two have played together consistently since 2017, reaching the U.S. Open final in 2018 before losing to Mike Bryan and Jack Sock. They beat the top seeded Cabal and Farah in the finals of the Mexican Open in February, and will hope to repeat that performance on the faster paced courts in New York. Ram and Salisbury are relatively new partners who began playing together consistently at the beginning of 2019. But they quickly showed their strengths, winning two tournaments in 2019, in Qatar and Vienna. They went on to win the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam for either of them. They will hope to take that momentum forward, especially considering that the U.S. Open hardcourts are most similar to the courts on which they secured their championship in Melbourne. The pair of 35 year olds from the Balkans started playing together in the middle of last year, and quickly won two highly coveted titles in Cincinnati and at the China Open in Beijing. Dodig holds one Grand Slam title, from the 2015 French Open with Marcelo Melo, while his partner has not yet been past the semifinals of a Grand Slam. Dodig and Polasek also have collective experience. Together, they went to the semifinals of Wimbledon in 2019 as well as at the Australian Open this year. The two are an exceptionally formidable pair and will be sure to keep pushing for titles as they try to beat the clock. Babos and Mladenovic have won three Grand Slam titles together, their latest coming at the Australian Open this year. Although Mladenovic has had some success on the singles tour, reaching a peak rating of No. 10, Babos is a doubles specialist. Babos and Mladenovic are also exceptionally dominant in the WTA Finals, where they have won for the past three years in a row. No doubt, even with the lengthy forced break, the pair will be back to their dominant winning ways. Mertens and Sabalenka, the defending champions, are two young and exceptionally talented players. In the last four Grand Slam tournaments, they have not lost before the quarterfinals, a rare level of consistency, especially for a pair that only began working together at the beginning of 2019. Both players are better known for their successes on the singles tour, but they have become the rare pair that can compete seriously in both formats, and should be paid more attention as they storm through the world of doubles. This is the pair's first year playing together, and they struggled at the beginning of 2020, losing in the first round at the Australian Open. However, the pair has had some success separately in the past. Melichar reached the final at Wimbledon in 2018 in women's doubles as well as winning the title in mixed doubles. Xu reached the final at Wimbledon in 2019. Together, the two can be a formidable pair, especially on faster playing surfaces like Wimbledon or the U.S. Open. Peschke, at 45, and Schuurs, at 27, have one of the biggest age gaps in doubles tennis. They began working together at the beginning of the year, and while they have not had much success so far, their performances improved throughout the Australia swing at the beginning of 2020. Peschke, who previously played with Nicole Melichar, is an incredibly intelligent doubles player, and won Wimbledon in 2011 with Katarina Srebotnik. Schuurs has yet to make it past the quarterfinals at a Grand Slam, but has previously won three Premier titles, twice while paired up with singles No. 1 Ashleigh Barty and once with Elise Mertens. Here are a few more pairings to watch. The two singles specialists are pairing up for this year's doubles draw. Azarenka reached the finals last year alongside Ashleigh Barty, and has the potential to do so again with this year's Australian Open singles champion. This Midwestern duo reached the quarterfinals in Flushing last year, and Sock won the U.S. Open doubles championship in 2018 alongside Mike Bryan. These Americans are a pleasure to watch, and have the potential to go all the way. These two young Americans are rightly heralded as the future of American tennis. Although they lost in the third round of last year's U.S. Open to Victoria Azarenka and Ashleigh Barty, they are aggressive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Nayaa Opong of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in "Afterwardsness," which was recently filmed before an audience of volunteers at the Armory.Credit...Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times Nayaa Opong of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in "Afterwardsness," which was recently filmed before an audience of volunteers at the Armory. A few days ago, I attended the premiere of an hourlong dance performance. In New York City. Indoors. With more than 100 other people. Let me rephrase that. A few days ago, 98 volunteers, including me all pretested for Covid 19, all masked, all following strict rules of social distancing played the role of audience members for an indoor filming of an hourlong dance performance. The Park Avenue Armory, where the filming took place, is part of a coalition of theaters that are lobbying New York State for special permission to present ticketed performances to reduced capacity, socially distanced audiences. Because of their open spaces and flexible designs, these theaters argue that they can safely return to business now or soon, before standard theaters do. At present, though, only rehearsals, gallery exhibitions and film shoots are allowed. Since August, the Armory has been the site of rehearsals and workshops, as several artists experiment with the building's most distinct feature, its barrel roofed Drill Hall. The room is like an airplane hanger, with 40,000 square feet of open space to spread out in and an enormous volume of air circulating above. How to take advantage of such a space? What kind of performance suits it and the moment? What do audiences want now? How to make them feel safe? Different projects have come up with very different answers to those questions. The one being filmed that day was "Afterwardsness," a new work by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. (The title of the dance was updated after this article was first published.) The next closest to being ready is "Social!" billed as "the social distance dance club" which is not a performance but an experience featuring the voice and spirit of David Byrne. At "Afterwardsness," you sit in a chair at least 11 feet away from any other viewer. Nine dancers, young and beautiful even with their faces partially obscured by masks, move all around you in an empty center space and in wide, tape demarcated lanes between the chairs. They are far away in the distance or as close as six feet. They don't touch each other, not even when the choreography calls on them to do the patty cake. The music is live and largely elegiac, the dancing virtuosic and mostly abstract though flecked with gestures of vulnerability, pain and anger. From the start through a journal entry audio installation before you enter the Drill Hall you confront the traumas of recent months: the pandemic, the protests. Throughout, voices periodically intone calendar dates in chronological order, starting with March. In "Social!" at least as experienced during a late September workshop instead of a chair, you have a circle on the floor, six feet in diameter, just for you. The music is a 55 minute D.J. set, a flow of dance tracks designed to be irresistible. There are no dancers, though. Or rather the dancers are you and another 100 or so masked people in their own individual circles, responding to movement suggestions from the recorded voice of Mr. Byrne. Before the pandemic, Bill T. Jones had a show in mind for the Armory, but "Afterwardsness" was not it. "Deep Blue Sea" a big work for a big space, featuring 100 performers and lots of physical contact was scheduled to premiere there on April 14. When rehearsals were shut down, Mr. Jones was stunned. "I couldn't believe it would go on for longer than a month or two," he said in an interview. "But then the Armory told us they were going to have to postpone longer, and I thought, 'There goes another gig.'" "I was despairing, actually," he continued. "I was thinking, 'Is this the end of the company?'" Janet Wong, the company's associate artistic director, insisted on weekly virtual company meetings. She gave the isolated dancers an assignment to learn bits of old repertory from archival videos. And when the Armory invited Mr. Jones to create a new, socially distanced production, these choreographic fragments became the basis for that work. Rehearsals at the Armory began in mid August, the first time in months that Mr. Jones had seen his dancers in person. "They were free," he said, "and it was profound, and I thought, 'This is what we do.'" Still, when he learned exactly what the Armory meant by "socially distanced," he was skeptical: "'This is going to kill the theatrical experience,' I thought." Yet with every day of rehearsal, he became more convinced that it could work, he said that intimacy was possible in the vast space, even with all the rules. He quoted Stravinsky: "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself." The project's music director, Pauline Kim Harris, created a score with the composer and vocalist Holland Andrews. It includes the folk song "Another Man Done Gone" and ethereal and cacophonous passages from Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," written and first performed in a World War II prisoner of war camp. Sounds of protest fade in and out. Ms. Kim Harris, on violin, plays her own "8:46," a homage to George Floyd that sounds like a slow suffocation over that many minutes and seconds. But the most potent sounds might be the calendar dates, steadily advancing. "Afterwardsness" is a psychoanalytic term for a belated understanding of trauma. Mr. Jones intends it ironically. "We would like to believe that we're putting this behind us, that we've earned the truth that comes with distance," he said. "But it is not behind us. We're going to have to behave as if we are in a state that is never going to end." So you want to dance like David Byrne? Before the pandemic, when the scenic designer Christine Jones became an artist in residence at the Armory, she was already imagining using the Drill Hall for a communal dance event. She discussed the idea with another artist in residence, the choreographer Steven Hoggett. "That is where I'm at," Mr. Byrne said, "finding a way to be engaged with the wider world and have it be joyous. This seems to be a way to do that." During the September workshops, the three collaborators fine tuned the playlist and script with volunteers who had been tested for Covid 19. What they learned above all is that people, of many ages and backgrounds, are ready for this. One participant, in tears, said, "This is what dance clubs should always be like." Mr. Byrne said that his "touring brain" envisioned franchises: "Social!" in Seattle, Chicago, London. The Armory is the best chance, though, and it remains a maybe. In the meantime, the filming of "Afterwardsness" did happen, like a phase in a clinical trial. When the dancers were finished, they each thanked the audience for coming, and that taken for granted exchange was moving. But it wasn't the end, as we might have assumed in pre pandemic days. The audience still had to be shepherded out of the building, one by one, like well behaved children in a fire drill. That's the kind of choreography that will be most crucial if such events are to become regular again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
On a dazzling Friday afternoon, Everett Floyd Abrams, 3, was racing down the sidewalk in the West Village, neatly steering past pedestrians. Pedaling a pint size bike with training wheels, his duckie blond hair nearly hidden by his helmet, he was headed west on Grove Street. Running flat out behind him was his father, the journalist Dan Abrams, ready for action in a baseball cap and high tops. "What's that, a bump?" Mr. Abrams called. "You want to go on it?" "Yeah, O.K., I go on it!" Everett answered. Besotted parent that he is, Mr. Abrams fast talking legal expert, new media mogul and restaurant maven wanted the verdict. "How was it, Bud?" he asked. "Was it amazing?" To some who recognized Mr. Abrams, 49, ABC's chief legal analyst, the sight of him with a toddler (his son with the publicist Florinka Pesenti) may have seemed discordant. Famously single, he has long been pegged by Gawker, et al., as a man who sought reflected glory; his much discussed hit list includes Elle Macpherson, Renee Zellweger and Elisabeth Rohm. A partnership with his brother from another mother, Dave Zinczenko, has fueled his image as a heat seeker. Formerly the editor in chief of the better sex and biceps bible Men's Health and now a wellness titan who pumps out titles like "Eat It to Beat It!," Mr. Zinczenko, 45, is tall, buff and dirty blond. He packs a reputation as a conquistador with an impressive list of done thats, and inevitably the more erudite Mr. Abrams has been branded his wingman one approaching midlife on the prowl. In 2010, their shared interest in food and wine led them to a deeper level when they invested in the Lion. Cozy and clubby, with an Old New York vibe, the boite on West Ninth Street was described by some as a knockoff of the cool kid Waverly Inn, owned in part by Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair. Last September, Mr. Abrams and Mr. Zinczenko switched gears by opening White Street in TriBeCa. In the evenings, the soaring space is defined by Venetian mirrors and velvet drapes. On the weekends, it morphs into a skylit brunch spot with a V.I.P. lounge for children. Grown ups are allowed, but not required, in a bubbly room where the soundtrack features Florence and the Machine and the face painting never stops. The lounge was inspired in many ways by Mr. Abrams's evolution. These days, instead of pursuing shimmering femmes, he often makes the scene with Everett. Last July, the two appeared at a charity event in Bridgehampton, N.Y., with Mr. Abrams in Ray Bans that matched his son's. The pair have been featured on the cover of Hamptons magazine, and in 2012, Everett met Oprah Winfrey with his father on the set of "Good Morning America" and later documented it on his Twitter feed. Mr. Abrams now shares his townhouse with Everett's mother, Ms. Pesenti. A Vassar College graduate and the director of public relations for Gucci, Ms. Pesenti, 36, has been in his life since 2009. Though not a celebrity, she catapulted into Wikipedia in 2002 as the first female winner of "The Amazing Race." "Florinka is very fierce and very smart," said Christine Cole, the general manager at White Street and a friend of Mr. Abrams's. "Instead of being in search of his partner, he's found her." Now, his pale pistachio living room with clean lines and contemporary furniture is crowded with trains, trucks and gnome size sports gear. A poster size version of the Hamptons cover is propped by the fireplace; Everett, it seems, likes to ride his bike on it. Cut to White Street, the palmy expanse on West Broadway that Mr. Abrams and his partners designed as a temple for serious food. In the evenings, free spending locals, financiers and outlanders come for globally influenced dishes from the chef Floyd Cardoz, who made his name at Tabla. (Set to leave at the end of July, he will be replaced by the sous chef Jason Lawless.) Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne, Naomi Watts and Sting have savored dishes including the duo of Elysian fields lamb ( 39) and taro crisped halibut ( 34) at White Street. And President Obama rallied the troops over pumpkin soup with lemon ricotta at a Democratic fund raiser in October. The concept of courting the squirmy set was spawned in the early months, when brunch turnout was low. Ms. Cole (a partner in the restaurant) said that they tried hiring a band, which wasn't a draw. So they brainstormed: a clown, perhaps? Happily, Plan C prevailed. On a recent Sunday, couples lingering over prosecco ignored abandoned strollers. In the V.I.P. lounge, an elegant silver gray room with long windows, their toddlers to preteens dawdled over puzzles and games while a cherub mouthed blocks in his high chair. Supervised by Julia Pfender, a serene young woman who works as a nanny, the novice epicures chattered, shrieked and occasionally wandered out to their parents for bites of pancake. The scene resembled a birthday party, minus the stickiness and tears. At diaper changing time, parents headed to a private enclave downstairs. Instead of struggling with a pull down shelf, they could do makeovers on a full size changing table stocked with diapers and wipes. With flattering lighting and a wall lined with gin bottles, the ambience was pleasantly surreal. Apparently, it is all working: Ms. Cole said that she sees the same little painted faces from week to week, and that brunch has "grown organically" since the V.I.P. space debuted in January. One regular is Everett Abrams, who began restaurant hopping as babe. "Going to dinner was always a big part of our lives, and we wanted to keep that," Ms. Pesenti said. Her romance with Mr. Abrams, in fact, had its beginnings at Mr. Carter's media hive. In 2009, a mutual friend introduced them at a party to celebrate "The Hunger," a memoir by John DeLucie. (Then the chef at the Waverly Inn, he later left for the Lion.) A legal analyst for NBC and substitute "Today" anchor at the time, Mr. Abrams failed to recognize the vibrant Ms. Pesenti. "We had met a few times before, which Dan claims didn't happen, but he meets a lot more people than I do, and he was famous," she said. "So it stuck with me much more than it did with him." Nor did he peg her as the overwrought "Flo," who, in the third season of "The Amazing Race," leaned on her hard working teammate, Zach Behr. Born in Milan, Ms. Pesenti moved to New York in 1984. Her parents Roberto, the bureau chief for an Italian newspaper, and Ilike, a photo editor had settled with Florinka and her younger brother, Viktor, on the Upper East Side. Just out of a serious relationship when she met Mr. Abrams, Ms. Pesenti wasn't in the market for another. And though she said the attraction was immediate, she and Mr. Abrams dated other people for a time. "Dan is not a relationship person, really, and I needed some space," she said. "But we got to know each other really well." And when the issue of parenthood came up, she said, "We were like, 'Oh, this feels right. ... ' " At home at the end of a busy week, Ms. Pesenti was curled on a leather sofa in a study upstairs. Barefoot and without makeup, she was dressed for a drive to the Hamptons in camouflage print leggings and a long sleeved tee. A midcentury family they are not. "We went into it sort of unconventionally, because we weren't married," Ms. Pesenti said. "But even though we're very different people, we have a lot of the same philosophies on life. And we felt we were on very solid ground. That seemed to be a very good way to go into a crazy thing like parenthood." From the beginning, Mr. Abrams has been a dynamic presence in his son's life. "In all our years as friends," Mr. Zinczenko wrote in an email, "I've never seen him throw himself into anything like he does with Everett." Everett's grandfather Floyd Abrams, the constitutional lawyer and a frequent babysitter, described his son in an email as "very much the father my wife, Efrat, and I might have expected totally engaged and unrestrictedly loving." Back in his toy stocked living room, Everett's father was reflecting on the flood of decisions that crop up in a day of tending a toddler. He was taking on the topics that seem charmingly distant to parents whose children are long grown and prompt exhausted sighs from others. Obsessed with healthy eating, Mr. Abrams was "monumentally" annoyed at Everett's nursery school, for example, because "it seems every week it's someone's birthday," and out come the treats. Not long ago, he learned of a cupcake fest when he arrived for pickup and spun into a lather: "I'm thinking, 'It's the morning, what is this school doing serving cupcakes to 2 1/2 year olds without asking the parents?' " In this case, there was no face off because Everett was set to change schools. But even when scores are settled, there are epiphanies to be processed, moments of awakening to be acknowledged. Mr. Abrams was struggling with the notion that he sometimes gives mixed messages and that when Everett is within earshot, "everything I say now is effectively on the record." That is a milestone that may seem like old news to Mr. Abrams next year. In the meantime, it is clear that he is seizing the moments. "Dan wants to take Everett to every dentist visit, every doctor's appointment, every haircut," Ms. Pesenti said. He also makes room for the occasional boys' night out. A few weeks ago, he and Everett dined a deux at Rosemary's trattoria on Greenwich Avenue, half a block from the Fire Department's Squad 18. "You should have seen us," Mr. Abrams said. "We sat outside, and Everett got the seat facing the fire station. There was a little bit of action when the truck backed out, and he got excited when ambulances drove by. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
DETROIT The 2017 GMC Acadia sport utility vehicle that is just starting to arrive in dealerships around the country is 700 pounds lighter than the version it replaces, and can go 23 miles on a gallon of gasoline, up from 18 m.p.g., a 28 percent improvement. One of the secrets to the big weight loss? Glue. Many of the steel parts of the Acadia's underbody are held together not by rivets or welds but by advanced adhesives similar to those used in modern airplanes like the Boeing Dreamliner. Since this ultra superglue bonds parts together all along the seam where they connect, not just in certain spots, the parts become stiffer. Because of the stiffness, General Motors is able in many cases to switch to thinner steel, helping the new Acadia shed pounds. The grades of steel are thinner by only about the width of a human hair, but "it's all the little things that add up to the big number," said Charlie Klein, executive director of G.M.'s global carbon emissions reduction strategy. Automakers are racing to improve fuel efficiency to meet the increasing mileage standards that environmental regulators have set for the next nine years. Space age adhesives are being used more widely, just one of the many leaps manufacturers are taking to reduce weight and save fuel. But to continue their gains, automakers must find additional innovations. One promising technology on the horizon is a new type of gas electric hybrid that draws power from a 48 volt battery, which is more powerful than a standard 12 volt auto battery but less expensive and less complicated than the power packs of 200 volts or more found in hybrids like the Toyota Prius. The 48 volt battery drives an electric motor that gives the engine an extra 20 or so horsepower, cutting fuel use in starts and acceleration. Mary Gustanski, vice president of engineering and program management at Delphi, an auto supplier that is going to produce 48 volt systems for car companies, believes these hybrids can improve the fuel economy of normal gasoline powered cars by 15 percent or more with little additional cost. "Is it leaps and bounds?" she said. "No, but does it move us further along? Definitely." Parts like a rear door striker latch plate of a GMC Acadia are glued instead of being riveted or welded together. Hyundai Motor, the Korean automaker, is "working very hard on 48 volt technology," said Michael O'Brien, the company's vice president of corporate and product planning. He declined to say when those cars would be on the market. G.M. also expects to offer 48 volt cars in the United States market in the next few years, an executive said. Ms. Gustanski said Delphi's technology would first appear in Europe and China in 2018. Continental, another supplier, plans to begin producing 48 volt systems for automakers by the end of this year. Even with new technologies, automakers still have a steep uphill climb to keep pace with gas mileage targets. By 2025, they are supposed to sell a fleet of vehicles that hits an average of 54.5 miles per gallon. That number is based on a complicated formula that gives credits for reducing emissions from air conditioners and selling electric vehicles, among other things. In real world driving, the target equals a fleet average of about 40 miles per gallon. The average for cars and light trucks that were sold in July was 25.4 miles per gallon, according to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Last month, a joint report from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department said automakers were probably able to reach only an average rating of about 50 miles per gallon by 2025 about 36 miles per gallon in real world situations. The main problem is that low gasoline prices and the absence of high fuel taxes that are common in most other advanced industrial nations have enticed Americans to move away from cars and buy more pickup trucks and S.U.V.s, which score lower on fuel efficiency. Missing the 2025 target would result in higher levels of carbon dioxide emissions, which regulators are trying to reduce in a bid to battle climate change. Regulators have just begun a review of the fuel efficiency standards and by April 2018 must decide whether to ease them in some ways a path automakers would prefer or leave them unchanged. These include hybrid and plug in models from Ford Motor, Hyundai, Toyota and others, as well as pure electric vehicles like Tesla models and G.M.'s Chevrolet Bolt. Ford's aluminum bodied F 150 pickup truck, when equipped with the company's EcoBoost V6 engine, comes close to the 2025 requirement 23 miles per gallon in real world driving for vehicles of that size. Automakers agree that electric cars offer impressive fuel economy numbers, but counter that consumers buy too few of them to move the average number. The big challenge, they say, is in improving fuel economy in conventional gasoline powered cars without adding so much cost that consumers turn away. "It is going to be extremely difficult for traditional powertrains to hit those targets in the last couple of years" leading to 2025, said Richard L. Gezelle, a senior program manager at Toyota. Toyota is one automaker that has less interest in 48 volt "mild" hybrids, as they are known in the industry. Mr. Gezelle said his company thought automakers would need to focus more on breakthrough technologies such as electric cars and hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles that can meet the 2025 standard and continue improving fuel efficiency beyond then. For now, automakers are making gains from a series of technologies they started introducing about six years ago. These include shrinking the size of engines while adding turbocharging, which increases power and efficiency by forcing extra air into an engine. This approach enables a 4 cylinder engine to put out about the same power as a traditional V6, and a V6 to replace a V8. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Federal Judge Richard Gergel of South Carolina with a portrait of Judge J. Waties Waring behind him. When Richard Gergel was elevated to the federal judiciary by President Barack Obama in 2010, he found himself assigned to the Charleston, S.C., courtroom of an illustrious predecessor, J. Waties Waring, who had changed the course of American constitutional law. Few including Gergel knew much about him. The paradox was not lost on Gergel, a lifelong South Carolinian well versed in local history. But soon, using his knowledge of court procedures and F.B.I. records and the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act, he was on a crusade. Now, despite judicial duties that included the 2017 trial of Dylann Roof, the young white supremacist sentenced to death for massacring nine African American worshipers at a Charleston church, Gergel has written a book about a largely forgotten racial atrocity that turned a Confederate soldier's son into an improbable giant of civil rights jurisprudence. (Gergel would not comment on the Roof trial.) "I stumbled across the story and stumbled across Truman's role," said Gergel, 64, on a recent visit to New York. "It was a case that not only woke up Waties Waring, it woke up Truman." "There was no one like him," he said of Waring. "In the South in the 1940s there was a sense that something had to change but no one could figure out how to break the Gordian knot of Jim Crow." 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. What turned a Southern gradualist into a revolutionary? "I started digging," the judge said. Beyond the book, his quest ended in a 2015 renaming of the Charleston federal courthouse as the J. Waties Waring Judicial Center. The backdrop of the Woodard case was indeed harrowing. On Feb. 12, 1946, Army sergeant Isaac Woodard, 26, discharged with a chest of medals after three years of fighting in the Pacific in a segregated unit, boarded a Greyhound bus from Camp Gordon, in Augusta, Ga., en route to home in Winnsboro, S.C. There were conflicting accounts of what happened on that bus. Joyous soldiers, black and white, may have been sharing a celebratory bottle of whiskey. Woodard and the driver argued about restroom breaks and Greyhound's rules requiring a driver to accommodate passengers's needs. When the bus stopped in Batesburg, a small town about 30 miles from Columbia, the state capital, the driver summoned the town's two police officers, Chief Lynwood Shull and his deputy, Elliot Long, and Woodard was ordered off the bus. Shull admitted using his blackjack on the sergeant. When Woodard wrested it away, Long, gun drawn, ordered him to drop it. Then, by the Gergel book's account, Shull rained blows on Woodard so ferociously the blackjack broke. Woodard was left sightless, both eyes gouged out, and thrown in jail, igniting a racial fuse that would burn its way across America to Waring, the White House and eventually the Supreme Court. "It's more than just an incident, it's a huge historical moment," said Patricia Sullivan, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and author of "Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement." As a law student at Duke University in the 1970s, Gergel had read of Waring. But passing mention of Woodard escaped him and he didn't think much of Waring again until, as an intellectual property and personal injury lawyer and outside counsel to the city of Columbia, he was named to the federal bench. "In my installation talk, I spoke about Judge Waring," Gergel recalled. "I saw blank looks." He plunged into research, using his inside knowledge of court dockets and evidentiary records. "I understood what I was looking at," he said. "I knew what to ask for." "There was no one like him," said Judge Richard Gergel of Judge J. Waties Waring. "In the South in the 1940s there was a sense that something had to change but no one could figure out how to break the Gordian knot of Jim Crow." Waring, he found, was an eighth generation Charlestonian born in 1880, with ancestry going back to slaveholders and colonists who arrived in the 1600s. He served as an assistant United States Attorney in Charleston, and with the support of the racially demagogic South Carolina Democratic Senator Ellison "Cotton Ed" Smith, was named by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as one of three judges on the district court in 1942. His first years on the bench were undistinguished. But in 1944, Waring settled a case in favor of a black teacher paid less than white counterparts, astonishing her NAACP lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, later the first African American Supreme Court justice. In a second equal pay case, Waring ruled for the black plaintiff, under the prevailing separate but equal doctrine. Woodard, meanwhile, was convicted of drunk and disorderly conduct and settled his 50 fine with his last 44 cash. Doctors pronounced him irretrievably blind, and the government disclaimed responsibility as he had been discharged from the military five hours before his injury. Outrage built as news of the assault spread through what was then called the Negro press, attuned to anger over the 900,000 black veterans who had fought for democracy abroad and were now demanding it at home. Orson Welles denounced the beating on his national radio show. Joe Louis, Nat King Cole, Cab Calloway, Woody Guthrie and other stars staged a benefit in Harlem where Woodard spoke. In various archives, including NAACP files, Gergel found overlooked material on the reaction of Truman, who told an aide: "Enough is enough. Dammit, I'm going to do something immediately." Truman directed the Justice Department and F.B.I. to pursue a criminal civil rights case against Shull. The case fell to Waring, who was skeptical of any federal role in enforcing racial justice and ready to dismiss the charges. But prosecutors were pressed to proceed and the trial began in November 1946. Woodard testified that Shull had driven the handle end of the blackjack into each eye. Shull countered that Woodard had attacked him without provocation and that in self defense he had struck Woodard a single blow. Medical records never introduced in court but later tracked down by Gergel and shown to a pathologist confirmed Woodard's account. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The publisher of the irreverent sports website Deadspin tapped a former editor in chief of The Daily News on Thursday to lead rebuilding efforts, nearly three months after a staff exodus over what employees characterized as editorial meddling. Admirers credit Jim Rich, the site's new editor in chief, with revitalizing The News as a sharp liberal counterpoint to its conservative rival, The New York Post. At The News, Mr. Rich also presided over an investigation into police evictions that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. G/O Media, Deadspin's owner, said Mr. Rich would work in Chicago, where Deadspin recently moved after 15 years in New York. Deadspin, which promises "Sports News Without Access, Favor or Discretion," occupies a distinctive place in sports media. It earned acclaim for a 2013 investigation that exposed as a hoax the death of the college football star Manti Te'o's long distance girlfriend. (Mr. Te'o was fooled into thinking she was real.) The article epitomized the site's sardonic yet rigorous coverage of the sports world, which it defined broadly. "One of the things that we will continue to do is take on the issues and the stories that other sites traditionally shy away from, even if they make people a little uncomfortable," Mr. Rich said in an interview. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Jim Spanfeller, G/O Media's chief executive, praised Mr. Rich in a statement, saying his "extensive experience as a reporter and editor will enable him to rebuild and lead Deadspin into the future." That ability is also likely to depend on Mr. Spanfeller, who has been running G/O Media since April, when the Boston private equity firm Great Hill Partners bought Deadspin along with several other sites that Gawker Media once owned including Jezebel, Gizmodo and Lifehacker. Mr. Spanfeller's firing in October of Deadspin's interim editor in chief, Barry Petchesky, who had refused to obey an editorial directive to stick to sports, prompted more than a dozen staff members to head for the doors. Deadspin has not published anything since Nov. 4. This month, 97 percent of the G/O Media editorial staff members who are represented by the GMG Union supported a vote of no confidence in Mr. Spanfeller, the union said. In a statement posted to Twitter on Thursday, the union said it objected to the decision to move the editor in chief position away from New York without negotiating. A spokesman for G/O Media declined to make Mr. Spanfeller available for further comment on Thursday. G/O Media was profitable in its previous two quarters, for the first time since the sites were combined in 2015, the company said last month in an emailed news release. Mr. Rich, who was ousted as the Daily News editor in 2018 when its owner halved the newsroom staff, said he sympathized with the former writers and editors. "It's not a decision you make lightly when you're weighing your livelihood against your journalistic principles," said Mr. Rich, who has edited sports at both The News and The Post and was a Huffington Post executive editor. He said that G/O Media had approached him and given him assurances that "led me to believe that I was not going to be constrained as far as my editorial decision making, and that I was going to be able to go after whatever story I felt we needed to." His next task is to build a staff, and he said he welcomed all applicants including those who left the site last fall. Laura Wagner, a former Deadspin writer who covered media and who posted a long Deadspin article in August about G/O Media's management said, "I understand media is a tough industry, and I'm sympathetic to the fact that people may be desperate for jobs." But she said she doubted that ex Deadspinners would rejoin the site under current management: "That's not going to happen." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Twyla Tharp is writing about rehearsing, touring and creating new work, 50 years after her first dance concert. Aug. 25, our eighth day of work and the weather is turning. Long ago I made the choice to mark this point in my career not with events celebrating the past, but with new dances showing what I had learned and some of what I have experienced during this working life. Much of my life is defined by its interconnection with these dancers: Matt Dibble, the youngest member of the Royal Ballet when I worked with the company in London in 1995; or Ronnie Todorowski, the replacement for our "Movin' Out" second cast Eddie, who was killed in a motorcycle accident; our two tall girls, Kaitlyn Gilliland and Savannah Lowery, nearly six feet tall, will always be accompanied in my mind by Big Rose, Rose Marie Wright, who was over six feet on point. Along with Sara Rudner, Rose anchored a group of strong, independent women who worked with me from 1965 until 1970, my treasured "bunch of broads doing God's work." This is how I put it to the custodian who wanted to remove us early one Sunday morning when we were working in the basement gym of the Judson Church. By now my room is filled with many, many dancers, present and past. But today the ones in this room are tired. This is no surprise as last week was a hard one finishing the entire show, which is nearly 90 minutes of dancing. I always push the first week of a rehearsal period so that we can all see what we actually have, because dance is not about what you are thinking, or what you can explain with words. It is only about what you see. What I see. What we all see. And this is the challenge to bring this into focus as quickly as possible and then begin concentrating on nuance. The first work of our evening, "Preludes and Fugues" set to Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier," was relatively easy because much of it came from my video archive, or sperm bank, as I also think of it: good material stockpiled but never used. This material could come into our studio edited, because like a melody or a rhythmic idea for a composer, it has been stored until it's needed and surfaces in my mind. "Yowzie," the second work of the program, though, is new material made for these 12 dancers and for this tour. "Yowzie" also includes the superimposition of two phrases from 1971's "Eight Jelly Rolls," for both these dances feature lots of slapstick business, Buster Keaton hijinks, vaudeville turns and pratfalls. Dying is easy, comedy is hard. Any successful gag takes time and practice, a lot of practice. Today, John, Ronnie and Amy Ruggiero spent an hour working on one 20 second cross from stage right to stage left that includes a moment of humorous business. Each repetition was different. John, Ronnie and Amy are masters of this sort of improvisation, which allows shtick to materialize. All three have worked on Broadway shows with me, and together we have learned that every time a bit is done, it needs to be different, and that whatever worked in the last pass will be retained, and whatever didn't work will be dropped. Now. Upstage of this crossover is another trio, Reed, Savannah and Kaitlyn. This one features an identity crisis, a hero who has spent the dance, to this point, not recognizing that the girl he is following is actually two different women, identically dressed. Both ladies are strong, a tribute to my "bunch of broads," and by the end of this scene they will take it upon themselves to show our hero that one girl is not the same as the other. (Disclaimer here: I have twin brothers, Stanley and Stanford, called Stan by my father who this way was always sure to get his son's name right.) The question I am most often asked is "Where do you get your ideas?" My answer is from the air, from the past. From a belief that there is a future. From a desire to band together and run the last 8 seconds of a piece at least 900 times. Both to sample finding the most elegant solution for getting the dancers one more last time from upstage to downstage and also to delay the inevitable moment when the piece is completed. Great dancers are indefatigable. This is a quality I work hard to preserve but even so, at some moment know we must part. I have to join the audience out front and they have to go backstage to prepare to put on a show. The two works of our evening have totally different structures and very different endings. Bach's world is a measured progression of orderly events concluding within the comforting confines of a circle. "Yowzie" is episodes cascading pell mell on diagonals, through lateral lines left to right, hurtling out of wings, popping through the back wall, careening through time and space until suddenly the dance skids to a halt on the edge of the stage, suspended just short of the abyss. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
with one of her works, "A Fashionable Marriage." In a career as an artist and activist spanning more than 30 years, Ms. Himid has tried to bring black history to greater attention. She Won the Turner Prize. Now She's Using Her Clout to Help Others. LONDON "It doesn't matter whether it's in France, or Oxford, or Karlsruhe, Germany: I want galleries to acknowledge that all around them are artists," the British painter said in a recent telephone interview. "The best artists don't necessarily come from somewhere else." In 2017, 30 years into her exhibiting career, Ms. Himid won the Turner Prize, Britain's pre eminent award for contemporary art. As the first black woman to take the prize and, at age 63, the oldest winner, she brought more press attention to the event than it has received in years. This spring, Ms. Himid has four shows opening around Europe, starting with a retrospective at the MRAC museum for contemporary art in Serignan, France. Others will take place in Glasgow, Berlin and Gateshead, England. All were programmed before the prize was announced, but Ms. Himid is now using her enhanced clout to request that galleries showing her work reach out to black artists living and working nearby and include them in events like talks and debates that run with the exhibitions. "The Turner Prize changed all sorts of things," she said. "Now, if I say I want something, people try and do it for me, and that's never happened to me in the whole of my life." The requests Ms. Himid now makes of the institutions showing her work are part of a long running mission to make black histories available through archival research and to encourage arts institutions to value the work of women and people of color. Her personal archive laid the foundation for Making Histories Visible, a research project based at the University of Central Lancashire exploring the contribution of black visual art to the cultural landscape. Whether painted on canvas, newspaper, dinnerware or the wooden panels of a piano, Ms. Himid's work has an immediate, gripping appeal. Beyond her paintings' alluring colors and engaging graphic qualities lie troubling questions: about the attitudes toward black creativity; about the stereotyping of minorities even in the liberal media; about British wealth derived from Caribbean sugar. And they set the scene for conversations about what art is shown by the world's taste making institutions, what art is overlooked, and why. The exhibition at Serignan will present works from eight series Ms. Himid made since the '80s: All are talking points connected to Europe's colonial past and wealth derived from slavery. "Cotton.com," a series of 85 painting from 2002, recalls an incident from the 1860s when mill workers in northern England refused to process cotton grown in the Confederate States. The patterned panels imagine coded communication between black slaves on American plantations and British textile workers. As part of her participation in the forthcoming Berlin Biennale, Ms. Himid asked the organizers to translate into German texts by the African American poet and activist Essex Hemphill, and by Maud Sulter, a British artist and writer of Ghanaian and Scottish heritage. In Serignan, a region where more than half the voters chose Marine Le Pen from the far right National Front in the second round of the 2017 French presidential elections, the gallery will host, at Ms. Himid's request, a conversation between Francoise Verges, an academic known for her work on the legacy of colonialism and slavery, and the French Cameroonian curator Christine Eyene. ("It will be hard hitting," Ms. Himid said.) Ms. Eyene, artistic director of the International Biennial of Casablanca, Morocco, said in an interview that public conversations like these were important, particularly in France, where it could be difficult to discuss issues of race and the country's colonial legacy. Ms. Eyene recalled that while she was studying art history at the Sorbonne in the 1990s, "There were no black professionals in museums. I knew very early that there was little chance for me to get a job in a museum." She noted that she still sees a tendency in France to favor work by black artists from outside the country over the work of French artists of color. "In France, when institutions do an African art exhibition they will look for artists based on the continent, or perhaps in other countries," she said. "They're not interested in bridging the gap between the diaspora and the Africans from Africa." "Naming The Money" (2004), a throng of 100 life size standing figures, was inspired by portraits of black slave servants who were given as gifts to the king of France by the king of Spain. Each figure bore a sash stating their name and occupation in the court: lute player, dog handler, dancer and so forth. Lavishly dressed, they were the glamorous face of exploited black labor and exotic status symbols. Gabi Ngcobo, the Berlin Biennale's curator, said that it was important to look at Ms. Himid's work in the global context of creative practices giving voice to shared history that remains hidden or untold: "It is here that black artists working in different parts of the world can find a space in which they are not marked by an otherness but rather self determination." This year the Biennale borrows its title from the Tina Turner anthem "We Don't Need Another Hero," a call for "love and compassion" that Ms. Ngcobo said was reflected in the determined but generous way Ms. Himid has worked "as an artist, curator and cultural activist: quietly, forcefully whilst reaching out to many." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Humanity's growing tally of exoplanets worlds seen orbiting other stars stands at 4,151. Most were found indirectly, as they passed in front of their stars and cast a telltale shadow, or as they caused their star to wobble as they swung around it. Only 50 have been directly imaged through a telescope. Directly imaging an exoplanet was first achieved in two discoveries announced simultaneously in 2008. Multiple worlds were seen around the star HR 8799 through ground based telescopes, and a solitary planet dancing around the star Fomalhaut was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope. Fomalhaut b, as the latter was named, appeared to be a colossal world, potentially as massive as three Jupiters, zipping along the inner edge of a giant doughnut of debris. Perusing a decade of Hubble's observations, some scientists now say that planet Fomalhaut b never existed. Andras Gaspar, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, was looking at Hubble's images of the Fomalhaut system taken up through 2014, on the off chance that someone missed something. To his surprise, Fomalhaut b was nowhere to be found in 2014. Starting with the original 2004 and 2006 Hubble shots that led to the exoplanet's identification, he flicked forward in time and noticed that it appeared to expand and fade away. Dr. Gaspar, along with George H. Rieke, a fellow University of Arizona astronomer, used computer models to simulate scenarios that could reproduce Hubble's observations. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, they offered the hypothesis that instead of a planet, Fomalhaut b is the cloud of debris left behind after two 120 mile long asteroids slammed into each other. In the ensuing decade, the debris drifted apart. "I'll buy it, if I can get a three year return policy," says Paul Kalas, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, not involved with the work and one of the discoverers of Fomalhaut b. Future observations from Hubble and the long delayed James Webb Space Telescope are needed to confirm the new finding. By far the brightest star in its corner of the night sky, Fomalhaut is sometimes called the Loneliest Star, an even more apt nickname if what Hubble saw was not the star's sole exoplanet but the dusty ghosts of two asteroids. The star is 25 light years from our solar system. Although it is only twice the size of the sun, Fomalhaut is 16 times brighter. That made Fomalhaut b, a billion times fainter than its star, remarkably difficult to spot "one of the most difficult detections in the history of exoplanet science," Dr. Kalas said. The idea that Fomalhaut b may be a dust cloud of some kind had been proposed. This new paper's detailed evidence makes a stronger case for a collisional cloud, says Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer at Stanford University who helped discover the exoplanets around HR 8799 and was not involved with the Fomalhaut study. Scientists have seen plenty of planets orbiting other stars, but "we have never seen collisions between such massive objects," Dr. Gaspar said. Such direct observations of asteroid on asteroid smash ups are exceedingly rare even in our own solar system. Witnessing this tremendous display of annihilation, he said, is an excellent way to better understand how planetary systems evolve. But that rarity gives other astronomers pause. Such monumental meetings of asteroids that could manufacture this sort of dust cloud are not believed to occur frequently, and when they do, simulations suggest, the debris would only be visible a decade afterward. The study's observations and simulations suggest that the collision took place in or just before 2004, the year Hubble first spotted signs of Fomalhaut b. Such serendipity is implausible, Dr. Macintosh said. "Was I really the luckiest astronomer in the world when I pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at Fomalhaut back in 2004?" Dr. Kalas said. It will take more observations before astronomers can definitively describe the object as an exoplanet or an expanding cloud of asteroid wreckage. "It's also quite possible it's something no one has thought of," Dr. Macintosh said. He added that Fomalhaut b, "definitely hasn't gotten any less weird as it's been studied more." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The American news cycle has become so manic and surreal that there hasn't been much time to reflect on the revelation, in the new book by the former national security adviser John Bolton, that Donald Trump encouraged President Xi Jinping of China in the building of concentration camps for its Muslim Uighur minority. Bolton's "The Room Where It Happened," which I received this week in advance of its release on Tuesday, describes a conversation Trump had with Xi at the opening dinner of the Group of 20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, with only their interpreters present: "Xi explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do." It is impossible, at this late date, to be shocked by the behavior of our depraved president. Nor is it surprising, given Trump's treatment of migrants at the U.S. Mexico border, that he is pro concentration camp. But Americans should know that China's detention of over a million people largely on religious grounds a project that reports say includes torture, sterilization and forcing Uighur women to sleep with members of China's Han majority to promote "ethnic unity" is happening with our president's behind the scenes approval. (In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump denied the account in Bolton's book.) Bolton has presumably known about Trump and Xi's exchange since it happened last year, did not resign over it and decided to say nothing until he could monetize it. That tells you much of what you need to know about his ethics. This is a bad book by a bad person, which nonetheless contains some important revelations. Informants emerging from criminal enterprises, after all, are rarely unblemished. As has been widely reported, Bolton criticizes the House's impeachment hearings, at which he refused to testify, for being too narrow. Democrats focused, he complains, "solely on the Ukraine aspects of Trump's confusion of his personal interests (whether political or economic)," instead of on the "broader pattern of his behavior." This pattern includes Trump's alleged interventions on behalf of the Chinese telecommunication companies ZTE and Huawei and the Turkish bank Halkbank. Had Democrats broadened their inquiry, he writes, "there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that 'high crimes and misdemeanors' had been perpetrated." Obviously, nothing was stopping Bolton from speaking out on these issues then instead of now. After using a reference from "Hamilton" for a title, he again quotes the musical, gallingly, to explain his timing: "I am not throwing away my shot." There are other places in the book where Bolton inadvertently shows us who he is. Even as he paints a picture of Trump as a dangerous incompetent, he delights in recalling the president's flattery. He describes Trump ending a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France by praising Bolton's performance first on Fox News and then in the administration. "Now he's got to make hard decisions, which he didn't have to do on TV, but he's doing a great job," Bolton recalls the president saying. The French, writes Bolton, "got a kick out of that. So did I for that matter." You can almost hear him purring. Bolton isn't particularly detailed about the misbehavior he witnessed in Trump's White House. He mentions "Trump's penchant to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked" and lists a number of examples, including the lifting of sanctions on the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the onetime patron of Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. "Whether there was anything even more troubling beneath the surface, none of us knew," he writes. A few sentences later, he adds, "The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn't accept." (He continued to accept it, though he writes that "resignation territory" was "nearby.") Some of what Bolton recounts is petty gossip. He believes that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney are major sources of leaks. And he recounts Trump's version of an argument between former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, in which Tillerson uses a demeaning sexist obscenity to tell her she's "nothing" more "and don't ever forget it." All the same, there is information here that deserves whatever attention people can muster in the midst of plague and mass protest. Bolton provides, albeit belatedly, firsthand confirmation that Trump did exactly what he was impeached for leveraging American military aid in exchange for Ukraine's help in smearing Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden: "Aug. 20, I took Trump's temperature on the Ukraine security assistance, and he said he wasn't in favor of sending them anything until the Russia investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over," Bolton writes. Such behavior was nothing new for Trump; earlier Bolton describes him "pleading with Xi" for help in the 2020 election by making agricultural purchases from farm states. Though Bolton writes that the government's pre publication reviewers prevented him from using Trump's exact words, Vanity Fair saw an unredacted version of the passage: "Make sure I win. I will probably win anyway, so don't hurt my farms. ... Buy a lot of soybeans and wheat and make sure we win." That Bolton did not testify to this earlier is to his immense disgrace. But it is a national disgrace that his confirmation of the Democrats' impeachment case probably won't matter, so inured are Republicans to staggering corruption. Bolton's warning to his ideological allies should be heeded, though it won't be. Should Trump win in 2020, he writes, "conservatives and Republicans should worry about the removal of the political guardrail of Trump having to face re election." Don't buy this book. John Bolton doesn't deserve to be rewarded for withholding testimony he had a duty to provide months ago. But don't dismiss it either. The president cheered China's concentration camps. At this point in the Trump era, it's a constant challenge not to let oneself be bored by evil. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
"Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears," Tchaikovsky, zharkoye. Movie, music, meat stew. For the third week in a row on "The Americans," Claudia hosted a meeting of her informal Soviet culture appreciation society other members: Paige and Elizabeth and this time they cooked, assembling a traditional Russian recipe. Back in Moscow rival factions may be battling over the Soviet Union's future but in Washington these three are rediscovering its heart, even if Paige doesn't know how to slice a carrot. Elsewhere in the episode, the dangers and deceptions of the show's end game continued to mount. Philip lied to and spied on Elizabeth, and Oleg lied to Stan while risking everything by meeting with Philip. Elizabeth, meanwhile, just kept doing what she does: exercising extremely tough love with Paige, surveilling the arms negotiators and killing another American, an innocent one this time. The action picked up straight from last week, with Elizabeth in the Jenningses' garage scrubbing off General Rennhull's blood. Inside Philip tried to use some of his EST training to comfort Paige, while they both glanced nervously toward the door. They were right to be wary: Elizabeth immediately began dressing down Paige for leaving her post and possibly endangering the mission. Paige was worried about her mother, of course, but Elizabeth was hearing no excuses and brooking no Philip like softness: "You don't get to talk about what you thought or how you felt or anything else, not now." When Paige asked if she could spend the night at her parents' house, Philip said "Of course" but Elizabeth said no to the change in routine, and Paige, the good soldier, got up without protest and went home alone. It was more fuel for the Elizabeth haters out there a group of which I am emphatically not part but we all realize that her love of, and fear for, Paige are at the heart of her reactions, right? Later, without telling Paige the whole story, Elizabeth told her that Rennhull "was caught up in something and didn't see a way out," which of course was a pretty good description of Elizabeth's current situation. Elizabeth acknowledged that she mishandled the whole Rennhull situation, telling Philip that she moved too fast because of the pressure she's under from the "trouble back home." In a quiet, sad moment in the kitchen, they both kept secrets, though Elizabeth admitted that she was withholding her mission from Philip. Philip, guilty and grim, was just plain working her. The mission took Elizabeth and the chastened (but increasingly self assured) Paige to a stakeout of Haskard's team of American and Soviet arms negotiators. After some more baseball talk Haskard is a fan of the Minnesota Twins, formerly the Washington Senators there was finally some action involving the Soviet expert Elizabeth is staking out. When an American suggested a get together at his house to watch a World Series game, two Soviets immediately begged off, but Elizabeth's target was suspiciously enthusiastic. There was also the matter of the radiation sensor Rennhull was supposed to have obtained. (As Philip somewhat snippily pointed out, Rennhull no longer has access.) Shifting focus to a worker at a warehouse where the sensors are stored, she posed as an auditor to quiz him about security procedures. It looked like a benign operation until he mentioned that his girlfriend worked there, too in security. Cue the chokehold strangulation, with Elizabeth subduing a considerably larger man for the second week in a row. (She killed the civilian to the melancholy strains of Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" on the soundtrack.) Elsewhere, it was a good episode for Stan Beeman fans. We got to see him in the kitchen with Renee, who appeared to upend a lot of fan speculation by announcing that she wanted to serve her country and join the F.B.I. Stan gently pointed out that she was over the cut off age for new agents, 37. (Presumably the KGB would know that.) We also got to see Stan and Dennis in a rare moment of triumph, snatching Gennadi and Sofia and her son, Ilya, out of danger in a risky, split second bit of spy theater. (I mistakenly included a description of this scene in an early version of last week's recap.) Of course it ended in embarrassment and pain, as so many scenes involving Stan do he had to tell a distraught Gennadi that Sofia wanted a divorce and that Gennadi probably wouldn't see her or Ilya again. Awkwardness, thy name is Beeman. And then Stan was involved in the best moment of the episode, his long awaited reunion with Oleg at the Potomac Inn, a delicate scene finely played by Noah Emmerich and Costa Ronin. Stan's emotions and motivations were manifold. He wanted to apologize for having put Oleg in danger but also take credit for having intervened to save him. He needed to do his job, questioning Oleg's presence in Washington, and be a friend, warning him, "Whatever you're doing here, don't." (Oleg's cover story provided the episode's title, with Stan asking: "Urban transport planning. What's that?") They bonded over their shared love for Nina, but otherwise Oleg stonewalled Stan, showing him the door. And in the episode's dour, ominous ending, he met Philip, who had donned a disguise to report on his own wife. Though what he reported, we didn't see. Philip continued to fret over business we saw him poring over a pile of bills and in a painful scene he carried out a positive thinking exercise at the travel agency, forcing his employees to gather and discuss sales strategies. He exhorted them like a cheerleader or an encounter group huckster before escaping into his office. He may be a master of duplicity and deception, but his management skills need work. In a potentially series defining development, Dennis mentioned Rennhull's death to Stan, and Stan noted the odd coincidence of a man with no history of depression, who in Season 2 killed someone who accused him of being a Soviet spy, now turning up dead in a park. We know what happens when something gets stuck in Stan's mind. After the zharkoye dinner, Elizabeth brought some home to Philip, who'd just eaten Chinese takeout. Being Elizabeth, she put it down the garbage disposal can't have Russian food in the house. This led to a discussion, and disagreement, over the changes happening in the Soviet Union a Pizza Hut opening in Moscow! and a testy Philip saying to Elizabeth, "You haven't talked to anyone back home in over 20 years." When she replied, "Neither have you," he didn't answer, because of course now he has. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
AUSTIN, Tex. In this state that spawned test based accountability in public schools and spearheaded one of the nation's toughest high school curriculums, lawmakers are now considering a reversal that would cut back both graduation requirements and standardized testing. The actions in Texas are being closely watched across the country as many states move to raise curriculum standards to meet the increasing demands of employers while grappling with critics who say testing has spun out of control. The Texas House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill this month that would reduce the number of exams students must pass to earn a high school diploma to 5, from 15. Legislators also proposed a change that would reduce the required years of math and science to three, from four. The State Senate is expected to take up a similar bill as early as this week. The proposed changes have opened up a debate in the state and beyond. Proponents say teachers will be able to be more creative in the classroom while students will have more flexibility to pursue vocational or technically oriented courses of study. But critics warn that the changes could result in the tracking of children from poor and minority families into classes that are less likely to prepare them for four year colleges, and, ultimately, higher paying careers. "What we all know is when you leave it up to kids and schools, the poor kids and kids of color will be disproportionately not in the curriculum that could make the most difference for them," said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that advocates for racial minorities and low income children. Texas is currently an outlier in both the number of exit exams it requires students to pass and the number of courses its default high school curriculum prescribes. Legislators raised the number of high school exit exams to 15 from 4 in 2007, a year after they passed a law to automatically enroll all high school students in a curriculum that mandates four years of English, science, social studies and math, including an advanced algebra class. (Students may enroll in a less rigorous course of study with the permission of their parents.) Texas now requires more than double the number of end of course exams used in any of the eight states that currently mandate that students pass such exams, according to the Education Commission of the States. And only two other states and the District of Columbia set similar graduation requirements, according to Achieve, a nonprofit organization that works to upgrade graduation criteria. Here in Texas, the backlash has been fiercest among parents and educators who believe testing has become excessive, particularly after a period when the state cut its budget for education. On a recent afternoon, Joanne Salazar pulled out a copy of a testing calendar for the school in Austin where her daughter is a sophomore. "Of the last 12 weeks of school, 9 are impacted by testing," Ms. Salazar said. "It has really started to control the schedule." Test critics also argue that standardized tests stifle experimentation in the classroom. "It turns our schools into these cookie cutter manufacturing plants," said Dineen Majcher, president of Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, a grass roots group. Some educators say the tests do not account for students who learn at different paces. "We expect every student to perform at certain levels with the same amount of time," said H.D. Chambers, superintendent of the Alief Independent School District west of Houston. "That's fundamentally flawed." But at a time when about half of the students who enroll in community colleges in Texas require remedial math classes, Michael L. Williams, the state's commissioner of education, called the proposed changes "an unfortunate retreat." Since the tougher recommended curriculum was signed into law, the proportion of Texas high school graduates taking at least one Advanced Placement exam who were from low income backgrounds rose to 45.3 percent in 2012, from 30.5 percent in 2007. But some argue that the current recommended curriculum could drive more students to drop out if they struggle with advanced courses. (The graduation rate in Texas actually rose from 63 percent in 2007 to 72 percent in 2011, the most recent year for which state education agency data is available.) Defenders of the current curriculum come from "the elitist in our society who devalue blue collar work and believe every student must get a four year college degree," said Daniel Patrick, a Republican senator from Houston who has sponsored Senate versions of the education bill. Representative Jimmie Don Aycock, the Republican from Killeen who sponsored the House bill (which passed 147 to 2), said the revised curriculum would give students more options, including community colleges or technical schools. "I don't want them to have to choose up or choose down," Mr. Aycock said, "but choose what's right for them." Some business leaders say that without advanced requirements, students will not be prepared for the kinds of jobs employers need to fill. "The jobs of today require higher level skills," said Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Business Association. Josh Havens, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry, said the governor favored a curriculum that required four years of math and science and "does not support efforts that lessen the accountability and academic rigor that prepares our students for career and college." Senator Leticia R. Van de Putte, a Democrat from San Antonio, said she was proposing an amendment that would require four years of math and science, although allow students to substitute more applied courses for advanced algebra or subjects like physics. "This allows for relevance and flexibility while maintaining high rigor," she said. But some principals and guidance counselors, along with civil rights groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens, fear that low income and minority students could slip through the cracks. "It puts more of the onus on the school to make sure that kids are taking the most rigorous courses possible," said Daniel Girard, principal of Akins High School in Austin. With large class sizes and shrinking budgets for guidance counseling, he said, "some adults may not push kids on the potential that is there when it's not required by the state as a graduation plan." One morning last week, several high school seniors, all from low income families, gathered in the Akins guidance office beneath dozens of college pennants hanging from the ceiling. Nathaniel Buescher, 18, is considering offers from Columbia, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Texas and Yale. His mother immigrated to the United States from Mexico without a high school diploma, and his father never attended college. But his elder sister and brother both advised him to "take the hardest classes that are available." Proponents of the changes in the default curriculum say students can continue to select the most advanced classes. But those who want to take math or writing classes geared toward technical careers will be able to do so. "There is a fundamental policy disagreement between those that think kids can't make choices and will take the easy way out," said Hector L. Rivero, president of the Texas Chemical Council and a member of Jobs for Texas, a coalition of employers and industry trade groups, "and those of us who believe that kids can make the right choices given the right support and direction." Even some students say, though, that standards help guide their choices. "If they are allowed the option to not take a harder math class, of course they're not going to do that," said Anthony Tomkins, 18, a senior at Akins who plans to attend Texas A M. "So forcing it upon us in the long run is actually a good thing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Video Title: How China Is Changing Your Internet Video Description: In China, a sheltered internet has given rise to a new breed of app, and American companies are taking notice. What was once known as the land of cheap rip offs may now offer a glimpse at the future. PART I: Intro 1. If you are sitting in the United States or Europe right now, you've probably never used a Chinese app, but the reality is, if you want to know how the internet will develop, China, the land once known for its cheap rip offs, has actually become a guide to the future. PART II: The creation of the Chinese Swamp Monster 2.1 You know, the internet is the internet, but for China the internet is more like an intranet. It's largely walled off from the Western world by this incredible complex system of filters and blocks that we call the Great Firewall. And basically the Great Firewall blocks any foreign site the Communist Party doesn't think it can control. 2.2 So that means there is no Facebook, no Twitter, no Google. Instead, what filled the internet vacuum was a generation of Chinese copycats that have grown into huge companies. 2.3 So for Google, you had Baidu; for YouTube, you had Youku; for Twitter, you had Sina Weibo, and the list goes on and on. 2.4 It's almost as if the Chinese internet is a lagoon as an aside to the greater ocean of the internet, and in that lagoon there are these swamp monster apps that bear some resemblance to the creatures in the ocean but are mutated in some ways because they evolved in a different kind of environment. PART III: The Chinese Swamp Monster Leaves the Pond 3.1 But things have started to shift, in the sense that before, no one outside of the lagoon really cared about the swamp monsters. But now all of a sudden, some of the features they've developed are so amazing that Western apps are trying to copy them. And the greatest example of this is WeChat. 3.2 WeChat is an example of, for lack of a better word, a super app. It's a Swiss Army knife that basically does everything for you. 3.3 It's your WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype and Uber. It's your Amazon, Instagram, Venmo and Tinder. But it's other things we don't even have apps for. There are hospitals that have built out whole appointment booking systems. There are investment services. There are even heat maps that show how crowded a place is, be it your favorite shopping mall or a popular tourist site. The list of services goes on basically forever. 3.4 But it's not the variety of things you can do on WeChat that makes it so powerful, it's the fact that they're all in one app. So why does that matter? PART IV: The Power of the Super App 4.0 These are real people. Using the app in real ways. (We just made up the story.) 4.1 Hypothetically, imagine you're sitting at home and one day you notice your corgi is dirty. You open WeChat, hit a few buttons and a few hours later a man shows up at your door with some shampoo and a big vacuum. Your dog gets cleaned, and he looks great. You take a photo. You share it with your friends and tag the dog cleaning business. You haven't left the app. 4.2 Your friend who likes Hello Kitty and works a boring office job is slacking off at work and looking at WeChat. She sees the photo of your clean corgi. She decides she wants her poodle cleaned. She clicks the tag on your photo and orders the same service. Within seconds the man with the big vacuum is on his way to her house. She pays him, and he's happy because he got paid instantly on WeChat. She starts chatting with you to thank you. Neither of you have left the app. 4.3 While chatting, she tells you about a new, hip noodle joint. She says, "You have to come." It's a shlep, but you accept. She orders food while still at her desk. You order a taxi. She pays for the food. On the way to her house, the man with the big vacuum invests the money he earned from both of you into a wealth management product that's probably a little too risky. Neither of you, nor the man with the big vacuum, have left the app. 4.4 Both of you arrive, and the app tells the kitchen you're there. Your WeChat profile photo pops up on the wall. Its an old photo from that year you had that weird part in your hair. Of course, she makes a comment. Your food is served. You notice your meat is a bit overcooked, so you snap a photo and post a disparaging restaurant review. You're already on your phone, and you remember you still owe your friend money because she paid. You transfer her money. Neither of you, the man with the big vacuum, nor the restaurant, have left the app. 4.5 At the restaurant: There are no menus. There are no waiters. There is no cashier. There is only WeChat. 4.6 By rolling so many functions into one single app, it's altered the concept of virality. It's no longer just videos or images or tweets that can go viral it's a dog washer, noodles, all sorts of companies and products that get the push of a social network. 4.7 Here in China, that network is 700 million people. Part V: The Costs of the Super App 5.1 Sounds great, right? Well it is, but using a single app to find a date, schedule an oil change or notarize a document also enables WeChat to collect a staggering volume of personal data. 5.2 They know what you talk about, who you talk about it with, what you read, where you go, why you're going there, who's there, how you spend money when you're online, how you spend money when you're offline. The list goes on indefinitely. 5.3 For advertisers, this is miracle: It's the combined data of Facebook, Amazon, Google and PayPal, all in one place. The problem is, all of the data is information Chinese companies are forced to share with the Chinese government, which has a long record of human rights violations and isn't exactly shy about stalking its citizens. Part VI: Outro 6.1 So if you're not in China, why does this matter? It matters because we're starting to see a number of Western tech companies attempt to replicate super apps like WeChat. 6.2 For the companies, it's incredibly powerful, and for you and me it's a convenient and even transformative technology. 6.3 But of course, it could also be problematic. Concentrating so much data in so few hands could lay the groundwork for an Orwellian world where companies and governments can track every single movement you make. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., confers a kind of halo to each member. The gallery feels like a chapel, and the Hall of Famers are the saints. A few gilded sentences summarize the reasons to honor each one. "Of course the people that have plaques in there, it's all going to be about the good stuff," Ozzie Smith, the artful shortstop for the Padres and Cardinals and a member since 2002, said by phone the other day. "But there's some bad stuff, too, and that's for all of us. I think we all have a dark side of our lives." For some, that dark side casts an especially long shadow. Baseball's first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was inducted in 1944, when the color line he upheld was still in place. He is hailed for "integrity and leadership," with no mention of the scourge of segregation. Likewise, a 1939 inductee, Cap Anson, is cited for his batting titles and pennants, not for his refusal to play in exhibitions with Black players. An enduring legacy of 2020, this painful year, has been a reconsideration of monuments to racist icons. The notion has echoed in Cooperstown, where Jane Forbes Clark, the chairman of the Hall of Fame's board of directors, has heard from people asking to remove some of the more problematic members from the walls. What the Hall of Fame is doing, she said, will not include the removal of any plaques. Instead, the museum has enhanced and renamed its exhibit on Black players in baseball while adding a sign to the gallery entryway that nods to the complicated legacies of some members: Enshrinement into the National Baseball Hall of Fame reflects the perspective of voters at the time of election. The plaques on these walls recognize Members for their accomplishments in the game. Our Museum exhibits, Library archives, and educational resources address the totality of their careers, as both part of a society and a game that always strive to improve. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's mission is to Preserve History, which is what we seek to do throughout the Museum. There is precedent for revising the wording on a plaque, as the Hall did with Jackie Robinson's in 2008. The original Robinson plaque included a boilerplate recitation of statistics, citing him as a four time league leader in double plays by a second baseman but making no mention of integrating the major leagues, as his new plaque does. In theory, the Hall could have also made new plaques for Landis or others like Thomas Yawkey, the longtime Boston Red Sox owner whose team was the last to integrate. Yawkey's name was removed from the street outside Fenway Park in 2017, and the Baseball Writers' Association of America removed Landis's name from the Most Valuable Player Award this year. The hope in Cooperstown is that the new sign will help visitors understand that the gallery is an oasis to celebrate the good, while nudging them toward the library and museum for the fuller story. The board had no desire to revoke enshrinement for Landis or anyone else. The Hall of Fame's board voted in July to add the sign and make changes to the exhibit on Black players in baseball, which has been updated several times since its creation in the late 1970s. Its new title is "Ideals and Injustices" the old name was "Pride and Passion" and it refers to Landis as a "roadblock" to integration who was disingenuous in passing off the issue to individual team owners. "As the most powerful person in baseball, Landis had the greatest ability to effect change," the display now says, "but his lack of overt action in promoting integration gave tacit approval to maintaining the status quo of a segregated system." Anson is also cited for having "used his stature to drive minorities from the game," noting that Sol White, the Hall of Fame player manager for the all Black Philadelphia Giants, said that Anson "claimed he would never step on a field that also had a Black man on it." The exhibit also highlights Effa Manley, the only female member of the Hall of Fame, who co owned the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League and established the precedent that major league teams would recognize Negro leagues contracts. Smith said he missed visiting Cooperstown this year, with the induction ceremonies for Derek Jeter, Larry Walker, Ted Simmons and Marvin Miller canceled because of the pandemic. The tentative plan is to induct them in 2021, along with any others elected in January. But the idea of legions of Jeter fans squeezing into a small New York village next summer is still somewhat hard to imagine. Clark said the Hall had expected about 300,000 total visitors this year but would probably have only 50,000 or so by the end of December as the pandemic continues. "If we do have 100,000 people pitch up in the middle of a field in upstate New York, I think the governor would be quite upset," Clark said, laughing softly. "So we're working our way through this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"Once on This Island," a tragic West Indian fairy tale that won this year's Tony Award for best musical revival, will end its Broadway run on Jan. 6. The musical was much praised by critics, and scored an upset victory over the better known "Carousel" and "My Fair Lady" in the Tony race, but it never fully caught on with audiences. It opened last December; at the time of its closing, it will have played for 29 preview and 458 regular performances at the Circle in the Square Theater. The revival has grossed 27 million thus far, and has been seen by 280,000 people. Its best week was over Christmas last year, when it grossed 827,890, but it has more typically brought in significantly less than that last week, also a holiday week because of Thanksgiving, it grossed 459,321. The show, about a young woman whose life is upended when she falls in love with a wealthier man, features music by Stephen Flaherty and a book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. The original production opened on Broadway in 1990 and ran for 14 months. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The author Linda Wolfe in 1998. "Bitten by the bug of actuality," as she put it, she specialized in writing about the psychological motivation behind startling crimes. Linda Wolfe, a writer who took her readers behind the scenes of true crimes and into the minds of their perpetrators, including the young man who committed the so called preppie murder and the judge who stalked his socialite ex mistress and landed in jail, died on Feb. 22 in Manhattan. She was 87. Her granddaughter Rachel S. Bernstein said the cause was complications following bowel surgery. Ms. Wolfe studied literature and planned to write short stories. She worked at Partisan Review and Time Life Books and wrote short fiction as well as writing and editing an anthology cookbook, "The Literary Gourmet" (1962), which consisted of dining scenes and recipes from literature. All the while, she was clipping out newspaper accounts of true crimes, thinking they would help her plot her fiction. A turning point of sorts came in 1975, when twin doctors, both gynecologists, were found dead in their trash filled apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It turned out that Ms. Wolfe had been the patient of one of them, years before only briefly, but that was enough to propel her to investigate the case and turn to a life of writing about crime. "This will sound callous," she told The Los Angeles Times in 1994, but she felt lucky that she had had "the 'good fortune' of knowing somebody involved in the kind of story I had been clipping." Both doctors had been barbiturate addicts and had died not of an overdose but of the drug's typically severe withdrawal syndrome. Ms. Wolfe, by then working at New York magazine (she worked there for 25 years as a contributing editor, writer and restaurant reviewer), wrote a journalistic account of the case, "The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists." Her article inspired the David Cronenberg movie "Dead Ringers" (1988), which starred Jeremy Irons. She later wrote a novel about the twins, "Private Practices" (1979), told from the vantage point of a pregnant patient. Ira Levin, the author of "Rosemary's Baby," called it "frightening." But after she had written her factual account of the case, she was "bitten by the bug of actuality," as she put it to The Los Angeles Times. She had become especially intrigued by the psychological motivation behind startling crimes and the events leading up to them. "I'm more interested in what went before and what comes after than in the actual crime itself," she said. She would go on to write several books and magazine articles that delved behind some of the nation's most sensational headlines. Her articles included "The Professor and the Prostitute" (1983), about a Tufts University professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved, and "From a Nice Family" (1981), about a teenager in Dallas who killed his mother and his father, who was the president of Arco Oil and Gas. One of her best known books was "Wasted: The Preppie Murder" (1989), so called because the perpetrator, Robert E. Chambers Jr., had bounced around various elite schools and lived on the Upper East Side. He pleaded guilty to first degree manslaughter in the 1986 strangulation death of Jennifer Levin in Central Park after they had had sex behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was released in 2003 after serving 15 years in prison and subsequently went back to prison on drug charges. Ms. Wolfe's book explored their family backgrounds and exposed a privileged urban youth subculture awash in alcohol, drugs and sex. The New York Times named it a Notable Book of the Year. Another of her books ripped from the headlines was "Double Life: The Shattering Affair Between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy Silverman" (1994). The charismatic and ambitious Judge Wachtler, the married chief judge of New York State's Court of Appeals and a potential candidate for governor, had been despondent over the breakup of his affair with Joy Silverman, a Republican fund raiser. He posed as a private investigator and stalked her, sending her vulgar letters and threatening to kidnap her daughter. In 1993 he pleaded guilty to one count of harassment and was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Ms. Wolfe wrote that Judge Wachtler, whom she interviewed at length, was guilty of hubris. She accepted his contention that his outlandish behavior was partly the result of his dependence on prescription drugs. She told The Los Angeles Times that she knew she would write about the Wachtler case "the minute it happened." "I felt it had my name on it," she said. "All my work had led up to it." Linda Kay Friedman was born on Nov. 15, 1932, in Brooklyn to Harry and Mina (Kaufman) Friedman. Her father was an accountant and the vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Her mother was a homemaker and a secretary at the society. Linda went to high school at Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn and briefly attended Antioch College in Ohio before transferring to Brooklyn College. She graduated in 1955 with a major in English literature and received a master's degree in American literature from New York University in 1959. She was married in 1956 to Joseph D. Wolfe, a magazine editor. That marriage ended in divorce. In 1971, she married Max Pollack, a psychologist, who died in 2007. In addition to Rachel Bernstein, her granddaughter, she is survived by another granddaughter, Miriam Bernstein; a daughter, Jessica Bernstein; two stepdaughters, Deborah and Judith Pollack; two step grandchildren; and three step great grandchildren. Her other books included "The Murder of Dr. Chapman" (2004), about a 19th century killing in Bucks County, Pa., and "Love Me to Death: A Journalist's Memoir of the Hunt for Her Friend's Killer" (1998), about a man who killed several women, including a friend of Ms. Wolfe's. Her most recent book was a memoir, "My Daughter, Myself: An Unexpected Journey" (2013), which detailed her daughter's stroke at age 38 and her recovery. Before her death, Ms. Wolfe had completed a draft of a novel, "Unforeseen Circumstances," based on the life of a friend, an American woman who found herself trapped in Nazi Germany. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Clemson hasn't lost a football game in two years. But when they play Louisiana State in the national championship game on Monday, they will be 5 1/2 point underdogs and the team that most gamblers will be rooting against. Clemson has the best defense in the country, giving up only 11 1/2 points per game. Yet bettors looking to wager on the total points scored by both teams in the game are facing a massive number: 69 1/2 . It would seem to be pretty tough to bet against a team with 29 straight wins, but fans have been doing so heavily in the two weeks leading up to the game. After the College Football Playoff semifinals, L.S.U. opened as a 3 1/2 point favorite against Clemson. Bettors who had just watched the Tigers' record breaking 63 28 rout of Oklahoma started putting their money down on L.S.U., and the line moved up. "The early betting, close to 90 percent came in on L.S.U.," said Pat Morrow, the head oddsmaker at the online bookmaker Bovada. "The line got to 6 1/2 at one point, then back down to 6." So why were bettors so much more excited about undefeated L.S.U. than about undefeated Clemson? "Clemson was so fortunate to beat Ohio State in the semifinal," said Marco Blume, the trading director at the online bookmaker Pinnacle. "But L.S.U. had an incredible performance in obliterating Oklahoma. L.S.U. has won many, many games with ease." Another knock against Clemson is that they play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, widely regarded as an inferior league to the Southeastern Conference, where L.S.U. plays. "Clemson did not have a lot of sexy wins, and they struggled to pull it out against North Carolina," Morrow said, describing a game in which Clemson had to stop North Carolina on a 2 point conversion on its final drive to win. Clemson so towered over their opponents that until the playoffs they were never less than a 16 point favorite in any game. "L.S.U. has all the excitement around a guy like Joe Burrow, who was 200 1 to win the Heisman when the season started and then put up video game numbers." L.S.U. was only No. 6 in the preseason Associated Press Top 25 poll, while Clemson was No. 1. A key moment in taking L.S.U. seriously came back in September, when it beat Texas, at the time a top 10 team. The wins kept coming, and some, like Florida and Auburn, made strong impressions. "Then there are the middling teams that they stomped," Morrow said. "With Clemson, the victories were tighter, and Trevor Lawrence had a bit of a regression compared to his previous season." The clincher that showed L.S.U. was perhaps the best team in the nation came when it beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa on Nov. 9. The spread opened with Alabama as a 7 point favorite. After some concerns about an injury to quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, it dropped to 4 1/2 . When L.S.U. won the game by 5, there was a clear new top dog in college football. After that, expectations for L.S.U. grew against even good teams, while views of Clemson stayed relatively unchanged with its easier schedule. Going into the final, L.S.U. has a record of 9 4 1 against the spread while Clemson is 11 3 against the standard set by sports books. Point spreads are not destiny, of course, and sometimes, like in the title game, they reflect the opinions of ordinary bettors more than professional gamblers or football experts. "We do rate L.S.U. internally as a better team on a neutral field, but maybe not as a 6 point favorite," Morrow said. On a game like this, which will have the most money bet all season, "we do kind of bend to public pressure." And the public loves L.S.U. So do some of the coaches who tried to win against the SEC champions. "I think people got to be careful at times with the spreads," said Derek Mason, the defensive minded coach at Vanderbilt, which lost to L.S.U. in September. "They put so much pressure on your offense to be good all the time that you can't afford to waste possessions. If Clemson does not stay on the field, and they give L.S.U. too many opportunities, I think L.S.U. can get too far ahead." (Before you bet your bankroll on Mason's tip, consider that he also had kind words to say about Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney and that team's big game experience.) Considering how stingy Clemson's defense is, the over/under of 69 1/2 might seem to be absurdly high. That number, plus a point spread as much as 6 in some places, means bookmakers are expecting a score of in the neighborhood of 38 32, with L.S.U. winning. If that is the score, it will be the most points given up by Clemson in 48 games. But while Clemson has the No. 1 defense, L.S.U. has the No. 1 offense, scoring a dazzling 49 points a game. Besides Oklahoma, L.S.U. put up 58 against Mississippi and 66 against Vanderbilt. So will great offense or great defense dominate? "It's the unstoppable force versus the immovable object," Morrow said. "It's very, very difficult. We haven't seen a college player light things on fire like Joe Burrow. Can Clemson's defense be the first all year to stop L.S.U.? Even Georgia gave up 37 to them." And, even if Clemson does win, will they really do so by holding L.S.U. to 10 or 14 points? "The only way that we anticipate that it is winnable for Clemson is if it is a complete shootout," Blume said. "An all out frenzy where the offenses drive the defenses into the ground. In a tight game, the L.S.U. offense is just superior." So whichever way the result goes, there may be a lot of points on the board. Don't expect the total to climb even higher though. "There's a ceiling effect," Blume said. "It would seem crazy to go to 72. How high can it possibly go? It's more likely to go down." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
What to Know About CES 2017 To average people, the name of the International CES, formerly known as the International Consumer Electronics Show one of the largest tech conventions, taking place in Las Vegas this week will seem dated, if not highly misleading. Tech companies often use the annual trade show as a marketing mechanism to bombard people with news about products that will have little, if any, impact on consumers. And the word "electronics" is awkward in an era when tech giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook are focusing innovations on areas like cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Gadgets with buttons? Not so much. Yet there are a few product categories worth following this week: high definition television sets, smart home accessories and drones. Here is a briefing on things you might want to know as the show unspools this week. First, a primer on 4K televisions: 4K is the successor to 1080p, the high definition resolution found on many modern TV sets. The term 4K another name is Ultra HD refers to screens with two times the vertical resolution and twice the horizontal resolution of 1080p sets. When companies like Sony, Samsung Electronics and Panasonic introduced Ultra HD sets a few years ago, the TVs were shockingly expensive; one 84 incher from Sony cost 25,000. There was also virtually no content encoded to take advantage of the step up in resolution. In other words, 4K was a rich fool's purchase. But this week, CES will make it clear that buying a 4K television set finally makes sense. TV makers will announce a host of improvements to 4K features, including color technologies like high dynamic range, a software feature that enhances the contrast and color profile of a picture, and wide color gamut, a technology that shows a wider range of colors. Some TV manufacturers, like LG, will introduce TVs that are only a few millimeters thick and easily mountable on a wall. Toward the holiday season, prices on many high quality TVs with these features will probably drop significantly, as they have in previous years, to roughly 800 to 1,300. In addition, there are now many devices capable of playing 4K content, including 4K Blu ray players, Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro console and Roku's higher end streaming devices. "Now's a fine time to buy one," said Chris Heinonen, who tests high definition TVs for The Wirecutter, the product recommendations website owned by The New York Times. The keyword is "fine." It's still not the ideal time to buy a 4K TV because the vast majority of high definition video content is encoded in lower resolutions. But Mr. Heinonen said that consumers shopping for a big screen TV should consider a modestly priced 4K TV over a cheap 1080p model. Low end TVs made with 1080p resolution lack important features, like local light dimming, a technology that lets TVs dim the area of a screen that should be darker while keeping brighter parts bright, he said. The smart home outfitted with internet connected accessories controlling home appliances was once a gimmicky niche. Older smart home systems were difficult to set up, requiring separate hubs and clunky apps for controlling lights and locks. But the category is rapidly maturing now that giants like Amazon, Apple and Google offer Alexa, Siri and Assistant, their artificially intelligent virtual assistants, able to control smart home accessories. For consumers, voice assistants have broken down the complexity of interacting with smart home devices, said Ben Bajarin, an analyst for Creative Strategies, which was among the first market research firms in Silicon Valley. (It's easy for anyone to say "Alexa, turn on the lights.") And for companies that sell home accessories like locks and thermostats, it has never been easier to make a convenient smart home product because the companies can now team up with the tech giants. "Now there's an ecosystem to plug into and build support around, and I think that's going to help a lot," Mr. Bajarin said. At CES, consumers can expect a wave of smart home accessories to be announced with voice assistant compatibility. Apple customers should be on the lookout for a horde of lighting systems, locks and smart thermostats compatible with HomeKit, Apple's smart home framework for devices working with Siri and the iPhone. Amazon Echo owners should also expect a broader range of internet connected cameras, door locks and thermostats that can be controlled through Alexa. A smaller number of devices are expected to be announced for Google's smart speaker Home because it was just released in November. What that means is that in the next year or two, shopping for a smart home accessory will be as simple as looking up a type of product and finding one that matches up with your Apple, Google or Amazon device. That's a lot simpler than with older accessories, which required you to install extra hubs and download additional apps to work with your smartphone. "When you go to Amazon.com or the Home Depot or Lowe's to buy a connected dead bolt from us, what you can expect from us is we want to make sure that lock is going to work with whatever platform you choose," said Rob Martens, a futurist at the lock company Schlage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Battery Dance Festival, presented by the Battery Dance Company in Lower Manhattan for 34 years, has become known for its international roster. This year artists from India, Norway and Poland are among those appearing along the Hudson River routinely backed by stunning, if blinding, sunsets at Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park in Battery Park City. Tuesday brought the festival's first ever South American guests, with the electrifying New York debut of the troupe Sankofa Danzafro from Medellin, Colombia. It shared an evening of Colombian dance with Pajarillo Pinta'o Dance Company, a New York troupe founded in Germany by the Limon Dance Company soloist (and Pina Bausch moonlighter) Daniel Fetecua Soto. Sankofa means "reach back and get it" in Akan, a Ghanaian language, and it describes what both companies do: carry traditions into the present, whether fully intact or fused with something new. The down to earth performers of Pajarillo began with a medley of Colombian folkloric dances, upbeat courtship rituals (for the most part) in which straw hats, handkerchiefs and candles, respectfully bestowed and exchanged, served as tokens of affection or more. (The riverside breeze sent hats flying, a cause for improvisation.) With their weaving patterns, waving skirts (for the women) and kneading, close to the floor steps, these dances had an inviting formal simplicity that was lost in "Amalgama," a more contemporary concoction with a live band. (Pablo Mayor, on piano, composed the jazz folk music.) Still, any chance to watch the statuesque Clement Mensah, an arrestingly silky mover, is welcome; he and Julia Kelly played giddy lovebirds whose separate daily routines (brushing teeth, tying shoes) merged into one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The flight of the Falcon Heavy will have to wait another day. SpaceX announced that the giant rocket, the most powerful in operation on Earth today, could not fly on Wednesday night because of winds high in the atmosphere. The spacecraft's payload this time is mundane and useful: Arabsat 6A, a Saudi Arabian communications satellite which will relay television, internet and mobile phone signals to the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Why is Falcon Heavy different from other SpaceX rockets? The company's workhorse is the Falcon 9 rocket, which first launched in 2010. The first stage of the Heavy essentially consists of three Falcon 9 first stages bound together. The second stages of the two rockets are identical. The additional thrust allows the Heavy to propel 140,000 pounds to low Earth orbit, nearly three times what the Falcon 9 can lift. How does this Falcon Heavy differ from the first one? On the test flight, the two side boosters were older versions reused from earlier flights. (SpaceX's best innovation to date is landing the booster stage of its rockets and launching it again; traditionally, rockets have been one use throwaways, with the booster stages dropped into the ocean.) For this one, the side boosters have never before been used. They are the latest version of the rocket, called "Block Five." ("Block" is what rocket companies call a major upgrade.) That boosts the thrust and how much the Falcon Heavy can carry. Will SpaceX land the three boosters? Yes. The two side boosters are to return to landing pads at Cape Canaveral, not far from the launchpad, just as in the maiden flight. SpaceX also has had a backlog of Falcon 9 missions to fly. It launched 20 Falcon 9 missions in 2018, more than in any previous year, in addition to the one Falcon Heavy launch. The company was also busy at work developing its Crew Dragon capsule for taking NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The market for the Falcon Heavy is also much smaller than once envisioned. When Mr. Musk first announced the rocket in 2011, he said he expected that there would be a 50/50 mix between the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy. In the years since, improvements have made the Falcon 9 more powerful, and miniaturization of electronics has shrunk the size of many satellites. The Falcon Heavy is now needed for only the largest satellites like the 13,000 pound Arabsat 6A satellite, which is headed to geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles above Earth. Will Falcon Heavy go to the moon? At present, no, but that answer could change. In 2017, SpaceX announced that two space tourists would go on an around the moon trip in one of the company's Crew Dragon capsules launched by a Falcon Heavy. But when the first Heavy reached the launchpad last year, SpaceX said it had decided not to go to the expense and effort of making the rocket safe enough for launching people. The possibility of using the Falcon Heavy for lunar missions was revived last month by Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, when he told a Senate committee that the big rocket that his agency is developing, the Space Launch System, would not be ready for its first test flight in 2020. NASA was looking into using commercial rockets as an alternative, he said. One of the alternatives was putting the second stage of the Space Launch System on top of a Falcon Heavy first stage. Mr. Bridenstine later said that option was feasible but could not be done by next year, because major changes would be needed to the boosters and SpaceX's launchpad to accommodate the Frankenstein rocket combination. Mr. Bridenstine, however, left the door open, saying that NASA would explore all options to meet the Trump administrations goal of sending astronauts back to the moon by the end of 2024. What other rockets is SpaceX planning to build? SpaceX's next generation rocket was once known as B.F.R. where "B" stood for "big" and "R" stood for "rocket." It now has the less colorful name Starship. SpaceX has begun small hop tests of a preliminary design, nicknamed Starhopper. The full fledged design is to reach orbit and eventually make distant journeys to the moon and Mars, but that is still years away. One of Starship's first passengers is to be Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the online Japanese clothing company Zozo. Mr. Maezawa had been one of the lunar tourists who had signed up for the Falcon Heavy trip around the moon but now will wait longer for the even larger rocket. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Directed and narrated by John Chester, a longtime documentary cinematographer, "The Biggest Little Farm" opens with the then seemingly unstoppable California wildfires of 2018 threatening to wipe out the small farm Chester founded with his wife, Molly, nearly 10 years before. The sight of Molly, who had been a chef and blogger before she and John got serious about their farm to table ideas, gathering clothes as billowing smoke is seen out the window behind her, is immediately tension inducing. But here the movie flashes back to the cute reason the couple left Los Angeles to found a farm they would run in an old school, anti corporate agriculture style. (It involves a promise made to a dog.) As depicted in the movie, the Chesters' inexperience at the outset seems close to naivete. It's a little implausible, but it gives the movie a lot of narrative juice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The Park Avenue Armory must really want you to know who Benjamin Appl is. Otherwise it wouldn't have given such significant real estate three concerts, three Schubert masterworks to Mr. Appl, a 36 year old baritone who, with these performances, is making his American recital debut. His concerts at the Armory's intimate Board of Officers Room, which began with Schubert's "Die Schone Mullerin" on Sunday and continue with the composer's "Schwanengesang" on Tuesday and "Winterreise" on Thursday, remind me of the pianist Igor Levit's debut there in 2014. Mr. Levit made an entrance by daring to program Beethoven's final sonatas; Mr. Appl has chosen some of the most well known, and revealing, works in the art song repertory. And like Mr. Levit, who pulled off his American entree with confidence and preternatural maturity, Mr. Appl presented a masterly account of "Die Schone Mullerin." He had the exacting attention to text of an actor, the charisma of a seasoned storyteller and an agile voice that, while not fully formed, shows promise not only for this week's remaining concerts, but also for what I hope to be more appearances here in the years ahead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
WASHINGTON Seymour M. Hersh didn't even want to write a memoir. He had been on contract for a book about Dick Cheney, the former vice president. He had spent four years reporting it, amassing dozens of files of what he called explosive material, only to find that his sources had gone jittery amid a government crackdown on leakers. He went to his publishers at Alfred A. Knopf, "hat in hand," and said he couldn't go through with it. He offered to mortgage his Manhattan pied a terre to repay the advance. "They said, 'Write a memoir,' and I said, 'No way,'" Mr. Hersh, 81, recalled the other day. "I don't write about my family, and I never do." Plus, the Sy Hersh story the story of a working class Jewish kid from the South Side of Chicago, who through serendipity and toil had exposed the horror of the My Lai massacre, revealed domestic and foreign abuses by the C.I.A. and harried Washington's elite for a half century was not finished. "I'm still doing it," Mr. Hersh said, sounding both matter of fact and defiant. Not for the first time in his career, the editors prevailed. "Reporter," a 355 page memoir, will be released on Tuesday. The book is by turns rollicking and reflective, sober and score settling. It reconstructs his reporting on Vietnam, his feuds with Henry Kissinger, the foibles of former bosses like A.M. Rosenthal at The New York Times and William Shawn at The New Yorker. It also exhumes journalism's flush, predigital heyday when newspapers felled presidents and Mr. Hersh, as a newbie at The Times, was put up at the Hotel de Crillon while on assignment in Paris. Sentiment, though, is scarce, befitting the flinty style of Mr. Hersh, who has a knack for cycling through employers and exhausting his editors. (After a messy split with The New Yorker, he no longer has a regular venue for his work.) He knocks reporters for laziness and editors for timidity. He notes that major publications passed on his My Lai expose, fearful of government denials that American soldiers had murdered dozens of Vietnamese civilians. In the end, Mr. Hersh syndicated the stories himself, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts. As with any Hersh production, "Reporter" has news. He recalls hearing a tip that Richard Nixon's wife, Pat, went to the emergency room in 1974, shortly after the Nixons had left the White House, saying her husband had hit her. (Mr. Hersh writes that he made a mistake by not reporting this at the time; the Nixon family denied similar allegations of domestic abuse when they surfaced in years past.) He describes Lyndon Johnson expressing his displeasure over an article by meeting a reporter at his Texas ranch and there is no pleasant way to put this defecating on the ground in front of him. He remembers a night in San Francisco during the 1968 presidential campaign, when he was working as the press secretary for Eugene McCarthy. (Yes, Mr. Hersh, the reporter's reporter, had a stint on the public relations side of the game.) Mr. McCarthy had never smoked pot, so Mr. Hersh produced a joint; joining the group was Jerry Brown, the future governor of California. "The stuff did little for McCarthy, so he said, but it did much more for Brown," Mr. Hersh writes. A spokesman for Mr. Brown, contacted for this article, called the anecdote "a complete and total fabrication." Mr. Hersh shrugged off the denial. "omg ... why is he making a big deal of it?" Mr. Hersh wrote in an email. "it was the 60s, was it not?" During an interview in his cluttered office here, between the White House and the home he shares with his wife, a psychoanalyst, in the Cleveland Park neighborhood, Mr. Hersh seemed not much different from how Time magazine described him in 1975: "He is in turn talkative, churning, abrupt, zealous, egotistical and abrasively honest." In athletic shoes and a V neck sweater, he bounced from topic to topic. He offered measured support for Gina Haspel, the new director of the C.I.A., and recalled the time he and Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, watched "Platoon." (Mr. Ellsberg cried, he said.) A framed photograph of Mr. Kissinger, the subject of one of his books, hangs above his desk; in it, Mr. Kissinger is stuffing his face with cake. Mr. Hersh's place in the pantheon of reporters is secure, but his current status is ambiguous. In arguably the most fertile moment for investigative reporting since Watergate, he has been on the sidelines. By choice, he said. "I'm not going to write anything about the whole last two years," he said. "The story's fixed now. 'Trump bad, Democrats good.' It's a fixed story. And, of course, it's a little more muddled than that. A lot more muddled than that." He added, "I doubt if I went to The Washington Post or The New York Times with a story, they'd run it. Doesn't bother me." Other reporters criticized the article, and his subsequent reporting on Syria, which questioned whether President Bashar al Assad had gassed his own people, was similarly derided. But Mr. Hersh is unrepentant. 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. "It's pretty clear now; nobody disputes it anymore," he said, in an asked and answered tone, when I brought up the Bin Laden piece. (In fact, many reporters and former White House officials still dismiss his version of events as fantasy.) "When I wrote it, there was just hell to pay." In his memoir, which refers to "the American murder of Osama bin Laden," he writes: "I will happily permit history to be the judge of my recent work." In the book he also writes that David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, had grown too chummy with President Barack Obama, the subject of Mr. Remnick's 2010 biography an assertion the editor, in an interview, called "nonsense." But Mr. Remnick took a warm tone toward his former star reporter, whose New Yorker scoops included the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story. "I think that Sy and I say this with great respect psychologically needs to feel that editors are 'The Man,' capital T, capital M, and I mean that in a non gendered way," Mr. Remnick said. "They are the authority figures who need to be pushed back against, and so I don't take that personally." He added: "When all was said and done, his achievements are enormous." In his office, Mr. Hersh fielded a call from his son, a reporter at Vice News, and laid out his "two little rules" rules for reporting: "Read before you write. And, secondly, get the hell out of the way of a story. You don't say 'in a startling development,' you tell the development. You don't need an adjective in the first two paragraphs. You don't have to sell it to yourself." I was expecting Mr. Hersh to have a lot to say about the Trump presidency, but he often changed the subject. He eventually allowed that the narrative of Russian meddling struck him as incomplete. "Do you have any evidence that these 13 guys really were trolls and changed the election?" he asked, referring to the 13 Russians indicted by the Justice Department in February on charges they tried to subvert the election and support Mr. Trump. He called the president an unserious man surrounded by "terrible people." But he has reported on unscrupulous leaders before. "We will survive Trump," he said. "America will go on." These days, his main concern is the 24 hour, Twitter driven news cycle, which he denounces in his memoir as "sodden with fake news, hyped up and incomplete information." In his office, he brought up unprompted the manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. "I hate to say it if he hadn't killed people, if he hadn't been a psychotic who thought it was O.K. to mail bombs to people, if you went and reread it, he's talking about machines taking over our life," Mr. Hersh said. "We're all going to be beholden to machines, and here we are, you know: Facebook and Instagram. I mean it's happened!" It was a funny thing to say for a man whose critics accuse him of being a conspiracist and an obsessive though Mr. Hersh takes those complaints in stride. He has faced skeptics throughout his career: from his junior college days working at his family's dry cleaning business to a brief stint running a weekly paper in suburban Illinois where Mr. Hersh sold ads and sometimes delivered the papers himself. Later, he carried out a nationwide hunt for William Calley, the soldier whose interview with Mr. Hersh would unlock the grim secrets of My Lai. "There's a kind of monomaniacal gene that you have to have, a sense of single minded pursuit, that Sy at his best exemplified," Mr. Remnick said. "He never stopped being hungry. The hunger, the sense of skepticism about power, is always characteristic of Sy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Shikumen complexes are part of the city's historic architecture that is disappearing because of rapid development. Walk through one of these multifamily, low slung dwellings. China's Communist Party celebrated its 95th birthday this summer with a lavish First of July gala at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. In Shanghai, where the First National Congress took place in 1921, the occasion was noted in a more subdued way, with the promotion of a digital map of the important sites of the party's heroic early years in foreign occupied Shanghai. The map is a simple affair. Clicking on a man wearing scholar's robes, for example, sends a cartoon icon toddling off to the brick building on Lane 163 of Zizhong Road, where Chen Wangdao, one of the party's founding members, translated "The Communist Manifesto" into Chinese. (A Chinese and English language app version will soon be available for smartphones.) A problem for anyone contemplating a real life pilgrimage to the urban shrines of the Communist Party: Much of the historic city depicted on the virtual map has been wiped off the real map of Shanghai by two decades of breakneck development. The few remaining buildings, among them Dr. Sun Yat sen's modest tile roofed mansion in the former French Concession, stand in the shadows of 30 or 40 story towers. Fortunately, enough examples of Shanghai's historic architecture have survived to give visitors a sense of what life was like when the city gave birth to the Communist Party. To walk through Shanghai's last remaining shikumen (alleyway complexes entered through a stone framed kumen, or gateway) is to return to the wicked, glamorous "Paris of the Orient" and to get a glimpse of what has happened to Shanghai in the century since then. My first introduction to shikumen came 10 years ago, when Peter Hibbard, the former president of the Shanghai chapter of the Royal Asiatic Society China, took me on a tour of an alleyway complex near the riverfront Bund. "Up until the '90s, 80 percent of the population lived in two or three story shikumen," Mr. Hibbard told me then, as we wandered through an atmospheric maze of mostly vacant homes. "They were basically city blocks that functioned as gated communities, with guards manning the front entrance. The whole essence of old Shanghai was that life was lived horizontally all the activity happened at street level." Though the complex Mr. Hibbard showed me has since been razed, you can get an idea of what shikumen were like by visiting Xintiandi, a reconditioned alleyway complex located in the Huangpu and Xuhui districts, which were until 1943 the city's French Concession. The houses at 76 and 78 Xingye Road were saved from the wrecker's ball only because they played host to the clandestine First National Congress of the Communist Party. Turned into a memorial 30 years later, by which time the private residences had become a noodle factory, they are now a museum and the cornerstone of Xintiandi (the name means "New Heaven and Earth"), a high end shopping and entertainment district. On the second floor of a thoroughly modern exhibition space, the Congress is commemorated in the orthodox Communist way with starkly lit wax figures displayed behind glass. The skinny rowhouses that brought together two European members of the Comintern, 12 future party bigwigs and a 27 year old Mao have been preserved intact. Visitors walk through a lacquered partition into a high ceilinged room with whitewashed walls. On a polished red floor, a dozen stools surround a long table, set with teacups and an open box of wooden matches a staging meant to suggest the participants have just left. (The meeting was, in fact, cut short by the sudden appearance of a police informer. Mao and his colleagues fled before the police could raid, reconvening on rented sightseeing boats in the tourist town of Hangzhou.) Wandering the lanes of Xintiandi gives a hint of the magic of the typical shikumen. Faced with bluish gray bricks and adorned with elaborately carved, oxblood red lintels, the rowhouses call to mind a radically compacted version of the terraced workers' housing found in northern English cities. The tributary lanes, some only eight feet wide, were built to accommodate rickshaws and bicycles, rather than cars, making shikumen tranquil oases in the heart of a traffic plagued city. Commissioned mostly by Western developers, the first shikumen appeared in the 1870s, designed to offer wealthy families refuge from the flooding, famine and unrest of the countryside. The local contractors who built them drew upon the interior floor plans of traditional Chinese courtyard homes and local decorative motifs. The Shikumen Open House Museum, a refurnished private residence in the north block of Xintiandi, demonstrates the beguiling collision of East and West that resulted. Leaving an exiguous forecourt the equivalent of a front yard, generally used to wash and dry clothes you take a big step over a wooden sill into a rectangular living room decorated with blackwood furniture and period photographs and paintings. It's all beautifully staged, and terribly misleading. By the late 1930s, when the Second Sino Japanese War caused a wave of immigration to Shanghai's foreign controlled zones, most shikumen homes became occupied by four families and sheltered an average of 20 people. As an idealized vision of rowhouse life, the Open House Museum is like Xintiandi itself. Until the 1990s, the area was home to 2,000 families. Their homes were gutted, and often completely rebuilt, to make way for a shopping district where you can buy a latte at Starbucks, a mug of pilsner at the Paulaner Brauhaus or an eye poppingly expensive silk scarf at the upscale clothing chain Shanghai Tang. "Xintiandi is fake vintage," said Ruan Yisan, the director of the National Research Center of Historic Cities at Tongji University and an architectural preservationist. "There aren't many shikumen houses left in the city. Those that remain are the living fossil of life in Shanghai." The day typically began with the "Cantata of the Alley," the sound of night stools (bucket shape latrines) as they were cleaned with bamboo sticks after being emptied by night soil men. Then the first vendors would arrive, selling hand wrapped won tons, fried bean curd and fresh green olives, often delivered in baskets lowered from upper floor windows. The alleys echoed with the cries of children running off to school, often within the same complex. During unexpected cloudbursts, the next door grandma would rush to bring in clothes that absent neighbors had hung out to dry. In the summer, residents would gather after dinner to cheng fengliang ("enjoy the coolness"), trading gossip, playing mah jongg and sharing slices of melon chilled in a water well. "If you want to see what a typical shikumen is like," he said, "you'd better hurry." I rode the metro to the Xinzha Road station and walked a few blocks to eastern Siwen Li (Gentle Lane). Built over a former cemetery by a Sephardic Jewish entrepreneur in 1914, it was once home to 11,000 people; now it's down to 12 households. After I stepped through its threshold, the smell of exhaust was replaced by air redolent with frying garlic and stewing meat. Brownish gray brick exteriors were plastered with peeling posters for "anticorpulence tablets" or scrawled with cellphone numbers of plumbers or fake ID peddlers. Many of the doors were daubed in red paint with the Chinese character "Kong" ("Vacant"). Between concrete sinks used for washing clothes, bicycles leaned against walls. Somewhere a rooster crowed. At the intersection of two alleys, a half dozen residents had gathered on stools to pass the time. When I told one of them, Ni Wei Ming, 57, a taxi driver, that I had never seen the inside of a real shikumen home, he invited me into his. Though its floor plan forecourt for washing clothes, rectangular living room, steep rear staircase leading to second story bedrooms mirrors the shikumen home in the Xintiandi museum, it lacked its idealized glamour. Room partitions were made of plastic sheets joined by duct tape; cooking amenities were limited to a wok on a jury rigged hot plate; the bathtub was a waist high wooden barrel. Though the government had offered to buy it for 7 million yuan (just over 1 million), Mr. Ni told me he was holding out for more. "That would be enough money to be comfortable," he said. "But I'll still have regrets. My primary school was here. I met my wife here she lived on the same block. My children did their homework with the neighbors' kids. There used to be a real feeling of community. Now there are only seven families left on my alley." Mr. Ni told me there was a rumor that a Hong Kong property developer planned to replace the complex with skyscrapers. Seeing me back to the laneway beneath the asphalt lie the original cobblestones Mr. Ni lit a cigarette and let his gaze run down the row of carved lintels that marked the entrance to each home. "You know, if they chose to save and restore this place, it would be better than Xintiandi," he said. Other shikumen are scattered among Shanghai's office and residential towers. Fude Li, where the Communist Party's Second National Congress took place, is intact (Mao, who got lost in Shanghai's back streets, failed to attend). The extraordinary Zhang's Garden off West Nanjing Road, built by a Chinese merchant in 1882, has been saved from demolition because of its role as a community center for seniors. Less picturesque complexes, though, tend to be occupied by migrant workers, many of whom lack of residency permits, which makes the future of these homes tenuous. Perhaps the quickest way to get an idea of the vitality of a traditional alleyway complex is to visit Tianzifang, a five minute walk from the Dapuqiao station. In the late '90s, the small factories and shikumen homes along Lane 210 on Taikang Road were occupied by painters, sculptors and ceramists. Their tiny workshops eventually became a complex of 200 street level cultural and art sites, with older residents continuing to occupy upper story apartments. Though local residents lament that cafes, restaurants and small businesses have begun to replace artists' studios, the district retains its original architecture and charm. The narrow cobbled lanes, shaded by trees and potted plants, are filled with window shoppers and diners who have stopped at a terrace to enjoy exquisite hand brewed Japanese coffee (Cafe Dan) or a chocolate milkshake or a smoked salmon bagel (Kommune). Unlike Xintiandi's international chains, Tianzifang is home to such quirky local businesses as Pureland, which specializes in hand painted ceramic tile images of koi ponds, pagodas and other traditional Chinese landscapes, and Teddy Bear Family, a Thai restaurant where every surface is covered with plush toys. Wandering around low rise Tianzifang is an antidote to the soaring Shanghai of magnetic levitation trains and mega skyscrapers. Like other shikumen, it's free of cars, making it one of the rare places in Shanghai where you can stroll without having to watch out for a darting electric bike or a barreling Volkswagen taxi. It's a gentle reminder, too, of an irony of Shanghai's recent history. In tearing down shikumen, which fostered the canny interdependence of the Shanghainese, government officials are erasing the architectural form that saw the birth of the uniquely Chinese version of Communism. The condominium towers that are replacing them, where next door neighbors remain strangers, are breeding nothing but isolation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The New Orleans resident Jared Sternberg, 30, started Gondwana Ecotours in 2013, the same year he graduated from Tulane University Law School in that city. He studied environmental and human rights with the idea of helping indigenous and underserved populations preserve land and resources, but after completing service work in locations including Ghana, Ecuador, Alaska and Nicaragua, Mr. Sternberg became convinced that tourism could achieve the same goals. This year, Gondwana offered trips to six destinations on three continents. (The name Gondwana refers to an ancient landmass.) Below are edited excerpts from an interview with Mr. Sternberg. Q. What inspired the switch from law to tourism? A. After I saw the movie "Crude," about the huge lawsuit by Ecuadoreans against Chevron over contaminating the Amazon Basin, I wanted to do an internship with an Ecuadorean law firm, but everyone turned me down because I didn't have enough experience. I ended up volunteering with the Achuar tribe in the Amazon, which decided ecotourism was the form of development that was right for them. They built Kapawi Ecolodge to protect part of the rain forest and share their culture with visitors. I'm a nature geek and traveled a lot with my family, but I'd never thought about doing anything in tourism. But after being with the Achuar, it just clicked, and I saw the power that tourism can have as a positive force, not only economically but emotionally. How did you get the business off the ground? Starting out, everyone told me it would never work. One guy said, "There's only one Backroads for every 5,000 new tour companies," not that I want to be that big, but it was a good dose of reality. I started with places I'd lived and volunteered, where I knew guides and lodges. We had four trips in 2014, with 24 people, and this year we ran 25 trips for more than 200 people. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A fully renovated penthouse near the top of the Trump International Hotel and Tower, with picture book park, river or cityscape views from each of its oversize windows, sold for 33,000,000 and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. Monthly carrying costs for the 5,018 square foot apartment, PH51B, which traded for 4.5 million below its most recent asking price of 37,500,00 and 10 million below the list price last spring, are 17,863. The four bedroom four and a half bath residence is the larger of just two units on the 51st floor of the building at 1 Central Park West, between 60th and 61st Streets, the Philip Johnson/Costas Kondylis redesign of the former Gulf and Western Building. Residents of the 158 condominium units have both a private lobby and access to the hotel's white glove amenities, which include a spa, health club and roof deck. The penthouse was transformed in a renovation "down to the studs" by SLC Interiors and Hottenroth Joseph Architects that lasted around two and a half years, according to Cathy Franklin of the Corcoran Group. Ms. Franklin and Alexis Bodenheimer, also of Corcoran, represented the seller, the limited liability company Endicott Holdings. Helen L. Dreyfuss of Brown Harris Stevens brought the buyer, whose identity was also shielded, through DLNH and Bean LLC. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
With this rule, our federal government is telling these "second chance entrepreneurs" that the value they bring to their communities, their employees and to our nation as a whole does not matter and is not worth saving. Beyond the fundamental unfairness, this arbitrary exclusion makes no economic sense. Today, unemployment in the United States hovers near Great Depression levels, with more than 40 million people filing new claims over the past two months. But even before the pandemic, individuals re entering society from prison were unemployed at a rate of over 27 percent higher than the total domestic unemployment rate during any historical period, including the 1930s, according to a 2018 study by the Prison Policy Initiative. The S.B.A.'s choice to block formerly incarcerated small business owners from access to funds not only compounds this structural problem, it also increases the economic vulnerability of their employees, families and neighbors. The rule should be reversed. Doing so would enable vital investments in the neighborhoods that house such small businesses. It would begin to address the pre existing racial disparities in access to funds that have been exacerbated by the program. And, of equal importance to law enforcement offices like mine, it would enhance public safety by keeping more New Yorkers employed and by ensuring that a number of our restaurants, barbershops and bodegas the eyes, ears and soul of our neighborhoods wouldn't have to shutter permanently. At the Manhattan district attorney's office, we hire re entering New Yorkers and provide full funding for New York's first statewide college in prison program. Through our Criminal Justice Investment Initiative, we use funds forfeited in our investigations against major banks to create employment opportunities and career training for re entering New Yorkers and at risk youth. Among other social enterprises, we invest in Drive Change a nonprofit that operates food trucks where 18 to 25 year olds who were formerly incarcerated receive culinary arts training and business skills. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Slava Hazin had never heard of Riverside Boulevard when his wife, Karen, "found an ad for this brand new condo," he said, and "dragged" him there a dozen years ago. They had been living on the East Side and needed a larger apartment for their family. He loved the location, across the street from the Hudson River and from Riverside Park South, a band of greenery that stretches from West 59th Street up to West 72nd Street, as does the boulevard. Now, he and some pals from his building regularly work out with a trainer in the park, he said, moving to their building's gym when the weather is bad. "We bought off a floor plan and moved in early in 2008," he said of the three bedroom, two bathroom apartment, for which they paid about 2 million. "It's the best thing we ever did." "It's a family oriented neighborhood. It feels like you're in the suburbs, but you're 10 minutes from Broadway," said Mr. Hazin, who has since become president of his condominium board and of the Riverside South Property Owners Association, which collects fees from all the boulevard buildings to help maintain the park. "It's absolutely its own neighborhood. Some people don't even consider it part of the Upper West Side." Until the 1990s, Riverside Boulevard did not exist. It was built over a Penn Central train yard, starting at the northern end, part of a project with a complicated history. The street and park have grown over the years, Mr. Hazin said, with the final three buildings and park areas nearing completion: "The neighborhood has only gotten better." "We love the park," she said. "We go there all the time, and the children bring sketchbooks. We look at the barges going by." They also watch people walking dogs, pushing strollers and whizzing by on Rollerblades. In the summer, they attend free activities like yoga, Irish dancing and movies, and often have picnics. "It's like mini vacations," she said. Renee Simons, 69, a retired marketing communications executive, and her husband, Eglon, 72, a retired media management executive, looked "downtown and uptown" for a place to downsize from their Chappaqua, N.Y., home after their three children grew up, she said. In 2009, they bought a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment in the neighborhood with water views for about 2 million. "We love being near Lincoln Center, the amenities within the building and the general neighborhood," Ms. Simons said. "It was just fitting for us." A parade of tall buildings with tall windows runs along the eastern side of Riverside Boulevard, from West 72nd down to West 59th Street. On the west lies Riverside Park South, which has graceful landscaping with walking paths, play areas and other features, mostly below street level, along the Hudson River. A raised portion of the West Side Highway hovers over the park. The earliest buildings, toward the northern end, opened in the late 1990s. The most recent three glass towers and a park between West 59th and West 61st Street, collectively called Waterline Square are not yet finished. All the boulevard buildings have doormen, water views and extravagant amenities. Common areas may include pools, gyms, indoor and outdoor lounges, and children's playrooms. 80 RIVERSIDE BOULEVARD, NO. 23D A three bedroom, three and a half bathroom corner condo with three exposures, a washer dryer and an eat in kitchen, in a 2006 doorman building with a pool, a gym and a lounge, listed for 3.5 million. 917 669 8630 "These are lifestyle buildings," said Annie Cion Gruenberger, an agent with Warburg Realty. "They look like hotels. Everything you need is right here." Residential plans for the area began in the 1970s with proposals from Donald Trump, none of which were executed; in 1994, Mr. Trump sold his controlling interest in the project to other investors. His company still manages some of the buildings, and seven were given the name Trump Place. Since 2016, the Trump name has been removed from four of the buildings. The Trump instigated development known as Riverside South includes a few addresses on nearby streets, including two new buildings on West End Avenue and one in Waterline Square, at 400 West 61st Street. Jennifer Kalish, the sales director for One West End Avenue, said her 42 story building, which abuts Waterline Square, is part of an area called Riverside Center and part of the boulevard community. It includes a large Morton Williams supermarket, soon to open, that many boulevard residents are anticipating. Like other new buildings, it is a condo that also has middle income housing units, which gave the building a 20 year tax abatement. 200 RIVERSIDE BOULEVARD, NO. 27A A three bedroom, three bathroom condo with river and city views, a corner dining room and a windowed kitchen, in a 1998 doorman building with a gym, a pool and a playroom, listed for 2.75 million. 212 439 4527 Of the 100 homes with Riverside Boulevard addresses listed for sale on The New York Times real estate site in early February, the least expensive was a studio with "panoramic river and sunset views" at 120 Riverside Boulevard, offered at 690,000. The most expensive was a six bedroom, eight bathroom condo listed for 13.95 million. The average closing price for the 12 month period ending Jan. 10, 2019, according to data provided by Warburg Realty, was 2,155,297; the active listings average, including apartments in the more expensive Waterline Square, was 3,339,619. "This is a neighborhood in transition," Ms. Gruenberger said, adding that, as elsewhere in the city, "there is a lot of price revision" downward. 50 RIVERSIDE BOULEVARD, NO. 9N A two bedroom, two and a half bathroom condo with partial river views and a washer dryer in a 2015 doorman building with a pool, a rock climbing wall and a bowling alley, listed for 2.35 million. 917 783 2041 Of 97 rentals on The New York Times site in early February, the lowest priced was 2,565 a month for a studio at 180 Riverside Boulevard, one of three all rental buildings. The highest, at 55,000, was a five bedroom, six and a half bathroom corner unit with a terrace at 50 Riverside Boulevard, a condo building. Pier I Cafe, at the foot of a recreational pier that juts nearly 800 feet into the Hudson River at West 70th Street, is "a frequent gathering spot for people in the neighborhood," said Dan Garodnick, president and chief executive of the Riverside Park Conservancy, which helps to take care of the park. He described it as "a New Yorker's park," partly because it is too out of the way for tourists and also because "people who live in the area are wildly committed to its upkeep." The conservancy offers 250 free programs a year, from May to October, as well as public art projects like Sarah E. Brook's "Viewfinding," at West 67th Street through Aug. 22, 2019. New sections of the park, which will extend it on the street level, are in the works, Mr. Garodnick said. Spencer Sloan, 41, a resident of the neighborhood since 2010, with his wife, Alma, and two children, ages 7 and 8, has noticed "more action" on the boulevard, he said, including new schools, new medical offices and the first two restaurants: BLU Cafe, at 120 Riverside Boulevard, run by the BLU Realty Group next door but open to anyone; and Vin Sur Vingt, at 100 Riverside Boulevard, a wine bar that serves brunch on the weekends. Mr. Sloan said he is looking forward to the new Cipriani restaurant and food court scheduled to open this year in Waterline Square. Most buildings run a shuttle bus to the West 72nd Street subway station on Broadway for the 1, 2 and 3 trains, and some also have shuttles to Columbus Circle, where the A, B, C and D lines are available, in addition to the 1. Some residents find walking easier. The 1 line also stops at Lincoln Center, which is closer to several buildings. The 69th Street Transfer Bridge, one of the few visible remnants of the neighborhood's railroading past, is in the Hudson River just offshore, south of Pier I. It once allowed barges loaded with train cars to cross the river between New Jersey and New York. The bridge was abandoned in the early 1970s, after the New York Central Railroad went out of business, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. 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 |
Indeed, despite the film's title, the early scenes, focusing on the camp, turn out to be a kind of a getting the band together story for the post camp years, when several Jened alumni became nationally visible activists and resettled around Berkeley, Calif. Judy Heumann had sued for discrimination in New York after she was denied a license to teach and became a leader in San Francisco in the 504 Sit In of 1977, when activists demanded federal regulations guaranteeing civil rights for the disabled. (Heumann also served as a special adviser under President Barack Obama, who, along with Michelle Obama, is one of this film's executive producers.) Newnham and LeBrecht deftly juggle a large cast of characters past and present, accomplishing the not so easy task of making all the personalities distinct, and a build a fair amount of suspense in their nearly day by day account of the sit in. LeBrecht, who appears as a talking head (a longtime sound designer, he also contributed to the movie's audio mix), notes that this was no ordinary demonstration. Protesters had to persist without access to necessities like catheters or backup ventilators. "Crip Camp" repeatedly links the struggles of the disabled to other fights for civil rights. The Black Panthers brought in hot meals to keep the protesters fed. HolLynn D'Lil, a journalist who became a paraplegic after a road accident, says that her change in perspective taught her that disabled rights were rights for everyone. Ultimately, "Crip Camp" has a universal message: Inspirations that begin in youth can lead to radical, world changing results. At the end, a number of former campers reunite at the camp's unprepossessing present day site. They see something more, and so will you. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The Dia Art Foundation helped pioneer the use of industrial spaces to exhibit contemporary art when it opened in New York City in 1974. Then it flirted with idea of opening new buildings in 2005 and 2012, but both proposals were abandoned following the departures of two former directors. Now Dia is renewing its mission, with plans to renovate and expand its existing industrial spaces in Chelsea and SoHo in Manhattan and Beacon, N.Y., to shore up its future programming. "The idea of new architecture is so antithetical to Dia," said Jessica Morgan, its director since 2015. "The unique thing about Dia is precisely the constellation of these industrial sites that allow the artist or artwork to speak much louder than architecture." Overseen by Architecture Research Office, the project calls for unifying Dia's three contiguous buildings, including a former marble cutting facility, on West 22nd Street in Chelsea and integrating them into a street level exhibition and programming space with a bookshop. The two existing galleries will retain their raw character but will receive an infrastructure upgrade. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In the 1973 animated classic "Charlotte's Web," an entire musical number is dedicated to the film's antagonist, a rat named Templeton, feasting on garbage at the county fair. He tosses apple cores, banana peels and turkey legs down his craw with abandon. At one point, he juggles snacks foraged from the dumpster while simultaneously using a discarded melon rind as a surfboard. The rat doesn't merely survive on garbage he thrives among it. Now, as humans around the world bed down in their nests, many are faced with the fact of their own mounting trash. Even those who once diligently gathered their onion skins and citrus husks for compost may now be stuck with a decision: freeze their organic waste for stock or throw it away? Out of anxiety, guilt, newfound virtue, frugality or a combination of the above, some frequent tosser outers are changing their habits, whirling carrot tops into pesto and giddily watching their green onions grow tiny roots in jars of water. In the face of pandemic, climate dread and the seemingly ceaseless parade of macabre that is the news, saving a couple of onions from the dumpster may feel akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But as Tejal Rao put it last week in The New York Times, "it could also shape a collective response, and all of these small habits could add up to a meaningful shift that changes our food culture." And on the most individual level, these small grasps at sovereignty may also yield some scrap of agency over our own lives. Here are a handful of things you can make with your would be garbage. Kami Ahrens, an assistant curator at the Foxfire Foundation, an Appalachian heritage preservation center in Mountain City, Ga., said that 20th century Appalachian homesteaders were scrupulous about conserving and repurposing their hard fought resources. "There was a saying that when you used a hog, you used everything but the squeal," she said. Animal fat, for instance, was used to bake cornbread, seasoned cast iron, and make soaps and candles. To set a fire lit mood in your home, simmer pork or beef fat at a low temperature on the stove, or in a crock pot for several hours with a bit of water. Skim the solids that rise to the top, then pour the leftover liquid into a jar. Dip a wick into the jar, and voila: You have a perfectly serviceable candle that, lacking as it may be in aesthetics, can do wonders for your sense of self sufficiency. And, Ms. Ahrens said reassuringly, it won't smell like meat. Onion skins, beet tops, carrot leaves, avocado pits and tea bags can all be used as natural dyes, which are less saturated but yield pleasantly muted hues. Avocado pits will lend a soft blush tone, coffee lands somewhere on the ochre to sand spectrum, and hibiscus tea imparts mauves and muted reds. Even the cooking water from black beans can be used, according to Anastasia Cole Plakias, a founder of the rooftop farming company Brooklyn Grange. "It makes a really beautiful, very pale blue," she said. Ms. Plakias also makes watercolors from vegetable dyes and even uses beets to add color, and subtle sweetness, to frosting. The dyeing process requires brewing a concentrated tea from your ingredients, then simmering unbleached natural fabric, like cotton, linen or wool, in the dye. To do this, you'll need a pot dedicated to dyeing and a mordant, which fixes the color in place. Typically people buy alum, though other folk solutions include boiling a pot of old nails. (This is why you do not want to use your dye pot for cooking later.) Simon Perez, who developed recipes for "Future Food Today," a cookbook focused on sustainable eating, said that crushed eggshells can be blended with water to give plants a boost of calcium and magnesium, and coffee grounds sprinkled directly on the soil add a jolt of nitrogen. Ms. Ahrens, of Foxfire, recommends drying out chicken bones in a dehydrator or low temperature oven, then grinding them into bone meal with a food processor. ("You can also mash them with a hammer," she said.) The result is a fertilizer rich in phosphorus, one of the primary nutrients plants require. In the last couple of weeks, regrowing scallions appears to have supplanted sourdough baking as the isolation coping mechanism of choice. Alliums in general are well suited for regrowing, as are celery crowns, herbs like mint and even pineapple tops (though, in the best of circumstances, it would be a few years before you'd see any fruit from your labor). Yolanda Gonzalez, an urban agriculture specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension, said that green onions are the easiest to regenerate: "All you have to do is cut them from about an inch from the roots and leave them in a glass of water." She recommended experimenting with Egyptian walking onions, which form bulbils that can be broken off and replanted. After brewing a pot of coffee at home, Claire Sprouse doesn't always toss her spent grounds. Instead, she makes what she calls "old brew," running the grounds through a second brew cycle. The bitter, diluted result isn't something you'd necessarily want to drink out of a coffee mug, but when combined with equal parts sugar, it becomes a syrup ideal for use in an espresso martini or an old fashioned. Ms. Sprouse, whose Brooklyn cafe and bar, Hunky Dory, has been in limbo since mid March, has been cooking at home much more than usual. "The capacity for food waste right now is very high," she said. Inspired by the challenge, Ms. Sprouse reached out to bartenders around the country for cocktail recipes that make use of kitchen scraps. The resulting collection, "Optimistic Cocktails," is available online, as a PDF, for 15; all proceeds will go to the contributing bars and a group of undocumented workers funds. Recipes include a drink incorporating a banana peel syrup with rum, lime and orange juice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Nets guard Kyrie Irving, addressing the media for the first time in two months, said on Saturday that he had taken a cortisone shot in an attempt to avoid surgery on an ailing shoulder that has kept him out of games since Nov. 14. He did not give a concrete timetable for his return but said that he was "doing a lot better." "It just sucks, man," Irving said. "It really is disheartening." The 27 year old point guard, who has missed the Nets' last 23 games including Saturday's, said that he has felt pain when lifting his right shoulder during jump shots and that he had also been dealing with bursitis, a condition that causes joint pain. Irving said he began feeling pain in his right shoulder after a Nov. 4 game against the New Orleans Pelicans, in which he scored 39 points. The pain became progressively worse afterward. If the cortisone shot does not work, Irving raised the possibility of arthroscopic surgery. "It's very unique," Irving said. "It's the first time I've ever had such a significant feeling in my shoulder where I'm going up to shoot jump shots and I can't really lift my shoulder." Irving, one of the Nets' marquee free agent acquisitions over the summer, has played only 11 games for the Nets this season, but he had been dominant. He was averaging 28.5 points and 7.2 assists, both on pace for career highs. Speculation that Irving's injury was more serious than initially thought had been rising for weeks, especially since the team has not provided many details about it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
PHOENIX No city's fans combine supreme confidence, mother bear protectiveness and unrelenting demands the way Philadelphia's do. To root for a Philly team is to always expect success, to be devastated aggrieved, even in the face of failure, and to insist that the world know exactly how you feel. As the Eagles' Jason Kelce proudly proclaimed last year, in his epic, breathless, post Super Bowl rant on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "No one likes us, we don't care." Into this caldron steps Bryce Harper, who really seems to crave it. True, a record 330 million contract buys a lot of affection. But in agreeing on Thursday to sign with the Phillies for 13 years without an opt out clause, which is usually standard in contracts for Scott Boras clients Harper has bound himself to a sports culture all its own. "Before my first season, we had player appearances at the ballpark, and I was in my own little booth," said Brad Lidge, a former Phillies closer, by phone on Friday. "One guy was like, 'Can you please sign for my son?' and then: 'You'd better not blow any saves this year. We're going to come down hard on you if you do!' I was like, 'Oh my God.' " Lidge did as instructed in that 2008 season. He converted all of his 48 save chances, including the World Series clincher, a cathartic moment for a city that had gone 25 years since its last championship. Lidge said he thrived on the fans' intensity. "In a way, it gets your mind right," he said. "It gets you really focused. You know you're being watched under a microscope and it's not just how you perform on the field, it's the way you play. The fans in Philly understand the game really well, and they can tell if you're not hustling or taking plays off." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Harper, 26, will come of age as an athlete in Philadelphia. He could be moody in his seven years with the Washington Nationals, and was sometimes cited by managers for not hustling on ground balls. Yet he has also run into walls a habit that can make an outfielder a hero in Philadelphia, as it did for Aaron Rowand and he plays with a fiery edge. "He plays every game like it's his last game," said Pete Rose, the career hits leader and former Phillie, by phone from Las Vegas on Thursday. "He's not worried about getting hurt; we all get hurt. Bryce is just a talent, a big league talent since he was 13 years old around here. "Now he just needs to get that same enthusiasm during the season that he had when he won the home run derby last year. That was like a World Series celebration. Bryce is going to be there a long time, and once you get that feeling of World Series competition, you want it every year." A record contract should not come with pressure, Rose said "Pressure is when you're making 5,000 a month and your bills are 8,000," he added but Harper now shares the mandate Rose faced: to get the Phillies over the top. His arrival caps a thorough makeover of an offense that produced the fewest hits in the majors last season. The Phillies, who were 80 82 and have not had a winning record since 2011, have also added catcher J. T. Realmuto, shortstop Jean Segura and left fielder Andrew McCutchen. Harper, Realmuto and Segura were All Stars last season, and McCutchen the 2013 National League most valuable player had 20 home runs and a .368 on base percentage. "It's the perfect timing," the Phillies Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt told MLB Network Radio on Friday. "We were very close to contending prior to all of this happening. Now with all of this happening, Bryce Harper knows what's going on. He knows that Philadelphia is going to be a great place to play. They ended up giving him the biggest contract ever, so he's pretty much getting everything he wants right now." Harper has 184 home runs and a .900 on base plus slugging percentage through his Age 26 season; Schmidt, who started later, had 131 homers and an .869 OPS at the same age. Harper is signed through age 38, an age at which Schmidt was still productive. He turned 38 at the end of the 1987 season, when he hit 35 home runs and batted .293. Schmidt, of course, is one of the greatest players ever, a three time M.V.P. who won 10 Gold Gloves at third base and was a central figure in the golden decade of Philadelphia sports: 1974 to 1983, when the Flyers won two Stanley Cups, the Phillies and the 76ers each won a championship, and the Eagles reached their first Super Bowl. Now the Eagles are a force again, the 76ers are a blossoming power and the Flyers have a dynamic rookie goaltender, Carter Hart, and an oddly captivating rookie mascot a wild haired creature named Gritty who became an instant Philadelphia sensation, at least partly because fans seemed to mock him everywhere else. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"K L 32 H 4. Mon pere et moi (My Father and I)" right, by Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. President Trump's executive order banning travel and rescinding visas for citizens of seven majority Muslim nations does not lack for opponents in New York from Kennedy Airport, where striking taxi drivers joined thousands of demonstrators, to the United Nations, whose new secretary general, Antonio Guterres, said the measures "violate our basic principles." Now the Museum of Modern Art which in past decades has cultivated a templelike detachment is making its voice heard as well. In one of the strongest protests yet by a major cultural institution, the museum has reconfigured its fifth floor permanent collection galleries interrupting its narrative of Western Modernism, from Cezanne through World War II to showcase contemporary art from Iran, Iraq and Sudan, whose citizens are subject to the ban. A Picasso came down. Matisse, down. Ensor, Boccioni, Picabia, Burri: They made way for artists who, if they are alive and abroad, cannot see their work in the museum's most august galleries. (A work from a Syrian artist has been added to the film program. The other affected countries are Somalia, Yemen and Libya.) The works will be up for several months, and alongside each painting, sculpture, or photograph is a text that makes no bones about why it has suddenly surfaced: "This work is by an artist from a nation whose citizens are being denied entry into the United States, according to a presidential executive order issued on January 27, 2017. This is one of several such artworks from the Museum's collection installed throughout the fifth floor galleries to affirm the ideals of welcome and freedom as vital to this Museum, as they are to the United States." On Thursday night I observed three curators Christophe Cherix, head of the department of prints and drawings; Jodi Hauptman, a senior curator in that department; and Paulina Pobocha, an assistant curator in the department of painting and sculpture mulling which works from a rolling dolly to include and, no less challenging, what to remove. In the recently redesigned Picasso gallery, that Spanish artist's "Card Player" of 1913 14 has been replaced by "The Mosque," a small oil painting from 1964 by the Sudanese artist Ibrahim el Salahi. Mr. Salahi freely interweaves Modernist abstraction, Arabic calligraphy and architectural motifs. There's a tonal rhyme between the burnished browns of "The Mosque" and the mucky beige and mushroom pigments of Picasso's analytical Cubist tableaus and Picasso's own deep debt to African art is further underlined by his new company. The Matisse gallery, where the masterworks "Dance" and "The Piano Lesson" hang, has been refitted with a large, intricate work on paper by the Iranian artist Charles Hossein Zenderoudi. In his "Mon Pere et Moi" (1962), stylized gold hands and feet accompany jam packed squares containing concentric circles and dancing glyphs. Are the two figures performing sujud, the act of prostrating oneself during Muslim prayer? They are too abstract to say with certainty. Like Matisse, Mr. Zenderoudi translated bodies into pure shapes, informed by patterns gleaned from the decorative arts. An untitled canvas covered in dried, cracked earth, by Marcos Grigorian, who grew up in Iran, now hangs amid similarly geological works by Alberto Burri and Antoni Tapies. The gallery devoted to futurism has a small bronze totem by Parviz Tanavoli, one of Iran's foremost sculptors. (Mr. Tanavoli, who divides his time between Iran and Canada, was briefly detained last year by Iranian authorities.) Now, next to Henri Rousseau's "The Sleeping Gypsy" is a painting by Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi born British architect who died last year. Hadid's depiction of Hong Kong as an allover composition of interlocking shards satisfyingly fractures the gallery's timeline of art around 1900, and other works, too, are installed almost as intentional disruptions. A massive 2011 photograph of three billiard balls by Shirana Shahbazi who has German citizenship but whose Iranian birth means she is now barred from this country incongruously dominates the gallery devoted to Dada, right behind "To Be Looked At ...," Marcel Duchamp's impish painting on glass. Next to a large, Expressionist street scene by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a 2007 video, "Chit Chat," by Tala Madani, who was born in Iran, plays on a loop. The frames of the stop motion animation derive from bold, brushy compositions Ms. Madani paints and repaints. But where Kirchner depicts the streets of Dresden with a certain alienated distance, the video depicting men grabbing each other by the throat and vomiting up yellow paint is quietly urgent. America's leading museums have been vocal in the past week about their opposition to Mr. Trump's executive order, which is still being enforced at some airports. James Cuno, who leads the Getty in Los Angeles, called the order "ill advised, unnecessary and destructive." Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggested that the blockbuster "Assyria to Iberia" might never have happened under Mr. Trump's rules. Artists have participated in protests, especially in Los Angeles, home to the largest Persian community in the United States. The order will also have a negative effect on arts journalism; Roxana Azimi, the arts correspondent for Le Monde, is no longer able to enter the United States, as she was born in Iran. But the speed and directness with which MoMA not an institution usually thought of as nimble has responded to Mr. Trump's ban are especially impressive. Its particular force comes from the curators' decision to present these works on the fifth floor, in the galleries most steeped in MoMA's flowchart narrative of Modernist development. The Iranian, Iraqi and Sudanese art does not merely disrupt the old timeline of art history; it disrupts MoMA's own institutional character. It says: Even the room in which Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" hangs is not irreproachable, but rather a particular story told by individuals, who at times must speak out. The institution, of course, has never been divorced from power and politics. (MoMA's continued sponsorship from Volkswagen which admitted to installing illegal software in 11 million cars worldwide, resulting in more than 4.3 billion in fines especially rankles.) But in the years to come, all institutions, from the most experimental to the most established, will have to decide whether to keep their heads down or whether to reply. This welcome new voice, less Olympian and more pluralistic, is not how MoMA has spoken in the past but, then again, this is not how presidents have spoken in the past, either. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
There are trends in movies just as there are trends in fashion, and occasionally the twain shall meet and not just on the runway. Such will probably be the case this summer, anyway, as the gangster movie, after a period of dormancy that followed the 2007 finale of "The Sopranos," returns with a vengeance. First comes Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," an old time noir dressed in Los Angeles nostalgia, and next "The Irishman," by Martin Scorsese, which reassembles the crew from the last great gangster flick, "Goodfellas," in all their sharkskin suits and spear point collar and alligator shoes glory. Together the two are bound to reignite a passion for silk shirts and overcoats that, though the directors, costume designers and retailers involved most likely don't know it, can at least in part be traced to the first megastar of the underworld: Albert Hicks. No one taught him how to dress. He learned by studying the dandies he met in gambling houses around the world. His outfits were assembled from items he found in the great seaports: red silk shirts from Rio, blue scarves from New Orleans, high heel boots from New York. He was handsome, tall and broad shouldered with menacing black eyes (that helped). He was feared in the taverns of the Fourth Ward of Manhattan, and became famous only after he was caught. He had committed dozens of crimes but was not arrested until he was 40 years old. He had joined an oyster sloop with evil intent killed the crew in New York's lower bay, dumped the bodies, escaped in a dinghy. That's not what people remembered. What they remembered was the way he dressed, the slapdash elegance. His jacket and hat were mentioned again and again in court as the best way to identify him. Witnesses called it a monkey coat: the sort of peacoat pictured in a Burberry catalog. It was dark blue. He wore it unbuttoned. It flagged behind him. He was made, in the way of O.J. Simpson and the glove, to try it on for the jury. He slipped it on with languid ease, smiling. The hat got even more attention. It flopped in the way of a slouch brim, falling over one eye, giving Hicks a mysterious aspect. Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian freedom fighter, wore a hat like that during his visit to the United States, which is how it got its name a Kossuth hat but Hicks made it famous. It became a trend after his arrest. In the weeks between his sentencing and death by hanging, Hicks became the kind of prisoner that mesmerizes the rich and fashionable. Swells visited him in the Tombs. P.T. Barnum gave him 25 and two boxes of cigars for the right to make a mask of his face. Barnum wanted the killer's clothes, too, in exchange for a store bought suit. Hicks complained bitterly about the trade. He said the new clothes itched and were poorly made. Hicks was executed on July 13, 1860, on Bedloe's Island now Liberty Island, home of the statue as 12,000 people, at anchor in ships, watched. It was New York City's last public execution. He had had a suit made for the occasion. It was electric blue, as gaudy as anything on Broadway. "His coat was rather fancy, being ornamented with two rows of gilt navy buttons and a couple of anchors in needlework," according to a news account. "A white shirt, a pair of blue pants, a pair of light pumps, and the old Kossuth hat he wore when arrested, completed the attire." Afterward, the pirate's wax figure was on display fat P.T. Barnum's American Museum on Ann Street and Broadway for 10 years, until the museum burned. It was in this way that millions came to know and emulate the style Kossuth hat, monkey coat, pumps. You can see it in pictures of old New York gangs: the Montgomery Guards, an Irish outfit photographed by Jacob Riis; Lucky Luciano in a silk suit and homburg; Bugsy Siegel, in a houndstooth jacket. It was attitude translated into fashion, a flashy underworld style that passed from gangster to gangster until it reached Hollywood and was modeled by James Cagney in "The Roaring Twenties," Edward G. Robinson in "Little Caesar." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Mr. Pulphus, a high school artist from St. Louis, may never become a free speech cause celebre akin to Mr. Ofili, the professional London artist whose depiction of a black Virgin Mary, encrusted with a lump of elephant dung, caused a furor in 1999. Still, Representative William Lacy Clay, Democrat of Missouri, filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday arguing that the removal of a work by Mr. Pulphus from the Cannon House Office Building in Washington violates the artist's First Amendment rights. "This case is truly about something much bigger than a student's painting," Mr. Clay said in comments outside a courthouse in Washington on Tuesday. "It is about defending our fundamental First Amendment freedoms which are currently under assault in this country." He went on to argue that the painting which renders some police officers as pigs in a confrontation with people in downtown St. Louis "was wrongly disqualified and removed" from a public exhibition of work by high school winners of a Congressional Art Competition. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Covid 19 has crippled television production in 2020. And yet, an astonishing number of new series limited and otherwise have premiered so far this year. Maybe you've already seen the most talked about shows: "The Last Dance," "Normal People," "The Queen's Gambit," "Tiger King," "The Vow." That leaves only about 500 more. No person with decent sleep hygiene can or should keep up with them all. But Thanksgiving, and the long weekend it introduces, invites bingeing of all kinds. Here are a dozen options, across form, genre and age rating, that you may have slept on. And since these are all debuts (meaning they have aired only one season or are limited series), you can watch them in their entirety, or at least until that tryptophan really kicks in. American girls who came of age in the '80s and '90s regarded Ann M. Martin's novels of tween entrepreneurship as sacred texts. Happily, the series creator Rachel Shukert has updated these stories to the screen without losing any of Martin's sympathy, pluck and can do attitude. "It's heartwarming but not heavy," our critic James Poniewozik wrote. The casting is impeccable, for the preteens and parents both particularly Alicia Silverstone as a frazzled mom. Which probably explains the show's immense intergenerational appeal. Gen X and millennial parents can reunite with the literary heroines of their youth. Their Gen Z kids can ask what a landline is. Watch it on Netflix If you want to spend the holiday considering how the wrongs of the past echo into the present, give this Showtime limited series a go. Based on the National Book Award winning novel by James McBride and created by Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard, the seven episodes provide an antic, imaginative biography of the 19th century abolitionist John Brown (Hawke). "It's like getting to be King Lear, but even better," Hawke told the Times. Onion (Joshua Caleb Johnson), a Black boy informally adopted by Brown, narrates the hourlong episodes. Few shows since "Deadwood" have offered a vernacular so lush or a vision of an earlier America so morally complex. Watch it on Showtime This Netflix documentary series, which turns its anti aging creamed eye on Paltrow's wellness and lifestyle company, seems purpose built for hate watching. Yes, its version of the "best life" ethos focuses on healthy, wealthy lives that float free of systemic oppression. And it often trades in woo woo. (Although is woo woo the worst thing?) But the series brisk, unexpectedly engaging and beautifully shot throughout includes one perfect episode: "The Pleasure Is Ours." An exploration of female anatomy and sexuality, it features the peerless sex educator Betty Dodson, who died in October, and demonstrates the female orgasm without winking or embarrassment. Watch it on Netflix A workplace sitcom that trades on the real world slog that makes online gaming possible, this Apple TV series debuted in February. Created by Rob McElhenney, Megan Ganz and David Hornsby of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," the show sets its nine go down easy episodes within a studio responsible for a wildly successful multiplayer online game. If the characters begin as flimsy stereotypes, later episodes fill them out a little. And in May, the show somehow managed its best episode yet, a surprisingly moving 25 minutes, shot remotely during quarantine a technical feat made manifest in a delirious Rube Goldberg finale. Watch it on Apple TV Come for the dancing. Stay for the feminist workplace critique. This Starz drama, from the first time showrunner Katori Hall, follows the employees of a struggling shake joint in the Mississippi Delta. "Here these women, most of them Black, get to be subjects, not objects," Poniewozik wrote. "And they demand notice." Plotlines tangle, like a string bikini left in the dryer, and resolve only rarely. But the dancing is dynamic, no character is minor and a drama that treats exotic dance as just another grind deserves the rain of some very large bills. Playing the principal dancers, Brandee Evans, Elarica Johnson and Shannon Thornton give stand up, standout and occasionally "upside down gripping the pole by thighs alone" performances. Watch it on Starz Philip Roth's 2004 novel imagines an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh, an America First xenophobe, wins a presidential election, sowing racial and ethnic division. Which makes David Simon and Ed Burns's wintry, richly textured adaptation only slightly more comfortable viewing now than when the limited series debuted on HBO in March. If your family fights about politics, scroll past. Otherwise enjoy the layered performances from Zoe Kazan, Morgan Spector and Winona Ryder and the uneasy reminder that totalitarianism can happen here. "It's a story," Poniewozik wrote, "in which America comes to realize that democracy is merely a choice, not an inevitability." Watch it on HBO This Portland noir stars Cobie Smulders as Dex, a locked and loaded private investigator with big time personal trauma. A case of the week procedural, it might have benefited from the prestige treatment: fewer episodes, bigger budgets. But Smulders's persuasive, tight lipped performance and the pleasure of seeing tough guy conventions tailored to a tough girl form made it sing, however morosely. This show actually debuted in September 2019, but its first season ended in March. ABC renewed it for a second, then walked back that renewal this September, blaming coronavirus related delays. The season finale cracked one foundational mystery, then introduced one more. Maybe another network can pick up the series and put Dex back on the case. Watch it on Hulu Think of this show, about twin sisters who collar wanted criminals and bail jumpers, as kettle corn television: sweet, salty. Set in Atlanta, where the girls (Maddie Phillips and Anjelica Bette Fellini) attend a conservative Christian high school, the show does smart, sometimes subtle work as our heroines make their own moral choices. And the cast attacks the scripts with the enthusiasm of a newly adopted shelter puppy. "It's quirky and naughty and funny, the show so many teen shows think they are but aren't quite, satirical and earnest often in the same scene," our critic Margaret Lyons wrote. So don't flee this series, created by Kathleen Jordan, even though Netflix canceled it not long after its August premiere. Watch it on Netflix This hallucinatory limited series, which borrows from folk horror (think "Midsommar," but chillier, or "The Wicker Man," though less flammable), entrenches an elegant nightmare in a bold structure. Created by Felix Barrett and Dennis Kelly ("Utopia"), its first three episodes star Jude Law as a man ensnared on a peculiar island. The next three star Naomie Harris as a woman who goes in search of him. When the series aired in late summer, a durational performance by the immersive art stars Punchdrunk linked the two halves. You'll just have to perform your own response to a claustrophobic chiller about the inability to travel. Watch it on HBO Has 2020 sometimes felt like a simulation gone awry? That sensation will prepare you for this bleak, ingenious comedy from Greg Daniels ("The Office," "Parks and Recreation"). In the near future, technology allows the recently deceased to upload consciousness into a cloud based afterlife. The show stars Robbie Amell (all chin and masculine complacency) as a bro coder who is suddenly introduced to a plush digital heaven. (It looks a lot like Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York.) The series skews cynical. Nathan is often punchable. But there's some nifty Imagineering and charming support from Andy Allo as Nathan's living handler. And as Poniewozik wrote, "coming to screens around the height of the pandemic, a comedy about death and bridging the distance between the living and the digitized had an unintended level of poignancy." Watch it on Amazon | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The last meeting between Lamar Jackson of the Ravens and Patrick Mahomes of the Chiefs a 33 28 Kansas City victory had plenty of hype, but that was nothing compared to this week's, as the Super Bowl champion Chiefs face a Ravens team that hasn't lost a regular season game in nearly a year. Sunday's games are an appetizer at best. Even a terrific matchup like the Los Angeles Rams facing the Bills in New York seems like a snoozer when the matchup between Kansas City and Baltimore awaits on Monday night. But the league still plans on playing the other games, and there should be some good ones along the way to get you ready for Monday. Here is a look at N.F.L. Week 3, with all picks made against the point spread. For Buffalo, an explosion of the team's passing game can be attributed to weak competition, but also to wide receiver Stefon Diggs. Acquired in a trade with Minnesota, Diggs has given the Bills the No. 1 receiver it lacked, which has opened up the entire field for quarterback Josh Allen. The big armed Allen has responded with a league leading 729 yards passing and six touchdowns, with no interceptions. And with the team's running game off to a sluggish start, and its defense still rounding into form, Buffalo actually has quite a bit of room for improvement. The Bills may need to show that improvement quickly, as the Rams have a lot of options on offense, even with the rookie running back Cam Akers injured. And Los Angeles, while not exactly the Steelers, is not a pushover in pass defense. The Bills are a narrow favorite at home, and that feels right. Pick: Bills 2 The Raiders (2 0) are off to a nice start to their season and just opened their new home in Las Vegas in style with a huge win over New Orleans. For their trouble, they now get Cam Newton and the Patriots (1 1) in Foxborough, Mass. That hardly seems fair. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Newton opened up the full arsenal of the New England offense against Seattle last week, and if he had been able to run in a goal line touchdown something he typically does with ease the Patriots would have shocked a Super Bowl contender on their turf. New England's defense has shown some effects from an off season spent shedding players, or having them opt out of the season, which could leave open some room for quarterback Derek Carr to put points on the board. But there's little reason to believe that a red hot Newton can't will his team to victory. Pick: Patriots 6 Between how pedestrian the Saints (1 1) looked on Monday night, and how terrifically the Packers (2 0) have played in both of their games, the Saints being favored, even at home, is one of the more surprising decisions of the week by oddsmakers. It could be a matter of the New Orleans defense being the stiffest test that quarterback Aaron Rodgers, running back Aaron Jones and the Packers have faced this year. It might be a belief that Drew Brees and Alvin Kamara are capable of more than they've shown. Or it might just be a holdover belief that you have to respect the Saints at home. But based on everything we've actually seen, Green Bay should be expected to win. Pick: Packers 3 It would be easier to feel good about the Cowboys (1 1) and their huge comeback victory against Atlanta last week if they had not fallen behind, 29 10, in the first place. There is clearly something amiss for the Dallas defense, and facing Russell Wilson and the Seahawks (2 0) in Seattle is not a good time to work through your issues. Pick: Seahawks 4.5 Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs (2 0). Lamar Jackson and the Ravens (2 0). There are no better quarterbacks in the N.F.L., no better teams and there is no better matchup that the league could have for a prime time game. The hype will reach a peak likely unseen since the epic 2018 clash between the Chiefs and the Rams, which could be setting us up for disappointment, even if the game is a thriller. This game comes one day short of the one year anniversary of Baltimore's last regular season loss, and it's not hard to figure out how the Ravens have stayed so consistent thanks to a running game that is the most productive the N.F.L. has ever seen, and a passing attack that is not big on yardage, but is almost ruthlessly efficient. Couple that with a defense that is solid at every level and it's no wonder that they win so many games in blowouts. Kansas City's formula is even simpler: Mahomes. At no point in any game that he's playing, no matter the score, can the Chiefs be counted out, and that helps hide any deficiencies the team might have in overall defensive depth. That they've surrounded Mahomes with a group of ultrafast and reliable receivers, while retaining Harrison Butker as one of the game's elite long distance kickers, pays dividends regularly, including last week's come from behind overtime victory against the Chargers in a game Kansas City absolutely should have lost. Between home field advantage and the team's superior defense, Baltimore is a rightful favorite. But even if it's 35 3 at halftime, you'll want to keep watching, just in case. Pick: Ravens 3.5 The Texans (0 2) opened the season with games against the N.F.L.'s two best teams (Kansas City and Baltimore), and did an excellent job of not standing in either team's way. Things have been particularly brutal in terms of run defense, where they've allowed an average of 198 yards a game. That should be music to James Conner's ears, as Pittsburgh loves to focus on the run and would be more than content to let him carry them to a win at home. Pittsburgh's stellar defense, meanwhile, is likely smarting after allowing a combined 37 points against weak competition in the Giants and Broncos, and they should be amped up for a challenge from Houston's Deshaun Watson. Pick: Steelers 3.5 The Titans (2 0) put most of their energy into preserving the team's offense this off season and that is showing up in the results so far, with quarterback Ryan Tannehill (six passing touchdowns, no interceptions) and running back Derrick Henry (200 yards rushing) doing their thing. But the team's defense keeps things so close that both games have come down to a last minute field goal by Stephen Gostkowski. Their offense should meet very little resistance from the woeful defense of the Vikings (0 2), but if Tennessee can barely slow down Denver or Jacksonville, it could be in for a world of hurt against Kirk Cousins and Minnesota. Pick: Vikings 2.5 The circumstances of Tyrod Taylor's late scratch last week it has been reported by ESPN that his lung was punctured by a team doctor during treatment for injured ribs are terrifying and upsetting. The veteran quarterback may miss multiple games as a result, adding yet another obstacle to a career in which Taylor has often been far better than his own teams seem to realize. Complicating matters for Taylor, whenever he does return, is the phenomenal performance the rookie Justin Herbert turned in during an overtime loss to Kansas City last week. Herbert was just the third quarterback to ever have 300 plus passing yards and a rushing touchdown in his first N.F.L. game (Otto Graham and Cam Newton are the others), and if he follows up that performance with a win over the Christian McCaffrey less Panthers (0 2), it may be very hard to unseat him from the starting job. That win is certainly possible, but giving a rookie a spread of nearly a touchdown is overly generous. Pick: Panthers 6.5 When Tom Brady chose the Buccaneers (1 1) it was likely based on the team's terrific defense and its depth at wide receiver. Having running back Leonard Fournette fall into the team's lap was icing on the cake, and things seemed to be running at full speed in a Week 2 win over Carolina. The Panthers weren't the toughest competition, and neither are the Broncos (0 2) especially with quarterback Drew Lock and wide receiver Courtland Sutton both out but at this point, getting Fournette into a rhythm and developing chemistry between Brady and his receivers is an important step for when Tampa Bay does face someone good. Pick: Buccaneers 6 It seems like Ryan Fitzpatrick has at least one game like this every season. He makes every throw, he moves around in the pocket, and he rallies his team behind him on the way to victory. That version of Fitzpatrick showed up in Jacksonville on Thursday, and the large bearded 37 year old completed 18 of 20 passes for 160 yards and two touchdowns, adding some insult to the Jaguars' injury by running in a score as well. He improved his career record against the Jaguars to 6 3, and became the first quarterback to ever beat an opponent with six different teams (Cincinnati, Buffalo, Tennessee, Houston, the Jets and Miami). Our prediction of Jaguars 3 was based on the pluck Jacksonville had shown in its first two games, but on Thursday, the Jaguars looked a lot like the bottom feeder that most had predicted coming into the season. A quick primer for those who are not familiar with betting lines: Favorites are listed next to a negative number that represents how many points they must win by to cover the spread. Seahawks 4.5, for example, means that Seattle must beat Dallas by at least five points for its backers to win their bet. Gamblers can also bet on the total score, or whether the teams' combined score in the game is over or under a preselected number of points. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Maybe you've decided to learn a foreign language during lockdown and have downloaded a language app like Duolingo, which saw its numbers double in March to around 30 million monthly users. You may now be able say useful phrases, like "My horse eats eggs" and "My sister is not in the park," in French, German, Italian or Spanish. But perhaps you're looking for something a little more, er, conversational? Here's where another great lockdown pastime streaming comes in. Services such as Netflix play host to hundreds of foreign language films and television shows, including cartoons, cheesy rom coms and award winning movies. For absolute beginners, watching with English subtitles should help you pick up the sounds and rhythms of the new language, an important part of learning. If you're a more advanced learner, switching the subtitles to the original language will offer new vocabulary, colloquialisms and the differences between formal and informal modes of address. (For foreign films and shows that play dubbed in English, you can usually switch back to the original language.) Searching streaming services for foreign language offerings can be frustrating. Netflix, for example, often yields only a part of its library and a glut of mediocre movies. Here's a selection of excellent television series and a few movie gems in French, German, Italian and Spanish the most popular languages on Duolingo to get you through the next weeks. All links are for American Netflix libraries. This satirical spy series is set in 1960s France, a world in which the self important agents of the French secret service are all men, the women are busty and secretarial, and colonialism still reigns. (An African delegation's demand for independence and representative democracy is greeted by uproarious French laughter.) The tone is tongue in cheek, but the dialogue is straightforward and often repeated to allow time for the thick witted, officious agents to absorb a point, and the language is relatively formal and classic. "Je ne dis rien, mais soyez discret," ("I won't say anything, but be careful,") a secretary tells the hapless new recruit, Andre Merlaux (Hugo Becker), when she discovers that he is still working an unacceptable 20 minutes after the day has ended. An addictive portrayal of a high end Parisian talent agency, this series (called "Dix Pour Cent" in French) combines aspects of "Entourage" and "The Office": It offers famous face cameos (Nathalie Baye, Isabelle Adjani and Juliette Binoche), office intrigue and hilarity. The show stands out for the competence and devotion of its four principal characters and its offbeat, endearing portrayals of its celebrity guests. The dialogue is often colloquial and rapid fire, however, and you may need to switch on the English subtitles fairly frequently. On the other hand, you'll know exactly how to say "What an idiot!" in French after an episode or two. David Gelb's series profiling some of the world's most famous culinary figures includes four episodes devoted to French chefs. The quartet (Alain Passard, Alexandre Couillon, Adeline Grattard and Michel Troisgros) talk about their favorite produce, their craft and their love of cooking in mostly simple language, with occasional poetic asides. You'll learn a lot of vegetable names, and the food footage is mouthwatering and gorgeous. This 2016 film by the Chilean director Pablo Larrain ("Jackie") mixes fact and fiction in depicting the 1948 flight of the beloved Chilean poet and prominent leftist politician, Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco). When the Communist Party, which Neruda represents in Parliament, is banned, the poet and his wife Delia go into hiding, chased by a grimly determined cop (Gael Garcia Bernal). A curious bond forms between the pair as Neruda manages to deftly, and rather fantastically, keep a step ahead. The Spanish here is, given its literary hero, often challenging. A good idea might be to watch it with English subtitles, then watch it again with Spanish captioning. There is more than enough text and subtext to justify two viewings. It's easy to see why this binge worthy series is Netflix's most watched non English language show. "Money Heist" (called "La Casa de Papel" in Spanish) is a stylish, breathlessly paced and witty show, employing all sorts of visual tricks flashbacks, unreliable narration, bizarre costumes and bold graphics to tell the story of a supercool cast of thieves who use city names as their aliases. The only danger here is that you'll be too impatient to know what happens next to rewind and check your Spanish comprehension. Netflix's Spanish language film selection is pretty good, and several are great candidates for more advanced language immersion: Alfonso Cuaron's "Y Tu Mama Tambien," from 2001, and his 2018 Oscar winning "Roma" are both available to stream, as is the 1998 Argentine crime drama, "Pizza, Beer and Smokes," a milestone debut from Bruno Stagnaro and Adrian Caetano that signaled the beginning of the New Argentine Cinema movement. Alice Rohrwacher directed this 2018 film, which earned rave reviews and a best screenplay award at that year's Cannes Film Festival. It's a visually beautiful, narratively powerful account of a rural community called Inviolata, where sharecroppers farm tobacco and lentils. The young hero, Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), is either a little simple or a little saintly, meeting bullying with unfailing contentment. The film is consistently compelling and easy to follow even as it swerves away from the countryside and into magic realism, and the language has a kind of poetic clarity. "Cosa ve ne fate delle lampadine con la luna bella che avete qua?" asks a farmworker. ("Why do you need light bulbs with the beautiful moon you have here?") This gripping series is based on the neo noir film "Suburra" (also on Netflix), and it offers a deep dive into the murky intersections between organized crime, Italian politics and religion. The language is formal among politicians and priests, slangier and more difficult to follow with the gangsters. There's also a great mix of vocabulary (and curse words), gripping story lines and gorgeous views of Rome and the seaside community of Ostia, where shady characters fight over the valuable land that can be turned into a casino. (You will definitely learn the word for "corruption.") "Welcome Mr. President!" features the Italian comedian Claudio Bisio as Giuseppe Garibaldi, a librarian who happens to share his name with the 19th century general and who is accidentally elected president of Italy. (You will also learn the word "corruption" here.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
PARIS On paper, the theater directors Krystian Lupa and Thomas Ostermeier have much in common. They are heavyweights of the European stage: Mr. Ostermeier is the director of the famous Schaubuhne theater in Berlin, while Mr. Lupa's productions have long been revered beyond his native Poland. Both are renowned for their pin sharp direction of actors as well as their willingness to tackle onstage the rise of extremist forces. Yet new productions in Paris reveal them in strikingly different moods. The directors, who are favorites here, have opted to engage with the instability of our times through classic texts, but the comparison stops there. At the Comedie Francaise, Mr. Ostermeier's "La Nuit des Rois" ("Twelfth Night") finds hope in shifting notions of gender; Mr. Lupa's "Le Proces" ("The Trial"), meanwhile, takes a despondent trip to the darkest corners of Kafka's world. "Le Proces," presented at the Odeon Theatre de l'Europe, doesn't just take the audience inside the author's claustrophobic novel. It leaves us there for five long hours, until we abandon hope. As meticulously crafted as the stage action is, that's a tall order. The director initially began adapting Kafka's book for the stage in 2016 at the Teatr Polski in the Polish city of Wroclaw, a house where he was a frequent collaborator. But after Cezary Morawski, a director known for his conservative approach, was appointed to the helm of the theater later that year, Mr. Lupa severed ties with the institution. In his program notes for the Paris production, he argues that the "nightmarish" decision to appoint Mr. Morawski was politically motivated, and points the finger at the right wing nationalist Law and Justice Party, which is currently in power. "Le Proces" had its premiere last season at the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw instead, and it's obviously an indictment of Poland's political climate. While Mr. Lupa writes in the playbill that he avoided Kafka for a long time because of his "pessimism," he now appears to embrace it. At the end of "Le Proces," the actors line up with black tape over their mouths, just as the Teatr Polski's actors did to protest Mr. Morawski's appointment, after a performance of Mr. Lupa's "Woodcutters" on the Odeon stage two years ago. Mr. Lupa is an artist of slow burning precision, and the first and third parts of "Le Proces" artfully trap us in its protagonist's nightmare, as the character, Joseph K., is prosecuted for a crime that is never explained to him, and encounters the sort of labyrinthine judicial system that gave us the adjective "Kafkaesque." Visually, the sets echo this distortion of reality: The proportions of every scene are slightly off, from the tall, decaying walls of the house where Joseph K. lodges to the shadowy bedroom of a lawyer he visits. Andrzej Klak is perfectly cast as Joseph K. awkward, lanky, looking in over his head and the other actors inhabit this world with the right amount of ominous matter of factness. But the bleakness of the scenes Mr. Lupa has adapted from "The Trial" (parts of the original plot are omitted) would have been more digestible if it weren't for the production's middle part. The nearly two hour segment sandwiched between the two intermissions was inspired by Kafka's on and off relationship with Felice Bauer, which Elias Canetti called, in a book of the same name, "Kafka's Other Trial." In this section, Mr. Klak plays Kafka, prostrate and distraught over the breakup of his first engagement to Ms. Bauer, which is said to have led him to write the first chapters of "The Trial." At this point, the nihilism of the production goes from oppressive to self indulgent. The text moves between Kafka's romantic problems and running commentary on today's world. The characters, who include Ms. Bauer and Kafka's friend Max Brod, pontificate aimlessly, when they're not undressing for no apparent reason. "It's time for this country to seek medical help," Brod announces. When he leafs through a book titled "The Year 2017," he describes its content as science fiction. Mr. Ostermeier's version of "Twelfth Night" does more for the sanity of Paris's theatergoers. The German director has long been popular in France, but this production of Shakespeare's play marks his debut at the venerable Comedie Francaise. In an interview with the news service Agence France Presse before the premiere, Mr. Ostermeier acknowledged that he was wary of the playhouse's reputation as "the last bastion of text based classical theater." In the event, this highly awaited production proves to be a meeting of minds between the director and his cast. Mr. Ostermeier takes the confusion created by the cross dressing heroine, Viola, and connects it with a modern understanding of the fluidity of sexual attraction. While the production doesn't skimp on comedy, it lends the central lovers a depth of feeling that never feels forced. As Olivia, Adeline d'Hermy owns the character's growing feelings for Viola, disguised as Cesario, with complete sincerity. Opposite her, Georgia Scalliet is blazingly good, and doesn't attempt to force any cliches of masculinity onto her androgynous character. In their scenes together, the two women have a sensual chemistry, and Mr. Ostermeier is careful not to shut down any of the possible relationships the play suggests. In the final scene, when a quartet of lovers becomes a quintet with the addition of Sebastian's devoted "friend" Antonio, they are bound together by feelings that are decidedly non monogamous. Viola may be in love with Duke Orsino (Denis Podalydes, who makes gentle comedy out of the character's lovesickness), but Olivia is never far from her mind. The farcical subplots involving Malvolio and Sir Andrew benefit from a new, modern translation by Olivier Cadiot, who has found witty puns to match Shakespeare's, without giving in to vulgarity. There is space in the production for improvisation by the actors, especially Christophe Montenez (as Sir Andrew) and Laurent Stocker (as Sir Toby), who at a recent performance threw in a few barbs about President Emmanuel Macron of France, in keeping with Mr. Ostermeier's left wing sensibility. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A stolen Etruscan vessel will be returned to Italy thanks in part to the efforts of a hunter of looted antiquities. Last month, Christos Tsirogiannis, a Greek born researcher who has spent more than a decade poring over auction and antiquities catalogs trying to identify stolen Greek and Roman artifacts, spotted an Etruscan amphora for sale at a Midtown Manhattan gallery. Mr. Tsirogiannis, of the Scottish Center for Crime and Justice Research in Glasgow, combed through an archive of 13,000 photos and documents seized in 2002 from an Italian antiquities dealer, Gianfranco Becchina, who was convicted in 2011 of trafficking in looted objects. He spotted several photos of the very same vase. As he has done several times in recent years, Mr. Tsirogiannis contacted the Manhattan district attorney's office, which seized the dual handled vessel, featuring a nude satyr and draped youth, from the Royal Athena Galleries. It dates from 470 B.C. and is valued at 250,000. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
It may sound perverse, if not masochistic, to say that I've spent weeks of quarantine watching autopsies. But these procedures have been the ultimate escape: Taking place in a distant, fictional environment, they usually involve an agent of death that isn't a volatile, out of control virus but a volatile, out of control human being. (At least a relentless person's range is limited.) I refer to the many homicide post mortems in the addictive BBC thriller "Silent Witness," which may be the only television drama whose title character is a corpse. Created by Nigel McCrery, a writer and former police officer, "Silent Witness" is also Britain's longest running crime series and one of the most enduring anywhere at 23 seasons, it surpasses even "Law Order: Special Victims Unit." Like that American production, "Silent Witness" features a central female character, has survived multiple cast changes and is not headed for the morgue itself. The BBC has announced at least two more seasons in which this show's brilliant forensic scientists will toil over the remains of unlucky people. "Silent Witness" also offers some of the fun of "Law Order": spotting future stars in their early careers. I've seen Idris Elba as an ambitious young boxer, Benedict Cumberbatch as a callow university student, Jodie Comer as the unfortunate subject of an exorcism and Daisy Ridley as a guilt ridden teenager. But the most poignant performance is that of Daniel Kaluuya, who, in the 2008 episode "Safe," plays an adolescent trying desperately to keep his little brother from being lured into working for a remorseless gang. (A warning: Don't count on happy endings.) I initially encountered "Silent Witness" in 1996, when A E began to broadcast the early seasons. Without a cable service that offered BBC America, which ran the show from 2005 7, I lost track of it. Now, however, Seasons 1 to 22 are streaming free on Amazon Prime Video; 22 and 23 are on BritBox, which will eventually have the entire series, as well as coming seasons. Here are three reasons I'm a fan. In the first season, you meet Sam Ryan (don't call her Samantha), a pathologist in Cambridge, England. When she was a teenager in Northern Ireland, her father, a Belfast police officer, stormed out of their house after arguing with her and started his car, forgetting to check it first for a saboteur's bomb. The error proved fatal. Haunted by guilt, Sam devotes her career to investigating the deaths of others. The actress Amanda Burton makes this heroine dogged, determined and, I'll admit, self righteous wholly believable. Never putting expediency over justice, Sam involves herself deeply in criminal cases, often to the consternation of the detectives who are her professional (and sometimes personal) bedfellows. By the time Sam leaves, in Season 8, she has become a London professor and head of the fictional Lyell Centre, a pathology institute. At first, I wasn't sure I liked her replacement, Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox), a South African forensic pathologist. Younger and blonder than Sam, she assumes a less senior title and shows up in a few midriff baring outfits that would make even the cadavers blanch. But although "Silent Witness" then becomes more of an ensemble show the Lyell's new chief, Leo Dalton (William Gaminara), and the pathologist Harry Cunningham (Tom Ward) get story lines, too Nikki, ably played by Fox, has ultimately won me over as the series's emotional and moral center. (And I couldn't help being entertained by her simmering flirtation with Harry.) Clarissa Mullery, who joins the Lyell in Season 16, is also unforgettable. A forensic examiner who uses a wheelchair, Clarissa is a fierce advocate for the disabled (as is Liz Carr, who portrays her). With dry wit and ample courage, she does more than work at the lab, going undercover as a patient at a suspicious care facility in the 2019 episode "One Day." I was sorry to see her exit the series at the end of Season 23. In that finale, "Silent Witness" also loses the Lyell Centre's most recent boss, the levelheaded Thomas Chamberlain (Richard Lintern). I would like to see Nikki accept his position and the series finally cast a person of color in a leading role. But whatever happens, I'll watch. Fictional suspense helps me flee the real life variety, and this show's longtime pattern of episodes that are divided into two one hour parts has given me the equivalent of a gripping feature film every night. The subjects run the gamut: human trafficking, biological weapons, drug cartels, serial crime, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the occasional perplexing accident. In "The Fall Out" (Season 6), for instance, Sam is called to a horrific highway pileup involving the discovery of a severed arm that doesn't belong to a crash victim (a development that's quintessential "Silent Witness"). But the drama's writers know that the worst crimes often involve toxic family dynamics. For shocking conclusions, try "The Prodigal" (Season 14), about what seems like an assassin's attack on an embassy, or "Family" (Season 21), in which several members of a household appear to have been massacred by a gunman. What I find most compelling, however, are the mysteries incorporating the lead characters' back stories. Before Sam leaves the series, she uncovers the truth of her father's murder. When the body of Harry's college girlfriend arrives at the Lyell, he isn't allowed to do the autopsy but still discovers how she died. And in "Fraternity" (Series 17), the forensic scientist and amateur boxer Jack Hodgson (David Caves), the debonair Harry's more testosterone driven successor, must make a wrenching moral decision involving his own wayward brother. Yes, the mortuary occupants in "Silent Witness" are well beyond help, but the series's meticulous attention to anatomy and physiology still fascinates me. (Multiple pathologists serve as medical advisers.) I've been intrigued to learn how the smallest clues can indicate whether a death is a suicide or a homicide, an accident or not. And as an erstwhile fan of "House," I was pleased when I guessed the genetic condition affecting a baby in "Trust" (Season 16), an episode in which Leo struggles to prove that the indigent mother is not an abuser. "Silent Witness," however, is famously gory. Skip it if you recoil at seeing a pathologist pluck out a stomach and empty its contents into a basin as if she were pouring afternoon tea. But its rewards for the non squeamish include a reverence for scientific rigor that I find bracing at a time when pandemic related fears fuel baseless internet rumors. The show champions research and accuracy, even as it acknowledges that experts are fallible. In the 2019 episode "Betrayal," Nikki gives impassioned courtroom testimony that resonates especially now: "The opposite of truth is not just a lie. The opposite of truth is chaos." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
THE beginning of the year is the time when many people sit down with their financial advisers or otherwise seek out advice about their finances. And with stock markets' rocky start to the year, that impulse may be greater this time around that is, if people don't run and hide. While no one knows how the year will play out, plenty of so called experts are lining up to offer their opinions. But how should you weigh what they advise? Philipp Hensler, president and co chief executive of Vontobel Asset Management, has some thoughts from his academic days. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in 2013 on how financial advisers reacted after the financial crisis. As part of his research, in 2010 he asked financial advisers around the United States what they were doing differently in their advisory practices. They all said that the financial crash had been a game changer, but 80 percent of them said they weren't doing anything differently. The advisers gave typical reasons for inaction: They didn't cause the crash; they couldn't change anything; they believed the markets would eventually heal themselves. What struck Mr. Hensler was that 20 percent of the advisers had used the crisis to rethink their roles. These advisers focused the most on their clients' specific concerns, and not on investment returns alone. This group had three characteristics in common. They were tuned in to the present investing environment. They were not leaning on what they had done in the past or what had happened years ago. And when new information came in, they tried to understand it without prejudging it. "Others made 2008 an exogenous event," Mr. Hensler said an event that they considered beyond their control. "These advisers made it an endogenous event. They said, 'It's part of the system.' " These advisers had "high contextual sensitive behavior," he said. The rest were likely to be part of what he termed the "equilibrium of collective wrongness" they had no desire to change what they had done wrong, because everyone had been wrong and they wouldn't be penalized for it. This distinction matters, Mr. Hensler wrote in his dissertation, because the smaller group of advisers persuaded their clients to focus on what they needed the money for and had better results for it. "They were humble, and it made them contextually aware," he said. "They weren't focused too much on the market but more on the client." For investors who rely on advisers, these traits could matter if markets continue to be bumpy this year, as some experts predict. But relying on advisers alone, even in good times, is misplaced, said Norton Reamer, the former chief of Putnam Investments and the founder of two asset management firms that he has since sold. In "Investment: A History," to be published next month, Mr. Reamer and his co author, Jesse Downing, write that more people are able to invest their money today than at any time in history. "Yet for most of us, we have not made the leap to the challenges and responsibilities we have been given," Mr. Reamer said in an interview. He said individuals, no matter their background, needed to take a greater role in their financial lives. Mr. Reamer, who is 80, has laid out four principles to help the layperson think through investing. Think of every investment as something you really own. Look for the fundamental value in that investment. Use only moderate financial leverage, like a mortgage, in your financial life. And pay close attention to how your money is allocated among investments. Mr. Reamer readily admits that none of these ideas are new. "The book wasn't intended to give investment advice, but I couldn't see us creating an entity of this kind without some guideposts," he said. "The best way to look at these things is to understand what's deep down inside. You can't always do that yourself. But you can work with people who do." Even this may seem like more than many people want to do. But Mr. Reamer makes an argument akin to what doctors tell patients: There is only so much that even the best physicians can do if patients do not do their part. "It's not sensible or reasonable for any person to be completely mindless about investment," he said. "Investment is a basic element of human identity. As assets have grown in the hands of the common man or woman, and not nobility, it's become an opportunity and a responsibility to have a reasonable understanding of what investment opportunity and risk is." As for advice on what to do this year, recommendations from Mr. Hensler, Mr. Reamer and others were not what anyone would describe as hot tips. They were sensible suggestions, regardless of the investing environment. Mr. Hensler said people should focus on companies with strong competitive positions and high earnings growth that they could understand. And, he said, they should avoid overconfident advisers. "If I was a client, the adviser I'd stay away from is the mechanical adviser," he said. "This is the one who has some sort of process 'I'm going to ask you three questions and plug in the numbers and take the 50 year average as the assumption.' That mechanical behavior is contextually insensitive." Karl Wellner, chairman of Papamarkou Wellner Asset Management, which manages about 3 billion, made an argument, akin to Mr. Reamer's, for looking closely at where your money is going. "Just because it says Dec. 31 doesn't change the fundamentals," Mr. Wellner said. "Companies don't change overnight because the calendar says so. We talk about quality. Quality wins at the end of the day." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
For all the havoc that zebra mussels, Asian carp, round gobies and dozens of other alien species have wrought on the Great Lakes, those waters have never known a foe like the sea lamprey. The vampirelike parasites cost many millions each year in depleted fisheries and eradication efforts. Wildlife managers have long used lampricide the lamprey version of pesticide with mixed results. Now, an innovative control program seeks to improve on that method by using pheromones to trick the bloodsuckers into voluntarily corralling themselves in designated areas, to then be trapped or poisoned. But achieving this depends on cracking the fish's olfactory language. "The broad goal is to understand how this animal makes decisions," said Michael Wagner, a fish ecologist at Michigan State University. "Then, we want to use that understanding to guide lampreys' movements by manipulating the landscape of fear and opportunity." Lampreys look like the stuff of horror films: a slithering, tubular body topped with a suction cup mouth ringed with row upon row of hooked yellow teeth. With this mouth, a sea lamprey anchors to its fish prey and uses its rasping tongue to drill into the victim's flesh. It remains there for up to a month, feeding on blood and body fluids. Even if a fish survives the attack, the gaping wound left behind often results in death. In their natural ranges, lampreys are important components of food webs. The problems begin only when they shift from native to invader. Sea lampreys slipped into Lake Ontario through the Erie Canal in the mid 19th century, and then made it past Niagara Falls around 1919 with the renovation of the Welland Canal. In the lakes, lampreys found a utopia: no predators, and bountiful prey that had no natural defenses against their voracious appetites. Biological disaster ensued. By 1940, lampreys had colonized the entire Great Lakes system. Harvests of lake trout fell from around 18 million pounds a year to less than 300,000 pounds; other species, especially whitefish, also took significant blows. Unchecked, lampreys killed an estimated 110 million pounds of fish each year. Desperate to find solutions, Canada and the United States in 1955 established the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. Its researchers tested nearly 7,000 chemicals on lamprey larvae and fish to identify one that would kill the invaders, with minimal effect on other fishes. Eventually, they settled on 3 trifluoromethyl 4 nitrophenol, or TFM, a metabolism targeting poison applied to larvae infested streams. At the same time, the commission built about 70 lamprey barriers to limit migration. Lamprey numbers in the lakes soon plummeted by 90 to 95 percent, sparing some 100 million pounds of fish each year. But that success requires continuing effort. Today, the commission spends around 20 million annually on lamprey control, mostly to apply TFM to about 100 streams, where it has a 98 percent success rate in killing larvae. The poison, however, is not perfect; there are occasional mishaps with native fish. In 2014, for example, it inadvertently killed 32 juvenile sturgeons, a protected species. Relying on one chemical also puts managers in a precarious position. "A fire could destroy the supply, the price could go up, or lampreys could develop a resistance to lampricide," said Marc Gaden, spokesman for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. Dr. Gaden, Dr. Wagner and others say that pheromones could alleviate some of the reliance on poison. "We're trying to move away from brute force techniques like pesticides and achieve the most environmentally friendly control of lampreys possible," Dr. Wagner said. Researchers have been investigating lamprey pheromones since the 1980s, though records from the late 19th century show that French fishers suspected that lampreys use odor to attract mates. In fact, pheromones seem to play a prominent role throughout the lamprey life cycle. Like salmon, lampreys spawn in rivers and streams, but instead of returning to the place of their birth, they use the scent of current larvae which burrow into the muck and remain there around four years before metamorphosing into parasites and moving into open water to determine where to deposit their own young. "It's like choosing where to raise your kids based on a neighborhood's crime rate and quality of schools," Dr. Wagner said. "The odor larvae release says, 'We're thriving here.'" Male lampreys follow their noses to larvae filled streams ahead of females. There, they construct a cradle of small stones (the name lamprey possibly derives from the Latin lampetra, or "stone licker") and then pump out a concoction of come hither chemicals to guide females to their love nests. After spawning, both parents die. Making larvae is not the only way the parasites use scent, however. Researchers also suspect that lamprey tissue contains an alarm cue, which warns others to steer clear of injured or dead lampreys. When Dr. Wagner pours just a few drops of a solution extracted from decaying lampreys into a tank of live ones, their frenzied response makes it appear as if someone just flipped on a blender. The researchers hope to use synthesized versions of these three chemical classes to hack lampreys' natural behaviors, creating a "push pull" means of control, with the alarm pheromone nudging the animals away from certain areas, the migration and sex ones reeling them in. Lamprey males could be tricked into selecting subpar streams, females could be sent down dead ends, and all could be manipulated for more cost effective poisoning and trapping. Such pheromone driven strategies have long been used for insects, but never for a vertebrate species. "It turns out that the principles of control for insects also hold for lampreys," said Jim Miller, an entomologist at Michigan State who serves on the fishery commission's board as a pest management adviser. The most significant development is the Environmental Protection Agency's December registration of 3kPZS, a male sex pheromone identified by Weiming Li, a physiologist at Michigan State and "the guru of sex attractant lamprey pheromones," according to Dr. Miller. Dr. Li and his colleagues began by searching for chemical differences in water samples taken from tanks holding immature and mature male lampreys. One compound later identified as 3kPZS stood out. They purified the mystery compound and found that, when it was applied to lamprey noses, electrodes registered activity in their sensory tissues. They found that natural and synthesized versions of the compound elicited the same olfactory responses in captive lampreys. Finally, they confirmed that females responded to the synthesized pheromone in field experiments. "We could actually see the animal move upstream as the odor was being pumped into the water, then drifting downstream when we stopped," Dr. Li said. "If you were standing there watching that animal, you would have been so excited to see science work so well." The researchers hope this success will pave the way for other synthetic lamprey pheromones, eventually letting them concoct several biological perfumes convincing enough to fool wild lampreys. "This is the beginning of what could potentially be a new era in invasive species control," Dr. Gaden said. The same technology may serve as a conservation tool in other parts of the world including Western Europe and the West Coast of the United States where native lampreys are in precipitous decline because of dams and habitat degradation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
An audience expected to be around 100 million. Big companies paying as much as 5.6 million for 30 seconds of advertising time. In addition to deciding the National Football League champion, the Super Bowl is the biggest event of the year for TV commercials. The commercials on Sunday were mostly light and bright. Nostalgia was a big theme, with companies marketing their products with ads that showed love for the '80s and '90s. Cheetos had the rapper MC Hammer and his zoot suit inspired pants in an ad about the orange dust the snack leaves in its wake. Squarespace sent Winona Ryder, the Gen X star who has made a comeback thanks to Netflix's "Stranger Things," to Winona, Minn., where she was born. "The ads that people remember most over time are the simplest ads with human stories, and that was missing for the most part," said the longtime ad executive Donny Deutsch. Much of the game day advertising, he said, "was a manic, overproduced celebrity cornucopia, to the point that some of these ads didn't mean anything and you didn't really remember who was with who." In other Super Bowl ads, Verizon, Bud Light and other companies emphasized and celebrated what Americans have in common beneath their differences. Don't we all complain about the same things? Don't we all defy cultural stereotypes? And don't we all love hummus? Those were some of the messages that figured in the sunny portrait of a nation that emerged from 80 plus commercials during the Super Bowl LIV broadcast. "We're at a moment in the country where it's important that we all contribute to things that unite as opposed to things that separate," said Diego Scotti, the chief marketing officer of Verizon. Sabra cast two former contestants from "RuPaul's Drag Race," Kim Chi and Miz Cracker, making it possibly the first Super Bowl commercial to feature drag queens. One Million Moms, a conservative activist group that recently pushed the Hallmark Channel to pull ads featuring brides kissing each other, circulated a petition demanding that the Sabra spot be removed, to no avail. The first of two 30 second ads from President Trump's campaign, which together cost more than 11 million, aired in the first commercial break after kickoff. The spot focused on Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who was serving a life sentence in federal prison on charges related to cocaine distribution and money laundering when her case was brought to Mr. Trump's attention by Kim Kardashian West, the reality television star. Mr. Trump commuted Ms. Johnson's sentence in 2018. It was the first Super Bowl to feature national ads from two presidential candidates, and the political tone of the ads stood out in a broadcast filled with companies trying to avoid sensitive topics the day before the Democratic caucuses in Iowa. Before the second half kickoff, the billionaire presidential candidate Michael R. Bloomberg presented an ad about gun control that featured Calandrian Simpson Kemp, whose football loving son died in a shooting in 2013. Mr. Bloomberg has swarmed the Democratic field with over 275 million in advertising, according to the ad tracking firm Advertising Analytics. This was not his first Super Bowl commercial touching on gun laws he did the same in a 2012 ad with Thomas M. Menino, then the mayor of Boston. Another exception to the escapist fare was a spot on police shootings. Surprisingly, it came from an organization that has shied away from the issue: the National Football League. The spot showed the retired 49ers wide receiver Anquan Boldin reflecting on the 2015 death of his cousin, who was shot by a police officer, and it included a dramatic re enactment of the killing. The commercial promoted the N.F.L.'s Inspire Change initiative, a social outreach program that the league has put together with Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded by Jay Z. Colin Kaepernick Mr. Boldin's onetime 49ers teammate set off an uproar a year after the killing by kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. The N.F.L. struggled with its response for years. After days of hype, Planters ran a commercial showing the funeral of its monocled mascot, Mr. Peanut. Other brand avatars stood at the grave site, including the Kool Aid Man and Mr. Clean. After the Kool Aid Man shed a tear, something sprouted in the dirt. It was a baby version of Mr. Peanut, squeaking like a dolphin and saying, "Just kidding, I'm back." The reaction on social media was not kind. The great majority of Super Bowl LIV spots were jaunty and optimistic, lightening the mood with what Matt Ian, the chief creative officer of the McGarryBowen agency in New York, called "some wonderful dumbness." TurboTax had a commercial involving people of many races, genders, ages and walks of life dancing to a bounce inflected earworm of a jingle, "All People Are Tax People." The mood continued the trend toward tonally light commercials that came to the fore in 2018. In 2017, the first year of President Trump's administration, Budweiser and Coca Cola, among other brands, touched on immigration, equal rights and fair pay. Martin Scorsese, who is nominated for an Oscar this year for "The Irishman," was also involved in a Super Bowl commercial, but not behind the camera. Instead, he appeared in an ad from Coca Cola, waiting anxiously at a party for Jonah Hill, whom he had directed in "The Wolf of Wall Street," to muster enough energy to join him. Mr. Hill, who was cast first, suggested Mr. Scorsese when the company asked him to recommend someone to play the out of place friend. While many ads looked to the past for inspiration, Walmart and others were fixated on the cosmos. Olay alluded to the first all female spacewalk last year in an ad featuring Lilly Singh and Busy Philipps with the retired astronaut Nicole Stott. A spot from the home carbonation company SodaStream, with Bill Nye, showed astronauts finding water on Mars. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In what they hope will be a spark of light in years of darkness, a group of scientists circulated a beam of electrons around a ring in Allan, Jordan, in January. The group, called Sesame, is made up of physicists from several countries that rarely talk to one another Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan and also from the Palestinian Authority, but whose scientists are determined to collaborate. Chosen for its resonance in the region's culture, the name Sesame now works as an acronym for Synchrotron light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East. The Sesame institute is set to open its doors on May 16, in a ceremony to be attended by King Abdullah II of Jordan. The heart of the new institute will be a kind of particle accelerator known as a synchrotron, speeding electrons around. The goal is not to collide the electrons or anything else in search of new forces or particles of nature, as at CERN's Large Hadron Collider where the famous, or infamous, Higgs boson was found five years ago. Rather, the goal is to make them dance and emit powerful beams of radiation so called synchrotron light that can be used to study the properties of materials ranging from exotic semiconductors to viruses. There are about 60 such light sources in the world, which have been become increasingly valuable as tools in medicine and engineering. In April, for example, scientists using X rays from a light source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California discovered new details about the structure of proteins that regulate blood pressure, raising the possibility of better treatments for hypertension. Sesame, in short, could bring world class modern physics to a region of the world lacking much in the way of facilities or research money, its proponents say. "Somebody with a bright idea could get a Nobel with this," said Christopher Llewellyn Smith, an Oxford University physics professor and president of the Sesame Council, the governing body of the project. But perhaps that might be the least of it, according to Eliezer Rabinovici, a theoretical physicist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who has been pursuing a dream of Arab Israeli cooperation, walking a political and technical tightrope past wars, treaties, negotiations, ultimatums, assassinations and other crises with his friends and collaborators for more than 20 years. This is the story of an impossible dream, a journey to what Dr. Rabinovici calls a parallel universe of peace and cooperation in the Middle East. "We call it the light at the end of the tunnel," he said recently. The only difference today, Dr. Llewellyn Smith noted, is that in Europe hostilities had already ended, while in the Middle East they are still very much alive. Dr. Rabinovici traced the origins of Sesame to the 1993 Oslo Accords, when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands in front of President Bill Clinton. At the time he was working at CERN. A short while later, he recalled, an Italian colleague, Sergio Fubini, walked into his office and told him it was time to put his "naive idealism" to the test. Science is a natural way to build bridges between cultures and nations, Dr. Rabinovici said, because of its common language. He and Dr. Fubini went on to create a self appointed Middle Eastern Science Committee, which in turn led to a meeting in November 1995 in a big red tent at Dahab, Egypt, in the Sinai Desert near the Red Sea, attended by scientists from around the Middle East and beyond. They escaped uninjured from a 6.9 magnitude earthquake. "We saw Mount Sinai shake," Dr. Rabinovici said. In another telling moment, the Egyptian minister of scientific research Venice Gouda, asked everyone to stand for a moment of silence in honor of Mr. Rabin, who had been assassinated just two weeks before. While the group was hesitant to accept such a relic because it might not attract first class research, "it was clear that one has to take it because you cannot build a coalition of Arabs and Israelis around something which is air," Dr. Rabinovici said. Bessy was dismantled and shipped in boxes to the Jordanian desert, which had been chosen as the site for what was now called Sesame. "Jordan was the site. It was where everybody could come," he said. There, plans evolved. Bessy would become the booster, or first stage, of a newer, more powerful synchrotron propelling electrons to energies of 2.5 billion electron volts. (By comparison, the protons in the Large Hadron Collider are bumped to energies of about seven trillion electron volts.) The idea behind synchrotron light sources is to turn what was once a liability and wasted energy into a scientific tool. As charged particles, in this case electrons, are accelerated around an electromagnetic racetrack in machines like the Large Hadron Collider, they radiate energy, so called synchrotron radiation. The output of the machine can be tuned by inserting arrays of magnets called wigglers and undulators to make the electrons dance and produce very powerful pencil beams of any type of light. How these beams are reflected or absorbed by the target materials can reveal the arrangements and shapes of molecules the way the double helix of DNA was revealed by X ray photographs taken by Rosalind Franklin back in the 1950s. As built, Sesame has room for seven different such beams, providing energy from X rays to infrared, or heat radiation, to experiments. When it opens for business, however, there will be only two. The first is an X ray beam that will be used, among other things, to study pollution in the Jordan Valley, by ascertaining the amounts of metals like chromium and zinc in soil samples. Another beam will supply infrared waves for an infrared microscope that will employ the same principles as the night vision goggles worn by soldiers or snipers to study, say, cancer cells and other biological tissues. A third beam planned for the end of the year will supply X rays for crystallography, the study of the structures of proteins and viruses. The group has already received 55 proposals for the use of those beams more than they can accept, Dr. Llewellyn Smith said. To the scientists, money has been as big a problem as politics. Dr. Rabinovici said, "It's a miracle that we have all these people together that's nice. But ultimately this is going to be decided by the quality of the science. And this is where we need help." "We are working on a shoestring budget," he added. "Good science costs money." In all, about 90 million has gone into getting the project going so far, according to Dr. Llewellyn Smith. That includes 5 million apiece pledged by Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Iran and another grant of 5 million euros from the European Union, which enabled CERN to help build the magnets and supervise construction of the Sesame machine. "I saw that crew of Europeans working on it, and they were excited. You could see it in their eyes; their eyes were shining," Dr. Rabinovici said. The latest piece of largess was a 7 million grant from Jordan for a solar power plant, which will make Sesame the first accelerator in the world powered by renewable energy. One likely contributor to the cause is missing the United States much to the chagrin of many scientists and bureaucrats. Franklin Orr, under secretary for science and energy in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration, and now a professor at Stanford, said the administration had tried to find funding. "It didn't jell, we didn't have a source of money," he said. The budget issues are not likely to get easier, he added. "Getting an appropriation through Congress would be tricky at best." Originally formed through Unesco, the nine Sesame members each hold two seats, typically a scientist and a diplomat, on its council, which is led by Dr. Llewellyn Smith. The council appoints a director, presently Khaled Toukan, who is also head of the Jordan Atomic Energy Commission. The project is not immune to the shadows of history. In 2010 a wave of attacks on Iranian scientists allegedly linked to Iran's nuclear weapons program generated headlines around the world. Two who were assassinated had connections to Sesame: Masoud Alimohammadi, a professor at Tehran University and delegate to the Sesame Council, and Majid Shahriari, a nuclear engineer with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. Iran subsequently arrested and executed a man named Majid Jamali Fashi who confessed that he had been trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to kill Dr. Alimohammadi. Neither Dr. Rabinovici, who said he had met Dr. Alimohammadi once, nor Dr. Llewellyn Smith said they could see any connection between Sesame and the killings. The Sesame Council condemned the murders, insisting that its project had no military connections. At present Sesame consists of about 50 scientists and technicians working in a building surrounded by a secure cyclone fence. Italy is building a hostel that will provide a place for visitors to stay and include that key ingredient of scientific life, a cafeteria. Accidental encounters and gossip glommed over lunch or coffee loom large in the mythology of scientific discovery. In that regard, behind its secure fence, Sesame will be no different than any lab in the world, Dr. Llewellyn Smith said. "Working 20 hours a day and meeting in the cafeteria, that's where a lot of science and discussion happens." As a theoretical string theorist Dr. Rabinovici won't be found in the cafeteria or manning a beam line this summer; indeed he professed ignorance of the details of how they work. So why, he was asked over tea during a visit to The New York Times recently, has he been doing this? The answer, of course, comes from string theory, where, he explained, it often (and controversially) comes out that there are many possible universes. "I must say that personally, I always wanted to visit some of these other universes, just to see how things are there." So with the Sesame project, he went on, "I actually got to live in a universe where Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, Pakistanies work together for the same cause for their own people, for humanity. And that definitely feels good." It is too grandiose, he said, to call Sesame a beacon of hope, "but we have shown a way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Researchers have announced an advance that could double the capacity of fiber optic circuits, potentially opening the way for networks to carry more data over long distances while significantly reducing their cost. Writing in the journal Science on Thursday, electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego proposed a way to extend the range that beams of laser light in fiber optic glass wires can travel and, in theory, achieve that dramatic improvement. One way to understand the challenge of sending data through fiber optic circuits is to imagine a person shouting to someone else down a long corridor. As the listener moves farther away, the words become fainter and more difficult to discern as they echo off the walls. A similar challenge confronts the designers of networks that carry data. Beams of laser light packed densely in fiber optic glass wires need to be both amplified and recreated at regular intervals to send them thousands of miles. The process of converting the optical ones from light to electricity and then back again is a significant part of the cost of these networks. The process also limits how much data they can carry. In its report, the group described a way to "predistort" the data that is transmitted via laser beams so that it can be deciphered easily over great distances. This is done by creating, in effect, guardrails for the light beams with a device known as a frequency comb using very precise and evenly spaced signals to encode the information before it is transmitted. That has the effect of embedding a digital watermark in the original data, making it possible to transmit data accurately over much longer distances and dispense with the need to perform optical to electronic conversions at relatively short intervals. The researchers said they had set a transmission record for a fiber optic message, sending it more than 7,400 miles in a laboratory experiment without having to regenerate the signal. That experiment is not discussed in the just published paper. The research, which has been supported in part by Google and Sumitomo Electric Industries, a maker of fiber optic cables, is a step closer to the vision of an "all optical network," according to Nikola Alic, one of the authors of the paper and a research scientist in the Photonics Laboratory of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technologies at the University of California, San Diego. Such a network would be significantly less expensive and could carry more data. So far, the researchers have been able to increase the power of the lasers twentyfold to achieve transmissions over far greater distances, he said. Until now, increasing the power of the laser signal in current fiber optic networks has been analogous to moving in quicksand the more you increase the power, the greater the challenge of interference and distortion. "The more you struggle, the worse off you are," Mr. Alic said. Bart Stuck, a venture capitalist at Signal Lake Management and a former Bell Laboratories scientist who conducted research in signal processing, said of the new paper, "This is great engineering." Similar ideas were used in an earlier era of communications, he noted. Although the concept was used in the world of analog voice communications, the U.C. San Diego researchers have pushed the ideas into the optical communications world. "Their contribution is doing this at gigabits per second," Mr. Stuck said. Other optical scientists were more skeptical about the prospects for the new approach. "This is very interesting research, but there will be challenges applying this approach in the real world," said Alan Huang, a former researcher at Bell Labs who has worked extensively with the "Kerr Effect," a physical phenomenon that distorts optical signals, which the San Diego researchers are trying to overcome. "Their results will be more or less effective depending on the type of data transmitted." Optical networks emerged during the 1980s as a faster and higher capacity alternative to copper wire based communications. Their ability to carry vast amounts of data has been further increased by encoding multiple streams of data in different frequencies or "colors" in the same beam of light. Because the signal needs to be both amplified and regenerated at regular intervals over long distances, power for the computers that make the conversion between light and electrical data is required. Each conversion step also introduces a brief delay, or "latency." The new research suggests a path that effectively eliminates the regeneration over long distances. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Warren Hinckle, the flamboyant editor who made Ramparts magazine a powerful national voice for the radical left in the 1960s and later, by championing the work of Hunter S. Thompson, helped introduce the no holds barred reporting style known as gonzo journalism, died on Thursday in San Francisco. He was 77. The cause was complications of pneumonia, his daughter Pia Hinckle said. Ramparts was a small circulation quarterly for liberal Roman Catholics when Mr. Hinckle began writing for and promoting it in the early 1960s. A born provocateur with a keen sense of public relations, he took over as the executive editor in 1964 and immediately set about transforming Ramparts from a sleepy intellectual journal to a slickly produced, crusading political magazine that galvanized the American left. With cover art and eye catching headlines reminiscent of mainstream magazines like Esquire, Ramparts aimed to deliver "a bomb in every issue," as Time magazine once put it. It looked at Cardinal Francis Spellman's involvement in promoting American involvement in Vietnam and the Central Intelligence Agency's financing of a wide variety of cultural organizations. It published Che Guevara's diaries, with a long introduction by Fidel Castro; Eldridge Cleaver's letters from prison; and some of the wilder conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination. The magazine's photo essay in January 1967 showing the injuries inflicted on Vietnamese children by American bombs helped persuade the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to take a public stand against the war. The covers became countercultural classics: an illustration depicting Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader of North Vietnam, as Washington crossing the Delaware; a photograph of four hands (belonging to the magazine's top editors) holding up draft cards that had been set on fire. By 1967, the magazine, which began with about 2,500 readers, had a circulation of nearly 250,000 and an ability to wrest coverage, however grudging, from mass circulation magazines and newspapers. "What journalism is about is to attack everybody," Mr. Hinckle told The Washington Post in 1981. "First you decide what's wrong, then you go out to find the facts to support that view, and then you generate enough controversy to attract attention." Warren James Hinckle III was born on Oct. 12, 1938, in San Francisco, where his father, Warren Hinckle Jr., was a shipyard worker and his mother, the former Angela DeVere, worked in the accounts department of the Southern Pacific Railroad. At 10, he lost an eye in a car accident, and for the rest of his life he wore a large eye patch, which became a prominent feature of his buccaneering image. He attended Roman Catholic schools and enrolled in the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1961. As editor of the college newspaper, The San Francisco Foghorn, he showed early signs of the flair that would insert Ramparts into the national conversation. On a slow day, he and a friend generated news by burning down a wooden guard house at the entrance to the campus, an incident he described in his 1974 memoir, "If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade." After graduating from college, he started a public relations company and ran, unsuccessfully, for the county board of supervisors before joining The San Francisco Chronicle as a city reporter. In 1962, he married Denise Libarle. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Pia, he is survived by his wife, the writer Susan Cheever, from whom he was separated; his companion, Linda Corso; another daughter, Hilary Hinckle; a son, Warren Hinckle IV; five grandchildren; a brother, Robert; and a sister, Marianne Hinckle. His relationship with Ramparts began inauspiciously, when Edward M. Keating, who founded the magazine in 1962, hired him to develop a promotional plan. Mr. Hinckle proposed a splashy party at a Manhattan hotel for leading Catholic laymen and journalists, with models and film stars thrown in for glamour. Mr. Keating, appalled, fired him. The December 1967 cover of Ramparts, showing the hands of four of the magazine's editors with burning draft cards. Undeterred, he contributed an article on J. D. Salinger to the magazine's first issue and, after whipping up press attention for an article on the killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June 1964, was named executive editor. It was a turning point. Before the year was out, he had transformed the publication from a quarterly to a monthly and hired Robert Scheer, a seasoned foreign correspondent, who wrote some of the magazine's most hard hitting antiwar articles and secured the rights to publish the Guevara diaries. In short order, Ramparts scored some stunning coups. A cover story exposed Michigan State University's Vietnam Project in the 1950s as a C.I.A. front to train Saigon police and stockpile ammunition. It persuaded Donald W. Duncan, a former special forces sergeant in Vietnam, to describe how he was trained to torture prisoners. (Mr. Duncan died in 2009, but his death became widely known only in May.) Mr. Hinckle extracted maximum publicity at every turn. When the C.I.A. learned that Ramparts was about to reveal the agency's secret funding of a long list of organizations, including the National Student Association, the A.F.L. C.I.O., and Encounter and Partisan Review magazines, it tried to minimize the impact by holding a news conference to admit the facts. Mr. Hinckle counterpunched. "I was damned if I was going to let the C.I.A. scoop me," he wrote in his memoir. "I bought full page advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post to scoop myself, which seemed the preferable alternative." The magazine received a George Polk Award that year for its coverage. Ramparts was always in the news, always in chaos, always in debt. The hard drinking Mr. Hinckle often worked from Cookie Picetti's, a bar in San Francisco's North Beach that was frequented by the police. When Mr. Cleaver told him that colleagues at Ramparts objected, he challenged him to name a decent left wing bar. He spent lavishly, traveling first class and staying in top hotels. He particularly enjoyed treating investors to sumptuous meals at their expense. In Feed/Back magazine in 1975, Adam Hochschild, a staff writer and later a founder of Mother Jones, wrote: "All action at the magazine swirled around him: a pet monkey named Henry Luce would sit on his shoulder while he paced his office, drink in hand, shouting instructions into a speakerphone across the room to someone in New York about a vast promotional mailing; on his couch would be sitting, slightly dazed, a French television crew or Malcolm X's widow (who arrived one day surrounded by a dozen bodyguards with loaded shotguns), or the private detective to whom Hinckle had given the title Criminology Editor." With Sidney Zion, a former legal affairs reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Hinckle founded Scanlan's Monthly, named for a pig farmer and reprobate whom the two men had heard being toasted, sardonically, in a pub in Ireland. The magazine lasted only eight issues, but Mr. Hinckle used his platform to his advantage. He ran a scathing profile of the French skier Jean Claude Killy that Hunter Thompson had written for Playboy, which rejected it. He then dispatched Mr. Thompson to cover the Kentucky Derby, in company with the English illustrator Ralph Steadman. The resulting article, "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," put Mr. Thompson on the road to gonzo glory. Mr. Hinckle briefly edited City of San Francisco, a magazine owned by Francis Ford Coppola. "Insiders joke that Hinckle is the only man who can spend money faster than Coppola can make it," Newsweek wrote. After that magazine ceased publication in 1976, Mr. Hinckle founded another magazine, Frisco, which quickly died. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a columnist for The Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner and The San Francisco Independent, he validated his reputation as a free swinging street brawler. He led a campaign to remove "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" as the city's official song, calling Tony Bennett "an over the hill Italian croaker," and attacked Dianne Feinstein, when she was mayor, with such gusto that she once tried to empty a drink over his head. "He's a man who invents things, who often gets his facts wrong, who gets carried away by the emotion," Maitland Zane, a reporter for The Chronicle, told SF Weekly in 1996. "He lets his prejudices dictate his writing. He's not even a good speller." In 1993, Mr. Hinckle revived The Argonaut, a 19th century magazine once edited by Ambrose Bierce, as a thick journal devoted, he told The Times in 1994, to "muckraking, left politics and the willingness to promote new writing and celebrate popular culture." In 1969, Mr. Hinckle described Ramparts under his editorship as "totally and absolutely and joyfully biased." He added: "We went in to hang the Saigon government, to kill the war in Vietnam. That's what political journalism is about." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
WASHINGTON Judy Shelton, an unorthodox economist who was an adviser to President Trump's 2016 campaign, could move one step closer to a seat on the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors this week. While her fate is far from guaranteed, the Senate Banking Committee is expected to approve Ms. Shelton's nomination on Tuesday, putting her one simple majority vote in the full Senate away from confirmation at a moment when the central bank is employing vast powers that she has a track record of questioning. Opponents of Ms. Shelton's nomination say confirming her would place the Fed at risk of politicization while it tried to rescue the pandemic hit economy. Democrats on the committee have called for a second confirmation hearing in light of the crisis so that they can get her views on the current response. While her nomination seemed shaky in the wake of her mid February Banking Committee hearing, Republican opposition has slowly crumbled. Senators Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama and John Kennedy of Louisiana were initially skeptical. Mr. Toomey has since said she allayed his concerns, and Mr. Shelby has said he will go along with his Republican colleagues. While Mr. Kennedy has not publicly made up his mind, many analysts saw the scheduling of the vote as a sign of his likely support. Ms. Shelton's bid can advance to the full Senate without any support from the 12 Democrats on the committee so long as all 13 Republicans back her. Her nomination will come to a vote alongside Christopher Waller's. Mr. Waller, the research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, was also nominated by Mr. Trump to the seven seat Fed board. Mr. Waller, a more traditional nominee, is expected to clear the committee easily. Ms. Shelton has become the focus of criticism in part because she flip flopped on key policy positions after Mr. Trump was elected, moving quickly from supporting higher interest rates to favoring lower ones, in line with the president's view. She has also questioned the basis of central bank independence. While nominees with close political ties have landed on the Fed board before, Ms. Shelton faces enhanced scrutiny given widespread speculation that Mr. Trump may try to promote her to Fed chair when Jerome H. Powell's term expires in early 2022. Ms. Shelton also has a long record of supporting a return to the gold standard, which mainstream economists see as a nonstarter because it would be so economically harmful. She recently backed partly away from that position. Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Fed governor and top Treasury official, said in an email: "The economic moment right now is too precarious to be rolling the dice on a person who has not wrestled with the current challenges of managing an economy that has been shocked by a pandemic, and whose views have not been fully articulated or reconciled with prior views." Ms. Shelton has at times questioned the Fed's basic functions. In an opinion piece written for The Wall Street Journal in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis, she criticized the practice of allowing interest rates "to be fixed by a central committee in accordance with government objectives." "We might as well resurrect Gosplan, the old Soviet State Planning Committee, and ask them to draw up the next five year plan," she continued. Months later, in early 2009, she led a column with the sentence: "Let's go back to the gold standard." One question that analysts are pondering is what version of Ms. Shelton will show up for work at the Fed if she gets the job: A gold standard proponent, or not? A supporter of low rates, as she has been during Mr. Trump's administration, or an inflation hawk? "It leaves open the question of what exactly she'd be like on the Fed," said Sarah Binder, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who has written a book on the politics of the central bank. She pointed out that Ms. Shelton's out of the mainstream ideas were likely to find little purchase among her colleagues, and that individual governors couldn't make much of an impact on their own. "You can really imagine her tilting at windmills," Ms. Binder said. The question of whether Ms. Shelton would become Fed chair in waiting seems to be key. Mr. Trump spent 2018 and 2019 publicly criticizing Mr. Powell, though those critiques have tapered off during the current crisis. Should Mr. Trump win re election, Ms. Shelton could be a potential replacement for Mr. Powell, since governors are often promoted to the leading position. "She could do real damage all on her own as chair," said David Wilcox, a former research director at the Fed. He also said he worried that she might get in the way of the coronavirus crisis response. "In the moment of crisis, there simply isn't time to revisit ideas that have been consigned to the dustbin of history," Mr. Wilcox said. Ms. Shelton would fill a seat that formerly belonged to Janet L. Yellen; the unexpired term would be up for renewal in 2024. Mr. Waller would fill a seat formerly held by Ms. Bloom Raskin, with a term expiring in 2030. While neither nominee would exert much influence as an independent governor, their confirmations would give Mr. Trump his handpicked choices for six of the board's seven spots. Lael Brainard was appointed governor by President Barack Obama, and although Mr. Powell was named to the board by Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump elevated him to the chair. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Mosquito nets infused with two pesticides work much better against malaria than those with only one, reducing prevalence in children by 44 percent, according to a recent study. As a result of the report, published in The Lancet last month, the World Health Organization has recommended that the two chemical nets be used in areas where mosquitoes have developed resistance to the first line insecticide. The new nets contain pyrethroids, a class of chemicals used in nets for over a decade, along with the newer compound, piperonyl butoxide, which blocks mosquitoes' ability to break down pyrethroids. (It is sometimes called a "pesticide synergist.") The Vestergaard company, which introduced pyrethroid infused nets in 2004, later developed a two chemical version that the W.H.O. began evaluating in 2014. Now many companies have similar nets awaiting W.H.O. approval. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Eight years after the glittering mall at the Time Warner Center opened, it is clear that, while it may be a stretch to say its long term place in Manhattan is assured, the gamble of opening a five level indoor shopping center in street centered New York is paying off. The recent loss of an anchor tenant, the 26,000 square foot Borders bookstore, is offset by sales of 1,600 per square foot, up from 1,000 per square foot soon after the mall opened, according to Related Companies, the developer of the shopping center and a co owner with AREA Property Partners. And Related has already filled some of the Borders space. The sprawling underground Whole Foods and the restaurants of celebrity chefs like Thomas Keller, Jean Georges Vongerichten and Masa Takayama on the top level were aligned to draw shoppers up and down throughout the mall, known as the Shops at Columbus Circle. But retail specialists wondered whether the center would draw residents or tourists accustomed to the high streets of Fifth and Madison Avenues and the increasingly fashionable aura of the meatpacking district. Sales per square foot on those avenues are much higher, but so are rents, said Richard B. Hodos of CBRE, who described the Time Warner mall as "one of the most productive shopping centers in the U.S." Last year some 16 million visitors passed through the center, an average of 40,000 a day. Slightly more than half of the shoppers classify themselves as local residents, and an additional 24 percent work in or near the property. The remaining shoppers are tourists, most of them from abroad. While Related would like to see even more tourists, the percentage of residents who shop there has run counter to expectations. Josh Podell, a former executive at Jones New York who runs Podell Real Estate Advisors, a consultancy, said he had been "pleasantly surprised" by the amount of activity on the upper levels. "Historically, this format doesn't work" in New York, he said. Michael Lomonaco, the chef owner of Porter House New York, a 250 seat American steakhouse that opened on the top level in 2006 after the closing of Mr. Vongerichten's V, a French steakhouse, said he was so taken with the strength of walk in business that he will open a 50 seat bar in the center of the fourth floor atrium in early fall. "The old adage that New Yorkers won't go upstairs to shop has been proven wrong by Time Warner Center," said Mr. Lomonaco, who ran Windows on the World in the World Trade Center for four years before the building's destruction and spent nine years at "21" Club. "A good portion of our guests are walk in business." Related has employed a full court press marketing effort with a deliberate approach to leasing. The marketing group choreographs about 200 events each year at the center's shops and restaurants, and arranges for art and photography exhibits that also lure visitors. But the core of the business attracting a steady and growing stream of free spending shoppers depends on carefully curating the retail environment. Paco Underhill, the chief executive of Envirosell, a retail consultancy, and the author of "The Call of the Mall" and other popular books on retailing, said "there is a big difference between operating a mall and an 'all.' " Unlike the "all" approach, in which developers are less constrained to be selective of their tenants, Mr. Underhill explained, "a mall requires lots of leasing decisions." Trial and error play an inevitable role. Along with the Whole Foods store, an immediate hit, the center's earliest efforts focused on high end retailers like the shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, Tourneau watches and the accessories store J. W. Cooper. While these have proved successful, Related found that bringing in more mainstream, though still relatively upscale, brands like J. Crew, Sephora and Esprit also bolstered traffic. Other name brand luxury and mainstream retailers included Hugo Boss, Cole Haan and Eileen Fisher as well as Coach and Williams Sonoma. Of course, there have been misses. There was the sprawling Borders; the 10,000 square foot Samsung Experience, a showroom for electronics enthusiasts that offered products for demonstration but not for sale; and the European sister brands United Colors of Benetton and Sisley. These four retailers, and a few more, have departed. Related says it has 28,000 square feet of space in play and 20,000 feet of "imminent" moves. It says an additional 20,000 feet will become available over two years. The Borders bankruptcy, which left Related with a lease still five years to run, could have meant a long running retail black hole while Related and other creditors slugged it out in bankruptcy court. "When we saw the signals that Borders was going to go out of business, we were able to get control of the space before we were thrown into the whim of the bankruptcy proceedings where landlords lose control," said R. Webber Hudson, executive vice president of Related Urban, the company's mixed use development arm. "When it got into court we already had our deal." Related declined to be more specific. The openings are also allowing Related to recalibrate its retailer roster, said Kenneth A. Himmel, the chief executive officer of Related Urban. The developer has already signed C. Wonder, a clothing and furnishings store from J. Christopher Burch, the former husband of the designer Tory Burch, into one third of the Borders space. Mr. Himmel, who founded Related Urban in 1997 with Stephen M. Ross, the chairman and chief executive of Related, said he expects to create some multilevel stores by combining the rest of the Borders store with the vacant Samsung space above it. Related declined to comment on a report that the Swedish fast fashion retailer H M had agreed to lease about half of the Borders space. The vacancies include the 4,500 square foot space that Sephora is leaving to move into the 8,700 square foot store just vacated by Esprit on Monday, after that company closed its retail outlets nationwide. In early April, L. K. Bennett, a women's boutique based in London, will open its first New York store in a 2,100 square foot space. J. Crew recently moved its men's line into a separate store in the center to make room for a 3,300 square foot Crew Cuts store offering children's wear as part of the original store on the third floor. Success will bring its own challenges, said Mr. Podell, the consultant. For example, available space can run low. "We see it all the time," he said. "If a tenant wants to expand, they will move." However, he added, the choices within striking distance of Time Warner Center are limited. "The only other area is Madison and Fifth," he said. "They are so far way, it's not really competition." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In his new Netflix special, "Latin History for Morons," John Leguizamo jumps from genocide to cultural apartheid, dances merengue and dresses like Frida Kahlo. WE'RE STILL TALKING ABOUT THE ELECTIONS Early indicators show that voting in the midterms was up among women, Latinos and young people. ("Donde votar" was Google's top search term on Election Day morning.) And a record breaking number of women, people of color and young people were elected. But midterm madness isn't over; as of this morning, Florida and Georgia are still counting votes and many municipalities are wrestling with the fact that election centers were overcrowded or had voting machines that didn't work. (At my polling location in Queens, I saw one of the volunteers hurriedly help a woman fill out a provisional ballot, then fold it and toss it onto an increasingly unwieldy pile.) The Democrats won back a majority in the House and Republicans maintained control of the Senate, gaining a few more seats. If you're wondering, "What does it all mean?" we've got you. In news unrelated to midterms: John Leguizamo's "Latin History for Morons" is now streaming on Netflix following a successful run in 2017 in New York at the Public Theater and on Broadway. I saw the play in April of last year, right before my first day at The Times, and the version on Netflix is even sharper and more incisive than I remember, showcasing a type of harsh, honest humor that's distinctly Latinx. In the show, Leguizamo takes on the role of a professor attempting to find a Latinx hero for his son to research for a middle school project. "That's how it happened in real life," he said in a phone call this week . "My son needed a historical hero for a school project, and there weren't any in his textbook. So I started reading, doing research." The history lesson that ensues is frenetic and animated, with Leguizamo jumping from Christopher Columbus's decimation of the Taino people in the Caribbean to the present "age of Pitbull," all while doing impressions, cursing in Spanish and dancing merengue. Growing up in Queens, Leguizamo, who is half Colombian and half Puerto Rican, only learned about Latinx history "through osmosis," he said. "Hanging out, I saw how brilliant and how funny and how sharp and how savvy our people were, but I wasn't learning it in school. I was in public school, and it wasn't in the textbooks." So as part of the show's rollout, Leguizamo released a syllabus on Twitter, recommending more than 60 books on Latinx history and social justice, including Eduardo Galeano's "Open Veins of Latin America," Charles Mann's "1491" and Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" his favorites. "They state our powers and our contributions," Leguizamo said of these books. "How much was destroyed and how much has been exploited and how with the incredible amount of resources and power we have, why are we powerless?" He also talked scathingly about underrepresentation of Latinx people in the media. "We're less than 3 percent of the faces in front of the camera," Leguizamo said. "We're 35 percent of the population of New York City. White people are 35 percent of the population of New York City. We're equal. And yet The New York Times rarely, if ever, has positive, Latin aspirational stories in any section. And that, I find, a cultural apartheid." (Latinos make up 29 percent of New York City's population, while non Hispanic whites make up 32 percent.) What's next? Maybe he'll write a book of his own. "That'll be my life's work," he said. Jennifer Lopez (the queen of romantic comedies; fight me!) talked to The Times ahead of her upcoming film, "Second Act," which is out Dec. 21. I stan for Lopez as an actress: "The Wedding Planner," the 2001 rom com which features Lopez as, you know, a wedding planner, was my favorite movie until "Maid in Manhattan" (Lopez, a hotel maid, becomes Lopez, a politician's love interest) came out in 2002. Suffice to say, I will be seeing "Second Act" on opening day. In the profile, Lopez talks about pushing herself in her career, going to therapy and trying to teach her daughter self love and that "she don't need no fairy tale." There are also several paragraphs of Alex Rodriguez hyping her up, which gave me heart eye emoji vibes. But one of her comments gave me pause. In "Second Act," Lopez plays Maya de la Vargas, a 40 something assistant manager at a big box store in Queens who has bigger dreams. Our reporter wrote that the movie "glosses over the institutional and social hurdles that a character like Maya might face," adding: To Lopez, that is another instance where mind over matter determination should prevail. She was a Puerto Rican from the middle class Bronx with aspirations far beyond that, and a tenacity that made it happen. "There is racism. There is sexism. There is ageism. There is all of this and you know what, that's still not going to stop me," she said. "I believe that 100 percent, to the bottom of my soul." So essentially, Lopez doesn't see any flaw in the movie's premise, because she subscribes to the central message: Anything can be accomplished with sheer force. I get it: I'm the first of my American raised primos and siblings to go to college and, to their great annoyance, this means I'm the standard to which they're frequently held. My relative success is used as a counterexample for anyone else's perceived failures, the idea being: If Concepcion did it, why can't they? It's a symptom of a mind set called survivorship bias, whereby the survivors (i.e., the people who have "made it") are viewed as the rule rather than the exception, a worldview that ignores the substantially greater numbers of people who aren't able to overcome limiting circumstances. It places the burden of success on the individual without recognizing, let alone tackling, the systemic barriers that hold marginalized people back, according to many, many studies and reports. It's fine to gloss over inequality in romantic comedies, (O.K., maybe not fine but personally, I don't mind two hours of optimistic escapism). But in real life, nuance matters. 67,000 Doctors Say You Should Stop Spanking Your Kids Time to retire the chancla? "One of the most important relationships we all have is the relationship between ourselves and our parents, and it makes sense to eliminate or limit fear and violence in that loving relationship," said one of the authors of a recent statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics. In This Week's Installment of "Things That Should've Happened Sooner" A British supplier of ballet shoes is now making shoes for brown people. It only took 200 years! Ballerinas of color have long been using makeup or paint to get their traditionally pink shoes to match their complexion, but now they can just buy shoes that do the work instead. Opinion: I Have a Green Card Now. But Am I Welcome? "I feel exactly like I felt in my first days in this country in 1999 different, unwanted," writes the poet Javier Zamora. I just discovered this Eddie Cepeda column in Remezcla where he covers the history of reggaeton, and I'm obsessed. In particular, Cepeda's profile of Dominican reggaeton producers Luny Tunes brought me right back to 2004, dancing to reggaeton in my room while my friends were out at actual parties because Papi wouldn't let me go out. (Sigh.) At me with your favorite throwbacks bycdl, and let me know if you'd subscribe to this as a newsletter: elespace nytimes.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The mechanics of elections that attract the most attention are casting and counting, snafus with voting machines and ballots and allegations of hacking and fraud. But Jeff Jonas, a prominent data scientist, is focused on something else: the integrity, updating and expansion of voter rolls. "As I dove into the subject, it grew on me, the complexity and relevance of the problem," he said. As a result, Mr. Jonas has played a geeky, behind the scenes role in encouraging turnout for the midterm elections on Tuesday. For the last four years, Mr. Jonas has used his software for a multistate project known as Electronic Registration Information Center that identifies eligible voters and cleans up voter rolls. Since its founding in 2012, the nonprofit center has identified 26 million people who are eligible but unregistered to vote, as well as 10 million registered voters who have moved, appear on more than one list or have died. "I have no doubt that more people are voting as a result of ERIC," said John Lindback, a former senior election administrator in Oregon and Alaska who was the center's first executive director. Voter rolls, like nearly every aspect of elections, are a politically charged issue. ERIC, brought together by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is meant to play it down the middle. It was started largely with professional election administrators, from both red and blue states. But the election officials recognized that their headaches often boiled down to a data handling challenge. Then Mr. Jonas added his technology, which has been developed and refined for decades. It is artificial intelligence software fine tuned for spotting and resolving identities, whether people or things. "Every time you get two pieces of junk mail from the same place, that's an entity resolution problem," Mr. Jonas said. "They're missed, but entity resolution problems are everywhere." Shortly after the election administrators tapped him, Mr. Jonas sketched out how his technology might be applied to their challenges. And they needed to take a very different path than another data matching initiative, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck System, which was already underway. Crosscheck was portrayed as a program to root out voter fraud. But election administrators and experts agree that voter fraud is a rarity. Voter rights advocates long argued that Crosscheck was a partisan effort to purge voter rolls of likely Democratic voters, and a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found a rising rate of people being removed from voter rolls. Last year, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Microsoft Research concluded that Crosscheck produced a flood of false positives, raising the risk of disenfranchising legal voters. And an investigation by ProPublica found Crosscheck was riddled with security flaws. Today, the Crosscheck system is little used, essentially dormant. ERIC, by contrast, was meant to both increase voter access and clean up voter rolls. Member states have to agree to specific steps to do both. "If we didn't do that, ERIC would become another politicized tool," said David Becker, former head of the elections program at Pew and the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. The organization's reach has grown gradually and its members now include the District of Columbia and 24 states, both traditionally Democratic ones like Connecticut and Illinois and Republican ones like Louisiana and Missouri. From each member, the group collects a minimum of voter registration and motor vehicle license data. The software Mr. Jonas and his team developed digests and links that data, and combines it with other information like postal change of address lists. Some states contribute other data. Among the actions required by member states is to mail out notifications to people identified as eligible but unregistered. Follow up research in some states concluded that 10 to 20 percent of those contacted had later registered to vote, a high response rate for direct mailings, Mr. Hamlin said. That rate suggests 2.6 million to 5.2 million of the 26 million people notified became voters, though they could have signed up for other reasons. The software is not flawless. A couple of state administrators said determining a person's current address can be difficult, according to the Brennan Center study, and like any technology tool, much depends on how it is used, despite the safeguards. But the states using the ERIC software generally say false positives are few, and returned unopened mail evidence of a wrong address is much reduced. And the outreach seems to be working. Colorado had the highest percentage of eligible, registered voters in the country in 2016, at 90 percent, up from 82 percent in 2012. "For my money, ERIC is a big part of that," said Judd Choate, Colorado's director of elections. "ERIC has been a game changer in elections for those of us in it." One thing Mr. Jonas finds satisfying is that ERIC has a two person staff with one tending the constantly growing database of more than 275 million records. "It's not beholden to an army of experts," he said. Mr. Jonas is advancing the technology in a start up, Senzing, which he founded and spun out of IBM in 2016. He joined IBM after it bought his previous start up, Systems Research and Development, in 2005. Senzing has no headquarters. Its 20 full time employees work from wherever they please, following their founder's lead. Mr. Jonas, 54, has long been a road warrior, but recently he decided to go further a lifestyle experiment he calls "full nomad" and "extreme minimalism." He is selling his home in Venice, Calif., and jettisoning nearly all his possessions. He has digitized family photos, papers, awards, anything that stirs memories of his experience, and stored them on Dropbox. His clothes are laundered, stored and sent ahead to him to his travel destinations by DUFL, a travel valet service. On Sunday, Mr. Jonas completed his 61st Ironman Triathlon swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles and running a full 26.2 mile marathon in Florida. "I'm unencumbered, so I can focus on stuff that matters," Mr. Jonas said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Persistent high unemployment among young people is adding up to 25 billion a year in uncollected taxes and, to a much smaller degree, increased safety net expenditures, a new report says. "The key takeaway here is that it's not just the individuals who are suffering as members of our generation," said Rory O'Sullivan, the policy and research director of the Young Invincibles, a postrecession youth advocacy group, which did the study. "When you have an entire generation of people that are out of work, it's going to create tremendous costs for taxpayers both now and in the future." Fifteen percent of workers ages 16 to 24 are unemployed, compared with 7.3 percent of all workers. That does not include young people who are not working because they are in school, who are no longer looking for work or who were too discouraged to begin a job search. Much has been written about how much this will cost them in the long run, as they spend years trying to catch up. The new report is an effort to quantify the financial effect now. Its authors determined how much young people would have paid in taxes had they been working, and how much less they would have collected in unemployment and other social welfare spending. Each jobless worker between 18 and 24 accounted for 4,100 a year, they concluded, and those between 25 and 34 accounted for 9,875, the study said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Lawyers and scientists do not always get along, but some are now finding common cause in an effort to defend the integrity of science especially climate science in government and academia. Climate scientists are feeling the heat as Republicans cement control of the executive branch and Congress. The Trump administration has already rolled back about two dozen environmental laws and regulations, dismissed members of an important science panel and taken down web pages giving information on climate change. Republicans in Congress have also brought pressure to bear on climate scientists. Now scientists and lawyers are fighting back, with well attended public demonstrations and legal action. The push included a recent conference that brought law professors from across the United States to New York for training to protect scientists who come under scrutiny. Scientists have found themselves the targets of investigations from those who deny the evidence of climate change most notably in the 2009 scandal known as Climategate, when hackers stole and released internal research discussions. Global warming denialists took comments out of context to allege widespread scientific fraud. Subsequent efforts to mine internal emails have been undertaken by conservative organizations like the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute and Judicial Watch, as well as conservative public officials like Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former Virginia attorney general. When the Environmental Protection Agency removed the climate related web pages, it announced that it was reviewing and revising portions of its website in ways "that reflect the agency's new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt." Judith Enck, a former top E.P.A. official who is critical of the agency's new direction, said its online presence "now looks like the National Mining Association website." Other conservatives in Congress took aim at climate researchers well before the 2016 election. Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee, last year subpoenaed federal climate scientists whose work supporting the evidence of a warming planet shows what he has called a "suspect climate agenda." Actions by the Trump administration have been met with anger, lawsuits and friend of the court briefs. A group of former Obama administration lawyers has filed lawsuits seeking information about charges of bullying of civil servants and scientists who work on climate issues. David M. Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former top prosecutor of environmental crimes at the Justice Department, has taken part in several such efforts, including briefs filed before Mr. Trump took office. He said the work was important both as an attempt to preserve environmental progress and as a message to his students. In November, many of his students expressed dismay over the election results "and their concern that everything they came to law school for no longer mattered," Professor Uhlmann said. "My message to them was, 'Everything you came to law school for matters more than ever before.'" Other lawyers are stepping up to protect dozens of climate scientists who have been targeted by private conservative groups demanding their personal emails and other documents. The groups, which dispute the powerful evidence underlying climate change science, use the tactic to unearth embarrassing and inartful language in private correspondence and then publicize it. Those filing the document requests say they are trying to ferret out politicized, sloppy science and fraud. David Schnare, an official at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, said, "The legislatures give the citizens a right to know, and for good reasons and there are good reasons for citizens to find out what's going on." Mr. Schnare, who was a longtime E.P.A. employee, briefly served in the Trump administration's transition team at the agency; the group receives funding from the fossil fuel industry. Dr. Dessler cited the Climategate emails, which included discussion of the work of Michael E. Mann, now a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, with phrases like "Mike's Nature trick" and a technique to "hide the decline," which conservative commentators publicized as proof of fraud in climate science. The phrases, which were taken out of context, did not involve fraud, and several investigations have cleared the scientists of allegations that they manipulated research to meet their predetermined expectations. Still, Climategate was used to smear the scientists; President Trump has cited the "horrible emails" as a reason for doubting the threat of climate change. The law professors who came to New York for training attended classes taught by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. The fund was created in 2012 in response to litigation by Mr. Cuccinelli that also involved Dr. Mann's emails. Dr. Mann would eventually win that case, but by then, the burdensome litigation had run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills for Dr. Mann and the University of Virginia, his employer at the time. In light of those costs, the defense fund got its start. What had been an informal referral network for scientists facing legal pressure took on structure and financing. Mr. Trump's election has provided a boost to the defense fund, said Joshua Wolfe, a founder. "We've been a bit overwhelmed by the number of checks that came in postelection," he said. And while he noted that "we didn't build the organization for the Trump era," the previous cases "really prepared the organization for the current set of challenges." The New York conference kicked off an effort to build a nationwide network of legal aid providers. Participants heard lectures on open records laws and were warned that the climate fight could be brutal, with online harassment and death threats common for researchers. One law professor attending the conference, Myanna Dellinger of the University of South Dakota, said her own environmental legal scholarship had prompted attacks from conservatives, so "if I could help others who might be in the same situation, I would like to do so." Emphasizing that she spoke only for herself and not for her institution, she added: "It would be easy to sit and do nothing and write about tax law. But some of us have to do something." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
More optimistic consumers are propelling the economy forward, even as businesses pull back. The pickup in spending by consumers, along with a burst of defense orders and a stronger housing market, helped the economy expand at an annual rate of 2 percent in the third quarter, a slightly better pace than had been anticipated, according to government data released Friday. In the previous quarter, economic growth had dipped to a rate of just 1.3 percent. While growing more confident that the housing market has stabilized, households have been buoyed by lower energy prices, until recently a rising stock market and a slight improvement in employment. After years of shedding debt, there are also signs that consumers are starting to borrow again. "Consumers are feeling wealthier so they are still out there spending," said Joshua Dennerlein, an economist with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Still, the pace of economic activity is short of what's needed to substantially reduce the unemployment rate, now at 7.8 percent and also well below the level of growth typical in this stage of a recovery after a sharp downturn. What's more, fears are growing that the economy could slow again in the fourth quarter. Companies are preparing for the possibility of steep tax increases and sharp spending cuts if Congress cannot agree on a deal to reduce the deficit after the election, a combination of factors frequently referred to as the fiscal cliff. In fact, a series of disappointing earnings reports from the nation's biggest companies this week, along with a handful of layoff announcements from corporate bellwethers, suggest businesses have already begun to retrench. With the presidential campaign entering the final, desperate dash to Election Day, there was plenty of fodder in Friday's report for both candidates to cite as they spar over the direction of the economy. For President Obama, the best news was that consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 2 percent last quarter, up from 1.5 percent in the second quarter, while residential investment increased at an annual rate of 14.4 percent, compared with 8.5 percent in the second quarter. The business snapshot was much dimmer. The report showed that business investment fell 1.3 percent, a reversal from the 3.6 percent increase recorded in the second quarter, and a sign businesses are indeed clamping down on spending ahead of the fiscal cliff. Inventories also were a notable factor with the summer drought in the Midwest shaving overall growth 0.4 percentage point as farm inventories dropped. In addition to the uncertainty about government policy, corporate performance has been hurt by a recession in parts of Europe and weaker demand from China. Some economists fear that all these factors will keep a lid on growth in the final quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of next year. The Commerce Department data showed exports decreased by 1.6 percent in the latest quarter, compared with a 5.3 percent increase in the second quarter. It was the first time exports had fallen since the first quarter of 2009, when the global economy was reeling from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing financial crisis in the United States. At a campaign appearance in Iowa, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, termed Friday's report "discouraging," adding, "slow economic growth means slow job growth and declining take home pay." Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. The new figure, released by the Commerce Department, is the government's first estimate of growth in the third quarter. Slightly better than the 1.8 percent increase economists had been forecasting, it showed the nation rebounding to the growth it had in the first quarter of the year after a spring slump. "The report highlights the fact that businesses have already begun to react to the looming fiscal cliff while consumers march steadily ahead," said Mr. Dennerlein. Noting the jump in residential spending, he added that the slowly recovering housing sector is a bright spot. Housing values and stock values certainly contribute to consumers' sense of financial well being. And despite the hesitancy among businesses, optimism among consumers continues to rise. A separate survey released Friday showed consumer sentiment at its highest level in more than five years, with the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan index rising to 82.6 in October from 78.3 in September, though it was lower than a preliminary October reading of 83.1 that had been previously reported. To be sure, the latest growth in consumer spending was still well below the rate of increase in the first half of the last decade, when easy credit and a boom in home prices fueled growth in the 3 percent range. But it was a crucial antidote to gloom pervading the business sector, experts said. "We'd really be in trouble if consumer attitudes were deteriorating like business attitudes," said Nigel Gault, chief United States economist for IHS Global Insight. Mr. Gault warned, however, that the outlook among consumers could erode if political leaders in Washington cannot break the deadlock over tax and budget policy. "Consumers are not so forward looking as businesses," Mr. Gault said. "So there are two ways this can go. Either we clear up the uncertainty, or consumers start focusing on the fiscal cliff and we see consumer spending hurt as well." In recent days, government data and a steady drumbeat of disappointing earnings reports from corporate bellwethers have underscored the threat to the job market posed by softness in sectors more dependent on exports, like manufacturing and chemicals. Dow Chemical and DuPont announced job cuts earlier in the week, and that list grew Friday with Newell Rubbermaid, which makes commercial and consumer products like Calphalon and Paper Mate pens, announcing plans to cut more than 1,900 workers, or just over 10 percent of its work force. And Rockwell Collins, an aviation and defense giant, said it was considering eliminating up to 1,250 positions, equivalent to roughly 6 percent of its employees. The latest data suggest a tug of war between countervailing economic forces that could shift at any time. For example, growth last quarter was unexpectedly bolstered by a 13 percent jump in military spending that few economists expect to be repeated in the fourth quarter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
LONDON The European Union's highest court ruled on Tuesday that a 2014 trade deal with Singapore required the approval of parliaments from the bloc's 28 members, leaving in place an obstacle to future negotiations including talks with Britain over its withdrawal from the union. The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, has concluded many aspects of trade deals in the past, and Tuesday's ruling mostly supported that approach. Yet in maintaining the status quo, the court also made clear that parts of trade agreements, particularly those that concerned investment, were contingent on approval by national governments, leaving them open to shifting domestic politics. The requirement that trade deals be approved by dozens of parliaments has been a sticking point in the past. An agreement with Canada nearly fell apart last year after a Belgian regional assembly initially voted against it, calling for greater protection for local dairy farmers. Although the impasse was eventually resolved, the dispute highlighted the extent to which a vast array of groups can effectively veto deals that can take years to negotiate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Whether this week's collapse of stock and oil prices will spiral into a much deeper economic crisis, perhaps even eclipsing that of 2008, depends on how the United States and other governments react. The United States has now, belatedly, taken drastic actions on travel and announced some support for businesses. But these are too late to prevent the coronavirus from spreading and too little to stave off a deeper economic downturn. Swamping the markets with liquidity, as was done in 2008, is not going to resolve the problem this time. The markets are already awash in cash, and as was again demonstrated in early March, further cuts in interest rates no longer translate into growth. What is needed now is leadership that focuses on the domestic challenges and seeks to build international cooperation rather than scapegoating other countries. How bad could this get? Breaks in supply chains, factory closings and worker quarantines have disrupted supplies. Restrictions on hospitality and travel, and fears regarding contagion have hit demand. Growth is being dragged down and could turn negative in a range of economies from Germany to China to the United States. The crippling of retail and consumer businesses could quickly escalate into bankruptcies, the downgrading of corporate debt and impairment of the balance sheets of banks. While this crisis is different in its origins from the last one, it is following a similar cycle of collapsing consumer and stock market confidence, leading to a spiraling down of demand, growth, employment and incomes. With central banks impotent and fiscal policy undermined by supply bottlenecks, novel approaches are needed. There is much that should be done immediately. Banks, supported by governments, should provide discounted loans and increase their tolerance of late repayments by businesses that risk bankruptcy because of the absence of supplies or customers, or because of late payments by creditors. Gig economy and hourly contractors, estimated to include 57 million people in the United States, require particular help, and government should help employers to guarantee a basic income and to ensure that workers who are not currently entitled to sick pay a quarter of the U.S. work force are covered for the period in which they are unable to work. These and other wide ranging targeted interventions, including tax cuts for the lowest income earners, would restore confidence and help working people and the businesses that could be devastated. The Government Accountability Office estimates that the 2008 crisis cost the U.S. economy over 22 trillion, including a 750 billion bailout for banks. This time, governments should use targeted interventions of a different kind to prevent the fears of a total economic collapse from turning into a prophecy. In Britain, this week's budget commitment to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus provides a powerful demonstration of what can be done, even though the 38 billion allocated is too small compared with the 650 billion bailout given to British banks after 2008. However, national policies alone, adopted government by government, will not be enough to forestall a global catastrophe. For that, countries around the world must work together. When the markets crashed in September 2008, President George W. Bush called the leaders of China, Germany, France and Britain, securing a collective response and participation in a crisis summit. Actions agreed to by 20 heads of state, including an unprecedented spending boost by China, helped avert an even greater disaster. The concerted collective response calmed markets. The contrast with today could not be greater. President Trump has responded belatedly and erratically to the pressing domestic needs. Internationally, he has isolated the United States and, by turning his back on the world, has stymied an international response. And he is just the most prominent symptom of a wider problem: Since the 2008 crisis, governments around the world have become more nationalist and have adopted a zero sum approach to international politics and economics. Yet today's crisis shows isolationism escalates, rather than reduces, foreign threats. The collapse of American leadership could not come at a worse time. After 2008, Britain led the European response to the crisis, but now Brexit has ended Britain's ability to lead Europe, and squabbling among key countries means that the European Commission cannot speak for its 27 members. China has been turned from an ally of the United States in dealing with common threats like finance and climate change into a perceived enemy. The trade war and the United States' withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement are the most visible expressions of wider tensions that have been eroding not only global growth but also the potential for cooperation. The priority now needs to be the immediate needs of pandemic management, with governments collaborating to accelerate the development of vaccines, to produce urgently needed medical equipment and other supplies, and to coordinate restrictions on movement and the treatment of foreign nationals. But the world also needs a coordinated economic response. Vulnerable governments that risk buckling under the strain of the pandemic require financial support to prevent the global health crisis from also becoming a financial crisis. Italy is already in urgent need of a fiscal shot in the arm, and many developing countries will soon be, too. Coordination to preempt a systemic collapse of economies around the world is vital, with the International Monetary Fund and other agencies taking a lead, encouraged by the United States. The international solidarity that arose in response to the 2008 financial crisis was short lived. The question now is whether the current crisis can be turned into an opportunity to take a different path. Domestically, this situation could be used to restore faith in government and in the expertise that is required to address the pandemic and stop a global economic collapse. Internationally, there could be a fresh commitment to restore trust in global institutions by ensuring that the World Health Organization and other vital agencies of the United Nations, as well as the I.M.F., the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, are equipped to meet 21st century challenges. The United States' role is pivotal. Not as a bully, but as a leading member of the global community addressing shared threats. Achieving this in the current climate may seem unlikely because the rich countries have not only fired all their fiscal and monetary ammunition but also lost the political will to cooperate. Governments are trapped in a cycle of stagnant growth and mounting debt, postponing much needed investments in risk management and infrastructure. Political gridlock undermines the will to work together. Breaking it is our biggest challenge, but is necessary if we are to minimize the damage done by the current crisis and prevent future more dangerous threats from climate change, conflicts and pandemics. No wall is high enough to keep out the threats to our future, even for the mightiest countries. Growing global integration brings rising interdependency. The greatest risk we face is not from any of the individual systemic risks. It is the lack of willingness to cooperate with others to resolve these problems. Why are we waiting? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Holly Black, an author of the best selling "The Spiderwick Chronicles" fantasy series, believes that everybody would look better with pointed ears like those on fairies and elves. Last November she visited Lindsay Wood of the Elven Caravan, a company that sells custom latex elf ears for 20 to 40, at FaerieCon in Hunt Valley, Md., to try on a pair. Ms. Black, 45, had been mulling getting her ears surgically modified since a New Year's Eve party she threw with a fairy theme, and she was so pleased with the way the latex ears looked that she decided to go ahead with the procedure. Wearing a Gothic frock with batlike bell sleeves, she showed off her freshly pointed ears under a silver pixie haircut not long ago at BookExpo, the publishing convention in New York. She'd had them done by the Finnish body modification artist Samppa Von Cyborg. Excited fans at the convention got their books signed and then took selfies oh, all right, "elfies" with the author. While you might not want to go to the extreme of surgery, perhaps it would be fun to try on a pair of pointed ears at your next office party? Live a little. Elves and fairies have long been depicted as having ear cartilage that peaks in a lilting sylvan way. Ms. Wood, who travels to festivals to tempt humans with her assortment of 13 fantasy ears in species including troll, faun, Hobbit and high elf, said she took her shape inspirations from "Faeries" by Brian Froud and the Victorian illustrators Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham. Ms. Wood, 28, who lives in Floyd, Va., and has been selling ears on Etsy since she was 18, credits "Lord of the Rings" who can forget Orlando Bloom as J. R. R. Tolkien's "fair of face beyond the measure of Men" Elven prince, Legolas for causing a spike in her business. At the NY Faerie Festival in the hamlet of Ouaquaga, N.Y., this summer, people of all ages lined up at the Caravan so Ms. Wood could scan features and jaw lines to determine the most flattering ears for undecided patrons and then artfully tint them with makeup before affixing with spirit gum. "These people who come to me are influenced by fairies and goblins," said Mr. Von Cyborg in a phone interview. Elf ears do not quite overshadow requests for points, a la Spock on "Star Trek." Based in Britain, Mr. Von Cyborg said he has performed some 50 modifications so far this year. "I made this thing popular, I believe, because before me there was just old school folding method, and they were unfolding all the time and they just don't look good," Mr. Von Cyborg said, adding that he developed the technique a decade ago after training with an ear, nose and throat surgeon. "The whole point is to have ears that look natural, that you can't tell are modified." Of course, looking naturally elflike is not everyone's goal. Luis Padron, 25, who owns a cosplay business in Argentina, said he has spent over 35,000 in surgeries and procedures including skin lightening, nose surgery and hair removal for his sylvan shape shifting. His look has been influenced by Katherine Cardona, a contemporary illustrator specializing in fairies, and Sakimichan, a gender bending fantasy digital artist. Mr. Padron plans to change his eye color to violet using an intraocular implant procedure in New Delhi (not approved by the Food and Drug Administration), because "it is the color of magic, fantasy, dreams and imagination," he said. The idea is on point, elfishly speaking, when you consider that Mr. Bloom, who wore blue contact lenses in the Tolkien film, once described elves as "incredible angelic spirits who create and appreciate great beauty." To complete his elflike transformation, Mr. Padron is planning a heart shaped hairline implant and PRP scalp injections in Beverly Hills, Calif., because "elves have long hair," he said. He is also planning more plastic surgery in Korea, including Adam's apple reduction, jaw reshaping and limb lengthening, and plans to finish his look with ear pointing surgery, which he calls "the cherry on top." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
N.B.A. fans can be forgiven for being distracted by shiny objects. And there are few objects shinier than a star who is being added to a playoff contender. But even though the powerhouses of the Eastern Conference went to war over which team could add the biggest piece, it is worth taking a look at some under the radar moves that could prove significant this season or in the near future. Amid the flurry of moves this week, these three deals stood out as opportunities for players to thrive in situations far more advantageous to their careers than where they had been, which could end up paying significant dividends to the teams that acquired them. The Magic are trading Jonathon Simmons, a first round pick and a second round pick to the Philadelphia 76ers for Fultz, according to The Athletic. Why it matters: The very public breakdown of Fultz's career has made any move involving him relevant. A consensus No. 1 pick in the 2017 draft after a terrific freshman season at Washington, Fultz was viewed by Philadelphia as the endgame of the team's long running Process. The Sixers traded the No. 3 pick in that draft (which ended up being Jayson Tatum) and a future first round pick (likely to be Sacramento's pick in this year's draft) to Boston so they could move up two spots to get him. Things fell apart almost immediately. Fultz's shooting form went from quirky to horrendous, debates emerged as to whether he had been injured or had simply lost his confidence, and he played just 14 games last season and 19 this season before shutting down with a diagnosis of thoracic outlet syndrome. No one knows what Fultz is capable of, but it had become painfully obvious that he was not going to have the opportunity to play his way through his problems with the Sixers, a team that believes it has a legitimate chance of winning the East this year. In Orlando, the pressure should be turned down considerably. The team values length, and while Fultz is a modest 6 foot 4, he has a seven foot wingspan and has at times shown flashes of brilliance, including during a game last April in which he became the first teenager to officially record a triple double in the N.B.A. In this week's trade, Philadelphia managed to land a few picks to replace what it gave up to be able to draft Fultz. But Simmons is primarily filler to make the trade work, and the move is mostly about clearing an unproductive player off the Sixers' roster and letting him try to find a better situation elsewhere. As Fultz looks to avoid joining Anthony Bennett and LaRue Martin as the biggest busts to be taken with the No. 1 overall pick, Orlando seems as good of a place as any to get started. The Kings traded Justin Jackson and Zach Randolph to the Dallas Mavericks for Barnes. Why it matters: The Kings entered Thursday night's games as the No. 9 seed in the West, one and a half games behind the Los Angeles Clippers and one game ahead of the Los Angeles Lakers. With the Clippers having just traded Tobias Harris, the door is open for Sacramento to secure its first playoff spot since 2006. Sacramento plays extraordinarily fast, partly as a result of repeatedly using lineups with three guards, but they play at a significant size disadvantage. Enter Barnes, a 6 8 small forward who gives the team a bigger body without requiring the offense to slow down all that much. It's hard to remember after three productive if uninspiring seasons in Dallas, but Barnes was once a member of Golden State's ultrafluid Death Lineup, and if he can get back to a 3 and D style of play, he could be a perfect addition to the Kings' starting five, though that does not mean the deal is without drawbacks. First and foremost, Barnes has been used to a high usage role in Dallas, and that will not be available to him in Sacramento, a team with an offensive pecking order that will make him a third option at best. He also has let his defense slide to the point where he was a net negative on the court for Dallas. The Kings will probably be on the hook for his 25.1 million player option next year, and if he isn't on board to shift his style of play, he could make the team worse. All of that said, Barnes is still just 26, and after winning a championship in his third season, and 73 regular season games in his fourth year, he has not sniffed the playoffs since. A return to a relevant team could unlock the complementary player who helped Golden State soar, and for a franchise that has often been accused of sabotaging itself, this is a real attempt to make the team better. Porter, a 25 year old forward who has plenty of size at 6 8, has seen his statistics decline this season, at least in part because of the overall decline of the Wizards. But at his best, he is capable of shooting better than 40 percent from 3 point range while also contributing rebounding and passing. For an example of why Chicago would take a flier on a frustrating player owed a great deal of money, look no further than one of the players he was traded for: Parker. Last off season, the Bulls had money to spend and wanted to make a free agent splash. Parker, a player known as much for being injury prone as for being defense averse, was the best they could do. In Porter they pick up a young player with plenty of potential who is owed a little more than 27 million next season and has a player option of a bit less than 28.5 million in 2020 21. That is probably better than what Chicago could get on the open market, which makes it worth saying goodbye to Portis, a decent rotation player who was mostly wasted on a team that is several big pieces away from contention. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Conservatives criticized Twitter and Facebook on Thursday as "censors" and "monopolies" and said they were interfering in the coming election. SAN FRANCISCO President Trump called Facebook and Twitter "terrible" and "a monster" and said he would go after them. Senators Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn said they would subpoena the chief executives of the companies for their actions. And on Fox News, prominent conservative hosts blasted the social media platforms as "monopolies" and accused them of "censorship" and election interference. On Thursday, simmering discontent among Republicans over the power that Facebook and Twitter wield over public discourse erupted into open acrimony. Republicans slammed the companies and baited them a day after the sites limited or blocked the distribution of an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. For a while, Twitter doubled down. It locked the personal account of Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, late Wednesday after she posted the article, and on Thursday it briefly blocked a link to a House Judiciary Committee webpage. The Trump campaign said Twitter had also locked its official account after it tried promoting the article. Twitter then prohibited the spread of a different New York Post article about the Bidens. But late Thursday, under pressure, Twitter said it was changing the policy that it had used to block the New York Post article and would now allow similar content to be shared, along with a label to provide context about the source of the information. Twitter said it was concerned that the earlier policy was leading to unintended consequences. Even so, the actions brought the already frosty relationship between conservatives and the companies to a new low point, less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election, in which the social networks are expected to play a significant role. It offered a glimpse at how online conversations could go awry on Election Day. And Twitter's bob and weave in particular underlined how the companies have little handle on how to consistently enforce what they will allow on their sites. "There will be battles for control of the narrative again and again over coming weeks," said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies social media companies. "The way the platforms handled it is not a good harbinger of what's to come." Facebook declined to comment on Thursday and pointed to its comments on Wednesday when it said the New York Post article, which made unverified claims about Hunter Biden's business in Ukraine, was eligible for third party fact checking. Among the concerns was that the article cited purported emails from Hunter Biden that may have been obtained in a hack, though it is unclear how the paper obtained the messages and whether they were authentic. Twitter had said it was blocking the New York Post article partly because it had a policy of not sharing what might be hacked material. But late Thursday, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's head of legal, said the policy was too sweeping and could end up blocking content from journalists and whistle blowers. As a result, she said, Twitter was changing course. Ms. Gadde added that Twitter would continue blocking links to or images from the article if they contained email addresses and other private information, which violated the company's privacy policy. For years, Mr. Trump and other Republicans have accused Facebook and Twitter, which have headquarters in liberal Silicon Valley, of anti conservative bias. In 2018, Mr. Trump said the companies, along with Google, "have to be careful" and claimed, without evidence, that they were intentionally suppressing conservative news outlets supportive of his administration. That issue has since come up repeatedly at Capitol Hill hearings, including in July when the chief executives of Facebook and Google, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, testified on antitrust issues. Tensions have also been running high for Twitter and Facebook as they aim to avoid a replay of the 2016 election, when Russians used their sites to spread inflammatory messages to divide Americans. In recent weeks, the companies have said they will clamp down on misinformation before and after Election Day, such as by banning content related to the pro Trump conspiracy theory QAnon and slowing down the way information flows on their networks. But with Mr. Trump trailing Mr. Biden in the polls, the companies' handling of the New York Post article has ruptured any truce they had managed to strike with conservatives. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, asked the Federal Election Commission in a letter on Wednesday to investigate whether the companies' actions could be considered an in kind contribution to Mr. Biden's campaign. "I think it really is a new frontier," Mr. Hawley said in an interview. "It will also lead to a new openness on the Republican side to think about what we are going to do about their monopoly power." Mr. Cruz, of Texas, and Ms. Blackburn, of Tennessee, said on Thursday that they would subpoena Mr. Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, for a hearing on what they deemed "election interference." "I'm looking forward to asking Jack and Mark about silencing media that go against their political beliefs," Ms. Blackburn said in a tweet. Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, sent Mr. Dorsey a letter excoriating Twitter for blocking the article and asking for a detailed summary of the process behind the decision. "Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech," Mr. Pai said in a statement. "But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters." Mr. Trump was even more pointed, saying in a tweet on Thursday that the companies needed to be deprived of their Section 230 protections "immediately." Others applauded the aggressiveness of the social media companies. "The actions taken by Facebook, Twitter and Google show that these platform companies are indeed willing to enforce their existing policies, in particular around 'hack and leak' material," said Shannon McGregor, senior researcher with the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Unlike previous criticism of Facebook and Twitter for acting too slowly in taking down content, the uproar this time has centered on how they may have acted too hastily. (The exception was Google's YouTube, which said after about 36 hours that it would allow a New York Post video about the article to remain up without restrictions.) The speed with which Facebook moved was uncharacteristic, fueled by how quickly the article took off online and the sensitivity of the material, according to two Facebook employees, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Within three hours after The New York Post published its article on Wednesday, Facebook said it would reduce the distribution of the piece across the network so that it would appear less frequently in users' individual News Feeds, one of the most highly viewed sections of the app. The company billed it as part of its "standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation," said Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman. That process included spotting some "signals" that a piece of content might be false, according to Facebook's guidelines for content moderation. The company has not clarified what those signals were. Twitter's hacked material policy was written in 2018, with blocking links the main course of action. The company has since increasingly opted to label tweets, adding context or saying if they glorified violence. But Twitter had not updated the hacked material policy. So when the New York Post article appeared, and questions about the emails' origin were raised, the only system it had was to block the content. "We are no longer limited to tweet removal as an enforcement action," Ms. Gadde said late Thursday. Mike Isaac reported from San Francisco and Kate Conger from Oakland, Calif. Daisuke Wakabayashi contributed reporting from Oakland, David McCabe from Washington, and Tiffany Hsu from Hoboken, N.J. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Linda Fairstein, chief of the Manhattan district attorney's sex crimes unit, left, entering court in 1990 with Elizabeth Lederer, the prosecutor who handled the Central Park jogger case. For much of her life, Linda Fairstein was widely viewed as a law enforcement hero. As one of the first leaders of the Manhattan district attorney's sex crimes unit, later the inspiration for "Law Order: Special Victims Unit," she became one of the best known prosecutors in the country. She went on to a successful career as a crime novelist and celebrity former prosecutor, appearing on high profile panels and boards. But since last Friday and the premiere of "When They See Us," Ava DuVernay's Netflix series about the Central Park jogger case, Ms. Fairstein has become synonymous with something else: The story of how the justice system wrongly sent five black and Latino teenagers to prison for a horrific rape. Update: Linda Fairstein dropped by her publisher after series on Central Park 5. Ms. Fairstein ran the sex crimes division when, in 1989, a white woman jogging in Central Park was viciously raped, beaten, and left for dead. In the four part series, Ms. Fairstein's character is shown as the driving force in the case, urging on a prosecutor who had doubts and finding ways to explain away facts that pointed to the teens' innocence. In the last few days, online petitions and a hashtag, CancelLindaFairstein, have called for a boycott of her books and her removal from prominent board positions. After a barrage of criticism directed at her on Twitter, she took her own account down. And she resigned this week from the boards of several organizations including Safe Horizon and the Joyful Heart Foundation, which aid victims of sexual violence, and Vassar College, her alma mater. Back in 1993, Glamour named her one of its women of the year. But on Tuesday, it published a letter from the editor saying, "Unequivocally, Glamour would not bestow this honor on her today." Ms. Fairstein's conduct during the case has been a matter of intense debate and criticism since a man named Matias Reyes surfaced in 2002 to confess that he committed the crime. Ms. Fairstein continued to write books and serve on important boards even after the convictions were overturned, as the case faded into memory for many. But the Netflix series has placed the prosecution back on center stage, where the power of television's narrative focus, the lightning speed of online reaction and the villainous characterization of Ms. Fairstein have made her a target of public outrage. A reporter reflects on the true story of the Central Park Five. The series is a dramatized account based on the experiences of the "Central Park Five" Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray and Yusef Salaam. They went to prison for several years before being cleared, and in 2014 the de Blasio administration settled their lawsuit against the city for 41 million, while admitting no wrongdoing on the part of investigators. Mr. Reyes's confession exposed the deep flaws in the way Ms. Fairstein's unit had handled the case. No forensic evidence tied the teenagers to the crime and prosecutors relied on contradictory confessions that the teenagers said were coerced. The DNA evidence pointed to another perpetrator unknown at the time, and who turned out to be Mr. Reyes but investigators never pursued other lines of inquiry, heedlessly assuming they were right. But was the real life Ms. Fairstein as scheming as the TV version? (She is played by Felicity Huffman, who was arrested in the college admissions scandal after filming was complete.) The script took liberties with dialogue and timing of events, a use of artistic license that Ms. Fairstein's defenders describe as unfair, and her detractors embrace as in broad keeping with the injustice that ensued. Jonathan C. Moore, a lawyer who represented four of the five men in their lawsuit, said while "we don't know for sure what she was saying to the prosecutors or to the detectives," her depiction in the series "captures the essence of who she was." But Ms. Fairstein, 72, called it "grossly and maliciously inaccurate," as she put it in her resignation letters to several boards. "The truth about my participation can be proved in the pages of public records and case documents," she said in her letter to the chairman of Vassar's board. "But that has not been apparent to those embracing the mob mentality that now dominates social media, any more than it was considered by the rashly irresponsible filmmaker." Ms. DuVernay was unavailable for comment, a representative said on Wednesday. She ran that department for 25 years, and of the thousands of investigations she oversaw, including the Robert Chambers "preppy killer" case, which ended with his guilty plea for manslaughter, the Central Park case was perhaps the most high profile. In 2002, a report by the Manhattan district attorney's office said that the convictions against the five should be vacated, and that there had been significant problems with the prosecution's case. The report said statements by the five defendants "differed from one another on the specific details of virtually every major aspect of the crime who initiated the attack, who knocked the victim down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault, and when in the sequence of events the attack took place." None of them accurately described where the jogger was attacked. A dueling report, commissioned by the New York Police Department, found that no misconduct occurred during the investigation and said it was "more likely than not that the defendants participated in an attack upon the jogger." One of the authors of the report, Stephen L. Hammerman, was the top legal adviser for the police department at the time. The Central Park Five discussed "When They See Us" with their onscreen counterparts. Daniel R. Alonso, who was a colleague of Ms. Fairstein's at the district attorney's office, said that while "it's a terrible, terrible thing when someone gets wrongfully convicted," he did not believe the case should overshadow Ms. Fairstein's accomplishments. "I think it's terrible to 'cancel' someone's entire career over one matter," he said, citing Ms. Fairstein's history of prosecuting rapists and lobbying for policies that benefit victims of sexual crimes. The facts now forcing Ms. Fairstein into exile have been known for nearly two decades, and she has faced some backlash before. Last year, the Mystery Writers of America said that because of her role in the Central Park case, it would not present her with an award it had already announced was hers. (In 2013, a petition circulated online calling on Columbia University's law school to fire Elizabeth Lederer, the lead prosecutor in the case, who was an adjunct faculty member. She remains a lecturer there today.) But the level of outrage seen in recent days has been different. In Ms. DuVernay's emotional and intimate series, Ms. Fairstein comes off as the primary villain, with numerous lines depicting her as bent on railroading the young men. "Every young black male who was in the park last night is a suspect in the rape of that woman," Ms. Fairstein's character says early on. "So, there must have been another attacker," she says to Ms. Lederer in the second episode. "One must have gotten away." "I do if it helps a jury believe what we know is true," Ms. Fairstein responds. Among other liberties taken by the series was in its depiction of the beginning of the investigation. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Ms. DuVernay said she reached out to Ms. Fairstein before she wrote the script. She said she asked if they could have a conversation so Ms. DuVernay would have Ms. Fairstein's perspective in her head. According to Ms. DuVernay, Ms. Fairstein said she would sit down only if certain conditions were met, including approval over the script. Ms. DuVernay said no, and the conversation didn't happen. Ms. Fairstein's lawyer disputed that account, saying that she "only requested that Ms. DuVernay take into account public records, transcripts, and written testimonies when writing her script about the Central Park Five." Ms. Fairstein is also, in a way, still fighting with the five. Long after her office moved to erase their convictions, and essentially without any evidence beyond their problematic confessions, she and others involved in the investigation have maintained that the men probably played some role in the rape, which they deny. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Nearly 60 Yankees players and their coaches will gather on Saturday at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx for full squad workouts. It will be the first time everyone is together again in one place since March 12, the day Major League Baseball shut down spring training because of the coronavirus outbreak. After four months of upheaval, contentious negotiations between the players' union and team owners, and a lot of home workouts, Yankees Manager Aaron Boone insisted on Wednesday that the club's original mission remained the same. "Because circumstances and certainly this season have changed, that goal doesn't change: We want to be champions," he said on a conference call with reporters. They were on a short list of favorites to win the title when they first convened in February, after having fallen two wins short of reaching the World Series last fall. They figured they had added the missing piece they needed the top flight pitcher Gerrit Cole, whom they signed for a record 324 million contract over the winter to claim their first title since 2009. Now they just have to find a way to do it over a 60 game regular season, instead of the normal 162. "I do think one of the separators this year is going to be the teams that are able to find that energy, to find that focus, to find that edge on a daily basis in what is going to be unique and challenging circumstances," Boone said. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Across M.L.B., Wednesday was report day for summer workouts. A handful of players arrived at Yankee Stadium around noon, all donning masks. Players underwent another round of physicals, but there was a new M.L.B. prescribed intake screening: temperatures were taken, and coronavirus and antibody tests were administered. Most M.L.B. organizations have already dealt with cases of the virus among their players and staff, including the Yankees two of their minor league players tested positive in March and a handful of staff members did so in Tampa, Fla., did last month. General Manager Brian Cashman said in a Tuesday conference call that everyone had recovered, and that in most cases the symptoms had been "extremely mild." But in the coming days, more cases could emerge as M.L.B. begins testing players and on field staff every other day, and essential staff multiple times a week, as stipulated by M.L.B.'s 113 page manual of health and safety protocols for the 2020 season. While praising the breadth of the protocols, Cashman and Boone acknowledged a level of unpredictability in the season. "If this year has taught you anything, it's to understand that anything is possible with this," Boone said, referring to the virus. "All I know is that in my world, my job and my focus is to comply as best I can and comply as best as a team that we can." In recent days, Yankees officials have rushed to adapt their workouts, and Yankee Stadium itself, to the new health and safety requirements. The Yankees' first choice for a second camp was their sprawling spring training facilities in Tampa, but as the virus surged in Florida they decided to return to their home stadium. It will be unlike any preseason camp they have experienced. To follow social distancing rules, Cashman said players and staff at Yankee Stadium will spread out between the home, visiting and auxiliary clubhouses. Both the home and visiting bullpens and batting cages will be used. Pitchers may even use the stadium's concourses to play catch, and training tables might be set up in open areas for better ventilation. "We will utilize every aspect" of Yankee Stadium, Cashman said. As soon as workouts begin, Boone said he expected pitchers, who have been throwing bullpen sessions over the past few months, to face their teammates. Intrasquad games are expected later in camp. Cashman said four key injured Yankees pitcher James Paxton (back surgery), and outfielders Aaron Judge (fractured rib), Aaron Hicks (Tommy John surgery) and Giancarlo Stanton (calf strain) had been able to continue rehabilitating during the hiatus, and he was optimistic they would all be ready for opening day on July 23. But Cashman was aware that his team's status as favorites might have been dented by this season's untraditional circumstances. Games will be, at least to start, in front of empty stands. Players and support staff will have to adjust their routines in several ways, at and away from the stadium. On the field, there are many new rules, including a runner on second base to start extra innings. And the Yankees will have just more than a third of the usual runway to separate themselves from the rest of baseball. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
TORONTO President Obama arrived here Friday for back to back meetings of world leaders that will test international unity on how to restore global economic growth. After landing, Mr. Obama quickly boarded a helicopter for a G 8 meeting in Muskoka, Ontario, about 100 miles to the north. His arrival came less than five hours after Congressional negotiations reached agreement on sweeping legislation to overhaul the architecture of financial regulations, an accomplishment that gives momentum to his role at the meetings of the Group of 8 and the Group of 20 countries. "We need to act in concert for a simple reason: This crisis proved, and events continue to affirm, that our national economies are inextricably linked," Mr. Obama said on the White House lawn before leaving for Toronto. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters aboard Air Force One that the Unites States was "leading the world in dealing with the financial system." But the world's richest countries find themselves divided on several areas that require global coordination, including proposals to tax giant banks and impose tougher capital and liquidity requirements on them. Perhaps the biggest area of potential disagreement is when and how indebted countries, including the United States, should pull back the extraordinary spending programs they undertook to revive their economies. In a letter last week, Mr. Obama cautioned that countries should not withdraw spending too quickly. "We must be flexible in adjusting the pace of consolidation and learn from the consequential mistakes of the past when stimulus was too quickly withdrawn and resulted in renewed economic hardships and recession," he wrote. But in an essay published Friday in The Globe and Mail, Britain's new prime minister, David Cameron, argued that reining in deficits was essential to promoting economic growth. "Of course, there must be the flexibility for countries to act, taking account of their own national circumstances," Mr. Cameron, the Conservative leader of Britain's first coalition government since 1945, wrote. "But I believe we must each start by setting out plans for getting our national finances under control." While the fiscal question has preoccupied discussion among economists, the Obama administration said this week that the United States and Europe were not in fundamental conflict. A senior administration official said that American and German officials were largely on the same page about whether the global economy needed stimulus or deficit cutting over the next year. "Everybody is for growth," the official said. Although German officials have been publicly emphasizing the steps they will eventually take to reduce their deficit, the actual cuts they will make in the near term are quite small, the official added; the United States is on course to reduce its deficit significantly faster than Germany in 2011 and 2012. A crucial issue at the G20 will be whether Europe is pursuing structural reforms like changing labor rules to make it easier to fire workers that support the expansion of domestic demand, the official said. The United States government reacted far more aggressively to the financial crisis than most Europeans governments, including Germany's, did, according to International Monetary Fund data. The Europeans, for their part, say the United States, as the country where the financial crisis started, had more to do. The United States will run a larger deficit than Germany in 2010 and 2011 thus doing more to stimulate the economy than the Germans, economists say. But the United States is also withdrawing its stimulus at a more rapid rate than the Germans, I.M.F. numbers show. The G 20 meeting that will begin here Saturday will also test the leaders' resolve in reaching a consensus on new bank capital standards by November, when the G 20 leaders are to meet again in Seoul, South Korea. Several of the G 20 countries have new leaders who will be encountering Mr. Obama for the first time. Along with Mr. Cameron, Japan's new prime minister, Naoto Kan, and Australia's, Julia Gillard, the first woman to occupy the position, will meet with Mr. Obama for the first time since taking office. Both Mr. Kan and Ms. Gillard took office this month, Ms. Gillard just this week. Canada, Australia and Japan have expressed reservations about proposals supported by the United States and Europe for a global bank tax, but the recent changes in governments complicate that picture. Kazuo Kodama, a spokesman for Japan's Foreign Ministry, said here on Friday morning that "a one size fits all approach may not be productive," but said it was not accurate to characterize Japan's new government as being opposed to a bank tax. The G 8 leaders will meet in a lakeside lodge in the village of Huntsville. In meetings and over dinner, the G 8 leaders will discuss poverty alleviation a topic that global relief organizations say has been largely neglected during the economic crisis. Mr. Obama will return to Toronto on Saturday. Mr. Obama will have at least six one on one meetings with other leaders. But except for Mr. Cameron, all of the confirmed bilateral meetings so far are with Asian leaders Mr. Kan of Japan, Hu Jintao of China, Manmohan Singh of India, Lee Myung bak of South Korea and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia in a reflection of Asia's role in leading the global economic recovery. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The columnist Russell Baker complained about the overuse of the word "icon" in this newspaper back in 1997. Since then, its adjectival form has spread like an invasive species. It holds a special place among the fashion set as a descriptor for an outfit that puts one in mind of a look from myth, legend or classic movie. A poncho can be "iconic" if it looks like the one worn by Clint Eastwood in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," for instance. But like fashion, language is always evolving, and in recent months, the word has sometimes been used as a pejorative. Upon seeing a get up that mimicked the look of Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones," an underwhelmed critic may say, "Points for trying, but isn't it a bit ... iconic?" Why say "shirts" when you can say "shirting"? In defense of this term, it may be said that it serves as a catchall for the full array of shirt styles offered by a particular label. Its real purpose, though, is to signify that the speaker is part of the fashion crowd. When most people use the word "story," they mean a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. Fashion people have long used it as a stand in for "theme": A stylist or editor may refer to a four page magazine fashion shoot with a rugged setting as "an outdoor story," for instance. Lately, the meaning of "story" has expanded greatly. I have heard it used to describe a runway show with some momentum ("That was a good story") as well as a fashion reporter's smartphone case decorated with pink unicorn stickers ("Such a fun story. I love it"). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
BEIJING For all of China's efforts to become a global force in high technology rivaling the United States, it has mostly failed to produce top flight contenders in one crucial area: the industry that gave Silicon Valley its name. Last year, China imported more than 300 billion worth of computer chips, the backbone of all digital products. That is more than it spent on crude oil from abroad. Washington has now turned China's reliance on American microchips against Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant that the Trump administration has labeled a national security threat. The Commerce Department last week restricted American firms from selling components and technology to the company, essentially cutting Huawei off from Google software, Qualcomm chips and more. The department said Monday that it would allow Huawei to continue doing business with American suppliers for 90 days to prevent disruption to mobile networks that use the company's equipment. Yet Washington's move still strikes at a national soft spot for China that has weighed on the minds of the country's leaders for decades. Desperate to reduce the dependence on imports, the authorities in China have pledged tens of billions of dollars to help foster homegrown chip champions. The country's dreams of semiconductor hegemony have added to the trade tensions with the United States, which wants Beijing to scale back what it considers unfair government support for Chinese firms. Washington has found reason to directly punish one state backed chip maker, Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Company. After Micron Technology, an American rival, accused the Chinese company of pilfering chip designs, the Commerce Department blocked it from buying American components. The fruits of China's chip drive have been mixed at best. Chinese firms' market share remains modest in most areas of semiconductor production. Nearly all of the most complex chips must still be imported. Several Chinese state backed makers of memory chips, which store data, have announced big production plans. But the global market for such chips is currently saturated, suggesting grim prospects for turning a profit. On the whole, government support has helped the Chinese industry, said Gu Wenjun, chief analyst at ICwise, a semiconductor market research firm in Shanghai. "But now that the market has become overheated and fickle, the negative effects are increasingly apparent," he said. Local governments in China "don't understand the industry," Mr. Gu said. They are merely using up resources that private companies know how to spend more effectively, he added. China's role as the world's leading assembler of electronics, and its vast consumer market for electronics, has convinced some observers that given enough time, the country would inevitably attract or foster the knowledge for producing advanced chips. If China could catch up in making toys and then in producing cellphones, the thinking goes, then why not in semiconductors someday? For now, surviving without American chips promises to be the ultimate test for Huawei, despite the company's recent strides in developing its own processors. In an interview with Chinese media on Tuesday, Huawei's founder and chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, said that in "peaceful times," half of Huawei's chips came from American companies, and the other half it developed itself. Huawei has stockpiled chips for emergencies like this, Mr. Ren said. But the company could never entirely reject American technology, he said. Even members of his own family, he said, are iPhone users. "We will not recklessly get rid of American chips," Mr. Ren said. "We need to grow together." As Japan, South Korea and Taiwan emerged with formidable chip industries in the 1980s and '90s, China experimented with various forms of state planning to develop its own abilities. In 2014, Beijing set a goal of becoming a global leader in all segments of the chip industry by 2030, and national and local government semiconductor investment funds began springing up across the country. The results of those efforts are hard to spot, however, in the innards of leading Chinese tech companies' products. To crack open one of Huawei's smartphones or cellular base stations is to see the extent to which advanced technology is a truly globalized endeavor, even as Beijing and Washington have come to distrust each other's tech providers. In Huawei's new P30 Pro flagship phone, for example, American firms supply a number of key components, including parts that help process the radio signals that carry calls and data through the air, according to an analysis by System Plus Consulting, a research firm in France. The P30 Pro's memory chips are from Micron and the Japanese company Toshiba. The camera technology is from Sony of Japan. The processor, the brains of the phone, was developed by Huawei itself. Huawei's semiconductor division, HiSilicon, has surprised industry observers with the progress it has made in developing processors and baseband chips, which connect phones to data networks. Yet even HiSilicon may be affected by the Commerce Department's restriction. Many of the leading providers of chip design software are American. For other kinds of components, Huawei should not have much trouble finding non American substitutes if it is fully cut off from American suppliers. In memory chips, for instance, Micron is a leading global supplier, but so are Samsung and SK Hynix of South Korea. In general, the more advanced the silicon, the more likely it is that Huawei will have to compromise on quality to avoid American providers like Broadcom, which supplies specialized chips for Huawei's data centers, and Nvidia, which makes high end graphics processors for Huawei's laptops. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
SHANGHAI Faced with a difficult combination of an economy addicted to cheap credit, exorbitant real estate prices fueled by that credit and mounting public concern that housing is no longer affordable, China's government is laying plans for steep new taxes on home sellers. But those plans set off a sharp drop in Chinese stocks on Monday, as investors worried that the taxes could take a heavy toll on developers, an important sector of the Chinese economy. Any slowdown in real estate investment could ripple quickly across the entire economy, reducing demand for steel, cement, household appliances and many other mainstays of China's manufacturing dependent economy. China's cabinet, or State Council, said late Friday that it would insist that home sellers pay a uniform 20 percent capital gains tax on their profit. The government also said it would make it harder for people to buy a second home. Because China, as the world's second largest economy behind the United States, now plays an increasingly important role in global demand for many goods, the drop in Chinese share prices quickly reverberated through stock and commodity markets across Asia. Stocks in Europe also fell; in the United States the stock market dipped early but recovered to register modest gains by the end of the day. "This shows the government is determined to dampen the property market," said Patrick Chovanec, chief strategist at Silvercrest Asset Management in New York and a former professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. "But they go through cycles when they want to pump up the economy, and then they want to cool it down. And this is what's happening again." The slowdown alarmed China's leaders and prompted them to unleash a flood of fresh credit last autumn and this winter from banks, semiregulated trusts and other sources. With loans readily available again, there are signs now that rising real estate prices might be back. The National Statistics Bureau reported that prices jumped in 54 of the 70 cities tracked by the government in January. In Shanghai, for example, average property prices were up as much as 40 percent in the first two months of the year, compared to the same time last year. "Despite the policy induced slowdown in activity, Chinese property remains on a wildly unsustainable path," Mark Williams, an economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a research note. "Developers actually completed just short of 11 million properties last year." In another worrying trend for the Chinese government, the flood of credit in the last few months has failed to cause a sharp uptick in sectors other than real estate; instead, the Chinese economy seems to be settling into a slower long term growth rate even when receiving strong monetary stimulus. The Chinese state news media said in recent days that the government was considering other measures in the hope of holding down housing prices. The announcements led to a weekend rush among those eager to buy and sell properties before the policy took effect. With analysts predicting a sharp drop in property transactions after the policy takes effect, the Shanghai composite index fell 3.65 percent Monday to close at 2,273.40. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng Index dropped 1.5 percent, to 22,537.81. Property developers were hit particularly hard. Shares of Vanke, one of the biggest property developers in China, fell the daily limit of 10 percent in Shenzhen. Poly Real Estate also dropped 10 percent in Shanghai. Early Tuesday, Chinese markets showed signs of stabilizing as shares gained slightly. Enshrining a leader. China's Communist Party delivered Xi Jinping, the country's top leader, a breakthrough on Nov. 11 that will help secure his political future by enshrining him in its firmament of era defining leaders in a resolution reassessing the party's history. A momentous decision. Senior party leaders approved the resolution at a gathering focused on reviewing the party's 100 year history. A communique from the meeting said that under Mr. Xi's leadership, China had "made historic achievements and undergone a historic transformation." Rewriting history. The resolution is expected to become the focus of an indoctrination campaign. It will dictate how the authorities teach China's modern history and how they censor discussion of the past, including through a law meant to punish people who criticize the party's heroes. Third of its kind. With the resolution, which was issued in full on Nov. 16, Mr. Xi can cement his status as an epoch making leader alongside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw the only two other resolutions of this kind, in 1945 and in 1981. As share prices fell on Monday, the government opened its annual parliamentary meeting in Beijing, a session that is expected to complete the nation's once a decade leadership transition and also set the agenda for the leadership team. Among the major challenges Beijing's new leaders face is how to cope with a widening income gap and how to address inflation and the high cost of housing for ordinary Chinese. Another social issue is a generational divide, as tens of millions of young people are finding that home prices have soared far beyond their buying capacity. A popular comparison among recent college graduates is that their typical paycheck of 500 a month means that in an entire year, they could save only enough to buy two square meters, or 21.5 square feet, of an apartment in a large coastal city, and then only if they spent nothing on food or anything else. Buying an 800 square foot apartment could take the paychecks of an entire career, by that calculation. Affluent families often spend heavily to help children buy their first homes, particularly sons a popular perception holds that young men have trouble finding spouses if they do not own a home. But buying a city apartment with family backing is seldom an option for the more than 10 million rural residents pouring into Chinese cities each year, as China maintains one of the world's fastest paces of urbanization. Compounding the national angst over high real estate prices this winter has been a series of cases in which low ranking government officials and bank managers on modest salaries have mysteriously been found to own dozens of homes. Some Chinese cities have responded to the acrimony in recent weeks by severely restricting public access to real estate records. The government's plan for a capital gains tax on home sellers is a new suggestion that had received little public discussion. Previous tax plans to cool the sector had been focused on introducing annual taxes on the assessed value of luxury homes, which have experienced the fastest appreciation over the last decade. The Chinese government has pushed hard for the annual tax because it would raise the carrying cost of homes and prompt more owners to rent or sell their homes, instead of leaving them vacant as speculative investments, as many do now. But local governments lack systems for assessing the value of homes. And many developers and homeowners have argued strenuously that an annual tax would be unfair because the government already owns the land in China and issues very long leases for it, requiring that a sizable fee be paid up front for each year of the lease. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The Cook County Medical Examiner's Office said on Monday that it could not determine Mr. Higgins's cause of death until additional studies were administered, including cardiac pathology, neuropathology and toxicology. The police said they did not suspect foul play. But additional details from the Chicago police department about the incident began to fill in some blanks about the sudden death of one of the most promising and commercially successful young artists in hip hop. Authorities said that when the plane landed at the Atlantic Aviation hangar at Midway airport, it was carrying approximately 70 pounds of marijuana in 41 vacuum sealed bags; six bottles of liquid prescription codeine cough syrup; and three firearms, including two 9 mm pistols and a .40 caliber pistol, along with metal piercing bullets and a high capacity ammunition magazine. The plane, a Gulfstream jet, had come from Van Nuys, Calif., on Saturday. None of the suitcases carrying the drugs had names or personal items attached, the authorities said, and no drug charges have been filed. "As of last night, everybody was being cooperative," said Mr. Guglielmi, the police spokesman. Two men identified as security guards for Mr. Higgins Christopher Long, 36, and Henry Dean, 27 were charged with misdemeanors for illegally possessing guns and ammunition. Mr. Long was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm, while Mr. Dean, who had a permit to carry a gun in Illinois, was charged with carrying a concealed firearm at an airport and possessing the ammunition. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Brianna was never so compelling as when she cracked Jamie right in the face. Her rape story line may never escape the shadow of the show's reliance on sexual violence. That said, her early days at Fraser's Ridge felt more like the beginning of a process than a bandage on a wound, suggesting "Outlander" was trying to make Brianna a full character at the center of this story, however belatedly. And this episode, she unleashes on Jamie and Ian in one of the more painful family scenes since the Fraser reunion. It is part of a shift in Brianna's arc. She has moved from dull horror to burning anger, confessing to Jamie that she dreams of murdering her rapist. Whatever that suggests for the long term, in the short term it's clear that she is trying to come to terms with what happened. She declines to terminate the pregnancy on the slim chance it could be Roger's, and yet her nightmares about Bonnet get worse. But this family feud is also comeuppance for Jamie. And that's rare enough to feel important. Early in this episode, Jamie goes from "It's not your fault, Brianna" to devil's advocate on a dime, so he can goad her into attacking him. Then he pins her in a weirdly loaded sleeper hold and points out that she's powerless to stop him from killing her. You know, to make her feel better. (The actual heart to heart that follows is honest and earnest, but it's hard to forget that Jamie ran out of patience so fast that a father daughter half nelson seemed more expedient than a little more reassurance.) It seems destined to come back and bite him his confidence the sort that implodes. But on "Outlander," Jamie is the hero, and he doesn't tend to face a lot of pushback from characters he respects. Murtagh is still coming over for dinner without a word about how Jamie plans to handle his pledge to the Governor. So the most remarkable thing about this episode is that after Brianna and Claire find out Jamie and Ian dealt some secret violence to Roger, they get mad at Jamie and stay mad. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
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