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The new tower's developer, the Continuum Company's indefatigable Ian Bruce Eichner, has a complicated history with One Madison. He tried unsuccessfully to buy One Madison in 2010, after the building ran into financial trouble and was hobbled by debt and multiple lawsuits; the Related Companies, the CIM Group and the HFZ Capital Group later emerged as the new owners. This time, Mr. Eichner did his due diligence in obtaining financing for his multimillion dollar project at 45 East 22nd Street: Goldman Sachs provided a 340 million construction loan, with an additional 80 million from the Fortress Investment Group and Dune Real Estate Partners. In a recent interview at the sales office at 315 Park Avenue South, Mr. Eichner described the financing, architectural plan, interior design and amenity packages as "fully baked. The only things we haven't picked out and bought yet are the mailboxes." Mr. Eichner, whose previous projects include One Broadway Place, CitySpire and the Continuum South Beach, says he feels the opportunity to build a significant tower in an iconic Manhattan neighborhood is a one off. "Look, I'm a senior citizen, and I don't see myself ever getting to do anything like this again in my lifetime," he said. The glass tower will have what KPF describes as a "contextually appropriate" rusticated granite base reminiscent of a grand manor house, carved from the same type of stone used for the historic United States Custom House in downtown Manhattan. There will be no more than two apartments per floor, and residences will begin on the equivalent of the ninth floor, with full floor units from the 55th floor. Lower floors will be dedicated to building amenities. The views from the upper floors will include the Hudson and East Rivers, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings and Gramercy Park. But even buyers of the smaller apartments on lower floors will have access to the building's so called Upper Club on the 54th floor for private dining and entertaining. One bedrooms will average 1,074 square feet and cost 2.5 million. The two variants of two bedroom apartments will cost 4.49 million for 1,497 square feet and 4.87 million for 1,525 square feet. Three bedrooms will start at 6.04 million for 2,153 square feet. None of the apartments will have private outdoor space, but there will be a terrace on the fifth floor, which will also house a lounge, billiards room and card room. The fourth floor will have a fitness center, and there will be a children's playroom, golf simulator, yoga studio and half court basketball facility on the second floor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The collector Glenn Fuhrman has long been interested in highlighting the work of contemporary artists even those he and his wife, Amanda, do not personally collect through his Manhattan based FLAG Art Foundation. Now the Fuhrmans are joining forces with Suzanne Deal Booth and the Contemporary Austin museum to create a new 800,000 artist prize that builds on the prize started in 2016 by Ms. Deal Booth, a trustee of the Contemporary Austin. The new prize includes a 200,000 cash award, a catalogand a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Austin and at FLAG. The Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize was 100,000 and was first awarded to Rodney McMillian. "It seemed like a natural next step," Mr. Fuhrman said in a telephone interview, "a way to learn about artists we may not even be familiar with."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
LONDON The new head of Boeing's commercial jet business said on Sunday that he was not worried about losing American customers to Airbus, the European airplane maker, after that company's decision to build its first factory in the United States. "I don't think our customers really care where an airplane is built," Raymond L. Conner, who succeeded James F. Albaugh last month as the head of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, told journalists on the eve of the Farnborough International Airshow in England. "If they did, we would have about 100 percent market share" in the United States. Airbus said last week that it would invest 600 million over the next five years to build an assembly line in Mobile, Ala., for its popular A320 single aisle jet. Airbus has said it views the move into Boeing's home territory as part of a long term strategy to double its share of the world's largest market for 150 seat airplanes, which includes Boeing's top selling 737. It is a market that Boeing now dominates. While the two companies split the global market almost evenly, Boeing holds an 83 percent share in the United States, with many carriers, including Southwest and Alaska Airlines, flying only Boeing jets.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
By the time Alex Donahue, a 31 year old United States Air Force veteran, moved to New York in the summer of 2016, he had already been a renter in Montana, Oregon, Texas, the Philippines and Germany. He knew that every housing market has its quirks, so he booked three weeks at a hostel in Long Island City to give himself sufficient time to look. But he soon discovered that finding housing as a veteran in New York required far more than that. "This is the most challenging place I've been in to get a room," he said. Mr. Donahue, who was moving here to attend the City University of New York, had a housing allowance from the Post 9/11 G.I. Bill that came to 3,600 a month, tax free. With additional veteran's compensation that he received for his time in the service also tax free he felt his income should be more than enough to cover the rent on a studio apartment. However, because he had been a full time student for more than a year at that point, his tax returns showed no taxable income. "I'd heard the city runs on money, and I came here with that thought: If it's income, it's income," he said. "But I was turned away from place after place because my tax returns said zero." Some landlords, he said, thought that his veteran's income was a welfare program that would vanish, rather than part of a professional benefits package. Others could not be convinced that his G.I. housing allowance was not, like a student loan disbursement, also intended to cover tuition. He tried to explain the situation countless times, he said, but the landlords and real estate agents he encountered were unfamiliar with veteran's income and were unwilling to accept it. What many landlords don't realize, however, is that turning away veterans on the G.I. bill is, in fact, illegal. Several brokers suggested he get a guarantor, but his only living parent was unable to help. And he was shocked by the amount guarantors were expected to earn: 80 times the monthly rent, not just the difference between his income and the 40 times the rent that most landlords require. In addition to that being potentially unfeasible, having supported himself his entire adult life he found the notion of asking a friend or relative to submit extensive financial documentation and co sign a lease deeply unappealing. "I never had to have a guarantor in my life," said Mr. Donahue, who tried to placate landlords by telling them that in addition to the security deposit, he had renters' insurance that would cover any potential damages to the apartment. "You don't need someone with half a million dollars in a bank account." But it seemed that you did. With landlord after landlord turning him down and his time at the hostel drawing to an end guests at the hostel were limited to stays of less than 30 days a year he was left with one option: He contacted the city's Department of Veterans' Services, which offered him a bed in a veterans' shelter. "It was a pretty nice at the shelter, which was set up like apartments with individual rooms," Mr. Donahue said. Working with the city agency, he was finally able to get a landlord to accept his income documentation for a 1,500 a month studio in Flushing, Queens. That the broker for the apartment, which he found on Craigslist, was also a veteran, helped too. The 1,000 bonus that the city offers landlords who rent to homeless veterans an amount that has since been raised to 3,500 was an added sweetener. Despite the difficulty of landing his first place, this spring Mr. Donahue decided to venture into the New York City rental market again. This time, he was in search of a room share. While 1,500 is considered reasonable for a studio in New York, it was still a small fortune compared to what he paid in every other place he had lived. The extra money would also be welcome, as housing was not the only expense he found high in the city. Plus, he knew that he would receive his full G.I. housing stipend even if his costs were lower. In May, he moved into a three bedroom apartment in Woodside, Queens, that he shares with two academics. He pays 875 a month, plus utilities, for a medium size room with a window overlooking a quiet street. The process, however, was almost as difficult as getting his first studio. Not only did he have to find roommates willing to accept his form of income, but he was looking for an alcohol free, no smoking home without pets, a TV, or long term guests sleeping on the couch.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Peter Serkin, a pianist admired for his insightful interpretations, technically pristine performances and tenacious commitment to contemporary music, died on Saturday at his home in Red Hook, N.Y., in Dutchess County, near the campus of Bard College, where he was on the faculty. He was 72. His death, from pancreatic cancer, was announced by his family. Mr. Serkin was descended from storied musical lineages on both sides of his family. His father was the eminent pianist Rudolf Serkin; his maternal grandfather was the influential conductor and violinist Adolf Busch, whose musical forebears went back generations. By 12, Peter Serkin was performing prominently in public, and he soon seemed poised to continue the legacy of his father, who was known for authoritative accounts of the central European repertory. His first two recordings, made for the RCA label when he was 18, confirmed this impression. One was a buoyant, lucid and probing account of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations that many critics compared favorably to Glenn Gould's influential version; the other was a glowing, preternaturally mature account of Schubert's spacious late Sonata in G, Op. 78. Yet, though he was proud of his heritage, Mr. Serkin found it a burden. Like many who came of age in the 1960s, he questioned the establishment, both in society at large and within classical music. He resisted a traditional career trajectory and at 21 stopped performing, going for months without even playing the piano. He traveled to India, touching down in Nepal and Thailand, and lived for a while in Mexico with his wife at the time, Wendy Spinner, and their baby daughter. Recalling those years in a 1987 interview with The Boston Globe, Mr. Serkin said that back then performing was often "a painful ordeal" for him, and that he could not bear all "that harping by musicians and critics on how you play, as if that's the central issue." This pressure was compounded, he added, by the fact that his family "took music so seriously, in the Old World sense of being a kind of religion," and maintained "such identification with our being musicians" that it was necessary "for me to just drop that." By challenging his legacy, he sought to claim it on his own terms, and contemporary music became central to his artistic identity. Yet Mr. Serkin disliked being called a "champion" of contemporary music, as if the music of his own time occupied some different realm and required expert advocates. Throughout his career, he presented recital programs that juxtaposed the old and the new: 12 tone scores and Mozart sonatas; thorny pieces by the mid 20th century German composer Stefan Wolpe and polyphonic works from the Renaissance. Admirers of his playing appreciated how he drew out allusions to music's past in contemporary scores, while conveying the radical elements of old music. He played almost all the piano works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Wolpe. He also introduced dozens of pieces, including major works and concertos, written for him by composers like Toru Takemitsu, Charles Wuorinen and, especially, his childhood friend Peter Lieberson. Reviewing Mr. Serkin's 1985 recording of Mr. Lieberson's Piano Concerto No. 1, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa, the critic Tim Page wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Serkin seemed to him "America's pre eminent young pianist his intelligence and perceptivity invariably take the listener to the heart of the music." Peter Adolf Serkin (his middle name was in honor of his grandfather) was born in Manhattan on July 24, 1947, the fifth of seven children of Rudolf Serkin and Irene Busch Serkin. (A daughter died in infancy.) During his childhood he mostly lived on his parents' farm in Guilford, Vt., not far from Marlboro College, the site of the summer Marlboro Music Festival, founded by a group of artists including Rudolf Serkin and his grandfather Adolf Busch. Irene Serkin, like her father, played the violin, which was young Peter's first instrument. But he was drawn more to the piano. Nevertheless, Rudolf Serkin acknowledged that he had not given his son much encouragement early on. "I doubted he was talented," he said in a 1980 New York Times Magazine profile of his son. "He was so full of tension when he played; I didn't realize that was his real gift." He said that having been compelled by his own father to be a musician, he "was reluctant to push Peter." At 11, Peter Serkin enrolled at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where his father was teaching. (Rudolf Serkin later became the institute's director.) There he studied with the master Polish born pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski, who became a major influence, as well as the American virtuoso Lee Luvisi and his father. After graduating at 18, Mr. Serkin took an apartment in New York, avidly listened to recordings by Frank Zappa and the Grateful Dead, and explored Buddhist and Hindu spiritual teachings. He found the pressure of playing in public, and simply of being a Serkin, almost crippling. "Up until then I was playing concerts largely out of compulsion, and not much new music," he said in a 1973 New York Times interview. "I had just fallen into it without ever deciding for myself that it was what I wanted to do." After his time off and restorative travels, he resumed performing with renewed satisfaction. That he had found the right balance was suggested by the success of two three LP albums, both recorded in 1973, when he turned 26, both of which earned Grammy Award nominations. The first offered Mozart's Piano Concerto Nos. 14 19, with Alexander Schneider conducting the English Chamber Orchestra. The performance splendidly balanced Schneider's Old World approach to Mozart with Mr. Serkin's youthful, rethought playing. The second was a complete account of Messiaen's "Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus," a set of 20 solo piano "contemplations" on the infant Jesus composed in 1944. It is music of extraordinary difficulty lasting two and a half hours, alive with cluster chords and evocations of bird calls, moments of mystical bliss and stretches of driving intensity. In conjunction with the recording Mr. Serkin played the piece, from memory, more than two dozen times in concert halls and colleges, sometimes backed by a light show. Messiaen heard him play it at Dartmouth and was "really too kind," the pianist recalled in the Boston Globe interview: "He told me that I respected the score, but that when I didn't, it was even better." That same year he formed the chamber ensemble Tashi along with three like minded colleagues: the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, the violinist Ida Kavafian and the cellist Fred Sherry. The group's signature piece was Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," an alternately meditative and ecstatic work in eight movements lasting nearly 50 minutes. Tashi performed it more than 100 times, often with its young players dressed in dashikis or tunics, and recorded it to acclaim in 1975. The group essentially disbanded in the late 1970s after several internal upheavals. Though Mr. Serkin never completely shook off the early perception of him as "the counterculture's reluctant envoy to the straight concert world," as the Times critic Donal Henahan called him in an admiring 1973 profile, over time he reconciled to the ways, even the dress protocols, of that classical world and developed productive associations with artists like the Guarneri String Quartet, the mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (who had married Peter Lieberson) and the conductors Seiji Ozawa, Herbert Blomstedt, Robert Shaw and Pierre Boulez. Having children also gave him an emotional mooring that he cherished, even during periods of marital strain. Karina Serkin Spitzley, the only child of his marriage to Ms. Spinner, which ended in divorce in 1979, survives him, along with four children from his second marriage, to Regina Touhey Serkin (from whom he was divorced in 2018): Maya, Elena, Stefan (named after Stefan Wolpe) and William Serkin; and two grandchildren. His brother, John, and his sisters Elizabeth, Judith and Marguerite also survive him. Another sister, Ursula, died last year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The weather is always a collaborator in River to River, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's annual festival of site specific performance, and last weekend it was in peak form. The festival's organizer, Sam Miller, deserved nothing less; his lineup this year is stellar. Lucid skies, light breezes and just right temperatures made a dancegoer rejoice in the concept of piers, lawns and seaside cafes as theatrical spaces, as did the stealthy use of those spaces by the artists who occupied them. Just as a place can frame a performance, a performance can frame a place, intensifying what it looks and feels like or magnifying details you might not have otherwise seen. Such was the case with the three shows I saw over 36 hours: Vanessa Anspaugh's "What Was Wasn't Here," in and around a 19th century house on Governors Island; Ephrat Asherie and Hector Arce Espasas's "Everyday I'm Hustlin' " at Nelson Blue, a South Street Seaport bar; and Enrico D. Wey's "where we are right now" on Pier 15, set against a panorama of the East River and its Brooklyn shores. The midday sun on Saturday made for unsettling contrasts in Ms. Anspaugh's gritty work, an extension of her recent "we were an island." The first things you noticed upon entering Building 10A an oddly staid name for what was once someone's home were the tendrils of paint peeling from the walls, the dried grass scattered across the wooden floorboards and the funereal organ blasting through big black speakers in the corners of empty rooms. Had someone died? The window shades were closed, the space lit by small industrial fixtures. No one was home, or so it seemed until you went upstairs, where two women (Ms. Anspaugh and Bessie McDonough Thayer) began to lift the shades and unplug the fixtures with ceremonious attention, replacing artificial light with natural. We had been instructed to watch the performance, which continued outside in the yard, through any open window. From my perch on the second floor, the women and a third dancer, Addys Gonzalez, looked like poetic, almost tragic misfits in a landscape dotted with picnicking families and bluegrass bands. Ms. Anspaugh's choreographic scenarios are full of struggle, blurring tenderness and violence. One dancer hauled another's limp body across the lawn. Crouched on all fours, the three lowered their faces to the ground and came up with clumps of grass in their mouths, as a dark, heavy beat pounded through the house. And what to make of the photo shoot trappings behind them: two tall lights framing a white backdrop and a bed of flowers, which they stuffed down their shirts before wandering out of sight? Across the river the next evening, a similar ambiguity and loneliness suffused Mr. Wey's new work for four performers, which had moments of stunning alignment with its maritime surroundings. An overhead installation of slanting ropes mirrored the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and the architecture of a passing ship, which raised its sails just as the show began. When John McGrew sounded a trumpet, a departing water taxi matched his pitch. And the dancers seemed to embody oceanic states, the behavior of the waves behind them: choppy and agitated, gently swelling, crashing into or engulfing one another. These coincidences could be marvelously absurd, too, as when a boat emblazoned with the name Hornblower Hybrid trundled toward the reedlike Mary Read, a hulking impostor in the middle of her meticulous, melancholic solo. The night before, Ms. Asherie, a hip hop B girl versed in seemingly every style of street dance, and Mr. Arce Espasas, a D.J., navigated a more logistical kind of ambiguity: Was this a performance or a party? Part of the festival's new late night Living Rooms series, "Everyday I'm Hustlin' " was both, with Mr. Arce Espasas spinning disco and funk for Ms. Asherie and three fleet footed colleagues. Her mash up of Latin hustle, salsa, breaking and house was fabulous. But even better was her dexterity, when the choreographed part was over, in getting everyone out on the dance floor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Every four years, at an international gathering of mathematicians, the subject's youngest and brightest are honored with the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. This year's recipients, announced on Wednesday at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro, include one of the youngest ever : Peter Scholze, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bonn who is 30 years old. Two weeks ago, Peter Woit, a professor at Columbia University who blogs about mathematics and physics, was among those who anticipated that Dr. Scholze would receive the medal. Dr. Woit said Dr. Scholze was "by far the most talented arithmetic geometer of his generation." By custom, Fields medals are bestowed to mathematicians 40 years old or younger. That means Dr. Scholze would have still been eligible for another two rounds of medals. The medal, first awarded in 1936, was conceived by John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician. The youngest winner, Jean Pierre Serre in 1954, was 27.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The director Clint Eastwood speaking to reporters at the Atlanta premiere of his new movie, "Richard Jewell." ATLANTA Clint Eastwood received a standing ovation on Tuesday when he was introduced by the Georgia House speaker, David Ralston, for the red carpet premiere of "Richard Jewell" at the Rialto Center for the Arts in downtown Atlanta. The audience broke into applause again at the climax of the fact based film Mr. Eastwood directed about the security guard who was suspected by the F.B.I. of planting a bomb at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. The reaction was a contrast to how the film was received Wednesday at a screening arranged by Cox Enterprises, the owner of The Atlanta Journal Constitution, at a theater near the newspaper's headquarters. During a scene in which a Journal Constitution reporter is shown offering sex to an F.B.I. agent in exchange for information a scene the paper has called "false and defamatory" an audience member hissed. The film shows Kathy Scruggs, a law enforcement reporter, sidling up to the F.B.I. agent at a bar days after a pipe bomb packed with nails had exploded at Centennial Olympic Park in the city's downtown area, causing two deaths and injuring 111 people. "Give me something I can print," says Ms. Scruggs, who is played by Olivia Wilde. In most respects, "Richard Jewell," based on a 1997 Vanity Fair article, "American Nightmare," and a recently published nonfiction book, "The Suspect," is faithful to the events it describes. But the scene in which Ms. Scruggs, who died in 2001 at age 42, trades sex for a scoop did not appear in either the article, by Marie Brenner, or the book, written by Kent Alexander, the United States attorney in Atlanta at the time of the bombing, and Kevin Salwen, a journalist who was based in Atlanta for The Wall Street Journal. As the movie shows, Mr. Jewell was indeed a suspect, and The Journal Constitution reported that fact in a front page article. After a CNN anchor read the story aloud on the air, other networks and newspapers joined the media herd. The suspect, who was never charged, spent his days holed up in his apartment as reporters staked him out, an ordeal that ended only when he was exonerated three months after the bombing. In 2005, Eric Robert Rudolph, a serial bomber, confessed to the crime. Mr. Jewell died in 2007, a symbol for those who have faced trial by media during the 24 hour news cycles that came about when cable television was on the rise, a syndrome that prefigured the rushes to judgment of the social media era. Tom Johnson, who was the president of CNN at the time of the bombing, said the news media's handling of the story was regrettable. "We were almost saying that he was guilty," he said in an interview. "Nobody wrote that, but the unbelievable amount of coverage that was being given to Richard Jewell and the way in which all of us were trying to investigate it and report on it it was incredibly complex, but it was unsettling." Mr. Eastwood's film, written by the veteran screenwriter Billy Ray, follows the standard practice for movies based on real life events by taking liberties with certain facts to speed the story along. But it uses Ms. Scruggs's real name while giving a new one to the F.B.I. agent, raising the question of whether the filmmakers risked damaging the reporter's reputation in their efforts to convey how Mr. Jewell lost his. This week, The Journal Constitution sent a letter to Warner Bros. and the filmmakers, hinting at legal action for what it characterized as a defamatory depiction of Ms. Scruggs and an incomplete portrayal of how the paper arrived at the article naming Mr. Jewell as a suspect. "For a film that purports to be about the besmirching of someone's reputation to proceed to smear Ms. Scruggs and the paper she reported for in this manner is highly offensive," said the letter, which was also signed by Cox Enterprises, the owner of the newspaper and one of the country's largest cable companies. Cox hired the litigator Martin D. Singer, known for his work on behalf of celebrities like Charlie Sheen and Bill Cosby, to represent the paper. 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. Warner Bros. fired back with a statement that said, "It is unfortunate and the ultimate irony that The Atlanta Journal Constitution, having been a part of the rush to judgment of Richard Jewell, is now trying to malign our filmmakers and cast." Weeks before the film's release, The Journal Constitution published an article headlined "The Ballad of Kathy Scruggs." It described a "hard charging" police reporter who used "salty language," wore "short skirts" and did not leave crime scenes "until her notebook was full." The article also said the film version of Ms. Scruggs "veers from reality, according to people who knew and worked with her, in suggesting she landed scoops by offering to sleep with sources." The film's bar scene has turned a cinematic examination of privacy, due process and the excesses of the news media into a target for critics who have called it the latest example of Hollywood's sexist take on women in journalism. The trope of female reporters sleeping with sources or story subjects has appeared in the HBO limited series "Sharp Objects," the Netflix show "House of Cards" and the movie "Thank You for Smoking," among other productions. Kelly McBride, a onetime police reporter who is the senior vice president of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit organization that supports journalism, said the portrayal of Ms. Scruggs did not reflect reality. "It is so exceedingly rare," she said. "And yet this male dominated world of Hollywood needs to cast female reporters as subject to the whims of nature." "I think Clint Eastwood is showing his age, frankly," she added of the 89 year old director. Critics have noted that a film focused on a low point for law enforcement and the press was directed by a prominent conservative at a time when President Trump has vilified the F.B.I. as an arm of the so called deep state and has repeatedly called the news media "the enemy of the people." In the Vanity Fair article, Ms. Brenner wrote that an unnamed staff member at The Journal Constitution referred to Ms. Scruggs as a "police groupie." But the article did not report that she had used sex to learn that Mr. Jewell was a suspect or had a sexual relationship with any F.B.I. agent on the case. Ms. Scruggs shared a byline for the July 1996 article naming Mr. Jewell as a suspect with Ron Martz. In an interview, Mr. Martz, who spent 26 years at the paper before leaving in 2007, said that he had not been contacted by anybody working on the film and that its portrayal of his colleague was false. "She could be flirtatious, but she wouldn't have done that sort of thing, because she was very conscious of her role as a reporter and she wanted to be known as a top notch reporter," he said. He added, "That sort of portrayal of her, it's an insult not only to her, but to just about any other woman who's been a reporter." The discussion also went into the question of whether the newspaper had been right, in the weeks after the bombing, to report that Mr. Jewell was the leading suspect and to describe him as someone who "fits the profile of the lone bomber." (A libel lawsuit filed against the newspaper was dismissed in 2007.) "I think it's worth addressing the broader criticism, regardless of what the movie got right or wrong," Meris Lutz, a reporter at the paper, said. Of the bar scene, she added: "It felt so unnecessary. If they had cut that, I don't think it would have affected the movie at all."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
FREIBURG, Germany Siemens, an electronics and engineering giant that is a bellwether for German industry, said on Tuesday that profit and new orders fell late last year as the European debt crisis made customers more cautious about investing in new projects. Profit in the last three months of 2011, which is Siemens's fiscal first quarter, fell to 1.5 billion euros ( 1.95 billion), a drop of 17 percent compared to a year earlier. Sales rose 2 percent to 17.9 billion euros. But new orders declined 5 percent to 19.8 billion euros, which augured poorly for future quarters. "The uncertainties of the ongoing debt crisis have left their mark on the real economy," Peter Loscher, the chief executive of Siemens, said in a statement. He said he expected a recovery in the second half of the year but added, "We must work hard to achieve our goals." The company, based in Munich, reported lower profit in all its major business areas, including a 36 percent decline in its energy unit, which Siemens attributed to delays in major power transmission projects and a loss in the division that makes wind turbines. The energy unit is the largest part of the company by sales.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Leaf through vintage records from Sly and the Family Stone while sipping coffee. Pair duck confit with a mezcal cocktail. Sprawl on a kidney shaped banquette with a personal mixologist. Maybe catch a rugby match. Those are the divergent options at the Vnyl, a four floor, 7,000 square foot entertainment Tower of Babel that opened in the East Village in September. "What we're trying to create here is a lifestyle brand," said James Morrissey, the owner, who tapped Adrian Grenier of "Entourage" fame as its music director. "It's not just a bar and restaurant." While the Vnyl may be the most ambitious of the New York's night life openings this fall, other would be hots spots are similarly hybridized. The Flower Shop is a restaurant and sports pub; San Remo Cafe is a cafe, coffee shop and bar; Kola House is a club, restaurant and marketing experiment owned by Pepsi. Multiuse bars may be the result of generational migration and shifting tastes. "All the young, out and about creative types moved to Brooklyn," said Ronnie Flynn, a co owner of the Flower Shop. "They want a place to do a little bit of everything when they come into the city. Ten years ago, there were a million cool little things to do." His partner in the Flower Shop, Dylan Hales, suspects the issue is even more macro level. "The big nightclub phase of New York has kind of faded away," he said. Spiraling Manhattan rent is another factor. It's not always viable to operate for a few nocturnal hours a week. "If you have a space and the rent is so high, you have to come up with creative ways to activate it for longer periods of time," said Billy Jones, a co owner of Baby's All Right, a club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that has a bar, dining room and performance stage. His next venture, a two floor club in NoHo, will follow a similar blueprint. "Pay your rent with brunch," added Zachary Mexico, the other owner. Owned by Pepsi, Kola House turns the 5,000 square foot space above the discotheque, Gilded Lily, into a laboratory for marketing initiatives and recipes that utilize the kola nut. (It shows up in cocktails and is infused into "Electric Brew" beer.) The restaurant and club are a bit of a head scratcher; the familiar red, white and blue cans are nowhere to be seen, and the only apparent nod to the company's signature beverage is a series of black and brass pipes intertwined behind the bar. Before its official opening last week, Kola House hosted a slew of parties during fashion week, including a celebration for Made, with a performance by the rapper Vince Staples and a D.J. set by Vashtie Kola (no relation). Open now. Reshaping the 2,000 square foot space occupied by the sloshy tiki bar Riff Raff's, Squares is fortuitously positioned in a transitional neighborhood now bubbling with activity. "We've been in this area six years and it's dramatically changed," said Michael Stillman, an owner and restaurateur behind Quality Branded. "But there's no real night life." The pixelated decor is a clever twist on the name. Walls are covered in tile mosaics of deer heads, fireplaces and badminton rackets, and a painting of a digitized fox hunt hangs behind the bar. 'You're in a Nintendo version of an old club, like 'Maniac Mansion,'" said Eric Adolfsen, the lead designer. Indicating the type of crowd it hopes to attract, Squares hosted fashion week parties for Bibhu Mohapatra and Tim Coppens, and Jennifer Lopez attended the opening party last week. Open now. Squares, 360 Park Avenue South (entrance on East 26th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues); squaresny.com. North Williamsburg's transformation into a bloodless meatpacking district marches forward. The new 22 story William Vale hotel, which looks like a layer cake on stilts, may be Brooklyn's version of the Standard, High Line, but can Westlight be the borough's Boom Boom Room? The large rooftop bar, an airy rectangle of muted tones, glass and steel, leaves most ambience to the altitude. Unobstructed views from its surrounding balcony are spectacular (look down on the puny Wythe hotel and teeming mortals in scorn). The menu of tacos and spring rolls comes from Andrew Carmellini, whose Italian restaurant Leuca opens downstairs this fall. Anne Robinson, formerly of the Evening Bar and PDT, is the head bartender. "Maybe we'll get the Output runoff of clubgoers," she said, referring to the music club across the street. Open now. The Flower Shop, 107 Eldridge Street (between Grand and Broome Streets); theflowershopnyc.com. Anchored in the daytime by a coffee shop and cafe, San Remo loosens up at night, sharing Petrosino Square in NoLIta with La Esquina, Cafe Select and Southside. The 1,500 square foot space has long green leather banquettes, three chandeliers and a tiny "phone booth" room (they would prefer you take calls there, if necessary). For now, the goal is appealing to locals, not luring crowds with big name bookings. "Every place with a D.J. ends up being the same," said P.J. Monte, one of three owners and a D.J. himself. "We want to be a little more grown up living room for the neighborhood." Opens in October. SWAY (305 Spring Street), the onetime hot spot that closed last year, is returning under the stewardship of Paul Sevigny and Brian McPeck; expect the beloved Sunday night Morrissey party to return. Also in Manhattan, the team behind Baby's All Right and Elvis Guesthouse is planning an indie music hall and restaurant in NoHo (428 Lafayette Street) that is to open this year. ELSEWHERE (599 Johnson Avenue, Brooklyn), a large music hall and arts space from the owners of shuttered D.I.Y. venue Glasslands, will open in a converted warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Three fellow dissidents whom I've known personally have been murdered (Boris Nemtsov, Anastasia Baburova, Stanislav Markelov) and two beaten almost to death (Mikhail Beketov and Oleg Kashin). I myself was sent to prison for two years just for singing a song, and many, many activists in my country have been sentenced to more time and suffered far worse fates. This is the reality I live with day to day, that we in Russia and my friends in Belarus are living with day to day. You learn to live with it, to fight it as you can, deal with it how you can, but it becomes your life. And of course it's not just activists who are targeted by Mr. Putin's authoritarianism: The greed and corruption of this president and a handful of families that are close to him affects everyone, every day. Inequality is skyrocketing in Russia. Unrest is growing. Many Russians are tired of backward looking, post imperial, oppressive, Cold War style politics and ready to become a forward looking country focused on building infrastructure, better schools and health care. Since the 2018 election, Mr. Putin's popularity has been on the decline, hitting an all time low of 59 percent in May. Our president has only just recently had the law changed so that he can stay in power until 2036, but his program of repression didn't start out this blatantly. These things happen in pieces, bit by bit, small acts. And each one may even seem relatively benign at first, perhaps bad, but not fatal. You get angry, maybe you speak out, but you get on with your life. The promise of our democracy was chipped away in pieces, one by one: corrupt cronies appointed, presidential orders issued, actions taken, laws passed, votes rigged. It happens slowly, intermittently; sometimes we couldn't see how steadily. Autocracy crept in, like the coward it is. Nadya Tolokonnikova is an artist and activist and a founder of the band Pussy Riot. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The latest person to offer his services as guide in this regard is Kevin Davis, in "The Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America's Courtrooms." Davis, a veteran Chicago reporter, is the author of two previous books, "The Wrong Man" (1996), an engrossing true crime account of a mentally challenged man falsely convicted of a savage murder in Florida, and the brilliant "Defending the Damned" (2007), a revealing portrait of Chicago's public defenders. In both those works, despite Davis's efforts to be evenhanded, he could not help but bring his natural proclivities toward the defense's side to bear; and in those books, that proclivity was entirely appropriate. But is it here? To answer that question, we can focus (as Davis does) on the case of Herbert Weinstein, a 65 year old New Yorker, seemingly reserved in manner, who struck and strangled his second wife in 1991, then threw her (perhaps still alive) out of a 12th story window to try to make her death appear a suicide. His family and friends were stunned; nothing in his life seemed to indicate that he was capable of such an act. When initially examined, he passed all the standard neurological and psychiatric tests for brain competency easily. But Weinstein had committed his crime in the era of M.R.I.s; and when he was scanned with one such machine, the results appeared shocking. He had a gaping space the size of an orange in the area of his left frontal lobe: the region that, it is generally agreed, governs impulse control. His defense lawyer, when the space was revealed to be an arachnoid cyst (a growth in the weblike lining between the brain and the skull), knew he had his defense. And it worked in the short term. When presented with the M.R.I. and other imagery, the prosecutor in the case decided that he could not press the murder charge. If the jury saw this apparent "hole" in Weinstein's brain, they might bring in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. So he agreed when Weinstein said he would not contest a lesser charge of manslaughter, and the judge decreed the minimum sentence of seven years. It was historic, the first time that brain imagery had been used to mitigate the sentence of a confessed killer. But were the use of the images, the plea bargain and the sentence just? Davis's answer is ambiguous and perplexing, just as it is when he considers many similar cases indeed, far too many, for a book of this length. Perplexing because Davis never adequately explores alternate behavioral theories (the work of forensic psychology) that were and are illuminating. There are general questions such as the very large numbers of people walking around the United States with arachnoid cysts and other brain irregularities in their heads who never commit crimes or become violent and there are questions specific to Weinstein. It turns out, for example, that the supposedly genial gentleman may have had financial motives (including gambling debts) for his well to do wife's death, and that he had attended meetings of the Hemlock Society, a national right to die group that often discusses methods of suicide: methods that Weinstein may have found useful in covering his crime. And, perhaps most damning of all, the same forensic psychologist who discovered these and more incriminating facts before the plea agreement was reached, Daniel Martell, also found that Weinstein had been an overweight, bullied child, one who had struggled throughout his life to control an inner sense of rage often planted by such experiences. As if to demonstrate as much, it turned out that on the day of the killing, when he and his wife had been arguing about their respective children from their first marriages, his wife had been taunting him about his grown son's own weight.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Since 2000, I have participated in three presidential transitions from the vantage points of both the departing and the incoming administration. This year, although I serve on the Biden Harris transition advisory board, I am not a member of the transition team and, as always, these views are my own. Each transition I experienced was different, but what they shared was a recognition that our country's national security is best served when both sides endeavor to have a responsible handoff of power. Conversely, it is undermined when either side refuses to engage the other seriously. In the week since Joe Biden's victory became clear, President Trump and his administration have taken no steps toward starting the process of transition. The risks to our national security are mounting. My first transition began in December 2000, soon after a Supreme Court ruling made George W. Bush the winner of the disputed election. As the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, I was the first bureau chief to meet with the incoming secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell. President elect Bush and his senior national security team had begun receiving the president's daily intelligence briefing and had access to critical information. But the normal process that follows after a president elect has been chosen the incoming administration sends teams to each department to receive detailed information on policy, budget, personnel and other matters had awaited the Supreme Court's Dec. 12 Bush v. Gore decision. I was struck immediately by Secretary designate Powell's unique style. He came alone to the State Department cool, confident, casually dressed and without staff members, bag carriers or pretense of any sort. He asked to meet with me and the Africa bureau first, presumably to send the message that he would treat this sometimes under appreciated region of the world with the seriousness it deserves. Mr. Powell asked thoughtful, probing questions and brought his signature dignity and professionalism to every encounter with the departing administration. Despite the abbreviated transition timetable and the controversy surrounding the election, we on the exiting Clinton team did our utmost to provide Mr. Powell with everything that he might want in terms of information and support. In 2008, I was a co leader of President elect Barack Obama's national security transition team and was named United Nations ambassador designate. I had started working with the General Services Administration before the election to ensure that the office space allotted to the president elect's team would be suitable for all of our needs, including the handling of classified information. Swiftly granted a top secret security clearance, I received access to the president's intelligence briefing in order to help facilitate the smooth transfer of sensitive security information from one team to the next. Later, I was provided full support by my predecessor at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, and his team, as I sought to prepare for confirmation and quickly get up to speed. Mr. Obama often speaks of how much he valued the stellar efforts of Mr. Bush and his administration to conduct a thorough and seamless transition. At each agency and in almost every respect, the 2008 transition was a model for its thoroughness, collegiality and efficacy. Finally, I was national security adviser in 2016 during the handoff from Mr. Obama to President elect Trump. Under strict instructions from Mr. Obama to provide his successor, whoever it may be, with a quality start that matched or exceeded that which he had received from Mr. Bush, the National Security Council staff worked for months in advance of the election to prepare more than 100 briefing papers. I personally reviewed every memo on subjects that ranged from staffing, budget and the most complicated policy issues, to numerous potentially dire national security contingencies that might arise early in a new administration, along with recommended steps for how to deal with them. Shortly after my successor, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was named, I called to congratulate him and pledged to give him as much of my time until the Trump inauguration as he wanted. It took a couple weeks for General Flynn to take me up on my repeated offers to meet but, ultimately, we met on four occasions, spending more than 12 hours together. I answered all of his questions on how to approach the job of national security adviser and laid out in depth the numerous challenges he would confront immediately from the campaign to defeat the Islamic State to threats posed by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. I also stressed the need to be prepared for less obvious threats, like the potentially catastrophic collapse of the Mosul Dam in Iraq and pandemic disease. At the conclusion of our last meeting, I wished General Flynn well and offered to be of assistance, if needed, after he took office. Following our goodbyes, but before he left my office, General Flynn surprised me by asking for a hug. It was a collegial and respectful, if slightly awkward, request, and I obliged. As it turns out, my hours with General Flynn and those of other White House officials with their incoming counterparts, plus President Obama's two hour meeting with President elect Trump, proved to be the sum total of the 2016 national security transition at the highest levels. That's because the incoming Trump cabinet was apparently told not to meet with their Obama counterparts in their respective departments and most did not do so. The exception was one three hour tabletop exercise in January, which is mandated by law, during which cabinet officials on both teams sat together to review mock threat scenarios relating to terrorism, cybersecurity and pandemic disease. It was far from the optimal transition that Mr. Obama had wanted. In 2020, as the days tick by and Mr. Trump shows no signs of starting a transition, the risks increase. Mr. Biden and his top national security team have not been provided the daily intelligence briefings to which they are entitled. Mr. Biden's team is not receiving classified information. The Biden Harris agency review teams are constituted but have been denied access to every element of the executive branch. Vital exchanges of information and expertise that would help combat Covid 19 and jump start the economy remain stalled. While we are extremely fortunate that Mr. Biden may be the most experienced president elect ever to take office and brings with him a deep bench of highly qualified, knowledgeable experts, the Trump administration's continued refusal to execute a responsible transition puts our national security at risk. Without access to critical threat information, no incoming team can counter what it can't see coming. If, today, the Trump administration is tracking potential or actual threats for instance, Russian bounties on American soldiers, a planned terrorist attack on an embassy, a dangerously mutated coronavirus, or Iranian and North Korean provocations but fails to share this information in a timely fashion with the Biden Harris team, it could cost us dearly in terms of American lives. Indeed, the 9/11 Commission, which investigated the 2001 Qaeda terrorist attacks on U.S. soil that killed some 3,000 Americans, found that the truncated 2000 transition slowed the installation of key national security officials and stressed the importance of complete and thorough presidential transitions to U.S. national security. Instead of acting in the national interest to orchestrate a responsible, democratic transition, Mr. Trump and many Republicans are spending time sowing false doubts about the legitimacy of Mr. Biden's election. Tragically, but not surprisingly, Mr. Trump appears determined to take a final wrecking ball to our democracy and national security on his inevitable way out the door. Susan E. Rice ( AmbassadorRice), the national security adviser from 2013 to 2017 and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a contributing opinion writer. She is the author of the memoir "Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'AMERICAN MOOR' at the Cherry Lane Theater (in previews; opens on Sept. 8). An actor playing Othello is disagreeing with the show's director. The director asks if the actor is playing the race card. "Othello," the actor argues, is "the race deck." In Keith Hamilton Cobb's play, produced by Red Bull Theater and directed by Kim Weild, a man reckons with Shakespeare and with race in America. 212 352 3101, redbulltheater.com 'DERREN BROWN: SECRET' at the Cort Theater (previews start on Sept. 6; opens on Sept. 15). Brown, a dazzling practitioner of what he calls psychological illusionism, will read minds on Broadway. Maybe yours? When Ben Brantley reviewed an earlier version of this show at the Atlantic Theater Company, he called it "enthrallingly baffling." Some routines, he wrote, produce "results that have you slapping your forehead." 212 239 6200, derrenbrownsecret.com 'THE GREAT SOCIETY' at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (previews start on Sept. 6; opens on Oct. 1). In 2014, Broadway went "All the Way" with Robert Schenkkan's drama, which depicts Lyndon B. Johnson's attempt to pass the Civil Rights Act. This new play, starring Brian Cox and directed by Bill Rauch, takes up Johnson's tumultuous second term. With Grantham Coleman, Bryce Pinkham and Richard Thomas. greatsocietybroadway.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"On the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters." Yes, last November. I remember. But the line above is taken from Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" (2004), a novel in which the aviator hero Charles A. Lindbergh, after being elected president in 1940 over Franklin D. Roosevelt, keeps the United States out of World War II and not so subtly threatens American Jews while cozying up to the Third Reich. Returning to the novel at this moment, when panic reading is all the rage, offers a perspective different from that of many apocalyptic best sellers, new and old. Contemporary dystopian fiction has been surging in popularity for several years, but the chaotic and confounding state of America in 2017 has sent readers scrambling back to the genre's canonical texts: "1984," "Brave New World," "The Handmaid's Tale." Those books have plenty to say to anyone fearful of our political climate, and where it might be headed. But they are also fantastical, a blend of satire, science fiction and parable, the point of which is to change our view of reality by inflating it to surreality. "The Plot Against America" more rightly belongs to the genre of alternative history, but even that shelf is not an easy fit for it. Books like Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" (in which the Axis powers prevailed in World War II) and Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee" (in which the Confederacy won the Civil War) offer intricately and extensively changed bizarro universes. Roth's book, by contrast, is a work of deep realism, much of it the thinly veiled autobiographical story of a family in midcentury Newark, N.J. The brash counterfactual around which it's built plays mostly as a bass note in an otherwise familiar Roth song. In the novel, Lindbergh unites a fractured Republican Party, and runs for office on an isolationist platform, promising to keep America out of the war raging in Europe. He keeps Roosevelt from a third term in a blowout election, carrying 46 states and winning 57 percent of the popular vote. The widespread antiwar sentiment in the country at the time is turned, in Roth's version, into a winning hand. But before embarking on further discussion of a novel about America that has a swastika on its cover, perhaps some caveats would be wise. When "Plot" was published, Roth wrote an essay in The New York Times Book Review, in which he emphasized that his interest was in revisiting 1940 1942, not in commenting on George W. Bush's America or any other version of the country. He wrote the book "not so as to illuminate the present through the past but to illuminate the past through the past." After the election of Donald J. Trump, which even to many on the left made the George W. Bush presidency seem deeply traditional, even boring, Roth told The New Yorker in January: "Writers here don't live enslaved in a totalitarian police state, and it would be unwise to act as if we did." However much readers might crave it, no novel offers a neat parallel between its pages and the real world. Still, what parallels do exist in Roth's novel are striking. As today, when many urge President Trump to denounce attacks on synagogues and mosques, observers in "The Plot Against America" worry about those emboldened by "a provocateur cynically encouraging American citizens who needed in no way to feel besieged to cling to their oldest, most crippling anxieties." In the novel, synagogues have windows broken and walls defaced. One is firebombed. The government positions its policies as efforts at greater assimilation, with the Office of American Absorption drawing up programs like Homestead 42, in which Jews from places like Newark are sent to live and work in places like Kentucky. The goal is to weaken Jewish communities and "diminish whatever electoral strength" they might have. Characters particularly the family's father, Herman Roth, a firm supporter of Roosevelt say things that could be lifted from today's Twitter feeds. "How can this be happening in America?" Herman asks. "How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination." And later: "The man is unfit. He shouldn't be there. He shouldn't be there, and it's as simple as that!" Lindbergh in the novel is clearly an outlier in political life. But in other ways, Roth perhaps rightfully saw 1940s America as a place where several conventional criteria would have to be met if highly unconventional ideas were to land in the White House. Lindbergh, with his "relative youth" and "graceful athleticism," represents "normalcy raised to heroic proportions, a decent man with an honest face and an undistinguished voice." He's even said to possess an "affable blandness." Lindbergh's diplomatic relationship with Germany mirrors in some aspects the unusual dynamic involving Trump, his administration and Russia. Americans in the book, as they are now, are left to wonder about exactly why certain global relationships have warmed. Most striking just 13 years after it was published is Roth's portrayal of organized opposition, which is limited and only rises in the communities most directly threatened by the new government. Though there are protests in a dozen cities after the Iceland Understanding (a nonaggression pact signed by Lindbergh and Hitler), and Democrats condemn the president for "dealing with a murderous fascist tyrant as his equal," widespread dissent does not develop. The White House becomes "accustomed to nearly universal deification of Lindbergh," and even late in the book, he is supported by "a record 80 to 90 percent of every classification and category of voter, except the Jews." Perhaps because he creates a mostly unified electorate, Roth doesn't write a political solution for the quandary he envisions. Lindbergh's reign is resolved (brilliantly or cheaply or a bit of both, depending on your tolerance for clever plot twists) by something I can't spoil but it will raise eyebrows, especially of those who have speculated in recent weeks that the Russians might "have something" on Trump. Roth didn't have the first weeks of 2017 to draw on when devising a picture of what mass resistance to unprecedented political change in this country would have looked like. One might imagine him heartened.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Why Black Americans Are Hit Harder by the Coronavirus Re "Black Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb" (front page, April 8) and "The Racial Time Bomb in the Covid 19 Crisis," by Charles M. Blow (column, nytimes.com, April 1): Though the virus may not be racist, structural inequalities the sturdy products of racial discrimination shape health outcomes. The devastation handed to us after this pandemic will be no exception. This raises the question of how we engage some of our most systemically vulnerable populations. First, we need more states to follow New York, Michigan, Louisiana and the Carolinas and make Covid 19 outcomes by race and ethnicity available. Don't keep people in the dark, including local advocates who can develop strategic interventions. Next, be inclusive of more disenfranchised populations in public health messaging by drumming home more nuanced statements like "if you have had limited access to quality health care before now, be especially vigilant for progression of your symptoms." I learned last week that a neighbor of mine, a man in his early 60s and African American like me, was ill with Covid 19 and died unexpectedly in his home. What were the barriers to his getting the care he so desperately needed? Was he unaware of some silent condition he had that was socially determined by things like chronic stress, income inequality and discrimination? Did he distrust a broken health care system and not go to the hospital at some critical juncture? Would it have made a difference? I'm haunted by these questions and the implications of them for so many others. Angela Coombs New York The writer is a psychiatrist at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Re "Iran, With Over 47,000 Cases, Says U.S. Sanctions Are Taking Lives" (news article, April 2): The United States has a chance to right its reputation with the rest of the world and come to the aid of the citizens of Iran. The humanitarian thing to do would be to lift the sanctions right now while Iranians are dying of a virus they are unable to combat because we have strangled their economy and their health care systems with our avenging sanctions. Re "We Will Need New Ways to Grieve," by Beth Waltemath (Sunday Review, April 5): Thank you for this touching article. I would like to recommend Dr. Pauline Boss's book "Ambiguous Loss," which deals with the complications in grieving, and its resolution, when the usual expected rituals are absent. We saw this on 9/11, when the loved one never came home from work that day, and the family had no body to bury. We are now faced with a situation in which we have too many bodies, but we are forbidden to engage in all the usual supportive ritual gatherings of family and friends. We cannot be with the mourner in the usual ways. Things feel very strange and out of order. Without an income, survivors of violence become all the more dependent on abusive partners to provide shelter, food and access to health care. The power dynamics of abuse are therefore worsened. With an abuser in the home around the clock, the opportunities to organize a departure or meet with helping professionals are all but eliminated. That's on top of halted immigration adjudications and continued operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, further worsening the complex situation immigrant survivors face. While some nonprofits are continuing to provide services like case management, counseling, food distribution and legal representation to clients, not all are able to do so as they avoid the spread of the virus. Immigrant survivors deserve more attention and assistance as we continue to mitigate this pandemic. Archi Pyati Falls Church, Va. The writer is chief of policy and communications at the Tahirih Justice Center. It's the two way traffic on narrow walkways that presents the biggest threat to social distancing, so let's change our collective behavior and do our best to stay on the right side of the road. Of course, we'd need to work out some kinks, like what to do when you enter the sidewalk mid block and need to turn left. Cross in the middle of the street, or walk on the left until you arrive safely at a crosswalk? Surely we can make some exceptions. But if everyone follows this basic rule, pedestrian life in New York City will be more anxiety free for everyone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
When the North Carolina rapper DaBaby first reached No. 1 on Billboard's album chart last fall, it was the triumph of a fast moving newcomer who was a master of meme ready marketing that album, "Kirk," was the third project in 12 months from a musician who had gotten attention by walking the streets of South by Southwest wearing only jewels and an adult diaper. DaBaby has now repeated his success with a new album, "Blame It on Baby," and has said that he plans to release yet another full length project his year. "Blame It on Baby," with a cover image featuring the rapper in a face mask, opened at No. 1 with the equivalent of 124,000 album sales in the United States, according to data from Nielsen Music. His success was driven almost entirely by streaming, with almost 159 million clicks on streaming services and just 12,000 copies sold as a complete package. Also this week, the Weeknd's "After Hours" falls to No. 2 after a four week run at the top, and the rapper Lil Uzi Vert's "Eternal Atake" another recent chart topper is No. 3.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Even if Tina Charles never plays another basketball game, she's bound to be a Hall of Famer. That's according to UConn's Geno Auriemma, her already inducted former coach but it doesn't take winning 11 national championships to see that her enshrinement is inevitable. Some of her numerous accolades, though, already have a public place of honor. At Charlie's Records on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, a banner that's several feet tall bears a photo of Charles shooting in her Connecticut Sun uniform. It hangs above racks of calypso, soca and dancehall records, and next to several signs printed with Charles's No. 31 and "MVP." A large adjacent banner reads "Bud Light Salutes Tina Charles, 2012 Olympic Gold Medalist." Smaller photos and news clippings complete the tribute. About a half hour walk away is Barclays Center, where the New York native might have continued chasing a W.N.B.A. championship, one of the few awards missing from what must be straining shelves of trophies. The accomplishment would certainly be recognized prominently at Charlie's Records, her father Rawlston Charles's decades old Bedford Stuyvesant record shop. In spite of Tina Charles's many rings and medals, her lack of deep postseason runs in the world's best women's basketball league has made her an all time talent who's inexplicably hiding in plain sight. "I think that eats at her," Washington Mystics Coach Mike Thibault said. "I think she wants to re establish that, 'Look, I'm one of the top players and I can help a team win a championship.' That was her big goal when she went to New York, and it didn't work." Charles, who leveraged her franchise player status to get back to her hometown from the Connecticut Sun in 2014, was traded by the Liberty to the Washington Mystics earlier this year when the team hit a hard reset, liquidating almost all of its veteran talent. Instead of winning a title at Madison Square Garden for the team she grew up watching, Charles had been relegated to playing at the 5,000 seat Westchester County Center after James L. Dolan put the Liberty up for sale in late 2017. Joe Tsai, who owns the N.B.A.'s Nets, purchased the Liberty, giving them a new home at Barclays. Along with a new general manager, chief executive and head coach, the Liberty now have a young, development oriented roster framed around their 2020 No. 1 draft pick Sabrina Ionescu. "I was very thankful to play for the hometown team. Not a lot of people get that opportunity," Charles, 31, said in an interview. "That's where I'm leaving it." The Liberty declined to comment on the trade, instead sharing a statement from their chief executive, Keia Clarke: "While she is no longer part of the team, her name will forever be synonymous with New York basketball." Charles was traded to the reigning W.N.B.A. champion Mystics, which also meant reuniting with Thibault who coached Charles after the Sun picked her first over all in the 2010 draft. Thibault helped her win awards like the rookie of the year (2010) and most valuable player (2012). "He was the first person to believe in me," Charles said of Thibault. "When you're consistent as a coach, you know how to get the best out of your players regardless of who's on your roster." What the Mystics also have is an established group of top tier players, something that has eluded Charles for much of her professional career. The Mystics have struggled to a 5 13 record in the W.N.B.A. bubble in Bradenton, Fla. without key starters like reigning M.V.P. Elena Delle Donne and Natasha Cloud. Charles is not with the team after receiving a medical exemption this season because she has extrinsic asthma and is at high risk of having complications from Covid 19, the disease caused by coronavirus. Thibault said that although Charles is on a one year deal, she has verbally committed to returning to the Mystics next year. The 6 foot 4 center has the fifth most rebounds and the 11th most points in W.N.B.A. history both because of her exceptional ability and because she's more or less had to shoulder that much of the load to keep her teams afloat. "She's always been the one, not one of," said Bill Laimbeer, who coached the Liberty during four of the six seasons Charles played for the team and now coaches the Las Vegas Aces. "She's been put in these situations where she has to be the standard bearer without other Olympians around her; she was carrying us so heavily, she just ran out of gas." Being the one is familiar for Charles. In New York's always competitive amateur basketball scene she was center stage, playing at the Garden with her Amateur Athletic Union team during Liberty halftimes and then again as the star player of the No. 1 ranked Christ the King team in 2006 (naturally, she hit the game winner). As the best high school player in the country, she went to UConn, the best women's basketball program in the country. There, she became the best college player in the country, leading that team to two more titles. "The expectations are so high for a kid like that, that I don't know that there's any way you could have said she exceeded expectations," Auriemma said. "That would be impossible." Charles has at least met, if not surpassed, those sky high expectations at every level on the court, without necessarily getting much attention for doing so. Whether that's because of her lack of W.N.B.A. titles or her generally understated demeanor, Charles is unbothered by so often being in the background. "It doesn't make me feel any type of way," Charles said. "If your team isn't successful, you're not going to get individual success. I know it has nothing to do with my skill or anything I've been able to put out on the court." Since 2013, Charles has donated her W.N.B.A. salary to her Hopey's Heart Foundation, which supplies automated external defibrillators to schools and recreational centers. This year, she's shifting that donation to organizations that support the Black Lives Matter movement, Black owned businesses and Covid 19 relief. Her contributions will be in 846 increments, in recognition of the eight minutes and 46 seconds that have come to symbolize how long the police in Minneapolis pressed a knee into the neck of George Floyd, killing him. Charles attended a memorial service for Floyd in Brooklyn's Cadman Square Plaza. "It's gotten overlooked that us W.N.B.A. players were the ones who were really on the front lines, who were always very vocal," Charles said. She and her Liberty teammates were initially fined for wearing T shirts that bore the hashtag BlackLivesMatter in 2016; even after being warned by the league about violating uniform policies, she wore her warm up shirt inside out in protest. "We didn't really have the support of the W.N.B.A. when Philando Castile and Alton Sterling's lives were lost," she said. "It was totally different. So it's definitely very beautiful to see them support this cause just as they support breast cancer awareness, Pride, any other cause you know? It's really important."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Where's the line between covering a scoundrel as a news figure and giving him a promotional platform? The question has consumed Megyn Kelly this week, after she showed a trailer Sunday night of her coming feature on NBC about Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who has questioned whether the Sandy Hook school massacre truly happened and asserted that Sept. 11 was an inside job. " ShameOnNBC" and " ShameOnMegynKelly" campaigns broke out across Twitter, including from some Sandy Hook parents; JPMorgan Chase pulled its advertising, and Sandy Hook Promise, a group founded by Sandy Hook parents to prevent gun related deaths, canceled Ms. Kelly's planned appearance at its annual gala this week. Coming on only the third episode of her new NBC newsmagazine, "Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly," the segment has become, as the technical television term goes, a hot mess. Ms. Kelly was respectfully unapologetic when I caught up with her late Tuesday. "What we do as journalists is we shine a light on those with power, those with influence, those who have become culturally relevant," she said. "Of course, it's upsetting to know that doing that causes any upset to the Newtown families, many of whom I know well. But I have to do my job." Mr. Jones, she noted, has found new prominence in the Trump era. He's gaining in popularity and, perhaps more important, has back channel communications with the president of the United States, who has been known to espouse some of his theories. "As journalists, we don't get to interview only the good guys that's not journalism," Ms. Kelly said. "It's going to be very difficult for us to keep an eye on the more controversial figures of our time if we never talk to them." I talked to Mr. Jones myself for a column in February. He informed me that he was hoping for a White House press credential for his organization, Infowars, and that he had spoken with Mr. Trump by phone on more than one occasion and even offered the president advice, though he said Mr. Trump didn't need it. As such, I wrote, Mr. Jones was "newsworthy for taking on a new role as occasional information source and validator for the president of the United States." I didn't receive the same amount of grief Ms. Kelly has, which she pointed out to me. While television is a different ballgame giving interview subjects more room to have their say in front of more people than the average news site Ms. Kelly noted the reaction was similarly low key for Piers Morgan of CNN and "Nightline" on ABC when they featured interviews and segments on Mr. Jones in early 2013; there were no advertiser pullouts or major Twitter campaigns against them. Their interviews were shown after Sandy Hook and, more to the point, after Mr. Jones began spinning his conspiratorial yarn about the mass shooting (ABC says the interview video in the "Nightline'' segment came from 2010). "They didn't get into the conspiracy," Ms. Kelly said, referring to those CNN and "Nightline" appearances and Sandy Hook. "I press him." Mr. Jones was also scheduled to appear on "The View" next week, though a spokeswoman for the show told me that he canceled the interview (she declined to speculate on whether "The View" would have canceled the appearance after the blowback for Ms. Kelly and NBC). The test for Ms. Kelly, of course, will come in that interview, how it's packaged on Sunday night and how aggressively she questions him. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. The argument from several of the Newtown parents is that Ms. Kelly shouldn't be interviewing him at all. "I hear what Megyn is saying about journalistic integrity you have to expose the unsavory parts as well so that people understand them," said Nicole Hockley, a founder of Sandy Hook Promise, whose son Dylan, 6, was killed in the massacre. But, she said, "It gives him a national platform a much bigger platform than he's had in the media before which serves to recruit new supporters to his cause and tell people that there are conspiracy theories out there they might not be aware of." In the end, she said, "People like me are going to have to deal with the fallout." Ms. Hockley said that Mr. Jones's promotion of the fiction that Sandy Hook was a hoax had led to harassment campaigns and even death threats against her and others who lost children and loved ones in the massacre, which is just sickening. So you can see the concern. Mr. Jones's conspiracy theories can have truly dreadful, real life consequences. Part of the problem for Ms. Kelly came with the release of the trailer for her interview this Sunday, which included snippets in which he waxed conspiratorial about how "9/11 was an inside job" and played down his previous assertions that Sandy Hook was a hoax. Ms. Kelly tells Mr. Jones, "That doesn't excuse what you did and said about Newtown, you know it," but she is also shown laughing lightly as he says, "We didn't get to any of the really important stuff" (about supposed animal human hybrids). Then there was a photo Mr. Jones released of him and Ms. Kelly side by side in his car. It has a look and feel of a selfie though NBC says it wasn't a selfie giving the impression of a chummy get together, which critics have seized upon. It's not the first time that has happened, albeit without the same drama. In the "Nightline" segment, the correspondent, Dan Harris, calls Mr. Jones a "premier purveyor of what could be called paranoia," but he is also shown tossing a football with Mr. Jones, even saying, "When you turn the cameras off, Jones is a pretty calm, friendly guy." But those were different times, before the election of Mr. Trump and before the nation's divisions boiled over to the point that even corporate advertisers are being pressed to take sides. "Too many people expect their media to choose sides," Ms. Kelly said. "They want 'evisceration journalism,' and I think there are a lot of people who are very angry that Donald Trump is president and a lot of people who believe Alex Jones played a large role in it," which, she said, she wouldn't disagree with. The broader goal of Ms. Kelly's segment on Mr. Jones, she said, was to explore "his influence and his for lack of a better term method for putting information together to figure out how he got to be so important in the president's world, in millions of people's world." Ms. Kelly said her demeanor with Mr. Jones including the photo in the car was in part to get him to talk, while still challenging him. "I don't know if people know how journalism works, but you don't show up, scowl at the subject of your interview all day, cross your arms and try to project as frosty an image as you can," she said. So, where do I come down? You can't argue with the journalistic imperative; that's why I interviewed Mr. Jones myself. As Ms. Kelly told me, while people may wish Mr. Jones didn't exist, "he does exist and his influence is growing exponentially." At the same time, you can't argue with the pain of the families of Newtown. The continuing, outrageous questions about the biggest tragedy that could befall any of us only worsens and prolongs the suffering. And talking to a conspiracy theorist like Mr. Jones is not like a typical interview. Facts and reason have to square off against the fanciful and the fallacious. Absurd arguments are hard to combat because the person making them is not playing by logic's classic set of rules. All of which is to say, if the interview is done, it must be done carefully, with the best journalism that can be brought to bear. If the trailer NBC presented teasing the piece had shown that was the case here, which it didn't, there might not be so much outrage. Ms. Kelly said, "I do not think people will emerge from having seen this piece thinking anything other than 26 people were brutally murdered in Newtown, Conn., and there is a group of people that refuses to acknowledge that." The proof will come when NBC shows the piece on Sunday night, when the segment can be judged in its entirety.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, announced her engagement to Tom Bernthal, the founder of a Los Angeles based strategic consulting agency, on Monday. "Engaged!!! Tom Bernthal, you are my everything. I could not love you more," Ms. Sandberg, 50, said in a Facebook post. Mr. Bernthal replied in a comment: "Sheryl Sandberg, I love you so much and couldn't be more excited about spending the rest of our lives together." The couple, set up by Ms. Sandberg's former brother in law, were engaged over the weekend, People reported. Ms. Sandberg has two children, and Mr. Bernthal has three.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Can a woman be president of the United States? I've covered the men who run the world my whole life. And there have been a lot of screw ups, from Vietnam to Watergate to Afghanistan to Iraq to pushing the economy off a cliff. There has also been plenty of creepy behavior, culminating in the news that Donald Trump, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz have joined together in a pervy, hypocritical cabal to argue that Trump did not smirch the Constitution. So please, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, stop whingeing about sexism and just show how you could wield power like a boss. Ibid: Nancy Pelosi. When Steve Bannon called Pelosi a "total assassin," according to the hot new book "A Very Stable Genius," by Washington Post writers Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig, he meant it as the highest compliment. You won't find Pelosi keening about gender; she's too busy taking care of business. Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She faced sexism, of course, just as Barack Obama faced racism. She lost because she ran an entitled, joyless, nose in the air campaign and because she didn't emulate her husband's ethos of campaign 'til the last dog dies and the last bowling alley closes, and always make it about the voters. She lost because she and her campaign manager, Robby Mook, didn't listen to Bill Clinton, the world's leading expert on the white, male, rural vote, when he warned them that there was trouble and offered to help out. Donald Trump operates from the id, which is fitting because he represents a last gasp primal scream from working class Americans threatened by the changes transforming the country. Women are now a majority of the work force and whites are heading toward a minority status. Hollywood cannot cling to its benighted and self defeating desire to stay a white male club forever, despite the fact that women have always made up half the audience. Trump's ascent does not make it harder for women to ascend just the opposite. Look at the throng of women who were outraged enough about Trump to march and run and get elected in 2018. Once a woman electrifies Democrats the way J.F.K., Bill Clinton and Obama did and the way Trump does his base she will win. Trump is once more doing his part to energize women voters. On Friday, we learned that the president will get help from Starr and Dershowitz for the impeachment trial in the Senate. The Starr chamber was a shameful period of American history, with the prissy Puritan independent counsel hounding and virtually jailing Monica Lewinsky and producing hundreds of pages of panting, bodice ripping prose that read more like bad erotica than a federal report, rife with lurid passages about breasts, stains and genitalia. Like the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale and other Pharisaic Holy Rollers before him, the prosecutor who read the Bible and sang hymns when he jogged became fixated on sex in an unhealthy, warped way. Even Trump was appalled. "Starr's a freak," the bloviating builder told me back in 1999. "I bet he's got something in his closet." In other interviews, he called Starr "a lunatic," "a disaster" and "off his rocker," and expressed sympathy for Hillary having to stand by her man when he was "being lambasted by this crazy Ken Starr, who is a total wacko." Starr, who once clutched his pearls over Bill Clinton's sexual high jinks, is now going to bat for President "Access Hollywood." After playing an avenging Javert about foreplay in the Oval, Starr will now do his utmost to prove that a real abuse of power undermining Congress and American foreign policy is piffle. In 2007, he defended Jeffrey Epstein. By 2016, Starr was being ousted as president of Baptist Baylor University for failing to protect women and looking the other way when football players were accused and sometimes convicted of sexual assaults. In other words, he's a complete partisan hack who doesn't give a damn about sexual assault. And then there's Dershowitz, whose past clients have included such sterling fellows as Epstein, Claus von Bulow, O.J. Simpson and Harvey Weinstein. How did he miss Ted Bundy? Still, Dershowitz has put himself on the side of an impressive pantheon of villainy in the realm of violence against girls and women. Virginia Giuffre, Prince Andrew's accuser, has also claimed that she was offered as a teenager to Dershowitz for sex a contention that Dershowitz has denied in a countersuit. On Fox News, Dershowitz has made the case that it is Pelosi who put herself above the law by delaying the delivery of the articles of impeachment. Good luck with that one. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan government watchdog, a few days ago deemed that Trump's slimy Ukraine gambit violated a law. Yet Dershowitz will somehow argue that it doesn't represent high crimes and misdemeanors.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Despite a 12 million ad blizzard by a giant tobacco company, voters in San Francisco resoundingly supported a new ban on the selling of flavored tobacco products, including vaping liquids packaged as candies and juice boxes, and menthol cigarettes. The measure, known as Proposition E, is said to be the most restrictive in the country, and health groups predicted it could serve as a model for other communities. The vote had been expected to be close, but the final tally was 68 percent to 32 percent in support of the ban. Those results reflected a big miscalculation by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which had saturated the city with multimedia ads in four languages, likening the ban to Prohibition and invoking a black market crime wave. "They had a strategic chance there to show that they are actually walking the walk and talking the talk about moving smokers to nonsmoker tobacco products," said Eric Lindblom, a Georgetown Law professor and former Food and Drug Administration tobacco official. "Instead they took this scorched earth approach, trying to eliminate the entire flavor ban. They failed and now other jurisdictions can say, 'Why should we compromise?'" Although using electronic cigarettes, or vaping, is touted as a means of smoking cessation, parents, public health advocates and federal regulators have expressed deepening concern as some studies show that the products are gateways to smoking for teenagers. E cigarettes give users a powerful hit of nicotine, but without the mix of toxins contained in traditional, combustible cigarettes. Schools across the country have grown increasingly alarmed about the growing use of e cigarettes among middle and high school students, and some are taking harsh disciplinary measures, including suspensions, to curtail it. Dr. Melissa Welch, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association, one of several national organizations that fought to uphold the ban, said she hoped the San Francisco vote would be a first step toward ending "the sale of candy flavored tobacco before nicotine addiction claims a new generation of young people." Proponents of the ban pointed to some 7,000 products, including those with flavors said to be particularly alluring to young users like bubble gum, chicken and waffles, and unicorn milk. San Francisco's Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the ban last year. It was to take effect in April. But R. J. Reynolds, which makes popular vaping products called Vuse, as well as Newport menthol cigarettes, propelled the campaign to block it by getting the initiative on Tuesday's ballot. Jacob McConnico, a spokesman for R. J. Reynolds, called the vote "a setback for tobacco harm reduction efforts because it removes from the market many potentially reduced risk alternatives." Nevertheless, he added, the company would urge federal officials to draft regulations to restrict youths' access to the products while "preserving choice for adult smokers who are looking for alternatives to help them switch." Juul Labs, maker of the top selling vaping devices, which is based in San Francisco, did not have a prominent voice in the debate. The company did not respond to requests for comment. A coalition of groups, including the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and Tobacco Free Kids Action Fund, conducted a vigorous drive to uphold the ban. Their war chest was significantly smaller 2.3 million, including a 1.8 million personal contribution from Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City. In a statement, Mr. Bloomberg said the vote "shows that the tobacco industry, no matter how much money it spends on misleading ads, can be defeated. This vote should embolden other cities and states to act." The United States has lagged behind other nations in regulating menthol cigarettes. The inclusion of menthol in the San Francisco ban was hailed by numerous groups, concerned about the booming sales of menthol cigarettes among minorities, who have seen disproportionately high mortality rates related to smoking. "The ban on menthol cigarettes is a monumental step forward for health equity and social justice for communities of color," said Dr. Phil Gardiner, a co chairman of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. Canada banned the sale of menthol cigarettes last fall, and a similar measure for the European Union will take effect in 2020. In the United States, the F.D.A. banned cigarettes with flavors like chocolate, cinnamon and vanilla in 2009 and said it would look at menthol cigarettes. Though it has taken steps to regulate them as well, the agency has continued to allow them on the market. A handful of other cities, including Chicago, New York and Providence, R.I., have some restrictions on flavored tobacco products, such as limiting their sale to adults only stores. Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, said that some cities, including Duluth and St. Paul in Minnesota, have instituted more circumscribed bans than San Francisco's, but held off widening their reach when they saw the pushback from R. J. Reynolds. "When Reynolds paid to put this on the ballot, other jurisdictions were cautious," he said. "The resounding vote in San Francisco is going to lead a lot of cities to take a closer look." Such policies can be tough to manage, said Mark D. Meaney, a senior lawyer for the Public Health Law Center, which has helped draft tobacco restrictions. "But San Francisco certainly has the expertise and capacity to enforce them." Oakland recently passed restrictions that will soon take effect, and outreach workers are contacting small retailers to educate them about the new ordinance. Just this week, the San Mateo County, Calif., Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a ban that very much resembles San Francisco's and one in small, rural Yolo County, Calif. Although R. J. Reynolds led the attack on the ban, other groups joined in. Libertarians took up the protest, saying that the government was overreaching. Small business owners also fought back, saying that the ban would sharply reduce their profits.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Yoga has left the studio as traveling yogis hit the road, guiding practice before more exotic backdrops on rivers, at full moon celebrations and in the great outdoors. During one December departure, the river cruise company Aqua Expeditions will turn its Mekong River ship in Cambodia into a floating fitness studio with classes led by the Singapore based trainer Alex Salihin. The trip, running Dec. 15 to 19, will include morning yoga classes on the sun deck, meditation classes and one on one training sessions in addition to active sightseeing excursions via bike and kayak. Rates from 5,140 a person. Farmscape Yoga celebrates the seasons on an organic farm in Interlaken, N.Y., in the Finger Lakes region, with farm based and barn based classes held each quarter. A winter session will take place Jan. 7, and cost 45. Combining hiking and yoga in various parks in the Finger Lakes area, Hikyoga participants trek to a scenic site where they stop, drop and pose while taking in the scenery ( 16 a class).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
OTTAWA Take a walk down an aisle at Pro Hockey Life, an emporium of the Canadian national sport here on the capital's southern fringe, and a customer comes away with a decidedly non Canadian feel. Almost every pad, mask, stick and skate is made elsewhere mostly in Asia, often by foreign owned manufacturers. Just about the only thing Canadian about buying hockey equipment in Canada has for years been the tariff on imported goods. Now, even that quirk of Canadian hockey history is going away. On Thursday, the finance minister, Jim Flaherty, announced that the Conservative government would end import tariffs on all sports equipment, except bicycles, on April 1. The tariffs were as high as 18 percent. Usually, changes to tariff policy are more the concern of budget directors and accountants, but this change has become a national obsession, with the focus almost entirely on hockey equipment. Even before it was officially announced, the end of the tariff was cast by the Conservatives' opponents as more of a political than an economic measure. In the budget, the government said the end to the duties came "with an expectation that wholesalers, distributors and retailers will pass these savings on to consumers." But exactly how much the move will save Canadian hockey players or, more likely, their parents is unclear. Sitting in the stands of the Brewer Arena, a community rink in Ottawa, while his 11 year old son's team practiced for a tournament, Brendan McCoy said that the tariff change would not improve his family's fortunes. What was clear on Thursday is that the announcement highlighted what had become a quiet source of embarrassment to the many devotees of Canada's game, or as some see it, Canada's national religion: that very little hockey gear is produced here. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. The aisles at Pro Hockey Life provided many examples: a wall of gloves made in China for Reebok (a unit of Germany's Adidas) and in Vietnam for C.C.M. (another Adidas operation) faces off against gloves from China bearing the logos of Bauer (Canada based but run from New Hampshire) and Easton (owned by Easton Bell Sports of Van Nuys, Calif.). There were also imports from the Philippines sold by Sher Wood (privately and Canadian owned). A selection of skates sprawled across the back of the store. But the only Canadian made models were priced from 500 to 600 a pair and came from Graf, a skate maker whose headquarters are in Switzerland. "About 90 to 95 percent of hockey equipment is made in Asia," said Richard Desjardins, the product manager at Sher Wood, which is based in Sherbrooke, Quebec. "Everybody knows it. Made in Canada might have been important 10 years ago. But now it's all about how much you pay." Sher Wood ended production of protective equipment over 10 years ago and outsourced its entire production of sticks, its signature product, two years ago to China and Ukraine. Mr. Desjardins said that it only added maple leaves or the slogan "designed in Canada" to products sold in Europe, the last place where a Canadian connection still had marketing power. The government's decision to eliminate tariffs that were protecting a largely nonexistent industry seems to have more to do with online shopping and the rise of the Canadian dollar to parity with its American counterpart. For example, many of the skates at Pro Hockey Life priced from 500 to 700, a surprisingly large category, are available from American online retailers at prices that are at least 100 lower because of low tariffs in the United States. "We appreciate that there's a pricing differential between Canada and the United States," said Kevin M. Davis, the president and chief executive of Bauer Performance Sports. He added that his company was likely to reduce its wholesale prices, but that "we can't control what happens with retail pricing." Bauer, which was once owned by Nike, and Reebok C.C.M. Hockey are by far the dominant equipment makers in the Canadian hockey market. At both companies, Canadian production is now limited to relatively small numbers of custom made skates for professional players and affluent amateurs. Similarly, a handful of small producers, like the goalie pad maker Vaughn, serve the high end of the market. As for why it took Canada so long to adjust its tariffs to reflect the changes in the hockey equipment business, Mr. Desjardins was uncertain. "It's been in the tariff code for a long time," he said. "Maybe they just overlooked it." All is not lost for the Canadian hockey equipment industry: the humble puck, with its 5.6 ounces or so of vulcanized rubber, is still produced at home.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Ting Shen for The New York Times Ting Shen for The New York Times Credit... Ting Shen for The New York Times Tony Gyepi Garbrah and Desiree Venn Frederic at their residence in Washington. WASHINGTON Desiree Venn Frederic and Tony Gyepi Garbrah live in a light filled apartment in the Trinidad neighborhood of Northeast Washington that is small in size but grand in scope. The charcoal walls, stretching up to 15 foot ceilings, hold dozens of paintings, prints, photographs, 100 year old textiles, collages, drawings, pastels, ceramics and antiques, conferring a museumlike aura on the home. Ms. Venn Frederic is wearing art as well. Her floor length slip dress, by the Brooklyn based designer Fe Noel and the Chicago painter Harmonia Rosales, incorporates the image of a Yoruba deity, Oshun. Ms. Venn Frederic said the appeal of the dress was in its "fanciful and disruptive" character. When the couple met four years ago, they were acquiring art individually. "One of the reasons I took an interest in Tony was because he understood legacy building with art," she said. She and Mr. Gyepi Garbrah, 39, plan to marry later this year. "Our environment is a reflection of the ethos and the curiosities we carry individually and as a couple, who we are at our core and what it means to be transcultural," Ms. Venn Frederic, 37, said. He is a first generation American born to Ghanaian parents who works as an information technology engineer . He is also a photographer and painter. She is of Geechee and Maroon ancestry. She was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and raised in Montgomery County, Md. Through her company, Combing Cotton, she pursues her interest in social equity . You recently hosted a private tour of your art collection as part of the 2019 Collector's View series sponsored by Transformer a gallery in Washington . What was that like? How do you select works to buy? DESIREE VENN FREDERIC Meticulously. I don't merely collect what I like. I'm attracted to works that challenge the linear understandings of origin, culture, form, function and race. I call these aesthetic triggers. GYEPI GARBRAH We buy from galleries, art fairs and auctions. We also scour estate sales and private vintage collections. Often we buy directly from the studios of artists with whom we build friendships. I do a lot of research before acquisitions. Is there a piece with an interesting back story? GYEPI GARBRAH The two mixed media works by Victor Ekpuk. I went oversees to Galerie SANAA in Utrecht, the Netherlands, to acquire "God Head." During that time I discovered that Ekpuk was represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington . They had "Untitled (Red and Black)," so I bought it too. Now the pair is in conversation. Ekpuk lives in Washington and we've become friends. Those little wood statues lined up against the wall on the floor look like toys. VENN FREDERIC They're Colon figurative sculptures depicting occupations policeman, doctor, baker held by colonists in the Ivory Coast between 1893 and 1920. I have a collection of 150. Your photos capture images that span decades and can be read as a history of our times. How do you think photography represents both society today and in the past? GYEPI GARBRAH Photography is a visual documentation of fleeting moments and changing landscapes, and, in this vein, we believe Steven M. Cummings is a master. "Chocolate City" speaks to forced migrations and the displacement of African Americans from their native lands. "Fred Meets Fred" is an oversized black and white double image of Frederick Douglass that contrasts past and present. A chain dangling lengthwise from top to bottom of the picture separates the two Douglasses. The bicycle wheel symbolizes change and continuance of time. Your couch material is unusual. Did you commission the design? VENN FREDERIC We acquired the couch from the visual and textile artist Sharla Hammond, who was inspired by "Afro Blue" a jazz composition recorded by J ohn Coltrane . The fabric depicts the heads of five Afro clad icons Angela Davis, Betty Davis, Pam Grier, Minnie Riperton and Diana Ross. Above the couch that black and white painting seems very in your face. VENN FREDERIC It's "Cow in the Field" by Andrew Cressman. We operated a gallery in Washington and exhibited his works. I continually approached this painting with a sense of wonder and bought it after the show in 2015 . It takes up a lot of our wall real estate. I appreciate that some pieces overwhelm, and this is one.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Late Monday afternoon, New York's creative communities met in Hell's Kitchen at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. There were writers and dancers, actors and musicians, from uptown and downtown, all drawn together by the memory of one woman: the designer Isabel Toledo, who died in August of breast cancer. She was as close to an artist as fashion had even if she was best known for designing Michelle Obama's first inaugural parade dress and coat. On a darkened stage illuminated by a white glow from a sewing machine and hanging ivory gown in one corner there came not only speeches (from Wendy Goodman, the journalist, and Kim Hastreiter, the Paper magazine co founder and curator, and Michaela Angela Davis, the writer, among others), but also performances. The dancer Jillian Davis, of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, extended her limbs in elegy accompanied by a violin played by Ezinma (late of Beychella). Caridad de la Luz, the spoken word poet known as La Bruja, unscrolled a river of paper on which she had scrawled, in looping black pen, her paean. Basil Twist, the puppeteer, flew a marionette like a fluttering spirit. Joey Arias, the performance artist, belted out a love song after telling an off color story about farting. Many of the speakers wore Ms. Toledo's designs. Ms. Davis said she had on a dress Ms. Toledo made for her to wear to the People's Ball at the first Obama inauguration; La Bruja said that she had taken her shoes, which Ms. Toledo had given her and which she had been saving, out of their box for the first and last time. And in the end, Whoopi Goldberg read a letter of skin and blood from Ms. Toledo's husband, the artist and illustrator Ruben Toledo, to his wife. The visceral emotion in the letter was reflective of the tenor of the event, because as much as the afternoon was a homage to Ms. Toledo and her work, the gathered throng was also there to acknowledge one of fashion's greatest love stories. Mr. and Ms. Toledo were legend in an industry where individual ego and ambition often seem the norm and the relationships that are known tend to be fraught and soap opera dramatic. Rarely, if ever, seen apart, the Toledos (they were always "the Toledos") were each other's muses, with an almost symbiotic need to create. They were beyond, said the curator and retailer Katharina Sand, who had met the Toledos when she was a very young journalist, "Yoko and John, Morticia and Gomez." She realized "he was her missing link," Ms. Goodman said. James Kaliardos, the makeup artist, talked about a dream he had in which he couldn't tell where Ruben stopped and Isabel began. "He was the fabric, she was the needle, and they stitched it all together," said Mr. Arias, who first met the Toledos when he was a salesman at Fiorucci. Ms. Hastreiter, who knew the couple even before they were married, said that Mr. Toledo had often painted his wife, and she had raised the possibility of doing an exhibition of his portraits. She guessed, Ms. Hastreiter recalled, that he probably had about 1,000. He corrected her. "More like 10,000 Isabels," he said. And as guests like Agnes Gund, the philanthropist, and Sandy Schreier, whose wardrobe has just gone on show at the Met; the Cuban American designer Narciso Rodriguez and Simon Doonan, the writer and former Barneys window dresser; Linda Fargo of Bergdorf Goodman and Ikram Goldman from Ikram in Chicago lined up to hug Mr. Toledo, who had been hovering in the shadows, the image that lingered was the last still from the final film of the afternoon (because there was film, too). It was a moment caught as Ruben and Isabel were dancing they loved to dance and did a mean bossa nova arm in arm in the loft where they lived. They had just done a twirl, and she hadn't yet quite come down to earth. Her dark hair was flying out behind her, and they were eye to eye, laughing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The financier Wes Edens, who is an owner of the Milwaukee Bucks N.B.A. team, bought a triplex condo on the High Line at 520 West 28th Street for 20.2 million. In the final weeks before the presidential election, real estate closings slowed in New York City, but there were still several big transactions, including a record purchase in SoHo and another king size sale at 220 Central Park South. An anonymous buyer paid 35.1 million for a meticulously renovated triplex atop 419 421 Broome Street, the 19th century cast iron building where the actor Heath Ledger had been renting a loft when he died in 2008. This was the highest price paid for a single residence in the SoHo neighborhood, according to the real estate appraiser Jonathan J. Miller, though far below the unit's 65 million initial price tag two years ago. In Chelsea, the financier Wes Edens, who is an owner of the Milwaukee Bucks N.B.A. team, scored a hefty discount, too. He bought a triplex at the apex of the High Line hugging 520 West 28th Street for 20.2 million. The original asking price in 2016 was 50 million. Sales activity throughout New York has lagged for much of the year because of uncertainty surrounding the election and the coronavirus pandemic, though listings and signed contracts are now on the rise. For the month of October, the city's highest sale was, once again, at 220 Central Park South, the Midtown condominium that in 2019 set the national record for the most expensive home sold in the U.S. A duplex in the villa building of the complex that had been under contract since February 2018 closed at 65.6 million. The SoHo penthouse, near Crosby Street in the SoHo Cast Iron Historic District Extension, was sold by David Matlin, a distressed asset investor, and his wife, Lisa Matlin. The buyer was listed in property records as MF. Nemshov1tz NY Realty Inc. The Matlins had purchased the Broome Street apartment, encompassing nearly 8,000 square feet on the fifth through seventh floors, for 17.8 million in April 2011. They then spent the next four plus years on extensive renovations, painstakingly selecting wood, stone and other high end materials, before putting it back on the market in June 2018. Their most recent asking price was 43.75 million. The loft like unit includes three bedrooms and five full and two half bathrooms, along with two kitchens, a gym and a media room. Outdoor space totals 3,800 square feet and features six landscaped terraces, one with a hot tub, and an unfinished roof deck, where there are staff quarters. The Chelsea triplex purchased for 20.2 million by Mr. Edens, a founder of the Fortress Investment Group private equity firm, has been described as the crown jewel of 520 West 28th Street the 11 story futuristic condo of curved glass and steel bands abutting the High Line. It was one of the final projects of the Pritzker Prize winning architect Zaha Hadid and her only residential building in Manhattan. She died in 2016, almost two years before the building opened. The apartment, known as Penthouse 37, measures 6,853 square feet inside, with an additional 2,552 square feet of outdoor space. It contains five bedrooms and six and a half bathrooms, as well as a library and an enormous great room. The primary bedroom suite, on the lower level, features dual baths, a sizable dressing room and a balcony, one of two in the unit. A distinctive sculptural staircase connects all three floors. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. On the roof level is a 2,000 square foot terrace that wraps around an interior lounge and pavilion and provides stunning views of the city skyline, the Empire State Building and, of course, the High Line. The apartment's most recent asking price was just under 25 million, or half its original price. The duplex at 220 Central Park South encompasses the eighth and ninth floors of the 10 unit, 18 story villa building, which faces the park and sits adjacent to the main tower. It was bought through the New York based limited liability company Enka Residence. The apartment extends 7,911 square feet, with six bedrooms and seven and a half baths, and has 1,095 square feet of outdoor space, according to the latest amended offering plan filed by the developer, Vornado Realty Trust.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
On July 20, 1969, men walked on the moon in what became the centerpiece of one of the more indelible years in American history. That same day, 50 years ago, the New York Mets split a doubleheader with the Montreal Expos. You could say, so what? But the Mets, until then a baseball punch line, had suddenly become a team to reckon with in the eighth year of their existence. The two games against the Expos gave them a 53 39 record, which meant they were a big, fat 14 games over .500. Considering everything that had come before for the Mets the initial buffoonery, the occasional lunacy, the lopsided losing records it seemed that they, too, were now defying gravity. A month later, on the same weekend as the Woodstock music festival, the Mets really took flight. They swept four games from the San Diego Padres and began a surge that carried them into first place in September and all the way to the World Series in October which they proceeded to win, in five games, against the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles. Just how had this happened? Yes, the Mets had excellent pitching, solid defense at key positions and some very good young players, but their lineup was hardly overwhelming. And yet, that didn't matter in the regular season, when the Mets won a whopping 100 games and, in the process, beat out a Chicago Cubs team that played three future Hall of Famers every day. Nor did it matter in the National League Championship Series, when the Mets swept an Atlanta Braves club led by Henry Aaron, one of the best players in the sport's history. Or in the World Series, when the Mets went up against a mighty Orioles team anchored by the two Robinsons, Frank and Brooks. The Orioles, winners of 109 games in the regular season, seemed unbeatable until the Mets quickly proved otherwise. Making this all the more remarkable is that the 1969 Mets did not represent the beginning of a dynasty. In the seasons that followed, the Mets won considerably fewer games and while they did make it back to the World Series in 1973, they did so almost by accident, having finished the regular season with a thoroughly mediocre 82 79 record. But none of that diminishes what occurred in 1969. Here was a group of players who stumbled all over the place in 1962, with fans who embraced them almost in defiance. A team that slowly improved in the years that followed, but only slowly. And yet a team that proceeded to figure it all out for one intensely memorable season. It is not easy to explain, but 50 years later, it is worth revisiting. Time has taken its toll on this team; a half dozen players who had significant roles have died, and others, including Tom Seaver, are now struggling with serious health issues. But what endures through all the bittersweetness is what they accomplished together. From the depths of the standings they soared right into space. NEXT UP: 1962: The Bumbling Beginning	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The concept of "blood" and "bleeding" is generally avoided in mass marketing for period products. It was only recently, and with some fanfare, that commercials showed red liquid being absorbed, instead of blue. But when it comes to period underwear an increasingly popular type of underwear made with extra absorbent fabric it's difficult to avoid. At least when talking to the founders of the Period Company, a brand that was introduced in October, touting period underwear that was more affordable and sustainable than other menstrual products. For them, bleeding is a kind of profound act. "Something emotionally begins to happen when you bleed into your underwear and you don't have tampons, you don't have pads, you don't have waste when you're just allowed to really kind of be in your period," said Sasha Markova, who, with Karla Welch, founded the company. "Flowing is a very different experience, and we feel kind of evangelical about it." Ms. Markova, a longtime creative director, is not exaggerating about evangelizing; she refers to switching to their product as "conversion." As in "We really converted ourselves to the idea of this underwear." Or "The amazing thing you can begin to do with Gen Z is say: 'OK, now we've got you. Hey, convert your older sisters and your mothers.'" There's a spiritual element to this approach, landing somewhere between typically Californian and harmlessly cultish. But conversion really is essential to running the business. The Period Company and every other brand making alternative products (such as the menstrual cup) needs customers who are open minded enough to break from the products they've always used the products their mothers handed them long ago, "sighingly, with a lot of burden," Ms. Markova said. It isn't an easy adjustment, particularly when generations of women have been raised to dread leaks. (For a time, fear of humiliation was a hallmark of period product commercials, along with the blue mystery liquid.) And there is growing competition for those willing to convert. Which is why it helps that the company was co founded by Ms. Welch, a high profile stylist whose clients include Tracee Ellis Ross, Olivia Wilde and Sarah Paulson. (On Instagram Chelsea Handler and Busy Philipps were among the celebrities giving unpaid endorsements to the brand, wearing matching gifted sweatshirts that read: "Dear Mother Nature: Thank You!") Ms. Welch has also designed a line of tees in collaboration with Hanes, initially inspired by her client Justin Bieber, as well as jeans with Levi's. Four years ago, when her child's first period arrived, Ms. Welch found herself in a "hot mess," struggling to guide her now teen, who doesn't identify as female, through the traditional options. "Which made me go back to when I got my period, and my mom didn't even talk to me about it," she said. This kind of zeal is fairly common when it comes to alternative period products. The internet teems with articles and videos preaching the gospel of the cup, in particular even more so than period underwear and the destructive evils of disposable tampons. In 2018, this devotion led the Shelton Group, a marketing firm focused on sustainability, to conduct a survey about these products, collecting responses from more than 2,000 people with periods. In the survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents said they have used or considered using reusable menstrual products. "We were flabbergasted by that number," said Susannah Enkema, the group's vice president for research and insights. But it didn't come as a surprise that the majority of that group was 18 to 34, the age group most concerned with the environment. "It's the perfect product category for Gen Z and young millennials who absolutely, more than any other age cohort, feel a desire and to some degree an obligation to go greener," said Suzanne Shelton, the chief executive of the firm. At the same time, about 20 percent of respondents said they had decided against reusables. They were more likely to be in their late 30s and 40s, Ms. Enkema said, and resistant largely because they'd already found what worked for them. "The group that's rejected these products is a group that doesn't care as much about the environment," Ms. Shelton said, pulling no punches with Gen X. "They care more about their personal convenience." Conversely, the younger group had a different concept of convenience. "I'm in my early 50s," she continued. "The idea of period panties or the idea of a Diva Cup seems totally inconvenient. But to these young women, no. What seems inconvenient is having to go buy products every month." The younger group also tends to talk more openly about periods, seeing menstruation as a women's empowerment issue and promoting the idea that "'this is not dirty, this is not gross, it's not embarrassing, it's not something to be whispered about,'" Ms. Shelton said. (The researchers also learned from this group, qualitatively, that it's no longer acceptable to refer to period products as "feminine hygiene.") When Ms. Welch turned to period underwear for her child, it was a solution, but it wasn't perfect. Most pairs ranged from about 25 to 40, and she didn't want to pay 40 for juniors underwear. The market's two dominant brands are Thinx and Knix, both founded in 2013. At one point, Thinx was considered one of the fastest growing companies in the United States. It made headlines for its subway ads and its founder Miki Agrawal, the self titled "SHE EO" ousted in 2017 following sexual harassment allegations (which she denied). Another competitor, TomboyX, specializes in gender neutral underwear, while Ruby Love (formerly PantyProp) was founded to help address urinary incontinence. The founders of the Period Company said they're fans of these brands, but, as Ms. Welch has repeated, she and Ms. Markova are more interested in being like Jockey, offering basic no frills underwear, than like La Perla. Their prices fall between 12 and 14. (Comparatively, a pack of disposable tampon or pads typically costs under 10.) Their underwear fits tightly but with some stretch, not unlike shapewear, if shapewear had a pad sewn into the crotch between two thick layers of cotton; converting to the underwear seems easiest for those who already rely on pads. There are a few different cuts, including high rise and bikini. They're all black, except for two gray junior size styles. After a day of wear, the product is rinsed in the sink and wrung out, then laundered or hand washed. Sizes go up to 3X, although the company expects that by the holidays, they will go up to 6X. "The only way you can really have change is if you're available to everybody, and you're affordable and you're willing to go to a really mass market," Ms. Welch said. "We don't want to be posh. We want to be accessible."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
In the great room of Mia Sara and Brian Henson's Los Angeles home, designed by Kristen Becker, light pours in from huge Brombal windows (one pivots open by means of a gear and chain contraption, offering access to the patio and pool) and clerestories. The chandelier made of bicycle chains is by Facaro (Carolina Fontoura Alzaga). Comforts, but Few Creatures (Unless You Count the Dog) The house was designed by Kristen Becker of Mutuus Studio while she was an associate at Olson Kundig in Seattle. That architectural firm is known for its embrace of natural settings and materials, artisanship and "kinetics": industrial scale, movable building elements, like hand cranked skylights on chunky hinges. Ms. Becker had previously remodeled the couple's loft in TriBeCa and easily grasped her clients' shared aesthetic, which Ms. Sara, 51, called "archaic" and Mr. Henson called "contemporary medieval." Just over the threshold, stairs lined with Stick Sconce lights a modern variant of antique metal sconces lead to a very spacious room. A kitchen area dark with blackened steel and walnut veneered cabinets is at the back, dining is in the middle and living at the sunny end. Light pours from black framed and mullioned Brombal windows and clerestories on three sides. The far wall is all glass and looks south onto a stunning panorama of Los Angeles. The room is filled with idiosyncratic objects Mr. Henson's cast from a childhood bone break, covered in cartoons by his father, Jim, and displayed in a case, like a relic; a Willy Daro bronze table; African masks chosen by Ms. Sara's father, Jerome Sarapochiello, a former photographer, onetime draftsman for George Nelson and now, as Ms. Sara described him, "picker extraordinaire." Over coffee at a Finn Juhl teak dining table, under a chandelier made of bicycle chains, with Casper the longhaired dog underfoot, the couple explained why this room, about 900 square feet and 13 feet high, is the heart of the house. "Mia loves to cook," Mr. Henson, 54, said. "We also just felt like the whole grand room lifestyle for a family really keeps you all connected, particularly today when everybody vanishes to different corners of the house." The couple took cues from an Irish medieval tower keep called Bunratty Castle they had once visited. It wasn't the dour architecture they wanted to emulate, clarified Ms. Sara, who worked closely with Ms. Becker on the design: "I didn't want to do some oldy worldy, strange medieval looking thing in the middle of Los Angeles. But I liked the feeling because there are certain very elemental things like a central hearth and one big room with a sort of great hall." Mr. Henson revealed this when he leapt up to turn the wheel of a heavy metal gear and chain contraption at the side of the west window. The window pivots like a garage door, opening up the room to a terrace for outdoor dining and to a zigzag pathway down to the pool and guest rooms. The house, in other words, is both steampunk and greentech, Arthurian and Manhattanite, sumptuous and earthy. Ms. Becker, who was mentored by Tom Kundig, a principal of Olson Kundig, through the design process, mixed blackened steel, a hallmark of the firm, with brass and copper. Floors and stair treads are antique fumed oak; the master bath and bedroom upstairs are separated by a sliding screen made of woven copper strips. The building, composed of intersecting volumes that step down and hug the hillside, has walls that are cast in place concrete or clad in stained cedar siding. And where, you may wonder, are Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog? You won't find them. With the exception of a mound of stuffed Muppets in the room of their 14 year old daughter, Millie, and two stone stools on the deck with monster feet, the house does not scream goofy creatures. Growing up, "we always owned workshops and those places are where you would find all the creatures and that feeling. But home was always home," Mr. Henson said. If the Henson empire is a looming nonpresence, so too is "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," the cult 1986 movie directed by John Hughes and starring Ms. Sara as Sloane Peterson, Ferris's luscious girlfriend. The topic comes up during a visit to the garage, which has two slender vertical windows (one for each Tesla) offering a sneak peek of the view. Ms. Becker joked that she and her clients considered installing a large pane of glass in a "kind of a nod" to the window crashed through by a Ferrari that belonged to the father of one of Ferris's friends. However, they did not want to tempt the couple's children into reckless behavior (Ms. Sara's son, Dash, from her marriage to Jason Connery, is now 21). "So we maintained this view, but it's just now a little bit more modest." Solar panels carpet the roof of the garage, but fall just short of fully powering the house ironically because the two e cars chug too much electricity. Nonetheless, the building, which also has a gray water system, delivers a "super luxurious lifestyle" while being "environmental without being weird," Mr. Henson said. "Weird," he explained, describes "the people who can never turn their air conditioners on," even "when it's really, really hot." That lifestyle is also about occupying a reasonable amount of space. The house, with its garage and mechanical systems, takes up about 4,200 square feet, on an almost 12,000 square foot site. The family uses about 3,000 square feet, down from 5,000 in their previous home, and an area they believe is just right. "Particularly in L.A., everybody just goes big," Mr. Henson noted. "We don't plan on ever selling the house," he explained. "So the way I approached it was, how much less wealthy am I comfortable being to have a house that I will have forever and I'll never get a return on the money?" He likes to think the house sets an example for a certain class of owner: "I think this is the way wealthy people should live," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Jim Kerstetter doesn't want unreliable devices to get in the way of his work as deputy technology editor in San Francisco, so he favors easy to use products. How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Jim Kerstetter, deputy technology editor in San Francisco, discussed the tech he's using. What tech tools do you rely on the most for your job, and what could be better about them? This will probably surprise no one, but you don't need that many technology tools to be a good editor. If you have a computer, a not too painful to use publishing system, decent internet access and a phone, you're pretty much all set. But my internet access at home could be more reliable. Yes, Comcast, you cause angst. So you keep tech use to a minimum. What's your philosophy for how people should use tech for work? Steve Jobs was right: Simplicity is harder than complexity. The best products are almost always the easiest to use. I don't even use an external keyboard or monitor. Why bother? Reporters are relying on me to help them do their work, so the last thing I should be doing is monkeying with unreliable technology. That means avoiding tech's bleeding edge. The exception to my less is more rule is outside of work: I am addicted to my Garmin Forerunner 235 watch for running. The GPS for tracking distance, time and elevation is rock solid, and the iPhone app you use with it is beautiful. It allows you to slice and dice data from runs in all sorts of ways. It doesn't make me any faster, but it makes running more entertaining. You've been involved in tech journalism for more than two decades at different publications, including PC Week. How have the tools that reporters use changed over time? It's easy to forget how much technology has made this job easier. I can edit a story from my living room because I have high speed internet access (usually) and a MacBook Air that doesn't break my back when I take it home. I can do research on an article in minutes thanks to Google. I can learn that major news is breaking anywhere in the world thanks to Twitter. I can reach reporters anywhere in seconds because we're all carrying smartphones (I use an iPhone). And I can make sure those conversations are not surveilled thanks to privacy apps like Signal. All of that would have been significantly more difficult 20 years ago. When I started at PC Week, I was lugging around a monster Dell "laptop." I didn't even have a cellphone (remember pay phones?), and we used Lotus Notes for email. Watching Notes download email on a dial up connection while sitting on a convention center floor in Las Vegas was painful. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. How has tech reporting as a whole changed over the years? At the beginning of the dot com boom in the 1990s, the industry was so much smaller. The executives weren't well known. People were familiar with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but that was about it. There was more access. Now some tech execs are more famous than movie stars, and they have the armies of publicists that go with that. The tech press was all about product scoops new processors, new software, things that were working well and things that weren't. I suppose that part hasn't changed all that much. One big change came and went: I was shocked by how many tech reporters took sides and championed the social media companies in their early days. It has been entertaining watching some of the writers who fawned over them position themselves as industry watchdogs in the last year or two. Today, some tech companies are as influential in the lives of people around the world as governments. They should be scrutinized as closely as governments. You refuse to ride Uber and other ride hailing services. Why? That's not entirely true. I occasionally use ride hailing services when I have no other choice, like when I'm going to the airport. It's almost impossible to get a traditional taxi in my neighborhood in San Francisco. What tech product is your daughter currently obsessed with? Do you approve? The usual for a teenager: YouTube, Snapchat, her iPhone and a near constant state of Google Hangout with friends. And I'm pretty sure she has "Gilmore Girls," the television show, running on a nonstop loop on Netflix. She's at an age that if I didn't approve of her tech choices, she'd be even more determined to make them. But I've been blunt with her about the risks, and I hope I taught her to make good decisions. Or at least to learn from Rory Gilmore's mistakes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
LAS VEGAS The annual Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show is traditionally a good place to track trends and find the leading edge of new technology arriving in the automotive industry. The 2014 edition, which runs through Friday, is no exception. Among about 2,500 exhibitors packed into and around a million plus square feet of exhibition area at the Las Vegas Convention Center are entities representing virtually every major automaker. This is a bit counterintuitive because the show's raison d'etre is supposed to be options, accessories and add ons available after the initial sale of an automobile. But automakers have sniffed out opportunities to offer lucrative accessory lines of their own, as well as to showcase new ideas that others have come up with for customizing, differentiating and personalizing stock offerings. Performance activities like racing are particularly celebrated this year. Toyota is displaying heavily modified trucks and sport utility vehicles outfitted for competition in the Baja 1000 endurance race this month. There is even an 850 horsepower Camry drag racing car.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
This Woman Wants to Help Regulate Your Period With Food A few months ago, in a conference room at the Yard , a co working space in Manhattan, a group of female employees were updating their boss, Alisa Vitti , on their latest projects and the state of their hormones. "I'm in my luteal phase right now, so very into organization," said one woman, citing the second phase of her menstrual cycle as explanation for the series of perfectly structured charts she was presenting on a screen at the front of the room. Ms . Vitti, 42, the founder of Flo Living, a lifestyle company focused on female health and nutrition , listened as she drank water and herbal tea. She has been caffeine , dairy , gluten and sugar free for 20 years, and maintains that the shift helped cure her of the polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) she struggled with since she was a teenager. That recovery has also informed her professional mission to spread a gospel of dietary and lifestyle changes that may help women dealing with complex and confounding hormonal issues, usually related to their periods. There are some tips that Ms. Vitti dispenses somewhat universally: Eat fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut to help support your microbiome; avoid consuming large quantities of sugar; and eliminate dairy, which she sees as a root cause for issues like PCOS, acne and endometriosis. Ms. Vitti does not have a medical degree. After studying for two years at the Integrative Institute of Nutrition, a licensed vocation school, she quit a job in marketing and apprenticed for a few years with alternative medicine practitioners. In 2000, she started her own walk in clinic in Manhattan . By 2010, she said she was seeing around six patients every day, often during after work hours, and receiving hundreds of emails from women in Europe and India seeking her advice. That year, she closed the clinic to focus on expanding the practice into a digital brand. Dr. Elizabeth Fino, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at the New York University Langone Fertility Center who is familiar with Ms. Vitti's work, agrees that diet and lifestyle shifts should be the first line of treatment for women facing hormonal issues like PCOS. But she also believes that modern medical treatment for example, taking birth control to regularize periods is often the best and most realistic option. (Ms. Vitti is pro birth control in general, but does not encourage it as a treatment for existing hormonal imbalances.) "Her approach takes significant dedication on the patient's part, and it's just not attainable for a lot of people," said Dr. Fino, noting how expensive and time consuming it can be to follow a clean eating regimen. Ms. Vitti's supplement kit, for example, which includes a 60 day supply of five different supplements including fish oil and magnesium, costs 215. That's about 1,200 a year. The language Ms. Vitti's employees use is pulled from "WomanCode," a book she published in 2013. Referred to by fans as "the purple period bible," the book offers women alternative strategies for dealing with tough hormonal issues, including endometriosis and cystic acne. Its treatment suggestions are meant to replace medicines like spironolactone and ibuprofen that many gynecologists rely on for symptom management. The approach is grounded in a concept of "cycle syncing," or catering one's diet, exercise and lifestyle habits to the four phases of the menstrual cycle (luteal, menstrual , follicular and ovulatory). Within each menstrual phase, women's hormones shift, causing energy levels and dietary needs to shift as well, Ms. Vitti said. During the luteal phase, for example, "WomanCode" recommends that women eat roasted vegetables to stave off increased sugar cravings, and increase their intake of leafy greens to ward off bloating. Unlike during the follicular and ovulatory phases, when Ms. Vitti said women have the most energy, exercise during the luteal phase should be less intensive think gentle yoga or light weights. For Nashira Arno , a 30 year old jewelry designer in Brooklyn, discovering "WomanCode" gave her hope. "I've had a horrible period not a bad period, a horrible period since I was 13," said Ms. Arno, who grew up in the Dominican Republic. As a teenager, she would have to go to the emergency room because of the severity of her cramps. She received no diagnosis, she said, and a stream of heavy duty painkillers that didn't solve the problem. Eventually, she felt even worse. By the time she came across "WomanCode" at age 29, she had written off doctors altogether. Once she made the dietary shifts recommended by Ms. Vitti, she said, her cramps went from a pain level of 20 to 5, her once acne prone skin cleared up, and she had fewer digestion issues. "I've always been healthy ish, but now I look at food as medicine," said Ms. Arno, who takes supplements recommended by Ms. Vitti, including vitamin B6 and magnesium. "WomanCode" is part of the larger Flo Living brand, which includes a digital clinic, a period tracking app and hormonal supplements. The company's "Monthly Flo Program," which costs 297, provides educational videos. Thousands of women have signed up for one or all of these offerings. "I think most people today understand that there's a clear overlap between your diet and lifestyle and how these things impact you medically," Ms. Vitti said. "It's a lot, and that's coming from me, a person who takes 500 different, obscure vitamins every morning," said Ariana Cleo, a 26 year old founder of a wellness public relations firm. A few years ago, Ms. Cleo took a fertility test and was told by a doctor that she had diminished ovarian reserves. She is now using Ms. Vitti's period tracking app to monitor her hormones while also eating more food specifically more carbs and protein which is all in line with the Flo Protocol. When she feels the need to rest, she is trying to honor that, instead of pushing through a SoulCycle class like she would have in the past. "Alisa's teachings are all about tapping into our feminine energy being intuitive, compassionate and empathetic towards our bodies and resisting the masculine drive to succeed at all costs and just go, go, go," she said. There are some who have serious reservations about the approach. Dr. Jennifer Conti, an adjunct clinical professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, wrote in an email that the fixation on so called hormone imbalances may be "on trend," but "in reality, hormones are necessary, fluctuating chemicals our body needs for a variety of everyday functions." Women who have a condition like PCOS, she said, should "talk with their gynecologist about creating a shared decision making goal for management." Still, many women feel supported by Ms. Vitti's approach. After Nicole Gulotta, 37, of Raleigh, N.C., struggled to get pregnant and then suffered a miscarriage in 2013, she followed the Flo Protocol for a year. She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy in October 2015. To her, there was a clear connection. "The program helped me uncover the root cause of my symptoms and also release some emotional blockages that were holding me back," Ms. Gulotta said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
186 188 First Avenue (between East 11th and 12th Streets) A local investor bought these two five story East Village walk ups, totaling 14,900 square feet with 50 feet of frontage. They offer 16 two bedroom apartments, which are mostly free market, as well as three retail spaces occupied by a computer store, Handsome Dan's candy shop and Uogashi, a Japanese restaurant. The building, in the same hands since 1980, sold in an all cash transaction within two weeks. Air rights come to about 5,000 square feet. A lingerie manufacturer and wholesaler has signed a five year lease for a 2,754 square foot space that has a view of the Empire State Building for its offices and showroom on the 15th floor of this 16 story NoMad building. The company, which received two and a half months of free rent for its buildout, is moving from 320 Fifth Avenue. 308 East 109th Street (between First and Second Avenues), at left This 24,655 square foot fully occupied rental building in East Harlem consists of an eight story portion with a white stucco facade, and a six story one with a gray facade. The building, originally built as a condominium in 2013, has 20 apartments 13 one bedrooms and seven three bedrooms that are rent stabilized as a result of a 15 year 421a tax benefit. All apartments feature sleek modern kitchens, including breakfast bars and Bosch appliances. The building also has a rooftop terrace, a fitness center and bicycle storage. Dear Mama Coffee occupies the ground floor retail space.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
As with anything that has to do with wedding planning, preparation is key. Attending your first bridal show is no different. Bridal expos can be a great place to start while you're on the hunt for inspiration, new trends and local vendors. Best of all, it's all in one place and you have access to tons of freebies and discounts too. However, when you factor in the large crowds and the hundreds of vendors vying for your business, it can also be overwhelming and mentally taxing. Here are a few tips to help you survive your first experience: 1. Do your research before selecting a bridal show or expo. All shows are not created equally. Decide in advance if you want to attend a show that has more of a boutique feel with fewer vendors at a smaller venue or a mega show in a large venue with lots of vendors and activities. 2. Plan ahead and take a look at the list of featured vendors and speakers in advance. Once you've created a list of potential favorites, plan to visit those vendors first. This will help you manage your time if you don't plan on staying all day. 3. Arrive early and bring your partner or a member of your wedding party. If crowds aren't your thing, try to get to the show early or later in the afternoon. There will be tons of vendors vying for your attention and handing out literature, so having someone along means you can share the load and stay more sane in a frenzied environment. 4. Take notes during breakout speaker sessions. Bridal shows often feature wedding experts and seasoned industry pros that offer great tips that can save you money and time during your planning process. This is also a great time to ask questions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
LOS ANGELES The former prop house at 720 North Cahuenga Boulevard was once old Hollywood. Into the 1990s, it housed props from police shows like "Hill Street Blues." The building's newly installed glass doors were recently opened to prospective tenants. Docler Media, based in Luxembourg, installed its technology and film production division in the 33,173 square foot building, which has concrete floors and 30 foot bow truss ceilings, subway tile showers, a kitchen that seems out of a Nancy Meyers movie, yoga studio and full bar. The property is the 12th in a portfolio of so called creative office spaces in Los Angeles from the developer Robert Herscu. They have attracted tenants like Mashable, the apparel company Outerknown and the animation studio Animal Logic. Mr. Herscu, who is chief executive of HQ Creative Office, said he expected that 720 North Cahuenga would lease quickly. "Traditionally you think of amenities as great parking and A.C.," said John Kim, a principal at Miren.Co and co founder of Opodz, a co working space in the Little Tokyo neighborhood. "That's still all very important," he said. "But if you can say there's on site laundry, a cool kitchen area, there's a little dog park that helps landlords land and attract more tenants, especially in the tech sector." In Los Angeles, that kind of space has been specifically positioned for more creative firms, rather than those in fields like insurance, law and finance, according to John D. Zanetos, senior vice president for brokerage services at the commercial real estate services firm CBRE in Los Angeles. But that is changing. "Whether you're an entertainment firm or a law firm, what we hear consistently is that companies are trying to enhance collaboration and deliver a workplace that will enhance that," Mr. Zanetos said. "The audience for this type of space isn't the normal cast of characters," he said. "It's growing." Petra Durnin, CBRE's director of research and analysis for Southern California, estimated the Los Angeles County office space market at 200 million square feet. Technology and creative tenants lease 38 percent, roughly 76 million square feet, she said. "Going forward, another 30 million square feet of tenants will be expiring and then renewing," Ms. Durnin said, speaking of the next five years. "From that pool we're looking at everybody turning to some kind of creative space. Eventually all office using tenants will be in some sort of creative." "L.A. has this unique combination of historic office buildings and industrial product that's no longer useful in the way it was originally intended," Mr. Zanetos said. Cory Bird, a co producer on the television shows "Bates Motel," "The Strain" and "Colony" at Carlton Cuse Productions, often searches for spaces like these. The company produces television shows with sometimes unpredictable schedules and changing needs. This means maintaining multiple offices. "In our 'Bates Motel' building, everyone's under one roof and there's a real community environment," Mr. Bird said. That building in Sherman Oaks comes closest to fulfilling the needs of a production: a suitable writers' room, space for casting and the capacity to handle the terabytes of digital information used in postproduction. Yet Mr. Bird still faces challenges. "If we come in with postproduction, a lot of times we'll have to overhaul the entire Internet setup," he said, speaking of not quite enough web power. He looks forward to an influx of available space tailored to what he will need. Ronen Olshansky is chief executive and co founder of Cross Campus, a working space company with two locations in Los Angeles and a third on the way. The company provides fully managed office space with amenities on a membership basis. It's an alternative to signing a longer term lease on an office space, something attractive to start ups and small companies. "If you asked us a year ago when we started Cross Campus, we would have said that's going to work for offices of up to about 10 people," Mr. Olshansky said. "What we're starting to see is most of the demand coming from 20 , 40 person offices. That same value proposition still exists." He added, "Tenants aren't just limited to creative companies. We've got financial companies, law firms, branding, design, advertising. It's a really wide cross section." According to CBRE, the law firm Hueston Hennigan leased space in the PacMutual complex in downtown Los Angeles in 2015. Avery Dennison, the global packaging corporation, leased in the trendy Arts District, joining the venture capital firm Greycroft Partners after its move there from Santa Monica in 2014. CBRE itself expanded into a rehabilitated 1928 Masonic Temple in Glendale this year. The Masonic Temple's 37 foot ceilings, stadium staircase seating and 24 hour concierge illustrate the kind of adaptive reuse these spaces employ. CBRE's workplace division was a consultant on CBRE's downtown and Masonic Temple offices. "That group started off as 12 people; now there are over 50," said Lewis C. Horne, who heads the firm's Los Angeles/Orange County region. "We would not go to meet with a tenant without bringing our workplace strategy professionals." "People would move in, put perimeter offices around the edge of the space," he added. "The core would be support, and away you'd go. That's just not what we're doing anymore. Now there's wellness components, this concierge idea, natural light. The line between your home and your office really blurs." Los Angeles comprises many smaller regions that Mr. Zanetos says have reached a "critical mass." On the west side, Playa Vista has attracted tech, entertainment and design companies. Burbank, to the north, is home to two major studios Warner Bros. and Disney and the companies that do business with them. Both areas have a high concentration of tenants desiring different spaces. "There's an effort to bring down real estate costs," said Eric Sussman, senior lecturer of accounting at the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management. "Costs of doing business here are quite high. This can reduce the amount of square footage per employee," he said. According to the CoreNet Global Corporate Real Estate 2020 survey of 500 corporate real estate executives, the average square footage per employee dropped to 176 square feet in 2012, from 225 square feet in 2010. It is projected to hit 151 square feet per employee in 2017 nationwide. "You had this move to very traditional space in the '80s, '90s, 2000s," Mr. Sussman said. "And now you're getting this other stream where everything's open and you're sitting in people's laps. The dogs are roaming the concrete floors." And tenants are willing to pay. When the developer Rising Realty acquired the PacMutual complex in 2012 for 60 million, rent went for 2 a square foot, according to CBRE. Rising transformed the traditional office space and then sold it to Callahan Capital Properties and Ivanhoe Cambridge. "When a developer goes in and buys a historic office building, those buildings need love. They need money," said Mr. Zanetos of CBRE. "Elevators need to be modernized; HVAC and electrical need updates. Data is critical. Nobody can function without high speed Internet." Similarly, in the Arts District, industrial rents go for 65 cents a square foot per month triple net, meaning the tenant is responsible for taxes, insurance and maintenance. A lease was just recorded in a converted 1920s industrial building at 3 a square foot triple net. "In L.A., these buildings that were once looked at as obsolete are now being rediscovered," Mr. Zanetos said. Mr. Kim of Miren observed, "It's like 'Field of Dreams' if you build it they will come."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
As I entered the student center, for a meeting with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan about to graduate from a state university, the men and women facing me slumped in their chairs and gazed at the ceiling. I knew they must be thinking: "This guy not only didn't fight in my war, or even my father's war, but in my grandfather's war! What could he possibly have to tell me about finding a job?" There was an elephant in the room, and he was 86 years old. I'm at an age when my wife's reminder to stand up straight echoes my mother's command from 70 years ago, when I was sprouting to a 6 foot tangle of teenage limbs. My tilt is one more indication that I'm growing old. Some reminders no longer having to remove my jacket and shoes on airport security lines are welcome. Others, like a fitness instructor barking: "Everyone, 25 push ups; Mr. Goldfarb, you can stop at 10," puncture my self esteem. Succumbing to gravity's tug at 86 is expected. If I fall I'm likely to need a walker. The slightest bump inflicts a purple welt. Names and facts are becoming more elusive. Uncertainty is harder to bear. (I find myself relying on my car's GPS while driving to familiar destinations.) Despite these and other signs that I'm one of the old old, I remain determined so long as I'm healthy and still can to find doors that open to parts of myself I've never explored. My continuing work as a management consultant opened one of those doors: mentoring former military men and women eager to find their place in civilian society. I had contacted university career centers, social networks, employment recruiters and the Department of Veterans Affairs for introductions to job seekers willing to discuss their experiences. Some I've met with only once or twice; others I talk with at least two or three times a month. I've role played job interviews with corporals and colonels with two objectives: helping them assure employers they are assets, not risks, and translating their military skills to their civilian equivalent. Other than marriage and fatherhood, nothing shaped my character more than my three years in the Army. The men who trained me had jumped into Normandy. When one of them told me "You are one of us," it felt like a benediction imposing an oath that I would not disappoint him, then or ever. I could not stand idly by while those who might have worn the same shoulder patch I did were being seen as potential employment risks simply because they had served. It didn't take many meetings to convince me that veterans were being perceived through a distorted lens. Like most of us, those who do the hiring have read about the grievous injuries suffered by some combat veterans. But most do not pose threats to those they work with. Combat veterans tell me job interviewers have asked them how emotionally damaged they are, or how many people they've killed. A former Army Ranger was asked if he would use his martial arts training in a dispute with a co worker. I had to find a way to help veterans put an end to this distortion and be seen for what they are: a pool of talent waiting to be tapped. So there I was, the elephant in the room, standing before a group of graduating veterans, some of whom were already looking at their watches. Hurriedly, before introducing myself, I said, "Every week, I meet with those in positions to hire or reject you, promote or bypass you. They trust me and reveal their unstated, but deeply held, perceptions of you, perceptions you must begin correcting the moment the interview begins. What I'm going to tell you I heard as recently as this morning, not 30 years ago." Within moments, eyes stopped rolling; no one was slouching anymore. I reminded them an elephant might follow them to job interviews, where repeated deployments could be seen as having made them employment risks. Skills they had worked for years to master might appear to have no civilian match. When asked about their military job descriptions, veterans too often respond tersely, as though standing at attention before a promotion board. A sergeant describing his responsibilities told me, "I was an E 7 in logistics at Fort Drum and in Iraq." A military promotion board would know exactly what this said about the soldier, but it would bewilder most civilian job interviewers. I suggested the sergeant add, "I believe you would call me a supply chain administrator." That converts bewilderment into interest. At a job fair near Fort Bragg, N.C., I met a paratrooper about to sit for an interview with a manufacturing company. When I asked if he had a specific job in mind, he showed me a list he'd been given. "What about that one?" I asked, pointing to an opening for quality assurance inspector. He said that he knew nothing about inspecting products. "Do you check your chute before you jump?" I asked. "Are you nuts?" he replied. "Of course I do!" "Then tell the interviewer you'll inspect his parts as carefully as you checked your chute." He did, and after follow up interviews at a nearby electronics plant he entered their training program. Opening a door leading to new possibilities within myself brought me to veterans, some of them my grandchildren's age, who are teaching me as much or more than I'm teaching them. I am devoting myself to helping them prove they can be as competent in the workplace as they were on the battlefield. They've given me something as well: a way to lead a meaningful life in the years remaining to me.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Relationship Advice From Two Who Have Withstood the Test of Time and Rhyme Attention, couples everywhere: We've got some relationship advice from a New York couple who shared a familiar table in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday night, celebrating their 20th anniversary. Beyonce and Jay Z? Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick? Jessica and Jerry Seinfeld? Mike Breen and Walt Frazier (known as Clyde)? However, their table was not covered with a white linen tablecloth and candles, but rather statistics sheets, laptops and a video monitor. Mr. Breen, 57, and Mr. Frazier, his 73 year old partner in rhyme, have been a New York Knicks broadcasting team on MSG Networks for two decades. They recently discussed the keys to maintaining their rock solid relationship, which began on television on Feb. 5, 1999, at Orlando, back when Mr. Frazier was a precocious neophyte (a phrase he uses to describe promising rookies, which happens to be one of Mr. Breen's favorite Frazierisms). "To me, the most important aspects of any partnership are respect and concern," said Mr. Frazier, an All Star guard in his heyday he was voted one of the 50 greatest players ever who led the Knicks to their two N.B.A. titles, in 1970 and 1973. "Mike and I not only have a mutual respect, but we care about each other, and each other's families," said Mr. Frazier, who lives in Harlem with his longtime girlfriend, Patricia James. "I know that if I had a problem personally or professionally, Mike would be the first one there for me, and vice versa." Rosanne Breen, who in September will celebrate an even longer time with Mr. Breen (their 30th wedding anniversary), said that listening to her husband and Mr. Frazier on the air "is like listening to a couple of relatives chatting on the phone." "My favorite aspect of their relationship is how kind they are to one another, and how their admiration for each other comes across specifically through humor," Ms. Breen said. "I think at least once a broadcast there's some sort of very organic and natural interaction between them that ends up with one of them belly laughing, and I find that makes the broadcast really pleasant to listen to." Mr. Frazier, who is better known to a legion of younger hoops fans for his colorful wardrobe and lyrical analysis "The Knicks were crashing and dashing in the first half, now they're stumbling and bumbling," he said during a telecast earlier this season and possibly many other times this season was again seated alongside Mr. Breen at the Knicks broadcast table on Tuesday when the Detroit Pistons arrived at Madison Square Garden. Mr. Breen, a lifelong Knicks fan whose sports idol was, and still is, Mr. Frazier, said that "maintaining a sense of humor" has also been crucial to achieving their long term success. "We both enjoy laughing together on the air," said Mr. Breen, who noted that an action poster of Mr. Frazier still hangs in the bedroom of the Westchester home where he grew up, and where his mother lives. "Obviously what we are talking about is important, it's basketball, it's the Knicks," said Mr. Breen, who now lives on Long Island. "But to have some fun while we're working, that's been a real key over the years." And when situations arise that are no laughing matter, they know they can agree to disagree. "In all honesty, Mike and I have never had an argument off the air, but we've disagreed on air," Mr. Frazier said. "When that happens, we take off the headsets and remind each other that we have our own opinions, and then one of us will usually say something like, 'Hey man, that was good,' and we move on." Mr. Breen said that he and Mr. Frazier also "understand the importance of being good listeners, and knowing when to let each other speak." "It's never a good idea for any two people to try and talk over one another," Mr. Breen said. "There are certain things that I will bring up that Clyde knows I'm passionate about, and he lets me have my space. "And when he's talking about something he's passionate about I just sit back and let him go, and the viewer gets analysis from one of the greatest players of all time, as beloved an athlete as we have ever had in any sport, someone who has taught the game to generations of fans." To Mr. Frazier, it's all a part of the job. "A job that I can't believe I'm getting paid to do," he said. "Mike's the play by play man, and I'm the color analyst," he said. "I know that he always goes first, he leads and I follow. It's no different than having a dance partner." Mr. Breen and Mr. Frazier both said that at the root of every solid relationship is a solid friendship, like theirs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Last weekend, the 12th annual Pitchfork Music Festival took over Union Park in Chicago. Along with the fans in their finery, the performers arrived ready to entertain an outsize audience with their sound and style.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Companhia Urbana de Danca sounds like a bad idea. It is a Brazilian dance troupe composed of young people, mostly men of African descent, mostly from the favelas, or slums, of Rio. But it is led and choreographed by Sonia Destri Lie, a white woman not from the favelas. She is trained in ballet and American and European contemporary dance, yet the works are based in hip hop, somehow refined. Exploitation, condescension: Pitfalls abound. And yet, as the company's Joyce Theater debut on Monday demonstrated, Companhia Urbana de Danca is so wonderful that it seems miraculous. Anyone who saw the troupe's American debut at the Fall for Dance festival in 2010, or caught its visit to Montclair State University in New Jersey in 2011, already knows why. "ID: Entidades," a signature work on those programs, is one of two pieces being presented at the Joyce as part of the theater's four company festival of Brazilian dance. The return of the work reveals another rare aspect: It rewards repeat viewings. "ID: Entidades" (2009) is neither a bag of tricks nor a bloodless abstraction. Classic hip hop moves are visible the rippling of arms, the rolling on backs yet they have been stretched and shaped into something new. Occasionally and briefly, the eight dancers face front and sync to a beat, but the rhythms of most phrases have been pulled apart and inflated with breath. And that open and unpredictable rhythm extends to the dancers' continual comings and goings and groupings and separations. This is a work overflowing with movement and ways of putting movement together.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
"Life is short," read the slogan of The New Day, Britain's youngest national newspaper. "Let's live it well." Unfortunately for the publication, the first half of its slogan proved prophetic. Barely 10 weeks after its start as a counterintuitive print only experiment, The New Day's publisher, Trinity Mirror, announced on Thursday that it was shutting down the newspaper amid a precipitous decline in newsstand sales that the company conceded was financially unsustainable. Targeting what it believed was a significant potential audience of "lapsed" print readers in Britain's famously crowded newspaper market, Trinity Mirror, one of Britain's largest media companies, began The New Day in late February with a goal of reaching as many as one million paying readers a week. But unlike most of the world's major publishers, which have pushed aggressively to distribute their content online and on mobile platforms, The New Day made a conscious decision to forgo those options as a way of keeping operating costs down and simplifying the business model. "We always said that there was an element of experiment to this, and if it wasn't going to work, we would close it," said Elizabeth Holloway, a Trinity Mirror spokeswoman. "This confirms that it is a challenging time for print." In a statement, Trinity Mirror, which also publishes The Daily Mirror tabloid and dozens of other British national and regional titles, said that the reception for The New Day, whose daily circulation had fallen below 40,000 copies in recent weeks, had been "disappointing" and that, as a result, it would cease publication on Friday. The news came as the company reported a 4.5 percent drop in group print circulation revenues in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, and a 19 percent drop in sales from print advertising. The closing of The New Day, which employed a modest editorial staff of 25 people, comes as other European newspapers are also taking a critical look at the long term future of their print operations. The Independent, one of Britain's most respected newspapers, went digital only in March. El Pais, Spain's largest daily, warned its staff this year that it was considering a similar move. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Last week, The New York Times announced a major restructuring of its own global print editions to focus on digital platforms. The move, which involves the closing of the Paris based editing and print production operation of The Times's international editions, will result in the elimination of around 70 jobs. It comes alongside plans to invest 50 million over the next three years to grow its international digital audience. The New Day, which printed five days a week, was originally available only at newsstands and sold for 50 pence, or about 70 cents, a copy. Although the company used social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to promote its content, none of it was available online. Circulation reportedly fell from around 150,000 copies a day in early March to as low as 30,000 by last month. Although it had initially shunned subscriptions, The New Day experimented with a paid "e edition" via a mobile app in mid April, but that failed to generate significant sales, Ms. Holloway said. Analysts said the main challenge for The New Day was changing the habits of readers, who have become used to a cornucopia of free content online, as well as the convenience of being able to read it on mobile phones and other devices. In the end, Ms. Holloway said, "it proved too big of an ask to get a critical mass of people to change their behavior frequently enough to make it viable."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
SAN FRANCISCO Uber is in talks to sell a stake in its self driving technologies unit to SoftBank and other investors for as much as 1 billion, as the ride hailing company prepares to go public, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. The talks are still underway and may not result in an investment, said the people, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Apart from SoftBank, the investor consortium includes an automaker, they added. Under the terms of the proposed deal, investors would purchase from a pool of Uber stock specifically earmarked for the self driving technologies unit. Uber would maintain majority control of the self driving arm and would use the investment to fund its research and development. The deal would value the self driving business at 5 billion to 10 billion, the people said. Uber filed confidentially to go public in December in what would be one of the largest tech initial public offerings of recent years. The company, based in San Francisco, could hit a valuation of 120 billion when it reaches the stock market.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
MSNBC and NBC News dismissed the veteran political journalist Mark Halperin on Monday, joining several other organizations that have also severed ties with him after a group of women came forward last week to accuse him of sexual misconduct. Mr. Halperin's contract with MSNBC and NBC News has been terminated, a spokesman at MSNBC said in an email on Monday, three days after the "Game Change" author apologized for the "aggressive and crude" behavior he had exhibited while working at ABC News more than a decade ago. A celebrity among political reporters, Mr. Halperin joined ABC News in 1988 after graduating from Harvard University, working his way up from an entry level position as a desk assistant and rising through the ranks to become political director in 1997. During that time he also garnered acclaim for his widely read politics newsletter, The Note.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The actor Tom Cruise recently erupted at crew members on the set of "Mission: Impossible 7" over a breach of Covid 19 protocols in an apparent effort to prevent further disruptions to a film whose production has already been delayed by the pandemic. "We are creating thousands of jobs," Mr. Cruise, the star of the film, can be heard saying in a leaked audio clip that is littered with expletives. "I don't ever want to see it again! Ever! And if you don't do it, you're fired!" The recording was published on Tuesday by The Sun, a British tabloid, and its authenticity was confirmed to The New York Times by two sources close to the film. One source said that Mr. Cruise had been speaking to members of the "Mission: Impossible 7" crew about a breach in Covid 19 protocols on the set in London, and that further details were not immediately available. Mr. Cruise apparently became enraged after spotting two crew members standing together at a computer screen, in violation of an on set rule requiring people to stand about six feet apart, The Sun reported.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Moving to a particular neighborhood in order to land a seat at a coveted public school has long been the middle class modus operandi for obtaining a high quality education in New York, where placement in many elementary schools is determined by home address. But navigating school zones has become much trickier in the past few years as more families with young children put down roots in the city. Even living two blocks from a well regarded public school no longer means your child will get in, and with many neighborhoods becoming increasingly expensive, it isn't always possible to squeeze into a smaller apartment. In November the attendance boundaries for Public Schools 321 and 107 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, were redrawn to relieve overcrowding, which was bad luck for families who had bought their homes specifically because of those schools and suddenly found themselves zoned for another. Even without rezoning, families living in districts with overcrowded schools may find their best laid plans upended. Last month, more than 2,300 children, or roughly 3 percent of applicants, were put on waiting lists for kindergarten seats at 105 schools, according to the Department of Education. Although the overall number of children on waiting lists is down slightly from last year, waiting lists at some schools soared. The waiting list at P. S. 41 in Greenwich Village had 100 students, up from 55 last year, and the one at P. S. 307 in Queens had 167, up from 109. Many children on waiting lists end up securing spots as families of enrolled children pursue other options: moving away; placing their children in private schools or gifted and talented programs; or winning lotteries for charter school admission. But the wait to find out can be excruciating. By the end of June, those who remain on a waiting list will receive an offer of an alternative school. All of this is forcing families to consider new ways to navigate the city school system. Some do school research even before a child is born. Other parents pay specialists to help identify neighborhoods with up and coming schools, the hope being that if they move to these places now, the school will have improved by the time their child reaches kindergarten. Still others rent a home in a top school zone. Then, if they find themselves priced out when it comes time to buy an apartment, they'll move to a more affordable neighborhood. The child will be able to stay put, schoolwise, because city policy is basically "once you're in, you're in." There have always been people who outright lie by borrowing an address from a friend or relative to get their children into a school. If caught, however, those students will lose their seats. Sure, it's easy to mock the neuroses of New York City parents when it comes to their offspring, as films and documentaries have done. But the city poses unique challenges, and as a result, more families are thinking earlier about where they want to live in relation to what it means for their children's education. "Anyone who thinks it through realizes you can't count on one option," said Christine Dirringer, a commodities banker who, with her partner, Keith Richards, also a commodities banker, is selling an Upper West Side two bedroom and looking for a town house in Carroll Gardens or Park Slope. The reasoning: Both areas have good public and private school options and offer more space for the money. Chloe, their daughter, hasn't celebrated her first birthday yet. "It's crazy to be considering schools when she's only 7 months old," Ms. Dirringer said. "But I'd rather have a plan, knowing how difficult it can be to get in." Here are some of the ways families with young children are approaching the complicated calculus of real estate and education in the city. Renting or buying in a given school zone may be the most straightforward strategy for getting into a popular public school. But neighborhoods with coveted public schools tend to be pricey. The good news is if you can't afford to stay, your children don't have to switch schools. They have the right to remain in the same public school until graduation, regardless of where in the city the family lives after registration day, according to the Department of Education. The idea behind this longstanding regulation is to offer stability to children. Some parents in overcrowded schools bristle at families who take advantage of the rule with no intention of staying in the neighborhood. But the Education Department does not track the movement of families after enrollment. And families who end up leaving the zone often would prefer to stay but can't for financial reasons. When Sundus Kubba moved from Ann Arbor, Mich., to take an investment banking job in New York four years ago, she and her husband, Joe Kazemi, a graduate student and independent statistician, searched for a rental that would put their daughter, Maya, within the zone for the highly sought after P. S. 87 on the Upper West Side. "We had to be very specific with addresses what side of a street an apartment was on," Mr. Kazemi recalled. The couple rented a two bedroom on the second floor of a walk up two blocks from P. S. 87. In 2011, Maya began kindergarten at the school, which offers a dual language program of English and Spanish and runs through fifth grade. This year, with Maya in first grade, the family searched for a place to buy in the neighborhood but found nothing they could afford. So with the help of Stefania Cardinali, a broker at Citi Habitats, they began looking in Harlem and Hamilton Heights. "We can get more for our money uptown," said Mr. Kazemi, noting that the 15 to 25 minute subway commute wasn't bad. Last month the couple went into contract on a two bedroom two bath apartment with a private rooftop cabana in a full service building in Hamilton Heights for 680,000. A recent online search for a comparable place in the P. S. 87 zone found listings from 995,000 to 3.85 million. Though school quality was a factor in their search, Mr. Kazemi added, the fact that Maya can remain at P. S. 87 is "fantastic for us." Now the family is zoned for P. S. 153, which has lower test scores than P. S. 87, but also has gifted and talented classes and language and art programs. School advisers say more parents are apartment hunting in neighborhoods that offer promising schools with strong leadership and rising attendance rates, including Greenpoint and Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn, and parts of South Harlem, Inwood and Washington Heights in Manhattan. For instance, respectable options like P. S. 180 in Harlem, which teaches prekindergarten through eighth grade, have remained under the radar mainly because they served a low income community, said Clara Hemphill, the founder of Insideschools.org, a project of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School that offers profiles of city schools. "It was always a terrific school with a terrific principal," Ms. Hemphill said, "but its test scores reflected the fact that poor kids tend not to get a fancy preschool education." P. S. 180's attributes, she added, include small classes and active parents. "Now, we're seeing more middle class parents choosing it." Julianna LeMieux, an assistant professor of biology at Mercy College, visited schools in Washington Heights, Harlem and the Upper West Side last June in preparation for a move from Boston; her husband, Mark Emerson, had accepted a new job. "We were willing to do whatever it took to get our sons into a good school," she said. That included squeezing themselves and their boys, 6 and 2, into a one bedroom on the Upper West Side if necessary. But after visiting P. S. 180 and being impressed by the small class sizes and the diversity of the student population, she narrowed her search to condos in that school's zone. There were five listings in the Harlem area within their budget. The couple bought a two bedroom with one and a half baths and a washer/dryer, listed for 520,000. Their elder son, Isaiah, began kindergarten in September at P. S. 180. Ms. LeMieux says the principal greets students by name each morning at drop off. "It ended up being a great match," she added. "I can see Morningside Park from our window and like being so close to Central Park." The number of children they saw in the neighborhood when they moved in, she added, "really spoke to the fact that this is probably going to be a good place, a comfortable place to have for years." Schools don't always follow their neighborhood's upward trajectory. "Every neighborhood is different," said Joyce Szuflita, the founder of NYC School Help, which helps families find schools in Brooklyn, "but what I find is the gentrification of the school lags many years behind a gentrification of a neighborhood. People occasionally move in when they're pregnant and say this neighborhood is awesome and diverse and rich, and then their kids get to be school age and they're like, huh?" Many of those families, she said, end up trying to "squeak into the schools" in better established neighborhoods nearby. Timing, it turned out, was on their side. The following year the city announced that it would phase out P. S. 22 and replace it with P. S. 705, also known as the Brooklyn Arts and Science Elementary School, which shares a new building with Exceed Charter School and currently teaches through third grade and offers dual language immersion starting in prekindergarten, as well as art, music, dance and fencing. "It's like a little gem," said Ms. Bare, who enrolled Drew, 5, her older child, in prekindergarten and plans to have her daughter, Lizzie, 2, follow in 2015. The expense and competition involved in sending a child to a good private school in the city is monumental. But with no guarantee that their child will end up in a top notch public school, some families are viewing private education as a safety net and, gambling that their child gets in, are willing to move to a cheaper place to fund the tuition. In other words: live small, educate big. Marcia Giordano, a New York City real estate broker, and her husband, Shawn, a private chef, were thrilled when P. S. 276, a new elementary school in Battery Park City, opened near their home in 2009, just after the birth of their son, Otto. They had outgrown their one bedroom. But rather than sell it in a down market, they held onto it and moved to a larger rental unit in the building, so as to remain in the same school zone. Then last year, after Otto, then 3, was put on the waiting list for P. S. 276's pre K program, their plan began to feel tenuous. Parents at P. S. 276 were petitioning to limit next year's kindergarten to avoid overcrowding. So the family moved out of the zone to a cheaper two bedroom rental in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, on what Ms. Giordano calls "the fringe" of Dumbo. They are thus saving about a third of their monthly housing costs and funneling that directly into tuition for a private pre K program for Otto and child care for their daughter, Chieko, 1. If their plans change again, they can always squeeze back into the apartment they own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
JUST before Memorial Day, Ashley Judd graduated from Harvard. In a universitywide commencement ceremony, she shared billing with Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline, who was getting her bachelor's degree, and Meryl Streep, who was awarded an honorary degree. Ms. Judd's father and "a mess of girlfriends" were in Cambridge, Mass., for the ceremony. Her husband, Dario Franchitti, could not attend because of the Indianapolis 500, which he would win that weekend for the second time. He watched live via Harvard's Internet feed, and they texted. Ms. Judd, who plays tough yet vulnerable women on Broadway and in film ("Double Jeopardy," "The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood"), has spent the last year in the midcareer master's program in public administration at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Hollywood has always had its share of activists from Ronald Reagan and Warren Beatty to Madonna and Angelina Jolie. But Ms. Judd is one of the few to get formal training in public service. She hardly lacks for causes. She has delivered impassioned speeches to the United Nations General Assembly about sex and labor trafficking, and to the National Press Club about mountaintop removal mining in Kentucky, her home state. She is a board member of PSI, a global health organization where she has worked on issues like maternal health, family planning and malaria prevention. During her travels in developing countries, she has met women who support themselves with native handicrafts. But it was Martha Chen, one of her Harvard instructors, who taught her the concept of the "informal economy" that exists beyond the regulated economy. Ms. Judd says she attended Harvard not for the prestige "compare, despair," she says but to become a more effective activist. "I didn't go to Harvard Kennedy School to be approved of by anyone, but to immerse myself in some very serious, earnest, practical learning with people who have literally dedicated all they have to public service." Organizations benefit from charity minded celebrities who can generate media coverage and encourage donations. Stuart I. Bretschneider, chairman of Syracuse University's public administration department, calls this "the Bono model," in tribute to the U2 lead singer who raises money to fight global poverty. An understanding of how governments and nonprofits work could help a star activist better manage her celebrity status in the public interest, Dr. Bretschneider says. For those who cannot be Ashley Judd, Syracuse has a course in courting Ashley Judd. It's called "Fund Development for Nonprofit Organizations." A Kennedy School degree can also provide the tools and credibility needed to sit across the table from policy makers and speak their language. Harvard's program is specifically designed for established professionals, often in their 30s and 40s. Notable alumni include Secretary General Ban Ki moon of the United Nations, Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News Channel, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of the New York Police Department and, most recently, the accused Russian secret agent Donald Heathfield. More typically, public administration programs attract students who want to hone on the job skills or are planning moves into government or nonprofit management. Many have altruistic motives. "Increasingly, you get these social entrepreneurs," says Ellen Schall, dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. "They want to feed the poor, make urban education work, get health care to people who haven't had it, or financial instruments for the unbanked." SISTERHOOD Ashley Judd last month at a conference on maternal health around the world. Ms. Judd, at age 42, may be riding the wave of the Obama era, suggests Ms. Schall, who also teaches health policy. "There's a new interest in public service, because we have a president who cares about public service," she says. "I think people have stopped and taken a look at what they want to do." Ms. Judd says that "going to graduate school is always something I thought I would do." But the path was hardly a straight line. Ms. Judd graduated with honors from the University of Kentucky as a French major with four minors. But her degree was delayed 17 years, until 2007, because, she says, she neglected to complete paperwork for a course substitution in science. Her "untreated shame from a kooky upbringing" her mother, Naomi, and older sister, Wynonna, are the popular country music singers had made her shy of authority and she had not even planned to go to commencement. "I was ready to blow out of town and get started in the Peace Corps, or bail on that and hit Hollywood, my secret dream." From the time she was an undergraduate, she says, she also dreamed of going to Yale or maybe the University of Chicago to study anthropology. More recently, she thought about applying to the University of California at Berkeley for a master's degree in public health, "under my mentor Malcolm Potts," who is on the board with Ms. Judd at PSI. Since her home is a Tennessee farm, she also considered Vanderbilt, in Nashville. But while visiting campus, she was surprised when "a really dynamic, brilliant faculty member" ended their conversation about her interests with a question: "Why are you not going to Harvard?" To her, going to Harvard sounded as realistic as "going to the moon." A friend suggested she look up the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School. Reading about the center's work with exploited women, "I just began to weep," she says. "I thought, this is my home, these are my people, this is where I'm meant to go." She reels off favorite professors and courses, among them: Marshall Ganz and Bernard Steinberg, teaching moral leadership; Jacqueline Bhabha on human rights; Robert Kegan on psychological development in adults; and Diane Rosenfeld on gender violence (for anyone who still thinks she is a dilettante, Ms. Judd won a dean's scholar award for her final paper in that class). She got through quantitative methods a core requirement along with classes on management and leadership, democracy and political institutions by "overbooking" her professor's office hours. "It was harrowing at first," she says, laughing. "I had no idea that I would go to Harvard to exorcise my 11th grade geometry demons." She loved school so much that she looked forward every weekend to going back. "Every day I was eating the best piece of homemade pie; it was something I savored," she says. "That entire place was there simply to give. I'm in a position in my life where everybody wants something out of me. I'm constantly on transmit, coping with influx, demands, some of which are very admirable and some of which are just rude, you know." For once, she says: "I wanted to be on receive. I wanted to have a greedy and selfish experience and just take in all I could." Fellow students, she says, expressed no cynicism about a movie star's motivation. "They were shamelessly unapologetic about being do gooders," she says. "Other people were doing the injustice rage, too. I didn't have to be the standard bearer." Talking as she rushes around doing errands a few days after graduation, Ms. Judd says she is still devoted to acting. "I don't think it's an either/or career," she says. "I'm very spontaneously jumping onto a film. I literally start tomorrow." The new film is "Flypaper," a comedy about a bank heist, which is filming in Baton Rouge, La., and costars Patrick Dempsey. She has hardly had a moment to think about what she will do with her new degree. "I had nine final papers due between Easter and the end of reading period, and then it was graduation and the Indianapolis 500," she says. But after a pause, she admits that she has thought a little bit beyond "Flypaper." "One interesting idea is to possibly apply for a White House Fellows position," Ms. Judd says. "That could be pretty cool."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Fred Silverman, left, with Redd Foxx in 1976 when Mr. Silverman, who was president of ABC at the time, announced that Mr. Foxx, the star of the hit NBC show "Sanford and Son," was moving to ABC. Fred Silverman, who as a top executive at CBS, ABC and finally NBC was one of the most powerful people in the three network era a force behind the success of beloved series like "All in the Family," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "M A S H," "Laverne Shirley" and "Hill Street Blues" died on Thursday at his home in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles. He was 82. Julia Rossen, of the public relations concern 42West, announced his death in a news release. She said the cause was cancer. At 25, Mr. Silverman was made head of daytime programming for CBS, and in 1970, in his early 30s, he landed the network's top programming job, putting him in charge of the prime time schedule. CBS, known in the 1960s for relatively conventional comedies like "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Beverly Hillbillies," was looking to freshen its image, and Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin's groundbreaking "All in the Family," which tackled contemporary issues like bigotry with scalding humor, became a key component of that strategy. "I couldn't believe I was seeing what I was seeing," Mr. Silverman recalled in an oral history recorded in 2001 for the Television Academy Foundation. "Compared to the crap that we were canceling, this was really setting new boundaries." He credited Robert Wood, president of CBS at the time, with putting the show on the air in January 1971. But it was Mr. Silverman who rescued it from its original, deadly Tuesday night time slot, stacking it on Saturday nights with another savvy series, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." "These were the first building blocks," Mr. Silverman said, leading to other successes like the spinoffs "Maude," from "All in the Family," and "Rhoda," from "Mary Tyler Moore." Mr. Silverman was lured to ABC, which had long trailed the other two networks in the ratings race, in mid 1975. He was named president of ABC Entertainment, the division that developed programming and talent. By the time he left in 1978 to become NBC's president and chief executive, ABC was No. 1 in the Nielsen rankings, on the strength of shows like "Laverne Shirley" (a spinoff of "Happy Days"), not to mention the landmark mini series "Roots" (1977). Mr. Silverman failed to work his magic at NBC, which had fallen to third place in the ratings, despite some successes, like the police drama "Hill Street Blues," which premiered in January 1981. He resigned in mid 1981 and turned to producing his own shows. His hits as a producer included "Matlock," which made its debut in 1986 and ran for 181 episodes; "Jake and the Fatman," which ran from 1987 to 1992; "In the Heat of the Night" (1988 95); "Diagnosis Murder" (1993 2001); and a series of made for TV Perry Mason movies. Fred Silverman was born on Sept. 13, 1937, in New York City to William and Mildred Silverman and grew up in Rego Park, Queens. His father was a television and radio service man, his mother a homemaker. Fred graduated from Forest Hills High School in Queens. As a child he was drawn to the radio, especially dramas, and he collected radio scripts. "When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I used to go down to the studios and made friends with all the porters," he said in the oral history. "They would collect scripts for me. I think at one point I had about four or five thousand scripts." Mr. Silverman earned a bachelor's degree at Syracuse University and a master's in television and theater arts in 1959 from Ohio State University. (He later donated his boyhood collection of scripts to Ohio State.) His master's thesis was a 406 page analysis of ABC's programming from 1953 to 1959, and it helped get him a job at WGN TV in Chicago in what was called the continuity department, "basically screening commercials and approving copy for live TV," as he related in the oral history. "So I was a censor, basically," he said. From there he went to WPIX in New York before landing at CBS.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
These Labs Rushed to Test for Coronavirus. They Had Few Takers. When a stay at home order in March all but closed the revered labs of the gene editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, her team at the University of California, Berkeley dropped everything and started testing for the coronavirus. They expected their institute to be inundated with samples since it was offering the service for free, with support from philanthropies. But there were few takers. Instead, the scientists learned, many local hospitals and doctors' offices continued sending samples to national laboratory companies like LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics even though, early on, patients had to wait a week or more for results. The bureaucratic hurdles of quickly switching to a new lab were just too high. "It's still amazing to me, like, how can that be the case, that there is not a more systematic way to address a central need?" said Fyodor Urnov, the scientist who oversaw the transformation of the Innovative Genomics Institute into a clinical laboratory. The inability of the United States to provide broad diagnostic testing, widely seen as a pivotal failing in the nation's effort to contain the virus, has been traced to the botched rollout by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the tardy response by the Food and Drug Administration, and supply shortages of swabs and masks. Yet one major impediment to testing has been largely overlooked: the fragmented, poorly organized American health care system, which made it difficult for hospitals and other medical providers to quickly overcome obstacles to testing. Despite calls for more than a decade to create a national laboratory system that could oversee a testing response in a public health crisis, there is, in fact, little coordination among public and private health labs, said Scott Becker, the chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, an association of state and local government labs. An effort to create one 10 years ago withered away over time for a lack of funding, he said. In recent days, President Trump has delivered a mixed message on testing, saying on May 11 that in ramping up, "we have met the moment and we have prevailed," while a few days later, he suggested that testing was "overrated" and that the high number of cases in the United States could be traced to more prevalent testing. The picture for testing is slowly improving. The United States is completing more than 300,000 tests a day, double the amount of a month ago, according to the Covid Tracking Project. A new, high capacity test by the manufacturing company Hologic is being shipped to labs around the country, offering the potential to double testing capacity in many cases. Some states, like California, Rhode Island and Minnesota, have undertaken widespread testing of residents. And the federal government is beginning to distribute 11 billion to support state testing efforts, which was authorized by Congress in April. When the Berkeley Institute didn't get the expected influx of tests, it shifted to work with the city of Berkeley and other local groups to conduct the kind of blanket testing of front line workers and other at risk groups that many public health experts believe will be necessary to safely reopen society. And companies like LabCorp and Quest, which were inundated with orders as the pandemic spiked in hot zones, have since cleared their backlogs. They, too, said they could be doing more testing, a mismatch that has complex causes, including an outdated sense by doctors and members of the public that the availability of testing remains scarce. Still, the level of testing in the United States is orders of magnitude less than what many epidemiologists say it should be. The country should be doing at least 900,000 tests a day and as many as 20 million to yield an accurate picture of the outbreak, they say. The need for extensive testing is even more acute as many governors have reopened their states before the epidemic has crested. Most testing is not done by public health authorities whose labs have been chronically underfunded but by hospital laboratories and major for profit testing companies. Some of the biggest industry players, including LabCorp and Quest, have consolidated their influence for years, buying up smaller competitors and negotiating exclusive deals with insurers and large health systems. Representatives of other laboratories, including at the University of California, San Diego and the for profit Eurofins Clinical Diagnostics, said they were surprised when they heeded the call to scale up testing in March but were not sent as many samples as they could manage, even as public health experts complained that the country was not testing nearly enough. "There's all this talk about doing more testing," said Ryan Thomas, a co owner of Centennial State Laboratory in Colorado, which quadrupled its staff in March and bought extra testing machines but has not received nearly as many tests as they have the capacity to process. "We are here, and we're here to help." Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Dr. Deborah L. Birx, who is coordinating the White House coronavirus response, has made the issue of unused testing capacity a major talking point. A team from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center recently sent a list of such labs to states. But the directors of several labs said they have not seen an uptick in requests since she highlighted the issue. "We are now reaping what we sowed for the last several decades," said Dr. Geoffrey S. Baird, the interim chairman of Laboratory Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, which operates one of the biggest academic clinical labs in the country. "It's not a six week solvable problem. It's not, buy more tests, get more swabs, and all of a sudden, we're going to have a public health system." In normal times, scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute at Berkeley spend their time advancing the gene editing technology called Crispr that the lab's founder, Dr. Doudna, is known for. But after the pandemic shut down the institute's research in March, Dr. Doudna called for volunteers to redirect most of the labs' work to coronavirus testing. The country was clamoring for more tests, after all, and her lab was full of researchers with the technical skills to make it happen. Unlike many other major research institutions, Berkeley does not have a medical school or run its own hospital. So Dr. Urnov reached out to others in the area, who were still ordering from LabCorp and Quest, despite lengthy delays in processing results at the time. "We would come to these entities and say, 'Hi, we hear you have problems,'" Dr. Urnov recalled. "And they said, 'Well, you have to basically work with our EHR,'" the acronym for electronic health records. Eurofins, based in Europe, has 14 clinical labs in the United States. It started offering coronavirus tests to U.S. hospitals and doctors in March, but an executive said the labs were frequently operating at about half their capacity of 10,000 tests a day. Puzzled by the low volume, the executive, Dean Tassone, Eurofin's vice president for payer services, said he wrote to a host of state and federal officials, including representatives of the White House coronavirus task force. He said he found it "bizarre" that so many governors have talked about a lack of available testing. "The capacity is there, it's simply not being utilized," he said. "There's this economic dysfunction that's occurring." Weeks after the company had reached out to New York officials, Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office contacted Eurofins last Friday to assist with testing, the company said. Its labs will now provide testing for nursing homes in five of the state's counties. LabCorp and Quest, as well as other large players like BioReference Laboratories and Sonic Healthcare, have competed for years to win the loyalty of doctors and hospitals, and to make ordering a test as frictionless as possible. Large health systems, which often run their own labs, have also gotten into the game, requiring doctors in the practices they have bought to use in house labs. "They're all trying to make ordering as easy and as paper free as they can," said Jondavid Klipp, the publisher of Laboratory Economics, an industry trade publication. The biggest lab companies have also been buying up smaller competitors, and negotiating exclusive arrangements with major insurers like UnitedHealth and Aetna, part of CVS Health. Adam H. Schechter, LabCorp's chief executive, said in an interview that hospitals and doctors chose his company because "we're a trusted partner and have been in this country for over 50 years now. We have a lot of longstanding relationships." The large companies say they do accept the overflow from some public health laboratories. And a spokeswoman for Quest says the company is working on a plan to send specimens to smaller, independent labs that could process extra tests. Many of the smaller laboratories have since abandoned efforts to run tests for hospitals and doctors' offices. Instead, they are focusing on broad based testing of high risk groups of people, like health care workers and nursing home residents, to help officials determine when it will be safe to permit residents to return to some semblance of normalcy. Dr. Bob Kocher, a partner at the venture capital firm Venrock who is on California's testing task force, said the state is in touch with the labs at Berkeley and San Diego. While the level of testing so far is a little more than half of the state's lab capacity, he expects that will change as the state reopens and more people will need to be tested. "I think excess capacity today is ethereal and about to be used up," he said. The Centennial lab in Colorado is testing nursing home residents and employees of companies that are planning to reopen their offices. But Mr. Thomas said they could be doing far more. "We have staff members willing to work the overnight, graveyard shift," he said. "We're here, and we have capacity, and we are available to do the testing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Peter Liguori, the longtime television executive, was appointed the new chief executive of the Tribune Company in 2013, just two and a half weeks after the newspaper and TV company emerged from an agonizing four year bankruptcy process. Mr. Liguori swiftly moved to spin off the publishing business and rebrand the company now called Tribune Media as a kind of 167 year old start up focused on television. His strategy is built on three pillars: local television, data and the conversion of WGN America, a onetime superstation, into a national entertainment network. To that end, Tribune struck a 2.7 billion deal in 2013 to buy 19 television stations, making it the largest station owner in the country, and in 2014 it closed a 170 million deal for the entertainment data service Gracenote. WGN America now is in about 80 million homes and has invested in four original scripted series that have helped build audiences for the network: "Salem," "Outsiders," "Underground" and the now canceled "Manhattan." Yet the company's share price has plunged about 45 percent over the last year as fears loomed about the fate of the media business. And Mr. Liguori recently disclosed that Tribune had hired financial advisers to explore strategic partnerships or the potential sale of the company. Mr. Liguori discussed the transformation of Tribune and the broader media industry during a recent interview in his New York office, decorated with a photograph of Mike Tyson, a picture of the laundry business he ran at Yale and a coloring book with a box of Crayolas. Here are excerpts from that conversation: After the publishing side of the business was spun off, one of the top strategies was to focus on original programming at WGN America. Why? Originals are important because they brand your network. There is no tagline, there is no marketing campaign that will ever work for a network that is as good as showing your performance. The story lines of WGNA's four original programs span the Salem witch trials ("Salem''), the secret race to build the world's first atomic bomb ("Manhattan''), a clan of outsiders living off the grid in Appalachia ("Outsiders'') and a group of slaves escaping a Georgia plantation ("Underground"). Why these stories today? We want to go after American themes. Now, there is a marketer's reason for that, and that is, especially when you are our size, especially when you are trying to make a mark, you want to make sure that you are targeting the biggest cross section of people to go after. The number of scripted shows available is expected to pass 400 this year. Is there too much TV? There is too much mediocre TV, but there is never enough quality TV. The "Underground" premiere ranked as the most watched program in nearly 18 years on WGN America, with 5.7 million total viewers across the week. How did you attract such a large audience? Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. We did screenings in black universities, megachurches and with the White House. We screened in certain museums. The most important thing that we needed to get going on the show was word of mouth and the approval of unbiased audiences, not a professional audience, not Hollywood premieres, not New York premieres, but premieres in Middle America. You recently announced that Tribune had hired financial advisers and is exploring a possible sale or strategic partnership for some or all of the company's assets to "unlock value." What's the latest? Look, it is our job every day to maximize the value of the assets. It's early on in the process. There is no preconceived notions as to where it ends. The board and management was just looking at this wide discrepancy between the value that we saw in this company and the performance we've shown and where the street was looking at us. We know this company is running well, and I think that at that moment in time when we made the announcement, there was a frustration with that discrepancy. I think this brings our assets into focus, it brings what we are doing into focus, and it kind of creates a process by which we think that value should get recognized. Tribune's stock has declined about 45 percent in the last year, amid broader fears about the role of traditional TV in a digital world. Major concerns include sharp ratings declines, a weak ad market and so called cord cutting. What is the role for traditional television in a digital world? First, I would clearly categorize a lot of it as overreaction. Let's just deal with the facts. At the end of the year, cord cutting was less than 1 percent versus the year before. So if you have 99.5 percent or 99.4 percent of people staying with cable, it is pretty slow erosion. Two, when you look at what is going on with ratings, clearly ratings are changing. The businesses which are currently more vulnerable are the mature ones that have 'been there, done that,' whereas when you look at where we are, we are outsiders. In the first quarter, our ratings were up over 40 percent, so our trajectory is much higher. No. No. No. Absolutely not. In some ways, maybe, it is growing TV. You look at their top shows, and the top ones will get between three and six million views over the course of 30 days. "Outsiders" and "Underground" did between 5.5 and 5.7 million viewers in seven days on traditional television. God only knows what happens when someone decides to binge. So here we are, a nascent network, going toe to toe with the biggest show, the biggest behemoth, and we're able to get somewhat equal viewership. I think that says if you continue to put on provocative programming, broadcast and cable television will be quite healthy. Did you just call Netflix the biggest behemoth? That's interesting because until only recently, they were considered an upstart. I used that in quotes. Everyone is looking for a boogeyman in the media environment, and I just think we all need to stick to our knitting. On your watch, Tribune has made a big push into the data business. What is the power of that data? Without giving away too many trade secrets,the questions before everyone are: Is music a frontier for television? How do you get sports information out there in an effective, compelling manner? How do you create rock solid, predictive recommendations? What will the television business look like in five years? I am so not a prognosticator, but so what I will do to answer your question and avoid prognosticating, I will go back to a turn of phrase which hasn't been used in a while: You will be able to watch what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, where you want to watch it. With all that being said, and "Underground" proved it, it will still be a part of you that wants that shared experience.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Even with this unflinching focus on the harsh realities of today's medical system, pitches in the writer's room often begin with this question: "Is there a world where...?" What freedom! Maybe there is a world where I used the hospital care packages to help a patient or solve a diagnostic dilemma. So too could there be a world where my patient's daughter raced through the airport and made it onto the last flight to land in Boston before they closed the runways. Maybe she was able to give her father a final hug and say goodbye after all. There is a world where all of this is possible. A few weeks before I flew to Los Angeles to dream of that world, I found myself part of a real world conversation about which of two patients should be placed on a machine called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. The machine works as an artificial lung, circulating blood outside the body, and it is increasingly used to help patients whose lungs are so damaged that the ventilator is not enough to support them. We have a handful of such machines in our hospital and all but one was in use. On that night, two patients could potentially benefit. Who would get the machine? Turned out the writers liked this idea. As they built the stories and as I offered my opinion on medical details and dialogue, I continued to follow my actual patients in the online medical record. At first fiction and reality unfolded as if in parallel. But then they diverged. I learned that in nonfiction life, the patient who was placed on ECMO grew sicker and ultimately died, while on TV we are allowed to hope that both patients lived. At first I worried that made the televised version misleading. But the authentic core of uncertainty how we balance risk and benefit and the great complexity in making decisions about allocating a limited resource is still there. And I like believing in an alternate reality where my patient might have lived. This was the world we had hoped for. And in the writer's room we were able to make that world come to life. Maybe this is the power of the medical dramas I love. As a nonfiction writer, I am used to relaying the truth as it occurs. But television finds a way to offer enough reality to teach and to provoke, but also offer a balance. Viewers can come close to the fire but they are not scorched. That is not the same truth as nonfiction. But it is a kind of truth telling nonetheless, one I am still learning to navigate. Toward the end of my time in the writer's room, I flew from the on set hospital back to Boston for a weekend in the intensive care unit. "Is there a world," I found myself thinking in a windowless family meeting room, where I told a wife that her husband would not live to leave the hospital. "Is there a world," I thought again as I examined a woman whose lung transplant had failed, leaving her dependent on a ventilator for every breath. "Is there a world," I murmured as I listened to the moans of a man who had been healthy until a disseminated staph infection cascaded through his bloodstream. When I left the hospital that night, I passed the clerk who sits at the entrance to the I.C.U. Her job is to answer the main phone line, which rings frequently, often from panicked family members. She had just settled in for the evening, and I noticed that she was watching something on her tablet. Curious, I approached. "What are you watching?" I asked her. She smiled at me before responding: "General Hospital." Daniela Lamas is a doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and the author of "You Can Stop Humming Now: A Doctor's Stories of Life, Death, and in Between."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
One of the first biotech companies to begin human trials of an experimental vaccine for the coronavirus is now ready to move onto the next phase of testing. On Thursday, Moderna announced that the Food and Drug Administration had cleared its application to proceed to a clinical trial involving about 600 people. "The imminent Phase 2 study start is a crucial step forward," Stephane Bancel, Moderna's chief executive, said in a statement. The main goal of this set of tests is to find out if the vaccine is safe and if positive results from the first few dozen volunteers in the first phase can be replicated in a much larger group. If it is successful, later studies, known as Phase 3 trials, will determine exactly how well the vaccine works.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Mr. Marcus, 66, is the chairman and chief executive of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a publicly traded real estate investment trust, or REIT, based in Pasadena, Calif. The company, which Mr. Marcus also co founded in 1994, owns and operates properties in the life science industry, totaling around 17 million square feet, including the Alexandria Center for Life Science on Manhattan's Far East Side. Q. How much of your portfolio is in the New York area? A. We have about 750,000 square feet. And we're just about to complete our second tower of 400,000 plus square feet at the only commercial life science park in the city, in Manhattan. We also hope to build a third building on the option parcel in New York. Q. What's the timetable for that project? A. So we finished the first building in 2010, and it's fully leased out. We started this next building in the fall of 2012; Roche moved in the first week of January, from Nutley, N.J. Q. Can you tell me more about your deal with Hoffman La Roche? A. It's a 15 year lease. Between 10 and 20 years is pretty average for our leases. They're paying in the 70 per square foot range, and they're leasing two floors, approximately 60,000 square feet. It's their translational clinical group, which collaborates on a bunch of projects with a lot of the New York institutions. And probably over time they'll move a number of research groups there. We've been told that could happen. They said they would like to have a deeper presence in New York, so we expect that over the next couple of years that they'll add space. Q. And the rest of the building? A. Leased and in process negotiations are approaching 60 percent. We've got one New York company that's come in I'm not at liberty to say who that is at the moment. We've got a number of floors that were leased to institutional tenants and we're talking to three or four more about moving. Q. How much more expensive is it to develop this type of property versus traditional office space? A. It's hard to say. In some markets, maybe a typical commercial office building might cost 70 percent of what a lab building would be. But in normal times lab rents have generally been 2X of what office rents have been. Q. What is the range per square foot of your leasing rates? A. In North Carolina and Maryland, it may be 20 triple net for our labs, and the highest rate would be in New York, probably 80. Q. So what kind of year was 2013, and what are your expectations for this year? A. Pretty impressive. We beat our internal and external growth numbers. Occupancy hit highs it's about 96 percent, which is among the highest it's been in the history of the company. Our lease renewals and same store growth were strong. Our dividends are up 21 percent over 2012, which is great. We're projecting 7 percent growth in 2014, plus a dividend of 4.5 percent, so over 10 percent growth, which in this economy is not too bad. Q. Your company strategy has been to build or acquire, then hold. How often do you sell assets? A. We like not to because they're hard to replace. But legacy assets that we bought early in the company's history, we've turned quite a few of those assets. Last year we sold three groups of assets. We exited Worcester, Mass.; we lightened up our asset base in Gaithersburg, Md.; and we sold a big asset in Seattle. A. Novartis of Switzerland. They have a couple hundred thousand square feet, primarily in Cambridge, Mass. They also just leased some space from us in North Carolina, and they have some various spaces elsewhere. Q. What's the average amount of space that you lease per tenant? A. Full building users could be 100,000, 200,000 square feet. Multi tenant users could be as low as 5,000 or 10,000. Q. So how did you come up with the Alexandria name? A. Well that's interesting. My oldest son, who was at Wharton, came up with the name. My experience on Wall Street was that you always wanted an "A" name so it shows up first in whatever ticker or list there is. So "A" was a mandatory requirement. I also had done research with the New York Stock Exchange and the symbol "ARE" was available, so I told my son, "Think of something that the symbol would fit." He came up with Alexandria, Egypt, which was the scientific capital of the ancient world. And the first lighthouse was in Alexandria Harbor. No one has ever discovered it because I guess it was probably destroyed by an earthquake or something like that. So he combined the name and the lighthouse as our logo. Q. You were an accountant and lawyer before you got into real estate. A. My dad was a home builder so I kind of grew up in a real estate family. I had gotten involved pretty deeply in the biotech and pharma industry when I was a lawyer and ended up representing many major pharma companies, biotech companies and venture capital firms. Our tenant base is like my client base before.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The major networks are unveiling their offerings for the coming television season to advertising buyers in Manhattan. Money, prestige and cultural import are at stake. Three New York Times reporters who specialize in the media John Koblin, Michael M. Grynbaum and Sapna Maheshwari assess what they saw at the Fox presentation on Monday, the second upfront presentation of the week. JOHN: Well, we spent Monday afternoon at Fox's presentation, then headed to "Trump Rink" in Central Park, where Fox threw a booze and sushi soaked after party. SAPNA: The sheer variety of food, from the dim sum station to the bakery with glass cake cases, was astounding. It was like a wedding where the hosts paid for all the extras. JOHN: Let's take a breath. First things first, the war is on. Sapna, the networks are just not having it with digital folks like Facebook and YouTube. SAPNA: Yes! We saw NBC's chief of ad sales talk about "brand safety" and throw shade at Silicon Valley on Monday morning, but Fox's equivalent, Joe Marchese, took it to a new level Monday afternoon which it should be noted was his third day on the job. He slammed a statistic that Facebook loves to cite "a Super Bowl every day on mobile" by touting the number of advertising minutes Fox delivers to viewers every night. It felt like Fox was throwing down the gauntlet by calling out YouTube and Facebook by name and offering competing metrics, and I bet we'll see a lot more of that in coming months. MICHAEL: This dog and pony show only covered Fox's broadcast programming, but the specter of its troubled corporate cousin, Fox News, was tough to ignore. Last year, Megyn Kelly came out to plug her soon to be panned interview special, "Megyn Kelly Presents." This year, the only reference came courtesy of Seth MacFarlane, who introduced Fox's programming chiefs, Dana Walden and Gary Newman, as "the only two people at Fox not being sued." JOHN: The entire presentation felt a little off. I can't tell you how many Fox folks at the after party were rolling their eyes at the interminable sports portion: Jimmy Johnson in basketball shorts; Joe Buck making not one, but two groan worthy jokes about his ex wife. Technically, Fox finished the year in second place in the all so vital age demographic important to advertisers, and that was because, well, they had gangbuster ratings from the Super Bowl and the World Series. And Fox really talked up its baseball coverage. The Pete Rose and Frank Thomas pregame show, regarded as something of a joke in outside circles, was presented as a treasure. MICHAEL: I actually thought the Pete Rose thing was a parody. JOHN: For good reason. But there's a reason for all the World Series talk. Baseball's relatively low ratings were, not long ago, something network executives loathed. Twenty years ago, NBC's Don Ohlmeyer said he hoped the World Series would be a short one so he could return to his prime time lineup. "We started off winning the first 12 or 14 nights of the season, then baseball started," he sniffed back then. Even without the Chicago Cubs making history, baseball's ratings are looking relatively better than whatever else the networks have to offer now. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. SAPNA: The "first wife" jokes really felt like a time warp to the 1980s. John, you had to explain the second one to me! JOHN: I can't even talk about it. By the time we got to the after party, things felt relatively muted. There's a reason for this: Ratings for "Empire" are down a lot, so the wind has come out of that 2015 breakout. And when I took the temperature of the Fox room last year, everyone raved about the "Lethal Weapon" trailer (the show did, indeed, turn out to be a modest success). This year, I could not get a consensus from the Fox folks. I heard "Ghosted," the Adam Scott and Craig Robinson comedy; I heard "The Resident," about a powerful but menacing doctor in what the network hopes is a "House" style medical drama hit; and I heard "The Gifted," its swing for the fences Marvel genre show directed by Bryan Singer. Guys, was there anything that excited you? SAPNA: My sister is an overworked resident, so I think I'm too close to that world to really "get" how a sassy third year resident is able to mouth off to a senior doctor on a regular basis while keeping his job. But who knows, "The Resident" could be the season's breakout hit. I thought "Ghosted" looked entertaining, with an off the wall premise. Adam Scott has given me a lot of delight in the past few years with "Parks Recreation" on NBC and "Big Little Lies" on HBO, so I have hope for whatever he does on Fox. I liked him in "Party Down," too, but I only know that through Hulu! Millennial cord cutter over here, amirite?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Big Break While riding the subway with friends at the age of 16, Mr. Lang was discovered by the young talent scout Aaron Bakalar. One month later, he flew to Los Angeles (accompanied by his mother) to star in a Saint Laurent campaign photographed by Hedi Slimane. "I honestly didn't know who Hedi was, so I ended up having fun and joking around with him," Mr. Lang said. Latest Project Playing a friend of Jaden Smith's character in "Skate Kitchen," a film about a clique of young female skateboarders directed by Crystal Moselle, which will have its premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. "I had known a few of those girls on set from hanging out around the city," he said. Next Thing Mr. Lang's M.C. moniker, Judah Stax, combines his first name and a slang word for large amounts of money. Later this year, he will release a new set of music videos and a mixtape of frenetic hip hop tracks he made with a D.J. named Loudman (a.k.a. his older brother Ike). "There are times I rap totally for myself and I don't even bother recording it," he said. "I do it for emotional reasons." Dropping Knowledge Many of his lyrics name check unexpected historical figures, like Catherine the Great and Yi Sun sin, the 16th century Korean naval commander. (Sample lyric: "I'm feeling like Admiral Yi/ You don't want to battle with me.") "It's not 'Hamilton' y at all in the sound," Mr. Lang said of his craft. "But it is totally historically accurate."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
"A Library" is no simple reduction of "Filament," as the trio actually had its premiere first, in April this year. At Issue Project Room, without the orchestra or the whispery, roving chorus heard at David Geffen Hall, it was easier to appreciate some of Mr. Lopez's delicate, near the bridge playing. The intimacy of the Brooklyn space didn't sap any of Ms. Fure's intensity, either: The final buzzing chords hit with extraordinary force. Ms. Lockwood's music was heard on both evenings. Her 1998 piece "Immersion" was performed on Wednesday by the percussion duo of Frank Cassara and Dominic Donato. The work's most compelling stretches were achieved by Ms. Lockwood's use of a cylindrical container placed atop a marimba. One musician drew a mallet around the cylinder's circumference, while the other gently thrummed the edges of the bars underneath, producing slight, dreamy dissonances. On Thursday, Ms. Lockwood's recent piece "Becoming Air" was played by Mr. Wooley, using his extended technique on trumpet to create, as in "Immersion," a mood of elegant energy. While using circular breathing to produce long tones on his instrument, he also manipulated a small microphone inside the bell, as well as an effect pedal at his feet. As the microphone moved farther inside the trumpet, the amplified overtones shifted incrementally, producing some dramatic howls of distortion. Ms. Lockwood also made full use of Mr. Wooley's quieter strategies, like the mouthpiece free blowings he sometimes uses, blasts of frenzy that remain soft. (The sound is suggestive of a sprinkler system that's gained consciousness.) Mr. Wooley's interpretive powers were brought into even clearer focus by "Red Autumn Gold," a work written by the trumpet virtuoso (and 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist) Wadada Leo Smith and played twice during For/With. Mr. Wooley's solo rendition opened the festival on Wednesday. Using polyphonic extended techniques, he made multiple droning lines drift apart and then return to states of equilibrium. Pauses in the music brought shifts toward brief flurries of notes that sounded like descendants of bebop phrasing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
On terraces and decks, one piece of furniture is often key to anchoring a seating arrangement: the coffee table. And if you haven't got one, where are you going to put your drinks? "It's a must," said Lee Cavanaugh, a partner at Cullman Kravis Associates, a New York based interior design firm. "I've seen people, to my horror, who don't have a table near a seating arrangement a decorator's worst nightmare and they have to put everything on the floor." When you're selecting a coffee table, she advised, choose the materials carefully. Be aware that wood will weather over time if it's left unsealed and that urban grit has a tendency to work its way into porous surfaces. Some metal finishes, on the other hand, may be problematic in the salty air near the ocean. Another piece of advice: Don't make the mistake of trying to match your table to your chairs. Patio sets, Ms. Cavanaugh observed, invariably look outdated. "It's more interesting and aesthetically appealing if the materials are different," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Q. Can you explain just what a recovery drive will do as opposed to a system restore point or a recovery image? How do these features differ from Reset PC? If my Windows 10 Surface Book crashes, which feature do I try first? A. Microsoft provides a slew of troubleshooting options to aid ailing Windows computers, but choosing which one to try first requires close observation of the situation. Minor glitches may be fixed by rolling back to a previous restore point, but a nonstarting computer might need more assistance. A system restore point, which Windows automatically creates once a week or before software updates and installations, is a snapshot of the computer's settings at that moment hopefully when things were working well. If you have just installed a program, a driver or a patch and Windows is behaving erratically, it may be a problem with the new software. Reverting to a previous restore point may be enough to get your system functioning properly again. Recovery drives are USB drives you make that have Windows system files and tools installed on them. You need to create the recovery drive ahead of time, before the computer starts having problems. If Windows cannot start up properly, you can plug in the recovery drive, boot the Surface Book from it and use the tools on it to restore or reset the system.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
UPDATE: Bodo/Glimt beat Stromsgodset, 2 1, on Sunday, Nov. 22 to seal its first Norwegian championship. The best perch is on the rooftop overlooking the stadium. Reaching it is not for the fainthearted: The only access is via an external staircase, and most of the field can be seen only if you sit right on the lip of the building. But still, during most games, a handful of hardy fans have made the journey up there. If anything, others have had to be even more creative. Before one match over the summer, one group of fans hired a cherry picker, parked it outside the stadium, climbed into its basket, and then extended its hydraulic arm until they could see the field. The stunt resulted in a fine for the club, but it was accepted with a laconic grin. The club's executives understood that nobody in Bodo, a city of 50,000 people just north of the Arctic Circle, a 16 hour drive from Oslo, has ever seen anything like this; they know that, this season, people will go to extraordinary lengths just to see Bodo/Glimt play. This has been a golden year for the club. It stands on the cusp of claiming its first Norwegian championship. Despite a budget that is just a fraction of some of its rivals', it has steamrollered the competition. It has won 21 of its 24 league games and scored an improbable 83 goals and counting in the process. It has a slew of records in its sights. The team's rise has captivated not only the city and the region, but the country as a whole. Frode Thomassen, Bodo/Glimt's chief executive, said recently it had sold merchandise to new fans in every corner of Norway, and across Europe, too. Despite a traditionally small fan base, its games are suddenly a major draw for television networks. Ulrik Saltnes, the club's captain, said barely a day had gone by without an interview request. Orjan Berg, a former player and now a coach in the club's youth academy, was struck during his summer vacation by the number of people who approached to congratulate him on the team's season. "Everyone is cheering for Bodo/Glimt," he said. Earlier this year, when his son, Patrick, a 22 year old midfielder for the club, won his first call up to the Norwegian national team, he was greeted enthusiastically by Erling Haaland, Martin Odegaard and the rest of Norway's exported superstars. "They said they didn't normally watch much of the Norwegian league," Berg said, "but that they were watching our games." The bitter reality, of course, is that few have been able to see the greatest team in the club's history in the flesh. There is a reason fans have had to clamber up that staircase or rent construction equipment: The coronavirus has meant that, for much of the season, only 200 fans have been allowed inside Bodo's low slung Aspmyra Stadion for each game. Its largest attendance this year has been 600. In a year when everyone wants to watch Bodo/Glimt, scarcely anyone can. All sports produce underdog stories. Leicester City wins the Premier League. Iceland makes the World Cup. Joe Namath leads the Jets to the Super Bowl. But while such stories are rare that is what makes them special and while each is unique, their rhythms are familiar. There is, generally, a charismatic coach. There is either a group of players with something to prove or a squadron of homegrown talents ready to take the world by storm. Most of the time, there is some sort of behind the scenes advantage an edge that will hold for a year or two until everyone else adopts it or some bold new style of play that takes opponents by surprise. What makes Bodo/Glimt's story stand out what transforms it into almost the Platonic ideal of an underdog story is that it contains all of those ingredients, and a few more. The coach, in this case, is Kjetil Knutsen, a 52 year old who inspires deep affection in his players. Saltnes said he "loves him," and Patrick Berg praised his collectivist approach: "He listens to his players." The core of the squad is homegrown, the likes of Berg, Saltnes, the defender Brede Moe and the winger Jens Petter Hauge all drawn from Bodo itself or from elsewhere in the north of Norway. All came up through the club's youth system. "Half the first team are local boys," Orjan Berg said. "We aim to have 40 percent of our squad from northern Norway, and 15 percent of playing minutes for local players. That is part of our identity. The fans want northern Norwegians to play." And yet, while Bodo/Glimt is a story of the shining promise of youth, it is also a story of redemption. A couple of years ago Patrick Berg, frustrated at his lack of playing time, considered leaving the team that is entwined with his family. "I was not in the right head space," he said. "I was disappointed and angry, and I was blaming everyone else besides me." Saltnes, his captain, considered walking away from the game altogether, saying he had long since ceased to find soccer fun. Before games, he battled nausea and stomach cramps. He was, in hindsight, consumed by "doubts and fears." That was only three years ago. A few weeks back, he led the team out at San Siro for a Europa League game against A.C. Milan. "If you look at the team that day," Saltnes said, "almost every player would have a strange story about how they ended up on that pitch. They had all been let down or injured or wanted to leave. You would never have guessed their stories." All of these, of course, are familiar tropes in any case study of success against the odds. What makes Bodo/Glimt especially compelling is that they are all present, all at the same time. That, in part, may explain the club's appeal. "We are an underdog," said Thomassen, the chief executive. "And who doesn't love an underdog?" The Only Ambition Is to Have None In the spring of 2019, Bodo/Glimt's players traveled to Spain for their preseason training camp. Traditionally, while they were there, they would discuss their goals for the year ahead. This time, though, they came back with a different mission. "We did away with all of that stuff," Saltnes said. "We did not have any ambitions. We just wanted to focus on performance." Saltnes, like his colleagues, does not believe there is a singular explanation for what has happened to Bodo/Glimt in the past three years, a silver bullet that has transformed it from an also ran into what many regard as the best club team Norway has seen in at least two decades. "People always ask what the secret is, but there is no one thing or one person," Saltnes said. "It has all happened very naturally. There was no grand vision, no map." The one thing that everyone agrees on, though, is that none of it would be possible without Bjorn Mannsverk. A former fighter pilot who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and flew missions above Libya, he was hired as the team's mental coach in 2017. Though he was not a soccer fan Mannsverk found the first few games he watched "boring," though he insisted he enjoys soccer much more now. As a member of Norway's air force, he had discovered the benefits of mental training and mindfulness, and he accepted the challenge of trying to introduce his methods to sports. "I only had two rules," he said. "It all had to be voluntary. And I would not be the club's agent. I would not tell the players they should be more happy or that they should work harder." Occasionally, his methods appear in plain sight: When Bodo/Glimt concedes a goal, the players regularly come together to talk it through. "Not every time," Mannsverk said. "Sometimes there is a bit of bad luck or whatever. But if they need to, they do. This is quite rare, I think." Saltnes had just come from a group session with Mannsverk and several teammates when we spoke. It was, he said, intensely personal. "We have a very open culture," he said. "We say things to our coach that, at other clubs, might be taken as a sign of weakness." Patrick Berg credits Mannsverk with not only helping him "as a player, but as a person, too." It was Mannsverk who encouraged the idea of thinking about performance, rather than results. "Focusing on results generates a lot of stress," he said. "Focusing on performance is a really creative process." The results were immediate. Bodo/Glimt finished 11th in 2018, a creditable, but unspectacular, finish for a newly promoted team. Last year, it finished second, and only a late collapse prevented the club from claiming the title. This year, there will be no mistake: It will claim the championship playing an adventurous, open, expansive style of play that even Saltnes described as "kamikaze." "I don't think it would be possible to play like that without Bjorn and the mental work we do," he said. "No, I don't think that would end very well at all." Orjan Berg was 7 when Bodo/Glimt won that cup in 1975. He remembers that for quite a while afterward his family could not go into Bodo on a Saturday. "People just wanted to stop him and talk about football," he said of his father. "It feels the same now." Next up might be two of the team's imports, the Danes Philip Zinckernagel and Kasper Junker, or even the 22 year old Berg. "Players have bigger ambitions than playing in Norway," he said. For him, as a local player, as a childhood fan, this season has felt "like a dream." There is a risk for the club, though, that once it ends, dawn will bring a cold, bleak light, that when people wake up from their reverie this team that everyone wanted to watch will be gone. Thomassen does not see it that way. When the club advertised for an under 19 coach a few weeks ago, he said, it was inundated with applications, more than 400 in all. He believes Bodo/Glimt is now more attractive to players in the rest of Norway than ever; he is full of pride at the work that has been done to improve the academy, to keep it churning out prospects.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
What initially got you interested in the refugee crisis? One lady from Iraq came to see me. She said, "I want you to help me to select drawings made in an Iraqi refugee camp. With your reputation, the wind is behind you, so we want to draw some attention." I looked through their drawings kind of naive drawings, memories about how their houses had been bombed. They were like children's drawings. I got very attracted to it. I said, "I can do that only with one condition: if I can send some of my team to that camp. I just want to interview those people." You ultimately were able to regain your passport and go to a refugee camp on the Greek island Lesbos yourself, for the documentary "Human Flow." What was that like? It's so different when you see a real snake. I was quite surprised to see this very, very unprepared primitive response in dealing with this human crisis. It's total neglect or wanting to avoid the issue. If you're a doctor and you see sickness, you deal with it. This is a very scientific society we have all kind of resources. Yet we were totally paralyzed. In the beginning, we didn't know how to respond, just let it be rotten. With your installation, "Laundromat" featuring the cleaned castoff clothes of refugees and your recent public art project, "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors," a series of fences and barriers, you've lately been a larger presence in New York. Why is that? I have a strange relationship with the city I really struggled here, but I love it here. Lately, I started thinking about New York's history with immigration everybody in New York comes from somewhere. Here are the strongest characters, the imagination, the passion. Something about New York is about losing control and having control at the same time. It generates so much energy. If you're walking down Broadway, and you just see the people passing, you never know where they come from. They often look tired but they're quite determined to survive here. I wanted to do something about this. You have said that your early blogs were often funny. Yet most of your more recent artistic expression seems fairly serious. How do you explain that?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Last week we walked past the lot where a monstrous mechanical tyrannosaur was scooping up the remains of a house it had just demolished. As we passed the cacophonous destruction zone, Millie picked up speed but didn't bolt. She didn't even look up to ask for the treat she knows she'll get for not freaking out in the presence of something frightening. Lately it's been dawning on us that we might have turned Millie into a bit of a brat. Early on, trying to convince her that the world contains good things, my husband started saving her the last bite of his scrambled egg. This dog who for more than a year was almost entirely silent now barks impatiently if she believes he's taking too long to finish breakfast. This dog who had to be tricked into eating now knows exactly when the clock strikes 5 and paws at me unceasingly until I feed her. This dog who feared all strangers now greets guests with a level of exuberance that not all guests actually welcome. She drinks out of unattended coffee cups, makes herself at home on the afghan my great grandmother crocheted, rifles through open drawers in hopes of discovering a cough drop. She has stolen a lot of cough drops. People who haven't seen her in a while invariably make some version of the same observation: "This is not the same dog I met last time." But she is the same dog. She's just a happier, braver version of herself. Perhaps most remarkably, her fears continue to fall away, day by day, the longer she is here. Even now, she is not yet the dog she is in the process of becoming. Millie reminds me that I am also a creature in the process of becoming. I, too, am still learning to be brave, still trying to understand a world that holds so much cruelty and so much pain. Maybe we're all creatures in the process of becoming. Against all immediate evidence, I hold out hope that the nation itself is in the process of living up to its own promise unacceptably slowly but nonetheless still becoming. The arc of the moral universe will always bend toward justice. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that, and I try with everything I have in me to believe it. It would be absurd to turn this one little rescue dog into an analog for a troubled country, much less for humanity as a whole. This little rescue dog isn't even fully rescued herself. She will always carry within her the life she endured before us. The brutality, the hunger, the fear they will always be there, deep inside, just as they are for any other living thing who has suffered terribly. The body remembers pain. The brain holds on to trauma. But we also cling to kindness. A stumble in the dark may elicit a yelp, but a tender touch will always bring Millie back to us now. When cruelty is all the news ever seems to hold anymore, I try to remember that too. Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book "Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The 19th century buildings at the former lighthouse service depot on the North Shore of Staten Island are in such a state of decay that tree branches reach out of the dormer windows. But the city hopes this abandoned site, which dates to the French and Indian War, will soon re emerge as a bustling urban center with shops, restaurants, a hotel and housing. The lighthouse area, which was abandoned by the Coast Guard in the 1960s, is one target of an ambitious redevelopment plan for downtown Staten Island. Nearly 1 billion in private investment is expected to pour into the North Shore around the Staten Island Ferry terminal over the next decade, bringing the borough the world's tallest Ferris wheel, an outlet mall, and rentals and condominiums. In June, developers will break ground on a sprawling residential development on the site of a former naval base in the Stapleton neighborhood, a mile and a half south of the terminal. "We really believe that this is a transformational moment for the North Shore of Staten Island," said Seth W. Pinsky, the president of the city's Economic Development Corporation. "Staten Island is entering into a golden age." This next phase of development is intended to persuade two groups to stay on Staten Island: the 1.5 million tourists who arrive by ferry each year only to turn around and immediately return to Manhattan, and young Staten Islanders, who have been leaving for decades. Between 1990 and 2009, Staten Island has lost 2,000 residents ages 20 to 34, resulting in a nearly 6 percent decline among that population group, according to a report by the Center for an Urban Future. Developers hope the new apartments will entice more homegrown Staten Islanders to stay, and maybe even draw residents from elsewhere.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
As cinematic practitioners of bad taste go, Lloyd Kaufman, one of the founders of the microbudget quasi studio Troma, is no John Waters. He lacks that director's Wilde at the grindhouse verbal wit, and in place of Waters's queer iconoclasm, Kaufman imbues his films with a species of heteronormative New York wisenheimer leering. That said, in "Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High A.K.A. Vol. 2," a rough hewed sort of sequel to 2014's "Return to Nuke 'Em High," Kaufman really does bring the bad taste. Buckets and buckets of it. The opening scene pays homage to the 1976 horror film "Carrie" by ... well, you don't want to know. The "Nuke 'Em High" films, like those in the "Toxic Avenger" series, are set in the fictional, and oft traumatized New Jersey town Tromaville. The byzantine, trivial plot here features high school lovers Chrissy and Lauren (Asta Paredes and Catherine Corcoran) trying to keep on the down low, despite the prying of unappealing male internet trolls and radioactive monsters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Twitter, bowing to pressure from its users, said on Tuesday that it would more aggressively scrutinize fake or altered photos and videos. Starting in March, the company said, it will add labels or take down tweets carrying manipulated images and videos. The move, while short of an outright ban, was announced one day after YouTube also said it planned to remove misleading election related content on its site. Twitter's new policy highlights a balancing act between allowing parody and removing disinformation that social media companies face as they try to more aggressively police the content posted to their platforms. To determine whether a tweet should be removed or labeled, Twitter said in a blog post, it will apply several tests: Is the media included with a tweet significantly altered or fabricated to mislead? Is it shared in a deceptive manner? In those cases, the tweet will probably get a label. But if a tweet is "likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm," it will be taken down. Twitter said it might also show a warning to people before they engaged with a tweet carrying manipulated content, or limit that tweet's reach. "Our approach does not focus on the specific technologies used to manipulate or fabricate media," said Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of site integrity. "Whether you're using advanced machine learning tools or just slowing down a video using a 99 cent app on your phone, our focus under this policy is to look at the outcome, not how it was achieved." The company developed its rules after surveying more than 6,500 users, civil groups and academics, said Del Harvey, Twitter's vice president for trust and safety. They found that about 70 percent of surveyed Twitter users believed it was unacceptable for the company to take no action against manipulated content. More than 90 percent said such content should be removed or placed behind a warning label saying the video or image had been altered. "Things that distort or distract from what's happening threaten the integrity of information on Twitter," Ms. Harvey said. Like other social networks that have tried to crack down on bogus content, Twitter will be under pressure to consistently apply its new rules. Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, said that defining harm was not always clear, especially in the context of social media. "And it would be difficult to automate these responses on a global scale," she said. Last year, an altered video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi that made it appear that she was slurring her words spread across the internet. Another heavily edited clip of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. falsely made it seem as though he had made racist remarks. Mr. Roth said the manipulated videos of Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Biden would get a label under Twitter's new policy. Depending on what a tweet sharing the video said and if it caused harm, Mr. Roth said, Twitter could take the tweet down. Last year, Twitter said it would add warning labels to hide messages from major political figures who broke the company's rules for harassment or abuse. Normally, those tweets would be taken down, but the company argued that they would be newsworthy enough to remain on the platform. As of Tuesday, Twitter had not yet used the labels. In January, Facebook banned "deepfake" videos from its platform. But the company said the videos of Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Biden would not be removed under the policy because they had been edited with video editing software, not artificial intelligence. YouTube banned misleading political content on Monday as part of a new policy ahead of the presidential election in November.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Toxic Men Get All the Attention. But Not in These Plays. There's something feral about Jud Fry, and something pathetic, too. Jud is the bad guy in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!" the farmhand who makes Laurey, the heroine, feel threatened in her own home. And in Daniel Fish's indie auteur take on the musical, at Circle in the Square, he resembles nothing so much as one of those furiously entitled contemporary outcasts who react to a woman's rejection by committing some horrifically violent crime. Still, I couldn't stop myself. Looking at his watery, pink rimmed eyes, I felt a pang of pity for him. Misdirected empathy on my part, I know, but I don't remember being so uncomfortable about it last fall, when the show ran at St. Ann's Warehouse. I suspect I owe my newly acute awareness to two current Off Broadway plays: Mara Nelson Greenberg's "Do You Feel Anger?" at the Vineyard Theater, and Halley Feiffer's "The Pain of My Belligerence" at Playwrights Horizons. "Belligerence" is still in previews, so I have to be a little coy about it, but "Anger" absolutely staggered me sent me off afterward rethinking my life, examining my own sympathies. Both pitch black comedies, they show the ways that women are conditioned to feel for even wildly toxic men, while doggedly discounting their own needs, their own suffering and that of other women. "I'm sure they don't mean to make you feel unsafe," Sofia, the empathy coach in "Anger," tells a woman who is scared of her male colleagues a menacing bunch, actually, including one notorious for throwing tantrums. For all her professional expertise, Sofia is a product of the culture; in myriad everyday situations, she, too, prioritizes the perspectives of men. On influential New York stages lately, though, the perspectives of women are shifting the discourse. Even Broadway shows "Kiss Me, Kate," elegantly updated to excise the sexism, and Heidi Schreck's "What the Constitution Means to Me" are thinking about empathy along gender lines, and who deserves it from us. This is a welcome evolution of an art form that inherently fosters empathy and in which it matters greatly whom we're asked to feel for. "Anger" and "Belligerence" are responses to the election of Donald J. Trump, and to the feminist debate that has been simmering ever since. To judge by their titles, ire is the top note in each play, and they are in fact plenty angry though aware that anger is one of those emotions that women are less free than men are to display. Ms. Nelson Greenberg sets her absurdist "Anger" in the office of a collection agency, where Sofia arrives to give the staff a handful of crude, obstructionist men and a quietly terrified woman who feigns laughter at their jokes remedial lessons in emotional literacy. It's an environment so female unfriendly that when Sofia tells the boss, Jon, that the women's bathroom has nowhere to dispose of tampons, he responds with total incomprehension: This, like so many elementary female concerns, is foreign to him. "O.K.," he says, trying to puzzle it out. "And is that a riddle?" It's a brilliant line, but it might seem over the top until you remember that NASA engineers, in the 1980s, guessed that Sally Ride would need 100 tampons for a week in space a story that resurfaced in March, when the agency kicked one astronaut off what was to have been its first all female spacewalk because it didn't have a spacesuit in her size. So: not such an exaggeration after all. "Belligerence," which opens on April 22, unspools over three presidential Election Days: 2012, when Cat, a magazine writer played by Ms. Feiffer, is having her first date with Guy, a sexy but poisonous married man who warns her repeatedly that he's bad news (for one thing, he's a biter); 2016, when she has been subjugating herself to him for four dysfunctional years; and 2020, when we see the crippling damage their relationship has wrought. The playwright has said that she wanted her play to be "the theater equivalent" of Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person." A short story about a young woman who imagines a poignant vulnerability lurking beneath the aggressive hostility of the largely unappealing older guy she's dating, it went viral when it ran in The New Yorker in late 2017. Ms. Feiffer told me that she would like "Belligerence" to "provide the same kind of sense of connection and catharsis the short story did and hope: 'I no longer need to keep engaging in these patterns that are hurting me and others and our culture at large.' " She and Ms. Nelson Greenberg, a student in the M.F.A. program at the University of California San Diego, are both interested in how women's internalized misogyny becomes abnegation and self loathing. Neither lets women off the hook for betraying other women including, in "Anger," Sofia's mother, who is going through a traumatic divorce. Sofia's unseen father is egregiously at fault, but Sofia ghosts her sweet mom and keeps in contact with her sociopathic dad. Perversely, her empathy lies with him. That's the way we've been socialized to be, but even the revival of "Kiss Me, Kate," at Studio 54, is resisting that tendency. Amanda Green's sensible tweaks to the text turn Kate's humiliating scene at the end, about what women owe to their men, into a compassionate scene about what lovers owe to one another. For seven decades, it was acceptable to withhold empathy from Kate. Not anymore. In "Constitution," at the Helen Hayes Theater, Ms. Schreck plays herself at 15, addressing an American Legion hall full of men. She tells them, in an unfalteringly sunny tone, about a fantasy she had as a child of how to talk a man out of raping or murdering her. (This play, too, is a comedy. There's a lot of fairly shattering comedy coming from female playwrights these days.) "You say, 'I'm here to murder you,'" she says, "and I say, 'No. Think about this for a moment. Just like you, I am a human being.' And then you see me for the first time as a human being and you say, 'You're right! Oh, my God, you are a human being!'" Like "Constitution," which scrutinizes the nation's founding document to see whose interests it leaves out (initially at least, anyone who wasn't a white male property owner), "Anger" and "Belligerence" examine a culture constructed to sympathize with men, to value them more highly, to see women as inherently less deserving of consideration. Both plays are full of harmful behaviors made up of individual actions that are often unremarkable. As in life and as in "Cat Person" the pattern is what's alarming. Yet it can be difficult to see a pattern whose components are commonplace. "Nothing happens in a split second," a woman named Janie says near the end of "Anger," when the wackiness of the play's tone has given way to something more exalted and devastating. "One tiny moment after one tiny moment turns into a big moment. So it's hard to blame anyone in one of those tiny moments because it's hard to even recognize it as a moment in the first place!" There are moments it's easy to recognize, though, and this is one of them, when the voices of female playwrights are elucidating a pathology that skews all our sympathies leaving us feeling a reflexive twinge for guys like Jud Fry, onstage and in the world. Theater isn't known for lighting quick responses to cultural change, but this shift is happening fast. Let's make a pattern of it. Woman human being, indeed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
PARIS Perhaps only in Paris would a past its prime nightclub be brought back from dereliction. But to Parisians of a certain age, Les Bains Douches was not just any old boite de nuit. "Oh, there was no other nightclub," said Andre Saraiva, 43, the graffiti artist and night life impresario behind the exclusive Le Baron clubs in Paris and around the world. "It was like a place of freedom. A temple for night culture. And it was cool." There were other clubs in that golden age of Paris night life, but perhaps none of them were as era defining. Opened in 1978 on the site of a 19th century bathhouse in the Third Arrondissement, Les Bains Douches made stars of its designer (Philippe Starck) and resident D.J. (David Guetta), who were unknown at the time. Joy Division recorded a live album in the basement, where Prince performed impromptu and Depeche Mode played years before selling out stadiums. "We would come with our runway makeup on and whatever beautiful couture things we put together," said Dianne Brill, a former model and "It Girl" of 1980s New York (Andy Warhol called her "Queen of the Night") who now has her own cosmetics line. "It was very, very glamorous, but it was not slick." It is today. You will still find the face of Bacchus sculpted into its Haussmannian facade. The original David Rocheline frescoes and double faced clock are still in the foyer. And the circa 1983 Futura graffiti, created while on tour with the Clash, now adorns a patio beside the restaurant, where Mr. Starck's black and white checkered dance floor has been fully restored. But the new Les Bains (the "Douches" was dropped), which opened quietly this month after being closed for five years, is now a 39 room hotel, with a smaller club in the basement (the pool, a replica, sits behind a glass partition that slides up at night) and a restaurant that literally shines: The walls, undulating ceiling and stalactite like pillars are swathed in a burgundy red lacquer. The restaurant made a dramatic backdrop for a star studded Dior after party during Paris Fashion Week in March, the first of several splashy preopening events (Tommy Hilfiger and Givenchy have hosted parties, too). And with plans for more parties in the coming weeks during the men's fashion and haute couture shows, Les Bains is already among the hottest spots in town. Upstairs, the interior designer Tristan Auer (who is currently restoring the Hotel de Crillon) has furnished the rooms with rust red velvet sofas modeled after the one in Andy Warhol's Factory, and suites have outdoor showers and private hammams. "It's a fuller experience than it used to be because before it was only a restaurant and club," said Jean Pierre Marois, the 51 year old filmmaker whose family has owned the building since the 1960s. Having spent his formative years climbing the club's crowded front stoop to be assessed by the formidable doorwoman, Marie Line, he is now the owner and the man behind the reinvention of Les Bains as a hotel and lifestyle brand. When Les Bains Douches opened, "it was after birth control pills for the masses, and before AIDS," he said. "So it was like a unique window. People could be very promiscuous and careless. Our life is much more controlled now." And in the past, if you were so inspired (or inebriated) to strip down to your underwear and jump into the pool, there was no risk of it ending up on Instagram. "I don't know how young people do it these days," said Elisabeth Raether, an editor at the Berlin based Zeit Magazin, which held a party at the nightclub in April. "There's iPhones everywhere, so how can you really forget yourself and dance the night away?" Still, the revelry has returned with abandon. Funktion One speakers help, with the music going until 5 a.m. most days. Recent weeks have featured up and coming live acts like the emerging French electro pop duo My Dear and D.J. sets by artists like Nancy Whang of the Juan MacLean. On another night, the French producer Breakbot spontaneously took over the decks using whatever USB sticks were in his pocket. (Mr. Marois said that the anonymous members of Daft Punk were also in the audience, sans helmets.) And with old regulars like Roman Polanski and Jean Charles de Castelbajac coming back again, Les Bains has managed to retain its fashionable mix. "My biggest goal is that Les Bains attracts really much the same crowd than before, which is people from all walks of life that are creative and inspired and inspiring," Mr. Marois said. "I think there is room to celebrate Raf Simons's new collection, and on the other end of the spectrum, I also want to have, you know, like underground dinners and parties for street artists or unknown musicians. To go from LVMH to an art student, and give them the same exposure." Mr. Marois has assembled a notable team of "curators" to help with the task, including the local gallerist Jerome Pauchant (to organize art residencies) and the music director Lars Krueger (to advise on playlists and D.J.s). The bouncer Marie Line, who is now in her 60s and is still blond and clad in black, has come out of retirement to "curate the crowd." And Thomas Erber, known for his roving Cabinet de Curiosites, has tapped French labels big and small to create one off items that "define the essence of the place." Among them: a Thierry Mugler dinner dress, a Melindagloss smoking jacket and a white collared shirt by Pierre Maheo of Officine Generale (who designed Serge Gainsbourg esque suits and silk knit ties for the male staffers). They'll be sold across the street at La Boutique des Bains, a gallery like shop that opens this week, alongside Aedle headphones and Pierre Hardy sneakers embossed with the face of Bacchus. Look closely, and you'll see mermaids twisted into his beard. "We're honoring the heritage, but reinventing it," Mr. Marois said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Mumps is resurging. And it may be because the immune response provoked by the mumps vaccine weakens significantly over time, and not because people are avoiding vaccination or because the virus has evolved to develop immunity to the vaccine, a new study has found. The mumps resurgence has been largely in people 18 to 29, most of whom received the recommended two shots in early childhood, and not in older people who gained immunity through natural infection before the vaccine was developed. Using data from epidemiological studies and mathematical models, researchers found that the ongoing resurgence, which began in 2006, has left about a third of children 10 to 14 at risk. The researchers estimate that about 25 percent of vaccinated people will lose their immunity in 8 years, 50 percent in 19 years, and 75 percent in 38 years. The study is in Science Translational Medicine. "We've seen the outbreaks of mumps in vaccinated populations," said the lead author, Joseph A. Lewnard, a research associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, "in contrast to measles, where it's only been in unvaccinated pockets."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... 20 Minutes, and I'm Ambitious 'Gourmet Makes' When to watch: Now, on YouTube. On each episode of this web series from the magazine Bon Appetit, the intrepid and cheery chef Claire Saffitz attempts to make an at home, gourmet version of popular junk food Twinkies, Pringles, Cheetos, etc. The processes are frequently too advanced to recreate yourself, sometimes because the kitchen equipment is esoteric but more often because Saffitz's meticulousness is superhuman. If you want a cooking show that's funny and lively but isn't a competition, try this.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Russell Baker, the two time Pulitzer Prize winning author whose whimsical, irreverent "Observer" column appeared in The New York Times and hundreds of other newspapers for 36 years and turned a backwoods born Virginian into one of America's most celebrated writers, died on Monday at his home in Leesburg, Va. He was 93. The cause was complications of a fall, his son Allen said. Mr. Baker, along with the syndicated columnist Art Buchwald (who died in 2007), was one of the best known newspaper humorists of his time, and The Washington Post ranked his best selling autobiography, "Growing Up," with the most enduring recollections of American boyhood those of James Thurber, H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain. In a career begun in a rakish fedora and the smoky press rooms of the 1940s, Mr. Baker was a police reporter, a rewrite man and a London correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, and after 1954 a Washington correspondent for The Times, rising swiftly with a clattering typewriter and a deft writer's touch to cover the White House, Congress and the presidential campaigns of 1956 and 1960. Then, starting in 1962, he became a columnist for The Times and its news service, eventually composing nearly 5,000 "Observer" commentaries 3.7 million insightful words on the news of the day often laced with invented characters and dialogue, on an array of subjects including dreaded Christmas fruitcake and women's shoulder pads. The columns, which generated a devoted following, critical acclaim and the 1979 Pulitzer for distinguished commentary, ended with his retirement in 1998. To a generation of television watchers, he was also a familiar face as the host of "Masterpiece Theater" on PBS from 1993 to 2004, having succeeded Alistair Cooke. Mr. Baker wrote 15 books, including many collections of his columns, and "Growing Up," a 1982 memoir of his Depression era youth, his inspirational mother and America between the wars. It earned him his second Pulitzer, the 1983 prize for biography. Besides his two Pulitzer Prizes, he won two George Polk Awards, for commentary in 1978 and career achievement in 1998, and many other honors. After his retirement from The Times, Mr. Baker wrote for The New York Review of Books on politics, history, journalism and other subjects. A collection of 11 of those essays, on revered public figures, was published in 2002 under the title "Looking Back." Earlier, he wrote for Life, Look, Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal and other publications. From 1985 through 1994, he served on the Columbia University Pulitzer Prize board, selecting winners of the nation's most prestigious awards in journalism, literature and the arts. He was its chairman in 1993 and 1994. But soon he was doing what he called his "ballet in a telephone booth," creating in the confined space of 750 words satirical dialogues, parodies and burlesques of politicians and the whirling capital circus then stoking the fires of the antiwar and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard M. Nixon from office in 1974. That year, Mr. Baker moved from Washington to New York, and his column changed. His topics grew more varied, less tied to news events and more to the trappings of ordinary life. His writing, admirers said, matured into literature: an owlish wit, sometimes surreal, often absurdist, usually scouring dark corridors of paradox, always carried off with a subtext of good sense. He wrote of Francisco Franco's dying and going straight to the New York Department of Motor Vehicles. In another column, a pseudonymous Sykes tells of awakening one day to find that he has someone else's feet. Sykes conceals the shame from his wife and colleagues. Doctors are no help. Finally he confides to an editor, who signs him to a three book contract. The feet become television celebrities. Hollywood wants Sykes's life story for a Robert Redford movie. In 1975, after The Times's food editor and restaurant critic Craig Claiborne reported in gastronomic detail on a 4,000 31 course epicurean repast for two, with wines, in Paris, Mr. Baker wrote "Francs and Beans," describing his own culinary triumph after coming home to find a note in the kitchen saying his wife had gone out. "The meal opened with a 1975 Diet Pepsi served in a disposable bottle," he wrote. "Although its bouquet was negligible, its distinct metallic aftertaste evoked memories of tin cans one had licked experimentally in the first flush of childhood's curiosity." And on to a "pate de fruites de nuts of Georgia": "A half inch layer of creamy style peanut butter is troweled onto a graham cracker, then half a banana is crudely diced and pressed firmly into the peanut butter and cemented in place as it were by a second graham cracker." Two years later, he conceived "A Taxpayer's Prayer": "O mighty Internal Revenue, who turneth the labor of man to ashes, we thank thee for the multitude of thy forms which thou has set before us and for the infinite confusion of thy commandments which multiplieth the fortunes of lawyer and accountant alike. ..." Curious to read some of Russell Baker's books? Try starting with these. His targets were legion: the Super Bowl, Miss America, unreadable menus, everything on television, trips with children, the jogging craze, the perils of buying a suit, loneliness and book of the month clubs. He struck poses of despair that resonated with harried readers: of his endless effort to read Proust, of lacking the gene for resisting salesmen, of boredom with dull dirty books. Stylistically, the "Observer" examined the American scene with plain phrases that echoed Twain as they skewered the pompous. But his voice could be haunting, as in a 1974 column on older poor people in a supermarket: "Staring at 90 cent peanut butter. Taking down an orange, looking for the price, putting it back." "Old people at the supermarket are being crushed and nobody is even screaming," he wrote. Mr. Baker occasionally hammered at uncaring government or big business, but frontal attacks were not his stock in trade. "What Baker does," Ronald Steel wrote in Geo magazine in 1983, "is punch holes in vast bubbles of pretension, humanize the abstract and connect the present with what one predecessor, Walter Lippmann, once described as the 'longer past and the larger future.'" A subversive among the sober editorial voices of The Times, Mr. Baker could be tongue in cheek one day and melancholy the next, then folksy, anguished, lyrical or acid. He once wrote a Jonathan Swift like satire on the advantages of public hanging, arguing that a society pleased with capital punishment might do well to cut off thieves' hands and notch the noses of incurable double parkers. His column ran on three weekdays a week from 1962 to 1972, then switched to a schedule he likened to the "metronomic" rhythms of "Chinese water torture: FridaySundayTuesday, FridaySundayTuesday." After 1988, the column ran on Tuesdays and Saturdays. He cut back to one a week in July 1997 and retired "Observer" on Dec. 25, 1998. Lanky and laconic, Mr. Baker was reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart's reporter in the 1948 movie "Call Northside 777." He had a rumpled, tired look, as if he had pored over old court records all night under a dim bulb and come to the prison, still skeptical, to see the wrongly convicted man. Ms. Ephron saw him as "extremely low key, terribly nice, often on the verge of being embarrassed, particularly by praise of any sort." He had kindly blue eyes with droopy lids and an unruly thatch of sandy gray hair that fell over his forehead like a country boy's. He liked to flop in a chair, put his foot up on a radiator and talk about practically anything. His voice was gravelly but soft, a faded echo of rural Virginia: perfect for the barbed lash or the awful oxymoron. And he was as devilish in person as in print. A fellow Times columnist, Tom Wicker, recalled that Mr. Baker, talking once to college students, was asked, "What courses should a journalism school teach?" He replied: "The ideal journalism school needs only one course. Students should be required to stand outside a closed door for six hours. Then the door would open, someone would put his head around the jamb and say, 'No comment.' The door would close again, and the students would be required to write 800 words against a deadline." Russell Wayne Baker was born into poverty on Aug. 14, 1925, in Loudoun County, Va., and spent his early years in Morrisonville. "It was primitive," he recalled. "No electricity." When Russell was 5, his father, Benjamin Rex Baker, a stonemason who was often out of work, drank moonshine one night, sank into a diabetic coma and died, leaving his wife and three children destitute. Russell's strong willed mother, Lucy Elizabeth Robinson Baker, was forced to give up an infant daughter to childless in laws and took the boy and his younger sister to live with her brother in Newark. The uncle, a 35 a week butter salesman, was the family's only wage earner in the Depression, though Mrs. Baker eventually found work as a seamstress and Russell sold magazines door to door. When Russell was 11, the family moved to Baltimore, where he attended high school. He was popular, a member of the track team and a promising writer, winning a senior essay contest with "The Art of Eating Spaghetti." He entered Johns Hopkins University on a scholarship in 1942, but left the next year to join the Navy. He took pilot training, but never went abroad during World War II and left the service in 1945. Returning to Johns Hopkins on the G.I. Bill, Mr. Baker graduated with a bachelor's degree in English in 1947. He wanted to be Ernest Hemingway, but had no real idea what to do. Then a friend who worked part time for The Baltimore Sun told him about a job. It was not much, but he took it: 30 a week as a night police reporter. For two years, he phoned in robberies, fires and mayhem, and slept late. He helped organize the Newspaper Guild at The Sun and became a tenacious unionist. In the summer of 1948, he churned out a novel about a reporter in love. He had just broken up with Miriam Emily Nash, a native of Camden, N.J., whom he had met after the war. The novel wound up in the attic, but he married Mimi, as she was called, in 1950. She died in 2015 at 88. Mr. Baker is survived by three children, Allen, Michael and Kasia, as well as four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He is also survived by two sisters, Doris Groh and Mary Leslie Keech. By 1950, Mr. Baker had become a rewrite man, taking phoned notes from legmen (reporters at the scene) and banging out stories on deadline. He found he was hooked on journalism, and his skills speed, accuracy and style earned him a plum in 1952 when The Sun sent him to London as a correspondent. He later became The Sun's White House correspondent, and his work in the capital caught the eye of James Reston, the Washington bureau chief of The Times, who hired him in 1954. The column idea was vague. He had in mind casual essays like E. B. White's in The New Yorker, cast in "plain English" with "short sentences," in contrast to what he called The Times's "polysyllabic Latinate English." Soon the columns began to roll out of his typewriter: on the foibles of politicians, bureaucrats, military contractors. Spoofing a plan to haul nuclear weapons around the country on railroad cars, he proposed a system of mobile Pentagons, complete with little secretaries of defense and presidents who would crisscross the country to confuse the enemy. During the Pentagon Papers case a test of government secrecy versus the public's right to know the truth about the Vietnam War Mr. Baker wondered in print how long officials intended to suppress the "Myles Standish papers," saying their disclosure might jeopardize national security. Many Baker columns were collected in books, including "No Cause for Panic" (1964), "Baker's Dozen" (1964), "All Things Considered" (1965) and "Poor Russell's Almanac" (1972). He wrote a novel, "Our Next President: The Incredible Story of What Happened in the 1968 Elections" (1968), about an election being thrown into the House of Representatives and chaos enveloping America. Some reviewers called it all too real. After moving to New York in 1974, Mr. Baker took up topics as varied as death and dishwashing, neuroses and the new math. He was often hard pressed for ideas, but something always seemed to turn up, or down. One day, as the deadline approached, a potato fell past his window. It was the subject of his column the next day. "I have never read of anyone dying of a falling potato," he wrote. "On a slow news day, it might merit a paragraph or two on the Associated Press wire. 'Potato Mashes Man.' " His 1979 Pulitzer the first to a humorist for commentary was given for 10 columns on tax reform, inflation, the short life of trends, loneliness, fear, Norman Rockwell and other subjects. More collections were published: "So This Is Depravity" (1980) and "The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams" (1983). After the success of "Growing Up," Mr. Baker produced a sequel, "The Good Times," in 1989, about his days as a young reporter. Though a best seller only briefly, it was hailed by critics. Writing in The Times, Frank Conroy, whose memoir "Stop Time" had also found wide acclaim, called "The Good Times" splendid, but complained, "It would certainly make life easier for book reviewers if Russell Baker could manage to write something bad once in a while."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Call it "The Buzzing Dead." Infestations of what scientists have dubbed "zombie bees" have spread across both the West and East coasts in recent years. The honeybee hordes, while not actually undead, are the unwilling hosts to a parasite infection that researchers think drives the drones to act erratically, or "zombielike," in the moments before they die. To better understand the parasitized swarms, John Hafernik, an entomologist at San Francisco State University has recruited people countrywide to join his hunt. "The big question for us was, 'Is this a San Francisco thing?' Or something that is taking place all over the country that has not been noticed by biologists before," he said. Since he began the project four years ago, he has concluded the answer is the latter. Volunteers have helped identify infected honeybees in California, Washington and Oregon as well as Vermont, Pennsylvania and New York. More than 800 bee observations have been uploaded to the ZomBee Watch online database. Dr. Hafernik first discovered something eerie was happening to the bees on his campus in 2008 when he stumbled upon several of them staggering in circles along the sidewalk. For weeks he picked a few up and placed them in a glass vial with plans to feed them to his pet praying mantis. One day he came across a vial he had forgotten on his desk for a couple of weeks. The bees inside were dead, but the vial was overwhelmed with small brown fly pupae. He came to the realization that the bees were parasitized. After further exploration across San Francisco Bay, he and his colleagues found several bees that were also behaving strangely. They would fly from their hives at night, which was something bees would normally never do, and then circle around a light fixture. After their nocturnal dance the bees would drop to the ground and start walking strangely. They were succumbing to their overlord, larvae of the fly Apocephalus borealis. The life cycle of the parasitic fly is straight from a horror story. The female fly uses something called an ovipositor, which is like a hypodermic needle, to inject her eggs into the abdomen of the honeybee. About a week later the larvae lurking within the abdomen wriggle into the bee's thorax and start liquefying and devouring its wing muscles. Then, like in the movie "Alien," they burst through the bee's body, erupting from the soft space between its head and shoulder area. "As far as we know this is a death sentence," Dr. Hafernik said. "We don't know any bees that have survived being parasitized by these maggots." As many as 80 percent of the hives that Dr. Hafernik examined in San Francisco Bay had been infected. Understanding more about how the infection spreads is important, he said, because although the infestations are not the main driver behind honeybee declines across the country, they could help collapse an already vulnerable colony.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
North Korea may be the most secretive and totalitarian country in the world, as well as the wackiest. As a result, it inspires some of the best fiction and nonfiction, so the upside of the risk of nuclear war is an excuse to dip into literature that offers glimpses of this other world and some insights into how to deal with it. Thousands of North Koreans have fled their homeland since the famine of the late 1990s, and many are writing memoirs recounting their daily lives and extraordinary escapes. A leading example is IN ORDER TO LIVE: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom (Penguin, paper, 17) by Yeonmi Park, with Maryanne Vollers. Park is a young woman whose father was a cigarette smuggler and black market trader. As a girl, she believed in the regime (as did her mother), for life was steeped in propaganda and anti Americanism. Even in her math class, "a typical problem would go like this: 'If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?'" What opened Park's eyes was in part a pirated copy of the film "Titanic." The government tries hard to ban any foreign television, internet or even music, and North Korean radios, which don't have dials, can receive only local stations. But the black market fills the gap, with handymen who will tweak your radio to get Chinese stations, and with illegal thumb drives full of South Korean soap operas. I'm among those who argue that we in the West should do more to support this kind of smuggling, because it's a way to sow dissatisfaction. Indeed, what moved Park was the love story in "Titanic": "I was amazed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were. The idea that people could choose their own destinies fascinated me. This pirated Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste of freedom." In the end, Park's father was arrested for smuggling, and the family's life collapsed. Park and her sister went hungry and had to drop out of school, and she survived eating insects and wild plants. 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. So at age 13, Park and her mother crossed illegally into China and immediately into the hands of human traffickers who were as scary as the North Korean secret police. They raped her mother and eventually Park as well, and both struggled in the netherworld in which North Koreans are stuck in China because the Chinese authorities regularly detain them and send them home to face prison camp. Park and her mother were lucky, finally managing to sneak into Mongolia and then on to South Korea. Another powerful memoir is THE GIRL WITH SEVEN NAMES: A North Korean Defector's Story (William Collins, paper, 15.99) by Hyeonseo Lee, with David John. She is from Hyesan, the same town as Park. It's an area on the Chinese border where smuggling is rampant, where people know a bit about the outside world and where disaffection, consequently, is greater than average. Still, Lee's home, like every home, had portraits of the country's first two leaders, Kim Il sung and his son, Kim Jong il, on the wall. (The grandson now in power, Kim Jong un, hasn't yet made his portrait ubiquitous.) Lee begins her story recounting how her father dashed into the family home as it was burning to rescue not family valuables but rather the portraits of the first leaders. There's an entire genre of heroic propaganda stories in North Korea of people risking their lives to save such portraits. Like other kids, Lee grew up in an environment of formal reverence for the Kim dynasty. At supper she would say a kind of grace to "Respected Father Leader Kim Il sung" before picking up her chopsticks. "Everything we learned about Americans was negative," she writes. "In cartoons, they were snarling jackals. In the propaganda posters they were as thin as sticks with hook noses and blond hair. We were told they smelled bad. They had turned South Korea into a 'hell on earth' and were maintaining a puppet government there. The teachers never missed an opportunity to remind us of their villainy. "'If you meet a Yankee bastard on the street and he offers you candy, do not take it!' one teacher warned us, wagging a finger in the air. 'If you do, he'll claim North Korean children are beggars. Be on your guard if he asks you anything, even the most innocent questions.'" Hmm. No wonder my attempts at interviewing North Korean kids have never been very fruitful. Lee escaped to China at age 17 and started a new life in Shanghai but remained in touch with her family. One day her mom called from North Korea. "I've got a few kilos of ice," or crystal meth, she said, and she asked for Lee's help in selling it in China. "In her world, the law was upside down," Lee says, explaining how corruption and cynicism had shredded the social fabric of North Korea. "People had to break the law to live." It's fair to wonder how accurate these books are, for there's some incentive when selling a memoir to embellish adventures. I don't know, and in the case of "In Order to Live," skeptics have noted inconsistencies in the stories and raised legitimate questions. So how did North Korea come to be the most bizarre country in the world? For the history, one can't do better than Bradley K. Martin's magisterial UNDER THE LOVING CARE OF THE FATHERLY LEADER: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (St. Martin's Griffin, paper, 29.99). Martin recounts how a minor anti Japanese guerrilla leader named Kim Il sung came to be installed by the Russians as leader of the half of the Korean peninsula they controlled after World War II. Martin discovers that Kim's father was a Christian and a church organist, and Kim himself attended church for a time. That didn't last, and Kim later banned pretty much all religion though he became something of a god himself, quite a trick for an atheist. But do North Koreans really believe in this "religion"? Judging from defectors I've interviewed and much of the literature on North Korea, many do especially older people, farmers and those farther from the North Korean border. That's partly a tribute to the country's shameless propaganda, which B.R. Myers explores in his interesting book, THE CLEANEST RACE: How North Koreans See Themselves And Why It Matters (Melville House, paper, 16). He notes that North Korea produced a poster showing a Christian missionary murdering a Korean child and calling for "revenge against the Yankee vampires" at the same time that the United States was the country's single largest donor of humanitarian aid. Myers argues that North Koreans have focused on what he calls "race based paranoid nationalism," including bizarre ideas about how Koreans are "the cleanest race" hence the title bullied and persecuted by outsiders. For a more sympathetic view of North Korea's emergence, check out various books by Bruce Cumings, a University of Chicago historian, like KOREA'S PLACE IN THE SUN: A Modern History (W.W. Norton, paper, 19.95). Cumings argues that North Korea is to some degree a genuine expression of Korean nationalism. I think Cumings is nuts when he says, "it is Americans who bear the lion's share of the responsibility" for the division of the Korean peninsula. But his work is worth reading unless you have high blood pressure, in which case consult a physician first.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Karen Kanter and Stan Tobin of Philadelphia have been a couple since 2002 and have shared a home since 2004, but they are not married. "We love each other and want to be together, and we've made the commitment to stay together until death parts us," Ms. Kanter said. In many ways, the life that Karen Kanter and Stan Tobin share in Philadelphia sounds entirely typical. Both 75, they happily see movies and plays together, visit children and grandchildren, try new restaurants (but avoid sushi). Mr. Tobin, an accountant who maintains a small tax practice, makes time for a monthly men's group. A retired middle school teacher, Ms. Kanter hustles between book and art appreciation groups while volunteering and writing a historical novel. He supported her through a successful breast cancer treatment years ago. She has been prodding him about putting on pounds, so he has returned to Weight Watchers. Careful about financial and legal arrangements, they co own their condo near the Museum of Art and a cottage in upstate New York. She has his power of attorney and health care proxy, and vice versa. "We love each other and want to be together, and we've made the commitment to stay together until death parts us," Ms. Kanter said. But although they have been a couple since 2002 and have shared a home since 2004, they are not married. And among older adults, they have a lot of company. The number of people over 50 who cohabit with an unmarried partner jumped 75 percent from 2007 to 2016, the Pew Research Center reported last month the highest increase in any age group. "It was a striking finding," said Renee Stepler, a Pew research analyst. "We often think of cohabiters as being young." Most still are. But the number of cohabiters over age 50 rose to 4 million from 2.3 million over the decade, Ms. Stepler found, and the number over age 65 doubled to about 900,000. So called gray divorce has roughly doubled among those 50 plus since the 1990s. Divorce leaves two people available for repartnering, of course; losing a spouseleaves one, and these days it tends to strike at older ages. But attitudes have shifted, too. "People who've divorced have a more expansive view of what relationships are like," said Deborah Carr, the Rutgers University sociologist who served as chairwoman of the Population Association panel. "The whole idea of marriage as the ideal starts to fade, and personal happiness becomes more important." Of course, the boomers pretty much invented widespread premarital cohabitation while in their 20s and 30s or like to think they did. "It used to be called shacking up, and it was not approved of," said Kelly Raley, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Austin, and former editor of The Journal of Marriage and Family. Families and religious groups often condemned living together outside marriage. But Americans are far more accepting now, she said, and the people turning 60 "are very different from the people who were 60 twenty years ago." Karen Kanter, for instance, had divorced twice after long marriages 38 years, in total when she met Mr. Tobin on Match.com. "Getting divorced gives you so much to untangle," she said. "Our life is good together, so why disturb it? I just don't see the importance of that piece of paper." Mr. Tobin, also divorced after a long marriage, wouldn't mind marrying his partner he actually proposed on bended knee once, though he knew Ms. Kanter would say no but he is also fine with cohabiting. "The relationship is looser," he said. "We don't make demands on each other's time. She has her life, I have my life, and we have our life together." For older people, the advantages and drawbacks can stack up differently than at earlier ages, when such relationships tend to be more unstable. Demographers see most youthful cohabitation as a prelude to marriage or simply a short term arrangement. In later life, however, cohabitation like remarriage brings companionship and wider social circles, not to mention sexual intimacy, at ages when people might otherwise face isolation. Financially, pooling resources in a single household often improves elders' economic stability, especially for women, who are at higher risk for poverty. It also offers certain economic protections. Older adults have more debt than previous generations, Dr. Carr pointed out, including mortgages and children's college loans. "You become responsible for your legal spouse's debt, but not for your cohabiting partner's debt," she said. Marrying or remarrying can also affect government and pension benefits. Consider Jane Carney and Norm Stoner, who live in Oklahoma City and were both widowed. For years, even after he moved into her house in 2004, they debated whether to make their union legal. "The list of pros was very short, and the list of cons was very long," said Ms. Carney, 69. Among the latter: Each was receiving Social Security survivors benefits, checks that would have stopped had they remarried. Nor will one partner's assets prevent the other from qualifying for Medicaid. Other factors become harder to quantify. Couples monitor one another's health, so cohabiters fare better, physically and mentally, than those who live alone, Dr. Carr said. But relationships with adult children sometimes suffer. Matthew Wright, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Bowling Green State University, reported at the Population Association meeting that cohabiters had less frequent contact with their children, and less positive relationships, than continuously married or widowed parents. Or you can follow a marital pattern without the letter of the law. In the end, Ms. Carney and Mr. Stoner, now 74, never married. But when he developed liver disease and vascular dementia, she cared for him as if they had. And when she could no longer keep him safely in their home, she and his children agreed on a continuing care retirement community, where she visits him almost daily. Married or not, "we were committed to each other," she said. "I can't imagine his getting sick and my saying to his kids, 'It's your problem.' After 20 years? No."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell testified before the House Financial Services Committee about several risks to the United States economy, and suggested that an interest rate cut could happen soon. At our June meeting, we indicated that in light of increased uncertainties about the economic outlook and muted inflation pressures, we would closely monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook, and would act as appropriate to sustain the expansion. Many FOMC participants saw that the case for a somewhat more accommodative monetary policy stance had strengthened. Since then, based on incoming data and other developments, it appears that uncertainties around trade tensions and concerns about the strength of the global economy continue to weigh on the U.S. economic outlook. In particular, economic momentum appears to have slowed in some major foreign economies and that weakness could affect the U.S. economy. Moreover, a number of government policy issues have yet to be resolved, including trade developments, the federal debt ceiling and Brexit. And there is a risk that weak inflation will be even more persistent than we currently anticipate. We're carefully monitoring these developments and will continue to assess their implications for the U.S. economic outlook and inflation. WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, signaled on Wednesday that the Fed could soon cut interest rates, sending stocks higher as the benchmark S P 500 stock index briefly traded above 3,000 for the first time. Mr. Powell, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, highlighted ongoing risks to the United States economy from President Trump's trade war and a global economic slowdown, suggesting a cut may be likely when the Fed meets again later this month. That the Fed is considering a rate cut at a moment when the United States economy is strong and job market gains are solid underscores Mr. Powell and his colleagues' concern about the future of a record economic expansion. The Fed expects unemployment to remain low and inflation to gradually increase, but Mr. Powell said that "uncertainties around trade tensions and concerns about the strength of the global economy continue to weigh on the U.S. economic outlook." The Fed, which has not cut rates since slashing them nearly to zero during the financial crisis, has been under pressure from Mr. Trump to lower borrowing costs. The president has called the Fed the biggest risk to the United States economy and has said repeatedly that Mr. Powell does not know what he's doing. "Let's take a look at the economy and let that be the report card," Mr. Powell said when asked about the president's criticism, pointing to the record long expansion and low unemployment. Mr. Powell has insisted that the Fed will not bend to political pressure and will do what is needed to sustain the expansion. His testimony pushed markets higher as investors ignored possible economic storm clouds and cheered the increased likelihood that the Fed will soon lower borrowing costs. Falling interest rates lift stocks for several reasons, even when they come amid mounting economic risks. They lower the returns on new investments in bonds, the main alternative to stocks for many investors. That makes stocks look more attractive to investors. A rate cut also makes it cheaper for consumers and companies to borrow, and that can buck up economic activity and help corporate profits. The S P 500 is up 19.4 percent in 2019, after already enjoying one of the longest bull markets on record. Since the climb began in March 2009, the index has more than quadrupled. Stocks closed higher, though the S P had retreated to 2,993.07 by the end of trading. "You've got some modest growth, you've got moderate inflation, you've got a decent labor market, and you've got valuations in the market that aren't stretched," said Scott Wren, senior global equity strategist at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute. What is worrying the Fed now are looming risks to the economy. Mr. Powell told lawmakers that "uncertainties about the outlook have increased in recent months," adding that "a number of government policy issues have yet to be resolved, including trade developments, the federal debt ceiling and Brexit," referring to Britain's negotiations to exit the European Union. The federal debt ceiling may need to be raised early this fall for the government to borrow more money and avoid default. The United States and China have agreed to restart trade negotiations, but Mr. Powell said that did not eliminate the economic risks emanating from the dispute, which has begun to hurt confidence and business spending around the globe. Mr. Trump has already placed tariffs on 250 billion worth of Chinese goods and China has retaliated against American products. A resolution is far from certain. "We've agreed to begin discussions again with China while that's a constructive step, it doesn't remove the uncertainty," Mr. Powell said, adding that a strong June jobs report did not change the outlook on interest rates. "The uncertainties around global growth and trade continue to weigh on the outlook," he said. "In addition, inflation continues to be muted." Investors fully expect a cut of a quarter percentage point at the Fed's July 30 to July 31 meeting, and bets that the move could be as big as half a percentage point climbed on Wednesday. Mr. Powell did not explicitly say a rate cut is coming, but he pointed to mounting economic concerns and made no effort to walk back market pricing for expectations of a cut in July. He also did not rule out the possibility of a larger cut when given the chance to do so. The Fed's pre meeting blackout period starts July 20, so officials have just this week and next to manage expectations. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." The 17 member Fed policymaking committee was split in June over whether the central bank should cut rates this year, with eight officials projecting a cut before the end of the year and nine pointing to no change or a rate increase. Minutes from the June meeting that were released on Wednesday reinforced Mr. Powell's message. Many Fed officials thought a rate cut could be warranted "in the near term" if uncertainty persisted, the notes show. That sentiment seems to be holding up. James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the lone dissenter in favor of lower rates in June, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday that he would argue for a rate cut of a quarter percentage point at the next meeting. He has penciled in half a percentage point in cuts before the end of the year. "That would depend on how the economy developed, and especially on how inflation and inflation expectations developed," he said. If the Fed lowers borrowing costs this month, the move may please the president. Mr. Trump has been jawboning the Fed to cut rates for months, aiming a barrage of tweets and comments at the central bank. Mr. Powell reiterated that he was not acting at the behest of political pressure, which has included reports that the White House has looked into demoting him from chair to a Fed governor. Asked by a lawmaker what he would do if Mr. Trump tried to fire him, Mr. Powell responded that he would not step down. "Of course I would not do that," Mr. Powell said. "My answer would be no." He added that "the law clearly gives me a four year term, and I fully intend to serve it." Political pressures aside, tepid price gains are making a rate cut more likely. Inflation climbed just 1.5 percent in the year through May, well below the Fed's 2 percent target. Weak prices are a problem because they increase the risk of economy harming deflation, and leave policymakers less room to cut rates in a downturn. Fed officials are also increasingly alert to slow wage growth, and Mr. Powell made what might be his strongest comments yet that the labor market was not behaving the way most economists would have expected. Unemployment is at a 50 year low, but wages have yet to rise in the way they typically should if there are more jobs than available workers. "We don't have any basis, or any evidence, for calling this a hot labor market," Mr. Powell said. "To call something hot, you need to see some heat, and while we hear lots of reports of companies having a hard time finding qualified labor, nonetheless, we don't really see wages really responding," he said. "So I don't really see that as a current issue." Moving rates lower even just slightly could signal that the Fed is ready to defend its 2 percent inflation goal, and show that it is prepared to act to offset fallout from the trade war and slowing foreign growth. When discussing reasons to potentially cut rates at their June meeting, several Fed officials said they saw less upward pressure on inflation from tight labor markets than they had expected. A few were concerned that inflation expectations had already sunk too low, based on the meeting minutes. Mr. Powell will get a second chance to convey expectations about a potential rate cut on Thursday, when he testifies before the Senate Banking Committee.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Having graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology and vacated her dorm room, Danica Ciccariello needed to find a new place to live last summer. A friend connected her with Teresa Sanacore and Sarah Pascuzzi, newly graduated from Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y. The three joined forces, figuring it would be easier and cheaper to find a two bedroom to share among three than a one bedroom to share between two. Wandering around the East Village in the early summer, having received no answer to their knock at an apartment they were scheduled to see, the three young women stumbled upon a father moving his daughter into a walk up building. He invited them to see her place. Four roommates were sharing a three bedroom "flexed" into a four bedroom, similar to what they sought. They inquired about the rental agent who had helped the foursome, and were directed to Gina Majore Bonner of Miron Properties. Within hours, the three were meeting with her. They weren't sure where to hunt. "The only places I'd heard of were the East Village and the Upper East Side," said Ms. Sanacore, who works at a metal trading company. So she left potential locations to her roommates, who selected the East Village and the Lower East Side. Their monthly budget was 3,000 to 3,600, which was "ridiculously low" for a three bedroom in a hot neighborhood, Ms. Bonner said. But they were likely to find a two bedroom that would "flex" into three. Partitioning a living area, they had decided, was preferable to having two of them share a bedroom. If the bedrooms were of unequal sizes, Ms. Pascuzzi, who works at a home decor wholesaler, wanted the biggest bedroom so she could fit in her bed, which had a sleigh frame. In general, the women were prepared to make sacrifices. "We are young," said Ms. Ciccariello, who works at an interior design company. "We can get away with cutting back spacewise in order to get a better price. As long as a living room was a little more rectilinear, there could be a wall set up." They visited more than a dozen places, often getting their hopes up. "But each one had that one thing that was wrong with it," Ms. Sanacore said tiny bedrooms, railroad layouts, inflexible living rooms. At first glance, a two bedroom on Stanton Street seemed suitable. The rent was 3,595. The place was easily convertible to a three bedroom. It had a nice kitchen and good light. But then there was the bathroom: tiny, with a toilet topped by a minuscule wash basin topped by a mirrored medicine chest. All were dumbstruck. "You could fit, like, one dish if you did dishes in there," Ms. Ciccariello said. "It was the oddest thing. If we washed our face, water would be dripping everywhere." They just couldn't live that way. "That apartment cracked us up for hours," Ms. Bonner said. An actual three bedroom on Avenue B, with new appliances, was everyone's favorite. At around 3,340 a month, it had a dining area but no real living room. The women, who all had parents as guarantors, rushed to apply. But someone else was given the apartment. "Seeing how quickly it slipped through our fingers was discouraging," Ms. Pascuzzi said. On they went to a place in the East Village for 2,800 a month, substantially less than most of what they had seen. The kitchen was comparatively big, with counter space and room for a table. The two bedroom spaces, mirror images, had no windows. Or closets. Or doors, though they did have doorways. But the living area was rectilinear, allowing the creation of a third bedroom. Ms. Bonner encouraged them to take it, saying that, with the low rent, "you are going to have money to spend to experience the city." So they signed on for a year, paying a broker fee of 12 percent of a year's rent, or a bit more than 4,000. Because all the rooms are comparable in size, they split the rent evenly, at 933 each, with one paying 934 on a rotating basis.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Ballet was once considered such a natural fit for television that CBS's first color broadcast in 1951 featured New York City Ballet dancers performing George Balanchine's "La Valse." But the changing media landscape has made televised ballet rare in America, and left City Ballet's current stars with few chances to preserve their performances for the small screen. So it is noteworthy that City Ballet will get two nights on public television this winter. The final performance of the company's three week engagement last summer in the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris will be broadcast over two consecutive Friday nights in February as part of the Great Performances series. The program, which WNET announced on Tuesday, is set to air on Feb. 17 and Feb. 24 at 9 p.m., though viewers should check local listings. It will showcase City Ballet performing several Balanchine works set to the music of French composers. For fans of American ballet, it will be a welcome opportunity to see a broadcast of one of their premiere companies at a time when the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and the Royal Ballet in London have dominated the market in simulcasting dance performances to cinemas around the world. The programs were made possible in large part because of French interest in City Ballet: They were produced for Bel Air Media by Francois Duplat and directed by Vincent Bataillon. So which dancers will be seen? Sara Mearns, Adrian Danchig Waring and Lauren Lovette will be featured in "Walpurgisnacht Ballet," which is set to music by Gounod; Megan Fairchild and Joaquin De Luz will dance "Sonatine," a pas de deux set to Ravel; and Tiler Peck, Andrew Veyette, Teresa Reichlen, Tyler Angle, Alston Macgill, Anthony Huxley, Brittany Pollack and Taylor Stanley will be among the 50 dancers in Bizet's "Symphony in C."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
"Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" has been criticized for simplifying the actress killed by the Manson family. But there's more to it than that. This article contains spoilers for "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood." With the arrival of each new Quentin Tarantino film, the mix of collective excitement and dread is palpable. There's the feel good anticipation of a guaranteed visual feast, quick witted exchanges of dialogue, standout performances. And then there's the concern about which explosive subject he's depicting like slavery, the Holocaust or rape is most likely to detonate should he, a noted provocateur, flip the wrong switch. The dominant discussion around his latest movie suggests that with "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," Tarantino got it mostly wrong when it came to the women who populate his script. It's not quite so simple as that, confounded by the way the movie plays fast and loose with audience expectations and historical context. A dreamy, meandering ode to Old Hollywood and a nod to what were perhaps the most infamous American deaths of 1969, the film weaves a fictional tale about a fading TV star, his stunt double and the Manson family murders. Margot Robbie plays the best known of those victims, the actress Sharon Tate, who flutters in and out of Tarantino's picture like a gazelle in a nature documentary she hardly speaks, but does dance and walk and drive around Los Angeles a lot in slow motion, the camera lingering on her presence in her natural habitat. Read A.O. Scott's review of "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood." Critics have seized on that characterization or rather, lack of characterization. (She's merely a "sexualized cipher," as one review put it.) They're not wrong line count aside, we don't really glean much about who Tate might have been beyond her onscreen bombshell persona. In typical Tarantino fashion, the line between evoking the tropes and ideals of pop cultural pastimes for the sake of "authenticity" and reinforcing those tropes and ideals is heavily blurred. The way Tarantino has talked about his decision to include Tate in the film provides some insight into how he developed the character for "Once Upon a Time." He "became very enamored of her" while researching her life, he told Entertainment Weekly. He added, "When you talk about all the different friends that she had, even acquaintances that she had, they all tell the same story about her, about this unaffected beauty, just this reservoir of goodness and kindness." Tarantino's interest isn't in unpacking Tate's struggle to be taken seriously in her craft though he almost brushes against this tension during the great sequence in which Sharon goes unrecognized by the ticket taker at a theater showing one of her films. The director wants her to seem full of life, whether dancing at a party at the Playboy Mansion or generously picking up a hitchhiker on her way to run an errand. She is instead merely an idea and a feeling, and a near perfect idol a rarity for Tarantino, whose characters, regardless of gender, are usually fundamentally flawed or bad in some way. It's a different kind of box to be put in as a woman , the kind that lifts them up while stripping them of power. And the more I've contemplated this choice, the more Sharon reminds me of an ostensibly different Tarantino character, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) in "Django Unchained." When she first shows up onscreen, it's as a memory of her husband, Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave from whom she was separated when he was sold off to another owner. She appears beautiful, on a swing under a sweeping, picturesque tree, and introduces herself with just one line: "They call me Hildi," she says, smiling and bashful. For much of the film, she is hardly real, a vision, a fantasy existing only in Django's imagination as he bathes in a creek or rides a horse . Hildi's interiority barely surpasses the one dimensional; when she's not an angelic presence for Django, usually some kind of act of violence is being enacted upon her: tortured at her master's command, held hostage with a gun to her head during the climactic shootout. But what complicates Hildi is the history of how black women, and especially slaves, have been treated in real life (raped, beaten) and depicted onscreen (as mammies or Jezebels). While Tarantino doesn't shy away from showing the mistreatment of Hildi, he does so to elicit empathy for her, through the eyes of Django. She's even given the tiniest bit of agency trying to run away. When Django finally lands at the plantation of her new owner, she has been trapped in a hot box for hours as punishment. Hildi and Django stir up that familiar combination of excitement and dread. Everything happens to Hildi; there isn't much for her to do but then, how often has a black woman been the object of affection, in a way that doesn't feel creepy, in the movies? It's a low bar to clear, and an object of affection is an object but also, it still kind of works? There is something to be said for the existence of the tender love story that somehow peeks its head out from the disturbing and over the top Tarantino isms we're used to. White womanhood comes with different baggage, but "Once Upon a Time ..." elicited a similar conflict within me. As Tarantino pointed out in that Entertainment Weekly interview, how often has Tate's life been filtered through pop culture over the past several decades as opposed to the gruesome circumstances of her death? No, the director doesn't give her much of a life here, either, but the absence of her death the Manson family members don't murder Sharon and her house guests on that fateful night in the film feels somewhat cathartic. It can and has been argued that the film's twist does a disservice to Tate's legacy by not affording her the opportunity to defend herself and ultimately win against her attackers, in the way that Shosanna in "Inglourious Basterds," the Bride in "Kill Bill" and other preyed upon Tarantino women have. That's true. It's also true that Tarantino succeeds at having us focus on something other than Tate's murder. (And a relief, considering that Tarantino's depictions of violence almost always feel exploitative.) That's the thing about Tarantino everything he does can be two things (or even more things) at once. There' s n o "easy" viewing experience when it comes to his films. Sometimes the women are full, messy, intelligent and resourceful human beings: Pam Grier's Jackie Brown, a smart, willful character who banks on everyone's underestimation of her, is one such woman. Others are one note shrill, ineffectual, tempting, annoying. (All such women, including the wife whom Brad Pitt's stuntman probably murdered, appear in some form or another in "Once Upon a Time.") Sharon Tate lies somewhere in between. In a triumph of creative license, she lives. But we're still no closer to understanding her.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'THE ARTIFICIAL JUNGLE' at the Clurman Theater at Theater Row (previews start on May 27; opens on June 8). Polly wanna thriller? Theater Breaking Through Barriers revives this Charles Ludlam comedy, a film noir homage to the likes of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The show centers on a pet store owner, his discontented wife and the sultry drifter she falls for (a role once played by the revival's director, Everett Quinton). A parrot also figures. 212 239 6200, tbtb.org 'THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR' at the Duke on 42nd Street (in previews; opens on June 1). Anyone panicked by the current political reality can escape into an arguably more problematic one. This Red Bull production of Jeffrey Hatcher's adaptation of a Gogol masterpiece stars Michael Urie as a man who thrusts a small town into paroxysms of anxiety and bribery. Jesse Berger directs a cast including Mary Testa, Arnie Burton, Stephen DeRosa and Michael McGrath. 646 223 3010, redbulltheater.com 'RAW BACON FROM POLAND' at Abrons Arts Center (previews start on June 1; opens on June 7). The playwright Christina Masciotti turns mumbles, stutters and other linguistic infelicities into theatrical poetry. In this new play, directed by Ben Williams, she applies her versifying talents to the story of an Iraq war veteran (played by Joel Perez of "Fun Home"). Now working as a shoe salesman, he struggles with post traumatic stress and personal rupture. 212 352 3101, abronsartscenter.org 'WOODY SEZ: THE LIFE MUSIC OF WOODY GUTHRIE' at the Irish Repertory Theater (previews start on June 1; opens on June 8). The Dust Bowl rolls into town with this musical tribute to that great American folk singer, Woody Guthrie, performed by four musically inclined actors. Reviewing a 2014 production in Hartford, Sylviane Gold described the piece as a "haunting, powerful show" with "enough humor and understatement to keep its hero recognizably human." 212 727 2737, irishrep.org 'ARLINGTON' at St. Ann's Warehouse (closes on May 28) and 'ROOMS' at Cybert Tire (closes on June 4). Two new works by the playwright Enda Walsh, the three actor drama "Arlington" and the sound installation "Rooms," end their dystopian visions. Ben Brantley described "Arlington," about captives in an institution who are forced to tell stories, as a "riveting fever dream" and "Rooms" as "disturbingly relaxing." 718 254 8779, stannswarehouse.org 866 811 4111, irishartscenter.org 'THE FANTASTICKS' at the Theater Center (closes on June 4). You wonder how these things begin and maybe also how they conclude. A guy, a girl, two meddling dads and some traveling players will have their last happy ending when this musical, revived in 2006, closes. Reviewing that incarnation when it opened, Ben Brantley wrote that parts of it resembled "a prettily embalmed corpse, whimsy preserved with formaldehyde." 212 921 7862, fantasticksonbroadway.com 'HAPPY DAYS' at Polonsky Shakespeare Center (closes on May 28). Dianne Wiest will conclude her long day at the beach when this Samuel Beckett piece, directed by James Bundy, finishes its Theater for a New Audience run. Though Jesse Green described the staging as "dutiful," he wrote that Ms. Wiest plays the role with "ineffable gentleness." 866 811 4111, tfana.org 'IPHIGENIA IN SPLOTT' at 59E59 Theaters (closes on June 4). Effie, the fire starter in this scorching solo by Gary Owens, singes audiences for the last time when this Brits Off Broadway production closes. Sophie Melville stars in this Welsh version of a Greek tragedy, with Ben Brantley praising the "disturbing, exciting pleasures of her company in this fast and furious production." 212 279 4200, 59e59.org 'THE MARRIAGE OF ALICE B. TOKLAS BY GERTRUDE STEIN' at Here (closes on May 28). A real life literary couple gets a fictional wedding, courtesy of the playwright and director Edward Einhorn, who maps Stein and Toklas's relationship in an approximation of Stein's swirling, repetitious prose style. Jesse Green described the piece, which reflects on fame and intimacy, as sometimes "a silly aural pleasure" and sometimes "not silly at all, but still pleasurable." 212 352 3101, here.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
In other words, the Oscar telecast has become an entertainment program determined to divest itself of all entertainment. Does the academy understand why we still tune into this show? When I think back on the Oscars of yesteryear, I remember moments, not minutes: a speech that surprises, a musical performance that connects, an unplanned line that becomes a part of history. If the academy isn't going to leave room for those moments to happen, it might as well issue a press release instead of a broadcast. The Oscars ought to take a few cues from the Super Bowl, another mammoth entertainment event that refuses to be ashamed of its size. When the Super Bowl is broadcast this Sunday, producers won't be forced to choose between either the national anthem or the halftime show, or eliminate overtime if the game goes long. They understand that people want the Super Bowl to be as maximal as possible, a communal watching experience that gives us plenty to talk about. Why can't the Oscars be as unabashed? Even the Super Bowl's most annoying feature endless commercial interruptions has been rebranded as one of its greatest strengths: You now watch not just to see which team prevails, but to debate what high profile ads won the night, too. Instead of apologizing for the Oscars' length, ABC could take similar advantage of it by stuffing the commercial breaks with exclusive footage from "Avengers: Endgame" or "Toy Story 4," two films to be released by the network's fellow Disney subsidiaries Marvel and Pixar. There are plenty of other organic, exciting ways to work those blockbusters into the broadcast, and they can even help restore some of the categories the academy wants to cut from the show. Is a sound mixing Oscar the most scintillating thing to present during the telecast? On its own, perhaps not, but what if you could show a clip of Beyonce and Donald Glover mixing their duet of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" from the forthcoming redo of "The Lion King"? The presentation might take a little longer, but I doubt anyone would complain. So let's embrace that attitude: Instead of apologizing for the show's length, the academy should resolve to pack the Oscar broadcast full of major moments, no matter how long it goes. Instead of antagonizing the craftspeople who should be celebrating the biggest night of their careers, the Oscars should find a way to honor them by making every presentation a blockbuster event. As a kid, Lin Manuel Miranda tuned in to the Oscars simply because he loved a movie, and there was no show on earth that loved movies more. It's time for the Oscars to prove they can still be that show.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Western medicine is the most successful system of healing ever devised and is becoming more so as technology improves and synthetic medicines proliferate. But Mother Nature has been synthesizing weird and wonderful medicinal chemicals for over three billion years, many of which chemists could not predict or devise in their wildest dreams. They should go to the Amazon. Over more than three decades, I've worked, collaborated and lived with the forest's shamans as I learned some of their secrets. In the dreamscape of Amazonia flourishes an abundance of astounding species of plants and animals that have provided society with a pharmacopoeia of medicines of astonishing range, from contraceptives to treatments for high blood pressure and malaria, a dental analgesic and surgical muscle relaxants and chemicals that expand the mind. The region is so vast and impenetrable that much within it remains undiscovered. No wonder the richness of the landscape and the impressive medicinal knowledge of the Indigenous peoples inspired bewilderment and wonder in early visitors from Europe. Today the region's magnificent forests are being destroyed and its Indigenous cultures disrupted and extinguished ever more rapidly. But the medicinal potential of Amazonia is actually rising, because new technology allows us to find, isolate, evaluate, manipulate and employ natural products faster than ever. If we can outrun the destruction, we will not have to choose between the microchip or the medicine man. Both can lead us to new cures, if approached in a responsible and ethical manner. Our ignorance about Amazonian flora and fauna remains staggering. A recent study estimates there are about 16,000 species of trees in Amazonia, of which several thousand have not even been named by scientists, much less evaluated for medicinal potential. Scientists cannot even agree on how many species of plants and animals and fungi inhabit the South American rainforest. We are collecting new species almost faster than we can identify them: In late July, a panel estimated that we find a novel species in Amazonia every other day. These discoveries are not merely tiny fungi and insects. In just the past few years, researchers have discovered such seemingly obvious creatures as a new species of river dolphin, two novel species of electric eels, a cobalt blue tarantula and the loftiest tree in Amazonia, which is almost 100 feet taller than the previous record holder. In a world where records are typically broken by seconds or inches, this latter find clearly demonstrates how much remains to be learned. Wonders abound. One is the green monkey frog. Laboratory analysis of its skin has yielded several new proteins, two of which have been investigated as potential means of increasing the permeability of the blood brain barrier, an important physiological challenge for delivering medicine directly to the brain one of the holy grails of modern medicine. Two other novel groups of proteins found in the same frog are antimicrobial, which might help fortify our arsenal of antibiotics; bacteria resistance to commonly used ones is a serious and growing problem in American hospitals. Most striking was the isolation from the frog of a new opioid, dermorphin, which is 40 times more potent than morphine. While it may one day serve as the basis for a new and nonaddictive painkiller, it has already proved its utility in a lucrative and sinister manner: doping thoroughbreds. Investigators found that dermorphin was being administered to racehorses to make them run faster without pain; the substance was undetected by standard drug screens. To better comprehend the pharmaceutical cornucopia potentially available in Amazonia, we need to expand our scope far beyond the archetype of the Western scientist searching for medicinal plants and animals known only to rainforest shamans. Some of the most intriguing leads derive from harmful or dangerous creatures either not used or even avoided by rainforest peoples. In the words of the 16th century Swiss physician Paracelsus, the father of toxicology, the difference between a deadly poison and a lifesaving medicine may be only a matter of dosage. Hence a growing interest in studying the poisonous plants, animals and fungi of Amazonia. Even when a poison or other peculiar compound cannot be converted into a medicine, it may teach us something new: The synthesis of A.Z.T., the first effective treatment for H.I.V., was inspired by unique compounds extracted from a Caribbean sponge. Venoms, with which Amazonia is amply stocked, have played a vital role in helping us understand how medicines function in the human body, particularly the nervous system. For example, the Amazon rainforest harbors approximately 75 species of the spectacularly colored poison dart frogs. More than 400 novel alkaloids a class of biologically important chemicals that include cocaine, caffeine and strychnine have already been found in their skin. The study of these new compounds is leading to a better understanding of the function of local anesthetics, anticonvulsants, anti arrhythmics and even some toxins in the human body. The Amazon is home to more than a dozen species of venomous snakes, mostly pit vipers from the rattlesnake family. One species inhabiting grasslands southeast of the Amazon wields a venom that causes a rapid drop of blood pressure in the unfortunate victim. Study of this compound resulted in the synthesis of captopril, one of the most effective and lucrative drugs ever devised, which in turn helped spawn an entire class of blood pressure drugs ACE inhibitors, which have saved the lives of millions with hypertension. An equally fearsome creature is the dreaded Amazonian wandering spider, perhaps the deadliest spider on Earth. The Amazon abounds in spiders current estimates are about 3,000 species and their venoms tend to be extraordinarily complex cocktails of proteins, dangerous peptides and other toxins. One component of the wandering spider venom is now being investigated as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. At the same time, Amazonian scorpions are receiving increasing attention for their pharmaceutical potential, particularly for their analgesic and antimicrobial promise. Other intimidating Amazonian fauna have generated potentially important therapeutic leads, including the vampire bat and the giant caiman leech, 18 inches long. Both consume blood: the bat by slicing the skin of the victim and slurping from the wound, and the leech by attaching itself to a host and sucking blood out through a syringelike organ. And each carries a unique anticoagulant in its saliva: The leech produces hementin, and the bat draculin. Given that heart attacks and strokes probably kill more people in the industrialized world than any other category of disease and that strokes are a leading cause of disability among older people, there is an urgent need to find and develop new drugs that can enhance or retard blood clotting. Both of these compounds showed promise in early clinical trials but did not make it to market. Nonetheless, research on Amazonian creatures like these and their unique compounds can provide new insights into the coagulation process that could lead to new and better synthetic drugs. From a global perspective, fungi are the least studied group of organisms with the greatest potential. They have already given us the most important class of drugs ever discovered antibiotics. More recently, the fungal kingdom provided us with another blockbuster class of pharmaceuticals: statins, cholesterol lowering drugs that rank among the most important and widely used medicines in the industrialized world today. Though both of these classes of pharmaceuticals were derived from temperate zone fungi, tropical regions like Amazonia harbor many more species. Once again, Western science knows very little about the potential utility of tropical fungi. Ethnobotanists in western Amazonia have often encountered piri piri, a strange looking sedge a flowering, grasslike plant reputed to feature many medicinal qualities. Detailed research in Peru with Indigenous colleagues by the American ethnobotanist Glenn Shepard unlocked the secret: The medicinal virtues attributed to this relatively chemically inert plant actually come from a fungus that infects it. Lab research revealed that this Amazonian fungus produces eight novel alkaloids related to L.S.D., and it is employed by Indigenous peoples to treat headaches and snakebite wounds, and to enhance coordination, control fertility and stanch birth related hemorrhaging. Dr. Shepard considers piri piri a sort of "ginseng of the Amazon," because of its multifaceted, panacea like medicinal uses. Thousands and thousands of fungi in Amazonia remain unstudied, their medicinal potential unknown. The most significant major medical development in the past few years involving tropical organisms is the mainstreaming of hallucinogens into Western medicine. They represent the ultimate tools of the Indigenous shaman, who employs these plants and fungi like biological scalpels to investigate, diagnose, treat and sometimes cure ailments that have a partial emotional or spiritual basis. This is why these healers can often alleviate a medical problem unresponsive to therapies employed by Western physicians. The use of these chemicals is rapidly gaining acceptance in traditional clinical settings. Many initial efforts have focused on the use of hallucinogens administered by Indigenous shamans: mescaline, psilocybin and ayahuasca the latter from the Amazon. These mind altering remedies have been clinically shown to produce promising therapeutic effects in some cases of addiction, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and end of life anxiety in terminal cancer patients. Further formal studies are likely to take place for the treatment of anorexia, early stages of Alzheimer's disease, insomnia, intractable pain and PTSD. This newfound interest in hallucinogenic therapies is not only improving our understanding of the human mind but also driving an enhanced appreciation of shamanic healing practices. And this shamanic therapeutic wisdom is not limited to hallucinogens: A single shaman may know and use 300 different plants for healing purposes. Ultimately, the question has to be asked: Who should benefit first and foremost from the pharmaceutical treasures of Amazonia? The answer is clear: the Amazonians. The Amazon is home to more than 30 million people, and almost all who live outside the very few large cities rely to some degree on the great forest as a source of medicines. A concrete example of how this should function is the case of the tree Sangre de Grado. Its healing sap is a staple component of many shamans' botanical medicine cabinet. A compound from that tree crofelemer was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as the first antidiarrheal drug for H.I.V./AIDS patients. It is currently being evaluated for chemotherapy induced diarrhea, as well as other potential applications. Every effort is being made to share the benefits of this drug with local communities, including generating employment through reforestation. This type of reciprocity, absent in most previous efforts where pharmaceuticals were developed from Indigenous rainforest societies, should be mandatory for all similar efforts going forward. The entire world pays a price if the continuing destruction of the rainforest proceeds unabated, not just in terms of the very real disruptions and economic costs of climate change, but also in cures forgone as the forest burns, just so that the world can have more cheap beef and soy. I have been unable to return to the Amazon since March. But through WhatsApp, I can sometimes communicate with the shamans I've long known. They tell me they are taking immunostimulating plants to keep the coronavirus at bay, though the effectiveness of this treatment has yet to be independently verified. As they do, the medicine quest continues: The shamans are combing the healing forest for plants that could be an effective treatment for people in their communities infected with the virus. But with the advent of the burning season in Amazonia, which is caused by rampant deforestation, their medicine chest is on fire. Mark J. Plotkin is an ethnobotanist and president of the Amazon Conservation Team, which works with local communities to protect the Amazon forests and traditional cultures. He is the author, most recently, of "The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know." Cover photo by Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg. Cover inset photo by Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Shaped like a torpedo and about as swift, squids are jet propelled underwater predators. Together with their nimble brethren, the octopus and cuttlefish, they make for an agile invertebrate armada. But that was not always the case. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of the tentacled trio were slow, heavily armored creatures, like the coil shelled ammonites and the cone shelled belemnites. Alastair Tanner, a doctoral student at University of Bristol in England, wanted to better understand why those cephalopods lost their shells. But though both ammonites and the belemnites have left behind rich fossil records, their shell less descendants have not. So Mr. Tanner conducted a genetic analysis of 26 present day cephalopods, including the vampire squid, the golden cuttlefish and the southern blue ringed octopus.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
SAN FRANCISCO House lawmakers have asked more than 80 companies for information about how their businesses may have been harmed by Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, according to four people familiar with the requests. The House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the influence of the tech giants, sent formal requests for information to the companies on Sept. 13. They were asked about their own businesses and how the four tech companies may have engaged in anticompetitive behavior, according to the people who have seen the requests and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the lawmakers asked to keep the letters private. The bipartisan requests from the committee indicated the increasing scope of the congressional investigation into Silicon Valley's power and offered more insight to the pressure Big Tech faces in the coming months. Similar inquiries are underway at the Justice Department, at the Federal Trade Commission and a bipartisan collection of attorneys general from dozens of states. Lawmakers sent the requests on the same day they asked for scores of documents and personal emails from top executives at the four tech companies, according to the people. All of the companies have until mid October to respond. The additional letters to more than 80 companies show the breadth of the offensive forming against Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The recipients of the requests range from smaller firms in retail and advertising to large corporations in entertainment, software and social media, the people said. A range of companies, including News Corp., Oracle, Spotify, TripAdvisor and Yelp, have complained about the behavior of the four big tech companies and were likely to have received the requests. It was unclear how the queries to the more than 80 companies are split among the four tech giants. One person familiar with the requests said lawmakers decided against publicizing the requests to protect the complaining companies from potential retribution from the four tech firms though those firms have said they do not retaliate against critics. Companies have protested Silicon Valley's growing size and influence for years, but regulators and lawmakers in Washington have sharply increased their focus on Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google in recent months. The House investigation is largely centered on the market power and alleged anticompetitive practices by the four companies. The committee is examining accusations that the big companies favor their own products over rivals, buy smaller firms to head off competition and leverage their size to further cement their dominance. Lawmakers are also scrutinizing how the companies avoid taxes, are used to spread disinformation and handle people's personal information. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have said in the past that they face ample competition and do not engage in anticompetitive practices. When asked on Friday about the letter sent to the more than 80 companies, none of the companies offered additional comment. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that House lawmakers had sent requests to some of the tech companies' rivals. The various investigations are just beginning in earnest. How far they will go, what they will uncover and whether any allegations will stand up in court are all uncertain. It is also not clear how the tech companies will defend themselves. On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, met with President Trump and held discussions on Capitol Hill about election security, privacy and other issues. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said on Thursday that it was time for the companies to be more upfront with the public. "We've had a lot of talk from Facebook, and we have a troubling pattern, when they're up on the Hill, of them saying things that turn out to be either very misleading or at the end of the day it's just not true or they just don't follow through on it," Mr. Hawley said. The Department of Justice sent Google a formal request for information this year, and Facebook has acknowledged it is the subject of an antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. When the agencies divided up responsibility for handling competition questions about Silicon Valley this year, the Justice Department also took Apple and the F.T.C. got Amazon. State attorneys general around the country have also banded together to start separate investigations into Google and Facebook. The House Judiciary Committee has held multiple public hearings on the subject of the tech companies' market power as part of its inquiry. It escalated last week when it sent the formal requests to the tech companies and their critics. Representative David Cicilline is the chairman of the subcommittee on antitrust, which is leading the Judiciary Committee's investigation into the influence of Big Tech. In a statement last week, Representative David Cicilline, Democrat of Rhode Island and the chairman of the subcommittee on antitrust, which is leading the Judiciary Committee's investigation, called the document requests "an important milestone" in the fact gathering stage.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Mr. Shvo, 40, is the chief executive of Shvo, a luxury residential development company that he founded in New York in 2004 after several years as a top grossing broker for Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Mr. Shvo's first major development project, in partnership with Victor Homes, is a condominium at 239 10th Avenue in West Chelsea, the site of a former Getty gas station near the High Line. He is an avid art collector. Q. How long have you wanted to be a developer? A. Under Shvo Marketing, I did act in many cases as the developer de facto because we did really everything that a developer would do. We did not only the design, we were involved in the actual concepts. A great example is probably 20 Pine. It was the first residential project that married a fashion house Armani, in that case into a residential development. That started a world trend a lot of other fashion brands came into that. In that case we created the idea, we put together the team. I reached out to Armani and after months convinced them to do this with us. The missing part was the construction and financing, which is what we do today. Q. How are you financing projects? A. Every building that's being built in New York City has substantial costs. It depends on which project. I'm involved in multiple developments right now. Most of them are my own equity at the moment. Q. But you do have partners. A. At 239 10th Avenue I have a partner, Victor Homes. We've done developments previously together. Q. Many other developers have called the 850 per square foot price for 239 10th Avenue exorbitant. A. Everybody has a different way of looking at development, and I think that this is where my vision is a little bit different. I don't think development is about how cheap you could buy the land or how much money you can save on building it. I think it's finding the right site and then building the right thing at the right place at the right time for the right person. Two Thirty Nine 10th Avenue was one of those pieces of land that when I saw it, I knew that this was somewhere I could create something special. I actually tried to buy it before it came to the market, and I couldn't do it because the seller was a big corporation, and they had to go through a bidding process. But I was determined to own that land. I saw it, I knew I had to have it. Q. Tell me a little about your plans for this building. A. We just started the design process, so I don't have all those details yet. We are not yet announcing the architect. We are very close to picking somebody. The building will be between 11 and 12 stories, due to the zoning of the High Line district. The building will be a collection of residences that will be uniquely designed, probably 12 to 15 apartments. We're talking about larger units two bedrooms to four bedrooms. But it's not really about how many bedrooms; it's about how much space. And it's a building that's really going to be designed for people who are art collectors from the actual systems that'll be in the building to ways of getting art in the building, climate controls, the window system, the security system, hanging systems, weight of the floor. Q. When are you looking to break ground? A. Early next year more toward the end of the first quarter of next year. The building will be completed more or less October November of 2015. Q. Have you gotten any early inquiries from potential apartment buyers? A. I've gotten a tremendous amount of calls for the retail space for what's going to be on the ground floor. We will have probably 4,000 square feet on the base and 4,000 below grade. Q. Do you have any prices in mind yet? A. I don't foresee anybody buying in this building sitting there with a calculator and making the math on how much the apartment is per square foot. This building will be built for people that if they want it, they'll buy it. It's not about the dollar per square foot. When you go buy a Birkin bag at Hermes, you're not calculating how much you're paying for every inch of your bag. It's truly looking at real estate as a luxury brand. Q. Would you consider moving there? A. Absolutely. We spend a tremendous amount of time in West Chelsea buying art, being involved in the commissioning of art, producing art shows. The whole High Line neighborhood is where people want to be today. Q. Speaking of art shows, you've turned the construction site at 239 10th Avenue into an exhibit. A. It's the idea of beautifying a development site. The site is transformed into this sheep's meadow. The French artist Francois Xavier Lalanne produced sculptures of concrete sheep. There are 25 concrete sheep roaming in the middle of Chelsea. There will be different art shows throughout the construction. Q. Tell me about some of your other projects. A. At the moment I'm involved in four developments, all in New York. The first one, closed a month and a half ago, is 239 10th Avenue. The second project is in SoHo. It's a very large development 300,000 square feet which I assembled with Keystone Group. And there are two additional developments in Midtown that I'm in the process of working on. Q. In your broker days you've been called difficult to work with. A. Difficult is not the correct word. I'm a perfectionist, and there are really two types of people: the people that can work with me, and the people that, I guess, could say I'm difficult. I'm difficult if you don't understand that things have to be done to perfection. Q. And there have been some who have questioned your ethics in doing deals. A. We've never crossed any line as far as ethics. I did everything in my power to get a deal, and we always made sure that we knew what the right thing to do is. Q. Getting a deal done even meant flying to Mexico for a signature. A. As a broker, yes, I got on a plane, and I flew all the way over to Mexico to get the deal done. As a developer today when I pick the stone that I want to put in a bathroom, I will fly to Italy or wherever the stone is made, and I'll pick the exact piece of stone that I want. Q. You came here from Israel in 1996, and you're not from a real estate family. A. My parents were organic chemistry professors in Yale and in Stanford. I started from zero. I came to this country with 3,000.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Credit...Beatrice de Gea for The New York Times One blue surgical drape at a time, the patient disappeared, until all that showed was a triangle of her shaved scalp. "Ten seconds of quiet in the room, please," said Dr. David J. Langer, the chairman of neurosurgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, part of Northwell Health. Silence fell, until he said, "O.K., I'll take the scissors." His patient, Anita Roy, 66, had impaired blood flow to the left side of her brain, and Dr. Langer was about to perform bypass surgery on slender, delicate arteries to restore the circulation and prevent a stroke. The operating room was dark, and everyone was wearing 3 D glasses. Lenox Hill is the first hospital in the United States to buy a device known as a videomicroscope, which turns neurosurgery into an immersive and sometimes dizzying expedition into the human brain. Enlarged on a 55 inch monitor, the stubble on Ms. Roy's shaved scalp spiked up like rebar. The scissors and scalpel seemed big as hockey sticks, and popped out of the screen so vividly that observers felt an urge to duck. "This is like landing on the moon," said a neurosurgeon who was visiting to watch and learn. The equipment produces magnified, high resolution, three dimensional digital images of surgical sites, and lets everyone in the room see exactly what the surgeon is seeing. The videomicroscope has a unique ability to capture "the brilliance and the beauty of the neurosurgical anatomy," Dr. Langer said. He and other surgeons who have tested it predict it will change the way many brain and spine operations are performed and taught. "The first time I used it, I told students that this gives them an understanding of why I went into neurosurgery in the first place," Dr. Langer said. But there is more to it than just the gee whiz, Imax factor. The shared viewing makes 3 D surgery an ideal teaching tool. In addition, Dr. Langer and other doctors say the device is smaller and much less cumbersome than standard surgical microscopes and provides better light. It can easily be moved and angled to show bits of anatomy that surgeons would otherwise have to twist and crane their necks to see. Two surgeons on opposite sides of the table can work together easily. "I don't think there's any doubt that it's going to be valuable," Dr. Langer said. But, he added, "In the eyes of someone who's more conservative and who's not as willing to try new things, they may not get over the hump and be willing to do it." The device at Lenox Hill is called the Orbeye, made by Somed a joint venture of Olympus and Sony and marketed by Olympus. Dr. Langer has received consulting fees from the company. A number of other medical centers in the United States have also been testing the Orbeye. Dr. Charles L. Branch, chief of neurosurgery at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston Salem, N.C., said his first patient with it was a red bell pepper. "I cut a hole and plucked seeds out of the center," he said. "I wanted to make sure you could see down a tubular opening. It worked really well." He quickly moved on to humans, and has used the equipment in about 20 spine surgeries, all minimally invasive and performed through a tube. "The very first case, I almost felt like I was getting carsick," he said. But it was a fleeting sensation, and he adapted quickly. "It's really cool," Dr. Branch said. "It's like being in the Imax. It lets not only the surgeon but everybody else in the room see what's going on. Instead of having to lean up against the microscope, and strain my neck or back, I can stand comfortably, look at the big screen in front of me and work with my hands." He described the camera as "a Coke can on a stick over my shoulder," easy to move, adjust and angle into positions not possible with a microscope. There are 10 neurosurgeons in his department, Dr. Branch said. "Everyone that's used it has seen some potential benefit, but not everyone has decided they want to use it in every case." He said that the company had lent an Orbeye to his hospital for surgeons to try out, and that he hoped the hospital would buy "a handful" of the devices, more than one because so much surgery is done there. Dr. Branch said he had no financial ties to the company. "I don't think it's a gimmick," he said. "I believe it will be widely adopted fairly quickly." Mark Miller, a spokesman for Olympus, said the Orbeye's pricing would be similar to that of standard surgical microscopes, which range from 200,000 to 1 million. The system that Lenox Hill bought cost about 400,000, Dr. Langer said. Other companies are also trying to enter the market. Dr. Bob S. Carter, chief of neurosurgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, said using the Orbeye was like having "Superman eyes," but added that his hospital was also evaluating other devices and had not yet decided which to buy. The technology, he said, is "the way of the future." Ms. Roy, a retired administrative assistant who lives in the Bronx, first noticed troubling symptoms in 2015: episodes of weakness in her right hand, and trouble speaking. Tests at a local hospital ruled out a stroke. But the occasional episodes continued, and in July 2017, while recovering from heart surgery at Lenox Hill, she had a seizure. A battery of tests found she had moyamoya disease, a rare condition first identified in Japan. The name means "puff of smoke," and describes patients' X rays, which show a cloud of fragile blood vessels that sprout in the brain where normal vessels are blocked. There are probably various causes, which are not well understood. Many patients are children. The condition can progress and lead to multiple strokes, mental decline and, in adults, death from brain hemorrhage. Ms. Roy had no doubts: Hoping to avoid a major stroke that could cripple or kill her, she wanted brain surgery. Her operation, on Dec. 15, was the first bypass Dr. Langer performed with the Orbeye, though he and his colleagues had used it for other operations. This type of bypass is one of the most difficult neurosurgical operations, and requires stitching together arteries that are only a millimeter or so in diameter. Colleagues say Dr. Langer is one of the few surgeons in the world with the skill and experience to perform it well. A vessel in Ms. Roy's scalp one that Dr. Langer called "the Michael Jordan artery," because his can be seen pulsing at his temple would be rerouted to feed a deeper artery whose blood supply had been cut off. The cut end of one branch of the scalp artery would be sewn to a hole cut in the side of the deeper vessel. Another branch of the scalp artery would simply be laid atop Ms. Roy's brain, with the expectation that branches would grow into the nerve tissue, because oxygen deprived cells secrete substances that can stimulate the growth of blood vessels. The procedure started with assistant surgeons touching an ultrasound probe to Ms. Roy's temple to detect the pulse of the scalp artery, and then marking the vessel's path with purple ink so that Dr. Langer would know precisely where to cut. Then he would begin the painstaking process of freeing the two branches of the artery from their surrounding tissue. When the scalp artery was free, the surgeons took a drill and a saw to Ms. Roy's skull, removing a disc of bone about three inches in diameter. Magnified 15 times on the monitor, her brain, webbed with bright red blood vessels, gleamed in the light and pulsated with each heartbeat. It took about 10 stitches to sew the scalp artery to the artery in the brain, using a curved needle about the size of an eyelash and fine thread barely visible to the naked eye. By 4 p.m., six hours after the surgery began, Ms. Roy, the drapes removed from her face, was blinking in the glare of the operating room, and moving her arms and legs. An anesthesiologist told her the surgery was finished and had gone well. Ms. Roy managed a sleepy smile. Three days later, in a robe and bright red socks, she was sitting up in bed, chatting with her husband over lunch. It was hard to believe she'd so recently had brain surgery. "I just feel good," she said. She jokingly accused Dr. Langer of having told her "a story" about potential side effects and a difficult recovery. It was the week before Christmas, and she had decorated her tree and finished wrapping gifts before heading to the hospital, fearing that she would be unable to do so after the surgery. But the operation, she said, "was, like, nothing." "They don't all go so well," Dr. Langer said. "These things are high risk, and they don't always turn out perfectly." Without surgery, for patients like Ms. Roy, estimates for the risk of a stroke range from 20 percent to 50 percent or even higher within five years, he said. After successful surgery, the risk drops to a few percent a year or less. Ms. Roy, to be released that day, was more than ready to leave the hospital. "I need some air," she said. She was looking forward to the walk across town with her husband to catch an express bus home to the Bronx.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Almost a decade ago, Diego Simeone set out to annoy Europe's elite with Atletico Madrid. But what happens when the underdog joins the aristocrats? MADRID Diego Simeone loved the way the sunlight hit the stands at the Vicente Calderon. First as an Atletico Madrid player, and then as its manager, he relished home games in the stadium in late afternoon, when he could look up from the field and see the red and white seats glinting in the waning glow. That was when he felt the stadium's energy on the touchline, when the sun shone and the banners fluttered and the songs drifted down from on high. Simeone spent a considerable portion of his professional life in that stadium, but he was never inoculated against its power. "The Calderon has an ability to affect you," he said. Simeone knew, when he agreed to take charge of Atletico a few days after Christmas in 2011, that he would have to harness that power. He understood, he felt, what the club's fans wanted, what sort of team would be in line with Atletico's history, its identity, what style of play would win the backing of the Calderon. His team, he told The Coaches' Voice a few years later, would have to be built on a strong defense, a deadly counterattack and an unyielding work ethic. Simeone, the player known as El Cholo, was creating his own philosophy: Cholismo. "The only thing that is not negotiable is effort," he told his players in their first meeting. Most of all, he said, Atletico had to be a thorn in the side of the superpowers. He and his team have delivered on that promise. By almost any metric, Simeone's tenure as Atletico's manager has been an unqualified, spectacular success. The trophies are, of course, the most obvious proof. Under Simeone, Atletico has lifted the Europa League and the European Super Cup twice, in 2012 and 2018. He won the Copa del Rey, against Real Madrid, in 2013, and led the club to the Champions League final in 2014 and 2016. Most important, of course, he led Atletico to the Spanish title in 2014 sealed on enemy territory in Barcelona, too. It was the club's first championship for almost two decades, and the first time in 10 years that a team other than Barcelona or Real Madrid had won the Spanish crown. It is a remarkable haul for a team that was, until recently, known for its ability to fall at the last, for its perpetual disappointment. Atletico has long been known, by fans and foes alike, as El Pupas: the Jinxed. The nickname does not come up so much, these days. Even more telling, perhaps, is the sea change in Atletico's fortunes off the field. His success has effectively wiped out the club's soaring debts, and attracted the kind of deep pocketed foreign sponsors China's Wanda group, Azerbaijan's tourism board, an Israeli billionaire that helped pay for a new stadium, for higher salaries, for new players. Last summer, Atletico spent 142 million on a single player Joao Felix and a further 100 million on strengthening the squad. Atletico, in other words, is no longer the poor relation: It has paid more for a player than Real Madrid, and it reportedly pays its coach more than any team in the world. On Tuesday, when Atletico hosts Liverpool in the last 16 of the Champions League, it will not be at Simeone's beloved Calderon. The club left its longtime home in 2017 for the Wanda Metropolitano, a state of the art but slightly soulless bowl on Madrid's northern fringes, one grand enough to be the stage on which Liverpool won last season's Champions League final. Atletico is close to opening an equally lavish training base, too, one that according to Simeone "lives up to what the club deserves." At last, in his eyes, the "growth of the club is parallel to that of the team." Simeone still regards Atletico as "socially, morally and emotionally the people's team," but even he acknowledges its image, and its status, have changed. In 2012, as his team prepared to face Chelsea in the European Super Cup, Simeone declared that the English club's vast financial superiority was irrelevant. "Heart can cancel out budget," he declared then. For years, that was how Atletico competed, how it ensured its cherished place as European soccer's great irritant. Now it does not need to. That is the extent of what Simeone has achieved: He has helped the eternal outsider crash through the doors of the palace. Atletico is now part of Europe's elite. The question most are asking, now, is where that leaves the coach who took it there. Simeone wanted more energy. Not, in that precise moment, from his team toiling at home to Bayer Leverkusen in a Champions League group game in October but from the fans. Midway through the second half, with the game goalless, he paused in his characteristic prowling around the technical area to turn to the crowd with his fist raised, demanding more noise, more power. Even so, that moment was striking. Simeone always knew, instinctively, what Atletico wanted. The club's modern identity was entwined with his. Yet for the first time in almost a decade, discord was in the air. As Simeone prepares for the visit of Liverpool, there is a fragile peace. This has been a testing season. Atletico sits fourth in La Liga, cut adrift from Real and Barcelona in the title race, and behind even Getafe, an unheralded team from one of Madrid's satellite towns. It was eliminated from the Copa del Rey by a second division side. Its defensive parsimony remains: Only Real Madrid has conceded fewer goals this season. Simeone's training sessions are still a reference point for teams across Europe. Last summer, seeking inspiration for how to improve its own defense, Bournemouth sent a delegation just to watch how he worked. The problem is his team's toothlessness. Atletico has scored only 25 goals in 24 games. Given the amount of money spent last summer, particularly on Joao Felix, to try to make the team more expansive, it is a paltry return. Simeone is conscious of this. He tried to sign Edinson Cavani, the Uruguay striker, in January to give the team more cutting edge. He has met in recent weeks with Miguel Angel Gil, Atletico's chief executive, and the sporting director Andrea Berta to discuss how to improve the team's attacking performance without compromising its resilience. What Atletico as a club, as a fan base demands of its team has changed, mutated in some way along the road from the Calderon to the Metropolitano. As one associate of Simeone's noted, there is an unavoidable incongruity in playing underdog soccer in an aristocrat's home. "In Cholismo, the result is God," the former Argentina forward Jorge Valdano now a columnist for El Pais, and one of Spain's most erudite soccer observers wrote last year. That was always Simeone's logic, and his defense: As long as his philosophy produced results, there could be no complaints. This season, it is not working. Simeone has not been able to craft a more attacking team, and all of Atletico's old virtues have not been enough. In the absence of God, Simeone's congregation has started to doubt its faith. In recent years, Simeone has lent his name to two books, in collaboration with the journalist Santi Garcia Bustamante. Both sit more comfortably on the lifestyle shelves than in the sports section. In the second, longer edition entitled simply "Creer," or "Believe" Simeone writes: "When the opposition team sense that there is fear, they take advantage without mercy." For much of the last decade, that could have functioned as a summary of what made Atletico great. Now, it encapsulates as well as anything the problem it is facing. Opponents no longer fear Atletico; instead, they detect an uncertainty, an anxiety, in Simeone's team, one that bounces and echoes between the field and the stands. Ordinarily, the visit of Liverpool the reigning European and world champion, a side unbeaten in the Premier League and hailed last week by Lionel Scaloni, the Argentina coach, as the only "invincible" team in the world would be a calvary for a team struggling for form. Far less certain is what comes after. Simeone retains his aura and the faith of most of his players, though those inside the club admit that perhaps the squad's dynamics are suffering because so many of his most trusted lieutenants the likes of Diego Godin and Gabi have departed. His aura has not dissipated. As one player noted, Atletico is still the sort of club where nobody is ever late for a team meeting. A year ago, the manager extended his contract until 2022. But there is a feeling that change is coming. German Burgos, Simeone's longstanding assistant, is keen to start his own managerial career; it was telling that he did not sign a new contract when Simeone did. The biggest question is what happens to Simeone. He might be able to go through his back catalog, to play the greatest hits, to pick a way past Liverpool. The greater challenge, though, is to find a way to update Cholismo to reflect Atletico's new circumstances, to develop a style that suits a team that is no longer always content to be the underdog and a club that demands entertainment with its efficacy. Atletico's identity is now fused with Simeone's. It is hard to imagine one without the other. But Simeone, for one, has never believed in his own immutability. "I always leave before they kick me out," he once said. "And I always believe they can kick me out tomorrow." After almost nine years, that moment of reckoning may be coming. Liverpool might be his last hurrah. It might also be his last stand.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Left, Annie Tritt for The New York Times; right, Geordie Wood for The New York Times Left, Annie Tritt for The New York Times; right, Geordie Wood for The New York Times Credit... Left, Annie Tritt for The New York Times; right, Geordie Wood for The New York Times Glenda Jackson will return to Broadway in "King Lear," while Adam Driver takes on his first starring role there in "Burn This." Expect the canyons of Broadway to echo with shouts and screams this spring and moaning and groaning and lamentation of an exceptional amplitude and ferocity. And I'm not referring to ticket buyers who have just registered what an orchestra seat will set them back, or not only that. Rather, I'm referring to two stars, much celebrated for their combustible presences on stage and screen, who will be taking on parts in which being able to generate high dudgeon at high volume is a primary job requirement. That would be the British actress Glenda Jackson, in the rage filled title role of Shakespeare's "King Lear," and the unlikely American heartthrob Adam Driver, who is portraying what might be described as an emotional arsonist in the first Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson's 1987 drama "Burn This." As is the case with many of this season's main stem offerings, the road to New York for this "King Lear" and "Burn This" has hardly been a straight line. They're each arriving later than was originally anticipated and in somewhat altered form. Lear is the part in which the then 80 year old Ms. Jackson, a two time Oscar winner who had left acting to become a member of Parliament, returned to the London stage after an absence of more than two decades. That production, directed by Deborah Warner at the Old Vic in 2016, reaped such ecstatic notices for its star that it was widely assumed it would be crossing the Atlantic posthaste. Ms. Jackson did indeed show up on Broadway a little more than a year later. But it was not as Shakespeare's ultimate angry old man but as the angry old woman of Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," for which Ms. Jackson won a Tony for Best Actress in a Play. Now, a mere (and one hopes, for her, very restful) year later, Ms. Jackson will be reincarnating the most challenging role in the Shakespeare canon, but with a different director and supporting cast. The "King Lear" opening in April at the Cort Theater will be staged by Sam Gold, who showed an original and subversive hand for Shakespeare in starry productions of "Othello," with Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, and "Hamlet," in which Oscar Isaac was the Prince of Denmark. (His "Lear" casts Ruth Wilson as both the King's Fool and one of his daughters.) "Burn This," an intense, four character study of love and grief in a New York loft, had been expected to come to the Hudson Theater in early 2017. That production was to be headlined by Jake Gyllenhaal in the role of a foul mouthed, cocaine hoovering restaurateur named Pale and directed by Michael Mayer. It was subsequently announced that because of "scheduling conflicts with the show's star," the opening of "Burn This" would probably be "during the 2017 2018 season." The version of "Burn This" finally scheduled to open on April 16 will, as promised, be staged by Mr. Mayer at the Hudson. But its Pale is now Mr. Driver, playing opposite Keri Russell as a dancer in mourning (for her recently deceased roommate, Pale's brother). Though Mr. Driver has appeared on New York stages before notably in revivals of "Look Back in Anger" (directed by Mr. Gold in 2012) and Terence Rattigan's "Man and Boy" (2011) it was in supporting roles of relative calm, meant to ballast the showier, fierier leading parts played by Matthew Rhys (in "Anger") and Frank Langella (in "Man"). But anyone doubting Mr. Driver's ability to do bad, mad and dangerous need only take a look at his subsequent screen work, including his turn as the arch villain Kylo Ren in the recent "Star Wars" films. Or check out his set incinerating fight with Jemima Kirke in the Season 5 finale of HBO's "Girls." Theatergoers attending "Burn This" might do well to wear asbestos. As for Ms. Jackson, no one has doubted her capacity for delivering annihilating rage since she destroyed the hulking Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's 1969 film of "Women in Love." Nor should anyone question this octogenarian's capacity to "howl, howl, howl" nightly against the bleak and cruel universe of "Lear." Speaking last year of her performance as Lear in London, Ms. Jackson said matter of factly, "I expected to do it eight times a week, because that's the way I've been raised. When the first additional matinee went in, the whole cast was asking me how I was, they were afraid I was going to die in the middle of it. "The only time I ever felt tired was on Sundays when we didn't have to do it. Because there's so much energy in the play," she said. Cosmic rage, it would appear, is a great rejuvenator.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Samuel Zell's disastrous stint as a media tycoon, which led to the bankruptcy of the Tribune Company less than a year after he took it private, has not tarnished his reputation in the real estate industry. He is in demand around the world as a conference speaker and has been a guest host on the CNBC program "Squawk Box." His deals have made many investors rich. Now Mr. Zell is once again in the news because of a real estate maneuver. Through Equity Residential, the apartment real estate investment trust of which he is chairman, he is bidding for a stake in Archstone, a huge, privately held apartment landlord jointly owned by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy estate, Bank of America and Barclays. The Lehman estate blocked Equity Residential's first attempt to acquire half of the banks' interest in Archstone, but Mr. Zell still has the right to bid on the other half. On Tuesday Equity Residential announced that the banks would allow the company an extra 60 days to negotiate with the sellers. Though analysts do not believe Mr. Zell will succeed in becoming Lehman's partner, Ross Nussbaum of UBS said in a report that the delay improves Equity Residential's prospect of gaining a large chunk of the buildings in exchange for the equity stake. If Lehman once again succeeds in blocking Mr. Zell, the consolation prize will be a breakup fee of 80 million. "I assure you the breakup fee was not our intent," Mr. Zell said in an interview this month at the Park Avenue offices of Capital Trust, a commercial mortgage REIT he helped to found. Mr. Zell has made it clear he would like to own all of Archstone. His goal is to create a recognizable national brand of apartment housing, one that would presumably attract tenants on the strength of that name. Such brand loyalty was also the idea behind the nationwide expansion of a former Zell REIT, Equity Office Properties, which offered companies with offices around the country the chance to lease all of their space with one stop shopping. Mr. Zell now acknowledges that this concept was flawed. "It failed," he said bluntly. But he said such branding had much better prospects in the apartment sector because the units were marketed to individual consumers, who were more inclined to make distinctions among landlords. Though branding has worked in the self storage business, the concept has yet to be validated in other sectors, said Jim Sullivan, a managing director at Green Street Advisors, a research company in Newport Beach, Calif. One apartment REIT, Post Properties, has managed to create a brand in the Atlanta area, he said, "but no one has done it on a national or a regional basis." Investors view Mr. Zell as an oracle of sorts because of his shrewd timing in selling Equity Office Properties, the nation's largest office landlord, to the private equity group Blackstone for 39 billion in 2007, just months before the real estate market began a steep decline. Though the company had trailed its rivals in the office sector for years, shareholders did very well in the end. "Sam has made billions and billions of dollars for investors," said Laurence Geller, a fellow Chicagoan and chief executive of Strategic Hotels and Resorts, who considers Mr. Zell a mentor. "Any investor who gets it right 80 percent of the time is at the top of the pack." Mr. Zell is credited with helping overhaul the REIT industry in the 1990s by pushing for more transparency, fewer conflicts of interest and lower levels of leverage. In 2001, Equity Office Properties became the first REIT to be included in the Standard Poor's 500 stock index. "There's no question he's left an indelible imprint," said Barry Vinocur, the editor of REIT Zone Publications in Novato, Calif. At 70, Mr. Zell, who is known for his rough language and penchant for motorcycles, shows no signs of kicking back. He is active in a wide variety of businesses apart from real estate, including the Covanta Holding Corporation, a company that converts waste to energy, and says that 70 percent of his net worth 4.7 billion, according to Forbes is generated by activities outside real estate. Equity Residential has been an active buyer and seller in the past two years. The company, which owns or has interests in more than 121,000 residential units, has been ridding itself of older stock and acquiring newer buildings and development sites in coastal cities, including New York, that are prized by young professionals. In December, Equity Residential announced a joint venture with the home builder Toll Brothers to build a 40 story building on Park Avenue South at 28th Street in Manhattan. The top half will consist of condominiums, with the lower half reserved for rental units. Mr. Zell has been involved in these deals even though, as chairman, he does not run Equity Residential on a daily basis. His personal investments are focused on countries with a rising middle class, like Brazil, Colombia and India. "I'm a professional opportunist, and I see relatively few real estate opportunities that I think justify taking action," he said, referring to the domestic market. His objective as a private investor is to buy properties at a fraction of what it would cost to replace them. In November, he teamed with Hilton Hotels to buy the Elysian, a 188 room luxury hotel on Walton Street in Chicago, for 95 million. Despite the deep discount to the 145 million construction cost, the per room price of 505,000 was still the highest ever paid in Chicago. The hotel has been converted into a Waldorf Astoria. Last year, Mr. Zell invested in an office building for the first time in years, buying a stake in 200 South Wacker Drive, opposite the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago. The deal valued the 755,000 square foot building, which was one third vacant, at 95.5 million, or 126 a foot, about one third the replacement cost. That was too good a bargain to pass up, he said, but in general Mr. Zell is especially pessimistic about the office sector, saying that the United States is "profligate" in the amount of space it allocates per office worker 250 square feet, on average, compared with 80 square feet in Hong Kong. Longtime employees of Mr. Zell say he instills confidence by opening his own wallet before he asks others to invest with him. The exception was the 8.2 billion purchase of Tribune in late 2007, of which a relatively small fraction, 315 million, came from Mr. Zell. Yet Mr. Zell does not blame the heavy debt burden for Tribune's failure, but rather the precipitous dive in newspaper advertising that occurred just after he bought the media company and the staff's intransigence. "I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to convince the people that it was in their own interest to modify the way in which the business ran, so as to be profitable," he said. He says he solicited feedback from the staff, and personally answered 15,000 e mails. "I did that as an attempt to create at The Tribune the same kind of collegial environment that's been so successful in everything else we've done," he said. "But it takes two to tango."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The rookie sensation is a captivating character for sports fans, a blank canvas for the imagination. The young ballplayer with uncommon talent inspires awe, even among the greats. So it was for the teenage Claudell Washington, who joined the Oakland Athletics in the summer of 1974, when he was 19, and fit seamlessly into their lineup. That October, he hit .571 in the World Series to help the A's win their third championship in a row, against the Los Angeles Dodgers. "He's the best player for his age I've ever seen or known," the future Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson raved to The Sporting News that September. Jackson, a fellow Oakland outfielder, said Washington should be a .300 hitter and easily capable of 20 home runs per season. His swing, Jackson added, reminded him of that of Carl Yastrzemski, another future Hall of Famer. Washington, who died on Wednesday at 65, never reached those heights. He batted .278 with 164 home runs, topping out at 17 for the Atlanta Braves in 1984. But he was named to two All Star teams, compiled 1,884 career hits and stole 312 bases as a durable mainstay for seven teams across 17 seasons.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
AFTER months of bad publicity and a drumbeat of negative news including millions of recalled vehicles, investigations of unintended acceleration, embarrassing Congressional hearings and a 16.4 million federal fine for foot dragging on required safety reports Toyota is eager to change the conversation. Conveniently, the company has something else to talk about, and it's a comforting family friendly subject: a new minivan. Specifically, Toyota has introduced a substantially revamped version of its Sienna van for the 2011 model year, and the news on that front is mostly good. The latest Sienna is considerably better than the preceding model in nearly every way, and its improved ride and handling are particularly notable. Those who need a first rate family room on wheels will find it checks off all the must have boxes. There are five trim levels, two engines, front or all wheel drive configurations, regular or sporty suspensions and a wide range of prices. A 4 cylinder version starts at a budget friendly 25,060 and is so nicely equipped that a lot of buyers could stop there. For those with nagging concerns about ice and snow, the least expensive Sienna with all wheel drive is 31,930, and prices top out at a jaw dropping 45,705. Indeed, Toyota is the only automaker offering a conventional minivan with either a 4 cylinder engine or all wheel drive. There are versions catering to other preferences as well. If the race driver Danica Patrick slows down to become a mother, she can zip her children around in a Sienna SE with a sport suspension. Baby boomer grandparents can spoil their grandchildren (and themselves) with the luxurious XLE or Limited versions. Toyota calls the 2011 model the third generation Sienna, although there are many similarities with the previous one. The V 6 engine is carried over and the van is built on "roughly" the same underlying architecture, said David Lee, a product communications specialist. The new exterior styling came from Toyota's California design studio. A 6 speed transmission replaces a 5 speed unit. The steering system, formerly hydraulic, is now electric. The least expensive Sienna with a V 6 engine is 26,300. I tested a fancier XLE V 6 with all wheel drive. It came with 18 inch run flat tires and a Premium Package ( 6,225) that included rear seat entertainment features, a navigation system and a backup camera. That, and a 51 cargo net, ballooned the price to 41,591 from a starting point of 35,315. I put the Sienna to the test with a 1,400 mile New Hampshire to Ohio round trip that included a visit to Cleveland where two nephews, ages 10 and 13, joined the test crew. While fancy gadgets are appreciated by passengers, minivans are all about spacious interiors, accommodating seats and flexible cargo space. Seven passenger Siennas come with two plush captain's chairs in the second row. In 8 passenger versions, a very narrow seat is wedged in between. In either version, the second row seats can move forward or backward as much as 23 inches, providing a lot of space flexibility for the second and third rows. Sliding the second row forward also makes it much easier to climb into the third row. That seat can accommodate three small people or two adults. For carrying more gear, the third row folds fairly easily into a well. But even when the third row seats are being used, the cargo space is 39 cubic feet about two and a half times as much as the trunk of a Camry sedan. One potentially negative note: the second row cannot be folded flat into the floor as it can in Chrysler minivans with the clever Stow 'n Go feature. Like other XLEs with all wheel drive, my test van had second row "lounge seats" as standard equipment. These have pull out leg rests an "ottoman feature," in Toyota speak that turn them into recliners like the ones you may have in your living room. Nephews Adam and Clay scrambled into the back, popped in a DVD, reclined the seatbacks, crossed their arms and became rulers of their own ottoman empires. But Mr. Lee says you won't find any cautionary information about the ottoman feature in the Sienna owner's manual. Rather, the warning will be on a tag hanging from the gearshift lever in dealer showrooms. As for storage, there are so many trays, bins and compartments that even the messiest among us could become highly organized. Notably there are two glove boxes, including one with two levels and several compartments; a tray on the floor for a purse or briefcase; and a center console with a rear portion that can slide back to make the cup holders more accessible to second row passengers. The V 6 engine is available on all versions and is required with all wheel drive. This 3.5 liter engine, rated at 266 horsepower and 245 pound feet of torque, was used in the old Sienna as well as in the Avalon, Camry, Venza, RAV4 and Highlander. The new 6 speed automatic transmission always seems to be in the correct gear, matching up so well with the V 6 that it forms a kind of propulsion dream team. With the V 6, there is plenty of power to merge into fast moving Interstate traffic. In sixth gear, you can cruise at about 65 miles per hour with the engine loafing around 2,000 r.p.m., a boon to fuel economy. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates fuel economy for the all wheel drive Sienna at 16 m.p.g. in town and 22 on the highway. I averaged a little over 21 on the Cleveland trip, which included some hill climbing in Vermont. The van returned 22 m.p.g. on a separate 200 mile trip on two lane roads. Fuel economy should be higher for the V 6 with front wheel drive: it is rated 18/24 m.p.g. The economy minded customer may be attracted to the 4 cylinder Sienna, but there is not much to be gained: its mileage estimate is only slightly better than the V 6's (19 m.p.g. in town vs. 18). I tested a 4 cylinder Sienna as well. Its 2.7 liter engine, rated at 187 horsepower and 186 pound feet, can also be found in the Venza and Highlander. It is also paired with the 6 speed automatic. Loaded with four adults and their luggage, this Sienna struggled a bit to merge onto Interstates. But it had no trouble keeping up with fellow travelers at speeds of 75 m.p.h. or higher, even on inclines in Vermont. As you might expect, the engine makes more noise, a sort of droning, than the V 6. I averaged 23.3 m.p.g. on a 321 mile trip in the Sienna 4 cylinder. On a separate trip on two lane roads, by myself, the van averaged 26.6 m.p.g. The Sienna handles well for a big box on wheels. It rides smoothly on broken up roads and the body feels solid. In the turns it isn't excessively nose heavy and is pleasingly responsive. Over all, the driver feels far more connected and confident than with the old Sienna, which sometimes made driving feel like a chore. I didn't care for the electric power steering, which seemed too light and too vague. Wind and road noise can intrude a bit, and there is the drumming sound you often hear in an open van interior. The Sienna is loaded with air bags, including one for the driver's knees, and safety features like electronic stability control. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rated it a Top Safety Pick for its performance in crash tests, including rollover protection. It seems fair to conclude that the Sienna is the new benchmark for minivans. But that status could be fleeting. Honda will be introducing a new version of the Odyssey this fall, Chrysler is updating its minivans later this year and Nissan will have a new Quest early in 2011. Toyota is carefully watching the reception its new Sienna the first big car introduction since the troubles earlier this year receives in the marketplace. In May, the company's overall sales were up 6.7 percent, but that fell far short of the performance of other major automakers, which had gained 17.5 percent or more. And in another sign that bad news has taken a toll, Toyota's ranking plunged in the latest Initial Quality Study by J. D. Power Associates, to 21st place (out of 33 brands), from sixth a year earlier.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
June is Pride month in New York City, a time when it feels like nearly everyone in the five boroughs is a member of the family or a trusted ally. That sense of community will be surpassed this year as New York celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, the night in 1969 when a group of gay, lesbian and transgender people stood up to harassment, and the gay liberation movement was born. Big Apple's Pride will also feel more international as it becomes the first time the United States is home to WorldPride, whose previous locations include Rome, Jerusalem, London, Toronto and Madrid. There are a multitude of events happening this month, but ultimately pride is personal. How you choose to celebrate is up to you. The events below will not necessarily keep you out until dawn, but they will take a bite out of what New York has to offer this month. "Stonewall 50" is the overarching theme for several exhibitions at the New York Historical Society, among them "By the Force of Our Presence: Highlights from the Lesbian Herstory Archives," a collection of photographs, books, posters, clothes and other mementos that seeks to prevent the erasure from history of the many contributions made by lesbians and queer women. The full collection of the Lesbian Herstory Archives is housed in Park Slope and can be visited in person or virtually. Another exhibition, "Say It Loud, Out and Proud: Fifty Years of Pride," is a march through significant moments in L.G.B.T. history, with photographs of past marches from the 1960s to now. Admission: 13 to 21. Need some help navigating New York for WorldPride? We've got you covered. The best way to appreciate the city is by walking it, so take some time for a stroll before the next pit stop. You can get an elevated view from the High Line, an abandoned freight line turned into a public space, and walk south toward the Chelsea neighborhood and check out its many galleries, many of which can be found between 19th and 27th streets between 10th and 11th Avenues. Not far away, Team New York Aquatics is hosting this year's International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics Championships, and as part of that, the New York group is presenting a Q. and A. on Friday, June 28, at 5 p.m. with three out and proud Olympians: the Americans Bruce Hayes and Betsy Mitchell, who won gold medals in 1984, and the Australian Daniel Kowalski, who got the gold in 2000. The event will be moderated by Jeff Commings, the author of "Odd Man Out: True Stories of a Gay Black Swimmer," his autobiography about swimming, his Olympic trials and his struggles with homophobia. Tickets: 10 (and limited to 400 attendees). The bar and restaurant Cowgirl, opened in 1989 by Sherry Delamarter, a native of Texas, is all about comfort and kitsch. Every nook and cranny seems to be adorned with gay flags, checkered tablecloths, tequila bottles and Western memorabilia. There are salad options if you're trying to be good, but if today is your cheat day, opt for the Frito pie: an open bag of Fritos gloriously topped with chili and all the fixings jalapenos, Cheddar cheese, sour cream and onions. The veggie version is 8.50, beef is 9.95. Another favorite: artichoke fritters with spinach dip ( 10.95). Indulge away, there is exercise ahead. The art collective known as Papi Juice, which caters to queer and trans people of color, was founded in 2013. The Papi Juice World Pride dance party on June 28 in Brooklyn starts at 7 p.m. with a rooftop sunset reception and promises to go until 5 a.m. There will be 15 D.J.s in three rooms at the massive venue Elsewhere in Bushwick. Ticket sales will benefit Landscape, a program for visual artists. Tickets: 30 to 50. You could make a weekend visit out of Central Park by itself. For this trip, start June 29 off with the Front Runner s New York LGBT Pride Run. This five mile run, organized by New York Road Runners and Front Runners New York, an athletic group for L.G.B.T. runners and their allies, has been an annual event since the inaugural outing in 1982 with 440 runners. This year, even more runners can participate in a bid to establish a new Guinness World Record for a charity run. The minimum to beat is 6,000 finishers. This year's beneficiary is The Center, a resource hub for the L.G.B.T. community, in the West Village. Entries are 15 to 37. The race begins near East 67th Street and heads across the park first north, then west, then south to the finish line near West 71st Street. 6) 11 a.m. View from the top After a post run cool down and clean up, enjoy an aerial view of Central Park from Robert, a swanky American restaurant and lounge that is on the ninth floor of the Museum of Arts and Design building at Columbus Circle. There are bold colors, furnishings that recall Don Draper's apartment in "Mad Men" and many culinary options. Try the pairing of a tomato bisque and grilled cheese ( 18) or the caprese sandwich ( 18). The Criminal Queerness Festival, which runs through July 6, presents L.G.B.T.Q. theater from around the world. Among the performances is "Jhaanjar Di Paanwaan Chhankaar," written by Fatima Maan and directed by Nicky Maggio. The play is about a blind man, his controlling mother and his new neighbor in Pakistan. It is adapted from "Butterflies Are Free," a play by Leonard Gershe set in Manhattan, which earned Blythe Danner a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in 1970. Tickets: 20. "Camp: Notes on Fashion," through Sept. 8, displays garments from the 17th century through today in an examination of the concept of camp, which can be humorous and theatrical. Picture the concert outfits of Cher or Elton John and you will be in the right frame of mind for these wearable works of art. One of the standouts is Jeremy Scott's kimono cape for Moschino that looks like the compartments of a TV dinner vegetable medley on one side; mashed potatoes on the other. After a long day of culture, wind down with a late dinner and cocktails at Bsquared, known for its artisanal pizzas and shareable small plates. Start with a Clemenza ( 13), a bourbon drink with smoked maple syrup, and the roasted cauliflower ( 14), with a medley of capers, pine nuts and raisins. For the main course, pick whichever pizza name tickles your fancy: Oscar the Grouch ( 17), The Becky ( 17), Meat Packing ( 19) or the Italian Stallion ( 20). End with the budino ( 8), an Italian chocolate pudding with sea salt, olive oil and whipped cream. 12) 9:30 a.m. More to overcome Pride is political and not everyone has a seat at the table. The Queer Liberation March on June 30 is a reminder that there are still many battles to be fought at home, across the country and around the world issues that the Reclaim Pride Coalition, the organizers of this morning march, feel are lost in the Pride March at noon. The coalition's mission statement includes recognizing the legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion by highlighting the most marginalized members of the community. It kicks off from the Stonewall Inn (53 Christopher Street) and will head up Sixth Avenue to Central Park for a rally on the Great Lawn. Just before the official noon kickoff for the New York City Pride March on June 30, there is a moment of silence at 11:58 a.m. for participants to pause and remember those who lost their lives to AIDS and hate crimes. It is an incredibly powerful moment of reflection, before the loud, colorful parade begins. This year's marshalls include the Gay Liberation Front, an activist group formed just after the Stonewall Uprising; members of the cast of "Pose"; and Monica Helms, a transgender activist and a veteran of the United States Navy. The march begins at 26th Street and Fifth Avenue and heads south and west before making its way back north to 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue. Happy Pride!	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
If you skipped New York's grittier art fairs this season and now regret it, compensation awaits in a scruffy food fight of an exhibition at a relatively swank address: Lever House, the first glass curtain wall skyscraper on Park Avenue. The show is "Midtown," a contentious mix of art, design, craft and various hybrids by more than 60 artists from around the world. A pop up affair, it has been organized by the New York art dealers Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Michele Maccarone, and the contemporary design dealer Paul Johnson, with help from the independent curator Ali Subotnick. It sprawls throughout the denuded second floor of Lever House, the ever elegant International Style gem designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois (for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) and completed in 1952. Lever House arrived when glass box skyscrapers were new, city planners were wary of them (can you imagine?), and setbacks were the law. Consequently its relatively slim 21 story tower sits on a broad, wonderfully porous two story pedestal. The ground level is ingeniously generous and unlike anything else in the city: It's mostly outdoor public space, enhanced by a light giving atrium that cuts through the second floor, where, up one flight of a fire stair, "Midtown" can be found. It's worth visiting this show just to experience the space of Lever House, which became a landmark in 1982; even under these stark conditions, you can sense the intimacy and human scale that informed early skyscraper design. But the show itself is provocative, throwing out questions on all sides, even if it answers few of them. Mainly it exposes the growing, often dubious, gray area of pricey, often one off objects that are more interesting to look at than to use but may not be visually adamant enough to be art. You decide. Anton Alvarez's great looking chairs, benches and stools, for example, are made by tightly wrapping together planks and scraps of wood using bright polyester thread and a machine of this Stockholm artist's own invention. They have a cheap, thrown together yet sturdy flamboyance, like big toys; the bench and stools could be used, but the chairs seem too angular for comfort, more like sculpture (and not bad as such). The celebrated British designer Max Lamb doesn't come off as well. He is represented by a mini retrospective at the center of the show, an assortment of quasi furniture and not quite art. There are a couple of great moments: a cartoonishly thick, bumpy chair that seems to be cast copper but is actually something called nanocrystalline. From 2015, it promises to become a classic, a Flintstones like one that might also have escaped from a Philip Guston painting or an R. Crumb comic. Mr. Lamb's other efforts are briefly intriguing, especially if his innovative materials and sometimes simple processes are explained. But besides the chair, the only things I lusted for were two luxuriously thick wool rugs whose contrasting patterns are nicely collaborative: They were devised by their weavers from spools of yarn provided by Mr. Lamb. In one corner office area, you'll find objects that justify themselves by sheer extravagance: an example of the artist Nick Cave's ornate costume sculpture assemblages, this one involving textiles sewn with china plates; Takuro Kuwata's five foot tall conical sculpture in black porcelain and covered with five inch thick chunks of pink glaze (think monumental craquelure), and a big colorful see through abstraction on pigmented urethane by Alex Hubbard. Several of the artists have shown their work at Ms. Rohatyn Greenberg's Salon 94, Maccarone or Mr. Johnson's gallery. But several unfamiliar names stand out. The Arkansas basket maker Leon Niehues is represented by 13 vessels and exquisite sculptures involving thorns that have a delicate, scorpion menace. The works by the South African ceramic sculptor Andile Dyalvane are notable for their combination of topographical ruggedness and refinement, even though they can sometimes verge on fussiness. Aneta Regel, a Polish sculptor who makes simplified animal forms encrusted with bright colored glazes that seem descended from African Baule, is another talent worth watching. And Kenzi Shiokava, a professional gardener from Los Angeles, and a breakout star of the Hammer Museum's 2016 biennial, is an older newcomer represented here by five delicate and totemic forms dating to the 1980s and made in carefully carved and burned wood. They are both indebted to Isamu Noguchi and Louise Nevelson and free of them. The show features work by forerunners who mined the gap between sculpture and design, starting in the 1970s and '80s. Scott Burton (1939 1989), whose gifted life was cut short by AIDS, was one of the first Americans to exploit this in between space, as evidenced here by a table made of two massive pieces of interlocking granite. Here, it serves as a base for a curving black vessel from 2016 by Christine Nofchissey McHorse that is accurately titled "Robster Claw" and extends the tradition of Navajo micaceous pottery. R. M. Fischer's signature lamp sculptures still impress with their sophisticated use of industrial materials more than 30 years on. The inventive designer Gaetano Pesce, 77, contributes a colorful sculpture, nominally a bookshelf, from 2007; made of polyurethane resin, it stands near a window and glows like latter day stained glass. A 1991 Pesce, "Sandbag Chair," also called "January 16th Sofa," is named for the starting date of the first Iraq war. Oozing bloodlike latex, it remains pertinent in an angry, heavy handed way and also might be nice to sink into. Vito Acconci's "Stretched Facade" of 1984, is a giant mask that manages to combine comedy and tragedy, with a big red mouth that is also a love seat. Mr. Acconci, a trailblazing artist, died last month. Josep Grau Garriga (1929 2011), a Catalan textile artist is both a forerunner and a relative unknown, at least in New York, although his solo debut at Salon 94 should change that. He is represented here by two equally powerful but quite different fiber pieces from 1973 and 2011, the first suggesting a giant cocoon, the second a deliciously fringed wall hanging. His work helps clarify the tapestry like nature of its neighbor, a taut new painting by Rosy Keyser. Several artists included works that announce aesthetic shifts. Jon Kessler, usually Mr. Mechanical, has three new pieces that are essentially airy stabiles dangling sweet found objects, as if they were collaborations by Calder and Dali. Nate Lowman has dropped his facade of hyper cool to cover a wall with big playful paintings shaped like leaves or flowers; it's quite startling, in a good way. And Betty Woodman has transformed her glazed ceramic cutouts into beautiful women, whose garments include actual textiles. These are among the best work of her long career. Joe Zucker's striking paintings achieve an unusual balance among art, craft and design, as well as materials. Their pale fluctuating grids are made from incised wallboard whose tiny squares have been stained different shades of gray. They resemble weavings and might be tributes to Anni Albers. Urs Fischer goes site specific with a beautiful expanse of trompe l'oeil wallpaper that replicates drywall patterned with splotches of glue and interrupted by exposed beams and electrical conduit. Amid the clash of sensibilities and amusing sights this show fruitfully unleashes, I realized, once more, my preference for design that is functional, affordable and capable of mass production. Sadly, there seems to be only one candidate here: a metal tubing armchair by Mr. Fischer that looks back to modernist masters like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, but adds extra curves. It's a bit of a Surrealist joke, a bit of an abstract sculpture and comfortable to sit in. Perhaps there will be many more like it, reasonably priced.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Rumors that Maserati's coming Levante S.U.V. would be based on the Jeep Grand Cherokee a reasonable assumption considering that Fiat, which owns Maserati, also owns Chrysler and its Jeep division have been put to rest by Maserati's chief executive, Harald Wester. Although the company told Car and Driver that it had not made any formal announcements yet, a Maserati engineer told Motor Trend that the Italian S.U.V. would be based on the same platform as the Quattroporte and Ghibli sedans. (Car and Driver) For those curious enough to travel to Kentucky to see the sinkhole that swallowed eight classic Corvettes this month, the National Corvette Museum is offering the opportunity to see the 'Vettes before General Motors collects them to make repairs. The museum will begin pulling the cars out of the hole next month, and plans to line them up where visitors can have a look. (Torque News) According to a report from CNN, the Las Vegas Police Department said it would no longer respond to emergency calls for car accidents unless someone had been injured. City officials said that officers in the thinly spread department spent about 250 hours each week responding to traffic calls, and that other problems required their attention. (The Car Connection) According to Top Gear, the Hennessey Venom has supplanted the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport by clocking the fastest speed ever recorded in a production car. Driven by Brian Smith, the 1,244 horsepower twin turbo General Motors V8 powered supercar rocketed to just over 270 miles per hour at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this month. The relatively short runway, just 3.22 miles long, made braking a challenge; Mr. Smith barely had enough room to stop. (Top Gear)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Peter Hoeg's 1992 publishing sensation, "Smilla's Sense of Snow," was America's gateway drug to a long term dependency on Nordic noir, suspense novels in which the placid progressive surface health care, tolerance, bicycles is routinely shattered by neo Nazis, rapists, neo Nazi rapists. Just maybe, despite our more than 30,000 annual gun deaths and mass incarceration and unconscionable poverty, those Scandinavians aren't any more civilized than we are. Every subgenre has its conventions, and Scandi crime's have become commonplace to readers (and moviegoers): bleak landscapes and brooding protagonists, sexual violence and abounding umlauts. So it's refreshing to find the action in 's "After the Monsoon" set in a place that is the opposite of Sweden: Djibouti, a "little thumbnail of land" where the Horn of Africa meets the Gulf of Aden, and two plotlines converge. One is the kidnapping of the Bergenskjold family off the luxury sailboat where they had decamped from their private equity lifestyle in Stockholm dinner parties at which Carl Adam "rambled on with a colleague about grand cru wines ... while Jenny stood in the kitchen, cleaning up, talking with some wife about the usual drivel" at a kitchen sink "made from a single piece of Italian marble, transported across Europe as the only cargo on a flatbed truck." Karjel has a gift for the telling detail that reveals a broader story. His author biography boasts that "he is the only Swedish pilot who has trained with the U.S. Marine Corps," and it's to be expected that this man's novel would feature a military component. Sure enough, the second plotline does: Ernst Grip of Sapo, Sweden's security police, investigates an army mishap at a Djibouti shooting range. But instead of the usual bromides about honor and duty and warriors and weaponry, Karjel writes: "When the first shot rang out, people cheered ... and a little cloud rose up like an exclamation point before falling again."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Medicare has lowered its star ratings for staffing levels in one out of 11 of the nation's nursing homes almost 1,400 of them because they were either inadequately staffed with registered nurses or failed to provide payroll data that proved they had the required nursing coverage, federal records released this week show. Medicare only recently began collecting and publishing payroll data on the staffing of nursing homes as required by the Affordable Care Act of 2010, rather than relying as it had before on the nursing homes' own unverified reports. The payroll records revealed lower overall staffing levels than the homes had disclosed, particularly among registered nurses. Those are the highest trained caregivers required to be in a nursing home, and they supervise other nurses and aides. Medicare mandates that every facility have a registered nurse working at least eight hours every day. "It's a real positive that they actually are taking the payroll based system seriously, that they're using it to punish those nursing homes that either aren't reporting staffing or those that are below the federal limit," said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. "Could they do more? Sure, but I think it's a really good start." The five star rating system is a tool for families searching for nursing homes, and the rankings are published on the government's Nursing Home Compare website. The revised ratings gave the lowest rating for staffing to 1,387 of the nation's 15,616 skilled nursing facilities, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of the latest data released by Medicare. They all received one star out of a possible five on July 25, when Medicare updated the ratings. Nursing home industry officials have acknowledged that some facilities are struggling to meet the new payroll reporting requirements. Katie Smith Sloan, president of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit providers of aging services including nearly 2,000 nursing homes, said the lowered star ratings were disappointing and attributed them largely to a work force shortage. "Our members are battling on multiple fronts to recruit and retain all types of qualified staff, and nurses in particular," she said in a statement. In footnotes on the Nursing Home Compare website, Medicare said the homes with the one star staffing rating either lacked a registered nurse for "a high number of days" over three months, provided data the government couldn't verify or didn't supply their payroll data at all. The downgraded homes reported seven or more days without any registered nurses, the analysis found. For roughly half the homes, the downgrades lowered their overall star ratings, which are the measures displayed most prominently on the site. But some of the homes saw their overall ratings stay the same or even rise, buoyed by their scores on other quality measures. Seventy nine are still rated with a coveted five stars. While the Kaiser Health News analysis found substantially lower average staffing of nurses and aides at for profit facilities than at nonprofits and government owned homes, the number of downgraded nursing homes was roughly proportionally divided among the three categories, indicating an industrywide issue with staffing by registered nurses in particular. Medicare concedes that because the payroll system is geared toward reporting hourly work, salaried staff may not always be reflected correctly, especially if they were working overtime. But Medicare had warned the nursing homes in April that the downgrades would be coming if facilities continued to show no registered nurses on duty. The agency noted it has been preparing nursing homes since 2015 for the new payroll system. "We've just begun to leverage this new information to strengthen transparency and enforcement with the goals of improved patient safety and health outcomes," the Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services said in a statement. The payroll data, analyzed by Kaiser Health News, showed that for profit nursing homes averaged 16 percent fewer staff than did nonprofits, even after accounting for differences in the needs of residents. The biggest difference was in the number of registered nurses: At the average nonprofit, there was one RN for every 28 residents, but at the average for profit, there was only one RN for every 43 residents. Researchers have repeatedly found lower staffing in for profit facilities, which make up 70 percent of the industry. The data also revealed that nursing homes have large fluctuations in staffing. The average nursing home had one licensed nurse caring for as few as 17 residents or as many as 33, depending on the day. On the best staffed days, each certified nursing assistant or other aide cared for nine residents, but on the worst staffed days, each aide was responsible for 16 residents. Weekend staffing was particularly sparse. On weekends on average, there were 11 percent fewer nurses providing direct care and 8 percent fewer aides.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A roundup of motoring news from the web: The Toyota Camry has been the best selling car in the United States for the last 12 years. But Akio Toyoda, the automaker's president, is calling for "more emotional, more impactful design," Kevin Hunter, head of Toyota's American design studio, told Bloomberg. A break from the staid, but strong selling styling of the Camry could be risky, but Toyota appears to be willing to take a risk. (Bloomberg) ADAC, Germany's 18 million member car club the largest in Europe has become the subject of scandal over vote rigging in an annual car award contest. A highly respected organization, particularly in Germany, the falsification of results has rocked its credibility, leading Volkswagen to consider returning its award. (Reuters) Steve Cannon, chief executive of Mercedes Benz USA, said that the automaker expected the new GLA crossover, introduced last week in Detroit, to be a hot seller, which could lead to tight inventory. Dieter Zetsche, chief executive of Daimler AG, Mercedes' parent company, said that the automaker would try to increase CLA production. The GLA and front wheel drive CLA share a platform. (Automotive News, subscription required) Although Tesla Motors' electric cars have been popular in Norway, plunging winter temperatures have posed a problem for owners there have been reports of batteries dying far from recharging stations. Peter Bardenfleth Hansen, Tesla's Northern European sales chief, apologized to customers for the inconvenience and said that the automaker was "trying hard to resolve this." (News in English)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The Museum Is Closed, but Its Tomato Man Soldiers On The halls of the Guggenheim Museum are pretty quiet these days, with mostly just its ghosts and some security guards as company for the art. Oh, and there's the guy who takes care of the tomatoes. David Litvin, an indoor crop specialist, tends the plants in a temporarily shuttered exhibition, "Countryside, The Future." He moved to New York from Tel Aviv in February, along with his wife, Stefanie, and their Dutch shepherd, Ester, with a plan to stay six months harvesting the Guggenheim tomatoes. He was going to see the city, too. "I went out once to a comedy bar, but that's it," he said. The museum has been closed since March 13, but Mr. Litvin still walks across Central Park every day around noon from his rental on the Upper West Side to tend to his flock. "When you grow tomatoes on Fifth Avenue, you want to have the perfect tomatoes, there's no room to mess up," he said. "If I have ugly plants, I'll hear it from the neighbors." The tomatoes, housed in what looks like a radioactive shipping container on the sidewalk, were on view as part of the exhibition for just three weeks before the city folded in on itself. But they're still growing, their vines snipped every Tuesday and donated to City Harvest, at least a hundred pounds at a time. "This tomato growing module couldn't just be turned off with the lights," said the Guggenheim curator Troy Conrad Therrien, who organized the exhibition with the architect Rem Koolhaas, and Samir Bantal of AMO, the research arm of Mr. Koolhaas's firm. "We brought the exhibition to the street, and the street is still accessible." The tractor is a top of the line Deutz Fahr 9340 TTV Warrior. It has a computer in the cab, can lift more than 26,000 pounds and looks completely out of place on the Upper East Side. But the tomatoes look nice there. The shed's color matches the Guggenheim's bone white facade, and neat rows of vines along with Mr. Litvin, when he's there are visible through a plate glass window, bathed in a neon pink light that spills onto the sidewalk after sunset. Mr. Litvin works for 80 Acres Farms, a company that grows organic produce including cucumbers, leafy greens and herbs at giant indoor farms where controlled environments allow for year round harvesting. They're close to making it work for strawberries, too. While at the museum, Mr. Litvin prefers to work in the afternoon and evening to avoid crowds in Central Park, and because of the bees. The tomatoes need to be pollinated, so he has two small hives going in the module at a time, each living out of a specially designed cardboard box with little doors that open and close on a timer. This way, he can confine the bees' working hours to the morning so he doesn't have to share 700 square feet with 100 agitated co workers. "I get them shipped to me here at the museum," he said of the beehives. "The guards are like, 'What the hell is that humming noise?'" The technology Mr. Litvin is using at the museum is the same as in his commercial work. He controls the temperature, humidity and amount of "daytime" the tomatoes get. The light's color maximizes energy efficiency, because the plants absorb only certain light from the spectrum. Raised on a diet of sunshine and rainwater they are not, but they taste (and smell!) like the best juicy ones found in backyards in August. In the context of the exhibition, these tomatoes specifically, they're Brioso tomatoes are meant to reflect the potential future of agriculture, a contrast to monocrop farms and their hulking, high tech tractors like the TTV Warrior, Mr. Therrien said. They were written about in the Southeast Produce Weekly, which was an extremely rare appearance of the Guggenheim in a publication dedicated to fruits and vegetables. Inside the museum's rotunda, the rest of "Countryside" is closed off even to Mr. Litvin. He goes in through an employee side entrance once in a while to use the bathroom or buy something from the vending machine. The exhibition includes a spider like robot that can harvest food, Joseph Stalin's plans to plant 14 million acres of trees and an examination of climate change through Siberian permafrost that emits methane and anthrax as it thaws. But Mr. Therrien hopes that the outdoor portion is even more relevant now. "The supply chains are not just being disrupted but being reconfigured," he said. "Cities are battlegrounds in the pandemic, and the ability to move agriculture into cities is no longer just a flight of fancy for agriculture students who want to put gardens on top of skyscrapers." Indeed, the tomatoes are being put to use. Every Wednesday, a City Harvest van is loaded with about 3,000 tomatoes that Mr. Litvin has snipped, still on the vine. Last week, the van also made pickups at a Gristedes, a catering company and a Momofuku restaurant before heading to La Jornada food pantry in Flushing, Queens. Other museums are also finding ways to help feed people during the coronavirus crisis. Cafe Sabarsky, a couple of blocks south of the Guggenheim inside the Neue Galerie, has been sending goulash, bratwurst and strudel to the staff at Mount Sinai Hospital nearby. The Brooklyn Museum opened its kitchen for a time to Great Performances, a catering company that has been providing nearly 40,000 weekly meals to health care workers and the elderly. The Perez Art Museum Miami partnered with its caterer, Constellation Culinary Group, to provide tens of thousands of meals per day to people in South Florida. Mr. Litvin said that several people walking by have asked if they can buy some of his tomatoes. But he gently told them no. "City Harvest gets them all," he said. "Well, my wife gets some, too. She deserves some."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
A private investor bought this 25 foot wide seven story elevator Chelsea building. Built in 2004, the 8,025 square foot building has a dozen market rate apartments a two bedroom with a garden, 10 one bedrooms with terraces and a one bedroom penthouse with a roof deck. It sold for 25 times the rent roll, and has a cap rate of 2.43 percent. A company involved in branding, design and content has taken a three year lease for the entire 1,150 square foot top floor loft space with hardwood floors and original tin ceilings in this 1920 four story East Village building.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Closing arguments are expected on Thursday in the case, which is being heard before Judge John A. Kronstadt in United States District Court for the Central District of California. At one point during Mr. Williams's testimony, which lasted less than an hour, he was played snippets of both songs in skeletal versions reconstructed by a musicologist retained by the Gaye family. Listening to the juxtaposed bass lines, Mr. Williams responded, "It sounds like you're playing the same thing." At that point, Mr. Thicke, who was attending the trial, left the courtroom. The trial has gripped the music world with its war between celebrities and the family of a beloved Motown star, as well as the possibility of huge damages. This week it was revealed in court, through an accounting statement attested by both sides, that "Blurred Lines" the top selling song of 2013 generated more than 16 million in profits. Although Mr. Thicke, Mr. Williams and T.I. share official credit on "Blurred Lines," Mr. Williams testified that he wrote and masterminded the song in nearly every way. The core of it was created in about an hour, Mr. Williams testified, before Mr. Thicke arrived at a planned recording session. Under questioning from his lawyer, Howard E. King, Mr. Williams was asked directly if he had copied "Got to Give It Up." He said no. Speaking in mellow and polite tones, Mr. Williams added that he had grown up with Motown and that Gaye was "one of the ones we look up to the most."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Premieres have been popping forth from Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance this week with variable results. Wednesday's gala began with a piece (new to New York) by Mr. Taylor, "Sullivaniana." Like many Taylor creations this century, it seemed like a skillful preliminary sketch of something this master didn't have the energy to turn into an interesting dance. It also looked neither American nor like modern dance. Wednesday also included the first performance of Larry Keigwin's "Rush Hour," a study of modern urban life that was as slick, bland and unimportant as anything else by this choreographer, though on a big scale and modishly dark in tone. This was an "Apocalypse Postponed" affair, with fancy lighting and a commissioned minimalism without tears score by Adam Crystal. Haven't I seen this piece by several other choreographers? They just keep changing the title and the music. The audience gave it an ovation. The centerpiece on Thursday night was "The Weight of Smoke," by Doug Elkins, another world premiere. At first this was another unrealized sketch, to a dismaying degree: One quartet for two couples was tedious in plan and limp in execution. Then suddenly though a little too late for comfort "Smoke" snapped into marvelously fresh vitality. For its few closing minutes, it became the injection of new life the Taylor enterprise desperately needs just now. Not only did this closing section give us a view of Mr. Elkins at his liveliest with strong elements of club/disco dancing and impish comedy, rhythmically exuberant but it was also the first important gift to these remarkable dancers that the company has had in years, showing all of them in new lights. You've admired Michael Novak since he joined this company in 2010? Here he is in full force, loads of fun and scarcely recognizable. You've idolized Michael Trusnovec, for many years the company's superb leading dancer? You never knew this side of him: rippling through one vividly feminine sequence, parallel to three women, hilarious yet devoid of camp. What happens during "Smoke" is that the taped score, which has original music by Justin Levine and Matt Stine, starts to interpolate chunks of Handel (especially the irresistible aria "O ruddier than the cherry," from "Acis and Galatea"), and then turns them into pop music, with various disco and rock accompaniments. Daft, engaging, it releases the dancers' high spirits as well as Mr. Elkins's naughtiness. "Smoke" starts out (and "Rush Hour" stays) politically correct in sexual terms, like a humorless ad for a bisexual dating website: a judicious amount of same sex partnering coexists with standard heterosexual behavior (and no one relationship counts for much). Then, however, it switches gear into party time. The dance pulse grows vivid, and when you see the angelically discreet Mr. Trusnovec start to do the same shimmying sequence as the women, you can feel the twinkle in the eye of "Smoke." Costumes (by Karen Young) are changed: Mr. Novak returns in sky blue, prancing to the beat center stage with outrageous go go authority. I can understand why Mr. Elkins wanted to take "Smoke" from somberness to brightness, but why, with this finale up his sleeve, did he keep the opening section so boring for so long? A few more words are in order about Mr. Taylor's "Sullivaniana" and Mr. Keigwin's "Rush Hour." "Sullivaniana" is a genre study of absurdly Romantic affairs, set to the Gilbert and Sullivan overtures from "Iolanthe," "The Pirates of Penzance" and "Patience." Single women pursue single men, and vice versa; some neat formations develop. Santo Loquasto's individualized costumes are perfect; the women wear high heeled shoes. The whole thing feels like ballet elegant, genteel, pretty without generating any fun. "Rush Hour" mixes pedestrian movement with higher energy movement, opposite sex and same sex combinations, groups and individuals, men and women. The moods, shared with Mr. Crystal's score and Clifton Taylor's lighting, change, suggesting various interior and exterior spaces. As rush hours go, this one seems oddly preoccupied with couples, groups and partnering; any loners make little impression. A few dance ideas the sway on one leg before the transferral of weight to the other, the pass the partner this way then the other move are showily reiterated. One sequence, in which women lean far back and travel fast, while their men support them by the necks, struck me as an objectionable image of feminine dependency. The big events of the Taylor season have all been Taylor revivals. The rarest so far has been "Images" (1977): one of those singular Taylor creations in which no other choreographer would have yoked this Debussy music (piano pieces from "Images" and his "Children's Corner Suite") to these images of human behavior (poetic ceremonies from the ancient world, with Gene Moore's bodices handsomely exposing the women's breasts, Minoan style). There will be more to say of these, and meanwhile, "The Weight of Smoke" will repay revisiting.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
NEWARK There have been times over the last two months when Golan Ben Oni has felt like a voice in the wilderness. On April 29, someone hit his employer, IDT Corporation, with two cyberweapons that had been stolen from the National Security Agency. Mr. Ben Oni, the global chief information officer at IDT, was able to fend them off, but the attack left him distraught. In 22 years of dealing with hackers of every sort, he had never seen anything like it. Who was behind it? How did they evade all of his defenses? How many others had been attacked but did not know it? Since then, Mr. Ben Oni has been sounding alarm bells, calling anyone who will listen at the White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New Jersey attorney general's office and the top cybersecurity companies in the country to warn them about an attack that may still be invisibly striking victims undetected around the world. And he is determined to track down whoever did it. "I don't pursue every attacker, just the ones that piss me off," Mr. Ben Oni told me recently over lentils in his office, which was strewn with empty Red Bull cans. "This pissed me off and, more importantly, it pissed my wife off, which is the real litmus test." Two weeks after IDT was hit, the cyberattack known as WannaCry ravaged computers at hospitals in England, universities in China, rail systems in Germany, even auto plants in Japan. No doubt it was destructive. But what Mr. Ben Oni had witnessed was much worse, and with all eyes on the WannaCry destruction, few seemed to be paying attention to the attack on IDT's systems and most likely others around the world. The strike on IDT, a conglomerate with headquarters in a nondescript gray building here with views of the Manhattan skyline 15 miles away, was similar to WannaCry in one way: Hackers locked up IDT data and demanded a ransom to unlock it. But the ransom demand was just a smoke screen for a far more invasive attack that stole employee credentials. With those credentials in hand, hackers could have run free through the company's computer network, taking confidential information or destroying machines. Worse, the assault, which has never been reported before, was not spotted by some of the nation's leading cybersecurity products, the top security engineers at its biggest tech companies, government intelligence analysts or the F.B.I., which remains consumed with the WannaCry attack. Were it not for a digital black box that recorded everything on IDT's network, along with Mr. Ben Oni's tenacity, the attack might have gone unnoticed. Scans for the two hacking tools used against IDT indicate that the company is not alone. In fact, tens of thousands of computer systems all over the world have been "backdoored" by the same N.S.A. weapons. Mr. Ben Oni and other security researchers worry that many of those other infected computers are connected to transportation networks, hospitals, water treatment plants and other utilities. An attack on those systems, they warn, could put lives at risk. And Mr. Ben Oni, fortified with adrenaline, Red Bull and the house beats of Deadmau5, the Canadian record producer, said he would not stop until the attacks had been shut down and those responsible were behind bars. "The world is burning about WannaCry, but this is a nuclear bomb compared to WannaCry," Mr. Ben Oni said. "This is different. It's a lot worse. It steals credentials. You can't catch it, and it's happening right under our noses." And, he added, "The world isn't ready for this." Mr. Ben Oni, 43, a Hasidic Jew, is a slight man with smiling eyes, a thick beard and a hacker's penchant for mischief. He grew up in the hills of Berkeley, Calif., the son of Israeli immigrants. Even as a toddler, Mr. Ben Oni's mother said, he was not interested in toys. She had to take him to the local junkyard to scour for typewriters that he would eventually dismantle on the living room floor. As a teenager, he aspired to become a rabbi but spent most of his free time hacking computers at the University of California, Berkeley, where his exploits once accidentally took down Belgium's entire phone system for 15 minutes. To his parents' horror, he dropped out of college to pursue his love of hacking full time, starting a security company to help the city of Berkeley and two nearby communities, Alameda and Novato, set up secure computer networks. He had a knack for the technical work, but not the marketing, and found it difficult to get new clients. So at age 19, he crossed the country and took a job at IDT, back when the company was a low profile long distance service provider. As IDT started acquiring and spinning off an eclectic list of ventures, Mr. Ben Oni found himself responsible for securing shale oil projects in Mongolia and the Golan Heights, a "Star Trek" comic books company, a project to cure cancer, a yeshiva university that trains underprivileged students in cybersecurity, and a small mobile company that Verizon recently acquired for 3.1 billion. Which is to say he has encountered hundreds of thousands of hackers of every stripe, motivation and skill level. He eventually started a security business, IOSecurity, under IDT, to share some of the technical tools he had developed to keep IDT's many businesses secure. By Mr. Ben Oni's estimate, IDT experiences hundreds of attacks a day on its businesses, but perhaps only four each year give him pause. Nothing compared to the attack that struck in April. Like the WannaCry attack in May, the assault on IDT relied on cyberweapons developed by the N.S.A. that were leaked online in April by a mysterious group of hackers calling themselves the Shadow Brokers alternately believed to be Russia backed cybercriminals, an N.S.A. mole, or both. The WannaCry attack which the N.S.A. and security researchers have tied to North Korea employed one N.S.A. cyberweapon; the IDT assault used two. Both WannaCry and the IDT attack used a hacking tool the agency had code named EternalBlue. The tool took advantage of unpatched Microsoft servers to automatically spread malware from one server to another, so that within 24 hours North Korea's hackers had spread their ransomware to more than 200,000 servers around the globe. The attack on IDT went a step further with another stolen N.S.A. cyberweapon, called DoublePulsar. The N.S.A. used DoublePulsar to penetrate computer systems without tripping security alarms. It allowed N.S.A. spies to inject their tools into the nerve center of a target's computer system, called the kernel, which manages communications between a computer's hardware and its software. Mr. Ben Oni learned of the attack only when a contractor, working from home, switched on her computer to find that all her data had been encrypted and that attackers were demanding a ransom to unlock it. He might have assumed that this was a simple case of ransomware. But the attack struck Mr. Ben Oni as unique. For one thing, it was timed perfectly to the Sabbath. Attackers entered IDT's network at 6 p.m. on Saturday on the dot, two and a half hours before the Sabbath would end and when most of IDT's employees 40 percent of whom identify as Orthodox Jews would be off the clock. For another, the attackers compromised the contractor's computer through her home modem strange. The black box of sorts, a network recording device made by the Israeli security company Secdo, shows that the ransomware was installed after the attackers had made off with the contractor's credentials. And they managed to bypass every major security detection mechanism along the way. Finally, before they left, they encrypted her computer with ransomware, demanding 130 to unlock it, to cover up the more invasive attack on her computer. Mr. Ben Oni estimates that he has spoken to 107 security experts and researchers about the attack, including the chief executives of nearly every major security company and the heads of threat intelligence at Google, Microsoft and Amazon. With the exception of Amazon, which found that some of its customers' computers had been scanned by the same computer that hit IDT, no one had seen any trace of the attack before Mr. Ben Oni notified them. The New York Times confirmed Mr. Ben Oni's account via written summaries provided by Palo Alto Networks, Intel's McAfee and other security firms he used and asked to investigate the attack. "I started to get the sense that we were the canary," he said. "But we recorded it." Since IDT was hit, Mr. Ben Oni has contacted everyone in his Rolodex to warn them of an attack that could still be worming its way, undetected, through victims' systems. "Time is burning," Mr. Ben Oni said. "Understand, this is really a war with offense on one side, and institutions, organizations and schools on the other, defending against an unknown adversary." Since the Shadow Brokers leaked dozens of coveted attack tools in April, hospitals, schools, cities, police departments and companies around the world have largely been left to fend for themselves against weapons developed by the world's most sophisticated attacker: the N.S.A. A month earlier, Microsoft had issued a software patch to defend against the N.S.A. hacking tools suggesting that the agency tipped the company off to what was coming. Microsoft regularly credits those who point out vulnerabilities in its products, but in this case the company made no mention of the tipster. Later, when the WannaCry attack hit hundreds of thousands of Microsoft customers, Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, slammed the government in a blog post for hoarding and stockpiling security vulnerabilities. For his part, Mr. Ben Oni said he had rolled out Microsoft's patches as soon as they became available, but attackers still managed to get in through the IDT contractor's home modem. Six years ago, Mr. Ben Oni had a chance meeting with an N.S.A. employee at a conference and asked him how to defend against modern day cyberthreats. The N.S.A. employee advised him to "run three of everything": three firewalls, three antivirus solutions, three intrusion detection systems. And so he did. But in this case, modern day detection systems created by Cylance, McAfee and Microsoft and patching systems by Tanium did not catch the attack on IDT. Nor did any of the 128 publicly available threat intelligence feeds that IDT subscribes to. Even the 10 threat intelligence feeds that his organization spends a half million dollars on annually for urgent information failed to report it. He has since threatened to return their products. "Our industry likes to work on known problems," Mr. Ben Oni said. "This is an unknown problem. We're not ready for this." No one he has spoken to knows whether they have been hit, but just this month, restaurants across the United States reported being hit with similar attacks that were undetected by antivirus systems. There are now YouTube videos showing criminals how to attack systems using the very same N.S.A. tools used against IDT, and Metasploit, an automated hacking tool, now allows anyone to carry out these attacks with the click of a button. Worse still, Mr. Ben Oni said, "No one is running point on this." Last month, he personally briefed the F.B.I. analyst in charge of investigating the WannaCry attack. He was told that the agency had been specifically tasked with WannaCry, and that even though the attack on his company was more invasive and sophisticated, it was still technically something else, and therefore the F.B.I. could not take on his case. The F.B.I. did not respond to requests for comment. So Mr. Ben Oni has largely pursued the case himself. His team at IDT was able to trace part of the attack to a personal Android phone in Russia and has been feeding its findings to Europol, the European law enforcement agency based in The Hague. The chances that IDT was the only victim of this attack are slim. Sean Dillon, a senior analyst at RiskSense, a New Mexico security company, was among the first security researchers to scan the internet for the N.S.A.'s DoublePulsar tool. He found tens of thousands of host computers are infected with the tool, which attackers can use at will. "Once DoublePulsar is on the machine, there's nothing stopping anyone else from coming along and using the back door," Mr. Dillon said. More distressing, Mr. Dillon tested all the major antivirus products against the DoublePulsar infection and a demoralizing 99 percent failed to detect it. "We've seen the same computers infected with DoublePulsar for two months and there is no telling how much malware is on those systems," Mr. Dillon said. "Right now we have no idea what's gotten into these organizations." In the worst case, Mr. Dillon said, attackers could use those back doors to unleash destructive malware into critical infrastructure, tying up rail systems, shutting down hospitals or even paralyzing electrical utilities. Could that attack be coming? The Shadow Brokers resurfaced last month, promising a fresh load of N.S.A. attack tools, even offering to supply them for monthly paying subscribers like a wine of the month club for cyberweapon enthusiasts. In a hint that the industry is taking the group's threats seriously, Microsoft issued a new set of patches to defend against such attacks. The company noted in an ominously worded message that the patches were critical, citing an "elevated risk for destructive cyberattacks." Mr. Ben Oni is convinced that IDT is not the only victim, and that these tools can and will be used to do far worse. "I look at this as a life or death situation," he said. "Today it's us, but tomorrow it might be someone else."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
LIKE so many other young people in Cairo, Yasmine el Mehairy saw no future in Egypt. What she saw was a dead end. Six months after an uprising led by people like her ousted Hosni Mubarak and overturned the established order of the Arab world, Ms. Mehairy has joined the ranks of Egypt's newest business class: the entrepreneurs of the revolution. Instead of leaving Egypt as she had planned, she is staying to nurture a start up called SuperMama, an Arabic language Web site for women that has 10 local employees. "The revolution really made my generation believe in ourselves," Ms. Mehairy, 30, says. If Egyptians can topple Mubarak, she wonders, what else might they accomplish? That is a sobering question for educated, affluent Egyptians like Ms. Mehairy people who, unlike most Egyptians, have other options. She has a master's degree in interactive media from the University of Westminster in London and hoped to move to Britain or Canada. The revolt now known as the Arab Spring placed Egypt on an uncertain course. After years of corruption, its hidebound economy is reeling. Tourism and investment have plunged. Mass unemployment which fed Egyptians' anger has worsened and protests in Tahrir Square continue. The nation will elect a new government in September, and it's anyone's guess what will happen then. Yet for all the uncertainties, some of those who embraced Facebook and Twitter during those heady days in Tahrir Square are now busily trying to start or continue working on Web sites and Web applications that they hope will yield profits and jobs. "This is an unusual revolution in that it was led by a very educated and economically conversant, forward looking group of people," says Khush Choksy, executive director of the United States Egypt Business Council, which is part of the United States Chamber of Commerce. "But to secure what they really went into Tahrir Square for, there needs to be economic growth, a modern set of thinking, and a more diversified economy." Ms. Mehairy wants to seize the moment, and she and Zeinab Samir, the co founder of SuperMama, have been on the move. In June, the pair applied for a spot at the NextGen IT Boot Camp, which took place in Cairo in late June. The program was sponsored by the Global Entrepreneurship Program, a collaboration between the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development. During the five day program, which was also sponsored by the Danish and Egyptian governments, six American entrepreneurs including Jeff Hoffman, co founder of Priceline.com; Ryan Allis, chief executive of the marketing site iContact; Shama Kabani, chief operating officer of Marketing Zen; and Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council helped 38 Egyptian entrepreneurs hone their business plans. On the last day, four winning teams were chosen. Two will go to North Carolina this fall for a three week internship at iContact, and two will attend a three month training program in Denmark. (Ms. Mehairy and Ms. Samir will be heading to Denmark.) Most of the entrepreneurs in the program are well educated, have jobs, and are from middle and upper middle class families. But they still face much uncertainty. "Everyone is worried about what will happen next," said Marwan Roushdy, 20, a student at the American University of Cairo who is developing an app called Inkezny to locate hospitals anywhere in the world. The name means "rescue me" in Arabic. Despite the political situation, Mr. Roushdy, who participated in the boot camp and won an internship at iContact, is working on his app. He is trying to block out his worries about the future and focus on his business. After all, what else can he do? "Part of being an entrepreneur is being an optimist," says Steven R. Koltai, senior adviser for Global Entrepreneurship at the State Department, who has visited Egypt a dozen times in the last year. "Entrepreneurs are like the crab grass that grows up in the city: they are going to make it through the cracks in the sidewalk." Still, these young entrepreneurs eventually will have to navigate the bureaucratic hurdles of registering their company with the Egyptian government, a notoriously difficult step that Ms. Mehairy says she won't take until a client or business partner insists. "The paperwork is a nightmare," she said. "And in the past, prerevolution, you needed bribery to get your paperwork through." Ms. Mehairy has heard some encouraging stories, however. "My friend finished the registration for his company in a day and half," she says, "because the person handling it was 'all fueled up with the values of the revolution,' as we say." Mohamed Rafea, 30, and his cousin Ali Rafea, 23, are also optimistic. They along with three other young relatives co founded Bey2ollak, an app that lets users warn each other about congested traffic routes. "We are lucky that we don't need the support of anything except good wattage, as opposed to manufacturing goods or opening a store. Those kinds of businesses need the support of the government," Ali Rafea explained. In a city where commutes can average two hours each way, their app found an instant audience. As of this month, it had more than 50,000 subscribers and a strategic marketing and advertising partnership with Vodafone, one of the largest mobile phone operators in Egypt. Like many in their cohort, Mohammed and Ali Rafea, who won one of the internships at iContact, are trying to solve some of Egypt's problems through technology and hope to turn a profit in the process. After the revolution, they said, Egyptians were turning to Bey2ollak to pass along information about the safety of the roads. "We added a new status to say that a road is a danger zone and there are protests and thugs," Mohamed Rafea said. Mr. Roushdy is trying to solve another problem with his app unreliable medical services. "In Egypt, even if you dial the emergency number 123, it is not always a guarantee that an ambulance will come," Mr. Roushdy explained. "So I thought an app that showed the nearest hospital and phone number would be a useful service." For some of the six American entrepreneurs who visited Cairo in June, it came as a surprise that there was such a vibrant start up community in Egypt. "The point is to create jobs," he said. "Jobs are the single most important underpinning for civil society and economic growth, and that is true whether you are in Ohio or Egypt, and the biggest driver of job growth is entrepreneurship." Egypt is certainly no stranger to the relationship between civil unrest and joblessness. Youth unemployment, which still hovers in the double digits but is more of an issue for those without a college degree, was one of the underlying forces that led to the revolution. FOR some of the Web entrepreneurs, there are already some success stories. In January, through a delegation organized by the Global Entrepreneurship Program, a group of United States investors and entrepreneurs traveled to Cairo to meet with Egyptian entrepreneurs. During that visit, organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the American University in Cairo and Sawari Ventures, a Cairo based venture capital firm, hosted a business plan competition that awarded two companies 20,000. One of the winners was Kngine, a search engine, which was started by two brothers, Ashraf el Fadeel, 30, and Haytham el Fadeel, 23. The competition helped persuade Ahmed el Alfi, the founder Sawari Ventures, to bankroll Kngine. He had connected with the founders on Twitter. "Having eight outside people look at the company, and the fact that they won, helped with my decision," Mr. Alfi said. Kngine now has 12 employees. The company recently met with a number of investors in Silicon Valley. For investors, there is certainly a case to be made to look at this new crop of companies: there's an opportunity to get in early in a much less saturated Internet market because only a third of Egyptians use the Internet at home, according to the Ministry of Information and Technology. In other words, these young entrepreneurs have the first mover advantage in spaces that are already crowded in other parts of the world. Seeing the potential in Egypt, Mr. Alfi left Southern California in 2006 to move to Cairo. "Most of my friends questioned my sanity for making that move," Mr. Alfi said. "But I was very encouraged by what I saw." At SuperMama, Ms. Mehairy and Ms. Samir, 29, who financed their venture with personal savings, are positioning themselves to be one of the first Arab language Web sites focused on mothers. The site, plus a smartphone application, is to be introduced in September, and will offer information on child care, pregnancy, nutrition, cooking and health. They are hoping to capitalize on the fact that women make up almost half of Internet users in Egypt. Those in the entrepreneurial trenches are certainly aware of the challenges to being on the forefront of a movement. The lexicon has not even caught up with the times yet. "We went to a training camp and they were calling us 'businessmen.' We are not businessmen, we are entrepreneurs," Ms. Mehairy said. The hope is that with a little money and a lot of hard work, Egypt could leverage its huge population of young people over half the population is under 29 and a strong pool of technical talent. Low start up costs for Internet businesses could turn Egypt into one of the region's entrepreneurial hot spots. That is the dream, anyway. But Mr. Allis, the co founder of iContact and an investor in East African tech companies, said he was encouraged by what he saw in Cairo. "These entrepreneurs are thinking big and globally, and they are creating Web apps that you could see in Dumbo or Palo Alto," he said, referring to the neighborhood in Brooklyn. "They are building companies and products that can be very influential. I would invest 30, 40 or 50 thousand dollars in these young entrepreneurs."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
On Wednesday, the federal government plans to execute Lezmond Mitchell, 38, the only American Indian under a federal death sentence. This a profound insult to Navajo sovereignty. I am a leader of the Navajo Nation, and along with its president, vice president and legislative branch, I call on President Trump to commute his sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of release. In 2001, Mr. Mitchell, then 20, and a juvenile co defendant, both Navajo citizens, were charged with killing a woman and her granddaughter, both Navajo people. The federal government prosecuted this crime in the U.S. District Court in Arizona. Although the prosecutor acknowledged the co defendant was the primary assailant, he was under 18 at the time of the crime and ineligible for a death sentence. Mr. Mitchell, barely out of his teens, became the focus for then Attorney General John Ashcroft's desire to prosecute this case as a capital crime. However, Mr. Ashcroft faced a major impediment. Under the Federal Death Penalty Act, the federal government promised that it would not seek the death penalty against American Indians who committed crimes against other American Indians on tribal land unless the tribe agreed. The Navajo Nation opposes capital punishment for all of its people, including Mr. Mitchell. On at least three separate occasions, the Nation formally petitioned the federal government not to subject Mr. Mitchell to a death sentence. The woman who is the daughter and mother of the victims, a Navajo citizen, also asked the government not to pursue a death sentence. And even the local U.S. attorney's office opposed the capital prosecution of Mr. Mitchell out of respect for the position of the Navajo government. But the government found a workaround. It prosecuted Mr. Mitchell for carjacking resulting in death, a crime of general federal jurisdiction for which tribal consent was not required. This case remains the only time in the history of the modern death penalty that the federal government has sought capital punishment over tribal objection for a crime committed on tribal land. There have been at least 20 other instances of murder on tribal land in which the Justice Department considered a capital prosecution, but did not pursue a death sentence, apparently based on the tribe's opposition to capital punishment. In virtually all of these cases, the government could have circumvented the tribes' viewpoints by seeking death for general federal jurisdiction crimes, as it did in Mr. Mitchell's case. Instead, the federal government abided by the promise it made to American Indians and honored the tribe's sovereign views. Mr. Mitchell's case offends tribal sovereignty for other reasons. After his arrest, the government abused the tribal court system in order to deny Mr. Mitchell his federal due process rights. Mr. Mitchell was held in a tribal jail for 25 days, without access to a lawyer, while the F.B.I. continually interrogated him. It was only after the F.B.I. reportedly obtained a full confession that Mr. Mitchell was taken to federal court, presented to a magistrate and appointed legal counsel. The F.B.I. did not tape record Mr. Mitchell's purported confession, nor did it allow him to write a statement in his own hand. In fact, in his only recorded statement, Mr. Mitchell denied having a direct role in the capital offenses. Were Mr. Mitchell a non Indian, the federal government would not have been permitted to use these purported confessions against him. There are also strong indications that federal prosecutors worked to keep Native American people off Mr. Mitchell's jury and played to anti Indian biases during the trial. Mr. Mitchell's lawyers have sought for years to investigate these issues, but the federal courts refuse to allow them to interview the jurors. If Mr. Mitchell was not an Indian, I strongly doubt he would be facing the death penalty today. While the crime for which Mr. Mitchell was convicted was brutal, his more culpable co defendant received a life sentence for the same offense. Mr. Mitchell's tragic life story is all too familiar to Native Americans. He grew up in a home rife with intergenerational trauma of abuse, addiction and mental illness. His jury was told almost nothing about his background or the fact that he had been awake for several days bingeing on drugs and alcohol to such an extent that, according to a board certified psychiatrist, he was likely psychotic when the homicides occurred.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion

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