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In the wake of the horrific school shootings in Parkland, Fla., President Trump has called repeatedly for building or reopening mental institutions. Strangely, perhaps, he has echoed an argument made by some experts who study the mental health care system. It's not that they believe that having more institutions would somehow prevent spree killings, as Mr. Trump apparently does. The majority of these murderers appear to be angry, antisocial individuals with access to guns whom the mental health system probably could not have spotted in advance. The proposal to bring back asylums in a modern, transparent form is very much alive for other reasons among some policy experts, psychiatrists and bioethicists. But a modern incarnation does not impress advocates for people with mental disabilities, who want the very idea dead and buried, along with transorbital lobotomy, insulin shock therapy and other cruelties visited on people with mental disorders in times past. The intensity of this debate and the rare points of agreement between partisans provide a guide to the maze of the American mental health care system for anyone trying to navigate it while watching a loved one sink into delusion, mania or suicidal despair. "When people are going back and forth from prisons to hospitals, that's a sign they might have benefited from longer term treatment options," said Dominic Sisti, a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who was co author of a 2015 paper subtitled "Bring Back the Asylum" in the journal JAMA. "For this really seriously mentally ill population, our resources have dried up, and I find that to be an ethical social justice violation," he said. Yet Jennifer Mathis, the director of policy and legal advocacy at the Bazelon Center, which litigates on behalf of those with mental disabilities, called the idea offensive on its face. "It took a lot of effort to move away from the practice of warehousing people," she said. "Locking people up long term is no treatment at all. The idea that we could be going back to those days we did this before, and it failed and failed badly it's crazy and discriminating." One thing few experts dispute: soul crushing abuses have occurred in mental institutions, and still do, across the world. The first therapeutic asylums, established in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, were just that: asylums, retreats, closer to present day yoga spas than clinics. They coincided roughly with the founding of what is now modern psychiatry. Through the 1800s, Quakers in the United States established retreats based on a similar principle: that respite and patient care were the best remedy for "mental breakdowns" of all kinds. The first mental hospitals were intended to provide a humane, protective environment, too, and there were "pockets of decency" in many of them, the late Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote in the New York Review of Books especially in facilities that pursued some semblance of the Quaker example. But these institutions, particularly the state hospitals, soon became repositories for society's unwanted and adrift, alcoholics, the indigent and vagrant, mixed in with those experiencing psychosis and severe mood problems. Funding tapered off through the first half of the 20th century. Staffs shrank, and in some facilities, a single doctor was responsible for hundreds of residents, who often lived in squalid, abusive, dangerous conditions. For many, there was no path out, nowhere else to go. Hospitalization was a life sentence, or close to it. "It is hard to describe the smell," said Joseph Rogers, 66, executive director of the National Mental Health Consumers' Self Help Clearinghouse, who spent stretches of up to six months on locked wards, mostly in Florida, after a psychotic episode at age 19. "I guess it is the smell of caged humans. Someone once told me that part of the smell comes from the medication everyone is on." He added: "You're told when to go to bed, where to go, what to eat and when. They take all your freedom away, and in my eyes they're not placed where you get any help." He later founded the clearinghouse, which provides assistance and advocacy for people with psychiatric diagnoses. By 1960, doctors had the first drug that could effectively blunt psychosis chlorpromazine, brand name Thorazine giving tens of thousands of residents a chance to live independently. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy initiated the Community Mental Health Act, intended to end institutional abuses and create a system of community based care. The idea was that those released from the institutions would move back into neighborhoods, with easy access to a doctor, therapists, at home services if needed. The money saved by closing the hospitals would be used to support independent living. The downstream consequences of that legislation are now generally accepted. State governments, with some exceptions, did not make good on promises to provide adequate community care, like well staffed local clinics, supports for housing, employment and daily living. Under budgetary strain, they offloaded much of the expense of mental health care to federal programs like Medicaid. Homelessness swelled in the nation's cities well through the 1980s. In more recent decades, an increasing number of people with mental disabilities landed in prison, usually for nonviolent offenses. Today there are at least 100,000 inmates with psychosis, far more if those with severe mood problems and drug problems are included, experts estimate. During this time, the number of public psychiatric beds available has plunged, to 11 per 100,000 people from 360 per 100,000 in the 1950s, according to Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, which lobbies for more investment in psychiatric beds for people with severe mental illness. Dr. Torrey estimated that more than 90 percent of people with psychosis could be stabilized and discharged within a few weeks or so that is, with short term or acute care. This is a clinical point on which both sides of the debate generally agree: Many people with psychosis need acute care in a hospital, finding the treatments that help before returning to their families. The loss of psychiatric beds means less care of this type is available in many areas. Dr. Torrey parts ways with opponents of asylums in that he favors longer term institutionalization for the 5 percent or so who do not improve with acute care, along "with continual, unannounced inspections" to prevent abuses. The third, and perhaps most critical, point of agreement in the asylum debate is that money is lacking in a nation that puts mental health at the bottom of the health budget. These disorders are expensive to treat in any setting, and funds for hospital care and community supports often come out of the same budget. In his paper arguing for the return of asylums, Dr. Sisti singled out the Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital in Massachusetts. This 300 million state hospital, opened in 2012, has an annual budget of 80 million, 320 private rooms, a range of medical treatments and nonmedical supports, like family and group therapy, and vocational training. Its progress is closely watched among mental health experts. The average length of stay for adolescents is 28 days, and the average for continuing care (for the more serious cases) is 85 days, according to Daniela Trammell, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health. "Some individuals are hospitalized for nine months to a year; a smaller number is hospitalized for one to three years," she wrote in an email. Proponents of modern asylums insist that this kind of money is well spent, considering the alternatives for people with mental disabilities in prison or on the streets. Opponents are not convinced. "When you set up a place like Worcester, one issue is there are no eyes on, no one outside watching, and that becomes an invitation to abuse," said David J. Rothman, a historian at Columbia University. He and Sheila M. Rothman, his wife, wrote "The Willowbrook Wars," the definitive account of the notorious Willowbrook State School on New York's Staten Island, which closed in 1987. It costs some 150,000 or more annually to house a resident at modern state mental facilities like Worcester, compared to about 30,000 a year for good community care, including housing, experts estimate. "The more you spend on these hospitals, the less is available for community care," Dr. Rothman said. At the heart of the modern debate over new asylums are two questions awaiting answers: What is good mental health care, really? And what does its quality say about the society attempting to provide it? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Twitter's stock has more than doubled in value in the last 12 months as the company has undergone a perception shift on Wall Street. While Twitter once struggled to keep up with lofty expectations for user growth, investors now no longer expect the company to be a growth rocket and instead see it as one that may cut its spending to become more profitable. "They're not going to become the bright shiny object that they were," said Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research who specializes in the technology sector. "But they're good enough." Youssef Squali, a managing director and senior analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, said of Twitter, "2018 is going to be the year they put their house in order, improve their performance for advertisers and see their revenues grow." The service provided by Twitter is mostly unchanged from last quarter; analysts said the company had just become more efficient at filling the niche it had found. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Credit...Cole Wilson for The New York Times Here is your mattress shopping bill of rights, 2016 edition: You are entitled to a multiple night sleep test in your home. Getting rid of the mattress should not require turning back flips and begging. In recent years, a number of new companies, including Casper, Helix, Leesa, Saatva and Tuft Needle, have declared that they will abide by these rules. This is great news, assuming they actually follow through. So this summer, I put the five companies to the test by ordering a mattress from each one, then returning them all, just to see how painful the process would be. Why bother? Let's begin with something that should have been obvious to mattress retailers decades ago but apparently was not: Buying bedding in a showroom is absurd. Most of us spend a quarter to a third of our lives on mattresses, and they are essential to our physical and mental health. So testing plastic covered beds while fully clothed, under the florescent lights of a store with a commissioned salesclerk hovering over us, makes no sense whatsoever. Things are better now. All five of the companies I tested charged me nothing for the return. Only Saatva charges any shipping or delivery fee, and its 99 covered three guys showing up at my apartment with a plastic wrapped mattress and carefully carrying it inside. The other four companies compress their mattresses and cram them into boxes for shipping, though Casper offers free courier delivery of the box in my neighborhood. I offer no recommendations on comfort. Mattresses are like shoes or bras or chairs in that different people with different bodies will have different needs. As for the hassle of returning an unwanted mattress, none of the companies flunked the test. Leesa normally requires customers to keep a mattress for at least 30 days before returning it, but it waived that rule when I sent an email questioning the logic of that policy when I knew I didn't want it anymore. Saatva sent a crew to pick up its mattress, so there was no trouble there. (And it should have been hassle free given that it snootily markets its product as a "luxury purchase, unlike other online mattress sellers who stuff their beds in a box and leave it for you to handle.") Still, many things happened during the return process that I never could have predicted. It's not practical for individual consumers to recompress their beds, shove them in the original boxes and hand them back over to UPS or FedEx, though one early Tuft Needle customer did manage to box up his mattress for return and stick the company with a 300 shipping bill. So the surprises began when Casper, Helix and Leesa dispatched the 1 800 Got Junk truck to fetch my never been slept on bedding. Under normal circumstances, the companies try to find a way to get returned mattresses to a needy person. Helix claims to have 3,000 donation partners in its database. But when it came to my mattresses, the local Salvation Army truck was booked until October, according to the customer service representatives at Tuft Needle and Helix who tried to help me before calling in the junk haulers. Bedbug fearing nonprofit groups and strict New York City regulations pose special challenges for the companies in my area, it turns out. Evan Cohen, the general manager of the 1 800 Got Junk franchise that covers Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, says that it manages to completely recycle 30 to 40 percent of the mattresses. The other mattresses go to transfer stations, where some parts of them may be recycled before the rest of the material ends up in a landfill. The potential environmental cost of returns is bad enough. But the companies must also pay 1 800 Got Junk to haul the mattresses away. Mr. Cohen said that he would charge an individual 118 to haul away an old mattress. Mattress companies that hire the company to handle returned mattresses get a bulk discount. Still, those costs are high enough on mattresses that ranged from about 550 to about 950 for my full size models to have the potential to cause serious problems for the companies. David Wolfe, chief executive of Leesa, said he was all for the unalienable right to an in home trial. "But it's not going to be helpful for the industry if people start to order multiple mattresses," he said. He urged consumers to thoroughly research any mattress purchase before starting an in home trial. And you can't blame the guy for not wanting to end up like Zappos, where people frequently order piles of shoes with the intention of keeping just one or two pairs. Cole Wilson for The New York Times All of the companies claim return rates below 10 percent. 1 800 Got Junk reports having taken in about 9,000 mattresses this year on behalf of the various direct selling mattress retailers it works with. Tuft Needle provided the most unusual return experience I've ever had as a consumer. Its website promises that "we" will work together to donate a returned mattress. "It's that easy," the site reads. In reality, the company could not find a charity partner near me. So it posed a challenge of sorts. I could find a worthy organization on my own and send Tuft Needle an ad hoc receipt of sorts, with a signature from the recipient. Failing that, I could give the mattress to a friend or family member in need and provide similar proof. If that didn't work, I could post a note on Craigslist or Freecycle offering to give the mattress away. And if that wasn't possible, the junk truck was an option. Given that the other companies had already told me how hard it was to give a mattress away in New York City, I wasn't optimistic. But I posted a note on my personal Facebook page, and a friend I'd made years ago and hadn't seen since popped up to tell me about a sex trafficking victim her organization was helping. The client had just moved to a new apartment with her family and was sleeping on the floor. Could I help her? And sorry but no, the organization had no moving truck or anything like that. Which was how I found myself behind the wheel of a rental van a few nights later with a case manager from Sanctuary for Families, driving to a neighborhood in Queens that the organization asked me not to identify. We hauled the mattress up a narrow flight of stairs and dropped it off for the grateful recipient. "I will be able to sleep happy for once," she said. That was a heartwarming and unexpected ending to what was supposed to be a virtual shopping experience, but I need not have left my own apartment. Daehee Park, a co founder of Tuft Needle, said that if I had spoken up about the van rental bill and the time consuming nature of the potential donation, the company might have hired a errand runner from Taskrabbit to handle it. "We try to do what we can," he said. Like Mr. Wolfe at Leesa, however, he does worry about people abusing their in home testing privileges (though he declined The New York Times's offer to pay in full after all, as did the other companies). He and his competitors deserve enormous credit for trying to make free, in home trials the price of admission for participating in the mattress industry, and all of us should demand the same deal from brick and mortar retailers. So now that the mattress start ups have proved that they're serious about real world sleep tests, please don't take undue advantage of them. "You can never prevent people from gaming a system," Mr. Park said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. held up a copy of The Chicago Defender, the city's storied black newspaper, its cover plastered with photos of two dozen black men killed by the police. The headline read, "Wake Up: There's No Justice for Black Men." He implored the audience at his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition headquarters in Chicago to buy a subscription to the paper. "The Sun Times and Tribune appraises our worth every day," Mr. Jackson said of Chicago's two daily newspapers. "And they are not going to have a front like this." This was in November, after a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., decided not to indict the police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of 18 year old Michael Brown. The Defender has endured a storm of financial woes, new leadership, staff turnover and not the least a media industry in flux. But after the deaths of black men by police or in their custody in Ferguson, Staten Island, South Carolina, Oklahoma and now Baltimore, The Chicago Defender is seeking to seize this moment to reclaim its voice for the black community. There has been no shortage of news: In April alone, The Defender devoted two of its weekly front pages to reports on police brutality. Started in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott in his landlord's kitchen, The Chicago Defender was once a major force in the migration of a quarter million black Americans from the South to the North. Its pages carried coverage of economic prosperity for blacks. In the South, Pullman porters threw stacks of the paper off their trains to the smugglers and newsboys who risked being lynched for selling them. Its circulation peaking at 250,000 copies, the paper was home to the bylines of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. A recent biography, "Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press," chronicles the life of one of the paper's most renowned correspondents. At present, however, some might say The Defender's legacy is its most valuable asset. Once a daily, the paper has pulled back to a weekly, its circulation a fraction of what it was in its heyday. Today, after increasing newsstand distribution, its readership comprises 5,000 print subscribers and roughly 16,000 copies sold on newsstands, for 1 each, or distributed free. It has 50,000 registered readers online. Last May, Cheryl Mainor, 51, a Michigan native, became the paper's eighth publisher its fourth in the last 12 years. Since Ms. Mainor took the helm, she says she has returned the paper to profitability and generated fresh revenue streams with new print and digital products. She plans to nearly double its circulation by the end of 2015. With the recent conversations around race and police violence, the paper has an opportunity to lend its credibility to the issues of the day, as it did with the November cover Mr. Jackson praised. But at the same time, Kai El' Zabar, the executive editor Ms. Mainor hired in October, is looking to reflect a more empowering narrative, much in the same way The Defender once fed the Great Migration by urging blacks to cast off Jim Crow in favor of better jobs and fairer treatment in the North. "That is what we are doing now but in a different sense," Ms. El' Zabar said. "We need to stimulate people to move and to act and to make that change. That is what we are about." Those are lofty goals for any local newspaper, with the industry in free fall after decades of decline. Today, ad revenue and circulation numbers for print media and local news continue to drop as advertisers flee to more lucrative markets. But black community newspapers there are about 200 across the country have the advantage of a built in audience that trusts and identifies with its source. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. "Black newspapers are still trusted," said Cheryl Pearson McNeil, senior vice president for consumer engagement at Nielsen, the media measurement company. A recent survey by the company showed that 59 percent of African Americans agreed that advertisers in black newspapers knew how to connect with African American audiences. As a result, "blacks feel a connection to your brand," Ms. Pearson McNeil said. The Defender was sold 12 years ago to Real Times Media, a company based in Detroit that owns a collection of black newspapers, including The Michigan Chronicle, New Pittsburgh Courier, Atlanta Daily World and The Tri State Defender, in Memphis. "You have an owner that is committed to your survival and, not only that, is vested in the whole notion of black newspapers," said Ken Smikle, founder of Target Market News, a market research firm in Chicago that tracks black media and consumer trends. Still, the paper's resources are slim. After a revamp of personnel, it has only 10 full time employees, including one staff reporter. Ms. Mainor said the paper's revenue was roughly 2.3 million last year, but after cutting about 300,000 in expenses, she says the paper is profitable for the first time in some years. Though that comes with a disclaimer: "When I say we are profitable, we were of the narrowest of margins," she said. In March, the paper made its first of three circulation jumps, by 31 percent, to 21,000. To lure more advertisers and increase circulation, Ms. Mainor is considering making the paper free. Since taking charge, Ms. El' Zabar has put a renewed focus on local coverage. In the middle of writing weekly editorials, she is also developing a stylebook for the paper. It includes the reintroduction of an old phrase favored by Mr. Abbott: "the Race." It will be used interchangeably with "black" or "African American." "We have to let them know that change really is afoot," she said of the paper's readers, who have in the past referred to it as the "Chicago Offender" for its sloppy editing. "I see this as at least being a shot at making sure that the paper survives," said Monroe Anderson, a longtime Chicago journalist and The Defender's new political columnist. In recent weeks, the paper's cover articles reflect this shift. It targeted Illinois's newly elected Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, outlining what black residents expect of him. In mid February, the paper endorsed Mayor Rahm Emanuel for the municipal election over his progressive opponent Jesus Garcia. It was a much needed lift for Mr. Emanuel, who has struggled to earn Chicago's black vote after closing nearly 50 schools in minority neighborhoods on the city's South and West Sides. Mr. Emanuel won re election in an April runoff. "I see it as our responsibility that we report the news and be objective," Ms. El' Zabar said. "But we have to deal with it in terms of our reality, how it lands with us." That November cover showing black men killed by police: "Those are the kinds of things we are going to keep putting in your face again and again and again," Ms. El' Zabar said, "until you get it right." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In 19 years of piloting his boat around Lake Superior, Jody Estain had never observed the water change as it has this summer. The lake has been unusually balmy and cloudy, with thick mats of algae blanketing the shoreline. "I have never seen it that warm," said Mr. Estain, a former Coast Guard member who guides fishing, cave and kayak tours year round. "Everybody was talking about it." But it was not just recreational observers along the shores of the lake who noticed the changes with concern. Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes with more than 2,700 miles of shoreline, is the latest body of water to come under increased scrutiny by scientists after the appearance this summer of the largest mass of green, oozing algae ever detected on the lake. From the Gulf Coast to the northernmost shores of the United States, scientists and government officials are working to decipher algae blooms to help them interpret the causes of the blooms, changes to their climates, and the effects the blooms have on public health and regional environments. Starting in August in Lake Superior, reports of the thick, green algae stretching along about 50 miles of the southern shore reached Robert Sterner, the director of the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and his team. "We believe it to be the largest, most intense bloom yet," he said. "I have been emphasizing we are talking about a small volume of Lake Superior, but it is a very highly prized, recreational part of the lake." Dr. Sterner said that while scientists did not completely understand the causes and frequency of blooms, they start with warmer water. And Lake Superior, he said, "is one of the fastest warming lakes on earth." Algae blooms are a natural occurrence, but certain species can be toxic. While the species of algae found in Lake Superior can become toxic, Dr. Sterner said, tests showed that none of its commonly occurring toxins were found in hazardous concentrations. Harmful algal blooms are a "national problem," Donald M. Anderson, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in Washington on Tuesday. "Their increasing frequency and intensity are impacting the economics and environmental health of communities, states, tribes and regions around the nation," he testified. In an interview on Wednesday, Dr. Anderson said that scientists were seeing outbreaks surging in places they had not appeared before. "The fresh water problem has exploded in the United States," he said. "But even on the marine side, we are seeing events larger in scale." Scientists and National Park Service employees were unaware of any noticeable blue green algae blooms in Lake Superior before July 2012, when visitors reported surface scum along a 15 mile stretch of shore near the Apostle Islands, Dr. Sterner said. That was after 10 inches of rain drenched the Duluth region, wrecking infrastructure and shooting a plume of sediment into the lake, Minnesota Public Radio reported this month in a feature about this summer's algae blooms. The latest algae bloom in Lake Superior arose after major storms in June dumped nearly a foot of rain across the region, the report said. In July, Mr. Estain noticed algae around the Apostle Islands, in the western part of the lake, and he said it took up to three weeks to break up, longer than usual. Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources hosted an outreach event to inform the public about the potential health risks. National Park Service signs went up, amid warnings that the blooms were being tested for toxicity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
High numbers of students are beginning college having felt depressed and overwhelmed during the previous year, according to an annual survey released on Thursday, reinforcing some experts' concern about the emotional health of college freshmen. The survey of more than 150,000 students nationwide, "The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2014," found that 9.5 percent of respondents had frequently "felt depressed" during the past year, a significant rise over the 6.1 percent reported five years ago. Those who "felt overwhelmed" by schoolwork and other commitments rose to 34.6 percent from 27.1 percent. Conducted by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles's Higher Education Research Institute for almost 50 years, the survey assesses hundreds of matters ranging from political views to exercise habits. It is considered one of the most comprehensive snapshots of trends among recent high school seniors and is of particular interest to people involved in mental well being. "It's a public health issue," said Dr. Anthony L. Rostain, a psychiatrist and co chairman of a University of Pennsylvania task force on students' emotional health. "We're expecting more of students: There's a sense of having to compete in a global economy, and they think they have to be on top of their game all the time. It's no wonder they feel overwhelmed." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
There was no precedent for the Wu Tang Clan insurgency in the early and mid 1990s, and, if we're being honest, there's been nothing quite like it since. Its success was a challenge to hip hop's prevailing business model, its aesthetic principles and its relationship to emotion. The group RZA, GZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Inspectah Deck, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, U God, Masta Killa and sometimes Cappadonna was a collection of performers who could be fantastical superheroes or of the soil narrators, often both at once. And as a collective, they had an almost mystical veneer. In "Wu Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men," an intimate four part docuseries directed by the documentarian and former music journalist Sacha Jenkins debuting on Showtime Friday, they are human scaled determined, gifted, anxious, fallible. It is less a film about the group's sui generis success and more about how individuals use art as a lifeline. For the first half, at least, this is a tale of conquest. The Wu Tang Clan was a coat of armor, a group identity rooted in martial arts mythos that reimagined hip hop as a site of wild mystery and grungy mien. Especially in the period from its 1993 debut album "Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers)" through the 1997 follow up "Wu Tang Forever," with several solo releases in between it expanded the genre's sense of possibility more than any of its peers, all while muscling it toward the pop mainstream. The film traces how, from the beginning, the members saw their creativity as a means of escape from the Staten Island projects that most of them grew up in, and the persistent, seemingly ubiquitous racism of 1980s New York. "Mini Mississippi," Inspectah Deck says of a neighborhood he often had to traverse. "Of Mics and Men" has ample early era video footage and photos that capture the group in its raw joy, taking in the world that was opening up to them. The disagreements among members and over the years, there have been countless don't kick in until the third episode, and even then, they're refracted through the lens of resilient brotherhood. That generosity of spirit is also embedded in the filmmaking, which is patient and lets people speak their piece. Often, rather than hard cuts away from interviews, the camera lingers for a second or two, capturing the softening of a pose. Given space to breathe, the members tell disarmingly, and sometimes disturbingly, frank stories about their lives: Method Man recalls a stretch of his childhood living in a shelter for battered women; RZA remembers sharing four pairs of pants among three brothers; U God speaks about his 2 year old son getting shot; Ghostface Killah talks about helping care for his younger siblings who had muscular dystrophy. Time and again, Ghostface is the urgent emotional pulse of the group, the arbiter of principle and the quickest to call out what he perceives to be injustice, whether financial or personal, like when he tells off the influential New York radio powerhouse Hot 97 at the station's own concert, leading to a ban on the group's music. The second episode opens with a humorous segment: the group disagreeing over where its name came from. It's a reminder that "Of Mics and Men" is both historical record and personality sketch. And given the group's fundamental unruliness, it is also an impressive feat of logistics. (Just ask any journalist ever tasked with interviewing the whole crew.) RZA serves as something of an omniscient narrator, even for the parts where he's at odds with other members. One of the most important reveals in the film is the nature of the tug of war between RZA and his brother Divine, who served as CEO of Wu Tang Productions, the icy businessman behind the visceral music. When the group begins to splinter, RZA tells Divine to let everyone out of their contracts, essentially collapsing the company. Divine, sitting on his boat for a rare interview years later, remains incredulous. The most heart rending moments come in the third episode, which lingers on the decline and death of Ol' Dirty Bastard, the jester whose tragic unraveling became a wound that the group could not bear. This was the mid 2000s, and almost everything was being filmed: Ol' Dirty Bastard calling Divine to complain about being penniless after getting out of jail, and Ol' Dirty Bastard's new manager failing to recognize RZA when they first meet. And then he's gone. In many ways, that's when the story of the Wu Tang Clan ends as well the group has released albums since then, but its centrality to the genre has vastly diminished. Its rootlessness is embodied in the fourth and final episode, which is unsure of the story it wants to tell: mistrust, instability, redemption. In the early episodes, almost no time is spent on the group members' solo albums, which include some of the most important music of the 1990s: Ghostface Killah's "Ironman," Raekwon's "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx ..." But several minutes are given to "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin," the sole copy of which was auctioned off in 2015 for 2 million. The buyer was the reviled pharma bro Martin Shkreli, and, uncomfortably, he gets about as much screen time as Masta Killa, the group's least visible member. These days, the Wu Tang Clan is an abstraction a symbol, a logo, shorthand for a kind of unpredictability that mainstream hip hop has largely abandoned. The group members only convene as a unit for business purposes, they admit. But to call this tale cautionary is to miss the point. As "Of Mics and Men" makes clear, survival itself is a kind of triumph. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
An installation view of "Nari Ward: We the People," a midcareer survey on view through May at the New Museum. Works include "We the People" (2011), made of colored shoelaces; "Ground (In Progress)," from 2015, on the floor; and at right, "Breathing Panel: Oriented Center," from 2015. The persistent and liberating message in Nari Ward's sculpture and room size installations is that art can be made from virtually anything. In his midcareer retrospective at the New Museum, "We the People," this means old carpets, plastic bags, bottles, zippers, bed springs, keys and furniture. Hundreds of fold up baby strollers take up a gallery in "Amazing Grace" (1993), while a canopy of yarn, rope and other found materials are used to create "Hunger Cradle" (1996). "We the People" (2011), nodding to the preamble of the United States Constitution, has that title spelled out in colored shoelaces embedded in a wall. Using found materials to make art is a radical, if decades old, tactic. In the late 1950s, the artist Allan Kaprow predicted that artists would use everyday objects, including chairs, food, electric and neon lights, old socks and billboards. Many of these items appear in Mr. Ward's show . And although Mr. Ward came up through the art system he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and shows regularly in New York galleries and global biennials his work also resembles folk art and relates to specific locations, documents and histories. "We the People" reminds you of street memorials with shoes thrown over tree branches or telephone wires. But who is the "we" in this work? It might apply to everyone covered under the Constitution, since these words come from its preamble except that we know, historically, that the Constitution hasn't been applied similarly or equally to people of the African diaspora, like Mr. Ward, who was born in Jamaica and moved to the United States when he was 12. "Amazing Grace" also echoes street art with its room size installation of baby strollers arranged so that you walk around them on a carpet of fire hoses, in a space lit like a church or mausoleum. Mr. Ward found all the abandoned strollers for this work on the streets of Harlem in the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis and a drug epidemic that disproportionately affected residents there. Mr. Ward's art practice also harks back to the found object aesthetic of Robert Rauschenberg, or Californians like John Outterbridge or Noah Purifoy, who tied his junk (or "funk") practice to the Watts rebellion of 1965. Mr. Ward also adds a newer element in the mass of objects he assembles, which amount to a contemporary version of the sublime, in which you are awed and overwhelmed by the magnitude of stuff gathered in one place . Our ancestors might have experienced something similar, standing on the savanna or the tundra, watching tens of thousands of migrating animals pass before them . Now we are awed by the amount of consumer objects in existence, plastic in the ocean, or the vastness of landfills. The downside is that this aesthetic has become very familiar a global trademark employed by artists from Beijing to Berlin and used to relate to a history, a culture, an event or an atrocity. (Ai Weiwei has used this motif so much until it barely registers anymore.) Moreover, we're experiencing the baby strollers in "Amazing Grace" at both a historical remove and in a very different site from their original location: an abandoned firehouse in Harlem in the early '90s. Installation work gains as Kara Walker's sugar sphinx a few years ago showed from its site; some of that is lost in the museum setting. It's not just site or contemporary historical amnesia but also the exhaustion of a process too much of a good thing and particularly when it's triggered by the existential crisis of too much ness. I would love to enter another site specific work like "Amazing Grace" by Mr. Ward. At the New Museum, however, I spent more time with his smaller sculptures, which is where his materials sing. "Trophy" (1993) is a singular baby stroller caked with objects, including sugar and Tropical Fantasy soda pop that function as a gross out nod to excess but perhaps a millennial ode to the sugar trade that required bodies and labor and drove the slave trade for centuries. "Savior" (1996) is a shopping cart turned into a tower, like an ad hoc watchtower or minaret or a homage t o the homeless who carry their life's possessions with them. "Glory" (2004) is an oil barrel turned into a tanning bed with fluorescent lights a dazzling and deadpan comment on oil's links to everything from luxury to melanin and the fossil fuel industry in Africa and "Spellbound" (2015) is a piano covered with used keys, separated from their locations and purposes, and a video that includes footage of a church in Savannah, Ga., that had breathing holes in its floorboards for escaped slaves hiding there. One of the works I lingered over longest is also among the simplest. "Den" (1999) is a log that came from a tree growing through a chain link fence sitting on a faded carpet runner. Attached to the log are the carved wooden feet or paws, technically, since they mimic those of a lion or panther from a piece of furniture. Mixing nature and culture, wood from the urban wild and "civilized" furniture, the object is arresting and disturbing, a brilliantly simple and subversive gesture. There is much more in "We the People": altered photographs, videos, more installations and immersive environments that relate pointedly and poignantly to the history of black Americans and Harlem in particular. Mr. Ward is best as a sculptor, though, one who reminds us that our world is filled with potentially magical objects. We enter museums expecting to be transformed, but if we shift our perspective, look around us, we'll see that everyday life is really just art waiting to happen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A full floor penthouse at the Greenwich Lane, a sprawling condominium complex being built on the site of the former St. Vincent's Hospital campus in Greenwich Village, sold for 21,162,385 and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. The official closing of PH6B, a sponsor unit with 18,210 in monthly carrying costs, was the second recorded transaction at , between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue. The first closed sale was another penthouse just above it, PH7B, with 3,977 square feet of interior space and two expansive terraces, that sold for 20.14 million earlier this month. The recently sold apartment is much larger, at 5,304 square feet, but with no outside space, according to the listing, and includes five bedrooms, five and a half baths, a library, a utility room with a washer/dryer, and an eat in kitchen with stainless steel Wolf, Sub Zero and Miele appliances. The buyer, identified by the limited liability company GL6B, made the purchase directly through the listing broker, the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, which is handling sales for the development. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Spike Lee finally won his first competitive Oscar, and his acceptance speech was a doozy. At Sunday night's Oscar ceremony, Lee won best adapted screenplay for "BlacKkKlansman" (sharing the award with Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott) and walked on stage bursting with energy and emotion. Lee, who had received two previous nominations, for the 1997 documentary "4 Little Girls" and for 1989's "Do The Right Thing," started his acceptance speech by ordering the Oscar producers not to turn the clock on. (He used some more choice language and was bleeped.) Read our analysis of the Oscars ceremony. The speech that followed touched deeply on black history and exhorted the crowd to get involved in the 2020 presidential election. The word today is "irony." The date, the 24th. The month, February, which also happens to be the shortest month of the year, which also happens to be Black History month. The year, 2019. The year, 1619. History. Her story. 1619. 2019. 400 years. Four hundred years. Our ancestors were stolen from Mother Africa and bought to Jamestown, Virginia, enslaved. Our ancestors worked the land from can't see in the morning to can't see at night. My grandmother, inaudible , who lived to be 100 years young, who was a Spelman College graduate even though her mother was a slave. My grandmother who saved 50 years of social security checks to put her first grandchild she called me Spikie poo she put me through Morehouse College and N.Y.U. grad film. N.Y.U.! Before the world tonight, I give praise to our ancestors who have built this country into what it is today along with the genocide of its native people. We all connect with our ancestors. We will have love and wisdom regained, we will regain our humanity. It will be a powerful moment. The 2020 presidential election is around the corner. Let's all mobilize. Let's all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate. Let's do the right thing! You know I had to get that in there. See the full list of winners. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
IMDb, the entertainment database, is now allowing people to remove their birth names from its site in response to pressure from advocacy groups that said using those names without consent a practice known as "deadnaming" promoted discrimination against transgender performers and crew members. Under the new policy, IMDb will remove birth names upon request if the person no longer voluntarily uses it and if it is not "broadly publicly known ." So because they are widely known, the birth names of Chaz Bono and Caitlyn Jenner remain. And if the person's birth name was originally listed in a production's credits, it will be kept on the site, in parentheses. While the new policy was adopted in response to gay and transgender rights groups and Hollywood leaders, several said it still fell short. SAG Aftra, the sprawling union of actors, performers and broadcast professionals called it "a half measure" in a statement that also said, "IMDb has more work to do." In June, Glaad, which tracks media representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, along with a coalition of rights groups joined SAG Aftra in calling for changes in what information IMDb made public. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
More American children than previously thought may be suffering from neurological damage because their mothers drank alcohol during pregnancy, according to a new study. The study, published Tuesday in the journal JAMA, estimates that fetal alcohol syndrome and other alcohol related disorders among American children are at least as common as autism. The disorders can cause cognitive, behavioral and physical problems that hurt children's development and learning ability. The researchers evaluated about 3,000 children in schools in four communities across the United States and interviewed many of their mothers. Based on their findings, they estimated conservatively that fetal alcohol spectrum disorders affect 1.1 to 5 percent of children in the country, up to five times previous estimates. About 1.5 percent of children are currently diagnosed with autism. "This is an equally common, or more common, disorder and one that's completely preventable and one that we are missing," said Christina Chambers, one of the study authors and a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego. "If it truly is affecting a substantial proportion of the population, then we can do something about it. We can provide better services for those kids, and we can do a better job of preventing the disorders to begin with." The range of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (also called FASDs) can cause cognitive, behavioral and physical difficulties. The most severe is fetal alcohol syndrome, in which children have smaller than typical heads and bodies, as well as eyes unusually short in width, thin upper lips, and smoother than usual skin between the nose and mouth, Dr. Chambers said. A moderate form is partial fetal alcohol syndrome. Less severe is alcohol related neurodevelopmental disorder, in which children have neurological but not physical characteristics and it is known that their mothers drank during pregnancy. Dr. Chambers said the researchers were in the process of analyzing the mothers' answers to questions to see if they can identify relationships between the timing and amount of drinking during pregnancy and the type and severity of children's impairment. It has been unclear how common these disorders are because the facial features are subtle, and some effects, like problems paying attention or recognizing the consequences of behavior, can apply to other diagnoses. Also, the degree and area of a child's brain damage appears to vary depending on when and how much during pregnancy the mother drank, as well as genetics, so symptoms can vary, too. Then there is the stigma that often makes mothers reluctant to acknowledge alcohol consumption. "When you identify a kid with FASD, you've just identified a mom who drank during pregnancy and harmed her child," said Susan Astley, director of the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Diagnostic and Prevention Network at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. While Dr. Astley, a longtime expert in the field, said she admired the researchers' hard work, she said the reliability of the study's numbers was hampered by several factors. For example, only 60 percent of eligible families in the schools allowed their children to be evaluated and more than a third of those children's mothers declined to answer questions about drinking during pregnancy. "If we could generate accurate estimates of FASD, we'd all benefit," Dr. Astley said. "But the major limitations in the study design render the results, for the most part, uninterpretable." The authors of the study, which was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, acknowledged the study's limitations and tried to partly compensate by providing a conservative estimate (of 1.1 percent to 5 percent) that is likely low and another estimate (of 3.1 percent to 9.9 percent) that is likely high. Dr. Chambers also said the results might not generalize across the country because although the four communities were diverse, they did not include a large, high poverty urban area or certain rural or indigenous communities that struggle with high rates of alcoholism. The locations, which are not named in the publication, include small to midsize cities in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains, a Southeast county and a Pacific Coast city the authors identified in interviews as San Diego. Participating first graders were given neurodevelopmental evaluations and most also had their facial features evaluated by dysmorphologists. About 62 percent of the first graders' mothers were interviewed. Of 2,962 children evaluated, the researchers identified 222 with a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, Dr. Chambers said. All but two of them had not been previously diagnosed, although the authors said many parents had been aware their children had learning and behavioral difficulties. "It's kind of like the hidden problem," said Dr. Howard Taras, a study author and professor at the University of California, San Diego, who is the physician for the San Diego Unified School District, which participated in the study. "If not in one classroom, certainly in another, there's going to be one or two kids with these problems, but they're not identified as such." Identifying children with alcohol related impairments can help teachers and psychologists work with them more effectively, experts said. Even if educational approaches might resemble those for other special needs children, the diagnosis tells teachers behavior problems are "not because this child is disobedient, it's because of some neurological disorder," said Dr. Svetlana Popova, a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health's Institute for Mental Health Policy Research in Toronto, who was a co author of an editorial about the new study. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"Tehamana Has Many Parents" (1893) by Paul Gauguin, a standout work in the exhibition "Gauguin's Portraits" at the National Gallery in London. LONDON "Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?" That's the startling question visitors hear on the audio guide as they walk through the "Gauguin Portraits" exhibition at the National Gallery in London. The show, which runs through Jan. 26, focuses on Paul Gauguin's depictions of himself, his friends and fellow artists, and of the children he fathered and the young girls he lived with in Tahiti. The standout portrait in the exhibition is "Tehamana Has Many Parents" (1893). It pictures Gauguin's teenage lover , holding a fan. The artist "repeatedly entered into sexual relations with young girls, 'marrying' two of them and fathering children," reads the wall text. "Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him." Born in Paris, the son of a radical journalist, Gauguin spent his early years in Peru before returning to France. He took up painting in his 20s, while working as a stockbroker, a profession he would soon give up along with his wife and children to make art full time. He set sail for Tahiti in 1891, searching for the exotic surroundings he had known as a boy in Peru. Gauguin spent most of the 12 remaining years of his life in Tahiti and on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa, cohabiting with adolescent girls, fathering more children, and producing his best known paintings. In the international museum world, Gauguin is a box office hit. There have been a half dozen exhibitions of his work in the last few years alone , including important shows in Paris, Chicago and San Francisco. Yet in an age of heightened public sensitivity to issues of gender, race and colonialism, museums are having to reassess his legacy. A couple of decades ago, an exhibition on the same theme "would have been a great deal more about formal innovation," said Christopher Riopelle, a co curator of the National Gallery show. Now, everything must be viewed "in a much more nuanced context," he added. "I don't think, any longer, that it's enough to say, 'Oh well, that's the way they did it back then,' " he said. Mr. Riopelle described Gauguin as "a very complicated person, a very driven person, a very callous person," and said he was "disappointed" that his overwhelming urge to make art "led him to hurt or use so many people badly." The show was co produced with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and opened in Ottawa in late May. A few days before the opening, the museum's newly appointed director, Sasha Suda, and the exhibition's curators decided to edit some of the wall texts after touring the show. Nine labels were changed to avoid culturally insensitive language, according to the museum's press office . In Ottawa, the title "Head of a Savage, Mask" was shown with an extended label explaining that the words 'savage' and 'barbarian,' "considered offensive today, reflect attitudes common to Gauguin's time and place." Elsewhere, his "relationship with a young Tahitian woman" was changed to "his relationship with a 13 or 14 year old Tahitian girl." Ms. Suda said that out of 2,313 feedback cards submitted by visitors at the Canadian exhibition, about 50 were complaints about Gauguin and about the museum programming. The show should "have addressed these issues in a more open and transparent way that connected with contemporary audiences," Ms. Suda said in an interview. Addressing "blind spots" in the work of historical artists "could make those artists more relevant," she added. To other museum professionals, re examining the lives of past artists from a 21st century perspective is risky, because it could lead to the boycott of great art. "The person, I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work," said Vicente Todoli, who was Tate Modern's director when it staged a major Gauguin exhibition in 2010, and is now the artistic director of the Pirelli HangarBicocca art foundation in Milan. "Once an artist creates something, it doesn't belong to the artist anymore: It belongs to the world," he said. Otherwise, he cautioned, we would stop reading the anti Semitic author Louis Ferdinand Celine, or shun Cervantes and Shakespeare if we found something unsavory about them. Yet Ashley Remer, a New Zealand based American curator who in 2009 founded girlmuseum.org, an online museum focused on the representation of young girls in history and culture, insisted that in Gauguin's case the man's actions were so egregious that they overshadowed the work. Ms. Remer questioned the constant exhibitions of Gauguin and the Austrian artist Egon Schiele, who also depicted nude underage models, and the ways those shows were put together. "I'm not saying take down the works: I'm saying lay it all bare about the whole person," she said. Gauguin remains a tourist draw in Polynesia and the South Pacific. There is even a luxury cruise line that tours the region that is named after him. But to many locals, the painter's cliched representations of lush, exotic islands full of dusky maidens with no voice or identity are tiresome. "Gauguin, you piss me off," begins "Two Nudes On a Tahitian Beach, 1894," a poem by the New Zealand poet and academic Selina Tusitala Marsh. You strip me bare assed, turn me on my side shove a fan in my hand smearing fingers on thigh pout my lips below an almond eye and silhouette me in smouldering ochre. The anonymity of his Tahitian portraits is another cause of frustration. In the 2009 photographic series "Dee and Dallas Do Gauguin," the New Zealand born Samoan artist Tyla Vaeau has cut out the faces in Gauguin reproductions and inserted photos of her own sister and friend. Gauguin's art is a problem "if it continues to be used to frame the Pacific in this timeless, semi damaged past, when actually there's so much going on," said Caroline Vercoe, a senior lecturer in art history at the University of Auckland who is part Samoan and is participating in the National Gallery in London's talk and film program. "It's such a lively and dynamic culture within the indigenous context as well." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
As one of SoulCycle's top instructors, Stacey Griffith, 48, has a following that transcends likes on social media. Her weekly spin classes at the Upper East Side and TriBeCa locations are packed with New York City's power players, such as Mickey Drexler and Kelly Ripa, who rave about her infectious enthusiasm. It turns out that Ms. Griffith, who grew up in Cupertino, Calif., isn't crazy only for spin; she is also quite the beauty product buff. Here, the Upper East Side resident, whose fitness inspiration book, "Two Turns From Zero," will be published in March, shares her favorite skin care and makeup picks. I was blessed having a mom she's the most beautiful woman, ever who was super, super into beauty. I think I was 8 years old when my mom painted egg whites on my face. That was my first ever mask. And now I am super, super into taking care of my skin. In the morning, I use a sensitive cleansing gel from my dermatologist, Dr. Paul Jarrod Frank, on my face. It's so light you can use it every day. And I'm a junkie for anything from Fresh. I use the grapefruit shower gel, and I'm obsessed with the brown sugar scrub. I exfoliate every day. I sweat so much that I have to. Then I have a really awesome trick. I take the Fresh Brown Sugar Lip Polish it comes in a teeny tiny jar and I scoop it out with my thumb. I use it on my cuticles, not my lips. I do this in the shower, and I even do my toes! As if the scrubs are not oily enough, I use the Neutrogena sesame oil when my skin is still wet. Then I pat dry I never rub. There's this vitamin C serum from Dr. Dennis Gross that comes in a little orange bottle with a dropper. I use it under my eyes and in the corners of my cheeks while my skin is still wet. I have sensitive skin and can't do anything heavy or I break out. I do this instead, and I think it makes my skin a little firmer. That's my regimen. I never miss a day. At least once a week, I do a face mask. Over Thanksgiving weekend, a bunch of my friends and I did these paper masks that had a dog's face on each one. We Snapchatted the experience they were so cute! I use Urban Decay Naked Skin liquid foundation in 3.5, which gives me a bit of a tan without looking like George Hamilton. I call it my urban legend. There's a story behind it: Wende Zomnir, who's one of the company founders, was my neighbor in Laguna Beach, like 20 years ago. We became good friends and surf partners. At the time, she was commuting every week to San Francisco to work on Urban Decay. My mom was actually her first secretary! So I'm always down to try anything from the brand. But the secret is really less is more. I always wear a bit of foundation and then a little CoverGirl So Lashy mascara. There's a ball at the end of the brush, and you can really get into the corners of your eyes. For eye shadows, I usually mix between a YSL palette and the Urban Decay earth tones. I don't do shimmer. Sometimes I'll do a bit of earth tone eye shadow under my cheekbone for shadowing, but I don't do blush, and I'm not an eyeliner girl. My look is very androgynous tomboy. If I put on too much makeup, it looks a little drag queen. My hair is blond right now with very short sides, and I have a flip to it. The flip actually warrants its own Instagram. I go to Valery Joseph for my cut, and Nicole in Valery's salon colors it. I'm probably the only person getting this cut there it's an Upper East Side kind of place. My natural hair color is actually salt and pepper, so it takes two and a half hours to get this blond. It's kind of a nightmare, but I have to deal with it. I wash my hair with Frederic Fekkai Apple Cider Shampoo once a week, and then I use a Pantene conditioner, but only on the sides. The flip has to stay unconditioned or it won't stand. I towel dry and use Tancho Tique Stick while my hair is still wet. I also use TIGI Bed Head. Then I let it dry naturally for two hours before the flip goes up. It's really complicated. I should do a YouTube video. I think Voyage d'Hermes is literally in my blood stream, I've worn it so much. Once in a while, if I'm going to be tearing up a dance floor, I wear Terre d'Hermes. These are men's fragrances, which to me kind of makes sense. I'm a gay woman; my girlfriend likes a more masculine scent on me. But I also mix in Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir sometimes or Jo Malone Grapefruit. I really believe in pedicures because I bounce around on cement floors for hours a week. I do that once a week, and I get facials every other week at Haven. I also get proactive physical therapy, which is P.T. before you get hurt. This is one of my best secrets. I go to the therapist Liz Bonamo, and I've been three years injury free. There's a trainer we all go to her name is Michelle Brugal. It is the most awesome workout ever because it hits all the body parts. I try all the instructors at SoulCycle, too. And I use an Ab Carver. It's the little thing with the wheel and handles you see at the gym, only this one is a huge tire. It's so serious for your abs, it's crazy. I'll be 50 in a year and a half, so I have to watch what I eat. I try to do a balanced diet, but not going to lie, I love pizza. For me, I abide by calories in, calories out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WHISTLEBLOWER My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber By Susan Fowler In December 2015, Susan Fowler was settling into a new job as a software engineer at the technology transportation company Uber when her boss sent her a series of disturbing chat messages. After asking how her work was going, Fowler's manager, "Jake," began complaining about inequities in his relationship with his girlfriend. "It is an open relationship, but it's a little more open on vacations haha," he wrote, to Fowler's bewilderment. "She can go and have sex any day of the week. ... It takes a herculean effort for me to do the same." It became clear to Fowler that Jake was propositioning her. She saved screenshots of the conversation and sent them to Uber's human resources department so that he could be appropriately sanctioned. Instead, they told her that Jake was a "high performer," and that it was his first offense, so they "didn't feel comfortable giving him anything more than a stern talking to." It was up to Fowler to move to a different team within the company to get away from him. Both the inappropriate comments and the company brushoff are the kinds of experiences that women at all levels of the income spectrum have come to accept as inherent to the professional world. Rather than quietly tolerate it, though, Fowler, who was 25 at the time, decided to make a fuss. What happened next received abundant news coverage: In 2017, Fowler published a blog post describing the harassment she experienced at Uber, including multiple incidents of discrimination and corporate bullying. The post went viral and the company started an investigation. Suddenly Uber, one of the fastest growing and most valuable companies in Silicon Valley, found itself at the center of several ethical and legal scandals, culminating in the departure of the company's co founder and C.E.O., Travis Kalanick. Fowler's revelations came eight months before The New York Times and The New Yorker published explosive allegations about Harvey Weinstein's serial abuse of women, and helped catalyze the MeToo movement. What is less well known is the remarkable back story that came before Fowler found herself at the center of these newsworthy events. "I wasn't supposed to be a software engineer," she writes in "Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber," her sharp and engrossing memoir. "I wasn't supposed to be a writer, or a whistle blower, or even a college graduate, for that matter. If, 10 years ago, you had told me that I would someday be all of those things if you had shown me where life would take me, and the very public role I would end up playing in the world I wouldn't have believed you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Concert halls around the world are programming Beethoven this year to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth. So it is perhaps fitting that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center decided to focus next season on one of Beethoven's greatest admirers: Schubert. "The Magic of Schubert," a festival next winter that will offer performances of Schubert's sonatas, quartets, dances, octets and lieder, will anchor the Chamber Music Society's 2020 21 season, which was announced on Tuesday. The festival will include four Schubert heavy concerts with a lineup of artists including the pianist Alessio Bax, the soprano Joelle Harvey and the Escher String Quartet followed by a fifth exploring Schubert's legacy through works by Mendelssohn, Liszt, Previn, Ernst, Mahler, Prokofiev and Korngold. In the new season, the society will also continue its New Milestones series, which explores more recent work. The series will give the New York premiere of "A Song by Mahler," by Marc Neikrug, as well as of a new work that the society commissioned from Zosha Di Castri. And it plans to present the New York premiere of "Abgang and Kaddish" for clarinet, violin, cello and piano by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, who was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for composition. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
There are certain guarantees in life. Death, the rising sun and Ben Stiller returning to play Michael Cohen in this week's cold open of "Saturday Night Live" are among them. The newest "S.N.L." spoofed Wednesday's widely watched congressional hearing in which President Trump's former personal attorney testified under oath before the House Oversight and Reform Committee that Trump was a "racist" and a "con man," and detailed what he said was a pattern of criminal behavior. Cohen has already pleaded guilty to lying to Congress under oath, something Stiller himself poked fun at in character. "Of course the first time I testified was under oath, but this time I, like really mean it," Stiller said. The sketch began with Kenan Thompson playing the role of Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the committee chairman, who quipped, "For any other president, this hearing would be the most damning and humiliating moment of their lives, but for Trump, it's just Wednesday," before handing the floor to Cohen. Stiller, as Cohen, said in his opening statement that he had help in writing it "from the guys who wrote 'Green Book.'" "I know that I was wrong," Stiller said. "And I know it, because I got caught." He concluded with this missive: "But now, I'm all out of faith. This is how I feel. I'm cold and I'm ashamed and lying naked on the floor. Illusion never changed into something real. I'm wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is torn." If this bit went over your head and we wouldn't blame you Stiller was reciting lyrics from the song "Torn," a '90s hit for the Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia. The main target of the "S.N.L." writing team was Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking Republican. The show brought in a pinch hitter, one of its most famous alums, Bill Hader, to play a furious version of Jordan. "You're right that I'm angry," Hader said. "I'm angry that I have to sit here through this two bit dirtbag flea circus. I'm so angry I couldn't even wear a jacket today. You know something, Mr. Cohen, I've never even heard of you!" Hader said. The rest of the sketch featured Democrats ceding their time to Jordan, hoping he would make a fool of himself, as well as a lampoon of Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, who at the testimony on Wednesday brought Lynne Patton, a black Department of Housing and Urban Development official and longtime Trump ally, to counter Cohen's claim that Trump is a racist. "S.N.L." recreated the moment, with Alex Moffat portraying Meadows, and Ego Nwodim as Patton. With one problem, courtesy of Moffatt: "Her name is Omarosa," Moffat said, a reference to the former Trump aide, who is also black. Nwodim tried to correct him, but Moffat would have none of it. Did you guys see this picture online of a chubby sewer rat that got stuck in a manhole? It's this creature that usually seems gross, but under these circumstances, it's kind of adorable and you almost feel sorry for it. That's how I felt about watching Michael Cohen testify in Congress. Cohen also provided Congress with copies of letters threatening Trump's high schools and colleges not to reveal his SAT scores. And while Cohen did not reveal what those scores were, let's just say Trump lives a little closer to 920 Pennsylvania Avenue than to 1600. Michael Cohen told Congress about all the dirty little nasty freaky things that Donald Trump made him do. I don't know why I just made that sexual but I am tired of Michael Cohen's whole damsel in distress routine. "Oh, Mr. Trump took advantage of me. I guess I'm a fool." You stole a United States presidency. Why are you acting like a expletive now? Your voice wasn't trembling when you was threatening schoolteachers and shaking down porn stars. I want to hear that guy talk to Congress. At least Donald Trump has the decency to slowly fall apart until he is dragged off in handcuffs like a boss. I mean, that's how I want to leave "S.N.L." This week, President Trump met with North Korean dictator and let's face it, one of his top five closest friends Kim Jong un. Talks broke down when the two leaders could not agree on sanctions. Another problem was Kim Jong un used an interpreter, while Trump just spoke English, but louder. We love a good character break, especially when it comes from cast members who typically hold it together. Jost led into the bit telling the story about a pig named Picasso who was saved from a slaughterhouse because of his ability to paint. He invited the owners of "Smokery Farms Meat Gift Delivery Service," on to comment: cousins Vaneta and Wylene Starkie, played by Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant. In deep Southern accents, the two lamented the preponderance of heartwarming animal stories. "People going vegan left and right because the damn internet keeps showing people videos like 'Pig Teaches Deaf Dog To Bark,'" McKinnon said. The sketch almost derailed immediately after, as McKinnon and Bryant had trouble containing their laughter. They brought on raw cuts to describe the quality of their well known Smokery cuts of meat. The lines barely mattered at that point, as the spectacle of the duo losing it had the audience in stitches. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
About a decade into the podcast boom, I'm continuously surprised there aren't more shows about classical music. It's an ideal medium: Little can compare with the experience of hearing someone talk about a piece, then listening to it with enlightened ears. Yet few in the field have taken advantage of podcasting. Which is why the debut this month of "Aria Code," by WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera, is both a major event and a gift. Eminently listenable and often illuminating, the 10 episode series is like a bonus feature for opera fans, and a welcoming entry point for newcomers. Four episodes have been released so far, and each follows a simple format. The host Rhiannon Giddens, the polymathic musician and MacArthur "genius" grant recipient takes a deep dive into a famous aria with diverse guests who have included singers, scientists and even a sex worker turned writer. Then she signs off by playing the song in full. That's it; the whole thing usually lasts no more than 30 minutes. Ms. Giddens approaches these arias as a fan barely on the outside. She has conservatory bona fides by way of Oberlin but left opera to carve an idiosyncratic, celebrated niche in folk music. So she is knowledgeable, but not didactic or technical. And, by bringing in guests far removed from music, she goes beyond mere analysis to make classical music surprisingly relevant to modern audiences. You come to understand a 19th century courtesan's emotions in the aria "Sempre libera" from "La Traviata" by hearing about the first time a present day sex worker fell in love. The episode on "Dio, mi potevi scagliar" from "Otello" is a relatable meditation on envy and despair; and the most recent one, about "Vissi d'arte" from "Tosca," is a moving reflection on the difficult sacrifices artists have always had to make. (Ms. Radvanovsky, a widely praised Tosca at the Met this season, unpacks her guilt in choosing to sing in the opera's opening night over helping her mother move into an assisted living home.) Where the show's approach falls short, however, is in the second episode, about "Che gelida manina" from "La Boheme." The guests bring historical and scientific perspectives to the opera that rob it of its, well, operaness. Rodolfo and Mimi's meet cute is over the top and extremely charged, but so is this art form. To explain their extraordinary attraction with brain scans and anthropology seems unnecessary, even irrelevant. You may have also noticed that these four episodes have only featured music by two composers, Verdi and Puccini. Future installments will branch out somewhat Saint Saens, Donizetti, Bizet, Massenet and Mozart but "Aria Code," by partnering with the Met, seems to have fallen into the company's habit of narrow programming. Don't plan to hear about the pathbreaking 17th century arias of Monteverdi, or the fate of the aria in contemporary opera. That problem isn't limited to "Aria Code." Another podcast, "Sticky Notes," hosted by conductor Joshua Weilerstein and dealing primarily in symphonic music, is similarly informative and accessible, yet lacking in scope. Most episodes of "Sticky Notes" are devoted to a single work. With endless enthusiasm and a curious mind, Mr. Weilerstein offers historical context and musical analysis (rarely too technical for outsiders), as well as a wealth of illustrative audio clips; the effect is like program notes for his concerts brought to life. Imaginatively produced by Alex Overington and hosted by the violist Nadia Sirota (who now hosts the New York Philharmonic's Nightcap event series), "Meet the Composer" was devoted entirely to contemporary music; each episode was a vivid portrait, poetic yet informative, of a living composer. The archive is online and worth listening to revisiting, even, if you're about to hear a new piece by someone like Andrew Norman or Anna Thorvaldsdottir. Ever since "Meet the Composer" ended, I've been waiting for a new show to fill the niche it left behind. "Classical Chicago," a podcast by the record label Cedille, is one candidate; its episodes are tied to album releases, like a recent one featuring the violinist Jennifer Koh about the music of Kaija Saariaho. And it was heartening to see that New Amsterdam Records a wide ranging and essential label recently announced it would launch a podcast, not yet titled, in 2019, "giving more people the opportunity to learn about music that is moving and meaningful." That mission sounds a lot like "Aria Code," but the two shows are inherently different. One aims to illuminate great music of the past; the other, of the future. The ecosystem of classical music podcasts needs both. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The most well known story about Chaim Soutine has him alarming his Montparnasse neighbors by bringing in fresh sides of beef to paint, and dousing the carcasses, as he turned out one gory, ecstatic still life after another, with blood to keep them fresh. Born outside Minsk, in what is now Belarus, Soutine (1893 1943) arrived in Paris in 1913. There he endured almost a decade of struggle before finding a few patrons, most notably Albert C. Barnes, the great Philadelphia collector, who catapulted Soutine to fame and fortune when he bought every canvas in the painter's studio in 1922. The blood story, dating to the mid 1920s, may or may not be true. Hardworking but unworldly, Soutine made things difficult for historians by destroying his own paintings when he didn't like them, leaving others unsigned and never keeping a diary. But the anecdote captures an essential truth about Soutine's interest in his most famous subject matter: It wasn't about accuracy of colors, or whatever stories he himself told about the kosher butchers of his childhood, or a fixation on death. It was about using his brush as a scalpel to reveal the immaterial force of the material world. The centerpiece of "Chaim Soutine: Flesh," a new exhibition of more than 30 paintings at the Jewish Museum, is a stupendous example, his "Carcass of Beef" (circa 1925), borrowed from the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. But to lead to it, the curator Stephen Brown, in consultation with the Soutine scholars Esti Dunow and Maurice Tuchman, has assembled a well paced procession of other still lifes that demonstrate the peculiarities of Soutine's style: naked fowl; silver herring; a giant ray fish, inspired by Chardin; and explosive bursts of popeyed sardines. "Still Life With Artichoke" (circa 1916) shows a simple, if oddly asymmetrical, place setting in which all the objects seem alive. The fork bends gently, like a wrist; two lemons press impatiently against the lip of a plate; the long stemmed artichoke lies like an exhausted lover. The painting is also an unusually easy to read example of Soutine's distinctive perspectival wobble. In later paintings, lines seem so far askew that if you stand too close, as most people do, you may think you're looking at a world deranged. But here, the distortion is gentler. Even from inches away, you can see how it ties the whole scene into a single, expressive gesture, giving it almost as much motion and continuity as a glimpse of real life. In other paintings, a few partially plucked, not necessarily dead chickens exemplify Soutine's talent for finding action in stillness and wringing spiritual meaning out of physical facts: Ruffs of black feathers, swinging sideways on their yellow necks, stand in for the sudden, annihilating strokes of a butcher's ax. Two turkeys, one a stormy froth of yellow and orange, the other a feathery spattering of dashes and drips, anticipate Abstract Expressionism. And in "Side of Beef With a Calf's Head" (circa 1923), broad, patchwork strokes of red, white and green give an abstracted but vivid sense of the complicated harmony of a living body. Then you get to the mountaintop and meet "Carcass of Beef." Here, a glistening scarlet carcass, streaked with orange fat and sliced open to reveal a skeletal Jacob's ladder of parallel lines, seems to tumble out of the canvas, one thigh cocked as if it were kicking itself up into a headstand. An abstract blue background, speckled with white and marked, on the right side, by a framework of thick strokes that echoes the body's exposed rib cage, does more than throw the figure forward by contrast. By evoking a starry sky, it makes the tumbling body sacrificed, you might say, to art look as if it were straddling the cosmos. Along with an oil on panel fish, modeled on a Courbet, and a plucked goose whose broken neck allows its head to lie gracefully beside it, the exhibition's final room contains a couple of barnyard animals Soutine made while in hiding in the French countryside after the Nazi invasion of Paris in 1940. The best of them is "Sheep Behind a Fence." A patchwork of creamy off whites and off browns, it also contains scattered daubs of maroon, the color of dried blood, as if the artist could see right through the animal's body to the action within. The sheep leans into a fence that angles out with its body, and pulls back its lips to expose a few sad teeth. Behind it the emerald green pasture rises to two dramatic crests that look like waves, but they're rolling with streaky, bluish white sky instead of ocean foam. It's not clear if the creature is singing or trying to escape. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
LOS ANGELES "You have to take it in," Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle said, standing in an exhibition room at the California African American Museum that features 100 of her drawings and seven of her panels pinned to the walls. She was wearing a one piece saffron jumpsuit, along with a vibrant patterned blazer of Ankara fabric that was given to her by a Nigerian tailor. The ensemble contrasted with the subtlety of her work. The images by Ms. Hinkle, who lives in California, are, at first glance, random intersections of curves. All are amorphous representations of bodies, some with dashes of color to accent certain parts. But to whom do the bodies belong? Follow Ms. Hinkle's instructions. Take it in, and you realize that that question is the point. "It's sublime," Ms. Hinkle said, "64,000 missing African American women. For all of those faces, there's a family. There's a whole set of circumstances. They have favorite colors. All of those things that they like to do." To evanesce means to disappear gradually, vanish or fade away, and Ms. Hinkle's work is poignant, timely and coincidental. In March, a social media campaign was started to raise awareness about missing young women of color in Washington. The hashtag, MissingDCGirls, started trending, helped by celebrities like Ludacris and Viola Davis. But this exhibition was eight years in the making, said Ms. Hinkle, who is 29 and the mother of a 4 year old son. She has spent her career focused on the issue of erasure, inspired by her upbringing in Louisville, Ky., by a single mother who was also an artist. However, living in the segregated South, her mother wasn't able to pursue her creative passions. "Her artistic talent was never truly nourished by the environment that she was in," Ms. Hinkle said. In Ms. Hinkle's eyes, it was a major theft of identity. "My mother always taught me that if I feel an injustice or an abuse of authority, to never be afraid to speak up about it," she said. "She really instilled in me this powerful self possession." Ms. Hinkle set out to pursue art through canvases, performances, collages and sketchbooks, often calling on history. One of her first works was a series called "The Uninvited," in 2009, which focused on 19th century postcards from Europe that depicted West African women in sexualized positions. She marked up the postcards, occasionally giving the women different backgrounds or covering up their bodies. She wanted to give them armor and an identity beyond how they were captured. "That changes the narrative, so that you are not consuming their nakedness," Ms. Hinkle said. "They're now looking back at you." Ms. Hinkle is one of a group of young female artists pursuing multifaceted approaches to exploring identity, especially with respect to gender, race and Africa. For example, the Kenyan born Wangechi Mutu, one of the most acclaimed African artists working today, sometimes draws over existing images of black female bodies. Ms. Hinkle's significant break came in 2012, when she became the youngest artist to be featured in the "Made in L.A. 2012" biennial, organized by the Hammer Museum here. It was a performance based installation called "Kentrifica," about a fictional nation where the histories of Africa and Kentucky come together. The layered piece studied migration habits, social structures and cross cultural experiences. On the other side of the country, "The Uninvited" was featured in an exhibition called "Fore" at the Studio Museum in Harlem. "Increasingly, her work has examined the black female body specifically, as a 'territory' to be occupied and objectified, or to be devalued and allowed to disappear through various acts of violence," Anne Ellegood, a senior curator at the Hammer and an organizer of "Made in L.A.," said of Ms. Hinkle. In 2016, after finishing a Fulbright fellowship in Lagos, Nigeria, Ms. Hinkle returned to the United States and became fascinated and appalled by the case of a convicted serial killer, Lonnie D. Franklin Jr., also known as "the Grim Sleeper." Last year, Mr. Franklin was convicted of murdering 10 young women in Los Angeles over 30 years, and sentenced to death. Law enforcement officials were criticized for not giving the case enough attention, and there were suggestions that this was because the victims were women of color on the margins of society. Ms. Hinkle met with her friend Naima Keith, a curator who is now a deputy director at the California African American Museum, to discuss a project. The connection between the two ran deep; Ms. Keith was one of the curators of "Fore." "We really got into this deep conversation about not just black women, but the invisibility of African American women," Ms. Keith said. "We were both obsessed with Lonnie Franklin. We just started talking about how a serial killer could go uncaptured for 30 years, killing African American women." Ms. Hinkle got to work. She made her own brushes. Then, to create the art, she danced. Ms. Hinkle would play hip hop, including Kanye West, and then draw on acid free, recycled paper, dipping Spanish moss into India ink while dancing, which creates the nebulous and sporadic nature of her work. She added: "I'm a channel. I literally channeled these multiple presences to come out." Once she took her first pass, she would come back and listen to softer, more relaxing music, like Billie Holiday's. Then Ms. Hinkle would take calligraphy pens to add color and texture to faces, curves, breasts and hair. It was her way of providing the missing women with personalities and stories. "I didn't want to judge what I was putting on the paper, or who was going to come out," Ms. Hinkle said. "I didn't know what I was going to draw before I did it. They're not sketches. It was a one shot deal." The images are vivid. Some women are dancing. Others are braiding hair. Others are shown in introspective poses. But Ms. Hinkle is more than comfortable with letting viewers draw their own conclusions about what the women are doing. "I want them to think about how we are all agents in erasure, and how we all have a role that we play," Ms. Hinkle said. "Who we go out looking for. Who we spread the news for. What names we say. The names we don't say. I want them to go home and think about the women and their families." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
For years, health researchers bemoaned what they saw as excessive medical care in the United States. Too many tests and treatments, they said, are unnecessary or even harmful, and add to the huge cost of health care in this country. The coronavirus has given them a unique chance to find out if they were right. "If we can separate signal from noise, maybe we can learn there are a lot of things we don't need to do," said Dr. Scott Ramsey, a co director of the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research in Seattle. "Maybe patients will do better." The stakes are high, both for health and for the economy. Before the pandemic, an estimated 50 million American patients were subjected to one or more instances of health care overuse each year, at a cost of 106 billion, according to a recent analysis in the journal Health Affairs. "We see a unique methodological opportunity to evaluate the harms of low value care," wrote Allison H. Oakes, a health services researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Jodi B. Segal, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins. As the pandemic took hold, elective surgeries were canceled and radiology equipment stood abandoned as patients and doctors avoided CT scans, M.R.I.s, mammograms and colonoscopies. Even prescriptions for antibiotics plummeted. "We are in the midst of an unprecedented natural experiment that gives us an opportunity to determine the effect of a substantial decline in medical care utilization," said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a senior investigator at the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. No researcher denies the untoward effects of deferred medical care. Too afraid to go to the emergency room, many patients in the throes of heart attacks or strokes, for example, died or experienced life altering consequences this year. In March and April alone, visits to doctors' offices plunged by 70 to 80 percent compared with pre Covid levels, according to IQVIA, a health care analytics company. Lab tests resulting from emergency room visits and visits to doctors' offices fell by 90 percent. The number of mammograms plunged by 87 percent, colonoscopies by 90 percent and Pap smears by 87 percent. PSA tests for prostate cancer declined by 60 percent. But was it all bad? Or were there benefits? The answers to those questions won't be known for some time. Still, scientists are drawing up plans for deciphering what needs to be done in the doctor's office, and what doesn't. One priority will be to examine what has happened to the downstream signs of unnecessary medical care. Dr. Oakes and Dr. Segal described that phenomenon, so familiar to many American patients, as "a cascade of further testing, treatments, office visits, hospitalizations, and new diagnoses." If downstream care declines during the pandemic without a significant impact on hospitalization and death rates, then researchers will have strong evidence that those procedures aren't worthwhile and should be limited. Researchers might compare the health of patients scheduled for questionable procedures like a colonoscopy in a person over age 85 before and after those elective procedures were suddenly shut down, Dr. Oakes and Dr. Segal proposed. President Trump has hailed the rise of telemedicine as a significant unexpected benefit of the pandemic. But some scientists aren't so sure. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Video patient visits may be accelerating some forms of "low value" care, like unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions. Yet telemedicine also seems to put patients more in contact with primary care physicians, and in past research that trend has been linked to a decrease in unnecessary health care. Orthopedics is another area that is ripe for revision following the pandemic, said Dr. Vinay Prasad, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. There have long been questions about steroid injections for aching backs and common surgeries to shore up spines and painful knees. The question now: Did patients who could not get these treatments during the pandemic recover on their own? How often? In February, Shelton Mack, a 28 year old assistant wrestling coach at Columbia University, leaned onto his foot while training for the Olympic wrestling trials. He heard a pop and felt searing pain. "It felt like the bottom of my foot went almost completely flat," he said. Dr. Justin Greisberg, an orthopedist at Columbia, diagnosed a Lisfranc fracture broken bones in the middle of his foot. The usual treatment is surgery, but then the coronavirus intervened. "Everything was shutting down," Mr. Mack said. Unable to get the operation, he healed on his own and is training again. If he had undergone the procedure, Mr. Mack would have been unable to wrestle for nearly a year. "If it wasn't for Covid, I would have been completely out," he said. The pandemic also provides a unique opportunity to re examine cancer screenings. Some cancers, like kidney cancer and thyroid cancer, tend to be diagnosed incidentally a patient gets a scan for another reason and doctors find a mass that turns out to be a tumor. It is not known whether patients whose cancers are diagnosed incidentally fare better than those whose cancers are not discovered until later, when the patient has symptoms, said Dr. John Gore, a urology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. But incidentally detected cancers might be easier to treat, in which case these screenings might be justified. Mammography has long been a special area of concern. Some researchers estimate that as many as one in three cancers that are diagnosed by mammograms could have safely gone undetected and left alone. Now the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium, a federally funded research group, is prospectively collecting data during the pandemic from more than 800,000 women and nearly 100 mammography centers across the country. Millions of women missed their regular mammograms in the first wave of the pandemic. Before the pandemic, about 100,000 women had screening mammograms each day in the United States. In the spring, nearly all mammogram centers shut down for three months, and even though they began opening again in the summer, it was not until October that nearly all were operating normally. That may change with the surge of new coronavirus infections, but for now, women who want mammograms can get them. Clinics had to slow the rate at which they do mammograms because of Covid 19 precaution requirements, including physical distancing and cleaning of equipment between exams. But they are making up for the delays by keeping longer hours and opening on weekends. The situation may be different for women who have worrisome findings, like a lump or a suspicious finding on a mammogram. The wait for diagnostic imaging and biopsies can be long, stretching out for weeks or months, said Dr. Christoph Lee, a professor of radiology and health services researcher at the University of Washington. Doctors expect that many women who missed their mammograms last spring will not return now that they can have the screening test again, some because they fell out of the habit but others because of the pandemic's social and economic effects. Women may have to stay home to care for children or may have lost jobs and health insurance. The breast cancer consortium should have the first results of the effects of the screening shutdown on patient outcomes in six months, Dr. Lee said. "We've never been able to argue to stop screening for a period, because the standard of care is regular screening," Dr. Lee said. "We are trying to see if less screening leads to more or to less harm." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Martin Shkreli, center, leaves court in 2017. "He does not deserve a death sentence" from the coronavirus, Christie Smythe, a former Bloomberg reporter, wrote in a request for compassionate release. "Your Honor, finding love with Martin was a great joy for me." In April the journalist Christie Smythe wrote those words to a federal judge about Martin Shkreli, the widely vilified former pharmaceutical executive who is serving a seven year sentence on a fraud conviction. Ms. Smythe, 37, wrote to Judge Kiyo Matsumoto of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on April 14 as part of an emergency motion filed by Mr. Shkreli's lawyers requesting a compassionate release. They argued that Mr. Shkreli, who gained infamy for raising the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent, would be able to work on a cure for Covid 19 and could avoid contracting the virus himself if he were released from prison. In the letter, an unredacted copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Smythe laid out the story of how she, a former Bloomberg News reporter who helped break the story of Mr. Shkreli's arrest in 2015, had fallen in love with a man the BBC had called "the most hated man in America." She asked the judge to allow Mr. Shkreli to continue serving his sentence in home confinement, at her Manhattan apartment. "It has been a long emotional journey for me from when I first came into your courtroom as a journalist covering Martin Shkreli's case in 2015 to the present moment, as I submit this letter to you as his girlfriend and would be life partner," she wrote. Ms. Smythe said she was concerned about the risk posed by the virus to the prison population. "He does not deserve a death sentence," she wrote, "or even a potential death sentence, from a virus that is beyond the capacity of prison officials to control. Nor do I deserve to lose out on a chance at happiness with a man I love." "In journalism school, they don't really tell you what to do when this comes up," Ms. Smythe said. "I just tried to muddle through it and handle things as best as I could." The relationship between Ms. Smythe, who joined Bloomberg News as a legal reporter in 2012, and Mr. Shkreli was revealed in an Elle magazine article on Sunday. "I started to fall for him, I think, after he got thrown in prison," Ms. Smythe said in an interview with The Times, referring to when Mr. Shkreli's bail was revoked and he was jailed in September 2017. "I definitely felt emotionally compromised then, but I didn't quite know what to do about that." Ms. Smythe left Bloomberg News in 2018 and got divorced from her husband the next year. Mr. Shkreli's lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said in an interview on Monday that he was surprised by the Elle article, only to add: "Nothing about Martin or the case surprises me." He said he had "always suspected" that the relationship between the reporter and his client was more than professional. "I tried to warn Martin about that," he said. "And Martin, as is his custom, said, 'Thank you, and I'll factor your advice in.'" Ms. Smythe said she had met with Mr. Shkreli's parents and brother last year in Brooklyn, where Mr. Shkreli grew up. "His dad took me around their neighborhood, which was really sweet," Ms. Smythe said in the interview with The Times. 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. When asked if the Shkreli family knew about the Elle article, which Ms. Smythe participated in, she said: "Yeah, I think so. I should probably send them the link just to make sure." In September 2015, Mr. Shkreli who was then 32 and the chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals hiked the price overnight of Daraprim, a drug that treats a rare, potentially fatal parasitic infection, from 13.50 to 750 a tablet. He was accused of price gouging, and his combative, sneering responses to the criticism earned him the moniker Pharma Bro. His arrest, in the early hours of Dec. 17, 2015, related to his time as a hedge fund manager and as the chief executive of the biopharmaceutical company Retrophin. Mr. Shkreli was charged with securities fraud and conspiracy for lying to investors and mismanaging money. Ms. Smythe and a Bloomberg News colleague, Keri Geiger, broke the news of the arrest in an article that described Mr. Shkreli as a "boastful pharmaceutical executive." Ms. Smythe continued on the story, covering Mr. Shkreli as he was convicted in 2017 and sentenced in 2018. He is now in the Allenwood Low federal prison in Pennsylvania. In 2018, after Ms. Smythe's editors cautioned her about her social media posts about Mr. Shkreli one included a snapshot of her personal correspondence with him she decided to leave Bloomberg News, with the idea of writing a book about the man she had covered for nearly three years. (Ms. Smythe told Elle that she did not have high hopes for publishing a book that did not make Mr. Shkreli out to be a villain, but said she had sold a film option.) "I didn't hide how much I interacted with him," she told The Times. "I don't really think I did anything wrong. I realize, in hindsight, maybe earlier I should have acted a little more proactively. But, honestly, I don't think any harm was done." Bloomberg News said it had found no bias in Ms. Smythe's coverage of Mr. Shkreli. "Ms. Smythe's conduct with regard to Mr. Shkreli was not consistent with expectations for a Bloomberg journalist," a Bloomberg News spokesperson said. "It became apparent that it would be best to part ways. Ms. Smythe tendered her resignation, and we accepted it." Ms. Smythe said she had no regrets about how she had dealt with the ethically perilous issue of covering someone she had developed feelings for. "In journalism school, they don't really tell you what to do when this comes up," she said. "I just tried to muddle through it and handle things as best as I could." She added, "I hadn't had a romantic relationship with him at the time. I hadn't slept with him. I just cared about him. So it's messy. How do you deal with that?" Now, it seems, the relationship might be off. Ms. Smythe said she had last seen Mr. Shkreli in person in February, when she visited him in the Pennsylvania facility, before the pandemic flared in the United States. "We were talking that day about me possibly doing something publicly, and he was in favor of it at the time," she said. But then, she added, Mr. Shkreli "freaked out" when the possibility of her going public became more real. "He's got a lot of kind of PTSD around media exposure," Ms. Smythe said, "and he's sort of attached to his villain image as a sort of a safe space." She had last spoken with him on the phone in the summer and said he no longer replied to her emails. Still, she said, she would wait for Mr. Shkreli, who is due for release in September 2023. "I love him," she said. "I'm here for him." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Orlando: So much excitement, so little time. Universal Orlando, Sea World and Disney World all compete for your attention. It seems within the realm of possibility to visit all of them over the course of a (very long) weekend until you realize the Disney World problem. The complex includes the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney's Hollywood Studios and Disney's Animal Kingdom, four equally appealing options. Most people have to choose between Disney World and the rest, but roller coaster enthusiasts like me (and very ambitious family travelers) refuse to make a decision. We can do it all. Fortunately, Disney World offers a one day park hopper ticket for the four parks. You may not see it advertised in packages because there's no discount for it. Also, some may think it crazy to attempt to traverse these four parks in a day. Each has rides that a thrill lover wouldn't want to miss. But visiting all four in a day is possible with patience, stamina, a solid pair of walking shoes and a few tips. Here is some advice on experiencing the thrills at the parks while still having time later for refreshments at Downtown Disney. My friend Peter and I bought park hopper tickets ( 155 a person) at the Caribe Royale hotel, where we stayed. During breakfast, we downloaded the Disney World app and linked the tickets to it. That gave us access to the Fast Pass system, which allows you to reserve time on rides. We chose a three ride pass, which you must use at only one park. Using the pass at the Magic Kingdom made sense; it would be the last park we would visit, and reservations had already filled up on the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, the new ride that I wanted to try. Because we would have to wait in line for that one, I booked reservations for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and Space Mountain. It was time to start. I decided to make Disney's Animal Kingdom our first stop because I was eager to ride Expedition Everest, a signature high speed roller coaster that weaves around mountain landscapes and comes with some surprises. It's one of three attractions in the Disney World complex that has a line for single riders; we got in line and shaved 30 minutes off the 45 minute wait for people who were riding with companions. Single riders have to go with strangers, but it's worth it. The ride has bold twists and turns, a crazy moment where it goes backward and, in the mountain, offers an encounter with a menacing creature. We had enough time to try it twice. Adequately jostled, we went on to Dinosaur, an energetic indoor ride that whisks you from room to room amid aggressive animatronic dinos. There was a 30 minute wait, but the line moved with a steady pace and was mostly indoors. The last ride we took was Primeval Whirl, the delightful wild mouse coaster. It zigzags back and forth through hairpin turns, then the cars start to spin as they move along the track. Because the ride is constantly loading and has two tracks, the wait to board was less than 10 minutes. With that, we were done with Animal Kingdom. Next up was Disney's Hollywood Studios, which includes my favorite Disney park ride, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. We drove there rather than take Disney World transport so we would have the car with us at the end. (You can pay once for parking and use that receipt to park all day at the other parks.) We found a spot, got our tickets scanned and headed in. (The swift admission is one of the advantages of the park hopper ticket.) We took the Tower of Terror ride, essentially a crazy haunted elevator that drops and rises at random intervals, brilliantly done and very popular. The wait was a punishing 45 minutes, though. To make up time, we grabbed a quick lunch on the way to Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, the indoor ride that features music by Aerosmith. This time, we waited less than 20 minutes to get on because of the single rider line. This attraction is meant to simulate a crazy limo ride along with Aerosmith, and it begins by launching the train at high speeds into a series of loops and hills. We could have gone on to Star Tours, the energetic simulated 3 D "Star Wars" ride. But given the 30 minute wait, we thought that our time would best be spent elsewhere, like a similar simulated ride at Epcot, Mission: Space. Epcot is spread out and doesn't provide a lot of high intensity options, so we stayed mostly in Future World at the front of the park; venturing into the World Showcase section would have meant lots of strolling and very few thrills. Peter really wanted to ride the laid back, moody Spaceship Earth, inside the globe near the entrance. Lucky for us, the wait was roughly five minutes, so we indulged. Next was Test Track, which had the fastest moving single rider line we experienced in the parks. It seats three across, and attendants are frequently looking for a third person to fill in a seat. This ride comes with a challenge: You have to design a concept vehicle on a computer and then take your vehicle through a few paces to determine performance. The ride concludes with a speed test in the open air around a fixed track. We were on it within 15 minutes. Now that we were in geek mode, we could try Mission: Space, which simulates a rocket launch to Mars, with a good amount of sound and movement in a slightly claustrophobic environment. The digital Mars animations are fascinating. The wait, 25 minutes, was not too bad. To get a taste of the World Showcase, we visited the country closest to the Future World attractions, the Mexico Pavilion. In the rear of the pavilion, which is inside a giant pyramid, is the Gran Fiesta tour, a leisurely boat ride with Donald Duck animations on screens built into the walls. Perhaps because it's a bit hidden away, it had no line whatsoever the day we were there. We got enough of a glimpse of what Epcot had to offer and had to move on. We checked the app to see the wait time because I felt it essential to ride the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, the newest roller coaster in the park, regardless of the wait, which was listed at 60 minutes; we went for it. While we waited, we played a touch screen game where you gather and sort gems into different trays by shape. Another spot in the line allowed you to spin a barrel of glowing gems until they projected an animation on the ceiling. Next was the Haunted Mansion (a 15 minute wait) because we still had some time to kill before Space Mountain. It was standard haunted house fare with a bit of technology thrown in: You are seated in a two person car and guided through a spooky mansion with hologram ghosts. We got to Space Mountain full of anticipation. I remembered this ride as stellar when I was a child, and after all these years, it remains a thrill. As we got off and noticed the line was short even for those without Fast Pass, we decided to wait to ride it a second time. We still exited the ride in time to make a light show at the castle, and were able to leave by 10:30 p.m. In roughly a 12 hour period, we traversed four parks, rode all of Disney World's coasters and took advantage of many other rides with minimal wait times. We were weary but believed we had done more than most would think possible, and left early enough to rest up for more theme park fun elsewhere the next day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Polka dots. Mirrors. Pumpkins. Balloons. And long lines to see all of the above. Yayoi Kusama, whose obsessively patterned and repetitive imagery has made her one of Japan's most celebrated artists, is opening her own museum in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo on Oct. 1. The news, reported by the Japanese culture website Spoon and Tamago on Thursday, was confirmed by the David Zwirner Gallery, which represents Ms. Kusama. The museum, a five story building designed by Kume Sekkei, was completed in 2014, but Ms. Kusama, 87, remained quiet about its purpose. (She perhaps alluded to the project in an interview in February with The Washington Post when she was asked what had been the highlight of her career. "It's still coming," Ms. Kusama said. "I'm going to create it in the future.") The museum will be directed by Akira Tatehata, the president of Tama Art University and director of the Saitama Museum of Modern Art. The space will be dedicated to Ms. Kusama's own work, with two changing exhibitions each year, as well as one floor housing her popular "infinity rooms" and other installations. The top floor will house a reading room and archival materials. The first exhibition, "Creation Is a Solitary Pursuit, Love Is What Brings You Closer to Art," running Oct. 1 through Feb. 25, will show a recent series of paintings, "My Eternal Soul." Tickets, priced at 1,000 yen, or about 9, go on sale on Aug. 28 and will be offered in time slots, suggesting that large crowds are anticipated. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Mount Fuji is a beloved and sacred peak that is an unforgettable sight and easily viewable, which is why I was frustrated when on a visit in 2013 I was able to get to within a few miles of the mountain only to find it obscured by thick clouds. I wasn't alone that steamy Sunday. Thousands of others had swarmed the resort towns on the Yamanashi Prefecture side of the mountain to revel in the addition of the mountain to Unesco's World Heritage list as a cultural asset for inspiring artists, poets and religious pilgrims. So on a return trip to Japan last May my wife and I set out again to bask in the glow of Fujisan, as it's known to the Japanese. But this time we traveled to the Shizuoka Prefecture side of the mountain, farther away and to the south, for better views. In decent weather, finding the best places to take in Mount Fuji is not hard because it dominates the landscape and also because hundreds of inns and restaurants market their vantage points. In fact, Japan persuaded skeptical Unesco delegates to also include one of the most celebrated viewing spots Miho no Matsubara, a beach bordered by thousands of pine trees about 50 miles from the mountain on the World Heritage list. "For us, the beauty of the mountain can only be seen from the distance, so for us it is natural to include this part," Seiichi Kondo, the commissioner for Cultural Affairs, said in 2013. Miho no Matsubara isn't just a good place to see the mountain, it is also a cultural icon. For hundreds of years, artists have incorporated the views from there into their work. The beach is central to one of the most famous noh plays, "Hagoromo," or "The Feathered Robe." The play, which is performed every October illuminated by firelight on the beach, is based on a folkloric story about the goddess of the mountain, who visited the beach and was so overcome by the beauty of the sand and the pine trees that she removed her robe and hung it on a pine tree before bathing. A fisherman found the robe, but the damsel begged him to give it back to her because she would not be able to return to heaven without it. He gave it back after the maiden promised to dance for him in the sky. The pine tree, which is believed to be about 650 years old, now sits behind a wooden fence. We didn't want to wait that long to celebrate, so during our trip last May we made plans to travel from Tokyo to Miho no Matsubara. Along the way we stopped at a hot spring, or onsen, that would be relaxing and offer great views of the mountain. We focused on the Izu Peninsula, famous for its rugged coastline, fresh air and great fish. The towns that dot the area provide a convenient seaside getaway for millions of people who live in the Kanto region, a kind of Jersey Shore for Tokyoites. The peninsula's best known town, Shimoda, is where Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in 1853 with several American naval ships, the beginning of the end of Japan's 250 years of self imposed isolation. We found an onsen called Shotokan at the other end of the peninsula in the port of Numazu. The city was not as remote as other parts of Izu, but it had spectacular views of Mount Fuji. Getting there was easy, too. The Odoriko express train, which runs hourly from Tokyo Station, left us in the Izu Nagaoka station in two hours. A driver from the onsen met us there and took us by van to the inn, about 15 minutes away. Even before we entered the inn, we could see that it was in an ideal spot to admire the mountain. The view across the cove along Uchiura Bay was filled with sailboats, ferries and fishing boats. After women in kimonos ushered us into the lobby and gave us free glasses of beer, we took in the mountain on a cloudless afternoon. Our corner room on the fifth floor of the six story inn had its own pebble filled entranceway and 12 tatami mats with two sets of windows that afforded more great views. After cups of green tea and small sweets, my wife and I dressed in yukata, or light robes, and went to separate baths on the floor above. After showering, I dipped into the sun soaked outdoor bath. The grand view of the mountain was out of a picture postcard. In the foreground was a crescent shaped harbor with a gumdrop hill that gave way to green lowlands and Fuji's snow capped peak. I was soon joined by a man from Chiba Prefecture who said he had visited many hot springs, but the views at Shotokan were among the best. I didn't disagree. Part of the allure of a high end hot spring are the elaborate meals, and Shotokan did not disappoint. We had our own private eight mat dining room with a painting of Fuji on the wall. The small ceramic chopstick holders were in the shape of the mountain, too. Our waitress, Aya, a cheerful woman from Nagasaki, did a good job of describing each of the nine courses. The first was a delectable assortment of bite size appetizers that included scallop, shrimp, salmon in a honey marinade, fried Camembert and snapper in jelly. The meal was so pleasing that I fell asleep before I could take a moonlight dip in the bath. But I was up by 4:30 the next morning to admire Fuji at sunrise. After another bath, we returned for breakfast, this time with the windows open so we could see the mountain as we enjoyed soup, eggs and an assortment of pickles and seaweed. Then came soup with large asari clams and grilled sun dried mackerel. Sated, we took the van to the station for the 80 minute train ride to Shimizu, a city on the other side of the Surugu Bay filled with uninspiring strip malls, warehouses and auto repair shops, making me wonder whether we had taken a wrong turn. After about a 25 minute bus ride, we were let out a few blocks from a long wooden promenade with pine trees on both sides. The walk under the canopy of trees had the feel of a grand entrance, and at the end of it we climbed a small hill covered with pine trees to the beach on the other side. We had arrived at Miho no Matsubara. The beach hugs the coastline for about four miles and is abutted by about 54,000 pine trees, some of which were shaped by the wind and leaned inland. The sand was more black than white now. In one direction, the bay stretched out to sea and in the other, Fuji loomed large, even on a hazy day. Japanese are fanatics about photography and there are entire websites devoted to finding the best spot to take pictures of the mountain from the beach. While we were there two monks in saffron robes and a handful of tourists snapped pictures and took in the view. As my feet sank in the sand, I could imagine why painters like the spot so much. The mountain, sea and trees blended together in equal proportions, with Fuji as the center of attention. I could also see why the mountain was a beacon to fishermen returning from sea and the travelers who centuries ago passed the mountain on their way from Tokyo to Kyoto. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"American Woman," directed by Jake Scott from a script by Brad Ingelsby, is, on its face, the kind of movie that many of us are afraid is getting squeezed out of the market by blockbusters and franchises. It's a considered, conscientious character study chronicling the ups and, mostly, downs in the lives of its working class subjects. Deb (Sienna Miller) is a single mother in a hardscrabble rural Pennsylvania town. She gave birth to her daughter, Bridget, while she was still in her teens, and when the movie's story begins in the early 2000s, the teenage Bridget (Sky Ferreira) has a child of her own. Their relationship is simultaneously fraught and playful. Deb's relationships with her older sister, Katherine (Christina Hendricks), and her mother, Peggy (Amy Madigan), both conveniently parked across the street from Deb, are more on the consistently fraught side. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It was not the most ominous sign of health trouble, just a nosebleed that would not stop. So in February 2017, Michael Schaffer, who is 60 and lives near Pittsburgh, went first to a local emergency room, then to a hospital where a doctor finally succeeded in cauterizing a tiny cut in his nostril. Then the doctor told Mr. Schaffer something he never expected to hear: "You need a liver transplant." Mr. Schaffer had no idea his liver was failing. He had never heard of the diagnosis: Nash, for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, a fatty liver disease not linked to alcoholism or infections. The disease may have no obvious symptoms even as it destroys the organ. That nosebleed was a sign that Mr. Schaffer's liver was not making proteins needed for blood to clot. He was in serious trouble. The news was soon followed by another eye opener: Doctors asked Mr. Schaffer to become the first patient in an experiment that would attempt something that transplant surgeons have dreamed of for more than 65 years. If it worked, he would receive a donated liver without needing to take powerful drugs to prevent the immune system from rejecting it. Before the discovery of anti rejection drugs, organ transplants were simply impossible. The only way to get the body to accept a donated organ is to squelch its immune response. But the drugs are themselves hazardous, increasing the risks of infection, cancer, high cholesterol levels, accelerated heart disease, diabetes and kidney failure. Within five years of a liver transplant, 25 percent of patients on average have died. Within 10 years, 35 to 40 percent have died. "Even though the liver may be working, patients may die of a heart attack or stroke or kidney failure," said Dr. Abhinav Humar, a transplant surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who is leading the study Mr. Schaffer joined. "It may not be entirely due to the anti rejection meds, but the anti rejection meds contribute." Kidneys in particular may be damaged. "It is not uncommon to end up doing a kidney transplant in patients who previously had a lung or liver or heart transplant," Dr. Humar added. Patients usually know about the drugs' risks, but the alternative is worse: death for those needing livers, hearts or lungs; or, for kidney patients, a life on dialysis, which brings an even worse life expectancy and quality of life than does a transplanted kidney. In 1953, Dr. Peter Medawar and his colleagues in Britain did an experiment with a result so stunning that he shared a Nobel Prize for it. He showed that it was possible to "train" the immune systems of mice so that they would not reject tissue transplanted from other mice. His method was not exactly practical. It involved injecting newborn or fetal mice with white blood cells from unrelated mice. When the mice were adults, researchers placed skin grafts from the unrelated mice onto the backs of those that had received the blood cells. The mice accepted the grafts as if they were their own skin, suggesting that the immune system can be modified. The study led to a scientific quest to find a way to train the immune systems of adults who needed new organs. Dr. Peter Medawar, around 1960, when he won the Nobel Prize for studies of the immune system. That turned out to be a difficult task. The immune system is already developed in adults, while in baby mice it is still "learning" what is foreign and what is not. "You are trying to fool the body's immune system," Dr. Humar said. "That is not easy to do." Most of the scientific research so far has focused on liver and kidney transplant patients for several reasons, said Dr. James Markmann, chief of the division of transplant surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. Those organs can be transplanted from living donors, and so cells from the donor are available to use in an attempt to train the transplant patient's immune system. Far more people need kidneys than need any other organ there are about 19,500 kidney transplants a year, compared with 8,000 transplanted livers. And those transplanted kidneys rarely last a lifetime of battering with immunosuppressive drugs. "If you are 30 or 40 and get a kidney transplant, that is not the only kidney you will need," said Dr. Joseph R. Leventhal, who directs the kidney and pancreas transplant programs at Northwestern University. Another reason to focus on kidneys: "If something goes wrong, it's not the end of the world," Dr. Markmann said. If an attempt to wean patients from immunosuppressive drugs fails, they can get dialysis to cleanse their blood. Rejection of other transplanted organs can mean death. The liver intrigues researchers for different reasons. It is less prone to rejection by the body's immune system. When rejection does occur, there is less immediate damage to the organ. And sometimes, after people have lived with a transplanted liver for years, their bodies simply accept the organ. A few patients discovered this by chance when they decided on their own to discard their anti rejection drugs, generally because of the expense and side effects. An estimated 15 to 20 percent of liver transplant patients who have tried this risky strategy have succeeded, but only after years of taking the drugs. In one trial, Dr. Alberto Sanchez Fueyo, a liver specialist at King's College London, reported that as many as 80 percent could stop taking anti rejection drugs. In general, those patients were older the immune system becomes weaker with age. They had been long term users of immunosuppressive drugs and had normal liver biopsies. But the damage caused by immunosuppressive drugs is cumulative and irreversible, and use over a decade or longer can cause significant damage. Yet there is no way to predict who will succeed in withdrawing. The more researchers learned about the symphony of white blood cells that control responses to infections and cancers and transplanted organs the more they began to see hope for modifying the body's immune system. Many types of white blood cells work together to create and control immune responses. A number of researchers, including Dr. Markmann and his colleague, Dr. Eva Guinan of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, chose to focus on cells called regulatory T lymphocytes. These are rare white blood cells that help the body identify its own cells as not foreign. If these regulatory cells are missing or impaired, people can develop diseases in which the body's immune system attacks its own tissues and organs. The idea is to isolate regulatory T cells from a patient about to have a liver or kidney transplant. Then scientists attempt to grow them in the lab along with cells from the donor. Then the T cells are infused back to the patient. The process, scientists hope, will teach the immune system to accept the donated organ as part of the patient's body. "The new T cells signal the rest of the immune system to leave the organ alone," said Angus Thomson, director of transplant immunology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dr. Markmann, working with liver transplant patients, and Dr. Leventhal, working with kidney transplant patients, are starting studies using regulatory T cells. At Pittsburgh, the plan is to modify a different immune system cell, called regulatory dendritic cells. Like regulatory T cells, they are rare and enable the rest of the immune system to distinguish self from non self. One advantage of regulatory dendritic cells is that researchers do not have to isolate them and grow them in sufficient quantities. Instead, scientists can prod a more abundant type of cell immature white blood cells to turn into dendritic cells in petri dishes. "It takes one week to generate dendritic cells," Dr. Thomson said. In contrast, it can take weeks to grow enough regulatory T cells. The regulatory T cells also have to remain in the bloodstream to control the immune response, while dendritic cells need not stay around long they control the immune system during a brief journey through the circulation. He moved on to nieces and nephews. Three agreed to donate, and one, Deidre Cannon, 34, who was a good match, went forward with the operation. It took place on Sept. 28, 2017. Afterward, Mr. Schaffer was taking 40 pills a day to prevent infections and to tamp down his immune system while his body learned to accept the new organ. But now he has tapered down to one pill, a low dose of just one of the three anti rejection drugs he started with. And doctors hope to wean him even from that. His case may be intriguing, but he is just one patient. The scientists plan to try the procedure on 12 more patients and, if it succeeds, to expand the study to include many more patients at multiple test sites. For Mr. Schaffer, it has all been worthwhile. He is active, working with a teenage grandson to replace the tiles on his kitchen floor. He shovels snow and mows lawns as a favor for his neighbors, and helps take care of his grandchildren after school. "My goal is to live to be 100 and get shot in bed by a jealous husband," Mr. Schaffer said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Cars at Garden Grove Kia in Anaheim, Ca. Last month, Kia Motor increased sales by telling its 755 dealers in the U.S. they were each cleared to create computerized sales records for as many as nine vehicles from their inventory without having customers for them. Auto sales hit an all time high last year in the United States, and many analysts expect another record this year. But in this surge, some automakers are increasing sales by counting new cars bought by their own dealers as sold, raising questions about whether some segments of the auto industry a pillar of the nation's halting economic recovery are as healthy as they appear. Kia, BMW and Nissan have all encouraged their dealers to buy cars themselves and then offer the vehicles as used models, sometimes with only a few miles on the odometer, internal company memos to dealers show. Automakers say they do this with consumers in mind. Nissan, for example, said the tactic helped make more cars available for rent while a vehicle is being serviced by a dealer. And not all automakers engage in the practice. Honda is one that offers little to no incentives for dealer purchased loaner vehicles. "We will never pursue artificial sales goals that could hurt resale values and the loyalty of our customers," said Jeff Conrad, general manager for the Honda brand. General Motors, the largest domestic automaker, Toyota and Fiat Chrysler offer subsidies so dealers can operate loaner fleets, but their programs are more limited. The practice has come under scrutiny because of a lawsuit by two dealers who asserted that they were pressured to falsify sales by Fiat Chrysler. No legal challenges are known regarding purchases by dealers. Ford did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but dealers said their programs were more modest. But for those automakers that use the tactic, many analysts see a motivation beyond keeping more loaner cars. "There is a lot of economic pressure to grow," said David Lucas, an analyst at Autodata Corporation, a market researcher. While car companies have long used test drive and rental fleets to manage sales and inventory, such efforts in the end do the same thing. "They make the numbers look good," he said. Exactly how many vehicles are sold this way is not known. Dealers estimate they amount to 10 percent or more of Nissan and Kia sales over the course of a year, and a higher percentage of BMW sales. But in an industry where automakers fight for every sale, the numbers can add up. The aggressive tactics recall methods used a decade ago, when the industry was also at a peak. Back then, General Motors, Ford Motor and Fiat Chrysler raised sales by selling tens of thousands of cars to rental car companies and offering big discounts like employee pricing. Those actions ate into profit margins and contributed to the severity of the industry's eventual crash. Today's techniques, by contrast, are harder to spot than those blatant cash back offers and sales to rental companies. Last month, Kia Motor increased sales by telling its 755 dealers in the United States they were each cleared to create computerized sales records for as many as nine vehicles from their inventory without having customers for them. In a memo sent to dealers on March 14, Kia instructed them to hold those cars for a minimum of 15 days as "test drive" models. After that, they qualify for special discounts of as much as 6,000, and can be offered for sale as "used" cars including many that have not been driven more than a few miles. "I think they're trying to get the numbers up, but I don't want to speak for them," said Mike Maguire, general manager of Portsmouth Kia in Portsmouth, N.H. That dealership is advertising a "used" 2016 Kia Sportage with 14 miles on the odometer. Garden Grove Kia, in Garden Grove, Calif., offers a dozen or more used cars that have barely been driven and have never been titled to owners, according to records on the dealership's website. They can no longer be advertised as new cars because they were marked as sold under Kia's test drive sales program, a salesman, Bang Nguyen, explained Kia confirmed the outlines of the test drive sales program, but did not respond to requests for additional details. BMW regularly pays dealers to buy cars and keep them as demonstration models or lend them to customers who are having their vehicles serviced. But several years ago, BMW created a category in its sales reporting system called Specialty 8, according to communications between BMW and its dealers. These vehicles are counted as sold for BMW's monthly total, but remain on the lot and continue to be offered as new cars, the dealers said. BMW typically pays the dealer 1,000 to 3,000 for each Specialty 8 car marked as sold. On Thursday, the day before monthly sales are reported on Friday, BMW made a one day offer to dealers to entice them to buy cars for loaner fleets. A BMW spokesman, Kenn Sparks, confirmed that Specialty 8 was a "subcategory" for sales of vehicles used as demonstrator models and test drives. Nissan Motor has dealers buy cars for use in what it calls dealer rental fleets. The cars are supposed to remain in rental service for 90 days, and some are in fact rented by dealership customers. But occasionally Nissan waives the 90 day rule and clears dealers to sell their rental models as used cars, although many were never driven while in the rental fleet. Nissan then requires dealers to buy additional new vehicles to restock the rental fleet, which increases monthly sales. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
After a burst of construction, the luxury real estate market is awash with million and multimillion dollar homes for sale. Buyers are taking their time before signing on the dotted line, and sales agents and brokers have had to get more creative in drawing attention to their listings. "We've seen buyers come see an apartment four or five times and they're still on the fence," said Steven Rutter, director of Stribling Marketing Associates, a division of Stribling Associates. "There's no sense of urgency." Luxury, of course, is a relative term when it comes to New York City, where the average price of a condominium keeps rising and is currently 3.2 million, according to the latest report from CityRealty.com. The definition of which home can be referred to as "luxury" changes, and is now determined to be about 4.5 million and above, or the top 10 percent of the market, said Jonathan J. Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. StreetEasy's data show more than 2,500 homes priced at or above 3 million as of last week, with more than half of those listings at or above 5 million. Even though some buyers are taking their time in sorting through this oversupply, they are still willing to sign contracts. And prices are generally stable, though with some exceptions. Apartments priced in the 1 million to 3 million range may prompt a bidding war, but most homes 5 million and under are selling well. Many offerings over 10 million have been discounted already, and some can be negotiated down as much as 30 percent more, brokers say. The market was off to a good start this year. There were 330 contracts signed in the first quarter of 2017, a 33 percent increase from the same period last year, according to a report from Olshan Realty Inc., which tracks sales in this price range. This is evidence that buyers are pulling the trigger, even if they are taking their time about it. Still, brokers have to find new ways to make their offerings stand out. To introduce the sale of an 11.75 million, four bedroom penthouse in Midtown, Tara King Brown and Amy Williamson, two associate brokers from the Corcoran Group, ditched the evening cocktail party, the industry's tried and tested event, and instead held a morning meditation class in the building's common area yoga room. About a dozen people, mostly brokers, attended the class, which was run by MNDFL, a firm that runs several meditation studios throughout the city. After a 30 minute session of deep breathing and reflection as the sun rose over the East River, the group got a tour of the penthouse at 305 East 51st Street. "What's fantastic about this place is the view and morning light so we wanted the brokers to feel it for themselves," Ms. King Brown said. "Hosting a different type of networking event is necessary to stand out, especially since buyers have so much to choose from." To draw attention to a 6.995 million, four bedroom condo at 6 Cortlandt Alley, Susan Wires, a Stribling saleswoman, held a continuing education class run by the firm TitleVest called "Condominium Essentials" for agents and brokers in the residence. She said it helped "get a lot of eyes on this building since we're a small, new development, not a large tower that gets a lot of attention." Fredrik Eklund, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman and a cast member of the television show "Million Dollar Listing New York," recently invited 55 so called Instagram influencers, or those with the most followers in the city, to a four bedroom, 20.75 million home at Madison Square Park Tower. Ripping a page out of fashion marketing, where social media stars are invited to post photos and comment on designer wear and store openings, Mr. Eklund allowed the group to post photos from the apartment on the 56th floor. He admitted that the move was a little risky, since he didn't check to see what everyone was posting. "But if you're an Instagram influencer, you're creative, a good photographer," so you're guaranteed a good shot, he said. "They were happy to have access to an apartment with a gorgeous view, plus I reached a non real estate audience." The event generated more than 100 postings on the building, eliciting over 150,000 interactions (likes, comments, views) and reached over five million Instagram users who follow the invited social media influencers. The building's own Instagram page immediately signed up about 1,000 new followers after the event, now totaling about 14,600. Mr. Eklund said a Chinese fashion designer who was in town in February for fashion week made an appointment to see an apartment after the Instagram blitz. He said many younger buyers check information on a property through social media even before looking at the building's website. Many developers and brokers like to turn a model showroom or listing into a temporary art gallery and give parties, an easy guest list to compile because buyers of high end art and real estate tend to overlap. Vickey Barron, a broker at Douglas Elliman, said she prefers smaller get togethers. To drive attention to a Chelsea condominium building, she organized a small breakfast with the developer and several brokers. "I gave my friends access to someone they wouldn't otherwise have," she said. "The result is, though, you're pulling people together that help you get a contract signed." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, has put interest rate changes on hold as the economy continues to expand. WASHINGTON Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged at their January meeting as the economy grew steadily, but they spent their meeting reviewing risks to the outlook including fresh concerns about the coronavirus that had begun to take hold in China. Minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee's Jan. 28 and 29 meeting showed that officials called the new coronavirus "a new risk to the global growth outlook." At the time, the outbreak had killed more than 100 people and sickened about 5,000. It has continued to spread since, causing more than 2,000 deaths and infecting more than 75,000 people. Central bankers have been cautious about predicting how much the virus will affect the United States economy, though they have made it clear that they expect some spillover. Swaths of China have ground to a standstill as authorities try to contain the virus by shuttering factories and enforcing quarantines, disrupting trade and tourism. Factories across the nation are reopening, but haltingly. The Fed is monitoring how the economic fallout in China bears on American growth and inflation. "The question for us really is: What will be the effects on the U.S. economy? Will they be persistent, will they be material?" Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, told lawmakers while testifying last week. "We know that there will be some, very likely to be some effects on the United States. I think it's just too early to say." Fed officials have signaled that they plan to leave policy unchanged as they wait to see how the economy shapes up in 2020. That patient stance comes after central bankers cut interest rates three times last year in a bid to insulate the economy against fallout from President Trump's trade war and a slowdown abroad. While an initial trade deal with China has alleviated some uncertainty that dogged America's economy last year, tensions are not fully resolved. Beyond that, manufacturing remains slow and business investment is still weak. "Participants generally expected trade related uncertainty to remain somewhat elevated, and they were mindful of the possibility that the tentative signs of stabilization in global growth could fade," according to the January minutes. Against that backdrop, they saw the current policy as "likely to remain appropriate for a time." Interest rates are currently set in a range between 1.5 and 1.75 percent. That is below the Fed's longer run estimate of where its rate will settle, and officials believe the current stance should give the economy a slight boost. The central bank's next meeting will take place March 17 and 18 in Washington. Since the January gathering, Fed officials have consistently signaled that they remain comfortable leaving rates unchanged for now, unless an economic surprise knocks them off that course. Coronavirus is not the only risk on the Fed's radar. Some Fed officials fretted over financial stability risks at the meeting, noting that "financial imbalances including overvaluation and excessive indebtedness could amplify an adverse shock to the economy." And "several" pointed out that "planned increases in dividend payouts by large banks and the associated decline in capital buffers might leave those banks with less capacity to weather adverse shocks." But the minutes also suggest a paradox for regulators, noting that relatively high capital requirements could cause "potential migration of lending activities" into the shadow banking system loosely regulated nonbank lenders where supervisors lack oversight authority. From the way the minutes are written, it is unclear how many people shared in that concern. Officials also discussed a longer running problem at the January gathering: Inflation has remained below policymakers' 2 percent annual goal even as the unemployment rate lingers near half century lows and the economy grows steadily. "A few participants stressed that the committee should be more explicit about the need to achieve its inflation goal on a sustained basis," the minutes said. Several said that "mild overshooting" might help the Fed to reinforce that its goal is symmetric, meaning that officials want price increases to oscillate around 2 percent rather than hovering below that level. 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." If prices grow too slowly, it diminishes the central bank's already limited room to cut interest rates in a recession, since the federal funds rate incorporates price gains. As of December, the central bank's preferred price index accelerated by just 1.6 percent. While Fed officials are hopeful that inflation will rise toward its 2 percent target in 2020, they have expressed a similar optimism for years, only to repeatedly fall short. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
MOMENTS are having a moment in advertising. Or at least a micromoment. As people flit from app to app online, they have little patience for any interruption, especially a banner ad or, heaven forbid, a 30 second commercial. Moments, whether they come during a 10 second Snapchat video or Twitter's new collection of real time news bites called, fittingly enough, Moments increasingly are all companies have to market against. Companies that buy and sell online advertising are increasingly taking aim at these fleeting instances. They are hoping that targeting people based on what they are doing on their mobile devices at a particular time might make them more receptive to the message. Last fall, for instance, the spirits company Campari America targeted liquor consumers aged 21 to 34 while they were in neighborhoods with lots of bars and restaurants. Using Kiip, a San Francisco firm that places ads in mobile apps, Campari offered consumers 5 off from the ride sharing service Lyft when, say, they checked a score on an app while at a sports bar. More than 20 percent redeemed the offer, a high rate for digital ads. "The attention span of consumers today is, what, eight seconds?" said Umberto Luchini, Campari America's vice president for marketing. "You get one shot." And an ever more brief one at that. Google, which has always matched its tiny search ads to moments of curiosity, has been counseling marketers since early last year to aim at even more evanescent "micromoments." Those are the dozens of times a day that people pick up their phones to look up information, research a product, or find a local restaurant or store. Dunkin' Donuts uses this method to target people who search for "coffee near me," providing a map and wait times at nearby locations. "The advertising game is no longer about reach and frequency," said Lisa Gevelber, a Google vice president for marketing, who pioneered the micromoments concept. "Now more than ever, intent is more important than identity and demographics, and immediacy is more important than brand loyalty." Some ads offered a 5 credit on rides with Lyft. That means marketers must be omnipresent with apps, a social media presence, short how to videos and the entire range of digital ads. They can be search ads, or those like Kiip's that offer a reward, or Google's local inventory ads that reveal what is in stock in a nearby store, or click to call ads that dial up a business with a tap. More important than the format, the ads must appear at the instant people need the information. Reaching people at key junctures has always been a staple of advertising: billboards ahead of a highway exit, beer ads during halftime of the Super Bowl, digital search ads. The terminology is not all that new, either. A.G. Lafley, executive chairman at Procter Gamble, where Ms. Gevelber once worked as a brand manager, coined the term "first moment of truth" in the 2005 book "The Game Changer," written with Ram Charan. It describes the point at which a consumer forms an impression of a brand. The difference today is the rise of mobile phones as the consumers' tool to find or do almost anything. That has introduced several wrinkles to the way marketers can influence and track how consumers decide to buy something. Global Positioning System navigation provides precise location data, apps track people's every tap and swipe, and sensors such as accelerometers can even tell if people are sitting, walking or driving. The herky jerky nature of app use, much lamented by marketers, has an upside, too: There are now many more times during the day when consumers are engaging in discrete activities, between which they may be primed to see a related message. It is not just a matter of reaching people at a particular time of day, a capability advertisers have employed for decades. Randy Wootton, chief executive of the ad technology firm Rocket Fuel, which recently announced a "marketing in the moment" approach, refers to ancient Greek concepts of time: chronos, or sequential time, and kairos, a moment of opportunity independent of linear time. The latter, of course, is the one his company claims to employ for marketers. Another key, said Brian Solis, a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a market research firm, is that the ads need to be more useful than they are attention getting. According to a Google survey, 51 percent of smartphone owners have bought from a different company than they intended on the basis of information found online. "There are more jump balls, and now we can capitalize on those moments," said Jared Belsky, president of the New York digital agency 360i. One client, Red Roof Inn, linked flight data from the aviation software company FlightAware with Google's search ad system to target travelers stranded at airports but at very precise moments, such as when O'Hare Airport in Chicago experienced a major flight cancellation. Then, the system automatically raised the hotel chain's bids for ad space enough to win the top spot in three quarters of search results for queries such as "hotels near O'Hare." The company experienced a 60 percent jump in room bookings from those searches. However, to build brands, an effort that accounts for the majority of ad spending, companies need more than a moment. And few marketers currently have all the skills needed for moments based marketing, such as ethnographic studies of their customers and the ability to match customer data to the right context, according to a report released last July by Forrester Research. Without those skills developing throughout the industry, the latest scheme to reach peripatetic consumers could prove, well, momentary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
With eight planets whirling around its sun, our solar system has held the galactic title for having the most known planets of any star system in the Milky Way. But on Thursday NASA announced the discovery of a new exoplanet orbiting a distant star some 2,500 light years away from here called Kepler 90, bringing that system's total to eight planets as well. The new planet, known as Kepler 90i, is rocky and hot. It orbits its star about once every 14 days. The finding was made using data collected by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, a planet hunter that has spotted more than 2,500 confirmed exoplanets since its launch in 2009. Unlike those previous discoveries, the new exoplanet was detected with the help of an artificial intelligence researcher at Google using a machine learning technique called neural networking. The technology, which is loosely inspired by the human brain, is designed to recognize patterns and classify images. It can learn to tell the difference between something simple like a cat and a dog, and also to distinguish exoplanets from cosmic noise. For the project, the computer looked at a small chunk of data gathered by Kepler from 2009 to 2013. Of the 150,000 stars represented in Kepler's collection, the computer combed through 670 star systems for signs of exoplanets. Astronomers spot exoplanets when the celestial bodies move, or transit, in front of their stars. The interaction causes a dip in brightness that creates a detectable signal. So far, the data set has about 35,000 such signals. The astronomers trained the program on a set of about 15,000 signals, and it identified planets correctly 96 percent of the time. The neural network learned what was a planet and what was not a planet and was able to find the exoplanet Kepler 90i, as well as a second exoplanet named Kepler 80g around a different star system. Next, the researchers plan to explore more star systems studied by Kepler. "We plan to search all 150,000 stars in the Kepler data system," said Mr. Shallue. Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin, said that Kepler 90i is about 30 percent larger than Earth and about as hot as the planet Mercury, reaching about 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Like the other seven planets in its system, it is packed close to its star. It resembles a miniature version of our solar system, he said, where the most distant known planet is about as far away from its star as the Earth is from our sun. But there could be additional, more distant planets not yet detected because planets close to their stars may be easier for astronomers to find. Seth Shostak an astronomer with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who was not involved in the project said the finding that Kepler 90 has eight planets shows that our solar system is "just another duck in a row." "The bad news is we're not quite as special as we thought we were," he said. "But the good news is we may have a lot of cosmic company." It's possible that the two systems may not be tied for long as astronomers search the outer reaches of our solar system for the elusive Planet Nine. It sets the stage for a new space race: Which team will break the intragalactic deadlock? Will artificial intelligence first detect another planet in the Kepler 90 system, or will astronomers find a distant ninth planet orbiting our sun? "It's kind of cool to see which one will be proven next," said Jessie Dotson, Kepler's project scientist at NASA. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Making its debut at the Joyce Theater this week, Black Grace, a dance company from New Zealand, opens its program with dancers standing in a ritual circle as someone sings softly. Take note of the stillness and calm, because it isn't going to last. Very soon, the dancers break into motion, and once they start, they barely ever stop. The distinguishing spirit of this troupe is incredible speed and stamina, an exhilarating, seemingly inexhaustible energy. The first selection, "Kiona and the Little Bird Suite," is a premiere but it draws from two decades of repertory, work created last year and all the way back to 1996, a year after the company was founded. As such, it's a bit of a greatest hits compilation, and a terrific introduction to the unaffected style of the troupe and the innovative choreography of its artistic director and founder , Neil Ieremia. Mr. Ieremia, who is of Samoan descent, calls his work "traditionally inspired." This suite features live drumming, singing in harmony and chanting. It borrows from the body percussion of Samoan slap dancing, and occasionally dips into the swaying hips and wave motion arms you might associate with the South Pacific. But Mr. Ieremia also borrows freely and organically from Western contemporary dance, incorporating a little vocabulary and a lot of structure. Sections of choreography look like intricately interlocking machines or an impatient god trying to solve a Rubik's Cube of people. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The story of the sisters Procne and Philomela is one of the truly gruesome Greek myths, full of rape and murder and bloody mutilation but also, and this is rather nice, tremendous sibling devotion. For "Weightless," a smart retelling of it as an indie rock opera by the Bay Area band the Kilbanes, that love is the core of the legend. "Weightless," at BRIC House in Brooklyn though Sunday as part of the Under the Radar festival, feels only about a half step into myth from our world, and that's a good thing. It's just far enough to accommodate a sardonic god (Julia Brothers) who amuses herself by taking an interest in Procne (Kate Kilbane, also the band's bassist) and Philomela (Lila Blue, appealingly sultry). "One day Procne's father told her that he was going to marry her off to some local half wit," the god tells us, and in the Kilbanes' version of the story, Procne and Philomela flee to a cabin on the ocean, where they build a happy, self sufficient life. Until, that is, a hunter named Tereus (Josh Pollock, who doubles as the guitarist) happens along. He's creepy, but Procne is too curious about him to hear any blaring alarm bells. She accompanies him to his island and is soon pregnant. When she's ready to give birth, Philomela flies to her side. Tragedy ensues. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Ever since Rene Redzepi announced that he'd be closing what's been possibly the most celebrated restaurant in the world, the only thing harder to find at Noma than out of season vegetables are reservations. Fortunately, there's a workaround. Just a summer plum's toss from Noma's back door, Mr. Redzepi has opened 108, a stylishly casual alternative that's a third of the price, yet far more than half as good. Prep cooks run ingredients back and forth between the two kitchens, but a Noma alumnus, Kristian Baumann, is firmly at the helm. Chef stalkers will find Noma staffers starting their mornings at 108, where an adjacent venue called the Corner doubles as a top flight coffee shop with tea and pastries by day and a modern enoteca with beer and snacks by night. "It's a friendly vibe," Mr. Baumann said. "I wanted people to relax and have fun with family or a group of friends." Although 108 officially opened on July 27, it began as a 13 week pop up at Noma while Mr. Redzepi and company were off cooking in Australia. The kitchen is already in practiced rhythm, and the first dish, like many on the menu, had the hallmarks of Noma's creative perfectionism: a raft of crisp steamed romaine stems marinated in a paste made from the leaves, served with aged turbot roe and adorned with marigold petals. Highly Instagrammable, it's also delicious. The restaurant's bright, no fustiness allowed atmosphere makes you want to eat it with your hands help there arrives with the bread, a sourdough rye that is satisfyingly crusty outside and chewy soft inside. The menu is in Danish; instead of the bucket listers who frequented Noma, 108 hopes to woo locals. "We call 108 a Copenhagen kitchen," Mr. Baumann said. "Foraging, fermentation and collaborating closely with farmers are the pillars of our kitchen." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
As has happened so many times since the recovery began nearly five years ago, the economy turned in another disappointing quarterly performance, surprising even the most pessimistic observers as growth in the first three months of 2014 slowed to a near standstill. But looking past the weak report from the Commerce Department on Wednesday morning, policy makers at the Federal Reserve said they believed that activity was already rebounding from the deep winter dive, and are sticking with their plan to gradually reduce monthly bond purchases aimed at stimulating the economy. While that optimism was reassuring for Wall Street, which rallied after the Fed announcement, the view in the rear view mirror was as bleak as a January walk along the Hudson River. In their initial estimate for growth in the months of January, February and March, government statisticians said output expanded at an annual rate of just 0.1 percent, although experts noted that figure was affected by one time headwinds like unusually cold weather and slower inventory gains after businesses aggressively built up stockpiles in the second half of 2013. For all the attention devoted to the quarterly fluctuations, the current underlying rate of expansion is not much different from the frustratingly slow trajectory in place ever since the economy began to recover from the Great Recession. The average quarterly rate of growth since the summer of 2009 stands at 2.2 percent. Even if activity picks up in the current quarter and the second half of the year, said Dan North, chief economist at Euler Hermes North America, a large insurer, the annual growth rate in 2014 will most likely still be below the post World War II average just over 3 percent. "We've been living in sub 3 percent land, and people have gotten used to that as the new normal," Mr. North said. "But it's not. It's anemic." With midterm congressional elections on the horizon in November, the seeming inability of the economy to gain any sustained momentum is also likely to weigh on the fortunes of Democrats up for re election on Capitol Hill, since their prospects are in many ways tied to voter attitudes toward the performance of President Obama. His poll numbers have been sinking, and although there have been some encouraging economic signs recently, like a surging stock market and a gradual fall in the unemployment rate, much of the electorate remains very skeptical that things are getting any better. "Weather was a factor, but it has become increasingly clear that the housing recovery has lost steam over the past six months, as higher mortgage rates and higher prices have weighed on buyer demand for new homes," Ryan Wang, United States economist at HSBC, said in a note to clients. Corporate investment in equipment, which jumped sharply in the fourth quarter of 2013, reversed course in the first quarter, a major reason overall business investment slackened, shaving 0.4 percent off growth. Other major sources of weakness included a slower buildup in inventories, which reduced the pace of expansion by 0.6 percent, and a weakening trade balance, cutting 0.8 percent off total growth. For all the controversy over Mr. Obama's health care reform efforts, the rollout of the program actually made the difference between a stall and an outright contraction last quarter, as a surge in health care spending added 1.1 percent to growth. Although prices for health care have not been rising sharply at all, consumption has, and economists expect the sector to continue to gain strength in the months ahead. Wednesday's report was the first of three estimates of growth by government statisticians, and subsequent revisions could move the final figure up or down sharply as more data comes in, with the next report by the Commerce Department on gross domestic product scheduled for May 29. The fresh economic indicators and the Fed announcement Wednesday afternoon kicked off a busy few days for economists and investors, and Wall Street will be glued to the flow of data. On Thursday, the Commerce Department will report new figures on personal income and spending in March, followed on Friday by the Labor Department's latest data on the job market in April. The consensus among economists calls for a jump in payrolls of 215,000, with the unemployment rate falling by 0.1 percent to 6.6 percent. On Wednesday, the payroll processor ADP said that American businesses increased hiring in April, adding 220,000 jobs in April, the most since November and up from 209,000 in March. The ADP numbers cover only private businesses and often diverge from the government's more comprehensive report. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Pull up to the 7 Eleven in this car and you feel like Leonard Bernstein arriving at Lincoln Center. Ride in the back and you're escorting Julie Andrews to the Oscars. The doors are substantial enough to repel anything Occupy Wall Street throws at them, and it's effortlessly powerful enough to outrun any S.E.C. subpoena. The 2014 Mercedes Benz S550 4Matic sedan is so advanced it should be in geosynchronous orbit over Gstaad. The new S Class wears hyperbole well. It isn't merely a new version of Mercedes's largest sedan, but a technological leap beyond its ancestors. It's built differently, ambitious in its details and utterly indomitable in how it behaves and performs. It's not the car of the future, but it's the car that some car of the future will be measured against. Yes, it's luxurious, but concentrating on that is to miss its fundamental brilliance. It's a new and better Mercedes, but the liturgy is familiar. It's the only car in the current line that comes only with a traditional radiator shell and tristar hood ornament. The car is too dignified and temperate for a big corporate logo in the middle of its grille. While the entire skin of the new S Class is aluminum, a steel cage structure undergirds and supports it. The result, Mercedes asserts, is more rigid and crash resistant than the previous generation S Class, but slightly lighter. At 124.6 inches, the wheelbase carries over from the previous generation and the overall length is still pegged at 2.5 inches beyond 17 feet. And at 4,773 pounds when equipped with the optional 4Matic all wheel drive system, it's a road bound dreadnought. It's not a car that draws attention, but it has a mature, reassuring presence. It's the steel and aluminum embodiment of adult supervision: George C. Marshall at the State Department or Dr. Zorba at County General Hospital. It's more cleanly elegant than the previous S Class, but hardly flamboyant. Of course, Mercedes has adopted LED lighting, but it doesn't define this car's face the way Audi's Glitter Gulch headlights do on the A8. It's the huge radiator shape grille that announces this car even at night. Down each side, the flanks are sculpted to minimize the appearance of mass; the back end tapers to a tall fantail. Around the world, the S Class is offered with engines ranging up from ordinary V6s and diesels. In the United States, however, only gasoline burning twin turbocharged V8s and V12s are offered. A hybrid will eventually be added. The high performance 142,425 S63 AMG 4Matic sedan uses a 5.5 liter V8 rated at a thundering 577 horsepower. The 222,925 S65 AMG's 6 liter V12 runs at a mind and spine boggling 621 horsepower. There's also, starting at 167,825, the S600 with a 523 horsepower version of the 6 liter V12 for buyers who want the creamy 12 cylinder experience without the high performance pretensions. With a base price of 93,825, the S550 seems like a bargain compared with its six figure near twins. And with a 4.7 liter version of the direct injected, twin turbo V8 rated at 449 horsepower and 516 pound feet of torque, it's thickly muscled. Behind the engine is a 7 speed automatic transmission feeding the 4Matic system. The 3,000 premium for 4Matic seems almost cheap. But adding in items like a 4,500 Premium Package, a 5,900 Sport Package, 4,450 for Nut Brown Nappa leather upholstery and the adorably named 2,600 Warmth and Comfort Package brought the test car's bottom line to 121,345. When warmth and comfort are on the options list, cuddly is unlikely to be part of a car's character. And there is a coolness that's immediately apparent about the new S Class. Mercedes proudly hails this as the first car that doesn't have a single bulb in it everything is lighted with LEDs. Opening the door brings with it one of five selectable lighting themes. I nicknamed them Mirage, Bellagio, Wynn, Encore and Golden Nugget. That noted, the rest of the cabin is spectacular. Conventional gauges in the dash have been replaced with two 12.3 inch high resolution screens that reconfigure themselves according to what the driver is doing at any moment. If the night vision system is operating, for instance, the screen directly in front of the driver displays what's in front of the car in high contrast black and white instead of the usual oversize speedometer and tachometer. The screen to the right usually displays navigation information and the ventilation settings. But the dazzling light show and video screens are a sideshow. It's the sweeping shapes of the door panels and dashboard, accented with eyeball vents and finished in various metallic surfaces, several different gorgeous woods and leather that feels almost like velvet that elevate the S Class beyond the competition, which is often even more expensive. Throw in heated, cooled, 16 way adjustable front thrones you can order up to six massage programs including hot stone effects and the most comfortable back seat not found in a private rail car, and the effect is astonishing. A cabin atomizer infuses the air with four scents: Nightlife Mood, Sports Mood, Downtown Mood and Freeside Mood. They all smell like money to me. Start the engine and it settles into nearly silent idle. A wand on the steering column electronically engages the transmission, and then, it seems, the rest of the world moves while the car stays put. The isolation of the passenger cell is so thorough that the sensation of movement itself is muted. There is even a second reverse gear to more gently guide this ship out of port. But as speed grows, the S550's talents become increasingly apparent. Tuned to produce its peak torque at a low 1,800 r.p.m., the S550's engine is never stressed or strained in normal operation. At part throttle, the transmission's seven gears change almost imperceptibly as the engine approaches 3,000 r.p.m. At full throttle, the engine will run to its operating limit of 6,300 r.p.m. But what's the point of doing that in this car? Mercedes says the S550 will glide to 60 miles per hour in only 4.8 seconds, and it's hard to believe anyone who can afford this car would be in that much of a hurry. Mercedes has updated and redesigned its Airmatic air suspension for the S Class, and it feels as if it obliterates road bumps as it hovers over them. Other cars in this price class may be more in the vein of a sport sedan, but the S Class the S550 at least is about isolation from the road. That isolation doesn't come with an unmoored or floaty ride. It's as if the Airmatic system creates an alternate reality to the road. And that, I might add, was in an S550 lacking the optional Magic Body Control technology that scans the road surface ahead with cameras and then adjusts suspension damping to match what it sees. There should be more feel through the electromechanical steering, and there's no way to overcome the S550's mass as it winds through corners. But when it comes to driving serenity while covering great distances over highways, there aren't any better cars. It's so good, in fact, that it hardly needs a driver at all. That's because Mercedes has embedded a system called Intelligent Drive that will drive the car in 16 second bursts, at least. It's the logical extension of existing technologies like the radar based active cruise control, lane keeping systems and accident avoidance sensors. With the Distronic cruise control set, the Intelligent Drive system uses its sensors to monitor cars in front, track the lines that define lanes on a highway and scan for unexpected obstacles. With your hands on the steering wheel, you can feel the system adjusting as the S550 enters gentle curves or reacts to other cars entering in front of it. But the real fun comes as you take your hands off the wheel and the car continues to drive itself. Then, 11 seconds later, the S550 realizes you're behaving like an idiot and a graphic shows up on the dash depicting a steering wheel with two red hands. Wait another five seconds beyond that and a warning tone announces that the car is no longer driving itself and the moron behind the wheel had better grab it. So it's not quite set and forget self driving yet. In fact, because the system practically demands that the human driver pay attention, it's of only limited utility. But it sure is fun to watch in action. What's most satisfying about the S550 is how tightly it ties all the technology together. Nothing feels tacked on; every bit of tech is a seamless part of the car's character. And beyond that, it expands upon the virtues expected of a large Mercedes it seems fantastically well built, supremely comfortable and in every way impressively overengineered. It's not a cheap car, but it's a bargain compared with the 267,800 Rolls Royce Ghost, the 205,825 Bentley Flying Spur or the 143,600 Maserati Quattroporte V8. After the disappointing CLA250 that now sits at the bottom of the line, it's reassuring that toward the top the company still knows how to build a real Mercedes. After a hard day guiding the International Monetary Fund, arguing before the Supreme Court or figuring out how to maximize the value of your franchise's N.F.L. draft picks, this is the automotive decompression chamber you deserve. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Let us dive into the sea, beyond the colorful world of the sun. About 1,000 to 2,000 feet down, we'll arrive at a place where only blue beams in sunlight can penetrate. This is the home of the swell shark and chain catshark. Look at them with your human, land ready eyes, and all you'll see are a couple of unimpressive fish, spotted in shades of brown, beige and gray. But peer through a blue filter, more like the way these sharks see each other, and behold beaming beauties robed in fluorescent green spots. Recently scientists discovered that these sharks see the world totally differently than we do. They're mostly colorblind, with eyes that can detect only the blue green spectrum. This means when the sharks appear to change color in the blue water, they're almost projecting a secret code to other sharks: One pattern male, the other female come and get it. But just how they take blue light from their dull environment and transform it into a neon sign has been a mystery. In a study published Thursday in iScience, researchers reveal the secret behind this magical transformation: Molecules inside their scales transform how shark skin interacts with light, bringing in blue photons, and sending out green. This improved understanding of these sharks' luminous illusions may lead to improvements in scientific imaging, as the study of biofluorescence in other marine life already has. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. This phenomenon is widespread, and these sharks are among at least 200 marine species known to color their dim oceanic world through biofluorescence. But the molecules these shark species use are nothing like the painting tools scientists know the others to use. "I think this is just yet another amazing feature of shark skin that we didn't already know about just adding to their list of superpowers," said David Gruber, a marine biologist at City University of New York and an author on the paper. These aren't the charismatic predators "that make it onto shark week," he adds. "But if we look at them deeply, we'll see that there are hidden secrets and beauty." Shark skin is weird, plated in toothlike scales called denticles. To find their hidden beauty, Dr. Gruber worked with Jason Crawford, a biochemist at Yale University, and other colleagues. Dr. Crawford helped determine what metabolic pathways, or sequences of chemical reactions inside cells, could explain the neon shark skin of the swell and catshark. Under the microscope, they noticed several types of dendrites that, depending on their size, emitted green light of varying intensities in response to blue light. Some dendrites focused the light, channeling it outward like a kitschy fiber optic light display. Examining the skin more closely, the team found a set of molecules that were derived from tryptophan, an amino acid important for sleep and mood in humans. These molecules also contained bromine, which changes how the molecules, and essentially the skin, interacts with light. Those in the light skin, for example, could turn blue light into green light, creating that neon beacon for the other sharks to see. Many fluorescent marine animals seem to have evolved their own techniques for transforming light. The most well studied among them is the use of green fluorescent protein, which can make neon rainbows out of jellyfish, corals and other animals in shallower depths. But the sharks' process was unlike any of these. These small molecule metabolites in the shark skin may have stuck around because it helps sharks recognize mates in dark blue places. But some also have known antibiotic properties, which may explain why the shark skin stays so clean around so much bacteria on the seafloor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
About 50 people sat in front of their computers on a recent afternoon, banging on pots and pans with kitchen utensils. In a departure from common Zoom etiquette, everyone was unmuted and making as much noise as possible. What began as an attempt to find a synchronized beat quickly unraveled into clanging, joyful chaos. This group activity, based on a choreographic score called "Thunderous Clash," was an online introduction to a largely offline project, Yanira Castro's "Last Audience: A Performance Manual." Before participants left the Zoom event, they received a PDF of the score basically a set of written instructions so that they could try it in full on their own. (The complete "Thunderous Clash," inspired by the form of pot banging protest known as a cacerolazo, Spanish for casserole, calls for running and shouting with a large group of people, "for a good long time.") "Last Audience: A Performance Manual" is an effort to maintain the liveness of performance by handing over the instructions for a work's creation. The manual, to be released in November by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, contains 28 scores from Ms. Castro's 2019 work "Last Audience," adapted so that anyone can try them at home. The scores involve everyday movement and household items no dance training or elaborate materials required. Rather than canceling or rescheduling the engagement, Tara Aisha Willis, a curator of performance at the museum, invited Ms. Castro to reimagine "Last Audience" in an another format. While many choreographers were adapting to digital spaces, making dance films and Zoom dances, Ms. Castro felt herself pulled in a different direction. "I've found watching dance to be really hard online," she said in a phone interview. "There are times when it has made me cry, because I just want to be there." For her project, she wanted people to have an experience "really rooted in their bodies." "I really didn't want it to be about the screen," she said. "Last Audience," which had its premiere last year at New York Live Arts, lends itself naturally to the form of a do it yourself manual. It relies on scores that can be written down, functioning as a script or stage directions. And it's highly participatory, contingent on the active involvement of an audience, while also interested in audience refusal and ambivalence. The process of creating the manual, Ms. Castro said, "in some ways felt like the project becoming more itself." In the stage version, Ms. Castro and several members of her company, a canary torsi (an anagram of her name), guide participants through a series of scores that change with each performance. (The idea, she said, was to keep the performers "in a place of discovery with the audience.") When I attended last year, I was asked to join a chorus whispering variations on the phrase "have mercy," and to illuminate the space around me with a flashlight. The stage teemed with activity, as individuals and groups completed various tasks, or declined to take them on. "It's energetically a lot to negotiate," said David Thomson, one of the performer guides, reflecting on his role in the show. "It's like having a party. Some people are bored, and you have to be OK with it, and other people are unruly." For the audience participants, it was unclear what would happen next, or why; you were just along for the ride. The manual reveals much more, not only the scores themselves, but also some of the thinking behind them. Ms. Castro, who was born in Puerto Rico and lives in Brooklyn, began creating "Last Audience" in response to the 2016 presidential election and what she calls "a real reckoning for the country." (She also notes how ubiquitous the word "reckoning" has since become.) But until assembling the manual, which includes writing by her and her collaborators Mr. Thomson, Devynn Emory, Leslie Cuyjet, Pamela Vail and Kathy Couch, who was also instrumental as a designer she wasn't explicit about her intentions. "I think many of us in the performance world have this training of not wanting to impede the interpretation, in any way, of the audience," she said. "That means maybe not speaking to why you made something." But as she drafted an introduction to the manual, in the tumultuous months before another election, she tried a new approach. "I'm going to do that thing I never do, which is to say: This is why I did this piece," she recalled thinking. "I'm going to tell you directly why, and it's about slavery, it's about genocide, it's about our common American history." In the introduction, she writes about her visceral feeling, four years ago, that these violent histories "had been dragged out into the public square, under stadium lighting, and we were all staring at the carcass." While the project takes "an analog approach to the moment," Ms. Willis said, it also has some digital components. An accompanying website, lastaudience.com, provides video and audio recordings to help with enacting some of the scores. Participants are also asked to document their performances with photographs of the household items or spaces they used pots and spoons, for instance and upload them to the website, where they become part of a publicly viewable archive. Anyone who purchases the manual (which is also available as a PDF) is invited to join an online gathering on Dec. 13, around a meal of arroz con gandules (rice and pigeon peas), a Puerto Rican dish that Ms. Castro served before live performances of "Last Audience." The manual includes a recipe, its own kind of score, so that anyone can make the dish and bring it to the Zoom table. The Chicago based artist and chef Jorge Felix will join Ms. Castro and members of her company for a conversation about food and other forms of nourishment. The online meal is also a chance for people to discuss their experiences with the scores, even if they have only read them. Ms. Castro said she has no fixed expectations for how people will use the manual. "It's hopefully a gift that's like, you can do this if you want," she said. Some might choose to do the scores in full. But for her, "being present with the page" is also enough, its own kind of live experience. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The explosions at the House impeachment hearings Wednesday were not the work of a mad bomber. The man deploying the bombshells seemed oddly to be enjoying himself. The testimony of the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon D. Sondland , was deeply serious in substance: that he and his colleagues "followed the president's orders" in pressuring Ukraine to investigate Donald Trump's political rivals; that there was a "quid pro quo" expected; and that "everyone was in the loop" on the plan, including several high level officials. In the Watergate hearings, John Dean (now serving as a commentator on CNN) played the part of the heavy hearted insider testifying against his administration out of grim duty. Mr. Sondland showed up wearing the smirk of a man able to imagine himself the toast of any room even if that room was investigating an international scandal that he had a major role in. Told that Tim Morrison, a national security aide, had referred to his actions as "the Gordon problem," he cringe joked, "That's what my wife calls me. Maybe they're talking. Should I be worried?" He grinned through rounds of exasperated questioning, through recollections of a cheerfully profane phone call with the president, through the memory of buying a "V.V.I.P." ticket to the inaugural. Mr. Sondland was the V.V.I.P. on Wednesday. But there were serious stakes, for the country and for him personally. He had already emerged as an offscreen figure in the hearings, described in phone calls and text chains, orchestrating the efforts to muscle political favors out of the Ukrainians. He showed up in person as the defendant in the legal drama who refuses to be the fall guy. Beyond the bombshell explosions, if you listened closely, you also heard a series of clicks: Mr. Sondland handcuffing himself, one by one, to a list of officials attempting to stay out of the scandal. More than any statement, the faces on the screen seemed to tell the story on Wednesday. Adam Schiff , given copious material to work with by Mr. Sondland , kept an intent headlight stare throughout. After the first round of Democratic questioning, the ranking minority member, Devin Nunes , appeared to be digesting a bad clam. And Mr. Sondland seemed to take the high pressure appearance with a look of enjoyment, even impishness : It all felt disorienting, partly because Mr. Sondland wasn't plainly as friendly or hostile a witness to the opposing parties as his predecessors. On Tuesday, for instance, Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman was hailed by Democrats, while Republicans insinuated that he was disloyal. Mr. Sondland, on the other hand, came into the session with a statement devastating to the White House, but his answers grew cagier as the day went on. Democratic representatives praised him as a successful child of immigrants, then pushed him for more clarity. Republicans commended him for his service, then laid into him for relying on his presumptions of the president's motives. Under blistering questioning from Jim Jordan, a Republican, and Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat, his grin melted to a grimace. Perhaps being the V.V.I.P. was less than entirely fun. Even President Trump, who has not hesitated to assail others for testifying against him, went back and forth on Mr. Sondland. Early Wednesday, he dismissed him as "not a man I know well." ("Easy come, easy go," the ambassador said when he heard about the remark. ) Then, after the ambassador related a phone call in which a "cranky" Mr. Trump had said "I want nothing" from Ukraine, the president met reporters to give a dramatic, self exonerating reading of his own secondhand testimony, scrawled in Sharpie: The president's performance omitted a lot of context: that he had made those comments the day the whistle blower's complaint came to the intelligence committee's attention; that Mr. Sondland himself had said that the quid pro quo was widely understood among his colleagues; and that, in a hearing earlier this year a sort of prequel to today Mr. Trump's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen testified that he had a practice of giving orders "in a code." But Mr. Trump knows the value of a dramatic televised statement. In fact, that value was central to Wednesday's testimony. Mr. Sondland testified how important it was to Mr. Trump that the president of Ukraine publicly announce an investigation involving Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter: "He had to announce the investigations. He didn't actually have to do them." As we now know, the whistle blower's charges came out, the aid to Ukraine was released and the Ukrainian president never gave that statement to CNN. Instead, the spectacle is playing out on every news channel. And by the end of the day, it had even wiped the smile off Mr. Sondland's face. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
As many people check the news compulsively for even the smallest positive word on vaccine development, we are at an anniversary moment in vaccine history. We are between the anniversary of the day May 14, 1796 that Edward Jenner inoculated 8 year old James Phipps with cowpox virus, and the day July 1, 1796 that he tested his new process by inoculating the same child with smallpox virus, to find out whether he was protected. This is the season in which that experimental vaccine was doing its work in the child's immune system, 224 years ago. Although that is not the kind of nice round anniversary number we usually celebrate, it's worth reflecting on the biologic brilliance of the technique, on the ethics of vaccine development and testing, then and now, and above all, on what our bodies and immune systems are capable of doing, when appropriately prompted. Because whatever the scientific brilliance involved in vaccine development and we are watching an unprecedented level of inventiveness, improvisation, adaptation and cooperation now in the current Covid science successful vaccine development amounts to our human entrepreneurial capacities allowing us to turn on a system that we certainly did not build ourselves, though we recreate it from our internal instruction sheets every time an infant is born. Smallpox, caused by the Variola virus, stalked and killed humans for millenniums, leaving traces on the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs (it did not respect high rank) and in the ancient texts of China and India. It came into Europe four or five centuries before the Common Era, and Europeans brought it to the New World, where it devastated the Indigenous populations. It killed anywhere from 20 percent to 60 percent of the people who were infected, left most of the survivors badly scarred, and a third of them blind. Mortality was higher among children, and almost all infected infants died. Before there was any way to protect against smallpox, people did understand that those who had the disease and recovered would not get sick again, even if they were exposed to the disease. Building on this observation, before vaccination, there was variolation, a technique in which smallpox was deliberately introduced into the body of someone who had never had the disease, either by blowing dried scabs up the nose or by inoculating pus from a pustule. Variolation was practiced in Africa and in Asia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador in Constantinople, her own face scarred by smallpox, had her young son inoculated by variolation in 1718, and brought news of the technique back to Europe. It arrived in the New World as a practice known to some of the enslaved people brought from Africa; one of them, Onesimus, taught Cotton Mather about the practice, and Mather, a Puritan minister best remembered today for his role in the Salem witch trials, used the technique in a 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston. Variolation did confer immunity, when it worked, but it was a risky technique, with a mortality rate of 2 percent; people could develop full blown smallpox, or could spread the infection to others. The great human invention involved in vaccination, instead, was to turn on the immune system just as effectively with something that was not actually live potent smallpox virus. The person widely credited with that invention, Edward Jenner, was a British country doctor. As a child in Gloucester, he had been successfully inoculated with smallpox virus. He was not the only one to take note of the observation that women who worked in dairies and contracted the much milder infection of cowpox caused by the Vaccinia virus, named for vacca, the Latin word for cow were immune to smallpox. In fact, he was not the first to try using the cowpox virus to protect against smallpox, but he was the one who made an experiment of it, published his results, and took it on as a crusade. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. The virus he used came from a dairymaid, Sarah Nelmes, who got it from a cow named Blossom. In May of 1796, Jenner inoculated the 8 year old James Phipps, the son of his gardener, and carefully recorded the symptoms, as the boy developed low grade fever, swollen lymph nodes under his arm, loss of appetite and then recovered. And then in July, Jenner inoculated him with smallpox, and he did not get sick. Jenner published his work a few years later. The practice spread in both Europe and the United States, although there was also controversy, right from the beginning, about whether it was dangerous, and whether it could or should be made compulsory. Of course, medical research standards have evolved since then. "His experiment would be completely condemned, even though it demonstrated something of importance on a par with fighting today's plague," said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU Langone Medical Center. "He used a poor kid, who didn't consent or volunteer, his father 'volunteered' him to please his employer." Still, Dr. Caplan has supported the idea of human challenge trials for a new coronavirus vaccine, that is, of deliberately exposing vaccinated volunteers to the disease. "We've evolved an ethical framework that would make it more acceptable," he said. "Giving the disease after you vaccinate is not inherently always wrong it's how you do it, how you select the person." What was happening in 1796 inside the body of James Phipps was something for which Jenner had no vocabulary, a highly complex immune process which has only begun to be teased out over the past 20 years. The vaccinia virus turned on an intricate "cascading network of integrated immune pathways," scientists wrote in a 2009 article. And then the vaccinated person was left with a group of white blood cells, a "small, long lived memory population capable of responding to subsequent infection." That's vaccination isn't it beautiful? As for Jenner, he set up a clinic in a small garden cottage, calling it the "Temple of Vaccinia," and offered free vaccination to the poor. His own family was blighted by a different microbe; tuberculosis killed his son and his wife Smallpox was our familiar; it infected only humans. That was, in the end, what made it possible to dream of eradicating the disease, by vaccinating the world, by tracking down every last case. And the eradication of smallpox (the last natural case was in 1977) stands as the kind of human achievement multinational, data based, reaching all levels of society that we need our scientists and our governments to replicate now. Because we are living through a pandemic, we find ourselves hoping now for a vaccine which will, in some sense, give us back the world, or at least, a sense of safety as we move about it; protect our grandparents, allow our students to learn and live in groups, and offer us ways back to the many plans for work and for play which are currently shadowed, or on hold altogether. Vaccination is named for that cowpox virus which successfully tricks the immune system, setting off that complicated powerful protective reaction without requiring exposure to the real danger. That's what vaccines do, though vaccine science has come a long way since then; current approaches to a coronavirus vaccine would not include a live unaltered virus, like the one that Jenner used, but would rely on inactivated or weakened virus, or segments of viral genes. To get to the vaccine we're hoping for now if we're lucky will involve a great deal of very smart science, and the participation of many animal subjects, from mice to monkeys, followed by a cohort of human volunteer subjects, to grant consent and be cared for according to our modern ethical framework, even if we do set up special pandemic parameters. It's an appropriate moment to remember Edward Jenner, James Phipps, Sarah Nelmes and even Blossom the cow. Dr. Perri Klass is the author of the forthcoming book "A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future," on how our world has been transformed by the radical decline of infant and child mortality. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
LOS ANGELES Disney reported a 19 percent increase in quarterly profit on Tuesday, with growth from its consumer products, theme parks and movie businesses offsetting another period of modest decline at ESPN. For the quarter that ended on Dec. 27, the first of Disney's 2015 fiscal year, the entertainment giant reported net income of 2.18 billion, or 1.27 a share, up from 1.84 billion, or 1.03 a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 9 percent, to 13.39 billion. Analysts had been expecting 1.07 cents a share for income and revenue of 12.87 billion. Disney shares rose as much as 5 percent in after hours trading, to roughly 98.50. Disney is known for exceeding analyst expectations, but not by such a wide margin. Notably, the company faced arduous year on year comparisons; the first quarter of 2014 was a flush period fueled by the release of the blockbuster "Frozen" in theaters, stout sales of the Disney Infinity video game and record theme park attendance. This time around, profit climbed substantially in every division except for the one that has traditionally served as Disney's financial engine: ESPN. Operating income at the company's cable networks division, which is dominated by ESPN but also includes properties like the Disney Channel, declined 2 percent, to 1.26 billion. The decline, while modest, is likely to feed investor concern about higher sports programming costs. It was the third quarter in a row that more expensive contracts this time with the National Football League dented ESPN's financial results. ESPN also saw higher administrative costs in the quarter and lower ad revenue. While acknowledging a "short term" impact from rising sports costs, James A. Rasulo, Disney's chief financial officer, told analysts on a conference call that the company was "confident in our ability to continue to grow ESPN in the long term." Mr. Rasulo added that ESPN would see higher costs again in the second quarter but that the impact toward the end of the year would be "much lighter." The star of the quarter was Disney Consumer Products, which generated operating income of 626 million, a 46 percent increase from a year earlier. Merchandise related to "Frozen," "Guardians of the Galaxy" and stalwarts like Spider Man and Minnie Mouse contributed to the gain. Disney noted that its chain of retail stores contributed meaningful growth in Europe, Japan and North America. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, told analysts that the consumer products unit has seen unusual "post holiday momentum." He noted that several new films, including a live action "Cinderella" in March and "The Avengers: Age of Ultron" in May, could bring substantial merchandise sales. Operating profit at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts surged 20 percent, to 805 million, because of higher ticket, merchandise and food spending at Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California, both of which had record attendance. Occupancy at Disney's domestic hotels reached a stellar 89 percent. Results were weaker overseas as a result of higher costs at Hong Kong Disneyland and construction spending at Shanghai Disneyland, which Disney said on Tuesday would open in spring of 2016. (Principal construction remains on track to be finished by the end of this year, the company said.) Mr. Iger told analysts to expect the company to soon unveil "ambitious" plans for "Star Wars" themed expansions at multiple parks. Home entertainment spending on films like "Maleficent" and "Guardians of the Galaxy" contributed to a 33 percent increase in operating profit at Walt Disney Studios, to 544 million. The company's broadcast television division reported a 35 percent increase in operating income, to 240 million, due in large part to the sale into syndication of Disney owned programs like "Criminal Minds," "Scandal" and "Once Upon a Time." Disney's broadcast network, ABC, notched advertising declines, however. And Disney Interactive, a unit that includes video games and Disney.com, had a 36 percent rise in operating income, to 75 million, driven by mobile gaming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
TEL AVIV When Israel imposed a coronavirus lockdown in March, I walked home after raiding the supermarket and was able to hear the birds chirping on Dizengoff Street, one of the busiest arteries here. The next day I spoke to my father in Jerusalem, where the country's first death from coronavirus had just been recorded. We both danced around the fact that, since his age made him more susceptible to complications from the virus, it would probably be a long time before we could see each other. Movement was restricted to within 100 meters (about 330 feet) from one's home. I taped to our fridge a "schedule" for my children, who were 3 1/2 and 1 1/2 , which included assembling puzzles in the living room, coloring on our tiny porch and tent building in their room. Five days later, I scrapped the "schedule" because every unfilled task felt like a personal failure. When my husband got off work (our dining table became his home office), I would lock myself on the porch with the shutters down to write. The government reopened schools, allowed indoor dining, stopped enforcing social distancing in shopping malls and permitted large weddings. These reckless decisions reversed the public health gains of the first lockdown. Cases started to spike to over 8,000 a day and hospital beds filled perilously close to capacity by September, and it became clear that another closure was inevitable. On Sept. 18, the government imposed a second national lockdown. But it did not feel like deja vu. Whatever trust Israelis had had in the government to lead us through the pandemic has evaporated. The sense of national solidarity the kind of wartime singleness of purpose that characterized the first lockdown has been replaced by what can only be described as a free for all. Soon after the new restrictions were announced, I started hearing of shortcuts. Family friends booked a flight to Greece the next day; another couple went to Italy. The workshare office where I rent a desk, which had been closed for much of the first lockdown, is staying open this time around. A friend's marijuana supplier took to riding around town in the uniform of a food delivery service. (Deliverymen are the only people allowed to move freely.) "Fake lockdown" was the headline of one newspaper article. The WhatsApp groups at both my children's preschools were flooded with questions: Could we keep the preschool open if we divided the kids into two groups? Into three? Could we parents just cover whatever fine the center might get? Soon, it also became apparent that the virus wasn't respreading uniformly. Dr. Ronni Gamzu, Mr. Netanyahu's coronavirus czar, carved the country into red, yellow or green zones depending on their virus rates. He intended to enforce lockdowns in the hardest hit places. But his plan, which became known as the "traffic light plan," turned into political dynamite: The red cities were found to be overwhelmingly ultra Orthodox or Arab, attesting to the crowded conditions in which these communities live. Mr. Netanyahu, for whom the ultra Orthodox parties are a crucial coalition partner, balked. We became the country with the highest rate of new coronavirus cases per capita in the world. The second lockdown was set to coincide with the Jewish holidays, when the economy would have slowed down anyway. But the timing has meant that for weeks all we heard from the Knesset was wrangling over prayers: Should synagogues be open? Should there be quotas? Will there be mass prayers outdoors? Mr. Netanyahu used the eventual decision to limit public prayer to also restrict the weekly protests against him outside his Jerusalem residence. The so called battle between "prayers" and "protests" has so thoroughly dominated the news in recent days that it is as though Israeli life can exist only on one of these axes. We are now two weeks into Israel's second closure, which has now been extended until at least mid October. My children will soon be back from a bike ride with my husband to a nearby park. Movement this time is limited to 3,300 feet. The cafe around the corner from us is open for takeout, though it is not supposed to be. The bike shop down the street has a handwritten note with a mobile phone number: "Call and I will open the door," it says. Close friends continue to send their daughter to her kindergarten, except that it is now held in the instructor's home and paid for off the books. That the restrictions are more scattershot this time doesn't make them any easier. As shocking as that first lockdown had been, the knowledge that we were all in this together had at least made it bearable. Maybe it is the workarounds that I see all around us now the creeping sense that we are the only "friyers" ("suckers") abiding by the rules or the general exhaustion of having to go through this a second time. Maybe it is the desperation I hear from friends who have now been furloughed twice or the uncertainty over whether this watered down version will even make a dent in the infection rate, but the mood is that much bleaker. On Thursday, 7,039 new cases were reported and more than 1,600 overall deaths have been recorded. Israel may be the first country to go through two national pandemic related lockdowns, but, sadly, it won't be the last. To the people living elsewhere who are about to experience a similar ordeal, I offer my condolences and a single thought: If you're going to do it, do it right. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The coronavirus has changed the way we live our daily lives and it has upended countless business sectors, including the New York real estate market. Brokers, buyers and sellers are struggling mightily to do business when it's anything but business as usual. Open houses are being eliminated, or at least circumscribed; brokers are doing FaceTime apartment tours for clients who are worried about being out. And, in the suburbs, they're scrambling to find short term rentals for clients who feel the walls and everything else closing in on them in the city. Getting Buyers into Your Home Restrictions on open houses now range from limits on frequency and duration, to required preregistration to full on bans in some buildings. Prospective buyers should be prepared to swap their shoes for booties before they start counting closets and to keep their (sanitized) hands to themselves. Even a week ago, before many businesses and schools closed, a survey by the National Association of Realtors found that 25 percent of sellers nationwide had already changed the terms of engagement with prospective buyers because of the virus. New requirements include a stop at a hand washing station, at the very least, a liberal spritz of hand sanitizer. In some instances, buyers are being asked to leave their shoes at the door and don booties. And they're often discouraged from touching kitchen and bathroom fixtures. Denae Montesi, a sales agent at William Raveis NYC, is punctilious about being the one to open and close the front door. She keeps as firm a grip on her iPad as she does on the doorknob, signing in prospective buyers at open houses rather than letting them do it themselves. Other brokers have chosen to go old school: they provide pens, wiping them down after each use, or simply invite attendees to keep them. Some sellers and brokers are requiring prospective attendees to preregister for open houses. "That way we can call them and assess their interest," Ms. Montesi said. "If they're just coming to educate themselves about the market this isn't the best time. The feeling is the fewer bodies the better." If the goal is sparse attendance, that goal is being realized. Some buildings and sellers have put the kibosh on open houses altogether a big shift for New Yorkers who have long appreciated the ease and efficiency of hitting three open houses on one weekend day. The board members of a building on Central Park South announced on March 10 that open houses would be limited "to two open houses per allotted time slot" and would be restricted to weekends between the hours of 9 and 5, with all attendees required to sign in at the concierge desk and present government issued identification. "As things with the virus are getting worse, people are getting more conservative," said Neil Davidowitz, the president of Orsid, a real estate management company. According to Fritz Frigan, Halstead Property's executive director of sales and leasing, the average number of open houses per weekend ranges from 5,500 to 6,000. By contrast, this past weekend, March 14 15, 3,900 were scheduled, but many were canceled. That's unfortunate said Kathy Braddock, a managing director at William Raveis NYC, "because obviously being able to go to the property is the best way to see the property." Granted, there's nothing magic about an open house, but a private showing requires more juggling all the more so with many people now working from home and many children out of school. "And with an open house," Ms. Braddock said, "the property has to only look great once a week." Some sellers who've already moved out of their apartments hear opportunity knocking. Nicole Beauchamp, a saleswoman at Engel Volkers NYC, has just such a client. "He told me: 'Gee, if other sellers are pulling back because they're home and they're children are home, we don't have any of those problems. We're going to keep moving forward, you can let people see it any time of day,'" said Ms. Beauchamp, who is holding appointment only open houses for the property as well as private showings. With limits on open houses, prospective buyers increasingly reluctant to be out and about, and sellers worried about just who will be coming through their door and touching their countertops, brokers are, by necessity, becoming expert house cleaners, videographers and public health screeners. It's now standard practice for a seller's agent to call a buyer's agent the night before a showing to make sure that the prospective buyer is feeling fine, has not been out of the country recently and is not bringing any children along to look at the property. "We're all learning the new rules of the time and we're all respectful of the rules," said Robin Kencel, an associate broker in the Greenwich office of Compass. Phil Scheinfeld, a salesman with Compass, arrives at his showings extra early to wipe the counters down with Clorox, to run a Swiffer over the floors and to spray with Lysol. When the prospective buyer exits, Mr. Scheinfeld repeats the process. In some cases, there's the additional challenge of having to do less showing and more telling. Neil Davidowitz of Orsid has been fielding calls from co op and condo boards about whether to temporarily shutter gyms and children's playrooms. "Some are contemplating it and some have already closed them," he said. "That means a prospective buyer would go to a building and not see the amenity package and that's a big part of the tour." Faced with a client who is looking for an apartment on the Upper East Side but who, for the moment, didn't want to get in a cab or take public transportation to the Upper East Side, Heather McDonough Domi, an associate broker at Compass, went around to several properties and shot detailed videos. Meanwhile, a London based couple abandoned plans to come to New York to look at properties with Holly Parker, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman. Instead, Ms. Parker took them on a FaceTime tour of one of the apartments under consideration: a three bedroom condo at 225 Fifth Avenue that's listed at 6.395 million. "It went well," Ms. Parker said. "We're still in conversation." Short term Rentals to Get Out of Town As the city moves toward a near total shutdown, some New Yorkers are looking for ways to leave its confines. Those who have second homes are heading to them and others with the means are seeking short term rentals in the more sparsely populated suburbs. Matt Breitenbach, an associate broker in Compass's Southampton office, just heard from a wealthy client who was looking to buy a second home in the Hamptons but now wants an immediate two week rental so he can escape the city. Another New York based client who works in finance had planned to rent out his East End property but has pulled it from the rental pool. Because his company has asked employees to work from home, he's going to make his Hamptons home his base of operations. Ms. Kencel, of Compass, said she had been fielding calls from New Yorkers in search of short term rentals in lower Fairfield County. "They want to be in a less dense area right now," Ms. Kencel said. "Some of them have children coming home from college to finish the term with online classes and they want their family to have more elbow room." These New Yorkers are not as fussy or demanding as they might otherwise be, Ms. Kencel said. A lucky thing since there are very few properties available for, say, two weeks or two months. "It's easier to find yearlong leases," she said. "But I'm working with some clients who are willing to sign a long term lease even though they don't plan on being here nearly that long." Some New Yorkers have decided it's time to leave the city for good. A year and a half ago, Serena Richards, a saleswoman in Halstead's Darien office, worked with two couples who were looking to move to the suburbs, then decided to stay put "because they would miss the New York vibe," Ms. Richards said. But in the last week both these couples have gotten back in touch: they're ready to buy in lower Fairfield County. The wide open spaces don't spell peace of mind to everyone, though, and perhaps they shouldn't. "The infrastructure including medical care is in off season mode," said Diane Saatchi, an associate broker at Saunders Associates in East Hampton. "It will really be at a stress point if a lot of people decide to come out here. They can take beautiful walks on the beach but they're fooling themselves if they think things will be easier." Some of Ms. Saatchi's clients, Hamptons part timers, have taken due note. "They're telling me they just have to get back to the city," she said, "because they don't want to be sick in the Hamptons." "Some people see the Hamptons as their safe place and others think it's safer to be in New York," Ms. Saatchi added. "I guess they're both right." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The researchers think that some time during the Early Cretaceous Period, a massive herbivorous dinosaur similar to an Iguanodon fell into a shallow swamp or bog. There, its head quickly became buried beneath the sediment. As it stewed in the stagnant, acidic pool, minerals began to replace the soft tissue in the cranium, preserving it for millions of years. "The acid solution would have pickled the parts of the brain that were immersed," Dr. Norman said. He added that the brain, which is incomplete, does not tell us much about dinosaurs. We already knew that they had brains, and we already thought their brains would probably look similar to those of crocodiles and birds. Instead, he thinks the finding will help get paleontologists to investigate their fossils more carefully because they could never know what might be hiding within them. "It's uniquely remarkable," he said, "but it's not going to change the way we think." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Beyond the D.J. in the Lobby: How Resorts Cater to the Creative Crowd Transformational travel or having experiences with lasting impact seems like a reach for hotels to espouse. But the Potato Head Studios property, set to open in Seminyak, Bali, this month, aims to encourage creative renewal among both guests and locals through sustainability workshops, artistic programming and even its own architecture. Designed by David Gianotten of OMA, the architectural firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, the resort organizes its 168 rooms in a raised structure, creating a ground level pavilion for music and performance events and workshops on recycled design. This public aspect, Mr. Gianotten said, transforms "a hotel that is typically for hotel guests' exclusive enjoyment, into a place for cultural encounters open to everyone living in and exploring Bali." The resort joins a growing list of hotels going beyond art on the walls and D.J.s in the lobbies to court the creative crowd. Both residents and travelers are being welcomed to tap their imagination through things like hands on pottery classes, design workshops and art therapy. "In today's extensively digitized social network environment, actual interpersonal interaction is prized," Henry H. Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and the president of Atmosphere Research Group, said. "The classes can also help the hotel become a more active and respected part of its community." Similarly, Ace Hotels has cultivated the culturally curious with art exhibitions and concerts. Its newest location, the Ace Hotel Kyoto, opening in Japan in April, plans to hold monthly workshops in Japanese language and culture and will house a cinema devoted to Japanese cult and classic films with English subtitles. Some resorts use creative programming as a means of cultural exploration. At Amanyangyun an Aman resort, opened in 2018 near Shanghai, that rebuilt 13 Ming and Qing dynasty villas on site a cultural center called Nan Shufang conjures a scholar's studio. Here, guests can learn Chinese calligraphy and practice Chinese brush painting. Other resorts incorporate creative classes as part of a holistic wellness approach. Opened in 2019, Blackberry Mountain, the sibling resort to Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tenn., houses an Art Studio offering opportunities to throw pots, build ceramics, paint, sketch, weave baskets or learn textile arts. This year, there are also periodic multiday events featuring professional artists such as the potter Keith Kreeger and the glass artist Richard Jolley. "Part of creating the programming for the Mountain was developing opportunities for guests to explore connection, nature and wellness beyond the traditional avenues," Mary Celeste Beall, Blackberry's owner, wrote in an email. The resort has fitness and yoga classes, massage therapy and many outdoor adventure activities, but the art program, she added, is designed for guests at any level of art proficiency to "reignite their imagination and shake them from their normal routine to tap into a deeper layer of creativity." Spas, too, are offering creative opportunities. The new Asaya Hong Kong, a destination spa in the Rosewood Hong Kong hotel, uses visual art, storytelling, movement, music and drama in its Expressive Arts Therapy as a means to emotional balance in a comprehensive program that also addresses fitness, nutrition, skin health and more. "Research has shown that creative expression can have a powerful impact on health and well being by reducing stress and increasing positive emotions," wrote Simon Marxer, the director of spa and well being for Miraval Group of destination spas, in an email. Locations in Tucson, Ariz. and Austin, Texas, offer classes such as painting to music or learning to photograph with an instant camera. Back in Bali, Potato Head Studios plans to house a recording studio, multifunctional gallery space and farm to table restaurant in a compound designed to balance community collaboration, sustainable living and vacation fun with the slogan, "Good Times, Do Good." Its approach extends to children who will be welcomed at a sustainably built playground made of bamboo and covered in recycled flip flops found on the island's beaches. It will be the site of workshops designed to teach zero waste building in hands on fashion. Ronald Akili, the founder and chief executive of Potato Head, which includes the new hotel, an existing hotel and a beach club, called the project a "creative village" intended to inspire travelers and community members of all ages through music events, design workshops and cultural excursions. "We hope to be the facilitators that allow them to connect while leaving as little environmental impact on the planet as possible," he wrote in an email. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Tony La Russa has a permanent home along the top row of the back wall in the Hall of Fame's plaque gallery in Cooperstown, N.Y., between Bobby Cox and Frank Thomas. That is where visitors will find La Russa: in profile, lips creased, eyes focused, a strategist in bronze. The first sentence of the text below his image cites his 2,728 victories, the third most for a manager. The plaque went up in 2014, and La Russa never expected the numbers to change. After starting his managing career with the Chicago White Sox in 1979, he seemingly finished it 32 years later with a victory in Game 7 of the World Series for the St. Louis Cardinals. Managing would not be part of his future. "I thought I'd probably get the chance," La Russa said on Thursday. "I didn't think I would want it." But La Russa left a hint, right there on the plaque, one of the few in the gallery without a logo on the cap. La Russa managed the Cardinals and the Oakland Athletics to three World Series appearances each, but he gave the White Sox equal standing in his reasoning: They gave him his start, and he remains a close friend of the team's owner, Jerry Reinsdorf. So when the White Sox sought a new manager to elevate a roster coming off its first playoff appearance in 12 years, La Russa was ready. They hired him on Thursday, making La Russa, at 76, the third oldest manager ever and the first to come out of retirement to manage after being enshrined in Cooperstown. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "We've spent a lot of time over the last few years talking about where we are in this rebuild, and phases the transition from phase one to phase two to phase three," General Manager Rick Hahn said. "This hiring today is another indication that we've moved on to that final, most exciting stage, and that is the one about competing for championships." The only managers who were older than La Russa during their tenures were Connie Mack, who was 87 in his final year with the Philadelphia A's in 1950, and Jack McKeon, who was 80 when he guided the 2011 Florida Marlins. La Russa needs 36 victories to move past John McGraw and into second place on the career list for managerial wins. (He is still 1,003 behind Mack.) La Russa stayed busy after retiring from the Cardinals, first working for Major League Baseball and then as the chief baseball officer for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He became an adviser to the Boston Red Sox in 2017, and then for the Los Angeles Angels in the 2020 season, taking the role much more seriously than most who have it, following the teams closely and often traveling to road games. "It was very difficult, increasingly so, to sit there and think about what's going on downstairs," he said of his recent roles, adding later: "I did get a fresh opinion and observation point for how difficult front office work is, I got a better feel for scouting and player development. But my heart was always in the dugout. When the first inquiry was made by the White Sox, I perked up." La Russa's ties to the White Sox go so deep that the man he replaced in 1979, Don Kessinger, was actually a player manager, a role no team has filled for decades. The closer in La Russa's first game, Ed Farmer, went on to spend 29 years as a team broadcaster before his death in April. La Russa even managed Minnie Minoso, who was born in 1925 and made a cameo in 1980 so he could play in a fifth decade. With the A's, especially, La Russa was considered an innovator young, well educated (he has a law degree) and the subject of a chapter in "Men At Work," the 1990 book by George F. Will, who said La Russa had an "information intensive approach" to game preparation. More recently, of course, the analytics revolution has significantly reshaped game strategy, as seen on Tuesday in the final game of the World Series between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Kevin Cash, the manager of the Rays, pulled Blake Snell from a shutout in the sixth inning, largely because data suggests pitchers should not face the same hitters three times in a game. The Dodgers, on their way to the title, quickly took the lead against the next pitcher. On Thursday, La Russa sidestepped a question about what he would have done in Cash's position. But he said that while he embraced the "wealth of information that helps you prepare," it was critical to make decisions based on the way a game unfolds. "Once the game starts, it's a very volatile experience," he said. "Players, not machines. How they vary, how the game may be changing within innings, much less games to series. That's why I think it's very important we use the term 'observational analytics.' So I think the difference is the preparation will be better I'm looking forward to it but the actual game decision making will be much like what I learned: You watch the game and try to figure out how to put people in position to win." La Russa was also asked about activism by players. He told Sports Illustrated in 2016 that he would not support a player taking a knee during the national anthem, but he said on Thursday that his stance had evolved. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Social groups demonstrating against Argentina's economic crisis, exacerbated by the national quarantine of the pandemic, in Buenos Aires, on May 7. Argentina is currently engaged in intense negotiations with its creditors over at least 65 billion in government debt. The most important part of that negotiation, which can make or break Argentina's economic recovery, is foreign currency debt. That is mostly in dollars, and mostly owned by foreigners. Argentina's 45 million residents, as well as hundreds of millions of people on this planet, have a large stake in the outcome of these negotiations. With vital foreign exchange earnings plummeting in the world recession, how much will be used for essential imports such as medicine or food, and how much to pay off debt? If governments are forced to use scarce foreign currency to make unsustainable debt payments, they will not be able to afford the health care, testing, medical equipment, and even "social distancing" measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic. And if the austerity prolongs or deepens economic crises, the problems of dealing with the health crisis worsen. These are the kinds of dire choices that sovereign debt negotiations could set the precedent for in the coming months. The World Food Program projects that the number of people who will be on the brink of starvation this year will roughly double, from 135 million to 265 million. In 2020 and 2021, low and middle income countries' payments on their public external debt alone will soar to between 2.6 trillion and 3.4 trillion. Argentina is among the many countries whose current debt burden is unsustainable. Some of the largest creditors rejected the government's initial offer, but they would be foolish to force Argentina into default. This could happen on May 22 when a grace period for interest payments expires, or earlier if negotiations break down. To its credit, the International Monetary Fund has recognized this reality since at least February, when it explained why it would not be possible for Argentina to use budget austerity to pay down the debt. A "meaningful contribution from private creditors" would be necessary to restore debt sustainability, the I.M.F. economists stated. In other words, private creditors who own 41 percent of Argentina's foreign currency debt would have to get less than their bonds' promised payments. Recognizing the need for the recovery of an economy already in its third year of recession, the I.M.F. conducted a more detailed analysis of Argentina's debt crisis in late March that proposed no spending cuts for the next four years. They concluded that the Argentine government could not afford to make any debt payments in foreign currency to private creditors from 2020 to 2024. The I.M.F. analysis of what might be sustainable is thus similar to what the recently elected Argentine government of President Alberto Fernandez is proposing. Of course the I.M.F. has also emphasized that there is enormous uncertainty about the near future and downside risks, since so much of what happens to both the Argentine and the regional and world economy depends on the unpredictable course of the pandemic. Even in the United States, a high income country whose central bank is currently printing trillions of dollars, the pandemic has led to losses of jobs and gross domestic product at levels not seen for more than 70 years. But the dangers are vastly greater for low and middle income countries, as in Latin America. The loss of export revenue can lead to balance of payments crises because the economy depends on these dollar earnings to pay for imports and debt service. The result can be shortages of essential, even lifesaving imports; as well as debt and financial crises that feed prolonged recessions and even depressions. The Argentina case clearly shows how important it is for governments to be able to achieve a sustainable debt settlement, and how dangerous it is to try and pay a debt burden that is unsustainable. In fact, some of these dangers materialized in Argentina before the Covid 19 crisis and world recession struck: an I.M.F. loan agreement with the prior government for a record 57 billion in 2018 required tighter budget and monetary policies. The result was exorbitantly high interest rates, a sharp depreciation of the peso and high inflation as well as increasing foreign indebtedness, and the deep recession that continues to this day. These kinds of avoidable downward spirals have happened in various countries when previous crises hit, as during the financial crisis and Great Recession between 2008 to 2009, the Asian financial crisis of 1997 1999, or Latin America in the 1980s, a period known as the lost decade. These tragic outcomes could be repeated now if unsustainable debt burdens are backed by deadly austerity. And the immediate threat to human life today is much greater, as the difference between governments taking the necessary steps to contain the coronavirus, and not doing so, is estimated at millions of lives. Here in the United States, there is at least some attention to the injustices exacerbated by the Covid 19 depression: for example, much higher infection and death rates by race and income. Yet vast structural inequalities at the international level are exacerbated even more than they are nationally by the pandemic, and international debt and finance are among the main vehicles through which this happens. But Argentina's debt negotiations can take a better path. Argentina has put forward a reasonable proposal for restructuring its foreign currency debt with private creditors. Its latest offer postpones debt payments for the next three years. It extends maturities and reduces interest rates going forward from an average of about 7 percent to 2.3 percent. There is a minimal reduction in principal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
HBO's "Paterno" is a film about a real life sex abuse scandal in which the abuser and the abused are relegated to supporting roles. A dogged reporter (Riley Keough) and one brave victim (Benjamin Cook) get a fair bit of screen time to help fill in the historical record, but they're not at the center of the story. Jerry Sandusky, the perpetrator, is relegated to a cameo. The writers, Debora Cahn and John C. Richards, and the director, Barry Levinson, focus instead on Joe Paterno, the beloved head coach of the Penn State football team who froze in the headlights and got run over by history. There's a lot of clamor and fuss in "Paterno," which has its premiere Saturday, but at heart it's a film about the lack of action about things that didn't get done. The tightly constructed film at 1 hour 40 minutes, it's a chamber piece by current television standards is set during two weeks in 2011, before and after the indictment of Mr. Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach, on 52 counts of sexual abuse of minors. Paterno, whose epic career ended when he was fired a few days after the indictment was announced, lies inside an M.R.I. machine (he died of lung cancer in January 2012), and we watch both recent and more distant events as he recalls them. Al Pacino plays Paterno, and in keeping with the film's conception, he gives a tamped down, contained performance. His Paterno is still intelligent and possessed of the quick, pragmatic instincts of a leader at 84, but he's hollow: His life is built around a work ethic, and his fatal failure to follow through on reports of Sandusky's crimes isn't about corruption or complicity, it's about single mindedness. He simply won't allow himself to be distracted from football. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"My wife said we could get a Mustang, but I wasn't going to go out shopping for a car," Mr. Maletic said. The drop in sales is the second big blow to automakers. Most companies have shut down factories across North America to prevent the spread of the virus among workers. Automakers and dealers expect a bigger decline in April because stay at home orders will be in effect for most or all of the month in many parts of the country. Even as some states lift or relax those orders, consumers will likely stay away from showrooms for some time. To lure buyers, G.M., Ford Motor and Fiat Chrysler are offering zero percent loans that last up to seven years for new car purchases. In St. Louis, where a lockdown order has been issued by the local government, Ann Kittlaus is unsure of how to trade in her family's 2017 Acura MDX, since the lease is expiring soon. "We would have to have the dealer deliver a new one and take the other away," said Ms. Kittlaus, a public relations professional and mother of two college age children. She added she would probably let the vehicle sit for a week to be sure it doesn't have any traces of the virus. In any case, she said she is not in a hurry to make the trade. "It's not like we're going anywhere," Ms. Kittlaus said. A dramatic drop in sales in April could cause a painful chain reaction. With no buyers driving cars off their lots, dealers won't have to order more from the manufacturers. That could force car companies and their suppliers to keep their plants idle or production low even once officials allow more people to go back to work. "April is likely to see further historic declines, driven largely by a lack of consumer confidence and substantial increases in unemployment," said Charles Chesbrough, a senior economist at Cox Automotive. "And that trend will likely continue into early summer, at best. The second quarter will be the real measure of Covid 19's impact on the economy and the auto industry." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
'In Fabric' Review: The Dress Is Possessed. But It Was on Sale . None The horror films directed by Mario Bava and Dario Argento in the 1960s and '70s deliberately put coherent story lines on the back burner, the better to concentrate on shocking scares and uncomfortable atmospheres. The British director Peter Strickland is one of several current European filmmakers to embrace the mode of horror that Bava, Argento and some of their lesser known contemporaries pioneered. His new picture, "In Fabric," is his fourth feature and his most impressive, engrossing, imaginatively unchained work yet. After an opening sequence in which a series of fake ads announce a season of sales at the fictional (thank God) department store Dentley Soper's , Marianne Jean Baptiste appears as Sheila, a bank clerk looking for a fresh start. Her husband has left her, her tetchy adult son still lives with her and she's tired of tedium. Dating through the classifieds (the film is ostensibly set in 1982), she's looking for a hot dress, and she finds one, a red number, at D S. She buys it despite the ultra baroque sales pitch of a clerk, who's dressed, like all her colleagues, as if she stepped out of a Velasquez rendition of a funeral. The presence of Jean Baptiste, an actor who brings an honest edge of realism to all her work, is an inspired bit of casting, but also a great piece of misdirection. If she makes you believe that this is going to be a less outre outing than Strickland's 2014 "The Duke of Burgundy," more fool you. Like Dentley Soper's itself, the dress is bad news. It gives Sheila a rash and destroys her washing machine. It will do much more damage before the film concludes. " Don't tell me you're scared of a dress," one character says. Right? Strickland risks ridiculousness with shots of the dress hovering, with menace, in a room at night. But the tableaus work. As much as Strickland has learned from Bava and Argento, here he is more of England than of the Continent. In a relentlessly stylized fashion, the film insistently evokes the Britain of power failures and inflation and creepy public service films. The idea of "period" is filtered through imagination and fevered memory. "In Fabric" sometimes feels like a spontaneous cinematic outpouring from the esoteric record label Ghost Box, whose aesthetic applied hauntology to anti nostalgia for postwar England. (Cavern of Anti Matter, the electronic music group that scored this film, has in fact released one of its singles on that label.) The movie also has an absurdist bent. In scenes where an unctuous pair of bank managers interrogate an employee, and then, later, a loan applicant, it's as if Eugene Ionesco were doing an adaptation of "Office Space" for an Amicus horror anthology. But is the movie scary? Well, yes. The film spaces out several nasty and effective frights. And as its narrative seems to deliberately devolve into a dissociative dream, even the funny material hits with a choke in the throat. The general dread becomes overwhelming, a black shroud that perhaps can only be cleansed by fire. But let's avoid spoilers ... Rated R for a cursed dress doing evil, icky things, and for extra kinky department store employee meetings. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Q. Apple's Safari browser used to have a Reader button on the right side of the address bar that made the webpage show just the text so you could read without videos, ads, animation and other stuff getting in the way. I recently got a new Mac and don't see this button anymore. Is it gone? A. Apple's Safari Reader feature for distraction free text consumption was introduced in 2010 and is still part of the browser for the Mac. The feature is also available on the iOS version of Safari and other browsers (like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge) have their own reader friendly variations or add ons. Safari's design has evolved over time, and in the current version of the program, the Reader button is now on the left side of the address bar and represented by a small icon depicting horizontal lines of text. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
SAN FRANCISCO At a conference in Silicon Valley this week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, vowed that his company would "keep building" despite a swirl of questions around the way it has dealt with misinformation and the personal data of its users. That is certainly true in the important area of artificial intelligence, which Mr. Zuckerberg says can help the social media giant deal with some of those problems. Facebook is opening new A.I. labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh, after hiring three A.I. and robotics professors from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University. The company hopes these seasoned researchers will help recruit and train other A.I. experts in the two cities, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer, said in an interview. As it builds these labs, Facebook is adding to pressure on universities and nonprofit A.I. research operations, which are already struggling to retain professors and other employees. The expansion is a blow for Carnegie Mellon, in particular. In 2015, Uber hired 40 researchers and technical engineers from the university's robotics lab to staff a self driving car operation in Pittsburgh. And The Wall Street Journal reported this week that JPMorgan Chase had hired Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon's head of so called machine learning technology, to oversee its artificial intelligence operation. "It is worrisome that they are eating the seed corn," said Dan Weld, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. "If we lose all our faculty, it will be hard to keep preparing the next generation of researchers." With the new labs, Facebook which already operates A.I. labs in Silicon Valley, New York, Paris and Montreal is establishing two new fronts in a global competition for talent. Over the last five years, artificial intelligence has been added to a number of tech products, from digital assistants and online translation services to self driving vehicles. And the world's largest internet companies, from Google to Microsoft to Baidu, are jockeying for researchers who specialize in these technologies. Many of them are coming from academia. "We're basically going where the talent is," Mr. Schroepfer said. But the supply of talent is not keeping up with demand, and salaries have skyrocketed. Well known researchers are receiving compensation in salary, bonuses and stock worth millions of dollars. Many in the field worry that the talent drain from academia could have a lasting impact in the United States and other countries, simply because schools won't have the teachers they need to educate the next generation of A.I. experts. Over the last few months, Facebook approached a number of notable researchers in Seattle. It hired Luke Zettlemoyer, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in technology that aims to understand and use natural human language, the company confirmed. This is an important area of research for Facebook as it struggles to identify and remove false and malicious content on its networks. In the fall, Mr. Zettlemoyer told The New York Times that he had turned down an offer from Google that was three times his teaching salary (about 180,000, according to public records) so he could keep his post at the university. Instead, he took a part time position at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Seattle lab backed by the Microsoft co founder Paul Allen. Many researchers retain their professorships when moving to the big companies that's Mr. Zettlemoyer's plan while he works for Facebook but they usually cut back on their academic work. At Facebook, academics typically spend 80 percent of their time at the company and 20 percent at their university. Like the other internet giants, Facebook acknowledges the importance of the university system. But at the same time, the companies are eager to land top researchers. In Pittsburgh, Facebook hired two professors from the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, Abhinav Gupta and Jessica Hodgins, who specialized in computer vision technology. The new Facebook lab will focus on robotics and "reinforcement learning," a way for robots to learn tasks by trial and error. Siddhartha Srinivasa, a robotics professor at the University of Washington, said he was also approached by Facebook in recent months. It was not clear to him why the internet company was interested in robotics. Andrew Moore, dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, did not respond to a request for comment. But over the past several months, he has been vocal about the movement of A.I. researchers toward the big internet companies. Google also operates an engineering office near Carnegie Mellon. "What we're seeing is not necessarily good for society, but it is rational behavior by these companies," he said. The two new Facebook labs are part of wider expansion for the company's A.I. operation. In December, Facebook announced that it had hired another computer vision expert, Jitendra Malik, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He now oversees the lab at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Even with its deep pockets, Facebook faces fierce competition for talent. Mr. Allen recently gave the Allen Institute, which he created in 2013, an additional 125 million in funding. After losing Mr. Zettlemoyer to Facebook, the Allen Institute hired Noah Smith and Yejin Choi, two of his colleagues at the University of Washington. Like Mr. Zettlemoyer, both specialize in natural language processing, and both say they received offers from multiple internet companies. The nonprofit is paying Mr. Smith and Ms. Choi a small fraction of what they were offered to join the commercial sector, but the Allen Institute will allow them to spend half their time at the university and collaborate with a wide range of companies, said Oren Etzioni, who oversees the Allen Institute. "The salary numbers are so large that even Paul Allen can't match them," Mr. Etzioni said. "But there are still some people who won't go corporate." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
WASHINGTON Global trade tensions escalated this week as the United States renewed its tariff war with China, sending major stock indexes tumbling as fears of an economic slowdown rattled investors around the world. The S P 500 index had its worst week of trading this year, as shares on exchanges from Tokyo to London fell on Friday one day after President Trump announced new tariffs on another 300 billion worth of Chinese imports following stalled negotiations. Beijing's response was swift. "China's position is very clear that if U.S. wishes to talk, then we will talk," Zhang Jun, China's new ambassador to the United Nations, said Friday. "If they want to fight, then we will fight." As the two sides appeared to drift further from a deal, Japan and South Korea veered toward their own trade confrontation on Friday, injecting greater uncertainty into the region. The disputes could exacerbate fears of a global economic slowdown and threaten to crimp the United States' economic expansion, its longest on record. The European Central Bank is preparing to try to bolster the eurozone economy to help weather the slowdown in growth, while China has experienced its slowest economic growth in 27 years. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the first time in over a decade to get ahead of possible downturns. New hiring data released Friday showed the United States economy continued to chug along, with employers adding 164,000 jobs in July. But there were signs of cooling in the job market, complicating matters as the trade war begins to reshape the economy in ways that could run counter to Mr. Trump's goals of strengthening it. The Commerce Department announced Friday that the trade deficit with China fell in the first six months of the year compared with a year earlier, and the country fell from being the United States' largest trading partner to being its third, after Mexico and Canada. However, the overall trade deficit increased. American exports of goods and services to the rest of the world were flat from the year before, while imports from the rest of the world grew. In a campaign rally in Cincinnati on Thursday, the president was unbowed with his strategy. "Until such time as there is a deal, we will be taxing the hell out of China," Mr. Trump told a cheering crowd. "We definitely will take whatever necessary countermeasures to protect our fundamental right, and we also urge the United States to come back to the right track in finding the right solution through the right way" said Mr. Zhang, China's U.N. ambassador. After a series of missteps and misunderstandings, the United States and China appear to be nowhere close to a trade agreement at a time when trade barriers remain in place with other American partners. Mr. Trump's rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement is still stalled in Congress, awaiting the support of Democrats. His threat of auto tariffs has not yet persuaded Japan or Europe to sign a trade deals with the United States, as he intended. And the European Union, India, China, Turkey and others have responded to Mr. Trump's aggressive trade tactics by putting their own retaliatory tariffs on American products. If the president's newly threatened tariffs go into effect, the United States will have imposed levies on all of the goods it imports from China, which totaled 539.7 billion last year. Mr. Trump said that the new tariffs would go into effect on Sept. 1, leaving a window for the United States and China to try to work out their differences. But that appears to be a difficult task. Negotiators from the two countries continue to disagree over how the agreement would be enshrined in China's laws, how many of Mr. Trump's tariffs on China would be removed, and how many American goods China would purchase. 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. You might feel the pinch of this round of tariffs. Here's how. The president and his advisers insist the strategy is necessary to take on China's long record of unfair trade practices, but the tariffs are taking a toll. The tech heavy Nasdaq composite index fell 1.3 percent on Friday, and the Dow Jones industrial average dipped 0.4 percent. The yield on the 10 year Treasury note fell to 1.85 percent, its lowest level since 2016, in a sign of economic pessimism. Myron Brilliant, executive vice president and head of international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that the president's additional tariffs "will only inflict greater pain on American businesses, farmers, workers and consumers, and undermine an otherwise strong U.S. economy." "We are deeply disappointed that the two sides missed the opportunity in May to address the substantive disagreements between them and have not yet reached a comprehensive, enforceable agreement," Mr. Brilliant said. China has vowed to retaliate against American actions, but it remains unclear how exactly it would respond. Because many more goods flow from China to the United States than the other direction, China has not been willing or able to match Mr. Trump's tariffs dollar for dollar. But company executives say the Chinese government has used other painful methods to retaliate against them surprise inspections, rejections for licenses and China's move to construct a list of "unreliable entities" that Beijing has threatened to take action against. Beijing could also encourage a boycott of American goods or direct its state owned companies to stop purchasing, for example, American soybeans or Boeing airplanes. South Korea's president, Moon Jae in, threatened retaliation. "If Japan intentionally hurts our economy, it will also have to suffer big damage," Mr. Moon said. With the specter of the China conflict as a backdrop, Mr. Trump on Friday promoted his trade record in an event in the White House's Roosevelt Room, where he announced that his administration had secured access for American cattle ranchers to the European market. The agreement could triple the amount of beef that the United States can export duty free to the European Union over the next seven years, to a value of 420 million, the United States trade representative said in a statement. The agreement was reached in June, and still requires ratification by the European Union's member countries. During the event, Mr. Trump paused to compliment the hats of the assembled cattle ranchers before lauding the new agreement as a "tremendous victory" for American farmers and European consumers. "My administration is standing up for our farmers and ranchers like never before," the president said. "We're protecting our farmers. We're doing it in many ways, including with China. You may have read a little bit about China lately." The announcement is welcome news for American beef producers who have found themselves pushed out of markets as Japan, Australia, Canada, the European Union and other countries have written new trade deals among themselves in recent years. But the limited agreement is unlikely to do much to distract from the uncertainty and volatility that Mr. Trump has stoked by pushing American trading relationships to their limits. Mr. Trump suggested Friday that he would continue to pursue the type of trade policy that resulted in the agreement with the E.U. one, he argued, that came about because of his tough trade posture, not in spite of it. "Look, the E.U. has tremendous barriers to us, but we just broke the first barrier," Mr. Trump said. "And maybe we broke it because of the fact that if I don't get what we want, I'll put auto tariffs. Because it's all about the automobile, and it's all about the tariffs." "If I don't get what I want, I'll have no choice but maybe to do that," he added. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Researchers in Iceland have identified a new mutant superpower but the genetic trait probably won't be granting anyone admission to the X Men. A small contingent of the world's population carries a mutation that makes them immune to the odious funk that wafts off fish, according to a study of some 11,000 people published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. The trait is rare, but potent: When faced with a synthetic odor that would put many people off their lunch, some test subjects smelled only the pleasant aroma of caramel, potato or rose. The vast majority of people aren't so lucky. Nearly 98 percent of Icelanders, the research said, are probably as put off by the scent as you'd expect. The mutation is thought to be even rarer in populations in other countries. "I can assure you I do not have this mutation," said Dr. Kari Stefansson, a neurologist and the study's senior author. "I tend to get nauseated when I get close to fish that is not completely fresh." Dr. Stefansson is the founder and chief executive of deCODE genetics, a biopharmaceutical company in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, which has been parsing the human genome for several decades. The team's latest caper involved a deep dive into the underappreciated sense of olfaction. Study participants were asked to take a whiff of six Sniffin' Sticks pens imbued with synthetic odors resembling the recognizable scents of cinnamon, peppermint, banana, licorice, lemon and fish. They were asked to identify the smell, then rate its intensity and pleasantness. The older the study subjects were, the more they struggled to accurately pinpoint the scents. That's unsurprising, given that sensory functions tend to decline later in life, said Rosa Gisladottir, the study's lead author. But even younger people didn't always hit the mark, she said. The lemon and banana sticks, for instance, prompted descriptions of gummy bears and other candy sweet smells. The reek of fish, however, was mostly recognizable and received by far the lowest pleasantness ratings among the six sticks. But a small group of people consistently tolerated or even welcomed the piscine perfume: those born with a genetic mutation that incapacitated a gene called TAAR5. TAAR5 helps make a protein that recognizes a chemical called trimethylamine, or TMA, that is found in rotten and fermented fish and certain animal bodily fluids, including human sweat and urine. Most people carry an intact version of TAAR5, and easily recognize the fishy fragrance as mildly repulsive an ability that might have evolved to help our ancestors avoid spoiled food. But a small number of the Icelanders in the study carried at least one "broken" copy of the gene that appeared to render them insensitive to the scent. When asked to describe it, some even mistook it for a sugary dessert, ketchup or something floral. "They were really not even in the right ballpark," Dr. Gisladottir said. A blunted sense for bad smelling fish might sound maladaptive. But TMA doesn't always spell trouble, especially in Iceland, where fish features prominently on many menus. The country is famous for nose tickling dishes like rotten shark and fermented skate, which serve up about as much odor as you may imagine. That might be why the TAAR5 mutation appears in more than 2 percent of Icelanders, but a much smaller proportion of people in Sweden, Southern Europe and Africa, the researchers found. "If they hadn't looked at this population, they might not have found the variant," said Bettina Malnic, an olfaction expert at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil who was not involved in the study. Paule Joseph, an expert in sensory science at the National Institutes of Health, noted that these genetic changes could affect, or be affected by, dietary patterns. "It would be good to see a similar study in another population and more diverse group of individuals," Dr. Joseph said. Dr. Stefansson said it's a shame he doesn't carry the rare mutation, considering how much cod liver oil he had to swallow as a child at the behest of his mother. Still, he eventually figured out a way to escape the chore. "I told my mother, 'I'm not going to have another spoon unless you do it yourself,'" he recalled. "I never took cod liver oil again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
One of 60 watercolors by Charles Santore in a 1991 edition of "The Wizard of Oz." After a successful career in magazines and advertising, he changed his focus to illustrating revisions of children's classics. Charles Santore, a leading illustrator who reached millions of TV Guide readers with his cover portraits of television stars before finding more artistic fulfillment depicting characters from classic children's books, died on Aug. 11 in Philadelphia. He was 84 . His daughter , Christina Santore, confirmed his death, at a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined . Mr. Santore's most recognizable work appeared on about 30 covers of TV Guide, beginning in 1972, some years before the magazine reached its peak weekly circulation of about 20 million . His first cover rendered Peter Falk holding a cigar as the police lieutenant in "Columbo." Later covers depicted the stars of "Kojak," "The Jeffersons" and "60 Minutes." In a striking composite cover drawing for TV Guide made in 1977, Mr. Santore drew Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as their characters in the first two "Godfather" movies, which were being shown together in a special TV presentation. His 1976 cover depicting Redd Foxx as the title character of "Sanford and Son" is in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington. In addition to his work for TV Guide, Mr. Santore illustrated print ads for AT T, De Beers diamonds and Pfizer pharmaceuticals. He also sold illustrations to Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Redbook and other publications. In the mid 1980s he was commissioned by the publisher Running Press to illustrate Beatrix Potter 's "The Classic Tale of Peter Rabbit and Other Cherished Stories" (1986) . He went on to illustrate retellings of "Aesop's Fables" (1988), "Snow White" (1996), " Alice's Adventures in Wonderland " (2017) and "The Wizard of Oz" (1991). In reviewing the new version of "The Wizard of Oz," Marke Andrews wrote in The Vancouver Sun, " What makes this oversized hardcover so attractive are the 60 illustrations by Charles Santore." "The tornado inspires awe," he added, "the view of Munchkinland bristles with vivid flora and fauna, and his use of various shades of green for the Emerald City scenes makes for spectacular viewing." Mr. Santore wrote and illustrated his own children's books, among them "William the Curious: Knight of the Water Lilies" (1997), an environmentalist parable about a frog who becomes a medieval knight, and "The Silk Princess" (2007), a fairy tale about the origin of silk, with art reminiscent of classical Chinese painting. Despite his success, Mr. Santore was wary of self satisfaction. "You have to be humble," he said in a podcast released last year by the Woodmere. "You have to say, 'I've got a hell of a lot more to learn,' and try to be open to learn it even if you're trying to teach yourself. So I never think of myself as a professional, always as an amateur." Charles Joseph Santore was born in Philadelphia on March 16, 1935, and grew up in a hardscrabble Italian neighborhood on the city's South Side. His father, Charles, was a union organizer, and his mother, Nellie (Jackel) Santore, was a homemaker. He began to draw at an early age, an eccentricity his tough friends tolerated. "I could fight as well as they could, too, so there was no problem," he told an interviewer for the catalog that accompanied his Woodmere retrospective. Mr. Santore graduated from high school in 1953 and went to the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (now University of the Arts) on a scholarship. He studied illustration and graduated in 1956, then worked as a freelance illustrator before serving briefly in the National Guard in Kentucky and Texas. In 1963 he married Olenka Litynska. They both became avid collectors of antique Windsor chairs , known for their solid wooden seats with delicate legs and back spindles, and he wrote and illustrated "The Windsor Style in America" (1981), with photographs by Bill Holland. That book, published by Running Press, was praised by Rita Reif of The New York Times, who noted Mr. Santore's "arresting drawings of chairs" and his "knowledgeable and absorbing text." . "Indeed, this book may well become the bible on the subject," she added. Mr. Santore's wife died this year. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two sons, Charles and Nicholas; two brothers, Joseph and Richard; and three grandchildren. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
THE Internal Revenue Service is about to toughen the rules on a type of investment vehicle that has been abused by some very wealthy families to avoid millions of dollars in taxes. The wealthy are allowed to use family limited partnerships, family limited liability companies and their variants to hold family businesses, real estate or other illiquid, hard to value investments. And they can discount the value of the assets because that is seen as the only way people outside the family would buy in, particularly since nonfamily members have no control over what the partnership does. But some partnerships have put marketable securities, even cash, into the entities and still claimed a discount even though the investments have a value that is easy to determine. Others have taken steep and unreasonable discounts on the value of the partnership shares solely on the basis that the entity itself is family owned. A few have gone so far as to value the assets they hold at a steep discount for estate tax purposes only to turn around and liquidate the partnerships and distribute the cash as soon as the statute of limitations on estate tax audits has passed. Stung by its mixed record in challenging these entities in court, the I.R.S. could soon get help from the United States Treasury. Cathy Hughes, an attorney adviser at the Treasury's office of tax policy, said in May that new regulations restricting what would be allowed with family partnerships could be released as soon as mid September. The exact terms of those regulations, when they take effect and whether the wealthy should scramble to make transfers now is anyone's guess. But some practitioners are resigned to an end of an era. "It's been a great run," said Diane E. Lederman, chief executive and president of Neuberger Berman Trust Company. "There's been a tremendous amount of wealth transferred through these." Closing the loopholes is something that the I.R.S., backed by the White House in recent years, has long wanted to do. "Where you see the potential abuse is you have two taxpayers, each with 100 million," said Richard A. Behrendt, a former I.R.S. auditor who is now director of estate planning at Annex Wealth Management. "One takes his lumps. The other wraps his 100 million in an entity that whacks 40 percent off the top. In the I.R.S. framework, that doesn't seem fair." Given that the current estate tax exemption is nearly 11 million per couple, only very wealthy people have the need to set up one of these entities or the willingness to pay all the costs of maintaining them. But the size of these entities means the estate tax savings from discounting their value or lost to the Treasury, depending on your view can be substantial. The White House estimated in 2012 that closing this loophole could bring in 18 billion in tax revenue over 10 years. Even in cases where the assets in the family partnerships like securities and cash have an obvious value that does not support a discount of 30 percent or more, some advisers have argued that the partnership, not the individuals, controls when securities are bought and sold and distributions are made. Tax experts expect that entities that are set up to hold businesses or assets that require consolidated management, like rental properties, will continue to receive some sort of discount. "For any family with significant real estate, it's very typical for those families to use discounts in transferring interest in the entity," said Matt Brady, senior director of planning for Wells Fargo Private Bank. "There are practitioners in the legal field who don't feel justified in taking a discount for securities," he said. "But it's the feeling that whatever the partnership holds is what the partnership holds." Thomas J. Handler, a managing partner at Handler Thayer and a lawyer who has set up many partnerships, said that in the future the way these partnerships are created would matter more than pushing the envelope on the discount. He said the last three transactions he put together had all been challenged by the I.R.S. Two involved businesses worth more than 100 million, and the third was a gift to one of these entities in excess of 25 million. The discount was reduced for only one, he said to 32.4 percent from 34.6 percent. "In all three cases everything was buttoned up and tied together," he said. "The I.R.S. doesn't want to go after complicated taxes. They want low hanging fruit." He said his firm created what he called "a threat matrix" to determine when the I.R.S. had succeeded in its challenges. Big threats include big discounts 40 to 60 percent sloppy accounting for the family entity and poor documentation. He said he also encouraged all family members to become part of the entity on Day 1. "The I.R.S. likes to see everyone is in," he said. There are valid reasons for these entities beyond steep tax breaks. Ms. Lederman said a big one was having protection from a creditor or estranged spouse. Another is having a way to manage various types of assets in one entity. "You really need to have a business purpose for these entities to receive a discount," she said. With not much time until the new regulations are expected, advisers are making suggestions on the margins. Because these partnerships are complicated and costly to set up, they generally cannot be rushed. But Mr. Brady said he had been alerting clients who were already in the process of setting up a partnership or making gifts to one to accelerate what they were doing. "Get it in under the deadline," he said. "It would be very hard for the I.R.S. to make the date retroactive. The I.R.S. would be hard pressed to go back and undo these." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Carrying sand in Surat, India, in September. The pandemic and India's nationwide lockdown had a devastating effect on small business and day laborers. NEW DELHI China has come roaring back from the devastation of Covid 19, and the United States, Europe and Japan are finding their feet. But the hundreds of millions of laborers and shopkeepers who keep India's economy running still can't find relief. India's economy shrank 7.5 percent in the three months that ended in September compared with a year earlier, government figures showed on Friday. The data reflects the deepening of India's severest recession since at least 1996, when the country first began publishing its gross domestic product numbers. The new figures firmly ensconced India's position among the world's worst performing major economies, despite expansive government spending designed to rescue the thousands of small businesses severely battered by its long, hastily imposed lockdown. Nikhil Das, a 62 year old manufacturer of silk ties and scarves in New Delhi, says his business is teetering on the edge of collapse. His sales, which depend on demand from luxury shops and airport retailers, have fallen by four fifths. He needs payments from customers to make up for his manufacturing costs, but retailers who can't move his wares still owe him more than 50,000. He has idled six workers he once paid for each tie and scarf they made, and he has been treated for stomach pain that his doctor has attributed to stress. "The money supply chain is broken," Mr. Das said. "It is a constant source of tension to me." The Indian government has committed 50 billion, roughly 2 percent of India's annual economic output, to help small businesses, as well as cash transfers to low income workers as part of a 266 billion economic package. For the average Indian worker and entrepreneur, it hasn't been enough. An estimated 140 million people lost their jobs after India locked down its economy in March to stop the outbreak, while many others saw their salaries drastically reduced, the Mumbai based Center for Monitoring Indian Economy said. As the lockdown was eased, many went back to work, but more than six million people who lost jobs haven't found new employment. In a June survey by the All India Manufacturers Organization, about one third of small and medium sized enterprises indicated that their businesses were beyond saving. The industry group said that such a "mass destruction of business" was unprecedented. India's textile factories, leather tanneries, brick kilns, foundries and other small enterprises form "part of the country's social fabric, bringing local wealth and local employment," said Venkatachalam Anbumozhi, an economist who focuses on South and East Asia. Just a few years ago, India, with a population of 1.3 billion people, was one of the world's fastest growing large economies. It regularly clocked growth of 8 percent or more. Global businesses began to warm to the idea of India as a potential substitute to China, both as a place to make goods and to sell them. China's costs are rising, and its trade war with the United States has complicated doing business there. The Chinese Communist Party is increasingly intruding into business matters, and local Chinese competitors have upped their game against international brands. 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. But India's economy was facing headwinds well before the pandemic. Between April and December 2019, G.D.P. grew only 4.6 percent. Since coming to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shaken the economy with policies meant to boost government revenues and help India's transition to digital banking. Some of the efforts have been embraced by business, such as Mr. Modi's pledges to slash the country's vast and tangled web of red tape. But other Modi initiatives meant to bring India's informal, off the books economy into the open proved disruptive for many small businesses, which don't have the resources that big companies can deploy to overhaul how they make payments and keep their books. One of Mr. Modi's policies, called demonetization, banned large currency notes overnight in an effort to crack down on tax avoidance and money laundering. Under another, India replaced its welter of national and state taxes with a single value added tax, in part to cut down on corruption among tax collectors. Mr. Modi also increasingly turned India's industrial policy inward, which many economists say has hurt overall growth. The country has long nurtured some of the steepest trade barriers of any major economy, to help its domestic industries develop. Mr. Modi added to that in areas like electronics. His government has also tightened rules around e commerce, to assist Indian businesses that compete with companies like Amazon and Wal Mart. Even after the pandemic wanes, Ms. Kishore projects, India will be the worst affected among the world's major economies. Debt laden companies will have to borrow even more. Growth could fall to 4.5 percent annually over the next five years, well below the 6.5 percent growth that had been projected before Covid 19. "The worst," said Dr. Anbumozhi, the economist, citing the potential impact to small business in particular, "is yet to come for India." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Vice recently announced an agreement with ESPN to produce and distribute films and other programs. In the last several years, the company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in financing and signed deals with major media companies including Rogers Communications, a Canadian media conglomerate. It has also pushed to expand its presence internationally, announcing multiplatform deals with the Times of India Group and the Moby Group, a Middle Eastern media group. Vice already produces a weekly newsmagazine show for HBO, called "Vice," which began in 2013. In a statement, Mr. Tyrangiel said he wanted to make broadcast news more appealing to young viewers. "We're going to have to earn people's time and attention with great reporting and original forms of storytelling," he said. Plans for "Vice News Tonight'' were first announced in March 2015. At the time, Richard Plepler, chief executive of HBO, said the show would debut that year. A spokesman for Vice Media said in an email that the show was "on schedule." Vice has been on an aggressive hiring push in the last year, snapping up dozens of journalists from news organizations including MSNBC, the BBC, The Guardian and The New York Times. Along with Mr. Tyrangiel, the company has hired Nellie Bowles, a technology reporter from The Guardian, and Madeleine Haeringer, an executive producer at MSNBC and veteran of NBC News. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Jerry Sloan, who entered the National Basketball Association as an unlikely prospect for a Hall of Fame career but carved out one nevertheless, as an All Star guard with the Chicago Bulls and one of the winningest coaches in league history, died on Friday at his home in Salt Lake City. He was 78. The Utah Jazz, a team he coached for 23 seasons, said the cause was Lewy body dementia and Parkinson's disease. Both illnesses were diagnosed in 2015, as the team had announced at the time. Sloan had a low profile when he arrived in the N.B.A. in 1965. He had played for a small college N.C.A.A. school, and, though he was tenacious on defense, he wasn't a brilliant scorer. But he became a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame after forging an N.B.A. career spanning a half century. He became the fourth winningest head coach in N.B.A. history and No. 2, behind Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs, for longest tenure with one team. Only Don Nelson, Lenny Wilkens and Popovich have compiled more regular season N.B.A. coaching victories than Sloan, whose teams won 1,221 games and lost 803 in his 26 seasons, three with the Bulls before he became head coach of the Jazz. Sloan coached the Jazz to 15 consecutive playoff appearances, from 1989 to 2003, with teams featuring Karl Malone at power forward and John Stockton at point guard in his pick and roll offense. His Utah teams reached the N.B.A. finals in 1997 and 1998 but were beaten both times by Michael Jordan's Bulls. Sloan was inducted into the Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., together with Stockton, in 2009. Malone joined them there in 2010. The 6 foot 5 Sloan was selected by the Baltimore Bullets in the first round of the 1965 N.B.A. draft out of Evansville College of Indiana (now the University of Evansville), which he led to the 1964 and 1965 tournament championships in the N.C.A.A. small college division, now known as Division II. He averaged 17.6 points per game as a senior but was coveted mostly for his defensive skills. Sloan suffered a string of knee injuries and retired as a player after the 1975 76 season. He averaged 14 points a game for his career. He was offered the head coaching post at Evansville early in 1977 and agreed to take it, but he changed his mind a few days later, feeling that his future lay in the pro game. He was working as an assistant coach with the Bulls that December when a plane carrying the Evansville basketball team, head coach Bobby Watson and his staff crashed on takeoff from the Evansville airport en route to a game in Tennessee, killing everyone aboard. "I had just talked to the team the week before," Sloan told Sports Illustrated in 1997. "It made me realize that basketball wasn't everything in life." Sloan became the Bulls' head coach in the 1979 80 season. He took them to the playoffs in his second season in Chicago but was fired during his third season, having compiled an overall record of 94 victories and 121 losses. After serving as an assistant coach with the Jazz, he became head coach in December 1988, replacing Frank Layden, who moved up to team president. On the sidelines Sloan was by turns unassuming and intense, collecting his share of technical fouls but commanding loyalty from his players. "The game is extremely important to him, how it looks, how it's played," Stockton told The New York Times in 2000. "I think he gets technicals because he's standing up for the game more than anything else. I think it's his non self promoting demeanor. He's not out there telling you what a great coach he is." Malone, also in a Times interview, said: "He wants you to come, work hard, do what he tells you to do. I won't play for another coach. Me and him clash every now and then, but it's one of those things in the end where I want what he wants to win. And he realizes that." Gerald Eugene Sloan was born on March 28, 1942, in McLeansboro, Ill., near a rural area called Gobblers Knob, where his family had a farm. He was the youngest of 10 children. His father died when he was 4, and he joined with his brothers and sisters in helping their mother with the chores. Sloan was an all state basketball player at McLeansboro High School, then played for three seasons at Evansville and became a second team All American. Through his years in the pros, he retained touches of his upbringing as a farm boy. He liked to wear John Deere caps, and he collected and restored tractors. Sloan had only one losing team in his 23 seasons as the Jazz coach and posted an overall regular season record of 1,127 682 with Utah. He resigned in February 2011, at least in part because of his contentious relationship with his star guard Deron Williams, who wanted more freedom to create plays. Soon afterward, Williams was traded to the New Jersey Nets. But Sloan's tenure with the Jazz wasn't over. He returned to the team as an adviser and scouting consultant in 2013. Sloan's survivors include his second wife, Tammy Jessop; his son, Brian, and his daughters, Holly Parish and Kathy Wood, from his marriage to Bobbye (Irvin) Sloan, who died in 2004; and a stepson, Rhett Jessop. When Stockton and Malone neared the end of their careers, Sloan acknowledged that he would be disappointed to miss out on an N.B.A. championship. "I know this, though," he told Sports Illustrated in 2002. "A lot of guys will show their rings to you who didn't have anything to do with winning a championship. There's something to be said for coming back after you lose, for putting yourself on the line, for having the will to try it again and again, for putting every ounce of energy into achieving something after you've fallen short. "That's the kind of guys we've always had here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Frequently outshone by the idyllic Aegean Islands, and overshadowed by the ancient glories of Athens, Greece's second largest city is hardly a household name. But the buzzing metropolis in the country's northern mainland doesn't need to trade on its looks or fame to earn respect. The once powerful port is still filled with the Unesco listed remains of the three empires that ruled it the Romans, the Byzantines and the Ottomans as well as many traces of its multireligious past, which saw Muslims, Christians and Jews living side by side. (Two world wars, a Turkish Greek population exchange in the 1920s and the deportation of the Jews in the 1940s effectively ended the "Jerusalem of the Balkans.") Sprinkled among those monuments are impressive contemporary restaurants, vintage shops, a notable C.P.C. (cafes per capita) ratio and a staggering B.P.P. (bars per person) quotient. So here's some rare advice for a weekend in Greece: Forget your swimsuit and leave your copies of Plato and Socrates at home. 2) 7 p.m. THE TOWER AND THE GLORY A Greek flag flutters atop the crenelated battlements of the circular White Tower, but the structure was actually built by the Ottomans, who captured Thessaloniki from the Byzantine Empire in 1430. (They built the tower later that century and ruled the region until the Greek state captured it in 1912.) The interactive exhibitions about city history are a bit mysterious to anyone who can't read Greek, but the glorious 360 degree view from the summit requires no translation. Admission, 4 to 8 euros, depending on season. Each level of The Aficionados, an elegant townhouse and restaurant, offers a distinctive temptation. On the ground floor, Dimitris Pamporis (a veteran of the three Michelin star restaurant l'Auberge de l'Ill in France) serves a multicourse tasting menu (90 euros), while the top story houses a plush cocktail bar. On the floor between, neo Greek cuisine with Asian infusions is the star. Meat mavens can experiment with the "Chinese Hot Dog" (Iberian pork and Chinese cabbage) followed by a veal filet or rib eye. For an Aegean evening, trawl the seafood side of the card. Among appetizers, thin crunchy discs of kohlrabi sculpturally enfold an excellent tuna tartare flavored with soy sauce, sesame oil and an inspired puree of beetroot and peanut butter. More Asian accents follow with a thick slab of cod atop a velvety potato puree tinged with yuzu and truffle. A three course meal for two is around 100 euros. Middle Eastern music drifts from the sound system while smoke from silvery water pipes fills the air. Are we still in Greece? Yes and no. Built in the 16th century as a Turkish bath, the Aigli Geni Hamam is now an indoor outdoor bar and nightclub where the lofty stone domes shimmer with disco balls, and the soaring pointed arches glow with colored lights. Complete the Greco Ottoman fantasia with a mix of raki and honey (5.50 euros) or a Mythos beer (4 euros). A vigorous uphill walk (or take the number 23 bus) leads you to the Ana Polis, or Upper Town, where the orderly grid of busy streets and dense apartment blocks gives way to peaceful winding lanes of small houses. You would need wax wings for a better view than the one afforded by the 15th century Trigoniou Tower, while the nearby 14th century Vlatadon Monastery ushers you into an intimate dark chapel decorated with wood panel paintings, medieval Christian frescoes and a sign bearing an extraordinary message: "At this place St. Paul preached to Thessalonians at his second missionary journey (51 A.D.)." A bit downhill, the ancient Church of Hosios David contains two masterworks of early Byzantine art: colorful interlocking frescoes and a dazzling, radiant mosaic in the half dome depicting a young Christ, a scroll in his hand, surrounded by rainbows, animals, fish and rivers. All are free. Overlooking the centuries old city wall, the two story building housing Radikal restaurant is an Old World blend of stone, brick, planks and plaster embellished with contemporary sculptural lighting and Edison bulbs. The menu follows the same recipe, melding classic ingredients and 21st century elements. No Greek meal is complete without feta cheese, which might arrive in a deep fried grain coating, and drizzled with honey and pistachios. The exotic notes in the aubergine puree that accompanies the robust veal ragout come from touches of ginger and orange. Staying local, the wine list includes a Thessaloniki chardonnay that is a slimmer, softer iteration of its global cousins. Lunch for two: around 50 euros. If the venerable Modiano covered market is still under renovation, follow your nose to nearby Kapani Market, a warren of bustling lanes lined with stalls selling everything from fresh fish to dried herbs to Orthodox icons. Hidden amid the skinned lambs and mountains of olives, Semente Cafe is a new espresso bar where you can grab a cappuccino (1.20 euros), along with teas, chocolate bars and packets of nuts and grains. For something more intoxicating, To Laikon is a house of spirits: bottles of wine, ouzo and fruit brandy line the walls. Helmets, uniforms, medals, boots, gas masks and deactivated grenades are among the offerings at John's Military, one of the many antique, vintage and junk shops along Tositsa and Karmpola streets, near the Roman Agora. (Old bands never die there either, as witnessed by the shop's vinyl albums by Midnight Oil, The Hooters and other acts you had almost forgotten.) To resurrect women's fashion of bygone decades, ring the bell at Vaudeville.room and enter a small apartment full of steamer trunks, flapper caps, leather handbags, 1970s glitter tops and other castoffs from Greece's hipper great grandmothers. The circular domed monument known as the Rotunda is Thessaloniki's answer to Rome's Pantheon, and the structure's story is the story of the city itself: Built by the Romans in the early fourth century, the soaring space became a church under the Byzantine Empire and then a mosque during Ottoman rule. The marquee attractions are the remarkably intact fourth to sixth century paleo Christian mosaics of archangels, saints, religious officials and ancient buildings that decorate the lofty dome, glittering and sublime. Admission, 2 euros. The brilliant workmanship from the region's Roman period comes vividly to life in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, one of the few things open on Sunday. Every material has its exemplar. Gold? Exquisitely wrought myrtle wreaths of ultrafine gold leaf shimmer with delicate power. Glass? Tiny perfume vessels in rich blues and greens show remarkable prowess with the delicate material. Textile? Admire the purple silk with gold embroidery found in the tomb of the noblewoman, whose skeleton lies just alongside. And stone? From huge detailed floor mosaics with mythological scenes to intricate chiseled reliefs of battles and bacchanals, the rich colors and fine details awe in equal measure. Admission, 8 euros. Goodbye, drunk satyrs. Goodbye, naked Venuses. Goodbye, orgiastic ebullience. Crossing the street, you cross into the next era of Thessaloniki history at the Museum of Byzantine Culture, a modernist Le Corbusier inspired building where long ramps slope upward through dark galleries of somber Christian creations. In addition to barrel vaulted stone tombs painted with biblical scenes (Abraham's sacrifice, Lazarus's resurrection), the most moving items are the many wood panel paintings: melancholy Christs, Madonnas and saints with long narrow faces and richly colored robes against glorious gold backgrounds. Admission 4 to 8 euros, depending on season. Situated in the heart of the Ladadika dining and nightlife district, the new 16 room Bahar Boutique Hotel (Edessis 10; baharboutiquehotel.com) occupies an elegantly renovated 1931 townhouse, with its own classy cafe bar just next door. Doubles from 90 euros. The cafe bar of The Caravan (1 Rebelou; thecaravan.gr) is more colorful, funky and kid friendly thanks to an assortment of toys and games while the 13 rooms are done in a mix of retro and contemporary style. Doubles from 75 euros. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
First Sonny Grosso was a police detective, one of the two depicted in the 1971 movie "The French Connection." Then he went on to a career in film and television as a producer. He is shown here in 1985. Sonny Grosso, the true blue New York City police detective who with his gung ho partner made the record heroin bust that inspired the Oscar winning film "The French Connection," died on Jan. 22 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his longtime companion, Christina Kraus. A product of East Harlem and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Grosso rose to the rank of detective first grade in the New York Police Department faster than any predecessor. He followed his 22 years on the force with a second career as a television producer and consultant for television shows about law enforcement, including "Kojak," "Baretta" and "Night Heat," and for the movie "The Godfather," in which he played a detective named Phil. Until he died, Mr. Grosso carried his off duty .38 caliber Colt revolver, the very same gun that was taped to the tank of a toilet and fired (using blanks) by Al Pacino in a mob hit in "The Godfather." The film, a fictionalized account based on Robin Moore's book of the same title, recounts how the case unfolded after the two detectives, out for drinks at the Copacabana nightclub, spotted known drug dealers adulating an unidentified man, whom they later discovered owned a greasy spoon luncheonette in Brooklyn. They followed him on a hunch, and the trail led to a French smuggler who was shipping to the United States 100 pounds of heroin, some of it stolen from a police vault. Mr. Grosso determined the magnitude of the cache by weighing the Frenchman's 1960 Buick Invicta when it arrived by ship and again when it was about to be transported back to France. (Mr. Grosso appears uncredited in the movie as a narcotics agent.) Police said the seizure was a record amount at the time. "He made that case," Randy Jurgenson, another former partner on the police force, said of Mr. Grosso in a phone interview. The "French Connection" movie might have made it seem as if Mr. Egan was more menacing than Mr. Grosso. But Mr. Grosso was no pushover. "I played Sonny's character as more of a calming influence," Mr. Friedkin, the director, said in a published interview. "Thing is about Sonny, if he's your friend, he'd stop a bullet for you. Eddie had that Irish bluster, but Sonny had that Italian iron fist. You did not mess with Sonny Grosso." Edward Conlon, a former detective who became a best selling author, compared Mr. Egan and Mr. Grosso this way: "One was the gas pedal; the other was the brake." As a police officer from 1954 to 1976, Mr. Grosso handled cases that involved the Police Department's battles with the Black Liberation Army and other high profile cases. His television and film career was equally gritty. Mr. Grosso played a counterfeiter in a 1973 film he wrote about his own career, "The Seven Ups," which also starred Mr. Scheider. He portrayed the sidekick of a detective played by Frank Sinatra in the 1977 TV movie "Contract on Cherry Street." Mr. Grosso produced, acted in or consulted on so many police dramas that the critic James Monaco jocularly predicted that someday scholars would be dissecting "Grossovian subtexts" behind his oeuvre. Despite his celebrity while still a detective, Mr. Grosso maintained his reputation for being loyal, generous and unpretentious. Yes, he happened to be a regular at Rao's, the tiny, cliquish eatery on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem that has occasionally had unsavory associations. But it also happens to be a neighborhood hangout, just around the corner from where he was born. Even there, drama intruded one night before Christmas in 2003, when a patron who objected to the singing of one of Mr. Grosso's dinner guests was shot dead by another customer. Salvatore Anthony Grosso was born on July 21, 1930. His father, Benedetto, was a truck driver who died when Sonny was still a teenager. His mother was Lillian (Vetrano) Grosso. In addition to Ms. Kraus, Mr. Grosso is survived by a son, Salvatore; three daughters, Donna and Gloria Grosso and Tina Salino; two sisters, Antoinette Treanor and Celeste Grosso; and five grandchildren. In 1997, Mr. Grosso received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for being "an Italian American first, a cop second, a producer third and a trusted and valued friend always." Another example of the longevity of his friendships was his relationship with Larry Jacobson, a television veteran with whom he had formed a production company not long after retiring from the police force. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
BREAKTHROUGH: THE IDEAS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). PBS chose an excellent time to run this program about the telescope, just a week after a network of radio telescopes delivered the first image of a black hole straight from another galaxy. And it could hardly have found a more space related actor/ narrator than Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard), who here walks viewers through the history of telescope technology and recent advancements. The episode begins PBS's series "Breakthrough," which focuses on inventions that altered the modern world. Later episodes, also narrated by Stewart, look at airplanes, robots, cars, rockets and smartphones. SPY KIDS (2001) 8 p.m. on Nickelodeon. Good inventions can be used for nefarious deeds in the wrong hands. And villainous are the hands of Fegan Floop, the mastermind played by Alan Cumming in this espionage for kids movie, which introduced the evil, thumb shaped Floop owned robots known as Thumb Thumbs. In hot pursuit of Floop are the mini spies Carmen (Alexa PenaVega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara), stars of the show, who help save the world after their spy parents (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) are captured. For a darker story about a child saddled with saving humanity for the adults, see the 2013 adaptation of Orson Scott Card's ENDER'S GAME, at 11 p.m. on Syfy, with Asa Butterfield as the alien fighting Ender. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Likewise, while Western leaders have condemned Putin's quest for spheres of influence, Conradi shows that in Yeltsin's time too Russians believed that they were entitled to preponderance in the countries of the former Soviet Union, particularly Ukraine. For Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Ukraine and Russia were organically connected. Vladimir Lukin, Yeltsin's ambassador to Washington, advised Strobe Talbott Clinton's top Russia expert and later deputy secretary of state to consider Russia and Ukraine as akin to New York and New Jersey. Yeltsin's first foreign minister, the liberal reformer Andrei Kozyrev, asked why Russia should retreat from territories that took centuries to conquer. Putin's Russia and the West are now at loggerheads even, according to a popular but misguided analogy Conradi uses, enmeshed in a new Cold War. But things didn't start out that way. Putin's early meetings with President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and NATO Secretary General George Robertson were convivial. He presented Russia as part of the West and even startled his interlocutors by proposing that Russia join NATO. He called the White House immediately after the 9/11 attacks, offering assistance, and actually provided it during Washington's war against Taliban ruled Afghanistan. Though he didn't like George W. Bush's renunciation of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, his invasion of Iraq and NATO's incorporation of the three Baltic States Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania he took these matters in stride. When did things go awry and why? Conradi suggests that the democratic revolutions in Georgia in 2003 4 and Ukraine in 2004 5 may have been a turning point. Western governments applauded the protesters, and American and European NGOs had long financed and trained Georgian and Ukrainian pro democracy groups. For Putin, the democratic movements represented a Western effort to undercut Russia in its own neighborhood; democracy and human rights were ruses, demanded of some countries but not others. In 2007, at the annual Munich Security Conference, Putin lambasted the United States for foisting its values on others, sowing instability and behaving arrogantly. He has stuck to this script. And it has had enormous appeal within Russia. For lots of Russians, Putin personifies a break with the 1990s, when their country, led by a boozy, erratic president, was politically chaotic, economically near collapse and dissed by the West. Only 47 when he was elected president in 2000, Putin exuded vitality a stark contrast, as Conradi shows, to Yeltsin's decrepitude. Taking advantage of soaring oil prices, which quintupled between 2000 and 2008, Putin bulked up Russia's army, acquiring the muscle to push back: in Georgia in 2008 (Conradi provides an illuminating account of the events that culminated in the Georgian army's humiliating defeat) and in Ukraine in 2014 (here Conradi doesn't add anything original). If any one event explains the rupture between Russia and the West, it was, as Conradi vividly shows, the mass rebellion that erupted in Ukraine in late 2013 when President Viktor Yanukovych, popularly elected albeit venal, cut off negotiations with the European Union on an association agreement and tacked instead toward Russia. Western governments immediately embraced the uprising against him. Senator John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland visited Kiev and communed with the protesters. On Feb. 21, the E.U. brokered a deal between Yanukovych and opposition leaders that included an early presidential election. But when the protesting masses cried betrayal, Yanukovych was finished. He fled the next day. To Putin, his ouster was another Western conspiracy. Russian officials seized on a telephone conversation in Kiev between Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador, about the post Yanukovych government's composition, an amateurish exchange that was intercepted by Russian intelligence and inevitably reached YouTube. Putin upped the ante in March, annexing Crimea, with its Russian majority, and backing separatists in eastern Ukraine with weapons and troops. The West slapped Russia with economic sanctions and banished it from the G 8. President Obama's ailing "reset" policy lay dead. So who lost Russia? Russia's leaders, primarily Putin, who neither built democracy nor made Russia a partner of the West? Or the West, which was never serious about respecting Russia's interests, let alone a partnership? Conradi doesn't provide a clear cut answer to his question. Given the complexities he grapples with, who can blame him? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Bill Cosby's public defenders have not been numerous of late, but they have included some serious, credible people like Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Vereen and, most recently, Phylicia Rashad his wife on television for more than a decade who expressed her full support for him as he confronted accusations that he was a serial sexual predator. In an online interview on Jan. 6, Ms. Rashad made a point of mentioning that her faith in Mr. Cosby was bolstered by the unflinching loyalty of his actual wife, . "This is a tough woman, a smart woman," she said. "She's no pushover." As Mr. Cosby continued his comedy tour last weekend in Colorado and California, his most important character witness remained his wife. When she spoke out last month in his defense, Mrs. Cosby said her support was based on the integrity of her husband, with whom she will celebrate a 51st wedding anniversary this weekend and with whom she has shared multiple triumphs and the pain of a child's death. But it was also clear from her statement that Mrs. Cosby's reaction to the allegations was influenced by a longstanding view that the news media trumpeting them was routinely wrong, even dishonest at times, in the way it portrayed African Americans. "There appears to be no vetting of my husband's accusers," Mrs. Cosby, 70, said in her statement, "before stories are published or aired." To review Mrs. Cosby's life and accomplishments running a business, amassing a world class art collection, producing films is to see that perhaps nothing has motivated her more than her interest in addressing what she views as glaring lapses in the media's treatment of blacks. In her doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts, in a book she later published, in a series of newspaper opinion articles and in a range of other activities that stretch back two decades, Mrs. Cosby has argued that the media, particularly television, has so distorted the image of African Americans that it can taint the way young black people come to view themselves. "I don't want others outside our community to define us, because they are doing a horrible job of it," Mrs. Cosby said in a 1994 interview. "And they are lying." To some, Mrs. Cosby's ability to dismiss the accounts of more than two dozen women who have now publicly accused her husband of some form of sexual abuse, reads like denial, regardless of what the media may have bungled in the past. But Mrs. Cosby has characterized the allegations as a media feeding frenzy, and not unlike those she has seen before. Jannette L. Dates, who with Mrs. Cosby wrote a 1992 newspaper op ed article critical of the media, said Mrs. Cosby was "adamant and passionate" about trying to get network executives and others to be more responsible in their depictions of African Americans. "She wanted to shake things up," Ms. Dates said. "We were saying those images are demeaning caricatures. That's a thread that is still being woven today." Her quest to create more positive images for blacks began decades ago and included efforts to convince her husband that Heathcliff Huxtable, the character who would evolve into America's Dad during eight seasons of "The Cosby Show," starting in 1984, should be a well to do doctor with a solid family, not a limousine driver, as Mr. Cosby had proposed. In other settings, independent of her husband, Mrs. Cosby worked to preserve black history because she said it was being ignored. In 1995, she co produced a play, "Having Our Say," about two pioneering centenarian sisters raised in the Jim Crow South who became successful after moving to New York. Nominated for three Tony Awards, it ran for almost nine months on Broadway. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. More recently, in 2001, she helped found an organization, the National Visionary Leadership Project, that videotapes interviews with accomplished African Americans. Charles J. Hamilton Jr., a former board member, said Mrs. Cosby had been drawn to the project because "major institutions have relegated African American history to the lower rung of the ladder." But Mrs. Cosby's concerns about the media run far deeper than simple neglect. Friends say she became particularly incensed by coverage of the murder of her son, Ennis, in 1997. He was shot to death on the side of a Los Angeles highway while changing a tire by a man who tried to rob him and later referred to him by a racial slur. On the same day as the shooting, a young woman, Autumn Jackson, claiming to be Mr. Cosby's daughter from an extramarital affair, demanded money from him to buy her silence. She was later convicted of trying to extort millions of dollars from Mr. Cosby. Mr. Cosby ultimately admitted to an affair with Ms. Jackson's mother, Shawn Berkes, but he denied his paternity, and Mrs. Cosby became frustrated that the media focused so much of its coverage on her husband's infidelity, not, she believed, on finding her son's killer. "All old personal negative issues between Bill and me were resolved years ago," Mrs. Cosby said in a statement she released in 1997. "We are a united couple. What occurred 23 years ago is not important to me except for the current issue of extortion. What is very important to me is the apprehension of the person or persons who killed our son. I appeal to all of you to help us find the murderer." When The National Enquirer published an article saying the death had pushed her to the edge of a nervous breakdown and that she was sedated, the Cosbys threatened to sue. Mrs. Cosby wrote an opinion article in USA Today with a headline that read "Don't Believe the Tabs." The following year, when the shooter was convicted, Mrs. Cosby wrote another essay in USA Today suggesting that the murderer, an immigrant from Ukraine, was a racist who had killed her son because he had been taught to hate blacks by, among other things, the American media. In a 1998 letter to The New York Times, she complained that the newspaper's account of the crime had depicted it as an attempted robbery and omitted a racial slur the killer had used, which minimized race as a motivation. (The letter was never published.) "I think the death of her son hardened her," said Sylvia Faddis, a friend at the time. "And I think she became hard in the years she had to fight for the privacy of their lives. I think it is hard for her to trust anyone." Mark Whitaker, an author who wrote a largely favorable biography of her husband last year, "Cosby: His Life and Times," said Mrs. Cosby was hardly the first spouse to see protection of the family as the primary priority when confronted by a situation like this. "You see this with political spouses," he said. "They come to see things as a battle and a siege and who is on our side and who is not." An intensely private woman, Mrs. Cosby declined to be interviewed by Mr. Whitaker, and Mr. Cosby's publicist did not make her available for this article. But she was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in early 2000 and said she had known about her husband's affair with Ms. Berkes since the 1970s. Mrs. Cosby described a period in their marriage when they both had to learn to be unselfish and said she did not believe in "unconditional love" and wanted to be surrounded by "people with integrity." Around that time, a young actress who had worked on "Cosby," the CBS show in which Mr. Cosby starred from 1996 to 2000, told New York City police officers that Mr. Cosby had attempted to force her hand down his sweatpants. But no charges were brought in that case, and Mr. Cosby, 77, who has denied all the allegations of sexual abuse, has never been criminally charged. It is unclear when Mrs. Cosby learned of that actress's account or to what extent she understood Mr. Cosby's reputation as a womanizer during a period when he was a fixture at the Playboy Mansion and later when he often traveled alone on comedy tours. Certainly Mrs. Cosby knew her husband had settled a 2005 civil suit filed in Philadelphia by a woman who said she had been drugged and sexually abused. The terms of the settlement were never disclosed, but the woman's lawyer said they had sworn statements from 13 other women who said they, too, had been molested in some way. More than a dozen other women have surfaced in the past few months with similar stories, a number that prompted several institutions that had been Mr. Cosby's longtime allies, including Spelman College, to drop their ties. One friend, who asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting the Cosbys, said that beyond her love for her husband, Mrs. Cosby simply had not seen the evidence to suggest she should put any faith in the accounts of women she didn't know as relayed by media outlets she had long distrusted. "She does not believe these women because they have no proof, only their stories," the friend said. Mrs. Cosby's faith in her husband is not so different from that of the many ticket holders who still flock to Mr. Cosby's shows, give him standing ovations and say they are skeptical of accounts of abuse that took as much as 30 years to surface. Such proof is also essential to Mrs. Cosby, who last year wrote an op ed article in which she related the trusted advice that her father, a research chemist, had drummed into her. "The evidence," she remembers him saying, "is the truth." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Credit...Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times Along with the rest of the world, athletes have had their careers upended by the coronavirus pandemic. They are giving The New York Times an intimate look at their journeys in periodic installments through the rest of the year. Read Lee's first installments here and here. Follow our live coverage of the women's gymnastics Olympic qualifying round. At first, Sunisa Lee, a favorite to make the United States women's gymnastics team for the Tokyo Olympics, didn't think much of the tickle in her throat. But on that Sunday evening last month, two days after the 2020 Summer Games were supposed to begin before they were postponed a year, the tickle turned into soreness that made her throat feel like it was on fire. When she woke up with a fever and chills, she panicked. Contracting the coronavirus and unknowingly infecting her father, John, had been her worst fear throughout the pandemic. He is at high risk for Covid 19, the disease caused by the virus, because he was paralyzed from the chest down after falling from a ladder in 2019, and his breathing is compromised. Though her coronavirus and strep tests came back negative, Lee, spent nearly two weeks in isolation, not wanting to take any chances. Her aunt and uncle, with whom she had been very close, died of Covid 19 this summer, within 13 days of each other. She had to say goodbye to her aunt via Zoom. Now Lee, a high school senior this year, is finally back at her gym, Midwest Gymnastics, for what seems like her hundredth restart in 2020. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Of course, the first thing I thought when I got sick was, "I have the coronavirus." It was scary. I had the worst headache of my life and it lasted for four days. My throat hurt so bad that I couldn't talk or swallow. At night, I slept with five blankets on me because I had the shivers and couldn't stop shaking. Then my fever got really high, like to 103. One day I cried all day when I couldn't even lie down because it hurt to do anything. My mom left chicken soup for me at my door, and it was so great that she could take care of me. The food was good. I didn't lose my taste or smell, so maybe it wasn't the coronavirus after all. The week after I was sick, I was still stuck in my room while I rested and isolated. It was frustrating, but everyone wanted me to stay away from them, stay out of the gym and stay home. So I watched a lot of "The Vampire Diaries" and FaceTimed with my friends. I also did a lot of schoolwork, wrote three or four papers, and just chilled. My dad called me every day to check up on me, and I also made sure he wasn't feeling sick. It was stressful to think that he might have caught something from me. I'm so relieved that he didn't. While I was at home, a Snapchat memory on my phone reminded me that it was one year since my dad's accident. I actually didn't cry when I saw it. I'm just so happy that my dad is alive right now. I looked back at the memories of his accident and got chills. I thought he was going to pass away when he was in the hospital, so I didn't want to go to nationals and compete. But he told me to go, that he really wanted me to go. So I did. Now I realize that if he didn't push me like that, I wouldn't be in the spot I am right now with the Olympics so close. On the anniversary, I texted him and said, "Dad, I'm so proud of how far you've come and that you've come back so strong." He is still in a wheelchair, but he can use his hands and he is getting better every day. The day the Olympics were supposed to start, one of my coaches, Alison Lim, sent me a text. She said today was the day I'd be at the opening ceremony and that this year didn't turn out how any of us wanted it to. She told me to keep reaching and pushing my limits, and that it won't be easy, but that nothing worth it ever is. On that sad, depressing day of this crazy year, it was so nice to get a note like that. It really sucked to be out of the gym for so long. I can't afford to miss more time because I already missed so much with my ankle injury. Getting sick pushed me back another two weeks. I'm so nervous that I'm falling behind. One of the hardest things was watching my friends post what they are doing in the gym. I just sat on my bed in my pajamas and watched them on Instagram. Everyone got pretty good. Before I went back to training, I had to take an EKG to make sure my heart was OK. I also had to take a chest X ray, do a throat culture and give blood for testing. The national team and my coaches wanted to make sure my body was ready for hard training. When I finally got back to the gym, my coach, Jess Graba, told me to take it slow and not rush into anything. Now I basically have all of my skills back, except on vault. I haven't done vault yet because my ankle still hurts a little bit, but I go to physical therapy every week to strengthen it. After you take time off, it can be really scary to do the harder things you used to do, and I personally hate being scared. When I'm scared of hurting myself, I start to overthink things and won't go for it. The uneven bars make me especially nervous because when you stop training, you lose sense of where the bar is going to be. And I grew an inch and a half this year, so I have had to make adjustments. So instead of thinking too much, I just force myself to do a skill. After I throw one, I'm fine, even though I always wipe out on that first one. I just get back up and get ready to go again. I learned one very important lesson through all this. I realized that I could actually miss practice and rest, then come back to the gym and still have my skills. I had no idea that it could be that way. Now I think it's more beneficial, mentally and physically, to rest sometimes because your body and your mind can heal and you can work on yourself as a person. And when you finally go back, your body feels brand new. Thinking about all the bad things that have happened to me has actually made me more positive about the Olympics. It reminds me that I could handle tough times and still be OK because I've handled many tough times before. Last year, just like this year, was one bad thing after another. I broke my ankle, then my dad had his accident, but then I did great at nationals and at worlds. I knew he was watching me so I did great for him. I fought off the negative thoughts and the sadness, and just focused. Now I feel like I'm maybe tougher because of it. No, not maybe. I am tougher because of it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
For decades, physicists have dreamed of discovering a material that could effortlessly convey electricity at everyday temperatures, a feat that would save gargantuan amounts of energy and revolutionize modern technology. Writing in the journal Nature, a team of researchers announced on Wednesday that they have done just that. They have made a superconductor that works at 58 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of a cool autumn day. This material is still far from practical, produced in only minute quantities and under immense pressures usually found closer to the Earth's core. But the scientists hope that with further experimentation they can devise a variation of their material that remains a superconductor even after that pressure is removed. "Ultimately, we want to bring the pressure to almost ambient pressure, to actually have an actual application," said Ranga P. Dias, a professor of physics and mechanical engineering at the University of Rochester and the senior author of the Nature paper. Shanti Deemyad, a professor of physics at the University of Utah who was not involved with the research, said, "It's a very robust study, very beautifully done." The first superconductors observed by scientists lost their electrical resistance only at ultracold temperatures, a few degrees above absolute zero, or minus 459.67 degrees, the lowest possible temperature. In the 1980s, physicists discovered so called high temperature superconductors, but even those became superconducting at temperatures far more frigid than those encountered in everyday life. The latest research is an outgrowth of predictions decades ago that hydrogen, the lightest of elements, turns into a metal and then a superconductor, possibly at room temperatures, when sufficiently squeezed. But pure hydrogen is difficult to work with. Three years ago, Dr. Dias, then a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, and Isaac Silvera, a Harvard physics professor, reported that they had produced the long sought metallic form of hydrogen. That claim, not yet reproduced, is still viewed skeptically by many. Scientists also started looking at hydrogen mixed in with another element. The bonds between the atoms of the other element might help compress the hydrogen together. In 2015, Mikhail Eremets, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, reported that hydrogen sulfide a molecule consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one sulfur atom turned superconducting at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit when squeezed to about 22 million pounds per square inch. That was a record warm temperature for a superconductor at the time. "That's, I would say, the game changing paper that sort of set the tone," Dr. Dias said. Dr. Eremets and other scientists subsequently discovered that lanthanum hydride a compound containing hydrogen and lanthanum reached a superconducting temperature of minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit at ultrahigh pressures. Dr. Dias's group looked at a mixture of three elements: hydrogen, sulfur and carbon. With three elements, the scientists were able to adjust the electronic properties to achieve the higher superconducting temperatures. "You can start with knowing what the good binary systems are and then potentially adding another element to it to get more complex," said Eva Zurek, a professor of chemistry at the University at Buffalo who performs numerical calculations to predict the behavior of the high pressure materials. "And hopefully, this complexity can bring the superconducting critical temperature up or stabilization pressure down." Dr. Zurek, who was not involved with the latest research, said carbon was a good third element to add because it formed strong bonds that could potentially keep the material together. "If you release the pressure, then those bonds potentially will not break," she said. To make the superconductor, the scientists had to squeeze the substance between two diamonds to nearly 40 million pounds per square inch. That is approximately the pressure you'd experience if you could tunnel more than 3,000 miles into the Earth and arrived at the bottom of the molten iron outer core. The process produced specks of material about the volume of a single inkjet particle. The experimental results did not fully agree with Dr. Zurek's computer calculations, which predicted the highest superconducting temperatures at lower pressures. Dr. Dias instead found that the superconducting temperature continued to increase as the pressure rose. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
COPENHAGEN Because of the summer vacation, the crowd that gathered early Wednesday morning in the lobby of Copenhagen's central library was smaller than usual. But what it lacked in numbers, it made up for in gusto. Accompanied by piano, and holding well worn blue songbooks, 90 or so people, ranging in age from 11 to well over 70, belted out four songs selected for the day. And then, in roughly the same time it took customers in the coffee shop next door to finish their lattes, it was over, and Christina Walldeskog, 31, was back on her way to work. "Morgensang always puts me in a much better mood," she said. "Who doesn't get happy from singing songs together?" Maybe not everyone. In Denmark, morgensang communal morning singing is a cherished cultural tradition, a form of bonding that many children acquire at school, but that is also happily practiced at universities, in large corporations, even at political party conferences. Yet recently, controversy over which songs should be sung has threatened to undermine the bonhomie . The latest flap, which began at the end of July, centers on the planned selections for the 2020 edition of "The High School Songbook," the country's most beloved morgensang anthology. Among the hundreds of melodies being considered is an invited submission by a rapper called Isam B. titled "Ramadan in Copenhagen. " Some critics say a song about the Muslim holiday has no place in such a quintessential symbol of Danishness. "The High School Songbook" was used from the 19th century in Denmark's folk high schools, popular residential institutions offering courses for people over 18 . They made morgensang a cultural staple, and the book itself a potent symbol of national identity. It is widely used in other institutions and, with 450,000 copies sold since 2006, is the country's best selling book. "You could say it's become part of the backbone of Danish democracy," said Kristine Ringsager, an assistant professor of music anthropology at Arhus University. "The songs in it are seen as a very special treasury of what it means to be Danish." That definition isn't entirely static, however. Immigration is a divisive issue here, and anxiety about it has strengthened far right groups like the Danish People's Party and prompted everything from a burqa ban to tortured debate over whether school cafeterias should serve pork meatballs. Yet underneath those conflicts in this once homogeneous but now ethnically diverse country is a more fundamental struggle over what it means to be Danish and that includes what Danes sing. There have been 18 editions of "The High School Songbook" so far, the latest published in 2006. Each edition has retained a core of classics, many of them paeans to Denmark's landscape and seasons, but outdated songs are retired and new ones introduced. The process always generates conflict, particularly among citizens upset to see a favorite excluded. But the 19th edition, currently being selected, has produced a whole different level of controversy. The task fell to Isam B. In 2007, the singer, whose full name is Isam Bachiri, released a hit interpretation of "In Denmark I Was Born," one of the songbook's classics, with words by Hans Christian Andersen. It is so well known it is sometimes referred to as Denmark's unofficial national anthem. "If I'm going to be the first brown Muslim man contributing to this book, I'm going to tell you a story of how my Denmark is looking," Mr. Bachiri said. Because the workshop fell during Ramadan, the experience of fasting in the city presented itself as a natural subject, and while there, he collaborated with three other composers and musicians to write "Ramadan in Copenhagen." Although Mr. Bachiri presented the song at a library morgensang in April, his contribution recently become a nationwide flash point after news of it appeared in a local newspaper, and conservative politicians denounced its inclusion. "No, no, no! A Ramadan song doesn't belong in the Danish High School Songbook," tweeted the anti immigrant Danish People's Party. In an interview with the newspaper Berlingske, the Liberal Alliance's Henrik Dahl accused the committee of "ideological signaling of multicultural views." Mr. Bachiri said he saw this kind of criticism as an unwillingness to acknowledge reality. "They want to keep Denmark white," he said of the song's opponents. "But Denmark is not just white anymore. And if a song can threaten your whole national identity, I'd say you've got an identity crisis." It's not even the first time in the past year that morgensang has turned into a political hot potato. Late in 2018, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, Mads Mordhorst, apologized after a teacher with an immigrant background objected that another classic, "The Danish Song Is a Young Blond Girl," made her feel excluded when sung at a school assembly. After Professor Mordhorst announced that the song would no longer be included in any of the school's ceremonies, a number of politicians objected, including the prime minister at the time, Lars Lokke Rasmussen; some joined together to sing the song from inside the Parliament. Alex Ahrendtsen, the Danish People's Party's spokesman on culture and schools, said in an interview that it was neither the content of Mr. Bachiri's song nor the author that grated, but rather the selection process. "Until 2006, every time the songbook changed, the new songs were already being sung," he said. "They were already popular. Here, they reversed the process; now, the committee is the one deciding for the people. It's elitist." The songbook, Mr. Ahrendtsen said, "represents our tradition, our culture and history, the taste of the people." "Mr. Carlsen, an old hippie, is trying to politicize something that is not political," he added. But that can be a hard argument to sustain about a songbook that in the past included Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changin'" and currently contains lyrics about the fall of the Berlin Wall. "It's got 'The Internationale' in it," said Henrik Kober, a volunteer morgensang leader at the library. "I don't know what's political if not that." The public will not learn for sure whether "Ramadan in Copenhagen" will make the final cut until the 19th edition comes out in November 2020. But Isam B., whose new single, "Lost for Words," dropped on Friday, loves the idea of Danes across the country singing his lyrics. "That would be legendary," he said. On Wednesday, Taus Christiansen, 28, cautiously agreed. A morgensang regular, Mr. Christiansen dropped by the library at 8:30 a.m. before rushing off to another morgensang being held as part of the Copenhagen Opera Festival. "Denmark has changed, and I think a song about Ramadan suits perfectly with what Danish identity is today," he said. "But the melody is very complex, and the lyrics are very personal. So for me, the question is whether it's suitable for singing together." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Have questions about recipes, cooking and food? My job is to answer them. Ask me anything: foodeditor nytimes.com. I'm a millennial in a New York City apartment with a small kitchen, and my question for you is what cooking essentials does a moderately skilled home cook need? A chef's knife and a paring knife, obviously, but what else do you think is important? A food processor? A pressure cooker? You don't need a pressure cooker. A food processor is nice to have, but you don't need that either. What you need in addition to your knives is a pair of tongs, a wooden cutting board and a good, big, lidded saute pan of the sort you can buy at a kitchen supply shop for around 40. Also, an enameled Dutch oven for stews, soups and roasting chickens (they're spendy, so keep an eye out for sales, or go to Ikea), as well as a half sheet pan and a bunch of aluminum mixing bowls. Maybe a colander. Aspire to a rice cooker, and buy one when they clip your boss at work and give you her job. You are an inspiration to me for your approach to everyday cooking. However, you do it as part of your job, which makes it inherently manly. I too love to cook every day. My problem comes when I tell friends about my cooking habits. Most of them don't seem to know what to do with me, and usually I get a raised eyebrow and comments along the lines of "That must really make your wife happy." It does, but apparently there aren't too many men out here making their wives happy in this particular way. How do I enjoy my passion for turning beautiful ingredients into beautiful food and not feel too weird about it? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Thomas Waerner was contending for the lead in the Iditarod sled dog race in mid March. Yet as he focused on the race and his dogs, he couldn't help pick up the whispers at rest stops: Coronavirus. Covid 19. Flights canceled. Borders closed. When Waerner, 47, crossed the finish line in first place on March 18, winning the race in only his second try, he celebrated. But he also confronted a stark reality in a world much changed since the ceremonial start of the race 11 days before. He knew that he and his dogs might not be able to get home to Norway. Sure enough, more than two months later, Waerner and the 16 sled dogs are still residents of Alaska. "I had a feeling when we were still at the Yukon River you get messages," he said on Monday. His wife, Guro, who was expecting to meet him at the finish line, decided to fly back to Norway a few days before the race ended. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
On Thursday afternoon, Marc Jacobs closed out fashion week with a show that provoked vociferous debate, though not about the seven inch platforms or glitter doll frocks on the runway but about the hair. Bouquets of towering multicolored yarn fashioned into faux dreadlocks fueled a continuing conversation about the relationship of cultural appropriation and creative inspiration that has grown increasingly heated. A black woman wrote in a Twitter post: "An unknown black man/woman has dreads, it is assumed they smoke and/or are unprofessional. Marc Jacobs has a model with dreads, it's boho chic." "So, I guess this means POC can wear our locs freely now and not be blocked from a promotion or job in general?" wrote another, using an abbreviation for "people of color." The furor might have died down after a couple of hours, but instead reached a new intensity after Marc Jacobs took to Instagram to address the criticism. Responding to two commenters using the handle themarcjacobs, he wrote below a photo on his brand's page: "All who cry 'cultural appropriation' or whatever nonsense about any race or skin color wearing their hair in any particular style or manner funny how you don't criticize women of color for straightening their hair. I respect and am inspired by people and how they look. I don't see color or race I see people." His response set off a slew of fresh condemnations on social media. Capturing a sentiment expressed widely on the Instagram thread below Mr. Jacobs's comment, one user wrote: "black women who straighten their hair were forced to conform to those standards. A form of assimilation. I'm from Canada but in America if your hair is unkept, in styles such as dreads, Afros, cornrows, black women lose jobs and opportunities, and they also get ridiculed like Zendaya." The user, kiidiosa, was referring to comments the E! News host Giuliana Rancic made about the singer Zendaya's locs at the Oscars in 2015. The same user continued: "You don't see color, huh? How convenient for you. Cuz black women are reminded abt their hair and skin everyday. But your privilege has allowed you that option. I loved you, also didn't take offense to the dreads, but your comment was redundant and ignorant. Shame." This wasn't the first time a fashion designer has come under fire for cultural appropriation. Last year, Valentino was criticized for sending models down the runway with their hair in cornrow buns, and DSquared2 faced outrage over a collection that the brand described as "an ode to America's native tribes meets the noble spirit of Old Europe." Recently, the author Lionel Shriver denounced efforts to stop writers from making use of the perspectives of those different from them. She insisted on her right to channel the voice of a member of a minority group in any situation. "Otherwise, all I could write about would be smart alecky 59 year old 5 foot 2 inch white women from North Carolina," she said. Critics of cultural appropriation say that a key difference between being inspired by a culture and appropriating it lies in attribution. By those standards, Guido Palau, the hairstylist behind the hair at Marc Jacobs's show, may have fallen short. Mr. Jacobs's original muse for the hair was the director Lana Wachowski, a transgender woman and star of the brand's spring 2016 ad campaign, and Mr. Palau said the final version drew on raver culture, Boy George and Harajuku, a district in Tokyo known for its colorful street style. Asked if the look he created was inspired by Rastafarian culture, Mr. Palau told The Cut, "No, not at all." "It would be crazy to say that dreadlocks aren't something that is part of black culture," said Nelson Vercher, a hairstylist who has worked with models. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Typically, dancers are barefoot, not their audiences. But at the Beach Sessions, at Rockaway Beach, spectators can wriggle their toes in the sand. Last year, the Rockaway resident Sasha Okshteyn started this free outdoor series to bring contemporary dance from city stages to the long shoreline of Queens. The effort is ecological as well as artistic: In pairing performance with beach cleanups and partnering with organizations like the Surfrider Foundation, Ms. Okshteyn is forging a dialogue between dance and its environs. For the last of this year's sessions, the dynamic Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener present "Horizon Event No. 4," a compilation of excerpts from their previous work reconstructed for the seaside. Joining them is Netta Yerushalmy's "Paramodernities 3 Black Modernism," a re imagination of the 1960 Alvin Ailey classic "Revelations," now with crashing waves in the background and the ocean's salty scent. Take a cue from the Ramones and "hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach." Or just take the A train. (Saturday, Aug. 27, 6:30 p.m., Beach 86th Street; beachsessionsdanceseries.com.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Credit...Doug Strickland for The New York Times He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves. Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300 mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from "little hole in the wall dollar stores in the backwoods," his brother said. "The major metro areas were cleaned out." Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between 8 and 70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, "it was crazy money." To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic. Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them. "It's been a huge amount of whiplash," he said. "From being in a situation where what I've got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to 'What the heck am I going to do with all of this?'" Update: Matt Colvin has decided to donate his bottles of hand sanitizer. Mr. Colvin is one of probably thousands of sellers who have amassed stockpiles of hand sanitizer and crucial respirator masks that many hospitals are now rationing, according to interviews with eight Amazon sellers and posts in private Facebook and Telegram groups from dozens more. Amazon said it had recently removed hundreds of thousands of listings and suspended thousands of sellers' accounts for price gouging related to the coronavirus. Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other online commerce platforms are trying to stop their sellers from making excessive profits from a public health crisis. While the companies aimed to discourage people from hoarding such products and jacking up their prices, many sellers had already cleared out their local stores and started selling the goods online. Now both the physical and digital shelves are nearly empty. Mikeala Kozlowski, a nurse in Dudley, Mass., has been searching for hand sanitizer since before she gave birth to her first child, Nora, on March 5. When she searched stores, which were sold out, she skipped getting gas to avoid handling the pump. And when she checked Amazon, she couldn't find it for less than 50. "You're being selfish, hoarding resources for your own personal gain," she said of the sellers. Sites like Amazon and eBay have given rise to a growing industry of independent sellers who snatch up discounted or hard to find items in stores to post online and sell around the world. These sellers call it retail arbitrage, a 21st century career that has adults buying up everything from limited run cereals to Fingerling Monkeys, a once hot toy. The bargain hunters look for anything they can sell at a sharp markup. In recent weeks, they found perhaps their biggest opportunity: a pandemic. As they watched the list of Amazon's most popular searches crowd with terms like "Purell," "N95 mask" and "Clorox wipes," sellers said, they did what they had learned to do: Suck up supply and sell it for what the market would bear. Initially, the strategy worked. For several weeks, prices soared for some of the top results to searches for sanitizer, masks and wipes on Amazon, according to a New York Times analysis of historical prices from Jungle Scout, which tracks data for Amazon sellers. The data shows that both Amazon and third party sellers like Mr. Colvin increased their prices, which then mostly dropped when Amazon took action against price gouging this month. Then the companies, pressured by growing criticism from regulators and customers, cracked down. After the measures last week, Amazon went further on Wednesday, restricting sales of any coronavirus related products from certain sellers. "Price gouging is a clear violation of our policies, unethical, and in some areas, illegal," Amazon said in a statement. "In addition to terminating these third party accounts, we welcome the opportunity to work directly with states attorneys general to prosecute bad actors." Mr. Colvin, 36, a former Air Force technical sergeant, said he started selling on Amazon in 2015, developing it into a six figure career by selling Nike shoes and pet toys, and by following trends. In early February, as headlines announced the coronavirus's spread in China, Mr. Colvin spotted a chance to capitalize. A nearby liquidation firm was selling 2,000 "pandemic packs," leftovers from a defunct company. Each came with 50 face masks, four small bottles of hand sanitizer and a thermometer. The price was 5 a pack. Mr. Colvin haggled it to 3.50 and bought them all. Elsewhere in the country, other Amazon sellers were doing the same. Chris Anderson, an Amazon seller in central Pennsylvania, said he and a friend had driven around Ohio, buying about 10,000 masks from stores. He used coupons to buy packs of 10 for around 15 each and resold them for 40 to 50. After Amazon's cut and other costs, he estimates, he made a 25,000 profit. Mr. Anderson is now holding 500 packs of antibacterial wipes after Amazon blocked him from selling them for 19 each, up from 16 weeks earlier. He bought the packs for 3 each. Eric, a truck driver from Ohio who spoke on the condition that his surname not be published because he feared Amazon would retaliate, said he had also collected about 10,000 masks at stores. He bought each 10 pack for about 20 and sold most for roughly 80 each, though some he priced at 125. "Even at 125 a box, they were selling almost instantly," he said. "It was mind blowing as far as what you could charge." He estimates he made 35,000 to 40,000 in profit. Now he has 1,000 more masks on order, but he's not sure what to do with them. He said Amazon had been vague about what constituted price gouging, scaring away sellers who don't want to risk losing their ability to sell on its site. To regulators and many others, the sellers are sitting on a stockpile of medical supplies during a pandemic. The attorney general's offices in California, Washington and New York are all investigating price gouging related to the coronavirus. California's price gouging law bars sellers from increasing prices by more than 10 percent after officials declare an emergency. New York's law prohibits sellers from charging an "unconscionably excessive price" during emergencies. An official at the Washington attorney general's office said the agency believed it could apply the state's consumer protection law to sue platforms or sellers, even if they aren't in Washington, as long as they were trying to sell to Washington residents. "There's a crushing overwhelming demand in certain cities right now," he said. "The Dollar General in the middle of nowhere outside of Lexington, Ky., doesn't have that." He thought about it more. "I honestly feel like it's a public service," he added. "I'm being paid for my public service." As for his stockpile, Mr. Colvin said he would now probably try to sell it locally. "If I can make a slight profit, that's fine," he said. "But I'm not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I'm selling for 20 times what they cost me." After The Times published this article on Saturday morning, Mr. Colvin said he was exploring ways to donate all the supplies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Love is a beautiful liar in "Unknown Soldier," Daniel Goldstein and Michael Friedman's gentle musical reverie on the deceptions of Eros and memory. Old fashioned, mellifluous songs of courtship and marital bliss float beguilingly through Trip Cullman's carefully assembled production, which opened at Playwrights Horizons on Monday night. But even at their prettiest, the songs in this multigenerational family portrait seem tainted by suspicion, a sense that the sweetness they extol could dissolve into nothingness, melting "like sugar into water," as a recurring lyric has it. As for the beloved, those cherished beings who elicit all that enchanted poetry, can you really say you know them, once they're gone from your sight? Such reflections of the elusiveness and illusiveness of human identity have acquired an unexpected and unwelcome poignancy since "Unknown Soldier" was first staged at the Williamstown Theater Festival, in Williamstown, Mass., in 2015. Only two years later, Friedman, its protean composer, died at 41 of complications from AIDS. As a consequence, it's difficult not to see and particularly hear this show without perceiving it as a memorial to the man who wrote its music. A character sings hopefully in the opening scene that when we see a picture, or hear a song or read a letter, "a person that's forgotten comes alive for a moment." And every note that's sounded here inevitably both summons Friedman's presence and makes us all the more aware of his absence. To regard "Unknown Soldier" primarily as a sentimental work, however, is a disservice to the complexity of this imperfect musical and, above all, to Friedman as a songwriter. Built around the quest to identify the amnesiac World War I veteran of its title, the show celebrates the urge to fully know other people in the present as well as in the past. But it is also steeped in a rueful awareness that such attempts are doomed to fail. Friedman has matched that sensibility here with songs that slide from lilting, gaslight era melodiousness into a jagged, more contemporary anxiety. The plot is a multilevel, armchair detective story. At its center is Ellen Rabinowitz (Margo Seibert), an obstetrician who has returned to her childhood home in Troy, N.Y., after the death of Lucy, the grandmother who raised her (the incomparable Estelle Parsons, who turns out to be a creditable singer). At a crossroads in her marriage and career, Ellen finds herself obsessed with a past that Lucy never talked about much. An old newspaper clipping, showing Lucy as a young woman with a mysterious man in uniform, inspires Ellen to do some investigative digging. Most of this is done online, with the assistance of Andrew Hoffman (Erik Lochtefeld), a Cornell University librarian, with whom she initiates an email flirtation. A cavalcade of ghosts haunts the premises as well. They include Ellen's 7 year old self (a charmingly unaffected Zoe Glick), and the dewy young version of her grandmother, Lucy (the silver voiced Kerstin Anderson). Then there's the soldier in that photograph (Perry Sherman, impeccably blank and bewildered), who, having lost his memory, was given the provisional name Francis Grand. He is treated by a psychiatric doctor (an agile and witty Thom Sesma), who, in a bonus for the audience, lectures in vaudeville pastiche numbers about the nature of recollection. As the narrative shifts between past and present, parallels emerge between the young Lucy's love for the soldier she never really knew and the developing semi romantic relationship between Ellen and Andrew given persuasive, unglamorous existence by Seibert and Lochtefeld as they hide behind their online personas. Whatever the historical period, it seems, our lovers, and would be lovers, remain strangers. As you may have gathered, many strands of plot are being spun here, a process further complicated by the unreliability of our narrators (and implicitly, of all narrators). Sung with conviction and lucidly staged, the production manages admirably to keep confusion at bay. Still, there's an abiding sense that the creators have taken on too many elements to fit comfortably into the show's 90 minutes, with so much to say, in so many voices, in so little time. Even with extensive recent revisions by Goldstein and Cullman, "Unknown Soldier" somehow feels both slender and overstuffed. But there's no denying the care that has gone into every level of the production. That includes Mark Wendland's pale gray, institutional looking set, presided over by a glowing clock without hands, in which packing boxes morph into twinkling streetscapes; the century spanning costumes by Clint Ramos and Jacob A. Climer; and Ben Stanton's lyrical lighting (with gorgeous astral projections by Lucy Mackinnon). Under the direction of Julie McBride, a five piece band eloquently mirrors the varied musical languages Friedman uses here. He was always a chameleon composer, with work that ranges from the emo rock satire of "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" to the R B inflected wistfulness of "The Fortress of Solitude." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Every week brings a fresh hell in the tech world. As news of the latest scandals pile up over weeks, months and eventually years, narratives switch. Friendly tech companies become "Big Tech." The narrative is flattened. The tech giants become monolithic and their employees become caricatures often of villains. The truth is always messier, more interesting and more human. It is a central tension animating Anna Wiener's excellent memoir, "Uncanny Valley." The book traces Ms. Wiener's navigating the tech world as a start up employee in the mid 2010s what might be thought of as the last years before Silicon Valley's fall from darling status. Ms. Wiener said she was drawn into the tech world by its propulsive qualities. Graduating into a recession and spending her early 20s in publishing, tech offered opportunities: jobs, the seductive feeling of creating something and, of course, the money was good. But what makes "Uncanny Valley" so valuable is the way it humanizes the tech industry without letting it off the hook. The book allows us to see the way that flawed technology is made and marketed: not by villains, but by blind spots, uncritical thinking and armies of ambivalent people coming into work each day trying their best all while, sometimes unwittingly, laying the foundation of the surveillance economy. From a privacy standpoint, "Uncanny Valley" is helpful in understanding what it's like being on the other end of the torrent of information that streams from our devices each minute. Early on, Ms. Wiener recounts working for a successful data analytics company and the gold rush toward big data, noting that "not everyone knew what they needed from big data, but everyone knew that they needed it." When confronted with the mass of information her company collected, Ms. Wiener describes feeling uncomfortable with the "God Mode" view that granted employees full access to user data. "This was a privileged vantage point from which to observe the tech industry, and we tried not to talk about it," she writes. This, she notes, becomes a pattern. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the National Security Agency's Prism program in 2013, employees at her own data company never discussed the news. What she describes is a familiar dissociation for anyone who spends time interrogating tech companies on their privacy policies. Her company simply didn't consider itself part of the surveillance economy: "We weren't thinking about our role in facilitating and normalizing the creation of unregulated, privately held databases on human behavior. We were just allowing product managers to run better A/B tests. We were just helping developers make better apps. It was all so simple: people loved our product and leveraged it to improve their own products, so that people would love them, too. There was nothing nefarious about it. Besides, if we didn't do it, someone else would. We were far from the only third party analytics tool on the market. The sole moral quandary in our space that we acknowledged outright was the question of whether or not to sell data to advertisers. This was something we did not do, and we were righteous about it. We were just a neutral platform, a conduit. If anyone raised concerns about the information our users were collecting, or the potential for abuse of our product, the solutions manager would try to bring us back to earth by reminding us that we weren't data brokers. We did not build cross platform profiles. We didn't involve third parties. Users might not know they were being tracked, but that was between them and our customer companies." They were, in other words, just doing their jobs. Ms. Wiener frequently returns to this reticence to question the product, the end goals of the technology and the Silicon Valley ethos as a whole. At her next job working on the terms of service team for a large open source code platform, she reveals how the evolution of the internet pushed her and her co workers into becoming "reluctant content moderators." Soon it became her team's job to fashion a balance between preserving free speech on her platform and protecting it from trolls and neo Nazis: "We wanted to tread lightly: core participants in the open source software community were sensitive to corporate oversight, and we didn't want to undercut anyone's techno utopianism by becoming an overreaching arm of the company state. We wanted to be on the side of human rights, free speech and free expression, creativity and equality. At the same time, it was an international platform, and who among us could have articulated a coherent stance on international human rights?" As a journalist who has covered content moderation issues for the better part of a decade, the perspective is somewhat clarifying. Decisions that feel ad hoc or made by one or two people in the belly of a large company often are. What looks from the outside like a conspiracy or nefarious techno authoritarianism is often just confusion caused by poor management, poor communication and dizzying growth. "Most of the company did not seem aware of how common it was for our tools to be abused," Ms. Wiener writes of her group of de facto moderators. "They did not even seem to know that our team existed. It wasn't their fault we were easy to miss. There were four of us for the platform's nine million users." In this instance, "Uncanny Valley" shows how the internet can thrust ordinary people into extraordinary positions of power usually without qualifications or a how to guide. This is not to say that the book excuses any of the industry's reckless behavior. Like a good travel writer, Ms. Wiener positions herself as an insider outsider, "participating in something bigger than myself and still feeling apart from it." And she is sufficiently critical of her and her peers' participation in the industry. She writes that she would "wonder whether the N.S.A. whistle blower had been the first moral test for my generation of entrepreneurs and tech workers, and we had blown it," she writes at one point near the end of the memoir. Ms. Wiener's memoir comes at a point where the backlash against Silicon Valley is strong enough to have earned its own name. Narratives have hardened and aggrieved tech employees are adopting a "bunker mentality." As Ranjan Roy of the newsletter Margins wrote recently of Facebook, "the rank and file are seeing that they are the villains, and will increasingly become so." As so much of the reporting shows, the increased scrutiny and criticism of the techlash is important and almost all is warranted. Big Tech has amassed wild, unregulated power that has grown unchecked. Still, it's easy to get conspiratorial and to fall comfortably into black and white notions of good versus evil. "Uncanny Valley" is a reminder that the reality is far more muddled but no less damning. Our dystopia isn't just the product of mustache twirling billionaires drunk with power and fueled by greed though it is that, too, sometimes. It's also the result of uncritical thinking, blind spots caused by an overwhelmingly white male work force and a pathological reluctance to ask the bigger question: Where is this all going? What am I building? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Jill Abramson responded to plagiarism accusations about her latest book, "Merchants of Truth," by saying errors were unintentional. Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, responded on Thursday to accusations that her latest book, "Merchants of Truth," contains passages that were plagiarized or not properly attributed to the original source material. "I was up all night going through my book because I take these claims of plagiarism so seriously," she said in a statement issued by the book's publisher, Simon Schuster. "I tried above all to accurately and properly give attribution to the many hundreds of sources that were part of my research." She added: "The notes don't match up with the right pages in a few cases and this was unintentional and will be promptly corrected. The language is too close in some cases and should have been cited as quotations in the text. This, too, will be fixed." A Simon Schuster spokesman said the company would work with Ms. Abramson to make corrections and clarify the sourcing in future print editions and in the e book. On Wednesday evening, a reporter for Vice News, one of the four news organizations Ms. Abramson chronicles in her book, alerted readers to passages that appear to have been lifted from other sources, in some cases word for word. The reporter, Michael Moynihan, revealed the similarities in a series of tweets. In one instance, he cited a 2005 article from Ryerson Review, a news site run by journalism students, in which a paragraph describing Gavin McInnes, a founder of Vice News, reads: "McInnes wrote a column in 'The American Conservative,' a magazine run by Pat Buchanan. In the magazine, he called young people a bunch of knee jerk liberals (a phrase McInnes and his cronies use often) who'll believe anyone with dark skin over anyone with light skin." The similar passage from Ms. Abramson's book reads: "He wrote a column in 'The American Conservative,' a magazine run by Pat Buchanan, calling young people a bunch of knee jerk liberals (a phrase McInnes and his ilk often used) who would believe anyone with dark skin over anyone with light skin." Nicolle Weeks, the author of the 2005 article, said in an interview, "I'm concerned that she's written a book about truth and journalism, and she has done something dishonest." Other examples cited by Mr. Moynihan include sentences or paragraphs that appear similar to those from articles published by The New Yorker and the Columbia Journalism Review. Ms. Abramson, who was fired from The Times in the spring of 2014, after less than three years in its top job on the editorial side, sold the book to Simon Schuster in 2015 after an auction with multiple publishers. Reviews for "Merchants of Truth," a 500 page examination of how newsrooms, both new and established, are grappling with the changes brought on by the rise of digital media, were largely positive, including in The Times. Vice is one of the media companies that Ms. Abramson focused on, and when galleys of the book circulated last month, many of its staff members pointed out inaccuracies on social media. In response to those complaints, Ms. Abramson made corrections in time for the final version. The inaccuracies and apparently cut and pasted lines were surprising, given the subject of her book, which came with the subtitle "The Business of News and the Fight for Facts." In the parts of "Merchants of Truth" focused on her tenure as executive editor of The Times, Ms. Abramson described her concern that the line between the business and news departments was starting to blur. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The majority of the book is not memoir, but a work of deep reporting driven by the thesis that the new breed of digital outlets specifically, Vice and BuzzFeed are somewhat lacking in their commitment to traditional journalistic values. "The irony is, it's the people who didn't have a culture of fact checking who are the ones fact checking her work," Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, said in an interview. Plagiarism is a cardinal, and sometimes career ending, sin in journalism, but the practice of approving borrowed phrases gets a pass in the book world, except in egregious instances. Several prominent authors who stood accused of plagiarism, including the poet and memoirist Jill Bialosky and the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, have emerged relatively unscathed, their mistakes chalked up to haste or sloppiness rather than intellectual dishonesty. "Book publishing has almost adopted the role of that of a Facebook, saying, 'We're just a platform,'" Mr. Pope said. "Which I think is wrong." Jane Mayer, a writer for The New Yorker who collaborated with Ms. Abramson on "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," defended the author. "I'd be hard pressed to find a more honest and hardworking reporter," she said in an email. "Anyone can make a few mistakes, but it's a distortion to devalue a lifetime of outstanding work because of this." Mr. Moynihan, the Vice correspondent, said he uncovered evidence of apparent plagiarism when he started looking closely at the book to determine whether Ms. Abramson had gotten facts about Vice wrong because she had come upon them elsewhere. Thomas Morton, a reporter for Vice, said he was surprised to read a chapter about himself that included incorrect details about his high school years that he did not recall discussing with Ms. Abramson during their phone interview. She described him as a teenager who wore skinny pants and ironic T shirts and listened to Southern gangster rap, none of which were true, he said in an interview. In another section included in the book's first printing (but not in the current e book version), Ms. Abramson described how Mr. Morton traveled to the mountains outside Cartagena to report on a tribe that has a tradition of having sex with donkeys. The problem, Mr. Morton said, is that he was not the correspondent of the donkey story. It was covered by another correspondent. Ms. Abramson did not respond to requests for comment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Unsafe abortions kill many Tanzanian women, according to a recent study, but the deaths result from several factors and women in some regions die much more often than others. Birth control is hard to get, and public health clinics lack trained staff and vacuum aspiration kits used to perform abortions. In addition, the legality of abortion is ambiguous, forcing many women to try to do it themselves or see illegal abortion providers. Of one million unintended pregnancies in 2013, the study found, 39 percent ended in abortion. The study, done by the Guttmacher Institute, Tanzania's national medical research institute and the country's leading medical school, and published in PLOS One, was based on surveys of hospitals and clinics and interviews with Tanzanian doctors. Although Tanzania ratified the African Union's 2005 Maputo Protocol on women's rights which endorsed abortion rights and also recognizes colonial era British case law permitting abortion in some circumstances, national law mandates 14 year sentences for anyone "unlawfully" performing an abortion and seven years for women who try to make themselves miscarry but without defining "unlawfully," said Sarah C. Keogh, a Guttmacher Institute researcher and the study's lead author. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
As the life expectancy of Americans has declined over a period of three years a drop driven by higher death rates among people in the prime of life the focus has been on the plight of white Americans in rural areas who were dying from so called deaths of despair: drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide. But a new analysis of more than a half century of federal mortality data, published on Tuesday in JAMA, found that the increased death rates among people in midlife extended to all racial and ethnic groups, and to suburbs and cities. And while suicides, drug overdoses and alcoholism were the main causes, other medical conditions, including heart disease, strokes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, also contributed, the authors reported. "The whole country is at a health disadvantage compared to other wealthy nations," the study's lead author, Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, said. "We are losing people in the most productive period of their lives. Children are losing parents. Employers have a sicker work force." The increase in deaths among people in midlife highlighted the lagging health measures in the United States compared with other wealthy nations, despite the fact that the United States has the highest per capita health spending in the world, noted an editorial that accompanied the study. "Mortality has improved year to year over the course of the 20th century," said Dr. Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania. "The 21st century is a major exception. Since 2010 there's been no improvement in mortality among working aged people." While the total number of excess deaths meaning the number of deaths that would not have happened if the mortality rate had continued to improve is small, at 33,000, deaths in younger people have a much bigger effect on national life expectancy estimates than deaths of people in their 80s or 90s. Death rates are actually improving among children and older Americans, Dr. Woolf noted, perhaps because they may have more reliable health care Medicaid for many children and Medicare for older people. According to the new study, the death rate from 2010 to 2017 for all causes among people ages 25 to 64 increased from 328.5 deaths per 100,000 people to 348.2 deaths per 100,000. It was clear statistically by 2014 that it was not just whites who were affected, but all racial and ethnic groups and that the main causes were drug overdoses, alcohol and suicides. "The fact that it's so expansive and involves so many causes of death it's saying that there's something broader going on in our country," said Ellen R. Meara, a professor of health policy at Dartmouth College. "This no longer limited to middle aged whites." The states with the greatest relative increases in death rates among young and middle aged adults were New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and Ohio. Dr. Woolf said one of the findings showed that the excess deaths were highly concentrated geographically, with fully a third of them in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana. "What's not lost on us is what is going on in those states," he said. "The history of when this health trend started happens to coincide with when these economic shifts began the loss of manufacturing jobs and closure of steel mills and auto plants." For demographers like Kenneth Wachter, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, the study's findings are not surprising because there have been a number of similar reports. But, he said, "it is a valuable paper in bringing together these trends." The study leaves unanswered questions, including, Why is there an increased death rate only in the 25 to 64 age group? "We need to look at root causes," Dr. Woolf said. "Something changed in the 1980s, which is when the growth in our life expectancy began to slow down compared to other wealthy nations." The increased deaths from drug overdoses reflected increased rates of addiction to opioids. But they have also risen because of changes in the drug supply in the East and Midwest. Over the last decade, the synthetic drug known as fentanyl has been mixed into heroin or in some places has replaced it. That has made the drug supply more deadly, since it is difficult for users to know the dose they are taking. This is not the first time that life expectancy has gotten stuck in the United States. Male life expectancy stalled in the 1960s, Dr. Preston said. It picked up again, and the gains made since have been substantial. Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, offered a word of caution. "I'm not sure the dramatic, 'there's something desperately wrong with the entire country' narrative is entirely accurate," Dr. Harper said. "Certain groups, such as Hispanics and Asians, are doing O.K. It's not like the entire country is being subsumed by a single social phenomenon that can explain all of this. There are a lot of moving parts." He added: "The U.S. has made dramatic gains in life expectancy over the past several decades. It's important to remember that people here live a very long time compared to a lot of places in the world." John G. Haaga, director of the division of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, which funded this study, also saw a bright spot: Life expectancy in the coastal metro areas both east and west has improved at roughly the same rate as in Canada. "It's important because it means this is not somehow deep in our national soul or genetics or something," he said. "We know we can do better right here in America. It proves that it's possible." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Bandra, an artsy Mumbai suburb on the Arabian Sea, is a favorite of the city's creative set and counts Bollywood stars, film producers, artists and designers among its residents. Old bungalows in varying stages of dilapidation and colorful graffiti murals adorning the walls of cafes and shops lend a bohemian feel to the area, about 3.5 miles from bustling South Mumbai. Buzzy restaurants abound. But above all, Bandra is a mainstay shopping destination for Mumbaikars, who find it convenient that cool shops are clustered on a few streets. Shoppers are often on the lookout for one of a kind wares, whether it's home goods, clothes or works by emerging artists. This five story, 10,000 square foot shop is a magnet for art lovers. The works here include more than 400 paintings from up and coming Indian artists, tribal sculptures crafted in central India and hundreds of statues in teakwood and marble of Hindu gods such as Ganesha and Krishna, as well as elephants. The knowledgeable staff can help shoppers navigate through the overwhelming assortment. Prices from 200 rupees, or about 2.90. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Q. YouTube's desktop website has this handy Share setting that lets you share a clip that starts playing later, at a certain part of the video. Is there something similar for clips on Vimeo that I don't see? A. Although the Vimeo site doesn't have the same onscreen options that YouTube does, you can also share links to its videos that are set to start playing at a certain point. The first step is to figure out the specific spot, or timecode, where you want the clip to begin. Once you have established the starting point for example, two minutes and 13 seconds into the clip you need to add this information to the end of the clip's Vimeo URL. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
If anyone embodies the archetype of the evil that was Auschwitz, it is surely Josef Mengele. Dubbed by the inmates and survivors of the camp the "Angel of Death," the immaculate doctor with a slight flick of the finger would casually select those permitted to live and work and those destined to die in the gas chambers. Among those he selected to live were the subjects upon whom he conducted his infamous race inspired medical experiments. His postwar escape to South America and prolonged successful evasion from capture (in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil) only reinforced the fear and mystique of the man. Popular culture has perpetuated the demonic legend. Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play, "The Deputy," featured a Mengele character with the stature of "absolute evil"; Ira Levin's 1976 novel (and later film), "The Boys From Brazil," portrayed the fiendish geneticist cloning Hitler; and none other than Charlton Heston played Mengele meeting his confused and ambivalent son, Rolf, in the 2003 film "My Father, Rua Alguem 5555." His was a stubborn legend. Even when Mengele's death had been definitively established, there was a refusal by many survivors and others to believe it. For them, the only fitting psychological and moral conclusion entailed live confrontation and subsequent just retribution. As David G. Marwell notes in "Mengele: Unmasking the 'Angel of Death,'" little in Mengele's wealthy, respectably conservative, Catholic background helps to account for his Auschwitz career and his reputation as a monster. He was born in 1911, and his decision to study medicine, human genetics and physical anthropology in the 1930s was largely in tune with the scientific mood of the times. Given his driving professional ambition and increasingly Volkisch predispositions, he became a member of the Nazi Party in 1938, at which time he also joined the SS. He ultimately landed at the Frankfurt Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, a research body closely aligned with official Nazi ideology. It was through this institute's director and Mengele's doctoral adviser, Otmar von Verschauer, that after serving as a decorated medical officer in the Waffen SS Viking Division Mengele was posted to Auschwitz in May 1943. And it was there, apart from his selection activity (which was also conducted by other SS doctors), that Mengele perpetrated his criminal heredity experiments. Setting up an entire sophisticated research structure devoted to the nature of genetic and racial determinism, he variously experimented upon Roma, dwarfs and most obsessively twins. Although many of these deeds were indubitably cruel and cavalierly murderous, Marwell, like other biographers and scholars before him, insists upon stripping away the exaggerated aspects of the Mengele legend. Despite his innumerable crimes, Marwell writes, "what is known about Mengele's time at Auschwitz is more trope than truth. ... Mengele's outsize reputation as a medical monster is in inverse proportion to what is known and understood about what he actually did." Indeed, some prisoners claimed that they had never even heard his name. Survivor memory perhaps suggestively nudged by Mengele's subsequent notoriety has not always been entirely accurate. Thus, a few survivors remembered being selected by Mengele before his arrival at the camp. Some reported that he spoke Hungarian, which he did not. Others regarded him as tall and blond in fact, he was relatively short and dark haired. Given his alleged omnipotence, grotesque and untrue accusations that Mengele had attempted to create Siamese twins by sewing together a pair of twins, or that he had attempted to make boys into girls and vice versa were circulated. Contrarily, and for inmates confusingly, to further the "integrity" of his research, he would at times even be kind to his subjects and provide better conditions for them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Helen Lachs Ginsburg, an economist and leading authority on full employment, or what has been called a job guarantee, died on Oct. 8 in a hospital in Queens. She was 91. Her family said she had multiple health problems. Dr. Ginsburg had retired as a professor of economics at Brooklyn College, where she specialized in labor and social welfare. She studied the public policy's ramifications of full employment in the United States as well as in Sweden, and she received several awards from the U.S. Department of Labor. Full employment defined as an economy in which anyone who wants a job can find one has been part of the national conversation since the early 20th century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a strong proponent of full employment during the Depression. His hiring programs, including the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, provided significant relief for many workers, but their temporary nature made them insufficient to achieve the long term benefits that he had hoped for. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
It has long seemed like the project that would never be completed: The Louvre Abu Dhabi, announced in 2007, has had an opening date that kept getting delayed, from 2012 to 2013 to 2015 and beyond. Now, the museum is announcing that it will finally open for real this time on Nov. 11. The architect Jean Nouvel designed the domed building on Saadiyat Island, a cultural district off the coast of the United Arab Emirates capital, and highlighted its surrounding water, with promenades overlooking the sea. Displays from the museum's collection and loans will range from the ancient to the modern. A Bactrian princess created in Central Asia dates to the end of the 3rd millennium B.C., along with an Ottoman turban helmet, Paul Gauguin's "Children Wrestling" (1888) and a monumental work by Ai Weiwei (1957). Among the first of the Louvre Abu Dhabi's site specific outdoor works are three engraved stone walls created by the American artist Jenny Holzer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
At Sotheby's, ASAP Rocky Breaks Out of the Box On the fourth floor of Sotheby's, there's a private room sponsored by Loro Piana, the Italian cashmere specialist. On a recent afternoon, the rapper and style muse ASAP Rocky was sitting on the floor, wrapped in one of the company's cashmere blankets, a pearlesque necklace peeking out from beneath his T shirt and Prada technical sneakers on his feet. A young woman entered the room and brought him a coconut cracked in half. He took a spoon to the tender white meat, and considered his place in and out of hip hop. When he emerged seven years ago, he was a high fashion natural, displaying the sort of comfort and fluency in that world other rappers had pretended to pull off but never quite nailed . But something strange has happened in the years since: Almost all of hip hop's young generation followed suit. Goyard is more common than Carhartt. Gucci is more ubiquitous than Nike. Sotheby's, though that is something new. That evening, he was unveiling "Lab Rat," a performance installation in a high ceilinged space on the seventh floor typically used for auctions. A few hours later, he was inside a large glass box set up in the middle of that room, with tools of torment spread around him: exercise equipment, holes in the wall through which he could be touched, a large pool of ice water. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. The box, he said, was "a metaphor for me being distracted." It's been three years since he last released an album, and he realized that his fans worried whether music was his focus. "Their main concern was, do he even like doing this?" he said. While he has been one of the most influential personalities in hip hop of this decade in terms of aesthetics, musical and personal that hasn't always translated to musical success. It was notable, and unusual, hearing him rap the hook of a major pop rap hit, G Eazy's "No Limit," which went to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. "It's fun," he said of those kinds of songs, which are few and far between in his catalog. "Sometimes I'm frustrated. I'm in limbo, like, do you cash out or do you stay genuine to your craft? I would sleep better at night knowing that I'm me." He is the sort of rapper the sort of New Yorker who understands the difference between living on Park Avenue in the East 60s and living on Park Avenue in the East 70s. That person was at home at Sotheby's. "Can I be real?" he asked. "All of the chicks look like they want to give me some ..." Once Rocky was inside the box, a pair of examiners in lab coats peppered him with questions of varying degrees of intimacy and cruelty: "What do you like least about your own body?" "In 100 years, do you think anyone's going to remember your music?" They made him dunk his head in the ice water; he lasted 56 seconds. As he came up, gasping for air, the male examiner announced, "The subject will do better," and made him go again. A couple hundred of Rocky's friends (and friends of Sotheby's you could tell the difference) stood around the box, aiming phone cameras at him. Thousands more watched on a YouTube stream. Out in the crowd, a gaggle of dancers, many of whom looked like mini Rockys, interacted with the crowd and various mannequins strewn around the room. They encouraged viewers to wield a golf club and strike an imaginary ball from atop a baby mannequin. "I never won a Grammy that makes me sad," Rocky said. "I might be getting discounted." "Testing" is his most outre album to date, the one least concerned with prevailing trends. "I wanted to make my version of trip hop," he said. One song, "Praise the Lord (Da Shine)," was produced by the grime star Skepta while both men were on LSD, Rocky said. The album closer, "Purity," is mournful indie rock featuring Frank Ocean and a Lauryn Hill sample. "I feel like I'm just changing sounds again, and it takes some getting used to," Rocky said. His taste in art is similarly instinctual. "It's unorthodox. I don't completely know what I'm doing, I just know what I like and what I don't like. That's what people trust more than anything." "I can afford contemporary art, but I prefer masters, Renaissance," he added. "Those pieces like a million and up, 5 million and up." But then the dancers freed him, and "Testing" began to play from the speakers. By the end of the night, Rocky was in one of those suites, surveying the detritus. Mobb Deep's "Shook Ones (Part II)" was blasting. Everyone was dancing. "It's not for everybody to understand," he'd said earlier. "I can afford to be myself." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
For almost 30 years, Blue Man Group has pervaded pop culture around the world with its eclectic, nonverbal percussive performances, zany lights and comedic movements. (O.K., fine. Dancing.) And of course, there is the blue body paint from head to toe. Now, the Blue Men are joining the circus. Cirque du Soleil, the global performance juggernaut best known for its acrobatic circus displays, on Thursday announced that it had acquired Blue Man Productions, with the mutual aim of expanding Blue Man's reach beyond its five permanent United States shows (in New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla.), a world tour and one permanent international show (Berlin). After the acquisition, Blue Man will be able to tap into Cirque's worldwide access to theaters and marketers. In particular, both organizations have their eye on China, home to one of the most powerful and quickly growing entertainment industries in the world. "We saw the potential for a marketing and distributing powerhouse like Cirque du Soleil to be able to distribute Blue Man Group and make their brand better known internationally," said Daniel Lamarre, Cirque's chief executive, in an interview. Cirque currently has 18 live shows worldwide. The purchase provided an opportunity for Cirque to diversify its portfolio after years of financial tumult. In 2015, the company sold a majority stake to TPG, a private equity firm in Texas. "The acquisition of Blue Man, for us, is kind of a breakthrough to make clear to people that Cirque is going from a circus company to becoming a global leader of entertainment," Mr. Lamarre said. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, although Mr. Lamarre said the sale price was in the "tens of millions." Chris Wink, who founded Blue Man Group in 1991 along with Phil Stanton and Matt Goldman, said that the idea to sell came about a few years ago, as the company was looking to gain a foothold in other parts of the world. China specifically came to mind. "We started to feel like we needed some help, plus we had some creative ideas that were beyond our own means," Mr. Wink said in a phone interview. "We thought of some ways that the Blue Men and their performances could go on a bigger scale." It just so happened that for a company looking to find a permanent home in an entertainment pillar like China (and other large markets), Cirque was a fit. Along with TPG, the Chinese investment firm Fosun owns a minority stake in Cirque, and Mr. Lamarre said the circus was trying to make heavy inroads into China. Mr. Lamarre said that next week he was headed to China to announce a seven city Cirque tour that is to start in October. Conceptually, China is an ideal destination for Blue Man Group. One of the biggest challenges facing American productions in China is the language barrier, an obstacle that doesn't exist for Blue Man's mostly nonverbal shows. "I think that to unlock the larger audience in China, it either needs to be in Chinese or nonverbal," said Marc Routh, the president of Broadway Asia, a company that produces and distributes tours throughout Asia. "Blue Man is certainly one of the greatest entrees into that nonverbal market." Mr. Routh also said that the demand for theater in China and other areas of Asia is growing. Over the last several years, Mandarin language versions of popular Broadway productions have been visible in China, including "Into the Woods" and "Mamma Mia!" In 2014, China announced plans to build a 320 million musical production center near Beijing. In addition, several theaters have been built around the country in the last decade, according to Mr. Routh, referring to them as "mini Lincoln Centers." "It's been an explosion," Mr. Routh said. During the process of finding a prospective partner "The idea of letting go of the reins is not an easy one," Mr. Wink said Cirque seemed like a match for other reasons. Mr. Wink said there was mutual admiration, even though the companies were in some ways competing over the same off the wall creative turf. Mr. Lamarre, in a separate interview, agreed. "Those guys have been able to develop the type of show that is very unique," Mr. Lamarre said. "A little bit like Cirque." Blue Man Group was founded in the 1980s as a sort of response to and rejection of performance and cultural norms. Cirque du Soleil's founder, Guy Laliberte, was a fire eater before creating Cirque in 1984, a show that sprang from cultivating street performers near Quebec. Both companies feature shows that have been traditionally nonverbal. After initially starting with 20 performers, Cirque says it has expanded to almost 4,000 employees (including 1,300 performers from roughly 50 countries) and brings in roughly 1 billion in revenue yearly. Its shows are as varied as they are typically well attended, with 13 million patrons annually. (It has had its flops over the years, including the calamitous 2010 run of "Banana Shpeel," at the Beacon Theater, and "Zarkana," which forgettably ran at Radio City Music Hall in 2011 and 2012.) Blue Man Group has achieved a level of pop culture success that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s. It reportedly brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, although a spokeswoman declined to confirm that number. The group was the subject of a long running and still oft quoted story line in the sitcom "Arrested Development," along with being referred to in countless other movies and shows. It starred in commercials for Intel, has been nominated for a Grammy and has even founded a private school in New York City called the Blue School. However, Blue Man Group has had its own problems. In 2016, a musical collaborator since the group's inception, Ian Pai, sued Blue Man for 150 million, contending that he had been underpaid for decades. A trial is set to begin in April. There have been no discussions about combining Cirque and Blue Man onstage, nor has either side expressed hope for such a collaboration. "The Blue Man Group will keep its autonomy," Mr. Lamarre said. "We're not going to mix the Cirque du Soleil brand with the brand of Blue Man Group." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
OSTANINO, Russia When a Chinese investor bought a farm outside this village a few years back, he was pleased enough to name it Golden Land. The soil was rich, the sunshine and rain bountiful. The land, deep in rural Russia, was also largely devoid of people. No more. Today, row upon row of greenhouses here teem with dozens of Chinese farmhands picking tomatoes. And in a season with a bumper crop of tomatoes, the foreman said he would happily have employed hundreds more. For years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, both countries have struggled to convert these complementary strengths into real business opportunities. A few mining ventures are succeeding. And state companies have struck big oil, coal and timber deals that form the backbone of the economic relationship. Although China's ventures into Russian agriculture have been on a smaller scale, they could end up being just as important not least because they raise tensions about the role of immigrants similar to those seen in the United States over migrant Mexican farm laborers. According to the World Food Program, Russia has the world's largest reserve of arable yet now fallow land, a legacy of the collapse of the Soviet collective farm system and the depopulation of rural Russia over the last two decades. Russia's population is 141 million, compared with 1.3 billion in China. China has perennial worries about securing enough food and finding enough work for its rural population. Some Chinese run farms in Russia ship their soybean crops to China, and as the Chinese presence in the farm sector grows, so will the potential for more food exports. (Vegetable farms such as Golden Land sell their produce locally.) As food prices spiked five years ago, before the financial crisis, the Chinese government opened talks on investing in Russian farmland. The program came to fruition this year with a 1 billion contribution by the China Investment Corporation in a joint Russian Chinese fund investing in agriculture and timber in Russia and other former Soviet states, such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Under a Russian government backed program, Chinese companies also formally lease about a million acres of farmland, much along the border with northeast China. In addition, Chinese companies lease about two million acres of Siberian forests, where Chinese lumberjacks fell timber for export back to China. In some cases, Chinese investors are purchasing land in Russia. Golden Land is one of nine Chinese farms in the Sverdlovsk region in central Russia, according to the local ministry of agriculture. Far more have sprung up to the south, in the Chelyabinsk region. Chinese vegetable farms even operate outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, thousands of miles from the border. Golden Land's business could grow as easily as the chest high tomato vines do in the hothouses here, said Zhang Wei Dong, the foreman, who goes by the Russian nickname Lyosha and doubles as an interpreter when needed. "Look at the empty land," he said, gesturing about. Mr. Zhang had a Federal Migration Service quota this year for 70 immigrant farm laborers, but said he could use many more. Recruiting workers is not the problem. Chinese weeders, planters and pickers are more than willing to make the journey, a cramped, sweaty third class rumble across Siberia from Manchuria. It is a trek toward economic opportunity familiar to countless Mexican grape collectors in California, Filipino nannies in Dubai or Algerian street sweepers in France. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Unfolding from her stoop over a tomato bed, Li Hunlao, a farmer from near the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, explained, through an interpreter, why she ventured so far from home: "I came for the money, what do you think?" Salaries of about 650 a month are five times the salaries of field hands in China, she said. "We have been through times of sunshine which were very beneficial," President Vladimir V. Putin said in an interview with the Russian state owned RT television released on Thursday. As host, Russia set the meeting agenda. Tellingly, given Russia's bounty of land, Mr. Putin chose food security and agriculture as a top topic, in recognition of Russia's large and growing role in exporting grain to developing nations. The Russian government has set a goal of increasing trade with China to 200 billion a year, from 80 billion in 2011. By comparison, trade between the United States and China was 503 billion in 2011, according to the Department of Commerce. Skeptics of further economic ties between Russia and China point to deep mistrust dating to border skirmishes fought along the Ussuri River in 1969 that froze all development for decades. The border, in fact, was only fully demarcated in 2009. Russians also harbor fears that broadening economic cooperation will lead to a wave of Chinese immigrants taking over sparsely populated territories, a concern heard in this village, too. "Why are these people here?" said Nadezhda A. Kolyesova, a saleswoman out for a stroll recently through Ostanino, a picturesque jumble of wooden homes overlooking a pond, birch forests and the Golden Land farm. "I have nothing against them," she said. "But Russia is for Russia, and China is for the Chinese." After some contemplation, she conceded, "I suppose it's all right, so long as they don't enslave our children in the future." The farm has a policy of giving free vegetables to any local who shows up, mostly older people. The Chinese workers live in makeshift dorms made of plywood and scrap lumber, and patronize the village store for cigarettes, vodka, sausage and ice cream. Once, a fight broke out between young Russian and Chinese men. No romances have been reported, but the consensus of several grandmothers at the local market was that, in fact, Russians and Chinese can live peaceably side by side in rural Russia. Today about 400,000 Chinese migrants live in Russia, making up only a tiny portion of all immigrants in the country, most of whom come from former Soviet states in Central Asia. Chinese migration could well increase, however. In past seasons, Golden Land, a farm created out of an empty field five years ago, obtained at least enough permits to work its greenhouses, though bureaucratic tangles in Russia's temporary work visa program reduced the quota this year. Vladimir Balasanyan, a local from Ostanino who works as a manager at the farm, and in whose name the Chinese investor initially formulated the land title, said few Russians wanted farm jobs these days. "Our government wants our farmers to work," he said. "But Russians don't want to work on a farm." The Chinese investor in Golden Land had traded for years in a market in the nearby city of Yekaterinburg, according to Mr. Balasanyan. He obtained the land by buying shares in a defunct collective farm from villagers. He now lives in Harbin and recruits farmhands for Golden Land by word of mouth in surrounding Chinese villages. The owner, Piao Chen Nan, pays a higher salary to the Chinese than they would earn at home. He can afford it because he earns more on the sale of tomatoes a pound sells wholesale for about 25 cents in this part of Russia, compared with about 8 cents in northern China, Mr. Balasanyan said. In the late fall, workers set up iron stoves in the greenhouses, and through the first frosty nights, feed them with split birch firewood from the forest, extending the growing season for a few weeks. Inevitably, though, the Russian frost sets in and the Chinese leave, retracing their journey home along the trans Siberian railway until the next season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Astronomers said Wednesday that they had discovered a lost generation of monster stars that ushered light into the universe after the Big Bang and jump started the creation of the elements needed for planets and life before disappearing forever. Modern day stars like our sun have a healthy mix of heavy elements, known as metals, but in the aftermath of the Big Bang only hydrogen, helium and small traces of lithium were available to make the first stars. Such stars could have been hundreds or thousands of times as massive as the sun, according to calculations, burning brightly and dying quickly, only 200 million years after the universe began. Their explosions would have spewed into space the elements that started the chain of thermonuclear reactions by which subsequent generations of stars have gradually enriched the cosmos with elements like oxygen, carbon and iron. Spotting the older stars in action is one of the prime missions of the James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched by NASA in 2018. The discovery of such stars "would be wonderful," James Peebles, a Princeton professor and one of the fathers of modern cosmology, said recently. Now, in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, an international crew of astronomers led by David Sobral of the University of Lisbon, in Portugal, and the Leiden Observatory, in the Netherlands, said they had spotted the signature of these first generation stars in a recently discovered galaxy that existed when the universe was only about 800 million years old. Its light has been traveling to us for 12.9 billion years, while succeeding generations of stars have worked their magic to make the universe interesting. The galaxy, known as CR7, is three times as luminous as any previously found from that time, the authors said. Within it is a bright blue cloud that seems to contain only hydrogen and helium. In an email, Dr. Sobral called this the first direct evidence of the stars "that ultimately allowed us all to be here by fabricating heavy elements and changing the composition of the universe." In a statement from the European Southern Observatory, he said, "It doesn't really get any more exciting than this." Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a veteran of the search for early galaxies, pointed out, however, that these stars were appearing far later in cosmic history than theory had predicted. Dr. Sobral and his colleagues were using the Very Large Telescope of the Southern Observatory in Chile and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, among other big telescopes, to build on an earlier search for glowing clouds of hydrogen that might represent very early galaxies. Galaxy CR7 short for Cosmos Redshift 7, after the method by which distant objects in the universe are dated stood out. In an expanding universe, the farther away or back in time an object is, the faster it is receding, which causes the wavelength of light from it to lengthen, the way the pitch of a siren sounds lower after it passes. In astronomy, this lengthening is known as redshifting. The galaxy's name, Dr. Sobral said, was also inspired by the great Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, a.k.a. CR7. As in much of astronomy, the nomenclature of these star generations is awkwardly rooted in history and Earth centered. Modern stars like the sun, with healthy abundances of so called metals (anything heavier than helium), are now called Population I, mainly because they were the first known. They mostly inhabit the spiral arms and younger parts of galaxies like the Milky Way. In the middle of the 20th century, however, the astronomer Walter Baade noticed that the stars in older parts of the galaxy, like its core or globular clusters, are older and have fewer metals. He called them Population II. The advent of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe forced astronomers to realize that the first stars must have had no metals at all; those are known as Population III. Stars of both Population II and Population III are probably present in CR7, Dr. Sobral and his team report. While the blue cloud is metal free, according to spectral measurements, the color of the rest of the galaxy is consistent with more evolved stars making up most of its mass. This suggests, they write, that the Population III stars there are late bloomers of a sort, forming from leftover clouds of pristine material as the galaxy was sending out its light 12.9 billion years ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
How to watch: 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the Tennis Channel and 11 a.m. onward on NBC; streaming on the Tennis Channel app and the NBCSN app. Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic are living legends of tennis, and it's easy to think that they will meet in the final at Roland Garros. However, Diego Schwartzman and Stefanos Tsitsipas each have a chance to prove that it is no accident that they have made it this far, and each hopes to reach his first major final by taking out one of the so called Big Three. Here is what to watch for in Friday's semifinals: Because of the number of matches cycling through courts, the times for individual matchups are at best a guess and are certain to fluctuate based on the times at which earlier play is completed. All times are Eastern. Nadal, a 12 time French Open champion from Spain, is trying to tie Roger Federer's record of 20 Grand Slam titles. The cold conditions at this French Open do not favor Nadal. The weather dulls the heavy topspin on his shots, making them settle lower in the court instead of sending his opponents careening off the court in the way that Nadal has come to expect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The skies over Broadway will be darker come Sunday, Sept. 3, when one of the brightest shows to blaze there in many seasons, Dave Malloy's "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812," ends its exuberant run. This musical reimagining of a section of Tolstoy's "War and Peace," directed with boundless inventiveness by Rachel Chavkin, began life in a small Off Broadway space under the auspices of Ars Nova five years ago. Its admirers were surprised and delighted when it transferred to the big time last November at the Imperial Theater without shedding a spark of its extravagant individuality, and it picked up 12 Tony nominations, the most of any show that season. The reasons for its premature demise are complicated and unpleasant. Instead of revisiting them, make a point of seeing or re seeing a one of a kind triumph of the imagination. For the show's last days, Mr. Malloy himself will be playing that great klutz of a hero, Pierre. (249 West 45th Street, 212 239 6200; greatcometbroadway.com.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
It should have been a breakthrough moment: Swin Cash, a former forward for the New York Liberty of the W.N.B.A., was on the cover of Sports Illustrated last spring, wearing not a uniform, but a red silk chiffon Michael Kors dress and a Hollywood smile for its 2016 "Fashionable 50" roundup. Sure, it was fashion, not basketball, being celebrated. But fashion is big business in the hoops world these days. Male stars like LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Russell Westbrook have cemented their status as mainstream celebrities by starting clothing labels, appearing in glossy fashion spreads and mingling with Anna Wintour on the front row. The emergence of a female LeBron a star of fashion tents and the hardwood may show that the league had, culturally, arrived after 20 years of wavering fan support and sporadic news media exposure. "You would think from a W.N.B.A. standpoint, just the body shape and frame, these tall and gorgeous women reflect a lot on what designers like on the runway," said Ms. Cash, 37, who walked the runways at fashion shows in New York as a teenager. Too many times, however, it has been "like pulling teeth" to get the fashion world to take notice, she added. "I played in New York," she said. "I'm going out on red carpets. But if I wasn't paying a stylist, they wouldn't be looking to do anything with me." If you are six feet plus with a killer crossover, you are seemingly even more likely to bump your head on the glass ceiling. As the W.N.B.A. finals between the Los Angeles Sparks and the Minnesota Lynx begin Sunday (3 p.m. Eastern on ABC), the league's stars still face a yawning gap in income, exposure and endorsement opportunities compared with their male counterparts. Nowhere is that more apparent than the style world, where N.B.A. players seem to carry as much clout as movie stars, but many of the W.N.B.A.'s athletes remain as invisible as key grips. Mr. Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder is just one of many N.B.A. stars who have become front row fixtures during fashion week; he has also augmented his eight figure salary as a creative director for True Religion, the clothing brand, and by designing his own clothing line in partnership with Barneys New York. Mr. James, who would hardly seem to need more exposure, or income, collaborates with Nike on designs bearing his name. In 2015, he executive produced the splashy N.B.A. All Star All Style fashion show during All Star weekend that featured six foot something fashion plates like DeMarcus Cousins, Klay Thompson and James Harden treading the runway in designer duds for a TNT television audience. Female players, by contrast, are lucky enough to see their games televised, let alone their fashion exploits. "There are so many cool people in the women's league that have a good sense of style," said Cappie Pondexter, a guard for the Chicago Sky. "We talk about it every week it's visibility. We don't have that exposure." Undeterred, Ms. Pondexter has made a splash with her fashion company, 4Season Style Management, which provides wardrobe styling, personal shopping, and other services for celebrity clients like the model Jessica White and the singer and actress Teyana Taylor, and which styled the designer Laurel DeWitt's runway show at the recent New York Fashion Week. She acknowledged, however, that female players have to work harder than male players to be recognized. They also have to deal with the economic reality that they make a fraction of what their male counterparts earn. To supplement salaries that range from about 40,000 to 112,000, female stars often sign with teams in Asia or Europe during the off season, meaning they are not even in the country to attend fashion events, according to Ms. Diggins, a Dallas Wings guard. (Ms. Diggins, whom Vogue called "basketball's best dressed woman," is an exception to the rule, having modeled for Nike and walked the runway at an American Heart Association benefit show at New York Fashion Week last February and at a Michael Costello show two years ago.) Players who miss out on fashion week miss out on a prime opportunity to promote their league, and their personal brand. "You look at the N.B.A., it's the mecca of pop culture," Ms. Diggins said. "You don't just talk about ball with those guys, you talk about everything that goes with it: fashion, music, technology. People want to know what the athletes are wearing, what designers they like." Fashion, she added, "is an opportunity to be seen in a different light, not just in my jersey." The marketing potential of fashion is obvious to league executives. "We are not in the basketball business, we are in the entertainment business," said Lisa Borders, the W.N.B.A. president. "People don't follow leagues. They sometimes follow teams. But what they really follow is people. If one of our players is a fashionista, and you are a fashionista, you might follow that individual player because she has the same interest that you do." And W.N.B.A. athletes do understand the power of clothes to make a statement: Last July, players from the Liberty, Indiana Fever, and Phoenix Mercury drew league fines when they donned plain black warm up shirts in support of the Black Lives Matter protests (the league rescinded the fines after widespread uproar). "I'd love to see women's players get to the point where we're sitting next to Anna Wintour at fashion shows," said Tiffany Bias, a guard with the Dallas Wings. But there are snags. Among them, she added, "people have that perception: They hear 'women's basketball player,' and think of a very masculine player." That basketball, at certain positions, tends to favor large, powerfully built women is also a challenge, one not faced by many male players, like Chris Bosh, another noted N.B.A. clotheshorse, whose willowy 6 foot 11 frame and broad shoulders make him look like a fashion sketch come to life. As the fashion designer Rachel Antonoff put it: "The typical male athlete's body is in line with the gender normative body ideal we all see in movies and fashion. The female athlete's isn't. And what a shame. Their bodies are incredibly beautiful, like sculpted works of art." Other players cited race as a potential complicating factor. "You look at the W.N.B.A., and a high percentage of the league is African American women," Ms. Cash said. "We struggle with a lot, in jobs or in society in general." This explanation hit home with some designers, like Becca McCharen of Chromat. "There's a history of racism in every industry," she said, "and fashion is not exempt from that." Then again, the degree to which race complicates W.N.B.A. players' attempts to market themselves is part of a "bigger conversation," Ms. Cash said, particularly since almost all of the prominent N.B.A. fashionistas are also African American. What is clear is that the concept of "ideal" beauty in fashion is changing quickly as designers like Ms. Antonoff, Ms. McCharen and Tracy Reese, along with many others, make efforts to include a wide range of body types, ethnicities and gender identities in their shows and lookbooks. "Individuality is being celebrated," Ms. Reese said. "You don't have to be cute and petite, you can be cute and tall, or cute and wide. You can be every color under the rainbow. Already, there are a lot of runway models who are 6 1, so in a lot of ways, the average W.N.B.A. player is a perfect runway girl." The recent elevation of Ms. Griner, a 6 foot 8 center for the Mercury, to style influencer may be a case in point. Despite her androgynous style or, most likely, because of it Ms. Griner has attracted mainstream attention in the style media since she attended the 2013 draft, where she was selected first over all, in a white on white tuxedo. During her rookie season, the laconic Houston native signed a deal to model men's clothing for Nike ("They let me be me," she said). Elle dissected her work with Ellen DeGeneres's fashion adviser, Kellen Richards, as she considered a Saint Laurent sweatshirt top with cutoff sleeves for an appearance at the ESPY Awards. In a 2014 Sports Illustrated interview in which she discussed being gay a significant disclosure for a league with a loyal following among gay women Ms. Griner wore a blue gingham shirt, an ivory bow tie and glasses that recalled the neo Urkel look pushed by N.B.A. players like Kevin Durant and Mr. James, which inspired jokes about the "Nerd Basketball Association." While Ms. Griner's gender bending style may have confounded the conservative culture of professional sports in another era, today it has made her a candidate for that most elusive title: W.N.B.A. style icon. The question is whether mere equality with male players is good enough. "When you look up and see what Russell Westbrook has on," Ms. Griner said, "you say, 'Let's push the envelope, too.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The average shock from an electric eel lasts about two thousandths of a second. The pain isn't searing unlike, say, sticking your finger in a wall socket but isn't pleasant: a brief muscle contraction, then numbness. For scientists who study the animal, the pain comes with the professional territory. "I remember the first time I was shocked," said Carlos David de Santana, an ichthyologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who recalled falling into the water and dropping his equipment. "I was scared." Dr. de Santana has suffered several high voltage attacks in his years studying electric eels, including one close to 400 volts. He is the lead author of a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications describing the discovery of a new species of electrical eel, Electrophorus voltai. Named after Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist who invented the battery, it can generate an electric shock as high as 860 volts, the strongest of any known animal. In the process, the researchers realized that what for centuries had been considered a single species of electric eel, Electrophorus electricus is actually three. "It's quite literally shocking, when you discover new diversity in such an eye catching fish first described 250 years ago," Dr. de Santana said. He became enamored of the serpentine freshwater fish during childhood summers on his grandparents' farm, where he observed them while wading in the nearby Amazon River. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
PARIS The president of the European Central Bank, Jean Claude Trichet, tried on Friday to bolster confidence in the outlook for the euro zone and to remind investors that budgetary problems were not confined to Europe alone. Mr. Trichet made the comments a day after the central bank announced its continued support for struggling banks and entered the market to buy the bonds of debt ridden countries. "Since the start of the recovery, which in Europe was the third quarter of last year, the economy is going a little better quarter after quarter," Mr. Trichet said in Paris. A continued recovery hinges on the ability of countries to consolidate their budgets and to a restructuring of the real economy, he said. "The euro is a credible currency," he added. "The euro is a currency that is considered just as credible for the next 10 years as for the last 12 years." "I don't say we should be complacent things are still very difficult," he added. Mr. Trichet studiously avoided singling out specific countries to blame for the sovereign debt crisis, which emerged because of creeping indebtedness. Instead, he said, a "quantum leap" was needed in the zone's fiscal and economic governance. Specifically, he called for a "quasi federation not a political federation" to better coordinate "the budgetary surveillance processes and rules that we have." "We need to see equivalent economic behavior," he said, adding there was a need for "quasi automaticity of sanctions" against countries that allow budget consolidation to slip. And Mr. Trichet tried to remind investors that while euro countries had suffered the most, budgetary problems ran far beyond this region. "We are all, in the industrialized countries, facing a common problem," he said. The euro zone's overall budget deficit is expected to stand at 6.3 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the year, Mr. Trichet said, compared with 11.3 percent in the United States and 9.6 percent in Japan. He noted that unemployment rates on the two sides of the Atlantic were not dissimilar, suggesting that the central bank had no need to change its mandate, which hinges on price stability. Mr. Trichet appeared to nudge euro zone governments which already have stepped in to create huge financial guarantee facilities, so far used only by Ireland and Greece into playing a more active role. "All authorities, all institutions have to be up to their responsibilities," he said. Among the suggestions to deal with the debt crisis is one that would expand the European Financial Stability Facility, or E.F.S.F., which can now issue up to 440 billion euros in bonds guaranteed by euro zone members. "The E.F.S.F. is not enough," said Christoph Rieger, head of interest rate strategy at Commerzbank. "Before long, policy makers will be forced to explore the 'nuclear' option: genuine common issuance." On Thursday, the central bank conceded that an extraordinary loan program to banks was still needed into next year. Months earlier, the central bank had indicated that it would be wound down. Traders said the central bank was also buying Irish and Portuguese debt on open markets on Thursday and Friday, continuing a program begun this year and pushing up bond prices and lowering the cost of borrowing for these countries. Mr. Trichet declined to comment on the bank's bond buying policy, except to say that the latest data on purchases would be published next week. The steps taken by the bank appear to have calmed market tensions for now. Further out, it remains to be seen whether other countries, like Portugal and more worrying, because of its size Spain, will be driven by investors to accepting financial aid from their neighbors and the International Monetary Fund. As a result of the recent tensions in bond markets and the central bank's resolve to tackle them, economists at Goldman Sachs said that the bank was now unlikely to raise its ultralow interest rates until the last quarter of 2011; previously the bank had forecast an increase during the third quarter. "While we think that the recovery is progressing nicely for the euro zone as a whole, the E.C.B., given the experience of the last four weeks, wants to buy additional insurance that a tightening in the monetary stance does not endanger the recovery or the stability of the financial system," the economists wrote in a research note. Mr. Trichet said the seeds of the current turmoil in the markets were sown by government moves, led by France and Germany, to weaken the zone's fiscal rules in 2004 and 2005. That episode appears "surreal now," he said. "We were beaten when we tried to defend it," he said, referring to the stability and growth pact. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Mercedes Benz is not new to the mid sized crossover market. The angular GLK came to the U.S. back in 2009. Now, the K is gone, C? Its replacement, the GLC300 shaves the sharp edges off the design for a closer resemblance to the long nosed C Class sedan. And why not? They share architectures. (ON CAMERA) The GLC moniker was once used by Mazda and it literally stood for Great Little Car. I'll cut to the chase, 'great' could be used to describe this GLC. Little? Not as much. It's over 4 inches longer than GLK, and two inches wider. Lighter too, by around 175 pounds, due in part to more aluminum body panels. A rear drive model starts at nearly 40 grand it's easy to quickly option this car up past 55 thousand bucks. (SUPER) all wheel drive model tested retails for xx,xxx A 2 liter turbo 4 cylinder with 241 horsepower (SOUND UP) and 273 lb ft of torque provides power. (SOUND UP) The usual (if not totally likeable) Mercedes controller runs a silky smooth nine speed automatic. Tailor the driving dynamics to your liking down to suspension stiffness. (ON CAMERA) When you put your seatbelt on, you get a nice little hug. Acceleration (SOUND UP) is solid with little lag. Wait for the AMG performance version if you feel the need to light the tires up on the way to the mall. (ON CAMERA) Right off the bat you'll notice there's a real polish to this car. It feels like... well, a Mercedes. It is hushed at speed, the ride quality is smooth and comfortable. (ON CAMERA) GLC handles pretty well... for a crossover. Remember, it rides higher than a sedan, sort of like playing basketball in platform heels. Not that I would know about that. Running with all wheel drive GLC300 is EPA rated 21 city, 28 highway, about the same as the rear drive version. On average that's about 4 mpgs better than the outgoing GLK. (SUPER) Observed average fuel economy is 24 m.p.g. with specified premium fuel. For the safety minded, an auto braking system that detects pedestrians can be ordered for 2,800. (ON CAMERA) Some auto start stop systems really call attention to themselves. This one? Not so much. Like the C Class sedan, GLCs interior quality is best in segment. Trimmed... out... richly... it's a great place to see the world from. Materials look and feel expensive. If you can't find a comfortable seating position, check and make sure you're human. The COMAND interface keeps improving, it's surprising how easy it is to enter information while not looking. Lots and lots of places to stash stuff, nice that the rear camera lens (pause) stays nice and clean . (ON CAMERA) GLC gains a couple inches of legroom over the GLK, which goes a long way to improve the experience back here. There's no lack of storage, heated cushions are available, electronics can be charged without fuss. Two will be very comfortable back here, three adults will be fine for shorter trips. (ON CAMERA) Using the proximity key, some liftgates open by simply standing next to it for a few second or waving your foot under the bumper. Obviously, this one doesn't do that. The cargo hold is very flexible though, four people can hit the slopes with skis and boards riding inside. Under the floor there's a good amount of space, not quite enough for a pack of my standard measuring metric. Normally, vehicles this size swallow up 9 packs, GLC stops at an easy seven but let's add one more for the area underneath. GLC300 is exceptionally done, but for piece of mind you'll still want to cross shop Acura RDX, Audi Q5, BMW X3, and Lexus NX. To be sure, this is not an inexpensive rig but a whole new approach by Mercedes Benz to its mid sized crossover makes the GLC close to letter perfect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Ms. Schutz, who first exhibited the painting last year in a gallery in Berlin, has stated that she intends never to sell the work. In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Schutz said: "I don't know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till's only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. Their pain is your pain. My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother." She added: "Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection. I don't believe that people can ever really know what it is like to be someone else (I will never know the fear that black parents may have) but neither are we all completely unknowable." The curators said that they wanted to include the painting because many of the exhibition's artists focus on violence racial, economic, cultural and they felt that the work raised important questions, especially now, in a political climate in which race, power and privilege have become ever more urgent issues. "For us it was so much about an issue that extends across race," said Mr. Lew, who along with his co curator, Ms. Locks, met with Mr. Bright on Tuesday to discuss his protest. "Yes, it's mostly black men who are being killed, but in a larger sense this is an American problem." Ms. Locks said: "Right now I think there are a lot of sensitivities not just to race but to questions of identities in general. We welcome these responses. We invited these conversations intentionally in the way that we thought about the show." She added that she felt the painting was a means of "not letting Till's death be forgotten, as Mamie, his mother so wanted." The story of Till's murder has begun to resonate loudly again in recent months. News recently emerged that the Mississippi woman who said that the 14 year old Till whistled at her and was verbally and physically aggressive an account that led to Till's abduction, torture and killing told a historian in 2007 that she had made up the most sensational part of her account. The Black Lives Matter movement and greater awareness of the killing of black men by the police have led to efforts to film the Till story, with at least three screen adaptations in production. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
ANDREW PEKLO III lives almost on top of the Pomperaug River, in an old woolen mill that dates to the 1800s. The mill hovers at the river's edge, but Mr. Peklo's property extends out into the water, encompassing a curved dam that creates a cascade just below the Pomperaug Road Bridge. A furniture designer and architect, he has reclaimed the three floor mill building as both living space and workshop. Now he wants to rejuvenate the dam as well, by using its waterfall to power a hydroelectric turbine. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is reviewing an application from Mr. Peklo to install a turbine beneath his home. The turbine would generate about 300,000 kilowatt hours a year enough to power 30 to 35 houses of average size. The estimated cost of the project is roughly 400,000. "I'm going to generate power, use what I can, and sell the rest to finance the project," Mr. Peklo explained over coffee in his loftlike living space. "It's not just benefiting me it benefits the grid." But Mr. Peklo's neighbors on Pomperaug Road, in what is now a residential neighborhood, are not interested in reviving the property's long buried industrial roots. They have peppered the commission with letters accusing Mr. Peklo of keeping them uninformed about his plan until now, even as he has been communicating with the regulators for years. The hydroelectric project's impact on the waterfall is of particular concern. The proposal calls for water to be periodically redirected toward the turbine, causing the falls to stop running over the dam about half the time. Neighbors say that restraining the falls will harm their property values. "My decision to locate to this neighborhood was based on the proximity to the Pomperaug falls and the natural beauty that makes this area a desirable place to live," wrote Tom Greto, a Pomperaug Road resident and real estate agent, in comments submitted to the commission. Other neighbors noted that Mr. Peklo himself had been instrumental, many years back, in persuading the town to designate their street as a "scenic road." The falls, they say, were a contributing factor. But Mr. Peklo argues that the scenic road designation was not meant to "prevent people from using their property." He views the partial loss of the waterfall as a reasonable tradeoff for harnessing clean, renewable energy. "The dam was built to make power," Mr. Peklo said. "It wasn't built to look nice." Federal regulators have scheduled a visit to the mill site for Jan. 18, to be followed by an informational meeting at the Woodbury Senior Center. Both events are open to the public. A 30 day comment period will ensue. Mr. Peklo bought the mill property for 60,000 in 1980. The building was in significant disrepair, but over time he improved it enough to make it a focal point of the riverside neighborhood. He lives on the top floor, above his workshop, with his wife, Abby, and their young son, Zeke. The open living area has a central kitchen and a corner fireplace. Mr. Peklo built the high backed leather and wood chairs that encircle the dining table. He has applied to the energy commission for a "small hydro exemption," a licensing process applicable to projects under a certain size, in which approvals are granted in perpetuity rather than for a period of years, according to Mary O'Driscoll, the commission's director of media relations. The proposed project would be "run of the river," meaning it would operate without altering the quantity of water, thereby reducing the likelihood of disruption to fish and wildlife. No water will be stored, and the height of the dam will remain as it is, Mr. Peklo said. After consulting with state and federal environmental authorities, he has also agreed to build a fish ladder, a passageway that allows migrating fish to get over or around a dam. "That's what I consider my giveback," he said. But Lee Sherwood, who lives just up the road, said he believed Mr. Peklo was motivated solely by money and "spite." Almost a decade ago, Mr. Peklo proposed to build a single family home on land he owns across the street. The town's inland wetlands board rejected the proposal, which Mr. Sherwood himself vehemently opposed. Mr. Peklo appealed, but the court upheld the board's decision. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
'Light of My Life' Review: Together at the End of the World None Anna Pniowsky, left, and Casey Affleck as her father in "Light of My Life," which imagines a dystopian future in which women have been wiped out by a plague. In a bleak future where women have been wiped out by a deadly plague, a forlorn man and his young daughter, disguised as a boy, make their way through the wilderness. You probably haven't seen this movie before, but then again you sort of have. Written and directed by Casey Affleck, who also stars, "Light of My Life" offers a predictable dystopian premise, recalling everything from "The Road" and "Children of Men" to Debra Granik's decidedly unfuturistic father daughter survivalist drama "Leave No Trace." So it's not original, but it is enlivened by some artful touches and two excellent performances. Affleck's familiar melancholy energy is ideal for the part of a man (known only as Dad) who is struggling to persist in a world without hope, if only to ensure his child's survival. His simmering sadness has a self sustaining quality it never explodes or wears itself out. His daughter, Rag (Anna Pniowsky), is the opposite: Though she's loyal to her father, her headstrong curiosity suggests her spirit won't be contained for much longer. As these two drift through forbiddingly quiet forests, sparsely populated towns and eerily empty homes, Affleck's camera takes in the desolate, dead end majesty of this shattered world. He directs with a delicate touch but it might be too delicate. At nearly two hours, the film has a staid, even keeled tone that wears after a while, especially since we learn so little about these characters. We're immersed in their reality, but not particularly involved in it. Rated R for some violence and utter hopelessness. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Batsheva Dance Company, the foremost contemporary dance troupe of Israel, is 50. For nearly half its life, though, it has been less a national company than a vehicle for the choreography and aesthetic of its artistic director, Ohad Naharin. His style has become hugely influential. Imitators abound across the globe. But the 18 Batsheva dancers who performed the United States premiere of Mr. Naharin's "Sadeh21" (2011) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday are the real thing. The 75 minute work begins and ends with solos, a structural device that establishes and re establishes the amazingness of every single dancer. Part of the credit must go to Gaga, Mr. Naharin's "listen to the body" training method, yet not many Gaga trained dancers go this far. Absolutely in control and yet seemingly knocked about by explosive external forces, they stretch and twist in every direction, especially backward. For them to bend their heads back nearly to the floor in an instant and stay there for an eternity appears to be as easy as pie. Which is to say they look freakish, peculiar, sometimes stunted or misshapen. It is this aspect of Mr. Naharin's aesthetic that many viewers find mannered, and it can make me uncomfortable, too. All that back bending can feel like a tic, even an abdication of intelligence. And the oddness combines in odd ways with Mr. Naharin's humor. There's slapstick kicks to the rear, plain old slapping but much of the absurdity is self reflexive. "Sadeh" means "field," as in "field of study." Projected titles announce segments "Sadeh1," "Sadeh2" but Mr. Naharin knows we are counting to 21, and as the work starts to grow long, he gets a laugh by bunching numbers together. At one point, a dancer speaks strings of numbers, yet these patterns aren't any more serious than the high pitched, giggle inducing gibberish of another. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
For Rui Pinto, it is a measure of a return to normal life. All the more so because much of the rest of Portugal's 10 million inhabitants are also confined to their homes under restrictions imposed to halt the spread of the coronavirus. In recent years, Pinto, the Portuguese computer hacker, has garnered almost as much attention as the country's most famous soccer stars. He revealed some of their secrets in a startling series of leaks that shook the global soccer industry and beyond for almost four years until he was apprehended in Budapest and extradited to Portugal to answer 147 charges. Until Wednesday, Pinto, 31, had languished in preventive custody in a Lisbon jail for more than a year awaiting trial. An international coalition, including his lawyers and others, believed he should be granted whistle blower status for the crimes and wrongdoing his leaks had exposed. Pinto's lawyers have since announced that he had been released and placed under house arrest on the condition that he not use the internet. New details of Pinto's situation have emerged. He is staying in a small apartment owned by Portugal's judicial police, and the release is linked to the possibility of Pinto sharing the passwords of 10 encrypted hard drives that were seized when the apartment in Budapest in which he was tracked down was raided. The hard drives may hide a trove of new investigative material for the authorities in Portugal and beyond. The information Football Leaks made public including player contracts, internal team financial documents and confidential emails pulled back the curtain on the murky world of soccer finance, led to criminal tax prosecutions of several top players and even helped prompt officials in the United States to reopen a sexual assault investigation involving the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo. (Officials in Las Vegas eventually decided not to pursue charges against Ronaldo.) Pinto also burrowed into the servers of several Portuguese entities, including the top division soccer team Sporting Clube de Portugal, the national soccer federation, a well known law firm and even the country's attorney general's office. The coronavirus crisis played a direct role in allowing Pinto to leave prison. On one hand, the judge said, Pinto had shown willingness to work with the police; on the other, the pandemic had meant Portugal's borders were subject to heightened controls, reducing the opportunity for Pinto to flee the country. The repercussions of Pinto's efforts continue to roil the soccer industry. Players and clubs have faced punishment from sporting and state authorities, and investigations into tax avoidance continue in several European countries. His material was also responsible for European soccer's governing body opening an investigation and then punishing English soccer champion Manchester City with a two season ban from European competitions like the Champions League for breaching financial regulations. City is appealing. Most recently, and most dramatically, in January, Pinto was revealed to be the source behind leaked documents and emails that revealed how Isabel dos Santos, Africa's richest woman and the daughter of Angola's former president, had amassed her 2 billion fortune. Last month, a Portuguese judge ordered the seizure of all of dos Santos's assets in the country, and in January Angolan prosecutors accused her of embezzlement and money laundering. Dos Santos denies all the allegations against her. The revelations were dubbed "Luanda Leaks" and were published by a consortium of international media outlets that included The New York Times. William Bourdon, a Paris based lawyer on Pinto's legal team, said he believed Pinto's link to the dos Santos case has helped to change perceptions of Pinto in Portugal, where his supporters portray him as a genuine whistle blower and his opponents paint a darker character. Bourdon has represented other high profile people who leaked sensitive information into the public domain, including the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. One of the charges Pinto faces involves a soccer agency which Pinto is accused of attempting to extort by offering to delete confidential and highly damaging information in exchange for as much as 1 million euros. "I do think Luanda Leaks has been an earthquake," Bourdon told The Times. "I do think it's opened the eyes of the Portuguese people to his serious contribution." Still, the charges against Pinto remain serious. The trial, despite the impact of the ongoing coronavirus crisis, is scheduled to take place later this summer. And there remains uncertainty over what Pinto's cooperation with the Portuguese authorities can bring him. Portugal law does not allow cooperation agreements with criminally accused individuals, something that is commonplace in the United States. There are also concerns that the information gleaned by Pinto would be inadmissible in a Portuguese court because it was illegally obtained. For now, Pinto's lawyers said, the plan is to try and get him moved to a larger, more comfortable accommodation than he currently finds himself in. As for what might be revealed next, Bourdon said there are likely to be a number of anxious individuals and institutions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
At Novant Health in Winston Salem, N.C., the new ultracold freezers are ready enough to eventually house more than 500,000 doses of the first coronavirus vaccine approved in the United States. In Los Angeles, the Cedars Sinai medical center has installed extra security cameras to protect the secret location of its soon to arrive supply of the vaccine. U.S. coronavirus vaccine distribution begins in New York. In Jackson, Miss., the state's top two health officials are preparing to roll up their own sleeves in the coming days and be the first to get the shots there as cameras roll, hoping to send the message, "We trust it." The Food and Drug Administration's emergency authorization on Friday night of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech has set in motion the most ambitious vaccination campaign in the nation's history, a challenge of staggering proportions choreographed against a backdrop of soaring infection rates and deaths. This weekend, 2.9 million doses of the vaccine are to begin traveling by plane and guarded truck from Pfizer facilities in Michigan and Wisconsin to designated locations, mostly hospitals, in all 50 states. The Pfizer vaccine needs to be kept at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, and the special boxes it is being shipped in can be opened no more than twice a day, in order to maintain the deep freeze. Side effects, like achiness or headache, could cause some of the nurses, doctors and others who are first in line for the vaccine to miss a day or two of work, challenging overburdened hospitals. States say they have only a fraction of the funding they need from the federal government for staffing to administer the shot, for tracking who has received both doses of the vaccine a booster is needed three weeks after the initial injection and for other crucial pieces of the effort. Preparations for this moment have been months in the making. Military planners have looked at a range of potential obstacles, from large scale protests that could disrupt traffic to poor weather conditions. In an emergency, officials are prepared to use military airplanes and helicopters to deliver vaccines to remote locations. On Saturday morning, vials of vaccines were being packed and prepared for shipping at Pfizer facilities, with employees from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on site to make sure there were no mishaps, according to a senior C.D.C. official. Pfizer said the first shipment would leave its Kalamazoo, Mich. facility early Sunday morning. FedEx and UPS will transport the vaccine throughout most of the country, and each delivery will be followed by shipments of extra dry ice a day later. Pfizer designed special containers, with trackers and enough dry ice to keep the doses sufficiently cold for up to 10 days. Every truck carrying the containers will have a device that tracks its location, temperature, light exposure and motion. For all the planning, and contingencies, there is still a good deal of confusion. States are receiving initial allocations according to a federal formula based strictly on their adult population. But many hospitals say they still don't know exactly how much they will get or when the shipments will arrive. "It's really been a lot of the unknowns about the logistics," said Dr. Jeffrey A. Smith, the chief operating officer for Cedars Sinai, noting that the medical center was also treating the highest number of Covid 19 patients it had seen since the pandemic began in March. Other hospital systems are reeling from the news that their initial allocations will be much smaller than they had hoped. The Cleveland Clinic, one of the 10 hospital groups in Ohio that are receiving the first batch of vaccines, is expecting only 975 doses in an initial shipment, even though it has more than 40,000 employees around the state. Ohio has prioritized getting initial doses of the vaccine to people in nursing homes and assisted living centers because they are at such high risk. "We're going to have a lot less vaccine than we have people wanting it," Dr. Robert Wyllie, Cleveland Clinic's chief of medical operations, said, adding that the system would first vaccinate workers in the intensive care units at four hospitals that are experiencing the highest volumes of Covid patients. Everybody who works in those units, including housekeepers, will be eligible for a shot. Like many health systems, Cleveland Clinic plans to stagger vaccinations so that if side effects cause some employees to miss work, the unit can still be fully staffed. "We know the first dose is partially protective," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former F.D.A. commissioner and a board member of Pfizer, said on CNBC Friday. "We need to get as much protective immunity as possible into the general public." Pfizer has said it can provide up to 25 million doses to the U.S. by the end of this month. "Eventually, we will become much more confident in our manufacturing, our distribution process, state handling, et cetera," General Perna said. "And then the requirement for reserve won't be necessary." Additional vaccines are in the pipeline. Moderna recently applied for emergency authorization for its vaccine. The company said it is "on track" to produce 20 million doses by the end of this month and between 500 million and a billion through 2021. States are largely planning to follow recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about who gets vaccinated first: health care workers at high risk of exposure to Covid 19 and residents of nursing homes and other long term care facilities, a population that has died from the virus at disproportionately high rates. There is some variation among their plans. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said this week that "tip of the spear, high contact workers" in hospitals would receive the very first shots and that he hoped to reach "as many elderly people as we can" by the end of December. "They're still a little bit hesitant," he told reporters on Tuesday. "If we don't put ourselves out there first, take the first doses of vaccine and show that we believe in it and trust it, I don't think the long term care folks are going to have the uptake they need." In most states, the concerted effort to vaccinate nursing home residents will begin a week later. Starting Dec. 21, CVS and Walgreens will send teams of pharmacists out to about 75,000 nursing homes and other long term care facilities in all 50 states, under a contract with the federal government, to vaccinate as many residents and staff members as agree to it. CVS is aiming to complete the process over nine to 12 weeks. On Thursday afternoon, as an F.D.A. advisory committee debated whether to recommend authorization of the Pfizer vaccine, the first packages of supplies to administer it vaccination record cards, masks, visors, information sheets and syringes arrived at UPMC Presbyterian, a hospital in Pittsburgh. Dr. Graham Snyder, the medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at UPMC, said that a hospital committee had concluded that the immediate goal for allocation was to prevent transmission from the community to the hospital staff. "The greater likelihood of their exposure is in the community and home than in the workplace," he said, noting that health care workers have generally taken great precautions when they are among patients. Some hospitals have said they will give priority to workers with underlying medical conditions that would put them at higher risk for severe disease. Dr. Marci Drees, the infection prevention officer and hospital epidemiologist at ChristianaCare, a Delaware based hospital system, said that the system would offer its health care workers a list of such conditions but would ask them only to disclose generally whether they had any. "Lower wage workers might be less likely to disclose because of the perception of discrimination," Dr. Drees said. "So we're trying to focus on job roles and spreading allocation across our system." One of the biggest outstanding questions is how many Americans even in the health care field will hesitate to get the vaccine; a Pew Research Center poll conducted late last month found that 18 percent said that they would "definitely not" take the vaccine "if it were available today" and that 21 percent said that they would "probably not." Many health care workers have been hesitant about this vaccine because it is so new, and they are eager to see hard data before they decide whether to take it. Mindful of their cautiousness, Dr. Drees said that ChristianaCare was emphasizing to its staff that taking the vaccine is voluntary. "While I know that the risk of getting Covid far outweighs the risk of getting the vaccine," Dr. Drees said, "meeting workers where they are at is important." At Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System in South Carolina, Dr. Chris Lombardozzi, the system's chief medical officer, said he did not anticipate much in the way of resistance from employees. "Our medical staff is completely on board," he said, noting that he'd had discussions with leaders of several departments. To a person, he said, they say, "I want to be first." Their willingness reflects the reality of how hard the pandemic has hit their professions. "We are so tired of this," Dr. Lombardozzi said. "We are tired of watching people die. We are tired of not having a cure for an awful, awful virus. We want this to go away." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A petite blonde in a tight ponytail sashayed through the metal doors into the depths below. But three 40 something women in puffy coats grimaced when told it's reservations only. An unshaven man in a black beanie couldn't take the wait anymore and stormed off. Little Sister, which opened under the Moxy NYC East Village Hotel in September, is the latest slice of the Hamptons to land right on the edge of the once gritty East Village. There aren't any graffiti covered bathrooms and beer soaked floors; instead this glittery lounge offers gold speckled lacquerware tables and leather banquettes firm enough to withstand the sharpest stilettos. The Place: Located across the street from Webster Hall, and three floors below ground, the golden hued room was designed by the Rockwell Group and features curved wooden beams and a sheet of crystal whisky decanters anchored to the ceiling. It's like partying in a ship's hull. The Crowd: Around midnight on a recent Friday, the lounge was filled with 20 somethings from a financial consulting company who swayed in reluctant harmony. A nearby table full of late 40s businessmen in French cuffed shirts danced strenuously with younger women in short, flouncy dresses and thigh high boots. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
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