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Louise Abate first noticed an itchy tingle near her hairline. The pain started a day or two later as a blistering rash swept down from her scalp onto her forehead. "My eye was so swollen I couldn't open it," she said. Shingles. Ms. Abate, 76, a retired casino supervisor in Rio Rancho, N.M., had had the disease twice before, in her 60s, but the episode three years ago hit particularly hard. Long after the rash healed, which took about three weeks, she suffered the complication called postherpetic neuralgia lingering nerve pain that can last for months or even, as in her case, years. "I get up every day, and it's there," she said. "I go to sleep, and it's there." She had heard something about a shingles vaccine, but "I really didn't pay attention," Ms. Abate confessed. And she is hardly unusual. And elders have been particularly slow to take advantage of the shingles vaccine. The Food and Drug Administration approved it a decade ago, and the C.D.C. recommends it for those over 60, including those who've already had shingles. Coverage has climbed steadily, but in 2014 it had still reached only 31 percent of those over 65. As with nearly all of these vaccines, older whites were more likely to have been vaccinated than blacks, Hispanics or Asians. "Vaccines are less likely to be routinely incorporated in adult medical practice," Dr. Bridges said. "Every time a child comes in, a pediatrician makes sure they're up to date." Older adults often have medical issues that take precedence during brief office visits. They also see specialists who are more focused on cardiology or oncology than on flu and shingles. Seniors and their caregivers should request vaccinations; the C.D.C. publishes guidelines and a quiz that explain which ones are recommended. Zostavax, the current shingles vaccine, reduces the risk of the disease in adults over 60 by half, and the incidence of postherpetic neuralgia by two thirds. The vaccine's underuse can be blamed, in part, on supply shortages in its early years until about 2012. The manufacturer, Merck, and the C.D.C. didn't increase media campaigns until vaccine supplies were sufficient; such campaigns had just started when Ms. Abate became ill. It's not surprising that she was only vaguely aware of Zostavax. Cost remains a barrier to getting Zostavax and some other adult vaccines. In a study published this past summer, researchers reported that nearly 40 percent of the time, patients over 50 who requested a prescription for Zostavax at a pharmacy chain chose not to receive the vaccine; out of pocket costs were most frequently the reason. The Affordable Care Act requires private insurers to cover Zostavax without co pays for people older than 60, and many cover it for policyholders over 50. But Medicare beneficiaries find that, unlike the flu and pneumococcal vaccines, which are covered under Part B and often administered in physicians' offices, Zostavax and Tdap are covered under Part D. Physicians can't easily bill for Part D reimbursement, so they often send patients to pharmacies, which can. But because Part D involves a welter of different plans and formularies, some requiring patients to pay for the vaccine and then seek reimbursement, the cost and co pays can discourage use. Zostavax, at about 200 a dose, is the most expensive adult vaccine. This landscape could change drastically in a year or so. In October, the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline submitted a new shingles vaccine for F.D.A. approval. International studies indicate that the newcomer, Shingrix, is far more effective than the current vaccine, reducing the incidence of shingles by 90 percent. Moreover, the effectiveness doesn't appear to decrease among older age groups, as Zostavax's does. Shingrix has its own drawbacks. For one, it requires a second injected dose several months after the first; some people won't follow up. The manufacturer has yet to set a price, and unless Congress changes the law, any new vaccine will face the same Part D billing complications. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
MOST couples want their wedding to be awe inspiring. And therein lies the foundation of an enormous industry that, for a price, can guarantee bragging rights for the betrothed, whether it's beachside fireworks, a chocolate candy bar multitiered cake flown in from Napa or flower covered candelabra. But in an age when it's possible to outsource the entire affair, some couples are now forging bonds while forging their own gold, oxy propane torches in hand, to create DIY wedding bands. "It just makes a difference to put blood and sweat into the ring that he will wear his whole life," said Millie Hale, 23. She made a dragon scale patterned white gold band for her husband, Ralph Hale, also 23, a lover of, that's right, the game Dungeons and Dragons. "It's special to me as well as to him. Plus, it's a good story to brag about at parties later on." The couple both second lieutenants in the Air Force but based in separate cities spent 2,415 to make each other's wedding bands in a daylong workshop called the Wedding Ring Experience, which now has eight locations, including Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco, where the Hales made their rings. Last year the company, headquartered in San Diego, held 340 workshops nationwide, up from 160 in 2007, an official said. "Obviously, forging something by hand is much more intimate than using a credit card," said Adam Nadel, 44, a photojournalist, who made rings with his wife, Sara Zatz, 35, at another company, New York Wedding Ring, under the guidance of Sam Abbay, a goldsmith, before their 2009 nuptials. "We both torched," he added. "Torching is very important that's the forging. It was fun because the ring starts glowing, and it's rather dramatic and unexpected." Ms. Zatz, the associate director for Ping Chong Company, a theater group, acknowledged she wasn't particularly adept at crafts. To her surprise, the 12 hour day in Mr. Abbay's workshop in Manhattan was not the disaster she feared. "I thought it would look like a misshapen lump of gold," she said. Instead, their rings his platinum, hers gold include a circle of each other's metal. The ring making workshops are so new that Carley Roney, editor in chief of theknot.com, a wedding planning site, acknowledged that she had never heard of them before a reporter told her about them. She quickly warmed to the idea. "It takes some of the simple commercialism" out of getting rings, Ms. Roney said. "It's truly romantic. It's making someone dinner versus ordering takeout." Be forewarned. Making a ring in a day is about as challenging as a souffle is for a newbie cook. "It's not really easy, but we control every step of the way," said Sarah Wan, a jeweler in Toronto who teaches a wedding band course and who owns the Devil's Workshop, a gallery. "We only take two couples per class. They are working with gold. If they go too far then we're in trouble." Gold can melt like cheese, said Ms. Wan, who pulled an all nighter before her own wedding to make her fiance's white gold band because she was so swamped with planning till then. "It melts quickly when it's ready to go," she said, "then we have to fill in that section again with new metal." Such a setback befell Basilica Bliachas, 36, an actress not once but twice at Mr. Abbay's studio as she toiled to make a band for Krikor Gazarian, a manager at a fast food restaurant. It happened the first time as she soldered it; the second time the ring broke as she impatiently started to hammer it for a textured finish before it was cold. "It was really a pain in the neck, but we were laughing about it," Mrs. Bliachas said. The couple, who have known each other since they were children in Venezuela, were married in August at City Hall in Manhattan; they are planning a Greek Orthodox ceremony. "I was trying to get focused, but I had my husband there." In December 2010, Mr. Gazarian had flown to Athens, where his future wife was working, to propose with a princess cut diamond on a white gold engagement ring that he had hammered himself during a session with Mr. Abbay. At first, he did not tell her he had handcrafted it, but showed her a video of him making the ring. "She was so touched," Mr. Gazarian said. The couple then decided to make their wedding bands together. Lewis Barnes, the chief executive of the Wedding Ring Workshop chain in the United States, said that a handmade ring can be a deal closer. "We have quite a few young men come in and make an engagement ring," he said. "It takes a rather tough minded lady to say 'No' after he says: 'Will you marry me? I made this with my own hands.' " The cost of a hand forged ring varies, depending on the design and materials (and metal prices are volatile). The Wedding Ring Experience, which costs from 995 to 2,600 for two rings, requires a deposit after couples choose their metal, to lock in a price, Mr. Barnes said. Some people bring their own metal. Christopher Michaud, 34, a product strategist at Huge, a digital agency in Brooklyn, and his fiance sawed in half a South African Krugerrand, a gold coin and a family heirloom, as the raw material. The rings, made with Mr. Abbay for roughly 2,000, cost less than the thick platinum bands from Tiffany's that they had first considered for about 4,000. "There's always a double take when we say, 'We made the rings,' " said Mr. Michaud, who recently proposed to Andrew Cohen, 33, a lawyer. "They say, 'Ohhhh, who made the rings?' and we say, 'No, we made the rings with fire,' " he said. His band white gold outside and the Krugerrand crown gold on the inside has a clue about its pedigree. A tiny line where Mr. Cohen fused the ends together is visible, but like so many in love, Mr. Michaud sees imperfection with rose colored glasses. "I kind of love it," he said, "because it reminds me of when we made it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Every now and then, fans get "I can't believe my own eyes" moments in sports. On Tuesday night, Bam Adebayo, the 23 year old center for the Miami Heat, pulled off such a play with the opening game of the Eastern Conference finals on the line. Jayson Tatum, the 22 year old Boston Celtics star, was on his way to the rim late in overtime in a game that his team had mostly led. The Heat were up 2 points. Tatum, with four seconds left, rose up to do something he has done many times in his career: dunk the ball, with a basket that could tie the game, or at the very least, draw a foul. Adebayo, who like Tatum made his first All Star game this season, met him at the rim and swatted away what appeared to be an open dunk. There was no foul; it was a clean block. And it saved the game for the Heat, who went on to win, 117 114, to draw first blood in the series. "It's the playoffs," Adebayo told reporters after the game. "I had to make a great play." "That could be a poster dunk, and a lot of people aren't willing to make that play and put themselves out there," Spoelstra said. "Jayson Tatum was getting to the launching pad, and he just made a big time save for us." The most famous recent block is LeBron James's chasedown of Andre Iguodala, who happens to be a member of this Heat team, in Game 7 of the 2016 finals. That block came with just under two minutes left in the game, not the final seconds, and stopped a layup, not a dunk. There is also Tayshaun Prince on the 2004 Detroit Pistons swatting away Reggie Miller's game tying layup with 18 seconds left in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals. It's an impressive block, but it might be harder to stop a Tatum dunk than an end of his career Miller layup. "He made a great play," Tatum said of Adebayo. "Can't do nothing about it." Hakeem Olajuwon, the Houston Rockets great, blocked John Starks as he tried to shoot a 3 at the end of Game 6 of the 1994 N.B.A. finals to force a Game 7. Great play, but a center blocking a guard on a 3 pointer is just one Adebayo sized hand below blocking a dunk. There are other contenders: Roy Hibbert of the Indiana Pacers on Carmelo Anthony of the Knicks. Horace Grant on the Phoenix Suns' Kevin Johnson to win the 1993 finals for the Chicago Bulls. The San Antonio Spurs's Manu Ginobili on James Harden's 3 pointer in the 2017 Western Conference semifinals with the series tied at 2 2. In all of those instances, the blocker was playing on the superior team and it was apparent they were going to win the series. The Heat needed this win. The Celtics are on paper the better team. In the regular season, Miami was 4 1/2 games behind Boston in the standings. The Celtics had a plus 6.4 point differential, while the Heat were at plus 2.9. Boston had a top five offense and defense. The Heat were tied for ninth offensively and were 11th defensively. Boston won two of three matchups with the Heat, and the Celtics may have the best player in the series in Tatum. But the Heat keep showing that "on paper" superiority is meaningless to them. Last round, they easily dispatched Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks, who had the N.B.A.'s best record and were expected to cakewalk to the finals. Every win Miami can steal puts more pressure on the Celtics. On Tuesday, Boston led by double digits in the fourth. They led by 5 points late and 4 points in overtime. And they still could not put Miami away. Boston just escaped a grueling series with the Toronto Raptors, the reigning champions, who had a toughness similar to the Heat's. Like Miami, Toronto was a team greater than the sum of its parts based on its effort. And now, the Celtics seem to be getting used to end of game miracles depriving of them of seemingly sure wins. There was Game 3 against the Raptors, when OG Anunoby hit a bonkers game winning 3 pointer from the corner with 0.5 seconds left. There was the Game 6 double overtime thriller against the Raptors, which, like Tuesday's game, the Celtics could not pull out despite several late leads. One game can be chalked up to bad luck. But several is an indication of complacency. The Heat no matter the situation are not a complacent team, and that can make up for a talent deficiency, as the Los Angeles Clippers discovered against the Denver Nuggets in shocking fashion. "I don't think it's just execution," said Jimmy Butler, the Heat star who hit multiple baskets to give Miami the lead late in the game. "I think we're in really, really, really good shape, you know, mentally. Whenever you're not tired physically, you can concentrate. You can remember plays. You can do this and you can do that. We pride ourselves on that, and I think as of late, we have been playing great basketball." The Celtics probably don't have to go back to the drawing board to win this series. Gordon Hayward, who has been out for the past month with a sprained ankle, is expected to return soon. Tatum had 30 points and grabbed 14 rebounds. Marcus Smart continued his hot shooting, scoring 26 points on 18 shots. Boston even got unexpected contributions from the bench: Backup point guard Brad Wanamaker had 11 points, 6 assists and 5 steals. But Boston had one big problem: Kemba Walker the Celtics' marquee acquisition last summer had his third straight poor game. On Tuesday, he shot 6 for 19 from the field and only 1 for 9 from the perimeter. He should be feasting on the Miami backcourt, but instead he was routinely flustered by the Heat's aggressive trapping, which extended to half court. He often looked lost on offense. Great players have bad games in the playoffs. It's a testament to the Celtics that they have won or almost won their last three games, despite Walker's struggles. But against a team like Miami which searches out flaws and exploits them with pinpoint precision Boston is going to need Walker to give more, especially with Hayward's physical conditioning uncertain. Even though Adebayo's block was just one play, it was emblematic of the Heat's team identity. Even when the odds are not in their favor, even when they seem outmatched don't be surprised when you look up at the scoreboard and see them as the victors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Dr. Seuss' classic children's book "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" was first adapted as an animated TV special in 1966, with Boris Karloff voicing the titular grump. Then Jim Carrey embodied the curmudgeon in a live action 2000 version. Now Benedict Cumberbatch is bringing his own take to the crotchety, holiday hating character in a big screen cartoon simply titled "Dr. Seuss' the Grinch," which has just released its first trailer. The film was made by Illumination, the same company behind "The Secret Life of Pets," "Sing" and the "Despicable Me" franchise. The new teaser includes a sly inside joke, as the Grinch is woken up and annoyed when his alarm clock plays Pharrell Williams's relentlessly upbeat song "Happy," the Oscar nominated tune from "Despicable Me 2." Most of the clip's footage features the Grinch and his loyal dog, Max, who fixes his boss a hot beverage with a frowny face floating on the surface. For his part, the mean green one shuts down someone trying to wish him "Happy holidays" at the grocery store and vomits into a jar after tasting pickles then puts it back on the shelf. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A local investor, who owns several buildings around the city, has bought this 2,415 square foot mixed used building with 12 apartments eight three bedrooms and four two bedrooms, of which 11 are rent stabilized and one market rate. The buyer plans to renovate the eight apartments that are vacant. A bodega/deli leases one ground floor space, while the other, formerly occupied by a church, is vacant. Air rights come to 2,415 square feet. 120 1/2 First Avenue (between East Seventh and Eighth Streets) A London based bubble tea franchise has signed a seven year lease for its flagship shop to open this summer in a 750 square foot storefront, with a backyard patio, in this five story East Village walk up. The shop will feature milk and fruit based bubble tea blends including Oreo Crush, along with alcoholic brews including Raspberry Mar Tea Ni. The space was formerly the site of the International Bar. . A five story walk up at 53 East 67th Street is on the market for 17.5 million. This 7,268 square foot 1878 five story mixed use walk up in Lenox Hill designed by the Jardine Brothers, who were known for rowhouse development features a vacant 1,709 square foot ground floor medical space, as well as eight occupied market rate furnished one bedroom apartments, two with rear private terraces. The projected cap rate of 3.2 percent takes into account the medical space once it is leased. Approval is in place for single family conversion of the existing property, while air rights, totaling 12,816 square feet, must be approved separately for further development. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Boeing successfully tested a safety system of its commercial spacecraft on Monday morning, bringing the American aerospace industry one step closer to launching astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time since 2011. The company ran an uncrewed test on the launch abort system of the CST 100 Starliner, a 16.5 foot spacecraft that can carry up to seven people, in New Mexico. At 7:15 a.m. local time, the capsule blasted off from its support platform and soared thousands of feet into the air above the White Sands Missile Range. Less than two minutes later, it was gliding back down to earth under two red, white and blue parachutes. A third main chute did not deploy, but the craft still landed safely. NASA broadcast live coverage of the test on its website. The safety test, also called a pad abort test, was meant to demonstrate whether the part of the spacecraft that carries that crew would be able to successfully detach itself from a malfunctioning rocket in the case of an emergency. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Early next year, Apple plans to start requiring iPhone owners to choose whether to allow companies to track them across different apps to better target their ads a practice that Facebook relies on. For years, signs of discord have brewed between Facebook and Apple. Their chief executives, Apple's Tim Cook and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, have periodically taken thinly veiled shots at each other. "If they're making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried," Mr. Cook said of companies like Facebook in 2014. In turn, Mr. Zuckerberg has retorted: "You think because you're paying Apple that you're somehow in alignment with them? If you were in alignment with them, then they'd make their products a lot cheaper." But now Apple is making changes that threaten Facebook's business and the fight has intensified. Early next year, Apple plans to start requiring iPhone owners to explicitly choose whether to allow companies to track them across different apps, a practice that Facebook relies on to target ads and charge advertisers more. On Wednesday, Facebook went on the offensive to forestall Apple's changes. The social network created a website that slammed Apple's moves as potentially hurtful to small businesses. (It did not mention that the changes could hurt itself.) To reinforce its displeasure, Facebook also took out full page ads in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times to declare that it was "standing up to Apple." And then to doubly emphasize its point, Facebook said it would provide information for an antitrust suit against Apple filed by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, so that the court would understand "the unfair policies that Apple imposes." Facebook took out full page ads in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times to declare that it was "standing up to Apple." In a blog post, Dan Levy, a vice president for advertising at Facebook, said the company was taking the steps now because "we've heard from many of you, small businesses in particular, that you are concerned about how Apple's changes will impact your ability to effectively reach customers and grow let alone survive in a pandemic." He added, "So we're speaking up for small businesses." Apple executives have expected Facebook's protests and, in recent weeks, have vowed to go forward with the planned changes. "It's already clear that some companies are going to do everything they can to stop the App Tracking Transparency feature," Craig Federighi, Apple's software chief, said in a speech last week. "We need the world to see those arguments for what they are: a brazen attempt to maintain the privacy invasive status quo." On Wednesday, in response to Facebook's public challenge, Apple said it was standing up for its users, who "should know when their data is being collected and shared across other apps and websites." The company added that Facebook did not need to stop tracking users or creating targeted advertising, but that "it simply requires they give users a choice." The escalating tensions are part of an unusual, high stakes battle between two of the world's most valuable companies, which rely on each other and exert tremendous influence over digital behavior. At the heart of the fight is how Facebook and Apple are diametrically opposed on how they make money and which company wins out is likely to help shape the internet for years to come. Apple prefers that consumers pay for their internet experience, leaving less need for advertisers, while Facebook favors making the internet free for the public, with the bill footed by companies that pay to show people ads. The fracas is also a reminder of both companies' power over the internet, as well their leverage over each other. Facebook needs its apps to work on Apple's devices to reach hundreds of millions of people. And Apple needs Facebook's apps Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger to make its devices worth their high price tags. That precarious relationship has underpinned their larger fight, with both careful not to do anything to blow it up. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. "All of this is a long time coming," said Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, a tech research firm in Silicon Valley. "A lot of the privacy moves that Apple has made over the past few years, in terms of allowing people to understand what's happening to them in the background, a lot of it has to do with Facebook." Mr. Cook and Mr. Zuckerberg have long made clear their distaste for the other's philosophies on advertising, targeting and privacy. In 2018, scandal engulfed Facebook over the news that the voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica had harvested the Facebook data of more than 50 million people. When Mr. Cook was asked on national television what he would do if he were Mr. Zuckerberg, he replied, "What would I do? I wouldn't be in this situation." He added that it was beyond time that Facebook was regulated. "We could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer if our customer was our product," Mr. Cook said, referring to Facebook's business model. "We've elected not to do that." Mr. Zuckerberg responded by calling Mr. Cook's comments "extremely glib." He said, "It's important that we don't all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you." Then the fight went beyond words. Last year, Apple became upset when Facebook bypassed the iPhone App Store process to distribute an app that paid users 20 if they allowed the app to snoop on their online activity. In response, Apple temporarily blocked some iPhone apps that Facebook employees used to message each other, catch shuttle buses around Facebook's campus and check the cafeteria menu. That power that Apple wields over which apps appear on iPhones and how they work is now at the center of antitrust probes against the company. And Facebook was again at the receiving end of that clout this year when Apple blocked its new Facebook Gaming app from distribution in its App Store. Apple rejected at least five versions of Facebook Gaming, citing its rules that prohibit apps with the "main purpose" of distributing casual games. At the time, people close to Facebook said that Apple's moves may have been influenced by how Facebook Gaming appeared to compete with Apple's own sales of games. Then in August, Epic sued Apple, accusing the company of violating antitrust laws by forcing developers to use its payment systems. On Wednesday, Facebook signaled that it was on Epic's side, saying it was "committed to providing relevant information in the Epic Games litigation regarding how Apple's policies have adversely impacted Facebook and the people and businesses who use our services." All the while, the two companies have sparred over data and privacy. In June, Apple flexed its muscles over the issue, this time with a potential long term effect on Facebook's business. That was when Apple announced changes to iPhone software that would blunt the ability of companies like Facebook to collect data on iPhone users. The changes included enabling people to share their approximate location, instead of a precise one, and adding easy to read summaries to the App Store on what data each app collects. Most concerning for Facebook, however, was a change that would require iPhone owners to grant apps explicit permission to track them across different apps. Under that policy, most people would probably block Facebook from collecting such information. Facebook uses such data to build robust profiles of its users that it then markets to advertisers. Analysts said the change would probably have a limited impact on Facebook's main ad business, as it already knows plenty about its users' interests from their activity on Facebook and Instagram. But they said it could hurt Facebook's efforts to sell ads in other places around the internet. Facebook's enormous trove of user data is also one of its most valuable assets. "What could be at stake is some future business that Facebook thinks is the next big thing that they can't get without this data," Mr. Bajarin said. For now, Apple and Facebook hardly compete, save for some limited areas, like Facebook Portal, a screen that Facebook sells for video chatting. But both companies are working toward what many in Silicon Valley believe is the next big thing in computing augmented reality, or a way to mix digital images into a person's view of the real world and analysts expect that race to put them on a collision path. By the time it publicly blasted Apple on Wednesday, Facebook had already taken a shot at its frenemy this week, on Monday. When authorities in Europe were preparing new proposals to regulate tech companies, including a measure to require more transparency on ad targeting, Facebook responded with a statement saying it welcomed regulation but wondered why the regulators had not taken aim at Apple, too. "Apple controls an entire ecosystem from device to app store and apps, and uses this power to harm developers and consumers," the company said, "as well as large platforms like Facebook." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
THE BANKER (2020) Stream on Apple TV Plus. Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson play men who join forces to subvert discriminatory housing practices in this historical drama. Set primarily before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the film begins by introducing Bernard S. Garrett (Mackie), an African American entrepreneur who moves to Los Angeles along with his wife, Eunice (Nia Long). There, Bernard meets Joe Morris (Jackson), a club owner with whom he teams up on an admirable scheme: Buying homes in white areas and renting them out to members of the city's black middle class. They do that with the help of a somewhat guileless white colleague (played by Nicholas Hoult). The characters are based on real people. "It's hard not to root for them even if they're obvious and underdeveloped, burdened with dialogue that too often sounds programmatic rather than embodied," Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times. The film, Dargis wrote, "uses laughs, white racism and black righteousness to soft sell a tale of inequality, heroic capitalism and eye drooping mathematics." THE LETTER FOR THE KING Stream on Netflix. In a dramatically lit, expensive looking high fantasy world, a short, easily underestimated hero is tasked with transporting a small object across a vast distance. That's the perhaps not entirely unfamiliar premise of this new series, an adaptation of a popular European children's book by the Dutch writer Tonke Dragt. The story follows Tiuri (Amir Wilson), a young would be knight sent on a perilous letter delivery quest. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
H. Boyd Woodruff, a farmer's son whose groundbreaking research enabled fellow scientists to harvest an arsenal of lifesaving antibiotics from ordinary dirt, died on Jan. 19 at his home in Watchung, N.J. He was 99. His death was confirmed by his son Hugh. Dr. Woodruff was instrumental in isolating two microbes that, while effective against tuberculosis and other infections, proved toxic to humans. But his findings in the early 1940s inspired the rapid development of streptomycin, the miracle cure used to treat tuberculosis, typhoid, plague and other diseases that did not respond to penicillin and other drugs. "This was the eureka moment in all antibiotic discovery," Dr. Douglas E. Eveleigh, a professor emeritus of biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers University, said of Dr. Woodruff's research in an email on Thursday. "The pharmaceutical industry caught on very rapidly, and there followed an avalanche of antibiotics," Dr. Eveleigh said. "This was all dependent on the Woodruff proof of concept in screening for antibiotic production." In 1942, Dr. Woodruff left his laboratory at Rutgers to join Merck Company, the pharmaceutical giant, where he oversaw the introduction of other antibiotics, vitamins B12 and C, and riboflavin; a treatment for a rare cancer called Wilms tumor; a pneumonia vaccine; and a drug used to treat river blindness. His mentor at Rutgers, Dr. Selman A. Waksman, and his Merck colleague Dr. William C. Campbell, who developed Avermectin for river blindness, both won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Harold Boyd Woodruff, known as Boyd, was born on July 22, 1917, in Bridgeton, N.J. His father, also named Harold, owned a farm, continuing a family tradition that dated to the early 18th century. His mother, the former Velma Smith, was a secretary. The family farm, which lacked electricity, could not support the Woodruffs during the Depression, so his father resorted to sharecropping and later moved the family to Buffalo, where he worked briefly in a seafood restaurant. They moved from upstate New York because Mrs. Woodruff suffered from the cold first to Virginia, then to Florida and finally back to New Jersey. "She'd get sick every winter and, of course, in those days, you didn't have antibiotics or anything to treat infections," Dr. Woodruff recalled in a 2004 oral history for Rutgers. "The doctor finally told my dad, 'Look, you've got to move out of this country or you're not going to have her much longer.' " In high school, he considered becoming an architect but, he later recalled, decided he wanted to be a chemist after taking an experimental course that encouraged "unexpected smells and disruptions of nearby classes," he wrote in the Annual Review of Microbiology in 1981. He enrolled at Rutgers, where he lived above a chicken coop on campus. Dr. Woodruff in 2004, when he was inducted into Rutgers's Hall of Distinguished Alumni. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree in soil chemistry in 1939 and earned a doctorate in microbiology under Dr. Waksman in what was then the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (now the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences). "For the first time," Dr. Woodruff wrote in the Annual Review, "I realized the unity of biology and chemistry, that each biological observation has an underlying chemical cause, that in unraveling the latter, one could understand the other." He joined Merck the same year he married Jeanette Whitner. His wife died in 2015. In addition to their son Hugh, he is survived by another son, Brian, and three grandchildren. Inspired by Alexander Fleming's experiments with penicillin and research by a former Rutgers graduate student, Rene Dubos of the Rockefeller Institute (now the Rockefeller University), Dr. Waksman encouraged Dr. Woodruff to investigate whether actinomycetes, threadlike bacteria found in the soil, could produce what would become known as an antibiotic. Dr. Woodruff was able to isolate two microbes, culture them and purify the antibiotics they produced: first actinomycin, which he found could inhibit tuberculosis, and later streptothricin. That advance led to the discovery of streptomycin by another Rutgers graduate student, Albert Schatz. Dr. Schatz later successfully sued to be recognized with Dr. Waksman as a discoverer of the drug and, with Dr. Waksman and his other former assistants, to share in some of the royalties. (Most of the royalties supported further research.) During that suit, Dr. Waksman said that in isolating streptothricin, Dr. Woodruff had contributed "as much as 20 times" more than Dr. Schatz to the later discovery of streptomycin, Peter Pringle wrote in his book "Experiment Eleven: Deceit and Betrayal in the Discovery of the Cure for Tuberculosis" (2012). Dr. Eveleigh of Rutgers agreed. "The studies of Albert Schatz in his discovery of streptomycin," he said, "were dependent on the initial antibiotic demonstration by Boyd Woodruff that one could isolate soil microorganisms, culture them and recover inhibitory compounds from them." Dr. Woodruff, who was assigned 2 percent of the royalties in the settlement of Dr. Schatz's suit, later endowed an undergraduate scholarship fund and a microbiology graduate fellowship in soils and environmental biology at Rutgers. At Merck, he was on the team that during World War II perfected the first commercial mass production of penicillin. He was later the executive director for biological sciences and executive administrator for Merck Sharp Dohme Research Laboratories in Japan for 10 years. He was also the founding editor of the journal Applied Microbiology. In addition to Dr. Woodruff's many awards, a bacterium, Seleniivibrio woodruffii isolated from sludge in a New Jersey wastewater treatment plant was named in his honor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Independent Spirit Awards are often positioned as the casual alternative to the Oscars even if the ceremony, held in a Santa Monica tent the afternoon before the Academy Awards, often features some of the same nominees and winners. Still, at this year's event, some major changes were evident. For one, unlike the Oscars, the Indie Spirits actually had a host in the witty Aubrey Plaza. The most notable difference, though, was how people made the most of their acceptance speeches. More than once, as someone spoke at the microphone on Saturday, I thought, "I bet you won't see that tomorrow." Read the Carpetbagger's Oscar predictions, then fill out your ballot. Part of that freshness was due to the fact that several of the Independent Spirit winners hadn't been victorious at other award shows this season, and this offered them the first notable chance to seize the spotlight. Take Richard E. Grant, the supporting actor winner for "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" who has lost most prizes to the "Green Book" star Mahershala Ali but has won Hollywood hearts with his happiness to just be nominated. When he took the stage to accept his Independent Spirit Award, Grant had to fight back tears. His character in the 1991 set film eventually succumbs to AIDS and Grant told the audience, "This movie, more than anything, is an homage to that generation of men who were wiped out by that disease." "Has Rami Malek said that this season?" asked my seatmate, referring to the 37 year old actor, an Oscar front runner, who plays the AIDS afflicted Queen singer Freddie Mercury in "Bohemian Rhapsody." The most controversial statement came later, when the "Sorry to Bother You" auteur Boots Riley won the Independent Spirit award for best first feature and used his speech not just to discuss class struggle but also to lob an accusation about rising tensions in Venezuela. "I want to say the C.I.A. is trying to have a coup in Venezuela," Riley told the crowd. "We should all be putting our voices out there to stop the U.S. from having regime change for oil." At that, even the Independent Spirits broadcast cut Riley off. Later, as Barry Jenkins took the stage to accept a best director trophy for his James Baldwin adaptation "If Beale Street Could Talk," he professed some uneasiness about winning in a category in which the majority of nominees were female. Notably, all of those women Debra Granik, who directed "Leave No Trace," Tamara Jenkins, who directed "Private Life," and Lynne Ramsay, who made "You Were Never Really Here" were all overlooked by Oscar. "I'm not gonna lie, man: I didn't want to win this damn award," Jenkins said at the podium. He noted that though women only made up a tiny minority of big studio directors last year, they comprised more than 40 percent of the directors in competition at Sundance and 60 percent of the nominees in his category, suggesting a pipeline to major projects that is still stalled by sexism. Jenkins exhorted the crowd of industry figures to make a film in the next 18 months with a woman at the helm, an echo of the challenge issued by the industry group Time's Up, then gave a particular shout out to Ramsay, whom he met in 2002 at the Telluride Film Festival. "I was a student, I hadn't made anything and she was so kind to me and took the time to tell me what her process was," Jenkins said. "I think this award has your DNA in it, my dear." Though the show had plenty of contemplative, heavy moments, the most delightful came late in the ceremony when Glenn Close won her latest best actress trophy for "The Wife." As Close walked to the stage, she turned back and beckoned someone from her table to join her. She was not calling on a co star, or the film's director. Instead, she was motioning to her dog, Pippi, a Havanese who eagerly trotted to the stage alongside his owner. "I hope you don't mind that Pippi came up here with me," Close said, explaining, "He's my date." Pippi stared up at Close with reverence give or take an entirely excusable yawn or two then walked to the back of the stage to sit next to presenters Javier Bardem and Yalitza Aparicio as Close had her moment. A dog who could hit his marks and cede the spotlight when need be? At the Independent Spirits, perhaps Pippi was the afternoon's biggest winner. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
" Too Late to Die Young ," Dominga Sotomayor's haunting third feature, could be classified as a summer vacation coming of age story. Since it takes place in Chile, summer coincides with New Year's Eve, when the movie's big, climactic party takes place. The setting is highly specific. The year drawing to a close is 1990, when the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet came to an end. Though nobody on screen talks about politics, the sense of exhaustion and tentative optimism that hovers over their actions might have something to do with the state of their country. Or maybe not. Sotomayor approaches her characters and their problems with subtlety and tact, and is more interested in reading their glances and gestures than in putting words in their mouths. In any case, her attention is focused on the daily routines at a makeshift vacation colony in the foothills of the Andes, where a group of artistically inclined adults and their children and pets have come to escape the stresses of city life. The younger children ride bikes, splash around in the swimming hole and nap in the sun. Their teenage siblings smoke, strum guitars and flirt. The grown ups gossip, cook, drink wine and discuss work that needs to be done. There are intimations of trouble: a break in at one of the cabins; disputes over water; concerns about fire and relations with the locals; marital tensions. But most of what happens has a ritualistic feel, and the still, dusty air wraps the story in nostalgia. A romantic triangle takes shape involving Sofia (Demian Hernandez), who is 16. Lucas (Antar Machado), who is her age, is clearly in love with her, but she's more interested in Ignacio (Matias Oviedo), an older guy with a motorbike. Sofia's parents are separated, and she is impatient for adulthood. When her father tells her to put out a cigarette, she says: "I'm a smoker. End of discussion." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
were married Sept. 1 at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. Rabbi Ruth Gelfarb officiated. Ms. Snyder, 27, is a television writer who is currently developing projects for HBO and the Freeform television channel. She is a writer on the Freeform show "Young Hungry." She also was the co author of a book inspired by the series entitled "Young Hungry: Your Complete Guide to a Delicious Life" (Freeform, 2017). She graduated with honors from N.Y.U. She is a daughter of Leslie J. Snyder of Harrison, N.Y., and the late David L. Snyder. The bride's mother and father founded the law firm Snyder Snyder in Tarrytown, N.Y. The brides mother is a principal owner of the firm. The groom, 36, is the co founder and chief executive of Ritter Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company focusing on digestive diseases based in Los Angeles. He graduated from the University of Southern California and received an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
It used to be that when a 13 year old wanted a binder for school, it meant a trip to Staples. For today's tweens and teens who identify as gender nonconforming or transgender, shopping for a binder may mean a compression undergarment worn to flatten breasts. Made of thick spandex and nylon, binders resemble tight undershirts, creating a masculine profile. The American Academy of Pediatrics has estimated that 0.7 percent of 13 to 17 year olds in the United States, about 150,000, identify as transgender. Dr. John Steever, assistant professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center in Manhattan, who runs its transgender health program and has evaluated over 500 patients from ages 8 to 23, said that almost 95 percent of the transmasculine teenagers in the program bind. Binders are not classified as medical devices, but some doctors and parents have concerns about their safety. (Common sense binding guidelines include: Don't use Ace bandages or duct tape, don't bind at night, limit a binder to eight to 10 hours a day, don't shower in it, don't wear two, and don't wear one that is too small.) Some transgender teens say they buy binders so that they can "pass" as male or to diminish feelings of discomfort with the body known as body dysphoria. And though wearing binders is temporary, their use can be associated with later medical transition. Dr. Steever said most of his patients who use binders "then tell me the next things they want to do, like testosterone, mastectomy and maybe phalloplasty. Ninety five percent of the people I've evaluated get started on cross hormones." (Cross gender hormone treatment in young people may affect future fertility, but data is limited.) For transgender or gender nonconforming teens who cannot afford binders, which start at around 30, there are free binder programs. FTM Essentials runs an application and lottery for those age 24 and under. Point of Pride, a transgender nonprofit based in Eugene, Ore., ships binders free to people of any age who express need and has sent over 4,000 nationally and internationally. Often, teenagers first learn about binders through YouTube videos hosted by young people. An instructional video called "Chest binding" by a Norwegian teenager named Kovu Kingsrod, who wears as many as three sports bras a day, has more than a million views. Tami Staas, 51, a schoolteacher who lives in Tempe, Ariz., and is president of the Arizona Trans Youth and Parent Organization, has a 21 year old son who was assigned female at birth and who started binding at 12. He wore a binder about 12 hours a day for five years. He had trouble in gym class and breathing trouble. "It was like trying to run a marathon in a tight bustier," Ms. Staas said. "It was difficult for me to weigh: Am I doing the right thing? Is it causing irreparable damage? It was very difficult to watch him cause himself physical pain in order to be comfortable in his own skin." At 18, he had a double mastectomy, or top surgery, and now takes testosterone weekly. A 17 year old in Phoenix who binds daily and asked to be identified only by the initials J.M. said he started binding at 13. To maximize the compression, he bought a binder one size too small and wore it at night. "My arms and hands would feel numb and tingly off and on," he emailed, "from how tight the material was around that area." When he removed the binder, he found his skin "severely chafed and raw." He added: "The divots left behind from those times took months to heal. In all honesty, I couldn't have cared less about the damage being created, just that my chest was flat." Dr. Ilana Sherer, a pediatrician and founder of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at the University of California, San Francisco, Benioff Children's Hospital, emailed that "binders can be physically very uncomfortable and can cause problems especially if overused or ill fitting, so it's important that every youth weigh the risks and benefits for themselves and have access to quality, well fitting binders." But even those are correlated with negative health effects. Though there have been no studies on binding and adolescent health, because of ethical concerns about research on minors, a 2017 study by students at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Boston University School of Medicine, and the Boston University School of Public Health looked at 1,800 transmasculine adults with a median age of 23. Seventy eight percent of respondents said they had bound for over a year, over half bound an average of seven days a week, and 66.6 percent were interested in top surgery. An additional 13.1 percent had already had the surgery. Participants reported a statistically significant improvement in mood after binding. They also reported decreased gender dysphoria, anxiety and depression. As for physical effects, 97.2 percent of the group that bound reported at least one negative physical symptom, such as back pain, overheating, chest pain and shortness of breath. Other symptoms included numbness, bad posture and lightheadedness. Commercial binders were highly associated with negative outcomes (20 of 28 negative outcomes), as were elastic bandages (14 of 28), and duct tape or plastic wrap (13 of 28). One reason may be that commercial binders lend a false sense of security, leading wearers to keep them on too long or sleep in them. The American Academy of Pediatrics does not have an official position on binding. But in a policy statement last year on care of transgender and gender diverse children and adolescents, it advocated a "gender affirmative care model," where providers convey that "variations in gender identity and expression are normal aspects of human diversity." Read more about caring for transgender children. Read more about raising a transgender child. But some worry that parental efforts to affirm a young person's identity by supporting binding may contribute to self hate. Jane Wheeler, a co founder of an organization called Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics, which examines standards of care for gender variant children and youth, said binding "feeds into a normalization of body hatred, that some forms of body hatred are O.K." Brie Jontry is the spokeswoman for 4thWaveNow, which describes itself as "a community of parents and others concerned about the medicalization of gender atypical youth." Her daughter, now 15, told Ms. Jontry that she was trans at 11 and wanted a binder. Ms. Jontry bought her a running bra, but her daughter felt it was not constricting enough, refusing to leave the house until she got a binder. The first one she tried, at age 12, was too tight, Ms. Jontry thought, so they returned it and ordered a larger one. Her daughter, who was home schooled, bound at home and every time she went out. She stopped running, rock climbing, backpacking and swimming. "We would go for our evening walk and she would get winded and dizzy," Ms. Jontry said. "She stopped climbing trees. She stopped doing things where any degree of upper body flexibility was important." "Binding is not benign," Ms. Jontry said. "It encourages the idea that people's distress and anger and trauma should be turned inward toward their own bodies instead of outward toward the culture that feels oppressive to them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
FOR years, the most thrilling new motorcycles have been those at the top of the model line: the racetrack replicas splashed with a Valentino Rossi livery or the high stepping machines with the go anywhere styling of a Dakar rally competitor. Beginning riders, and those who simply preferred smaller machines for their easy handling, had to settle for older designs and then wait for innovative technology to trickle down from the upper end of the market. At the lowest price point, excitement was an option, when it was available at all. The lone bright spot among sportbikes in those dark days was the Kawasaki Ninja 250R, which has supplied inexpensive thrills to novices since 1986. A sign that Kawasaki's dominance was in peril appeared with the arrival of the 2011 Honda CBR250R, offering everything the Ninja did and upending the old order. Now the Kawasaki engineers have responded to Honda's challenge in exactly the way you'd wish: by elevating the game with the 2013 Ninja 300. At a press introduction last week in Manhattan, followed by a public promotion called the Ninja Times Square Takeover, the company rolled out the new model. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
"It made me chuckle when I thought of it, and then it seemed to be making a lot of people chuckle," Mr. Perry said. "But after about two weeks of that, as we sort of settled into the groove of coronavirus, it didn't quite speak to the outlook that I, at least, wanted Lake Oswego to walk away with." After watching Celine Sciamma's "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" (2019), Mr. Perry decided to change his tactic. "I had this marquee at my disposal or the business's marquee at my disposal and I liked the idea of not only getting people to watch this great movie but of trying to speak in more hopeful terms," he said. Mr. Perry, who has worked at the Lake Theater Cafe on and off for 23 years, said the two screen theater is both a home for his staff and a home away from home for his patrons. And though digital support is no substitute for the physical community that he's missing, it's still nice to see people laugh. "The fact that it did catch on made me happy because it essentially showed there's a place for more hopeful messages; that dark humor isn't the only way we can express ourselves," Mr. Perry said, before laughing. "It was also fun to see everybody think I was high, too." "Cinema was always for me about hope and optimism," Mr. Wyatt said. "You always hope these marquee messages going out will resonate the same way, or create the same effect that people have while sitting together and watching a movie communally and sharing those emotions." His single screen theater has since caught the eye of many housebound movie fans, with Michael J. Fox who played Marty McFly in the "Back to the Future" trilogy reposting a photo of the marquee himself. Since then, Mr. Wyatt has tried out two new messages: A play on different Tom Cruise movies and a reference to The Princess Bride. "I think there's a communal experience that goes beyond the budget spectacle," Mr. Wyatt said. "If you have a 100,000 movie theater in your home, it still does not compare to sitting elbow to elbow with people, and enjoying those experiences together," he continued. "A comedy is going to be funnier, and an exciting adventure is going to be that much more exciting when it's watched communally." Though there's no end in sight yet, he's sure that the community will flock back to theaters once it's allowed. "People really do enjoy going to the movies and getting out of their apartments and being with people in general that's why you live in New York, right?" Mr. Viragh said. "For all the culture, all the food, and all of the time spent with friends." The other two sides of the Nitehawk's marquee say "see you on the other side" and advise passers by to "Be excellent to each other" a message from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" (1989) that has been written on theater marquees around the country. And perhaps when it's safe to reopen, theaters will add the response to that quote, rejoicing as we're finally able to "Party on, dudes." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Season 22 of "The Bachelor" ends with a final rose ceremony. And the food focused drama "Delicious" returns to Acorn TV. THE BACHELOR 8 p.m. on ABC. This season's bachelor may not be a fan favorite, but that hasn't stopped viewers from tuning into the reality show. In this three hour season finale, the racecar driver turned real estate agent Arie Luyendyk Jr. introduces the final two contestants, Becca Kufrin and Lauren Burnham, to his parents and decides who will become his bride to be. Despite last week's unexpected appearance by Ms. Kufrin's ex boyfriend, the series "is a self sustaining ecosystem with few surprises," wrote Carla Correa of The New York Times, who spent a day engrossed in Bachelor Nation. CLEOPATRA 8 p.m. on Smithsonian. Historians recount the remarkable life of the Egyptian queen in this two part dramatic reconstruction. The first episode covers Cleopatra's upbringing under the violent and incestuous Ptolemaic dynasty, her ascension to ruler by the age of 21 and her efforts to save the dynasty, and Egypt, by seducing Julius Caesar. DIVIDED STATES 9 p.m. on A E. This new documentary series revisits acts of racial violence across the United States and Europe and looks at communities' efforts to tackle the problem. These first two episodes focus on an altercation at a Pennsylvania high school prompted by a racist Snapchat video, and a verbal attack on a Portland, Ore., train that turned deadly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The vaping powerhouse Juul Labs replaced its chief executive with a veteran of Big Tobacco on Wednesday, deepening the company's turmoil and raising doubts about the very future of the e cigarette industry. The sudden announcement capped a relentless cascade of events that has called into question the safety of devices once billed as a promising alternative to cigarettes, one of the world's leading preventable causes of death. Now, Juul is looking to that very industry for its survival as it faces a federal criminal inquiry, new bans on some of its products, and an onslaught of state and federal regulatory investigations into its marketing practices. Early Wednesday morning, after frantic days of internal meetings, the company announced that Kevin Burns would resign as chief executive. His chosen replacement is K.C. Crosthwaite, a top official at Altria, the cigarette giant that bought a 35 percent share in Juul for 12.8 billion last December and has seen the company it invested in rocked by growing crisis. In another sign of regulatory and business uncertainty, Altria and Philip Morris International said on Wednesday that they had ended talks to merge, dashing the chances of reuniting the two arms of what had once been the tobacco giant Philip Morris. The e cigarette industry which Juul commands, with more than 70 percent of the market is being threatened by twin public health crises: the rise of teenage vaping, which public health officials fear could create a new generation of nicotine addicts, and a surge of severe lung illnesses, including at least 11 deaths, linked to vaping. Dr. David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said that in light of the epidemic of youth vaping, he doubted that any e cigarette company could now prove that the benefits of its products outweighed the risks a critical factor to win agency approval to stay on the market in the United States. "In some ways the last several years has provided a record where it's hard to see that these products could ever meet the 'protection of public health standard,'" Dr. Kessler said. "And if they can't meet that standard, they can't be marketed." Testifying at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, the acting F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Ned Sharpless, appeared to echo that sentiment, saying, "We really don't think anyone should be using e cigarettes, except perhaps a person who is using it instead of a combustible cigarette." Dr. Sharpless said the agency could have done more to keep the products away from teenagers. "In retrospect the F.D.A. should have acted sooner," he said. "We're going to catch up." In addition to the deaths, 530 cases of the lung sicknesses have been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, causing public health agencies to warn most people to refrain from vaping any substance. Many of the patients have said they had been vaping THC, the high inducing ingredient in marijuana, when they became short of breath and grew sicker, officials have reported. But some said they were using just nicotine, or both. Juul sells only nicotine products along with its sleek and popular vaping pens. Nevertheless, the company has become synonymous with vaping generally for much of the public. "Juul is the face of the current public health crisis. Heads need to roll," said Stefanie Miller, a co founder of Sandhill Strategy, which consults with investment firms on regulatory policy, particularly tobacco industry regulations. "To see the top head roll is a sign to public health, investors, to everyone that they know they need to make some changes." In announcing its change of leadership, Juul appeared to cave on issues that could be detrimental to its business. It said it would not fight a Trump administration proposal to ban most flavored e cigarettes, which would slash its domestic sales. The company also said it would end one of its marketing campaigns, "Make the Switch," which the F.D.A. warned could be construed as an illegal effort to portray its e cigarettes as safer than traditional cigarettes. A Juul employee said the company was also considering whether it should abandon its multimillion dollar campaign on a ballot initiative to overturn an e cigarette ban that is to take effect in San Francisco early next year. On Sept. 10, President Trump met with Dr. Sharpless and Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary. After informing the president of another spike in teenage vaping, the two officials said they would issue the proposed ban on most flavored e cigarettes within several weeks. That would include mint and menthol, they said, although some vaping industry leaders have vowed to contest the inclusion of those two items. Juul has said mint and menthol now account for about 80 percent of its products and a ban on those would severely hurt its domestic sales. All of this foreshadows a regulatory showdown at the F.D.A. that is slated to begin in May next year when the agency will determine what, if any, e cigarettes can remain on the domestic market. "The United States is moving toward asking vaping companies for permission to sell any products," Ms. Miller from Sandhill Strategy said. "The people they're asking, the F.D.A., have shown these products are killing people." The turn in fortunes for Juul, and perhaps e cigarettes generally, culminates one of the biggest disagreements in public health in recent years: whether e cigarettes would prove a benefit to society. Supporters of e cigarettes have argued that these devices have the potential to save millions of lives and billions of dollars by providing a safer alternative to the nation's leading killer, traditional cigarettes. Some investment advisers pointed to the disarray with e cigarettes as a potential benefit to traditional smoking. "The recent media scrutiny on vaping will help overall cigarette consumption," Nik Modi, a tobacco industry analyst for RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a message to investors. In recent weeks, as Juul sales have slowed, sales of cigarettes declined at a slower pace with each passing week, according to Nielsen, a market research firm. But skeptics have said all along that not enough is known about the long term health effects of e cigarettes and assert that they, and Juul, in particular, have spurred heavy experimentation by teenagers. The upshot may drive the market for e cigarettes overseas, a market that Juul's new chief executive, Mr. Crosthwaite, highlighted to employees in an all hands meeting at the company headquarters on Wednesday morning. "International expansion continues to be a huge opportunity given the number of smokers around the world," he told employees. But the company's initial foray in China this month failed almost immediately, and last week India also said it would ban the sale of e cigarettes. Mr. Crosthwaite, in coming from Altria, brings to Juul the experience of working for one of the most regulatory savvy companies in the world; the tobacco industry has navigated perilous straits in keeping its product on shelves and pushing internationally, despite cigarettes being a proven, addictive killer. In a speech to a tobacco industry gathering in Washington on Wednesday, Howard Willard III, chief executive of Altria, said Mr. Crosthwaite would help Juul "urgently control, confront and reduce youth vaping," and deal with the company's other problems. But Altria is likely to face a bumpier future amid the uncertainty around Juul. Analysts said it was increasingly likely that Altria might have to write down the value of its 12.8 billion investment in Juul, given the recent developments and uncertainty surrounding the company. "When the Juul transaction was done, it valued the company at around 37 billion," said Garrett Nelson, an analyst at CFRA Research. "Juul's valuation today is probably a fraction of that." Meanwhile, Altria's debt levels more than doubled as it borrowed to buy the Juul stake, he noted. Tim Hubbard, an assistant professor of management in the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, said it was not surprising that Mr. Burns was stepping down from the company as it had struggled to adapt to the swift change of perceptions, from a company that was providing an alternative to smoking to one that had been vilified. "When compared to traditional tobacco products which have remained on the shelves for decades despite being proven dangerous e cigarette makers have failed spectacularly," Mr. Hubbard said in an email. "Bringing in a traditional tobacco executive who knows how to market and manage government relationships with deadly products matches the firm's needs." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Rebecca Taichman, a director known for her work with such leading playwrights as Sarah Ruhl and Paula Vogel, was addressing a gaggle of young men, most in their late teens and early 20s, in a Greenwich Village rehearsal space. They promptly picked up guitars and other instruments, and, within moments, they were stomping and bouncing and raising their voices in song, giddily summoning the rock gods. "Nice!" one shouted, as another slid across the floor on his knees. As Taichman's presence might suggest, this was no band practice. They were rehearsing a song aptly called "Up," which is featured in the new stage musical "Sing Street." Based on the 2016 film of the same name, the show follows a group of teenage boys who form a band in the recession strapped Dublin of the '80s. They're led by a lad named Conor, who hopes to win the heart of Raphina, a girl nurturing her own dreams of a modeling career. For the musical, set to open on Dec. 16 at New York Theater Workshop, the film's writer director John Carney enlisted the Irish playwright Enda Walsh to write the book. They'd had good luck on another stage adaptation of a Dublin set, music driven Carney movie: "Once," which earned eight Tony Awards, including best musical, after transferring from the very same theater to Broadway in 2012. For "Sing Street," though, they needed kids who looked like kids and could play pop rock songs by Carney and the Scottish musician Gary Clark. The group they put together included the English actor and "Game of Thrones" alum Brenock O'Connor, who portrays Conor, and Zara Devlin, an actor from Northern Ireland, as Raphina along with a clutch of affable and energetic actor musicians, one of whom is still in high school. Music runs deep in these actors' DNA; some have parents who've played professionally. Several cast members have, in fact, formed their own group, called Kings of Positivity. "Right now we exist on Instagram," noted Brendan C. Callahan, who portrays the keyboardist, Gary. "We also played a gig in Brooklyn," said O'Connor, wearing a Duran Duran T shirt and glittering blue eye shadow. (That band's early MTV staple "Rio" is among the '80s tunes also featured in the show.) Max William Bartos, the baby of the bunch at 16, first saw "Sing Street" which was a cult hit at best on an airplane. Then his agent called: "They need 16 year olds who can sing and dance and play instruments," he reported. "Like, that's me!" He and his cast mates described how their backgrounds and their passion for music that was recorded well before they were born make this show a serendipitous gig. Getting into character Conor is "the show's instigator" in setting out to form a band. "I've sort of been living Conor's story myself. I did a workshop for the production over a year ago in London, and since then I've been writing songs about a girl and just waiting for us to run away to London." Parental influence "My dad is the lead singer of an Irish folk band back home. He taught me to play the ukulele when I was eight, and when I got older we upgraded to a guitar." Favorite '80s act "It's this guy BA Robertson; he's from Glasgow, and my mother's from there, and I sort of look like him as well." Getting into character Raphina, Conor's crush, is a year older and has stopped attending school. "I feel like she knows a lot more than a 17 year old should know," Devlin says. The actress uses her accent for the part; attending school in Dublin, she learned that speaking differently can impart "another kind of loneliness." Parental influence "My father has a Bruce Springsteen tribute band and looks just like him." Favorite '80s act "When I got this part I was listening to a lot of Madonna. I feel like Raphina watches the videos for 'Papa Don't Preach' and 'Like a Virgin' and tries to copy her." Getting started After embracing musical theater at a young age, Bartos started competing in lacrosse, but a traumatic brain injury sustained in a bike riding accident turned him back to the arts. "I learned the guitar, started playing piano and got an agent." Getting into character As Darren, the band manager turned band member, Bartos shares his character's entrepreneurial spirit: "Within minutes of meeting Conor, Darren hands him his business card. At my audition, they asked if anyone had a business card, and I just pulled out mine." Parental influence "My mom's a piano player. My dad I love him dearly, but I've heard him try to sing 'Roxanne,' and it's not great." Getting started "I was 4. My parents were both teachers, and at my dad's school they needed a little Asian boy, and I was the teacher's son." Much later: Broadway roles in "Macbeth" and "The King and I." Getting into character "I relate to Eamon a lot. At the beginning he's got no confidence at all. He's sort of a lost soul and then he finds Conor, and through Conor and the band he finds out who he is." Parental influence "My dad played in a cover band. He gave me the gift of music, and my mother gave me the gift of musical theater she did community stuff when she was younger." Favorite '80s act "I'd have to say Bowie and the Police, thanks to my dad." From "Just north of Boston. I got this part from an open call there." Getting started "My parents have video of me singing along to Disney movies and albums." Community and regional theater followed, and he also served as music director for a children's theater. Getting into character "I play Gary, who I'd say is a little more cautious than some of the band members. I think maybe outside the band he's a little lonely." Parental influence They took him to his first musical at the age of 2. "I was completely silent and attentive the entire time, and they haven't stopped being supportive since." Favorite '80s act Billy Joel. "My parents have been to far too many of his concerts." Getting started Hart's father, a musician, "started me on piano when I was 4." Guitar lessons followed a few years later, "but music became a weird thing, because my dad is so gifted, and I never thought I could measure up." A leading role in a school play spurred an interest in acting; Hart has since accumulated Off Broadway, regional theater and TV credits. Getting into character "Larry has this elusive quality; he seems to have something figured out that the others can't grasp. I don't know if I've ever had that, but it's nice to try to tap into it." Parental influence "My dad also had a band of his own; he performed a lot on Long Island, doing weddings and parties and club dates." Favorite '80s act "My earliest recollection of a song from the '80s that I learned to play is 'Cult of Personality,' by Living Colour. Great song, all black rock band." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Comcast's one third stake in Hulu and to take full control of the streaming service, the companies said on Tuesday. The sale price would be at least 5.8 billion and could climb once an independent party assesses Hulu's fair market value, the companies said. The potential payout is based on Hulu's current 27.5 billion valuation (last month, it was valued at 15.8 billion). The sale itself will not happen for at least five years, the companies said. Hulu's valuation will most likely be based on that of a similar company like Netflix and could rise or fall in that time. Hulu had 28 million subscribers at the end of April, a 12 percent jump since the end of last year. Although it is expected to lose more than 1.5 billion in 2019, Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, said he expected the service to reach 40 million subscribers and turn a profit by around 2024. "Hulu represents the best of television, with its incredible array of award winning original content," Mr. Iger said in a statement on the deal. He added that the company planned to integrate the service into its business operations, and that its staff would probably be folded into Disney's streaming and international division, led by Kevin Mayer. Under the terms of the deal, Comcast, the owner of NBCUniversal, agreed to continue licensing its NBC shows to Hulu through 2024, with an option to pull its content after three years. The provision is potentially crucial to the future of Hulu, which began as a joint venture among broadcast networks and built its audience on shows from NBC, ABC and Fox. Comcast could end up lowering its investment over the next few years if it decides to stop financing Hulu, but its stake will never fall below 21 percent, according to the deal's terms. For now, Disney will probably take on all of Hulu's losses. Comcast, which invested a total of 2 billion in the venture, will relinquish its three Hulu board seats immediately. Next year, NBC plans to roll out its own streaming service. Disney, which owns ABC, absorbed the bulk of Fox's assets after it won a fierce bidding war against Comcast to acquire the majority of Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox entertainment empire. That acquisition put the continued availability of NBC shows on Hulu in doubt. Stephen B. Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, said the deal between Comcast and Disney was "a perfect outcome for us." 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 extension of the content licensing agreement will generate significant cash flow for us," he added, "while giving us maximum flexibility to program and distribute to our own direct to consumer platform." Hulu started as a free service in 2008 and was entirely supported by advertising. It later began charging subscription fees while offering a live television service similar to the bundles of pay TV channels offered by cable providers. For much of Hulu's existence, its complicated ownership arrangement, with a committee led management team, occasionally hampered decision making and the service's overall mission. Was it a repository of network shows for next day viewing, or did it want to compete more directly with the likes of Netflix? The answer was not always clear. Hulu's identity came into sharper focus when it started to offer its own programming, most notably "The Handmaid's Tale," the first show native to streaming to win an Emmy for best drama series. Netflix, with 148 million subscribers around the world, remains the leading streaming service. It has 60 million subscribers in the United States, more than double the number who pay for Hulu, which primarily serves an American audience. But Hulu is growing faster than Netflix in the United States, and it has ambitions to expand internationally. Making a global push would require new rights agreements with content owners, including Comcast. In 2018, the cable giant acquired the British satellite TV service Sky, which has a growing streaming presence in Europe. Disney became Hulu's majority owner after formally completing the Fox deal in March. In April, Hulu agreed to buy back the 9.5 percent stake in the service that AT T had taken on when it acquired Time Warner last year. Hulu's acquisition of that smaller stake will be partly financed by Disney and Comcast. Hulu has three products: the live service that replicates a cable bundle at 45 a month, an ad free streaming service priced at 12 a month (this one acts most like Netflix) and a 6 a month streaming service that includes commercials. The 6 offering is Hulu's most lucrative business. It generates more than 15 in revenue per subscriber each month, because it allows for targeted advertising, the high cost commercials tailored to individual viewers. Its success suggests that NBCUniversal is on the right track with its plans for an ad based streaming network. Disney and Comcast announced the deal during the television industry's annual upfront presentations, when the networks pitch their fall lineups to advertisers in New York. Hulu held its version this month at Madison Square Garden, with stars like Margot Robbie, Reese Witherspoon and George Clooney taking the stage. "It's been more than 10 years since my last upfronts," Mr. Clooney, once a star of NBC's "E.R.," said to loud cheers. He was there to promote "Catch 22," a new series based on the classic Joseph Heller novel. Unlike commercial free rivals like Netflix and Disney's coming Disney Plus, Hulu has placed a big bet on advertising. Last year, it took in more than 1.5 billion in ad revenue, a 45 percent increase from the previous year. Randy Freer, Hulu's chief executive, said he expected the ad market for online television to grow to 50 billion in the next three years. "This uniquely positions Hulu to benefit from leading brands into the digital video ad market," Mr. Freer said at Disney's investor presentation last week. "Hulu does this with a viewer first ad experience that has less commercial interruption, with ad breaks that are shorter and ads that are more relevant." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
MUMBAI, India Indian newspapers have been gushing about the new governor of the central bank, Raghuram Rajan, in terms usually reserved for Bollywood film stars: his trim physique, his long distance running, even his "rather photogenic appeal," as The Mumbai Mirror tabloid wrote this week. Mr. Rajan, 50, took charge on Wednesday of the Reserve Bank of India, which has tried and failed to stop the steep decline of the rupee against the dollar. India's chronic inflation is almost certain to move higher in the coming months, given the country's heavy dependence on imported oil priced in dollars. The stock market is plunging as economic activity slows by the day. Yet unlike Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Rajan has very little political independence in his new job. Some of the biggest problems bedeviling the Indian economy are beyond his control, like the trade and government budget deficits and the crippling shortage of roads and other infrastructure. All of his policy options carry big risks that could antagonize large sectors of the public, who will soon forget the rapturous accounts of his athleticism and charm. "Any entrant to the central bank governorship probably starts at the height of their popularity," Mr. Rajan said at a news conference early Wednesday evening. "Some of the actions I take will not be popular. The governorship of the central bank is not meant to win one votes or Facebook 'likes.' " Mr. Rajan, a University of Chicago finance professor, used his initial news conference to announce a long list of financial deregulatory measures that he plans in the coming weeks and months. These included issuing more licenses for new banks, making it easier for banks to open branches across the country and gradually lowering the percentage of assets that banks must hold in government securities three steps aimed at increasing competition in India's banking sector, long viewed by critics as a clubby, cautious industry reluctant to lend to small and medium size businesses or farmers. The most immediate question facing Mr. Rajan, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund whose most recent job has been as chief economic adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, lies in how to halt the fall of the rupee. He said nothing on Wednesday evening about monetary policy, deferring the subject to a statement to be issued on Sept. 20. Currency market intervention by the Reserve Bank has helped limit the rupee's losses this week, and it even gained 0.94 percent on Wednesday, to 67.09 to the dollar. But the rupee's slide through the summer and its continued weakness have fostered speculation in financial markets that Mr. Rajan might raise short term interest rates in his first week in office. A sliding currency pushes up inflation. An inflation fighting central banker could raise interest rates. Higher rates would make investment in India more attractive to foreign and domestic money managers who have been hustling to move money out of the country. It could help curb inflation, already approaching 10 percent even before the full effect of rising import prices is felt in the coming weeks. But with the economy already growing at its slowest pace since the worst of the global financial crisis in early 2009, India's business establishment fiercely opposes any increases in interest rates. The Confederation of Indian Industry, the country's most prominent business coalition, reiterated on Tuesday its call for the Reserve Bank of India to cut short term interest rates a full percentage point. "The last thing you want is to choke off any hope of growth by raising" the benchmark interest rate, said Omkar Goswami, the chairman of CERG Advisory, a consulting firm based in Delhi, and an independent director of Indian companies like Infosys, a big outsourcing company, and IDFC, a financial conglomerate. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. Mr. Rajan has a few longer term options. The Indian government could issue dollar denominated bonds or seek a loan from his former colleagues at the I.M.F. Either step would replenish and expand the Reserve Bank's supply of foreign exchange for further currency market intervention if the rupee started tumbling again. But it is not going to be solely his call. In contrast with the political independence of the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, the Reserve Bank of India, headquartered here since before the country's independence from Britain in 1947, is required by law to consult closely and take direction from the government in New Delhi. Sometimes the government is unusually open, at least by Western standards, in pushing around the Reserve Bank. In late April, a top adviser to Mr. Singh, the prime minister, said publicly that there was a "case for R.B.I. to cut interest rate" policy, and added," I think we have a case for stronger growth." The adviser who made the remarks was Mr. Rajan. The Reserve Bank of India took action that resulted in the rupee slowly sliding. It has fallen every month since then. Less than three weeks after the Reserve Bank acted, on May 22, Mr. Bernanke told Congress that the Fed could start reducing its asset purchases in the coming months. The suggestion that the Fed might buy fewer bonds resulted in a drop in bond prices, pushing up yields, and prompting international investors to begin shifting money out of emerging markets like India and into the United States. India's leaders appear to have been taken by surprise. Mr. Rajan and other leading policy makers had been framing the national discussion over interest rate policy in terms of whether the Reserve Bank should keep rates fairly high to fight inflation or start cutting them to rekindle economic growth. "The R.B.I. did not have a view on what the Fed would do," said Madan Sabnavis, the chief economist of Care Ratings, a big Indian credit ratings agency headquartered in New Delhi. As investors began pulling large sums of money out of India, the Reserve Bank effectively reversed course in mid July and began tightening monetary policy. But it did so in a face saving way that attracted little attention outside India raising the borrowing cost for commercial banks that are especially heavy borrowers from the central bank. Faced with double digit borrowing costs, banks began cutting back on lending, which has hurt many businesses in India and contributed to a further slowing of the economy. Mr. Rajan's supporters said he should not be blamed for putting pressure on the Reserve Bank in late April to reduce interest rates. They said he was only voicing a widely held view in the government at the time that inflation was beginning to recede. Mr. Rajan said on Wednesday evening that he would not discuss past monetary policy decisions. Like many central bankers, Mr. Rajan leans toward putting a greater emphasis on reducing inflation and is reluctant to risk higher inflation for the sake of short term increases in economic growth, people who know him said. Mr. Rajan seemed to confirm that at his news conference early Wednesday evening, when he emphasized that the role of the bank was monetary stability. "Ultimately, this means low and stable expectations of inflation, whether that inflation stems from domestic sources or from changes in the value of the currency, from supply constraints or demand pressures," he said. Mr. Rajan also has a history of skepticism about financial innovations, having warned in a paper in 2005 that they had made credit markets more risky and could prompt a financial crisis. That was not a popular view at the time. Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, now said to be the chief candidate to lead the Fed, publicly described Mr. Rajan's paper then as "slightly Luddite" and "largely misguided." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Tumblers drinking glasses without stems are the most multipurpose form of glassware, equally suitable for serving tap water and single malt whiskey. In fact, they are so ubiquitous that they might not seem as glamorous as their stemmed siblings. But when they're distinctive, they almost always attract attention, especially as part of a table setting for a special event. Glasses like tumblers "are not only functional, but also a really pretty part of the decor," said Marcy Blum, an event planner in New York who has organized weddings for celebrity couples like LeBron and Savannah James, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, and Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent. Ms. Blum said she usually includes two stemmed glasses (for red and white wine) with each place setting, as well as one eye catching tumbler for water, often in a color like the yellow glasses she recently used on a table decorated with lemons for a wedding on the Amalfi Coast of Italy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Standing cross armed on the beach, stiff with anticipation, I watched as my little towheaded son made his first solo ride on a surfboard. Jacopo scrambled to his feet shakily, the wave propelling him toward us, and then, as his toothpick legs set into a wider, firmer stance, he determinedly stood up to his full three and a half foot self, a huge smile taking over his whole face. Back on the shoreline, my own expression reflected his joy. He was just a week shy of his fifth birthday, and I'd brought him here, to the fabled North Shore of Oahu, specifically so that he could have his first lesson with none other than Garrett McNamara, one of the world's most famous surfers. I am still not sure who was more excited. While it was an extra boon to have Mr. McNamara offer up his considerable talents as a surf teacher, I had dreamed about my son learning to surf from the time he was born. As anyone who has ever caught a wave on her own knows, surfing is a profound confidence booster. And the pursuit, even casually, can toughen you both physically and mentally. It certainly did that for me when I started back in 1998, in my 20s, at a time when I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and on a fundamental level who I wanted to be. My first experience was at the women's only Las Olas Surf Camp in Sayulita, Mexico, and now it's a hobby that I try to pursue at least a few times a year. I have also had some of my best travel experiences following in the footsteps of maverick surfers: Always seeking new breaks and challenges, they tend to be intrepid and creative travelers. From Siargao in the Philippines to the unblemished coves on Mexico's Michoacan coast, surf experiences added an even richer memory of the place. The author's son, Jacopo, with Garrett McNamara, who set a world record surfing a 78 foot breaker off the coast of Portugal. Because of the joy and independence I discovered on the waves (even with my limited skills), not to mention friendships made on the water, I wanted my son to immerse himself in this world as soon as possible. The fact that he loves to swim and is relatively fearless in the ocean, even at this age, of course made it all the more feasible. And even though the North Shore is renowned for big wave surfing, it is also extremely family friendly, with surf breaks that are also suitable for beginners. I had jumped at the opportunity to return to this long rocky shoreline, not only for my son's first surf experience, but also to retrace a journey I had always loved since my first visit when my husband, John, and I were still undergraduates at Columbia. Heading north across Oahu from Honolulu is like stepping back in time. As the traffic thins, and the road narrows, the landscape changes dramatically, with lush vegetation and empty fields replacing the crowds, the towering hotels and designer storefronts of Waikiki. Here the modern and cosmopolitan tourist destination gives way to the low slung, clapboard farmhouses with crowing roosters and sleek rumped horses that greeted visitors in the same way decades ago. Our journey here had actually begun in landlocked southern Tuscany nine months earlier. We had met Mr. McNamara, 47; his wife, Nicole, a champion paddle boarder herself; and newborn son (aptly named Barrel) in our adopted hometown, Pienza, where Mr. McNamara was on a spring holiday after breaking the Guinness World Record for surfing the largest wave in the world, a 78 foot monster off the coast of Nazare, Portugal. I don't get star struck often but Mr. McNamara (and, frankly, surfers in general) embody something otherworldly to me, not only as someone who had escaped death by a few inches on numerous occasions, but also as one who thrives on almost daily adrenaline rushes that most of us will never experience even once in a lifetime. After a couple of Aperol spritzes overlooking the cypress dotted Val d'Orcia, Mr. McNamara offered to give Jacopo his first surf lesson when we went to Hawaii in late January to visit my in laws. We jumped at the chance. Big wave surfing was practically invented here. While Oahu's Waikiki was already known for its surf culture in the early 20th century, it was a handful of intrepid surfers from California including Greg Noll and Mickey Munoz (a group who came across the breaks here in the 1950s on a road trip through Hawaii) that put the North Shore on the map internationally. And their discovery heralded in a golden period here a handful of young daredevils taking up residence in simple beach huts to while away their days on the water. Fueled by the Gidget inspired surf mania sweeping the country, the group not only drew attention to this part of the world as a surf haven, but they also became the poster children for its culture, a way of life that put waves and freedom ahead of mainstream values like getting a job or paying bills. By 1959 Waimea Bay was the epicenter of big wave surfing, and over the subsequent decades, champions like Laird Hamilton and Kelly Slater, Mark Foo and Ken Bradshaw further added to the legend of the North Shore, a man versus ocean narrative that could be appreciated globally even by nonsurfers. The quiet town of Haleiwa, near where Mr. McNamara lives, embodies the still prevailing low key vibe of this part of Oahu. Battered pickups with multiple surfboards strapped to the roof meander along the two lane highway. Hens with fluffy chicks trailing behind wander through the parking lot. Food trucks tout shrimp scampi on handwritten chalkboards to strapping tattooed guys with still dripping board shorts. And a family friendly culture prevails too: Most surfers have families in tow and spend time at gentler breaks with them when not heading into bigger waves. We joined the line of off duty surfers in trucker hats and well worn flip flops at the Coffee Gallery, a shingled storefront known for its legendary roasted brew and home baked muffins. As if out of nowhere the barefoot surfing giant appeared with big cheeked Barrel on his hip. Mr. McNamara, his hair speckled with gray, is surprisingly unassuming. With a big smile, he called out, "Hey, dude" to Jacopo. "Ready to surf?" One thing I have also discovered is the need for trust in your teacher out in the water. And to listen. It was interesting how Jacopo immediately saw Mr. McNamara in that role, and remained extremely calm throughout the day, though I wondered whether he would grow anxious out in the waves themselves. Of course we weren't taking my child to the Pipeline, the North Shore's epicenter. The break called Chocolates, behind the Surf n Sea shop at the mouth of the Haleiwa River, is the locals' choice for a more child friendly ride, even in the winter months. Mr. McNamara showed Jacopo the mechanics of care for the fin, how to use the leash, and what to do if he fell into the water (calmly come up to the surface and get back on the board). We did a couple of "pop ups" rising from the prone position to standing in the correct stance on the beach and stand up paddle boarded through the mangroves of the river to get a sense of balance on the water, Jacopo and Mr. McNamara sharing a board. As we moved along the gentle current, giant turtles crested in front of us, and butterflies fluttered above the water's surface. During the course of our day together I learned more about Mr. McNamara's back story: the child of a peripatetic hippie mother, he went to elementary, middle and high school here, living on food stamps, and found his passion in the waves offshore when a neighbor gave him a surfboard. His mother still lives on the island, too: "If she hadn't brought us here, my destiny would have been completely different." Now, some three decades later, he is sponsored by the water sports brand Body Glove and travels the world for championships and big wave riding; his history seems intertwined with North Shore landmarks and rising fortunes, a true rags to riches story. On the pebbled beach, after our paddle through the quiet waters of the river, Mr. McNamara scanned the horizon for waves of the right size and timing for his little charge. He asked Jacopo to clasp his hands around his neck on the board, and they paddled out. With the first wave they easily popped up together on the board, Mr. McNamara standing behind, Jacopo toward the front. As I watched them head out, it made me think of Captain James Cook, writing in 1777 his thoughts upon seeing a native Hawaiian surf for the first time. "I couldn't help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was being driven on so fast and smoothly by the sea." It was clear exactly what Cook meant as I saw the expression on Jacopo's face. On the second try, they again jumped up easily in tandem. It seemed strangely effortless, and I thought about how it is with adults who get caught up in the anticipation before the actual moment of doing something new. "I want to try by myself," Jacopo exclaimed back at shore, excitedly. "Why not?" Mr. McNamara replied. This time Mr. McNamara pushed him to the break and then into his first solo wave, a little speck on a 10 foot board. As he turned toward us, his hair wet and tussled, his lips already a little blue, a huge smile enveloped his face, one of those images that you know as a parent will always stay with you. Little boy, big board and wave, enormous smile against a panorama of blue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Every week, Popcast listeners email us questions sometimes about the topic of the most recent show, sometimes about subjects that have been gnawing at them, sometimes about topics that, no matter how much you discuss them, have no clear answer. This week, the Popcast gives it a shot, taking on listener queries on a range of topics, including but not limited to: the career struggles of Nicki Minaj; the perceived(?) career struggles of Taylor Swift; the G.O.O.D. Music summer that wasn't quite; whether anything positive comes from streaming services; and the moments when pop music makes you cry. On this final Popcast of 2018: | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
BALCOMBE, England Despite the stakes, there was almost a festival spirit in this wealthy little village nestled in the hills of West Sussex. Children buzzed around an open sided tent by the street and families spread blankets on the tiny village green. What brought them together on Thursday evening, though, was not a spring fair but deep worry. Cuadrilla Resources, a British energy company, is on the verge of drilling an exploratory oil well just down the road. Villagers see it as a possible precursor to the environmentally controversial drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. "Don't frack my future," read the children's T shirts as the youths munched on chocolate cupcakes. The villagers "are going through the grief process; they have just been told they have cancer," said Alison Stevenson, chairwoman of the Balcombe Parish Council, a local government body. A recent survey conducted by the parish council found that more than 80 percent of the 284 respondents wanted the council to oppose fracking. The protest was in keeping with the steady resistance that oil and gas companies, and the governments that approve their exploration, are facing as they try to tap underground rock deposits in populated areas to extract fossil fuels. The Balcombe site is limestone, but Cuadrilla and energy companies elsewhere are using similar drilling techniques in efforts to produce oil and natural gas from shale rock. Although shale gas extraction has created an energy boom in the United States, many Europeans have been reluctant to accept the technology on concerns that it could contaminate groundwater and encourage continued reliance on carbon emitting fossil fuels. Balcombe, with about 1,800 residents, is no hotbed of radicalism. It is in the Conservative Party's heartland, about a half hour's train ride south of London. It is represented in Parliament by Francis Maude, a cabinet minister. But residents say their opposition to fracking, the process of pumping large quantities of liquid, sand and other substances to release gas trapped inside rocks, is not being heard in official circles. "This is naturally a very conservative, wealthy village," said Lawrence Dunne, a physics professor who lives here. "But we feel the government is completely ignoring us." On this evening, Cuadrilla, the company that is spearheading shale gas development in Britain, was trying to listen. In a former church known as Bramble Hall, the company held a "drop in session" for local residents. Several Cuadrilla executives accompanied by an entourage of public relations aides talked to small groups of residents, who were joined by environmental activists from London and the surrounding area. Francis Egan, Cuadrilla's chief executive, called the gathering, which attracted more than 200 people and lasted more than four hours, "really, really valuable." The encounter gave people "an opportunity to hear from us what we are doing" rather than what they "read on the Internet," he said. He and other European business leaders who advocate shale gas development are envious of the head start achieved by their American counterparts. But they know that on this side of the Atlantic, fears of pollution run so deep in the grass roots that local and national politicians are hesitant to endorse drilling. France has a ban on fracking, and Germany is unlikely to give it a green light until after the coming elections. The British government views shale gas as a possible replacement for the declining energy reserves in the North Sea, but those intentions have been slow to translate into action. It is unlikely that there will be any shale gas fracking in Britain this year. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. On Thursday, Balcombe was a microcosm of European concerns. Many minds seemed already set against the energy company a result, some local people said, of heavy campaigning by opponents of fracking. Eric Vaughan, Cuadrilla's director of wells services, found himself peppered with questions about regulation by Katy Dunn and Emma Cooke, two young women who were dressed in black outfits and knitted yellow socks, who called themselves "the knitting nannas against gas." Worries cited by residents included fears that drilling activity would increase road traffic and harm the environment. They also suspect that the production of oil and gas, lucrative though it might be to Cuadrilla, would offer few benefits to Balcombe. "I am concerned about the environmental impact on the air and our water supply," said Louisa Delpy, who lives nearly a mile from the site. "I have two small children." Ms. Delpy held a long private conversation with Mr. Egan to go over a list of concerns. But their talk left her "with more questions," she said. "This was just the start." Not everyone was opposed to fracking. "If we've got natural resources, let's use them," said Derek Earl, a retired builder of mobile phone network towers. But he seemed to be in the minority. On the walls of Bramble Hall was a series of posters explaining the company's plans. In the next few weeks, Cuadrilla plans to drill an exploratory well on a site called the Lower Stumble, where Conoco drilled a well in 1986 but then abandoned its efforts. Cuadrilla wants to try again with modern methods including horizontal drilling and the use of hydrochloric acid to stimulate the well. Cuadrilla executives said they did not plan, at least initially, to "frack" this test well. But Mr. Egan, who became Cuadrilla's chief last year after the company had selected the Balcombe site, said that it might later decide to frack the well "if we decided it would make a difference to the flow rate." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
What books are on your nightstand? I'm a bit of an itinerant, so my reading material lives in my luggage. Rattling around there now are the following: Javier Marias's "Berta Isla"; Catherine Lacey's "The Answers"; two issues of Esquire (to include the one with the cover story by Jen Percy titled "An American Boy" that people got so worked up about); Florian Zeller's "The Fascination of Evil"; and a copy of Sam Shepard's "True West," which my girlfriend, Lea, bought for me when we went to see the reboot with Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano. What's the last great book you read? Are there any classic novels you only recently read for the first time? "Bel Ami," by Guy de Maupassant, which is a sendup of fin de siecle Paris. Its protagonist, Georges Duroy, is a confidence man, a social climber, who plays on the sympathies of both his lovers and friends to attain status and eventually a fortune as the eponymous Bel Ami. Reflecting on the novel's significance decades later, Jean Paul Sartre wrote of Duroy, "His rise testifies to the decline of a whole society." I found it in the current affairs section of my bookshop. What do you read when you're working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing? What goes in comes out. So I try to read good books, to watch good films, to listen to good music. What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? Did you know West Virginia was the first state to celebrate Mother's Day? Never knew that. I've been working with my son on his state project for school this week. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. What moves you most in a work of literature? These days there are no shortage of voices encouraging divisiveness, from the right, from the left, across international boundaries; the forces pitting us against one another are rampant, destructive, and they are challenging the very idea that every one of us shares a common humanity. When I write, I feel something as I put the story on the page. If a piece of art succeeds whether it's literature, film, painting, etc. it causes the person experiencing that art also to feel something. How many times have you watched a movie and cried, or gone to a museum and felt overwhelmed? In that moment, you were feeling some fraction of what the artists felt as they made their work. I would call this emotional transference. Amid all our divisions with voices putting up fences around our imaginations, telling us what we can write, what's allowable to think, and who is allowed to say what that type of emotional transference is a powerful way to assert our shared humanity. With so much cynicism out there, it is also an inherently optimistic act. That optimism is what moves me most in a work of literature. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night? I enjoy the book as an object, so I do almost all of my reading the old way. Admittedly, I often buy a book solely for its cover. There's nothing better than a beautifully written book with a great cover. I've got some mediocre books with great covers on my shelves, and some great books with mediocre covers. But the book that has both ... that's something special, isn't it? That being said, I was on assignment last year for Smithsonian Magazine, driving through the South with the photographer Huger Foote, whose father, Shelby, wrote "The Civil War: A Narrative." It is a classic, one of the most immersive reads out there, coming in at three one thousand page volumes, woof! Huger told me about a recent recording by Grover Gardner, a very talented narrator. For my New Year's resolution, I committed to working my way through the audiobook, a first for me, and it's amazingly done. What books did you read while you were on active duty with the Marines? When I showed up to my first platoon as a lieutenant I famously made everyone read "Starship Troopers," by Robert A. Heinlein, which (as opposed to the movie) is an astute work of science fiction that deals with the role of violence in society and the obligations of citizenship. But god, everyone in the platoon hated me for it. ("We didn't join the Marines to read, sir!") Then, when we went to Iraq, I stopped forcing them to read and we all got along much better. My favorite reading while deployed to be honest was tabloids: US Weekly, People, Star. After several days out on patrol, the last thing you want to do is come back to your firebase and tuck into a chapter of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." And I wasn't the only one. You walked into most any firebase in Iraq or Afghanistan and you'd find a healthy stash of those types of magazines, and guys talking about Brangelina, or Kimye, or Bennifer, as a way not to talk about other things. What are the best books you've read about military life? The modern war novel, which was birthed in the trenches of World War I, has been often arrayed into the following moral arc: A naive, idealistic youth goes to war; he witnesses the horrors and waste; he returns home haunted or even destroyed by what he's seen; hence war is evil. Obviously, there are many variations on this theme sardonic novels like "Catch 22," or narratives that only obliquely reference war like "The Sun Also Rises" but much of literature adheres to this basic framework and its moralism. And why shouldn't it? War is pretty terrible. But counternarratives exist, ones that examine deeper complexities. "Storm of Steel," by Ernst Junger, an infantry officer who served in the trenches all four years of World War I, is one such book. Of the war, he wrote: "Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame, we could go into life as though from the anvil; into friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had in store. It is not every generation that is so favored." How do you organize your books? I place them on shelves in no particular order. Sometimes I stack them under the bed. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? "Long Live Southbank," which is a photographic history of British skateboarding. I grew up in London as a skater. They say once a Marine always a Marine, and that's true. But once a skater always a skater has proved equally profound. What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? It's not exactly a book, but it is a literary gift. This past year one of my best friends clandestinely filled out an application for my induction into the Patrick Leigh Fermor Society as a birthday present. The prior director of the society then suddenly passed away, thus forestalling my application, which is still under review. We'll hear soon, fingers crossed. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? Alexei Vronsky in "Anna Karenina" gets a bad rap. His end in the novel is so sad, or at least is so sad to me. I believe that he loved Anna, in his strange broken way. After she throws herself under the train, we last see him on a train himself, headed back to his regiment, which he left in disgrace because of his affair with Anna. But we're not sure if he's rejoining them to chase after glory and redemption, or whether he's on that train searching out his own death on the battlefield so that he might rejoin Anna. Tolstoy never tells us. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I loved stories as a child, reading less so. I was more into movies and television. On Saturdays, my father used to make me sit in my room and read for an hour. Once he had me reading "Ender's Game," by Orson Scott Card. To say I skimmed it would be generous. When I announced to him that I'd finished the book, he asked me what I thought of the ending. I told him I thought it was pretty good. (If you've never read that book, it has a spectacular plot twist at the end.) He sent me back to my room to finish it. Which I did. And which I count as one of the moments when I became a reader. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? "Service Etiquette, 5th Edition," I think that's the most recent one. When he's done maybe he could pass it to his pals on both sides of the aisle in Congress. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Lea Carpenter would, of course, be there. So that leaves two. If you'd allow me one extra seat (I'm often that boor who brings an unannounced guest), I would like to invite Moses, Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad, that's in addition to Lea. I bake from time to time and Lea does this amazing salmon in ginger, so we'd do a whole loaves and fishes motif in honor of J.C. Then we'd commence a small, nuevo Nicene council and amend the sacred texts Torah, Bible, and Quran to include crystal clear language that killing in the name of religion was antithetical to all three of their teachings. Then Lea and I would cozy up with a good bottle of wine and listen to our three guests swap stories of miracles. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? It's tough enough to get people to read anything. I feel like it's bad karma to discourage someone from reading a book that they might otherwise be inclined to pick up and enjoy even if it wasn't my favorite. Whom would you want to write your life story? Someone who owes me money. Or the ghost of William Manchester, can't decide. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A Colorado civic group is spearheading an effort to buy The Denver Post, which on Sunday excoriated its owner, a New York hedge fund, in its opinion section by saying, "Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom." The group, Together for Colorado Springs, said it had begun contacting potential investors in the state, who have so far pledged 10 million to the effort. "We believe that The Denver Post is vital for Colorado," John Weiss, the chairman of Together for Colorado Springs and the founder of The Colorado Springs Independent, a weekly newspaper, said in an interview. "It should be owned by people in Denver, but it should also be owned by people statewide because it's a statewide paper, not just a Denver paper." The initiative follows a revolt at The Post that grew out of years of dissatisfaction with the paper's owner, Alden Global Capital, which has cut costs and significantly shrunk the newsroom staff. Last month, the hedge fund ordered 30 jobs trimmed from a news gathering operation that already had fewer than 100 journalists. Mr. Weiss said several wealthy Coloradans had emerged as potential investors, including Perry Sanders, a hotel owner, and John Street, a technology entrepreneur. It was unclear how much money would be needed to buy the newspaper or whether Alden Global Capital would consider selling it. The Post, which covers a metropolitan area of roughly three million residents in a state of nearly six million, has a weekday circulation of about 170,000 and about 8.6 million unique monthly visitors to its website. In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Sanders and his business partner, John Goede, said they were "committed to helping facilitate the purchase of The Denver Post to ensure open minded, journalist driven print and digital news for decades to come." Representatives for Alden Global Capital and a subsidiary that runs The Post, Digital First Media, did not respond to requests for comment. The effort in Colorado comes amid a broader reckoning over the ownership of local newspapers, whose financial problems many have struggled to offset steep declines in print advertising and circulation revenue have prompted questions about whether they might be better off operating under local control than as part of large media companies. A recent newsroom rebellion at The Los Angeles Times, for instance, helped induce its owner, Tronc, which is based in Chicago, to sell the paper to Patrick Soon Shiong, a local doctor and billionaire. 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 other papers Alden Global Capital runs through Digital First Media include The Boston Herald; The Pioneer Press of St. Paul; The Mercury News of San Jose, Calif.; The East Bay Times; and The Orange County Register. The Post garnered widespread attention and support with its public denunciation of Alden executives as "vulture capitalists," and an editorial saying that "if Alden isn't willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will." But journalists at other newspapers under the hedge fund's control frustrated by what they view as similarly relentless cost cuts have also been hoping to be sold to local buyers. The editor of The Mercury News and The East Bay Times, Neil Chase, has for months been holding discussions with people and groups in the community who might be interested in purchasing the newspapers. On Tuesday, he wrote a column that called for support of local journalism. "Democracy cannot succeed without a healthy, free press," Mr. Chase wrote. "So the owners of the press must be committed to its vital role, even if it reduces their profit." The Bay Area News Group, which, in addition to The Mercury News and The East Bay Times, includes The Marin Independent Journal, now has 160 newsroom employees, down from 380 in 2011. Over that time, the group's operating profit has increased, Mr. Chase said. In the Philadelphia suburbs, the union that represents journalists at four Digital First Media papers The Mercury of Pottstown; The Times Herald of Norristown; The Trentonian in Trenton, N.J.; and The Daily Times of Delaware County, Pa. has been seeking new owners. The union, the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia, has also asked Alden Global Capital whether it would consider offers, Bill Ross, the union's executive director, said in an interview. "I think they would entertain an offer if we were to put one together," he said. Mr. Ross said the union had contacted local philanthropists, foundations and other hedge funds about the possibility of submitting bids. Since Digital First Media took over the papers, the union's membership, which includes reporters, photographers and other employees, has declined by about 70 percent, Mr. Ross said. The Daily Times, which once had 125 union members, now has just 25. The Trentonian has 20. Of those who remain, many work under demoralizing conditions, he added. The Trentonian's building, Mr. Ross said, had no hot water for so long that the union filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Rats scamper about. Employees at the Norristown paper no longer have a building of their own and must work either from Pottstown's offices or out of their homes. "They've put no money into any of the properties," Mr. Ross said. "It's a bizarre situation of neglect." All four of the papers the union represents are profitable, he said. Despite Mr. Ross's belief that Alden Global Capital would consider an offer, it is not clear how willing the company is to sell any of its papers. The hedge fund generally buys publications at a low price it recently bought The Boston Herald for roughly 12 million with the goal of extracting as much profit as it can, for as long as it can. A sale might provide a quick infusion of cash, but it would deprive Alden Global Capital of future returns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
As the lyrics go in "I Been 'Buked" the opening section of Alvin Ailey's masterpiece, "Revelations" "There is trouble all over this world." Don't we know it. Last week after Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater abruptly ended its tour and sent its dancers home, Danica Paulos who creates content on Instagram for the group asked her fellow company members if they were, she said, "down to create some positivity and some inspiration." The idea came from the dancer Miranda Quinn: The opening sequence of "The Brady Bunch" popped into her head. "How they're all in little squares," she said. "That made me think of how we're all being quarantined and are supposed to stay separate, but this was a way for all of us to still be dancing together and creating together even though we're apart. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
TALKING PICTURES: THE CINEMA OF YVONNE RAINER at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (July 21 27). After revolutionizing dance in the 1960s, Ms. Rainer, a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, turned her attention to filmmaking, not to return to the dance world for more than 20 years. The Film Society presents this retrospective of her work for the screen the first in New York in over a decade organized by Thomas Beard. The series also includes films by Ms. Rainer's contemporaries and influences, including Charles Atlas's "Rainer Variations" and Andy Warhol's "Paul Swan." Ms. Rainer joins the novelist and critic Lynne Tillman for a conversation at 7 p.m. on Monday. 212 875 5232, filmlinc.org 3 FOR 3 at Situations (July 25, 6 9 p.m.). The dancer Alexandra Albrecht organizes this free gallery showing of works in progress on the Lower East Side. Visitors can come and go as they please as the choreographers Christine Elmo, Kyli Kleven and Nehemoyia Young try out new ideas. situations.us VICTORY DANCE at the Duke on 42nd Street (July 27, 7 p.m.). Created for dancegoers 8 and up, this lively series continues with works by Preeti Vasudevan, Ronald K. Brown and Heidi Latsky. In "Me ... You," an excerpt from "Etudes," Ms. Vasudevan joins forces with the New York City Ballet principal Amar Ramasar to create a dialogue between classical ballet and South Indian Bharatanatyam. Ms. Vasudevan also performs "Boxed," a pared down Bharatanatyam solo with live percussion and vocals. Mr. Brown, with his company Evidence, presents his spirited exploration of Afro Cuban rhythms, "Why You Follow," and Ms. Latsky offers "STAMPedTIME," a new work for 10 dancers. The program repeats on Aug. 3. 646 223 3010, newvictory.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The veteran pop singer Britney Spears announced "an indefinite work hiatus" on Friday, canceling her new Las Vegas residency, "Britney: Domination," that was set to run at the Park MGM resort beginning in February. "I don't even know where to start with this, because this is so tough for me to say," Spears, 37, wrote on social media. "I will not be performing my new show Domination." She cited the health of her father, Jamie Spears, who she said "almost died" two months ago. Representatives for Spears said her father's colon spontaneously ruptured, causing him to spend 28 days in the hospital. "We're all so grateful that he came out of it alive, but he still has a long road ahead of him," the singer wrote. "We have a very special relationship and I want to be with my family at this time just like they have always been there for me." I don't even know where to start with this, because this is so tough for me to say. I will not be performing my new show Domination. I've been looking forward to this show and seeing all of you this year, so doing this breaks my heart. pic.twitter.com/kHgFAVTjNA Britney Spears ( britneyspears) January 4, 2019 Jamie Spears has played an outsize role in his daughter's music and merchandising career since 2008, after she suffered an infamous and prolonged public breakdown. Since then, her father and a lawyer, Andrew Wallet, have overseen Spears's life and finances via a court approved conservatorship, known sometimes as a guardianship, designed for people who cannot take care of themselves typically the old, the infirm and the mentally disabled. (Though much of Spears's arrangement is kept private in a Los Angeles probate court because of her fame, filings have cited an undisclosed mental illness and substance abuse as the reasons for the decade long conservatorship.) Spears, one of the best selling artists of all time, last released an album, "Glory," in 2016. Though she has also toured and appeared on television since the conservatorship took effect, Spears's primary project in recent years has been a tightly controlled, greatest hits Las Vegas residency. Beginning in 2013, "Britney: Piece of Me" ran for four years at the Planet Hollywood Resort Casino, grossing a reported 138 million across nearly 250 shows. Traditionally the domain of performers in the twilight of their careers, Vegas residencies have become a more common revenue source for pop acts since the success of shows by Spears and Celine Dion, with similar productions in recent years from Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani and the Backstreet Boys. Lady Gaga's "Enigma" residency will run at the Park MGM throughout this year. Representatives for Spears said "Domination" was "on hold until further notice," but added that Jamie Spears was expected to make a full recovery. In October, Wallet, the lawyer and co conservator, cited the expected success of the new Vegas show as he requested his fee for overseeing Spears's business be raised to 426,000 a year. He said in court filings that the singer's estate, which had been "nearly out of funds," had raised its worth to at least 20 million since 2014, because of the singer's "increased well being and her capacity to be engaged." He added, "The next several years promise to be very lucrative." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Bank of Japan's new antideflation policy made waves throughout the global financial system on Monday, driving down the yen and lifting share prices in Tokyo, but economists said the effect had yet to be fully felt overseas. The most visible sign of the move by the bank, which is the country's central bank, was the sharp decline of the yen and a 2.8 percent rise in the benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average. The dollar settled at 99.32 yen on Monday in New York, a four year high. The euro traded at 129 yen, its highest level in more than three years. "They're taking a page out of the quantitative easing playbook, multiplied two and a half times what the Fed is doing," said Michael H. Strauss, chief investment strategist at Commonfund in Wilton, Conn. That, he said, created a situation where institutions and individuals both faced pressure to buy stocks, at home and overseas. The shake up was touched off on Thursday by Haruhiko Kuroda, the new Bank of Japan governor, who announced a decisive break with his predecessor's policies. He said the bank would nearly double the amount of Japanese currency held by individuals and banks over the next two years as it tries to raise the annual inflation rate to its new 2 percent target. Mr. Kuroda's plan calls for the central bank to inject nearly 62 trillion yen, or 630 billion, into the economy this year, new money that must find a home. Some of that will undoubtedly end up overseas. "This is a very big new injection of money into the global system," said Thomas Mayer, senior adviser to Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, and overseas bonds and equities will be among the beneficiaries. United States stocks and bonds, which are already trading at high levels, are one obvious target for investors with yen to spend, he said. Core European countries like Germany, France and Britain are also favored destinations for Japanese capital, as are Australia and New Zealand. The debt of governments in the developed world is already trading at low yields, Mr. Mayer noted, but as long as the euro zone crisis continues, struggling southern euro countries like Spain, Italy and Portugal may attract rather less investor interest because of concern about political risk. While the size of the Japanese intervention is perhaps unprecedented relative to the size of the country's economy, the Bank of Japan is in good company. The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank have all poured in liquidity and worked to hold interest rates down as the global financial sector creaks along year after year. That money is credited with helping to keep government borrowing costs low and to push the Dow Jones industrial average to high levels this month. A weakening Japanese currency opens a window for international investors to profit on two fronts. With the central bank's main interest rate target near zero, they can borrow the yen cheaply, then lend it abroad. This "carry trade" offers the possibility of higher returns overseas and if the yen falls, investors also reap a foreign exchange gain since they can repay the loan in cheaper yen. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Of course, a rising yen would bring the opposite result, but the magnitude of the central bank's plan could persuade investors that the currency is set to fall further. Julian Jessop, chief global economist at Capital Economics in London, estimated that the dollar would continue strengthening to 110 yen this year and to 120 yen next year. "The Bank of Japan's new policy stance surely does amount to a game changer," he noted, "at least for the currency markets." The weakening yen may also be felt by companies operating outside Japan like American and German automakers and South Korean device manufacturers, which compete head to head with Japanese corporations. Those companies may find themselves under pressure to squeeze profit margins to compete against suddenly flush Japanese competitors. "Some of these Japanese companies were profitable at 78 yen to the dollar," Mr. Strauss said, so the dollar at 100 yen would be a boon for the corporate sector. It will take time for competitors to Japanese companies to feel the effects, Mr. Mayer said, but he cautioned that there were larger concerns to consider: "By injecting such a large amount of money into the global financial system, you may end up distorting prices in such a way that it causes distortions in the real economy." Mr. Strauss said the biggest effect would be felt in Japan, where an investor could hold a 10 year government bond with a yield of less than 0.4 percent or could take on a little more risk in stocks. The lesson after the Japanese investment bubble collapsed in 1990 was "never own equities again," he said, but the moment may have arrived where that no longer holds true. But today's Japanese investors are more cautious than those of a generation ago, he added. "I don't think they're going to go out and buy Pebble Beach," he said, referring to the golf course in California that was acquired by a Japanese business owner in 1990 at a wildly inflated price. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Still, on their own terms both performances were rewarding. Mr. Gatti made the most of the Concertgebouw's rich sound, especially its mellow, full bodied string section, during a radiant, spacious account of the Wagner. (Mr. Gatti proved himself an insightful Wagnerian when he conducted "Parsifal" at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013, a staging that returns next month.) Bruckner died in 1896 while composing the fourth and final movement of his Ninth Symphony. The three completed movements add up to a score of some 60 minutes. Mr. Gatti's magnificent account of the sublime Adagio made a convincing case for it as a fitting end to this work: a composer's farewell. The long first movement is an extreme example of Bruckner's penchant for writing episodic, unconventional forms, in which a theme can seem less a statement than a strand of a later development section that has crept in too soon. Rather than imposing some sense of order on the movement, Mr. Gatti lavished expressive beauty and majestic restraint on the music. Ms. Jansen chose Bruch's concerto, a staple of the repertory, for this appearance with the pre eminent orchestra of her homeland. Her performance was so probing and lucid, and so matched by the refined playing of the orchestra, that this popular piece sounded fresh and bracing. I'll not soon forget the intimate way she shaped the poignant ruminations of the second movement's wistful melody. She played a beautifully soft spoken encore: Manuel De Falla's setting of "Nana," a Spanish folk song. For those who prize flawless playing and clean entrances in Mahler, this performance of his First Symphony would have been a little frustrating. But Mr. Gatti and his players dug deep into this early work. The opening of the first movement hauntingly conveyed the primordial, cosmic elements of the music. The second movement came off like a real, foot clomping country dance. The finale built inexorably to a brassy, jubilant final flourish, some bloopers notwithstanding. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Michael Wadleigh's epic, immersive, and still stirring 1970 documentary "Woodstock" remains the definitive account of the "Three Days of Peace, Love and Music" that went down in upstate New York in the summer of 1969. While that picture has a well deserved rep as a fantastic concert film, it's also a first rate piece of contemporary reportage. "Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation," directed by Barak Goodman, uses the perspective of nearly 50 years' hindsight to demonstrate anew how the festival was both a mess and a miracle, and implicitly argues that it was a good deal more miracle than mess. The movie is all archival footage, no talking heads. Attendees both famous (David Crosby, for instance) and not contribute commentary and anecdotes off screen. The shots of the flower children flocking to the festival site are bracing. These young creatures that were once deemed "dirty hippies" look clean and cute and sweet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Members of the Sackler family could withdraw their pledge to pay 3 billion as part of a nationwide deal to address the opioid crisis if a bankruptcy judge does not block outstanding state lawsuits against them and their company, Purdue Pharma, Purdue lawyers said in a legal complaint. Whether the threat is posturing or real, the move by Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, to inject it into the company's bankruptcy proceeding could jeopardize the tentative settlement it reached last week with representatives of thousands of local governments that have brought lawsuits against it. Two dozen state attorneys general who have sued the company in their own courts have signed on to the agreement, too. The 3 billion to be paid over seven years, plus another contribution the Sacklers would make with the proceeds of the sale of their British drug company, Mundipharma, is a key component of the deal. But all lawsuits must be resolved, the lawyers said. The new complaint, filed in bankruptcy court in White Plains on Wednesday night, is aimed at about two dozen states that have not signed on to the settlement and are continuing to pursue cases against both the company and various Sacklers. "This filing isn't a surprise. It's yet another effort by Purdue to avoid accountability and shield the Sackler family fortune, and we will be opposing it," said Maura Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts, the first state to sue the Sacklers. As soon as a company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, all civil lawsuits against it are automatically stayed. Cases brought by states are an exception: states often have the power to keep pressing claims in their own courts. Purdue is asking that the states' lawsuits initially be blocked for 270 days while settlement details are worked out. That is more than double the time a debtor typically has to produce such a plan, including specifics about the proposed trust and distribution process. The complaint weaves threats and pleas to argue that the protection of the Sacklers as well as Purdue is in the public's interest. Some legal experts pointed out the role of protecting the public interest is one accorded to Purdue's opponents, the states. If the bankruptcy judge, Robert D. Drain, does not stop the states' cases, the lawyers said, the legal costs from the continuing litigation which Purdue estimates is costing the company about 5 million a week will "destroy hundreds of millions of dollars or more of value available for all claimants and for the public." If the Sacklers must keep paying state judgments, they "may be unwilling or unable to make the billions of dollars of contributions" outlined in the settlement, the Purdue lawyers wrote. In a statement, members of the family said, "We remain committed to working with all attorneys general, cities, counties, towns and other parties to implement a resolution that provides meaningful resources and substantial funding to people and communities who need help now." Melissa B. Jacoby, a bankruptcy law expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill saw some logic to Purdue's request. "It makes sense to ask for the bankruptcy court's umbrella to be put over the Sacklers because Purdue is trying to argue that the family will maximize the value of the estate to the benefit of the creditors," she said. However, the Purdue lawyers contended, it is the states that would be responsible for blowing up the deal by continuing to pursue their cases against the company and family members. A central part of the settlement involves restructuring Purdue into a public trust that would distribute the money from the sale of its drugs to the plaintiffs. But some legal experts said the new complaint is an effort to protect the Sacklers through the bankruptcy process even though they themselves are not filing for bankruptcy. "The Sacklers don't want to file for bankruptcy because that would expose all their finances as well as the transactions they made with Purdue," Ms. Jacoby said, referring to the scrutiny required by such proceedings. "The Sacklers want the benefit of bankruptcy without the burdens of bankruptcy," she said. About two dozen states have sued the Sacklers or are planning to. They want to get at the family fortune, which they believe is more lucrative than anything the company could provide. Many of the states' claims involve allegations that the Sacklers improperly withdrew billions from Purdue for years. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, issued 33 subpoenas last month to banks and financial advisers who do business with the Sacklers. Last week, she announced that one of those subpoenas allowed her office to track a billion dollars that one family member had transferred from Purdue to previously undisclosed accounts. On Monday, a Massachusetts judge turned aside Purdue's efforts to dismiss the state's lawsuit, and said she would shortly rule on its proceedings against individual Sacklers descendants of two of the three brothers who created the Purdue empire who have played roles in the business. Sackler family members have repeatedly denied the charges in the state lawsuits. (Descendants of a third brother, Dr. Arthur Sackler, note that his estate sold his share of the company to other branches of the family long before OxyContin came on the market in 1996.) The Purdue complaint included passages that prompted legal experts to roll their eyes. Purdue said morale had plunged, good employees had been hard to retain (necessitating the payout of millions of dollars in bonuses) and many executives were distracted by the litigation. The value of the company and its ability to contribute meaningfully to a settlement was evaporating, the company's lawyers said. And the state efforts to determine whether the Sacklers had committed fraud with Purdue's billions would be duplicative of Purdue's own scrutiny, lawyers said. In a hearing on Tuesday, Purdue said that investigators had been examining records on the company's behalf, as part of their fiduciary duty. "Many of Purdue's arguments make sense to me," said Lindsey D. Simon, a bankruptcy expert at the University of Georgia Law School. Even so, Ms. Jacoby noted that Purdue is solvent and not riddled with debt. "The states can ask, 'Is this a valid bankruptcy?'" she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Two new examinations of Sammy Davis Jr.'s life and career have arrived on PBS and at the 92nd Street Y. How many people does it take to summon the multiple talents, decades spanning career and complicated life of Sammy Davis Jr.? Laurence Maslon, who wrote the 2017 documentary "Sammy Davis, Jr: I've Gotta Be Me," which had its premiere on PBS's "American Masters" this week, remembered coming across a 1968 Mad Magazine satire on racial stereotypes that said three black individuals could equal an "emerging African nation" but it would take four to represent Davis alone. Maslon, now the artistic director and writer of "Yes I Can: The Sammy Davis Jr. Songbook," running Feb. 23 25 at the 92nd Street Y as part of its "Lyrics Lyricists" series, mentioned this to the show's director, Tazewell Thompson, during a rehearsal break last weekend. Thompson ventured, "It would take at least four people or 14, or 40" to match Davis, who died in 1990 at 64, of throat cancer. For "Yes I Can," Maslon and Thompson settled for three: Jared Grimes, who dances and choreographs Davis's steps, and also sings; Max Kumangai, who conjures Davis's vocal skills and dances; and Harriett D. Foy, a woman, cast as the "more mature, soulful" Davis, as Maslon put it, noting, "There was something androgynous about Sammy." Matthew Saldivar plays mentor figures (Frank Sinatra, Steve Lawrence and Eddie Cantor); Betsy Wolfe juggles Davis's female muses (the Broadway stars Janis Paige and Paula Wayne and Davis's wife, May Britt). Once rehearsal resumed, the cast ran through part of the prologue, in which Davis describes the exhausting toll of his Broadway appearance in "Golden Boy," a musical adaptation of the Clifford Odets play that cast him as a black boxer who falls in love with a white woman. "Can I be what I wanna be?" Foy rapped, to which Wolfe and Saldivar responded, chanting, "Yes you can!" In truth, success and self actualization did not come easily to Davis, who started out as a prodigy in vaudeville. For many below a certain age, he's remembered as a bejeweled fixture on variety and talk shows, or as the one black member of Sinatra's Rat Pack and as such the butt of jokes that would start an instant firestorm on social media today. But in addition to the many hats he juggled as an entertainer song and dance man, actor, impressionist, raconteur Davis became a civil rights activist. He befriended Martin Luther King Jr. and took part in the 1963 March on Washington and the "Stars for Freedom" rally during the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery even if some of Davis's later actions, like expressing support for President Nixon or performing for troops in Vietnam, stumped younger, more progressive admirers. Maslon conceived "Yes I Can" the title of Davis's 1965 autobiography, and of a song cut from "Golden Boy" as a companion piece to the documentary. "Because we covered so much of his life and the political stuff, the performance aspect got a little attenuated," he said. "This show is mostly a celebration of his life through song." The car accident that cost Davis an eye, and informed his conversion to Judaism, is not addressed in the 92nd Street Y show, for instance. "Because it was through song that Sammy expressed himself, really," Maslon added. Thompson recalled gaining affection for Davis while in high school, living with his grandmother. "I remember her saying that Sammy Davis Jr. and Mickey Rooney were the two performers who could do anything," he said. "But she said Mickey was the one who got all the breaks; Sammy had to keep proving himself and struggling. That's why she forgave him when he hugged Nixon. She understood. She said, 'The man just wants to be accepted.'" Grimes, at 35 a millennial who grew up watching Davis in old movies and performance clips, has a similar perspective. "I had an extensive conversation with Wynton Marsalis years ago, and until then I didn't know how tough or complex Sammy's journey was," he said. "There were people who wanted him to fight and people who wanted him to make or at least seek peace. And he desperately wanted to please everybody." Thompson figured: "The timing of his life was off. If Sammy were alive today, he would be the greatest star in the world we would have caught up with him." He didn't, Maslon said, "live long enough to do a 'Duets' album like Sinatra or Tony Bennett, or sing with Lady Gaga. Would Sammy Davis be doing a duet with Cardi B if he were alive today? I think he would." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Q. My phone camera has gotten me interested in photography, but I'm afraid of the learning curve on an expensive digital S.L.R. What's the easiest way to get started? A. Moving up to a digital single lens reflex camera (D.S.L.R.) is a big step from the relative simplicity of using a smartphone camera. However, it can be rewarding if you want higher quality pictures, more control over how your images look and to learn more about the technical aspects of photography. But you should plan time to educate yourself on how the camera works and be prepared to spend at least a few hundred dollars on equipment, including for the camera body and interchangeable lenses. Before you plunk down the money for expensive gear, do some research on popular models and check out the user reviews to get an idea of how D.S.L.R. cameras work. Visiting a camera shop or electronics store with display models to sample can give you a feel for using the bigger devices. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
FOR most of the United States, the estate tax is now something only the very wealthy have to plan for. The federal exemption for an individual this year is now 5.34 million, or 10.68 million for a married couple. And that amount is indexed to inflation, so it will continue to rise. The exception is in the 16 states, mostly in the North, where state estate taxes remain and ensnare middle and upper middle class residents the very people the high federal exemption was supposed to protect. The worst for taxpayers is New Jersey, with the lowest exemption in the country, 675,000 a person, and a rate that tops out at 16 percent. (Rhode Island is second.) New Jersey also has an inheritance tax for bequests to, say, a niece or friend which starts to be applied at 500. The rate is 15 percent until the amount reaches 700,000 and then it rises to 16 percent. (One concession: The estate pays the higher of the two taxes, not both.) This week, New York's governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, took a step toward bringing the state's estate tax in line with the federal one. And he is not alone among governors of cold weather states (along with the District of Columbia) that have realized affluent residents are moving to states without estate taxes (and in some cases, income taxes) and in doing so, depriving their old state of the other taxes they paid, like property, sales and income tax. "We have a lot of people moving out of these jurisdictions to avoid the state estate tax entirely," said Samuel Weiner, co chairman of the tax, trusts and estates department at Cole Schotz, which has offices in New York and New Jersey. "I have people all over Florida. We even wrote a book on how to establish a residency in Florida." New York's current exemption is 1 million a person with a top rate of 16 percent. Governor Cuomo proposed raising the exemption to 5.25 million by 2019, indexing that to inflation and lowering the top rate to 10 percent. (That tax is still in addition to the 40 percent federal estate tax rate.) New York is not alone in re evaluating this. Indiana repealed its inheritance tax, and Ohio ended its estate tax. Tennessee is in the process of phasing out its inheritance tax, and Maryland and the District of Columbia are reviewing their estate taxes. "There is a strong possibility that the gap is going to be closed over a few years," said Jamie C. Yesnowitz, a principal at Grant Thornton and chairman of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountant's state and local tax technical resource panel. "Once some of these other states see New York and D.C. are doing this, I would find it unsurprising if some of these other states join the bandwagon." Until or if that happens, people who have more money than their state's exemption but less than the federal exemption generally have three options: set up trusts to reduce or defer the tax, start making gifts to reduce the estate or move. All have complications and pitfalls. Sharon L. Klein, managing director of family office services and wealth strategies at Wilmington Trust, said a married couple could set up a credit shelter trust for state estate taxes. When the first spouse dies, the amount of the state's exemption would go into a trust. The remainder would pass free of tax to the surviving spouse and any additional tax owed would be assessed when that spouse died. Such trusts were commonly used as the federal estate tax exemption rose over the last decade. What complicates this for state estate planning is that the legislation that set the federal estate tax exemption and rate last year included a provision, called portability, that allows surviving spouses to use their deceased spouses' exemption even if they did not set up a credit shelter trust. This means that a married couple today would have an exemption of 10.68 million without much planning at all. Not so with states like New York and New Jersey that do not have portability. In New Jersey, a couple with 1.35 million would owe no estate tax when the first spouse died. If the second spouse died with that same amount, the estate would owe 55,000 in New Jersey tax. "It's ironic because you'd think families with smaller estates don't need a complicated estate plan," said Laura A. Kelly, a partner at McCarter English in Newark. "But these are the families that can least afford to pay the tax. If you have a credit shelter trust to get the New Jersey exemption, the surviving spouse can have access to it and get the rest." Whereas such estate planning is standard for people worth tens of millions of dollars, it is less common for affluent couples worth several million dollars because of the cost and time needed to set them up. But it is worth it. Consider a couple in New York with 5 million in assets. They would owe no federal estate tax. But what they would owe to New York would depend on their planning, said Ita M. Rahilly, a partner at the accounting firm Vanacore, DeBenedictus, DiGovanni Weddell. If each spouse had 2.5 million in his or her name, 1 million would go into a credit shelter trust upon death and the marginal estate tax rate on the remaining 1.5 million would be 8 percent, she said. If the spouse who died second had all 5 million in her name, that marginal rate would be 11.2 percent on the amount over the exemption. One upside: People who bought life insurance to cover federal estate taxes could use that policy to pay state estate taxes. Another option is to give away money while you are still alive. Only Connecticut and Minnesota have state gift taxes that are applied below the federal gift tax exemption, which is the same as the federal estate tax exemption. (This is separate from the annual gift exclusion of 14,000.) Some states, however, consider gifts made close to death for estate tax purposes. But when you give heirs a gift of, say, appreciated stock, you are also giving them all the unrealized gains the stock has from when you bought it known as your cost basis. When they sell that gift, they are going to have to pay capital gains on it. This is where people need to make a calculation. Depending on the recipient's tax bracket, that rate could be lower than the state estate tax or it could be much higher. (When someone dies, the cost basis goes to what it was on the date of death, called a step up in basis, and essentially erases all of the embedded gains.) In Massachusetts, for example, anyone who received an asset with embedded gains and sold it would also be subject to the state's 5 percent capital gains tax, which is on top of the federal rates, said Beth C. Gamel, managing director at Argent Wealth Management. A person in the highest tax bracket for capital gains and subject to the 3.8 percent Medicare tax would pay a capital gains tax of 28.8 percent on that asset. The highest rate for Massachusetts's estate tax is 16 percent, with an exemption of 1 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
MINSK, Belarus On a recent Saturday night, Hide, a trendy nightclub in Belarus's capital, was packed. More than 600 clubgoers were jostling for a view of the stage in the tiny venue, hidden in an inner city courtyard. Social distancing was impossible, but none of the crowd seemed worried about the coronavirus. Instead, they just looked happy to have gotten in to see Molchat Doma, a moody local synth pop trio that this year became a lightning rod for younger people in Belarus, and an unlikely internet phenomenon abroad. Since August, when President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, who has been called Europe's last dictator, claimed an implausible election victory, mass street protests and a brutal police crackdown have put a spotlight on the former Soviet country. But even before that, Molchat Doma was bringing Belarus some international attention. In February, one of the band's tracks, "Sudno" ("Vessel"), started appearing in clips on TikTok, the social media app. A TikTok spokesman said that he believed the first use was by a man promoting his tattooing business; that video got a few hundred likes. But the gloomy yet danceable song's popularity grew, and, within a few months, it had been used in more than 150,000 clips. In one, the music plays while a woman dyes her armpit hair blue; in another, someone tries on dozens of outfits. One short video, in which a dog wearing sunglasses runs around to the frenzied tune, has been liked more than 1.4 million times. Most of the app's users seem unconcerned or unaware that the song's lyrics, in Russian, are about a poet contemplating suicide: "Living is hard and uncomfortable, but it's comfortable to die" goes one line. Word of Molchat Doma soon spread beyond TikTok, and now more than two million people stream the band's music each month on Spotify, many of those in the United States. In November, the band released its latest album, "Monument." At Hide, few were talking about Molchat Doma's social media success. Instead, fans spoke about how important the band had been to young Belarusians through this turbulent year. Some chanted slogans associated with the protests while they waited for the band to come onstage, such as "Long live Belarus!" and "We believe! We can! We will win!" "If Belarus were music, it would sound like Molchat Doma," said Polina Besedina, 20, waiting to get a drink at the bar. Another clubgoer, Aleksandra Shepelevich, 20, said, "These guys feel what we live in right now." Other fans agreed that Molchat Doma's music had captured the atmosphere in Belarus. It may sound depressing, but it was also upbeat, said Yegor Skuratovich, 32, adding that it reflected young people's "hope that everything will turn great." In a Skype interview, the band's members the singer Egor Shkutko, 25, and the instrumentalists Roman Komogortsev, 26, and Pavel Kozlov, 27 said they did not make a conscious effort to address Belarus's political situation in their music, but, naturally, the circumstances in which they live were reflected. "Monument," the new album, was finished before the disputed presidential election in August, and the band said that its songs were about failed relationships, rather than current affairs. In fact, they preferred not to talk about the protests at all. "Any hasty word that was said too loud can result in a loss of freedom," Kozlov said of daily life in Belarus. "In a good situation, that would mean 15, 30 days of arrest; in a worst case, two to three years behind bars," he added. "So, as a band, we don't talk about politics and our music doesn't touch upon it." "That doesn't mean it doesn't concern us," said Komogortsev. "It does." The band's success on TikTok has taken them by surprise, they said: They only found out that "Sudno" had become a hit on the app when friends started sending them clips. It was odd to see people "doing silly things to such existential lyrics," Kozlov said, but the band quickly saw the upside, given that the pandemic had stopped them from playing shows. "I was worried that we could wither away," Shkutko said, "but this thing kept us afloat." Kozlov said that he thought an idealized view of the post Soviet world had contributed to the band's international appeal. Its album covers and music videos feature some striking examples of communist architecture, including heroic monuments and huge concrete housing blocks. "We make it look romantic," Kozlov said, adding that the reality was quite different. "Just send an American to live in our apartment," he said. "They would be shocked." Not everyone using the band's music on TikTok seemed interested in Brutalist aesthetics. Kaya Turner, a psychology student at the University of Central Florida, got more than 1.2 million likes for the clip in which she dyed her armpit hair blue to "Sudno." She said she had used the song because she had heard it in other clips on the app, and "just thought it was cool," she said in a telephone interview. She hasn't listened to the band since, she added. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
It is a truth well acknowledged that great composers lead tragic lives. We are all, in that sense, Romantics: We want, even need, our artists to suffer, and to express that suffering in their work. However nonsensical this rule, it is almost impossible not to think Bernd Alois Zimmermann's biography and music indeed tragic, and tragically intertwined. Everything, it can seem to us looking back, led to his suicide, at 52. Family notwithstanding, his life had been lonely, and became lonelier; his work dark, and became darker. No, whereas Catholic ritual and mysticism provided enduring if somewhat generalized inspiration for the younger Stockhausen, Zimmermann was more traditionally observant unfashionably so, for a modernist composer and more traditionally inspired, both on and beneath the musical surface. He was old enough to have served in the army for Nazi Germany on both the Western and Eastern fronts. Although he took the opportunity to resume musical studies in Cologne in 1943, he never fully demilitarized. Once the war was over, he reacted angrily to the Allied process of denazification what he saw as persecution of his fellow former soldiers and he fell prey, time and again, to severe depression. He remained semidetached from his fellow composers, finding them, not entirely without reason, cliquish. But some of his earliest works, such as a "Sinfonia Prosodica" (1945) and Concerto for Orchestra (1946 48), garnered significant critical attention. They remind us that those years of the German new music scene were far from dominated by the serialism of the Second Viennese School and its successors. T hat scene was far more pluralistic a crucial concept for Zimmermann than legions of anti Schoenberg postmodernists later claimed. Zimmermann's early studies of Stravinsky and Milhaud were supplemented, yes, by Schoenberg, but also by Hindemith, Bartok and others; and this range of influence was also the case more generally at the influential Darmstadt Summer School, which Zimmermann attended for the first time in 1948, two years after its founding. The history, not just the chronology, is more confused (or, rather, more complicated, contested and interesting) than ideologues of any stripe will admit. Boulez, for instance, sometimes conducted Zimmermann's work and spoke admiringly of it. Wind and percussion sonorities vocal writing, too in Zimmermann's 1957 "Omnia Tempus Habent" suggest influence from, or at least affinity with, Boulez's "Le Marteau Sans Maitre." And the influence in later Zimmermann of the ultra distilled expressivism of Webern, another serious Catholic, did not spring from nowhere. We hear it also in the two piano, serial "Perspektiven" (1955 56), written for Darmstadt's 10th anniversary. The 1950 Violin Concerto, like Schoenberg's, has a broadly traditional overarching three movement structure, drawing upon what might still be salvaged from old forms and yet far from being hidebound by them. The generative role played in the second movement by the "Dies Irae" chant speaks neither for the first nor the last time of liturgy. So brazen a variety of stylistic flirtations would have been alien to Schoenberg or, indeed, even to Stravinsky, for whom different masks tended to be donned for different works, or at least reconciled when they appeared within a single one. "We live in harmony with a huge diversity of culture from the most varied periods," Zimmermann later wrote, adding: "We exist simultaneously on many different levels of time and experience, most of which neither are connected with one another, nor seemingly derived from one another." And, yet, we soon "feel at home in this network of countless threads." If that sounds like liberal multiculturalism, even postmodernism, it is not; Anything does not go. When Zimmermann spoke of pluralism and the "sphericity of time," he was making a claim about the essential simultaneity of experience, not about doing whatever one liked. For him there was no question that an overarching form to musical composition and experience, to the world and our experience of it remained, even if we could never truly approach it. The 1960 Cello Sonata was one of the works that marked a turning point toward the expressionistic extremes of Zimmermann's final decade. "I've played his 1967 'Intercomunicazione' and solo sonata a number of times, and think they are extraordinarily powerful works," the cellist Robin Michael said in an interview. "I don't know why his music isn't more widely played. There is such immediacy underneath the complexity. It's visceral, very human qualities associated with Beethoven." Stylistic pluralism went hand in hand with expressionism one heightening the other nowhere more so than in "Die Soldaten" ("The Soldiers"), for which Zimmermann wrote a libretto closely built (at least to begin with) on an 18th century play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz drawing upon his military service. Zimmermann extended Lenz's multilayered plotlines in every direction, eventually including a vision of the atomic bomb whose return so many in the '60s feared. Multiple ensembles, languages, stages, film projections, loudspeakers, musical styles and so on were intended to surround the audience originally meant to be seated on swivel chairs in the center of a vast performing space to tell in multiple ways the story of a girl's destruction by a brutal society. Zimmermann's final version was a simplification of the initial conception, which had been rejected by the Cologne Opera. The libretto and score maintained different levels of staged action, yet could conceivably be performed (abortive first attempts notwithstanding) by traditional opera companies in traditional theaters. Michael Gielen, who conducted the 1965 premiere in Cologne, would later say that Zimmermann's "imagination was always several stages ahead of current standards of performing practice, and he could never understand why, precisely for that reason, we performers could offer only an approximation of his vision at the first performance." We know, Gielen added, "that, from Beethoven onward, so called 'unplayable' pieces become playable with time," and "Die Soldaten" has seen memorable performances in recent years, including at the 2012 Salzburg Festival and at the Zurich Opera, in 2013, directed by Calixto Bieito. A production that originated at the Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany and came to the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2008 put the audience on moving risers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Elisabeth Sifton, a widely respected book editor and publisher who burnished manuscripts by many of the 20th century's literary lions, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 80. Her son Sam Sifton, the food editor of The New York Times and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, said the cause was complications of metastatic breast cancer. Ms. Sifton was also an author in her own right, affirming in a memoir that it was her father, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who had popularized what became known as the Serenity Prayer, which begins, "God give us grace to accept with serenity that which we cannot change." Since the prayer began circulating during World War II, various theories have emerged about its derivation did Niebuhr actually write it or cobble it together from historic precedents? and about its precise wording. Ms. Sifton made it her mission to demystify both questions. Nicholas Lemann, one of many authors in Ms. Sifton's stable, described her in an email as "one of the few people in publishing who's also a prominent public intellectual." Her other authors included Isaiah Berlin, Don DeLillo, Ann Douglas, Susan Eisenhower, Carlos Fuentes, Philip Gourevitch, Michael Ignatieff, Stanley Karnow, Stephen Kinzer, J.R. MacArthur, Robert MacNeil, Peter Matthiessen, Jules Witcover and Victor S. Navasky. "I can't recall a single author who wasn't over the moon grateful for the work she did on their manuscripts," said Altie Karper, the editorial director of Schocken Books. Barbara Elisabeth Niebuhr was born on Jan. 13, 1939, in Manhattan. Her mother, Ursula (Keppel Compton) Niebuhr, founded the religion department at Barnard College and was its chairwoman. "My mother was extremely English in a high Oxonian way, and my father was this, as he put it, yahoo from Missouri," Ms. Sifton recalled in 2003 in an interview with the weekly San Diego Reader. A daughter and granddaughter of pastors (she described her father as "quasi Congregationalist" and her English born mother as Anglican), she had considered herself to be "a believing Christian" when growing up. But, she said, "I declared to my parents when I was 17 years old that I was not a believer, and I stopped going to church regularly." Raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she graduated from the private Chapin School and went on to Radcliffe College. "I sat at her table in my first year at Radcliffe," the journalist and historian Frances FitzGerald said in an email. "She would ask us what we were interested in, and then talk eloquently about whatever subject we had raised." Ms. Sifton graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe with a bachelor's degree in history and literature and then studied at the University of Paris as a Fulbright scholar. In 1962 she married Charles Proctor Sifton, a lawyer and later a federal judge. Their marriage ended in divorce. In addition to their son Sam, she is survived by two other sons, Toby and John, and four grandchildren. Professor Stern, whom she married in 1996, died in 2016. After working for the State Department in Washington, Ms. Sifton began her literary career in 1962 with Frederick A. Praeger Publishers. In 1968, after the company was sold, she joined the Viking Press as an editor; she was named editor in chief in 1980. She was executive vice president of Alfred A. Knopf from 1987 to 1992 and then joined Farrar, Straus Giroux as senior vice president and publisher and editor at large of its subsidiary Hill Wang. She retired from editing full time in 2008. In the late 1980s Ms. Sifton was among the first 20 women admitted for membership in the Century Association, the venerable New York private club, after it lost its legal challenge to a city human rights law that prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender. In 1998 she began exploring the derivation of the Serenity Prayer, which had been widely attributed to Niebuhr and popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12 step programs. She remembered the prayer from 1943, when her father preached from the Union Church in Heath, Mass., a farming village in the northwestern part of the state where the family spent summer vacations. Other sources quoted Niebuhr from a decade earlier, and he himself later wrote that the prayer "may have been spooking around for years, even centuries, but I don't think so." "I honestly do believe that I wrote it myself," he said. The prayer has appeared in various forms, though, including: "God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." Ms. Sifton later reflected on the prayer. In one interview, she said: "Every single day one has to think, Is this something that I should accept with serenity, or is this something I should try to change? That's the deep conundrum that serious people think about all the time." As an editor, Ms. Sifton "had read deeply enough in literature and history that she could immediately see what was fresh, or why the question investigated or thesis proposed was urgent and necessary," Dan Frank, the editorial director of Pantheon, said in an email. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
I returned to Ukraine nine years later after securing wide ranging access to photograph the country's penal system. I visited 17 prisons all over the country: maximum security, pretrial, men's and women's, and one juvenile. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Selfies, snapped to be shared, are "performed," in academic lingo. It is a star's job to know how to pose. Now ordinary people are in the same business. Their models are "media driven," notes Alice E. Marwick, a communications professor at Fordham University who researches the highly followed. Duck face sucked in cheeks to accentuate lips and bone structure is both silly and postmodern. "You are being sexy and being ironic about being sexy," she says. Ms. Kardashian, the seminal pouter, told NPR in June she is now "too cool for duck face." Variously touted as the new duck face: the sparrow (widened eyes and parted lips like a baby bird waiting to be fed) and the Miley Cyrus face. Men, on the other hand, draw from the pop idol iconography of Elvis, the Beatles and the Bieb. The meme "Pics or it didn't happen" is a call for documentation in a world of unverifiable claims. It's also a political or social statement, a way to engage one's social network in real time events, says Terri Senft, a New York University professor who heads the Selfie Researchers Network on Facebook, which has a group sourced syllabus to use for teaching. Manipulating an image changing tone, contrast or light shows off the taker's personal, arty style. "N.F.," for no filter, signals authenticity, as in "I'm on this unbelievable beach and I didn't change the contrasts," Dr. Senft says. "If somebody found your cellphone 500 years from now and from that had to tell the entire story of your generation, what story would they tell?" Dr. Senft asks. A tale of narcissism and party scenes and Solo red cups, sure. Yet to those who find all this a trivial topic of study, note that a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum is a list of workers' beer rations in 3000 B.C. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
More High Price Closings at New Condo Tower Next to MoMA One of the latest of Midtown Manhattan's snazzy new skyscrapers, 53 West 53, a sculptural tower adjoining the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art, opened its doors in February to several more residents. The slim, 82 story condominium at 53 West 53rd Street, designed by the renowned French architect Jean Nouvel, had more than a dozen closings during the month, according to property records. The largest was a unit on the 59th floor selling for nearly 12.8 million. But New York City's biggest closing took place at an older building, a condo conversion across town. A penthouse at 610 Park Avenue sold for 32 million. Rounding out the month's top deals: a 56th floor aerie at 220 Central Park South sold for 28 million, and a four bedroom, six and a half bath penthouse at Madison Square Park Tower, at 45 East 22nd Street, for 24.8 million. Pamela Schein Murphy, the founder of the lifestyle website theselect7, sold an apartment at the Beresford, on Central Park West, that she shared with her husband, Marc Murphy, a celebrity chef and frequent judge on the TV series "Chopped." It was the month's biggest co op sale. The top townhouse purchase took place nearby, on West 74th Street. The sellers were Jonathan C. Gallen, the managing director of the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, and his wife, Amy Gallen. Among the other notable transactions were two Park Avenue estate sales. One had been the home of Robert A. Bernhard, the last Lehman Brothers descendant to serve as a firm partner, and the other belonged to Eugene V. Thaw, a prominent art dealer and collector. Closings at 53 West 53, the supertall, vitreous building between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, began earlier this year, with prices starting at around 3 million for a one bedroom. (At least 30 more units are under contract, according to a spokesman for the building.) The nearly 12.8 million closing in February, unit No. 59B, was the largest recorded sale so far in the building, although well below the 16.1 million asking price. The buyer made the purchase through the limited liability company Vulcan 53W53. The 3,230 square foot apartment has three bedrooms, three full baths and a powder room, and floor to ceiling windows that offer panoramic views of some of the most beautiful real life art the city has to offer: Central Park and the Hudson River. The interiors of the building's 145 apartments were designed by Thierry W. Despont, another prominent French born architect, with finishes that include oak floors, Carrara marble and Verona limestone. Residents have access to a host of amenities. Besides having some of the world's greatest art next door and in galleries at the building's base, courtesy of MoMA perks include a 65 foot lap pool, golf simulator, squash court and private theater. Oh, and there's also perpetual benefactor membership to MoMA. The month's most expensive transaction, at 610 Park Avenue, formerly the Mayfair Regent Hotel, was for a sprawling duplex once owned by David Chu, the founder of the Nautica apparel brand, and his wife, Gina Chu. The limited liability company 610 Park acquired it from the couple in 2011 for 23.7 million, and sold it to another entity, 16EF Apartment LLC. The apartment has five bedrooms, five and a half baths and around 7,700 square feet, along with a roof terrace, according to StreetEasy. The 15 story limestone and brick building at 65th Street, also once home to the famed Le Cirque restaurant, was designed by the noted architect James E. R. Carpenter in 1925. It was converted into condos in the late '90s by the Trump Organization and Colony Capital. The sale at 220 Central Park South, another supertall Midtown skyscraper, was No. 56B, encompassing half the floor. The buyer's identity was shielded by the limited liability company Parkview Holdings. The apartment contains three bedrooms and three and a half baths, and is 3,222 square feet (about the same size as the one at 53W53 that sold for 12.8 million). It's also just three floors above the collection of apartments bought last year by the hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin for a record 240 million. Nearly all the units in the 70 story building, clad in limestone and designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, have now been spoken for. The Murphys' apartment at the Beresford, the landmark co op tower at 211 Central Park West, between 81st and 82nd Streets, sold for 20.5 million. The buyer was the Phoenix Trust, with Adam Schwartz listed as the trustee. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. The apartment offers striking park and cityscape views and features three bedrooms and five and a half baths, as well as a laundry room and windowed eat in kitchen with a butler's pantry. In a 2018 interview with Architectural Digest, the couple, longtime TriBeCa residents, discussed how they had reconfigured the apartment after buying it in 2011 for 16.5 million. While they maintained and restored prewar finishes, like the moldings, they also converted a study into a full bedroom and knocked down walls separating the kitchen from the dining and living rooms. A few short blocks away, Mr. Thaw's estate sold his ground floor duplex at 730 Park Avenue, at 71st Street, for 4 million to Andrew and Nathalie Scharf. The co op unit, once brimming with museum quality artwork and collectibles, has five bedrooms and five and a half baths. It includes a formal marble entrance gallery, a library and a staff room, according to the listing with Sotheby's International Real Estate. Mr. Thaw, who died in 2018 at the age of 90, was an art gallery owner and philanthropist considered one of the world's greatest collectors of European old master drawings. Over the years, he and his wife, Clare, donated numerous works to various museums, including the Frick Collection, the National Gallery and MoMA. 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 |
A woman in an hourglass suit poses, back to the camera, against the ruins of a bombed out church in London. A study in incongruity by Cecil Beaton, that image was all the more riveting since it appeared not in a newsreel or in one of London's proliferating tabloids, but in the rarefied pages of British Vogue. Audrey Withers, the editor who commissioned it, made an appearance herself in the magazine's November 1941 issue. Tidy and imperturbable in a plaid over shirt and pillbox hat, she is seen huddled with her staff in a the basement of the magazine's makeshift headquarters on New Bond Street, putting the final touches on the issue against a backdrop of peeling walls and shattered glass. "Here is Vogue, in spite of it all," she declares in the accompanying text. Her words had the force of a rallying cry, the assertion of a woman who, from the day she took the magazine's helm in 1940, at age 35, was bent on serving readers coverage of country houses and city brogues alongside plain talk about coping with food shortages and clothes rationing, spliced with harrowing glimpses of a nation and world under siege. Yet her voice seems freshly resonant (and has been cited on social media) in a time of pandemic, widespread unemployment and unrest. "It is an old right wing trick to sit tight and say nothing (because that's the best way of keeping things as they are)," she once all but scolded her American employers at Conde Nast, and moreover "to accuse the left wing of 'being political' because it is forced to be vocal in advocating anything new." Withers's left of center politics and visceral response to events beyond the hermetic world of style is the subject of "Dressed for War," a biography by Julie Summers. Published in February by the British division of Simon and Schuster and recently optioned for television, the book is an appreciation of an editor coolly grappling with challenges of a chaotic time. In a heated political climate, compounded in publishing by advertising declines, slashed budgets, staff cuts, and an audience largely diverted to rival social media platforms, Withers, these days, is being invoked in spirit at least as a role model for a new generation. The British Vogue editor, who died at 96 in 2001, has found a kindred spirit in Edward Enninful, the current editor of British Vogue. A champion of inclusivity and social progress, Mr. Enninful in his July issue gives star billing on the magazine's cover to three essential workers a train conductor, a midwife and a supermarket clerk and a gallery of others inside. An Irving Penn series commissioned once by Withers similarly portrays men and women holding traditional blue collar jobs: a chimney sweep, a cobbler, a fishmonger and what was then known as a rag and bone man, a sack slung over his shoulder. "Here at Vogue we are, perhaps, not most famous for chronicling the minutiae of everyday life," Mr. Enninful acknowledges in his editor's letter, adding, "I can't think of a more appropriate trio of women to represent the millions of people in the UK who, at the height of the pandemic, in the face of dangers large and small, put on their uniforms and work clothes and went to help people." His tribute arrives at a time of transition for fashion magazines. Harper's Bazaar has announced that next month Samira Nasr, formerly the executive fashion director of Vanity Fair, will succeed Glenda Bailey, who stepped down as editor of Harper's Bazaar in January. Ms. Nasr will be the first black editor of the venerable Hearst title. "I will work to give all voices a platform to tell stories that would never had been told," Ms. Nasr said in a video announcing her move. Over at American Vogue. Anna Wintour, its editor in chief, and the artistic director of its parent company, Conde Nast, has faced calls for accountability on matters of race and class, amplified during an abrupt change of leadership at the food magazine Bon Appetit. In a new memoir, "The Chiffon Trenches," the former Vogue mainstay Andre Leon Talley portrays Ms. Wintour, his onetime friend and boss as soulless and stone faced, driven by nothing more urgent, as he writes, than "a sense of her own ability to survive as a power broker," carrying on "with sheer brute force." Long said to be approaching retirement, Ms. Wintour has cast herself as a progressive; she announced her support of Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, in Vogue's May issue. A vocal champion of the fashion industry, if not of the consumer, in her June/July issue she introduced A Common Thread, a fund raising initiative to support designers. The magazine otherwise offers a somewhat tepid acknowledgment of the continuing coronavirus crisis, with uncaptioned portraits of masked health care workers and a portfolio of "creatives" models, artist, designers and others photographed chopping and cooking homegrown vegetables, painting, or bonding with their pets. High time, some argue, for change of the guard. "The industry needs a new mind set," said Phillip Picardi, a former editor at Teen Vogue and Out magazine. The very concept of leadership needs reinvention, Mr. Picardi suggested. "When I think about the overall culture, how these insular people keep being built up or torn down," he said, "it seems society is ready to move past the idea of one above all." For others the matter is moot. "To have an expectation that an editor is going to lead in the conversation, whether in words or pictures is to be disappointed," said Ariel Foxman, a writer and brand consultant, and the former editor of InStyle. "To expect a magazine to become that voice or offer consistent and innovative context for the new world that we live in is anachronistic." At a time of rising democratization in media, authoritarian magazine editors may themselves be anachronisms. "The celebrity editor is a dead or dying breed," said Samir Husni, the director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. In a time of upheaval, he said, readers are increasingly inclined to place their faith in a brand, not an editorial diva. "The editor doesn't have to be somebody sitting on the side of the runway," said Michael J. Wolf, a media consultant and the chief executive of Activate, a consulting firm in New York. "I don't think readers are looking for the editors themselves to be aspirational figures." They may gravitate instead to a model cast in the image of Withers, a woman driven less by self regard and a thirst for fame than by a fervid sense of mission. "It is simply not modern to be unaware of or uninterested in what is going on all around you," she wrote to Edna Woolman Chase, her mentor, in a kind of manifesto. In a time of crisis, Withers argued, a fashion magazine would be remiss turning its back on politics. "One is being every whit as political," she wrote to Woolman Chase, "in giving one's tacit approval to things as they are than in pressing for change." She buttressed that conviction, dispatching journalists including Beaton and Lee Miller, a model turned photographer, to the front lines. Who would have thought? Born in 1905 into a free spirited, intellectual family, Withers was educated at in Oxford and worked in a bookshop and, briefly, at a publishing house, before taking a post at Vogue. "Austerity," as she was affectionately known among staff, was bent from the outset on exhorting her readers to make more of less and, at a time of shortages to plant and harvest their own vegetables, stock preserves and, rather than shop, to "mend and make do" with items already in their wardrobes. Sartorially she lead by example, her own fashion rotation consisting of three suits and some blouses for work, one wool dress for evenings, and trousers and sweater off duty. When limits were placed on the amount of labor and material used in civilian clothing, she consulted the British Board of Trade on a range of utility fashions priced within reach of many of her readers and encouraged paring down. "Subtraction," she told readers, "is the first of fashion rules." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
COLUMBUS, Ohio They seem an odd couple. J. D. Vance, author of "Hillbilly Elegy," his best selling memoir of growing up in the postindustrial Midwest and his journey of escape. And Steve Case, the billionaire co founder of America Online. But Mr. Vance joined Mr. Case's investment firm this year to scour the Midwest for small yet promising start ups, particularly for a new seed fund. The firm, Revolution, plans to raise up to 100 million for that fund's investments, it disclosed in a filing last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They are by no means the only notable investors seeking opportunity in the region. Four years ago, Mark Kvamme, a top venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, left the heart of the tech industry to become a tech investor here in the Midwest heartland. After a slow start, his firm has raised 550 million and invested in 26 companies. Its bet is that the middle of America amounts to an undervalued asset, rich in markets, new business ideas and budding entrepreneurs. The Midwest, the thinking goes, is not only untapped, but also an antidote to the scalding hot tech market on the West Coast. "Silicon Valley is kind of crazy now," Mr. Kvamme said. The money, power and influence of tech companies on the West Coast have reached new heights. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon are now the four most valuable companies in the country. Venture capital, the financial fuel for new companies, is also concentrated on the coast. More than 50 percent of all venture capital money spent in the United States goes to companies in California alone, according to the National Venture Capital Association. But some investors, led by people like Mr. Kvamme and his firm, Drive Capital, see plenty of potential in the center of the country. Focusing on the Midwest is no longer considered a nutty idea, as it was by skeptical West Coast venture capitalists when Mr. Kvamme and Chris Olsen, another Silicon Valley transplant from Sequoia Capital and co founder of Drive Capital, made the move in 2013. Every major Midwestern city now has clusters of start up accelerators and incubators, typically housed in renovated red brick industrial buildings. Deals like those are still rare. But local entrepreneurs and big investors are scouting the Midwest for start up investments that range up to tens of millions of dollars, far more than local angel and venture investors. And they are beginning to attract venture capital from Silicon Valley for follow on rounds of funding. The rationale for investing in the Midwest combines cost and opportunity. A top flight software engineer who is paid 100,000 a year in the Midwest might well command 200,000 or more in the Bay Area. The Midwest, the optimists say, also has ample tech talent, with excellent engineers coming out of major state and private universities in the region. But they also point to technology shifts. As technology transforms nontech industries like health care, agriculture, transportation, finance and manufacturing, the Midwest investors argue that being close to customers will be more important than being close to the wellspring of technology. "The value will come from marrying industry knowledge with technology," said Mr. Olsen of Drive Capital. "There's an arrogance in Silicon Valley that we don't need industry expertise. That's going to be less and less true in the future." But broadening the geography of innovation fueled economic growth will require capital. Today, three quarters of all venture capital invested in America goes to California, New York and Massachusetts, the National Venture Capital Association estimated. Ohio gets less than 1 percent and the 12 state Midwest region less than 10 percent in total, according to figures compiled by the State Science and Technology Institute. "There are two Americas," Mr. Case said. "One with an abundance of capital and opportunity in Silicon Valley and pockets around the nation. But not in the other America, and that other America is most of the country." Mr. Case served on White House advisory councils on jobs, innovation and entrepreneurship during the Obama administration, and that experience, he said, shaped his thinking about investing in the Midwest. Since 2011, his firm has raised more than 1 billion for two funds, Revolution Ventures and Revolution Growth, which generally make investments of 4 million to 50 million, including in start ups in the Midwest. Both Mr. Case and Mr. Vance, whose career path went through the Marines, Ohio State University and Yale Law School and then to a Silicon Valley venture firm, view building businesses as a social virtue as well. Referring to the troubles chronicled in his book, Mr. Vance said that "at least a partial solution is to get more investment capital into this part of the country." The firm also sponsors road trips in a colorfully painted bus that it calls Rise of the Rest, also the name of Revolution's new 100 million investment fund. Mr. Case and members of his team leave Revolution's base in Washington, D.C., to visit and champion emerging start up communities in cities across the country. Since 2014, there have been six such tours, and the most recent one ended last month after stops in central Pennsylvania; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Indianapolis; Columbus; and Green Bay, Wis. The day in Columbus was typical. There were seven stops, including three start up hubs, with Mr. Case and Mr. Vance listening and speaking at each location. Mr. Case and Mr. Vance talk of the need to create "network density" by bringing together more entrepreneurs, customers, partners and investment capital. The trips can and do yield investment candidates for Revolution, but start up evangelism is the main theme. There are encouraging signs in Columbus. The city's start up clusters are full of activity. At the Idea Foundry, a two story refurbished factory, one tenant is the Smart Columbus project. Last year, Columbus beat out several locations including San Francisco; Austin, Tex.; Denver; and Portland, Ore. to win a 50 million federal Transportation Department "smart city" grant. That was initial funding for a public private partnership to develop technology to tackle problems from managing self driving car traffic to reducing infant mortality. The Kauffman Foundation, which studies start up activity, reported last month that Columbus ranked third among 40 metropolitan areas in "growth entrepreneurship," the share of start ups that employ 50 or more workers within 10 years. CrossChx, a five year old start up with a payroll of 80 people, is one of them. The company, which makes health care software, has raised 35 million of venture funding in three rounds. Drive Capital spotted the company, led the early financing and has since been joined by Bay Area investors including Khosla Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. In Ohio, that 35 million is the equivalent of 70 million in the Valley in terms of being able to hire talent and sustain operating costs, said Sean Lane, CrossChx's co founder and chief executive. "I'm not sure we would have made it through the zigs and zags if we were in the Valley," Mr. Lane said. CrossChx is one of more than two dozen companies in Drive Capital's portfolio. To date, none have folded, and they are generating more than 150 million in revenue. After three years its first fund started investing in 2014 the firm's gains look good on paper. But it is too early to declare its Midwest bet a success. That will take a few more years, and the proof will be if it delivers high returns to its limited partner investors. "And if two guys from Silicon Valley and Sequoia can't do it," Mr. Olsen said, "capital isn't going to come here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Finally a major New York ballet company has a black swan. Misty Copeland's promotion to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater this summer put ballet back on popular culture's map and ushered in a conversation about diversity in ballet. So what now? Classical ballet is still overwhelmingly white, but over the past few years diversity has finally become a priority. On the stages of American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet black, Asian, Latino and multiracial dancers are beginning to change the face of ballet where it matters most: Lincoln Center, home base to both companies. More than equality is at stake when Ms. Copeland the first African American principal female dancer in the company's 75 year history dances. When a company is diverse, the audience becomes more diverse, too, and for those faced with aging, dwindling audiences, that is priceless. Money is another incentive to change: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have financed recent diversity initiatives. The two major New York companies have realized that change starts with the schools. If it takes 10 years to make a dancer and you can't waste a minute diversifying ballet must begin with children. Both Ballet Theater's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School and the School of American Ballet, the training ground for City Ballet, have initiated programs to spot and recruit young minority dancers. Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief of City Ballet as well as the artistic director and chairman of faculty at the School of American Ballet, says that substantial change may take time, but it will happen. "We are not a white company," he said. "We don't seek to be a black company. We don't seek to be half and half. I just want to be American." While it's still too soon to tell if the children discovered through recent community auditions will make it into City Ballet, since 2008 9, the school has graduated 36 minority dancers who have gone on to join professional companies. Eleven of those joined City Ballet. India Bradley, a 17 year old advanced student at the school said her ambition obsession really is to become one of them. "More than anything in life," she said. "I have actual dreams." Ms. Bradley, a Detroit native, found her way to the School of American Ballet through the Dance Theater of Harlem. One of her teachers, Andrea Long Naidu a former City Ballet dancer encouraged her to audition for the school. "Maybe she wanted me to follow in her footsteps," Ms. Bradley said. And now Ms. Bradley has a chance to get into City Ballet, which rarely accepts dancers who have not trained at its school. Still, she said that she has had friends tell her that the school "probably needs a black girl to make it look more diverse." She disagrees. "The teachers don't care about that," she said. "They just want you to do your tendu. I'm glad S.A.B. is like that. Lately, with this whole Misty Copeland thing she's black. It just shouldn't have anything to do with that. It should just be like, she's so good at ballet, she should be a principal. Now she is a principal, but it shouldn't have taken all of that." Last spring, of the five apprentices Mr. Martins named for City Ballet only one was white. In the main company, Mr. Farley, Olivia Boisson, Preston Chamblee, Taylor Stanley and Lara Tong have become familiar dancers. Is the company ready for a black female principal, too? "We've always been ready!" Mr. Martins exclaimed. "But where is she? Show me her. I'll take her in a minute." But there's more to changing the racial makeup of ballet companies than the determination of individual dancers. And different generations see the issue differently. Theresa Ruth Howard, a teacher and former member of Dance Theater of Harlem who wrote a much talked about piece for the website My Body My Image focusing on the many black ballerinas that preceded Ms. Copeland, can't help but view diversity initiatives with some skepticism. "There's a lot of money in diversity now," said Ms. Howard, whose digital archive, mobballet.org, or the Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet, documents the history of black dancers. "And everyone's jumping on the bandwagon, but what is that really going to look like seven years from now after that money comes through? Are we just getting pictures for our brochure? Are you going to hire the dancers that you're training?" One way to increase that possibility, as the School of American Ballet sees it, is to broaden its scope nationally. It has recently formed an alumni advisory committee to assist with recruitment and to raise issues about how it handles diversity criticism is welcome. The school also works with Arthur Mitchell, the former City Ballet principal and a co founder of Dance Theater of Harlem, who advises it on diversity initiatives. One major issue is training. Simply put: Students seen at auditions around the country weren't where they needed to be. "We want the field to be level by the time students come and audition for us," said Kay Mazzo, the school's co chairman of faculty, "and it's not at this point." This fall, the School of American Ballet instituted a national visiting fellows program, in which five ballet teachers who work with students from a variety of backgrounds will attend two sessions at the school to observe classes and discuss issues related to diversity and training. One fellow, Angela Harris, a ballet teacher and choreographer from Atlanta, said she wasn't so sure that the problem has to do with training. For her, more emphasis needs to be placed on getting jobs for higher level dancers. Ms. Harris, who has had many conversations with artistic directors across the country, said, "A lot of them say, 'I don't discriminate if I see talented dancers, I'm going to hire them no matter what.' " But, she continued: "I challenge that notion. I am a ballet choreographer, and I always seem to find really talented dancers of all races." Ms. Moore started Project Plie in 2013 to diversify American ballet through teacher training and partnering with companies. In 2014, Ballet Theater certified teachers chose 15 students from Boys and Girls Clubs of America master classes to attend their schools; none of those students have advanced to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School or summer intensives so far, but their progress is being monitored. The education department of Ballet Theater said that there is diversity in its teacher training program, but there are no demographics available. The company plans to track minority percentages in the future. "We're still young in this," Ms. Moore said. (With her departure in August, Ballet Theater's artistic and acting executive director, Kevin McKenzie, oversees Project Plie with the director of education and training, Mary Jo Ziesel.) This fall, a special children's division class was added to the curriculum for 22 students recommended by dance teachers in public schools and at organizations like Harlem School of the Arts and Groove With Me. Travel assistance, uniforms and shoes are provided. "The hope is after a full year, coming to American Ballet Theater won't be quite so scary," Ms. Moore said. "They'll feel much more part of the class when they integrate into the regular school." The problem of diversity in ballet is complex, and linked, in part, to economic issues that include the cost of training as well as a lack of role models. But why have companies done so little to change the status quo? Ms. Moore said that there had been a reluctance in the field to discuss it. "Even with my peers, people don't want to talk about the statistics in their companies and in their schools because they're afraid people are going to come down on them and they don't want to be called a racist," she said. "It's much more complicated than just that." Outreach initiatives related to diversity are in place at companies outside of New York. Miami City Ballet, for example, offers Ballet Beyond Borders, a program that helps subsidize tuition, travel and housing for dancers from Central and South America; and Ballet Bus, a new scholarship program for students, 90 percent of whom are living at or below the poverty line. Other companies offer scholarship programs, like Pacific Northwest Ballet with DanceChance and San Francisco Ballet with Dance in Schools and Communities. No matter how they start, ballet, as all dancers know, is an arduous path. Rachel Hutsell, 18, a City Ballet apprentice, said that diversity had never been her biggest struggle. "I just decided, I don't care if people think it's an issue," she said. "I'm not going to take it on as an issue. I'm not going to let it personally get to me, because I have a lot of other bigger giants to kill right now. I need to work on my splits." Yet she would love for there to be a minority female teacher at the School of American Ballet someone to lead by example. "A lot of young girls are told that because of your color or because of your body shape that this isn't a possibility," she said. "It's like you don't have access to the beauty that ballet is, and that's not true. It's a complete lie. You look at Michaela DePrince and Misty Copeland and so many other beautiful dancers, and they did it because they stopped believing that lie." For Mr. Farley, there is an extraordinary possibility for ascent at City Ballet, whether a dancer is black, white or otherwise. "Anyone's number could get called up to be the Swan Queen," he said. "It doesn't matter if you're in the corps. Like this girl Miriam Miller who just did Titania. Just seeing that is so exciting for everybody, because it's like: Look, it doesn't matter if you're 19, it doesn't matter if you're black if you've got it, and the boss sees it, you fly." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Two Bedrooms in the Heart of Hong Kong This two bedroom, two and a half bathroom apartment is in the western section of Mid Levels, an affluent residential area built into the northern slope of Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island, in Hong Kong. The loft like 1,215 square foot unit is one of seven penthouses at Merry Court, a 20 story, two tower high rise constructed in 1970 with 139 units. Its alfresco rooftop terrace offers sweeping views of Central (Hong Kong's business district), Victoria Harbour and the Kowloon Peninsula to the north. Concrete walls, exposed beams, tall windows, wood floors and an open layout give the home an industrial feel. A renovation three years ago eliminated the maid's quarters and "made it much more spacious," said Charis Chan, the head of international projects for List Sotheby's International Realty, which has the listing. From the elevator landing, which is shared by four apartments, the front door opens between the kitchen and dining and living areas. Bar seating makes the kitchen an entertaining hub. The oversized, granite topped island has a built in five hob cooktop and wok ring, with a rectangular fan hood above and storage below. The Siemens refrigerator and dishwasher have the same glossy white finish as the cabinets, and the wine fridge has a black surround. Close to the entry, floor to ceiling steel cabinets have a rusty finish. A powder room is across from the kitchen. The lighting and speakers are controlled through a smart home system. The furniture is not included in the price, but is available to buy, Ms. Chan said. Beyond the living and dining areas are two bedrooms. Each has an en suite bathroom with a patterned ceramic tile floor and a granite topped vanity. The master bedroom has a walk in closet and room for a queen size bed. Slightly smaller, the second bedroom has a built in wardrobe. An indoor staircase, open to the living area, leads to a 918 square foot rooftop terrace, which has outdoor seating and dining spaces, as well as a kitchen and minibar. A sailcloth provides shade, and windscreens line the perimeter. A washer and dryer are also on the roof. The apartment comes with a covered parking space on the ground floor of the podium style building. The Mid Levels West area of Hong Kong is teeming with ultraluxury condos and tiny bachelor pads. This apartment is a 20 minute commute to the city's business district via a chain of 20 covered outdoor escalators, the longest series in the world. Along the flow of moving stairs and inclined moving walkways are supermarkets, convenience stores, specialty shops, pubs, coffee shops, restaurants and wet markets selling fresh poultry, pork, and fish and reptiles. Mid Levels West also has a number of international schools, among them the University of Hong Kong and King's College. The apartment is about 35 minutes by car from Hong Kong International Airport. Hong Kong has three main regions: Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories. Even with an 8 to 10 percent drop in prices and sales volume between last August and the end of 2018, the city remains for nine years running the world's most expensive housing market. The "downhill ride" was sparked by the trade war between the United States and China, said Koh Keng Shing, the founder and chief executive of Landscope Christie's, in Hong Kong. Other factors included interest rate hikes in the United States, the "slowdown of China and Hong Kong's economies, and uncertainties brought by Brexit," he said. According to the government's Rating and Valuation Department, the drop halted a 28 month upward trend. However, Binoche Chan, the chief operating officer of List Sotheby's International Realty, said she saw "a strong rebound" at the beginning of this year. Simon Smith, head of research and consultancy for Savills Hong Kong, agreed, attributing the "1 to 2 percent" pickup during the first quarter of 2019 to "a recovering stock market, ending of the current interest rate hike and possible resolution of the U.S. China trade conflict." The strongest areas of the market are the "very tiny flats and the super luxurious," Ms. Chan said, with prices reaching 130,000 Hong Kong dollars ( 16,600) a square foo t. Luxury buyers favor the Peak, South Side and Mid Levels areas, with the "new rich" buying in the Kowloon Station district, she said. Housing is less expensive beyond Hong Kong Island. In the first quarter of 2019, prices in Kowloon were 6 percent lower, and in the New Territories, Hong Kong's northernmost region, they were 25 percent lower, Mr. Smith said. To help ease the housing crunch, 97,445 units are expected to be built during the next five years, Mr. Smith said. Because of the scarcity of land on Hong Kong Island, new inventory will be created by razing old buildings for redevelopment. In Central and Western Hong Kong Island, one to two new buildings are expected to be built every year, said James Fisher, director of market analysis and analytics for Spacious Hong Kong, a real estate platform. There is more expansion in the Eastern District of Hong Kong Island, in Kowloon and in the New Territories. In Mid Levels, prices for a two bedroom unit in an older building range from 18,000 to 20,000 Hong Kong dollars ( 2,300 to 2,550) a square foot, Mr. Smith said, and new apartments generally sell for 35,000 to 40,000 Hong Kong dollars ( 4,460 to 5,100) a square foot. Because nonresident buyers have to pay a 30 percent stamp duty, the vast majority of buyers in Hong Kong are mainland Chinese and locals, Ms. Chan said. Foreigners tend to rent, Mr. Fisher said. "It is not a low income immigration," Mr. Fisher said, explaining that residents from mainland China have come to Hong Kong in the past 10 years for "middle class and executive jobs" once held by British, American, Australian and European expatriates. "It didn't help that you had expats in Hong Kong costing so much more than other places in the world," he said. "Companies thought about how they could localize more." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
music The Cranberries wouldn't have become famous if it wasn't for Dolores, there's no question about it. There was something about Dolores and her innocence. She lived in Limerick, had never been outside of Limerick and didn't know anything of the world. She's so innocent, And so naive, and so unworldly and was suddenly playing concerts to 17,000 and 18,000 people. She grew up very quickly. I think a lot of people maybe felt they were a little bit like her. And the voice is one thing that seemed to connect with so many people. I first met Dolores in I think it was 1990 and 1991. The radio station I worked for put on a series of gigs around the country. One of the bands we had on was a band who had changed their name They had been called The Cranberry Saw Us, which is a terrible name for a band. And by tonight they were called the Cranberries. And Dolores never once looked at the audience. She had her back to the audience the whole time because she was very kind of shy and very frightened of the whole thing. "I mean when we last talked to each other, you were just beginning." "Just beginning, yeah." "Yeah, what was the secret, how did you do it?" "We just went to America and we spent six months, or five months touring there, was it, yeah? And, uh, it just kind of just kept going up and up and up." One of the most important things about the Cranberries is timing. Grunge was happening in America, and Brit pop was happening over in this part of the world. In the middle of that early '90s stuff, came something a little bit different, something ethereal I think you could nearly say. Something that was for people who weren't really into the kind of noise or the torn jeans of grunge. They just wanted some music that would be a soundtrack to them growing up between the ages of about 16 and 21. And the Cranberries were one of the few bands giving them something that was really pure pop that was quite heavenly. And with the help of MTV, they just sold platinum after platinum album. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Get ready to pay more to borrow. When it comes to economics, certainty is usually elusive, but in the case of the decision by the Federal Reserve to raise short term interest rates on Wednesday, the impact on consumers is clear. The typical credit card holder who is carrying a balance will quickly see annual interest charges rise to 16.75 percent from 16.5 percent. Rates on auto loans and home equity loans will also creep higher, as will mortgage rates, albeit over a longer period of time. "It will be a direct pass through to credit card holders," said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst with Bankrate.com. "This is a rising tide that lifts all boats, and you're going to feel it in equal magnitude wherever you sit on the credit spectrum." Still, rather than focusing on the the Fed's increase, experts have been warning that the long term trajectory for borrowing costs will steadily move higher, especially if the central bank follows through on signals that it will raise rates twice more this year. According to Mr. McBride, credit card costs are directly tied to the prime rate, which in turn is linked to the federal funds rate. The latter is what the Fed increased Wednesday. As both these rates move higher, so will the adjustable annual interest rate on credit cards. Over all, the Fed's increase a quarter point is small, and it still leaves short term borrowing costs near historical lows. But because credit card debt is so much more expensive than other forms of credit, like a mortgage or a car loan, an already expensive way to borrow will become even more burdensome. Experts always advise paying monthly balances in full, but roughly 40 percent of consumers don't do that. And among this group, the typical balance stands at nearly 17,000. Unlike credit card terms, which move according to short term interest rates, mortgage rates generally follow the trajectory of the yield on 10 year Treasury bonds. Bond yields have been moving higher, partly because of the Fed's intention to tighten monetary policy, but mostly because of indicators that the economy is getting stronger and the possibility that government borrowing will soar under President Trump. Mortgage rates have already run up sharply since the election rates on a 30 year fixed mortgage now stand at about 4.25 percent, up from 4 percent late last year and 3.75 percent in early November, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Guy Cecala, the company's chief executive and publisher, said that investors had expected the Fed to raise rates, which meant to a degree that the increase was already built into the market and mortgage rates. "But it's not lock step, and the Fed is a relatively minor factor in determining mortgage rates," he said. On the other hand, homeowners who have borrowed against properties using a home equity line of credit will feel a pinch much sooner. These rates are variable and will most likely rise by a quarter point after a Fed move. With a typical balance equaling 30,000, that adds about 6.25 in monthly interest payments. Still, even if home buyers won't really be put out by a single Fed move in March, tighter monetary policy and rising bond yields will gradually make mortgages significantly more expensive in the months ahead. And because the outstanding balances of mortgages are so much larger than they are for credit cards or home equity loans, the ultimate impact of higher mortgage rates is much more noticeable. For example, a rise of one percentage point on a mortgage of 500,000 will lift interest payments by nearly 5,000 in the first year of the loan. As a result, more borrowers are looking at adjustable rate mortgages, which lock in rates initially, but then let them float after five, seven or 10 years. Rates on five year adjustable rate mortgage are about a full percentage point below what a 30 year fixed mortgage costs. "We've been spoiled," said Mr. Cecala, noting that during the housing boom before the recession, 30 year mortgage rates stood at 6 percent. He doesn't expect a return to that level anytime soon, but he does expect rates on a 30 year, fixed rate mortgage to hit 5 percent in 2018. "I don't think there's any question that mortgage rates are heading to 5 percent or higher," Mr. Cecala said. "It's just a question of when." Although car loans will also get slightly more expensive, the quarter point rise in financing costs comes on top of relatively low borrowing rates to begin with. Currently, consumers pay about 4.3 percent annually for a loan on a new car, while the rate on loans for used cars stands at 5 percent, according to Bankrate.com. "The good news is that there is still intense competition in the auto lending landscape," Mr. McBride of Bankrate said. "Even with rates moving up, plenty of people are finding loans for 3 percent a year or lower." What is more, as car loans are nowhere near the size of mortgages, the impact of the quarter point increase is slight. The cost of a 25,000 auto loan looks to rise by just 3 a month. Returns for savers, unlike those for stock market investors, have never recovered from the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession, when overall interest rates plunged. Short term rates have crept higher since the Federal Reserve embarked on its path to normalize monetary policy in December 2015, but savers wouldn't know that: The typical savings account currently pays 0.1 percent per year. "If it goes from 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent, who cares?" Mr. McBride said. "If you're waiting at your existing bank for better yields to land in your lap, you're going to be disappointed." But that doesn't mean yield starved savers have to settle for next to nothing. Mr. McBride notes that a handful of banks pay more much more on savings and money market accounts. For example, PurePoint Financial offers a 1.25 percent yield on savings accounts with a minimum of 10,000 in assets, while Popular Direct pays 1.15 percent on savings accounts with at least 5,000. PurePoint is a unit of MUFG Union Bank, whose Japanese parent is among the largest financial institutions in the world, and Popular Direct is an affiliate of the Puerto Rico based Banco Popular. Both institutions get high ratings for safety and soundness from Bankrate.com. In addition to earning more now, savers at these institutions will also see yields rise more quickly if the Fed continues to nudge rates higher in the months ahead. "To see an improvement, you have to have your money at one of the banks that's paying the best yields," Mr. McBride said. "You've got to play in the right sandbox." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The company had raised about 50 million from investors, including Venrock, Accel and Shasta Ventures, but it needed several hundred million dollars more to develop the market for its rear facing camera, as well as a forward facing camera that was in development. With about 75 employees, about 50 of whom had worked at Apple, the company was burning through cash at a rate that venture investors were unwilling to continue funding without a clear path to a hit product. "It was an ambitious and risky proposition from the beginning, with some great vision to try to revolutionize the automotive aftermarket," said David Pakman, a partner at Venrock who oversaw the Pearl investment. "They are extraordinary product people, but none of us understood the market correctly." Pearl's failure was first reported by Axios. Mr. Gardner said that Pearl held talks with several potential acquirers in the automotive industry but could not reach an agreement. It did find a company, American Road Products, to take over its RearVision backup camera so current customers will not be left in the lurch. While the company has failed, its employees are already fielding job offers. Brian Latimer, a program manager at Pearl who had previously worked at Apple, said that the employees liked working as a team and that some of them were trying to sell themselves as a package to a new employer. "We're trying to keep the band together," he said. "We're incredibly effective." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
There aren't many country music superstars who emerge from hardscrabble lives in Glasgow, and that unlikelihood is both the appeal and the subject of "Wild Rose." What at first appears to be another crowd pleasing, music driven Britcom in the vein of "Billy Elliot" is cut with a strain of kitchen sink realism an interest in the daily lives of blue collar workers and in the trade offs of pursuing dreams. First and foremost, the movie, written by Nicole Taylor and directed by Tom Harper, is a superb showcase for Jessie Buckley. Doing her own singing, Buckley is a rich, startling vocalist who if anything seems to under excite the crowds she performs for. Yet she is also persuasive as a reluctant, unreliable parent. Her Rose Lynn, a former star at Glasgow's Grand Ole Opry, left her children with her mother (Julie Walters) while serving prison time. Upon release, she shows little interest in altering that arrangement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"Yesssss!" Peter Martins yelled with relish, as he pulled a scarf out of a caldron and brandished it overhead. "Wipe the floor with him!" Mr. Martins was enthusiastically demonstrating a moment in his new production of "La Sylphide," when the witch Madge gives a poisoned scarf to the hero James. Two dancers, watching nearby, laughed. "He is so enjoying this," one said to the other. Members of New York City Ballet, which will present the premiere of "La Sylphide," together with "Bournonville Divertissements," at the company's spring gala on Thursday, were onstage in late February at the David H. Koch Theater, enjoying the unusual luxury of an orchestra and costume rehearsal three months before opening night. And Mr. Martins, the company's ballet master in chief, was making the most of the opportunity to show the dancers just how clearly the ballet's extensive mime passages and varieties of dance tone had to read to the audience. "La Sylphide," created in 1836 by the Danish choreographer August Bournonville (who took the idea from an 1832 version by Filippo Taglioni), is set to music by Herman Lovenskjold, and offers the tale of a young Scottish farmer, James, who jilts his fiancee, Effie, on their wedding day after becoming entranced by an ethereal woodland sprite. ("Sylphide" comes from "silva," Latin for forest.) The ballet is the oldest of the 19th century works still commonly performed all over the world. And it's the one that established the Romantic idea of the ballerina as a luminously unattainable object of desire, partly through its extensive use of pointe work a relatively newfangled idea to create an effect of lightness and flight. It isn't exactly an obvious choice for City Ballet, home to the great modernist oeuvre of George Balanchine, and harbinger of the balletically new. But "La Sylphide" is a deep part of the dance heritage of Mr. Martins, who was born in Copenhagen, trained at the Royal Danish Ballet School and danced with the Royal Danish Ballet. He first performed in a child's role in the ballet when he was 8, then danced corps de ballet parts when he entered the company. Later, when already a star in New York, he returned to the Danish company as a guest to dance James. "I brought it to City Ballet because there is a history of Bournonville and Danish teaching and dancing here, and I wanted it to be part of the dancers' educational process," Mr. Martins said in an interview in his office at the theater. "It was Balanchine who went to Stanley Williams, who had been my teacher at the Royal Danish Ballet School, and said please put together 'Bournonville Divertissments,' an audience should know this work. Stanley did it, and Balanchine never missed a performance. He once said to me, 'Bournonville entertained with steps, like Petipa.' No psychology, just the steps." Mr. Martins has staged "La Sylphide" before; he set it on the Pennsylvania Ballet in 1985, and has kept the designs from that production, by Susan Tammany, for the City Ballet version. In both instances, he did not change the Bournonville choreography. "It is too good to tamper with," he said. To help master Bournonville style, which emphasizes fleet footwork, a bouncy jump and an almost static torso with arms held low, Mr. Martins invited Petrusjka Broholm, a former Royal Danish Ballet dancer and teacher, to coach the dancers. "It's a different coordination to what they are used to here," Ms. Broholm said in a break during the rehearsal. "There is a lot going on with the feet, nothing on top, and the musicality is very different. Balanchine uses the downbeat to go up, Bournonville is the opposite. It's like changing the way you walk. Not easy, but the dancers here can adapt to anything." That adaptation was tough, said Sterling Hyltin, who is dancing the title character, with Joaquin De Luz as James, on opening night. "The big difference is that you can't use your arms to jump up, only when you are landing," she said. "It gives an incredibly light look, but for the first weeks, I felt like I had the flu because my legs hurt so badly." The ballet's extensive mime sequences presented even more of a challenge than the Bournonville technique, Mr. Martins said. "It's the key to getting the ballet across," he said. "In Denmark, we had mime classes from 12 years old; I know that mime, it is in me. These dancers are not trained in that way. The art of mime is very important to me, and I am determined to get them to convey what they are actually saying. It can't look like sign language, it must resonate. So I tell them you have to say it out loud while practicing it." The character that drives the "Sylphide" story is the witch Madge. (The role is often played by a man; the great Danish dancer Erik Bruhn was both a famous James and a famous Madge.) Insulted by James early on in the ballet "he knows instinctively she is evil," Mikhail Baryshnikov wrote in an interesting account of the ballet. After James winds the scarf around the Sylphide, she dies in his arms. Utterly bereft, he sees Effie go by in a marriage procession with his friend Gurn. Georgina Pazcoguin, who plays Madge, said she had been amazed by the level of detail written into the role. "Just turning your palm one way or another can make the meaning of a gesture completely different," she said. "I don't know how it will translate to our audience who aren't used to mime, but Peter has been really emphatic about it all." She added: "I think he secretly really wants to do Madge." Mr. Martins laughed when that was put to him. "Madge became a vehicle for stars, and I don't want to go there," he said. In any case, his approach to dancing Bournonville had never been an orthodox one. "I allow them to dance the way they dance and not be confined to an image of the past," he said. "As much as 'Sylphide' is historic, it cannot be approached like a lithograph or an old photo. It doesn't mean you can't approximate a stylistic accuracy, but you don't have to be a slave. It has to move the way we dance now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The N.B.A. will formally review the Cleveland Cavaliers' recent signing and near immediate release of the restricted free agent Patrick McCaw for possible salary cap circumvention, according to a person with knowledge of the league's stance. The investigation was requested by the Golden State Warriors, who had held McCaw's rights, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the situation publicly. In such cases, officials from the Cavaliers and the Warriors, as well as McCaw's representatives, are typically interviewed before the league office rules whether Cleveland will face punishment. Signing a player to a nonguaranteed offer sheet is technically not against league rules, nor is waiving him shortly thereafter. But because McCaw lasted only a week in Cleveland before the Cavaliers released him, some around the league have suggested that the move was designed more to help McCaw extricate himself from the Warriors than because of any true interest in the player on Cleveland's part. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Among the top stars of men's tennis, Novak Djokovic has always been the biggest showman for good and for bad. The Many Sides of Novak Djokovic, Out There for All to See As the French Open moves to its final weekend, for the first time in years, the eyes of the tennis world are not solely trained on the 12 time champion, Rafael Nadal. Novak Djokovic, the No. 1 seed, is searching for absolution to bookend a year in which he drew most of his attention for questioning vaccinations, contracting the coronavirus at a poorly organized event and losing his temper at the United States Open, prompting his disqualification. Djokovic had been decimating his opponents with cruel efficiency before stiffness throughout his upper body slowed him down slightly in the quarterfinals on Wednesday against Pablo Carreno Busta. Djokovic won 4 6, 6 2, 6 3, 6 4 to reach the semifinals, where on Friday he will play Stefanos Tsitsipas. But forehands and backhands are not what have landed him in the spotlight lately. The youngest and least predictable of the Big Three of men's tennis which includes Nadal and Roger Federer Djokovic, 33, of Serbia, is an exhibitionist and tennis showman whose risks can turn into spectacles, both good and bad. Those qualities appeared to help during the quarterfinal on Philippe Chatrier court, as he unleashed his verbal fusillades at his coach, and cut loose with several primal, lung busting screams to shake himself from an early funk. Unlike his elite peers, Djokovic has long been comfortable with letting the public see him as something other than a tennis machine and dealing with the consequences. "I am not the one that likes to separate the professional and private life and say that I am a completely different person on the tennis court and in private life," Djokovic said on Monday after his fourth round win over Karen Khachanov of Russia. "I think that's really hard to do." On the court, Djokovic has for years searched for a balance between keeping his emotions and irreverence in check and displaying a personality that is by turns fiery, flippant and self conscious. The question is whether Djokovic needs to be the extroverted, unpredictable showman that Federer and Nadal so clearly are not to play his best tennis even if it gets him in trouble sometimes. "It's all a learning curve," Djokovic said of his on court mentality. "It's serious stuff. Sometimes you have fun with it. Sometimes you get frustrated." The first public clue that Djokovic might be very different from the other greats of his era came in 2007, when Djokovic, then just 20, had his friends film him in the U.S. Open locker room impersonating Maria Sharapova, Andy Roddick, Nadal and Federer. Djokovic mocked Nadal for his tics and moaning swings, and Federer for his balletic style and pandering to an imaginary crowd. Nadal was less than pleased. "I think this is not a show," Nadal said when asked the next year whether Djokovic's showmanship was good for tennis. "I think this is a sport. Everyone can do what they want. My opinion, the show or the star is the tennis. It's not the imitation." Djokovic would later smooth things over with Nadal, once he became his equal on the court. He even did the impression during an awards ceremony after Nadal had beaten him at the Italian Open in 2018. As Nadal laid low and Federer offered his lesson on trick shots during the sport's coronavirus hiatus, Djokovic decided to start what he calls his "Self Mastery Project" with Jafarieh, "my brother from another mother," as Djokovic describes him. Jafarieh, a former commercial real estate and hedge fund executive who now runs a nutritional supplement company, is a kind of life coach/spiritual guide/fountain of affirmation for Djokovic. Jafarieh did not respond to requests to be interviewed. Their low tech videos are filled with glitches, delays, tilted camera angles, even some awkward dead time as Djokovic waits for Jafarieh to sign on. Djokovic is unrehearsed, inquisitive, passionate and prone to falling into discussions that zig and zag toward hard to comprehend destinations. Interspersed with Jafarieh's musings about intention, gratitude and the "gnosis of self," Djokovic delivers a unique moment of introspection about his journeys as a tennis player and a person. "How does what I am representing, what I am saying, what I am doing in life affect the universe and the planet, and the people as a whole?" Djokovic asks. "I believe in God, I believe in angels, I believe in the universe and higher powers that are helping you when you need it the most," Djokovic says, adding, "Tennis right now is a place where I grow and learn and try to perfect myself. I have so many suppressed programs and emotions surfacing that I obviously need to work on seeing it as a place that allows me to thrive personally, allows me to share the passion, the love, the dream that has been with me since I was 5 years old." Within days, Djokovic and three other marquee players tested positive for the virus. Subsequent events were abandoned. And at the U.S. Open in New York last month, Djokovic became the first No. 1 seed to be defaulted from a Grand Slam tournament in modern professional tennis. Angry at himself for his sloppy play, Djokovic pulled a ball from his pocket and swatted it behind him, not intending to hit the judge. Horrified and embarrassed by what he had done, Djokovic rushed to her side as she had crumpled to the ground. He pleaded with tournament officials not to disqualify him, though he knew they had little choice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
For a sense of the dilemma confronting Facebook over its ad targeting system, consider the following word: confederate. As of Wednesday, any prospective advertiser who typed that word into Facebook's ad targeting engine would be prompted to distribute their ad to a potential audience of more than four million users who had indicated an interest in the Confederate States of America, according to a test by The New York Times. The social network recently grappled with revelations that advertisers were able to target Facebook users who used terms like "Jew hater" to describe themselves. But even after the company took steps to shut down those clearly offensive categories, other targeting terms remain that fall into a gray area. That includes categories like Confederate States, which are legitimate in principle but can be potentially problematic or misused in practice. It illustrates the blurry lines and policing challenge that confront Facebook in its ad targeting. And after a year in which the social network has accepted more responsibility to crack down on false or offensive material, and last week, when the company twice announced new measures to prevent abuses by advertisers, some experts said the scale of that challenge is only starting to become apparent. "What we're actually talking about is all of the social issues one can think of any social issue, social debate, social strife being reproduced in this arena," said Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies content moderation on digital platforms. "These issues are taken wholly unresolved and put into a commercial context where they're amplified and disseminated at instantaneous speed, forever," she added. "I have great empathy around the difficulty." Targeting involving contentious subjects can be done legitimately, said Rob Goldman, Facebook's vice president of ads products, such as companies advertising historical books, documentaries and television shows. He acknowledged situations in which certain targeting categories could be used "in malicious ways" but said, "This type of behavior is against our policies and has no place on our platform." Facebook said it had multiple safeguards to ensure that an ad campaign was appropriate. While its system is far from perfect the company recently disclosed that it allowed Russian operatives using fake accounts and pages to place ads on topics that polarized American voters, like race and immigration the company said it would block an ad that included overtly racist content or directed users to a web page promoting racist ideas. "We are taking a hard look at our ads policies and enforcement, and are looking at ways we can do better," Mr. Goldman said. How do people end up in the potential audience for Facebook's ad targeting categories in the first place? Facebook creates an ad category corresponding to a subject through a mix of human discretion and automated processes that it declined to describe. Facebook users then effectively sort themselves into the targeting category by liking and visiting certain pages on the social network and through other activities they engage in on the service. Facebook has said that liking a page is one signal among many that helps it place users into the categories that advertisers can target. So if Facebook creates, say, a red wine category, people increase their likelihood of being included in it by engaging with Facebook pages dedicated to the topic. Once an ad category exists on Facebook, advertisers can push their messages to those users. Those who may be targeted in an ad campaign around the Confederate States may be Civil War buffs who visited or liked a page about the Confederacy set up by a seller of history books. But advertisers can also gain access to people associated with Facebook pages that perpetuate false, misleading or divisive information. For example, many people who liked two pages on Facebook that frequently defend the Confederacy are likely to be included in the Confederate States of America category that advertisers can target. One of the pages, with roughly 250,000 likes, recently included a post declaring the Confederate Army "the greatest force that ever walked the Earth," and another post prominently featuring a quote attributed to a Confederate general: "The Army of Northern Virginia was never defeated. It merely wore itself out whipping the enemy." Stephanie McCurry, a Civil War historian at Columbia University, examined both pages and found them littered with "fake history," such as the suggestion that slavery was not the central reason for secession. Despite their potential to offend, Facebook's Confederacy pages do not appear to run afoul of the company's standards on issues like hate speech. Some veterans of the digital advertising business said that as long as that is the case, it should be up to advertisers to determine whether to target categories composed partly of people who like these pages. "At the end of the day, these gray areas are dictated by the advertiser," said Chris Bolte, a longtime ad technology official at companies like Yahoo and Walmart. Mr. Bolte said advertisers had every right to target the audiences most likely to be interested in their products and services, unless those audiences were "obvious hate groups." But Ms. Roberts at U.C.L.A. argued that simply by allowing Confederate States of America and similar pages to exist and then using this content to help advertisers target people with those interests, Facebook was blessing the views expressed there as legitimate. "We can draw a line from content that proliferates on the platform to what is extracted and monetized, made into revenue flow from advertising," she said. "It is up to Facebook to make the decision here whether to impede that process. Whatever they decide, it is no longer possible for that to fly under the radar." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Why the Oscars, Emmys and Tonys Are Not Ready for They and Them Sam Smith, the British crooner with a voice often described as heaven sent, announced in September that "my pronouns are they/them ." Days later, the Brit Awards, which had nominated Smith for top male artist earlier in the year, said the categories would be reconsidered for 2021. If the Brit Awards do go gender neutral, they would join the Grammys, which did away with separate male and female awards in 2012 , and MTV's Video Music Awards, which did the same in 2017 . MTV scotched gendered prizes at its Movies TV Awards that year too . And important prizes like the Nobel, Pulitzer, and Man Booker are not allocated separatel y by sex at all. Yet with the major acting awards the Oscars, Baftas, Tonys and Emmys there are no signs that gendered categories are going anywhere. Even though more artists are identifying as nonbinary, and theater awards in Canada and several American cities have done away with gendered prizes, there seems to be scant momentum in the bigger awards organizations to make the switch. Now one performer, the nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon, of "Billions," is calling on the Television Academy to drop gendered acting categories outright from the Emmys. Dillon said in an interview, "I presume no one has asked them directly to make that change, so perhaps this is the right moment," Dillon said. "What are the first steps that need to be taken to make that change? Call me. Email me. Let's get it done." But a spokesman for the Television Academy said while the group "celebrates inclusiveness," it has no plans to make that change. Neither does the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which hands out the Baftas, or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which administers the Oscars and has given out separate actor and actress prizes since the first awards in 192 9. A Bafta spokeswoman confirmed there would be no changes in the performance categories this season, and a spokeswoman for the American academy said it would "continue to be sensitive to the evolving conversation" and planned to keep its current structure in place. A spokesperson for the Tonys declined to comment . Until relatively recently, divvying up acting categories by gender was largely unquestioned . Dillon challenged this in 2017, writing an open letter to the Television Academy about being confounded over whether to submit themselves for Emmy consideration as a supporting actor or actress. The academy replied that Dillon could choose whichever category they identified with. At the time, Dillon opted for actor, but said in the interview that making distinctions by gender identity or assigned sex is arbitrary and discriminatory. "If we separated categories by the colors of eyes, hair or skin, people would go, 'This is unacceptable,'" said Dillon, who is appearing in and producing the play "Orchid Receipt Service," featuring gender nonconforming and transgender performers. "That's how I feel about gender categories. At this point, it feels unacceptable and unnecessary and archaic." The debate has roots in older conversations about whether carving out places in a male dominated field for one group, in this case women, comes at the cost of excluding others. Proponents of gendered categories say that absent such distinctions, men would dominate the nominees and winners. "Merging gender categories would create a cosmetic definition of equality in an industry where we know that equality does not exist," said Mark Harris, who covers Hollywood's awards season for Vanity Fair. "It's placing this huge bet that sexism is so solved that it doesn't need to be paid attention to anymore. It's so solved even though a vast majority of voters in awards groups are men. It's so solved even though actresses have absolutely no shortage of important and fascinating things to say about the way gender inequities persist in the industry." Melissa Silverstein, the publisher of the site Women and Hollywood agreed, noting that in prize categories that are nongendered, like director, producer and cinematographer, very few women are recognized. In 2017 , Steve Pond of The Wrap found that in fields where acting awards divided by gender were scrapped, men indeed disproportionately bagged more nominations and wins. At the gender neutral awards handed out by the Television Critics Association, Pond determined that over two decades, men won the individual drama and comedy acting awards seven times out of 10. But Dillon and other nonbinary actors argue that gendered categories give the false appearance that prime roles for women are far more prevalent than they actually are. If the best actress category was axed and the vast majority of the nominations went to cisgendered men, Dillon said, "We would have to deal with the inequality that still is in Hollywood and always has been when it comes to gender as well as race." Becca Blackwell, the nonbinary star of the Off Broadway show "Hurricane Diane," said that gendered categories obscure a theatrical canon and systems around it that do not value women. "They're forcing you into boxes for what?" Blackwell said. "Of course women will get short shrift until we deal with the fact that women are still not considered first class citizens with full agency." The Obies, which herald achievements in Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway theater, do not separate awards by sex , and in the last few years, theater awards in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Toronto have adopted gender inclusive categories , with varied results. Most doubled the number of finalists per performance category, and meted out two awards in each. Leigh Goldenberg, the executive director of Theatre Philadelphia, which administers the city's Barrymore Awards, said that before the switch, women voiced concerns about being overshadowed given that so many productions revolved around men. "We eventually got to a place where folks who had those fights women or people of color recognized that there needed to be a nother group brought in , and this would build toward equity for all if we make that change," Goldenberg said. Theatre Philadelphia, which has also been working to diversify its adjudicators, held the Barrymores on Monda y. Of the eight performance awards, six went to women. Dale Albright, the deputy director of the Theater Bay Area Awards in San Francisco, said that finalists in the new gender inclusive performance categories tended to skew male, but that the wins were equitably divided between male and female identifying performers. After changes were made in Chicago's Jeff Awards last year, there was controversy when many of the nominees ended up being ma le, which Drew Blau, an official with the awards, said was a reflection of the fact that larger theaters were producing male centric shows. The hope is that by spotlighting the imbalance and pushing to diversify judges, the awards will balance out. Meanwhile in Toronto at the Dora Awards over the summer, winners in the performance categorie s were dominated by women of color, according to Jacoba Knaapen, the executive director of the Toronto Alliance for Performing Arts. "There is inequity overall, but it is trending toward balance," Knaapen said. Until such changes are more widely embraced, Blackwell, the trans star of "Hurricane Diane," said, should they end up nominated for a major award, they would opt to compete with performers who identify as male. "I'd rather beat out a bunch of cis men than take an award from a woman," Blackwell said. "I always joke that I better be the first person with a vagina to get a best actor award." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"I think we take for granted that there's always going to be something to do," said Jenna Camille Henderson, a singer songwriter in Washington, D.C., who lost all of her jobs in the space of a few days. She Had 3 Jobs to Support Her Music. Now All Are Gone. Jenna Camille Henderson, a singer songwriter in Washington, D.C., didn't have just one job. Instead, like many other musicians and creative workers in the United States, she pieced together a living from multiple sources. This delicate process, known dryly as the freelance hustle, can be exasperating, but it can also provide a special kind of freedom and independence. It can even be reassuring to know that your economic fortunes aren't tied to a single company or field. Until a global pandemic hits, and all the places where you work are affected. At the beginning of March, she was making steady money thanks to three jobs: working security at the 9:30 Club, one of the city's most beloved music venues; providing paraprofessional support at a charter school; and playing a weekly gig at a local club. In less than a week, each one of those had been canceled or put on hold, because of measures to try to halt the spread of the new coronavirus. Ms. Henderson, 29, who does not have health insurance, has no source of income for the foreseeable future. As freelancers, she said, "I think we take for granted that there's always going to be something to do." "I never thought, maybe I should consider doing something more permanent in case something like this happens," she added, "because how many times does something like this happen?" This is how it all fell apart, as recounted by Ms. Henderson and in screenshots of texts and emails from her phone. The first notice came on March 11 from the 9:30 Club, emailing to say that all shows through the end of the month were off. (More have since been canceled.) Ms. Henderson has been making music in some form since she was 6 years old. Growing up in Accokeek, Md., just south of Washington she started learning by ear and then took up classical piano and jazz. Her talents led her to the renowned Duke Ellington School of the Arts and on to study jazz in college. She has released a handful of singles and albums on Bandcamp and other platforms, but channels much of her energy into live shows, playing with bands and collaborators around the Washington area. That calls for a flexible schedule, which freelancing had afforded her. The big blow came two days later, when she found out that the high school where she worked would also be closing its doors temporarily, following an order from the city. (She declined to name the school, saying she did not want to bring it negative attention.) Although she wasn't on staff, Ms. Henderson spent a lot of time there often five days a week. She got the job last year through an agency, filling in as a substitute for a teacher who went on leave. When that person never came back, she continued helping various classes and students with specific needs. "The school is basically how I pay my rent," she said. Ms. Henderson was still reeling from that news when she lost her last steady gig. She'd been playing with a band called Trae Company Neo Soul every Wednesday night at Harlot DC, a lounge that opened late last year. The group's residency had started in February, and it had begun to gain momentum. But on Sunday, Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered the closure of all the city's nightclubs. "We just really started building this thing, and it was growing, and then it got shut down pretty quickly," Ms. Henderson said. She is now staring down several weeks, possibly months, without any income, since no one knows how long the suspensions will last. Because she's a freelancer, she is not eligible for unemployment benefits. She has some savings that she had intended to use for taxes, which are not withheld from her pay. She will probably have to spend that money on rent instead. "Initially, I was just trying to put all my ducks in order, trying to figure out how much I had saved," she said. "Once it started becoming clear how deep of an issue it was, my confidence that we would be going back in two weeks started to wear. It's starting to become worrisome." She's approached the agency that placed her at the school about other jobs, and she knows the 9:30 Club is trying to find tasks to hire people to do. So far, she's come up short. Ms. Henderson's situation isn't unique. Artists, musicians and performers, as well as freelancers of all kinds, are struggling to find work as the coronavirus crisis has disrupted multiple industries seemingly overnight. Many of her friends are also searching for interim jobs. She suggested that one friend, also a contract educator, apply at Mom's, an organic supermarket chain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Two weeks ago, in the bowels of a Las Vegas casino, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont confronted the president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, with a stern demand: Be fair to me. Mr. Sanders, fresh off his victory in the New Hampshire primary, was fed up with what he considered unfair treatment by the cable network that is required viewing for many Democratic voters. He chided Mr. Griffin before abruptly ending their discussion, according to two people briefed on the exchange. By Wednesday night, hours after Mr. Sanders suffered a string of defeats to his chief rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., MSNBC viewers were greeted with the sight of Mr. Sanders sitting for a live interview with the network's most influential host, Rachel Maddow, whose program the senator had avoided since July. "Good to see you, Rachel," Mr. Sanders said, grinning. It was a striking turnaround by the senator, whose allies often hold up MSNBC as Exhibit A of the "corporate media" that Mr. Sanders likes to condemn. His campaign agreed to the Maddow interview after digesting Tuesday's results, prompting the anchor to rush to Burlington, Vt., in time for the 9 p.m. broadcast. Now Mr. Sanders's campaign is in final discussions with MSNBC to appear on the network for a prime time town hall before the next round of primary voters go to the polls on Tuesday, according to a person briefed on the discussions. It would be Mr. Sanders's first MSNBC town hall in nearly four years. The network had a longstanding invitation, but the senator whose campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, once dismissed the network's coverage as "terrible" had declined the offer until now. Mr. Sanders's sudden embrace of MSNBC seemed to signal a newfound need to engage with a broader swath of a Democratic electorate that is rapidly coalescing around his opponent. And it was an unlikely turn for the cable network just days after one of its longtime stars, the anchor Chris Matthews, was forced to resign. MSNBC says the network covers the Democratic field fairly, not fawningly, and rejects any claims of anti Sanders bias. 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 Mr. Sanders's supporters and other Democrats critical of the party's moderate wing complain that MSNBC is out of step with the current state of Democratic politics. Some MSNBC anchors who have warned against socialist policies Mr. Matthews, for instance, suggested a socialist leader would order executions in Central Park have been dismissed as elites standing in the way of progress. When Mr. Matthews, in a clumsy on air exchange, compared Mr. Sanders's victory in the Nevada caucuses to the Nazi invasion of France, it caused a firestorm. Aides to Mr. Sanders, who had family members killed in the Holocaust, savaged Mr. Matthews, and the anchor later apologized. "The party is split between progressives and moderates, and that's the tension we're seeing at a channel that appeals to Democrats," said Andrew Heyward, a former president of CBS News who teaches at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Arizona. "MSNBC has been comfort food for people who are very upset with the Trump era," Mr. Heyward continued. "It gets much more complicated when you have to think about the alternative." Plenty is on the line: In the Trump years, MSNBC's net advertising revenue has nearly tripled, to 614 million last year from 212 million in 2014, according to Kagan, a media research firm. MSNBC also raked in 546 million in profit versus the 181 million it made in 2014, Kagan said. Fox News faced a similar problem in 2015, when another populist candidate, Donald J. Trump, shocked establishment Republicans and openly mocked the network's stars. Mr. Trump feuded with the anchor Megyn Kelly and even boycotted one of the network's debates. Fox News commentary gradually moved Trumpward, jettisoning traditional Republican regulars like George Will and hiring pro Trump opinion hosts like Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin. As Mr. Sanders notched victories in the early voting states, it seemed like MSNBC could be heading toward a similar intraparty dust up. In Las Vegas last month, Mr. Sanders's complaints to Mr. Griffin, the MSNBC president, were so animated that afterward, the senator's wife, Jane Sanders, offered conciliatory words to the network executive, according to the two people briefed on the exchange. And Sanders supporters might have found some grist for their complaints on Tuesday, when MSNBC featured Biden allies like Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina. "That guy literally saved the Democratic Party," James Carville told viewers, speaking of Mr. Clyburn's endorsement of Mr. Biden ahead of the South Carolina primary. But Mr. Sanders's tough night on Tuesday and Mr. Biden's comeback could begin a new phase in the relationship between the candidate and the network. In her interview in Burlington on Wednesday, which took up the whole show, Ms. Maddow challenged Mr. Sanders about his poor showing with African American voters on Tuesday and asked how he planned to improve turnout among his supporters. She also expressed her gratitude to the senator for appearing on the show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Credit...David Walter Banks for The New York Times Pioneertown Wants to Be the New Old West YUCCA VALLEY, Calif. The Pioneertown Motel is a dusty, single story inn with 20 rooms in a remote community named Pioneertown, in the middle of the desert in Southern California. The motel, recently renovated by its new owners, has an outdoor makeshift lobby and offers few amenities aside from morning coffee, Wi Fi and a parking space large enough for a pickup truck outside each room's door. Across the parking lot is a street that was built as a film set, with an old fashioned saloon, post office, bowling alley and a trading post. Long legged model types and their scruffy faced boyfriends sprawled out on colorful couches under tents outside the motel. They drank canned beer and smoked cigarettes by day, huddling around firepits at night, starlight and guitars in ample supply. This setting may seem incongruent to its backdrop. But this is the new Old West. Pioneertown, 125 miles outside Los Angeles, was founded in 1946 by a group of Hollywood legends including Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Russell Hayden and Dick Curtis. They were tired of traveling far to film the westerns that were popular at the time. They built facades and spaces to replicate a 19th century western town, as well as the motel, where they stayed up into the night, drinking, playing cards, staging duels and then sleeping it off before starting again. The dream of turning Pioneertown into a permanent playground with golf courses, hotels, restaurants and large homes never materialized. There wasn't enough money or water. Julian T. Pinder, a filmmaker, moved to Pioneertown in 2014 from Los Angeles with his wife, Yasmina Jones. Their friends were perplexed by their decision to do so, initially. "At first they are like: 'What are you doing in the middle of the desert? What do you do up there? You are insane," said Mr. Pinder, 34. "Then they come up here and stay for a weekend, and they meet all these amazing artists and everyone is just totally laid back and there is a stress level that is gone." Mr. Pinder and Ms. Jones were attracted to Pioneertown as an alternative to the Los Angeles lifestyle. "We were paying six grand a month, and we were doing jobs we didn't want to do," he said. "Finally, I said: 'Forget it. Instead of wasting this money on rent, I can come here and buy 40 acres for 100 grand.'" Theirs is one of the first homes seen when driving from the main highway into Pioneertown. Mr. Pinder and Ms. Jones renovated what was a run down century old mining cabin into an airy family home that has huge windows, a beamed roof, an open kitchen and 40 acres of uncultivated land. Somewhat by necessity, Mr. Pinder has learned to kill rattlesnakes. Pioneertown is an unincorporated community, so small that you can address parcels with someone's first name and they will arrive at the right place. You can drive for miles without seeing another human or even a building; people's homes can be about a 10 minute drive apart. The boulders, the sand and the Joshua trees make the landscape look otherworldly. Cellphone service is spotty. But the remoteness is among its greatest attributes, say people who have moved there recently. Yves Kamioner, a Belgian jewelry designer, and his partner, Hugh Glenn, a retired jewelry industry executive, left their New York life and their Fifth Avenue apartment four years ago. Since then, they have bought and restored three homes in the area, including one that came with a church. "The desert is a blank page, and people come here to reinvent themselves," said Mr. Kamioner, 59. "You are like a kid again. There is oxygen up here." Claire Wadsworth, a teacher, and Nikki Hill, a chef, were residents of Los Angeles when they took a weekend visit to Pioneertown in April 2015. They decided on the spot to move there. "Someone told us there was a restaurant for sale, and 10 days later we had the keys," said Ms. Wadsworth, 31, who married Ms. Hill, 33, last year. "We were just so in love and wanting something different in life," Ms. Wadsworth said. The couple opened the doors to their new restaurant, La Copine, in the area about six months ago. It would be hard to find the tiny restaurant, on the side of a sparsely populated two lane highway, if not for the crowds of people and cars that always surround it when it's open mostly for brunch, Thursday to Sunday. The crowd could rival that of the newest haunt in the West Village: Beautiful artist or graphic designer couples come with friends to laugh and gossip over juice spritzers and organic stone ground grits. To kick off the Speakeasy festival in April, La Copine hosted an alcohol fueled three course dinner of spring pea and tendril salads and coq au vin (wine was B.Y.O.B.) for locals and tourists alike. The local music business is growing. Rocco Gardner, a British born musician, has built a state of the art music recording studio. "We now have the stuff you need to have Beyonce come and stay and record," he said. This spring, he gave a party to show off the studio. Musicians, actors and other scantily dressed, full lipped partygoers took selfies in the hot tub against the unobstructed views of valleys and Joshua trees. The fashion scene, with an aesthetic influenced by Pioneertown's proximity to music festivals, is developing as well. Promised Land, a vintage store, opened five months ago nearby. Its racks and shelves are overflowing with Bohemian skirts, maxi dresses, jumpsuits and leather jackets. Jay Carroll, 36, a brand consultant who once was a creative director for Levi's, moved to Pioneertown in 2015. With a partner, he is starting a men's wear line. With his wife, Alison, he is starting a company called Wonder Valley that sells olive oil. Mr. Carroll understands the lure of the dusty western town. "I'm sure it correlates to the fact that the market in L.A. has gone up," he said. "There is also the fact that simple living is such a new hot topic with young people, and this is definitely a place you can do it with it being two hours from L.A." Not everyone is excited about the newness of the old Pioneertown. Jim Austin, 58, has lived there for 12 years in a house called Rimrock Ranch on a quirky plot of land with numerous structures, including a red barn with the word "breathe" written on it. Nearby, there is a display of rocks in the shape of a heart that surrounds two Joshua trees. From some vantage points, it looks like trees are kissing. Mr. Austin came to Pioneertown when it was truly a sleepy nowheresville. Now he thinks it is time to move on. He sold the ranch to a young couple from Oakland. "It is a little too crowded for me," he said. "It was time for me to bug off rather than becoming that grumpy old dude trying to stop change." Matt and Mike French, brothers from Portland, Ore., are among those fueling the change. Mike, 27, and Matt, 32, bought the Pioneertown Motel in December 2014, after discovering it while visiting their parents in Palm Springs, 30 miles away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Documents released by WikiLeaks that indicate the extensive collection of cyberweapons by the C.I.A. are a reminder that this sort of thing is a growing international business. On Tuesday, WikiLeaks released a huge cache of documents that detail how the C.I.A. has collected various types of cyberweapons, including so called zero day vulnerabilities that would expose iPhones, Android phones, Windows and Linux computers, internet connected televisions and maybe even high tech cars to hackers. The argument for the C.I.A. gathering these hacking tools would be that they are needed to counter the increasing technological sophistication of its targets. What's more, by targeting the underlying software of a smartphone, the agency would be able to capture communications before they were encrypted by popular communications programs like Signal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
T.J. and John Osborne have been carving out their own path in Nashville, focusing on rock oriented music that's shaggier than the sounds dominating country radio. NASHVILLE Brothers Osborne broke an unspoken rule at a recent songwriters round a show where groups of writers take turns singing their songs in their most unadorned forms, spotlighting the lyrics and melody. But when the duo performed its hit "Stay a Little Longer," the singer T.J. Osborne reached the end of the final chorus and tilted his head toward his older brother John, who promptly went into a rhapsodic acoustic guitar solo. Besides showcasing some of the best known entries in their catalogs, the participants in this songwriters round, a charity event called The First and the Worst, were asked to share some of their greenest, most embarrassing output for the audience's amusement. So the Osbornes offered "Don't Bring the Redneck Out in Me," a song that reeled off rowdy, boastful good ol' boy stereotypes. Midway through a line about having three children and a wife, T.J., 33 and lanky with a long face and combed back hair, paused to wryly point out that at 16, this was what he'd thought country songs were supposed to be like. The day before, at a taco shop the brothers frequent up to twice a day when they're not on the road, John, 35 and sporting a bushy, red beard with a ball cap over his shaggy mane, joked that "Don't Bring the Redneck Out in Me" was "the first official song we wrote that we thought, yeah, we've got it all figured out." Back then, the Osbornes naively assumed that copying country's familiar templates might get them somewhere. Later, they concluded it was far more important, and satisfying, to commit to a musical identity they could inhabit convincingly. The one they chose a groove driven, occasionally jammy singing and shredding duo has made for a rather exotic presence in contemporary country over the last half decade. Guitar heroes have receded from the spotlight, and even in Nashville, once nicknamed Guitar Town, studio production is frequently powered by drum machines, programming and synthesizers these days. "We really wanted to drive that into people's minds really early in our career that John isn't holding a guitar so that we can call ourselves a duo," T.J. said. "He literally is every bit of another singer in the group, with his hands." The contrast between the beat driven trend and the Osbornes' approach proved an obstacle at first but eventually became an asset. The perception that country music had become too reliant on just one thing so called "bro country" brought on a gentle loosening of the format, most spectacularly demonstrated by the breakthrough of the country soul belter Chris Stapleton. The brothers began to accumulate modest chart successes and Country Music Association trophies on the strength of their 2016 debut. Having gotten Nashville's attention, they slipped off to a sleepy, coastal town in the Florida panhandle to record an invigoratingly footloose follow up, "Port Saint Joe," out April 20. The location reminded the brothers a bit of their Chesapeake Bay hometown, the blue collar hamlet of Deale, Md. Many of its residents eked out livings on the water, but for the Osbornes described by T.J. as "the only liberal family that I can think of in our town" plumbing was the family business. "We'd be crawling under houses," John said, "and if you needed pipes, fittings or tools, we were the ones that would crawl out and go get them and bring them back. We did that ever since we were little kids." Their parents wrote country songs on the side and made trips to Nashville, taking notes on what it took to hold down a honky tonk gig. They returned home convinced that the family band, Deuce and a Quarter, a trio featuring John Osborne Sr. and his teenage sons, needed to work up a four hour set for its local shows. John and T.J., given identical first and middle names in reverse order (John Thomas and Thomas John), learned chords so they could join in at relatives' picking parties. John developed into a full blown guitar geek, spending endless hours dissecting Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton in the bedroom he and T.J. shared. With five children in the family, money was tight. Still, their dad managed to assemble a reel to reel recording rig in a shed in the backyard. First John, then T.J. moved to Nashville after high school, envisioning separate musical paths. "All I wanted to do was grow up, be in a band, play songs that I think are great and get to play guitar solos," John said. T.J. sang on demos and tried to find his footing as a solo act. But he received the greatest response when his brother accompanied him. "There was something there that we didn't notice because we had been around it our whole lives," he said. "It didn't seem like it was anything unique. But people just kept commenting on it." The Osbornes were part of a circle of open minded singers, songwriters and musicians that included Kacey Musgraves, Charlie Worsham, Kree Harrison and Lucie Silvas, whom John eventually married. "They were some of the first friends I had when I moved to town," Ms. Musgraves said of the brothers in an email. Before long, she and they both had record deals. "John and T.J. stick to what they think is good," she added, "not what they think will get played on radio ." People occasionally confused the Brothers Osborne with the Osborne Brothers, who'd made their mark in the 1960s and '70s. A radio station intern once welcomed the younger Osbornes with a banner depicting the elder pair. John and T.J. found it hilarious, adding a funky cover of the bluegrass legends' "Rocky Top" to their set. But it was harder to maintain a sanguine attitude about the monumental popularity of bro country songs leaving room for little else on country playlists. "We were watching artists that were getting signed a year or two years after us just fly by us on the charts," T.J. said. After self producing an EP, the brothers made their debut album, "Pawn Shop," with the producer Jay Joyce. Known for his adventurous angle on commercial record making, he pushed John in particular for gutsier performances. "A lot of people come through this sort of Music Row school, and it's full of great players and everybody gets honed in on this thing," Mr. Joyce said in a phone interview. "If they can just transcend and stop thinking, that's when it gets great." The brothers have leaned heavily on live shows to build their audience, recalling the days when guitar driven country groups shared sensibilities with longhaired Southern rock bands. They've opened arena dates for country superstars and headlined club tours but also ventured into territory more associated with jam bands: landing a Bonnaroo booking, playing the main stage at a festival headlined by Gregg Allman and warming up for the Tedeschi Trucks band at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium. "The conversation was, 'Is there a country band that we can think of that this crowd would really appreciate, that can hold their own on that stage with Tedeschi Trucks?'" said the concert promoter Jason Zink. "That's how we came to Brothers Osborne, because they're not your average country band." The fans who'd shown up to hear bluesy improvisation gave the Osbornes a standing ovation. "It was like, 'Well, I guess they got it,'" Mr. Zink said. T.J. Osborne said he considered it an honor to take part in the Grammys' musical remembrance of the victims of the massacre at last year's Route 91 Harvest festival. But it disappointed him that the issue of gun control went unaddressed. "I wish it said a little bit more, personally," he said. If the Osbornes seem less burdened by fears of blowback than many of their country peers, it has everything to do with the fact that their aspirations are simultaneously sweeping and humble. "If you threaten me, 'We'll do to you guys what we did to the Dixie Chicks,' it's like, 'What are you talking about?'" T.J. said with a crooked grin. "I love playing music, and I want to do it for the rest of my life, but I don't play music so I can be rich and famous. I play it because I like playing music and I can be a plumber and play music, too." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
To consider yourself well versed in contemporary literature without reading short stories is to visit the Eiffel Tower and say you've seen Europe. Not only would monumental writers be missing from your literary tour, but entire angles and moves and structures of which the novel, in its bulk, is incapable. The quirky neighborhood, the narrow cobblestone alley, the stray cats and small museums and the store that sells only butter. Since the publication of "White Teeth" in 2000, readers have known Zadie Smith as a novelist of tremendous scope, a maximalist with a global eye and mind. Those who've been paying attention have also caught her stories along the way in our better magazines and journals stories that until recently have, for the most part, followed a linear narrative, taking advantage of the shorter form but not its more eccentric powers. Some of these more traditional stories have landed in Smith's first collection, "Grand Union," and while still brilliant on the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the often hilarious skewering of humanity, they're the least successful ones here, sour notes in a collection in which the best pieces achieve something less narrative and closer to brilliance. The more traditional stories become most interesting as examples of a mode from which Smith seems to be evolving away. In "Escape From New York," Michael Jackson and his friends leave Manhattan on the morning of 9/11 in a rented Toyota Camry, traveling among normal folk and realizing that whatever's going on, they're "stuck in it, just like everybody." In "Big Week" (the best of these), a disgraced former cop named Mike attempts to redeem himself, but he and his efforts are shot down; no one needs him, and the story finishes with his soon to be ex wife grateful for the freedom she feels, "distinct at last from every other body in the world," especially Mike's. In "Meet the President!" an arrogant boy who simultaneously plays a virtual reality game and escorts an orphan girl to a funeral realizes that death is "coming for him as much as for anybody." In other stories, a drag queen and an awkward schoolboy are similarly brought up short, and fundamentally isolated, by the limitations of their own vision. While the stories vary in their details, the thrust is always the same: A character feels himself the singular victim of circumstance but winds up realizing how tangential he is to the lives of others or at least the reader does. All are compelling until the very end, when they land with a thud on their own most logical conclusions. These are single use machines that serve to demonstrate how the body the "anybody," the "everybody," the "every other body in the world" is both indistinct from the masses and forever alone. These are stories about disillusionment. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Smith has always been merciless in splaying her characters open and allowing their flaws their weakness, blindness, narcissism, vanity to spur the narrative. In her novels, she has increasingly managed to do this without holding them at arm's length. Her evolution on this point has been dramatic. Her earliest work often felt unkind to her characters, not because of what happened to them but because the world that tripped them up seemed so clearly the invention of a puppeteer author, one who rigged elaborate Rube Goldberg devices for their demise. The climactic scene in "White Teeth" notably features a showdown between militant Islamists, Jehovah's Witnesses, scientists, animal rights activists, a Nazi and a mouse part of a narrative ebullience the critic James Wood, reviewing the novel in The New Republic, problematically termed "hysterical realism." (Some words can never divorce their etymologies.) But witness Smith's most recent novel, "Swing Time," in which her more exuberant impulses vent themselves in the messiness of one real life, in tangential thought, in the passage of time. At last, the breadth of the novelistic world allows enough space for her characters to contain multitudes, for their interactions and the randomness of the world to complicate any moral judgments. It's perhaps the lack of such space that has stymied Smith's more traditional efforts in the short form. Minus the texture of a fleshed out world, her go to moves feel repetitive, once again preordained and cruel. Take "The Lazy River," in which a first person narrator considers the pool attraction at a resort in southern Spain as a metaphor for modern inertia. ("Sometimes we get out: for lunch, to read or to tan, never for very long. Then we climb back into the metaphor.") Nothing happens in the story and yet every line dazzles, and it lands on a note of eerie clarity. Several stories take a mosaic approach, juxtaposing disparate scenes in one case, venues around New York City involving music into a brilliant whole. The effect, appropriately, is rather like instrumental improvisation. The showstopping "Sentimental Education" digs, retrospectively, into one woman's early sexual history without any real narrative exigency, but the leisurely pace of her memories allows for reflection and epiphany rather than plot. Other stories veer into the surreal. In the title story, the speaker meets her dead mother ("for convenience's sake") outside a Chinese restaurant to discuss motherhood and heritage and Billie Holiday. "Parents' Morning Epiphany" is structured as a take home work sheet on narrative techniques. "Blocked" is told from the point of view of God. Lurking in quite a few of these stories is a first person narrator, either centered in the telling or peeking in from the periphery, not even a character. This "I" (except when it's God) is consistent in tone, a bemused philosopher, and feels quite close to Smith herself. (The narrator of "Mood" has "the most common surname in England.") This hint of a repeating narrator is one of a few threads that emerge and submerge unevenly throughout the collection never exactly tying things together, but at least providing a few nice sticky knots along the way. There are story collections that cohere, that rise and fall the way a great album does, and then there are collections (best presented in late career as "Collected Stories") that show the evolution of the writer over time, more catalog than album. "Grand Union" gestures toward the former, but ultimately winds up as the latter. For a lesser writer, we might wish more avidly for an editor to have stepped in to carve the book into something more specific, more pointed. But Smith's stature will have made many of her readers completists and her artistic development a matter of interest. While the collection might not coalesce as a unit, it contains some of Smith's most vibrant, original fiction, the kind of writing she'll surely be known for. Some of these stories provide hints that everything we've seen from her so far will one day be considered her "early work," that what lies ahead is less charted territory, wilder and less predictable and perhaps less palatable to the casual reader but exactly what she needs to be writing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Enjoying this newsletter? Tell a friend to sign up at nytimes.com/rory and then you'll have something new to talk about every Friday. For a moment, as the squabbling stopped and the conversations started, it felt as if it was possible to discern the faintest flicker of hope. Across the world, soccer had stopped. The sport was facing an unforeseen, unimaginable situation; it felt, even then, like a looming existential crisis. But there was hope. Aleksander Ceferin, the president of UEFA, which runs the European game, was talking about a renewed sense of unity, about the need for a reset after the coronavirus pandemic. FIFA, the scandal scarred global governing body, was volunteering the billions of dollars it had acquired with such avarice over the years to help bail out teams and competitions and national associations. The clubs were no longer trying to claw power away from the leagues. The leagues were no longer at the throats of the bodies that are supposed to manage them. UEFA and FIFA were no longer rivals, but allies. All of the factionalism and the empire building and the infighting that had served as the background noise to the sport for how long: a decade, two decades, forever? had stopped. For a fleeting moment, it was possible to believe this would be the point when soccer changed, when it saw the error of its ways, when it started to heal its self inflicted wounds, when it remembered that it is fairly self evidently an interdependent ecosystem, with the health of the individual reliant on the health of the whole. Where might that road have led, whenever we emerged from all of this? To a more financially sustainable future, perhaps, with stricter cost controls in place to protect clubs for the long term, with ambitions reduced, and with a closing of the gap between rich and poor. To a more politically stable sport, where the elite were no longer agitating, constantly, for more and more from their leagues, their peers and UEFA. A more trusting one, maybe, too, with FIFA transformed into a beneficent supervisor rather than a rival empire, itching to compete. Ceferin had been right, that soccer needed a reset. The most dire circumstances had sufficiently focused minds to bring it about. Soccer's cash soaked golden era, its rampantly uneven golden era, its morally void golden era, its financially fragile golden era, the golden era in which it sold its soul and conquered the world, would be over. It lasted barely a few weeks, if it even lasted that long. Now, across Europe, the game burns bright with self interest. Belgium and Scotland canceled their leagues to protect new television deals. The Netherlands called time on its league after a democratic vote among its clubs, the results of which were ignored completely. France's league was canceled by its politicians, almost entirely without warning, and has now had to call on the government to bail out clubs facing financial ruin. Threats of legal challenge rumble on: from Lyon, from AZ Alkmaar and from Rangers in Glasgow. And then there is the Premier League, alone among Europe's major competitions in having no sense of direction whatsoever, despite eight weeks of Zoom meetings. France knows its fate; in Spain and Italy, there is slow progress toward a resumption; in Germany, there will be a full slate of matches next week. In England, though, there is only an angry, blinkered stasis. (And to think people say soccer reflects society.) For years, the global success of the Premier League has come at a very specific cost: For the majority of its teams, the only thing that matters is to be present. They know they cannot hope to win it. They know that even qualifying for European competition is a distant dream, so close to an impossibility as to be indistinguishable from it. The dogma that the purpose of soccer is not to succeed, but to survive, now has its apotheosis. The six teams at the bottom of the league need to stay in the Premier League so much that it is best, for them, if there is no soccer at all. Officially, all 20 teams want to find a way to resume play when it is safe and permitted to do so, largely to safeguard television rights fees and to stave off financial catastrophe. Unofficially, the gang of six has proved far more adept at identifying hazards than at offering solutions. They are not prepared to countenance playing at neutral venues, even though that is the only option the government, and the police, will accept. They do not believe it is fair to have to play without fans, even if there may be no scope for fans to return until next year at the earliest. They wonder if relegation should apply, in these unusual circumstances. The sense of unity is breaking down, as a simmering, unspoken disagreement turns into a messy, public scrap. At the heart of it all, of course, is self interest, which in this case is a synonym for money. The bottom six have made a simple calculation: Being in the Premier League next year is worth more than having to pay back broadcast income this season, because that load would be shared among all 20 clubs. Where does that road lead? It is easy to be distracted by the short term: by the prospect of the season being voided, by the transfer market largely funded by English money grinding to a halt, by potential legal challenges against whatever decision is made. But it is the long term that should be of more concern. In the future, it will be hard for the Premier League's makeweights to demand the elite act in the collective interest when it comes to broadcast revenues, asking rivals to do as they say, not as they do. There has always been a schism between the league's Big Six clubs and the rest. It has only hardened in recent weeks. While we're on the subject, it is a shame to see that for all the thought that has been given to what should be done with Europe's soccer seasons, nobody alighted on the most sensible one. Well, almost nobody: a glorious trinity of me, a reader by the name of Peter Welpton, and Victor Montagliani, the president of Concacaf, all seem to have reached the same conclusion. The conclusion in question was this: Europe's leagues should be given the rest of the calendar year to complete this season, with immediate financial shortfalls for smaller teams made up either by FIFA or through solidarity payments from the elite or broadcasters, and offset by wage cuts for the players (they are not, after all, actually playing soccer). Three international tournaments the European Championships, yet another Copa America, and the African Nations Cup would be held in December and January (summertime in South America, but maybe take a sweater to the Euros). A full season would be held from February to November 2021, and another full season from spring to fall 2022. That, of course, has the benefit of aligning everything for the Qatar World Cup, which will, as we have all known for many years, mess up the global soccer calendar anyway. Once that has finished, soccer has a choice: Either play another spring fall season in 2023, if it works nicely, or create a one off tournament such as the Spring Series played by England's Women's Super League in 2017, when it shifted to a winter calendar to bridge the gap. Today, soccer is, at last, back. Soccer in a morally acceptable form, anyway: They have been playing in Nicaragua and Belarus and Turkmenistan throughout the pandemic, of course, but to have latched on to any of that would have been to make a tacit choice to ignore the political reality of why they were still playing. Belarus is often described as Europe's last dictatorship. Turkmenistan is one of the world's most closed countries. As a Nicaraguan journalist told my colleague James Wagner, these are the places where there is "sufficient authoritarianism to keep exposing their soccer players." South Korea, though, is different. The K League returns on Friday because of the success the country has had in tackling the pandemic. Soccer there is, in a sense, a reward. It is appetizing for the rest of us, too. The K League is Asia's longest established league, and probably still its best, though Japan and even China might protest that. It is, recognizably, elite sports, in a way that say Belarusian soccer is not. The return brings an opportunity for the K League: It has struck at least 10 international rights deals that would, presumably, not have been available had a full slate of programs been underway. And it gives us a chance not only to watch soccer, once again, but also to take a glimpse at rosters of unfamiliar players, to learn a different set of team names, to expand our horizons, just a little. And who knows: perhaps to develop some new emotional bonds, too. A great point from Brian Yaney on the discussion of styles of play. "I don't think you emphasized strongly enough that style comes more from individual players than from a coach's ideological imposition of strategy," he wrote. "Tiki taka could never have been so successful with Xavi and Iniesta. Jill Ellis was smart enough to allow the brilliance of Rose Lavelle and Megan Rapinoe to run wild. Jogo bonito went away because Pele, Ronaldinho and Ronaldo went away, not because some coach tried to develop a new style for Brazil." It is such a great point, in fact, that I will be stealing it and claiming it as my own. That's all for this week. Set Piece Menu is here for you, if you're at a loose end. Thanks for all the correspondence keep it coming to askrory nytimes.com. I'm on Twitter, if you want to shout "null and void" at me. And you can tell everyone you know about how nice it is to get an email every Friday here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Mildred Thompson (1936 2003) graduated from Howard University in 1957, went on to study at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School, and had an early start to a strong career when the Museum of Modern Art bought two of her prints. Trips to Europe, however, convinced her that, for a black female artist, living and working there would be far more comfortable than in New York. So she returned to Germany and spent a productive decade there, exhibiting often. (She later traveled to Africa and the Middle East.) In 1974, an artist in residence grant brought her back to the United States. In 1985, she settled in Atlanta, painting and teaching to the end of her life. She was right about sizing up her opportunities in New York. It's taken six decades to have a first solo show here, but what a sparkler it is. Thompson's formal range was wide, embracing painting, sculpture and electronic music composition. So were her intellectual interests, which along with art history, included physics, astronomy and theosophy. There's evidence of all these disciplines in the show made up of abstract paintings and drawings, most from two 1990s series titled "Magnetic Fields" and "Radiation Explorations." Each of the series is color keyed. In the "Magnetic Fields" paintings and pastels, molten yellow forms an allover ground for funnel like swirls of red lines and fusillades of pink and lavender. The larger, horizontally oriented "Radiation Exploration" pictures are based on fields of sea blue over which burst the equivalent of cosmic fireworks: lightning bolts, planetary fireballs and meteor showers of individual strokes. It's a chaos that doesn't feel chaotic. It's a spontaneously choreographed and completely controlled dance to the music of the spheres. In short, this is beautiful, upbeat work, backed up by an entire creative history yet to be fully explored. And it arrives at a moment of long delayed acknowledgment of abstract art by African American women. A Howardena Pindell retrospective recently opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. And in Chelsea, along with the Thompson show which comes with an excellent catalog by the art historians Lowery Stokes Sims and Melissa Messina there's a solo exhibition of paintings and collages by the New York City artist Nanette Carter. It's at Skoto Gallery, and not to be missed. This show brings the painter Edith Schloss (1919 2011) one step closer to the small but definite niche that is her due. Following a larger, somewhat confusing retrospective at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in 2015, this show, "By the Sea," zeros in on her best work: a group of small, delightful still lifes from the 1960s and '70s. They were made in Italy, to which Schloss decamped for good in 1964, after about 18 years of marriage to the photographer/filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt and active participation in the nascent downtown New York art scene. These paintings make good on Schloss's longtime interest in still life, partly by taking cues from the painters Cy Twombly and Giorgio Morandi, both of whom she knew in Italy. The canvases feature a set cast of vases, pitchers and occasional toys (her son's) that Schloss was never without, even when traveling. She would fill the vessels with blooms thick circles in hearty shades of blue, orange or red balanced by whites and pinks and sometimes by patches of bare canvas. Especially in paintings from 1967 and '68 titled "Rignalla" and "On the Ledge" from 1976, she lines up the vases on a high horizon, giving them a personable lean and monumental scale reminiscent of Philip Guston's late works. In others, the bouquets line the bottom edge of the canvas or paper, as if on a windowsill overlooking a beach or the sea stretching beyond. At this point in her life, Schloss painted with consummate ease and abundant charm, sketching in her subjects and then applying color as needed. But don't be fooled. Her best works are primers on the shortest route to a good, original painting. Thomas Demand is a hybrid photographer. He trained as a sculptor and is best known for making cardboard and paper models of momentous events and politically charged sites the meager kitchen in Saddam Hussein's last hide out in Iraq or the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan and photographing them to look deceptively realistic. In his current show at Matthew Marks, however, Mr. Demand shifts his primary focus to recreating photographs taken with his cellphone. In the front gallery the walls are covered with gray wallpaper depicting school or workplace lockers (overtones, perhaps inadvertently, of American school shootings). Two videos shown on monitors suspended from the ceiling and a handful of photographs reproduce saccharine or banal subjects that Mr. Demand photographed with his cellphone: a red bow tied to a fence; a box with electrical wiring; blinking stoplights and balloons attached to a plastic clip. In the rear gallery are three large photographs in Mr. Demand's recognizable style, depicting the ruins of an unidentified bombardment, the interior of a barracks tent and the warmly lit workshop of a Bavarian violin maker all near perfectly sculpted in cardboard and paper and photographed. The cellphone derived works, titled "Dailies," are not as dramatic or captivating as the historical scenes. And yet, they accurately depict the present, merging Mr. Demand's anesthetized aesthetic with a world in which people are attached to their smartphones, capturing images they will never look at again. In this sense, Mr. Demand memorializes the banal and the forgotten with the same painstaking care he gives to more charged moments in history and suffuses the "Dailies" with an uncanny absurdity and pathos. Constantin Brancusi made an iconic, egg shaped marble head, which he called "Le Nouveau Ne" ("The Newborn"), in 1915. In 1993, Sherrie Levine made a mold of the piece for a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns it, and subsequently cast versions in foggy white crystal and black sandblasted glass. Carissa Rodriguez's new video, "The Maid," on view in the middle of SculptureCenter's main gallery, visits several of these casts in the richly appointed collectors' homes and the sterile white warehouses on both coasts where they've ended up. No people are visible, except for the gloved hands of two preparators and a cleaning woman seen through a window, and the only sound is minimal electronic music. In New York, the weather is snowy and dark; in Los Angeles, staggeringly bright. If Ms. Levine's appropriation was a one to one critique of the male artist hero mythos that congealed around Brancusi, Ms. Rodriguez's reframing would seem to be a critique of the old fashioned matrix of money and power in which even Ms. Levine's feminist reversal was still inextricably embedded. But what makes the video not merely effective but strangely moving is its air of scientific detachment. Taking in both Ms. Levine's casts themselves and the tokens of wealth and access with which they're surrounded Warhols, sports cars, snapshots of the Clintons with the same impartial attention, Ms. Rodriguez makes the entire complex social phenomenon of art making and collecting seem as blindly mechanical as evolution. If there is a critique, it's in the suggestion that we could have dissolved our idols already just by looking at them more closely. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Do doctors need to know their patients' sexual orientation and gender identity? A growing number of federal agencies has been pushing health care providers to ask. Federally funded community health centers, which treat millions of patients, have begun to collect the data. Electronic health software must be able to store it. And blueprints for national health goals recommend collecting the information from all patients. By knowing whether a patient is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or straight, say public health experts, clinicians can be more alert to a person's medical needs and more thoughtful in interactions. If hospitals report statistics on all patients, health care disparities among L.G.B.T. patients can be identified and redressed more effectively. But most doctors and nurses are in no rush to comply. In several studies, they have said they feel uneasy about asking because they don't want to make patients uncomfortable. Research now suggests those assumptions may be wrong. A new study of both patients and providers in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine looked at the feasibility of gathering such information in emergency departments. Nearly 80 percent of providers surveyed believed that patients would refuse to disclose their sexual orientation. By contrast, only 10 percent of patients from a randomized, national sample of lesbian, gay, bisexual and heterosexual subjects said they would refuse. (Those who said they would decline were more likely to be bisexual.) "Clinicians weren't saying the information wasn't important," said Dr. Adil H. Haider, the lead author of the study and a trauma surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "It was mostly paternalistic: 'We don't want to make anyone feel different.' But it turns out to be that, 'Doctors, you may have the best of intentions, but your patients want to be asked.'" The signature message from the study, added Dr. Haider, the director of the hospital's Center for Surgery and Public Health, is that "patients are saying that you'll make us feel more comfortable if you ask and ask everyone, so that normalizes the questions." In related work, the researchers surveyed 101 transgender patients: Nearly 90 percent thought it was important for primary care providers to know their gender identity, while nearly 60 percent thought sexual orientation was relevant. And they felt it was equally important for emergency department clinical staff to know both. The movement to collect the information, which some public health experts compare in significance to gathering patient data on race and ethnicity, is gaining traction. Two independent advisory organizations, the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) and the Joint Commission, have both strongly recommended doing so. In February more than 1,400 health centers that receive federal funds and treat more than 24 million people annually were given the option to report to the government percentages of patients who identified in the previous year as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. And increasingly, hospitals and providers who participate in a financial incentive program with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will be shifting to electronic health records which, by 2018, must have the capacity to store sexual orientation and gender identity data. Patients can always refuse to answer; disclosure is voluntary. Whether the Trump administration will sustain this momentum is unclear: A draft of an annual survey of older Americans, released in March by the Department of Health and Human Services, no longer included a question about sexual orientation. Requiring that software systems include fields to document responses is not the same as mandating that providers actually ask the questions. And the slow uptake by hospitals reflects a tangle of challenges. Among them: What are the best ways to pose questions? (On a form? With what wording? In a face to face conversation?) How will patients' privacy be safeguarded? Physicians often fumble when they do try to gather the information, an indication of a need for training. During a consultation with a doctor, Laura Vail, 31, of Baltimore, one of several patients who advised the JAMA researchers, said she was asked, "What gender are your partners?" Ms. Vail said she paused, unsure of the question. "The doctor moved right on," she recounted. "My impression was that she just wanted to get through a list of questions. And I thought, 'I'm not going to say anything if you don't want to hear it.'" In the past few years, a handful of health care entities across the country have begun to collect such data. Since 2014, all 100 practices affiliated with Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City have been encouraged to ask patients the information; 1,400 providers have been trained to do so. In 2015 Mount Sinai Health System, which has seven hospitals in the city, began adding sexual orientation and gender identity questions to its outpatient and primary care electronic health record, and offering provider training. But at the medical center at the University of California, Davis, which in 2013 became perhaps the first academic hospital to roll out a comprehensive data collection program for sexual and gender identity, results point to how difficult it can be to elicit this information. Doctors and nurses are encouraged to ask, and patients can self report if they can find the questionnaire on online portals. But so far, data has been collected on only about 10 percent of patients. "It is a painful lesson," said Edward J. Callahan, a psychologist and professor at the university's medical school. Until these demographic questions become standard, "providers and staff will not ask," he said, adding, "It leaves the burden of telling on each individual patient, which is unfair many older patients have been hurt in the past when they revealed." Jillian C. Shipherd, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health Program for the Veterans Health Administration, noted that in the JAMA study, patients and providers were on the same page about how to ask. "Simply include sexual orientation as part of routine demographics on E.D. intake forms," she said in an email. "This gets the doctors and nurses the information they need and everyone is comfortable." The researchers in the JAMA study, from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, are examining obstacles and solutions for emergency department questioning, and are continuing their trials. Indeed, in this study, in which 53 gay and bisexual patients and 26 emergency department providers were interviewed in depth to inform the national survey of 1,516 patients and 429 health care professionals, providers challenged the necessity of gathering such data. With so little time and private space to treat patients in a busy emergency department, clinicians traditionally have been reluctant to ask information that they believed was not clinically relevant, said Dr. Jeremiah D. Schuur, a vice chairman of the department of emergency medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Doctors felt such questions could be potentially stigmatizing, particularly when family members were in earshot, he added. But Dr. Schuur's research on the JAMA study led him to realize that most patients in fact did not share that perception. "It is part of their identity," he said. Dr. Schuur said that, for example, when emergency department patients must be admitted to the hospital or prepped immediately for surgery, doctors often ask whether the patient would like them to communicate with someone. If the patient has already been asked about sexual orientation, he added, the patient might be comfortable allowing doctors to speak with a significant other. And there are other good reasons to ask as well, said Dr. John P. Sanchez, an emergency department doctor at University Hospital in Newark. Millions use emergency departments for primary care, he noted. Patients often establish a medical record that will travel with them within the hospital or on future visits to the department. So documenting sexual orientation, he said, can have both immediate and continuing benefit. But safeguarding patients who do disclose is essential, said Sean Cahill, director of health policy research at the Fenway Institute in Boston. "In many states without nondiscrimination policies," he said, "disclosing can open them to more discrimination without redress. They can be denied services." So amid a push for more data collection, he said, "we also have to push for more protections." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
It's been a record setting year for wildfires in California, especially Northern California. Among three major blazes, one threatened Yosemite National Park and another became the largest in state history. The Ferguson Fire was centered near Yosemite, which reopened Tuesday , welcome news in a state that generates 132 billion in travel spending. "The fires affected about 700,000 acres of the 100 million acres in California," said Caroline Beteta, the president and chief executive of Visit California, the state tourism office. "That's less than one percent, largely in national forests with no tourism infrastructure." Following are updates on three major fires near popular tourist areas. Because conditions continue to change, visitors can check the fire map, which is frequently updated by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, for information including road closures. Started July 13 in the Sierra National Forest east of Yosemite National Park, the Ferguson Fire has burned over 96,800 acres, killed two and caused the national park to temporarily close. On Tuesday, Yosemite reopened its tourist hub, Yosemite Valley, where two famed rock formations, Half Dome and El Capitan, are visible. In the south end of the park, the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia trees reopened Monday. "Everything the everyday tourist would be looking to do, they can do again," said Laura Wattles, a spokeswoman for the Yosemite Mariposa County Tourism Bureau. Lodging in the park also reopened, though the Victorian era Big Trees Lodge near the Mariposa Grove will remain closed until Aug. 30. Aramark, the company that manages the hotel, has stated that anyone with a reservation during the closure will have their deposit refunded. Even as its quells and air conditions improve, authorities expect the forest to continue to smolder, creating lingering smoke. The federally run Wildfire Air Quality Response Program forecasts moderate conditions for most of the park except for Yosemite Village. There, air quality is rated as between moderate and unhealthy, according to the site. It recommends that sensitive travelers reduce prolonged or heavy exertion outdoors. The gateway communities around the park have started a social media campaign, using the hashtag YosemiteNOW to show current conditions, and, said Ms. Wattles, "cool off some of the major headlines that could make people needlessly shy away from the destination." Sixty seven percent contained as of Wednesday, the Carr Fire near Redding in northern Shasta County covers over 207,000 acres, including sections of the Shasta Trinity National Forest. In addition to many homes, it burned Whiskeytown National Recreation Area on Whiskeytown Lake, which is now closed indefinitely. Cal Fire has not predicted a containment date. The area's lakes, including Shasta and Trinity Lakes, are popular outdoor destinations for camping, hiking and boating. Most of the region's tourist attractions, including Lassen Volcanic National Park, McArthur Burney Falls Memorial State Park, home to 129 foot Burney Falls, and Castle Crags State Park, with 6,000 foot granite spires, remain open. Some areas closer to the fire, including Mount Shasta and Redding, are experiencing unhealthy smoke levels. "We're limiting the physical activity we do outside," said Laurie Baker, the chief executive of Visit Redding and the Shasta Cascade Wonderland Association, the tourism group covering eight of California's northeastern counties. "Where we might go on a four hour hike, we're waiting, most of us, until September. By then the air quality should be fine." The largest fire in state history, according to Cal Fire, the Ranch fire in northern Mendocino, Lake and Colusa counties covers over 314,000 acres, most of it in Mendocino National Forest. It is 64 percent contained and still threatening Lake Pillsbury, where residents have been evacuated. Together with the smaller, fully contained River Fire nearby, it is also known as the Mendocino Complex fire, now nearly 364,000 acres. Despite that name, much of the fire is in Lake County, home to Clear Lake, a popular bass fishing destination and the largest natural lake in the state (the larger Lake Tahoe is shared with Nevada). About 110 miles northeast of San Francisco, it is a popular destination for boating, fishing and an emerging wine industry distinguished by sauvignon blanc. "A good part of the Ranch Fire is in the wilderness area that does not impact our small communities," said Melissa Fulton, the chief executive of the Lake County Chamber of Commerce. Those include small towns and resorts around the lake. The smoke outlook for much of the area remains moderate. West of Lake County, Mendocino County is best known for its rugged coastline, part of California's so called Lost Coast, home to redwood forests and wineries. The county is roughly 4,000 square miles with a relatively sparse population of about 88,0000. The fire area is roughly 80 miles east of Mendocino, the popular coastal town. "Our battle has been to remind people that Mendocino is a huge area and this is nowhere near anything visitors might encounter," said Alison de Grassi, director of marketing and media for Visit Mendocino County, the county tourism board. "There are no walls of flame to drive through." Cal Fire predicts full containment of the Ranch Fire by Sept. 1. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A ground floor residence with a garden at Soori High Line. Mr. Chan is known for designing spaces that blend indoor and outdoor areas. Soori High Line will also have rooftop pools for residents of its four penthouse triplexes. The alcove pools, at most 24 feet long, will be more for submerged contemplation of the cityscape than for serious laps. Sixteen of the units in the condo will have private pools. Most of them will built in alcoves, and open to the street. Soo K. Chan, an architect and developer from Singapore who has designed and built residences, hotels and museums around the world, is launching his first two projects in the United States in New York City. And it seems as if Mr. Chan and his company, SCDA Architects, intend to come on strong, with two condominiums along that magnet for brand name architects, the High Line. Both projects will have a watery theme. The facades of his 515 Highline, a 12 unit condo at 515 West 29th Street in West Chelsea that will almost touch the elevated park, will be rippled like the surface of a sea. And Soori High Line, a 27 unit condo across the street at 522 West 29th, will have not only rooftop pools for residents of its triplex penthouses. More than a dozen lower floor apartments will also come with private pools to allow residents to float above it all while contemplating the brash buildings that increasingly populate the surrounding blocks. "There are a lot of attention grabbing attempts here, and if they become gimmicky, it's unfortunate," said Cary Tamarkin, another architect developer, whose 508 West 24th Street, a 15 unit condo with a giant clock facing the High Line, is nearly complete. "But I think these kinds of buildings are only good for a neighborhood that's becoming a museum of architecture." Soori High Line, which has a boxy 11 story shape that could be considered subdued for the area, was developed by a team that includes Singapore based Oriel, of which Mr. Chan is a managing principal, and the New York based Siras Development. The interiors of the two to five bedroom units have ceilings that soar as high as 18 feet, and some walls made of a single sheet of glass. But the pool packed Soori High Line may steal the show. The 125 million project, between 10th and 11th Avenues, promises to provide the hard to beat thrill of allowing residents to take a dip without having to leave their apartments. Rectangular pools are tucked into alcoves with just one end exposed in all seasons to the open air. At most 24 feet long, the 4 foot deep cubbyhole pools are not intended for serious swimmers. "Most of the time, it will be a focal point for people to enjoy," said Mr. Chan, who compared the project to Alila Villas Soori, the pool adorned beachside resort he built in Bali. At the luxury villas, indoor and outdoor spaces can seem indistinguishable. New Yorkers might be loath to don swim trunks after Labor Day, so Soori High Line buyers will have the option of purchasing panels to cover the pool and turn it into a different kind of outdoor space, like a terrace, Mr. Chan explained. But because the pools can be heated to 80 degrees year round, an intrepid owner could soak while watching the snow fall. The pools will definitely be a cornerstone of marketing efforts, said John Gomes, a broker with Douglas Elliman and a leader of the sales team. "They're so cool, whether you take a dip every day or not." Since marketing began in Singapore this summer, five units have sold at the building; prices start at about 3,000 a square foot, or 3.7 million for two bedrooms. The project is scheduled to open in spring 2016. "We're definitely going after buyers from that part of the world," said Ashwin Verma, a Siras managing partner and a developer who has been active in the High Line area, though through Blackhouse Development. While many buildings in Manhattan have swimming pools, they tend to be of the shared indoor or rooftop variety. According to a mid August search of StreetEasy, the real estate website, 705 co ops and condos for sale advertised pool access, with a few private pools existing in townhouses. At 515 Highline, meanwhile, Mr. Chan went with a more exuberant exterior, covering the northern and southern sides with curvy glass fins, a treatment similar to one he used on the toy museum he designed in Singapore. Mr. Chan is an investor in the 11 story project, which will have 12 apartments, most floor throughs; its developer is the Bauhouse Group of New York. The 70 million project broke ground this summer and will be completed at the end of 2015. The building's ribbed facade is not its only unusual feature. It sits at a place where the High Line takes a sharp turn, which will give every apartment a view of the High Line, developers say. And, a dumbwaiter will run from each home to a large kitchen in the basement, so residents can have extra space to prepare large feasts, said Joseph P. Beninati, the managing member of Bauhouse, which was formed in 2012. In addition, a towering 65 by 45 foot space on the building's flat eastern wall, which faces the High Line, will be dedicated to the display of large artworks. "There can never be a Nike swoosh or a Budweiser Clydesdale on it," Mr. Beninati said. In terms of development, the site is also unusual. Had the developers torn down the existing six story brick building, which was used to store wire hangers for garment district businesses, they would have been forced to build a much smaller structure, since zoning laws have changed over the years. So, Bauhouse is constructing its tower inside the brick building, as if putting a hand in a glove, so the project can be counted as a conversion and not new construction, said Chris Jones, a Bauhouse co founder. When the glass portion reaches a certain height later this year, the brick walls will be peeled back and, "Hey, presto, this sort of new building will emerge," Mr. Jones said. The only original brick that will remain will serve as space for the artwork. Sales are to begin this fall, after the condo's offering plan is approved; prices are expected to start at 5 million. The High Line area is full of inventive projects, like 200 Eleventh Avenue, a high rise where residents can park their cars next to their apartments. And a condo by Zaha Hadid, underway on West 28th Street, has curvaceous walls that recall a midcentury car. Mr. Chan will find himself in good company, Mr. Beninati said. "Twenty years from now, the students from Yale School of Architecture will be taking field trips down here to go and see some of this generation's best talents." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Written by Lupino and Young, "Never Fear" is a tough minded, modest, yet memorable film about a profound existential struggle. The arc of its rehabilitation narrative is largely familiar; it was released amid a clutch of movies about disabled veterans like "The Men" (1950), Marlon Brando's big screen debut. For inspiration, Lupino drew on a physiotherapist she had known at the real rehab center where the movie was set, the Kabat Kaiser Institute in Santa Monica, Calif. She also probably borrowed from her life, having contracted polio when she was 16 and under contract at Paramount. (Because of a set accident during "Never Fear," she directed from a wheelchair.) "Never Fear" has an attractive no frills look that fits the story and its modesty, and is in keeping with Lupino's embrace of documentary realism. Working with a cast that includes actual patients and largely avoiding glamour (except in the hair and makeup), she whittles the story down to basics and mainly focuses on the rehabilitation and Carol's emotions. Although never less than sympathetic, Carol isn't picture perfect; she doesn't suffer beautifully or pacifically. She frets and fights, and lashes out at Guy and often at herself. She also starts a needy flirtation with another patient, Len (a suave Hugh O'Brian in the film's strongest performance), whom she clings to as her worries about her progress escalate. Much of "Never Fear" unfolds indoors, which gives it a claustrophobic quality that dovetails with Carol's sense of feeling trapped, and comes out in jolts of anger, panic and self pity. Perhaps it's no surprise that Lupino, a tough number and a memorable, complicated presence in noirs like "High Sierra" has little patience for Carol's despair. The movie's attitude toward its protagonist is fiercely devoid of sentimentalism and, at times, flat out disapproving. In one bracing scene, Carol, now in a wheelchair, shrieks "I'm a cripple!" at Guy, an explosion that provokes a withering rebuke from two lovers, one a man on crutches who firmly puts that self pity in its place. Forrest and Brasselle are never quite as good as you want them to be, though both have their moments, especially when their characters are most tightly wound. (From some angles and in certain lights, Forrest can resemble Lupino, who cast her in other films.) Some of the more haunting performances happen around the edges: The look of contempt that the woman with the man on crutches gives Carol resonates long after the scene has ended, deepening the story's emotional colors. And an aching sequence with Guy and another woman, a would be fling (a touching Eve Miller), condenses a movie's worth of adult desire and regret into the melancholy that settles in her face. "Never Fear" is sprinkled with scenes shot outdoors that deepen its textured realism, including a picnic for the patients, their friends and others. (While Lupino was directing her first film, she admiringly spoke about the neorealist god Roberto Rossellini.) Here, as elsewhere, Lupino underscores the ordinariness of these men and women, some of whom are in wheelchairs while others relax next to them. She matter of factly conveys disability in intimate moments of rehabilitation in close ups of Carol's body moving and being coaxed to move and when she goes big and wide for an exuberant square dance in which the revelers do si do in wheelchairs, joyously independent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Gift shops and the merchandise inside them are a core part of most museums try naming an art institution that doesn't take part. Sales not only shore up the bottom line but also help visitors bond with an institution, making them more likely to come back. Such operations are evolving. The Whitney Museum of American Art is now introducing a tie in with its signature show, the Whitney Biennial, which tries to take the pulse of contemporary art. Five biennial artists are collaborating with Tiffany Company which is sponsoring this and the next two biennials with a gift of 5 million on a series of limited edition works. Priced from 2,500 to 10,000, they will be for sale in the Whitney store and at Tiffany's flagship store in Midtown Manhattan in tandem with the biennial, which runs from March 17 through June 11. The venture blending philanthropy, art and commerce is new territory for the Whitney, which has never had such an extensive collaboration with an outside partner. The painter Carrie Moyer, who has several colorful works in the biennial, designed a sterling silver pendant called "Daisy" that is based on her collage work. Shara Hughes created a bone china pitcher hand painted in a loose manner to resemble her canvases in the show. Each is in an edition of 10. Harold Mendez, known for his mixed media installations, created a piece that's a far cry from the classic engagement ring in a blue box: a colorfully iridescent silver vessel in the shape of a death mask. The piece, in an edition of five, looks like a slightly melted face. If it's hard to imagine Audrey Hepburn sidling up to the Tiffany window to check out a death mask, that's the point. For Tiffany, which has built itself into a powerful luxury brand with broad appeal, the collaboration has been part of an attempt to re emphasize its artistic roots: Charles Lewis Tiffany, the business's founder, was a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the company later enlisted such artists as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg in collaborations. Beyond its significant donation, Tiffany felt like a good partner for the Whitney in trying something different that would highlight the content of the museum's signature show. "The ethos of this comes from how the Whitney always engages with artists," said Christopher Y. Lew, a co curator of the biennial with Mia Locks. "We follow what artists are doing. The objects they have created are ones they wanted to produce." Perhaps appropriately, given that it's one of Tiffany's signature materials, silver was the choice for four of the five projects, including Raul de Nieves's "In the Beginning," a sterling silver box. "They are sensitive and simpatico to the spirit of the institution," Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney's director, said of Tiffany. "We've had a lot of contact with them. If we say, this doesn't feel so good, 'They say, 'O.K., we'll find something else.'" Noting that the biennial has sometimes proved controversial, Mr. Weinberg also applauded Tiffany for taking a chance. "You never know what the biennial will look like until it opens, so it's very brave of them," he said. For 180 years, "Tiffany has been at the forefront of collaboration with artists," said Frederic Cumenal, who recently stepped down as the company's chief executive. Mr. Cumenal, who helped initiate the project, was on the Whitney's board from 2015 until this year. He added that Tiffany had always pioneered "new technology, new materials, new skills." Charles Lewis Tiffany founded the company as a stationer in 1837; later his son, the celebrated artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, was its artistic director, although he is better known for his own prodigious glassmaking, examples of which are on view around the country. Today Tiffany is a publicly traded company. Mr. Weinberg stressed that the art objects made in partnership with Tiffany were at a remove from what was being exhibited. Whereas some museums have merchandising spaces just off their galleries, where they sell posters and other items based on the art visitors have just seen, the Whitney maintains only one store, in its lobby. "We're not setting up a Tiffany shop in the galleries," he said. According to the biennial curators, who suggested the artists for the Tiffany collaboration, twists and turns were part of the process. "The surprise is what the objects have turned into," Mr. Lew said. The artist Ajay Kurian has a complicated installation in the biennial, "Childermass," which includes a fog machine and fur, among other elements. For the Tiffany project, he did "Modern Secrets," a sterling silver card case in an edition of 10. Its title seems to inject a layer of artistic ambiguity. But no one has tested the boundaries of the project as much as Mr. Mendez, whose silver vessel riffs on a Colombian death mask he knew from a museum in Medellin. "I was skeptical in the beginning," Mr. Mendez, who is based in Los Angeles, said of the process. "I thought, 'Tiffany, maybe they're trying to rebrand. But the more I found out about it, the more encouraged I was. I got excited after a conference call, and they described what the possibilities were." In particular, Mr. Mendez relished his trips to the Tiffany holloware workshop in Cumberland, R.I., where a series of silver polishing wheels that were colorfully caked with bits of silver and chemicals set his mind racing. When he discovered a picture of an iridescent tea caddy from an old Tiffany catalog, it fired his imagination further. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Just when the last of Detroit's automakers were hopping on the LED lighting bandwagon, Audi had to one up everyone again. The German automaker's distinctive LED daytime running lights have become a trademark of sorts over the better part of the last decade, but it has added something new: lasers. Audi announced this week that it would introduce a concept car at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. The Audi Sport quattro laser concept will feature E tron plug in technology that the automaker says will deliver more than 94 miles a gallon. And yes, it will have laser eyes. LEDs will provide daytime running and low beam lighting, and the high beams will consist of laser lighting. Audi says the laser diodes, while smaller than the LEDs, have "twice the lighting range and three times the luminosity," with high beams able to project light more than 1,600 feet ahead of the car. With a 77.3 inch width and only 54.6 inches of height, the two door model of the car is wide and low slung. Its 181.2 inch length gives it an imposing, sporty look. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The phrase "luxury rentals" means different things to different people. If you have money, it probably rolls off the tongue. If you don't like many in the downtown dance world it's an unpleasant reminder of the struggle to make rent in a city that increasingly feels like a construction site for the wealthy. Where does that leave dancers and one of their greatest necessities, affordable space? In "Luxury Rentals," the choreographer Juliette Mapp's new work, she explores New York City's altered landscape through her personal stories, which take place, mainly, in the Williamsburg and Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The work, which opened on Thursday at Danspace Project, features the charismatic Ms. Mapp with Levi Gonzalez, Jimena Paz and Kayvon Pourazar as they show, with admittedly some struggle, that when it comes down to it, dance is one of life's luxuries. "Luxury Rentals," which unfolds a little like the story based Moth podcast, with interruptions, does have its agonizing side: It's overlong and compartmentalized, with dancing sections that tend to diminish in power, and talking sections that veer into a pedantic tone. According to a program note, the stories which include a man telling Ms. Mapp that he will kill her because "Allah says I can do this," along with the witnessing of a young woman's suicide on subway tracks are true and recent. "I thought about context," Ms. Mapp repeats over and over before adding, "The context of no context." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Nashville has seen an influx of residents in recent years, with many of them moving into newly built downtown apartment complexes. Apartments line the streets of East Nashville. When Amazon announced in January that Nashville had made the list of 20 finalists being considered for its second North American headquarters, city leaders cheered. They saw the project as the next step in Nashville's transformation from country music capital into a regional and even national economic force. To some locals, Amazon represented something else: more people, more traffic and, most of all, higher rents in a city where a rising share of residents were already struggling to afford a place to live. "With the onslaught of new people, with the onslaught of higher income earners, I just think it's going to further exacerbate what's already a crisis situation," said Paulette Coleman , a local affordable housing advocate. Other cities could also see big increases if Amazon picks them. Monthly rents in Boston and Los Angeles could jump by even larger amounts in dollar terms albeit from a higher starting point reflecting a shortfall in rental housing construction. Denver like Nashville, a midsize city that has seen brisk population growth in recent years could see its already rapid rate of rent increases hit nearly 6 percent per year, triple the overall rate of inflation. "I definitely think it has the possibility of pushing us over the tipping point," said Felicia Griffin, executive director of United for a New Economy , a Colorado nonprofit that has opposed the Amazon project. Some potential locations would be less severely affected. Atlanta and Chicago, big cities that have made it relatively easy to build new housing in recent decades, would see only a small rent increase if they won the Amazon project. And Indianapolis, where population growth has been slow and housing is plentiful, would see no effect on its rents at all, according to Zillow's model. Even in those cities, however, neighborhoods near the Amazon campus would most likely see significant rent increases. (The study did not look at the effect on prices of owner occupied homes.) Amazon has provided few details about what it plans for the new campus, known as HQ2, other than that it could eventually be a base for up to 50,000 employees earning an average of about 100,000. The company hasn't said whether it prefers to build downtown, as it has at its current headquarters in Seattle, or will opt instead for a suburban office park a decision that could have significant implications for the project's effect on local housing costs. Though it mentioned the issue only in passing in its request for proposals last fall, Amazon says it will take such costs into account, and has met with affordable housing groups in several of the finalist cities. Zillow cautions that its estimates are rough, based on a simple model that looks at how rents in each city have responded to past influxes of workers. If the cities respond differently to Amazon's arrival for example, by building more housing the impact on rents could be smaller than Zillow's model estimates. But there are also reasons to think Zillow's analysis could understate Amazon's potential impact. The model looks only at the effect of the jobs that the new campus is expected to create directly. If Amazon's presence draws other businesses to the area, rents could rise even faster. That's what has happened in Seattle, where a mini Silicon Valley has sprung up around Amazon's downtown campus. Facebook, Google and other internet giants have opened satellite offices nearby, and start ups including Zillow itself have their headquarters there. 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 boom has been good for Seattle's economy, which has experienced years of steady job growth, low unemployment and, unlike much of the country, strong wage gains. But it has also become a far less affordable place to live. Rents in Seattle now rival those in Boston and New York, and home prices are rising faster there than in any other big city. Amazon says it has contributed more than 40 million to affordable housing projects in the city, as part of obtaining approval for its plans . Whichever city wins the HQ2 sweepstakes will enjoy one big advantage over Seattle: advance warning. Aaron Terrazas, a Zillow economist who led the rent analysis, said Amazon's growth caught Seattle by surprise, and the city struggled to build enough housing to accommodate the influx of young, affluent tech workers. Whichever city is chosen, Mr. Terrazas said, needs to move quickly to build. "What's so important is once a city is selected that they start to get ahead of the curve," Mr. Terrazas said. So far, however, cities have been focused mostly on attracting Amazon in the first place. City and state governments have rolled out the red carpet for the company, offering tax incentives and other inducements. But the public response has been more lukewarm, particularly in cities where rising housing costs have already led to concerns about affordability and gentrification. A recent Elon University poll of residents in the finalist cities found that while relatively few residents outright oppose Amazon moving to their city, only 43 percent strongly supported such a move. Residents in many cities said they were concerned that Amazon's arrival would increase the cost of living and opposed offering special incentives to attract the company. In Nashville, the debate over HQ2 has gotten caught up in a broader discussion of gentrification, race and the consequences of growth. Residents long described Nashville as a small town disguised as a big city. But over the last decade, the city's tourism industry has taken off, and some of those tourists liked Nashville enough to stay. For years, the Nashville metropolitan area grew by more than 100 residents per day, with many of them moving into newly built downtown apartment complexes. As in other cities that have experienced such booms, the growth has led to tensions. Longtime residents, many of them African American, have been displaced, and the city's homeless population has grown. A recent study commissioned by the mayor's office found that the city had lost 18,000 affordable housing units since 2000. That gap could grow to 31,000 units by 2025 if current trends continue without taking Amazon into account. "There are many neighborhoods in Nashville where the fight is lost," said James Fraser, a Vanderbilt University professor who has been active in the city's affordable housing movement. Adriane Harris, who leads housing policy for the Nashville mayor's office , said concerns about gentrification were legitimate. But she said there were two sides to the affordability equation: housing costs and income. Nashville's tourism economy depends heavily on low wage service workers. The promise of HQ2 is that it could be the foundation of a new, more lucrative industry. "If we're only addressing housing, then I don't think we're getting to the root of the issue," Ms. Harris said. "Wage growth is critical in this conversation." Affordable housing groups, however, worry that current Nashville residents won't be, for the most part, the beneficiaries of the high paying jobs that Amazon promises. Fabian Bedne, a Nashville City Council member, said the city should ask the company to help mitigate its impact, perhaps by financing affordable housing programs. Fabian Bedne, a Nashville city council member, said that as part of a tax deal, Amazon should help mitigate the impact of its arrival. "People don't want to sign a suicide pact," he said. Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York Times "We welcome technology, we welcome great jobs to the city, and I think people would even welcome Amazon, but it would have to be a trade off there," Mr. Bedne said. "People don't want to sign a suicide pact." Jenny Schuetz, a Brookings Institution economist who has studied housing policy, said cities would be wise to start planning for HQ2 even before Amazon announced its decision, which is expected this year. The good news, Ms. Schuetz said, is that the steps cities should be taking to prepare for Amazon are largely the steps they should be taking anyway, like improving transit systems and easing regulations that make it hard to build in the places people want to live. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Hulu surprised "Veronica Mars" fans at ComicCon on Friday by releasing the show's eight episode fourth season a week early. Such instant gratification hasn't been the norm for "Marshmallows," the nickname given to longtime devotees of that Southern California noir. Through three ratings challenged seasons on UPN and CW beginning in 2004, and one Kickstarter funded movie in 2014, its creator, Rob Thomas, and his cast have maintained its continuity remarkably well. But the time between installments has made it difficult to keep everything straight. During its network run, "Veronica Mars" was two shows at once: an ultra hip, modern day Nancy Drew, full of self contained mysteries cracked by the prodigious daughter of a private eye, and a sun scorched procedural in the tradition of "Chinatown" and "The Long Goodbye," revealing the sordid underbelly of a seaside town. With the movie and the new Hulu season, however, Thomas no longer had to worry about appealing to a more general audience. Season 4 jettisons case of the week episodes to tell one complete story about a series of bombings that turns the city of Neptune into a less than ideal spring break destination. The good news is, it's possible to dive right into the fourth season cold. But the series does make reference to events dating back to the beginning, so it's better to know the basics. Here's where all the relevant players stood heading into the new season: Through her last two years of high school and most of her first in college, sleuthing was a sideline in Veronica's life, an unofficial extension of her father's business as a private investigator. Nine years later, in the movie, she shelved an offer from a prestigious New York law firm and returned to Neptune to defend Logan, her on again off again boyfriend, from a murder charge. She ultimately opted to stay home and take over the family business, Mars Investigations, fighting the corruption that roils her town. The two defining cases in her life both happened in the first season: The murder of her best friend, Lilly Kane, which was pinned to her boyfriend's philandering movie star dad, and her own drugging and rape at a party, which takes longer than a season to solve. A World's Greatest Dad contender several seasons running, Keith lost his job as Neptune's police chief after botching the Lilly Kane case, but he stuck around as a private investigator. His daughter's prodigious talent was a source of pride and concern during her student years, but he has happily served as Veronica's partner (and subordinate) ever since she left the nest. He is also recovering from a nasty car crash. Veronica's best friend at Neptune High, Wallace has been her partner in fighting crime from the beginning. But he has been pushed ever so gradually to the margins over time, as Cindy Mackenzie, known as Mac, a computer hacker and premium wiseacre, has filled the same role. Mac isn't in the new season, which would seem to give Wallace an opening. But he has settled into a coaching job at the high school and didn't figure much into the movie. Although he is the leader of the PCHers, a biker gang that terrorizes the locals, Weevil has always had a soft spot for Veronica, who is similarly marginalized in a moneyed community. In the movie, Weevil's heroic attempt to shield a rich driver from bikers resulted in a bullet to the chest and a false accusation of assault. He returned to the criminal life after Mars Investigations cleared his name, though, despite having a wife and child at home. The popular kids at Neptune High were called the 09ers, and Dick Casablancas has always been the ultimate 09er: A rich, bullying, obnoxious surfer dude, redeemable only in relation to his criminal father; his gold digging stepmother; and his troubled brother, Beaver, who committed two of the show's most terrible atrocities before killing himself. His frat boy antics followed Veronica to college and beyond, but he has lately become more of an affable doofus in the vein of Hansen's "Party Down" character. Dick and Beaver's unctuous father, known as Big Dick, who made his millions in the real estate business, appeared only a few times on the show's second and third seasons, just long enough to flee S.E.C. agents on fraud charges. He eventually turned himself in and returns in Season 4 with suspicious plans for Neptune's revitalization. Not even a SoCal beach town is immune from the Irish mob, apparently. The Mars family has foiled these hapless gangsters more than once Keith put five of them behind bars but they're back for more. Since Neptune ran Keith out of office over the Lilly Kane investigation, the position of sheriff has generally fallen to contemptible dummies, most notably the now deceased Don Lamb ( Michael Muhney ), who scoffed at Veronica's morning after attempt to report her rape, and his brother, Dan Lamb ( Jerry O'Connell ), who replaced him in the movie. There's a new sheriff on the Neptune bomber case, and the bar is low. The one police department non idiot is Leo D'Amato. His flirtatious relationship with Veronica led to heartbreak and betrayal in the first season when she got him suspended from his job and broke off their brief romance in order to be with Logan. He remained good humored and forgiving about it, periodically helping her in later seasons and popping up as a San Diego police detective in the movie. Another Neptune private eye, the morally elastic Vinnie constantly homes in on Mars Investigations business: When Keith and Veronica drop a case, he's there to pick it up. When Keith runs for Sheriff, he finds his way onto the ballot. He has redeemed his sleazy behavior in key moments, however, teaming up with the Marses to catch Steve Guttenberg 's second season villain and saving Veronica from a Fitzpatrick trap. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It's been proven repeatedly: Artists have a finger on the pulse of a city's creative landscape. As part of DoublePlus, a series in which lesser known choreographers are selected by their more experienced peers, Gibney Dance continued that nurturing spirit on Thursday at the Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center with a split bill programmed by Jon Kinzel and featuring Stuart Shugg and Anna Azrieli. At the start of "Dear Washing Machine, Long Night," Mr. Shugg, a lucid dancer with scrupulous technique, contrasts precision with weight and weightlessness. The first to take the stage, he holds his arms straight but loose enough to swing, and tips his torso forward and back. As he skims along the surface of momentum, all the while a picture of serenity and meticulous footwork, he tightens a hand into a fist and presses his knuckles on the floor. Leaning on it, he performs a leapfrog jump. Mr. Shugg has taken a lot from Trisha Brown, with whom he dances. After Hadar Ahuvia and T. J. Spaur join in, the pendulum motion of the movement loses its urgency, and it's increasingly hard to know what Mr. Shugg has to say for himself. Apart from some promising moments in which the dancers explore their body weight by leaning onto one another's arms, "Dear Washing Machine" never really evolves. In "Averaging," Ms. Azrieli explores the familiar or the humdrum, which to her means an arabesque penchee, in which a dancer extends a leg and leans forward. That comes later in this sultry dance. At first, she mirrors Talya Epstein in a sequence of full bodied undulations as three others Evvie Allison, Megan Kendzior and Katy Telfer, wearing Connor Voss's winning terry cloth dresses wind their way around the stage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The icy rock that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past on New Year's Day is coming into focus. On Thursday, the mission team released the sharpest picture of the 21 mile long body known officially as 2014 MU69 and nicknamed Ultima Thule. Consisting of two roundish lobes that are fused together, it is believed to be an almost pristine leftover from the earliest days of the solar system, more than 4.5 billion years ago. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The spacecraft took the picture when it was 4,200 miles from Ultima Thule, just seven minutes before its closest approach. From this angle, the shadows are more apparent, revealing a deep depression on the smaller lobe. This could be a crater, a pit that collapsed or an area that was blown out when gases escaped from the interior long ago. Scientists also can better resolve light and dark patterns on the surface, including a particularly bright collar where the two lobes connect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
As New York City entered Phase 2 of reopening this week, thousands of real estate agents across the city returned to work, but the business of listing and showing properties has taken on a series of pandemic protocols designed to keep brokers and their clients safe. Many agents had already adopted some of these practices in mid March, when the coronavirus arrived in New York and much of the real estate industry went on pause. There will be no open houses where potential buyers or renters can just drop in unannounced, and in scheduled showings, brokers will clean before and after each visitor, as well as discourage clients from touching any surfaces and provide access to hand sanitizers. Virtual tours have become the norm and will likely continue. As of Monday, real estate brokerages have been deemed essential businesses and like the other industries reopening during Phase 2, the state has recommended a series of best practices. The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) has issued its own set of guidelines to its members to ensure the safety of employees and clients in the field. In addition to the usual forms that a broker might ask a potential buyer or seller to sign, many agents may also ask a client to sign a coronavirus liability form and fill out a health screening questionnaire. The real estate board also urges members to conduct in person showings only in vacant or unoccupied properties in other words, only when the seller isn't home. Before Monday, Jason Haber, an associate broker at Warburg Realty, hadn't been in an apartment other than his own since March 10. For three months, he declined new showing opportunities even virtual ones and instead focused on checking in with his existing clientele, going so far as to help some of them organize various Covid 19 relief projects. He did, however, close contracts for spaces that had already been seen by clients pre pandemic. Like many agents, Mr. Haber isn't worried about returning to work. He's itching to begin showing properties again and is currently sitting on 12 residential listings, a mix of rentals and sales, all of which are coming online in the next few weeks. He said that he had never had so many on the market at once. Brokers agreed that the focus on client comfort and safety is more important than ever, but during Phase 2 and possibly beyond it, the consideration of everyone involved in a single listing may be a little tricky to handle. For in person showings, agents will not only have to communicate with the buyer and seller, but also building managers or co op and condo boards, as many buildings will have their own rules and coronavirus protocols. For the foreseeable future, virtual walk throughs will probably remain a popular option. As the only way to do business during the pandemic, many agencies touted them as the wave of the future. Candace Adams, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New York, New England and Westchester Properties, said in person showings will eventually become the second and third step, not the first. "Everyone's time is so valuable today," she said. "Virtual tours will be a forever thing for us going forward." Sotheby's International Realty has featured 3 D tours and virtual reality experiences on its website since 2016. Cathy Taub, a top Sotheby's broker in Manhattan, said she has been getting more questions about virtual tours than ever before. "Real estate has always been eye candy," she said, "but during this time when we've all been sheltering at home, people have been browsing nonstop." Even developers realize the benefit of boosting their online presence. Before leasing began, Sam Charney, of Charney Companies, and Nicholas Silvers, of Tavros Holdings, had already begun working with Listing 3 D, a start up used by Corcoran, Douglas Elliman and Compass, among other agencies, to develop an online marketing tool for The Dime, a rental building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Plans to welcome potential clients on April 1 were pushed back to May 18 because of the coronavirus, but both men now see the timing as fortuitous. "I think our eyes were opened a little bit to what the market looks like due to Covid," said Mr. Charney. "For a rental, we wouldn't have thought to do virtual tours because we were originally trying to attract locals, but recently we've seen a lot of interest from people out of state and other countries." The Dime this week opened its on site leasing office, allowing prospective renters to schedule socially distanced tours. Those who first previewed the building online can now walk through to feel out what Mr. Silvers described as an easy to use and touchless experience: doors are outfitted with keyless entry technology; tenants have access to a smart package room and a hands free storage option, as well as a video intercom viewed through their smartphones. Practicing safety during in person showings is crucial for engaging with clientele, but the same goes for returning to work in real estate offices across the city. Corcoran, for example, bought a robot and trained a receptionist to test the temperature of employees in its Bridgehampton office when Long Island entered Phase 2 on June 9. Pamela Liebman, chief executive of the company, said they may use the robot in Corcoran's Manhattan and Brooklyn offices in the future. For now, the company is providing PPE and also tracking how many people enter the office. To limit the number of people in the office, staff key cards were deactivated and agents must sign into an app before heading into work. Bess Freedman, the chief executive of Brown Harris Stevens, said the key to reopening was "harm minimization." Ms. Freedman, a survivor of the coronavirus, said her agency was mourning the recent passing of one of its top agents due to Covid 19, Sal Capozucca, but she also spoke of the near future of real estate with optimism. Like many agency heads, she believes all the pent up demand from the weekslong pause will make for a strong market in the late summer and fall. "Obviously we can't expect this year to be anything like it would have been without the pandemic, but given all that's happening in our world, it could pan out to be OK," she said. "And I'm OK with an OK year." 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 |
Credit...Erik Tanner for The New York Times OAKLAND, Calif. When Sundar Pichai succeeded Larry Page as the head of Google's parent company in December, he was handed a bag of problems: Shareholders had sued the company, Alphabet, over big financial packages handed to executives accused of misconduct. An admired office culture was fraying. Most of all, antitrust regulators were circling. On Tuesday, the Justice Department accused Google of being "a monopoly gatekeeper of the internet," one that uses anticompetitive tactics to protect and strengthen its dominant hold over web search and search advertising. Google, which has generated vast profits through a recession, a pandemic and earlier investigations by government regulators on five continents, now faces the first truly existential crisis in its 22 year history. The company's founders, Mr. Page and Sergey Brin, have left the defense to the soft spoken Mr. Pichai, who has worked his way up the ranks over 16 years with a reputation for being a conscientious caretaker rather than an impassioned entrepreneur. Mr. Pichai, a former product manager, may seem an unlikely candidate to lead his company's fight with the federal government. But if the tech industry's bumptious history with antitrust enforcement is any lesson, a caretaker who has reluctantly stepped into the spotlight might be preferable to a charismatic leader born to it. Mr. Pichai, 48, is expected to make the case as he has for some time that the company is not a monopoly even though it has a 92 percent global market share of internet searches. Google is good for the country, so goes the corporate message, and has been a humble economic engine not a predatory job killer. "He has to come off as an individual who is trying to do the right thing not only for his company but broader society," said Paul Vaaler, a business and law professor at the University of Minnesota. "If he comes off as evasive, petulant and a smart aleck, this is going to be a killer in front of the court and the court of public opinion." Google declined to make Mr. Pichai available for an interview. In an email to employees on Tuesday, he urged Google employees to stay focused on their work so that users will continue to use its products not because they have to but because they want to. "Scrutiny is nothing new for Google, and we look forward to presenting our case," Mr. Pichai wrote. "I've had Googlers ask me how they can help, and my answer is simple: Keep doing what you're doing." Bill Gates, who was chief executive of Microsoft in the last big technology antitrust case brought by the Justice Department two decades ago, came across as combative and evasive in depositions, reinforcing the view that the company was a win at all costs bully. Mr. Gates said last year that the lawsuit had been such a "distraction" that he "screwed up" the transition to mobile phone software and ceded the market to Google. Mr. Page dealt with impending antitrust scrutiny with detachment, spending his time on futuristic technology projects instead of huddling with lawyers. Even as the European Union handed down three fines against Google for anticompetitive practices, Mr. Page barely addressed the matter publicly. On a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, officials at the Justice Department declined to reveal whether they had spoken to Mr. Page during its investigation. In its complaint, the Justice Department, along with 11 states, said Google had foreclosed competition in the search market by striking deals with handset manufacturers, including Apple, and mobile carriers to block rivals from competing effectively. "For the sake of American consumers, advertisers and all companies now reliant on the internet economy, the time has come to stop Google's anticompetitive conduct and restore competition," the complaint said. Google said that the case was "deeply flawed" and that the Justice Department was relying on "dubious antitrust arguments." Google is also the target of an antitrust inquiry by state attorneys general looking into its advertising technology and web search. And Europe continues to investigate the company over its data collection even after the three fines since 2017, totaling nearly 10 billion. At Mr. Pichai's side are senior executives who are also inclined to strike an accommodating tone. He has surrounded himself with other serious, buttoned up career Google managers who bring a lot of boring to the table. The point person for handling the case is Kent Walker, Google's chief legal officer and head of global affairs. Though Mr. Walker, who worked at the Justice Department as an assistant U.S. attorney and joined Google in 2006, oversees many of the company's messiest issues, he rarely makes headlines a testament, current and former colleagues said, to his lawyerly pragmatism. Wilson Sonsini has represented Google from the company's inception and helped it defend itself in a Federal Trade Commission investigation into its search business. In 2013, the agency chose not to bring charges. Regardless of the legal argument for prosecuting Google as a monopoly, the case may shape the public perception of the company long after it has been resolved. Until now, Google's public posture has been a shrug. Mr. Pichai has said that the antitrust scrutiny is nothing new and that, if anything, the company welcomes the look into its business practices. Google has argued that it competes in rapidly changing markets, and that its dominance can evaporate quickly with the emergence of new rivals. "Google operates in highly competitive and dynamic global markets, in which prices are free or falling and products are constantly improving," Mr. Pichai said in his opening remarks to a House antitrust panel in July. "Google's continued success is not guaranteed." But shortly after he became Google's chief executive in 2015, Mr. Pichai displayed his tendency for pragmatism when he buried the hatchet with Microsoft. The two companies agreed to stop complaining to regulators about each other. Early in his tenure running Google, Mr. Pichai was reluctant to press its case in Washington a job that one of his predecessors, Eric Schmidt, had reveled in. Mr. Schmidt, a big donor in Democratic politics, was a frequent visitor to the White House during the Obama presidency and served on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In 2018, Google declined to send Mr. Pichai to testify at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Annoyed senators left an empty seat for the company's representative next to executives from Facebook and Twitter. (Mr. Page was also invited to testify, but there was never any expectation from people within the company that he would.) Since then, Mr. Pichai has made frequent trips to Washington, testified at other congressional hearings and held meetings with President Trump. Microsoft's long battle with the government has also influenced how Google plans to wage its antitrust fight. Many Google executives believe Microsoft was too combative with the Justice Department, bringing the company to a standstill. For most of the last decade, even as Google has dealt with antitrust investigations in the United States and Europe, the company has continued expanding into new businesses and acquire companies, such as the fitness tracker maker Fitbit last year. Now the bill for that growth may have come due. And like it or not, it has been left to Mr. Pichai. Mr. Page, who is a year younger than Mr. Pichai and who Forbes says is worth 65 billion, is pursuing other interests. Mr. Pichai "hasn't had to deal with anything of this magnitude," said Michael Cusumano, a professor and deputy dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. "He has to face the government. He has no choice." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Astronomers found an intermediate black hole not too big, not too small that sheds light on how the universe was assembled in the dark. Seven hundred and forty million years ago, a star disappeared in a shriek of X rays. In 2006 a pair of satellites, NASA's Chandra X ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's X ray Multi Mission (XMM Newton, for short), detected that shriek as a faint spot of radiation coming from a far off corner of the Milky Way. To Dacheng Lin, an astronomer at the University of New Hampshire who hunts black holes, those signals were the trademark remains of a star that had been swallowed by a black hole: an arc of leftover fire, like drool on the lips of the ultimate cosmic maw. Such events tend to be perpetrated by supermassive black holes like the one that occupies the center of our own Milky Way. But this X ray signal was not coming from the center of our or any other galaxy. Rather the X rays, the fading Cheshire smile of a black hole, perhaps were coming from the edge of a disk shaped galaxy about 740 million light years from Earth, in the direction of Aquarius but far beyond the stars that make up that constellation. That meant that Dr. Lin had every reason to suspect that he had hooked one of the rarest and most sought creatures in the cosmic bestiary an intermediate mass black hole. The word "intermediate" might be a misnomer. If Dr. Lin was right, he (or, more to the point, that unlucky star) had stumbled upon an invisible sinkhole with the gravitational suction of 50,000 suns. He is the lead author of a paper, published in March in Astrophysical Journal Letters, that describes a cosmic ambulance chase. Black holes are the unwelcome consequence of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the warping of space time by mass and energy, much as a heavy sleeper sags a mattress. Too much mass in one place causes space time to sag beyond its limit, trapping even light on a one way tunnel to eternity. Einstein disliked the idea, but astronomers have discovered that the universe is littered with black holes. Many are the remains of massive stars that collapsed after burning through their thermonuclear trust funds. Sometimes they collide, rippling space time and rattling antennas like the LIGO gravitational wave detectors. Nobody knows where these holes came from or how they get so big. Two years ago Australian astronomers discovered a black hole that was 20 billion times more massive than the sun, gorging itself back when the universe was only a couple billion years old. Astronomers for years have sought the "missing link" in this line of mythological sounding monsters: black holes "only" thousands or hundreds of thousands of times more massive than the sun. "Intermediate mass black holes are indeed fascinating, and in some sense these are becoming the frontier of black hole studies," Daniel Holz, a University of Chicago astrophysicist who was not part of Dr. Lin's team, said in an email. "Why would the universe only make big and little black holes, and not ones in between? Goldilocks would not be pleased. What makes this particularly troubling for astronomers has to do with our origin stories." There is a suggestive correlation between the mass of a galaxy and the mass of the black hole in its center: The bigger the galaxy, the bigger its hole. This has led astronomers to a rough theory of how the universe gets built in the dark: Small galaxies with their "small" holes accrete into bigger and bigger assemblages of stars, with ever bigger black holes at the center of it all. Intermediate mass black holes, weighing hundreds or tens of thousands of solar masses, could be expected to anchor the centers of smaller dwarf galaxies. But as such they would be hard to find. We only notice black holes when they feed. Stellar size black holes call attention to themselves as they cannibalize their companions in double star systems. Their supergiant cousins feed at troughs at the centers of big galaxies. But intermediate black holes living in dwarf galaxies would normally find little to eat. "We could only find them when gas and dust fall onto them," said Natalie Webb, an astronomer at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulouse, France, a member of the XMM team and a co author of the paper. "When this happens, they shine less brightly than the supermassive black holes, but they are usually just as far away (if not further), so they are usually too faint for our observatories." In effect they are only visible when they swallow a star, an event that occurs only once every 10,000 years in any particular galaxy, Dr. Webb said. So Dr. Lin may have been lucky indeed. The new source, which his team named 3XMM J215022.4 055108, would be only the second good candidate known. By coincidence, astronomers using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea had recorded an outburst of light from that same spot in 2005. That was perhaps the first fatal bite. Moreover, the knot of stars resembled precisely what astronomers thought the core of a small galaxy would look like if it had been swallowed by bigger one. It fit the notion that galaxies are assembled by mergers. "This is good news, as it was thought that it is likely that intermediate mass black holes are found in dwarf galaxies," Dr. Webb said. Back in the day, the black hole had been the center of its own little dwarf galaxy. Now it was an empty nester, most of its stars gone. And it was on the way to an eventual marriage with the bigger black hole at the center of Gal1. "Therefore, the new observations confirm the source as one of the best intermediate mass black hole candidates," Dr. Lin wrote in the recent paper. This is only one of a few good candidates for the missing link black holes. Another one, HLX 1, was discovered in 2009 by many of the same astronomers on the edge of a distant galaxy called ESO 243 49. It, too, is in a small cluster of stars that looks like the remains of a dwarf core, and weighs in at about 20,000 solar masses. In the case of HLX 1, however, the X rays seem to be coming from an accretion disk, the doughnut of hot, doomed material swirling outside the edge of a black hole material that is periodically ripped from a star orbiting the black hole. Dr. Webb, who was the lead discoverer of HLX 1, said, "The star keeps coming back to a similar position and a bit more mass is ripped off and falls onto the black hole," she said. "We have now seen eight X ray flares from HLX 1 and have observed it with many different types of telescope." The main difference with the new missing link candidate, "is that our object is tearing a star apart, providing strong evidence that it is a massive black hole," Dr. Lin said in a statement released by the Space Telescope Science Institute. Left unanswered is where such gigantic vortices of hungry nothing come from. The universe seems to come with some assembly required, and black holes are key, but astronomers are still struggling to put the parts list together. Astronomers have a pretty good sense of how "ordinary" black holes, three to 100 times more massive than the sun, result from the collapse and explosions of massive stars. But there has not been enough time in the history of the universe for such black holes to grow millions or billions of times bigger into the supermassive black holes we see today. "They must have formed from something else," Dr. Webb said, namely, intermediate mass black holes. Such holes would be dragged together as their home galaxies coalesced into ever bigger galaxies. Dr. Lin agreed that it was "popular" to believe that supermassive black holes can form from intermediate mass black holes, dragged together as their home galaxies collide and merge. Less certain is where these medium class black holes too massive to result from the collapse of stars as we know them today came from. One possibility, Dr. Lin said, was that they were created by runaway mergers of massive stars in star clusters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
What does a night in one of New York's new micro apartments look like? Last week, the first tenants moved into the city's first micro apartment development on East 27th Street. I did, too, for one night. Tucked into a New York City Housing Authority site, on a spot between First and Second Avenues that was once a parking lot, and flanked by linden and honeylocust trees and a small plaza lined with park benches, the nine story building, with 55 apartments between 260 and 360 square feet, is an elegant design by nArchitects, and built by Monadnock Development and the Lower East Side People's Mutual Housing Association. It's also adorable, a compressed vision of the city in both ethos and mien. Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, nArchitects' founding principals, imagined it as four slender stepped towers, like a mini skyline. Carmel Place, formerly known as My Micro NY, was the winner of the small space/tiny home competition sponsored by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development in 2013. For the last three years, its flourishes and features the modular units prefabricated in a factory in the old Brooklyn Navy Yard and stacked like Legos on site; its capacious common areas and windowed hallways; the humane and lovely elements of the apartments, like 8 foot windows and nearly 10 foot ceilings have been on display, at first in renderings, and finally, in a model apartment that was tricked out last winter. For housing advocates, the architectural community and urban policy makers, the building is a trial balloon for a medley of themes: the changing demographic of a city with inadequate housing (according to the NYU Furman Center, a third of the city's households are single people); a culture eager to make a smaller environmental footprint by paring down belongings and sharing resources; and what has become a unicorn in this city, affordable housing. Carmel Place is no affordable housing utopia, but it's a start. While the lion's share 32 of the units are market rate, with monthly rents ranging from 2,446 to 3,195, eight have been set aside for formerly homeless veterans, and 14 units are designated affordable, with monthly rents from 914 to 1,873, and for which 60,000 people applied in a lottery. One apartment has been set aside for the superintendent. Fifty percent of the building is already leased. It's a nice place for a sleepover. The 302 square foot unit I stayed in rents for 2,670 a month, furnished, which includes convertible and small space objects from Resource Furniture. That company's sofa wall bed combination called Penelope (my destiny?), made in Italy by Clei, is the linchpin of the space: a Murphy style bed, surrounded by deep cabinets, that unfolds over a diminutive charcoal gray sofa. The aesthetic vibe of the apartment is hipster Scandinavian, a state that had been achieved by Jacqueline Schmidt, the director of design at Ollie, a company that has embellished Carmel Place with housewares, furniture and services, from dry cleaning to "unique community engagement opportunities" in other words, mixers, day trips and other "curated events" geared to well employed millennials (urban renters, in Ollie's parlance). There were knobbly succulents in small ceramic biomorphic planters with leather straps hung on a wall (succulents are good pets for small scale living, since they don't need much attention, as Ms. Schmidt pointed out); black and white prints of endangered animals; and voluminous canvas baskets set here and there, to hide the sofa pillows and other detritus when you unpack your bed for the night. There was also a white Parsons style table, also from Resource Furniture, that extends (with leaves) to seat 10. The leaves live in the large front hall closet. The kitchen is, proportionally, massive. With a 27 square foot counter, its total zone, if you count the opposite wall, is 84 square feet, more than a quarter of the apartment's entire volume. There are a two burner stove top, a very large microwave and a toaster oven, but no conventional oven, which concerned Ginia, one of five colleagues I invited to dinner and to road test the apartment. "If groovy millennials are all about cooking and Instagramming the vegan cheesecakes they are making," she said later, "how do you live that life with a two burner stove?" Feh, countered Julia, another of my colleagues. Very few people living alone use their whole stove for cooking or fill their full size refrigerators, she said. "Many of them use their ovens to store shoes or sweaters." In any event, I ordered in, pizzas and fennel salads from Motorino on East 12th Street. Vivian brought flowers, in case someone was moved to Instagram. I hankered for candles, and flicked off the overhead lights. The apartment comes with recessed ceiling and undercabinet lights on dimmers, along with a nifty task light you tap on and off, and a tough looking standing lamp with a bare bulb, chosen by Ms. Schmidt. Still, there was no way to read comfortably in bed. Ms. Schmidt said she had been bothered by that deficiency, too, so she's ordered LED lights you'll be able to clip to the side of the cabinets on either side of the bed. We could have sat eight; 10 would have been pushing it. As it was, there wasn't room to open the fridge or push back the chairs these were solid Italian folding chairs with a slim profile that fit in the closet; you get four with your furnished apartment. We didn't really notice, being well exercised by office gossip and shared work trauma. My guests were delighted by the Penelope contraption, and plopped down on the bed to test its mettle. They enthused over the spare decor and shiny surfaces. Easy to hose down, opined Alexandra and Julia. "It is the working mother's dreamscape!" wrote Ginia a few days later. "Micro apartments take me away 300 Lego free square feet! But where do you put the books?" The best part of the evening, to my mind, was being alone again, after whisking away the pizza boxes and the bottles, shrinking the table back to its slim desk size, and unfolding my namesake bed. I killed the lights, slid open the window and raised the opaque shade, so I could see a linden tree from my nest. As I drifted off to sleep, I imagined a life swept clean of my grubby, needy possessions and instead envisioned a new, improved one that was sparely accessorized by Ms. Schmidt's resilient and independent succulents, neutral art prints and soft baskets. So lightly encumbered, I would spring easily from my tasteful and tidy micro unit into the cultural soup of the city. Which is the point, of course. I thought, too, of the canon of the studio apartment from the dreary bed sitters housing the heroines of Anita Brookner and Barbara Pym novels to Laurie Colwin's cozy nest in the West Village, where she hunkered down happily, alone with an eggplant and a chipped Meissen dish; and Quentin Crisp's gothic and lordly squalor on East Third Street. And I worried. Perhaps this apartment is too good, too soft, for the demographic it purports to address. How will they mature in a friction free environment? It irritated me that a 25 year old would soon be lolling in my bed, or in the lounge chairs on the roof deck, after having fired up the commercial grill there, and after a long day of networking in some shared work space, or returning home from a day's surfing in the Rockaways, tucking his surfboard into the space Mr. Bunge and Ms. Hoang designed for it. Carmel Place's rent includes not just internet and Wi Fi, but a weekly tidying service and a monthly deep clean, along with dog walking, dry cleaning pickup and any number of customized errands through an app called Hello Alfred, all organized by Ollie. Ms. Schmidt said her company is about to announce more building alliances that will allow Carmel Place residents to avail themselves of more and more thermal pools, yoga studios and barbecue pits all over town. "You will meet with your home manager to say what you want for your home experience," Ms. Schmidt said. "Maybe you want your slippers by the door, or your towels folded a certain way." As it happens, it's not just the market rate tenants who will be coddled. Ollie has donated its services to the veterans, and offered them at cost to those in the affordable units. The single state itself is also now aspirational, with boosters like Sasha Cagen, the author behind the quirkyalone blog and book; Rebecca Traister, a writer at large at New York Magazine and the author of "All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation"; and Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology and the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. A decade ago, Mr. Klinenberg set out to write a book tentatively called "Alone in America" that would chronicle the rise of single adults in the United States according to a Pew study published in 2011, only 51 percent of adults 18 and older are married (compared with 72 percent in 1960) and explore themes of isolation and loneliness. What he found instead was that for the overwhelming majority of single people, living alone meant being social. His 2012 book, "Going Solo," examined the ways contemporary urban singletons, as he called them, were finding community and generally having a blast. "People live alone together in neighborhoods that are full of people just like them," he said recently. "You can name those neighborhoods, in cities like Chicago or San Francisco or New York," he added, "because those are the places you visit to have the best time. It's where the bars and restaurants and galleries are. It's where you want to be." In his book, Mr. Klinenberg traces the history of single living in bohemian enclaves like Greenwich Village, where at the turn of the 20th century, you could live alone without stigma. The male pioneers were followed by single women, who had been liberated by work and evolving social norms; some were buoyed by the ideals of "the free and independent republic of Washington Square," as Marcel Duchamp and friends famously proclaimed from the arch. Developers were already building so called bachelor apartments there. I was no Laurie Colwin (I don't recall owning a pot) and anyway, the Korean market on Bleecker Street was my cafeteria. It was 1984; on weekends, the young men who came downtown to showboat kept me awake until 5 a.m., but I didn't care. When I wasn't cursing them, I loved watching the performance. The kitchen and bathroom windows looked out onto a grimy air shaft, and right into my neighbors' apartments, so at night I did a lot of ducking, being too slack to install a shade or even tack up a sheet. If you closed the bathroom door, you'd be stuck until a PATH train rumbled past and shook it free. (My first night in the apartment, I spent two hours trapped in there, having closed the door firmly to clean the black and white herringbone tile floor.) Mostly, my tiny apartment was a launching pad, and I was thrilled to be living alone. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. "Stop Killing Us!" Three words, scrawled on a sign held by a 3 year old black boy at a Tampa protest against police brutality. Messages don't get any clearer than that. Yet to judge by the days of protests sweeping the country, this message still hasn't gotten through. Last week it was George Floyd, who died while restrained by a police officer in the middle of a Minneapolis street in daylight, though he posed no physical threat. His alleged offense? Passing a counterfeit bill to buy a pack of cigarettes. Before him it was Breonna Taylor, an emergency room technician in Louisville, Ky., shot dead in her own apartment by officers who used a battering ram to burst through her front door. Before Ms. Taylor it was Laquan McDonald. And Eric Garner. And Michael Brown. And Sandra Bland. And Tamir Rice. And Walter Scott. And Alton Sterling. And Philando Castile. And Botham Jean. And Amadou Diallo. The list goes on and on, and on and on. Black Americans brutalized or killed by law enforcement officers, who rarely if ever face consequences for their actions. Derek Chauvin, the officer accused of kneeling on Mr. Floyd's neck until he was dead, had 18 prior complaints filed against him. In the name of all these men and women and countless more, this is why thousands of Americans have taken to the streets to express a rage born of despair. Despair that their government has failed to provide one of the most fundamental protections in the Constitution: the right to life, and to not be deprived of that life without due process of law. Stop killing us. What the protesters want is a country where bad cops are fired rather than coddled. They want a country where cops who beat demonstrators aren't protected by their unions, but instead lose their jobs. They want a country where the police protect the right of their fellow Americans to gather in public and seek redress for their grievances, rather than one where they are rammed with SUVs. They want a country where federal troops aren't used against a peaceful protest to facilitate a photo op. A vast majority of these protests have been peaceful. But not all. Where they are not, police officers are often the target of that violence. Officers may feel left with no good options in that moment, but how they respond does matter. Because it's sometimes the police themselves who make matters worse by instigating physical confrontations, manhandling elderly people and pepper spraying children. And wherever violence has broken out whether committed by law enforcement, outside agitators or rioters and looters it has provided an excuse to shift the debate away from the sources of the original despair. Riots are "socially destructive and self defeating," Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, during an earlier spasm of unrest. In the same passage he wrote, "It is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots." "In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard," Dr. King said. "As long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again." More than half a century later, justice is still being postponed. Racial inequality remains rampant in wealth, housing, employment, education and enforcement of the law. This is not news, but it is the responsibility of all those in power to recognize and fix it. As President Lyndon Johnson's Kerner Commission found after studying the inequality at the root of the 1960s riots: "White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it." Here are some steps to move the country toward a place where citizens don't live in fear of those charged with serving and protecting them: In departments with policies that sharply limit when, where and how police officers may use force, shootings and killings by the police are much lower. For instance, police officers should be required to try de escalation before resorting to the use of force. They should not be allowed to choke people. Officers should be required to stop other officers from using excessive force. When the police do use deadly force, the public should be able to know about it. That means getting rid of provisions like Section 50 a of New York's civil rights law, which prevents the release of police personnel and disciplinary records and allows bad officers to continue abusing their power with impunity. Police officers enjoy a web of protections against the consequences of their behavior on the job. From the legal doctrine of qualified immunity to state and local police indemnification laws, it is nearly impossible for a plaintiff to get any justice, even when an officer unquestionably violated his or her rights. Across the country, powerful police unions negotiate favorable contracts that shield the police from investigation and discourage citizens from bringing complaints. The contracts make it easier to hire, and harder to fire, officers with documented histories of bad behavior. Cities are under no obligation to agree to these terms, and they shouldn't. Following the beating of Rodney King and the Los Angeles riots in 1992, Congress empowered the Justice Department to oversee local police departments. That led to scores of investigations and long overdue reforms in places like Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo. But the federal government also has other tools. It can deny grants to police departments that fail to impose strict use of force policies or refuse to discipline officers who engage in misconduct. When you have a grenade launcher, even peaceful protesters look like enemy combatants. It's no surprise that as police departments have stocked up on military grade equipment, they have acted more aggressively. The Obama administration restricted the flow of certain types of equipment, but President Trump lifted those restrictions in 2017. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
On Tuesday, after the Alabama Senate voted to pass a bill that would ban almost all abortions in the state, the actress Busy Philipps felt compelled to take action. "Women deserve compassion and understanding in their personal health choices," Ms. Philipps, 39, said on Wednesday. "This is something a lot of people experience and go through in their lives, and it's a health care decision like many health care decisions." Just a week earlier she had opened up about her own abortion, at age 15, on her late night show, "Busy Tonight," in a plea to protect women's reproductive rights. Ms. Philipps, who is known for her roles on the TV shows "Dawson's Creek" and "Freaks and Geeks," wrote about the abortion in her memoir, "This Will Only Hurt a Little." "The statistic is one in four women will have an abortion before age 45," she said last Tuesday on the show, referring to a study that was published in the American Journal of Public Health. "That statistic sometimes surprises people, and maybe you're sitting there thinking, 'I don't know a woman who would have an abortion.' Well, you know me." Now, thousands of women have shared their own abortion stories online, many using the hashtag YouKnowMe. In a phone interview, Ms. Philipps discussed her motivations for speaking out, the response to her story and what comes next. What led you to talk about abortion on your show? Part of what I think was so successful in getting people motivated and men on board with the MeToo movement was hearing from women about their personal stories. Abortion has been, historically speaking, a very taboo subject that women have a hard time talking about publicly, because it's such a personal decision. The anti abortion people in this country are so vocal, and for all of those reasons I think women have remained silent. And I felt like, well, maybe there's actually value in sharing. We need to be as loud as they are, but with the truth. That's the only thing we have. For me it includes people standing up and saying, "I am that one in four." It doesn't matter why, when, or how old you were. "You know me, you like me, and I went through this." I think there's something super empowering about being able to shift the narrative and being able to have a ton of people say, "I've also gone through this thing." Before I spoke on my own show, I had read a story about an 11 year old rape victim in Ohio who was going to be forced to carry a pregnancy. I have a daughter who is the same age. I became physically ill thinking about the horror of that for that child. For those men in charge to decide that that collection of cells has more value than that child defies all logic. How did the comment you made on your show lead to your tweet on Tuesday calling for women to share their stories with the hashtag YouKnowMe? I don't understand hashtags that much. I never hashtag. Tina Fey, who doesn't have her own social media accounts and who's my executive producer, reached out to me. She said, "I think you hit on something, which is 'you know me.' It makes it very personal. I think you should think about starting that hashtag." It was the day after I had done the show. I felt overwhelmed already by the responses to my show. I had to think about it. Then, last night, I went to dinner with my girlfriends, and we were on our phones reading about the Alabama law. I told them about the hashtag and they said, "Just do it right now. This is the right time to do it." How do you feel about some of the negative reactions people have had to the comments you made on your show and the hashtag? I had some of the trolls hit me up, and a lot of people were like, "How could you be proud of this thing you have done?" I never said I was proud of it. It's a thing I experienced as a woman that many women in this country and around the world have experienced. I refuse to live in shame, and I refuse to hold on to something that I have no shame about. I don't know one woman who's had an abortion who has been like, "I can't wait, I'm so excited about this." I can't control that someone else feels that way about this. I believe they're wrong and, to be honest with you, it really has no effect on me at all. Not even for a second. In terms of followers on Instagram, if that's something you believe, and you believe a woman shouldn't decide with her doctor and herself what's right for her own body, you can go ahead and unfollow me. I don't need you. Men can be louder. I think they can be participatory and stand shoulder to shoulder with women, opposing these bills. My husband and I talked about it before I talked about it on my show. We talked about the possible repercussions. He and I both decided that anything negative about me that could come my way would be completely minuscule in comparison to the possible good that it could do for other people. What's your outlook on the future when it comes to reproductive rights? I do want everyone, myself included, to be hopeful that women will be able to have true equality in our society. I am hopeful of that, for our daughters. I am hopeful that we won't slide backwards, and that what we're seeing right now is the last dying grasp of old white men who are trying to uphold the patriarchy and hold on to their power in any way they can. I hope this is a real turning point, and from here on out, things will get better. It might get worse before gets better, but it's pretty bad right now. And I'm speaking from a place with so much privilege. This interview has been edited and condensed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
On Wednesday morning, Robert S. Mueller III made clear that he was done with this. He had spent two years on his investigation. There is a report. You can read it for free. You can download it to your Kindle. You can buy it with an introduction by Alan Dershowitz. Mr. Mueller, his body language practically shouted, did not do this for fun. But he did it. He put everything together. He was not going to come to your house and personally read it to you. Mr. Mueller's reservations, such as I can guess at them, are likely well founded. His testimony would be a circus. It would hurl him into the cable TV blab o sphere. His words would be spliced and tweaked and twisted in bad faith and maybe digitally altered on Facebook. But if he honestly believes there was nonpartisan value in investigating the integrity of our elections and of the presidency, then there are good reasons for him to detail out the findings where people will notice them: God bless Mr. Mueller for his quaint faith in his fellow citizens, but let's be honest. This is America. We wait for the movie, or the TV adaptation. After Mr. Mueller's appearance, cable news buzzed with a breaking story, long available to anyone with an internet connection, that Mr. Mueller had intimated the possibility that the president had obstructed justice. Democratic candidates who presumably at least have staff to read reports for them came out for impeachment proceedings. After Mr. Mueller submitted his report, he made the doomed assumption of many a longform journalist: That people would read his full work and draw conclusions then and only then. That allowed Attorney General William P. Barr to become the editor who writes the clickbait headline for all the browsers who never actually read the piece. You can choose not to tell your story in the format people actually pay attention to. You do not get to choose whether it will be told. If there's interest enough, as Mr. Mueller has now seen, it will be told for you, incompletely, selectively and to someone else's tastes. Fine, some Americans do read. Or they read analyses written by people who did do the reading. Yet even for these hardy print types, there's a power to images and voices on a screen. Look at the landscape of entertainment TV today. "The Handmaid's Tale," "Catch 22," "Outlander" all works based on volumes that are out there for the reading. It's human nature to want to see and hear a thing and to be moved by its actual appearance. No sooner had Mr. Mueller spoken than journalists (who, presumably, at least knew his report's conclusions already) began saying how "huge" it was. It's easy to ding them for marveling over something you'd hope they'd already read. But what was huge was that Mr. Mueller chose to emphasize it on camera. TV events concentrate attention and focus. It's true of the finale of "Game of Thrones." And it's true when the special counsel announces a statement out of the blue. Everything Mr. Mueller said on Wednesday was also true on Tuesday. But it was news on Wednesday. Because He Doesn't Want To There's a certain Groucho Marx, "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member" catch to how people receive public testimony. If you believe you have witnessed a wrong, the conscientious thing is to tell people about it. But the more eagerly and prolifically you tell, the easier for people to paint you as self aggrandizing or having an agenda. It's the James Comey factor. By saying, "I hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak to you in this manner," Mr. Mueller effectively de Comeyfied himself. It would be hard to cast Mr. Mueller as a camera thirsty Michael Avenatti type, though surely someone will try. He has a certain Joe Friday, just the facts affect that practically doesn't exist in this TV age, except for comic effect in figures like the stoic Capt. Holt of "Brooklyn Nine Nine." You will not mistake Mr. Mueller for a "Scandal" character. This does not make for great TV in the Hollywood sense. It probably reflects a mind set that made Mr. Mueller stubborn about, or oblivious to, how a TV culture would hijack his narrative. And that mind set is likely why he fears that "The Mueller Show," live before a congressional studio audience, would be a polarizing spectacle. But perversely, that makes him the best person to star in it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
From its founding a century ago, Aston Martin created cars meant to appeal to the sporting instincts of upper class Britons who appreciated their design, exclusivity and, perhaps, scarcity. Judging by today's models, which start at more than 115,000 and stretch to the brink of 300,000, the formula has proved durable. Aston Martins earned a reputation for being sexy, raffish and yet buttoned up like a panther in a three piece suit. Your mother wouldn't think them vulgar, and your broker would be envious. The Aston Martin name may sound aristocratic and double barreled, as the British would say, but Lionel Martin, who started the company in 1913 with Robert Bamford, had simply combined his surname with the name of his favorite hill climb near the English village of Aston Clinton. Despite its image of elegance, the marque barely survived its early years. Sales sputtered along for decades. The company produced fewer than 700 cars before World War II, a result of high prices and serial bankruptcies, and Aston had yet to establish its reputation on the track. Racing successes in Britain were steady, but premier league victories were fewer. Notable prewar results included a Le Mans class win in 1935. The modern history of Aston Martin starts with the 1947 purchase of the company by David Brown, an industrialist who was perhaps looking to ennoble himself after making a fortune in tractors. Those beasts of burden enabled him to finance the development of DB models the name is derived from his initials through the DB6 series. Recognition of the brand, at least in popular culture, took off in 1964 when the newest model co starred in "Goldfinger." Ian Fleming had put Agent 007 at the wheel of an Aston, though the casting credit must be shared with the film's producer, Albert Broccoli, whose vision of James Bond included a DB5. Sean Connery's portrayal of Bond played a role in the film's romantic conquests, to be sure, but the DB5's sex appeal certainly helped matters. The present happy state of Aston Martin is doubly remarkable for a marque initially overshadowed in racing by Alfa Romeo, Bentley and Bugatti. In the 1920s, Aston Martin shared a niche with brands like Alvis, Frazer Nash, Lea Francis and Riley. Mighty oaks grow from acorns, but their survival can be precarious. When Robert Bamford left Aston Martin in 1920, only two cars had been built. Things picked up slightly, and 61 cars were sold by 1925, when the company was rescued from bankruptcy. The next year, Aston Martin was sold to a racecar driver and designer, A. C. Bertelli, and an engineer, William Renwick, who would produce the International, Le Mans and Ulster models that established Aston's prewar reputation. Postwar austerity seemed to hold little promise for Aston Martin, though around the time Brown bought the company, it began using the last engine designed by W. O. Bentley. That 2.6 liter twin cam 6 cylinder that powered DB cars for 10 years. In 1958, a 3.7 liter aluminum 6 replaced it in the DB4. The two engines drove Aston Martins through 1972. With that DB4, Aston Martin made the jump from rather staid British sports car to elegant grand tourer, and the DB5 and DB6 were at least the equal of road going models from Ferrari and Maserati. The DB4, DB5 and DB6 also became symbols of upper class England in the Swinging '60s. A believer in the precept that winning on the racetrack would bolster sales, David Brown hired John Wyer to enter three cars for the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1950. They finished fifth and sixth over all. Aston bought advertisements in motoring publications and persuaded Americans including Phil Hill, the future Formula One world champion, and the sportsman Briggs Cunningham to buy DB2s. The most exotic and expensive Aston Martins are racing models from this period. Stirling Moss switched to Aston in 1956, scoring two wins and three second place finishes in a rakish DB3S. Aston Martin finally won the Le Mans 24 hour race in 1959 with Carroll Shelby and Roy Salvadori. The company languished in the 1970s and '80s with less elegant V 8 models, though its loyal enthusiasts included Prince Charles. Still, for many, the marque's low point came in 1987 when Ford bought control. To some, the improved assembly quality of the cars was offset by the stigma of parts obtained from Jaguar's warehouse. It was during the Ford era, in 1993, that the supercharged 6 cylinder DB7, designed by Ian Callum, reawakened interest in the marque. Ford sold its interest in 2007. This bumpy road was all but forgotten during the centennial celebrations this year. In June, the company opened a Heritage Showroom at the old factory in Newport Pagnell, catering to the needs of classic models. The next month, in London, Aston Martin filled Kensington Gardens with 550 cars and attracted 50,000 visitors. The marque's largest ever gathering attracted cars from A3, the oldest survivor, to the new CC100 Speedster Concept, along with seven of the James Bond movie cars. In August, on the Monterey Peninsula of California, the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance featured a 13 strong Aston Martin Centennial Class, won by the 1953 Aston Martin Bertone DB2/4 roadster of Bill and Linda Pope of Paradise, Ariz. Because of its lovingly polished image and more recent introductions like the One 77 supercar (2009) and acclaimed Rapide sedan (2011), the company is never short of admirers. "Aston Martin has never been more successful than it is these days," said David Adams of West Linn, Ore., a restorer who has owned 20 DBs over 30 years. "There's so much new blood, it's driving up the values of the vintage cars." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
"We would love to have played better over these last two games," Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry said, "but that's not going to define our season." Before traveling to Milwaukee for their game against the Bucks on Friday afternoon, the Golden State Warriors spent four nights in New York. Ordinarily, staying in the city would be a nice perk for an N.B.A. team on the road. But these are strange, challenging times, and the Warriors, in adhering to the league's coronavirus protocols, did not venture beyond their hotel other than to head to practice and get walloped by the Nets on Tuesday in their season opener at Barclays Center. Coach Steve Kerr tried to set a good example for his players. On Wednesday night, he called his son Nick, one of the team's lead video coordinators, who was holed up in a nearby room at the team hotel: Did he want to get together to order some room service and watch a game on television? "And he said, 'It's probably not a good idea,'" Kerr recalled Nick telling him. "And I said: 'Oh, yeah. You're right.' Even though we're getting tested and we're together every day, the more we can be on our own, the better. It's not a fun way to live, but it's the smart thing to do." The Warriors' challenges are not unique. Every team is dealing with the same circumstances. But few teams outside of Houston have had a rougher time so far. Golden State's illustrious, not so distant past is fading a bit by the day. It is far too early to make any generalizations or draw any dire conclusions. But: Yikes! Two games, two blowout losses for a team that seems bound for several more months of growing pains. "We need to win," the Warriors' Stephen Curry said after their 138 99 loss to the Bucks. "Immediately." Kerr said he was most frustrated that the Warriors were coming off two days of solid practice before they took the court and "did not execute much of anything." "We're just scattered right now," Kerr said. "Just feels like we're a series of moving parts." It has been a nightmare start for two players who will go a long way toward dictating whether the Warriors are a playoff team. Kelly Oubre Jr., whom they acquired in a trade after Klay Thompson was lost to injury for the second straight season, has missed all 11 of his 3 point attempts. And Andrew Wiggins has shot 10 of 34 from the field to start his first full season with the Warriors. "It'll shake out over time," Kerr said. "Kelly will be fine. Andrew will be fine. Both guys are proven players in this league." The N.B.A. schedule makers did not do the Warriors any favors: two championship contenders on the road to christen the season, back to back. Before Thompson was lost for the season, both games figured to be marquee matchups. But the Warriors are not the same without Thompson, which is obvious but ought to be emphasized. Draymond Green, the other core member of the Warriors' championship years, has yet to make his first appearance because of a foot injury. On Friday, Green was in street clothes and a mask, jumping off the bench to share his wisdom with James Wiseman, the team's first year center, about defensive positioning. Wiseman has been one of the team's bright spots, averaging 18.5 points and 7 rebounds while shooting 50 percent from the field. He went 3 of 4 from 3 point range against the Bucks. "The game is starting to slow down for me," Wiseman said, which is saying a lot considering he is two games into his career. Even so, the first two games have offered a grim reminder that these are not the Warriors who made five straight trips to the N.B.A. finals between 2014 15 and 2018 19, coming away with three championships. These are not the Warriors who won 24 straight games to start the 2015 16 season, or finished that season with a 73 9 record the best in N.B.A. history. No, these Warriors have won 15 games in the 561 days since they last appeared in the finals. Only five players remain from that team. Injuries and roster turnover have taken an enormous toll. Last season, they hobbled to the worst record in the league without Thompson and Curry (who missed all but five games with a broken hand). On Friday, Curry one of the few threads that ties this team to its title runs was asked how he would address his younger teammates. "This year is different," he said, "and to not feel any pressure about the Warriors teams of the past. We obviously have that championship DNA and we understand there's expectations around our organization, and that's what we want. But this year is different. It's a new group of guys. We would love to have played better over these last two games, but that's not going to define our season." There is some cause for optimism. The schedule will loosen up. Green will be in uniform. And Oubre will presumably make a 3 pointer at some point in the near future. There is also the long view: Thompson is rehabbing (again) in hopes of playing next season. But right now, his return feels about as far away as the team's championships do. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
After five months at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where its run was extended four times, the National Yiddish Folksbiene Theater production of "Fiddler on the Roof," performed in Yiddish, recently moved uptown to Stage 42, where it opened on Thursday with a run scheduled through June 30. The cast, led by Steven Skybell, now includes Jennifer Babiak as Golde, Lisa Fishman as Bobe Tsaytl and Drew Seigla as Pertshik. The staging, by Joel Grey, remains largely the same. Here is our review of the show, from July. My father was driving; my 11 year old brother sat behind him. My mother was in the passenger seat; I, age 8, sat behind her. It was 1966, and we had all just seen the first national tour of "Fiddler on the Roof," in Philadelphia. The right half of the car, if not the left, was flooded all the way home in tears. I admit I'm an easy crier, especially at musicals. More specifically, "Fiddler" and I have a long, wet history. Even so, I'm usually decent enough to wait until Act II to turn on the waterworks. But when I saw the new National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene production of "Fiddler," I didn't make it to intermission. I barely made it to the first song. Even the jokes were making me cry. No. Though it features a Broadway quality Tevye in Steven Skybell and, for Off Broadway, a high level of professionalism throughout, the Folksbiene production, directed by the actor Joel Grey, cannot (and does not aim to) achieve the status and polish of mass entertainment. Rather, it offers a kind of authenticity no other American "Fiddler" ever has: It's in Yiddish. Yiddish, of course, is the language Tevye and his neighbors would have spoken in Anatevka, a fictional shtetl modeled on real ones near Kiev in what is now Ukraine. (This version renders the town's name as "Anatevke.") It couldn't sound more right as spoken by these characters or as sung; the translation, created by Shraga Friedman for an Israeli production in 1966, follows the rhythmic and rhyme patterns of Sheldon Harnick's English lyrics as closely as could be hoped. So "If I Were a Rich Man" quite naturally becomes "Ven Ikh Bin a Rothshild" "If I Were a Rothschild," a phrase drawn from the title of one of the Sholem Aleichem stories on which the musical is based. The argument between two townsmen about a horse and a mule becomes an argument about a he goat (bok) and a she goat (tsig). The heartbreaking song "Far From the Home I Love" is now "Vayt fun Mayn Liber Heym." Even the show's Yiddish title scans perfectly: "Fidler afn Dakh." As a result, if you're familiar with "Fiddler" already, you will probably understand a lot of this version even without knowing Yiddish. In any case, supertitles in English and Russian are helpfully projected on Beowulf Boritt's simple set, a collage of paper and fabric panels. It was one of those panels that got me going. Printed in big black Hebrew characters on a rectangle of brown paper was the Yiddish word "toyre" (Torah), which is used almost interchangeably in this translation with the word "traditsye" (tradition). The tension between the immutability of religious law and the possibility of change always latent in mere custom is the engine of "Fiddler" and the usual trigger for my tears. The musical's book, by Joseph Stein, approaches that conflict mostly through family drama. When Tevye's firstborn, here spelled Tsaytl (Rachel Zatcoff), wants to marry a poor tailor instead of the rich butcher snagged by Yente the matchmaker (Jackie Hoffman), her father not only bends to her will but goes to elaborate lengths to trick his wife, Golde (Mary Illes), into agreement. When his second daughter, Hodl (Stephanie Lynne Mason), falls in love with a penniless radical who winds up in Siberia, Tevye bends again and blesses their marriage. But when his third daughter, Khave (Rosie Jo Neddy), announces her engagement to a Russian boy a non Jew that's a bride too far. Snapping back violently from his previous liberality, Tevye banishes Khave from the family, declaring her dead a decision he will come to regret. These are the currents that have always prompted my tears; even as a child I asked myself how I could ever leave the home I loved, as "Fiddler" suggested would one day be necessary. More recently, as a parent, I have responded to the other side of that struggle. You need not be a Tevye to wonder how far to contort your values for the sake of someone you treasure. So, yes, I am usually a puddle well before the wrenching finale, in which Anatevke's Jews, having suffered age old poverty and a recent pogrom, are forced by a 1905 edict of Czar Nicholas II to leave Russia on three days' notice. Pretty much everyone cries by then. And Mr. Grey's production (with musical staging by Stas Kmiec) earns that response on its own terms. Outside of the big numbers, all carried off robustly, it is not, perhaps, as suave as it might be; the pacing is sometimes erratic, the stage business stereotypical. In "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" here "Shadkhnte, Shadkhnte" Tevye's daughters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time folding then unfolding the laundry. But when the production hitches a ride on the astonishing craft of the original, it is often thrilling. Mr. Skybell gives us an unusually strong sense of Tevye's improvisational morality, which intensifies the drama of his rejection of Khave to an almost terrifying degree. Ms. Illes is dignified even when henpecking and, like Mr. Skybell, contributes much to the haunting beauty of Jerry Bock's score. (The music direction is by Zalmen Mlotek.) Ms. Hoffman, eschewing her usual scene stealing antics, fills the role of Yente without overflowing it. All this alone would make a very nice "Fiddler," not a truly profound one. But for those who grew up around Yiddish, its use here will likely strike a deep emotional chord. For me, it's not just the fusillade of familiar words and phrases: meshuga, geklempt, zay gezunt. It is the sound of my own grandparents and all they lost in leaving their Anatevkes. "Fiddler on the Roof" always makes you cry for that loss and, more recently, for the losses endured by many other migrants. But by reuniting the Jews of the Pale with their language, "Fidler afn Dakh" does something more: It brings both alive again, not just in sadness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
For a Texas nurse, the first sign that something was wrong happened while brushing her teeth she couldn't taste her toothpaste. For a Georgia attorney, it was hitting a wall of fatigue on a normally easy run. When a Wisconsin professor fell ill in June, he thought a bad meal had upset his stomach. But eventually, all of these people discovered that their manifold symptoms were all signs of Covid 19. Some of the common symptoms a dry cough, a headache can start so mildly they are at first mistaken for allergies or a cold. In other cases, the symptoms are so unusual strange leg pain, a rash or dizziness that patients and even their doctors don't think Covid 19 could be the culprit. With more than 18 million cases of coronavirus worldwide, one thing is clear: The symptoms are varied and strange, they can be mild or debilitating, and the disease can progress, from head to toe, in unpredictable ways. "The problem is that it depends on who you are and how healthy you are," said Dr. Mark A. Perazella, a kidney specialist and professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine. "It's so heterogeneous, it's hard to say. If you're healthy, most likely you'll get fever, achiness, nasal symptoms, dry cough and you'll feel crappy. But there are going to be the oddballs that are challenging and come in with some symptoms and nothing else, and you don't suspect Covid." Sign up for the Well newsletter. The Texas nurse who couldn't taste her toothpaste said she developed fever, "horrible" body aches and coughing the next day. Her symptoms lasted for five days. (She and many others interviewed asked that their names not be used to protect their medical privacy or to protect their families from the stigma of Covid 19.) Anosmia, the loss of sense of smell that is also often accompanied by a loss of taste, is viewed as a defining symptom. In a study of 961 health care workers who were tested for Covid 19, anosmia was the most predictive symptom, but it wasn't foolproof. Only half the people who reported losing their sense of smell or taste tested positive, said Dr. Brian Clemency, the study's lead author and an associate professor in the department of emergency medicine at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. Even a symptom as common as fever can be tricky when trying to predict if a patient might have Covid 19. Although many businesses are doing fever checks to screen for Covid 19, many Covid 19 patients never have a fever. In a European study of 2,000 Covid 19 patients with mild to moderate illness, 60 percent never had a fever. In the University at Buffalo study, fewer than one in three patients with fever also tested positive for Covid 19. Rob Gregson, 52, of South Orange, N.J., went to bed feeling under the weather and woke up with chest tightness, a "weird" cough, difficulty breathing and "crazy fatigue." It was March 11, just before lockdowns were imposed, and he immediately suspected Covid 19. But because he never had a fever, it took him more than a week to find a doctor to help and get a swab test. He tested positive. "It's been the fatigue that is the most debilitating," said Mr. Gregson, executive director of a faith based nonprofit, adding that he's still struggling to regain his stamina nearly five months later. "I've been on the coronavirus roller coaster, feeling better and thinking I'll be OK, then it comes roaring back." When Erin, a 30 year old who works for a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., first developed a cough and headache in May, she wasn't worried. "I did not have a fever, and I'd been very diligent about wearing a mask and washing my hands, so I figured it was allergies or a cold at the beginning," she said. About four days after the cough began, Erin was hit with severe fatigue, sore throat, congestion, chills, body aches and a slight loss of sense of smell but still no fever. She also had one unusual symptom: severe pain in her hip muscles, which she described as "really weird." Although body aches are a common symptom of Covid 19, some patients are reporting severe joint and body pain, particularly in large muscles. Although it's rare, Covid 19 can cause painful inflammation in the joints or lead to rhabdomyolysis, a serious and potentially life threatening illness that can cause excruciating muscle pain in the shoulders, thighs or lower back. A New York cyclist who developed severe leg pain in May was initially diagnosed via telemedicine with a bulging disc. She sought a second telemedicine opinion with Dr. Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine specialist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, who asked her to move, twist and put pressure on her legs as he watched her on video. "Down to her calf she said, 'Ouch, that really hurts,'" said Dr. Metzl, who grew worried. "I'm not an alarmist doctor in the least, but I looked for the closest emergency room to her, which was 16 miles away. I said, 'I want you to get in the car and drive yourself to the E.R. right now.'" An ultrasound showed she had no pulse in her legs and severe clotting in both legs, putting her at risk of amputation. She was transferred to another hospital and underwent nine hours of emergency surgery. Dr. Metzl said it was fortunate that he had just had a conference call with colleagues about blood clots and Covid. "It's a terrifying story, which is why we need awareness around these weird presentations," Dr. Metzl said. "Covid infection can affect different body parts differently. Some people get this hypercoagulable state and end up getting blood clots. We don't always know who those people are." In June, John, a 55 year old professor in Oshkosh, Wis., woke up one morning feeling like something he had eaten disagreed with him. The next day he was hit with debilitating fatigue and nausea, cramping and other gastrointestinal symptoms. He didn't suspect Covid 19 because he had been wearing a mask and social distancing. "By the second day I was just wanting to sleep all the time. I was probably sleeping 20 hours a day," he said. "I even remember during that time my mind set changed. I could not imagine how my wife and son were able to be awake all day. I thought, 'How can anyone possibly do that?' I would get out of bed and go to the kitchen for a glass of water, and by the time I got there all I could think about was wanting to go back to bed." Doctors tested him for Covid 19 and Lyme disease. Both were negative. An ultrasound showed no problems, but blood work suggested he had an infection of some kind. A doctor prescribed a two week course of a heartburn drug, and he lost 10 pounds. After two weeks, he began feeling better. Two months later, he tested positive for Covid 19 antibodies, suggesting his original Covid test had been a false negative. Doctors say Covid patients with only gastrointestinal symptoms often test negative when tested with a nasal pharyngeal swab. The virus might be more likely to show up in fecal testing, which is common in other countries, but not widely used in the United States. The gastrointestinal tract and the respiratory tract both are rich in a receptor called ACE2, which the virus uses to get into our cells. But it's unclear why the virus sometimes seems to skip the respiratory tract and instead infects only the digestive tract. "This is a very tricky and confounding virus and disease, and we are finding out surprising things about it every day," said Dr. Asaf Bitton, executive director of Ariadne Labs at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Ilan Schwartz, assistant professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alberta, said he was tested for Covid 19 after developing respiratory symptoms. The test came back negative, but then he developed Covid toes painful red or purple lesions on the tips of fingers and toes that are believed to be a telltale symptom of coronavirus, particularly in younger patients. It may happen as a result of small blood clots or when the virus invades blood vessels. "I started getting these sores on my feet and couldn't figure out what was going on," said Dr. Schwartz, who is 37. "They were really painful. I thought maybe I had stubbed them like all of them, which would be unusual. Then I thought maybe there's something wrong with my shoes. I've heard a lot of people with similar stories end up buying new shoes because they don't know what's going on. It's such an unusual symptom that it's not natural to think of a respiratory virus being responsible for sore toes." Thomas Ryan, 36, an Atlanta attorney, said the first sign that something was wrong hit him during exercise. "I went for a run on a Thursday afternoon after work and felt awful," he said. "I hit the wall like you do in a marathon on a very short run for me." The next morning, he woke up with a light cough, sore throat and a feeling in his chest like heartburn, and later developed fatigue, lung pain and shortness of breath. Although his Covid test was negative, his doctor told him that it was a false negative, and that based on his symptoms, he clearly had Covid 19. "This is not great," said Mr. Ryan, who was still coughing weeks after falling ill. "The amount of energy I have I feel like I'm at altitude. It was two weeks of not being able to do anything. If this is a mild case, it makes me think people are taking a lot of risks they probably shouldn't be." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
new video loaded: The Salty Pink Pools of the Yucatan | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
For one thing, it dealt with sensitive subject matter. And it didn't come from a person it came from YouTube, the largest video site on the internet. During an interview at South by Southwest in Austin, Tex., YouTube's chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, announced that the company she leads would enlist Wikipedia's help to deal with the proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation on its platform. The plan was presented as just one of many ways that YouTube, which is owned by Google, would address mounting concerns about its content. But it highlighted a jarring dynamic: Here was Google, a company with revenue in excess of 100 billion last year, calling on a volunteer built, donation funded nonprofit organization to help it solve a crisis. Specifically, Ms. Wojcicki said, YouTube would soon begin experimenting with what it called "information cues" sourced from the online encyclopedia. The cues would appear as captions and article links beneath videos that dealt with topics related to popular conspiracy theories she used the moon landing and "chemtrails" as examples. Her interviewer, Nicholas Thompson of Wired Magazine, gently teased, "So, YouTube will be sending people to text?" Away from the conference stage, the responses were anything but gentle. "I'm genuinely curious whether YouTube management is a bunch of Pollyannas who have never watched the videos on their platforms, or a bunch of people who just don't care," Renee DiResta, a researcher and expert in online disinformation, tweeted. Justin Brookman, the director for consumer privacy and technology policy at Consumers Union, called the plan "a disingenuous cop out that will make Wikipedia's job harder." Others noted what seemed like an obvious point: Can't anyone edit Wikipedia, including the conspiracy theorists themselves? From the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, the first response was confusion. Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, sounded as if she wouldn't have minded a heads up. "When the announcement came out, we were surprised that we hadn't been contacted," Ms. Maher said in an interview. She had learned about YouTube's plans at the same time as everyone else including Wikipedia's army of volunteer contributors, some of whom were not pleased with the idea that an internet colossus had casually declared that it would outsource one of its knottiest problems to a relatively small nonprofit organization. "Wikipedia is not something that just exists," Ms. Maher said. "It takes work and it requires labor." A Wikipedia editor who goes by the handle SEMMENDINGER shared a concern on a contributor discussion page, writing, "My worry is that the people viewing these sorts of videos in the first place are the same people who wholeheartedly are in agreement with the content." 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. Another editor, Doc James, was more sanguine. "I do not imagine many problems," he said. "We have lots of policies to help support those who come with good references and rebuff those without." YouTube's announcement might be chalked up to an unintentional miscommunication or a public relations misstep. But for Wikipedia, it was part of a familiar pattern. A cross between a piece of infrastructure, a public commons and an online community, Wikipedia has been a boon to some of the largest companies in the world since it started nearly two decades ago. Whatever benefit Google hopes to get from using the online encyclopedia to fact check YouTube videos is likely to pale in comparison with the value it receives from including Wikipedia entries in its search results. Google's "Knowledge Graph," which displays certain answers to search queries in separate, authoritative looking boxes on the right side of a computer screen, draws heavily from Wikipedia. Furthermore, virtually every voice assistant, including Amazon's Echo and Apple's Siri, uses the site to give customers a wide range of answers to their questions. Wikipedia has also proved invaluable to tech companies as they develop artificial intelligence and translation services as a multilanguage corpus for researchers, it is unparalleled (and, of course, free). "The degree to which the Wikipedia data has informed computer science is pretty astonishing," said Brent Hecht, an assistant professor at Northwestern University who has studied Wikipedia's relationships with tech companies and online communities. "Wikipedia definitely creates massively more value for these companies than they put in." With the YouTube announcement, Wikipedia finds itself in a predicament similar to that of a small town after it has been chosen as the site of a new Walmart: Some municipalities have said that the retail giant creates undue stress on local police forces, straining them to the breaking point with endless calls to deal with petty crimes at the super stores. Wikipedia's lopsided relationships can also amplify pre existing internal problems. Its contributors skew white and male, for example, leading to predictable outcomes just 17 percent of the subjects of biographies on the site are women. Wikipedia is taking steps to address the issue, but the next generation of consumer tech is being built on top of it and its gaps and biases in the meantime. Having come of age in the era of desktop and laptop computers, Wikipedia is also struggling to bring itself into the smartphone era (not to mention whatever comes next). "If we have interfaces like Alexa, for example, they're using infrastructure and content generated by editors, but they're not really encouraging readers to contribute in any way," said Dariusz Jemielniak, who published a book length ethnographic study of Wikipedia and now sits on the Wikimedia Foundation's board. "They might not even realize it's coming from Wikipedia," he added. "It would be nice if people who take also give a little bit." The main problem with YouTube's presumptuous announcement, Mr. Jemielniak suggested, is that Wikipedia is not necessarily geared toward breaking news and conspiracy theories tend to move at lightning speed during times of crisis. Recently, for instance, YouTube was rife with conspiracy videos about the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and it is unclear what even a thorough and well sourced Wikipedia article could have done to dissuade an audience intent on believing that students at the school were paid "crisis actors" carrying out orders. More to the point, Mr. Jemielniak said, if Google wanted help from Wikipedia, it could have asked. Ms. Maher agreed. At the very least, she said, it would be nice to have "a primary point of contact" at Google and companies like it "someone who is invested in thinking of us an entity rather than just a resource." As it stands, no such person has that role though YouTube has reached out to the foundation since the announcement, and the two organizations are regularly in touch in less formal ways. (Google declined to comment for this article. Ms. Maher said of their interaction this week, "It was good for a start.") Then there's the issue of money. As important as Wikipedia may be to some of the richest companies in the world, it is, in financial terms, comparatively minuscule, with a yearly budget of less than 100 million a rounding error for big tech. (It should be noted that Google has made one off contributions to Wikipedia in the past and includes the Wikimedia Foundation in a program through which it matches employee donations, which netted the foundation around 1 million last year.) For now, Wikipedians among the most central and least visible participants in this conversation seem not overly perturbed. "Looks like we have more work to do," wrote one, after the YouTube announcement. "I doubt that much will change anytime soon." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
As "Kinky Boots" continues its high kicking run on Broadway, its composer, Cyndi Lauper, has announced her next project: a stage adaptation of the 1988 film "Working Girl." That movie starred Melanie Griffith as a secretary fighting for respect at a male dominated Wall Street bank and it was nominated for six Oscars, including best picture. Carly Simon's music was featured prominently in the film, and her song "Let the River Run" won an Oscar for Best Original Song. There is no word yet on whether Ms. Simon will be involved; the music and lyrics will be handled by Ms. Lauper, whose first foray into Broadway composing "Kinky Boots" in 2013 earned her glowing reviews and made her the first solo woman to win the Tony for Best Score. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
MUMBAI, India At a raucous news conference on Tuesday that began almost two hours late and lasted almost that long, Vijay Mallya defended Kingfisher Airlines from accusations of mismanagement and instead blamed taxes, oil prices and a competitive industry for the company's financial troubles. The second biggest Indian carrier, Kingfisher, which is owned by Mr. Mallya, the Indian liquor and beer baron, was once known for its luxurious service and ambitions to fly around the globe. Now, it is seeking more bank loans after reporting a steep loss for its fiscal second quarter. Unlike in the past, when Mr. Mallya commanded the attention of the news media, on Tuesday he struggled to speak over shouted questions and reporters who cut him off. "It is a very competitive environment, it is a high tax environment and it's a hostile environment as far as investment is concerned," Mr. Mallya said. "The fact of the matter is that the entire industry is in serious trouble." Kingfisher, which is struggling with a 1.5 billion debt load, posted a loss of 4.7 billion rupees, or 93 million, in the three months that ended in September, compared with a 2.4 billion rupee loss in the period a year earlier. The announcement came Tuesday, after the company abruptly canceled scores of flights on Friday as part of a reorganization of its schedule. On Monday, one of its most important bankers publicly called on Kingfisher's owner to invest more money in the airline, which has never reported an annual profit. The company's problems are indeed emblematic of the difficulties facing the Indian airline industry, much of which has struggled to make money despite India's rapid economic growth and a 20 percent annual increase in air travel. Many Indian airlines, including Kingfisher, have made expensive acquisitions, grown too fast and cut fares to win market share. Those missteps have been compounded recently by rising interest rates and a falling rupee, which has made oil imports more expensive. Furthermore, the Indian government has been pumping money into the unprofitable state owned carrier Air India, which has used the cash to sharply lower fares in an effort to attract more passengers. Only one of the seven largest Indian airlines Indigo, which has a business model similar to the Dallas based Southwest Airlines has been consistently profitable in recent years. Because of its large debt, Kingfisher spends more than 20 percent of its revenue on interest. By contrast, Jet Airways, the largest airline in India, spent only 6.5 percent of its revenue on interest payments in the most recent quarter, for which it reported a 7.1 billion rupee loss. "The problem with Kingfisher is their debt has gone beyond what they can manage," said Sharan Lillaney, an analyst at Angel Broking. "Their interest cost is way beyond their operational profits." Mr. Mallya, who calls himself the "king of good times" and sports a goatee and wavy white hair, said the government should start allowing foreign airlines to invest in Indian carriers. He called on policy makers to reduce sales taxes on fuel, which average about 25 percent, or about five times the rate in other countries. He also said the company was asking its banks to increase its working capital loans by about 8 billion rupees and reduce its interest costs. Public officials have said they are considering changing foreign investment regulations, but such reviews in other industries, like retailing and insurance, have been halted for years. The airline's banks, 13 of which converted some of their loans into a 23.4 percent stake in the company, also seem reluctant to help. On Monday, a senior executive at the State Bank of India, one of the airline's biggest lenders, said Mr. Mallya and his other companies must invest 160 million in Kingfisher. The airline flies to destinations as far as London and Hong Kong but has had to defer plans to fly elsewhere, including New York and San Francisco. Over the weekend, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said he would consider providing support to the airline. But other public officials, including the aviation minister, have distanced themselves from the idea that the government should help a private airline. India, which has a large budget deficit, has already pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Air India. "From the looks of it, Kingfisher is headed in the direction of Air India," said Shushmul Maheshwari, chief executive of RNCOS, a research firm. "There are no quick fixes possible at this stage." Mr. Mallya's other companies, including United Breweries, which makes Kingfisher beer, and United Spirits, are profitable and control about 50 percent of the beer and liquor markets in India. Analysts have said Mr. Mallya may have to invest his earnings from those companies in his airline to keep it flying a plan that analysts say could hurt those companies. At the news conference, Mr. Mallya said he would not "cross subsidize" the airline from other businesses. But he added that his holding companies and friends would stand behind the airline. Shares of Kingfisher closed up 2.3 percent, at 21.85 rupees, on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Tuesday. The stock is down 67 percent for the year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
From televisions in every room to smartphone room keys, the hotel industry has evolved to stay at least on pace with travelers, if not a step or two ahead. Now, challenged by the home sharing economy Airbnb alone reported over 1 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2018, its highest to date new hotels are toying with everything from pricing to privacy. Airbnb, said Chekitan S. Dev, a professor in the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, "shook legacy brands out of their slumber and forced them to consider innovating their value propositions, and it encouraged entrants to experiment with novel and bold innovations." Today, he added, new hotel brands are routinely asking a series of "what if" questions: "What if customers could check in anytime they like? What if the room was customized to the needs of the guest? What if the room could be rented in parts or in combination with others? What if the guest determined the value of the room? What if there was a seamless experience between the hotel and the local community?" The following three new hotels embody some of those experiments. Beyond providing the convenience of having someone else make your bed and launder your towels, can a hotel room improve your mood? That's the question posed to guests of the new Angad Arts Hotel in St. Louis. The 146 room hotel, which opened in November, offers four color schemes designed to support emotions. Rooms come in yellow, said to be associated with happiness, green for rejuvenation, blue for tranquillity and red for passion (doubles from 185). "While exploring ideas, we came across a quote by Pablo Picasso, 'Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions,'" David Miskit, the executive managing director of Angad, wrote in an email. He added that the company used no particular source for translating emotions into color, but that "these were the most common interpretations." Rooms come with corresponding accessories, including a tabletop Zen garden with a mini rake in the blue rooms, a lamp set with Himalayan salt crystals in the green rooms, a smiley whoopee cushion in the yellow rooms and a scented candle in the red rooms. In December, I booked a yellow room to test the effect, reasoning that anyone staying solo on a business trip could use a boost of happiness. My room glowed with warmth, from the yellow rubber duck in the bathroom to the overhead ductwork, also painted yellow. The morning sunlight streaming in only heightened the effect, making it just too impossibly bright and, yes, cheerful, to sleep past 8 a.m. The new SCP Hotels stands for "soul, community, planet," with the aim to operate sustainably and nurture connections between guests. Its first location, which opened in June in Colorado Springs, Colo., introduced a key component of its intended transparency with what it calls "fair trade pricing." It allows guests to name their rate when checking out, meaning they can lower the suggested price if they feel the value doesn't align. "We want to lead by being good, not by being profitable," said Ken Cruse, the chief executive of SCP Hotels. "We think of profits as a byproduct of the new experience." That experience relies on wellness, with a multifaceted, 12,000 square foot fitness center that includes an exercise studio, climbing wall and group classes in yoga and Pilates. Its 174 rooms have a rustic quality, with barn style sliding doors and reclaimed wood from trees that had been damaged by invasive beetles. A store stocks local coffee, beer and healthy snacks, and communal tables and free Wi Fi in the plant filled lobby are designed to encourage co working. A renovation of a derelict Knight's Inn , SCP suggests rates from about 100 to 200, depending on the season. The name your rate strategy aims to entice travelers to take a chance on a new brand. "This is a means of taking risk out of that decision point of consumers to give us a shot," Mr. Cruse said. Though the policy sounds ripe for abuse, so far no one has lowballed the rates, he added. He hopes it will solicit feedback from guests, and says the hotel will honor a request to reduce the rate, such as a noise complaint, and not just negotiate a discount. SCP has only the one hotel in Colorado Springs and aims to open 30 to 40 more throughout the United States in the next three years. Opened in November, the Bode hotel in Nashville is designed to mimic the group friendly features of home shares, including multi bedroom units with kitchens, while adding traditional hotel amenities, such as bars in the lobby (rooms from about 260). The company based the Bode model on its founders' love of group travel with family and friends, and dissatisfaction with socializing in a hotel and searching for a stylish, well located home to share. "The hotel experience was truncated because we'd be crammed into a room or forced into a lobby," said Philip Bates, the managing partner of Bode. "Airbnbs are sometimes not well located, the booking takes forever, the design appointments aren't as good and they don't have the vibe or theme of a good boutique hotel." Instead, Bode offers condo like units of up to five bedrooms with living areas and kitchens. Guests have the convenience of hotel housekeeping, a concierge to point them to local restaurants and public social space, including a bar with coffee and pastries in the morning and alcoholic drinks and charcuterie plates later on. A market sells basic groceries, beer and wine. Outdoors, there are firepits, games like Ping Pong and a stage for live music. The group chose Nashville for its first location for its attraction as a concert, festival and convention destination. Future plans include openings in Palm Springs and Orange County, Calif., and Chattanooga, Tenn., where it aims to appeal to the family market. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
MELBOURNE, Australia This country's biggest hopes in decades for a homegrown Australian Open singles champion ended in the semifinals on Thursday when top seeded Ashleigh Barty lost to an American, Sofia Kenin, 7 6 (6), 7 5. In the final on Saturday, Kenin, the 14th seed, will face unseeded Garbine Muguruza, who pulled off the second upset of the day with a 7 6 (8), 7 5 win over fourth seeded Simona Halep. Of course, surprises have been the norm in women's tennis in recent years. Saturday's final will be the fourth consecutive women's Grand Slam final without a player that was seeded in the top five. Kenin, 21, who was born in Moscow, had not advanced past the fourth round at a Grand Slam in her 11 main draw appearances before this tournament. She did not face a seeded player here before meeting Barty, who was not only the No. 1 seed, but also the face of the tournament, carrying expectations of a host country that has gone longer without a homegrown Grand Slam singles champion than any other Grand Slam host country. That was in an era in which nearly all of the top international players skipped the tournament, which routinely drew a limited field, in part because it was held in December, often over Christmas. Starting in the 1980s, the tournament's stature grew, and the parade of homegrown champions ended. In defeat, Barty insisted, as she had throughout the tournament, that she was undaunted by external pressures. "I've just tried to go about my business the same every single day; it's regardless of whether I was 50 in the world or 100 or 1 in the world," she said. Barty and Kenin were familiar with each other's games, having met four times last season. Kenin won only one of those matches, but Alex Kenin, her father and coach, said he had a strategic breakthrough when he reviewed video of Barty's earlier matches at this tournament. "Barty is a great player, and she was changing her game and everything was very hard and she came up with great shots, but that basic plan we developed, we stuck to it, and it looked like it worked," Alex Kenin said. Kenin seemed to find particular success targeting Barty's backhand, on which the Australian made 18 unforced errors and only four winners. "I didn't feel supercomfortable," Barty said. "I felt like my first plan wasn't working. I couldn't execute the way that I wanted. I tried to go to B and C." Barty also landed only half of her first serves. Still, she nearly won anyway. "I'm two points away from winning that in straight sets, which is disappointing," Barty said. "Knowing I had to fight and scrap, I still gave myself a chance to win the match." Alex Kenin moved to the United States in 1987, but traveled back and forth to Russia in the years after. Sofia was born in Moscow in 1998, and moved to Florida full time as a young child. Her results have improved rapidly in recent years she was ranked outside the top 100 just two years ago but she has flown under the radar, largely staying in the shadow of other American women such as Serena and Venus Williams; the 15 year old prodigy Coco Gauff; 10th ranked Madison Keys; and the 2017 United States Open champion, Sloane Stephens. Jessica Pegula, another American player, wrote on Twitter after Kenin's victory that she was "finally getting the recognition she deserves," something Kenin said was satisfying. "People haven't really paid attention much to me in the past," Kenin said Thursday. "I had to establish myself, and I have. Of course, now I'm getting the attention. I like it, not going to lie." Muguruza, like Kenin, nearly lost both sets she played on Thursday. She saved two set points during the tiebreaker in the first set, once by prevailing in a 20 shot rally. Halep, a Romanian, served for the second set and nearly took it, but Muguruza, a Spaniard, broke and then broke again to end the match in straight sets, if not straightforward ones. "To lose like this hurts more, definitely," Halep said. "I'm in pain now, I have to admit. But life is going on. I think maybe I could be a little bit more brave in the points that were important. I didn't do that." Muguruza, ranked 32nd, is the first unseeded finalist here in 10 years, since Justine Henin in 2010. But like Henin, who was then a seven time Grand Slam champion coming back from retirement, Muguruza is a known quantity. Tennis observers expressed renewed optimism for Muguruza in the off season after she reunited with Conchita Martinez, under whose watchful eye she won her most recent Grand Slam title, Wimbledon in 2017. Kenin won her only previous match against Muguruza in October, 6 0, 2 6, 6 0, in the second round of the China Open in Beijing, but Muguruza has radiated a renewed ruthlessness in this tournament. After carrying an illness into the first round and losing the opening set, 6 0, she has defeated three top 10 players, all in straight sets. After beating Halep, she did not crack a smile; her objective here is not yet complete. "Definitely the mission is to get away from here with a big trophy," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Earlier this week, a couple in Colorado filed a class action lawsuit against an eyewear chain they say gave them faulty eclipse glasses. Watching the moon's spectacular crossing of the sun on Aug. 21 left them with distorted vision, according to their lawyer. A couple in South Carolina filed a similar lawsuit against Amazon in late August. Tens of millions of eclipse glasses were sold ahead of the first total solar eclipse to cross the United States in nearly a century. And though no one has an exact tally, it's clear that a significant portion were unreliable. Along with Amazon's massive recall, there was the coffee chain that stopped trusting glasses gifted with lattes and the medical center that scrambled to locate shades distributed at the county fair. Even optometrists were getting duped. "I found counterfeits in a country store in a small town in New Hampshire," said Rick Fienberg, a press officer at the American Astronomical Society who became a sort of glasses safety referee in the weeks leading up to the eclipse. "If they reached there, they reached everywhere." Astronomers could chart the trajectory of the moon's shadow across the Earth, but somehow modern commerce could not deliver trustworthy eclipse glasses. How had a celebration of science devolved into a shady shades debacle? As I neared my eclipse watching location in Excelsior Springs, Mo., a town of 11,000 along the line of totality, I spotted a path toward possible answers: "ATTENTION DO NOT USE OUR GLASSES," a sign declared. It was unclear who "our" referred to, as the space above was eerily blank and Rod's, the building behind the sign, was boarded up. Perhaps if I found the author of the warning, and followed the supply chain, I could find at least one person to blame for the inescapable, joy killing sense that no matter where we bought our glasses, our retinas were about to be toast. A few hours before totality, a man at a nearby carwash pointed me through a suds filled tunnel toward an auto repair shop. Veronique Ford, a clerk at the family owned EZ Quick Lube, confirmed the glasses cited in the sign were theirs. They sold around 800 at three to five dollars each. Pasted to the counter, was an email from the man who sold them the glasses, which included what looked like a certification number. But then a customer called. The "score" was not right. 2. Where did the glasses come from? I called the company, Spirit Pack, that had sold EZ Quick Lube the glasses. None of the employees were willing to be quoted, but one told me that he had picked the manufacturer from a directory called DistributorCentral. The listing promised "our ISO 12312 2 certified eclipse glasses are independently tested for safe solar viewing." A Spirit Pack employee checked the certificate that had come with the glasses and saw it did not match the ad, instead listing a certificate number of 12312 1. When he followed up with the vendor, Global Promos Service, a woman told him that the glasses were safe. It was just an older certification. He said he believed her. 3. Who decides if the glasses are safe? But the problem was not about old certificates, it was about ineffective protection from sun exposure. And this is the part where we have to talk about federal regulations specific to eclipse glasses. In fact, there are none. Many sellers of glasses for the Great American Eclipse turned, voluntarily, to the guidelines offered by the International Organization for Standardization, known as ISO. Some government agencies, primarily in Europe, use the Geneva based organization's standards to regulate imports and sales. When Global Promos Service, or anyone else, advertised an ISO certification of 12312 2, the companies were promising that the product met requirements outlined by Dr. B. Ralph Chou, an optometrist and the president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. 4. Why did Amazon say the glasses weren't safe? Global Promos Service, the next link in the glasses chain, was listed in Los Angeles, also home to an active amateur astronomy community. Since I was there, I decided to meet with another vendor, Manish Panjwani, the owner of Agena AstroProducts. Like Mrs. Bishop of EZ Quick Lube, improperly certified shades hurt his credibility. In his case, though, the problematic products were not his. Several weeks before the eclipse, as reports of suspicious glasses surfaced, "Amazon took down virtually every storefront selling eclipse glasses, including ones from legitimate manufacturers and their authorized dealers," said Dr. Fienberg of the American Astronomical Society. The company then sent emails to many customers warning them that they may have received eclipse glasses that couldn't be verified as safe. When Amazon issued its recall, the company yanked the entire product page, and sent emails to Mr. Panjwani's customers as well, even though they had received legitimate Baader glasses. In a statement to The New York Times, an Amazon spokesman said: "Out of an abundance of caution and in the interests of our customers, we asked third party sellers that were offering solar eclipse glasses to provide documentation to verify their products were compliant with relevant safety standards. After reviewing the documentation, the offers from sellers with compliant eclipse glasses remained available to customers. The listings from sellers who were not approved were removed and customers who purchased from them were notified." Mr. Panjwani said he submitted proper documentation three times. He said that Amazon did reinstate the page, only to pull it again, and then reinstate it again, leaving him with an inbox full of confused and angry emails. "Amazon could have addressed it earlier and more carefully instead of making everyone into a bad guy and freaking out the country out in the process," he said. Dr. Fienberg of the American Astronomical Society agreed that Amazon exacerbated confusion by failing to vet eclipse products earlier. Initially he estimated that the recall cost legitimate vendors millions in profits. In a statement to The Times, Amazon said the company would cover the cost of refunds for sellers with proper certification. This includes Agena AstroProducts. These are the glasses purchased by a couple in South Carolina who filed a lawsuit against Amazon. The man ordered the glasses through his aunt's account so he did not see the recall e mail, according to his lawyer. The glasses were on a best seller list and the description guaranteed safety, so he said that he felt comfortable wearing them and giving them to his fiance. "I think 2024 will be very different," said Dr. Fienberg, referring to the next total eclipse to cross the United States. But for Steven W. Teppler of the Abbott Law Group, who is co lead counsel in the two eclipse glasses lawsuits, the issue is much broader. If one cannot trust an Amazon listing, he said, "What comfort can you get from the representation of anything you buy online?" As Mr. Panjwani, observed, the fraudsters are not going away. Even so, their motivations are a mystery to him: "Why would you risk bodily harm and injury to someone else for so little profit?" I was hoping to ask this question to the people at Global Promos Service. As I parked near their address in Los Angeles, I knew that Spirit Pack's main contact, Fiona Rjrr as her name appeared in email, was in China that week. She'd told me this in an exchange, which ended when I clarified that I was a reporter from The New York Times, not a buyer of eclipse glasses. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
ABC will officially announce its 2016 17 fall schedule at its annual upfront presentation in Manhattan on Tuesday. Here is a look at some of the highlights: ABC's so called T.G.I.T. block of Ms. Rhimes's shows on Thursday night, which has been the most reliable part of the network's schedule, is getting a shake up. "Scandal" is moving to midseason, and a new drama that was not created by Ms. Rhimes, "Notorious," will take its place. The bookends "Grey's Anatomy" and "How to Get Away with Murder" stay the same. Ms. Rhimes's shows suffered this season, particularly "Scandal" and "How To Get Away with Murder," which both had declining ratings. ABC's new president of entertainment, Channing Dungey, explained in a telephone call with reporters that the switch was made for a "variety of reasons," including an adjusted production schedule to accommodate the pregnancy of the "Scandal" star Kerry Washington. When asked whether ABC would still brand its Thursday night lineup T.G.I.T., Ms. Dungey said the network had not yet considered marketing plans for the fall. Fear Not: There Will Be Plenty of Shonda Ms. Rhimes's Thursday night block will be reassembled for midseason with "Grey's Anatomy," "Scandal" and her second year show, "The Catch." Ms. Dungey noted that by year's end Ms. Rhimes will have five shows on the air (just like Dick Wolf at NBC), including a new show, "Still Star Crossed," a period drama about the Montagues and Capulets after Romeo and Juliet are dead. It will be on the midseason schedule as well. While Fox and NBC have struggled mightily with comedy, ABC is raising the ante on its comedy. ABC is expanding from two nights of comedy (Wednesday and Friday) to three (welcome, Tuesday). "The Middle" moves to Tuesday, while "Modern Family" will continue to anchor the Wednesday night lineup. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The eight dancers in Liz Gerring's "Glacier" keep changing its temperature. At first, the mood is clinical. Dancers walk, run, balance, fall; they're often on the cusp of pedestrianism. Since much of the movement is big and some of it is sports related that's already arresting. But a kinesthetic impetus soon develops, and this becomes full bodied dancing that changes my breathing. New 18 months ago at the Alexander Kasser Theater in Montclair, N.J., "Glacier" has a quite different impact at the Joyce Theater, where I watched it on Tuesday. Aspects of the dance have certainly changed, not least its use of peripheral space and parts of its music, but both times I found it marvelous. What you see is what you get. This is not choreography that turns into poetic images, metaphors, stories, anything other than itself. Yet at times it's wild, cold, amusing, surprising, impetuous. Its scale varies immensely. While others are dancing onstage, Brandon Collwes, his back to them, arrives from stage left, and then keels over backward toward them, arriving bang! on the floor, face up. By contrast, Tony Neidenbach, in profile to us, crosses the back of the stage in an eager tiptoe through the tulips, prancing, hopscotch like step the funniest moment of the show (the more so from a virile, athletic performer). Having gone from right to left, he immediately retreats along the same line in huge, hungry strides. Yes, to stride (almost crawl) backward, and fast! an intriguing task, one that Mr. Neidenbach takes up rapaciously. Other men succeed Mr. Collwes and Mr. Neidenbach in these assignments; it's fascinating the way the tone changes. The analytical tone of "Glacier" becomes just part of Ms. Gerring's recipe. When Adele Nickel, Jessica Weiss and Mr. Collwes do lines of turns on one foot across the stage, they tip their torsos sideways, as if to counterbalance the raised feet. The feeling is investigative let's see what it's like to turn with our balance and line changed this way but what's remarkable is how that sense of exploration makes it reach into our bodies as we watch. Likewise when a dancer throws himself full force onto the floor and, as if bodysurfing a wave, slides across. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Ms. Siamdoust is the author of "Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran." Within minutes of the death of the Iranian vocalist Mohammad Reza Shajarian last week, thousands streamed into the streets surrounding his hospital in Tehran, openly wept and sang his songs in unison. A man climbed on an ambulance and yelled to applause: "It is the right of the Iranian people to give him a majestic funeral. He belongs to all the people." Another person called out for three days of mourning, a suggestion that drew cheers from the crowd. A state funeral would have befit Iran's most beloved public figure, who died at age 80 after a six decade career. Mr. Shajarian's music and message, drawn from the humanist canon of Persian poetry, unified people of all generations and political persuasions. But Iranian authorities kept his procession small by fencing off thousands of people paying their last respects in the ancient city of Tus, where he was buried next to the tomb of Ferdowsi, the revered Persian poet and author of the national epic "The Book of Kings." Mr. Shajarian's politics were almost never explicit, and he long insisted that he was not political. His work, he argued, was simply "mardomi," a term that means "of the people." But for several years before Iran's 1979 revolution and in the decades since, he created some of the country's most political songs calling on people to join the revolution in 1979, criticizing it in 1985 with his album "Injustice," and commenting on the hypocrisy of clerics in his 2002 album "Without You." His most famous ballad, "Bird of Dawn," based on an old Persian poem, became a protest song. At his concerts, whether in Tehran or in London, Paris or New York, people implored him to sing it. With his right hand on his heart he always obliged. As he sang in his familiar plaintive tenor, Mr. Shajarian embodied the pained bird, dramatizing in music and verse the struggle of a people: Bird of dawn, start your lament, relight my anguish Break this cage with your scintillating sighs and turn it upside down Wing tied nightingale, emerge from the cage corner And sing the song of human freedom An enraptured audience always joined the prayerlike refrain, expressing its desire for freedom from tyranny: "O God, O Heavens, O Nature, turn our dark night into morning!" The poem on which the song is based dates to the 1920s, when Iranians' hopes for representative government were crushed with Reza Pahlavi's authoritarian takeover. Repression ensued, and the poem became a call to freedom. When Mr. Shajarian sang his lyrical version of that poem, fused in his voice were not only thousands of years of civilization and a storied musical and poetic tradition, but a century long arc of a modern political struggle for freedom. When I pressed him on the political nature of his music in a 2011 interview, Mr. Shajarian was cryptic: He said he had always tried to "walk the right path." "When you're moving with the people, your position is clear," he said. "The people know what they want." That he so often drew from the mystical tradition of Persian poetry for his lyrics was not an accident; it allowed him to offer subversive political commentary while maintaining an air of deniability. The poetry of the likes of Rumi, Khayyam and Hafez is so nearly universally revered that even arch conseratives can't fault it. And in an Islamic Republic where political subversion can land artists and writers in jail, Mr. Shajarian's unparalleled virtuosity as a vocalist and his virtuousness of character long made him untouchable. For more than 40 years, Mr. Shajarian channeled the hopes and frustrations of Iranians and became the "people's voice." He delved into the country's rich poetic heritage and sang verses that directly addressed people's political and social problems. This turned his concerts into one of the few public places where crowds of strangers could get together and openly express their discontent through music. For all his coyness, Mr. Shajarian understood this well and enjoyed nothing more than singing to his own people in his own land. He once told me, "In Iran, it's like you're reminiscing and sharing secrets with people you've suffered with." Iranians, he said, "know what the words mean. Everything you say carries so much weight." But even Mr. Shajarian couldn't stay untouchable forever. In 2009, when opposition demonstrators flooded the streets after Iran's disputed presidential election, Mr. Shajarian spoke out against state violence on protesters and sang "Put Your Gun Down," with lyrics drawn from a poem: "Come, sit, talk, listen/ Maybe the light of humanity will open a path in your heart." As a punishment, he was forbidden from ever performing in Iran again and his work including his iftar prayer, "Rabbana," which people had listened to on radio and television as they broke their fast on Ramadan nights for 30 years was banned on national media. People resorted to streaming it from their phones. "They think they are doing me harm, but they're only harming themselves," he said, referring to the government officials who instituted the ban. "They don't even have enough social awareness to understand that you can't take away from people something that they have connected with spiritually." Since his death, people have huddled together in groups throughout Iran to sing "Bird of Dawn" in what has become a new sort of national anthem. Crushed by government corruption, extreme U.S. sanctions and the pandemic, which has already resulted in nearly 30,000 deaths in the country, Iranians are at a particularly precarious moment. In commemorating Mr. Shajarian, they are also hanging onto the humanist messages of his songs, and the possibility however remote of a brighter day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Phil Tulkoff's family has owned a Baltimore condiment company for more than 90 years, and he's uneasy. Not because business at Tulkoff Food Products is bad he lived through that this spring but because it is suddenly good. "I don't know what to expect," said Mr. Tulkoff, the company's president, who employs about 100 workers. "I watch the news and think it has to go down again." After a slump in April and May prompted a shutdown of three of four production lines at his factory near the Port of Baltimore, demand roared back in June as restaurants and retailers hungered for products like minced garlic, horseradish and cocktail sauce, which are among Tulkoff Food's most popular offerings. Mr. Tulkoff is grateful for the rebound, but his apprehension is shared by thousands of other business owners: While sales have returned to healthy levels, the surge in coronavirus cases in many parts of the country threatens the comeback. Yet on Thursday, the government reported that new claims for state unemployment insurance topped one million for the 17th week in a row. So even as millions go back to work, millions of others are newly unemployed, threatening both their personal finances particularly with a 600 weekly federal supplement to unemployment insurance about to expire and their ability to help drive the economy's recovery. After a gradual reopening, indoor dining in many parts of California, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, was newly banned this month. In Texas and Florida, bars have been shuttered after initially reopening and attracting hordes of quarantine weary patrons. Mr. Tulkoff hasn't seen any impact from these moves, but he knows from the wave of shutdowns in March how rapidly things can change. "The downturn came on so quickly, it was like someone pulling the plug from a bathtub," he said. Orders were canceled so fast that cases of sauce already on their way to customers had to be shipped back to the factory. Some went into inventory while others went to local food banks or were discarded. Rather than lay workers off, Mr. Tulkoff took advantage of a Maryland program that allowed him to cut employee schedules to four days a week, with the state picking up the cost of the fifth day. He also received a loan of just over 1 million from the federal Paycheck Protection Program. "We definitely had more people than we needed, but we didn't want to let anyone go," Mr. Tulkoff said. Working in staggered groups, production employees spent time on the one line that was still in operation during the trough. The paycheck protection loan was a welcome cushion, but Mr. Tulkoff intends to return the money because the rebound has made it unnecessary. The company took other steps to survive the lean period: Matching payments on the employees' 401(k) plans were halted, Mr. Tulkoff took a 20 percent pay cut, overtime was stopped, and temporary positions were eliminated. Mr. Tulkoff shut the company's California plant in May, eliminating 34 jobs, in a move that had been planned for a while but was sped up because of the coronavirus outbreak. Much of that output will be taken over by a new plant that is getting up to speed in Cincinnati. It will eventually employ as many as 70 workers. At the main factory in Baltimore, roughly 60 hourly employees are working 40 hours per week, plus overtime. The company is looking to fill five more slots, which start at 12 per hour. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "It's been a roller coaster," said Buddy Dietz, the chief operating officer. "It's hard for us to tell whether it's for real or not." "What we believe has happened is that customers depleted their inventories," he added. "Now they're trying to refill the pipeline. We're anticipating that orders will fall off again, but there's no way for us to know." If things turn down again, the company plans to repeat the cost saving measures imposed last time, like the elimination of the 401(k) match and overtime. Another option would be to slow spending on the Cincinnati factory, Mr. Tulkoff said. To be sure, Tulkoff Food Products has survived other challenges, including the Great Depression and World War II. The company was founded by Mr. Tulkoff's grandparents Harry and Lena, immigrants from Russia whose freshly ground horseradish was a hit at the grocery store they operated. "It's pretty amazing, but after all these years we've stuck to our roots horseradish, garlic, and cocktail sauce," Mr. Tulkoff said. Mr. Tulkoff has run the company conservatively, averse to debt or risky new product lines. When the pandemic hit, the company had enough cash to last a year, and with losses running at 250,000 a month, the Paycheck Protection Program loan bought it four months, if it needed to use the money. For now, the company is solidly profitable, Mr. Tulkoff said, and workers in the factory like Maria Bunce say they are more focused on fulfilling the daily quotas than worrying about what they can't control in the future. "I'm in the moment," said Ms. Bunce, a floor supervisor. "We're so busy we don't have time to think about what's going on." Mr. Tulkoff, on the other hand, finds himself worrying about what the resurgence of the virus could mean for his company and its employees. "It keeps me up at night," he said. "It's my biggest nightmare to see all that equipment idle again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
A teenage writer and director took home the top prize at the Tribeca Film Festival for his tale of an alcoholic preacher in rural Louisiana, festival organizers announced Thursday. The prize, the Founders Award for best narrative feature, was one of several awards for "Burning Cane," which its filmmaker, Phillip Youmans, now 19, has said was inspired by the blues. He also won for the movie's cinematography, and Wendell Pierce, who stars as the troubled clergyman, won best actor in an American feature. The jury described Youmans as "a voice that is searingly original," according to a statement, and likened him to the Southern writers William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Best actress in an American movie went to Haley Bennett, who plays a pregnant woman obsessed with consuming dangerous objects in the thriller "Swallow." On the international side, "House of Hummingbird" (Beol sae), directed by Bora Kim, was named best feature, and its star, Ji hu Park, best actress. The South Korean movie is a coming of age tale about a Seoul eighth grader. Best actor went to a star of the Turkish language "Noah Land," Ali Atay, who plays a son accompanying his ailing father on a journey to the village where he grew up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
As the pop music landscape has shifted over and over again this decade, major artists have repeatedly attempted to reinvent the album release for a digital time: There have been surprise albums, visual albums, albums edited after the fact, albums with little notice and no advance singles, streaming only albums, video only albums and so on. And then there is Taylor Swift, steady in her traditional pop playbook, with radio singles, music videos, magazine covers, television appearances and a stream of things for sale, all on schedule. Just before the clock struck midnight on Friday, the singer, 29, released "Lover," her seventh album and first for Universal Music Group/Republic Records after more than a decade on the Nashville based label Big Machine. Swift, in the liner notes, called the 18 tracks "a love letter to love itself all the captivating, spellbinding, maddening, devastating, red, blue, gray, golden aspects of it (that's why there are so many songs)." "Lover" seems to start there, before indicating that Swift is ready to move on. The first track, "I Forgot That You Existed," was written with Louis Bell and Frank Dukes, the production and songwriting team behind hits for Post Malone and Lorde, and appears to allude to West with lyrics like, "Free rent living in my mind/but then something happened one magical night/I forgot that you existed." Bell and Dukes are credited writers on two other tracks ("Afterglow," "It's Nice to Have a Friend"), while the bulk of the additional writing and production comes from Swift's frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff. Other guests include Annie Clark, also known as St. Vincent (guitars and a songwriting credit on "Cruel Summer"), and the Kendrick Lamar affiliated producer Sounwave ("London Boy"), both of whom have worked with Antonoff in the past. The pandemic has been a time of renewal and reinvention for Taylor Swift. After releasing two quarantine albums, the singer is in the process of releasing the rerecordings of her first six albums. None A Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift's rerecordings: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, "Folklore" and "Evermore." In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of "Fearless (Taylor's Version)," the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose. Reshifting the Power: The new 10 minute version of a bitter breakup song from 2012 can be seen as a woman's attempt to fix an unbalanced relationship by weaponizing memories. The album was recorded largely in New York, at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, and features numerous geographic shout outs to the area, as well as to London, the home of Swift's boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn. Songs written solely by Swift include "Lover," "Cornelia Street," and the album closer, "Daylight"; she is also credited as a co producer on every track, and as the executive producer of the album. Notably absent are the Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback, who have appeared on Swift's three previous albums dating back to "Red" in 2012. The lead up to "Lover" lasted longer than most promotional cycles in the streaming age. The first single, "Me!," featuring Brendon Urie and co produced by Joel Little, was released in April and reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 before gradually falling out of the Top 40. The second single "You Need to Calm Down," another Little production, followed in June, complete with a cameo heavy, L.G.B.T.Q. themed video. That song also reached No. 2 during the record breaking run of "Old Town Road" and currently sits at No. 18 on the Hot 100, while steadily increasing radio play has sent it to a peak position of No. 9 on the pop songs chart. The advance tracks Swift has released since are more muted. The title track "Lover" is built around acoustic guitar an instrument more prevalent on this album than on Swift's previous two while "The Archer," made with Antonoff, is a synth based build that never breaks. In a typical Swift dichotomy, the album and its path to release have mixed moments of intimacy and introspection with bombast and headline grabbing controversies. After eschewing interviews for "Reputation," Swift also appeared on the cover of the September issue of Vogue, where she teased "The Man," a playful song about sexism and double standards, and revealed that her mother was battling cancer for the second time. (On the "Lover" ballad "Soon You'll Get Better," which features banjo, fiddle and vocal harmonies from the Dixie Chicks, Swift sings, "Who am I supposed to talk to?/What am I supposed to do?/if there's no you.") Less carefully calibrated was Swift's industry shaking war of words, beginning in June, with her former label, Big Machine, and its new owner, the manager Scooter Braun. When Braun announced that he had acquired the company, along with the rights to Swift's first six albums, she responded with a fiery open letter that accused Braun of bullying her with Kanye West, and called out Scott Borchetta, the Big Machine founder, for his leveraging of her master recordings. (As part of Swift's new deal with Universal, she will own her work in the future, beginning with "Lover.") During her promotional tour this week, Swift nimbly returned to that conversation and steered the narrative, announcing plans to rerecord new versions of her old material that she would control beginning in November 2020, when she said her past contracts would allow it. "I think that artists deserve to own their work," Swift said on "Good Morning America." "I just feel very passionately about that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Superman Building in Providence, Now Dark, Is in Need of a Savior PROVIDENCE, R.I. This city's skyline has long been defined by the Superman building, so named by most everybody in Rhode Island because the 26 story skyscraper closely resembles the Daily Planet building that Superman leapt over in the 1950s television series. Officially called the Industrial National Bank Building, the 428 foot skyscraper in downtown Providence is the city's tallest building and a wonderful example of Art Deco architecture, with geometric friezes and a staggered facade that narrows to a lantern light on top. That light has shone brightly in Rhode Island's capital city since 1927, when the bank was built, but these days a different type of spotlight reflects off the Superman building. For the first time in its long history it is vacant, and with no new tenants on the horizon, its future has become a source of concern. The owner of the building, High Rock Development of Massachusetts, which bought the skyscraper in 2008 for 33.2 million, wants to convert most of its 441,000 square feet into 280 rental apartments. Under High Rock's redevelopment plan, put forward this year, 35,000 square feet of the lower floors and street level would be reserved for retail and office use. A marketing study commissioned by High Rock concluded that changing the building's use from office to largely residential made the most economic sense, noting a high demand in Providence for rental apartments and a relatively soft market for office space. "We know that residential conversion is the highest and best use," said Bill Fischer, a spokesman for High Rock Development's president and general manager, David Sweetser. With a vacancy rate of 19 percent, Providence is "saturated" with midrange office space, Mr. Fischer said. High Rock maintains that the proposed conversion is a "rare opportunity in the generational life of an iconic building," one that would complement the city's efforts to recruit more people to live downtown. But High Rock cannot afford the immense redevelopment project without significant financial help from the city and state, Mr. Fischer said. Specifically, High Rock says it needs 75 million in public funds to help convert the building: 39 million from the state, 10 million to 15 million from the city and 21 million more from the federal government in the form of tax credits for historic buildings. Throughout the spring, High Rock took its case to the local news media and the state's General Assembly, noting that public subsidies have been necessary in many cases to make large redevelopment projects work. But the answer from Rhode Island taxpayers has been a resounding no. The state's residents are still bristling over the bankruptcy last year of 38 Studios, a video game company started by the former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, which received a 75 million state guaranteed loan. As a result, Rhode Islanders are responsible for more than 100 million. "The anger out there with 38 Studios is palpable," Mr. Fischer said. An economic impact analysis commissioned by the developer predicts the project would generate 159 million in one time construction spending and 1,095 full time jobs for the estimated 30 months it would take to complete the building's overhaul. But even at a time when the state's 9.1 percent unemployment rate remains above the national average, Rhode Islanders have made it clear they are in no mood to subsidize a private development, according to state legislators who said their constituents were adamantly opposed to the project. "It was the wrong place at the wrong time for those guys," said Dan Yorke, the host of an afternoon radio talk show on WPRO, who had Mr. Fischer on his program. Callers responded with "raw emotion" to the developer's request, saying that they didn't care if the Superman building remained vacant and that it wasn't their responsibility to bail out the developer, Mr. Yorke said. The state's General Assembly reinstated a historic buildings tax credit program for developers this year, but each project can receive no more than 5 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Three navigation coordination points above Palm Beach International Airport that had been named in honor of Donald J. Trump will be renamed, the Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday. "In general, the F.A.A. chooses names that are noncontroversial," said an agency spokeswoman, Laura Brown. A growing number of businesses have been severing ties with Mr. Trump since the Republican presidential candidate made derogatory remarks about Mexican immigrants in a campaign speech. That includes NBC, which aired Mr. Trump's show, "The Apprentice." In 2010, an air traffic controller who was a fan of Mr. Trump's reality show and its catchphrase, "You're fired," named some of the navigation points that pilots use for takeoff from the airport DONLD, TRMMP and UFIRD. At the time, Mr. Trump told a reporter with The Palm Beach Post that he was flattered, but Thursday morning, he issued a statement that said: "'Making America Great Again' is far more important to me than an honor I never knew I had ... meaning a blip on the radar," he said in a statement released by Michael D. Cohen,executive vice president and special counsel at the Trump Organization. Other navigation points were named IVNKA ONE, in honor of Mr. Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and BUFIT ONE, after the singer Jimmy Buffett. Ms. Brown said she wasn't sure if IVNKA ONE would be renamed as well, but said that nothing would happen immediately. "Because of the charting cycle, the updates could take several months to take effect," she said. The coordinate names are used for a type of instrument area navigation, called RNAV. The points entered into the computer should be five letters long and must be unique to that airport. Ideally, they relate to the area where the coordinates are located. Mr. Trump has had a long history with the area, where his daughter, Tiffany, was born in 1993. He purchased Mar a Lago, an estate built in the 1920s for Marjorie Merriweather Post, in 1985. After renovating it, Mr. Trump opened the estate in 1995 as a private club, though he still maintains a residence there. He has sued the county repeatedly over the flight noise around the property. In January, he filed a 100 million lawsuit against Palm Beach County, contending that his ongoing conflict with the airport led officials to retaliate by routing all flights directly over his estate. A 2010 lawsuit was dismissed. A 1995 lawsuit over the noise ended with the county agreeing to lease Mr. Trump the land where he later built Trump International Golf Club. It's not uncommon to name flight coordinates after celebrities, real or imaginary. In Orlando, Fla., there are a GOOFY, MINEE, PIGLT and BUGGZ. The flight paths into San Francisco are named with Grateful Dead references, including DEDHD, GRTFL, HYPEE, COSMC, TYDYE and TRUKN. But from the get go, some pilots were unhappy about honoring Mr. Trump. Paul Agnew, who was then head of the airport's advisory committee on noise, was quoted in The Palm Beach Post saying that some pilots were unhappy with the decision to honor Mr. Trump. "We actually have had reports of people refusing to fly these departures because they are so offended by the fact that Trump has been memorialized," Mr. Agnew told the airport's advisory committee during a 2010 meeting. The flight controller who suggested the names, Gregory Gish, has since retired, the paper reported. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
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