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As the presumptive new owner of the Mets last week, Steven A. Cohen spent days answering fans' questions on Twitter. The Mets' loyalists, he wrote, are the "most knowledgeable fans around" and Cohen has always been one of them. On Friday, when he closed on a record 2.475 billion purchase of his favorite team, Cohen started his tenure with precisely the kind of move a frustrated Mets fan would make, clearing out a front office that had failed to take the Mets back to the postseason. Cohen fired five members of the baseball operations staff, including General Manager Brodie Van Wagenen, three assistants and the player development director, Jared Banner. Sandy Alderson, the Mets' former general manager and new team president, will hire a fresh front office team supported by not just Cohen's billions, but also his drive. At a time when other owners will show caution after a season without ticket sales, the Mets are positioned to spend the way they rarely did after the Bernard L. Madoff scandal ravaged the Wilpon family finances. The Cohen developments were part of an impressive news dump around Major League Baseball on Friday, joining the league's decision not to punish Justin Turner for celebrating the World Series title last week with his Dodgers teammates, despite having just tested positive for the coronavirus, and the return of Alex Cora to manage the Boston Red Sox. All three stories, in a way, were underscored by a quality too often missing these days: mercy. Cohen, for his part, was approved by league owners on Oct. 30 with four dissenting votes despite baggage that includes several discrimination claims filed by women against his firm, Point72 Asset Management, and the insider trading finding against his former company, SAC Capital Advisors, in 2013. Cohen has never been charged with a crime, but SAC Capital Advisors paid 1.8 billion in fines. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. But with Cohen's deep pockets, and abiding love for the team, now controlling the Mets, the options in free agency are dizzying: Catcher J.T. Realmuto, outfielder George Springer, starter Trevor Bauer and infielder D.J. LeMahieu headline a sneaky deep class of available players, and the Mets also have flexibility to trade for contracts their rivals want to unload. Cohen's respect for the power of analytics a field Alderson helped pioneer with the Oakland A's should help keep the team from making rash decisions. This is the moment when everything seems possible, before any moves of the Cohen era backfire because of underperformance, injury or bad luck. The Mets, of course, will not be immune to those forces. It took the current owners of the Dodgers the model big market franchise eight consecutive division titles before they finally won the World Series. Like Cohen, whose past was ultimately not held against him, Cora was allowed to return after serving a penalty for his role in the Houston Astros' sign stealing scandal of 2017, when he was their bench coach. The Red Sox fired him last winter sparing him a season with their wretched roster, yes, but also costing him his paycheck. A.J. Hinch, the Astros' manager in 2017, was suspended for a year and subsequently fired. He was hired last week as manager of the Detroit Tigers. Managers with championship rings are hard to find, and it is no surprise that Cora and Hinch are back. Two others who lost their jobs after the Astros' scandal are still out of baseball their former general manager, Jeff Luhnow, who was suspended for a year and fired, and their former designated hitter, Carlos Beltran, who was fired as Mets manager. Both have plenty to offer, wherever their next opportunities arise. The point is not to excuse bad behavior, but to let talented people have another chance after serving their time. Fans and historians have long memories, and high profile transgressions never disappear from the record. But not every story has to finish that way. In Turner's case, what would baseball have proved by punishing him for poor judgment? Turner has been roundly vilified for thoughtless exuberance, and he acknowledged in a statement that he had "unwisely" removed his mask while taking a team photo with the trophy. But M.L.B. would have been disingenuous to hold him solely responsible for heading back to the field. "Major League Baseball could have handled the situation more effectively," Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement on Friday. "For example, in retrospect, a security person should have been assigned to monitor Mr. Turner when he was asked to isolate, and Mr. Turner should have been transported from the stadium to the hotel more promptly." Manfred also explained that at least two Dodgers employees had said nothing to Turner as he was on his way to the field, and that, in Turner's recollection, at least one Dodgers official had given him permission. To his credit, Manfred also understood the emotional pull of Turner's decision, which no teammate has publicly opposed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Who gains from a trade war with China? At the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Peru over the weekend, one of the biggest questions was whether Donald J. Trump, as the next president, would stick to his threat to erect steep trade barriers against Beijing, dragging the United States into a tit for tat confrontation with the world's second largest economy. No such war has begun, yet it seems clear that the United States has already lost. China has been steadily gaining in the global economic system. Waging war against globalization, America is making China's case. Eswar Prasad, a former head of the Chinese division at the International Monetary Fund, argues that "over the long term China comes out a winner no matter what." China's economy would surely suffer if the United States were to impose a 45 percent tariff on nearly 500 billion worth of Chinese imports. The United States absorbs only 16 percent of Chinese exports, but it is China's healthiest export market. Fears of American protectionism are already stoking capital flight from China. But China might be better placed than the United States to take the blow. And it would certainly counterpunch. An editorial in China's Global Times, a Communist Party mouthpiece, is probably not far off in its warning that American action would mean: "A batch of Boeing orders will be replaced by Airbus. U.S. auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback, and U.S. soybean and maize imports will be halted." China has several ways to retaliate. It could bar state owned companies from doing business with American businesses. It could limit access to essential commodities, as it did in response to a fishing dispute with Japan by stopping exports of so called rare earth minerals essential to the electronics industry. It could soft pedal efforts to combat the piracy of American patents and copyrights. Some of the United States' most successful companies would be in for a rough ride. Most of Apple's iPhones, for example, are assembled in China. The assembly costs, though, account for less than 4 percent of the value added of the device. That means China could force a halt in iPhone production at little cost to itself, while Apple would face a deeply disruptive, expensive effort to shift production elsewhere. Building it from scratch in the United States is nearly impossible. How long could American resolve hold? An analysis by the pro trade Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded that a full blown trade war with China and Mexico would push unemployment in the United States to nearly 9 percent in 2020, from 4.9 percent today. That would not improve the economic outlook for millions of working class Americans in whose name Mr. Trump proposed this fight. And that may not even be the worst part. Circling the wagons around the American border plays directly into China's hands in other ways. Washington would be cast as the villain in the fight. No matter how many tricks the Chinese government might deploy against American interests, it would remain the victim in the eyes of many nations, a champion for the cause of open rules based trade. Even if Mr. Trump is just bluffing, as many of his allies say, to gain leverage in some future negotiation, much of the damage has been done. His bluster has changed the perception of the role the United States will play in the world. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. In the face of a turn toward populist nationalism in other rich countries like Britain and France China has emerged in the unlikely role of defender of globalized capitalism. "China is the one major power still talking about increased integration," said Nicholas Lardy, a China specialist at the Peterson Institute. "China is the only major country in the world projecting the idea that globalization brings benefits." And that is the United States' loss. A great many countries in the developing world still believe prosperity depends on their successful integration into the supply chains that traverse the global economy. By turning inward a move already reinforced by the rejection of the Trans Pacific Partnership the United States appears to have little to offer. Steven Ciobo, Australia's trade minister, conveyed that point only a few days after the American election by saying that his nation would work to conclude the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership a Chinese initiative among 16 Asian and Pacific countries that excludes the United States and would support Beijing's proposed Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific. Ditto for Peru and Chile, which, according to a senior Chinese official in Lima, are also now seeking to join the Chinese trade initiative. "Almost certainly every economy in the Asian region sees its future lying more closely linked with China," Mr. Prasad, the former I.M.F. official, told me. "With Trump talking about withdrawing from trade deals and making allies pay for protection, it will be tough for Asian countries to resist China's embrace." And if Washington's actions against China start to disrupt Asia's supply chains, the United States could quickly become the region's economic pariah. The question is, to what purpose? It can't simply be about stopping currency manipulation. That's an outdated fear. Instead of working to lower the value of its currency to improve its exports, China has spent about 1 trillion lately to prop up the value of the renminbi in the face of capital flight. If it stopped, the currency would drop like a stone, enhancing China's trade competitiveness. Moreover, slapping trade barriers against China would do little to narrow the American trade deficit. American companies building things in China wouldn't bring much manufacturing home; in most cases they would go to some other country with cheap labor. And to the extent they did "reshore" production, most of it would be highly automated, employing few additional Americans. "It does not make economic sense for Trump to want to balance trade with China," said Derek Scissors, a China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Balanced trade doesn't bring back jobs." Initially, Mr. Trump might look like a winner, resolute in his defense of the working class. But any increase in popularity would be unlikely to last as the consequences started to become apparent. Washington has already been playing a relatively weak hand trying to contain China's influence. China has skillfully deployed investments to win over countries from Africa to Latin America, broadening its network of influence. Its proposed Asian infrastructure bank proceeded, despite opposition from the Obama administration, after Britain and other American allies jumped on board. "China is becoming a leading member of the international community," Mr. Prasad wrote in his new book "Gaining Currency," but not, "as the West prefers, by being co opted into existing institutions under the current rules of the game." Instead, China is "co opting other countries into the system of rules it wants to dictate." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
BLOCKCHAIN CHICKEN FARM And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside By Xiaowei Wang Raising free range chickens isn't easy, a Chinese farmer named Jiang tells Xiaowei Wang in a fascinating new book, "Blockchain Chicken Farm." Why? "Chickens aren't very smart," he notes; if you leave lights on, they'll cluster around "and they overcrowd each other, killing each other. A kind of chicken stampede." Even if you get the chickens safely grown in their sunny, free range yards, you have a new problem: You have to convince your finicky customers, in far off cities, that you're telling the truth about how the chickens were raised. So Jiang turned to high tech chicken surveillance. He outfitted his chickens with wearable legbands that record their movements "a chicken Fitbit of sorts" and worked with a tech start up to record the data on a blockchain. A blockchain is a type of software, most famously used to create Bitcoin, that can make nearly tamper proof digital records. When customers buy the chicken, they don't need to take Jiang's word that his birds strolled around in the sunshine. They can trust the implacable math. Blockchain in this case is a clever tech solution that also happens to have a bleak libertarian philosophy behind it. As Wang notes, some blockchain coders are fond of citing Thomas Hobbes's dismal view of human nature: Nobody can trust anyone else. It's a weird, delightful and unsettling tableau. In "Blockchain Chicken Farm," Wang introduces us to dozens of such quixotic figures, hopscotching across the country on a mission: to document how technology is transforming the lives of China's rural poor. It's good to turn on the klieg lights here. Rural China is a part of the world Americans likely ponder very little, despite being economically entwined with it. To the extent China looms in the American imagination, it's mostly as an economic adversary, a land that has mercilessly stolen American manufacturing jobs by offering dirt cheap labor in gleaming factories. (At least, that's the message the White House has hammered for years now.) It's certainly true that the country's manufacturing explosion has helped create a much wealthier China. But it has also produced a rural urban economic schism that neatly mirrors that of the United States itself. While the cities have gotten rich, the countryside has been left behind, with higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy and markedly lower educational attainment. This divide worries China's leaders deeply. Factories in urban China aren't quite so competitive anymore, because the increasing wealth of cities has jacked up the price of factory labor. Meanwhile, dismal work opportunities in rural areas send young people fleeing for cities, where they find that the high cost of living and lack of legal status, thanks to China's "Hukou" registration system, which incentivizes people to stay in certain geographical areas means that homeownership and even car ownership are out of reach. This creates a powder keg. "Young, able bodied workers, especially young men, untethered from car or house ownership, job or family are threats to political stability," Wang writes, an observation that might give Americans, too, a shudder of recognition. But whereas our federal government has given up on any serious national policy for its countryside, the Chinese government and private sector are busily even desperately trying to engineer a technologically fueled "rural revitalization." 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. Traveling the country to see what this looks like in practice, Wang has a keen eye for the steampunk like details of ancient rural areas now shot through with internet opportunity. We visit Dinglou, a "Taobao village" which is to say, a digital age company town where residents make stuff to sell on Taobao, the e commerce platform of Alibaba, China's high tech behemoth. In Dinglou, the specialty is making costumes like Snow White outfits for Halloween, for example that they ship worldwide, relying on Alipay (another Alibaba creation) for their banking needs. "Nothing beats coming back to your hometown to run a Taobao business!" banners hung in the city declare, and families transform their houses into factories. Wang watches as a woman "in her kitten heel shoes and red skirt" clambers onto a table to jigsaw expertly through layers of fabric for a set of costumes, while a chicken squawks nearby. Wang travels to Zhejiang Province, where pearl farmers patiently feed mussels pig and chicken feces, selling their prize pearls for top dollar and shipping the lousy ones halfway around the globe to American live streamers, who sell them for 20 apiece via influencer style "Pearl Parties" online. Wang hangs out with a 25 year old man named Sun Wei, who despite having only a high school degree has built a career flying drones to do aerial reconnaissance for China's small farmers. Wei radiates a bonhomie that reminds one of America's postwar boom: "It's a feeling that you have a right to the future, a right to imagination beyond the immediacy of the day," as Wang puts it. The technological boom produces genuine moments of rural prosperity, when it works. Though sometimes it doesn't, quite. As a former software engineer in San Francisco, Wang has a grim appreciation for the dark side effects that technology can bring the "breaking things" suffix to the diktat of "moving fast." Consider the boom in the production of pork, a hot commodity among China's increasingly prosperous diners. To increase the yield of pork farms, Alibaba trained a new artificial intelligence, "ET Agricultural Brain," on vast amounts of data from pork operations, the better to predict how to increase yield. (They set up entire "digital towns" where young rural workers sit all day long clicking on pictures of pigs, labeling them as sick or healthy, to feed the A.I.'s smarts.) In the short run, the A.I. does indeed help optimize soaring pork production. It's a win for diners, for pork producers and for government, which yearns for China to achieve "food security." ("The food bowl of the Chinese people must always remain firmly in their own hands," as Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, has said.) But nature does not always respond so obediently. One key strategy that emerges from all this high efficiency pork farming? Feeding the animals "industrial pig swill," a goulash that, cannibalistically, includes ground up pig parts. And this, in turn, creates dangerous new vectors for disease, spreading the dreaded African swine fever so badly that by 2019 it tore through China and destroyed nearly one quarter of the world's pigs. Certainly, technology is good at "scaling" making things grow big, run more efficiently, move more speedily. With its hundreds of millions of rural poor clamoring to join the middle class, China craves scale. ("The West doesn't understand our problems. We just have too many people," Wang is told.) But efficiency can cause problems of its own, leaving China caught in a dilemma: the need for scale, the peril scale brings. Wang also finds that, for rural China, tech propelled business models can produce the grim dynamics of the gig economy, where a far off tech giant runs your life. The blockchain chicken software? It's nifty, but the farmer neither understands the technology nor owns it; it's provided by a tech firm that in the first year of their collaboration ordered 6,000 chickens in advance to sell off to an online supermarket, and in the second year, nothing. Meanwhile, those Taobao villages also contain some embittered merchants who hate the e commerce platform, because it allows buyers to demand refunds long after they've received their goods. One shoemaker has lost so much money this way that he's forced to make lower and lower quality shoes to keep his profits up. "It's all a scam," he says. Wang has written a nuanced and thought provoking account, and it is not easy to tell, after you're done reading it, how rural China will fare whether its tiptoe toward prosperity and tech savviness is durable. Given that China's economic fate is now so entwined with the world, one hopes it can thread the needle. Visiting the "Cloud Computing Museum" of Alibaba, Wang sees the firm's first homegrown server from years ago, adorned with a poem: code line by line builds the foundation for eternity just like sand grain by grain calms the roaring sea. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"Don't you think it needs something after he runs after her?" asked J R recently in a studio at New York City Ballet. The something in particular a leap, a pirouette, an entrechat? was a puzzler. Choreography is a new undertaking for J R, the French street artist known for his large scale photography, like pasting an image of City Ballet dancers, seemingly adrift in a soft, crinkly cloud, onto the floor of the promenade in the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. Yes, it's true: City Ballet is turning itself and more than 40 members of its company over to a man who has never choreographed before. He watched his first ballet in June. Do you hear that sound? Choreographers everywhere are eating their hearts out. Why did City Ballet, which regularly commissions works from choreographers like Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon, give J R this extraordinary opportunity? It hopes to reach a younger audience, which seems happy to post J R's street art on every form of social media. Peter Martins, the company's ballet master in chief, approved the unconventional project, which opens on Tuesday at the Koch Theater. "If nothing else, I'm pretty gutsy," Mr. Martins said. "And the ulterior motive, to be frank, is to really see if we can get some young people in this house. I don't know whether we can do this in one week, but if it works, who knows?" It's Mr. Martins's duty to translate J R's ideas into steps, but even so, he refuses to call the work, "Les Bosquets," a ballet. To him, it's "a piece." Even with a support system, creating a three dimensional ballet is a daunting challenge for J R. Of course, gimmicks don't always work. When the fashion crowd was lured to City Ballet for "Bal de Couture," a work by Mr. Martins featuring costumes by Valentino, the artistic result was savaged by critics. Whether "Les Bosquets" is a disaster, a success or simply mediocre, it is a gamble that helps redefine the notion of collaboration. The work, an approximately eight minute dance for 42 set to a lush score by the French director and musician Woodkid, stars Lauren Lovette, a City Ballet soloist, and Lil Buck, the jookin talent who is appearing as a guest artist. He is a friend of J R's. "I basically assisted him," Mr. Martins said of J R. "Before we even went into a studio, he was in my office. He would mimic images, and I would say, 'So you want me to translate that into a ballet step?' and he'd say, 'Yes, please!' Every move or every gesture he made, I tried to come up with the balletic equivalent of it. I've never done anything like that: Here I was assisting somebody's vision who did not know what choreography was." J R's inspiration, the 2005 French riots, is personal and dates to 2004, when he pasted photographs of residents on the walls of the Cite des Bosquets, a group of bleak projects on the outskirts of Paris. He said that he chose that area because his friend Ladj Ly, who later documented the rioters, lived there. "We covered entire buildings by night with hundreds of kids protecting us from the cops," J R said. "We hadn't been arrested, but the city had sued me for degradation of private property, and they wanted to clean it, but the people in the neighborhood said: 'Don't touch that that's our art! If you touch it, we're going to make a mess.' " J R left France, but returned a year later when the riots began. Because his images were visible on the buildings, his photographs became famous. "The whole ballet is exactly about how the media approached the riots, and how we were documenting from the inside of the riots," he said. "Lil Buck is playing Ladj Ly, who was filming and trying to show the people who were trying to calm the rioters." In "Les Bosquets," Ms. Lovette portrays a journalist who finds herself alone with Lil Buck's character; at first, she's frightened, but through movement, they find a connection as he translates her steps into versions of his own. "I have no skill to say if her foot is in the right position, but I can see her energy, and same with Lil Buck," J R said. Ms. Lovette, a rising talent in the company, also had to adjust to J R. "I really had to get into his mind," she said. "For me, it opened up a world of imagination. He'd try to demonstrate in his way, but he'd also give you a picture of what he wanted: 'I want your arms to be like you're a flying bird!' I'd be like, 'That's a tour jete I'll put my arms up like this' and he'd say: 'Yes! That's exactly what I was going for.' " Like J R, Woodkid has found a connection with the ballet world that he hopes to continue after the premiere of "Les Bosquets." His orchestral score is his first to be performed live, with no produced or electronic elements. Woodkid described the opening percussive section as "focusing on collisions between ternary and binary rhythms." He added: "It's really about the masculinity of the riots and about the violence and chaos of them. Slowly, as the piece progresses, there's a sense of hope that comes from within that mess, and it balances itself rhythmically, but also harmonically. The strings come in. It actually becomes very romantic." In "Les Bosquets," the corps de ballet 20 men and 20 women plays both the rioters and the police. For the opening moment, J R, who watched performances and studied photographs, became obsessed with a movement from George Balanchine's "The Four Temperaments." Mr. Martins put his own twist on it: In "Les Bosquets," the men hold the women, who each extend one leg forward like a gun. "It's a 'Four T's' reversed," Mr. Martins said. "The girl is facing the other way. He loved it." Toward the end of the rehearsal, the dancers were preparing for their final run through of the day. "In the last few weeks, I was out there where the real riots happened," J R said. "I wish I could just transport you there so you could see the context. The way you run, all those details they make the piece. Now you have all the moves, and now you can just let go. Bring the actors in you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The R B singer Chris Brown reached No. 1 on the Billboard album chart this week with his new release, "Indigo," while the rock band the Black Keys opened at No. 4 with their first album in five years, "Let's Rock." "Indigo" (RCA) opened at the top with the equivalent of 108,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen. Like many artists these days, Brown offered copies of his album as part of sales bundles with concert tickets and merchandise, but the success of his album came largely from streaming. His total sales number, as computed by Billboard and Nielsen, includes 98 million streams and just 28,000 copies sold as a full album. (His streaming number may have been helped by the fact that the album contains 32 songs.) While to much of the wider public Brown remains tainted by his arrest in 2009 for assaulting Rihanna he was sentenced to five years' probation and community service for that offense Brown has remained consistently popular, particularly among R B and hip hop fans. His first two No. 1 albums "F.A.M.E." and "Fortune" came in the years after that arrest, and his singles have frequently dotted the Top 10; "No Guidance," a track from "Indigo" that features Drake, went to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and No. 5 on the R B chart. Also on the chart this week, Lil Nas X's debut EP, "7," holds at No. 2, while Billie Eilish is No. 3 with "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
New Robert A.M. Stern Condo on Park Avenue Sells for Nearly 74 Million The newly opened towers at 520 Park Avenue and 220 Central Park South, each designed with stately limestone facades by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, are steadily filling up. Several luxury residences officially closed at 520 Park in November, including the most expensive sale in New York City this year: a duplex penthouse selling for 73.8 million, according to property records. The other big sales at the building were another penthouse duplex that sold for 62 million, as well as apartments on the 30th floor selling at 25.86 million, the 24th floor at 23 million, and the 23rd floor at 20.01 million. The 54 story condominium, at Park Avenue and East 60th Street, began its closings in September; many more units are under contract. At 220 Central Park South, a few blocks away at West 58th Street, a 27th floor condo sold for 13.49 million. Closings there commenced in October, and they are ultimately expected to include the city's priciest listing: a 250 million penthouse with 23,000 square feet. Several other notable transactions took place in the month of November. Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist, finally sold his Greenwich Village duplex penthouse, while Paul Waaktaar Savoy, a guitarist in the Norwegian pop band A ha, parted with his SoHo home. The closing price for each was 9 million. Adriana Lima, the Brazilian model and actress, sold her Midtown apartment. Louise McNamee, the first woman named a partner in a major advertising agency, sold the Greenwich Village townhouse she owned with her husband, Peter McHugh, who briefly ran Pan American World Airways after its bankruptcy. And the billionaire hedge fund manager William A. Ackman, a major player in Manhattan's luxury market, continued to replenish his real estate holdings after deeding several properties to his former wife in an apparent property settlement. He bought a compound of four penthouses at an Upper West Side co op building. The two penthouses that sold at 520 Park, units PH60 and PH52, each have 9,138 square feet of interior space, with six bedrooms and seven and a half baths, according to the offering plan. They also have high ceilings, white oak floors, a private elevator bank, and 279 square feet of outdoor space with panoramic cityscape and Central Park views. The buyer of PH60 was James Dyson, the billionaire founder of the British home electronics maker Dyson, which has a new flagship store in Manhattan just a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue. Mr. Dyson made his purchase using a limited liability company; the other purchases were also through a limited liability partnership or company. The three smaller apartments at 520 Park were similarly configured on a full floor. Each has 4,628 square feet of space, with four bedrooms and five baths, as well as a spacious living room, formal dining room and family room. These units also have park and city views. The condominium offers its residents numerous amenities, among them: a landscaped private garden; a club room and playroom; a fitness center with a pool, sauna and steam room; and a wine cellar. The building was developed by Zeckendorf Development, in partnership with Park Sixty and Global Holdings. At 220 Central Park South, the buyer for the 27th floor condo was listed as Tong Tong Zhao, a founder of the China Lodging Group, a hotel management company now known as the Huazhu Hotels Group and based in Shanghai, China. Ms. Zhao's new apartment has 2,394 square feet, with two bedrooms and two and a half baths. The building was developed by Vornado Realty Trust. Mr. Richards and his wife, Patti Hansen, a model and actress, sold their penthouse at the co op building at 1 Fifth Avenue, near Eighth Street and Washington Square Park, for a 1.5 million loss. The couple had purchased the four bedroom, four bath apartment in 2014 for 10.5 million, and about two years later put it back on the market for 12.3 million. The most recent asking price was reduced to nearly 10 million. The sprawling duplex has three terraces on the lower level, which contains a living room, dining area, kitchen and two bedrooms, according to the listing with Douglas Elliman Real Estate. A family room and two additional bedrooms are upstairs. The SoHo apartment sold by Mr. Waaktaar Savoy and his wife Lauren Savoy, a music composer and director, was unit No. 5 South at 42 Wooster Street, a prewar condominium between Grand and Broome Streets. The unit has four bedrooms and four and a half baths over nearly 4,500 square feet. Ms. Lima, the model best known for her work with Victoria's Secret and Maybelline cosmetics, sold No. 42D at 146 West 57th Street, a.k.a the Metropolitan Tower Condominium, for 3.3 million. She paid nearly 2 million for the apartment in 2003, and first listed it in late 2016 for 4.85 million. The 2,200 square foot residence has three bedrooms and two and a half baths, along with Central Park and city views, according to the listing with Douglas Elliman. In the Village, Ms. McNamee and Mr. McHugh, who now live in Charlottesville, Va., sold 11 Leroy Street. This former carriage house between Bleecker Street and Seventh Avenue South is 25 feet wide and three stories high, with a garage on the ground level, a terrace on the roof and a wine cellar in the basement. The sale price was 11.25 million. The 4,880 square foot home has five bedrooms and three and a half baths. The exterior space is about 1,000 square feet. Ms. McNamee spent several decades in the advertising business, including her role as partner at the firm of Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer. Mr. Ackman, the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, bought four adjacent penthouses on the 16th and 17th floors of the grand co op building at 6 16 West 77th Street. The units, which he is expected to combine, ranged from a studio to a duplex, according to the listing with Brown Harris Stevens, and include about 3,200 square feet of terraces. The compound had been owned by Nancy Friday, an author known for her best selling books about gender politics. She died a year ago, and the property was sold through a revocable trust. All the proceeds from the sale are expected to go to charitable foundations to benefit emerging writers and animals. The total sale price for the four apartments was 22 million, according to property records. The prewar, 15 story, beige brick building is on Central Park West, near the American Museum of Natural History. Mr. Ackman has been active in the market of late. In October, he transferred a duplex at 420 West Broadway in SoHo to his former wife, Karen Ackman, a landscape architect and artist whom he divorced last year. The month before, he deeded to Ms. Ackman another duplex in the Beresford, at 211 Central Park West, between 81st and 82nd Streets. He also purchased for himself two units on the eighth floor of the Beresford. Also last month: The city's second biggest sale, at 27.5 million, was a 68th floor apartment at 432 Park Avenue, the 96 story skyscraper between 56th and 57th Streets, on Midtown Manhattan's Billionaires' Row. The 4,019 square foot unit, No. 68B, has four bedrooms and four and a half baths, along with panoramic views of the city and beyond, according to the listing with Compass. It also comes with a 342 square foot studio for staff, No. 28L, and a 1,764 bottle wine cellar. This property was initially put on the market in July 2017 for 30.9 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
I first saw the South Unit one sunny fall afternoon last year with the wildlife biologist Richard Sherman. Born and raised on Pine Ridge, Mr. Sherman has a devotion to the land that was evident as he showed me the fringed sagewort, wild rose, curly cup gumwood and scarlet globe mallow he gathers, and as he described the wild deer he hunts in the region. During our hike, he had darted ahead of me with ease, disappearing around switchbacks and over bluffs and across a meadow of dry towering velvet mullein before leading me to Cedar Butte. There, we had a commanding view of the park's magnificent buttes surrounding a desolate and verdant valley. And as if on cue, while I admired the dizzying landscape, a flock of wild pigeons swept across the ravine to our right, and then tucked into crevices in the canyon wall. Later, I spotted seven bighorn sheep, as still as statues as they balanced effortlessly on a precipitous mesa face, a startling image. Despite the steep ascent, it felt like a privileged trek, with no trail to follow because there isn't one. Tangles of tree branches blocking passage and the tricky climb notwithstanding, the unspoiled remoteness, the wild, the silence, all illustrated to me that we were happily far, far from the beaten path. Mr. Sherman later told me that he had led groups of German and French tourists to Cedar Butte, and upon reaching the shelf where we stood, they had sat lost in thought, speechless and enraptured at the primeval landscape. But beyond the landscape, the Badlands are a sacred place to the Oglala Sioux. Before my hike with Mr. Sherman, a group of students from the Red Cloud Indian School let me tag along on an excursion to Stronghold Table, a grassy bluff believed to be where the Lakota performed the last ghost dance in December 1890 before the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, about 30 miles south of here. The dusty and fissured road leading to the Stronghold ends in front of a hollowed out, hexagon shaped bungalow a testament to Keith Janis, an Oglala Sioux, who built it in 2003 while protesting the park service's possession of the land. "The natives told the settlers when they came to these lands that they were tough to live on," Vance Blacksmith, the activities director at Red Cloud Indian Schools, told the students, as they sat in a semicircle at the bluff's edge. He then turned to look out at the canyon and, with a sweep of his arm, described excavations that revealed alligators and three toed horses had once roamed this arid region. "The Lakota," he said, "helped scientists understand what came before." During my hike later with Mr. Sherman, I asked him about the Lakota and their relationship to the land, and the idea of setting it aside as the National Park Service has for 100 years now to foster an understanding of natural and social history. He thought for a long moment and said: "This goes a long ways back. When settlers came to these lands, or scientists even, they said to the Lakota, 'Show us your sacred sites.' But," he said, "for the Lakota, it's all sacred, the land, the sun, the stars, all of it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Q. What is the difference in security protections between TunnelBear and Ghostery? A. Both programs are meant to protect your privacy and give you more online anonymity. But TunnelBear primarily encrypts your overall internet connection, and Ghostery blocks the software that wants to track your wanderings around the web. (Both apps have desktop and mobile versions.) TunnelBear is a virtual private network (VPN) service, and it is designed to protect the data transferred by your computer over the internet, even on an open public network, by connecting your device to a secure server (sometimes called "tunneling") that shields your online activity from others. The data transferred by your computer is encrypted, and the VPN can even mask the location of your computer, or make it seem that you are connected from another country. Using the internet may seem slower than surfing without the protection, but TunnelBear can block some online tracking software, too software that can slow websites. TunnelBear is one of numerous paid and free VPN services and apps that are available, including IPVN, the provider recommended by Wirecutter, a product review site owned by The New York Times. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In glossy sci fi movies like "Ex Machina" and "Chappie," robots move with impressive and frequently malevolent dexterity. They appear to confirm the worst fears of prominent technologists and scientists like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates, who have all recently voiced alarm over the possible emergence of self aware machines out to do harm to the human race. "I don't understand why some people are not concerned," Mr. Gates said in an interview on Reddit. "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence," Mr. Musk said during an interview at M.I.T. "If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that," he added. He has also said that artificial intelligence would "summon the demon." And Mr. Hawking told the BBC that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Not so fast. Next month, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon research arm, will hold the final competition in its Robotics Challenge in Pomona, Calif. With 2 million in prize money for the robot that performs best in a series of rescue oriented tasks in under an hour, the event will offer what engineers refer to as the "ground truth" a reality check on the state of the art in the field of mobile robotics. A preview of their work suggests that nobody needs to worry about a Terminator creating havoc anytime soon. Given a year and a half to improve their machines, the roboticists, who shared details about their work in interviews before the contest in June, appear to have made limited progress. The agile robots in films like "Ex Machina" are far ahead of reality. In the previous contest in Florida in December 2013, the robots, which were protected from falling by tethers, were glacially slow in accomplishing tasks such as opening doors and entering rooms, clearing debris, climbing ladders and driving through an obstacle course. (The robots had to be placed in the vehicles by human minders.) Reporters who covered the event resorted to such analogies as "watching paint dry" and "watching grass grow." This year, the robots will have an hour to complete a set of eight tasks that would probably take a human less than 10 minutes. And the robots are likely to fail at many. This time they will compete without belays, so some falls may be inevitable. And they will still need help climbing into the driver's seat of a rescue vehicle. Twenty five teams are expected to enter the competition. Most of their robots will be two legged, but many will have four legs, several will have wheels, and one "transformer" is designed to roll on four legs or two. That robot, named Chimp by its designers at Carnegie Mellon University, will weigh 443 pounds. None of the robots will be autonomous. Human operators will guide the machines via wireless networks that will occasionally slow to just a trickle of data, to simulate intermittent communications during a crisis. This will give an edge to machines that can act semi autonomously, for example, automatically walking on uneven terrain or grabbing and turning a door handle to open a door. But the machines will remain largely helpless without human supervisors. Robots in films like "Chappie" are capable of great destruction. In real world contests, state of the art robots struggle simply to remove debris. "The extraordinary thing that has happened in the last five years is that we have seemed to make extradorinary progress in machine perception," said Gill Pratt, the Darpa program manager in charge of the Robotics Challenge. Pattern recognition hardware and software has made it possible for computers to make dramatic progress in computer vision and speech understanding. In contrast, Dr. Pratt said, little headway has been made in "cognition," the higher level humanlike processes required for robot planning and true autonomy. As a result, both in the Darpa contest and in the field of robotics more broadly, there has been a re emphasis on the idea of human machine partnerships. "It is extremely important to remember that the Darpa Robotics Challenge is about a team of humans and machines working together," he said. "Without the person, these machines could hardly do anything at all." In fact, the steep challenge in making progress toward mobile robots that can mimic human capabilities is causing robotics researchers worldwide to rethink their goals. Now, instead of trying to build completely autonomous robots, many researchers have begun to think instead of creating ensembles of humans and robots, an approach they describe as co robots or "cloud robotics." Ken Goldberg, a University of California, Berkeley, roboticist, has called on the computing world to drop its obsession with singularity, the much ballyhooed time when computers are predicted to surpass their human designers. Rather, he has proposed a concept he calls "multiplicity," with diverse groups of humans and machines solving problems through collaboration. While Jonathan Harris could school The Robot on "Lost In Space" in fine art, today's robots have difficulty opening doors. For decades, artificial intelligence researchers have noted that the simplest tasks for humans, such as reaching into a pocket to retrieve a quarter, are the most challenging for machines. "The intuitive idea is that the more money you spend on a robot, the more autonomy you will be able to design into it," said Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. roboticist and co founder two early companies, iRobot and Rethink Robotics. "The fact is actually the opposite is true: The cheaper the robot, the more autonomy it has." For example, iRobot's Roomba robot is autonomous, but the vacuuming task it performs by wandering around rooms is extremely simple. By contrast, the company's Packbot is more expensive, designed for defusing bombs, and must be teleoperated or controlled wirelessly by people. The first Darpa challenge more than a decade ago had a big effect on the perception of robots. It also helped spark greater interest in the artificial intelligence and robotics industries. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
For Amy Quichiz , a founder of Veggie Mijas, a vegan focused collective, it's about "reflecting on the systems around us that impact the choices that we make." Veggie Mijas is a collective of over 300 nonbinary, female identifying people and women of color in 12 chapters across the United States, and the group originally founded by Amy Quichiz and Mariah Bermeo facilitates community building through vegan potlucks, cleaning up community gardens and hosting youth seminars to teach children about the importance of growing their own food. "Veggie Mijas is about reclaiming what a plant based lifestyle looks like, which isn't just about not eating meat," said Ms. Quichiz , 24, a native of Queens, N.Y., who is Peruvian and Colombian. "It's about what we can do for our communities, and about reflecting on the systems around us that impact the choices that we make." In 2018, following her move back to New York City after college, Ms. Quichiz started asking for recipes from other Latinx people in her community as part of her own many attempts to start eating healthier in the aftermath of late night binges as a student. She started an Instagram account and then a website as a resource for recipes and community. The response she got prompted her to start the collective. For Ms. Quichiz, her frequent attempts to start eating better were interrupted by what she said were her lack of knowledge and systemic racism that creates food deserts in many poorer neighborhoods. The result is what some members of Veggie Mijas refer to as "white veganism," and a lack of resources when it comes to eating well. "Mainstream vegan spaces, both online and in person, aside from being predominantly white, have been middle class and able bodied," said Brandie Skorker , 33, a Veggie Mijas organizer from Boston. "We need spaces where we can talk about the food justice issues we're so passionate about and come up with solutions while creating bonds and community," Tammy Arias , 25, who started a chapter in Miami, wrote in an email. Consider every aspect of food: production, how it's labeled and how it's being sold. "J ust because it says 'organic' doesn't mean it's healthy ," Ms. Quichiz said, noting soy as an example. "It's technically good for you, but you're not supposed to eat it all the time, and it's not necessarily ethically grown. The revolution we want doesn't include capitalist brands profiting of f people of color. It's about supporting ourselves by learning what's good for us." Know where your food comes from The easiest way to know about your food is to grow it yourself, which is an unrealistic expectation for many. But you don't need your own farm; volunteering at a community garden is a great way to gain access to land on which to plant, while also engaging with your community. Farmers' markets are another way to be conscious of where your food comes from. In New York, for example, farmers' markets accept food stamps . Veggie Mijas mijas is a Spanish term of endearment offers an online directory on its website that helps you find a farmers' market in your community. Learn about the plant based foods your parents ate and incorporate them into your diet. When Ms. Quichiz started eating a vegan diet, she took home a bag of quinoa from Whole Foods. Her father laughed and said he used to eat quinoa as a poor child in Peru. Finding out the history of different vegetables and recipes shows you how they have been commodified, Ms. Quichiz said. Looking into your cultural background can also teach you about other ways food can be important. "Food is medicine," she said. "Our ancestors made healing tools and survived because of it." But don't be afraid to change those recipes Another problem the women have encountered, even within their own communities, is that people believe they can't cook traditional dishes without meat and dairy products. When Ms. Quichiz recently spoke at the University of California in Santa Barbara, a student told her she "didn't know how to go vegan as a Salvadoran, because she would miss her food too much." Whether that means cutting out all animal products or eating them only when you don't have access to vegan alternatives , "if you change the way you eat, you'll change the way you think about the world," Ms. Quichiz said . That can include where you shop, what you wear, how you recycle and what you buy. "When we talk about access whether it's fast fashion or fast food even though I'm rooting for you to buy that 5 shirt because it's affordable, you have to be conscious of why it's so cheap," Ms. Quichiz said. "Thinking about those things are the first step." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Members of Congress returning home for the July 4 recess last week were met with rallies, sit ins and Independence Day demonstrators, as activists on the left intensified their push to defeat Republican legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The groups on the right that once fueled the party's anti Obamacare fervor might as well have been on vacation. "Not too many are focused on health care currently," said Levi Russell, a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and funded by the Koch brothers. Instead of health care, he said, the organization's state chapters were holding town hall style meetings about veterans' concerns during recess week. Two other major groups, FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Patriots, said they were planning rallies in August and September that would push for an overhaul of the tax code; Americans for Prosperity was already running ads toward that. The shift in priorities is remarkable. Since the summer of 2009, when Tea Party activists angrily confronted Democrats who were drafting the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party has been driven and defined by outrage over it. But now, with the Republican health care legislation hanging in the balance, President Trump and congressional leaders are getting little support from what were once the loudest anti Obamacare voices. The lack of grass roots enthusiasm will make it even harder for the party's Senate leaders to line up votes for their troubled bill when they return on Monday. Activists on the right said they felt betrayed by the Republicans they helped elect, who pledged that when they had a Republican president they would repeal the act "root and branch," as Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, once declared. "This is not anywhere close to that, and I think it has left a number of conservative activists saying I'm not advocating for this," said David Bozell, the president of ForAmerica, an organization founded in 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act was passed, to help spread conservative ideas on social media. These activists want the subsidies that help people buy insurance repealed, not just reduced. They want the Medicaid expansion eliminated, not slowed. "You're not going to get a grass roots activist to spend their valuable time calling their senator because, 'Well, this is better than nothing,'" Mr. Bozell said. Public opinion polls show support for repeal and replace slipping among the very groups that once demanded it. Support for the Republicans' efforts among Trump supporters, while still a healthy 55 percent, dropped 14 percentage points since May, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in mid June. Among Republicans over all, support had dropped 11 points, to 56 percent. Just 8 percent of Republicans polled thought repeal should be the top priority of Congress and the president. While Republicans have become more lukewarm on their party's efforts, Democrats are more fiercely defending the Affordable Care Act. Fifty three percent of Democrats in the Kaiser poll had a "very favorable" view of the health care law, while 21 percent of Republicans had the same view of their party's plan to repeal it. In May 2010, two months after the law passed, 30 percent of Democrats had a very favorable view of it. Republicans were heatedly against it: 69 percent had a "very unfavorable view." "There's definitely an enthusiasm gap," said Liz Hamel, the director of public opinion and survey research for Kaiser, a nonpartisan research group. "It's not that they're not interested in repeal," she said. "They just have other priorities." In the June poll, 74 percent of Republicans said their families would be better off without the health care law. But a majority expressed support for its major provisions: 59 percent want the federal government to continue prohibiting insurers from charging more to people with pre existing conditions; 52 percent said the federal government should continue to require insurance plans to cover a list of "essential health benefits," like maternity care and treatment for drug abuse. Advertising, too, has been one sided against the Republican legislation. Groups from Planned Parenthood to the AARP have bought television and radio spots in states with wavering Republicans imploring them to vote against the plan. Groups on the right were mostly silent; FreedomWorks has run digital ads in Tennessee alone, showing Senator Bob Corker, who has criticized his fellow Republicans for proposing to eliminate the act's 3.8 percent tax on investment income, cozying up to President Barack Obama. Like Republican lawmakers, some of the groups have found that fixing complex legislation is far more challenging than opposing it. "It's easier to generate a crowd when you don't have to be in on the sausage making," said Adam Brandon, the president of FreedomWorks. "The Democrats, their strategy is outrage," he said. "I get that strategy. I lived that strategy. It's a unifying strategy to be outraged at the other guy. The hard part is when you get in and have to deliver." Jenny Beth Martin, the president and co founder of the Tea Party Patriots, said the group's email blasts against Obamacare still trigger hundreds of responses from activists angry about it. The group helped make more than 100,000 phone calls over 48 hours when the House was voting on its bill in the beginning of May to repeal and replace. But, she said, "We're not yet on the yes side with what the Senate is doing." Grass roots activists like Pat Daugherty, who once marched on Washington against Obamacare, now sound as disgusted with Republicans in Congress as they were in the early days of the Tea Party, when they helped primary challenges against lawmakers they derided as "Republicans in Name Only." "Every Republican in Congress ran on repealing Obamacare," said Ms. Daugherty, a retired university administrator in Athens, Ga. "Why do we suddenly have a hard time repealing Obamacare when Republicans are in the majority? "I know a lot of conservatives who are more upset with Republicans than with Democrats," she said. David Zupan helped organize Tea Party groups in Ohio against the Affordable Care Act, which he blamed for driving up health care costs and forcing him to shutter his technology support business. Before the law, he said, he paid 910 per month to insure him and his wife, with a 750 annual deductible. When he renewed his policy last year, he said, the rates had increased to 2,845 per month, with a 3,500 deductible. Mr. Zupan had hoped to confront Senator Rob Portman over the recess to demand that he and his fellow Republicans push for a full repeal. Mr. Portman has expressed concern that the Senate bill would roll back Medicaid too far, particularly jeopardizing treatment for opioid addiction. But Mr. Zupan gave up after being unable to figure out where Mr. Portman would be. Mr. Zupan, too, expressed a certain resignation with Republicans. "Nothing they're going to do to this bill is going to make it better," he said. Mr. Brandon, at FreedomWorks, said activists were beginning to think that Republicans had voted for that bill only because they knew Mr. Obama would block it. That suspicion "they were just being political" fosters apathy now, he said. "You think of the origins of the Tea Party and the origins of why Donald Trump won," he said. "People are sick of the political show." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
SAN FRANCISCO WhatsApp sued the Israeli cybersurveillance firm NSO Group in federal court on Tuesday, claiming the company's spy technology was used on the popular messaging service in a wide ranging campaign targeting journalists and human rights activists. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, claimed in the lawsuit that an NSO Group program that was intended to piggyback on WhatsApp was used to spy on more than 1,400 people in 20 countries. The lawsuit did not say who was using NSO Group technology to target WhatsApp users. But the area codes for a number of phones that had been attacked indicated a focus on people in Mexico, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The filing of the lawsuit, believed to be the first by a tech company against a for profit digital surveillance company, could be the "beginning of the end" of the rapid and largely unregulated adoption of these surveillance technologies, said John Scott Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab. WhatsApp worked closely with Citizen Lab, a research group affiliated with the University of Toronto that aids victims of digital surveillance, in its investigation of the attacks, which took place from April to May. The messaging service said the victims included 100 journalists, prominent female leaders, several people who had been targeted with unsuccessful assassination attempts, political dissidents and human rights activists as well as their families. The suit was filed in the United States District Court in the Northern District of California. NSO Group, which sells its surveillance technology to governments all over the world, said in a statement Tuesday that it disputed the claims in the WhatsApp lawsuit in the "strongest possible terms" and "will vigorously fight them." NSO Group added that its technology was used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies in lawful antiterrorism efforts and crime fighting, and it "has helped to save thousands of lives over recent years." The investigation started after Citizen Lab charged that NSO Group's technology had been used to exploit a WhatsApp security hole to hack the phone of a London lawyer. The hole was patched in May. The lawyer had represented several plaintiffs in lawsuits that accused NSO Group of providing tools to hack the phones of a Saudi Arabian dissident living in Canada, a Qatari citizen and a group of Mexican journalists and activists. He contacted Citizen Lab. The researchers said they discovered that NSO technology left digital crumbs that helped them uncover the spy campaign. The weakness: Whoever was using the NSO Group hacking tools had to place a WhatsApp call to their target. Even if the target did not pick up the phone, NSO's technology would become embedded in the phone and provide access to all of its contents. The missed calls, however, tipped off the lawyer, he told The New York Times. After WhatsApp patched the security hole, NSO employees lamented that the company closed off a major espionage channel. An NSO employee even told a WhatsApp employee in a message: "You just closed our biggest remote for cellular," according to the WhatsApp complaint. Citizen Lab and WhatsApp would not name the individuals targeted, citing privacy policies. WhatsApp said in a statement that it was informing affected customers with special WhatsApp messages. The company is seeking a permanent injunction to block NSO from its service, and called on lawmakers to ban the use of cyberweapons like those sold by NSO Group to governments. "This should serve as a wake up call for technology companies, governments and all internet users," Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Post on Tuesday. "Tools that enable surveillance into our private lives are being abused and the proliferation of this technology into the hands of irresponsible companies and governments puts us all at risk." Mr. Cathcart also urged technology firms to join a call from the United Nations special rapporteur, David Kaye, for an immediate moratorium on the sale, transfer and use of dangerous spyware. NSO Group is one of dozens of digital spy outfits that provide technology to track everything a target does on a smartphone. Its spyware allows governments to track the location, communications, contacts and web activities of targets. But such access can be easily abused. NSO Group has said in the past that it limits the sale of hacking tools to governments with poor human rights records, but it has little insight into how its tools are used once they are in government hands. The company has said it only learns and investigates cases of abuse when they surface in the media. NSO Group's technology has repeatedly been discovered on the phones of civilians. In 2017, The Times helped uncover the use of NSO spyware on journalists, dissidents and consumer rights activists in Mexico. Since then, the spyware has been uncovered on the phone of the wife of a murdered Mexican journalist and, last year, on the phone of a close confidant of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist whose murder was linked by United States intelligence services to the Saudi Arabian government. The WhatsApp complaint that was filed on Tuesday claims that NSO Group is closer to the deployment of its spyware than it portrays to the public. WhatsApp traced several servers that deployed NSO's spyware back to internet addresses operated directly by NSO Group. The company leased servers including servers in the United States from Amazon and two other cloud services called Choopa and Quadranet, to help deploy its spyware, the lawsuit said. Amazon did not return a request for comment. Since NSO Group was founded in 2011, its spy technology, called Pegasus, has become the preferred mobile spy tool of many governments. An early NSO commercial proposal leaked to The Times claimed Pegasus could overcome encryption to grant "unlimited access" to everything on a target's mobile device. "Pegasus silently deploys invisible software on the target device," the company's early pitch read. "Installation is performed remotely over the air, does not require any action from or engagement with the target and leaves no trace whatsoever on the device." For years, commercial spyware makers have been unregulated, in part because governments are the clients. "They get close to governments and when those governments do bad things with their products, commercial spyware companies can claim it's not their fault," said Mr. Scott Railton, of Citizen Lab. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The coaches led soccer teams and sailing teams, guided water polo champions and budding volleyball stars. At least two had won N.C.A.A. championships. A third gave Michelle Obama and her daughters tennis lessons from his post at Georgetown. The coaches charged Tuesday in a massive federal college admissions fraud scandal were some of the most prominent in their fields. But it was their apparent willingness to exploit their access to the admissions process at several exclusive universities that has them facing federal charges. Who are they? Several had deep associations with the University of Southern California, where Donna Heinel, a senior athletic department administrator, is accused of playing a central role in the scandal. For nearly a decade, Heinel had overseen the admissions of athletes into U.S.C., working closely with several of the current and former Trojans coaches who have been indicted. She was fired Tuesday. Here is a brief look at the current and former coaches identified by a federal complaint. Vavic won 16 national titles at U.S.C., more than any coach in university history (10 in men's water polo, the most recent coming in December, and six in women's water polo). He was fired Tuesday after he was arrested in connection with the admissions scheme. He had coached the women's team, currently ranked No. 1 and the defending national champion, since 1995 and had been the sole head coach of the men's team since 1999. A 15 time national coach of the year, Vavic was named the Pac 12 Conference's "coach of the century" for water polo in 2015. According to the indictment, the co conspirators in the admissions fraud paid 250,000 to an account that financed the U.S.C. water polo program, and in return Vavic recommended two students as recruits to the water polo team. The ringleader of the scheme, William Singer, known as Rick, is said to have paid the private school tuition for Vavic's children through one of his company's charitable accounts "under the guise of a fabricated scholarship." According to the indictment, Ernst, known as Gordie, earned more than 2.7 million between 2012 and 2018 in payments that were falsely labeled "consulting" fees. He "designated at least 12 applicants as recruits" for Georgetown's tennis teams, court papers said, "including some who did not play competitively." One such player, listed in the complaint, was encouraged to make playing tennis part of her application essay and claimed to be a top 50 ranking player in the U.S.T.A. for junior girls, which was not true. She was accepted at Georgetown in 2016. Ferguson has been the women's volleyball coach at Wake Forest since 2016. Before that, he coached the men's team at U.S.C., winning 150 matches and leading the Trojans to three N.C.A.A. Final Fours. He was the American Volleyball Coaches Association coach of the year in 2009 and 2012. His success has not continued at Wake Forest, where he was 22 41 in his first two seasons. After Tuesday's charges were unsealed, Wake Forest announced that he has been placed on administrative leave. Ferguson is accused of accepting 100,000 from Singer in 2017 to help Singer's client's daughter, who had been wait listed by the school, gain admittance to Wake Forest as a volleyball recruit. Salcedo has been U.C.L.A.'s men's soccer coach since 2004. The Bruins are one of the nation's top programs annually, and Salcedo has produced dozens of players who have gone on to play professional soccer. A former All American at U.C.L.A. who had a brief career in Major League Soccer and other leagues, he has been a member of the Bruins' soccer program as either a player, assistant coach or head coach for two decades. He is accused of helping two students gain admission to U.C.L.A. as student athletes in exchange for 200,000. The Los Angeles Times and others reported that he had been placed on leave Tuesday. Khosroshahin won a national championship in his first season with the Trojans in 2007, when he was named national coach of the year, but he was fired in 2013 after missing the N.C.A.A. tournament three years in a row. U.S.C. went 8 10 2 in his final season; he was 82 53 15 over all. Janke joined Khosroshahin's U.S.C. coaching staff as an assistant after playing for him in his previous job at Cal State Fullerton. A biography of her at the Geffen Academy, a private school in Los Angeles for students in grades 6 through 12, lists her as the physical education department chair. A previous announcement hailed her hiring as the head of the school's girls soccer program. A third cooperating witness in court papers was an unnamed person whose description closely matches Meredith, who served as Yale's women's soccer coach from 1995 through late last year. Meredith was also a participant in the scheme, according to court filings. Meredith resigned as Yale's coach in November after a disappointing season, but also after, the authorities said Tuesday, he had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of payments to facilitate the admission of a non soccer playing soccer recruit to Yale. When he stepped down after last season, Meredith told the university that "it is time to explore new possibilities and begin a different chapter in my life." A month later, he was elected to the Connecticut Soccer Hall of Fame. Vandemoer is accused of taking financial contributions to his championship winning sailing program from an intermediary in exchange for agreeing to recommend two prospective students for admission. "Neither student came to Stanford," Stanford said in a statement Tuesday. "However, the alleged behavior runs completely counter to Stanford's values." Stanford said Vandemoer had been fired. The Longhorns have one of the top programs in the country, having reached the N.C.A.A. tournament every season since Center took over in 2000. He was placed on administrative leave Tuesday after being accused of accepting 100,000 from Singer in 2015 in exchange for recruiting a student who was not a competitive tennis player. According to court papers, the student's application to Texas said he played one year of tennis as a freshman, but his other activities included being manager of his high school basketball and football teams. The student withdrew from the tennis team shortly after beginning classes at Texas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LONDON Wireless carriers have for years said the next generation network, known as 5G, will provide not only hyper fast mobile phone speeds, but breakthroughs for data heavy technologies like autonomous vehicles, robotics and artificial intelligence. So it came as a surprise last month when one of the world's largest carriers, Britain's Vodafone, said it was pausing some 5G investments in Europe. The decision stemmed from the roiling debate about the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, and uncertainty over whether European countries would ban the company from 5G networks because of national security concerns being raised by the Trump administration. Vodafone's decision involved only a small piece of its business in Europe, but shows how questions swirling about Huawei risk a cooling effect on the broader wireless industry. Even Huawei's competitors have cautioned that the new uncertainty could harm business. A blanket ban on Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment, would have a "significant implication" for the wireless industry, and lead to a "significant delay" in the construction of new 5G networks, said Nick Read, Vodafone's chief executive. Huawei's fate will hang over the wireless industry's largest annual trade conference, MWC Barcelona, previously called Mobile World Congress, which starts on Monday. Typically a celebration of new handsets from Samsung, LG, Sony and other brands, this year's conference in Spain is being overshadowed by less glamorous policy questions about how to safeguard the behind the scenes infrastructure that keeps those devices connected to the internet. "Many operators are now delaying their 5G investments because there is so much uncertainty related to whether they can work with Huawei or not," said Mikael Rautanen, an industry analyst with Inderes Oy, a research firm. "That affects the whole telecommunications sector." 5G networks are considered critical to the future global economy, increasing mobile phone speeds by up to 20 times from the current 4G system, while also creating new applications in medicine, augmented reality and manufacturing. Telecom companies are starting to roll out the new systems this year, with wider adoption coming in 2020. Huawei makes the antennas, base stations, switches and other gear that make the technology work. The debate over Huawei is particularly intense in Europe, where network operators that have long relied on the company's equipment are facing potential new regulations. Britain, Germany, France, Poland and the Czech Republic are among those considering new restrictions against Huawei. British and German authorities have indicated that a complete ban is unlikely, but the United States led campaign threatens to slow down construction of the new technology in Europe that governments and businesses believe is needed to stay competitive in a digitized economy. The head of T Mobile in Poland warned this week that new restrictions could disrupt the introduction of 5G technology. For a year, Trump administration officials have been working on an executive order that would effectively ban Chinese telecom companies, including Huawei, from American 5G networks. The order would block American companies from purchasing equipment from China and other "adversarial powers," but would not stop purchases of European made equipment. The wireless industry's global trade group, GSM Association, said a ban of Huawei equipment in Europe would disrupt the overall market and increase costs for consumers. "The effects would be delay the roll out, delay the technology and very probably higher pricing," said Boris Nemsic, chairman of Delta Partners, an advisory and investment firm focused on the telecommunications market. Huawei has become a lightning rod in the broader trade war between the United States and China. The Trump administration argues that Huawei is beholden to the Chinese government, and that allowing its equipment into 5G networks will create a grave national security risk a charge Huawei has vehemently denied. The increased scrutiny of Huawei would appear to present an opportunity for rivals such as Ericsson and Nokia, but executives at the companies have said it risks creating a broader slowdown. "All our customers are trying to work out what this means, and that is causing uncertainty," Borje Ekholm, the chief executive of Ericsson, told The Financial Times this month. Ericsson and Nokia, which declined to comment, have fallen behind Huawei in market share over the past decade, struggling to match its rival's lower prices and large investments in 5G and other emerging technology. Many carriers say the Chinese company's 5G technology is more advanced than that of its Western rivals. Despite being blocked by the United States, Huawei is the largest seller of telecommunications equipment, accounting for about 28 percent of the global market, according to the Dell'Oro Group, a market research firm. Companies such as Cisco Systems provide equipment like routers used by carriers in other parts of their networks. The new 5G networks represent a once in a decade opportunity. In Europe, mobile carriers are expected to spend at least 340 billion by 2025 constructing the networks, according to GSMA. Ericsson and Nokia have been careful not to appear to take advantage of Huawei's misfortune, perhaps out of concern that China would retaliate against the European companies if new bans against Huawei were introduced. The two companies each earn around 1.5 billion in revenue each year in China, according to an estimate by Pierre Ferragu, an analyst at New Street Research in New York. By contrast, Huawei earns 3.5 billion a year in Europe, Mr. Ferragu estimates. Any company forced to replace Huawei equipment will have to shoulder heavy costs. "It would take time for the existing vendors to scale R D, operations, sales, services and partner agreements to fill the void," the Dell'Oro Group said in a recent report. It may be for that reason wireless carriers that have long depended on Huawei are coming to its defense. Mr. Read of Vodafone urged governments to act carefully before imposing new restrictions, because much of the present debate was not "fact based." "The noise level is at an unhealthy level," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
BASELESS My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act By Nicholson Baker This has been a hard season for truth. Between the disinformation surrounding the coronavirus, Russian bots on the internet, police cover ups of excessive force applied to unarmed civilians and the regular torrent of lies emanating from the White House, objective reality seems to be fading before our eyes. Nicholson Baker (no relation) now weighs in with "Baseless," an account of his efforts to pry old secrets out of the C.I.A. through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), in the service of truth. Unfortunately, he only adds to the ball of confusion that is our world today. "Baseless" evolved from a seven year quest by Baker to obtain classified Air Force memos on a secret government program called "Project Baseless," which he thinks might reveal whether or not the United States used biological weapons during the Korean War. (The North Koreans claimed we did.) The pursuit becomes part of the story, as Baker exposes how the C.I.A. and the United States military have gutted much of FOIA one redaction at a time, stalling for years on releasing documents and trying to rebury what has been exposed already. Along the way, he dredges up many of the "nasty, ugly, wrong things" done by intelligence agencies and the military in our name, especially during the Cold War era. Baker's proposed policy solutions, including a vast increase in declassification and transparency, and the termination of the C.I.A. as we know it, are all to the good. The crimes the agency committed during the Cold War, particularly in Latin America subverting elections, running death squads and coups, even destroying food sources are some of the worst things this country has ever done. Yet too often, Baker's search for the truth dissolves in his own prejudices and rampaging sense of moral superiority. "Baseless" is framed as a work diary he kept for three months in 2019, in which we are also treated to tidbits about his children, his wife, the two small dachshunds they adopted from the Humane Society in Bangor, Maine; the weather; what he's eating potatoes, a granola bar, bean soup, yellow lentils and ginger, noodles, "a baked good from the cafeteria" and "a crunchy baked good"; as well as any number of grating maxims. ("Be a leaf tumbling and leaping around a gravestone. Don't be a gravestone.") 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. Baker is making a case for himself as a man of small and virtuous pleasures. He goes to a Quaker meeting. He loves his wife and the warmth of her body in bed. He loves the feel of a paw in his hand, the smell of a laundry detergent that reminds him of his son. By contrast, our leading Cold War wise men, with their "deep crazy suspicions and enmities," are "not normal people." Baker can be slashingly funny about this "tiny handful of unelected desk warriors," middle aged men reveling in "a form of treehouse, boy's club, prep school ugliness" and their "power to wage political war via cablegram in a suit and tie, and drop hints to newspaper columnists over cocktails in a Georgetown living room that same night." Yet Baker smears even the likes of this establishment with what he chooses to "redact" on his own. His distortions, speculations and omissions outstrip any effort to note them all. Suffice it to say that in his view there is not a calamity anywhere in the world that was not caused by a United States government program. Baker wonders "idly and perhaps unfairly" whether a 1920s Department of Agriculture effort to eradicate barberry bush didn't make the Dust Bowl worse. (It didn't.) And he muses that "Rabbit fever, Q fever, bird flu, Lyme tick disease, wheat stem rust, African swine fever and hog cholera all look, to my nonscientist's eye, like unnatural epidemics that owe their outbreaks to the laboratory" an American laboratory, that is. To my nonscientist's eye. Similar caveats "we may never have incontrovertible proof," "it's remotely possible, though perhaps eternally unprovable," "we may never know," "it's at least possible," "will we ever know?," "let me just blurt out what I think happened," etc. infest Baker's narrative, usually preceded or followed by wild accusations (and, occasionally, by a sign of self awareness: "I lay in bed some of today reading more of this book, hating it, excited by it, embarrassed by it"). At times, the book is framed as a deliberate challenge to the intelligence community: "I could be completely wrong. The only way to prove me wrong is by declassifying the entire document." But this is not how a historian proceeds. Again and again, Baker bristles with anger over actions that were "seriously contemplated" by the C.I.A., other intelligence agencies and the military but never undertaken. "I felt trembly and disgusted at the same time," he writes of Operation Sphinx, a proposal to gas millions of Japanese from the air during World War II. "It's a horrible and disillusioning thing to know that your own country was passing around a paper like Sphinx in the Pentagon." Really? To know that in a brutal war men thought brutal things? At another point, he questions the "long, interesting, confusing letter" he got from Floyd O'Neal, one of some 30 captured American airmen and Marines who "confessed" to germ warfare bombing in Korea. O'Neal's confession is "surprising and moving, though, whether or not it's true," Baker tells us. O'Neal "recanted completely" after he was released, and writes in his letter of sustaining torture so awful he still won't describe it to Baker more than 50 years later: "What they did for the next days I don't care to discuss but I finally agreed to sign their confession." There is nothing surprising or moving about a coerced confession, save for O'Neal's ability to endure the price it exacted. Baker concedes that "Americans individually have done good things," a gesture followed by a banal list that includes "sunglasses," "topiary," "no hitters" and "the midcentury New Yorker." Yes, and also little baby ducks and old pickup trucks. This is another affectation of virtue, not a moral argument. I share Baker's disgust with all the crazy, wasteful, illegal, counterproductive and murderous things the C.I.A. has done, and no doubt continues to do. Hell, I even like dogs. Baker's Olympian worldview, though, takes him to almost the same place he landed in "Human Smoke," his paste up 2008 history of the road to World War II: immobilized by purity and concluding that we should never have intervened, even to stop the Nazis. Americans are neither beasts nor angels, just human beings trying to forge our way through the murky moral choices this world poses. To pretend otherwise is perhaps the worst deception of all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Pat Reilly had good reason to worry about Alzheimer's disease: Her mother had it, and she saw firsthand the havoc it could wreak on a family, much of it financial. So Ms. Reilly, 77, a retired social worker in Ann Arbor, Mich., applied for a long term care insurance policy. Wary of enrolling people at risk for dementia, the insurance company tested her memory three times before issuing the policy. But Ms. Reilly knew something the insurer did not: She has inherited the ApoE4 gene, which increases the lifetime risk of developing Alzheimer's. "I decided I'd best get long term care insurance," she said. An estimated 5.5 million people in the United States have Alzheimer's disease, and these patients constitute half of all nursing home residents. Yet very few people in the United States have been tested for the ApoE4 gene. But last month, with the approval of the Food and Drug Administration, the gene testing company 23andMe began offering tests that reveal whether people have the variant, as well as assessing their risks for developing such conditions as Parkinson's and celiac disease. Other genetics companies are planning to offer similar tests, and soon millions of people will have a better idea what their medical futures might be. Recent research has found that many, like Ms. Reilly, are likely to begin preparing for the worst. But for companies selling long term care insurance, these tests could be a disaster, sending risky patients in search of policies even as those with fewer risks shy away, damaging an already fragile business. "There is a question about whether the industry is in a death spiral anyway," said Robert Hunter, director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America. "This could make it worse." The tests are simple: All people have to do is send away a saliva sample and pay 199. Their disease risks, if they say they want to know them, will be delivered with a report on ancestry and on how their genes influence such traits as flushing when they drink alcohol or having straight hair. The company will not reveal how many people have received disease risk data, but it says that in Britain and Canada, where it has offered such testing for several years, about three quarters of their customers have asked for it. 23andMe has sold its genetic services to more than two million people worldwide since 2007. The issue for now is with long term care insurance, not employment and not at least so far health insurance. Under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, companies cannot ask employees to take gene tests and cannot use any such results in employment decisions; insurers are not permitted to require gene tests or to use the results in coverage decisions. But legislation proposed in the House would exempt corporate "wellness" programs from some of these requirements. And the American Health Care Act, passed by the House, would permit states to waive some insurance safeguards regarding pre existing conditions. At the moment, companies selling long term care insurance unlike medical insurers are permitted to ask about health status and take future health into consideration when deciding whom to insure and how much to charge. The 23andMe test results will not appear in people's medical records, and the company promises not to disclose identifiable findings to third parties. It is up to the customers to reveal them and the fear for insurers is that many will not. Two thirds of nursing home residents are on Medicaid, and the remaining private insurers are already struggling. In the early 2000s, more than 100 firms offered long term care insurance, according to the Treasury Department. By the end of 2015, only 12 firms offered it, and new enrollees fell from 171,000 to 104,000. The insurers charged too little for these policies, experts say; policyholders have turned out to be much sicker than anticipated. To pay for an unanticipated increase in policyholders who develop Alzheimer's, insurers would have to raise prices, said Don Taylor, a professor of public policy at Duke University who has studied the issue. Increasing numbers of people at low risk might decide the insurance was not worth the rising price. Even many at high risk would eventually find the policies unaffordable. It is the definition of an insurance death spiral. If that happens, said Mark Rothstein, the director of the bioethics institute at the University of Louisville's medical school, even more people with Alzheimer's will end up on Medicaid, with the federal government paying for their nursing home care. Someone must pay, he said. The only question is whether it will be taxpayers or policyholders. "How do you want to spread the risk?" Mr. Rothstein asked. For 23andMe, the new tests are simply a way to help people learn about their makeup. "People clearly want information about themselves," said Anne Wojcicki, the chief executive at 23andMe. "There is a demand." Yet even if just a minority of 23andMe customers decided to game the current insurance system, "it's enough to perturb the market," said Dr. Robert Cook Deegan, a professor at the school for the future of innovation in society at Arizona State University, who has studied the issue. Research by Dr. Robert C. Green, a geneticist at Harvard University, indicates that this is exactly what is likely to happen. Drawing on data from his clinical trials involving more than 1,000 people, Dr. Green has found that people who learn they have the ApoE4 gene fare just as well if they get the results without counseling. But he also found that those who learned they had the gene variant Ms. Reilly was one of them were nearly six times more likely to buy long term care insurance than those who did not. The ApoE4 gene variant is present in about a quarter of the population. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Credit...Tessa Neustadt On her HGTV show, "Restored by the Fords," Leanne Ford paints everything white, so it's no surprise that her tiny, early 20th century four room cabin in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles would be white. Ms. Ford is a host of the show, along with her brother, Steve Ford, a carpenter with a dry sense of humor and a penchant for wearing a backward baseball cap. (In one episode, in the middle of construction she wrapped a drop cloth around him and trimmed his long hair. "I think I'd be better off with a construction guy cutting my hair," he said playfully.) The brother and sister generally renovate dark or outdated homes and revamp the space so that it has a modern yet rustic feel that involves a lot of light and a whole lot of bright white paint. Her go to color is Behr's Ultra Pure White, and she convinces her clients on the show (and off the show) that it should be their go to color as well. They all merrily follow Ms. Ford into the cult of bright white. For many of us for a contractor looking to flip a house or an art gallery owner removing visual distractions, or a Scandinavian who wants to brighten her home over a long dark winter white is an unobtrusive base color. This is not so for Ms. Ford, who mixes whites as a philosophy. The cabin, which she shares with her husband, Erik Allen Ford (he recently changed his last name to hers), a founder of Buck Mason, a men's wear company, is rustic and messy with exposed wood and scattered vintage paintings. It is like a wintry Catskill retreat, the opposite of what you'd expect to see in the middle of Los Angeles. Yet the cabin's interior, and the entire open backside of the space, are painted Shoji White down to the hardware in a bedroom, the exposed beams in the living room, the doors, the walls, the unfinished, splintery cabinets and the shelves. In certain light, Shoji White looks like an aged book page. In direct sunlight, it's as soft as a cloud. But her obsession with white isn't limited to paint. On a chilly morning in March, Ms. Ford served me eggs on white pottery plates. She pulled arugula from her glossy white Smeg refrigerator. Her oven backsplash was salvaged ivory color tile and the countertops a milky onyx. Two oversize metal chandeliers, painted white, hung above the long wooden kitchen table. The Moroccan rug in the living room was ivory. A midcentury Gepo arc lamp with a cream globe shade was suspended next to a stone hearth with an ivory midcentury Malm fireplace tucked inside it. The bathroom walls had a skim coat of concrete mixed with a touch of white powder. "This house would not be interesting if it had drywall ceilings," Ms. Ford said. "The reason this house is interesting is because we pull in all of these textures, down to the old sheepskin, down to the Mexican blanket and the knit throw." She pointed to furry layers of cream and white on low slung vintage chairs in the living room. "Cream makes white prettier, and white makes cream prettier," she said. Ms. Ford has been compared to Diane Keaton in her looks and sunny demeanor. She's from Pittsburgh originally it's where her show is taped and where she still lives part of the year and that cheerful, nothing is too precious nature oozes into her decorating style. "The reason I didn't use bright white in here was because I didn't want this cabin to feel modern," she said. "I actually made it look older than when I bought it." And it was never young. The cabin and the eight lots surrounding it originally belonged to Clara Kimball Young, a silent film star who was the second actress to have founded her own production company. Ms. Ford pointed to where the dark wood of a beam peeked through the paint. This is one of her favorite things when the white paint ages and the wood is exposed. "It creates a newer version of white," she said. Ms. Ford has always been drawn to washed out tones. In the sixth grade, she told her mother their kitchen was too dark. Another parent might have suggested that when she got her own kitchen, she could paint it any color she wanted. But Ms. Ford's mother, Jackie, said, "Sure. Let's paint it white." According to Ms. Ford, the kitchen cabinets looked "1,000 percent better." Ms. Ford, 37, sometimes wears a black T shirt on her show that reads: "Wear black. Paint white." Her home in Pittsburgh a former schoolhouse that also serves as an office for the HGTV show is painted entirely in Behr's Ultra White. There, she slathered high gloss paint on a built in cabinet ("High gloss is slick. Modern," she said) and spread matte paint on the adjacent brick wall. She likes playing textures against each other. Ms. Ford says she believes anything can be painted white. She told a story about her sister, whose Pittsburgh home had a red brick fireplace. Ms. Ford told her to paint it you know what, but her sister stalled. You don't paint brick, her sister insisted. "But there's good brick and bad brick," explained Ms. Ford. "You have to step back and see how it works in the space. You don't have to save the wood or save the brick. What you need is a house you love." So the brick was painted white. (For the record: Her sister loves it.) "People get nervous because they think white is going to be cold," Ms. Ford said. "But white paint is anything but cold." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"I'm very happy with the way the study worked out, and I think this precision is about the limit of what we can do" with the brain imaging tools available, said Dr. Anderson, who wrote the report with Aryn A. Pyke and Jon M. Fincham, both also at Carnegie Mellon. To capture these quicksilver mental operations, the team first taught 80 men and women how to interpret a set of math symbols and equations they had not seen before. The underlying math itself wasn't difficult, mostly addition and subtraction, but manipulating the newly learned symbols required some thinking. The research team could vary the problems to burden specific stages of the thinking process some were hard to encode, for instance, while others extended the length of the planning stage. The scientists used two techniques of M.R.I. data analysis to sort through what the participants' brains were doing. One technique tracked the neural firing patterns during the solving of each problem; the other identified significant shifts from one kind of mental state to another. The subjects solved 88 problems each, and the research team analyzed the imaging data from those solved successfully. The analysis found four separate stages that, depending on the problem, varied in length by a second or more. For instance, planning took up more time than the other stages when a clever workaround was required. The same stages are likely applicable to solving many creative problems, not just in math. But knowing how they play out in the brain should help in designing curriculums, especially in mathematics, the paper suggests. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Ever since the mid 1980s, Thirstin Howl the 3rd had been saving everything: every photo of him and his friends, dressed in head to toe Polo; every last mention of his gang, the Lo Lifes, in a media publication, large or small. The clothes, the accessories, the ephemera. Over the years, his life became a museum. "I've been documenting this story without even knowing I was documenting," he said recently, discussing the impending release of "Bury Me With the Lo On," a thick, ostentatious and loving coffee table book that captures the history of a certain subculture of Polo obsession, beginning with the Lo Lifes, the Brooklyn gang that he helped found that terrorized department stores from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s. All of the blueprints for hip hop's current obsession with fashion are contained herein: the laserlike focus on brand, the lifestyle aspiration, the subversion. Today, the genre's stars collaborate with high fashion houses or create their own clothing lines. None of that would have been possible without the Lo Life blueprint. Thirstin Howl the 3rd or, as he was known back then, Big Vic Lo (his real name is Victor DeJesus) became, later in life, one of the most visible members thanks to his rapping career, in which he always kept his dedication to Polo at the tip of his tongue. (The book takes its title from his song "The Polo Rican," but it's not only a lyrical euphemism: In the back of the book is a picture of one Lo Life member in his coffin, wearing a Polo ski sweater.) "Bury Me" is made up of vintage photos, largely from the Thirstin Howl archive, and regal current day portraits of Lo Lifes and Polo obsessives shot by Tom Gould, a young photographer from Auckland, New Zealand, who moved to New York in 2009 with an interest in hip hop and graffiti and an urge to document the culture he had studied only from afar. He met Mr. DeJesus the following year. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of this book is, in Mr. Gould's portraits of Lo Life founders, how good the clothes themselves look, still department store crisp despite two plus decades of wear. Each member's portrait is paired with vintage photos, as well as a first person account of his relationship to the brand, often relating wild stories of teenage shoplifting. And the book's vintage photos are consistently thrilling, from the ones capturing parties where dozens of teenagers wore stolen Polo head to toe, to one Lo Life member's grinning 1988 Bloomingdale's security mug shot, which he stole from the store. All together, it makes for a potent folk history of capitalist sedition. In a time when Polo was being made for and marketed to the aspirational white middle class, some of the most rigorously sourced collections were sitting in closets in Brooklyn housing projects. (Given the Lo Lifes' fraught history with the Ralph Lauren company, the book comes with no official support from Ralph Lauren.) "The first generation, it was straight 'hood," Mr. DeJesus said. "It was criminal. You'd get robbed. You'd have to rob." But by the mid '90s, things were beginning to change. Polo had gained a foothold in hip hop, and many Lo Lifes had died or were in prison. After completing the last of several prison stints in 1994, he went straight and brought his crew with him. "Once we made that positive transition," he said, shoplifting "was no longer a requirement in Lo Lifes." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The most recent season of FXX's astringent comedy "You're the Worst" ended, if not with a proposal, at least with a panicked surrender to the idea of marriage. Having fled, "The Graduate" style, from a safe boyfriend, Gretchen (Aya Cash) turned to her dark night of the soul mate, Jimmy (Chris Geere), and said, "So, what are we thinking, October?" He gulped and grimaced for a short eternity and managed to croak out, "October could work." Since the series is a romantic comedy one of the purest examples on television, if also one of the most twisted, acidulous and sex drenched the question for its fifth and final season (beginning Wednesday) should be whether it will stick the wedding. And the 13 episodes do loosely follow a matrimonial checklist: site visits, cake tastings, centerpiece choices. But nowhere does the course of true love run less smoothly than on "You're the Worst," and the season is like one long held breath. Will the misanthropic, elitist writer Jimmy, who yells "Eject" when he wants someone else to stop talking, and the needy, clinically depressed publicist Gretchen make it to the finish line? A season long series of cryptic, near future flash forwards teases the possibility that they won't. It's the job of romantic comedies to throw obstacles in the way of lifelong happiness, and "You're the Worst" has tackled that obligation with unmatched enthusiasm. Gretchen and Jimmy (who met and bonded as the two biggest jerks at someone else's wedding) were boorish, narcissistic commitment phobes from the start, and in subsequent seasons the show's creator, Stephen Falk, worked in Gretchen's mental illness as a consistent and serious element. Cash has deftly handled the challenge of a character who, when she's not partying or copulating, spends a lot of time hiding under blankets and staring out windows. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
THE GREAT MOTHER 9 p.m. on Starz. This documentary tells the story of Nora Sandigo, a Miami woman who serves as the guardian to more than 1,000 children who were born in the United States to undocumented immigrants. Sandigo, who fled Nicaragua as a teenager, moved to Florida in the late 1980s, where she started working for an organization that helped immigrants with documentation. After President Trump took office, many parents in the immigrant community started to give Sandigo power of attorney, so that she could make decisions for their United States born children, should they be deported. This designation protects the children in Sandigo's care from entering the foster care system, keeping them from being legally separated from their parents. When Sandigo is not making grocery runs, contacting lawyers or trying to find beds for the hundreds of people she looks after, she makes trips to Washington to meet with lawmakers to discuss immigration policy. The filmmakers Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker followed Sandigo over two years during and following the 2016 election for this documentary . TIGER WOODS CHASING HISTORY 8 p.m. on Golf Channel. When Tiger Woods won the Masters in April, for fans, it served as a metaphorical triumph over his decade of personal and professional struggles. His long and storied career has charted victories and disastrous setbacks, including numerous surgeries, an addiction to painkillers, the death of his father and his very public infidelity scandal and subsequent breakdown of his marriage. This two hour documentary, however, focuses on the positives in his career that may have been overlooked, offering a chronological view of his 81 professional victories, from his first in 1996, through the latest Masters win. The film also explores how Woods popularized golf and his bond with his father , Earl. THE CODE 9 p.m. on CBS. In the season finale of this series, which follows the legal minds of the United States Marine Corps, Capt. John Abraham (also known as Abe and played by Luke Mitchell), a gifted prosecutor who was a survivor of a 2010 mission in Afghanistan, winds up arrested and court martialed for mutiny . His colleagues Maj. Trey Ferry (Ato Essandoh) and Capt. Maya Dobbins (Anna Wood) work to defend him. The show offers a dramatized look at the pressures members of the armed services face. TIME FREAK (2018) Stream on Hulu. With access to a time machine, some people might want to meet a hero from the past, try to stop an international crisis or live in another era. But in this teen comedy, Stillman (Asa Butterfield) chooses to use his ability to travel time and space to win back his girlfriend (played by Sophie Turner) after she dumps him. With help from his buddy Evan (Skyler Gisondo), Stillman relives the last year of his relationship, attempting to avoid the future breakup. The movie has some decent star power with Butterfield, of Netflix's "Sex Education," and Turner of HBO's "Game of Thrones." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Sea turtles six to 18 months old are active swimmers that work hard to find favorable ocean habitats, according to a new study in Current Biology. Scientists know little about the so called lost years that young turtles spend at sea before returning to coastal areas to forage and reproduce. Juvenile sea turtles were thought to passively drift with ocean currents. Researchers discovered otherwise after using satellite telemetry to track 44 young turtles in the Gulf of Mexico. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It has happened time and again in recent months as Europe's debt crisis has played out. Stocks stage a strong comeback on expectations that a solution has been found. Then they quickly resume their decline as hopes dissipate, leaving investors puzzled and frazzled. The problem, say close watchers of both the subprime financial crisis in 2008 and the European government debt crisis today, is that many investors think there is a quick and easy fix, if only government officials can agree and act decisively. In reality, one might not exist. A best case in Europe is a bailout of troubled governments and their banks that keeps the financial system from experiencing a major shock and sending economies worldwide into recession. The latest rescue package for Europe gained approval from Germany on Thursday, after Chancellor Angela Merkel won a vote in Parliament, throwing the financial weight of the Continent's biggest economy behind a new deal. But a bailout doesn't wipe out the huge debts that have taken years to accumulate just as bailing out American banks in 2008 didn't wipe out the huge amount of subprime debt that homeowners had borrowed but couldn't repay. The problem too much debt and not enough growth to ease the burden could take many years to resolve. "Everybody has been living beyond their means for nearly the last decade, so it is an adjustment that will be painful and long, and it will test the resilience of societies socially and politically," said Nicolas Veron, a fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels research group. This is not to say that the discussions in Europe are moot. If governments can't agree on how to rescue Greece from its debilitating government debt, some fear the worst could happen a collapse of the financial system akin to 2008 that would ricochet around the world, dooming Europe but also the United States and emerging countries to a prolonged downturn, or worse. Just like the United States, Europe built up trillions in debts in past decades. What is different is that more of the United States borrowing was done by consumers and businesses, while in Europe it was mainly governments that piled on the debt, facilitated by banks that lent them money by buying up sovereign bonds. Now, just as the United States economy is held back by households whose mortgages are still underwater and who won't begin to spend again until they have run down their debts, Europe can't begin to grow again until its countries learn to live within their means. In short, it means years of painful adjustment. "We have to adjust to lower growth," said Thomas Mirow, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, referring to both Europe and America. "It is of course going to be very painful. But leaders have to speak frankly to their populations." The uncertainty about Europe's future has been driving the gyrations of financial markets since the summer. Earlier this week, stocks rallied on euphoria that a new, more powerful bailout was near, but the rally fizzled Wednesday when cracks began to appear among European nations over the terms of money being given to Greece. On Thursday, markets were mostly up again after the German approval of the 440 billion euro ( 600 billion) bailout fund, intended to keep the crisis from spreading beyond Greece and Portugal to other European countries. Several other nations still have to ratify the agreement, but it now looks likely to be in place by the end of October. Even this fund, however, is already seen as inadequate. Some worry that it still fails to fully address one of Europe's most pressing needs: fully recapitalizing its banks. Now there is talk of enhancing the fund's firepower by allowing the European Central Bank to leverage its assets to buy up troubled government debt from the financial system. That would serve mostly to shift the debt from European banks to taxpayers. "Clearly something is cooking, but the markets will eventually choke on the taste," said George Magnus, an economist at UBS in London. "It is about getting banks off the hook, but the darker side is it's not doing anything real." Not everybody shares this view. Some argue that Europe is actually in better shape than the United States. Debt levels are painfully high in European countries like Italy, Ireland and Greece, but overall euro zone debt as a percentage of gross domestic product is 85 percent, less than the 93 percent level in the United States. Also, European consumers did not go on the same borrowing binge, so their retrenchment need not be so severe. "We need to do a lot to get over the crisis," said Holger Schmieding, an economist at Berenberg Bank in London. "But once we are over it, it will be the U.S. facing years of fiscal retrenchment, not Europe." A resolution of the crisis could bolster confidence in these battered economies, and lead to a return to positive growth. But the danger is that the strict austerity measures being adopted will only worsen economic downturns that some think could drag on for at least a decade in Greece, Portugal and Spain. Stagnant economies only make it harder for governments to pay down their debts. Germany pulled itself around after years as the "sick man of Europe," with high unemployment and sluggish growth. In the early 2000s, while the countries of Southern Europe spent beyond their means, the German government initiated a series of structural reforms, deregulation and wage adjustments that helped it become an economic powerhouse. But it is unclear how other European nations like Portugal and Spain are to achieve a similar makeover. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
It was the great exception in a summer for the performing arts almost entirely scratched out by the pandemic. Its calendar reduced and its audiences distanced, but still defiantly ambitious, the Salzburg Festival, classical music's most storied annual event, went forward in August with a robust schedule of opera, theater and concerts. "The people were so happy that it happened; they were so devoted to what was there to experience," Markus Hinterhauser, the festival's artistic director, said in an interview. "The concentration, the silence, the joy I've never experienced a festival with such tenderness. It was tiring for us because every nanosecond could bring something, but looking back it was incredibly satisfying." Ticket sales, while capped at a fraction of capacity, were stronger than had been feared. And strict safety protocols and frequent testing, combined with what was then a limited spread of the coronavirus in Austria, seem to have worked: Helga Rabl Stadler, the festival's president, said that an intern tested positive shortly after arriving in July, but otherwise no positive tests emerged from staff, artists or audiences. But the event was still a shadow of what had originally been planned as a jubilee celebration of the festival's 100th anniversary. So the party will spill over into 2021, Salzburg announced on Thursday as it unveiled a season largely back to pre pandemic scale and containing several productions postponed from the centennial slate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A few years ago, Hilary Knight, the illustrator best known for "Eloise," was talking with a builder he knows in East Hampton. The guy had just read a profile in New York Magazine of Lena Dunham, which mentioned she had an Eloise tattoo. "I was unaware of Lena Dunham," Mr. Knight, 88, said recently. He called up the publicity department at Simon Schuster and asked them to send Ms. Dunham some signed "Eloise" books. She wrote back, "You are the very fiber of my being." Soon after, she came over to his apartment on East 51st Street, where he has lived for 55 years, a boudoir like fantasia festooned with Mr. Knight's drawings, theatrical posters, peacock feathers and gilded palm trees. They ate Indian food and chatted for hours. They talked about Ms. Dunham's recent trip to India and watched Mr. Knight's home movies. Despite the six decades between them, they had a lot in common. "We both have parents who are artists," Ms. Dunham said. She was sitting in Mr. Knight's apartment one recent Thursday, crunching on crispy okra from a bowl. "He and I both want to have dinner around six o'clock, which is really nice." By the end of the first night, a cross generational friendship had formed. "It's very, very rare that you instantly feel at home with someone," Mr. Knight said. Like many aspects of Ms. Dunham's life, it was not long before the bond turned into a high profile creative project. Along with the director Matt Wolf and Jenni Konner, an executive producer of "Girls," Ms. Dunham captured the friendship in a 35 minute documentary, "It's Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise," which airs on HBO on Monday. Though she is nothing if not au courant, Ms. Dunham, 28, meshes easily with her elders. She and Ms. Konner are developing an HBO series about Betty Halbreich, the longtime personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman. "I've always loved talking to people who have had a lot of life," Ms. Dunham said. Aside from chronicling Mr. Knight's boundless creativity (one sequence shows him directing a "frog opera" in his pond in the Hamptons), the documentary features interviews with "Eloise" fans as varied as Mindy Kaling, Fran Lebowitz and Tavi Gevinson. Ms. Dunham herself appears on camera in the role of Mr. Knight's interlocutor and devotee. "It's sort of like the old fashioned equivalent of thinking you're a Carrie thinking you're Eloise," she said, referring to the zeitgeist invading heroine of "Sex the City." Growing up far downtown from Eloise's digs at the Plaza, "I didn't have a lot of friends, and something I really connected to in 'Eloise' was there was no relationship to other kids," she added. "I was the girl downtown with weird feminist Barbie alternatives my mom bought me and a hairless cat." When Ms. Dunham was given a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder, a therapist asked her to picture a soothing location. "I fully just imagined Eloise's home at the Plaza," she said. At 17, she was on a family road trip through New Mexico when she persuaded her parents to let her get an Eloise tattoo on her lower back. "I remember my dad saying to me, 'Though I wasn't sure whether you should get a tattoo or not, I think this image is a great piece of self knowledge.' " Listening to the story in his apartment, Mr. Knight interjected, "You know, I have a tattoo." (A butterfly on his hip, which he got in the Navy.) He was sitting below a gold Oriental screen painted by his mother, the artist Katharine Sturges. "Part of what I find so compelling about Hilary's story," Ms. Dunham said, "is that his creative control and his creative freedom was challenged, and he continued to work in other ways." The challenger was Kay Thompson, the famed entertainer, composer, godmother to Liza Minnelli, cabaret singer and eccentric, from whom the character of Eloise sprang like an impish inner child. D. D. Ryan, an editor at Harper's Bazaar, introduced Ms. Thompson to Mr. Knight in the mid 50s, and together they captured Ms. Thompson's invention on paper. The first "Eloise" book came out in 1955, and their intense collaboration lasted for three sequels, until Ms. Thompson abruptly lost interest. A contract Mr. Knight had signed at Ms. Thompson's behest prevented him from continuing to produce "Eloise" books on his own. His combination of resentment and reverence toward his estranged partner, who died in 1998, became a prominent theme in the HBO film. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve sent a sharp, simple message to financial markets on Wednesday: Pay attention. The Fed is thinking seriously about raising its benchmark interest rate at its next meeting, in June. The unusually frank bulletin was delivered in the official account of the Fed's April meeting, which said explicitly that most officials thought "it likely would be appropriate" to raise rates in June if the economy shows clear signs of a rebound from a weak winter. That message was sharply at odds with the expectations of investors, who had largely written off a June increase before Wednesday, betting instead that the Fed would leave rates unchanged until later in the year. Measures calculated from asset prices suggested that investors saw less than a 5 percent chance of a June increase at the beginning of the week; by the end of Wednesday, that had spiked above 30 percent. It remains far from certain, however, that the Fed will move at its meeting on June 14 and 15. The economy has yet to demonstrate the strength the Fed says it wants to see, and some officials said in April there might not be time to gain the necessary confidence before the June meeting. Still the account made clear that Fed officials want markets to take the possibility more seriously. "The markets are certainly more pessimistic than I am," Dennis Lockhart, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and a bellwether for the Federal Open Market Committee, said on Tuesday in Washington. Two other Fed officials similarly said on Tuesday that they were thinking about a June increase. The Fed, which entered the year predicting quarterly rate increases, instead held steady in the first quarter as the global economy weakened and markets swooned. Its benchmark rate remains in a range between 0.25 and 0.5 percent. The Fed is holding rates at historically low levels to support economic growth by encouraging borrowing and risk taking. It plans to raise rates, gradually reducing those incentives, as the economy gains strength. The April account, published after the standard three week delay, showed the Fed was continuing to struggle with communications. Officials have said repeatedly that they want to get out of the business of telling markets when rates will rise. They want investors to draw inferences from the economic data. They want to move from date dependence to data dependence. As a corrective, it offered an account of how the Fed would decide whether to raise rates in June. "Most participants judged that if incoming data were consistent with economic growth picking up in the second quarter, labor market conditions continuing to strengthen, and inflation making progress toward the committee's 2 percent objective, then it likely would be appropriate for the committee to increase the target range for the federal funds rate in June," it said. 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 Fed carefully distinguishes in its meeting accounts between the broader group of 17 officials who attend policy meetings and the 10 of those officials who hold votes. Narayana Kocherlakota, a professor of economics at the University of Rochester who stepped down as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis at the end of last year, noted that those 10 "members" were described in the minutes as more tempered in their assessment of the chances of a June hike. "Members generally judged it appropriate to leave their policy options open," the account said. William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and one of those voting members, said in a recent interview that it was reasonable to expect the Fed to raise rates twice more this year, but that the decision would depend on the strength of the data. "We should continue to see tightening of the U.S. labor market, probably a gradual acceleration in wages as the labor market gets tighter," Mr. Dudley said. "And if that's how the economy plays out, then I think we're going to see further moves by the Fed to gradually normalize interest rates." The labor market has gained strength in recent months, while reported economic growth has been relatively weak. Economists have puzzled over which to take more seriously, but the account said most Fed officials had concluded the economy was doing better than the data suggested. They judged "the apparent softness in spending in the first quarter was unlikely to persist," it said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Sometime after he doubted the character of George Washington ("Didn't he have a couple things in his past?"), urged a wire service reporter to ask a tough question ("Give it to me, Reuters!") and referred to a Kurdish correspondent as "Mr. Kurd," President Trump paused to directly address the dozens of journalists who had gathered for a rare solo news conference. "Can you imagine," he said, "if you didn't have me?" Mr. Trump denounces news organizations as "the enemy of the people." His supporters turned "fake news" into a political rallying cry. And the daily White House press briefing is all but a thing of the past. But in 80 minutes on Wednesday, Mr. Trump made clear that he is never more comfortable, never more engaged, than when he is sparring with the news media that he loves to say he hates. Back on his native turf a hotel ballroom in Midtown Manhattan, five blocks from Trump Tower the president strolled onto the stage like a prizefighter eager for the opening bell. An hour later, his enjoyment of the occasion had only increased. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
How's that? Without net neutrality rules, the deepest pocketed internet companies and some of them have very deep pockets indeed could simply pay to have their content digitally delivered in the fastest lanes, Farhad says. They could easily outspend start ups and small rivals to do so. And that way, their hegemonies not only would persist but also could potentially grow. In other words, if Mr. Pai gets his way, the internet will be even less fair than it used to be. "The giants seem likely to keep getting bigger," Farhad writes. "If we give them a chance to buy up every fast lane online, we'll be removing another check on their untamed power." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
NO PROPERTY IN MAN Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding By Sean Wilentz 350 pp. Harvard University Press. 26.95. Across from the New York Stock Exchange sits Federal Hall National Memorial, the beautiful Greek Revival columned structure that in 1842 replaced Federal Hall, the birthplace of American government. That building is where George Washington took the oath of office as the first president. It housed the Supreme Court and the first Congress. The address is 26 Wall Street. Two blocks east at 75 Wall Street stands a 42 story modern structure of marble, glass and steel. This condominium sits at the old water's edge of the East River, atop the slave market where for half a century (1711 62) enslaved Africans were bought and sold like cattle and corn. They were traded as commodities in the enormous trans Atlantic slave markets that linked four continents together for nearly four centuries. These parcels of flesh and bone were "not like merchandise," James Madison argued at the Federal Convention in 1787. But they were counted as assets, or property, that helped build and finance the infrastructure and the wealth of the richest nation in the world. It is impossible to comprehend American history without understanding slavery's role in every aspect of its early development. Eleven slaves built a wall to protect a fledgling Dutch colony in 1626. Within a century, those 11 grew to represent one in five residents of what is now Manhattan, the nation's first capital city and today's global financial capital. Ten of America's first 12 presidents were slaveholders, as were two of the nation's earliest chief justices. Slavery is at the heart of the nation's origin story. The core of our democratic institutions from the presidency to the Congress to the courts was shaped immeasurably by it. And yet it is one of the least understood and distorted subjects in American history. The hip hop superstar Kanye West's bizarre remark this spring that slavery was "a choice" is just one of many examples. A recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that a "bare majority" of social studies teachers said they are qualified to teach it. Educators also complained about unclear state content standards and inadequate curricular resources. The net result: High school students are virtually illiterate on the subject, and this has had severe consequences for our national life. Sometimes in plain view and often just beneath the surface, slavery rests uncomfortably in the middle of national debates about monuments, white nationalism, kneeling athletes, Donald Trump's election, policing, immigrant family separation, racial wealth disparities and so on. Its meaning and legacy are, in many ways, as fiercely contested today as was the case when the framers first debated how to make America great. 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. Wading into one of these debates, Sean Wilentz, the esteemed Princeton historian and author of a new book, "No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding," provoked a storm of controversy three years ago when he wrote in this newspaper that it was a "myth" that the United States "was founded on racial slavery." He was responding to a statement made by Bernie Sanders, who said the country was "created, and I'm sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles." Wilentz described such thinking as one of "the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history." Wilentz's words, at the time, struck a discordant note to the ears of many. Not only were activists on the left pushing for greater recognition of America's racist past, but a spate of recent books had been published with new evidence of slavery's indispensable role in the development of capitalism. From the very beginning, slavery was not a "Southern pathology" but an essential part of a modernizing, global economy, wrote Sven Beckert, the Harvard historian and author of "Empire of Cotton: A Global History." "Slave plantations, not railroads, were in fact America's first 'big business.'" So what is the falsehood? What does Wilentz know that others have gotten so terribly wrong about the founding connection between slavery and racism? In his revealing and passionately argued book, he insists that because the framers did not sanction slavery as a matter of principle, the antislavery legacy of the Constitution has been "slighted" and "misconstrued" for over 200 years. "Although the framers agreed to compromises over slavery that blunted antislavery hopes and augmented the slaveholders' power," Wilentz writes, "they also deliberately excluded any validation of property in man." To put it simply, the Constitution, as ratified in 1788, was less racist and pro slavery than many have thought. The nation's founding document contained a fundamental antislavery ideal built into it. Enslaved people were defined legally as "persons" and not property. The usual evidence for what the celebrated historian John Hope Franklin called the "sweeping constitutional recognition of slavery" consists of the three fifths compromise (with the enslaved counted for political representation as three fifths of free persons), the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade until 1808 and the so called fugitive slave clause. None of these provisions contained the actual words "slave" or "slavery." Nowhere do these words exist in the Constitution, that is, until after the Civil War, with ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments. Wilentz goes to great lengths and, at times, takes great pains to show how Northern antislavery delegates combined forces with some moderate Upper South delegates to ensure the United States "would not validate slavery in national law." All references to persons "bound to service" or "held to service" were the deliberate and intentional consequence of these hard fought efforts. Still, to critics at the time and to posterity this all looked like a hypocritical charade and a cover up. Even those New Englanders whose professed antislavery commitments were beyond reproach, Wilentz finds, charged that "the framers had sneakily covered up their concessions to slavery with confounding euphemisms." Within weeks of the Federal Convention, Benjamin Gale, a Connecticut millowner, accused the delegates of writing a "dark, intricate, artful, crafty and unintelligible" document, the worst he'd ever read or seen, he complained. "Why could they have not spoke out in plain terms Negroes?" On the other hand, the inviolability of private property, then as now, meant that the most ardent pro slavery delegates and supporters did not see subterfuge but surrender. They wanted explicit language to protect existing state slavery laws, enshrining their natural right to own human beings. Patrick Henry said he "smelt a rat" when he noted, as Wilentz explains, the "absence in the Constitution of any categorical guarantee to the slaveholders of their rights to property in man." The difference between these two constitutional interpretations would shape the most consequential political debates over territorial expansion, the limits of federal power and one of the most basic questions of American democracy, whether or not blacks had any rights whites were "bound to respect." In 1836, the wealthy slaveholding Virginian James Madison died. The most important architect of the nation, he made possible the publication of his notes, breaking the seal on the "convention's agreed upon secrecy." They revealed that during a key debate over import duties on the slave trade, he had persuaded the framers not "to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men. The reason of duties did not hold, as slaves are not like merchandise, consumed. c." With that posthumous revelation, Wilentz argues, "the framers left room for political efforts aimed at slavery's restriction, and eventually, its destruction, even under a Constitution that safeguarded slavery." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Nearly six years ago, viewers of "Breaking Bad" watched the final episode of that series, in which the drug kingpin Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston ) emerged from hiding and sacrificed his life to rescue his one time partner, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul ) from an Aryan Brotherhood gang. When White expired in a meth lab and the credits rolled, audiences believed it might be the last time they would see many of these characters. But it turns out the story of "Breaking Bad" isn't quite finished. Netflix announced on Saturday that it will release a new "Breaking Bad" movie that will center on Pinkman, the excitable meth cook played by Paul, who was last seen in the TV series speeding off in a stolen Chevrolet El Camino to parts unknown. The film, called "El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie," was written and directed by Vince Gilligan , the creator of "Breaking Bad," and will be released on Netflix on Oct. 11. The film is also expected to be broadcast at a later date on AMC, the cable network where the TV series was originally shown from 2 008 to 2013. "It's a chapter of 'Breaking Bad' that I didn't realize that I wanted," Paul said in an interview. "And now that I have it, I'm so happy that it's there." Netflix provided only the briefest plot summary of "El Camino," which states, "In the wake of his dramatic escape from captivity, Jesse must come to terms with his past in order to forge some kind of future." Paul said in the interview that he was forbidden from revealing anything more about what happens in the film. But, like the show's fans, he said he also believed he had said goodbye to the world of "Breaking Bad" when the TV series concluded. "It was a hard, emotional thing for all of us," Paul said. "And when the finale happened, we all got together and hugged it out and said I love you. And that was it." In his final screen appearance as Pinkman, Paul said, "I loved the way Jesse was flying through the exterior gates of the Nazi compound. He's screaming, he's crying. He's got these emotions going through his body. And then it just cuts away from him." But Paul said that about two years ago, he received a phone call from Gilligan, ostensibly to talk about plans to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the debut of "Breaking Bad." "At the very end of the conversation," Paul said, "he mentioned that he had an idea of where to take it from here, and he wanted to hear my thoughts on it. I quickly told Vince that I would follow him into a fire." Paul said he could understand if audiences were wary to revisit the conclusion of "Breaking Bad," whose last episode remains one of the few highly regarded finales of the modern TV era. (A spinoff series, "Better Call Saul," starring Bob Odenkirk , has stuck to the origin story of the Saul Goodman character, before Walter White crossed his path.) But Paul said any potential misgivings were quickly dispelled when he finished reading Gilligan's script for "El Camino." "I couldn't speak for a good 30, 60 seconds," he said. "I was just lost in my thoughts. As the guy who played the guy, I was so happy that Vince wanted to take me on this journey." But Paul said that, by the time the news media became aware of the project, "The movie had already happened and was in the can . It was done." If anyone asked him what he was up to during this time, Paul explained, "I just said I was doing this small little indie out in New Mexico and that was it. No one second guessed it." He added, "I definitely had people asking, 'Are you doing 'Better Call Saul'?' And I'd go, 'Hey, man, I wish I was. But they're on hiatus right now.'" While it might be reasonable to wonder if "El Camino" will reunite him with other notable "Breaking Bad" alumni like Cranston, Odenkirk, Krysten Ritter or Jonathan Banks , Paul said he once again had to remain silent on this subject. "All I can say, I think people will be really happy with what they see," he explained. Paul is holding onto a lot of professional secrets these days: He will also be appearing in the coming third season of the HBO science fiction series "Westworld," in a role he said he could not yet disclose. Asked if he had ever had to keep quiet about so many things simultaneously in his career, Paul said, "Not at all. But I like it, man." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Analia Saban in her studio in Santa Monica, Calif., with Folded Concrete sculptures and other works now in her show "Folds and Faults" at Spruth Magers gallery in Los Angeles. SANTA MONICA, Calif. Analia Saban's studio here, which she took over from John Baldessari eight years ago, is still packed with remnants from the early, heady, low rent days when conceptual art started in Los Angeles. She points out boxes of correspondence and records left behind by Mr. Baldessari, a pioneer of the movement. On the dingy bathroom wall is a gift he received from another central figure, Lawrence Weiner: a text piece that says in red, "the trace of an action past, i.e. a wet place." In the back remains a small darkroom built in 1971 by an earlier inhabitant, William Wegman, who also left a basketball hoop. "These guys never move out, they just leave," Ms. Saban offered, smiling. Then there's the jagged crack running through the concrete floor, caused by an earthquake. The crack shows up in early photographs and videos by Baldessari and Wegman. "Originally I was thinking about the material, how to make something that does not bend seem as flexible as paper," Ms. Saban, 36, said in her lilting Argentine accent. "But looking back I see a connection to earthquakes the way they cause city streets to buckle or a floor like this to crack." And the earthquake imagery is not the only thing connecting Ms. Saban's work to the studio's past tenants. She is regarded as one of the heirs to their droll conceptual art tradition, even as she edges into sculptural territory with her concrete pieces, their marble counterparts and other tactile thought experiments. "We're all watching to see what she comes up with next." Lacma already owns 17 of her works. She is also represented in the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the most visible of private collections: those of Cindy and Howard Rachofsky of Dallas, Don and Mera Rubell of Miami, and Maurice and Paul Marciano in Los Angeles, whose inaugural show features three of her pieces. The critic Christopher Knight of The Los Angeles Times called her a "standout" of that show for making "inventive use of traditional materials." Ms. Saban received her first museum survey in September from the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston. A fitted bedsheet loosely draped over a large canvas, it turns out, was actually made out of acrylic paint. A perfect facsimile of a white cotton hand towel? Just paper. The survey showed her testing the limits and uses of art history's media paint, canvas, ink, marble, much as her contemporaries Walead Beshty and Wade Guyton expose the inner workings of new technologies. In another series called "Markings," she manages to scrape a slice of emulsion off the surface of a photograph, placing it on a canvas nearby like a brush stroke. This work will appear in a Spruth Magers show opening Friday, July 7, in Berlin, "a very nerdy show based on my research into pigments," said Ms. Saban, who has the soft spoken, self effacing manner of a scientist and happens to be married to a doctor. "There is something surgical about what I do," she said. "I do a lot of cutting and opening and reconfiguring in my work. I'm interested in taking something apart to see if it can have another life." She was sitting at a table in her studio facing a large wooden loom, used for weaving together linen thread and strings made solely of dried acrylic paint. "Instead of painting on the canvas, I'm painting through the canvas," she explained. With her new "Pleated Ink" series, hanging near the loom, she tweaks the centuries old drawing process. Instead of using ink on paper, she used paper on ink: pressing laser sculpted paper with large cutout areas onto a bed of newspaper type ink so thick that it took six months to dry. One shows a potted plant; another an angled stairway with railings embedded in the ink. She began mining and subverting the materials of art history while she was still in graduate school at the University of California in Los Angeles. Born in Buenos Aires to a professional family her father was an accountant and her mother, a librarian she says her childhood was disrupted by the bombing of the Israeli Embassy there in 1992, just around the corner from her school. She was 11. One odd effect: After her school reopened, it built a first rate video lab. "The Japanese Embassy felt so bad for our school that they donated this incredible video equipment from Sony," she said. As the lab's only apprentice, she learned basic editing and composition skills that she has used since. She went on to study film and video art at Loyola University in New Orleans for her bachelor's degree. Then, for her master's, she enrolled in the home for art outcasts known as the "new genres" program at U.C.L.A., studying with the ever provocative Paul McCarthy and Mr. Baldessari, who remains a friend, mentor and source of witty titles. (He came up with "Threadbare" for her new trompe l'oeil series at Spruth Magers, which looks uncannily like canvas.) Shown in her graduating exhibition, "The Painting Ball (48 Abstract, 42 Landscapes, 23 Still Lifes, 11 Portraits, 2 Religious, 1 Nude)," helped secure her first gallery show in Los Angeles and then one in Munich in 2007 with Spruth Magers. And her interest in pigments led to a residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2015 to 2016, when the scholarly theme was art and materials. "My idea was: Could I use conservation tools to make art instead of conserve art?" she said. She ended up experimenting with early pigment sources like azurite minerals and cochineal insects, sources of rich blues and red hues. In one work in the Berlin show, she slyly mixes whole bugs into encaustic paint along with the red powder made from grinding them inviting viewers to see her process. In 2014, the artist began working on her "Draped Marble" series, devising a way to bend a marble slab over a sawhorse as you might hang a beach towel over a chair. She used a sledgehammer to create a crease in the marble slab, lined with fiberglass mesh underneath to keep the fragments from falling apart. (The Folded Concrete sculptures took much more force, requiring a crane to bend the concrete.) Claudia Schmuckli, who organized the Blaffer exhibition, calls her choice of marble "extremely loaded," referring to its evolution from the temples of ancient Greece to ubiquitous kitchen countertops today. "I don't think her work is meant as an overt critique of consumer society or the role of women within it, but it certainly reflects an awareness of how art has been absorbed by the decorative, domestic sphere." Ms. Saban said she was inspired by the masterly drapery carved in marble by classical and Renaissance sculptors, citing the folds of the Virgin Mary's robe billowing at her feet in Michelangelo's Pieta in Rome. The artist was struck by the extraordinary effort and skill evident in transforming stone into what looks like fabric "turning the hard into the flexible, the rough into the polished, the strong into the fragile." "I love the way these artists were insisting on the impossible," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The girls are back but they've changed. At least, that's what everyone in class is saying about Maya Ishii Peters and Anna Kone. At the start of the sophomore season of "PEN15," Hulu's painfully visceral, wildly funny comedy about the traumas and exhilarations of middle school, everyone is talking about what Maya and Anna did in the janitor's closet at the school dance at the end of Season 1. When the slut shaming begins, the show's 13 year old protagonists played by Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, its 33 year old creators (alongside Sam Zvibleman) begin to question whether they're suddenly different. In reality, in the new season, premiering Friday, everything seems to be changing. The seesawing between naive, gleeful girlhood and teenage growing pains is even more jarring than it was last season. "I don't think we consciously tried to make it darker," Erskine said recently over Zoom. "It was just more like, OK, we know that these girls are going to stay in seventh grade forever, but that they have to evolve." For Konkle, in particular, the last year has been an especially raw, surreal experience: As she was shooting the second season, her father died from lung cancer. She was with him at the end, then flew back to set and stepped back into her teenage self and acted with her TV dad (Taylor Nichols). "It's been a wonderful time of reflection," Konkle said. "It's also been a really painful time." Over Zoom, Erskine and Konkle can sound like kinder versions of their characters, offering effusive love and support without the angsty middle school bickering. "We've talked about this, but you're my muse," Konkle said to Erskine at one point. "I was never like, 'I'm going to write comedy.' I wanted to write things for you that were sad and funny because you're so inspiring to me." From their respective homes in Los Angeles, the two women spoke about the new season, internalizing misogyny and their middle school crushes. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. The first season was a breakout success for you both. What have the last couple years meant for your real life friendship? MAYA ERSKINE We didn't get to grow together as 13 year olds, but I feel like we had a second adolescence together now, truly. I'm thinking of us meeting in college, to now that is another adolescence. ERSKINE I never thought of that. Yeah, that just hit me. Imitates mind being blown. Did the acclaim change your mind set going into the second season? KONKLE Maya and I met as perfectionists and also, ironically, spent so much time in this industry failing. I quit so many times which is good, I needed to fail a lot. I was so afraid of that and it really crippled my work for a long time. When "PEN15" rolled around, I was truly in a mind set of: "Come and get me, failure. Hate me. Hate the show. We love it." But when there was success for it, that kind of messed up my mentality because I was pretty content, and felt like I had an understanding of myself and my creative process as an underdog. So that was hard going into the second season: People liked it. How did that happen? And what does that mean about your work now? This season both girls have poignant mother daughter moments. Maya, yours is a tender conversation when you and your mom are in the bathtub, and it's with your actual mother, Mutsuko Erskine. How real was that scene? ERSKINE The bath scene was wild for me because that looks like my bath growing up. My relationship with my mom I was insanely close to her, and as soon as I was starting to turn into a woman, we started to fight more and I felt like I was losing her love, in my mind. Because I was like, I'm becoming a woman, so now I'm not your little girl. But the one place where we would come to each other was in the bath. Every time we came into the bath, we would talk, and it was our most mature conversations because it was calm and we really listened to each other. I'll get emotional about it now, but that's where we would talk about anything. And it's such a cultural experience. Other people, when I would tell them, "Yeah, I took baths with my mom," they'd be like, "Ew, that's so weird." And I'm like: "But it's not. It's normal." So to show that and normalize it in our show is very special to me. Anna's moment comes when she shows this sudden empathy toward her mom amid her parents' divorce. Does that dynamic come from something real in your adolescence? KONKLE It meant a lot to us in this season, that arc. That pro dad, anti mom, anti yourself the sexism that you're taught. ERSKINE We're slut shamed in the beginning and instantly start to hate ourselves, hate our vaginas and then hate women. So we wanted to show that reflection in our mothers, how you sort of turn against your mother at that age because you're kind of turning against yourself your mom is a reflection of yourself. So I feel like that scene is something that you would be saying now, Anna, to your mom. It's sort of like a love letter, a rewrite apology. KONKLE That scene was probably a revelation I had in therapy in my 20s. Like, "Oh, I blamed everything on my mom." Because my parents' relationship was so public to me that I was constantly choosing sides and constantly trying to decide who was right and who was wrong, and I pretty much always blamed my mom. In the show I get to acknowledge that my dad is an expletive sometimes. Laughs. This season starts with Maya's obsession over Brandt (Jonah Beres), whose treatment of her is really striking in his manipulation. We see his consciousness of his power at such a young age that's darker than his just being a mean boy who internalizes toxic masculinity. KONKLE Yeah, that he's not just a cog in the wheel, and he's making a conscious choice. We talked a lot about motivating the gaslighting that's happening in the sense that he's like, "Hey, cutie." And then someone else walks in, and because she's on a lower status, he's like: "What are you doing? Get away." We both related to that growing up, sadly. ERSKINE I didn't really get the private, "Hey, cutie," even. It was just all rejection. Both laugh. So I don't fully relate. KONKLE You never got a guy that flirted with you or was nicer to you or whatever when other people weren't around? I definitely got that. ERSKINE There was a popular boy who car pooled with me for like two days. And he was flirting with me in car pool, and then as soon as we got out of the car, he walked so fast ahead of me. And that fast walk was devastating, like he didn't want to be seen with me. It was so devastating. It's those small things. Like when, in the new season, Brandt switches his place in line to be further away from Maya. Yet she ends up only wanting him more. ERSKINE This is something that didn't feel totally autobiographical, but was exciting to see how a girl gets labeled "crazy" so easily. And we lean into it a bit the exaggeration of her stalking him and all these things. But he's leading her on so heavily in these moments, pulling and pushing. KONKLE Of course you're going to put hair in his locker! ERSKINE Of course I'm going to put hair in his locker! Of course I'm going to follow him around. He just said he loves me, we just have to be alone. Both laugh. I wrote a boy's name on chalkboards everywhere in middle school, and it got reported to the principal. The boy was like, "I think someone's stalking me," and they found out it was me. KONKLE I definitely knew when certain people were going to be in the hallway. I definitely went around that corner an extra 10 times when they were there. "I need to go back to the water fountain. Oh, is my pencil on the floor?" Brandt's actions contrast so much with someone like Sam's. The actor who plays Sam, Taj Cross, is so good that he makes your heart flutter even though he's a teenager. Is that weird? KONKLE You're not the first person to say that. ERSKINE I've had so many adult women where they're like, "I find myself having a crush on Sam." He represents the guy I should've been with at that age. Was there ever someone you had that feeling or relationship with in middle school? KONKLE There was that guy who got away at that age. My friends still will be like, why did you like him? I'll be like, what's he doing now? I remember when I got to borrow his hat for the day. We never were together it never happened. But it gave me that feeling because he looked in my eyes! It was romantic. Like, it was adult romance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
But the choreography, by the Copenhagen troupe's British born artistic director, Tim Rushton, forgoes a comprehensible narrative in favor of a murky atmosphere without much formal interest. The man from the beginning (the taut, compact Luca Marazia) wanders through, occasionally threatened by the hordes, losing and regaining the light of humanity orb. But he keeps ceding the stage to some dumb tribal dance or an uninspired variation on the tired formula by which a woman is passed around and manipulated by a group of men. It's not a good sign when the most striking section involves dancers checking their own pulses. Every so often, the lights brighten and the music swerves from minimalist strings by Alexander Balanescu or Philip Glass into club beats by the Danish electronic music producer Trentemoller. The soggy dancing this inspires, like a rave for the undead, is momentarily diverting. But the work takes itself seriously, reprising all of its weak motifs at the end, before topping off Mr. Rushton's male fantasy with some female nudity. In Alpine skiing, black diamonds are symbols for steep and hazardous slopes. This "Black Diamond" is theater that keeps falling flat. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The weekly show, hosted by Ariel Levy of The New Yorker and available widely on podcasting platforms, will look in detail at the case and Mr. Epstein's connections to the rich and powerful. It will also endeavor to cover any new developments, according to Mr. Davidson, a contributing writer at The New Yorker who was one of the creators of NPR's "Planet Money" podcast. "Broken: Jeffrey Epstein" is the first project of Three Uncanny Four, which was formed four months ago. The studio's original plan for an Epstein project, Mr. Davidson said, had been to "wait awhile," perhaps tying a series to a trial. That timeline was accelerated after Mr. Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on Aug. 10. Ms. Mayer, a former producer at WNYC, said one of the goals of the show was to explore the social context of Mr. Epstein's crimes the networks of power and money that allowed him to escape justice for so long. "He's not the disease," she said. "He's a symptom of it." Three Uncanny Four is half owned by Sony Music, which made an undisclosed investment in the company; its remaining 50 percent is owned by Mr. Davidson and Ms. Mayer. The studio, in Brooklyn, plans a slate of five to eight shows by next year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The sprawling factory complex in Eindhoven that housed the Dutch manufacturing giant Philips is now a vibrant hub showcasing design shops, dining spots, a gallery of cutting edge art and festive events. After Philips moved its headquarters in 1998 to Amsterdam, nearly 80 miles away, this company town reinvented itself as a center for design and technological innovation. Nowhere is Eindhoven's makeover more evident than at Strijp S (pronounced "Stripe S"), the former Philips complex. Dormant factory space has become residential lofts, shared creative workspaces, boutiques and restaurants. The complex also serves as center stage for the monthly food and craft FeelGood Market and the annual Dutch Design Week. When this art space relocated from downtown Eindhoven to Strijp S in 2014, it doubled its space, allowing ample room for large installations and edgier experimental art. Shows often mix design, music, technology, new media and social commentary. Every fall MU organizes an exhibit to complement Dutch Design Week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Women performing "Un violador en tu camino," or "A Rapist in Your Path," in a demonstration against gender based violence in front of the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, last month. SAO PAULO, Brazil During the jury selection process for Harvey Weinstein's criminal trial this month, dozens of women gathered outside a Manhattan courthouse to perform a version of the dance/chant known as "Un violador en tu camino," or "A Rapist in Your Path." First in Spanish, then in English, they sang: "Patriarchy is our judge that imprisons us at birth/And our punishment is the violence you don't see." This performance, which quickly went viral, was created last year by the feminist collective Lastesis in Valparaiso, Chile, and is based on the work of the Argentine Brazilian anthropologist Rita Segato. The lyrics describe how the state upholds systematic violations of women's rights, through institutions such as the judiciary and the police. It's not just that members of those institutions simply disregard the complaints looking the other way, doubting the victims but that they are often the perpetrators themselves. "This oppressive state is a macho rapist," the chant goes. "Un violador en tu camino" was first performed in front of a police station by a small group during a protest in Valparaiso on Nov. 20. It was then repeated five days later in the capital, Santiago, by hundreds of activists on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. In early December, a group of thousands sang the anthem together outside Santiago's National Stadium, which was a detention and torture center during Chile's military dictatorship. (In one verse, the song mentions the "disappearance" of women.) The choreographed dance begins with a driving drum beat, as the women do a side to side movement and stomp out the rhythm with their feet. Many verses speak universally about the violence against women: They mention rape, femicide, impunity for the killers. "And it's not my fault, not where I was, not how I dressed," they shout, as if collectively rebuffing the same old forms of victim blaming. But the performance also carries strong local elements that might go unnoticed by the broader public. One verse sarcastically quotes the Chilean police anthem word for word: "Sleep calmly, innocent girl/ Without worrying about the bandit,/ Over your dreams smiling and sweet,/ watches your loving police." The title, "A Rapist in Your Path," is also an ironic appropriation of an old slogan used by the national police, "a friend in your path." The performance also makes references to police abuse in Chile, and by extension in neighboring countries. Part of the choreography includes squatting down, hands behind the head, a common search procedure still performed in many Latin American countries: Police officers and prison wardens often force women sometimes even children to squat, naked, in order to do a body cavity search. The activists wear a black lace blindfold as a symbol of the often invisible ways that women are made vulnerable, but also as a nod to the hundreds of protesters who were partly blinded by the Chilean police in the past three months. (Since the beginning of the demonstrations, Chilean's National Human Rights Institute has filed 1,080 lawsuits against the state, 770 for allegations of torture and inhumane treatment and 158 for sexual abuse, including four rapes.) In Latin American countries, women performing the song also wear panuelos verdes the green scarves symbolizing the campaign for legal abortion. (The use of green scarves as an abortion rights emblem derives from the white scarves carried by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, whose children disappeared during Argentina's military dictatorship.) But "Un violador en tu camino" is way more than its Latin American specificities. This is why it has spread so far and so quickly. It speaks about something that is true in too many countries not only Chile, Argentina or Brazil. "The rapist is you," the women repeat here and everywhere, either pointing to a courthouse, to the police headquarters or to the presidential palace. They mean that violations against women are not isolated events, not merely connected to interpersonal relations, but rather, essentially political. Activists point a finger at institutions that facilitate gender based violence by systematically dehumanizing women and promoting ideologies to keep them under control. For proof that this is really a global political issue, look to Turkey, where the police broke up a performance of the song in Istanbul and confiscated the activists' megaphone. Six women were arrested for supposedly insulting the president and degrading the institutions of the state. In a separate incident, courts issued arrest warrants for 25 women who protested in Izmir, while nine were detained. "Turkey has become the only country where one has to have immunity to stage this protest," said a lawmaker, Sera Kadigil, as she and other colleagues staged a version of the protest in the parliament. It should come as no surprise that female representatives make up only 17 percent of the Turkish parliament and 11.8 percent of the ministerial positions. The country ranks 130th out of 153 countries in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report for 2020. Here in Brazil, we face similarly depressing statistics. Activists here have added a couple of verses to the lyrics of "Un violador," saying: "Marielle is present. Her killer is a friend of our president." These refer to Marielle Franco, a Brazilian City Council member who was assassinated in 2018, and to the fact that President Jair Bolsonaro has ties to both of the suspects in the killing. (The investigation is ongoing.) In Brazil, women occupy 15 percent of the lower house seats and 9 percent of ministerial positions. "It's the cops. It's the judges. It's the system. It's the president. The rapist is you." According to the 2020 Global Gender Gap Report, the largest gender disparity in the world still lies in the sphere of political empowerment. I dare say that's where everything else begins. Only 25 percent of the 35,127 global parliamentary seats are taken up by women, a figure that drops to only 21 percent at the ministerial level. In nine of the 153 countries the forum examines, women are not represented at all. Over the past 50 years, 85 countries have had no female head of state. It is no wonder that women from Chile, where the song was created, are demanding gender parity for a forthcoming constitutional convention. There will be no justice for women as long as we are kept out of the political process. There won't be any hope of equality. The rapists will continue while most of us stand powerless outside courthouses, police stations and presidential palaces, furiously pointing at them, to no avail. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
When you build a home from the ground up, there's one thing that's more important than the concrete, the lumber, the steel or nearly anything else: patience. For Jack and Araxi Evrensel, that became abundantly clear when they began start and stop work on a house that clings to a steep slope of granite at the edge of Burrard Inlet, in West Vancouver, Canada. By the time the house was completed, they had spent eight years working on it, with three different architects. The couple tried to take each delay in stride. "We took our time, because we weren't in any rush," said Mr. Evrensel, a former restaurateur who sold his five upscale British Columbia restaurants in 2014. Although they were eager to see their dream house built, they were fortunate enough to be able to stay in their old home as long as they needed to, and were focused on getting things right. The Evrensels, who are in their mid 60s, bought the half acre lot for about 2.5 million Canadian dollars (roughly 1.9 million) in 2004. To design the house, Mr. Evrensel initially turned to his friend Werner Forster, the architect who had worked on his restaurants. They got off to a quick start, and construction began in 2005. "He developed it to a point where we started the blasting of the property, since it was all rock," Mr. Evrensel said. Shortly after blasting began, however, Mr. Forster became seriously ill and died. With little more than a clearing in the rock completed, Mr. Evrensel put the project on hold. "I wasn't sure, at the time, I would build it without him," he said. Eventually, though, he began thinking about finding another architect. He had long admired the work of Arthur Erickson, one of the most decorated Canadian architects of the era, and had seen him at Mr. Forster's wake. Although Mr. Erickson had dined in Mr. Evrensel's restaurants on a few occasions, Mr. Evrensel felt intimidated to ask the architect about his personal project, as Mr. Erickson was known for high profile buildings like the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Wash. "When we first stepped into the project, it was tentative," Mr. Milkovich said. "Knowing that Jack's good friend had been working on the house, we wondered how much we could change." For months, Mr. Milkovich tentatively floated one small change after another, until Mr. Evrensel made it clear that he wanted his new architects to have full creative freedom. "He said, 'Look, you guys, you can do whatever you want. Don't consider anything that was done before precious,'" Mr. Milkovich said. "He really respected the work that architects do." With the promise of carte blanche, Mr. Milkovich made significant changes to the plans in consultation with Mr. Erickson, designing a 7,000 square foot house that appears to cascade down the rock and toward the water, with a series of terraces. A stand alone painting studio with a curved roof for Ms. Evrensel, an artist, is embedded in craggy rock at the top of the site, near the road. The garage and main entrance to the house sit farther down, where the front door opens into a hall overlooking a double height living room below. From there, a staircase descends into the three story main house. Each level has glass walls, expansive sliding doors and long terraces facing the water. An ocean loop heat pump system provides energy efficient heating and cooling. Concrete is everywhere, inside and out, but the architects treated the material to give it an earthier look. "The superstructure of the upper levels is sandblasted very lightly," Mr. Milkovich said, to dull the natural shine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Mr. Gunas says the reliably plugged in fellow who takes care of his lawn alerted him that a lot more property owners in the area are trying to rent their homes for at least half the summer. But this year, at least, he's all set: the Bain agency found him a season long renter in February. Heather Jurewicz, another homeowner, says she lowered the rate by about 10 percent on her rental property in Sharon this summer. Earlier in the process, before their listing on HomeAway.com yielded any renters, she and her husband, Tony, had been a little nervous. The house, a former mill alongside a brook, is also now fully leased, to two different renters, through the end of September. The couple, who live in Scottsdale, Ariz., bought the property five years ago with the intention of spending their summers there when they retire. "When we saw it, we decided we had to do what it takes to get it," said Ms. Jurewicz. "And what it takes is to rent it out to other people right now." Some areas of Litchfield have fewer rentals than others. In Norfolk, home to the Yale Summer School of Music, "you would be hard pressed right now to find anything," says Tom McGowan, of Elyse Harney Real Estate. "It's hard to get into this town. There are fewer people who aren't using their houses during the summer." But closer to New York, in the Washington Roxbury Kent area, inventory is still "very high," according to Stacey Matthews, with William Raveis Real Estate. Nearly all her season long rentals are gone, but Ms. Matthews still has one house with a pool left for the month of July. A converted barn in Washington, the house is listed for 15,000. Some of her clients would prefer to sell their homes, but either can't or won't until the market improves, and are renting in the meantime. Other people "who never thought about renting before are now thinking, 'Wow, we can get some extra income,' " Ms. Matthews said. In Lakeville, a section of Salisbury, Rebecca Ward, another agent with Klemm, says she has rented several pool equipped homes for the season more than last year, and enough to give her reason to believe that city dwellers who have been putting off buying second homes because of the poor economy may be growing impatient. Shoppers often use summer rentals to try out an area before settling on where to buy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Update, June 4: Since initial reporting on this study, concerns were raised about the data used by the researchers, and on June 4 The Lancet retracted the study. Read our coverage here. The malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine did not help coronavirus patients and may have done harm, according to a new study based on the records of nearly 15,000 patients who received the drugs and 81,000 who did not. Some were also given the antibiotic azithromycin, or a related medicine. Hydroxychloroquine is the drug that President Trump has advocated, and that he said he has been taking in hopes of preventing coronavirus infection. People who received the drugs were more likely to have abnormal heart rhythms, according to the study in the The Lancet. They were also more likely to die. But the findings were not definitive, because the study was observational, meaning that the patients were not picked at random to receive the drug or not, and may have had underlying differences that affected their outcomes. The findings match those of several earlier observational studies that also found no benefit and possible harm from the drugs, and that have led some medical centers to stop recommending their use. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
There are no one handed push ups or headstands on the yoga mat for Gordon Murray anymore. No more playing bridge, either he jokingly accuses his brain surgeon of robbing him of the gray matter that contained all the bidding strategy. But when Mr. Murray, a former bond salesman for Goldman Sachs who rose to the managing director level at both Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse First Boston, decided to cease all treatment five months ago for his glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, his first impulse was not to mourn what he couldn't do anymore or to buy an island or to move to Paris. Instead, he hunkered down in his tiny home office here and channeled whatever remaining energy he could muster into a slim paperback. It's called "The Investment Answer," and he wrote it with his friend and financial adviser Daniel Goldie to explain investing in a handful of simple steps. Why a book? And why this subject? Nine years ago, after retiring from 25 years of pushing bonds on pension and mutual fund managers trying to beat the market averages over long periods of time, Mr. Murray had an epiphany about the futility of his former customers' pursuits. He eventually went to work as a consultant for Dimensional Fund Advisors, a mutual fund company that rails against active money management. So when his death sentence arrived, Mr. Murray knew he had to work quickly and resolved to get the word out to as many everyday investors as he could. "This is one of the true benefits of having a brain tumor," Mr. Murray said, laughing. "Everyone wants to hear what you have to say." He and Mr. Goldie have managed to beat the clock, finishing and printing the book themselves while Mr. Murray is still alive. It is plenty useful for anyone who isn't already investing in a collection of index or similar funds and dutifully rebalancing every so often. But the mere fact that Mr. Murray felt compelled to write it is itself a remarkable story of an almost willful ignorance of the futility of active money management and how he finally stumbled upon a better way of investing. Mr. Murray now stands as one the highest ranking Wall Street veterans to take back much of what he and his colleagues worked for during their careers. Mr. Murray grew up in Baltimore, about the farthest thing from a crusader that you could imagine. "I was the kid you didn't want your daughter to date," he said. "I stole baseball cards and cheated on Spanish tests and made fun of the fat kid in the corner with glasses." He got a lot of second chances thanks to an affluent background and basketball prowess. He eventually landed at Goldman Sachs, long before many people looked askance at anyone who worked there. "Our word was our bond, and good ethics was good business," he said of his Wall Street career. "That got replaced by liar loans and 'I hope I'm gone by the time this thing blows up.' " After rising to managing director at two other banks, Mr. Murray retired in 2001. At the time, his personal portfolio was the standard Wall Street big shot barbell, with a pile of municipal bonds at one end to provide safe tax free income and private equity and hedge fund investments at the other. When some of those bonds came due, he sought out Mr. Goldie, a former professional tennis player and 1989 Wimbledon quarterfinalist, for advice on what to buy next. Right away, Mr. Goldie began teaching him about Dimensional's funds. The fact that Mr. Murray knew little up until that point about basic asset allocation among stocks and bonds and other investments or the failings of active portfolio management is shocking, until you consider the self regard that his master of the universe colleagues taught him. "It's American to think that if you're smart or work hard, then you can beat the markets," he said. But it didn't take long for Mr. Murray to become a true believer in this different way of investing. "I learned more through Dan and Dimensional in a year than I did in 25 years on Wall Street," he said. Playing that role was enough for Mr. Murray until he received his diagnosis in 2008. But not long after, in the wake of the financial collapse, he testified before a open briefing at the House of Representatives, wondering aloud how it was possible that prosecutors had not yet won criminal convictions against anyone in charge at his old firms and their competitors. In June of this year, a brain scan showed a new tumor, and Mr. Murray decided to stop all aggressive medical treatment. For several years, he had thought about somehow codifying his newfound investment principles, and Mr. Goldie had a hunch that writing the book would be a life affirming task for Mr. Murray. "I had balance in my life, and there was no bucket list," Mr. Murray said. "The first thing you do is think about your wife and kids, but Randi would have killed me having me around 24/7. I had to do something." The couple have two grown children. And so he has tried to use his condition as a way to get people to pay attention. The book asks readers to make just five decisions. First, will you go it alone? The two authors suggest hiring an adviser who earns fees only from you and not from mutual funds or insurance companies, which is how Mr. Goldie now runs his business. Second, divide your money among stocks and bonds, big and small, and value and growth. The pair notes that a less volatile portfolio may earn more over time than one with higher volatility and identical average returns. "If you don't have big drops, the portfolio can compound at a greater rate," Mr. Goldie said. Then, further subdivide between foreign and domestic. Keep in mind that putting anything less than about half of your stock money in foreign securities is a bet in and of itself, given that American stocks' share of the overall global equities market keeps falling. Fourth, decide whether you will be investing in active or passively managed mutual funds. No one can predict the future with any regularity, the pair note, so why would you think that active managers can beat their respective indexes over time? Finally, rebalance, by selling your winners and buying more of the losers. Most people can't bring themselves to do this, even though it improves returns over the long run. This is not new, nor is it rocket science. But Mr. Murray spent 25 years on Wall Street without having any idea how to invest like a grown up. So it's no surprise that most of America still doesn't either. Mr. Murray is home for good now, wearing fuzzy slippers to combat nerve damage in his feet and receiving the regular ministrations of hospice nurses. He generally starts his mornings with his iPad, since he can no longer hold up a newspaper. After a quick scan, he fires off an e mail to Mr. Goldie, pointing to the latest articles about people taking advantage of unwitting investors. The continuing parade of stories does not seem to depress him, though. Instead, it inspires him further, bringing life to his days. "To have a purpose and a mission for me has been really special," he said. "It probably has added days to my life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Hunting Mushrooms, and What Makes Some Glow in the Dark PISGAH NATIONAL FOREST, N.C. Here's what I was told: Get away from the city, go during a new moon and keep my flashlight off. When the sky faded black enough to spot stars twinkling, I'd be able to see mushrooms glowing. There are about 100,000 species of fungi, but only about 80 of them bioluminesce, or glow in the dark. They pop up in tropical and temperate forests in the Americas, Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia and South Africa. They emit green light, a result of nearly the same chemical reaction that illuminates the belly of a firefly or the skin of a squid, only the resulting light is constant in the mushroom, not on demand or reactive as in some insects or marine animals. The molecules responsible for the colors are different too. And in a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances, researchers have finally revealed what's going on inside these flamboyant fungi at a molecular scale. With mushroom season approaching, you can see them glowing, too, and you don't even need to leave the country. But you'll need to practice patience and prepare for disappointment when heading out on the hunt. In a boggy forest near Asheville, N.C., I once spent a night two summers ago tracking down three species of glowing mushrooms. Lost in the dark with a dying phone and a forager known locally as the Mushroom Man, I learned that mushrooms are unpredictable. "You can't always get what you want, when you want it," said Alan Muskat, who leads quirky foraging tours with his company, No Taste Like Home, near Asheville. "This isn't like a convenience store." I learned a few other lessons as well. Getting to know the object of your affection In all bioluminescent organisms, a small molecule called luciferin interacts with oxygen and a bigger protein called luciferase, creating chemical energy that is eventually released in the form of cold light. Every organism has its own version of luciferin and luciferase, with individual properties that could prove useful. For example, one group has unsuccessfully tried to make glowing plants by splicing in genes from bioluminescent bacteria. But the chemicals involved in fungal bioluminescence may be more compatible with plants. "Maybe it will be as difficult as people traveling to Mars or other galaxies, but maybe we will use it," said Zinaida Kaskova, a chemist at Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University in Moscow who led the study of bioluminescent mushroom molecules. Unlike other bioluminescent organisms, fungi emit a constant light, possibly to attract spore transporting insects, that dims and intensifies according to a circadian clock that still isn't quite understood. Something exotic in your own backyard On the Japanese island Hachijo jima, tiny, common mushrooms known locally as hato no hi, or pigeon fire glow along forest paths during the rainy season from May through September. And in the Atlantic forest of southern Brazil, Neonthopanus gardneri, or flor de coco, resembles a large, radioactive flower from another planet. But among the thousands of fungi that grow in the subsection of the southern Appalachian Mountains I was exploring, there are a few glowers. The large, orange fruiting bodies of Omphalotus olearius, or jack o' lantern, appear in great numbers around June through September. Then there's Panellus stipticus, or bitter oyster, a summer mushroom that looks like a tiny, tan fan growing on sticks. You can also find Armillaria mellea, a sometimes parasitic fungus also known as honey mushroom that appears in the fall and makes wood look as if it's glowing. My guide, Mr. Muskat, is not a professional mycologist, but he has decades of experience enough to write a book. His weird sense of humor and Tao like wisdom made a dragging hunt less taxing. A week before we met, he enlisted "informants" who provided leads on where to find our three mushrooms. These included photos and detailed descriptions of what trail they were on, how far down it they would be found and even the unique characteristics and type of tree they were under. But tips don't always pan out. We spent two hours wandering down a trail searching for honey mushrooms, only to find after we had turned back that the fungus was under the tree we had passed at the trail head. Foxfire is the emberlike glow that appears when a honey mushroom's rootlike filaments infect and start killing a deciduous tree, often an oak. To see whether the fungus we had found would produce a glow, we looked for the dark, stringy infestation known as a rhizomorph, or shoestring rot, because that's what it looks like, and that's what it does to the wood. As a mushroom's metabolism shuts down in death, so does its ability to create light, said Dr. Kaskova: "Fewer and fewer molecules of luciferin are synthesized, so the glowing becomes weaker and weaker." After an unsatisfying evening, we went looking for other mushrooms just for fun the next day. Unexpectedly, we found hundreds of jack o' lanterns in the daylight. This is why you should always bring a basket. It should be wood or natural fiber with a lattice bottom so the mushrooms' spores can return to the forest floor. To collect the mushrooms, bring a knife and a brush. Unless you want your 'shrooms to turn into slime, bring wax paper or a paper bag, never plastic. At home, I placed my fresh jack o' lanterns, gills up, in a cardboard box in the corner of a windowless bathroom and waited for my eyes to adjust. It didn't take long before I saw the little glowing gills. They appeared to be breathing. Hello there, my neon green friend. I've heard so much about you. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The director Peter Sellars believes that Bach wrote his "St. Matthew Passion" not as a concert work or theater piece but as a "transformative ritual reaching across time and space." That's the way he presented it in a revelatory performance with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic at the Park Avenue Armory in 2014. The orchestra and chorus, each divided into two groups, as Bach stipulated, here became like combating forces in a searing story of faith and doubt, trust and betrayal, community and mob chaos. Of course, the "St. Matthew Passion," which tells of Christ's last days on earth, is a church piece, a sacred oratorio. But how would Bach have presented it at the church where he worked in Leipzig? An affecting answer was suggested on Thursday at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Chelsea when Tenet Vocal Artists and the early music ensemble the Sebastians, who have a string of remarkable collaborations to their credit, performed this masterpiece. It's likely, many scholars believe, that under Bach the choruses would have been performed with one singer per part. These singers would have also shared the solo arias and even taken the crucial roles of the Evangelist and Jesus. In its intimacy and directness, this beautifully small scale performance by Tenet and the Sebastians was just as shattering as the Berlin Philharmonic's near operatic approach. In the somber, steady opening piece, the choristers of one group beseech the daughters of Zion to join the lament. "Behold!" they sing. "Whom?, the others ask. The "Bridegroom!" the first group explains. Here, the music was performed by just eight singers, four in each chorus, standing in front of the pews, one group to the left, the other to the right. In other performances of the passion, you can be swept along by the choral majesty of Bach's music. In this one, you heard the individual lines and the individual qualities of the voices with striking clarity. So, the desperate pleas and the confused responses came through like personal utterances. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
SEATTLE Amazon is bringing one of its experiments in brick and mortar retailing to New York. Barricades went up several days ago outside a retail space in the high end mall at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, with a sign saying an Amazon bookstore would open there soon. On Thursday, an Amazon spokeswoman, Deborah Bass, confirmed that the company would open in a space previously occupied by an Armani Exchange. The Manhattan location, with an opening planned for the spring, will be the eighth that the internet giant has opened or announced. Stores in or near Portland, San Diego and Seattle are open now, and Amazon has said it is working on stores in Chicago and Dedham, Mass., near Boston. On Thursday, it updated its listing to include future stores in Lynnfield, Mass., and Paramus, N.J. The plans for an Amazon store in the Time Warner Center were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
new video loaded: Dive With a Cousteau in a Private Submarine | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
On the Billboard album chart this week, the Canadian rapper Nav, a protege of the Weeknd, opened at No. 1, while a new Netflix biopic propelled Motley Crue to the Top 10 for the first time in over a decade. Nav's "Bad Habits," released through Republic Records and the Weeknd's label, XO, opened with the equivalent of 82,000 sales in the United States, including 79 million streams and 24,000 copies sold as a full album, according to Nielsen. Nav's numbers were helped by bundling deals that offered his fans copies of "Bad Habits" along with tickets to his upcoming tour, and also by the release of a deluxe version of the album, as Billboard noted. Also this week, Ariana Grande's "Thank U, Next" holds at No. 2, Juice WRLD's "Death Race for Love" fell to third place after two weeks at No. 1, and the Atlanta rapper Rich the Kid opened at No. 4 with "The World Is Yours 2." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
In brief italicized passages separating seven major sections, an unspecified, interestingly reticent narrator offers glimpses of Oppenheimer just before the test. How long does he inspect "the device"? This narrator, who pretends to know only the kind of evidence available to a biographer, won't say. "I can't find any record. I know, however, from photographs, that he's wearing his porkpie hat." The hours tick by; it rains, and then stops glimpse, glimpse, glimpse. By the last of these passages, he and his companions "lie facedown in a trench, to protect their eyes from the bomb flash," unaware that, a few hundred yards from the tower, antelope are crossing the desert. There's a lot Oppenheimer doesn't see, and a lot we don't see. Except for these passages, everything we'll learn about him arrives obliquely and in fragments, stories told to that invisible narrator by seven invented characters. Ranging from an Army intelligence officer tailing Oppenheimer in 1943, to a journalist assigned to write a last profile of the dying physicist in 1966, these characters are insinuated into the world of Oppenheimer's real life friends, family and colleagues, playing roles (secretary, old friend, curious neighbor) similar to their historical analogues. This is not in itself an unusual strategy: Think of all the historical fiction involving the great man's butler, the queen's housekeeper, the overlooked minor bystander speaking at last. But these figures seem designed, in a way I haven't seen before, to mirror the ambiguous tensions of Oppenheimer's personality. They lie, as Oppenheimer famously did during the many investigations preceding his horrifying 1954 security hearing. They have secrets, as Oppenheimer did, and are deeply conflicted about the necessity of keeping them. Betrayed by others, they betray in turn, forever tunneling back through the past, seeking the meaning of their acts. Their visions are limited, their understanding skewed by desire and fear. When Grace Goodman that WAC member at Los Alamos, in 1945 reports on the Trinity test, it's a minor part of her anguished narrative, secondary to the end of her love affair with a married scientist. Her view of the explosion comes not from a trench, but from "our little Shangri la on the mesa," more than 200 miles away, where she waits with other workers kept in the dark. She remembers falling in love, losing her lover, being coerced into an abortion. A light fills the sky; the mountains seem to tilt. Or do they? Just a few weeks later, "all I could really imagine were the mountains shifting two feet to the left." One foot, or two feet? Right, or left? Grace, in common with many of these speakers, can't get her story straight. She can't escape her earlier choices, or her need to re examine them. Each character's section offers a partial view that builds by the repetition of a handful of images Oppenheimer's porkpie hat and his silver lighter; dogs and turtles, photographs and eyes; a John Donne poem and crucial remarks about three real life characters whose relationships with Oppenheimer were used to implicate him in 1954. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Aleatha Hinds, 17, ventured a guess about Anne Frank's identity as she waited in line for two hours recently to enter the museum devoted to that world famous diarist, who hid with her family in a secret annex for 25 months during World War II. "No, no, no!" replied several friends, all 11th and 12th graders from the St. Charles College high school in Ontario. "She was Jewish!" they corrected her, in unison. "She was hiding in her father's factory," said Eric LeBreton, 16. "The Nazis were looking for all the Jewish people because Hitler was trying to do genocide." With attendance swelling to 1.3 million annually, from one million in 2010, the Anne Frank House has begun reckoning with a striking dimension of its popularity: Many of the younger and foreign visitors who flock here nonetheless have little knowledge of the Holocaust and sometimes none about Frank. The museum and some others dedicated to Jewish life are seeking new ways to address a declining understanding of World War II and the genocide that took the lives of six million Jews in Europe, efforts that have increasing relevance as anti Semitic incidents intensify across parts of Europe and the United States. "We find that, with the war being further removed from all of us, but especially for young people and people from outside of Europe, our visitors don't always have sufficient prior knowledge of the Second World War to really grasp the meaning of Anne Frank and the people in hiding here," said the museum's managing director, Garance Reus Deelder. "We want to make sure that Anne Frank isn't just an icon, but a portal into history." Sara J. Bloomfield, the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said that more than 500,000 students visit annually, but "attracting and sustaining their attention is an increasing challenge." The museum has increased its emphasis on personal stories and ideas in addition to facts and events in hopes of drawing in young people. Technology was important too, given its popularity with young people, "but it must be effective in generating engagement and learning," Ms. Bloomfield said. "Most people of good will today would think, of course we should remember the Holocaust," said Mr. Snyder, the author of the new book "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century." "But the level of historical knowledge among people about the Holocaust is not very high. Remembering becomes a kind of circle where you're remembering to remember, but you don't remember what you're supposed to be remembering." Museums that preserve and present the truth are also fighting revisionists and Holocaust deniers who are increasingly vocal on the internet, and who are confusing the public, at a time when firsthand accounts of the Holocaust are fading. As the generation of survivors disappears, museums dealing with Holocaust related issues are seeking a new narrative, said Emile Schrijver, general director of the Amsterdam Jewish Cultural Quarter, which includes the Jewish Museum and the new Dutch National Holocaust Museum. "The strength of a lot of the information that we provide has always come from the people who experienced it." At the same time, the United States has seen a spike in attacks on Jewish cemeteries, Nazi swastikas sprayed on walls at schools and more than 150 bomb threats across the country at Jewish community centers, schools and synagogues, according to the Anti Defamation League, whose offices have also been targeted. In Europe, attacks on Jewish schools and a kosher grocery store in France are examples of a trend on the rise for a decade that has included anti Semitic incidents in Germany, Britain and other countries. A European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights report from 2016 concluded that 76 percent of Jewish people surveyed "believe that anti Semitism has increased in the country where they live during the past five years." "What schools need, and what anyone who wants to learn about the topic needs, are institutions that provide information on a trustworthy level," Mr. Schrijver said. That museum plans to open an 18 million euro (about 19.2 million) redesign of its permanent exhibition in 2019. It will begin with a better overview of the Nazi rise to power in Germany and give more attention to the "inner Jewish perspective" of German Jews trying to cope with National Socialism. "I'd like to be a relevant institution that also takes a stand," she said. For the Anne Frank House, the challenges are both historical and practical: How to accommodate and engage tourists who may be frustrated with the increasingly long lines to explore the museum, with its tiny, cramped canal house attic. Early this month, the museum announced that it would expand the educational facilities and visitor entrance by 20 percent, redesign the entry halls and enhance exhibitions to provide more historical context. The project will cost around 10 million euros (about 10.7 million) and unfold during the next two years while the museum remains open. Phase 1 of the redesign began this month, when curators installed an introduction video at the start of the museum tour. It underscores the basics, explaining that Frank was born in Germany and her family fled to Amsterdam when she was 4 after the election of the National Socialist Party. "Germany became an anti Semitic dictatorship in which opponents feared for their lives and Jews were systematically persecuted," the narrator explains in the video. "The Nazi leader was Adolf Hitler." In the next exhibition room, a new display explores anti Jewish measures that Nazi occupiers instituted in Amsterdam in 1941, rendering persecution in greater depth than before. For instance, a panel of photographs traces Frank's school years here: She attended a public Montessori school until 1941, when the occupiers required all Jewish pupils to enroll in Jewish only schools. During the redesign's second phase, the museum will present a more substantial prologue to Frank's story, with historical information about the years 1923 to 1940, describing her life and European history before she went into hiding. "Anne Frank became a kind of poster girl for hope and inspiration, when in fact her story was very, very tragic," said Tom Brink, head of publications and presentations at the Anne Frank House, who is overseeing the redesign of the exhibitions. "We want to balance the story a bit more, so that we have more information about the context and the times, while still keeping it a very personal experience." "Anne's gift as a writer is remarkable and through its simplicity and its naturalness we find a connection to her as a young teenager whose questions and challenges are as relevant today as ever," Ms. Geft said. " If you contrast the normalcy of her literary content with the insanity of a world torn asunder by evil and hate, the legacy of her diaries and essays is an eternal lesson to confront anti Semitism, to denounce hate and injustice, and to speak up against persecution." Saved from demolition after the war by Frank's father, Otto Frank, and other preservationists who created a foundation to protect it, the family's former hiding place within a stately canal house at Prinsengracht 263 opened as a museum in 1960. The annex, with its fading wallpaper and Frank's newspaper clippings still pasted to the wall, will remain preserved in its postwar state during the renovations. It can accommodate only 300 to 400 visitors an hour, causing the long lines that have become a constant feature of the adjoining Westermarkt church square landscape. The museum has changed its policy so that visitors can enter through the morning and early afternoon only with tickets prepurchased online, and in late afternoon the line forms for people who do not have prepurchased tickets. These efforts may not markedly reduce waiting times, but they are expected to alleviate some of the congestion inside and the lines outside. On a recent Friday afternoon, the line still snaked around the block. A group of college students from the United States, just behind the Ontario high schoolers, knew a lot about World War II history. All of them had read Frank's diary. They said that more context in the museum might help some visitors, but they still wanted its focus to be on her message of optimism. "What's so amazing is that she could write things that are so full of hope in such dark times," said Michaela Gawley, 20, a Brandeis student from New York. "America is really facing dark times, to my mind," added Ms. Gawley, who is Jewish. "To be able to hold on to hope and faith that people are good is ... " she said, before pausing. "It's hard." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
FROM two expansive windows in Glauco Lolli Ghetti's 11th floor condominium in West Chelsea, there are sweeping views of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. But visitors will not find an inviting sofa in this room, no place where a guest might sit back and admire the cityscape. Most of the room, you see, is filled with a 2004 Range Rover. Mr. Lolli Ghetti has one of the world's most expensive parking spaces, a costly talking point in a city where residents spend dearly to shelter their cars. His three bedroom apartment at 200 11th Avenue now on the market for 7 million includes a 300 square foot "en suite sky garage" that would be valued at more than 800,000 if priced at the same rate per square foot as the rest of the apartment. It is not the parking spot in the sky attracting buyers to the new 19 story building at 24th Street, Mr. Lolli Ghetti says, but the Hudson River panorama, the floor to ceiling windows and the thousands of square feet of space. Still, the sky garages in the building, which was designed by Annabelle Selldorf, are what has drawn the most attention. "This is about as close to a suburban home that you can achieve in an urban area like New York," he said. "You walk out your door and three steps later you're in your garage." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
As the fashion circus moves on to Milan, stock up on hero pieces that were just shown at London Fashion Week. Christopher Kane entered the brave new world of faster fashion with his Space Collection capsule of safety buckle shoulder bags ( 995) and high top sneakers ( 445) in a galactic range of colors like Mars Red and Planet Blue. At christopherkane.com. Half of the Topshop Unique collection, including a peppy yellow leather blouson jacket ( 700) and miniskirt ( 380), is available immediately. At 478 Broadway. And at Burberry, you can shop all 78 runway looks, with the knockout finale capes in intricate fabrications like chain mail and silver feathers available for custom order. At 131 Spring Street. Bergdorf Goodman will host a Right From the Runway event on Thursday and Friday from noon to 4 p.m., with the store's edit of the best of the New York collections Altuzarra, Gabriela Hearst, Jason Wu, Rosie Assoulin, Michael Kors Collection and Prabal Gurung available for preorder. At 754 Fifth Avenue, third floor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Raul Martinez, Conde Nast's corporate creative director, in his new offices that are under construction at One World Trade Center. American fashion has never been afraid of declaring its political allegiance, at least in an insider kind of way. During the last two presidential elections, for example, numerous designers created pieces to raise money for the Obama campaign in initiatives called Runway to Change (in 2008) and Runway to Win (in 2012), and Anna Wintour, the artistic director of Conde Nast, is a famous bundler. But even by those standards, the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump have galvanized the industry to an extent never before seen. Two weeks ago, American Vogue offered the first endorsement of a presidential candidate in its 124 year history, urging its readers to vote for Mrs. Clinton because of "the profound stakes" and the "history that stands to be made." Last week, Patagonia announced that for the first time it was closing all of its stores, as well as its headquarters, distribution center and customer service center, on Election Day to encourage everyone to "head to the polls and engage in civil society" instead of shopping, according to a company announcement. And just before that, Conde Nast announced that as part of a reorganization, it would consolidate all 21 of its creative departments (all the magazines, websites and 23 Stories, its native advertising arm) under the leadership of Raul Martinez. Wait, you say: That's not a politics story. That's a media story. Which it is. Except for one thing: Though his promotion (he is officially called head of the creative group) was intended as business strategy, it had the unplanned effect of casting Mr. Martinez as not only the leader of almost 200 Conde Nast employees at the country's most influential glossy magazines (like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour and GQ) but also as the most powerful Latino in glossy publishing. And that has put a spotlight on someone in the throes of a personal transformation ignited, albeit unintentionally, by Mr. Trump. While the story of Mr. Martinez is in many ways representative of a number of stories from this strange and twisted election cycle, that he can now tell it from 22 floors up at One World Trade Center gives it a certain reach. Which he intends to use. "I never really labeled myself ethnically or in terms of sexual orientation," Mr. Martinez, 54, said a few days after his promotion. It was his first interview on a subject that was not his new group at Conde Nast, and he spoke of a new sense that it was also now his job to put himself above the parapet as the representative of an alternative narrative for a group of people. Though he grew up in a political household "A very Republican one," he said, noting that this was the first year since his mother could vote that she would not be voting Republican he was not particularly active. "I was always very focused on my career and just thought I should do a good job, and if someone gets inspiration from that, fantastic," he said. "But at this point, given all the negative discussion around a specific group of people, I thought our stories have to start being told. "In a way, getting this job was already a statement. But now it is my responsibility to my community and my children to start to talk about myself, because I've been shocked at some of the conversations I have had to have with them." The son of Cuban emigres who came to New York in 1970, when he was a young boy, Mr. Martinez has been a fashion world insider for years. There are some well known Latinos in the industry; many, like the designers Carolina Herrera and Narciso Rodriguez, were featured in "Nuevo New York," a recent book on creative Latinos and their contributions. But few have reached the top tier of mainstream glossy publishing. Among them were Paul Cavaco, whose family has Spanish and Cuban roots, and who was a founder of KCD, the fashion production and public relations megalith, and the creative director of Allure; and Karla Martinez de Salas, who was a W fashion editor before taking the helm of Vogue Mexico and Latin America. But Mr. Martinez's remit extends to all Conde Nast platforms, an unprecedented position. Mr. Martinez became the associate art director of Vogue in 1988 (his tenure dates from Ms. Wintour's first issue), and the art director in 1990. He left Vogue in 1995, and in 1996 started AR New York, a creative and branding agency, along with his life partner and business partner at the time, Alex Gonzalez, currently the creative director of Elle. They created campaigns for Valentino, Calvin Klein, Dolce Gabbana, Lanvin and Givenchy, among others, before selling the agency to Publicis in late 2012. In 2009, Mr. Martinez went back to Vogue as a consulting design director, and last year was named the corporate creative director of Conde Nast. Then came what Mr. Gonzalez sees as the cracking of the great glass ceiling. "Raul Martinez is that rare thing in our business: a prodigious talent who is as approachable as he is brilliant," Ms. Wintour said. "In his many years at Conde Nast, he has shown himself to be someone with an unerring eye and a remarkable generosity of spirit. He is the perfect choice to unify our creative teams." But until now, he had never spoken publicly about his ethnicity. (In a way, Mr. Martinez was the anti Anna, who wears her politics on her back, literally, appearing during fashion week in a Made for History T shirt.) Neither he nor Mr. Gonzalez, for example, was in "Nuevo New York." "For me, the breaking point was the first speech," Mr. Martinez said, referring to Mr. Trump's speech announcing his candidacy in 2015. "I found it almost unbearable, from the walls to the rapists. And the rhetoric just continued from there. It was unacceptable." He started talking to Mr. Gonzalez, he said, and both decided it was time to make the private public. "We realized we had to contextualize whatever achievements we had," Mr. Gonzalez said. "We've always been intensely proud of our roots but also very private. But when Donald Trump started attacking Judge Curiel, I realized if he could do that to someone who was so much a part of civil society, what could he do to me and my legacy? And it dawned on both of us that the way to counteract that was to get our stories out there." Just as so many women have been provoked into action by the sexism debate incited by the campaign, so, too, was Mr. Martinez activated by the debate on immigration. The question for him now is how to most effectively combine his new power position and a new sense of purpose. "I'm not sure where all this will lead or what I can be," Mr. Martinez said. "But I feel very personal about it. I want to do the right thing." Mr. Gonzalez is already in talks with New York University about creating a symposium on Latinos in the media. The election, Mr. Martinez said, "is just the beginning." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Expect "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," with Brad Pitt, left, and Leonardo DiCaprio, to win best motion picture, musical or comedy. What will happen at the Golden Globes? Part of the fun of this ceremony is that you never quite know: A tipsy actor might make a speech too colorful for network censors, or a win could go to the person everyone least suspects. That can make predicting the results of Sunday's show a bit difficult, especially since the Globes are voted on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an eccentric collection of around 90 journalists: Sometimes, those voters will pick the contender with the most Oscar buzz, but just as often, they'll go their own unique way. This year's film races offer no shortage of places where the Globes can make their mark: Despite the opportunity to spread the wealth in separate categories for best drama and best comedy or musical, there are still plenty of close races in which a triumphant Globe victory could accrue the edge needed to convince some on the fence Oscar voters. As your Carpetbagger always says, it never hurts to be seen winning, and below, I've picked the people and movies I expect to do just that. One of the night's few mortal locks, Zellweger came on strong early this season with her passionate performance as Judy Garland and she has never given up her place as the best actress front runner. Though Johansson is the only nominee who's also fronting one of the best drama contenders, this is Zellweger's to lose and she won't. Driver couldn't be having a better year: Alongside recent star turns in "The Report" and "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," he has delivered one of his most moving performances in "Marriage Story," which scored more Golden Globe nominations than any other film. If he weren't up against Phoenix, he'd win this in a walk, but Phoenix, a six time nominee who won a Golden Globe for "Walk the Line," likely has the edge for his more talked about, transformational performance. If the Hollywood Foreign Press Association picks Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman" or Noah Baumbach's "Marriage Story," everyone will simply nod and say, "That seems about right." Which is why I think it may not happen! After all, this is the voting body that curved last year's perfectly respectable best drama choice, "A Star Is Born," and selected "Bohemian Rhapsody" instead. It wouldn't be a Globes ceremony without a big win that comes out of left field, and I think "Joker" could provide the shock of the night. The Globes always pay heed to where the Oscar wind is blowing, and since Awkwafina is the only contender in this eccentric category with any real chance at earning an Academy Award nomination, that could give her an advantage. Still, her odds have dwindled since she was snubbed by the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and that could open the door for an up and comer like the "Knives Out" lead de Armas to prevail instead. Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy Daniel Craig, "Knives Out" Roman Griffin Davis, "Jojo Rabbit" Leonardo DiCaprio, "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" Taron Egerton, "Rocketman" Eddie Murphy, "Dolemite Is My Name" Could this category give us Sunday's most delicious upset? My brain is telling me that DiCaprio should take the award easily: He's an 11 time Globe nominee who has won three times before, and the Hollywood foreign press counts on his star wattage to keep their lights on every year. That said, "Rocketman" star Egerton has campaigned much more extensively than his reticent competitors, and though he's hindered by the fact that his performance as Elton John comes in the shadow of Rami Malek's Globe winning "Bohemian Rhapsody" turn just last year, I can't underestimate Egerton's willingness to press the flesh. DiCaprio is probably safe, but oh man: If he loses, that reaction shot GIF is gonna be brutal. "Dolemite Is My Name" "Jojo Rabbit" "Knives Out" "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" "Rocketman" His screenplays for "Pulp Fiction" and "Django Unchained" earned Quentin Tarantino a pair of Oscars and a pair of Golden Globes, but he has never taken the top award from either voting body. The Globes will rectify that by giving "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" the best comedy trophy. Will the Oscars follow suit? Dern is considered the Oscar front runner but if there's any ceremony she might lose at, it's this one: The Globes love a surprise supporting actress winner, and a vote for Lopez would give them plenty of superstar flash. I also wonder whether Dern, who is on the Oscars' Board of Governors, might be so associated with that group that the Hollywood Foreign Press will feel permission to go a different way. Then again, she is a four time Globe winner who served as Miss Golden Globe at age 15. Expect a photo finish. Tom Hanks, "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" Anthony Hopkins, "The Two Popes" Al Pacino, "The Irishman" Joe Pesci, "The Irishman" Brad Pitt, "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" Pitt has never won an Oscar for acting, but the Globes haven't proved as hard to impress: He triumphed in this category back in 1996 for "Twelve Monkeys" and on Sunday, he'll win again. This will be a true clash of the titans, as Scorsese and Tarantino face the surging Bong. Scorsese has won this Golden Globe three times before, while Tarantino would be picking up his first award in the category. On paper, both of them would be a safer bet than the man I'm putting my chips on: Bong, who I increasingly think will win the best director Oscar, too. Noah Baumbach, "Marriage Story" Bong Joon Ho and Jin Won Han, "Parasite" Anthony McCarten, "The Two Popes" Quentin Tarantino, "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" Steven Zaillian, "The Irishman" Baumbach was denied a best director nomination in part because "Marriage Story" is considered more of a scripting accomplishment. Here, then, is the perfect category for Globe voters to make it up to him, though he'll face formidable competition from two time winner Tarantino. "The Farewell" "Les Miserables" "Pain and Glory" "Parasite" "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" It's way past time for the Golden Globes to open their top drama and comedy musical categories to films made outside the English language, but in the meantime, this will be an easy win for "Parasite." "Frozen 2" "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" "The Lion King" "Missing Link" "Toy Story 4" This Globe almost always goes to a Pixar film, and though "Incredibles 2" lost last year to "Spider Man: Into the Spider verse," "Toy Story 4" should have an easier road to victory. Meanwhile, let's enjoy the delicious shade of the Golden Globes nominating the photorealistic remake of "The Lion King" for this category, despite the fact that Disney itself has positioned it as a live action movie for awards purposes. If you're related to competing cousins Randy and Thomas Newman, filling out your Golden Globes pool could prove awfully fraught. The latter Newman is better situated thanks to a war movie that makes more pervasive use of his music, but I think the Globes are down to clown and will go for Gudnadottir's "Joker" score instead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
THERE are now so many new ways of watching dance on small screens that I hear people speak of DVDs as if they were already outmoded. Yet historic dances often suddenly vanish from YouTube, while DVDs of dance works never seen in the United States keep emerging. What is more, DVDs often have invaluable appendices. The Royal Ballet's series, on Opus Arte, is remarkable this way: Not only does the company's 2009 DVD of "Swan Lake" contain the fullest current record of the 1895 dance text choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov (with details like the use of students as the child swan maidens), but it also includes "Four Swan Queens," a fascinating and touching conversation in which Beryl Grey, Monica Mason, Lesley Collier and Marianela Nunez with a collective history of dancing the central role over seven decades hold forth on the experience. Would that any American dance company provided such testimony. Alexei Ratmansky's "Concerto DSCH" (New York City Ballet), and his "Nutcracker" and "Sleeping Beauty" (American Ballet Theater) should have been broadcast and recorded with their original casts; the same is true for Justin Peck's "Rodeo" (City Ballet) and many other recent works. In this important respect, American ballet lags. A five volume VAI series of Canadian television broadcasts, "New York City Ballet in Montreal," abounds in fascination, with accounts of Balanchine ballets from "Apollo" (1928) to "Bugaku" (1963) (both are on Volume 5). On Volume 2, which also contains "Agon" (1957) with several illustrious members of its original cast, the 1956 performance of "Concerto Barocco" (1941) is both frustrating and marvelous to regard: The TV studio was so small that the choreography was considerably compromised. The corps de ballet of eight is reduced to six, and several steps are scaled down to the point of being unrecognizable. But here are Tanaquil Le Clercq, Diana Adams and Jacques d'Amboise, and in some good ways the performance is like no other. Ms. Le Clercq and Ms. Adams are wonderful duetists in the outer movements, and Ms. Le Clercq sweeps, with Mr. d'Amboise's partnering, through the second movement in a state of something like seraphic bliss. "Barocco" is one of the all time peaks of choreography. The music is Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, but such is the amalgam with the courteous geometries of Balanchine's choreography that as we watch the dance, we also seem to hear the music of the universe. The variety is phenomenal: Sometimes we're at the heart of a force field, and sometimes we're wafted into infinite space. And it's intriguing how this changes from one cast to another. Currently, you can compare this 1956 performance on DVD with two others by the same company that are viewable online, from 1966 (Suzanne Farrell, Marnee Morris, Conrad Ludlow in black and white) and 1973 (Patricia McBride, Carol Sumner, Peter Martins color). The level of performance is very high on all three, yet the details vary drastically. There's a famous series of high to and fro lifts (echoed by the corps de ballet, stepping from side to side), in the last of which the ballerina descends until her point rests with firm finality on the floor. But with Ms. Le Clercq there are five lifts, with Suzanne Farrell there are seven, and with Patricia McBride there are four. Balanchine, always revising, must have approved them all. (Ms. Farrell is given the slowest tempo by far in that movement.) Even today, Ms. Le Clercq's legs make quite some effect. But to jump from 1956 to 1966 and see the height attained by Ms. Farrell's legs, notably when stretched behind her in arabesque, is to witness a revolution in style. But seven years later, in 1973, Ms. McBride's usually go no higher than Ms. Le Clerq's. IN ballet, 1904 was a very good year: It included the births of Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine, whose contributions transformed the art in such immeasurable ways that we are still reaping the benefits. New York City Ballet is, mercifully, the house of Balanchine. But as the Royal Ballet performs across an ocean, and its recent Lincoln Center season didn't have enough Ashton, a 2013 DVD recording of a special evening commemorating the 25th anniversary of his death is a welcome immersion. Shot at the Royal Opera House, "Ashton Celebration: The Royal Ballet Dances Frederick Ashton" highlights several short works, including "La Valse," "Meditation" from "Thais," "Voices of Spring," "Monotones I and II" and "Marguerite and Armand," along with a brief selection of coaching session extras. Those extras are too brisk; you want to spend an hour, not two minutes, with Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, who tell a story, with marvelous suspense, of dancing "Meditation" at its premiere. It was meant to be a gala pas de deux, but the reaction was so enthusiastic that Ashton, to their horror, asked the audience members if they wanted to see it again. (They did. The dancers complied.) "Meditation" requires patience of its dancers, and at times in this DVD, Leanne Benjamin and Valeri Hristov rush through it. The steps unfurl with as much silken power as the ballerina's entrance: Her head covered in a veil, she takes steps on point as fabric streams behind. Ashton was a romantic, and as this mysterious encounter between a man and his partner she is more of a weightless spirit than a woman continues, the pas de deux touches on the fleetingness of love. The light, sunny "Voices of Spring" alludes to youthful love the ballerina seems to walk on air and the tragic "Marguerite and Armand," with Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin, reads as harrowingly on screen as it can be onstage. In "La Valse," Ashton captures the swirl of Ravel's music with floating jetes that rise robustly and land like falling feathers. Is it the repetitiveness of the choreography or the filter of a DVD that makes it hard to respond deeply? Balanchine's feverish 1951 "La Valse," about a woman who is seduced by Death, is superior. In Ashton's version, the most fascinating details are in its contrasts: indelibly refined epaulement with twisting and bending torsos a proper exterior concealing simmering emotions. But it is in the two "Monotones," from 1965 and 1966, where you see, most directly and profoundly, Ashton's exquisite distillations of classicism as the dancers, dressed as celestial beings in leotards and skull caps, progress through classical positions to create smooth, uninterrupted landscapes of sculptural purity. In "Monotones II," Nehemiah Kish and Edward Watson slowly rotate Marianela Nunez, first upright in a standing split and then in the reverse, bending forward in the deepest of arabesque penchees while holding onto her foot. She's still yet never static; it's like watching lace move. LAST year, when the Royal Ballet's production of Christopher Wheeldon's "The Winter's Tale" had its debut in London, the critical huzzahs were mixed with sighs of relief. The project was audacious: a three act ballet of a Shakespeare play, a difficult one that had never been adapted that way before. Moreover, it was only the second full length story ballet commissioned by the Royal in the past 20 years; the enduring ones are all many decades old. And so the positive reports about this tale of unlikely redemption, of something precious foolishly cast away and then recovered, carried extra resonance: The Royal's tradition of narrative ballet is itself something precious. Such news was certainly good to hear, but what if you couldn't make it to London? When the Royal Ballet visited New York in June, it did not, alas, bring "The Winter's Tale." Fortunately, the Royal made a DVD of the production, and the precious thing, though inevitably diminished, survives another translation of medium. The second act, largely a folk celebration in Bohemia, is packed with dance, some of Mr. Wheeldon's freshest choreography to date. But it's the wordless storytelling that's rare and most remarkable. In its first act, the ballet covers the plot of Shakespeare's first three, including back story and other events not dramatized in the play. Mr. Wheeldon both omits and invents judiciously, with sure theatrical smarts. Nearly everything is clear without being coarse, speeding senselessly into awful outcomes. And in the resolutions of the third act, Mr. Wheeldon goes further, tugging a viewer's heart in multiple directions. The filming, directed by Ross MacGibbon, a former Royal dancer himself, strikes adequate compromises between the demands of detail and the larger stage picture. Bob Crowley's lauded set and video design probably suffers most in the reproduction, although the exaggerated facial expressions in Edward Watson's contorted portrayal of the jealousy racked King Leontes aren't well served by close ups. The cast, including Mr. Watson, is excellent all around and through the ranks. Zenaida Yanowsky, as Paulina, the loyal lady in waiting of the falsely accused Queen Hermione, is particularly impressive: imposing, complex. She's the backbone of the ballet, resisting simplification into either unadulterated joy or pain. REMEMBER when Beyonce borrowed (without asking) from the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, reproducing scenes from the film of "Rosas Danst Rosas," a De Keersmaeker classic, in her 2011 "Countdown" video? The next year, perhaps not coincidentally, Ms. De Keersmaeker released a new book and DVD set: "A Choreographer's Score: Fase, Rosas Danst Rosas, Elena's Aria, Bartok." The attractive, thorough resource, published by the art book press Mercatorfonds and Ms. De Keersmaeker's company, Rosas, details the development and structure of four of her early works, which put her on the map in the 1980s as a serious new voice in contemporary dance. Was this a reclaiming of ownership through intricate documentation? Or just an accident of timing? Whatever the case, it was a good idea. The four discs include interviews with Ms. De Keersmaeker (conducted by the writer Bojana Cvejic, whom we hear but don't see) spliced with footage from the dances, which share a seemingly inexplicable alchemy of feeling and form. Yet Ms. De Keersmaeker is all about explaining. Looking as severe as her surroundings an empty room, except for a stool and a blackboard she describes and diagrams the process behind each piece, from conception to audience reception. (The accompanying book contains versions of those interviews, along with drawings, press clippings and other archival materials.) That collection has led to two more. The third and latest, released last year, delves into "Drumming" (1998) and "Rain" (2001), two ensemble works set to music by Steve Reich, Ms. De Keersmaeker's kindred minimalist spirit. Even for the "Rosas" devotee, the level of detail in this three disc edition can grow tiresome, too technical and dry. Yet some of it, especially with respect to the exhilarating, propulsive "Drumming," is fascinating. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Gliding into her 70s, Glenn Close is in her prime. Her performance in Jane Anderson's four handkerchief "Mother of the Maid," at the Public Theater, is a triumphant blend of sharp sense and passionate sensibility, of an old pro's expertise and a newcomer's enthusiasm. This production, which opened on Wednesday night under Matthew Penn's lucid direction, is Ms. Close's second interpretation of a script by Ms. Anderson, who wrote the screenplay for her current film "The Wife." In that movie which has sparked talk of another Oscar nomination (her seventh) for Ms. Close she offers equally dazzling evidence of the more subliminal skills of screen acting. But if you want to see a bona fide stage star at the height of her powers, drawing energizing sustenance from an audience's rapt attention, "Mother of the Maid" is the ticket for you. Ms. Anderson's robustly sentimental play, a take on a saint in the making from a parent's perspective, provides an old fashioned showcase for the kind of acting with a capital A that once had Broadway theatergoers queuing around the block for returns. There was a time when Ms. Close would have been a natural for the Maid of the title. That's Joan of Arc, the teenage French warrior and holy avatar, who is played here most credibly by a rough hewed Grace Van Patten. In her early film career, in works like "The World According to Garp" and "The Natural," Ms. Close was celebrated for her wholesome radiance and clean scrubbed, androgynous beauty. Such traits are indeed the classic stuff of the Maid of Orleans in the theater, in performances by the likes of Julie Harris (in Jean Anouilh's "The Lark" in 1955) and Condola Rashad (in Shaw's "Saint Joan" last season). Ms. Close, of course, went on to exchange her dewy glow for a more feverish wattage, playing glamorous, strategizing villains in "Fatal Attraction" and "Dangerous Liaisons," as well as the deluded movie goddess in the musical "Sunset Boulevard," which she memorably reprised on Broadway last year. For Ms. Anderson's new play, Ms. Close has shed all vestiges of surface sophistication to portray the humble but formidable, earthy but pious Isabelle Arc, a 15th century mom to an exceptionally gifted and headstrong daughter. It's easy to see where her Joanie gets her strength and incandescence I mean, aside from a France loving God. The premise of "Mother of the Maid" is smart, simple and encapsulated in its high concept title. Ms. Anderson whose credits include the play "Defying Gravity" and the HBO series "Olive Kitteridge" revisits the well plowed terrain of Joan's path to martyrdom from the point of view of her proud but understandably fearful mom. What, after all, does a mother do when her adolescent daughter announces with an age appropriate mix of uneasiness and defiance "Ma, I'm having holy visions?" Isabelle is both skeptical and empathic, wondering if Joan's state of mind isn't a byproduct of sexual awakening. And this being rustic, Renaissance era France, Isabelle isn't shy about making such a diagnosis. "The sounds around me, they get loud," Ms. Van Patten's Joan says with a perfect matter of fact astonishment. "Birds, cicadas, the bees in the clover, the sheep grinding their teeth." She continues, "It all gets very large, you see. And wondrous. Even the dung balls on the sheep's arses are gorgeous to me." She sums up Saint Catherine's effect on her in words that bring to mind a latter day Katy Perry fan: "She fills me, she slays me, she takes me apart." The balance here between contemporary vernacular and period detail is far more adroit than in the earlier version of "Mother" I saw at Shakespeare Company in Lenox, Mass., three years ago. That production featured a now excised character, Saint Catherine, as a wisecracking narrator, glibly pointing out the differences between then and now. Isabelle's story doesn't need meta theatrical touches. And as Joan marches on to predetermined glory and doom, the revised script avoids irony for a more conventional account guaranteed to push the emotional buttons of any parent who has felt equal elation and terror as she watches her child grow up. Ms. Anderson doesn't break new ground in exploring those reactions. But sometimes context can make the hoary feel bracingly fresh. Mr. Penn makes the most of that context's novelty without overselling it. John Lee Beatty's rustic set (which shifts neatly to royal sumptuousness for later scenes at the Dauphin's court), Jane Greenwood's homespun costumes and Alexander Sovronsky and Joanna Lynne Staub's sound design summon a world in which people are unavoidably subject to the whims of nature. And Lap Chi Chu's lighting speaks of a time when a shaft of sun, or the sight of a loved one wreathed in candlelight, might be perceived as a heavenly communication. The supporting cast does well by Ms. Anderson's conversational, expletive laced dialogue, in which the possibilities of barbaric invasion and divine intervention are regarded as everyday possibilities. Andrew Hovelson is spot on as Joan's loutish brother, riding a gravy train to fame by association; so is Kate Jennings Grant as the patronizing, well intentioned Lady of the Court, who treats Isabelle the way a Hollywood studio assistant might deal with the down home relatives of a fledgling movie star. Dermot Crowley is excellent as Joan's father, Jacques, an unlettered, strap wielding patriarch whose suspicions of his daughter's voices are never entirely quelled. His final, third person monologue, in which he traces his character's last days following Joan's death, is a heartbreaker. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Maryland Schools May Tell Children When It's Time to Log Off Maryland could become the first state to address parental concerns about computer screen time for children in the classroom. Legislation passed this month would require state education officials to develop optimum health and safety practices for the use of digital devices in schools. Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, has not taken a public position on the legislation. If he does not sign or veto it before May 28, the measure will become law without his signature. The bill throws Maryland into an already heated national debate over the potential for digital devices and apps to addict children and whether it is up to the tech industry or parents to make sure children don't get hooked. Mindful of such risks, a group of Apple shareholders recently wrote the company a letter that warned of the iPhone's potential for overuse and that pressed Apple to develop tools for parents to better manage their children's device habits. Some pediatricians and parents are now raising similar concerns about classroom laptops, tablets and apps, partly because school districts are adopting digital tools in droves. Last year, primary and secondary schools in the United States spent 5.4 billion on 12.4 million laptop and tablet computers, according to International Data Corporation, a market research firm known as IDC. Several pediatricians warned that heavy digital device use in schools or for homework could have unintended physical and emotional consequences for students, including vision problems, interrupted sleep and device compulsion. In particular, they noted that some classroom learning apps used powerful, video game like reward systems to engage and stimulate students, making it difficult for some children to turn them off. "The concern is that many programs students use in school are entertainment and gamified," said Dr. Scott Krugman, a pediatrician in Baltimore County who supported the school device bill. "We felt these are things that should be tracked and monitored." So far, however, there is little concrete evidence on the potential health effects of digital learning tools for students. Many schools are more focused on tapping the potential for digital tools to enrich children's education by helping them collaborate, create projects and research online than on tracking the effects of screen time on students. And video game like math education apps may benefit some children even if the apps create problematic habits for other children, said Dr. David L. Hill, a pediatrician in Wilmington, N.C., who is the chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' council on communications and media. The doctors' group has published guidelines on entertainment media, recommending among other things that children avoid exposure to digital screens at least an hour before bed. But Dr. Hill said the group had decided against issuing recommendations on the use of devices in classrooms because of the lack of school specific research. "As a doctor, my answer is always to get the data," Dr. Hill said. "Right now, we have anecdotes." The Maryland bill aims to provide some answers. The legislation would require the state's Department of Education, in conjunction with its Health Department, to develop best practices for the healthy and safe use of digital devices in schools, optional models that schools in the state can choose to follow. Some school districts are already developing their own recommendations. Baltimore County Public Schools, the nation's 25th largest school system, has a health council made up of doctors and other experts who give guidance on classroom technology. The group has recommended minimal screen time before children enter kindergarten and, for high school students, that computer use take up no more than half of learning time during the school day. It also recommended that students take activity breaks from computer tasks every 20 minutes and leave their devices inside during recess. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Matthew Hussey spreads love, one YouTube video at a time. The 32 year old British dating coach has built a mini empire by doling out advice to single women seeking love in the age of Tinder and ghosting. His book "Get the Guy" was a New York Times best seller, he hosts 250 person retreats, and he has more than a million followers on social media. He also appears regularly on "Good Morning America." Mr. Hussey's goal, he said, is to make women feel empowered, even if his advice often sounds like common sense. "I love when people come up to me and tell me they are in a relationship because of me," he said in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. "But I equally love the breakup stories, the person who says, 'I left someone last week because of you.' I like to think I saved 10 years of their lives." Here, in an edited interview, Mr. Hussey recalls the roots of his career and describes some of the perils of online dating. Q.: What made you want to be a relationship coach? A.: Even when I was young, I cared too much about what other people thought, especially girls. I remember, once a girl I had a crush on walked past me and I just zoned out. My friend busted out laughing. I started reading everything I could to help myself. I learned that you can get better at this. Earlier in your career you coached men. What made you switch to women? I started reading the books out there for women, and it concerned me. These women were being told if a guy is shy, he isn't into you. As a guy who spent his entire life avoiding women he really liked, this confused me. Women were also being taught in their love lives to sit back and wait. At least as a guy you can stink at talking to girls and be deathly afraid of rejection, but in the very least you have agency. I kept thinking about how 100 years ago a woman would drop a handkerchief in front of a guy and kept walking. It gave him the opportunity to pick it up, walk over to her, and start talking. Even then, they could be proactive. Why not now? What alarms you about the current state of dating? We've reached a new level where people feel so disposable. We know we can keep swiping. We know we can increase our radius on our apps so there are always new dates. It's not like everyone became a stud overnight, but most men feel like they are. Especially people who have not had a lot of attention their entire lives, they can all of a sudden hit on every attractive person they see online. Maybe they don't get a response, but that doesn't matter. Just the possibility gives them a sense of entitlement. How does that impact women? Because so many men act like this they don't go on dates and are flaky someone comes along that they have a connection with, they massively overvalue that connection. They think they have to hold on to it and chase it. I deal with women every day who are literally chasing men who aren't taking them seriously or investing in them. They think, "If I don't sleep with someone quickly, someone else will. He's invited me over at the last minute, and I really want more, but I do really like him, so maybe if I get close enough with him, maybe he will realize he does want me for more." That is extremely dangerous. That isn't a new thing, but is it worse now? People are more fearful. It's coming from a scarcity mind set. It's coming from the idea that he can hit up so many people, so he won't be interested in me. It's important to connect with the person you end up with, but it's not a reason to invest in someone. Connection just feels good, but so do drugs. You invest in someone based on how much they invest in you. Also, you have to be willing to let go. You become a better dater when you have a truly fulfilling life that is not dependent on someone else. Even if someone leaves, your life continues unscathed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Jason Segel, pictured with his co star Eve Lindley, was inspired to create "Dispatches From Elsewhere" at a time when he no longer knew what kind of artist he wanted to be. "It came to me right at the moment I needed it," he said. A prismatic new TV series, created by Jason Segel, adapts an alternate reality game and his own existential crisis. First, you would have seen a flier, an advertisement for a human force field experiment or a camera that took pictures of the past. Had you called the number printed at the flier's bottom, you would have been directed to the 16th floor of a high rise in San Francisco's financial district and told to an unlock an office door. So began your "induction process" to the Games of Nonchalance, an art project cum social experiment that ran in San Francisco and Oakland from 2008 to 2011 and sent an estimated 7,000 people on a series of avant garde scavenger hunts. Some participants didn't know if they had stumbled onto a game or some grand conspiracy. Others feared being lured into a self help cult. Now, in a wily example of art imitating art imitating life, that immersive experience has been reimagined as "Dispatches From Elsewhere," a 10 episode scripted series created by Jason Segel, beginning Sunday on AMC. "This one just felt particularly magical in the way that it all came together," Segel said, speaking by telephone from a park bench in Burbank, Calif. It was also, he added, "super, super hard." Given the extreme slipperiness of the source material, that checks out. Created by an artist and former data manager named Jeff Hull, the Games of Nonchalance were an alternate reality game that blurred fact and fiction, leading participants into an elaborate drama in which rival organizations called the Jejune Institute and the Elsewhere Public Works Agency fought for control of esoteric technology. For three years, players followed clues tucked into anonymous phone calls and pirate radio broadcasts, tasked with sabotaging the Jejune Institute and tracking the whereabouts a young woman named Evalyn Lucien or Eva, as in "Eva Lucien" who was somehow involved and said to have disappeared in 1988. Some treated Nonchalance as a lark, a goof. Others approached it with fanatical seriousness. Segel discovered it after seeing "The Institute," a 2013 quasi documentary by Spencer McCall that was in on the ruse, raising more questions about the phenomenon than it answered. "I was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is what I've been looking for,'" he said. The CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" had reached its nine season end, and Segel was in the midst of what he called a "moment of existential crisis." He no longer knew what kind of artist he was or wanted to be. The Games called out to the kid in Segel who had read portal fantasies and still longed to be told that he had been selected for some great endeavor the kid who had ignored the rides at Disneyland in favor of roaming around Frontierland in a cowboy costume. "It came to me right at the moment I needed it," he said. The inception of "Dispatches" mirrored the trickiness of its real world inspiration. Soon after viewing the film, Segel contacted McCall, who put him in touch with Hull, whose production company had co produced "The Institute." Hull, Segel said, hung up on him. I checked this out with Hull. "Yeah, go with that," he said. Then a cryptic email arrived. Its contents: an address in San Francisco, a date, a time. A week or two later, Segel drove up the California coast and found himself participating in the first chapter of a new project, The Latitude Society, which had him sliding down a hidden passage into an occult library and then back into the street, following clues from one local business to the next. "For that hour, I felt anonymous" he said. "I felt like I was a kid playing pretend." Later, another email arrived. This one read, "You have divine nonchalance." The Games of Nonchalance had grown out of Hull's coursework for a master's degree in interdisciplinary arts at San Francisco State University. While in school, he had begun to think about how he could use different media maps, voice mail messages, installation art to create narrative. Hull had designed the game in hopes of creating a psychic shift that made the ordinary world seem more magical. After visiting the "induction center," a player might have been led to unearth a buried treasure, walk blindfolded through a chapel or dance on a street corner with a man dressed as Big Foot. The lines between where the game ended and reality began sometimes smudged. McCall's film describes at least one debilitating injury and a lot of unhealthy obsession. Several players seem to experience profound breaks with reality. One player says he broke into a stranger's home in search of answers. None of that may be true. For a while, Segel envisioned making "Dispatches" a feature film, but he eventually realized that he wanted to write a series; asking audiences to show up at the same time each week felt a little more participatory. While developing the script, he had moved to a farm in a small town an hour or so outside of Los Angeles, which had informed the way he thought about the project and about everything else. "I think that changed my life," he said. "I felt like a part of a community. The real thing has been just trying to feel a part of the world around me." He also decided to focus less on the project's mythology than on its participants ordinary people who willingly took a plunge into the unknown. His character is an Everyman with a dead end job who, like Segel, faces an existential crisis. The other major characters, played by Sally Field, Andre Benjamin and the newcomer Eve Lindley, come equipped with their own interior calamities. Segel wanted to investigate what had led them to the game and how and why each person played it. "A lot of stories are about someone finding out that they're extraordinary," he said. "And this whole thing, it's this idea that we can all be ordinary together and that it's beautiful." Based on early episodes, the result is genre hopping, form bending and tonally eclectic. Benjamin, who plays a man convinced that Nonchalance is more just than a game, said he hadn't known the series was based in fact until he was filming Episode 8. He had a go at defining the show. "It's fantasy, it's kind of sci fi, it's drama, there's a love story underneath, there's mystery, there's tragedy, there's kind of everything," he said. "It's really a trip." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
MEMPHIS For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city. A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college. Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure. "I'm going to tell you the deal, plain spoken: I'm a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living," said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. "I'm proud of what I've accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring." Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress. The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times. Black middle class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, Whitehaven and Cordova. As job losses mount black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average. The repercussions will be long lasting, in Memphis and nationwide. The most acute economic divide in America remains the steadily widening gap between the wealth of black and white families, according to a recent study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study. The Economic Policy Institute's forthcoming "The State of Working America" analyzed the recession driven drop in wealth. As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to 94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to 2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences. "This cancer is metastasizing into an economic crisis for the city," said Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr. in his riverfront office. "It's done more to set us back than anything since the beginning of the civil rights movement." The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high cost mortgages and consumer loans. The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank's foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure. In a recent regulatory filing, Wells Fargo hinted that its legal troubles could multiply. "Certain government entities are conducting investigations into the mortgage lending practices of various Wells Fargo affiliated entities, including whether borrowers were steered to more costly mortgage products," the bank stated. Wells Fargo officials are not backing down in the face of the legal attacks. They say the bank made more prime loans and has foreclosed on fewer homes than most banks, and that the worst offenders those banks that handed out bushels of no money down, negative amortization loans have gone out of business. "The mistake Memphis officials made is that they picked the lender who was doing the most lending as opposed to the lender who was doing the worst lending," said Brad Blackwell, executive vice president for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. Not every recessionary ill can be heaped upon banks. Some black homeowners contracted the buy a big home fever that infected many Americans and took out ill advised loans. And unemployment has pitched even homeowners who hold conventional mortgages into foreclosure. Federal and state officials say that high cost mortgages leave hard pressed homeowners especially vulnerable and that statistical patterns are inescapable. "The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities," Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's civil rights division, told a Congressional committee. The reversal of economic fortune in Memphis is particularly grievous for a black professional class that has taken root here, a group that includes Mr. Wharton, a lawyer who became mayor in 2009. Demographers forecast that Memphis will soon become the nation's first majority black metropolitan region. That prospect, noted William Mitchell, a black real estate agent, once augured for a fine future. "Our home values were up, income up," he said. He pauses, his frustration palpable. "What we see today, it's a new world. And not a good one." "You don't want to walk up there! That's the wild, wild west," a neighbor shouts. "Nothing on that block but foreclosed homes and squatters." To roam Soulsville, a neighborhood south of downtown Memphis, is to find a place where bungalows and brick homes stand vacant amid azaleas and dogwoods, where roofs are swaybacked and thieves punch holes through walls to strip the copper piping. The weekly newspaper is swollen with foreclosure notices. Here and there, homes are burned by arsonists. Yet just a few years back, Howard Smith felt like a rich man. A 56 year old African American engineer with a gray flecked beard, butter brown corduroys and red sneakers, he sits with two neighbors on a porch on Richmond Avenue and talks of his miniature real estate empire: He owned a home on this block, another in nearby Whitehaven and another farther out. His job paid well; a pleasant retirement beckoned. Then he was laid off. He has sent out 60 applications, obtained a dozen interviews and received no calls back. A bank foreclosed on his biggest house. He will be lucky to get 30,000 for his house here, which was assessed at 80,000 two years ago. "It all disappeared overnight," he says. "Mmm mm, yes sir, overnight," says his neighbor, Gwen Ward. In her 50s, she, too, was laid off, from her supervisory job of 15 years, and she moved in with her elderly mother. "It seemed we were headed up and then" she snaps her fingers "it all went away." Mr. Smith nods. "The banks and Wall Street have taken the middle class and shredded us," he says. For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods. Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times. "We're wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation," said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. The African American renaissance in Memphis was halting. Residential housing patterns remain deeply segregated. While big employers FedEx and AutoZone have headquarters here, wage growth is not robust. African American employment is often serial rather than continuous, and many people lack retirement and health plans. He adds: "I remember riding my bike as a kid through thriving neighborhoods. Now it's like someone bombed my city." Camille Thomas, a 40 year old African American, loved working for Wells Fargo. "I felt like I could help people," she recalled over coffee. As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans for autos, for furniture, for houses edged into mania. "It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus," she said. Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city's lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another. "Your manager would say, 'Let me see your cold call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,' and you knew those were African American neighborhoods," she recalled. "We were told, 'Oh, they aren't so savvy.' " She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went "fishing" for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral. Several state and city regulators have placed Wells Fargo Bank in their cross hairs, and their lawsuits include similar accusations. In Illinois, the state attorney general has accused the bank of marketing high cost loans to blacks and Latinos while selling lower cost loans to white borrowers. John P. Relman, the Washington, D.C., lawyer handling the Memphis case, has sued Wells Fargo on behalf of the City of Baltimore, asserting that the bank systematically exploited black borrowers. A federal judge in Baltimore dismissed that lawsuit, saying it had made overly broad claims about the damage done by Wells Fargo. City lawyers have refiled papers. "I don't think it's going too far to say that banks are at the core of the disaster here," said Phyllis G. Betts, director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action at the University of Memphis, which has closely examined bank lending records. Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining. Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. "This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks," he said. For a 150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan tacks on 90,000 in interest payments over its 30 year life. Wells Fargo officials say they rejected the worst subprime products, and they portray their former employees as disgruntled rogues who subverted bank policies. Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low cost mortgage. "I thought, 'This is great! ' " Mr. Banks says. "When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings." What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to 1,700 from 1,200. Months later, he ruptured his Achilles tendon playing basketball, hindering his work as a janitor. And he lost his job at FedEx. Now foreclosure looms. He is by nature an optimistic man; his smile is rueful. "Man, I should I have stayed 'old school' with my finances," he said. "I sat down my youngest son on the couch and I told him, 'These are rough times.' " Many neighbors are in similar straits. Foreclosure notices flutter like flags on the doors of two nearby homes, and the lawns there are overgrown and mud fills the gutters. Wells Fargo says it has modified three mortgages for every foreclosure nationwide although bank officials declined to provide the data for Memphis. A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation's four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"Clash of Images," an exhibition in Paris of posters, paintings, films and other works from the uprising of May 1968 and beyond. During the major strikes and student uprisings in France that year, the Ecole des Beaux Arts turned itself into a workshop for revolutionary messages. PARIS Fifty years ago, almost to the day, students here began to strike over the rigidity and hierarchy of the French university system, defying the historical deference of young people to their elders; the same day, workers at a major factory near Nantes walked out. Within days, the strikes spread to other universities and factories, and garbage collectors and office workers joined in. By mid May, more than 10 million people across France were on strike, and the country had all but come to a standstill. The protests of 1968 ushered in more than five years of social upheaval, intensifying an antiwar movement in Europe and contributing to the women's liberation and gay rights movements. And it all started with a call to upend the old order. "There was an idea that France was a class society and it had to be torn down," said Eric de Chassey, a professor of contemporary art who curated, with Philippe Artieres, "Clash of Images," an exhibition at the Beaux Arts de Paris. It showcases posters from those early days of social upheaval, as well as art and documents from subsequent protests for women's rights and gay rights. The Ecole des Beaux Arts was at the center of the revolt. Many of the prestigious art school's students and teachers occupied the 300 year old stone structure on the Left Bank of the Seine: Rather than holding meetings only in the building's vast rooms and courtyards, they turned the school into an atelier, or artists' workshop, where they created protest art. The often arresting posters straddled the line between art and propaganda. In keeping with the utopian ideals of collective work and anonymous authorship, the artists labored together to conceptualize, design and write slogans for the posters that framed their revolutionary sentiments. "Someone would say 'We need a poster that talks about immigration,' " Mr. de Chassey explained. "Then someone would propose a design, someone else would propose a slogan and then it would be discussed by a committee." The students printed hundreds or sometimes several thousand copies of the posters and taped them to lampposts and walls around Paris. In an era before the internet, the posters became a trusted way to communicate plans for action as well as the protesters' political messages. There was little faith in electronic media at the time because it was state owned. The strikes that began in May 1968 became the template for social protest in contemporary France, and although the fervent anti establishment sentiments have faded, the mentality of struggle still resonates. The Beaux Arts posters, on display through May 20, give a sense of the ferment of idealism, rebellion and rejection of the status quo that permeated French society and marked the second half of the 20th century. Some of the posters are easily comprehensible, but others need a little explanation. Here's a look at 11 of the most emblematic. Police officers raided the Ecole des Beaux Arts and forcibly expelled the students who had occupied it, turning the complex into a workshop. In this poster, a helmeted officer, complete with wolf sharp teeth, grips a paintbrush in his mouth, a symbol of the police takeover of the school. The slogan plays on the French verb "afficher," which means "to display" but in its reflexive form, "s'afficher," means "to show up." The poster says: "The police show up at the Beaux Arts, the Beaux Arts displays in the street." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
FLORENCE, Italy While the wider world may have doubled down on cargo shorts, flip flops and whatever passes for a male uniform in the world of open space workplaces, here on the streets of this Renaissance city and throughout the trade pavilions crammed inside the 25 acre walled Fortezza da Basso for the huge Pitti Uomo men's wear fair, it's dandy time. Suddenly, it seems, every cobbled lane (and Instagram feed) is chockablock with men in Homburg hats or straw boaters, suits with nipped jackets and pleated trousers cropped short to reveal two tone spectator shoes. There are capes and canes and foulards and billowing pocket squares, beards of every imaginable cut and even waxed mustaches. Sometimes, seen walking two or three abreast, the Finnish and Korean and Russian and Chinese and Japanese buyers or vendors seem dressed as if for some arcane form of cosplay. All of it is decorative, anachronistic, highly refined and considered and more than a bit silly. And it has all begun to change. Far too little is said about fashion's relation to Newton's third law of motion, the one that posits for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Indications are already visible as Pitti Uomo begins 20,000 visitors and 1,240 brand representatives descending en masse on the tiny Florence airport that reactive change is coming to men's wear. The dandy is dead. We are entering the age of fugly. Taking to Instagram in May, Mr. Rucci let rip with an unfettered attack on designs emanating from the house of Balenciaga, venting spleen on what he saw as desecration of its founder, the couturier Cristobal Balenciaga. "They have taken his name and have conveniently used it as a springboard for such mediocrity, such tastelessness, such ugly ideas," Mr. Rucci wrote. Who you calling ugly? What Mr. Rucci derided as Balenciaga's "whorish greed to sell a gym shoe" has not only spurred a huge boost in sales but propelled the brand into the consciousness of a new population. What nearly everyone in fashion has been attempting for years, Mr. Gvasalia neatly accomplished: Snagging the sneakerheads. That he did so may be attributable to his canny understanding of a population that cares less about how wearable something may be than its likelihood to attract online eyeballs. "Social media is the culprit here," Nick Sullivan, the fashion director of Esquire, said last week. By tradition, the best dressed men tended to be those whose clothes you did not instantly recognize. If logo and label dressing changed all that, Instagram raised the ante, making it necessary for designers to produce products whose iconography produces a pop on a smartphone screen. "Designer brands have become beacons of fugly precisely because people have replaced shopping for things with posting them and then regramming them," Mr. Sullivan said. "Old fashioned taste at the moment is out of taste." What takes its place is stuff so deliberately and uproariously awful, so defiant of traditional canons of taste you almost have to applaud it. Although certain of the male superstars at the recent Billboard Music Awards think Lil Pump were clad in big name styles, the net effect was of sartorial mayhem: pink dreads, studded cowboy wear, neck tats and braces. "The ugliness has a real beauty to it," Chris Law, a young men's wear pundit whose Fresher Than Chris style site was deemed one of the top 25 blogs of 2018 by The Fashion Spot. "As a kid, I thought dad sneakers and Hawaiian shirts were so awful I was embarrassed by my dad wearing them," Mr. Law said. "Now I wear them all the time. The louder the print, the more ridiculous, the more right it seems." Bolstering his point, the Webster, an influential specialty retailer, recently posted Instagram ads featuring loud floral rayon Hawaiian shirts from Rhuigi Villase n or 's cult label Rhude. Each bore as its tagline a revised men's wear call to arms: "The brighter, the better, the tackier, the trendier.'' "In some ways what's changed is that there's no dictating aesthetic anymore," Mr. DeLeon said. "Guys are free to pick and choose what they want to wear in a way that reflects the fast paced social media economy." For the greater part of a decade at Pitti Uomo, said Nick Wooster, a longtime industry figure and Instagram influencer, the focus has been on traditional Italian tailoring; fine woolens; bench made shoes from Northampton, England shoemakers like Tricker's, John Lobb and Grenson; and classic headgear like true Panama hats. "I think it's super important that the tailored jacket with full canvas lining is still represented here," said Mr. Wooster, who this season is presenting a capsule collection in collaboration with Paul Shark. "What makes Pitti relevant is that they leave room for that core tailoring consumer, but they're also moving on.'' Although old enough at 57 to be a granddad, Mr. Wooster saw in the Triple S sneakers he bought this year not a dad shoe (one that, weighing seven pounds a pair, might give dad a hernia) but an object whose every dimension was fastidiously designed. "They're not a knockoff of a pair of Nike Air Monarchs from Payless they're homage," Mr. Wooster said. And, despite being hefty as bricks, the Triple S sneakers went into his luggage alongside 12 other pairs of shoes, an assortment that included Mr. Owens's Birkenstocks and the truly unclassifiable footwear that Teva has produced in collaboration with the Japanese artisanal footwear designer Ryo Kashiwazaki . | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Arsenic in Bottled Water Prompts a Product Removal: How Much Is Safe? Keurig Dr Pepper said it was withdrawing its Penafiel brand unflavored mineral spring water products after reports that they contained high levels of arsenic. The announcement, which was made on June 21, came three days after the Center for Environmental Health notified the company that tests showed the amount of arsenic in the water exceeded the level requiring a health warning under California's consumer protection law, and two months after Consumer Reports found the amount exceeded the level set by the federal government. A market withdrawal is voluntary and "occurs when a product has a minor violation that would not be subject to FDA legal action," according to the United States Food and Drug Administration's website. Keurig Dr Pepper said its own independent water quality tests confirmed arsenic levels exceeding the F.D.A.'s bottled water standards of 10 parts per billion. Katie Gilroy, a company spokeswoman, did not disclose how many bottles would be affected by the withdrawal but said the products, which are imported from Mexico, were "sold in a limited number of retailers" in the United States. Ms. Gilroy said production was suspended in April and enhanced filtration systems were installed. The company said none of its other products were affected by the withdrawal. Consumer Reports and the Center for Environmental Health, which is based in Oakland, Calif., said another brand, Starkey Water, which is owned by Whole Foods, contained arsenic levels that met federal standards but exceeded levels they deemed safe. Consumer Reports said the levels were eight parts per billion. A spokeswoman for Whole Foods declined to comment on Sunday about the center's testing but said the products tested by Consumer Reports were "fully compliant with F.D.A. standards for heavy metals." What's the danger of arsenic in water and how is it regulated? Here's what you need to know: What is arsenic and how common is it? Chronic low dose exposure to arsenic has been implicated in respiratory problems in children and adults and in cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancers of the skin, bladder and lung. Studies have also shown it can be harmful to developing fetuses and children, and negatively affect cognitive development, intelligence and memory, according to the World Health Organization. Arsenic is a heavy metal found in the Earth's crust and ubiquitous in the environment, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Because it can leach into groundwater through rocks in soil, contaminated drinking water is the most common way humans can ingest it. But it can also be found in certain foods, such as rice. What are considered 'acceptable' levels of arsenic? The Environmental Protection Agency sets arsenic levels in public water systems at 10 parts per billion the same limit the F.D.A. sets for bottled water. Consumer Reports said there should be more consistent oversight of the bottled water industry. "If anything, bottled water a product for which people pay a premium, often because they assume it's safer should be regulated at least as strictly as tap water," Consumer Reports' chief scientific officer, James Dickerson, said in its report. Consumer Reports also said the federal threshold should be lowered to three parts per billion. Erik D. Olson, a drinking water expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, agreed. "Since it is a carcinogen, there is no completely 'safe' level of arsenic," he said. The F.D.A. did not respond to a request for a comment on Monday. The International Bottled Water Association said the findings by Consumer Reports "unnecessarily" scared consumers about the safety of bottled water. "Bottled water, like all food and beverages, is strictly regulated" by the F.D.A., an association spokeswoman, Jill Culora, said. And experts who work for the agency "have concluded that based on the best available science the current 10 ppb standard for arsenic in bottled water protects the public health," she said. Americans last year consumed 13.8 billion gallons of bottled water, surpassing carbonated soft drinks in popularity, the association said. Unlike tap water, which is largely regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, bottled water, as a packaged food product, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency also oversees inspections of bottling plants. Some states require bottled water companies to be licensed annually. But "some states have inconsistent arsenic guidelines in place for tap and bottled water, with stricter thresholds in place for tap than for bottled water," according to Consumer Reports. And "few states regularly conduct independent tests on bottled water for contaminants, as municipalities must for tap water." Can consumers test for arsenic in their water? Mr. Olson said no over the counter kits are reliable for testing for arsenic. The Natural Resources Defense Council recommends using a state certified drinking water lab; a list is on the E.P.A.'s website. Some labs, like mytapscore.com, will do a test at a reasonable price, Mr. Olson said. He suggested asking for a discounted test for an array of contaminants. If affordability is an issue, you could consider only an arsenic test, which will cost less. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Credit...Ana Cuba for The New York Times LONDON E L James does not like speaking to journalists, who often want to know deeply personal things, like how much money she makes and whether she has a sex dungeon in her basement. Her aversion to publicity can be inconvenient, and somewhat impractical. As one of the world's most famous and in demand authors, she must occasionally submit to public interrogations, particularly when she has a new book to promote. But she's not happy about it. "She hates it," her agent, Valerie Hoskins, tells me ominously on the phone a week before James and I meet. Normally, this sort of stance a notch more hostile than a celebrity's typical ambivalence toward nosy reporters would make for an uncomfortable interview. But when James greets me at her bright, airy home in Ealing, a placid suburban borough in west London where she lives with her husband, the writer Niall Leonard, and their two Westies, she doesn't seem remotely ill at ease, at least not outwardly. She suggests we sit in her enormous, spotless kitchen overlooking the garden for coffee and croissants before we move to her office to talk about her new romance novel, "The Mister," and suggests the pastries will be better with apricot jam. She talks about her sons, ages 22 and 24, and TV shows she's obsessed with ("Game of Thrones" and "Stranger Things"). She laments her lack of hobbies after I ask her what she does in her spare time, when she's not writing or running the elaborate business of being E L James. She can't think of anything she does for fun. "I need to get a hobby," she says. "Writing used to be my hobby." Over the past eight years, that hobby has morphed into a billion dollar entertainment franchise, and James has gone from being an anonymous writer posting lusty fantasies online, to an erotica industry mogul who's running her own small empire of kink. Overseeing a wildly successful multimedia franchise left little time for James's one time hobby, writing. On top of that, James, who is 56, faced impossible expectations set by her blockbuster debut, as ravenous fans kept clamoring for more sequels. Inevitably, many of her readers will be disappointed by any story that doesn't involve the dominant submissive relationship between the sadomasochistic billionaire Christian Grey and his demure conquest Anastasia Steele, who becomes his willing sexual servant. So it's taken her a while to write something new. "I'm incredibly nervous about it," she says. "There are other stories I want to tell. I've been with these two for so long." With "The Mister," her first new work of original fiction since she became an international phenomenon, James hopes to inaugurate a new phase of her career. Her latest work is a tame (by comparison) love story set mostly in contemporary London and Cornwall, featuring a wealthy British aristocrat who falls for his house cleaner, a beautiful, mysterious young woman who fled Albania. In Hollywood pitch terms, it's like a porny mash up of "Cinderella" and "Downton Abbey." Those themes feel particularly relevant in Britain these days, as the country's contortions over Brexit have exposed ugly divisions over race, class and British identity. James has become preoccupied with these issues lately, particularly since she has fallen unexpectedly into wealth, and seen firsthand how society is weighted in favor of the rich. "It's important for me to put some of this in," she said. "As an incredibly wealthy person, you keep the money." James is a passionate Remainer who wants Britain to stay within the European Union, a position she broadcasts unabashedly on social media even though she knows she risks alienating some fans. The issue has come up repeatedly in interviews she's given about "The Mister," i ncluding with French and Norwegian media outlets. She's anticipating a backlash, in part because we live in such polarizing times, but also because she's come to expect scrutiny of everything she does. "Being a successful, middle aged, overweight woman, people are so angry that you're stepping out of line," she said. "Sometimes it really gets me down." The books sold so quickly in Britain that the printers ran out of silver ink for the iconic black and metallic gray covers, which James designed herself. In the United States, Vintage printed more than a million copies a week to meet demand, overwhelming its paper suppliers. "We couldn't get enough paper," Messitte said. "It felt somewhat surreal." At book signings, fans wept, which in turn made James cry (her publicist always carries boxes of tissues on tour). In Portland, Ore., a local TV news crew chased her car through the streets. James was bewildered by her overnight success. From the beginning, she told her agent she didn't want to be famous. "I said, it's not my fault, you wrote the bloody books, not me," her agent, Hoskins, recalled. The series altered the literary landscape, paving the way for more boundary pushing erotica, and changed the way that major retailers and entertainment companies catered to female desire. Sales of sex toys surged. Target began selling "Fifty Shades" lubricant, vibrating rings and blindfolds. James became a taboo breaking evangelist for certain kinds of sexual fantasies that women were often silent about, or ashamed of. Around half past noon, a car arrives to drive James to a photo shoot at a hotel in Kensington, for an upcoming feature in You, a magazine for The Mail on Sunday. In the car, James offers an unsolicited critique of the first "Fifty Shades" film, which she felt failed to capture the allure of the novel. Her agent, who's been an otherwise unobtrusive chaperone, gently interjects and suggests she move on to another topic. On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, Charlotte Bush, the director of publicity for Arrow, James's British publishing house, greets James effusively and shows off her manicured nails, which she had painted hot pink to match the lettering on the cover of "The Mister." "The talent is here!" Bush calls out as she guides James to a makeshift dressing room, where hairstylists and makeup artists spring into action and begin ministering to her . "All this fuss, it's lovely," James says. "I'm sort of a minimal fuss kind of person." James sifts through a rack of evening gowns that the stylists brought for her to choose from. She dismisses one as "very matronly." Another is "very kaftan y," another "too print y." "Sequin y," one of the stylists concludes. It's unclear how James's readers will respond to "The Mister," and whether their devotion to the author transcends their love of Christian Grey and a bottomless appetite for more of the same story. Other mega best selling authors, including Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling, have switched genres and rebranded themselves after ending their successful fantasy franchises, and have retained just a fraction of their audience. James seems to have nearly exhausted her own appetite for "Fifty Shades." She's written a paranormal romance a ghost story set in contemporary London which she hopes to publish, and is contemplating a sequel to "The Mister." "There's so many ideas and everyone's like, oh, go back to what you've been doing for the last 10 years," she says. But readers have taken matters into their own hands , ensuring the story will continue, whether James writes it or not . On websites like fanfiction.net and Wattpad, amateur writers have posted tens of thousands of stories based on "Fifty Shades." James says she doesn't read them, but she acknowledges that it's only fitting for fans to take over. "Those characters feel like they belong to everyone now," she says. "This was born of fandom." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
An all star team of black theater artists has formed a new coalition vowing to combat racism in the theater community. Black Theater United counts among its founding members the Tony Award winners Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Phylicia Rashad, LaChanze, Kenny Leon, Adriane Lenox and Lillias White. The group, whose founders also include the actors Wendell Pierce, Vanessa Williams, Norm Lewis and Brandon Victor Dixon, said it had formed a nonprofit that would seek "to influence widespread reform and combat systemic racism within the theater industry and throughout the nation." Among its plans: working for social change by pressing for greater participation by hard to count communities in the census, and reviewing theater industry practices and assisting black theater artists. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the United States Surgeon General, called for action on Thursday to reduce the use of e cigarettes among young people. (SOUNDBITE) (English) U.S. SURGEON GENERAL VIVEK MURTHY SAYING: "E cigarettes went from being rare in 2010 to now being the most common tobacco products used by our nation's youth surpassing traditional cigarettes, hookah and chewing tobacco. This represents a staggering development in a relatively short period of time. And it also threatens 50 years of hard fought progress that we have made curbing tobacco use and it places a whole new generation at risk for addiction to nicotine." //"Furthermore e cigarette used by young people is strongly associated with the use of other tobacco products. And new research has shown that kids who use e cigarettes are more likely to use traditional cigarettes. Now contrary to the belief of many, the aerosol that's produced by e cigarettes is not harmless water vapor for either the user or for those who inhale it secondhand. It often contains nicotine and other chemical compounds which can have harmful effects on the user as well as those who inhale it secondhand." Soaring use of e cigarettes among young people "is now a major public health concern," according to a report published Thursday from the United States Surgeon General. It is the first comprehensive look on the subject from the nation's highest public health authority, and it finds that e cigarettes are now the most commonly used tobacco product among youths, surpassing tobacco cigarettes. E cigarettes, which turn nicotine into inhalable vapor, can harm developing brains of teenagers who use them, and also can create harmful aerosol for people around the user, the report said, citing studies in animals. "Adolescent brains are particularly sensitive to nicotine's effects," and can experience "a constellation of nicotine induced neural and behavioral alterations," the report said. It urged stronger action to prevent young people from getting access to e cigarettes. Some researchers have said that e cigarette use among youth could act as a gateway to traditional smoking, but the report says the relationship is not yet fully established. Cigarette smoking among youth has fallen sharply in recent years but use of nicotine products over all remains essentially flat among young people. With its focus on youth, the report did not address adult use of e cigarettes, and the most divisive issue of whether the technology is an effective tool to help smokers of traditional cigarettes quit their deadly habit. The report also did not break new scientific ground, but public health advocates said the voice of the surgeon general in the debate marked a milestone. "It's the most comprehensive and objective answer to the question of whether e cigarette use is a matter of serious concern that requires government action," said Matthew Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. "The answer, based on the findings, is: yes." In a preface to the report, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, wrote that e cigarette use among high school students increased "an astounding 900 percent" from 2011 to 2015. Citing research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the report found that 16 percent of high schoolers used e cigarettes in 2015, up from 13.4 percent a year earlier. In 2015, nearly 38 percent of high schoolers reported having tried an e cigarette at least once. Chief among the concerns raised by the report is simply that "nicotine is a dangerous drug" to the developing brain, said Terry Pechacek, a professor in the school of public health at Georgia State University. It has been shown in animal models that nicotine damages the adolescent brain, he said. But he said the risk is less than combining nicotine with carcinogenic combustion in traditional cigarettes. Echoing other research reports, the surgeon general's report finds that the 3.5 billion e cigarette industry has mimicked marketing techniques of the tobacco industry that have "found to be appealing to youth and young adults." Of particular concern to public health advocates has been the explosive growth and marketing of flavored e cigarettes; a study published last month in the journal Pediatrics found that young people who smoked flavored e cigarettes were more at risk of taking up traditional smoking. The alarms raised about nicotine among youth come as the landscape is shifting around tobacco use. The C.D.C. finds that the use of traditional cigarettes has dropped below 40 million Americans for the first time in 50 years, since record keeping began. At least among adults, e cigarettes are considered a far less harmful alternative because, unlike traditional cigarettes, they do not rely on combustion, which leads to inhalation of deadly carcinogenic particles, and 480,000 deaths each year. The C.D.C. report on smoking trends, published last month, found the sharpest drop of traditional cigarette use was among young people, with 13 percent of 18 to 24 year olds still smoking. There is no evidence that the increase in e cigarette use is leading to the drop in smoking, researchers said. The report concluded with a "call to action" that includes urging the Food and Drug Administration to put previously approved regulations into effect. The agency in May passed final rules governing e cigarettes, but many of them will take several years to take full effect. The report called for additional policies that, for instance, include e cigarettes in programs at the state and national level that are aimed to deter young people from smoking traditional cigarettes. It also urged greater education among parents, teachers and coaches about the risks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
It's only fitting that the admissions tour for the University of Alabama starts in Bryant Denny Stadium. On game days, the campus's iconic quad a painterly expanse of lawn, majestic trees and bell tower becomes a crimson and white tent city of numbered tailgating plots, some with electricity. Coach Nick Saban is so revered that as rain threatened this year's sorority rush, prayers went out to "Lord Saban" for sunshine, which brings us to the second thing Bama is famous for: Greek life. Banners flew along Colonial Drive after the August rush. One, for Alpha Omicron Pi, descended over four white pillars boasting, with a pun on the house's floral symbol, of recruiting success: "We Rose Higher Than the Rest." THIS ISSUE The Plight of the Public U: Survival Strategies The Plight of the Public U: Survival Strategies How then, you might ask, did Brianna Zavilowitz, a Staten Islander with 2120 SATs and a 4.0 grade point average, daughter of a retired N.Y.P.D. detective and an air traffic controller, with zero interest in pledging and middling enthusiasm for football, wind up in Tuscaloosa for college? The University of Alabama is the fastest growing flagship in the country. Enrollment hit 37,665 this fall, nearly a 58 percent increase over 2006. As critical as the student body jump: the kind of student the university is attracting. The average G.P.A. of entering freshmen is 3.66, up from 3.4 a decade ago, and the top quarter scored at least a 31 on the ACT, up from 27. Each year, about 18 percent of freshmen leave their home state for college in another. They tend to be the best prepared academically and most able to pay, said Thomas G. Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, who tracks this data. Achieving students are likely to be bound for successful lives, enhancing their alma mater's status and, the hope is, filling its coffers with donations. Schools want them. Merit aid given to achievers has a magnetic effect. "If we recruit five students from a high school, we will get 10 students the next year and they may not all be scholarship students," said Stuart R. Bell, president of the University of Alabama. Instead of layoffs and cuts, some public universities facing budget challenges are following this blueprint for survival: higher charges to students, and more of them. Nowadays, the real money comes from tuition and fees. The average for four year public colleges rose 81 percent in constant dollars between 2000 and 2014. At Alabama, tuition and fees have about doubled in the last decade, to 10,470 for residents and to 26,950 for nonresidents. Even when it awards full tuition scholarships, the university makes money on dorm rooms and meal plans, books, football tickets, hoodies and school spirit items like the giant Bama banner Ms. Zavilowitz and her roommates bought for the blank wall in the suite's common area. All told, these extras and essentials brought in 173 million last year on top of 633 million in tuition and fees, up from 135 million in 2005. "I hate very much to use this analogy, but it's like running a business," Dr. Whitaker said. The impact of this strategy is visible on campus, where pristine brick Greek Revival buildings seem like toy models slipped from boxes and set on green plots amid curvilinear streets of fresh black asphalt. In the past decade, the university has added 64 buildings, including an engineering research quad with labs for testing combustion engines and large scale structures (a "shake table" simulates earthquakes). "The university must have campus facilities that are competitive to meet student enrollment goals," according to the 2014 15 financial statement. Gleaming new labs await researchers, and there are plans to expand graduate programs and hire 300 to 400 new faculty members in the next five years. Around Tuscaloosa are cranes, fenced off construction zones and new apartments (8,270 additional beds since 2012). The parking lots are license plate bingo heaven. Ambition has its costs. As colleges adopt enrollment management strategies like aggressive recruiting and merit aid, the traditional role of public colleges is changing, said Stephen Burd, senior policy analyst at the think tank New America. This is leaving state residents and lower income students with "no four year schools where they can go in an affordable way," he said. "There is less aid for low income students and there are fewer seats" as colleges favor those who already have an advantage. Alabamians are now just 43 percent of the student body. On a campus bus tour crowded with out of state students and parents, a senior in a red dress, black heels and pearls (a guide uniform) offered that fact as a selling point. Public higher education is facing an identity crisis in mission and modus operandi. Nearly 30 years ago, legislative appropriations provided 59 percent of core revenues at public four year colleges. In 2013, the latest year available, states covered 27 percent on average, according to Mr. Mortenson's calculations. Funding is on track to reach zero in less than 20 years in some states and as soon as six in Colorado and nine in Alaska. "What happens when states stop funding higher education altogether?" he asked. Politicians have made college affordability a talking point, but education experts like Mr. Mortenson doubt that election year proposals will reverse the trend, at least any time soon. Overall enrollments have been dropping since 2010. That has all but the nation's top schools battling for students. Alabama may be a standout example, but across the country university flagships and even regional campuses once focused on serving nearby counties are extending their reach. Arizona State University, Oregon State University and Utah State University have amped up online programs (Starbucks reimburses employee tuition for A.S.U. Online degrees), expanded their campuses, are building or buying satellite campuses and, in the process, significantly raising enrollments. When states suffer budget woes, others feast. "Stress in California," said Kent Hopkins, vice president of enrollment management at A.S.U., "is definitely an advantage as we talk to California students and their parents." Enrollments from California are up 46 percent in six years. It might be ugly, but once staid public universities "are doing what private colleges have done for a long time," said Kevin W. Crockett, president of enrollment management at Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a higher education consulting firm. They are asking, "What is the appropriate price point for students to cross state lines?" Over the next 18 months, Miami hired two national recruiters and bought contact information from the College Board and ACT for students around the country instead of tapping the usual feeder schools. With its classical arches, tranquil courtyards and liberal arts curriculum, it is often mistaken for a private college, which it is capitalizing on, reaching out to families "seeking that private school experience," Ms. Schaurer said. Applications are up 62 percent since 2010; two thirds now come from out of state. Last year, for example, 41 students applied from Greenwich High School in Connecticut and 33 from Mira Costa High School in California. With its success in drawing more students, Miami has walked back on merit aid; there are still scholarships, but the guarantee is gone and, as of this fall, the qualifying ACT score is higher. These days, Ms. Schaurer said, "a student with a 26 ACT is really below average." Miami now has seven recruiters. The University of South Carolina has 20. Since it hired someone to recruit in Massachusetts, applicants from that state have jumped, from 335 in 2010 to 881 last year, and enrollments have nearly tripled, from 57 to 156; Massachusetts now ranks eighth as a source of out of staters to the Columbia, S.C., campus. Over all, applications from out of state students are now double those of residents. Recruiters are shaking up college conversations, said Paul C. Kaser, a counselor at the Bergen County Academies, a public magnet school in New Jersey where nearly half the seniors are National Merit Scholars, finalists, semifinalists or commended students, and parents and students meet counselors with Excel spreadsheets in hand. "There might be an old stereotype of public universities not caring and just looking at numbers," he said, but their recruiters "come to our school to be on panels, to host luncheons." They respond to emails within hours. As a result, students are now at universities that "were not even on our radar five years ago." When he first mentioned Alabama four years ago, he recalled, "the parents said, 'Alabama!?' I said, 'Hear me out.'" One student starts a pipeline. Five graduates of the Academies are now there. A Connecticut map made by Ms. Mazon's friend Camille Perrault shows how far from home she and her college bound besties have traveled. Bob Miller for The New York Times "Everybody wants the kids from the Northeast and California," according to Mr. Burd of New America. "They are wealthy and they tend to be good students." In the past six years, in Ms. McGraw Hickey's region, applications to Alabama rose from 193 to 903. At Alabama, recruiting assignments go all the way to the top. Dr. Bell, the president, routinely travels to meet parents and students, recently telling a young man in Dallas not to visit campus without stopping by. "He came to my office on Friday with his dad," Dr. Bell said. Raising alumni money for academics, much as the Crimson Tide Foundation has cultivated athletic boosters, is on Dr. Bell's wish list. "That is an area we are going to grow," he said. "That is a culture shift." It's one that more are making. While most public universities have sat back as privates landed eye popping donations, that's changing. As dusk settled over New York City, the Empire State Building was lit up in green and gold, the colors of the College of William Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Uptown, over miniature Virginia ham sandwiches, the college thanked 400 local donors who helped to raise 52 million. A new 1 billion campaign has as a goal to secure donations from 40 percent of its alumni. This year, donor dollars covered 12.8 percent of William Mary's budget; 11.8 percent came from the state. In 1980, state money provided nearly 43 percent of the budget. It is no accident that states with among the largest drops in state allocations since 2008 Arizona (down 56 percent), South Carolina (down 37 percent) and Alabama (down 36 percent), according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have entrepreneurial public campuses trained on growth. Those same states also had the greatest net gain in students: More entered the state to attend their four year public institutions than left to study elsewhere, according to fall 2014 data, the most recent available. New Jersey has long struggled to draw students. It had the second largest net loss in students, after Illinois. Rutgers officials noticed. An honors college, another popular recruiting tool, opened at the New Brunswick campus last year in a new building with stained glass windows, carpeted dorm rooms and light filled social spaces, including a coffee bar with fireplace. Campus recruiting goals are modest 7 percent more out of state students and 2 percent more international students for next fall but officials certainly want to keep the likes of Daniel Ferioli from Hillsdale, N.J., with a 2300 SAT and 3.98 G.P.A., from leaving. "We have been losing top academic talent to other states," said Matt Matsuda, academic dean for the honors college. Halting that "is something that from the president's office on down has been a priority." Mr. Ferioli turned down Georgetown for Rutgers, reasoning that with plans for an M.B.A. from Harvard or Wharton the honors college offered a similar path at a better price. "It wouldn't be worth paying all that money for Georgetown if I would end up in the same place." Daniel Ferioli chose Rutgers over Georgetown because of its honors college. Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times Jillian Mazon, too, had weighed college options carefully. When we met before classes began in August, she was still getting used to the South ("Everyone calls you ma'am") and the serious sorority rush (35 parties in seven days; she's in Delta Gamma). It was 96 degrees, and unbearably humid for a Burlington, Conn., native. She showed me her dorm room. Over the desk was a map of Connecticut made by one of her six best friends; arrows radiated from a heart with the distance to each one's college. She has gone the farthest: 1,135.6 miles. An organized person whose closet is arranged by color, Ms. Mazon started her college list in eighth grade and toured 26 campuses. Her mother liked Duke, but she was certain after two visits that Vanderbilt was her top choice until the full tuition scholarship and admission to the honors college came from Alabama. She didn't apply elsewhere. "I would never want to be 70,000 a year in debt," said Ms. Mazon, who plans a career in finance. For Ms. Mazon, whose mother is a teacher and whose father heads maintenance at an assisted living complex, graduating nearly debt free put Alabama alongside prestigious privates in her mind. "I don't think I am at a disadvantage," Ms. Mazon said, leaning against a crimson padded bench, green toenails slipped into flip flops. "How many Alabama alumni are out there compared to Harvard? My freshman class is 8,000 kids," she said. "That network is so extensive, it is insane." To critics who say public universities are shirking their public service role, Dr. Bell counters that enrolling out of state students seeds the Alabama economy with talent. It's not uncommon for students to settle in the state of their alma mater "one of the biggest drivers of growth in our state," he said. But Natasha Levitin, daughter of computer programmers, is looking forward to "going home" for a job as an analyst at Wells Fargo in New York City after graduation this spring. "I was just looking for the school that was the best bang for the buck," she said. When she matriculated, she had not grasped the culture of the campus. "I had never seen a Confederate flag until I came down here," she said. Then there was the dominance of Greek life. She had known a sorority was not for her. But neither was she prepared for the protests and national attention after the student newspaper reported the exclusion of black women from sororities, partly because of pressure from the Machine, a secret society that controls Greek life, to block pledges based on skin color. "Seeing it happen my freshman year that black girls are not allowed in sororities because they are black it was embarrassing," she said. "It was all over the news." Suddenly, she had to defend her choice of Alabama to friends on social media. The United States attorney's office in Birmingham demanded an action plan, which the university released in July ahead of a new strategic plan. Plans call for hiring a campus diversity officer and a model to promote inclusion of minorities in Greek life (during this year's sorority rush, 29 African American women were admitted; in 2012, there were fewer than five). The campus is now 11 percent African American. It was 15 percent in 2000. The state is 27 percent black. When I asked Ms. McGraw Hickey how diversity concerns figured in her recruiting, she said it rarely comes up. "I feel like to me the campus is diverse in so many ways," she said, adding, "You see so many students from all over the country, from different religions, different racial backgrounds." How a school with deep Southern history builds a modern national identity is an open question. To students from the urban North, the oft evoked appeal to Bama "pride" and "tradition" may seem more like stubborn adherence to parochial views than something rich to rally behind. More than just ACT scores and G.P.A.'s, growth in stature is also about extending cultural boundaries. Diluting ties to home states and communities, and filling classrooms with students from around the nation, can free ingrained perspectives. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Credit...Felix Schmitt for The New York Times MUNICH Inside an airplane hangar about 20 miles from central Munich, Daniel Wiegand lifted the door of a prototype that he said would become one of the world's first flying taxis. He's coy about how much it cost to build "several million," he says but promises that within five years a fleet of them could provide a 10 minute trip from Manhattan to Kennedy International Airport for 70. A lot is riding on his plane. Mr. Wiegand, 34, is the chief executive and a founder of Lilium, one of the most promising and secretive start ups in the global race to build an all electric aircraft that will regulators and public opinion willing move passengers above cities. "This is the perfect means of transportation, something that can take off and land everywhere," Mr. Wiegand (pronounced VEE gand) said. "It's very fast, very efficient and low noise." At least 20 companies are in the market, which Morgan Stanley estimates will top 850 billion by 2040. Larry Page, the billionaire co founder of Google, is financially backing Kitty Hawk, a company run by the first engineers on Google's autonomous car. Boeing and Airbus have projects underway. Automakers including Daimler, Toyota and Porsche are investing in the sector. Uber is developing an air taxi service, with plans to open by 2023 in Los Angeles, Dallas and Melbourne, Australia. Yet saying your plane could fly over Manhattan in five years doesn't mean it will. Building durable jets at a reasonable cost still presents engineering and technical challenges. And a long process awaits with regulators, including the Federal Aviation Administration, that will need to weigh safety concerns. "The question is can we build a platform that is broadly accessible to everybody and is not just a rich person's toy, and can we build it so quiet that people on the ground aren't annoyed by it?" said Sebastian Thrun, the chief executive of Kitty Hawk. Lilium, which has raised more than 100 million from investors, illustrates the high wire act of the companies trying to live up to the hype. The black and white aircraft shown by Mr. Wiegand is less "Jetsons" like flying car than a glider, with a carbon fiber body and 36 foot wingspan. Like several other flying taxis in development, it is battery powered, providing a range of 186 miles and a top speed of nearly 190 miles per hour. Inside the oval cabin will eventually be plush seats and other comforts for four passengers and a pilot. The engines are packed inside four wings with flaps that rotate so the aircraft can take off and land vertically like a helicopter. But it is quieter than a helicopter, so it could potentially land in some areas traditionally off limits to aircraft. The costs of the jets may eventually fall to several hundred thousand dollars each, Mr. Wiegand said. And with lower maintenance costs because there are fewer mechanical components, rides should cost roughly the same as an Uber or a taxi ride. Insurance companies have told him that they will provide him with risk coverage. If successful, he said, the jets will transform urban transportation, with customers using Lilium's app to book a flight from a network of small airports that connect suburbs, college towns and other hubs to cities. Imagine, he said, jets connecting areas across California or southern Germany that don't have high speed train lines. Eric Allison, the head of Uber's flying taxi effort, said the technolog ical hurdles were less complex than for autonomous vehicles ; there is less traffic in the air, and the first generations of the aircraft will have pilots. Still, Mr. Allison said, no company has received government certification to fly commercially. Then there are the many other obstacles to overcome. Battery technology limits how far the vehicles can fly. Building a prototype is different from starting mass production. And the price of the machines, and operating them, needs to be low enough to make rides affordable for customers. Regulators could slow development by limiting the number of takeoffs and landings on desirable routes. There aren't enough air traffic controllers now to handle a big influx of flights across cities. One fatal accident and demand could dry up. "This is going to be a test of staying power an ability to lose money, an ability to ride out a failure," said Adam Jonas, a lead author of the Morgan Stanley report on the industry. "Many will fail." Lilium is years away from making money and, with more than 300 employees and an expensive research and development budget, is burning through cash. Mr. Wiegand said it would have to raise more money. "It's not enough to just build a nice prototype and fly it around," he said. "What we really need to be successful is building a company that's capable of designing, certifying, manufacturing and operating these aircraft in very large scale." Lilium has said little publicly beyond releasing a few engineering specifications and declaring that it will be carrying customers by 2025. It is seeking certification for its jet from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and plans to do the same with the F.A.A. The hypothetical New York route is more of a long term goal. American rivals say they know little about Lilium beyond its hiring of experienced aviation executives from Rolls Royce, Airbus and Raytheon to oversee areas such as manufacturing, quality control and procurement. Even Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor and a trained physicist, is intrigued. At an aviation conference last year, she stopped by Lilium's booth and peppered Mr. Wiegand with questions about the battery, flight range and engines. Mr. Wiegand said secrecy was necessary to keep rivals from learning too much. Unlike other jets that look similar to the small commercial drones that can be bought in a store, Lilium's plane has packed 36 smaller engines in its rotating wings that act as thrusters for takeoffs, landings, and subtle movements forward and back. Encasing the engines in the wings reduces friction and noise. "Nobody has one with the performance we have," Mr. Wiegand said. He came up with the idea for Lilium during college, working out the engineering specifications while many of his friends were out drinking. He founded the company with three others in 2015, borrowing money and persuading suppliers to provide some free parts to begin building a small prototype. After proving it worked, they raised money from investors including Niklas Zennstrom, a co founder of Skype who now runs Atomico, a venture capital firm in London. In 2017, the Chinese internet giant Tencent led an investment of 90 million. Nobody has flown inside Lilium's jet. Test flights are done remotely from the ground. But Mr. Wiegand, who was flying gliders at age 14, promises to be one of the first. "I was flying long before I was allowed to drive a car," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Internal documents show how a source ended up in jail and the fallout in the newsroom. Where were you when you first heard about the Snowden leak? The huge breach of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program in June 2013 was one of the proudest moments in modern journalism, and one of the purest: A brave and disgusted whistle blower, Edward Snowden, revealed the government's extensive surveillance of American and foreign citizens. Two journalists protected their source, revealed his secrets and won the blessings of the Establishment a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar for it. One of the people who fell in love with that story was Pierre Omidyar, the earnest if remote billionaire founder of eBay. That October, he pledged 250 million for a new institution led by those two journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Mr. Omidyar was the benefactor of journalists' dreams. He promised total independence for a new nonprofit news site, The Intercept, under the umbrella of his First Look Media. The Intercept was founded in the belief that "the prime value of journalism is that it imposes transparency, and thus accountability, on those who wield the greatest governmental and corporate power." The outlet's first mission was to set up a secure archive of Mr. Snowden's documents, and to keep mining them for stories. The recent history of the news business has been about what happens when your traditional business is disrupted by the internet and your revenues dry up. But at The Intercept and First Look, the story is of a different destabilizing force: gushers of money. In 2017, the for profit arm of the company had budgeted 40 million for a growing staff and bets on movies and television shows, a former executive said, while the nonprofit arm spent about 26 million in 2017 and again in 2018 according to its public filings, most of it on The Intercept. High profile stars collected big salaries Mr. Greenwald brought in more than 500,000 in 2015 and they sometimes clashed in public with their titular bosses over the rocky efforts to build an organization. Writers warred on Twitter and in Slack messages over Donald Trump, race and the politics of the left. Mr. Greenwald continues to infuriate younger colleagues with tweets like one denouncing "woke ideologues." Not long after Mr. Omidyar wired his first dollar, he found himself presiding over chaos so public that Vanity Fair asked in 2015 "whether First Look Media can make headlines that aren't about itself?" All the drama would make this another colorful story about extreme newsroom dysfunction had The Intercept not caught the attention of a naive National Security Agency linguist with the improbable name of Reality Winner in 2017. Ms. Winner, then 25, had been listening to the site's podcast. She printed out a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software that seemed to address some of Mr. Greenwald's doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and mailed it to The Intercept's Washington, D.C., post office box in early May. The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker. "They sold her out, and they messed it up so that she would get caught, and they didn't protect their source," her mother, Billie Winner Davis, said in a telephone interview last week. "The best years of her life are being spent in a system where she doesn't belong." Failing to protect an anonymous leaker is a cardinal sin in journalism, though the remarkable thing in this instance is that The Intercept didn't seem to try to protect its source. The outlet immediately opened an investigation into its blunder, which confirmed the details that the Justice Department had gleefully announced after it arrested Ms. Winner. They included the fact that The Intercept led the authorities to Ms. Winner when it circulated the document in an effort to verify it, and then published the document, complete with the identifying markings, on the internet. Internal emails and records I obtained reveal the tumult that led to one of the highest profile journalistic disasters in recent memory and provide broader insights into the limits of a news organization dependent on an inattentive billionaire's noblesse oblige. A spokeswoman for Mr. Omidyar declined to make him available for an interview. The New York Times is not publishing the documents, which run to more than 100 pages, because they include discussions of sourcing and security measures. The documents, among them two internal reports on the Reality Winner incident that have not been made public, were given to me by people who were senior employees in 2017 and contend that the organization failed to hold itself accountable for its mistakes and for what happened to Ms. Winner as a result. Some current and former staff members I interviewed expressed fundamental questions about the internal investigation into the debacle, including why Betsy Reed, the editor in chief, had assigned Lynn Dombek, then The Intercept's head of research, who reported directly to her, to work on the investigation, under the direction of an outside law firm. Ms. Reed, who had been brought in to stabilize The Intercept and rein in its big personalities in 2015, told me she faced "a treacherous situation" after the article was published. She needed to balance a "legitimate demand for transparency" that aligned with The Intercept's founding values with lawyers' strong advice to stay silent to protect her reporters and their sources. Ms. Poitras said The Intercept should have held itself to a higher standard. "We founded this organization on the principle of holding the powerful accountable and protecting whistle blowers," Ms. Poitras said in an interview. "Not only was this a cover up and betrayal of core values, but the lack of any meaningful accountability promoted a culture of impunity and puts future sources at risk." The internal tensions were boiling over one night, just before Thanksgiving 2017, when the two American journalists who helped bring Mr. Snowden's revelations public were exchanging late night emails, which I obtained. They were writing not about government misconduct, but their own newsroom's. Ms. Reed's oversight of the investigation, Ms. Poitras wrote, was an attempt "to cover up what happened for self protective reasons." It was, Mr. Greenwald agreed in response, a "whitewash." The documents fall short of revealing a conspiratorial cover up. Instead they show an extreme version of the human errors, hubris and mismanagement familiar to anyone who has worked in a newsroom and the struggle of The Intercept to live up to its lofty founding ideals in dealing with its own errors. Ms. Winner may have thought she was mailing the documents to Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras, who went to great lengths to protect Mr. Snowden. But Mr. Greenwald was in Brazil and when he heard about the document, he was not interested. He told me that he considered its claims about Russian hacking during the 2016 race "wildly overblown" and that it didn't include direct evidence to persuade him otherwise. Ms. Poitras, meanwhile, had at that point left The Intercept, and gone on to establish a nonprofit production firm, Field of Vision, a part of First Look Media, which also includes The Intercept and Mr. Omidyar's other ventures. Ms. Reed and her deputy, Roger Hodge, gave the story to a pair of established television journalists: Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito. Mr. Cole, formerly of NBC, had collaborated with Mr. Greenwald on the Snowden stories and was on staff. Mr. Esposito, also a veteran of broadcast news at NBC News and ABC News, was brought in from outside and is now the top spokesman for the New York Police Department. Ms. Reed told me she'd brought them in partly because The Intercept's outsider posture had left it without the inside sources who could verify documents like Ms. Winner's. But their reflex to reach out to national security officials carried its own risk. 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. "If you get a document that purports to be from the N.S.A., it should be a five alarm fire," a member of The Intercept's high powered security team, Erinn Clark, said in her interview for the internal inquiry. "Go to a secure room, with an editor, freeze where you are. You are not aware who you are exposing or putting at risk." Instead, Mr. Cole put the document in his bag and got on a train to New York. One concern did cross his mind. "I thought at the time there would be an audit if they printed on a government printer," he said, according to the internal review notes. "I forgot about that thought." Later, he called a source in the intelligence community in an attempt to verify the document, and casually revealed its postmark. "My source said something about, 'How did it come to us?' I said in the mail, from Georgia, and my source laughed about that," he recalled during the internal investigation. Then, Mr. Cole mentioned that the postmark was Fort Gordon, Ga., which is home to the N.S.A.'s Cryptologic Center. "'There's a logic to that,' the source said." The startling carelessness about protecting Ms. Winner was particularly mystifying at an organization that had been founded on security. The Intercept had hired leaders in digital security, Ms. Clark and Micah Lee, for just such situations. Mr. Cole did not involve them at all. Mr. Cole and Mr. Esposito said they'd been pushed to rush the story to publication, but Mr. Cole also acknowledged that failing to consult with the security team was a "face plant." The Intercept's leaders argued in 2017, and still contend, that the narrative laid out by the Justice Department in its prosecution of Ms. Winner was shaped to make The Intercept a thorn in the government's side look bad. And Ms. Winner's own carelessness she printed the document at work could easily have gotten her caught even if The Intercept had been more cautious. But they also knew they had made real journalistic errors. And so a key question was who to blame for this catastrophe and what consequences they should suffer. Ms. Dombek, who helped conduct the internal investigation, concluded that the editors Ms. Reed and Mr. Hodge needed to take responsibility. Others, including Mr. Greenwald, were demanding that Mr. Cole and Ms. Reed be fired, and The Intercept provide a public reckoning. (Mr. Greenwald later relented, and said he understood the desire not to "scapegoat" for an institutional failure.) On July 11, 2017, Ms. Reed published a post on The Intercept announcing that First Look would pay for Ms. Winner's legal defense. Ms. Reed also announced that an "internal review of the reporting of this story has now been completed." "We should have taken greater precautions to protect the identity of a source who was anonymous even to us," she wrote. "As the editor in chief, I take responsibility for this failure, and for making sure that the internal newsroom issues that contributed to it are resolved." But the drama didn't end there. Mr. Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, an investigative reporter who is the third founder of The Intercept, demanded a more thorough investigation, and in response to their pressure, the company commissioned a second internal report, by a First Look lawyer, David Bralow. Mr. Bralow's report, issued four months later, cited as central issues the decision to share the document with the N.S.A., Mr. Cole's discussion of the postmark and the publication of the identifying markings. The Intercept never fully regained its swagger after the Reality Winner case, though it has continued to produce notable stories. It has broadened its original mandate to reporting on "civil liberties, social justice, the fight against corruption," Ms. Reed said, and broken stories including revelations from the Snowden files of AT T's role in N.S.A. surveillance and an investigative profile by Mr. Cole of Erik Prince, the founder of the private security contractor Blackwater. Nowadays, it seems more taken by politics, both in Brazil, where Mr. Greenwald lives, and in the United States, where it has become a hub for the fiery ideological battles playing out among the American left. A leak to Mr. Greenwald last year showed how corruption investigations had been politicized in Brazil; the reporting reshaped the country's politics. In the United States, Mr. Greenwald has been increasingly engaged in the bitter feuds with others on the left, charging that liberals including some of his Intercept colleagues have become fixated on identity politics and Russia, and ignored the more insidious workings of corporate power. His most memorable television appearances these days seem to be on Fox's Tucker Carlson show, during which the two men denounce the so called "deep state." Meanwhile, his colleagues have refashioned the site to champion insurgents and critics of the Democratic mainstream, including a woman who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, Tara Reade, as mainstream outlets raised doubts about her story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Owner's Manual, Out of the Glove Box and Onto the App THE recent death of the actor Anton Yelchin has spurred a class action lawsuit against Fiat Chrysler, maker of the 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee that rolled backward after he stepped out and crushed him. Other Jeep and Chrysler owners, citing many similar accidents if no other deaths say that the transmission shifter used in his car and some other models is confusing and not intuitive. A quick read of the owner's manual might have helped some drivers avoid thinking the car was safely in parking gear when it was not. But whatever one's opinion is of a car gear shifter that requires special instructions to operate, an anomaly of the Fiat Chrysler fiasco is this: The company is actually an industry leader when it comes to providing state of the art user guides for its increasingly complex vehicles. The automaker offers an array of smartphone apps, web videos and other digital means for letting owners know how to drive their cars. (The app's instructions for the 2015 Grand Cherokee gearshift, accompanied by a photo illustration, flag an important point that perhaps too many people have missed, "The electronic shift lever in this vehicle does not slide like a conventional shifter.") Along with other carmakers, Fiat Chrysler has come to realize that consumers these days are as unlikely to read the voluminous owner's manual traditionally stuffed in the glove box as they are to read a printed telephone book. So auto companies increasingly are using apps, onscreen displays, videos and other technological means to familiarize the digitally adept buyer with the multitude of features in their highly computerized vehicles. "The question is, What do millennials expect from their cars, now that they view them as an operating system?" said Prof. Maggie Hendrie, chairwoman of the Interaction Design program at ArtCenter College of Design, in Los Angeles. "Today, we learn about a car's functions through trial and error,'' Professor Hendrie said. "If we can't, we expect context specific help built into the vehicle." Or we might look at the YouTube videos created by vehicle fans, as well as online forums populated by a particular make's enthusiasts, which often provide better answers than the pages written by a manufacturer. "If I ever had an issue with my car, I'd do a Google search before I read the manual," said Akshay Anand, a senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book. In some ways Fiat Chrysler, Toyota and other digital adopters are simply trying to catch up to their user communities. But they are also adopting digital instructions because cars have become so complex and feature laden that printed manuals, with their step by step instructions and myriad legal warnings, are becoming unwieldy. If Fiat Chrysler still printed its manual, it would be 700 pages long and contain 240,000 words, said Tricia Hecker, head of the company's connected vehicle group. (Longer, for comparison's sake, than Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment.'') Fiat Chrysler first went to a digital user's guide in 2009, mainly as a money saving step when the company was in dire financial straits. But the initial effort was blandly utilitarian. "It was just a regurgitation of the printed manual," Ms. Hecker said. An app version of the 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee owner's manual. Today, though, the company offers smartphone app versions of all its vehicle manuals. Users can search for instructions by topic, concept or alphabetically. Videos are often embedded in the instructions. The Fiat Chrysler app also gives users a place to write and email pertinent information after an accident, as well as a listing of maintenance schedules, active recalls and an accessory shop. Toyota's owner's manuals are available as smartphone apps and on the website. But rather than being reimagined for the screen, Toyota's digital manuals are simply shrunken pages of the paper ones. The company also continues to offer paper manuals in all its vehicles, to accommodate older buyers. "We're sticking with paper; some generations love the paper version," said Brian Williams, head of the company's marketing and product education division. "Sometimes you may not have your phone or be near a website, and it's also a lot quicker to flip through the paper index." For those willing to click beyond the mini manual pages, Toyota offers how to videos. The app also displays explanations of dashboard warnings and can be used to schedule service, view the vehicle's service history or request roadside assistance. "People don't see manuals as something you can learn from," said Manish Mehrotra, senior group manager for digital business and connected operations at Hyundai. Although Hyundai still provides paper manuals and web based PDF versions, the company has also introduced an augmented reality feature to its app. Point the smartphone at the engine, exterior, or interior of one of its vehicles, and an exploded three dimensional view of various parts appear on the screen, with explanatory videos and operating instructions. Limited augmented reality is also available with Fiat Chrysler's owners' app. By hovering a smartphone over the vehicle instrument cluster, users can read text based explanations of each warning light's function. An owner's app for BMWs performs a similar function to help users solve the riddles of the various buttons in the car. Manufacturers are also beginning to make some of the information on the smartphone apps available through the vehicle's dashboard digital display. Fiat Chrysler has done so for its Chrysler 300 and Pacifica models, as well as the Dodge Charger and Dodge Challenger, showing users how to connect a garage door opener to the vehicle's controls. Since this migration, use of the app's help feature has risen to 16 percent of owners, from only 5 percent before, Ms. Hecker said. Tesla, the maker of expensive all electric cars, has always offered its owner's guide through its vehicles' giant 17 inch touch screens. And just as a Tesla car regularly receives software updates from the cloud to alter the vehicle's functionality, so too is the instruction manual always kept up to date via software downloads. Future systems will not always wait for a driver to ask how to do something. Instead, they might sense what the driver needs and proactively offer to help. Chrysler, for example, is at work on an app that would not merely offer an explanation of how to connect a garage door to the vehicle's HomeLink system but also notice when the driver has not done it and ask if he or she would like to know how. In a system under development at Hyundai, once an owner begins to schedule service and indicates what times would be convenient, the car's screen will offer a list of available appointment times. "The printed car manual feels like a relic," said Professor Hendrie. "Imagine a dynamic manual that gives you information, just in time, knowing who you are, and how you're driving. It's up to us to figure out how people learn today." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Fed Seen as Unlikely to Raise Rates, as Pressures Mount From Both Sides WASHINGTON Federal Reserve officials, wrapping up a two day policy meeting on Wednesday, are still thinking about raising the Fed's benchmark interest rate in 2015, in part because they see strategic advantages in moving earlier than necessary. The Fed is widely expected to announce that it will continue for now to hold its benchmark rate near zero. The case for liftoff has weakened since the summer. The rest of the world is struggling and there are worrying signs of slower domestic growth. But Fed officials are unlikely to rule out an increase at their final meeting of the year, in December, in part because they are still waiting to see whether economic growth weakened in recent months, and in part because they want to start raising rates early so they can raise them slowly. "An advantage to beginning a little bit earlier is that we might have a more gradual path of rate increases," the Fed's chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, told Congress this summer. She explained that moving slowly was prudent, while moving more quickly might be disruptive. Early does not necessarily mean December. Analysts and investors increasingly are betting the Fed will not move until next year. Economists, including several former Obama administration appointees, say the Fed should not move this year, and a small but significant minority of Fed officials have said in recent weeks that they, too, are not yet ready to start raising interest rates. Early does mean, however, that the Fed eventually plans to curtail its stimulus campaign even if the economy might still benefit from a little more help. By holding rates near zero since December 2008, the Fed has encouraged borrowing and risk taking, stimulating economic activity that has helped to increase job growth. Raising rates will begin to weigh on the pace of growth. Monetary policy makers and academics have long debated the value of moving early and slowly. Central banks, including the Fed, typically raise and lower rates in small steps, at regular intervals, over long periods of time. The Fed, for example, raised rates by exactly 0.25 percentage point at each of its scheduled meetings from June 2004 to June 2006. The result is that monetary policy often changes more slowly than economic conditions, particularly during periods of turbulence, opening a gap between the actual level of interest rates and the level recommended by economic theories and policy rules. Some economists have argued that the Fed could have constrained financial speculation by raising rates more quickly during the last decade, perhaps limiting the scope of the 2008 crisis. Similarly, the Fed has been criticized for cutting rates too slowly during the crisis. Ben S. Bernanke, the former Fed chairman, said in his recent memoir that the Fed sometimes should have moved more quickly. Policy makers often cite uncertainty as the most obvious justification for these lags. "A number of the recessions that have occurred in the past have been in situations where we have tightened too rapidly and slowed down the economy much more than we expected," Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said in an interview earlier this month. "I'm a little more concerned than maybe some academics that we have enough certainty about how the economy works or how monetary policy works that we can move in large increments and be confident that we won't end up slowing down the economy much more than we expected." Policy makers also have an aversion to disrupting financial markets. Fed officials cited market volatility as a reason they decided not to raise rates in September. Mr. Rosengren noted that academic models tend to assume markets adjust rationally and smoothly to changes in Fed policy. History tells a different story, and Mr. Rosengren said there was particular reason for caution in raising rates from near zero for the first time since December 2008. "Particularly after being at the zero lower bound for a long time, I think moving in large discrete amounts would be a risky strategy," Mr. Rosengren said. Central bankers also like to move slowly because they prize predictability. The Fed, like other central banks, increasingly has focused on managing expectations about the evolution of interest rates, because those expectations shape borrowing and investment decisions. People do not just care about the level of rates right now; they also care where rates are likely to be next year. And moving slowly reduces the chances the Fed would need to reverse course abruptly. The focus on the longer term also lets the Fed exert significant influence on economic conditions without adjusting current rates sharply, by shifting expectations about future rates. "What matters for overall financial conditions is the entire trajectory of short term interest rates that is anticipated by markets and the public," Ms. Yellen said in September. Frederic Mishkin, a Columbia University economist and a former Fed governor, has sat on both sides of the divide between academics and practitioners of monetary policy. He said there was theoretically a clear case for the Fed to wait until tangible signs of inflationary pressure emerge. Practically, however, he said the Fed might need to raise rates before then, at least once, just to demonstrate to investors that it is willing and able to do so. "From a pure monetary policy viewpoint, it's completely reasonable for the Fed to keep rates at zero and not move for a long time," he said. "But one of the problems that Janet faces is that people in the markets think that she's very dovish and that she won't do the hard things she needs to when inflation goes up. So there's a perception issue that the Fed will never pull the trigger." He added, however, that he saw little reason to do it in December. Mr. Mishkin said the Fed should abandon its earlier predictions and wait. "If they did move by the end of this year," he said, "it's an indication that they really are focused on dates rather than data." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
ATLANTA I talk with Black voters every day, and what I hear keeps me up at night. Their faith in the political system is being eroded by voter suppression and the government's negligent response to the pandemic. It breaks my heart that even Black women at church unfailing voters who rally their friends to turn out for every election have asked me, "Will our votes even be counted?" These very real challenges require a whole new playbook. The problem is that Democrats have long treated Black people as though all they need is a gentle nudge the week before the election. Although Donald Trump won Georgia by just 211,000 votes in 2016, some 900,000 eligible Black people stayed home, a majority of them Atlanta residents. They were unconvinced that voting for the Democratic candidate would mean getting a president who represented them. This is a treasure trove of gettable voters who could overwhelm the political system. But Democrats have to persuade them, now more than ever, that voting will get them candidates up and down the ballot who care about things like health care expansion and ballot access. Unless Democrats fix their shortcomings, I fear we are on track for another catastrophic Election Day. We've been screaming from mountaintops about the health care crisis in the state's rural southwest for years; the region has a dire shortage of doctors and hospitals. A few majority Black counties there have some of the highest death rates in the country. The governor refused to fully expand Medicaid, leaving nearly half a million people without coverage (36 percent of whom are Black and 22 percent Latino) and 45 billion on the table over the next decade. Now he plans to slash funding for state agencies, including the one that administers Medicaid, while enrollment is projected to rise. Republicans in Georgia and other Southern states are weaponizing the virus against Black people while ramping up efforts to suppress the vote. Another part of the problem when it comes to mobilizing Black voters for November is that we haven't addressed the sins of elections past. Southwestern Georgia is also where, long before anyone listened, Black people sounded the alarm that Mr. Kemp would try to steal the race for governor in 2018 from his Democratic rival, Stacey Abrams. (Disclosure: my organization was founded by Ms. Abrams.) As secretary of state overseeing his own election, Mr. Kemp served as umpire, player and scorekeeper, purging 670,000 voters from the rolls in 2017 and, weeks before the 2018 election, withholding 53,000 more registrations under a spurious "exact match" law (70 percent of those registrations were from Black people). Mr. Kemp also oversaw the shutdown of 214 precincts. Georgia had the longest lines in the country that year and the highest rejection rates of absentee and provisional ballots. A consultant linked to Mr. Kemp recommended that the board of elections in majority Black Randolph County close seven of its nine polling locations. Why? The bathrooms in the polling locations lacked handrails, which the board claimed violated federal disability law. But the county had earlier refused to apply for money for the handrails when given the chance. It dropped the consolidation plan only after enormous attention from the news media. Such hyperlocal voter suppression has become rampant since the Supreme Court freed elections officials in Georgia and other states from having to prove to the Justice Department in advance that their voting changes would not be discriminatory. Mr. Kemp won the race by just 54,700 votes. If Jim Crow laws suppressed votes by forcing Black voters to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar, Dr. James Crow, with a Ph.D. in data science, has erected a far more sophisticated suppression apparatus sophistication we have to match. But I have not seen any campaign, political party or elected official address voters' pain at having their voices silenced. I know that pain has also spread to Alabama and Mississippi, where people were looking at Ms. Abrams's candidacy as a glimpse into what was possible. They also saw the theft. And they saw the world move on as if a major crime against democracy had not been committed. That's a problem. When we talk to college students now, the most common refrain we hear is, "I know my vote won't count." My organization registered a staggering 18,000 17 and 18 year olds in the months after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018. They flooded our office with earnest messages, wanting to learn how they could set up registration drives in their schools. We told them voting was a way to make material improvements in their lives by electing candidates like Lucy McBath, a Georgia representative who cares about gun reform. Then they watched as they were robbed of their civic voice, without any consequences. We have to address that if we want to win in November. Action is even more urgent because the pandemic is being used as cover for more voter suppression. At the national level, the Republican National Committee doubled its litigation budget to file even more lawsuits to limit vote by mail access. Republicans aim to recruit up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and intimidate voters. Those efforts are aided by Donald Trump, who appointed a top Republican fund raiser to serve as postmaster general, and is withholding a 10 billion loan from the Post Office, which desperately needs the money. Georgia may be the center of all this. The state has created an absentee ballot "fraud" task force made up of mostly prosecutors and mostly Republicans to hinder voting by mail. "If a county official says my signature doesn't match," Cathy Cox, a Democrat who is a former secretary of state for Georgia, asked a reporter, "is this task force going to show up with guns and badges at my office or my home?" Our office continues to receive a troubling number of inquiries about whether absentee ballots will even be counted. The question is common, and for good reason. We asked the 159 counties in Georgia where they'll place drop boxes for those who want to avoid human contact during the pandemic. Only 78 provided locations and more than one quarter won't have drop boxes. These are monumental challenges that require a monumental response. We need the courage to act on a scale we've never seen before. Democrats will win if they invest in an enormous marketing and organizing campaign that persuades Black people and young people to participate in our democracy. That campaign should answer uncomfortable questions about what happened in Georgia in 2018 and explain how this year will be different. Through millions of personal conversations, organizers can connect the dots between who makes decisions that puts their lives at risk and who can make things better. That's how we can show young people grieving the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in South Georgia that voting is a way to create real change by electing new sheriffs and prosecutors. This campaign will require the progressive political industry to spend differently. Campaigns never balk at investing significant resources to court moderate white men. But when all the data is laid out about Black people, why does the political industry hesitate? Black people have long been the most loyal supporters of the Democratic Party indeed, no other major voting bloc is as loyal to a political party as Black people: Every 10 new Black voters nets eight Democratic votes, but the party gets only two net votes for every 10 new white, college educated female voters. Democrats have to stop treating Black people as deserving of only mailers after Labor Day and invest in ways that make clear that Black people are the core of the multiracial coalition. We have to address voter suppression head on, identifying the hurdles and offering solutions now, not in October. My organization is suing Georgia over its practice of throwing out absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day but received after 7 p.m. that night. And for imposing a poll tax by sending absentee ballot applications to voters without prepaid returnable envelopes. This creates obstacles for people unwilling to go out during a pandemic to buy stamps or vote in person. Vote by mail is not a panacea. While it is the safest option and it provides a paper trail, some states are using it in a way that creates hurdles. The next federal coronavirus legislation package must include 3.6 billion so states can expand their vote by mail initiatives and make voting easier. In addition, states should mount public education campaigns that include infographics and videos in multiple languages about how to cast ballots during the pandemic. In Georgia, the secretary of state must urge elections officials and lawmakers to increase funding to hire and train more staff members to deal with the increase in absentee ballots. We also need foundations, state and federal governments and the Democrats to help prevent and neutralize disinformation campaigns. Bad actors are online, sowing doubts about basic facts to undermine faith in the democratic process. To counter this, the industry ought to invest in trusted messengers to spread competing messages with good information, in addition to inspirational candidates who can alleviate voters' concerns. My organization is doing its part. We're building mobile video games to educate new and infrequent voters and are launching programs to monitor social media and provide media literacy that will compete for Black voters's hearts, minds, attention and votes. A vibrant, robust democracy is our greatest weapon against authoritarian rule. And Black people have been at the vanguard of fighting for that democracy. This year, more than ever, we need overwhelming participation in our elections to neutralize voter suppression and halt the rise of despotic, unaccountable leaders. Our liberty and our lives are at stake. Nse Ufot ( nseufot) is the executive director of the New Georgia Project Action Fund. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
At the Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York center in Flushing, Queens , men comb through newspapers and sip coffee at long cafeteria tables under fluorescent lights. Normally Swedish pop wouldn't fit in such a scene, but there it is the sound of Abba in the distance. Follow it. Behind a partition are women, bedecked in sequins, gliding across a checkered floor to "Dancing Queen." This is the KCS Senior Dance Team, a group made up of spry and glamorous women in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They can dance, they can jive and, yes, they are having the time of their lives. And so is the dancing. Their numbers are heavy on footwork, and the steps, while basic, are knitted together with precision. At first, for the dancer Cha Kyung Yoon, 79 , the memorization was demanding. "Thank God for the smartphone," she said, speaking, like some of the other dancers, with the help of an interpreter. "I practice at my home. While I am dancing, I am very focused. I listen to the music and the lyrics. I also think about my movement: How can I dance beautifully? I actually forget that I am aging." They start off in two horizontal rows, crossing a foot in front of the other while their arms swoop down from side to side. Their hips twist; cha cha cha steps pivot them forward and back. They swim through the air, and later they spin, raising their arms high, and stopping with an emphatic clap. There are no pauses. At the end, they shout, "Gloria!" And then they usually giggle. Myung Hwa Chung , who is 78 and is usually seen presiding in the front of the dancers in rehearsals she demonstrates or watches, arms crossed, from the front with elegant posture and an exacting eye is one of the group's choreographers. She designed the ruffled costumes for "Gloria," silver tops and bottoms that make them look like glamorous action figures preparing to embark on a three month tour of outer space . The pants are essential. "This woman, Gloria, is deciding what she wants to do when she wants," she said. "The dance has a bit more action and a bit more strength. Because the movements are so strong, they can't wear skirts. The clothes and the dance have to match. I wanted to make it modern, as well as very fancy." As a teenager in South Korea , Ms. Chung trained in ballet, even dancing on point but never professionally. Now, she scours YouTube for choreography ideas. She might "see something that our knees can handle," Ms. Chung said. "I'll think, that looks good. I listen to the music and I practice on my own. I study gestures and movements a lot. I also have to keep in mind the condition of the dancers, because they are a bit older so they can't do anything too crazy like spinning around a bunch. Otherwise they'll get dizzy." Of course, age creates physical limitations. But there is artistry in their dancing and musicality, in the way they hang a fraction behind the beat to create the lilting sensation of floating. It's soulful. By the end of their sessions, which do involve breaks cookies and coffee are essential for recharging the body they seem to transform into lighter, younger versions of themselves. You wouldn't know that Susan Lee , a graceful wisp of an 84 year old, has had two knee replacements, wears a pacemaker and is diabetic, which affects the vision in her left eye. Even when walking hurts, she said, "Dancing helps me feel better." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
SAN FRANCISCO The "Queen of the Internet" will soon have her own investment firm. Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, plans to depart the firm this year to start a new investment fund. It is a significant loss for Kleiner, which hired Ms. Meeker, a former Wall Street analyst known as the Queen of the Internet for her bullish coverage of internet stocks, in 2010. Ms. Meeker is leaving Kleiner as the storied venture firm has been shrinking. It plans to spin off its practice of investing in more mature and larger private companies, known as late stage investing, into a separate entity. Three other investors at Kleiner Mood Rowghani, Noah Knauf and Juliet de Baubigny will join that new firm with Ms. Meeker, which has not yet settled on a name, she said in an interview. Ms. Meeker, 58, made her name in the late 1990s as an analyst at Morgan Stanley, cheerleading risky dot com stocks even through the 2000 market crash. Since joining Kleiner, she has led its investments in more mature start ups and yielded several successful bets by putting money into Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and Snap when the companies were further along. She also delivers an annual internet trends report that is often regarded as required reading in the technology industry. Her exit is the latest shake up at Kleiner, a 46 year old firm that helped put venture capital on the map and in its heyday nurtured companies including Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Google and Amazon. In recent years, the firm has struggled to produce the same successes. After the dot com bust, Kleiner missed the initial wave of social networking start ups and focused on putting money into technologies that would help the environment, in what turned into a costly detour. Over time, other venture firms have risen and garnered more buzz. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
BENSALEM, Pa. "Do you want to see your tendons?" Dr. Asif Ilyas, a hand and wrist surgeon, was about to close his patient's wound. But first he offered her the opportunity to behold the source of her radiating pain: a band of tendons that looked like pale pink ribbon candy. With a slender surgical instrument, he pushed outward to demonstrate their newly liberated flexibility. The operation Dr. Ilyas performed, called a De Quervain's release, is usually done with the patient under anesthesia. But Ms. Voynow, her medical inquisitiveness piqued and her distaste for anesthesia pronounced, had chosen to remain awake throughout, her forearm rendered numb with only an injection of a local anesthetic. So she had been able to watch as Dr. Ilyas first sliced into her swollen right wrist, tugged gently at skin flaps, and then opened a small bloody crater, exposing the inflamed sheath that had trapped her tendons. Now she could see why her thumb and wrist had been relentlessly throbbing. As he scraped, Dr. Ilyas chatted with Ms. Voynow, trying to keep her calm. From a sound system, the Temptations crooned along, with "The Way You Do the Things You Do." More surgery is being performed with the patient awake and looking on, for both financial and medical reasons. But as surgical patients are electing to keep their eyes wide open, doctor patient protocol has not kept pace with the new practice. Patients can become unnerved by a seemingly ominous silence, or put off by what passes for office humor. Doctors are only beginning to realize that when a patient is alert, it is just not O.K. to say: "Oops!" or "I wasn't expecting that," or even "Oh, my God, what are you doing?!" In a continuing study of negative experiences during awake procedures, a patient informed University of Chicago researchers, "The surgeon told me he was going to get a sharper knife, and started laughing." As a heads up to staff members, some hospitals now post warning signs on the O.R. door: PATIENT AWAKE. "For a thousand years, we talked about the operating theater," said Dr. Mark Siegler, a medical ethicist at the University of Chicago and an author of a recent study on surgeon patient communication during awake procedures, published in the American Journal of Surgery. "And for the first time, in recent years the patient has joined the cast." But Dr. Alexander Langerman, the senior author of the communication study and a head and neck surgeon on the faculty of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, said that a patient's decision to remain awake during an operation also reflects a growing suspicion, generally, of authority figures. Noting how pedestrians pull out smartphones to capture police activity, he said, "There's an element in that for patients, too. The occasional scandals that emerge while patients are sedated continue to erode their trust in us." But patients are also intrigued by what is being done to them while they are asleep. In choosing to stay awake, added Dr. Langerman, "there's a curiosity and desire to have control over your experience." Indeed, a few studies suggest that some patients feel less anxious about staying awake during surgery, despite possible gruesome sights, than they do about being sedated. Other patients, studies show, are very anxious about general anesthesia, particularly right before an operation, afraid they will not be able to wake up afterward. Some operations, including deep brain stimulations, require the patient to be awake for critical communication. But as anesthesia alternatives like regional nerve blocks and site injections become increasingly sophisticated, many more procedures are possible with the patient fully alert or moderately sedated. Orthopedics is the chief specialty for such procedures, but surgery in breast, colorectal, thoracic, vascular, otolaryngological, urological, ophthalmological and cosmetic specialties is also moving in this direction. Studies show that regional anesthesia has fewer complications than general anesthesia and is less expensive. Recovery time is swifter and side effects are fewer, which can reduce the need for postoperative opioids. Proponents like Dr. Ilyas, who operates at the Rothman Orthopaedic Specialty Hospital in Bensalem, praise awake surgery as a step forward in transparency. "It's all about communication, comfort and experience," he said. "It is definitely catching on and creating a different kind of surgeon patient relationship." Patient satisfaction, however, tends to be high. Ms. Voynow did not need a preoperative physical exam, blood work, an I.V. drip or even an attending anesthesiologist. As nurses wheeled her on a gurney out of the O.R., she looked pleasantly surprised. "I've had root canals that were worse," she said. Scarcely a half hour after the surgery, she drove herself home, using her right hand, which had just been operated on. By contrast, if she had been given general anesthesia, she would most likely have needed several hours to recover, possibly had side effects like dizziness and nausea, and required someone to drive her. An anesthesiologist would have been necessary throughout the operation. And billed accordingly. "If I want sedation, I'll have a beer," said David S. Howes, who has had several awake procedures (and who is himself a doctor, an emergency physician in Chicago). During his awake colonoscopy, he discussed fly fishing with the gastroenterologist. He had two total knee replacements with only regional nerve blocks. "It's not for the faint of heart," he said. "They have to cut the capsule of the knee, which is quite thick. I could feel the vibration of the saw cutting through the leg bones. Then they hammer, and it sends a shock wave slamming into your knee. It doesn't hurt, but you feel the pressure. And you smell burning flesh." Knowing that the knee replacement would take several hours, Dr. Howes came prepared. While surgeons put in the new joint, he read The Economist. The increasing number of patients who choose to be at least minimally awake is also a reflection of the continuing demystification of surgery, Dr. Langerman said. Some doctors post surgical videos on YouTube, and live procedures on Snapchat. And with patients having been exposed to graphic surgery on reality television shows and nighttime medical dramas, he said, "They are primed to think they're ready to watch this." But patients can find the experience a letdown. "It's not as orchestrated and symphonic as on TV," he said. "It's people at work, doing their job." Whether the patient is offered the option of staying awake depends on many factors: the amenability of the surgery, the willingness of the surgeon, the flexibility of the anesthesiologist and the ability of a busy hospital to customize procedures. Although typically patients meet and make decisions with an anesthesiologist moments before an operation, Dr. David M. Dickerson, an assistant professor of anesthesia at the University of Chicago, confers with patients earlier, at a surgical clinic intended to coordinate and personalize medical care. Patients are evaluated for their likelihood to succumb to stress while awake; they learn about sedation alternatives if, midsurgery, they become overwhelmed. While a satisfying personal experience would be ideal, the patient is told, the most important driver is safety, including the ability of the surgeon to focus and communicate with other medical staff members without interruption. Patients sometimes overestimate their ability to handle the unfamiliar stimuli of the operating room, said Dr. Stavros G. Memtsoudis, a researcher and professor of anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medical College. "The patient will keep asking, 'What is my heart doing? Is that beep normal? Is this normal?' I might say, 'If you'd rather go to sleep you can, because I can see your blood pressure is going up because you're so stressed and you'll bleed more,'" said Dr. Memtsoudis, who is also an anesthesiologist at Hospital for Special Surgery, an orthopedic center in New York where regional anesthesia is common. He also keeps on hand headphones, music selections and video glasses to soothe anxious awake patients. And when it is the assistant's turn to try a technique, Dr. Michael L. Marin, a professor and chairman of the surgery department at Mount Sinai Medical Center, is particularly judicious. Rather than risk unsettling the patient with what might be a typical instruction to a resident "See if you can find your way through it" Dr. Marin may be more circumspect: "We need to adjust this piece over here." Throughout, he is both trying to assure the awake patient, and educate residents and fellows about the importance of doing so. "You have to recognize that the patient may be listening intently and they're nervous," said Dr. Marin, who specializes in aortic aneurysm repair. "Sometimes I'll go overboard and say, 'That's perfect!' or 'It came together exactly the way we wanted!' "That makes patients feel much better," he said. "They want to know you are confident, focused and in control. They are not really interested in hearing doctors joke about the drinking they did last night." Dr. Ilyas, the hand surgeon, who is also an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, began routinely offering awake options to patients about four years ago. Among other advantages, he said, patients enjoy having a better understanding of their medical problem. And because they are awake and can follow direction, Dr. Ilyas can test their mobility right away to learn whether he needs to do further repair. "You get more ownership and appreciation of the treatment from patients," he said. Now when he gives patients the choice to be awake or asleep, Dr. Ilyas said, about 80 percent are opting to be awake. But when Dr. Ilyas himself needs surgery, he is still rather old fashioned. "I don't want to be awake and worrying about it," he said. "When I had a vasectomy I had the awake option. But I said, 'Nope! I'd rather be asleep. I'm good, thanks.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
SEATTLE When Jeff Bezos and his former wife, MacKenzie, celebrated what would be their last anniversary together around Labor Day 2018, they arrived at a Miami nightclub with no fanfare. His table was booked online, which is "totally what tourists do" and "totally dorky," the club's celebrity liaison said in an interview at the time. Almost a year later, Mr. Bezos arrived at a hot Miami seafood restaurant in grander fashion, on a 90 foot long Leopard superyacht in what The Miami Herald called "the most extravagant entrance ever." It was not his only superyacht of the summer. He lounged with his girlfriend on the media mogul David Geffen's boat in the Mediterranean, along with the supermodel Karlie Kloss and the former Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein. Mr. Bezos, 56, was also spotted on a ship owned by Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller off the coast of Venice. After gossip sites gushed about the 260 purple octopus swim trunks he wore in many photographs, the swimwear quickly sold out. That image exploded by the end of January, when The National Enquirer reported about his affair with Lauren Sanchez, a former TV personality, including contents of intimate text messages between the two. After the Enquirer reporting, Mr. Bezos said he had opened up an investigation into how the paper acquired the messages, hinting that Saudi Arabia may have been involved because of his ownership of The Washington Post. This week, the United Nations released a statement, based largely on a forensic report commissioned by Mr. Bezos' investigators, that essentially accused Saudi Arabia's crown prince of hacking Mr. Bezos' phone to spy on him. The Saudi government called the claims "absurd." The report did not provide evidence that hacked material ended up in The Enquirer. But it did provide a potent reminder of how much has changed in a year. Mr. Bezos had become a tabloid fixture, with yacht appearances, evening strolls and romantic dinners captured in detail. For people who know Mr. Bezos or have worked with him for years, the shift to the glare of The Daily Mail and Page Six is almost an out of body experience. "It is a story that is pretty much irresistible to anyone," said George Rush, who co wrote a gossip column with Joanna Molloy in The Daily News for 15 years. "It has changed the public perception of him," Mr. Rush added. Jay Carney, Amazon's spokesman, said Mr. Bezos remained much the same. "In the senior leadership here, which includes some of the people who have known and worked with Jeff the longest, there is a lot of empathy for what he's had to deal with and a lot of admiration for his remarkable ability to tune it out and focus on what matters," Mr. Carney said. Mr. Bezos remains deeply engaged with his work at Amazon and committed to the mission of The Washington Post, Mr. Carney said. "None of that has changed." Ms. Bezos later focused on novel writing and studiously protected her family's privacy. Mr. Bezos' own employees used to tease him about his cargo pants. At one large staff meeting early in the company's history, someone asked what exactly he had in all those pockets. Among other things, Mr. Bezos pulled out a Swiss Army knife, to everyone's laughter, according to a longtime Amazon worker. Even as the company grew, Mr. Bezos did relatively little press for a tech executive and was far from a jet setter. In a 2014 interview, he said he didn't like being on the road because it made him "feel disconnected from the office." He estimated he traveled as little as 10 percent of the time. As Amazon became ascendant and Mr. Bezos was on his way to becoming the world's richest man, his profile rose. He put on Oscar parties, supporting the company's investment in Hollywood, and bought The Washington Post. He began putting a billion dollars a year into his space company, Blue Origin. But only rarely did he become a subject of celebrity news and tabloid publications. In the summer of 2017, he strutted through the Allen Company Sun Valley Conference, an event swarming with prominent executives, bulked up with muscle. "Swole Bezos" became a viral sensation. Soon after, The New York Times Style section said he had "steadily, and stealthily," transformed into a "full fledged style icon." Then came the Enquirer revelations about the affair a year ago, supported by publishing photos and texts. It was juicy gossip, but received little sustained mainstream news coverage until February, when Mr. Bezos snapped back. He published a post on Medium, the online publishing platform, accusing The National Enquirer's parent company, American Media, of blackmail and extortion. He said the publisher had threatened to print a "below the belt selfie" of Mr. Bezos and other embarrassing photos if he didn't back off his claims that the paper's reporting was politically motivated. His post said American Media had motivations to please President Trump and the Saudi government. American Media said it acted lawfully. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Yankees were supposed to take the field for the first time in five days on Tuesday night, against the Braves in Atlanta. Then a rainstorm disrupted their season again, forcing a postponement that extended the Yankees' layoff to six consecutive days and clogged their schedule even more in the coming weeks. Breaks in baseball, a sport meant to be played almost every day of the season, are not supposed to last this long. The 2020 season, though, is anything but normal. Twice in this season, the Yankees, who have a 16 9 record, had to pause their schedule for multiple days because of the coronavirus. After the Miami Marlins' outbreak late last month, the Yankees spent two days in a Philadelphia hotel unable to play the Phillies, who were sidelined for a week because of their exposure to the Marlins. Over the past weekend, the Yankees hosted workouts for their players at Yankee Stadium while Mets players and staff members were tested and quarantined. A Mets player and a staff member tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday, which postponed the first installment of their annual subway series, a three game set at Citi Field. "I've actually been surprised we haven't had more, honestly," Yankees reliever Zack Britton said of the interruptions to the team's schedule. Completing an abbreviated 60 game season across 30 different cities during a pandemic was always going to be a challenge. The Cincinnati Reds, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Marlins and the Mets are the four teams in Major League Baseball that have dealt with positive cases since the season began on July 23. But now, because of the postponements, the Yankees a team dealing with myriad injuries that they believe have arisen partly because of the condensed calendar have even more cramming to do. After Tuesday's rainout, which set up a doubleheader on Wednesday, they were facing 22 games in 19 days, including four doubleheaders. Even with expanded rosters, that is a lot of innings. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. This weekend at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees and Mets will make up two of last weekend's postponed games, with a doubleheader on Friday and another on Sunday. Doubleheaders this season mercifully feature seven inning games. "If you're swinging the bat well, doubleheaders are the best thing to a ballplayer," outfielder Aaron Judge said over the weekend. Before he landed on the 10 day injured list on Aug. 14, Judge was indeed swinging the bat like one of the best hitters in baseball. But a right calf injury arose as Judge played both games of a doubleheader against the Tampa Bay Rays on the artificial turf at Tropicana Field. The doubleheader was one of the ripple effects from the Marlins' outbreak. Judge, who did not consider the injury serious, was in the lineup for the Yankees on Tuesday. Even though he told Manager Aaron Boone he felt ready to be in right field in all of the team's remaining 35 games, he said the Yankees might be judicious with his playing time in one of the coming doubleheaders. "2020, baby," Boone said of the upcoming doubleheaders. "We've got to figure it out. It's a challenge. Obviously seven inning games makes it a little more doable and not as daunting. But there's no question we're heading into a tough stretch here." Boone has tried to be conscientious about players' workloads, but injuries are piling up again. In their 103 win regular season last year, the Yankees set a major league record by sending 30 different players to the I.L. Less than halfway through this season, they have outpaced themselves: 13 different players have landed on the I.L., with nine currently absent. Because of that, and the Aug. 31 trade deadline, the Yankees' front office has been considering additions to the pitching staff. James Paxton, who strained a muscle in his left forearm while on the mound last week, and shortstop Gleyber Torres, who strained left quadriceps and hamstring muscles while running to first base last week, were the latest to join the Yankees' wounded. Both will be out for at least a few weeks. One possible factor behind the rash of injuries, according to Paxton and Britton, who landed on the I.L. last week with a left hamstring strain: the short ramp up period of three weeks leading into the truncated season. Britton, who is the team's union representative, said he had spoken with his counterparts on almost every other M.L.B. team, and they too have noticed the higher rate of injuries. He believed the smaller, soft tissue injuries might have been avoided during the gradual buildup of a normal six week spring training leading into a traditional 162 game season. Torres felt otherwise. He said: "Players prepared really well during the quarantine. Myself, I prepared really well. I think it's injuries that just happened. Right now, it's time to prepare myself a little bit better and get a little bit stronger in my lower half." For the Yankees, though, the answer to their persistent injury question is made more complicated because they overhauled their health and performance staff, including hiring a noted high performance trainer, Eric Cressey, in an effort to avoid a repeat of 2019. Britton spoke highly of the retooled staff and their new strategies, such as training players to be better athletes rather than training them specifically for their position. "For them to implement these programs, it's hard to do that with the season that we've had," Britton said. Under Cressey's guidance, the brawny outfielder Giancarlo Stanton lost 20 pounds since last season and was performing well until he landed on the I.L. with a left hamstring strain on Aug. 9. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
While Twitter and Facebook dithered over whether to append warning labels on outrageous and dangerous posts from Donald Trump, the president continued to tweet and post. Twitter took the plunge last week with a fact checking link on two misleading and false tweets about mail in voting and, later, an admonition that the president's tweet warning protesters that they risked being shot had violated its rules. Rather than blunt the president's message, the effect of Twitter's knuckle rapping has been to draw even more attention to it. Twitter executives deserve credit for at least calling out President Trump, even if it took them two years to finally decide to do so. Despite Twitter's measured approach, its solution only amplifies the problem. And Twitter's boss, Jack Dorsey, has fallen victim to the Streisand Effect, the internet phenomenon where attempts to censor or excise information instead backfire, causing the information to be cast even more widely. Mark Zuckerberg, under the guise of free speech rights, has in the meantime given the president carte blanche to say what he pleases. Though he wrote he had a "visceral negative reaction" to the president's posts, Facebook ultimately left the posts up, warning label free. "Although the post had a troubling historical reference, we decided to leave it up because the National Guard references meant we read it as a warning about state action, and we think people need to know if the government is planning to deploy force," Mr. Zuckerberg posted on his personal Facebook page Friday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
MOSCOW Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, strongly indicated on Friday that the United States did not intend to censure Japan for weakening its currency over the last several months, something that has aided Japanese exporters and angered its competitors. Mr. Bernanke spoke in brief introductory remarks at a conference in Moscow of the Group of 20, a club of the world's largest industrial and emerging economies. At issue are stimulus programs backed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is also maintaining pressure on the Bank of Japan to keep interest rates near zero and flood the economy with money to support Japanese manufacturers. As a result, the yen has lost about 15 percent of its value against the dollar over the last three months, meaning products made in Japan, like some Sony electronics or models of Toyota cars, are relatively cheaper. Japan's maneuver touched off fears that other countries and the European Union might follow suit in a so called currency war, which has been the main topic of the Group of 20 meeting here, which runs through Saturday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Vietnamese Art Has Never Been More Popular. But the Market Is Full of Fakes. HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam The exhibition at the Fine Arts Museum in Ho Chi Minh City was billed as a triumphant homecoming for works by some of Vietnam's most influential artists. But Nguyen Thanh Chuong, a prominent artist himself, was stunned by what he saw. Hanging on the wall was a painting he recognized as his own, a Cubist inspired portrait he did in the early 1970s. But instead of his name, the canvas bore the signature of one of Vietnam's best known artists, Ta Ty, and the date 1952. "I could not believe my eyes," he said. "It made my hair stand on end." Mr. Chuong's discovery set off a scandal that has rocked the Vietnam art world and highlighted an embarrassing truth: The Vietnamese art market, where prices of prewar paintings have recently broken the million dollar mark, is rife with fraud. "That remains one of the biggest challenges for the Vietnamese art market," said Suzanne Lecht, an American who owns the Art Vietnam Gallery in Hanoi. "How do people know what is fake and what isn't?" Even esteemed Vietnamese art institutions, including major national museums, have showcased paintings they acknowledged were not authentic. Likewise, the auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's, as well as a consultant who worked for both of them, have sold works later dismissed by some experts as fakes. Some of Vietnam's greatest artists are enjoying a moment of increasing world attention, especially those who studied at the French influenced Fine Arts College of Indochina before World War II. The best of them synthesize European post Impressionist trends with classical Asian styles and subjects, and their work is commanding higher prices. Vietnamese art remains a niche market globally but is surging in popularity at international auctions. In April, a late 1930s painting by one artist, Le Pho, sold for nearly 1.2 million at a Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong, breaking the 844,000 record set by another of his paintings in 2014. Vietnam's nouveau riche, who have begun to pay high prices for local artists, are a prime target for unscrupulous traders. So are international buyers, whose faith that they are buying the genuine article is bolstered by the institutions that vouch for it. The Fine Arts Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, where the disputed painting by Ta Ty, who died in 2004, was part of the exhibition "Paintings Returned From Europe," rents its walls to private collectors, giving their paintings the imprimatur of the top museum in Vietnam's largest city. The 17 paintings in the exhibition belonged to Vu Xuan Chung, a Vietnamese art dealer who said he paid the museum about 1,300 to hold the 12 day event last year. "A museum is the ultimate venue to validate a work of art," said Colette Loll, founder and director of Art Fraud Insights, a Washington consulting firm. After questions surfaced about the paintings, the museum quickly determined that none of the 17 paintings were created by the painters claimed by the exhibition. Museum officials apologized to the public and said they would hold the paintings for an investigation. But that never happened. Soon after, the museum quietly returned the paintings to their owner, Mr. Chung, who disputes the museum's findings and says the paintings are authentic. He is now offering them for sale and recently sold one for more than 66,000. All 17 paintings had been certified as genuine by a French art expert, Jean Francois Hubert, a senior consultant for Vietnamese art at Christie's. One painting still had a Christie's tag dangling from it. Mr. Hubert appears to have had a conflict of interest. The 17 paintings had belonged to him, and he had sold them to Mr. Chung, his friend of more than 20 years, Mr. Chung said. Mr. Hubert declined to comment on the artwork or his role in the exhibition but said by email, "As a general principle I abide by the most stringent standards." Christie's said it would not knowingly auction any works if it had valid concerns about their authenticity. A spokesman for Christie's said that the company had nothing to do with the show in Ho Chi Minh City and that Mr. Hubert was acting on his own. But in an email to a Vietnamese journalist while the exhibit was underway, Zineng Wang, then Christie's head of curation and sale for Southeast Asian art, said that he and Mr. Hubert were "absolutely convinced that the works presented by Mr. Chung are authentic and genuine." A newly discovered painting by Mr. Van would indeed be valuable. Regarded as a revolutionary hero and one of Vietnam's greatest painters, he died in 1954 from injuries he suffered at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. In 1996, he was posthumously awarded the Ho Chi Minh Prize, one of the country's highest honors. Christie's sold the painting to an unidentified buyer for about 45,000. But Vietnamese art experts said the painting was actually an uninspired copy of "The Young Beggar," by the Spanish artist Bartolome Esteban Murillo. Painted in 1650, it hangs in the Louvre in Paris. Mr. Van's son, To Ngoc Thanh, an established painter himself, called the painting attributed to his father a fake. "I can tell you 100 percent that is not my father's painting," he said. "I am disgusted. In this country there is a lot of fake art. Some crook just used that trick to make money." Christie's said it had completed "rigorous due diligence" and had "no basis" to question the painting's authenticity. Even at the country's most prestigious museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi, officials have long been uncertain which of their treasured paintings are copies and which are genuine. During the war with America in the late 1960s, museum officials removed hundreds of artworks for safekeeping, in case Hanoi was bombed by the United States, and commissioned copies to replace them. Originals disappeared, copies were passed off as originals, and no one knew which was which. Asked whether the museum had since tried to sort them out, the director, Nguyen Anh Minh, only smiled. Adding to the confusion, relatives of some prominent artists were known to certify copies as originals so they could fetch a higher price. At an auction in Hong Kong last year, Christie's sold the paintings "Boats on the Perfume River" by To Ngoc Van for 57,000, and "A Lady of Hue" by Le Van De for 89,000. Identical paintings are hanging at the Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi. The museum says it acquired "Boats" in 1965 and "Lady" in 1976. Despite concluding that the 17 works were not genuine, the museum had little recourse. It had no means to prove the paintings were fakes or forgeries, one official said, so it had no legal authority to keep them. Even as he continued to insist that all 17 paintings were genuine, Mr. Chung returned the supposed Ta Ty to Mr. Hubert for one he could sell. He is optimistic that he will find buyers for all of them. "It's impossible in Vietnam to do an investigation," he said. "Who is going to determine whether a painting is real or not? The police? They know nothing about what is real or not. And those painters? How can they judge my paintings?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
"I thought I could turn these tapes into plays and they'd be my little fortune," Warhol said in his diary in 1985, but Capote had died the year before and the project never got realized. In 2007, when Mr. Roth noticed the diary entry and learned that the tapes had survived, he was determined to bring the concept to life: "I had to uncover the idea, but it's Andy's idea." For decades, the Andy Warhol Foundation has denied almost all access to the 3,000 cassettes that Warhol recorded of his daily talk: His gossip could sometimes veer into slander, bringing a risk of lawsuits. To get his hands on Warhol's Capote tapes, Mr. Roth said he had to agree to indemnify the foundation, to give it full script approval and also a joint author's share of the profits. And then he had to reach the same kind of arrangement with the Capote estate. In the end, there was no need to worry about slander in recordings that were mostly, Mr. Roth said, "two guys gossiping about stuff." (Although the play does include a tall tale from Capote about going to bed with Humphrey Bogart.) In fact, the first dozen tapes that Mr. Roth listened to left him doubting that there was gold to be mined there. Then one day, on a 1978 recording, Mr. Roth, 54, heard Warhol say this to Capote: "Let's write a new play. Gee, Truman, can't I just tape you?" Mr. Roth realized his own play would be all about letting us watch Warhol and Capote collaborate on a first, live draft of theirs. With 8,000 pages of transcripts, it took Mr. Roth a year to extract the 600 or so snippets of talk that held promise, and then years more to assemble them into a compelling picture. "I'm excited for people to know more about these two people," he said. "I grew to love them even more in doing this." On the first day of rehearsals in August, the actor Leslie Jordan said he already has a deep connection to Capote. As a little boy who was taunted as a "fairy," he said, seeing the flamboyant author on TV triggered such a shock of recognition that Mr. Jordan ran to the bathroom to vomit. He could hardly be more perfectly cast for the role, he said: "I'm Southern, I'm gay, I'm little I get Ma'am'd a lot on the phone." (On Sept. 7, Mr. Jordan withdrew from the production for personal reasons. Dan Butler will play Truman Capote instead.) Opposite him onstage (Michael Mayer is directing) will be a Warhol played by Stephen Spinella, a two time Tony winner for "Angels in America." As Mr. Jordan told his bathroom story hamming it up, Capote style the lanky Mr. Spinella listened in silent, Warhol ish observation. He said he didn't have such a personal connection to his character, partly because of his admiration for him: "I'm playing somebody who has a way of seeing the world that is so much more interesting and revelatory than the way I see the world." His challenge, said Mr. Spinella, would be to reveal a "real" Warhol inside a creator so controlled and self conscious that he was always playing some kind of part. Mr. Roth's own crush on Warhol blossomed when he first saw the artist assuming a role. In 1985 Warhol appeared, as some version of himself, on "The Love Boat," a favorite TV program of Mr. Roth's throughout his youth in New Jersey. "I related to him an outsider, a geek," he explained. Mr. Roth's career in theater began with a degree in drama and then writing and directing live shows for Disney theme parks. It exploded in 1992, when Disney agreed to let him concoct a musical based on its animated movie "Beauty and the Beast." The result was a vast hit, and Mr. Roth (then known as Robert Jess Roth) spent the next several decades staging the show around the world. That reliable, profitable gig eventually gave him the luxury of spending almost every non "Beauty" minute digging into the Warhol tapes. Early on, he discovered that the recordings might work as the bones of his play, "but it needed a bit more meat on it." He imported a fresh supply of Capotean eloquence from published interviews; he mined new, more extended Warholisms out of the artist's books, some of whose words come from the pens of ghostwriters. "You can't play the tapes and hear the play, at all," Mr. Roth admitted. For all the genius of his heroes' conversation, "they needed help making it into a Broadway play," he said. (Capote himself has been center stage there before, with Robert Morse winning a Tony in the one man "Tru.") Mr. Roth's years at Disney had taught him that a show needed drama and emotion to speak to an audience, so he arranged his material to supply both. That may turn out to be his riskiest move. Warhol once published a novel based on taped conversations, and, like so much of his art, it was radical: Readers were left to drown in verbatim "ums" and "uhhs." To channel Warhol's true notion of a tape recorded play, "WARHOLCAPOTE" will need to baffle its viewers as well as please them. If it appears with a full quotient of Mr. Roth's "drama and emotion," it may attract the Broadway audience he is hoping for after the A.R.T. run. But also the ire of two colorful critics looking down from on high. On that first day of the rehearsal, however, Mr. Mayer was already feeling an urge to nudge Mr. Roth's script away from naturalism and toward something more "abstract," as he put it, using one of Warhol's favorite words. It was almost as if the artist had put it in his mouth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Tech Founders Embraced Control Over Companies. This One Is Giving It Up. For more than a decade, some of the best known technology companies, including Google, Facebook and Snap, have sold shares to the public while maintaining a corporate structure that allowed their founders to keep tight control over their companies. For Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, it was a way to protect themselves from pesky investors interested in short term gains, even as shareholder advocates blasted the arrangements for creating unaccountable leaders. Now Zynga, a once high flying maker of popular internet games such as FarmVille and Words With Friends, has taken the unusual step of scrapping its founder friendly structure a change that could make it easier for the company to sell itself down the line. The founder empowered structure at the heart of many tech companies is known as a multiclass stock structure, under which those who started the company own a certain class of stock that gives them outsize voting power even after it goes public. At Zynga, Mark Pincus, the company's founder, has now converted some of his shares that carry more voting clout known as Class B and C shares into common Class A shares. The conversion reduces his overall voting power at Zynga to about 10 percent from about 70 percent. Mr. Pincus will not see any change in his economic interest in the company from the conversion. The change comes as Mr. Pincus and his wife, Alison Gelb Pincus, are going through a divorce. Last year, publications in San Francisco, where Zynga is based, speculated that the divorce could jeopardize his control over Zynga. Ms. Pincus is challenging a prenuptial agreement with her husband, according to a document filed in California Superior Court. An attorney for Ms. Pincus did not respond to a request for comment. In a phone interview, Mr. Pincus said his divorce, which he described as amicable, was "not part of or relevant to the announcement" of his conversion of his stock. Rather, Mr. Pincus said, he made the decision in consultation with Zynga's board, partly because of growing criticism of dual and multiclass share structures. As part of the change, Mr. Pincus said, he will leave Zynga as an employee he was executive chairman and become nonexecutive chairman of the company's board of directors. "We think the company doesn't benefit anymore from a multiclass structure," Mr. Pincus said. Dual class voting structures have been around for decades and have been especially popular at media companies, such as News Corporation and The New York Times Company. Many prominent tech companies have turned to them as well, starting with the initial public offering of Google in 2004. Since then, Facebook, Zynga, Snap and a variety of others have followed suit with similar structures. As a result, shareholder meetings for some of the world's most valuable companies including Facebook and Alphabet, the holding company that now owns Google are mostly for show. Shareholders propose and vote on resolutions even though the founders have the only votes that matter. The vast majority of companies that go public have a single class of stock, where one share equals one vote. About 81 percent of companies that went public last year had single class arrangements, according to the Council of Institutional Investors, a nonprofit association of pension funds and other large investors. Charles Elson, a corporate governance professor at the University of Delaware, said that in his 20 years of tracking issues around multiclass stock structures, Mr. Pincus was the first public company executive he could recall who voluntarily reduced his voting power so dramatically. "It's quite an unusual move, but it's a welcome move," Mr. Elson said. Multiclass structures are bad for ordinary investors because they make founders unaccountable, he added. "If a C.E.O. does a poor job, he's not going to fire himself," he said. "The problems it creates far outweigh any benefits." In response to some of the criticism of multiclass structures, more companies are going public with provisions that automatically convert their shares to a single class after a period of time, anywhere from five to 20 years. Fitbit, the maker of fitness trackers, went public in 2015 with a 12 year provision that sunsets its dual class stock, while the cloud software company Okta went public last year with a similar 10 year provision. Mr. Pincus said Zynga's multiclass share structure provided his company with "air cover" during several difficult years after it went public at the end of 2011. The company originally made games that people played on Facebook through desktop web browsers, but its business was upended by the surge of mobile gaming on smartphones. Zynga gradually focused on mobile games, but its stock has languished even as it has mounted a turnaround under a new chief executive, Frank Gibeau. The company's shares closed at 3.64 on Wednesday, far below the 10 public offering price. Zynga also announced it had swung to a profit of 5.6 million in the first quarter from a loss of 9.5 million a year ago. Mr. Pincus said his voting control at Zynga had not given him veto power over outside offers to acquire the company, though it did give him the ability to replace board members. He said he had never exercised that right. When asked if Zynga could consider acquisition offers more easily now that Mr. Pincus had relinquished most of his voting power, Mr. Gibeau said, "That's not our mission our focus is to grow the company." Mr. Pincus said he intended to devote more time to investing in start ups. He said he was particularly interested in companies focused on the blockchain, the technology that's behind electronic currencies like Bitcoin, but could also have broader applications. Giving up his control of Zynga, Mr. Pincus said, will "create more space between me and the company whenever I go launch new products." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
On Sunday night, a cadre of exquisitely dressed actors will wave and smile their way along the Dolby Theater's red carpet for the 89th Academy Awards. When the women stop, their dresses will almost certainly get mentioned. But so, too, might the jewels around their necks and dangling from their ears. While their ensembles have most likely been borrowed from designers eager to dress Oscar worthy stars and to reap the publicity from doing so those gowns cost a pittance compared with the jewelry on loan to them. At last year's Oscars, Charlize Theron wore a Harry Winston necklace with nearly 50 carats of diamonds, worth 3.7 million. Just a few weeks ago, at the Grammys, Beyonce topped that with a long diamond necklace that reportedly had 400 carats of stones and a price tag of 12 million. Needless to say, these celebrities get to wear things that other women can only dream about. But the actors and entertainers who parade such gems for the cameras do share one thing with mere mortals: They need to protect them. "The jeweler won't provide insurance," said Janece White, senior vice president and jewelry underwriting leader at Chubb, the insurer. "They'll provide security. They'll provide someone to escort them. But that's when the individual needs to contact their insurance agent." For any woman who has ever touched her ear only to feel flesh where a diamond stud should be, pause and imagine this: The 12 million diamond necklace that Beyonce wore was held together by a mere clasp and clasps, as any jeweler knows, are prone to break. (Sensibly, she did remove the necklace when she performed.) Whether borrowing or buying jewelry, protecting it requires thought and can be costly. Christy Scott Cashman, an actress and producer whose credits include "American Hustle" and "The Kids Are All Right," said she had borrowed many ensembles, for entertainment galas, but also for soirees around Boston, where she lives. "I've borrowed jewelry," she said. "I'll tell my stylist what the event is like and he'll give me a couple of options. Then he'll send along all of the accessories. He's into accessorizing, so I always have something to think about." Her own jewelry, she said, is too nice to wear around town even nicer than what her stylist proffers, so when she travels with it, she protects it as best she can. For instance, on a trip to Los Angeles to attend a lifetime achievement celebration for the actress Shirley MacLaine, she wore her impressive emerald and diamond necklace on the plane. "I took great pains to wear it and not pack it," said Mrs. Cashman, who said that her husband, who owns a large construction company, had given it to her. She added, "We got to the hotel and I said: 'I'm not going to put it in the safe. That seems like an obvious place to look.' So I hid it. I hid it so well that I couldn't find it the next day." Yet, Mrs. Cashman's thinking belies a fear many jewelry lovers have of traveling with their valuables. What might happen when they are apart from it? Michelle Marie Heinemann, a socialite and publisher of a magazine called Old Fashioned Mom, attended the Oscars 10 years ago with 12 pieces of jewelry that together were worth more than 1 million. She was getting ready to go to a party before the Oscars and opened the room safe. "None of it was there," she said. "I immediately started thinking it was in the luggage. Then I thought, 'Did I forget it?' I called my personal assistant, who was with me, and she said, 'No, it was in the safe.'" Her jewelry was insured and she was reimbursed for it. But to her, that wasn't enough. "It's so much more than the financial loss," she said. "I was devastated. I didn't enjoy my time there. These were pieces handed down to me, or from my husband and children." Since then, she has replaced her fancy luggage with basic Samsonite suitcases that have a hidden compartment for her jewelry, created by her carpenter and seamstress. "You can't find it," she said. "You'd have to take an ax and cut it open, which you couldn't do because Samsonite is the hardest luggage in the world." Such extreme steps show the fear people with the finest jewels have. It may be misplaced. Mark Galante, president of the Northeast zone and strategic alliances at Pure Insurance, said that most jewelry claims were for pieces that were lost or damaged say, a stone fell out not stolen in some brazen heist. "As an industry, we get very few jewelry claims, period," he said. But when they do get one, he said the average claim was 18,000. For most people, that exceeds the standard coverage in a mainstream homeowner's policy for lost or stolen jewelry. "If your house burns down and you're insured to 100,000, you're going to get paid 100,000," said Ed Charlebois, vice president for personal insurance at Travelers. "But if your house gets broken into and they steal your jewelry, you're limited to 1,000 for basic coverage, as it pertains to jewelry." The cost for this coverage is 1 to 2 percent of the collection's value, though insuring 10 10,000 rings will cost less than one 100,000 ring since that could be more easily lost or stolen. And there are tips to avoid having jewelry stolen or hiding it so well that you can't find it. For one, insurers tell people that if they are staying in a hotel, it is best to put their jewelry in the hotel's main safe, never in the room safe. "Every maintenance man knows how to open that safe," said Ms. White of Chubb. "Every head of housekeeping knows how to open that safe. Many housekeepers know how to unlock it. They have to know how to open that safe. That's why I get claims from hotels." Safes in the home are not as safe as they might seem. For one thing, people often forget to lock up their jewels. And if they were robbed, the thief could compel the homeowner to open the safe and hand over the contents. In the case of Beth Zuckerman, whose father worked in the jewelry business, the thieves simply picked up the safe in her Miami home and walked out the door last Memorial Day weekend. "It was big and heavy, but not big and heavy enough," she said. "I didn't imagine two men could just walk out with it." She said that Pure Insurance paid the claim and the thieves were caught. But she recovered only a dozen of about 150 pieces. In another unusual claim that Ms. White said she handled, the thieves were drilling a safe for so long that heat and dust set off a fire alarm. She said the thieves stopped drilling, waited for the fire engines to leave and then finished the job. Episodes like this show why people who have truly exquisite and valuable pieces can get a discount on their insurance by getting vault insurance as in, putting the jewelry in a bank vault. The rates for this type of insurance are a small fraction of the rates charged for keeping such jewelry in a home. Mr. Galante said the cost dropped to 0.2 percent of the piece's value. But vault insurance has its drawbacks. Diane Schoeman, 70, was given a nearly 20 carat diamond ring on her 20th wedding anniversary. That was 15 years ago and she wore it every day for over five years. Then her husband, Michael, who worked in the clothing business, wanted to cut insurance costs in retirement. The ring now resides in a bank vault. The insurance is about 3,000 a year for that one ring. Mrs. Schoeman said she was allowed to take it out only three times a year. Any more and the insurance company charges her more. She misses wearing it all the time. "I take it out for my birthday, my anniversary, or when I'm traveling to Paris or Italy," she said. "I also have a copy that was made, but I hate it. It's actually a good copy. It's platinum, real baguettes, but the stone looks dull." Therein lies the trade off between security and happiness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Imagine Netflix died. What happens to stand up comedy? This may seem like an outlandish hypothetical since Netflix is the most powerful player in comedy today. But in the current media landscape, when major new streaming services will be entering the market in the new year including Disney and AT T (which owns HBO), uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. This quarter, for the first time ever, Netflix lost American subscribers and its stock price plunged. Meanwhile, entertainment companies including HBO and Amazon Prime are positioning themselves as alternatives with new specials from Jim Gaffigan and Julio Torres that signal two very different strategies. Considering its major resources, Amazon Prime always seemed like the biggest potential threat to Netflix's stranglehold on stand up, and this month it presents its first original stand up special, Jim Gaffigan's "Quality Time," which premieres next Friday. The streamer, which already has a sizable library of specials produced by HBO, Showtime and others, will release four more original specials next week, and it recently shot the inaugural hour from Ilana Glazer ("Broad City"). These are all from Comedy Dynamics, the behemoth producer and distributor behind the recent boom in specials. Debuting with Gaffigan is a savvy choice: He's no next big thing: "Quality Time" is his seventh special and he's one of the most broadly popular comedians working today. But he can get a bit lost on Netflix because his family friendly material can seem too safe to make news or stand out in a crowded screen filled with big names. He delivers his punch lines at the end of patiently established premises, and then doubles down on them using a second voice, higher pitched and quicker in cadence. This is his inner critic, which provides a running commentary on his show. This device has become fairly common in stand up, turning a solo art into a double act, but no one does it better than Gaffigan. Where his comedy excels is not in his insights, but in the densely populated world surrounding his material. In the highlight of the special, he does 10 minutes of jokes about horses that he pulls off by mocking his indulgence, parodying himself, in his own voice and his critical one, while also shifting to the perspective of an audience incredulous at the number of jokes about equestrian life. It's stand up that feels like a crowded scene, a series of one off jokes that somehow manages to achieve a kind of bizarre suspense. Will he keep going? Why do we care? Why not? In contrast to the scale of Amazon, HBO has traditionally been a prestige niche. There is much speculation about whether that will change in response to streaming age competition, but you wouldn't know it from its stand up, which has remained tightly curated, ambitious and rarefied. Just as HBO had the most formally daring special last year with "Drew Michael," it will surely have the most experimental special of 2019 in Julio Torres's "My Favorite Shapes," which premieres Saturday. After an introduction in which Torres, a slight blond in a silver costume, speaks to his mother in Spanish, he appears sitting in front of a conveyor belt on a starkly abstract set that seems designed by Pierre Cardin. Small objects (figurines, jewelry, simple shapes) roll up. Picking each up, the camera so close in that you can see the glitter on his hands, he turns each into a bit, Torres dances nimbly from the purely conceptual quip (musing on a square, say) to more elaborate vignettes like an imagined scene between Fred Flintstone and Betty Rubble turning "The Flintstones" into a melancholy slice of life. As he has on "Saturday Night Live," where he works as a writer, Torres puts you in the most unexpected perspectives, doing an impression of a Brita filter or explaining the inner thoughts of a tiny cactus in a container. The way he lavishes attention on even inanimate objects is not just silly and surreal, it makes the case for radically empathetic comedy without a trace of didacticism. Torres can seem like he is from another planet, one where reruns of "Pee wee's Playhouse" play on a loop, but if Jim Gaffigan's conventional stand up hides some clever conceptual tricks, the experimentalism of "My Favorite Shapes" hides what is actually the meat and potatoes of comedy: setups and quick punch lines, personal revelations through mockery of popular culture. It's a stand up set deconstructed and rebuilt in a style that seems too strange to be a reaction to anything so much as its very own, distinctive thing. In showcasing Torres, as well as Ramy Youssef, the Hulu series star who also released a very funny debut this summer, HBO has fashioned itself as a home for promising young comedians. But it hasn't tried to match Netflix in star power or volume. The greatest rival there might be YouTube, where many younger audiences discover new work, whether from the site's own celebrities or the old fashioned kind whose work gets repurposed on the vast service. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"Ooooooh!" shrieked the New York City Ballet dancer Tiler Peck, held high in the air, her body bent into a backward arch, her feet almost touching her head, as her partner, Robert Fairchild, ran across the studio. "Ooooooh!" shrieked the dancers in the room, half laughing, some hiding their faces in their hands, as Ms. Peck rocked dangerously forward, almost toppling over his head. Liam Scarlett, the British choreographer who is creating a work for New York City Ballet that will have its premiere on Friday as part of the New Combinations program, looked thoughtful. "Maybe if you hold her a little higher on the hips," he said, lifting Ms. Peck overhead with apparent ease, and contemplating the result in the mirror for a moment. "Are you going to put me down?" Ms. Peck said, giggling. It's not every choreographer who can show his dancers exactly what he wants, particularly when it involves holding grown women over your head. But it's not too long ago that Mr. Scarlett, 27, had a day job as a corps dancer with the Royal Ballet, where he shot to choreographic fame in 2010 with his first work for the Covent Garden main stage. That piece, "Asphodel Meadows" set to Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos, and a large scale, ambitious work for 20 dancers was a success. But it might have taken longer for Mr. Scarlett to gain an international reputation if Edward Villella, then the director of the Miami City Ballet, hadn't happened to watch a stage rehearsal just before the premiere. He immediately commissioned a work for Miami, and by the time "Viscera" had its premiere in January 2012, gaining critical praise, Mr. Scarlett was a hot property. Since then, he has retired as a dancer (he is artist in residence at the Royal Ballet); has created further ballets for the Royal, Miami City Ballet, the Norwegian National Ballet and the BalletBoyz; and has coming commissions for English National Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet and American Ballet Theater. But first there is City Ballet, a company that Mr. Scarlett said he had dreamed of working with ever since a 2009 stint at the New York Choreographic Institute, which City Ballet runs. "I owe Eddy Villella a lot," Mr. Scarlett said in an interview in a cafe close to Lincoln Center. "I was very aware of people watching how Miami would go, and everyone called within the next two weeks, which justified my decision that this, choreography, is really what I want to do." Given the success of "Asphodel Meadows," it seems surprising that Mr. Scarlett hadn't already made that decision. Like Christopher Wheeldon, he joined the Royal Ballet School at 11, and stayed there until graduation, when he was hired for the corps de ballet. He began to choreograph at the school and later for the company's annual Draft Works showcase, but he was an unknown to most of the ballet world until "Asphodel Meadows" appeared. Mr. Scarlett certainly looked confident and in charge during the two hour rehearsal of his second cast, which included a young corps dancer, Sara Adams, a late replacement for the injured principal dancer Janie Taylor. "Very good, Sara, really," he told her warmly after she finished a pas de deux full of tricky, slippery partnering, with Andrew Veyette. "To do that after you've only just learned it is amazing." Ms. Adams smiled shyly and looked at the floor. The dancers applauded. "He knows how to command the room and get what he wants," Ms. Adams said in a telephone interview a few days later. "He doesn't give general corrections, but ones that are specific to every dancer. I am a very technical dancer, and he keeps telling me not to make a correct position, but to keep everything very fluid, which I think is really going to help my dancing." That fluidity a tensile, elongated stretch and flow along with Mr. Scarlett's keen feel for inventive pas de deux work, was immediately apparent in the piece, which is set to Poulenc's organ concerto. (It's known to balletomanes as the score for Glen Tetley's 1973 "Voluntaries," a piece still performed regularly by the Royal Ballet.) "Liam is so musical," said Clotilde Otranto, the City Ballet conductor, who was at the rehearsal, the score before her. "Poulenc wrote this piece after the death of a friend, and it has this gothic, somber character, but also the influence of Stravinsky in the fast, ostinato repeats. I am amazed by how I hear the music in this choreography." Peter Martins, the company's ballet master in chief, said that he had "had an eye" on Mr. Scarlett since the Choreographic Institute. "I was contemplating inviting him back, and suddenly he was in Miami and everywhere, and I thought I had better hurry up," he said in a telephone interview. "I love to use the orchestra, and I said to him, 'You are coming to New York City Ballet, you should think big.' " Mr. Scarlett has taken Mr. Martins at his word. The ballet has three principal couples, a lone principal man and a corps de ballet of 10. Unusually, Mr. Scarlett is rehearsing two full casts, because, he said, there were so many dancers that he wanted to work with. "For me, making a ballet is all about specific dancers," Mr. Scarlett said, when asked if he was trying to make a work that uses the hallmark speed and attack that characterizes City Ballet's style. "There is some tight footwork in there, probably something of a Balanchine technique has come through, but I don't think about differences in style so much, because I'm just using what's there. And these dancers are so receptive, so intelligent, so driven." Mr. Scarlett added that he tended to create work "out of sync, all over the place," starting with the musical section that most interests him, then finding key moments throughout the rest of the score. "There are these epicenters of artistic inspiration, then it's about joining it up," he said. "When we get to the first full call, people are always confused, because they don't know yet where things come. I think it's good, because if you start in the middle, you can create a premonition of certain moments at the beginning, or echo later. You don't give away too much too soon." Although Mr. Scarlett comes from a strong narrative tradition at the Royal Ballet, his new piece, for which he has also designed the costumes, is abstract. But it contains suggestions of story, subtle hints of mood, memory and psychology in ways that are reminiscent of the choreographer Antony Tudor and, more contemporaneously, Alexei Ratmansky. "I think because I was using Poulenc again, I went back to the ideas I had when I did 'Asphodel,' " he said. "The Greek underworld, the sense of eternity, infinity. The people who were sent down to retrieve others, and maybe didn't return. But that doesn't matter so much. I always like to push things, try to push things, especially with partnering, and that can often generate something emotional as well. I want my steps to speak." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
On a drizzly Tuesday morning, Shiloh Shabazz, a wiry and excitable 71 year old, was talking about sleeping on subways, on and under park benches, and generally about being an addict and a nomad. "Crack was big. Base was big," he said of the time when he was using drugs. The shelters, he said, were rough. "I don't know if any of you are aware of those." It was a fair question, considering his audience was 16 to 18 year old students from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. The private school, in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, is not far from Honeywell Apartments, the low income housing complex where Mr. Shabazz was speaking. But he may have sensed it was a long way away. If the students were not aware of shelters and affordable housing before the trip, they were getting a crash course now. That same morning, a Fieldston parent, Adam Weinstein, who happens to be chief executive of the nonprofit organization that developed Honeywell, led a discussion about the evolution of public housing from tenements to towers. The students had also visited Lambert Houses, another low income complex, and would set off for Via Verde, a new subsidized, sustainable development. The trip was one of many making up Fieldston's City Semester, an experiential, project based class that integrates history, English, ethics, languages and science. "The idea is to use place as a primary source," said Andrew Meyers, chairman of City Semester and one of the eight teachers leading the class. Students have explored the Bronx and beyond. Lena Cole, a junior who lives in Chelsea, said, "In the semester, I've seen more of New York than in my whole life." Experiential, or hands on, learning is a buzzword in educational circles, the theory being that it helps students absorb information better and think more critically than they would in a classroom. "Aristotle said that which we learn, we only learn by doing," said Patrick F. Bassett, head of the National Association of Independent Schools. "Schools somehow found themselves migrating away from that." A few years ago, a group of private schools founded the Independent Schools Experiential Education Network. Lakeside School in Seattle (Bill Gates's alma mater) and the Watershed School in Colorado are among a growing number that are expanding their curriculums around experiential and expeditionary learning. "They are getting great results," Mr. Bassett said, noting that at the Watershed School, scores on a test of critical thinking were exceptionally high. "It's what colleges are looking for." City Semester evolved from other Fieldston courses, including one on the Bronx and another called "Inventing Gotham." But those were expensive, with the Bronx class including six teachers. Last year, Mr. Meyers and his colleagues secured a 10,000 grant from the venture grant board at Fieldston, which finances new initiatives. They used it to develop a class that all of them could teach. Students led walking tours through Harlem and the Lower East Side. They took sides defending or prosecuting the renowned urban planner Robert Moses in a weeklong trial about his role in the deterioration of the South Bronx. They went to Hunts Point in the Bronx at 4 a.m. to see the city's food supply arrive and to interview owners and workers, and a two day scavenger hunt took them from Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. On another rainy Tuesday, the students paddled canoes down the Bronx River on the first part of a two day trek. Traffic whizzed by as they approached the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Moses legacy that cleaved the South Bronx. Three students had never been in a canoe; others were experts from summer camp. Howard Waldman, (the "green dean"), who teaches science, called attention to the tweet of the yellow warbler, and students asked park workers on the banks of the river whether the Japanese knotgrass was hybrid or regular. The canoes gathered every 10 minutes so that groups could make presentations on topics like the creation of Shoelace Park, macroinvertebrates, and the birds and fish of the Bronx River. "Two million cubic yards of dirt was removed to create the park," Charlie Holtz, a junior from England, said. "If you want to make a park, why remove the dirt?" A conversation about the transformation of the Bronx followed. Soon after, a water fight ensued on the river. The class has created some scheduling conflicts. The students said that at least one math teacher was sick of their late returns from trips, and that a yoga class had to be created to satisfy a gym requirement. (Next year, a biking component will be added to the course to satisfy that requirement.) Some seniors complained that the class, an elective, had taken them away from their friends in their last semester. But students also said they preferred talking over listening to lectures, and completing projects over writing papers. "It's pushed me out of my comfort zone, socially and academically," Emma Bratman said. "I've made a lot of friends I wouldn't have known." On the river, the mood turned less chipper. A canoe with lunch disappeared for an hour, and the rain began to get to some of the students. "I've never been this miserable," one girl said. "It's probably acid rain," another said. Mr. Meyers remained upbeat. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
SAN FRANCISCO When the state backed Russian news channel RT became the first news organization to surpass one billion views on YouTube in 2013, it marked the achievement with a retrospective of its most popular videos and a special guest one of the Google owned site's senior executives. Robert Kyncl, a YouTube vice president who has since become its chief business officer, joined an RT anchor in a studio, where he praised RT for bonding with viewers by providing "authentic" content instead of "agendas or propaganda." But now, as investigators in Washington examine the scope and reach of Russian interference in United States politics, the once cozy relationship between RT and YouTube is drawing closer scrutiny. YouTube the world's most visited video site, owned by one of the most powerful and influential corporations in America played a crucial role in helping build and expand RT, an organization that the American intelligence community has described as the Kremlin's "principal international propaganda outlet" and a key player in Russia's information warfare operations around the world. While Kremlin aligned agents secretly built fake Facebook groups to foment political division and deployed hordes of Twitter bots to stoke criticism of Hillary Clinton, RT worked out in the open, bolstered by one of the largest online audiences of any news organization in the world and a prominent presence on YouTube's search results. As the presidential election heated up in the spring of 2016, RT consistently featured negative stories about Mrs. Clinton, according to United States intelligence officials. That included claims of corruption at her family foundation and ties to Islamic extremism, frequent coverage of emails stolen by Russian operatives from Mrs. Clinton's campaign chairman, and accusations that she was in poor physical and mental health. "More than half of American adults say they watch YouTube, and younger viewers are moving to YouTube at staggering numbers," said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russia's exploitation of social media platforms based in the United States. "YouTube is a target rich environment for any disinformation campaign Russian or otherwise that represents a long term, next generation challenge." Much like the Russian controlled pages on Facebook, RT's YouTube videos comply with YouTube's community guidelines, which cover things like nudity, copyright violations and promoting violence against a group based on race or religion. But not propaganda. RT's reach on YouTube 2.2 million subscribers, just slightly behind CNN stemmed from a long and mutually beneficial relationship between the news channel and the video site, according to current and former RT employees and technology industry analysts. YouTube had the vast audience and global reach that RT needed as it set out to become a worldwide alternative news source with influence and viewers beyond Russia's own borders. RT has YouTube channels in a number of foreign languages including Arabic, Spanish, German, French and Chinese. "RT management did view YouTube as hugely important to spreading content," said Liz Wahl, a former correspondent in the United States for RT who quit on the air in 2014 over concerns that the network was whitewashing the Russian annexation of Crimea. "Traditional television ratings weren't important because the aim was to get the messaging out through various digital and social platforms." The Russian channel was among the first news organizations to recognize YouTube's power and developed content intended to perform well on the platform. RT uploads videos frequently, sprinkling in buzzy viral videos of disasters plane crashes, tsunamis, a meteor strike to earn likes and longer watch times, which YouTube's algorithm rewards with better placement among search results and recommendations. "People come for the click bait material," said Bret Schafer, an official at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, the Washington based public policy research group. "And they eventually land on videos that the Kremlin wants them to see." While much of RT's traffic stems from nonpolitical videos, the channel's political and foreign affairs content ranks highly in many YouTube searches. Searches on topics on which the Kremlin is typically eager to promote its point of view American intervention in Syria, the Ukrainian civil war or the rise of Germany's far right AfD party will often turn up an RT video as one of the top results. YouTube also provided RT with the kind of perks it reserved for big publishers, including custom backgrounds for its channel in the early days and a "check mark" that designated RT as a verified news source. Until recently, RT was also among a select group of news organizations included in Google's "preferred" news lineup, granting them access to guaranteed revenue from premium advertisers. Those advertisers, in effect, subsidized Russia's international propaganda arm. Google dropped RT from the preferred lineup last month. Andrea Faville, a Google spokeswoman, said the decision was unrelated to the congressional inquiry, and that RT had been dropped as part of a "standard algorithmic update." But Google also noted that it was not placing any other limits on RT: The channel could still sell regular ads on its videos and the status downgrade only applied in the United States. Google later clarified that RT was downgraded in other markets, but it would not say which ones. Kirill Karnovich Valua, RT's deputy editor in chief, said the organization had not been informed of Google's decision and it was puzzled about why it was dropped despite being "one of the most watched YouTube channels in the world." "This speaks to the unprecedented political pressure increasingly applied to all RT partners and relationships in a concerted effort to push our channel out of the U.S. market entirely, and by any means possible," Mr. Karnovich Valua wrote in an email. Last month, RT said the Justice Department had demanded that a private company affiliated with RT America register as a "foreign agent" a term that dates back to a law originally enacted in 1938 to deter Nazi propaganda. On Thursday, after the deadline set by American officials had passed, an RT spokeswoman said that the news organization was "doing everything possible for RT to avoid having to register." Registration could impose voluminous disclosure requirements on RT, a particular burden for a media organization producing frequent content. Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, responded in more forceful terms: Should the United States impose restrictions on Russian media, Mr. Putin said last week, Russian would act "symmetrically and quite swiftly." RT's use of other technology platforms is also under investigation. Last month, officials at Twitter told a Senate Intelligence Committee that three RT accounts targeting an American audience with a combined following of roughly six million users had spent 274,100 to promote tweets in 2016. But none of RT's social media activities or its presence in cable and satellite TV lineups has delivered the impact of its YouTube channel. RT launched its YouTube page in March 2007, roughly four months after Google paid 1.65 billion for the fledgling video site. At the time, YouTube was better known for pirated content and videos of cute animals than news programming, but RT caught on quickly. The Russian channel recruited talent from within the burgeoning world of YouTube born media stars, people who had already shown a knack for creating viral or popular video content. One RT contributor, the British blogger Graham Phillips, built a large following on YouTube with videos from Ukraine's civil war, many of them critical of Ukraine's central government. RT often featured Mr. Phillips and at one point employed him as a part time freelancer before he was arrested and deported by Ukrainian authorities. His personal YouTube channel has earned more than 60 million views. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Walter E. Mattson, a former president and chief operating officer of The New York Times, who helped transform the newspaper with innovative labor agreements and new technologies, died on Friday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 84. The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, his wife, Geraldine Mattson, said. He had been living in a retirement home in Sarasota and died at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. A detail oriented production executive, Mr. Mattson was a tough, shirt sleeves decision maker who preferred rumbling pressrooms and clattering composing rooms to the executive suite. He had once been a printer, and while he had degrees in accounting, engineering and advanced management, he cultivated a working class persona, eschewing small talk, holding his dinner fork like a shovel and buying suits off the rack at Sears, Roebuck. For much of the 1970s and '80s Mr. Mattson was a right hand man to the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, a corporate equivalent of A. M. Rosenthal, the paper's powerful newsroom editor. Mr. Mattson negotiated labor contracts, spearheaded automation to replace production workers, diversified company media holdings, helped to revolutionize the paper's appearance and pushed technology to extend its circulation to readers across the nation. In their 1999 book, "The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times," Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones said that Mr. Sulzberger had long had his eye on Mr. Mattson as president of the company. "He liked Mattson's straightforward approach to problems, his encyclopedic grasp of business and production details, his stability and dedication, and his firm, decisive manner," the authors wrote. "He also knew that Mattson had the hands on operational experience he considered essential to lead a company of growing complexity." Mr. Mattson's first major coup as The Times's executive vice president and general manager was to negotiate a landmark 1974 agreement with the printers' union. It was the death knell for 19th century Linotype machines, which cast type in hot lead, and opened a new era of computerized electronic typesetting at the paper. In exchange, The Times guaranteed lifetime employment for 800 printers, whose jobs disappeared through attrition. The 11 year agreement, with Local 6 of the International Typographical Union it also covered The Daily News and its 600 printers gradually ended restrictive and wasteful union work rules that duplicated many printing tasks, and it enabled The Times to cut costs sharply at a time of stagnant circulation and advertising revenues in a national recession, which had hit New York City particularly hard. In the mid 1970s Mr. Mattson, working closely with Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Rosenthal, introduced striking and profitable changes in the newspaper's appearance and content, switching from eight news columns on a page to six, and expanding the weekday Times from two sections to four. The six column measure gave the paper an airier, more open and modern look, making it easier to read. But the changes were not just cosmetic. The four section paper was a radical transformation. The first part carried foreign and national news, while two sections were given to metropolitan and business financial news. The fourth inaugurated a cornucopia of feature sections that were different for each weekday: Sports on Mondays; Science on Tuesdays; Living on Wednesdays; a Home section on Thursdays; and Weekend, an arts and entertainment section, on Fridays. The Times also introduced four Sunday regional sections aimed at New York City's affluent suburbs in New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester County and Connecticut. The changes spurred advertising and feature articles on suburban localities, and on food, gardening, entertaining and other topics. Some critics said pieces on penthouse deck furniture and high end cooking undercut the paper's reputation for serious journalism, but defenders said they took no space away from regular news and brightened the tone of The Times. In any case, the sections proved popular with readers and advertisers, and some media historians called them collectively the most important redesign of the paper since its purchase by Adolph Ochs in 1896. In 1976, Mr. Mattson announced plans to computerize The Times's newsroom, and over the next two years writers and editors surrendered typewriters for bulky computer terminals that sped the processing of news. The last major labor management dispute negotiated by Mr. Mattson was an 88 day pressmen's strike in 1978 over demands by The Times, The News and The New York Post to cut the number of workers operating their presses. It ended with smaller staff reductions than the newspapers had sought and cost 150 million in advertising and circulation revenues. But the papers won concessions that insured long term profitability and eventual control over their own pressroom operations. Mr. Mattson brought another long planned project to fruition in 1980: a national edition of The Times, edited in New York and transmitted by satellite to Chicago for same day distribution in the Midwest. Two years later, The Times began beaming its national edition to California for same day distribution to major cities in 13 Western states. Two decades later, the national edition accounted for more than half the print paper's circulation. Mr. Mattson was named president when Mr. Sulzberger gave up the title in 1979 and formally took over the chief operating officer's duties that he had been handling for years. He went on to diversify company holdings with dozens of broadcast, newspaper and magazine properties in the 1980s. Before retiring, he was a forceful advocate of The Times's purchase of The Boston Globe in 1993 for 1.1 billion, a transaction much criticized in leaner years. (In 2013, The Times sold The Globe and its other New England media properties to John W. Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, for 70 million.) "Walt was a wonderful business partner for my father," Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., The Times's current publisher and chairman, said in an email on Friday. "He was kind and always straightforward, which Dad greatly valued, as did I in the few years we overlapped in management at The Times." Walter Edward Mattson Jr. was born in Erie, Pa., on June 6, 1932, to Walter Mattson and the former Florence Anderson. As a boy, he delivered papers for an uncle's weekly in Erie. His father worked for the National Biscuit Company and was transferred to various cities, including Portland, Me., where Walter Jr. graduated from Deering High School in 1949. After two years in the Marine Corps, he worked nights as a printer at The Portland Press Herald while attending Portland Junior College and then Portland University, where he received a bachelor's degree in business and accounting in 1955. He married Geraldine Anne Horsman in 1953. Besides his wife, he is survived by two sons, Stephen and William; a daughter, Carol Heylmun; a sister, Norene Hastings; eight grandchildren, and one great grandchild. In the mid 1950s Mr. Mattson was an advertising manager for a newspaper in Oakmont, Pa., and a production assistant at The Boston Herald Traveler. After earning an electrical engineering degree from Northeastern University in 1959, he joined The Times in 1960 as an assistant production manager. He became a vice president in 1970, attended summer advanced management programs at Harvard Business School and within three years was general manager, in charge of all business, marketing, circulation, personnel and production operations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
From left, "Anoranza" ("Longing"), from 1998, and "Nlloro" ("Weeping"), from 1991, by the Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayon, at El Museo del Barrio. Late last week, the Trump administration announced that it would be re abnormalizing the relationship between the United States and Cuba. A few days earlier, El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan opened "NKame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayon," reminding us exactly how much we have to gain from a free exchange of cultural energy with our island neighbor. Ayon was born in Havana in 1967 and died there, by her own hand, in 1999. As baffling and crushing as her end was, her life and career had been warm with forward motion. She began studying art at 12, went on to the renowned Instituto Superior de Arte, and joined its faculty after graduation. She began exhibiting in Cuba, and word went out. Invitations for exhibitions and residencies took her to Europe, Japan and North America. Fortunately, it was readily portable work, even though it was monumental in concept and scale. She had settled on printmaking early as a medium, one that had had a long and brilliant history in Cuba, but was out of fashion by the 1980s, when she picked it up. And she chose to specialize in one of its more esoteric and labor intensive forms: collography, a method of engraving that involved applying materials to a printing plate rather than digging into its surface. In Ayon's hands, the process became one of staggering virtuosity. She composed images from hundreds of pieces of soft paper, sandpaper, even vegetable peelings, fitting them all together on a cardboard sheet, like elements of a puzzle, then inking the sheet and running it through a hand cranked printer. (You can see her doing this in a video in the show.) The results were notable for their complex physical textures, suggesting embossing, embroidery and raised painting, though what's most striking on a first encounter is the work's scale. Some of her pieces are almost as big as murals, composed from as many as 18 separate prints, joined edge to edge to form panoramic narratives, sometimes with near life size figures. Their recurrent subject is fairly specific. Most of the narratives are derived from the Afro Cuban religion called Abakua, which came to the island in the 18th century with slaves arriving from what is now Nigeria and Cameroon. Their religion struck deep roots and is still practiced there. ("NKame" means "greeting" or "praise" in the Abakua language.) In some ways, her choice of it as a theme was odd. Abakua is a secret society restricted to male initiates, with a foundational story based on an act of female betrayal. In the very simplest terms, a woman named Sikan, a princess, while filling a water jug in the river, accidentally caught a miraculous fish that embodied the voice of an ancestor and guaranteed power to whoever heard it. She took the fish to her father, who swore her to silence, but she later passed the information to a leader of another community, for which she was condemned by her people to die. Why Ayon focused on Abakua isn't clear. She wasn't personally religious. (She referred to herself, when asked, as an atheist.) Nor did she seem to have any particular investment in Cubanidad, or Cuban identity, as an aesthetic phenomenon. In terms of audience reception, the subject, predictably, came with as many disadvantages as rewards. The Cuban government was suspicious of religious art of any kind. Outside Cuba, her work's perceived exoticism drew fascinated attention, but was also automatically slotted into a "Latin American" category that limited its reach. My guess is that along with appealing to her curiosity about culture, Abakua provided Ayon with an opportunity for invention. The religion has a strong oral tradition but fairly little in the way of two dimensional imagery. This left her free to invent some, and, in doing so, to create a complete visual drama, one with social and intellectual dimensions, a moral allegory about power and control, set in a male world, but with a woman taking the central role. I wonder if her work's allegorical nature decided her palette. A 1988 study for the earliest large print in the show, "La Cena" ("The Supper"), is in bright colors: yellow, green and pink. The final version, though, is entirely in black, white and tones of gray, as most of her subsequent art would be. As in Kara Walker's black paper silhouette work, the limited palette gives highly expressive narratives a little distance, makes them look stylized, choreographed, rather than fully naturalistic. The perceptual delay that results can heighten their mystery. 4 Other Names to Know in Latin American Art Paving the way. Frida Kahlo is internationally renowned for the emotional intensity of her work. But she is not the only woman from Latin America to leave her mark in the art world. Here are four more to know: 1. Luchita Hurtado. For years, Hurtado worked in the shadow of her husbands and more famous peers. Her paintings, which emphasize the interconnectedness of all living things, didn't get recognition from the art world until late in her life. 2. Belkis Ayon. A Cuban printmaker, Ayon was a master in the art of collagraphy. She worked almost exclusively in black, white and gray. She used her art, focused on a secret religious fraternity, to explore the themes of humanity and spirituality. 3. Ana Mendieta. Mendieta's art was sometimes violent, often unapologetically feminist and usually raw. She incorporated natural materials like blood, dirt, water and fire, and displayed her work through photography, film and live performances. 4. Remedios Varo. Though she was born in Spain, Varo's work is indelibly linked to Mexico, where she immigrated during World War II. Her style is reminiscent of Renaissance art in its exquisite precision, but her dreamlike paintings were otherworldly in tone. For Ayon, restricting herself to flat, monochromatic forms may have removed the burden of academic finesse. (She once claimed that she chose collography because she lacked drawing skills.) It certainly made her figures feel otherworldly, extraterrestrial. With their eyes staring from otherwise featureless faces, they're human, but not; culturally specific but broader than that, broad enough for her to introduce a range of cross cultural references. For all its beauties, the mythical world she half invented, half adopted is a disturbing one, with its drama of martyrdom, self assertion and redemption unresolved, though it's important to note that Sikan, though condemned to death, doesn't die. There is even the suggestion that the magic, and the power it generates, stays in her hands. What's not in doubt is the effect of the work: Visually, it's hypnotic. It absorbs your attention the way paper absorbs ink, gradually and lastingly. In a final series of comparatively small prints from 1997 and 1998, Ayon shrinks her panoramas to a tight circle, a kind of whirlpool of darkness, floating on a white ground. The titles sound as personal as diary jottings: "Let me Out!," "One Must Be Patient," "Groundless Fears." Dimly, in the center of each pool, you can make out a face of someone either surfacing or being pulled down. With Ayon, you want to be cautious about interpretation. There is nothing simple about her art, and research on it has only begun. This show, organized by Cristina Vives, in collaboration with El Museo; the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles; and the Belkis Ayon Estate, should help enormously. The estate, headed by Ayon's sister and niece, has carefully preserved the bulk of her art in the family home in Havana. It is thanks to them that it has survived. And it is thanks, at least in part, to the thaw in Cuba United States relations initiated by the Obama administration that the work has finally traveled here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In the eight months since the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, announced the first investigation of Exxon Mobil over its past research statements about climate change, nearly 20 other state attorneys general have voiced their support. But Exxon Mobil has increasingly been pushing back, fighting subpoenas in court and winning the support of lawmakers and friendly state attorneys general who have attacked the investigations as flashy political prosecutions dressed up as legal inquiries. The company, for example, filed a motion on Wednesday in federal court in Texas to block a demand for documents by the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, calling it a "fishing expedition." The filing argued that Ms. Healey was "abusing the power of government" to silence the company, and that she made statements in a March news conference with Mr. Schneiderman and other state law enforcement officials that suggested she had already made up her mind about what her investigation would find. On Thursday, Exxon Mobil followed up with a petition in state court in Massachusetts asking the court to recuse Ms. Healey's office from pursuing the investigation because "it is impermissibly biased" against the company. Exxon Mobil also argued that the state law that Ms. Healey relied in her investigation has only a four year statute of limitations. Alan T. Jeffers, a spokesman for the company, said, "The great irony here is that we've acknowledged the risks of climate change for more than a decade, have supported a carbon tax as the better policy option and spent more than 7 billion on research and technologies to reduce emissions." A spokeswoman for Ms. Healey, Cyndi Roy Gonzalez, said in a statement that Exxon Mobil's legal efforts are "an unprecedented effort to limit the ability of state attorneys general to investigate fraud and unfair business practices." The law enforcement officials' actions also have been questioned by Lamar S. Smith of Texas, the Republican chairman of the House Science Committee, and more recently by a coalition of state attorneys general who called the investigations "a grave mistake" that "raises substantial First Amendment concerns." Mr. Schneiderman has consistently argued that he is trying to determine whether the company committed fraud by telling investors and consumers one thing while its research showed the opposite. "The First Amendment does not give any corporation the right to commit fraud," said Eric Soufer, a spokesman for the attorney general. Mr. Soufer added, "Everything we've seen this week is ripped straight from the Big Tobacco playbook: delay, deflect, and distract from any serious investigation into potential fraud or corporate malfeasance." Mr. Schneiderman has called the pushback from the company and its supporters "First Amendment opportunism." State attorneys general have been at odds over many issues, including the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act and Clean Power Plan. But the sniping among conservative and liberal attorneys general has been especially heated over Exxon Mobil. The letter this week from the coalition of conservative state attorneys general, led by Luther Strange of Alabama, stated that Mr. Schneiderman and his allies are "using law enforcement authority to resolve a public policy debate" that is not suited to the courts. Exxon Mobil went to court in April to oppose subpoenas issued by Claude E. Walker, the attorney general of the Virgin Islands. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy group that also received a subpoena from Mr. Walker, filed a motion against him under a law limiting malicious or frivolous lawsuits intended to suppress speech. Mr. Walker, who had tried to reassure the group it was not a target, withdrew the subpoena. In a news conference on Thursday, Kent Lassman, the institute's president, said that "Maura Healey is on a witch hunt" and Mr. Schneiderman is involved in "a conspiracy to punish dissent." During Exxon Mobil's years of funding organizations that undercut climate science, the Competitive Enterprise Institute received about 2 million from the company and its affiliated foundations, according to records obtained by the Climate Investigations Center. "The reason C.E.I. is so up in arms about these subpoenas is their fear of revealing their dirty laundry," said Kert Davies, the founder of the investigations center, in reference to Competitive Enterprise Institute. Sam Kazman, the general counsel for the institute, said that the organization does not disclose donor information. He called Mr. Davies's suggestions about the group's motives "whistling in the dark." While it has fought some investigators fiercely, Exxon Mobil has provided hundreds of thousands of pages of documents in response to Mr. Schneiderman's office. And Robert C. Post, the dean of Yale Law School and a constitutional scholar, rejected the notion that Exxon Mobil is being gagged by the state efforts. "Debate is not being suppressed in any way by this," he said, adding that citing First Amendment rights has become "a weapon in the arsenal of those who would seek to unravel the regulatory state." "They're bringing it up because it sounds good." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
So you think you have finally found the right apartment? Not so fast. Many New York City landlords expect to see some hefty financial documentation from prospective tenants and their guarantors. To increase your chances of landing an apartment, brokers suggest collecting the following paperwork before even starting a search and, if possible, submitting it the same day you see an apartment. Here is what you will need: Pay stubs, if you are already working, typically for the last two months Otherwise, a letter from an employer stating your position, salary, length of employment or anticipated start date Tax returns for at least two years Recent bank statements, typically for the last three months Proof of other income, like revenue from stocks, securities, real estate or trust funds A credit report (many landlords require a score of at least 600 and would like to see 700; most will also do their own credit check, for which they charge a nonrefundable fee, usually included in the application fee) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"You're telling me that the king of a third world country runs around in a bulletproof catsuit?" a C.I.A. agent (played by Martin Freeman) asks a black market gun runner (Andy Serkis) in a TV spot for Marvel's "Black Panther" that was broadcast during the college football national championship on Monday night. The 90 second spot features almost as much action as Alabama's overtime win did, and even includes music by the game's halftime show headliner, Kendrick Lamar. In addition to Chadwick Boseman's titular superhero, also known as T'Challa, the trailer includes scenes of the primary villain, Erik Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan, who reunited with his "Fruitvale Station" and "Creed" director, Ryan Coogler, for the new movie. "I hope you're ready, bro," Killmonger, an expatriate who tries to stage a coup in the fictional African country of Wakanda, warns T'Challa. "I'm just getting started." There were also glimpses of Lupita Nyong'o (as T'Challa's ex lover, a spy), Danai Gurira (as his chief bodyguard), and Forest Whitaker (as an elder who warns him, "A war is coming"). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
THIS WEEK AT THE COMEDY CELLAR 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. Since the main character of "Standing Up, Falling Down" (above) isn't an A grade comic, don't expect to see any superb stand up sets in it. For that, consider "This Week at the Comedy Cellar," a series filmed at the Comedy Cellar in New York that features sets from some of the club's regulars. The show returns for a third season on Friday. Past episodes have featured Chris Gethard, Roy Wood Jr. and Bonnie McFarlane. THE HOURS (2002) 10:30 p.m. on TCM. Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep star in this adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize winning 1998 novel, about Virginia Woolf (Kidman) and two women whose lives imitate Woolf's art. Stephen Holden called it "deeply moving" in his review for The New York Times, adding that it is "an amazingly faithful screen adaptation of a novel that would seem an unlikely candidate for a movie." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
An African black rhino in the Singita Grumeti Game Reserve in Tanzania. Africa's rhino population is about 24,500 animals, but poaching remains a threat. In Africa, 892 rhinos were poached for their horns in 2018, down from a high of 1,349 killed in 2015. The decline in deaths is encouraging, but conservationists agree that poaching still poses a dire threat to Africa's rhino population, which hovers around 24,500 animals. Now, in the hopes of driving down the value of rhino horn and reducing poaching even more, scientists have created a convincing artificial rhino horn made from horsehair. "We're not trying to supplant boots on the ground, vigilant customs officials and protection of rhino habitat," said Fritz Vollrath, a biologist at the University of Oxford and senior author of the study, published in Scientific Reports. "But these measures alone so far have not been sufficient to save the rhino, so what we're doing here is bringing out a really good fake." The product that Dr. Vollrath and colleagues at Fudan University in China have produced looks identical to rhino horn under a microscope. It has a similar chemical signature and behaves like rhino horn when cut or shaved. It even smells the same when burned. With such properties, Dr. Vollrath believes his artificial horn could be used to covertly flood the market with a cheap, convincing replacement, reducing the demand that leads to rhinos being slaughtered. He also hopes it might provide an educational tool for "demystifying that rhino horn's something very special," he said. A number of experts pushed back, however, saying such a product is unnecessary and even dangerous. Some wealthy elites in China and Vietnam continue to give rhino horn as gifts and, in Vietnam, bring it to parties as a hangover preventive. In China, it's also carved into jewelry and ornate cups, and collected for speculation purposes. "What we've seen is that most rhino horn is now being used for status symbols," said Olivia Swaak Goldman, executive director of the Wildlife Justice Commission, a nonprofit organization that investigates wildlife trafficking networks. Status depends on rhino horn's exclusivity, high price and rarity things that Dr. Vollrath believes his artificial horn could undermine. "We are giving back street entrepreneurs the recipe for how to make fake rhino horns, so hopefully people will get it into the market," he said. Rhino horn, as Dr. Vollrath puts it, is "nothing but a tuft of nose hair stuck together with glue that comes out of the animal's nose glands." He and his colleagues chose horsehair as a basis for their fake rhino horn because horses are a close relative of rhinos. They cleaned and tightly bundled the hair, then bound it together with a mixture of liquefied silk, which stood in for the collagen found in rhino horn, as well as cellulose, which represented the plant material that gets rubbed in as rhinos sharpen their horns. Pembient, a Seattle based bioengineering company launched in 2015, is already exploring the development of 3D printed rhino horn. Matthew Markus, Pembient's chief executive officer, said he would be open to testing the new horsehair formula. "Their organic matrix is a neat innovation and definitely brings horsehair horn closer to being a good substitute for rhino horn," he said. But his company has also faced pushback from conservationists. Critics say that fake rhino horn risks stimulating demand for real horn, and that it would complicate policing. "There's already scarce resources for wildlife crime and we don't want to make it even more difficult for law enforcement," said Ms. Swaak Goldman, who works with governments and law enforcement agencies. Peter Knights, chief executive officer of WildAid, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending illegal wildlife trade, added that the market in Vietnam is already flooded with convincing fakes, like water buffalo horn, which accounts for up to 90 percent of what's sold as rhino horn. "It's widely known that there is a lot of fake product out there, so this experiment is already running," Mr. Knights said. Frederick Chen, an economist at Wake Forest University, said that there is more than one way to flood a market, however. "Conservation groups tend to clump different strategies under one roof and have a knee jerk reaction that they have to reject them all," he said. "But the dangers they point out don't apply to all strategies." Dr. Chen agreed that introducing a product marketed as an artificial alternative would risk driving up demand for real rhino horn. But covertly introducing a product that passes as real rhino horn but later reveals itself to have some undesirable defect horns that deteriorate after purchase, for example, or horns that, when consumed, trigger a stomach ache could ultimately undermine demand. "If you introduce quality uncertainty into the market, you are trying to create confusion and essentially destroy the rhino horn market," he said. For now, these ideas remain in the realm of theory and much of that theory goes against real world evidence suggesting what might happen if the market was flooded with fake horn, said Solomon Hsiang, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Hsiang cautioned, for example, that experiments trying to undermine black markets in elephant ivory by selling legal ivory backfired and ultimately lead to increased poaching. Engineering fake rhino horn "seems like an elaborate technological approach that is not without potentially serious risk," Dr. Hsiang said, when a much simpler strategy would be to focus on targeted demand reduction. According to Lynn Johnson, founder of Nature Needs More, a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce wildlife demand and supply, demand reduction campaigns should focus on top rhino horn users, who are usually wealthy, elite men. Dr. Johnson interviewed 20 such individuals in Vietnam and found that they do not fall for fakes: They take measures to ensure their purchase is genuine, including working with a trusted supply chain and requesting the rhino's tail as proof of provenance. They also told her that they view rhino horn as a luxury product that confers prestige. A 2018 study involving 30 Vietnamese rhino horn buyers found that most no longer believed it could cure cancer a newfangled use that became popular around a decade ago but they still sought it out as a symbolic final gesture to comfort terminally ill relatives. Belief in rhino horn's traditional medical properties also seems to be on the decline. A survey of 400 people in Vietnam carried out by WildAid in 2016 revealed that 23 percent thought rhino horn had medicinal value down from 69 percent in 2014. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
With many opera houses and concert halls, particularly in the United States, still closed by the coronavirus pandemic for months to come, the musical action has moved online. That's been the case since March, of course but as fall is upon us, artists and institutions are creating digital presentations with more care and intention. There's a flood of offerings out there. Here is a selection of 10 highlights coming in October. (Times listed are Eastern.) Few musical works are as strong and stark as "Coming Together," Frederic Rzewski's inexorable setting of a letter by Samuel Melville, one of the incarcerated men who died during the brutal crushing of the inmates' rebellion at Attica prison in upstate New York in 1971. The countertenor Reginald Mobley takes on the piece's key, calmly heart rending narrating role, on a program that also features songs and spirituals by Florence Price and Bach's cantata "Widerstehe doch der Sunde." ZACHARY WOOLFE Gustavo Dudamel's Los Angeles Philharmonic can be seen in half a dozen filmed concerts this fall on the orchestra's free Sound/Stage platform. This program, "Power to the People," blends orchestral and more intimate performances. It features the Los Angeles players in works by two Black composers: William Grant Still and Jessie Montgomery, as well as a set of songs by Florence Price, sung by the mezzo soprano J'Nai Bridges. SETH COLTER WALLS Oct. 13, 7:30 p.m.; 92y.org; available for one week. The 92nd Street Y is opening an enticing season of livestreams with a concert by this exciting quartet. On paper, a program offering works by Haydn and Mendelssohn might not seem so daring. But these superb players have chosen rarer fare, including Haydn's String Quartet in D (Op. 17, No. 6); four short pieces by Mendelssohn; and that composer's String Quintet in B flat, a restless score with a mournful slow movement and hurtling finale. (The violist Hsin Yun Huang joins for it.) ANTHONY TOMMASINI Folk songs, sweet strings, spoken text, a girls' choir and quirky electronics come together in Nathalie Joachim's charmingly understated yet unmistakably ambitious "Fanm d'Ayiti" ("Women of Haiti," in the kreyol language), featuring the Spektral Quartet and presented by Cal Performances. With sly loveliness, Ms. Joachim, a Haitian American composer, flutist and vocalist, sketches a whole universe, conjuring the stories of Haitian women and, as George Lewis observed in The New York Times, bringing "musical Minimalism home to the African diaspora from which it has drawn so much." ZACHARY WOOLFE Oct. 15, 7 p.m.; clevelandorchestra.com; available live, then on demand. For its virtual fall season, "In Focus," the Cleveland Orchestra is presenting five "episodes" on its new platform, Adella named after the group's founder, Adella Prentiss Hughes. December will bring a can't miss concert with John Adams and the pianist Vikingur Olafsson; but to start, Franz Welser Most leads a program of Respighi's third set of "Ancient Airs and Dances," a musical embodiment of grace, as well as George Walker's "Antifonys," played by the Clevelanders for the first time, and Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence." JOSHUA BARONE Oct. 22, 7:30 p.m.; dso.org; available live, then on demand. Take your pick among the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's well balanced programs this fall; there's not an uninteresting concert in sight. This one, led by Donald Runnicles, features a quartet by Carlos Simon and Benjamin Britten's early "Variations for String Orchestra on a Theme of Frank Bridge." The Simon, "An Elegy: A Cry From the Grave," is a solemnly lyrical and emotive reflection on, its composer once wrote, those killed by an oppressive power. At the time the piece was written, he meant Black Americans like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown a list that has only continued to grow. JOSHUA BARONE Oct. 23, 8 p.m., operaphila.org; available through May. Among American opera companies, only the Metropolitan so far has created its own streaming channel. The Met will have a fellow shortly, when the plucky Opera Philadelphia launches its own paid streaming app. In addition to showcasing past productions, there will also be new content like this opening night "recital and conversation" program, featuring the aesthetically wide ranging tenor Lawrence Brownlee. SETH COLTER WALLS | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Our weekday morning digest that includes consumer news, deals, tips and anything else that travelers may want to know. Your trip to the Greece may not be as worry free as you'd expected given the country's debt crisis. Two things to lift your spirits: the 60 euro cap on A.T.M. withdrawals will not apply to tourists issued cards from their home countries, and subway and bus service is free in Athens. Check our international news report for more updates. NEW WAYS TO SEE SIBERIA Siberia often conjures up images of extreme cold and isolation, but two new trips from the New York City based travel company Remote Lands show off the photogenic side of the 6,200 square mile region in northern Russia. The customizable itineraries, meant for spring, summer and fall, are "Classic Siberia," a 15 day journey beginning in the historical city of Irkutsk and continuing on to Lake Baikal, one of the oldest and deepest lakes in the world. A two night trip on the Trans Siberian Railway and a trek on the Chuysky Tract, the scenic route connecting Russia and Mongolia, are also included. Lake Baikal: Cruising the Blue Heart of Siberia is another option and involves eight days of sailing around the lake with highlights like exploring the island of Olkhon and experiencing a shamanic ceremony on its western coast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: General Motors announced fuel economy numbers Wednesday for its all new 2015 Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon midsize pickup trucks. The trucks equipped with a 305 horsepower 3.6 liter V6 engine, a 6 speed automatic transmission and rear wheel drive get an E.P.A. fuel economy estimate of 18 miles per gallon in the city and 26 m.p.g. on the highway. The 4 wheel drive models are 17/24. G.M. says it will offer a 2.8 liter turbodiesel option for the 2016 model year. (General Motors) According to a report from Cars.com, the base price for the 2015 Toyota Sienna minivan will jump 1,680 over the 2014 model year to 29,485, including an 885 destination fee. (Cars.com) Nissan announced this week that Jeremy Tucker, who has been a brand manager for Disney, Pepsi and Procter Gamble, would take over as marketing communications and media chief of its North American operation. Mr. Tucker's last position was with Disney's consumer products branch. Nissan said he was scheduled to begin his new job Sept. 22. (Market Watch) G.M. and Seeing Machines, an Australian technology company, said Monday that they planned to install equipment in G.M. vehicles over the next few years that would help prevent distracted driving. Composed of sensors and a warning system, the technology would detect the angle of the driver's head and eyes to determine the degree of distraction, issuing warnings when necessary. (CBS News) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The operators of Cornerstone Sonoma, a popular site for weddings in Sonoma, Calif., had plans in place for dealing with power outages. Pacific Gas Electric, the utility giant, has been preemptively cutting off power, eliminating the risk that one of its transmission lines would spark and lead to fires. Kristin Tice Studeman, a wine expert and writer, and Jake Greenblatt, who works in finance, stood this past Saturday under a huppah crafted in red, orange and green blossoms at Meadowood, a hotel and golf club in California's Napa Valley. The couple , who are from New York City, held hands and beamed as the rabbi declared, "We are standing in the Garden of Eden just as it was when the world was created. The electricity has just been hooked up, and God said, 'It was good.'" This was no metaphor. Since Oct. 9, much of Napa Valley and Sonoma, including Meadowood, had operated without power. It was a dry week with almost no humidity, and the winds were strong, gusting at times. Because these weather conditions were ideal for wildfires, Pacific Gas Electric, the utility giant, preemptively cut off power, eliminating the risk that one of its transmission lines would spark and lead to tragedy. With no electricity in guest rooms, the groom took a cold shower to prepare for a welcome dinner on Thursday, a fun affair with a waffle and chicken station. For the rehearsal dinner on Friday at Inglenook, a winery that was founded in 1879 and now owned by the film director Francis Ford Coppola, he showered at the pool. There he ran into Rabbi Elliot J. Cosgrove of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York in his pajamas (who was also showering there). Meadowood had generators to power public spaces, so the bride showered in the locker rooms by the pool and her hair was professionally styled in a corner of the resort's three Michelin starred restaurant . "We were looking at getting generators in from Los Angeles," said Ms. Tice Studeman, who is the founder of the Rose Project , an event series that includes dinners paired interesting rose wines. "My wedding planner bought every candle she could find. We were like, Maybe we will have a candlelit reception. As long as we could get everyone drunk on wine, we knew they would have fun." The power returned Friday evening, so all backup plans were abandoned. But the relief of all parties involved was evident by the ceaseless jokes during the festivities. "Is this a power couple?" asked the groom's father during his wedding toast at the reception held in a see through tent next to a pond with swans. "What can I say, Is this the power of love?" "We were lucky this weekend we only had one wedding a day usually it's four to six a weekend in October," said Katie Kristensen, the events director of Cornerstone Sonoma, a marketplace and garden events space in Sonoma. PG E released a list of counties where it might shut off power on Tuesday, but gave no definitive information. Some neighborhoods and counties had only a few hours' notice before the lights went off within 48 hours. These last minute power outages left couples, wedding planners, venues, lighting companies, caterers and others scrambling. Couples who could afford it threw more money at the problem. Sasha Souza, an event planner in Napa and Sonoma, staged a wedding, a winery event and a rehearsal dinner last weekend. Her wedding client spent 30,000 moving the ceremony from a church, which had no power, to the winery, where the reception was held. "We rented 200 extra chairs, built a huge ceremony arch, and added sound for the ceremony," she said. "We added a lot of extra things to make it look just as special, instead of putting them on a lawn with nothing." The church's power returned Friday morning, and the original plans were reinstated (some of the new flower arrangements could be repurposed but nothing else). Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Some places swallowed the extra costs for their clients. "Our clients pay their venue fee, and our goal is for them to have a beautiful experience at this amazing venue, so we just decided we were going to make this work," Ms. Kristensen said. She commissioned 5,000 in battery powered lighting, which was later canceled when the power returned. Water trucks were brought in to keep four acres of gardens thriving. She bought solar powered luxury portable bathrooms. "Many venues in Sonoma Valley have septic systems that need power to pump the wells," she said. "That was interesting to navigate." One of the most sought after commodities in wine country was not fine wine, but generators. They were sold out of stores by Tuesday, and couples brought them in from 500 miles away. Those who could find one paid heavily. "An 1,800 generator now costs 4,000," Ms. Souza said. Sondra Bernstein is the owner of the Girl and the Fig, a popular restaurant and catering company in Sonoma that was working four weddings in four different locations last weekend. Without water or power in her catering kitchen, friends came to the rescue. One offered her a kitchen with a generator to make wedding cakes. Another lent her a refrigerated truck in which to prepare food. "The community was amazing," she said. "It kept everyone sane." Wedding guests were also thrown into turmoil. Calistoga Motor Lodge and Spa, a quirky hotel in Calistoga where rooms come with hula hoops and tables that fold into camper beds, was one of the few places in the region with power Thursday morning. (It lost electricity Thursday night but only for a few hours.) Guests, spooked by the power outages, canceled reservations, which opened the way for others. Claire O'Neill, a financial planner based in Denver who was in Napa for a friend's wedding, got a last minute room at the property after her Airbnb rental lost power and running water (and two other hotels she called first were fully booked). While she was making the most of the hotel's facility like the mineral pools, staying there cost her 180 more than her original accommodation. "Other friends decided to stay in their Airbnb without power," she said. "I think they had fun having a flashlight party, but they all came to my room to get dressed for the wedding." Someone else who struggled to dress was Kacy Fowler , Ms. Tice Studeman's sister from Lakewood, Colo. "When I learned the power was out, I bought an adapter that plugged into the cigarette lighter in the car and has two outlets available," she said. Ms. Fowler dried and curled her hair in the car. "This was my sister's wedding. I did whatever it took." A few guests canceled because of the outages. "One had a newborn," Ms. Tice Studeman said. "I completely understood." The power outages have left wedding vendors contemplating whether October is still the best time for a California wedding. (Los Angeles had wildfires last week.) "I would hate for people to just freak out and go, 'Oh my God, we can't get married in October,' because that would be horrible," Ms. Bernstein said. "It's so beautiful here right now. But do we need to change our business model for October? Maybe." Some vendors claim this experience has left them more prepared for fall weddings. Ms. Souza said one of her most valuable wedding planning tools is now an app called Windy, which predicts the strong winds that lead to wildfires. "It looks like this same thing is going to happen, the 36 mile an hour gusts, on Sunday the 20th," she said. "This is just how it is going to be." "Knowing we are in fire season, we have now invested in better equipment and a better plan moving forward," Ms. Kristensen said. "We are booked next October so I feel good about that." The couples who went through this experience can't say with certainty they would choose to do it this way again. But they know they have a tale to tell. As Ms. Tice Studeman said, "It certainly was exciting. It definitely made me appreciate how my wedding turned out even more." Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In 1983, the year of its premiere, Lucinda Childs's "Available Light" was hailed as a breakthrough of formal beauty. Then, like most dance works, it disappeared. In 2015, it was revived and has been touring nationally and internationally to near universal acclaim. But it wasn't until Thursday that it arrived in New York, for a two night run at the Rose Theater as part of the Mostly Mozart festival. As an idea of order, it endures. In some ways, it has grown larger and more important, as the reputation and fame of Ms. Childs's collaborators has risen. The set is by the architect Frank Gehry, but rather than the spiraling steel that became his signature, there's an elegantly industrial doubling of the dance floor: a raised platform duplicating the stage at a higher level, backed by chain link fence. The music is by John Adams, his accurately titled "Light Over Water": waves of synthesizer and blasts of brass that give the whole 55 minute production a symphonic magnitude but also remind you, much more than anything else in the production, of exactly when it was made. Yet the idea of order here, the dominant vision, is the choreographer's. The vocabulary is the modest version of ballet that Ms. Childs adopted in the late 1970s, as she moved from the avant garde toward the mainstream, increasing her scale and adding music. Pivots, turns, hops, low swinging legs, jumps that are more horizontal than vertical: The materials are kept simple, standard and slightly soft, maintaining decorum while heightening intelligibility and focusing on design. After most phrases, the dancers reset to first position, arms at their sides. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The W.N.B.A. plans to hold its draft as scheduled in April, using video conferencing in hopes of recreating the moment so many athletes say they dream about: when a league commissioner hands them a jersey and their professional lives begin. "We want to make sure that the players who are the draftees get their moment in the limelight," W.N.B.A. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said in a phone interview on Wednesday from her New Jersey home, where she has worked remotely for nearly two weeks because of the coronavirus outbreak that has brought the sports world to a standstill. The draft is scheduled to be televised on ESPN at 7 p.m. Eastern time on April 17, with streams from players wherever they are and Engelbert "somewhere in New Jersey, announcing the draft picks live." "And that's an honor for them," she said. "So that while it'll be virtual, and I won't be with them, maybe they'll be with their families and could be streamed in at home." ESPN initially announced that the draft would air on ESPN 2, prompting an outcry on social media, including from Sabrina Ionescu, the Oregon star who is expected to be a top pick. The network changed its mind Thursday afternoon, as first reported by the Sporting News and confirmed by The New York Times. In a way, it's not much different from the usual draft teams are typically not all in the same place anyway but it presents an unusual blend of opportunity and challenge for the W.N.B.A. in what looked to be a pivotal year for gaining fans and raising its profile. This was to be the debut season of Ionescu. This year was also expected to bring a possible seventh straight gold medal for the U.S. women's basketball team at the Olympics and increased promotional and financial investment from the W.N.B.A. in its players. While the coronavirus pandemic has threatened the season, the league is keeping its options open. "One thing I learned is, don't take any plans off the table prematurely," Engelbert said. "Everything's changing hour by hour, if not day by day." No decision has been made about when or if the season will start this year. The regular season was originally planned to start May 15. For the league's coaches and general managers, the April 17 draft date will still allow them to finish scouting and arranging deals. Nicki Collen, the head coach of the Atlanta Dream, said that with the team staff living all over the country, much of the work was done by teleconference, anyhow. The Liberty have the first pick in the draft, followed by the Dallas Wings, the Indiana Fever, the Dream and the Phoenix Mercury. "Draft preparation has not changed too drastically, as video has always been an extensive part of the evaluation process," said Cheryl Reeve, the head coach and general manager of the Minnesota Lynx. Reeve, whose team has the sixth overall pick, said the cancellation of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament did affect how teams could prepare for the draft. "What we miss is watching the next class of W.N.B.A. talent rising up, making big plays to help her team win on a big stage," Reeve said. "But most of the evaluation work had already been completed prior to the N.C.A.A. tournament." As for underclassmen who wish to declare early for the draft eligible if they turn 22 any time in 2020 or if they are four years past their high school graduation date the deadline remains April 7. The league's dates for training camp to begin, April 26, and the regular season's tip in mid May, however, seem unrealistic, given widespread orders to stay home and limit contact with other people. Whether the league can play at all this year will be decided in large part by outside forces, like government and health officials who have urged against large gatherings. The N.B.A., whose team owners partially own the W.N.B.A., postponed its season on March 11 after Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the coronavirus. Engelbert was meeting with her team in the W.N.B.A. offices that night when she heard about the shutdown. But seeing how the virus was advancing, she had already begun planning for such an eventuality. The next morning, she checked in with Terri Jackson, head of the W.N.B.A.'s players' union, and started generating plans for a season delayed by 30 days, 60 days or 90 days. A day later was supposed to be a work from home test for league officials. Instead, it became the first day of a new reality, with everybody working from home. Should men's and women's pro seasons eventually start and overlap dates, Engelbert noted that there are just a few W.N.B.A. teams that play in N.B.A. arenas, making the N.B.A.'s plans less of a stumbling block than they would have been in the early days of the league, when more teams shared space. Only the Sparks (Staples Center in Los Angeles), the Lynx (Target Center in Minneapolis) and the Liberty (Barclays Center in Brooklyn) were scheduled to play in N.B.A. arenas in 2020. Even those overlaps could offer chances to expand the league's footprint, both by playing some home games in alternate venues or by pairing W.N.B.A. games in doubleheaders with N.B.A. games. "One of our transformational goals is to expand the fandom, expand the reach of the W.N.B.A. beyond our 12 cities to get more exposure to our players in our potential fan population," Engelbert said. "So we could actually be creative here and think about other cities." The postponing of the Tokyo Games also provides the league with three extra weeks this summer that had been off limits when the season was originally scheduled. The W.N.B.A. typically goes on a midseason hiatus in Olympic years so that its players can compete in the Games. The U.S. women's basketball team has won six consecutive gold medals, dating to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Playing games this year is paramount, Engelbert said. Even if the league must play in empty arenas for safety's sake, she said, she and her team are reimagining what experiencing live sports might look and feel like. It could mean playing games in one, centralized location that has been cleared for fans or playing in front of no fans in person but emphasizing other live forms of engagement, like social media. "Getting live sports back on television, I think we have almost a public service responsibility to do everything we can," Engelbert said. "Because it's clear that everybody's missing live sports." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
There's a fine line between tacky and spectacular. In creating costumes for Cher over the years costumes that often tell the story of a shy woman emerging triumphant from a chrysalis the designer Bob Mackie has kept on the right side of the line by making sure the level of craft supports the extravagance of the gesture. Sadly that's not the case with "The Cher Show," the maddening mishmash of a new musical that opened on Monday at the Neil Simon Theater. Except for the dozens of eye popping outfits Mr. Mackie gorgeously recreates for the occasion, it's all gesture, no craft: dramatically threadbare and surprisingly unrevealing. That's too bad because, reading between the paillettes, you get the feeling that the 72 year old singer actress survivor is a good egg: self mocking, plain speaking and a hoot. Whether that's enough to build a Broadway musical on is another question, one "The Cher Show," striving to be agreeable, never gets close to answering. Rather, its energies are waylaid in trying to solve the puzzle of its own concept, of which weird vestiges remain after a tryout in Chicago. The plan was to explore Cher's life in the form of a television variety show like the ones she starred in with or without her first husband, Sonny Bono between 1971 and 1977. That doesn't sound like a bad idea to me, but there's no way to know. In its current state, you can't distinguish scenes meant to borrow comedy hour elements from those meant to be taken at face value. Cher's difficult marriage to the Nashville born rock musician Gregg Allman is covered in a ludicrous saloon sketch interspersed with bad jokes. Cher to Allman: "Are you from Tennessee, 'cause you're the only 10 I see." And back story is handled with the subtlety of a backhoe. You can almost hear a groan on the laugh track when, later in the show, Cher asks Sonny's ghost, "Are you really dead?" Complicating matters is the decision to confine such an unconventional figure as Cher in the straitjacket of the biographical jukebox musical particularly the tripartite diva subgenus most recently botched by "Summer: The Donna Summer Musical." We need not rehearse the traps inherent in the genre, except to say that "The Cher Show" falls into all of them. It wastes so much time hammering its biographical bullet points and tunestack into place, despite logic or chronology, that it never seems to notice the unintelligible result. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter Anyway, unless you are Edward Albee, that three ages of woman gimmick is subtractive, not additive. In giving us a kaleidoscope of Cher avatars called Babe, Lady and Star, the book writer Rick Elice, who also scripted "Jersey Boys," creates three one note characters from what might have been a single rich one. Babe, the "sweetheart" spirit of Cher in her teens and early 20s (Micaela Diamond), and Lady, the "smart mouth" Cher of the next few years (Teal Wicks), are especially flat, as is usually true of innocents being crushed by forces they don't yet understand. It's only with Star the "bad ass," mature Cher that we get a character who rewards our attention. She also rewards the efforts of the fine singing actress Stephanie J. Block; once Ms. Block takes over it feels as if Star has swallowed Babe and Lady whole. Not only does she ace Cher's vocal inflections and physical mannerisms, including the half mast eyes, the arm akimbo and the dancing from the hair up hauteur, but she somehow integrates them into a portrait of a woman at odds with the very dream that sustained her. The dream, of course, was stardom, and "The Cher Show" does not seem to know what it thinks about that. Growing up poor, outcast and painfully shy, little Cherilyn Sarkisian nevertheless clung to her mother's mantra: "The song will make you strong." We see no evidence of this, especially during the years when most of her songs were written by Sonny, the annoying pipsqueak who also cut her out of the ownership of their mutual endeavors. The effort of husbands, directors and network executives to control and profit from Cher is a powerful and timely subject that the book keeps raising then dropping, or turning into jokes. (It's perhaps worth noting that Cher is one of the show's above the title producers.) Though Jarrod Spector gets Sonny's Napoleon complex just right, he also gives him an adenoidal honk so exaggerated as to render him cute and harmless. Even so, the book hedges. "Are we making Sonny seem too horrible?" Babe asks. "'Cause I don't wanna do that." Why not? Must a musical intended for popular consumption defang the anger of its powerful subject and, in doing so, whitewash her most interesting problems? A scene in which Cher, who's dyslexic, struggles to read an audition script for a Broadway play is well handled by Ms. Block, but omits the fact that the resulting production was an infamous flop. At least the musical numbers are gleefully staged; the director Jason Moore and the choreographer Christopher Gattelli keep the super buff ensemble whirling constantly on pop pastel sets under sparkly lights. The songs are beautifully arranged by Daryl Waters and sung better by the three lead women (and by Emily Skinner, in the thankless role of Cher's mother) than Cher usually did. In any case, they will surely satisfy die hard fans. For occasional admirers, though, they will more likely mystify, having only the most notional connection to the story. Cher's 1989 comeback hit, "If I Could Turn Back Time," is grabbed as the opening solely because of its title; her entire movie career is crammed into a version of "The Beat Goes On" with new lyrics like "There's Mike Nichols standing at the door!" This is where the jukebox problem and the star splitting problem converge with the craft problem. With too many character arcs and agendas to serve three Chers, several careers, 35 songs or parts thereof the show's creators can serve none well. And yet despite its total ham handedness, "The Cher Show" is not as unpleasant as slicker jukebox musicals that valorize thugs or bulldoze the audience. Yes, it argues way too hard for Cher's significance a significance it would be better off merely assuming and then complicating. And yes, it gets whiny just when you want it to get fierce. But it's not cynical. It even has moments in which, like Cher herself, it's strong enough to tease its own conventions. At one point, Star crows to Babe and Lady, "It's so much easier to talk to myself when I'm all here." The solid laugh Ms. Block gets from that line should have been a clue. However gorgeously attired, a biomusical divided against itself cannot stand. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In their travels, a confused Jean and a sober, capable Cal discover the baby is a real crier. They stop by the side of the road to settle the kid down, then fall asleep themselves. They're roused by a cop, who among other things, doesn't like the sight of a Black man in the driver's seat with a white woman in the passenger's seat. "I'm Your Woman" unfolds these tense situations in a paradoxically languorous style. Hence, the near misses with death start to feel like so many red herrings. The movie's vagueness wants to appear purposeful, reflecting Jean's disorientation, but it's mostly confounding. Brosnahan, when she's not playing panicked, largely enacts Jean as an irritated cipher. "I am so sick of everyone telling me what to do," Jean grouses at a certain point. But the evidence that is, the characters killed every time she acts on her own accord suggests that she just might want to take some direction. This is one of those movies in which the protagonist is shown time and again to be grievously ill equipped to handle danger, until the point when she suddenly and decisively performs with bring down the house competence. It's a tired trope that underscores why this ambitious movie doesn't work. I'm Your Woman Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Some people show love through gifts, through kind words, through time and touch. Helping your estranged spouse cover up a murder? That works, too. In Lizzie Vieh's grim comedy "Monsoon Season," produced by All for One Theater at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Danny (Richard Thieriot ) and Julia (Therese Plaehn ), are a recently separated couple, scrambling for subsistence in a rain soaked, cactus strewn Phoenix. They share custody of a young daughter, though "custody" is a very loose term here. Structured as dual monologues first Danny's, then Julia's this is theater as ethical limbo. How low can these characters go? Very. Danny works a dead end computer support job and moonlights as an Uber driver to make child support payments. He likes to chat with his fares about drug cartel beheadings, which keeps his Uber ratings low. The persistent nosebleeds don't help. Danny can't sleep the lights from the neighboring strip club shine into his lousy apartment rendering him narcoleptic and maybe also insane. (You have to be at least a little crazy to think a hermit crab will make a decent pet.) His hobbies include stalking and making threatening phone calls. Here's how he sweet talks a stripper: "I keep having a nightmare where my wife tosses me a water balloon full of blood." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
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