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The outbreak would become "China's Chernobyl," some headlines and U.S. politicians screamed at the time, a societal and political meltdown that would expose the regime's structural bankruptcy and fatally undermine Mr. Xi's standing with both the party and the people. Ten months later, Mr. Xi seems to be getting his way on nearly all fronts. The C.C.P. recently held its semiregular plenum of the Central Committee, the 370 odd member body that formally approves major decisions, such as the country's five year economic plans or the choice of top leaders. In years past, observers of the gathering would typically try to unearth the hidden meaning of top level personnel moves or any signs of shifting power dynamics between long jostling factions, such as the China Youth League or the so called Shanghai Gang. The pundits never had much hard evidence to go on. Communist habits die hard: Delegates are locked in at the gathering's venue for several days, and all media are excluded from the event. But for years, there were at least visible signs of jockeying and horse trading among political clans with links to past leaders and others with revolutionary pedigrees. This year, though, no one has even bothered to do much of a Youth League vs. Shanghai Gang head count. The longer Mr. Xi stays in office, the less the old factions and clans matter. His predecessor, Hu Jintao (a former leader of the Youth League), has barely been seen outside of ceremonial occasions since he handed all of his positions to Mr. Xi in late 2012. Mr. Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin (the titular head of the Shanghai Gang), who maintained influence over senior appointments and the military during Mr. Hu's tenure, is now an ailing 94, and he and his acolytes have been kept in their place by the threat of anti corruption investigations, should any of them be tempted to push back. And now, too, Mr. Xi's strength has only been reinforced by the coronavirus pandemic. After early cover ups of the outbreak in Wuhan, the Chinese government deployed the authoritarian tools at its disposal very effectively. Unencumbered by the messy discussions that have bogged down some democracies, China promptly closed provincial borders, stopped domestic travel, shut down businesses and confined millions of citizens to their homes measures that were implemented firmly thanks partly to the state's surveillance capacity. A crisis that risked looking like a systemic meltdown was soon recast as a battle of national will and patriotism of the rally around the party, more than rally around the flag, kind. Ren Zhiqiang, the real estate tycoon known as "Big Cannon" Ren, called Mr. Xi a "clown" during the early, difficult stages of the coronavirus outbreak. In the past, Mr. Ren's excellent connections in the party had afforded him protection for his outspokenness. Not this time. He was investigated for corruption, expelled from the C.C.P. and in September sentenced to 18 years in prison. By then, Mr. Xi and the party were enjoying a major propaganda windfall. The population could readily see how the coronavirus had largely stopped spreading in China, whereas a mess was unfolding, again, in the United States and many European democracies, as new outbreaks were about to force some of those countries back into lockdown. China's economy grew by 4.9 percent in the third quarter of 2020, and some economists project that it may soon return to pre pandemic growth rates. The intensifying confrontation between China and the Trump administration has only played into this narrative, allowing Mr. Xi to portray various policies as necessary measures in an existential struggle against an implacable enemy dead set on destroying China. China's state media were effusive at the close of the recent plenum, lauding the country's leaders for "injecting certainty into a turbulent world." The official communique released after the meeting stated that China must "comprehensively strengthen training and preparedness" in the military a notable injunction since post plenum statements rarely mention war readiness. Mr. Xi is also doubling down on efforts to make China self reliant in key technologies. In a speech published recently in the party magazine Qiushi, Mr. Xi called on China to forge "killer technologies" and protect itself against possible disruptions of foreign supplies. China is not decoupling so much as it is de Americanizing. Although that shift was accelerated by the Trump administration's own policies, the election of Joe Biden as the United States' next president is unlikely to fundamentally change matters in the near future. The trade war with America has already given momentum to Mr. Xi's domestic economic policy, which is something of a balancing act between reinforcing the state sector while encouraging the benefits created by vibrant private businesses. Some of Mr. Xi's chief economic advisers like Liu He, a vice premier; Yi Gang, the governor of the People's Bank of China; Guo Shuqing, the chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission are closely aligned with the pro market factions in economic policymaking. But Mr. Xi seems to be pushing for the state and the private sectors to cooperate in a kind of hybrid economy designed to serve the party's interests first and foremost. Private companies are allowed to grow and prosper, but they face increasing demands from the state. Not only does the C.C.P. require that committees of party members be set up within private companies; those committees are now expected to have a say in major aspects of the businesses. In this way and others, the plenum has confirmed the ideological pillars of Mr. Xi's rule, set out most notably in the now all pervasive "Xi Jinping Thought," the president's program for strengthening the party and the country, as well as his own rule. This reassertion of hard core principles also helps soothe the angst of the conservative constituency within the C.C.P. in Chinese political parlance, "the left" which has long been critical of China's capitalist excesses. Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader from the 1970s through the late 1980s, had said that China should become an advanced state by 2050. Now that timetable has been accelerated. The new target for completing the "socialist modernization" of China code for building it into a wealthy and powerful country on par with the United States set out at the recent plenum is 2035. Mr. Xi will be 82 then, but he could quite conceivably still be in office, or at least in power behind the scenes. According to the conventions of Chinese politics, Mr. Xi already should have named his successor and be preparing to step down at the next party congress, scheduled for late 2022. He has not done so. Instead, he has removed formal constraints on the length of his tenure, such as term limits. And here lies the paradox of Mr. Xi's rule. Now that he is so firmly in charge of the party, with no clear rivals and no known succession plan, he is also setting the stage for a full blown crisis of leadership in the future. The greatness of Mr. Xi's power is its greatest weakness. Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, is the author of "The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers" and "Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Gucci, Italy's greatest fashion success story and a brand whose renaissance has become a model the whole industry wants to emulate, is also being investigated as perhaps among its biggest tax evaders. The Italian tax police searched the so called Gucci Hub, the 377,000 square foot campus in Milan that is home to over 250 employees, last week, as well as Gucci's offices in Florence. The search was part of a criminal investigation into the brand by the prosecutor's office in Milan. The Italian newspaper La Stampa reported that the authorities were looking into whether Gucci should have paid as much as 1.3 billion euros, or 1.54 billion, in past taxes, a figure confirmed by a person briefed on the inquiry. That would be among the largest tax bills to hit any brand in Italian fashion history, and among the largest bills ever in the country. In a statement, the company said: "Gucci confirms that it is providing its full cooperation to the respective authorities and is confident about the correctness and transparency of its operations." At issue are Gucci's long established Swiss operations. The prosecutor's office, Italy's white collar criminal authority, says that Gucci declared profits in Switzerland that should have been declared in Italy. The Swiss tax authorities tend to tax companies at a more favorable rate. The inquiry is the latest in a string of tax investigations in Italy against prominent companies. Google settled a tax bill with the Italian authorities this year for 334 million; in 2015, Apple settled for around 350 million. It is also the latest in a series of investigations into Italian fashion brands, most of which were settled by the companies involved to avoid expensive, extended litigation and the tarnishing of their image. Giorgio Armani, for example, agreed to pay 373 million in 2014; Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, paid a reported 571 million in 2013; and Bulgari settled for 78.6 million in 2015. Dolce Gabbana spent seven years fighting accusations that it created a Luxembourg based company to shelter its profits. Though the brand and its owners, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, were originally convicted, in 2014 the Court of Cassation in Rome, Italy's highest court, cleared them of all charges. Even on such a list, however, Gucci's case stands out, because of the extremely large sum involved; the fact that the fashion brand is owned by Kering, the French luxury and sports lifestyle group that also owns Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, among other names; and Gucci's reputation as the fairy tale of fashion. (Kering declined to comment further.) Gucci's astonishing recent growth 48 percent in comparable year on year sales in the first quarter of 2017, 39 percent in the second quarter and 49 percent in the third has made both the chief executive, Marco Bizzarri, and the creative director, Alessandro Michele, the toast of the industry. Gucci was ranked 47th on Forbes's Most Valuable Brands list this year, with a value of 12.7 billion as of May. Last year at the Fashion Awards in London, Mr. Bizzarri was given the International Business Leader award, and Mr. Michele won the International Accessories designer award. The same year, Mr. Michele also won the International Award at the Council of Fashion Designers Awards in New York. It may be exactly that halo that caused the prosecutor's office to focus on the brand. "They could become the poster child of a new world order of tax avoidance," said Leopoldo Zambeletti, an independent strategic adviser and former banker at JPMorgan Chase. "What better way to show you mean business than to take on the biggest, shiniest name?" Luca Solca, head of luxury for the investment firm Exane BNP Paribas, was more sanguine. "The Italian tax authorities have been challenging a number of tax optimization frameworks the case of Luxottica, Dolce Gabbana and several others come to mind with different levels of success," he said. Noting that Gucci had established significant operations in Switzerland, he added: "I presume that this is one legitimate reason why their tax rate is lower. I'm expecting a measured reaction."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Without Charles Lippincott's groundbreaking approach to publicity, there is a good chance that far fewer people would have flocked to a film set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." That film, of course, was "Star Wars," George Lucas's 1977 space opera starring Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, which not only became a box office smash but also grew into one of the most successful franchises of all time. But before it was released, no one knew if there would be much of an audience for it. Mr. Lippincott set out to build one. He began promoting "Star Wars" more than a year before its release date, arranging for tie ins with Marvel Comics and building enthusiasm by courting aficionados of science fiction and comic books at conventions. Sometimes he brought along Mr. Hamill, the little known actor who starred as Luke Skywalker. His approach, unheard of at the time, has since become de rigueur.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The fashion designer and author of the new memoir "I.M." likes his literature "sort of plain": "Style is suspicious to me in general. I think that's true about my taste in everything. Food. Decor. Clothes." What books are on your nightstand? "The Portrait of a Lady" and all the rest of Henry James, including a ravishing novel about him called "The Master," by Colm Toibin. "Dr. Faustus," by Thomas Mann. (A lot of Thomas Mann on my nightstand. "Buddenbrooks." "The Magic Mountain." Short stories.) "Austerlitz" and "The Rings of Saturn," by W. G. Sebald. I have a huge nightstand! Also I'm very possessive about books and I don't necessarily edit. Things just pile up. I keep a broad selection of Mark Twain. Volumes of Tolstoy and Flaubert. Dawn Powell and Philip Roth. Some Seamus Heaney and Whitman. And I change my mind a lot. I like things and then I remember I like other things better. What's the last great book you read? "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" (Vol. 2 of "In Search of Lost Time"), by Marcel Proust. I'm in the midst of reading the entire series and it's really daunting and inspiring, not to mention time consuming. So in between volumes I read stuff that collects and I'm a little late. I'm just getting to what everyone was talking about last year. For instance I just read a beautiful novel about Lorena Hickok and Mrs. Roosevelt called "White Houses," by Amy Bloom. Also "A Little Life," by Hanya Yanagihara. What should we read if we want to learn something about fashion? What's your favorite book no one else has heard of? There's a series of novels by E. F. Benson about Mapp and Lucia, set in the fictional town of Tilling, which comes to mind as being obscure ish. But then I found out there was a monthly newsletter published by the Tilling Society, which I subscribed to for a while until the society ceased publishing it. But I guess that means masses of people know about these books already! 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. Which writers novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets working today do you admire most? Impossible to really narrow this down, but here's one pass: Colm Toibin. Anne Carson. Haruki Murakami. A. M. Homes. Dave Eggers. Tony Kushner. Andrew Solomon. Pete Wells. Alex Ross. Maira Kalman. Whose opinion on books do you most trust? I trust my friends who talk about books they're reading. My best friend, Mark Morris, who gives me books to read when we collaborate, some of which I have yet to return. I also listen to my friend the interior designer Robert Couturier, who reads everything printed. He's another insomniac with very similar tastes in literature to mine. He recommended the beautiful Patrick Melrose novels, which I devoured a few years ago. Also he introduced me to someone called Caroline Weber, whose book about Marie Antoinette, "Queen of Fashion," I'd enjoyed 10 years ago and who's recently been a guiding light in my pursuit of Proust. Her book "Proust's Duchess," about three women who were models for the Duchesse de Guermantes, is a masterpiece. Also I listen to my bridge playing friends Choire Sicha, Dale Peck and Richard Desroche. As bridge players we share a careful skepticism about everything, including literature. Rather than recommendations, those guys tell me which books I don't have to read. I read at night when I'm supposed to be asleep. I read in the car on my way to QVC. I know a lot of people get carsick from reading, but I get carsick if I'm not reading. What moves you most in a work of literature? For me literature is most effective when it's sort of plain. I like "unstylish" writers. I think of how much I love the book "Stoner," by John Williams. And Raymond Carver makes me cry. I make exceptions to this rule about stylish writers: I love Joyce Carol Oates. And Fitzgerald. And Gertrude Stein. Also brevity and simplicity are not the same things. I never adored Hemingway. And often lengthiness can be the absolute soul of wit, as in Proust or Dickens. I have a difficult time reading poetry (I'm much better when someone reads it to me) but when I do, usually those ideas about unstylish writing apply. I love Mary Oliver. I love Anne Carson. Style is suspicious to me in general. I think that's true about my taste in everything. Food. Decor. Clothes. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? I never thought of myself as someone who reads within genres but since you asked, it occurs to me that I really love diaries. One of the most perfect books ever written is Dawn Powell's "Diaries." Noel Coward's "Diary" is so funny. Samuel Pepys. Leo Lerman's "The Grand Surprise." Also I adore reading about food. I love cookbooks. I love compilations of old food writing; A. J. Liebling, Ruth Reichl; one of my "nightstand" books is something called "Life Is Meals," by James and Kay Salter. I just read a wonderful book called "The Gourmand's Way," by Justin Spring. The only upsetting thing about it was how good a case he made to discredit certain aspects of M. F. K. Fisher, whom I revere as a god. I stay away from popular novels. Many of them seem like premeditated screenplays. Unless three or four people recommend it, it's best to wait for the streaming series. How do you organize your books? I have massive piles of books, things people send me or that I come across in bookstores, like everyone's favorite place Three Lives. These books collect either in my bedroom in N.Y.C. or on the coffee table in Bridgehampton. I rifle through those piles till I'm sufficiently intrigued to start reading. For every three books in that pile, one gets read. Do any writers bring an especially strong sense of fashion or style to their literature? Proust refers a lot to clothes and decor and food. But especially color, which I think a lot about when I read. Whether it's a color specifically described as in the color of Odette's lingerie, or a color suggested by the subtext of any book, it's something inexplicable, like music that suggests colors which come to define a work. I see color a lot when I listen to music and when I read. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? I have an enormous number of books about the game of bridge (which might surprise some people who think I'm a lousy bridge player!). Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? I love " Memoirs of Hadrian," by Marguerite Yourcenar. In that book the emperor Hadrian talks about being an insomniac, sitting up nights writing while everyone else is asleep. Years ago when I read that I stopped hating being awake at night. I also remember being very inspired by Becky Sharp when I read "Vanity Fair" a long time ago. She's my opposite in that she never worries. Also she's very three dimensional as a character. Neither good nor villainous. As for antiheroes. I love Lady Macbeth. I love Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes novels, elusive as he is. Dracula is one of the great characters of all times. Just a fun guy. I love "The Master and Margarita." In that book, which on the surface is about good and evil, there seem to be no bad or good characters, just images. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I don't remember reading as a child. When I was 3 1/2 I was hospitalized with spinal meningitis and there was one book (ironically I can't remember which one) that was read to me so many times that I memorized it. I even memorized where the pages were turned. I fooled the adults, who were astonished because they thought I could read. I remember the "Madeline" series by Ludwig Bemelmans because my mother read it to us when we were really young. Also the Dr. Seuss books which I consider masterpieces. Also the wonderful books about Eloise. But they were read to me. I do remember not liking Maurice Sendak as much as everyone else. I read Roald Dahl late in the game as a young adult to see what I missed and I adored it. When I was in grade school my mother started giving me grown up books to read. I remember she gave me "The Godfather" when I was 11, which I loved, and a book called "Earthly Paradise," by Colette, when I was 12, around the time of my bar mitzvah. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Humor is really important to me, especially at dinner, so I would invite Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde. And David Sedaris. I think he cooks too. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? I never quite grasped Kurt Vonnegut. I tried a few books and couldn't do it. I think you have to be heterosexual. Recently I tried "The End of Eddy," which was gripping, but there was a lot of graphic violence so I abandoned it. Whom would you want to write your life story? What do you plan to read next? Before I embark on "The Guermantes Way" (Volume 3 of "In Search of Lost Time"), which will preclude me from reading anything else for four or five months, I have these books lined up: "The Charterhouse of Parma," by Stendhal; "Upstream," by Mary Oliver; "The Mighty Franks," by Michael Frank; "South and West," by Joan Didion. Also, I've had "The Origins of Totalitarianism," by Hannah Arendt, on my pile for years. I might save that till after Proust entirely.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
SAN DIEGO To be the best, you have to beat the best. That's what Justin Rose did over the past four days to win the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines, protecting his status as the world's top ranked golfer. After a shaky start Sunday that included three bogeys over his first five holes, Rose recovered to shoot a three under par 69 and beat his close friend Adam Scott by two shots. Rose conquered a field that featured 12 of the top 20 players in the world rankings to record his 10th PGA Tour victory, passing Nick Faldo for the most tour wins by a player from England in the modern era. Rose, 38, finished with a 72 hole total of 21 under 267, a tournament record since the South Course was redesigned in 2003 and one shot off the overall record of 22 under shared by Tiger Woods (1999) and George Burns (1987). Scott birdied the final four holes to close out a 68 and finish at 19 under. Hideki Matsuyama (67) and Talor Gooch (68) tied for fourth at 16 under. The scores were unusually low because recent rain had softened the greens, and there was very little wind coming off the Pacific Ocean.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Caddebostan Dalyan Park, on the Asian side of Istanbul, where lounging on the grass is a local pastime. The Asian side of the Turkish city, oft overlooked by travelers, provides plenty of charms and a better chance to get maximum enjoyment from a minimal amount of lira. Istanbul, famously, is a city that straddles two continents. And it's clearly the European side of the Bosporus that attracts the bulk of the city's tourism in part because it's home to the ancient city's big league attractions, like the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. But the Asian side of the strait, oft overlooked by visitors, is worth exploring in its own right, as I found when I visited this past June with my girlfriend, Sarah. I felt like I could have spent weeks exploring Kadikoy, a huge seaside district of over half a million people with great shopping, incredible food, colorful street art and an energetic and progressive sensibility. Even better, from where I was based, in the bohemian, laid back Yeldegirmeni neighborhood, I could seemingly count the number of tourists I encountered daily on one hand. It also happened to give me ample opportunity to do what I do best: getting maximum enjoyment from a minimal amount of lira. Speaking of lira, the exchange rate has moved drastically in favor of the dollar since I visited (from roughly 0.22 U.S. dollars to the Turkish lira to 0.15) another blow to a country that has seen tourism take a downturn in the wake of political turmoil and terrorist attacks in recent years. A couple of tips: Keep that disparity in currency in mind as you're shopping, and be respectful while bargaining. And don't raise a stink when, for example, you have to purchase a much more expensive SIM card at the Vodafone kiosk at the airport because you're a foreigner (260 Turkish lira, about 39, for 10 gigabytes of data). When I asked about a cheaper 50 lira plan that was advertised, the clerk shook his head and said, "That's for Turkish people." A couple of other logistical notes: Americans should apply online for a 90 day e visa ( 20) and print out the visa before leaving the country. The other is to download the BiTaksi taxi hailing app on your phone Uber has more limited functionality, and the taxi drivers I spoke to seemed to dislike using it. Turkey's president famously proclaimed Uber to be "finished" in the country that's not quite true, but I felt more comfortable using BiTaksi. Our lodgings at the My Dora Hotel in Yeldegirmeni were ideal for a couple of reasons. The hotel was close to the waterfront, ferries and subway station, and provided easy access to the Moda neighborhood to the south, with its bars and night life. I was also happy with the price 52 a night for a clean, air conditioned room during summer season. Moreover , Yeldegirmeni felt established and welcoming, and utterly lacking pretension. The relatively uncrowded, narrow streets are a pleasure to walk, with innumerable cute coffee and breakfast places, as well as street art installations on Karakolhane Street and pleasant shopping spots like Bee Vintages, a charmingly cluttered clothing and collectibles store on Recaizade Street. All the while, you're followed by the slightest of breezes and the faint but inescapable scent of sea air. Those briny breezes certainly whet the appetite particularly in a city where the residents clearly love to eat, and eat well. And near the end of Ramadan, when I visited, restaurants were positively packed once the sun went down. That included Yanyali Fehmi Lokansi recommended by the owner of Bee Vintages a family run restaurant just a few steps from the Osman Aga mosque, with a classic, old school vibe befitting its nearly 100 years in existence. As with many of the more traditional restaurants in the city, the ordering process is cafeteria style. You order from (or point to, in my case) a series of dishes that are prepared by the kitchen throughout the day, and these are brought to your table. My girlfriend and I were aided by the kind and patient Ergin, the grandson of the original chef. He de livered a banquet spread of delicious dishes to our table: savory chickpeas with lamb, a gratin like zucchini casserole with a perfectly golden cheese crust, and eggplant and peppers stuffed with minced beef and rice. Dinner for two, with tea and a sweet piece of poppy seed cake, was 76 lira. A few blocks south is Ciya, a restaurant so popular that it has two additional outposts on the same street (you'll want to go to Ciya Sofrasi, if you can; it has a more extensive menu while the other two specialize in kebabs). We had no luck finding a table at dinner, but were seated immediately when we returned the next day for lunch. There, we took part in chef Musa Dagdeviren's extraordinary ongoing experiments with Anatolian cuisine. I can't remember the last time I had so many varied textures and tastes from a simple sampler plate of cold meze (17 lira, priced by weight). A nutty bulgur salad segued into pleasingly bitter stuffed grape leaves. A portion of mung beans was delicious, as was a fragrant wild oregano salad, a simple hummus, an eggplant salad and purslane drowned in tangy yogurt. Best of all was a simply prepared, impossibly crunchy salad of sea beans. Seventeen lira for lunch isn't expensive but you don't even have to pay that, if you don't want to. Deeper into Kadikoy, in the Goztepe neighborhood, I found the restaurant Gaziantep Lahmacun, which specializes in its namesake: a crispy, pizza like Turkish classic. For just 6 lira, I enjoyed a huge lahmacun covered in tomato, herbs and pleasingly funky lamb ground nearly to a fine paste. Washed down with a powerful bottle of fermented black carrot juice (4 lira), it was a perfect midday snack. But what about dessert? I've said nothing of the sweets in Istanbul, about which numerous epics could be written. Baylan, founded by an Armenian immigrant in 1923, is the place to go for a sleek, classic atmosphere. Sitting on its outdoor patio, I enjoyed a kup griye (21 lira), a decadent, sundae like chalice of vanilla and caramel ice cream, swimming in caramel and served with a cookie. But if it's just ice cream you're looking for, you'll want to head out to Pinar Dondurma, where a man named Alp Durak makes the wonderfully elastic and chewy ice cream that Turkey is famous for. The addition of mastic and salep, a flour derived from orchids, gives the ice cream a pleasingly stretchy quality. A two scoop cone runs 5 lira; I went with bitter chocolate and walnut, both of which were excellent. Lest you think all I did was eat on my trip (though, to be fair, I spent a good deal of time doing just that), there is plenty to do that does not revolve around food. I enjoyed walking on the waterfront, both near the ferries, which provides nice views of Istanbul's European side, and on the city's southern coast, in Caddebostan Dalyan Park. There are walking and bike paths, a beach and views of the Prince Islands to the south. Lounging on the grass in Caddebostan is a local pastime: People bring their beers, cigarettes and books and spend the afternoon. Take the opportunity to peek at some of the decrepit old mansions that line the water huge structures like the Sabiha Hanim Kosku, and the Ragip Pasa Kosku, built in 1906. Shopping is nearly as pleasurable an endeavor in Istanbul as eating, and the sprawling Kadikoy market is a must see if you're around on a Tuesday or Friday. The easiest way to get there is a quick subway ride to Goztepe station. (I bought an Istanbulkart transportation card, which requires a 6 lira deposit, then you pay as you go in this case, a 2.60 lira fare.) The magnitude of the market hits immediately, but takes a minute to sink in: There's seemingly endless merchandise, and almost anything you could want. I passed stalls of pants from 30 lira and shirts from 10 lira, while stepping over boxes of baby chicks and ducks for sale. There are watches, handbags, perfume, toys and scarves. There are cleaned artichokes floating in water, and 20 lira polo shirts. There are pickle varieties to awe any fermentation fan, as well as some comically large loaves of bread, which in turn are just past crisp green plums selling for just 3 lira per kilo. I picked up a couple of cotton towels for 10 lira and a 5 lira bag of Urfa pepper. Evren Butik is a slightly more manageable shopping environment a cozy vintage store run by the friendly and affable Algodan Kemaloglu. I bought a jacket and a few teacup saucers, bargaining from 60 lira down to 45. Then, as I was leaving, he talked me into buying an old peppermill style coffee grinder for 15 lira, which he carefully wrapped in newspaper. There is also culture to be appreciated: I enjoyed checking out Moda Sahnesi, a performing arts center in the heart of Moda. After downing an eye opening Turkish coffee (5 lira), I caught a screening of "Mr. Gay Syria," a documentary about gay Syrian refugees (15 lira, 10 for students). Later, I caught a piano recital up the street at the Sureyya Opera House, a beautiful building constructed in the 1920s (15 lira). The nearby Thales Cafe, a restaurant and bar set in and around a beautiful old mansion, proved a perfect place for grabbing a local Bomonti beer (16 lira) and people watching in the garden. On our last morning in Istanbul, we walked over to Garda, a small streetside cafe, for a preflight breakfast (did you really think I wasn't going to mention Turkish breakfast?). When there were no tables available, I thought we were out of luck, but one was procured from thin air and placed on an empty area of sidewalk. The Garda kahvalti (27 lira) produced the usual suspects from a good Turkish breakfast bread, jam, olives, Nutella, meats and cheeses. It was followed by a 13 lira coup de grace, the karisik menemen, a volcanically hot skillet of cheesy, tomato y eggs. It, like most of the other things we'd eaten on our trip, was wonderful. I'm not sure why I was still surprised at that point, though everything about these few days in Kadikoy had proven exceptional.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Jared Polis, the incoming governor of Colorado, at left, with his partner, Marlon Reis.Credit...Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times BOULDER, COLO. On Tuesday, the first openly gay man elected governor in American history was sworn in, his partner at his side. It was a vision of progress captured in its unfurling: a milestone celebrated by those who saw themselves represented, even as it was also accepted by others as a matter of unremarkable course. In November, Jared Polis beat his Republican opponent, Walker Stapleton (a second cousin to Jeb and George W. Bush), in a self funded campaign that helped make the race the most expensive in Colorado history. Constituents voted for him by a more than 10 point margin, in a state whose swing on gay rights in the last three decades can be described as a complete about face. Even in Colorado, once known as the "Hate State" for its anti gay policies, Mr. Polis's gayness was "interestingly uninteresting to voters," as the conservative columnist George F. Will wrote. "What we found," Mr. Polis said, "was that the voters don't really care. This has been a much bigger deal nationally." When Mr. Polis was first elected to Congress in 2008, though, the usual preconceptions about gay men preceded him. "The things people assume but don't know about the L.G.B.T. community," said his partner, Marlon Reis, 37. "All gay men are stylish, they dance well, they yada yada yada." When they arrived in Washington, Mr. Reis continued, "Barney Frank actually said to Jared one day, 'Your suit looks like you crumpled it up in your pocket for the whole day.'" Annise Parker, the chief executive of LGBTQ Victory Fund, which supports L.G.B.T. candidates and endorsed Mr. Polis, stumped with him during the last month of his campaign. "I have great respect and affection for him but he's not the most exciting guy in the world," she said. "He's very low key; he's a policy wonk. He just wants to work for the citizens of Colorado. And that clearly came through." A candidate's sexual orientation, she said, was "not a reason for people to vote for you." "Someday," she added, "it won't be a reason for people to vote against you." His recent campaign for governor focused on education (Mr. Polis proposed to fund full day preschool and kindergarten for the entire state), affordable health insurance and renewable energy, and he neither played up nor played down his sexual orientation and his family. Mr. Reis, who has generally shied away from interviews and public appearances, campaigned with him, but sparingly. Other openly L.G.B.T. officials have served in Congress, but not many. The last gay governor, Jim McGreevey of New Jersey, stepped down after announcing both his gayness and the affair that led to his resignation. Mr. Polis said that his election which is similar only to that of Kate Brown, the openly bisexual governor of Oregon who was re elected last year "can show L.G.B.T. youth that their orientation or gender identity shouldn't stand in the way of whatever they want to achieve in life, including public service." But in his own political lifetime there was good reason to think that it could. "How would it be when we arrived in Washington? Would we be treated differently?" Mr. Reis wondered when Mr. Polis was first elected to federal office in 2008. Politics has always required its practitioners to negotiate deals and deal breakers, the spoken and the unspeakable. When Mr. Polis was elected to the House, he and Mr. Reis before kids, before dog road tripped to Washington through the American South, stopping in Amarillo, Tex., and swinging up through Pigeon Forge, Tenn., to see Dollywood. They recalled stopping at a steakhouse in Amarillo for dinner one night. "We might be the only Jewish people in town but they probably understand that," Mr. Polis told Mr. Reis at the time. "There's not a lot of gay people but they probably understand that. But no matter what you do in this town, don't say you're a vegan." Mr. Reis, a vegan, is slim and baby faced, with an abiding love of animals and Halloween. He and Mr. Polis met in Boulder in 2002, when Mr. Reis was finishing college. He taught Mr. Polis about Romantic literature; Mr. Polis taught him about baseball. He worked as a freelance writer, volunteered for L.G.B.T. organizations and advocated for animal welfare. Mr. Reis plans to make animal welfare one of his signature causes as First Gentleman of Colorado his new title and proceeds from the inaugural ball will support, among other organizations, the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg. "When I first arrived with Jared in Washington I had zero sense of what I was supposed to be, if there was even a definition of what a congressional spouse would be," he said. "I was completely terrified in the beginning to talk to anyone." Mr. Polis had been interested in politics for years, but Mr. Reis endured what he called a "steep learning curve." He devoted himself to raising their two children, Caspian, now seven, and Cora, now four "the kids are better at working a room than I am," Mr. Reis joked and slowly grew more comfortable in his place among the congressional spouses, even as something of an odd man out. "I always likened it to being the toy at the bottom of the cereal box," he said. "Everyone wanted to come up and they all wanted to be friends. They made hilarious comparisons. They said, 'My hairdresser of 30 years is gay.'" When Mr. Polis made his first congressional run, he came out publicly in a local newspaper article. By then, he and Mr. Reis had been together for years, but because of his political aspirations, Mr. Reis remembered, "we went out to restaurants and held hands under the table." "The reality I think is that 10 years ago this was an issue that detractors could bring up to harm a candidate," Mr. Reis said. And Mr. Polis has been subjected to slurs and threats; in his first campaign, he received so many pieces of hate mail that he began to tack them up. "It filled up a whole wall," he said. More of the attacks were anti Semitic rather than homophobic, Mr. Polis said he is also Colorado's first Jewish governor and the vitriol diminished over time. But it is not gone. Mr. Polis mentioned the anti gay sentiment he faced during last year's campaign: sign defacings in Eagle County, letters to the editor in Walsenburg, homophobic slurs written in shaving cream on his car. He shrugged it off. "It just looked out of touch and weird and it didn't cost any votes," he said. "People have said far worse in politics." If anything, Mr. Polis added, his orientation may have actually mobilized voters who saw in him a fellow traveler outside the status quo, persecuted or maligned: "I wasn't just another straight white guy who didn't get it." His victory is all the more notable for taking place in Colorado, which offers, at the moment, a certain, if largely white, glimpse of the country in miniature, split between Democrats, Republicans and independents. It is historically red but, thanks to an influx of the young and urbane, it's turning purple, if not blue. In the 2018 elections, Coloradans elected not only Mr. Polis; they voted in Joe Neguse, the son of Eritrean immigrants, to Mr. Polis's vacated congressional seat as Colorado's first African American congressman, and Brianna Titone as the first openly transgender state representative. The state is not a gay mecca in the way New York, California or Florida are perceived to be "The district I represent, most of the time I represented it, didn't have a single gay bar," Mr. Polis said but Colorado holds a central and complicated place in the history of L.G.B.T. rights in the United States. It carries, Mr. Polis said, "a lot of baggage." The first major Supreme Court victory for the gay rights movement, Romer v. Evans, came in 1996 in response to Amendment 2, a Colorado constitutional amendment that prohibited the passage of laws specifically protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination. The Supreme Court struck down the amendment as unconstitutional, a decision that served as a precedent for later milestones, including Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which decriminalized sodomy nationwide, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which made marriage equality the law of the land. Colorado also happens to be where the first unchallenged gay marriage license was granted, in 1975, by a Boulder County clerk named Clela Rorex, thanks to the vague wording of the Colorado legal code. It may be the base of Focus on the Family, which preaches family values that do not include homosexuality, headquartered in Colorado Springs, but it also home to the Matthew Shepard Foundation, in Denver. It was in Lakewood just west of Denver that Jack Phillips refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple at his Masterpiece Cakeshop, leading to another Supreme Court case; the court ruled in Mr. Phillips's favor against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission last year. "We won't be ordering cake from them," Mr. Polis said. In 1994, Tim Gill, 65, the multimillionaire software developer, established a foundation and poured hundreds of millions into advocacy after being stunned by the victory at the polls of the anti gay Amendment 2 in 1992. At the time, Mr. Gill said, two thirds of Coloradans said they didn't know anyone who was gay or lesbian. Mr. Gill eventually extended himself and his donations into the political arena, and with a like minded group of megadonors known as the Gang of Four, helped to swing Colorado's General Assembly from Republican to Democratic in 2004 the same year that 11 states adopted a ballot measure banning gay marriage. The Gang of Four included Mr. Polis, who was one of the richest members of Congress during his tenure. Before taking office, Mr. Polis was an entrepreneur; he digitized his parents' greeting card business into the e card behemoth BlueMountain.com, and founded ProFlowers.com, an online flower delivery service. "I think he saw an opportunity when the state was changing for him to become a more active participant," said Scott Miller, 39, who is Mr. Gill's husband and with him, the co chair of the Gill Foundation. Mr. Gill and Mr. Miller have since supported Mr. Polis's congressional campaigns and his run for governor, although they initially backed one of Mr. Polis's opponents in his first congressional primary. "My mission in life is to protect as many people as I possibly can in the shortest amount of time," Mr. Gill said. "Essentially, in every case where legislation was passed, there was an L.G.B.T. elected official who helped it." Mr. Gill said that while he long believed there would be a gay governor in the U.S., he "wouldn't have thought it would happen this soon." "Jared is particularly interesting because it shows where America has come to," he said, "and that America is a much, much more tolerant place than it was." That shift may resonate most strongly with those who have known the country as it was. For Mr. Miller, who grew up in Colorado's more conservative, red leaning Western Slope, the election of a gay governor was all the more satisfying for being in his own state. "For me, on election night, seeing Jared and Marlon up on that stage and him giving his victory speech I so much would have loved to have known what that would have felt like back when I was in high school," he said. This rang true even for young local voters, who in the week leading up to the inauguration described feeling elated. Jean Peterson, a paralegal in Denver who turns 26 this week, described watching Mr. Polis's November victory speech with her girlfriend, tears in her eyes. "It was really moving," she said, "to see him point to his partner and all the support that his partner gave him, to have someone acknowledge their partner ... We were both kind of crying." At his inauguration on Tuesday, the Denver Gay Men's Chorus warmed up with "True Colors" (Cyndi Lauper, who first recorded it, was booked for the inaugural ball that night) before remarks from local grandees and faith leaders and the new officials were sworn in. Mr. Polis sat with Mr. Reis and their children behind a pane of bulletproof glass, a precaution one veteran Colorado reporter noted he hadn't seen in five previous inaugurations. But when Mr. Polis got up to speak after a quick selfie with the crowd he addressed divisiveness and diversity only briefly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Andre Holland, an executive producer of the film, plays a sports agent who finds himself in a tight professional and ethical spot. Steven Soderbergh's electrifying new film "High Flying Bird," which debuted Friday on Netflix, tells the story of a fictional N.B.A. lockout set in the Instagram Age, in which longstanding concerns about money, race and social justice are galvanized by disputes over players' personal images, and who has the right to control them. (Appropriately, the entire film was shot on an iPhone.) The film's dense but fast moving script, written by the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney ("Moonlight"), is also replete with references to the game's history not least to the currents of protest and politics that have coursed through pro basketball since it was segregated. There's a rich subtext here, much of it only hinted at. Below is a spoiler filled guide. What were the all black leagues? As in baseball, football and most areas of American life, segregation kept black players out of the white pro basketball leagues, confined to amateur and semipro all black teams, which formed in schools, churches, community centers and the like. Games were frequently paired with ragtime dances to make for a full evening of entertainment. The best known of these barnstorming teams, often called "Black Fives" by historians, were the New York Renaissance and the Harlem Globetrotters. The Renaissance or, as they were better known, the Rens were so impressive that in 1947, Coach Joe Lapchick of the New York Knicks lobbied the Basketball Association of America to admit the team into the young league, a precursor of the National Basketball Association. The owners voted him down. The next year, a competing league, the National Basketball League, brought the team in instead. How did the Harlem Globetrotters help spur integration? Indirectly. The Rens and the Globetrotters, in particular, were internationally known for their dazzling play, often besting white teams when matched up for exhibition games. The Rens, for example, beat the all white Oshkosh All Stars in the first integrated tournament championship in 1939; the Globetrotters beat the Minnesota Lakers in a celebrated 1948 exhibition game that The Chicago Tribune pinpointed as key to the integration of the game. As Spencer (Bill Duke) explains in "High Flying Bird": "There's a reason why the N.B.A. started integrating as the Harlem Globetrotters exhibitions started going international. Control. They wanted the control of a game that we played, and we played better." How did the N.B.A. integrate? Lapchick, however, did not give up. In 1950, the year after the Basketball Association of America absorbed the smaller National Basketball League and became the N.B.A., he signed Nat (Sweetwater) Clifton, who had played for the Rens and the Globetrotters (as well as in baseball's Negro leagues), to join the Knicks. That same season, West Virginia State's Earl Lloyd joined the Washington Capitals and Chuck Cooper was drafted out of Duquesne by the Boston Celtics. (Another black player, Hank DeZonie, played five games with the Tri Cities Blackhawks in December of that season.) Yes in fact, there were four. (One lasted only a few hours.) In the first dialogue scene of "High Flying Bird," the sports agent Ray Burke (Andre Holland) tells a client, "Last time this happened, folks was broke left and right!" That "last time" was the 2011 lockout, which lasted five months and resulted in the loss of 16 regular season games, the entire preseason and an estimated 400 million in revenue for team owners and players. A 10 year deal was announced late that November, which heavily favored owners. It reduced player salaries by nearly 300 million and shifted an estimated 3 billion to the owners over the course of the contract. The truncated 66 game season finally got underway on Christmas Day. What about those exhibition games? Much screen time in "High Flying Bird" is spent contemplating the legality of public appearances and exhibition games by league signed players during the lockout. The 2011 lockout was threaded with similar concerns. The film's fictional team owners grouse over the attention attracted by a "lockout street ball event in Las Vegas," presumably inspired by the "lockout league" in Vegas, which comprised two weeks of pickup games with more than 70 N.B.A. players in September 2011, according to The Las Vegas Sun. (Profits from ticket sales were donated to charity). As New York magazine and others have noted, the character Myra (Sonja Sohn) strongly resembles Michele Roberts, who became the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association in 2014. The first woman in history to head a major sports union, Roberts made waves from the beginning. A Times profile a few months into her tenure noted that she had already "forcefully questioned the league's pay model and labeled its entire cadre of owners as replaceable." Like the character she inspired, Roberts is a tough as nails negotiator who is undaunted by working in a male dominated world. "My past," she told players while making her case for the job, "is littered with the bones of men who were foolish enough to think I was someone they could sleep on." In the film's first scene, Ray gives a client a mysterious package, calling it "the Bible." It contains the book "The Revolt of the Black Athlete" by the sports sociologist and civil rights advocate Dr. Harry Edwards, who also appears briefly in Ray's office near the end of the film. Edwards first came to national prominence for organizing the Olympic Project for Human Rights, whose members Tommie Smith and John Carlos made headlines for raising their gloved fists while receiving medals at the 1968 Olympics. Edwards has spent the ensuing years teaching, writing, consulting and leading protests. "Revolt," published in 1969, argued that racism is as prevalent in sports as in any other section of society. "The sports world is not a rose flourishing in the middle of a wasteland," he writes. "It is part and parcel of that wasteland, reeking of the same racism that corrupts other areas of our society."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
For three decades, I talked to Trump about his fear of germs. When I interviewed him at the Trump Tower restaurant during the 2016 race, the famous germophobe had a big hospital strength bottle of hand sanitizer on the table, next to my salad, ready to squirt. He told me about the nightmarish feeling he had when a man emerged from the bathroom in a restaurant with wet hands and shook his hand. He couldn't eat afterward. Today, in a stunning twist of fate, germs are infecting his presidency and threatening a bad prognosis for his re election prospects. Trump is the first president to use the stock market as a near daily measure of his success and his virility and now the market is slumping. If you want to own it on the way up, you have to own it on the way down. Investors, who worried when Trump began to rise in politics, soon realized that he had their backs. He was just a corporate vessel pretending to be a populist; the stock market was his sugar high. Now Trump is learning the hard way what my fatalistic Irish mother taught me: The thing you love most is the first to go. As Mike Bloomberg points out, investors have factored in Trump's incompetence, and that is contributing to the market cratering. The president urged the Fed to do something soon to mitigate the stock market losses. Socialism for the rich! The scaremonger in chief has been downplaying the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic and joining Fox News hosts in accusing the "anti Trump" media and "Do Nothing Democrats" of scaremongering about the virus. At the CPAC convention, Mick Mulvaney told a cheering crowd that impeachment was the "hoax of the day" and now the press thinks the coronavirus "is going to be what brings down the president." The media, he said, should spend more time on positive stories, like the president's "caring" relationship with his teenage son, Barron, even though White Houses usually frown on stories about young presidential offspring. Mike Huckabee went on the attack, asserting that Trump "could personally suck the virus out of every one of the 60,000 people in the world, suck it out of their lungs, swim to the bottom of the ocean and spit it out, and he would be accused of pollution for messing up the ocean." On Fox, Don Jr. said the Democrats "seemingly hope" the virus kills millions to stop Trump's winning streak. Rush Limbaugh chimed in that the media "would love for the coronavirus to be this deadly strain that wipes everybody out so they could blame Trump for it." There are 2,800 dead worldwide and disturbing stories showing how federal criteria delayed the diagnosis of a California woman and how federal health employees interacted with Americans who had possibly been exposed to the virus in China without proper training or gear. Yet Trump seems more consumed with how the Democrats might blame him for a coronavirus recession than with the virus itself. Trump had tweet shrieked at President Barack Obama about how he should handle Ebola. ("Obama should apologize to the American people resign!") Yet he was so relaxed about the coronavirus threat that he spent 45 minutes Thursday chatting in the Oval with the authors of a little play called "FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers," inspired by the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The play's leads, Dean Cain of "Superman" fame and the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" actress Kristy Swanson, were also in the meeting. Trump joked that he'd be willing to be Cain's understudy, the actor said. The president got together the same day with a group that included his social media boosters Diamond and Silk. At the White House press conference, Trump preened: "Because of all we've done, the risk to the American people remains very low." He later said that one day, like a miracle, the virus "will disappear." His top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, pushed the crisis as an opportunity: "Stocks look pretty cheap to me." Trump won't be able to deflect and project and create a daft alternative narrative. The virus won't respond to conspiracy theories from Rush Limbaugh or nasty diatribes from Sean Hannity or nicknames from Donald Trump. This will be a deus ex machina test of Trump's authoritarian behavior. Epidemics are not well suited to authoritarian regimes and propaganda, as we saw this week when Beijing's use of propaganda tactics to suppress information about the outbreak failed spectacularly and when Iran tamped down news about the virus for political reasons even as it ravaged top officials. The reality of the coronavirus spreading will reflect poorly on Trump his cavalier dismantling of vital government teams for health response and his disdain for experts and science. Trump tried to make federal agencies complicit on his fabulist hogwash about the size of his inaugural crowd and the path of Hurricane Dorian. It is unlikely that he will be able to keep his insatiable and insecure ego in check long enough to give the nation the facts, reassurance and guidance it needs about the infection. Trump is already doing his orange clown pufferfish routine, acting as though he knows more about viruses than anyone, just as he has bragged that he knows more about the military, taxes, trade, infrastructure, ISIS, renewables, visas, banking, debt and "the horror of nuclear." He appointed Mike Pence to be point man, even though, as the famously homophobic governor of Indiana, Pence helped make the H.I.V. epidemic there worse by substituting moral pronouncements for scientific knowledge. Coronavirus Czar Pence spent Friday at a 25,000 a plate dinner in sunny Sarasota raising money to try to win back the House, The Tampa Bay Times reported.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
"Hey this is Tate Taylor, director of Ma." "Not today. Not today. Come on, sweetie." "This is the scene where most teenagers will remember that moment where they tried to get an adult to buy them alcohol. We see here that Octavia's in some kind of scrubs with a three legged dog, which is a little bit of foreshadowing a maimed beast. And this is when Maggie meets Sue Ann for the first time sheer chance." "You want to spend the night in jail? Does that sound fun to you?" "But just by chance, she sees the writing on this van the kids are driving Hawkins Security. And we later figure out, throughout the course of the movie, the name Hawkins awoke something in Sue Ann, something that's been asleep for a very, very long time. And she puts it together. And there's a hint that maybe this kid could possibly be a link to her past, so she's intrigued." "I wouldn't be able to live with myself if you got into an accident." "Oh, well, I'm driving and I don't drink. We were just gonna go to the rock pile for a little bit, I promise." "I know where that is. Shoot. We used to hang out there all the time when I was a kid." "So she decides that, O.K., I'm gonna buy alcohol for these kids and just keep seeing what's happening. If this is what I think it is, I want in." "Hell. Hold this dog." "Yes!" "So it's like a monster that's been asleep, and this is the moment that it's woken up. And in many ways, I like to think if Carrie in the movie "Carrie" had not burned everybody alive, and she had somehow repressed her trauma and gone on to live, what would have happened if, later in life, that trauma resurfaced?" "O.K. They didn't have whatever Fireball is so, I got Aftershock. The man said it's the same thing This never happened, O.K.?" "Thanks again for " "I really wanted to pump up the nostalgia, the innocence, those crazy summers when kids had nothing to do. It just feels innocent. And as a director, and knowing how loved Octavia is as an actor, I wanted it to be fun. I wanted the audience to feel like they were those kids, and they were pulling wool over her eyes, and they were getting away with something." "Hey!" "Oh my god!" "Your change. I'm not some thug." "It's the genre. I wanted to have fun with it, and a wink and a nod to the movies of the past that we all love."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
When Jonathan and Barbara Pessolano began renovating an 1850s three family house on Staten Island earlier this year, they didn't intend to make it a model of recycling. But a search for a deal on a Miele dishwasher led them in an unexpected direction. After admiring a high end dishwasher at a Manhattan appliance store, and being shocked by the price tag of about 1,300, Mr. Pessolano turned to the Internet in search of savings. He soon stumbled upon the website of Green Demolitions, a store in Fairfield, N.J., that sells used luxury kitchens and other fixtures collected by the nonprofit donation program Renovation Angel. Browsing the store's inventory online, Mr. Pessolano, a hospital administrator, and Ms. Pessolano, a teacher, saw complete kitchens, including cabinets, countertops and appliances, priced for a fraction of what they would cost new. "We couldn't believe it," Mr. Pessolano said. "We thought, 'Really, you buy the whole kitchen?' It seemed impossible, or incongruous." But after visiting the store, they bought an enormous used kitchen from a house in Upper Saddle River, N.J., this past April for 11,100. Green Demolitions estimated the kitchen would have set them back about 60,000 new. "The appliances alone would have cost a fortune," said Mr. Pessolano, noting that the kitchen came with two Miele dishwashers, a 42 inch wide GE Monogram refrigerator, a six burner Viking range top, two Viking wall ovens and a Viking warming drawer. It also included seven lengths of granite countertop, under cabinet lighting and more cabinets than they know what to do with. (Some leftovers may wind up in the laundry room.) "It was an unbelievable deal," he said. Inspired, they searched for more recycled building components, and soon discovered other stores with a similar mission to capture and divert construction materials that might otherwise end up in a landfill. At the Paterson Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Wayne, N.J., they came across two new surplus windows for 100 apiece. "It cost me more to rent the U Haul than to buy the windows," Mr. Pessolano said proudly. At BIG Reuse (until last week known as Build It Green! NYC) in Gowanus, Brooklyn, they found a reclaimed oversize picture window for 670, and an antique marble mantel for 300. At the nonprofit's other store in Astoria, Queens, they bought another large picture window for 350, and ceramic subway tile for a kitchen backsplash for 10 a box. These and other goods at the stores included old fixtures that homeowners had removed to launch their own renovations, leftover building supplies, showroom floor models and items from new developments that buyers didn't want to keep. Construction is ongoing, but Mr. Pessolano said that using so much salvage is allowing them to do far more than they expected with their renovation budget of 100,000. "It has enabled us to achieve a certain look and style that we would not have normally been able to afford," he said. In New York, it's no secret that some buyers of multimillion dollar homes are willing to do whatever it takes to create a residence that reflects their personal taste even if it means tearing out brand new or lightly used kitchens and bathrooms that were installed by a previous owner or developer. The traditional way of dealing with that material is to demolish and dispose of it. According to the Department of Sanitation, the city's facilities for processing construction and demolition debris handled approximately 2.25 million tons of waste last year, representing about 20 percent of all trash. However, some environmentally minded homeowners and contractors choose to take things apart more carefully a process known as deconstruction and then donate the materials to salvage operations, so they can be reused by others. For budget conscious homeowners willing to do a little hunting, and to be flexible about design decisions, that means there's a ready supply of high quality building materials available for surprisingly low prices. Much of the material goes to BIG Reuse and Green Demolitions. Habitat for Humanity New York City also opened a ReStore in Woodside, Queens, last month. And there are dozens of ReStores farther afield in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, from a total of about 860 such stores across the country. Recent stock at BIG Reuse's Brooklyn location included a free standing Waterworks bathtub for 5,000, sold new for more than 10,000; contemporary Toto toilets for 160 each, about 400 new; a large marble bathroom vanity top for 255; solid wood interior doors for 75 each; and complete kitchen cabinet sets for under 1,000. The environment is more supersize garage sale than polished showroom, and shoppers should be prepared to get dusty while poking about the castoffs. "It's sort of like a treasure hunt," said Justin Green, the executive director of BIG Initiatives, which runs the BIG Reuse centers. But time spent searching can pay off. "Being New York City, there's a lot of very high end renovations going on, and very lightly used things going out," said Mr. Green, noting that the centers frequently receive products from top tier brands, like cabinets from Poggenpohl and Bulthaup, and appliances from Sub Zero and Viking. The organization has collected materials from many of the city's most prestigious buildings, including 15 Central Park West, the Dakota, the Apthorp, the Time Warner Center and the Plaza. Each year, Mr. Green said, the operation diverts about 2,000 tons of construction castoffs from landfills. Most items are priced at about half of what they would cost new. The trade off is that "there is more work involved in reuse, because you have to make what you find work," said Mr. Green, rather than having new cabinets or floors built to your exact measurements. And the discards, however high end, may not come with a warranty. For the designer Thomas Warnke, it's well worth the effort. He regularly visits BIG Reuse, looking for bargains. Mr. Warnke has used his finds to renovate his own townhouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which he completed last summer; in projects for clients; and in homes that he has bought, fixed up and resold. "Reusing things just makes sense" from an environmental perspective, Mr. Warnke said. "And, I wouldn't be able to afford a lot of these products at regular prices." For his own home, he found a suite of Smeg kitchen appliances an oven for 1,200, about 2,400 new; a cooktop for 600, about 1,200 new; and a refrigerator for 800, about 2,000 new. He also obtained a steel wet bar for 500, and industrial style light fixtures for 120 each. For a different home he renovated and sold in Red Hook, he discovered nearly new high end windows for 250 each and doors for 500 each, all of which had been installed and then promptly removed from a mansion in the Hamptons, because the homeowner didn't like them. Those prices were about a quarter of what the pieces would cost new, Mr. Warnke estimated. To use materials that were custom made for another space, "I design around them," he noted. "I might feel a slightly different proportion would be nicer, but I'm willing to compromise a bit," to save money and build in a more sustainable fashion. The couple bought a large set of cabinets for 2,400; a Sub Zero refrigerator for 1,800, about 10,000 new; a Viking range for 2,400, about 9,000 new; and beams reclaimed from a Manhattan building to create a distinctive ceiling for 3 per linear foot. BIG Reuse guarantees the appliances it sells will be functional for 90 days, a policy that pleased Mr. Savatteri and Ms. Powers when they discovered their refrigerator required repairs. "It needed about 800 worth of work," Mr. Savatteri said. "The Sub Zero guy repaired it," he said, and the organization took care of the bill. They also sanded and repainted the kitchen cabinets, and had a carpenter modify them to fit their kitchen. "It was a bit of a puzzle," Mr. Savatteri said. Now, they are at work on the renovation of their second home in upstate New York, using more products from BIG Reuse stores, including another set of kitchen cabinets ( 1,500), French doors ( 175 to 600 per pair), and a bathroom vanity with a stone top ( 200). Proceeds from sales of materials collected by Renovation Angel and BIG Reuse are largely used to fund their operations. However, Renovation Angel also donates a portion of its revenue to other nonprofits, and BIG Initiatives runs programs that train people for green jobs, and donates or discounts materials to other nonprofits as well as community and school gardens. Proceeds from sales at the ReStore in Queens help fund the activities of Habitat for Humanity New York City. When Dennis Lee, a financial services professional, and Migene Kim, an investment portfolio manager, were preparing to start the renovation of their co op apartment on Park Avenue South in Manhattan in March, having Renovation Angel remove their 12 year old kitchen was "a no brainer," said Mr. Lee. "Our contractor was very transparent and said he would shave off close to 5,000 of our demolition costs," said Mr. Lee, who is now having a professional appraisal completed for tax purposes. He expects the fair market value of their old kitchen, which had Arclinea cabinets, stainless steel and Corian countertops, a 48 inch wide Sub Zero fridge and a 48 inch wide Wolf range, to be about 15,000. "That's additional money in my pocket that I can use to help offset the cost of renovation work," Mr. Lee said. "It's also nice to know it's not going to end up in a landfill." To other homeowners, kitchens like the one donated by Mr. Lee and Ms. Kim are the pinnacle of luxury. Gail Heatherly, for instance, bought a small galley kitchen from Green Demolitions that came from a building on Park Avenue South for a one bedroom co op apartment she was in contract to buy in Washington Heights. For 5,100, she was surprised at the quality of the components wood cabinets, granite countertops, a Sub Zero refrigerator, a stainless steel Verona range and a Bosch dishwasher. Green Demolitions estimated the tab for these items new would have been 19,500. Ms. Heatherly wanted to move quickly, after losing a previous kitchen to another buyer, so she bought it in August 2012, even before closing on the apartment the following month. The apartment purchase went smoothly, and she hired a contractor to install the kitchen soon after. "There was some customization that had to be done, including a little cutting of the granite top and placing one of the counters on an L," said Ms. Heatherly, who is a lawyer. "But the lady who helped me at Green Demolitions charted the whole thing out, and helped me figure out that it would fit in my space." That's just the sort of experience that Mr. Feldman hopes will encourage other homeowners to consider using recycled materials in their renovations. "We have a lofty goal," he said. "We're trying to make sure that no good luxury kitchen gets thrown out."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
WASHINGTON Faced with a crop of lemons too much ethanol, a population of cars not tuned to burn it effectively and a driving public leery of the fuel's properties the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to make lemonade. The effort to untangle itself from this sticky situation is part of a larger proposal by the federal government to make the most sweeping changes in gasoline since lead additives were banned. Tucked inside the E.P.A.'s March announcement of a plan to cut the amount of sulfur allowed in gasoline was an audacious suggestion that sought to solve all three ethanol challenges at once. The proposal, for a fuel that is 30 percent ethanol, could reduce tailpipe emissions and improve fuel economy and even encourage drivers to use more ethanol. "You make the dog like the dog food," said William H. Woebkenberg, senior engineer for fuels policy in the United States at Mercedes Benz. The idea is that while today's typical pump blend E10, which is 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline has drawbacks, a blend of 30 percent ethanol and 70 percent gasoline could take advantage of ethanol's strengths. Unlike a flexible fuel vehicle that can use E85 formulations but offers little financial or performance benefit, an engine tuned specifically for E30 would perform better on that fuel than on the standard E10, creating a market incentive. The idea has widespread support among technical experts. It also has another appealing aspect: current ethanol policy is probably unsustainable, because Congress has ordered the oil companies to use ever larger amounts of ethanol. To comply with the mandate, ethanol levels would have to exceed 10 percent of each gallon of fuel, yet many automakers advise against using higher concentrations unless the car is equipped for it. With a declining demand for gasoline, the problem becomes more acute. The 30 percent idea is laid out deep in the 938 page text of the proposed Tier 3 rule, which would lower the amount of sulfur in gasoline by two thirds, to the level required in California. In the proposal, the E.P.A. asked automakers to comment on E30. Like other efforts to introduce new fuels, it would require big investments at gas stations for blending pumps and storage tanks. Still, there is a powerful incentive in the E.P.A. plan: offering automakers the option of having their cars certified on E30. Before a new car can be sold in the United States, the company must submit data on the vehicle's pollution output and fuel economy to the E.P.A. Certifying with E30 would call for engines optimized to take advantage of the blend's octane rating of 93 or perhaps higher. Using high octane premium grade gas in an engine that does not require it offers no benefit. But in engines designed to squeeze the fuel air mixture to very high pressures before igniting it with the spark plug, high octane fuel burns predictably and can produce more horsepower. (On the other hand, burning low octane gas in an engine tuned for premium grade can cause erratic combustion, or knocking, and result in severe engine damage.) Ethanol contains only about two thirds as much energy as gasoline, gallon for gallon. But if it is burned in engines designed for high cylinder pressures, it will produce competitive horsepower. In general, the oil companies have opposed using higher concentrations of ethanol. The oil industry is trying to get Congress to change federal rules so they can use less ethanol, not more. But various engine and fuel experts like the idea, because the E.P.A. is inviting the auto companies to take advantage of the good characteristics of ethanol, including an octane rating that is well over 100. "That's getting smarter," said Margaret Wooldridge, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. The way ethanol is used now, she said, "if anybody does notice there's any ethanol in the fuel, it's always in a way that is negative." The trouble with the flexible fuel vehicles on the market now, which can run at blends of up to 85 percent ethanol, is that they are still mostly optimized for gasoline, not ethanol, she said. While there are millions of such vehicles on the road, they run mostly on E10 because that is a better bargain for the driver. Higher concentrations are no better, and ethanol companies are struggling for acceptance of E15 with drivers, who show little enthusiasm. "E15 is the answer to the question nobody asked," said Mr. Woebkenberg of Mercedes Benz. "It is a detriment." But an E30 blend in an engine designed to use that fuel would be attractive to car buyers, he said, with "ridiculous power and good fuel economy," and owners of those cars would seek out the fuel, unlike owners of flex fuel cars. "I hope that the E.P.A. agrees to do it," said C. Boyden Gray, a former aide to President George H. W. Bush who is now a Washington lawyer representing energy clients. In coming years, Mr. Gray and others say, more cars are going to be engineered for high octane fuel so they can get better fuel economy as automakers move to double economy, and high octane fuel with 30 percent ethanol is cleaner than blends relying more heavily on gasoline. But Mr. Gray and other experts said that the E.P.A. would probably have to do more than just give automakers the option to certify vehicles on E30; it would probably have to mandate its availability to give car shoppers confidence that they would be able to refuel such vehicles.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
PICTURE THIS: Scrolling through Pinterest one day, saw something that would change her life: "a digital illustration of a black girl with bright green hair." The image, which burrowed into her subconscious, "was so stunning and magical" that it inspired her to begin an epic fantasy trilogy that draws equally from current events and African culture. The first volume, "Children of Blood and Bone," which enters the Young Adult list at No. 1, "is an epic West African adventure," Adeyemi explains, "but layered within each page is an allegory for the modern black experience. Every obstacle my characters face, no matter how big or small, is tied to an obstacle black people are fighting today or have fought as recently as 30 years ago." DRAWING FIRE: Did you know that the United States Army has an artist in residence program? No? Neither did the novelist Brad Meltzer, who discovered it while he was filming an episode of his cable TV show, "Lost History," at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. "They were giving me a tour and showing me their art collection," he says. "I kept thinking, 'Why does the Army have all this art?'" Meltzer, an enthusiastic researcher, soon discovered that "since World War I, the Army has assigned at least one person an actual artist whom they send out in the field to, well ... paint what couldn't otherwise be seen. They go, they see, and they paint and catalog victories and mistakes, from the dead on D Day to the injured at Mogadishu." The idea for "The Escape Artist" which debuts this week at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction list soon sprang into his head. "Imagine an artist soldier whose real skill was finding the weakness in anything. 'The Escape Artist' started right there," he says. Other research for the book sent Meltzer to Dover Air Force Base, which houses "the mortuary for the U.S. government's most top secret and high profile cases. I became obsessed with it. In this world, where so much of the government is a mess, Dover is the one place that does it absolutely right," Meltzer says. "It is the one no fail mission in the military. When a soldier's body comes home, you don't mess it up." The most interesting thing he learned there, which he obviously incorporated into the novel, was also the oddest: "When your plane is going down and about to crash, if you write a farewell note and eat it, the liquids in your stomach can help the note survive the crash. It has really happened. Next time you're on a plane and hit turbulence, you're going to be thinking of me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The Arkansas Racing Commission suspended the Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert for 15 days on Wednesday and vacated the victories of two of his horses after they tested positive for a banned substance. One of the horses, Charlatan, won a division of the Arkansas Derby on May 2. The colt's owners will forfeit the 300,000 in prize money for finishing first. The owner of the other horse, a filly named Gamine, must forfeit a 36,000 first place check won in an allowance race earlier that day. The suspension will run from Aug. 1 to 15. On June 20, Gamine won the Acorn Stakes at Belmont Park in New York by nearly 19 lengths in a stakes record time of 1 minute 32.55 seconds, a performance that inspired talk of the filly taking on males in the Kentucky Derby, which is scheduled for Sept. 5. Baffert is America's pre eminent active trainer. He has won the Kentucky Derby five times. In 2015, he trained American Pharoah, the first horse to win the Triple Crown since Affirmed in 1978. Baffert won his second Triple Crown in 2018 with the colt Justify. Baffert has also caught the attention of regulators over the years. These are his 26th and 27th drug violations, according to public records compiled by the Association of Racetrack Commissioners International and the Thoroughbred Regulatory Rulings database maintained by the Jockey Club. Charlatan and Gamine had two samples test positive for lidocaine, a local numbing agent, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case had not been fully adjudicated. The Times reported on the positive tests of their first samples in late May. Lidocaine can be used legitimately for suturing wounds or as a diagnostic tool to determine if horses are sound enough to compete. The drug may also be present in ointments or creams used on cuts or abrasions. It is regulated because of its potential to mask lameness in an unsound horse. In a hearing, Baffert and his representatives argued that the horses were accidentally exposed to the lidocaine by an assistant trainer, Jimmy Barnes, who had applied a medicinal patch to his own back. Barnes had broken his pelvis, and the brand of patch he used, Salonpas, contains small amounts of Lidocaine. The drug was transferred from his hands through the application of a tongue tie, they said. A lawyer for Baffert, W. Craig Robertson, said the trainer was disappointed in the ruling and planned to appeal. In a statement, he said, "This is a case of innocent exposure and not intentional administration." Four days after Charlatan's runaway victory in the Arkansas Derby, the colt's stallion rights were sold for an undisclosed sum to Hill 'n' Dale Farms. The colt missed the Belmont Stakes with an ankle injury, and Baffert has said he will miss the Kentucky Derby, as well. Charlatan may be able to come back in time for the Preakness on Oct. 3. Baffert trained Justify failed a drug test after winning the Santa Anita Derby, nearly a month before the 2018 Kentucky Derby. Justify wound up winning the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont that year for the Triple Crown. The rule on the books when Justify failed the test required that the horse be disqualified, forfeiting both his prize money from the Santa Anita Derby and his entry into the Kentucky Derby. California racing officials investigated the failed test for four months, allowing Justify to keep competing long enough to win the Triple Crown. In August, after Justify's breeding rights had been sold for 60 million, the California Horse Racing Board whose chairman at the time, Chuck Winner, had employed Baffert to train his horses disposed of the inquiry in a rare closed door session. The board ruled that Justify's positive test for the banned drug scopolamine had been the result of "environmental contamination," not intentional doping. Baffert has denied any wrongdoing, but the quantity of the drug found in Justify suggested that it was present not because of contamination in his feed or his bedding but rather because of an effort to enhance performance, according to Dr. Rick Sams, who ran the drug lab for the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission from 2011 to 2018. Mick Ruis, the owner of the second place horse in the Santa Anita Derby, is in litigation with California officials to have his colt Bolt d'Oro declared the winner and awarded the 600,000 first place check.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Two years ago, when Joe Vogel agreed to write a new edition of his influential book about Michael Jackson to be released this summer for the 10th anniversary of the singer's death he thought it would be demanding but gratifying work, a fresh opportunity to train his arrow on the most formidable legacy in all of modern pop, to address new questions about the artist's collaboration with the producer Quincy Jones and to celebrate the enduring resonance of Jackson's abundant song catalog. In the month since HBO debuted the explosive documentary "Leaving Neverland," in which two men and their families accuse Jackson of sexual abuse that they say went on for years while the men were children, Vogel has instead found himself in a biographer's nightmare, scrambling to re examine thousands of hours of research and his unspoken biases and assumptions as the cultural and informational landscape lurches beneath him. "It complicates things in ways that are just really, really challenging," Vogel said by phone recently. "Not only are you thinking about how do you deal with this on a personal level, you're also thinking about how to handle it professionally." As music fans have tried to reconcile the Jackson of "Leaving Neverland" a brazen pedophile who left children and their loved ones in ruin with the spellbinding "Thriller" singer whose DNA winds through generations of art and culture, the biographers and journalists who wrote him into our collective memory have quietly been retracing their steps, some with pride, some with anguish, some hovering unsteadily in between. Most said they were moved by the graphic and emotionally wrenching testimony of James Safechuck and Wade Robson, the Jackson accusers. Three authors are revising their books about the singer and will release new editions this year. But in a sign of an emerging tug of war and of growing fallout over the methods of filmmaker Dan Reed two people who were interviewed said they refused to watch the documentary, prejudging it as craven vandalism. And only one said "Leaving Neverland" had changed his verdict on Jackson from "innocent" to "guilty." At the time of its premiere in March, Vogel had already been sent galleys of the second edition of his book, "Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson." He rewrote the preface, which he said was "rendered incoherent by the documentary," but stopped short of declaring the case against the singer closed. "I felt like I had just watched the prosecution's case," he said. "I was like, 'O.K., now where's the defense?'" The rift among Jackson journalists over "Leaving Neverland" is the latest manifestation of a 25 year old dispute about how best to interpret his life story. On one side are those who regarded Jackson warily, seeing a powerful celebrity for whom paying a 25 million settlement over 1993 child molestation allegations was but one example of a willingness to use money and influence to camouflage grotesque behavior. On the other are those who saw him as a lifelong victim a developmentally arrested and unjustly maligned black entertainer who was a magnet for tabloid opportunists, corrupt cops and scheming frauds. "The first thing I thought when I watched it was, 'Yeah, I've heard all this before,'" she said of the documentary. "I felt very sorry and sad for those victims." Diane Dimond, who first exposed the Chandler allegations as a reporter for the tabloid television show "Hard Copy," said Jackson's fans have been sending her death threats ever since. She is at work on three new chapters for the audiobook version of her 2005 Jackson biography and wept while watching "Leaving Neverland." "I have a daughter, and I do lament that I spent so much time chasing leads on Michael Jackson," said Dimond, who was a young mother at the time. "But I hope that people will now understand that these reports were not just done for sensationalism." But some journalists see the documentary as just the latest in a pattern of disreputable attempts to bring Jackson down one being opportunistically marketed after his death when, by law, he can no longer be defamed. In an interview, Fischer called "Leaving Neverland" a "major distortion," and Robson and Safechuck "unreliable accusers." She was especially critical of Reed's failure to note potential conflicts of interest standard practice in journalism like the men's previous lawsuit against the Jackson estate, and reports that Robson had earlier sought a book deal. "That to me feels very manipulative, and I resent it," Fischer said. Vogel, who wrote an article in Forbes highlighting the lawsuit and prospective book deal before the film's release, also accused Reed of cherry picking. "I think an equally compelling film could be made in Jackson's defense by including certain people and certain evidence and excluding others," Vogel said. He noted alleged discrepancies in the timeline presented by Robson and Safechuck in the film, a growing point of contention for online skeptics. "There are still a lot of questions to be asked, if we believe in due process, and I think there are respectful ways to do that," Vogel said. Interviews that Reed gave explaining his decision not to interview sources who could defend Jackson arguing that the film's inclusion of Jackson's own public statements was sufficient so troubled some experts that they condemned the movie sight unseen. Steve Knopper, author of "MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson," said the film left him regretting some of his own blind spots. His book, which came out shortly after Robson and Safechuck jointly sued the Jackson estate in 2013, expressed skepticism of their claims and defended Jackson against the allegations from 1993 and 2005. "I found it pretty devastating," Knopper said of "Leaving Neverland." He now believes that Jackson was guilty. Or, that is, mostly believes it: "There is a small part of me that says, 'I still want more evidence.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Stewart Cairns for The New York Times	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
How Do You Count Endangered Species? Look to the Stars The conversation started over a fence dividing two backyards. On one side, an ecologist remarked that surveying animals is a pain. His neighbor, an astronomer, said he could see objects in space billions of light years away. And so began an unusual partnership to adapt tools originally developed to detect stars in the sky to monitor animals on the ground. The neighbors, Steven Longmore, the astronomer, and Serge Wich, the ecologist, both of Liverpool John Moores University in England, made their backyard banter a reality that may contribute to conservation and the fight against poaching. Claire Burke, an astrophysicist at the university now leading the project, presented the team's latest findings at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science on Tuesday. Keeping track of elusive animals, especially those that are endangered, isn't trivial. First, it takes time and money to conduct manual counts on the ground or to shoot photos from planes in the sky. With video, cheaper drones and software, identifying animals has become more efficient. But cameras made for daylight can miss animals or poachers moving through vegetation, and the devices don't work at night. Infrared cameras can help: Dr. Wich had been using them for decades to study orangutans. These cameras yield large amounts of footage that can't be analyzed fast enough. So what do animals and stars have in common? They both emit heat. And much like stars, every species has a recognizable thermal footprint. "They look like really bright, shining objects in the infrared footage," said Dr. Burke. So the software used to find stars and galaxies in space can be used to seek out thermal footprints and the animals that produce them. To build up a reference library of different animals in various environments, the team is working with a safari park and zoo to film and photograph animals. With these thermal images and they'll need thousands they'll be able to better calibrate algorithms to identify target species in ecosystems around the world. The experts started with cows and humans in England. On a sunny, summer day in 2015, the team flew their drones over a farm to see if their machine learning algorithms could locate the animals in infrared footage. For the most part, they could. But accuracy was compromised when drones flew too high, cows huddled together, or roads and rocks heated up in the sun. In a later test, the machines occasionally mistook hot rocks for students pretending to be poachers hiding in the bush. Last September, the scientists honed their tools in the first field test in South Africa. There, they found five Riverine rabbits in a relatively small area. These shy creatures are among the world's most endangered mammals. Only a thousand have ever been spotted by people. The tests helped the scientists calculate an optimal height to fly the drones. The team also learned that animals change shape in real time (rocks don't) as drones fly over. And the researchers found that rain, humidity and other environmental, atmospheric and weather conditions can interfere with proper imaging. The scientists are refining their system to account for these issues. And in two years, Dr. Burke said, they plan to have a fully automatic prototype ready for testing. Within five years, she hopes to sell systems at cost today, just around 15,000. In the meantime, these astro ecologists are also working with search and rescue groups to help find people lost at sea or in fog. And starting in May, they will collaborate with conservation groups and other universities to look for orangutans and spider monkeys in the dense forests of Malaysia and Mexico, as well as for river dolphins in Brazil's murky Amazon River.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The subtitle of the rich recent Drive East festival at La MaMa was "A Journey Through South Asian Music and Dance." The word "journey" was just right: The range covered different geographical parts of India, different dance and music styles, different aspects of spirit and technique. I caught 18 performances: nine of music, nine of dance, most an hour long. The music events included examples of Hindustani (northern) and Carnatic (southern) music; recitals led by violin, veena, bansuri, solo voice and choir. I'm especially sorry to have missed the Sufi songs. There are eight dance genres generally listed as India's classical dance forms; six were represented here. I caught five, one of which Sattriya was new to me. I'm by no means sure, however, how well it was exemplified here. Sattriya comes from Assam, the northeast state geographically separated from most of India by Bangladesh and Bhutan like an eastern peninsula. Like another of the eight classical styles, Manipuri (from the neighboring state of Manipur), Sattriya looks Indian even while suggesting several different cultural qualities and different rhythms. But is it as guarded and polite as the three women of the Sattriya Dance Company (based in Philadelphia) made it look? Their final number on Saturday was about the Brahmaputra River, which is central to Assam; but the vocal and orchestral sound seemed awkwardly like Europop. The festival's dances were for economic reasons almost all to taped music, but most soloists and companies made as much a virtue of this as possible. You could feel how precise and often how complex the musicality of the various idioms is. Only with the Sattriya troupe and Satya Pradeep's Kuchipudi on Saturday were there even passing moments of musical imprecision; these were the festival's least assured performances. The northern form Kathak depends more than any other on live interplay with music, and yet on Thursday, the brilliant virtuosity and bewitching charm of Barkha Patel helped us forget that tape must be second best. Likewise, the Bharatanatyam stylist Dakshina Vaidyanathan enchanted on Friday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
It was the fifth day of New York Fashion Week, and Laura Brown, the new editor in chief of InStyle magazine, had to be at the Zimmermann show on West 46th Street in five minutes. Unfortunately, she, her driver and her S.U.V. were stuck behind a Prince Lumber truck that could not seem to maneuver out of its parking spot on Washington Street. "What are you trying to do, lumber man?" she said. "We've got fashion to go to!" Wearing an animal print dress from Ganni and Saint Laurent stiletto boots, Ms. Brown was perched on the edge of her seat. The truck finally pushed out of the spot. And immediately began trying to get back in. "Don't try to get back in there, buddy," Ms. Brown said. "Prince Lumber, it's not your day." Finally, a quarter of an hour later, the truck found its way out and the S.U.V. headed uptown. Over the course of her 15 years in New York, Ms. Brown, who is from Sydney and still speaks with a pronounced Australian accent, has become a prominent figure in the fashion industry, appearing as a judge on Bravo's "The Fashion Show," interviewing Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton for Harper's Bazaar and accumulating 119,000 followers on her Instagram account, where she posts photos with friends like Karolina Kurkova and Christy Turlington. Yet Ms. Brown insists that when it comes to street style, she is not the one the photographers are after. "People are always rushing past me to get to Nicky Hilton or something," she said. She took a sip of iced coffee, a routine unaffected by the 38 degree weather. "I know it's weird," she said. "I don't mind hot coffee, but this feels like a refreshing beverage." So far that morning she had seen The Row (Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's collection) and sat in the front row at Carolina Herrera. "I bolted backstage after the show," she said. "I'm always the first one. Security is like, 'What are you doing?' I'm like, 'I'm a friend! Not going to harm her!'" Ms. Brown hoped that her day would end by 10 p.m. She goes to certain designers' dinners during fashion week Diane von Furstenberg's, for example but mostly avoids late night parties. "I'm a bit of a nana," she said. "I burn bright and I flame out early." Still, she had made time for one big bash the week before: InStyle's party for its March issue, the first that she had edited from front to back since leaving her post as executive editor of special projects at Harper's Bazaar in August. As part of her mission at InStyle, Ms. Brown wants the magazine to become more relatable, and to reflect the hybrid roles of many of today's celebrities. Hence, the inclusion of contributors like the writer and actress Lena Dunham, the fashion blogger and entrepreneur Leandra Medine, and the actress and model Hari Nef. Hence also, the cover star, Emily Ratajkowski, a model and actress known for her activist side (she campaigned for Bernie Sanders last year). When the car drew close to the Zimmermann show, Ms. Brown jumped out and jogged slash teetered down the remaining block, arriving with minutes to spare. After the show, she dashed off in search of the bathroom. It took her 15 minutes to get there. On the way, she chatted with Malcolm Carfrae, former head of communications for Ralph Lauren; congratulated Nicky Zimmermann; and posed for photos with Olivia Culpo, 2012 winner of the Miss USA pageant, and Shay Mitchell, an actress. Back outside, her hobnobbing duties done, Ms. Brown grabbed Ruthie Friedlander, who runs InStyle's website, and Sam Broekema, the magazine's accessories director, and hopped back into her car. Inside, Mr. Broekema and Ms. Brown flipped through a stack of photos: accessories for the May issue that needed Ms. Brown's approval. "It's the new Panther from Cartier," Mr. Broekema said in a French accent. "Can you say 'Panther' again?" Ms. Brown said. "The only French I know is 'I'm tired' or 'I need my wine' French." Between shows, Ms. Brown recalled her first fashion weeks, in London in the late 1990s. "I snuck into a couple of McQueen shows, but then I started to get invited," she said. "I would be in, like, Row J or something." It is Row J no more. The last stop before lunch was Proenza Schouler, where Ms. Brown was planted in the front, as she is at every show. Part of Ms. Brown's job is to know the right people, the interesting characters, the up and comers and the established players. The shows are a chance to pay her respects to the designers she knows and to take a peek at the ones she is curious about. The accumulated knowledge helps her choose looks for shoots and decide which designers to team up with for articles. It is a lot of socializing, and fashion is full of personalities and sometimes drama. The secret to Ms. Brown's success may be how effectively she keeps her head above it. "Go be mad at something else," she said. "I'm a nice girl and I'm happy to be here."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
At some point during its troubled gestation, the movie once known as "The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle" was renamed "Dolittle." Was "voyage" too fusty, "doctor" too fancy? Whatever the case, it's too bad that the rest of this movie couldn't have been ditched as well, or at least dramatically shortened. A dreary, overextended yawn, this is the latest movie to feature John Dolittle, the doctor turned horse whisperer that Hugh Lofting, a British born civil engineer, invented during World War I in letters to his children from the front. (He also drew the illustrations.) Robert Downey Jr., working an indistinct accent (Welsh? Scottish?), stars as Dolittle, now a recluse, who in the wake of a tragedy has retreated to his manor in Victorian England. There, he lives with a computer generated menagerie voiced by an army of actors who include Tom Holland (as a pacific dog), Octavia Spencer (an excitable duck) and Emma Thompson as Poly, a bright blue parrot with a battered beak. Poly spends a lot of time gently yet firmly bossing Dolittle around like a cliche of a wife, an interspecies dynamic that's lightly amusing (and weird) to think about when things slow down. Dolittle's wife died a while ago, as women often do in movies for children.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
ALTADENA, Calif. Jackie Beat is the grand poobah of drag comedy, West Coast division: a twisted mistress of highly clever lowbrow song parodies, a fearless maestro of "wait, it gets worse" standup clowning, a jokester who has put words in Joan Rivers's mouth on "Fashion Police" and opened for Roseanne Barr in Las Vegas. And, that's not to mention perhaps Ms. Beat's most in demand enterprise these days: impersonating Bea Arthur in Los Angeles stage parodies of "The Golden Girls." "There's no one faster than Jackie. She just doesn't stop," said Sherry Vine, another veteran drag performer, who recently completed a sold out 19 show run as the man hungry Blanche opposite Ms. Beat's deadpan Dorothy in "The Golden Girlz" at the Cavern Club Celebrity Theater in the Los Angeles enclave of Silver Lake. But when Ms. Beat, 52, does take off her wig and lay her head down to rest, it's in a five bedroom showplace done up in her inimitable style. Collaborating over the last year with Senor Amor, a designer and D.J. whose firm has done work for Jane Wiedlin of the Go Go's, Ms. Beat has transformed an appealing but inconspicuous house in this up and coming suburb a house that was once a day care center upholstered in pastel chintz into a moody, Brutalist inspired bastion of art and kitsch. For this house, she chose a new batch of period furniture and accessories from antiques stores, thrift shops and online listings. "Jackie is such an avid shopper who's always on the hunt for the next great thing, and she always delivers," Senor Amor said. Evoking retro futurism and midcentury Acapulco, the home is a chic counterbalance to the tastelessness of, say, Ms. Beat's spoof of Sir Mix a Lot's 1992 hit "Baby Got Back," which she rewrote as "Baby Got Front." The anatomically frank music video has racked up more than a million views on YouTube "She's the Weird Al Yankovic of drag," said the nightclub promoter Mario Diaz, a friend and, while dirty, may be the least potentially offensive song in Ms. Beat's very naughty repertoire. The music parodies, which one critic called "smartly vulgar," are not for everyone. And not everyone could live in the surroundings that Ms. Beat the alter ego of Kent Fuher, who first brought his drag character to life at a poetry night at Cafe Largo on Fairfax Avenue in the late 1980s now calls home. But those who share Ms. Beat's artistic sensibilities appreciate what she has accomplished. The house, said Ms. Beat's thrifting buddy Muffy Bolding, a writer whose credits include the film "Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust," "is an expression of who she is and it's a part of her art, and she loves nothing more than to bring people in to see her masterpiece." Ms. Beat's housewarming, on a Monday night in January, drew a crowd that included the drag luminaries Bianca Del Rio and Alaska 5000, the actors Kate Flannery ("The Office") and Selene Luna ("Coco"), and the transgender activists Andrea James and Calpernia Addams. "When you see Jackie's house, you realize how deep her attention to detail goes," said Alaska 5000, a recording artist who won the second season of "RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars" in 2016. "Who has a party and plans what's going to be on every single TV monitor? She keeps it like a showroom." With a wall size mural that looks like the Arizona flag (Ms. Beat lived in Scottsdale as a child) rendered in hippie era appliance colors, and a Paul Evans inspired bedroom set by Pueblo by Lane Furniture, which Ms. Beat found for 2,300 on Craigslist, the master suite looks as if a great cinematic dame like Helen Lawson of "Valley of the Dolls" just slipped out to the balcony for a cig. One of Ms. Beat's guest bedrooms, where Ms. Vine was staying during her "Golden Girlz" run, is a homage to the 1976 Brian De Palma horror film, "Carrie," with nearly 100 framed pieces of memorabilia, and a bedspread that supersizes a photo of the movie's stars, Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek, in a familial embrace. Beneath a skull lamp on a bedside table, there is a small framed photo of the late Ms. Arthur (Ms. Beat refers to her as her "spirit animal"), the vestige of a "Golden Girls" themed room that she had in her former home in Highland Park. The kitchen features vintage cookie jars, two large graphic framed fruit prints and cabinetry lacquered in bright peacock blue. "I love matchy matchy," Ms. Beat said, so the appliances and the flatware are that color, too, contrasting with a new set of dishes in Howard Johnson orange. The first floor bathroom is inspired by the "Planet of the Apes" movies, which featured Brutalist architecture in their production design. A shower curtain reproduces an illustrated movie poster from the 1968 original with a shirtless Charlton Heston displaying his signature brand of hypermasculine anguish. "'Planet of the Apes' is very anti glamour," Senor Amor said. "The question became, how does that all fit into the home of someone who loves all things beautiful and refined?" "One of my favorite things to do to drive her crazy is move a tchotchke," Mr. Diaz said. (Ms. Beat is relaxed enough, though, to live with two dogs: Chihuahua mixes named Miss Toni Home Perm and Darlin'.) "I didn't want the place to look like the Madonna Inn," Ms. Beat said, referring to the wackadoodle themed room hotel in San Luis Obispo, Calif. But she put any concerns about resale value out of her head. "I would never tone down what I do to get more work, so I'd never tone down my personal style to sell the place in the future," she said. "This home is not for other people. This place is for me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The tsunami that killed hundreds of people on Sumatra and Java in Indonesia late Saturday is a reminder that such destructive waves are not always caused by earthquakes. This disaster, which struck without warning and killed at least 222 people and injured more than 800 others, appeared to have been caused by volcanic activity. No earthquakes were recorded before the tsunami struck, the Indonesian authorities said. But there had been an eruption on the volcanic island of Anak Krakatau about half an hour before, they said, one of a series of eruptions there in recent weeks. Tsunamis are created when large amounts of water in the ocean, a bay or even a lake are quickly displaced. In an earthquake, that displacement can occur when the ground moves as a fault breaks. This was the mechanism by which a 9.1 magnitude earthquake on Dec. 26, 2004, off Aceh Province in northern Indonesia, spawned large waves that traveled across the Indian Ocean and killed 225,000 people. Many other tsunamis have also followed earthquakes, including those in September that devastated the city of Palu on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi after a 7.5 magnitude quake. See images from Indonesia after the latest tsunami to strike the country. Volcanic activity creates a tsunami differently. One possibility is an explosive eruption, or general weakening of the flanks of a volcano by hot magma passing through. Either way, part of the volcano perhaps, in the case of Anak Krakatau, a part that is underwater can collapse, creating a landslide that displaces water. Another possible mechanism is the collapse of a magma chamber below the volcano as it empties during an eruption. Volcano related tsunamis are not uncommon. An eruption in 1792 in Japan created waves that were several hundred feet high. Landslides during the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington spawned large waves in a lake nearby. Perhaps the most famous volcanic disaster in history, the 1883 eruption of Krakatau, also called Krakatoa, triggered tsunamis that killed tens of thousands of people. (Anak Krakatau island has built up in place of Krakatau, which was obliterated in the 1883 event.) Landslides hitting water can sometimes create huge waves. The largest wave ever recorded was caused by a landslide into Lituya Bay, in southeast Alaska, in July 1958. It followed an earthquake, not an eruption, but created a wave that wiped vegetation off the hillside on the opposite side of the bay. A United States Geological Survey geologist, measuring the scouring marks, determined that the height of the wave had been more than 1,700 feet.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'THE ILLUSIONISTS MAGIC OF THE HOLIDAYS' at the Neil Simon Theater (previews start on Nov. 29; opens on Dec. 4). Christmas with its crowds, its commercialism, its obligations doesn't always feel like the most magical time of the year. Annually, a group of prestidigitators tries to change that. This year's sorcerous lineup includes the mind reader Chris Cox, the comic conjurer Paul Dabek and the close up magician Eric Chien. theillusionistslive.com 'JAGGED LITTLE PILL' at the Broadhurst Theater (in previews; opens on Dec. 5). This jukebox musical, inspired by Alanis Morissette's best selling album, arrives unironically on Broadway. The story of a dysfunctional family, it is directed by Diane Paulus, with a book by Diablo Cody. Of last year's production in Massachusetts, Jesse Green wrote that it does the good work "we are always asking new musicals to do: the work of singing about real things." Will you fall head over feet? Don't be surprised. 212 239 6200, jaggedlittlepill.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
A. Your phone's app store should have several utilities for converting documents and pages into PDF files, and some are free. Adobe, which created the format back in the early 1990s, has a version of its Acrobat Reader app for Android, iOS and Windows phones, but the PDF conversion tool requires a monthly subscription fee of about 10. Recent versions of Android and iOS, however, have their own PDF making tools built right in. Android features can vary based on the version used by the device manufacturer. But in most cases, you should be able to create a PDF from an open email message or web page by tapping the three dot More menu in the upper right corner of the screen and selecting the Print option. If you do not see a Print command, select Share and check for a Print option there. When you are asked to select a printer, choose Save as PDF, tap Save and choose a place to store the resulting file.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
In "Cambuyon," a percussive dance and music show that opened at the New Victory Theater on Friday, rhythm comes from many sources: wooden crates, metal buckets, matchsticks, glass bottles, kitchen utensils, feet slapping the floor and hands slapping the body. The concept bears more than a little resemblance to "Stomp," but in this production by Enlace Servicios Culturales, a company based in the Canary Islands and in Barcelona, all of the tapping and clanging happens aboard a ship whose location in time and space remains open to interpretation. What century are we in? What hemisphere? Does it matter? Created with young audiences in mind a solid under 12 contingent turned out for opening night "Cambuyon" sets out to explore the cultural cross pollination engendered by sea travel. This proves less a historical concern than an excuse to smash together lots of different styles clogging, tap, hip hop, salsa in one rambunctious, fast paced, frayed around the edges hour. Rudimentary projections by Jonatan Rodriguez, who is also one of the seven performers, situate us, at the outset, somewhere along the coast of England. (The show's title comes from the phrase "Come Buy On," which, according to the program, British ships would display when selling goods at Spanish ports.) The first of 12 awkwardly linked scenes features a foot music battle between two scruffy men: Thanos Daskalopoulos, who wears wooden slabs on the soles of his shoes, and Jep Melendez, one of the company's artistic directors, in tap shoes. As Raul Cabrera, the cast's most skilled vocalist, sings a hornpipe, Mr. Melendez insists on breaking out of their upright routine with looser improvisations. Mr. Daskalopoulos, getting exasperated, eventually sheds his clunky footwear to keep up. Thus we zoom through the evolution of tap in a single costume change. Another contest goes down in the next scene between the sisters Clara and Berta Pons, who introduce popping, locking and other stop motion snaking moves into the mix. These will resurface in the finale, when the deck of the ship is most like a playground.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. If you'd never seen a Neil LaBute play before "True Love Will Find You in the End," which opened recently at the Denizen Theater here, you might be surprised by the huge twist that comes exactly two thirds of the way through. I, on the other hand, having seen so many, dreaded the twist the whole time, as if watching an atomic clock count down to a cataclysm. That's because LaBute's technique, hardened over the course of some 30 plays in 30 years, typically involves a sudden turn that realigns everything and leaves the audience feeling snookered. Why did we sit through the elaborate buildup, getting to know characters one way, only to learn they were secretly and not very logically another? Why did the plot turn out to be a mousetrap with us as the mouse? That this technique, however mechanical, actually serves the slim story of "True Love" is something I realized only after the two character, 46 minute play was over. While in the theater I just felt mystified and antsy. Perhaps that was because I was in fact in a theater, for the first time since March 10. The Denizen, based in this bustling Mid Hudson college town, decided to produce the show in its black box space when plans to do so as part of a live outdoor series at the Water Street Market were scotched by Covid. Bringing "True Love" safely indoors involved a major adjustment to the director J.J. Kandel's production and to the concept of in person theater. The audience would be present, but not the actors. So on Saturday evening, I found myself, along with seven other playgoers, seated along the perimeter of the Denizen's small square playing space. (We were all masked, and more than six feet apart, with two people on each side of the square.) In the middle, where you would expect actors to be, the scenic designer Marcele Mitscherlich had placed an abstract sculpture consisting of two metal bands overlapping on the floor; suspended above them, a third occasionally dripped water like a leaky shower. The two bands on the floor clearly represented wedding rings: marriage, or at least adultery, is the play's subject. Perhaps the dripping band represented torture, for that was what it felt like to be so near to the lost experience of theater and yet still so far away from it. The actors, Gia Crovatin as a wife and KeiLyn Durrel Jones as a husband, were represented by their recorded voices only. As part of a soundscape by Nick Moore, their lines emerged from different empty parts of the room, which sometimes made the house feel haunted. But then so did the story, one of those LaBute peekaboos in which there are more holes than fabric. (The holes are where information has been suppressed, to permit the surprise later.) The wife talks about how an affair she almost fell into with a neighbor was interrupted before it fully began by the pandemic and its restrictions, and how sequestration with her husband helped rekindle their love. The husband's testimony does not always match up, occasionally leading him to contradict her or merely say curtly, "No comment." That's all I can say about the plot, but you don't need spoilers to see the question it raises. Whom are the characters talking to? From their tone I sometimes thought they were being interviewed by a nosy lifestyle magazine, sometimes by a marriage counselor and sometimes by a police officer: There is, as always in LaBute, a cloud of menace over the proceedings. That menace is distributed unevenly; the wife, though less "likable" than the husband her detours around the truth amount to lies gets the brunt of the double meaning of the play's title. You leave worried for her. Which is not to say that the actors don't do a great job of using their voices to put the various tonalities of the tricky dialogue across; they do so much so that the color coding of the lights (pink for her, blue for him) feels not just old hat but gratuitous. Still, I found it impossible not to miss their bodies. If characters are going to love and lie, you want to see them do it. To correct for that, as perhaps LaBute and Kandel intended, I began unconsciously but then deliberately to associate each voice with someone in the tiny audience. The "wife" sat across from me, often twirling her hair. The "husband" was cater corner to her until, oops, he fell asleep. Whether that was marriage I cannot say but it was, finally, theater. True Love Will Find You in the End Through Nov. 22 at Denizen Theater, New Paltz, N.Y.; denizentheatre.com. Running time: 46 minutes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Since its subterranean galleries opened in 2014, the National September 11 Memorial Museum in Lower Manhattan has depended upon income from millions of visitors to pay for programming, operating costs and security. Now, deprived of ticket revenue because of the coronavirus pandemic and facing a deficit of up to 45 million over the next year, the organization has started a fund raising campaign and resorted to furloughs and layoffs that affect almost 60 percent of its staff. "We've had to make difficult and painful decisions to forestall the deficit and address the loss of revenue," the memorial and museum's president and chief executive, Alice M. Greenwald, said in a statement, adding: "It is not easy to let go of dear friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to this sacred place." Although the outdoor memorial is scheduled to reopen on July 4, the museum is expected to remain closed for now, in accordance with city and state guidelines.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Credit...Kent Andreasen for The New York Times STELLENBOSCH, South Africa For tourists, this prim colonial town is the gateway to a spectacular mountain region dotted with wine estates. To most South Africans, however, it is the redoubt of the Afrikaner elite, a Calvinist town whose university trained the framers of apartheid and where banking billionaires roost today. In a land that is sharply unequal despite 26 years of democracy, money and whiteness feel especially concentrated here. Either way, it's an unexpected place for a contemporary art exhibition particularly of the experimental, pan Africanist variety, with artists from around the continent, none of them white, exploring economic and cultural themes led by a curator steeped in black feminism and Xhosa spirituality. So when the first ever Stellenbosch Triennale began last month, and artists mingled with Afrikaner finance types at the opening night party while hip DJs from Cape Town spun Nigerian and Congolese dance hits, even the organizers who intended this effect did a double take. "I did look around many times, and just smile," Andi Norton, a board member of the Stellenbosch Outdoor Sculpture Trust, the civic group behind the triennale, said the next day. "It was a group of people that I hadn't thought I would ever see in the same place." But the location was the biggest story of all. For South African culture veterans, to see this kind of work in Stellenbosch, of all places, was deeply incongruous. For six weeks, the triennale attracted more than 6,000 visitors, before the event went on hiatus after the coronavirus outbreak reached South Africa. The presence of these artists and their work brought an optimism and energy that confounded even the cynics. "It's not a natural unfolding," said Jay Pather, an adviser to the triennale, who is a choreographer, curator and teacher at the University of Cape Town. "It sits oddly." The town is not just wealthy, but insular. Stellenbosch University long taught only in Afrikaans, the settler language derived from the Dutch, officially adding English and Xhosa only in 2016. "The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaires' Club," a native son expose by the journalist Pieter du Toit, made a splash in 2019, documenting the workings of this tight knit business elite and the Steinhoff affair, a financial scandal that rocked the national economy. For the left wing Economic Freedom Fighters opposition party, Stellenbosch denotes shadowy forces that members believe control the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa. But it's far from just radicals who view the place with suspicion. "Most of my black friends don't come here," Ms. Norton said. Mr. Mavura told them of his journeys across Africa by bus, attending art events organized on a shoestring. Pictures of the 2017 Lubumbashi Biennial, with events al fresco on plastic chairs, showed that a biennial or triennial didn't have to be as elaborate as Venice's, Ms. Norton said. "It took a lot of pressure off us," she said. "It gave us a lot of ideas of how we could do it our authentic way." The Stellenbosch Triennale was relatively frugal, with a budget of 8 million rand (roughly 600,000), plus in kind contributions, according to Ms. Beyers. Almost all of the funds were raised from local donors, many of them anonymous (in keeping with the secrecy associated with Stellenbosch money). Still, the investment was significant, a cautious bet on breaking the mold. "We're so much more than food and wine," said Jeanneret Momberg, the head of the town's tourism board and a former winery executive. "I think it's very fresh and necessary that we bring young, progressive, inclusive people into the area." She added: "Colonialism, slavery, those are all topics that it's not nice to talk about, but they're part of our heritage." The initiative reflected, too, an ongoing dynamic in South African society some members of the Afrikaner community are seeking to make a social impact while they process guilt from the apartheid era. "A lot of serious liberal Afrikaners want desperately to change the paradigm," Ms. Beyers said. "Our lives as black people, people of color, people who have been oppressed we're programmed to respond to the system all the time," Ms. Mbongwa said. Instead, she said, her cardinal values were "care and cure." "Care in terms of caring for the artists, for the space. And cure, because the reality of the world is there's so much woundedness we have that we don't understand. I'm coming here to open some form of wound so I can understand how to heal, and instigate spaces of healing." Ms. Mbongwa grew up in Cape Town's Gugulethu township; she belonged to Gugulective, an artist collective active there a decade ago. The townships resulted from forced displacements under apartheid, which designated land by race across South Africa, clearing nonwhites from desirable areas. The social ills that followed this violent uprooting crime, sexual violence, alcoholism still endure. "We did not create these places," Ms. Mbongwa said. "We were put here, we made life here, we had our moments of joy, but this place is inherently sick. We found a way to sort of negotiate the disease. And I realized, I'm tired of dying. I want to know how to live." She studied sociology, deliberately choosing Stellenbosch University to grasp the psychology of the system. Beside her record as a curator, that experience gave her an edge with the organizers. "Somebody's got to understand this town," Ms. Beyers said. The main show, with 20 artists outdoors and inside an industrial hangar at the Woodmill, a timber plant turned office and retail complex at the edge of town, was heavy on installations. One large scale textile work by Zyma Amien, from South Africa, evoked the collapse of the Cape region's garment industry; another, by Hellen Nabukenya, from Uganda, was a ceiling hung assemblage stitched over six months with women in her local community. Ms. Mbongwa's emphasis on care came through in a performance installation hybrid by Ms. Kukama, from South Africa, who collected soil each day from a local river to tend to indigenous plant seeds in a fragile bed surrounded by concrete. Sethembile Msezane, also South African, built a hut like structure set with candles, plaited hair and a wafting soundtrack of female voices, dedicated to "women who did not leave the world peacefully." Ronald Muchatuta took on his native Zimbabwe, through painted panels and drawings hung on clotheslines, referring to political leaders and events. On the ground, however, he placed his wood carved version of a children's game that involves tossing seeds or stones, and invited visitors to play. Similarly, Patrick Bongoy, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, broke the tension and heavy theme of his installation of rubber sculptures and strips evoking resource exploitation with a loop of sweet rumba by the famous Congolese singer Franco. Later, Mr. van Wyk offered an impromptu tour of sites around Stellenbosch that bore marks of its troubled history and present. "The first time I was called a racial epithet was in Stellenbosch," he said. He pointed out the Moederkerk, or Mother Church, in the town center, where pastors developed the religious rationale for segregation. "Apartheid was prayed into existence here," he said. Nearing the campus, he showed where a Coloured neighborhood had been demolished for the university to expand; and Andringa Street, where, in 1940, white university students destroyed the property of mixed race inhabitants. "We feel like we don't belong on our earth, on our land," Mr. van Wyk said. Even nature was wounded, he said, pointing to rows of oak trees the town emblem with cancerous growths. In the face of such stakes, Mr. van Wyk was happy to see the triennale. "It's beautifully audacious," he said. "This place just needs disruption, constant disruption." The visiting artists provided some of that. They gathered at long tables at nice restaurants, usually the sole black diners. Some were housed at the homes of local patrons, prompting awkward or enlightening breakfast conversations. After an official cocktail event, they booked a convoy of Ubers and fled for Kayamandi, the city's largest black township, a short drive from the center but a world away, with streets edged by corrugated shacks and, up the hill, utilitarian concrete homes. Sundown found the artists at an open air drinking spot, sharing beers and grilled meat while a DJ spun house music. It was a welcome break, but for those unused to South Africa and its extremes, also jarring. "It was like, OMG," said the Ghanaian artist Kelvin Haizel. "So how do we deal with the complexity of this pristineness, and then this other space that provides labor to the city?" Kaloki Nyamai, a mixed media artist from Kenya, embraced the contrast in his own way, visiting as many wineries as possible to grasp, he said, how the society functioned. His plan initially involved shipping more materials than the triennale could afford, and the space allocated him was smaller than he expected. Ms. Mbongwa coaxed him into being guided by what he found on location. He came up with an installation that was one of the show's strongest, involving sisal rope and suspended money boxes from the Bank of Uganda, in a shacklike structure that visitors can enter, minding the large mound of cow manure at its center. The work, he said, was informed by the discomfort among white people he met in town, and his own discomfort at experiencing theirs. The dung came from area farms, and he pointed out that it had two different consistencies one from industrial raised cows, the other free range. "This is actual Stellenbosch art," Mr. Nyamai said. "It's theirs to stay."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Huy Bui has an unusual design specialty. So unusual, in fact, that it's hard to explain. But it has to do with creating little structures vertical villages, really that house vegetation rather than people. "I call them modular ecologies," said Mr. Bui, 40, who studied architecture at the Parsons School of Design and now spends his time making intricate wooden terrariums under the name Plant in City, a collective he founded with two partners. "They all have their own little world within, but you can stack them to create a bigger interconnected piece." Among his latest projects is a room size installation on view at the Lowline Lab on the Lower East Side, a plant sprouting scaffold that can be reconfigured to serve as a jungle gym, a studio or a wine bar. At home, however, Mr. Bui appreciates the simplicity of a plant in a pot and the easiest way to achieve that is with a good planter. There are just a few things to keep in mind, he said: Know your roots. If you have a cactus, for example, "the root system is small and you can have a planter with a really short base," Mr. Bui said. "But if you have a tree with a complex root system, you want something deep."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
American employers have a variety of job vacancies, piles of cash and countless well qualified candidates. But despite a slowly improving economy, many companies remain reluctant to actually hire, stringing job applicants along for weeks or months before they make a decision. The number of job openings has increased to levels not seen since the height of the financial crisis, but vacancies are staying unfilled much longer than they used to an average of 23 business days today compared to a low of 15 in mid 2009, according to a new measure of Labor Department data by the economists Steven J. Davis, Jason Faberman and John Haltiwanger. Some have attributed the more extended process to a mismatch between the requirements of the four million jobs available and the skills held by many of the 12 million unemployed. That's probably true in a few high skilled fields, like nursing or biotech, but for a large majority of positions where candidates are plentiful, the bigger problem seems to be a sort of hiring paralysis. "There's a fear that the economy is going to go down again, so the message you get from C.F.O.'s is to be careful about hiring someone," said John Sullivan, a management professor at San Francisco State University who runs a human resources consulting business. "There's this great fear of making a mistake, of wasting money in a tight economy." As a result, employers are bringing in large numbers of candidates for interview after interview after interview. Data from Glassdoor.com, a site that collects information on hiring at different companies, shows that the average duration of the interview process at major companies like Starbucks, General Mills and Southwest Airlines has roughly doubled since 2010. "After they call you back after the sixth interview, there's a part of you that wants to say, 'That's it, I'm not going back,' " said Paul Sullivan, 43, an exasperated but cheerful video editor in Washington. "But then you think, hey, maybe seven is my lucky number. And besides, if I don't go, they'll just eliminate me if something else comes up because they'll think I have an attitude problem." Like other job seekers around the country, he has been through marathon interview sessions. Mr. Sullivan has received eighth and ninth round callbacks for positions at three different companies. Two of those companies, as it turned out, ultimately decided not to hire anyone, he said; instead they put their openings "on hold" because of budget pressures. At one company, while signing into the visitor's log for the sixth time, he was chided by the security guard. "He thought I worked there and just kept forgetting my security badge," Mr. Sullivan said. "He couldn't believe I was actually there for another interview. I couldn't either! But then I put on a happy face, went upstairs and waited for another round of questions." The hiring delays are part of the vicious cycle the economy has yet to escape: jobless and financially stretched Americans are reluctant to spend, which holds back demand, which in turn frays employers' confidence that sales will firm up and justify committing to a new hire. Job creation over the last two years has been steady but too slow to put a major dent in the backlog of unemployed workers, and the February jobs report due out on Friday is expected to be equally mediocre. Uncertainty about the effect of fiscal policy in Washington is not helping expectations for the rest of the year, either. "If you have an opening and are not sure about the economy, it's pretty cheap to wait for a month or two," said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University. But in the aggregate, those little delays, coupled with fiscal uncertainty, are stretching out the recovery process. "It's like one of those horror movies, an economic Friday the 13th, where this recession never seems to die." Employers might be making candidates jump through so many hoops partly because so many workers have been jobless for months or years, and hiring managers want to make sure the candidates' skills are up to date, said Robert Shimer, an economics professor at the University of Chicago. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. But there's also little pressure to hire right now, so long as candidates are abundant and existing staff members are afraid to refuse the extra workload created by an unfilled position. Employers can keep dragging out the hiring process until they're more confident about their business or at least until they find the superstar candidate. "They're chasing after that purple squirrel," said Roger Ahlfeld, 44, of Framingham, Mass., using a human resources industry term for an impossibly qualified job applicant. An H.R. professional himself, Mr. Ahlfeld has been looking for work since August 2011, and has been frustrated to find himself the "silver medalist" for a couple of jobs after six separate rounds of interviews totaling 10 to 20 hours for each position, not including prep work and transportation time. For both of those jobs, though, there still has been no gold medalist. After eight months, they remain unfilled, with the companies intermittently posting a job ad, taking it down, and then posting it again. In addition to demanding credentials beyond what a given position traditionally requires, employers have thrown up more hurdles as screening devices. In his job hunt over the last year, Mr. Sullivan has taken several video editing tests, which he says he aced. But he has also been subjected to a battery of personality and psychological exams, a spelling quiz and even a math test (including a question that began, to the best of his recollection, "If John is on a train traveling from New York at 40 miles per hour, and Susie is on a train from Boston..."). He passed the math test with a 90 percent score, he said. "Sister Callahan would be very proud that I was able to remember math problems I learned in prep school," he said. "But what on earth does that have to do with the job I was applying for? It was like something out of 'Seinfeld.' " For the companies themselves, economists say, the gantlets they have constructed may be wasting managers' time and company resources. Besides, there are diminishing returns to interviewing candidates so many times; a recent internal analysis at Google, a company that developed a reputation for over interviewing even when the economy was good, showed that the optimal number of interviews for any given candidate was four. But according to user reviews on Glassdoor.com, the average Google interview process has expanded in the last two years, to 30 days from 21. Google declined to comment. And for applicants, the expenses add up fast. Mr. Sullivan calculates that the three positions he applied for cost him 520.36 in parking fees, two parking tickets, gas and trips to Starbucks while waiting for his interviews. (He recently switched to taking a coffee thermos, he says.) That excludes the costs of producing and mailing his video work, dry cleaning bills for the suits he dons for interviews and thousands of dollars of fees to become certified in new video editing programs. Job seekers just have to hope that the investment pays off. Jameson Cherilus, 23, counts himself as one of the lucky ones. Since graduating at the top of his 2012 class at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, he has spent hundreds of dollars traveling from his home in Bridgeport to interview for jobs in New York. After about six weeks of interviews for an entry level administrative position at a talent agency, he was finally offered the job in mid December. More than two months later, he said, "They still haven't given me my start date."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
LISBON The smell of fresh paint wafted recently inside a mansion on the grounds of the Sao Bento Palace, the official residence of the Portuguese prime minister. International lenders calling this week on Pedro Passos Coelho, who moved in just two months ago, will be looking, however, for more than superficial improvements to the country's economy before writing their next check. Three months after approving a EUR78 billion, or 111 billion, bailout for Portugal, officials from the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank are conducting their first review of progress toward meeting conditions set for emergency financing. Those include budget cuts and an economic overhaul intended to stimulate growth. Portuguese officials and business executives expect a broadly favorable assessment following general elections that replaced a minority Socialist government with a stronger, center right one. But they also worry that elements out of their control a widening debt crisis in Europe and fears of a slowdown in global growth that have been rattling markets could undermine Portugal's efforts. "To make the changes that we have agreed to is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one" alone, said Antonio Mexia, chief executive of EDP Energias de Portugal, the country's largest utility. "There are now a lot of things that no longer depend on Portugal but instead on Spain and Italy and other countries around us," he said. "In this crisis not even bigger countries than ours can say that they control fully their destiny." Still, since his electoral victory in June, Mr. Passos Coelho, Portugal's new prime minister, has struck a confident note, insisting that his government would reduce the budget deficit by more than a third this year, to 5.9 percent of gross domestic product from 9.1 percent in 2010. Such drastic tightening would be a significant improvement on the performance of the previous government. It would also contrast with the situation in Greece, which remains on the brink of default more than a year after becoming the first euro zone country to be rescued. The Finance Ministry in Athens reported last month that the budget deficit there had widened by almost a third in the first six months of this year blowing its targets as a deep recession exacerbated by budget cuts dampens government revenue. "What we learnt from Greece is that it's all about implementation," said Carlos Moedas, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker named by the Portuguese prime minister to oversee the budget agreement with its foreign creditors. "The kind of implementation monitoring that we are putting in place is completely new in Portugal and I believe even ahead of what was done in past I.M.F. programs." As in the bailouts of Greece and Ireland, the lenders have set quarterly progress reviews. For Portugal, the outcome of the first review is expected as early as the end of this week. When the I.M.F. was last called to Portugal's rescue in the early 1980s, the intervention was widely unpopular, largely because it led to a sharp rise in interest rates. This time, despite grumblings by Portugal's powerful Communist party about foreign intervention and excessive austerity demands, "there is a real and widespread sense of relief that we are finally getting helped by qualified financial experts, because people here are completely fed up with mismanagement by our politicians," said Pedro Reis, author of "Returning to Growth," a recent book detailing Portugal's economic woes. Nuno Vasconcellos, who heads Ongoing, a family investment company that has several media businesses, as well as a significant stake in Portugal Telecom, said the arrival of the I.M.F. "must be seen as the perfect excuse to make all the reforms that Portugal has refused to consider for the past 30 years." Indeed, one of Mr Passos Coelho's challenges is to lead by example and rein in spending in the country's bloated public administration, as well as improve performance at state controlled companies that have accumulated about EUR40 billion of debt. This week, for instance, Standard Poor's downgraded the debt of Comboios de Portugal, the railroad company, warning that "there is an increasing likelihood the company could default on its next five months' maturities if timely extraordinary support is not provided by the Portuguese government." His Socialist predecessor, Jose Socrates, pushed three separate austerity packages through Parliament that failed to make much of a dent. At the fourth attempt, opposition lawmakers balked, prompting Mr. Socrates to resign. After an early election on June 5, Mr. Passos Coelho formed the youngest and smallest government since Portugal's return to democracy in the 1970s. Four out of 11 ministers have no party affiliation, including Vitor Gaspar, the finance minister. In contrast to Mr. Socrates, who governed with a parliamentary minority, Mr. Passos Coelho can count on the support of a center right coalition that is in command of Parliament. In fact, lawmakers agreed last month to limit their traditional summer recess to two weeks instead of five weeks to sign off on urgent legislation. But despite the political change in Lisbon, bond investors have kept Portugal's borrowing costs close to record highs, although the bailout was designed to cover the country's financing needs until 2013. Meanwhile, Portugal is next scheduled to sell as much as EUR1.25 billion in short term bills on Aug. 17. Furthermore, the Portuguese stock market index has tumbled this month amid worldwide concerns over fiscal imbalances in much larger economies like the United States and Italy. That could jeopardize Portugal's privatization calendar because falling share prices mean that sales will not raise as much as the government had hoped. First in line is the power company EDP, in which the government is hoping to sell a stake of about 20 percent to a foreign utility for about EUR2.5 billion. Anxiety over Portugal's own fiscal performance has not subsided. On July 5, Moody's Investors Service cut Portugal's debt rating to junk status, and warned of a further cut because of the "formidable challenges" faced by the incoming government. Underlining such challenges, the statistics agency reported in late June that the deficit was 8.7 percent of G.D.P. at the end of the first quarter leaving almost three percentage points to be cut before year end.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
"All is quiet on New Year's Day." Fat chance, Bono. U2's wintry hit "New Year's Day" may kick off the "Billions" episode it shares a title with, but Bono's opening line certainly doesn't describe it. Directed with verve and humor by Adam Bernstein and written by the series creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien always a sign that the game is well and truly afoot "New Year's Day" has the feel of a turning point for the season. Nothing shocking or momentous takes place, but the air is electric. This, despite taking place on a traditionally low key holiday. On a day when the rest of the world is nursing hangovers, watching bowl games or simply kicking back and chilling out, these workaholic characters are preparing for the fight of their lives. Or the fight of their year, anyway. (They do a lot of fighting.) The focus of the episode falls on Wendy, who has become the show's protagonist since Bobby and Chuck declared a cease fire on her behalf. Her license to practice is on the line because of her unethical handling of Taylor Mason's personal information, and her normally professional facade is being eaten away before her colleagues' eyes. Taylor sails smoothly through a mock medical board hearing, augmented by Chuck and Wendy's one time friend Lonnie Watley (Malachi Weir). But Wendy flunks her practice session royally. Recognizing his wife's dire straits, Chuck suggests a bargain: accept a suspension and probation in exchange for eventual expunction. When he advises her to take the deal instead of make a deal, though, the jig is up. Wendy knows now that he expects her to lose and has made face saving arrangements behind the scenes. She suspects this is as much about his own convenience as it is about her well being, and she sends him off. Her work husband succeeds where her real husband fails. Taking her aside, Bobby reveals the moment he knew she would be his partner for life. It wasn't when she read the Riot Act to a roomful of grieving 9/11 families who were demanding that Bobby, virtually the lone survivor in his firm, immediately pony up the money he'd promised them. It was when, after defending him publicly, she told him that if he didn't deliver, "I'll kill you myself." Loyal to him in public, loyal to a greater cause in private, willing to hold him to his word and call him on his mistakes: This, Bobby says, makes Wendy the ideal ally. It is also why, much as it pains them both to do so, he advises her to approach Taylor and simply apologize for what she did. Stepping out of the Taylor Mason Capital elevator, her dark clothing darker still in the low light of the closed office, Wendy does what Bobby suggests. Then she adds some ill advised advice, telling Taylor not to be the vengeance seeking creep that she and Bobby have become. That's the moment that lets Taylor know, if there was any doubt, not to buy what Wendy's selling. "Your apology isn't real," Mason says. "This, like everything with you, is now merely transactional. That's who and what you are." So Taylor makes a demand: Only if Wendy asks Taylor not to testify directly, laying bare the quid pro quo behind the mea culpa, will the hedge fund genius relent. But even that gets weaponized in the feud. Taylor knows that in effectively forcing Wendy to decide her fate for herself, she will face a judge harsher than any medical board could ever be. It should be noted here that Taylor has experience on both the vengeance and self judgment sides of the equation this episode. While Mason Cap plots to take over the No. 1 appliance supplier to Rebecca Cantu's ailing department store chain in order to stick it to her boyfriend, Mason Cap's founder is confronted by its major domo, Sarah, about, ahem, extracurricular activities with the company's investor relations specialist, Lauren. It's one thing for Mafee to be interested, but Lauren is Taylor's employee. Is that the kind of hedge fund hot shot Taylor wants to be? What of our other major players this New Year? Chuck appears to blithely waltz even deeper into corruption, cutting a deal with Treasury Secretary Todd Krakow to free up the funds needed for his father's construction project. Bobby, meanwhile, hauls in both himself and pretty much every Axe Cap character with a speaking role on the holiday. He has pretexts for each: He has to help Wendy prepare; he has to defend against Taylor's takeover of that appliance company; he has to come up with an appropriate tax evasion scheme to offset the 18 fine art masterpieces he purchased on a whim at Art Basel; he needs Wags to deliver Joe's Stone Crab takeout from Miami Beach; and so on. But he really just wants them to feel the same unceasing drive he does. "What's the point of being rich if you can't expletive enjoy it?" Wendy asks, before convincing him to send everyone home again. "I'll let you know when I do," he replies. And then there's Bryan Connerty, of all characters, who is faced with the kind of professional temptations troubling Wendy and Taylor. His wiretap of Chuck's meeting with Krakow fails to yield the juiciest details. His underling Kate Sacker refuses to bend on her mandate to preserve the integrity of the probe. You know what that means: Dr. Gus to the rescue! The bowlegged bulldog of a performance coach advises Connerty to commit fully to his mission in the most over the top ways imaginable. Sample quote: "The kamikaze get a bad name because everyone wants to focus on the suicide!" So what should we take from Bryan's subsequent decision to reconnect with his shiftless, bar fighting big brother, a criminal whose safecracking skills can retrieve the Krakow deal from a vault in Charles Rhoades Sr.'s house? Is this, too, a suicide mission? And what to make of the similarity between Dr. Gus's praise of Bryan's commitment and Bobby's praise of Wendy's? Is she wrong to feel that Axe is more loyal to her than Chuck, who can't even remember the moment he knew she was the one? To quote Bobby, I'll let you know when I do. That not knowing is what I enjoy most about "Billions." Each episode is clockwork precise, doling out exactly enough information to get to the next step and no more. The arch dialogue sizzles in the brain, which is already hot from doing the work of trying to figure out where things are headed. And just when you think things are ready to boil over, you're kept at a simmer for another week. You'll get the dish you ordered exactly when the master chefs preparing it are ready to serve it. Knowing this show, I'm guessing it will be served cold.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
When J.K. Rowling was accused of transphobia about two years ago for "liking" a tweet that referred to transgender women as "men in dresses," much of the Harry Potter fandom tried to give their beloved author the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it really was just an accident, a "clumsy and middle aged moment," as Ms. Rowling's spokesperson said at the time. Then people noticed that Ms. Rowling followed commentators on Twitter who described transgender women as men. In December, she made her personal views more clear when she expressed enthusiastic support for a British researcher who filed a lawsuit against her former employer, claiming that she had been discriminated against for her "gender critical" views (i.e. her stance on the fixity of one's sex at birth). "It felt like we were waiting for the other shoe to drop," said Melissa Anelli, a veteran leader in the Potter fandom who co owns the Leaky Cauldron. First, Ms. Rowling took aim at an article that referred to "people who menstruate," suggesting that it was wrong to not use "women" in a misguided attempt to include trans people. When she received negative response to this, she then published a 3,700 word essay on gender, sex, abuse and fear: "I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode 'woman' as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators." Across the Potter fandom the first book was published 23 years ago, making it one of the online world's most enduring fandoms a conversation began. Some discussions were tense, when fans who sympathized with Ms. Rowling's views clashed against fans who found them to be odious. Others felt that they could simply turn away from the politics of the real world and focus on what's happening in the wizarding world. Among the fans who vehemently reject Ms. Rowling's views, the discussion is on how to distance or separate themselves from the author who created a fantasy world that animates their lives on a daily basis. They listen to chapter by chapter podcasts, get tattoos with the Hogwarts crest or Deathly Hallows symbol, and attend Potter conferences like LeakyCon, which draws thousands of fans every year. Some have even built their careers on it. Over the past week, some fans said that they had decided to simply walk away from the world that spans seven books, eight movies and an ever expanding franchise. Others said that they were trying to separate the artist from the art, to remain in the fandom while denouncing someone who was once considered to be royalty. "J.K. Rowling gave us Harry Potter; she gave us this world," said Renae McBrian, a young adult author who volunteers for the fan site MuggleNet. "But we created the fandom, and we created the magic and community in that fandom. That is ours to keep." The essay was particularly gutting for transgender and nonbinary fans, many of whom found solace in the world of "Harry Potter" and used to see the series as a way to escape anxiety. Rori Porter, a writer and digital designer who started the books about two decades ago, at age 10, had been listening to the audiobooks as a way to relax and fall asleep until the Rowling controversy bubbled up in December. Ms. Porter, who is a transfeminine woman, which, to her experience, means she was assigned male at birth but identifies with a feminine gender, stopped listening in the middle of "Prisoner of Azkaban" and has not started again. The series no longer felt grounding and nostalgic, but stress inducing. Ms. Porter said she needs a break from the series (and doesn't plan on giving Ms. Rowling a cent ever again), but she thinks she may revisit the audiobooks one day. "I don't want to give J.K. Rowling the satisfaction of taking away from me something that I loved as a kid," she said. For Talia Franks, who is nonbinary and works with an activist group called the Harry Potter Alliance, Ms. Rowling's comments were disturbing and demoralizing. But they said that they won't have a problem continuing to write their fan fiction (where queer characters abound), attend Wizard Rock concerts and participate in the online Black Girls Create community, where they often discuss "Harry Potter." "I don't need J.K. Rowling at all," Mx. Franks said. Fan organizations that serve as repositories of niche news, providing updates on plans for the "Fantastic Beasts" film series and regional Quidditch award results, are now searching for ways to affirm to transgender and nonbinary fans that they are welcome in those communities. Fandom leaders are teaming up to present a unified statement condemning Ms. Rowling's comments, said Kat Miller, MuggleNet's creative director. It helped boost morale when a series of Harry Potter actors spoke out to affirm transgender identities, including Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry; Emma Watson, who played Hermione; Rupert Grint, who played Ron; and Katie Leung, who played Cho. (Ms. Rowling has also received a recent bout of criticism for the character Cho Chang, whose name is as weak as her characterization.) Other Potter lovers are thinking about ways to keep delving into the series without spending money that might make its way into Ms. Rowling's bank account. On Twitter, "The Gayly Prophet Podcast" which describes itself as an intersectional, queer "Harry Potter" podcast encouraged fans not to attend the theme park, see the "Cursed Child" play or even rent the movies. The hosts of the podcast, Jessie Blount and Lark Malakai Grey, are already quite comfortable with criticizing the series and its author while pointing out where things get, in their view, problematic (for instance, the underdevelopment of black characters). The intention is to enjoy the art while still holding the artist accountable, Mr. Grey said. Proma Khosla, a 29 year old Ravenclaw, who has been going to "Harry Potter" conventions since age 15, also read the Cormoran Strike crime series that started with "The Cuckoo's Calling" in 2013, which Ms. Rowling published under a pen name. The fifth book in the series is expected to be published in September, but because of Ms. Rowling's anti transgender comments, Ms. Khosla said that she has no intention of purchasing it ("I'm fine to not know how it ends," she said). Karter Powell, another Harry Potter Alliance volunteer, has a bedroom filled with Potter merchandise, from Potter bedsheets to a Slytherin scarf to a wand from the Universal theme park but they don't plan to buy that kind of merchandise ever again. Even if the fandom presented a united front, which of course it cannot, it's unlikely it could "cancel" an author who created a multibillion dollar franchise. "We can say we're going to cancel her, but she's going to get money for the rest of her life," said J'Neia Stewart, host of "The House of Black Podcast," which looks at the series through a social justice lens. Each fan must make her own choices for herself then. Ms. Anelli, 40, who is also the author of the book "Harry, a History," had planned to buy her nephew the books in the series for his 7th birthday this past week. But she decided that she couldn't go through with it during the same week that Ms. Rowling again captured the attention of the internet with her anti transgender tweets. "I've been looking forward to this for seven years, and it was going to be this week," she said. "I couldn't do it, and it broke my heart." "I did buy him the 'Percy Jackson' series," she added. J.K. Rowling and the Case of the Bathroom Trope Ms. Rowling's essay, which was published on Wednesday, rails against the term T.E.R.F., or trans exclusionary radical feminist, describing it as a slur used to silence women like herself on the internet. She repeated a number of pieces of misinformation that are common talking points for this loose association of people, and made the claim that the "movement" led by transgender activists is eroding the notion of womanhood and "offering cover to predators like few before it." As a sort of explanation for that fear, Ms. Rowling recounted memories of a sexual assault in her 20s. "When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman," she wrote, "then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside." The idea that allowing trans people to use bathrooms that align with their identities endangers other people subjecting them to a greater risk of assault and privacy violations has been voiced most prominently by conservative lawmakers to stop gender inclusive legislation from passing. There is no evidence to back up their claims. Researchers have found that young trans and nonbinary people face a greater risk of sexual assault when they are denied use of appropriate restrooms or locker rooms. In a 2017 survey of L.G.B.T.Q. students, the organization GLSEN found that students said the bathroom was the most avoided and most unsafe space for them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The ocean is loud: Ship propellers, sonar, oil and gas drilling and other industrial work make sounds, even if, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, no one can hear it. But marine animals can, and all that noise has been shown to interfere with their behavior, since many of them, from whales to invertebrates, use sound for all kinds of activities, including to communicate, to find food or each other, to avoid predators and to migrate. And while the ocean was never a quiet place full of natural rumblings, clickings and chatterings the problem has grown worse over the last 100 years or so, and significantly increased over the last 50 years in some places, much of it from commercial shipping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So the agency, which manages and protects marine life in United States waters, released on Wednesday a draft for a strategy to reduce the effects of ocean noise, and invited public comment. The Ocean Noise Strategy Roadmap draft is an early step in a 10 year plan to quiet the oceans and reduce some of the harmful effects on aquatic species. The public comment period will end July 1, and a more concrete plan will be put in place in the coming months. At this point, the oceanic administration's road map includes more research on the cumulative effects of noise on ocean animals, and outreach to other governmental, military, environmental and industry groups. The administration, the Navy and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a review of the cumulative effects of sound on marine mammals, and the administration has already started to reduce its own impact by using quieter research vessels. While the agency has been collecting information on ocean noise and its effects on certain species for several years, the full range on marine animals is not completely understood, though the symptoms are often striking. But sound produced by human activity can get in the way. In the waters off Massachusetts, oceanic scientists have observed that many whales no longer seem to register the sounds of ships, said Richard Merrick, the chief scientist for the oceanic administration's fisheries service. They do not necessarily associate the sounds of ships with danger, he said, so they do not always move out of the way. Elsewhere, other species of whales, he said, "just shut up" when ships pass by, in part because many species communicate using sounds in the same range of frequency as the noise produced by ship engines. And some studies have demonstrated that cod and haddock populations in the Atlantic, both of which are considered or are becoming overfished, can hear and also avoid low frequency sounds, though it is not clear what the effects might be on their behavior, said Jason Gedamke, an acoustics expert with the oceanic administration and a lead author of the road map. Cod, in particular, also make lots of noise when they spawn, but the implications of human sound on that behavior is not fully known, either, Dr. Gedamke said. Mr. Jasny added that he was disappointed that the announcement lacked a concrete plan or a schedule for being carried out. But unlike other ocean pollutants, this problem can be solved, he said: "Once you stop making noise, it goes away."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
"Trump is, in effect, a king," Samantha Bee joked on her show Wednesday. "Not like King Arthur more like a Burger King." Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. On Wednesday, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted to acquit President Trump. Although not surprising, the late night hosts lamented the fallout, saying Trump would continue to believe he could act without consequence. "Trump's acquittal is bad for many reasons. For one, it would have been fun seeing Pence try to figure out if he wants to call his wife 'first lady Mother' or 'first Mother lady.' But more importantly, now that his executive overreach has been sanctioned by the Senate, Trump is free to basically do anything. Trump is, in effect, a king. Not like King Arthur more like a Burger King." SAMANTHA BEE "Even Senators who acknowledge that what Trump did was wrong were unwilling to do anything about it. By voting to acquit Donald Trump, the Senate has set a devastating precedent. Future presidents can solicit foreign interference in an election; they can investigate private citizens. There are no rules. That's not America; that is Outback Steakhouse." SAMANTHA BEE "The only lesson Trump ever learns is that he gets away with everything: multiple bankruptcies nothing. Multiple sexual assault accusations nothing. He's in perfect health despite eating like a rat behind the Bob's Big Boy nothing!" STEPHEN COLBERT "He never learns. The day after Robert Mueller testified was the day he threatened Ukraine and Biden. Tomorrow he'll probably call China to see if he can give Bernie the coronavirus." JIMMY KIMMEL "He's like an untrained dog. If he pees on the floor, you've got to rub his nose in it. And even then, he'll probably do it again while making direct eye contact with you." SETH MEYERS "He celebrated by calling Ukraine and asking for dirt on Joe Biden." CONAN O'BRIEN "Minority leader Chuck Schumer said that, from here on, Trump's presidency will always have an asterisk next to it. And Lindsey Graham will be there to kiss that asterisk at all times." JIMMY KIMMEL The only Republican senator to vote in favor of impeaching the president was Mitt Romney, and the late night hosts called out his willingness to go against the party line. "Who would have thought that the most bad ass Republican in the Senate would end up being a Mormon dude named Mitt?" TREVOR NOAH "That's right: Today, Mitt Romney bravely stood up and said, 'I cannot handle another dinner with this expletive .'" SAMANTHA BEE "Romney was actually choking back tears as he explained his decision because well, because he knows the president is about to order the space force to attack his home state of Utah." JIMMY KIMMEL "Yes, his faith compels him to vote for impeachment. And it makes sense because the Old Testament does say that you should worship God, not golden cows." STEPHEN COLBERT "Romney's decision took a lot of grit, nerve and guts. Incidentally, 'Grit,' 'Nerve' and 'Guts' are the names of some of Mitt Romney's sons." JIMMY FALLON The Punchiest Punchlines (Tearing It Up Edition) "After President Trump gave his State of the Union address, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tore it in half. Tore in half! Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Then Melania said, 'Great, now do my prenup.'" CONAN O'BRIEN "I will say, I didn't like that. I think tearing up the speech was a bad move. She should have rolled it up and spanked him with it." JIMMY KIMMEL "Needless to say, Mike Pence was very upset by this act of defiance against Master. He described it as a new low. I guess he forgot about the time his boss invited the Taliban to Camp David." JIMMY KIMMEL "Yeah, people were shocked, because when they heard that someone ripped one at the State of the Union, everyone thought it would be Trump." JIMMY FALLON "So between Pelosi and J.Lo, women over 50 are tearing it up this week." JIMMY FALLON "The Late Show" offered an exclusive look at how Pelosi made sure to destroy Trump's State of the Union speech.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Imagine a Netflix show about a divorced Latina veteran with PTSD. Her ex husband has rejected their lesbian teenage daughter. Her best friend is in recovery and active in AA. Her mother can be overbearing and has also secretly stashed a gun in their shared apartment. This should probably be a gritty drama, or maybe a sour smart single camera auteurish dramedy. Instead it's the beautiful, improbable "One Day at a Time," a multicamera family comedy. Justina Machado stars as Penelope sometimes Lupe, sometimes Lupita a single mom, nurse and veteran raising two children with the help of her widowed, immigrant mother, Lydia (Rita Moreno, the brightest star in our solar system). This season Penelope gets a viable love interest, the almost unbearably hunky Max (Ed Quinn), a veteran himself and an EMT. He towers over the rest of the cast, and the moment he's on screen opposite Lydia, it's impossible not to think "I hope that giant man picks up Rita Moreno." He does it takes a few episodes, but it is worth the wait. Season 1 had a more urgent through line about the teenage daughter Elena (Isabella Gomez) eventually coming out to her family in the lead up to her quinceanera. This season doesn't have one central story, and that lack of a to do list is a blessing and a curse: The show is looser and funnier than before, but it also sputters a little toward the end of the season, before an emotional finale that walks right up to but does not cross the corniness barrier. But the trade off is worth it, adding in room for stories about Lydia pursuing citizenship ("these colores don't run"), Penelope struggling with the demands of studying for a new certification, and Elena taking over fix it duties for the building. Schneider (Todd Grinnell), the quintessential sitcom neighbor, is more grounded, and in one terrific scene talks with Penelope about her PTSD and his addiction crises. After a stretch of sobriety, he says, he relapsed. "Woke up three days later in an alley. Then the bowling ball hit me." The audience laughs for a beat. "I was in the gutter for a long time." Lines like that really only work in a multicamera format, a structure that relies on present laughter as part of its punctuation. Studio audiences make shows feel bigger, and "One Day at a Time" is a show that's big maybe even broad with its line deliveries, its staging, even in its sad moments. CBS's "Mom," about a formerly estranged mother daughter duo, is another current multicamera show with edge and depth (and that network's "The Big Bang Theory" remains wildly popular). But otherwise this is a style that's become unfashionable, something comedy nerds sneered at; "laugh track" is shorthand for not merely unfunny but also worthy of scorn. If any show could re establish the format as a place for innovative, modern comedy, it's "One Day at a Time," energetically political and progressive. Partially that's because the show hails from the executive producer Norman Lear, alongside the creators Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce. Mr. Lear helped popularize the modern incarnation of the multicam comedy, with shows like "All in the Family" and "The Jeffersons." That rhythm became the standard for family comedies right on up through, say, "Everybody Loves Raymond." Then the tides turned, and single camera shows like "Modern Family" or "black ish" are now the standard bearers. So despite its retro vibe, "Day" feels almost daring. Its lack of cynicism makes it easy to marathon and also sets it apart from the revered comedies of the moment, like "Veep" or "BoJack Horseman." Its devotion to that straightforward sitcom setup makes it more accessible than shows like the highly serialized "The Good Place," or the structurally inventive "Atlanta." It's suitable for most ages, but without the crushing inanity of a "Fuller House." More than anything, though, "One Day at a Time" is a show that radiates delight. Ms. Moreno purring that Max is "a stallion" isn't just funny, it's joyous. The younger brother Alex (Marcel Ruiz) standing up for his sister to their homophobic dad isn't just awwww, it's potent and affirming. We're all looking for comedy that numbs the pain, but "One Day at a Time" cultivates an intimacy and sense of belonging that goes a step further, introducing a level of genuine human happiness into the experience.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
LONDON Britain is awash in World War I centenary commemorations and poppy mania. Ballet companies here haven't lagged behind. Both English National Ballet and the Birmingham Royal Ballet have offered war themed programs; on Friday came the Royal Ballet's contribution, with a triple bill that uses music by Britten and Leonard Bernstein from the 1930s and '40s and poetry by W. H. Auden to evoke a period in which another great war changed the world. Two of the ballets, by Kim Brandstrup and Christopher Wheeldon, were created for the company last year. Most eagerly awaited was Liam Scarlett's "The Age of Anxiety," a new work based on the long and difficult Auden poem of that title and set to Bernstein's Symphony No. 2, which was also inspired by the poem. Mr. Scarlett, who until recently was a Royal Ballet dancer and is now the company's artist in residence, is a hot property in the ballet world. He has created six ballets this year, and "The Age of Anxiety" is his second war related work, after "No Man's Land" for English National Ballet. It's tempting to think that this prolific output might be one of the reasons for the weakness of "The Age of Anxiety." But that may not be the case; an artist who creates slowly doesn't necessarily produce better work than an artist who works fast. It's more likely that the issue is the book length Auden poem itself, which is simple in narrative structure yet complex in content, language and thought. Choreographers have attempted it before: Jerome Robbins in 1950, soon after Bernstein's score had its premiere; John Neumeier in 1979. Watching a reworking of Mr. Neumeier's ballet 12 years later, the critic Jennifer Dunning observed in The New York Times that it was hard to imagine anyone successfully adapting the Auden poem to dance. "It is even harder to imagine," she continued, "why, in 1991, anyone would want to create a ballet drawn from that wordy philosophical poem and set to a relatively minor score by Leonard Bernstein." And now it's 2014. Undeterred by the pitfalls of the literary ballet, in which great texts reshaped into dance generally lose everything that makes them great texts, Mr. Scarlett has given it another try. That he has is partly understandable, given the Royal Ballet's historical tradition of narrative dance works and its fine acting. But the literalism with which he approaches the Auden poem leaves us only with a schematic outline of the story, and a period piece effect that would have felt dated 30 years ago. "The Age of Anxiety," which Auden worked on for several years before its publication in 1947, tells of four lonely characters: Emble, a Navy recruit; Quant, an Irish businessman; Malin, a retired Canadian medical officer; and Rosetta, a Jewish department store buyer. Meeting in a Manhattan bar in wartime, they talk feverishly about human history, diagnose an age of anxiety and embark on a dream journey. Later they repair to Rosetta's apartment for further drinking and talking before going their separate ways. The supposed dive on 52nd Street where the characters meet and to a limited extent interact with a barman (Kevin Emerton) and a soldier (Luca Acri) and his girlfriend (Leticia Stock) looks rather appealing in John Macfarlane's set, with its array of gleaming bottles and red seated booths. (The ballet is also beautifully lit in glowing tones by the queen of lighting design, Jennifer Tipton.) For balletgoers, the setting is inevitably reminiscent of Robbins's first ballet, "Fancy Free," in which three young sailors start a night on the town in a bar. The choreography is reminiscent of other stylized, jazz inflected Robbins pieces from the 1940s and '50s, like "Interplay," "NY Export: Opus Jazz" and "Moves." Laura Morera (Rosetta) performs in high heels, and Mr. Scarlett eschews an overtly balletic vocabulary as he responds with skillful facility to Bernstein's shifting rhythms and syncopations. The dancing moves nimbly through solos (particularly glittering for Steven McRae as a dashing Emble), duets and various encounters. (Conflicted homosexual leanings briefly appear.) To a limited extent, each character emerges as an individual, with Tristan Dyer appealingly vulnerable as Malin and Ms. Morera's Rosetta successfully brash, sexy and (yes) anxious. Best of all is Bennet Gartside, a fine actor and dancer, as a vulnerable, awkward, chivalrous Quant. But by the terrifyingly cliched end, as Malin walks toward a New York skyline sunrise to the final crashing musical chords, there is little to remember about the ballet except its most superficial aspects. Mr. Scarlett has tried story ballets before with more substantial results. Before "The Age of Anxiety" came Mr. Brandstrup's "Ceremony of Innocence," set to Britten's 1937 Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Here an older artist (Edward Watson, often seated on a chair) encounters his younger self (Marcelino Sambe) and spends a lot of time with his mother (Christina Arestis). The dancers are excellent, the choreography thin, the course of events completely befuddling. Last was Mr. Wheeldon's "Aeternum," set to Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. Well crafted and choreographically inventive, the ballet feels cool and remote despite the emotional intensity of the music and its elegiac final pas de deux, performed with lovely precision by Marianela Nunez and Federico Bonelli. War, ghastly and brutal, keeps eluding dance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Over the past two decades, the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy has published dozens of essays and nonfiction works, taking on subjects such as the dangers of Hindu nationalism, government corruption, environmental degradation and income inequality. So it irritates her, naturally, when people complain that she's been absent from the literary scene for the last 20 years. "I've always been slightly short with people who say, 'You haven't written anything again,' as if all the nonfiction I've written is not writing," she said in a 2014 interview with The New York Times Magazine. But for fans of Ms. Roy's fiction, the extended wait is about to end. She is poised to make a comeback this summer with "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness," which will be released in the United States this June by Alfred A. Knopf. It's her first new novel since her debut, "The God of Small Things," came out in 1997, to rapturous reviews. It won the Booker Prize and drew comparisons to works by Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V. S. Naipaul.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In the 1920s, before matter could be magnified millions of times under electron microscopes, a German graphic designer was developing his own techniques for capturing the minute wonders of organic life. Carl Struwe never gained fame during his lifetime, but over the decades his stark images of diatoms, spermatozoa and other life under the microscope have gathered admirers for their distinctive artistry. A selection of his works will go on display at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York starting April 14. When Mr. Struwe began making photographs, he used microscopes that could only magnify items up to 2,000 times. The traditional scientific view under a microscope was rounded, so Mr. Struwe cut black pieces of paper into rectangular shapes and set them over the biological subject matter in his slides. He then pointed his camera into the eye of the microscope, capturing the scene he had composed under the microscope. The thoughtful way that he positioned his subjects in the microscope his canvases is what made his work so pioneering, said Gottfried Jager, a photographer in Bielefeld, Germany, who is the administrator of Mr. Struwe's estate. Mr. Struwe saw great artistic potential, Mr. Jager said, where before him, many only saw the objectivity of science. Mr. Struwe's work had little impact outside of Germany during his life because he lacked resources and did not speak languages other than German. "He was a poor man, not very successful with his work during his own life," said Mr. Jager. Mr. Struwe did make some appearances in the United States, including a Brooklyn Museum show in 1949. A number of his photos were also used in scientific texts, including this biology textbook from 1957. An American biology textbook published in 1957 included 10 of Carl Struwe's microphotographs, as well as this cover image of the diatom Surirella. The work of Carl Struwe may mean more to art history than to science. But Mr. Jager believes there is something to be learned from these photographs, even if they do not do much to further objective knowledge. "They open a window in this fantastic, non visible world," he wrote in an email. "He visualizes its meaning and beauty as its own reality."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
An apartment on Central Park has long commanded a premium, but as real estate prices have soared, blocking all but the most affluent from buying a perch there or along one of New York's other premier greenswards, developers have increasingly sought out sites on smaller, non marquee parks. An address on Isham Park or Herbert Von King Park may not have quite the same ring as one on Prospect Park or Gramercy Park, but in a market where buyers can become dizzy trying to distinguish one marble kitchened, white oak floored condo from another, a view of treetops swaying outside the living room window is a distinctive edge. Even more significant, an apartment on even a pocket park comes with more light, air and open sky than an identical unit that faces another building and a near guarantee that no towering new development will take those advantages away. "You have these little oases, these enclaves within the city, and it creates an opportunity," said Josh Schuster, the founder and managing principal at Silverback Development, which has several park adjacent projects in the works. "In New York, the light and air window is usually the width of the street. When you walk into an apartment that's across from a park and there are large windows to showcase that, I definitely think there's a wow factor." He said that he spent seven years assembling the site for 75 Kenmare, a seven story condo under construction in NoLIta that will overlook DeSalvio playground. The project is being developed by DHA Capital, where Mr. Schuster worked previously. Another site, on Second Avenue and East 21st Street, is across the street from Peter's Field, a blocklong stretch of basketball and tennis courts. And at 67 Livingston Street in Brooklyn Heights, where Silverback is converting a former college dorm into condos, one side of the building looks down on the schoolyard of the Packer Collegiate Institute, where on a recent afternoon children were jostling for control of a big red ball. While such parks may lack the splendor of Central or Prospect Parks, unsung green spaces can claim near equivalent benefits: In addition to extra light and sky, many offer playgrounds, dog runs, farmers' markets, a bench to read a book, or a lawn for a picnic. Many cities prize their waterfronts above all else, but Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the real estate appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel, said that New York is a bit different. "One of the things about Manhattan is that we're inward looking," he said. "We're more into our park views than our water views." Which could have something to do with Robert Moses, the major builder last century of New York City infrastructure and the fact that nearly all of Manhattan's waterfront views have highways in them. But whatever the reason, living on even a small park does make a difference to buyers. And, ultimately, the apartment's value. When it comes to pricing, however, expectations should be modest: According to Mr. Miller, apartments on Central Park are only about 10 to 15 percent more than those on a side street if they're below the tree line, and 15 to 25 percent more if they're above. And any analysis of prices for park facing units comes with a caveat: Developers are more likely to put the largest apartments where the best views are, and there's also a premium for more contiguous space. And, he added, "while there's an aesthetic of openness that people gravitate to," there is a difference between living on a tiny Moses era playground and a Frederick Law Olmsted masterpiece like Morningside Park "that has been a stalwart of the neighborhood for many years." Toni Martin, an associate broker with the Corcoran Group, said that anytime she has a listing on a park be it Von King Park in Bedford Stuyvesant, or Washington Park in Park Slope it gets snapped up fast. Fort Greene Park is such a huge draw that she's seen bidding wars for condos in townhouses half a block away. One of her clients lost a bidding war for a 950 square foot two bedroom in one such building. "It was a nice apartment, but nothing overwhelming. And it was a fourth floor walk up!" Ms. Martin said, adding that the place sold for 125,000 over the asking price. "In a city as dense as New York, to live next to something green is a beautiful thing," she said. Of course, not all buyers come to tour a new condo with a strong desire to live on a small square or playground whose name they might not even know. Fred Duck, who works in marketing at Bloomberg, recently bought a one bedroom at 1790 Third Avenue, a condo project across from Cherry Tree Park in East Harlem. "To be honest, I'd never been to that park," said Mr. Duck, who previously owned a condo on Second Avenue and East 92nd Street. "But I had just come back from working in Hong Kong for several years, where I lived very high up, on the 37th floor. I got used to that light and I wanted to find something that wasn't just looking into an adjacent building." The advantage is real enough that developers are keen to play up any nearby green space. In Jersey City, Fields Development staked out a site by St. Peter's Prep's football field for its new luxury rental, Lenox, which will also have a courtyard open to the public. And in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Brookland Capital is building condos at 850 Metropolitan Avenue, across the street from a small community garden in Orient Grove, a tiny .149 acre triangle park. "I won't tell you the site was appealing just because of the community garden," said Boaz Gilad, the chief executive and a founder of Brookland. "But if I can give you a park, I will." Brookland's condos are priced to attract younger first time buyers a price point that "can't usually afford to be on a park." But Mr. Gilad said that buyers and renters like "even a small piece of greenery they feel like they can have access to."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Howard D. Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, said in a letter to employees on Sunday that baristas would no longer be encouraged to write the phrase "Race Together" on customers' coffee cups, drawing to a close a widely derided component of the company's plan to promote a discussion on racial issues. "While there has been criticism of the initiative and I know this hasn't been easy for any of you let me assure you that we didn't expect universal praise," Mr. Schultz wrote. Having baristas write on customers' cups, Mr. Schultz wrote, "which was always just the catalyst for a much broader and longer term conversation will be completed as originally planned today, March 22." That end date had not previously been mentioned publicly, including during Mr. Schultz's discussion of the initiative at the company's annual shareholders meeting last week, but a company spokeswoman, Laurel Harper, said employees had been told about it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
LONDON After a miserable day for Britain, when the economic and political future of the country remained uncertain and the battle over how to leave the European Union tore politicians apart, the annual Fashion Awards (Britain's answer to the Met Gala) came as something of a glittering balm Monday night. A red carpet scattered with Swarovski crystals led the way to an evening full of fairy tales and elegance, escapism and surprises. Starting with the arrival of a beaming Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, wearing a one shouldered black velvet evening gown and stroking her pregnant belly. Almost all of the 4,000 guests assembled inside the Royal Albert Hall, one of London's grandest buildings, were stunned when the duchess emerged to present Clare Waight Keller, the artistic director of Givenchy, with the award for British designer of the year for women's wear. The pairing did make a certain amount of sense, given that Ms. Waight Keller designed the dress the duchess wore when she married Prince Harry in May. Still, royalty doesn't often make an appearance at the Fashion Awards, organized annually by the British Fashion Council. "It is such a pleasure to be here, celebrating British fashion and designers, in my new home, the U.K.," the duchess said, drawing cheers from the crowd. "We have a deep connection to what we wear. Sometimes it's deeply personal, sometimes it's emotional. And tonight it is about supporting and empowering each other, especially as women." Praising the "vision and creativity, but also incredible kindness" of a visibly stunned and tearful Ms. Waight Keller, the duchess added that "the culture of fashion was shifting, it feels, from one where it was cool to be cruel, to one where it is now cool to be kind." The two women, both appearing elated, then embraced. While the overall atmosphere was one of celebration and optimism, this year was also marked by heightened emotions (perhaps understandably, given the unease that surrounds the future of every British industry, including fashion). Richard Quinn, winner of the award for British emerging talent in women's wear, cried softly as he accepted his prize and thanked his parents. Not so quiet was Vivienne Westwood, who was presented with the Swarovski award for positive change in recognition of her work on humanitarian and environmental issues. "I have a plan to change the world, but I really do need you to help me, I can't do it on my own," Ms. Westwood said in a rambling speech that touched on issues as varied as the rotten financial system to climate change, the shortcomings of the president elect of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, and the recent "Yellow vest" protests that have swept through Paris and other French cities in recent weeks. "Nothing will work until we urgently change the system, the system is totally broken and time is running out," Ms. Westwood declared, before being gently ushered offstage by the model Jerry Hall. And so it went. The fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, who received the Isabella Blow award for fashion creators from Kate Moss and Penelope Cruz, spoke to the hundreds of fashion students sitting in the rafters, pushing them to follow their passion at a time when London's ability to maintain its reputation as a melting pot of young talent seems up in the air. (The fashion awards ceremony is also a fund raising bash for the British Fashion Council's Education Foundation, which provides design scholarships and supports apprenticeships). "I came to Britain as an immigrant with dreams of being an artist too," Mr. Alas said. "Your guts are your guns. Keep fighting for your vision and have fun, like I did." It's a sentiment that was echoed by Miuccia Prada, who received the outstanding achievement award after 40 years as the creative leader of her family company; Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino, designer of the year; Kim Jones, Dior Men's artistic director, winner of the Trailblazer award; Kaia Gerber, surrounded by her family, who scooped the prize for model of the year; and Virgil Abloh, artistic director of men's wear at Louis Vuitton, who took home the Urban Luxe award for his work at Off White. But it was Ms. Waight Keller who summed it up best. "This is just an incredibly special moment," the British designer, 48, said, after paying tribute to Hubert de Givenchy, and honoring her team at the French fashion house, as well as the Duchess of Sussex. "This woman is so amazing," Ms. Waight Keller said as guests whispered about the possibility of seeing more "Markle Sparkle" in the fashion world in the future. "I have got to know Meghan on such a personal level. And to have someone like that trust you in an incredible moment in their life their wedding day is just the most unbelievable honor. I can't thank you enough, but thank you again. Thank you, thank you, thank you."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
AFTER THE LAST BORDER Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America By Jessica Goudeau Many of us think we can imagine the life of an immigrant to the United States the isolation, the loneliness, the small triumphs and lacerating defeats of trying to find one's way in a new world. Such stories are the staples of newspaper and TV news features, so much so that telling them in fresh ways seems almost impossible. But now comes Jessica Goudeau, who brings the 21st century American immigrant experience to life anew. Her "After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America" is simply brilliant, both in its granular storytelling and its enormous compassion. This book should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the challenges of getting to and surviving in the United States in the Trump era, and it would make an excellent, subversive gift for those who believe that closing our borders is the best way to keep America strong. "After the Last Border" is really three books in one. There is the story of Mu Naw, a refugee from Myanmar who comes with her family to Austin, Texas, in 2007 after spending most of her life in a Thai camp, and that of Hasna al Salam, who arrives nine years later, escaping from the horror and violence of modern day Syria. (Their names are pseudonyms, as both women have family members in their countries of origin who could be endangered were their names made public.) Then, interspersed between gripping chapters about narrow escapes, seemingly impossible language barriers, excruciating paperwork, child rearing in a radically different culture and marriages that sometimes reach the breaking point, there are chapters that recount the twists and turns of American immigration policy from 1880 to the present day. "After the Last Border" offers a crash course in how shifts in public attitudes and, in turn, United States policy have helped and hindered people desperate to escape the poverty or violence in their homelands. As Goudeau explains, "Americans' national fight for identity the wrangling about who we once were, how we will define ourselves for each generation, and who we want to become is the single greatest determiner of who we accept for resettlement."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Facebook's long awaited civil rights audit is now public and it isn't flattering. The 100 plus page report laid bare many of the issues facing the platform that Facebook does not fully understand how its algorithms drive hate, that anti Muslim speech is "rampant," that Facebook's reforms never fix the problem and warned the company may be "driving people toward self reinforcing echo chambers of extremism." The very existence of the audit is the work of civil rights and civil society activists, who've pressured the company for years to remove hateful content. Rashad Robinson, the head of the civil rights group Color of Change, has been one of the leaders of this push as well as one of the vocal backers of Facebook's recent advertiser boycott. In recent months he's met numerous times with Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, over the company's inability to rein in bigotry and misinformation on the platform and its failure to diversify its work force. I spoke to Mr. Robinson after his recent meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg about the audit, about whether Facebook can be reformed and about his nightmare scenarios for Election Day. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You met with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook over Zoom on Tuesday and told my Times colleagues, "They showed up to the meeting expecting an A for attendance. Attending alone is not enough." Do you think Facebook actually understands this problem? It's so frustrating. We are doing a lot of work for a multibillion dollar company and it's just always dispiriting we have to do this for them because they won't do it for themselves. Mark was talking about how much hate they're catching and throwing this number out: 89 percent that the company catches 89 percent of hate speech before it is reported by users . And I was like, "Come on. Even I see this stuff on my feed and my algorithms are pretty trained around progressive stuff." And I tell you that to say that what they're doing is gaslighting. You're in these meetings and you're listening to them explain their rationale and thinking, "Nope, that's not how this works." And you're left with this choice: Do I argue with the very premise that they don't seem to understand the actual problem of their platform? Or do I argue with the number that catching only 89 percent of hate isn't something to be happy with? Facebook did not respond to a request for comment about these meetings. It's hard to know how to engage when the problems are so big and glaring. I recently wrote a column suggesting that Facebook is beyond reform. How are you thinking about reform and what to do about the company if it won't change on its own? I believe we're not going to win this fight through policies that Facebook puts in place. Yes, there are things Facebook could do tinkering on the margins. And, honestly, the only reason I'm at the table is because we don't have the legislative and regulatory levers to pull right now. So I feel I need to be there. But the big fixes need those levers. If there were not rules of the road for car companies around safety and seatbelts we wouldn't get safety from the auto industry just because. They'd probably say things like Facebook says right now. "89 percent of seatbelts work!" And we'd say, 'that's not good enough!' And they'd say, well it's a B plus!' The point is that there are regulations enforcing that accountability that Facebook does not have. You were instrumental in pushing Facebook for a public civil rights audit. What's your reaction to the audit? The audit speaks to just how much Facebook's incentive structure is broken. I keep thinking about the fact that the decisions around political speech and violations to rules goes through the team at the company that is the most political who are in charge of dealing with lobbyists and Washington operators like Joel Kaplan Facebook's vice president of global public policy and a former Republican staffer and lobbyist . And so then they consistently say things to me like, "Well, you just don't like Republicans." And I say, "I don't think these issues should go through anyone who is primarily a political animal and operates inside D.C. politics." I won't pretend there are two equal sides of the issue. Joel Kaplan has political leanings that would make it harder for my grandfather to vote. And so if you put him in charge of voter suppression content, that's an issue. You've been in a lot of meetings with Mark Zuckerberg talking politics. What do you think Mark Zuckerberg's politics are? I've always thought his only real politics are advancing the growth and influence of Facebook. I agree. I think his politics are basically just Facebook. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative does some good work. They are involved in some things that matter to me politically. I think he's involved in that, too. And he does personal mentoring work with Dreamers in East Palo Alto. I think his politics are Facebook first and Joel serves as a gateway to a world he needs to be connected to. He serves a very clear purpose at the company and that's connecting Mark to power. Do you agree with the criticism that Facebook is more afraid of angering or alienating conservatives than liberals and that this drives a lot of their policy around speech? I think conservatives are just unafraid to go after Facebook. They don't see Mark and Sheryl Sandberg as their people. But the Democrats have a tougher time with corporate accountability because they want to believe these people share their values. And, socially, Mark and Sheryl do share them. I like Sheryl and I feel like a lot of the attacks on her are gendered. She is earnest, personable, smart. I don't feel like she's a bad person. But that doesn't mean I trust what is coming out of her mouth. I know what her job is. I think Facebook's heart is in the right place sometimes. But their heart doesn't make decisions inside the corporation. They're not running a soup kitchen or a religions institution where their heart is leading. They're running a business and so I don't care where their heart is. I want to know what their head is. Now that the audit is out, what's the next step? Well, Mark will testify in front of Congress on antitrust soon and that has to be a big moment. Right now we're monitoring what he's saying to companies around the ad boycotts. Right, but I guess what I'm saying is that it seems like it's just another cycle like we've had before. They'll get some bad P.R. but see few consequences. Personally, as a journalist I struggle at where to go with Facebook. It seems tinkering with banning a group here or an ad here isn't going to cut it. Honestly, there is an election and I need to get them to enforce the policies on the books before the fall. I need them to have some real rules around elections and voter suppression posts that actually will apply to Trump and other politicians so he doesn't do anything dangerous on Election Day or before. I have a bunch of scenarios in my head around Election Day. Like, claiming victory early. Claiming tons of people are voting illegally and threatening that armed guards will show up. Or claiming discrepancies in turnout that don't exist. Or signaling and calling on his base to do something like show up to polls and intimidate voters. That's what his whole 'looters and shooters' post was about. And I had to really explain that looters and shooters post to Mark on two separate occasions. And I had to say, "This conversation right here is the problem with you all not having any expertise in race." A draft of the civil rights audit obtained by The New York Times cited this post: "After the company publicly left up the looting and shooting post, more than five political and merchandise ads have run on Facebook sending the same dangerous message that 'looters' and 'Antifa terrorists' can or should be shot by armed citizens." Can you say more about that conversation? We got into it around looters and shooters. They were trying to explain to me their policies and suggesting this was a head of state merely talking about the use of state force. And I was like, "Was that really what he was doing? Was it that or was it signaling or dogwhistling?" I referenced the history of this language and how Trump has repeatedly cheered on his white male supporters who have showed up to protest situations strapped with guns. Trump has already called vote by mail illegal, which isn't true. This is just another example of the dangerous ways the Facebook policies and algorithms are weaponized against us when elected leaders are allowed to lie and even incentivized to do so. I have to keep hope that we can get through to Mark and his team and that there's potential for some new policies around voter suppression. Is the leadership at Facebook the problem? Do you feel that the company is pushing for real reform but the executives are the ones who blocking it? With Mark there are moments when he just doesn't understand something around the implications of race. This is why a single person shouldn't control something that's talked about as a public square. He'll always have deep blind spots. He'll naturally and unknowingly de prioritize things that aren't connected to his own experiences. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email:letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
LONDON "Our society today honors all the wrong people. Those who do good now live on the last pages of the newspaper. Then there are these footballers making millions. Fashion designers who just stand on the end of a catwalk after a show. Or women who sit on a front row and are paid to wear ridiculous clothes. It really makes us shudder, the level some people will go to for attention. I'm sorry, it is so banal. Where are our values?" Johann Rupert, 66 year old South African billionaire, chairman and controlling shareholder of the luxury goods group Richemont, owner of brands such as Cartier, Montblanc and Van Cleef Arpels, was in full rant behind a gleaming mahogany meeting table in his London Mayfair office last month. But instead of just talking about his issues, he is actually doing something about them. In October, quietly and without much fanfare, he co founded the Michelangelo Foundation. A Geneva based nonprofit organization, it aims to champion master craftsmanship (initially focusing on Europe) by building networks of like minded artisans and their supporting institutions, facilitating apprenticeships and nurturing global recognition for the Continent's applied arts culture, hoping to bolster its future. Franco Cologni, an Italian author and former Richemont business executive, is the other founder; so far, the foundation has a full time staff of four. "Over the last 15 years, I've repeatedly had discussions on what had been happening to the cultural heritage of Europe, but it had got to a point where we basically realized we had to start this right now or let it go completely," Mr. Rupert said as he puffed on a cigar. "And with it, the decline and disappearance of a generational handover of precious skills and disciplines. I simply wasn't about to let that happen. "It will be fun, that's for sure. But boy, it's also going to take a hell of a lot of time, and a lot of patience to boot." Magnates of the luxury world taking charitable steps into the arts and opening the world to new audiences is hardly new. Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton and France's richest man, unveiled the 126,000 square foot glass and steel contemporary art museum and performance space Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2014 on the outskirts of Paris, attracting 1.2 million visitors last year. Francois Pinault, founder of the holding group that became Kering, owner of brands such as Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Christie's, announced plans in April to create a private museum in Paris to display his vast collection of contemporary art. The Michelangelo Foundation is intended to help such businesses as Henri Selmer Paris, a musical instrument maker. Mr. Rupert has something a little different in mind, however. His focus is not art but artisanship, not the already famous, but the little known. One key objective of the Michelangelo Foundation is to build a digital platform that would showcase all the applied artistry that Europe has to offer; exactly what form that might take is still being decided. In five years, Mr. Rupert said, the site might have a TripAdvisor style recommendation system, where people could leave comments and critiques on a database, as well as verification of history and provenance related to a specific business. Mr.Cologni, 82, a close friend of Mr. Rupert's whose work on Fondazione Cologni provided much of the inspiration for the new foundation, added via email that other proposals included underwriting collaborations between designers and artisans; developing a title and recognition at the national level for master craftsmen; and creating an apprenticeship program. "Look, we've been very lucky and made more money than we ever thought possible out of luxury goods. But uncovering the raw or enduring talent for me, that's the best part," Mr. Rupert said. "What's not fun anymore is going to Bond Street or Fifth Avenue or Via Montenapoleone where the shops and product all look the same and have done now for the last 30 years because all the smaller, independent artisans have been pushed out by the retail rentals. We have to protect their livelihoods." "This will not be a moneymaking thing," he said. "It is going to be an open platform, a place where people can explore unique products in the one area where Europe is still better than America or Asia." There will be no direct relationship between the Michelangelo Foundation and Richemont or any of its portfolio brands. Mr. Rupert said an effort such as this one is made because it is "the right thing to do," not to sell products. "I hate that corporate and social responsibility stuff people telling me how happy I must be because I'm green," he said. "Of course we are going green. You can't destroy the environment anymore; otherwise, that will eventually destroy you." "In order for our foundation to be seen as neutral, it has got to be truly neutral," Mr. Rupert stressed, noting that to reassure business rivals that they could place products on Yoox and Net a Porter, he deliberately has never visited the head office of the luxury e commerce site in which Richemont controls 50 percent of shares. "Artists need to know that whoever they worked for in the past, or even who they work for now, that they can still come to us and get a fair shot." With a nickname of "Rupert the Bear" because of his predictions before the 2008 financial collapse, Mr. Rupert emphasizes that the most important issue for the luxury industry and global economy is the unemployment that will be caused by the expanded use of robots, artificial intelligence and the new machine age. Millions of jobs will be lost, he believes, while social inequalities on which the luxury industry thrives will be reinforced. "There is rising unemployment across the Western world, and it is going to take a generation to re skill people. Capitalizing on the discontent that has arisen from that is a large part of the Donald's success," he said not long before Donald J. Trump won the American presidential election. Mr. Rupert warned of the deep unrest that could stem from a gulf between the haves and have nots a disconnect that many of his brands already heed. "Luxury has got to be more discreet; the day of bling is gone; forget it. The hatred of the rich is going to expand, and people will not want to show their wealth off and put it in people's faces, like they have in the past. Designers need to start understanding that," Mr. Rupert said, adding that he told his watch houses five years ago to steer clear of "great big hamburger watches" and instead "go slim, white gold and platinum." Yet despite its chairman's design directives, sales for Richemont have slowed as of late, as the entire watch and jewelry industry has continued to grapple with China's recent crackdown on "gifting" between officials, exchange rate volatility, the impact of terror attacks on European tourism and sluggish economic growth. But Mr. Rupert remained upbeat about the sector's prospects, as long as it nurtured its roots in local craftsmanship. "Ultimately, luxury is not something made by a machine in a repetitive fashion," he said. "It needs a human element that is what makes it unique and different. That will always pique curiosity. And we need to protect that talent at its source, while teaching customers that it is always worth paying 20 percent more for something that will last three times as long. "The problem is most either don't have the time or just can't be bothered to walk the back streets and find the individuality. We have to show them exactly where to go." Mr. Rupert spoke passionately about his favorite personal finds over the years in Europe, such as an Irish linen mill, a ceramic shop in Palermo, a Milanese bookbinder and a family owned Ferrari body work restoration shop in Modena. He attributed what he called a widening disconnect between the shopping habits of the global wealthy and those of earlier generations to the expedited rate at which wealth could be made in the 21st century, an era where many luxury shoppers began to track currencies before determining where they should buy. The Michelangelo Foundation, he said, would go some way to preserving an important thread of social fabric on the Continent: respect for exceptional workmanship that embodies culture and place, and preserving and protecting the boundless creativity of human beings in a rapidly changing world. "Ultimately, nobody who hates the successful can really complain about an artisan who does really well," Mr. Rupert said. "Genuine products made by genuine people in a little town somewhere that really understands beauty and its own history: That is and always will be something special, and I know I have to do all that I can to protect that. "I feel honor bound to do all that I can for this foundation, and start something that we can finish properly, too."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
This week, the federal government reported that nearly half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 59 are infected with genital human papillomavirus some strains of which can cause deadly cancer. The report, by the National Center for Health Statistics, notes that HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States. It also said that some high risk strains infected 25 percent of men and 20 percent of women, and cause about 31,000 cases of cancer each year. The good news is that the HPV vaccine is very effective, especially if given in early adolescence. Here are some basics about HPV and the vaccine. How is the human papillomavirus transmitted? About 40 strains of HPV are transmitted through direct contact with infected skin or mucous membranes during vaginal, anal and oral sex. Many sexually active people are exposed to the virus by their early 20s, indicating that it is hardly only a risk for people who engage in promiscuous sex. How serious is the risk of cancer? Most HPV infections are destroyed by the immune system and cleared from the body within two years, but some strains can persist, including the HPV 16 and HPV 18 strains, which cause most cervical cancers. More than 4,000 women are estimated to die from cervical cancer each year, according to the American Cancer Society. Other strains cause genital warts or cancer of the vagina, vulva, penis, anus, throat and mouth.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
STRATFORD, Ontario On the last Saturday afternoon in May, when the season's first productions at the Stratford Festival were still in previews, visitors to its Tom Patterson Theater were greeted with two warnings at the auditorium entrance. One was the usual kind of advisory, a heads up that the show they were about to see contained fog, haze, strobe lighting and mature content. The other sign, in a bold black frame, was more eyebrow raising partly because the phrase "mature content" had evidently been judged insufficient on its own. "This production includes explicit scenes of erotocism," the second warning read. Aside from the misspelling, it wasn't wrong. The director Jillian Keiley's feminist staging of "Bakkhai" a new translation, by the poet and classicist Anne Carson, of Euripides' ancient Greek tragedy "The Bacchae" practically pulses with sexual pleasure, almost all of it female. The women in the play, followers of the god Dionysos, revel in their carnality without self consciousness or shame a theme Ms. Keiley was deeply interested in exploring in her dreamlike production, which is lush with music and dance. She knew, though, that she would be embarrassed by some of the things she needed to ask her actors to do not nudity, which she deemed unnecessary, but sexual touching, movement and sound. Even talking about sex, she can get shy, and she feared she might transmit that discomfort to her actors. "The last thing in the world that I would want to do is make people feel inhibited in rehearsal," said Ms. Keiley, now in her fourth season at Stratford. So she called in an intimacy choreographer. If you've never heard of such a thing, neither had Ms. Keiley until she read an article last year in the Toronto magazine Now, about an Oklahoma City woman, Tonia Sina, who teaches a codified method of approaching onstage intimacy. Rather than leaving actors to improvise their way through creating a sex scene, as often happens, Ms. Sina designs a choreography that is as structured as the steps of a dance or the pivots and parries of a sword fight. "I can certainly foresee that job description being useful," said the director Mark Wing Davey, who as chair of the graduate acting program at N.Y.U.'s Tisch School of the Arts introduced a class this spring called Sex on Stage. Meant to give actors "confidence about boundaries and techniques" when a production asks them to simulate sex, it was taught by Mr. Wing Davey, "partly because I'm used to staging scenes like that," he said. To handle the steamier moments in "Bakkhai," the Stratford Festival hired Ms. Sina. Late in the day after the show's first preview, with Ms. Sina there to do some fine tuning, the actresses who play the bakkhai reassembled at the Patterson Theater, a converted curling rink a couple of doors down from a hockey arena. Onstage, the red centerpiece of the set looked like a leaf topped with a raised altar and also, at certain angles, like a stylized vulva. Ms. Keiley is not keen on having that resemblance, which is intentional, brought up. "I don't want people to say, 'Oh, that's the show with the vulva set,'" she said. Ms. Sina, who comes across as constitutionally unflappable on matters of sex, seemed by contrast to relish it, freely pointing it out. For Ms. Sina, the task in that rehearsal was to amp up the frenzy in an unbridled scene of group ecstasy not quite an orgy, but something like it, all in a swirl of long veils and floor length skirts. Seeking the performers' consent for each sensitive adjustment, and fielding sporadic requests from Ms. Keiley, who watched from the sidelines, Ms. Sina added more kisses and roaming hands, more overlapping of bodies. And maybe it would be nice to have a pelvic thrust from one woman as she straddled another? "But not like a jack rabbit," Ms. Sina instructed Laura Condlln, who was doing the straddling. "We actually need to isolate the pelvis." "Wow," Ms. Condlln said, about to try it. "I love that everybody's watching this. Everybody, just close your eyes for a minute." Her colleagues laughed warmly, and kept watching. Ms. Sina was a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, studying theater pedagogy with an emphasis in movement, when she began choreographing sex scenes for student productions. "I was noticing that it was very similar to fight directing," she recalled in an interview. "It's just a different side of the coin, and it had to be much more specific. Every finger was important." Her thesis, in 2006, was titled "Intimate Encounters; Staging Intimacy and Sensuality." More recently, she started an association called Intimacy Directors International, but so far it has only a handful of members. Her method borrows from the protocols of fight direction, with the same allegiance to keeping actors safe in potentially dangerous circumstances. "With stage combat, you can get stabbed in the eye or punched in the face," she said. "This is emotional and mental health, which is just as important." "Once they have the skeleton of the scene, then the actors can feel free to improv within the moves that I've given them," Ms. Sina said. "And there's no surprises. There's no 'Where is his hand going? Is he doing that on purpose? Is that him or is that the character? Do I have feelings for him now? Does he like me?'" The Stratford Festival is Ms. Sina's most prestigious gig thus far in a career built more on giving workshops about stage intimacy than on choreographing professional productions. Ms. Condlln, who had done only one onstage sex scene before "Bakkhai," said that Ms. Sina's presence allowed the company to have "really fluid communication" about the moments of intimacy. Ms. Condlln, too, likened the practical, technical nature of the work to stage fighting, which is tightly planned even when it feels explosive to the audience. "Inside the fight, it's like paint by numbers," she said. "And there's something about Tonia's building a vocabulary that she's endeavoring to make the intimacy the same. So that in the throes of onstage passion, things never wander. Nobody ever gets lost along the way, and therefore everybody is safe." One of the most erotic moments in Ms. Keiley's "Bakkhai" is the transformation of Pentheus, the play's Dionysos hating ruler, into a woman. The metamorphosis is simultaneous with Pentheus's sexual awakening, and it culminates in an orgasm. Part of Ms. Sina's job was helping Gordon S. Miller, who plays Pentheus, understand how to portray a woman's orgasm. "Tonia did a lot of vocalizations for me," Mr. Miller said, "even recorded basically a track for me that I could follow from the get go of how to escalate, how to use the breath tension in the body and release." Ms. Sina, whose research included watching a lot of pornography created from a female point of view, also showed the women in the cast how to express an orgasm in performance. "That was a really, really helpful thing to do," Ms. Keiley said. "Nobody has to bring their personal experience onstage. Nobody has to say, 'Well, this is what I'm like in the bedroom.' That's very exposing, you know, asking people to improvise that stuff. You really have to be aware that that's private." There is a need, Mr. Miller said, for someone with the right set of skills and here he included both Ms. Sina and Ms. Keiley to guide actors in performing intimacy. "Because it is going to get personal," he added. "It's exhausting work because it demands so much vulnerability and sensitivity, and it can be emotional." The method he learned from Ms. Sina will travel with him to other productions, he said, and likewise the understanding that there is a better way to handle sex scenes than leaving actors to figure them out on their own. As for Ms. Keiley, her work on "Bakkhai" has made her vastly more comfortable talking about sex and anatomy. Still, she is not sure she's ready to forgo using an intimacy choreographer. "There's a language around intimacy that would make an actor feel vulnerable, and there's a language that will make them feel that you're just dealing with business," she said. "I think I'd need to learn a bit more." But if she were to go it alone? "I probably would be a bit braver," she said good humoredly. "I can certainly stage a pretty good kiss now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
SAN FRANCISCO The iPhone as an eavesdropping device? Watch out. It can happen. On Monday, Twitter and other social networking sites lit up with anxious Apple users after the news site 9to5Mac reported on a strange glitch in the company's iPhones. The issue: It turns out that an iPhone user can call another iPhone user and listen in on that person's conversations through the device's microphone even if the recipient does not answer the call. The problem was the result of a bug and involves Apple's FaceTime app for placing video and audio calls over an internet connection. The bug could also give a caller access to a live feed of the recipient's camera. On Monday night, Apple said it had disabled Group FaceTime, the feature that was causing the glitch. The glitch is embarrassing for Apple, which is set to report disappointing financial earnings on Tuesday. The Silicon Valley company has long positioned itself as a protector of user privacy offering more secure devices than its rivals.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A Father's Day lunch at the White House in June. Federal spending on children is down 15 percent in real terms from 2010. Conservatives have a particularly soft spot for babies. They tend to have more children than liberals and they are much more likely to oppose abortion rights. They also appreciate babies' power. In December, Ross Douthat wrote an Op Ed column for The New York Times titled "More Babies, Please," which noted that the United States' relatively high birthrates would give it an edge against aging rivals around the world. But there is an odd inconsistency in conservatives' stance on procreation: many also support some of the harshest cuts in memory to government benefit programs for families and children. First Focus, an advocacy group for child friendly policies, will release on Wednesday its latest "Children's Budget," which shows how federal spending on children has declined more than 15 percent in real terms from its high in 2010, when the fiscal stimulus law raised spending on programs like Head Start and K 12 education. Some school districts have been forced to fire teachers, cut services and even shorten the school week. Head Start has cut its rolls. Families have lost housing support. And the 2014 budget passed by Republicans in the House cuts investments in children further sharply reducing money for the Departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services. Birth rates have dropped precipitously since the onset of the recession six years ago to 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 2011, the lowest at least since 1920. The total fertility rate of American women the number of children they will bear in a lifetime fell to 1.9, the lowest in a quarter century, well below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population. The abrupt decline has multiple causes, including less immigration from Latin America, where women tend to have more children. Bruce Sacerdote, an economist at Dartmouth College who has studied fertility, surmises that the deep recession and weak recovery produced enormous pessimism about the future, prompting many families to postpone plans to have children. "It is all about the costs and the opportunity costs for women," notes Professor Sacerdote. After more than a decade of stagnant incomes, many families stressed by the rising cost of providing an education to their children appear to have concluded they are too costly. Fertility can rebound. It has done so before. Birthrates plummeted in the 1960s and 1970s as women by the tens of millions opted out of their traditional role as housewives and mothers, went to college and got jobs postponing and often forgoing what until then had been the classical American family of a single male breadwinner and a stay at home mother. In economists' terms, women's "opportunity cost" of children rose. By the middle of the 1970s, the fertility rate of American women fell to just over 1.7 children from 2.7 a decade earlier. But fertility didn't continue to fall. By 1990, it had bounced back to around 2.1, the rate needed to stabilize the population. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. In an important study, Professor Sacerdote and his Dartmouth colleagues James Feyrer and Ariel Dora Stern noted that families worked out a way for women to accommodate children and a job. In 1975, women performed three quarters of the family hours devoted to child care, according to the Multinational Time Use Study. By 1995, they performed 60 percent. In 2012, men in families with children under 6 spent 59 percent as much time as women performing primary child care duties, compared with 45 percent in 2003. This shift in cultural norms within American families can explain why fertility in the United States is higher than in many other advanced nations places like Japan, Germany, Spain and Hong Kong, where women still shoulder an overwhelming share of child care. There is widespread evidence that government assistance to families increases fertility. France's generous child subsidies, for instance, have been credited with lifting that nation's fertility rate above 2, from about 1.75 in the mid 1990s. A study in Quebec found that increasing benefits to new parents by 1,000 Canadian dollars increased the probability of having a child by 16.9 percent. One study in Sweden traced its higher fertility compared to other Scandinavian countries to government programs like paid leave and subsidized day care, which made it easier for mothers to work. None of this comes cheap. But even conservative thinkers like Gary S. Becker, the Nobel laureate from the University of Chicago, readily acknowledge that government can combat low fertility by subsidizing education or other costs of children. "Since children are expensive over their first 20 years or so, subsidies have to be big per child to have a sizable effect," he told me in a recent interview at his office. Mr. Douthat, too, has consistently argued for more family friendly government policies. There are some troubling trends that suggest that fertility rates will not simply rebound as the economy recovers. Women's participation in the labor force has stagnated over the last 13 years after growing by leaps and bounds for decades. In 1990, the United States had the sixth highest share of women in the labor force among 22 advanced countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By 2010, its rank had fallen to 17th. This suggests increasing tension between women's responsibilities at work and at home. In a study this year, Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn of Cornell found that the labor supply of American women fell compared to those of other rich countries partly because the United States does not provide the generous family benefits common in the rest of the industrial world like direct subsidies for children, mandatory paid maternity leave and free child care. Helping children, particularly those from families with modest means, provides a real payoff for society.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Watching Emily Coates's "Incarnations (Sketches for a Longer Work)," part of the third performance event in Danspace Project's Platform 2015, you may wonder if your brain is turning to jelly. Ms. Coates's embodiment of ideas about corporality and physics in relation to Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion and the Higgs field challenges the nonscientific among us. At one point, Ms. Coates, a gorgeous redheaded, pregnant former dancer with the New York City Ballet performs Apollo's solo from George Balanchine's 1928 ballet of that name, while her co performer, the Yale physicist Sarah Demers, rapidly describes Ms. Coates's moves in terms of space, force, mass, acceleration, etc. In this playful but utterly serious work, Ms. Demers also writes formulas on a whiteboard and explains them verbally. Occasionally, Ms. Coates asks her to continue while circling the board, the air then becoming her only writing surface. In the fascinating ending, gestures derived from the ones made by a physicist over the course of a lecture generate an eerie, almost spiritual passage across the space by Ms. Coates, glowing in the blue world of Carol Mullins's lighting. Platform 2015, organized by Claudia La Rocco, a freelance critic for The New York Times, pairs artists from different dance worlds and asks them to collaborate. The program on which Ms. Coates's work appears opens with a piece created by Troy Schumacher, a choreographer and a dancer in New York City Ballet, and Jillian Pena, a postmodern dancemaker who is passionate about ballet. In it, the former City Ballet dancer Kaitlin Gilliland and Cassie Mey (essentially a modern dancer) perform modest, attractively designed ballet steps. Despite their differences, these two sleek women can move in immaculate unison. After Ms. Pena and Mr. Schumacher discuss the history of their close collaboration and their own processes in an overly long and halting dialogue, and after Ms. Mey and Ms. Gilliland dance again, the choreographers signal the moves each created by raising a hand. Interestingly, the steps you might have attributed to one of them often turn out to have been designed by the other.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Early last year, the virtual sales center at One57 set the tone for a year of astronomical listings in the high end residential real estate market. Billionaires found the green carpet views of Central Park meticulously captured by a remote control helicopter to be irresistible. Gary Barnett, the president of the Extell Development Company, announced sales of full floor apartments for more than 50 million apiece in the unfinished building, later confirming that the duplex penthouse and an even larger duplex 14 floors below had each gone into contract for more than 90 million. Success begat boldness. And boldness begat listings like the penthouse at CitySpire, which at 100 million is now perceived as the highest F.S.B.O. listing in New York history, although the owner, Steven Klar, has listed the property with his own brokerage. The sales contract that Mr. Klar, who is also a developer, signed with Douglas Elliman and its brokers Raphael De Niro and Victoria Logvinsky, has expired, and now Mr. Klar is trying to sell the 8,000 square foot octagonal residence himself. (An Elliman spokeswoman had no comment this week on whether any serious offers had ever been received.) New York was not alone. In Miami, owners and their agents took their cues from the frenzy seizing Manhattan. The developer Bruce Eichner listed his penthouse at the Continuum for 39 million. The telecom mogul Peter T. Loftin listed Casa Casuarina, the former Gianni Versace mansion, for 125 million, dropping the price five months later to 100 million. The buyers of Mr. Loftin's 23,000 square foot spread on Ocean Drive will have to tangle with a pile of litigation; the latest suit, from Barton G. Weiss, the restaurateur who has been operating the property as a hotel, revealed that the 54 foot mosaic tiled swimming pool lined in 24 carat gold was never approved for use by hotel guests. If there is a defining feature of the last year, it is that the mania over listing prices for trophy properties was built on a mirage of big sales creating new comps in the market. Consider that in Manhattan only one monster sale above 80 million the 88 million sale of a penthouse at 15 Central Park West has actually been recorded as a sale so far. The others are contracts that could be torn up if the prospective buyers somehow change their minds. Which isn't to say that extremely wealthy people aren't paying extraordinary prices for amazing apartments in New York and Miami. It's just that the mega rich in both cities are gravitating not to resales, but to spectacular new penthouses designed with them in mind. Properties like the duplex penthouses at Ian Schrager's Residences at the Miami Beach Edition, which sold as a package for 34 million (or 3,800 a square foot, a new Miami Beach record), or the penthouse at 432 Park Avenue, which the developer Harry Macklowe said is under contract for 95 million, continue to prove the point. "The only properties that are getting these numbers are new development projects, and those can't be confirmed until the year after when they close," said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, a property appraiser. "So in many ways this is a phenomenon that is hard to document or prove. However, it has launched the next wave of development." And that new wave of development, in New York, at least, is focused almost entirely on the top 10 percent of the market, Mr. Miller said, as developers feel pressured to build luxury units to justify soaring land prices. Still, it may well be that the trophy property craze spawned a wave of transactions for more modest believe it or not 20 million and 30 million apartments. "When we look back," Mr. Miller said, "the legacy of this period is going to be that it jump started with a handful of trophy property sales that led the way for a lot of top tiered transactions that we haven't seen in the last two or three decades. The trophy sales broke the ice." The same can be said of Miami, where the going rate for trophy penthouses climbed above 3,000 a square foot this past year, driven by the boldness of Mr. Schrager and other developers reacting to an influx of prospective buyers from Brazil, Russia and China. "Everywhere there is a grand property, we have these great buyers, and there is no end to them," said Mark Zilbert, the president of the Zilbert Realty Group in Miami Beach. What is attracting wealthy buyers to Miami, Mr. Zilbert said, are quality buildings with grand spaces, like Edition, 1000 Museum and even Related's recently announced Marea, a six story building with only partial views of the ocean and bay where buyers have nevertheless already reserved about half of the 30 units. "It is sort of build it, they will come," Mr. Zilbert said. "We didn't have this a few years ago. But now developers are building these exceptional properties." None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. But not all properties are created equal. And some, like Casa Casuarina, are saddled with complications. It's tough enough that it sits on a touristy stretch of Ocean Drive and has no parking not exactly the kind of privacy and exclusivity the superwealthy demand these days. Mr. Versace was killed outside the entrance gate in 1997. Mr. Loftin bought the property in 2000, initially living in it and running it as a members only club. Then, faced with impending foreclosure and eviction, he invited Mr. Weiss in 2009 to open a Barton G. restaurant on the property and to run it as a high end hotel and event site. Last summer Mr. Loftin decided to sell, inflaming Mr. Weiss, who had a lease to operate his business there until 2019. Mr. Weiss's business, 1116 Ocean Drive L.L.C., filed suit earlier this month, saying Mr. Loftin misled him and had not told him that the mansion's swimming pool was not approved by the state of Florida for hotel use. (A few months after Mr. Weiss signed the lease, the state required that a "no swimming" sign be posted at the pool, meaning guests paying upward of 2,250 a night were not allowed to swim there.) Adam J. Steinberg, Mr. Loftin's attorney, called the suit "baseless" and said that Casa Casuarina had "provided a tremendous amount of slack to Barton G.'s company to comply with the lease." He said Mr. Weiss never made an issue of guests not being able to use the pool. Until this week, I viewed Casa Casuarina as a symbol of the irrational exuberance that permeated the highest end of residential real estate the past year, despite it being listed by the prominent Coldwell Banker agents Jill Eber and Jill Hertzberg, known as "The Jills."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
GUANGZHOU, China Three years ago, as part of its green energy policy, the Chinese government set an ambitious goal: by the end of 2011, the nation would be able to produce at least 500,000 hybrid or all electric cars and buses a year. With only about a week to go, it is clear China will fall far short of that target. Despite dozens of electric vehicle demonstration projects around the country, analysts put China's actual annual production capacity at only several thousand hybrid and all electric cars and buses. "It's pretty trivial at this stage they hardly sell any," said Lin Huaibin, the manager of China vehicle sales forecasts at IHS Automotive, a global consulting firm. Obstacles include continued technological hurdles, disputes over technology transfers by multinational automakers, and a broad wariness by the Chinese public regarding alternative technology cars. But it would be shortsighted to count out China's electric car efforts just yet. Only a few months ago Prime Minister Wen Jiabao called for Beijing to create a new "road map" for energy saving vehicles. Unlike in other nations, where automakers are leading the push for electric vehicles, in China the effort is being led largely by one of the country's most powerful industries the state run electric companies that operate the national power grid. With China expected to surpass the United States in the number of all vehicles on the road by as early as 2020, the government run utilities see it as their job to provide an alternative to imported oil as a way to power several hundred million cars, trucks and buses. This month in this sprawling southern industrial city, for example, the giant China Southern Power Grid company opened a sales and service center for electric cars. The new three story building, resembling a giant lizard egg of lime green glass, is a showcase for technology supplied by Better Place, a start up based in Palo Alto, Calif. Under the Better Place business model, customers not only recharge their electric cars but also periodically stop at an electric filling station to swap their nearly depleted batteries for freshly charged ones. And just because there are no customers kicking the tires now doesn't mean China Southern Grid, as it is commonly known, isn't in the electric vehicle game for the long haul. The power company and Better Place are in talks to sell electric cars to the Guangzhou municipal government and to taxi fleets, according to Shai Agassi, Better Place's founder and chief executive. The demonstration project showcases imported Renault Laguna sedans and Nissan Dualis crossover utility vehicles whose gasoline fueled power trains have been replaced with electric motors and swappable batteries. But the companies are in talks with Chinese automakers to produce battery powered cars, for which no price has been set. In a separate bet, meanwhile, China Southern Grid has also built recharging stations in another big southern industrial city, Shenzhen, for electric buses and cars made by a Chinese automaker, BYD, which has Warren E. Buffett among its investors. Though automakers in other countries have supplied charging equipment to be installed at homes and parking lots, China's power industry has already made it clear that it wants to dictate when and how plug in gasoline electric hybrids and all electric cars are charged, by owning the charging equipment and setting technical standards. "It is more and more difficult to manage the grid; we need more flexibility," by controlling how cars are recharged, said Zhang Diansheng, the deputy general manager of China Southern Grid. After initially seeking to leapfrog Japan and the West by moving straight from internal combustion engines to cars powered only by batteries, Chinese policy makers are now paying more attention to hybrids that combine gasoline engines with electric motors. (As battery fire problems with the Chevrolet Volt in the United States have recently indicated, technical problems still bedevil electric automotive technology.) Even some of the Chinese companies like BYD that have bet most heavily on all electric cars are now investing in plug in hybrid cars that have gasoline engines as well as batteries. Some of the obstacles that have slowed deployment of all electric cars in China also exist in other markets. The cars' range, less than 200 miles even under ideal conditions, falls steeply in cold weather, if the air conditioner is turned on or if the car was not fully charged overnight. "I'm not interested in them I worry I'd run out of electricity and get stuck," said Mu Zhongbao, a 31 year old businessman who paid the equivalent of 130,000 for an Audi Q7 minivan on a recent afternoon here at one of the many dealerships near the Better Place site. Southern China Grid's Better Place demonstration project indicates that powerful interests in China still back the development of all electric cars. "I see the Chinese fully committed on a path toward electric vehicles the time frame may shift, the volume numbers may shift," said Raymond Bierzynski, the executive director of electrification strategy at General Motors China. Some executives say that China has fallen behind its schedule for hybrid and all electric cars because it has put heavy pressure on multinationals to transfer technology to their Chinese partners to be eligible for generous subsidies for the sale of alternative energy vehicles in China. Some foreign manufacturers have responded by withholding some of their latest models from the Chinese market as Nissan has with the electric Leaf. G.M. has put the Volt on sale in China, despite the Chinese government's decision to make it ineligible for renewable energy subsidies of up to 19,300 per car. That is because G.M. has not transferred enough of the technology to satisfy Beijing, although G.M. did agree this autumn to share some electric technology in the coming years. "By forcing foreign technology sources into a junior role, that's going to significantly slow the development of the technology in China," said Bill Russo, a former auto executive who oversaw the Chinese and Korean markets for Chrysler and is now an industry consultant in Beijing. But the betting in China is that China Southern Grid and another big grid operator, the State Grid Corporation, and their allies among the country's five main electricity generation companies have much more influence in Beijing than the auto industry. The Chinese auto industry was tiny until the last decade, and very few of its executives have wound up in senior government positions. By contrast, specializing in electric power has long been a path to the top of the Chinese Communist Party for leaders like Li Peng, the former premier. And as long as the electric companies are influential, all battery cars may hold the political edge over hybrids. But what is not clear is which of three experimental approaches to recharging will eventually dominate the field: the so called fast charging of vehicle batteries at recharging centers; overnight charging options at homes and parking lots; or battery swapping a la Better Place. Meantime, World Trade Organization rules are also influencing how China approaches electric cars, said a Chinese official close to the decision making who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss transportation policy. The government wants to build an electric car industry that can export vehicles all over the world. But it does not want to someday face W.T.O. trade complaints from other countries that might accuse China of violating free trade export rules by subsidizing the industry's development. With China having raised trade tensions with the United States earlier this month by slapping additional tariffs on a range of American imported autos, Beijing may need to tread more carefully than ever. The most promising trade strategy for China to avoid legal pitfalls might be for the government first to subsidize the development of a network of charging stations for electric buses and other municipal vehicles, the Chinese official said. Mass transit subsidies are hard to challenge at the W.T.O. because they involve an almost purely domestic government service. The bus recharging stations, and the lessons learned in building them, might then be used in a more extensive network of electric car recharging stations. Subsidizing the charging stations could help make electric cars more affordable, and in turn help Chinese automakers achieve economies of scale in their home market that would help them build up an export business. Already BYD is expanding its annual capacity to manufacture all electric buses 1,000 this year, up from 500 last year and with a target of 5,000 next year. Mr. Agassi of Better Place predicted China would become a large scale maker of electric cars and then start exporting them. "This is the fork in the road moment" for China, Mr. Agassi said. "You get to a trade deficit on oil imports, or you get to a trade surplus with a lot of car exports."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
WASHINGTON A number of countries China most prominent among them have long acted to hold down the value of their currencies against the dollar, helping their industries by keeping exports to American consumers cheaper and making goods from the United States more expensive. And while every president from Bill Clinton on has repeatedly criticized the practice, none have ever taken formal action against China or any other nation to try to stop it. Now, a growing bipartisan majority in Congress is coalescing around a demand that could derail President Obama's ambitious trade agenda before it really gets moving: include a robust attack on international currency manipulation or no deal. The push for strong currency provisions in legislation to grant the president "fast track" trade negotiating authority, in a major trade deal with a dozen Pacific Rim countries, or in both has presented the White House with what it fears is something of a Catch 22. If members of Congress are to be believed, unless the president's trade negotiator includes strict, enforceable prohibitions on policies to intentionally hold down the value of currencies, any completed trade accord will die on Capitol Hill. But, administration officials say, demanding the inclusion of such prohibitions would kill the trade deals before they were completed. "You cannot be pro trade and pro this kind of currency mechanism," warned Tony Fratto, a former official in the George W. Bush administration who is working against the congressional currency push. "They are completely incompatible. It will in fact kill a deal." None of the officials representing the 12 nations, including the United States, want to see such prohibitions in the Trans Pacific Partnership, which is near completion, and negotiators working on a follow up deal with Europe are similarly unenthusiastic. "We agree with many in Congress that more needs to be done and are working with them to figure out if there is something that can be accomplished in the context of our trade agreements that is consistent with our overall strategy of bilateral and multilateral engagement," Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said in a statement. "We remain concerned that an enforceable provision on currency could have a negative impact on our ability to protect American workers and firms and set back our international efforts." But on Capitol Hill, currency is gaining currency. "An awful lot of this is real, and the reason is the frustrations on this have built up for a very long time," said C. Fred Bergsten, director emeritus of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and an administration trade adviser. "There's a pretty strong insistence on action. Next question is, what action." There is little wonder why lawmakers from both parties say their patience has grown thin. For years, the United States has endured a large, chronic trade deficit, intensified by China and some other trading partners that have deliberately kept their currencies cheap relative to the dollar. A study conducted by Joseph E. Gagnon, a scholar at the Peterson Institute, and C. Fred Bergsten, now its director emeritus, estimated that currency interventions had cost the United States as many as five million jobs over the last decade. In fact, currency manipulation may be far more effective in distorting trade than the import tariffs and export subsidies that trade agreements focus on, Mr. Bergsten said. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, have been banging the drum on currency manipulation since 2002. Yet beyond talk, neither the Obama nor the Bush administration has done what they were legally entitled to do: fight back. Some 230 members of the House have pledged in writing to oppose future trade deals without action on currency, more than enough to stop the president's agenda. "If your area of the country has experienced job exporting by the thousands, you understand," said Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat whose district includes the industrial north of Ohio. "That's bipartisan." The Obama administration fears that prohibitions on currency intervention could boomerang on Washington, allowing trading partners to challenge policies of the independent Federal Reserve Board and possibly even basic fiscal policies, like stimulus spending in times of recession. Officials also worry about other forms of potential retaliation, including reducing purchases of government debt, which help keep long term interest rates low. Corporate America is badly split. Some industries, including automobiles, steel and textiles, are standing with Congress. Ford Motor has threatened to oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership if it lacks a currency chapter. Other companies, better positioned to take advantage of growing globalization, are perfectly happy to buy components from Asia that are artificially cheapened by currency manipulation. "A lot of Big Business uses currency as a hedge," said one industry lobbyist, who spoke on condition of anonymity to be frank about the business divide. "They're comfortable operating in an environment where manipulation is part of the process." The administration has a crucial ally in Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The trade promotion authority bill he plans to push through his committee by March will include new reporting, monitoring and transparency rules to spotlight currency manipulation, but it will avoid retaliatory enforcement rules that he fears could prompt a trade war. "Such a result could jeopardize our status as the world's leading currency," said Brendan Buck, the committee's spokesman. "We are confident there are ways the administration can make progress on this issue without upending our trade agenda and the good jobs it stands to create." It is difficult at times to distinguish between currency manipulation and market forces that can push currency values in directions that work against the United States. The global currency market is naturally biased toward a strong dollar, the world's reserve currency. The recent rise in the dollar is more attributable to economic weakness in Europe, China and Japan and falling interest rates abroad than any intentional effort to increase exports at the expense of American workers. At the same time, the global supply chain has diminished if not nullified the advantage that currency manipulation might bring to sophisticated economies like Japan's, Mr. Fratto noted. Japan's exports might be cheaper with a devalued yen, but its manufacturers import components that would be more expensive. Even in China, the policy has begun to shift. As economic growth fades, foreign investors are starting to show less interest in the country, while Chinese investors are trying harder to put their money into foreign markets that may offer better returns. The result has been that the Chinese central bank, the People's Bank of China, has been spending some of the dollars from its hoard to prevent the renminbi from weakening in currency markets, an about face from when it prevented the renminbi from strengthening. Still, Congress appears done with equivocating. The traditional pitch that free trade will expand business and help consumers has lost salience in an era when middle class incomes are declining and well paying industrial jobs are disappearing. "To a president, geopolitics matter a great deal, but to senators and congressmen, what matters is how their constituents and economy are doing," Mr. Schumer said. Last week lawmakers from both parties and across the ideological spectrum introduced legislation that would allow companies in the United States to petition for relief from foreign competitors benefiting from currency manipulation, setting off a mandatory Commerce Department investigation. That investigation could lead Washington to impose duties on imports that benefit from depressed currencies. Legislation would also allow the government to counter manipulation with manipulation: If China spent 1 billion to buy United States dollars to drive up their value, the United States could buy the same amount of Chinese currency to negate the move. Such legislation passed the Senate in 2011 by a vote of 63 35. The year before, the legislation passed the House 348 79. "With more U.S. jobs at stake every year, we must stand up to protect Americans from unfair trade practices by countries who fight dirty via currency manipulation," Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina,said at the bills' unveiling. To the Obama administration, such legislation is unnecessary and dangerous. Mr. Lew testified before the Senate Finance Committee that currency is "the No. 1 topic" he raises in bilateral trade talks, and he insisted that diplomacy was working. China has eased on its manipulation, he said, letting the renminbi appreciate in recent years. Japan has not intervened in currency markets in some time. "The challenge in the context of a trade agreement is how to address the issue in a way that helps and doesn't hurt," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Dreary hotel rooms with no hot water. Or no hotel room at all. While Cuba has many lures, the quality and even availability of its accommodations are not among them. Now, though, the re entry of major American hospitality chains into Cuba's overstretched hotel market could alter the landscape, adding competition to an industry dominated by Cuban state tourism companies and their European partners. Later this year, Starwood Hotels and Resorts is expected to begin managing two Havana hotels, one near the city's Capitolio building and another near the business district. Marriott International is reported to be in discussions with Cuban officials about running or developing hotels on the island. If there are rooms available, they will become easier to find and book quickly after Booking.com, the Amsterdam based online hotel reservation service, said on Monday that it had reached agreements with a dozen Cuban hotels to join its booking system. Leslie Cafferty, vice president for global communications at the Priceline Group, which owns Booking.com, said it would begin offering booking services in Havana in the next few weeks and planned to extend to locations like Cayo Coco and Cayo Santa Maria on Cuba's northern coast, and the eastern town of Baracoa. "For the industry, it's a game changer," Mr. Lubbers said. American hotels were not necessarily better, he said, but catered to American expectations, which include bigger bedrooms and wider beds. Americans would be drawn to brands they knew from home, he said. Between having American hotels in Cuba and new rules that make it much easier for Americans to travel without organized groups, "things become more normal," Mr. Lubbers said. The deals to run the Hotel Inglaterra and Hotel Quinta Avenida, which Starwood plans to refurbish, will take a little pressure off a hotel sector that tourism operators said has been "overwhelmed" by the surge in bookings to Cuba since the United States announced a detente with the island in December 2014. Cuba received a record 3.5 million visitors last year, an increase of about 25 percent over the previous year. Travelers are trying to cram into the country's few high quality hotels and thousands of private homes, nearly 4,000 of which are now advertising on airbnb.com. But Havana has only a half dozen properties that meet international five star standards, and many more deals like the Starwood one are necessary if the hotel sector is to meet surging demand from visitors, tour operators said. As hundreds of Americans traveling as part of President Obama's entourage arrived in Havana this week, hundreds of visitors were packed off to stay in hotels in Varadero, a beach resort 90 minutes away, tour operators said. Lucy Davies, founder of Cubania Travel, said that her organization stopped taking bookings for the first half of 2016 in October last year because they could not guarantee hotel rooms. Bob Guild, a vice president for Marazul, which offers travel services to North American travelers visiting Cuba, said Havana would need to at least double the number of high quality hotel rooms in the next few years. That could be done through deals like Starwood's, to refurbish and manage existing properties. The Cuban tourism ministry also has plans for a big five or six star hotel on the Parque Central near Old Havana, which is home to several of the city's top hotels, and is developing properties to run as boutique outfits, he said. These hotels, however, "will sell out instantly," Mr. Guild said. The number of American travelers who booked through Marazul in 2015 excluding Cubans and Cuban Americans going to visit family rose 67 percent. In addition, said Mr. Guild, the city needs "clean economy hotels" to accommodate student groups and other American travelers who cannot afford top rates. Many hotels start the season in decent shape, he said, but deteriorate as visitors arrive back to back and the staff is unable to keep up with maintenance. How quickly the Cuban state run tourism companies would develop new hotel infrastructure was unclear, travel agents said. Cuban officials may be wary that the next president will reverse recent changes and clamp down on travel to the island. Mr. Guild said United States elections may be "a factor for them and whether it is worth making these investments."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Akutagawa's early life, in Peace's telling, was scarred by trauma. His mother, "born of samurai stock" and married to "a parvenu beneath herself," succumbed to mental illness six months after Ryunosuke's birth. In a harrowing early scene, the reluctant child is taken to see her, "her tiny face ashen, her tiny body lifeless, as though already no longer really here," a living ghost. For the rest of his life, Akutagawa, who was farmed out to live with an uncle's family in a shabby industrial ward in Tokyo, feared he would inherit his mother's madness. A fretful boy, Akutagawa, "afraid of the dark, afraid of the light," found refuge in books. "Don't be scared, they whisper. We can bring you to another time, we can take you to a different world." His beloved Aunt Fuki introduced him to the fantasy world of ancient Japanese folklore, the basis of some of his finest writing, including the tale that inspired Kurosawa. Through reading, the child's humdrum world was magically transformed: "The frayed tatami, now forest floors. The dripping tap, a thunderous river. The steep stairs, a mountain pass." Later, libraries and secondhand bookshops helped him build his own "house of books" composed of Poe and Baudelaire, Balzac and Dostoyevsky. According to Peace, books were Akutagawa's primary reality; his life was "always, already secondhand." Akutagawa was initially dismissed, by both his colleagues and the literary critics, as a mere "mosaicist," lacking in originality. But for Peace, such literary appropriation links Akutagawa to our own postmodern world of blurred genres and textual borrowing, of which "Patient X" is a distinguished example. In the Borgesian section called "A Twice Told Tale," the protagonist, split into multiple selves, finds himself "trapped inside" a story by Poe, full of literary echoes, doubles and narrative repetition. An urban flaneur like the central character in Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," he immerses himself in Poe's "The Premature Burial," only to find himself placed in a coffin, "the world growing charnel, grim." Much of Tokyo was buried in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. After the initial devastating shocks, the Akutagawa of Peace's novel returns to his house to retrieve his favorite books. After much hesitation "Baudelaire or Strindberg? Flaubert or Dostoyevsky?" he finally settles on just two, the Bible and "The Communist Manifesto."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
BEIJING To entrepreneurs in China, he is a legend akin to Steve Jobs. To United States officials, he is the secretive mastermind behind a company that is extending the Chinese government's ability to infiltrate computer systems and data networks around the world. But for all his fame and power, Ren Zhengfei, the 74 year old founder and chief executive of the Chinese technology giant Huawei, may no longer have the luxury of letting his company's success speak for itself. In his first public comments since United States authorities arranged for the arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou, who is also Huawei's chief financial officer, Mr. Ren told a group of reporters on Tuesday that he missed his daughter very much, and that he would wait to see if President Trump intervened in her case. He called Mr. Trump a "great president," and said that his tax cuts had helped American business. Ms. Meng was arrested in Canada last month on accusations of defrauding banks to help Huawei's business in Iran. Washington is seeking her extradition, but Mr. Trump has suggested that he might intercede if it would help China and the United States reach a deal to end their trade war. Huawei has said that it is unaware of any wrongdoing by Ms. Meng. And last week, the Polish authorities said they had arrested a Huawei employee there on charges of spying for Beijing. The company fired the man on Saturday. Mr. Ren insisted that his company had not spied for China. "I love my country. I support the Communist Party. But I will never do anything to harm any country in the world," Mr. Ren said on Tuesday. A company spokesman confirmed his remarks. Huawei has 180,000 employees and has become the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment. It estimates that it generated more than 100 billion in sales last year, and it sells more smartphones around the world than Apple. Yet Mr. Ren seldom appears in public. For most of its existence, Huawei was opaque to people in China, too. It was founded in 1987, but it did not begin publishing the names and biographies of its board members until its 2010 annual report. Mr. Ren spoke to the news media for the first time in 2013. The next year, he told The Independent of London that he had no hobbies, prompting a colleague to lean in and suggest that he enjoyed reading and drinking tea. Mr. Ren was born in 1944, in the mountainous southwestern province of Guizhou. His parents were teachers; he was one of seven children. His father, Ren Moxun, was the son of a master ham maker in Zhejiang Province. When he was growing up, Mr. Ren wrote in a 2001 article, the family was so poor that he did not own a proper shirt until after high school. According to an official company biography, he studied engineering in college and joined the Chinese military's infrastructure engineering corps in 1974 to help build and run a factory manufacturing synthetic fibers for textiles. At a time when China had no private sector economy to speak of, it was not unusual for college graduates to join the military. The infrastructure engineering corps was disbanded in 1983, according to the official biography. A few years later, Mr. Ren and business partners founded Huawei in what he called, in a 2016 interview with the official news agency Xinhua, a "run down shack." The company started as a reseller of telephone equipment imported from Hong Kong, but later started developing its own technology. As it expanded around China and then across the world, Huawei inculcated a die hard competitive spirit in its employees, pushing them to work harder and move faster than the company's rivals. Huawei still speaks proudly of its "wolf culture." "We will always have wolf culture," Mr. Ren said in an interview last year with Xinhua. "Catching prey might be difficult. But the wolf is unrelenting." Mr. Ren has a reputation for being blunt in conversation. In 2010, Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, spoke at the ribbon cutting for Huawei's new American headquarters in Plano. That penchant for brutal honesty has not spared the members of Mr. Ren's family who also have worked for Huawei: Ms. Meng and her husband, plus two of Mr. Ren's siblings. For a long time, people in the telecom industry speculated about whether Mr. Ren would pick one of these relatives to lead the company after his death. But in a 2013 letter to employees that was shared on a company website, Mr. Ren said his successor needed to have vision, good character and a deep understanding of both new technologies and customers' needs. "My family members do not possess these qualities," he wrote. "Therefore they will never join the line of succession." Mr. Ren's plain speaking has not managed to make United States officials feel comfortable about allowing Huawei's gear into the country's internet infrastructure. Huawei executives have said repeatedly that they are independent of the Chinese government and military. They have challenged Western governments to produce evidence that the firm's products are vulnerable to state meddling.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
KIM BRANDT at MoMA PS1 (Feb. 18 at 3 p.m.). Following a three month residency at MoMA's Queens campus, choreographer Kim Brandt presents "Problems," a kind of human sculpture in motion that takes place under the museum's white geodesic VW Dome. In recent years, Ms. Brandt has been working with larger ensembles. Here, 16 dancers repeatedly come together and separate to pursue their own physical tasks, putting into motion Ms. Brandt's interest in the relationship between the individual and the collective and how that shifting dynamic affects the surrounding environment. 718 784 2084, momaps1.org BEBE MILLER AND SUSAN RETHORST at New York Live Arts (Feb. 21 24 at 7:30 p.m.). The elusive art of making a dance is the central theme of this double bill program, featuring new works from the veteran dance makers Bebe Miller and Susan Rethorst. "In a Rhythm," by Ms. Miller, takes inspiration from authors like Gertrude Stein and Toni Morrison and uses text, music and gesture to explore how structure breeds meaning. In "Stealing From Myself," Ms. Rethorst revisits 30 years of her own work and borrows from those moves and memories to create a fresh duet for Gabrielle Revlock and Gregory Holt. 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A biopic about an athlete who became a secret agent is on Showtime. And a documentary on the child welfare system debuts on HBO. THE CATCHER WAS A SPY (2018) 8:15 p.m. on Showtime. This espionage thriller, based on Nicholas Dawidoff's biography of the same name, tells the true story of Moe Berg, a Jewish professional baseball player who became a spy for the United States during World War II. (How? He spoke several languages, was incredibly smart and knew how to keep a secret.) He's ordered to fly to Nazi Germany and find out whether the physicist Werner Heisenberg is developing a fission bomb; if so, Berg (played by Paul Rudd) must kill him. The story is fascinating, and Rudd is joined by an all star cast that includes Paul Giamatti and Mark Strong. The film failed to impress critics: Some found it surprisingly dull while others said Berg comes off as one dimensional, leaving much to be explored. FOSTER (2019) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. This sobering documentary offers a behind the scenes look at the shortcomings of the foster care system. The Oscar winning filmmakers Deborah Oppenheimer and Mark Jonathan Harris weave the stories of a handful of workers, parents and children who navigate the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. We learn that the child welfare system lacks resources, leaving many in need of help. But there is a sign of hope: One foster mother interviewed here has helped more than 100 children.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Two Saturdays ago was the first time I used my computer on Shabbat in over 20 years. I was leading and participating in my congregation's Zoom Minyan our Cyber Shul. Had you asked me a year ago whether logging on to my computer and participating in Saturday morning's service would be breaking Shabbat, I would have answered, "yes." But I found that doing so not only enhanced my Shabbat; it made my Shabbat. I still wore a tie, feeling even more compelled to wear "bigdei Shabbat" (clothing special for Shabbat). I donned my Tallit and away we prayed. A majority of those participating were from here in Minnesota, but we heard "amens" and harmonies from California, North Carolina, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and even as far away as Chile. Seeing the smiles on the faces of children recognizing their classmates, seniors miraculously experiencing companionship in their solo occupied homes, newly bereaved choking up at the opportunity to pray and mourn with community it all brought tears to my eyes. I was raised in a home that observed the Sabbath. I carried that practice into adulthood and professional life, including 15 years as a Conservative rabbi. Shabbat is about leaving the week behind the toils, the trials, the anxiety, the heartbreak all of it. Once Shabbat sets in, everything is on pause. My shoulders relax, my breathing changes, and I enter into what I hope is a restorative period. That is the charge of Shabbat: the rest of the week is about creation, but Shabbat is about ceasing from creating. If we are in a perpetual creating mode, we burn out, the world burns out. Shabbat is the reset. Further, the Torah charges us to rest because God rested. For us to suggest that we don't need to disconnect and rest, especially when God did, is to suggest that we are more capable and able than God. There may not be a greater subtle display of arrogance than to suggest that we have a far superior stamina than the Divine. To truly experience the restorative force of Shabbat, one needs this pausing to happen within community. Shabbat may be the gift God keeps in store for Israel, as described by the Talmud, but the way to truly delight in it is with other people. Before the coronavirus pandemic, community on Shabbat centered around synagogue. Some people have relationships that exist only within the walls of their synagogue. Friends, for decades, sitting near or next to each other because of Shabbat at synagogue. The pandemic took that physical community away from us. But because of technology once a distractor and now a savior we are able to immerse in community despite our physical isolation. Yes, there are traditional Jewish legal challenges about using a computer on the Sabbath. Many rabbis have written about this over the past several decades in support and against logging on. But the absence of community takes a person down a path of despair. It can lead to life threatening depression. Building and engaging in community saves lives and violating the Sabbath has always been acceptable in the name of saving a life, even if the danger was not imminent. The pandemic has cut many of us off from our communities, and so we've forged new paths to connect. This is a good thing. And it extends beyond the Sabbath. Families will be joining together virtually for Seder on Passover iPads and laptops, intentionally and strategically placed around the table. We will each be able to very obviously answer the question of how different this night is from all other nights (and years). The memorial service on the last day of Passover will be broadcast from each community into nursing homes and private residences alike. The smell of Pop Pop's matzo brei may not waft through the screen, but the smiles and laughter of the great grandchildren as they connect over FaceTime may indeed be as soothing. We will eventually keep this virus at bay and return to our "normal" daily life. But that normal really is no longer. We will be changed and the world will be changed. We as a synagogue will have reached people we've never reached before. The collective world is finally realizing that this is the type of outreach and engagement we should have been doing all along. Meeting people where they are, bringing light into their dark corners that is how you change and build a world. Rabbi Avi S. Olitzky is a senior rabbi of Beth El Synagogue in St. Louis Park, Minn. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
As Vice Moves More to TV, It Tries to Keep Brash Voice The live music at the Vice Media party on Friday shook the room. Shane Smith, Vice's chief executive, was standing near the stage with a drink in his hand, pants sagging, tattoos showing watching the rapper cum chef Action Bronson make pizzas. The event was an after party, a happy hour bacchanal for the hundreds of guests who had come for Vice's annual presentation to advertisers and agencies that afternoon, part of the annual frenzy for ad dollars called the Digital Content NewFronts. Mr. Smith had spoken there for all of five minutes before running a slam bang highlight reel of the company's shows that had titles like "Weediquette" and "Gaycation." In the last year, Vice has secured 500 million in financing and signed deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with established media companies like HBO that are eager to engage the young viewers Vice attracts. Vice said it was now worth at least 4 billion, with nearly 1 billion in projected revenue for 2015. It is a long way from Vice's humble start as a free magazine in 1994. But even as cash flows freely in Vice's direction, the company is trying to keep its brash, insurgent image. At the party on Friday, it plied guests with beers and cocktails. Its apparently unrehearsed presentation to advertisers was peppered with expletives. At one point, the director Spike Jonze, a longtime Vice collaborator, asked on stage if Mr. Smith had been drinking. "My assistant tried to cut me off," Mr. Smith replied. "I'm on buzz control." Now, Vice is on the verge of getting its own cable channel, which would give the company a traditional outlet for its slate of non news programming. If all goes as planned, A E Networks, the television group owned by Hearst and Disney, will turn over its History Channel spinoff, H2, to Vice. The deal's announcement was expected last week, but not all of A E's distribution partners the cable and satellite TV companies that carry the network's channels have signed off on the change, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private. A cable channel would be a further step in a transformation for Vice, from bad boy digital upstart to mainstream media company. Those investments valued Vice at more than 2.5 billion. (In 2013, Fox bought a 5 percent stake for 70 million.) Then in March, HBO announced that it had signed a multiyear deal to broadcast a daily half hour Vice newscast. Vice already produces a weekly newsmagazine show, called "Vice," for the network. That show will extend its run through 2018, with an increase to 35 episodes a year, from 14. Michael Lombardo, HBO's president for programming, said when the deal was announced that it was "certainly one of our biggest investments with hours on the air." Vice, based in Brooklyn, also recently signed a multiyear 100 million deal with Rogers Communications, a Canadian media conglomerate, to produce original content for TV, smartphone and desktop viewers. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Vice's finances are private, but according to an internal document reviewed by The New York Times and verified by a person familiar with the company's financials, the company is on track to make about 915 million in revenue this year. It brought in 545 million in a strong first quarter, which included portions of the new HBO deal and the Rogers deal, according to the document. More of its revenue now comes from these types of content partnerships, compared with the branded content deals that made up much of its revenue a year ago, the company said. Mr. Smith said the company was worth at least 4 billion. If the valuation gets much higher, he said he would consider taking the company public. In the United States, Vice Media had 35.2 million unique visitors across its sites in March, according to comScore. The third season of Vice's weekly HBO show has averaged 1.8 million viewers per episode, including reruns, through April 12, according to Brad Adgate, the director of research at Horizon Media. (Vice said the show attracted three million weekly viewers when repeat broadcasts, online and on demand viewings were included.) For years, Mr. Smith has criticized traditional TV, calling it slow and unable to draw younger viewers. But if all the deals Vice has struck are to work out, Mr. Smith may have to play more by the rules of traditional media. James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's son and a member of Vice's board, was at the company's presentation on Friday, as were other top media executives. "They know they need people like me to help them, but they can't get out of their own way," Mr. Smith said in the interview Friday. "My only real frustration is we're used to being incredibly dynamic, and they're not incredibly dynamic." With its own television channel in the United States, Vice would have something it has long coveted even as traditional media companies are looking beyond TV. Last year, Vice's deal with Time Warner failed in part because the two companies could not agree on how much control Vice would have over a 24 hour television network.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Over at the Swiss Institute in SoHo, the walls were lined with the latest candy colored bags and shoes from Rachel Mansur and Floriana Gavriel of Mansur Gavriel, the handbag label that has become a favorite thanks to its outside the industry status. After the frenzy that surrounded their best selling bucket style in 2014 (and six months after the debut of their footwear), the designers, who nine months ago won the Swarovski Award for Accessory Design, introduced two new bags and five new shoe styles. The Sun tote comes in mini, medium and large sizes, and a choice of suede, calfskin or patent leather. The square shaped Elegant, with both a top handle and a clasp, appeared to be a foray into more formal territory for the designers. Their prediction for the label's next sellout item: light hued, shearling lined suede ankle boots. "The boot we always wished we could have," Ms. Gavriel said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Andrew Weissman makes a compelling case that the next attorney general should prosecute Donald Trump for crimes he may have committed as president. He is right to say that nobody, and especially not the president, is above the law. But it would still be the wrong thing to do. President elect Joe Biden understands that this is a moment for reconciliation rather than recriminations. With a pandemic still raging and a nation profoundly divided, with 74 million people having voted for Mr. Trump in spite of his despicable behavior, it is time to heal if possible. Pressing criminal charges against the former president, as tempting and justified as that might be, would make the task of unity impossible. Joe Biden should emulate President Lincoln. As the Civil War was concluding, Lincoln advocated for no reprisals, even against people who took up arms against the United States. He knew that to bind the nation's deep wounds, that was the only path. Lincoln was right then, and that is the right approach now. Steven Sanders Troy, N.Y. The writer is a former member of the New York State Assembly. Eric Posner argues persuasively that it would be unwise to prosecute Donald Trump for federal crimes he may have committed while in office. Perhaps then a more promising strategy might be for Congress to determine whether there are some potential legislative remedies for the kinds of behavior Mr. Trump displayed while in office behavior that has made his presidency probably the most lawless in our history. For starters, Congress might consider laws that would require candidates for the presidency to disclose their tax returns. And how about laws relating to conflicts of interest? And laws governing the issuance of pardons? If indictment is not the way to go in Mr. Trump's case, what can be done to prevent the threats posed by the Trump presidency from recurring in future administrations? Given the stakes, doing nothing is not a viable option. Andrew Weissman's and Eric Posner's competing views should be tested, not debated. Neither Mr. Weissman nor Professor Posner can know what a full and fair criminal investigation of Mr. Trump's conduct in office would show. A full and fair investigation would be one unencumbered by the substantial constraints attending Robert Mueller's investigation. A wise attorney general under the Biden administration would direct that an investigation proceed apace. The results would either bear out Mr. Weissman's view that there is "ample evidence" of Mr. Trump's criminal conduct or Professor Posner's view that there is "little evidence" that Mr. Trump committed crimes as president. Or come out somewhere in between: ample evidence as to some crimes, little evidence as to others. Nothing could be more harmful to the credibility of our justice system than allowing someone to blatantly be above the law. President Trump's critics, myself included, would feel thoroughly betrayed by our government if he was not prosecuted after leaving office. Enduring the lack of indictments over his many atrocities while in office was bad enough. I believe in the rule of law, and expect that everyone will be treated the same under it. We've waited long enough for this offender to face justice. Letting him off the hook now would destroy my trust in the justice system. And if Mr. Trump was not prosecuted, future presidents would assume that they, too, can get away with anything. Of course, in any rational world, Donald Trump should be prosecuted, and likely found guilty, for his many acts of corrupt malfeasance. But we do not live in a rational world. Many of us may know that any such prosecution would be on its merits, and not simply political vengeance. But 74 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump will not see it that way. And when the Republicans return to power, as they most certainly will one day, political payback will be inevitable. And we will simply begin, to borrow Lin Manuel Miranda's words from the song "My Shot," "an endless cycle of vengeance." The price of Donald Trump getting away with the havoc he caused is great. The price of inviting a never ending cycle of prosecution as political retribution, however, would be even greater. Let him go. The incoming Biden administration could offer a "truth and reconciliation" process as an alternative to questionable pardons. The process, open to all persons linked to the Trump administration, could follow the South African model. In return for submission of testimony and supporting evidence, those opting to participate in the process would be offered exoneration. Proceedings would be public. The benefits would be lower cost, certainty of outcomes and, unlike pardons, a public record of misdeeds. Given the likelihood that prosecution would inflame partisan rancor, what better way to move the country toward healing. Democrats should play hardball. In exchange for not investigating or prosecuting Donald Trump, he and members of his family would agree not to run for public office or hold a position in the Republican Party. This would give Republicans the opportunity to restructure their party. And Americans could look forward to a future without Donald Trump. President Trump could be indicted but there is virtually no chance that he would ever be convicted. Given his massive support, it is almost certain that even in New York there would be at least a few of his loyalists on a 12 person jury who would believe anything he said, no matter the evidence, which is precisely what is happening now.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
WASHINGTON In the summer of 2017, when one of the country's premier dance schools was looking to hire a comptroller, it just so happened that someone with experience in the role was looking for a job. Sophia Kim had been the treasurer at the Kirov Academy of Ballet here two decades earlier, when the school was affiliated with the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. But Ms. Kim also had a gambling habit and had recently spent almost two years in prison for embezzling 800,000 from another nonprofit affiliated with the church. So it was more than a bit surprising when the Kirov Academy, for reasons that remain tremendously opaque, hired Ms. Kim back, put her in charge of the books, gave her a Branch Banking Trust debit card and access to the school's accounts. "I wondered myself, 'Why would they rehire her?'" said Michael Beard, a former executive director of the school who retired in 2012. "I was completely shocked." The consequences of that decision became clearer earlier this month when Ms. Kim appeared in court to face charges that, not long after she started working again at the academy, she misappropriated 1.5 million from its coffers. According to a Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit, over a period of nine months in 2018, Ms. Kim wrote checks to herself and used her academy bank card 120 times to withdraw cash and pay off losses at the MGM Grand Casino in nearby Maryland. "These losses really hurt us a lot," said Pamela Gonzales de Cordova, the executive director of the academy, who said the school was brought to the brink of bankruptcy. Although perhaps better known for its mass weddings, business ventures from real estate to media to commercial fishing, conservative politics, and the derisive term associated with its members Moonies the church has also long funded a number of nonprofits, some of which promote dance. "It truly is a heavenly art form," Rev. Moon once said. "Ballet uses the entire body as an instrument to express man's aspiration towards God. In that sense it is the ultimate expression of artistic beauty." His dance ventures included "The Little Angels" children's ensemble, the Seoul based Universal Ballet and, in Washington, the Kirov Academy, which takes its name from the elite St. Petersburg troupe now known as the Mariinsky. (The Russian company and the school are friendly, and once shared an artistic director, but are not officially linked.) Rev. Moon's interest in ballet grew in part out of his relationship with Julia Moon, a ballerina whom a critic once described as "an elegant wisp of a dancer with a demure gaze and feathery technique." Julia Moon performing with the Universal Ballet in Chicago in 2000. Ms. Moon, then known as Hoon Sook Pak, was on tour with the Washington Ballet in 1984, preparing for the lead role in "Giselle," when Rev. Moon's 17 year old son, Heung Jin, ran his car off the road. Having died single, he was not eligible to enter heaven under the church's teachings, so Ms. Moon agreed to marry the dead teen's spirit in a lavish ceremony in which she carried his portrait. Later that year, Rev. Moon created the Universal Ballet company, where Ms. Moon, who took the family name, became the principal dancer. Six years later, he opened the Kirov Academy, converting a former monastery near Catholic University in Washington into a ballet paradise complete with a theater, dorms, classrooms and studios. Among the school's first leaders was a ballet luminary, Oleg Vinogradov, then the director of the Kirov Ballet in Russia. At its peak more than a decade ago, the school turned out about a dozen high school graduates a year. Nearly all landed at top companies like American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet. The Unification Church initially bankrolled nearly all of the Kirov's budget, and Ms. Kim was hired to help as treasurer. Ms. Kim, who is also known as Sookyeong Kim Sebold, joined the Unification Church at 19 in South Korea, she told the court during her first trial. Now 59, she came to the United States in 1983 and married an American who served as a church lawyer. After working for the Kirov, she was later hired by the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit affiliated with the church that largely served to funnel its money and other donations to the Kirov, Little Angels and Universal Ballet. But between 2001 and 2005, while she was working for the foundation, Ms. Kim often drove to Atlantic City to play Blackjack with its money, according to federal prosecutors in Virginia who charged her with filing a false tax return and tax evasion. The government said the investigation began because of discrepancies between the amount of money flowing through her personal accounts and what she had reported on her income tax returns. Ms. Kim's lawyers said her efforts were not designed to benefit her personally. Rather, they argued, Ms. Kim, a devoted church member and divorced mother of three, was gambling and day trading in an effort to offset poor investments made by Ms. Moon's father, Bo Hi Pak, a church leader who ran the nonprofit and was a top aide to Rev. Moon. "She thought she'd have a chance to raise additional revenue," Kevin Brehm, her lawyer, said at trial. But the jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to two years in prison in 2013. Unification Church leaders did not appear outraged by Ms. Kim's conduct. Mr. Pak, who ran the foundation from which Ms. Kim took the money, said he believed she was acting in its interest. He and his daughter, Ms. Moon, the general director of the Universal Ballet, which relied on funding from the nonprofit, wrote the court requesting leniency. "This was a poor exercise of judgment," Ms. Moon wrote in her letter, "but I do not see her as a criminal." By the time of Ms. Kim's release in January 2015, matters at the Unification Church and the Kirov Academy had changed. After Rev. Moon's death, in 2012, his wife and children and others in the church squabbled over who should succeed him, divisions that continue to this day. Donations to the Kirov from the church diminished and the academy relied more and more on tuition fees to support what is now a nearly 4 million operating budget. But church members retained a role in the academy's operation. For example, in 2017, when Ms. Kim was rehired, Julia Moon was the school's president, chairwoman and artistic director. One of her brothers was executive director. The remaining five board members included her father and a Unification Church communications specialist. The academy has declined to address why it took a chance on rehiring Ms. Kim despite her history. Ms. de Cordova, the current executive director, referred questions about Ms. Kim to the current president of the academy, Tatiana Moon, a daughter of Rev. Moon. Tatiana Moon declined to be interviewed. Julia Moon, who is based in South Korea and remains a member of the school's advisory board, could not be reached for comment When Ms. de Cordova, a lawyer who was acting then as the school's interim executive director, heard about the missing money, she said she told the board it had to be reported to the authorities. With their assent, she went to the F.B.I. herself. Ms. Kim, who has yet to plead in her case, was arrested in November at the MGM casino. She was released on Nov. 20 after promising to stay away from gambling establishments. But, actually, the government said in court papers, she has been back to the casino many times since her release. Now, under the direction of Ms. de Cordova and Tatiana Moon, the Kirov is attempting to move forward. Ms. de Cordova, who is not a member of the Unification Church, said the church still provides some funding through an affiliated nonprofit, the Universal Cultural Foundation. The academy is soliciting corporate donations, in part to replace the lost money. Last year, the Universal Cultural Foundation transferred the school property valued at 10 million to the foundation that operates the ballet academy. Ms. de Cordova said signs of progress by the academy are evident in its successes at the Youth America Grand Prix competition in New York last month. The academy and its students took home 15 prizes, including Best School and Best Choreography, from the new artistic director, Runquiao Du. "I have resurrected this school from close to bankruptcy to winning 15 awards," Ms. de Cordova said. "I hate to use this phrase, but I want to make the Kirov great again."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. There are two ways, said the sports psychologist Michael Gervais, for a team to respond to the stress that comes when thoughts of a particularly painful defeat are dredged up. One is to think about situations in which the dreadful memory will re emerge and face it down, talk about it, plan how to respond. The other is to move on. Period. "For some people," Gervais said, the latter option "is the correct choice." "For most of us," he added, "that seems fine until we get close to the environment that feels or smells or looks like the first environment." At which point, he said, it becomes apparent that things should have been thought through a little more. The Virginia men's basketball team is approaching such a situation. In the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament last year, the Cavaliers had a meteor land on them. They became the only No. 1 men's seed ever to lose to a No. 16, falling to the Retrievers of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, by 20 points. Now, here they go again: Top seeded Virginia will meet the No. 16 Gardner Webb Runnin' Bulldogs (more frisky canines) on Friday in Columbia, S.C. Last year's loss initially devastated Virginia's players. Kyle Guy, a guard who is now a junior, wrote a moving Facebook post in which he described walking around campus knowing that everyone knew why he was wearing a hoodie and sunglasses. "There aren't many people who know what it's like to be the ONLY person (program in this instance) in the world to be on the wrong side of history," he wrote. But six months after that, in Charlotte, N.C., for a media day, Guy was singing a different tune in the same building, no less, where the awful upset had occurred. "For me, it's never forgetting it," he said, "but definitely trying to move past it to where I'm not hanging my head." This month, in Charlotte again for the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament, Coach Tony Bennett seemed to reject inquiries about Last Year. "We've grown from that experience," he told reporters. "We've owned it. We've talked about it. We had a great year last year and a hard loss. But it's time to press on, and there's not any more to say about that." Through a spokesman, Bennett declined a request to discuss last year's tournament loss in an interview. In other words, Virginia appears to have chosen Gervais's Option B. Fans aren't quite there, at least not those interviewed before and during the Cavaliers' final regular season game, a win over Louisville. They had not quite moved on. "I want people to stop talking about losing to a 16th seed," said Nicole Vaughan, a fan waiting to watch the game at a sports bar that had been converted from a train station not far from the university's John Paul Jones Arena. The greatest Cavalier ever, Ralph Sampson, was a three time college player of the year and a No. 1 overall N.B.A. draft pick who took Virginia to a Final Four but never won a conference tournament. His teams were stymied by the great Tar Heels squads of Michael Jordan and James Worthy, and by North Carolina State's miracle national champions of 1983. As the Cavaliers have won or shared four regular season A.C.C. titles during the last several years under Bennett, there has been a string of N.C.A.A. tournament disappointments. Last year's loss was the third time Virginia had been defeated as a No. 1 seed. "Part of their depression, for lack of a better word," Jerry Ratcliffe, a longtime local sports journalist, said, referring to the fans, "went back to when they lost to a really good Michigan State team in Madison Square Garden a few years ago, and they felt like that team was Final Four material. And the collapse against Syracuse a couple years ago that definitely was a Final Four team." Then, too, there was the style of last year's defeat. Virginia found itself trailing early in the second half, and Bennett's team, famous for a careful, slow style of play that critics say makes it susceptible to upsets, failed to erase the deficit. "Now you have to hear it forever," said Tyler Pearson, another patron at the restaurant to watch the regular season finale. "Everything they said is true: The system doesn't work; if you fall behind, you can't come back; Tony is stubborn." This year's Cavaliers are almost certainly better than the team that lost to U.M.B.C. They had just two regular season losses, both to Duke, the tournament's top overall seed. They retained most of their leading players from last season while adding Braxton Key, a transfer from Alabama, and the freshman Kihei Clark. De'Andre Hunter, a sophomore who did not play in the U.M.B.C. game because of a broken wrist, might be this season's national player of the year if Duke's Zion Williamson did not exist. And he is healthy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Pete Rademacher with his gold medal in 2002, five decades after his improbable fight against Patterson. One boxing journalist nicknamed him "the Pug in the Gray Flannel Suit." When Pete Rademacher won the gold medal in heavyweight boxing at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, he checked off one part of his audacious plan to be the first fighter to take on the world heavyweight champion in his first professional bout. No boxer had ever made that improbable leap before. Rademacher knew who his opponent would be within hours of his Olympic victory. Floyd Patterson, had just knocked out Archie Moore in Chicago to fill the vacancy created by Rocky Marciano's retirement. But first, Rademacher had to persuade Patterson to face him. In May 1957, he did. Helped by a sporting goods magnate he knew when he was stationed at Fort Benning, Ga., Rademacher raised the 250,000 demanded by Patterson's manager, Cus D'Amato, to guarantee his fighter's purse. Rademacher was also adept at promoting himself as a confident, viable challenger. "For one thing, he is frightfully glib, and for another, he is a phenomenal salesman," Gay Talese wrote in The New York Times before the bout. One boxing journalist, he added, had nicknamed Rademacher "the Pug in the Gray Flannel Suit." Fight night was on Aug. 22, 1957, at Sick's Stadium in Seattle. In the ring, Rademacher started strong. He won the first round, according to various reports. In the second, he knocked Patterson down with a right hand. "I thought he was down for good," Rademacher told The Ring magazine in 1990. "I was screaming to myself, 'Boy, we're there! We're there!'" The loss was the best known bout in Rademacher's boxing career, which ended in 1962 with a modest 15 7 1 record. Rademacher died on June 4 at the Ohio Veterans Home in Sandusky, Ohio. He was 91. His daughter Margot Skirpstas, in confirming his death, said he had had dementia. She said his brain had been donated to the Brain Injury Research Institute in Wheeling, W. Va., to determine if blows to his head from boxing, or another cause, had contributed to his illness. Thomas Peter Rademacher was born on Nov. 20, 1928, in Tieton, Wash., a small town in the south central part of the state. His father, Herbert, owned an apple orchard; his mother, Thelma (Nelson) Rademacher, was a homemaker. Pete was 14 when his parents sent him to a military academy in Tennessee. There, after contracting rheumatic fever, he learned to box to help rebuild his strength and endurance. He returned to Washington and attended Yakima Valley Junior College, where he played football and baseball and wrestled and boxed. He won the Northwest Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Seattle four times, the first in 1949. The next year he entered Washington State College (now a university), where he earned a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry. After graduating, he won the 1953 United States Amateur Championship. A year later, he headed to Fort Benning to fulfill his commitment to the R.O.T.C. program at Washington State. He continued to box at Fort Benning. As a member of the Army team, he won the Chicago Golden Gloves and the All Army and All Branches service championships in 1956 the prelude to victory at the United States Olympic trials and a spot in the Melbourne Games. Rademacher's gold medal victory was as cathartic for him as it was for a fellow boxer from Hungary, where Soviet tanks and troops had crushed a popular uprising weeks earlier. "When I dumped the Russian and they held my hand up, the Hungarian fighter jumped in the ring and lifted me up," he told The Gazette of Medina, Ohio, in 2007. "I was bawling like a baby." In Seattle eight months later, the circumstances were much different. Rademacher had dared to fight a champion but lacked the stamina to stay with him. "I took the gamble and lost," he said after the fight, conceding that he had felt his strength fade in the fourth round. "But I'm glad I did." After boxing, Rademacher sold homes at a development in Medina, his home for many years; served as president of Kiefer McNeil, a manufacturer of swimming pool products; and was the golf director for the American Cancer Society in Ohio. In addition to Ms. Skirpstas, Rademacher is survived by two other daughters, Susan Rademacher and Helen Chaney; his sisters, Mary Brown, Melba Strand and Sharon Brown; and two grandchildren. His wife, Margaret (Sutton) Rademacher, died in 2007.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The Radio City Rockettes' dazzling Christmas outfits. The tutus and feathers that adorn the company of the New York City Ballet. The catsuits of "Cats." If you've seen it on a New York stage, Ernest Winzer Cleaners has probably cleaned it. Before a viral pandemic dropped the curtain on performances this month, a team of 20 full time employees at the Bronx dry cleaning business would work 12 hours overnight to get Broadway's costumes back into fighting shape for the next day's shows. For over a century, Winzer has picked up the sweat soaked outfits of Roxie Hart and Eliza Doolittle and trucked them through Midtown Manhattan to Cedar Avenue in the Bronx, where the business has operated since 1908. But since March 12, when the coronavirus shut down productions on and Off Broadway, the cleaners at Winzer have been working a fraction of the hours they used to four, maybe six at the most. The Winzer crew is part of a much wider ecosystem of workers ushers and theater staff, stage hands, musicians left without a steady gig now that shows don't go on. Stage productions make up about 75 percent of the clients at Winzer, which handles the costumes for anywhere from a dozen to 30 shows each night. Two years ago, the operation earned a special Tony Award for its contributions to the industry. "Unfortunately, there's a lot of unknowns here," said Bruce Barish, who owns the business with his wife, Sarah, in a phone call on Tuesday. "We're doing what we can." Mr. Barish is considering the company's options while Broadway remains shut. At some point, he said, the work will dry up he may have to lay off his staff for some time, or temporarily close. But in the long run, he is hopeful: "We're going to be here," Mr. Barish added. "I'm not planning on this putting us out of business." Mr. Barish is the third generation in his family to run the operation after his grandfather bought it from Ernest Winzer, who was known for keeping Broadway clean, in the early 1950s. The business has stayed in the same spot in the Bronx, moving only once to what was then an abandoned building across the street when the Major Deegan Expressway was built. "Not only do they come and pick up the clothes and deliver the clothes in a wearable fashion in plastic, they also repair items, especially if you've noted them with a special telltale safety pin with a colored ribbon on it," said William Ivey Long, a six time Tony Award winning costume designer. "Red ribbon means 'Fix me.'" Winzer, he added, has cleaned the costumes for "literally every single Broadway show I've ever worked on," a number now north of 75. Mr. Harrison said he is fortunate he has been able to plan ahead and save some money to pay the rent for the next couple of months in case he and the other Winzer employees are laid off. After that, he said, "it's just like anybody else: definitely uncertain." "I'm hoping that Broadway gets up and running as fast as possible, because this is our livelihood," Mr. Harrison said. "It keeps food on our table, it keeps our families fed, and if they're not performing, it's a trickle down effect. It hits us first."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Working for Trump Ends in Getting Fired or Getting Covid, Kimmel Says None Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We're all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. 'You Get Fired or You Get Covid' Christopher Krebs, a top cybersecurity official, was fired by President Trump on Tuesday, just a week after Krebs referred to the 2020 presidential election as one of the most secure in history, contradicting Trump's claims of voter fraud. "He was terminated last night via tweet, which is not normal," Jimmy Kimmel said Wednesday. "Usually to get rid of Krebs, Trump uses a little comb and some medicated shampoo." "Basically if you work for Donald Trump, there are two possible outcomes: You get fired or you get Covid." JIMMY KIMMEL "Yesterday he even fired a top cybersecurity chief, Chris Krebs, for calling the election, quote, 'the most secure in American history.' Unfortunately, this president is the least secure in American history." JAMES CORDEN "In another example of closing the barn door after the cows voted for somebody else, the president is still firing anyone who dares challenge his dexy induced fever dreams." STEPHEN COLBERT "Yeah, Trump fired Krebs. He was like, 'It's not the first time I've gotten rid of Krebs, and it won't be the last.'" JIMMY FALLON "Hard to know who to trust here. Chris Krebs was head of the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency within the Department of Homeland Security; but remember, Trump once touched a glowing orb." JAMES CORDEN "Apparently, el Presidente has even canceled his plans to travel to Mar a Lago for Thanksgiving, deciding to stay in Washington instead. Smart move. The minute he steps out of there, you know they're changing all the locks." STEPHEN COLBERT "Instead of traveling to Mar a Lago next week, President Trump will reportedly spend Thanksgiving at the White House with first lady Melania Trump, or whichever Melania he can book on such short notice." SETH MEYERS "He's still in there we think." JIMMY KIMMEL "And according to one official, there is a 'bunker mentality' in the White House somewhere between Archie and Hitler." JIMMY KIMMEL "Meanwhile, Trump was like, 'If Don Jr. asks, I'll still be at Mar a Lago.'" JIMMY FALLON "Yep, a big party at the White House, what could possibly go wrong?" JIMMY FALLON "Maybe that's just how he observes quarantine: He never leaves the house, unless he knows he's spreading the virus." STEPHEN COLBERT "So we know there is at least one racist grandpa who won't be showing up for Thanksgiving this year." JAMES CORDEN Jimmy Fallon parodied Vogue magazine's "73 Questions" with his best Harry Styles impersonation. What We're Excited About on Thursday Night Former President Barack Obama will talk about his new best selling memoir, "A Promised Land," on Thursday's "Jimmy Kimmel Live." Also, Check This Out Pamela Sneed, whose new book is "Funeral Diva," a mix of memoir and poetry. Pamela Sneed recalls AIDS activism and 1990s lesbian aesthetics in her new poetic memoir "Funeral Diva."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
This reliance on types rather than characters and signals over information Boston's intellect is established by a glimpse of him reading Booker T. Washington's autobiography is only one of the movie's difficulties. When the regiment finally mutinies against the violently racist police force (in what became known as the Houston Riot and resulted in the largest murder trial in American history), the sequence should feel cathartic and moving. Instead, it's confusingly indistinct, the action so murky it's sometimes difficult to tell who is firing on whom. Mixing fact with fiction, Willmott and Byers's screenplay feels compressed and a little corny (as when the camera glides upward from the scene of a horrible beating to land on the American flag), the leads bearing so much weight of history they can barely breathe. A touching Aja Naomi King, as Boston's love interest, is little more than a sketch, and the skilled Mykelti Williamson suffers a similar fate as a wily sergeant who understands all too well the likely consequences of their revolt. Shot in just 18 days, "The 24th" is a movie desperately in need of nuance. Despite Byers's attempts to humanize his rigidly upstanding character, it's really McRae we need to watch: In too few scenes, he gives Walker the intensity of an unexploded bomb, his fury the vivid point of a film with so much death, yet far too little life. The 24th Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch through select virtual cinemas; rent or buy on Vudu, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
BMW's i8 plug in hybrid may be as fast as a Corvette Stingray, but it made me late every time I drove it. Fast getaways should be a given, considering the BMW's jaw dropping 3.8 second surge to 60 miles per hour. The problem is that the simple act of opening the i8's "swan wing" doors brought gawkers running that is, if they weren't already snapping photos, as happened after midnight in Manhattan when I found tourists surrounding the parked i8. The bombastic attitude of, say, a Lamborghini can make passers by keep their distance. But the i8's "Back to the Future" vibe drew people, including proponents of green technology, who said they rarely made a fuss over cars. Bystanders, in fact, constantly invoked the DeLorean from the Michael J. Fox movies as they enthused over the BMW's cinematic shape. The i8 may not have 1.21 gigawatts, but designers created the i8 to thrill and enlighten would be Doc Browns: Born from the company's multibillion dollar investment in sustainable transportation, the i8 was intended to look, drive and even sound like a sports car of the future. As with some other electrified cars, including the Tesla Model S, the BMW's exclusivity can dampen the feel good story. At 136,650 to start, and with BMW declining to estimate production totals, the i8 is too rich and too rare to save the planet. But its technology, especially its groundbreaking use of carbon fiber, may influence a global trend to drastically reduce vehicle weight and therefore improve efficiency. That trend is already spotlighted in the i8's sister car, the distinctive but less breathtaking i3 city car, which at 42,300 is easily the most affordable carbon fiber intensive car in history. In both "i" models, the passenger cell is formed of light yet ultrastrong carbon fiber in a patented process that molds components in minutes, rather than over the thousands of hours it once took to craft the material by hand for cars that cost 1 million and more. Even with 7.1 kilowatt hours of lithium batteries strung below its floor, the i8 weighs 3,455 pounds, about 480 less than a similarly sized Aston Martin DB9 and some 1,200 less than the Tesla. Slashing weight sets off a chain of energy saving benefits, allowing lighter, less powerful batteries, engines, brakes and other components to meet the desired level of performance. The BMW happily demonstrated its dual personalities on the street. As for one question: The BMW whips the battery bloated Tesla in acceleration and agility. (The coming Tesla Model D might end up faster in a straight line, yet the BMW is vastly more connected and engaging everywhere else.) But the BMW's back seat is purely for luggage or child seats, whereas the Tesla is a spacious luxury car, so the comparison is not green apples to green apples. The i8's front wheels are driven by a 129 horsepower electric motor and a 2 speed transmission that operate entirely behind the scenes. The rear wheels are served by a 228 horsepower turbocharged 1.5 liter 3 cylinder (adapted from the Mini Cooper) with integrated electric assist. Using paddles or a console lever, drivers operate a spectacularly quick 6 speed automatic transmission to manage a total of 357 horsepower and 420 pound feet of torque. I first toggled up the eDrive mode, which propels the i8 for up to 22 miles strictly on front drive electricity, albeit at a Prius like pace of 9.5 seconds to 60 m.p.h. and a top speed of 75 m.p.h. But since the BMW's all wheel drive Sport mode can replenish the battery on the fly (adding one mile of E.V. range for roughly every 17 miles driven), eDrive mode has a philosophical purpose beyond short electric commutes: For modern megacities like London that charge entry fees for internal combustion vehicles and may one day ban them hybrids like the i8 could conserve or replenish the battery range to qualify for entry. The BMW defaults to a Comfort mode that maximizes electric efficiency, but automatically blends in engine power when the driver shoves harder on the accelerator. That mode produced the best gas electric mileage, with gentle driving eking out 38 m.p.g. on the highway. Over several rip roaring days, the BMW delivered a solid 31 m.p.g. over all, 3 better than the E.P.A.'s combined city and highway estimate. That economy was about 50 percent higher than the 20 m.p.g. I've experienced in rival sports cars like the Stingray and Porsche 911. With wall current far cheaper than gasoline, the E.P.A. figures a bigger edge in energy costs. The i8 owner will pay 1,550 a year in electricity and gasoline to cover 15,000 miles, compared with 2,800 for the Stingray and 3,700 for the Aston DB9. The E.P.A. credits the i8 with 76 m.p.g.e. (the electrical equivalent of a gallon of gasoline) in eDrive mode, within sight of the Tesla's 89 m.p.g.e. The Tesla, of course, can cover roughly 250 miles on batteries alone, while the BMW must sip premium unleaded to raise the total range to 330 miles. But here's what the Tesla can't do: keep pace on a track or on twisty roads with Porsches, Corvettes or BMW's own M3 and M4 with fill ups around every corner and no worries about being stranded with an empty battery. As for the cabin, it's clear that BMW wanted the i8 to feel like an everyday sports car, with no intimidation factor. Reminiscent of the 6 Series, the interior is intimate and luxurious, including enviro friendly leather and a 10.2 inch iDrive screen, but one could quibble that the cabin doesn't match the avant garde dazzle of the exterior. The efficiency coaching digital driver's displays are cramped and not terribly exciting. Available blue seatbelts that match the two tone exterior trim add some sci fi flair. With efficiency runs out of the way, it was time to pivot open the featherweight doors, climb over the awkward sills (falling into the car is almost easier) and admire the performance. What I couldn't admire was the electric motor under the hood. If the i8's lowercase name recalls an iPhone, the car mimics one as well: Officially, the sealed hood can be opened only by technicians. And there's barely enough storage in the cabin for that iPhone. Perhaps it's better to imagine that a profligate engine is under the hood. Step on the i8's throttle, and after a beat of turbo lag, you're whisked into motion like sauce in a blender, propelled by 420 pound feet of electric boosted torque. Abetted by the stellar transmission, upshifts unleash a crackling barrage that you'd swear was old school internal combustion. In reality, the BMW pipes a synthesized simulation of engine noise through door speakers to complement the exhaust soundtrack. It sounds so incredible like a Porsche flat 6 hooked to a humming flying saucer that you'd never know a miniature 3 cylinder was doing the work. Initial handling impressions were less positive: omnipresent understeer and a relative shortage of tire grip. The 20 inch tires are indeed much narrower than typical sports car tires, helping to save fuel. But my impressions rapidly changed: The faster you go, the more the BMW balances out, with beautifully quick steering and rock solid poise aided by a lengthy 110 inch wheelbase. The brakes feel strong and natural by the standards of hybrid cars, though their regenerative function makes them touchy in low speed traffic. For some electric car fans, one i8 number that's out of balance is the price, which on the test car reached 138,650 with one option, a 2,000 Giga World leather package. But the i8 is at once an auto show exotic, a technological tour de force and a BMW. Anyone who expected it to sell for the price of a Chevy Volt, or even the Tesla Model S, was bound to be disappointed. I've also heard suggestions that the i8's design may not age well, because it's so singular, truly of the moment. I think the opposite is true. The most collectible cars of any era are striking, rare, advanced and high performing, and evoke nostalgia for their specific era. The i8 fits four of those descriptions, with nostalgic yearnings for 2014 yet to be determined. And unlike the notoriously slow and unreliable DeLorean, the BMW is actually a car worth driving.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
When Susan Zirinsky was named the new president of CBS's troubled news division in January, she said she wanted to unite her team "both functionally and spiritually." She is about to put that mission to the test. CBS News, whose Cronkite and Murrow tradition was shaken last year by a series of sex scandals, is set to make sweeping changes to its morning and evening anchor lineups in a roll of the programming dice that the network hopes can lure back a shrinking audience. The moves would be Ms. Zirinsky's first to put her imprint on the network where she has worked for nearly five decades and whose fortunes fell after painful revelations of workplace misconduct felled the company's chief executive, Leslie Moonves; its star morning show host, Charlie Rose; and Jeff Fager, executive producer of its most popular and prestigious show, "60 Minutes." Ms. Zirinsky is expected to announce her shake up as soon as Monday, ahead of the network's annual presentation to advertisers on May 15. The latest round of changes and tensions at CBS News were described by several people granted anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions. Norah O'Donnell, Ms. King's other co anchor, is the likely contender to take over "CBS Evening News," replacing Jeff Glor, who has been in the job for 18 months, the people said. If Ms. O'Donnell ascends to the job, she would join a short but exalted list of women who have served as solo evening news anchors at the three major networks, including Katie Couric at CBS and Diane Sawyer at ABC. Ms. O'Donnell's role remains under negotiation, and CBS declined to comment for this article. The changes will bring a degree of certainty to a news operation that has been besieged by speculation about who's in and who's out. It will also be a benchmark for Ms. Zirinsky, now 67, who had been reluctant in the past to accept the role of CBS News president, and in recent months has openly questioned if she should have accepted the role, two of the people said. Ms. Zirinsky told the journalist Yashar Ali, who previously reported her misgivings, that she had "ZERO regrets about taking this job." A legend within the news division she was the inspiration for Holly Hunter's character in the 1987 movie "Broadcast News" Ms. Zirinsky is the first woman to serve as CBS News president, and her promotion was literally met with cheers. The longtime overseer of "48 Hours," she was a trusted consigliere to the network rank and file. She said in an interview in January that she took the job because, "I felt at this moment in my life and my career this was the time to step up." But Ms. Zirinsky had little prior experience in the darker arts of managing a television news network: negotiating with rapacious agents, juggling multiple programs, weathering leaks to The New York Post. Colleagues say they admire Ms. Zirinsky's resolve and journalistic instinct, and her approachable management style of consulting with staff members at all levels on a range of topics. But they say that her approach more closely resembling that of a producer than a traditional tight lipped media executive has allowed uncertainty and fear to fester among some anchors and crew members. 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. She has not been shy about discussing potential changes to the anchor lineup with a variety of staff members, two of the people said, and several complained that her decision making process has stretched too long. Ms. Zirinsky has also been adamant about not letting news reports dictate her decisions. But speculation about new roles for Ms. O'Donnell and Ms. King has floated in the news media for months. As recently as Thursday, The Post reported on Ms. Zirinsky's ideas to change the morning show and the evening newscast. The uncertainty has allowed other factions of the newsroom to assert themselves. Within the last two months, some in the senior ranks lobbied for Scott Pelley to return to the anchor chair of "CBS Evening News," according to two people familiar with internal conversations. Mr. Pelley anchored the newscast from 2011 to 2017, before leaving for "60 Minutes" amid falling ratings and a somewhat strained relationship with David Rhodes, Ms. Zirinsky's predecessor as CBS News president. Ms. Zirinsky considered the Pelley idea before ultimately ruling it out, the people said. Ms. O'Donnell's move to the evening shift may be accompanied by a bigger change inside CBS: uprooting the "Evening News" from its longtime Manhattan home and relocating the broadcast to Washington. The change is a bold and expensive risk for an evening newscast that has been mired in third place among the broadcast networks. A Washington based crew would need to be hired, and the cost of shuttling staff between the two cities could prove costly. Two of the people said that Mr. Glor, a relative unknown at the time he ascended to the anchor's chair, would probably be offered another job at the network; Mr. Mason's move to weekdays leaves open his Saturday morning slot. Although he landed two interviews with President Trump, Mr. Glor's run may prove the limits to the theory that big name anchors are no longer necessary for an evening newscast. For now, a tense environment remains inside the CBS News offices on West 57th Street. On Friday, however, the "CBS This Morning" broadcast seemed chirpy as ever. "We are reading lots of things with great interest and we will address them on Monday when Gayle is back and John as well," said Ms. O'Donnell, who had Mr. Mason on as a guest host.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
There's so little genuine, starry eyed you had me at hello romance in American movies today that when a new love story pops up, it's hard not to root for it. That's the case with "The Photograph," about parallel affairs of the heart. One is hindered by ambition and miscommunication while the other suffers from familiar fears of commitment. Movies like this tell us that falling in love is easy cue the thunderbolt looks, passionate kisses and surging orchestration but if it really were that simple there wouldn't be much to tell, so also bring on the agonies, tempests and tears. When you meet Mae (Issa Rae), she's in mourning. Her mother, Christina, a distinguished photographer and rather less capable mother, has recently died, leaving Mae a New York museum curator bereft, confused and more than a bit resentful. Christina has also left Mae a pair of letters, including a confessional one that soon becomes a portal to the past. In the magical way of some romances, around the same time, a New York photographer, Michael (a sensational Lakeith Stanfield), learns about Christina while researching a story in Louisiana that leads him to a former fisherman, Isaac (Rob Morgan, excellent), who knew her. It isn't long before Mae and Michael meet back in New York (there's an undercurrent of destiny here), setting the story on its bifurcated way. The sparks fly fast and persuasively Rae and Stanfield make sense right away and you're soon cozying up with the couple while they share stories and increasingly heated looks in a dimly lit restaurant. The writer director Stella Meghie understands that you want to see these two beautiful people get together, and she smoothly delivers on your own romantic (and romance genre) longings. There's glamour, banter, clinking glasses, searching looks and even one of those crashing storms that echo internal squalls.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Diversity is increasing onstage on Broadway, according to a new study by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition. The study, released Monday, examined the 2015 16 season and found it to be the most diverse the group has reviewed so far, with 35 percent of all roles going to minority actors, up from 30 percent the previous season and 24 percent the year before that. The coalition has now compiled 10 years of data on diversity on New York stages. Musicals like "Hamilton," "On Your Feet!" and "The Color Purple" have provided opportunities for African American and Latino performers in particular. During the 2015 16 season, 23 percent of all roles went to African American actors and 7 percent went to Latino actors. But Asian American performers dropped to 4 percent of all roles; the arrival of "Allegiance," set at a Japanese internment camp during World War II, could not sufficiently offset the departure of "The King and I." Plays lagged far behind musicals, with minority actors in only 16 percent of those roles. And most of that casting 14 percent over all went to African American actors, boosted particularly by Danai Gurira's "Eclipsed," which is set in Liberia.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Donald Trump made it clear during the presidential campaign that he wanted to cut taxes to spur economic growth. With Congress back from its summer recess, the president may get the chance to do just that though analysts and wealth advisers are less confident that he will get wholesale tax overhaul. With any tax plan, the devil is in the details. And with this one, the details have been few. At the end of April, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, unveiled the plan, written on a single sheet of paper with tax proposals listed as bullet points. Because changes are expected for business, income and so called transfer taxes those levied on estates and gifts the lack of details has wealth advisers urging caution to clients asking the most natural of questions: What does this mean for me? "We're all Pavlovian when it comes to taxes," said Jayne Hartley, director and senior wealth strategist at Union Bank in San Francisco. "We groan when we hear we're paying a new tax. We cheer when we hear a tax cut is coming." With meetings over tax policy having started this week, what follows is an attempt to lay out when people might groan or cheer in the months ahead. Federal tax rates seem poised to change, although whether they will do so as part of a full fledge tax overhaul is still to be determined. President Trump has charged lawmakers, back from their summer break, with pushing through changes to business and income tax rates. Todd Simmens, national managing partner of tax risk management at BDO, a tax and accounting consulting firm, spent three years with the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation that produced the last big tax overhaul package in 2001. He said congressional staff members were considering several possible courses of action, but they have so far received little guidance from the president. He is doubtful that a wholesale overhaul can happen before the end of the year and predicts that if it does not get done early next year, the effort will get bogged down by the midterm elections. "There are too many other things in the air that will keep this from getting to the front burner," Mr. Simmens said. "Tax policy is more complex than health care repeal and other policy issues we hear about. You've got groups who are interested in their piece and have been lobbying for it." What he does expect is piecemeal changes to the tax code, particularly with business and income taxes. But if Washington tries to tackle bigger issues like a repeal of the estate tax the trade offs could create more work and confusion. Mr. Trump's initial one page plan on tax changes called for the corporate rate to be reduced to 15 percent, from 35 percent. Few analysts believe the corporate tax rate could go this low, but it could drop to 20 or 25 percent. For affluent business owners, there could be a real advantage if the lower rate applies not just to corporations but also to so called pass through entities. These are companies, like limited liability corporations, for which the business owners claim the revenue on their personal income tax returns. For a high earning company, that could be 39.6 percent at the federal level alone, before the 3.8 percent Medicare surcharge and state and local taxes are calculated. If a lower corporate rate were applied to pass through entities, it could give small businesses more working capital. As it stands now, business owners must file quarterly tax estimates and pay the tax at the individual rate even if they expect their business to slow down in the next quarter. A change would give them more money to invest in their business or help it weather slumps. "You'd have more working capital to do other things," said Joseph J. Perry, the tax and business services leader at Marcum, a national accounting firm. "If I can invest that money in my business and make more money, then I should leave it in my business. If you leave the money in the entity and it gets taxed at 15 percent, you haven't used that money personally." When business owners take the money out for personal use, they would presumably pay an additional tax. This adds a layer of complexity, but it may be worth it for business owners. "Once we see what it looks like, there is going to be a lot of planning for business owners," said Ms. Hartley, the Union Bank wealth strategist. "The question is, are they going to wait and see what others are doing or do they have a team of professionals already set aside?" Mr. Trump's proposal of cutting the number of tax brackets from seven to three with rates of 10 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent seems straightforward. But people need to pay attention to what happens to deductions. The administration's one page tax proposal says it will "eliminate targeted tax breaks that mainly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers" while keeping deductions for mortgage interest and charity. Advisers worry, though, that to pay for the cuts, the plan would cap deductions for high earners or eliminate certain credits, like those for state taxes. That would affect people who live in places like California and New York that have high state taxes. "We don't know if that's still in the plan, but earlier in the year, it was," said Jeffrey Carbone, managing partner at Cornerstone Wealth, a wealth management firm. "For clients who itemize their returns, that would be a major tax increase." If such a system goes into effect, people have few options. One would be to claim more deductions this year by prepaying state income and property taxes, for example and delay receiving income until next year when the tax rates are lower. But as a practical matter, that is difficult: Paying additional state taxes could put someone in the alternative minimum tax, which could limit their deductions, and few people have control over when they get paid. The 2001 tax package put in motion increased exemptions on estate taxes and decreased tax rates until the tax went away for one year in 2010. But the issue seemed to be settled in 2011 when Congress and President Barack Obama reached an agreement to set the individual exemption at 5 million and have that amount increased each year. They also agreed to a rate of 35 percent, which rose to 40 percent in 2013. Today, the exemption stands at nearly 11 million for a married couple, which means most people in America have no concerns over ever earning enough to pay the estate tax. Yet Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise to repeal what he called "the death tax." Getting rid of it could cause more problems for average taxpayers. When someone dies, their assets are valued on the day of their death so their heirs inherit them as if they had bought them that day. If the assets had been sold the day before, the person would have paid a capital gains tax. This may seem like a big giveaway, but it erases a headache for heirs who would have no idea what securities cost when they were bought decades earlier. If the estate tax went away, tax advisers wonder if heirs would owe a capital gains tax when they inherit the assets or when they later sell them, or if some credit would be put in place to help people who receive a modest inheritance. The difference could make receiving an inheritance considerably more expensive, particularly when it comes to modest estates. Adrienne M. Penta, executive director for the Center for Women Wealth at Brown Brothers Harriman, said she reminds clients that, unless they are on their death bed, they can count on the estate tax continuing to change. "The real advice is to stay calm," Ms. Penta said. "Don't go making really big changes to your estate plan based on a single page of hopes and dreams around tax reform." The other issue is the gift and generation skipping taxes. They are pegged to the estate tax and keep wealthy people from giving away all of their assets at the end of their life to avoid the estate tax. It's unclear what might happen to those taxes. Mr. Simmens, whose focus on the congressional tax writing committee was on the changes to the estate and related taxes, said the glossing over the thorny details came down to marketing. "'Killing the death tax' sounds different from a public relations perspective than 'eliminating the estate, gift and generation skipping taxes,'" he said. Regardless, he hopes legislators can make any tax changes permanent, and not have them revert to today's rates in 10 years, as happened with the 2001 plan. "That's horrible policy," he said. "The rest is just rates that go up and down, but we see that anyway."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Credit...Olivia Obineme for The New York Times EVANSTON, Ill. Like millions of parents, Kimberly Marion Suiseeya, a political science professor at Northwestern University, saw her work life upended when her third grader's school shut down in March. Later, she was demoralized to learn that local schools would not reopen this fall. But Dr. Marion Suiseeya faced an additional source of stress: her looming all or nothing tenure evaluation, which will determine whether she earns a lifetime appointment at Northwestern or must find a new job. "This year was critical for me to finalize my tenure packet," she said. "I stare at my computer and try to be productive. And every five minutes my daughter comes in and says, 'My Zoom link doesn't work.'" The pandemic has been brutal on many working mothers, especially those with little leverage on the job. Experts say it may be uniquely unforgiving for mothers in so called up or out fields, where workers face a single high stakes promotion decision. The loss of months or more of productivity to additional child care responsibilities, which fall more heavily on women, can reverberate throughout their careers. At Northwestern, hundreds of female faculty members have pressed the university to alleviate the disruption of the pandemic, but with limited success. "The present is unsustainable," said Susan Pearson, a tenured Northwestern history professor who has helped rally colleagues to seek more accommodations. Dr. Pearson, who is divorced and is the primary caregiver for her two children, said parenthood was too often seen in academic settings "as a personal choice" rather than as a societal obligation "like if you choose to live two hours away from work and you have a long commute, the university shouldn't have to do anything about it." Northwestern, like other universities, initially responded to the pandemic by pausing the so called tenure clocks of junior faculty members, giving them an extra year to publish academic work that would help them earn the promotion. But research has shown that stopping the tenure clock is an imperfect policy. According to a study of tenure decisions in economics departments published in 2018, men were substantially more likely to receive tenure at their first job after the university allowed an extension for new parents of either sex, while women were substantially less likely to receive tenure than they were before the policy change. The reason, said Jenna Stearns, an economist at the University of California, Davis, and a co author of the paper, is that men appear to devote more of the additional year to academic research, while women appear to spend more of it managing parental obligations. There is evidence that the pandemic is having a similar effect, with the gender divide in new academic papers skewing more male in recent months. Several women on Northwestern's faculty said they doubted that the additional time for tenure consideration would offset the pandemic's impact on their work. She said that she was spending no more than two hours a day on the project, versus the three or four she would spend in a typical term, and that the quality of those work hours had declined significantly. "I'm literally working in a closet," she said. "My daughter has different perceptions. She thinks all I do is work. But I work a lot less." 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. Dr. Marion Suiseeya intends to come up for tenure in the spring as originally planned because the stress of an unfinished book is too hard on her family and she doesn't want to prolong it. But she is not sure she'll be ready. Instead of an extension, she would prefer additional child care subsidies and a more nuanced evaluation process with less weight on whether her book has been published. Magdalena Osburn, a geobiology professor at Northwestern, divided days into two hour shifts with her husband, a fellow research scientist, when their son's day care facility shut down in March. "With a 4 year old, there are interruptions even when it's your time to work," she said. "Mommy knows where everything is. Nothing can proceed without Mommy's permission." Dr. Osburn, who submitted her tenure materials this month, said she was down to three or four hours of daily work after the pandemic hit, with much of the time spent figuring out how to teach a lab course online. Though her son's day care provider reopened in July, her output had been further squeezed by months of unreliable lab access for herself and her students. In the winter term, she is scheduled to teach two courses online that will again require considerable preparation, she said, and some relief from her teaching obligations would have been far more helpful than delaying the tenure decision. "I don't need a clock extension," Dr. Osburn said. "I need an acknowledgment that this year is trash." Other Northwestern professors seeking tenure echoed those concerns, as did a survey of nearly 200 female faculty members by a campus group. The survey also highlighted the tendency of other workplace obligations, such as advising students struggling with emotional stress, to fall disproportionately on women. "Beyond the pandemic, there's the protests and everything that's happening with Black Lives Matter," said Sylvia Perry, an assistant professor of psychology who teaches a course on prejudice and stereotypes. "Students wanted to take time to talk about what's going on, how it's impacting them as individuals, because they know I study it, because of my identity." Dr. Perry, who is Black, said additional flexibility in her teaching schedule would be "extremely helpful." Thus far, however, Northwestern has offered faculty members few across the board policies beyond the tenure clock extension primarily a subsidized rate for up to 10 days of child care. While it has announced support for alternative work arrangements such as sharing teaching responsibilities, faculty members must consult their supervisors about these options and many junior faculty members are wary of doing so for fear of being labeled slackers. In an interview, Kathleen Hagerty, the university's provost, said there was always a trade off between blanket policies like the tenure clock extension, which she conceded could have inequitable effects, and more tailored accommodations that put the onus on employees to arrange them. "That's the contradiction," she said, adding that she generally favored the latter approach. "Maximum flexibility is the university policy. That has been the order from the top: to be as flexible as you possibly can, as empathetic as you possibly can." Faculty members say they have been disappointed that there wasn't more planning for the possibility that schools and child care facilities would not reopen in the fall or more sensitivity to the challenges. "I have two young ones at home and a working spouse, though she has definitely taken on the heavy lift and allowed me to focus on Northwestern!" one administrator remarked in an email after Dr. Pearson asked about plans for the fall. The administrator assured her that the university took the issue very seriously. Unsatisfied "that set of assumptions and practices is EXACTLY what I am suggesting that NU not perpetuate," she later told the university's president by email Dr. Pearson teamed up with a fellow historian and mother, Amy Stanley, to write a letter to the administration. Among the options they urged the university to explore was paid leave for parents with pressing child care needs and a reduction in teaching obligations. Both women have tenure and said it allowed them to speak up for more vulnerable colleagues, including assistant professors and faculty members not on the tenure track concerned that their jobs were in danger. More than 200 faculty and staff members signed the letter, but the administration barely acknowledged it, Dr. Pearson said. Last week, the Organization of Women Faculty, the campus group that produced the survey of female professors, released its own proposals. They included additional child care subsidies and adjustments in tenure standards to "reflect pandemic realities." Dr. Hagerty, who said she was willing to take part in a moderated discussion that the group had requested, said the concerns raised in the survey were painfully familiar to her as a longtime professor with three children. "In my younger days, I didn't want to ever suggest that I couldn't do something because I had kids," she said. "They said, 'Be department chair, even though your husband is in Washington all week and you've got three kids under 10.' You know, 'Sure, I'll do it.'" She added: "It was killing me, but I did it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
An image from NASA's OSIRIS REX spacecraft showed particles coming out of its sampling collector after an operation on Tuesday to gather rock and dirt from the asteroid Bennu for scientific study on Earth. NASA's effort to grab a piece of an asteroid on Tuesday may have worked a little too well. The spacecraft, OSIRIS REX, grabbed so much rock and dirt that some of the material is now leaking back into space. The operation some 200 million miles from Earth on the other side of the sun was "almost too successful," Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the mission, said during a telephone news conference on Friday. NASA officials worried that without careful effort to secure its samples in the days ahead, the mission could lose much of the scientific payload it traveled for years across the solar system to gather. A few rocks wedged in the robotic probe's collection mechanism prevented a flap from fully closing. In images taken by the spacecraft, scientists could see bits of asteroid coming out. Dr. Lauretta estimated that each image showed about 5 to 10 grams up to about a third of an ounce of material floating around the collector. That is a significant loss as the mission's aim is to bring back at least 60 grams of asteroid dirt and rocks. "You've got to remember the entire system is in microgravity," Dr. Lauretta said. The particles move as if in a fluid, "and particles are kind of diffusing out," he said. If the collection attempt had not succeeded, OSIRIS REX could have made two more attempts. Mission managers also decided to call off two maneuvers. One, scheduled for Friday, was to slow down the spacecraft and to allow it to re enter orbit around the asteroid Bennu, which is only about 1,600 feet in diameter. Instead, it continues to drift away at a speed of less than one mile per hour. The second one was to spin the spacecraft around on Saturday to measure how much is trapped inside the collection mechanism. But that would shake out more material. "So that is not a prudent path to go down," Dr. Lauretta said. The collection of a sample was the key objective of the mission whose full name is Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer. Asteroids are primitive 4.5 billion year old leftovers from the earliest days of the solar system. Scientists on Earth using sophisticated instruments would be able to study the Bennu material in much more detail than any instruments on the spacecraft could. On Tuesday, the spacecraft's collection mechanism touched the asteroid Bennu at a leisurely pace of about 1.5 inches a second. The sampling mechanism, which resembles an automobile air filter, had been designed to work on a wide variety of surfaces ranging from completely rigid "Like running into a slab of concrete," Dr. Lauretta said to something much more porous. That part of Bennu turned out to be on the softer side, with the asteroid hardly pushing back at all. The sampling mechanism pushed 10 to 20 inches into the soil before the spacecraft backed away, allowing it to fill up its collector when a burst of nitrogen gas from the probe stirred up the surface. "We could not have performed a better collection experiment," Dr. Lauretta said. The operation to stow the collection mechanism may start on Tuesday. Engineers are looking at how to modify the procedure to minimize the amount of material that may be shaken out into space. It will take several days before the samples are safely stored in a return capsule. OSIRIS REX must wait until March to leave Bennu and to return to Earth, a journey that will take two and a half years. The spacecraft will drop off the return capsule, which will parachute to a landing in Utah on Sept. 24, 2023. OSIRIS REX is the third mission to attempt to bring back pieces of an asteroid. A Japanese mission, Hayabusa, faced a series of technical malfunctions, and it barely managed to bring any samples about 1,500 grains back from an asteroid it was studying called Itokawa. The Japanese space agency sent a second mission, Hayabusa2, to a different asteroid, Ryugu. That spacecraft is on its way back to Earth and will drop its asteroid payload in the Australian Outback in December.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Jets and Giants Are N.F.L.'s First to Say They'll Play Without Fans None The Jets and Giants will play their regular season games without fans at MetLife Stadium this fall, the teams announced in a joint statement Monday, nearly three weeks after Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey issued an executive order limiting social gatherings to 500 people. The teams are the first in the N.F.L. to decide to forego fans, and the revenue they bring, when the season begins in September. Both teams said in the statement that they would continue to work with the governor and update the status of a no fan plan, if necessary. "We support Governor Murphy's decision in the interest of public health and safety and, until circumstances change, both the Giants and Jets will play our games without the benefit of fans in attendance," the teams said in the statement. New Jersey, home of MetLife Stadium, has seen a sharp reduction in the number of coronavirus cases in the past two months, and has been slower than other states to relax social distancing guidelines and closures after being one of the hardest hit states at the outbreak's onset in March. Governor Murphy's order to raise the number of people allowed at public gatherings to 500 from 250 came in early July. Rutgers University will also abide by the limitation this college football season but will allow 500 fans to attend its home games, the school said in a statement Monday. Neither N.F.L. team's training camps and practices will be open to the public. The Jets will warm up for their training camp in Florham Park, N.J., while the Giants prepare at MetLife at the end of July. In recent weeks, both the Miami Dolphins and Green Bay Packers also announced that they would hold training camps and preseason games without fans, but both stopped short of saying that they would not admit spectators at regular season games. Season ticket holders for both N.F.L. teams are permitted to transfer credits to the 2021 22 season or apply for a full refund. Other teams have either deferred all season tickets or announced plans for half capacity stadiums, however none have announced a no fan policy. Restrictions on gatherings in many states across the nation may make crowded stands impossible when the season begins on Sept. 10. But the N.F.L. has not issued any leaguewide fan restrictions. Decisions on attendance are up to each team in accordance with guidance from state and local government officials and public health experts, a league spokesman said in an email. The season is expected to kick off on time despite an upswing in infections across the United States in recent weeks. The team owners and the N.F.L. Players Association are still negotiating safety protocols, but both sides agree that they want to play this season, safely. The Jets and Giants teams were two of 13 N.F.L. teams that Ticket IQ, which tracks sales, recommended fans wait to purchase tickets for given local coronavirus outbreaks. Still, the Jets and Giants may bring their audiences back to home games, should New Jersey crowd restrictions change in the coming months. And if they're allowed to, experts say, fans will be there. "We've seen a lot of demand for events that are allowed to happen," said Jesse Lawrence, the founder of Ticket IQ. "If the safety measures are in place, we expect that fans will come back."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
FRANKFURT The Frankfurt version of the Occupy Wall Street movement has many of the trappings of the New York City original, including a tattered cluster of tents, a location close to the beating heart of financial power and a diverse group of activists trying to come up with a unifying demand. But the Occupy Frankfurt encampment, spread out on the front lawn of the European Central Bank, is missing one feature of Zuccotti Park in New York: the police. The Frankfurt authorities, who control the park in the middle of the city, have taken a tolerant attitude toward the encampment, while the activists have generally behaved themselves since taking up residence in October. As a result, there have been none of the polarizing confrontations seen in New York and other cities, much less any violence or pepper spray. By anarchist standards, the Frankfurt activists are an orderly bunch. They have an outdoor kitchen that serves meals of donated food, a Web site and professional public relations operation, and a tent for community meetings. "If all demonstrations went so well we wouldn't have much to do," said Michael Jenisch, a spokesman for the Frankfurt Ordnungsamt, or Office of Public Order, which issues permits for public gatherings and has been monitoring the Occupy Frankfurt encampment. "If they have the staying power, they can camp there all winter," Mr. Jenisch said. That attitude contrasts with that of the authorities in cities like New York, Oakland or Boston, where the police have evicted protesters from public space, and also with other financial centers in Europe. In Zurich, for example, police cleared an encampment in November, arresting 31 people who resisted, according to Reuters. Earlier this month, police in London sent a letter to local businesses that appeared to link members of the Occupy movement with terrorist groups, according to the Guardian and other newspapers. The Frankfurt encampment of about 50 tents is not exactly a picture of German order. The residents have trampled much of the small park to mud. Several sawed off oil drums, apparently used for fires, lie about. Atop a knoll, someone has built a sculpture out of bent bicycle frames, toy dolls and empty beer bottles. But there have been no arrests of Occupy Frankfurt activists, and residents of the camp described the local police more as allies than antagonists. A 42 year old man who would give his name only as Jay, and said he was originally from North Carolina, described how the police had intervened when a group of rightist youths started shouting insults and trying to provoke a fight. "The way I see it, they don't bother, they protect," Jay said, as rain began to drum on the plastic tarp covering the outdoor kitchen, where he was helping to serve a communal breakfast of donated bagels and peanut butter. "We have never had a problem with the police." Likewise, the Frankfurt police have never had a beef with the protesters, said Manfred Vonhausen, a police spokesman. "The people there have been totally calm," he said. The activists chose the site next to the E.C.B. to protest what they consider the bank's aloofness from the democratic process and the austerity it is helping to impose on indebted countries like Greece. But the protesters do not seem to be very aware of the central bank's policy actions, like its rate cut last week. Leftist movements have a long history in Europe, and the German police are used to dealing with neo Nazis, extreme left "Autonomen" and other groups with much more of a hang for violence than the Frankfurt campers, who do not even rate a permanent police presence. "The U.S.A. is not as used as the Europeans to dealing with these movements," said a 50 year old Occupy Frankfurt resident who would identify himself only as Uwe. He was managing an information stand fashioned from plastic tarps and wooden freight pallets, where passers by could pick up leaflets and perhaps make a donation to help pay for portable toilets and other camp infrastructure. The protesters have been careful not to obstruct heavily traveled walkways that lead through the park from a nearby streetcar stop. A few minutes later, Uwe, wearing a rumpled red overcoat, assumed the role of tour guide for a group of students in their last year of secondary school. He lit a hand rolled cigarette as the students gathered around him in a semicircle, then described how the activists had rigged up a computer server in one of the tents. "Very interesting," said Nikolay Schiljahin, one of the students. A classmate, Sandro Kaufmann, said he agreed with protesters that "banks have too much power" but he was not quite ready to join the cause. "They need to form their arguments better," Mr. Kaufmann said. There was a list of demands on the Occupy Frankfurt Web site, , but it was removed after some people complained it did not reflect the consensus of the group. Now the Web site says simply, "We are a community with many different ideas and goals, that nevertheless is in agreement that we want to set limits on the power of capitalism, money, banks, markets and governments." "The course of action looks different according to the individual member," the Web site adds. But the activists are resolute in their rejection of violence. This month, after a letter bomb was sent to Josef Ackermann, the chief executive of Deutsche Bank, Occupy Frankfurt issued a press release within hours condemning the attempted attack. Mr. Ackermann's office is in a high rise building a short walk from the Occupy Frankfurt site. Though the headquarters of the European Central Bank looms over the site, the protesters have made no attempt to obstruct its business. When the bank's governing council met in early December, a lone protester wearing a mask handed out leaflets near the bank entrance. The camp generated a flurry of news coverage when it first appeared, but it has largely disappeared from the pages of German newspapers. Anti capitalist movements are not really news in Germany, where the Left Party, with roots in the East German Communist regime, has seats in Parliament. Residency in the park, part of the Taunus Anlage, a green ring that surrounds the central business district, also seems to have dwindled. Though there are about 50 tents, residents concede that some but not all are still occupied overnight. City officials counted only 20 people outdoors at the site one evening this week, but did not attempt to check how many more people might have been inside tents. Still, the movement seems to have more general appeal than the traditional protest groups. It has served as the focal point for weekend protest marches that have drawn thousands of people. "Some of the Saturday demonstrations have been the biggest in Frankfurt for years," said Harald Fiedler, chairman of the Frankfurt branch of the Confederation of German Trade Unions, which has donated a large tent to the protesters and provided other support. "They speak to a broader public." Mr. Fiedler predicted that the movement would gain new momentum when the weather turned warm again. At least some protesters are determined to tough it out until then. "It can get cold," Jay conceded. "But you got to adapt."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
WASHINGTON The federal government on Friday appealed a judge's ruling that prevented the Trump administration from imposing a ban on WeChat, the popular Chinese owned messaging app. The Justice Department said in a short filing that it was appealing a preliminary injunction issued by Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler of U.S. District Court for the North District of California. Mollie Timmons, a Department of Justice spokeswoman, declined to comment further. The appeal was made to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The decision to appeal the preliminary injunction blocking the ban escalates the battle over the future of WeChat, owned by the Chinese company Tencent Holdings. Officials in Washington have increasingly looked to stop people in the United States from using Chinese owned apps like WeChat and TikTok, and have worked to banish Chinese telecommunications products from American networks. Last month, the Department of Commerce moved to block American companies like Google and Apple from hosting WeChat in their app stores, as well as bar companies from hosting its data or helping to deliver content to its users. But Judge Beeler blocked the ban last month, days before it was supposed to take effect, in response to a request from a group that says it represents WeChat users. Judge Beeler granted a preliminary injunction because there were "serious questions going to the merits" of their argument that the ban violated the First Amendment. A Department of Justice lawyer argued in the case that the rules were narrowly written to protect the rights of WeChat's users to share personal and business information. "We don't think that they've raised any basis for Judge Beeler's well reasoned opinion to be disturbed or stayed pending appeal," said Michael Bien, a lawyer for the WeChat users. He said the government had "once again" discounted First Amendment concerns about the ban. The government had previously asked the judge to put a stay on her preliminary injunction before it formally appealed the ruling. Beijing has for years blocked American websites and apps. But only in recent years has the American government acted against Chinese owned companies. It has pushed American companies to abandon Chinese telecom providers like Huawei and ZTE. More recently, it has targeted Chinese owned consumer apps like Grindr, TikTok and WeChat. In August, President Trump signed an executive order banning WeChat as of midnight on Sept. 13. The injunction temporarily delayed the ban. The app is widely used around the world, including by people in the United States who communicate regularly with friends and family in China. The Trump administration has also pursued a similar ban of TikTok, the viral video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The first part of the ban, which would block the app from online stores, was delayed to allow the company to try to strike a deal with Oracle and Walmart that gives more control over the app to shareholders in the United States. Last weekend, a judge issued an injunction temporarily blocking the TikTok ban.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The topics new parents are talking about. Evidence based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox every week. When Lindsay Abt was pregnant with her first child, she remembers reading a book for expectant mothers that cautioned against making too many big life changes at once. She went ahead and made three anyway. "I broke all of the rules," she said. Not only did she take on a job with greater responsibility she is a partner at the accounting firm Ernst Young she had to move her family to Florida from New York to do it. She moved in July 2014 while her husband stayed behind to sell their house. Her son was born that October. Throughout the transition, she had a dedicated coach, Delaine, provided by her employer, as part of a new program at the firm to help parents prepare for parental leave and ease the transition when they return. In one hour phone sessions each month, Delaine helped Ms. Abt think through what was important to her being home by bath time every evening? Working from home once a week? and how to set limits during a long workweek to make that happen. "You can have a grand plan, but it's something that needs to be figured out on a day to day basis because no two days are the same," Ms. Abt, 39, said. At a time when new parents may find themselves overwhelmed even sobbing late at night as they deal with their new at home responsibilities while trying to hold down a full time job a growing number of companies are making efforts to soften the blow. They are providing employees with coaching sessions, either in person, over the phone or through small group sessions that may be broadcast over the web. The services are often available to new fathers, too. But employers are not doing this entirely out of the goodness of their corporate hearts: They are hoping to retain more women by helping them through a stressful time, while eventually improving gender diversity among their senior employees. Other companies that are introducing more generous parental leave policies realize the benefits need to be managed more thoughtfully. Perhaps not surprisingly, the employers who started offering these benefits are organizations that often demand long hours from employees or are competing for talent: The big accounting firms, Ernst Young, KPMG and Grant Thornton, as well as MetLife, Deutsche Bank and Etsy all offer some level of coaching to workers, whether in person or online, regardless of gender. Proskauer Rose offers coaching to its female lawyers, KKR to its female investment professionals, while Kohl's is running a pilot for all of its workers at its corporate headquarters. BDO, another accounting firm, is introducing a coaching program conducted over the web next month. "There are more and more companies every month looking into this, but we are still probably one to three years away from getting to any critical mass," said Kyra Cavanaugh, president of Life Meets Work, a consulting firm that provides coaches and training to employers. Companies have strong financial incentives to make their coaching and transition programs work. Ernst Young, which expanded its policy this month to 16 weeks of paid leave for all new parents, said it typically costs the firm 1.5 times an employee's salary to replace them. "When we train supervisors about how to be supportive, we see bottom line effects for the company," said Leslie Hammer, an industrial organizational psychologist and professor at Oregon Health Science University. That might be from reduced turnover costs, less absenteeism and fewer health expenses as well as workplace safety issues, even among employees working in offices, she said. But another reason employers are introducing these programs, consultants say, is to illustrate that it's all right to take advantage of newly announced or existing leave programs. "What they are finding is they need to change the culture," said Karen Rubin, managing director of Talking Talent, a consultancy that provides coaching to organizations. "It is not enough to say employees have a year's maternity leave available, but demonstrate that it is safe to take it. This is where managers and senior leadership make the difference." For a parent coaching program to be successful, academics, psychologists and consultants say, it cannot be an isolated benefit involving just an employee and the coach, or simply a perk that companies offer for competitive reasons. Instead, it needs to be part of a broader change that involves and trains supervisors. Twitter which recently extended its leave policy for all parents to up to 20 weeks of full pay is offering formal coaching services to its managers. "At the end of the day, it's helping us reshape how we think about our business since we have an active population of parents going out," said Laura Brady, vice president of compensation and benefits at Twitter. "It's making us think about workplace planning and development opportunities for those who may want to cover for someone going out. So not only is this a parent and manager issue, but I think ultimately it extends to all employees." Every employer takes a slightly different approach to parental leave programs. Etsy recently expanded its leave policy to 26 weeks for all parents and formally introduced a coaching program in April. Employees at its Brooklyn headquarters can meet with a coach in person, typically several weeks before they go on leave and after they return. Managers are also provided with training, and workers in other locations can participate remotely. Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and O'Melveny Myers, a law firm, all offer support to some employees. Amy Beacom, founder and chief executive of the Center for Parental Leave Leadership, has developed a parental leave support program that uses technology to reach more employees and involve all affected parties: the employee, managers and any team members. "Using assessment tools as a guide, the work culminates in an action plan that is shared with all stakeholders before they go on leave," she said. For now, parent coaching has not been extended to the types of jobs held by low wage workers, who have less control over when and where they work and for whom these programs may have the biggest impact. And because these programs are still largely in their infancy, it is hard to determine what sort of long lasting effects they will have. But for now, some programs appear to provide the perception of support while reshaping the thinking of at least some members of an influential group: fathers. Jerry Whelan, a partner at Ernst Young, said his wife had twin boys in April. He said he spoke to the twins in utero each night, pleading with them to make their debut after his busy tax season. They complied, arriving 11 and 12 minutes after the tax day deadline. His wife had an emergency cesarean section and needed time to recuperate, meaning he was the primary caregiver for two weeks. Mr. Whelan started preparing with his coach in January. "By the time the twins arrived, we were ready to go," he said. "The ability for me to disconnect from work and focus exclusively to take care of the babies was a godsend." After being a career oriented workaholic for so long, Mr. Whelan said, he and his coach discussed questions such as what kind of father he wanted to be, as well as how to deal with delegating more to his colleagues, which he said made him a better manager. He said the sessions also helped him realize that he shouldn't call his time away vacation, but "parental leave," to send a message to both his team and his clients. "I thought it was important to do the coaching program, to take formal leave and get involved in the fathers' network and the women's network in a new way," Mr. Whelan said. He now plans to take another month of leave when his wife returns to work. "It really opened me up as well to talk about these things in an emotional way that people have been hesitant to in the past."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
were married Aug. 31 at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. Martin Gorrick, a friend of the groom who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated. The bride, 28, is the director of strategic projects for the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit organization working to restore a sustainable oyster population to New York Harbor. She graduated from Cornell, and is a candidate for a master's degree in food studies at N.Y.U. She is the daughter of Katherine Noto of New York and William B. Wachtel of Chappaqua, N.Y. The bride's father is a founder and senior partner in Wachtel Missry, a law firm in New York. The bride is the stepdaughter of Ann Zabar; her family runs the Zabar's deli in Manhattan. The groom, who is also 28 and works in New York, is a rights manager at the Universal Music Group, where he works in business and legal affairs. He graduated from Sydney University in Australia, and received a law degree from University of Technology Sydney.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
NBC's "Today" show started in 1952 as a bid to lure people away from early morning radio programs. The brainchild of its creator, Sylvester L. Weaver Jr., it was the first show of its type, pioneering a TV format that other networks came to embrace. And what started as a two hour program has grown to become a four hour live broadcast, an institution that draws millions of viewers each morning as it weaves together news, weather and entertainment. It has been the home for several hosts who became household names, from Barbara Walters to Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker. Mr. Lauer was fired on Wednesday after an allegation of sexual misconduct. "Today" spent decades filming out of NBC's headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where for a time it was neighbors with "Saturday Night Live," before moving to its current location nearby. Fans can peek into the studio through its street facing windows, and are often shown in the background of broadcasts. In warmer weather, musical guests often perform on the plaza outside the studio. The show became known for celebrity interviews and gimmicky stunts sprinkled in between newscasts. For several years in the 1950s, "Today" gave a starring role to J. Fred Muggs a chimpanzee co anchor credited with boosting the show's popularity among families. Some hosts, however, who exemplified a goofy geniality on air engaged in bitter personality clashes and turf wars backstage. In 1989, Mr. Gumbel wrote a confidential memo complaining that the show's weather presenter, Willard Scott, was holding "the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste." After the memo leaked, the two men performed a staged reconciliation on air, with Mr. Scott planting a kiss on Mr. Gumbel's cheek. "Today" dominated the morning TV ratings from the end of 1995 to 2012, when it started losing out to its ABC rival, "Good Morning America." As ratings sagged in 2012, Ann Curry was ousted as an anchor because she and her co host Matt Lauer were deemed to lack chemistry. But her removal was deeply damaging for the show. After Ms. Curry said her teary goodbye, the show lost advertising revenue and viewers. Ms. Curry had felt that the atmosphere behind the scenes at the show had undermined her and she told friends that her final months were a form of professional torture. Mr. Lauer's indifference to her situation also hurt, she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Credit... Could This Be the Last Time We See Our Dad? New York City's streets and restaurants were still packed in early March, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio argued over methodology, logistics and the economic repercussions of whether to shut the city down to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The government dismissed the benefits of wearing masks. But my sisters, Tamar, Talia and Elana, and I knew that our father, Barry Haviv, an 82 year old stroke survivor who lived in Midtown, needed protection. We got him N95 masks and begged him not to leave his apartment. Our father first came down with a cough and a fever, and then, on April 8, he was taken to the hospital after collapsing. The city's health care system was already overwhelmed, so he was sent back home. The next day, he received a diagnosis of Covid 19. Ten days after our father became ill, he was admitted to Mount Sinai West in Manhattan, a short walk from where two of my siblings and I live. And yet, he may as well have been in another state. Suddenly we had become one of the many families for whom Zoom and caring strangers became a link for loved ones. It was surreal to communicate with him in this way. It was hard to hear him over the roar of air purifiers and oxygen machines, and it was nearly impossible to make out what his doctors were saying through their double masks and face shields. We strove to set up routines and waited for his body to heal. Amazed when he seemed closer to himself and crushed when he wasn't. Because our father lapsed into a contentious state that affected his care, the hospital agreed to allow one family member to visit in person. My sister Talia, who had recovered from Covid 19, stayed with him. The hospital provided a mounted iPad linked to Zoom, which enabled us to spend hours together every day, Talia in person and the rest of us in a digital cocoon. When we'd end our daily video call, we wondered if it would be the last time we would see our father. Each day that Talia was able to return in person was another day we felt we had more of an understanding of this disease and control over what was happening. But was what we saw onscreen real life? One day we were told that our father was dying, which came as a shock. From where I was standing, things did not appear so dire. After all, he responded to our voices and reacted when we played songs from his favorite operas and Broadway musicals. Our father hated hospitals. Months after he suffered a stroke four years ago, he flew overseas on his own to visit friends. He had defied medical predictions in the past, and we were reluctant to accept this latest one. The next day another doctor told us that he was going to make it. But each day would bring a new health issue. Did we want to intubate if needed? Resuscitate? Some decisions he had already made in his living will; others were left to us to figure out. The pressure was immense. We had another conversation about taking him home to die. Then within hours, we were told he was accepted into a plasma trial. Again we went from discussing taking him home to die to trying something new. In the end, after our father was hospitalized for five weeks and even tested negative for the coronavirus, a doctor told us there was nothing left that the staff could do for him, and asked, did we want to take him home? We listened to the digital transmission, unable to fully accept what was being said. I couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if he had been given plasma a week earlier. We still held out hope that once home, away from the noise and medical interruptions, he could improve. I can't imagine how our family would have coped if my sister hadn't been allowed to visit. What the hospital did for us, which would have been normal at other times, was extraordinary during this time. For our father to have had the chance to have his daughter nearby, and his children to have had more time with him, albeit through a screen, is irreplaceable. With infections spiking across the country, I hope that other families will be allowed the same experience for themselves and their loved ones.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
SCOTT BASE, Antarctica A group of hikers in red parkas approached a half dozen seals resting on floating sea ice. The leader of the entourage Secretary of State John Kerry raised his arms and ordered everyone to halt. As an ethereal silence descended, Mr. Kerry cocked his head in the stillness of one of the world's last truly wild places. In that moment, the frozen landscape seemed timeless, but it is actually in grave peril, as Mr. Kerry had been told by scientists only minutes before. The ice across large parts of West Antarctica may be starting to disintegrate because of global warming, and if it goes, the world's coastal cities face destruction, too. The presence of Mr. Kerry, the highest ranking United States government official ever to visit Antarctica, lifted the morale of scientists working to understand the icebound continent. Yet the visit, at the end of last week, was shadowed by anxiety. Mr. Kerry and the aides traveling with him to Antarctica, many of them young liberal Democrats, were not expecting Mr. Trump to win. The trip began a day before the election, and Mr. Kerry had confidently predicted a Hillary Clinton victory. He was flying over the South Pacific toward New Zealand the next day when the results began to come in. His aides rushed around the plane, shocked at some of the states Mrs. Clinton was losing. The results were not definitive until he was in his hotel room that night in Christchurch. In an interview the next evening, and in a series of chats on the trip, Mr. Kerry trod carefully, declining to offer any direct criticism of Mr. Trump. He and his aides plan to welcome the Trump appointees who will soon run the State Department, hoping to build relationships with them and, possibly, persuade them to keep some of Mr. Kerry's diplomatic deals. But Mr. Kerry also made clear that when he leaves office Jan. 20, he will rejoin the political struggle over climate change, speaking publicly on the issue and perhaps campaigning against members of Congress who dispute the validity of climate science. "I'm ready to continue to fight," Mr. Kerry said. "We've made too much progress." On Wednesday, in Marrakesh, Morocco, Mr. Kerry is expected to urge delegates at a United Nations climate conference to redouble their efforts to limit emissions. But the world's climate diplomats are intensely worried that under Mr. Trump, the United States will renege on its commitments, potentially leading to a collapse of the global political will to tackle the problem. Mr. Kerry can make no promises that will bind the Trump administration. After a campaign in which Mr. Trump made little more than broad brush pronouncements on climate and energy, the details of the president elect's policies remain largely unknown. But he has described climate science as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to undermine the American economy, and his electoral coalition includes climate change denialists who are likely to press him to abandon American commitments on the issue. Myron Ebell, a libertarian who is Mr. Trump's choice to lead the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency which the president elect has vowed to dismantle has long dismissed concerns about global warming and has called prominent climate scientists "alarmists." Mr. Ebell has said that the E.P.A.'s Clean Power Plan, one of the Obama administration's signature climate efforts, is illegal. Mr. Kerry's tenure as secretary of state has been the capstone of a career working on environmental protection. In 1970, as a veteran just back from the Vietnam War, he helped organize Massachusetts events for the first Earth Day, a mobilization that sent 20 million people into the streets across the country. In decades as a senator from Massachusetts, he urged the United States government to tackle global warming, but won only a handful of legislative goals, including tougher efficiency standards for cars. His State Department tenure, by contrast, has featured diplomatic achievements including a deal in Paris last year to limit emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction, and separate pacts to reduce certain other greenhouse gases, limit emissions from airplanes and protect enormous swaths of the ocean. "If global climate change keeps moving at the pace it is, there are going to be climate refugees, there are going to be climate conflicts, there are going to be food conflicts," Mr. Kerry said. In his years as secretary of state, Mr. Kerry turned up at obscure negotiating sessions where he was by far the most senior diplomat in the room. He cajoled the leaders of Russia, China, India and other countries. He won cooperation from China, helping to spur the Paris deal. The meeting in Marrakesh is supposed to be a major step toward putting it into practice. As he approached Antarctica on Friday, Mr. Kerry, an experienced pilot, rode in the cockpit of the C 17 Globemaster cargo plane transporting his entourage, one of the regular flights from New Zealand to Antarctica run by the United States Air Force. In the cockpit, he recounted lobbying President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to help win protection, just weeks ago, for 600,000 square miles of the Ross Sea, off the Antarctic coast. As the plane steered toward the American logistics base at McMurdo Station, Mr. Kerry looked down at the stretch of ocean he had helped to preserve. Over two days, he hiked for hours, listening to scientists explain evidence that the Antarctic landscape is undergoing profound change. He lingered to discuss a project led by John Stone of the University of Washington, who was at McMurdo Station preparing for a journey to haul drilling apparatus into the frozen wilderness. "What's been observed in the West Antarctic ice sheet that's so alarming now?" Mr. Kerry asked. Dr. Stone showed him maps of glaciers that are being weakened by warmer ocean water, possibly indicating an incipient destabilization of the ice sheet, which scientists believe is vulnerable to collapse in a slightly warmer climate. Dr. Stone plans to drill through the ice into rock to establish the last time much of West Antarctica melted, a potential clue to the amount of global warming it will take to cause another collapse, which could raise the global sea level by 10 or 15 feet. "We know that sea level has been higher in the past," Dr. Stone said as they gazed at the maps. "But sea level doesn't tell you where the ice sheets were melting and what melted, and it doesn't so easily tell you how fast it all happened." Mr. Kerry was also fascinated by Antarctic wildlife. On his first day, flying by helicopter to see the spectacular geology of an ice free region called the McMurdo Dry Valleys, his group was accosted by a lone Adelie penguin. The secretary of state whipped out his phone and filmed the creature. "Come on, walk up here, buddy!" Mr. Kerry said. The penguin hesitated, then did exactly that. Lumbering Weddell seals lolling about on the sea ice near Scott Base, the New Zealand government's research facility showed less interest. They barely lifted their heads to sniff the air as Mr. Kerry's group approached. Flying back to New Zealand, Mr. Kerry seemed invigorated. The task now for people worried about climate change is to create a widespread movement that politicians cannot ignore, he said. While the first Earth Day is remembered for those millions of marchers, he noted that many legislative victories did not come until the newly energized environmental movement targeted recalcitrant senators for defeat in the 1972 election. "It was the losing of seats that moved people," Mr. Kerry said. "You have to translate it into political fear."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries Before the first Dutch colonists sailed through the Narrows into New York Harbor, Manhattan was still what the Lenape, who had already lived here for centuries, called Mannahatta. Times Square was a forest with a beaver pond. The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, at Foley Square, was the site of an ancient mound of oyster middens. Eric W. Sanderson is a senior conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo. In 2009 he published "Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City." The book geolocated old maps onto the modern city to reimagine a cornucopia of hills, beaches, fields and ponds. This is the latest in a series of (edited, condensed) virtual walks with architects and others. I spoke with Mr. Sanderson by phone. Our "stroll" explored Lower Manhattan. We "met" where the Staten Island Ferry docks at Whitehall Terminal. Except that we imagined it was the September afternoon in 1609 when Henry Hudson arrived, and we were standing near the shore, gazing at the water. Ecosystems, actually. Manhattan is something like one percent the size of Yellowstone. Yellowstone is 2.2 million acres and it has 66 ecosystems. Mannahatta had 55. It's an interesting thought exercise to imagine what might have happened had the United States been colonized from the West, instead of from the East. We might have decided to make Manhattan a national park. We would be coming to New York for an entirely different sort of wildlife. The Dutch and English, of course, saw the island as a commercial paradise. It had vast forests of timber. There were otter, beavers, mink, oysters, brook trout, bears. We have historical records of a black bear being shot in the vicinity of Maiden Lane during the 1630s. We know wolves lived on Manhattan until the 1720s. Over time Avalonia slammed into the craton, geologically speaking. The east side of the East River is pretty much the edge of the old continent. Most of Queens and Brooklyn are what used to be Avalonia. Translation for older New Yorkers: Katz's deli on Houston Street was the craton, Junior's on Flatbush Avenue was Avalonia. More or less. Then there's an extensive glacial history at least seven glaciation events over the last 620,000 years. The glacial event that matters most peaked about 21,000 years ago. It was called the Wisconsin glaciation. The glacier stopped in Brooklyn and Queens, giving us what are now Brooklyn Heights and the hills of Bay Ridge, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights. If the Wisconsin glaciation buried Manhattan, how much ice would we have been standing under here? How tall are these skyscrapers? Well, One State Street Plaza, facing the ferry terminal, is 42 stories, about 450 feet high. The ice was more than three times that thick. And that's when we got the harbor and the topography we now know? There were lots of steps in between. But by about 5,000 years ago, we had the oak and hickory forests that Henry Hudson would have seen when he arrived. He would have seen another island, too, Kioshk, as the Lenape called it we call it Ellis Island, which was called Gibbet Island during the 1700s because the English hanged pirates and criminals there. It became known as one of the oyster islands because geological events had turned the harbor into an ideal home for oysters and a superhighway for the sort of fish that swim from saltwater upstream to breed in freshwater, like shad or sturgeon. We know from historical records that people caught hundreds and hundreds of fish in a few hours just casting their nets off Ellis Island during the 18th and 19th centuries before the harbor became polluted and dams were built that closed off streams upriver where the fish had gone to breed. You mean, until we screwed everything up. No. No. Well, yes. The point of the last 22 years of my life is not to make people feel bad or to say that we should just wipe out the city and restore it all back to forest. I love New York. Every species has its way of being. Our human way of being is that we talk to each other, we can share ideas about the past, so that, together, we can plan a future that includes nature. You're not from New York. No, I grew up in the Bay Area. A biology teacher in high school led trips along the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada, from Yosemite to Mount Whitney 211 miles, 22 days. When I came to New York City, I was reminded of what I loved about the trail all these layers of complexity, these tall peaks and deep valleys, abundant life in a dramatic landscape. Just a different kind of life. Which is sort of what we're doing. By the way, where we are standing, was this the shoreline in 1609 or is it landfill? None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. We're around the rocky edge of the shore. What's now Pearl Street marks the approximate shoreline on the East River side. The Dutch and the English wanted to expand the island into the rivers, not move uptown, so they sold water lots to people who were then under contract to fill the lots in. They would knock down hills and use that soil or take garbage from the dump. What's now the land between Water Street and the F.D.R. Drive is all landfill, like much of the west side, which in 1609 was a white sand beach all the way up to 42nd Street. If we were to head uptown, Broad Street takes us to the steps of Federal Hall, across from what's now the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Broad Street used to be a valley with a salt marsh. Wall Street marks the edge of the forest. It's called Wall Street because the Dutch built a defensive wall out of wood. The forest was hickory, chestnut, oak, sycamore. Sycamores are also called buttonwoods because they're good for making buttons. The Buttonwood Agreement, which legalized the trading of securities, was supposedly signed under a sycamore outside what's now the Stock Exchange. In your book it's clear that the history of Manhattan is in many ways the story of the Collect Pond. Where was it? Well, where the Javits building is today was roughly the west edge of the pond that was a hill named Kalck Hoek by the Dutch, because of the mounds of oyster shells the Lenape had left on it. Kalck means "chalk or lime," from the shells. To the north of the Collect Pond, Bayard's Mount was the tallest hill around, from the top of which you could see to the Verrazzano Narrows. Imagine the Collect Pond sitting within this amphitheater of hills, protected from the winter winds. The water was fresh, very deep maybe 80 feet deep fed by springs. An outlet stream flowed north from the pond to the Hudson River, along what's now Canal Street. Another stream, Wolfert's Brook, flowed southeast to the East River, along Pearl Street, past 1 Police Plaza. Continuing the old school restaurant theme: south of Chinatown's Nom Wah Tea Parlor and the Great NY Noodletown. The city poisoned its own water supply. It's an interesting parable about unintended consequences. When the pond became a cesspool, the city decided to fill it in by leveling Kalck Hoek and Bayard's Mount. But the landfill was so badly done that the buildings they built on it sank into the mire. That's when the neighborhood became notorious as Five Points, which Charles Dickens described as the worst slum he had ever seen. And he knew his slums. The city finally cleared the area and created the neighborhood we more or less now know, with the courthouses and municipal buildings. For want of a nail, in other words? The ripple effects were even more dramatic. Because the city polluted its own water supply, Lower Manhattan needed to find another water source, which led Aaron Burr to form the Manhattan Company. The company charter included a provision that allowed Burr to use most of the assets for something besides water. So he formed a bank, which today is JPMorgan Chase. Which was Burr's real ambition. He, I think, argued for the water company after the city suffered an outbreak of yellow fever. Then the company built a system so poor it provoked a series of cholera epidemics. Which in turn led to the construction of the Croton Aqueduct, a remarkable engineering feat to bring water by gravity 41 miles south to reservoirs in the city, which in turn had its own ripple effects on the rest of the island. Why do we have the flat Great Lawn in Central Park? Because that was originally the site of a receiving reservoir called Lake Manahatta. Why is the Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue? Because it replaced another massive reservoir on Murray Hill. Edgar Allan Poe described the views from the top of the 42nd Street reservoir, where he said he could see "the whole city to the Battery, and a large portion of the harbor." Then, of course, we got the library building by Carrere Hastings.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
No one likes a rodent's nest, and for good reason. Beyond sheltering mice, rats and other creatures we aren't fond of, they kindle car fires, harbor bloodsucking bugs and infest the walls, ceilings and attics of homeowners. But for paleoecologists studying the prehistoric natural world, ancient, urine soaked rat nests can be a treasure trove, not unlike owl pellets dissections that you might have done during a school trip to a natural history museum. Since the 1960s, scientists have examined thousands of fossil rat nests, or middens, to learn about regional changes in climate and ecosystems over time. Today, with advanced molecular technology, scientists can even tease apart the owners of millenniums old DNA preserved in those middens. Until now, they've targeted small genetic fragments from specific organisms such as plants or viruses. But in a study published Tuesday in Ecology and Evolution, paleoecologists show that an expansive approach can be used to sequence all kinds of DNA found in a single midden the scientific equivalent of moving from spear fishing to casting a broad net. "It's just wild that it works," said Michael Tessler, an evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History and one of the study's authors. "There's a very rich picture that takes a lot of work to paint but is now paintable."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Baseball cards on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unlike art restoration, changes to items in the collectibles market hurt their value. A scandal in the world of baseball card collecting threatens to undermine the value of a long established card grading system, has put into question the legitimacy of a prominent marketplace and has raised concerns that some collectors overpaid for expensive cards. Millions of dollars' worth of cards are at stake as collectors question purchases and wonder whom they can trust. The controversy centers on the authenticity of sports cards. To verify their condition, cards are sent to a grading company, which scores them on a scale of 1 to 10. Grading sets the value of the cards and is considered a prerequisite for selling them on an auction platform like eBay. Cards in pristine condition are highly valued by collectors and can fetch thousands of dollars more than similar cards with scuffs or worn edges. Sellers can improve the appearance of a card by trimming its edges or removing residue, but collectors believe any alterations make a card less authentic, and cards that are known to have been doctored are often worth considerably less. And card alteration can lead to federal fraud charges, which happened in 2013 when a seller admitted to trimming a Honus Wagner card, one of the most valuable baseball cards in the world. "Originality is the bedrock of the hobby, and it all flows from there," said Peter Spaeth, a lawyer in Boston who is an avid collector of cards. "Most people place a premium on originality and don't want altered cards." Mr. Spaeth and other collectors are claiming that altered cards are on the rise in the marketplace, and they have accused one auction service of supporting fraudulent sellers. Beyond accusations that cards are being touched up, complaints are surfacing that prices have surged because of market manipulation, said Darius Houseal, who works in finance in New York and spends six figures annually on collecting cards. He blamed "shill bidding" for creating volatility in a marketplace that had been stable for decades. Allegations of fraud in baseball cards or any collectible markets are not rare. Unlike the fine art market, where one of a kind works come with a record of their provenance, the collectibles market relies on the veracity of sellers, who have expertise but also benefit directly from the sale. Jonathan Steinsapir, a partner at the law firm Kinsella Weitzman, pointed to scandals that involved the sale of wine that belonged to Thomas Jefferson and the first comic book to feature Superman. In both examples, the products were fakes. The seller in each case had more information than the buyer, Mr. Steinsapir said. "There are incidences of fraud in fine art, but you can find several experts in every city," he said. "Where there is less experience, less knowledge, the incidence of fraud is going to go up." The baseball card scandal started with some internet sleuthing. Collectors believed that a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card had been altered and wanted it removed from sale. The seller, PWCC, a service run by Brent Huigens, said the card had gone through a conservation process, which he said was different from an alteration. Purists were outraged, and a group of tech savvy collectors searched for other times when cards were manipulated. They began to suspect that PWCC was allowing corrupt sellers on its platform. For these collectors, originality matters. Baseball cards, comic books, coins, stamps, even bottles of wine are initially produced in large numbers, so their condition is going to vary over the years. Originality is more significant in collectibles than in fine art, where a restoration of a work is understood. Yet most of these disputes were confined to message boards, which are not often populated by the richest collectors. Mr. Huigens, who positioned himself as an honest broker, has cultivated a following beyond hobbyists. Last Friday, he convened a private meeting of collectors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss the museum's collection of baseball cards. He was joined by Allison Rudnick, the museum's assistant curator in the department of drawings and prints. Ken Kendrick, an owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who has a collection that includes the 25 rarest baseball cards in the best condition, said he knew Mr. Huigens and had recently introduced him to officials at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., which has a display of baseball cards. "I'm just disappointed to learn that he's been involved with things that have been alleged to be improper," Mr. Kendrick said. "In my experience, I've found him to be a bright, capable guy, particularly compared to some of his peers in the baseball card world." Mr. Huigens declined repeated requests for comment. His public relations representative said the company was involved in an investigation, but declined to provide details or the name of Mr. Huigens's lawyer. PWCC said in a statement posted online that it was working to identify all cards that had been altered. It also barred a longtime baseball card dealer, Gary Moser, 55, who had been accused of trimming the rough edges on cards, removing stains and altering colors, all to attain slightly higher grades and garner considerably more money. Mr. Moser, who lives on Long Island, said he had nothing to hide. In an interview, he denied that he had trimmed or altered cards. He said he had always tried to buy cards for less than they were worth and sell them for a higher price. He added that he looked for mistakes in the grading process. If a card had what he believed was a low grade, he would ask for a re evaluation, which often produced a higher grade. "It's all what the public believes," he said. He faulted grading companies like Professional Sports Authenticator, which is part of Collectors Universe, a publicly traded company in Santa Ana, Calif., that offers authentication services for sports memorabilia and trading cards. P.S.A. charges up to 5,000 to grade a card. Mr. Moser said that its graders were not as knowledgeable as they purported to be and that they were overwhelmed by the volume of submissions and rushed the process. The grade you get, he said, depends as much on the grader as on the card. Fraud in collectibles markets is rife but difficult to prove, said Carter Reich, a lawyer who specializes in art fraud cases. He, too, blamed grading companies for not following a universal standard. "It's their own standard," he said, "and some other grading company has a different one." Joe Orlando, chief executive of Collectors Universe, referred a request for an interview to his assistant, who provided a statement from P.S.A. that said that it had been fighting consumer fraud for 30 years and that each year it rejected thousands of cards out of the two million it graded. "Our job is to be skeptical," Mr. Orlando said in an interview with me last year. But that does not mean the company always gets it right. The first card that P.S.A. ever graded was a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner. It awarded a near perfect grade of 8 in 1991. Mr. Kendrick paid 2.8 million for the card in a private sale in 2007. Despite being the first and highest graded Wagner card, it was dogged by suspicion that its edges had been trimmed. In 2013, Bill Mastro, who in the 1980s was the king of card sales, admitted to trimming the corners of the card, pleaded guilty to fraud charges and was sentenced to federal prison. "It was upsetting," Mr. Kendrick said of learning that the card had been altered. "I heard the rumors back in 2007 when I acquired the card, but they weren't confirmable. I wanted to have the card, and I still want to have it." But the controversy only increased the value of the card. Shortly after the news broke, Mr. Kendrick said, he received an offer to buy it for four times what he had paid. More recently, an insurance appraisal valued the card at more than 10 million.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Who is Ivo van Hove and why are theatergoers saying such (thrilling) (furious) (mystified) things about him? How did the unassuming Belgian director, who since 2001 has made the theater company Toneelgroep Amsterdam his base of operations, turn into the most important auteur on the international stage circuit and now a three time Broadway director? With Mr. van Hove's divisive production of "Network" earning more than 1 million a week on Broadway having Bryan Cranston as your star doesn't hurt The New York Times gathered three writers who have followed his path for nearly two decades. In this edited conversation, Ben Brantley, co chief theater critic for The Times, and the critics Elisabeth Vincentelli and Jason Zinoman aim to make sense of Mr. van Hove's ascent, from Off Broadway to a Tony Award, David Bowie to "All About Eve." With a Broadway revival of "West Side Story" looming on the 60 year old director's docket, the theater editor, Scott Heller, kept them from rumbling. Read about seven other adventurous directors. SCOTT HELLER How rare it is to be meeting for a three way debate about ... a theater director? JASON ZINOMAN A pleasure, really. And a testament to the success of Ivo van Hove. BEN BRANTLEY And who would have thought, when he first started his explosive demolitions of hallowed classics at New York Theater Workshop in the late 1990s, that he would become a mainstream force. ZINOMAN I was trying to think (and maybe you can help me) of another artist who has transitioned from experimental theater to the red hot center of Broadway with as much success. Richard Foreman was on Broadway, I believe, twice. Peter Brook has a longer resume but hasn't been on Broadway since 1984. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI The only artists with this kind of crossover success are musicians or visual artists. Someone like Philip Glass, for instance. But American theater is different: the entry gate to the mainstream is guarded ferociously. BRANTLEY And when you think of how many American avant gardists (Peter Sellars, Robert Wilson) have had to go to Europe to experience popular acclaim, it's all the more astonishing. His 2015 "View From the Bridge," which turned Arthur Miller's kitchen sink drama into majestic tragedy, was the turning point, I suppose. VINCENTELLI I've seen almost all his New York shows since "A Streetcar Named Desire" in 1999, and I don't feel his aesthetic has changed much, if at all. What has changed is the American audience's willingness to enter his world. He's a brilliant director of visuals, which puts him in sync with our incredibly visual culture. BRANTLEY Agreed, Elisabeth. And the fact that he introduced video cameras into his mise en scene so early as a means of seeing, literally, different faces (and facets) of his characters certainly jibes with a screen dominated moment in culture. ZINOMAN He creates a kind of chaos onstage, with all the points of view. You often never know where to look. VINCENTELLI Plenty of Broadway shows are actually very high tech, but their use of technology tends to be kept behind the scenes. Van Hove brings the artifice to the forefront. BRANTLEY And he does that with acting itself, making us aware of the various tricks and tropes performers use and how they manipulate that ultimate tool of acting, the human body. HELLER You've all written about video as a stage tool going back decades the Wooster Group and beyond. The same with stylized acting styles. What happens when van Hove applies these techniques to familiar texts Shakespeare? A novel like "The Fountainhead"? And movies so many, many movies, re enacted onstage? BRANTLEY I'm glad you mentioned the Wooster Group, because they really pioneered the multicamera, multi mic art of disorientation. Van Hove uses these things specifically to illuminate the text, I think, sometimes in rather literal minded ways. But he also in two of his epic examinations of corrupting tyranny, "Kings of War" and "The Damned" allows us to see behind the scenes of the corridors of power, so we're always aware of several levels of action happening at once. ZINOMAN I no longer think van Hove adjusts his techniques to fit or illuminate the text so much as he shoehorns the material into his particular aesthetic. He's become a rigid if often stunning stylist, whose longtime collaboration with the designer Jan Versweyveld is his most important partnership. One hallmark is shooting a scene on the street that is then projected in the theater. It invariably get a laugh when the audience sees New York pedestrians acting baffled by actors performing near hot dog carts. It's the kind of cheap laugh David Letterman would get when he took cameras on the street. But the backdrop is Nazi Germany in "The Damned" and a media hellscape in "Network." His use of media here is jarringly at odds with the content in a way I am not sure he is in control of. BRANTLEY I do think one of his concerns is to erase borders and tear down walls, not just to rattle us with avant garde self consciousness, but to suggest our own kinship with the people onstage. He did this more effectively in "The Damned," I thought, by beginning with the cast in civvies and letting the characters' preparation for the big party that begins the show become our entry point into the story. ZINOMAN While I think of him as more interested in form than content, he seems right now very focused on politics. VINCENTELLI The "one size fits all" accusation isn't entirely off base. (It reminds me of accusations lobbed at Robert Wilson, also not off base.) What concerns me a bit is the reliance on multimedia these days, which wasn't always the case in van Hove's earlier shows. I wonder if it has something to do with an overuse of films as source material. I wish he'd go back to the classics! BRANTLEY But he's less a one trick pony than his reputation would have it. Remember his viscerally immediate, relatively technology free adaptation of Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage" a few years ago? He cast three different sets of performers as the same couple at different ages, and it universalized our (or at least my) identification with them. I think, oddly enough for a modernist, he's a universalist. VINCENTELLI Toneelgroep's Hans Kesting, strikingly physical as Richard III ("Kings of War") and Mark Antony ("Roman Tragedies"). BRANTLEY How about Saoirse Ronan's malevolent serving girl in "The Crucible"? Or Elizabeth Marvel's flayed, viscera exposing performances in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "The Little Foxes"? ZINOMAN I'm not much of a believer that van Hove is great for actors. But Ben reminds me of another admirable trait: his gutsy conceptual flourishes. In "The Crucible" he dared to suggest that the witches might in fact be real. I had never seen this before. I didn't find the execution of this idea to have enough conviction to completely work, but respect the attempt. VINCENTELLI It's hard to overestimate the impact his European upbringing has on his work on American and British classics, like "The Crucible." He doesn't come to them with the same baggage. This does not always entirely pan out, but when it does, the results are illuminating "View From the Bridge" is a perfect example. HELLER Let's circle back to Jason's points about van Hove's politics. "Network" ends with a controversial flourish, in which we watch footage of presidents being inaugurated since the 1970s, culminating with Trump. The audience howls. Is this merely playing to the crowd? BRANTLEY Absolutely. It's pandering and unnecessary. Many of my problems with "Network" have to do with the source material. What wowed me about the production, though, was Bryan Cranston's stunning performance as a man made by media and the way that guy interacted with the onstage cameras, and his own reflected images! VINCENTELLI I agree with Ben, that was a cheap shot. HELLER So capture for me how or when van Hove makes richer, more bracing political arguments. ZINOMAN He doesn't. "Network" is not an anomaly. The only person who hammers television as much and broadly as the artists behind "Network" is Trump himself. In other hands, some of this would be played as satire, as in the original movie. But van Hove, as far as I can tell, is incapable of a sense of humor. His one mode is epic, grim, relentless tragedy. BRANTLEY He is a tragedian, first and foremost, though I think we can make room for tragedians in a time when they're a rare breed among directors. No, he lacks a sense of satire and even of irony, except in a cosmic sense. What I think fascinates him and what often works for me, is the idea of monolithic personalities, damned to suffocate under their own passions (or egos). That was true of Mark Strong's amazing Eddie Carbone in "View From the Bridge" and the monarchs from "Kings of War." VINCENTELLI I don't think of him as a political director at all. Sometimes I feel he stumbles into it, but that's not his primary or even secondary mode. What he does best is excavate new readings from plays you thought you knew subtext from text. For instance, he had Bruce McKenzie play Stanley in "Streetcar," an actor who's not the beefy, hypermasculine guy people commonly associate with that character. That was revelatory to me the shapes masculinity can take. BRANTLEY For me, one of his most remarkable gifts is his ability to sustain a feeling of suspense (that Gotterdammerung doom) even though you know where you're headed. And it works with dark, monumental classics like "View" and "The Crucible." Curiously, his one attempt at Greek tragedy that I've seen, an "Antigone" starring Juliette Binoche, was utterly uninvolving. VINCENTELLI I'm fine with him always working in the same register. Are we complaining that Jerry Zaks always does comedy? He's brilliant at it. As for gimmickiness that criticism isn't aimed at, say, Richard Nelson, whose Apple Family plays are just as gimmicky. But because they are in a familiar naturalistic mode, nobody notices or cares. What van Hove is doing is loosening up, if only a bit, the naturalistic grip on mainstream American stages. That's a big deal in our world. ZINOMAN Now that he's getting to work on the most prominent stages of the commercial theater, I do think his range matters. We agree "View From the Bridge" was wonderful. But is he the right director for "West Side Story"? This question is no longer academic. HELLER Part of what has gotten him these opportunities is the embrace of critics like the three of you. He has become a name, a brand of sorts, that theater fans follow. Or not. As one commenter to a Times review wrote: "Ivan Van Hooey. Enough. Please. Make him go away." VINCENTELLI When you go to "The Damned" and you hear people having animated discussions pro and con on the street afterward, there's something happening that I think is very exciting. People arguing over directorial choices! That is just incredible to me. I'll forgive "Lazarus," the Bowie show, just for that. ZINOMAN I agree with Elisabeth that inspiring heated argument about theater directing is wonderful. But I also think we have a bias for ambition that can make us go easy on van Hove. For instance, let's take the most provocative decision I have seen him make, the molestation scene in "The Damned." That was a very young actor, and he lingered in that scene in a way that was meant to make us uncomfortable. To be fair to him, the scene was in the film. But theater is a different medium. And when I watched it live, I didn't think about the decadence of Nazi Germany or the corruption of that family or any contemporary parallels. The only thing on my mind was that actor: How did they explain this scene to her? Van Hove had already shown us executions, orgies, adult bodies smeared in blood and feathers. Did we need this too? Was it worth it? BRANTLEY All of your concerns were certainly on my mind when I watched. I think it would require more space than we have to justify that particular choice. But you're right, it jerked us out of the moment. I, too, found myself wondering how the young actress had been prepared for that moment. HELLER Is sex in van Hove world simply part and parcel of the grimness that Jason talked about? VINCENTELLI I've seen women take issue on social media with the way his productions can be physically taxing for actors. But from everything I've read, actors love working with him and the process is thorough and methodical. As for what's onstage, I don't find his depiction of sexuality grim. It can be brutal, manipulative, yes, but it's also matter of fact in the way it looks at power relationships and how they are expressed through sex. BRANTLEY I'm also often aware of the loneliness of the characters in his productions, even when they're locked in carnal embrace. That was part of what was so beautiful to me about his interpretation of "Angels in America" the hopeful futility of reaching out and touching someone. And I think he just might do well by Eve in the upcoming "All About Eve," given his stage version of John Cassavetes's "Opening Night." HELLER The productions do keep coming. Beyond his own work, I wonder: Has he influenced other directors, or what we're all seeing onstage? VINCENTELLI What he does can be expensive, and American directors with ambitions and ideas are usually short of cash. There is not the same institutional support system as in Europe or Britain. BRANTLEY But I do think he's opened doors for directors who take less traditionally naturalistic approaches to theater. After all, the Daniel Fish "Oklahoma!" is Broadway bound. And perhaps there's a touch of van Hove in its use of merciless simulcast video and the witty contradiction between text and action. ZINOMAN Success doesn't just lead to imitation. It expands the realm of the possible for producers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
TOKYO The Bank of Japan held its policy steady on Tuesday, brushing off recent market volatility and standing by an ambitious target to stoke 2 percent inflation in two years, despite skepticism from within its own ranks over how quickly it can lift Japan's economy out of its long deflationary slump. Stock market reaction was swift and negative. In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 stock index fell almost 200 points, or 1.5 percent, marking another day of turbulent trade. European stocks picked up the pace, with the Euro Stoxx 50 down 2.1 percent in afternoon trading. Wall Street stock indexes opened with a loss of about 1 percent. David Hussey, head of European equities at Manulife Asset Management in London, said the equities drop was the result of concern about the potential end of economic stimulus in general. "People are worried that the Fed would taper off quantitative easing," Mr. Hussey said about the United States Federal Reserve board. "It could go wrong if they do it too early, but I think at some point that stimulus will have to come off as the economy is starting its healing process. and that ought to be a good thing." In a unanimous vote at the end of a two day policy meeting, the Bank of Japan's board decided to stay pat on a policy to grow its base money, or the cash and deposits the bank holds, by between 60 trillion yen and 70 trillion yen a year ( 600 billion to 700 billion a year), which in turn increases the funds that flow through the Japanese economy and encourages companies to borrow and invest. The bank also raised its assessment of the Japanese economy, saying Japan's economy was "picking up," a slight improvement over its appraisal last month that the economy was "starting to pick up." The brighter outlook came after revised government data showed Japan's economy grew at a rate of 1.0 percent between January and March, faster than a preliminary estimate of 0.9 percent, due to stronger corporate capital and household spending "Japan's economy is expected to return to a moderate recovery path" thanks to resilient domestic demand and the effects of its aggressive monetary easing program, the bank said in a statement. Since April, the Bank of Japan has embarked on monetary stimulus of an unprecedented scale in a bid to jolt the Japanese economy out of 15 years of deflation, part of a wider economic growth push introduced by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Under Haruhiko Kuroda, its new governor, the central bank pledged to double Japan's money supply in two years through aggressive purchases of government bonds and other assets. It also committed to a target to hit 2 percent inflation over the next two years, a goal that some economists say is overly ambitious in a country that has seen prices fall for 15 years. In a sign of faltering confidence, one board member, Takahide Kiuchi, proposed replacing that two year target with a less ambitious commitment to achieving 2 percent inflation "in the medium to long term." That proposal was voted down by the other eight members on the bank's policy board, according to the bank's statement. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "It's true that the road to 2 percent will be long," Mr. Kuroda said at a news conference following the decision. To get there, he said, other facets of Prime Minister Abe's economic growth program needed to kick in, bringing about a rebound in jobs, wages and demand. "Once the entire economy enters a positive cycle, we will see prices stabilize at 2 percent," he said, adding that for now, the bank's policy push was "on track." The central bank also held off from introducing measures to keep down Japan's long term interest rates, a move expected by some economists ahead of the meeting. Yields on benchmark 10 year government bonds spiked in late May as prices of those bonds slumped, causing investor jitters over Japan's ability to keep funding, and servicing, its colossal public debt. Those fears helped end a spectacular rally in the Japanese stock market this year and brought several weeks of volatile trading. One measure floated by economists that might calm investor nerves had been to extend a low interest loan program that would make it easier for financial institutions to buy government bonds even if interest rates started rising. But that runs counter to the bank's goal of shifting corporate investment out of low interest bonds to higher yielding equities and borrowing. Mr. Kuroda said that the board had discussed such measures, but ultimately decided fresh steps were unnecessary for the time being. He has said that the recent rise in long term interest rates is a healthy reflection of inflation expectations, and does not pose an immediate threat to the Japanese economy. He stressed that the bank has had a measure of success in reducing volatility in bond markets by conducting its bond purchases more frequently, in smaller amounts. He said that the bank would sustain those efforts, and would watch financial markets closely. "We continue to be wary of movements in long term interest rates, especially undesirable spikes in volatility, and will keep up efforts to reduce that volatility," he said. "But the economy is on a solid path to recovery, and I expect financial markets to soon reflect that, and regain composure."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
COLD WAR (2018) Stream on Amazon. This latest black and white film from the Oscar winning Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski packs a decades long romance into a swift 89 minutes. That it includes Polish, French, German, Russian, Italian and Croatian dialogue hints at its country hopping nature. It begins in the Polish countryside at the end of the 1940s, when a musician, Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), and his colleague, Irena (Agata Kulesza), travel among villages recording the music of the people living there. While traveling, Wiktor meets Zula (Joanna Kulig), a singer. Romance ignites between them amid a thorny political landscape. They struggle to navigate that landscape together and apart and together again for years after, in several European countries. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised the film's "two knockout leads" and the cinematography, which, she wrote, "is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty, with gleaming and richly textured surfaces, and the kind of velvety black chiaroscuro you can get lost in."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Spencer Dinwiddie and DeAndre Jordan, key members of the Nets, both said on Monday night that they had tested positive for the coronavirus since returning to Brooklyn for individual workouts last week. Jordan, who has asthma and has battled multiple cases of pneumonia in his 12 year career, announced on Twitter that he would not participate in the N.B.A. restart, which is scheduled to begin soon at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. Dinwiddie, who averaged 20.6 points and 6.8 assists per game in what had been a breakout season, followed up Jordan's tweet with one of his own, saying he still hoped to play in Florida but adding that "unfortunately I have been one of the cases that has various symptoms." A Nets spokesman said Tuesday morning that the team's practice facility had been re opened after a brief closure, but it is unclear which teammates and team staff members Jordan and Dinwiddie had worked with or if the club was reconsidering its plans to participate in the N.B.A.'s 22 team return because of the lost manpower. General Manager Sean Marks and the Nets' interim coach, Jacque Vaughn, are scheduled to speak to reporters Wednesday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The cinematic cosmos of the French director Arnaud Desplechin teems with literary allusions. He frequently makes films about a character named Paul Dedalus a nod to the young hero of Joyce's "Ulysses." And Mr. Desplechin's characters sometimes soliloquize with words adapted from Philip Roth's novels. This latest film, "Ismael's Ghosts," adds Henri Bloom, an aging filmmaker, to Mr. Desplechin's oeuvre, and his name, of course, evokes the older protagonist in Joyce's novel. For all that, Mr. Desplechin's films cannot, or ought not, be considered literary. Cinema is the only medium that can accommodate the narrative sprawl that has distinguished this director's work since even before "My Sex Life ... or How I Got Into an Argument" (1996), a film in which he originated several characters who incarnate in his later works. "Ismael's Ghosts" opens with a film within a film, an espionage thriller about one Ivan Dedalus, a globe trotting diplomat turned spy. (He's probably related to Paul, but you don't have to understand this convoluted situation to enjoy the movie.) Ivan springs from the mind of Ismael Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric), whose reverie is interrupted by a 3 a.m. phone call from his former father in law, Henri Bloom (Laszlo Szabo). Both men are still mourning the loss of Carlotta (hello, "Vertigo" people), Bloom's daughter and Ismael's wife, who disappeared 20 years ago. Ismael is now involved with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), an astrophysicist, who, shortly after her introduction becomes the movie's temporary narrator, and takes the story back a couple of years. On return to the present, Ismael and Sylvia hole up in a beach house, and one afternoon while sunbathing, Sylvia is approached by a woman (Marion Cotillard) who introduces herself as Carlotta.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
LIVERPOOL, England Bayern Munich's time has passed. This incarnation of Bayern Munich, anyway, this team with Manuel Neuer at one end of the field and Robert Lewandowski at the other, this team that has taken up residency at the summit of the Bundesliga, this team that has been such a fixture and a force in the final rounds of the Champions League. The wear and tear has been showing a little more with every passing season: Pep Guardiola left, and Jupp Heynckes could not be persuaded to stay; Philipp Lahm and Xabi Alonso retired. Bayern, this Bayern, was creaking, though it was not always possible to hear, not with the pop of champagne corks as another title was sealed, or the roar of the crowd as another Champions League semifinal sailed into view. And then, this season, as these things tend to do, the slow burn caught light, and it all unraveled, all at once. Too many components had degraded or been replaced, and all of a sudden the mechanism ground to a halt. In the silence, what had been a background hum of unease, of discontent, came rushing to the ears, loud and clear. Bayern's coach, Niko Kovac, was not good enough, appointed to the job with an air of anticlimax and living up to his billing. The squad he was bequeathed was a shadow of its former self, too vulnerable to the ticking of the clock, its stolid dependability rendered obsolete by the obscene wealth of the Premier League, of Paris St. Germain, of Real Madrid and Barcelona. The cadre of former players that serve as the club's power brokers Uli Hoeness, the president; Karl Heinz Rummenigge, the chief executive; and the sporting director, Hasan Salihamidzic stood accused of overseeing that decline, and doing nothing, or not enough, to stop it. In December, at the club's annual general meeting, Hoeness was booed by a sample of Bayern's members; one, Johannes Bachmayr, was bold enough to take the microphone and lambast those on stage for everything from their failure to sign Kevin De Bruyne to Bayern's commercial relationship with Qatar Airways. Change, everyone agreed, was not only necessary but overdue. The season itself bore witness to that: Bayern, winner of the last six German championships, has spent much of the season behind Borussia Dortmund, at one point dropping as low as sixth in the Bundesliga table. Results have ticked upward since the winter break, though performances have been sluggish to follow suit. Dortmund's lead is down to only three points; it is a measure of Bayern's competitive spirit and proof of how concerned the club has been that when news of Dortmund's 0 0 draw at Nurnburg on Monday made it to the Liverpool restaurant where Hoeness and the board were dining that night, there was a rousing cheer, and a little singing. Bayern has set about replacing them with the clearheaded efficiency that has been its hallmark in recent years. Alphonso Davies arrived from Major League Soccer's Vancouver Whitecaps last year. Benjamin Pavard's signing was announced in January, though the French World Cup winner will not join the squad until the summer. Only Chelsea's obstinacy prevented Bayern from bringing in Callum Hudson Odoi, an 18 year old English winger who has never started a Premier League game, for 40 million last month. Bayern Munich has the air of a club that feels it has wasted enough time on emotion. Change was needed, and it is coming. None of that was changed by a goalless draw against Liverpool at Anfield on Tuesday in the first leg of a Champions League round of 16 tie. None of that should be dismissed because Bayern held out against a Liverpool team without its three first choice central defenders. Reports of Bayern Munich's demise have not been greatly exaggerated. They may, though, have been misinterpreted. This Bayern team had not been to Anfield before: Individual players had visited, of course, but never en masse. There had been no competitive meeting between these clubs since 1981. Lewandowski, for one, acknowledged in the days before the game that he was eager to sample it, to tick another iconic stadium off the list. The German news media focused no little energy indulging the (occasionally overblown) lore of Liverpool's home, bolstered by the host's run to the final of this competition last year. And yet not for a second did a single Bayern player seem fazed or unnerved or overawed by the location, by the occasion. Even in the first few minutes, as Liverpool tried to build up a head of steam, scratching and searching for a single stray doubt, Bayern played with an ease, a composure, a control. Liverpool carved out a handful of openings, half chances and snatched chances and glimpses of goal, and the crowd surged, sensing possibility, and Bayern did not blink. Neuer kept on playing disdainful passes on the edge of his box, unruffled by risk. Thiago Alcantara glided around the midfield. James Rodriguez floated into vacated space. It is true that this Bayern team has passed its peak. It is also true that, once that point is reached, the descent tends to be steep. It is not, though, consistent, and it is not immediate. This is still a team that contains a multitude of World Cup winners and Champions League winners and serial Bundesliga winners. It is still a team that has ranked as one of the four best in Europe in all but two seasons this decade. Its problems, its flaws and its shortcomings are relative. When Bayern Munich falls, it does so from a great height. It can still take people with it on the way down. At the end Tuesday night, as Liverpool's players pumped their fists and embraced their coach Jurgen Klopp rightly celebrating a hard earned, hard fought night Bayern's strolled to their fans, packed into one corner in the Anfield Road Stand. They stood there, laconic, as they took their applause and offered it back, as they have done hundreds of times before. These are the stages on which these players belong, and have belonged for years. They will vacate it soon enough, but they will do so, you sense, in their own time.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
For years, residents of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., watched in envy. Up and down the Hudson River, hard hit postindustrial cities like theirs were experiencing a rebound, including Beacon, a hatmaking hub turned bedroom community whose mention was often followed by a disbelieving shake of the head. Although Poughkeepsie had train service, cultural attractions and reasonably priced housing like other once bleak places, the city could seem like a rock in a stream, constantly bypassed by the currents of change. But after a long wait and a few false starts, the five square mile enclave in Dutchess County which is a city, as opposed to the surrounding town of the same name may finally be getting its long awaited turnaround. Encouraged by city leaders who have rezoned neighborhoods to boost density, hired planning staff and dangled tax breaks, those builders are adding apartment buildings to downtown blocks once pocked with empty lots, near new restaurants and craft breweries. And buyers are discovering Victorian houses on par with the most elegant in the region, said brokers and neighbors, even if those slate roofed, pocket door filled homes often need work. "I often thought a revival would happen, but that it would take time," said Rena M. O'Connor, 58, a divorce lawyer who grew up in Poughkeepsie and still lives and works there. "I'm glad to see it's happening." Ms. O'Connor's home, a 1928 colonial with four bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms, is set back on a shaded lot, on a tidy street without much obvious wear and tear. The house, which Ms. O'Connor bought in 1989 for 142,000 and shares with her husband, Michael J. O'Connor, also an attorney, might fetch 250,000 today, based on recent sales. The city's narrow but long commercial district has cycled through various looks since Ms. O'Connor was a child. In the 1970s, convinced that the future belonged to drivers as mid 20th century suburbs boomed, officials carved two high speed "arterials" through the retail district, which required large scale demolitions. Buildings were razed to make convenient parking lots, and two major blocks on Main Street were closed to traffic. But after shoppers failed to materialize at the outdoor mall, officials reopened the street decades later, in 2001. The current city government is working to undo urban renewal efforts, selling some of those parking lots to developers so buildings can be restored. "We're trying to atone for our sins," said Paul Hesse, Poughkeepsie's community development coordinator. Still, a rough edged downtown shouldn't be a stigma, residents insist. After all, in many cities, popular neighborhoods and less desirable ones are often separated by just a few blocks, noted Ashley Anderson, 35, who grew up outside Poughkeepsie, in LaGrange, before heading to college in Boston. Drawn back after graduation, Ms. Anderson, who works in information technology, bought a 1960 split level house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms on a third of an acre near Spratt Park, which offers an outdoor pool and looping paths. In 2010, the house, which she shares with her husband, Kenneth Anderson, a mechanic, and their baby daughter, cost 180,000. And although it needed a gut renovation an increasingly common sight in her neighborhood Ms. Anderson still believes she came out ahead. "A lot of my peers went to live in Manhattan after college, but the cost of living here is so much lower," she said. "If you focus too much on specific parts, you will miss the charm of it all." About 80 miles north of Manhattan, the boot shaped city of Poughkeepsie (pronounced po KIP see) has a personality that is distinct from the town of Poughkeepsie, which is rural, suburban, and known as the home of Vassar College. The aforementioned arterials divide the city, at least unofficially, into north and south sides. The slightly shabbier north has more multifamily buildings, while single family properties are more common in the south, which is also where the city's three historic districts are found. Although some districts are tiny the one named Garfield Place essentially covers a single block they are filled with fanciful designs. Slope sided cupolas, striped stone window arches and delicate roof cresting turn up on Garfield, for instance. Finding well kept antique homes can take work, as they are frequently off the beaten path, in small enclaves like Eden and Ivy Terraces, off Livingston Street. Getting to Union Street, which is marooned amid busy roads, can also be tricky. But its modestly scaled, Federal style structures, which once housed millworkers, are like a window on Poughkeepsie's pre urban renewal past. With a population of 30,500, the city is not only architecturally mixed, but ethnically diverse as well. Caucasians make up about the half the population, census records show; African Americans and Latinos make up most of the rest. Since 2016, when the current mayor, Robert G. Rolison, began his four year term, 1,289 housing units, most of them rental apartments, have been completed, are under construction or are planned, Mr. Hesse said, in a city that has about 12,000 units. About a third of those new apartments will be reserved for renters in specific income brackets, he added. Among the recent projects is Queen City Lofts, a four story rental on Main Street with 70 below market rate units. Many of the apartments in the building, from Kearney Realty and Development Group, are also set aside for working artists. In early June, Queen City was 97 percent leased. Similarly, Poughkeepsie Underwear Factory, a converted red brick 1874 structure on North Cherry Street that opened in 2017, has 15 apartments being marketed to artists; 11 are considered affordable. A coffeehouse and cafe are also in the building. More in the luxury vein is One Dutchess, a new 300 unit complex with one to three bedroom units, as well as pools, a hot tub and a firepit, built on a Hudson fronting former lumberyard. The first phase of the project, comprising 139 units, is slated open by the fall, said Finbar O'Neill, the director of operations for O'Neill Group, the New Jersey based developer. In the first phase, which is 45 percent leased, one bedrooms are about 1,750 a month, Mr. O'Neill said. "The city's undergoing a renaissance, for sure," he said. When offices empty out in the evening, the city can feel quiet. But pockets of night life exist. In a place known for its beer one high profile ale maker was Matthew Vassar, the founder of Vassar College modern day purveyors include Mill House Brewing Company, Blue Collar Brewery and King's Court Brewing Company. The cozy Nic L Inn Wine Cellar on the Hudson, which opened in 2014 near the Walkway, seems like proof of that attraction's gentrifying effect. Standbys include the Chance Theater, where INXS, Jerry Garcia and Charles Mingus all played, and which welcomes DJs and bands. The Bardavon is an 1869 former opera house where Graham Nash will perform in September. A newcomer is the Trolley Barn, a refurbished industrial building that has staged orchestral hip hop. And First Friday Poughkeepsie, a three year old event that runs from May to October, throws themed parties (one of which is dedicated to blues music and barbecue) at various outdoor sites including Mansion Square Park. Poughkeepsie had its share of notable industries, including cough drop making: The company Smith Bros. had a factory on North Hamilton Street. And IBM, the computer giant, had major footholds in the region. Another industry was whaling, despite the city's location far from where the mammals actually swim. But the Dutchess Whaling Company sent ships in search of sperm oil from docks near where the Walkway crosses the Hudson. And the Poughkeepsie Whaling Company was at the foot of Main Street, according to historical accounts, where a whale sculpture sits today. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The two black journalists at The Pittsburgh Post Gazette who told The New York Times that their bosses had unfairly kept them from covering protests against racism and police violence have taken steps to redress their complaints. Michael Santiago, a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, left the paper. And Alexis Johnson, a reporter, sued it. "I didn't see them trying to find a way to alleviate the situation at all," Mr. Santiago said in an interview. "I just can't work for a place that does this." On Twitter on Sunday, he said he had accepted a buyout that The Post Gazette offered employees last month. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Ms. Johnson accused the paper of retaliation and racial discrimination.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. "I just want to be your pretty girl when you want it/'Cause I can only think about you," King Princess breathily tells someone who's a lot more calculating than she is, for whom, "It's only 'bout the money and control." The 20 year old musician sees it all and doesn't care. Through a hymnlike bridge, a band crescendo, a proud guitar solo and a chorus flecked with glockenspiel and retro guitar reverb, she's still in thrall. Later, no doubt, lawyers will be involved. JON PARELES The scene: a moonlit living room in an oceanside mansion. The windows are floor to ceiling. Two men pour generously from a bottle into tumblers that stay full for mere seconds. They're late night rambling, scornful of their enemies and wounded by those who've betrayed them. "My depositions never surface," Drake says. "Hundred room mansion but I felt abandoned," Ross says. Together, they can share their fears, speak without structure. Eventually, though, the sun comes out of hiding. CARAMANICA "Memory Digital" starts with an buoyant kick snare beat and woozy, electric keyboard chords. Maybe we're about to hear a 21st century update of Evelyn Champagne King's basking "Love Come Down?" Nope. When the voices enter, they're weary and resigned; the song becomes a kiss off to a relationship doomed by deception, and fated to live on in the form of digital scraps. "At least I give you this, girl: You are consistent," Taylor McFerrin sings in his high, pristine voice, one eyebrow raised as he recounts the unraveling. "I can tell you have a special mind." Anna Wise, known for her work with Kendrick Lamar and in the duo Sonnymoon, haunts the track like a memory that refuses to flicker out. Toward the end, she sighs: "You, you, you, you/Knew me better than anyone/Now you're a memory digital." GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO BJ the Chicago Kid has been a busy mixtape maker and collaborator, singing hooks in his sweet grained tenor for rappers including Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and Freddie Gibbs. "Feel the Vibe" opens "1123," BJ's new album, as both song and branding statement, neatly placing him between the retro and the contemporary. The moody sway of the production, with trumpet and children's voices in the mix, harks back to Marvin Gaye (plus some turntable scratching), and the song, with Anderson .Paak rapping the opening verses, is about a family reunion where everyone's eating soul food and watching "Mama dancing to some Al Green": cross generational harmony. PARELES Blueface, YBN Cordae and Rico Nasty's 2019 XXL Freshman Cypher DaBaby, Megan Thee Stallion, YK Osiris and Lil Mosey's 2019 XXL Freshman Cypher Roddy Ricch, Comethazine and Tierra Whack's 2019 XXL Freshman Cypher The annual XXL Freshman Cyphers are a useful index of hip hop's increasing splintering, a display of the myriad sorts of rapping that are gathering traction among younger artists. They also serve as a camera hides nothing survey of up and comers who thanks to the power granted to them by the internet increasingly seem to believe that they have little to prove. The idea of freestyling over an unfamiliar beat as a worthwhile challenge feels particularly antiquated these days, a radio appearance relic in an online video age. But that dissonance makes for fascinating moments when artists can't seamlessly walk the tightrope between the two. These clips 10 artists in three groupings likely never to again share a stage include some impressive rapping (Megan Thee Stallion, Rico Nasty, DaBaby) and some conceptualist verse (Blueface), and are useful in poking holes in careers that have been quickly and unjustifiably inflated (Lil Mosey, Comethazine). But the rappers reveal the most when caught responding to someone else's performance: Megan Thee Stallion barely tolerating Lil Mosey; YK Osiris in slack jawed awe of DaBaby's arrogant ferocity; Blueface and YBN Cordae hitting the woah while Rico Nasty speed talks; Comethazine staring out into the ether while Tierra Whack, going a cappella, offers a master class in rapping, an art form of which Comethazine has little understanding. CARAMANICA Is it a protest song, or just a sigh? With "Take It Away," Norah Jones maintains the semi confrontational stance she struck on her previous single, "Just a Little Bit." But this time the target isn't a lover it's broader and more ambiguous: our collective shrug in the face of injustice, perhaps. Singing in wide harmonies with Tarriona Ball of Tank and the Bangas, Jones unspools her lament over a murky, two chord progression. That eventually gives way to a rolling storm bridge, ending with the line, "Find a way to make a real change." But it's not really clear to whom this plaint is addressed, or what we ought to be dismantling. RUSSONELLO Why don't electronic musicians release many live albums? Because they understand that home listening and live shows unfold in different time frames and attention states: one subject to distraction and carefully distilled, the other contained, immersive and therefore almost leisurely. Four Tet the electronic musician Kieran Hebden makes electronic music in a zone where synthetic and acoustic and meditation and motion overlap. He has just released a documentary album on Bandcamp "Live at Alexandra Palace, London 8th and 9th May 2019" that sometimes mixes in the applause and whoops of the live audience in tracks that stretch as long as 39 minutes. The relatively brief "Part 5" slightly over 6 minutes starts out sparse and rhythmic, then methodically changes: through a quasi reggae backbeat, looped female voices that sync up with the beat, consonant keyboard tones. As dance music, it's noncoercive; as electronic Minimalism, it strives to lead somewhere peaceful. PARELES Exasperation gathers, seethes, sputters and eventually explodes more than once in "Sunglasses," a nine minute post punk exposition, rhapsody and rant about the hollow consolations of materialism (among other things) including sunglasses that feel like "a high tech wraparound blue tinted fortress." Black Country, New Road places itself somewhere between Protomartyr and early King Crimson; the music veers from austere, sullen guitar vamps to dissonant saxophone squalls while Isaac Wood's talky, prosy vocals get all worked up, as disgusted with himself as he is with what he sees. PARELES	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Stephanie Leigh Roach and John William Weiss were married Aug. 25 at Hotel Bel Air, Los Angeles. Rabbi Laura Geller officiated. The bride, 35, is the director of the Flag Art Foundation, a contemporary art exhibition space in New York. She is also a member of the Leadership Circle at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and a chair of the Contemporary Circle at the Jewish Museum, also in New York. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a daughter of Jill Roach and Dennis A. Roach of Los Angeles. The bride's father, who works in Los Angeles, is a sports and entertainment lawyer in private practice. He is also the president of the Buddy Taub Foundation and a member of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collectors Committee. The groom, 37, is a founder and a chief executive of Curich Weiss, a public relations company with offices in New York and Los Angeles. He graduated from Boston University.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
SEATTLE Peter Boal, artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, staged a revelatory "Giselle" for that company here in 2011. Yet "Giselle" is danced everywhere. So what needed to be revealed? In truth, the basic text of this central work is in a terrible state all 'round the world. (The same is true for most 19th century ballet classics, alas. No classic play, opera or concert work is presented today laden with anachronistic and showy changes that are standard for the 19th century ballets.) Mr. Boal's staging was a "Giselle" stripped of mannerisms, with some surprising details and a wealth of mime; and it was fresh, alive, suspenseful a "Giselle" good for people new to the ballet, as well as for scholars. The main problem was that it used borrowed designs, from the Houston Ballet's staging. Now, it has acquired its own designs, by Jerome Kaplan, that are attractive, efficient, full of detail. But the designs add a different problem: They change "Giselle" by setting it in the 19th century instead of the late medieval era. The Act I huntsmen carry rifles; the gamekeeper, Hilarion, rival suitor for Giselle's hand, is impressive in a frock coat. When Albrecht is caught by the wilis, the spirits of maidens abandoned at the altar, and told to dance to death, he has removed a fur lined cloak and riding coat; he dances in waistcoat and boots. Though this works remarkably well the 19th century features are underplayed rather than made a gimmick it robs "Giselle" of its mythic quality. This could have been an exemplary staging; instead, it is an offbeat example of director's theater. Yet, in many respects, this is still a yardstick "Giselle": It often shows how this ballet should go. I caught this year's last three performances last weekend at McCaw Hall here. Nothing knocked the barnacles off the ballet better than the bright tempos set by Emil de Cou and Allan Dameron. The playing of the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra (despite an off patch from the brass section at one performance) remains the finest of any American ballet troupe, beautifully showing the sensuous harmonies of the score. The dancing is to match: stylish, clear, ebullient.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Want to Be Better at Sports? Listen to the Machines This article is part of our latest Artificial Intelligence special report, which focuses on how the technology continues to evolve and affect our lives. A couple of decades ago, Jeff Alger, then a senior manager at Microsoft, was coaching state level soccer teams and realized that there was very little science to player development. "There were no objective ways of measuring how good players are," said Mr. Alger, "and without being able to measure, you have nothing." He said it offended his sense of systems design to recognize a problem but do nothing about it, so he quit his job, got a master's degree in sports management and started a company that would use artificial intelligence to assess athletic talent and training. His company, Seattle Sports Sciences, is one of a handful using the pattern recognizing power of machine learning to revolutionize coaching and make advanced analytics available to teams of all kinds. The trend is touching professional sports and changing sports medicine. And, perhaps inevitably, it has altered the odds in sports betting. John Milton, the architect of Seattle Sports Sciences' artificial intelligence system, spent a week in October with the Spanish soccer team Malaga, which plays in Spain's second division, capturing everything that happened on the pitch with about 20 synchronized cameras in 4K ultra high definition video. "It's like omniscience," Mr. Milton said. The system, ISOTechne, evaluates a player's skill and consistency and who is passing or receiving with what frequency, as well as the structure of the team's defense. It even tracks the axis of spin and rate of rotation of the ball. That is not the only way that the company's technology is being used. Professional soccer teams derive a growing slice of revenue from selling players. Soccer academies have become profit centers for many teams as they develop talented players and then sell them to other teams. It is now a 7 billion business. But without objective measurements of a player's ability, putting a value on an athlete is difficult. "It's a matter of whether that player's movements and what they do with the ball correspond to the demands that they will have on your particular team," said Mr. Alger, now the president and chief executive of Seattle Sports Sciences. He said, for example, that his company could identify a player who was less skilled at other phases of the game but was better at delivering the ball on a corner kick or a free kick a skill that a coach could be looking for. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Some systems can also detect and predict injuries. Dr. Phil Wagner, chief executive and founder of Sparta Science, works from a warehouse in Silicon Valley that has a running track and is scattered with equipment for assessing athletes' physical condition. The company uses machine learning to gather data from electronic plates on the ground that measure force and balance. The system gathers 3,000 data points a second and a test jumping or balancing takes about 20 seconds. "Athletes don't recognize that there's an injury coming or there's an injury that exists," Dr. Wagner said, adding that the system has a proven record of diagnosing or predicting injury. "We're identifying risk and then providing the best recommendation to reduce that risk." "Based on the data that's collected, it tells me how I'm moving compared to previously and how I'm moving compared to my ideal movement signature, as they call it," Mr. Ross said. Sparta Science then tailors his workouts to move him closer to that ideal. The Pittsburgh Steelers, the Detroit Lions and the Washington Redskins, among others, use the system regularly, Dr. Wagner said. Sparta Science is also used to evaluate college players in the National Football League's annual scouting combine. Of course, it is inevitable that machine learning's predictive power would be applied to another lucrative end of the sports industry: betting. Sportlogiq, a Montreal based firm, has a system that primarily relies on broadcast feeds to analyze players and teams in hockey, soccer, football and lacrosse. Mehrsan Javan, the company's chief technology officer and one of its co founders, said the majority of National Hockey League teams, including the last four Stanley Cup champions, used Sportlogiq's system to evaluate players. Josh Flynn, assistant general manager for the Columbus Blue Jackets, Ohio's professional hockey franchise, said the team used Sportlogiq to analyze players and strategy. "We can dive levels deeper into questions we have about the game than we did before," Mr. Flynn said. But Sportlogiq also sells analytic data to bookmakers in the United States, helping them set odds on bets, and hopes to sell information to individual bettors soon. Mr. Javan is looking to hire a vice president of betting. They key to all of this sports focused technology is data. "Algorithms come and go, but data is forever," Mr. Alger is fond of saying. Computer vision systems have to be told what to look for, whether it be tumors in an X ray or bicycles on the road. In Seattle Sports Sciences' case, the computers must be trained to recognize the ball in various lighting conditions as well as understand which plane of the foot is striking the ball. To do that, teams of workers first have to painstakingly annotate millions of images. The more annotated data, the more accurate the machine learning analysis will be. "Basically, whoever has the most labeled data wins," said Mr. Milton, the A.I. architect. Seattle Sports Sciences uses Labelbox, a training data platform that allows Mr. Milton's data science team in Seattle to work with shifts of workers in India who label data 24 hours a day. "That's how fast you have to move to compete in modern vision A.I.," Mr. Milton said. "It's basically a labeling arms race." Dr. Wagner of Sparta Science agrees, noting that with algorithms readily available and cloud computing power now available everywhere, the differentiator is data. He said it took Sparta Science 10 years to build up enough data to train its machine learning system adequately. Sam Robertson, who runs the sports performance and business program at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, said it would take time for the technology to transform sports. "The decision making component of this right now is still almost exclusively done by humans," he said. "We need to work on the quality of the inputs," he said, meaning the labeled data. "That's what's going to improve things." Craig S. Smith is a former correspondent for The Times and hosts the podcast Eye on A.I.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... an Hour, and I Listen to a Lot of Podcasts 'This Giant Beast That Is the Global Economy' When to watch: Starting Friday, on Amazon. If you like in depth explainers with a slightly snarky vibe, try this eight part documentary about money, hosted by Kal Penn. Adam McKay is among the show's executive producers, and it includes his brand of celebrity cameos and sardonic asides. That doesn't dull the pain, though, of the vice grip that is squeezing most of us to death while the mega rich dance and give each other yachts. ... 3 Hours (And Change), and What's All the Fuss?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Large trucks may be involved in fewer crashes than passenger vehicles, but their size almost guarantees that the consequences of those collisions will be severe. Recent tragedies, including the June 7 accident that killed the comedian James McNair and critically injured "30 Rock" star Tracy Morgan, when their limousine was rear ended by a tractor trailer on the New Jersey Turnpike, are bringing renewed attention to issues of commercial vehicle safety. Crashes involving large trucks killed 3,921 people in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, representing a 4 percent increase from 2011, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Among the measures being discussed is an effort to equip more 18 wheelers with collision avoidance systems like those available or required by law on new cars. Safety systems in today's cars are more evolved: The Mercedes Benz S Class, long a standard setter for automotive safety, can park itself, sense vehicles in its blind spots, help drivers stay in their own lane and apply the brakes if sensors detect that drivers have not responded to warnings of stopped traffic ahead. Such systems could play a significant role in preventing or mitigating accidents caused by distractions and driver fatigue, trucking experts say. The New Jersey accident is still under investigation, but an attention lapse prosecutors said the driver had not slept "for a period in excess of 24 hours" may have played a role. The state police have said that the truck driver, who pleaded not guilty to charges resulting from the crash, failed to note the slow moving traffic ahead until just before the collision. Heavy trucks are catching up as electronic safety features become more widely available on big rigs. Industry executives say the systems are not perfect, but they are improving. "It's a lot like your cellphone," said Dean Newell, vice president for safety at Maverick Transportation, which operates a fleet of 1,400 tractor trailers out of Little Rock, Ark. "You buy it today, but six months from now there is a new model." Freight carriers, sensitive to a public perception that big trucks are accident prone, are adding safety electronics to their fleets. These systems can slow a truck when a vehicle ahead reduces speed, but, experts say, crash avoidance including coping with objects at a standstill remains primarily a driver's responsibility. "The whole goal of these systems is to get the driver back engaged," said Alan Korn, director for advanced braking systems at Meritor Wabco, a truck component supplier based in Troy, Mich. But, he added, "They don't replace the driver." According to Mr. Korn, 15 percent of new heavy duty trucks are ordered with an optional collision avoidance system, which uses a front mounted radar system to sense a potential crash. The system will automatically throttle back the engine, activate the diesel engine brake and apply the wheel brakes if the driver does not take evasive action after multiple warnings. Mr. Korn said that about 50,000 of the largest trucks, Class 8, are equipped with Meritor Wabco's OnGuard collision safety system, which made its debut in 2008. The active United States highway trucking fleet is a much larger pool of vehicles, comprising more than 2.2 million rigs, according to ACT Research, a trucking consultancy based in Columbus, Ind. Electronic stability controls are in wider use than collision avoidance systems. The stability controls use a network of sensors that measure speed, vehicle tilt and direction of travel to determine when the vehicle is overstepping the driver's control and then apply brakes to bring it back into line. About half of all new highway tractors are ordered with stability systems, Mr. Korn said. Most systems are extra cost options, but some manufacturers are taking them mainstream. Working with Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems, Volvo Trucks in 2005 introduced an electronic stability system called VEST and made it standard on all of its big rigs. The truck maker followed up in 2009 with an adaptive cruise control system option it can be set to hold a distance to the vehicle ahead and in 2012 added active braking that detects and responds to possible collisions even when the cruise control is off. At the same time, Volvo Trucks introduced a lane departure warning system, which, like systems in passenger cars, uses a camera to read lane markings on the road. If it senses that the vehicle has strayed out of a lane unintentionally a determination confirmed by the driver's failure to use the turn signal it issues a warning to the driver. "A secondary benefit from these types of technologies will be more usage of the turn signal," Mr. Korn said. "Because if the driver is never using the turn signal, they are going to get a warning every time they make a lane change." Some of these technologies are expected to be required in heavy trucks by 2020. Federal regulators estimated last year that collision avoidance technology would have reduced rear end crashes by 16 percent, fatalities by 24 percent and injuries by 25 percent. Systems in development that can also react to nonmoving objects, regulators estimate, would cut rear end crashes by 28 percent, fatalities by 44 percent and injuries by 47 percent, the safety agency said in a May 2013 report. In this demonstration of a Meritor Wabco stability control system, an outrigger device on the trailer lets test drivers make sudden maneuvers without causing a rollover. Regulations expected to go into effect later this year would require stability control systems on new highway tractors and long haul buses, and industry experts say that the safety agency will soon propose a separate set of rules requiring collision avoidance technology as early as 2019. Shortcomings in collision avoidance systems available on trucks an inability to react when a stationary obstacle like a line of stopped cars is detected are being addressed, experts say. "On completely stationary objects, today's large trucks systems will only provide a warning," Mr. Korn said. "In the near future, warning and braking on stationary objects will be implemented." Many of these technologies use the truck's antilock braking systems, required on all tractors using air brakes since 1997. (Unlike passenger cars, most heavy trucks use pneumatic systems, not hydraulic fluid, to actuate the brakes.) Trailers have been required to have antilock brakes since 1998. "What you have today is an entire population of vehicles that has A.B.S. as a starting point," Mr. Korn said, using the abbreviation for antilock braking systems. "A lot of the core architecture that you need in more of the advanced systems is found in the A.B.S. system." While the safety systems are not inexpensive, they represent a small portion of the cost of a highway tractor, whose prices typically start at 125,000 for a basic rig, said Steve Tam, vice president of ACT Research, the trucking consultancy. For example, lane departure warning systems cost about 800, or less than 1 percent of the cost of a basic truck; collision mitigation systems cost as much as 3,000 on a large truck, suppliers said. Motor carriers realize that the cost of one accident is incredibly high, Mr. Tam said. "The investment in the technologies is not cheap, but it's not prohibitively expensive." The truck involved in the June 7 crash in New Jersey, a 2011 Peterbilt tractor trailer, was equipped with adaptive cruise and stability controls, said Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the truck's owner, Walmart. Whether the technology was working properly and whether the driver responded to its automatic warnings are details still under investigation. However, the truck was speeding at the time of the accident, according to a June 18 preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board, which retrieved electronic logs from the engine computer. "A preliminary review of the data showed that the Peterbilt combination vehicle was traveling at 65 m.p.h. for 60 seconds preceding the collision with the Mercedes Benz limo van," the report said. The truck struck the van inside a construction zone filled with slow moving traffic and speed limit signs posted at 45 m.p.h. Although technology cannot replace a truck driver, automatic controls can help distracted or fatigued drivers stay alert, experts said. "We still believe that they are valuable to mitigating accidents like this," a spokesman for the national safety board, Keith Holloway, said. The agency last year placed collision avoidance technologies on its annual "most wanted" list, calling for regulations that mandated it as standard equipment on all new cars and trucks. Monitoring driver behavior is another concept that trucking fleets are trying. Lytx, based in San Diego, offers driver facing cameras that integrate with other safety systems to detect risky driving.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles

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