Split (2)

train · 585k rows

text stringlengths 1 39.7k	original_task stringclasses 8 values	original_label stringclasses 35 values
The Coronavirus Is New, but Your Immune System Might Still Recognize It Eight months ago, the new coronavirus was unknown. But to some of our immune cells, the virus was already something of a familiar foe. A flurry of recent studies has revealed that a large proportion of the population 20 to 50 percent of people in some places might harbor immunity assassins called T cells that recognize the new coronavirus despite having never encountered it before. These T cells, which lurked in the bloodstreams of people long before the pandemic began, are most likely stragglers from past scuffles with other, related coronaviruses, including four that frequently cause common colds. It's a case of family resemblance: In the eyes of the immune system, germs with common roots can look alike, such that when a cousin comes to call, the body may already have an inkling of its intentions. The presence of these T cells has intrigued experts, who said it was too soon to tell whether the cells would play a helpful, harmful or entirely negligible role in the world's fight against the current coronavirus. But should these so called cross reactive T cells exert even a modest influence on the body's immune response to the new coronavirus, they might make the disease milder and perhaps partly explain why some people who catch the germ become very sick, while others are dealt only a glancing blow. "If you have a population of T cells that are armed and ready to protect you, you could control the infection better than someone who doesn't have those cross reactive cells," said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington who is studying the immune responses of Covid 19 patients. "That's what we're all hoping for." T cells are an exceptionally picky bunch. Each spends the entirety of its life waiting for a very specific trigger, like a hunk of a dangerous virus. Once that switch is flipped, the T cell will clone itself into an army of specialized soldiers, all with their sights set on the same target. Some T cells are microscopic assassins, tailor made to home in on and destroy infected cells; others coax immune cells called B cells into producing virus attacking antibodies. The first time a virus infects the body, this response is sluggish; it takes several days for the immune system to sort out which T cells are best suited for the job at hand. But subsequent encounters typically prompt a response that is stronger and faster, thanks to a reserve force of T cells, called memory T cells, that lingers after the initial threat has passed and can quickly be called into action again. Usually, this process operates best when T cells must battle the same pathogen again and again. But these recruits are more flexible than they are often given credit for, said Laura Su, an immunologist and T cell expert at the University of Pennsylvania. Should these cells chance upon something that bears a strong resemblance to their germ of choice, they can still be roused to fight, even if the invader is a total newcomer. In theory, cross reactive T cells can "protect almost like a vaccine," said Smita Iyer, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, who is studying immune responses to the new coronavirus in primates. Previous studies have shown that cross reactive T cells may guard people against different strains of the flu virus, and perhaps confer a trace of immunity against dengue and Zika viruses, which share a family tree. The case for coronaviruses is less clear cut, said Alessandro Sette, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology who has led several studies examining cross reactive T cells to the new coronavirus. Researchers have found people in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore and the United Kingdom who have never been exposed to the new coronavirus but who carry T cells that react to it in the lab. Researchers are eager to understand the history of these T cells, because that might help reveal who is more likely to have them. A growing body of evidence, including data published this week in Science by Dr. Sette and his colleagues, points to common cold coronaviruses as a potential source. But even unrelated viruses can share similar features, and researchers may never know for sure what originally "drove their development," said Avery August, an immunologist and T cell expert at Cornell University. Whatever the origin of T cells, their mere existence could be encouraging news. There is much more to the immune system than T cells, but even a semblance of pre existing immunity could mean that people who have recently grappled with the common cold may have an easier time fighting off a nastier member of the coronavirus clan. Cross reactive T cells alone probably would not be enough to completely stave off infection or disease. But they might alleviate symptoms of the coronavirus in people who happen to carry these cells, or extend the protection provided by a vaccine. Covid vaccines get a muted welcome in South Sudan, a land that's awash in bigger problems. 'Not yet over': Portugal, with one of Europe's highest vaccination rates, prepares to add restrictions. "That would be awesome," Dr. Iyer said. Children, who share lots of germs with their peers, might be good candidates for this hypothetical scenario. But cross reactive T cells are not necessarily a benevolent force. They could instead be ineffectual souvenirs of infections past, with "absolutely no relevance" to how well people fare against the new coronavirus, Dr. Sette said. There is even a small chance that pre existing T cells could raise the risk for serious symptoms of Covid 19, although experts consider this possibility unlikely. T cells that are primed to recognize common cold coronaviruses might marshal only a lackluster response to the current coronavirus, potentially sapping resources from other populations of immune cells that have a better shot at defeating the new invader. "Now you have your immune system distracted," Dr. Iyer said. T cells are also expert orchestrators. Depending on the signals they send out, they can synchronize cells and molecules from disparate parts of the immune system into a tag teamed attack, or quell these assaults to return the body to baseline. If it turns out that cross reactive T cells tend toward quieting the response, they could suppress a person's immune defense before it has a chance to kick into gear, Dr. August said. Then again, many types of T cells exist, and all operate as part of a complex immune system. "It's almost like some people are trying to say this is 'good' or 'bad,'" Dr. Su said. "It's probably more nuanced than that." Teasing it all apart will not be easy. Unlike antibodies, which are inanimate proteins that often circulate in the blood, T cells are living cells that often hole up in hard to reach tissues. That makes them much more difficult to extract, maintain and analyze, Dr. Pepper said. Researchers could learn more by testing whether cross reactive T cells are more abundant in patients who have had mild or serious cases of Covid 19, although such studies cannot prove cause and effect. A more laborious effort might involve measuring cross reactive T cell levels in large groups of healthy people, then waiting to see if they became infected or sick from the current coronavirus, Dr. Sette said. Strong evidence could also come from an animal model, like the rhesus macaques that Dr. Iyer studies in her lab. Researchers could dose primates with common cold coronaviruses, and then see how their immune responses stack up against the new coronavirus. Less than a year into this pandemic, plenty of questions remain unanswered, Dr. Pepper said. Immunologists cannot fully forecast how the human immune system will respond to this new virus; even with science at its speediest, that interaction must be studied in real time. It's a frustrating reality, Dr. Pepper said: "Until we see it in real life, we just don't know."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Jamey Ralph Lundblad and William Lee Melamed Jr. were married Aug. 18. Maureen Mizwicki, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated at the R. W. Glasner Studio, a museum in Chicago. Mr. Lundblad (left), 45, is the chief marketing officer in the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. He is also a director of Edgar Miller Legacy, an organization in Chicago that seeks to preserve the art and craftwork of the 20th century artisan, including the museum where the marriage took place. The groom graduated from North Park University in Chicago. He is a son of Gloria L. Lundblad and Kenneth E. Lundblad of Alexandria, Minn. Mr. Lundblad's father retired as a pharmacist in the Alexandria store of Thrifty White Pharmacy, a Midwest chain. Mr. Melamed, 60, is the managing director for development at the Chicago Humanities Festival, an organization that promotes civil discourse and the exchange of ideas through events and programs. He graduated from Northwestern.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
In the heart of WeLive, a new apartment tower in the financial district created by the office space provider WeWork, is a communal area known as the Whiskey Lounge. The intimate space in a prime spot off a communal kitchen, lounges and a central staircase looks like an old speakeasy, with warm lighting, leather seats and a polished bar. Bartenders from a rotating list regularly take over the space, which seats 15 people but can pack in as many as 25. One week this spring there were three events: a curated whiskey tasting held by WeWork's own bartenders, a wine tasting by a vineyard, and a caipirinha night hosted by Leblon Cachaca, an artisanal liquor brand from Brazil. When bartenders aren't in residence, tenants can bring bottles and mix their own cocktails using a number of supplies, from shakers to bitters, stocked in the bar. Residents gather there after a long day at work or before going out, often inviting friends from outside the building. "You tell your friends this is my little unique space, and people love it," said Quinton Kerns, a 31 year old WeLive designer who lives in the building. "It's not something you see very often in a residential building." Some of these bars operate like members only clubs and are reserved strictly for residents. One of the amenities of 111 Murray Street, a luxury condominium going up in TriBeCa, is the Patisserie, a coffee bar where residents will be served complimentary breakfast every morning. The food and coffee will be made by Baked TriBeCa, and the architect David Rockwell is designing the space, from the custom pots and artsy trays to the display area where the food will be served. "Every detail matters," said Winston C. Fisher, a partner of Fisher Brothers, which is developing the building with Witkoff. "When you walk out of your apartment, you have something to look forward to. You have Baked TriBeCa every morning waiting for you. You have the smells." This will not be the kind of place where bagels are put out as "an afterthought," he added. Beyond New York City, Auberge Beach Residences and Spa, a condominium expected to open next year in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., will have an exclusive wine bar curated for tenants by a master sommelier. Auberge Residences and Spa Miami, also with a wine bar, is expected to open in 2019. Palazzo Del Sol, a condominium development on Fisher Island, Fla., that opened in March with only 43 residences, has an in house aperitivo bar that serves Italian snacks, cocktails and coffees daily. The space, which has front row views of crossing boats, is staffed daily by a butler from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Residential bars can offer more personalized service, said one of the butlers, Ernesto Graniero, who has worked in the restaurant business for 25 years in Italy, France, England and the United States. "I know when they come at 9 o'clock in the morning, who likes a glass of water sparkling, who likes it still, who likes a macchiato," he said. "I know when they come back to me at 12 o'clock who likes the ham with cheese and a touch of mustard." People living in residences connected to hotels like the Plaza, the Carlyle, and the Four Seasons in New York City have always been able to use the lounges as their own. But that's not the same as having one for just you and your neighbors, said Jim Ferraro, a lawyer who is in the process of moving into a penthouse at Palazzo Del Sol. "It is like what you would get at a top hotel, a five star hotel," he said, "but the beauty to this is it's not a hotel so you don't have all these random guests going through the place. It really is an extension of your home." Park Grove, a 5.2 acre residential complex opening across from Biscayne Bay in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, offers a bar and lounge area called the Oak Room near its pool decks. When designing it, the developers David Martin, a founder and the president of Terra, and Carlos Rosso, the president of the Related Group's condominium development division, considered the needs of families moving there from single family homes. With smaller living and dining rooms in which to entertain, Mr. Martin said, they needed places where they could "spend time and invite friends and enjoy and entertain and meet their neighbors." Mr. Fisher of Fisher Brothers said these bars are the result of an increasing focus on lifestyle. "The experience of your customer has become more important than ever," he said. "You can't take it for granted because your competition does not." This is especially true in a place like New York, where apartment buildings are exploding with amenities, from bowling alleys to climbing walls. Abington House, at the High Line on West 30th Street and Tenth Avenue, opened an independent coffee shop, Think Coffee, last year. In September, the shop will be joined by a Whitmans restaurant with a full bar. Landlords used to look for the best retail tenant that would give them no problems and pay the highest rent, said Larry Kramer, an owner of Whitmans. "Now, they are adapting to what is going to drive renters to the building, and I think a good restaurant, a good bar operation, really brings value to where people live," he said. Amy Nardi, a 30 year old talent acquisition manager at CrossCountry Consulting, lives in Abington House and visits the Think Coffee near the lobby at least three days a week. "I don't often have the time to go for a half hour walk to get something," she said. She says she especially enjoys running into neighbors in the coffee shop. Many of these suppliers offer perks to the residents who live in the same property. Kava Cafe, a restaurant and coffee shop on the ground floor of MiMA, a residential tower on West 42nd Street, gives residents a free cup of coffee every day when they show their key. There is also free Fika coffee for residents at the M Club on the building's sixth floor. Benjamin Joseph, a senior vice president of the Related Companies, which developed MiMA and Abington House, said the company was "always trying to improve what we can offer to people, and the ways we can offer residents additional experiences beyond just their apartments." Ms. Nardi is especially excited about having a bar in the new restaurant downstairs at the Abington House. "To people in Manhattan, the dream is having things close by, and it really doesn't get closer than the lobby," she said. "And who doesn't like a good after work drink? And if you have too many, it's really not a problem getting home."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Among the spate of Montreal restaurants that opened late last year is Candide, in the Sud Ouest neighborhood on a quiet street called Rue Saint Martin that makes you feel as if you have suddenly stepped into the countryside with its surrounding copse of black pine trees. Set in the former rectory of St. Joseph's Church, built in 1861, the restaurant is the vision of John Winter Russell, 29, who had been the head chef at Van Horne. He said the last line of Voltaire's "Candide" resonated with him: "but let us cultivate our garden." So he spent two years with his business partner, Danielle Bitton, creating a prix fixe restaurant (uncommon in Montreal) where diners would be inspired by the bounty of the garden and named it after the book. "The idea was to create a space that is warm and inviting, a little bit like home," Mr. Russell said. "Hopefully people have a new outlook on plants when they leave."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
During the final days of the Nixon administration in 1974, "Death Wish" became a populist smash as moviegoers cheered a vigilante Charles Bronson taking revenge on the punks who killed his wife and raped his daughter. 44 years later, MGM hopes to tap into the Trump era's similar law and disorder mentality with a remake casting the "Die Hard" veteran Bruce Willis in the lead role. The action has been moved from Manhattan to Chicago, and the protagonist Paul Kersey is now a doctor rather than an architect. A new trailer begins with statistics meant to build a case for Dr. Kersey giving the perps who invaded his idyllic house a taste of their own medicine, claiming that out of 125 million families in the U.S., "1 in 4 will become victims of a crime." The final sentence says "What if your family was next" The incorrect punctuation seems intentional, as if it's not meant to be posed as a question.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
AVELLANEDA, Argentina Partially obscured by a rusting rack of weights, the back wall of the gym at Racing Club's youth academy has been painted dark blue and daubed with symbols. On one side are four bright, color coded dots; on the other, four numbered yellow circles. Rising from the floor are two miniature depictions of goal posts, no more than a foot wide; fixed at the top are two hooks, looped with string, a ball hanging from each. Diego Huerta, an assistant at the academy and one of the club's scouts, walks past with barely a glance, stopping only when he registers the confused looks. At Borussia Dortmund, he explains, the academy boasts a Footbonaut, a futuristic piece of training equipment designed to improve speed of thought and skill of execution. Standing inside a cage, Dortmund players receive a ball every few seconds. Simultaneously, a box on one of the four walls will light up. The player must swivel, fire the ball into the correct box, and then be ready to receive the next pass. That price tag is way beyond Racing's means. It is working with a local software developer on a pared down, budget friendly equivalent, but in the meantime, its answer, adapted for the realities and restrictions of the game in Argentina, includes the dots and circles painted on the weight room walls, the soccer balls hanging from strings. "This," Huerta said, "is our version." The same ethos is struck through everything Racing does. Like all of Argentina's traditional powerhouses, this is a club conscious of its history. The walls of the cafe at the academy are lined with images of former stars; half of the room is given over to an extensive timeline of the club's achievements, from the swath of championships it claimed in the early part of the 20th century to its first Copa Libertadores success, in 1967. That year, it became the first Argentine team to win the Intercontinental Cup, beating the European champion, Glasgow Celtic, over two bad tempered legs. It has styled itself "el primer grande" the first of Argentina's great clubs ever since. Unusually, though, Racing is not beholden to that history, or content to be swaddled by its traditions. Argentina's biggest clubs are run as social institutions, in which members vote for presidents every few years. The system is cherished as a bulwark against corporate creep, a way of ensuring that clubs' identities are not leveraged to the highest bidder, but it can make them cumbersome and conservative, structurally resistant to change. In that context, Racing stands out as a bastion of innovation. It is not just the homemade Footbonaut. It is the support available to the 55 boys who live at the club's academy, far in advance of what most of their peers in Argentina would be offered, ranging from social workers and psychologists to academic tutors. It is the approach to player development, centering less on results and more on individual progress. Most of all, it is the work done in a small, subterranean office in the parking lot of the club's stadium. Here, Javier Weiner's team of four scouts, including Huerta, sits at a bank of four desks, each one dominated by an iMac. The scouts scour games from Argentina's lower leagues and a handful of South American countries on Wyscout, a content platform that streams action from across the world. Each scout has an area to cover: Weiner takes Argentina and Colombia; Huerta monitors youth soccer and Venezuela. Using the analytics service InStat, they compile dossiers on potential acquisitions, drawing together not just raw performance data but also players' psychological, emotional and medical backgrounds. They track information from journalists on social media. Most clubs of this scale in Europe, North America and Asia would see this work as standard now; in Argentina, it is all but revolutionary. "Most of the time, it is the head coach who recruits players, or the president, with the help of a few agents," Huerta said. "There is no process: Everything changes constantly. And there are times when crucial decisions are made by someone who does not know anything about football." Racing, however, is determined to be "another type of club," Weiner said. "We have to be creative," he said. "We have to have a network that means we can get players before bigger clubs because financially we cannot compete with River Plate and Boca Juniors." Diego Milito won two Argentine titles with Racing as a player, though most of his success came in Italy, where he was the attacking spearhead of Jose Mourinho's treble winning Inter Milan team. He returned to his boyhood team to see out his career in 2014. After retiring, in 2016, he was appointed Racing's technical secretary, an equivalent to a director of football role. Milito's goal, Huerta said, was to "make Racing a champion again." He is on the cusp of doing just that: Racing sits atop Argentina's Superleague, a first title since 2014 inching ever closer. Its journey, though, directed by Milito, has been unorthodox. "All the time Milito was in Europe, he saw how they were working, and he tried to adapt some of the ideas he found," Huerta said. Scouting was central to that. One of Milito's first appointments was Weiner, who had been working with his father, Gabriel, on his "mobile technical unit": a freelance scouting operation, effectively, that carried out project work for European and North American clubs. "We had been commissioned by Bayer Leverkusen, Udinese, Chicago Fire and a few others," Javier Weiner said. A Racing fan, he leapt at the chance to sign up permanently when Milito asked. Huerta's route was a little different. A journalist by training, he spent four years working at Clarin, Argentina's biggest news outlet, before starting to work with Marti Perarnau, once an Olympian for Spain and now a prolific journalist, author and the biographer of Pep Guardiola. Huerta's connection with Perarnau allowed him to visit several of Europe's most progressive clubs. "I talked to people from Dortmund, Sevilla, Barcelona, Olympique Marseille," he said. "I went to watch Zinedine Zidane while he was coaching Real Madrid's reserve team. I had read 'Soccernomics' and 'Moneyball.' I had some ideas on how to run a club." He started doing video analysis and statistics work for Racing. When Milito arrived, he spotted Huerta's gift for languages and recruited him into his inner circle. He now acts as a bridge between the scouting operation, the first team and the academy. "We did not have a structure before," Huerta said. "Now we have a clear vision of what we want the club to be." The best parallel he can find is with one of those clubs he visited on his tour of Europe: Sevilla, a team that has built sustained modern success among much bigger rivals by recruiting well and selling better. There is a focus, now, not on "training talent" the endless slew of creative, attacking players that Argentina is famous for but on "positions of concept," the more defensive, more cerebral roles. "We want to create the players that Racing needs," said Claudio Ubeda, a coach at the academy. "But also the players that Europe wants." Racing is looking further afield than any of its rivals for that raw material. It is, Huerta said, often the only Argentine team that sends scouts to international youth tournaments. It has started to recruit players from Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. Just as significant, it has "formalized," as Weiner put it, the other end of the process. "I remember seeing a couple of tall, blond guys in the crowd at one game," Weiner said. "It turned out they were scouts from F.C. Copenhagen, in Denmark. There was nobody to help them get tickets to watch a player, so they just ended up behind the goal. We have changed that now." So new that there remains some suspicion about it. The concept of scouting remains alien to some. Huerta is regularly asked by colleagues from other teams why he is bothering to watch lower tier games or follow players from Venezuela. There are skeptics within the club, too; Milito's revolution has not been entirely peaceful. Change does not come easily, even with such a potent figurehead. The team he has built, though, has the courage of its convictions. Racing can see the future; or its own, homemade version of it, at least.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
These images deploy a visual rhetoric capturing a whole economy in a single figure, a single store that was forged in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Howard Greenberg Gallery, a longstanding photography dealer, has turned to the web to showcase more than two dozen photographs from the Farm Security Administration, which tasked artists like Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and Ben Shahn to document rural agricultural crises and the prolonged immiseration of "one third of a nation," in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's words. The digital presentation displays Arthur Rothstein's 1936 photograph of a dust storm at a barren Oklahoma farm, picturing a father and sons against sky and earth scrubbed to gray nullities. Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," shot the same year in California, is accompanied by three lesser known variations, in which the impoverished woman snuggles her towheaded son or breastfeeds her baby; the show also includes Lange's images of migrants from Greece and the Philippines, cutting lettuce or harvesting cotton. These photographers were not journalists both Rothstein and Lange partly staged these famous images. They were artists, assigned to give form to ongoing hardship, whose achievements were made possible only through the assurance of government employment. Whether the Great Lockdown leads to a second Great Depression is a matter for policymakers, but this much I can say: Any serious response to the economic and cultural devastation that lies before us will have to see artists back on the public payroll. JASON FARAGO Through May 11. Online at False Flag, false flag.org. In times of uncertainty, it's hard to think about the future. That's part of what makes Sterling Crispin's first solo exhibition so compelling. I'd seen photographs of the show but didn't make it to the gallery before it closed because of the coronavirus crisis. Now I find myself returning to those images. "Future Tense" consists of complex objects that would undoubtedly reward in person viewing. Mr. Crispin often uses sophisticated technologies like 3 D printing, virtual reality and machine learning algorithms to create his work. Yet technology is also one of his primary subjects how it interfaces with and diverges from the natural world. And how we have become an advanced society on a path to rendering itself extinct. The profound strangeness of this discrepancy pervades the exhibition, which is filled with ordinary items gone haywire (and is well documented on False Flag's website and Mr. Crispin's Instagram account): fire extinguishers that are also candelabras, watches that don't tell time (one reads "Don't panic"), flower arrangements springing from vessels that look like machine parts, and oversize inspection tags containing hopeful and apocalyptic texts like "The time has come." The front of the surfboard shaped "Escape Vehicle 001" (2020) features a graph of the global temperature overlaid with stock price trading diagrams. It's shooting toward either the collapse of our ecosystem or A.I. saving the planet. Despite the promise of the work's title, its form suggests another lesson: We can't escape the future so much as find a way to ride on through it. JILLIAN STEINHAUER	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Jeanine Durning's work, a labyrinth of accumulation featuring looping, half finished thoughts and precise, nuanced movement, drives its own beat. In the solo "inging," a 2010 piece based on unscripted speaking, her task is to talk. It's a relentless practice in which language, more than movement, becomes the choreography. In her latest work, "To Being," she shifts her focus from the voice to the body to explore the precariousness of a dancer moving ceaselessly in performance. Her underlying question: "How can we give more when all we feel is that we've met our limit?" The work, which also includes the dancers Julian Barnett and Molly Poerstel and sound by Tian Rotteveel, delves even more deeply into her research practice known as "nonstopping," which means moving but never arriving. The Chocolate Factory, however, has arrived: This treasured performance space celebrates its 10th anniversary with the premiere of "To Being" (Sept. 9 19) and the reprisal of "inging" (Sept. 23 26).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
SANTA CLARA, Calif. The greats came back on Saturday, flooding a frothing Levi's Stadium to watch their treasured San Francisco 49ers engage in a pastime foreign to their fan base for so long: playoff football. Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Bryant Young they all showed up, flocking to witness the latest stage of the 49ers' revival, six years in the making. How familiar it must have seemed to them, the top seeded 49ers in the postseason again, winning again, defeating the upstart Minnesota Vikings, 27 10, to advance to the N.F.C. championship game. San Francisco's opponent will be determined on Sunday, when the Seattle Seahawks visit the Green Bay Packers. But it is certain that the 49ers, having never played a postseason game at Levi's before Saturday, will now host two this month, with a berth in the Super Bowl at stake next Sunday. This incarnation of the 49ers suffocates quarterbacks with pressure and deflates offenses with quickness. No one wearing purple seemed capable of countering all that San Francisco flaunted: Minnesota did not surpass 100 total yards yes, 100 until late in the fourth quarter. "When you go an entire drive just running the ball, you just feel like you're imposing your will and it just gives you a ton of confidence on the offensive side," San Francisco fullback Kyle Juszczyk said. "It makes it so tough for defenses when there's long drives like that, and things are physical. It's just tough to hold up for the rest of the game." The way sixth seeded Minnesota won last week in New Orleans a comprehensive effort powered by a balanced offense and Coach Mike Zimmer's outfoxing of Sean Payton, one of the league's preeminent play callers reasserted the Vikings' candidacy in a robust N.F.C. But with an extra week of rest, having earned a bye for the wild card round, the 49ers looked refreshed, energized and fast. They looked like themselves. Their sideline to sideline speed erased Dalvin Cook, who rushed nine times for 18 yards, and their defensive front, boosted by the return of Dee Ford, smothered Cousins, who finished 21 of 29 for 172 yards, and sacked him six times. "We all understand what we've got to do. And we scare everybody," Ford said after the game. The 49ers' Week 13 loss at Baltimore, on a field goal as time expired, was the first of five consecutive games decided in the final 10 seconds. There was no such suspense on Saturday. As the 49ers suppressed Minnesota in the second half, holding the Vikings scoreless, red clad fans stood and roared. The outcome was assured, and so, too, was the prospect of hosting another game, for a trip to the franchise's seventh Super Bowl. Just imagine all the Bay Area royalty who will be there for that. 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. Here is how the 49ers beat the Vikings: Robbie Gould kicked a field goal for the 49ers, capitalizing on a Vikings error to expand their lead to 27 10. The Vikings had dug themselves into a deeper hole after Marcus Sherels muffed a punt inside his own 15 and 49er Raheem Mostert recovered it on the Minnesota 10. This came after the Vikings made a strong defensive stand to stop Tevin Coleman on third and 1 to force the punt. The 3rd quarter was all 49ers. This game tipped drastically in the third quarter as San Francisco's physical advantage asserted itself. The Vikings, who played a tough game last week, had one possession in the quarter and never got a first down. The 49ers, meanwhile, added 10 more points, and then another field goal to open the fourth. Over all, San Francisco's time of possession advantage improved to 31:18 to only 14:29 for Minnesota, which still only has four first downs. Minnesota, which needed yards from Dalvin Cook, has only 14 rushing yards in the game. Coleman is running over the Vikings. Brutal start for the Vikings, who surrendered a field goal on the first drive and then a few plays later Kirk Cousins threw an interception to Richard Sherman. It was Cousins' first interception in three playoff games. The pass was intended for Adam Thielen, who seemed to be crossed up on the play and did not turn around for the ball. San Francisco got the field goal back on the first drive of the second half and increased their lead to 17 10. The big play was a great third down catch by Kendrick Bourne, who soared high between two defenders to catch the pass at the Minnesota 37. At best, it was classic bend don't break defense by the Vikings, who held on the final third down play to force the kick. The game is in danger of swinging irreparably in the 49ers favor. It was an entertaining first half. It was an entertaining first half. San Francisco is clearly the better team, but Minnesota refused to let the game get out of hand. The interception toward the end of the first half enabled Minnesota to kick a field goal and go into halftime trailing, 14 10. It could have been much worse for the Vikings. San Francisco has dominated the ball a bit more than the score would indicate, notching 14 first downs to only 4 for Minnesota. Jimmy Garoppolo has looked like, well, Jimmy Garoppolo. He made a lot of nice, crisp throws, showed resilience and toughness, but also threw a bad interception to Eric Kendricks. Kirk Cousins went 10 for 12 for 81 yards and the touchdown to Stefon Diggs, but the San Francisco defense has bottled up Dalvin Cook, holding him to 11 yards on 6 carries. It will be interesting to see if Minnesota tries to get him going, or decides to abandon that line of attack. Dan Bailey kicked a 39 yard field goal as the second half ended, to narrow the 49ers' lead. An interception set it up but the 49ers otherwise dominated in the first half. The 49ers take the lead on a run. What a momentum shift. It looked like Deebo Samuel had fumbled and the Vikings had the first turnover of the game, but after a review it turned out his knee was down before the ball came out. San Francisco went on to score a touchdown on Tevin Coleman's 1 yard plunge. But this was really Samuel's drive. He fought his way to a first down after initial contact, and also caught the pass that got the ball to the one yard line. From there it was only a question of when. The 49ers had 23 rushing touchdowns this season, the most in the N.F.L. What we learned in the first quarter. That was a good first quarter for the Vikings, who withstood an opening drive by the 49ers, went down and scored for themselves and then forced a punt. Mike Zimmer's defense started applying pressure on Garoppolo, who was sacked and also came up hobbling after he twisted his ankle. One thing to keep in mind about Garoppolo: he may be fragile. He suffered a serious shoulder injury when he was with the Patriots and blew out his A.C.L. last year. He is not necessarily a runner, but he has good mobility that helps him avoid pressure. When healthy, he can throw very well on the run. A key play was actually the third play of the drive when Cousins took the heat of a 49er rush and completed the pass for a first down. A punt there would have been disastrous. Cousins also took a crunching hit from Arik Armstead on a naked bootleg and completed that pass, too. That drive sent a message. How the 49ers made their first score. San Francisco took the lead on a Jimmy Garoppolo touchdown pass after a near perfect first drive. They went 61 yards in 8 plays and Garoppolo was 5 for 6, with a 3 yard touchdown pass to Kendrick Bourne on a simple slant. It was the worst possible beginning for the Vikings, who went three and out on their first possession. Their offensive line was on its heels, Kirk Cousins looked a bit nervous waiting for the snap on that third down pass, and his throw was very high. This will not help Minnesota keep the crowd out of the game. After going seven seasons without a playoff win, and with a reputation for choking in big games, Kirk Cousins enters the game with a chance at two huge wins in a row. But against one of the best defenses is the league, is it too much to ask Cousins to pull off another stunning upset on the road? Cousins went into the playoffs with an 0 1 record in the postseason (small sample size, indeed) and a 6 30 career record against winning teams as a starting quarterback. But he resembled Tom Brady when he led the Vikings to an unlikely win over the Saints in New Orleans, sealing the victory with a precision drive and a deft touchdown pass to Kyle Rudolph in overtime. Cousins' passer rating of 107.4 was fourth best in the N.F.L. this year, but he was not named to the Pro Bowl. A place in the N.F.C. championship game would augment his redemption tour. Critics will still point to Cousins' overall record in big games, and some have even equated his 0 9 record on Monday nights as further indication of how he shrinks under pressure. We'll see over the next three hours, but according to Vikings teammates, the choker label is unfair. "All we've heard is Kirk Cousins this, Kirk Cousins that," Rudolph told reporters after the electrifying win over the Saints. "Playoff games, big games on the road, so much nonsense. It takes 10 other guys on offense, and I said that all year long." This is San Francisco's first home playoff game in seven years. The last one? A win against Green Bay, 45 31, in a divisional round game. The 49ers quarterback was Colin Kaepernick. He ran for 181 yards, a record in the N.F.L. in a regular or postseason game. He passed for 263 yards and two touchdowns. The 49ers went on to beat the Falcons in the conference championship game but lost to the Ravens in the Super Bowl, 34 31. Kaepernick, of course, has since become an emblem of player protests against social injustice. He has not played in the N.F.L. since 2017 after kneeling during the national anthem at games, inspiring a host of other players to do the same. He settled a case accusing N.F.L. owners of colluding to keep him out of a job, and this past season conducted a workout under chaotic circumstances that left him and the N.F.L. pointing fingers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
For the past few years, the geologists Brenda Buck and Rodney Metcalf have combed the wild terrain of southern Nevada, analyzing its stony dunes and rocky outcroppings and to their dismay, tallying mounting evidence of a landscape filled with asbestos. Asbestos occurs naturally in many parts of the country, mostly in the West but also along some mountain ranges in the East. But in Nevada, the scientists found, natural erosion and commercial development were sending the fibers into the wind. Worried about the possible health risks, Dr. Buck and Dr. Metcalf, professors of geoscience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, reached out to experts in asbestos related diseases. With data from Nevada's cancer registry, an epidemiologist prepared a preliminary report that outlined what she felt was a troubling pattern of mesothelioma a cancer often related to asbestos exposure among residents of the affected areas. But if the scientists expected to be applauded by state officials for their initiative, they were mistaken. Upon learning of the report, the Nevada Department of Health forced the epidemiologist, Francine Baumann of the University of Hawaii, to withdraw a presentation of the findings at a scientific conference and revoked her access to the state cancer registry. Dr. Metcalf and Dr. Buck offered to meet with state officials but say they were rebuffed. In the years since, "no one from the health department has ever contacted us to ask for any information about the minerals," Dr. Metcalf said. So began one of the country's more unsettling public health controversies. Over the past several years, the researchers say, they have been vilified for making legitimate scientific inquiries that may have public health consequences. Officials at the state health department counter that the researchers are simply wrong about the asbestos hazard and are promulgating an alarmist hypothesis. The department's own analysis has turned up no particular asbestos risks to residents, the officials say, pointing out that the incidence of mesothelioma in the state is well within the national average. "Asbestos was there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and that has not translated into negative health effects," said Dr. Ihsan Azzam, the state epidemiologist. Brenda Buck and Rodney Metcalf found asbestos on rocks and soil near Las Vegas. Isaac Brekken for The New York Times Naturally occurring asbestos deposits are not uncommon, and in past decades, particularly rich veins were mined for commercial use. It proved to be a dangerous occupation: Asbestos fibers travel easily through the air and are easily inhaled, scientists later found, embedding themselves in the lungs. Once there, even in modest amounts, the fibers set off a cascade of inflammatory effects that can lead decades later to lung cancer, mesothelioma and other respiratory ailments. One study conducted a few years ago found that one fifth of the residents of Libby, Mont., the site of a large vermiculite mining operation, sustained asbestos related lung diseases. Many never worked in the mines. The Environmental Protection Agency designated the area a Superfund site in 2002 and, with the Department of Health and Human Services, declared a public health emergency there in 2009. The growing body of research into asbestos exposure inspired Dr. Buck and Dr. Metcalf to take a closer look at their home state. In October 2013, they published a study finding that natural asbestos bearing mineral deposits were abundant in the region, from the southern shore of Lake Mead to the edges of the McCullough Range. In a follow up analysis, Dr. Metcalf and Dr. Buck reported that asbestos fibers around Boulder City and the eastern part of Henderson and Las Vegas were similar in shape and size to those sickening people in Libby. And last month, the two geologists published a paper showing that a continuous swath of natural asbestos runs from Nevada into neighboring Arizona. The findings have already had consequences. The Nevada Department of Transportation delayed construction of a 490 million highway project, called the Boulder City Bypass, after learning that it would run through an area that the scientists had found to be rich in asbestos. After seven months, an analysis concluded that while asbestos was ubiquitous in the area (found in all 150 soil samples), the levels were low enough for workers to proceed safely with the construction. Still, the state D.O.T. plans to proceed with protective measures, such as watering down the roadbed and continual air monitoring. Plans for a federal interstate highway connecting Las Vegas and Phoenix may also be affected. The suggested route would cut through the asbestos deposits in Arizona recently identified by Dr. Metcalf and Dr. Buck. No one has suggested that naturally occurring asbestos is causing an epidemic of cancer in southern Nevada. The question is whether exposure to the mineral may be contributing in unrecognized, perhaps preventable ways. In her original review of data from the state cancer registry, Dr. Baumann says she found an unusual number of mesothelioma cases in younger residents and in women in the affected areas. The disease usually occurs in older men, after years of on the job exposure. Dr. Baumann thought the pattern she observed suggested an environmental exposure to asbestos at an early age. She submitted an abstract describing the research to the Geological Society of America and was to present it at the group's national meeting in 2012. But when the Nevada health department was alerted to the presentation, the state health officer, Dr. Tracey Green, invoked a clause in an agreement signed by Dr. Baumann, which allowed the health department to approve any scientific publication resulting from access granted to the state cancer registry. In a letter, Dr. Green demanded that the abstract be taken off the website, and the presentation was canceled. "If you choose not to retract the abstract or to decide to publish other manuscripts based on the statistics that you were provided, you may incur legal liabilities for your conduct," Dr. Green wrote. Denied access to Nevada's cancer registry, Dr. Baumann and her colleagues turned to cancer data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for confirmation. On Tuesday, they published a study in The Journal of Thoracic Oncology finding elevated rates of mesothelioma among adults under age 55 in southern Nevada and concluding that it may be linked to exposure to naturally occurring asbestos. Some of the cases were teenagers, the authors reported, and the disease is occurring more frequently among women in southern Nevada than elsewhere. The research seems likely to provoke a fresh round of debate in a region that is home to a rapidly growing population. But the researchers say that is the way science should work. "I've always thought that with public health research, the important thing is getting information into the open and then discussing it," Dr. Baumann said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Four different booklets in special editions of her new album contain reproductions of handwritten journals that reveal what Swift wants us to see and what she doesn't. On Friday, when Taylor Swift released her seventh album, "Lover," she didn't just deliver 18 songs into the digital ether. As one of the few remaining pop stars to prioritize physical sales, Swift offered her devoted fan base four special edition CD versions of the album, available exclusively at Target, each accompanied by a booklet containing a reprinted selection of handwritten journal entries spanning her career, from ages 13 to 27. Instead of collectible fluff, the result, for any close reader of Swift's work, is a meticulously curated glimpse into the artist's real time feelings on an array of issues, people, ideas and squabbles that have defined her life as a musician and celebrity. "I frequently and drastically changed my opinions on love, friends, confidence and trust," she notes in the introduction to the selections, and then proceeds to show just how. Across the four unique assortments, Swift tells a piecemeal story of her rise in the industry, where label meetings as a young teenager turn into radio play, record sales, the Grammy Awards and the Met Gala, mixing landmark moments with mundane personal updates, drafts of lyrics and other marginalia. JOE COSCARELLI Jon, I have to come right out and say that after reading the "Lover" booklets multiple times as if they were Tina Brown's "Vanity Fair Diaries," I can't help but be borderline hyperbolic: Nearly a decade and a half into Swift's career, which includes seven varyingly diaristic albums and countless hours in the public eye, these carefully selected and expertly pruned diary pages might somehow be the single most revealing cumulative artifact when it comes to establishing what kind of person, artist and operator Taylor Swift has become and has always been. I'm not sure she'll ever need a memoir if she has hundreds more of these pages lying around. Like the best pop culture ephemera, the entries feel like a skeleton key to an Established Persona in ways both intentional and not, leaving the reader to wonder exactly how much self awareness is involved at any given moment. Most often, the answer is obviously a lot every page feels designed to address a running theme or controversy in Swift's career, from her endless ambition to her obsession with fairy tale love to her anxiety around performance to newer narratives, like her struggles with her body image. But then there are selections that feel so telling, vulnerable and formative that you wonder how such a careful, politician like celebrity could be so casually, unceasingly herself. Because of course there's an entry decrying how the internet was making young people less present in the moment. (Was there also one not included talking about how awesome it is?) Of course there's an entry from when she was still shopping for a record deal where she says she was told that, in country music, "Radio just doesn't play teens," which we now know is false (at least, if that teen is named Taylor Swift). These are tiny firecrackers designed to spark empathy, to make any right minded person sign up to wage Taylor's battles right alongside her. The pandemic has been a time of renewal and reinvention for Taylor Swift. After releasing two quarantine albums, the singer is in the process of releasing the rerecordings of her first six albums. None A Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift's rerecordings: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, "Folklore" and "Evermore." In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of "Fearless (Taylor's Version)," the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose. Reshifting the Power: The new 10 minute version of a bitter breakup song from 2012 can be seen as a woman's attempt to fix an unbalanced relationship by weaponizing memories. COSCARELLI As far as her relationship to technology goes, Swift does call a new iPhone her "soul mate" at age 18. Could we ever have been so innocent? Don't get me wrong, more than half the fun of reading these is gut checking myself on when, exactly, I'm being spun or manipulated, which is exactly how I feel about her best lyrics (and most great art). The earliest stuff included is in many ways the most impactful for me, because it leaves you feeling as if things could not have ever turned out any differently than they have. A couple of sentences about Swift's first day of eighth grade in Wyomissing, Pa., from 2003 , have all the drive, eagerness, defensiveness, perceived ostracization and earnest optimism we've come to expect: "I think my teacher's gonna give me a spotlight solo in chorus! This year could be fun. I don't care what people think of me now because I won't let them bring me down." Or elsewhere, also from age 13: "I guess I'm just not good enough for people my own age. OR maybe I'm not bad enough?" The next year, she gives a big "I 3 SCHOOL!" but only on the day of the talent show, where Swift writes that she "got a standing ovation and everything." CARAMANICA Those early entries shook me as well, largely for their prescience here was a teenager with uncommon drive, fully formed ambition, and the wherewithal to write it all down, as if anticipating the needs of fans, scholars and The New York Times. Imagine, after attending your first Met Gala, having the patience and presence of mind to write a diary entry about everything that happened, including that Jon Bon Jovi said hello. COSCARELLI Not only said hello, but "(who called me over to talk to him)" crucial parenthetical! For someone who has long been accused by her least generous critics of having a victim or persecution complex, as well as a ruthless corporate spirit, it feels borderline defiant to have included some of this stuff. Though I do wonder if the physical nature of these documents and the scavenger hunt aspect of collecting them all a barrier to entry that could keep out all but the most completist fans allowed Swift to know she would be reaching an overwhelmingly sympathetic audience. CARAMANICA The diary entries from 2003 06 aren't simply the loose musings of a young singer with big dreams and, suddenly, the opportunity and resources to pursue them. They also capture the mercenary instincts of the teenage Taylor. Two of the entries begin with her noting her song placements on the Mediabase and Billboard charts. It all made me a little sad? The teen years are ruthless without the additional pressure of attempting to infiltrate a corporate ecosystem not at all designed for you. In May 2003, she's practically hyperventilating on the way to Nashville to audition for labels: "I'm okay. I'll be fine. I'm young. I'm talented. They'll see it in me. I'll be okay. I've got to hang on. Can't worry. I'm only 13. I'm allowed to make mistakes, right?" By 19, she's journaling about management: "I gave everyone in the band raises." Her crew included 72 people: "Bonused everybody." COSCARELLI We should probably talk about the weight and dieting moments, as well. Body image is not something that has traditionally been thought of as a Swiftian subject, but it's something that she's begun touching on in interviews and public statements and that's really prevalent here. She writes about visiting New York and stopping with her mother at a Tasti D Lite, the faux ice cream shop that was a favorite of Carrie Bradshaw. Swift raves about it as "kosher, noncholesterol, extremely tasty, dreamy frozen yogurt and only 40 calories. Does it get any better than that?" She was 13. CARAMANICA I felt a similar way when, at 13, she wrote about a Code Red drill at her school, which seems like an oblique nod at the current gun control debate, and the ways in which the specter of gun violence has become a reality hanging over American children. COSCARELLI In this age of celebrities controlling so much of their own narratives via social media, self helmed multimedia projects and an anemic press, I found these relatively raw, primary source documents to be a far richer personal text than, say, a Beyonce documentary or even Swift's own public writing, like her "30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30" listicle. And o bviously it takes a certain type of person to write things privately that seem from the jump to be designed for posterity, for history, for public consumption, but it feels almost throwback in the way it nods to Important Artists like Springsteen or Dylan donating their archives to major institutions. CARAMANICA I dare Bob Dylan to donate his teenage diaries to a museum! Also we've spoken so much about how we're waiting for Taylor to make her Joni Mitchell "Blue" album and there's an entry here where she cops to teaching herself to play the Appalachian dulcimer because that's what Joni played on that album. We see you, Taylor. COSCARELLI: And she mentions teaching herself to play "A Case of You," which felt like an allusion to the writer Bob Lefsetz, a longtime Swift antagonist, claiming that he was the one to introduce Taylor to Joni's music. Even as a pure P.R. exercise, the diary includes the sort of tactical sophistication I want from an artist of this size and caliber. There are two drafts of the lyrics for "All Too Well" that cement it as some of her strongest writing; and a tease of an entry pure wide eyed naivete about Kanye interrupting her at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards that cuts off before she gets to anything truly juicy. Then there's the last page of the Version 2 booklet, from August 2016, right after Kim Kardashian West detonated her Snapchat/snake emoji gossip bomb, that just reads: "This summer is the apocalypse," and nothing more. That's just great zine making. Sometimes, though, the kind she leans in to is telling, and brutal. I'm thinking of the casual allusions to Scott Borchetta, who recently sold Big Machine Records and with it, the masters to the first six Taylor Swift albums to Ithaca Holdings, the company led by Scooter Braun, who Taylor perceives as an enemy for his long association with Kanye West. In these entries, Borchetta is portrayed as a good guy, the one record executive who believed in her early they're source documents entered into evidence as proof of good faith. But Taylor isn't including these entries to absolve him she's including them to damn him. (He posted a pic on his Instagram nonetheless.) She does this, too, with the conservative country singer John Rich, who assailed her last year for her support of the Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen, but who at the end of the 2000s was someone she looked up to, and eventually wrote songs with. COSCARELLI In a lot of ways, it's a callback to the way she used to leave codes in her album's lyric booklets that gave more cryptic context and encouraged listeners to match the scenarios to real life events. These mentions aren't nearly as subtle. I also enjoyed the self effacing moments, like when she writes on Grammys' eve 2014: "Never have I felt so good about our chances. Never have I wanted something as badly as I want to hear them say 'Red' is the Album of the Year." Swift, of course, has won album of the year twice, but didn't that time; instead, there was the semi viral moment of her celebrating preemptively as Alicia Keys, accompanied by Yoko Ono, announced "'Rrr ... andom Access Memories,' Daft Punk" as the winner. CARAMANICA: I should say that I've maybe never been more impressed with Taylor than I was reading the 2014 entries that suggest that her total time between deciding to move to New York and being essentially fully moved in was under three months. Meanwhile, your favorite pop star has her assistant bookmarking StreetEasy listings that she never clicks on. But even after all this, there's one question that's still nagging at me. What if the entries are all ... deepfakes? COSCARELLI Then they're the most realistic ones I've seen yet.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
FRANKFURT Even in an era of bad banking deals, the case of Bayerische Landesbank, a bank based in Munich, stands out. Its ill fated attempt to expand in Eastern Europe has cost Bavarian taxpayers 3.7 billion euros ( 5.4 billion). It has also led to a criminal investigation of the bank's former chief executive, which included the spectacle of Munich police and prosecutors raiding offices of an institution whose supervisory board is stacked with local politicians. The criminal investigation is a new twist in the troubled history of Germany's state owned banks, but the sizable losses are not. Even before the most recent scandal, the Bayerische Landesbank, known as BayernLB, had required a taxpayer bailout equal to a quarter of the state's annual budget, in part caused by investments placed with banks in Iceland. Taxpayers in Baden Wurttemberg and Hamburg have also had to pump billions into their state owned banks. In North Rhine Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, WestLB in Dusseldorf needed 8 billion euros in government grants and loan guarantees to stay afloat after making disastrous investments that included derivatives tied to subprime mortgages in the United States. The Landesbank rescues reminiscent of the financial crises at American backed lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have placed a serious burden on German state governments already suffering from slumping tax revenue, as well as the federal government, which is helping to cover some losses. "They wasted billions that we could have spent on schools, police and streets," said Inge Aures, deputy chairwoman of a Landesbank oversight committee in the Bavarian legislature, referring to BayernLB. But the problems of the Landesbanks could turn out to benefit the fragmented commercial banking sector, which has long struggled to produce global players. Rivals, economists and European Union antitrust regulators have long complained that the state banks enjoy unfair advantages over commercial banks because they can raise money more cheaply, because of their implicit government backing. The public sector institutions are a major reason Germany's big banks have the lowest profit margins, on average, in Western Europe, even though Germany is the largest economy. Now, though, the Landesbanks are being forced to scale back operations to survive, creating more space for Deutsche Bank and other private sector institutions. "The prospects for private banks will improve because the competition won't be as severe," said Dirk Schiereck, a professor of banking at the Technical University of Darmstadt. He estimates the Landesbanks will have to shrink their assets by half compared with 2008. The German economics minister, Rainer Bruderle, told Der Tagesspiegel, the Berlin daily, in an interview published on Jan. 4 that the country needed only one Landesbank, rather than the seven it now has. But such severe consolidation is unlikely any time soon, because local politicians are reluctant to give up control over their Landesbanks, a potent source of influence in the local economy. A prosecutor is investigating fraud charges against Werner Schmidt, former BayernLB chief. There is also a risk that borrowing costs for companies could rise if there is less competition from the state banks one reason that politicians will resist privatizing the banks. However, they may be chastened enough by the recent losses to support mergers with other state owned banks. "The political will to support mergers is higher than it has ever been," said Katharina Barten, a senior analyst at Moody's Investors Service, who added that she expected consolidation to take several years. The losses, however, are already forcing the banks to focus more on their main business lending to local companies. Landesbanks account for about a quarter of all commercial lending in Germany, more than Deutsche Bank and the other big private banks combined. In recent years, institutions like BayernLB and WestLB opened branches overseas and moved into investment banking, with disastrous results. "Those times are over," said Peter Altmiks, an economist at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, a research group in Potsdam with ties to the pro business FDP party. "The majority of state governments have no ambitions to build these big banks anymore." Commercial bankers say the state supported banks have an unfair advantage because they face less pressure to be profitable and, with the state as owners, enjoy better credit ratings than their balance sheets would normally justify. While conceding that some reforms are needed, Landesbank representatives argue that the institutions are essential, especially in hard times, because they provide capital to the midsize companies that drive the German economy. "One Landesbank wouldn't be enough," said Stephan Rabe, a spokesman for the Association of German Public Sector Banks. Advocates also point out that private sector institutions like Hypo Real Estate Holding and Commerzbank have required government aid. Pressure on the Landesbanks is also coming from European Union antitrust authorities. Regulators set harsh terms in return for approving a rescue plan for WestLB, obligating the bank to unload risky assets and cut its balance sheet in half to about 140 billion euros. The state of North Rhine Westphalia and other shareholders in WestLB, once Germany's largest public sector bank with offices around the world, must also sell the bank to another Landesbank or a private sector institution by the end of 2011, meaning it will cease to exist as an independent institution. And the bank must give up high risk activities like using its own capital to trade in securities markets. The European Commission is not opposed to public ownership of banks in principle, said Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for Neelie Kroes, the European competition commissioner. "Our concern is that the banks should be viable without further injections of public money," he said. Mr. Bruderle's call for Landesbank consolidation came amid new accusations involving BayernLB and its 2007 acquisition of the Hypo Group Alpe Adria, an Austrian institution with holdings in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and other countries in Eastern Europe. The Munich prosecutor's office has confirmed that it is investigating possible fraud charges against the former Landesbank chief executive, Werner Schmidt, in connection with the price paid for Alpe Adria. Mr. Schmidt was forced out in early 2008. In October, about 100 law enforcement authorities seized documents during a raid of Landesbank offices in Munich.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
This month's conversation in our series exploring religion and death is with , who has been a member of the department of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego since 2007. Her research and teaching focus on the essential beliefs of Christianity and the theological engagement with the problems of racism and white supremacy. She is the author of "Racism and the Image of God." George Yancy George Yancy: I'd like to start with a personal question. What does it mean for you to embody the teachings of Roman Catholicism? : I grew up Catholic, and I continue to practice Catholicism not out of obligation but because I claim it as my home. I try to live faithfully by what is highest and best in my church. This actually means that my allegiance is not first and foremost to the Roman Catholic Church, a human and imperfect institution, but to Jesus and to his God of love and justice. So, for me, embodying the teachings of my church means trying to love deeply, to live with integrity, to treat every person as beloved by God, and therefore to work passionately for justice in the world. One way that I have chosen to demonstrate fidelity to my church is by raising my children Catholic. I want them to know in their bones what it means to belong to a faith community, so that when they grow up that is a real option for them. Embodying the teachings of Catholicism means living the truth that I believe, and really believing that this is the truth, while respecting and honoring the fact that others also live according to what they believe is true. Yancy: What do you consider some of the essential teachings of Roman Catholicism? Teel: Roman Catholics share the basic beliefs that all Christians hold in common. We believe that God is a Trinity, one god in three persons. We proclaim that Jesus saves. And we use the Bible, both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, as our sacred text. For me, the most important distinctively Catholic belief is the Eucharist. My church teaches that when we celebrate communion, Jesus becomes present in the bread and wine that we share. The way the people come together every week to be nourished by this concrete reminder of God's presence with us in the struggle is really beautiful. Yancy: We are concentrating in these discussions on learning about and understanding religious conceptions of death. How is the reality of death conceptualized in your faith? Teel: Death is conceptualized as a transition from this life into eternal life. Christianity teaches that God is eternal; this world came from God and will eventually return to God. In that sense, this life is temporary. Moreover, God created humans with immortal souls, so the death of a human being is not the end. The body dies while the soul continues to live. When this world comes to an end, Christianity teaches, Jesus, who has already been raised from the dead, will return to oversee the general resurrection of the dead and the last judgment. The bodies of those who have died will be resurrected rendered alive anew in a glorious, immortal state and reunited with our souls. The bodies of those who have not yet died also will be transformed into this new state. And Jesus will separate us into two groups, those who will be eternally rewarded and those who will be punished. Christians traditionally believe that heaven is where God is and hell is where God is not, but I like the idea, suggested in the teaching of one of my graduate school professors, Father Michael Himes, that we may all have the same destiny to spend eternity being loved by God. For those who want God's love, this will be heaven; for those who don't, it will be hell. For Christians, everything that God created is good, and God will not allow anything that is good to pass away. We are never alone, in this life or in eternity. The death of a loved one brings profound sadness. But it is a temporary separation; we hope and believe that we will see each other again. Death is not a separation from God but a return to God. When a Christian dies, we say that they have gone to be with God. And when we die, we will join them. Yancy: This all seems to work out well for faithful Christians, but what about atheists? Should they fear death? Teel: No more than anyone else. In the 1960s, the Catholic Church's teaching on non Christian religions developed beyond the ancient notion that only Christians could be saved. Now the church teaches that, under certain conditions, people who do not identify as Christians may be saved. Personally, I believe that whenever a person does their best to live rightly, according to the principles they know to be true, God honors that effort. Nothing good will be lost. Yancy: Speaking of atheism, I read recently that cosmologist Stephen Hawking said, "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail." He also added, "There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." How do you respond to the charge that Christians who believe in an afterlife are just really afraid of the dark, that is, afraid of facing the inevitability of nothingness? Teel: That's very logical. I can see why a nonbeliever might think that. The question here is whether we are going to allow people to be the authorities on what they feel. When my mother was 59, she was diagnosed with A.L.S., Lou Gehrig's disease. Hawking had it too. There's no cure for A.L.S. It's a neurological disease in which the mind usually remains sharp, but the voluntary muscles gradually stop working, leaving you totally dependent on others. Hawking lived for decades after his diagnosis; most people live two to five years. My mother lived for three years. During Mom's last weeks especially after she asked us to stop feeding her, when we took turns sitting with her around the clock, so that she would not die alone I realized two things: She was going to die soon, and I believed that I would see her again. This had nothing to do with being afraid of losing her. I was losing her. We had known for three years, with reasonable and devastating certainty, the precise manner in which we were going to lose her. But I also believed, with a conviction I had never before felt, that she would not cease to exist upon her death. She was going to join her parents, and one day I would see them all again. Before facing my mother's death, I never really knew that I believed that life continues. I still don't expect others to believe it. But I know it as I know the sun will come up in the morning, as I know I'll get wet in the rain, as I know I love my own children. It isn't about fear. It's a gift and a mystery, this conviction that we come from love and we return to love. Yancy: That is a powerful story and I thank you for sharing it. How do we explain the fact that even Christians continue to fear death despite the fact that they believe that there is so much more after we die? Teel: Well, Christians hope to go to heaven, but ultimately it's not up to us. Perhaps the outcome of the last judgment will not be in our favor, or a loved one won't make it. That's a pretty terrifying scenario. Then again, some of us probably imagine that heaven will be boring because we will no longer be doing any of the exciting stuff that we had feared might land us in hell. Change is scary, and death is a big change. Many ways of dying involve pain. Even if we expect a good death and something better beyond, this life is familiar and beloved, and we are in no hurry to go. We also fear for the loved ones we leave behind. Who will take care of them when we're gone? Yancy: It has occurred to me at times that the atheist belief expressed by Hawking that there is no afterlife, that there is nothing after we die, might have an upside of adding value to our current lives. For example, I might treat people differently knowing that I will never see them after this life. Given that, do you think believing that one will exist forever could negatively impact how one lives in the present? Teel: I suppose there are Christians who use their hope of heaven as an excuse to be lazy or immoral, though I don't know very many. More common, and more problematic, is our tendency to look down on people who don't believe what we do. Yet believing that life ends at death can also lead to nihilism, or to treating people horribly. Neither belief guarantees good character. Yancy: Do you think that people lose anything by taking an atheist stance? And if they don't, why should they invest in the belief that we exist beyond the grave? Teel: I'm not terribly interested in convincing others to believe what I do about life after death. I may turn out to be wrong; and anyway, whatever is going to happen will happen whether or not anyone believes in it. I'm much more interested in working to make our world more just. In this life we have right now, people are suffering. This is not new. In his "Urbi et Orbi" blessing in March, Pope Francis, praying with the world from a dark and empty St. Peter's Square, suggested that perhaps we can learn from the pandemic what we have failed to learn from war, injustice, poverty and environmental catastrophe: We need each other. If God is love, then we must do everything we can to reduce one another's suffering, now and always. In fact, Jesus says that God cares far more about whether we do that than about whether we invoke God as our reason to do it. So, if believing in life after death motivates you, great. If not, then let's find another reason, pick a cause, and get to work. Yancy: You say that your views on death and the afterlife could turn out to be wrong. If so if death were in fact final would it render life meaningless for you? Teel: No. I don't believe that life matters because it continues. I believe that life continues because it matters. If it doesn't continue, it still matters. We love each other imperfectly, yet love remains. My mother's love for me did not begin or end with her. She could love me because others loved her, they could love her because they had been loved, and so on. Her love is with me now. And it will continue, through me, through everyone I love, through everyone they love, long after we are all forgotten. Whether I actually see my mom again, in the specific way I anticipate, doesn't change that. As love, we live forever, we always will have lived. George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. His latest book is "Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher." Now in print: "Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments," and "The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments," with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books. 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
Just six months ago, American media outlets presented a sunny side up portrait of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia as he made a good will tour of New York, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Eager journalists captured him at Starbucks with Michael R. Bloomberg, strolling the Google grounds with Sergey Brin and dining with Rupert Murdoch. Built into the narrative was a mostly cheerful acceptance of the story Crown Prince Mohammed was selling about himself that here, at last, was the modern Middle Eastern leader the West had been waiting for. That story started to crack apart on Oct. 2, when the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a sharp critic of the Saudi government, walked into the country's consulate in Istanbul and didn't walk out. Last week, American intelligence officials found supporting evidence for Turkish assessments that Mr. Khashoggi, who lived as an exile in Virginia and wrote opinion columns for The Washington Post, was murdered at the hands of the Saudis, who deny involvement. Fred Ryan, the publisher of The Post, called Mr. Khashoggi's disappearance a likely case of "state sponsored, cold blooded murder." The apparent hit was part of a progression that was underway long before Crown Prince Mohammed's charm campaign, which made him out to be not some ruthless royal, but a youthful reformer who had granted Saudi women the right to drive and lifted the country's 35 year ban on movie theaters (a potential jackpot for Hollywood). The rebranding effort also made it easier for United States businesses to tap into the billions the crown prince controlled in the Saudi Public Investment Fund. As it happened, the fund was seeking stakes in the American entertainment and media companies that mint mythologies and own the news. So there was Crown Prince Mohammad at an April soiree at Mr. Murdoch's vineyard in Bel Air, Calif. Guests included the Walt Disney Company's chairman, Robert A. Iger; the studio chief at Warner Bros., Kevin Tsujihara; and the actors Morgan Freeman and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who overshared on Instagram that he was "blown away to be told about the level of love the Saudi people have for me." As the guest of honor at a Page Six worthy dinner at the producer Brian Grazer's Santa Monica home, the crown prince discussed Snapchat's popularity in his kingdom with the Snap chief Evan Spiegel;Vice's Shane Smith; Amazon's chief and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and the agent turned mogul Ari Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel, an organizer of the evening, had reason to celebrate: the Saudis planned a 400 million investment in Endeavor, his entertainment holding company. (In light of Mr. Khashoggi's disappearance, Endeavor is reassessing the deal, according to a person with knowledge of Mr. Emanuel's thinking, who shared it only on condition of anonymity.) Vanity Fair noted at the time that the festivities were not marred by talk of civilian deaths in Yemen from Saudi led airstrikes; the crown prince's "anti corruption" move to imprison scores of Saudi businessmen, including the owners of Saudi television networks and key rivals, at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton; or the five year prison sentence the Saudi royal court handed the journalist Saleh al Shehi for criticizing the government. The embrace between the American establishment and the leader known as M.B.S. was set to continue in Riyadh later this month at a business conference hosted by Crown Prince Mohammed. The sponsors, partners and participants of the conference known informally as "Davos In The Desert" included a number of media companies: CNBC, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, CNN and Fox Business Network. More business executives have canceled plans to attend the Saudi investment conference. With the exception of Fox, which is reviewing its participation, all of those organizations pulled out as the Khashoggi story climbed most viewed article lists and drew cable coverage. The story's popularity was helped along by its thriller like qualities, which included the allegation that the journalist's body was dismembered with the aid of a bone saw before it was removed from the consulate. Sherif Mansour, the director of the committee's Middle East and North Africa program, told me he took a dim view of the news media's more credulous accounts of Crown Prince Mohammed. "We have been beside ourselves," Mr. Mansour said. He added that the Saudis' "reform claims were merely a sham." Not everyone fell for the hype, though. In April, a clear eyed New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins highlighted the Saudi "crackdown on what remained of the country's independent press and pro reform groups." The story included an ominous quote about the crown prince from Mr. Khashoggi: "He can do whatever he wants now," he said. "All the checks and balances are gone." It would have made for jarring reading for anyone whose knowledge of the crown prince came from a glossy magazine called The New Kingdom that mysteriously appeared on newsstands ahead of his visit. It was 100 pages of Saudi cotton candy, filled with splashy photos of the crown prince smiling serenely beneath his checkered headgear here, shaking hands with President Trump there. The publication called him a "decisive leader prepared to back words with action."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The Dolphins Appear to Be Relevant. How About That? None The Miami Dolphins were arguably the N.F.L.'s least relevant team from the turn of the 21st century until two Sundays ago. They were never truly great during that span, but were rarely terrible enough to be comically entertaining, either. They produced few stars or personalities and fewer memorable moments. The Dolphins of the last two decades appeared to exist solely to provide a place holder in the A.F.C. East standings to visibly illustrate the chasm between the New England Patriots and the Jets. All of that was beginning to change when the rookie quarterback Tua Tagovailoa made his highly anticipated debut as a starter on Nov. 1 against the Los Angeles Rams. The Dolphins have won two straight games with Tagovailoa leading their offense and are now enjoying their first four game winning streak since 2016. Tagovailoa has been solid but unspectacular in his first two starts. His two touchdown performance in Sunday's 34 31 victory over the Arizona Cardinals was encouraging, but he did little in his first start except hold the steering wheel and sit in his defense's lap while it forced four turnovers. Tagovailoa makes the Dolphins interesting, but it's second year head coach Brian Flores who is making the team competitive. The Dolphins spent the 15 seasons between the slow collapse of the Jimmy Johnson and Dave Wannstedt eras and Flores's arrival operating at cross purposes. The organization cycled through head coaches (Nick Saban, Cam Cameron, Tony Sparano, Joe Philbin, Adam Gase, and some temps) and personnel executives (Randy Mueller, Bill Parcells and his lieutenants, Dennis Hickey, and Dan Marino for three not so memorable weeks) to a syncopated rhythm that sometimes resulted in head coaches working for general managers who did not hire them while trying to win with quarterbacks whom neither selected. By the time one regime swept away the previous regime's decisions, a third regime was often poised to exert itself. The years of friction and indecision trapped the team in a holding pattern. The Dolphins finished between 6 10 and 8 8 10 times since 2006, reaching the playoffs just twice and only winning the A.F.C. East in 2008, when Tom Brady's anterior cruciate ligament injury forced the Patriots to take a gap year. Under Flores, center, and Grier, right, Miami now possesses the type of "winning culture" that N.F.L. insiders like to compose refrigerator magnet poetry about. Chris Grier became general manager in 2016 and hired Flores after consolidating control over football operations in 2019. Grier was a Parcells protege who spent 20 years climbing the Dolphins organizational chart, and Flores had worked his way up from a Patriots scouting assistant to Bill Belichick's de facto defensive coordinator. Yet despite their resumes, there was reason to be skeptical of the Grier/Flores administration: Grier was a lifer in an organization that appeared to need fresh voices, and Belichick's disciples have a well earned reputation for inheriting all of their mentor's dictatorial grouchiness but none of his wisdom. Sure enough, the Dolphins began the 2019 season with seven straight losses, the first four by a combined margin of 163 26. There appeared to be a silver lining though: The Dolphins were positioning themselves to select Tagovailoa, who helped the University of Alabama win the national championship in 2017, threw 43 touchdown passes while leading them back to the title game after the 2018 season and was considered a can't miss prospect by most experts. Tagovailoa suffered a severe hip injury last November, causing his draft stock to dip. Flores began leading the Dolphins to occasional victories at about the same time. Enjoying just enough success to sabotage their future draft opportunities would be very on brand for the Dolphins, but Flores was rewarded for his late season effort to salvage the team's dignity when a healthy Tagovailoa remained on the board until the fifth overall pick in the draft in April. Celebrity journeyman for hire Ryan Fitzpatrick started the first six games of this season while Tagovailoa completed his N.F.L. orientation. Fitzpatrick then sparked a minor controversy by complaining about his demotion, which came before he could earn his customary annual benching after a multi interception meltdown. Flores appears to have changed quarterbacks at the proper time, however: Tagovailoa looks as prepared as any rookie, and there have been no signs of any locker room division. Flores projects a very different image from other recent Belichick proteges. Detroit Lions Coach Matt Patricia, who upstaged Belichick in the mid 2010s by strutting along the sideline with a pencil behind his ear like Kevin Smith directing "Jay and Silent Bob Take the SATs," has developed a reputation for alienating star players by enforcing petty rules. Bill O'Brien, famous for his in your face approach with Brady (who was already a superstar when O'Brien began coaching him), spent six years demolishing the Houston Texans roster and front office before getting fired in October. Flores, by contrast, appears to practice the process driven, detail oriented, even tempered approach that Belichick and the Patriots have long preached. The Dolphins are not close to being Super Bowl contenders yet. There are two rookies starting on their offensive line, their defense is bulwarked by Patriots castoffs, and Tagovailoa will inevitably experience some growing pains. But the youngsters are developing and the veterans are playing fundamentally sound football. Furthermore, Grier stockpiled extra first and second round picks in 2021 by trading offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil to the Texans during one of O'Brien's generous moods, so the Dolphins should enjoy a talent infusion next year. The Dolphins now appear to have both a franchise quarterback and the type of "winning culture" that inspires N.F.L. insiders to compose refrigerator magnet poetry. It's not much, but after 20 years of directionless mediocrity, it's finally a start.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
After a couple of rounds of investigation and some soul searching, NASA and Boeing believe that they have identified what went wrong during a troubled test flight of an uncrewed Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts. In addition to the software errors that slipped through undetected and were not fixed before the spacecraft was launched in December, NASA officials admitted that decades of working with Boeing gave them a level of trust. As a result, it might not have been paying attention to the company as closely as it should have while it was also placing more scrutiny on SpaceX, which also built a capsule for carrying people to the space station. "We were, I would say, a little more used to the Boeing process," Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program, said during a news conference on Tuesday. "It's one that we have used in the past on successful NASA programs like space shuttle and the International Space Station." Instead of building and operating its own spacecraft to take astronauts to space as it has in the past, NASA has hired two private companies Boeing and SpaceX, the aerospace newcomer started by Elon Musk to provide transportation to and from the International Space Station. "We may have been focused a little more on SpaceX because they use a bit of a nontraditional approach to their software development," Mr. Stich said. "And so we may have had a few more people looking at that." Last month, SpaceX successfully launched two NASA astronauts, Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, to the space station in its Crew Dragon capsule. The two astronauts are in orbit working on experiments and maintenance of the space station and will attempt a return trip in the SpaceX vessel later this year. If Boeing's December test flight of its spacecraft, called Starliner, had gone as planned, a demonstration flight with two astronauts aboard similar to Mr. Behnken and Mr. Hurley's voyage would most likely have occurred by now. Instead, Boeing will now repeat the uncrewed test, perhaps late this year, with a crewed flight delayed until next year. In addition to an investigation of what went wrong technically, NASA officials also declared what is known as "high visibility close call" to examine whether there were any blind spots within NASA that led to its overlooking Boeing's issues. Kathy Lueders, who was recently appointed associate administrator of the agency's human exploration and operations directorate, said that NASA, as part of efforts to reduce costly bureaucratic overhead, had not asked Boeing or SpaceX for a high level management plan for how complex pieces of engineering would be put together and tested. But that lack of knowledge meant that NASA did not fully understand how Boeing was designing the Starliner's software and the testing process for verifying that it would work as intended. "We thought we understood it, but we ended up finding out that over time, that kind of changed," Ms. Lueders said. She also said that for the December test flight, NASA had focused on the highest priorities, in particular ensuring that Starliner did not pose any danger to the space station as it approached, and that might have caused software engineering to receive less attention. "Where do you apply the resources to make sure that you're getting kind of the biggest bang for your buck, to be able to really flesh out where you have problems in your systems?" she said. NASA is now overseeing software development more closely at both SpaceX and Boeing. The Starliner spacecraft, launched on top of an Atlas 5 rocket on Dec. 20, encountered two major software problems during its flight. The first occurred minutes after the spacecraft had separated from the rocket, because the capsule's clock had been set wrong. That caused the spacecraft to squander its propellant, and a planned docking at the International Space Station was called off. Starliner also experienced a communications problem that prevented mission controllers from quickly regaining control. An investigation revealed that the spacecraft's radio receiver had been listening to too wide a swath of frequencies, which led to interference from other transmissions from Earth. Boeing engineers have added a filter to limit the frequencies. The second software flaw would have fired the wrong thrusters as Starliner was preparing for re entry. As Boeing engineers hastily combed through the Starliner software in the aftermath of the clock problem, they found that problem and fixed it. If it had not been fixed, two pieces of Starliner the capsule that returns to Earth and the service module, which is discarded might have collided. The capsule might have tumbled and burned up in the atmosphere instead of landing safely in White Sands, N.M.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
It wasn't only that it was also a sophisticated suburban married life comedy powered by the how were we ever so lucky pairing of Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. But the workplace half of this hybrid, about Rob Petrie's experiences in the pressure cooker writers' room of the fictional "Alan Brady Show," set the template for behind the cameras comedies including "30 Rock" and Moore's own self titled show in the 1970s. Carl Reiner was Rob Petrie; the workplace experience and situations drew on his experience as a TV actor and then writer in the 1950s. But he couldn't be Rob Petrie. He tried, playing the lead in the failed 1960 pilot for "Head of the Family." (Audiences, he later said frankly, were too used to seeing him as a "second banana.") Van Dyke's charisma and jack in the box physical comedy as the recast lead gave Reiner a more telegenic avatar. Instead, Reiner became the star within a show, the shouty, egotistic boss who kept Rob dancing on eggshells. The role would not make Reiner a household face. Just the opposite. In the early seasons of the show, Brady held court and berated his writers as shot from behind (or heard from offscreen), so viewers knew him mostly from the back of his bald (or toupeed) head. ("Seinfeld" would echo the device decades later with its depiction of George Steinbrenner, voiced by Larry David and embodied by Lee Bear, his back to the camera.) The device was a masterstroke. It made Reiner's lack of distinction distinctive. He was no longer a second banana but an angry light bulb, radiating his peevish glare on all his underlings. Reiner with a legendary cast at his disposal, including Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie as Rob's writers' room comrades used himself sparingly. But when called on, that bald head shone. Reiner, a performer before he was a writer creator, was often known as a straight man, as when he teed up questions for his pal Brooks in their "2,000 Year Old Man" routine. But as Alan Brady, an outsized tyrant (an ironic role for a man widely eulogized as a mensch), he was everyone's worst boss, and the personification of the new, high stakes medium and business.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Are the Apples becoming must see TV? Their latest episode, "And So We Come Forth," which was performed live on Wednesday and will remain available on YouTube through Aug. 26, had me thinking of the pleasure of sitcoms and the addictiveness of daytime drama. You remember the Apples: that thoughtful, cultured and economically precarious middle class family gathering over dinners in Rhinebeck, N.Y.? We met them when "That Hopey Changey Thing," written and directed by Richard Nelson, opened at the Public Theater on the night of the 2010 midterm elections. Three more in the first series of plays about the family and also about American bewilderment more broadly opened on the dates of significant milestones and anniversaries in the country's history through 2013. The thing about the Apples and then the Gabriels and the Michaels, neighbors who were the subjects of further Nelson plays in what he calls the "Rhinebeck Panorama" is that their own milestones were deeply downplayed. Inverting the strategy of traditional family drama, Nelson focused on the moments between the crises: the intimate microaggressions, the not quite idle chatter, the prickly rapprochements. Divorces, job losses and deaths all happened offstage. The result was a genre nearly new to the theater: inside out soap opera, riveting and relatable but without hokey climaxes. Nelson's direction likewise explored a new extreme of naturalism that went well beyond the kitchen sink to include, among other appliances, the fridge and the oven. Real meals were cooked in real time; you could smell the bread baking. Just as the coronavirus epidemic stopped us from gathering at the Public, it stopped the Apples from gathering for live, in person dinners. Their return for a fifth play in April the sorrowful "What Do We Need to Talk About?" was set (and produced) on Zoom, allowing some 80,000 people to view it since. They discovered Richard Apple, now sheltering with his sister Barbara, who had survived infection; Jane Apple, sequestering in one room of her house while her boyfriend, Tim, recovered in another; and sister Marian, home alone on a street nearby. Their separation and isolation, beautifully rendered by the new aesthetics of Zoom, were heartbreaking. Zoom is where the family remains in "And So We Come Forth," the slightly indulgent but still powerful sixth installment of their story. It finds the Apples, after months of limited contact with the outer world, beginning to lose it over the course of 60 minutes. Nerves are frayed. Dogs are having accidents. The homemade dinners are now Indian takeout (from a real Rhinebeck restaurant called Cinnamon) and, in Jane's case, cereal. Their tetchy turn inward is reflected in the topics of conversation. Barbara, a high school teacher, grouses because her former students have rejected her attempts to buck them up electronically. ("Let's just pause this for now," one texts her.) Richard, a lawyer who works for the state, tells an overlong story about a colleague trying to rescue a dead poet's memorabilia from the dumpster. If Nelson's aim is to replicate the tedium of Corona era discourse, he has done so expertly, trusting in the married actors Jay O. Sanders (as Richard) and Maryann Plunkett (as Barbara) to create profound sibling portraits from sub dramatic dialogue. It makes some sense that the political agony of the country, so key to the previous plays as a counterweight to their apparently narrow concerns, is buried more deeply now. The emotional effects of the epidemic are paramount here, as they are in many families. Not having "touched another human being for over three months," Marian (Laila Robins) has taken to gardening in short shorts and halter tops to attract the attention of a passer by who is either a "gentleman caller" or a stalker. Meanwhile the adverb seems especially apt in a story like this Jane (Sally Murphy) is dreading further disruption of her straitened Rhinebeck life; joining the call by Zoom from his ex wife's apartment in Brooklyn, Tim (Stephen Kunken) informs her and the others that he may have to bring his 18 year old daughter and the daughter's friend, whose parents are abusive to live with them. No one, not even the frightened teenager, wants that, yet once again the family is being buffeted by forces seemingly extraneous to them. It's that seeming extraneousness that leaves me slightly less satisfied with "And So We Come Forth" than I was with any previous Apple iteration. An epidemic does not make a very good antagonist, at least in a family where everyone is now well and in a state that has flattened the curve. The way the family wrangles with it, without regard to its more devastating effects elsewhere, does not tell us much, as all the other plays have done, about what the struggle to be good Americans means. The switch to Zoom, while enhancing the feeling of appointment TV, and doing no harm to the excellence of production, has thus underlined the feeling that the Apples, as subjects of dramatic inquiry, have come unmoored from the world the rest of us live in. It is, after all, on social media, on phones and apps, that the most profound questions of our day are being addressed in real time. "And So We Come Forth" the title comes from Dante's "Inferno" seems to swerve from those questions, even as it embraces their medium. The play, about a white family in a town that is nearly 90 percent white as well, alludes to Black Lives Matter only once and only indirectly, in an amusing anecdote about the siblings' grandmother walking through Harlem in the 1970s. It's telling but, at least for me, not telling enough. Nelson implicitly argues against that sort of litmus test critique in the way he questions but ultimately defends the value of literature, dramatic or otherwise. He admits into evidence, in his typical second cousin once removed style, an email from a friend of the Apples, a Russian born professor who now finds Proust "useless and dated" and Faulkner no longer worthy of curiosity. She blames the internet for having ruined discourse with its Soviet style oversight, its relentless spies "hoping to catch an awkward word or phrase and report it to authorities." True enough and an Apple episode that hit that theme squarely might be quite thrilling. (Richard gets canceled? Jane gets doxxed?) This one, lovely as it is, and despite being a benefit for the Actors Fund, cannot resolve the contradiction between the faith in humanism that has animated the series thus far and the facts on the ground. Seemingly admitting that, it sends us off with an aria from "Cosi Fan Tutte" "Soave sia il vento" as if to reassert, on the evidence of Mozart, the healing or at least the distracting power of art.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Administrative tumult, a prominent snub on the Bucharest National Opera's website and questions over artistic direction have cost the Romanian national ballet company its two biggest stars: Johan Kobborg and Alina Cojocaru. Mr. Kobborg resigned Tuesday as its artistic director and his fiancee, the dancer Ms. Cojocaru, said she would not dance under the current management. Their departures end a period in which the company's global reputation began to rise under the leadership of Mr. Kobborg, a former principal dancer at the Royal Danish Ballet and the Royal Ballet in London who became artistic director a little over two years ago, and through the dancing of Ms. Cojocaru, an international star and principal at the English National Ballet, who was a "permanent guest artist" in her native Bucharest. The trouble began earlier this month when a new interim general manager, Tiberiu Ionut Soare, took over at the opera house, which is home to the ballet. One of his first actions was to remove Mr. Kobborg's title on the website as artistic director of the ballet, and to place him among the company's "artists," a low rank comparable to the corps de ballet in other companies. Mr. Soare's explanation was that the company did not technically have an artistic director position in its administrative structure. But the move was seen in some circles as an attempt to undo the changes the company had made in recent years. It also raised questions about the direction of the company, which is state run, in a time of political upheaval in Romania and about how international it wanted to be. The slight to Mr. Kobborg created an uproar in the dance world, where he is a respected figure, and soon threw the company into tumult, with dancers threatening not to perform and even to leave the company. There was also concern about whether the company would continue to have the legal rights to perform some of the repertory Mr. Kobborg had brought to it. Increasingly bitter accusations were traded back and forth, including on social media. A new interim general manager, Vladimir Conta, was brought in to try to smooth things over, but on Tuesday Mr. Kobborg resigned. "I fear for what the future might bring for the Opera Nationala Bucuresti and for the credibility of Romanian culture and the light in which Romanian culture will be viewed," he wrote in a resignation letter that he posted on social media and then handed in on Tuesday. Mr. Conta, the new interim general manager, lamented Mr. Kobborg's decision to leave, saying in a telephone interview that his contributions there were "significant, and his productions have been successful." "It started with a really unfortunate event, all of which could have been solved easily," he said. "But instead of that it augmented and it augmented and became a scandal." A final straw was how the company handled Ms. Cojocaru's decision not to dance over the weekend in Kenneth MacMillan's "Manon," which the company staged for the first time this month. Ms. Cojocaru had posted on Twitter that she would "be performing ONLY under the management that made this ballet happen for our audience to enjoy, with KOBBORG as our leader!!" Her scheduled partner, Friedemann Vogel, later posted that "Out of respect for KOBBORG and DancingAlina I do not feel it is possible to perform in OperaBucharest under these circumstances." But management announced that she would not appear because her partner was indisposed. Ms. Cojocaru said in an interview that she objected to that announcement, feeling that it was not honest. Mr. Conta said it had been done that way because he believed the official pronouncement should be "short and clear," and that he should be able to elaborate elsewhere. "I am sorry that it happened this way, because I think Alina is one of the greatest dancers in the world," he said. Ms. Cojocaru said she was sorry that the company had lost someone of Mr. Kobborg's talents. "He created a family, and it's something rare in a theater," she said in an interview. "He was a director that, at 12 o'clock at night, would call me wherever I was and say what a fantastic show he'd witnessed, and that he feels maybe, in half a year's time, this company can perform that, and that, and that ballet, because they are getting there. And then he would say, with the repertoire that is growing, we would be able to show this company to the world."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Monique Von Vooren in a London hotel room in 1967. Some people knew her from her films, others from her appearances on game shows like "To Tell the Truth" and "Password." Big city nightclub patrons knew her as a cabaret headliner. Monique Van Vooren, the Belgian born actress and singer whose highly eclectic resume included roles in "Tarzan and the She Devil," "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein," the Pop Art television series "Batman" and "Wall Street," died on Jan. 25 at her home in Manhattan. She was 92. The death was confirmed by Geoffrey Bradfield, a longtime family friend. Ms. Van Vooren found fans in many places. Some American moviegoers knew her from her cult classic films. Others recognized her from her appearances on game shows like "To Tell the Truth" and "Password." Big city nightclub patrons knew her as a cabaret headliner. Her profile photos on Facebook included shots of herself with Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Warhol and David Bowie. In Ms. Van Vooren's youth, writers tended to describe her in terms of her physical attributes at least one referred to her as "40 24 36" reflecting an era when actresses' measurements were a standard feature on their bios. She made her movie debut playing a schoolgirl in "Domani E Troppo Tardi" ("Tomorrow Is Too Late"), a 1950 Italian drama that starred Vittorio De Sica. In her second film (a very American one), "Tarzan and the She Devil" (1953), she played an evil ivory poacher, alongside Lex Barker (as Tarzan) and Raymond Burr. In 1955 she starred in two French crime dramas, "Serie Noire" ("The Infiltrator") and "Ca Va Barder," whose title can be loosely translated as "There'll Be Hell to Pay." Her next role was especially brief. She appeared only in the opening credits of the Dean Martin comedy "Ten Thousand Bedrooms" (1957). Her other films included "Happy Anniversary" (1959), a romantic comedy starring David Niven and Mitzi Gaynor; "Ash Wednesday" (1973), with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; "Sugar Cookies" (1973), a low budget story of erotic games and revenge; and "Flesh for Frankenstein" (1974), also known as "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein." Ms. Van Vooren played the Baroness Frankenstein, who develops feelings for the stable boy (Joe Dallesandro) while her husband is busy creating monsters. Two television roles stood out. She was Zizi Molnari, the European starlet, in a 1959 NBC adaptation of "What Makes Sammy Run?," Budd Schulberg's bleakly satirical Hollywood novel. Almost a decade later, she played the haughty, hygienic henchwoman Miss Clean on "Batman" (1968), opposite Burgess Meredith, in his last portrayal of the Penguin. She appeared on Broadway twice, two decades apart. In 1953, she played multiple roles in the musical revue "John Murray Anderson's Almanac." In 1975, she played Venus in "Man on the Moon," a musical written by John Phillips of the rock group the Mamas and the Papas. It closed after less than a week of performances. Monique Bronz was born on March 25, 1927, in Brussels, the daughter of George Bronz and Louise (Van Vooren) Bronz. She often spoke about having grown up in a convent presumably a boarding school. According to her official biography, she arrived in New York in 1950, just after appearing in her first movie, to study philosophy at New York University on a Fulbright scholarship. When asked about the men in her life, Ms. Van Vooren once casually replied, "I've been married three or four times." Biographies sometimes mention a first husband in the 1940s with the surname Jacobsen or Jakobsen. She married Curt H. Pfenniger in 1950; they separated in 1954 and later divorced. In 1958 she married Gerard W. Purcell, a producer and personal manager, and they were together until his death in 2002. Survivors include a son, Eric Purcell, from her marriage to Mr. Pfenniger, and a granddaughter. Ms. Van Vooren was an ardent New Yorker. But, in a cable television interview in the late 1980s. she complained that the city's night life had gone downhill. "In New York we have a population of, what, 12 million?" she said, rounding up by about 30 percent. "Maybe 2,000 people a night go out." She also had a career as a singer. Her first album was "Mink in Hi Fi" (1958), a mix of French and English songs. The cover showed her in nothing but diamonds and off the shoulder white mink. John S. Wilson's enthusiastic New York Times review suggested that she had been "hiding her real talent under a bushel of cheesecake." Later, she was known for her cabaret performances. Once, when working at the Rainbow Room, she decided one of her three male backup dancers, Ronnie Walken, needed a new name. "Why don't you call yourself Christopher?" she suggested. (Mr. Walken has confirmed the exchange.) Ms. Van Vooren was also a writer. Her first and only novel, "Night Sanctuary," about three women and a male ballet superstar, was published in 1983. Although her reputation was as a sex symbol, Ms. Van Vooren's only real scandal was financial. In 1983 she entered a guilty plea to lying to a federal grand jury about having taken the proceeds of more than 18,000 in Social Security checks made out to her mother, who had died years before. She received a suspended sentence and was required to perform 500 hours of community service. There was, however, a whiff of romantic scandal in 2001 when Orin Lehman, a longtime New York State parks commissioner and the comedian Joan Rivers's late in life love interest, left her for Ms. Van Vooren. Ms. Rivers responded by ridiculing the new couple's advanced ages. Ms. Van Vooren retaliated, telling The New York Post: "She's one to talk. She's got more miles on her than an old Checker cab." Ms. Van Vooren's last appearance in a major film was as "Woman at '21'" (referring to the exclusive Manhattan restaurant) in Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" (1987). Her final screen appearance was in "Greystone Park" (2012), a haunted house drama of the supposed found footage genre. No one ever told her a blond bombshell couldn't make wisecracks. When the newspaper columnist Earl Wilson suggested she had been seen out on the town with a married man, she shrugged off the thought. "I'm so nearsighted," she said, "I wouldn't know whether they were married or not."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Hydrogen bombs the world's deadliest weapons have no theoretical size limit. The more fuel, the bigger the explosion. When the United States in 1952 detonated the world's first, its destructive force was 700 times as great as that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. And in the darkest days of the Cold War, the Soviets and the Americans didn't only compete to build the most weapons. They each sought at times to build the biggest bomb of all. "There was a megatonnage race who was going to have a bigger bomb," said Robert S. Norris, a historian of the atomic age. "And the Soviets won." Last week, the Russian nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, released a 30 minute, formerly secret documentary video about the world's largest hydrogen bomb detonation. The explosive force of the device nicknamed Tsar Bomba, or the Tsar's bomb, and set off on Oct. 30, 1961 was 50 megatons, or the equivalent of 50 million tons of conventional explosive. That made it 3,333 times as destructive as the weapon used on Hiroshima, Japan, and also far more powerful than the 15 megaton weapon set off by the United States in 1954 in its largest hydrogen bomb blast. From several angles and distances, the video shows the development of the weapon's gargantuan mushroom cloud, hinting at the bomb's churning power and apocalyptic force. Russia has previously released photos and video clips of the device, known officially as RDS 220. The Barents Observer, a publication in Norway, earlier reported on the video's full release. It features closed captions in English, as well as surges of triumphal music. In an interview, Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., called the release "a nice addition" to the growing body of public information. He said the bomb's description in the video documentary was much fuller than the public would normally receive, but nonetheless carefully avoided the secret technical details "despite appearing to show the innards." Dr. Norris, the author of "Racing for the Bomb," cited formerly classified American documents that revealed the largely dismissive reaction of American military officials to the colossal blast. A top secret document written in July 1963, nearly two years after the blast, noted that "the United States presently has the capability of designing" a weapon of such destructive force. Over decades, the big challenge for the makers of the nation's nuclear arsenal (as well as Russia's) turned out to be devising not big hydrogen bombs but small ones, which were judged as more useful for targeted attacks. Miniaturization let hydrogen bombs be made small enough so that many warheads could fit atop a single missile (putting many cities simultaneously at risk) or that they could be sent into war aboard trucks, submarines and other non aerial platforms. The secrets of miniaturization proved so remarkably difficult to master that they eventually became the stuff of spy scandals. Still, as Dr. Norris put it, history has long credited the Russians for creating and demonstrating the fearsome power of "the big one" and providing a terrifying object lesson in why hydrogen weapons, as a category, are known as unthinkable.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
MUMBAI, India After SKS Microfinance, India's largest microlender, completed its initial public offering last August, its shares quickly shot up 50 percent. Financial analysts charted rosy forecasts about the firm's future. That seems a dim memory now. On Tuesday, SKS shares closed at 298.60 rupees ( 6.67), down about 70 percent from the price at which it went public. SKS was once seen as a model for how microcredit firms could do very well for themselves by making loans as small as 50 to basket weavers and other poor people. Now the company, which last week reported its first loss as a public company, seems to symbolize the problems of microfinance in India. The loss for the quarter was a result of many borrowers' stopping payment on their loans in the company's home state, Andhra Pradesh, where government officials have branded SKS and other microlenders as greedy loan sharks ruining the lives of the impoverished. During the first three months of this year, only 10 percent of SKS's borrowers in Andhra Pradesh, where the company has more than a third of its loans, made their payments. SKS's financial problems are the latest in a string of bad news for the once celebrated microfinance sector. Early this month, in Bangladesh, the Supreme Court ruled against Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate who is recognized as the father of microfinance but who has come under attack by the Bangladeshi government, which argues that microlending victimizes poor people. The court rejected an appeal by Mr. Yunus to remain managing director of the institution he founded, Grameen Bank. In India's Andhra Pradesh state, loan repayments started falling sharply late last year after lawmakers there enacted a tough law to restrict lending by microcredit firms, which they said had lent more money than many borrowers could afford to repay. Many politicians also encouraged borrowers not to repay existing loans. SKS, whose investors include the Silicon Valley financiers Sequoia Capital and Vinod Khosla, reported that it had lost 697 million rupees ( 15.6 million) in its fourth quarter, which ended in March. That compared with a profit of 629 million rupees a year earlier. Analysts say SKS will probably have to recognize losses on a big part of its 312 million loan portfolio in Andhra Pradesh. Vikram Akula, the American who is chairman of SKS, said it was hard to say exactly how much money the company would lose in Andhra Pradesh. Loan repayments could go up significantly if the state stops restricting new lending there, he said, because it would give borrowers confidence in the company's viability in the state. "If we are able to restart lending, we think there could be a dramatic improvement," he said. "If we can't restart lending, we will have a painful couple of quarters." Other large Indian microlenders, like Basix, Share and Spandana, also face big losses in Andhra Pradesh, but those firms do not trade on the stock exchange. Samit Ghosh, managing director of Ujjivan Financial Services, a microlender based in Bangalore, said it would take up to two years for the industry to overcome the crisis in Andhra Pradesh, which has also made it hard for lenders to raise money from banks to make loans elsewhere in India. "In many ways, microfinance will have to reinvent itself," Mr. Ghosh said. Mr. Akula said SKS would not grow as aggressively as it had initially projected. Instead it will seek to make bigger loans to qualified borrowers outside Andhra Pradesh, who he said might have fewer options because of the trouble microfinance firms are facing. He also said SKS would expand into other businesses like loans made with gold as collateral, a popular form of personal and business finance in southern India. The firm plans to open as many as 50 offices to make such loans this year. Mr. Akula, who started SKS as a nonprofit organization, acknowledged that the company had not anticipated the crisis in Andhra Pradesh. SKS, he said, reacted too slowly to the criticism of its business by politicians and community leaders. "I still think it's a solid business," Mr. Akula said in a telephone interview from Hyderabad, where SKS is based. "Clearly, we failed at working with the broader political environment." Officials in Andhra Pradesh did not return calls or respond to messages. Microfinance firms are hoping to work out repayment arrangements with borrowers in Andhra Pradesh and persuade the state government to relax the tough lending law it passed in December. Those strictures require companies to seek government approval before making each loan and call for collections to take place in front of public officials. Mr. Akula said the state had approved only 1,643 of the 73,000 loan applications SKS submitted since the new rules went into effect. Policy makers have said they want to rein in aggressive loan collection practices that drove some overextended borrowers to commit suicide. Andhra Pradesh officials also said some borrowers took multiple loans from several lenders, amassing debts of 2,000 or more.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
There's one more big collection to go before the New York ready to wear season officially draws to a close and the style circus moves on to London, but unless something extraordinary happens (and it could, it always could; this is fashion, after all), Thom Browne just had the best show of the week. The kind of show that reminds you why there are shows in the first place, why we go and why anyone should care. In his usual Chelsea art gallery basement, Mr. Browne built a woolen pastoral; an ice rink surrounded by barren trees and bulrushes, with boulders and penguins and an old row boat on the side, all of it covered in many shades of gray men's wear fabrics: herringbones, tweeds, flannels and pinstripes. Then out walked four living lampposts covered head to toe in houndstooth, a globe in each hand. And an ode to tailoring began. At a time when challenging gender stereotypes is the watch phrase of the day, the show on Wednesday was the smartest commentary on the subject yet in part because it turned the issue on its head: Instead of putting men in women's wear, it put women in men's wear, simultaneously underscoring how much the antecedents are intertwined and demanding a reassessment of the suit. There was not a dress on the runway (indeed, a single breasted mink jacket bore the message "it's too cold for a dress" on the back). Instead, there were Bermuda short suits and skirt suits and trouser suits, almost all covered by perfectly cut overcoats. There was nothing uniform or limiting about it. Within the frame of jacket, trouser, coat and tie, Mr. Browne invented legions. There were puns on the penguin suit a.k.a. the tuxedo in patent leather intarsia with penguin profiles, and stuffed shirt tote bags (literally, shirt fronts with ties). There were inside out collages that treated lining tulle as a scrim (a technique also adopted by Derek Lam, who included in his appealing "one stop shopping" presentation louche pajama trousers, the print underneath cleverly veiled by a chiffon overlay). And there were intarsia farm scenes in furs, coats dripping fringe made of mother of pearl buttons instead of paillettes, and a wedding nondress finale featuring a bride in a short black puffer coat with a long black puffer train. There was a lot more. It was part social commentary and part disciplined creativity, and either way it made you think. Then it made you smile, and then it made you want to get dressed. That doesn't happen that often. Ever since Kanye West took over Madison Square Garden for his combined album/collection introduction a year ago, for example, thinking about his Yeezy fashion line has pretty much always meant thinking about Kanye the clothes falling a far second to the showman. Last season, his follow up mega production on Roosevelt Island did not end well (there were interminable waits, fainting models and boring stuff), and since that experience and his apparently stressful fall, a new, chastened Kanye has emerged. This time, he held his show in a studio in Chelsea Piers, a standard stop on the fashion week tour of Manhattan. There was no crazy line outside. It began only 20 minutes late; also standard for fashion week. Inside, bleachers surrounded a rectangular tower about 25 feet tall. The lights went up, and video projections of models wearing the collection appeared on the screens, one at a time, rotating slowly. They were looming. But in the context of Kanye, the effect was tame. So were the looks Season 5 which also appeared on models striding past: faded denim, camouflage print, track suits, big sweats, spike heel boots, a random old auntie fur, some Calabasas branding. In the end, Mr. West did not appear to take his bow. Instead, a body guard beckoned Kim Kardashian West backstage. She, in turn, waved Anna Wintour of Vogue inside. Most everyone else scratched their heads and left. Without Kanye's bombast and grand ambition to puff out the clothes and make them seem more important than they were, they looked kind of deflated. That's it? He had bought himself some patience, if not much else. For his second see now/buy now collection, however, Ralph Lauren bought himself some flowers. A lot of them. The walls of his Madison Avenue flagship were lined with 100,000 white orchids, 300 air plants and desert agave (all of which will remain in situ at least for the immediate future, so shoppers can see them, too), and a sprinkling of automated butterflies with wings that opened and closed in syncopation. "Everyone is so anxious and cold," said David Lauren, the designer's son and chief innovation officer of the company. "We thought it would be nice to create a bit of an oasis."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
No matter what you call it chroma key, green screen or blue screen it's the film and video technique that gives your local TV weatherperson something in common with the Avengers movies: artificial backgrounds inserted behind the action. You simply record your subject in front of a solid green or blue screen, and then add a touch of software magic to change the background. Dozens of free or inexpensive apps allow you to use the technique on your own clips. It's a great way to jazz up your presentations and other videos or to keep children busy with a weekend project filming their own toys in action scenes. Here's how to get started. First, you need a big piece of solid green or blue cloth or paper to use as a background when recording. You'll also need a place to hang it and strong lighting aimed at the screen to keep shadows and fabric wrinkles from showing up as blotches in your video. You can get a few yards of cloth at a fabric store for less than 20, or buy a professional chroma key backdrop, starting around 30, at a specialty store like B H Photo Video. If you have a major project, you can also find complete green screen studio kits (including the backdrop, a frame to hang it on and studio lights) for less than 100 on Amazon and other sites.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The music is a backdrop for a gripping, often brutal story of the struggles of a girl growing up poor in Queens. Ms. Adams delivers a compassionate performance as a girl whose swagger and practicality hides a melancholy edge. Stardom changes her life, but less than you'd think. Early scenes show Lolita resorting to petty crime to support her family and butting heads with her strict mother (Nia Long), a compelling character who could use more screen time. And then there's a small galaxy of men that disappoint or abuse both mother and daughter. As her older love interest, Mahershala Ali gives a silky performance with ominous undertones that never turns into caricature. The scenes between him and Ms. Adams are charged, filmed with a patient if herky jerky pacing. Some shots linger longer than necessary. At other times, Mr. Larnell cuts quickly, shifting from a shot of sex to pregnancy in a blink. You get a sense of the film's dramatic priorities from the first scene. Roxanne paces the streets preparing for a rap battle as a crowd of friends trail her. From the look on her face, you can tell she's formidable, and when she faces off against a guy who scoffs at her, you wait for the virtuoso performance. But then the film cuts away. Don't worry: There will be rap battles and concert scenes and they do not disappoint. But they are the bass line beat. The drama of ordinary life is what makes this story stick in your head.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. Like many other teenagers in this troubled city, Sheila Gomes said she found a surrogate family outside her home at Central Falls High School. But with the school board's decision on Tuesday to dismiss the entire faculty as part of a turnaround plan for the chronically underperforming school, some say they are losing one of the few constants in the state's poorest city, where 41 percent of children live in poverty and 63 percent of the high school's students qualify for free or reduced price lunch. "My teachers, they're there for me. They push me forward," said Ms. Gomes, a 17 year old senior whose father is largely absent and whose mother works long hours at a factory. "My parents, they tried to, but they don't know how. I don't think they fully know me as a person to help me." This former mill town of about 19,000, where unemployment is 13.8 percent, is now embroiled in a battle over school reform similar to those that have taken place in troubled districts in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, where officials have tried to fix failing schools by starting over with new staff members. Seventy four teachers and 19 staff members in Central Falls will lose their jobs. "The status quo needs to change," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview. "This is not the kind of stability I want. I'm looking for improvement." Teachers acknowledge that change is needed the school's graduation rate is 48 percent, and only 7 percent of students are proficient in mathematics by 11th grade but they say they are struggling against difficult odds. "We're carrying this immense burden here," said George McLaughlin, 60, a guidance counselor at the school. "We have a bag of bricks on our back that you don't get at places where it's taken for granted that everyone will succeed." Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times Central Falls has always been a city of immigrants, and boasts that it crowds "the whole world" into just over a square mile. Densely packed with triple deckers, Central Falls calls itself "a city with a bright future," but the poverty rate has consistently been high and the budget low. In 1991, Central Falls transferred operation of its schools to the state. The city maintains the buildings, but state and federal financing pays for the schools. The system is under the direction of Rhode Island's education board, which deemed it one of the state's six worst performing schools, instructing the superintendent, Frances Gallo, to choose one of four federally mandated models for school turnaround. Dr. Gallo said she chose the model called a "turnaround" plan after the teachers union rejected conditions in another state plan. While teachers and students at the close knit school said they considered one another family, Dr. Gallo said the current model was not working. "If it's such a family, then how do you account for losing more than half your family each year?" Dr. Gallo said, referring to the dropout rate. "We are about to change the culture of Central Falls." But many in the school think the culture of the school is one of its biggest assets. "I leave here at 6, 7 at night, working with kids, coaching, getting lesson plans, doing interactive literacy. That's what people don't see," said Frank DelBonis, who teaches history to English as a Second Language students in a school where 70 percent of students are Hispanic. Other teachers said progress was hampered by the high turnover at the school, where one in three students leaves each year. Theresa Agonia, 18, a freshman at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., is one of dozens of former students who are returning to the school to protest the move. She attended a rally before the board meeting Tuesday night. "I feel like they're saying my education, my certificate, was worth nothing," said Ms. Agonia, who graduated in 2009. "I worked for my diploma, as everyone else did. To be just a statistic is hurtful." Hope Evanoff, a French teacher, said she felt the decision was undermining her career. "It makes you feel like all of your expertise, all that you know, any degree you might have, is worthless," Ms. Evanoff said. "I've never been fired from anything, and to be fired, it's devastating." The faculty members have been offered counseling by the district, according to one of the fired teachers. The Central Falls Teachers Union plans to fight the plan, saying it comes in the middle of a three year contract. Dr. Gallo said the district was "looking for partners" like Teach for America to provide teachers for the school, which has also been receiving "resumes from all over the nation" as news of the plan spread.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
The Freret Corridor barely existed a decade ago. There was only Freret Street, run down and with a single restaurant. In recent years, though, the Uptown neighborhood has taken off. The New Freret (pronounced fur RET), as it's sometimes called, combs the space of about six blocks. What makes it particularly valuable is the variety of the new spots, more than 20 of them, including a comedy club, a cocktail bar, a pet grooming shop, a boxing gym, and a garden center. And that is to say nothing of the eateries where New Orleans po' boys are readily found, just in time for Mardi Gras. Full Blossom Chic bills itself as the city's first "consignment shop for women with curves." Daniela Zapata, its owner, is also the executive producer of NOLA Curves, a fashion show for women Size 10 and above. Her year and a half old shop sells dresses, skirts, shorts, jeans and tops. With a large Vietnamese population, New Orleans has never lacked for high quality Southeast Asian food. But the year old Mint presents Vietnamese food with a stylish twist in a space with chandeliers and a generous drink selection. Mojo's locally roasted coffee has long been thought to be among the best in the city. The lemons for the lemonade are smashed right in front of you, and you can savor a breakfast burrito while taking advantage of the free Wi Fi.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
LONDON Without fanfare or flourish, the Tennessee born Cherry Jones has calmly established her place as one of the major stage actresses in the United States. She has won two Tony Awards, received an Emmy for her role as President Allison Taylor in "24," and earned rave reviews both on and off Broadway. But she had appeared in just one production in Britain at last year's Edinburgh International Festival, in John Tiffany's production of Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie." As Amanda Wingfield a desperate single mother trying to hold on to her alienated son, Tom, and find a viable life for her disabled and shy daughter, Laura Ms. Jones triumphed both in the production's original run on Broadway in 2013 and in Edinburgh. She was "an Amanda that may someday be spoken of with the awe that surrounds Laurette Taylor's creation of the part nearly 70 years ago," the critic Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times after the Broadway opening. Now Mr. Tiffany (who directed the hugely successful "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" in London last year) has brought that production to the Duke of York's Theater in London's West End, where it opened this week. (Michael Esper and Kate O'Flynn will play Tom and Laura, with Brian J. Smith as the Gentleman Caller.) There, Ms. Jones, 60, has finally made her London debut, some 40 years after she created a folder and named it "My Career on the British Stage." In a Skype call from Paris, Tenn., where she grew up, Ms. Jones talked about her early desire to act, her initial resistance to the role of Amanda and her growing love for the character. Here is an edited and condensed version of the conversation: Is there any reason that you've never performed in the West End? No, not really. It's strange, because I have always wanted to work in England, I didn't care where. My mother was a teacher of English and American literature, and she lived and breathed all things British. I first went there when I was 14. My parents had saved up and we went for the most wonderful two weeks, traveling all over. Afterward, I made a folder titled "My Career on the British stage." So you knew very early that you wanted to act? I never wanted to do anything else. I was always creating wonderful adventures with my neighborhood friends, assigning roles to people. My family was very supportive. And it all went pretty smoothly. I never had tremendous ambition, I was just thrilled to be in a repertory company, and when I came to New York and could work Off Broadway, or get little movie roles, I would feel so fortunate. Given your Southern background, Amanda Wingfield seems like a natural role for you. But you have said in interviews that you never wanted to play her. Why? I think I had a Southern chip on my shoulder. I felt she didn't speak to me, I didn't know who this woman was. I auditioned for the role of Laura several times, but I was too large. Then John Tiffany and I met through a mutual friend, at the time that my sister and I were clearing our family home here in Paris, Tennessee. I was telling John about the letters from my mother that I had found, and he said: "We're going to work together and you are going to be my Amanda." Once you began to study the part, how did you feel? The moment I spoke her words in a reading, I knew who she was. I had grown up with her; not quite with women in her situation, but women in dire straits. I am the last generation who really remembers those Southern women; they had an elegance and nobility, and a real charm and style. When I was about 10, they were in their 70s and 80s, and I was mesmerized by the way they moved and spoke. For a long time I thought "war" was spelled "wawa" because of the way they said it. And the way they smelled, a lovely light powdered smell and the slight mustiness of mothballs, and hot chocolate and cheese biscuits. It was heaven. The language too, is so spot on. Every idiom, the musicality of it, is perfect. So perhaps your resistance to playing Amanda came from that closeness? Yes, perhaps I felt protective of those women, that the play was too exposing. When I did the first reading with Michael Esper, who then came to the show for Edinburgh and now again in the West End he made me understand the play and the family in a way I hadn't before. I saw the possibilities in what he did with his role; the love and gentleness he had. This isn't a family that hate each other. They love each other, and we wouldn't care, otherwise. Then John Tiffany seemed to understand the tone of each scene so beautifully. I didn't realize what a loving, fearless woman Amanda is. She has to push her children, cajole, charm. I have never felt a woman more determined. Perhaps Tennessee Williams was creating the fighter that he would have liked his mother to be. This will be your third run in this production. Has your interpretation changed since the first Broadway season? I think it's just the longer you do the part, the richer the memories get. What I mean is that I have her memories; I can see those carriage rides in the country, those afternoons with the gentlemen callers. And I do believe there were 17 of them, and half of them were gay! No one had any money, they had a bit of great granddad's silver and bought her some cotillion dresses, and the gay boys and straight boys would come over and they would drink sherry and have a rollicking good time. Philip Roth, the novelist, said that when writing, he can get to a point when he is not creating, he is just remembering his character's memories. It's like that.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Kuhn also railed against the rampant negative stereotypes about older people in the media, charging, in testimony before Congress, that "old people are depicted as dependent, powerless, wrinkled babies." So the Panthers monitored how older people were portrayed on television if they appeared at all and then lambasted network executives for demeaning caricatures, and got some eliminated. But crucial to the Panthers' progressive agenda were intergenerational alliances to promote issues that remain of pressing concern today: affordable housing, better access to health care, racial equality in employment, economic justice and environmental protection. Their motto was "age and youth in action." Kuhn was also outspoken about the ravages of racism and sexism. "We're the elders of the tribe," she said. "We are concerned about the tribe surviving." Older Americans, she said, "are most free to transcend special interests and seek public interests." She shared her home in Philadelphia with "panther cubs," youthful activists, and argued against age segregated housing that isolated older people from the young. She was especially perturbed by how the generations were pitted against each other in the media, with older people cast as getting benefits they didn't deserve. So why have she and the Panthers been mostly forgotten? In part, it's because Kuhn was such a charismatic leader that once she died, the organization began to drift. In the decades since, there's been a shift away from activism on the part of older people and toward more institutionalized forms of political power; these, in turn, have certainly seen some success. Starting in the 1980s, the American Association of Retired Persons expanded and built up its lobbying activities. Now called simply AARP, it focuses almost exclusively on issues affecting older people, like ageism and preserving their safety net. Its magazine combats stereotypes but emphasizes self actualization, not activism, a safer and often more comfortable message. It does not seek to unite old and young in the name of broader social justice efforts. Today we're seeing the limitations of that narrower agenda. On the one hand, many older people, including older women, are more visible and powerful than ever before. "Disengaged" is the last word you would use about Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters or Elizabeth Warren, not to mention Joe Biden. On the other hand, the fate of nursing home residents in the coronavirus pandemic a true debacle has revealed the persistence of ageism. We've seen narratives about the pandemic pit old and young against each other, with the old cast as "expendable" and the young as "irresponsible." At the same time, the Trump administration's cruel, destructive and divisive policies continue to expose great inequities in our country across multiple lines race, gender, class and age. Kuhn's activist agenda, both age and youth in action, is more relevant, and more necessary, than ever.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Weddings Are Their Job. What Happens When Everyone Postpones? This was supposed to be the start of the busy season for wedding vendors a time to freshen floral bouquets, ask guests to take their seats and wrangle wayward bridesmaids into picture perfect arrangements. Instead these florists, event planners, photographers and officiants are staying home. So are the DJs, caterers and, most critically, the brides and grooms. It's been about a month since the coronavirus was declared a worldwide pandemic and couples throughout the United States began postponing their spring weddings en masse. Some couples, though, are eloping, getting married on Zoom or hosting small, socially distant ceremonies in their backyards and front porches. But for the workers whose livelihoods depend on weddings happening as scheduled, there is no Plan B. The 74 billion wedding industry has been upended by Covid 19, with more than 400,000 businesses jerking to a halt, according to the market research firm IBISWorld. Wedding vendors now spend their weekends navigating the mechanics of a postponement. They're playing complicated guessing games about safe rescheduling dates; calculating how long they can last without their typical revenue stream; applying for financial assistance that they worry will never come; and thinking about how this pandemic may change weddings for years to come But for summer and fall weddings, the path forward is less clear. "When you're seeing these major world events being postponed the Olympics, or the Pride Parade, or the Met Gala couples really start to think: 'If they're postponing, why am I not postponing?'" Mr. Meyer said. "They're nervous and they have all this free time to worry about it." His next scheduled wedding is July 24, though he said it will likely be postponed. Two June weddings were postponed by one year, and another to December. An August wedding in Lake Como was canceled after the bride contracted Covid 19, Mr. Meyer said; she's since recovered, but she's worried about family members traveling for the wedding. Mr. Meyer, who has been a full time event planner for eight years, takes on six to 10 weddings a year. His events are typically large scale affairs, and he has two part time employees. (About 60 percent of his business is weddings, while the rest is corporate events.) In the next month or so, Mr. Meyer was expecting to make 30 percent of his annual income from final payments, he said. (Most wedding vendors break up their payments into two to four installments, with the final payment coming right before the wedding.) Last month he applied for a loan from the United States Small Business Administration, which is providing up to 10,000 for businesses experiencing temporary difficulties, but he's increasingly skeptical of the program and, like other small business owners, frustrated by a lack of communication. In the meantime, Mr. Meyer isn't charging couples a fee for postponements, though contractually he could if needed. Working in weddings is a balancing act, he said: "Being a human with a heart and compassion but also business that has to stay afloat." Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, there is a small chapel less than 250 square feet painted white with dark gray trimming, sitting on acres of greenery. Spike Gillespie, the owner of Tiny T Ranch, has been hosting weddings there since 2016, after a decade of performing officiant duties around Austin. She also has a ranch house and a reception hall on the property. About 30 times a year, she rents out the land for three day wedding weekends, welcoming up to 150 guests. Much more often, she performs ceremonies for elopers on the bucolic chapel's front steps, framed by stained glass windows. "I'm very grateful the word 'rustic' is still popular on Pinterest," she said. As of last week, she was still allowing eloping couples to visit the ranch with a photographer or someone equipped for live streaming (or both). During the ceremony she stands 10 feet away from couples, warning in advance that she'll be wearing a mask. "I do question the wisdom in it a little bit," Ms. Gillespie said, acknowledging that while she's firm about safety measures, she still feels uncertain about how the virus works. "When they hand me their wedding license, I'm thinking: 'Oh, is this crawling with coronavirus?'" All of Ms. Gillespie's upcoming weekend weddings have been rescheduled for the fall or 2021, she said. This doesn't just mean her anticipated spring revenue will be delayed, but that she's forgoing incoming bookings from new couples who would have otherwise taken those prime autumn dates a potential loss of about 21,000. (Renting the property for the weekend costs around 3,000.) Ms. Gillespie said she's applied for assistance from the Knot Worldwide, a wedding website conglomerate offering 10 million to assist local advertising partners. Tiny T Ranch spends 300 a month to partner with the Knot, though Ms. Gillespie has been considering canceling advertising to save cash in the short term. In the long term, she's thinking about how she'll fare in a post pandemic economy. "Not that this pleases me given all the suffering people are enduring, but oddly this might help my business in the long run," she said. "Because my prices for the venue are so low, it's possible that people who want to marry in 2021 but who have to scale way back will choose the ranch over a high end venue." The last wedding Kesha Lambert shot was on March 13 a destination wedding on the Caribbean island of St. Martin. Just before she left her home in Westport, Conn., her children's school had announced it was closing. Still, while her flight to the Caribbean seemed lighter than usual, there were only a few people around her wearing masks, Ms. Lambert said. At the wedding, the pandemic only came up once in conversation. "It was like we were in a bubble," she said. "The wedding was beautiful. No one seemed to be thinking about it." By the end of March, all 12 weddings she had booked in April, her busiest month, were postponed. (Ms. Lambert employs three seasonal associate photographers, and together they shoot about 60 to 70 weddings annually.) "I'm coming out of my slow season expecting to get started up again, and then we get hit like a brick," she said. For Ms. Lambert, it's helpful to know that the invoices she expected to be paid this month will be paid eventually all of the couples aren't canceling outright and asking for refunds. She's already submitted an application for the federal small business loan, though she's not optimistic about it. "You don't stay in business for long unless you're a fighter," she said. "I do have that in me, but I also understand that I can only control the things that I can control." Her next wedding is scheduled for May 25, though she expects it will also be pushed back. So far, 80 percent of her June weddings have been postponed, she said. Some couples had no choice. A wedding in St. Lucia was canceled after the government closed its borders indefinitely. That couple plans to keep their date but get married in a courthouse instead, and they've asked Ms. Lambert to still photograph the day. "A lot hinges on what's happening in the world," Ms. Lambert said. "I'm not fearful of passing on a financial opportunity when it comes to the safety of myself and my family." Last fall, after Sammy Go attended a wedding that had to be evacuated because of the California coastline's wildfires, the florist began thinking about how volatile environmental conditions might change weddings. Then the pandemic happened. "Will people be willing to put so much on the line for something we're realizing more and more that we are less in control of than we thought?" said Mr. Go, the owner of Lambert Floral Studio in San Francisco, which handles arrangements for about 15 weddings a year. Until the cancellations began rolling in, this March was supposed to be particularly busy for Mr. Go. Three weeks before Governor Gavin Newsom ordered California residents to stay home, Lambert Floral Studio was included on Harper Bazaar's list of top wedding florists in the world. Now Mr. Go is filing for unemployment, applying for loans and thinking about how to adjust his business model, while also co parenting an infant son. He's not charging couples for postponing, he said. All deposits and retainers are transferable to later dates. His clients have been "very pleasant and even apologetic to me as a vendor, knowing I will have to go without a paycheck until the actual event date," he said. "The pandemic is a great equalizer." While Mr. Go has no employees, he works with a network of freelance floral designers and he values this camaraderie in an industry where colleagues don't share an office or break room. In his free time, he's been leaving several supportive Yelp reviews for peers. (Though at one point, Yelp flagged this as suspicious behavior, Mr. Go said.) And he's still thinking about what weddings will look like when everyday life normalizes. "There's two ways to think about it," Mr. Go said. Either the economic hardship of the pandemic will result in simpler gatherings next year, with less expense and less risk. Or these months of isolation will underscore the importance of gathering, creating a hunger for meaningful shared events. "Humans will either invest or divest from celebrating with one another," he said. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A green sea turtle hatchling emerging on Heron Island off the coast of Australia. A new study suggests that the male green sea turtles of the Great Barrier Reef are disappearing. A new study of gender ratios found that 99 percent of immature green turtles born in the northern part of the reef are female. Among adult turtles, 87 percent are female, suggesting that there has been a shift in gender ratios over the last few decades. A sea turtle's sex is determined by its nesting environment. As sands warm, more females will hatch relative to males; if the sand temperature tops 84.7 degrees during incubation, only females will emerge. The gender shift suggests that climate change is having a significant effect on one of the biggest green turtle populations in the world, said Michael Jensen, lead author of the new study, published in Current Biology. "We're all trying to wrap our heads around how these populations are going to respond to those changes," said Dr. Jensen, a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in San Diego. The gender shift has been noticed before by people who study hatchlings, said Jeanette Wyneken, a sea turtle expert and professor at Florida Atlantic University, who was not involved in the new research. But it wasn't clear until this study that the shift was so dramatic and happening in such a large population across time, she said. "This is the first paper that's shown this multigenerational effect," influencing the gender of juveniles, older adolescents and adults, Dr. Wyneken said. It takes 35 to 40 years for a green sea turtle to reach sexual maturity, she said. "These animals are teenagers for an awfully long time," Dr. Wyneken said. "We won't see the effects of what's happening today for several decades." David Owens, a professor emeritus from the College of Charleston in South Carolina, was not involved in the new study, but said he's dreamed of doing such research for years. He praised the way the study team which included a wide range of expertise was able to link temperature with turtle gender. And if the green sea turtles of Australia are seeing this shift, the same thing is probably happening to many other sea turtles and other animals whose gender is determined by temperature, he said. Sea turtles tend to lay their eggs on the same beaches where they were hatchlings decades earlier, so they can't quickly adapt to warming temperatures, Dr. Owens said. It's possible that they could lay their eggs earlier in the season, instead of waiting for the hottest weeks of the year, but Dr. Jensen said there's no evidence to suggest that such a shift has or could occur. Sea turtles are the "lawn mowers of the ocean," according to Camryn Allen, an author of the new study and a marine biological researcher with the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research University of Hawaii and located at NOAA in Hawaii. The turtles maintain coral reefs and are nutrient transporters. If they are lost, other species that depend on the same habitat will also be harmed. "Sea turtles are sentinels," Dr. Allen said. "They're telling us something is going on in the oceans and we need to pay attention." Both she and Dr. Jensen said they do not yet see the problem as urgent, because there are enough adult males to sustain the population. Highlighting the problem now will give researchers time to learn more about factors affecting the animals. Dr. Allen said the government of Australia has already started to take steps toward helping sea turtles, such as funding the Raine Island Recovery Project to study and support the local turtle population. The group conducted its research over 16 days in July 2014, plying small boats around the Howick Group of islands in the north Great Barrier Reef "an absolutely magical place," according to Dr. Jensen. They captured 411 foraging turtles, one at a time, drawing blood to measure gender hormones and taking skin samples for DNA. The genetic analysis allowed them to determine whether the turtle had been born in the northern or southern parts of the reef, which are separated by about 1,200 miles. Dr. Allen said the reasons for the gender bias were still a mystery. "The exact mechanism is not well understood," she said. "But we do know they don't have sex chromosomes like humans do." Turtles born in the cooler south were only biased 65 to 69 percent female, the study showed. Researchers still don't know the ideal ratio, or how many males to females it takes to effectively sustain the population, Dr. Jensen said. Without the new study, he said, scientists might not have recognized the gender skewing in the north for decades perhaps missing the window to make a difference. "The result is definitely alarming," Dr. Jensen said. "But now we know and can focus our research on the right questions and start thinking about what can be done. So I'm hopeful as well."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The romantic drama "Chemical Hearts" opens with a bland voice over from its protagonist, Henry (Austin Abrams). "You are never more alive than when you're a teenager," he observes before lamenting that his own life, while full of love and privilege, lacks in interest. Beginning senior year, Henry aims to run his high school newspaper, but his ho hum experiences offer little fodder for writing. Luckily for Henry and for the engine of this angsty and often aggravating movie inspiration arrives in Grace (Lili Reinhart), a transfer student who walks with a cane. She is a doleful beauty, and her presence transfixes him. The pair meet when they are assigned as co editors of the newspaper, but Grace, moping through the club meetings, recoils from his efforts to connect. For a brief and alarming spell, Henry follows her in secret to spy on her alone time. Then the teenagers begin hanging out, and ease into a tentative relationship. Henry hopes to solve the puzzle of Grace's sorrow, and the writer director Richard Tanne, adapting the story from a young adult novel by Krystal Sutherland, makes this desire visual in Henry's hobby of kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery by affixing the pieces with gold. Grace's jagged edges come from recent trauma and, to the movie's credit, Henry finds that his doting alone will not restore his dream girl to a whole. We feel the sting of this realization, and Henry's sister, who is studying to be a doctor, adds another layer to the story by explaining his heartache on a chemical level. Yet despite the movie's sympathy for the high stakes of Henry's adolescence, the myopia of his point of view settles over "Chemical Hearts" like a layer of grime. As Henry struggles to crack the code of Grace's grief, her journey is robbed of space to breathe. We are locked in Henry's world, where Grace's pain looks more like a catalyst for our hero's emotional awakening.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"Did you ever think you would be so old?" The question startled me. If anyone knew where the time goes, I would have expected it to be the man across the lunch table, Alan Lightman. Dr. Lightman is best known in literary circles for his 1992 novel, "Einstein's Dreams," which is all about the vicissitudes romantic, physical and otherwise of time. It recounts the nightly visions of a young patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, as he struggles to finish his theory of relativity. Each dream explores how a different version of time might play out in the lives of the clerk's fellow citizens. But before that, Dr. Lightman was an astrophysicist, a card carrying wizard of space and time, with a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and subsequent posts at Cornell and. Harvard In 1989, at the peak of his prowess as a physicist, he began to walk away from the world of black holes to enter the world of black ink and the uncertain, lonely life of the writer. Recently he was in New York for the opening of "Einstein's Dreams," an off Broadway play based on his book. There have been dozens of such stage adaptations over the last 30 years. We had crossed paths for decades following similar tracks, in my own mind at least. In the 1970s, while I was an editor at Sky Telescope magazine in Cambridge, having renounced my own ambitions in physics, he was an astrophysicist just up the hill at Harvard, writing essays and poems in his spare time. In 1990 and 1991, we both published books about cosmology, which were reviewed together in places like Scientific American and the New York Review of Books. When "Einstein's Dreams" came out, I praised it in The Times through clenched, jealous teeth. I was working on my own Einstein book, and I had been to Bern, where Einstein hatched relativity. Dr. Lightman, it turned out, had not been there, but his fables conveyed more of the life and charm of the place than my own descriptions did. In person, Dr. Lightman is soft spoken, with a tangibly southern twang at times, and, as in print, he wears his erudition lightly. "Alan is a nice guy," said cosmologist Janna Levin, who teaches "Einstein's Dreams" in her classes at Barnard and Columbia. As he tells it, he began worrying about getting old long ago, while he was still a young graduate student at Caltech. When he talked to other graduate students there, "I could see that they wanted to do physics, come hell or high water, for the rest of their life," he said. "And I didn't quite feel that way." He ran in a fast crowd. "Alan was one of the amazing cadre of Kip Thorne relativity students in the 70s," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist and former Caltech student now retired from the University of Chicago. (In 2017, Dr. Thorne, with Barry Barish and Rainer Weiss, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of gravitational waves.) Richard Feynman, Caltech's resident eccentric genius, would drop by and dazzle them with impromptu blackboard calculations. "I could see their minds working and just see that they just had a very, very high capacity and ability to see things," Dr. Lightman said. Dr. Lightman would go on to have his own moments. He described one such incident in a memoir, "Searching for the Stars from an Island in Maine," when, early in his research career, a difficult calculation fell suddenly into place: "My head was floating off my shoulders. I felt weightless. I was floating. And I had no sense of my self, where I was, or who I was. I did have a feel of rightness." Many scientists will tell you these are the most precious moments in their lives. Dr. Lightman said that it had happened to him five or six times in his scientific career. But he believes most theorists dry up by the age of 40 or so. "You just seem to have more of what it takes at a young age," he said. "It's kind of like athletic limberness." In 1989, at age 41, he joined M.I.T. with a rare joint appointment in physics and humanities. "I love physics, but what was even more important to me was leading a creative life," Dr. Lightman said. "And I knew that writers could continue doing their best work later in life." His parents were nervous on his behalf, and he himself was a little frightened. "I was worried that my scientific colleagues would think I had chickened out," he said. "And I was worried that my new writing colleagues would not accept me as a writer." "Einstein's Dreams," published three years later to rapturous reviews, was runner up for the 1994 PEN New England/Boston Globe Winship Award. "By turns whimsical and meditative, playful and provocative, 'Einstein's Dreams' pulls the reader into a dream world like a powerful magnet," Michiko Kakutani wrote in The Times, with references to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. His novel "The Diagnosis" was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000. He is now a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with 16 books to his credit. His main academic duty these days is teaching an essay writing class at M.I.T. He also runs a foundation devoted to helping young women in Southeast Asia improve their leadership skills. There are still weightless moments, he said, where he forgets who he is. "Island," a meditation on science and spirituality, starts off with his ego dissolving as he stares up at the night sky from the bottom of a boat. "Yeah, I've had it writing, when you really get into the material and you lose track of yourself," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
THE MEDIAN MOVEMENT (Thursday through Dec. 3) Since 2008, Xan Burley and Alex Springer have created under the name the Median Movement with a number of collaborators. For their new work, "for North," the pair teamed up with the sound and set designer Will Owen and the dance artist Hsiao Jou Tang to explore how the body reacts to a shifting spatial and sonic environment. The score consists largely of sound gathered by body mikes, manipulated live. The creators call the work "a devotion." At 7:30 p.m., Center for Performance Research, 361 Manhattan Avenue, near Jackson Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718 349 1210, cprnyc.org. (Schaefer) MOVEMENT RESEARCH FESTIVAL (Monday through Dec. 3) The fall offering of this semiannual festival features classes, workshops (including one in which participants are told to create socially conscious work), discussions (like "financial and personal wellness in dance") and performances. (At various times and venues.) Each of the three evenings of performance, beginning Thursday, is distinct and includes works by several curious artists Hilary Clark, Jimena Paz and Saul Ulerio among them who address the idea of the body as "an interpreter" and a "living archive." Evening performances at 8 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, movementresearch.org. (Schaefer) MYSTICAL FEET COMPANY (Thursday through Dec. 18) "The Mar Vista," a new dance theater work by the choreographer and playwright Yehuda Hyman, takes its name from the Southern California neighborhood where Mr. Hyman grew up and is inspired by the romance of his parents. Through an eclectic musical soundtrack, dance and storytelling, he and five other performers conjure an immigrant Jewish family in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The five part piece mediates on culture, history and heritage with humor and wonder (2:15, including intermission). Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m., 14th Street Y LABA Theater, 344 East 14th Street, East Village, 646 395 4322, 14streety.org. (Schaefer) NEW YORK CITY BALLET (Friday through Dec. 31) Of the dozens of "Nutcracker" productions in town, none match the scale of "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker" or the giddy sense of childlike awe it inspires. Pantomime dominates the first half (along with that glorious growing tree), but Act II has a rousing world tour and culminates in a breathtaking pas de deux for the Sugarplum Fairy and her Cavalier. After all, this is a duet for Balanchine and Tchaikovsky, too, and it's magical (2:00, including intermission). At various times, David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, nycballet.com. (Schaefer) ZVIDANCE (Wednesday through Dec. 3) Zvi Gotheiner took four of his dancers on a two week, coast to coast road trip, following in the footsteps of the Beat writer Jack Kerouac. In his new multimedia work, "On the Road," inspired by Kerouac's generation defining book of the same name, the Israeli Mr. Gotheiner wrestles with the upheaval of 1960s America and its echoes today. Footage filmed on his journey open highways, desert scenery, small towns provides the visual backdrop for vigorous movement (1:00). At 7:30 p.m., Fishman Space, Fisher Building, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 321 Ashland Place, near Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, 718 636 4100, bam.org. (Schaefer)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
"Explode the computer with energy, you beautiful people," the director Rebecca Taichman said. It was an afternoon in mid April and Taichman, scarf swathed and sitting in what looked like her Brooklyn bedroom, was rehearsing the cast of "Sing Street," the Broadway musical that would have opened on April 19. Adapted from John Carney's 2016 movie about '80s Dublin youths who form a New Romantics band, it celebrates pop music as therapeutic and liberating. Now, in pandemic times, the "Sing Street" band plays on, virtually. "Sing Street" like most of Broadway's spring slate is a show in suspension, its original cast album, released last Tuesday, an artifact of a run that never began. But on Thursday, the cast will offer "Sing Street: Grounded At Home With the Broadway Cast" on the show's Facebook page. A benefit that will solicit donations for the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the half hour compendium testifies to the desire to keep a deferred show going, even when the cast and crew have scattered to four states and across the Atlantic Ocean. It will remain on the site through May 4. Your computer probably won't explode. "It's very stressful, because it's a stressful time to do anything," Brenock O'Connor, one of the musical's stars, said from London. On March 26, when "Sing Street" would have performed its first preview, producers arranged a Zoom party. "'Party' is sort of an overstatement because we all just sat there, putting on brave faces, but knowing that we were all hurting inside," O'Connor said. That "whole show" plan evaporated almost immediately. Dance sequences were a no go and a set was impossible. The cast doubles as the band, and several actors don't have access to the instruments they play onstage. Besides, as Gus Halper, another lead actor explained, putting the stage production on Zoom felt wrong. "So much of the challenge of getting the musical on its feet was trying to find the magic of the film in a way that felt unique to theater," he said, speaking from his mother's Massachusetts home. "This is the same challenge, just in reverse." The cast decided to perform most of the songs including a new one, "Love and Stars" with just enough narrative padding to give them context. "This is going to be a very truncated kind of version of the experience," Barbara Broccoli, a lead producer, explained. "Nothing will replace watching the show in the theater." A live performance, the producers quickly discovered, was also not an option. With O'Connor in England, his castmate Zara Devlin in Northern Ireland and most everyone else in the United States, audio and video delays were an issue. "They did a test with everyone trying to play on Zoom and it was just all over the place," Clark said. Clark and the producers with help from the video production company Smuggler, the creative agency Droga5 and the filmmaker Henry Alex Rubin figured out some workarounds, like a backing track and a move to combine Zoom with other platforms. But they accepted that they would have to record each performer's audio in advance, sync it and then synchronize the picture "putting everything back into the groove," Clark said. When asked if an observer would really notice the split second discrepancies, he replied: "It would sound like a train wreck." The producers sent care packages Apple AirPods, microphones, hard drives, hand props to the cast. These were all loaners, except for the AirPods. ("That would be gross," a press agent told me.) In April, proper rehearsals began, working around different time zones, tricky living situations, an actor's melted computer, Devlin's intermittent internet connection. A tentative run date emerged and then faded as work continued. In mid March, before theaters shut down, I sat in on a "Sing Street" run through. I had been working on an article one that seems extremely quaint now tracking how an Off Broadway show, which needed significant design and dramaturgical work, would leap to Broadway in just two months. And then, a month later, I sat in on another run through. On my laptop, in 10 windows, the cast rehearsed the new ballad, "Love and Stars," and the climactic number, "Go Now," a song about leaving an old life behind and escaping into a new one. If the housebound performers noticed the paradox, they didn't let on. Stage choreography, they found, worked differently. Devlin discovered that even little motions, like touching her face, read big. But the mood was largely buoyant. "I got so into it my hat fell off," one performer said after stumbling through "Go Now." O'Connor had described looking into his camera and pretending to see his co stars as "a real mind melter," but he seemed to manage all right. Though Taichman uses technology sparingly in her stage work, she has adjusted to the new reality. "My next show is going to be called, 'Zoom: A Love Story,'" she joked. She had encouraged the actors to embrace reality, too, leaving their bedrooms and basements undisguised. "The more we were honest about people being in separate spaces, the more it worked," she said. The live stream homespun, though a lot fancier than much Zoom driven content works, she thinks. The characters of "Sing Street," she said, "take these incredibly difficult circumstances and they refuse to bend to them; they rise above and they force their voices to be heard, they find expression in a world that's really conspiring against expression." She sees these actors as doing the same. Broccoli added, "It's been really moving to see the dedication of these kids, who are dealing with their own individual responses to this crisis." She still hopes to bring "Sing Street" to Broadway, though she doesn't know when Broadway will reopen. In the meantime, this live stream, which isn't really live, fulfills a lot of functions: as a fund raiser, a teaser, a way to maintain momentum and keep a young cast feeling energized and occupied. O'Connor, who had described rehearsals to me as a bulwark against insanity, characterized the performance as "a brilliant call of not giving up." Halper, his co star, put it like this: "It may be a small thing. But I think a small thing is better than nothing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
After 16 years of hauling suitcases to the Four Seasons Resort Nevis, Ivan and Ann Highley Gergel of Philadelphia no longer need to pack for vacations at the Caribbean island resort. About a year ago, the Highley Gergels paid around 3.5 million for a furnished, four bedroom villa that comes with a pool and a cottage and is operated by Four Seasons, allowing them to keep the bathing suits, flip flops and tennis rackets at their otherwise turnkey vacation home. "It is wonderful not to have to put bags in the hold" of an airplane when they head south, said Dr. Highley Gergel, 58, a psychiatrist, in a telephone interview from the island residence where he and his wife are spending a month this winter. The Highley Gergels had sworn they would never buy a vacation home because of "the hassle," but the convenience of buying at a branded development convinced them otherwise. From their private house, they have access to all the resort's facilities, plus 24 hour security, room service, home maintenance and weekly cleanings. "We originally came here because we loved the Four Seasons," Dr. Highley Gergel said, adding that the couple "was looking for somewhere with a kids' club," for their two younger sons, then 5 and 7. The Highley Gergels are among a growing number of Americans buying residences in brand name resort properties, mostly in the Caribbean and Latin America. Elsewhere around the world, international buyers are snapping up easy to lock up and leave, high rise residences under hotel banners like Mandarin Oriental, Marriott, Ritz Carlton and W, in cities from London to Barcelona to Bangkok. According to a Knight Frank "Global Branded Residences 2019" report, branded residences are "growing exponentially and can now be found in almost every major city and major holiday destinations," with more than 400 mostly hotel branded residences in 60 countries. "It allows people to go from dating us to marrying us," Mr. White said. In London, for instance, buyers looking to tie the knot with Four Seasons can do so at Twenty Grosvenor Square, A Four Seasons Residence, the hotelier's new stand alone project with 37 private residences, a wine cellar, spa, pool, game room and business center, amid private landscaped gardens in the high end Mayfair neighborhood. About a mile away, the Residences at Mandarin Oriental Mayfair, with 80 luxury apartments, housekeeping and a rooftop bar, are slated to open in 2021. Liam Bailey, a partner and global head of research for Knight Frank, said that when someone decides to buy overseas, "you are stepping outside your comfort zone. People find that quite a big step to take." By buying a home with, say, St. Regis or Ritz Carlton, "you buy into a global brand," Mr. Bailey said, one able to offer guidance on purchasing real estate in an unfamiliar country with unfamiliar tax laws and regulations. For those buying something that is still under construction, it instills confidence that the developer will deliver a completed product. It also makes leaving easier. "You are buying management, ultimately," Mr. Bailey said. "When you lock up and leave and go back to your main residence, you know the property is maintained and looked after. You know they are looking after who is coming in and going out." The model has become so popular, in fact, that brands beyond hotels are also attaching their luxury images to residential developments. The Italian jeweler Bulgari now offers residences in London and Dubai. French crystal maker Baccarat operates 60 homes in its Manhattan hotel. Fashion house Fendi is developing 41 Fendi Private Residences in Scottsdale, Ariz. At the Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., residents can park their cars next to their apartments even on the 50th floor. And just a few blocks away, 260 luxury residences are nearing completion in the 60 story Armani Casa tower. All that comes at a price. "If you have two developments sitting side by side and one has a recognizable global brand, it sells a bit faster, and at a premium," said Rod Taylor, director of international residential developments for Savills London. "People are buying a brand they recognize. If they don't know a town or a city very well, but they see a Four Seasons or a Mandarin, it gives them that warm, comfy feeling that they can actually go ahead and buy." Simon Jacobs, an investor from Manhattan, long considered buying a vacation home in the Caribbean, but he didn't know where. He was after something with a beachfront, and that was reachable via nonstop flight. "I didn't want to have to deal with any of the issues," he said. After checking out possibilities in Anguilla, St. Barts, Barbados, and Turks and Caicos, Mr. Jacobs, 58, his wife Eliana and their two daughters found their dream island home during a Christmas 2015 stay at Sugar Beach, A Viceroy Resort, which is built on an old sugar plantation on St. Lucia and offers privately owned, one to four bedroom residences. The 60 story Porsche Design Tower opened in 2017 in Sunny Isles, Fla., with 132 residential units. "These new residences they were building were right on the beach and there weren't dozens of them," Mr. Jacobs said. They were set between the Piton mountains and the Caribbean Sea, and he had "never seen anything that was that beautiful." They could also be rented out through the Viceroy hotel system when the family wasn't there. That May, he paid about 8.25 million for one of the hotel's five new contemporary beachfront residences, personalizing the 4,200 square foot house with a double height living and dining room, a media room and a closet to store snorkeling gear. Since the house was completed a year ago, the Jacobses, who also have a weekend home in Connecticut and summer in Europe, have only been there a few times. "You use it when you want it, and when you don't want it, it is available," Mr. Jacobs said, noting that the rent he collects offsets his homeowner fees. "You get income. You have no ownership cost." The Jacobses plan to return at the end of February and again in late March. "It is rented through the summer," Mr. Jacobs said. "It's part investment and part nice to have a house to come to that's your own." Penny Strawson, the property director of Sugar Beach Residences, said many owners typically those looking forward to retirement rent out the houses "a great deal to start with and then use them more as they reach retirement. They made their return." But as sales volume rises at branded communities, the average age is falling. Mr. White, of the Four Seasons, said buyers were "younger than expected," spanning several generations. At resort properties, multigenerational clients are important. "We will see a family buy a residence and bring the grandparents and kids along and use it as a vehicle to build a great legacy and memories," he said. Often, buyers are looking for more than swimming pools and spas. The Four Seasons Palazzo Tornabuoni, popular with Americans and Canadians, houses 37 apartments in a restored 16th century palace in Florence, Italy, and offers a calendar of lectures and events (wild boar hunting, anyone?) "which you generally wouldn't find in a residential complex in that location," Mr. Bailey said. Homeowners also are offered tours to other cities and towns, to help them engage with local culture. Tim Grisius, the global real estate officer of Marriott, which owns Ritz Carlton, St. Regis, Starwood, W and 10 other luxury and premium brands, said their residential business started about 20 years ago with a Ritz Carlton residence conceived mostly as a way to grow the company's hotel portfolio. Now, Mr. Grisius said, "The residential business has become substantial enough that it has become a nice business on its own." Marriott currently has 11 stand alone residential projects in the works from a Ritz Carlton in Singapore to a St. Regis in Dubai and a Marriott in Cairo as well as eight others in the pipeline. While the residential business used to be largely in the United States, 40 percent is now international, with 80 percent of the pipeline outside the U.S . "Globally, we are seeing a significant portion of luxury hotels including a residential component because they work really well together," Mr. Grisius said. When the Trump Organization launched its Trump International Realty brokerage in 2012, its first project in South America was a luxury residential tower in Punta del Este, a resort area in Uruguay. The building, slated to open in 2020, is not owned by Trump but will bear his brand. About 84 percent of about 160 units have been sold, and the first condos are expected to close by the end of 2019, said Juan Jose Cugliandolo, chief executive of YY, the developer. The Trump Organization currently has 10 properties completed or in development, according to a 2018 report on branded residences by Savills, which lists the organization as the 11th largest individual residence brand worldwide. As a wider range of brands enters the market, offerings are also being expanded to include people who are not phenomenally wealthy. In 2017, Andrew Ashcroft, a developer, approached Marriott about making Alaia, a 155 unit complex on the barrier reef of Belize's Ambergris Caye, part of the chain's Autograph Collection. Slated to open next year, the complex will include studios at 199,000, one bedrooms at 419,000, two bedrooms for 649,000, three bedrooms for 799,000 and eight beachfront villas priced at 1.3 million. Twenty five percent of inventory is sold, Mr. Ashcroft said, and 85 percent of the buyers are American. "If you go to more expensive markets, like Turks and Caicos, 1.3 million will get you a one bedroom in a tower," he said. In Belize, " 1.3 million will get you a three bedroom villa walking out onto the beach." Four Seasons also has its eyes on Belize, developing 85 residences as part of a new complex on Caye Chapel, a 280 acre private barrier island, slated to open in 2021. Even as international locales explode in popularity, though, the Savills report notes that the U.S. remains by far the largest market for branded residences, with 32 percent of the globe's supply. Four years ago, Mark and Tori Smith of Denver purchased a 3,500 square foot, three bedroom condo for 3.5 million at the Dorado Beach Ritz Carlton Reserve, in Dorado, Puerto Rico. When Hurricane Maria hurtled toward the island two years later, the Smiths left before it landed, worried they might lose their investment. "I have never lived in an area where I had to worry about hurricanes," said Mr. Smith, 64, the owner of a wealth management firm. "When this hurricane was coming, my wife said this place is built to be bombproof. We lost two ceiling fans on the outside and some water in the windows, but they didn't break." They got lucky. The resort suffered extensive damage and the hotel was closed for about a year, but the residents were allowed back when utilities were restored. Last October, Dorado Beach reopened with more than 300,000 new plantings and expanded facilities.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Nobody made much of it when Joe Hall skated off the ice. On March 29, 1919, his Montreal Canadiens were on the verge of losing Game 5 of the Stanley Cup finals to the Seattle Metropolitans. Hall, 37, was one of hockey's original enforcers, known for applying his wooden stick like a cudgel and delivering knockout blows. The Canadiens, behind by 3 0 heading into the third period, needed his pounding determination. But he went meekly to the bench and sat down. The Seattle crowd roared for the Metropolitans. The Canadiens mounted a comeback and won, 4 3, in overtime. Hall was gone. Reporters failed to draw a connection between his departure and the gaunt pallor of players on both teams and the Spanish flu, which had swept across the world the year before. By the time the 1919 Stanley Cup finals had gotten underway, la grippe had become an afterthought. "People were exuberant, in need of something to celebrate," said Kevin Ticen, a Seattle author who has written about the finals. "There was also a lot of denial." Then the celebration turned somber. Days after Montreal's comeback, players on both sides grew sick. More than half of the Canadiens, and the owner of the team, were stricken by the flu. Hall was suffering worst of all. The sports world, said his grandson Larry Hall, 79, should learn from history. "What happened to my grandfather is relevant now in a way I never thought it would be," he said. "The flu that hit the Stanley Cup came at the end of a series of pandemic waves. People relaxed, and then, unfortunately, it came again." Hours before a winner take all Game 6, hockey officials did something they had never done before or since. Joe Hall lay in a hospital, gasping for breath. His temperature was spiking. He was fighting for his life. Even now, amid daily stories of death and the fight against Covid 19, it can be hard to fathom the pain of that time, 101 years ago, when an aggressive pandemic and the devastation of World War I laid waste to the world. In the United States, the first deadly outbreak of the Spanish flu came in Kansas, hitting a small town and its Army base in early 1918. From there, it is thought, soldiers spread the flu across the country and into the trenches of Europe and then far beyond, fueling one of the worst disasters in human history. 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. Over two years, the Spanish flu killed at least 50 million people, including 55,000 in Canada and 675,000 in the United States. More than half of its victims died during the second wave, which lasted three months late in 1918. A Jack Dempsey fight was postponed. Many high schools and colleges shortened or shuttered their sports seasons. Michigan and Pittsburgh were named the college football national champions. Both played only five games. Major League Baseball was the dominant sport of the time. Worried about viral transmission, it banned the spitball. In a recently published book, "War Fever," the history professors Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith said that several Boston Red Sox briefly fell ill during spring training near an Army base in Arkansas and that the team's biggest star, Babe Ruth, was sickened by the virus in the season's first full month. Ruth recovered and led the Sox to a World Series title in 1918. But teeming crowds at Fenway Park may well have spread the pandemic and helped make Boston one of the worst American epicenters of infection. No sport, however, was affected quite like hockey. He wasn't big only about 165 pounds and 5 feet 9 inches. Though away from games he was well liked and known for his quiet dignity, on the ice he carried himself like a warrior. On one occasion, he was said to have attacked two Toronto players at the same time and caused a riot. Then there was a tale about an in game skirmish during which he inflicted such bloody mayhem that he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. "They called him Bad Joe in those days, or sometimes just the Bad Man," Larry Hall said. "A tough guy who refused to back down." Hockey was different then, said Eric Zweig, a historian and the author of "Fever Season," a book about Hall and the Cup. Players were not as big and strong as they are now, but they were tough and durable. Teams dressed only about 10 players. They did not wear masks or helmets and had little padding. Their pay? Larry Hall, a health club owner who spoke on the phone from his home two hours north of Toronto, described a cherished item on a wall in his office: Joe Hall's contract for the 1918 19 season. He earned 600, with a potential 100 bonus. Blow by blow accounts of what happened during the 1919 Stanley Cup come from archived newspapers and a slim number of history books. There is no known audio or film record. Descendants of the Montreal and Seattle players tend not to know much. "My father never really spoke of it, at least not to me," said Barbara Daniels, 90, the daughter of Frank Foyston, Seattle's best player. Maybe there was too much pain in the memories. Craig Patrick, a former N.H.L. player and coach who was an assistant for the "Miracle on Ice" team that won gold at the 1980 Winter Olympics, is the grandson of a league owner who figured prominently in the 1919 battle for the Cup. What little he knows about the championship series comes from what he has read. "In my family," he said, "I don't remember any stories being told about it at all." But after all this time, Joe Hall's family remembers. "The genes pass on," Larry Hall said, "and for us, so do the stories. They're part of who we are." The 1919 Stanley Cup pitted the best team from the N.H.L. against the best team from the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, a plucky upstart with clubs in Washington, Oregon and western Canada. Its champions that year were the Metropolitans. They had beaten Montreal in 1917 to become the first American franchise to win the Cup. "They were absolutely huge in Seattle, true celebrities," said Ticen, who has chronicled the team's championship season in a book, "When It Mattered Most." "They played sold out games in a state of the art arena for its day," he said. "There are kids climbing the roof to watch from skylights. The games are electric, and everywhere the players go in the city people flock to them." News stories about Hall's condition reported his regressing each day as it became clear that he had been struck especially hard by the virus. His fever rose to alarming levels 102 degrees, 103, 104. Because of the double overtime tie and Montreal's Game 5 win, the teams were slated to play once more to decide the championship. The Spanish flu spread like fire through both teams, and the Canadiens didn't have enough healthy players to keep going. After a proposal to bring in replacements was rejected, Montreal offered to forfeit. Seattle refused to claim the title that way. Finally, hockey officials decided to call the series a draw, a result memorialized on the Stanley Cup. The year and team names were etched on the silver chalice. Below that was engraved: His teammates recovered, but he remained hospitalized. Fluid filled his lungs, and his fever stayed stubbornly high. His wife raced by train from Canada to be at his side, but she was too late. A week after his last game, the great enforcer died.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
THE style icon Nan Kempner and Henry B. Platt, the Tiffany Company chairman, were the society fixtures of 1970s Manhattan when Doubles, a private club in the Sherry Netherland hotel, first welcomed the city's elite into its distinctive red space. "When we opened, society was driven by a whole troop of people who don't exist anymore," said Wendy Carduner, the general manager of the club and the daughter of its founder. "People stayed out to 2 in the morning, and everyone drank a lot." Today, Doubles is the go to haunt for another powerful city set: tweens from wealthy families looking for a night of dancing away from their parents. "Most of the people joining now are joining because of the children's events," Ms. Carduner said. "Their children are asking them, 'Why don't you belong to Doubles,' and then they're asking if they can join. Before, it was family oriented for young children and parents, but it wasn't driven as it is now by the tween set." Twerking to Miley Cyrus may not be the first thing people associate with private clubs in New York City. Most of them seem mysterious, even forbidding, places to passers by. What happens inside, after all, is supposed to be kept inside. But that air of exclusion is changing. "It's not as much about money," said Bruce Richman, founder of Inspired Philanthropy, which advises celebrities and companies on their charitable giving, and is a member of another private club, Soho House. "You can't really buy your way into it. They want the right kind of community so the price isn't prohibitive." Or as Angus Beavers, a lover of old private clubs who in the 1980s was an owner of the Surf Club, which was open to the preppy set and private to everyone else, said: "There is a commonality of interests, backgrounds and rituals. There are all sorts of things that make you part of that club and you don't have to explain yourself when you're inside." In the world of private clubs, Doubles is itself a tween, not yet 40 years old. The Union Club dates to 1836, the Harmonie Club to 1852. Many of the largest clubs occupy enormous piles of stone in prime locations, like the University Club on Fifth Avenue, the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South and the Metropolitan Club, which is tucked behind iron gates on East 60th Street. More recently, clubs like Soho House and the Core Club, with their sleek designs, less stringent rules and more casual membership, have set themselves up as a contemporary reaction to the stone edifices of an earlier era. At their heart, though, these clubs are still places to gather with people who have common interests. But what purpose do these places of camaraderie, contemplation and the continuance of manners serve in this digital, disconnected and overworked world? Both less and more than you may think if you're just peering in from street level. For one, they're not as expensive to join as their stately facades would suggest. According to members the clubs don't like to discuss prices publicly, for the most part the annual fees generally range from several hundred dollars to nearly 10,000. Initiation at the Core Club is 50,000 and the annual dues are 17,000 for full membership. The University Club's fees run from 1,000 to 5,000 a year. Soho House is 2,800 a year. Doubles costs 325 to 1,250 a year after an initiation fee of 400 to 7,000, Ms. Carduner said, depending on the membership category. "They have admissions policies, but you meet over drinks," said a private banker not allowed by his firm to speak on the record but who is a member of the Yale Club and the Links Club. "They're not nearly as restrictive as they were in 1960. You need a sponsor and letters because all of these clubs need to survive. They may have the characteristic in people's minds of old, WASP elite clubs, but it's far less true than it once was." And how these clubs are used today is different from how they were used in the past. They're largely about business, broadly defined. Mr. Richman, whose philanthropic clients have included Chris Bosh of the Miami Heat; Desmond Tutu, the South African cleric who is a Nobel laureate; and the actress Scarlett Johansson, said he relished the privacy of Soho House to conduct business meetings. "My clients can feel comfortable that it's safe and no one will intrude on their privacy," he said. "Members respect privacy, and the staff enforce no photos or no cellphones to keep it a private environment. That provides a kind of safety and comfort for my clients." Lisa Jackson, a jewelry designer who owns LJ Cross, a boutique in Manhattan, said she liked to conduct business meetings at the Core Club choosing it over Soho House and the Harvard Club, where she is also a member because the aesthetics of the club and her store are similar. "It's different than traditional clubs," she said. "I can conduct business meetings. I can use my laptop and do research. Their philosophy is different and it pretty much matches me, aesthetically and artistically." New or old, these clubs also have reciprocal privileges at other private clubs in cities around the country and, occasionally, abroad. Suzanne Kopp Moskow, a former lawyer in Chicago turned philanthropist, is a member of the Woman's Athletic Club of Chicago, which has reciprocal privileges with the Colony Club and the Cosmopolitan Club in New York. "Staying at a reciprocal club is nice," she said. "It's private and quiet. You don't feel rushed. You can have meetings in a quiet place." She added, "When I travel alone, I like staying at the club. Not that I feel unsafe, I feel more connected." Mr. Richman, who lived in Miami while working on Mr. Bosh's foundation, said the Soho House in Miami Beach gave him a private, easily accessible place to meet Mr. Bosh or his manager. And when he travels to Los Angeles for work, he stays at the Soho House there. The sports options are another draw. Like private country clubs, the facilities are generally better or at least more comfortable than their public counterparts. Richard M. Frome, a real estate attorney who has been a member of the New York Athletic Club for more than two decades, said he was attracted by the indoor track for winter running. But he soon discovered a world of subgroups dedicated to sports as diverse as water polo, judo, squash and wrestling. N.Y.A.C., as it is known, stands out for its commitment to athletics, boasting of its many members with Olympic medals. But Mr. Frome said he came to appreciate the broader club through the monthly meetings of its running club. "Once a month, they'd have a little gathering, and you'd meet a handful of people," he said. "Then, you'd go to one of the bars and they'd introduce you to a couple more people, and they'd introduce you to a couple of more people." These clubs are about camaraderie and contacts, particularly as people accrue years of membership. Alex Donner, a society bandleader, said his membership at the University Club had provided a variety of experiences. "I've really enjoyed a number of the speakers that they have brought in," he said. "I've met a number of people at the club that I didn't know. It's been good for business over the years. I've played a number of weddings for daughters of people I've met at the club. It's a welcoming place." And the University Club and others are no longer the prep school redoubts that they once were, he said, not least of all because most now include women and are competing with other attractions for members. Ms. Carduner of Doubles is wistful but pragmatic about the shift in club life over the last 40 years. "Everyone is working," she said. "They're going to bed earlier. They're drinking less. Everyone is so busy with their activities and their children's activities. It's just a much busier, intense New York."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
WASHINGTON David Sedaris was taking questions from the audience after his reading at the Kennedy Center last month, when suddenly the evening took an alarming turn. "How's Hugh?" someone asked, referring to Hugh Hamrick, Mr. Sedaris's boyfriend. Hugh plays the pivotal role of in house normal person in Mr. Sedaris's skewed alternative universe. ("I call him Congressman Prude," Mr. Sedaris said.) But just then Mr. Sedaris paused, looked stricken. His nerdy bravado slipped away and his voice quavered. "We're not together any more," he said. An audible gasp of dismay swept through the auditorium, packed with more than 2,000 people, as the author so unshockable, so seemingly unsentimental, so darkly humorous, yet so constant in his domestic arrangements began to lose it, right in front of us. "I'm sorry," Mr. Sedaris went on, "it's all ...." He could not continue. By now people in the audience were practically weeping, and Mr. Sedaris was for real. Until he wasn't. (We should have seen it coming.) He flashed a sunny grin. "Just kidding!" he said. "He's fine." Mr. Sedaris has been messing with our heads for more than 25 years, since he began reading his diary entries on National Public Radio. His breakthrough segment, "Adventures in SantaLand," contained the now famous account of how, while working a desperation job as a Christmas elf in a department store, Mr. Sedaris told a fractious child that if he didn't behave, Santa Claus would come and steal everything in his house, including the towels and the electricity. His first book was an essay collection called "Barrel Fever." Like its author, with his deceptively benign and innocuous appearance, the book had the stealth force of a jalapeno disguised as a bell pepper. Now he is about to publish his latest book, "Calypso," which reflects the usual Sedaris preoccupations: the bonds of siblings, the trials and comforts of domesticity, the softenings and ravagements of time, the general confusion of the world, his family's extremely weird sense of humor. Any family that names its seaside cottage "the Sea Section" and seriously considers "The Amniotic Shack" as an alternative is not exactly normal. But "Calypso" reveals the later day Mr. Sedaris to be more ruminative, more serious, and a little less inclined to play everything for laughs. He is 61 now, and life has crept up on him. His quick, charismatic and acerbically clever late mother is revealed in the essay "Why Aren't You Laughing?" to have been an angry alcoholic who abused and embarrassed her family even as they refused to acknowledge what was going on. The essay "Now We Are Five" poignantly discusses, in Mr. Sedaris's familiarly discursive way, the suicide of his troubled sister, Tiffany. 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. But the vicissitudes of his daily life are not so different from the vicissitudes of your life and mine, even if his eye for detail and way of processing the world around him are wholly his own. And one of his gifts as a writer is his ability to slip so easily between the profound and the mundane. "In a lot of the stories nothing huge happens," Mr. Sedaris said in an interview. It was breakfast in New York, a few days earlier. "I spent a week at the beach with my family, but it wasn't like anybody got into a car accident or someone broke into the house and stole things. But it still felt like a story to me. You know, how life feels like a story." Mr. Sedaris is an atypical author, and not just because of his singular worldview or because his books sell so well or because he spends so much of his free time striding through the English countryside, where he and Hugh now live, picking up trash ("I don't know what it is about England; people are such slobs," he said). He also has an unusually close relationship with his readers. Even when there is no new work to promote, he spends much of his time on extended tours in the United States and abroad. The current tour goes to places like Toronto, Minneapolis, Houston, Albuquerque, San Francisco, Missoula and many more; heads to Ireland and Britain; and returns to the United States in August. After he appears, he signs books and chats to people late into the night, even if that means all night long. (His record is 10 1/2 hours, in Chicago.) And so Mr. Sedaris remained at a table that night in the Kennedy Center until nearly 1 a.m. The readers snaked in a line far down the vestibule. Mr. Sedaris talked to every one of them. He was in no rush. His conversational gambits covered the sort of topics (abortion, religion, sexuality, disability) that people are advised to avoid in potentially non safe spaces. For someone else it would have seemed like a high wire act; for Mr. Sedaris it was business as usual. Mr. Sedaris: "Did you go to church on Easter?" Along came a young woman who, like most people in line, had her first name (Chelsea) written on a card that she handed to Mr. Sedaris, for book signing purposes. "How old do you think you are going to be when you die?" Mr. Sedaris asked. You would think people might be put off, but they weren't. Not when Mr. Sedaris wrote "Christ died for you" in one woman's book ("I teach high school students," she said, "nothing offends me"); or when in another's book he drew a picture of a three legged bear with blood spewing from its stump because, he said, it had stepped on a land mine; or when he wrote "you will not be alone forever" in the book of a fan who said she was single. Nor did anyone mind when he asked a (nonpregnant) woman if she might have an abortion this summer and then advised her to "do it while you still can, because you may not be able to have one in the future"; or when he wrote "you're using that cane as a crutch" to a reader with a limp; or when he said, "What happened to your mother is she dead?" to a man named Richard, who wanted a book signed for his father. "She is to him," Richard said. Mr. Sedaris drew a little person and gravestone with "R.I.P." written on it. "Here is your father looking at the ashes of his failed marriage," he explained. Someone named Christine said she worked in her firm's H.R. department. "You're absolutely lovely," Mr. Sedaris said, sketching out a key in her book. "Here's a key to a whorehouse where you're going to get a much better job." Released from conversational convention, readers confided in him: about their relationships, about their co workers, about their pet peeves, about their sexual arrangements, about strange events that had befallen them. "This is the most exciting thing that has happened to me all day," one reader said, after a discussion that touched on acrimony and syphilis, among other things. "Thank you for bringing so much humor into this world." Because Mr. Sedaris writes so matter of factly about Hugh, his non broken up with boyfriend, he draws a fair contingent of fans who are in same sex relationships, or who might be. "You make a fine couple," Mr. Sedaris said, to a pair of women. Not the way he meant, as it turned out: They were mother and daughter. Mr. Sedaris was not fazed by this piece of information. "Your mother looks like a predatory older lesbian," he said, to the younger one, who did not seem to mind at all.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Recently I talked to a man in his 60s who grew up in a small coastal town near Houston. He loved the Texas coast and its beaches. I asked him, as I usually do, if he had an image in his mind that had meaning for him. He had been thinking about a raindrop he had seen at home before he had been admitted. He talked about how far it had traveled, how it had gone through a storm and it had endured to be a unique drop at this moment on his windowpane. I thought about the image. The drop would dissolve and be absorbed into the earth, like all of us. I drew what he was describing: a window looking out on subtle shapes of trees and bushes, a narrow path obscured by slanting lines of rain, and in the center of the pane, a raindrop. He took the drawing and held it closely. There was his raindrop, a small oval shape on a piece of white paper. He looked at me as if we had discovered the universe. I ask patients to talk about what they love, what has meaning to them. Often the responses are about loved ones, spouses and children, fishing in the bay. Sometimes the patient wants to create an artwork with his or her own hands. Sometimes I create a collage of images: children, horses, flowers, sunsets and sunrises, the beach, a dog, a sport. I've drawn the Texas A M football stadium and Mickey Mouse with an angel because they meant something to a patient. I connected with MD Anderson because my husband was a patient there. He died in 2000, and losing him was the most difficult experience of my life. I felt flayed. It took me a long time and many paintings to deal with the raw grief. The first moments when I enter a patient's room are fragile and tender. Some patients are very beautiful in repose and seem at peace. Their partners or family members want me to draw them like that. Once a woman whose husband had just died asked their nurse if I would come to their room and draw them lying together. Recently I saw a young woman who was so ill she could barely talk. When I told her I was an artist, she perked up a little. She was bald, her skin was sallow, and a palm sized bandage covered the port on her chest through which her chemotherapy had flowed for months. When I asked her if she had an image in her mind, she said, "dying." "How do you see this?" I asked. "Just lying in bed dying," she said. "Would you like me to draw you?" "Yes," she said. I bent down to my bag for a sketchbook and pencil, and when I looked up, she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She appeared to have shaken off all the cancer and chemicals in her body. Her back was straight and her head was high. She looked at me unflinchingly, proud as a queen, projecting all the beauty within her. She was no longer "just lying in bed dying." When I handed her the drawing she clasped it to her chest and said, "Incredible." This was the image she wanted for her mother and her children. There was the woman who, with her skeletal hand, could still draw herself hanging from a line attached to a butterfly in whose wings she had drawn the life lines of her own hand. And there was the man who told me, "I am a murderer, a rapist, a robber and a thief." He was seeking forgiveness, mostly from himself, and cried when I drew him kneeling in a circle of fire with rays of light descending to his body.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
BEIJING Economies in Europe and the United States are still languishing as the pandemic forces cities to shut down and shoppers to stay home. But one major country is growing once again: China. The world's second largest economy expanded 3.2 percent from April through June compared to the same period last year, Chinese officials said on Thursday. It was an abrupt turnaround from the January through March quarter, when the economy shrank 6.8 percent, the first contraction that China has acknowledged in nearly half a century. The recovery points to the authoritarian government's success in bringing the coronavirus outbreak under control with widespread testing and travel restrictions, after its early missteps delayed the response and fed public anger. But the economic rebound also reflects the government's continued reliance on spending on the building of highways and rail lines and other infrastructure projects to juice the economy, rather than on domestic consumption. That approach raises questions about whether China's economic turnaround can be sustained, and whether it can become the engine needed to drive the global economy out of a slump. The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets in China fell 4.8 percent on Thursday as investors concluded that economic growth had become too dependent on government stimulus. "It's all investment," said Hong Hao, the chief strategist at Bank of Communications International. "Consumption, which is the most sustainable part of growth, is doing much less, so therefore the market sees it as a weakness in economic health." China needs to rev up consumption at home because demand for its exports has slowed as other countries go into recession and unemployment grows globally. Factories in China are already cranking out furniture, consumer electronics and mass market cars more quickly than consumers at home or abroad want to buy them. "It looks like there is still a mismatch there people are not consuming as much as previously," said Sara Hsu, a visiting scholar in economics at Fudan University in Shanghai. The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets had surged 14 percent in the first half of this month through Wednesday's close. The rally had been so strong that some analysts have worried it may be the start of another speculative mania like the one in early 2015 that led to a crash late that year and in early 2016. On the Chinese economy itself, however, a cautious optimism is emerging, at least compared with the first quarter of this year. "The economy is definitely on the mend," said Shen Jianguang, the China economist for JD.com, a large Chinese online retailer. China's economy has shown "development and resilience," said Liu Aihua, the bureau's director general of the department of comprehensive statistics, at a news briefing. But, she warned, "the national economic recovery was still under pressure." 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. Growth was driven by a ramping up of infrastructure investments. Beijing gave quick approval for local governments to issue bonds to pay for shovel ready projects like building a subway line in Dalian and renovating a train station in Xi'an. The government also provided quick loans and other subsidies to businesses on the condition that they not lay off workers. Despite those measures, however, tens of millions of Chinese remain out of work, particularly young Chinese. The government has tried to respond by sharply expanding the number of places in graduate schools this autumn and even redefining employment to include bloggers and professional video gamers. Millions of factory and service workers routinely quit their jobs each December or January to return to their home villages for extended Lunar New Year celebrations, and then hunt for new jobs when they return to cities in late February or in March. But this year, many of these workers are still unemployed, as eateries, hotels and many export factories have hired back practically no one since the holiday ended. As in the United States and elsewhere, the slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has widened the gap between the rich and the poor in China. Sales data shows that spending in villages, towns and smaller cities and among lower income households had faltered, Mr. Shen said. But wealthier households, who are more likely to work from home or to have considerable savings, are still spending money. Consumption has stayed fairly strong in big cities, where most of the country's affluent families live, Mr. Shen said. Ms. Liu of the statistics bureau acknowledged that the incomes of farmers and other residents in the less developed countryside had been "greatly affected" by the pandemic. The economic impact of the coronavirus poses a challenge to the ruling Communist Party and its efforts to make good on a promise by Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, to eradicate extreme poverty by the end of this year. Ms. Liu said that 5.51 million of China's 1.4 billion people were still counted as very poor at the end of last year. China's appearance of economic strength in the second quarter was also partly a statistical fluke. In April and May, China spent less on imports because the cost of oil, copper and other commodities went down. That meant China had a bigger trade surplus. And a larger trade surplus shows up in countries' accounting as faster economic growth. But those prices have jumped back up in the last several weeks, so the country's economic performance now through September will not reflect the same import savings. Now the question is whether China's exports can hold up at a time when many stores are struggling in the West, and particularly in the United States, which has seen a steep increase in new confirmed cases of Covid 19. China's exports were up only 0.5 percent in June compared to last year. Steve Denton, the chief executive of Ware2Go, a large warehouse logistics company controlled by UPS, said that from March through mid July, the company had seen a 17 percent jump in the volume of goods being stored. Many of these goods are from China. In China, consumption has also been affected by the coronavirus though sometimes in unexpected ways. In the spring, families at first rushed to car dealerships because of concerns about the risks of catching the virus from using buses, subways or other forms of mass transit. But with the outbreak nearly completely subsided, people are reconsidering those big ticket purchases as they look for ways to save in the face of broader weakness throughout the economy. Jian Xu, a former Daimler and Volkswagen executive who now leads the China automotive practice at the Kearney consulting firm, said that many families were canceling orders they had placed for new cars. According to the China Passenger Car Association, dealerships across China sold 6.2 percent fewer cars last month than in June of last year. But part of the drop was because many automakers discounted prices in June of last year to sell a lot of extra cars before tighter emissions standards took effect the following month.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
In his long career as a Hollywood costume designer, Michael Kaplan has created looks for disco legends (the Village People in "Can't Stop the Music"), 1980s icons (Jennifer Beals in "Flashdance") and '90s cult classics ("Fight Club"). But he holds special regard for science fiction, including the original "Blade Runner" in 1982, one of his first movie credits. Recent sci fi projects include the 2009 reboot of "Star Trek" and "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," both directed by J. J. Abrams. He returned to a galaxy far, far away this season, designing Rey's scrappy Jedi training outfit, Kylo Ren's high waisted pants (or is it a bandage? "They're high waisted pants" Mr. Kaplan said), and Princess Leia's majestic capes in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" ("She has two," he added). Mr. Kaplan, who lives in Los Angeles and was recently nominated for an award from the Costume Designers Guild, spoke to The New York Times recently about how he approaches costume design, and the unique challenges of creating costumes for otherworldly creatures. The old movies looked to Japan. The original costume designers looked at a lot of ninja clothes. They looked at westerns. And they looked at W.W. II and a little bit at W.W. I. I went to the same sources they did. I didn't want to reinvent "Star Wars." I wanted to embrace it and update it. How many costumes did you design for "The Last Jedi"? More than a thousand. And they're all individually made, all in different fabrics. They needed dresses and gloves and jewelry. You can't go out and buy clothes for "Star Wars." We had a milliner. It was like M.G.M. in the '30s. We had hats made, gloves made. We had people just making jewelry for this one sequence. The creatures would come to us naked, and we would dress them. Which was your favorite "Star Wars" costume? Praetorian guard. We looked at 1950s muscle cars. The costumes had to be on stuntmen who were fighting very hard. They use weapons and they need to have complete range of motion. And if these guys fall, you don't want the armor cracking. And the helmets look like they have no way of seeing, but there's actually tiny slits, and they can see out perfectly well. They're very samurai, very Japanese, but very clean. Very "Star Wars." The Academy tends to reward period pieces for costume. Does that annoy you? They don't love science fiction. I don't see it changing. Even the original "Blade Runner," which didn't have all the characteristics of a science fiction film, was still totally disregarded. And look what it has become. And with sequels, I think they think it's already designed. It's done. I do find it a bit odd, because when you're doing a period piece you can do research. You can look at costumes that someone else made. But with the future you're actually blazing new territory. What was Carrie Fisher like to work with? She commented on everything. But whenever she was talking, there was laughter. She referred to her costume in Episode 7 as her Sunoco gas station attendant costume. For "The Last Jedi," the director Rian Johnson wanted her to look more regal. I got a really lovely letter from him, saying, "You made her look so beautiful in these costumes for her final film." It meant a lot. Are you inspired by current fashion trends? I don't look at fashion magazines unless I'm doing a contemporary movie and the actress is wearing something very trendy. The last time I was influenced by fashion for a movie was looking back to the '60s, when I was doing "Star Trek," seeing Courreges and Pierre Cardin and trying to harken back to that period when "Star Trek" was developed. I actually did the same for "Star Wars." Would you ever design a line of clothing yourself? I really don't have an opinion of what other people should wear. Marc Jacobs always says to me, "I could never do what you do." And I say to him, "Of course you could, but I could never do what you do."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
LONDON The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase for the best of world theater, dance and music that has been held in the Scottish city every year since 1947, has been canceled because of the coronavirus. So has the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a scrappier event devoted to comedy and theater, which bills itself as the world's largest arts event. The Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Edinburgh Art Festival and the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an event involving armed forces bands from around the world, won't take place this year either. The cancellations, announced on Wednesday in a news release, are the latest sign that the pandemic's impact on the world's cultural calendar will last at least into summer. The International Festival was first held in 1947, with the aim of uniting people through culture in the aftermath of World War II. The other festivals and events sprung up around it, establishing Edinburgh as a popular August tourist destination. "Since their inception in 1947, the Edinburgh festivals have existed to champion the flowering of the human spirit, and in the face of their truly unprecedented global emergency, we believe that this spirit is needed now more than ever," Shona McCarthy, the chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, said in a statement. "Having taken advice and considered all the options," she said, "we collectively believe this is the only appropriate response." According to the release, the 2019 Fringe involved over 30,000 performers, from school groups to star comedians, who took part in 3,841 shows. Ms. McCarthy said the festival's organizers would do all they could to support "the thousands of artists and participants directly affected by today's decisions." The Edinburgh International Book Festival's organizers said they would "program a series of online events" to run in place of this year's events. Since mid March, the coronavirus has been bringing the shutters down on Britain's cultural life. On Mar. 23, the country was put on a virtual lockdown, with people urged to go outside only for essential trips, such as for buying food or for one session of exercise a day. The police have been using drones to enforce the measures and shaming some transgressors on social media. Some major summer cultural events, including the Glastonbury music festival, held each June, had already announced they would not go ahead, but the Edinburgh cancellations will come as a major blow to people who had hoped that later events would be unaffected. Their cancellation was not the only sign this week that cultural events in Britain will feel the virus's impact later than many hoped. The Barbican arts center in London said on Wednesday it would remain closed until at least July. "Looking at how long social distancing measures are likely to be in place, we feel we're very unlikely to be open until at least the end of June," Nicholas Kenyon, the venue's managing director, said in a news release. "We therefore felt the best approach," he said, "was to inform audiences, as well as the artists and organizations we work with, as soon as we could."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
MOSCOW There's no doubt Russia is a country with grandeur in its scale, sweeping across 11 time zones and home to gargantuan oil, gas and mining companies. The country's wealthy also have a reputation for living large and taking risky bets. But in the economic swoon today, getting by as an investor, says one wealthy Russian in the capital, means thinking small. "In the past two years, Russia has changed quite a bit," said Aleksei A. Kozlov, a partner in a private equity firm. "Before we invested in simple things like stocks and large company debt, but we changed strategy because the risk just wasn't justified." In the geopolitical upheaval and with oil prices still low, large companies face a risk of sanctions or nationalization, highlighted by the growing share of the economy in Russia in state hands: The government's portion of the gross domestic product rose from 35 percent in 2005 to 70 percent today, according to statistics from the Federal Antimonopoly Service, a state agency. "The business climate is extraordinarily murky, and the judicial system is poor," Mr. Kozlov said. But opportunity exists in untapped potential in the creative and educated population, particularly in Moscow. "We invest in medium businesses that would be very difficult to take away from the owners, and that are in demand," he said. A favorite category is private medical clinics, which are booming given cuts to state medical services. Because the doctor talent pool is the heart of the company, it cannot easily be seized, reducing risk. Mining for minds, and not for minerals, has been paying off, Mr. Kozlov said. Despite Russia's woes, a space exists for private investors. Mr. Kozlov's private equity firm typically steps in to replace bank loans, taking from 25 percent to 49 percent of shares in a closed stock company in exchange. "A lot of companies have defaulted because of the currency drop, the sanctions or counter sanctions," he said. "And the businessmen are good at what they do, but they are weak in financing," which is where he sees his firm's role. The firm, which has about 25 million invested in small and medium size businesses, rarely puts more than 1 million into any one company. "We don't have companies with a lot of capital land, machines, tools, or anything else," he said. "It is all risk, all hard to sell." Mr. Kozlov, 42, is married to a prominent political activist, Olga Romanova. Like many businessmen, he failed once spectacularly, before bouncing back with a Russian twist. "I had a corporate dispute with my partner, who was a member of the Senate," and well connected with prosecutors, he explained. At issue was ownership of a factory outside Moscow that was making artificial leather. In 2008, Mr. Kozlov was arrested on fraud charges he said were trumped up. Ms. Romanova formed a group, called Russia Behind Bars, to draw attention to her husband's detention and the broader problem of arrests of businessmen. It organized the wives into support and lobby groups. When his legal problems were finally resolved, Ms. Romanova suggested the couple leave Russia. "My wife said, 'You are exonerated, but it's better to leave. Get out.'" Mr. Kozlov, though, said he knew no other place to go, felt he could still do business in his hometown, still had friends, and in any case, "Moscow is the city I love most in the world. "You need to fight to the end," he said of this experience. Paying bribes is a shortcut for the wealthy in Russia, he said, but also a trap. With persistence, it's possible to run a transparent business, he said. "The chances are it will be all right." "We have been through more than one crisis" in Russia, and times of crisis are always the best for investing, he said. "It's always a time to start. Some parts of the economy fall, other parts rise. It never happens that everything falls at once." "What worries me is the political situation and foreign policy, the conflict that is happening between Russia and a lot of other countries." He worries that potential buyers of his shares in the small companies may not show up when he wants to exit. On weekends, Mr. Kozlov dedicates time to his wife's charity, saying he is giving back for the support shown to him during his roughly three and a half years in jail. The government's business ombudsman estimates more than 100,000 small business men are in jail in Russia. The charity, among other things, brings clothes and food to jails to pass along to incarcerated businessmen. Another weekend ritual for Mr. Kozlov, as for so many other Russian businessmen, is to visit the Sanduny steam baths, an opulent, Greco Roman themed bathhouse with a deep history in the Russian capital as a mixing place for the well to do. Here, wearing sheets or nothing at all, Russia's financial and governmental elite let the week's worries seep away. And sometimes, deals can be cut in the more relaxed atmosphere that could not happen in suits in an office, Mr. Kozlov said. "I go with a group of friends and discuss business," he said. "It's a good atmosphere. It's totally relaxed. And there're no cellphones bothering us. We go early in the morning, when there aren't so many people. And we get the pleasure of the steam, and of our company. I never skip the steam bath."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Thousands of years ago, megaliths began to appear in Europe standing stones, dolmens, stone circles. They vary from single stones to complexes like Stonehenge. There are about 35,000 such monuments in Europe, many along the Atlantic coast of France and Spain, in England, Ireland, Scandinavia and throughout the Mediterranean. They attract both tourists and archaeologists, who have spent a century debating how the knowledge to build such monuments spread. One idea suggested that this cultural change came from the Near East, and spread west along coastal routes, perhaps by a priestly caste. Later theories suggested techniques may have developed independently in different locales. But a scientist who analyzed 2,410 radiocarbon dates of megaliths and their surroundings reported on Monday that the first such tombs appeared in France, about 6,500 years ago, and then spread along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, as well as to England, Ireland and Scandinavia. "It took me 10 years of my life for this research," said the scientist, Bettina Schulz Paulsson, a prehistoric archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She combed the literature in 11 languages, assessed the validity of the dating tests, and used a statistical method called Bayesian analysis to narrow the dates further. She reported her findings in the journal PNAS, concluding that the building of megalithic graves appeared and spread along the coast of France, Spain and Portugal and the Mediterranean within a period of 200 to 300 years. Kristian Kristiansen, also at Gothenburg University but not involved in Dr. Schulz Paulsson's study, said the research was "a real breakthrough," providing for the first time both the origin and the evidence for a coastal, maritime spread of the technology. That, in itself is significant because it suggests that people of the time had boats and skill to travel along the coasts and quickly spread the megalithic method. Dr. Schulz Paulsson found that the oldest megalithic graves dated from about 4800 to 4000 B.C. in northwest France and other areas like the Channel Islands, Corsica and Sardinia. But northwest France is the only one of these areas that showed evidence of earthen grave monuments that preceded the first megaliths, dating back to around 5000 B.C. These graves, in the geological area known as the Paris basin, indicate the beginnings of monument building that are lacking in the other areas. Dr. Schulz Paulsson said that the earliest standing stones in Brittany were some of the largest. An early stone called the Grand Menhir, once rose more than 20 meters high. Some of the early monuments were dolmens, tablelike structures that look like the Greek letter Pi. Around 4300 B.C., she wrote, the builders made dolmens that could be re opened, for additional burials. The earliest is in Prisse la Charriere in central western France, constructed between 4371 and 4263 B.C. There were also subsequent waves of megalith construction, she said. One between 3500 and 4000 B.C. involved passage graves, which have a corridor and allow for multiple burials. She also found a "megalithic revival" in Sicily, Apulia and the Balearic Islands, which include Mallorca and Ibiza, in the second millennium (2000 to 1000 B.C.). Some of the more famous and elaborate megaliths, like Stonehenge, came near the end of the construction of megalithic monuments, around 2500 B.C. Dr. Kristiansen said that "an added bonus" of the work is that, "This matches the most recent genetic evidence we have. Recent ancient DNA results show that people in Ireland and England came from Iberia." He said the construction of the megaliths, particularly the passage tombs, was quite complex. He said researchers had even found tombs that seemed to bear a signature design in Denmark and in northern Germany. He said there were some missing dates for Near Eastern megaliths that could possibly complicate the picture, but that he found the evidence Dr. Schulz Paulsson marshaled clear and persuasive. "This is definite. It is a maritime diffusion." Dr. Schulz Paulsson said that future research will focus on the trading of greenstone along the route she traced for the expansion of the tomb technology. Greenstone trading is known to have occurred in the Stone Age, but she thinks the maritime trading along that route was more advanced than previously thought, and maritime technology more sophisticated, too. She also hopes to do carbon dating and more field work. Over the past decade, she said, she had dragged her family with her on research trips. Of course, she acknowledged, much of that travel was along the Atlantic coast of France and to the various Mediterranean coastal sites. "It's not the worst," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Credit... NEW DELHI Sitting in his basement, below the crowded dirt roads of Wazirabad village, Mohammad Saud leaned over the body of an injured black kite. The room was cramped, its walls chipping blue paint, the noise from the streets above drowned out by the whir of a fan. Mr. Saud stared at the bird in front of him for a couple of seconds, then gently folded its wing over with a gloved hand. At least two bones, four tendons and two muscles had been snapped. The bird's head tilted back limply, eyes cloudy. Mr. Saud adjusted his glasses with the crook of his elbow, then stated the obvious: "This is a gone case. Nothing can be done." Mr. Saud placed the kite back into a thin cardboard box. As he did so, Salik Rehman, a young employee of Mr. Saud, reached into a different cardboard box and pulled out another black kite. This bird's right wing was wrapped in a gauze bandage stained with dried blood and pus. Mr. Saud examined it briefly. Another gone case, he concluded; it would have to be euthanized. Fourteen more cardboard boxes surrounded them, each filled with a black kite that Mr. Rehman, Mr. Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, Mr. Saud's brother, had collected earlier in the day from animal hospitals around New Delhi. The three men, along with a part time veterinarian, comprise a bird rehabilitation organization called Wildlife Rescue that treats more than 2,000 birds of prey a year. Nearly all of those birds are black kites, which are everywhere in the city. The Yamuna River, which flows by Wazirabad, is so toxic that some sections cannot sustain aquatic life, but kites scavenge muddy trash from its banks in swarms. On a typical day, dozens can be seen circling above Old Delhi, the bustling heart of the city, rising on columns of warm air. Mr. Saud and Mr. Shehzad have sacrificed everything for Wildlife Rescue since founding it 20 years ago. Sacrificed everything for the black kite, a bird that is neither endangered nor particularly attractive and, in New Delhi, is about as unloved as the pigeon. "It's some kind of sense of duty," Mr. Shehzad said, with a shrug. "If not us, then nobody's going to take care of them." The bird was tangled in manja cotton thread coated with colorful layers of crushed glass. Manja is often used to fly paper kites, a popular pastime in India, one that became a symbol of national pride in New Delhi after the country gained independence from Britain in 1947. On clear days, especially after monsoon season, when the city's rooftops are dotted with people, kites speckle the sky, their threads forming an invisible cat's cradle overhead. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. Taylor Swift's 'All Too Well' and the Weaponization of Memory. The new version of the bitter breakup song luxuriates in its details and its supersize length, correcting a power imbalance in the relationship it describes. The Crypto Capital of the World. Ukraine has an ambitious plan to both mainstream the nation's thriving trade in crypto and to rebrand the entire country. The crushed glass gives manja enough texture to sever the strings of other kites in informal neighborhood competitions, but it can be fatal. Every year a dozen residents speeding motorcyclists, rickshaw drivers, young children are killed when glass encrusted thread falls and wraps around their necks. In 2017, the city banned the use of manja, but to little effect; the thread is still sold in many street side markets and can be found on almost every kite in the air. It is a particular threat to birds. Thousands have their wings slashed in the mild weather of late summer and autumn, and are sent tumbling down to the crowded streets below. Back in 1997, the brothers took the injured black kite they had found its wing torn by a paper kite to the Charity Bird Hospital, the largest and oldest bird hospital in the city and one of several animal hospitals established by Jains in New Delhi. A core tenet of Jainism, a small but influential religion in India, is ahimsa, the practice of nonviolence and compassion toward all forms of life. On a wall of the Charity Bird Hospital, located within Shri Digambar Jain Lal Mandir, a Jain temple with tall red spires, is a painting of a Jain king sacrificing his arm, then his foot and eventually his life to save a pigeon. Jains also do not handle meat on temple grounds. Consequently, the Charity Bird Hospital refused to accept the kite a carnivore that Mr. Shehzad and Mr. Saud found. Dr. Nidish Bharadwaj, one of the hospital's veterinarians, said in an interview that he has tried to feed raptors a mixture of cheese and soybeans, but it is not enough. If an injury to a black kite was serious, the hospital would turn the bird away, knowing it would starve if kept for more than a day. A death sentence either way. At the time, Mr. Shehzad was confused by this logic. "Why is there discrimination between a vegetarian and a nonvegetarian?" he thought. As Muslims, both he and Mr. Saud eat meat, and they took the hospital's rejection personally. "It hit us somewhere inside, because we were nonvegetarian ourselves," he said. The brothers brought the kite back to where they had found it. They could do nothing else. Over time and with the help of a number of local veterinarians, Mr. Shehzad and Mr. Saud started treating the birds themselves. They collected kites from the Charity Bird Hospital and other Jain owned hospitals, and brought them back to their basement in Wazirabad to care for them. There, the brothers learned how to clean and bandage open wounds, unwrap wings from tangled manja and feed raptors raw buffalo meat out of the palms of their hands. Ninety percent of the kites that Mr. Saud and Mr. Shehzad collect have wings slashed by manja, and about half of these die from gangrene or infection. Most are gone cases before they enter the basement room; others must be euthanized by a veterinarian. The kites that are nursed back to health are brought up three narrow flights of stairs to the roof, where they join several dozen other birds in various states of recovery, packed into three wire cages. The largest cage has an open top that fully rehabilitated kites can use as a gate of re entry to the city. Near the house, released kites, healthy enough to fly short distances, perch in rows on rooftops and window sills. Mr. Shehzad and Mr. Saud estimate that they have treated 20,000 black kites in the past 20 years. They sometimes dedicate more than 12 hours a day to treating birds; Mr. Saud said that he sometimes misses dinner while caring for kites and rarely finds time to play or do homework with his young son. The organization's expenses equipment, veterinarian, transportation and more than 500 pounds of meat every month have also placed a financial burden on the brothers. They have financed the operation entirely with the profits from their family's liquid soap dispenser manufacturing business, which they run out of their basement next to the small room filled with injured birds. They receive almost no support from the government; their grant requests have been rejected for a variety of bureaucratic reasons, but Mr. Shehzad is suspicious. He thinks it has something to do with the fact that Wildlife Rescue treats nonvegetarian birds. His wife, Tabassum Shehzad, sympathizes with his calling, and sometimes even helps to feed the birds. Nonetheless, she said, her husband was "ruining his life." She might not have married him had she known things would go this way. Mr. Shehzad is aware of this. "We have destroyed our family life," he said. "We have destroyed our relations with our friends, our relatives, our wives, our parents, even our 2 and 4 year old children." Now, with almost all their money gone and their families worn out, the brothers are confronting the prospect of shutting down Wildlife Rescue. "People don't want us to work?" Mr. Shehzad said. "O.K., this is the best we can do. Actually, we did better than our best: We are already empty."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
A roundup of motoring news from the web: According to a report from CarMD, an auto repair website, Hyundai vehicles are the least likely to need repairs and the least costly to fix when they do. Toyota, which topped the list last year, dropped to No. 2, while General Motors, which was eighth last year, climbed to third place. (CBS MoneyWatch) After opening an investigation into fires that occurred in two Tesla Model S electric cars this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has asked Tesla Motors to provide detailed records of any actions related to allegations of possible defects. The safety agency told Tesla that it wanted to know if the automaker had made any engineering changes to the Model S to address potential damage to the battery pack from an impact with road debris. (Automotive News, subscription required) Lobbyists working on behalf of China's carmaking industry in Beijing have taken issue with rules the Chinese government is considering that would allow broader foreign ownership. Opponents of the possible loosening of ownership restrictions say that allowing more foreign investment in China's car industry would result in a loss of control over current joint ventures among global automakers and Chinese companies. (Reuters) Members of the United Auto Workers may see their first increase in dues since 1967. Currently, union workers contribute two hours' worth of pay in union dues each month, but the increase under consideration would demand another half hour. Under Michigan's new right to work laws, U.A.W. members will be able to opt out of union participation after the current contract expires. (The Detroit News)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Julianne Taaffe and Kathryn Moon had been teaching English language skills to foreign students for decades at Ohio State University when they and their co workers were jolted by a particularly blunt email. The email, from their boss to a colleague at another university, said Ms. Taaffe and her fellow teachers were "an extraordinarily change averse population of people almost all of whom are over 50, contemplating retirement (or not), and it's like herding hippos." "It was completely unexpected," said Ms. Taaffe, 60, who worked for nearly three decades helping undergraduate and graduate students from other countries master speaking, reading and writing in English. Like many prominent universities, Ohio State has a large contingent of international students; nearly 10 percent of the almost 60,000 students on its sprawling Columbus campus are foreigners. The teachers, who did not have tenure, were surprised to read the 2010 email, which was shared with them by the recipient at the other university. But it confirmed an increasingly sour atmosphere at Ohio State. Veteran teachers, Ms. Taaffe said, began to see younger, less experienced people promoted instead of them. And that was only the beginning of what she, Ms. Moon and others describe as a yearslong pattern of age discrimination and retaliation that affected their teaching duties, pay, working conditions and even retirements. In 2013, the department got a new boss, Robert A. Eckhart. Ms. Taaffe remembers clearly when she met with him for her annual performance review. His first question, she said, was: "How long have you been around here anyway?" The previous director had rated her five stars out of a possible six, but Mr. Eckhart said he was lowering that, even though he had never observed her classroom teaching. "When I asked him why, he said, 'It's too high,' " recalled Ms. Taaffe, who started teaching at Ohio State in 1987. "He kept insisting that my teaching wasn't that good." When she responded that she might need to talk to someone, maybe a lawyer, about the sudden downgrade, Mr. Eckhart responded: "I love lawyers." Eventually, Ms. Taaffe and Ms. Moon, 65, both of whom retired from the university short of their full retirement benefits, decided to challenge their treatment as unlawful age discrimination. In legal papers filed recently by Ohio State's lawyer, Catherine L. Strauss, of Ice Miller, a Columbus firm, the university argued that its employees are not covered by federal discrimination law. Chris Davey, a spokesman for the university, said he could not discuss pending litigation. Mr. Eckhart was not made available for comment. Such complaints are far from unusual as many older workers are encountering harsh treatment in the workplace. Employers often seek to save money by paring workers who have higher salaries and richer benefits. A 2013 survey by AARP, "Staying Ahead of the Curve," questioned 1,500 older workers; 92 percent responded that they viewed bias against older workers as "very" or "somewhat" commonplace. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which was meant to be a bulwark against such discrimination, has too many loopholes to be able to curb such bias, said Patricia G. Barnes, a lawyer and the author of "Overcoming Age Discrimination in Employment." She added that its effectiveness had been undercut by a handful of Supreme Court rulings. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' "There is also a general hostility in society and in the courts to such claims," she said. Age bias cases are typically contentious, in part because they often involve people who know one another and have worked closely together for years. They are difficult to prove because there is rarely a "smoking gun" that definitively shows that an adverse personnel step is taken only to jettison or demote an older worker. "It is even harder to convince the court to reinstate someone to a job where there has been a dispute in the workplace," Mr. Kohrman said. "It's hard to uncrack that egg." As more people over 60 continue to work, claims of age discrimination are plentiful. Last year, more than 21,000 age discrimination complaints were filed at the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But only a handful have gone to court. In academia, "efforts to drive older staff out of their jobs have become common," Mr. Kohrman argued, especially after a 2000 Supreme Court ruling denied money damages in cases against state agencies, which include public universities. Even finding a lawyer in such cases can be difficult when there is no money only the possibility of reinstatement and legal fees to be recovered. In 2009, the Supreme Court made it even harder for an employee to challenge a demotion or dismissal because of age, ruling that the claimant must show that age was the motivating factor. Despite all the obstacles, Mr. Kohrman said the AARP is providing assistance to the case against Ohio State because it was "particularly blatant." The events and remarks, he noted, occurred repeatedly over a long period of time. According to legal documents, Mr. Eckhart, who now has another job at Ohio State, disparaged the teachers' technology knowledge. He moved more than a dozen teachers from individual offices to smaller, open work spaces and required them to use communal computers rather than having one at their desk. He also called one employee "an old lady who can't walk," and another "the Grim Reaper," according to the lawsuit. He referred to other older workers as "dead wood" and "millstones around my neck," it said. Ms. Taaffe filed her original complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May 2014. At the same time, she also wrote university officials in detail about the teachers' treatment, saying that Mr. Eckhart "treats all questioning of his decisions as personal attacks on him." Some co workers, including Sheri L. Gangluff, 57, who has left the program for a job overseas, also filed written complaints. Several suggested that the university's hierarchy appeared to condone the actions taken against the teachers, who are called academic program specialists at Ohio State. A university inquiry cleared the managers involved. In a report later in 2014, E. Keith Calloway, who worked for the human resources office, found only that communication with the teachers was lacking, which forced them to rely on the "grapevine" for information. The report recommended enhancing "communication, diversity and leadership skills." Within days, Ms. Taaffe, Ms. Moon and other teachers said, they were demoted to lecturers, positions with less pay and no sick leave or other benefits. Since they left the university, their careers have essentially ended, they said. Lack of a salary "has been very hard," said Ms. Taaffe, and the nearest job possibility was a three hour drive away. Any trial will not occur for at least a year. Ms. Moon, who said she no longer "has the heart for teaching," described her first 29 years at Ohio State as like working with "an extended family." "We celebrated birthdays, weddings, babies and other successes, and cried together over losses," she said. But during the last two years, "watching older employees be patronized, stereotyped, maligned and mistreated was extremely painful," she said. "They ask us to live up to all these high and noble values," she added, "but the university itself is not living up to them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The documentary "16 Bars" is constructed around a workshop that Todd Thomas a.k.a. Speech of the Atlanta hip hop group Arrested Development led at a jail in Richmond, Va., in 2017. Thomas helped inmates make music in a recording studio on site; the workshop was part of a voluntary program designed to reduce recidivism rates. The movie, directed by Sam Bathrick , follows Thomas and four participants during the process. In Garland Carr , whose country tunes (and a bluesy spiritual) provide the movie with some elegiac interludes, Thomas sees "a superstar that may never be, because he's behind bars." Perhaps the most volatile arc comes from Anthony Johnston , who keeps receiving sanctions that threaten his continued involvement in the program.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Ashleigh Barty, the top ranked women's singles player, has confirmed that she will not play in the United States Open because of concerns about traveling during the coronavirus pandemic. Barty, 24, soared from outside the top 10 to No. 1 last year when she won the French Open and three other singles titles, including the WTA Finals in Shenzhen, China. She has also confirmed that she will not play the Western Southern Open, an event normally played near Cincinnati that has been moved to New York this year to be staged at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center ahead of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open is still set to begin on Aug. 31. The last time the tournament was held without the top women's singles player was 2010, when Serena Williams withdrew because of a foot injury. "I love both events so it was a difficult decision," Barty said in a statement sent to Australian media outlets on Thursday. "But there are still significant risks involved due to Covid 19, and I don't feel comfortable putting my team and I in that position." Barty, who has been practicing in Brisbane in her native Australia, is the most prominent women's player to withdraw from the U.S. Open, but she is unlikely to be the last, with No. 2 Simona Halep practicing on clay and committed to playing a clay court event in Prague that begins on Aug. 10. "I respect every player's decision," said Stacey Allaster, the U.S. Open tournament director, who has been pushing hard with her staff to salvage the tournament, which will be played without spectators and with extensive health precautions. "Ash made her decision on what she thinks is best for her and her team. We wish her well, and I am looking forward to seeing her return to play as she is a fan favorite." Halep and three other members of the women's top 10 No. 5 Elina Svitolina, No. 6 Bianca Andreescu and No. 10 Naomi Osaka also have not entered the Western Southern Open, which starts Aug. 20. Andreescu, a Canadian, is the reigning U.S. Open singles champion. Osaka, who represents Japan but has long lived in the United States, won the 2018 U.S. Open singles title and has become one of the sport's biggest stars. Their management teams did not respond to messages on Wednesday inquiring whether they planned to play in the U.S. Open. Andreescu, 20, has not competed since last October after injuring her knee. She had hoped to return to play in the Miami Open in March, but that event was canceled because of the coronavirus. She initially committed publicly to defending her title at the U.S. Open. In a normal season, players would pay a significant price in the rankings for skipping a Grand Slam event, but both the men's and women's tours have adjusted their rankings to allow players to count their best result at an event from 2019 or 2020. That means Andreescu will keep the 2,000 points she acquired from winning the U.S. Open last year regardless of whether she plays this year. But Barty, who reached the fourth round of the U.S. Open in 2018 and 2019, has made it clear for months that she was uncertain about making the journey. Australia's restrictions on international travel have also been a concern, with Australian citizens requiring an exemption to leave the country and then being required to quarantine for 14 days upon returning. Barty would most likely qualify for an exemption and may still travel to Europe in September to play in clay court events and defend her French Open title. The French Open is scheduled to begin Sept. 21. "I will make my decision on the French Open and the surrounding WTA European tournaments in the coming weeks," she said in her statement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Last year, Angel Blue spent only 54 nights at home. "The first thing that comes into my mind is the Tasmanian devil, being how fast he goes in the cartoon," said Ms. Blue, a soprano who played Bess in "Porgy and Bess" at the Metropolitan Opera earlier this year, as well as Mimi in "La Boheme" at the Hamburg State Opera, among other venues. "That's how I felt just constantly going, constantly moving, constantly having to perform." In March, when the pandemic shuttered opera houses and stalled careers, Ms. Blue was allied with her devastated colleagues. But she also glimpsed a silver lining. "If I'm totally honest, I'm happy to be at home," she said. "I've been almost desperate for time off." Not that she has been idle. Like so many quarantined performers, Ms. Blue found an audience behind the lens, and fulfilled her dream of having a talk show. "Faithful Friday" streamed on Facebook from March to June, with the singer Christine Goerke, the actor Laverne Cox and the chef Cat Cora, among others, broaching topics like fear, motivation, encouragement and job loss. Ms. Blue plans to return with a second season in mid September, with a lineup including the soprano Anna Netrebko, "who's been really supportive of me as a younger singer," said Ms. Blue, 36. And on Dec. 19, she'll close out the Met Stars Live in Concert virtual recital series. Ms. Blue spoke by phone from New Jersey, where she lives with her husband, Adam Mielke, a computer programmer, and their 9 year old son. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Usually, I'm up at 6. It is so quiet. I love it when it is like this silent, still, no movement, just me, my thoughts, my daily devotional. And then 20 minutes of meditation that helps me to understand what I want from myself during that day. I'll let myself sit there and just be thankful that I can be still, because it's really a blessing. I've been running around for a long time. Most mornings I do a two mile walk on the treadmill in the basement. Today I did an exercise video instead. When I did beauty pageants, there was this lady named Leslie Sansone who did this video called "Walk Away the Pounds." Now she has her own walking series. She's positive and uplifting. I'm setting up my studio for this evening. Tonight "Porgy and Bess" is going to be broadcast on PBS. I'm hosting a cast reunion on my Facebook fan page. It's strange how nervous I am, I guess because I was that kid in school who, when they invited people to their birthday party, not many people came. Laughs I just opened a one on one vocal coaching studio, where I coach young singers who are interested in learning more about interpretation. My focus is to help each singer better connect with the characters they are portraying. So much emotion goes into our art form. Young singers might not realize that it is times like these that will help to bring out their artistry. I feel like I've done some of my best singing during the lockdown this is going to sound terrible, but I'm going to word it like this because I don't have anyone bothering me about how I'm singing. Even the stress of performing is different because the audiences aren't there. In a way, I'm on my own, and if I feel like crying during a certain section of the music, I can do that. Honestly, I have no words right now. So many members of the "Porgy and Bess" cast indulged me and showed up to the reunion. I don't know that I've ever been in a show where everybody was good, and by good, I'm not necessarily meaning the talent so much as it is we were in the same head space. We speak about the show with a lot of affection. We were watching all together at our homes, and we were texting, and people were sending video clips and saying, "You better sing, Angel!" That was really nice. I'm one of those singers who does not go to sleep after a performance, so yes, it is 2 a.m., but I'm awake. Wow! I still cannot believe that I had the opportunity to sing Bess at the Met. My husband has the biggest smile on his face right now. He said that I'm acting like a kid who is getting ready to go to Disneyland. I started the day with a 45 minute walk jog around our beautiful neighborhood. I'm from California and only recently moved to New Jersey. This state is so gorgeous. I love all of the trees and the deer in the morning. Not going to lie: They scare me a little bit, but they are beautiful. Today I had a French lesson with Mickael Terosier. He is an amazing coach. I have not met a language professor who is more patient than him. I studied French in school but have since forgotten much of it, so working with Mickael has definitely helped my confidence. I don't like to say that I'm fluent in any language, but I definitely do study quite a lot of languages. Good grief, I think I've sung in something like 12 or 13. It's wild. One of my favorite opera singers is Jonas Kaufmann. His recital is happening right now on the Metropolitan Opera website and yes, I'm drinking a glass of rose while watching. His singing is stunning and the presentation is exquisite. I feel like I'm having a voice lesson. The Met Opera gave me a huge honor in asking me to give a Met Stars Live in Concert in December. And I'm really thankful to be able to watch the other performances before I give mine. I'm paying special attention to his embouchure, and the positioning of his mouth. And the fact that he's singing these high notes, and he's able to bring these high notes back to a very soft piano, is just stunning. My husband and I both work during the week, and my son is in a virtual summer camp, so on the weekends we try to spend time together without any screens. But a couple of weeks ago we watched all of the "Back to the Future" movies because I had never seen them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Dikla Goren Dekel, a Brooklyn based mother of three who writes the lifestyle blog Girl Plus Two, shares a lot of her life on Instagram. A photo from last month shows her and her children eating sandwiches in their underwear. In a rare child free shot from Burning Man, Ms. Dekel gazes at her husband, Noam, and muses that the desert bacchanal could "get me pregnant again." But there is one thing Ms. Dekel, 36, filters out of her Instagram feed: photos of the part time nanny who cares for her children. "Posting your nanny is like posting your address or your kids' school," she said. "It's too much information." Nannies are often lauded as indispensable to keeping modern families afloat, but even as the rise of Instagram Stories the 15 second blips that self destruct after 24 hours encourages peak parental overshare (793,000 followers of Eva Chen, Instagram's director of fashion partnerships, know she packed a whale shaped sandwich for her daughter, Ren, this week), nannies are hardly ever included in the picture. Some appear only as floating hands, popping a blueberry into a toddler's mouth. "They're the forgotten faces," said Tammy Gold, a family therapist and author of "Secrets of the Nanny Whisperer: A Practical Guide for Finding and Achieving the Gold Standard of Care for Your Child" (Perigee, 2015). "Nobody puts it out there." This isn't just the case on Instagram: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt reportedly employ multiple nannies for their six children, but they're seldom seen in paparazzi shots. The same is true of Maria Borrallo, the full time nanny to Prince George and Princess Charlotte. But something about Instagram's ostensible greater intimacy, perhaps, makes the exclusion more jarring. Ivanka Trump leaves her nanny out of frequent Instagrams of her three children; it's been noted that she mentions the word "nanny" but once in her book, "Women Who Work." One may think parents just want to take credit for all the child care, but there are also potential security concerns. "They don't want to promote that this might be a nanny for a child of means," said Seth Norman Greenberg, marketing director at Pavilion Agency, a high end domestic staffing company based in New York. A nanny's immigration or income status can also be a deterrent. In the last nine years, Oliver Quillia, a producer and father of two in the Bronx, has posted exactly one photo on Instagram of his beloved nanny, Lynn, whose last name he withheld for similar reasons. "If it weren't for the 'under the table' pay we give her, I would probably post way more photos of her," Mr. Quillia, 47, said. But when oversharing parents omit nannies on Instagram or Facebook, it can indeed be intended to shape perception of their own characters. "I think many of us on social media, probably subconsciously, want to perpetuate this idea that we're doing it all on our own," said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School and a mother of two. Ms. Petrzela is a self described "exhibitionist" on Facebook, but it wasn't until five years after she and her husband hired their nanny, Nancy Peter, that she realized she'd never posted a photo of the woman they consider a "third parent." (Ms. Petrzela's husband hadn't, either, but he's not active on social media). "My children respect and love her so much, and I do too," Ms. Petrzela, 39, recalled thinking. "Why am I making that invisible?" Ms. Petrzela, who is white, had also considered the racial context between her and Ms. Peter, who is Afro Caribbean. Though Ms. Petrzela is confident their relationship is respectful, "the history of white families being ministered to by women of color is not a really beautiful history," Ms. Petrzela said. "Part of me felt hyper aware about even the impression that any of those dynamics are repeating themselves in our home." While Ms. Peter is not on Facebook, she said she appreciates being included. "It makes me feel part of the family," she said. "I did not give birth to the kids, but I love them very much." Of other parents who don't want pictures with their nannies, she said, "It's not fair. I'm going to tell you the truth: most parents feel that if the children are too close to the nanny, that they're losing something." Lauren Stein, a media executive and mother of two boys in New York, says she praises her live in nanny (whose name she'd rather not share) "in real life" but worries that posting odes to her on Facebook would only make Ms. Stein look fancier than thou and fuel mockery from her relatives. "A lot of them crack jokes, like, "Oh, Lauren, you're here without your help? Is that hard for you? Are you surviving?'" Ms. Stein, 35, said. That class discomfort goes both ways, according to Grace Savage, a former nanny in Los Angeles. "I think that a deeply institutionalized notion of 'place' is to blame," Ms. Savage, 35, said. "The domestic doesn't feel welcome in the photo, and the employer feels no inclination to extend such welcome." According to Ms. Gold, lifting the veil of secrecy and posting more about nannies on Instagram and Facebook would be a new way to value them, while also getting real with other parents about what it takes for working moms and dads to juggle it all. "It's great to say, 'I have help,'" Ms. Gold said. Andrea Lavinthal, the style and beauty director at People magazine, is a rare parent who does so on social media. Last week, she posted an Instagram Story of her 1 year old son, Saxon, perched on the lap of his nanny, Ann Marie, who did not want her last name published. "She's such a part of the fabric of this squad," Ms. Lavinthal, 38, said. "I wouldn't even think about cropping her out."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
ABC News apologized Monday for mistakenly running a video that apparently was taken at a gun range in Kentucky with a report about Turkish attacks in northern Syria. "We've taken down video that aired on 'World News Tonight Sunday' and 'Good Morning America' this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy," the network said in a statement on Monday. "ABC News regrets the error." A representative for ABC News declined to comment on how the mix up had happened. The clip that accompanied the reports on the bombings showed explosions and smoke dominating the dark horizon. Tom Llam as, an anchor with ABC News's "World News Tonight" spoke over the footage, which someone reposted on YouTube. "This video, right here, appearing to show Turkey's military bombing Kurd civilia ns in a Syrian border town," Mr. Llamas said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The frustrating horror film "The Hole in the Ground" opens with Sarah (Seana Kerslake) driving her elementary school age son, Chris (James Quinn Markey), to a secluded home in the Irish countryside. She hopes the move can provide a new beginning after her relationship with Chris's abusive father. But her son struggles to adjust. He fights with Sarah, and runs deep into the woods at the edge of their home. When Sarah follows him, she finds a massive, roiling pit that sucks up dirt like quicksand. It powerfully draws the eye perhaps it could suck up people, too. Soon, Sarah notices changes in Chris. He disappears from his bed at night; he buries beloved toys in the woods. Chris is rarely less than polite, but Sarah begins to suspect her child is not the boy he once was. Though he looks the same, even his declarations of love seem eerily hollow. In Sarah's dreams, Chris attacks her. "The Hole in the Ground" has memorable images the bottomless pit, a child's hand warped and extended in creepy imitation of the spiders that once terrified him. But the visuals serve an emotional world that feels false. Horror films can elicit terror by reminding viewers of frustrations they ignore in normal life. But Sarah approaches every uneaten dinner, school performance and petty fight with the same kindly forbearance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The musician Shannon Hoon, who died in 1995 of complications from a drug overdose at the age of 28, was an inveterate self chronicler. The documentary "All I Can Say" credits Hoon as one of four directors and was assembled from video footage he recorded from 1990 until mere hours before his death. It chronicles, among other things, the rise and decline of his band Blind Melon. The movie will be most profitably consumed by fans people who believe Hoon earned the tribute. While one does not want to be cruel, one is obliged to be frank. Hoon is not a figure like John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain, who elicit widespread curiosity about what great work they might have produced had they not died young. Blind Melon's sole hit was "No Rain," a sweet earworm that charted almost a year after the band released the album from which it spun.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Galleries like American Medium that work with young artists and cater to a crowd that has grown up with the internet are approaching web based art with a renewed purpose. Two of its enterprising founders, Josh Pavlacky and Travis Fitzgerald, former art students at Wesleyan, had been running an exhibition space in Portland, Ore., when Mr. Pavlacky left to join his future husband, Daniel Wallace, who was directing an art space in Philadelphia. In 2012, they contacted Mr. Fitzgerald and began thinking about how they could stake a claim in New York. American Medium created pop up shows, staged in the Union Square loft of Mr. Fitzgerald's father, that explored shifting boundaries between the virtual and real worlds. For the gallery's debut, the three encouraged Jon Rafman to create a physical installation inspired by his "Brand New Paint Job" series on Tumblr, in which famous artworks were superimposed onto digital objects Jasper Johns's "White Flag," for example, onto a 3 D model of the Oval Office. Mr. Pavlacky and Mr. Wallace fabricated the objects and brought them to the Union Square loft, where a Jet Ski painted in Yves Klein blue hung from the ceiling and a miniature motorcycle flaunted an Abstract Expressionist color field from Barnett Newman. By 2014, the founders were ready to put down roots on a residential block in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The three have collaborated in similar ways with other digital artists, like Brenna Murphy and Harm van den Dorpel, a group the art world has sporadically classified as Post Internet. "At this point we've staged at least over a hundred shows," Mr. Pavlacky said, "so we know: This will look good here, this is what you do, this is a faux pas. And that information is really helpful for someone who only makes collages on the computer."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
HOUSTON When Gov. Rick Perry visits Israel this week, he will leave a surprising piece of Texas behind: his alma mater, Texas A M University. Mr. Perry will join Texas A M leaders and Israeli officials in Jerusalem on Wednesday to announce the creation of Texas A M Peace University, a branch campus of the sixth largest university in the United States. It will be built in Nazareth, known as the Arab capital of Israel. Numerous American universities have opened outposts in the Middle East and around the world in recent years, including New York University, which has a campus in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. But if Peace University comes to fruition, it will represent a first for both Texas A M and Israel: No other American university has opened a branch campus there. Texas A M is the alma mater not only of Mr. Perry, but of the country music star Lyle Lovett, former Mayor Henry G. Cisneros of San Antonio and other Texas figures. It opened in 1876 as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, and students and alumni still proudly declare themselves Aggies and take pride in a sort of can do, hyper Texan aura, even as the university has sought to expand its international reputation. In 2003, it opened a campus in Doha, Qatar, that offers engineering degrees. The university said that students and teachers at the campus in Israel would include Arabs and Jews, as well as international students and faculty, and that graduates would receive an Aggie Ring, the same one worn by graduates of the main campus in College Station, Tex. Texas A M, a public university, is prohibited by state law from investing public dollars in international branches. Financing will come from private donors in Texas and around the world. Aside from taking part in the announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Perry has largely played a supporting role in the project, although he has offered to help raise money. Evangelical Christians, with whom Mr. Perry has long identified, have been active supporters of Israel, but the main Texas player in the branch campus effort is a Roman Catholic John Sharp, the chancellor of the Texas A M University System and a longtime supporter of Israeli and Jewish causes. "I wanted a presence in Israel," said Mr. Sharp, who was Mr. Perry's college roommate. "I have felt a kinship with Israel." When Mr. Sharp began exploring the idea, he sought the help of John C. Hagee, an evangelical pastor in San Antonio whose sermons are broadcast around the world and who has helped raise tens of millions of dollars for projects in Israel and for Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In March 2012, Pastor Hagee told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel about Mr. Sharp's plans and helped connect Mr. Sharp and other Texas A M officials with Israeli leaders. "A messenger boy is about what I'm turning out to be, and I'm glad to do it," said Pastor Hagee, the founder of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. "The things we have in common with Israel are much greater than anything that would be separating us." Officials said the campus would offer undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degree programs, with instruction in English. A potential site in Nazareth has been identified, but no financing has been obtained yet. They said fund raising efforts would begin within weeks, but declined to offer a fund raising goal. As many as 5,000 students will study there, officials said, with most coming from the Arab communities in and around Nazareth. Arabs make up more than 20 percent of the population of Israel, but only 11 percent of the student body in the country's higher education system, said Manuel Trajtenberg, who runs the system as a member of the Council for Higher Education in Israel. Though the Texans came to them with the idea of opening the campus, Israeli leaders, including President Shimon Peres, were the ones who wanted the new university to improve access to higher education for Arabs in Israel, and to foster peace between Jews and Arabs. "There's no significant academic presence in Arab towns and cities in Israel," Mr. Trajtenberg said. "It will have a symbolic impact beyond the academic impact." "It makes sense for Muslims, Jews and Christians to be educated together," he said in a telephone interview last week from London, another stop on his economic development trip. "It's that old concept, a rising tide lifts all boats. That tide can come in the sense of economics; that tide can come in the sense of education."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
The coronavirus pandemic has upended much, but with a late summer start to the season five months away, the N.F.L. has been one of the few major professional sports leagues to avoid postponing or canceling games. With little else going on in sports, the league has doubled down on holding its annual three day draft which ranks behind only the Super Bowl as the N.F.L.'s biggest spectacle beginning on April 23, altering the broadcast, which will now be a TV only studio production with top picks participating remotely. The N.F.L. is sticking to its self imposed calendar even as the league instituted travel restrictions and ordered team facilities closed, forcing teams to adapt all important evaluations that will impact their fortunes for years to come, causing worries that draft selections might go lower or higher than their available research would support. "When we look back at the draft in two years, we're going to see guys who were overdrafted because of their familiarity and guys who were under drafted in later rounds or not at all because they hadn't been seen or were injured," said Mike Tannenbaum, an ESPN analyst and a former N.F.L. general manager. Social distancing restrictions intended to contain the pandemic have forced team scouts and general managers to work from home. Team doctors cannot conduct physicals for prospective draft picks. And above all, team executives must forgo vital face to face conversations with prospects that are typically held on college campuses or at a team's headquarters. Teams, of course, had already spent countless hours on the road, scouting the top 100 or 200 prospects. Scouting personnel attended college games, spoke to players' coaches and families and watched at all star games and the league's scouting combine in February, a weeklong event that includes brief player interviews. But success in the draft is often determined by the use of late arriving information or the unearthing of minute details that elevate unheralded players to late round picks. Often, talented players that are overlooked visit team headquarters to give skeptical coaches a chance to size them up. 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. That's what the Jets did in 2007 when they brought in Darrelle Revis. He entered the draft after his junior year, and coaches on the Jets had questions about his talent because he played at Pittsburgh, which was then in the Big East, a less prominent football conference. But when Revis visited the Jets, the team's personnel were impressed with his knowledge and devotion to the game, as well as his close relationship with his mother, which signaled that he had a good support network, said Tannenbaum, who was the Jets general manager at the time. "He met maybe 12, 14 people, and everyone said he's our type of guy," Tannenbaum said. The team traded up 11 spots in the first round to take Revis at No. 14. He quickly became one of the league's top cornerbacks. Teams are doing without those visits this year, instead relying on phone interviews with players, and their coaches, families and friends, and watching yet more game tape, trying to find new ways to assess hard to qualify personality traits, such as players' level of narcissism, openness to criticism and new ideas, and interaction with team personnel. "Sometimes, you want to see someone in an uncomfortable situation and see how they react, and in person, it's always easier to do that," said Scott Pioli, a CBS Sports N.F.L. analyst who worked in player personnel and as a general manager for the Patriots, Chiefs and Falcons, among other teams. "The intangibles are really very tangible." Many of the people who make these widely watched picks say they have been unable to do their jobs properly, and question whether even a stripped down draft should proceed as planned. This stretch of the off season has its own hectic cadence, including free agency and the implementation of the new 10 year collective bargaining agreement, which has increased roster sizes and minimum salaries. The new logistical hurdles related to the virus led a committee of general managers to ask Commissioner Roger Goodell last week to delay the draft, according to ESPN. "This is not a fantasy draft that you conduct out there with just a list of things on a piece of paper," Mickey Loomis, the general manager of the New Orleans Saints and a member of the committee, told the Peter King Podcast for NBC Sports. "There's a lot of work that goes into it to prepare and there's a lot of work that is done during the draft. Listen, it'll be very, very difficult to conduct that and do it in a way that you're doing justice to the process." Complicating matters, the N.F.L. Physicians Society said in a letter to the league and players union that team doctors would no longer examine players, forcing teams to find other doctors to provide physicals. "At a time of the most serious pandemic in our lifetime, we believe medical resources should focus on those who are ill or in need of care," said Dr. Anthony Casolaro, the president of the society and the Washington Redskins team doctor. The difficulty in finding doctors and the inability to hold workouts has forced teams to sign players contingent on their passing a physical. Teams have been unable to fully assess free agents as well as college players like Tua Tagovailoa, the Alabama quarterback who had a season ending hip fracture in November. "You have to adapt," said Les Snead, general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. "This can be a stressful time, but the organizations that handle the stress best will win." Despite these limitations, the N.F.L. is forging ahead. In a memo sent to teams on Thursday, Goodell said rescheduling the draft would be difficult because it was unclear when a better date would emerge. The "public health conditions are highly uncertain and there is no assurance that we can select a different date and be confident that conditions will be significantly more favorable than they are today." Either way, it's clear this year has been like none other in the N.F.L., disruptive in an entirely different way than the 2001 season, which began in the wake of terrorist attacks. "September 11th was such an unsettling time because of what went on, but I remember a week later, with as much heartache as people had, they went back to work and tried to get the country going again," said Rich McKay, the president of the Atlanta Falcons, who has been around the N.F.L. for more than 40 years. "This time, we don't know the end date, which makes it more difficult."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
If you have ever traveled through Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, you would have seen the handiwork of the Dutch wayfinding design firm Mijksenaar, whose signs, maps and other visual information systems have been part of the facility's landscape since 1990. While Schiphol, one of the world's busiest airports, with more than 71 million passengers last year, is the longest running project of Mijksenaar (pronounced MIKE se nar), the firm's mark can also be found in other airports, transit hubs and museums around the world. "We all want to find our way; no one wants to get lost," said Herbert Seevinck, Mijksenaar's chief executive and owner during a phone interview from his Amsterdam office. (The firm also maintains a bureau in New York City.) "One thing I love about our work is the big chunk of psychology that's involved," said Mr. Seevinck, who took over the business in 2010 from the founder, Paul Mijksenaar. "While traveling, people are a bit more anxious and that affects how they act." How do your designers account for travelers' anxiety and stress? We use a lot of color, especially yellow, but if we're doing our job, you won't notice it unless you're a frequent traveler. For instance, at Schiphol, if you're going all the time, you might find the yellow too much. But if you're new there, the yellow signs become a source of comfort. But when people become really stressed, nothing helps them find their way except asking other people.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
With its thriving cultural scene, striking architecture and lush vegetation, this often overlooked California city the photogenic backdrop of the movie "Lady Bird" has much to offer the weekend visitor. As a travel destination, California's capital gets no respect. Despite sitting at the confluence of two impressive rivers, with sprawling shade trees that make much of the city feel like a leafy urban park, Sacramento has a misplaced reputation as a lowly, unattractive place. But the state's oldest incorporated city founded in 1849, the year before California joined the union remains a lush oasis of bougainvillea and palms, prolific fruit trees and mighty oaks. It also has a thriving cultural scene and architectural character all its own. Along with neighborhoods of midcentury modern homes, Craftsman Bungalows and ornate Victorians, there's the birthplace of Tower Records (the Art Deco Tower Theatre and its kitschy, colorful Tower Cafe are both still operating) and the Crocker Art Museum's bright white, modernist expansion, the 125,000 square foot Teel Family Pavilion, which tripled the museum's size in 2010. Unlike California's glittering, glamorous coastal cities, Sacramento's location in the Central Valley gives it an earnest, small town affect and a welcome lack of pretension. The Crocker is the city's must see institution, but make your first stop the smaller California Museum ( 9), which is based at the State Archives and is home to the California Hall of Fame, which, besides celebrating famous Californians, offers an overview of the state's history from the Spanish missions era to Japanese internment during World War II, indigenous peoples to Hollywood's Red Scare. Afterward, take a walk through the 40 acre, Victorian style Capitol Park, where there is a trout pond, a cactus garden and a collection of native plants representing every county in this heterogenous state. Cruise down to the R Street Corridor, a former railroad yard and industrial area, now home to intriguing shops and designers. For hyper curated outdoor clothing and gear with a city streets meets Redwood forests sensibility think fleece sweatshirts in vibrant colors head to the All Good flagship store, which also organizes hiking, surfing and bouldering trips in California and beyond. Down the street, the Warehouse Artist Lofts Public Market has a small but enticing food court with excellent poke the Hawaiian style raw fish salad that's sweeping California at Fish Face Poke Bar and an exciting collection of shops: midcentury wares and records at Kicksville Vinyl Vintage, where you can find everything from 45s to atomic age lamps; and fabulously retro vintage clothing at Old Gold. For admirers of bespoke clothing, Benjamins crafts shoes like a 375 boot made of leather from the Chicago tannery Horween, which takes 16 to 20 weeks to deliver on site. For a funky outdoor beer garden with communal tables imported from Germany and a shipping container kitchen, Der Biergarten, has 32 taps of mostly German beer and a menu that includes classics like currywurst ( 8.06) and schnitzel ( 12.67). There's even Sac Brew Bike, a mobile pub that tours beer bars and resembles a pedal powered trolley that can seat up to 15 people. Tours start at 27 a seat. Contrary to restaurant lore and signage, Broderick Roadhouse was not established in 1893. It actually started as a food truck in 2012 and, on the strength of its hamburger game, quickly grew into a small and beloved local chain. The original West Sacramento location retains the charm of a Western relic. If you come earlier for the 3 to 6 p.m. happy hour, the towering Old School burger and tap beer special ( 10) is a steal. Catch a show at The Sofia Tsakopoulos Center for the Arts (tickets, 9 to 46), the new performing arts complex by the 30 year old B Street Theatre. The two theater venue includes both the 250 seat main stage and the 365 seat Sutter Theatre for Children, which will host "family series" shows at 1 p.m. on Saturday and Sundays. For serious post theater cocktails, red velvet curtains, pressed tin ceilings, a horseshoe shaped wooden bar and live music blues, jazz, big band and country on weekend nights (starting at 9 p.m.), Shady Lady Saloon may be Sacramento's sexiest cocktail bar. Grab coffee at Temple Coffee Roasters, a highfalutin caffeine palace that opened its grandest location which includes a floor hand laid with 500,000 pennies in 2016 in an 1880s building in the trendy Midtown neighborhood. Coffee snobs will find Kyoto slow drip and a custom tap system for Nitrogen infused coffees and teas. Then get a picnic lunch for the road at Roxie's Deli BBQ, an East Sacramento corner store with a retro feel and sandwiches that will feed two adults for less than 10. A local favorite is the messy Meatball Mafia sandwich ( 9.65) with smashed meatballs, provolone and Parmesan cheeses, topped with tomatoes, onions and jalapenos. The paved, 32 mile Jedediah Smith Memorial Trail starts in Old Sacramento's Discovery Park and travels along the American River, a tubing hot spot during the scorching summer months. Stop at the Nimbus Hatchery, which raises steelhead trout and Chinook salmon, and has a nature trail. If you're up for an ambitious ride (or a short drive), continue all the way to the town of Folsom of Johnny Cash prison song fame which is loaded with Gold Country character. For a quick, quintessentially California snack, head to Chando's, a small local chain of taco stands where you can grab three flavorful street food style tacos like "The Ensenada," with fried fish and cabbage, birria (spicy stewed goat) and vegetarian options like spinach or potato and a fountain drink for just 7.49. Take your meal to the recently renovated pond at nearby McKinley Park, where 1,200 rose bushes in bloom from March through May. The garden was featured in Greta Gerwig's 2017 film "Lady Bird" a love letter to her hometown which has inspired walking and running tours of the film's locations. Many cities have beloved sports teams, but few treat sports events even minor league baseball games as much like a night life activity as Sacramento, where eating a Merlino's freeze while watching a River Cats game at West Sacramento's Raley Field is a favorite way to spend an evening. In 2016, the country got its first solar powered sports stadium when the Golden 1 Center opened in Sacramento, transforming the city's downtown with an indoor outdoor design that includes five towering, fully retractable glass doors. The 500 million plus arena hosts the Kings N.B.A. team, as well as big name musical acts like Paul McCartney, Ariana Grande and John Mayer. In the Southside Park neighborhood, Binchoyaki is a sassy little izakaya, where perky 1960s era oldies play and the open kitchen makes the compact dining room feel like a party. Specializing in Japanese style charcoal grilled skewers, the restaurant serves salty, umami packed bites of pork jowl, chicken gizzard, beef tongue, bacon wrapped enoki mushrooms and more (starting at 1.50). A testament to the restaurant's mom and pop, handmade impulse, the bar is lined with planter trays sprouting mung beans and pickling jars of beet colored daikon and shochu liquor infused with umi (plum). From 10 p.m. to midnight, there's a 1 oyster happy hour on weekend nights.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The title of Ivan Ayr's debut feature is a bit misleading: "Soni" is only partly about the titular cop (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan); her immediate superior in the Delhi police department, Kalpana (Saloni Batra), plays an equal role in this quiet character study. Despite their difference in rank, the two women forge a reserved friendship after Soni blows a fuse during an undercover operation verbally harassed while biking at night, she gives the offender a piece of her mind, and her fists. While the film is set among cops, it does not involve any crime solving. Relying almost exclusively on single take scenes and eschewing music, Ayr details the obstacles in Soni and Kalpana's way with low key, quasi documentary detachment. At its best, that pace creates a trance like feel, but a few scenes extend their welcome and become plodding.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
His favorite room: Mr. Newson and his family live in a converted Royal Mail sorting office. The library's nubby stone wall, inspired by ski chalets, was installed to "soften the atmosphere" of the cavernous Victorian era space. For Mr. Newson, the complete reworking came naturally. "I'm compelled to transform everything around me," he said. There's so much luscious color. The couch. The art. Even your socks are bold red. I'm genetically deeply programmed to respond to color I grew up in Sydney. It's like California, the light is incredible. I suppose it's a nostalgic desire to remind myself of my childhood. Everything I do has to do with childhood. You grew up in the space age '60s and '70s. Yet our homes have barely changed since then. Does that surprise you? I grew up watching "The Jetsons." Someone once likened my work to Georg Jensen meets George Jetson. But the future is simply not very futuristic anymore. Right now, I feel this incredible reassurance in the fact that the home is one of the things that's not yet completely submerged in technology. I am now making a concerted effort to bolster my record collection. I'm about to get out my turntable and get some analog speakers. In fact, the chairs and desk you created for your current show at Gagosian are made using ancient cloisonne and cast glass techniques. What I'm really concerned about is pushing the boundaries of what these techniques and processes were meant to do. Cloisonne would typically be used in a jewelry scale or to make a Faberge egg. I trained originally as a jeweler and a silversmith, so I'm coming full circle. Tell me about this model truck. It's so wild. It's by a great artist friend who's from Belgium, Wim Delvoye. It's made of laser cut steel. I don't know how to describe it it's a gothic dump truck. I adore the humor in his work. He's just done mad, mad, mad things.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Fox holds the distribution rights to the first "Star Wars" movie (now "Episode IV A New Hope") starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford. What Disney Is Getting From Fox The Walt Disney Company is set to become the proud owner of a vast swath of Rupert Murdoch's movie and television empire, having agreed to pay 52.4 billion to acquire most of 21st Century Fox, the companies said on Thursday. The enormous deal is the latest move toward consolidation in Hollywood. Fox's television division is one of the most prolific content producers in the business. Shows include "The Simpsons," "This Is Us," "Modern Family," "American Horror Story" and "Homeland." The (comparatively small) equivalent at Disney is ABC Studios, which has recently struggled to produce hits. In August, it lost its biggest hitmaker, Shonda Rhimes, who created "Grey's Anatomy" and "Scandal," to Netflix. Streaming is a market that Disney plans to break into in a big way. This year, the company announced two coming services: one, powered by sports programming from ESPN, set to begin next year and another, scheduled for 2019, to be built around movies and TV shows. Disney hopes that the Fox television juggernaut can supercharge its ambitions by producing original series for the services and providing access to a catalog of older offerings. Fox would also contribute its stake in Hulu, the streaming service that shows ABC content and original programming like "The Handmaid's Tale," giving Disney a majority share. X Men, the original 'Star Wars' and more In the 1990s, when Marvel was just starting out as a movie company, a licensing agreement gave control of the X Men and Fantastic Four franchises to Fox. Disney bought Marvel for 4 billion in 2009; the deal with Fox brings optioned characters, including the edgy Deadpool, back into the Marvel fold. Fox will bring its collection of regional sports networks to the table, including the YES Network that carries New York Yankees games, helping to fortify ESPN and its streaming service. Fox's sports channels often hold exclusive rights to broadcast local professional and college games in the United States. The channels also have deals with teams from Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League. That has proved lucrative for the company, drawing advertising revenue. ESPN has struggled this year, with 1.4 million cable subscribers abandoning its flagship channel, taking away tens of millions of dollars in revenue. The network has tried to attract more local viewership and to re engage fans lost to video clips on their mobile devices. Disney is already a global behemoth, with major operations in Europe, Japan and China, where it opened its Shanghai Disney Resort last year. But the company gets a lopsided amount of its profit from North America. Mr. Murdoch got his start in Australia, New Zealand and Britain and has developed a stable of international businesses, some of which will now be Disney's. That includes Sky, the largest media company in Europe, in which Fox holds a nearly 40 percent stake; the National Geographic cable channel, which reaches hundreds of millions of homes overseas and has Fox as a majority owner; and Star India, a sizable Indian media company that is a subsidiary of Fox.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
This week, as the fall dance season slowly gets rolling in New York, the attraction of out of town festivals diminishes. And yet the Philadelphia Fringe Festival offers an awfully tempting reason for a road trip with its presentation of "Available Light." This landmark 1983 collaboration of the choreographer , the composer John Adams and the architect Frank Gehry is now on a revival tour of America and Europe, with no scheduled stops in Manhattan or Brooklyn. "Available Light" is an austere exercise in large scale geometry with its patterns of skips, pivots and ballet steps that aspire to an impersonal, ecstatic ideal. Mr. Gehry's two tiered set, adapted for touring, helps clarify Ms. Childs's trademark doublings, as the formations of dancers on the top level reflect, or diverge from, the formations of dancers below. For the revival, Mr. Adams has tinkered with his recorded score of dappled synthesizers and brass, supplying a more consistent pulse. The costumes have been updated as well, with a sleek retailoring of the baggy jumpsuits of the '80s. And the role once performed by the captivating Ms. Childs, now 75, has been split between two performers a loss in charisma, perhaps, offset by a gain in doubling. At the time when when "Available Light" was new, Louise Lecavalier was emerging as a representative figure of the age. Alan Kriegsman, in The Washington Post, later called her "the Madonna of contemporary dance." A blond rebel who performed alongside David Bowie, she was the star of the Montreal company La La La Human Steps and the principal muse of its choreographer, Edouard Lock. Last week, that company announced that it is shutting down, too burdened with debt to continue. But Ms. Lecavalier, who left the troupe in 1999, is entering a new phase. Last year, at 55, she presented her first extended piece of choreography, "So Blue," which will have its New York premiere when it kicks off fall programming at New York Live Arts. Reviews from abroad have been mixed, but everyone seems to agree that Ms. Lecavalier, who performs in the work ,is a marvel of stamina and unbridled energy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
What You Need to Know About the Strike Against Marriott Hotels Edna Garcia saved for two years to afford her Hawaiian holiday, an 18 day splurge with two cousins. They all needed to recharge. There had been caregiving, and the loss of their mothers, and one cousin's bout with advanced breast cancer. "This was supposed to be a very, very special trip for the three of us," Ms. Garcia, of San Antonio, Tex., said. They booked two partial view rooms at Sheraton Princess Kaiulani in Honolulu, paying 9,030 including resort fees and parking. They flew first class from Texas to Oahu. "We really enjoyed it for the first few days," said Ms. Garcia, 58. Then, on Oct. 8, the 11th day of the trip, "I woke up extremely early because I heard yelling and shouting. I didn't understand what was going on." It turned out to be the housekeepers, cooks, servers, dishwashers, bartenders, doormen, bellmen and concierges walking off the job as they became part of a nationwide strike by 7,700 workers at 23 hotels operated by Marriott International. A notice slipped under her door said that the dining rooms, room service and bars were closed, and that housekeeping would be by request only. It asked guests to deposit their trash, recycling and dirty towels in hampers by the elevators, and to collect their clean towels, cups, coffee, bottled water and toiletries in the lobby. "It was all in boxes and bins on tables in the lobby, and everybody had to make a pit stop there on their way back from their activities to pick up what they needed," Ms. Garcia said. There were moments of, "There's no more towels," so she stashed extra washcloths and bath towels in her room. On one of the days she called for her room to be cleaned, she returned to find gloves and cleaning solution sitting on the counter. "I wasn't sure if it had been cleaned, or if they got called away in the middle of it," she said. Yet for Ms. Garcia, one of the main annoyances was the proximity of the picket line, which would start up at 7 in the morning, with bullhorns and microphones. To get to their rental car they had to cross the picket line, where workers would yell, "Don't check in. You need to check out." Ms. Garcia said, "One time my cousin rolled down the window and said, 'Can we go to your house then?'" When a labor dispute breaks out, guests like Ms. Garcia and her family can feel caught between the two sides, turning a vacation or work trip into a battle they never chose. Here's what you need to know. The walkout began in early October and quickly spread to 23 Marriott operated hotels in Boston, Detroit, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, San Diego, Honolulu and Lahaina, Maui. Marriott International is the world's largest hotel chain with management or franchise agreements with about 6,700 hotels under 30 brands in 130 countries and territories. Marriott International had net profits in 2017 of 1.37 billion. The strike encompasses a range of Marriott brands, including Marriott, Sheraton, Aloft, Element, Ritz Carlton, W, Palace, Courtyard, St. Regis, Westin and Royal Hawaiian. They are part of a group of 40 where collective bargaining agreements expire this year, said Connie Kim, a spokeswoman for Marriott International. Negotiations at the hotels involved in the walkout are continuing, and there are no plans to hold strike authorization votes at the 17 other properties before year end, said Rachel Gumpert, a spokeswoman for Unite Here, the union that represents the striking workers. The union has a full list of the hotels involved on its strike website. The workers want wages that keep up with the cost of living in the cities where the strikes are being held, said Ms. Gumpert. Pay varies by city, as do the proposed settlements, but a housekeeper at Ms. Garcia's hotel, the Sheraton Princess Kaiulani, makes about 22 an hour, Ms. Gumpert said. If the housekeeper worked 40 hours per week for the year, the 45,760 total is only 4,900 above the "very low income" limit set by the U.S. Housing and Urban Development for Honolulu County, a measure that considers housing costs. Although some people tip housekeepers, most don't, Ms. Gumpert said. The union is also concerned with job loss because of some types of automation, such as replacing front desk workers with iPads, or contracting out food prep like chopping and dicing. It also opposes the current Marriott "Make A Green Choice" program, which offers loyalty reward points for guests who forego daily housekeeping. The union doesn't want to end the program, but said that it throws off the schedule that housekeepers have to do heavy cleaning. When multiple guests checkout, the 30 minutes that a housekeeper might get to prepare a standard room isn't enough to safely deal with the backlog, Ms. Gumpert said. The union wants Marriott to allow more time to clean rooms that aren't serviced daily. Ms. Kim declined to comment on specifics, but said in a statement, "Marriott is a competitive employer that pays significantly above the minimum wage in most markets and provides generous benefits. For years Marriott has invested in the company's work force through benefits and training," particularly for hourly workers. A single hotel is on strike in Chicago in an unrelated dispute over health insurance coverage. That walkout hit 26 hotels in that city in September, but has settled at all but the Cambria Hotel Chicago Magnificent Mile, part of the Choice Hotels International chain. I'm booked at one of the hotels, what will I find? All of the hotels being picketed are open, and while services may be curtailed, Ms. Kim emphasized that rooms are cleaned between guests. She would not say if managers or replacement workers are keeping the hotels running. Guests might want to call their hotel directly before arriving, as things are in flux. For instance, the Sheraton Princess Kaiulani, where Ms. Garcia stayed, recently started offering breakfast in the dining room, and limited bar service by the pool. What if I want to cancel? "Whatever that hotel's cancellation policy is, it still stands," Ms. Kim said. Cancellation policies vary by hotel and may depend on time of year, but could require as much as 72 hours notification for a full refund. Ms. Kim said that she hadn't heard of there being a lot of cancellations, but did not offer numbers and said her information was only "anecdotal." Photos on Twitter have shown the New York Yankees, the Edmonton Oilers and the Los Angeles Dodgers crossing the picket line while staying at the Ritz Carlton Boston. Ms. Gumpert, however, said that "dozens of groups" have canceled or relocated events from hotels involved in the strike, including CityLab 2018, a recent global summit in Detroit, and ComNet 2018, a conference that had been planned at the San Francisco Westin St. Francis, and switched venues earlier this month at a reported cost of more than 300,000. If workers are on strike, will my hotel let me know before I check in? Ms. Kim said that guests are not being notified in advance of their check in because the hotels are "operating and functional," and that complaints are being handled by customer service on a case by case basis. Although people have complained on social media about being offered only incidental refunds, like resort fees, Ms. Garcia and her cousins met with the hotel manager and negotiated a reimbursement of 2,230, roughly equivalent to getting one room for free during the strike. "Because he came to the table and gave us a little something back we were happy with the results, and were happy with the vacation," Ms. Garcia said. Otherwise, "I'd be telling you it was totally ruined."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
As time goes on, more people are wondering, did I have coronavirus already. "I can help the next patient INAUDIBLE ."." Now, Stanford hospitals in northern California are giving their health care workers the answer with antibody testing for all. We were given exclusive access to follow two caregivers and their blood through the antibody testing process. "I do have a loved one at home, my mother, who is high risk. So I want to get tested just to make sure I'm O.K., and kind of maybe surprise her and say, I get to come see you." First, they're swabbed to make sure they're not currently infected. "Oh my god." And then they give a vial of blood for the antibody test. "There's so many asymptomatic carriers around, and there's so many people that may have had it or had mild symptoms, and not had known. If I have the antibodies and someone needs my plasma, I'd love to help out." "Honestly, I'm hoping that comes back positive, that it'll teach us a lot." " the blood antibody test for the COVID 19 virus." This blood test, also known as serology, will show if they had coronavirus in the past, and their immune system raised antibodies to fight it off. But it can't predict if those antibodies will make them immune. What this and other reliable antibody tests can do is give us a better picture of how widespread coronavirus actually is. And they're helping researchers design possible treatments and vaccines. "More widespread testing will help us to better understand more quickly what are the important variables, you know, who's going to be protected, who's not." These are samples from the people we just met including, Heidi and Jamshid. Here, they'll be spun to separate blood cells from plasma. Next, that plasma is taken to a different lab on campus for analysis. "You can see the robot is precisely putting in the right amount of each sample into the wells of the plate." "There's been great demand for the test. The lab is basically open 24 hours. The instruments have been running day and night." Dr. Scott Boyd and his team developed this test, and now they're ramping up quickly. They've just received a new shipment of robots called ELISA Instruments. Soon, the team hopes to process at least 4,000 samples a day. They use controls to validate their tests, so they know it works. The positive controls are from coronavirus patients at Stanford, and the negative are from healthy blood donors, taken before coronavirus jumped to humans. Out of 200 people, the results for a few may be inaccurate. But this kind of test is among the best we have. You can see the controls here in the left column of each assay plate. Once the plate finishes processing, you can see a yellow color in the patient samples that have antibodies. The darker the color, the more antibodies there are. "But just measuring the total quantity doesn't tell you all the information you'd like to know. The question is, does somebody likely have immunity. The answers are not yet as clear." Only some antibodies actually fight or neutralize the virus. So the next step for researchers is to identify those ones. Then, how much of those neutralizing antibodies are needed to block the virus and prevent re infection? "So we're also now working on developing a neutralizing anybody test that would allow us to test a lot of patients in the hospital, and also health care workers." That neutralizing antibody test, which Dr. Boyd hopes to have ready by the end of May, will give a better sense of who is actually immune. Remember Heidi from earlier? Well, we watched her sample go through the process. "Coronavirus." And now her results are in. "Not detected." All right, so what did the results say? "Negative. Negative COVID and negative serology, unfortunately. But it's a good thing, right? It can still be good. Today's really my only safe day, because I go back to work tomorrow. So I feel pretty safe that I can go over, see my mom without a mask. I don't think she's got the ability to survive a disease like this, so I've had to be very careful. I haven't seen her face. She hasn't seen my face without a mask on since like, the beginning of March. I'm negative." "What?" "Yeah." "Yay!" "You get to take your mask off, at least for today. Come out here." "Oh my goodness. I'm so happy." "I missed you." "I missed you. Oh, I haven't had a hug forever. Oh, I'm so happy. O.K. Bye bye, sweetheart. Bye bye." "All right. Bye bye." "Thank you." Jamshid's results are the same as Heidi's "So I do not have the antibodies, which is great, because it means PPE works, which is fantastic. I've definitely been in multiple rooms with people with known COVID, and I've been wearing PPE. And I'm glad that I was at a place that I didn't have to reuse or recycle my PPE." Preliminary data is starting to show that Heidi and Jamshid's negative antibody results are representative. "Hi, Romey." In places like the Bay Area that haven't been hard hit, only a small fraction of people are testing positive for antibodies. "You know, where I go to the grocery store, I get it. I go to work again, I get it. It's out there, so I'm still going to take the same precautions. I'm going to still wear a mask." But these tests are a first step towards understanding immunity. Just having antibodies is not a free pass. "Hopefully if someone's positive, it doesn't give a false sense of security. I still think that everybody needs to protect themselves just the way that we currently are."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
David Stern, who during a 30 year run as commissioner of the National Basketball Association masterminded its transformation from a league in peril to a multibillion dollar industry and the first American sports league to thrive internationally, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 77. His death was announced in a statement from the N.B.A. Mr. Stern had a brain hemorrhage on Dec. 12 and underwent emergency surgery. The N.B.A.'s fourth commissioner, serving from Feb. 1, 1984, to Feb. 1, 2014, Mr. Stern intimidated many with his domineering ways. But he also possessed a marketing vision and instinct that helped lift the league from its darkest period to new levels of prosperity and popularity both domestically and abroad. The N.B.A. was lagging behind the National Football League and Major League Baseball in both revenue and television profile when Mr. Stern took over. By the time he stepped down having surpassed Pete Rozelle of the N.F.L. as the longest tenured commissioner in the history of major North American team sports he had overseen the league's growth from fears of extinction in the late 1970s to a 5 billion enterprise. Television revenue increased more than 40 fold in that span, crossing the 1 billion threshold. He succeeded largely by keeping the focus on the N.B.A.'s biggest names Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley understanding that it was they who gave the sport its worldwide appeal. Mr. Stern's tenure practically began with the launch of the Jordan era; the 1984 N.B.A. draft, with Jordan and Barkley among its marquee players, was held soon after he started in the job. Seven new franchises were introduced during Mr. Stern's tenure, including two in Canada in 1995: the Toronto Raptors and the Vancouver (now Memphis) Grizzlies. The league, headlined by new stars like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, reached 30 teams in 2004 with the arrival of the Charlotte Bobcats (now Hornets). Other Stern innovations included the creation of the Women's N.B.A. in 1997 and the N.B.A.'s developmental league, known as the G League, in 2001. In 1985, Jerry Reinsdorf bought the Chicago Bulls for 16 million. In 2014, shortly after Mr. Stern's exit, Steve Ballmer purchased the Los Angeles Clippers for 2 billion. And as franchise values rose during Mr. Stern's stewardship, so did players' salaries. "I think people see all the money in sports and think that it was always like that," Charles Barkley, now a television analyst for Turner Sports, said recently on the program "Inside the N.B.A." "When I got to the N.B.A. in 1984, which was Commissioner's first year, the average salary was 250,000. It's almost 9 million now. And he is largely responsible for that." By the time Mr. Stern ceded his title to Adam Silver in 2014, the N.B.A. had opened offices in 15 cities outside the United States and signed agreements to televise games in more than 200 countries, in more than 40 languages. The effects of that international growth were apparent on opening night this season, when 108 players from 38 countries and territories populated N.B.A. rosters. It was the sixth consecutive season in which the league had at least 100 international players. David Joel Stern was born on Sept. 22, 1942, in Manhattan to William and Anna Stern. His father ran Stern's Deli in Chelsea. David grew up in Teaneck, N.J., and graduated from Rutgers University in 1963 before attending Columbia Law School. His affiliation with the N.B.A. began in 1966, when, as a recent law school graduate, he was hired by Proskauer, Rose, Goetz Mendelsohn, the prominent New York law firm, which represented the N.B.A. Among the cases Mr. Stern worked on was a landmark antitrust lawsuit brought against the league by the Hall of Fame guard Oscar Robertson in 1970. Robertson sought to block a proposed merger with the American Basketball Association and outlaw the so called option clause, which tied players to their teams. The lawsuit ended in 1976 with a settlement that enabled the N.B.A. to expand by adding the Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, San Antonio Spurs and New York Nets of the American Basketball Association but only after allowing N.B.A. players to become free agents for the first time. Mr. Stern grew up a Knicks fan and attended games at Madison Square Garden with his father. "Even though they didn't have a good record, they were my Knicks," he told The Times in 1983. He played the sport briefly in adulthood, saying he was "without most of the cartilage in my right knee from playing basketball with my firm's team in the New York Lawyers League." Professional basketball looked on the wane when Mr. Stern joined the N.B.A. in 1978 as general counsel under Commissioner Larry O'Brien. The league was slipping into irrelevance seven N.B.A. finals games from 1979 to 1981 were relegated to tape delayed broadcasts on CBS that began at 11:30 p.m. Eastern time. The league incurred further damage to its image after a report in The Los Angeles Times in August 1980 estimated that 40 to 75 percent of its players used cocaine. In the ensuing 1980 81 season, 16 of 23 teams reportedly lost money. Mr. Stern, elevated to executive vice president in November 1980, negotiated a drug testing policy in 1983, making the N.B.A. the first major sports league in North America to implement one. As soon as he became commissioner, the N.B.A. sought to help disadvantaged small market franchises by adopting a salary cap of 3.6 million per team for the 1984 85 season (about 9 million in today's money). Those measures helped the N.B.A. regain stability as a business, enough for it to capitalize on the revival of the Boston Celtics Los Angeles Lakers rivalry throughout the 1980s fueled by Bird and Johnson as well as Jordan's spectacular ascendancy to six championships with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. Mr. Stern found his true niche in the game under Mr. O'Brien, who put him in charge of marketing, television and public relations in addition to business and legal affairs. When Mr. Stern walked away from the league's day to day operations, Mr. Silver called him "one of the founders of modern sports marketing." "When I arrived at the league in the early '90s, leagues weren't considered brands the way they are now," Mr. Silver told reporters in 2014. Mr. Stern, he said, was one of the first "to take modern state of the art marketing practices, whatever the technology happened to be at the time, and apply them to sports leagues." Perhaps nothing made Mr. Stern prouder than the league's role in supporting Magic Johnson after he disclosed on Nov. 7, 1991, that he had contracted H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. In his N.B.A. office hung a photograph of Mr. Stern presenting Johnson with the Most Valuable Player trophy at the 1992 All Star Game in Orlando, Fla., just months after Johnson announced he had the virus and retired as a player (though he would later return for one season). Mr. Stern supported Johnson's desire to participate in the game as a leading All Star vote getter, amid a backlash in some corners over his participation and despite the fact that he was no longer an active player. Johnson's presence transformed the league's All Star Weekend that year into a virtual convention for H.I.V. and AIDS awareness. "It sort of helped us begin to firm up our view that there was something about the medium of sports that resonated with people," Mr. Stern told ESPN in 2014. "We could effect change." Johnson told the sportswriter Jackie MacMullan that without Mr. Stern, "I wouldn't be standing here today." "He gave me my life back," Johnson said. Mr. Stern had no shortage of detractors and adversaries over the years. He may have labeled himself "Easy Dave" to the news media during labor talks in 1994, but behind closed doors he was known for his temper, and for an approach that some found tyrannical at times. Throughout the 2005 6 season he was widely questioned after instituting a dress code for players before and after games that some saw as racist. The Philadelphia 76ers star guard Allen Iverson described the policy as "targeting guys who dress like me guys who dress hip hop." Entering the 2006 7 season, Mr. Stern sanctioned the introduction of a new microfiber basketball that was received so poorly by the players that the N.B.A. abruptly went back to the traditional leather ball on Jan. 1, 2007. Soon after, Mr. Stern was dealing with one of the most difficult challenges of his stewardship, when an F.B.I. investigation revealed that the referee Tim Donaghy had bet on games at which he had officiated. Mr. Stern also remained a pariah in Seattle for his role in allowing the SuperSonics to relocate to Oklahoma City after the 2007 8 season. Some punishments that Mr. Stern handed down were seen as draconian, notably the myriad suspensions that followed an infamous Detroit Indiana brawl in November 2004 and the yearlong suspension in 1997 of Latrell Sprewell for choking his coach, P.J. Carlesimo. In considering his accomplishments, Mr. Stern told Sports Illustrated in 2018 that he most valued the tough assignments. "I think about Magic announcing he was H.I.V. positive, and Latrell Sprewell deciding to choke P.J. Carlesimo, Ron Artest going into the stands, Donaghy betting on games," he said. "Those were places I had to step up and protect the league, and that comes with the job. That wasn't extra stress. That was the job." Negative reviews began accumulating more frequently in his latter years as commissioner. In 2011, when the New Orleans franchise was placed under league control after the team owner, George Shinn, could no longer afford to operate the club, Mr. Stern refused to allow the team's general manager, Dell Demps, to go ahead with a three team trade. The trade would have sent the disgruntled All Star guard Chris Paul to the Lakers. "Basketball reasons" was the initial explanation given for Mr. Stern's decision leading to numerous interviews in the succeeding years in which he continued to be asked for more detailed elaboration. "I did it because I was protecting the then Hornets," Mr. Stern told Sports Illustrated in 2018. "No team sells or trades a future Hall of Famer without the owner signing off, and I was the owner's rep." He added that he "didn't do a great job of explaining it at the time." Perhaps the harshest criticism Mr. Stern endured came during a labor impasse in the summer of 2011; it was just the second work stoppage in N.B.A. history to cost the league regular season games. (The first was in 1998.) The HBO commentator Bryant Gumbel essentially blamed the N.B.A.'s "infamously egocentric commissioner" for the lockout and responded to Mr. Stern's hard line negotiating tactics by likening him to "some kind of modern day plantation overseer." Mr. Gumbel's comments gained little traction; Mr. Stern's reputation as "an honest broker" for his largely African American player pool and a figure who "respects the men who play in his league and the community from which they come," as described by the noted sports sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards, was well established by then. But Mr. Stern made it clear how much the remarks by Mr. Gumbel still bothered him in June 2017, when he called him "an idiot" in an interview with The Washington Post. "I've done more for people of color than Bryant Gumbel has," he said. Even after resigning as commissioner, Mr. Stern could not detach from his workaholic tendencies. He served as an adviser to Mr. Silver with the title commissioner emeritus. He also advised the investment bank PJT Partners, the venture capital firm Greycroft Partners and the technology, media and telecommunications arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, as well as several sports technology start up firms. His survivors include his wife, Dianne Bock Stern, and two sons, Andrew and Eric. Mr. Silver has won praise as Mr. Stern's successor in part for employing what is regarded as a more collaborative and open minded style. But Mr. Stern's impact on the league continues to be felt, especially in its efforts to expand its brand beyond the United States. When the league announced that Mr. Stern had fallen ill, the Dallas Mavericks owned by Mark Cuban, a frequent Stern antagonist were playing the Detroit Pistons in Mexico City. "He was incredible to me," Mr. Cuban said, "even when he was yelling at me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
By the end of the novel, those four words look like a ridiculous understatement. Jacinda "Jake" Greenwood, the engagingly skeptical heroine of Christie's opening and closing chapters, is a forest guide (the only work she can get, despite holding advanced degrees in botany) who thinks she sees signs that the Great Withering has reached Greenwood Island. The value of old growth forest is an article of faith for her. She believes that "even the impenetrable mysteries of time and family and death can be solved if only they are viewed through the green tinted lens of this one gloriously complex organism." She'll do anything to save it. In this, she has a lot in common with her eco activist grandmother, Willow, although she knows almost nothing about her. For the young Willow of the 1970s, the name Greenwood is "a shorthand for rapacious greed," and her timber magnate father, Harris, is the culprit who has been "chewing up the natural world and selling the spoils at great profit." But even Willow can't fathom the extent to which the Greenwood clan is "a house built of secrets, layers upon layers of them." As Christie touches down in 2008, 1974, 1934 and 1908, Greenwood bloodlines take increasingly confounding turns against the broad backdrop of a world being looted for its natural resources. The author broaches every kind of human valor, villainy and vulnerability: drug addiction, forbidden desires and laudable do gooding, among others. He commands attention not through conservationist pieties but with the way his forest killers and tree loving zealots are equally off kilter and contradiction filled. Christie's description can be superb, whether he's conjuring clear cut devastation ("a black peppering of stumps arranged like seats in a coliseum") or Depression era Toronto ("where souls wander and collapse, damned either by something they've done or by something they're unable to do"). His look ahead to the late 2030s is gloomily wry. It's a world where the Canadian prime minister is "widely regarded as the most powerful human being on the planet" and resource rich Canada itself has become "the global elite's panic room."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Robert Lighthizer, the top American trade negotiator, talked with Vice Premier Liu He of China in October. Mr. Lighthizer has called the new deal "remarkable." WASHINGTON Trump administration officials predicted big gains for the economy from a newly announced trade deal with China, but the economic losses sustained during a bruising 19 month trade war will not be easy to make up. In a televised interview on Sunday, President Trump's top trade negotiator praised the progress that the agreement between the world's two biggest economies would make on issues like intellectual property, currency and financial services. He described the deal as "remarkable" and predicted that it would roughly double American exports to China by 2021. Yet the negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, admitted that the limited agreement, which the administration says is just the first of several phases, was only a partial victory. He said it would leave many of the existing tariffs between the countries in place and other bigger changes to the Chinese economy undone. "This is a first step in trying to integrate two very different systems, to the benefit of both of us," Mr. Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, said in an interview on CBS's "Face the Nation." Anyone who thinks you would change China in one stroke of the pen "is foolish," he said, adding: "The president is not foolish. He is very smart." Business groups have welcomed the first phase trade pact as a sign of easing tensions in the trade war. On Sunday, Mr. Lighthizer predicted that Chinese purchases of American products would rise by more than 100 billion a year once the agreement, which is expected to be signed in January, goes into effect. But the economic benefits of the pact appear to have come at significant costs namely, the tariffs Mr. Trump imposed to force China to accept an agreement and the uncertainty that his unpredictable approach to trade has created. Those factors have added new costs for businesses, forced them to undertake expensive changes to their supply chains and caused them to put off investments and new hiring. Once those costs are taken into account, trade experts said, the gains from the new agreement are less clear. "It's hard to see this China deal as the vindication of the president's tactics," said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's a pretty small deal, coming at a pretty high cost." But tariffs on more than 360 billion of Chinese goods the bulk of products the country exports to the United States will stay in place indefinitely. The remaining tariffs cover a wide range of product categories in which American officials contend that the Chinese government has provided huge subsidies to businesses to become globally competitive. They also include many goods for which the Trump administration is leery of having the United States depend on China for national security or economic security reasons, such as nuclear reactor parts or certain widely used industrial pumps and motors. In the interview on Sunday, Mr. Lighthizer described those tariffs as motivation for China to continue to negotiate with the United States. But many businesses continue to denounce them as a tax on doing business with the world's second largest economy. Companies that import parts and finished products from China have already paid nearly 40 billion in additional taxes since Mr. Trump imposed his first tariffs, data from United States Customs and Border Protection shows. While Mr. Trump insists that China is paying those tariffs, most economic studies have found that the burden of the levies falls more heavily on American businesses and consumers than Chinese ones. The deal will need to make up a lot of ground in the area of agriculture, as well. Under pressure from the trade war, American farm exports to China have fallen sharply, as China has put tariffs on American products and Chinese state purchasers shifted to buying goods from Brazil, Argentina and other countries. American agricultural exports to China fell from 19.6 billion in 2017 to 9.2 billion in 2018, according to the United States Agriculture Department, and have remained depressed this year. 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. Mr. Trump and his advisers have predicted that the deal will result in China buying 40 billion to 50 billion of American farm products per year. But some analysts have questioned how realistic those estimates are, given that the highest level of farm products the United States has ever exported to China was 26 billion in 2012. The uncertainty created by the trade war also appears to have taken a substantial toll on the American and global economy, particularly by suppressing business investment. Mr. Trump and his advisers have pointed to record low unemployment, a strong stock market and high consumer confidence as evidence that their trade war has little downside. But economists say American growth would be even stronger if not for the trade war. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, estimated that the trade war lowered American gross domestic product by a third of a percentage point in the third quarter, when the American economy grew by 1.9 percent. "The trade war has done significant damage to the economy," Mr. Zandi said. "You can see the fingerprints of the trade war clearly in the manufacturing sector." The new tariffs that Mr. Trump decided not to move ahead with on Sunday would have fallen more heavily on American consumers by raising the price of apparel, smartphones and other finished goods. He also scaled back tariffs imposed in September on other consumer products. But earlier tranches of tariffs, which fell more heavily on industrial components and machinery, will remain in effect. That could ironically penalize some companies for making goods in the United States, instead of China. Robert J. Leo, a lawyer for the American Down and Feather Council, said that levies would remain in effect on down and feathers from China, but not on Chinese made comforters and pillows. "That means the Chinese manufacturers can manufacture their products and get them into the country without tariffs," where American manufacturers that import the goods to make products in the United States will still be charged, Mr. Leo said. Despite the barriers that remain, Mr. Lighthizer said in the interview that Friday was "probably the most momentous day in trade history ever," because in addition to announcing the agreement with China, the administration submitted its revised United States Mexico Canada Agreement to Congress for a vote. The two deals "have been hyped as short term wins for the U.S. resulting from hard nosed negotiations by the Trump administration," said Eswar Prasad, a trade professor at Cornell University. "But the outcomes of these trade deals hardly compensate for the heightened uncertainty resulting from the trade tensions unleashed by the Trump administration on multiple fronts that has hurt business sentiment and contributed to falling investment." The North American deal has gained the support of congressional Democrats and appeared to be on track for passage in the House of Representatives as early as this week. But in recent days, Mexico has raised new concerns about the deal's stronger labor provisions, throwing up a potential stumbling block to its passage. Jesus Seade, Mexico's chief negotiator for the pact, flew to Washington for meetings on Sunday after the United States said it would send as many as five labor attaches to Mexico to monitor labor conditions under the deal. Mexico has described the idea as a violation of its sovereignty. For its part, the Chinese government appeared over the weekend to be keeping up its end of the deal struck on Friday, starting with the cancellation on Sunday of plans to impose further retaliatory tariffs against the United States. Wang Yi, China's foreign minister, praised the trade deal on Saturday, and that praise was widely echoed by state media. Mr. Wang said the Phase 1 pact was based on principles of mutual respect between China and the United States a crucial requirement and endorsement from Beijing's perspective. He also said the understanding between the two countries was good news for their economies and for the global economy. "It will help to shore up confidence" in the global economy, Mr. Wang said, according to state run Chinese television. Ana Swanson reported from Washington, and Keith Bradsher from Beijing. Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Beijing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
It's not news that female choreographers are underrepresented within major ballet companies. Take the coming season at New York City Ballet, which includes 58 works, among them seven new commissions, and not one by a woman. In the midst of this landscape, the emphasis on female choreographers at the Joyce Theater's recent Ballet Festival where four out of the six engagements were produced and/or choreographed by women was probably not incidental, an effort to counter that imbalance. And it made for a nice change of pace. The two week festival, which wrapped up on Sunday, highlighted troupes working on a small, independent scale, whose directors also stay busy as freelancers. The final weekend featured Emery LeCrone Dance, with guests from City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, and Amy Seiwert's Imagery, visiting from San Francisco. Ms. LeCrone, who has choreographed for high caliber regional companies and leading dance conservatories, founded her own ensemble in 2013, in part to work more consistently with the same group of dancers and musicians. In her limpid, orderly style, there's both a sophistication and a hesitation linked, perhaps, to starting something new. She has a keen sensitivity to music in the unfurling of an arm or unwinding of a turn, you can feel her listening which was heightened by live accompaniment for three out of the four works on Friday's program. The pianist Melinda Faylor played Ludovico's Einaudi's melancholic "Ritornare" (2015), for a duet of the same name, in which Shane Ohmer and Izabela Szylinska flirted with merging and parting, resistance and surrender.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
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. Robert Mueller, the former special counsel who investigated the Trump campaign and Russian meddling in the 2016 election, testified on Wednesday before two House committees. As promised, he said little beyond what was written in his 448 page report. "And because it didn't contain any boy wizards, no one wanted to read it." TREVOR NOAH "Anyone hoping for the Mueller of Dragons was disappointed." JIMMY KIMMEL "Truly, how dare you, sir, ask us, as Americans, to read a book. We are the country that made a hit out of 'According to Jim.'" SAMANTHA BEE "He's like the world's least cooperative audiobook. 'Chapter 1 you know what? You know how to read. Go get the book. Read it yourself.'" TREVOR NOAH "If you missed Mueller's hearing, don't worry: In a few weeks, William Barr will give a much shorter, inaccurate summary." JIMMY FALLON "He had the same look on his face that Billy Joel has when someone yells, 'Play "Piano Man."' Imitating Mueller 'Why? You already know it.'" SETH MEYERS	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Fantasies of love vary across time and culture. What seems a dream to some may seem a nightmare to others. Aesthetic ideals vary similarly. When the China Ningbo Performance Arts Group first presented "The Red Dress" in China, audiences were apparently rapturous. But when I saw the same dance spectacle at the David H. Koch Theater on Friday, my response was much more subdued. The show, set in Zhejiang Province in the 1920s, tells the story of a A'yong (Zeng Ming) and Yue'er (Cheng Lin), a boy and girl who fall in love as children. After their engagement, the boy goes off to find his fortune, and the girl waits and waits, dreaming of the boy's return, which never comes, and of the wedding she never has and the red dress she never gets to wear. The production, directed by Wang Xiaoying and choreographed by Yin Mei, has trouble gaining traction. The early scenes are structured anti climatically. An episode may begin picturesquely, even with hints of poetry, as when young couples gambol around mulberry bushes, but then it doesn't go anywhere. It's merely irritating that the adult performers play children with a false cutesiness, but beginning the love story in this mode is a more serious problem: It inhibits emotional engagement. When the lovers grow up, the situation doesn't improve much. The dance vocabulary, flashing a few arabesques amid embraces and posing, is highly limited in emotional expressiveness (not to mention formal interest). Mr. Zeng's split leaps do convey his joy in love and his excitement to travel, but that's as potent as the choreography gets.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Legal pressure on Richard Callaghan, a disgraced elite American figure skating coach, ratcheted up Monday with the filing of a lawsuit accusing of him of years of sexual abuse and accusing the sport's national governing body of not doing enough to stop it. The lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Buffalo by Craig Maurizi, 57, a prominent coach and a former skating student of Mr. Callaghan's. Mr. Maurizi first told The New York Times in 1999 that Mr. Callaghan, 74, had begun an inappropriate sexual relationship with him when Mr. Maurizi was a minor and that the exploitive relationship continued, off and on, for years as the two men became coaching colleagues. Mr. Callaghan, best known for coaching Tara Lipinski to an Olympic gold medal in 1998 and coaching Todd Eldredge to a world title and six national championships, has long denied any inappropriate conduct. Last August, Mr. Callaghan was barred from figure skating permanently by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit organization created to track and investigate the abuse of athletes. The ban followed another allegation of sexual misconduct made against Mr. Callaghan by Adam Schmidt, a former skating student. Mr. Schmidt became the fourth male skater to publicly accuse Mr. Callaghan of improper behavior during a period between the early 1990s and the early 2000s.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The filly Gamine, who tested positive for a banned substance in May, did so again in September after finishing third in the prestigious Kentucky Oaks, according to two people familiar with the results of the drug test who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. Gamine is trained by Bob Baffert, a Hall of Famer who is one of the most decorated people in horse racing, but also one who has caught the attention of regulators over the years. This was Baffert's 28th drug violation, and his third in six months, according to public records compiled by the Association of Racetrack Commissioners International and the Thoroughbred Regulatory Rulings database maintained by the Jockey Club. In a tweet sent Thursday, the Kentucky Public Protection Agency acknowledged that a sample had come back positive for a "Class C" violation from the horses tested on the Sept. 4 race card, which was highlighted by the Oaks, a race for 3 year old fillies that is considered second in prestige in the state to the Kentucky Derby.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
When I was growing up and taking weekly piano lessons, I loved playing Chopin. His melodic lines soared above a sea of dreamy romanticism. While culturally adopted by the French, Frederic (Fryderyk, in his native language) Chopin was, of course, Polish, born in a town near Warsaw in 1810. War, however, forced him from his homeland at a young age and he was never able to return before his death at 39. In Warsaw, national pride runs deep for its best known composer. There are events, concerts, monuments, museums, even entire schools named for Chopin. My personal love for the composer's music brought me to his hometown, eager to learn about his life. But with the help of some local connections I gained much more from my visit a deeper understanding and appreciation of a city that is an oft overlooked gold mine for budget travelers. "Don't make a picture of that, please," said Malgorzata, my kind and generous Polish host with whom I stayed ( she is the mother of a friend). I obeyed, tilting my camera down from the Palace of Culture and Science, an impressive, ornate structure in the center of the city that's also the tallest building in Poland. She laughed and said she was just joking, but there was a kernel of truth in her jest. The building, she explained, was Russian, not Polish an important distinction. "A gift from Stalin," she said dryly. Warsaw, like many places in Eastern Europe, has a painful and many faceted relationship with history and neighboring powers. Russia's influence (and its "gifts") are evident in much of the prosaic, blocky architecture found throughout the city. The Old Town, with its beautiful muted colors, is old in name only a faithful reconstruction of the original that was almost destroyed by the Nazis during World War II. (Make the 150 stair climb up to the top of the Taras Widokowy for great views of the Old Town a bargain at 5 zloty, about 1.40.) Malgosia (a nickname for Malgorzata) and I walked toward the Warsaw Philharmonic to attend an evening concert. (The building was originally built between 1900 and 1901 and was reconstructed in the '50s.) I suggested we take an Uber, which I found to be safe and reliable in Warsaw; she said she preferred her tried and true (and much cheaper) public transportation. We compromised, taking the bus and Metro there (3.40 zloty for a bus to train transfer ticket) and an Uber back (about 24 zloty). She jokingly chided me with a tsk as I pulled up the app on my phone. I felt downright profligate. I approached the ticket counter, planning to shell out 25 zloty each for the cheapest seats available. "Let me handle this," she said, and began speaking to a woman holding a fistful of tickets in the lobby who was looking around aimlessly. Malgosia returned a minute later with two 45 zloty tickets better seats than I was planning to buy that somehow cost only 9 zloty each, around 2.50. The woman had purchased severely discounted tickets for group of senior citizens who hadn't shown up, Malgosia said, and rather than let them go to waste, she was trying to sell them. I was being thoroughly out Frugal ed. The concert program, which included an Alexandre Tansman piano concerto and a Pawel Klecki orchestral piece, was excellent and featured great musicianship from the pianist, Jonathan Plowright. During the intermission, we walked across the parquet floor of a high ceilinged reception hall, stopping to admire busts of Chopin and Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a prominent composer and politician. Paderewski, who fought for Polish independence from Germany in the early 20th century, was an even more important figure than Chopin, Malgosia said, "emotionally and politically." Afterward we headed to nearby Resort, a bar and cafe on Bielanska Street. It's is a lively venue, open until 4 a.m. on weekends, and perfect for a nightcap or informal late bite, with 8 zloty Americanos and 15 zloty specialty cocktails. I had one of the better herbal tea sets I've ever enjoyed for 10 zloty; it came with lemon, lime and orange wedges, cookies and a smattering of mixed spices. A small Tyskie beer was just 6 zloty. Music is in the streets in Warsaw's center and I heard plenty of it during my downtown perambulations. Public benches that do double duty as boombox and furniture are placed throughout the city in locations like Krasinski Square, or Saski Palace, the Chopin family's former residence playing snippets of some of Chopin's famous nocturnes and polonaises. Sometimes a more direct approach is used to lure music lovers. "Chopin Concert Today at 6:00PM" read a large banner hung on a building on Swietokrzyska Street. I stopped in a little before show time at the House of Music and purchased a ticket to the evening's performance, solo piano, for 50 zloty. The environment is perfect for an intimate recital a parlor like setting with tables where patrons can sip tea or coffee probably how the music was originally heard. The pianist, Maria Marquez Torres, burst through the door a few minutes after start time, threw off her coat, and took her place at the piano. Her hasty entrance translated to a somewhat sloppy performance of a polonaise and a ballade. She settled in, though, with a crowd pleasing rendition of Albeniz's "Suite Espanola." Different artists rotate through the House of Music, and the schedule changes frequently my experience was fun, but not up to the level of the cheaper Philharmonic concert. The Fryderyk Chopin Museum (admission, 17 zloty), a quick walk from where I attended the House of Music piano recital, is a must or anyone with even a passing interest in the composer. There are old manuscripts, concert posters, personal effects and interactive exhibits (for example, something called Twister Muzyczny musical Twister) that take you through nearly every stage of Chopin's brief life. One of the highlights for me was getting to see Chopin's last piano. Built sometime in the 1840s by Ignace Pleyel, the beautiful 82 key specimen seemed to radiate the energy and sadness that characterized much of Chopin's music. There's an entire room dedicated to the women in Chopin's life (he was a popular fellow, apparently). The details of his relationships with Maria Wodzinska, the opera singer Jenny Lind, Jane Stirling and, of course, George Sand are all represented. What I found particularly fascinating, though, was the exhibit that focused on Chopin's love of opera. The young composer was obsessed with Italian opera, particularly the work of Rossini, and would attend performances at the National Theater whenever he had a chance. While he never wrote an opera, Chopin's adoration makes perfect sense the concept of bel canto is readily reflected in the melodies of his works. Afterward, I went across the way and walked around the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, where I could hear students practicing their instruments, singing, or accompanying one another. Hunger for music and hunger for food are not mutually exclusive, and I certainly spent a fair amount of time seeking out some great cheap eats. Fortunately, Warsaw is full of them. Prasowy is a clean, casual "milk bar" a throwback and reclamation of the Communist style cafeterias of the 1950s. Prasowy means media or press, and was, according to Agata (Malgosia's daughter and my lunch partner), popular with Polish newspapermen of the era. We ordered pierogi, of course Prasowy serves a number of different styles of the traditional dumpling. My favorite, the Ruskie, cost just 6 zloty for six pieces. Adding skwarki, or fried lard, for an additional zloty is highly recommended and adds a porky, bacon like crunch. The Ukrainian borscht was also quite good (5.90 zloty), a tangy beetroot based soup with green beans and chunks of potato. Agata also took me to Coffee Karma at Zbawiecela Plaza ("a hipster area," she said) where I got a 9 zloty AeroPress coffee and a decent croissant for 6 zloty.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
FLINT, Mich. A baby born in Flint, where I am a pediatrician, is likely to live almost 20 fewer years than a child born elsewhere in the same county. She's a baby like any other, with wide eyes, a growing brain and a vast, bottomless innocence too innocent to understand the injustices that without her knowing or choosing have put her at risk. Some of the babies I care for have the bad luck to be born into neighborhoods where life expectancy is just over 64 years. Only a few miles away, in a more affluent community, the average life span is 84 years. The ravages of Covid 19, which disproportionately affect low income families and people of color, are surely widening this gap even further. Throughout the United States, geography defines and describes inequities in health, wealth, mobility and longevity. The reasons for this are both visible and hidden. Life in a distressed neighborhood means limited access to health care and healthy food. It means living with violence, racism, poverty and uncertainty. It means bearing the brunt of environmental injustice not having safe and affordable water, as Flint knows too well, or living in the shadow of a polluting factory. More air pollution increases rates of respiratory disease and reduces student achievement as well as life span. We are also beginning to understand the interplay of water access and air quality with Covid 19 severity. These disparities between neighborhoods are rarely accidental; they are the product of purposeful policies and practices that have widened gaps in income, opportunity and equality. Over the decades, city inhabitants have been battered by deindustrialization; racist banking and real estate practices; white flight and population loss; austerity cuts to public education, public health and safety net programs; the corporate driven weakening of unions; dilution of environmental regulations; housing and nutrition insecurity; and racially driven mass incarceration. And so much more. Science tells us that children exposed to multiple adversities, both in their home and in their neighborhood, have a far greater likelihood of challenges later in life. From addiction to eviction, these constant pressures change children on a molecular, cellular and behavioral level and make them sick. The effects of toxic stress can be as disruptive as environmental pollution on their bodies and brains, increasing risk for chronic diseases like asthma and hypertension, and lowering life expectancy. Exposure to six or more adverse childhood experiences can cut a life short by as much as 20 years. The pandemic hot spots in Michigan follow this pattern: Outside of metropolitan Detroit, the troubled Flint area has been hardest hit. In Flint, we just marked the sixth anniversary of the water crisis, when poisonous, lead laced water was used to fill baby bottles and sippy cups of unsuspecting Flint kids who just happened to be born in the wrong city. Now we're being ravaged by another preventable public health emergency. With over 200 deaths, the county where Flint is has more Covid 19 fatalities than 19 states to date. All of us who live or work in this beleaguered community know somebody who has died from the disease caused by the coronavirus. There's Wendell Quinn, the gentle giant of a hospital public safety officer who always gave me a warm smile and a nod when I walked into work; and Ruben Burks, the dedicated United Auto Workers leader; and Nathel Burtley, the first black superintendent of Flint schools; and Karen Dozier, the kind and loving custodian at the early child care center. And bringing a level of grief that is difficult to comprehend, Calvin Munerlyn, a Family Dollar store security guard and devoted father of six, was recently shot and killed after telling a shopper to wear a mask. The epidemic of gun violence has compounded tragedy upon tragedy. At a multigenerational level of loss, there are the Jones and Brown families. Within weeks, a Flint elementary school principal, Kevelin B. Jones II, lost his father, Pastor Kevelin B. Jones; his uncle Freddie Brown Jr.; and his cousin Freddie Brown III. At the combined burial for her husband and only child, Sandy Brown waved to the parade of cars that drove by quietly as she stood alone next to two freshly dug graves. Reflecting on the difficult losses, a church elder, Keimba Knowlin, spoke on resilience, a quality that I've long observed and admired in the people of Flint. "We're going to rise above this and get past this," he said. More from "The America We Need" The will to survive and endure can be the deciding factor between a child who overcomes adversity and thrives and a child who never makes it to adulthood. But how long can we ask people born in the wrong ZIP code to "rise above" and persevere in circumstances beyond their control, no matter how central the idea of overcoming is to our archetypal American identity? When Hazim Hardeman, a 2019 Rhodes scholar, was asked about his journey from public housing in North Philadelphia, where many of his friends were shot or stabbed to death, he spoke a truth that we all need to hear: "Don't be happy for me that I overcame these barriers. Be mad as hell that they exist in the first place." Surviving life's hardest blows should not be celebrated or expected. Recovery and reconciliation require reparations and resources. To expect resilience without justice is simply to indifferently accept the status quo. Just as the New Deal sprang from the Great Depression and public health best practices were born in response to a previous plague, we need to embrace the bold innovations that are certain to arise. To begin with, we need to establish policies and practices rooted in science. And science tells us that where you live matters. For children raised in places replete with the stresses of misfortune, these adversities rooted in historic and systemic bias are scarring. Just as new Covid 19 cases can represent a time lag from infection two weeks earlier, adversities in early childhood play out later, filling our hospital beds and deteriorating the public's health. As this pandemic makes painfully visible, medicine alone ventilators, pharmaceuticals, defibrillators, I.C.U.s will not save us. It's always an ego deflating moment for my medical residents when they learn that medical care contributes only 10 percent to 20 percent to positive health outcomes. Our medical interventions are largely reactive measures and happen too late. Addressing the upstream root causes is the only answer. These big and bold ideas are not new. They are measures proved to improve health, quality of life and longevity standards that most developed countries already employ. And to ensure we are moving in the same direction together, the pathogens of divisiveness and bigotry need to be treated as the deadly, life shortening contagions they truly are. This is how we begin to transform the concept of resilience from an individual trait to one that describes a community and society that cares for everyone. Rather than hoping a child is tough enough to endure the insurmountable, we must build resilient places healthier, safer, more nurturing and just where all children can thrive. This is where prevention and healing begin. Mona Hanna Attisha ( MonaHannaA) is a pediatrician and professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine in Flint. She is also the director of the Pediatric Public Health Initiative and author of "What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City." 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
VERITAS A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife By In 2012, the Harvard scholar Karen King announced what she believed to be an extraordinary discovery: a second century papyrus fragment with a text hinting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife," as it became known, tapped into a plot point from "The Da Vinci Code" that had already helped King's academic treatise on Mary Magdalene become a best seller with a mass audience. This "gospel" was worldwide news before skeptical papyrologists and grammarians, in one case drawing on the research of an amateur Coptic obsessive working in his Macomb, Mich., basement, showed it to be a complete fake. King was mum on who the stranger from Florida was who had given her the fragment, but the writer , using sophisticated tools like Google, uncovered that it was one Walter Fritz, a former director of the Stasi Museum in East Germany with a fake Egyptology degree whose businesses included charging for online videos of his wife having sex with other men, and who, more than three weeks before King's bombshell announcement about the papyrus, had registered the web domain gospelofjesuswife.com. "Veritas," Sabar's exhausting, madcap, unforgettable book about this fiasco, is for enthusiasts of ancient Christianity, as well as anyone who likes watching snooty academics brought low and readers of idea driven capers, whether by Daniel Silva or Janet Malcolm. It's a barely believable tale, crazier than a tweed sniffer in the faculty lounge.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Over the past week, social media has been flooded with videos of knives slicing into ordinary objects only to reveal that they are actually made of cake. These hyper realistic cakes have taken the shape of a bottle of hand lotion, a chicken thigh, a bar of soap, rolls of toilet paper and human heads. It's unsettling to see them cut open to reveal their sweet insides. The trend took off on July 8 after BuzzFeed Tasty shared a compilation of videos from the Instagram feed of a Turkish baker, redrosecake tubageckil. "These are all cakes," the caption reads, as a kitchen knife cuts into what first appears to be a red Croc. "You try to call for help but the phone is a cake," one Twitter user replied. "Help arrives, but they are also cake," replied another. Viral cake videos sit at the perfect nexus of "satisfying" and "gotcha" content. Watching a sharp knife slice cleanly through what appears to be an everyday object is surprising and somehow deeply gratifying. The cake videos are similar in form to soap cutting videos in which a person cleanly slices and dices a bar of soap which can attract millions of views and have been popular for years. (When a video shows a bar of soap cut in half and it is revealed to be cake, it becomes doubly intriguing and shareable.) The hyper realistic cake craze is now part of the pantheon of illogical internet food jokes. In 2016, a clip from a Japanese game show titled "Candy Or Not Candy," in which contestants bit into various household objects to determine what was made of candy, went viral. The video shows a man smiling as he bites off a doorknob that is revealed to be made of chocolate. It amassed more than 25 million views. Before that, in 2008, a stop motion video by Adam Pesapane called "Western Spaghetti" went viral; in it, Mr. Pesapane prepares an absurdist meal with inanimate objects including a Rubik's cube and dice, in the style of a cooking video. It has more than 212 million views and is captioned: "The stop motion cooking film that started them all." Another predecessor to the current cake meme is 2019's unwittingly gross and viral "bigger than before" egg video a how to craft video in which an egg is dunked in vinegar and dye over the course of several days with the result that it is bigger (and bluer) than before. (Why someone might want that remains anyone's guess.) Don Caldwell, the editor of Know Your Meme, a website that documents memes, said that part of the reason these videos spread so far is that they're generic enough to appeal to a broad audience and don't carry a particular political view, agenda or message. They can provoke strong reactions (shock, surprise, disgust, horror) but the innocuous subject matter easily leads the viewer back to humor. Plus, cake jokes are easy to make in any online format. "One big meme right now is two astronauts looking at earth from space, and one says, 'it's all cake,'" Mr. Caldwell said. "The other says 'always has been,' looking at earth being cut in two and revealing a cake." It's ridiculous, yes, but confusion further propels the joke. "People see the memes and want to know where the joke came from," Mr. Caldwell said. So "then they'll watch the video too." Parodies of cake videos are now circulating in which people attempt to slice things like a piece of paper or a green Croc only to discover that the objects are, unfortunately, real. Ms. Sideserf said the number one thing people ask about her hyper realistic cakes is whether they taste good. "I would never put this amount of time and effort into something that doesn't taste as good as it looks," she said. "We've spent many years spending time making sure these flavors are delicious." Though many hyper realistic cakes are made using fondant, a type of icing made from a mix of sugar, water, gelatin and vegetable shortening, Ms. Sideserf said she uses chocolate molds for her creations. She can then flavor the modeling chocolate however she likes, leading to a tastier final product. Currently, she's in the midst of building a cake replica of her own head and torso. "When I post a picture of myself online, people are so used to seeing me post photos of cakes, so they always say, 'is that a cake?' or, 'are you sure it's not a cake?'" Ms. Sideserf said. "So I'm making a cake of myself. It's about halfway done and it looks like me. It's staring at me right now." She plans to post it online to see if it will fool people, much like her other cakes have. "A lot of people are saying I'm the reason they have trust issues," Ms. Sideserf said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Anterior cruciate ligaments often tear on the sports field, and after a complete rupture, they are notoriously hard to get to heal. On Wednesday, doctors at Boston Children's Hospital announced that they have succeeded in reconnecting A.C.L.s in 10 patients using a novel technique. Their preliminary results at three months suggest that healing an original A.C.L. without the usual grafts may be a viable option in the future. "This is definitely an advance," said Dr. Jo Hannafin, a senior attending orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, who was not involved in the experiment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Everyone wants to think of flamenco as bubbling over with spontaneity, urgency and authenticity. Yet most of the flamenco that gets exported to us from Spain arrives intensely packaged with elaborate lighting, fancy costume changes and star personalities. Is Andalusia being evoked or Las Vegas? Any evidence of the tradition's raw vitality seems to have reached us through a net. And flamenco dancing has so strong an element of narcissism that, even with the finest exponents, it often borders on the ridiculous. There are always extended bouts of glamorous preening: The dance luminary, body arched like a bullfighter or a bow stretched for archery, keeps one or both arms raised to show his or her thorax to best advantage. Forty years ago, many used to laugh at the way the ballet star Rudolf Nureyev use to pose, glare and manipulate his ovations. But many of today's flamenco stars go beyond Nureyev in their magnificently mannered stage comportment. Then, when a dance phrase comes like lightning from a blue sky it sometimes lasts less than 10 seconds, but even so its bravura invites a wave of applause. At New York's Flamenco Festival, you may be sure that applause comes on cue. Even New York City Center, where I attended two flamenco performances last weekend, quickly becomes like a flamenco club. Members of the public cry out "Ole!" and more (invariably in Spanish) to the performers. Nureyev came to mind on Sunday when Jesus Carmona danced. Those prolonged and statuesque pauses, those coolly regal waits before acknowledging applause! As the show progressed, however, Mr. Carmona started to emerge as a quite different character. He started to grin, and to show signs rare in this genre of dancing for fun. He led a small company (five musicians, five dancers): Once he began to have a good time, so did they. Flamenco takes off when it seems spontaneous. On Friday, Eva Yerbabuena's show, "Carne y Hueso," or "Flesh and Bone" "a stripped down and honest revelation of the vulnerabilities that lie at the heart of flamenco" featured a hierarchy of singers, musicians and dancers, some of them very fine. But with Ms. Yerbabuena as queen bee, community feeling was never on display. The production included a coyly doleful sub Chaplin clown figure who put on a red nose now and then, but that was about as vulnerable as the show got. And the complicated, rapidly changing grid patterns created by Fernando Martin's overhead lighting took flamenco as far from its Gypsy origins as possible. The audience loved everything and loved Ms. Yerbabuena most. The production's choreographer and the only woman onstage, she used five supporting male dancers who often appeared bare chested. She, at her most gracious and skillful, did a great deal with shawls. But you could believe that, as the program says, she first formed an independent flamenco company in 1998. For her, everything seemed to be happening for the thousandth time. Mr. Carmona's show, "Impetus," suffered from the same overproduction. Some sections featured a scrim, with Mr. Carmona in front and his colleagues behind; others presented Mr. Carmona as just one of the troupe. Lighting, by David Perez, often gave absurd emphasis to the slightest change of personnel onstage, as when one woman left the stage (sudden darkness on that side before her exit) and then, a few seconds later, returned with castanets (whereupon the stage light was transformed). But whereas Ms. Yerbabuena's production values express the often synthetic nature of her presentation, Mr. Carmona's merely distract from the force of his dance theater. In his early 30s, he contains a number of contradictions. His troupe is called Ballet Flamenco Jesus Carmona, and it's not hard to identify several ballet derived ingredients as in the partnering, arm positions and lightness of one male female pas de deux. Nonetheless, Mr. Carmona's general emphasis is brilliantly percussive, his rhythms often develop an exciting irregularity, and, though he uses the upper body well (both in his own dancing and his colleagues'), he usually avoids any balletic refinement. He's fond of series of rapid single pirouettes, but one of his fortes is the way he does these with his torso thrillingly angled way off the vertical. A detail that increasingly entranced me was the simplicity of Mr. Carmona's hands. Often, keeping wrists, thumbs and palms still, he would just move the four fingers softly to the beat: a wonderfully gentle effect from a dancer who at first seemed so flamboyant. Too many flamenco dancers keep proclaiming themselves, but Mr. Carmona mainly dances as if driven by a larger and sometimes sweet force. His dancing contains both thunder and fire; yet he and his colleagues can also be blithe, like a breeze on a sunny spring day.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
As global central banks race to rescue their economies from coronavirus devastation, they are crossing red lines and trying out policies they had never before attempted. They're probably not done yet. Faced with a crisis unlike any other in memory, central bankers have embarked on new efforts to keep credit flowing and to set the stage for an economic turnaround. Because they went into the crisis with limited ammunition to stoke growth, experimentation may prove even more crucial in the months and years ahead as the world embarks on what could be a long slog back to prosperity. In the United States, the Federal Reserve is buying municipal debt and corporate bonds and lending to midsize companies embracing never before tried efforts to keep credit markets functioning. The European Central Bank is accepting recently downgraded junk bonds as collateral in return for cheap loans, and the Reserve Bank of Australia is buying government bonds to keep the rate on three year debt steady at a quarter of a percentage point. Those attempts, along with others elsewhere, go beyond what the monetary authorities did even in the darkest days of the 2008 global financial crisis. The Fed "crossed a lot of red lines that had not been crossed before," Jerome H. Powell, its chair, said during a recent online appearance. Despite the risk, he added, "this is that situation in which you do that, and you figure it out afterward." Policymakers are going to new lengths in part because there had never been an economic shock like the one caused by the pandemic, in which the world closed up shop simultaneously. The U.S. economy officially tipped into recession in February, the National Bureau of Economic Research declared on Monday. But appetite for further fiscal action is eroding in some places, including the United States. And the next stage the recovery could pose a fresh test for the world's central banks, forcing them to get more creative as they try to keep pandemic aftershocks from permanently scarring growth potential and to avert economy damaging price declines. The Fed and its global counterparts are shifting from crisis fighting mode, when they worked to keep credit markets open, to a period when they must stoke lending and spending to get economies churning again. Central banks have historically cut interest rates to lift the economy during and after shocks, but borrowing was so cheap going into this sharp downturn that they will need to turn to unconventional approaches. Some are already experimenting with new approaches to stimulate demand the Bank of Japan has intensified its efforts to stabilize markets through stock fund purchases, and the European Central Bank has a pandemic related bond buying plan in place while others are likely to get creative before long. "It will be a potential concern as the economy turns around, if that turnaround is less than ideal," said Donald Kohn, a former Fed vice chairman now at the Brookings Institution. "Central banks will have to work hard at supplying the extra push, the extra zip that they'd want to achieve." At its meeting on Thursday, the European Central Bank said it would nearly double a de facto money printing program to 1.35 trillion euros, or 1.5 trillion, to ensure a steady flow of cheap credit to eurozone consumers and businesses. The bank was already allowing commercial banks to borrow money at a negative interest rate of 1 percent if they lend the funds to customers. In effect, the central bank is paying commercial banks to hand out loans. The Fed, which meets in Washington this week, is expected to use so called forward guidance a pledge to leave interest rates near rock bottom for an extended time to manage investors' rate expectations and stimulate the economy. Most economists expect it to continue buying bonds, pushing its balance sheet to never before seen sizes, and some think it could eventually try to explicitly cap market rates on longer term government debt. Some analysts warn there is a danger that central banks and elected officials will overshoot in their rush to prop up their economies. According to that logic, they are flooding the world with cash at the same time that restaurants, airlines and retailers are being driven out of business. That will create an imbalance between demand and supply that will lead to higher prices, argues Oliver Harvey, a macroeconomic strategist at Deutsche Bank. "The government is handing out 100 bills when there is nowhere open to spend them," Mr. Harvey wrote in a recent article. He pointed out that food prices were already rising sharply in Britain, which he attributed to "more money chasing after significantly fewer goods and services." But the prevailing view among economists is that central bankers have no alternative, and some ask the opposite question: Will the extraordinary efforts by central banks to stoke demand even be enough to quickly restore low unemployment and encourage stable inflation? Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." "Under current circumstances, when the world came to a full stop in a month, there is no such thing as doing too much," said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics a research firm. "If there is inflation, that is a small price to pay. The big social political economic problem is the loss of jobs and income." Growth could recover steadily as businesses reopen and consumers begin to spend government stimulus checks and savings built up during the shutdowns. Unemployment in the United States fell to 13.3 percent in May, suggesting that the early stage of that rebound is already underway. But a more pessimistic reality also looks possible. The economy could take years to get back to full strength as consumers and businesses brace for a second wave of infections, companies cut investment, and restaurants and retailers find that they cannot make money at partial capacity. In that world, central banks may be needed to nudge businesses to make their next machinery investment, or to encourage consumers to opt for the more expensive car. Rock bottom interest rates should help. But rates have been low for most of the last decade, so cheap borrowing costs may not offer the economic booster shot that they once did. The Fed slashed interest rates in March to near zero from a range of just 1.5 to 1.75 percent, less than half the pre 2008 starting point. In Europe and Japan, rates were already negative going into the crisis. While officials around the world have shown a willingness to buy bonds exploding their balance sheets from already historically large levels those policies might also prove less potent in 2020. When the Fed started its financial crisis bond purchases, aiming to push down longer term rates, the interest rate on 10 year government bonds stood above 3 percent. Today, rates are around 0.8 percent, leaving far less room to lower them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
SANTA CLARITA, CALIF. "Deadwood" is back for one final hello and goodbye. Last November, more than a decade after David Milch's award winning HBO series unexpectedly and maddeningly folded, Timothy Olyphant, as Seth Bullock, was once again in the center of the town's perpetually muddy main drag, having words heated, profane, Shakespearean ones with Gerald McRaney, the show's villainous George Hearst. From the balcony of the Gem casino, Ian McShane (Al Swearengen) glowered; offstage, Robin Weigert, the show's foul mouthed, tenderhearted Calamity Jane, waited in the wings. Against all odds, the producers were able to reunite nearly all of the show's principal cast for "Deadwood: The Movie," the show's much delayed, much anticipated finale. "I didn't think it was ever going to happen," Olyphant admitted later. But if reassembling the show's enormous ensemble cast 13 years on was a herculean task, reassembling the town of Deadwood itself was no less knotty, or crucial. The series is named "Deadwood" after all the locale is just as important as any single cast member, the story of its 19th century gentrification intertwined with the rising and falling fortunes of its inhabitants. So the filmmakers needed to get the place right. The good news: They got to return to one of the most memorable and beloved towns in the history of television. Although "Deadwood" ran for only three seasons, it was nominated for 28 Emmys, winning eight, and is now considered one of the greatest dramas in TV history (earlier this year, The Times declared it one of the "20 best TV dramas since 'The Sopranos'"). "Deadwood: The Movie," which debuts on May 31, is set in 1889, 10 years after the series left off, when civilization is coming to the town in the form of streetlights, fancy eateries and phone service (O.K., one phone). So the primary challenge was to create a slightly modernized Old West, with updated streets and new buildings to reflect a decade's worth of progress while preserving the look and feel of the original Deadwood for its purist fans. As with the original series, the film was shot on the Melody Ranch, a 22 acre film studio that has played host to Hollywood cowboys like Gene Autry (a former owner), Gary Cooper (who filmed "High Noon" here) and John Wayne ("Stagecoach"). When the producers and designers finally returned to the site last year, they discovered that most of the original buildings were still here even many of the original props, including the Bella Union's craps tables and roulette wheel. Bullock's house, however, had to be rebuilt from scratch (it had been torn down by the "Westworld" crew), as did the interior of the updated, now classier Gem ("No sleeping on the tables," one sign reads). But when the designers went to consult the show's original blueprints, they were nowhere to be found. "The show was canceled so abruptly and everybody was so traumatized that nobody bothered to save them," said Maria Caso, the production designer on the series and the film. Desperate, the designers painstakingly reviewed old episodes, often frame by frame, and tried to call back distant architectural memories. "We watched the show over and over to try to remember what we had built," she said. "We actually had to hire a part time researcher, Jerry Bryant, because the questions were so constant," said Mary Kopco, Deadwood History's executive director during the series's run. "He ended up writing a whole book on Al Swearengen based on all the questions we were being asked." The extra effort seemed particularly necessary with a show like "Deadwood," Caso noted. "The audience, they check on everything," she said. "So we did a lot of research before we started drawing or building. We really wanted to recreate as many of the details as we could, just so it's true to history, and to honor that." Of course, this being Hollywood, there is a certain level of artifice. Those gorgeous mountains and ponderosa pines are all added later by the visual effects department; the 40 foot logs brought in for Hearst's telephone poles are fake, because of continuing troubles with bark beetles, which have been killing California trees by the tens of millions. As for all that mud and mountainous terrain in flat, drought prone Southern California, "we brought in tons and tons of dirt, 50 or so trucks full, and constantly sprayed it down with water," Fienberg said. And no, Kopco said, unprompted, none of the residents of Deadwood were feeding corpses to the town's hogs. During a break in filming, Caso walked down Deadwood's main street, surveying her team's handiwork and pointing out landmarks. She noted the patchwork brick and stone facade of the Bullock and Star Hotel, which grew out of the hardware store the two men founded in the original series. (In real life, the hardware store partners eventually had a falling out; the hotel was named the Bullock Hotel.) "Bullock and Star started to make this grand hotel with this beautiful stone, but then they ran out of money so then they started using a different stone, and then finally they switched to brick," Caso said of the historical men. "So we copied that." In Deadwood's Chinatown, Caso revealed a 150 year old "opium bed" they purchased for the show. Returning to the main street, she pointed out the town's butcher shop, its roof cluttered with piles of antlers. "They would butcher the deer and then throw the horns on top," she said of the butchers in Deadwood. The town's fanciest restaurant, the Oyster Bay, offered bivalves of questionable freshness. "It took two weeks for the oysters to get from Providence to Deadwood," she said. Caso then headed inside the Bella Union, the saloon formerly owned by Cy Tolliver (played in the series by Powers Boothe, who died in 2017). Unlike on most Hollywood shoots, where the exteriors are in one location and the interiors are built inside a studio soundstage miles or even states away, there are no false fronts in Deadwood. Walk off the street into any hotel or cat house in Deadwood other than Swearengen's expansive, two story Gem and you're inside that hotel or cat house. "It grounded the show and gave it a sense of realism that's difficult to get when you're always cutting from exterior to interior," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
WHAT IS IT? A fattened up take on the tiny Fiat 500. HOW MUCH? Base price of Pop model, 19,900; Lounge version 24,995; as tested, 27,445. HOW QUICK IS IT? With its slow footed 6 speed automated transmission, the Fiat runs from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in about 9 seconds. IS IT THIRSTY? Federal mileage estimates are 24 m.p.g. in town and 33 on the highway. American car enthusiasts often cast an envious eye at Europe, where they see desirable models that never make it to our shores. But we rarely consider that America is often spared from second rate small cars that, once you drive them, remind you of how good we actually have it. A case in point is Fiat's 500L. Having established a toehold in America with its 500 microcar, the Italian automaker has taken another page from the Mini playbook by introducing a bigger four door model, the 500L, which is roughly 27 inches longer, 6 inches wider and 6 inches taller than its supercute predecessor. Fiat hopes you'll see the 500L as a roomier urban runabout, a charming oddball in the mold of the Countryman and Juke. But they may hope you don't notice that the 500L is built in Serbia, at the site of the factory that once produced the Yugo. The 500L's Eastern European provenance could easily be overlooked if the car delivered in style and substance. It does not. Rampantly uncomfortable, dubiously assembled and devoid of fun, the 500L is the kind of car that Europeans drive because they have to, while secretly wishing for a Range Rover. In this class of car, beauty is certainly up to the beholder. But while I've been won over by the Juke's bulldog strangeness and the Soul's smart, expressive details, the Fiat seems clumsy and derivative. It comes across as the Mini's poor, homely cousin, fresh off the boat. With 42 percent more interior room than the standard 500, the L's cargo hauling ability is about its only winning feature. The losing side includes the driving experience; the expanses of rock hard, gap ridden plastic; and the long list of ergonomic and engineering goofs. Every person who sat in the front seats that noun seems too kind to describe the rubbery upholstered back breakers complained within minutes about the lack of comfort. The top of the short backrest ended between my shoulder blades. The bottom cushions are ridiculously short and are rounded off rather than square. The effect is like balancing on a barstool. As in the 500, you sit on the Fiat, not in it, in an awkwardly high, buslike position that also exposes an unsightly mess of metal seat rails and hardware. The mini Greyhound theme continues with a steering wheel that, if you don't tilt it up into Ralph Kramden position, blocks the driver's view of the gauges. The Fiat adopts Chrysler's useful UConnect infotainment screen, although this lesser version has a small display and eye straining map graphics. With 160 horses and 184 pound feet of torque, the MultiAir turbo 4 a power plant also found in the Dodge Dart should be up to the task. But the engine's force is sapped by turbo lag and a deal killing dual clutch automated transmission. I began to suspect that the gearbox had no corporal connection to the car at all, but was controlled by some spooky outside force a Ouija board, perhaps. The Fiat's tardy responses repeatedly left it victimized in impatient New York traffic. I was left red faced at one stoplight as a U.P.S. truck beat the Fiat off the line and cut me off for good measure. As for driving fun, the car's utilitarian heart makes the hot handling Juke and Countryman feel like Formula One racers by comparison. Even the Korean Soul is bursting with sass compared with this Italian design. The steering is slacker than a Coachella stoner, and attempts to make the Fiat corner are met with copious body roll and tire squeal. Brakes are simultaneously spongy and grabby. In fact, in virtually every category from assembly quality to interior design to performance the Mini, Nissan and Kia leave the Fiat outgunned. Like the guests at most shotgun weddings, many people murmured good wishes at the Chrysler Fiat nuptials a few years back, all the while whispering doubts about the newlyweds' long term prospects. But if the couple hopes to convince American guests that Fiats deserve their R.S.V.P., it will need to serve up better than stale cannoli. LAWRENCE ULRICH	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
More than 400,000 years ago, hunter gatherers living in what is now Israel perked up a diet of game and vegetables with something unusual: tortoises. "The evidence shows they regularly ate turtle," said Ran Barkai, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University and one of the researchers who made the discovery. "It was a sort of supplementary dish, maybe like a dessert or an opener to dinner." The findings appear in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. Inside the Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv, Dr. Barkai and his colleagues discovered the remains of tortoise shells with burns, as well as tortoise bones with markings left by stone tools. The remains suggest that the inhabitants sometimes roasted tortoises whole over a fire and sometimes butchered them first, Dr. Barkai said, adding, "Somehow they cut them with stone knives, and most probably into small pieces."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
TOKYO Sony is best known as a consumer electronics company, making PlayStation game consoles and televisions. And it loses money on almost every gadget it sells. Sony has made money making Hollywood movies and selling music. That profitable part of the business is what Daniel S. Loeb, an American investor and manager of the hedge fund Third Point, wants Sony to spin off to raise cash to resuscitate its electronics business. But as Mr. Loeb pressures Sony executives to do more to revive the company's ailing electronics arm, some analysts are asking, Why bother? Sony, it is suggested, might be better off just selling insurance. Or just making movies and music. But not electronics. A new report from the investment banking firm Jefferies delivered a harsh assessment of Sony's electronics business. "Electronics is its Achilles' heel and, in our view, it is worth zero," wrote Atul Goyal, consumer technology analyst for Jefferies, in the report, released this week. "In our view, it needs to exit most electronics markets." The maker of the Walkman and the Trinitron without electronics? What would it do? Although Sony sells hundreds of products as varied as batteries and head mounted 3 D displays, it so happens that Sony's most successful business is selling insurance. While it doesn't run this business in the United States or Europe, Sony makes a lot of money writing life, auto and medical policies in Japan. Its financial arm accounts for 63 percent of Sony's total operating profit last year. Life insurance has been its biggest moneymaker over the last decade, earning the company 933 billion yen ( 9.07 billion) in operating profit in the 10 years that ended in March. Sony's film and music divisions, which produced hits like the Spider Man movies and "Zero Dark Thirty" and recorded musicians like the cellist Yo Yo Ma and the electronic music duo Daft Punk, have contributed 7 billion to the company's bottom line over the last decade. In that time, Sony's electronics division has lost a cumulative 8.5 billion. "The problem is that the board is still absolutely focused on fixing electronics," said Kouji Yamada, a visiting professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and research director of Mission Value Partners, a Sonoma, Calif., investment company. Sony's chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, said last Wednesday that its board would consider Third Point's proposal, even as it emphasized that the discussions were preliminary and that it had not set a time for a response. But to a small band of analysts, Mr. Loeb's prescriptions for Sony are shortsighted, merely milking the company's profit making content business for good money to throw after the bad. 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. As proof of the untenable future facing Sony's electronics, critics point to its televisions and smartphones. Competition is intense, and in cellphones Sony remains a bit player. Even where it is more successful, in digital cameras or game consoles, it is struggling to stay abreast of stronger companies. Sheer lack of managerial attention could soon start to hurt Sony's insurance and entertainment divisions, Mr. Yamada warned. Sony Financial Holdings, a publicly traded company of which Sony owns 60 percent, has been underperforming its peers on the Tokyo stock exchange. Its share price has risen just 4 percent this year, compared to a 36 percent increase in shares of its rival, Dai ichi Life Insurance. And in the entertainment business, where alliances and tie ups are starting to dominate strategy, Sony's film and music units could be slowed by having to deal with a board that sits in Tokyo and does not have its hand on the pulse of a fast moving industry, Mr. Yamada said. "Maneuvering three completely different industries, that's too much," Mr. Yamada said. "These should all be separate companies." Sony maintains that its varied units make up a coherent whole. But the history of how it acquired its hodgepodge of companies suggests otherwise. Sony's co founder, Akio Morita, first got the idea of buying a finance company on a trip to the United States in the 1950s to promote the company's new transistor radio, according to an official recounting of its corporate history. On that trip, Mr. Morita was stunned by the sight of Chicago's skyscrapers, especially the Prudential Building that dominated the Chicago skyline. "Why would a life insurance company have such an enormous building?" Mr. Morita marveled. "One day, we will also establish our own bank or financial institution and build a building like that." Mr. Morita's wish was finally granted in 1981, when Sony started a life insurance venture in Japan with Prudential, the large American insurance company. Perhaps disappointingly, Sony Financial Holdings has its headquarters on the fourth floor of a nondescript midrise building in Tokyo. Sony's acquisitions of Columbia Pictures and CBS Records in the late 1980s got a lot more attention. Mr. Morita, a co founder of Sony, and another executive, Norio Ohga, had long contended that content was crucial in promoting Sony's expanding electronics universe, first wading into music with a venture with CBS Records in 1968. But infighting between hardware and movies hindered that objective from the start, as did misaligned incentives that led Sony to wrestle with how to build devices that let consumers download and copy content without undermining sales at its music labels or film studios.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
New Yorkers, who live in a world shaped by advertising, are suckers for self transformation. In a choice between changing the body and changing the mind, changing the body is easier. And the easiest feature to change is skin, a blank canvas just waiting to be colored, stained or drawn on. That's what we see happening repeatedly, imaginatively and pretty much permanently in "Tattooed New York," a tightly packed survey of epidermal art opening on Friday at the New York Historical Society. Tattooing is a global phenomenon, and an old one. It's found on pre Dynastic Egyptian mummies and on living bodies in Africa, Asia and the Americas throughout the centuries. Europeans caught on to it, in a big way, during the Age of Exploration. (The word "tattoo" has origins in Polynesia; Capt. James Cook is often credited with introducing it to the West.) What's the longtime allure of a cosmetic modification that, even after the invention of modern tools, can hurt like hell to acquire? In some cultures, tattoos are considered healing or protective. In others, they're marks of social affiliation, certificates of adulthood. Like Facebook pages, they can be public statements of personal interests, political or amorous. They can function as professional calling cards sample displays for tattooists promoting their skills. The show, organized by Cristian Petru Panaite, an assistant curator at the New York Historical Society, begins with evidence, which is scant and secondhand, of tattooing among Native Americans in 18th century New York State. The clearest images are in a set of 1710 mezzotints, "The Four Indian Kings," by the British printmaker John Simon. The set depicts a delegation of tribal leaders, three Mohawk, one Mohican, shipped by the British military to London to request more troops to fight the French in North America. If the web of interests they represented was a tangled one, nobody cared. Queen Anne fussed over the exotic visitors. Londoners gave them the equivalent of ticker tape parades. From that point the story moves forward, at first somewhat confusingly, into the 19th century, when tattooing was largely associated with life at sea. In a label we're told that Rowland Hussey Macy Sr. (1822 1877), the founder of Macy's department store, was tattooed with a red star when he worked, as a youth, aboard a Nantucket whaler. And this says something about the jumpy organization of the show's first section we learn from the same label that Dorothy Parker, the renowned Gotham wit, acquired a very similar tattoo in the 1930s, presumably under nonmarine circumstances, and under more humane conditions, as old style poke and scratch methods had been softened by machines. By then tattooing had become a complex art form, and a thriving business. Ink and watercolor designs, known as flash, grew ever more wide ranging, running from standard stars and stripes motifs to soft core pornography to elevated symbolic fare (Rock of Ages; Helios, the Greek sun god), with degrees of fanciness determining price. At the same time, tattoos could have purely practical uses. When Social Security numbers were first issued in the 1930s, people who had difficulty remembering them had their numbers inked onto their skin, like permanent Post it notes. (A tattooist known as Apache Harry made numbers his specialty.) And in the 19th century, during the Civil War, a New Yorker named Martin Hildebrandt tattooed thousands of soldiers with just their names, so that, should they die in battle, as many would, their bodies could be identified. Hildebrandt was the first in a long line of revered Gotham tattoo artists, which includes Samuel O'Reilly, Ed Smith, Charlie Wagner (the "Michelangelo of Tattooing"), Jack Redcloud, Bill Jones, Frederico Gregio (self styled as both Brooklyn Blackie and the Electric Rembrandt) and Jack Dracula (born Jack Baker), whose ambition was to be "the world's youngest most tattooed man." Whether he achieved his goal I don't know, but Diane Arbus photographed him, and that's fame enough. Hildebrandt came to a sad end; he died in a New York insane asylum in 1890. But in earlier days his shop did well, and he had a notable asset in the presence of a young woman who used the name Nora Hildebrandt. The personal nature of their relationship is a mystery, but their professional alliance is clear: He tattooed her multiple times, and he was not the only artist who did. By the 1890s, she was adorned with more than 300 designs and had become an attraction in the Barnum Bailey Circus. "Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas," an early 1700s mezzotint by John Simon, after John Verelst. Like many self inventing New Yorkers, she provided herself with a colorful past: She said she'd been forcibly inked by Indians when captured as a girl. Variations on this story served other tattooed women of the era well, at least three of whom Trixie Richardson, Ethel Martin Vangi and the lavishly self ornamented ex burlesque star Mildred Hull worked "both sides of the needle," as one of the exhibition's witty label puts it, by becoming tattooists themselves. The show's more coherent second half gives a fascinating account of these women, who form a kind of tattoo royalty. One, Betty Broadbent, actually came close to earning a crown. While appearing in New York's 1939 World's Fair, she also took part in a beauty pageant, the first ever broadcast on television. Although she didn't end up as queen, her tattoos, which included a Madonna and Child on her back and portraits of Charles Lindbergh and Pancho Villa on either leg, were noticed. But despite such brushes with mainstream fame, tattooing was in trouble. Most New York storefront establishments were on the Bowery, which had long since became a skid row, with a reputation for crime. In 1961, in what was rumored to be an effort to clean up the city before the 1964 World's Fair, the Health Department claimed that tattooing was responsible for a hepatitis outbreak and made it illegal. That drove the trade underground, where it continued to flourish, often by night, in basements and apartments. A new generation of artists emerged, among them Thom DeVita, Ed Hardy and Tony Polito. Another of the group, Tony D'Annessa, drew his ink and marker designs on a vinyl window shade it's in the show which could be quickly rolled up in the event of a police raid. As the 1960s proceeded, tattooing gained fresh cachet precisely because of its anti establishment status, and that continued into the punk wave of the 1980s, which reclaimed the Bowery as rebel territory. By the globalist 1990s, when the tattoo ban ended, the non Western sources of much of this art, particularly Japanese, was attracting attention. So was the vivid work, much of it reflecting Latin American culture, coming out of prisons. The former underground gained high visibility. Artists like Spider Webb (Joseph O'Sullivan) and Thomas Woodruff, who came up through the tattoo world, made a transition to commercial galleries. New work by several young artists in the show Mario Desa, Flo Nutall, Chris Paez, Johan Svahn, William Yoneyama and Xiaodong Zhou seems pitched as much to the wall as to skin. And the gradual entry of tattoos into museums began the process of mainstreaming that has made the genre widely popular, but also watered down.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
What the Rebirth of This Old Steel Center Means for Trump BETHLEHEM, Pa. Just a few blocks from the rusted 16 story blast furnaces that once fired hulking steel beams for the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, OraSure Technologies each day produces thousands of thumbnail size pads made to spit on. These oral swabs, part of a home H.I.V. test kit, are products of a matrix of manufacturers, financial companies and health care institutions powering the Lehigh Valley's 41 billion economy. The region's success distinguishes it from onetime industrial dynamos in the Northeast and Midwest that have struggled to replace shuttered plants and vanishing jobs. While many midsize and smaller cities have lost out to the superstars large urban metropolises that gulp up scads of employers, workers and customers the Lehigh Valley is booming. "There's jobs everywhere," said Stephen Polczer, 46, as he inspected assembled swabs. Mr. Polczer, outfitted with a blue mesh apron for his beard and a head cap, started at the biomedical company less than two months ago, drawn by a 17 an hour wage for manufacturing technicians and a four day workweek. The economic renaissance has been more than a decade in the making in this eastern stretch of Pennsylvania, and it has much to do with location, luck and local leaders. "It's transcended presidents and administrations," said Don Cunningham, the president and chief executive of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation, a public private partnership. In the last five years, employers created 26,000 additional jobs. "It began under Obama and continued under Trump," he said. The valley's political affinities have been less steady recently. The area includes Northampton County, one of the few counties nationwide and among only three in the state that voted for Barack Obama twice before giving Donald J. Trump a plurality in 2016. That pivot, in a county that a Republican presidential candidate had not won since 1988, helped Mr. Trump capture Pennsylvania by less than one percentage point. Mr. Trump's message on trade and defending jobs resonated in the Lehigh Valley, where there are memories of how foreign competition clobbered the local steel and cement industries. Whenever the rebound began, people here are feeling more secure economically, and many credit the president. "The economy is 100 times better," Mr. Polczer said, "and it has a lot to do with President Trump." A junction for interstate highways and rail lines, the Lehigh Valley is within an eight hour drive of one third of American consumers. That has helped attract an army of warehouses and distribution centers built by Amazon, Walmart, FedEx and UPS as they scramble to keep up with the explosion of online shopping. A network of nearby universities, community colleges and vocational high schools pumps out workers with a range of skills. And there is more available land, cheaper housing and lower taxes than in neighboring New Jersey, Philadelphia or New York City. Local and state officials laid the groundwork for a possible revival after Bethlehem's colossal mills closed completely in 1998. They built industrial and office parks, and offered millions of dollars in tax credits and abatements to lure companies to Northampton and Lehigh Counties. More recent development efforts have centered on creating urban playgrounds of restaurants, bars, entertainment and culture that will attract millennial workers. The valley's three small cities, Bethlehem, Easton and Allentown, are within 15 miles of one another. Among them, residents can find an ice hockey rink, concert venues and music festivals, a casino, arts walks, breweries, a minor league baseball park, golf courses and new downtown apartments. Now the company is building a 100 million facility in its own backyard that will ultimately add 150 people to the payroll. The state and county kicked in 900,000 in grants and tax credits. A couple of blocks away in the same Hanover Township industrial park, Stuffed Puffs chocolate filled marshmallows that first appeared in stores in May broke ground in November on a 150,000 square foot manufacturing plant that will employ 134 people. The venture is backed by Factory, a business innovation center for growing food and beverage companies founded by Richard Thompson, a former chief executive at Freshpet. Hoisting up a couple of bags, he explained that the creator of Stuffed Puffs had "spent seven years figuring out how to put the chocolate inside the marshmallow." With support from a New York hedge fund, Mr. Thompson opened the center in 2019. "I looked everywhere from Boston to Jacksonville," he said, before choosing a site once occupied by Bethlehem Steel. 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. Building 96, a former tool and die shop built during World War II, is now, after a 10 million overhaul, Factory's airy headquarters. The site offers a sensory lab, a podcasting studio, a kitchen, a packaging center and a stage. For offices, he hauled in bright red shipping containers from Port Newark and put them on wheels that bring to mind mobile dorm rooms. There's also a simulated golfing range and a climbing wall, as well as a gondola cabin from a ski lift and a firepit surrounded by Adirondack chairs to hang out. Just to the north in rural Upper Mount Bethel Township, Air Liquide opened a plant in 2018 to produce specialty chemicals for semiconductors, and construction on an adjoining facility has started. The steelworkers, both Democrats and Republicans, who crowded into the Wind Creek office don't like Mr. Trump, whom they characterized as anti union. But Mr. Sedor acknowledged that a lot of other retired steelworkers voted for him over Hillary Clinton in 2016. "Hillary and the Democratic Party didn't pay enough attention to trade," Mr. Sedor said. Many of the men he meets for breakfast or sees in the union hall are still behind the president. "They're adamant about it because of trade," he said. There were other motivations as well, the group agreed. "They also loved what Trump was saying about immigrants and gun control," said Lester Clore, a 33 year veteran of Bethlehem Steel, referring to the president's pledge to keep out immigrants and oppose gun restrictions. In Pennsylvania, enough working class Democrats and moderate suburban Republicans joined with enthusiastic conservative rural voters to help swing the election to Mr. Trump. Whether this coalition will form again in 2020, and turn out in sufficient numbers to return him to the White House, is the question. As the recent clash between the United States and Iran demonstrated, foreign events could quickly overshadow domestic ones. And the economy's stable progress could unexpectedly reverse. He does not care for Mr. Trump's personal style, but he said, "As far as the economy, I would keep riding the horse that works." Recent polling by The New York Times/Siena College found that in Pennsylvania and five other battleground states, nearly two thirds of voters with a similar pattern supporting Mr. Trump in 2016 and a Democrat in the midterms said they intended to back the president. Among the more than 30 business owners, professionals and employees interviewed in the two counties, many said their votes were still up for grabs. But "Medicare for all," free public college tuition and other left leaning proposals championed by candidates like Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont aroused more skepticism than enthusiasm. The Democrats named as possibilities were all moderates, like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.; or the latest entrant, the billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg. "I think there's going to be a strong pull for Democrats in the county to come home if they can," said John Kincaid, a government professor at Lafayette College in Easton. But the Democrats will need to offer more than someone who is not Trump. "If Warren or Sanders is the candidate," he said, "it's going to be harder to bring those Democrats who voted for Trump over."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The notion of authenticity in dance is a mare's nest. It often turns out that what you thought were definitive versions of familiar classics ("Giselle," "Swan Lake," "Apollo") are very far from the original. Of all the choreographers whose work keeps returning to the stage, Martha Graham is the one whose pieces raise the most questions. Can we see her in the dances performed in her name today? Celebrations for this troupe's 90th anniversary reached a climax on Monday with its closing night gala at City Center, introduced by the company's artistic director, Janet Eilber. The gala fare, however, included an excerpt from Graham's 1934 "Celebration," danced by men. Sorry? What? If you know Graham history, you know that for the first 11 years her company was all female. It was a big deal when she admitted her first male dancer in 1937 (yes, reader, she married him); and for some people it reduced her work rather than enhancing it. Were we seeing a new 2016 gender reverse treatment of this originally female dance? Yes, we were, but nobody informed the gala audience. Sorry? What? I can imagine the opening of George Balanchine's all female "Serenade" (also from 1934) being danced by men in fact, I've seen some men do it but it's impossible to think the George Balanchine Trust would sanction a stage performance without at least making clear to the audience that it was an alternative version. Does the Graham company think the difference of gender is unimportant? Other questions arise about choreographic musicality. According to the performances on Monday, Graham's "Heretic" (we saw an excerpt from this 1929 all female dance) featured dance moving through silence and music playing through choreographic stillness. And the version given of "Steps in the Street" (from "Chronicle," 1936, also all female) demonstrated choreography through two stretches of extended silence. These silent sections, I'm now told, were made for the 1989 revival by the Graham dancer Yuriko. They're done well, but they don't ring true. If Graham used music and silence with such peculiar emphasis here, why hasn't this entered the dance history books? It's utterly unlike the safe examples of musicality in her "Tanagra" solo, set to Erik Satie's second "Gnossienne," or in her "Appalachian Spring" (1944, Aaron Copland), from which we saw the duet for the Bride and Husbandman labeled "'Simple Gifts': Theme and Variations." The issue of whether those older Graham dances were originally like what we're seeing now is a fraught one. Graham herself modified her works over the years; by the time I began watching this troupe (40 years ago), there were complaints from some Graham alumni and admirers that the Graham essence was being lost. But such controversies always surround alternative versions of classic choreography. (Balanchine experts often talk of "versionitis," an infinitely subtle form of dispute that could keep Graham researchers very busy indeed.) What was the Graham essence? It was hard to tell on Monday. As we entered the theater, a silent color film on a loop was showing three women dancing. (A seated man was briefly visible.) This was Graham's "Three Gopi Maidens," a piece (about two minutes long) presented in Graham's first concert in 1926. A review in Dance Magazine at the time noted "three gopis in their lovely draped batik costumes of melting colors and their young faces brightened by the warm flowers in their shining hair." This became part of a longer theatrical work (six to seven minutes long), "The Flute of Krishna," that Graham premiered some weeks later in Rochester, with stage direction by Rouben Mamoulian, who also directed the film of the same name. Monday's audience was told none of this, though these facts would have heightened the gala's historical interest considerably. (Ms. Eilber is a good speaker. For an event like this, I wish she had introduced each item.) What we also weren't told was that "Three Gopi Maidens" was an Orientalist example of very early Graham picturesque, soft, sensuous. Like "Tanagra," it actually seems pre Graham, reflecting the then popular Denishawn style in which Graham had begun her career. The jump from those 1926 items to the advanced sculptural Modernism of "Heretic" (a dance for a soloist at odds with an ensemble) and the 1930 "Lamentation" (a celebrated solo) is startling, though Monday's audience wasn't encouraged to notice this. In between, we were given the awful "90 Years in 90 Seconds" film by Justin Scholar: They say that drowning people find their lives flash before their eyes, and Mr. Scholar takes that view of Graham history. Once we were into the tense physical rigor of the 1929 30 works, however, we entered the style that made Graham great for perhaps 30 years. Yet in excerpts that isn't always evident. The duet for Husbandman and Bride from "Appalachian Spring" is the sweetest and most polite section of that great work: Out of context, it gives a misleadingly conventional impression. It was danced by Aurelie Dupont, the Paris Opera ballerina now becoming that institution's director of dance: She was sweet, polite and charming but largely devoid of the tension crucial to Graham style. (She also led the "Lament" from Graham's 1981 "Acts of Light," a piece of ritualistic twaddle from a period when Graham was moving into self parody.) Better, as her "Appalachian" spouse, was the young dancer Lloyd Mayor. The attack, sweep and openness of this man's style is remarkable; he also produced the most musical dancing of the evening. The dancing in Pontus Lidberg's "Woodland," set to string music by Irving Fine, was entirely fresh, too. This piece is related to classic Graham in the drama it creates between its isolated female soloist (Xin Ying) and the ensemble of four couples. The couples, following the formula now standard in much choreography, were male male, female female, male female and female male; and Ms. Xin's isolation poignantly suggests that she would like some of what they're having. It's a shapely, touching work, with sharp, piercing moments of real Graham incisiveness. Missing, though, is any Graham heroism. It's hard not to wish Ms. Xin's passive, schoolgirl type role had more blaze, more pain, more oomph.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
MORENO CONTI flicks the right hand shift paddle up one gear and the 560 horsepower V 10 responds in a fury, rocketing the Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560 4 Spyder to a tick over 220 kilometers per hour 137 m.p.h. A green Fiat sedan and a small white truck coming toward us on the two lane Via Malmanago flash their headlights in what I take to be a friendly greeting. The shoulderless rural road is as straight as a bocce court, and Mr. Conti maintains the pace for another 15 seconds before telling me, "I'm going to stop." As he aims the quarter million dollar convertible toward a small turnout some distance ahead, I'm hoping the carbon ceramic brakes will work as designed. Otherwise, it may be a ditch that arrests our forward motion. The genesis of the Gallardo's manufacturer was an incident that took place nearly 50 years ago, when Ferruccio Lamborghini, a farm tractor magnate and sports car enthusiast, had what he called "a bit of an argument" with the founder of a small Italian car company. The dispute stemmed from a brusque appraisal of his road skills by Enzo Ferrari, who reckoned that this customer, the buyer of a 250 GT model, "wasn't able to drive a Ferrari, only tractors," Ferruccio Lamborghini, who died in 1993, once told Radio Televisione Italiana. He added: "That's when I got the idea into my head, 'I'll make the cars myself from now on.'" So in 1963 Automobili Lamborghini started creating fast and exquisitely styled grand touring cars here in Sant'Agata Bolognese, about 20 miles from the home of Ferrari in Maranello. Three years later, Lamborghini hit its stride with the unveiling of its first true supercar, the Miura; the Countach, a radical departure from convention with scissor action doors and the profile of a doorstop, followed in 1974. Together with succeeding designs like the Diablo, and more recently, the Gallardo and Murcielago, Lamborghini was firmly established as the bad boy of exotic sports cars. The company passed from Ferruccio Lamborghini's ownership to among others a Swiss investor, the Chrysler Corporation, an unlikely consortium led by the son of former President Suharto of Indonesia and, finally, to its current overseer, the Audi division of Volkswagen. A bad day at work for Moreno Conti would still be a treat beyond words for most car enthusiasts. Towle Tompkins for The New York Times Sant'Agata Bolognese is a medieval town of 7,000 people, about 23 miles from the business, education and arts influence of Bologna, that wears the word quaint like a bespoke suit of armor. Brick and stucco buildings surround a car free historic center that one enters through an archway topped by a huge clock. While most of the land around the Lamborghini complex is occupied by modest farms and homes, the company's buildings are on a stretch of Via Modena that includes technology firms, an automotive wind tunnel and a dining establishment, Ristorante Bugs Bunny, that is probably not authorized by Warner Brothers. The picturesque setting could lead a visitor to conclude that Lamborghini is locked in the past, pursuing horsepower while casting aside other responsibilities. Not so: Lamborghini is using lightweight carbon fiber components to improve the efficiency and power to weight ratio of its cars, and it seeks to cut vehicle emissions by 35 percent within six years. For example, the 5.2 liter V 10 of the limited edition Gallardo LP 570 4 Superleggera (Italian for superlight) produces 20.5 percent less emissions than the previous engine, the company says. Introduced at the Geneva auto show last month, the car's exterior carbon fiber pieces include the side mirrors, rear wing and sections of the underbody. Inside, carbon fiber is used for the door panels, seat shells and transmission tunnel. Lamborghini's composite materials research is being conducted nine time zones away, at the University of Washington in Seattle. Paolo Feraboli, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the university, is the director of the school's Automobili Lamborghini Advanced Composite Structures Laboratory. He grew up in Bologna and worked at Lamborghini. He then moved to the United States, earned a doctorate and began working in the university's composite technologies program, which included projects with Boeing. Dr. Feraboli kept in touch with Lamborghini. "In 2007 they contacted me, saying, 'We'd like to really invest in carbon fiber technology make it our key technology and we'd like to partner up with U.W. and Boeing.'" The assembly line at the Lamborghini factory. Towle Tompkins for The New York Times In a telephone interview, Dr. Feraboli explained that to improve a car's power to weight ratio, you can either increase horsepower or shed weight. "But in reality, increasing the power, once you get to a certain level, becomes very difficult, and the kind of gains that you get by having a lot of horsepower becomes very small," he said. "On the other hand, if you drop weight you get exactly the opposite. Lamborghini identified that if you want to drop weight, you have to use carbon fiber." While carbon fiber composites are lightweight, they are expensive. "Over 50 percent of the cost comes from the time it takes to prepare the materials and to give it the shape you want before you can actually cook it," Dr. Feraboli said, referring to the necessity of curing the molded parts at high temperatures. If not for the cost, as much as two thirds of a Lamborghini or any car could be carbon fiber. "If rate and cost of production are not the issue, you could use a whole lot more carbon fiber," he said. Dr. Feraboli and the Lamborghini laboratory also pursue clever uses of the material. "Right now, for example, we're looking at using batteries inside the composite in order to make the structure basically also a battery." Such practical considerations are not the strongest appeal of a Lamborghini, of course. "I lower the rear window to give you the sound of the engine," Mr. Conti, the test driver, says. With late winter temperatures in the 40s there is still snow on the roadside the convertible top is up, but he is eager for me to experience as much of the bellow from the Gallardo's V 10, mounted just behind the seat, as possible. Mr. Conti is a 28 year veteran of Lamborghini with more than 15 years of performance car driving experience. And he has taught driving safety courses, so I am confident he knows what he is doing when he selects Sport from the three modes offered by the 6 speed e gear automated manual transmission a 10,000 option. A Murcielago mounted on the wall in the company museum. Towle Tompkins for The New York Times He elects to leave the traction control turned on, explaining, "We have the winter tires on today. Sorry." He then blips the throttle a couple of times and suddenly we're at the end of the Lamborghini driveway. I don't notice any winter tire drawbacks. The Gallardo, which made its debut in 2004, has become Lamborghini's best seller, with about 10,000 adorning driveways around the world. That car and its big brother, the V 12 powered Murcielago, are built in Sant'Agata Bolognese. The factory floor is spotless; the workbenches and parts bins are a neat freak's delight. And except for the occasional bark of an air wrench or warning beep from a forklift, the factory seems as quiet as a docent strike day at the Uffizi Museum. In the United States, Lamborghini sightings are rare treats, so it's remarkable to see dozens of Gallardos and Murcielagos here, each one being assembled according to the client work orders posted nearby. Another 30 or so completed cars are parked in a lot outside the factory doors, ready to be rushed to customers. Solar panels at the company's headquarters, recently installed, generate enough power to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent. The factory complex includes office space for roughly 800 employees, a gift shop, a cafeteria (so workers can avoid what is presumably an all carrots menu at Ristorante Bugs Bunny) and Museo Lamborghini. Displayed on the ground floor of the museum is the earliest production Lamborghini, the 350 GT, as well as examples of the Miura and Countach. The second floor includes Lamborghini powered Formula One and GT racing cars, a 2004 Gallardo Polizia Stradale that was donated to the Italian Traffic Police and a matte black Murcielago R GT whose knife edge design, high rise wing, three inch ground clearance and carbon fiber body are about as subtle as Silvio Berlusconi's hair color. Meanwhile, inside the Gallardo Spyder, the deceleration as Mr. Conti stands on the brakes is like hitting Luciano Pavarotti's cache of jumbo flannel pajamas: we stop silently, swiftly, without drama and well short of the ditch. As Mr. Conti makes a U turn on Via Malmanago, he adds: "A fast car must have powerful brakes." He turns back toward the headquarters. Charging into the Lamborghini parking lot, he slides the car into its spot in front of the building, kills the engine and proclaims, "Game over."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
EVERYBODY, it sometimes seems, complains about the minivan, or at least the bland, conservative image of the minivan. But despite the best efforts of marketing departments from Toyota's "Swagger Wagon" videos to Honda Odyssey ads pulsing with rock concert fantasies tampering with the basic van formula is a dangerous business. General Motors found this out in the 1990s with its slant nose "Dustbuster" vans, and Nissan went too far with the radical redesign of its Quest for the 2004 model year. Two earlier generations of the Quest had been largely designed by Nissan, but were built by Ford and shared many parts with the Mercury Villager. Compared with those models, the '04 Quest was revolutionary: a van considerably larger than its predecessors with an "urban loft" interior that included a center mounted gauge cluster. A podlike instrument panel between the driver and passenger housed the shift lever and other controls. Tepid sales convinced Nissan that it had gone too far, so it reconfigured the interior and the controls for 2007, putting the instrument cluster back in front of the driver. Nissan ended production of that third generation van after the 2009 model year; there was no 2010 model. For 2011, Nissan has ventured back in the minivan thicket with this fourth generation Quest. The latest version is clearly aimed at giving customers the conventional minivan experience that they seem to want, despite their frequent pleas for more excitement: family transportation that is comfortable, quiet and versatile. The 2011 Nissan Quest comes in four trim levels: S, SV, SL and LE. All have a 3.5 liter dual cam V 6 engine rated at 260 horsepower and the continuously variable transmission that the company uses across most of its model line. The S starts at 28,560 and the top LE at 42,160. I tested the SL, one step below the LE; it has a base price of 35,160. But the grand total for the test van topped 40,000 with the addition of options including a DVD entertainment system ( 2,100), Bose audio package with SirusXM Satellite Radio ( 1,300) and front and back sunroofs ( 1,350). The interior is the equal, in style and versatility, of Nissan's main competitors from Chrysler, Honda and Toyota. There are nice touches like padded front door armrests, and the seats provide good thigh and lateral support, proving comfortable even after a six hour drive. In a pre emptive strike against dehydration, the Quest wins this round of the cupholder wars. With 16, it has one more than the new Odyssey. The Quest seats seven with two comfortable captain chairs in the second row the center console can be removed and a split bench seat for the third row. The Nissan's second and third row seats fold to form a flat surface, but they do not slip into the floor like Chrysler's Stow 'n Go seats. But at least the Quest's seats don't have to be removed, as do the middle rows of the Odyssey and Sienna, to take full advantage of their cargo area. Bottom line, the Quest's maximum cargo volume is 108.4 cubic feet (or 119.8 if you include the storage well behind the third row) compared with 143.8 for the Chrysler Town Country and Dodge Caravan, 148.5 for the Honda and 150 for the Toyota. Chris Woodruff, the senior manager for model line marketing, said Nissan's research suggested that people were equally split between those who wanted more cargo capacity and were willing to go to more trouble to get it for example, by removing the seats and those who were willing to sacrifice some cargo space to get an easily accessible flat floor. Nissan continues to try to light up its minivan interiors, this time with a separate sliding sunroof over the second and third rows, in addition to the one up front. Rear passengers benefit most, because the glass panel up front cannot open all the way. The emphasis on keeping everyone comfortable doesn't ignore the balance between ride and handling. The Quest rides on the same basic Nissan platform that underpins the Maxima, Altima and Murano. It helps to give the Quest a ride that is smooth and handling that isn't sloppy. The power assisted rack and pinion steering has reassuring weight but does not provide much feedback. But the steering is predictably linear and reassuring. The turning radius is very tight for such a large vehicle, aiding maneuvers in parking lots. It seems, however, that no one can rid minivans of tire noise that filters up through the bottom of what is, essentially, a large box. The 3.5 liter engine belongs to the same well regarded family of V 6 engines as before, but upgrades have raised the horsepower to 260 from 235. That rating puts it in the middle of the minivan pack, and the Quest does not feel at all underpowered. The engine's torque the pulling power you feel when you scoot away from a stoplight remains the same at 240 pound feet. The previous 5 speed automatic has been replaced by the variable transmission used in many other Nissans. While some companies have given up their C.V.T.'s, this one works well enough and it adds to the van's overall comfort level. Although the highway fuel economy rating remains 24 miles per gallon, city mileage has improved to 19 m.p.g., from 16. Nissan said the improvement came primarily from changes to the engine and efficiencies from the new variable automatic transmission, along with some aerodynamic changes. Another money saving change: the company no longer recommends premium grade fuel. INSIDE TRACK: A more pedestrian, but more pleasing, family hauler.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Alexandria Wailes plays the Lady in Purple in "For Colored Girls." Dancing, for her, has been "a way of breaking down barriers between languages." Alexandria Wailes has had a cathartic, enlightening autumn. As the Lady in Purple in "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf," she finally has a part that reflects her just the way she is: deaf, mixed race and a dancer. In Ntozake Shange's celebrated feminist choreopoem, through Dec. 8 at the Public, seven women of color, named after and dressed in different hues of the rainbow, explore trauma and resilience through movement and text. Ms. Wailes's performance is captivating for the ease in which she weaves Camille A. Brown's choreography with American Sign Language. "That was a challenge," Ms. Wailes said through an interpreter in an interview. "I didn't want it to become too movement based so that the language started to get lost." Dance runs deep in her body. Ms. Wailes, who became deaf after contracting meningitis just after her first birthday, has danced nearly all of her life. When she was around 3, a doctor suggested that she try a class. It was a way, she said, "to help me heal and deal with the world." Even outside of the studio, dance has served her well. " Dancing has always been a way of communicating with people who didn't understand me," she said. "It was a way of breaking down barriers between languages. " "For Colored Girls" features a series of monologues. In the Lady in Purple's, Ms. Wailes narrates the story of a mixed race dancer who performs the role of an Egyptian goddess of love. The production's director, Leah C. Gardiner, was impressed with Ms. Wailes's elegant weaving of two visual languages, dance and A.S.L. "I could request something," Ms. Gardiner said, and "she would ask me questions and then take that information and put that into her body and translate that into A.S.L. in relationship to the text." Ms. Wailes worked with Onudeah Nicolarakis, who is credited as the production's director of A.S.L. , to focus on making sign and spoken language work together, as well as imbuing the choreography with expressiveness and nuance. "She didn't just translate the words, she translated the experience and emotion," Ms. Gardiner said. "One of my favorite moments in the show is when Alexandria turns upstage and is talking about how her hoop skirt falls. She gestures at her bottom and pulling the skirt down, but she does it kind of looking back. It's cheeky and expressive." The role was not originally for a deaf actress, but in casting, Ms. Gardiner with Shange's approval wanted to broaden the idea of what an African American woman could be. She also had another ambition in this production: To illuminate the idea of colorism, in which skin tone whether lighter or darker can lead to favoritism and discrimination within an ethnic group. Ms. Wailes, who is half black, has a lighter complexion than the others onstage. "When Alexandria came in and auditioned there was, for me, the excitement of, Wow, maybe my dream of exploring colorism can come true," Ms. Gardiner said. "And, oh my gosh, she's also she's deaf? This is insane." "For Colored Girls" had its premiere at the Public in 1976, the year after Ms. Wailes was born. And that connection is meaningful to her. " As a deaf woman of color who grew up dancing," she said she could see herself in the role. As she put it, "I felt like I needed to be doing this show at this time." Recently Ms. Wailes spoke about bringing A.S.L. and movement together, listening with her body and the freedom that dancing gives her. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. I was very lucky because in the last two years of high school, I transferred to the Model Secondary School for the Deaf. It was during the 1990s and they had a strong performing arts program. I started to meet other deaf dancers. More motivation and incentive to stay true to my path as an artist considering I never had anyone to look up to. I had no role model. A deaf woman of color? Dancing? Laughs I had to go, O.K., if that's not out there, I want to create it. How do you bring yourself to the character? This is me in my true element as an actor as a dancer. I have seven siblings. We're all girls. There are seven women in the show, and I'm the only deaf person in the cast and in my family. Are you generally very expressive when you sign? Yes. I can turn it down and be less expressive. I've worked with the contemporary choreographer Heidi Latsky for a few years. She had a piece, "Somewhere," inspired by different renditions of "Over the Rainbow." I told her that I wanted to challenge the notion of signing, which often tends to look so very beautiful and pastoral and emotive and expressive. I wanted to see signing used in an urban manner. I wanted it to feel gritty, edgy and just bigger more like an attack in a positive way, like in your face. How did she work with you? She worked with me on my expression. She said: "Don't put it in your face. It's not about putting on a show." I understood, but it was a challenge because face is my voice. My expressions are my voice. But over time, it was freeing, because I was focusing on bringing American Sign Language and movement together. How do you find rhythm without hearing the words? Signing naturally has a lot of musicality within it. The challenge is determining which signs best honor the length of the text, because in Ntozake's text you often see the slashes or you see space or an ampersand. How do I embody this physical language on top of a dancing language on top of trusting and working with the other actors who are speaking the lines that Ntozake wrote? Because a big difference between speaking and signing is I can keep signing, but you need to take a breath, right? There is a difference in the way that breath is used in both languages. This production explores the notion of colorism. How has skin tone affected you in your life? I didn't ask to look like this, do you know what I mean? Laughs So I was really grateful for Leah. She just got me. She understood the inherent challenges that I deal with in life because I'm always passing. I'm not going to deny that that privilege is there. But I've had to suppress who I am because the idea of who I am doesn't match who I am inside. It's an interesting tension, and it's a constant dynamic that I'm negotiating all the time. Do you know why you took to dance as a deaf person? Because it's another language. I learned sign language and dance around the same time. Dance is a physical vocabulary and a way of communicating. Sometimes it relies on sound but not always.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The press took note when Hillary Clinton wore pantsuits from the American label Ralph Lauren at the Democratic National Convention and at the first presidential debate. But the brands favored by her opponent, Donald J. Trump, have slipped under the radar. While the Republican nominee has in years past expressed a fondness for the upscale Italian label Brioni (owned since 2011 by Kering, a French corporation), it was not a certainty that he has been wearing Brioni suits on the campaign trail. An email exchange with Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, cleared things up. Mr. Trump has indeed been wearing Brioni as Election Day draws near, and he also favors suits by the Brooklyn label Martin Greenfield Clothiers, "among others," according to Ms. Hicks. Mr. Greenfield is perhaps best known as the tailor to President Obama. Other fans of Greenfield suits include the former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the former New York City police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. Jay Greenfield, a son of Martin and the co owner of the company, confirmed that it had made several suits for Mr. Trump before the start of his presidential run.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"She just had this wonderful enthusiasm not just for literature, but for the life around it," Terry McDonell, a former president of The Paris Review's board, said of Ms. Hunnewell. "She represented a really optimistic kind of continuity." Susannah Hunnewell, publisher of The Paris Review and a prominent member of its literary circles for three decades, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 52. Her husband, Antonio F. Weiss, said the cause was cancer. Ms. Hunnewell joined the magazine as an editorial intern in the late 1980s, when it was run out of an 8 by 14 foot office in the Upper East Side brownstone of its co founder and editor George Plimpton. She remained associated with the magazine for the next 30 years, including a transformative and sometimes turbulent period after Mr. Plimpton's death at 76 in 2003. During that time the magazine redesigned its pages, broadened its scope and, in 2018, installed a woman as its top editor, after one of Mr. Plimpton's male successors resigned amid accusations of sexual misconduct toward female employees and writers. Ms. Hunnewell, who had earlier been Paris editor of the magazine, was named publisher in 2015, taking over from Mr. Weiss, an investment banker who had joined the government as a counselor to Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew in the Obama administration. The novelist Mona Simpson, a member of The Paris Review board, recalled Ms. Hunnewell as the most hands on publisher the magazine had ever had. "She really cared about the possibilities of a literary magazine," Ms. Simpson said. In late 2017, after its editor, Lorin Stein, resigned over the misconduct allegations, Ms. Hunnewell successfully championed hiring Emily Nemens to replace him, even though, as a co editor of The Southern Review, she was far outside The Paris Review's clubby literary circle. In announcing Ms. Nemens's hiring, Ms. Hunnewell cited her "proven track record for finding diverse new voices outside established networks." Ms. Simpson said Ms. Hunnewell had notably managed to unify the magazine's different constituencies. "The Paris Review is known for its hysterically extensive masthead," she said, "and Susannah was the only person in the world who could coax all these founders, editors, associates, readers, contributors and board members not only to get along but to have wild fun together." Terry McDonell, a former editor of Esquire and a former president of The Paris Review's board, called Ms. Hunnewell a protector of the essential DNA of the magazine, which Mr. Plimpton helped start in Paris in 1953 and whose modest circulation had belied its influence in the literary world as a showcase for writers and a discoverer of new talent. "She just had this wonderful enthusiasm not just for literature, but for the life around it," Mr. McDonnell said of Ms. Hunnewell. "She represented a really optimistic kind of continuity." Susannah Gordon Hunnewell was born in Boston on July 16, 1966. Her father, Francis Oakes Hunnewell, was an international investment banker and an entrepreneur and a descendant of the family on whose land the town of Wellesley, Mass., was founded. He died in 2010. Her mother, Elizabeth Milton Hunnewell, is a freelance writer. The family moved to Paris shortly after Susannah was born, and she attended the Ecole Active Bilingue, a school that teaches in French and English. The family returned to Wellesley when she was 15, and she attended the Winsor School for young women in Boston and then Harvard, from which she graduated with a degree in English. As a young editorial assistant at The Paris Review, Ms. Hunnewell read through submissions relegated to the so called slush pile and edited short stories and articles for print. She was also among the staff members who Mr. Plimpton credited with helping him put together "The Paris Review Anthology" (1990).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
When the "Moonlight" Sonata was first published, the dedication page was in Italian. So Countess Julie Guicciardi, with whom Beethoven may have fallen in love, has been widely known as Giulietta ever since. Four years ago, I was having lunch with an editor who mentioned that Beethoven had fallen in love with one of his piano students. She was the woman to whom the great master had dedicated the "Moonlight" Sonata. The editor thought it would make a good novel. Was I interested? I was intrigued, but intimidated. Wagner once described Beethoven as a "titan, wrestling with the gods." Did I want to wrestle with a titan? I'd never written historical fiction, didn't read German and knew nothing about early 19th century Vienna. Though I'd studied piano for 12 years, my teacher thought Beethoven's music was too "agitating" for someone with my "high strung" temperament. When I got home from lunch, I listened to Maurizio Pollini play the "Moonlight." I'd heard the sorrowful first movement before, but it suddenly touched me differently. Both my parents had recently died, but with a heavy workload and my childhood home to sell, I hadn't given myself time to grieve. Now Beethoven was encouraging me to mourn, hypnotizing me with doleful, dronelike melody. Her name was Countess Julie Guicciardi. When the "Moonlight" Sonata was first published, the dedication page was in Italian, so she's been known as Giulietta ever since. She left no diaries and few letters. I could find only three suspected likenesses: a bust, a lithograph and a portrait miniature showing a young woman with large eyes, lush lips and hair "a la Titus," the daringly short style then popular among Vienna's fashionable set. Some once thought she was the "Immortal Beloved," the anonymous woman to whom Beethoven wrote a passionate letter that was discovered after he died. (Today, far likelier candidates are the composer's friend, Antonie Brentano, and Julie's cousin, Josephine von Brunswick.) Beethoven began giving Julie lessons in 1801, when she was 18 and so beautiful that people called her "La Bella Guicciardi." He was 30, with intense brown eyes and a volatile temperament. They probably met through the Brunswicks, who had made Beethoven's acquaintance two years earlier. Julie's aunt had come to Vienna from Hungary to marry off one of her daughters. In order to attract suitable husbands, aristocratic women were encouraged to play an instrument. The cello sat between the legs, and the violin required rigorous slicing movements; the piano was considered far more ladylike. Josephine von Brunswick and her sister, Therese, got Beethoven to teach them. He admired the lovely Josephine, but she quickly found a husband, and Beethoven turned his attention to Julie. It was an agonizing period in his life. For the previous four years, he'd been suffering from tinnitus, a ringing and buzzing in his ears, and was having trouble discerning high notes. He feared the situation was irreversible and tried to keep it secret. He became reclusive, afraid of what people would say when they learned that Vienna's foremost piano virtuoso was going deaf. Apart from the social stigma, he knew that it would probably end his brilliant performing career. Julie helped lift his despair. It's generally agreed that she is the "dear, enchanting girl" he refers to in a letter to his friend Franz Wegeler. He confided to Wegeler that he was thinking of marriage, but that the aristocratic young woman wasn't of his station. At some point in 1801, he completed the "Moonlight" Sonata. It's difficult to pinpoint the exact date; he recorded his compositional process in sketchbooks, and many pages related to the "Moonlight" have been lost. When it was published in March 1802, it had only a generic name; its romantic title emerged after Beethoven's death. In 1823, the writer Ludwig Rellstab described the first movement as a lake reposing in the faint shimmer of the moon, and that association eventually caught on. Even before it became the "Moonlight," however, the sonata was a hit; the dreamy first movement was played so often that Beethoven grew tired of it. He complained to his student, the composer Carl Czerny, that it seemed to be all anyone wanted to hear. One imagines that Julie would have been thrilled to be its dedicatee, but in 1852, when Otto Jahn interviewed her for his biography of Beethoven, she painted a different picture. She told Jahn that Beethoven had originally given her his Rondo in G, but when he suddenly needed to dedicate that work to the sister of his foremost patron, he offered Julie the "Moonlight" instead. (The story doesn't quite add up. The Rondo had been written several years earlier and was published after the "Moonlight." Perhaps Jahn didn't gain Julie's trust the rest of the interview is relatively uninformative or perhaps, having already been suggested as the "Immortal Beloved," she didn't want any more scrutiny.) In November 1803, Julie wed Count Wenzel Robert von Gallenberg, a composer of modest talents and limited means, with whom she moved to Naples. There her life, never dull, became even more dramatic. She met Joachim Murat, the King of Naples, and his wife, Caroline, Napoleon's youngest sister. In October 1814, Julie appeared at the Congress of Vienna, the assembly that reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. According to local police records, she was an "emissary" for the Murats, who wanted to make sure they'd keep their kingdom. In a city teeming with spies, Julie was one of many, but she had certain advantages. Her sister in law, Countess Eleonora von Fuchs, was married to an imperial chamberlain, and, according to the Viennese police, Julie was the mistress of a prominent Saxon diplomat. Did she see Beethoven during the trip? There's no record of it, but he was the musical star of the Congress, conducting his bombastic "Wellington's Victory" and Seventh Symphony before a crowd of luminaries. It's hard to believe that Julie wouldn't have encountered him. Their lives intersected again in 1822, when Julie and Gallenberg moved back to Vienna, where he'd been hired at the Theater am Karntnertor. The Karntnertor will always be remembered for one event in particular: the 1824 premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Was Julie sitting in a box that night to listen to the soaring "Ode to Joy"? Again, there's no evidence. But Anton Schindler, Beethoven's secretary and early biographer, met Gallenberg at the Karntnertor. This prompted Beethoven to reminisce about Julie: he claimed that Julie loved him more than her husband, and that after her wedding, she'd come to him crying but he had spurned her. Knowing of her financial hardships, though, he'd arranged through a friend to give Gallenberg money. It would seem that he hadn't entirely forgotten his "dear, enchanting girl." After Beethoven's death in 1827, friends discovered several items tucked away in a secret compartment of a desk drawer. Among them was the "Immortal Beloved" letter and two portrait miniatures. One was that "a la Titus" image believed to be Julie Guicciardi. Patricia Morrisroe is the author of "Mapplethorpe: A Biography" and the novel "The Woman in the Moonlight," coming in September.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
It makes perverse sense that the biggest movie show on earth provided ridiculous drama, unsurprising twists and cartoon villains leading up to Sunday's ceremony, including ill advised proposals (like a so called popular Oscar) that were either shelved or jettisoned. So perhaps it was unexpected that the actual Academy Awards would deliver a predictable bummer ending. Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, our co chief film critics, join Wesley Morris, a critic at large, to talk about the diverse slate of winners, "Roma's" not so surprise loss and, yes, "Green Book." The best and worst moments of the Oscars Our analysis of the ceremony. The complete list of winners. MANOHLA DARGIS To be fair, the awards were pretty good and sometimes great, until they weren't. It was a pleasure and often moving to see all those women rise up to take their rightful place on that stage, starting with the three nonhosts Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler who did exactly what you want from good hosts and what those who produce the Oscars rarely grasp. They were funny, charming, breezy, and then they got off the stage before they could bore or embarrass us. And then there were all the female winners, including two for "Black Panther": the costume designer Ruth E. Carter and the production designer Hannah Beachler. Both were hired by Ryan Coogler, the director of "Black Panther" and one of the heroes of last night. He doesn't just hire women to work on his movies, he hires them to head departments (like cinematography, a male dominated field), putting them in positions of power. His hiring practices represent the kind of real activism that few other moviemakers embrace, as the parade of men thanking their wives last night continues to affirm. Even so, it was also deeply satisfying to see one man, Spike Lee, finally receive a competitive Oscar, sharing best adapted screenplay. That it took the academy this long to formally honor him speaks volumes about this organization. A.O. SCOTT Spike Lee won an Oscar. So did Regina King and Olivia Colman. Alfonso Cuaron won three. All of that sparked joy (to cite Marie Kondo, who was at the Dolby Theater and maybe should have been consulted on that weird stage design). So did the absence of a host, which I hope becomes a tradition. The upside of the Kevin Hart fiasco was that we didn't have to endure the desperate, self conscious brand extension of a flailing comedian or the forced graciousness of a movie star who would have preferred to be seated among the nominees. Instead, the presenters were allowed to carry the night, and to infuse it with a glamour that felt, to me, both old fashioned and distinctly of the moment. It was an impressively inclusive bunch, with respect to gender, generation, background and celebrity pedigree. Queen Latifah! Awkwafina! Serena Williams! Barbra Streisand! That diversity is the result of carefully managed optics, to be sure, but it also felt like a plausible representation of reality. Of course the reality is more complicated. This is still Hollywood we're talking about, so there had to be some dissonance beneath the heartfelt harmonizing. There was lots of love for Queen and "Bohemian Rhapsody," but not a single mention in any acceptance speech of its director, Bryan Singer. MeToo? What? Who? And in the year of "Black Panther" and "BlacKkKlansman" and of "Sorry to Bother You," "Blindspotting," "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" and "Widows" the best picture trophy went to a movie whose best friend is black, a movie that doesn't see color, a movie about how all lives matter. "Green Book" believes itself to be a movie about racial progress, but its victory smacks of backlash. WESLEY MORRIS Tony, the set! It was the recurring bathroom art from "Russian Doll" come, disturbingly, to life. Anyway, would a concept like revanchism apply here? Is best picture territory reclaimed or doubled down against? Does this constitute a reassertion of authority? As you've both enumerated things are changing within this organization. And yet "Green Book's" victory makes all kinds of sense. First, for all the changing that's been reported about the academy's membership it's getting less white and less male every year it's not yet entirely reflective of all that change: white and male and, at this point, capable of feeling better about a movie like "Green Book" more than, say, a movie like "Vice," a fever dream about Dick Cheney. "Green Book" is the more convincing progressive fantasy. Second, and I say this as someone who doesn't like "Green Book," the movie works as a movie. Peter Farrelly makes comedies and this movie, if you're inclined to find laughs at the friendship at the film's center, is funny. And the last line is so good and right and pleasing that I actually went for a third helping just to make sure I wasn't wrong about it all. Only once I start thinking about what and who I'm laughing at do I get depressed and Tony, my seatmate at that first helping can attest I got depressed pretty fast. The idea that Representative John Lewis, civil rights hero and national activist treasure, gave such a roused (if rambling) endorsement of the movie's reality around the movie not in it felt both unclean and indicative of the spell it casts. To see this movie is to love it. There's also the idea that this movie won and not "Vice." I kept thinking about what would have happened if "First Man" had sailed through this campaign process to best picture, as it might have in the 1990s and early 2000s. It's certainly more imaginatively made than a lot of those winners. But I think a movie like that, a square (but not square at all!) historical drama about men who did Great Things and the women who were Wives, is a relic. And as much a reliquary as "Green Book" seems to be, its makers and the academy can be patted on the back for speaking to whatever racial euphemism people like Farrelly and Cathy Schulman are using when they talk about "truth." But also and I'm wondering whether you have as much anecdotal experience with this as I have I've talked to so many people who really didn't like, "get" or want to see "Roma." Some of them are real academy voters. Some of them are people in the majority membership demographic: It was too long, too in Spanish, too black and white, too dull, too much on the dreaded Netflix to grab them. With it also in the foreign language category (where it won), "Roma" might never have had a serious chance after all. DARGIS I think you're right about the chances of "Roma" winning best picture, particularly given that academy members are (wrongly) allowed to watch nominees at home, where they hit the pause button at will. "Roma" is a big movie and to appreciate its panoramic splendor and lapidary details you need a big bright screen. Some may also need, I think, a real theater to keep watching it because "Roma" is an art movie and in crucial ways more indebted to classic art cinema in its pacing, tableaus, ellipses and ambiguity than to Hollywood. As we know from the box office, American moviegoers these days largely watch relatively fast paced obvious movies. So, yes, perhaps best picture for "Roma" was always a long shot. I can imagine people hitting pause and then stop during the first sweeping camera movement across the family's emptied out house. And its chances might have been hurt by the animus that some in the industry understandably feel toward Netflix, which seems hostile to theatrical distribution. Still, I was holding out hope partly because in 2017 the award had been won by Barry Jenkins's "Moonlight," another art movie. In that case, the coming of age story and three part structure made it easier for viewers to accept Jenkins's formal and stylistic experimentation. The industry is often and sometimes laughably called liberal, but its entrenched economic conservatism as well as its gender and racial makeup is often matched by its aesthetic traditionalism. MORRIS While we're pouring one out for "Roma" maybe gratuitously (Cuaron himself won three major Oscars last night!) I also want to spill a little for Glenn Close, whose work in "The Wife" (a so so movie) lost to a performance, in Olivia Colman's ferocious, ingenious, origamic dithering in "The Favourite," that felt very Glenn Close in "Reversal of Fortune," "Hamlet" and "Cookie's Fortune." She was a great sport when Colman blurted a tribute to her from the stage. But it also almost reminds me of another aspect of Oscars folly. That Oscar wouldn't make Close any more essential to our ideas of risk in American movie acting than Close already is. I'll also say that Bradley Cooper, who pretty much did everything for "A Star Is Born" short of rip tickets, is also evidence of some kind of turned tide. That was deemed the big winner when it landed in the fall and according to at least one poll was the movie a majority of the public picked to win. But fashion is fickle with these things, too. And for all of that movie's hefty movieness and despite "The Shape of Water" winning last year, it's hard for a movie about a woman to go all the way. That said, I too am thrilled about Oscars for Regina King and Ruth Carter and Hannah Beachler and the women who won those shorts Oscars. But I'm just going to prepare us for next year's show, when something like "The Best of Enemies" could be a factor. That's set in late Jim Crow era North Carolina and is about a civil rights activist (Taraji P. Henson) who teams up with the local KKK chief (Sam Rockwell) to desegregate their children's school. I haven't seen this movie yet. (It could be great!) But it also speaks to an inclination to find racial reconciliation in the past as a proxy for the present, for a particular kind of nostalgia. SCOTT A song from "A Star Is Born" not performed onstage last night muses that "maybe it's time to let the old ways die." The academy, which is building a museum in Los Angeles dedicated to movie history and itself is not likely to take that sentiment to heart any time soon. "A Star Is Born" sure didn't. That traditionalism can be vexatious in the ways we've been talking about aesthetically and politically but it can also be charming, even moving at times. My glasses always fog up at the In Memoriam montage, in spite of the inevitable omissions. Albert Finney! Margot Kidder! Were we ever so young? The show sells continuity as well as novelty, nostalgia alongside relevance. And it encourages the audience to believe that the movies are uniquely positioned to answer our desires to look fondly at the past and eagerly into the future. Sometimes within a single viewing experience, like "Roma." That idea of movies has always been a myth, and maybe it's an especially fragile myth at this moment of disruption and dissension. This was a better show than most of its recent predecessors smoother, more relaxed, livelier and less anxious but the three hours and change also had a feeling of borrowed time. I found myself wondering who this whole thing is for, whether it can keep going in its current form and whether any of us would miss it if it went away.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Even if it was an operation ordered at some lower level, the attack on Mr. Navalny breaks new ground. Ranking assassinations according to degrees of infamy may seem frivolous, and attacking two former Russian double agents residing in England, Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko, by nerve gas or radiation, is hard to exceed in brazenness. But Mr. Navalny was not a former spy. He was by far the best known and most visible of Mr. Putin's political opponents. His exposes of official corruption most famously of the extravagant properties owned by the former president Dmitri Medvedev were widely circulated, detailed and credible. Those who tried to kill him had to know, and not care, that the attack could be seen only as an attempt to silence a strong and effective political voice. Even more appalling was their deployment of a banned chemical weapon on Russian soil against a Russian politician. The perpetrators knew that Novichok had been identified in the attack against Mr. Skripal and that its use was a violation of international law. Russia is a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and after Germany established that Mr. Navalny had been poisoned, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons issued a statement that under the convention, "any poisoning of an individual through the use of a nerve agent is considered a use of chemical weapons." At the very least, that obligates Russia to establish how a known nerve agent came to be used in the center of Russia. Mr. Putin must believe that there is not much the West can do that it hasn't already done by way of sanctions. President Trump, for reasons that remain one of the top mysteries of his administration, has largely closed his eyes to Mr. Putin's serial transgressions, whether it's meddling in American elections, annexing Crimea or stonewalling on the poisoning of dissidents. The surest sign of European anger would be cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a gas conduit from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. But the project is nearly completed, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, is reluctant to take a step that would be costly for Europe and that would look like bowing to threats from the Trump administration, which has demanded cancellation of the pipeline.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
But "Sunset" is something else: the unique vision of a great artist. Though the theme is standard young men and women before the men go off to war no one but Mr. Taylor could have created this work. His juxtaposition of plangent Edward Elgar music with a recording of loons is the most obvious odd but right choice, yet all through it are images and rhythms that in their unlikely rightness touch places in the heart that few other pieces reach. "Sunset" expresses a complex and not entirely paraphrasable understanding of men and women and even more, of men with men that makes "Gossamer Gallants" look even more slight. This is the curse of having masterpieces in the repertory, though the effect wasn't quite as glaring in Saturday evening's combination of "... Byzantium" (1984), "Esplanade" (1975) and one of the season's new works, "American Dreamer." A treatment of Stephen Foster songs, "American Dreamer" is merely uninspired. The stock devices Mr. Taylor uses to distance himself from the hokey material a doubling and tripling of couples, an amateur theatricals frame don't make up for a lack of invention and engagement. "American Dreamer" seems not worth keeping, but "... Byzantium" is an enigma worth another look. Structured as a triptych of present, past and future, it has a mysterious urgency. The present section, "Passing," seems to come from the same part of Mr. Taylor's worldview as the hints of incipient anarchy in "A Field of Grass": the sexual revolution as a slouching toward Sodom. But there is also self flagellation and dancers carried off in poses like religious icons. In the central "Past" section, a quartet is dressed like figures in a Byzantine mosaic. The mosaic is mobile, and the combination of daisy chain patterns and the glitter of gold is heady and strange. But when these religious figures combine with the orgiastic masses in the final "Or to Come" section (the subtitles come from Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium"), the outcome or point is highly ambiguous. "... Byzantium" is ultimately baffling, yet its dissatisfactions are balanced on a program with the deeply satisfying "Esplanade." Though the originality of "Esplanade" the skipping and sliding set to Bach is much more easily imitated than that of "Sunset," its many sidedness is still nearly inexhaustible. The same images keep taking on new meanings: joyful circling becomes a going down the drain. The peppiest role (Michelle Fleet's) is also the most stricken.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen the final episode of "Crashing." Pete Holmes we're talking here about the slightly lummoxy, less successful version of himself the comedian plays on the HBO series "Crashing" just wanted a seat at the table. Literally. One of the running gags in "Crashing" was Pete's passive aggressive campaign to be allowed to sit at the hallowed "comedian's table" at the Comedy Cellar. Pete got his seat, finally, near the end of the show's Season 3 finale on Sunday, in a crescendoing happy ending that saw him get the girl, too. (Get her back, that is he was last seen skipping down Sixth Avenue in an apparent reunion with his former girlfriend and true love, Ali, played by Jamie Lee.) But at virtually the same moment, the actual Holmes had the seat pulled out from under him: He tweeted on Friday to confirm that HBO had canceled his show. When "Crashing" premiered in 2017, created by Holmes and sporting Judd Apatow as an executive producer and writer, three seasons might have seemed generous. Here was another show featuring a stand up comedian's lightly fictionalized alter ego. Here was another show about a white male underdog trying to overcome his awkwardness. The one obviously unusual thing about the series that the character, like Holmes, was a Christian determined to focus on reasonably clean, uplifting humor wasn't going to increase its cachet in the precincts of prestige cable and streaming comedy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Players from Basaksehir, in orange, and Paris St. Germain left the field midway through the first half. A Champions League soccer match between Paris St. Germain and Istanbul Basaksehir was suspended on Tuesday after both teams accused a match official of directing a racial slur at a Black assistant coach. The game in Paris a crucial fixture in European soccer's showpiece competition was interrupted after just 14 minutes when Sebastian Coltescu, the Romanian fourth official, summoned the referee, Ovidiu Hategan, to the sideline. It was not immediately clear what had prompted the request. As Hategan approached the team benches, Coltescu appeared to ask that Pierre Webo, the former Cameroon international now working as the Turkish team's assistant manager, be ejected from the match. As Hategan prepared to produce a red card from his pocket, Webo approached the referee and accused Coltescu of using a racial epithet in singling him out. "Why did he say negro?" Webo shouted repeatedly in the direction of Coltescu as he was sent away from the field. "Why did you say negro?" Basaksehir's players immediately protested to Hategan, and soon the P.S.G. stars Neymar and Kylian Mbappe who also have been targeted by racist abuse in the past also joined the discussion. Demba Ba, Basaksehir's veteran Senegalese striker, then approached Coltescu and asked him, "Why when you mention a Black guy, you have to say, 'This Black guy'?" "You wouldn't say 'these white guys,'" Ba said, pointing his finger. "You'd say 'these guys.'" Coltescu's role as the fourth official involves policing the coaching areas and benches and handling player substitutions. As Ba protested inches from his face, he or another member of the all Romanian unit of match officials appeared to defend the choice of words as an issue of language, not intent. After several minutes of discussion, Basaksehir's players decided to leave the field, and they were swiftly followed by their counterparts from P.S.G. As he left the field, Hategan could be overheard on the television broadcast's microphones insisting that the protocol for dealing with the issue and whether the game would be restarted was "not up to me." UEFA, European soccer's governing body and the competition's organizer, initially planned for the game to resume at 10 p.m. local time, after a delay of 45 minutes, with Coltescu replaced by the official serving as the on site video assistant referee. P.S.G.'s players were reported to be willing to continue playing even returning to the tunnel to make their way to the field but Basaksehir confirmed on Twitter that its players had refused to do so "because of the racism of the fourth official, Sebastian Coltescu, against our assistant coach Pierre Webo." Two hours after the players left the field, UEFA said in a statement that the teams had agreed to play the final 76 minutes of the match on Wednesday after it had agreed to the unusual condition of replacing the entire crew of match officials. It also said it would review the incident that led the game to be halted. "A thorough investigation on the incident that took place will be opened immediately," UEFA said in a statement. P.S.G. will go into it knowing that its place in the tournament's knockout rounds is secure, after Manchester United's defeat to RB Leipzig on Tuesday night sealed the elimination of the Premier League club. Basaksehir had already been eliminated from the competition.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Jimmy Cobb performing with the Miles Davis Quintet in 1960. His instructions from the boss? "Just make it sound like it's floating." Jimmy Cobb, a jazz drummer whose propulsive ride cymbal imbued countless classic recordings with a quiet intensity, including Miles Davis's epochal album "Kind of Blue," died on Sunday in Harlem. He was 91. The cause was lung cancer, according to his daughter Serena Cobb. As the only surviving member of the "Kind of Blue" sextet, Mr. Cobb had long been hailed as the last apostle of a defining moment in American music. His great talent was his ability to play understatedly, almost casually, without letting the beat or the momentum sag. He rarely took a solo. "I was just trying to get it done," he said in a 2010 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, adding, "You have to be at the right place at the right time with the right stuff, and then you got a chance." On spirited performances led by the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, whispery jazz standards sung by Sarah Vaughan, dreamier late career collaborations with the pianist Geri Allen, and thousands of albums and gigs in between, Mr. Cobb goaded his bandmates by holding steady. In his hands, persistence didn't mean insisting, and an even keel never felt like a bore. Released in 1959, "Kind of Blue" with Mr. Davis's trumpet backed by Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane on saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, and Mr. Cobb on drums received warm reviews, but its immortality accrued only over time. Through changes in fashion and dips in jazz's popularity, its brooding, translucent aura has never gone out of style. It is widely known as the best selling album in jazz history, and last year the Recording Industry Association of America announced that it had surpassed five million copies sold worldwide. For most of its tunes, Mr. Davis brought in only rough sketches of melody; all but one of its five tracks were recorded in single takes. Mr. Davis's advice for his drummer at those sessions was simple. "He said, 'Jimmy, you know what to do. Just make it sound like it's floating,'" Mr. Cobb recalled. He remained in Mr. Davis's band for over four years and contributed to other landmark recordings: "Porgy and Bess," "Sketches of Spain," "Someday My Prince Will Come" and more. In 2003, listening to a set of live recordings from 1961, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times celebrated Mr. Davis's rhythm section Mr. Kelly, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Cobb as "the gold standard for straight ahead, postwar jazz rhythm." Even after they had all left Mr. Davis's band, that core trio continued playing together until Mr. Chambers's death in 1969. Mr. Cobb knew what moved him, and what didn't. When jazz turned toward the avant garde in the 1960s, he stayed on course, relying on his regal status to find work with giants of the hard bop era, often in Europe and Japan, after the clubs scene in New York had dried up. Though he never hungered for the spotlight, Mr. Cobb did embrace a leadership role in his last decades, often fronting bands under the name Cobb's Mob. In a Times review of Mr. Cobb's 2014 album, "The Original Mob," Nate Chinen took note of the "indefinable but unmistakable pull in the ride cymbal beat of the jazz drummer Jimmy Cobb, who's now 85 and sounds not unlike he did at 30." James Wilbur Cobb was born on Jan. 20, 1929, at his home in Washington. His parents, Wilbur and Katherine (Bivens) Cobb, lived just blocks from U Street, which had recently become the center of the country's most robust urban black middle class, as well as one of its greatest music scenes. His mother was a domestic worker, his father a security guard and taxi driver. The couple separated when their children were young, and to help support his mother, Jimmy worked from an early age: shining shoes, delivering newspapers, toting heavy bags of ice for 5 a day. He spent summers working on his grandfather's tobacco farm in Maryland. He fell in love with the drums as a teenager, listening to modern jazz records with a friend and using his knuckles to hammer out rhythms. Before his 20th birthday, he was working at clubs on U Street, sometimes accompanying stars who passed through town, like Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. Mr. Cobb first went on the road with the saxophonist Earl Bostic, then joined the vocalist Dinah Washington's band, which was as loaded with talented young instrumentalists as Mr. Bostic's had been. Ms. Washington and Mr. Cobb began a romantic relationship and lived together for a time. Soon after they split up, he began to fill in here and there for Mr. Davis's first call drummer, Philly Joe Jones. Then one day in 1958, Mr. Davis called Mr. Cobb at his home in Queens about 6 p.m. and asked him if he could make a gig that night. Mr. Cobb packed his drums and hustled to La Guardia Airport. He caught a plane and arrived at the club just as the band was starting to play "'Round Midnight."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.