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In a telling passage toward the end of his latest celebration of antidepressant drugs, Dr. Peter Kramer looks back on the pleasures of his long psychiatric career. He mentions the good company of his patients, his teachers, his colleagues. Then he turns to his favorite medications. He seems to choke up a little. "To get to meet Prozac and then to work in concert," he writes without a trace of irony. "I am conscious of the privilege." One needs no better evidence that the relationship between prescribers and their pills is quasi human, a partnership that may be utterly rational or wildly emotional, bolstered by wishful thinking, undone by bitter suspicion. Such has certainly been the case for antidepressants. Their safety and efficacy have been questioned repeatedly over the last decade. Some patients maintain the drugs are poison, while some experts have suggested they are just pricey, overused placebos. Foremost among the drugs' champions has been Dr. Kramer, the author of "Listening to Prozac" in 1993 and a professor at Brown Medical School, who now offers a long, point by point defense composed of anecdotes and data. Dr. Kramer's bottom line is well summarized by the double meaning of "Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants" he argues that antidepressants work just about as well as any other pills commonly used for ailing people, and that the drugs keep people who take them reasonably healthy. Antidepressants are not magic, Dr. Kramer acknowledges; they come with a risk of side effects, and their use in children can be quite problematic. But he has found them immensely helpful in the care of pretty much every variety of depressed adult. Further, he can back up his impressions with statistical proof. The reader with no particular ax to grind will emerge from the book with two impressions. One is that Dr. Kramer's data is extremely persuasive. A second is that future rebuttals may well be just as persuasive, thanks to the staggering difficulties of subjecting psychoactive agents to rigorous scientific analysis. For its articulate, heartfelt demonstration of all those problems, the book is invaluable. (Read an excerpt.) Most diseases have objective findings that lend themselves to numerical scales: heart, kidney and liver damage, bone marrow function, tumor size. The workings of the brain not so much. Translating the complicated emotions of depression to a single number is not easy, particularly as a complete assessment also requires a tally of the physical signs that may accompany depression, and the life altering events that may result. But drug studies operate off these numbers: one for a patient's presentation, others for recovery and relapse. Only with numbers can statistical validity be calculated. In theory, the pattern of the numbers tells the same story as does the multichaptered descriptive narrative a doctor creates over months of conversation with a hurting patient. At least, this assumption, dating from the 1950s, has led to the approval of generations of antidepressants, from the first tricyclic compounds like imipramine (Tofranil) through Prozac and its successors to the newest chemical hope on the block, the recreational drug ketamine. But accepting that the numbers accurately recreate the narrative is only one faith based aspect of the enterprise. There are many others. One is physiological: Depression most likely reflects an array of brain imbalances. Doctors may someday be able to map every patient's errant neurotransmitters and neural dead ends, then supply the precise chemical needed to restore normal traffic patterns. For now, though, prescribers are stuck with educated guesswork. Depressed patients who volunteer for prospective drug studies may not be comparable to those who do not. In addition, study subjects may find the structure of these trials (and the kind concern of the staff members who conduct them) comforting in and of themselves, leading to a high rate of placebo responses. Many studies have been too small to yield meaningful results, and must be combined with larger studies for interpretation, but the choice of studies to combine may, intentionally or not, bias the results. For instance, one large analysis included many patients on Serzone, a weaker drug seldom used these days. The study showed antidepressants did not work very well, but when the Serzone patients were excluded, the drugs all appeared to work far better. Finally, Dr. Kramer wonders if depression itself is not a shifting target, evolving from the deep melancholia often seen in the last century and seldom seen today into a different beast. Over and over again, with an emphasis bound to infuriate some scientific purists, Dr. Kramer argues that a doctor's instincts should be respected when it comes to patient care. He knows the drugs work, he reiterates, because he has seen them work, repeatedly and reliably. This is exactly the reasoning that the objective study of drugs aims to make obsolete, for the doctor's ego, and often, the doctor's income, are deeply bound up in the act and art of prescribing. Patients may get all tangled up in the expectations that result. And yet the image that insistently comes to my mind is a cartoon: A psychiatrist glowers at a hapless patient on the couch. "Do you really feel better?" the doctor demands. "Or do you just think you feel better?" That is indeed the question, important and ridiculous all at once. As Dr. Kramer implies, sometimes it makes sense just to let the poor guy off the couch and out into the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Linda Fairstein, a former prosecutor who has been the focus of public outrage since Netflix began streaming a series based on the Central Park Five case, has criticized the show in an op ed as "so full of distortions and falsehoods as to be an outright fabrication." Since "When They See Us" began airing on May 31, Ms. Fairstein, who became a successful crime novelist after retiring from the Manhattan district attorney's office, has faced calls for a boycott of her books, has stepped down from several nonprofit boards and was dropped by her publisher. The four part series created by Ava DuVernay portrayed Ms. Fairstein, who was played by Felicity Huffman, as pushing for the convictions of the five teenagers despite overt inconsistencies in their confessions, which they said had been coerced. Ms. Fairstein was running the sex crimes unit in the Manhattan district attorney's office in 1989, when five black and Latino teenagers were arrested in connection with the brutal rape and beating of a white woman who had been jogging in Central Park. Their convictions were vacated in 2002 after a man named Matias Reyes confessed to the crime, an assertion confirmed by DNA evidence. Mr. Reyes said he had acted alone. "Ms. DuVernay's film attempts to portray me as an overzealous prosecutor and a bigot, the police as incompetent or worse, and the five suspects as innocent of all charges against them," Ms. Fairstein wrote in the op ed, published in The Wall Street Journal in print on Tuesday and online Monday night. "None of this is true." Ms. Fairstein, 72, wrote that there were discrepancies between the facts and how they were dramatized, though some of her assertions do not match up with the record. In what she called "the film's most egregious falsehoods," she noted that the series depicts the teenagers as being held without food and their parents as not always being present during questioning. "If that had been true, surely they would have brought those issues up and prevailed in pretrial hearings on the voluntariness of their statements, as well as in their lawsuit against the city," Ms. Fairstein wrote. "They didn't, because it never happened." In fact, according to a 2003 report on the investigation commissioned by the New York Police Department, the defendants did raise these issues in a pretrial hearing, though they did not prevail. Ms. Fairstein wrote that she agreed with the decision to vacate the rape charges, but that other convictions against the five for lesser crimes should not have been overturned. She said that there was testimony to back up the accusations that the boys had been part of a group of more than 30 teenagers who were in Central Park that night, some of whom assaulted and robbed people. The strength of those charges has been in dispute. The district attorney's office, in a 2002 report examining whether the convictions should be overturne d, argued that the lesser crimes had been presented to the jury as part of a pattern of behavior, a pattern that included the rape. The report also said the evidence against the five teenagers for the other attacks "consisted almost entirely of the defendants' statements" the same problematic statements in which they confessed to a rape committed by somebody else. But the Police Department report said that there was "no new evidence or reason to review the old evidence regarding those crimes" and noted that two of the men had admitted their involvement in those crimes during parole hearings. The five men Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Antron McCray had already served several years in prison when their convictions were erased. New York City settled a lawsuit with them for 41 million in 2014, but admitted no wrongdoing. Jonathan C. Moore, a lawyer who represented four of the five men in their lawsuit, said that the men had not committed any crimes that night, but that since 1989, there has been a suggestion that if they were guilty of lesser assaults, then they were likely involved in the rape of the jogger, Trisha Meili, as well. "That's a false connection," Mr. Moore said. "The attack on Trisha Meili was so different than what was going on in the park that night. It was a sadistic sexual assault." "At no point did the police or prosecution stop and say, these are young kids, like in the eighth grade," he added. "Do we really believe they're really capable of committing this kind of crime?" Ms. Fairstein also decried her portrayal in "When They See Us" as that of an "evil mastermind." The series does stray from documented fact in the timing of certain events and in dialogue delivered by Ms. Fairstein's character, portraying her as seeking to ensure that the timeline offered by the boys matched actual events, or declaring that "every young black male" who was in the park when Ms. Meili was attacked was a suspect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
About eight years ago, the Canadian novelist Susan Swan looked into the research about how female writers compared with male ones when it came to literary prizes and coverage. She was shocked by what she found. "I thought it was going to be a happy progress report," she said in an interview. "Instead it was a bad news day." Books written by women were less likely to be reviewed or win the most prominent book awards, Swan said. Some of those numbers have shifted in recent years. VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, a group that tracks the gender imbalance in major publications, reported gains for female writers at several of them in 2018, and writers such as Bernardine Evaristo, Margaret Atwood, Susan Choi and Sarah M. Broom took home several of the highest profile book awards last year. But Swan teamed up with a friend who works in book publishing, Janice Zawerbny, in an effort to continue to level the playing field. The result is a new annual prize, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which starting in 2022 will award 150,000 Canadian dollars, about 113,000, for a work of fiction published in the previous year by a woman or nonbinary person. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
PARIS The high level politicking over who will be the next president of the European Central Bank moved closer to resolution on Tuesday. But it is not yet a done deal. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said he would support a respected Italian monetary official, Mario Draghi, to succeed Jean Claude Trichet when he steps down later this year. Mr. Sarkozy made his unexpected announcement at a joint news conference in Rome with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. But in the political brinksmanship common with appointments at top European institutions, Mr. Sarkozy's move may have made it harder for Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to endorse Mr. Draghi. Germany's finance ministry, led by Wolfgang Schauble, has recently warmed to the idea that Mr. Draghi is the best qualified person for the job. But Mrs. Merkel faces a delicate task in preparing German voters for the prospect of an Italian's having responsibility for keeping European inflation under control and managing the fate of the euro. Mr. Sarkozy, though, expressed no such reservations. "France will be very happy to support an Italian for the presidency of the E.C.B.," he said. "I know Draghi well. We support him not because he is an Italian but because he is a man of quality." Mr. Sarkozy made the announcement without consulting Mrs. Merkel, according to a German official who insisted on anonymity. The European Central Bank's role in fighting inflation is a major preoccupation for Germany, and Mrs. Merkel retains an effective veto over the appointment, which is scheduled to be decided at a summit in June. Mrs. Merkel had been hoping that an inflation fighting German, or a banker from a North European country, would take the helm from Mr. Trichet, who is retiring in October. But her preferred candidate, Axel A. Weber, the former president of the German central bank, took himself out of the running earlier this year. Mr. Weber resigned from the Bundesbank in February. Mr. Weber's exit pushed Mr. Draghi's candidacy to the forefront, despite widespread perceptions, particularly in Germany, that people from Mediterranean countries are not as prudent and responsible with money as those from northern nations. Despite that stereotype, in the corridors of finance Mr. Draghi, governor of the Italian Central Bank, is widely respected as an experienced economic policy maker with sterling credentials and a knack for navigating turbulent political waters. But Mr. Sarkozy's announcement, by appearing to pre empt Mrs. Merkel, could complicate the process of selecting the next central bank president. Mr. Sarkozy's remarks were all the more surprising because both he and Mrs. Merkel have sought to forge a closer relationship to keep the euro from unraveling amid the debt crisis. They have also worked to overcome differences in their approaches to the central bank. Germany wants to keep the bank free from politics, while France, according to German officials, is more interested in influencing it. It is not the first time Mr. Sarkozy has bewildered a crucial European partner by announcing policy without giving advance notice. But French officials insisted that they had been encouraged to support Mr. Draghi after Mr. Schauble appeared to endorse him; they expect Mrs. Merkel to ultimately support him as well. In return, France expects Germany to back a Frenchman for the seat that Mr. Draghi would vacate on the bank board, said senior French officials who spoke anonymously because of the political sensitivity of the matter. Mr. Draghi has a reputation as a consensus builder an important skill when running a central bank. Mr. Weber dropped out of the running in part because he was out of step with other members of the bank's policy making committee. Mr. Draghi, serious and direct, is also acutely sensitive to Germany's preoccupation with fighting the specter of inflation, and has spent the last few months underscoring his inflation fighting credentials. In a rare interview in February, he said monetary policy should "first and foremost be geared toward price stability." The central bank recently raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point, a move Mr. Draghi supported. Analysts expect the bank to lift rates perhaps twice more this year. That policy has come under fire from some experts who warn that higher rates will choke off the faltering recovery in some countries. But Mr. Draghi's firm position on inflation has helped endear him to Mr. Schauble, the German finance minister. He sees Mr. Draghi as someone who can guide a strict fiscal and monetary policy while keeping meddling politicians at bay, according to a German finance official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on the record. Mr. Schauble also holds the view that choosing a central banker from a southern European country would send a good signal to its troubled neighbors, the official said, because it might show that the politics and economics of the 17 member euro zone are not driven by northern countries alone. If Mr. Draghi got the job, he would have to navigate the tricky financial and political imperatives of bailouts for the most stricken European countries. He would also have to weigh how much support the central bank can and will continue to give to troubled banks in countries like Ireland and Spain. Mr. Draghi seems to have managed to overcome reservations about his role as a managing director at Goldman Sachs from 2002 to 2005. The investment bank was the lead manager for a 2001 derivatives transaction that allowed Greece to dress up its books in a way that brought it into the euro club, but Mr. Draghi has made clear that he was not directly involved. On another monetary policy issue, Mr. Draghi has discreetly voiced concern about the central bank's continuing intervention in markets for European government bonds. He emphasized that intervention was justified only to make sure that the bank maintained its influence over interest rates, and not as a form of economic stimulus or stealth financing for overindebted governments. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) 8 p.m. on NBC; stream on Amazon. Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" features George Bailey (James Stewart), a small town businessman, who is contemplating suicide on Christmas Eve. A guardian angel (Henry Travers) is assigned to save him, and, to do so, he shows George what his town would have been like had he not been born. The film received five Oscar nominations, including best picture, but flopped at the box office when it was first released. Yet like many other holiday films that performed poorly upon opening, it has since become a feel good classic. WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) 8 a.m. on Sundance TV; stream on Netflix. Set in 1994, this Christmas musical follows two soldiers turned performers (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) who fall for two sisters (Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen) and join them at a failing resort run by their former commanding officer. The group tries to save the resort, and their newly minted relationships, from falling apart. If you have yet to see the film, Sundance TV is airing it all day long. That's seven chances to watch the stars perform the titular closing number. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times We check in with Indiana Woodward and Anthony Huxley of New York City Ballet on a day of rehearsals and costume fittings for their debuts as Aurora and Desire. In 'Sleeping Beauty,' the Hard Work of Being Princess (or Prince) On or off the stage, it makes no difference: Indiana Woodward possesses an unmistakable sparkle. But mastering the formidable role of Aurora that fairy tale princess whose finger is pricked by a needle, causing a kingdom to sleep for 100 years has come close to dimming it. She won't let it. At a recent rehearsal for "The Sleeping Beauty," Ms. Woodward and Anthony Huxley, her Prince Desire, went over the details of the wedding grand pas de deux on the stage of the David H. Koch Theater where, on Thursday, they will make their debuts in the New York City Ballet production. Ms. Woodward was having trouble with a sequence in which she curls around the stage in a circle. She couldn't make her final pirouette stick. "I was starting to get angry," she told Glenn Keenan, the ballet master working with Ms. Woodward and Mr. Huxley, during a rehearsal of another failed attempt. Her face was bright red. Ms. Keenan said: "Get determined, not angry. Just know that you can do it." Ms. Woodward, 25 and a soloist, sighed. "O.K., one more time." It wasn't the first time she wanted to do it again. Even Mr. Huxley, a serious and soft spoken 30 year old principal, laughed. One of the most technically refined dancers in the company, Mr. Huxley said that Ms. Woodward reminded him of himself just a few years ago, when he rehearsed as if his life depended on it. But Ms. Keenan, 36, is confident that her two principals are more than up to "Sleeping Beauty" and its challenges. "First off, they're both phenomenal technicians they can do anything," she said. "And secondly, they are insanely hard workers." More important, though, is how well suited they are to their roles: Ms. Woodward because of her effervescence "she's so young and full of life, which is exactly what the character is" and Mr. Huxley because of his quiet elegance: "When you first see him, you don't really notice it," Ms. Keenan said. "But he starts moving, and it truly is astonishing." The three of them all under 40 have become something of a team; it is the first time Ms. Keenan, a former company member, has worked with the leads in the ballet, which was choreographed by Peter Martins in 1991. For Ms. Woodward, their bond has made a difference. For instance, those traveling turns she was having difficulty with earlier. Ms. Keenan always asks her, Ms. Woodward said, if she wants to redo that part. "I'm like, "Yes. Yes, I do.' " Ms. Woodward paused for a moment. "I really don't, because I don't like it, but I'm going to tell myself that I love it," she said and smiled brightly. "You just manifest it." Here are edited excerpts from interviews with the dancers and Ms. Keenan as they prepare for their big night. WOODWARD It was the first ballet I was ever in a production of. It was with the Kirov in L.A., and I was one of the kids in the Garland Dance. I was probably 9 or 10. Classical ballets are the only things that I grew up with. Yuri Grigoriev, my teacher, always said he wanted me to do this part. He passed away three years ago, but his wife is coming to see me do it. I feel like he'll be watching. And act like one too ... HUXLEY For me the difficult thing always is the acting and being a presence onstage and not getting so into myself. Especially with these story ballets where you need to actually tell the story and not just dance, because I'm not a natural projector with my face. The Prince has to convey that he's sort of sad and fed up with his life. In the pantomime, the Lilac Fairy asks, "Why are you crying?" I'm just trying to find a place where it may look like I've been crying but I don't really know where. WOODWARD As Glenn keeps explaining to me, throughout the Rose Adagio Aurora becomes more and more confident, and she is showing off to her suitors. I'm sure everybody has a different story that they tell themselves, but that's the story that we've created together. The suitors are all rooting for you. They're all like Whispers : "You can do it. You can do it." I'm like, "Help." Silas Farley one of the suitors is like: "Keep breathing. Keep breathing. Take a breath." He was the one who explained to me that the steps are telling the story. It's not just that the steps are commanding you. Rising above the demons of self doubt WOODWARD Glenn keeps saying, "You can do it!" The only person that is doubting me is myself. I think it's just because I've seen so many of my favorite ballerinas do it that I can't believe I'm doing it. I guess there's always that struggle of feeling like you're not good enough. So I just have to get over that and become the character. HUXLEY We always start the rehearsals just kind of talking about things: what happened at the last rehearsal, what we want to do and accomplish. The mood. In the wedding pas de deux, we talk about streamlining it and not adding too much extra fluff that we don't need. Some people add things here and there. I think it's beautiful, but we talk about trying to find our own version and it seems to be very simple and clean. WOODWARD When I watch the principal Sara Mearns, I don't feel like she ever doubts herself. She always steps out she takes huge steps and it's just so impressive and it always works. Sometimes you feel like it's not going to happen because it's so big and so exciting and then it happens. That's what I'm trying to work on. KEENAN She has a very soft, innocent quality, and he's more angular in a lot of ways. I think it's a perfect combination. They bring out certain things that the other person is missing in a sense, which is so beautiful to see. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Then she asked: "What does mad mean?" "Mad means you don't make sense to anyone but yourself," I replied. I had hurried past the word's countless implications in the grown up world, but she seemed to understand how it applied to our pug, locked in his own paranoid tail chasing. In coming to that simple, but very complicated, understanding with my daughter, I realized just how important a shared sense of meaning is in our brave new world of social distancing and self isolation. Communication and comprehension are as critical to the delicate social fabric that holds us together as facts and research are to scientific investigation and advancement. And art, in turn, is a social investigation, with the results contributing to the advancement of society. It is one of the key ways we work out, as a group, what makes sense to us and how best to communicate that awareness. That act of building a shared understanding is what attracts me to a particular role or story, or the work of one director over another. Work with themes and stories beyond my ken is vital to my developing any deeper understanding, appreciation or acceptance of the interwoven global culture that all art comes from. Recently, for example, I played the conservative icon and staunch anti feminist Phyllis Schlafly in the FX series "Mrs. America." On first encounter, Schlafly and I are, let's say, two guests you wouldn't invite to the same dinner party. But that was precisely why I was attracted to the role. I was drawn to investigate, illuminate, make sense of and hopefully understand the apparent gap between us. Simply put, there seems to exist a deep divide between Schlafly and me, between "staying at home" and "making your way in the world." Between, from one perspective, obedience and adventure. Or, seen differently, between the demands of faith and the indulgence of the self. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said during a rare television interview on Thursday that the United States "may well" be in a recession already, but that it should get the coronavirus under control before getting back to work. "The first order of business will be to get the spread of the virus under control, and then to resume economic activity," Mr. Powell said on NBC's "Today." "The virus is going to dictate the timetable here." Mr. Powell's comments contrasted with those of President Trump, who has suggested that he wants many Americans to get back to work as soon as Easter, less than three weeks away, and that efforts to slow the spread of the virus by shutting down large parts of the economy should not be worse than the disease itself. The coronavirus pandemic is inflicting enormous economic damage in the United States, as quarantines close businesses, force workers to stay at home and create uncertainty that has spurred volatility in financial markets. Mr. Powell and his colleagues have been taking aggressive measures to shore up the economy, and he used his first major interview since the crisis began to underline what they are doing and why. "You may well see significant rises in unemployment, significant declines in economic activity," Mr. Powell said. He added that eventually the economy would bounce back, helped by central bank policy, and "we want to make that rebound as vigorous as possible." Shortly after he spoke, new data on jobless claims were released, underlining just how painful efforts to contain coronavirus have been for America's businesses and employees. Nearly 3.3 million people filed initial jobless claims last week, a huge surge from 281,000 a week earlier and more than four times the previous record high. While the economic fallout from the coronavirus is sure to be severe, causing what many expect to be the biggest single quarter drop in U.S. growth on record, Fed officials have said they are trying to put the economy into position so it can snap back once the pandemic ends and the world returns to work. To do so, central bankers want to ensure that American households are well placed to borrow and spend once the economy begins its recovery. They cut interest rates to near zero over the course of two emergency meetings this month to make credit cheaper. Officials are also trying to prevent the financial system from melting down amid extreme market volatility. The goal is to keep financing easily available to businesses, which could help tide them through the current dry spell. If too many companies fail and shed workers permanently, the downturn could become much more protracted. The Fed committed to buying as many government bonds as necessary to soothe markets after ruptures appeared in Treasury and housing debt. It has intervened aggressively in the market for short term loans between banks to keep that corner functioning smoothly, and it is using its emergency lending powers to backstop corporate bonds. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The aid legislation working its way through Congress would give the Fed money to ramp up those lending programs. The central bank had already announced facilities to help large corporations, small businesses and money market funds, backed by a Treasury Department fund containing 94 billion. Now, it can scale up those programs with Treasury agreeing to take initial losses on any loans that go sour. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has estimated that the financing, 454 billion, could support more than 4 trillion in Fed operations. "When it comes to this lending, we're not going to run out of ammunition," Mr. Powell said. "That doesn't happen." His appearance at a fraught economic moment recalled a similar one by a predecessor, Ben S. Bernanke, during the depths of the 2007 09 recession. Mr. Bernanke appeared on "60 Minutes" in March 2009, six months after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and seven before the unemployment rate would peak at 10 percent. Fed chairs never appeared in television interviews at the time, making it a momentous attempt to reassure the American people. "I think we've averted that risk," Mr. Bernanke said when asked if the country was headed into a new Great Depression. "Now the problem is to get the thing working properly again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
When Meghan Fedor opened her mailbox recently, she found a brown paper bag with a length of green ribbon enclosed, along with a note explaining that a local high school girl was undergoing treatment for lymphoma and that the ribbons could serve as a show of support. Within days, some 150 homes in Ms. Fedor's Basking Ridge neighborhood had ribbons waving from mailboxes and lamp posts. It's this kind of neighborly act, said Ms. Fedor, who commutes to a job at the Environmental Protection Agency in New York three days a week, that has had her marveling since she moved here almost two years ago. "At the store," she said, "people would let you go first. On the road, drivers were letting me in instead of cutting me off. And people at the municipal building would actually return my calls. It blew my mind." Scott and Katie Strobridge have had a similar experience in their six years in Basking Ridge. About 18 months ago, with two children and a third on the way, they traded up from their two bedroom town house, never even considering any other towns, said Mr. Strobridge, a lawyer for Chubb Insurance. "We knew we had met a group of people we really liked," he added. "We were in a good school district. It was clear we were going to stay." Attractions include the highly rated school system, the wide range of housing, lower taxes and a reasonable commute to New York. What some may be surprised to find is a town of 28,350 residents that blends a rural setting with an urban vibe. The former comes from deep history and vast open space, both of which residents work hard to preserve. The latter is credited to the eclectic population, and to the many recreational, business and cultural possibilities. The community, which is actually part of Bernards Township, is home to Verizon's enormous corporate headquarters; the Lyons V.A. Medical Center and adjoining golf course; an arts center in an 18th century farmhouse; and even a nudist colony. "Everything peacefully coexists," said Mayor Carolyn Gaziano. "The town grew up slowly," she added, "so people are just content that whatever came before is O.K. We want to grow, but we're very protective of our history and open space; those are very important to our residents." The 24.5 square mile Bernards Township is divided into four sections; the smallest one is Basking Ridge. The name is used to describe the whole town, however, in part because the United States Postal Service has accorded most residents a Basking Ridge mailing address. Basking Ridge's houses remain on the market 2.5 months, on average, said John Turpin of Turpin Realtors. Marie Gilmore, 84, is one who hopes to benefit from that relatively quick turnaround, having recently listed the three bedroom three bath colonial on two acres that she and her family have lived in since 1962. She is asking 629,000. "I had a hard time deciding at first," she said, "but my feeling is, you just have to move on and let others move in." The name Basking Ridge first appeared in the early 1700s, supposedly inspired by the woodland animals that climbed up to a ridge to bask in the sun. Today, much of that ridge is filled with housing, which was greatly expanded in the last two decades through a multiphase development known as "the Hills": thousands of condos, town houses and single family homes built by some of the state's biggest housing development companies like K. Hovnanian Homes and Toll Brothers. "When I'm showing someone the town," said Jennifer Blanchard of Weichert Realtors, "I'll drive them around, and within the first half hour I'll know if they want to focus on the Hills or if they want to look in the downtown area." She notes that those who prefer the Hills want newer houses and more populated neighborhoods, for which they are willing to trade lot size. The Hills also has the newest elementary school. On the other hand, the town's center is full of shops and offices housed in 18th and 19th century buildings, and neighborhoods surrounding the center are home to Basking Ridge's more historic homes. The municipal hall is in a 1912 mansion on 28 acres once owned by John Jacob Astor VI, whose father died in the sinking of the Titanic. There are two other historic districts: Liberty Corner, which was originally a summer resort colony, and Franklin Corners, where some of the town's earliest farmers and millers lived and worked. Much of the central part of town consists of colonials, split levels and Cape style homes built starting in the 1950s. The town also has about 10 condominium and town house complexes. As of late March, 113 houses were listed in Basking Ridge, at an average asking price of 925,814, according to Ms. Blanchard. From March 2011 to March 2012, 401 houses sold, at an average price of 645,994; the previous year 349 sales occurred, at an average of 639,732. At the top of the current market is an 18 room French country manor on three acres; still under construction, it is listed at 6.5 million. Near the center of town, a recently built six bedroom house on an acre is listed at 3.95 million. At the low end, a one bedroom one bath condo is listed at 179,000. Homes in the Hills section start at 300,000 for a condo; town houses are in the 500,000 range; detached houses start at 600,000. The Strobridges paid 828,000 for their five bedroom 1978 colonial on an acre. The central gathering place in the summer is the Pleasant Valley Pool, where a family membership runs 475 for the season, plus an initation fee of 400. The 111 acre park also has tennis courts, ball fields and an amphitheater. A nine hole golf course on the V.A. hospital campus is run by the town and open to the public. At the 950 acre Lord Stirling Park and Horse Stables, a qualifying rider can rent horses or take advantage of the trails; the Environmental Educational Center has programs year round. Art exhibits and classes, and musical performances, are held year round at the historic Kennedy Martin Stelle Farmstead. Annually on Charter Day, coming up in mid May, the town is taken over by performers, artists and vendors. Beyond the downtown commercial district, the town has four shopping plazas; the Bridgewater Mall is 10 minutes away. Schools are consistently ranked near the top in the state, both in regional surveys and national publications like Newsweek and Forbes. Through Grade 5, children attend one of four public elementary schools: Cedar Hill, Liberty Corner, Mount Prospect or Oak Street. William Annin Middle School covers Grades 6 through 8, followed by Ridge High School, which has an enrollment of a little over 1,700. SAT averages in 2011 were 595 in math, 577 in reading and 578 in writing, versus 517, 493 and 496 statewide. Private school options include Pingry; Albrook, a Montessori school, and the School of St. James, a parochial school. Both I 287 and I 78 bisect Basking Ridge; each has two exits, providing easy access to the hourlong drive to New York. There are also two NJ Transit train stations, offering some direct and more frequent connecting service via Summit or Hoboken. The trip takes about 80 minutes and costs 14 one way. The Lakeland bus, via Route 78, takes an hour to get to Port Authority and costs about 12 one way. Founded by royal charter in 1760 and named after New Jersey's provincial governor at the time, Sir Francis Bernard, Bernards Township is loaded with structures, artifacts and plaques recognizing its role in the Revolutionary War. In the graveyard of the Presbyterian Church are the remains of 35 Revolutionary soldiers. During the Civil War, the town turned out uniforms for Northern soldiers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
SAN FRANCISCO Travis Kalanick, who built Uber into a transportation behemoth, was ousted as chief executive of the ride hailing company in June by unhappy investors. Now, one of those investors has escalated the battle by suing Mr. Kalanick, claiming fraud and other transgressions, in an attempt to remove him from Uber's board of directors. Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that is one of Uber's largest shareholders, filed suit against Mr. Kalanick on Thursday in Delaware Chancery Court, accusing the former chief executive of fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. At the heart of the suit is how Mr. Kalanick obtained outsize control of several Uber board seats in 2016, which Benchmark said he achieved through "material misstatements and fraudulent concealment" of information. Mr. Kalanick's "overarching objective is to pack Uber's board with loyal allies in an effort to insulate his prior conduct from scrutiny and clear the path for his eventual return as C.E.O. all to the detriment of Uber's stockholders, employees, driver partners, and customers," the suit said. The suit added that Mr. Kalanick's position on Uber's board "is thus improper and inequitable, and should be invalidated." The move signaled a new level of power politicking over the fate of Uber, the privately held company that is valued at nearly 70 billion. Mr. Kalanick, who had built Uber up over the last eight years, stepped down in June after pressure from investors, leaving no clear successor, though he remained on the company's board. Uber's directors have since fought behind the scenes over matters including potential candidates for chief executive, with the dissension hampering decision making. The suit shines a spotlight on governance issues at Silicon Valley start ups. Most young technology companies are built atop the partnerships of entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists who fund them. In recent years, start up founders have gained more control over their companies as investors have agreed to give up more of their authority to get a piece of the hottest firms. Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, and Snap's founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, all control voting rights at their companies, for example. Benchmark's suit shows that the balance of power is delicate. Investors will go to great lengths to undercut a company founder if they believe their investment is endangered. "This is a power struggle over management," Steven Hill, author of a book on Uber's economic impact, said of Benchmark's lawsuit. "The board looked the other way for years while Travis engaged in all sorts of unethical and even illegal behavior. He is their monster." Benchmark declined to comment further on its suit, which was earlier reported by Axios. Uber also declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Kalanick said, "The lawsuit is completely without merit and riddled with lies and false allegations." The spokesman said Benchmark was acting in "its own best interests" instead of those of Uber, and added that Mr. Kalanick "is confident that these entirely baseless claims will be rejected." Mr. Kalanick is not interested in returning to Uber as chief executive, according to a person involved in the proceedings, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to talk publicly. Others have said Mr. Kalanick wants to be a shadow leader without necessarily having the chief executive title. Benchmark invested in Uber six years ago, when the ride hailing service was a minnow. Bill Gurley, a Benchmark partner, joined the company's board at the time. Benchmark's then 20 percent stake in Uber has now ballooned into one worth of billions of dollars. For years, the relationship between Mr. Kalanick and Mr. Gurley and by extension Benchmark was close. But that changed this year when Uber was plunged into a series of scandals. Among other things, the company faced claims that its workplace included sexual harassment, and it was sued by Google's sister company, Waymo, for stolen trade secrets over self driving cars. Mr. Gurley distanced himself from Mr. Kalanick, and Benchmark eventually allied itself with other concerned Uber investors to push Mr. Kalanick out. Benchmark currently owns a 13 percent stake in Uber, and Mr. Kalanick has a 10 percent chunk, according to the suit. Even so, Mr. Kalanick has significant clout over the company. That's partly because of a move he made in June 2016, which the suit hones in on. At the time, Mr. Kalanick got Benchmark to approve an amendment to the company's charter that gave him the right to nominate three new directors to add to Uber's eight member board. According to the suit, Benchmark would never have agreed to the move had it known of Mr. Kalanick's "gross mismanagement and other misconduct at Uber." Yet Mr. Kalanick deliberately hid the problems at Uber, Benchmark claimed in the suit, and therefore he obtained the rights over the three new board seats fraudulently. After Mr. Kalanick stepped down in June, he also left the board seat that is designated for the chief executive, the suit said. Mr. Kalanick then immediately reappointed himself to one of the three new board seats that he controlled through the 2016 amendment. He has since refused to give up control of the other two board seats, according to the suit. In public, the board said there was a detente. "We look forward to continuing to serve with him on the board," said the board about Mr. Kalanick in a statement at the time. But his continued attachment to Uber has taken a toll, the suit said. For weeks, Mr. Kalanick has privately been waging a war against those who pushed for his dismissal, according to current and former Uber employees. And that has interfered with Uber's chief executive search and other situations, including a possible investment from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. Last month, many of Uber's board members were excited about one prospective candidate for chief executive, Meg Whitman, who is the chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. But Mr. Kalanick was not part of that group and had his own preferred candidates. Ms. Whitman eventually posted on Twitter that "Uber's C.E.O. will not be Meg Whitman." In the suit, Benchmark said it was seeking a judgment that the 2016 amendment to Uber's corporate charter should be voided, and asked for an injunction to stop Mr. Kalanick from participating in Uber board matters. "Kalanick's improper actions, if allowed to continue, would cause irreparable harm to Uber by exposing it to reputational, regulatory and other risks," Benchmark said in the suit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Lynn Evans Mand, who was plucked from obscurity to become the lead singer of the Chordettes, performing with them during the height of their fame in the 1950s and '60s on songs like the instantly recognizable hits "Mr. Sandman" and "Lollipop," died on Feb. 6 at a care facility in Elyria, Ohio. She was 95. Her grandson Robert Evans II said the cause was a stroke. The Chordettes began in the 1940s in Sheboygan, Wis., as an all woman barbershop quartet. They appeared regularly on Arthur Godfrey's popular radio and television shows. In 1953 Ms. Evans, as she was known at the time, was a case worker for the Red Cross and sang with an amateur barbershop quartet in Youngstown, Ohio. One day the Chordettes came through town for a performance, and Ms. Evans had a chance to sit in. The members of the group were so impressed with her voice that when the time came to replace one of the original Chordettes, Dorothy Schwartz, who was leaving to have a child, Ms. Evans was asked to audition for the spot. She won it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Every few days, the florist Maurice Harris goes to his local Home Depot in Los Angeles to get supplies for renovation projects that rarely have anything to do with flowers. "I have a bachelor's degree from YouTube University," he joked, of the how to videos that taught him to install a kitchen sink and pound decomposed granite into the ground. He has rented an Echo Park house for 16 years, but it wasn't until the pandemic that he actually spent much time in it, and improvements, and the Home Depot trips, were necessary. So much felt heavy, and he wanted his space to feel good. Mr. Harris, 38, is the founder of Bloom Plume, a luxury floral studio that has become a springboard for him as a multidisciplinary artist, businessman and entertainer. He designs floral installations and arrangements for global brands and high profile clientele; runs a community coffee shop; and is, most recently, the creator, producer and witty star of a new Quibi show, "Centerpiece," in which he interviews black multidisciplinary artists, including Maya Rudolph and Jeremy O. Harris, and then interprets their creative processes as floral installations. Mr. Harris calls his aesthetic "natural opulence." His floral arrangements are characterized by elements that don't make obvious company (a pine next to an anthurium, for example) and they look as if held together by magic. Though the high end flower landscape is dominated by muted palettes, Mr. Harris works with colors that are unapologetically bright sometimes neon popping through layers that evoke something different every time. The undone quality of his work what he calls a "wild" contrast to pave arrangements that dominated floral design until the early 2010s was not in vogue when Mr. Harris started a decade ago. "I grew up in L.A., there are florists everywhere," Ms. Jones said in a phone interview. "They're all kind of the same. So I took a deep breath when I saw an arrangement from him, because I'd just never seen anything like it before. He's not trying to fit into anybody's idea of what that aesthetic is supposed to be." Bloom Plume was born in 2010 after Mr. Harris was laid off from a job dressing windows at Juicy Couture. He had graduated from Otis College of Art and Design and grown up in Stockton, Calif., one of four children. He always wanted to be a designer and started rearranging his mother's furniture at age 7. "I've always been trying to make spaces more beautiful," Mr. Harris said. "I went with flowers because it was an untapped medium." He met the clothing designer Jenni Kayne in 2009 and eventually started arranging her brand's window dressings and her home florals. She introduced him to a circle of connected women in Los Angeles who became his clients. "I think there's a movement to his florals that most people don't have," Ms. Kayne said. "They feel sculptural, almost like they're dancing." That's intentional. "It wasn't until I took a dance class that I understood what it meant when someone gets the Holy Ghost," said Mr. Harris, who once taught at the Sweat Spot dance studio in Los Angeles. His father is a Baptist pastor, and church still informs Mr. Harris's work. "My black identity was basically developed in church," he said. "I would get buried in gospel music. I love it so much." But, Mr. Harris said, he has spent much of his life as a gay man at odds with that music's greater institution. "It was very clear to me, very young, that my parents weren't here for it, my community wasn't here for it," he said. Many of his family relationships have since evolved. (His mother, a former minister of music at his childhood church, plays a gospel organ on "Centerpiece.") After working with Ms. Kayne and her friends, Mr. Harris started attracting celebrity clients, though he balks at the suggestion that his proximity to fame is the most interesting thing about him. "I was talented before Beyonce sat on my sofa," he said, when asked about the star, who posed with his florals at the "Queen Slim" premiere last year. But with the growth of Mr. Harris's business came an uncomfortable tension. "I'm making these beautiful things that I couldn't afford myself, and there's something weird here," Mr. Harris said. "Capitalism and creativity and who owns it." "I've been keenly aware of me failing to be a rich person," he said, laughing. "I'm in all these homes, and at a certain point I was like, 'Oh my God, I can merchandise my refrigerator and go to the farmers' market and get all these cute little ceramic bowls to put my fruits and vegetables in.' And then I was like, wait what?" The act of negotiating multiple realms meant finding mediums for expressing himself. "I don't have a lot of clients of color, but a lot of people of color follow me on Instagram," Mr. Harris said of the platform, where he is known to anthropomorphize his arrangements. "People were interested in what was going on here, but don't necessarily have access. I've tried to find ways to give entry points for people to feel comfortable. I've always thought that beauty is one of the communicating tools that allures people to think about something differently." His thoughts around access to creativity led to the 2019 opening of Bloom Plume Coffee, a bright, color drenched cafe next to his floral studio in Filipinotown. "I wanted to create a transformative space that gave people access to the magic that we create," he said of the business, which features community programming like dialogues about the George Floyd protests. "Maybe you can't afford one of our arrangements, but you can come and see the beautiful flowers in our space, and coffee is a luxurious experience," he said. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the shop waits in takeout and delivery limbo. With his brother, the shop's co owner, Mr. Harris applied for Paycheck Protection Program loans and was approved for 25,000, which he stretched to pay his staff of seven. Because of the recent surge in support for black owned businesses, the shop had seen the number of people served daily jump from about 90 to 300, a shift Mr. Harris hopes isn't a short lived trend. But the business has little savings and "our space is set up for people to be in community," Mr. Harris said in an interview in May. "For people to connect. For people to feel seen and be seen. And now is not the time for that." "The way that capitalism is structured is not made for small businesses to win," Mr. Harris said. "It's not made for people who don't come from money to win which in turn usually means people of color, black people, are not set up to be successful." "Mind you, I'm in all these crazy 1 percent homes and I don't know how to negotiate what I do versus how I operate in the world," he said in our first interview, in February. "I was raised around a lot of white people, so I know how to code switch in a seamless way. And it was an interesting moment for me to be like: I feel like if I saw a black dude in a black hoodie, I would cross the street, too. Because I'm gay, and I feel like the only people who have been overtly mean to me were black people. I had to question my own prejudice against myself, my own homophobia, all these different things." By May, when we spoke again, protests were erupting across the country over the killing of George Floyd. "It's hard not to feel like my existence doesn't matter," Mr. Harris said, sitting in his car in the Home Depot parking lot. "Taking a pick, violently driving it into the ground and digging ditches was a productive way to deal with my rage." Control and impermanence were concepts he'd been thinking a lot about lately. (Flowers' short life spans had prepared him somewhat for this.) Ten years of dogged work had produced a small staff for his studio, a robust clientele, a creative space and a TV show. Now, the future was in question, and the fragile balance of creativity and commerce with which he'd always grappled had come to the fore. "It's heartbreaking because I feel like we were on the brink of something quite magical," he said. He could build a sought after brand, but that didn't mean his business would necessarily weather an unprecedented health crisis. He could devote his creative platforms to celebrating blackness, but he couldn't stop the murder of black people. "I can't control that people think my life is less valuable than theirs," Mr. Harris said. "So I try to counter that reality with letting go. And flowers are such a beautiful expression of that they aren't forever, you can't hoard them, so you have to be in a constant state of evolution and letting go." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Tara VanDerveer tied Pat Summitt for the most career coaching wins in Division I women's college basketball on Sunday night when top ranked Stanford trounced its rival California, 83 38, in Berkeley. The victory was the 1,098th of her career, which began at Idaho, led her to Ohio State for five seasons and then to Stanford, where in the space of four seasons she took a Pacific 10 Conference doormat to the 1990 national championship. It is one of two women's basketball national championships Stanford has won. VanDerveer, 67, can move past Summitt, the longtime Tennessee coach who died in 2016, on Tuesday night when the Cardinal plays at Pacific. How long VanDerveer holds on to the record is uncertain. She entered Sunday night's game with five more wins than Connecticut's Geno Auriemma. VanDerveer might have passed Summitt earlier and been further ahead of Auriemma had she not spent a year away from Stanford to coach the 1996 United States women's Olympic team to a gold medal. She may have also reached the milestone last season had the N.C.A.A. tournament not been canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Cardinal finished last season ranked seventh with a 27 6 record, leaving her four wins behind Summitt. VanDerveer said after Sunday's win that Stanford's annual game against Tennessee they have played every season since 1988 89 had helped her as a coach. "I liked the idea of competing against great coaches to get better," said VanDerveer, who appreciated Summitt's passion for basketball and how hard her teams played. "If I tied this record, she helped me do it by playing against her teams." For years, Stanford was a foil for the national championship ambitions of Connecticut and Tennessee, but the Cardinal in recent years have slipped slightly in stature in part through the ascendance of Oregon and Oregon State, which have each reached a Final Four in the past five seasons. Stanford, which had won 14 consecutive Pac 12 regular season titles from 2001 14, has not won one since. But a resurgence coincided last season with the arrival of Haley Jones, the first time in nearly a decade that the nation's top recruit went to Stanford. The Cardinal began this season ranked second before climbing to the top spot with three lopsided victories. The Cardinal scored the game's first 14 points against Cal, though there was at least one dramatic moment sophomore forward Francesca Belibi threw down a one handed breakaway dunk just before halftime. It was the first dunk in a women's college game since 2013. "Someone didn't send Fran the memo," said VanDerveer, whose players did a little dance around her at the end of Sunday's game. "We're going to be talking about the dunk instead of this." A celebration of VanDerveer's record has been muted by the pandemic. The Stanford women's basketball team, like its football and men's basketball teams, has left campus and is unable to return without quarantining for two weeks because of directives from the Santa Clara County, Calif., health department, which banned sporting events and practices on Nov. 28. The Cardinal spent 10 days in Las Vegas, where they played two games, before leaving for Berkeley, in Alameda County, Calif., north of their usual home base, on Saturday. Their next scheduled home game is Jan. 8 against Oregon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"True Detective" has fallen off the wagon. For the first two episodes of Season 3, the show had been taking a conservative, back to basics approach to the procedural that seemed like a correction to the indulgences of the previous season, which got lost in the tangled psychology of four lead characters who were the same brand of "edgy." Those two episodes, directed by the genre wizard Jeremy Saulnier ("Green Room," "Blue Ruin"), evoked the poverty and fear of its small town Arkansas backdrop, but they also did the unglamorous work of moving the story forward. Two kids were abducted. One is dead. The other is still missing. The urgency of that situation should be the engine that moves "True Detective" forward, even in the two later timelines, when the cold case has once more become hot. But now it has run completely aground. Developments in the case are so slow moving and diffuse that it's hard to keep track of them, and most of them are probably red herrings anyway. Dead ends are to be expected in the middle of an eight hour whodunit, but that doesn't absolve the series's creator, Nic Pizzolatto, from the responsibility to keep plugging away. It's not just the detectives in "The Hour and the Day" who are losing their sense of direction it's as if the show itself had unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Jack Daniels and gone for a swim. Maybe it will wake from its stupor and start working the case again, but for now it's passed out on the couch. And it's dreaming about the Viet Cong. This week's episode was Pizzolatto's inauspicious debut as director, though the problems here are mostly with the script, which is credited to him and David Milch, the trailblazing showrunner of "Deadwood" and "NYPD Blue." It's impossible to say how much influence Milch wielded, but many of Pizzolatto's weaknesses are on display here: grossly overwritten dialogue, a leaden understanding of domestic relationships and a tendency to brood alongside his characters. Of the many sins committed by this episode up to and including a scene in which about a dozen VCs haunt the elder Hays in his office the worst is that it's boring. At 67 minutes, it's the longest of the four so far, and a brief "previously on" would be enough to capture all that is really learned from it. What detective work does get done in this hour sets up a few suspects who will probably be knocked down later. Hays and West head out to the Catholic Church where the First Communion photograph of Will Purcell in "prayerful repose" was taken, which the detectives believe inspired his killer to position the boy's corpse in the same way. The priest says the image signifies "innocence and rebirth in Christ," suggesting that perhaps the perpetrator was readying him for the hereafter. Being in church is uncomfortable for Hays, a lapsed Catholic who later refuses to take the Eucharist because he hasn't been to confession for years. West is more blunt about it: He doesn't like the priest because the vow of celibacy is unthinkable to him. The bedroom is a battleground for Pizzolatto, a place where fighting and lovemaking are so closely associated that one inevitably leads to another, no matter how absurd the circumstances. There's a note of self awareness in the stormy exchange between Hays and Amelia in 1990, when she calls him out for the sort of listnessless that is dogging the case (and the show). "Everything's just happening to you," she says. "You're a grown man with no agency of your own." The throwdown to come is bad enough for Hays to turn up the volume on the television so the kids don't hear it, but all that spirited yadda yadda leads to an abrupt sex scene that tables the argument more than resolves it. Dysfunction is a continuing condition of Pizzolatto relationships, leavened occasionally by a good shag. The episode does touch on a theme about the regrettable inheritance children sometimes receive from their parents, despite good intentions. Hays and Amelia's kids will absorb the tensions in their marriage; we know this because Hays's daughter, Becca, is no longer speaking to him in the 2015 timeline. That sentiment carries over to a conversation Amelia has with Lucy Purcell, who bitterly regrets the unhappy home she and her husband Tom built around their now absent children. She feels guilty that their turbulent marriage caused Will and Julie to retreat somewhere else somewhere potentially unsafe for comfort, rather than seek comfort in the adults who were supposed to be protecting them. "Children should laugh," she tells Amelia. "There wasn't a lot of laughter around here." That's a heartbreaking sentiment, unifying many of the grown up characters in "True Detective" this season, who are all failing their children to varying degrees. Yet Pizzolatto steps all over it by having Lucy say lines like "I got the soul of a whore," which goes far beyond her (or anyone's) capacity for self assessment, or lashing out at Amelia by calling her a "pickaninny." The show had played subtly with race earlier in the season, when Hays and Amelia addressed her standing in the mostly white community in coded language. But a term like "pickaninny," paired with Tom Purcell's invocation of the N word earlier in the episode, is a provocation that Pizzolatto can't be trusted to handle. He's like a kid playing with matches. Part of the "True Detective" formula is the midseason spasm of violence, which manifested itself in the first season with the famed six minute tracking shot of a violent melee in the projects and in the second with a daylight ambush that wiped out dozens. This episode ends with Brett Woodard (Michael Greyeyes), a garbage collector and Vietnam veteran, hunkering down against the posse of redneck vigilantes who threatened him for talking to children. Fallout to be continued ... "You got some major cognitive dissonance." There are moments when Pizzolatto does seem to be aware of how ridiculous some of these situations can be, but they pass quickly. Hays and Amelia's relationship soured over time, but in retrospect, Hays's likening of a vagina to a holster should have raised a red flag. In his demented state, Hays has been haunted by his late wife and the Viet Cong. I shudder to imagine who his next imaginary guest might be. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Record sales of a new hepatitis C drug pushed the first quarter earnings of Gilead Sciences far beyond expectations, the company reported on Tuesday, but could also heighten concerns about the high cost of the drug, known as Sovaldi, and the ability of the health care system to pay for it. The 2.3 billion in sales of Sovaldi appears to have shattered the previous record for sales of a drug in its first full quarter on the market. It even appears to have already eclipsed the record for first year sales, at least in the United States. About 2.1 billion of the Sovaldi sales were in the United States. The previous record was held by Incivek, a hepatitis C drug from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, with 1.56 billion in United States sales in its first four full quarters on the market, according to EP Vantage, a news analysis service. Sales of Sovaldi were crucial to Gilead's first quarter revenue of 5 billion, double that of a year ago. Net income for the quarter was 2.23 billion, well above the 722.2 million of the same period last year. The rapid uptake of Sovaldi to some degree reflects pent up demand, as many patients were holding off treatment until it was approved in December. The drug, a pill taken once a day, has a higher cure rate, a shorter duration of treatment and fewer side effects than previous treatments. But Sovaldi, which has a list price of 1,000 per pill, or 84,000 for a typical course of treatment, has become a flash point in a debate over drug prices. Paying for Sovaldi for all the patients who need it could put financial strain on insurers, state Medicaid programs, the Department of Veterans Affairs and prison systems. UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest insurers, said last week that its first quarter earnings had declined in part because it had spent more than 100 million on hepatitis C treatments, including Sovaldi, far more than it expected. Concerns over public resistance to soaring prices contributed to a decline in Gilead's stock price since the beginning of March, along with those of many other biotechnology companies, though there has been a recent uptick. Gilead shares rose nearly 2 percent to 72.86 in regular trading Tuesday and climbed further in after hours trading following the release of the company's results. Gilead defends the price, saying Sovaldi can save the health system money over all. "First and foremost, the value of a cure, I tend to think, is underestimated in terms of the overall advantage that the health care system receives from it," John F. Milligan, chief operating officer of Gilead, said on a conference call with analysts Tuesday. Three million to four million Americans, mostly baby boomers, may have hepatitis C. The disease can cause cirrhosis, or scarring of the liver, and liver cancer, though usually not for decades after the infection occurs. Some organizations are now limiting use of Sovaldi to only those with more advanced disease, saying others can wait without risk because of how slowly the disease progresses. "We are telling folks to wait for a while on less urgent cases," said Dr. William E. Golden, medical director of Arkansas Medicaid. The Veterans Affairs Department put out guidelines saying it was "reasonable to defer" treatment for many patients. But in many cases, the decision to hold off is being justified for reasons other than cost. Dr. Golden said there was actually relatively little data showing Sovaldi was safe and effective for all patients. "We'd rather see more clarity before we engage in a large investment of limited resources," he said. Also, newer drugs are coming that might be even better. For now, many patients must combine Sovaldi with a weekly injection of interferon, which has harsh side effects. But clinical trial results are accumulating. And Gilead is expected by October to win regulatory approval of a one a day pill combining Sovaldi with another drug that will do away with the need for interferon. "By the end of this year, it will be very hard to make a case for waiting," said Dr. Sharon Levine, an executive at Kaiser Permanente. Once Gilead's new pill comes out, "We will treat anyone who warrants treatment," she said. Dr. Levine criticized Gilead's pricing, saying that if all of Kaiser's members with hepatitis C were to be treated in a single year, "it would double our total drug budget for all of our nine million members nationally." That won't happen because many people infected with the virus do not know they have it. And there is a limit to the capacity of doctors to treat patients. Gilead executives said on Tuesday that 30,000 people have tried the drug so far, leaving many more left. So the number of patients to be treated and big sales for Sovaldi may last years. Other companies are working on all oral regimens, and once their products arrive, competition might lower prices somewhat. One contender, AbbVie, said on Tuesday that it had applied for regulatory approval of its all oral regimen, which could reach the market by early next year. Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb and Johnson Johnson are also in the race. Some doctors say there is a benefit to treating even early stages of the disease, to prevent scarring of the liver. "If cost were not a factor, we would want to treat the entire population," said Dr. Rena Fox, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She said it was frustrating that "we finally get this great treatment and then we withhold it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Re "Reconsidering the Past, One Statue at a Time" (front page, June 17): As someone who has published revisionist history pieces, I find the debate over preserving our "history" fascinatingly disturbing. Most telling was this quote from Trip Hairston, a white county supervisor in Mississippi who opposed removing the monument to Confederate soldiers: "I don't agree with all that history, of course, but it is what it is it's history." Robert E. Lee himself said in 1869, "I think it wiser ... not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered." So even Lee would have wanted a statue of himself pulled down. What history does Mr. Hairston or others citing history as their defense think he is learning? Surely not one about heroic sons of the South. The Civil War was about treason and protecting the horrendous institution of slavery. And these monuments were mostly erected by white supremacists during the Jim Crow era to intimidate African Americans in their communities. If we learn anything from that history, it is to eradicate images of hate and oppression, not to glorify them. A history warped by the white victors of racism isn't what our country needs to perpetuate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
New York Galleries: What to See Right Now None Gina Beavers's "Who Has Braces?" (2014) in her show "The Life I Deserve" at MoMA PS1. Gina Beavers's sculptural paintings are too much. Caked with multiple layers of acrylic paint, they can look like earnest art projects more than bona fide art. However, this survey, "The Life I Deserve" at MoMA PS1 shows Ms. Beavers honing her idiosyncratic aesthetic that translates images into high relief objects, offering canny statements on contemporary bodies, beauty and culture . Ms. Beavers begins with pictures borrowed from social media and the internet and remakes them in a very material way: extreme manicures, makeup tutorials and foods simulating body parts. A painting of a body shaped cake with a slice removed from the buttocks is reminiscent of Wayne Thiebaud's Pop canvases of pastries and cakes, which equated food (or frosting) with painting and consuming art with eating but amped up to 21st century internet grotesqueness. The best known historical example of a work famous primarily for its excessive paint application is Jay DeFeo's "The Rose" (1958 66), a near abstract canvas that weighs nearly a ton. The work hovers on the edge of being gimmicky, relying on the shock value of paint accretion. Like Ms. DeFeo's project, the result of a seven year devotion, however, Ms. Beavers's works tackle the weirdness of immaterial images floating through the ether, building them up into something monumental, rather than dismissing them, as most of us do. MARTHA SCHWENDENER Monica Cook's "Receiver," from 2017, in her new solo show, "Above and Below" at UrbanGlass. In Monica Cook's world, and by extension her solo show "Above and Below," everything is both beautiful and decrepit. Glass serpents gleam in the sculpture "Honeypot" (2019), but the treelike structure they guard appears weathered and aged. The painting "Physalia" (2017) contains a congruous rainbow of colors yet looks like the residue of the chemical processes from an oil slicked ocean. For Ms. Cook, decay is not to be avoided or feared. Bringing together castoff objects with handmade ones, organic and artificial materials, she creates mutants and totems that seem less of our world than descended from it like a glimpse of a mythical, postapocalyptic, but still somehow human future. What's unusual about that future is that it feels hopeful. "Receiver" (2017), a marvel of assemblage, suggests that salvaged junk, if recombined in the right way, might just receive broadcast messages. The hollow, headless "Snowsuit" (2015) so stunningly and casually evokes the form of a woman that it seems like skin shed naturally, not through violence. In the video "Milk Tooth," a grotesque, humanoid pair lives surrounded by animals, eating corn, drinking watery milk, and caring for each other. Rather than be afraid of what comes next, Ms. Cook's work dares ask, what if we saw in it strange new possibilities? JILLIAN STEINHAUER 'Day After Day: RongRong and the Beijing East Village' Print from "RongRong's Diary Beijing East Village." RongRong documented Zhang Huan's famous performance work, for which he covered himself in honey and fish sauce and sat in a public latrine as flies covered his body. What is an avant garde? It may be a real group, it may be a historian's later confection, but once every few decades a young, mutinous generation collides with the rogue wave of history, and changes everything. It happened in 15th century Florence, in 1860s Paris, in 1950s New York and it happened in Beijing 25 years ago, when a circle of underfed bohemians, including Zhang Huan, Ai Weiwei and Ma Liuming, fought censors and developers to forge contemporary Chinese art. A 25 year old photographer named RongRong was among them, and 40 odd black and white prints here document the low rent fecundity of Beijing's East Village, named in tribute to New York's own beggared art quarter. RongRong witnessed Mr. Zhang's fabled, revolting performance "12 Square Meters," for which the artist slathered his naked body in honey and fish sauce, then let flies gorge on his flesh in a noxious public latrine. He photographed Mr. Zhang's nude body and shaved head, gleaming with sweat, angst and total dedication and then wrote to his sister, "It felt like the end of life." The police shut down Beijing East Village in 1994. The next quarter century would witness the flourishing of Chinese contemporary art, and then the arrival of a new president more powerful than any since the Cultural Revolution. If you know your Chinese art history, RongRong's photographs capture myths as foundational as Pollock dripping paint in front of Hans Namuth's lens . But you needn't be an expert to see RongRong's pictures of these young Beijing hipsters as a lost horizon, effaced by the capital's harsh new leaders and smooth glass towers. JASON FARAGO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
For her first official solo show in June 2018, the artist Ayana Evans was dressed in a skintight, neon green tiger stripe catsuit, doing jumping jacks (in heels) or push ups; then she challenged audience members to get down on the ground and do the push ups with her. The audience at Medium Tings gallery in Brooklyn consisted of several artists, college friends and former students she had taught at Brown. The mood was jubilant; Ms. Evans gave everyone a hug at the end. In later performances she wore a floor length gown, heels again and full makeup while going through the same calisthenic routines, until the makeup is washed away in a torrent of sweat and the artist almost melts into the floor. At other times she has popped up uninvited at exclusive events such as the Annual Black Ivy Alumni Gala wearing a fashionable dress and a sign pinned to her back that reads "I Just Came Here to Find a Husband." There is no shame to her game. Ms. Evans said there was an aspect to her wearing the neon catsuit that is about self acceptance. She had returned to the art scene after some time away working as an accessories designer, and though the fields of art and fashion are adjacent, she found herself feeling alienated. "I used to go to art events and no one would talk to me," she said. "It was really lonely." Ms. Evans found the catsuit at a designer friend's sample sale in 2012; it was one of the few things that fit her well, and so it became her art scene uniform. The catsuit operates like a trademark: It helps to make her a recognizable figure in the performance art scene in New York City, and more, donning it acts as a cue that she is going to work. And on June 24, she will have an Instagram live performance hosted by Wa Na Wari Gallery in Seattle. The artist is originally from Chicago, but her mother grew up in Alabama, and father in Mississippi, so a Southern lilt can be heard when she speaks. Both her parents are behavioral health therapists with doctoral degrees, and though Ms. Evans decided against becoming an academic, she demonstrates an incisive understanding of how to trouble a sleeping consciousness. In one performance, "Girl, I'd Drink Your Bath Water," created in Martinique in 2017, she drinks the soapy water from the tub in which she has taken a sponge bath while dressed in her catsuit. Her work focuses on perceptively playing with the tropes of femininity to dramatize the carefully calibrated balance that she and other people who identify as femme strike: among them, having a confident presence, wanting to be taken seriously, being regarded as desirable, and being emotionally or sexually available. The accoutrements of hair, makeup, dress, attitude, comportment and even companionship are all recruited to fine tune the signal as needed. But Ms. Evans doesn't want to succumb to the trap of unceasing self regulation and so turns up the controls of bodily presence until the signals commingle into dissonance. Ms. Evans's labors underscore and express all the risk and power of her body, which is regarded as voluptuous. She is influenced by the artists Pope.L and Lorraine O'Grady, particularly with Ms. O'Grady's willingness to take risks with her body and her ability to use her performances to issue a multifaceted critique of gender and race relations. Ms. Evans takes the baton and runs further. Roberta Fallon, co founder of Artblog, describes Ms. Evans as, "One part Wonder Woman, one part agent provocateur." I have seen the artist actually stop traffic on the Bowery in downtown Manhattan in 2016, where, in a floor length lace gown, a dollar store tiara and full makeup, she placed a chair in the street to do chair dips risking her life. She survived. The halted drivers honked in confusion, consternation or encouragement. Though she initially trained to be a painter, Ms. Evans became enamored with performance in the late aughts. It enabled her to confront "people who are unaware of their classism, people who are unaware of their racism, people who really don't support black women, people who have a lot of gender bias and don't support trans women, people who I think just need their eyes opened a little more," she said. Ms. Evans is deeply committed to not only making her audiences fully aware of the work of being a woman, but the particular labor associated with being a black woman in the United States. This has never been a popular avenue of discussion. She told Jessica Lanay in BOMB magazine that critics have advised her to speak in code in order to garner more attention, using words such as "feminism," "radical feminism," "body politics" and "acceptance," rather than say her work is about black womanhood. Through performing in outfits that mirror the ways some middle class black women are presented via popular culture, Ms. Evans focuses on herself as being representative of the general situation of black women, who experience persistent gender and race discrimination. They suffer from higher rates of incarceration and poverty and experience intimate partner violence more often than other women. Ms. Evans said that on dating sites, she sees that black women are always picked last. "I think it boils down to, somebody has to be on the bottom," she said. "We live in a society where that's how things are set up and a lot of people are invested in not being on the bottom with you." In this light, Ms. Evans's performance in her catsuit does the crucial work of not succumbing to this relegation. She makes herself hypervisible. Her black body cannot, and will not, be ignored or brushed aside. For eight years, Ms. Evans has been making punishing, layered performances. Her most grueling one consisted of her doing jumping jacks for three hours during the Rapid Pulse Festival in Chicago in 2016. Typically Ms. Evans only goes for two hours, but she extended herself because her family and friends were there. "My mother and my friends started jumping with me at one point, an older woman on the street started jumping; they want to encourage me to keep going," she said. "I used to say I'm jumping through hoops for men," she said. "And so, it was kind of like I need to work that out." The artist is making visible the labor that black women often carry out without being acknowledged by their romantic partners, their families, their peers, or their neighbors the labor of child care, of organizing the home, the civic labor voluntarily given to church groups and community organizations. In addition, Ms. Evans's work also alludes to the underlying disparities of critical attention, institutional support and financial status in an art scene that overwhelmingly favors white men. "There's an underlying feeling that this is how hard I have to go to make it as a black woman in art," she said. "And if I do any less, you won't be impressed." She continued, "If I march in place you won't be impressed; I have to jump. And if I do it for less than an hour you're not impressed. But if I do it for two you know you couldn't do it too, so now you're impressed. If I do it for three it makes me legend." Layered within her sense of responsibility to tell the intimate stories of black womanhood, there is also an aspect of the work that has to do with her feelings for her father, who has Parkinson's disease. The physically punishing performances are a kind of ode to her father, who used to be so fit he would run marathons. Her achievement came with consequences. Ms. Evans said she realized she would need to work with a personal trainer before she attempted another three hour performance. "I remember I couldn't walk for like a week." In a performance I attended in March 2019, "A Black Woman's Art Show and ... A White Man's Exhibition" I was asked to mash myself together with a group of mostly strangers as Ms. Evans circled us with a rope pulling us into an even tighter phalanx. As we hesitated to move toward each other, she repeated herself, loudly, which made us scurry into place. She said that when she's performing she tends to get bossy, just to keep the energy flowing and the piece moving forward. That performance ended with the now tight knit group, on her instructions, hoisting Ms. Evans's body above us, moving her back and forth, and then marching with her held aloft out of the gallery and onto the sidewalk. She knew what she was doing. We had to be a cohesive a group to pull off that final gesture. And only later I realized that this was, in its simplest terms, about raising a black woman up such easy, unpretentious nobility seen in a typically male, sports oriented gesture. The limiting factor of physically strenuous performance art (such as Pope.L' s famous "Crawl" pieces) is that it easily falls into spectacle, which washes away the nuanced meanings of the work. "At a certain point you're just drinking your own poison," she said. "You're trying to make people know that you're in pain, but there's a point where you're just hurting yourself and the people who are going to get it already got it." One way to avoid making the work a pageant of pain is to share the labor with audience members. "Come on, squish together!" she said. As participants shared the labor for a moment, our relationships to each other subtly transformed from simply being spectators. We all became engaged in trying to hold Ms. Evans's body and keep her safe above our heads. "I've been thinking a lot about hierarchies," Ms. Evans said. "The director of the gallery is standing next to the student. Everyone's mixing together, and I do think that there is something to these collective actions." The artist has discovered through physical work a way to cut through class, sexuality, race, gender, ethnicity and geography, and create a space for agency. "Especially for the femme presenting people in the audience, I was like, 'People don't expect you to ask for what you need, and I'm here screaming for it in front of you. Take that with you, remember that, because sometimes you need to demand what you need.'" It is both a beautiful and disruptive thing to ask for what you need to demand it; it means placing your body at risk. Ms. Evans is already there, in that place of risk, waiting for her audience to arrive and start doing the work with her. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Other governments have taken advantage of the crisis to take actions that otherwise would have been strongly resisted. With India under lockdown, the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced laws that would make it easier for Indians to become permanent residents in the Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir region. A look around the world shows many other governments that have overreached in response to the outbreak. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte, a ruthless strongman in normal times, seized even greater powers to fight the virus, including the threat of imprisonment for spreading fake news about the coronavirus a measure that presumably could be used to criminalize criticism of the government. Turkmenistan, arguably the most repressive country in Central Asia, imposed what may be the most draconian approach to information control, arresting people for even discussing the outbreak in public. In Thailand, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan ocha, who took power in a military coup in 2014, announced he was assuming emergency powers, including the right "to censor or shut down media if necessary." Whatever advantages autocracy might offer for shaping a response to the pandemic, it becomes truly dangerous when the strongman chooses to deny the threat or to give some alternative narrative. The all powerful president of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, has allowed the country's Premier League soccer season to proceed as scheduled, arguing in an echo of President Trump's comment that "we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself" that "the panic can hurt us more than the virus itself." Instead of staying home, as virtually every other government is urging people to do, Mr. Lukashenko recommends that Belarussians imbibe vodka daily, make regular visits to the sauna and do some hard farm work. In neighboring Russia, where President Putin has ramped up defenses against the outbreak, we can see another problem posed by autocratic regimes: dubious statistics. As of Thursday, Russia had more than 3,500 infections, but for weeks the authorities reported curiously low numbers. The real number may well be far higher. True to form, Russia has also joined China and Iran in spreading disinformation about the origins of the coronavirus on social media including the theory coming out of Beijing that it's an American disease that might have been introduced by American military visitors. In the end, it is hard to draw up a conclusive balance sheet on the relative disease fighting abilities of autocracies and democracies: The pandemic is far from finished, and there are many factors other than governing style. A country's wealth and resources obviously play a major role in its ability to respond to an unexpected crisis, and countries with a history of previous epidemics have a clear advantage in coping with new ones. Yet democracies do appear to hold a clear advantage. That may not seem obvious when China can throw up a new hospital in less than two weeks while New York City is fast running out of hospital beds. But the flow of information and public give and take in the United States could serve to constantly fine tune tactics against the disease; false information, deliberate or not, can be quickly exposed. Transparency, an official in Taiwan noted, was one of the most important factors in the success of the government's response. An analysis by The Economist of data from all epidemics since 1960 found that "for any given level of income, democracies appear to experience lower mortality rates for epidemic diseases than their non democratic counterparts." One reason, the magazine said, was that authoritarian regimes are "poorly suited to matters that require the free flow of information and open dialogue between citizen and rulers." It is unlikely that Mr. Lukashenko could sustain his foolhardy stance if Belarus had an independent news media. Where the Trump administration fits into this debate depends, as does so much in the American political landscape, on which side of the bitter political divide one stands on. The diversity of American democracy the local governments, varied health services, strong news media and multiple religious institutions preclude a China like rule by authoritarian diktat. But the inclination of the autocratically inclined to exploit a crisis should never be dismissed. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Have you lost someone you care about in the last month? Was a service held in his or her honor, either virtually or in a physical space? How has the experience of mourning or memorializing been for you? Please share your story, in no more than 200 words. Include your name, city, state and contact information, and put "mourning" in the subject line. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
At the start of January, the same month the world marked the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Antarctica, scientists on snowmobiles were zipping across its diamantine ice, dragging a rig of metal detectors in their wake. Researchers were hoping to discover a hypothesized cache of iron rich meteorites, the remnants of ancient asteroids and would be planets, under the frozen wastes. But the unexpected roughness of the ice caused the rig to shake itself to pieces. Components were being shorn off, and the electronic circuitry quickly became unstable, with multiple points of failure. On the 18th day in Antarctica's Outer Recovery Ice Fields, the device collapsed. All the backup metal detectors had been used in earlier repairs. No more repair jobs could resuscitate the unit. "It was death by vibration, but also death by a thousand cuts," said Wouter van Verre, an electrical engineer from the University of Manchester in England who helped build the system. This is no isolated tale. The history of the scientific exploration of Antarctica is riddled with tales of woe, most often loss of life for the continent's earlier explorers. And while major technological advancements and vastly improved safety regulations mean that the risk to Antarctic adventurers has been greatly reduced, equipment malfunctions that freeze scientific discovery persist there, said Daniella McCahey, a historian of Antarctica at the University of Idaho. When a vital piece of kit fails, the research often can only continue with MacGyveresque engineering solutions. Or projects end, leaving the prospects of additional discovery uncertain. The Snow Cruiser was an early example of an ill fated piece of equipment. Weighing 37 tons and built with pride in Chicago in 1939, it was designed to glide across the perilous Antarctic terrain with ease, allowing its crew to make scientific observations wherever they wished. But once it arrived in Antarctica, its massive and far too smooth tires were unable to power the wheeled beast across much of the ice. Eventually, after a particularly heavy storm, it was abandoned to a snowy grave. But even far less complex technology can be vulnerable to Antarctica's viciousness: During the 1957 1958 Commonwealth Trans Antarctic Expedition, the explorers' wristwatches vital for telling the time in a place with distinctly alien hours of light and darkness simply didn't work. "It's remarkably easier to keep the human machine working than the physical machines," said James Lloyd, an astronomer at Cornell University who spent two years at the Amundsen Scott research station at the South Pole in the mid 1990s. Preparation only gets you so far. You can test your technology as many times as you wish in the laboratory, or in Antarctic like wildernesses. Those iron meteorite hunters did both, and even conducted a successful trial run on a sliver of Antarctica. But until you try it at your eventual research site, "you don't know how it's going to work," Dr. McCahey said. "I promise you, there are no projects in Antarctica where the equipment works perfectly," said Matthew Siegfried, a glaciologist at the Colorado School of Mines. There are no heavy duty supply stops outfitted with abundances of gear at the icy end of the world, so expeditions bring as many spare parts as they can fly out, and hope for the best. "It's only a very short step from what you can resource people with in space," said Liam Marsh, an electrical engineer from the University of Manchester who helped build the meteorite detection system. Dr. Siegfried recalled a time he drove his snowmobile 45 miles from base to a remote GPS station, bringing along fuel canisters. When he stopped to refuel, he realized that the hand pump pipe that fed gas to the snowmobile had vanished, forcing him to transmogrify other parts of his kit into a fairly messy but ultimately effective fuel transfer system. This sort of ad hoc repair work is rarely enjoyable, Mr. van Verre said. You quickly miss the luxury of tables and chairs. Gloves are removed when fiddling with small components, leaving hands exposed to a painfully violent chill. Such difficulty can result in moments of posterior clenching horror. Nelia Dunbar, director of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, remembers bringing a snowmobile back to camp after its drive chain snapped. Mid repair, the snowmobile suddenly roared to life and reversed in full throttle, narrowly missing tearing up her team's tents. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The board is now Burnham's. Or so it seems. So much of this season of "Star Trek: Discovery" is about control. Of course, there is the literal villain Control the malevolent artificial intelligence which aims to wipe out all sentient life in the universe. A charming fellow, that one. And then there is the concept of control: So many characters struggle to take command of their own destinies, even though with the time travel element, it is a futile battle. Some characters Saru, for example have done better with this than others. But no character has had her life upended due to events beyond her control like Burnham. Whether it is investigating what happened with Spock, the re emergence of her mother or the loss of her friend Airiam, Burham is running from one emotional shock to the next. Her life has been full of suffering from a young age. The Vulcans shun her. Her adoptive father doesn't think highly of her human background. Her biological parents were murdered and she only finds out decades later the real reason. In "Perpetual Infinity," Burnham is teased with the slightest bit of happiness: Her mother is within arm's reach and finally they can be together. Of course, there is a containment field between the two of them, and by the end of the episode, Burnham has lost her once again this time, likely for good. She's less a Vulcan than a Buddhist: Life is suffering. At the very start of the episode, the Discovery crew awakens Burnham from the dead, because in the "Discovery" universe, death is merely a construct. No one really dies. There is only struggle and even that is pointless. Control takes over Leland's body, essentially, to fool his Starfleet colleagues into doing the artificial intelligence's bidding. I am not entirely sure what Control is, but there are some theories that this is an early form of the Borg. I'm not sure I buy that: Control is focused on destruction, whereas the Borg on perfection. (And selfishly, I am really hoping this isn't the Borg. The most terrifying villains in Trek history do not need an origin story. Their mystery adds to the intrigue.) A side note: How did Control restrain Leland to the chair? As far as last week's big revelation, Burnham's mother, Gabrielle, played admirably by Sonja Sohn, is trapped in Burnham's time. She appears to not be able to stay in different time periods for long, because an anchor of some sort keeps pulling her to a spot where organic life has been wiped out: apparently 950 years into the future from when Klingons appeared to kill her and her husband. She doesn't want to speak to her daughter. She only wants to speak to Pike, to whom she says, "I could say more about your future, but you won't like it," an Easter egg for Trekkies well aware of Pike ending up in a wheelchair. Gabrielle wants Discovery to destroy the sphere's data archive (a potentially invaluable resource), without which Control can't evolve. When mother and daughter finally see each other, Gabrielle is cold. She says she's let Burnham go: "There's only the bigger picture now. Nothing else." Destroying the sphere doesn't work, so the Discovery crew hatches a plan, with some incoherent technobabble: They're going to launch the time traveling suit and the sphere so far into the future that, somehow, this will save sentient life in the universe. And somehow, they'll be able to get Gabrielle to stay in the current time too. Possessed Leland disrupts these plans this isn't what Control wants. He stabs Tyler, who of course lives, and warns the Discovery crew that Leland is coming to the surface to cause a ruckus. Here, of course, some Starfleet crew members appear to die. The reason they die is because the audience doesn't know their names. The gambit from Leland doesn't quite work, but it requires Gabrielle to sacrifice herself in order to send the suit and the sphere into the future. Problem solved! But unfortunately, Burnham is in deep pain once again. "Perpetual Infinity," written by Alan McElroy and Brandon Schultz, was tightly focused but heavy on exposition. It also was stuffed with technobabble to the point that its developments were a bit difficult to follow. As she often does, Sonequa Martin Green made the episode a compelling watch. She plays Burnham's vulnerability very well. I would have liked to see Sohn stick around for a bit more of the story line, but "Discovery" writers like to fool the audience. She might be back before we know it. Once again, I am left wondering what Tyler's role is here. He seems to have a moral center, but his abilities seem minimal for someone in Section 31. And we seem to have forgotten why he made it to Section 31 to begin with: L'Rell staged his death to allow him to escape Klingons who doubted his loyalties. I try not to watch teaser trailers for next week because I like the surprise, so I am at a loss of where the story goes next. Is the universe safe from Control? Are we good? Can we give Burnham something to smile about? Please? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
PEBBLE BEACH, CALIF. A dark green 1934 Packard 1108 Twelve Convertible Victoria with a custom body by Dietrich became the first Packard in 36 years to win the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. The car, owned by Joseph Cassini III and his wife, Margie, of West Orange, N.J., was judged last Sunday to be the top entry in a field of 248 antique and classic automotive masterpieces, representing 36 states and 12 countries, at the prestigious annual classic car competition here. The field included the first two Duesenbergs sold to private owners as well as landmark Lincolns, fabulous Ferraris, history making racing cars and century old relics from the auto industry's infancy. Nominees for the top honor included a 1934 Hispano Suiza J12 Coupe, a 1914 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost Torpedo and a 1932 Lincoln KB Murphy Roadster. The concours capped a weeklong celebration of the automobile as art. Highlights included the 88 mile Tour d'Elegance that tested the roadworthiness of the concours entrants and five major auctions, where 302 million of cars were sold, a record. Even the tongue in cheek Concours d'LeMons, which pokes fun at some of the industry's bigger blunders, was a success, with a homely little Voisin Biscooter prototype from 1949 feted as Worst of Show. At times, it appeared to be a six ring automotive circus with the Pebble Beach concours at its center. "This is the Olympics of car shows," Mr. Cassini, who also owned the 1938 Horch that won Best of Show here in 2004, said. Mr. Cassini said it took three years 10,000 hours of shop labor to restore the Packard to its original glory. His concours winning Horch was sold here last year it brought 5.2 million to help move the project forward. What made this car so special? It is believed to be the only one exactly like it ever made. "The buyer selected it from a catalog of special order models offered by Packard that year," Rob Myers, founder of RM Auctions and RM Auto Restoration, where the Packard was rebuilt, said in a telephone interview. At that time, a buyer could walk into a Packard dealership, select a factory prepared model and drive away with it. But this buyer lived in Puerto Rico and had no local dealer, so he ordered it in the United States. When the car was ready, the buyer picked it up in New York and had it shipped home. "It was in his ownership, and then his family's ownership for many years," Mr. Cassini, a New Jersey Superior Court judge, said, adding that at some point it had been painted red and orange and used as a taxi. An American serviceman stationed in Puerto Rico had it shipped home. More than three decades in Puerto Rico's sun, sand and salt had nearly destroyed everything. "It was almost ready to fall apart," Mr. Cassini said. Still, this Packard had a following among collectors. "I've been aware of the car for 30 years," Mr. Myers said. "I kept trying to buy it on behalf of customers, but I never thought the last owner would sell it." When an opportunity to buy it came up four years ago, the client Mr. Myers had thought was interested backed out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
It's one thing to cruise the Arctic in search of polar bears and icebergs, quite another to jump in the frigid water. But that's exactly what Australia based Aurora Expeditions is newly offering this summer in polar snorkeling excursions. On small ship cruises to Spitsbergen in northern Norway and Greenland, passengers will have the opportunity to jump in at the edge of Arctic pack ice to view it from below. The cruise line will provide dry suits, hoods, gloves, boots and full snorkeling kit, as well as experienced guides. The optional activity costs 975 a person, and cruises start at 4,583 for 11 days. A new interactive training kiosk designed to teach CPR in as little as five minutes was installed last week at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, with plans for more to be installed at another four airports in March. Sponsored by the American Heart Association and the Anthem Foundation, the kiosk offers a touch screen video presentation on how to perform hands only cardiopulmonary resuscitation, followed by a practice session with a rubber torso mannequin and a 30 second CPR test. Practice on the mannequin provides feedback on hand placement, pressure and rate of compressions. Use of the kiosk is free. A pilot program featuring the kiosks in airports was launched at Dallas Fort Worth in 2013, and the 2016 rollout will station the training devices at airports in Atlanta, Baltimore, Indianapolis and Las Vegas. The barge cruising company European Waterways is holding a sale on many of its 2016 charter boats and barge cruises for spring and summer travel booked by March 29. Sales on the charters, which are entire boats privately booked by a single party and operated by a staff of four including a chef, range up to 12,000 off the 12 passenger Panache in Alsace Lorraine in July and August, for a sale price of 45,000 over a six night trip. Several barge cruises on the Panache, in which passengers book cabins individually, are selling for 2,500 off in April and May, for a discounted price of 8,000 per double occupancy cabin for a weeklong trip. Another ship, the eight passenger Anjodi operating on the Canal du Midi in southern France, is offering weeklong charters in May, June and August at 8,000 off, for fares starting at 27,000. Discounted rates on six night standard cruises aboard the Anjodi start at 8,130 for each double cabin on select dates in June, July and August, reflecting a 1,250 savings. Scandinavian Airlines, known as SAS, is offering a 99 one way fare from Los Angeles to Stockholm to mark the launch of new flights between the two airports, beginning March 14. The deal is good for travel between March 14 and 25 and must be booked by March 6. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Dina Litovsky for The New York Times Dina Litovsky for The New York Times Credit... Dina Litovsky for The New York Times Cooking the Book: Dinner with Publisher Daniel Halpern and Chef Wylie Dufresne When he was living in Tangier, the writer Paul Bowles befriended the Moroccan author and artist Mohamed Mrabet, who taught Bowles how to make a chicken tagine with almonds and prunes. According to literary and culinary legend, the dish became a staple at dinner parties Bowles hosted, and he often made it for the poet and publisher Daniel Halpern, who lived in the apartment downstairs in the late 1960s. Halpern used the recipe, crediting Bowles, in his 1985 cookbook, "The Good Food," which over the decades gained a cult following among writers and foodies (its devotees include the novelist Michael Chabon and the chef David Chang). Early one evening last month, Mrabet's chicken tagine as interpreted by way of Bowles and Halpern was served to a small group of writers at a dinner party hosted by chef Wylie Dufresne at his apartment near Union Square. The guests a group that included the novelists Francine Prose and Jennifer Egan, the short story writer Deborah Eisenberg, the writer and foodie celebrity Padma Lakshmi and the journalist Steve Kornacki had assembled to celebrate the republication of "The Good Food," which Halpern is releasing this month through his own imprint, Ecco. To mark the occasion, Dufresne threw a dinner party in Halpern's honor and cooked a few of his recipes a celery and raw mushroom salad with Emmenthaler cheese, followed by risotto with radicchio and the chicken tagine. "This is very unfussy food," said Dufresne, a food industry pioneer who is known for more inventive and technically challenging fare involving cubes of fried mayonnaise and something called meat glue. "I was thinking of what made sense for a family style meal, which is very much not the way I cook." The small but lively party was like a Venn diagram of Halpern's literary and foodie circles. In the publishing industry, Halpern who has an unruly halo of white curls and a dry, devilish sense of humor is perhaps known as much for his culinary as his literary taste. In addition to editing novelists like T.C. Boyle, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, and Amy Tan, Halpern has wide and deep connections in the food world, and has turned Ecco into a hit cookbook factory. In 2011, Halpern gave Anthony Bourdain his own publishing line, Bourdain Books, and over the years, he's assembled a large stable of star chefs, publishing cookbooks by Ferran Adria, Jose Andres, April Bloomfield, Daniel Boulud, Madhur Jaffrey and Danny Meyer, as well as books by Dufresne and Lakshmi, who published a spice guide and food memoir with Ecco. With a celebrity chef cooking his dishes, Halpern wanted to know how his decades old recipes held up. The instructions had barely been updated since 1985, when Halpern and his friend Julie Strand published a collection of soups, stews, salads and pastas, after guests of their frequent dinner parties urged them to write a recipe book together. Still, Dufresne, as the professional cook among the pair, carried the weight of authority. Originally, Halpern and Dufresne had planned to cook together, but Dufresne took the lead. "You were worried I was going to cut myself," Halpern told him as Dufresne was preparing the salad. "I didn't want you to use this," Dufresne agreed, holding up a razor sharp mandoline. The guests gathered around and watched in awe struck silence as Dufresne rapidly sliced raw mushrooms into paper thin slices on the mandoline. Dufresne tried to reassure the writers that they possessed technical skills he lacks. "This is delicious," Prose said. "It makes you think celery has been so overlooked." After a brief discussion of the underrated charm of celery, talk turned, as it tends to these days, to the Trump administration, then, less predictably, to serial killers. It was time for the next course. Someone asked Dufresne how he handles the stress of celebrity chefdom. He explained that for most chefs, the adrenaline rush is a feature, not a bug. "The average line cook enjoys a certain level of discomfort," he said. "It's like riding the Cyclone. It might be the last time you do it." The conversation drifted from kitchen war stories (Prose described the time her husband tried to make doughnuts and lumps of hot dough exploded from the pan, and rained down on the screaming dinner guests) to literary lore. Halpern told stories about his encounters with W.H. Auden and Jorge Luis Borges. Prose and Egan had a cathartic exchange about a review that Prose had written of Egan's latest novel, "Manhattan Beach," which criticized Egan's excessive use of historical and technical detail. After dessert a wreath shaped ring of doughnuts guests began to leave, taking goody bags with a box of doughnuts from Dufresne's Brooklyn doughnut shop, Du's Donuts, and a copy of Halpern's cookbook. Before the group had dispersed, Halpern complimented Dufresne again on his execution. "It was fantastic," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
KOLAD, India Time was, banks employed armies of human tellers. Later, they replaced many of them with automated teller machines. Now, India is using a hybrid of the two the human A.T.M. to expand banking to its vast rural population. Swati Yashwant, a 29 year old mother of one, is part of a growing legion of roving tellers intent on providing bank accounts to the nearly 50 percent of India's 300 million households that do not have them. Using a laptop computer, wireless modem and fingerprint scanner, Ms. Yashwant opens accounts, takes deposits and processes money transfers for farmers and migrant workers in this small town 70 miles south of Mumbai, India's financial capital. To reduce the risk of robbery or theft, no transaction by law may exceed 10,000 rupees (about 212). And in practice, many amount to no more than a dollar or two. But with the bulk of India's population living in villages that have never had a bank branch, Ms. Yashwant, with her electronic devices, is a missionary of financial modernity. Economists and policy makers say mobile agents like Ms. Yashwant who also are employed in countries like Brazil, Mexico and Kenya represent one of the most promising ways to help the rural poor save and protect their money. Many people in India who do not have bank accounts, for instance, buy gold necklaces or simply keep cash in their unlocked homes. "This is something that could be powerful," said Abhijit V. Banerjee, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wrote "Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty" with Esther Duflo. The banking agents enable the poor to easily save money they otherwise might be tempted to spend, Mr. Banerjee said. And when times are lean, people could withdraw money they had saved, instead of borrowing cash at high rates of interest. The accounts earn currently earn 4 percent annual interest, which is standard for savings accounts in India. There are no maintenance fees or charges for deposits or withdrawals. "It's true that this will not make them rich," Mr. Banerjee said, "but it will make them less likely to face starvation someday." Roving tellers took banking to Kolad and other rural areas. Ms. Yashwant is one of an estimated 60,000 of what Indian bankers call "business correspondents," who are not bank employees but earn commissions that the banks pay them for each transaction. The Reserve Bank of India, the country's central bank, began the push for banking correspondents about five years ago. After slow initial growth, the central bank predicts the ranks of correspondents will more than double, to 126,000, by March. The Reserve Bank has ordered commercial banks to set up correspondents in every village with more than 2,000 people and has assigned each of those villages to one bank or another. For India's banks, it is a relatively inexpensive way to recruit customers. While about 70 percent of India's population is dispersed among more than 600,000 villages, the entire country has only 33,500 bank branches. Correspondents like Ms. Yashwant have set up 74 million bank accounts in India. "If you used the traditional high cost banking system, you will never reach these people," said Jayant Sinha, who is managing director of the India office of Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm set up by Pierre M. Omidyar, the founder of eBay. Traveling by bus or rickshaw to villages around her town to recruit customers, Ms. Yashwant meets a variety of challenges. In some remote villages her wireless Internet connection fades in and out. Frequent blackouts disrupt the work. And the fingerprint scanner can struggle to read the calloused fingers of farm laborers. On a recent rain soaked afternoon, in her Kolad office, she patiently persevered to take a print from Rajashri Nakati, a 35 year old farmhand. "I want to save my money," said Ms. Nakati, a mother of five. "If I leave it at home, it will get spent." Ms. Yashwant dragged Ms. Nakati's rough fingers over her scanner several times, sighing as her laptop beeped when the scan did not render an acceptable imprint. She repeated the exercise with six fingers, three on each hand, as a gaggle of women, friends and relatives of Ms. Nakati, dressed in brightly colored saris watched through a window. Finally, Ms. Yashwant captured a print. That scan, with a simple one page application and a passport size photo of Ms. Nakati, would next go to the bank's back office. It would take two days before the account was ready for Ms. Nakati's first deposit of 100 rupees (about 2). Such banking represents the kind of "frugal innovation" that India has become known for in recent years finding inexpensive solutions to its development challenges. State Bank is also buying hundreds of solar powered A.T.M.'s that have fingerprint scanners and do not need air conditioning at temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) from an Indian company called Vortex Engineering. The machines are being placed in small towns, and, for now, are meant for customers who open regular bank accounts, not the no frills accounts set up by the roving correspondents, which do not come with A.T.M. cards. Because of the small sums involved, State Bank says it loses money on most of the accounts opened by correspondents. The balances in those accounts total 1.1 billion rupees ( 21.8 million), not even a rounding error relative to State Bank's total deposits of about 200 billion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Moving to address income inequality on a local level, the City Council in Portland, Ore., voted on Wednesday to impose a surtax on companies whose chief executives earn more than 100 times the median pay of their rank and file workers. The surcharge, which Portland officials said is the first in the nation linked to chief executives' pay, would be added to the city's business tax for those companies that exceed the pay threshold. Currently, roughly 550 companies that generate significant income on sales in Portland pay the business tax. Under the new rule, companies must pay an additional 10 percent in taxes if their chief executives receive compensation greater than 100 times the median pay of all their employees. Companies with pay ratios greater than 250 times the median will face a 25 percent surcharge. The tax will take effect next year, after the Securities and Exchange Commission begins to require public companies to calculate and disclose how their chief executives' compensation compares with their workers' median pay. The S.E.C. rule was required under the Dodd Frank legislation enacted in 2010. Portland's executive pay surcharge will be levied as a percentage of what a company owes on the city's so called business license tax, which has been in place since the 1970s. City officials estimated that the new tax would generate 2.5 million to 3.5 million a year for the city's general fund, which pays for basic public services such as housing and police and firefighter salaries. Criticism of how much chief executives are paid has risen in recent years as their compensation has grown substantially. In 2015, the median compensation for the 200 highest paid executives at public companies in the United States was 19.3 million, up from 9.6 million five years earlier. Comparing such compensation with how much lower level employees earn is likely to show a very wide gulf. A 2014 study by Alyssa Davis and Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal leaning advocacy group in Washington, found that chief executive pay compared with the earnings of average workers had surged from a multiple of 20 in 1965 to almost 300 in 2013. Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics and an authority on income inequality who wrote "Capital in the Twenty First Century," said he favored the Portland tax as a first step. "This is certainly part of the solution," Mr. Piketty wrote in an email, "but the tax surcharge needs to be large enough; the threshold '100 times' should be substantially lowered." Taxing companies that dole out outsize executive pay in Portland was the idea of Steve Novick, a former environmental lawyer who has been a Portland city commissioner since January 2013. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. "When I first read about the idea of applying a higher tax rate to companies with extreme ratios of C.E.O. pay to typical worker pay, I thought it was a fascinating idea," Mr. Novick, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview. "It was the closest thing I'd seen to a tax on inequality itself." Mr. Novick, who lost a bid for re election last month, said he had begun weighing such a tax about a year ago, but did not discuss it publicly until September. Another supporter of the tax is Charlie Hales, the mayor of Portland. "Income inequality is real, it is a national problem and the federal government isn't doing anything about it," Mr. Hales, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview. "We have a habit of trying things in Portland; maybe they're not perfect at the first iteration. But local action replicated around the country can start to make a difference." Mr. Hales, who did not seek re election, will leave office at the end of the month. Portland officials said other cities that charge business income taxes, such as Columbus, Ohio, and Philadelphia, could easily create their own versions of the surcharge. Several state legislatures have recently considered bills structured to reward companies with narrower pay gaps between chief executives and workers. In 2014, a bill in California proposed reducing taxes for companies whose executives were paid less than 100 times above the median worker. The bill did not pass. Among those objecting to the new tax was the Portland Business Alliance, a group of 1,850 companies that do business locally. Alliance officials have predicted that the measure would not have the desired result of reducing income inequality. "We see it as an empty gesture," said Sandra McDonough, the alliance's president and chief executive, in a telephone interview. "We think they'd be far better off trying to work with business leaders to create more jobs that will lift people up and improve incomes." Publicly traded companies, she added, are "an easy group to pick on." Mr. Hales conceded that the pay ratio is "an imperfect instrument" with which to solve the problems of income inequality. "But it is a start." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Meredith and Andrew Shackleford didn't want their wedding to have an ordinary cocktail hour. Instead of having their guests sip drinks and eat canapes, the couple divided everyone into six teams to compete in a series of games that included croquet, ladder ball, and blindfolded wine tastings. The winning team took home bottles of champagne and a trophy. "The games were a way to prevent people from staying glued to their phones," said Ms. Shackleford, 34. "We wanted to create something where people could really get involved and interact with each other." The Shacklefords, who are from Vancouver, British Columbia, and married in 2014, and own the wedding planning blog Love Lavender, aren't the only ones breaking away from traditional cocktail hour fare. In recent years , a number of rental companies have cropped up to meet this growing demand for wedding games that can be played both indoors and outdoors. Ian Samson, an owner of Rustic Charm Event Company in Charlotte, N.C., started his side business three years ago, after seeing how much fun guests had playing cornhole, giant Jenga, and giant Connect 4 at his outdoor wedding in Mason, Mich. "We try to bring back classic games like Yahtzee and tic tac toe and KerPlunk," Mr. Samson said. "You can tell people are going back to a different time in their lives when they played these games." Erin Fogg and her mother, Elaine Mee, founded Power of Love Rentals in 2013 in Portland, Ore. They offer lawn games in addition to table linens, place settings and other wedding decor. Wedding games, Ms. Fogg said, allow guests to mingle in a way that dancing doesn't. "People can socialize and chat when they're playing games, and oftentimes that's not possible when people are dancing to loud music," she said. Bea Rue, 33, and Tyler Alan Mason, 32, who are from New York City, drew inspiration from older games some from as far back as the 1500s when they started Upstate Jamboree, a wedding game rental business that operates in New York's Hudson Valley and New York City. "We have a maze game that dates back to the 17th century, and it was created in Switzerland," Ms. Rue said. Ms. Rue and Mr. Mason, who are engaged , started the business last year, after lending out their personal set of cornhole boards for a friend's wedding. "They had a little gaming corner during cocktail hour, where they also had ladder ball and croquet and it was really fun," Ms. Rue said. "We became quick friends with these far flung family members of our friends who we had never met before, people from Canada and England and Spain. That's when the light bulb went off." Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Upstate Jamboree offers four hour rental packages that cost 900 to 3,200. The basic package provides lawn games like cornhole and croquet, while more expensive ones also offer the couple's signature games, which Mr. Mason, a carpenter, builds by hand. Other companies, like Power of Love Rentals, let customers rent each game for three days for a flat fee , though customers are sometimes responsible for picking up and returning the games themselves. (Power of Love offers delivery and setup for an additional fee, starting at 100. ) Ms. Rue says that her packages come with more than just instructional cards. "All of our rentals include an attendant who is there to teach people how to play the games, reset the games, and get people excited about them," she said. Nina and Nicholas DePalma, both 29 of Olivebridge, N.Y., said having games at their wedding in Wallkill, N.Y., last year made it easier for guests to socialize with new people. "We had several groups of friends and family that had never met one another, so it felt really important to have some sort of icebreaker, besides the bar, that would allow people to feel comfortable and really get to know each other," said Ms. DePalma, who is a project manager and coordinator for a research organization. "Our wedding was also a reunion for a lot of friends who hadn't see one another in some time, so it was cool to see those old friends come together and get in on some friendly competition." Katie Test Davis and Dan Davis , both 34 of Raleigh, N.C., said the lawn games at their 2017 wedding in Charlotte, N.C. Jenga, Connect 4 and cornhole were a hit with guests, from toddlers to baby boomers. "Even before the ceremony started, we had kids from both sides of our family find the games and start playing," said Ms. Davis, who owns a public relations firm. "During cocktail hour, we gathered up a group of friends, grabbed drinks, and played a fairly competitive game of Jenga. That remains one of my favorite memories of the day." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Among the most important unanswered questions about Covid 19 is this: What role do children play in keeping the pandemic going? Fewer children seem to get infected by the coronavirus than adults, and most of those who do have mild symptoms, if any. But do they pass the virus on to adults and continue the chain of transmission? The answer is key to deciding whether and when to reopen schools, a step that President Trump urged states to consider before the summer. Two new studies offer compelling evidence that children can transmit the virus. Neither proved it, but the evidence was strong enough to suggest that schools should be kept closed for now, many epidemiologists who were not involved in the research said. Many other countries, including Israel, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have all either reopened schools or are considering doing so in the next few weeks. In some of those countries, the rate of community transmission is low enough to take the risk. But in others, including the United States, reopening schools may nudge the epidemic's reproduction number the number of new infections estimated to stem from a single case, commonly referred to as R0 to dangerous levels, epidemiologists warned after reviewing the results from the new studies. In one study, published last week in the journal Science, a team analyzed data from two cities in China Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, and Shanghai and found that children were about a third as susceptible to coronavirus infection as adults were. But when schools were open, they found, children had about three times as many contacts as adults, and three times as many opportunities to become infected, essentially evening out their risk. Based on their data, the researchers estimated that closing schools is not enough on its own to stop an outbreak, but it can reduce the surge by about 40 to 60 percent and slow the epidemic's course. "My simulation shows that yes, if you reopen the schools, you'll see a big increase in the reproduction number, which is exactly what you don't want," said Marco Ajelli, a mathematical epidemiologist who did the work while at the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, Italy. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The second study, by a group of German researchers, was more straightforward. The team tested children and adults and found that children who test positive harbor just as much virus as adults do sometimes more and so, presumably, are just as infectious. "Are any of these studies definitive? The answer is 'No, of course not,'" said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who was not involved in either study. But, he said, "to open schools because of some uninvestigated notion that children aren't really involved in this, that would be a very foolish thing." The German study was led by Christian Drosten, a virologist who has ascended to something like celebrity status in recent months for his candid and clear commentary on the pandemic. Dr. Drosten leads a large virology lab in Berlin that has tested about 60,000 people for the coronavirus. Consistent with other studies, he and his colleagues found many more infected adults than children. The team also analyzed a group of 47 infected children between ages 1 and 11. Fifteen of them had an underlying condition or were hospitalized, but the remaining were mostly free of symptoms. The children who were asymptomatic had viral loads that were just as high or higher than the symptomatic children or adults. "In this cloud of children, there are these few children that have a virus concentration that is sky high," Dr. Drosten said. He noted that there is a significant body of work suggesting that a person's viral load tracks closely with their infectiousness. "So I'm a bit reluctant to happily recommend to politicians that we can now reopen day cares and schools." Dr. Drosten said he posted his study on his lab's website ahead of its peer review because of the ongoing discussion about schools in Germany. Many statisticians contacted him via Twitter suggesting one or another more sophisticated analysis. His team applied the suggestions, Dr. Drosten said, and even invited one of the statisticians to collaborate. "But the message of the paper is really unchanged by any type of more sophisticated statistical analysis," he said. For the United States to even consider reopening schools, he said, "I think it's way too early." In the China study, the researchers created a contact matrix of 636 people in Wuhan and 557 people in Shanghai. They called each of these people and asked them to recall everyone they'd had contact with the day before the call. They defined a contact as either an in person conversation involving three or more words or physical touch such as a handshake, and asked for the age of each contact as well as the relationship to the survey participant. Comparing the lockdown with a baseline survey from Shanghai in 2018, they found that the number of contacts during the lockdown decreased by about a factor of seven in Wuhan and eight in Shanghai. "There was a huge decrease in the number of contacts," Dr. Ajelli said. "In both of those places, that explains why the epidemic came under control." The researchers also had access to a rich data set from Hunan province's Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials in the province traced 7,000 contacts of 137 confirmed cases, observed them over 14 days and tested them for coronavirus infection. They had information not just for people who became ill, but for those who became infected and remained asymptomatic, and for anyone who remained virus free. Data from hospitals or from households tend to focus only on people who are symptomatic or severely ill, Dr. Ajelli noted. "This kind of data is better." The researchers stratified the data from these contacts by age and found that children between the ages of 0 and 14 years are about a third less susceptible to coronavirus infection than those ages 15 to 64, and adults 65 or older are more susceptible by about 50 percent. They also estimated that closing schools can lower the reproduction number again, the estimate of the number of infections tied to a single case by about 0.3; an epidemic starts to grow exponentially once this metric tops 1. A tense era in U.S. China ties. The two powers are profoundly at odds as they jockey for influence beyond their own shores, compete in technology and maneuver for military advantages. Here's what to know about the main fronts in U.S. China relations: Pacific dominance. As China has built up its military presence, the U.S. has sought to widen its alliances in the region. A major potential flash point is Taiwan, the democratic island that the Communist Party regards as Chinese territory. Should the U.S. intervene there, it could reshape the regional order. Trade. The trade war started by the Trump administration is technically on pause. But the Biden administration has continued to protest China's economic policies and impose tariffs on Chinese goods, signaling no thaw in trade relations. Technology. Internet giants have mostly been shut out of China, but plenty of U.S. tech companies still do big business there, raising cybersecurity concerns in Washington. Mr. Xi has said China needs to achieve technological "self reliance." Human rights. Under Mr. Xi, China's confrontations with the U.S. over values and freedoms have become more frequent, including standoffs over Beijing's crackdown on pro democracy protests in Hong Kong and mass detentions of Muslims in Xinjiang. World leadership. China's leaders see signs of American decline everywhere and they want a bigger voice in global leadership, seeking a greater role in Western dominated institutions and courting allies that share their frustration with the West. In many parts of the United States, the number is already hovering around 0.8, Dr. Ajelli said. "If you're so close to the threshold, an addition of 0.3 can be devastating." However, some other experts noted that keeping schools closed indefinitely is not just impractical, but may do lasting harm to children. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the decision to reopen schools cannot be made based solely on trying to prevent transmission. "I think we have to take a holistic view of the impact of school closures on kids and our families," Dr. Nuzzo said. "I do worry at some point, the accumulated harms from the measures may exceed the harm to the kids from the virus." E learning approaches may temporarily provide children with a routine, "but any parent will tell you it's not really learning," she said. Children are known to backslide during the summer months, and adding several more months to that might permanently hurt them, and particularly those who are already struggling. Children also need the social aspects of school, and for some children, home may not even be a safe place, she said. "I'm not saying we need to absolutely rip off the Band aid and reopen schools tomorrow," she said, "but we have to consider these other endpoints." Dr. Nuzzo also pointed to a study in the Netherlands, conducted by the Dutch government, which concluded that "patients under 20 years play a much smaller role in the spread than adults and the elderly." But other experts said that study was not well designed because it looked at household transmission. Unless the scientists deliberately tested everyone, they would have noticed and tested only more severe infections which tend to be among adults, said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "Assumptions that children are not involved in the epidemiology, because they do not have severe illness, are exactly the kind of assumption that you really, really need to question in the face of a pandemic," Dr. Hanage said. "Because if it's wrong, it has really pretty disastrous consequences." A new study by the National Institutes of Health may help provide more information to guide decisions in the United States. The project, called Heros, will follow 6,000 people from 2,000 families and collect information on which children get infected with the virus and whether they pass it on to other family members. The experts all agreed on one thing: that governments should hold active discussions on what reopening schools looks like. Students could be scheduled to come to school on different days to reduce the number of people in the building at one time, for example; desks could be placed six feet apart; and schools could avoid having students gather in large groups. Teachers with underlying health conditions or of advanced age should be allowed to opt out and given alternative jobs outside the classroom, if possible, Dr. Nuzzo said, and children with underlying conditions should continue to learn from home. The leaders of the two new studies, Dr. Drosten and Dr. Ajelli, were both more circumspect, saying their role is merely to provide the data that governments can use to make policies. "I'm somehow the bringer of the bad news but I can't change the news," Dr. Drosten said. "It's in the data." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
This month, in a fifth floor studio at City Center, I spent part of an afternoon watching 30 minutes of Merce Cunningham's 1997 "Scenario." When new, this had been a work both glamorous and difficult. The most famous feature was its radical couture, outfits by Rei Kawakubo (of Comme des Garcons), wonderfully colored and patterned, but with padded bulges that changed the dancers' outlines and sometimes limited their movements. And its choreography was also one of Cunningham's more advanced creations in his late, "computer," phase. (He was 78 at the time of its premiere.) Since 1989, he had used computer technology to help him devise movement. "Scenario" showed how profoundly he was prepared to reconceive the rhythm and structure of dance phrasing and, strikingly, the coordination of different parts of the body. In 1997, I had found "Scenario" one of Cunningham's problematic works: Though I had loved his dances for 18 years, the phrases here often seemed arid and schematic. Watching this afternoon workshop showing, however, I kept thinking, "What was my problem?" It was notable how glowingly the young adult dancers, all highly able and attractive, performed. It's always a pleasure to see Cunningham choreography these days. No choreography is a keener tonic to the dancegoer's palate, and what once felt difficult now looks both absorbing and natural. But New York though it was Cunningham's home from 1939 until his death (five years ago this week), and was the scene of his company's farewell appearances affords too few current chances to see his dances in performance. February and March will bring at least two opportunities, most important Juilliard Dance's staging of the master's magnum opus "Biped" (1999), but these will be the city's first since a staging of "Four Walls/Doubletoss Interludes" at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in 2012. We're in a transitional period. Radical to the last (and determined to avoid the sad fate of heritage museum companies), Cunningham decreed, seven weeks before his death, that his troupe should tour the world after his death and then close (as it did on New Year's Eve, 2011). What? A choreographer's own dance company, chosen and trained to understand his precepts, is his best exponent. Cunningham's troupe had performed from Australia to Montreal, from Berkeley, Calif., to India. It contained a number of young dancers of extraordinary skill; most of its pieces were challenging, ahead of their times. Nonetheless, its maker was decreeing its end. Yet, at the same time, he named four trustees and approved plans for the trust that would license and supervise stagings of his works by other troupes. The young trust has been busier than many New Yorkers realize. There have been numerous Cunningham stagings elsewhere, from San Jose, Calif., to Munich. This "Scenario" showing, for example, was connected to a professional staging of this piece for the Ballett am Rhein in Dusseldorf, Germany, a company that also acquired Cunningham's 1998 "Pond Way" in 2013. "Scenario" was staged there in March by Banu Ogan, a member of the original "Scenario" cast and an eminent teacher of Cunningham's dance technique, and Daniel Squire, a Cunningham dancer who performed "Scenario" in his first seasons with the company. The Dusseldorf troupe gave them five weeks, with a further half week preparing it in the theater. This German staging of "Scenario" was no easy project. After the Cunningham company closed, its decors and costumes were all acquired by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; since they were created by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and other artists, they form the most historic dance costume collection since that of the Diaghilev company. But the Ballett am Rhein, working with the Minneapolis curators, created its own faithful copies of Ms. Kawakubo's costumes. This was the Dusseldorf company's second Cunningham staging. The very different "Pond Way," Cunningham's ravishing final nature study, was its first (set by Roy Lichtenstein, music by Brian Eno, costumes by Suzanne Gallo). These are among 24 professional stagings since 2009, licensed by the trust; others are in preparation. The same years have also seen over 30 Cunningham stagings for educational institutions (from Cornish College in Seattle, where Cunningham trained in 1937 39, to Lyon, France); I've watched admirable ones at Mills College and Stanford University, both in California, and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Some foreign companies now have long Cunningham track records. Since 1983, the Rambert Dance Company (based in London) has staged 11 Cunningham works, three of them since the master's death. Recently it presented an event an anthology format of Cunningham dances, long a central part of the his company's own performances. Meanwhile, that July "Scenario" workshop was just the latest in a series at City Center since 2012 without costumes or scenery, though the original music is played. (By the end of this summer, the total will be 26. Chronologically, the choreography has spanned from 1953 to 2009.) I've watched several; every one has brought its revelations. In most cases these have been the fruit of two or three weeks with young dancers, most of them American and several of whom were entirely new to Cunningham Technique and choreography, working with one or two former Cunningham company members who are all gaining experience in staging his work. In the "Scenario" presentation and others before it, the young adult dancers seemed less taxed by the choreography's challenges than hungry for them. The Ballett am Rhein's 2013 staging of "Pond Way" was by Andrea Weber, one of the leading dancers in the Cunningham company's final years; she preceded it in November 2012 with a two week City Center workshop, culminating in a showing. In an email to me at the time, she observed: "What's interesting is that this group embraced the spacing quicker than we did as a company. There was a very special willingness among these individuals. (Perhaps excitement to be able to do such a challenging piece, I don't know?)" Last month, I spoke to Lynn Wichern, the trust's executive director, and Patricia Lent, its director of licensing, in the trust's office. They spoke of how workshops alone have been a growth industry. Ms. Lent laughed in delight at the quantity and quality of dancers who had recently auditioned for workshops through the summer; she was then near the end of one on "Roaratorio" (1983). The two women described the many layers of the Cunningham enterprise today. An increasing number of films has been released on DVD. A vast store of videos, notes and documentation resides in the New York Public Library Dance Collection. Cunningham Technique is taught at numerous colleges around America as well as Europe; these produce a stream of dancers who come to the Cunningham classes and audition for the Cunningham workshops. A widening number of former Cunningham dancers is acquiring experience in staging his works. His compositional notes on his dances have brought their own revelations. Dance figures have long differed about what future the art's repertory and institutions can or should have. When Serge Diaghilev died in 1929, his Ballets Russes the most prestigious, radical and influential ballet company in the world automatically folded. Though other troupes soon sprang up to recapture aspects of its achievement, several of its most striking productions were never seen again. Cunningham, who was fascinated by Diaghilev's devotion to the new, probably had this in mind. Some of his circle had been hoping for decades he would make the decision he did. Since its birth, New York City Ballet has grappled with legacy questions. Jacques d'Amboise writes in his 2011 autobiography "I Was a Dancer" that the two founders of City Ballet, its ballet master George Balanchine and its general director Lincoln Kirstein, had opposing views on its survival. "Balanchine wanted a place for himself so that he could indulge his art with music and the dancers he admired. After, he didn't give a damn. Lincoln wanted it to last forever. So one of them got their wish or maybe both." How well City Ballet has served Balanchine's dances has been a matter of fierce and lasting disagreement for over 20 years. Certainly, Cunningham's announcement that his company would close shocked some parts of the dance world, not least the choreographer Paul Taylor, who recently made an almost diametrically opposite decision. Mr. Taylor (who in 1953 was a founder member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company) is 83. What was for decades the Paul Taylor Dance Company is now being reconstituted as Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance, a troupe to be devoted to preserving not only Mr. Taylor's dances after his death but those of others. The Trisha Brown Dance Company, by contrast, has chosen something closer to the Cunningham route. Ms. Brown, who is in ill health, choreographed her final work in 2011, and her troupe is now halfway through a three year "Proscenium Works Tour" of her larger pieces. Though it's widely being called a farewell tour, and though it may be the last time her ensemble performs these works, it is not the end of the company; the Trisha Brown Foundation is considering ways in which to keep Ms. Brown's work alive. One of the many ways in which Balanchine changed dance history is in how he bequeathed his ballets to friends and colleagues. His dances, he acknowledged, were likely to have future lives beyond any one home company. With this in mind, the Balanchine Trust was instituted in 1987. It soon became the world's leading example, helping to propagate his works internationally, so that they're danced by companies to whom they seemed alien in his lifetime. The legacy of the choreographer Martha Graham was wracked by a bitter posthumous multimillion dollar lawsuit between her heir, Ron Protas, and her company. Though the troupe has survived, it can no longer perform some of her dances. What seriousness the others retain onstage remains a matter of controversy. I wish I could watch the numerous posthumous Cunningham stagings across Europe. Meanwhile, however, the biggest shortage in Cunningham's legacy remains stagings of his work by American dancers and companies, especially in New York. During the last 45 years of his lifetime, Cunningham seasons in New York used to occur at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Joyce Theater, Lincoln Center and City Center; for many of us, they were the greatest dance adventures into the unknown. Currently, though, there are way too few, thanks to this country's unadventurous programming. It's sad to find America New York, in particular lagging behind Europe in honoring this American master's legacy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Well, well. The president says he's spent the last week and a half enjoying his hydroxychloroquine, presumably neat. It's impossible to say whether it's true; as doctors on Twitter were quick to note, Sean Conley, the White House physician, said in a memo that he discussed the drug with Trump, not prescribed it, though together he and the president concluded it was worth the risk. But if you take the president at his word something I admittedly almost never do, but let's just say it does make perfect sense. In Donald Trump, you have the patient perfect storm: a science denier, a devotee of medical quackery, and above all else, I cannot emphasize this part enough a powerful and narcissistic celebrity. This is what happens when your rich and famous V.I.P. client (think Michael Jackson, but with nuclear codes) also has a nutty perspective on medicine and an even nuttier one on facts. You get a statin taking, extravagantly overweight man demanding a drug that increases the risk of cardiac arrest. We already know a great deal about Trump's science denialism and fondness for snake oil. So I'd like to focus mainly on the most under discussed variable in this equation: the fact that Trump is rich and powerful and very famous. People like him often seek out doctors who'll follow their patients' egos, not science and data. We saw this quite clearly during the presidential election, when Trump's personal physician, Harold Bornstein, wrote a letter saying Trump's lab work was "astonishingly excellent"; that his "physical strength and stamina are extraordinary"; and that, if voters chose him, Trump would be "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Choosing a sofa can be a daunting proposition. From cocktail parties to catnaps, it has to meet a wide variety of demands. And it's probably the largest thing in the room, so it's not inconspicuous. A sofa is "among the biggest and most important pieces of furniture in the living room or family room," said Estee Stanley, a Los Angeles based interior designer whose celebrity clients include Ellen Pompeo, Patrick Dempsey and Justin Timberlake. Because it is so big, and so frequently used, a sofa is not the place to experiment with trendy designs, Ms. Stanley said: "Stick with what you love, and know that you will still love it in five to 10 years." For different people, that means different things. "A single guy might want to have the deepest, comfiest sofa," Ms. Stanley said, "so all his friends can huddle together and watch football." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Katie Couric gets a great night's sleep on the Casper mattress she and her husband, John Molner, share, and sipping Dunkin' Donuts coconut coffee makes her feel as if she is vacationing in the islands. At holiday time, Ms. Couric is thrilled to receive a package of Omaha Steaks as a gift. Listeners of "Katie Couric," Ms. Couric's podcast, already know these tidbits. Before diving into interviews with newsmakers and celebrities like Julia Louis Dreyfus, Samantha Bee and the journalist David Fahrenthold, Ms. Couric and her co host, Brian Goldsmith, banter about brands sponsoring the show, adding their personal endorsements. A podcast hosting gig has become a new status symbol for top journalists, entertainers and talking head politicos. Hosts can discuss whatever they want, usually for a rapt audience of in car drivers and on train commuters. Most podcasts are available free on iTunes, and advertising is often necessary to cover productions costs. So A list talent is now singing for its soup, routinely peddling products like audiobooks, bedsheets and delivery meal services. "Selling underwear on a podcast was always my highest aspiration," said Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama who now is a host of "Pod Save America," a political program. Mr. Favreau said he and the podcast's other hosts, including his fellow former Obama staff members Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfieffer, look for topical and comical transitions that will lead them from discussing policy to reading ads. The practice of podcast hosts reciting advertisements is reminiscent of the early days of radio and television. There was "The Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope,'' which promoted toothpaste, and NBC's "Camel News Caravan," with the journalist John Cameron Swayze mentioning the brand's cigarettes. Ed McMahon pitched Alpo dog food on the "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson," often to hilarious results. For today's podcast announcers, it's a return to the good old days. "It feels very retro in a kind of nice way," Malcolm Gladwell, the author and New Yorker writer, said in an interview. But the lofty rhetoric of some podcasts makes the sometimes lowbrow nature of the ads feel at odds with the show. During the first season of Mr. Gladwell's podcast, "Revisionist History," released last year, he reported on educational philanthropy and a 1960s Pentagon mission to interview North Vietnamese soldiers, among other subjects. On the finale episode, Mr. Gladwell summarized the central lesson that ties together the different episodes: "Nothing of consequence gets accomplished without courage," he said. But before anything of consequence gets accomplished on Mr. Gladwell's podcast ... first, a word from our sponsor. "First Republic is a bank with no teller lines," Mr. Gladwell has told his listeners in a reassuring, singsong voice. "But they didn't replace their tellers with computers or robots. How's that possible? Personal bankers." The "Blink" author doesn't dwell on the copy. "They send me the script, and I read it," he said. For Ms. Couric and Mr. Goldsmith, who worked together at CBS News, reading advertisements is a fresh challenge. "It's clearly a new experience for both us, and we're kind of being self deprecating more than anything else about our lack of experience as marketers," Mr. Goldsmith said. "Katie and I have both gotten into doing the Princess Cruises ads," he continued. "I personally have never been on a Princess Cruise. I honestly don't know if Katie has been on the Princess Cruise." So, they banter about the benefits of vacationing. "I think you need to have more experiences of awe, Brian," Ms. Couric said in one episode. Many of these hosts understand that "ad readers," as they're known, are economic necessities in funding passion projects, even if they would not be likely to flop down on a mattress in a television commercial. "In order for us to give away this free product, we have to do a little business on the other end," said the actor Joshua Malina, who hosts "The West Wing Weekly" podcast with Hrishikesh Hirway. Their podcast takes a fine tooth comb to each episode of political drama "The West Wing," which had its series finale in 2006. (Mr. Malina was a "West Wing" cast member, and now has a prominent role as the attorney general on ABC's "Scandal.") When they are not debating the skill the fictional press secretary C. J. Cregg shows in handling the news media, or which guest stars best handled the fast paced dialogue, Mr. Malina and Mr. Hirway discuss the benefits of snacking with Naturebox. ("You've got to try the Sriracha cashews," Mr. Malina said. "They will rock your world." ) A recent "West Wing Weekly" focused on staff discontent after the fictitious President Bartlet misled the public, and featured a plug for a jobs website: "When I was looking for a co host for 'The West Wing Weekly,' I used ZipRecruiter to find Joshua (Hotpants) Malina," Mr. Hirway said. Mr. Malina responded, "And there were no other applicants." "One way or another, I'm involved in selling products," said Mr. Malina, describing commercials that run during his TV shows. "This is cutting out the middleman I'm selling you soap. It's unlike what I usually do, which is sell soap by acting like I'm the attorney general of the United States." Podcasts are well suited for companies that otherwise couldn't afford such a wide range of celebrity endorsements. Blue Apron is a particularly active podcast advertiser, with spots appearing on hundreds of podcasts, including "The West Wing Weekly," said Jared Cluff, the company's chief marketing officer. Though Mr. Cluff said the brand didn't necessarily set out to market its service with celebrities, he agreed that podcasts were providing a comparably inexpensive way to do so. How many start up meal delivery companies can get Alec Baldwin to read their menus aloud in his deep, recognizable voice? That's precisely what Mr. Baldwin does for Blue Apron on his podcast, "Here's the Thing." "He definitely romances our ingredients," Mr. Cluff said. Lena Dunham has made an effort to personalize the Blue Apron ads on her popular podcast, "Women of the Hour," even though she doesn't actually use the product. She is particularly proud, she wrote in an email interview, of her practice of including her mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, in the Blue Apron spots. Ms. Dunham started doing so after Ms. Simmons complained to her about the lack of enthusiasm conveyed in podcast ad reads. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Shared lodging and communal spaces may be trending, but for those seeking more privacy than a "Do Not Disturb" sign offers, a spate of new private island resorts play to castaway in comfort fantasies. In the South Pacific, Kokomo Island Fiji opened this spring with 21 beachfront villas and five three bedroom to six bedroom residences on a 140 acre island. It is near the Great Astrolabe Reef, among the world's largest, where travelers can scuba dive, snorkel, sail and fish. On land, the resort features trails, an infinity pool and a children's club. Villas start at 1,995 a night, which includes meals and many activities. Guests at the new Six Senses Zil Pasyon in the Seychelles have exclusive access to three white sand beaches on Felicite Island. In addition to diving and snorkeling, the resort offers surfing, migratory bird watching and island hopping trips by boat. Its 30 villas, each with its own pool, start at 1,339 a night, which includes breakfast. About 150 miles northeast of Singapore, Bawah Private Island in Indonesia is scheduled to open in August (rates have yet to be determined). The 35 room resort will span five uninhabited islands in the Anambas archipelago, with access to over 700 acres of forest, three lagoons and 13 beaches. Guests can choose between safari style tents or over water bungalows. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
There's a smartphone that the United States does not want you to buy. It's called the Mate 10 Pro, and it's made by Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer that the American government has long suspected of committing espionage for China. The device, priced at 800, was supposed to make a big splash this year as the first high end smartphone from Huawei in the United States. But AT T, which intended to promote the Mate 10 Pro as a rival to premium devices from Apple and Samsung, abruptly pulled out of the deal this month, appearing to bend to pressure from Washington over security concerns. Verizon Wireless, the country's biggest carrier, may have also canceled a similar deal because of political pressure, according to some reports. (Verizon declined to comment.) The snub by AT T, the country's No. 2 carrier, aroused a candid diatribe from Richard Yu, Huawei's chief executive, this month at CES, the giant tech convention in Las Vegas. "It's a big loss for us, and also for carriers," he said. "But the more big loss is for consumers, because consumers don't have the best choice." Yet without the backing of a big American carrier, the risks of buying the smartphone are high. While the Mate 10 Pro will still be available online next month and on sale at Best Buy stores by the end of the quarter, the lack of carrier buy in means it will be tougher to get device support if your screen shatters or if something goes wrong. Here's what you need to know about the device. The signature feature of the Mate 10 Pro is the processor, which has a dedicated part of its silicon specifically designed for artificial intelligence. This allows the phone to crunch algorithms and do things like automatically recognize an object so that the camera can be adjusted to focus quickly and let in the right amount of light. Huawei also says A.I. allows the phone to maximize its performance: Periodically, it will automatically do maintenance, like clearing out old system files that might otherwise slow down the phone. The camera is notable as well. Huawei teamed up with Leica, a popular camera maker, to develop the phone's dual lens setup. Like phones from Apple and Samsung, the Mate 10 Pro's camera can create a so called bokeh effect, where the two cameras work together to show the picture's main subject in sharp focus while gently blurring the background. Like other modern smartphones, the Mate 10 Pro is water and dust resistant. But it also has an extra large battery that Huawei says will last longer than that in many other phones. That's partly because of its A.I. processor, which examines how the battery is being used and changes resource allocation to prolong its life. The Mate 10 Pro also ships with a screen protector applied to its display, and inside the box there is a plastic protective case. These are thoughtful additions. The case absorbs the impact of drops, and the screen protector helps prevent scratches, which weaken the structural integrity of a display. In my tests, the two best features of the Mate 10 Pro were the camera and battery. The least impressive was the display. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. But let's start with the good stuff. In side by side comparisons with an iPhone X and Samsung's Galaxy S8 , the Mate 10 Pro came in second to Apple's offering in photo quality. All took nice photos, but the colors in the Galaxy S8 's pictures looked oversaturated, and while the Mate 10 Pro's photos appeared rich and clear, the shadow details looked better on the iPhone X. As for the bokeh effect, also known as portrait mode, the Mate 10 Pro excelled at separating the subject from the background compared with the Galaxy S8 , but I still preferred the iPhone X because it did a better job at lighting up a person's face. There was one area where the Mate 10 Pro was the clear winner: the battery. In my tests browsing the web over a cellular connection, Huawei's phone had roughly two hours more juice than Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 and the iPhone X. The display the biggest downside of the Mate 10 Pro had a lower resolution than the Note 8, the Galaxy S8 and the iPhone X, meaning some graphics and text looked more pixelated. Over all, text appeared crisper and websites more vibrant on the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy screens than they did on the Mate 10 Pro's display. The Mate 10 Pro is an impressive smartphone, but you probably aren't going to buy it even if you get your hands on it. The lower resolution display is a major negative, as is the lack of carrier support. Huawei said that to get technical support for the Mate 10 Pro, you can call its hotline, and for repairs, you can ship your device to a center in Texas. That's still not ideal compared with the ease of strolling into an Apple store or your carrier's nearest location. Privacy and trust are also important. In 2012, the House Intelligence Committee concluded that Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese telecommunications company, were a national security threat because of their attempts to extract sensitive data from American companies. And in 2016, security researchers discovered preinstalled software on some Huawei and ZTE phones that included a back door that sent all of a device's text messages to China every 72 hours. That feature was not intended for American phones, according to the company that made the software. But American lawmakers have been wary of Huawei. Most important, you will have to decide whether you trust Huawei. The onus is on you to carefully read Huawei's privacy policy and determine if you feel confident using this phone. In a statement, Huawei said that privacy and security were top priorities and that it complied with stringent privacy frameworks and regulations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Emanuel Ungaro in 1982. "I hate boring clothes," he once said. "I hate seeing women dressed in a sad way." Emanuel Ungaro, whose merging of attention getting colors and patterns with sleek lines made him one of the most talked about fashion designers in Paris beginning in the 1960s and served as the foundation for the fashion house that still bears his name, died on Saturday in Paris. He was 86. The Emanuel Ungaro fashion house, which Mr. Ungaro sold in 2005, announced his death on its Facebook page. No cause was given. Mr. Ungaro, who came from a family of tailors, established his fashion house in 1965 after working under the designer Cristobal Balenciaga. The celebrity journalist James Brady, in a "Brady's Bits" column in 1987, wrote that Mr. Ungaro, whom he had known since the 1960s, financed his first show with a loan that used a girlfriend's Porsche as collateral. The event, Mr. Brady wrote, was held in a small apartment. People sat on the balcony and peered in through windows to see the clothes. Within a few years Mr. Ungaro's creations were being worn by A listers like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and being seen in films on Catherine Deneuve (in "Le Sauvage," 1975), Gena Rowlands ("Gloria," 1980) and other actresses. His ever changing signatures over the years included stand up collars, abundant use of suede, wrap dresses, mixed prints and more. He might pair a paisley blouse with a plaid suit, or prescribe a colorful shawl for a distinctive look, or go all in on polka dots. "I hate boring clothes," he told The Washington Post in 1977. "I hate seeing women dressed in a sad way." Mr. Ungaro explained his approach to design in 1994, when he opened a boutique in Manhattan. "If you want to exist in fashion, and in any other manifestation of art, you have to disturb people," he told The New York Times. "Provocation, in my mouth, means disturbing to the eye. Not disturb just to disturb, but disturb by showing something unexpected." Emanuel Ungaro was born on Feb. 13, 1933, in Aix en Provence, in southern France. His father, Cosimo, was a tailor who had fled Fascist Italy. "My father is like a god to me," Mr. Ungaro told The Boston Globe in 1965. "He taught me to respect line and quality, and to take pains with every stitch." After working for three years in his father's tailoring business, determined to make a career in fashion but needing a bigger stage on which to do it, he left his hometown for Paris when he was 21. "I arrived in Paris with two pairs of pants, three shirts and not one cent in my pocket," he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1992. He spent two years as a stylist for Maison Camps tailors, then in 1958 took a job with Balenciaga's fashion house. He spent six years there, absorbing Balenciaga's ideas on line and color and how to drape the body. Beginning in 1964 he spent about a year working with Andre Courreges, who shook up the fashion scene in Paris that year with his mod "Space Age" collection. The next year, Mr. Ungaro established his own company, and The Times took note of one of his first showings. "He likes geometric patterns in multitudinous colors," Bernadine Morris wrote in The Times that July. "He used to mix them up so much that you didn't know where to look, but this time he has put everything together properly." The 1970s and '80s were his best decades. In 1980, the Associated Press fashion writer Suzy Patterson called his summer show "one of his best couture collections ever and certainly the most exciting seen so far this week." "As usual," she continued, "Ungaro had a field day mixing fabrics with a whole rainbow of silks in the same outfit. In a favorite type of skirt, stripes or plaids and paisley appear on the same piece of fabric, and everything shimmers with Jacquard weave." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Roland G. Fryer in 2016. He is one of the most prominent African Americans in economics, a field that has long struggled with racial diversity. Roland G. Fryer, a onetime rising star in economics who has been accused by several women of sexual harassment, will lose his Harvard University research lab and be suspended for two years, the university said Wednesday. Harvard's actions represent a remarkable fall from grace for an economist who until recently was among the profession's most admired researchers and one of Harvard's highest paid faculty members. He is also one of the most prominent African Americans in a field that has long struggled with racial diversity. Mr. Fryer, 42, has been the subject of several concurrent university investigations, which concluded that he had engaged in "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" against at least five employees over the course of a decade. In a letter to the economics department on Wednesday, Claudine Gay, a Harvard dean, said Mr. Fryer would be put on administrative leave for two years, during which he cannot teach or conduct research using university resources. The Education Innovation Laboratory, the off campus space known as EdLabs where he conducted most of his work, will be permanently closed. A Harvard spokeswoman said he would not be paid during his suspension. After the suspension, Mr. Fryer will be barred from "advising or supervisory roles," and his teaching will be restricted. Ms. Gay said she would revisit those limitations after a further two years. "Professor Fryer exhibited a pattern of behavior that failed to meet the expectations of conduct within our community and was harmful to the well being of its members," Ms. Gay said in the letter. "The totality of these behaviors is a clear violation of institutional norms and a betrayal of the trust" of the Harvard community. Ms. Gay said the investigations also uncovered other conduct that violated its policies. A Harvard spokeswoman said that conduct related to Mr. Fryer's spending and the lab's finances. Under Harvard's rules, Ms. Gay had sole discretion over Mr. Fryer's punishment, but could not fire him. Only the Harvard Corporation the university's equivalent of a board of trustees has the authority to revoke tenure, and can do so only for "grave misconduct or neglect of duty." Mr. Fryer has defended himself from the charges in the Harvard investigations. He has pointed to his lab as a place where women have thrived professionally. "I am deeply disappointed, particularly because the important and outstanding work of my colleagues in our economics research lab has been forced to stop," Mr. Fryer said in a statement released by a spokesman on Wednesday. "Harvard has spoken. In due course, I will as well." Harvard's decision comes after a process that began in June 2017 when a woman who worked for Mr. Fryer reported to human resources officials that he had repeatedly harassed her. Several other women came forward with similar accusations. The complaints were brought under Title IX, the federal statute prohibiting sex based discrimination by educational institutions that get federal funding. In the spring of 2018, Harvard imposed "interim measures" on Mr. Fryer, including barring him from entering EdLabs. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The first concluded investigation, in the fall of 2018, found that Mr. Fryer violated university policy with unwelcome conduct on seven occasions. They included one in which Mr. Fryer referred to a date rape drug in a text message to a female assistant and told her, as she was out drinking with friends: "Be safe tonight. Wear gloves if ur gonna have hand action." On another occasion, according to several witnesses, Mr. Fryer put his groin near the face of a different female subordinate and began an extended monologue implying that the woman had performed fellatio on an older faculty member. Mr. Fryer told investigators that the actions had been jokes. A second investigation, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times, found in February that Mr. Fryer had engaged in unwelcome conduct when he sent a pair of BlackBerry messages that were sexual in nature to a former assistant. It concluded that the messages were "sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive to create a hostile environment for her" in the research lab. One, sent after work hours, read: "Ur lucky ur not here. I would either tackle, bite u or both." The university's investigations did not substantiate some other complaints, including ones accusing Mr. Fryer of retaliation. Mr. Fryer repeatedly told a university investigator that he was being unfairly scrutinized, at one point asking if he was being singled out for his skin color, though some of the accusers were minority women. He explained his "tackle, bite u or both" message as a "same race thing" with an assistant who was black. The woman told the investigator that the comment was "not a thing that black people say to one another," in her experience. At another point, Mr. Fryer asked the investigator to analyze all emails sent from Harvard professors over the last two decades, "to ensure there are no undocumented policy violations according to the standard to which I am being held." One of his accusers also filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, but withdrew it in February because she had reached a "satisfactory settlement" with Harvard. The terms of that settlement have not been made public. Mr. Fryer came to prominence as part of a new wave of researchers using rigorous empirical methods to tackle social issues beyond traditional economics. Much of his research has focused on the causes of racial achievement gaps in education, and how to close them. Mr. Fryer has put some of his ideas into practice: As chief equality officer for New York City's Department of Education under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, he spearheaded a pilot program that paid low income students for earning good test scores. Mr. Fryer received tenure at age 30, received a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2011, and in 2015 was given the John Bates Clark Medal , which honors an American under 40 for "a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge." His Harvard salary was more than 600,000, the university's 2016 tax filing shows. Profiles emphasized his rise from a rough childhood in Florida and Texas. He won a scholarship to the University of Texas, Arlington, and graduated in two and a half years before earning an economics doctorate from Penn State. The allegations against Mr. Fryer became public last year when The Harvard Crimson, a campus newspaper, reported on some of the complaints. Months later, Mr. Fryer was elected to the executive board of the American Economics Association, the most prestigious body in academic economics. He resigned from that post in December, before formally taking office, after The New York Times reported new details of the allegations against him. The furor helped accelerate a reckoning in economics, a field that has long had a reputation for hostility to women. At the economics association's annual meeting in Atlanta in January, just weeks after the Times article on Mr. Fryer, women shared stories of discrimination and harassment and demanded reforms. In March, the association published the results of a survey finding widespread harassment, bias and outright assault in the profession. It also announced a number of policy changes, including new procedures for removing officers and members accused of misconduct. Kathryn Holston, a Harvard graduate student who was a co founder of an advocacy group for women in economics, said it was hard to evaluate Mr. Fryer's punishment because Harvard has disclosed few details of the case. But she said the case highlighted the need for changes, including a system across the profession for reporting inappropriate behavior. "We do certainly know that this is a severe problem," she said. "There's been a lot of progress in the past year, but much more needs to be done." In a letter to the editor after the Times article, Mr. Fryer said he was wrong to have allowed off color jokes in the lab, and apologized "if anyone who worked at the lab ever felt alienated, confused or offended by the environment." But he denied bullying anyone or retaliating against employees, and said he was proud of his record of "hiring, retaining and promoting women." Others have spoken up in Mr. Fryer's defense. Tanaya Devi, a Harvard graduate student and former Ed Labs employee, said she was "stunned and disappointed" by the punishment, which she called a "disproportionate result compared to the allegations." "We devoted our lives passionately to the cause of racial differences and now that has forcefully been ceased by Harvard administrators," Ms. Devi wrote in an email on Wednesday. "My research with Prof. Fryer on criminal justice in America is halted for 4 years. I am trying hard to understand how Harvard deems this to be 'just.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
SAN FRANCISCO Airbnb said on Monday that it had raised 1 billion in new funding as it grapples with devastation from the coronavirus pandemic, and as some technology start ups take extra measures to stockpile cash during the outbreak. The private equity giant Silver Lake and the investment firm Sixth Street Partners led the investment, which was a mixture of equity and debt. Airbnb, a home rental start up that was previously valued at as much as 31 billion, also lowered its internal valuation to 26 billion last month, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who declined to be identified because the information was confidential. "The new resources will support Airbnb's ongoing work to invest over the long term in its community of hosts who share their homes and experiences," the company said in a statement. Airbnb's business has been hobbled during a shutdown in global travel caused by the spread of the coronavirus. It is a delicate time for the company, one of the largest and most prominent start ups to emerge from Silicon Valley in the last decade. Airbnb had said that it plans to go public this year. But that may be in limbo because of stock market volatility and uncertainty caused by the virus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"It hurt," The A.P. quoted Ms. Wilson as saying. "It was not gentle. He groped me hard." Ms. Wilson won Washington's Artist of the Year award that season but was not rehired, The A.P. reported, saying that she attributed that to her interactions with Mr. Domingo. The news service said that she had told her husband and parents of the groping contemporaneously and written about Mr. Domingo's unwanted attentions in a journal she kept at the time, but that a makeup artist she believed had witnessed what happened said he did not recall it. Ms. Wilson went on to sing elsewhere, including at the Dallas Opera, and to teach. She is one of 11 women who shared their experiences with the news agency after its initial report of allegations against Mr. Domingo. "The ongoing campaign by The A.P. to denigrate Placido Domingo is not only inaccurate but unethical," she said in a statement, which was sent to the news agency and then to The New York Times. "These new claims are riddled with inconsistencies and, as with the first story, in many ways, simply incorrect. Due to an ongoing investigation, we will not comment on specifics, but we strongly dispute the misleading picture that The A.P. is attempting to paint of Mr. Domingo." Read about how the allegations against Mr. Domingo have divided the opera world. The Dallas Opera announced its cancellation on Twitter Thursday, posting a statement in which it said it had decided to cancel the gala "in light of ongoing developments regarding allegations made against Placido Domingo." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Generally, there have been two approaches to creating electric automobiles: Stuff batteries and an electric motor into existing gas power cars, or start from scratch and create a new design. Not satisfied with either of those methods, BMW in a sense used a time machine. Its new i3 is a deep dive into what the car of the future should be: efficient and sustainable. It's transportation to be sure, but the i3 is also just as much an environmental think tank on wheels. Its passenger cell is made from lightweight carbon fiber and reinforced plastic manufactured in a hydroelectric power factory in Washington State. Interior panels use renewable Asian kenaf plants. It's all assembled in a German plant amped up by wind power. It would be no surprise to find that the i3 is organic. And edible. The motor provides 170 horsepower and 184 pound feet of instant torque. While the i3 can be purely electric, drivers seeking more range will insist on the model with the 2 cylinder gasoline power generator for 3,850 more. At 1.9 gallons, the gas tank adds about 60 miles of range. At speeds over 25 miles an hour, road noise masks the engine drone. Pedestrians may think you're mowing the lawn. With the generator, i3 weighs just 2,900 pounds. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
WASHINGTON Top officials at the Federal Reserve were feeling better about the economy, but not so much that they considered scaling back their 600 billion effort to hold down long term interest rates and stimulate the recovery by buying government bonds. Concerns about falling prices have eased for the Fed's decision makers, who now believe that inflation will gradually rise, but remain below the desired level of about 2 percent for some time, according to minutes from their Dec. 14 meeting. The minutes, released Tuesday after a customary three week delay, also indicated that Fed officials were not particularly worried about the recent rise in government bond yields, judging that the rise was a consequence of greater optimism about the outlook for growth and would not undermine their 600 billion program. The new minutes and in particular the new outlook for inflation got the Fed off to an optimistic start for the new year. By contrast, the central bank was preoccupied for much of 2010 with a pressing issue: whether inflation was so low that the economy threatened to tip into a deflationary cycle. Fear of deflation was one of the main justifications the Fed's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, advanced for the decision in November to pump 600 billion into the banking system, a resumption of a strategy to spur the recovery by buying government securities to hold down long term rates. The new minutes show that the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed panel that sets monetary policy, has become more optimistic about growth and less fearful of deflation. But the committee has not decided on whether to continue the 600 billion asset purchase program through June, or to scale it back early. "While the economic outlook was seen as improving, members generally felt that the change in the outlook was not sufficient to warrant any adjustments to the asset purchase program, and some noted that more time was needed to accumulate information on the economy before considering any adjustment," the minutes stated. The minutes, which do not refer to the Fed officials by name, noted that "some indicated that they had a fairly high threshold for making changes to the program." Economists are divided on whether the Fed will carry out the 600 billion in bond purchases, commonly known as QE2, shorthand for the Fed's second round of quantitative easing. "My guess is that the Fed will scale back the intervention in the first quarter of 2011 as they continue to see activity firming, no tangible deflation risk and a brightening of their outlook," said Gregory D. Hess, an economist at Claremont McKenna College. But Roger E. A. Farmer, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, predicted that the Fed would go ahead with the program. "If they don't it's a problem because the expectations of quantitative easing have already been priced into the markets," he said. Stephanie Schmitt Grohe, an economist at Columbia, said: "I don't think the minutes suggest they will stop anytime soon. But I also don't think whether they continue or stop will be all that important for the economy. I am skeptical whether QE2 has any real positive or negative effects." The Fed has held short term interest rates near zero since December 2008 to make borrowing cheap and ease the recovery from the financial crisis. Also, from that month through March 2010 it bought 1.7 trillion in mortgage related securities and government bonds to push down mortgage rates and other longer term rates. The November decision to do an additional 600 billion of quantitative easing (on top of 250 billion to 300 billion in additional bond purchases using money from the mortgage related holdings, a decision announced in August) unleashed criticism that the Fed was inadvertently financing the federal deficit, driving down the value of the dollar and raising the risks of future inflation and bubbles. The latest minutes make an oblique acknowledgment of the criticisms, stating that Fed officials agreed to examine "any unintended consequences that might arise" and make adjustments if needed. The minutes also suggested that officials were not alarmed by the recent uptick in government bond yields. The yield on the benchmark 10 year Treasury note was 3.33 percent on Tuesday, up from 2.67 percent on Nov. 3, when the Fed announced the QE2 effort. The minutes noted several causes for "the significant backup in yields." Investors had lowered their estimates of how much the Fed would buy. Economic data suggested that the outlook was improving. And the 858 billion tax cut deal the Obama administration reached with Congressional Republicans bolstered expectations for growth in the new year. Several on the committee thought the purchases were "helping to keep longer term yields lower than would otherwise be the case," according to the minutes. The minutes suggested that most on the committee expected "a gradual pickup in growth with slow progress toward maximum employment," but disagreed about potential risks. A few officials expressed concern that "growth could pick up more rapidly than expected," and "trigger undesirable increases in inflation expectations," which could result in a rise in actual inflation. But on the other side were officials who expressed anxiety that the recovery could slow again because of further weakening in the housing sector, sharp spending cuts and tax increases in states and cities, and spillovers from any further worsening of Europe's strained banking and financial markets. An important measure of inflation that the Fed uses, the price index for personal consumption expenditures, rose at a 1.1 percent annualized rate in November, much less than the unofficial goal of around 2 percent. While several participants said deflation was still a threat, they saw the risk "as having receded somewhat over recent months," the minutes said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Ever feel like there's too much happening? That the news is out of control? That there's barely time to process one outrage before another replaces it, leaving just the faint memory and a little bit of scar tissue from the previous Worst Thing to Ever Happen? "Years and Years" is not the escape for you. The HBO limited series, from the British writer Russell T Davies, is about a lot of ideas: runaway technology, European nationalism, the failure of liberal democracy. But its overarching idea, driven home by its pell mell narrative, is, "Man, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on these days." This six episode limited series, beginning Monday, is half family drama, half speculative fiction. It starts in the present, with the adult children of the Lyons clan of Manchester welcoming a new baby into the family. Then it tears ahead five years into the future, its foot jammed on the accelerator, and shows us what rough beasts are being born elsewhere. World governments continue to lurch toward right wing xenophobia. China builds a military installation on an artificial island. War breaks out in Ukraine. A nutty, populist entrepreneur, Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson), runs for Parliament. Oh, P.S.: There are no more butterflies! All this plays out in the context of an ensemble family story think "This Is Us" or "Six Feet Under" about the comfortable Lyons siblings, who become, as the world grows more chaotic around them, progressively more uncomfortable. Daniel (Russell Tovey) becomes entangled in the Ukrainian refugee crisis, which has sent citizens fleeing state sanctioned homophobia. Edith (Jessica Hynes) risks her life as an antiwar activist. Stephen (Rory Kinnear) and his wife, Celeste (T'Nia Miller), are increasingly alienated from their older daughter Bethany (Lydia West), who is retreating into virtual cyberlife. And Rosie (Ruth Madeley), finds herself drawn to Rook's eccentric, and vaguely menacing, political movement. Davies, who's written both science fiction ("Doctor Who") and contemporary character drama ("Queer as Folk"), merges the two genres here to a purpose: The Lyonses are the sort of people who were once insulated from global catastrophes. Now the insulation is peeling off a layer at a time. When things fall apart in Asia, in America, at the North Pole, it becomes your problem eventually, wherever you are. "Years" is very good at amplifying up today's familiar sense of tumult. Every once in a while, the timeline sprints ahead into the 2020s, in a blur of news clips and references there's lab grown meat! Mike Pence is president! "Toy Story: Resurrection" is in theaters! that pass at such a dizzying rate that "Years" plays like a trailer for itself. What it's less good at, and this is important given the kitchen table genre Davies has chosen, is making its characters into three dimensional individuals. Mostly, they each feel like a representative for a social or political demographic. Stephen, a banker, is the standard bearer for the moneyed globalist class; Rosie, a single mother, for the masses who want society shaken up; the materfamilias, Muriel (Anne Reid), for a past generation that remembers more stable times; Bethany, for a future generation grasping for hope in a virtual world that they can't find in the physical one. Oddly, the show's broadest and most distant character, Rook, is its most fully realized. That's partly thanks to Thompson, who gives her a casual authenticity that helps you see how people embrace her authoritarianism as folksy common sense. And her presentation in the first four episodes, she's a kind of Max Headroom figure seen through the news media feels better suited to this fast motion story. As "Years" shades from a how we live now sketch into a futuristic dystopia, there is a confident inevitability to its momentum. Climate change, financial collapse, political chaos all these are slowly accumulating worries on the periphery of the characters' consciousness, until suddenly they're everywhere and inescapable. It's an ambitious, occasionally moving effort, more successful in its zeitgeist y family narrative than HBO's "Here and Now," the ham handed 2018 attempt to make domestic melodrama out of the Trump era. (From an American perspective, it's refreshing, in "Years," to see a series in which our own political upheaval is treated as simply part of the worrisome, distant background noise.) But Davies's attempt to depict an era of too much news to process often feels, well, too much to process, like he's trying to catch a waterfall in a Dixie cup. This may not be his fault, but as viewers, it's our problem. This may also be why, lately, TV's most resonant commentaries on the present have been focused on single stories from the past. "When They See Us," Ava DuVernay's poetic and excruciating story of the railroading and eventual exoneration of the Central Park Five on Netflix, connects to the present only briefly, by referencing the dehumanizing demagogy of the New York businessman Donald Trump in 1989. (As president, he was prompted by the series's visibility to double down on his condemnation of the five teenagers.) But its autopsy of injustice manages to be both timeless and painfully topical. HBO's recent mini series "Chernobyl" appeared an even less likely candidate for buzzy relevance. But by focusing closely on individual stories amid a nuclear disaster, it hummed with current anxieties, whether about climate disaster or the cascading effects of governments denying objective reality. Jared Harris's closing statement "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid" may be the definitive TV line of 2019, even if it concerns the Soviet Union of 1986. For all its intelligence, "Years and Years" instead conveys how crazy life is today by simply having characters tell us how crazy life is today, as when Edith laments, "The world keeps getting hotter and faster and madder, and we don't pause, we don't think, we don't learn, we just keep racing on to the next disaster." She's right, of course. But that's why we count on stories to do the pausing and learning for us. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
CHADDS FORD, Pa. "He'd come down here for the weekend, but I don't think he was too crazy about the country," the painter Jamie Wyeth recalled, wryly, of Andy Warhol's visits to the bucolic southeastern Pennsylvania farm where Mr. Wyeth still lives. By the 1970s, when a joint show saw each man painting a portrait of the other, sparking one of the art world's unlikeliest friendships, Warhol was famous for many things. Being a nature enthusiast was not one of them. Mr. Wyeth's meadows and woods the land that had inspired the artwork of both Jamie and his father, Andrew Wyeth, at whose side he painted through his teenage years were little match for the pull of "General Hospital." "Andy would spend most of his time down here watching soaps on TV, because he said the TV reception was better than in New York," Mr. Wyeth added with a bemused shrug. The pair's budding simpatico was eyebrow raising for reasons beyond a lack of shared interests. Each had come to represent a warring camp within the art world: Mr. Wyeth was a proxy for, and inheritor of, his father's status as the paragon of realist traditions, with their emphasis on technical skill and a reverence for the rural terra firma; Mr. Warhol was the standard bearer of an urban demimonde, with an aversion to anything smacking of "flyover country." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
MELBOURNE, Australia Serena Williams could face a fourth round match against top seeded Simona Halep, or perhaps her sister Venus, in the Australian Open, which begins on Monday. Williams, who is seeded 16th and seeking a record tying 24th Grand Slam title, will play her first match on Tuesday against 71st ranked Tatjana Maria, a neighbor of hers in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. In the second round, she could face the 2014 Wimbledon runner up, Eugenie Bouchard. Venus Williams could be Halep's third round opponent, meaning the Williams sisters could face off in the fourth round. The last time they faced each other in Melbourne was in the 2017 final, which Serena won, 6 4, 6 4, while two months pregnant. Serena Williams has not played the Australian Open since then. As she seeks a second Grand Slam title, Halep will first have to make the best of a second chance. At the draw ceremony on Thursday evening, Halep drew Kaia Kanepi for a first round match for the second consecutive Grand Slam event. In the opening match of the 2018 United States Open, Kanepi decisively blasted the top seeded Halep off the court, winning, 6 2, 6 4, and sending shock waves through the tournament in its first hours. Though she has maintained the No. 1 ranking she consolidated by winning last year's French Open, Halep has not won a match since her loss to Kanepi more than four months ago, running up a five match losing streak as she struggled with a back injury. She lost her only match of this year, to 15th ranked Ashleigh Barty in Sydney on Wednesday. Halep also does not have a coach after splitting with Darren Cahill in the off season. An Estonian veteran capable of overpowering Halep's world class defense, Kanepi is ranked 70th but has reached the third round or better at her last three Grand Slam events on hardcourts. After beating Halep, she reached the fourth round of the U.S. Open last year, and took a set off the eventual finalist Serena Williams before losing in three. Seventh seeded Karolina Pliskova, who won the WTA tournament in Brisbane on Sunday, looms as a quarterfinal opponent in that top quarter of the draw. The bottom half of the women's draw is anchored by second seeded Angelique Kerber, last year's Wimbledon champion. She could face fifth seeded Sloane Stephens in the quarterfinals. Stephens opens against her fellow American Taylor Townsend, who was the 2012 Australian Open junior champion. The defending women's champion, Caroline Wozniacki, seeded third, is also in the bottom half of the draw. She could face 30th seeded Maria Sharapova, the 2008 champion, in the third round, and Barty, the highest ranked Australian in either draw, in the fourth round. Big hitters like No. 8 Petra Kvitova and No. 11 Aryna Sabalenka are also possible quarterfinal opponents. In men's singles, third seeded Roger Federer, seeking a third consecutive title, was drawn into the bottom half of the draw with second seeded Rafael Nadal. They could meet in the semifinals. Federer's road there will not be easy. He opens against 99th ranked Denis Istomin. He could face 14th seeded Stefanos Tsitsipas in the fourth round, and sixth seeded Marin Cilic or 10th seeded Karen Khachanov in the quarterfinals. Nadal has struggled with his durability on hardcourts, completing only one of the 12 tournaments he entered on the surface last year before withdrawing or retiring from a match. Nadal received a comfortable opening round match; he will face 238th ranked James Duckworth, an Australian wild card. Nadal could face fifth seeded Kevin Anderson or ninth seeded John Isner in the quarterfinals. Isner faces a rare challenge in his first round: an opponent taller than he is. The 6 foot 10 Isner will face Reilly Opelka, a 21 year old from Michigan who breaks the seven foot barrier. In the top half, top seeded Novak Djokovic, who won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open last year, opens against a qualifier and could face the wild card Jo Wilfried Tsonga in the second round. Djokovic, who is seeking his seventh Australian Open title, beat Tsonga for his first in the 2008 final. In the quarterfinals, Djokovic could face eighth seeded Kei Nishikori, who won the ATP event in Brisbane on Sunday for his first title in three years. The only other Grand Slam champion in the top half of the draw with Djokovic is unseeded Stan Wawrinka, who opens against Ernests Gulbis and could face 16th seeded Milos Raonic or Nick Kyrgios in the second round. Those players are in the quarter of the draw anchored by fourth seeded Alexander Zverev, who was the champion of the year end ATP Finals in London last year and who has yet to reach the semifinal of a Grand Slam. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
After years of protests from fans and Native American groups, the Cleveland Indians have decided to change their team name, moving away from a moniker that has long been criticized as racist, three people familiar with the decision said Sunday. The move follows a decision by the Washington Football Team of the N.F.L. in July to stop using a name long considered a racial slur, and is part of a larger national conversation about race that magnified this year amid protests of systemic racism and police violence. Cleveland could announce its plans as soon as this week, according to the three people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The Cleveland team did not immediately comment. In response to Cleveland's decision, many fans praised the move, saying it was long overdue and proposing ideas for new names. Others in particular President Trump criticized the decision. "Oh no!" Trump tweeted. "What is going on? This is not good news, even for 'Indians'. Cancel culture at work!" Other professional sports teams, including the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Chicago Blackhawks, have said in recent months that they have no plans to change their names. Many universities and high schools abandoned Native American names and mascots long ago, but efforts to address the names at all levels of sport in the United States have increased in recent months. For Cleveland, the process began when it announced it would retire its longtime mascot, Chief Wahoo, a cartoonish caricature that was seen as particularly offensive. Many applauded the decision, but insisted the team name must go, too. Then in July, just hours after Washington announced it would change its name (under pressure from key sponsors like FedEx, Pepsi and Nike), Cleveland said it would conduct a "thorough review" of its nickname. The team has consulted with many Native American groups, both in Ohio and nationally. "We are committed to engaging our community and appropriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regard to our team name," the team said in a statement in July. Native American groups usually appear at Cleveland's home opener each spring, sometimes in the face of withering verbal abuse from fans as they enter the stadium. In recent years, the team has worked with the protesters and police to help ensure the safety of demonstrators and their right to free and peaceful expression. The club has said that the name was originally intended to honor a former player, Louis Sockalexis, who played for the Cleveland Spiders, a major league club, in the 19th century and was a member of the Penobscot Nation. Some have suggested that Cleveland adopt the name Spiders as a replacement. Cleveland's name was long accompanied by the Chief Wahoo logo. Phasing the image out included removing the logo from uniforms and from walls and banners in the stadium. A block "C" was adopted in its place. "Our organization fully recognizes our team name is among the most visible ways in which we connect with the community," the team's July statement said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Hieronymus Bosch is a kind of populist superstar among the old master painters. His fans relish his surreal, inventive images of the afterlife, but particularly his vivid visions of hell: sinners straddling giant knife blades, egg shaped machines churning miscreants into their bellies, cruel hybrid frog devils and dog faced lizard birds. Five hundred years since the death of the Dutch artist in 1516, it's believed that only a tiny fraction of Bosch's output survives about two dozen paintings and some 20 drawings but the fascination with his oeuvre hasn't abated. In all that time, aficionados have asked the same question: How did he come up with his amazing imagery? Where did he get the inspiration for these strange little monsters? Very little is known about Bosch the man. We have no letters or diaries, and written information in archives tends to be about transactions: who bought what and when. I wondered what I could discover about his mind and his artistry by going back to the place where he was born, lived and worked. I headed to the city of 's Hertogenbosch, known locally as Den Bosch, whose name the artist eventually took as his own. This year the city celebrates the 500th anniversary of the death of its legendary son, in an attempt to "forever link Bosch to Den Bosch," as I was told by Lian Duif, program manager of the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has been planning the quincentennial celebration since 2008. Den Bosch, an hour south of Amsterdam by train, is a picturesque medieval city that's not on a typical tourist itinerary, though it boasts the country's largest cathedral and an underground network of natural waterways. Although only a handful of landmark buildings from before the 16th century survive, the city is still laid out almost exactly as it was in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance Bosch's time because all the new structures have been built on plots that were established in the 15th century, and the skyline has barely changed. As a result, one can still get a pretty good sense of how it felt to live in the old city in 1516. But until about 10 years ago, there was little to link Den Bosch directly to its most famous son. "We thought: There's something more than the paintings," Ms. Duif said. "There's this intangible heritage, another aspect of Bosch, his time, his city, the market square, his studio. That's all holy ground." The foundation supports a host of activities related to Bosch, which will go on throughout the year, including the sold out blockbuster exhibition "Hieronymus Bosch: Visions of Genius," the largest ever retrospective of his works, until May 8. Its opening was marked by a parade of Boschian puppets on Feb. 12, attended by tens of thousands of visitors, including the Dutch king, Willem Alexander. The city has also collaborated with the Netherlands's leading theme park, Efteling, a fairy tale and folklore based amusement park, to develop the Bosch Experience Discovery Tour, an app guided walking tour and Heaven and Hell Cruise, which passes by life size figurines modeled on Bosch's little monsters and demons from his most famous work, the "Garden of Earthly Delights," and ends with a fire and brimstone 3 D light show inside a dark canal tunnel called the Hell Gate. Exploring Bosch's life on one's own isn't terribly complicated, either. The key physical landmarks of his life are positioned along a single red brick street, the Hinthamerstraat, so that you can follow his life along a straight and narrow path. What an apt metaphor for this devout Catholic whose paintings often centered on the figure of the Wayfarer, a traveler torn between the righteous and the perditious paths. Walking the whole distance would be an easy stroll of about 10 minutes without stopping, but there are about seven historic locations linked to Bosch's life that are worth exploring along the way, so the whole tour can take about two hours. I planned my Bosch excursion with the art historian Gary Schwartz, who was born in Brooklyn but moved to the Netherlands more than 40 years ago. His new biography, "Jheronimus: The Road to Heaven and Hell," was published in February. We met at what's known as a "brown cafe," a kind of living room pub with a spacious terrace under umbrellas in the heart of the market square, called In de Kleine Werelt at Markt 10. Mr. Schwartz ordered us each a pastry known as a Bossche bol, the city's signature treat, a kind of doughnut filled with whipped cream and smothered in chocolate, and told me about Bosch's early life. We could see the verdigris bronze statue of Bosch in the city square, and two of the three houses where he once lived. The house where the artist was born around 1450 (no official date is known) to a family of painters, as Jheronimus van Aken, was also on this square, but it most likely burned down during a devastating fire in 1463, which razed much of the medieval city. The fire itself, many historians suggest, may have been an inspiration for Bosch's vivid depictions of hellfire, since it might have made a strong impression on him as a teenager. We know from city records that from about the age of 12 until 30, Bosch lived at No. 29, which is now De Kleine Winst, a modest wooden souvenir shop, painted forest green; it bears a brass plaque reading "Jeroen Bosch, 1450 1516." (Jeroen is the Middle Dutch equivalent of the English Jerome.) For many years, this three story building served as the Bosch family home, workshop and studio, where his family ran a very active art operation. His grandfather, Jan van Aken, from the town of Aachen, Germany, was a painter, and four of his own sons took up the profession; this is also where the young Hieronymus learned to paint, and probably where he adopted his artistic pseudonym, Bosch, taking the name of his own city as a kind of calling card. Around age 30, Bosch married Aleid van de Meerveen, who had inherited land, houses and income from her parents and grandparents (all of whom had died in quick succession) including her home at 61 Markt, which is now a shoe shop. He moved in with her, and while the couple had no children, they took in Aleid's orphaned nephew. They lived in this house from 1483 until Bosch's death. Bosch himself became the first artist to be accepted into the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Dear Lady, a fraternal order devoted to worshiping the Madonna that received its charter in the 14th century. "This order had a certain religious glamour and there were more people who wanted to be part of it, so they started taking members who weren't clergy dues paying members," Mr. Schwartz said, "but at the core they were sworn brothers they were 'made men' and they belonged to the church hierarchy." To become a "sworn brother," Bosch would have had to qualify as one of the four grades of minor orders, which were doorkeeper, reader, acolyte and exorcist. Mr. Schwartz suspects that Bosch may have qualified as an exorcist which naturally made me wonder: Could he have seen the demons he depicted? "It didn't mean that he was allowed by the church to exorcise demons in people. That was only done by full priests," Mr. Schwartz explained. "Just being called an exorcist, for an artist who dealt so heavily in demons, is something that must've meant a lot to him." Leaving the crowded, noisy Markt and heading east along the Hinthamerstraat, we soon came to Het Heilige Geefhuis at No. 72, or the Holy Spirit House, now the city's library, a venerable building that stands on the site of the former Tafel van de Heilige Geest (Table of the Holy Spirit) a kind of medieval soup kitchen for the city's poor dating to the 13th century. A few yards down at No. 94 is the Home of the Illustrious Brotherhood, with a mustard yellow facade and Gothic looking spires. Across the narrow street and through the cobblestone plaza is the immense Gothic Sint Janskathedraal (Cathedral of St. John), built in the 13th century originally as a parish church, and now the largest cathedral in the Netherlands. Just inside the front door of the cathedral, to the left, is the Brotherhood Chapel, where all the members of Bosch's order would gather for their more exclusive services and rites. Once, this church was full of artworks by Bosch, Mr. Schwartz said, commissioned by his friends and brothers in the clergy. Even the church's main altar was a Bosch work, which apparently remained in place until 1629 when the city fell to the Protestant army of the Reformed Dutch Republic in the Eighty Years' War. This is also where, on Aug. 9, 1516, Bosch's funeral Mass was held. We continued on to the end of the Hinthamerstraat, where we stopped before the chapel of St. Anthony and what was once an asylum for the insane, which Mr. Schwartz told me was established in the Middle Ages to treat those suffering from St. Anthony's Fire, today known as ergotism or erysipelas, which causes fever, chills, convulsions, loss of limbs, hallucinations and, ultimately, death. One of Bosch's favorite subjects was St. Anthony, who was tempted by demons and whom he depicted as a dour faced abbot hunched over in a heavy brown monk's robe. I always assumed that Bosch chose this theme because it gave him a chance to paint his beloved little monsters, but learning about St. Anthony's Fire puts a new spin on it: Could it be that Bosch was also depicting the hallucinatory terrors of the disease's sufferers, perhaps described to him? As dark clouds started to loom in the ever changing Dutch horizon, we headed toward the last stop on our walking tour: the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center, where I said farewell to Mr. Schwartz. This former church was renovated in 2006 to create a permanent destination for Bosch aficionados to explore his works. Inside, the display includes all of Bosch's known works presented in large format poster reproduction, in frames that you can open and close to see his triptychs, for example, up close and from all sides. This is a great place to visit if you miss the exhibition of original Bosch works at the Noordbrabants Museum. For the final leg of my trip after lunch, I took a boat tour offered by Kring Vrienden van 's Hertogenbosch. My guide was Hugo Groeneveld, a retired coastal engineer, who narrated a bit of city history as he motored our small skiff through the winding, watery tunnels underneath the city. Some parts travel through the open air, which was bucolic and lovely, while the passages through the tunnels at times were dank and eerie. Along the way we encountered various figures on the banks and popping out from walls of the tunnels from Bosch's "Garden of Earthy Delights." These figures are part of the "Bosch Experience," but I would have been just as content without them. Just being underneath the city in the boat, with the quiet ripple of the waves and the soothing purr of the skiff's motor, suggested a different element of Bosch's universe, the more positive side. The sense of peace one gets so close to the water and yet so close to the city seems to me a kind of paradise. The tunnel walls multiplied ahead of us, suggesting a kind of circular infinity. I gazed through the darkness until there was a hint of daylight, indicating the way forward. When our captain shut off the boat's lights and we floated onward in the dark, I was reminded of another Bosch picture, the "Ascent of the Blessed" from the Doge's Palace in Venice. In that image, the lucky souls who have followed the righteous path and have been delivered from purgatory into salvation float upward into a circle of light. There, in the center, is a faint figure, barely distinguishable by the suggestion of a pair of white wings, offering them welcome. It's nice to think that Bosch, so famous for his visions of hell, surely enjoyed this bit of heaven on earth. If You Go Bosch Experience 's Hertogenbosch. A discovery tour of Bosch's city, created in conjunction with Efteling theme park. Using a free Bosch Experience app and route booklet (in Dutch and English), follow Bosch's life on a tour through the medieval city center, to the top of St. John's Cathedral, and onto a canal cruise under the old city. Hieronymus Bosch: Visions of Genius, the Noordbrabants Museum. Billed as the largest ever retrospective of Bosch works, this exhibition brings together about 17 paintings by Bosch and 19 drawings, along with works by members of his workshop and followers. Jan Fabre Tribute to Hieronymus Bosch in Congo,the Noordbrabants Museum. Among several exhibitions related to Bosch, this one is by the Belgian artist Jan Fabre. Bosch Grand Tour. Seven Dutch museums in four cities in the province of Brabant present exhibitions of contemporary art that relate to Bosch. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The best moments concern the music. The dancer Norma Miller, who died last year, recalls seeing Fitzgerald's star making debut at amateur night at the Apollo Theater: Her introduction drew boos, but she silenced the audience quickly. The British singer Laura Mvula marvels that Fitzgerald "could solo using her voice to the same level, with the same ease that a trumpeter or a saxophonist could." Noting that Fitzgerald's improvisations always stayed harmonically sound, the music writer Will Friedwald recites a lengthy list of songs she incorporated during a five minute scat version of "How High the Moon." "What kind of a catalog do you have in your head to be able to do that?" he asks in amazement. But analysis like that is mostly the exception, as are instances when the documentary, directed by Leslie Woodhead, allows the music a moment to sink in. We do hear Fitzgerald speak out against racism in a radio interview that the movie implies was withheld from broadcast. But this rote biographical portrait never lives up to her voice. Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Watching Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater can change your life. If that sounds like a slogan, it's truth in advertising, an established fact that this most self congratulatory of companies has never been too modest to trumpet. Many testimonials to this Ailey effect come from inside the organization itself: from the dancers, directors and guest choreographers who cite their first experience of Ailey as life altering. Count the choreographer Darrell Grand Moultrie among them. Explaining the inspiration for "Ounce of Faith," his first work for the main Ailey troupe, which had its premiere on Wednesday as part of the company's weeklong summer season at the David H. Koch Theater, Mr. Moultrie has told a story about seeing an Ailey performance on a school trip when he was in third grade and how it set him on his path. That story isn't explicitly told in "Ounce of Faith," but in a central section, Mr. Moultrie, in voice over, thanks the music teacher who took him to that performance, and he explains the title of his dance: "If someone has an ounce of faith in you, it can change your life." The theme of inspiration and education is there from the start, as Khalia Campbell, a statuesque dancer who joined the company last year, emerges from a large ensemble to do a solo on the cover over the orchestra pit. The music is "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," an anthem often heard in African American educational institutions, and the steps look like Ailey classroom exercises. Ms. Campbell does them grandly, heroically, but she also keeps quivering, exaggerating a student's struggle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
How far will the Zika outbreak spread, and for how long? Predicting Zika's course in the continental United States is difficult. Health experts have never confronted a virus quite like this one: a mild infection that can nonetheless devastate unborn infants, and that is transmitted by both mosquitoes and sex. Even tracking cases is hard because so few cause symptoms. "This is such a new thing entomologically that we're all speaking above our pay grade," said Joseph M. Conlon, a technical adviser to the American Mosquito Control Association. Still, there is growing agreement among some experts that the virus may be, at best, slowed by aggressive mosquito control. Nothing short of winter will stop it, they said, and how many cases are mounting up is still hotly debated. Virtually no entomologists believe that the transmission of Zika is limited to a few square miles of downtown Miami and Miami Beach, no matter how vigorously state officials insist it is. "That's just dreaming it's totally unrealistic," said Duane J. Gubler, a former director of the vector borne diseases division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Mosquitoes move around, people move around. Mosquitoes even move by car sometimes." Nonetheless, the C.D.C. on Monday lifted its travel advisory for the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami, saying that no new locally transmitted cases had been detected there since early August and traps there had few mosquitoes since the spraying of two pesticides, naled and Bti, began. Elsewhere, Florida has been reporting new locally transmitted cases almost every day. There were 79 as of Sept. 16. As of Friday, it was investigating 17 infections to ascertain whether each was a lone case or part of a wider cluster. The state has refused to reveal the five places where it has trapped mosquitoes that tested positive for the virus, saying the information was "not necessary to public health." Last week, arguing that it was, The Miami Herald sued Miami Dade County to force it to name the sites. And it's likely that some local transmission is not even known about yet. According to local doctors, hundreds of women are waiting weeks to get test results from overwhelmed state laboratories. Experts have long predicted that other Gulf Coast cities might have outbreaks like Miami's. Indeed, they may be having them now without realizing it because of the testing lags and asymptomatic cases. "Every week there's another 'Little Shop of Horrors,' and everyone seems surprised," said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine. "But finding virus in both people and mosquitoes suggests intense transmission." But a wildfirelike spread on the Gulf Coast, such as Puerto Rico is experiencing, is not expected, largely because air conditioning and screens are more common. Also, Zika usually smolders for months before exploding. For example, Puerto Rico reported its first locally transmitted case in December, but did not have thousands each week until the summer. Florida's first local case was in late July, so cold weather may break the cycle. Since January, the C.D.C. has predicted that Zika would not spread faster on the American mainland than dengue and chikungunya, both of which are also carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. But some scientists argue that dengue and chikungunya are poor models for Zika. Lab animals with Zika develop more virus in their blood than they do when infected with the other viruses, said Rebecca C. Christofferson, a disease transmission specialist at Louisiana State University's veterinary school. And, she said, Zika appears to be unusually quick to move from a mosquito's gut to its salivary glands, where it is injected into the next victim. Dengue takes seven to 10 days to make that trip; chikungunya takes as few as five days, depending on temperature, mosquito size and other factors. "Zika is looking like chikungunya," Dr. Christofferson said. Also, Zika flies below the public health surveillance radar. Dengue's nickname is "breakbone fever," and chikungunya's is "bending up disease." Both can be excruciatingly painful, so victims often see doctors quickly and their test results are reported to the state. By contrast, 80 percent of Zika victims lack symptoms and may never see a doctor. "The symptoms are so diffuse that many, including many physicians, fail to recognize that a person has it," said Manuel F. Lluberas, a former Navy entomologist now in the private sector. As a result, a Zika cluster can grow without being noticed until someone infected, usually a pregnant woman, is tested. Also, the state's biggest dengue outbreak began in 2009 in Key West, a tiny vacation island with a relatively rich and educated population of 25,000. It still took two years to contain, with 90 confirmed cases. The state's first Zika outbreak is in Miami, an area of 5.5 million. Cities are more likely to have residents, some with guns or dogs, who refuse to open their doors to mosquito inspectors, said Mr. Conlon of the mosquito control association. One property's pools and gutters can produce enough mosquitoes to blanket a neighborhood. "What's getting to me is how complacent people in Miami are about this," he said. "That does not bode well for containment." For example, he said, mosquitoes breed in flowering bromeliads. Yet despite threats of 1,000 fines, some Miami Beach residents resist ripping up their gardens. Half measures will not slow the virus. Aedes aegypti lay eggs that can cling to a dry surface until the rain they need arrives. It is not enough merely to empty the rows of conch shells, for instance, that decorate outdoor restaurants in Miami. "You have to scrub each one out," Mr. Conlon said. Predictions of Zika's course are also made difficult by a monumental wild card. Unlike other tropical viruses, it can be sexually transmitted. "That makes Zika a different breed of dog," Dr. Gubler said. If an infected person passes it to a household sexual partner, the virus will be in human blood for up to 20 days at that location for local mosquitoes to pick up and pass on. The long term picture is even fuzzier. Experts are divided on whether the virus could become endemic, recurring summer after summer. The virus itself has two ways to survive winter. A recent laboratory experiment showed that about one mosquito in 300 passes it on to the next generation in her eggs. And Zika can last for six months in men's semen. Either route could seed a new domestic outbreak next year or the virus could be reimported from Latin America or the Caribbean. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
On Wednesday evening, the tidy and the would be tidy sat very still on the fourth floor of the Barnes Noble bookstore at Union Square in Manhattan, craning to hear the soft voice of Marie Kondo, the Japanese author of "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up," as she demonstrated her folding technique on ever more complex garments. She was balletic and masterly. When done, Ms. Kondo received a standing ovation. "Look at her, she's adorable," said Rita Wade, 51, a director of student affairs at a language center who said that she was in attendance because she was fascinated by Ms. Kondo's global reach. The elfin Ms. Kondo, perhaps the world's only decluttering celebrity, was promoting her new book, "Spark Joy," a more prescriptive manual (it comes with illustrations) than her last, which is a publishing juggernaut. (Both titles are at the top of the New York Times best seller list.) Kindly and self mocking, Ms. Kondo was already a tidy freak, as she said (assisted by an interpreter), by age 5, irritating her family by throwing away their belongings and mystifying her teachers when she skipped recess to organize her classroom's bookshelves. Now 31, KonMari, as she's known, exhorts you to ask yourself, "Do your things spark joy?" If not, you must thank them for their service, and send them packing. It's a liberating manifesto, though in practice it can take months. (This reporter once lost an entire weekend to the KonMari method.) Handle each object to properly gauge whether it truly thrills. Ms. Kondo suggests giving your clothes a hug, and mimed doing so as the audience gently applauded. Her approach to stuff isn't just minimalism, said Yuko DeYoung, 50, an account manager at a news agency, and one of over 100 attendees at the book signing. "Her method is something more basic, something more ..." Ms. DeYoung paused to find the right word, "... humane." Indeed, this patting and hugging of belongings, a kind of compassionate organizing, has resonated beyond all reckoning. More than five million copies of Ms. Kondo's books have been sold, along with licenses to print them in 40 languages, including Mongolian. Fox and NBC are working on a sitcom inspired by her. Last year, Time magazine named Ms. Kondo one of its 100 most influential people, in an encomium by the actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who proclaimed her devotion to Ms. Kondo by announcing that if she ever got a tattoo, it would say, "Spark Joy!" The Atlantic analyzed Ms. Kondo's tidying method through the lens of behavioral economics. Consignment stores have been overwhelmed by donations from devotees. Inevitably, there was a backlash, and then a backlash against the backlash. Finally, a parody appeared that wasn't quite parody: "The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a (expletive)," by Sarah Knight, out last month, was mostly practical. "So many books are about hoarding and clutter," said Christian Freedom, 46. "It's very shaming. I like her tone and her idea that untidiness is a spectrum." Mr. Freedom was at Barnes Noble with a friend, Darren Rosenblum, also 46, who had given him the book for Christmas, and they were disputing their place on that spectrum. Mr. Freedom, who lives in an L shaped studio in the East Village and loves to collect jewelry, clothes and decorative objects, graded himself with a harsh nine; Mr. Rosenblum clocked him at about seven. Mr. Freedom said he had already filled a large duffel bag with castoffs, delivered to a thrift store. "I thanked my stuff and handed it off," he said. "My therapist was really happy and said, 'Can you do that twice a week?'" As for Mr. Rosenblum, a law professor at Pace University, he averred that his space was fairly clear but his desk was a mess. Not a lot of landscape there, he admitted, "but the baggage is heavy." Lindsay Thomas, 32, who works at a humanitarian aid organization, said she was about halfway through Ms. Kondo's categories, having ticked off clothes, paper and books. Her colleague Sara Brandsema, 29, was inspired by Ms. Thomas's mood, which has been noticeably upbeat of late, she said. Also, having unearthed a few Starbucks gift cards in the process, Ms. Thomas had treated her to coffee. As Ms. Kondo signed her last book and smiled sweetly for the last selfie with a young woman wearing a black spangled watch cap, Kian Davis, a burly 23 year old security guard working the event, said shyly that last year he had overseen her book signing at the West 82nd Street Barnes Noble. He was so impressed that he bought the book and tidied his room. Had he mastered the folding? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
What Do You Get When You Cross Mark Morris With Samuel Beckett? DUBLIN A large portrait of Samuel Beckett peaked hair , deeply furrowed brow, piercing blue eyes looms over the public area of the Palace Bar, an 1823 watering hole long loved by journalists and writers. At midday, the bar was all dark wood and filtered light, muttering male voices, and the faint whoosh of glasses filling with beer. It was late May, and Mr. Morris was on tour with his company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, which was performing his Beatles inspired "Pepperland" around Ireland. He was working on a new piece, "Sport," which will have its premiere on July 10, alongside two older pieces, at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. But he was also branching out. He will stage three Beckett pieces for the Happy Days: Enniskillen International Beckett Festival his first foray into pure theater July 25 to 28 in Northern Ireland. The pairing of Mr. Morris, an American choreographer known for his playfulness, and the Irish playwright (who died in 1989) famous for his dark, often obscure and mordant writing, is not an immediately obvious one. As Mr. Morris put it, "you could get someone English er and cheaper." But Sean Doran, a director (with Liam Browne) of the Happy Days festival, said the connection was obvious to him. "It is underestimated how lightly Beckett wore his seriousness," Mr. Doran, who also commissioned "Pepperland," said in a telephone interview. "In my view, his work is as much about lightness as darkness, everyday language as much as intellectual depth. Mark has the seriousness of intent and lightness of communicative ability that puts him very much in the world of Beckett." Many artists, Mr. Doran added, "would shy off at the idea of doing Beckett." "But Mark never hesitated," he said. Mr. Morris's version was that "Sean gives me way too little notice, to trick me into doing stuff." More seriously, he said he had always loved Beckett's work and had seen innumerable productions of his plays. "Beckett's directions are extremely strict," he said. "You have to stay within the rules, and yet sometimes a production works and sometimes it doesn't. When Sean asked, of course I was interested." "We really want to do more with dance and movement in the festival, and the commission from Mark, which we consider our headline work, is a very visible flag of that," Mr. Doran said. He started the conversation with Mr. Morris by suggesting "Come and Go," a three minute work for three women, from 1965. He also proposed "Quad," a pure movement piece created for German television in 1981. Then Mr. Morris added "Catastrophe," from 1982, which Beckett dedicated to the then imprisoned Czech writer Vaclav Havel. Three works, he said, "seemed like the right number of pieces in that they all kind of refer to each other in their implication of infinitude." The three pieces are very different but are alike in their exactingly detailed stage directions. (For "Come and Go," those are longer than the play.) "I felt a choreographer's eye on that detail, literally down to the fingertips, would be very different to a theater director's eye," Mr. Doran said. "The work is so open to other art forms; it doesn't have to be theater practice only." This kind of lateral thinking about Beckett is characteristic of the Happy Days festival. From the start, it has had a determinedly eclectic approach, focusing on Beckett's passionate interest in visual arts, music and movement, as well as highlighting his interests in cinema, comedy and sport. (This year's other offerings include Beckett's "Cascando," "Ohio Impromptu," and "Not I," and also Schubert's "Swan Song," directed by Romeo Castellucci, and "Walking for Waiting for Godot," a performance in the border area between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.) "Beckett directed many of his own plays and always brought out the musicality of the work," Mr. Knowlson said in an email. "Often his productions became works to which the word 'balletic' could be applied with an emphasis on repetition and echo of movements. Most of them were pieces of work that could well be described as choreographed." It would be welcome, he wrote of the commission from Mr. Morris, "to have a choreographer bring his own experience with movement and gesture to these particular plays." Mr. Morris, who developed the work at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Canada, said he immediately decided to cast dancers for the pieces; to find them he "went way back historically to my earliest days." He wrote to the veterans Rob Besserer, Susan Weber, Teri Weksler and Elisa Clark (who danced with Mr. Morris's company more recently than the others). "The audition was an email that said, 'Can you walk and are you interested?'" Mr. Morris said. His approach was straightforward. "I am basically going straight from the written text and instructions. And then you question what Beckett didn't specify, what is not excluded," he said. "On purpose, I didn't memorize or plan anything before starting." Although he said he was initially "nervous and feeling like a charlatan," he found the process deeply interesting. The hardest part, he said, was the dancers' anxiety about memorizing the lines in "Come and Go" and "Catastrophe," in which he will also perform. Following in Harold Pinter's footsteps (no pressure!) he will play a director rehearsing an unnamed play in which an immobile man ("The Protagonist") on a podium is physically exposed and manipulated. "It's much more horrific than I thought, but also much funnier," Mr. Morris said. In an email, he said he had decided to play the director "so I'd have something to do in the festival with my friends." "It's also very like my real job," he added. "At the beginning I didn't realize I would have to speak," Ms. Clark said. "As a trained dancer, you know there are infinite possibilities in how you connect Shape 1 and Shape 2," she said. "I realized you had to think about words like that, in terms of timing and connection." Mr. Morris began with "Quad," which, he said, "seems like a dance Lucinda Childs might have thought of." Mr. Knowlson wrote of "Quad" in "The Life of Samuel Beckett," that "this nonverbal piece for four dancers also developed naturally out of Beckett's interest in choreographing movement and from his radical mistrust of language." In the piece, which Beckett created in his 70s, four figures in brightly colored djellabas move to a percussive beat along the sides and across the diagonals of a square, avoiding the middle and one another. Beckett wrote a detailed scheme for the order and sequencing of the movement, but didn't specify the pace or the instruments. Mr. Morris decided to use four musicians, one linked to each dancer, and worked out the musical parts with the composer Ethan Iverson, a frequent collaborator. "The piece is radical, but the way it's done is very pragmatic, just putting breath into it," he said. "The timing is actually much harder than it looks; the point isn't virtuosity, it's expertise." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
BRIC, the multimedia space in Downtown Brooklyn, will present a new concert series in its spring season, as well as an exhibition centering on Nuyorican bike clubs. The new series, BRIC House Sessions, will focus on experimental music and kick off with the soul and jazz musician Roy Ayers, on Feb. 16. Other performers include the Swedish rock band Dungen (March 16); the singer songwriters Patrick Watson (March 23) and Becca Stevens (March 30); and the Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure (April 6). From Feb. 2 through March 5, the sculptor Miguel Luciano will present "Ride or Die," which explores Nuyorican bike culture and the relationship between Puerto Rico and the rest of the United States. Another exhibition, "Public Access/Open Networks," will examine artistic experimentation on public access television and new media platforms. It runs from March 23 through May 7. The season also includes original TV programming, theater presentations and the classical music focused Look Listen festival, which will return on May 19. More information can be found at bricartsmedia.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The 1973 Jamaican movie "The Harder They Come" was a hybrid crime drama and musical with an irresistible premise: a singer hits the top of the pop charts at the same time he hits the top of the most wanted list. Starring the reggae stalwart Jimmy Cliff, the movie was directed by Perry Henzell; Chris Blackwell, whose Island Records was instrumental in introducing reggae to the United States and Britain, was a producer. Read J. Hoberman's Rewind column on "The Harder They Come," also in theaters this week. After that landmark film, Henzell began work on " No Place Like Home ," which is finally opening this week in New York. He was never able to complete it to his satisfaction, but a cut was shown in festivals before his death in 2006. This version is a new restoration of that cut. While "The Harder They Come" had a trim and nearly relentless story, this movie's eschewal of narrative momentum can hardly be understated. But that doesn't mean there's nothing going on. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Joe Harris: Walking Down Your Street and Pushing the Nets Up the Standings As Nets guard Joe Harris walks the cobblestone streets outside the team's practice facility in Sunset Park, no one seems to notice. "Most of the time, I blend in," he said. "I kind of look like I work in a Brooklyn coffee shop." Harris's journey from unemployed castoff to indispensable starter mirrors the rise of the Nets, a team reconstructed through savvy draft picks and second chance signings. Without a marquee star, the Nets have won 19 of their last 25 games, and they are on a six game winning streak against opponents in the stronger Western Conference. The Nets had 28 victories last season; now, despite a loss in Boston on Monday, they have the sixth best record in the Eastern Conference (27 24), and playoff talk is brewing. The injury riddled team has weathered the loss of Caris LeVert, out with a foot injury since November, and now is without Spencer Dinwiddie, a strong candidate for the Sixth Man of the Year Award, who may be out until mid March with a thumb injury. In Dinwiddie's absence, the next man up Nets will look to G League call ups and increased scoring from everyone. Three years ago, Harris, then with the Cleveland Cavaliers, had the worst day of his basketball life. In a period of a few hours, he had foot surgery, was traded to Orlando and was immediately waived. He was out of the league for six months before the Nets signed him to a minimum contract for less than 1 million in 2016. Last summer, he signed a two year, 16 million deal to remain with the Nets. "His story is about opportunity and development on a team starting to improve," Coach Kenny Atkinson said. "Given where he came from, it's a romantic story, a beautiful story. Everything about him his humility, the fact that he rides the subway everywhere is why everybody loves Joe." Harris's romance with the game began in Chelan, Wash., where his father coached high school basketball. In fourth grade, Harris came home one afternoon and asked his mother if he could write his basketball goals on his bedroom walls. She assumed he would scribble them on paper and tape them up. Instead, he took a marker and wrote directly on the walls and ceiling. The writings remain in his childhood bedroom, frozen in the amber of a 9 year old's penmanship. A 9 year old Harris wrote inspirational quotations on the walls and ceiling of his bedroom in Chelan, Wash. Those lines are still there today. Given that Chelan is a small town with only two gyms, the worst time of the year was when the courts were being refinished, leaving Harris nowhere to play. One time after an interminable wait, a 10 year old Harris ran onto the court, slid on his stomach and kissed the floor. "Baby, I'm back!" he screamed. "That pretty much sums me up as a kid," Harris said. "I just love basketball." To the right of his childhood bed is his favorite quotation from John Wooden, which he easily recites from memory: "Success is a peace of mind which is a direct result of self satisfaction in knowing that you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming." There are also lines from Charles Barkley, Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Larry Bird and others, as well as a list of goals. The last goal on the list: "Become a pro." After playing four years at Virginia, Harris was drafted in the second round by Cleveland in 2014. He played sparingly for two seasons on the LeBron James led Cavaliers. A few months after he was released, he watched Cleveland win its first N.B.A. title. This season, Harris was averaging 13.4 points a game through Sunday and had the third best 3 point shooting percentage in the N.B.A. (46.8 percent). Among players with at least 300 field goal attempts this season, he was eighth at 61.4 in effective field goal percentage, trailing only Golden State's Stephen Curry (62.1) among guards and wing players, according to Basketball Reference.com. "We want him to shoot more bad shots because he's such a great shooter, but he won't because he's such a good guy," Atkinson said. The pace and space era of the N.B.A. has made a player like Harris, a sharpshooter who creates space on the floor and strikes when opportunity arises, more valuable. "The game has slowed down for him," Atkinson said. "His first two years he was making turnovers, not reading situations right. He used to be a defensive liability, and now we put him sometimes on the best shooter. "I'm pleased that he's played beyond his contract. For a guy who wasn't even in the league, he became a stalwart, a guy you can count on." Casual sports fans may struggle to name a player on the Nets, particularly one who is a regular ... well, Joe. The team shot an amusing video spoofing Harris's accuracy in hopes of earning him a spot in the All Star 3 point shooting contest. Harris visited spots around Brooklyn he tossed oranges into a shopping cart, lofted eggs into a hot frying pan and shot some coins into a tip jar. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Reading the Signs When a Couple of Papal Pals Get to Talking The pages of a large Gospel, lying on the unadorned wooden coffin, fluttered in the breeze. Cardinals in red and bishops in purple stood in ranks nearby, and millions of mourners filled St. Peter's Square and surrounding streets for the vast spectacle that was Pope John Paul II's funeral in 2005. I was standing atop the square's colonnade with other journalists who had come from around the world to cover John Paul's death and the aftermath. The image of those riffling pages below seized my attention. Most of us on that colonnade presumably knew the symbolism: the wind ruffled Gospel represented the presence of the Holy Spirit. Or so we had learned while boning up on the pageantry of the funeral and the conclave to come. Actual footage of that image shows up in the opening scenes of the dramedy "The Two Popes," which began streaming Friday on Netflix. The film "inspired by true events," as an opening title reads depicts the election of John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI; Benedict's shocking resignation; and the election of the current pontiff, Francis. For Vaticanistas accustomed to tea reading but not so worried about historical exactitude, "The Two Popes" is a delightful imaginary look behind the thick walls of secrecy. The first voyeuristic frissons come during sequences about the 2005 conclave depicting the politicking that is known to go on among the cardinals, and showing them voting in arcane rituals. We know they politick from leaked accounts, and we know how the conclave is supposed to work from Vatican documents that detail the process. We can also imagine how it looks because the Holy See press office invited reporters into the Sistine Chapel for a look see right before the conclave. The interest comes because of the intense secrecy that the Vatican insists upon. Participants are sworn to reveal nothing and face excommunication if they violate the oath. All media, any connections to the outside world and recording devices are banned. The premises are swept for electronic bugging. In the movie, the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Anthony Hopkins) is elected Pope Benedict XVI and the stage is set for the ultimate pontifical buddy picture a series of imagined conversations between Benedict and Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), who will become his successor, Francis. It's a joy to listen in as these two formidable churchmen joust over sharply different views of Catholicism, admit spiritual doubts, joke about the Beatles, seek absolution from each other and end up drinking beer together, just two old popes watching soccer on a couch. About a quarter of the papal dialogue is verbatim from the words or writings of the two men, he said. The rest was paraphrased or made up "in the spirit" of the churchmen. The conversations open as they stroll through the gardens of the pope's summer residence, in Castel Gandolfo. Bergoglio has just flown to Rome to press Benedict to grant him his wish to resign as archbishop of Buenos Aires. McCarten does a fine job of telegraphing their politics traditionalist, protective of doctrine, inward looking vs. open to the modern world, compassionate and flexible and encapsulates the debate that continues throughout the church. Benedict grills the cardinal, expressing irritation with his supposedly sympathetic statements about married priests ("misquoted," the Bergoglio character says) and homosexuality ("taken out of context"), and with the cardinal's giving communion to divorced Catholics (not denied) and popularity among the common people. Bergoglio then delivers a pointed critique of the Benedict papacy that would warm the heart of a liberal Catholic: "We have spent these last years disciplining any one who disagrees with our line on divorce, on birth control, on being gay, while our planet was being destroyed, while inequality grew like a cancer." He continues, "All the time the real danger was inside, inside with us." That danger, he said, was the church hierarchy's knowledge that clerics were sexually preying on children, and its failure to protect these children. The movie then gins up a seemingly far fetched idea: that Benedict revealed to Bergoglio that he planned to resign. Bergoglio, like much of the Catholic world when the real life Benedict made the announcement, is stupefied by the idea. He runs through all the reasons it can't happen the kind of arguments journalists rehearsed in 2010, when rumors of a papal resignation surfaced. I wrote just such a piece myself, duly presenting the evidence for and against. The arguments against it seemed stronger. As Bergoglio says in the movie, popes sign on for life; their authority comes from the fact they will suffer and die on the job; the papacy will be forever damaged; two popes will create conflict. It hasn't happened in nearly 600 years. I was no less stunned when I heard the real world news, which Benedict first delivered in Latin. McCarten addresses perhaps the most fascinating question in these events: What was the real reason Benedict stepped down? Publicly, Benedict said failing strength "of mind and body" led him to believe he could no longer fulfill his ministry. No evidence exists that any of these conversations ever took place. In fact, in "Last Testament: In His Own Words" (2016), written with Peter Seewald, Benedict said he had no inkling who his successor might be and even doubted it would be Bergoglio. He also said the scandal and corruption did not play a role in his resignation. But McCarten may have captured a deeper truth: that toward the end of his papacy, Benedict came to believe that the church had to change course and that its center of gravity was shifting to Latin America, or at least outside Europe. That is the view of a Francis biographer, Austen Ivereigh, who pointed out that at the 2005 conclave, Bergoglio reportedly received a large bloc of votes but then threw his support to Ratzinger. Ivereigh also noted that Benedict allowed a major meeting of Latin American bishops in 2007 to go forward. The bishops produced a report, probably written by Bergoglio, laying out a road map for church renewal and the groundwork for a Latin American pope. Like the archbishop of Buenos Aires. "I don't think it's unreasonable to suppose that Benedict foresaw Bergoglio would be elected," Ivereigh said in an interview. "They had a good relationship, and Benedict was very sympathetic to Bergoglio," he added. By now, it might be clear what "The Two Popes" is not: a movie about two popes. Bergoglio only becomes Pope Francis about 15 minutes before the end, allowing the filmmakers to avoid a big question, one with real consequence for the church: What is the relationship of two popes (albeit one with an emeritus title) living within 10 minutes walking distance from each other and how will that affect the church's unity? Competing contemporaneous popes in the Middle Ages was a church nightmare. Benedict has become the point of reference for traditionalists and conservatives who disdain Francis' informality and his focus on inclusiveness over doctrine. Friction between the Francis and Benedict camps has been apparent, although Ivereigh argued that the men share a personal warmth. "The Two Popes" ends on a happy note, with the title characters watching the Germany Argentina World Cup final in 2014. (Germany won; score one for Benedict.) It's a harmonious picture that will please the Vatican image handlers. So will montages of Francis, championing the poor and oppressed. But it's only half the picture. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
LOS ANGELES Two weeks ago, the embattled Weinstein Company looked like it had finally found a way forward. An investor group had emerged with a plan to buy 90 percent of the studio's assets, including rights to "Project Runway" and a 277 film library. The new company would be primarily led by women. For the Weinstein Company, crippled in wake of sexual misconduct allegations against its co owner Harvey Weinstein, the offer was the only way to keep the studio intact and its 150 employees working. Other potential buyers only wanted to cherry pick properties, and the studio was nearly out of money to keep running. But the Weinstein Company's board or at least the three men remaining on it said late Sunday that the sale talks, which had been teetering since a lawsuit had been filed this month by the New York State attorney general, had fallen apart. By Monday, finger pointing over who was to blame had begun. And the studio's future seemed to be a court directed sale or liquidation, with assets sold off in bankruptcy proceedings like scrap from a wrecked car. "There's nothing pretty about this," said Larry Hutcher, a corporate lawyer at Davidoff Hutcher Citron in New York who has been following the Weinstein Company's struggles. "It's likely going to be a free for all that stretches on for months." Since October, when the Weinstein Company began to implode after reports in The New York Times and The New Yorker revealed decades of sexual harassment allegations against Mr. Weinstein, very little has gone as expected. At one point, two female led investor groups were competing to buy the assets, with one intending to give profits to organizations focused on ending harassment, sexual abuse and discrimination. So there is always the possibility of another twist. The Weinstein Company has yet to file for bankruptcy it said on Sunday that a filing would happen "over the coming days" leaving open the possibility, however unlikely, that the two sides could come to an agreement. "It appears that this transaction has now ended," Ms. Contreras Sweet said in a statement on Monday, adding that the Weinstein Company's move had "surprised" her. "While our efforts did not materialize as we had hoped, I am grateful for my investors who saw the compelling value of a women led board." The Weinstein Company declined to comment. In announcing its bankruptcy plans on Sunday, the company's board said in a statement, "While we recognize that this is an extremely unfortunate outcome for our employees, our creditors and any victims, the board has no choice." The studio also made public a sharply worded letter that it sent to Ms. Contreras Sweet and Mr. Burkle on Sunday that blamed her for failing to "keep your promises" about interim funding. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. It was in November when Ms. Contreras Sweet first sent a letter to the board outlining her proposal. "I will be chairwoman of a majority female board of directors," she wrote. "Women will be significant investors in the new company and control its voting stock." She also proposed creating a fund for victims and establishing a mediation process for reaching settlements. After failing to find other buyers who would keep the studio intact Lionsgate, Shamrock Capital Advisors, Killer Content and the Qatari company beIN Media Group were among those considering various pieces the board entered into exclusive negotiations with Ms. Contreras Sweet's group in late January. Most of the studio's all male board had quit in early October. Those who remained were Mr. Weinstein's younger brother, Bob Weinstein; Tarak Ben Ammar, a Franco Tunisian financier and film producer; and Lance Maerov, an executive at the advertising giant WPP Group. By Feb. 10, a Saturday, the two sides were finalizing a deal. The Weinstein brothers, who jointly own about 42 percent of the company, would receive no cash from the sale. Other equity holders would also be wiped out. Bob Weinstein, who had been running the studio since the firing of Harvey Weinstein in October, would step down. According to two people briefed on the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private process, the Weinstein Company and Ms. Contreras Sweet's group were set to formalize the agreement that coming Monday. Ms. Contreras Sweet said she believed the proposal addressed those points, but declined to have a substantive conversation. On Sunday, Feb. 11, Mr. Schneiderman, frustrated by a continued lack of responsiveness from the investor group to his queries, filed a lawsuit against the studio and the Weinstein brothers alleging that they repeatedly violated state and city laws barring gender discrimination, sexual harassment and coercion. And he held a news conference the next morning in which he publicly stated his three requirements for a deal. "As of yesterday, there was no deal that would have met these standards," he said. In particular, he said, "there was no victim compensation fund." By the end of that week, Mr. Schneiderman had started to get what he wanted. The Weinstein Company, for instance, fired its president, David Glasser, on Feb. 16. Mr. Glasser had been expected to run the new studio; Mr. Schneiderman had pointed to him as one of the managers who perpetuated Mr. Weinstein's behavior. Ms. Contreras Sweet and Mr. Burkle also met with Mr. Schneiderman and discussed plans to create a full fledged victim compensation fund, ultimately earmarking up to 90 million. But the Weinstein Company emailed a letter to the investor group on Sunday saying the deal was dead. "Over the past two weeks, we had very productive discussions with both parties," Eric Soufer, Mr. Schneiderman's director of communications and senior counsel, said in a statement on Monday. "We are disappointed that despite a clear path forward on those issues including the buyer's commitment to dedicate up to 90 million to victim compensation and implement gold plated H.R. policies the parties were unable to resolve their financial differences." Mr. Soufer added, "We will continue to pursue justice for victims in the event of the company's bankruptcy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Valentine's Day often finds couples speaking of love and lasting commitment. Some have concluded (for better or worse) that there is no finer way to celebrate eternal love than by showcasing it on one's ring finger with a tattoo. "Once you get it, there's no turning back," said Christopher Forsley, who was married last July to Sarah Patterson in Santa Monica, Calif. For Mr. Forsley, 30, a comic book writer, and Ms. Forsley, 28, a cake maker, the factors driving their decision to get inked came down to cost, minimalism and timing oh, and the fact that Mr. Forsley's brother is a tattoo artist. "We're both broke and not materialistic," Mr. Forsley said. "We liked the idea that this wasn't an object, but rather something that was going to become a part of us." The bride added, "This matched who we are." Mike Martin, the owner of Flesh Skin Grafix Tattoo in Imperial Beach, Calif., said, "I see maybe one couple a week, which is a lot considering five years ago almost no one was asking for them." Given the permanence of tattoos, inked on rings are generally for those who have recently been married rather than simply engaged. Surprising one's intended with an unexpected trip to a tattoo parlor, perhaps on one knee, may not go over as expected. "A proposal isn't always forever, and the wedding might not happen," said Mr. Martin, who is also the president of the Alliance of Professional Tattooists. He said he has never had calls for tattooed engagement rings. Like the ink itself, he added, "Once the knot is tied, it's far more permanent." Tattooed on wedding rings come in an array of designs. Among the most popular are branding the wedding date, spouse's name or initials onto the finger. Some designs are simple; a monochrome squiggle line or the infinity symbol around the digit. Some favor words: "always," "forever" or "together." For her marriage to Jay Z, Beyonce had a Roman numeral inked onto her ring finger. Behati Prinsloo, who is married to Adam Levine, had three dots tattooed onto her ring finger. Others are intricate works of art, incorporating objects like arrows going off in different directions, a heart and key, or an outline of the state where the couple fell in love. Dax Shepard, who is married to Kristen Bell, has a bell shaped tattoo inside of which are three initials: K, L and D, for Kristen, Dax, and their daughter Lincoln. Those who go for inked on rings are often looking for a different kind of wedding experience to go along with them. "I never wanted to have a traditional wedding," said Molly Serena Dorsman, 29, a music teacher in New Jersey, who married Dzermin Mesic, 32, a chef, in 2012. She contends that those who favor the traditional gold ring often get divorced. "We want to be married forever," she said, "and this cements that." For their ceremony, held in a courthouse in New Jersey, Ms. Dorsman and Mr. Mesic bought stand in rings from a flea market. He got a basic silver band and she got a thick banded ring with vintage roses on it, silver as well. A few days later, the couple visited her friend's store, Aqua Santa Tattoo, a parlor on West 18th Street in Manhattan, from which they each chose a simple band; she had a heart added to hers. In addition to "increasing the feeling of permanency of a couple's faith," said Myrna L. Armstrong, a retired professor from the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, a ring tattoo represents a "distinctive choice to have this done, and the understanding that no one else will have anything like theirs. These intense meanings are very appealing to couples." "Tattoos make people feel good, special and unique" and are particularly appealing to millennials, said Ms. Armstrong, who has studied tattoos for 25 years. "It's become a common and comfortable means of providing a message to themselves and to others." Anthony Botiglione, 43, who is to marry Jennifer Fiorenza, 35, a publicist, on Feb. 28 in Baiting Hollow, N.Y., said, "You can't take it off, you can't lose it, you can't put it in your pocket, which some men do to show the world they're not married. "I don't want to be that guy," Mr. Botiglione said. "I want to look at my hand and know this huge commitment I've made is forever." Because he's in construction, he cannot wear jewelry; he will get a simple black tattoo band when the couple return from their honeymoon in March. But she will stick with a traditional ultrathin rose gold band with pave diamonds. Those seeking tattooed wedding rings, said Mr. Martin, want to step out on the edge a bit. "But they don't want to freak anyone out," he said. "It's acceptable at work, and no one will fire them for it." Gold wedding bands typically cost 300 to 700 each, according to a representative of the Jewelers of America trade association. Mr. Martin said his shop typically charges about 60 for a simple design that the couple brings in. If he is creating it, and there are a number of colors or it's a technical piece, it could be 100 or more. Ms. Dorsman and Mr. Mesic recall paying the personal friend who inked their wedding bands about 50 each. That doesn't mean that Mr. Mesic skipped over presenting her first with an engagement ring. "My husband did give me an engagement ring," she said. "It was a plastic one from 7 Eleven. I was pretty gung ho on not wanting a ring." Tattoos can cost less than traditional jewelry, but that doesn't mean they are cost effective or long lasting. Inked rings do fade with time. The skin on hands sheds more quickly because of constant use, and gets the most exposure to sun. To compensate, tattoo artists must inject the ink deeper than the customary two levels of the dermis. Last month, almost every chair in Kings Avenue Tattoo on the Bowery in Manhattan was filled, as Devin Ikram, 32, and his wife, Kayla, 31, sat on the padded black seats while Zac Scheinbaum fixed the triangle tattoo he had inked onto Devin's ring finger four months earlier, when the couple wed. Mr. Ikram, a graphic designer, had created the triangles after he spent two weeks researching symbolism, alchemy and elemental shapes. "These represent a dichotomy of polar opposites and the fitting together," he said while Mr. Scheinbaum re inked his ring finger, a process that took only minutes. "A triangle pointing up is masculine. One pointing down is feminine," he added. If a marriage does not work out, one can't simply tug off a tattooed ring. Among those who may now wish they hadn't gotten inked are Rosie O'Donnell, who has an "M" her second wife's first initial tattooed on her ring finger, and Pamela Anderson, who had her "Tommy" ring tattoo removed. "In the past two years, we've been getting approximately one patient a month asking for the tattoo to be removed," said Dr. Roy G. Geronemus, director of the Laser and Skin Surgery Center of New York. "Prior to that, I'd not seen them at all." Dr. Geronemus said women were more apt to appear in his waiting room, eager for the deletion. "More women come in, some are angry, some convey concern, some remorse," he said. "The tattoo now is a constant reminder of a failed relationship. Women want it off and they want it off quickly so they can move on psychologically." That is very expensive. The tattoo may have cost 50 to 150 and taken a short time to ink, but to make it vanish, Dr. Geronemus said, could take four to five office sessions, costing 400 per visit. Yet that hasn't deterred those seeking something different. And tattoo artists are welcoming couples with open, tattooed arms. "Tattoo artists tend to be very entrepreneurial," said Ms. Armstrong, the retired professor. "It's a competitive world, and it seems quite logical that some would create tattoo wedding band packages where the couple comes in together to have them done either before or after their ceremony." Mr. and Ms. Ikram left Kings Avenue Tattoo all smiles and kisses. "We own this," Mr. Ikram said, while looking at his newly re inked finger. "We were part of this creation. Now that it's back to its original color, I feel much better. It didn't look like my wife's. Before, people couldn't tell what it was. Now I can show it off." Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion, and Vows), and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Q. How does the service and coverage compare for the smaller wireless carriers like Consumer Cellular, TracFone and others that never get mentioned because it's always the same big networks like AT T and Verizon getting reviewed? A. While AT T, Sprint, T Mobile and Verizon do indeed grab most of the attention, many of the smaller wireless carriers actually get their network service from one of the Big Four and resell it, often in the form of low cost or prepaid plans. (U.S. Cellular is the fifth largest carrier in the country and mostly uses its own network.) A smaller company that rents space on a larger network is called a mobile virtual network operator, or M.V.N.O. Although you may have to dig around to find an M.V.N.O.'s web page or contract to identify the host network, once you do, you can get a better idea of the service and coverage in your area. You can also just check the WhistleOut site's helpful list, which matches up an M.V.N.O. with its partner carrier. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
SANTA MONICA, CALIF. After being knocked out of commission in 1969 by an engine fire and then spending the next 44 years hibernating in Pennsylvania, a graceful 1967 Ferrari 330 GTS will come under the glare of spotlights on Jan. 18 when it is auctioned in Scottsdale, Ariz. The 330 GTS, one of only 100 roadsters in the series dominated by the 330 GTC its mechanical twin, but a coupe body is an example of how mid '60s Ferraris are receiving new appreciation as prices for the Italian automaker's vintage cars rise, David Brynan, a Gooding Company auction specialist, said. Gooding will offer the "Spider," or convertible, among approximately 120 cars at its two day auction. The Ferraris that draw multimillion dollar bids at auction are, for the most part, immaculately restored examples; a significant racing history or association will also raise the sale price. This car has neither, but instead is valued as an original car with a clear ownership history. Found in November with a coating of grime, spots of surface rust and a blackened and cracked windshield, the Celeste Blue GTS is all the more desirable as a nearly untouched example of the model, which helps Ferrari collectors and restorers to establish a baseline for the 330 series, Mr. Brynan said. The car, chassis number 9343, was consigned by its present owner, who ferreted out its whereabouts in a two bay carport in suburban Philadelphia and made the acquisition. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
On Sunday morning, Goldman Sachs, the financial partner on the new Apple credit card, said it would allow all cardholders who asked for help to skip their March credit card bill. The interest would disappear, never to be charged. And Goldman would foot the bill itself, as the financial backer of the partnership. On Sunday afternoon, I went to the largest credit card issuers, auto lenders and mortgage servicers and essentially asked them to match it: Would they do the same, for everyone, and declare a one month or longer pause on bills and interest? Several replied right away and said they would allow people to skip payments, interest free. They include American Express (cards), and Capital One (auto loans and cards). I'm glad to hear it, given that federal regulators more or less demanded last week that banks show some leniency. Here's one surprising company that would not make an ironclad commitment: the auto lending giant Ally Bank, which was the beneficiary of a federal bailout during the last financial crisis. Ally did say it would work with customers to identify their specific challenges and tailor solutions for them, but would not pause bills unilaterally. "As has been our practice during previous periods of hardship, we are not using a one size fits all approach," a company spokeswoman said in an emailed statement on Monday. But this isn't shaping up to be like past hardships. Statements like this from companies that would not exist but for their own recent rescues are baffling. And case by case solutions may quickly become impractical: Call centers may have to shut down, and they are likely to soon be overwhelmed with people seeking relief. Economic circumstances may quickly outrun any concerns about which lender is offering what incremental assistance this week, so the fact that large companies will not just hit a giant pause button for everyone is deeply disappointing. Yes, Goldman has a small fraction of the number of nonbusiness customers that other large financial institutions do. And yes, this is a pretty easy good will win for the company, whose reputation took it on the chin during the last meltdown. But if Goldman can see the light, so can other financial giants. A few hours after my initial contact with Ally, a spokeswoman followed up and said that given the fluidity of the situation, it was looking at other options for helping. I suspect that if you communicate with a company yourself about a payment and interest pause even the ones that say they'll help it may not agree to do so right away. Word of the leniency may not have spread to front line service representatives yet, who themselves are probably questioning whether they should even be at work. Hats off to them for showing up and trying to help. If any of the above lenders turn you down, gently remind them that their corporate representatives have been out in public saying that one month waivers are possible, and contact me if they refuse to help you. Even if the waiver goes through smoothly, make sure your lender agrees that the skipped payment will not ruin your credit. Goldman Sachs which extended its policy to the personal loans it issues through its Marcus online bank has promised that the pause will not bring down your credit score. A pause may be more complex when it comes to mortgage servicers, and possibly some auto loan servicers that have turned the loans they issued into bonds and then sold them to investors. "The overwhelming majority of the loans we originate and service are purchased by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, which require all servicers follow their process for mortgage forbearances," said a spokesman for Quicken Loans, the nation's largest home loan originator. "Policymakers at the federal, state and local levels need to act now to present options that allow mortgage servicers to help homeowners whose cash flow may be impaired." General Motors also received a bailout during the last big downturn. What is it doing for customers now? General Motors Financial said that it was not "currently" matching Goldman's offering to customers. Instead, it pointed me to a website saying that it would be hard to contact its representatives right now. For those who succeed, this is the policy: "Each customer's situation is unique and we're here to help." At Ford Credit, according to a spokesman, people can call and pause this month's car payment, but interest will continue to accrue. Barclays has the same policy for its U.S. cardholders (and will not charge late or nonpayment fees even as interest does pile up). Bank of America will also allow skipped payments while still keeping the interest clock running for auto loan, credit card and mortgage customers. I'm still trying to find out more from other lenders. I'm awaiting more detailed information from Citibank, PNC Bank, Santander and Wells Fargo. Discover said that it would match the Goldman Apple move allowing most cardholders the ability to skip a payment, but customers who already have too many late payments may not be eligible. It would not commit to waiving the accrual of interest though. Confusion reigns. I received changing information from JPMorgan Chase but for now, it is not matching Goldman's blanket waivers. The New York Times Company is handling hardship requests from subscribers in distress on a case by case basis, according to a spokeswoman. Much of the coronavirus coverage is not behind its subscription paywall. A one month pause for bills of all kinds might not be enough for people whose incomes fall to zero. The longer the virus shuts down large swaths of economic activity, the more the government will be considering moonshot ideas. One received the White House's endorsement on Tuesday: Send money directly to Americans, hopefully by the end of April. It's not clear how much money each person could get, and there may be income caps. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
In this economy, even counterfeiters are trading down. After years of knocking off luxury products like 2,800 Louis Vuitton handbags, criminals are discovering there is money to be made in faking the more ordinary like 295 Kooba bags and 140 Ugg boots. In California, the authorities recently seized a shipment of counterfeit Angel Soft toilet paper. The shift in the counterfeiting industry, which costs American businesses an estimated 200 billion a year, plays to recession weary customers looking for downmarket deals, the authorities say. And it has been fueled in part by factories sitting idle in China. Almost 80 percent of the seized counterfeit goods in the United States last year were produced in China, where the downturn in legitimate exports during the recession left many factories looking for goods in some cases, any goods to produce. "If there is demand, there will be supply," said John Spink, associate director of the Anti Counterfeiting and Product Protection Program at Michigan State University. In China, he said, "It's all of a sudden them saying, 'We have low capacity. What can we make?' " The answer is increasingly knockoffs of lesser known brands, which are easy to sell on the Internet, can be priced higher than obvious fakes, and avoid the aggressive programs by the big luxury brands to protect their labels, retail companies and customs enforcement officials say. The results: Faux Samantha Thavasa bags for 113 and Ed Hardy hoodie sweatshirts for 82.50. And, bizarrely, imitations that are more expensive than the real ones: In 2007, Anya Hindmarch sold canvas totes that said "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" for 15. Now fakes are available on the Web for 99. "If it's making money over here in the U.S., it's going to be reverse engineered or made overseas," said Jonathan Erece, a trade enforcement coordinator for United States Customs and Border Protection in Long Beach, Calif. "It's like a cat and mouse game." Counterfeit boots are destroyed in Australia after a court sided with Deckers Outdoor, owners of the Ugg boot line. The traders in mid price fakes are employing another new trick: by pricing the counterfeits close to retail prices which they can do when the original product is not too expensive they entice unsuspecting buyers. Any savvy shopper, for example, knows a Louis Vuitton bag selling for 100 cannot be the real thing. But when NeimanMarcus.com, an authorized retailer for Kooba bags, sells them for 295, and a small Web site sells them for 190, a deal hunting consumer could think she has scored a bargain. (She hasn't. The 190 bag is a fake.) "If the price points are somewhat close, some consumers get duped into believing they're getting a real product," said Robert Barchiesi, president of the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition, a trade group. "They might be looking for a bargain, but a bargain to buy real goods." The counterfeiters are also lifting photos and text from legitimate Web sites, further fooling some shoppers. "The consumer is blind as to the source of the product," said Leah Evert Burks, director of brand protection for Ugg Australia's parent company, the Deckers Outdoor Corporation. "Counterfeit Web sites go up pretty easily, and counterfeiters will copy our stock photos, the text of our Web site, so it will look and feel like" the company site, she said. While all of it is illegal, the authorities do not publish statistics on what brands' products are being counterfeited. But designers and trade experts said the downmarket trend in counterfeiting became more noticeable over the last year, as counterfeiters got more inventive. The field is big: the total value of counterfeit goods seized by United States customs officials increased by more than 25 percent each year from 2005 to 2008, using the government's fiscal calendar. In fiscal 2009, as imports over all dropped by 25 percent, the value of counterfeit products seized dropped by only 4 percent to 260.7 million. The official statistics capture only a piece of the problem, companies and experts say, because so many counterfeiters market directly to customers on the Internet and many of those sales go undetected by the authorities. "Online is much harder" to patrol and enforce, said Todd Kahn, general counsel for Coach, the handbag and accessories company. A couple of years ago, she began checking out which Foley Corinna items were selling on eBay. Her city tote, which now retails for 485, was a popular item, but on some listings "there was something off it's a color I never did, or a leather I never did," she said. As other sites proliferated, and Ms. Corinna Sellinger noticed more and more Internet fakes, she stopped looking altogether. "It's just too frustrating," she said. "You can try to do something, but it's so big and so fast." While Ms. Corinna Sellinger basically had herself and a computer to patrol for fakes, big companies use legal teams who train customs officials on the nuances of their product, monitor the Web, ask Internet service providers to take down copycat sites and file lawsuits against sellers. (The brands only go after sellers; the law in the United States does not prohibit consumers from buying counterfeit products.) Ugg Australia, the popular boot brand, developed a full enforcement program after it realized how prevalent copies of its boots were. In 2009, 60,000 pairs of boots were confiscated by customs agents globally, Ms. Evert Burks said. In the same year, the company took down 2,500 Web sites selling fake products, along with 20,000 eBay listings and 150,000 listings on other trading sites like Craigslist and iOffer. That's despite the relatively low price of real Ugg boots, which cost around 140 for a basic model. Under similar programs, Versace won 20 million in a recent lawsuit against counterfeiters, while Gucci, Louis Vuitton and other luxury brands have been pursuing similar cases. Coach last year announced "Operation Turnlock," in which it would file civil lawsuits against counterfeiters, and it has sued 230 times, Mr. Kahn said. At Liz Claiborne Inc., which owns brands like Juicy Couture and Kate Spade, the company has gone after 52 Web sites selling counterfeits, and removed 27,000 auction listings so far this year. The lesson for many counterfeiters has been that they have a better chance of getting away with it if they copy smaller brands like Foley Corinna even though Foley Corinna, while popular with celebrities and fashion types, is not widely recognized as a status brand and its bags can be had for as little as 126 on the brand's own Web site. "Once it's out there a lot, people won't even want the real one because then they're like, 'People are going to think it's fake,' " Ms. Corinna Sellinger said. "It takes the product away from the designer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Marriage, they say, is a negotiation, a protracted conversation built on trust, shared goals and infinite reserves of tact. It's a concept not lost on Yelena Ambartsumian and Miroslav Grajewski, who, well before they traded vows Jan. 19 at St. Illuminator's Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Manhattan, had already mastered the art of the deal. Two years ago, Ms. Ambartsumian, 30, an associate in the law firm Milbank, and Mr. Grajewski, 28, an engineer and executive with Zuvic Carr and Associates, embarked on a courtship sparked by a mutual passion for contemporary art. That shared appetite led them to invest piece by piece in a jointly held collection. Not at all, Mr. Grajewski said. Still, at Art Basel in Miami, collecting can be like a contest. '"People will greet you with, 'What did you get?'" he said, that question abruptly followed by, "'Oh here's what we got in the few hours since we last saw you.'" By contrast, he added emphatically, "We made sure we were buying a piece because we liked it and not for any other reason." To some, such sums may seem staggering. Indeed Ms. Ambartsumian's parents her mother a psychiatrist, her father, an electrical engineer may well have been taken aback. "We're not oligarchs," Ms. Ambartsumian said. The couple split the cost of each purchase, acquiring works at the rate of about one per month, each a considered decision and a valiant leap of faith. "The more we collected," she said, "the more we came to trust each other, and the more we fell in love." The couple met in 2016 at a reception for the Museum of Modern Art junior associates. "That night I went out on my own, which was unusual for me because I'm an introvert," Ms. Ambartsumian said. "I thought this is something I really want to do. I'll go and make new friends. Still, I didn't expect to meet my husband there." Their first formal date was a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "We wanted to go together to a place that we had gone to so many times on our own," she said. "Visiting something familiar seemed like a safe choice." They continued to go to museums and attend junior associate events and art fairs. "At a certain point we realized that the only way we could keep learning was by actually getting more involved in the art world," Mr. Grajewski said. "We felt the next step was to see what collecting was all about." During their treks, they would compare notes, often astonished to find that on just about every occasion they were drawn to the same several pieces, their interests encompassing canvases both abstract and figurative, vividly colorful and monochromatic, and, in addition, pieces of sculpture and photography. That shared affinity may well have been bred in the bone. Growing up they routinely accompanied their parents his Chilean and Polish born, hers Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan on museum and gallery jaunts here and abroad. As children, Ms. Ambartsumian said, "We each saw a lot of the same art works." Once the couple set their sights on a piece, they would return to it multiple times, at varying hours, and in shifting moods. When they settled on a purchase, Mr. Grajewski, the more extroverted of the pair, would begin negotiations. The couple, who drew from their savings, had agreed in advance to split the cost. As guests began filing into the church, Hanna Matevosyan, Ms. Ambartsumian's maid of honor, picked up the thread. Pinching a portion of the speech she would give at the reception, she said, "In today's world an engineer from Connecticut and corporate lawyer in Manhattan aren't often in the same room and usually don't have much in common. But their fit with one another is strikingly obvious." A short time later Ms. Ambartsumian caused necks to crane as she glided toward the altar in an ivory flower embroidered Elizabeth Fillmore dress, its back plunging toward her waist. Its otherwise regal look was enhanced when the officiant, the Rev. Mesrob Lakissian, intoned the familiar verses from Corinthians, "Love bears all things, hopes all things...," and placed a crown on her head. "Our goal," Ms. Ambartsumian added, "is to give our children an investment of their parents' time, of their learning, and of their exposure to different people, places, thoughts and experiences." They plan to continue expanding the collection of some two dozen original works. As the family grows, Mr. Grajewski said, "It will be something that's ours." An iPhone Courtship Within days after meeting her future husband, Ms. Ambartsumian took off with her parents for Spain. But Mr. Grajewski was never far from her mind. "The whole trip we were texting and texting," she recalled. "I felt like a teenager." A Style of Her Own Pushing aside the church call for modesty, the bride shed her cape before she sailed down the aisle, revealing a gown that plunged in the back. Moving Moment Forsaking the traditional "Canon in D" wedding march, Solange Merdinian, a mezzo soprano, brought many of the guests to tears with a solo rendition of "Ave Maria." Crowned Heads Toward the end of the ceremony, the Rev. Mesrob Lakissian placed gilded coronets on the heads of the bride and groom, an Armenian tradition anointing the couple as the rulers of their domestic kingdom. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion, and Vows) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Solange's breakthrough 2016 album, "A Seat at the Table," was a sweet voiced, multilayered manifesto: the sound of one black woman finding her path forward and confronting the ways systemic racism and sexism affect personal struggles. Its successor, "When I Get Home," is something different: a reverie, a meditation, a therapeutic retreat, a musicians' playground. "With 'A Seat at the Table,' I had so much to say," Solange said in an interview streamed from Houston on Sunday night. "And with this album, I have so much to feel." For Solange, 32, "When I Get Home" is one more step away from ordinary pop expectations. Even before "A Seat at the Table," she spiked her more conventional R B albums with songs insisting she was different. Now she has nearly let go of the pop structures that undergirded "A Seat at the Table" and kept its songs catchy. "When I Get Home" is built for gentle, repeated immersion, not instant gratification. Its tracks prize mantras over hooks, and wander in structure and tempo, taking improvisational tangents. Although the album is punctuated by spoken word interludes bits of poetry, self help, comedy and tribute it is designed to flow as a whole, gradually infusing a room like incense or the smells of home cooking. The opening song, "Things I Imagined," makes clear that Solange is offering floaters, not bangers. She sings, "I saw things I imagined" more than a dozen times, repeating the line or parts of it while continuously toying with the music: different melodies, different speeds, different chords, everything in a dreamlike flux. A labyrinthine transition leads to the optimistic, vaguely spiritual refrain that will also close the album: "Takin' on the light." The production, like nearly the entire album, uses layers of keyboards with improvisational tendrils and puffy, quavery, analog sounding tones that hark back to 1970s Stevie Wonder, particularly "Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants." And Solange's voice is sure footed and playful, confident that the music will follow her every whim. On nearly all of the full length songs, Solange is credited as the sole composer and lyricist. She has a long list of guests among them Playboi Carti, Gucci Mane, Earl Sweatshirt, The Dream, Dev Hynes, Sampha, Scarface and Panda Bear from Animal Collective but outside a few prominent guest raps, Solange and her musicians slip the collaborators into the background. This is her space, her sanctuary. "When I Get Home" is the follow up to Solange's breakthrough 2016 album, "A Seat at the Table." As its title suggests, "When I Get Home" contemplates returning home and making a refuge there, reconnecting with memories and everyday surroundings that were once taken for granted. The black solidarity that was Solange's strongest message on "A Seat at the Table" is still there in "Stay Flo" and in "Almeda," where she praises "Black skin, black braids, black waves, black days" and insists, "These are black owned things" over rattlesnake drum machine accents. But most of the album has her musing on more private, domestic matters and looking inward. The home she invokes is the Third Ward in Houston, where Solange grew up. She returned there to work on this album following a period of upheaval. After a tour that was a model of abstract, starkly choreographed precision, Solange had severe health problems. As 2017 ended, she canceled a New Year's Eve show because she was coping with an autonomic nerve disorder. Some tracks on "When I Get Home" are named after Houston streets, and Solange's lyrics (as they were in "Scales" on "A Seat at the Table") are dotted with references to the city's idiosyncratic status symbols like grills (extravagantly jeweled dental caps) and "slab" (slow, low and bangin') cars with reflective "candy paint." Solange echoing the artistic playbook of her sister, Beyonce paired the release of "When I Get Home" with an online film, which she directed and unveiled as an Apple Music exclusive. It's a slightly abridged version of the entire album, accompanying non narrative scenes of, among other things, black cowboys doing rodeo feats, a circular white arena holding group rituals in the desert, and dancers claiming Houston's urban spaces. At the beginning and end of the film, Solange, in a glittering dress, dances alongside a mysteriously hooded Holy Ghost, revealed at the end as a black man. "The film is an exploration of origin, asking the question how much of ourselves do we bring with us versus leave behind in our evolution," Solange said in a statement. The film visualizes "Sound of Rain" as a computer animated extravaganza: a stadium full of dancers that turns into a garden, a burning man, people riding flying machines. The song is one of the album's closest approaches to pop R B, with an ingenious beat, terse melodies and abundant countermelodies; the lyrics are cryptic and sunken into the mix, but at the end Solange reveals, "Sound of rain/helps me let go of the pain." Another near pop song is "Jerrod," a promise of intimacy "Give you all the depths of my wanting" that Solange coos with the airy tenacity of Janet Jackson. For much of the album, Solange dissolves verse chorus verse into meditations and vamps. Keyboards supply rich chords that offer plenty of places to alight harmoniously; the beat is often an implied pulse that can and does leave behind 4/4 convention. In the chromatic haze, Solange ponders questions and considers life lessons in a few ambiguous words. In "Beltway," she sings "don't, don't, don't," pauses, and continues, "you love me"; it's impossible to tell where the couple stand. In "Dreams," she recalls growing up with dreams and advises patience: "Dreams, they come a long way not today." She teeters on the verge of a relationship in "Time (is)" "I was getting to feel/All the way" Solange sings before its six beat meter changes to five beats and Solange and Sampha each repeatedly sing an enigmatic line: "You've got to know." And with hovering piano chords and hissing cymbal, "Down With the Clique" hints at the anticipation of Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" as Solange reminisces, "We were rollin' up the street/Chasing the divine." In the interlude "Can I Hold the Mic," Solange explains, rhapsodically: "I can't be a singular expression of myself. There's too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers, so many ..." A keyboard follows each syllable of that speech, soon joined by chords to harmonize. The lilt of her voice alone could have carried these few seconds of content, but she and her musicians made the effort to match the rhythm and find its song. Because Houston is not her only home on this album; music is. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
There is no ballet danced better by American Ballet Theater than Frederick Ashton's 52 minute "The Dream," 50 years old this year. This is remarkable for three particular reasons. First: "The Dream" which on the surface seems a quaint study in Victoriana is a flawless ballet, deeply witty, intricate and eloquent, full of complex challenges to its dancers, a piece that rewards countless re viewings. Second: Ashton was a British choreographer, yet here is Ballet Theater dancing "The Dream" on a level that at least rivals that of several revivals this century by Britain's own Royal Ballet, which names Ashton as its founder choreographer. At the Metropolitan Opera House, you have only to watch the corps de ballet of 16 female fairies to see how fully they respond to this choreography, and much of the soloist and principal dancing is superlative. Third (and most heretical): Although Ashton's ballet is not greater than George Balanchine's marvelously varied two act version of the same work (recently revived by New York City Ballet), it is the more acute in its response to Mendelssohn's iridescent music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The greatest parts of Balanchine's ballet are the items he brought in from other Mendelssohn scores; but when it comes to the "Midsummer" overture, the Lullaby, the Scherzo and the Nocturne, it is Ashton who makes the more telling insights into multiple layers of the music. (And it's also he who makes closer connections to Shakespeare's play.) Since New York remains Balanchine's city, I half expect to be burned at the stake for such utterances. But it was the city of Ashton's greatest triumphs too, and to love both Ashton and Balanchine is the most rewarding kind of pluralism. In 1979, the critic David Vaughan wrote that Ashton, Balanchine and Merce Cunningham were "the ABC of contemporary classicism" a credo to which I have adhered ever since. That year Ashton and Balanchine celebrated their 75th birthdays, Cunningham his 60th. All three are dead now; nobody since has equaled them. The current revival of "The Dream" is part of a Shakespeare double bill, nicely timed both to echo the recent "Midsummer" date and to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the master's birth. The program's other half is Alexei Ratmansky's 48 minute version of "The Tempest," new last October, now slightly revised. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest" are the plays in which Shakespeare deals most overtly with magic (and makes us feel the connections between magic and art); there are many connections between them. Mr. Ratmansky's ballet is set to the incidental music composed (a century after Mendelssohn's "Midsummer" 1826 overture) for Shakespeare's "Tempest" by Sibelius. The most marvelous aspects here are the extraordinary sonorities of this seldom heard music: startling contrasts of dissonance and harmony; the magical combination of harp and harmonium, sometimes with choir and sometimes with flute and muted strings; marvelous strains of melody and sighing motifs. In several ways Mr. Ratmansky's ballet has improved since its first performances next door at the David H. Koch Theater last fall. He has made certain changes to the banquet scene. Some aspects of Santo Loquasto's decor make a more imaginative impression on the Met stage. Sarah Lane and, especially, Joseph Gorak as the lovers Miranda and Ferdinand, beautiful before, are yet better now; the performances by Marcelo Gomes (Prospero) and Roman Zhurbin (Alonso) have only grown in authority; and James Whiteside's Caliban now registers with a new force. Yet the ballet as a whole probably the most flawed Mr. Ratmansky has staged for a New York company looks weaker and more misguided than before. It fails to tell its story clearly; and if you know Shakespeare's play well, it adds little. There are sections in which you can see Mr. Ratmansky straining to make dances where Sibelius's music gives him next to no rhythmic assistance. Worse, there are other passages when the music makes points he misses. But there is more, much more, to be said of "The Dream." In one respect the news is disappointing. Ballet Theater this year is using the version of David Walker's designs made for the National Ballet of Canada, rather than (as in previous revivals) the superior ones he made in 1986 for the Royal Ballet. (The most obvious changes are in the colors of the human lovers' costumes; the forest decor also is slightly closer to a two dimensional cartoon.) John B. Read's lighting now makes less marvelous effects from the depths and breadths of the Met stage. Though the changes are subtle, they matter when you recall the ravishing impact of the former designs here. David Hallberg, Ballet Theater's foremost Oberon, has a (short term) foot injury that has removed him from this week's performances. That might be devastating, but not when you saw how extraordinarily well Cory Stearns danced the role on Monday, with regal line and coursing rhythm. One cavil: Mr. Stearns, an exceptionally handsome and stylish dancer, is one of several important New York dancers today to whom we can be sure that Ashton would have given eye exercises, in particular to make their whites read in the theater. (Anthony Dowell, his original Oberon, used eyes with the eloquence of Maria Callas, and paid tribute to Ashton's tutoring in this respect.) The difference in terms of glamour and theatricality would be incalculable. Titania is Gillian Murphy's finest role. How much this says! Ms. Murphy is a formidable technician, an outgoing athlete; and yet there are roles Juliet, the "Nutcracker" Princess, Cinderella and, above all, Titania that show how she loves to lose her bravura in theatrical lyricism, and to become someone else. As Titania, the shimmer of her pirouettes in the Lullaby, the intensity with which she jackknifes her body in Oberon's arms in the Nocturne pas de deux, the thrill with which she lets him hurl her into a straight line arabesque and then yieldingly melts back toward him: These are among the glories of the New York dance scene. On Monday, as in previous revivals, the miraculous performance was that of Herman Cornejo as Puck, the greatest single conjunction of dancer and role in our day. His hurtling speed wins ovations, but better yet are his capering animal freedom, his pawing vigor, his clownlike merriment. Uncanny; breathtaking; life enhancing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Ettore Sottsass. You can't always live comfortably with his eccentric furniture, but you can't write the history of late 20th century art without it. On the 100th anniversary of his birth and only a decade since his death, in 2007, the Milanese maestro best known for his red Olivetti portable typewriter and as the guru of the revolutionary postmodern design group Memphis remains a magnificent irritant and an exemplar of originality. The largest Sottsass show staged in a New York museum, and one of a celebratory crop for the centenary, it provides a broad picture of the origins of this architect/designer and of Memphis itself that few are familiar with. It details his influences and inspirations with artifacts from Egyptian, Indian and other non Western cultures; examples of European and American modernism, as well as designs by Sottsass's Memphis contemporaries (especially Peter Shire and Shiro Kuramata) and also some acolytes, misguided and not. This effort has been organized seemingly on the fly by Christian Larsen, who arrived as the Met's associate curator of modern design and decorative arts only 18 months ago. Unusual for a show of this size and ambition, there is no catalog, although Mr. Larsen does his best to compensate with expert labels and several short, effective slide shows. But excepting architecture, this is a fairly complete Sottsass sampler: furniture, decorative objects, textiles, office machinery and jewelry and, of course, the idiosyncratic laminates so important to the indelible Memphis look. My favorite is Bacterio, a combination of little black squiggles on white that sheaths a 1979 proto Memphis cabinet for Studio Alchymia and is completed by a windowed door, three fluorescent lights and lunar module feet. Born in 1917 in Innsbruck, Austria, Sottsass teethed in proximity to one of the founts of modernism as the devoted son of Ettore Sottsass Sr., an architect who trained in Vienna when its design ethic was steeped in the grids and geometries of Otto Wagner and his brilliant student Josef Hoffmann, a founder in 1903 of the Wiener Werkstatte. (Junior would also be inspired by the Bauhaus, modernism's second front.) His father moved the family to Turin and after World War II, in Italy's frenzy of Marshall Plan rebuilding, father and son collaborated on designs for low cost housing and schools that were inspired by the varied structures and materials of small Italian villages. Their work is postmodernism in embryo and a veritable template for the 1989 house in Ridgway, Colo., that Sottsass designed for Daniel Wolf, an art collector and dealer, that is seen here in drawings and a slide show. During his 60 year career, Sottsass Jr. designed office systems (including the shell of the Olivetti mainframe computer, from 1957 to 1959) and systems for simplified living, as well, that were intended to discourage consumption. His Superbox, for example, designed in 1966, was an outhouse proportioned wardrobe with a surface of plastic laminates of the buyer's choice had it been produced. It stands out from the wall like one of Anne Truitt's painted Minimalist plinths. Complete with its own pedestal that ignored the Minimalist practice, while also complicating its use, it was intended to hold all your carefully winnowed belongings. His experimental Environment units similarly compressed the basic household functions (cooking, sleeping, bathing) into mobile modular cabinets that would link together for moving. At least in theory. They never got beyond the maquette stage and are present here only in a 1972 film that Sottsass made with Massimo Magri, and two excellent drawings. But he also had an obsession with handcrafted glass and especially ceramics, fed by his many trips to India. A grove of Sottsass's looming ceramic totems, built from cylinders glazed in many colors, are in a gallery painted marigold yellow, alongside tiny Indian stupas with similarly stacked structures. The remaining Sottsass ceramics here mostly lose out to the antiquities, except for the more delicate, Deco like black and silver vases of the Tenebre (Darkness) series from 1963. Initially a devotee of modernism, Sottsass designed one of its postwar classics: the Olivetti manual typewriter of 1968, intoxicatingly bright and enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art by 1969. Its form follows function economy is articulated by its magnetic color, but it was eventually cursed by its creator for overshadowing his other achievements (in an expletive probably never before seen in a Met wall text). But Memphis seems to have been in Sottsass's blood. Even before the Olivetti typewriter, he was intimating a sundering of modernism's form function credo, as evidenced by two towerlike cabinets from the early and mid 1960s in the show's first, dense gallery. Enlarging the Viennese grid seen nearby in designs by Hoffmann and Kolomon Moser, they attest to an inborn preference for bright color, combined materials and bold, subtly humorous scale. Sottsass's apostasy culminated in the exuberant wildness of his Memphis furniture, with its angled forms, Fiestaware hues, enlarged faux wood grains and startling modern laminates. The design group took its name from the cities in Tennessee and ancient Egypt and the Bob Dylan song "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," which played repeatedly during its first meeting in 1981. Later that year, Memphis caused a furor at the annual Salone del Mobile, Milan's revered Italian furniture fair, unapologetically infecting design with postmodernism's skeptical mixing of styles, symbols and emotional content. Karl Lagerfeld bought many of the Memphis prototypes for his Monaco apartment and well, the rest is history. (The pieces ultimately were priced too high for average consumers and became symbols of '80s excess.) For better and for worse, Sottsass's influence still ripples through contemporary design. The Met's insistence on mixing and matching, always pushing the relevance of its vast holdings to more contemporary developments, may become a tick. (It certainly diluted the recent show of Marsden Hartley's Maine paintings.) Mr. Larsen's add ons here are usually effective and they point up a strength of this tactic: singling out historical works you might otherwise have missed in the flow of the collection galleries, like the terrific little painted wood reliquary from New Kingdom Egypt that resembles a Romanesque chapel. Some add ons feel superfluous, including overexposed works by Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella. The Met's exceptional 1964 canvas by the Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb serves mostly to make the show's single Sottsass painting look bad. Some indication of Sottsass Sr.'s work, or his collaborations with his son, seem in order, as does the inclusion of relevant non Memphis legends like Joe Colombo and Gaetano Pesce. Mr. Larsen has some revelatory decoy maneuvers. A black and white cane armchair from 1903 by Hoffmann and Moser is accompanied by what initially appears to be a Werkstatte oddity but is actually a wood planter that Sottsass designed in 1961, more straightforward and less refined. One of the best juxtapositions is a vitrine that alternates three Sottsass glass objects with three kachina figures by unrecorded Hopi artists whose colorful geometric forms clearly relate. And the kachinas come racing back to mind in one of the high points in the show's final gallery: the akimbo, symmetrical semaphore of Sottsass's Carlton Room Divider, a standout from the 1981 Milan furniture fair. Here Sottsass, as in his other Memphis pieces, achieves a new friction between form and function, while slyly merging painting, sculpture and furniture with the spirit of architecture. The not always pertinent non Sottsass material means that this exhibition sometimes feels padded. Sottsass could easily have filled the space at the Met Breuer if there had been more lead time. Nonetheless, it provides an invaluable introduction to his complex, resonating achievement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Ask Richard S. Busch, the lawyer who last week won a nearly 7.4 million copyright suit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, why he is so successful, and he will mention the 1997 film "The Devil's Advocate," in which Al Pacino plays Satan posing as a master lawyer. In one scene, a modestly dressed Mr. Pacino shares a secret with his stylish and polished protege, played by Keanu Reeves. "I'm a surprise," Mr. Pacino tells him. "They don't see me coming." "I think that's me," Mr. Busch, a partner in the firm King Ballow in Nashville, said the other day with a laugh. "I'm sure Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke said, 'Who's this guy from Nashville, Tenn.?' They didn't see me coming." Mr. Busch is not a surprise any longer. In one of the most important copyright cases in the music industry in years, he triumphed over Mr. Williams and Mr. Thicke and their elite Los Angeles law firm, convincing a federal jury that the songwriters' 2013 hit "Blurred Lines" had too closely copied Marvin Gaye's 1977 song "Got to Give It Up." In truth, the lawyers representing the two musicians knew exactly who Mr. Busch was. In the small world of high powered entertainment lawyers, Mr. Busch, 49, has carved out a niche as a crusading outsider, winning cases that have had wide ranging repercussions for the music industry. Among them are Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, which established that even the tiniest sample a piece of one song used in another needs legal permission, and F.B.T. Productions v. Aftermath Records, which led to a wave of litigation over how royalties are paid in digital music. Compared with the polished style of many of the Hollywood litigators he has faced in court, Mr. Busch is a bit rough around the edges. One of his former clients, Joel Martin of F.B.T. Productions, a company connected to Eminem, proudly calls Mr. Busch "a street fighter." He is known for extensive preparation and an aggressive style in depositions. At the "Blurred Lines" trial, he spoke so intensely that his voice cracked and the judge, John A. Kronstadt, repeatedly told him to slow down. By comparison, Mr. Busch's opponent in the case, Howard E. King of the firm King, Holmes, Paterno Berliner, is a consummate industry insider, with an affable and sometimes sarcastic approach. In a sign of how familiar he was in the courtroom, Judge Kronstadt at one point joked that Mr. King need not worry about wearing a jacket the next morning because the jurors would not be able to see him as they entered through a side door. Janis Gaye, the former wife of Marvin Gaye, said Mr. Busch's distance from the center of the industry was one of the reasons that she and her children had hired him. "He's not one of the Hollywood mover and shaker guys who shows up at every party and says, 'Hey, here's my business card,' " Ms. Gaye said. "I've never met anyone like Richard Busch, and that's fine with me." As Mr. Busch sees it, that works to his benefit. "By being on the outside," he said, "everyone who hires me knows that they get 100 percent of my loyalty." Many top entertainment lawyers see themselves primarily as deal makers, whose connections to both artists and the studios and record labels that hire them are often viewed more as synergy than as conflicts by those involved. And even the tough minded litigators among the core firms seldom push against the status quo quite as aggressively as someone like Mr. Busch. "Talent does not want to sue the record companies, for fear of being blackballed," said the Los Angeles lawyer Neville L. Johnson, who represents actors and musicians. "You can't sue the hand that feeds you." Mr. Busch said that an important part of his courtroom strategy is connecting with the jury. That may have been an advantage in the "Blurred Lines" case. He pounced on the changing accounts by Mr. Thicke and Mr. Williams of how the song had been written as undermining their credibility. "You have to be the truth teller," he said in an interview last week. "Some lawyers I have gone up against are perhaps more technically proficient, but I feel like I've done a very good job of connecting with the jury and being sincere in everything that I do." Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Other lawyers describe Mr. Busch with words like bully not always insults in the legal field and complain he is so aggressive in fighting for his clients that he does not care what havoc is created along the way. But they afford him grudging respect. The nearly 7.4 million in the "Blurred Lines" case, a combination of damages and a share of the profits Mr. Williams and Mr. Thicke received, is one of the largest awards for a case of its type, legal specialists said. "He's a tough competitor," said David M. Given of the firm Phillips, Erlewine, Given Carlin in San Francisco. "But I think it's fair to say that his outside status, if you want to call it that, has empowered him to take on institutions and players in the music business that others wouldn't." Mr. King declined to comment about Mr. Busch, but said that he expected to file a variety of post trial motions to fight the decision. Mr. Busch, who lives outside Nashville with his wife and three children, came to the music business by chance. After graduating from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law he joined King Ballow in 1991 and was eventually connected with Bridgeport Music. It controlled music by funk acts like Parliament Funkadelic and the Ohio Players that was being widely sampled in rap songs without permission, and wanted to pursue litigation, Mr. Busch said. He filed suit against hundreds of opponents, with most cases resulting in settlements. One that went to trial, against the studio Dimension Films, resulted in a landmark appeals court ruling in 2005 that warned, "Get a license or do not sample." Just as that case did, the "Blurred Lines" verdict is now stoking concerns among advocates for artists that it could have hurt creativity. "Both cases have lowered the threshold of what counts as copyright infringement," said Kembrew McLeod, a professor of communications at the University of Iowa. "The 'Blurred Lines' verdict is gong to make songwriters paranoid about musical appropriation that could result in a lawsuit." The F.B.T. case, which Mr. Busch lost at the district level but later won on appeal with the help of another lawyer, Jerome B. Falk, had to do with how royalties are computed for downloads on stores like iTunes. The appeals court ruled that according to Eminem's contract, these transactions counted as "licenses" rather than standard record sales a category that, in Eminem's case, triggered significantly higher royalty rates. As a result of that ruling, dozens of artists filed suits against their record companies in 2011 and 2012; at least 20 of them were handled by Mr. Busch's and his firm, he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The lives of Henry Grimes and Giuseppi Logan already felt like the stuff of legend long before they came to an end last week just two days and one borough apart from complications of the coronavirus. Mr. Grimes, a bassist, and Mr. Logan, an alto saxophonist, were once the two biggest disappearing acts on the jazz avant garde. Each shot to prominence in mid 1960s New York and then vanished, quickly and darkly, for decades. And then, in the new millennium, they both mounted triumphant returns. Though they were never close friends or collaborators, their stories now feel cosmically linked. For a couple of artists whose music was about individual expressive freedom as well as interdependence, it is fitting that Mr. Grimes and Mr. Logan would now take their respective places in history side by side. Both Mr. Logan and Mr. Grimes were born in 1935 in Philadelphia, a metropolis then flush with black musical innovation. Both passed through modern jazz groups (Mr. Logan with Earl Bostic; Mr. Grimes alongside a number of leading bandleaders, including Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins) and the academy (Mr. Logan studied at the New England Conservatory; Mr. Grimes at Juilliard). Mr. Grimes eventually became a linchpin of free improvising groups led by Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, and in 1965 he released a well regarded album of his own, "The Call," on the influential independent label ESP Disk. Mr. Logan tended to lead his own groups, playing a range of instruments from the Pakistani shehnai to the bass clarinet and challenging his bandmates to upend their own roles. Like Mr. Grimes, he released one studio album on ESP Disk ("The Giuseppi Logan Quartet," from 1964), following it a year later with a live recording, "More." On both albums, harmony, rhythm and melody became agents of texture and suspense: Whether Mr. Logan is playing in apoplectic fits or in a long atonal smear, the radical open endedness of each moment is palpable. But by the late 1960s, Mr. Logan and Mr. Grimes each seemingly at the height of his powers had disappeared from the scene. For decades, each of them was a whisper in the back of jazz fans' minds, a question it seemed wise to leave unanswered. Both struggled with mental illness, though maybe it's more apt to say that each struggled to bring the world in tune with the music of his life. Mr. Grimes had traveled to California to perform with the vocalists Jon Hendricks and Al Jarreau, but when his bass broke he sold it for a meager sum. Soon he was without either an instrument or money. For more than 30 years, he worked off and on as a janitor while battling bipolar disorder and scribbling dreamlike, often beautiful poetry into notebooks. It was not until 2002 that a social worker and jazz devotee tracked him down in Los Angeles. The bassist William Parker had an instrument sent to him. Soon after, Mr. Grimes finally returned to New York, receiving a hero's welcome at the 2003 Vision Festival. Mr. Grimes had always had a bold, resounding bass sound, but upon his return, what those who played with him often noticed was his note choice. Even amid rancorous free improvisation, he still seemed able to select notes that were in perfect counterpoint to what surrounded him, such that they not only fit in but unlocked extra dimensions in the group sound. The drummer Chad Taylor, who played hundreds of shows alongside Mr. Grimes in the Marc Ribot Trio, described the bassist's note choices as "3 D." "He was always thinking of playing something against what you were playing," Mr. Taylor said in a phone interview. "Against might not be the right word. Playing something different that would be complementary to what you're playing." Mr. Grimes was a man of painfully few words, making it easy to misinterpret his silence as a consequence of age. But even as a young person he had been famously laconic; and as the decades advanced, he remained first and foremost committed to listening. In New York over the past 10 plus years, you were just as likely to find Mr. Grimes in the front row at a younger musician's concert eyes bright, body held upright, listening as to see him onstage. Mr. Logan was chattier by nature, and perhaps this became his saving grace. After bouncing for decades between Virginia and New York, cycling through homelessness and mental institutions where he was often barred from playing music, only deepening his despair Mr. Logan was at a music store in Manhattan one day, trying to buy a single reed for his saxophone, when he struck up a conversation with a young sales clerk. That clerk was the trumpeter and multi instrumentalist Matt Lavelle. When he discovered that this man was, indeed, the famous Giuseppi Logan, Mr. Lavelle became dedicated to bringing the saxophonist back into the music world. They recorded an album together, "The Giuseppi Logan Quintet" (2010), featuring a mix of Mr. Logan's avant garde compositions and the jazz standards he had by then been playing for years in public parks. For Mr. Logan, even walking back into more standard repertoire was an expression of openness. As he had said years ago, describing his musical mission in a short documentary in the mid 1960s, "You have to get closer to your creator. Because that instills in the individual a love for everything, an unbiased heart." More than any happenstance similarities, it's that omnivorousness that formed the crucial common bond between Mr. Logan and Mr. Grimes. They followed a hunger for listening into careers as performers, and found themselves pulled back into the fold, celebrated anew, by a community that wasn't finished listening to them yet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
What Passengers Need to Know After the Boeing 737 Max 8 Crash Update: On Tuesday, Britain, Australia, Germany, Singapore, Malaysia and Oman banned all Boeing 737 Max 8 planes from their airspaces. Read more live coverage on the crash and its aftermath here. The Ethiopian Airlines plane crash that killed 157 people on Sunday has rattled travelers around the world. Just six months ago, the same model of airplane a Boeing 737 Max 8, operated by Lion Air crashed off Indonesia and killed all 189 onboard. While the cause of Sunday's tragedy remains undetermined, and the investigation into the Lion Air accident is ongoing, several circumstances of these two crashes are similar. The 200 seat Boeing 737 Max 8 has been a popular plane since it came on the market in 2017, with more than 4,000 planes ordered within the first six months. The plane sold quickly based on features that passengers crave a quieter cabin, more legroom and bottom line benefits to airlines, like fuel efficiencies. The plane's entry into the market seemed like the rare win win for both passengers and airlines. At the time of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, nearly 350 Boeing 737 Max 8s were in operation around the world, including in the United States, on routes across the country: Miami to Los Angeles, Houston to Denver, San Francisco to Portland. In the wake of the Ethiopian crash, more than a dozen airlines around the world said they would ground their 737 Max 8 planes. But at least 12 other carriers, including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines continued to fly them on Monday. Alicia Winnett and her husband had planned to fly Air Canada from Vancouver to Calgary on Friday, and she contacted the airline, via Twitter, after hearing about Sunday's plane crash. The airline confirmed that her flight is scheduled to be on the Boeing 737 Max 8, she said adding that the airline told her that the Max 8s "have a great safety, reliability and customer satisfaction rating." "How could they say that a Boeing 737 Max 8 has a great safety record when two brand new planes have tragically crashed within five months of each other in a seemingly similar manner," Ms. Winnett wrote in an email. Ms. Winnett said she is hoping to switch to a later flight on an Airbus 320, although she said Air Canada had told her that was not possible. "I just cannot sit on a Boeing 737 Max 8 with confidence," she said. To help travelers understand how to determine what plane they are scheduled to fly on, and their rights if they decide they do not want to board a Boeing 737 Max 8, we talked to airlines, passenger advocates and airline experts: With 34 planes in operation, Southwest Airlines is the airline with the largest number of Boeing 737 Max 8s in the world. Air Canada and American Airlines each have 24. United Airlines does not operate any Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft , but it does fly the 737 Max 9. Delta Air Lines does not fly any 737 Max planes. The Federal Aviation Administration tweeted on Sunday that it was "closely monitoring" developments in the Ethiopian Airlines crash, and on Monday, stressed its assurance that the 737 Max suite of planes were airworthy. "If we identify an issue that affects safety, the F.A.A. will take immediate and appropriate action," the agency statement said. How do I know if I am flying on a Boeing 737 Max 8? For most travelers, the information about their plane type is available at the time of booking, either during the seat selection process or elsewhere online. Experienced travelers and especially those who frequently book longer flights often head to FlightStats.com or SeatGuru.com, to determine their planes. Even if passengers determine which type of plane they are booked on, airlines might change planes at the last minute, as required by logistics or a change of weather. If I want to cancel a flight scheduled on this plane, what are my rights? Could I get a refund or a free flight elsewhere? Henrik Zillmer, the chief executive of AirHelp, a company that helps travelers make claims against airlines, thinks passengers are probably out of luck. "Travelers can cancel their flights, but would not be eligible to claim compensation if they decide to do so," he said. "They do not have a right to compensation or reimbursement for tickets purchased as it is technically their decision to cancel." If, however, you are booked on a flight with an airline that has grounded its Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, Mr. Zillmer believes you will probably be refunded your fare. "Since this situation would be a result of mechanical issues and therefore the airline's own fault, travelers may be eligible to claim compensation," he said. Critically, though, what compensation is due and the laws that protect passengers depend on the departure airport and the home country of the airline. If you are on a flight in or out of the European Union, or operated by a European Union based airline, Mr. Zillmer notes that E.U. regulations may entitle you to compensation of up to " 700 per person." But depending on where you are, there may not be a different plane operating on the same route, limiting your options. Paul Hudson, the president of Flyers Rights, a passenger advocacy group, says even insurance might not help in these circumstances. "Insurance would probably protect against government or airline action grounding delays, but not passenger election to change flights," he said. Julie Loffredi, the manager of media relations for InsureMyTrip.com, a travel insurance comparison site, said that "fear" is usually not a good enough reason for insurers to pay compensation to travelers who cancel their flights. "With traditional, standard travel insurance you wouldn't be able to cancel and get your money back out of fear," she said. However, since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more fliers have purchased coverage that allows for any cancellation, whatever the reason. Because the F.A.A. has not grounded the planes, carriers are following their normal policies for passengers who wish to change their travel plans. American Airlines charges a change fee, as does Air Canada. Southwest Airlines does not charge change fees. Passengers may, however, need to pay any difference in fare price. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
On top of all that, it has also affected people's mental and physical health. A global survey conducted earlier this year confirms what many have already experienced firsthand: The virus and resulting lockdowns led to dramatic changes in health behaviors, with people around the world cutting back on physical activity and eating more junk foods. It has also worsened anxiety and disrupted sleep. And those who are obese, who already face increased health risks, may have fared the worst, the researchers found. While they tended to experience improvements in some aspects of their diets, they were also the most likely to report struggling with their weight and mental health. The study, carried out by researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, surveyed almost 8,000 adults across the globe, including people from 50 different countries and every state in America. The researchers found that the decline in healthy behaviors during the pandemic was fairly common regardless of geography. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
To many travelers, visiting Rome is akin to experiencing magic. The reputation is deserved it is hard to walk through sites like the Colosseum and not be reminded of the city's former splendor, to be struck by its air of romance and mystery. But Rome has evolved, even though our imagination of the Eternal City has not. These books explore the culture, art and grandeur of ancient Rome, but also bring visitors to the present, including a guided tour by a former art critic and a deep exploration of one fictional Italian family. Set in ancient Rome, this historical novel casts Cicero, best known for his oratorical contributions, in a different light, exploring his ascent to what we would now call a career politician. The novel is presented as a biography written by Cicero's former slave, Tiro, and chronicles his start as a lawyer and aspiring politician. Cicero confronts corruption head on in a case against Verres, a former governor, accusing the courts of showing preferential treatment to "any man, no matter how guilty, if he has sufficient money.'' The book is more engaging for its accuracy in many cases, the author uses Cicero's actual arguments and draws parallels between the dynamics of contemporary politics and those of ancient Rome. This book, by an opinionated former art critic, is hardly the dry city biography one might expect. Robert Hughes captures ancient Rome in rich detail, with revelations such as Emperor Augustus's propensity for commissioning sculptures of himself (with some 25,000 to 50,000 stone statues estimated to have been produced). Mr. Hughes does not limit himself to critiquing art, offering observations about the city's infrastructure, including Rome's apparent adoration of fountains, as well as ancient Romans' tendency toward spectacle. Mr. Hughes's guided tour of the city is impassioned, informative and entertaining. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Supreme Court made the indisputably right call last week when it refused to block California from limiting attendance at religious services in an effort to control the spread of Covid 19. A Southern California church, represented by a Chicago based organization, the Thomas More Society, which most often defends anti abortion activists, had sought the justices' intervention with the argument that by limiting worshipers to the lesser of 25 percent of building capacity or 100 people, while setting a 50 percent occupancy cap on retail stores, California was discriminating against religion in violation of the Constitution's Free Exercise Clause. Given the obvious difference between walking through a store and sitting among fellow worshipers for an hour or more, as well as the documented spread of the virus through church attendance in such places as Sacramento (71 cases), Seattle (32 cases) and South Korea (over 5,000 cases traced to one person at a religious service), California's limits are both sensitive and sensible, hardly the basis for constitutional outrage or judicial second guessing. So why did the court's order, issued as midnight approached on Friday night, fill me with dread rather than relief? It was because in a ruling that should have been unanimous, the vote was 5 to 4. And it was because of who the four dissenters were: the four most conservative justices, two of them appointed by the president who a couple of months ago was demanding that churches be allowed to open by Easter and who, even before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, was openly encouraging protests in the capitals of states not reopening as quickly as he would like. As an astonished country witnessed on Monday night, as he held a Bible in front of a church near the White House after demonstrators were violently cleared from his path, Donald Trump is using religion as a cultural wedge to deflect attention from the consequences of his own ineptitude. The recognition that four Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would have invoked the court's power to undermine fact based public policy in the name of a misbegotten claim of religious discrimination was beyond depressing. It was terrifying. Does that sound like an overstatement? Take a look at Justice Kavanaugh's dissenting opinion. "California's latest safety guidelines discriminate against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses," he wrote. "Such discrimination violates the First Amendment." It's interesting that while Justices Gorsuch and Thomas signed Justice Kavanaugh's opinion, Justice Alito did not. Perhaps he's just too good a lawyer to subscribe to the flimsy analysis underlying this opinion. Fair enough, but he evidently couldn't be bothered to explain his own dissenting vote. And no less than his fellow dissenters, he obviously inhaled the unfounded claim of religious discrimination that the president has injected into an atmosphere already saturated with polarizing rhetoric. Here's what's wrong with the Kavanaugh opinion: He throws words around imprecisely in a context where precision is everything. The state's rules "discriminate." We're all against discrimination. But what does this potent word mean? To discriminate, in the way law uses the word, means to treat differently things that are alike, without a good reason for doing so. That's why racial discrimination, for example, is almost always unconstitutional. People are people regardless of their race, and the government needs a powerful reason for using race to treat people differently. The concept of discrimination, properly understood, simply doesn't fit this case. California is not subjecting things that are alike to treatment that's different. Churches are not like the retail stores or "cannabis dispensaries" in Justice Kavanaugh's list of "comparable secular businesses." Sitting in communal worship for an hour or more is not like picking up a prescription, or a pizza, or an ounce of marijuana. You don't need a degree in either law or public health to figure that out. If anything, California is giving churches preferential treatment, since other places where people gather in large numbers like lecture halls and theaters are still off limits. So what was the dissenters' problem? Justice Kavanaugh's opinion offers a clue. The Christian observance of Pentecost was last Sunday, and the clock was ticking as the justices considered the South Bay United Pentecostal Church's request. "The church would suffer irreparable harm from not being able to hold services on Pentecost Sunday in a way that comparable secular businesses and persons can conduct their activities," Justice Kavanaugh wrote. What does that sentence even mean? What's the secular comparator when it comes to observing Pentecost? A Sunday afternoon softball game? I'm baffled by why a particular liturgical observance should have even a walk on role in this opinion. Last weekend was also Shavuot, a major Jewish holiday. But it's the Christian calendar about which recently appointed federal judges seem exclusively concerned. In April, Judge Justin Walker of the Federal District Court in Louisville, Ky., blocked that city from enforcing a ban on drive in church services. "On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter," his overheated opinion began. (Judge Walker is Senator Mitch McConnell's young protege who, barring a miracle or a pair of righteous Republican senators, is on the verge of confirmation to the powerful federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.). In any event, no one was stopping the church from observing Pentecost. As its own brief points out, the church conducts as many as five services on a typical Sunday, each attracting 200 to 300 worshipers. As the state points out, it could schedule more services. The only other opinion filed in this case was that of Chief Justice John Roberts, explaining why the court was denying the church's request. I am willing to bet that he never intended to write anything; orders denying applications of this sort are typically issued without explanation. But he must have concluded that the Kavanaugh dissent couldn't go unrebutted. Writing just for himself in five paragraphs devoid of rhetoric and labeled "concurring in denial of application for injunctive relief," he offered a sober explanation of the obvious. He noted that "similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time." The California rule, he observed, "exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks, and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods." After noting the severity of the pandemic and the "dynamic and fact intensive" question of how to respond to it, Chief Justice Roberts said that the politically accountable state officials charged with answering that question were entitled to act within "broad limits" and "should not be subject to second guessing by an unelected federal judiciary, which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people." Predictably, the chief justice was excoriated on the political right, in recognition that his vote was the one that mattered, just as in the Obamacare case eight years ago, for which the right has never forgiven him. "It wasn't just religious liberty that Chief Justice Roberts strangled," read the headline on a piece in The Hill by Andrew McCarthy, a reliable ally of the president. The Wall Street Journal accused Chief Justice Roberts of "faux judicial modesty," in an echo, which the chief justice surely didn't miss, of the "faux judicial restraint" critique that Justice Antonin Scalia hurled at him early in his Supreme Court tenure. Everyone who cares about the Supreme Court is busy looking for signs of how John Roberts will navigate the political thicket in which the court finds itself, how he will reconcile his conservative heart and his institution and history minded head. Until recently, I thought I saw signs that at least he wasn't completely alone, that Brett Kavanaugh was evolving into something of a soul mate, willing to stand with the chief and provide a bit of cover. For example, the court just last week turned down a Trump administration request to block a federal district judge's order to consider moving hundreds of medically vulnerable inmates out of a low security federal prison in Ohio. The unsigned order noted only that "Justice Thomas, Justice Alito and Justice Gorsuch would grant the application." (Note that these three observed the norm, in cases that reach the court in this posture, of noting their dissent without further explanation.) On the mental chart that I maintain of such developments, Justice Kavanaugh's refusal to join the three dissenters was a data point. But then came the California church case. Justice Kavanaugh might have chosen to observe the norm, casting his vote without issuing an opinion that served only to raise the political temperature. Instead of that unspoken gesture toward collegiality, he gave us more proof that the polarization roiling the country has the Supreme Court in its grip. The court can't save us; that much is clear. It can't even save itself. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, is testifying before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday to answer questions about the social network's failure to protect the data of millions of its users and its role in Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Here are some of Mr. Zuckerberg's claims, as well as some claims from the lawmakers, which we fact checked. The page will be updated throughout the hearings. "We made changes in 2014 that would have prevented what happened with Cambridge Analytica from happening today." Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, used information that had been harvested from as many as 87 million Facebook users several years ago to build psychological profiles of voters. Facebook did announce changes in 2014 to limit the access that new apps had to data about its users, but it was not until 2015 that the company rolled out the changes to affect all of the apps on the platform. When asked when Facebook learned of Russian influence operations on the social network, Mr. Zuckerberg said, "Right around the time of the 2016 election itself." Facebook has long maintained that it did not learn about how Russian agents had used its platform to influence the presidential election until the summer of 2017. While Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief information officer, warned the company that Russian hackers may have been active on the platform in the summer of 2016, he has said he was looking at cybersecurity breaches, not disinformation campaigns tied to the elections. Tuesday was the first time that Mr. Zuckerberg cited 2016 as the date when the company identified new operations linked to the election. "You're not allowed to have a fake account on Facebook. Your content has to be authentic." Facebook requires people to register for accounts with their real names. But the fact is that fake accounts and false pages have persisted on the social network. Russian agents set up accounts on Facebook with false identities before the 2016 presidential election. And just this week, Facebook removed a popular Black Lives Matter page after it was discovered to be inauthentic. "Cambridge Analytica wasn't using our services in 2015 as far as we can tell." Former employees of Cambridge Analytica have told The New York Times that they were using Facebook as early as 2014. Mr. Zuckerberg later said he had misspoken. "Actually, the first line of our terms of service say that you control and own the information and content that you put on Facebook." During the hearing, Mr. Zuckerberg was shown the terms of service of the quiz app that Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian American academic, used to gather data from Facebook users. The fine print may have told users that their data could be used for commercial purposes, according to a draft of the app's terms of service that was reviewed by The Times, and which was shown to Mr. Zuckerberg by Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut. In other words, it appears that Facebook may not have regularly checked to make sure that apps complied with its rules. The final wording of the terms of service for Mr. Kogan's app is now most likely unknowable. Facebook executives said they deleted the app in December 2015 after they found out about the data harvesting. When asked whether Facebook users and their friends had knowingly consented to sharing their data with Mr. Kogan's app, Mr. Zuckerberg said, "I believe that we rolled out this developer platform and that we explained to people how it worked and they did consent to it." Facebook users who downloaded Mr. Kogan's quiz app did consent to sharing their own and their friends' information by agreeing to the app's terms and conditions. But their friends were not aware that their information had been shared and did not knowingly grant permission. And notices in fine print are often ignored or misunderstood. Several people who used the app told The Times that they were not aware that it had harvested their data. Studies and surveys have shown that most people click agree to terms and conditions without actually reading them. "President Obama's campaign developed an app utilizing the same Facebook feature as Cambridge Analytica to capture the information of not just millions of the app's users but millions of their friends." More than a million people downloaded the 2012 Obama campaign's app, which gained access to the data of supporters and their friends. Facebook users who downloaded the Obama campaign app were aware of its aims: supporting and campaigning for a political candidate. Those who downloaded the app from Mr. Kogan, however, believed they were taking a personality quiz for academic purposes and did not know that their data would end up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica. "Contrast that, for example, with an area like finding terrorist propaganda, which we've actually been very successful at deploying A.I. tools on already." How successful Facebook has been at finding and eliminating terrorist propaganda from its platform is still up for debate. Facebook and other social media companies were chastised by the British Parliament in a 2017 report for "failing to remove illegal content when asked to do so including dangerous terrorist recruitment material, promotion of sexual abuse of children and incitement to racial hatred." The report called the companies' lack of enforcement shameful. Last week, the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit that combats extremist groups, also said it had found accounts of some extremists that remained active on Facebook. "In May of 2016, Gizmodo reported Facebook had purposefully and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news" A former Facebook employee told Gizmodo in 2016 that people working at the social network prevented stories about right wing conferences and candidates from trending on Facebook. Other former employees disputed this suggestion and Gizmodo said it was "unable to determine if left wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed." Facebook denied the allegations at the time, but the episode underscored the question of whether the social network was a media entity. "We already have a 'Download Your Information' tool that allows people to see and take out all the information they've put into Facebook." While Facebook recently introduced a tool that allows people to download data that Facebook has collected on them, the tool appears to be incomplete. Some people have noticed that some data are missing, such as a long forgotten feature of Facebook that lets you "poke" people. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
SAN FRANCISCO The phone calls began late Friday among Uber's new chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, and the ride hailing company's executives, as well as board members and a raft of lawyers. They were facing an emergency. The problem was that Travis Kalanick, Uber's former chief executive and a board member, had appointed two new directors Ursula Burns, the former chief executive of Xerox, and John Thain, the former chief of Merrill Lynch to the privately held company without informing them. The moves, which pushed the nine member board to 11 people, gave Mr. Kalanick new potential allies on major decisions at Uber. Mr. Kalanick's actions were "disappointing," Mr. Khosrowshahi wrote on Friday in a letter to employees that was obtained by The New York Times. "Anyone would tell you that this is highly unusual." The trigger for Mr. Kalanick's move one made possible by a board vote last year giving him control of three seats was a proposal that Mr. Khosrowshahi and the investment bank Goldman Sachs, an Uber shareholder, brought to the board on Thursday. The proposal, which is set to be discussed by directors on Tuesday, includes measures that would shift the power on Uber's board by reducing Mr. Kalanick's voting clout, expanding Mr. Khosrowshahi's powers and imposing a 2019 deadline on the company to go public, according to three people with knowledge of the proposal who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Parts of the proposal were also read to The Times. The power shift proposed by Mr. Khosrowshahi and Goldman Sachs spurred Mr. Kalanick to act to reassert control, according to a statement Mr. Kalanick issued on Friday. That has now plunged Uber into another period of uncertainty and a corporate governance crisis, at a time when the company had been trying to move beyond its controversial past with a new chief executive on board. Uber is "attempting to copy some things that characterize good governance at a public company," said Charles M. Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. But, he added, parts of the proposal "typically show up when you have poor management and are generally opposed by public shareholders." The governance plan that touched off the latest politicking was created by Mr. Khosrowshahi and Goldman Sachs as part of a bigger effort to finalize a deal to sell billions of dollars of Uber stock to the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, according to a person briefed on the proposal. That deal depends on the participation of some early Uber investors, who have said they will not sell their shares to SoftBank unless Uber's governance structure changes and Mr. Kalanick is barred from returning as chief executive. Those investors include the venture capital firm Benchmark, which put money into Uber early on and has more recently been warring with Mr. Kalanick over his control of the company. According to the proposal, if the Uber board seats currently held by three directors Ryan Graves, Arianna Huffington or Wan Ling Martello are vacated, Mr. Khosrowshahi gains the power to nominate directors for those spots. The new directors must be approved by a majority of the board and by a majority of all shareholders. The plan also includes a proposal to remove the outsize voting power carried in two categories of Uber stock, the Class B common shares and the preferred shares. Class B common shares currently offer their holders 10 to 1 voting power, for example. But under the proposal, that would change to one vote per share. The change would diminish the power of some current shareholders, like Mr. Kalanick, as well as that of Benchmark and other venture investors. The proposal also suggests that Uber elect only a few board members each year, in effect setting a cap. That would make it hard for an activist shareholder to take over the board. One part of the proposal takes direct aim at Mr. Kalanick. The measure states that any person who has previously been an officer of Uber can return as chief executive only if he or she can get the approval of two thirds of the board and 66.7 percent of all shareholders. The proposed plan also imposes a 2019 deadline for Uber to go public. To ensure that the public offering happens at that time, there is a provision that if more than one third, but less than one half, of the board wants an I.P.O., they can add directors until they have the control over the board they need to make the public offering happen. This provision may be dropped. The plan does allow Mr. Kalanick to keep his board seat, subject to the approval of Mr. Khosrowshahi. Of the two other board seats that Mr. Kalanick controls, one would be given to SoftBank while the other would be filled by the chief executive of a Fortune 100 company, if approved by the majority of the board and a majority vote of all shareholders. If for some reason Mr. Khosrowshahi rejected the proposed board member three times, he could designate someone for the third seat himself. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Dr. Mary Fowkes in her office at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. She was interviewed for a "60 Minutes" segment on Covid 19 that was broadcast after her death. Dr. Mary Fowkes, a neuropathologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan whose autopsies of Covid 19 victims early in the pandemic discovered serious damage in multiple organs a finding that led to the successful use of higher doses of blood thinners to treat patients died on Nov. 15 at her home in Katonah, N.Y., in Westchester County. She was 66. Her daughter, Jackie Treatman, said the cause was a heart attack. When Dr. Fowkes (rhymes with "pokes") and her team began their autopsies, little was known about the novel coronavirus, which was believed to be largely a respiratory disease. The first few dozen autopsies revealed that Covid 19 affected the lungs and other vital organs, and that the virus probably traveled through a patient's blood vessels and damaged the endothelial cells, which line the blood vessels' interior. "We saw very small and very microscopic blood clots in the lungs, the heart, the liver and significant blood clots in the brain," Dr. Fowkes said in an interview on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" for a segment, broadcast on Nov. 22, on the long term effects of Covid 19. She had been interviewed by the correspondent Anderson Cooper on Oct. 30, a little more than two weeks before her death. The clots in the brain suggested that there had been strokes, she told Mr. Cooper. Mr. Cooper asked if she had expected to see the breadth of damage in so many organs. "No, not at all," Dr. Fowkes said. "Nobody's seen it like this." Dr. Fowkes "had a curious scientific mind and an uncompromising attitude to doing as many autopsies as possible to produce something that was unique," Dr. Carlos Cordon Cardo, chairman of the department of pathology, molecular and cell based medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said in a phone interview. Dr. Cordon Cardo said that the findings from the autopsies of Covid patients done by Dr. Fowkes's team had led to an aggressive increase in the use of blood thinners, resulting in a marked improvement in the health of some patients. The medications were adjusted to account for the elevated response to Covid by patients' immune systems, he said. Dr. Fowkes and others involved in the Covid autopsies wrote a paper on their findings and released it in May, but it has not been peer reviewed and published. Mary Elizabeth Fowkes was born on Nov. 1, 1954, in Clayton, a village in northern New York, and grew up in Syracuse. Her mother, Isabel (Walroth) Fowkes, was a social worker. Her father, Glen, wrote insurance policies. Dr. Fowkes graduated from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse in 1977 and then worked as a physician assistant. Looking to improve her chances of getting into medical school, she became a technician at a cell and developmental biology laboratory, then enrolled in a doctoral program in anatomy and cell biology at SUNY Upstate Medical University, also in Syracuse. She eventually entered a combined Ph.D. M.D. program at the school and graduated with both degrees in 1999. Dr. Fowkes completed her residency in pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston in 2003. She then had fellowships in neuropathology at New York University Medical Center and in forensic pathology at the office of New York City's chief medical examiner, where she was mentored by Dr. Barbara Sampson, who was on the staff at the time, in 2006, and is today the city's chief medical examiner. "What she really learned from us is what can be learned in an autopsy, the importance of giving families closure and the importance of an autopsy to public health and understanding disease," Dr. Sampson said in a phone interview. After her city fellowship, Dr. Fowkes joined the Icahn School as an assistant professor of pathology and remained on the faculty until her death. She was named Mount Sinai's director of neuropathology in 2012 and its director of autopsy service two years later. She encouraged the hospital to perform more autopsies, citing their educational value, and pushed for an expansion of the hospital's brain bank. She also mentored many young doctors, including Nadia Tsankova, a neuropathologist. "I was very passionate about combining research and clinical service," Dr. Tsankova said in an interview. "And Mary was very passionate about research. Sometimes you take a job and you aspire for something and your boss says, 'No, you have to do this.' But she would say, 'I understand what you have to do and we'll make it work." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Who is the Versace Woman? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This year's Pride parades in New York and San Francisco on June 26 coincide with the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling making same sex marriage the law of the land. What had been thought of as celebratory events, though, are now being reconceived as the realization sets in that the landmark advance has been overshadowed by the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. The parades close out Pride month but kick off a busy calendar of events with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes that are intimate enough, even with added security in place, to balance fellowship with fun. Here's a curated look at several of them, from bisexual theater to transgender swims, to keep the gay times going all summer long. "Hot!," New York City's longest running performance festival celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (July 5 Aug. 6), returns to Dixon Place in Manhattan for its 25th year with an out there roster of dance, theater, comedy and other performing arts. Among the highlights are "Hyperbolic! (The Last Spectacle)," a multidisciplinary musical work by the choreographer and musician Monstah Black that promises "pretty glam gore" in its imagining of the last party on earth, and "Ignorance Is No Excuse, Reno," a comedy and spoken word piece by the lesbian feminist comedian Reno. Several communities of color celebrate Pride with their own events over the summer. This year's festivals include Chicago Black Pride (July 1 4); Miami Beach Brothaz (July 14 16); Charlotte Black Gay Pride (July 16), in Charlotte, N.C.; Portland Latino Gay Pride (July 29 31), in Portland, Ore.; New York City Black Pride (Aug. 17 21); and Atlanta Black Gay Pride (Aug. 30 Sept. 5). Look through any gay magazine, and the pages will be filled with a certain kind of body built, hairless, young, usually white that, like it or not, has been in vogue since gay men have been, well, gay. (You're not immune from this obsession either, straight guys.) And that's where bears come in, to demonstrate that hotness comes in all sizes. The gay community's big guys convene in Provincetown, Mass., the eclectic beach community at the tip of Cape Cod, for Bear Week (July 9 17). Events include pool parties, dances, a cruise, various contests involving large amounts of body hair and, of course, late night slices at Twisted Pizza, Subs and Ice Cream. Bears like carbs. Who says you need to be on land to celebrate Pride? Sea Tea, New York City's gay party boat, offers cruises throughout the summer that cater to almost every kind of gay scenester. This summer's offerings include a reunion for employees and fans of the popular Chelsea gay bar Splash, which closed in 2013 (July 17); a fund raiser for the Gay Officers Action League, an organization of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender police officers (Aug. 7); and a special cruise celebrating the drag and performance festival Wigstock, hosted by the subversively funny drag queen Lady Bunny (Aug. 21). The group Homo Climbtastic, a group of rock climbers, hosts what it calls "the world's largest queer climbing convention" in Fayetteville, W.Va. (July 21 24). The annual event, which also includes hiking and camping, is for experienced outdoor climbers, so be sure you know what a soft catch or jug haul is before you sign up. And no drama queens allowed. At least that's what the group's website says: "If you decide to drag a big ol' sack of crazy with you or decide to get your feelings hurt and spin into a drama spiral, we will not ask you to come climbing with us again." Tango has always been an art form friendly to same sex couples. (Alaistair Macaulay, the dance critic of The New York Times, has written that one possible origin of the tango is in the brothels of Buenos Aires, where men danced awaiting their turns for sexual assignations.) Queer tango festivals have been a staple of New York for a while, but it's in Europe where same sex couples have really been infusing the dance form with a gay spirit. One locus of the gay tango movement is Berlin, which this summer hosts an International Queer Tango Festival (July 28 31). The event will feature workshops and gender mixed milongas, informal gatherings of tango dancers from across the gender spectrum. While most Pride parades in the United States take place in June, cities in other countries hold theirs over the summer. Among the locales with parades in July are Paris (July 2); Bogota, Colombia (3); Munich (9); Barcelona, Spain (9); Berlin (23); Stockholm (30); and Vancouver, British Columbia (31). The International Gay and Lesbian Football Association as in the football played with your feet, not your hands will hold its world championship in Portland, Ore. (Aug. 6 13), the home of the Portland NetRippers, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender soccer club. Teams are divided into male, female and mixed divisions. Players and spectators of all sexual orientations are welcome. "GayFest!," an annual theater festival in Philadelphia, returns for its sixth iteration (Aug. 12 27) with plays about gay men and their rollercoaster relationships. This year's offerings include "Harbor," a comedy by the Tony Award nominated writer and lyricist Chad Beguelin ("Aladdin") about a gay man and his troubled relationship with his sister, and "My Favorite Husbands," a comedy by Andrew Marvel involving a drag queen and a Republican wedding. Pride takes on especially overt political tones in North Carolina this year, the most high profile state to become embroiled in controversy over bathroom use and the transgender community. The state is facing boycotts from musicians as diverse as Bruce Springsteen and Itzhak Perlman, as well as gay and lesbian travelers, over a new state law that limits transgender bathroom access and pre empts local governments from passing their own anti discrimination ordinances. The law will be on the minds of audiences at the North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (Aug. 12 20), which takes place at the Carolina Theater of Durham. Joe Student, the theater's director of live events, said that he anticipated an outpouring of support from filmmakers and the gay community in Durham, a liberal town where Mr. Student said the legislation has little support. "It's a nonstarter here," Mr. Student said in an interview. "It's strange to see it creating an issue in other places." Highlights include the lesbian romance "AWOL" and "Kiss Me, Kill Me," a contemporary gay noir. It's been a big year for gays and Cons. In January there was the debut of BroadwayCon, a theater related event that returns to New York next year for Round 2. In May there was RuPaul's DragCon, an all things drag convention that will be back in Los Angeles in April. This summer, New York will experience superhero fandom from a gay perspective at the second annual FlameCon (Aug. 20 21), described by organizers as a celebration of "the diversity and creativity of queer geekdom and LGBTQ contributions to pop culture." Set to be held at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott, the event will feature panels, exhibitions and interviews with comic book writers and artists, including Phil Jimenez ("Super Woman"), Steve Orlando ("Midnighter") and Sophie Campbell ("Jem and the Holograms"), who recently came out as transgender. Several kink and leather events happening this summer are reminders that the more sexually libertine corners of the gay world remain vital, even as same sex marriage suggests that the gay community's main flavor is vanilla. The biggest of these is Southern Decadence (Aug. 31 Sept. 5), a debaucherous round the clock party that mostly takes place in the gay section of the French Quarter of New Orleans. Now in its 45th year, the festival, much of which is free during the day, features dance parties, parades, concerts, drag queen performances and contests (with guidelines unfit for a family newspaper). August Pride events around the world: Amsterdam's Canal Parade for Europride (Aug. 6); Montreal (8 14); Prague (8 14); Antwerp, Belgium (10 15); Copenhagen (16 21); Glasgow (20 21); and Austin, Tex. (27). Thanks to Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox, the lives of transgender women are in the national conversation more than ever before. But transgender men remain much more under the radar. Hoping to bring visibility to the community in a small way is Transmission (Sept. 8 11), an annual gathering of trans guys at a private retreat in the woods of Upper Lake, Calif., about two hours north of San Francisco. Activities include meditation, swimming and lots of discussions about life as as transgender men. Credit big spectacle shows by singers like Britney Spears, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey, but in recent years Las Vegas has increasingly become a vacation destination for the gay community. Case in point is Gay Days Las Vegas (Sept. 6 12), a weeklong festival, now in its fifth year, that includes pool parties, shows and a travel and retail expo. Past events have included a Most Kissable Guy contest and twerking competitions, so consider yourself warned. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
One of the largest cities in Europe , Budapest is a regional powerhouse in terms of art, design and cuisine, home to a dynamic fashion scene and more Michelin starred restaurants than any other city in the former Eastern Bloc. Of course, the Hungarian capital boasts a rich and lengthy history, starting with early Celtic settlements and the later Roman city of Aquincum, before hitting a high point during the Austro Hungarian Empire. But fans of contemporary pleasures will also find far more than a weekend's worth of new attractions here. Most of the action lies in Pest, east of the Danube, with scores of compelling new bars, restaurants and boutiques in neighborhoods like the Inner City, the Jewish Quarter and the Palace District. Across the river, stately Buda Castle and renewed, Turkish era thermal baths reward travelers in hilly Buda. For years, Hungary's art scene was known for being relatively unknown, though several new galleries are working to improve things. One of the best is the 2014 arrival Art Text, housed in an Art Nouveau building whose ornate 1903 architectural details contrast stunningly against the contemporary artworks on display. Exhibitions focusing on emerging artists and modernist works of the post World War II era change roughly every month. Get here early: Like many other Budapest galleries, Art Text is not open on weekends, and only welcomes visitors on Fridays until 6 p.m. Relax over a glass and a bite at Tasting Table, a cool, casual wine shop and bar that became one of the city's favorite destinations soon after it opened in an atmospheric Palace Quarter cellar in late 2014. Owned by the American food writer Carolyn Banfalvi and her Hungarian husband, Gabor, Tasting Table stocks over 200 wines, which you can compare in flights of three glasses (3,900 forints, or about 15.40), while you sample local cheeses, charcuterie and other snacks. Placemat size maps illustrate the geography and varietals of the country's main wine regions, making it easy to justify another round in the name of your ongoing oenological education. Rudas Baths, one of the city's most atmospheric thermal pools, was originally built during the Ottoman occupation in the mid 16th century. Akos Stiller for The New York Times Years ago, Budapest led the way for cocktails in Central Europe, with favorites like Boutiq' Bar appearing on several global "best bars" lists. The new hotness: Good Spirit Bar, which opened last year in the Inner City with more than 350 kinds of whiskey and some 700 spirits overall, including takes on the domestic distillate palinka, made with beet, celery root and carrot. Relax at the spacious, L shaped corner bar over a relatively obscure Japanese whiskey like the 12 year old Togouchi (3,700 forints for a dram of 4 centiliters, or about 1.35 ounces), or make your way through the cocktail list, which bounds from classics like the Sazerac (2,400 forints) to such custom creations as Fig in Japan (Nikka All Malt whiskey, fig syrup, sherry vinegar and a dash of espresso, tobacco and bacon bitters; 2,400 forints). The list also includes creative, nonalcoholic drinks like the Sage Stage (sage, cardamom, lime, pear and tonic; 1,100 forints). Thanks in part to European Union development funds, many of Budapest's once rundown parks, sidewalks and squares have been spruced up in recent years. The riverside Nehru Part south of the Inner City reopened in late 2016 with new running tracks, basketball courts, workout equipment, playgrounds and a new skate park hidden under Petofi Bridge, offering great views of the Danube. Afterward, head north to check out the Balna (or "Whale") Building, a modern shopping mall partially composed of restored, 19th century warehouses. The Jewish Quarter offers historic sites, trendy shops, amazing night life and an array of excellent (and cheap) ethnic restaurants. Prepare for your tear through the neighborhood with a hearty bowl of noodles at Ramenka, a minimalist, Japanese style ramen bar. The house special (1,690 forints) pairs fresh noodles with a savory, pork based broth adorned with tender slices of braised pork belly, boiled egg, sprouts, chives, carrot matchsticks and wood ear mushrooms, while those following the neighborhood's more traditional dietary strictures might prefer the pork free, miso based version (1,690 forints). Along with several of its neighboring countries, Hungary is coming into its own in terms of fashion. Find apparel and accessories at Punch, launched in 2017 by a consortium of several up and coming designers just off Andrassy. Inside you'll find Anna Amelie's large purses, made of hydrophobic leather in dynamic colors (around 62,000 forints), velvet bodysuits (24,000 forints) by Anna Daubner and funky women's hats (59,000 forints) from Vecsei. Not far away is the new flagship store of Nanushka, a cult Hungarian brand hashtagged by style conscious women around the world. Although the brand can be found in boutiques from Paris to Tokyo, this is currently the only stand alone Nanushka store, stocking the widest selection of items like "Cascade" skirts with the brand's distinctive knot in faux leather (74,990 forints) and tank tops with a similar motif in silky "technical" satin (59,100 forints). Craft beer has hit the capital hard in recent years, appearing at stylish new restaurants like Bestia, across from St. Stephen's Basilica. Inside the spacious dining room you'll find beer from local producers like Mad Scientist, Hedon and Horizont, paired with excellent modern pub cuisine: massive beef marrow bones topped with bread crumbs and dried horseradish, accompanied by fluffy, focaccia style toast (3,850 forints); tender, sweet and sour barbecue chicken wings (2,050 forints for six); and truffled macaroni and cheese (3,050 forints). Plan to stay a while: The list of draft beers runs 12 deep, and like many places in town, there'll probably be a club worthy D.J. playing top shelf funk and house tunes, or another type of musical performance. Craft beer gives you plenty of options for the night, with sleek arrivals like 2017's First backing up established bars like the sprawling Eleszto, a "ruin" pub in a former glass works that opened with more than 20 taps of craft beer in late 2013. Other must sees for beer fans include the labyrinthine Kandallo, the intimate Lehuto craft beer and tapas bar, and the ten tap Hopaholic. Almost any of these pubs will provide entertainment. However, if a local offers to get you into a late night private cocktail club like Her Majesty the Rabbit which does not list an address by all means drop your pint and take them up on it immediately. Soak away the excess at the Rudas Baths, one of the city's most atmospheric thermal pools, originally built during the Ottoman occupation in the mid 16th century. Though it retains much of its original Turkish architecture, a 2014 reconstruction added modern spa facilities, a Turkish Hungarian fusion restaurant and a panorama pool on the rooftop terrace. Normally reserved for men, the Rudas Baths welcome both sexes on weekends. Don't forget your swimsuit, and if you don't have a spare towel, pay for a sheet (700 forints and a 1,500 forint deposit) along with your ticket (3,700 forints). The original Costes restaurant earned Hungary's first Michelin star some eight years ago. But many locals prefer the restaurant's newer and less stuffy second location, Costes Downtown, which brought a lighter atmosphere when it opened in 2015 and which quickly picked up its own Michelin star. The top shelf Continental cuisine highlights many of Hungary's renowned products, like goose liver, prepared as a buttery terrine and topped with cubes of fresh pear and quince and a honey ginger sauce (6,000 forints), or Mangalitsa pork medallions (9,100 forints), which are topped with earthy Jerusalem artichoke chips and dense droplets of savory black garlic puree. Leave enough time for a final glass before you rush off to the airport: The wine list features celebrated producers from regions like Badacsony, Eger and Villany, many of which you're unlikely ever to find anywhere else. Guests looking for excellent yet affordable views of St. Stephen's Basilica can book one of three rooftop suites (called "apartments") at 12 Revay Hotel (Revay utca 12; 12revay.com; doubles start at 92 euros, or about 113), or chose one of the 53 smaller rooms at the hotel, which opened in 2015. Ten years after the arrival of the posh Callas cafe and restaurant, Callas House (Andrassy ut 20; callashouse.com; off season doubles start around 82 euros) opened directly upstairs in 2016, offering 25 beautiful rooms and suites on Pest's most stylish boulevard, next door to the Budapest Opera. If you do plan a trip to Budapest, check out these suggestions on what to pack from our Wirecutter team. An earlier version of this article included a reference to the Shoah Cellar Museum. After publication, several readers and experts in Jewish history raised questions about the background of the museum; that reference has now been removed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In early December, I ran a marathon faster than I had ever dreamed. I had never thought an athletic breakthrough like that would be possible, especially not in my 30s. Until I looked around. Something extraordinary is unfolding for American female distance runners, and it's making all of us better. Well into our 30s and 40s, we are performing at explosively high levels, levels that used to be unimaginable. The fastest among us have shattered barriers: In 2017, Shalane Flanagan, at 36, became the first American woman to win the New York City Marathon in four decades. The following year, Des Linden, at 34, won the Boston Marathon, the first American woman to do so since 1985. That success had a quiet and powerful ripple effect, from Olympians and professional runners down to hundreds of amateurs like me. The most dramatic example is the United States Olympic marathon team trials, which will begin on Feb. 29 in Atlanta. The trials, where the fastest Americans race for the opportunity to be part of the Olympic team, are open to anyone, but to qualify, women have to run a marathon in under 2 hours and 45 minutes. It's outrageously hard. Only 198 qualified in 2016. This year, the number of women qualifying skyrocketed to 511. The number of men has increased only slightly, from 211 to 260. What's behind this huge jump? Few of these new qualifiers are professional runners. Most of them are women who train in their spare time, often around demanding jobs and families. They are lawyers and surgeons, biologists and engineers. There is an astrophysicist and a maple syrup producer in the mix, from places as varied as Brooklyn; Minot, N.D.; and Lake Jackson, Texas. At least one of the new qualifiers is a mother of four. Another qualified while she was pregnant, and she gave birth last August. And while distance running in the United States has always attracted white professional women, the sport is growing broader and getting better. Athletes have connected with one another more than ever before, in teams or online, sharing our training and sweeping each other along with each successful race. It's a new model of competitive female leadership: We're seeing each other win and challenging ourselves to keep up. Last year, it even trickled down to me. As I watched so many women qualify, I decided I would try, too. I had written about Flanagan's catalytic effect on her teammates after she took New York. And I had reported on the women who persevered behind Linden in Boston. I thought of these women as my team captains, even if they'd never heard of me, and it was thrilling to watch them finally triumph. And I thought: Why not me, too? I started last summer, and it was incredibly hard. It required a total reset in how I thought about myself and what I can do. I had always thought that, at some point in life, most people become "who we are." Our lives are built around whatever that is, and no matter what we might actually be capable of, this idea keeps us fixed in one place. At 35, I thought I was "who I was." I didn't think it was still possible to improve significantly in anything, let alone something involving my body. Our culture is fixated on youth, on potential, on lists of "30 under 30" especially for women, who are assigned a "biological clock," whether they believe in it or not. I had to dismantle all that. To qualify, I had to run a marathon pace of 6 minutes 17 seconds per mile. For me, that's usually a sprint. When I started training on a path along the Hudson River, I couldn't even hit that pace for one mile. I tried anyway, over and over. I would stagger home afterward, late at night or before work or both. Once, at the end of a workout, I cried out, "Oh, God!" so loudly that a man across the path looked up at me in alarm. But I kept trying, repeating something someone told me about "getting comfortable with the uncomfortable." It never got comfortable. But it did become possible. One evening in the fall, after logging 22 miles in Central Park close to my goal pace, I paused. Who did I think I was? That was the point. After months of work, my physical and psychological reframing had worked. It wasn't an idea anymore. It was my plan. We don't have many opportunities later in life to change who we are, without worrying about what other people think or upending wherever we've landed in our lives. We especially don't have a lot of ways to do that physically. I had internalized a narrative about my body that once I turned 30, there might not be much to look forward to. I didn't know the opposite could be true. This is what all these other American women runners are doing right now, in their own ways. We are following the best of us, those who have already broken out, and we are bringing everyone else along with us. When Flanagan won in New York, she told Linden, "Now it's your turn." And then it was. We're doing this in ways that sometimes surprised me. For example, all I'd ever heard about social media is that it makes you feel bad. That's not what happened to me. With my schedule last year, I often ran by myself. But I didn't feel alone. I used Instagram to create a virtual cross country team of women nationwide who shared the same goal and cheered me on too. If I was tired in the morning, I'd look through my apps to see what Veronica in Boston had run. I knew she was a lawyer, and her teammate had a small child what excuse did I have? I went out and trained. In December, I raced a marathon in Sacramento. The photos of the finish line of this race were beautiful. They show ordinary women achieving something extraordinary and then absolutely freaking out with joy as the strangers they ran with hit their goals and qualify, too. Female athletes are often presented as inspirational or embattled, instead of just excellent. This scene was completely different, and I loved it. But when it came to hitting my goal of running a 2:45 marathon, I failed. (It really is hard to do.) I still ran faster than I had ever thought possible, with a new best marathon time of 2:53, long after I thought my best times were done. I became the kind of athlete I'd always wanted to be. The experience was the embodiment of that cliche about sports it was empowering. As I trained, I realized I had become complacent in the rest of my life. Wasn't it all enough? But running shook me out of it. There are a lot of things we can't control right now, especially for women. Perhaps we choose running because we don't need permission to do it we can do it whenever and however we want. The roads are open. And behind those 511 women who qualified are hundreds of others, like me, who transformed ourselves trying. Lindsay Crouse is a senior staff editor in Opinion. Last year, she was the first woman to win the George Hirsch Journalism Award for coverage of distance running. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation's major insurers, reported on Wednesday that its earnings actually increased this past quarter, adding that the costs of the coronavirus pandemic were offset by the cancellations of routine medical appointments and elective surgeries for hip replacements and other conditions. The company's report provided an early glimpse of how the crisis is affecting the U.S. health care industry, which in many regions has been overwhelmed by emergency and intensive care of patients infected by the virus. Tens of billions of dollars in federal funds are now flowing to hospitals dealing with the crisis as part of the 2 trillion stimulus bill passed by Congress last month. The company, which operates one of the nation's largest health insurers as well as physician groups and surgery centers, announced on Wednesday that the coronavirus pandemic had "minimal impact" on its earnings. UnitedHealth reported earnings from operations increased by 3 percent, to 5 billion, for the first quarter of 2020, compared with the same three months of 2019, on revenue of 64 billion. The company said it was not changing its profit outlook for the year, but executives emphasized that it was too soon to predict what the final impact of coronavirus would be on its varied businesses. The pandemic began hitting communities in the United States heavily in the last month, and elective procedures only began to decline in early to mid March once public health experts and state governmental officials urged hospitals to clear beds for coronavirus patients. "These are still early days in the response to Covid 19 and we anticipate we will experience and learn more as events unfold in the months ahead," UnitedHealth's chief executive, David Wichmann, told investors. The possibility that overall medical costs could be lower might help allay fears that the crisis could lead to sharply higher insurance premiums for consumers next year. Mr. Wichmann indicated that employers could see some relief in the rates charged by UnitedHealth if the cost of care for patients with Covid 19 was significantly outweighed by savings in the reduction in other kinds of care so that its overall expenses were lower than it had originally expected. "It remains to be seen whether we can do that and if it makes sense," he said. Mr. Wichmann cited various efforts the company had made to help its customers and providers, including advancing nearly 2 billion in payments to hospitals and doctors strapped for cash during the pandemic. The company also said it would not request "any government assistance" as a result of the crisis. Executives did not rule out the possibility that there could be much higher demand for medical care later in the year, although they were careful to avoid predicting when a potential rebound might occur. "We haven't seen a cessation in activity like this," said John Rex, the company's chief financial officer. During the call with investors, Mr. Rex took pains to emphasize that the company's experience with previous events like hurricanes or the Great Recession might not be helpful. "This situation is so different from anything we've seen before," he said. The high levels of unemployment that have already been recorded in claims may also affect employer plans, resulting in lower enrollment. But executives said they also expected that people without job based coverage would seek alternative sources of insurance, benefiting the company's Medicaid and coverage for individual businesses. The company says many of its customers are already seeking to delay payments on the premiums they owe. The company, which also offers short term plans that do not meet the standards set under the Affordable Care Act, indicated that it had already been considering offering Obamacare plans in additional markets. UnitedHealth was among the major insurers that pulled out of A.C.A. markets because of heavy losses. UnitedHealth also announced that the chief executive of its Optum unit, Andrew Witty, who was also the former chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, was taking a leave of absence to help lead the World Health Organization's new initiative for the development of a Covid 19 vaccine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Bryson DeChambeau has four top five finishes in his last five events and is among the favorites at the Travelers Championship, which begins Thursday in Connecticut. When Bryson DeChambeau arrived on the PGA Tour four years ago as the reigning United States amateur champion, all anyone wanted to talk about were his many eccentricities in the sport. A physics major in college at Southern Methodist, he was barred by rules officials from using a protractor during rounds to accurately determine hole locations, and he would soak golf balls in Epsom salts to determine their center of gravity. DeChambeau signed autographs backward with his left hand even though he is right handed. "I'm a total nonconformist; for me, it's about going down rabbit holes," DeChambeau said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "I have to chase down the most scientifically efficient way to get the golf ball in the hole." This year, DeChambeau, 26, is roiling the professional golf world with his gaudiest experiment yet. In the last eight months, including 90 days when he was bored while isolating because the coronavirus pandemic put golf on a hiatus, DeChambeau threw himself into an extreme weight lifting routine that added 40 pounds to his physique, most of it in his upper body. DeChambeau is now 240 pounds the world's top ranked player, Rory McIlroy, is listed at 160 and routinely hitting drives 50 yards past the competition. His golf ball often travels at speeds approaching 200 miles an hour, and he envisions drives regularly flying 400 yards. Last week, when he was hitting balls on a tournament practice range, he was forced to back up 15 yards because his shots were sailing over a mammoth net meant to protect an adjacent neighborhood of homes hundreds of yards away. And DeChambeau is not done. He dreams of getting bigger and swinging harder during the next off season. "If I could get to 260 pounds and swing it upward of 210 miles an hour and control the ball, that would be amazing," said DeChambeau, who is among the favorites at the Travelers Championship, which begins Thursday at T.P.C. River Highlands in Cromwell, Conn. It is a prediction that might put a fright in his colleagues who are already gobsmacked by what they have seen in the two weeks of tournaments since the PGA Tour resumed on June 11. "It was crazy, it was nuts, it's unbelievable," McIlroy said, describing DeChambeau's tee shots. "He hit it like 375 into the wind." This being golf, where the object is to knock a little ball into a hole roughly four inches wide, DeChambeau's prodigious power has not yet translated to a victory this year, although he has four top five finishes in his last five events. Accurate putting still remains an essential skill, and a balky putter in the final round of the Charles Schwab Challenge in mid June kept him one stroke behind the eventual winner, Daniel Berger. A week later, DeChambeau also blamed a lack of touch on the greens for finishing tied for eighth at the RBC Heritage. But with his superhero build, and quirky charisma, there is a sense in the golf community that DeChambeau, who is ranked 11th in the world and has won five times on the PGA Tour, may be remaking the paradigm of a top golfer. Will the sport's future players be shaped more like N.F.L. linebackers? And consequently, will the next generation of young golfers adopt heavy weight lifting regimens to mimic DeChambeau's beefy frame? Social media has already found a new nickname for a trending golfer: DeChambeauFlex. In many ways, the link between golf and modern strength training owes its genesis to Tiger Woods's heyday earlier this century. Woods added muscle in relentless weight room sessions and outworked his contemporaries, helping to create a new recreational genre: golf fitness. Woods's body also eventually betrayed him, leading to multiple knee reconstructions and four back surgeries. "I have a concern; I would look a little deeper into the safety of his swing," said Joey Diovisalvi, who for two decades has trained scores of pro golfers including one of the PGA Tour's longest hitters, Dustin Johnson in the biomechanics of the sport. "It's important to understand what the effects are. Let's make sure your body can handle that." Diovisalvi, who operates a golf training center in Jupiter, Fla., said he admired how DeChambeau has highlighted athleticism in golf but acknowledged that he had recently heard from many young golfers who wondered if DeChambeau's regimen was worth pursuing. "Lifting too many weights or having too much load or stress on tendons, ligaments or skeletal structure at an early age is dangerous," Diovisalvi said. "You have to remember that Bryson is a grown man." DeChambeau insists he is carefully monitoring the demands that his golf swing imparts on his body with the aid of fitness specialists. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The organizing committee of FIFA announced Monday that it would recommend the use of video assistant referee technology at the Women's World Cup this summer, bringing refereeing advances introduced at the men's World Cup in Russia last year to soccer's most important women's championship for the first time. The decision, which is expected to be approved by the governing FIFA Council when it meets later this month in Miami, is a victory for women's soccer players, coaches and fans who have highlighted gender equality issues in the international game. The technology, known by the acronym V.A.R., allows the on field referee to consult with a colleague viewing video replays to help confirm, or overturn, close calls in a narrow set of instances. It was fully implemented for the first time at a major FIFA tournament last summer at the men's World Cup, where FIFA hailed its introduction as a rousing success. On the V.A.R. point, at least, the debate seems finally to be settled. Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, said last weekend that he supported the use of the technology at the women's event in June, stating that it was proving effective at discouraging the type of diving and playacting that often plague major soccer tournaments. "Players now know that it's not just sufficient to have a look where is the referee, so if he doesn't see me I can simulate, because he or she will be caught," Infantino said, according to The Associated Press. "That's why V.A.R. automatically helps the fight against simulation and diving in a very efficient way." Referees for the Women's World Cup began training with the video technology this winter at a series of seminars in Abu Dhabi and Doha. FIFA later said some had been introduced to the technology as early as 2016. Still, as this summer's tournament in France approached, questions lingered about whether there would be enough time to get all of the untrained officials up to speed and comfortable with the protocols. FIFA on Monday said their progress had been satisfactory. "Based on the thorough work carried out over the past few months, FIFA is happy with the steps taken and the excellent job done by FIFA's refereeing team and the female referees involved," Zvonimir Boban, the deputy secretary general of FIFA, said in a statement. "We are confident about proposing the use of V.A.R. in France to the FIFA Council, as we are very positive about its implementation." V.A.R. technology is quickly becoming an indispensable, if still sometimes controversial, presence at the top men's competitions in the world. Many leagues and competitions from Major League Soccer in the United States to Germany's Bundesliga and England's F.A. Cup already use the system. European soccer officials announced in December that they would introduce it for the knockout rounds of this year's Champions League, the world's richest club competition. In a recent interview with The New York Times, United States Coach Jill Ellis said she felt it was "hugely important" that the use of V.A.R. in the women's game kept pace with its spread on the men's side. "First and foremost, we've got to fight for what's going to help the game," she said. "You can just see the benefit of it. It's proven." Becky Sauerbrunn, a longtime defender for the United States team, and a member of its 2015 Women's World Cup champions, said that while the V.A.R. issue was far from the most pressing gender equality issue in international soccer, it symbolized the many little ways that FIFA can make the women's game feel like an afterthought. For her, its use was just a matter of common sense. "For me it's, why not?" Sauerbrunn said. "Why not give it to the women if you give it to the men?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
It was 3 a.m. by the time we turned down the desolate road that leads to the Ion Luxury Adventure Hotel, an hour's drive east of Reykjavik, Iceland. Propped up by knock kneed, tubular stilts, this ominously gorgeous Brutalist slab of glass, steel and concrete juts out from the base of Mount Hengill, an active volcano, over a mossy green lava field. Misty rain gave the sky the gray tone of a late spring evening in New England, before the sun has fully set. Here, just below the Arctic Circle in the heart of the summer, the sun sinks but never disappears completely, casting light even from below the horizon. The Ion, which opened in 2013, is a rare breed of Iceland hotel, offering upscale, design centric accommodations in a rural setting, where well heeled travelers can find ample opportunity to sample the sorts of romantic activities that my boyfriend, Josh, and I were looking for when we visited last summer: horseback riding, hot springs hopping, and snorkeling in the Silfra fissure, a freshwater rift where the tectonic plates divide the continents of North America and Europe. Other hotels I found while researching places to stay outside Reykjavik, even those that were higher end, seemed to offer antique, Old World charm or a slightly tacky rusticism. The Ion, whose sleek Squarespace website immediately set it apart, looked ultracool. It was designed by the Los Angeles based architecture studio Minarc, whose principals are Icelanders, to be "mistaken for part of the naturally evolving landscape"; it could be mistaken, at least, for a geothermal power plant, capitalizing on the industrial chic trend. The Ion had won myriad awards, including the 2014 World Boutique Hotel Award for Europe's best sustainable boutique hotel, thanks to its low carbon footprint, water saving showers, organic fair trade bedding, and furniture constructed of driftwood and other sustainable materials. A line of bath products made with Icelandic herbs added a note of refined localism. Now, as we approached the hotel in the wee hours of the morning, we were looking forward to sleeping in one of the deluxe rooms that looked, online, like a version of minimalist heaven, all clean lines and plush white bedding. Pulling up our hoods, we ran for the entrance. Both the front desk, made of rough hewed stone, and the spare, midcentury modern style lobby were empty. "Hello?" I called out. A bearded young man appeared. "Checking in?" he asked, surprised. The outcome was clear: Our room had been given away. "This never should have happened," he said gravely. The experience seemed to crystallize, in a small way, the challenges Iceland is facing as it emerges from an economically challenging period and seeks to embrace a relatively new breed of traveler: the luxury minded adventurer. In 2013, for the first time in the country's history, tourism surpassed fishing as the top industry. That year, the Boston Consulting Group, commissioned by a group of private Icelandic companies, assembled a report called "The Future of Tourism in Iceland," which designated three goals: environmental conservation, social benefits and economic impact. Reaching those goals would involve "attracting the right visitors to Iceland; generating the right products to create value for them, and for Iceland." In other words, the fewer tourists trampling over the fragile natural beauty, and the more money they'll pay to do so, the better. Topping the report's list of the tourist profiles that Iceland should ideally target were "older relaxers" and "affluent adventurers." No. 7 was "super premium" people 35 and older, with a high income, who are "seeking high end, unique experiences." Iceland, the report noted, holds little appeal for the super premium category because there are simply not enough luxury hotels. Iceland has no shortage of unique experiences, but can a country so egalitarian and unfussy master luxury? Consider the Ion: luxury pioneer, adventurer magnet. Pretty much anywhere in Iceland is a good base for adventure, but the Ion is squarely on the Golden Circle a popular tourist route that loops from Reykjavik through southwest Iceland and just a short drive from the mountainous Thingvellir National Park, a Unesco World Heritage site that's home to Lake Thingvallavatn, the largest in Iceland. The hotel offers an array of excursions: fly fishing, kayaking, hiking, "Super Jeep" safaris, "luxury" horseback riding, glacier tours, snorkeling and scuba diving in the Silfra fissure. The pieces were all in place. And yet, our first night fell well short of luxurious. In a scenario reminiscent of the scene in Christopher Guest's "Best in Show" in which a show dog owning couple hard up for cash are offered a janitor's closet in lieu of a hotel room, the concierge led us through an area stocked with cleaning supplies to a room barely large enough to contain a double bed. "Is this a room that's usually given to guests?" I asked. "Yes," he replied, unconvincingly, before urging us to let him know if we needed anything else. Four hours later, and we needed ear plugs. Our closet was directly beneath the dining room. Above us, early bird cyclists were fueling up and dragging their chairs across the floor as they went to and from the breakfast buffet. We cut our losses and joined them, piling plates high with warm, crusty rye baguettes; house cured gravlax; and sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and hard boiled eggs. A tray held dainty cups of yogurtlike skyr, and a bowl of oranges sat next to an electric juicer. The coffee was strong and hot. Back at the front desk, another concierge, Katrin, gave us a look similar to the young man's the night before. Though we'd been told we were all set for horseback riding and snorkeling in the Silfra fissure, the trips, it turned out, were booked up. But Katrin pulled through. There would be no horseback riding, but there was another snorkeling trip, in the early evening. Beforehand, we could settle into our new, proper room (we weren't charged for our first uncomfortable night) and then drive to Laugarvatn Fontana, a nearby spa and wellness center, for a soak and lunch. To most tourists, the quintessential Icelandic hot tub is the Blue Lagoon, a gigantic, manufactured geothermal pool filled with seawater that looks milky blue because of its high silica content. Just south of the airport, it's packed with travelers on layovers to and from other parts of Europe, drinking smoothies from the swim up bar and smearing their faces with mud. Laugarvatn Fontana is truer to the traditions of the classic Icelandic soak. Comparatively tiny and sparsely visited, it is perched on the edge of a lake called Laugarvatn, which comprises multiple hot springs that have supplied the surrounding village with heat and geothermal energy for generations. The village, of the same name, feels forgotten by time, reminiscent of the early 20th century sanitariums of Switzerland. Bara Kristinsdottir for The New York Times We sampled all three of the spa's outdoor tubs, savoring especially the one sourced directly from the Laugarvatn, which was silky with minerals and smelled faintly of sulfur. We steamed in the sauna, pouring water over scalding rocks, then darted out to dip our toes gingerly into the lake, which felt dangerously hot. Hot enough to bake bread, literally: for the "geothermal bakery experience," we followed a blond woman wearing Wellingtons and wielding a shovel down the muddy shore to a spot where a loaf of rye, sealed in a metal pot, had spent the past 24 hours baking underground. Sliced thick, still steaming and spread with creamy Icelandic butter, it was sweet, nutty and buoyantly dense. Loose and relaxed, we were ready for the Silfra. It was only when we began the arduous process of zipping into goose down onesies and dry suits in a parking lot at Thingvellir National Park that I realized what we'd signed up for: submerging ourselves in glacier melt that hovers between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius, year round. The dry suits would keep out the water, but our faces would be exposed and our hands sheathed in only wet suit gloves. The suits were damp and constricting, secured at the neck with painfully cinched collars, the snorkeling masks suctioned to our faces. We had finally reached the real adventure part of our luxury adventure vacation, and I was slightly terrified. Josh shrugged, and said, "What did you think we were doing?" I took a deep breath and allowed myself to be swept up in the goofy cheer of our guides, a young Icelander and a Brit. "If you get water in your snorkel, you can blow it out, or just drink it!" the Icelander said. "It's the cleanest water in the world" filtered, he explained, through porous underground lava for decades. I braced myself and waddled down a path to a metal stairway descending into the fissure. We plunged and bobbed, then kicked ferociously, swimming single file through a narrow rift. The water was colder and clearer and deeper than any I had ever seen, colored psychedelically in fluorescent greens and blues from algae and other plant life. I experienced a cognitive dissonance so strong that I had to remind myself I wasn't watching an Imax movie. After an infinite seeming 20 minutes, we were spat into a shallow pool, on the edge of which was another staircase leading to dry land. I shed my gear, feeling disoriented but triumphant, my face throbbing from the cold. Back in the parking lot, our guides doled out mugs of hot cocoa. The return drive to the Ion took us through rolling fields of lupines, where wild sheep grazed, and under thick, gloomily beautiful clouds. We pulled over at a horse farm that stretched across a hill, approaching the fence hopefully. The magnificent creatures trotted over and mugged for our cameras, nuzzling each other's noses, resting their heads on each other's necks, their thick, shaggy hair blowing in the wind. At the hotel, we stuffed ourselves with dill cured Arctic char, local lamb and lime vanilla poached cod. In our new room, we found a plate of apology macarons and a bottle of prosecco. We took them to the Northern Lights bar, which was empty but for a lone gentleman reading "Game of Thrones." It was too early in the year for aurora borealis, but the mist over the lava fields made for a fine view. A bartender poured a flight of Icelandic liqueurs, flavored with wild rhubarb and crowberry. Once we'd pulled the blackout curtains across the floor to ceiling windows in our room, and tucked ourselves into fair trade organic duvets, sleep came easily, under the watchful eye of an Icelandic horse, whose photograph covered an entire wall. Had we found luxury at the Ion? By our standards, absolutely. The fiasco of that first night was already a dim memory. We were sated and comfortable, exhausted from our adventures. By the standards of the super premium, maybe not. If a crucial mark of a luxury hotel is seamless orchestration, the Ion had a way to go. But it was certainly on the right track. The next morning, in the hot tub on the deck, an elderly German man an "older relaxer" backstroked past us and offered a one word review. "Gut," he said, laughing contentedly. "Gut." If You Go The majority of Iceland's most luxurious accommodations are in Reykjavik, its capital, where the country's first five star hotel is scheduled to open in 2018 next to Harpa, the glass and steel concert and conference hall towering over Reykjavik's old harbor. A luxury hotel is also planned as part of a renovation of the Blue Lagoon spa. Outside the city, the options for luxury are few. The Ion, with its emphasis on design, stands out. Other higher end properties, like the hotels Budir, Ranga and Glymur, offer Old World charm or slightly tacky rusticism. The Ion Luxury Adventure Hotel (Route 360, Selfoss; 354 482 3415; ioniceland.is). Prices vary: in high season, which at the Ion runs from June 16 to Sept. 15, doubles start at 47,000 Icelandic kronur (about 348, at 135 kronur to the dollar); in low season, at 36,000 kronur. Hotel Budir (Route 574, Snaefellsnes Peninsula; 354 435 6700; hotelbudir.is). In the hotel's high season, doubles from 30,680 kronur; in low season, from 24,960 kronur. Hotel Ranga (Route 1, Hella; 354 487 5700; hotelranga.is). In high season and on holidays, doubles from 344 euros (about 376 at 1.08 to the euro); in low season, from 258 euros. Hotel Glymur (Route 47, Akranes; 354 430 3100; hotelglymur.is). High season rates start at 246 euros for a small villa; in low season, at 239 euros. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. What do you think of it? What else are you interested in? Let us know: thearts nytimes.com. At the end of a good natured interview on "The Late Show" on Tuesday, Stephen Colbert asked James Franco to address the elephant in the room: allegations of sexual improprieties that had surfaced since Sunday. During Mr. Franco's appearance at the Golden Globes, where he won for his lead role in "The Disaster Artist," multiple women suggested on social media that he should not have been wearing a "Time's Up" pin in solidarity with victims of gender inequality. The actress Ally Sheedy tweeted that he was an example of "why I left the film/tv business," though she later removed the message. "First of all, I have no idea what I did to Ally Sheedy," he said. "I directed her in a play Off Broadway, I had nothing but a great time with her, total respect for her. I have no idea why she was upset." He added, "The things that I heard that were on Twitter are not accurate, but I completely support people coming out and being able to have a voice." Neither Mr. Colbert nor Mr. Franco mentioned an episode in 2014 in which text messages posted on Imgur suggested he had attempted to seduce a 17 year old girl. Nor did they mention a tweet from an actress who said she had felt pressured into doing nude film shoots for 100 a day. Mr. Franco instead promised reconciliation. When Mr. Colbert asked him how he planned to achieve it, and whether he would seek clarity from the women off social media, he did not have a direct answer. "If there's restitution to be made, I will make it," Mr. Franco said. "I'm here to listen and learn and change my perspective where it's off." O Say, Can You Sing? Late night hosts watched incredulously as video footage from the N.C.A.A. championship football game appeared to show President Trump mouthing along awkwardly to parts of the national anthem. "Trump sings the national anthem the way the rest of us sing 'Despacito.'" SETH MEYERS "No way he wins lip sync battle with a performance like that. The only part of the song he remembers is 'red glare,' because that's also the shade of fake tanner he uses." JIMMY KIMMEL "U2 frontman Bono said in a new interview that he thinks music has gotten too 'girlie.' Well, you know what they say, opinions are like U2 albums: Even when you don't want 'em, Bono's gonna give 'em to you." SETH MEYERS "I read about a company that's working on technology that would let your pet video chat with you. It's fun to get a video chat from your dog, but depressing to watch your cat decline your call." JIMMY FALLON "I want to say congratulations to Alabama, who overcame a 13 point deficit to win the college football national championship. I'm just happy to say the words 'Alabama' and '13,' and not be talking about Roy Moore." JIMMY FALLON Kobi Libii of "The Opposition" sought out the "insurgent refugee" population that he was sure he'd find in Idaho. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
When to watch SpaceX's next NASA launch of astronauts. Two astronauts who took the first commercial trip to orbit have left the International Space Station. They are scheduled to return home on Sunday. The astronauts, Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, traveled to the space station in May aboard a Crew Dragon capsule built and run by SpaceX, the private rocket company started by Elon Musk. The Crew Dragon undocked from the space station at 7:35 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, with brief thruster firings pushing the spacecraft back. As the capsule backed away from the station, Mr. Hurley thanked the current crew of the space station and the teams on the ground that helped manage their mission. A safe return would open up more trips to and from orbit for future astronaut crews, and possibly space tourists, aboard the spacecraft. Isaias is forecast to sweep up along the Atlantic coast of Florida over the weekend. NASA and SpaceX have seven splashdown sites in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, but the track of the storm ruled out the three in the Atlantic. What will happen after they leave the station? The capsule is now performing a series of burns to move away from the station and then line up with the splashdown site. For much of the trip, Mr. Behnken and Mr. Hurley will be sleeping. Their schedule sets aside a full night of rest. Any return journey that exceeds six hours has to be long enough for the crew to get some sleep between undocking and splashdown, Daniel Huot, a NASA spokesman, said in an email. Otherwise, because of the extended process that leads up to undocking, the crew would end up working more than 20 hours straight, "which is not safe for dynamic operations like water splashdown and recovery," Mr. Huot said. Just before a final burn that will drop the Crew Dragon out of orbit on Sunday afternoon, it will jettison the bottom part of the spacecraft, known as the trunk, which will then burn up in the atmosphere. At re entry, the Crew Dragon will be traveling at about 17,500 miles per hour. Two small parachutes will deploy at an altitude of 18,000 feet when the spacecraft has already been slowed by Earth's atmosphere to about 350 miles per hour. The four main parachutes deploy at an altitude of about 6,000 feet. Once the capsule splashes in the water, it is expected to take 45 to 60 minutes to pluck them out. Why does Isaias affect the departure? The storm complicated where splashdown could take place. At the splashdown site, winds must be less than 10 miles per hour for the capsule to land safely. There are additional constraints on waves, rain and lightning. In addition, helicopters that take part in the recovery of the capsule must be able to fly and land safely. The first landing opportunity will aim for only the primary site, Pensacola. If weather there is inconsistent with the rules, the capsule and the astronauts will remain in orbit for another day or two, and managers will consider the backup site, which is Panama City. When Boeing's Starliner capsule begins carrying crews to the space station, it will return on land, in New Mexico. SpaceX had originally planned for the Crew Dragon to do ground landings, but decided that water landings, employed for the earlier version of Dragon for taking cargo, simplified the development of the capsule. Why is the return trip an important part of the Crew Dragon's first flight? After launch, re entry through Earth's atmosphere is the second most dangerous phase of spaceflight. Friction of air rushing past will heat the bottom of the capsule to about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. A test flight of the Crew Dragon last year successfully splashed down, so engineers know the system works. A successful conclusion to the trip opens the door to more people flying to space. Some companies have already announced plans to use Crew Dragons to lift wealthy tourists to orbit. In the past, NASA astronauts launched on spacecraft like the Saturn 5 moon rocket and the space shuttles that NASA itself operated. After the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011, NASA had to rely on Russia, buying seats on the Soyuz capsules for trips to and from orbit. Under the Obama administration, NASA hired two companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to build spacecraft to take astronauts to the space station. NASA financed much of the work to develop the spacecraft but will now buy rides at fixed prices. For SpaceX, the trip by Mr. Behnken and Mr. Hurley the first launch of astronauts from American soil since the last space shuttle flight was the last major demonstration needed before NASA officially certifies that the Crew Dragon is ready to begin regular flights. Who are the astronauts? The astronauts are Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, who have been friends and colleagues since both were selected by NASA to be astronauts in 2000. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
In 1965, at the height of James Bond mania, Sean Connery told Playboy magazine that he had no problem with another actor assuming his signature role. "Actually, I'd find it interesting to see what someone else does with it," he said. "Lots of people could play him." Strictly speaking, he was right. But by public reckoning, he couldn't have been more wrong. In the popular imagination, the Scottish born Thomas Sean Connery, who died Saturday at 90, will always be both the first and the best "Bond ... James Bond." It's hard to believe that before Eon Productions perfected its Bond formula, the secret agent's creator, Ian Fleming, gushed about perhaps casting Richard Burton or David Niven as 007. The former would have brought the necessary guts, the latter the requisite charm. But for an enduring, vodka martini soaked franchise built on one man's tightly wound toughness, womanizing charisma, tongue in cheek one liners and exquisite tastes, Connery was the Fleming word made cinematic flesh. Critics and superfans endlessly argue the merits of the various Bonds. Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig and even the one time George Lazenby all have their respective strengths. Inevitably, they bow to the archetypal Connery. His appeal, wrote John Cork and Bruce Scivally in "James Bond: The Legacy," "comes not just from good looks, it comes from a particular confidence, a certainty within himself." They added that he had "a natural, authoritative grace, which was at once seductive and intimidating." Connery was not originally made of such stuff. He had done solid work in "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" (1959) and, briefly, "The Longest Day" (1962), playing a British Tommy. However, when it came to personifying the ultrasophisticated lodestar of Her Majesty's Secret Service, he was still "a pretty rough diamond," as the production designer Ken Adam put it. Born in the Edinburgh slums, Connery was full of raw material. The producer Albert Broccoli called him "ballsy"; his partner, Harry Saltzman, said that the man moved "like a big jungle cat." Bond buffs credit the director of his early films, the Cambridge educated Terence Young, for rounding Connery into shape. Though neither muscleman nor indiscriminate lover, Young (a.k.a. the "Bond Vivant") had a taste for high living, big spending, bonhomie and forthrightness. "He was completely ruthless in a gentlemanly sort of way," said the stuntman George Leech. Connery's start as Bond was a tad tentative. In the initial 007 outing, "Dr. No" (1962), his boss, M. (Bernard Lee), asks, "Does 'toppling' mean anything to you?" Connery answers diffidently: "A little. It's throwing the gyroscopic controls of a guided missile off balance with a ... a radio beam or something, isn't it?" He even screws up his eyes briefly, trying to recall what the term means. When he dallies with M.'s secretary, Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), his flirting is a bit too studied. Connery improves in "From Russia With Love" (1963). Outwitted by the covert SPECTRE operative Red Grant (Robert Shaw), he sheepishly admits missing a vital clue to his enemy's identity. "Red wine with fish," Connery says with a sigh. "Well, that should have told me something." But within minutes he stabs and garrotes Grant in what Bond fans have called one of cinema's most brutal family friendly fights ever. A sweating Connery then adjusts his tie and retrieves a few trinkets, including stolen money from the corpse. The punchline: "You won't be needing this ... old man." By "Goldfinger" (1964), Connery and the Bond persona have melded seamlessly in the outsize blueprint for all future classic Bond productions. In the short teaser, our hero blows up a heroin plant with plastic explosives, shucks his scuba suit to reveal a white dinner jacket (with red boutonniere), seduces a traitorous tarantella dancer in her bathtub and, after savage fisticuffs, electrocutes a would be assassin by knocking him and a space heater into said tub. Connery utters fewer than 75 words in about four and a half minutes. But the last three ("Shocking ... positively shocking," said with soft reprobation as the assassin slowly simmers), combined with Connery's self assured sexuality and knockabout confidence, release a loud laugh from moviegoers and get them hooked. So second nature is the persona that when the heroin plant explodes, the man who invariably saves the world reacts merely with an expression of bored, silent amusement and removes his just lit cigarette from his mouth. Hence Tom Jones, as Bondish a title singer as you can get, could warble in the 1965 outing, "He always runs while others walk / He acts while other men just talk / He looks at this world and wants it all / So he strikes like Thunderball!" Connery didn't want to continue to strike like thunder or, for that matter, lightning. Also, he wasn't crazy about swimming with live sharks. The Bond films, he said, "don't tax one as an actor. All one really needs is the constitution of a rugby player to get through 18 weeks of swimming, slugging and necking." After the release of "Thunderball" he griped, "What is needed now is a change of course, more attention to character and better dialogue." The dialogue in what he thought was his last Bond film, "You Only Live Twice" (1967), was just fine. "I like sake ... especially when it's served at the correct temperature, 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit, like this is." But character got short shrift. Stuffed with sumo wrestling; trap doors; an autogiro equipped with flamethrowers and missiles; a piranha pool; and, of course, a rocket base hidden inside a volcano, "You Only Live Twice" wasn't exactly an actor's breakthrough. By this time, Connery's boredom and even annoyance were obvious. And so he famously quit the series. Except for "The Molly Maguires" (1970), his next few films were unremarkable. Things weren't going exactly as the freed agent had expected. So for 1.25 million, 10 percent of the gross, and financing for two films of Connery's choice, Eon lured him back for "Diamonds Are Forever." Grayer, wiser and somewhat heavier, Connery nonetheless seems to enjoy himself in this bit of 1971 nonsense, reconciled to his increasingly cartoonish legacy. Stuffing a deadly cassette tape into a startled Jill St. John's bikini bottom, he quips, "Your problems are all behind you now." One of the screenwriters, Tom Mankiewicz, said, "There was an old pro's grace about him." A dozen years later he returned yet again, to the non Eon production "Never Say Never Again." It was a pallid remake of "Thunderball." But, Steven Jay Rubin wrote in "The James Bond Movie Encyclopedia," "When he's onscreen, the movie works. Fortunately, he's onscreen a lot." Connery once described the part that has now made him immortal as "a cross, a privilege, a joke, a challenge. And as bloody intrusive as a nightmare." But for those who cannot get enough beluga caviar or Walther PPKs, it remains a dream. Sean Connery as James Bond is forever. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In April, as the pandemic brought the concert industry to a halt, Taylor Swift canceled all her tour dates for the year. "I'm so sad I won't be able to see you guys in concert this year, but I know this is the right decision," she wrote on Twitter, giving her fans no indication they would see her again, in any form, until 2021. Three months later, she emerged from quarantine with "Folklore," a classic surprise release that has dominated the Billboard album chart this summer. Now it is in its sixth week at No. 1, the longest streak at the top of the chart for any album since Drake's "Views" four years ago. In its sixth week out, "Folklore" had the equivalent of 90,000 album sales in the United States, including streams as well as copies sold as a complete package. After selling 17 physical versions of the album through her website for the first two weeks, Swift has lately been surprising fans by sending autographed copies of the CD to indie record stores. In the United States, "Folklore" has sold 860,000 copies of its complete album version counting downloads as well as its various physical versions and nearly 700 million streams. Around the world, the album is "nearing" two billion streams, according to Swift's label, Republic, a division of the giant Universal Music Group. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
WASHINGTON President Obama's nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Robert M. Califf, coasted through a confirmation hearing on Tuesday, with most members of a Senate committee including some who have been skeptical about his ties to the pharmaceutical industry seeming set to support his candidacy. Dr. Califf, 64, is a cardiologist and clinical trial expert from Duke University who has been a consultant to drug companies and ran a research institute that received a majority of its funding from the industry. Such ties have raised concerns among some public health groups and some Democrats that he is too close to the industry he is being called on to regulate. Many medical experts dispute that, saying that industry is a principal funder of research in the United States and that working with companies does not present an inherent conflict. Dr. Califf said as much during his two hour hearing. The session, before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, was largely friendly, but was punctuated with skeptical questions from Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. "It's no secret that during your time at Duke, you received significant compensation" from the drug industry, Ms. Warren said. "It naturally raises questions about your relationships with the drug industry." Dr. Califf responded that the central repository of data for any given trial "is the really critical factor here. All of our contracts require that we have access to the database. Seventy percent of the studies we wanted to do we couldn't because companies were unwilling to grant that right. We had to walk away." He said that Duke had "graciously agreed" to make public the contracts it had concluded with drug companies. "We publish the papers with input from the companies, but they have absolutely no right to change what we say," he said, and added that he had donated his own consulting fees to nonprofits. Mr. Sanders reiterated that he would vote against Dr. Califf. Even so, Dr. Califf's candidacy appeared to have broad support, and most observers expect him to be confirmed. A date for the confirmation vote has not been set. Dr. Califf has served as deputy commissioner of the F.D.A. since February. The previous head, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, stepped down in March. If confirmed, he will be steering a vast and powerful federal agency that regulates about a quarter of every dollar spent in the United States. It is at the center of some of the most difficult health policy questions facing the country. A crucial decision on how to regulate electronic cigarettes is expected this fall, and Congress is halfway through a substantial overhaul of the way the agency approves drugs and medical devices. For years, Dr. Califf ran the Duke Clinical Research Institute, a 200 million center that manages clinical trials in more than 65 countries involving more than 1.2 million patients. The budget is 37 percent government grants and 63 percent from the private sector. Dr. Califf's supporters say his experience in clinical science could be a major asset in his new post. His nomination is supported by medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. Another prominent issue at the hearing was drug prices. "We can bring in fish products and vegetables from all over the world, but we can't bring from across the Canadian border brand name drugs?" Mr. Sanders said. "It is beyond my comprehension." Drug prices tend to be lower in Canada. Dr. Califf responded that "we have the capacity," but that it would add cost. "I'm very impressed with what you do," said Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who told Dr. Califf he was concerned that drug companies were not getting enough time with exclusive rights to the drugs they develop. "You'd add a great deal to the F.D.A." Thomas Marciniak, a former cardiovascular drug reviewer for the F.D.A., said he believed drug companies had too much discretion over what data they submit, a power that gives them what he said was inappropriate sway over the drug approval process. "The clinical trial system run by drug companies in this world is really broken," said Mr. Marciniak, who left the agency last year. "I think Rob Califf is one of the architects of that. I think he should be held accountable, not appointed to run the F.D.A." Dr. Robert Harrington, chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University, who used to work with Dr. Califf at Duke, had a different view. "He has been a leading voice in academic circles for strict contractual relationships that guarantee independent access to research data and the full, unfettered right to publish regardless of findings," Dr. Harrington said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Monday night's episode of "The Bachelor" seemed to be going well, drama and head injuries aside. The contestants dating this season's eligible man, Peter Weber, spent a group date modeling for a Cosmopolitan magazine photo shoot in the Costa Rican jungle. They picked out swimsuits, posed alongside a scenic backdrop of trees and waterfalls and one woman, Victoria Fuller, was chosen to adorn the magazine's March cover. And then, trouble in paradise. The magazine in a letter from the editor, Jessica Pels, posted minutes after scenes from the date aired said it would not publish the cover with Ms. Fuller, citing an ad campaign in which she modeled "White Lives Matter attire." "Unequivocally, the White Lives Matter movement does not reflect the values of the Cosmo brand," Ms. Pels wrote. "We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and any cause that fights to end injustices for people of color." When "The Bachelor" premiered in January, photos circulated on Twitter showing Ms. Fuller, 26, a medical sales representative from Virginia Beach, Va., posing in a blue "WLM" hat. Other apparel from the same, now defunct Instagram account featured an altered version of a Confederate flag which, in place of stars, featured tiny fish the words "White Lives Matter" and a web address: "MarlinLivesMatter.com." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A few years after Jill Testa married, she and her husband bought a townhouse in Westchester County. It was the first new construction real estate Ms. Testa had owned, and there would be no going back. "I really liked that everything was clean and shiny and that nobody had lived there before me," said Ms. Testa, the owner of an e commerce business. The follow up to that happy experience was building a house. "I loved the newness of everything," she said. When her marriage broke up and she moved to Manhattan, Ms. Testa saw no reason to change her ways. She rented in a new development; subsequently bought a condo in a building that had just undergone a gut renovation; then, two years ago, sold that property and moved into a two bedroom apartment in a brand new building on Riverside Boulevard, a purchase based on a floor plan. But for Ms. Testa and others, new is the only option. Brand new. Paint barely dry new. She was thrilled with the white lacquer cabinetry and the stainless steel tile backsplash in the kitchen and the black marble floor in the master bath. "It all made me happy," she said. "And I have really good light." There are lots of people who gravitate to prewar buildings, attracted to the large rooms, the high ceilings and the ineffable sense of gracious living. Maybe these addresses don't have the finishes or amenities of their successors, but what are such things compared to Old World charm? Ms. Testa's response: "So maybe you give up on charm but that was O.K. with me. I can make my new apartment charming enough." It's all a matter of priorities. "Certain people want something that no one else has lived in," said Frances Katzen, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman. "They want cutting edge." And they are willing to pay a premium for it. According to Jonathan Miller, president of the real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel, the median sale price of a Manhattan prewar apartment was 3.1 million in the second quarter of the year, while a new construction condo of similar size went for 3.3 million. But more than getting, say, wide plank, oak floors that no one else has trodden and a stainless steel cooktop that no one else has boiled water on, residents of new buildings may be gazing on sights that no one else has seen. "Developers are getting air rights and bundling them more strategically," Ms. Katzen said, "so a lot of projects that are going up now have extraordinary views." Josh Rubin, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman, said people who seek out new buildings may do so because of the architects involved or because of the appreciation potential. "They think the quality makes it a better investment," he said. But sometimes it's hard to tease out whether a preference for new construction is rooted in aesthetics or in economics. Renters may be motivated in part by concessions offered by developers, like a month (or two) of free rent. And buyers, who might otherwise consider a prewar, often rethink the matter after factoring in the time and money required for renovations "that will bring the apartment up to the standard of new," said Stuart Moss, an associate broker at the Corcoran Group. "So that makes the turnkey quality of new construction highly desirable." New construction appealed to Brian M. Pasalich, who owns a century old house in Seattle that he calls inviting but dusty "no matter how much you clean it." He moved to New York seven years ago and has rented in a succession of new buildings, including one near the Pepsi Cola sign in Long Island City. "There's just something about being the first person in a residence. It's pristine," said Mr. Pasalich, 43, who works in financial services. "Over the past few years," he continued, "new construction has gone from basic and boring to having a nice flow and to being a place where everything you want is within the facility." This is as much as anything about supply and demand. "New construction rental has become a crowded field," said Mr. Miller, of Miller Samuel. "So there's this emergence of rental design being more condo like in terms of layout, finishes and variety of amenities." One QPS Tower, a high rise rental in Long Island City, opened in February. Mr. Pasalich and his fiance, Dustin Latham, 30, who works in human resources at Columbia University, were in residence the next month. Their one bedroom apartment has floor to ceiling windows, granite countertops and central air conditioning. A gym, a rock climbing wall, a rooftop pool and a library are all part of the package. "Some people make the choice of a new building because it's about germs," Mr. Pasalich said. "But," he added, "that's not the case for me. It's a childlike feeling of being somewhere where no one has been before." Of course, "new" cuts two ways. Yes, you're getting a space that's never been occupied. But, oh yes, you're getting a space that's never been occupied. "Many buildings have growing pains," said Mr. Rubin, of Douglas Elliman. "For example, "there could be waterproofing issues that people wouldn't know about until buildings have been around for a year or two." And, as Mr. Pasalich observed, new construction often comes with a new management team: "And they have to get used to the building, too." For their part, Mr. Pasalich and Mr. Latham plan to stay at 1 QPS Tower for two years. Still, they are taking due note of the buildings going up around them and contemplating their next move because, after all, how long can a new building be considered new? "Generally a building is new for five years," Mr. Moss said. "It used to be a 7 to 10 year window, but with the rapid pace of condo development the time frame has gotten shorter. "Buildings have a life cycle," he continued. "They go from being brand spanking new to reasonably new to dated. And then maybe the lobby gets redone and amenities are added. And suddenly, they're reborn." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
It's a clever story turn that strips a large chunk of the movie down to Moretz's charismatic face and the voices of the other actors, who hammily play up their lewd banter over the intercom. Then the C.G.I. gremlin shows up, forcing Maude (and Liang) to maneuver impressively within the cramped space. The twists come rapidly in the movie's first half; in the second, the narrative dissolves into a zigzag of flying bodies and explosions that bend the laws of space time. But the implausibility of it all is a perk: There's never a moment in this rollicking film when you can tell what's coming next. Shadow in the Cloud Rated R for scary monsters, foulmouthed men and gory sights. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
For Linda Dearman, the House vote last week to repeal the Affordable Care Act was a welcome relief. Ms. Dearman, of Bartlett, Ill., voted for President Trump largely because of his contempt for the federal health law. She and her husband, a partner in an engineering firm, buy their own insurance, but late last year they dropped their 1,100 a month policy and switched to a bare bones plan that does not meet the law's requirements. They are counting that the law will be repealed before they owe a penalty. "Now it looks like it will be, and we're thrilled about that," Ms. Dearman, 54, said. "We are so glad to feel represented for a change." The voices of people like the Dearmans helped spawn a political movement after the passage of the health law seven years ago. But unlike the pro Obamacare forces that have flooded congressional phone lines and town hall meetings, opponents of the health care law have been quieter as Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress have worked to fulfill their promise to get rid of the law. Yet even if the law no longer faces the kind of strident grass roots opposition that helped hand the Republicans the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, many who perceive themselves as losers under its policies are still anxiously awaiting its demise. The challenge for Republicans is to reclaim the narrative, countering the intense resistance to repeal with personal stories of people struggling with high insurance costs, tax penalties and government rules. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, invoked those struggles when he sent a Twitter message on Monday: "To those who've suffered from the failures of Obamacare: We hear you. Congress is acting." The American Action Network, a conservative group, is spending nearly 3 million on new television and digital ads praising the House bill and those who voted for it. The television ads are running on national cable and in 21 congressional districts. Future ads will include testimonials from people "about how devastating the A.C.A. was for them," said Corry Bliss, the group's executive director. They are competing with viral video moments like the emotional appeal to Congress by the comedian Jimmy Kimmel to ensure that seriously ill people like his infant son can get treatment, and the furious response from a town hall audience to the assertion by Representative Raul R. Labrador, Republican of Idaho, that "nobody dies because they don't have access to health care." In some cases, though, their zest for repeal has been tempered by concern or confusion about some specifics of the Republican bill, especially the relaxing of protections for people with pre existing conditions. In interviews over the last few days, people who support repealing the Affordable Care Act pointed to their long simmering resentment of its mandate that most Americans have health insurance or pay a tax penalty. Many also said that they could no longer afford the comprehensive coverage available on the individual market, and that they were eager to once again be allowed to choose skinnier policies without a penalty. "Now I will no longer be expected to pay twice what I should for a product I don't need and be treated like a criminal with a fine if I refuse," said Edward Belanger, 55, a self employed business appraiser in Dallas. He is an independent who usually votes Republican but last year chose Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, over Mr. Trump. Like the Dearmans, Mr. Belanger canceled a plan that complies with the Affordable Care Act and bought a short term policy that does not meet the law's standards, paying 580 a month for his family of four compared with the nearly 1,200 a month he paid last year. Policies like theirs usually have high deductibles and primarily offer catastrophic coverage for major injuries. Once the policies expire, policyholders must reapply and may be rejected if they are sick. Last year, the Dearmans paid 1,100 a month for themselves and a college age son, with a 2,000 per person deductible. Both they and the Belangers earn too much to receive subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, which limits them to people with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty level, or 97,200 for a family of four. Middle class Americans who feel squeezed by the full cost of insurance under the law are among its fiercest critics, and could in many cases be winners of a sort under the House bill, which would provide subsidies to families that earn far more than the Affordable Care Act's income limit. They would range from 2,000 a year for people in their 20s to 4,000 for those in their 60s, with a limit of 14,000 per family, gradually phasing down for couples earning more than 150,000. There is no guarantee, however, that deductibles would be smaller under the Republican plan. Ms. Dearman said she was hesitant to embrace the House plan fully. Since last Thursday's vote, she had seen anguished posts about it in her Facebook feeds and heard news snippets about how it could hurt older people and those with pre existing conditions. "I've been listening to some TV here and there and thinking, 'What am I missing?'" she said. "They were showing protests outside somewhere in Chicago. That's when I thought, 'All right, I need to read a little bit more.'" Others feel the plan does not go far enough. Austin Craig, a commercial video producer in Provo, Utah, said he was frustrated that it would provide premium subsidies to many Americans though based on age instead of income and retain many of the insurance regulations in the Affordable Care Act. "This is not principled reform," said Mr. Craig, 33, who likened his political philosophies to those of Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who has called the House bill "Obamacare lite." "It's just rearranging the government involvement instead of pulling it out." Thomas Johnston, a retired factory manager in Marco Island, Fla., said he supported repealing the health care law only out of hope that he could afford health insurance again. Mr. Johnston, 61, bought coverage through the law's online marketplaces for several years but did not renew his plan for this year after learning his 640 monthly premium would be rising again. He said he qualified for a subsidy last year under the Affordable Care Act, but owed back all 2,000 of it at tax time. His income ended up being over the 64,000 limit for a household of two once his wife, who is on Medicare, started receiving her pension and he took a part time job at a miniature golf course. "It has to be better than what we've got now," Mr. Johnston said of the Republican plan to replace the law. "I have literally no health insurance because I can't afford it." He has not followed the details of the Republican plan, he said; he was not aware, for example, that as someone in his 60s, he would receive a 4,000 annual subsidy under it. "To be real honest, I wish I understood it a little more," he said of the bill. Mr. Belanger said that while the Republican bill would most likely help "people in my situation, who are in the individual marketplace and generally healthy," it would not address the problems of people with expensive diseases. "In the end, it's going to be some sort of government program that takes care of those people," he said. "If it were up to me, I'd allow people to buy their way into Medicaid. I'd rather be taking care of them through my tax dollars, with all the other taxpayers in the country, than pay twice as much as I should for insurance." Katrice MacKay, a homemaker in Provo, expressed revulsion toward the Affordable Care Act, yet said she wanted people with pre existing conditions to be protected moving forward. She said her family of four was paying 1,000 a month for a high deductible plan with no subsidy, up from 500 a month before the law took effect. "The amount we are getting hit, compared to other people who are paying nothing and getting everything covered, doesn't add up to me," she said. "I think the divide is too wide." Still, Ms. MacKay, who voted for Mr. Trump, added that people with pre existing conditions deserved to be protected. "I did have siblings who couldn't get insurance in the past and that's just wrong," she said. "They shouldn't be dinged more than anyone else." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The players and coaches of Saarbrucken aren't making the typical hopeful pregame predictions one might expect from heavy underdogs as they prepare to play Bayer Leverkusen in the German Cup on Tuesday. "If you are honest, we have no chance," midfielder Tobias Janicke told the German news media. "We lose 99 out of 100 games against Leverkusen," Coach Lukas Kwasniok said. Winning, he said, would be like the "rebirth of Jesus Christ." Saarbrucken plays in the fourth tier of German soccer, the Regionalliga Sudwest, a circuit whose very name hints at its marginalization. Yet somehow it slowly and steadily and altogether surprisingly advanced to the Cup semifinals, something no team at its level had ever done. Its opponent on Tuesday is Leverkusen, a club that sits in fifth place in the Bundesliga, one Europe's biggest leagues. In addition to better players and better coaches and better facilities, Leverkusen has also arrived in the semifinals with an advantage that Saarbrucken cannot overcome: With the recent restart of the Bundesliga, Leverkusen has had five games to get back in form. Saarbrucken's players haven't had a game in three months. (The German fourth tier simply decided to end its season when the coronavirus outbreak hit.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Yann Moix's novel "Orleans" was praised by critics but did not appear on this year's shortlist for the Goncourt Prize. PARIS It is one of the most widely discussed books in France these past weeks: a vivid autobiographical account of childhood mistreatment and literary salvation by Yann Moix, an author who until recently was also known as a resident provocateur on one of the country's most popular late night talk shows. Mr. Moix's book, called "Orleans" the town where he grew up and where, in his telling, he was physically and psychologically abused by his parents was praised by critics when it was published in August. Some saw it as worthy of the shortlist for the Goncourt Prize, France's top literary award. Relatives of Mr. Moix accused him of fabricating or exaggerating details of the abuse, but that only gave "Orleans" the scandalous whiff of dirty laundry being aired in public. Critics debated whether the factual accuracy of the book had any bearing on its literary qualities, but many agreed that the writing was some of Mr. Moix's best in years. Then things took a much uglier turn. Last week, the French news media uncovered vicious anti Semitic drawings and texts that Mr. Moix had made in his youth. He denied having done them, then admitted responsibility, leading to a firestorm of criticism that forced him to apologize and stop promoting his book. On Tuesday, the Goncourt jury revealed the 15 authors shortlisted for the prize, which will be awarded in November after several rounds of voting. Mr. Moix was not selected. 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. Bernard Pivot, the head of the jury, said this week that some of his peers found that the second half of the book was not as strong as the first, and added, referring to the accusations by Mr. Moix's relatives, that the Goncourt jury did not like the incursion of family drama into literature. "The third reason that was mentioned by one of us is that if we put him on the Goncourt list, inevitably all the social networks are going to accuse us of promoting anti Semitism," Mr. Pivot told RTL radio. "I think that Yann Moix has a lot of talent, he has immense erudition, but unfortunately he has an unrestrained taste for contestation, for provocation." The drawings and texts at the center of the controversy, which include crude caricatures and denials of the Holocaust, were made by Mr. Moix for an obscure student publication when he was in his 20s, and were first uncovered last week by the newsmagazine L'Express. Mr. Moix initially admitted responsibility for the drawings but not the texts, but later told the newspaper Liberation, "I take responsibility for and shoulder everything." "These texts and drawings are anti Semitic, but I am not an anti Semite," he said, calling them a youthful mistake that he was now ashamed of, and saying that his "whole journey as a man" since then had been an effort to "pull" himself "out of this trap." Mr. Moix is no stranger to controversies. From 2015 to 2018, he was a biting pundit on a popular late night talk show. And early this year he came under fire for telling a women's lifestyle magazine that he was "incapable" of loving women over 50 because they were "too old." (Mr. Moix is 51.) "Orleans" quickly attracted controversy of its own. Days before publication, Jose Moix, Mr. Moix's father, told a local newspaper that the novel was "pure fantasy" and that, while he had been a strict father who occasionally disciplined his children, he had never physically abused Mr. Moix. In the book, the author describes being whipped with electrical cords, abandoned in a forest in the middle of the night, and smeared with his own feces. Days after the publication, Alexandre Moix, Mr. Moix's brother, wrote in an open letter for the newspaper Le Parisien that it was actually Mr. Moix who had been abusive, and that the future writer had, for instance, tried to throw his brother out of a window and drown him in a toilet bowl. Mr. Moix, his brother wrote, was a cruel and violent narcissist. "In his life, my brother has only two obsessions: winning the Goncourt Prize and annihilating me," Mr. Moix's brother wrote, adding that Mr. Moix was "sacrificing reality on the altar of his literary ambitions." (In a television appearance, Mr. Moix said that "Orleans" was a "novel, not an account.") In 1996, Mr. Moix won the Goncourt prize for a first novel, which is separate from the Goncourt itself, and in 2013 he won the Renaudot, another French literary prize, for his novel "Naissance," which also explored childhood trauma. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In the 1970s and 1980s frogs and other amphibians seemed to be disappearing overnight. By 1999, researchers had determined the culprit was a deadly disease caused by chytrid fungus which infected the animals with tiny, swimming spores. Today this disease, called Chytridiomycosis, is thought to be one of the deadliest pathogens on the planet. It infects hundreds of species of amphibians and is thought to have wiped out a third of all frog species. These animals are important contributors to biodiversity, insect and disease control and may even be sources of new types of medicine. For decades, scientists hoping to save these semiaquatic animals from extinction have been trying and failing to pin down the origins of this mysterious killer. They knew it developed from a common ancestor, but couldn't agree on where or when. Now, an international group of scientists has compared the genomes of 177 samples of the deadly fungus from six continents. They determined that the pathogen most likely arose on the Korean Peninsula 50 to 100 years ago and spread through global trade. Their research, published Thursday in the journal Science, reiterates that the pathogen comes in many different strains, some more virulent than others. It suggests that new variations of the fungus can still develop and spread disease without proper protections. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
They forged an improbable, temporarily effective alliance with industrial workers, a convergence that many thought heralded a new revolutionary coalition. But Mr. Salles, with the benefit of hindsight and an astute ability to analyze the documentary record, throws cold water on this romantic notion. The witty slogans "Be realistic, demand the impossible"; "The walls have the floor"; "Underneath the paving stones, the beach!" had the punch of advertising copy. The street demonstrations galvanized the news media and the intelligentsia, but the public craving for order and normalcy was deeper than they or the students realized. And while the students claimed to desire liberation from consumer society, many of the workers wanted better access to it. The Prague Spring was an unsuccessful revolution of a different kind, ended by the military intervention of the Soviet Union in August. In China, by contrast, the revolution appeared to be successful, but the full dimensions of its cruelty were not yet visible to the few visitors, like Mr. Salles's mother, who were allowed into the country. Mr. Salles, who seems broadly sympathetic to the traditions of the international left (his brother is Walter Salles, director of "The Motorcycle Diaries"), nonetheless disdains the easy sentimentality of lost causes. He elucidates, above all, the ironic dimension of his film's title, imposing an elegiac, gently pessimistic tone on the energy and immediacy of what he sees and shows. What he reveals, perhaps against his own intentions, is the inevitable aestheticization of the past. The anonymous demonstrators in Paris and Prague, and the people holding the cameras, were caught up in the drama of the present, rushing furiously toward a future they could not comprehend. Those of us living in that future notice their clothes and cigarettes, the beauty of the 8 and 16 millimeter cinematography, the look of cities before Starbucks and McDonald's. For a few hours, we are caught up in the intensity of then. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
An alarming news item began to make the rounds in November, just in time to ruin the holidays: Glitter is not good for the environment, and some people are trying to ban it. It's partly true. Some scientists are talking more about the dangers posed by the sparkles used in children's crafts and some cosmetics. Most glitter is made with plastic, and when it drifts into a landfill or down a drain, it can become a microplastic pollutant. Those small pieces of plastic are not always caught by water filters, so they seep into oceans, lakes and rivers. But if you want to make a shimmering snowflake for the holidays this year, don't worry. You won't be on the wrong side of the law. The latest "glitter ban" hubbub appears to have been prompted by Tops Day Nurseries, a British child care provider. In a Nov. 16 blog post, the nursery chain said that the more than 2,000 children under its care would no longer be using plastic craft glitter. "Glitter enters the environment by landfill, through the air being blown around," it said. "It sticks to people's hands and goes down the sink into the water system, it sticks to people's clothes or mops, which go through the washing machine, and out into the water system." Sue Kinsey, the senior pollution policy officer for the Marine Conservation Society, a charity based in the United Kingdom, said she was happy to see citizens taking steps to protect the environment, but she would not encourage legislators to ban craft glitter in the United Kingdom. "That would possibly be a little bit draconian," she said. British lawmakers are, however, working now to phase out something similar to glitter: microbeads, those little plastic particles that are used as exfoliants in cleansing products. And in 2015, the United States also passed a law to phase out microbeads. But has the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which helped lawmakers shape that legislation, ever paid special attention to glitter alone? "Not specifically," said Amy V. Uhrin, the chief scientist of NOAA's Marine Debris Division, adding that news reports in recent weeks had brought the issue to her attention. "Because it is a microplastic, we would have the same concerns as we would with any other microplastic that ends up in the environment." Joel Baker, a marine pollution expert at the University of Washington at Tacoma, said glitter was just one of the many, many types of plastics that pollute waterways. But one thing sets it apart from other pollutants: It sticks around, conspicuously, in the most unwanted places. "A little bit of glitter goes a long way. Weeks after a kid's birthday party, there's still glitter all over your car," he said. So maybe that's a reason to ban the sparkly stuff. "Could we have had a happy childhood without glitter? Yes," said Sherri A. Mason, the geology and environmental sciences department chairwoman at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who has done extensive research on plastic pollution in freshwater. She said that glitter, like any other plastic particles, can carry chemicals that are ingested by small creatures and then make their way up the food chain. But consumers who want to cut down on microplastic waste don't have to lead a dull existence, because all that glitters is not plastic. You can make sparkly stuff out of degradable materials, and some companies have started to do just that. Dr. Mason said that while plastic glitter is popular around the holidays, it's not necessary. "Yes, there are going to be pains associated with reducing our use of plastic, but we have to think beyond ourselves," she added. "This isn't about your New Year's celebration. It's about humanity, and our ability to survive as a species." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
MAMARONECK, N.Y. The most repeated, and accepted, prediction before the 2020 United States Open at Winged Foot Golf Club was that the golf course would overwhelm the field with its time honored combination of elusive fairways and punishing rough. That forecast was not wrong. Every golfer but one failed to shoot under par in the championship this year. But the most prescient prophecy came from the lone player with an under par score in the event, Bryson DeChambeau, 27, the beefy college physics major who theorized that he would overpower Winged Foot by bombing tee shots so far that it would be irrelevant whether his ball landed in the fairway or not. Almighty distance would eclipse precision. Not only was DeChambeau right, in the wake of his runaway six stroke victory on Sunday at the 120th U.S. Open, but golf itself may be on the cusp of acceding to the new methodologies he espouses. The counterintuitive philosophies DeChambeau has preached and his unconventional tactics, including his belief that an intense strength training regimen can significantly augment what has been largely considered a finesse sport, now have the validation of a major championship title. Most of the 20 something pro golfers, like the 21 year old Wolff, already swing harder and do more weight training than their predecessors. But DeChambeau has gone further than anyone else, and not just symbolically. His average drive off the tee traveled 325 yards, the longest for any U.S. Open champion. He also shot 67 on Sunday, the only under par round of the day. "I think I'm definitely changing the way people think of the game," DeChambeau, whose four day score was 274, or six under par. He added: "The next generation that's coming up into golf hopefully will see this and go, 'Hey, I can do that, too.' I've just wanted to just keep pressing the status quo." He has done that and more. Next, DeChambeau will turn his iconoclastic deliberations toward conquering the Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters Tournament in two months. Its golf course, which is almost devoid of rough, is susceptible to a power game, especially now that DeChambeau has proved he can win at Winged Foot, where the victor's score was five over par the last time the club hosted the U.S. Open, in 2006. DeChambeau is 6 foot 1 and 235 pounds he gained 40 pounds this winter in an attempt to swing more forcefully but on Sunday evening he was asked if he wanted to become bigger before the Masters. "Yeah, I think I can get to 245; it's going to be a lot of working out," he answered. The extraordinary ball speeds he routinely generates in excess of 200 miles an hour have attracted most of the attention this season, but DeChambeau is far from a one trick pony. Long before he bulked up, he was a N.C.A.A. and United States Amateur champion and exhibited the deft skills near the green necessary to be a good short game player. He is a six time winner on the PGA Tour and last month finished tied for fourth at the P.G.A. Championship, the first golf major of the season. On Sunday, DeChambeau relied on all of his faculties to turn the mammoth drives off the tee into three birdies, 14 pars and only one bogey. On the first hole, Wolff, who began the round with a two stroke lead, outdrove DeChambeau, his playing partner. DeChambeau nonetheless hit his approach shot more than seven feet closer to the hole than Wolff did. With steadier putting, DeChambeau erased Wolff's lead by the fourth hole and took the lead on the next hole, when he sank a seven foot par putt and Wolff missed his par attempt from 10 feet. DeChambeau gained two more strokes on Wolff at the 10th and 11th holes, but he exhibited the somewhat underappreciated depth of his talent for golf at the 14th hole, which was also a turning point. DeChambeau hit only six of 14 fairways on Sunday, and his drive from the 14th tee was one of his worst pulled left and into the deepest grass on the hole. He had 135 yards to a sloped green that might reject a shot from rough that typically would lack spin, or one that landed too close to the hole. "I've got a lot of creativity," DeChambeau said, explaining what transpired next. He had an uphill lie and decided that would make it easier to hit his golf ball near the top of the face of an iron. It would reduce the impact of his swing and, in DeChambeau's mind, let the ball land short of the green but still have some roll. When DeChambeau made contact it sounded like a flubbed shot as if too much grass had lodged between the club and the ball. But that was the plan. "The ball came out dead because of the lie, and it rolled down there to 10 feet from the hole," DeChambeau said. He made his par putt, and Wolff missed his. The rout was on. "That was huge," DeChambeau said. "If I don't make that and he makes his, you know, we've got a fight." There were no other serious contenders DeChambeau had to worry about. Louis Oosthuizen, who shot 73 on Sunday, was in third place, eight strokes back. After hoisting the trophy, a smiling DeChambeau was already plotting the other breakthroughs he has for golf. They include a longer, 48 inch driver the kind more commonly used in long driving competitions, where accuracy is not paramount. He will test some new driver heads, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
During a May 8 conference call with numerous N.B.A. players, Adam Silver dismissed the praise he had received in some corners for suspending the 2019 20 season before other major North American sports leagues and downplayed the notion that it was a bold mandate from the commissioner's office. "I'm not proud of shutting down," Silver told the players. "I would be proud of finding a path that was safe and as risk free as possible for us to play. I think that would be much more of an accomplishment than shutting down the league." Nearly a month later, Silver and the N.B.A. have committed to a path to putting the game back on hardwood amid evolving attitudes about the risk of the virus nationwide. It materialized in large part through Silver's strong relationship with the Oklahoma City Thunder guard Chris Paul, the president of the players' union, and their shared close ties to Robert A. Iger, the executive chairman of Disney, which Silver described on that same conference call as the N.B.A.'s "largest partner." Yet just how safe and close to risk free the return will actually be, when 22 of the league's 30 teams convene next month at Walt Disney World near Orlando to live and play out the rest of the season, is likely to be determined only once this first of its kind reboot is operational. The N.B.A. has said it is working with infectious disease specialists, public health experts and government officials to establish safety guidelines to minimize the chances that the coronavirus can infiltrate its "campus," but negotiations with the National Basketball Players Association are ongoing about the depths of the restrictions that will be implemented, which will not be publicly revealed until next week at the earliest. "It's a start and a good plan," Robert Sarver, the owner of the Phoenix Suns, said via text message after his team, six games out of a playoff spot when they last played, was chosen for the restart as the last of 22 invitees. "But there are a lot of variables many of which we don't control," Sarver added. "Lots," said Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, echoing Sarver. There was likewise no Disney FastPass that put the N.B.A. on its Florida course. The league's hiatus will reach the three month mark next week. As the N.B.A. faces what The Athletic recently estimated as a revenue loss approaching 1 billion if it fails to provide playoff games to its primary television partners, Disney and Turner Sports, concern is naturally mounting as with so many wounded businesses. Officials from several clubs, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the league has discouraged public discourse about its finances, did not dispute the notion in interviews this week that monetary motivations are largely behind the comeback. The vibe has certainly changed since the early days of the March 11 shutdown. In Silver's lone news conference since pressing pause on the season, conducted April 17, he identified a number of prerequisites before play could resume. "We're looking for the number of new infections to come down," Silver said. "We're looking for the availability of testing on a large scale. We're looking at the path that we're on for potentially a vaccine. We're looking at antivirals. On top of that, we're paying close attention to what the C.D.C. is telling us on a federal level and what these various state rules are that are in place." Quoting Iger, who had been the N.B.A.'s guest on a Board of Governors call that preceded the news conference, Silver summarized the position by saying the league's return timetable would be dictated by "the data and not the date." How encouraging the data in May was depends on who is making the evaluation. Many states have begun reopening after extended lockdowns and there has been a marked increase in testing, but nearly two million coronavirus cases, including more than 100,000 deaths, have been recorded in the United States. Florida's Department of Health reported 1,419 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, a state high, but only 48 of them in Orange County, Fla., where the N.B.A. is preparing to play at a tightly controlled single site. By the time he addressed the union's membership on May 8, Silver told players that he was confident that the league would have little issue, both practically and from a public relations perspective, obtaining the requisite test kits to administer daily testing in an N.B.A. bubble. Silver also told them that he anticipated the N.B.A. being able to adopt the strategy introduced in German soccer's Bundesliga and quarantine individual players who contracted Covid 19 and play on in stark contrast to Rudy Gobert's positive test on the day of Utah's March 11 game at Oklahoma City that immediately shuttered the whole league and prompted numerous leagues to follow suit. In his question and answer session with the union, Silver stressed that the league's goal, from the minute play was halted, was to come back as quickly as safely possible to try to bring the season to a legitimate conclusion. Yet in a Thursday night interview with Turner's "Inside The N.B.A.," Silver also conceded that, in the league's quest for the best competitive conclusion it could muster, it was "choosing among multiple bad alternatives given the pandemic that we're dealing with." In front offices across the N.B.A., as well as within the player ranks, there is little mystery behind the pressures the league is facing. This has been a catastrophic season for the league financially, starting with a tweet by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey in October in support of pro democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong that did in "the hundreds of millions of dollars" in damage to the N.B.A.'s business relationships in China, according to Silver's estimate in February. On his conference call with players, Silver said that 40 percent of the league's annual revenue comes from ticket purchases and other in arena fan expenditures, which means that an even more lucrative revenue stream than the one damaged in China is unavailable indefinitely. Getting games back on television thus seems to have much more to do with mitigating financial losses, and players' lost wages, than ensuring that the N.B.A., for the 74th successive season, crowns a champion. Yet it's also true that Iger, on top of the many years of collaboration between Silver and Paul, has been an aggressive facilitator for both his sports network, ESPN, and an expansive theme park that had to beat out a worthy bid from the casino company MGM Resorts International in Las Vegas. In a pre coronavirus world, Iger was scheduled to attend the April 17 owners meeting in person, as Silver's special guest to talk about leadership and his business memoir, "The Ride of a Lifetime." He ended up participating in the call via Zoom and, according to multiple listeners, made it clear how bullish he was on the N.B.A.'s future despite the difficult circumstances and the daunting nature of rebooting. As the league intensified its negotiations to use the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Florida as its home base, Iger spoke with Silver and Paul "daily" according to one person with knowledge of the talks, who was not authorized to discuss them publicly. Iger declined an interview request and a Disney spokeswoman declined to comment. The business lure for Disney is also no mystery. The trend of consumers cutting the cord on cable has weakened ESPN in recent years, but the ubiquitous sports channel remains a crucial engine for Disney. The company's cable television business generated 5.2 billion in operating profit last year, a 4 percent increase. The problem: The coronavirus pandemic has left ESPN without live sports to broadcast, costing Disney hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising sales and threatening to speed up cord cutting, as American households continue to get charged for a channel that, for months now, has been reduced to documentaries and reruns of historic games. Michael Nathanson, a media analyst, recently estimated that ESPN would lose 481 million in ad revenue if the N.B.A. did not complete its regular season and playoffs. Disney World itself will also benefit if the N.B.A. can overcome its remaining hurdles and, as Cuban, the Mavericks' owner, described, instill "sustained confidence" that the incoming 350 players "only have to worry about playing basketball when they get there." At a minimum, analysts said, the N.B.A. will spend tens of millions of dollars at the resort in facility fees, hotels and dining. The league's presence at Disney may also offer an invaluable marketing message to families contemplating vacations: This place is safe to visit again. Silver can only hope his league has that effect. He has been criticized for his reluctance to address the news media during the shutdown, beyond interviews with league partners, leading up to a briefing he has scheduled next week to discuss the safety protocols. Yet such scrutiny is nothing to fret about compared with potential calamities given an unpredictable, easily spread virus in a contact sport that plays its games indoors. The praise Silver alluded to on the player conference call was a byproduct of the N.B.A.'s leadership position among sports leagues in pressing the pause button and letting the world know how serious the Covid 19 outbreak was. Chances are that even more will be expected from the N.B.A. in terms of leading the way in its return to play. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Airbus employees celebrated after the jet's maiden flight in Toulouse, France. "I feel such a mix of pride and relief," one worker said. TOULOUSE, France The A350 XWB, the first all new commercial jet from Airbus in more than six years, took wing into partly cloudy skies here on Friday. There was a lot more riding on it than the multinational crew of two test pilots and four engineers. The new aircraft carries the burden of dispelling Airbus's reputation for cross cultural and industrial dysfunction, which caused costly delays in the introduction of the company's previous plane, the A380 superjumbo. And in the wake of last year's failed merger of the plane maker's parent, European Aeronautic Defense and Space, and the British military contractor BAE Systems, Airbus is betting its future more heavily on the success of commercial jets like the A350. It is no coincidence that Airbus showed off the A350 a twin engine wide body jet meant to compete with Boeing's 787 Dreamliner and 777 as the global aviation industry assembled for the biennial Paris Air Show, scheduled to open Monday at Le Bourget Airport north of the French capital. As always at the show, which is the world's largest aerospace bazaar, any announcements by other industry players will be undercard matches compared with the main event of Airbus vs. Boeing. While both aircraft makers are going into the show with order books for commercial airliners fat enough to keep their assembly lines humming for much of the next decade, military budgets are shrinking in the United States and Europe, the two biggest spenders on military planes. Few, if any, major announcements for military orders are expected at the show, and belt tightening at the Pentagon means that the turnout of American military contractors will be among the lowest in recent memory. Northrop Grumman, for example, will be absent, and the delegations from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing's defense and security division, among others, will be much smaller than in years past. And this year's show may be relatively subdued in terms of new commercial jet order announcements as well, given the uncertain near term outlook for airline profits and economic growth, particularly in emerging markets. But on Friday the spotlight was on Toulouse Blagnac Airport, about a 90 minute flight south of Paris, where, precisely at 10 a.m., the A350 lifted effortlessly from the sun dappled runway. The purr of the plane's two Rolls Royce engines was momentarily drowned out by the cheers and whistles of a throng of Airbus employees, well wishers and members of the news media who had gathered camera phones at the ready to capture the moment. Judith Lindner, a 36 year old quality control technician from an Airbus factory in Stade, Germany, whooped as the jet sailed past, jabbing her thumb in the air. "What a tremendous thrill fantastic," Ms. Lindner said, adding that she had helped inspect the vertical stabilizer on the plane's tail. "I feel such a mix of pride and relief." Analysts said the value of a well timed and well executed A350 debut could not be overestimated. Some said they still expected Airbus to try to maintain the public relations momentum by staging an A350 flyby sometime during the weeklong show in Paris. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. It would be hard for Airbus to find a bigger stage. Show organizers said they expected the chalets and exhibition halls of the air show to be filled with more than 2,200 companies from more than 40 countries. As many as 350,000 visitors from the aerospace industry, as well as the public, are expected over the course of the week. Even Boeing executives acknowledged that the timing of the A350 flight was likely to steal much of the American company's thunder at the event. "I know they work hard to keep the home fans entertained," Randy Tinseth, Boeing's head of marketing, said at a briefing on Tuesday in Paris. Not so long ago, Airbus's prospects did not look nearly as bright. It was struggling to roll out its last big bet plane: the twin deck A380. Miscommunication in the design, manufacturing and installation of electrical cables resulted in a series of missteps in the mid 2000s that delayed the A380's first delivery by three years. The debacle prompted a management reshuffle in 2006 and more than 6 billion in losses. Airbus executives say they are determined not to repeat the experience. For the new A350, the company has changed its internal design systems and decision making, even involving major suppliers in the process from the start. While in the past Airbus engineers in France and Germany operated independently, in some cases using incompatible tools and software, they now collaborate on shared digital blueprints. So far, analysts said, Airbus has managed to keep the A350's development hiccups to a relative minimum. Friday's flight took place about a year later than the company had envisioned when it began marketing the plane in 2007 not all that significant a delay in aerospace terms. Airbus, of course, is not the only jet maker that has had trouble with new products. Boeing rolled out its 787 Dreamliner three years late, and early this year was forced to ground the plane for three months after its lightweight but volatile lithium ion batteries proved prone to overheating. "This is quickly coming down to a battle of credibility" between Airbus and Boeing, said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm in Fairfax, Va. "Signaling that you are a reliable provider sends a great message." That is especially crucial because orders for commercial jets have slowed after several years of record purchases. This month, the International Air Transport Association, a trade group based in Geneva and Montreal, predicted that its 240 member airlines would report a combined profit of 12.7 billion in 2013, up from 7.6 billion last year. But those expected gains are largely the result of falling fuel prices and efforts to pack more customers onto fewer planes, rather than a jump in travel demand. While new jet sales may be slowing, there is still a big backlog of plane orders. Both Boeing and Airbus, as well as smaller jet makers like Bombardier of Canada and Embraer of Brazil, have been steadily increasing output. That has increased short term demand for components, posing a quandary for parts suppliers. Many are reluctant to invest too heavily in new production capacity for fear that they will later be saddled with redundant plants and equipment and debt. "I hear concerns everywhere in commercial markets about the reliability and resilience of the supply chain when they are increasing production everywhere," said Damien Lasou, a managing director and aerospace analyst at Accenture in Paris. "It is a big distraction to management, particularly in terms of capital investment." In recent years, the battle for commercial jet sales has focused on shorter range, single aisle models like the Airbus A320 and the Boeing 737, particularly after the two companies introduced new versions of those planes with more fuel efficient engines. But airlines have also begun to show renewed interest in the latest wide body jets, which can offer significantly greater range and more seats than previous models promising bigger profit margins on long distance routes. Several flag carriers, including Ethiopian Airlines, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa of Germany and Malaysia Airlines, say they are considering multibillion dollar orders for the larger jets, including the A350 and the 787. Despite the battery hazards that were revealed on the 787 this year, airlines remain keenly interested in the plane, which is built extensively from lightweight composite materials. "The shelf life of new jetliner controversy is slightly less than fresh oysters," Mr. Aboulafia of Teal Group said of the Boeing 787's troubles. "It goes away incredibly fast." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
From left, Jonathan Lyndon Chase's "Quiet Storm" (2016); Jonathan Key's "Man in the Violet Dreamscape (Diptych)" (2018); Charlie Roberts's "Sommer Dyr" (2018); and Reginald Sylvester II's "Kalief Browder" (2016) in the exhibition "Punch" at Deitch Projects. Among New York's many commercial galleries, there are group shows and then there are group shows, veritable extravaganzas that give the genre all they've got. These exhibitions are immersive and often densely packed; they can require of viewers the same stamina as museum shows (and often as much effort on the part of their organizers). They reach into the past or focus on other cultures. They show us the art of our era in new thematic arrangements, or the art of this very instant, from unfamiliar creators. Here are four of the city's most energizing and eye opening group shows, with subjects stretching from fantastic art of the sixteenth century to contemporary assemblage from Port au Prince, Haiti. Each creates its own world, full of surprises and multiple rewards. For one thing, when will another Chelsea art gallery present a combination of old and modern masters that includes Titian, Piero di Cosimo, Salvator Rosa (a naked witch), Jan Bruegel the Younger, Gustave Moreau, James Ensor, Odilon Redon, Max Ernst (three great canvases), and a follower of Hieronymus Bosch? The show has been selected to enhance unexpected connections by its organizers, David Leiber, a partner at Zwirner, and Nicholas Hall, a specialist and dealer, in European art. (Yes, some of the works are also for sale.) The curators were inspired by the Museum of Modern Art's voluminous 1936 exhibition, "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism," with which their effort shares nearly 20 artists but it has taken a much more focused view. No Dada, for one thing. What the early 20th century finally labeled "Surrealism" has come to include the uncanny, unfathomable and disturbing. The through line here, for the most part, is the human body and what the human imagination has made and continues to make of it. (Living artists include Lisa Yuskavage, Sherrie Levine and Robert Gober.) We see bodies ideal and not, and those of other species. Get ready for demons the temptation of St. Anthony is a recurring theme and violent historical fact: Kerry James Marshall's discretely bloody "Portrait of Nat Turner With the Head of His Master" (2011) vividly conveys the fury of the act and, more gripping, the perpetrator's consciousness of what he has wrought. Nearly everything here is worthy of close study, so recommendations seem unfair. But please don't miss Paul Klee's gorgeously ominous "Black Herald" of 1924; a wonderful Klee like painting of an abstracted garden made in 1949 by the young Antoni Tapies; and a little painting from around 1906 by Jose Gutierrez Solana, of masked street musicians that echoes back to Redon's spooky canvas, "The Angel of Destiny," from around 1900. Also don't miss two small detailed paintings by unfamiliar artists: "The Cause of Thunder," a green succulent landscape from 1965 by Richard Humphry, an American Surrealist born in 1942, and its neighbor, Filippo Napoletano's "Dante and Virgil in the Underworld," from around 1620, in mostly dark red on slate, which merges Bosch and Piranesi. The indisputable centerpiece is a copy of Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights," from around 1515. In this panoramic vista of humans, animals, birds, near humans and strawberries, a gastronomical delicacy of the time, the pleasures depicted are often perverse, humiliating and painful, as befits the human condition. As "earthly" implies, Bosch seems to depict a world where God is absent and humans, subject to irrational forces within and without, are left to their own devices. On a recent Saturday, Mr. Hall drew a small crowd when examining the painting with a conservator. He said it is assumed to have been made with Bosch's permission, perhaps by someone working beside him as he painted his masterpiece. Proof: the drawing beneath the copy is schematic yet accurate, evidently derived from a tracing of the original. Micro macro extremes are the generating principle behind "Intimate Infinite: Imagine a Journey," which centers on midcentury artworks that mesmerize through small size, countless repeating details, intimations of endless space (or all three). Unfolding across the gallery's three floors, it starts with blue chip opulence: the ravishingly white on white canvases of Robert Ryman and Cy Twombly. The second floor is dominated by a conversation among four women who were contemporaries: Agnes Martin, Lee Bontecou, Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke. The show darkens in mood on the third floor, where it most lives up to its title. Here you'll find figures and landscapes by Jean Dubuffet, rendered in the painter's strangest material, butterfly wings; Bruce Conner's ink drawings, teeming with details; and a starry night sky by Vija Celmins. Box sculptures by Joseph Cornell and Lucas Samaras share a big pedestal with works in combed sand and brilliant white plaster by Mona Hatoum and Maria Bartuszova. Anyone interested in the future of art should see this invigorating show of works in two and three dimensions by 19 artists, one of whom is its organizer, the fast rising star Nina Chanel Abney. Ms. Abney's own bright brash paintings, devised with stencils, never stint on either the political or the pictorial and much of the work in this SoHo gallery, by artists with whom she is close, follow suit. The future that the show envisions is diverse in demographics and the art is wildly representational, influenced by Neo Expressionism, graffiti, cartoons and digital capabilities. Katherine Bernhardt, who has been sarcastically transforming such elements for two decades, is the show's eminence grise, represented by a new Day Glo Pink Panther painting. But all artists have made their mark in one sphere or another, whether street art, the fashion world or the gallery scene, starting with Derrick Adams and Austin Lee, both experts of stylized figuration, and the ceramist Ruby Neri. Other enticements include the sexually charged paintings of Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Reginald Sylvester II's Picasso/Basquiat fusion; Charlie Roberts's ambitious carved wood and painted wood sculptures; Alexandra Bell's "radical edits" of New York Times articles she has annotated and retitled, and Cheyenne Julien's skillful graphite drawings poignant views of black life through a slightly cartoonized lens. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
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