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There was symbolism in the timing when Major League Baseball announced a new, expanded postseason format. The league made it official on opening day in July, while the very first game of the season was already in progress. The message: We know this won't last very long, but wait till we get to the fall! By opening up the playoffs to 16 teams, instead of the usual 10, M.L.B. created a new batch of playoff games to sell to networks, boosting revenue after a pandemic shortened regular season of just 60 games. But the league risked competitive integrity: What if a losing team sneaked in and made a run for the title? Even that could have been appealing, perhaps, if the team were a scrappy underdog poised for a breakthrough, or one that had a marquee star like Mike Trout, Bryce Harper or Jacob deGrom. But what if the team turned out to be the Houston Astros, notorious for the cheating scandal that roiled the sport for months before the coronavirus shutdown? "They're really good we watched them plenty in the games leading up to ours," Rays Manager Kevin Cash said on Friday, after a thrilling 2 1 victory to eliminate the Yankees in Game 5. "They're rolling offensively; they've got some pitchers that we're not as familiar with. We're going to have our work cut out." For all their past misdeeds, the Astros are hardly a product of stolen signals. Even as their lineup struggled this season, it retained its signature characteristic: extreme contact hitting, a trait that distinguishes the Astros from the Rays. Houston's hitters had the fewest strikeouts in the majors this season, at 7.3 per game, while Tampa Bay's had the most, at 10.1 per game. The Rays still had better on base and slugging percentages, but now the Astros are slugging as they did in the past, with Correa leading the way. He is hitting .500 this postseason (10 for 20) with four home runs in six games, and five other everyday players Jose Altuve, Michael Brantley, Alex Bregman, George Springer and Kyle Tucker hit .368 or better against Oakland. The Rays hit a meager .202 against the Yankees, but they out homered them, 11 to 10. That margin proved to be the difference in the series when Mike Brosseau, an undrafted role player, smoked a 100 mile an hour fastball from Aroldis Chapman for the decisive homer in the eighth inning of Game 5. Brosseau, a right handed hitter, entered the game as a pinch hitter in the sixth inning when the Yankees replaced Gerrit Cole with the left handed Zach Britton. He is part of a deep and versatile lineup that supports a pitching staff with a 3.56 earned run average in the regular season and the most strikeouts of any team left in the playoffs. "We're a fun team, we play the game right, we pitch very well," Brosseau said when asked what fans should expect from the Rays. "They're going to see a lot of high velo on the radar gun, and they're going to see a lot of good defense and timely hitting. We use our roster so well." Last fall, the Rays took the Astros to five games in a division series but lost twice to Cole and once to Justin Verlander, who is out because of Tommy John surgery. Their absence puts the Astros in a similar spot as the Rays: depending more on the depth of their pitching staff than one or two aces, especially with no days off in this series. In five of the Astros' six postseason games so far all but Game 2 against Oakland, when Framber Valdez worked seven innings Manager Dusty Baker has pulled his starter before the last out of the fifth. The rookies Enoli Paredes, Blake Taylor and Cristian Javier have combined for 12 shutout innings of relief, with Valdez adding another five in the first round opener against Minnesota. "Our bullpen did such a great job keeping us in games," Correa said after beating Oakland. "I think they are the reason why we won the series." The Rays could say the same about their clash with the Yankees. They took two of the first three games, each with a starter Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Charlie Morton going only five innings. The Rays then used three other pitchers in a Game 4 loss, saving their best arms for the finale, when four hard throwers Glasnow, Nick Anderson, Pete Fairbanks and Diego Castillo stifled the Yankees for six to eight outs apiece. "Hey, are you surprised?" said Anderson, the Rays' saves leader, who entered the game in the third inning. "That's kind of like the Rays' way switch things up, do something a little different. Everybody's on board with everything; everybody knows anything could happen." The low budget Rays have never won the World Series and have been there just once, in 2008. Baker, 71, is seeking the first championship of a long and distinguished managerial career, and his presence may soften some fans' feelings for the Astros. But if most of the public and perhaps even the league office just wants the Astros to go away, the last two rounds have shown that it will not be easy. The Astros are holding tightly to their A.L. championship trophy, and need eight more victories for Manfred to present them with his. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Egypt is on the bucket list of Beth Warren, a middle school history teacher in Lookout Mountain, Ga. She's planning a trip for 2022. Beth Warren, a middle school history teacher in Lookout Mountain, Ga., had been looking forward to a much anticipated trip this summer to Egypt, a country she vowed to show her husband and friends after her first visit several years ago. She was deep into organizing the trip with High End Journeys when the pandemic struck, and has since shifted the visit to summer 2022, in part to make sure the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza is open. "2022 sounds really far away," she said. "But once I saw Egypt, I couldn't get enough of it." People have always planned big trips months or even a year ahead of time, but now many are extending that timeline even further. In the travel stasis induced by the pandemic, future travelers have taken to tackling their bucket lists with big trips that are more distant and longer than usual and planned further in advance. Optimists are targeting 2021. For others, their next big trip will be in 2022. Before the pandemic, according to the American Society of Travel Advisors, most travelers booked trips six months or more in advance, on average, and longer for elaborate honeymoons or very special events like the solar eclipse passing over South America in December. Some travel companies say longer term bookings have recently rebounded. For instance, Red Savannah, a British luxury travel agency that organizes custom trips, says it is up 160 percent over bookings this time last year. These days, even spontaneous types have more time to think about where they want to go and put a plan in place. "I'm trying to go big with my trips," said Rayme Gorniak of Chicago, who is currently laid off from his work managing fitness studio franchises. Anything short and normally easy to plan might bring disappointment as the pandemic continues, he reasoned, but a far horizon destination he's considering Jordan for June 2021 offers hope. The trip also represents a personal conquest for Mr. Gorniak, who is gay and worried about the persecution of L.G.B.T. people in some Muslim countries. "Jordan's been on my radar because of the rich history, and off it because of the potential risk I would have," he said. "But I've been doing research on Amman and seeing, as strict religious standards go, it's a little bit more lax on tradition," he said. For Lori Goldenthal of Wellesley, Mass., changing plans meant changing the destination. She had originally planned a trip in and around Vietnam for her husband's upcoming 60th birthday. But after the pandemic hit, she worked with the agency Extraordinary Journeys to book a two week trip to Namibia for 2021. "Namibia was on my bucket list and it seemed like a better idea than going to all these big cities in Asia," she said. Other forward looking travelers are simply picking up a year later. After months of reading about the climate and culture of Greenland, Jill Hrubecky, a structural engineer based in Brooklyn, was excited for a cruise she had planned there in August with her mother and an aunt and uncle. Working with their agency, Huckleberry Travel, they rebooked the cruise for summer 2021 only after learning that the cancellation policy is flexible. "I will not make any nonrefundable, permanent plans for the next couple of years," she said. "But I'm an optimist. Half the fun of traveling is planning and getting excited." There are psychological benefits to planning activities in the future, especially travel, according to Shevaun Neupert, a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. Future oriented thinking is equated with proactive coping, a means of reducing stress through detailed planning, such as learning which flights to book to avoid layovers, and gathering the resources including time and money to make it happen. "Being able to think about and imagine something positive in the future has benefits in the present," she said. The pandemic, too, may have shown travelers that what they thought they could always do namely, see the world isn't such a certainty. "Maybe they thought it would always be available, which was previously true. Now we've experienced restrictions and realize, oh, I need to make this happen," she added. Advance planning is also a practical way to turn vague desires into concrete plans. The travel adviser network Virtuoso offers a program called Virtuoso Wanderlist, an online survey that friends or family seeking to travel together take individually. (Since the pandemic, Virtuoso has made the online planning tool free.) The program asks where they want to go, their interests and the kinds of activities they prefer. It then compares the results of those surveyed to identify mutual preferences and priorities that a travel adviser will analyze and, in consultation with the clients, come up with a five year plan of tackling the bucket list. Jim Bendt, the managing director of Virtuoso Wanderlist, equates travel planning with financial planning in the sense that both seek to maximize precious resources. In the case of travel, the currency is time. "Having a plan takes it from dreaming and conjecturing to actually having things committed on paper, always with adjustments," she said. "We've moved the chess pieces around." In addition to compounding their wanderlust, many travelers and planners say the pandemic has revealed travel's environmental impact and are planning more mindfully. "Our current situation has made me even more committed to focusing exclusively on sustainability going forward," wrote Rose O'Connor, a travel adviser in Granite Bay, Calif., in an email. "On one hand, we have seen how tourism can be vital to conservation efforts in certain destinations," she wrote, noting the uptick in poaching in Africa in the absence of tourism revenue. On the other hand, she added, traveling from a hot spot like the United States particularly to remote or developing countries "is an ethical issue." Jeremy Bassetti, a professor of humanities at Valencia College in Orlando, Fla., has a sabbatical coming up in fall 2021 and plans to use miles to get to China and then travel overland to Tibet, Nepal and India for several months. While big trips often accompany sabbaticals, Mr. Bassetti has rethought his to "travel longer, farther and more slowly in 2021," he said. "Why wouldn't we want to travel more to connect more when our assumptions about being free to travel wherever we want is disappearing before our eyes?" he added. "If you want to experience new cultures, you can't do it very quickly." For others, 2022 presents the possibility of traveling in a time when the virus may be contained and spontaneity can resume. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Despite no longer reproducing, postmenopausal female whales play a crucial role in the survival of killer whales, researchers have found. With extensive knowledge of their environment, female whales in their 70s and 80s lead younger whales to food in times of scarcity. Female whales are the only mammals other than humans to live for decades after menopause, often reaching ages of 90 or above. Male whales live about 60 years at most. Researchers in Britain observed 750 hours of video footage of killer whales traveling. Older female whales, the scientists found, were significantly more likely than male ones to lead, and far more likely to do so in years when salmon were scarce. "In years when there's not much food around and you assume finding food is much more important in those years they are really out front," said Lauren Brent, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter and lead author of a study in Current Biology. "They know where the food is, so they're taking leadership positions." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Last week, chips that store eight gigabytes of data for digital cameras, smartphones and other devices cost as little as 7.30 each on the spot market, where many manufacturers buy components. On Monday, the cost was around 10. That jump in price illustrates how the disaster in Japan has immediately affected the supply of all sorts of components used in myriad consumer electronics and other products. The earthquake and tsunami there have damaged factories and disrupted the country's power and transportation infrastructure. Factory closures are already creating problems in the tech industry. Toshiba, which produces roughly a third of the world's chips used to store data in cameras, smartphones and tablet computers, said on Monday that it had closed some factories and that its production would be affected. The daily spot market for those chips rose 10 to 27 percent, said Jim Handy, founder of Objective Analysis, a semiconductor manufacturing research firm in Silicon Valley, who has been tracking these prices. Analysts said small companies in Japan, China and other Asian countries would bear the brunt of those price increases, as larger companies tend to have long term contracts for parts. But even giants like Apple could be affected. Over the last year, Apple has had a difficult time meeting demand for the iPad and the iPhone, and the new iPad 2, which went on sale Friday, sold out quickly. "Toshiba, which is one of their suppliers, has been impacted, and I think it will create more of a challenge in meeting their demand," said Dale Ford, vice president for market intelligence at IHS iSuppli, a research firm. Apple declined to comment. At the same time, nearly all automakers, even those with no plants in Japan, could be forced to halt production of some models in the weeks ahead if Japanese suppliers are unable to quickly resume making electronics or other parts used in the vehicles, analysts said Monday. Toyota and other Japanese automakers said that they hoped to restart production at most of their domestic plants this week, but that they were still evaluating how much the disaster had damaged some factories and nearby roads, railroads and ports. If shipments cannot be made, dealerships in the United States could start to run short of some small cars, hybrids and luxury models. "In a couple of weeks we could start feeling the effects," said Rebecca Lindland, an analyst with the research firm IHS Automotive in Lexington, Mass. "It could be something that's really pretty minor, but if it's specific to that vehicle you're not going to be able to produce that vehicle." More immediately, Toyota will miss out on building 40,000 vehicles by keeping all of its plants in Japan closed through Wednesday. Plants that build the subcompact Yaris and two small cars for the company's Scion brand are expected to be closed longer because they were closer to the epicenter. The overall impact of the unfolding crisis on the consumer electronics supply chain remained hard to assess, as companies gave few details about damage. The extent and duration of disruptions in electric power and transportation remained impossible to predict, as well. But Japan is a major global supplier of chips, flat panel displays and other components used in devices like computers, tablets, digital cameras, Blu ray players and televisions, as well as a major exporter of consumer electronics. Companies big and small are beginning to feel the pain. An aerial view of the port of Sendai in Japan on Monday, where shipping containers remained scattered. On Monday, Sony, Canon and Fujitsu which, like Toshiba, supply parts as well as make finished products also said they had shut some factories. Canon said its plant in Utsunomiya suffered extensive damage, including collapsed ceilings, electrical, gas and water damage, and breakdowns in water, electrical and gas supply, that will take some time to restore. The plant makes a variety of specialized lenses used in camcorders, office machines and other devices. Makers of chips and flat panel displays may be among those most immediately affected, said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering Group, a technology research and consulting company in Seaford, N.Y., in part because the manufacturing of those products depends on lengthy, multistep processes that cannot be interrupted. "It is hard to have an interruption of power supply in the middle of the manufacturing process," he said. While high tech goods rely on a complex network of suppliers that help keep inventories of parts low, most manufacturers whose factories are still operating have enough parts to continue operating for some time. "There usually are buffers of several weeks," Mr. Doherty said. "Unless there are rolling blackouts that last several weeks, the impact will be limited." About 1.4 million, or 15 percent, of the vehicles sold in the United States last year were assembled in Japan, and nearly all cars and trucks contain some parts manufactured there, including computer chips and navigation systems. Hyundai and BMW are the only major carmakers that do not use Japanese made electronics, according to the research firm IHS. The disaster occurred during the peak season for automotive production in Japan. Carmakers were scheduled to build about a million vehicles this month, and Ms. Lindland of IHS estimated that the stoppages could cut output by up to 250,000. Toyota officials on Monday were unsure how much damage had occurred at one plant, operated in a joint venture with Panasonic, that builds battery packs for the Toyota Prius hybrid car, although the plant that builds the Prius itself was not hit. Some American dealers have said they were running low on the Prius, whose sales have been surging as gasoline prices rise toward 4 a gallon. But a Toyota spokesman, Javier Moreno, said supplies would be sufficient unless shipments of the Prius were disrupted longer than expected. "The pipeline was full when this happened," Mr. Moreno said. He added that it was too soon to know whether Toyota might have trouble obtaining parts for models built in North America, including the top selling Camry and Corolla sedans, but "we're hoping that the impact will be minimal." Still, he said the company had canceled all overtime shifts indefinitely. Toyota is especially vulnerable, analysts said, because it builds more of its vehicles in Japan 3.3 million last year, or 43 percent of its global output than its rivals do. Its Lexus brand of luxury cars gets all but one model exclusively from Japan. In contrast, analysts said Honda should have fewer problems satisfying demand in the United States. Honda said it was keeping most of its Japanese plants closed through this Sunday. They build the Fit subcompact, all Honda hybrid cars and several Acura models, among others. Nissan said that six of its plants had been damaged but that they would reopen either Wednesday or Friday. In a statement Monday, it said supplies of most nameplates were sufficient but warned that "some Infiniti models and Nissan GTR and 370Z may experience delays in shipment." Mazda and Mitsubishi said they had suspended production in Japan through at least Wednesday, while Subaru and Suzuki intend to reopen plants Thursday. But several of the companies said they were concerned about acquiring all the parts they need. General Motors, which does not build vehicles in Japan, issued a statement saying that it buys components from Japan and was still determining how its production might be affected. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
A Chicago TV Host Knows Restaurants. She Has Some Ideas for You. Catherine De Orio has been to hundreds of restaurants for the show "Check, Please." She has recommendations for where to eat in Chicago and beyond. None Catherine (Cat) De Orio's high wattage personality not to mention her knowledge of all things food has made her a respected figure on the Chicago food scene and, increasingly, nationally. Ms. De Orio was the longtime host of the Emmy Award winning dining review show "Check, Please!" (she left in June). The public television series covers restaurants in the Chicago area suggested by diners and had her going out 10 times or more a week when it's in production . Off season, she said, she would "go anywhere in search of diverse culinary traditions." She said she is excited about her coming book and corresponding public television show, currently in development, which, she said, will be a "deep dive into food and culinary traditions aimed at the ravenous traveler." Here are edited excerpts from a conversation (by email and phone) with Ms. De Orio. What's new on the Chicago food scene? Vegetables. And amazing neighborhood restaurants. Lee Wolen at Boka restaurant is a veritable vegetable whisperer the guy who can make carrots exciting is pretty gangster. And places like Bad Hunter are making produce the star of the menu in this traditionally meat and potato town. But what I love most now is that high quality chefs that could bank money with locations near downtown's convention and tourist friendly hotels are opening their restaurants in outlying residential neighborhoods instead, like Giant and Daisies in Logan Square, Acadia in the South Loop or Band of Bohemia in Ravenswood, where the great majority of diners can walk to the restaurant from their homes. Your advice for an eating weekend in the city? We are a city of vibrant ethnic enclaves really, only San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston can compare and to truly experience the breadth and depth of Chicago's food scene, you need to be adventurous. Yes, some good food can be found on Michigan Avenue (Purple Pig, I'm looking at you!) but I recommend heading to 5 Rabinitos or Birrieria Zaragoza for authentic Mexican food; visiting Maxwell Street Market on a warm day to grab some tongue tacos and agua fresca from the food carts; or heading to other neighborhood places where chefs are celebrating their culture and putting a hip twist on it Fat Rice for Macanese food, Parachute for modernized Korean cooking or Mi Tocaya Antonjeria for regional Mexican. Your pick for emerging food destinations in the United States? The Midwest is having a moment. It started with Chicago and no, it's not hometown bias. We've been touted Bon Appetit's restaurant city of the year, and the James Beard Awards moved here five years ago. As Chicago has risen to culinary dominance, our chefs have pollinated the region. Detroit is luring top toques away, like the chef Thomas Lents, who left his post at Chicago's Michelin starred Sixteen currently closed to bring his vision to the Apparatus Room. And Jonathon Sawyer is turning Cleveland into a culinary stop (the Greenhouse Tavern, Trentina, Noodlecat). St. Louis, Minneapolis and the Midwest Southern hybrid Louisville, Ky., are all dining destinations in their own right. And don't even get me started with Nashville it's already emerged, but wow. I go there frequently; it's always exciting. How do you decide where to eat, off the radar, when you travel? I read a lot and always inquire about places people have visited, even if I don't have a trip planned. My notes app is jammed with lists. When I arrive at a destination, I pick up local newspapers/magazines. Most importantly, I talk to locals. I book a few places I want to try, but leave myself flexibility. If I dine out and the food is spectacular, or my server gave spot on recommendations, I will mine that person for info. Don't just ask for good places to eat; think about what you want cool vibe, modern cuisine, authentic mom and pop, spectacular food, whatever and then be specific with your questions. And please, let go of "cool." Don't try to prove to locals how much you know; rather, use your research as an indication of what you are up for so they can share their best recommendations for you. You learn more through listening than talking. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
THE BIG BANG THEORY 8 p.m. on CBS. When this nerd chic sitcom began in September 2007, Alessandra Stanley wrote in a review in The New York Times that 2007 was "the year of breakthroughs: First the iPhone, now the tall, dark and handsome nerd." You could argue that "The Big Bang Theory" turned into something like the iPhone of sitcoms: wildly popular and filled with tech. When it ends its run on Thursday with a finale double feature of two episodes, "The Big Bang Theory" will have been the longest running multicamera comedy series ever. Created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, the show made a star out of Jim Parsons, whose Sheldon Cooper character (one of the show's awkward scientists) has earned Parsons four Emmy Awards and is the focus of a spinoff, "Young Sheldon," which will be left to carry the torch or light saber. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In estuaries off the coast of Georgia, the water is so murky that if you were to dive in, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. There, blue crabs feast on mud crabs, oysters, fish and more. You may eagerly approach these hand sized arthropods when they're cracked into pieces and doused in butter. But in muddy water, tiny mud crabs, no bigger than the tip of your thumb, steer clear of the hungry blue crab predators. In this crab eat crab world, they can't see their enemies coming but they can smell them. Chemicals in blue crab urine are scented death messages to mud crabs. The language is different, but the warning is clear: Hide, or be eaten. "Blue crabs probably don't want to send out the message, but they can't help it. We all have to pee," said Julia Kubanek, a marine chemical ecologist at Georgia Institute of Technology. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Q. Why is the mail app on my Android phone asking for permission to use my contacts and calendars? I don't feel comfortable giving that access and it feels like an invasion of privacy, but the app doesn't seem to work otherwise. A. While it may feel as if you're granting the mail app permission to root around in your personal business, software from established developers or mail providers is not as completely invasive as it may sound. For example, the mail app may need to use your contacts list if you want to add a fresh address book entry for a new acquaintance, or to automatically fill in an address in the To: field when you are composing a message. The mail app may also ask permission to use your calendar, say, if it has the option to add invitations sent by email right to your schedule. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Two new works one by the tap dancer and choreographer Michelle Dorrance and one by Jessica Lang will headline American Ballet Theater's fall season at the David H. Koch Theater, the company announced on Tuesday. Building on the recent announcement of a multiyear initiative to support the creation of new works by female choreographers, the opening night gala on Oct. 17 features an all female made program. Ms. Dorrance's new piece, a co commission of the Vail Dance Festival, is to be performed alongside Twyla Tharp's "In the Upper Room" (1986) and Lauren Lovette's "Le Jeune," a work that Ms. Lovette, a New York City Ballet principal, created for Ballet Theater's Studio Company last year. A new dance by Jessica Lang, her third for Ballet Theater, will have its premiere on Oct. 19, with costumes and scenery by the artist Sarah Crowner. The season also pays tribute to the centennials of Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein with performances of "Fancy Free," created for Ballet Theater in 1944, with choreography by Robbins to a Bernstein score. Robbins's "Other Dances," created for Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1976, will also be performed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
They said it was their family curse: a rare congenital deformity called syndactyly, in which the thumb and index finger are fused together on one or both hands. Ten members of the extended clan were affected, and with each new birth, they told Stefan Mundlos of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, the first question was always: "How are the baby's hands? Are they normal?" Afflicted relatives described feeling like outcasts in their village, convinced that their "strange fingers" repulsed everybody they knew including their unaffected kin. "One woman told me that she never received a hug from her father," Dr. Mundlos said. "He avoided her." The family, under promise of anonymity, is taking part in a study by Dr. Mundlos and his colleagues of the origin and development of limb malformations. And while the researchers cannot yet offer a way to prevent syndactyly, or to entirely correct it through surgery, Dr. Mundlos has sought to replace the notion of a family curse with "a rational answer for their condition," he said and maybe a touch of pioneers' pride. The scientists have traced the family's limb anomaly to a novel class of genetic defects unlike any seen before, a finding with profound implications for understanding a raft of heretofore mysterious diseases. The mutations affect a newly discovered design feature of the DNA molecule called topologically associating domains, or TADs. It turns out that the vast informational expanse of the genome is divvied up into a series of manageable, parochial and law abiding neighborhoods with strict nucleic partitions between them each one a TAD. Breach a TAD barrier, and you end up with the molecular equivalent of that famous final scene in Mel Brooks's comedy, "Blazing Saddles," when the cowboy actors from one movie set burst through a wall and onto the rehearsal stage of a campy Fred Astaire style musical. Soon fists, top hats and cream pies are flying. By studying TADs, researchers hope to better fathom the deep structure of the human genome, in real time and three dimensions, and to determine how a quivering, mucilaginous string of some three billion chemical subunits that would measure more than six feet long if stretched out nonetheless can be coiled and compressed down to four 10,000ths of an inch, the width of a cell nucleus and still keep its operational wits about it. "DNA is a super long molecule packed into a very small space, and it's clear that it's not packed randomly," Dr. Mundlos said. "It follows a very intricate and controlled packing mechanism, and TADs are a major part of the folding protocol." Most of the genetic diseases deciphered to date have been linked to mishaps in one or another protein recipe. Scanning the DNA of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for example, scientists have identified telltale glitches in the gene that encodes dystrophin, a protein critical to muscle stability. At the root of Huntington's disease, which killed the folk singer Woody Guthrie, are short, repeated bits of nucleic nonsense sullying the code for huntingtin, an important brain protein. The mutant product that results soon shatters into neurotoxic shards. Yet researchers soon realized there was much more to the genome than the protein codes it enfolded. "We were caught up in the idea of genetic information being linear and one dimensional," said Job Dekker, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. For one thing, as the sequencing of the complete human genome revealed, the portions devoted to specifying the components of hemoglobin, collagen, pepsin and other proteins account for just a tiny fraction of the whole, maybe 3 percent of human DNA's three billion chemical bases. And there was the restless physicality of the genome, the way it arranged itself during cell division into 23 spindly pairs of chromosomes that could be stained and studied under a microscope, and then somehow, when cell replication was through, merged back together into a baffling, ever wriggling ball of chromatin DNA wrapped in a protective packaging of histone proteins. What was the link, scientists wondered, between the shape and animation of the DNA molecule at any given moment, in any given cell and every cell has its own copy of the genome and the relative mouthiness or muteness of the genetic information the DNA holds? Using a breakthrough technology developed by Dr. Dekker and his colleagues called chromosome conformation capture, researchers lately have made progress in tracking the deep structure of DNA. In this approach, chromatin is chemically "frozen" in place, enzymatically chopped up and labeled, and then allowed to reassemble. The pieces that find each other again, scientists have determined, are those that were physically contiguous in the first place only now all their positions and relationships are clearly marked. Through chromosome conformation studies and related research, scientists have discovered the genome is organized into about 2,000 jurisdictions, and they are beginning to understand how these TADs operate. As with city neighborhoods, TADs come in a range of sizes, from tiny walkable zones a few dozen DNA subunits long to TADs that sprawl over tens of thousands of bases and you're better off taking the subway. TAD borders serve as folding instructions for DNA. "They're like the dotted lines on a paper model kit," Dr. Dekker said. TAD boundaries also dictate the rules of genetic engagement. Scientists have long known that protein codes are controlled by an assortment of genetic switches and enhancers noncoding sequences designed to flick protein production on, pump it into high gear and muzzle it back down again. The new research indicates that switches and enhancers act only on those genes, those protein codes, stationed within their own precincts. Because TADs can be quite large, the way the Upper West Side of Manhattan comprises an area of about 250 square blocks, a genetic enhancer located at the equivalent of, say, Lincoln Center on West 65th Street, can amplify the activity of a gene positioned at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 45 blocks north. But under normal circumstances, one thing an Upper West Side enhancer will not do is reach across town to twiddle genes residing on the Upper East Side. "Genes and regulatory elements are like people," Dr. Dekker said. "They care about and communicate with those in their own domain, and they ignore everything else." What exactly do these boundaries consist of, that manage to both direct the proper folding of the DNA molecule and prevent cross talk between genes and gene switches in different domains? Scientists are not entirely sure, but preliminary results indicate that the boundaries are DNA sequences that attract the attention of sticky, roughly circular proteins called cohesin and CTCF, which adhere thickly to the boundary sequences like insulating tape. Between those boundary points, those clusters of insulating proteins, the chromatin strand can loop up and over like the ribbon in a birthday bow, allowing genetic elements distributed along the ribbon to touch and interact with one another. But the insulating proteins constrain the movement of each chromatin ribbon, said Richard A. Young of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and keep it from getting entangled with neighboring loops and the genes and regulatory elements located thereon. The best evidence for the importance of TADs is to see what happens when they break down. Researchers have lately linked a number of disorders to a loss of boundaries between genomic domains, including cancers of the colon, esophagus, brain and blood. In such cases, scientists have failed to find mutations in any of the protein coding sequences commonly associated with the malignancies, but instead identified DNA damage that appeared to shuffle around or eliminate TAD boundaries. As a result, enhancers from neighboring estates suddenly had access to genes they were not meant to activate. Reporting in the journal Science, Dr. Young and his colleagues described a case of leukemia in which a binding site for insulator proteins had been altered not far from a gene called TAL1, which if improperly activated is known to cause leukemia. In this instance, disruption of the nearby binding site, Dr. Young said, "broke up the neighborhood and allowed an outside enhancer to push TAL1 to the point of tumorigenesis," the production of tumors. Now that researchers know what to look for, he said, TAD disruptions may prove to be a common cause of cancer. The same may be true of developmental disorders like syndactyly. In journals like Cell and Nature, Dr. Mundlos and his co workers described their studies of congenital limb malformations in both humans and mice. The researchers have detected major TAD boundary disruptions that allowed the wrong control elements to stimulate muscle genes at the wrong time and in the wrong tissue. "If a muscle gene turns on in the cartilage of developing digits," Dr. Mundlos said, "you get malformations." Edith Heard, director of the genetics and developmental biology department at the Institut Curie in France, who with Dr. Dekker coined the term TAD, said that while researchers were just beginning to get a handle on the architecture of DNA, "suddenly a lot of things are falling into place. We're coming into a renaissance time for understanding how the genome works." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Kevin Baker's review of David Maraniss's "A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father" (July 14) ends with Baker trying to puzzle out why in the world any "great American spirit" would be drawn to joining the Communist Party. After more than three decades of serious treatment by acclaimed historians and nonfiction writers, from Robin D. G. Kelley to Vivian Gornick, this subject is hardly one of life's great mysteries. Aside from being at the cutting edge of civil rights throughout the first half of the 20th century, American communism offered people like Maraniss's father working class children of Jewish immigrants the priceless feeling that they had become more than the sum of their life's parts. But as historians of United States social movements, we know that communism did much more than light a fire in people's imaginations: Scratch the surface of any significant progressive movement in this country over the last 100 years and you will find participants with ties to American communism. Instead of "dreary Russian dogma," communism, for most Americans involved, was about committed and effective grass roots organizing. The writers are, respectively, a visiting assistant professor of history at Middlebury College and a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark. In his review of David Maraniss's account of his parents' involvement with the American Communist Party, Kevin Baker asks, "Just what were his parents, and especially his father, doing in the Communist Party in the first place?" My parents were also involved in the Communist Party in the same time period. They joined because the party was one of the only organizations in the country fighting for civil rights, for a fair shake for working people and for many other causes of justice. When they finally understood the evils perpetrated by Stalinism, they left the party and continued to be active in civil rights and peace efforts. Their motivation, like that of so many thousands of others including, I imagine, David Maraniss's parents is not hard to understand. 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. We're wondering what thinking went into having Kevin Baker review David Maraniss's book about his father's experience with McCarthyism. Baker's apparent cluelessness about why Americans joined the Communist Party, what being a Communist meant and the experience of being subject to the McCarthy fever seems a bit surprising. It was this sentence especially that should at least have been questioned: "Throughout their long marriage Mary insisted on buying the homes the family lived in strange behavior for an avowed communist." Wait. What? It's almost as though Baker got his idea from some of those old movies about the "red menace." It says something that scholars and critics have called Vasily Grossman "the Tolstoy of the 20th century." William Taubman's review of Alexandra Popoff's biography, "Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century" (July 14), was woefully superficial, cursory and inadequate. Taubman's review does not really evaluate Popoff's work. Instead, it repeats anecdotes and widely known, Wikipedia level biographical information about Grossman. For example, Pasternak's view of Grossman is far more nuanced than Taubman would allow. Anna Akhmatova, who Taubman would assert held Grossman's work in disdain, was known to shun prose, even Tolstoy and Chekhov. And while Grossman was relatively well off during his final years, Taubman repeats the myth that he lived in dire poverty. Popoff's work is not perfect; no biography is. But she has delved deeply into archival sources. Popoff's work adds important information to the scholarship surrounding this gifted writer. Like Grossman's oeuvre, especially the newly published "Stalingrad," Popoff's biography merits a more careful and thoughtful review. Corinna da Fonseca Wollheim's essay on Kurt Tucholsky (July 14) brings to mind the brilliantly satirical but perhaps overlooked "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," produced by Tucholsky in collaboration with the pioneering photomontage artist John Heartfield and published in Berlin in 1929. In 1972, I was the editor for a translation of the book, translated by the poet Anne Halley, with annotation and an afterword by Harry Zohn, a distinguished scholar of German literature. Both were prewar emigres, from Germany and Austria respectively. I was struck at the time and am still impressed by the pioneering and powerful combination of caustic, sometimes scatological, text and images a classic case of one plus one equaling something greater than two. Glimpsing through the mirror Tucholsky and Heartfield held up to Weimar Germany, we might apprehend shadows of our own time and culture. I don't want to startle Elisabeth Egan so much that she swoons, but someone needs to break it to her that beach reads (July 14) don't have to be about places east of the Mississippi. Someone ought to give her a map and some books set in the West. We have beaches too and beach reads! | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
This June, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and allies will celebrate WorldPride and commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion in New York City. But the festivities won't be contained to that urban jungle: The rainbow flag will also wave this summer and fall in the great outdoors, in a variety of backcountry trips, hikes, festivals and tours. Below are some standout events organized for adults, youth and families to celebrate pride with the emerging queer outdoor industry. The queer run wilderness education organization, The Venture Out Project, has operated L.G.B.T.Q. specific backpacking trips around the country for teens, adults and families since 2014. For those interested in white water rafting, take pride to the river this August with the gay owned Canyons River Company, a rafting company based in McCall, Idaho. Each year the company organizes a River Pride excursion: This year, the six day trip, which includes wine tasting, will weave along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. National Outdoor Leadership School has organized a queer trip, LGBTQ Canyonlands Backpacking Prime, from Nov. 2 to 10. The nine day backpacking adventure for adults ages 23 and up, through the ravines and slots of Utah's colorful canyonlands, will be led by L.G.B.T.Q. identified instructors. Around the same time, Safari Surf Adventures offers its first Surf Pride Surf Camp at Noosa Heads in Queensland, Australia. The weeklong camp is led by the openly gay professional surfer, Serena Brooke. Interested in climbing? Homoclimbtastic, a free four day climbing festival outside of Fayetteville, W.Va., will run from July 18 to 21. Now in its 12th year, the event will feature daily climbing excursions on the hard packed Nuttall sandstone of the popular New River Gorge area. Rendezvous: Wyoming's LGBT Camping Event takes place in Medicine Bow National Forest between Laramie and Cheyenne Aug. 7 to 11. The event began as a small collection of friends camping in 1992, but now more than 500 attendees come for car, tent and mobile home camping, as well as workshops on topics like PreP, and wet T shirt contests. New York City's Get Out and Trek (GOAT) organizes events, day trips and overnight trips throughout the year. For Pride month, they offer Wet and Wild PA June 22 to 23. The trip in eastern Pennsylvania begins with a day of river drifting on the Delaware River with white unicorn rafts followed by a morning of hiking and waterfall repelling. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
If a car already knows where you like your seat positioned, what radio stations you favor and how you want the air conditioning set, would you be more likely to buy it? Mercedes Benz thinks you might be. A project to develop what it calls the predictive user experience will observe how drivers and passengers use a car and analyze the data to anticipate their wants, from mirror positioning to GPS destinations. Those preferences could then be transferred among Mercedes and only Mercedes vehicles, adding a reason for customers to stay with the brand. "Today when you purchase a car or lease a car, you need to spend a long time, sometimes weeks, before you set your car up the way you want it," said Johann Jungwirth, chief executive of Mercedes Research and Development North America. In the predictive technology project, created as a prototype for the Concept S Class Coupe shown at the Frankfurt motor show last year, all of a driver's preferences and settings are transferable from car to car. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
One day last winter, I was down in my unfinished basement working on some music, and my fingers were too cold to play the guitar. So I grabbed a space heater that I was long term testing for Wirecutter, placed it on the wooden workbench where my audio workstation was set up, and plugged it into the nearest power strip the one my Marshall amplifier was also plugged into. I turned the heater on and waited five seconds. The power strip blew up. It might not have been the dumbest thing I'd ever done, but as I watched the sparks fade from the smoldering lump of burned plastic, I knew it was high on the list. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, an estimated 25,000 residential fires are associated with the use of space heaters every year, causing more than 300 deaths and 6,000 trips to the emergency room. Despite the frightening numbers, though, space heaters are actually much safer now than they used to be. "The electric heaters that I grew up with were open element," said Linda Hotz, category director for the Home Comfort team at the home appliance maker De'Longhi. "Most heaters today are 100 times better, but it still has a heating element, so it isn't as safe as an air purifier, for example." While electric, radiant, or convection heating is typically safer and more efficient than a combustion heating system, heat production still requires heat, which always carries risks. Fortunately, space heater designs now have better insulation around the heating coils and smaller grates to prevent curious fingers from finding their way inside. Many modern space heaters including those recommended by Wirecutter also have an automatic shut off that cuts the power when the device reaches a certain temperature, and a sensor to detect a blocked air passage that could cause heat to build up. Some have tip over switches that shut down the heater if it's not flat on the ground. As Ms. Hotz noted, most home space heaters must now be approved by an independent safety testing laboratory, such as Intertek (whose certification often appears as an "ETL" seal on the item) or UL. But as I demonstrated in my basement, nothing is idiot proof. So here are a few ways to ensure you're using a heater safely. The Heater Belongs on the Floor It may be tempting to place your space heater somewhere so it blows right in your face. Don't do that unless you're lying flat on the floor, which is just about the only place it should ever go. Don't set it on a shelf or a stool or a wooden workbench in the basement. If possible, keep it off the rug, too, and definitely off your bed. While these scenarios might appear safe, they increase the risk of the heater falling, tipping over or otherwise overheating, which could start a fire. To avoid that, we generally recommend placing your space heater on the flattest, smoothest surface available. Some of Wirecutter's picks, including the Vornado VHEAT Vintage Heater, let you tilt the heating element upward; the Vornado VH200 and AVH10 are angled slightly upward by default, but you can't tilt them any further. Don't try to find a way around that. Keep It Away From Water This should go without saying, but electricity and water are an even deadlier combination than orange juice and toothpaste. Keep your space heater out of kitchens and bathrooms. The Consumer Product Safety Commission calls it the "three foot rule," and it's pretty simple: Avoid placing a space heater within three feet of anything flammable. Some manuals list curtains, papers, furniture, pillows and bedding as objects to stay away from. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers recommends further precautions, including keeping flammable materials like paint and matches far away. If there's even a slight risk of a pillow or another flammable object falling, such as in an earthquake, set the space heater somewhere the object won't land on it. Never Leave the Heater Alone The best way to prevent a fire is to never leave a space heater running unattended. If you have children or pets that could knock over a heater or drape fabric on it, keep a close eye on its operation. The U.S. Fire Administration recommends keeping young children at least three feet from a space heater, but it's best not to leave one in a room or closet within reach of children, even if it's unplugged beyond the fire risk, the heater is a 15 amp appliance drawing considerable current. The plug and cord, combined with some intuitive on/off switches, pose a hazard to a curious toddler who won't be anticipating an electric shock. The instructions with many space heaters also warn not to leave them on while you sleep. Several of Wirecutter's favorites, such as the De'Longhi TRD40615T, and the Lasko FH500 All Season Comfort Control Tower Fan Heater in One, come with timers to minimize the chance of their running unattended. (Oil filled radiators like the De'Longhi are particularly good for bedrooms because they retain heat for longer and continue emitting warmth after they shut off.) It Wants to Be in a Wall Outlet Most modern space heaters should come with enough cord slack to allow you to plug them into a wall outlet and still position them conveniently in the room for maximum warmth. Notice that we said wall outlet: Manufacturers advise against plugging space heaters into surge protectors, extension cords, plug timers, G.F.C.I. outlets (the kind with the test and reset buttons) anything that's not a wall outlet. Those added layers of electrical connection can overload the circuit, or create additional resistance that allows heat to build up, potentially resulting in a fire or internal electrical damage. Many manufacturers also recommend keeping your space heater a few feet away from the wall where it's plugged in, to avoid overheating the wall itself. A lot of the picks in Wirecutter's guide fill an entire room with heat, so you should be able to get adequate performance with the heater at a safe distance. Space heaters with smart home functionality are rare in the United States. But the technology and the regulatory standards are moving quickly, and we can expect more smart space heater tech in the next year or two. In the meantime, if you want use a heater remotely or on a schedule, a few of Wirecutter's picks can do that. The Lasko FH500 All Season Comfort Control Tower Fan Heater in One, and the Vornado OSCTH1 have digital timers built in. Wirecutter's oil filled radiator pick, the De'Longhi TRD40615T, has an analog 24 hour dial you can use to set a schedule. If your space heater lacks a timer or if you're just determined to bark heating orders at your voice assistant consider a plug in smart outlet like the Wemo Mini. Although most manufacturers discourage plugging a space heater into an extension cord or surge protector, a representative of the Wemo outlet's manufacturer, Belkin, said in an interview confirming Wirecutter's interpretation of the product specs, as well as our tests that a Wemo Mini should be safe to use with space heaters for up to 15 amps or 1,800 watts of power. Most of Wirecutter's picks max out at 1,500 watts. But not all heaters are the same, and the Belkin representative did add a caveat: "Some space heaters with embedded fans might consume more power and cause a high inrush current, which could damage or wear out the switching contacts." So you should be good to go but remember, don't turn on a heater without first making sure it's positioned safely, and don't leave it running unattended. A version of this article appears at Wirecutter. Interested in learning more about the best things to buy and how to use them? Visit the site, where you can read the latest reviews and find daily deals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Thomas Ades, left, and John Adams. Piano concertos by the two composers will have their premieres on the same night in Boston and Los Angeles. After 250 years or so, the piano concerto has some life in it yet. This week alone, two piano concertos by two eminent composers, Thomas Ades and John Adams, will have their premieres on the same evening. They follow close on the heels of another, by the Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, presented by the Seattle Symphony earlier this year. On the East Coast, Mr. Ades will conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra in his unambiguously titled Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, featuring Kirill Gerstein. On the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Gustavo Dudamel, will play Mr. Adams's "Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?" with Yuja Wang. In their own postmodern ways, these concertos acknowledge the genre's long and wide ranging history, while also searching for what else it is capable of. Here are previews of both. If this piece has a predecessor, it's Mr. Ades's "In Seven Days" (2008), a work that moves fluidly between concerto and tone poem. Mr. Gerstein was performing it with the Boston Symphony in 2012 when he gathered the courage to ask the composer to write something for him. "I remember saying that I knew I had to stand in line for a while," Mr. Gerstein said. "And Tom charmingly said, 'Does it have to be a solo piece?'" (Mr. Gerstein later learned from Mr. Ades's publisher that he had "skipped the line," by a lot.) Mr. Ades, 48, wanted to write, he recalled, "a proper piano concerto." And in Mr. Gerstein he found a muse to explore the form's tradition and the idea of virtuosity itself. The two met in the mid 2000s while performing Stravinsky's "Les Noces," and have since become friends with the kind of mutual admiration that leads to new music: Mr. Ades arranged a Berceuse from his opera "The Exterminating Angel" for Mr. Gerstein, who gave its premiere last month in Vienna. They've also embarked on a two piano recital tour that will stop at Zankel Hall in New York on March 13. But there is always a twist with Mr. Ades. He revels in homage and quotation just listen to his delightful Belle Epoque pastiche score for the film "Colette" and here he finds ways to adhere to convention while at the same time breaking free with surprising melodies and dizzying demands on the pianist. "I've really asked this piece what it wanted to do," Mr. Ades said. "What it wanted to do was speak along traditional lines, the way a tree is a traditional form: It will always have a trunk. But I suppose part of me feels that the most freshness can be found in revisiting the tradition." While preparing for the premiere, Mr. Gerstein who with this week's performances is reuniting with the Boston Symphony after recording Busoni's colossal Piano Concerto in C with the orchestra has often checked in with Mr. Ades, sending cellphone videos and asking interpretive questions in text messages. "I feel like I don't have any anxiety," Mr. Ades said. "Kirill seems to absorb it, and it speaks through him. It's nice not to have any worry." "I can't play the piano," Mr. Adams, 72, confessed in an interview. "I have never even taken a piano lesson." That hasn't stopped him from writing some of the most spellbinding contemporary music for the instrument, like "Phrygian Gates" or the joyous and sweeping "Grand Pianola Music"; or the duet "Hallelujah Junction," which was inspired by the name of a truck stop and was a case, he has often said, of a title looking for a piece. His new concerto has a similar origin story. While working on his oratorio "The Gospel According to the Other Mary," he said, he came across an old New Yorker article that included a phrase begging to be a title: "Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?" Mr. Adams hoped the quote came from Chuck Berry, but found out later it was Martin Luther's. The words also suggested, Mr. Adams said, the Totentanz, or danse macabre. You can hear a similarity between Liszt's "Totentanz" and "Must the Devil": Both pieces begin with a low and lumbering piano part over the orchestra. But whereas Liszt opens with a Dies Irae melody, Mr. Adams aims for something funky and distinctly American. (The orchestration calls for a honky tonk piano and a bass guitar.) What follows is a concerto that more or less adheres to fast slow fast convention but within a sui generis, single movement form (as opposed to three, like the Ades) similar to the way Mr. Adams has written symphony length works without identifying them as such, like "Harmonielehre" and "Naive and Sentimental Music." "We live in a time when there are no templates," he said. "Mozart was a genius but he didn't have to find a new template for each piece. Each of us, when we write a new piece now, whether it's a 22 year old composer or someone my age, we have to decide its form." The piano part, though it will be played by other soloists including Jeremy Denk and Vikingur Olafsson in the future, was written specifically for Ms. Wang a superstar who delivers blurry handed dazzle in showy standards but nuanced readings in more quietly demanding works, like Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor. "She's in there a lot," Mr. Adams said of "Must the Devil." He recalled being impressed by a video of Ms. Wang playing Prokofiev with the conductor Claudio Abbado, but found "real depth" in a recording of Rachmaninoff's Etudes Tableaux. "I thought: There's something there besides the flash." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Bollywood movie "Dabangg 3" opens with several bangs: Wedding robbers are doing what wedding robbers do collecting guests' gold chunks and cash when the police arrive on the scene. The officers bumble until their leader, our hero, Inspector Chulbul Pandey, blasts his way onto the scene. He comes flying through a wall, riding what looks to be a giant drill (or is it a modest rocket?) and proceeds to punch, karate chop, kick, toss in the air, and generally drub the miscreants in a way that would be purely cartoonish if not for a dose of mild sadism. (Crotch, meet knife.) Wasting no time on narrative niceties, the movie cuts right from the fight to a song and dance number. There, Chulbul, played with ridiculous, winking confidence by Salman Khan, assures us of what we already know: "I am fearless ... fearless ... fearless." Khan has a gym toned physique that works better in brawls than in dances, where all those muscles look constricting. He gets by with a kind of minimalist semaphoring that distills the moves into gestures and poses. A close up of his rear, as the weight shifts from cheek to cheek, gives a decent sense of his charm onslaught: It's dopey, broad, ripe with self assurance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
At New York Fashion Week, Where to See and Be Seen None The designer Wes Gordon, left, chats with Jessica Chastain at the preview party for L'Avenue, which opened Monday at Saks Fifth Avenue. Andrew White for The New York Times Fashion may be a sprawling global industry but in many ways it can feel a lot like a high school, with its own cliques, pecking order, hangouts and cafeteria. For years, the last role has been played in Paris by L'Avenue, a brasserie on Avenue Montaigne cater corner from Dior's warren of dove gray salons and just down the street from the headquarters of Dior's parent company, Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, and the star magnet hotel that is the Plaza Athenee. Run by the Costes family, owners of the Beaumarly hospitality group, it has made something of an art out of catering to the style/celebrity industrial complex in the sort of offhand way that requires enormous amounts of care and concentration. Go for tea and look, Sidney Toledano, head of the LVMH Fashion Group! Head upstairs to the bathroom and hey, the supermodel Joan Smalls! Turn your head and oh, Delphine Arnault, executive vice president of Louis Vuitton and LVMH heir. Order a spritz and hello, Rihanna. And now L'Avenue has come to New York. Just in time for New York Fashion Week, L'Avenue at Saks the first American outpost of the Costes empire is scheduled to open on Monday on the eighth and ninth floors of the department store's renovated flagship, across from Rockefeller Center. The jewel in the Saks' crown, the restaurant/bar/salon is a clear reflection of the way the store wants to be positioned in the coming retail battle for New York: the fashion insiders' power hub, a de facto meeting place for the style elite and those who would like to be. The Saks president Marc Metrick flanked by the models Joan Smalls, left, and Carolyn Murphy at the preview party. Andrew White for The New York Times The first test came last week, when Marc Metrick, the Saks president, was host of an unofficial opening dinner for designers and assorted other fashion folk (plus Jessica Chastain and her husband, Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo). Joseph Altuzarra was there, as was Wes Gordon of Carolina Herrera with the model Grace Elizabeth; Kim Jones of Dior Men stopped by, as did Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim from Oscar de la Renta. Olivia Palermo, the front row fixture, showed up, and so did Selby Drummond, the former Vogue editor tasked with connecting Snapchat and fashion, and so on. "Don't take this the wrong way, but it doesn't feel like a department store restaurant," Alina Cho, the journalist and CBS contributor, said to Helena Foulkes, chief executive of Hudson's Bay Company, which owns Saks. Ms. Cho often goes to L'Avenue in Paris, so she was interested to see how the ethos had translated. "I love the fries," she said. Andrew White for The New York Times The menu in New York is pretty much the same as the menu in Paris: a skinny meets comfort food mix of Asian and French basics that reflects fashion tastes more than foodie ones. Think Vietnamese style spring rolls and steak tartare and shrimp risotto. Mr. Metrick said he did encourage the Costeses to add a few items that appeal to New York palates, like a chopped salad. Not that that really matters all that much. The food has never been the point in Costes restaurants. "It's the people watching," said Ms. Cho, who added, "Sitting on the terrace for lunch at L'Avenue has been a Paris ritual for as long as I can remember. It's an institution." Designed by Philippe Starck, who masterminded the Costes' first venture, Cafe Costes in Les Halles , L'Avenue at Saks covers almost 16,000 square feet and has its own entrance, for customers who find the idea of handbags as an amuse bouche kind of distasteful. Philippe Starck decorated the new L'Avenue space at Saks. Andrew White for The New York Times The eighth floor (which used to be the Cafe SFA, the dining equivalent of the store's shopping bags) has been transformed into Le Chalet, a bar modeled on an alpine lodge, with logs "procured from Europe" (as the fact sheet said) running the length of the ceiling, a stone wall and a scattering of mismatched faded floral couches. There's a kind of reading room with old china cups hanging from the eaves, and a balcony that will be open in the summer with views over Rockefeller Plaza. Up a curved staircase backed by a shelf lined in vintage French books is the main event (in a space that used to be a stockroom): another bar with sofas and chairs scattered about, and, at the rear, a restaurant that seats 181. Between the tables are large glass vitrines containing random objects that Mr. Starck collected at various flea markets over the past year; a long hallway to the elevator is lined with a stained glass installation by his daughter, the artist Ara Starck (who also made some of the throw pillows). The general feel is charming but exclusive, like a club that might or might not admit you, which is the hook. "I was really positively surprised," said Olivier Bialobos, the chief communications officer of Dior, who happened to be in town and came to the dinner. He said he liked the way the decor was "friendly and cozy at the same time." When he's in Paris, Mr. Bialobos said, he's at L'Avenue an average of twice a week. As for the New York version: "I will go again," he said. "You never think New York needs another restaurant," Ms. Cho said, "until a great one comes along." Did she think the same kind of people who are regulars in Paris would flock to the New York L'Avenue? Ms. Cho said she thought she would go back during fashion week. "So that would be yes." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LOS ANGELES Ending a power struggle in its senior ranks, Warner Bros. on Tuesday gave control of worldwide film production, marketing and distribution to Toby Emmerich, who rose through the studio by finding hits like "It" and shepherding "The Lord of the Rings" movies. Sue Kroll, one of Hollywood's highest ranking female executives, will leave Warner's management team on April 1 to become a producer on the studio's lot, where she will have offices next to Clint Eastwood and work on films like a remake of "A Star Is Born." Ms. Kroll had run Warner's film marketing and distribution division. "I love movies, and working even more closely with the filmmakers who bring great stories to life is both a great opportunity and an exciting new challenge for me," Ms. Kroll said in a statement. In an email to Warner employees, Kevin Tsujihara, the studio's chairman and chief executive, called her "a legend in the marketing world." The changes are being made as Warner anticipates new corporate oversight. AT T is fighting the Justice Department for approval of its 85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner, the studio's parent company. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Mr. Akunin is far less concerned than Shakespeare is with the prince himself, though he does award a central role to Hamlet's pal Horatio (Khris Lewin). Unlike the doofuses Rosencrantz (Owen Scott) and Guildenstern (Michael Propster), visitors who in their own way fit right in, Horatio is a true foreigner at Elsinore, arriving not only from another place but also seemingly another time. Speaking in prose, he wears monochromatic, contemporary clothes. Does he know that his black leather trench coat (the costumes are by Heather Klar) makes him look like a thug? No matter. He seems affable enough, and he's always been such a good friend. "I have an unusual occupation," Horatio tells Claudius (James Phillip Gates), Hamlet's throne seizing uncle turned stepfather. "I explore human nature, which means I have to do a lot of traveling. Yesterday I was in Wittenberg, today I'm in Denmark, and tomorrow perhaps I'll be in Poland." Ominous? Could be. But in Denmark, he noses around, gumshoe like, asking questions and supplying helpful information often amusingly, in Mr. Lewin's solid and clear performance. On the subject of Hamlet's father, who mistook him in the dark for the prince: "As you know, they say ghosts have poor eyesight." Presented by Red Lab Productions and Roust Theater Company, in a translation by Ileana Alexandra Orlich, the play flits quickly from one scene to the next like a "Hamlet" highlights reel. For Mr. Akunin's witty variation to work, the performances need to have some depth, yet Horatio is most of the time the only vivid presence. (An exception: Joy Hermalyn's guilt stricken Gertrude, in a pivotal confrontation with Horatio.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Live in one neighborhood in New York City long enough and other neighborhoods begin to feel like foreign countries. As with countries, there are some you want to visit and some you don't. The Upper East Side has long been one of the lands I wanted to visit. But I've been a Brooklyn boy for more than 20 years, so trips to that far northerly region have not always been convenient. Recently, however, my girlfriend moved into an apartment on East 85th Street between Second and Third Avenues. Frequent trips up the Lexington Avenue line and, later, the new Second Avenue subway, followed. In short time, that neighborhood slowly began to reveal some of its secrets and charms, and a long interborough holiday of sorts commenced. The reader, at this point, may wonder why, of all New York neighborhoods, the Upper East Side held a fascination for me. A fair question. Despite all its museums, stately architecture and polished thoroughfares or perhaps because of them the Upper East Side's reputation is as a stuffy, cushioned cloister of the wealthy and unadventurous. I can see that. But I can also see an area that has held on to its manners and personality while other locales its neighbor across the park, the Upper West Side, say have been pruned and vacuumed by the Big Bad Homogenization Machine, which sucks up bookstores and butchers and spits out Rite Aids and Chase banks. I've long nursed the pet theory that the Upper East Side has retained its old profile precisely because it is a redoubt of the well heeled. The affluent are conservative and move slowly. They don't like change and they are powerful enough to resist it. An example: A hundred yards from my partner's new address, to my giddy delight, sat Schaller Weber and Heidelberg Restaurant side by side, the twin totems of what was once the mighty German American stronghold of Yorkville. (When I mentioned to people that my girlfriend had moved to Yorkville, many asked "What's that?" The name doesn't enjoy the currency it once did.) I patronized the white clad meat men at Schaller Weber as often as I could, buying long wieners and thin, tiny Nurberger bratwurst; all manner of house made pates; spaetzle, both fresh and dried; obscure German mustards; Black Forest ham; prepared goulash; and those little square Ice Cube chocolates that taste like, yes, chocolate ice cubes, and that you can only seem to find in German establishments. When in a hurry, I'd grab a landjager, rip it open and gnaw on it on the way to the subway. A few blocks away, on First Avenue and 87th Street, was Glaser's Bake Shop, another relic of Teutonic Yorkville. The floor still testifies, in blue and white tile, that it was opened by John Glaser back in 1902. The store remains in the family. They're known for their black and white cookies. But that is a local treat the appeal of which I have never and never will understand. So I went for the strudel and turnovers. I took care never to be in a hurry. The workers are as slow as molasses, making time, which seems to stand still at Glaser's, move even more slowly. I didn't mind that much. It's good to slow down. (Glaser's will bake its last black and white on July 1. The owners have decided to close up shop.) Once done with the Germans, I moved onto the Italians. My girlfriend lived just two blocks from Erminia, a local treasure about the size of a walk in closet I'd long wanted to visit. (I write about food and drink. That my interests lean heavily toward the consumable cannot be helped.) Erminia is not a place you eat at alone. The cozy, timbered room exists in a permanent state of imperishable romance. And, so, as a twosome, we went, and were tucked into a corner table in the back. Everyone looked like a regular, at home. Soon, we did, too. Ticking Erminia off my to do list felt good. When my girlfriend asked if there were other items left on my Gotham bucket list, I paused. There weren't many. Write an article for The New Yorker. See Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden. Get a table at Rao's. Mission accepted. After some quick research, she learned from her sister, a longtime Upper East Side resident, that you can enjoy a drink at Rao's small bar even if you don't have one of those impossible to get reservations. This I did not know. A plan was born . The next Monday (actually, Halloween), we ventured into the Upper East Side's northerly neighbor, East Harlem. At Rao's bar, over bucket size Manhattans served by a man in a T shirt, we struck up a conversation with an older man who poured himself Campari and soda after Campari and soda. He said he drank it because it was low in alcohol and he could keep his head about him. Rum was what he really liked. This turned out to be one of the owners. I am not gregarious, but my girlfriend is and, somewhere between my second drink and a visit to the bathroom, she had charmed him and extracted an email address. We decamped to nearby Patsy's Pizzeria, an 85 year old institution where there was no wait for a table, and inhaled a pie in excited anticipation. Could it happen? Yes it could. Within a week, we had a reservation at the East Harlem icon. The meal was nothing but surprises. A red sauce joint with an outsize reputation usually means high prices and low quality. We got high quality and low prices. The waiter sat down and we all had a discussion about how we might stuff our faces. The lemon chicken, the meatballs, the orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe, the wine all superb. We thanked the owner and told him we'd bring him some rum. He nodded absent mindedly. Sure we would. There were similar evenings. The Upper East Side offers a wealth of old school restaurants, many of them pocket size, none of them in a hurry to innovate. Donohue's Steak House on Lexington, the smallest and coziest restaurant to ever call itself a steak house; Le Veau d'Or, one of the last of Manhattan's formal French restaurants; J.G. Melon, a corner building packed with regulars eating cheeseburgers and cottage fried potatoes; Bemelmans Bar, inside the Hotel Carlyle, where snacks come in silver bowls and the patrons come with silver spoons. One night, starving at 10 p.m., we wandered into Elio' s on Second Avenue near 84th Street. We had passed by many times without curiosity; the place looked like central casting for a New York Restaurant. Turned out Elio was Elio Guaitolini, who worked at Elaine's until he opened his own joint. Elio's serves much the same elite clientele Elaine's once did. I'm sure we had the most modest tax returns of anybody in the place, but we were treated well enough. The Martini I had, which the burly old bartender mixed by throwing it back and forth between two glasses, was unaccountably good. One Labor Day weekend, we checked in on the Frick Collection to make sure the Vermeers and Whistlers and Sargents were O.K. Reassured, we sat in the Garden Court and tried to imagine the building's days as a private residence. I posted a picture on Instagram of a tuna fish sandwich I had eaten at the Lexington Candy Shop, an old soda fountain, earlier that day. (Hey: it was a good looking sandwich.) A bartender who worked at the Bar Pleiades inside Cafe Boulud and who had been after me to stop by, commented, "You're getting closer." Bat signal received! An hour later, we were doing some posh day drinking at Bar Pleiades. My cocktail featured "Chartreuse snow" and was crowned with juniper berries. If you want to drink more affordably on the Upper East Side, you can. Just walk away from the park and keep going. Everyday pubs and saloons begin to pop up after Lexington. "Wing Night" (35 cents a wing) at Rathbones, a Second Avenue mainstay for four decades, became a tradition on nights when we couldn't afford the neighborhood's other offerings. (That was often, to be honest. As a foreign country, the U.E.S. is Scandinavia, cost wise) So did Ryan's Daughter, which has been on East 85th since 1979, and where they scatter free bags of Utz chips along the bar top. More bars need to do this. By the end of 2017, my girlfriend ha d decided to move to Brooklyn. Before we left, one task remained. We hadn't gotten that bottle of rum to the owner of Rao's. On our final night on the Upper East Side, hooch in hand, we repaired to Rao's. Drinking at the bar was a bartender I knew from Gallagher's Steakhouse, making our reservation free welcome a little smoother. Also at the bar was a barkeep from Bobby Van's. All the steakhouse bartenders drink at Rao's, it seems. The owner drifted into our orbit, Campari and soda in hand. We reminded him who we were, thanked him again for fitting us in, and handed him the promised booze, a bottle of Havana Club rum we had squirreled back from a trip to Cuba. His eyes flickered with dim recognition and he placed the rum aside, as if it was the tenth bottle he had been given that night. As we had before, we fell back on Patsy's for sustenance and absorbed another pie. Still no wait. To our surprise (his, too) the bartender from Bobby Van's was at a neighboring table. He sent over a piece of cheesecake. From there, we went to Brandy's Piano Bar, a scruffy cabaret that ought to be in Greenwich Village, but that sits incongruously on East 84th Street. It's the kind of place where the bartenders and servers sing and call out their liquor preferences. We bought the pianist a Jameson and a waitress a vodka, and listened to Berlin, Sondheim, Abba and Billy Joel. (Oh I got those Joel tickets for Christmas.) The next day, the move commenced, and my uptown girl became a Brooklynite, just like me. The regular rides along the Q and 4 lines ended as abruptly as they had begun. In fact, that first week, I didn't use the subway at all. The Upper East Side became a foreign country once again. But at least I'd been there. Nice place, if pricey. I'd like to visit again sometime. Robert Simonson's most recent book is "3 Ingredient Cocktails: An Opinionated Guide to the Most Enduring Drinks in the Cocktail Canon." He contributes regularly to the Travel section. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"If you have faith, then it must be true," says the man who has just extracted slimy gobbets of flesh from a woman's abdomen with his bare hands and no incision. The gobbets, he says, are disease causing "negativities," though we know they are actually chicken guts marinated in fake blood. Faith and faithlessness in healers, in countries and even in art forms are the ideas animating "Felix Starro," an earnest world premiere musical by the novelist and playwright Jessica Hagedorn (book and lyrics) and the composer Fabian Obispo (music). The Ma Yi Theater Company production that opened on Tuesday at Theater Row is said to be the first musical by Filipino Americans ever presented Off Broadway. That's no small thing, if the form is to keep from shrinking into a souvenir of itself. And there is much to like about a work that brings the tropes of classic musicals to a story about people usually ignored by them. But you may also find yourself wondering whether those time tested techniques are really capable of doing justice to a story so unlike the ones for which they were devised. That there are two title characters is emblematic of the opportunity and the problem. One Felix Starro is the faith healer himself (Alan Ariano): a man of about 70, once famous in his native Philippines for his "hands of power." "Is he for real? Of course he is!" runs one lyric in a flashback song. "Just ask the mayor of Manila or that doctor from Zamboanga or Shirley MacLaine." But now, sick, broke and on the run from relatives of relapsed customers, he depends more and more on the other Felix Starro: his 19 year old grandson and namesake, called Junior. Over the course of a 10 day visit to San Francisco in 1985, Junior (Nacho Tambunting) helps his "lolo" set up shop in a grungy hotel room in the Tenderloin, where the older man hopes to serve the local Filipino American community with "spiritual surgery" for " 200 cash only." Junior, who prepares the chicken guts and knows how quickly the "cures" wear off, has lost whatever childish faith he once had in his grandfather's scam. Too mortified to take up the family profession and also unwilling to return to his "shantytown" existence in Baguio City, he has come to the United States with a different spiritual cure in mind. It's no spoiler to say that it involves becoming an American. In the first full song, "Pocket Map," the older Felix already guesses why Junior has been studying the streets of San Francisco as if they offered a clue and a direction. Mr. Obispo's music, in that number and throughout the score, makes sophisticated, wide ranging references to Sondheim, theatrical pop, the Dies Irae and tango. But though Ms. Hagedorn's lyrics often feature trenchant hooks, they seem to catch the same fish over and over. The ensemble numbers, including one ("Medley of Maladies") in which we meet several hopeful if zombielike patients, grow repetitive, and the solos are too often muddy. So just by faithfully translating the plot to the stage, Ms. Hagedorn's version of "Felix Starro" slices our attention too thinly and evenly. We hear not only from Junior but also from Felix, various patients , a Mrs. Delgado (Francisca Munoz) and her lawyer son, Ramon (Ryan James Ortega), Junior's girlfriend back home (Diane Phelan), a florist who figures in Junior's escape (Ching Valdes Aran) and even a hotel housekeeper (Caitlin Cisco) . Many of the songs are exceedingly well sung, especially by Mr. Tambunting and Ms. Cisco, who have the most biting material and are able to bring specificity and pathos to it. Even so, too much of the writing and a lot of the staging, by Ma Yi's producing artistic director, Ralph B. Pena feels overwrought and generic, as if the marvelous novelty of the milieu (to non Filipino audiences, anyway) had to be forced into customary formats. The choreography, by Brandon Bieber, is an odd pastiche of familiar gestures. The vocal arrangements, by Mr. Obispo and Ian Miller, often involve disembodied backup singing that tries to gin up choral climaxes in the manner of megamusicals: an effect unachievable with a band of four and a cast of seven. And where the playbook says you need a powerful, wide screen summing up anthem, "Felix Starro" dutifully shoehorns one in. Called "T.N.T." an abbreviation for the Tagalog phrase "tago nang tago," meaning "hiding, always hiding" it is about the plight of undocumented Filipinos taking on new identities and trying to keep one step ahead of discovery. Though moving and timely, the song has very little to do with the story we've been watching. That story isn't about hiding; it's about desperate need and false miracles. If "Felix Starro" means to equate those elements with the dashed dreams of immigrants, scammed by a cynical, faith healing America, it doesn't have the right narrative to get there. But I was nevertheless encouraged by its determination to see whether the form that has brought us "Oklahoma!" and "Sweeney Todd" and "Hamilton" can keep expanding in new directions. If it can, that would be a miracle worth believing in. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Bill Shine, the newly appointed co president of Fox News, commutes two hours every morning from Long Island to Midtown Manhattan, leaving his house so early that, as he tells colleagues, "the other guys on the train all have Sheetrock on their boots." He is seen in the newsroom as embodying a typical Fox News viewer: an Irish Catholic family man, son of a New York City police officer. His wife is the author of "Happy Housewives," an ode to female empowerment through 1950s style domesticity. (Sample advice: "Don't Nag Him to Death.") For years, Mr. Shine was known as an affable and loyal right hand man to Roger Ailes, the now deposed Fox News chairman, who relied on him to handle delicate matters with personnel. In 2011, when Sarah Palin, then a Fox News contributor, infuriated Mr. Ailes by breaking news on a rival media outlet, it was Mr. Shine who called her agent to clean up the mess. Now, Mr. Shine, a consummate behind the scenes player, is moving to center stage. On Friday, he was placed in charge of news and programming at Fox News and the Fox Business Network, where he will lead a newsroom still reeling from Mr. Ailes's sudden fall last month and a groundswell of allegations of harassment. It is an unusually public role for Mr. Shine, 53, who is little known outside his industry and shies from the more glamorous side of television that other prominent news chieftains, like CNN's Jeffrey Zucker and NBC's Andrew Lack, tend to relish. Mr. Shine has never been profiled by a major magazine, and there are few public photographs of him besides his official head shot. Through a Fox News spokeswoman, he declined to be interviewed for this article. But to many inside Fox's newsroom, Mr. Shine's promotion came as a relief. He joined the network in 1996, the year it was founded, and he is close with prominent anchors like Greta Van Susteren and Sean Hannity, who recommended him to Mr. Ailes. "He'll hear concerns, he'll hear criticisms, he will make decisions," said Robert Barnett, the Washington lawyer who has jousted with Mr. Shine on behalf of Ms. Palin and other clients. One media executive, echoing others who said they preferred the approachable Mr. Shine to the mercurial Mr. Ailes, put it this way: "If I had to call Roger, I'd call Bill if I could." Still, Mr. Shine is emphatically a member of the network's old guard, with a reputation as a corporate survivor and an assiduous flatterer. Some at Fox wondered if he would be kept on after his name, along with those of other executives, surfaced in recent accounts by two women who accused Mr. Ailes of harassment. Laurie Luhn, a former booker at Fox, told New York magazine that Mr. Ailes enlisted Mr. Shine to recommend doctors and make travel arrangements for her while she was involved in a relationship with Mr. Ailes. Mr. Shine has told associates that he never knew that the two were romantically involved. In the television industry, Mr. Shine's promotion was taken as a sign that Rupert Murdoch, who is now executive chairman of Fox News, does not intend a full scale removal of people who worked closely with Ailes. It also suggested that Mr. Murdoch is enamored of Mr. Shine, who is now tasked with leading Fox News as CNN's ratings surge and some popular anchors have suggested they may retire or leave the network. Silver haired and bearded with a facial scar picked up from a rowdy night in college Mr. Shine is a Long Island native, who grew up past where the island's electrified train tracks end. After college, he worked as a producer at local stations there. He married a fellow producer, Darla Seneck, and met Mr. Hannity, who was soon to start at Fox News. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Producing "Hannity Colmes," Mr. Shine showed a knack for earning ratings and managing talent, quickly winning Mr. Ailes's trust. When Ms. Van Susteren was lured to Fox from CNN, Mr. Shine was put in charge of her prime time show. In news meetings, Mr. Shine is known less for voicing strident political views than for suggesting segments that prove popular with viewers, like stories about the gas tax. At Christmastime, he treats executive producers to lunch at a Midtown steakhouse. He can also be blunt when he needs to be. When Liz Claman, a Fox Business anchor, complained to Mr. Shine last year about what she viewed as too much politics in the coverage, Mr. Shine dismissed her complaint by noting that her ratings were among the lowest on the channel, according to a former employee at the network with direct knowledge of the conversation. His carrot and stick style impressed Mr. Ailes, who often asked Mr. Shine to handle an upset anchor. It was Mr. Shine who informed Mr. Hannity, in 2010, that he could not headline a Tea Party rally in Ohio; the two remain close. In 2004, Mr. Shine was directed by Mr. Ailes to mollify Susan Estrich, a lawyer and Fox News contributor, who was upset after the Democratic convention in Boston when fellow Democrats criticized her for appearing on the network, according to two executives familiar with the discussion. (Ms. Estrich is now defending Mr. Ailes in the harassment case brought against him by the former Fox host Gretchen Carlson.) Mr. Shine, a twin, was one of four children and grew up in a household where, according to his wife's book, his parents sometimes went weeks without speaking. "He always said he would never want this for his marriage," Darla Shine wrote, describing her husband as someone who doted on their children, and a romantic who likes to dance on dates. "Eat your hearts out," she wrote. "He makes the beds on the weekend and will even do a few loads of laundry (including folding and putting away)." Ms. Shine's book, published in 2005 by Judith Regan, then an executive at Fox News's parent company, was a response to the series "Desperate Housewives." The book urged women to "shut up, stop whining, and for goodness' sake, stop nagging your husband." Ms. Shine appeared on the "Today" show, and Mr. Shine told Newsday that he was unembarrassed by the sections in the book about the couple's intimate life. "Hopefully, it'll start a conversation between women and men and husbands and wives," he told the paper. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Outside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where a gunman killed 11 people on Saturday. After the shooting, anti Semitic messages surged on Instagram. SAN FRANCISCO On Monday, a search on Instagram, the photo sharing site owned by Facebook, produced a torrent of anti Semitic images and videos uploaded in the wake of Saturday's shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. A search for the word "Jews" displayed 11,696 posts with the hashtag " jewsdid911," claiming that Jews had orchestrated the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Other hashtags on Instagram referenced Nazi ideology, including the number 88, an abbreviation used for the Nazi salute "Heil Hitler." The Instagram posts demonstrated a stark reality. Over the last 10 years, Silicon Valley's social media companies have expanded their reach and influence to the furthest corners of the world. But it has become glaringly apparent that the companies never quite understood the negative consequences of that influence nor what to do about it and that they cannot put the genie back in the bottle. "Social media is emboldening people to cross the line and push the envelope on what they are willing to say to provoke and to incite," said Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism. "The problem is clearly expanding." The effects of social media were also evident globally. Close watchers of Brazil's election on Sunday ascribed much of the appeal of the victor, the far right populist Jair Bolsonaro, to what unfolded on social media there. Interests tied to Mr. Bolsonaro's campaign appeared to have flooded WhatsApp, the messaging application owned by Facebook, with a deluge of political content that gave wrong information on voting locations and times, provided false instructions on how to vote for particular candidates and outright disparaged one of Mr. Bolsonaro's main opponents, Fernando Haddad. Elsewhere, high ranking members of the Myanmar military have used doctored messages on Facebook to foment anxiety and fear against the Muslim Rohingya minority group. And in India, fake stories on WhatsApp about child kidnappings led mobs to murder more than a dozen people this year. "Social media companies have created, allowed and enabled extremists to move their message from the margins to the mainstream," said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti Defamation League, a nongovernmental organization that combats hate speech. "In the past, they couldn't find audiences for their poison. Now, with a click or a post or a tweet, they can spread their ideas with a velocity we've never seen before." Facebook said it was investigating the anti Semitic hashtags on Instagram after The New York Times flagged them. Sarah Pollack, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in a statement that Instagram was seeing new posts related to the shooting on Saturday and that it was "actively reviewing hashtags and content related to these events and removing content that violates our policies." YouTube said it has strict policies prohibiting content that promotes hatred or incites violence and added that it takes down videos that violate those rules. Social media companies have said that identifying and removing hate speech and disinformation or even defining what constitutes such content is difficult. Facebook said this year that only 38 percent of hate speech on its site was flagged by its internal systems. In contrast, its systems pinpointed and took down 96 percent of what it defined as adult nudity, and 99.5 percent of terrorist content. YouTube said users reported nearly 10 million videos from April to June for potentially violating its community guidelines. Just under one million of those videos were found to have broken the rules and were removed, according to the company's data. YouTube's automated detection tools also took down an additional 6.8 million videos in that period. A study by researchers from M.I.T. that was published in March found that falsehoods on Twitter were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than accurate news. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all announced plans to invest heavily in artificial intelligence and other technology aimed at finding and removing unwanted content from their sites. Facebook has also said it would hire 10,000 additional people to work on safety and security issues, and YouTube has said that it planned to have 10,000 people dedicated to reviewing videos. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, recently said that although the company's longtime principle was free expression, it was discussing how "safety should come first." At Twitter, for example, employees are increasingly concerned that the company is floundering in its treatment of toxic language and hate speech, said four current and former employees who asked for anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. The employees said their uncertainty surfaced in August, when Apple and other companies erased most of the posts and videos on their services from Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of the right wing site Infowars but Twitter did not. (Twitter only followed suit weeks later.) Saturday's shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue led employees to urge Twitter's leadership to firm up a policy on how to deal with hate speech and white supremacist content, two of the people said. Twitter did not address questions about its employee concerns on Monday, but said it needed to be "thoughtful and considered" in its policies. "Progress in this space is tough but we've never been as committed and as focused in our efforts," Twitter said. "Serving public conversation and trying to make it healthier is our singular mission here." Instagram, which was created as a site for people to share curated photos of their food, adorable pets and cute children, has largely avoided scrutiny over disinformation and hate content especially when compared with its parent, Facebook. But social media researchers said that the site had over the last year become more of a hotbed for hateful posts and videos meant to provoke discord. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
new video loaded: Sit With Santa at the Arctic Circle | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Jo Ellen Chism, 57, a retiree who lives in The Woodlands, Texas, about an hour outside Houston, was nervous about attending her stepson's wedding on June 20. "They were going to postpone it, but then the Catholic church decided they would open and would have up to 75 people," she said. "75 people seemed like a pretty big gathering to me during this Covid time." She went to support her family. She was inside the church for an hourlong service that included a processional and communion. At the reception, at Haak Winery, she sat indoors at a round table with other guests, some of whom were from out of town. While everyone started the day in masks, they took them off for photos and never replaced them. Her symptoms started four days later. With a runny nose, sore throat and bad headache, it could have been a sinus infection. Two days later she tested positive for coronavirus along with 12 other guests, including her 10 year old grandson and the groom's 76 year old grandfather. He is still recovering after a trip to the emergency room with double pneumonia. She said 13 additional guests had symptoms but didn't get tested. Ms. Chism's oldest son kept track of all the sick guests through the seating chart, on which he marked who was positive, negative and untested. Still, like most super spreader events, without sophisticated contact tracing, it's impossible to identify patient zero. "I could just kick myself because I probably shouldn't have gone to that wedding," she said. "I am really thankful I was not terribly ill." (She missed the birth of two grandchildren because of her need to isolate.) After a brief pause, wedding season is back in full swing across the country. Couples are working within the confines of state laws to carry out their nuptials during the pandemic. But despite precautions coronavirus has swept into many of these events, both large and small, infecting guests and vendors. The situation is so dire, some wedding planners are self quarantining after events and even subcontracting their duties at the reception, the part of the weddings where people mingle more closely. Some brides and grooms are having guests sign liability forms upon arrival. Others say they are losing sleep for two weeks after their wedding, wondering what unintentional harm they might have caused to people they love. In June, a wedding planner in Arkansas who wished to remain anonymous to protect her business predicted weddings would become the next super spreader events. "Weddings are so different from going into a store or sitting in a restaurant for 45 minutes," she said. "These receptions last for three, four hours, and everyone is in an indoor space, breathing the air. They aren't wearing masks and they are dancing. And when they start drinking, it's like there is no pandemic." Six months ago her anxieties were about the weather or tight schedules. Now they are much heavier. "I am scared there is going to be an outbreak at one of my weddings and someone is going to die." The problem, she said, is that she, along with other vendors, are helpless at controlling guests' behavior at a private party. "All the vendors are masked up, and I am cracking the whip on the vendors, but I can't do anything with the guests," she said. That vendor, despite her nervousness, pointed out that she is contractually obligated to carry out terms of the contract signed with the couple. Sarah Bett, a wedding planner in Houston, said even if vendors had power to rein in rowdy guests, the bride and groom could just move their event to a less strict venue. "Some venues make the bride wear masks, while others say those walking down the aisle are exempt," she said. "It's a little lawless down here." Without universal standards she is at the mercy of her clients, many of whom want their festivities indoors, without masks, with out of town friends and with dancing. "I have a grandmother who is 90 who I am around a lot," she said. "I haven't had my first wedding yet this summer, but when I do, I am going to self quarantine after." State laws vary when it comes to weddings. Some wedding spaces are governed by the same rules as restaurants, meaning they can accommodate a certain percentage of their overall capacity. In Arkansas, for example, you can fill venues to 66 percent capacity. So an event in a 1,000 person ballroom can legally host 666 guests. In other states events are limited to the size of the group. In parts of New York, for example, gatherings are limited to 50 people regardless of the space. Ms. Bett said many of her clients feel safer with smaller affairs. "I have clients doing private, intimate ceremonies, because no one is making a big stink about those," she said. "No one wants to be the new epicenter of the outbreak." But even weddings with the tightest guest list aren't immune to the coronavirus. Sunshine Borrer, 26, a veterinary technician in Houston, attended her sister in law's wedding in Crockett, Texas, which has a population of 6,000. "It was a real small town," she said. "Covid wasn't something I was super concerned about." The 30 person wedding was held outdoors, but the after party was in a small bar area of an indoor restaurant. It took about a week for her symptoms to develop. She tested positive for the coronavirus, along with the bride and groom, another couple, and the bride's daughter. Fortunately all cases were mild. She noticed there is no etiquette for how to communicate a coronavirus outbreak to wedding guests. "The bride and groom maybe told the people they were living with, but that was it," she said. "They told one of my other sisters in law, and she is a nurse, so she took it upon herself to tell people." Ms. Chism said it was her oldest son, not the bride and groom, who alerted wedding guests to the virus exposure. "If it were me I would have been on the phone calling every single person," she said. "But it wasn't me." Pre wedding events are risky as well. In July, Kathleen Oglesby, 66, hosted a tea party bridal shower at her home in Aubrey, Texas, for her daughter in law. The 10 guests wore big, Kentucky Derby style hats and ate mini Bundt cakes. Days after the event the entire guest list went into a two week quarantine after a guest tested positive for the virus. "She was a friend of my daughter in law's, and she helped me so much with the bridal shower that I went to her house and brought her a wreath as a thank you," she said. "I'm so lucky I didn't get it, because I probably wouldn't make it." Ms. Oglesby has an underlying heart condition. "It was really scary," she added. "My mind was running wild." Some Are Concerned About Risks Some couples are acutely aware of the fact that their wedding could turn into a super spreader event. Kate, 31, a social worker for the state of New York, married her husband, a 30 year old engineer, in a boutique hotel in central New York during the July 4 weekend. She didn't want to give her full name, because "there's a lot of judgment for people who went through with weddings, even with precautions." The event had less than 50 attendees, including vendors. Masks were on the entire time even outside and in photographs. There was no dancing not even a first dance for the bride and groom. "We didn't want to leave room for interpretation," she said. Still, she spent her wedding night in the honeymoon suite of the boutique hotel worrying. "I was hit with the thought, 'What did we just do? What if everyone gets sick?'" she said. "I didn't sleep more than 10 minutes that whole night." She checked in with guests regularly, making sure no one had symptoms. Only on Day 14 could she begin thinking about her wedding with joy. "My husband and I needed those two weeks to pass so the memories weren't tainted by anything terrible," she said. "It was a long two weeks." Some couples are turning to waivers to protect themselves from liability in case of an outbreak. The wedding planner in Arkansas said she uses her clients' fears about liability to drive them toward more protective measures. "I tell them, 'Listen, we don't know where liability is going to fall, and you are the host of this event,'" she said. "You want to say at the end of the day you did everything you could possible to keep your guests safe." Ms. Bett said, "I tell my clients, 'If you really feel you have to push this form, why are we having this wedding in the first place?'" Then there are the newlyweds who feel little responsibility for wedding guests getting infected. Ms. Chism's stepson, a 27 year old engineer in Houston who didn't want to be named because of the topic's sensitivity, believes his guests exercised free will when attending his wedding. "My wife felt bad and said, 'I feel like it's all our fault,'" he recalled. "I said, 'Look, they took a chance on coming, they knew the risk. People could have come or they didn't have to come.'" When asked whether he would make the same decision again, his answer was absolutely: "The day was very memorable, it felt like a normal wedding. Minus the part about people getting sick." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
THE third wave of gentrification is just now being felt in Long Island City, Queens. Artists and other creative types colonized the area's warehouses several decades ago, followed by a burst of high rise development aimed at singles and couples who wanted a lower cost alternative to Manhattan. Now apartments that can accommodate families are in demand, and buildings on the drawing board or under construction will have playrooms as amenities, along with gyms and rooftop spaces, area brokers say. "We're just seeing the infancy, no pun intended," said David J. Maundrell, the president of brokerage firm aptsandlofts.com, which has many listings in the area. "By the time the child is ready for preschool, there will be many options for them, and they can grow and stay in the community for 10 years." Families living in Long Island City now laud the neighborhood's new waterfront parks, its relative affordability and a congenial sense of community that, they say, makes the area feel like a suburban extension of New York City. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
There's always some risk when a dance company unveils a premiere, especially on gala night, when the crowd is full of donors. Will they like it? But that risk is lower when the choreographer is like an old friend of the company, with a knowledge of the dancers built up over years. Such is the case with Ronald K. Brown, whose new "Open Door" was the centerpiece of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's season opening gala on Wednesday at City Center, sharing the program with David Parsons's "Caught" (1982) and the enduring "Revelations" (1960). This is Mr. Brown's sixth piece for the troupe (his first, "Grace," returns later in the five week run). It's a pleasure to watch, if pleasure is sitting back and relaxing as fit bodies breeze through physically demanding, musically intricate material, on this occasion catchy Latin jazz (Luis Demetrio, Arturo O'Farrill and Tito Puente). If you've seen Mr. Brown's work, which tends to repeat itself, it's predictable and enjoyable all at once. First, though, there were formal and informal remarks, from trustees and esteemed guests and the artistic director, Robert Battle, who has really finessed the art of the curtain speech in his four years on the job. His jokes were funny and his praise for his predecessors unforced. The evening honored BNY Mellon, a major funder of the troupe, with the actors Chadwick Boseman and Brandy Norwood serving as honorary chairman and chairwoman. Mr. Boseman, a former student of Mr. Brown's, introduced "Open Door," which starts with a solo for the divine Linda Celeste Sims. Churning her arms around her body as if wrapping herself in fabric, she looked as invested as ever but had a softness that was less common for her. She marshaled more kick when joined by her equally sophisticated partner, Matthew Rushing (appearing as a guest artist), and eight other dancers. The atmosphere conjured by Mr. Brown's blended sources Afro Caribbean and Latin, spiritual and social dances is never less than joyous, peaking with a very "West Side Story" mambo section in which the women's full skirts (Keiko Voltaire's designs) get a lot of play. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The horses for the 146th running of the Kentucky Derby, which was moved to Saturday from May 2 and will have no spectators present because of the coronavirus pandemic, are listed in order of post position, with comments by Joe Drape and Melissa Hoppert of The New York Times. The morning line odds were set by Mike Battaglia of Churchill Downs. Tiz the Law, runaway winner of the Belmont Stakes on June 20 and the Travers Stakes on Aug. 8, is the 3 5 morning line favorite. He is the lowest priced morning line favorite since 1989, when the entry of Easy Goer and Awe Inspiring was also 3 5. King Guillermo was scratched Thursday with a fever, and Finnick the Fierce was scratched Friday with a foot issue. One inside gate and three outside gates of a new 20 horse starting gate will remain open. The post positions remain unchanged. The Preakness, the final leg of the Triple Crown in this year's rejiggered schedule, is set for Oct. 3, and will also be run without fans on site. How to watch: Coverage begins Saturday at 2:30 p.m., Eastern time, on NBC. It will also be streamed on NBC Sports Live. Here's how we see the field: Drape: This colt finished third behind Tiz the Law at the Belmont and the Travers. He isn't going to catch him here, either. Hoppert: His speed figures have steadily improved, and he has a new trainer and jockey. Sure, they are a combined 0 for 25 in the Derby, but Asmussen does have two seconds and two thirds. Drape: He is gray, and my mother always bet grays. That is the only case to make for a colt who has won twice in 10 tries. Hoppert: His last win came in January; he's just a cut below the rest. Drape: He won the Breeders' Cup Juvenile in November at odds of 45 1. His best performance since then was a runner up finish on the turf in his last race. He may have a future on grass. Hoppert: His sire, Court Vision, also started on the dirt before finding success on the turf. Pass. Drape: This closer showed signs of life, finishing second in the Indiana Derby in July. This is a big step up. Hoppert: He's the first Derby horse for this trainer, who grew up just outside Louisville and is based at Churchill Downs, but the feel good story ends there. Drape: He has had only three career races. Two of them were wins, though. His trainer has won this race twice, but that's not a whole lot to go on. Hoppert: He's the only horse in the field who has run against older horses, finishing second by a neck, and his speed figures have steadily improved. Intriguing. Drape: This colt won his first three starts as a 2 year old but has not found the winner's circle in nine starts since. Hoppert: A last minute addition to the field after the highly regarded Art Collector scratched, this closer faces a mighty task. Drape: He has not run nearly fast enough to keep up with most of the field. Hoppert: Seizing on another late opening, the connections of the sixth place Blue Grass finisher decided to shoot for the moon. Drape: He finished nearly 30 lengths behind Mr. Big News in the Oaklawn Stakes and turned around and beat Honor A.P. in the Shared Belief Stakes. Which one shows up? Your guess is as good as mine. Hoppert: Never count out a Baffert horse, but when he upset Honor A.P., he led from start to finish, an unlikely situation in the Derby. Drape: The third place finisher in both the Ellis Park Derby and the Indiana Derby, he was claimed for 100,000 to deliver two African American owners and a retired South Dakota high school teacher here. Nice story. Hoppert: He has won only twice in 10 tries, but both of those wins came at Churchill Downs last year. Drape: He finished 15 lengths behind Tiz the Law in the Belmont. Doubt that he will get much closer. Hoppert: This gelding was bred to excel on turf, and that's where he has been training leading up to this race. Drape: Pray for rain! His only victory in eight starts was on a sloppy racetrack. Drape: What's not to like? A 6 for 7 career record, owners you can root for and the possibility that he may become a horse of a lifetime. But I can't have the taste of chalk in my mouth. Hoppert: I like the taste, if it means picking winners, and there's no better horse in the field. Take this to the bank: This most unusual Triple Crown series will continue with a coronation on the line, asterisk aside. Drape: This colt has lost only once and will be the controlling speed from the gate. But he has distance limitations and might be staggering in the stretch. Hoppert: Another Baffert colt who has shown a lot of promise, but he has been inconsistent and shown signs of immaturity. His Haskell win did little to inspire confidence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Mr. Brown and Mr. Gomes both create stage worlds that contain same sex partnering as well as conventionally heterosexual duets; both allow for those same sex relationships to be interpreted in sexual terms. Although Mr. Brown is much the least experienced dance maker of this program's three, he's the one with the strongest sense of structural suspense. One group of four (one woman, three men) is juxtaposed with another of six (three male female couples); and what he does with each group keeps you wondering what will happen next. A sustained duet for two men looks natural: a study of intimate cooperation. His worst flaw here, one from which Mr. Gomes's work also suffers, is cuteness. Dancers flirt with the audience and jokily vie for attention in ways that shatter the stage reality they've been building together. The music is Rossini's unusually scored but appealing Duet for Cello and Double Bass in D major. If Mr. Brown can pare away his immaturities, he may yet become a choreographer. Mr. Gomes uses Dvorak's "American" String Quartet (No. 12 in F major, Op. 96) to tell a tale of social relations in small town America. One man wants to leave (with suitcase) despite his powerful affection for the woman we may assume is his wife. Two pairs of male female lovers spend time together, with one couple reaching the marriage ceremony as the ballet ends (veil, bouquet, trousseau, confetti); but one of these two men is keener on the other man than on his own girlfriend, and so sulks when his devotion is rejected. That's quite a soap opera to pile onto poor Dvorak's wonderful and large spirited quartet. Mr. Gomes is not short of ideas; but almost none of them feel organic. There are forcefully folksy handclaps where the music doesn't call for them; later, when the music develops a folk atmosphere, Mr. Gomes ignores it. Though I believe that there are many such small town stories to tell, I don't believe the way Mr. Gomes tells this one. He keeps nudging us to notice the same points about the same relationships. The long pas de deux between the husband and wife creates its own cliches. Larger than each work is the engaging impression created by Ms. Kent's dancers. They carry the evening. They aren't, however enriched or extended by it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The global "Sesame Street" family is getting three new Muppet members: Basma, Jad and Ma'zooza. The characters are creative and adventurous, speak Arabic and are set to tackle yet another difficult subject: the trauma facing refugee children in the Middle East. They will lead a new Arabic language, locally produced show, created by Sesame Workshop in conjunction with the International Rescue Committee, which aims to bring laughter and learning to children affected by displacement in Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. Called "Ahlan Simsim," which means "Welcome Sesame" in Arabic, the show will debut in early February 2020, according to a Medium post on Sunday by the show's executive producer, Scott Cameron. By tackling emotions like fear, loneliness and hopelessness, the show hopes to give children tools to succeed and understand the world. The purple furred Basma is almost 6 years old and loves to sing and dance, Mr. Cameron wrote. Basma welcomes Jad, a yellow furred boy of the same age, to the neighborhood with open arms. Jad likes to plan and organize and enjoys painting with a brush he brought from where he used to live. The two are followed around by Ma'zooza, a baby goat who eats anything shaped like a circle. The show is fueled by a 100 million grant provided by the MacArthur Foundation in 2017. Julia Stasch , the foundation's president at the time, said then they wanted to reach young children displaced by conflict and persecution in the Middle East by funding "the largest early childhood intervention program ever created in a humanitarian setting." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
On Tuesday, the trailer for the final season of "Game of Thrones" was released, and it reflects what fans already know: These final, near feature length episodes are going to be really, really big. Thinking about rewatching "Game of Thrones?" Here's our Season 1 rewatch guide. Here we get titillating glimpses of the final battles to come: Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow, steely as they lead their army on horseback; Grey Worm donning his helmet; the feet of a White Walker's horse touching down in Westeros. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
BRUSSELS There is a lot riding on Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's new "Golden Hours (As you like it)," set to music by Brian Eno, which opened at the Kaaitheater here on Friday. In December, the Brussels opera house, the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie, which co produced the work, and with which Ms. De Keersmaeker has had a 23 year association, announced it would have to remove all dance from its programming if projected budget cuts by the federal government go ahead. La Monnaie has had strong dance links since Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the Twentieth Century became its resident company in 1960. Mark Morris and his troupe were the controversial successors in 1988, and Ms. De Keersmaeker followed in 1992. Although her company, Rosas, has not been resident there since 2005, Ms. De Keersmaeker has maintained a strong relationship with the theater. La Monnaie is still waiting to hear what the government will decide. But "Golden Hours" might turn out to be one of the last dance performances it has a hand in producing. It would be nice to say that the work is a masterpiece of the kind that unquestionably demonstrates the potential loss to La Monnaie and its audience. In fact, it does unquestionably demonstrate a potential loss to La Monnaie and its audience, but for different reasons. "Golden Hours" is something of a mess. But it's a mess by an important and deeply thoughtful choreographer trying to carve out new terrain. For this, she needs rehearsal and stage time. Without the investment by co producers like La Monnaie (alongside a host of others here, including Sadler's Wells in London, the Kaaitheater and Montpellier Danse), ambitious works like "Golden Hours" don't get made, and don't get the chance to evolve. If that chance sounds utopian, think about theater, where works old and new often get several tryout weeks to iron out the kinks. Dance is a far more brutal business. New dance pieces are usually evaluated the very first time a paying audience sees the show, and they rarely run for long enough to allow choreographers to work on problematic elements. Often, dance pieces aren't really ready by opening night, and so it was with "Golden Hours," which is loosely structured around Shakespeare's "As You Like It." Ms. De Keersmaeker has rarely used narrative in her work. (Her 1990 "Stella" used text from Goethe's "Stella" and from "A Streetcar Named Desire," but disregarded a story line.) She has also rarely used pop music, and is usually given to more astringent tastes her last work, the 2013 "Vortex Temporum," used a blindingly tough score by the experimental French composer Gerard Grisey. "Golden Hours" takes its name from a song on Mr. Eno's 1975 album, "Another Green World," often described as an important transitional moment in his career as he moved toward an ambient minimalist sound. "Golden Hours" is, however, tremendously catchy, and it plays over and over at the start of the piece as 11 dancers walk very, very slowly forward, sometimes pausing. As they keep doing this upstage, downstage, upstage, downstage through repeats of the song, time seems suspended or uncertain, rather like Mr. Eno's words: "The passage of time/is flicking dimly/up on the screen." When they suddenly walk normally, it's as if a spell has been broken. The music stops, and a man hurls himself into a solo dance. Text is projected on both sides of the stage "I will no longer endure it" and soon enough it's clear that the dancers are enacting the characters and narrative of "As You Like It." (The man, Mikko Hyvonen, is Orlando, about to foil his brother's plot to have him killed in a wrestling duel.) From here on, most of the piece takes place in silence. Mr. Eno's music recurs sparingly, mostly performed by a guitarist and singer, Carlos Garbin, who plays a number of other songs from the album. But this music seems only to have a tangential relationship with what the work has become; an oddly ambivalent enactment of Shakespeare's play that teeters uncertainly between abstraction and literalism. The words projected on the sides of the stage clue us in to the actions and interactions, which would otherwise be impossible to decipher. But the textual extracts, frequently out of sync (perhaps teething problems?) with what seemed to be happening, are intermittent, no character names are given, nor are the play's multiple story lines offered in full. This presumes knowledge of the plot to say nothing of English among a predominantly French speaking crowd on Friday that is probably unrealistic. (A multilingual synopsis was given out in the program, but it's not a simple tale to keep in your head.) In some ways, the text seems more like a score than Mr. Eno's music, which feels disconnected from the work after the compelling opening scene. It's clear, watching the dancers, that they know the language of the play intimately, and that their movements are generated by its rhythms and meaning. Parsing the relationship between the dance full of spiraling turns, abrupt jumps, loping walks and refined gestures and the play's poetry is fascinating. Sometimes a dancer is so clearly incarnating both the dynamics and meaning of their "lines" that, even if a specific text isn't projected, you can almost hear them speaking. (Perhaps for this reason, the occasional thin singing of Mr. Eno's lines by various dancers is a particular disappointment.) Although the physical expressivity that the 11 dancers achieve is remarkable (special plaudits to the alluringly androgynous Aron Blom as Rosalind and to the febrile Georgia Vardarou), the choreographic language is repetitive and stretched thin across the work's two and a half intermissionless hours. The long silences and abrupt comings and goings can feel interminable, the pacing slack. We get little of the cut and thrust of the story, its highs and lows, disappointments and joys. Nor do we feel the comic warmth or the deep humanity of "As You Like It." "Golden Hours" remains unremittingly serious and dogged, without quite demonstrating that it has found its own identity. At least for the moment, while funding endures, Ms. De Keersmaeker has a chance of getting that right. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Installation view of Rem Koolhaas's exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "Countryside, the Future," which argues that cities are being supplanted by rural areas as centers of cosmopolitanism and dynamism.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times Installation view of Rem Koolhaas's exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "Countryside, the Future," which argues that cities are being supplanted by rural areas as centers of cosmopolitanism and dynamism. This much we knew by Tuesday night: at the electoral level, at least, the divide between America's cities and its hinterlands seems deeper than ever, with urban and rural having become almost synonyms for blue and red. The surprise that initially greeted this entrenched polarization reinforces, all too well, the thrust of the current exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: that the true terra incognita is outside of town. "Countryside, the Future," organized by the Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas, argues that architects, intellectuals and politicians have focused on metropolitan life to the point of myopia, and have missed convulsive changes demographic ones, political ones, technological ones in sparsely populated regions. Five years in the making, "Countryside" opened on Feb. 20 and closed three weeks later because of the coronavirus pandemic. The show is almost devoid of architecture as such, and instead examines the design history of nonurban areas through assemblages of historical propaganda and contemporary advertisements; torrents of agricultural statistics; and showcases of robotic tractors and crop seeding drones. As my colleague Michael Kimmelman wrote upon its opening, it has "something of the aesthetic of an old Soviet World's Fair pavilion," though the cacophonous exhibition design draws as much from today's meme culture as from yesterday's trade expositions. It plainly remains a messy, random, arch, inconclusive exhibition, and brings the same dispassionate or cynical gaze to the countryside that Mr. Koolhaas applied earlier to Chinese urbanization, to the mixing of art and commerce, and to the use and misuse of architectural preservation. There are shallow, cherry picked assemblages (like a collection of Vogue covers shot in the provinces, featuring Rihanna frolicking in a wheat field) and weird detours (two whole bays on gorilla habitats?). A major blind spot is the exhibition's indifference to Indigenous populations, and their past and contemporary management of land. Where it succeeds most is in its insistence on the cosmopolitanism and dynamism of the countryside where things can happen faster, and ambitions can be greater, than in the stultified cities of the West. Our theaters and nightclubs are gone, municipal shortfalls look certain, and urban refugee parents are infiltrating the P.T.A.s of farm country elementary schools. Is it perhaps not time, as Chairman Mao might say, for a return to "Countryside"? Along the winding museum ramps, Mr. Koolhaas and his team including Samir Bantal, Troy Conrad Therrien, and three columns' worth of credited collaborators and students hopscotch from Siberia to Kenya, from the Mojave Desert to the Japanese mountains, to correct the architectural profession's urban monomania. The show presents Nazi, Soviet and Maoist agricultural development plans, tacitly admiring their scale and ambition, briefly noting the millions of dead bodies that accompanied them. There are the socialist schemes of Charles Fourier, who designed self contained utopian societies for work, study, farming and sex. Visions of Roman villas and Chinese literati gazing at mountains give way to back to the land hippiedom circa Ken Kesey, then to wellness retreats and the eco bunkers of catastrophist millionaires. Certainly New Yorkers' revaluation of the countryside had begun long before the "Decameron" style outflows of remote working urbanites and their families, fleeing the coronavirus last spring. (No point denying that I was one of them. Born in New York, I spent more time in the countryside this year than I have in my entire life, holing up in rural Massachusetts and driving past farms with an equal distribution of Black Lives Matter and Make America Great Again yard signs.) The phrase "farm to table" has been a cliche for years, and Park Slope idealists long ago exported their Marie Antoinette rural fantasies to the Hudson Valley. Yet the pandemic now scything through sparsely populated regions as much as dense ones has judderingly accelerated new encounters between the city and its outskirts. Everyone from the farmers' market to the real estate brokerage can tell you that the arrival of high speed broadband in the countryside has flattened the space between urban and rural. Add now the pandemic's crushing of in person work, and your life in a Vermont forest or a Barbadian beach town might not look so different from your life in town. After all, the same digital commerce that has destroyed your Jane Jacobs approved urban neighborhood has also made possible a whole new life in the countryside, smoothed by just in time logistics software, enlivened by deliveries by drone. "What perverted genius thought of the name 'fulfillment center'?" asks Mr. Koolhaas in an early gallery. Near the end of "Countryside" is a rapturous paean to the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, in the Nevada desert said to be the largest industrial zone in the world whose enormous, windowless warehouses shelter the logistics operations of Walmart, Google, FedEx, and the Pioneer Nut Company. In this deregulated paradise, perfected by algorithms and staffed by robots, the Dutch architect finds a post human architecture more innovative, and pitiless, than anything back in town. One of the show's most bitter jokes is a mural size photo of Mr. Koolhaas's unmistakable bald head gazing out on the warehouses, in the same rearview pose as Casper David Friedrich's famous "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog." The desert factory, not the megacity, offers the best view of the capitalist sublime. Perhaps the strongest sections of "Countryside" are devoted to China, with several case studies of villages transformed by new logistics technology and digital commerce platforms. One town has become a leading producer of Ikea knockoff flat pack furniture; another has raised living standards by selling organic pumpkins to lodgers in renovated stone houses. (Students at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts did the research here.) Rural farmers sell apples fresh from the tree on the social network Kuaishou, the country cousin of TikTok. There's even a replica of the desk of a Chinese provincial official, backed by a film extolling President Xi Jinping's youth in the Shaanxi countryside. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. It was, of course, Mr. Koolhaas's firm that designed the Beijing headquarters of Chinese state television a decade ago, and mock Maoist echoes of the Cultural Revolution ripple through this exhibition: intellectuals "learning from the countryside"; bureaucrats sent down to the farm. Its undisguised admiration for Xi's China, not to mention its almost nostalgic gaze on colonial expansion and Soviet development, doubles down on Mr. Koolhaas's nonideological esteem for world reshaping ambitions. "This is what we have lost in the disaster of the modern project: the ability to think big," he wrote a quarter of a century ago in "S M L XL," his doorstop book with Bruce Mau. I'd suggest that the critical drubbing "Countryside" initially received bespeaks a total exhaustion with such grand efforts, and a sense that for young audiences especially today's overlapping emergencies have invalidated the ironic distance encapsulated in that photo of Mr. Koolhaas looking out over the Nevada industrial park. And yes, there is something dated in Mr. Koolhaas's go big approach, and careless in its omnivorous, oversaturated walls of Googled "research" outsourced to architecture students. Certainly this show's sections on Chinese localism, or Kenyan microfinance, or the physical architecture of the internet, have already been studied far more rigorously elsewhere. Certainly this nail biter of an election should leave all of us skeptical of the generalizations urban observers make of country life. But I am not so sure and I say this as a journalist, Mr. Koolhaas's first profession that the always online urbanites fed up with his irony and affirmation should be so proud of themselves, either. He may have a fatalistic acceptance of the world Xi Jinping and Jeff Bezos have forged, but his cool gaze and his critics' disdain for big pronouncements do not come from such different places. What "Countryside" does is take seriously the contention that all avant gardism gets commodified, that dissent is always co opted, and that under such conditions you might want to get out of town. "More than ever, the city is all we have," he wrote in "S M L XL." We don't even have that anymore. Through Feb. 14 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; guggenheim.org. (Timed tickets are required.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
LOS ANGELES Who will replace Robert A. Iger as chief executive of the Walt Disney Company when he retires in July 2019? It could well be Robert A. Iger. Disney is in talks to buy significant parts of 21st Century Fox, the media conglomerate controlled by the Murdoch family, and Rupert Murdoch has asked that any sale involve a commitment by Mr. Iger to extend his reign at Disney for a fourth time to help manage the absorption of Fox assets like the FX cable channel and the Star television operation in India. The request, reported on Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, was confirmed by two people briefed on the approach that Mr. Murdoch has taken in the talks, which they cautioned could still fall apart. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are confidential. Speculation about who might succeed Mr. Iger, 66, has increased in recent weeks. On Tuesday, some news outlets had Mr. Murdoch's son James, the chief executive of 21st Century Fox, as a likely candidate. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Bob Chapek, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, could take Mr. Iger's place. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
New tax rules will make it possible for workers to buy a type of annuity often called longevity insurance inside their retirement plans. The annuity aims to protect people from exhausting their savings in their later years. Longevity insurance is actually a deferred income annuity, in which a person pays a lump sum premium to an insurer in exchange for a guaranteed lifetime income stream that begins several years later perhaps well into the person's 70s or 80s. Until now, these annuities could not be widely used in 401(k) retirement plans and individual retirement accounts because those plans require account holders to begin withdrawals known as required minimum distributions at age 70 1/2 . But on Tuesday the Treasury Department announced that workers can now satisfy those rules if they use a portion of their retirement money to buy the annuities and begin collecting the income by age 85. The move is part of the Obama administration's broader effort to develop ways to provide Americans with more security in retirement. "As boomers approach retirement and life expectancies increase, longevity income annuities can be an important option to help Americans plan for retirement and ensure they have a regular stream of income for as long as they can live," said J. Mark Iwry, the Treasury's deputy assistant secretary for retirement and health policy. The new rules take effect immediately. To avoid the distribution rules, however, retirement plan participants can use no more than 25 percent of their total account balances, or 125,000, to buy the annuity, whichever is less. (The maximum dollar amount will be adjusted for cost of living increases over time.) So someone with a 500,000 account balance, for instance, can buy the maximum amount. And anyone who inadvertently exceeds the limits will have the opportunity to correct the error without penalty. The annuities must also be relatively basic and cannot be larded with many of the special features like cash surrender options that insurers sell in the commercial market. But annuity providers will be permitted to sell a feature that guarantees that the annuity owner's beneficiaries will receive the premium amount originally paid, minus any payments already made. They can also provide an option that would continue paying the income to a beneficiary after the annuity owner's death. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Though these options either cost more upfront or will ultimately reduce the income stream, insurance providers say many people buy them anyway because they are reluctant to part with such large sums with no guarantees. Treasury officials said that they wanted people to feel comfortable buying the annuities but that they also did not want to permit insurers to sell too many features that would reduce the income stream. Having more special options would also make it more difficult for workers to compare prices across providers. It remains to be seen if the new rules prompt more 401(k) providers to offer annuities. According to the Treasury Department, only about one in five 401(k) plans offers annuities, and few people elect to buy them when they have the option. Buying an annuity that doesn't begin making payments until much later perhaps more than a decade is more cost effective than buying an annuity at retirement and collecting the income immediately. The reason is straightforward: There is a higher chance the individual will not live long enough to begin collecting payments, and the money from people who die earlier benefits those who live longer. Take a 68 year old man who buys an income annuity and immediately begins collecting lifetime income of 1,000 a month, or 12,000 a year. He would pay a premium of about 170,000, according to New York Life. But if the same man bought the annuity at 58 and waited 20 years to collect his payments, he would pay less than 40,000 for the same 12,000 in annual income. According to Treasury officials, workers will have some flexibility when making their purchases. A person can, for instance, buy the annuities at age 58 or 68 and delay taking payments until age 80 or 85. But as with homeowner's policies and other types of insurance, the idea is to pay a smaller amount of money now for more protection later. "You're buying protection against risk in this case, the risk of outliving your savings," Mr. Iwry said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Andrew Scheer, the rabbi in question, was about to have a first date with Avital Zipper. Mr. Scheer's vocation was frequently a deal breaker once a woman learned of it. "I love being a rabbi it's a great honor but I would have to dance around what I did for a living and when I told them. It was like they were 12 years old again and speaking to their rabbi at their bat mitzvah," said Rabbi Scheer, 31, who is Modern Orthodox, grew up in Woodmere, N.Y., and is a Jewish chaplain for the Veterans Affairs New York Harbor Healthcare System and the New York City Department of Correction. "The girls I was meeting were lovely, but they were expecting a doctor or lawyer," he said. "Being a rabbi really impeded my dating life." Here's where the bar comes in. When they decided to meet the same night that she had replied to his query, they also found out that they lived only a few blocks from each other. When Rabbi Scheer entered Taproom No. 307 at 8 p.m., Ms. Zipper was seated on a stool waiting for him. By 2 a.m., they were the last people to leave. During those six hours his vocation came up. "I grew up religious, but he didn't look like the rabbis I grew up with," she said. "When he told me what he did, it was unexpected, but it didn't freak me out. He's not that random banker or millennial worker who's doing his own thing." Ms. Zipper was also impressed by his kindness. "I was really raw about my father, who passed away three months before we met. He was a veteran, and Andrew worked in the V.A. and the day before was Veterans Day," she said. "He was so compassionate. That really struck me. I felt understood." Rabbi Scheer felt similarly. "I was touched by how she spoke about her father," he said. "When I told her I was a chaplain, she said she thought it was great. She didn't make me feel bad about it. That's not a feeling I'd felt with anyone prior. It felt like I found someone who got me." A few weeks later he invited Ms. Zipper to a Hanukkah party at Rikers Island. To his surprise, she accepted. "I couldn't believe she was willing to go to a jail," Rabbi Scheer said. "When we entered, she went right to the women inmates' side and joined them and their families. She fell right into it like it was the most normal thing. She was dancing and talking to them. It was beautiful to behold." The couple became exclusive after that. Then a trip was planned to Indianapolis using points, miles and a Hyatt gift card previously bought on DansDeals.com. "We stood there and prayed," he said. "One of the hardest parts was not going into the professional mode, and just being her boyfriend, not her chaplain." A year passed, and the couple grew inseparable. Then came the proposal. On March 11, 2017, in 15 degree weather, under the Williamsburg Bridge, a favorite spot where the pair often biked or roller bladed, Rabbi Scheer got down on one knee and presented an unsuspecting Ms. Zipper with his grandmother's diamond ring. "Looking back, I should have known he was up to something because he never offers to go running with me," she said of the proposal. "I was caught off guard because we'd only talked about getting married in broad ways. But we'd both said each of us was the person we'd like to be with. He proposed two months after that conversation." They decided to have a short engagement. Modern Orthodox Judaism states that couples cannot live together until they are married. The couple moved quickly. Within the first week, a wedding dress was found at a local shop. A venue was picked. Rabbi Scheer's grandmother's ring was resized. A list containing the names of florists, bands and photographers was solidified. In August, a small apartment with only one closet in the East Village of Manhattan, just blocks from their synagogue, was secured. Then came registering at Bed Bath Beyond and the selling of many of their belongings on Craigslist. First went the love seat and couch, followed by the ottoman, chair, TV, desk and guitar, among other possessions. Unwanted clothing, pictures and other items went to Goodwill. "Tali's stuff is nicer than mine, so it sold faster, but I've been more proactive about selling it," Rabbi Scheer said. On Sept. 10, Rabbi Avi Weiss, at Temple Beth El in Cedarhurst, N.Y., married the couple in front of 275 guests. The bride's side of the family, most of whom were from Florida, were either flown in early or rented cars and drove, missing Hurricane Irma's wrath. Sharon Chesler, 37, Ms. Zipper's first cousin, with whom she lived for the last several years, remembers how the couple got together. "We were both working at home when she got Andrew's message," she said. "I asked her if it was creepy or interesting, and she said, 'I'm intrigued,' and wrote him back." Ms. Chesler cited Rabbi Scheer's shared religious background as part of the attraction. "It's amazing she found someone when she wasn't actively searching in the Orthodox community," she said. "I also told her, 'Your mother's going to die when she finds out what he does for a living. There's nothing that would make her happier.' " Pamela Scheer, 65, however, was unaware of how her son met his new bride. "He's always been very private," she said. "He wouldn't even make me his friend on Facebook, even though we are an extremely close family. In January he called and said he was bringing a friend to his father's birthday dinner." She asked if it was a man or a woman. "I wasn't sure the girl he wanted existed," Ms. Scheer said. "But she does. They just have this connection. He wasn't complete before. But she completes him. She's his meant to be." The wedding contained many highlights, including the signing of the ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, and the bedeken, a traditional veiling ritual in which the groom confirms the bride's identity. There was also an hourlong heartfelt ceremony; speeches; a tribute song ("You'll Be Back" from "Hamilton," rewritten and performed by the bride's four siblings); and a dance a thon. Before the married couple sat at their table in the dining room, they took an opportunity to mentally embrace the room, and each other. "I'd gotten advice from friends and our rabbi, who said to take a moment, and I felt like we needed to do that," Ms. Zipper said. "We needed a breath to see what we put together, and all the people who came to celebrate with us, and a moment to see the love. I got to see all the love." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Watch contestants sing their hearts out in the Eurovision Song Contest finale. And celebrate Mother's Day with the second season of the slow burn comedy "Mum." EUROVISION SONG CONTEST GRAND FINAL 3 p.m. on Logo. This wildly popular European vocal competition comes to an end, as singers representing the 26 final nations take the stage in Lisbon. Among the competing countries are Cyprus, Bulgaria and Finland. The first Eurovision contest was held in 1956, with seven participating nations. Now in its 63rd year, it has evolved into a global phenomenon, attracting superfans worldwide and putting artists like Abba (the 1974 winner) on the map. DUNKIRK (2017) 8 p.m. on HBO; also on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, HBO streaming platforms, Vudu and YouTube. This three time Oscar winner revisits a World War II rescue mission in 1940, when hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were evacuated from the French port city of Dunkirk as Nazi forces invaded. Directed by Christopher Nolan, the film boasts a strong cast, including Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh. But action on the ground, in the air and in the sea trumps dialogue. Manohla Dargis named "Dunkirk" one of her top 10 favorite films of 2017, and designated it a Critic's Pick in her review for The New York Times. PATRICK MELROSE 9 p.m. on Showtime; also on Amazon. Benedict Cumberbatch stars in this adaptation of the semi autobiographical novels by the writer Edward St. Aubyn. The five part series follows the descent of the title character, from his traumatic childhood to his self destructive adulthood, and his eventual recovery. Its nonlinear narrative begins with "Bad News," when the 22 year old Patrick, grappling with a harrowing addiction, flies to New York to collect his father's ashes. MUM on Britbox. This British comedy stars the Oscar nominated actress Lesley Manville ("Phantom Thread") as Cathy, a widow piecing her life back together after the death of her husband. Surrounded by God awful family and friends who act as if Cathy's only duty is to wait on them, she never ceases to rise above their petulant behavior and put on a smile. The only other character that doesn't elicit a cringe is Cathy's crush, the affable gentleman Michael (Peter Mullan). Season 2 opens with Cathy's self absorbed son (Sam Swainsbury) decorating her house with banners celebrating her 60th birthday, despite Cathy's request to keep her age hush hush. FISH TANK (2010) on iTunes, Amazon, FilmStruck, Google Play, Mubi and YouTube. Fifteen year old Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives in a dreary British housing project with her volatile single mother (Kierston Wareing) and irritable little sister. Ostracized by her friends, she leads an isolated life and seeks solace in hip hop dance. Things seem to look up when her mother's new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender), enters the picture. As he and Mia grow closer, they develop a dangerous relationship. The tale won the 2010 British Academy Film Award for outstanding British film . | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
At 76, disabled, with half the roof of her Grand Bahama home blown off and facing the prospect of months without electricity, Myrtle Cartwright decided she had to leave. Ms. Cartwright escaped in luxury: On Friday, she boarded Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line's Grand Celebration with about 1,200 other Hurricane Dorian survivors and headed for Palm Beach, Fla. She had her own handicap accessible cabin. "They even had a medical attendant come and see if I was O.K., because I have hypertension," Ms. Cartwright said. "Someone had a heart attack on the ship and a helicopter took them off the ship at 12 o'clock at night to the hospital. If they were at Freeport, they would not have made it." The Grand Celebration was the first to dock at the Grand Bahama port last week, and the ship arrived packed with doctors and nurses. Bahamas Paradise only sails to the Bahamas, and so company officials decided that instead of sidelining its ships and waiting for better times, it would launch a humanitarian mission to help the thousands of people forced from their homes who lacked food and running water. Bahamas Paradise joined Royal Caribbean, Disney, Norwegian and Carnival and other cruise companies in providing among the most robust corporate responses to Hurricane Dorian, which hit the Bahamas as a Category 5 storm and has so far killed at least 50 people and wrecked thousands of homes on Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands. The efforts are notable because the cruise companies have long had a contentious relationship with the Bahamas, replete with protests over their impact on the islands from activist groups and in some cases, checkered environmental legacies. Now, Royal Caribbean is serving 20,000 meals a day and helping shuttle people off Grand Bahama to Nassau, and Carnival is spending 1 million on medical supplies. But some industry critics argue that they should do even more to help a country that brings them billions of dollars a year. Nearly five million cruise ship passengers visited the Bahamas last year, each spending about 90 while on land. He particularly singled out Carnival Cruise lines, which is under court ordered supervision by the Department of Justice for illegal dumping at sea. In April 2017, Princess, one of its companies, pleaded guilty to felony charges for deliberately dumping oil contaminated waste from one of its vessels and trying to cover it up. The company paid a 40 million fine. Carnival paid another 20 million fine this summer for violating its probation by doing things like dumping plastics near the Bahamas and trying to cheat on the court ordered inspections. "A donation now of around 1 million to 2 million to the Bahamas in hurricane relief aid will not make much of a difference, although it makes for good press given Carnival's track record," Mr. Walker said. Carnival's foundation donated 1 million to Direct Relief, an aid organization, to provide medical supplies to the Bahamas and the company's chairman, Micky Arison, donated another 1 million to the relief effort. Mr. Thornton defended the company's record of helping out destinations hit hard by storms, including 2017's Hurricane Irma. "Our track record with what we have done is pretty consistent," he said. "I've worked for Carnival for 33 years; we have done this before." He noted that Carnival sent a ship to St. Croix to house relief workers after Irma. (The company was reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the use of the ship.) Disney, which has been widely criticized by environmentalists for a proposed project to develop a sliver of Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas as a cruise point, also donated 1 million to the storm efforts. Sam Duncombe, executive director of the local environmental watchdog organization reEarth, one of the groups trying to stop the Disney development, said that while contributions from cruise companies are welcome, the response has been uneven. "I have to thank Royal Caribbean, because they are actually evacuating people and bringing supplies," she said. "Companies make billions of dollars off of us." Ms. Duncombe said that the priority should be evacuating people. "People are desperate to get off of those islands, and these cruise ships have the capacity to move thousands of people at one time," she said. "That could have been five or six trips for these boats, if they all came together and helped us all out." Royal Caribbean has transported 810 people and donated almost 150,000 bottles of water as of Tuesday the company said. Ken Dames, 54, a building superintendent in Baker's Bay on Great Guyana Cay, one of the Abacos, said in an interview in Marsh Harbour, the biggest town on Great Abaco, that he thought the cruise lines should help "as a good will gesture," especially considering that they benefit from their relationship with the Bahamas. "The Bahamas depends on them," Mr. Dames said, "and they depend on the Bahamas." But he pointed out that Marsh Harbour, the hardest hit settlement on the Abacos, is not equipped to receive large vessels, so ferrying evacuees to the ships from the city's port would be logistically complicated and expensive. Tracy Quan, Royal Caribbean's associate vice president of corporate communications, said she believes Royal Caribbean has a moral obligation to the countries its ships frequent. Dionisio D'Aguilar, Minister of Tourism and Aviation for the Bahamas, acknowledged that the government's relationship with the cruise companies has at times been "rocky," but he said the companies are doing better, namely by designing projects closer to town centers that better integrate into the local economies. The companies are criticized for operating on private islands in the Bahamas, which do little to boost local economies. For Hurricane Dorian, he said, they have "risen to the occasion." Oneil Khosa, the chief executive of Bahamas Paradise, said he is still evaluating how to continue helping the Bahamas: Should he offer cruises to passengers designed for humanitarian aid? Evacuations, he said, felt like "the right thing to do." "We were there, we had room," he said, explaining the company's reaction. "If you are thirsty today, it doesn't help you if I bring you water in 10 days. We are close, we can do it, we know the waters, let's go." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In college at Howard University, Glory Edim "was reading bell hooks or Toni Cade Bambara or Audre Lorde or Pat Parker all these women have helped shape my own sense of self worth," she said. This September, outside a boutique store in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, members of the Well Read Black Girl book club sat in a misshapen circle of folding chairs on the sidewalk. The sky was gray, rain minutes from spilling over onto the diasporic spread of bantu knots, dreads, twist outs, wash and gos, afros and braids below; one woman covered her pressed hair with a scarf in anticipation. They listened intently while Glory Edim, who created the book club, interviewed Charlene A. Carruthers, author of "Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements." A number of passers by slowed down to hear the two women in conversation, and by the end it was hard to say who had planned to be there and who had come upon the gathering by chance. Well Read Black Girl started as an online community in 2015, when Edim launched an Instagram account where she posted writers' quotes and shared the books she was reading. At the time, she was working at Kickstarter as a strategist but was privately thinking of ways to channel her love of books into a career. She was inspired by a gift from her longtime boyfriend: a T shirt emblazoned with a custom crest that included the names of some of her favorite writers Gloria Naylor, Maya Angelou, Octavia Butler and, in academic font, his endearing name for her: Well Read Black Girl. "When I was wearing the shirt, I was constantly being engaged in conversations," Edim said, "Suddenly I was sitting next to someone on the subway, and we're talking about Toni Morrison, and it didn't feel like I had just met this person." Edim, 35, hosted her first in person book club in September of that year to discuss Naomi Jackson's "The Star Side of Bird Hill." Around 10 people were there, and a similar group turned up at the next meeting for Angela Flournoy, and then for Margo Jefferson. Today, the physical book club is still intimate, averaging around 30 people, but the community has grown substantially in other spaces. The Instagram account, which had about 100 followers when Edim hosted her first meeting three years ago, now has upward of 140,000 (the number keeps ticking higher), and last September, more than 300 people attended the inaugural Well Read Black Girl Festival in Brooklyn. Edim left her job at Kickstarter to concentrate on building the community full time. She also scored a book deal. "Well Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves," an anthology of essays and conversations she edited, will be published Oct. 30. Edim was raised in Arlington, Va., a multicultural hub near Washington, and is the eldest of three. Her parents, both Nigerian, divorced when she was in the sixth grade. Her father moved back to Nigeria, and as a teenager, she flew there to visit him during the summers. She comes from a family of readers; her mother was a historian before emigrating to the United States and often took Edim and her younger brothers to the library, where they would stock up on books. That's where she discovered Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." 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. "I remember my first book report on Maya Angelou. I had an A.P. English teacher really critique her and be like, 'She's not a good writer,'" Edim recalled, "He was looking at syntax, he was looking at grammar, he was looking at her completely different structure." But these weren't the elements that appealed to Edim. She was drawn in by Angelou's descriptions of her relationship with her brother, which reminded Edim of her own, and said Angelou "changed my thinking about literature, who can write and whose voice is important." After high school Edim attended Howard University and immersed herself in black feminist literature. "I was reading bell hooks or Toni Cade Bambara or Audre Lorde or Pat Parker all these women have helped shape my own sense of self worth." Edim brings this sensibility to her book club by centering on black woman writers and often coaxing members to ask questions and join the conversation. "I want to hear them fully, and I want to help them feel listened to and seen," she said. "I am thinking solely about us, and everything else is secondary." Several attendees said that the shared base understanding of cultural context makes for more interesting and rich discussions. "This is one of the rare opportunities to see a lot of black women who you don't know talk about their experience of reading the book, but also their experience in the world," said Raquel Thompson, a Panamanian American living in Brooklyn. "It's the only space I've been in, probably ever, where it's felt like black womanhood is the center, and it's not about our relationships with each other, necessarily, but about our identity." Leslie Martinez, a high school teacher who has been attending meetings for more than a year, called it a "sacred space," adding that in past clubs, she's been the only person of color among "a group of middle aged white women." Others said Well Read Black Girl has introduced them to new writers. "I didn't know about the vastness of black women authors," said Vanity Gee, a public programs producer who lives in Brooklyn. Amaka Iloegbunam, who sought out the book club after moving to New York from Georgia, echoes her sentiment. "Growing up, I read a lot of books by white people," she said, adding that the book club has prompted her to do her own research on black writers. Edim herself is also a draw. "She's managed to both make this feel as intimate as it is and stretch it out to people in Chicago, L.A.," said Shirleen Robinson, who works as a library assistant and part time sensitivity reader. The first time she attended in 2016, it was her birthday, and though Edim "didn't know me from anyone," she gave her a hug and had the group sing "Happy Birthday." Edim checks in with people and knows them by name, said Robinson. "That's why I keep coming," she said. "It's more than just reading the latest Pulitzer Prize winning book." Edim mentions several thoughts for the future of Well Read Black Girl, which she says is in its incubation phase: funding fellowships for writers of color, opening a bookstore and working with publishers and schools to diversify their offerings. The festival will return in November. "What I'm trying to do is beyond me," she said, and now that she's completed her anthology, she's asking herself, "How else can I help people? How else can this work be of service?" A day after the book club meeting, Edim and I met up to see the last performance of "Straight White Men," a stage show that explored the identity politics surrounding white men. It was raining when we walked out of the theater, and as soon as we escaped the crowds and were walking side by side, Edim said, "I have so many thoughts," before launching into an animated analysis of the show and its themes. She felt for the main character, Matt, who was reckoning with white guilt and felt that, despite his best efforts, he caused more harm than good as a white man. "We need more people who understand their privilege," but it does not need to be self deprecating, said Edim. Later, in a conversation about both her book club and the play, she added, "Whether it's straight white men, black women or Latina women everyone is just looking to be heard. Everyone deserves to have their stories told and held with integrity and dignity." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
BERLIN The European Central Bank increased aid to cash strapped financial institutions Thursday, but disappointed those expecting more drastic measures to combat slowing growth and address a deepening bank emergency. The E.C.B.'s restraint came in contrast to the action of the Bank of England, which announced another round of bond buying to support the slowing British economy. The pound fell against all major currencies after the announcement; the euro rose against the dollar. As a slump in German factory orders provided the latest sign of a looming recession, the E.C.B. left its benchmark rate unchanged, at 1.5 percent. The Bank of England also left its main rate unchanged, at 0.5 percent. During his last news conference as E.C.B. president, Jean Claude Trichet said that members of the central bank's governing council had discussed a rate cut before concluding "by consensus" that inflation in the euro area at 3 percent was still too high. The statement, and a subdued assessment of the euro zone economy, suggested the bank will be open to cutting rates in coming months, as many analysts expect. Mr. Trichet said the central bank expected "very moderate" growth ahead in "an environment of particularly high uncertainty." Janet Henry, chief European economist at HSBC, wrote in a note to clients that the E.C.B. "has clearly left the door open to a cut, possibly as soon as November." She said that Mr. Trichet may have been reluctant to send any stronger signals on E.C.B. intentions that might constrain his successor, Mario Draghi, now governor of the bank of Italy. Mr. Draghi will take office Nov. 1. Mr. Draghi brings a similar outlook and background as Mr. Trichet and is not expected to radically alter monetary policy. But he may find it hard to move boldly at the beginning of his term, given that he may feel it necessary to establish his anti inflation credentials. He has kept an extraordinarily low profile in the final months of Mr. Trichet's tenure and his intentions are largely a mystery. The E.C.B. did respond to signs that banks are reluctant to lend to each other because of fears about their exposure to shaky government debt. Those fears were intensified by the woes of the French Belgian bank Dexia, which is seeking its second taxpayer financed bailout in three years and said Thursday that it was close to selling its Luxembourg unit. The central bank will spend EUR40 billion, or 53.6 billion, in the coming year buying so called covered bonds, a form of debt secured by payments received on assets like packages of loans. Covered bonds are one of the main ways that European banks raise money. The E.C.B. also bought covered bonds in 2009 to alleviate the bank financing squeeze that followed the collapse of the U.S. investment firm Lehman Brothers in 2008. The E.C.B. measure, however, was dwarfed by the Bank of England's plans to widen its so called quantitative easing program to PS275 billion from PS200 billion. "Vulnerabilities associated with the indebtedness of some euro area sovereigns and banks have resulted in severe strains in bank funding markets and financial markets more generally," the Bank of England's governor, Mervyn A. King, wrote in a letter to the British Treasury explaining the bank's decision. The E.C.B. does not have the power to save ailing banks like Dexia or address deeper problems in the banking system, officials insist, caused by banks' exposure to sovereign debt and reserves that are too thin to absorb potential losses. That task belongs to governments. Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, suggested Thursday that Europe was moving closer to a coordinated effort to bolster European banks and address the longer term problems. While cautioning that more expert advice was needed, she said, "If the conditions are there we shouldn't hesitate." Mrs. Merkel appeared at a news conference in Berlin that also included Christine Lagarde, president of the International Monetary Fund, and Robert B. Zoellick, president of the World Bank. Her comments were similar to what she said Wednesday during a visit to Brussels and in line with remarks made Thursday by Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union. A coordinated bank recapitalization is "not only obvious but indispensable," Mr. Barroso said in Brussels. "I don't think anyone in Europe is opposed to coordination in such a sensitive area." But he declined to put any figure on the euro zone's bank recapitalization needs or to say whether he would propose the use of the euro zone's common bailout fund to help with the task. The E.C.B. also said it would resume offering banks unlimited loans at the benchmark interest rate for about one year. Previously the maximum loan term was six months. Banks must put up collateral like bonds or other securities, but otherwise are allowed to borrow as much as they want. Mr. Trichet said the E.C.B. would continue the unlimited lending "for as long as needed" and at least through mid 2012. Separately, the Dutch parliament voted Thursday to extend the powers of the euro zone's rescue fund, leaving Slovakia and Malta as the last two euro zone members whose legislatures have yet to approve the program. While calling on European leaders to implement an expanded bailout fund for Greece and other countries with severe debt problems, Mr. Trichet sought to dash hopes that the E.C.B. could be used as a vehicle to leverage borrowing by the fund, and increase its firepower. Analysts like Daniel Gros at the Center for European Policy Studies have suggested that the bailout fund register as a bank so that it could borrow from the E.C.B. The British move came about a month earlier than some economists had expected but was no surprise. The Bank of England's rate setting committee had hinted last month that it might have to inject more money into financial markets to support an increasingly threatened economic recovery. The decision shows that "they believe an already difficult outlook for the economy has deteriorated," said Howard Archer, chief economist for Britain and the euro zone at IHS Global Insight. Many economists have argued that the E.C.B. erred when it raised rates twice this year, most recently in July. A bigger than expected drop in German factory orders in August, according to data released Thursday, provided the latest evidence that the euro zone economy is headed for a downturn caused by severe austerity programs in countries like Spain, as well as the uncertainty created by the European government debt crisis. Recent figures showed inflation in the euro zone rose to an estimated 3 percent in September, well above the E.C.B. target of about 2 percent. Hard liners on the governing council are likely to have argued that the E.C.B. would violate its mandate to preserve price stability if it cut rates now. The E.C.B. governing council, in one of its occasional forays from Frankfurt, met at the Berlin offices of the Bundesbank, the German central bank, which remains Europe's bastion of price stability. Finland's prime minister, Jyrki Katainen, who was visiting the European Commission, underlined how such proposals for bank recapitalization are likely to encounter opposition. The first step, he said, was for national governments to encourage their banks to raise capital from the financial markets. Failing that, "the government is responsible for recapitalization," he added. The European Banking Authority, which coordinates national regulators, is reviewing the results of the last banking stress tests, which took place in July, in light of the slump in the value of Greek and other bonds. The value of the tests has been called into question by Dexia, which passed easily because those tests did not have to take into account the market valuation of holdings of Greek debt. The banking authority underlined in a statement that it had not announced new tests. So far the E.C.B. has followed a more conservative course than the U.S. Federal Reserve or the Bank of England. The E.C.B. has bought government bonds in an effort to hold down borrowing costs for countries like Spain and Italy, but has avoided the wholesale asset purchases made by its peers. With governments struggling just to approve a relatively modest aid package for Greece, the E.C.B. may eventually be faced with a choice of letting the country fail an event that could threaten the whole euro zone or making huge bond purchases even though such a move would enrage many north Europeans and split the governing council. Like their European peers, British leaders are under mounting pressure to act amid criticism from some economists and lawmakers for holding on to far reaching spending cuts that were introduced before the recent economic slowdown. Prime Minister David Cameron has been adamant that he was sticking to his austerity plan, but he acknowledged Wednesday that the economic slowdown was worse than he had expected. The government suggested this week that it could sell government bonds to finance loans for struggling companies. The Office for National Statistics said Wednesday that Britain's economic output rose 0.1 percent from the first quarter, half the 0.2 percent it had said earlier. The I.M.F. last month cut its growth forecast for Britain for this year to 1.1 percent from 1.5 percent. Consumers have started to curb spending, feeling squeezed by rising prices and unchanged salaries. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Leonardo DiCaprio, left, and Brad Pitt in "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood." Where to Watch 'Parasite,' 'Joker' and More 2020 Oscar Nominated Movies Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox. The nominees for the 92nd Academy Awards were announced in January, with "Joker" leading the way with 11 nominations and "The Irishman," "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" and "1917" receiving 10 apiece. "1917" is still early in its theatrical run, but those three others are all available to stream, along with two more best picture nominees and a host of contenders for best animated feature, international feature, documentary and other categories. The ceremony is on Feb. 9. Here's a complete rundown of where to find nominees that are streaming, with links to our original reviews. How to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube. Quentin Tarantino's evocation of 1969 Los Angeles clings to an era it doesn't want to end, even if it has to rewrite history a little to do it. With the story of a fading western star (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his trusty stunt double (Brad Pitt), Tarantino accesses the period through a side door, allowing him the space to cruise top down through the streets, hang out on Hollywood sound stages and follow the actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) in the blissful days before the Manson family goes to Cielo Drive. Nominated for: Best picture, director, original screenplay, international feature, editing and production design. How to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and Google Play. A family of penniless con artists infiltrates the lives of a much wealthier family in Bong Joon Ho's genre straddling mix of dark comedy, nerve jangling suspense and incisive social commentary. The less known about the intricacies of the plot going in, the better, since Bong has nested the many twists so meticulously. But as the two families grow more closely intertwined, their fates are tied up in duplicity, an uneasy tension between classes and one very big secret that's primed to detonate. Nominated for: Best picture, director, adapted screenplay, supporting actor (twice), cinematography, costume design, editing, production design and visual effects. How to watch: Stream it on Netflix. Based on Charles Brandt's book "I Heard You Paint Houses," the movie is about Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who claims to have worked as a hit man for the Bufalino crime family, and to have been responsible for the unsolved disappearance of the former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Yet the dubious facts of Sheeran's "confession" are folded into a uniquely meditative Martin Scorsese gangster epic, which slows the metabolism of films like "Goodfellas" and "Casino" to reflect on death and the consequences of a sinful life. How to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube. Standing in stark contrast to the bright, can do heroism of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and going down a darker road than even its DC brethren, like the Christopher Nolan "Batman" series "Joker" frames a villain's origins as a grimy tale of urban alienation. As Arthur Fleck, a failed stand up comedian who lives with his mother, Joaquin Phoenix more or less slaps clown makeup on Travis Bickle from "Taxi Driver," though the director Todd Phillips lays some of the blame for Fleck's psychosis on a broken social system. Nominated for: Best picture, original screenplay, actor, actress, supporting actress and original score. How to watch: Stream it on Netflix. Thirty years after "Kramer vs. Kramer" won best picture, the writer director Noah Baumbach gets into the excruciating particulars of divorce, especially when child custody is at stake. Adam Driver stars as a New York theater director who's left reeling when his wife (Scarlett Johansson), an actress trying to resume her Hollywood career, hires a skilled attorney (Laura Dern) and works to resettle their 8 year old son in Los Angeles. The process gets uglier from there, but Baumbach cushions the blows with humor and sneaky optimism. Nominated for: Best international feature and actor. How to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and Google Play. Nominated for: Best actor, supporting actor and adapted screenplay. How to watch: Stream it on Netflix. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Robert Greenblatt, right, is leaving as NBC's entertainment chief. He will be succeeded by Paul Telegdy, left, a president and the head of reality programming at NBC, and George Cheeks, a rising star at the company. NBC's entertainment chief, Robert Greenblatt, is stepping down from the company after almost eight years in charge, the latest change at the highest ranks of the major broadcast networks. Mr. Greenblatt, who took over when the network's prime time viewership was in the gutter, has been responsible for a remarkable turnaround effort. NBC finished the past television season No. 1 in the ratings for the fourth time in five seasons. The nearly unprecedented upheaval at the top levels of the broadcast networks is happening for a variety of reasons. A MeToo scandal felled Leslie Moonves at CBS, Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox is leading to churn at ABC and Fox, and Mr. Greenblatt is a successful executive ready to ride off into the sunset. But all of the broadcast networks are also dealing with the same problems: a declining number of viewers and a severely diminished influence in the era of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. "These jobs are really relentless," Mr. Greenblatt said in an interview. CBS enjoyed a long run of success under Mr. Moonves, but will need to chart a new future after he was ousted this month, following numerous allegations of sexual misconduct. With Disney poised to take control of many 21st Century Fox assets early next year, there will be executive turnover at both ABC and Fox. The current head of Disney and ABC's television group, Ben Sherwood, will leave the company at some point after the Fox deal is closed, according to a person familiar with his decision. Peter Rice, the president of 21st Century Fox, will be in charge of most of Disney's television properties. Dana Walden, currently the co chief executive of the Fox Television Group, is expected to have a high ranking role at Disney. She will most likely oversee, among several things, ABC's entertainment executives, according to two people familiar with the plan. Fox, meanwhile, will likely forge a new identity once it loses its television studio after the deal with Disney closes. Mr. Greenblatt's departure had been talked about in Hollywood during the Emmy Awards party circuit just over a week ago. At the time, through multiple representatives, Mr. Greenblatt denied he was leaving, though he was actually negotiating his exit. But if his departure is not a surprise, the suddenness is. His last day is Monday, the same day the 2018 19 television season begins. He will be replaced by two people: Paul Telegdy, a president and the head of reality programming at NBC, and George Cheeks, a rising star at the company. They take over on Tuesday. Mr. Greenblatt, 58, said his decision was some time in the making, even though he signed a new contract a year ago. "You do get weary in these jobs," he said. "With the daily changes that go on, you're constantly reconfiguring the business. I'm just really excited about doing something. Whatever I do will be some new challenge." NBC finished tops in the ratings after the summer's numbers were calculated and the network's prime time event "Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert" won five Emmys this month. Mr. Greenblatt a theater junkie who is friends with Dolly Parton and who was an investor in "Hamilton" orchestrated bringing live musicals to NBC and making them a staple of the schedule. 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. This is the second big executive change to NBC's entertainment operation in the last six months. Jennifer Salke, Mr. Greenblatt's No. 2 along with Mr. Telegdy, left this year to take over Amazon's entertainment offerings. George Cheeks, who has been at NBC since 2012, is one of two people who will succeed Robert Greenblatt as NBC's entertainment chief. Mr. Cheeks is the co president of Universal Cable Productions. Mr. Greenblatt arrived at NBC after overseeing the entertainment division at Showtime. NBC at the time was still licking its wounds after its disastrous decision to abandon its 10 p.m. time slot for a daily Jay Leno show. That had severely limited the number of dramas that NBC could develop in any given year, and it took years to undo the damage. NBC's comedy lineup, once the backbone of the network, had a pair of hits in "30 Rock" and "The Office," but the coffers were otherwise bare. "We were in a complete rebuilding phase, and everything had fallen apart," Mr. Greenblatt told The New York Times in an interview two years ago. It was a slog. As early as May 2015, rumors circulated that Mr. Greenblatt was done. At NBC's 2015 upfront presentation for advertisers, Jimmy Fallon, "The Tonight Show" host, said to Mr. Greenblatt as he was exiting the stage: "We're all going to miss you, buddy. You had a good run." But armed with hits like "This Is Us," "The Voice" and an array of Dick Wolf dramas from his "Law and Order" and Chicago empires, NBC reversed course. It helped that the network also had rights to "Sunday Night Football," the highest rated program in all of television. Other strategies also paid off, including loading up December with musicals and holiday fare. Not only did those programs draw large audiences but they also provided free promotion for NBC's midseason programs that premiered in January. NBC has also found outsize success in the summer. "America's Got Talent," which has seen ratings spikes since Simon Cowell joined as a judge in 2016, has been a strong performer. Stephen Burke, the head of NBC Universal, said in an interview that discussions with Mr. Greenblatt about his departure had been going on for some time. "We've talked over the last couple of years, very openly, and he would say, 'Geez, I don't know how much longer I can do this,'" Mr. Burke said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Magdalena Abakanowicz, a Polish sculptor who transformed sisal and burlap into brooding forms that evoked the weight of political oppression, the desperation of the individual and the sufferings of the natural world, died on Thursday in Warsaw. She was 86. She died after a long illness, her husband, Jan Kosmowski, said. Ms. Abakanowicz (pronounced ah bah kah NO vich), who once described her sculpture as "a search for organic mysteries," first attracted critical attention in the 1960s with free standing woven works made from sisal that she unraveled from discarded ships' ropes and dyed. These Abakans, as they became known, were monumental, some more than 15 feet tall, hollow at the core and fitted with slits and folds. Hanging from the ceiling, nearly touching the floor, they resembled shrouds, twisted tree trunks, cocoons or druid priests strange forms summoned from the lower depths of the collective unconscious. "Like all of Abakanowicz's cycles, the 'Abakans' lead outward, away from what they might appear to represent, into psychology and history, toward fundamental links between human beings and nature that are always waiting to be recognized and explored by the imagination," the critic Michael Brenson wrote in Art Journal in 1995. The stretched stitches and gnarled strands bursting their wrappings in the "Heads" series of 1973 75, part of a grander project called "Alterations," suggested, in stark terms, psychic distress tipping over into madness. In the series "Seated Figures" (1974 79) and "Backs" (1976 82), Ms. Abakanowicz used the plaster mold of a man to make glued burlap forms headless and armless and sexless that she deployed in groups. "Seated Figures" originally consisted of 18 torsos and legs resting on spare metal supports, lined up as though awaiting dire news. The hunched torsos in "Backs" as many as 80 arranged in rows and bent over as though in prayer, or obeisance or in anticipation of the lash cast a spell all the more powerful for their ambiguity. "The face can lie," she told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. "The back cannot." Two years after exhibiting 40 "Backs" at the 1980 Venice Biennale, Ms. Abakanowicz told The Chicago Tribune: "I was asked by the public: 'Is it about the concentration camps in Poland?' 'Is it a ceremony in old Peru?' 'Is it a ritual in Bali?' To all these questions, I could answer yes because my work is about the general problems of mankind." Her imagination was fecund, whether working with burlap or, in later years, stone, tree trunks or bronze. "Embryology" (1976 82), the final series in "Alterations," grew to include nearly 700 forms, soft burlap eggs ranging size from pebbles to boulders that looked like enormous Idaho potatoes. She executed 106 standing figures, each nine feet tall, for "Agora," which was installed in Grant Park in Chicago in 2006. "I turn sculpture from an object to look at into a space to experience," Ms. Abakanowicz told The Chicago Tribune in 2005. "Every sculpture can be turned into decoration. But if you have 100, you are confronted by them and must think and imagine and question yourself. This is what I want." Her art grew from difficult circumstances. She was born Marta Abakanowicz on a country estate in Falenty, southwest of Warsaw, on June 20, 1930. Her father, Konstanty, the son of a czarist general, was of Russian, Polish and Tatar extraction, his last name derived from a forebear, Abaqa Khan, who was Genghis Khan's great grandson. When the Russian Revolution broke out, Konstanty fled to Poland with a brother after the rest of the family was killed. Her mother, the former Helena Domaszowska, belonged to a noble landowning family, and Marta grew up on an estate about 125 miles east of Warsaw left by her grandparents. War brought ruin and horror. In 1943, drunken German soldiers burst into the family's home and shot Marta's mother, severing her right arm below the shoulder. She survived, but as Soviet troops advanced in 1944, the family relocated to Warsaw. Marta was recruited as a nurse's aide, treating the wounded when German troops put down the futile uprising of the Polish Home Army and laid waste to the city. After the Communists assumed power, the family moved to Tczew, outside Gdansk, to avoid being identified as class enemies. Marta studied at the fine arts lyceum in Gdynia and, after graduating in 1949, spent a year at the Gdansk Academy of Fine Arts, then located in Sopot. Around this time, seeking to break with her past, she began using the name Magdalena. In 1950, pretending to be the daughter of a clerk, she enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she studied painting after being rejected for the sculpture program. It was an unhappy time. Socialist Realism, the only approved style, ran counter to her experimental tendencies, expressed in large scale watercolors and gouaches on stitched together bedsheets that depicted semiabstract biomorphic forms. "In Poland it was almost forbidden to talk about mystery," she told The New York Times in 1992. "I did." After graduating from the academy in 1954, she designed material for ties at a silk factory and, in a tiny one room apartment, continued to paint. In 1965 she married Mr. Kosmowski, a civil engineer. In 1960, a show of her work at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw was not allowed to open after a cultural official deemed it formalist. As luck would have it, the eminent tapestry artist Maria Laszkiewicz peeked inside and, seeing the fiber art works that Ms. Abakanowicz had included in the show, added her name to a list of artists to be included in the first Biennale de la Tapisserie in Lausanne in 1962. She also allowed Ms. Abakanowicz to make use of her basement workshop and looms. For the biennial, Ms. Abakanowicz submitted "Composition of White Forms," in which she used old clothesline to create a rough abstract surface. Three years later she won the gold medal at the Sao Paulo Biennial. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
This article is part of our latest special report on Design, which is about getting personal with customization. A little respite from geopolitical and health crises can perhaps be found in five new design books, which demonstrate our ability to transform humble materials into enduring refuges. In "The Art of Earth Architecture: Past, Present, Future" (Princeton Architectural Press, 125, 512 pp.), 20 experts analyze how buildings made of textured multihued dirt can offer "a comforting material with a strong emotional charge." The construction technique has been used in Neolithic villages, Sumerian temples and Nubian fortresses. Its fans over the years have included Thomas Jefferson and Georgia O'Keeffe, and it has persisted in Alabama subdivisions and Moroccan resorts. The book's 800 illustrations reveal similarities between sinuous walls along Japanese gardens and Libyan medina alleyways, and kindred spirited caretakers at work on New Mexican pueblos and colorful earthen homes in Burkina Faso. Untold numbers of dirt buildings have been obliterated by wars or misguided modernizations, but earth remains relevant. Skyscraper engineers are strengthening soil components with plant fibers, and robots are fashioning shelters out of 3 D printed mud. Earthen barriers have reinforced mountainside rice beds in Bali for thousands of years, channeling rainfall, curbing erosion and providing habitats for ducks that feed on agricultural pests while also resulting in astonishing beauty. The tiered topography "when flooded in moonlight resembles a multifaceted diamond," the environmentalist and designer Julia Watson observes in "Lo TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism" (Taschen, 50, 420 pp.). The book's 18 case studies, along with the Balinese terraces, include thorny acacia corrals in Kenya that protect livestock and are covered in edible seedpods, and midair footbridges in northern India made of interwoven tree roots and navigable during monsoons. Ms. Watson warns of deforestation and chemical fertilizers, among other contemporary threats, yet she maintains optimism for sites still densely occupied and vigilantly preserved. In some cases even bureaucrats care; Kolkata's wetlands have been adapted for farming, fishing and treating sewage at minimal cost, "saving its taxpayers millions of dollars every year," Ms. Watson writes. Until 2010 or so, bureaucrats paid little heed to Untermyer Gardens in Yonkers, N.Y., a century old swath of flower beds and replicas of Mediterranean and Persian architecture on steep Hudson River frontage. "Graffiti covered walls, fragments of crumbling statuary, and shapeless shrubs created a theater of menace" for many late 20th century visitors, the historian Caroline Seebohm writes in "Paradise on the Hudson: The Creation, Loss, and Revival of a Great American Garden" (Timber Press, 27.95, 224 pp.). The property's original owner, the lawyer Samuel Untermyer, practiced brutal tactics in the courtroom while keeping his suit buttonholes stocked with fragrant orchids from his greenhouses. Dozens of gardeners were on staff, placing plant orders as ambitious as "15,500 hardy chrysanthemums of over 50 different species," Ms. Seebohm notes. After Mr. Untermyer's death in 1940, the city begrudgingly took over the property and could afford little maintenance. A young nonprofit run by the architect Stephen Byrns has been excavating wonders from the undergrowth, including rocky water cascades, crisscrossing canals, ancient stone pillars and a domed Temple of Love. The British Arts and Crafts architect Ernest Gimson sometimes walked miles a day, sketching flora, vegetation, birds and squirrels around his Cotswolds home. "Ernest Gimson: Arts Crafts Designer and Architect" (Yale University Press, 65, 372 pp.), by the historians Annette Carruthers, Mary Greensted and Barley Roscoe (a relative of Mr. Gimson's), explores how he adapted his observations of nature into buildings and objects. During his relatively short career he died of cancer in 1919, at 54 he outfitted interiors with hewn timbers, delicate plaster ornaments, botanical embroidery and filigreed hardware. He enlivened surfaces with "just the right amount of veining on leaves," the authors point out. The book is lavishly illustrated with photos of surviving works alongside Mr. Gimson's sketches. Much of the archival material was rescued during World War II from a bonfire heap in his garden, dumped there by auctioneers dispersing his widow Emily's estate. Beachcombing finds and glass game board pieces collected by the sculptor Lenore Tawney have been kept pretty much in her original collaged arrangements. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis., has been exhibiting vignettes from her whitewashed Manhattan apartment, where Ms. Tawney, who died in 2007 at 100, hung her gossamer weavings all around. She stocked shelves with "time polished river rocks, bleached bones, feathers, eggs, objects collected during travels around the world, and chests in which each drawer held a small assemblage," Kathleen Nugent Mangan, the executive director of the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, writes in "Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe" (Kohler Arts Center/University of Chicago Press, 45, 304 pp.). Ms. Mangan is one of half a dozen scholars contributing to the volume, which covers Ms. Tawney's origins in a blue collar Ohio community, two brief marriages, mentors including the artist Alexander Archipenko and self reinvention in early middle age as an avant garde Manhattanite. She filled atriums with clouds of knotted thread, and she wrapped cryptic messages around shoemakers' wooden foot forms. In the book's quotations from her stream of consciousness journals, readers can trace her path to peace of mind. She would ponder the passage of time while mesmerized by birds "darting in all directions," or a fountain's flow that "splashes up, the drop in endless formations." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The Sanhedrin wanted to be rid of this vexatious visionary, but they had no legal authority to kill him, so they sought the complicity of Pilate, arguing that Jesus was "no longer just a religious but also a political problem." Pilate was wary; he wanted to remain on good terms with the Jewish authorities, but he also feared a popular uprising if Jesus was condemned to death. He clearly preferred that the Jews handle this matter among themselves. Schiavone is best in reconstructing the exchanges between Jesus and Pilate. The accused man refused to defend himself and answered the governor's queries with rhetorical questions of his own. Pilate could easily have taken umbrage at the prisoner's effrontery, but Schiavone suggests that he was already enamored of Jesus' charisma and his equanimity, while his answer to the charge of claiming to be king of the Jews upended Jewish theocratic claims. "When Jesus says that his kingdom is not from this world," Schiavone writes, "he is literally overturning upon itself the tradition of Judaic theocracy. The power of God is no longer reflected without mediation in earthly power." Jesus thereby concedes the power of the state even as he asserts "the absolute primacy of the world he comes from over the one that is preparing to slaughter him." Schiavone portrays Pilate as increasingly reluctant to pass judgment against Jesus; he tried repeatedly to suggest a punishment short of death, but the Jewish authorities would have none of it. Schiavone believes that the turning point came when Pilate recognized that Jesus' refusal to defend himself was part of a larger scheme: "The governor put all the pieces together into a single picture, fully grasped the prisoner's attitude, and became persuaded strongly influenced by the man's aura not to oppose his design." The result is a history still being contested all these centuries later. Schiavone's account nicely lures Pilate out of the shadows, albeit briefly, even providing a measure of rehabilitation. Pilate's interlocutor, on the other hand, achieved a fame that far outlasted the Roman Empire. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
AS the financial crisis consumed Wall Street in 2008, James Corl left his job as chief investment officer of the money manager Cohen Steers, where he was a well compensated real estate stock investor, and struck out on his own. Mr. Corl figured there would be opportunities in distressed real estate and created his own private equity fund to pursue such deals. "Different times called for different strategies," he said. A wine lover, he started trolling local wine auctions at the same time. Most buyers were hoarding cash, empty restaurants were not replenishing their cellars, and Mr. Corl was able to snap up French Burgundies worth tens of thousands of dollars at 40 percent off. "I'm mostly self taught, but I know what I like," he said. "I'm a Burgundy man, and I knew these were prices I'd never see again." His success at the auctions emboldened Mr. Corl. So in 2010, when he was invited to invest in a wine fund, he did not hesitate, turning over 500,000 to a group led by Jorge Mora, an investment banker with a sophisticated palate and a nose for a deal. The Bottled Asset Fund, led by Mr. Mora and a few friends, is part of a new generation of alternative investment vehicles, funds specifically intended for investing in high end wines not for imbibing but for profit. "In a world of high uncertainty about where financial markets are going, wine is a real asset," said Mr. Mora. "And when you're talking about the premier names, it's a depleting asset. The premium goes up every time a bottle is opened, and there's less of it available." Hundreds of millions of dollars are invested in wine funds, which have been around for only the last 15 years or so. Most are run out of London and are primarily invested in French wines, which dominate the luxury wine market. And while many funds have had a rocky few years, leaving some high net worth clients in the lurch, a few funds have been able to consistently beat the equity markets. Four years after that initial investment, Mr. Corl's half million dollar investment is beginning to pay dividends. The Bottled Asset Fund paid out its first distribution recently 20 percent of an investor's initial outlay and plans on distributing 20 percent every six months for the next couple of years. Limited partners in the Bottled Asset Fund like Mr. Corl expect to at least double their money over the life of the five year fund. Mr. Corl said his investment in the wine fund would prove even more lucrative than his investments at auction. "If I were to liquidate everything I bought at auction, it wouldn't be two times net equity multiple," he said. "These guys have outperformed my own personal Burgundy investments." Not all funds have fared as well as the Bottled Asset Fund. Last year, the Vintage Wine Fund, which once had more than 100 million under management, returned money to investors and wound down. A spate of redemptions, an unpredictable market for the wines in its portfolio, and dismal returns were to blame. Another prominent fund, Nobles Crus, which also once managed more than 100 million, was suspended by regulators in Luxembourg last year after it ran out of cash and could not pay back investors. And while Wine Asset Managers, a London fund with about 20 million under management, is still running, the value of its portfolio is down from its peak. The volatility of funds, and some spectacular collapses, speaks to the fickle nature of the market for investing in fine wines. "Funds of this nature are mostly unregulated," said Miles Davis, a partner at Wine Asset Managers, and once a broker for Bear Stearns. "There's nobody that's going to inspect the valuations." Instead, fund managers assign values to their holdings based on auction results and the Liv Ex, an exchange that tracks the value of prominent vintages. Such practices led to problems for Nobles Crus and the Vintage Wine Fund, and make investing in wine funds inherently risky. Wine funds also take a risk because they are invested in mostly top French Burgundy and Bordeaux wines, which means they track the broader wine market. During good times, that can be a boon for the funds. For a couple of years starting in 2009, Chinese buyers made a splash on the international market, buying millions of dollars' worth of fine French reds. "They wanted anything they could get ahold of," said Mr. Davis. "It was all about visible consumption, label buying, showing off, gift giving, even corruption probably. That drove prices up." But in mid 2011 as a new government prepared to take office in China, the lavishness came to an end. Sales of Bordeaux hit a wall, auction prices fell and the value of many wines held by funds bottomed out. "They calmed down on this lavishness, and wine was one of the main beneficiaries of that," said Mr. Davis. "That whole revolution had been completely shut down." Most wine funds are open ended, meaning that investors buy shares in an investment vehicle that owns a large stockpile of fine wine, and can request their money back at any time. It is essentially like buying an index fund that tracks the broader fine wine market. Some of these, like Wine Asset Managers and another big open ended competitor, the Wine Investment Fund, have survived the tumult of recent years through a mix of good investing in vintages that held their value, with the good luck that investors did not all request their money back at the same time. Mr. Davis said Wine Asset Managers had investments from about 120 clients, a mix of wealthy individuals, family funds and corporate clients. After nearly doubling in value at the peak of the Chinese buying spree in early 2011, the value of the Wine Asset Managers' fine wine fund is up a modest 20 percent from its baseline value in 2006. But in a bid to avoid the vagaries of the broader market, Mr. Mora and his associates took a number of steps to distinguish the Bottled Asset Fund from its larger competitors. Mr. Mora recruited his friend Sergio Esposito, founder of Italian Wine Merchants, to advise on the project. Mr. Esposito had made a career promoting Italian wines and convinced Mr. Mora that a fund that held primarily Italian vintages would not be subject to the broader market swings because those wines are more limited in quantity and consistently in demand. Mr. Mora's fund also buys wines directly from producers in Italy, rather than from distributors, cutting out middlemen and all but ensuring a profit. And instead of mimicking the index fund structures of Wine Asset Managers and the Wine Investment Fund, Mr. Mora made his venture a closed fund, similar to traditional private equity structures. Investors could put in a set amount of money and expect to receive distributions in five years. Mr. Mora and his partners would take 2 percent under management and 20 percent of profits. "The problem with open funds is if people want out, they all want out at the same time," Mr. Mora said. Mr. Mora introduced the fund in 2010 with 8.5 million under management. It acquired a mix of rare Italian wines, new releases directly from producers and a few French Champagnes and Spanish reds. The wines are stored at Octavian Vaults, a military grade bunker outside London meant to protect the collection from fierce weather. The fund is now liquidating its assets by selling through auctions and retailers, and paying back investors. As that fund winds down, Mr. Mora is taking on investors for the next Bottled Asset Fund, which is likely to have 20 million under management. "From a risk reward perspective, what we put together is just ridiculously attractive," said Mr. Mora. "For us to lose money, there would have to be an atomic bomb that blows up in London that destroys our wine cellar, and the insurance company." Though some investors would like to receive some distributions in kind, allowing them to taste the bottles that are accruing such value, Mr. Mora said legal complications prevent investors from tasting their investment. Mr. Mora, however, is not shy about using some of his earnings from the Bottled Asset Fund to indulge his own taste for fine wines. "This is one where I definitely will drink my profits," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
TOKYO Despite a strong yen and the lingering fallout from recalls, the automaker Toyota said Wednesday that it had returned to a profit in the April to June quarter because of strong sales in emerging markets and aggressive cost cutting. Toyota's net quarterly profit of 190.4 billion yen, or 2.2 billion, was a sharp reversal from a loss of 77.8 billion yen in the period a year ago. The automaker continued to recover from a slump brought on by a global recession and a series of recalls over faulty pedals and inquiries into its safety record. The company, based in Toyota City, Japan, raised its net profit outlook for the year ending in March 2011 to 340 billion yen, from a 310 billion yen forecast earlier this year, citing a recovery in sales and progress in cost cutting efforts. Toyota said it now expected to sell 7.38 million vehicles in the fiscal year, up from the 7.29 million forecast earlier. But Takahiko Ijichi, senior managing director, said the strengthening yen could cloud the outlook. The yen has risen steadily in recent months, hitting an eight month high against the dollar in trading Wednesday as concerns over the American economy caused investors to sell the dollar. A stronger home currency hurts Japanese exporters by making their products more expensive overseas and eroding the yen value of their foreign currency earnings. Toyota said it had based its full year forecast on exchange rates of 90 yen to the dollar; however, the dollar was selling for around 85 yen in late trading in Tokyo on Wednesday. Mr. Ijichi also warned that a faltering economic recovery in major markets, including the United States, and the expiration of government incentives could also hurt earnings. In Japan, sales are expected to lose steam later this year when the government winds down subsidies for fuel efficient cars. Still, revenue at Toyota surged to 4.87 trillion yen in the quarter, an increase of 27 percent from the same period the previous year. The automaker sold 1.82 million vehicles in the quarter 419,000 more than a year earlier. Mr. Ijichi said that a companywide cost cutting drive, including efforts to reduce waste in Toyota's supply chains, had added 50 billion yen to profit. The effects of the economic downturn and the pedal recalls were still evident in the United States, although aggressive incentives were helping to lure buyers back. Toyota said Tuesday that its sales in the United States had fallen 3.2 percent in July from the period a year earlier. "Asia is growing at an incredible rate," Mr. Ijichi said. "We expect this to continue for the time being." The outlook for the United States was more uncertain, he said, given mixed signals on the strength of the recovery there. "There are signs that the auto market remains resilient," he said. Automakers are on track to sell about 12 million vehicles this year in the United States, up from 10.4 million in 2009. In the business year that ended in March, Toyota earned 209 billion yen. In the previous year, it lost 437 billion yen, its first annual loss in decades. In the year that ended in March 2008, Toyota's net profit hit 1.7 trillion yen. Much is at stake for Toyota, which surpassed General Motors to become the world's biggest carmaker in vehicle sales in 2008, only to see its business battered by the global economic downturn and recalls. Toyota has recalled about 8.5 million vehicles worldwide for faulty accelerator pedals and other problems, which have tarnished the automaker's reputation for making safe and reliable cars. Toyota also faces multiple shareholder lawsuits, as well as consumer lawsuits claiming injuries or deaths caused by sudden acceleration incidents. The annual J.D. Power Associates Initial Quality Study for 2010 showed that Toyota fell to 21st out of 33 brands, from sixth place the previous year. It was the first time in the 24 year history of the survey that the company had fallen behind the industry average. Toyota's president, Akio Toyoda, has promised to overhaul the company's safety efforts. Last month, the company bolstered a division responsible for overseeing quality, adding 1,000 engineers. The company has also said it would open new offices in the United States to investigate customer complaints more swiftly. Toyota's top management has forfeited bonuses for the second consecutive year. A filing this year revealed that Mr. Toyoda had received compensation of less than 1 million last fiscal year, a small fraction of what his counterparts at the Detroit automakers were paid. But Toyota has also been hit with a fresh round of recalls. Last month, the automaker said it would repair 480,000 Avalon sedans and Land Cruiser S.U.V.'s that had defective steering parts. In April it also recalled some Lexus S.U.V.'s. Shares of Toyota fell 1.6 percent to 3,090 yen in Tokyo before the earnings were announced. Toyota's share price has dropped about 22 percent in the last year, faring worse than the Nikkei 225 index, which has dipped 8.5 percent in the same period. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Credit...Rozette Rago for The New York Times Six weeks ago, as TikTok grappled with escalating tensions between the United States and China, the social media app's top executives huddled together to figure out their next steps. Vanessa Pappas, 41, was worried. TikTok's North American business, which she has run since 2018, was dealing with an uproar. President Trump had threatened to ban TikTok because of its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and many of the more than 100 million people who use TikTok in the United States were up in arms. So in the early hours of Aug. 1, Ms. Pappas recorded a 59 second video from her home office in Los Angeles to calm the creators on TikTok and its fans. "We've heard your outpouring of support, and we wanted to say thank you," she said in the video, which quickly went viral under the hashtag SaveTikTok. "We're not planning on going anywhere." Under an executive order from President Trump, ByteDance must essentially strike a deal to sell off TikTok's U.S. operations by Sept. 20; it will have a few weeks after that to close a sale. Yet after weeks of negotiations with potential buyers such as Microsoft, Walmart and Oracle, the discussions were thrown into disarray when the Chinese government signaled that it would weigh in on TikTok's future. On Sunday, officials said Microsoft's bid was rejected. In a recent 30 minute interview over Zoom from her home, Ms. Pappas said TikTok's predicament was "unique" and described what it was like to navigate it through "a challenging time." She declined to discuss specifics about TikTok's deal talks and said she was not involved in them. Instead, Ms. Pappas said, she is focused on what TikTok's future could look like if the app's ownership is bifurcated. Most of all, she said, she is doubling down on putting TikTok's community of creators and users ranging from those who post videos of cake decorating to those who break dance first. Ms. Pappas later added that she regularly talked to Zhang Yiming, ByteDance's founder and chief executive, about all of these issues. To focus on its community, TikTok in July formed a Creator Fund, where creators can earn cash for views, starting with 200 million. And with the pandemic forcing people indoors for the foreseeable future, Ms. Pappas said she and her team were working on making TikTok an uplifting place to visit. Last month, the company launched a largest national advertising campaign on television and digital media, highlighting more than 30 popular creators under the tagline "It starts on TikTok." "We've built this product for hundreds of millions of people, and we're not looking for that to change," said Ms. Pappas, a former YouTube executive. But keeping TikTok's community happy in such a turbulent period may be challenging. Some creators and fans have been rattled by Mr. Trump's moves against the app. Since his executive order, people in the United States have installed TikTok about 6.5 million times, down 13 percent from before the order, according to Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Competitors have also pounced. Facebook introduced Reels, a TikTok clone inside Instagram, in August. The social network has also doled out millions of dollars to some of TikTok's biggest stars to lure them over to using Reels. Ms. Pappas said she wasn't worried about Facebook and Instagram Reels. "You can certainly copy a feature, but you can't copy a community," she said. "I think that's really hard to replicate." Tom Keiser, chief executive of Hootsuite, a social media management company, said TikTok was right to make its power users a priority. "They need to be investing in those folks," he said. "There's so many things out of their control, but their future growth is based on influencers and content creators continuing to evolve and grow and leverage the new capabilities TikTok is rolling out." Ms. Pappas has worked in the online influencer world since some of its earliest days. Half Greek by birth, she grew up in Australia and speaks with an Aussie twang. She moved to London when she was 20, and eventually migrated to New York. In 2007, she joined Next New Networks, a company that helped web video creators earn money from their efforts. YouTube bought Next New Networks in 2011. Ms. Pappas joined YouTube and quickly rose through the ranks. She was YouTube's first audience development lead, a role that led her to connect with video makers. Her division at YouTube developed and popularized the term "creator" and helped transform video blogging, or vlogging, into a full time job. Ms. Pappas also wrote a book, "The YouTube Creator Playbook," on how creators could make money from their followings, in 2011. She went on to develop YouTube's Creator Academy, an educational content portal that teaches creators how to build a business on YouTube, and a channel certification program, which teaches creators about digital rights management, legal issues and advanced analytics. TikTok lured her from YouTube at the end of 2018 to be its general manager and head of North America, based in Los Angeles. At the time, TikTok had just expanded globally. It was a new challenge for Ms. Pappas, who said she had wanted to get in on the ground floor of the next big creator movement. "It was this burgeoning community that resonated as this next evolution of what the creator meant and redefined the creators over again," she said. TikTok noted that its community guidelines prohibit bullying and harassment, and encouraged its users to "exercise care and good judgment when it comes to the content they post, including parents and others who set an example through their behavior," a spokeswoman said. Nick Tangorra, 22, a TikTok creator with 1.2 million followers, said he had met Ms. Pappas only once but believed that she was the only tech leader who understood the creator community's needs. "It starts at the top," he said. "TikTok knows fully that this app is what it is because of its creators. Vanessa is putting such an emphasis on creators, making sure we feel supported by the platform." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
What is it? A sneak peek at a coming replacement for the Nissan Maxima, although Nissan isn't ready to make that official. Is it real? Some of the concept's filigree will surely be pared before this sedan reaches showrooms, perhaps including the trompe l'oiel taillamps and huge cheese grater wheels. Yet the overall silhouette and many of the brawny styling cues will survive the cut. What they said: Andy Palmer, Nissan executive vice president, said the automaker had topped one million sales in America for two years running and won't be deterred from its ambitious electrification plans. "We will not relinquish our lead in electric vehicles," Mr. Palmer said. "Despite naysayers, this is the era of electrification and electronics." What they didn't say: If Nissan has been building a thick playbook of new and exciting design ideas, why were none of them applied to an excruciating dullard like the Sentra? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to really start listening. Civil rights and good government groups and users have been shouting from the rooftops for years for real change at the world's most powerful social media company. Facebook, they say, has helped enable misinformation about the coronavirus, elections, political repression as well as incite actual violence. Critics have long warned about President Trump's spread of misinformation on the platform, where hate groups like white supremacists have also found a cozy home. Far too often Mr. Zuckerberg has chosen to allow posts spewing bigotry and lies to remain on Facebook in the name of free speech. Now, a thorough and damning audit of the company, two years in the making and solicited by Facebook, confirms those fears. "With each success the auditors became more hopeful that Facebook would develop a more coherent and positive plan of action that demonstrated, in word and deed, the company's commitment to civil rights," wrote the auditors in their 100 page report, a prepublication draft of which was obtained by The New York Times. "Unfortunately, in our view Facebook's approach to civil rights remains too reactive and piecemeal." "Many in the civil rights community have become disheartened, frustrated and angry after years of engagement where they implored the company to do more to advance equality and fight discrimination, while also safeguarding free expression," the auditors wrote. Particularly galling, they wrote, is Mr. Zuckerberg's position on so called political speech, which is allowed to remain on the site even when it is demonstrably false, misleading or sometimes dangerous. Mr. Trump's warning to protesters in May that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" can only be interpreted as a threat. "After the company publicly left up the looting and shooting post, more than five political and merchandise ads have run on Facebook sending the same dangerous message that 'looters' and 'antifa terrorists' can or should be shot by armed citizens," wrote the auditors, which include the civil rights advocate Laura Murphy and a team from the law firm Relman Colfax PLLC, led by a partner, Megan Cacace. "The auditors do not believe that Facebook is sufficiently attuned to the depth of concern on the issue of polarization and the way that the algorithms used by Facebook inadvertently fuel extreme and polarizing content," they wrote. Mr. Zuckerberg said leaving the post up is about protecting free speech (Twitter, at least, put a warning on the post). But Mr. Zuckerberg is not enabling free speech, he's just privileging some of it. "When it means that powerful politicians do not have to abide by the same rules that everyone else does, a hierarchy of speech is created that privileges certain voices over less powerful voices," the report found. That means posts by regular folks who are less likely to be believed and or widely read can be taken down with impunity. Mr. Zuckerberg should listen to his auditors. He should listen to his employees, some of whom walked off the job in protest last month. He should listen to his advertisers, many of which are halting marketing on the site until it can be cleaned up but he's said "these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough." He met on Tuesday with a group of civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Anti Defamation League and Color of Change. But he didn't listen. "All I was hearing was talk and no action," said Jessica J. Gonzalez, co executive officer of Free Press, in an interview. Ms. Gonzalez was on the video call. "Facebook has what I call an appeasement strategy: Tell us what we need to hear, and Facebook can keep doing whatever they like. What they really need is a comprehensive sweep of the site of white supremacists, homophobes, anti Semites and other hateful groups." Facebook's auditors agreed. They found anti Muslim speech rampant on the platform and that Facebook directed users to increasingly dangerous posts touting white nationalism. "Facebook has not yet publicly studied or acknowledged the particular ways anti Muslim bigotry manifests on its platform," they wrote. The report also raises concerns about the possibility that the social media site itself is becoming a sort of radicalization engine. "Facebook should do everything in its power to prevent its tools and algorithms from driving people toward self reinforcing echo chambers of extremism, and that the company must recognize that failure to do so can have dangerous (and life threatening) real world consequences." Take voting rights, which Mr. Trump has attempted to chip away at in social media posts, including falsely claiming that mail in ballots lead to increased fraud. While Twitter appended the posts with fact checking information, Facebook left them up unchanged and unchallenged. "Facebook has been far too reluctant to adopt strong rules to limit misinformation and voter suppression," according to the report. "With less than five months before a presidential election, it confounds the auditors as to why Facebook has failed to grasp the urgency." Voters could be forgiven for believing the president, but Facebook has said it's yet another free speech issue. Mr. Zuckerberg is either ignoring how the right to free speech works, or he fundamentally misunderstands it. It's time for him to listen to First Amendment experts: They would tell him that, as a private corporation, Facebook can remove or tag any post it likes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Most incredibly, it does, if only for a while. Gabriel happens upon what the skeptical would deem incredible strokes of luck, first locating antibiotics next to a suicide victim's corpse and then that person's car keys. In one commendably tense set piece, Gabriel sharp shoots a zombie off Dr. Carson with his eyes closed a miracle, by anyone's definition. These are textbook examples of darkness in service of a greater good, and in Gabriel's estimation, they are irrefutable evidence of God's enduring love. He's too pious to gloat about being right, but when their fortunes take a turn for the better, the priest smiles and tells the doctor, "I'm not going to say anything." But just as it looks as if they're out the woods, everything goes wrong and upends Gabriel's interpretation. Negan's troopers capture both men and return them to the stronghold from which they made their daring escape, the futility of it all compelling Carson to take his own life. Watching the only person with whom he had a genuine emotional connection die proves to be the last straw for Gabriel, who returns to Negan's compound a shell of himself. Whenever characters dare to open themselves up to another person on the show, they're punished not by their confidante, but by crueler forces in the universe itself. The writers wield irony like it's a dagger. Hope is in awfully short supply on multiple fronts this week. Gabriel's fears that he has been abandoned by God form poetic echoes with a handful of scenes portending grim things to come. After having piked Gavin through the neck at the close of last week's episode, Henry seems worrisomely unfazed about what he has done, causing concern about the boy's empathy in Carol and Morgan. Having received a vicious dressing down from Negan, the closet turncoat Eugene straightens out and returns to his Savior ways, coolly issuing insulting orders to those scuttling beneath him at their makeshift bullet factory. The episode ends by mocking the very notion of hope in such bleak times, as Negan gives what would be a rousing and inspirational speech if it weren't for the content of his words. He strides before his army like General Patton, readying them to take back the day, but he's ranting about poisoning his enemies by dipping his signature bat in the zombies' toxic blood. Elsewhere, gestures of humanity suggest that decency has not been completely extinguished from the world. After some pathetic begging from a contrite (and yet, no less detestable) Gregory, Maggie finds a bit of pity left in herself and allows him and his fellow captives a bit of food and time outside their pen. Dwight and Tara tromp through the woods, their conflicting affiliations keeping a distance between them. Even so, Dwight is being sincere when he tells Tara that he is sorry her lover Denise had to die the way she did. Such little passages of empathy are what have made the series worth getting invested in, though they're a bit too few and far between this season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
WASHINGTON Congress's 85 billion, across the board budget cuts may not have brought the economy to a halt, as many once feared. But they are having a negative effect on jobs in the private sector, according to an analysis of the industries whose head count is most dependent on federal funds. It is no surprise that some of the companies that are hurting are closely associated with military spending, which was specifically targeted to absorb about half of the cuts from the so called sequester that began March 1. But many of the businesses experiencing the most pain are those that provide a wide range of services, like plumbing and maintenance. "We're kind of invisible," says Robert M. Sacco, general manager of Aleut Facilities Support Services, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., "until your toilet overflows." Contractors say they are trying to make do by picking up other projects where they can, but private sector and state and local government demand has also been weak or shrinking in recent years. Many in the facilities support field, a business category that includes janitorial, maintenance, trash disposal, guard and security, mail routing, reception and laundry services, say they are frustrated by the lack of public awareness about how defense budget cuts affect workers who are not performing stereotypical military functions. "They just kind of left us hanging," said James M. Galligan, chief executive and founder of Strategic Consulting Alliances, a small business in Maryland that employs veterans to do things like clean bathrooms and repair roofs on government properties. "In midstream the government just sort of cut its funding in half, but I, of course, still have to pay for my workers' health care and taxes and everything else." As a result, he resorted to layoffs earlier this year that brought his total payroll down to 50 from about 80. Mr. Galligan's and Mr. Sacco's companies both provide facilities support services; about 43 percent of the sector's jobs are directly or indirectly paid for by military and other national security operations. That makes it one of top five sectors that are most reliant on military spending to pay employees. The others in the top five are ship and boat building; aerospace product and parts manufacturing; scientific research and development services; and navigational, measuring, electromedical and control instruments manufacturing, based on calculations by The New York Times using Labor Department methodology. (The calculations involve looking at which industries receive government allocations, and then determine where hiring occurs when production rises or falls in one of those industries. For example, if the Pentagon spends money on fighter planes, that affects employment in the aerospace industry as well as upstream companies like metal manufacturers.) "There is a huge amount of public sector employment today that is actually in the private sector," said Justin Wolfers, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Michigan. "Who is a public sector worker used to be a simple thing and now it's not." Across the five industries that are most sensitive to changes in military spending, employment fell at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in March and stayed flat in April, the latest month for which seasonally adjusted data are available. In all other sectors, by contrast, employment grew at annualized rates of about 1.6 percent in March and 1.7 percent in April. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Before the start of the sequester on March 1, employment at private companies heavily dependent on military spending had been more closely tracking employment in the rest of the economy, though the numbers were somewhat uneven. Military payrolls have been declining almost every month since November 2011 in response to the drawdown in American wars abroad. These are just the sectors that are most directly hit by Pentagon cutbacks; economists fear that the sequester will ripple through the rest of the economy in more subtle ways, as downsized or furloughed government workers and contractors spend less money at their local businesses. The federal government has shed 45,000 jobs since the sequester began, and federal workers who were working part time but wanted full time work numbered 55,000 in May, up from 38,000 a year earlier. Government cutbacks, not just the sequester and other federal budget cuts but also several years of state and local government layoffs, appear to be an important factor in holding back the economic expansion. "The great puzzle in this recovery is why it's not quicker, particularly relative to other recoveries," Mr. Wolfers said. "The sequester is one of the many insults that been hurled at the recovery so far." Some government contractors said that their problems started even before the sequester officially began in March, partly because months of debate over Congressional budget cuts made government agencies and military bases wary about how much money they'd have available to spend. In May 2012, for example, Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque reduced the number of times it had its bathrooms and other facilities cleaned from every other day to twice a week, according to Brian Ammerman, associate vice president of business operations at Adelante Enterprises, a nonprofit that employs people with disabilities and whose facilities support services division holds the custodial contract with Kirtland. In other cases, new contracts have been delayed, including projects to make government buildings more energy efficient. "There are expected jobs that we've been tracking for several years that we knew were supposed to hit in the first quarter of this year that we haven't seen yet," said Dave Mannix, director of the federal market for Sebesta Blomberg, another firm that has facilities management and other technical and engineering contracts with both public and private sector clients. "There were things that were supposed to be up for contract in the second quarter, and we haven't seen those yet either." Even companies that have not been affected so far are concerned about the pipeline for future government work. "Fiscal year 2014 is going to be a bad year," said Mario Burgos, president of the Burgos Group, a small business in Albuquerque that provides a variety of technical, administrative and management services to federal clients, including the Navy, the Air Force and the Bureau of Land Management. "The largest amount of contract awards comes in this last fiscal quarter, which ends in September. Well, that's also the time that the government employees who make those award decisions, who get those contracts out, are all being furloughed." Mr. Burgos said his company had been enjoying a good year so far, mostly by casting its net more broadly and bidding on contracts at agencies the company had not previously worked for. Nonetheless, he has resisted expanding because of uncertainty over the next federal fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1, and whether existing contracts, typically awarded on a five or 10 year basis, might be canceled. "It really makes us hesitant to invest in infrastructure, like additional people or additional tools, since we don't know what could be taken away," he said. "Usually one of the nice things about federal contracting is that you can plan on a longer time frame, as opposed to with business to business projects where somebody new gets hired and then they change their mind about the project. But now even in government work we don't know what's going to happen month to month." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
When he left a broadcasting career three years ago for his first job in an N.F.L. front office, with the San Francisco 49ers, John Lynch sought to model his partnership with Coach Kyle Shanahan on what he considered the paragon of general manager coach alliances: Ozzie Newsome and John Harbaugh's Super Bowl winning work in Baltimore. And in his first two months with Shanahan, Lynch thought he had done well. That was until he found himself discussing management styles with Harbaugh at the league's annual meetings in March 2017. Lynch mentioned on the rare occasions when he and Shanahan had disagreed, they sidestepped arguments by just moving on to the next topic. Challenging him, Harbaugh told Lynch that approach was the easy way out. If Lynch believed strongly in something, Harbaugh argued, he was responsible for making Shanahan believe it, too. "You learn little things like that from people and gather experiences over time," Lynch said in an interview at the 49ers' headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., before the 2018 season. The 49ers' success this season a 13 3 record, a No. 1 seed in the playoffs and a berth in the N.F.C. championship game on Sunday against Green Bay at Levi's Stadium reflects a continuation, not the culmination, of the process that began in 2017. That was when Shanahan and Lynch received six year contracts and were tasked with restoring to glory a franchise that had missed the playoffs for three consecutive seasons, one doomed by a toxic trinity of internal discord, poor morale and regrettable personnel decisions. Lynch and Shanahan inherited a team that went 7 25 in its previous two seasons, a team that came to be known for bad football, bad coaching and its uncomfortable place in the center of a contentious national conversation about social justice sparked by the activism of the quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the tweets of President Trump. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Lynch and Shanahan hit on some decisions, missed on some others and went 10 22 in their first two seasons. But these two men with deep Bay Area connections Lynch played at Stanford, and Shanahan is a former 49ers ball boy whose father, Mike, once served as the team's offensive coordinator did not stray from the plan they had forged, in both talent and spirit. What they have engendered is a harmonious locker room, governed by an altruistic culture embodied by cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon's request to play special teams after he was benched in last week's victory over Minnesota, and a roster crafted to Lynch and Shanahan's specifications: Of the 22 players who started against the Vikings, only five predate this administration. Carmen Policy, a high ranking executive on the 49ers' last four Super Bowl winning teams, said Lynch and Shanahan had reconnected the team to its halcyon days. He likened the franchise to a beloved relative who had become sick, one that still evoked warm feelings even as people figured it was best to keep their distance. "And all of a sudden, these great doctors and scientists came up with these various cures and medications, and that relative bounces out of the hospital and he's right back to where you remember him," Policy said. "And in some ways, because you haven't experienced it in a while, he's even more fun than he used to be." In fostering a more positive environment, Shanahan and Lynch valued candor and authenticity. Players felt as comfortable addressing them by their first names as they did discussing their contract status. Coming from Seattle, where he enjoyed playing for another impressive general manager coach tandem in John Schneider and Pete Carroll, linebacker Brock Coyle said he appreciated how Lynch would speak to the team on occasion. "It was almost like having two head coaches," Coyle, one of the first free agents Lynch signed in 2017, said in a telephone interview. Lynch's playing pedigree nine Pro Bowls and a Super Bowl title as a hard hitting safety gave him authority. "When you have a coach who you respect and a G.M. who you respect, and they respect you and what you're doing on the field, that breeds confidence, that breeds camaraderie, that breeds trust." In assembling their current team, Shanahan and Lynch took risks that rivaled the audacity shown by 49ers ownership when, after firing coaches in three consecutive years, it installed two unproven men in critical leadership positions and allowed them to learn on the job. In a pass oriented league, the 49ers handed the richest contract for a fullback in league history to Kyle Juszczyk, so San Francisco could run the ball or evince the impression it was running regardless of what the defense presented. Then they loaded up on speedy backs Raheem Mostert, Matt Breida, Tevin Coleman whom Shanahan could maximize in open space. Undeterred by serious injuries, they signed linebacker Kwon Alexander, who was coming off a torn knee ligament, and the All Pro cornerback Richard Sherman, who had ruptured an Achilles' tendon. Lynch summoned his own experiences as a 30 something defensive star to court Sherman, saying how, in 2004, some teams wanted Lynch for his leadership but never mentioned his performance. "I said, 'Richard, first of all, we want Richard Sherman the player we need a corner, and we need a guy that would come in here and play at a high level,'" Lynch said. "That spoke to him." Sherman's arrival, before the 2018 season, fit a pattern established early. Under previous regimes, San Francisco had welcomed players with perceived character issues. "Those years when we were in the playoffs, you'd wake up on Monday, and say, 'O.K., who's being escorted out of the back room of the sheriff's office?'" Policy said, referencing the 49ers' three consecutive trips to the conference championship, including the Super Bowl in 2013, under Jim Harbaugh. But on this risk reward point Shanahan would not cave: the 49ers, in free agency, would pursue only players whose moral fiber and work ethic matched their talent. He wanted overachievers. Drifting from that principle, he said in a 2018 interview, would damage his credibility among his players. (Their only high profile mistake, linebacker Reuben Foster, who had been one of San Francisco's first round picks in Shanahan and Lynch's first draft together, was cut midway through his second season after a series of arrests. Shanahan said it was a matter of "trust.") As the losses stacked in that first season, nine in a row to begin Shanahan's coaching career, five straight by 3 points or fewer, he and Lynch served as each other's psychologist. Some days, Lynch said, he would have to encourage Shanahan before he spoke to the team. "Because you're pulling your hair out," Lynch said. "We could go 0 and 16, you know? You try not to have those thoughts, but if you're human you do." Lynch had another thought, though, the day after the 49ers lost to Philadelphia to fall to 0 8. The New England Patriots had called and offered Jimmy Garoppolo, the presumed successor to Tom Brady, for a second round pick. To establish the vibe they wanted, Lynch, at first, remade the roster by seeking players Shanahan or his coaches knew. But when Garoppolo became available, Lynch pounced. He and Shanahan agreed that the trade amounted to an audition, not a commitment; it would not deter them from exploring other options. Then Garoppolo showed up. Lynch and Shanahan loved his mechanics and aptitude and capacity for improvement. What they loved even more was the way Garoppolo's teammates gravitated toward him. As the 49ers won their final five games, all Garoppolo starts, Lynch was reminded of a tidbit Carroll, the Seahawks coach, once told him: Teams that play younger players might suffer early, but that faith will be rewarded late. The optimism that the 49ers carried into 2018 was shattered when Garoppolo damaged a knee ligament in Week 3, wrecking their season, but their 4 12 record allowed them to fortify a defensive line already loaded with four former first round picks by spending this year's, the No. 2 selection over all, on the edge rushing dynamo Nick Bosa. "Sometimes we almost worried: Does that mean we needed some worse guys, because we are not winning?" Shanahan told reporters this week. "But we stuck with it. We brought in a few guys who thought the same way as our other guys and some difference makers with the pass rush and some guys on offense, too." In this jubilant season, Burke Robinson, a longtime management consultant, has thought often of Lynch, whom he taught in an Introduction to Decision Making course at Stanford in 2014, when the general manager was trying to plot the next phase of his career. About 10 days before the 2017 draft, Robinson helped Shanahan, Lynch and the 49ers executives Adam Peters and Martin Mayhew put into words an organizational strategy. It values attributes like "contagious competitiveness" and "accountability to other players and themselves." But toward the end of that meeting, Robinson said, he met alone with Shanahan and Lynch. He asked them how they planned to handle potential conflicts on draft night, in a crowded room if, say, Lynch wanted a defensive player while Shanahan favored offense. John Harbaugh's advice was already being implemented. They resolved to express their opinions in private, with vigor, before returning to announce their decision. One win from the Super Bowl, the plan appears to be working perfectly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
CLEVELAND The nation's three largest drug distributors and two manufacturers have agreed with multiple states on a framework to resolve thousands of opioid cases with a settlement worth nearly 50 billion in cash and addiction treatments, according to three people familiar with the negotiations. The agreement would release AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson Corporation, which together distribute about 90 percent of the country's medicines, along with Johnson Johnson and Teva, the Israel based manufacturer of generic drugs, from a rapidly growing list of more than 2,300 lawsuits that they face in federal and state courts. Although the states have agreed in principle to the framework, cities and counties across the country have not yet fully embraced it, said lawyers for a committee that represents thousands of municipal governments. They are seeking more information about how the money will be distributed, whether it will be directed to relief measures or end up in general funds for state legislatures, and "when they could expect the financial support to start," the lawyers said in a statement. All the parties are under extreme pressure to reach a deal by Monday, when opening statements are set to begin in Cleveland in the first federal trial to determine responsibility for the opioid epidemic, which has led to 400,000 deaths in the United States over the past two decades. Some of the largest drugmakers, pharmacy chains and distributors have been fighting with state and local governments in the courts for nearly two years, as the nation searches for accountability for one of the worst public health crises in America's history. The three drug distributors and Teva are defendants in the first trial, brought by two Ohio counties. With thousands of similar governmental lawsuits on the national runway, the Ohio suit is considered an important showcase that will test the strength of both sides' witnesses and legal arguments before 12 jurors. The drug distributors are not nearly as well known as some of the other corporate players implicated in the opioid crisis, like Purdue Pharma, whose misleading marketing of the drug OxyContin is thought to have set off the epidemic. But the distributors are bigger and richer than the manufacturers all three are among the top 20 companies in the United States by revenue and numerous lawsuits have pointed to evidence that they routinely evaded regulators and helped pharmacies and manufacturers circumvent limits on orders of opioid painkillers. Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the trial starting Monday have said that the distributors conspired through their trade organization to flout the federal law, which obliged them to monitor sales and report outliers. They said that the distributors not only cast a blind eye on extraordinary orders, but lashed and rewarded their teams to sell greater volumes of opioids. In New York State alone, the distributors sold 1.6 billion oxycodone pills to pharmacies between 2010 and 2018. It was distributors, said the office of Attorney General Letitia James of New York, who "jammed open the floodgates." The companies either did not respond to messages or declined to comment. The distributors have said they were simply delivering medication that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration and prescribed by doctors. Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas are leading the settlement talks for the states, along with lawyers for thousands of cities and counties whose cases are in federal court. According to people familiar with the talks, the combined value of the deal breaks down as follows: 20 billion to 25 billion in cash to be divided among the states and localities to help pay for health care, law enforcement and other costs associated with the epidemic; and another 25 billion to 30 billion in addiction treatment drugs, supplies and delivery services. Many details are still being debated, including the timetable for when the money would be paid, people familiar with the negotiations said. Some state and local governments wanted more details about how the companies calculated the total dollar figures on services and addiction treatment drugs. Whether the amount will be considered sufficient by all the plaintiffs remains to be seen. A new report by the Society of Actuaries projects that the costs related to the opioid epidemic including health care, child and family assistance programs, criminal justice activities and lost wages will hit 188 billion in 2019 alone. "It's not an accident these offers are coming out on the eve of trial," said Abbe R. Gluck, a professor of health policy and law at Yale Law School. "But I think the question will be if this number is going to be enough to get a sufficient number of local governments to sign on." People familiar with the talks said that one sticking point in the negotiations is how much money will go toward attorneys' fees for the private lawyers who represent governments in the overwhelming majority of cases and work on contingency. Those lawyers filed the first opioid lawsuits in 2014 and have since conducted hundreds of depositions and compiled many millions of documents. This proposed deal is considerably larger than the tentative settlement negotiated by Purdue Pharma earlier this fall, not least because it involves five large companies instead of one. Under the Purdue agreement, Purdue's owners, members of the Sackler family, would pay between 3 billion and 4.5 billion over seven years. The company would be restructured into a public corporation, with profits from drug sales going toward the plaintiffs. Purdue has also agreed to donate addiction treatment medication. The Purdue deal is being vigorously opposed by about two dozen states who contend that the Sacklers are not paying enough money and have not yet fully disclosed how much they have earned from OxyContin sales. Johnson Johnson recently settled with the two Ohio counties for about 20.4 million, but the company is named in many of the other suits, as well. Many drug manufacturers and pharmacy chains also have been named as defendants in federal and state opioids cases, but they are apparently not involved in these negotiations. On Wednesday, even as negotiations continued, jury selection was underway in the federal courthouse in Cleveland. Because the trial is expected to be heavily steeped in testimony about illegal drug use, addiction, crime and rehab, prospective jurors were interviewed in private in Judge Dan A. Polster's chambers, so that lawyers could determine whether they had a glancing acquaintance with any of those topics. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Re "For Once, the President Was Right," by Nicholas Kristof (column, Nov. 19): President Trump did not get this "right" by demanding that the schools stay open, because he's failed miserably in ensuring that the schools open safely. And he's fostered divisiveness around schools opening safely by lying, dismissing the dangers of the virus and not listening to doctors. If he had been "right," in March and April he would have provided for robust testing, screening and contact tracing so that all schools could have opened in August and September. If Mr. Trump had been "right," he would have promoted masks, social distancing and then strict isolation and quarantine for anyone who is positive. No, Mr. Kristof, Mr. Trump got none of it "right." Your article correctly enumerates the harms of schools closing, but, as you point out in your book "Tightrope," poverty, homelessness, addiction, education inequalities and a horrible health care system for a significant chunk of the population are all problems that were here before the pandemic. All problems that the pandemic has made exponentially worse. Please don't blame the Democrats. I don't think they've gotten it wrong. And Mr. Trump has done nothing right. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A CONCERT FOR ISLAND RELIEF at Radio City Music Hall (Jan. 6, 7 p.m.). As the Caribbean region continues its recovery from the devastating effects of Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Irma, musicians are stepping up their relief efforts. A solo set by Dave Matthews and a performance by the Trey Anastasio Band two modern jam band masters, appearing without their usual troupes are the main attractions at this all star benefit concert for Puerto Rico and the United States and British Virgin Islands. But the most meaningful performance may come from Hurray for the Riff Raff, the band led by the Bronx raised singer songwriter Alynda Segarra, whose recent album, "The Navigator," is a complex expression of Puerto Rican realness. 800 745 3000, concertforislandrelief.com GUNN TRUSCINSKI DUO at Union Pool (Jan. 9, 8 p.m.). This instrumental duo's work is based on a simple idea: The guitarist Steve Gunn plays languid, dreamy notes while the drummer John Truscinski keeps an understated beat. The two musicians have found ample inspiration in this format, releasing three albums together, most recently the well received "Bay Head" in late 2017. At the right time and in the right settings including, perhaps, this Brooklyn date, free with RSVP Mr. Gunn and Mr. Truscinski's music is transportive. union pool.com THE KILLERS at Barclays Center (Jan. 9, 8 p.m.). In an era short on arena level rock 'n' roll heroes, the Killers perform a valuable service simply by continuing to exist. The group's fifth album, "Wonderful Wonderful," is a good example: It's a fun listen, and it provides a welcome excuse for the band's frontman, Brandon Flowers, to strut through a decade plus of Killers hits at concerts like this one in Brooklyn. 917 618 6700, barclayscenter.com LONG NECK at the Silent Barn (Jan. 5, 8 p.m.). Lily Mastrodimos, formerly of the archly named punk band Jawbreaker Reunion, shifted her focus to this new project around the same time the real Jawbreaker reunited after a 20 year split. The change has proved apt, giving Ms. Mastrodimos room to show off her honed skill as a songwriter. The jokey air of her previous group is gone on Long Neck's new album, "Will This Do?," due out later this month, and this performance at the Bushwick community arts space the Silent Barn is a good choice for fans of emotionally direct indie rock. With Coping Skills, Mallrat and Leia Campbell. silentbarn.org PURLING HISS at Sunnyvale (Jan. 11, 8 p.m.). Led by the laid back guitarist Mike Polizze, a worthy adjunct of the Philadelphia psychedelic rock scene led by Kurt Vile and the War on Drugs, this group specializes in pleasantly meandering jams with plenty of electric fuzz on top. It's a sound that's well suited to spaces like this neighborhood dive in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 877 987 6487, sunnyvalebk.com RZA at City Winery (Jan. 5, 8 p.m.). One of the most innovative producers of the 1990s, the Wu Tang Clan's RZA mined endless gold from dusty vinyl racks for the songs and albums he produced for the Clan and its many affiliates. His brilliant use of samples has made him an elder statesman to later rappers and producers like Kanye West, even as RZA himself has seemingly devoted more energy to acting than music. At this downtown show, he will perform alongside his longtime compatriot Inspectah Deck at a party for a new line of branded rolling papers ("100% organic, 100% Wu Tang approved"). 212 608 0555 ext. 6023, citywinery.com ORRIN EVANS SEXTET at the Jazz Standard (through Jan. 7, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Mr. Evans' career is going through big change: This 42 year old pianist just joined the Bad Plus, a trio known for fusing forms and reframing jazz tropes. But Mr. Evans isn't giving up his life as a postbop bandleader and a nurturer of young talent, especially in his hometown, Philadelphia. This run at the Jazz Standard should be a reminder of how distinctive and catalytic his voice has become in the world of straight ahead jazz; his band here includes J. D. Allen and Bill McHenry on tenor saxophone, Ingrid Jensen on trumpet, James Genus on bass and Mark Whitfield Jr. on drums. VIJAY IYER SEXTET at Birdland (Jan. 9 13, 8:30 and 11 p.m.). Mr. Iyer's sextet was one of the most discussed stories in creative music last year, when it released a stalwart debut album, "Far From Over." The group plays this pianist's compositions, which cut and weave while maintaining solid structures, and build much of their energy around the jagged interplay of the three horn front line. The sextet appears here with the lineup from the album: Graham Haynes on cornet, flugelhorn and electronics; Steve Lehman on alto saxophone; Mark Shim on tenor saxophone; Stephan Crump on bass; and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. (Marcus Gilmore takes Mr. Sorey's place on Jan. 12 and 13.) AMIRTHA KIDAMBI AND SAM NEWSOME/JAMES BRANDON LEWIS AND ARUAN ORTIZ at the Clemente (Jan. 9, 7 p.m.). The vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who frequently doubles on harmonium, takes a holistic approach to singing, which can mean treating every element as unfixed: Words can be opened up, rendered nonspecific. Melody can be repeated and frozen and stuck in place. Markings of rhythm can become utterly abstract, freed from cadence. She appears here in duo with Sam Newsome, a soprano saxophonist whose solo performances often deconstruct the workings of his own instrument in a similar way. Earlier in the evening, the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and the pianist Aruan Ortiz both prodigious experimenters will also play in a duo. This concert is part of Arts for Art's monthlong "Justice Is Compassion, Action Is Power" festival, which ends later in the week. artsforart.org/evolving LEE KONITZ at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (Jan. 9 10, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). An early exponent of Lennie Tristano's hybridized theory of improvising, Mr. Konitz cut a distinctive path on the alto saxophone in the 1940s and '50s, when most others were tracing the footsteps of Charlie Parker. Last year Mr. Konitz celebrated his own 90th year with the release of a lovely quartet disc, "Frescalalto." These shows at Dizzy's featuring the pianist Dan Tepfer and other members of Mr. Konitz's inner circle are a kind of belated birthday fete. JOSE JAMES at Le Poisson Rouge (Jan. 11, 7 p.m.). Mr. James sometimes uses his sleepy baritone to boast, or to posture, or to console typical soul singer stuff but it's hard to get lost in his singing. He's a shy romantic, relativist and self questioning and complex: Whether by design or not, it's the uncertainty that makes his work interesting. His newest project is a tribute to Bill Withers, another singer whose music always seemed more defined by his internal life than by his public persona. Mr. James presents Mr. Withers' music here with an expert quintet. The concert also includes sets from three acts with their own ideas about how to make dance music surprising: My Brightest Diamond, the No BS! Brass Band, and Knower. SAMORA PINDERHUGHES'S 'THE TRANSFORMATIONS SUITE' at Joe's Pub (Jan. 7, 7 p.m.; Jan. 9 and 14, 9:30 p.m.). The young, Bay Area reared pianist Samora Pinderhughes released "The Transformations Suite" on CD in 2016, but ideally it belongs onstage. A work of protest and incantation, it mixes stout horn arrangements with fierce improvisations and radical poetry confronting the scourge of racial violence physical and political in the United States. At Joe's Pub, Mr. Pinderhughes appears with a full band, adding film and theatrical performance to the mix. JOSHUA REDMAN QUARTET at the Blue Note (Jan. 9 14, 8 and 10:30 p.m.). Mr. Redman's place is secure as one of the most effusive and engaging tenor saxophonists in straight ahead jazz. He appears here with three longtime compatriots the pianist Aaron Goldberg, the bassist Reuben Rogers and the drummer Gregory Hutchinson all well attuned to his language of elastic tenacity. 212 475 8592, bluenote.net | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Ian Spencer Bell likes to divide his dances into two categories, quiet and talking: those danced in silence and those accompanied by text that he writes and recites. "Accompanied," though, is not quite the right word. At its best, his movement itself seems to do the talking, physical sentences inseparable from verbal ones neither upstaging the other so that what results is not dance and not poetry but some third medium. On Wednesday at the Martha Graham Studio Theater, this dexterity with language was most apparent in "Geography Solos." Performed by Mr. Bell, a dancer of gentle but defined precision, it opened an hourlong program, "Elsewhere," made up of five thoughtfully interlaced pieces. The vast 11th floor studio, lined on two sides by arched windows overlooking Manhattan, feels hallowed no matter what happens there, but Nicholas Houfek's subtle lighting enhanced that atmosphere. Mr. Bell walked into the space, stood still for a moment, cracked a fleeting smile and began to talk and dance. A story about driving to the laundromat with his mother, at the age of 6, had as much carefully selected, clearly relayed detail (Diana Ross on the radio, tan leather seats) as his choreography, with its just so angles, vectors and lines, like a palm sliding up one thigh, over the crease of a hip and shooting out in front of him. The color in his recollections ("the green Formica counter," "the blue, yellow and pink" of the revolving laundry) counteracted the muted palette onstage: black backdrop, gray floor, gray and black rehearsal clothes for costumes. Mr. Bell's text is largely autobiographical, and his accounts of mundane or meandering outings rang truer than the more confessional tone that followed in "Cold March." Stationed close to the audience, he recounted a romance that presumably broke up his marriage, as the tall, arresting Joshua Tuason sliced through geometric sequences in the background. (Jenna Liberati and Mairead Filgate recycled that fastidious material in the next piece, "Cold Translation.") Here, the talking portion, while holding your interest, seemed more like a therapeutic exercise than like a necessary companion to movement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Stephen E. Strom's eloquent "Bears Ears: Views From a Sacred Land" is perhaps a more palatable picture book if not also in its own way a perverse bummer, another chronicling of territory taken by force. In 2016, President Obama relied on the Antiquities Act of 1906 (signed by Theodore Roosevelt) to set aside 1.35 million acres of public land in southeastern Utah, intending to protect for all time more than 100,000 sacred Native American sites, not to mention a contained landscape upon which the narrative of time has been written more eloquently and indelibly than anywhere else on earth. What Yellowstone is to wildlife, Bears Ears is to geology. However, just half a year later President Trump, in one of his first acts in office (and with characteristic racism), reduced the scope of the protected monument by 85 percent one of the many illegal executive orders that will remain caught up in courts for years. Peter and Beverly Pickford's "Wild Land" may be the most bearable and beautiful of the three large coffee table books; although to be fair, neither beauty nor tolerability is the primary concern of the first two. All three, I think, strive not just to slow the escalation of time, but to stop it and, through art, they succeed. "Wild Land" is a whopper of a book, beginning with a stunning frontispiece of countless penguins associating in the Antarctic, looking like so many urban commuters, though without the frenzy. Some are facing each other, communicating with apparent leisure. Subsequent pages of wandering musk ox in the Arctic, polar bears (what world designed such creatures, and how long did it take?), sea turtles, moonscape deserts and undersea schools of fish as infinite as the flocks of birds in the sky all cause the reader to stare agape, changed. It is this last book that gives me the most hope. The authors had to travel to the farthest corners of the earth to find the bounty, vitality and ferocity of a natural world still struggling with each day's merciful rising and setting as well as a host of new storms, floods and fires, to be certain. But it is an older world than the one the rest of us encounter, and it is a wonder for our own newly arrived species to gaze, with dull incomprehension, at such grace and power, and the deep history of our curious planet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
When someone says "I love you" for the first time, it usually marks a hopeful beginning. For Darius and Josh, it's a harbinger of doom. The men have been friends with benefits for a little while, until Josh blurts out those three little words and changes everything because he is married to someone else. The twist in S. Asher Gelman's new play, "Afterglow," is that Josh's husband is in on the affair. Indeed, the show begins with the sounds of a three way simultaneous orgasm. Never mind the feat of synchronization; rather, we are meant to admire how casual the participants are about the situation. The husbands Josh (Brandon Haagenson) and Alex (Robbie Simpson) are proudly polyamorous, and Darius (Patrick Reilly) is only the latest guest to grace their bed. (The frequent nudity is so willfully carefree that it ends up looking forced.) This time, however, the arrangement goes awry when Josh and Darius develop a bond more dangerous than sex, and a twosome cleaves out of the threesome. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The tennis player John Isner is tall. Very tall. 6 feet 10 inches, to be exact. Which means that traveling on a plane to tournaments around the world, which the Dallas resident does roughly 11 months a year, can be a daunting task. And the biggest annual challenge comes every January, when the Australian Open is played, requiring Mr. Isner, who lost in the first round this year, as well as many other American tennis players, to spend many hours in the air on their way to Melbourne. Ahead of the Open, Mr. Isner talked about his travel strategies. Over time he's learned not only how to keep his legs stretched but also ensure his body is in top shape for the tournament ahead. The following is an edited version of the conversation. What kind of traveler are you? When you go on vacation, are you looking for adventure, relaxation, culture all three? Usually I'm traveling for tennis, so the most important thing for me is to not get jet lag. Over the years it's stopped being an issue. What I do, the first very thing once I've gotten settled in a hotel, is break a sweat. You have to sweat it out; the airplane is too gross. I'll practice tennis or go to the gym. If I don't have time I'll use the sauna or steam room. I used to do the opposite. There was one time I flew back to Dallas from Asia, and I started partying a bit. I was so messed up with the time that I didn't feel that tired. But it was the absolute worst thing I could have done. I felt awful for a week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
STRATFORD, Ontario On a bright day here, not far from the Avon River, I saw jealous Othello walking in the market square. Also spotted, near a coffee shop: Mistress Ford of "The Merry Wives of Windsor," whose credulous husband thinks she is trysting with fat old Falstaff. And wasn't that Orin Scrivello, the gas huffing, girlfriend beating dentist from "Little Shop of Horrors," on his cellphone? Pay an extended visit to the Stratford Festival in midsummer, as I did earlier this month , and you may find theater spilling onto the streets. Over the course of a week I saw eight of the nine shows currently on offer; three more will join the repertory soon. From previous, shorter visits, I was already familiar with the way plays in proximity start talking to one another, seeming to raise common themes and bat about their differences. I had also seen how actors, switching among multiple roles each week, inevitably brought bits of each with them: a perfume of Prospero, an aura of Miss Adelaide. But when you spend more time at the festival, and five or six hours a day in dark theaters, something else happens: The dark starts to leak. Not only do you see the plays' characters everywhere, but you also feel the world taking up the threats and questions of the works. For me, that's the joy of Stratford, the largest repertory company in North America, now in its 67th season. Even if the individual productions are often B plus efforts rarely as good as the best versions you've ever seen but almost always among the better the variety and cleverness of the programming more than make up for it. Under the artistic directorship of Antoni Cimolino, the mix of Shakespeare, classics, musicals and new work demonstrates the continuity of theater through the ages, as well as the continuity of injustice that makes it necessary. Not that you'd guess this from the season's official theme: Breaking Boundaries, an upbeat phrase that could be applied to almost any play ever. No matter; the real theme, the result of Mr. Cimolino's pairings and groupings and casting, is considerably darker and more specific. Catch "Othello," "Merry Wives," "Little Shop," "Private Lives" and "Henry VIII" as well as a new play, "Mother's Daughter" and you cannot miss it: the paranoid need of men to regulate women's sexuality, as a source of both pleasure and progeny. That comes as no surprise in "Othello," sharply directed here by Nigel Shawn Williams on a modern set with overly literal projections of trickling blood and what look like lice. ("I'll pour this pestilence into his ear," Iago tells us in one of his chilling soliloquies.) As the Moorish general in the Venetian army who marries Desdemona, the white pearl of that society's aristocracy, Michael Blake establishes the psychosexual drama from the start. He wears his confidence like a cockscomb but is clearly more at a loss in love than he ever was in war. Though race can't help but be a theme in "Othello," it is not the main one here; Iago's hatred, and Othello's susceptibility to it, seem to stem less from each man's response to outsiderness than from their common fear of cuckoldry. (Iago imagines that Othello has slept with his wife, Emilia, here a soldier in Desdemona's retinue, not just her maid.) In a superb performance, Gordon S. Miller (a ringer for Tony Hale of "Veep") gives us Iago as a hypercompetent desk jockey who turns, after hours, into a vicious, fake news spreading incel. By the time Emilia points out that the failings women regularly stand accused of are merely reflections of men's worse ones "The ills we do, their ills instruct us so" it's too late for Desdemona. She has made her bed and will die in it. I left "Othello" thinking, oddly enough, about Vice President Mike Pence and other politicians who observe the "Billy Graham rule," not allowing themselves, even at work, to be alone with women who aren't their wives. So destabilizing are female bodies, and so fragile men's egos, that, even today, they must be kept apart. That idea came into relief, in both senses, in "Little Shop" and "Private Lives," the sour Noel Coward comedy of divorce and infidelity. But it became most obvious when the tragedy of "Othello" flipped into the comedy of "Merry Wives." The absurd fear harbored by Mr. Ford that his wife is sleeping with Falstaff is matched only by Falstaff's absurd fantasy that Mistress Ford and her bestie, Mistress Page, are gaga for him. Mr. Cimolino's charming production is set in a town like Stratford at the time of the festival's founding in the early 1950s. (The set resembles what you see while wandering the residential streets.) It's an apt connection, not just because of the story's inherent theatricality: The women devise and enact "scripts" of comeuppance for the men. Though they are radiantly successful, we are always aware that the success depends on leveraging their limited powers. (One scene is trenchantly set among hair dryers in a beauty salon.) Especially in the haunting conclusion, a community prank that suggests the birth of theater itself, I thought about how acting was one of the first professions available to women. Another, for a lucky few, was queen. Or at least, as "Henry VIII" demonstrates, they were lucky for a while . This rarely seen collaboration between Shakespeare, at the height of his powers, and John Fletcher, at the far lower height of his, compresses a 13 year slice of Henry's life, from 1520 to 1533, into what seems like a few days. Even if you don't know which passages scholars say are Shakespeare's and which Fletcher's, your ear will guide you accurately enough. Much of the play feels thin yet padded, a pro forma tribute to the House of Tudor; but then there are scenes so rich in poetry and emotional detail they can tear your heart out when properly performed. These are mostly the scenes with Queen Katherine , formerly of Aragon, for whom faultless chastity and obedience to her husband weren't enough to outweigh her "failure" to provide a male heir. Rarely have I seen fury and sadness and residual love so potently brewed as in Irene Poole's blistering performance here, under the direction of Martha Henry, a noted Shakespearean herself. Ms. Poole fulfills the play's alternative title, "All Is True." Still, Katherine gets sidelined, and the play ends with the glorious birth to Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn of the future Elizabeth I. Not that this ultimately helped Boleyn, who was beheaded not three years later on charges that, naturally, included adultery. Elizabeth makes a more substantial appearance, as the 20 something Bess, in Kate Hennig's "Mother's Daughter," commissioned by Stratford and directed by Alan Dilworth. But the play, the third in a series of Ms. Hennig's explorations of Tudor royals, mostly focuses on Bess's half sister, Mary , maligned by history as Bloody Mary for the kind of executions we take for granted in kings . Also recurring from "Henry VIII" is Mary's mother, Katherine, now a ghost who answers to her Spanish name, Catalina. Once again, Ms. Poole is fierce, but in "Mother's Daughter" her mission seems less pious. The play concerns her spectral efforts to assure the continuance of her Catholic line by getting Mary (Shannon Taylor, excellent) to kill a couple of Protestant rivals: the dashing Bess and the naive Lady Jane Grey. And also, yes, by getting hitched in time to produce an heir; she was already an old maid of 37 at her coronation. Ms. Hennig's feminist revision of history she makes Mary's chief political aides both women is fascinating and bracing, with its bloody minded parental ghost an especially pungent inversion of expectations (and of "Hamlet"). Does she make a convincing case for Mary as a Tudor action hero, defeating male attempts to control her marital and maternal choices? It would be nice to think so, but Mary reigned just five years, having indeed married but suffering two false pregnancies and leaving no heirs. Only after heading into the Stratford night, with all the other plays' characters hovering about, did I reflect that the Tudor woman who actually consolidated power and stayed on the throne long enough to name an age and to patronize Shakespeare was Elizabeth, the one we still call the Virgin Queen . | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times Scientists have been warning for decades that climate change is a threat to the immense tracts of forest that ring the Northern Hemisphere, with rising temperatures, drying trees and earlier melting of snow contributing to a growing number of wildfires. The near destruction of a Canadian city last week by a fire that sent almost 90,000 people fleeing for their lives is grim proof that the threat to these vast stands of spruce and other resinous trees, collectively known as the boreal forest, is real. And scientists say a large scale loss of the forest could have profound consequences for efforts to limit the damage from climate change. In retrospect, it is clear that Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, was particularly vulnerable as one of the largest human outposts in the boreal forest. But the destruction of patches of this forest by fire, as well as invasions by insects surviving warmer winters, has occurred throughout the hemisphere. In Russia, about 70 million acres burned in 2012, new statistics suggest, much of that in isolated areas of Siberia. Alaska, home to most of the boreal forest in the United States, had its second largest fire season on record in 2015, with 768 fires burning more than five million acres. "It's clear that the warming temperatures and extraordinary drought are major players here," said Thomas W. Swetnam, an emeritus scientist at the University of Arizona who studies the ecology and history of wildfires. "We probably wouldn't be seeing the scale of some of these fires if it weren't for those factors." The weather pattern known as El Nino has been pumping a huge amount of heat from the ocean and into the atmosphere for more than a year, and scientists say that could also have played a role in setting the conditions for this year's fires. Temperatures in parts of Alberta were as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in the weeks before the fires began, desiccating the landscape. Yet the same scientists say the overall increase in fire in northern regions would not be happening without global warming. The rising danger was predicted decades ago, as one of the likely consequences of human emissions. The situation, he and other experts said, demands new thinking by governments about how to manage forests and protect nearby human settlements. Fort McMurray, for instance, has just a single road for people to leave the city. But the dangers go far beyond the risk to the communities on the front lines, and they are global in scope. The forests of the world are helping to offset rising human emissions of greenhouse gases, absorbing a significant portion of the carbon dioxide that the burning of fossil fuels throws into the air. So far, even as fires and other disturbances increase, the forests are growing more than enough to compensate. But scientists see a risk that if the destruction from fires and insects keeps rising, the situation will reverse, and some of the carbon that has been locked away in the forests will return to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, accelerating the pace of global warming and further magnifying the stress on the forests a dangerous feedback loop. In addition, winds are sometimes carrying soot from the northern fires onto the immense sheet of ice covering Greenland, darkening the surface and causing it to absorb more of the sun's heat. In 2012, such soot contributed to melting the surface of virtually the entire Greenland ice sheet, the first time that had happened since 1889. Scientists have been trying for years to call attention to the boreal forest. ("Boreal" essentially means "northern.") The forest gets less public attention than tropical forests, but it represents close to a third of the forest land on the planet. It is ecologically unique, and vital to human welfare for its ability to limit the risks of global warming by soaking up some of humanity's greenhouse emissions. The boreal forest consists mainly of cone bearing trees like pines, spruces and larches, adapted to survive the long, cold winters of the northern region. The forest encircles the Northern Hemisphere in a band near and just below the Arctic Circle, through Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Russia. Across the hemisphere, the danger to the forest from global warming is being compounded by increased industrial activities like logging. Fort McMurray sprang up in recent decades as the commercial center for a huge industry that is extracting some of the world's dirtiest oil from a region known as the Athabasca tar sands. In Russia, extensive mining and drilling for fossil fuels are damaging the forest. More people means more activity that can spark forest fires, according to Sergei A. Bartalav, the director of a laboratory that helps monitor fires in Russia. But he added that the government had been slow to put in the necessary personnel and equipment to control the fires. Forest fires are a natural part of the history of the boreal forest, but records from recent decades suggest they may be reaching an unnatural level of frequency and intensity. Data from Canada and Alaska show a sharp increase in the area burned in recent decades. Scientists are still trying to reconstruct a longer fire history for the boreal region, using information like tree rings and lake deposits of soot, but limited evidence from Alaska suggests that fires in at least part of that state are at their worst in 10,000 years. Official Russian figures do not show an increase of forest fires in recent decades. But American scientists, working with colleagues in Russia, have concluded that the official figures "grossly underestimate the burned areas," said Susan G. Conard, a retired United States Forest Service scientist who remains active in the field and has worked extensively in Russia. She and her colleagues have lately constructed what they consider to be a more accurate record, using satellite data. The results have not yet been published, but they were presented at a scientific meeting in Vienna last year. They roughly track the Canadian and Alaskan figures in showing a sharp increase in the area burned in Russia since about 2000, culminating in the immense fires that accompanied a devastating heat wave in 2012. One of the explanations for the increase in fires seems to be an earlier melting of the spring snowpack across the Northern Hemisphere, another trend identified by satellites. The melt leads to a drying of the landscape early in the fire season. The resinous trees of the boreal zone become more susceptible to fire, and lightning sets off intense fires that are nearly impossible to control. David A. Robinson, a climatologist at Rutgers University who tracks snow cover, said that the April snow pack in the Northern Hemisphere was the lowest since records began half a century ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A good throw is as comforting as it is beautiful, providing a little extra warmth whenever you need it and making a room feel more welcoming and relaxed. "It's a homey thing," said Amee Allsop, a designer in East Hampton, N.Y., who often creates minimalist spaces warmed up by textured linen and other textiles. And throws aren't just for winter, said Ms. Allsop, who recommended having one slung over the sofa all year long, but changing the materials with the seasons. "In winter, I look for textured wool, mohair or cashmere," she said. "But in summer, having a linen or cotton throw is nice." Whenever possible, you should see a throw in person and touch it before buying it, to make sure it feels as good as it looks. A wool throw that appears thick online could turn out to be disappointingly thin, and one that looks soft could be scratchy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Despite what Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, described as an "increased" level of concern over a significant rise of coronavirus cases in Florida, the league moved forward on several fronts Friday by formalizing its plans to restart the 2019 20 season at Walt Disney World near Orlando. The league and the National Basketball Players Association jointly announced that they had officially finalized their agreement to revive the season with 22 teams next month, and the N.B.A. was set to reveal the 88 game schedule leading into the playoffs later Friday. The league and the union also announced that, out of 302 players tested by their teams on Tuesday, 16 were positive for the coronavirus. During a conference call with reporters Friday afternoon, Silver said the two organizations "ultimately believe it will be safer on our campus than off it." "My ultimate conclusion is that we can't outrun the virus, and that this is what we're going to be living with for the foreseeable future, which is why we designed the campus the way we did," Silver said. "While it's not impermeable, we are in essence protected from cases around us at least that's the model. For those reasons, we're still very comfortable being in Orlando." Hours after Florida announced a single day record of nearly 9,000 new coronavirus cases in the state up from 5,511 on Wednesday Silver said that the league had "no choice but to learn to live with this virus" and that no options for rebooting the season "are risk free right now." Any player who tested positive this week must remain in isolation until they record two consecutive negative coronavirus tests at least 24 hours apart. Michele Roberts, the executive director of the N.B.P.A., said of the positive results that "one would have been concerning," but she also expressed relief that there had not been more cases among the players. "I've been holding my breath for the last few weeks," Roberts said. Said Silver: "None of the 16 were seriously ill in any way and was also a big relief for us." Players who test positive also must undergo cardiac screening and receive clearance from a physician before resuming basketball activities, according to the N.B.A.'s 113 pages of health and safety protocols governing the planned restart. Malcolm Brogdon of the Indiana Pacers and the Sacramento Kings players Jabari Parker and Alex Len announced this week that they were among the 16 positive tests. Other players reported by various news media outlets to have tested positive include Sacramento's Buddy Hield (as reported by The Athletic), Miami's Derrick Jones Jr. (The Miami Herald) and two unnamed members of the Phoenix Suns (The Arizona Republic). Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets remained in his native Serbia this week rather than rejoin the team after he, too, tested positive. Jokic, though, was not among the 302 players tested this week, which included only players from the 22 teams involved in the season restart who are currently available for testing in their home markets. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Silver acknowledged that a "significant spread" of the coronavirus once teams were on campus in Florida "may lead us to stopping" again. But Silver said they had not yet determined what would constitute a "significant spread." The 22 teams participating in the N.B.A.'s restart are scheduled to report to the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex at Walt Disney World starting July 7. Until then, testing of players is scheduled to continue every other day until teams leave for Florida; part of the reason teams are spending two weeks in their home markets is to help with identifying coronavirus cases and getting those players isolated before all 22 teams convene. The defending champion Toronto Raptors are already in Florida, training at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, to avoid the travel restrictions involved in crossing the United States Canada border. As the N.B.A. released of its first batch of test results, Florida on Friday reported 1,051 new confirmed Covid 19 cases in Orange County, home to Disney World. Coronavirus cases have risen steadily all month in Florida since the N.B.A. and the players' association ratified the return to play plan at the Disney complex on June 4 and June 5. The N.B.A.'s positive test rate Tuesday was 5.3 percent, but the league did not announce results for coaches and team staff members who were tested. Teams will be allowed to bring up to 17 players to Disney World in traveling parties capped at 37 people, with a mandatory quarantine of 36 to 48 hours upon arrival until two consecutive negative tests are recorded. Testing, Silver said, is scheduled daily thereafter. Beyond the health concerns, Oklahoma City's Chris Paul, the N.B.P.A. president, expressed confidence in the league's pledge to support players in their efforts to further the Black Lives Matter movement when play restarts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The Bucks got better, but the Nets with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant might be too much for Milwaukee or any other team in the East to overcome. Is it already the most wonderful time of year again? With LeBron alley ooping and referees demanding we be of good cheer? There'll be dunks used for posting, Kawhi laughs for roasting and trash talking out in the snowwwww. Yes, the N.B.A. season is upon us, beginning Tuesday, with a much different landscape from any other season. Most arenas won't have fans in the stands because of the pandemic. At the same time, several top stars who missed most or all of last season will be returning, shifting the balance of power in the N.B.A. And all eyes are on James Harden to see where he ends up, whether he has to stay in Houston for the season or gets sent to one of his preferred destinations, like Milwaukee, Philadelphia or Miami. Outlook: On paper, this is the most talented team in the East, if not the league. The only new players this season are key reserves, but the real addition is Kevin Durant, who is ready to play after missing last season with an Achilles' tendon injury. His friend and fellow perennial All Star Kyrie Irving also will be returning, from a shoulder injury that limited him to 20 games last season. If they are close to the players they were before their injuries, this team is a threat to win the finals, especially considering its dynamic supporting cast. The Nets have elite shooting in Shamet and Joe Harris; rebounding and shot blocking in DeAndre Jordan and Jarrett Allen; quality playmakers in Caris LeVert and Spencer Dinwiddie; and bench sparkplugs like Green and Timothe Luwawu Cabarrot. Outlook: The Bucks enter the season without the cloud of whether Giannis Antetokounmpo will sign an extension hanging over Wisconsin. That's a huge win in itself. But now the focus will be on whether this team will vie for a championship or disappear early in the playoffs again. Trading for Holiday, a former All Star, was a great start. Antetokounmpo, Khris Middleton and Holiday are a fearsome trio. The Bucks also revamped their bench, adding Augustin, a veteran who can shoot the ball, to make up for the loss of players like Matthews and Ilyasova. (Side note: Antetokounmpo has the opportunity to become the first player since Larry Bird in 1985 86 to win the Most Valuable Player Award for a third straight season.) Outlook: After last year's Cinderella run to the finals, the Heat enter this season with the same team more or less, led by Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic. You can expect Tyler Herro, who mostly came off the bench last season and delivered many strong performances in the playoffs, to have a bigger role. You do wonder whether Miami will be able to take teams by surprise again, with many teams in the East making significant moves to get better or having players return from injury. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Out With the New at E3, as the Old Stays in Play Surprises are always a key part of E3, the giant video game convention that opens its doors next week in Los Angeles. Innovative new game titles and hardware are essential for stirring up excitement among gamers, which keeps them emptying their wallets. Next week, details are expected about an update to Microsoft's Xbox One console, called Project Scorpio, that will support 4K video and virtual reality. Super Mario Odyssey for Nintendo's new Switch console will be another highlight. But the outsize emphasis on the new at E3 disguises an important change in the game business over the past few years: The old has never mattered so much before. It used to be that a game publisher would put out a big title and, if it hit all the right notes, the game would sell well for a few months. But over the past five years, publishers especially those of the big console games that dominate E3 have used the internet to keep their games fresh with new content, finding new ways of keeping players engaged with the games and spending money on them through sales of virtual goods. Old games seem less old because they are regularly being updated with new things to do and see, giving them a shot of digital Botox. This reflects an important change in the game business toward providing a service that is constantly being enhanced, rather than selling discs wrapped in cellophane that mostly do not change after a customer purchases them. "The games industry has followed the same example investors have seen with Netflix," said Joost van Dreunen, chief executive at SuperData Research, a game research firm. "Entertainment in general is undergoing this tremendous shift." For an example, look no further than Grand Theft Auto V, the gritty action adventure game from Rockstar Games, which first came out in September 2013, almost four years ago. Grand Theft Auto V was published so long ago that it was initially released on the last generation of console hardware from Sony and Microsoft, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (Versions followed for newer hardware in November 2014 and for PCs after that.) And yet, there was Grand Theft Auto on the best selling games list as recently as April, when it ranked sixth in the United States by dollar sales, right up there with games released this year like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, according to NPD Group, the market research firm. More than 80 million copies of Grand Theft Auto V have been sold since it was released, according to Take Two Interactive Software, the publisher that owns Rockstar Games. Part of Grand Theft Auto V's enduring appeal is that it is an exceptional game, with a 97 out of 100 score on Metacritic, which aggregates reviews from game critics. But the way Rockstar has kept the game performing at such a high level years after its release is through the internet. The constant refurbishing has kept the community of Grand Theft Auto players, who typically have to wait four to five years between totally new versions of the game, paying attention. "It allows us to stay in touch with consumers between huge, tent pole releases," said Strauss Zelnick, the chief executive of Take Two, in a phone interview. There's a financial motive for Take Two. While players can do many things free, there are plenty of opportunities for them to buy virtual weapons, vehicles and other items to make their online game playing more fun. In April, Grand Theft Auto V ranked third among all console games in digital spending, according to SuperData Research. In a significant milestone, Take Two reported that for its last fiscal year, which ended March 31, slightly more than half of its revenue of 1.78 billion came from digital online sources. Of that digital revenue, a little over half came from people buying full, downloadable versions of games rather than physical copies, while the rest came from purchases of virtual currency and add on digital content. Grand Theft Auto V has generated digital revenue of 1.6 billion over its life, Mr. van Dreunen of SuperData Research estimated. The funnel of digital revenue between major releases of games means the feast or famine cycle that used to characterize Take Two's financial results huge spikes in revenue after big Grand Theft Auto releases, followed by deep troughs is no longer as severe. "We don't see as much of that now because every two or three months you're seeing new content being added to keep users engaged in the franchise universe," said Yoshio Osaki, president of IDG Consulting, a market research and consulting firm focused on the game industry. Digital revenue also carries higher profit margins than sales of physical game discs, because no manufacturing is involved and distribution costs are lower. Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard, among other big game publishers, have also heavily invested in expanding the internet side of their businesses, which has created longer legs for many of their games. As a result, stock prices of both publishers and Take Two have increased by triple digits over the past four years. Still, most copies of Take Two's games, including Grand Theft Auto, are sold on discs in stores. To make a lot of digital revenue on games, Take Two needs to sell as many physical copies as possible. That means building buzz at events like E3 with new products. "Physical distribution partners are terribly important for us," Mr. Zelnick said, "and we expect that to continue for some time to come." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
From the start, Ariel Schaap had cause to believe that Joshua Heisler might benefit from a caffeine infusion. They met in 2010 as pre med students at Columbia, and among the first things he asked was whether he could borrow her biology lab notes. "Josh basically wanted to do less work," said Dr. Schaap, an internist at Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan. Two years later, when meeting her parents, he fell asleep on their Teaneck, N.J., dining room table. Dr. Heisler, now an internist, is still fighting exhaustion. Since recovering from the coronavirus in March, he has been on the front lines of the pandemic alongside his colleagues at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. But his decision to marry Dr. Schaap on July 5 was not made in a fog of fatigue. Becoming her husband had been his dream since medical school. Before Dr. Heisler composed the mail hitting her up for that work, he realized he liked the idea of connecting with her regardless of the potential academic benefits. "I was immensely grateful when she sent them, and when I browsed them I saw that she was fastidious," he said. "But I had also found her attractive and intelligent." Dr. Heisler then started looking for Dr. Schaap around Columbia's Hillel, a Jewish student activities group, before figuring out a way to place himself in her orbit in the spring of 2011. "I heard she was going to Atlantic City for the weekend, and one of my friends was going, too," he said. "So I said, 'Oh, I'll go, that sounds like fun." But that was a feint. Dr. Heisler doesn't like gambling, even the low stakes kind. "I'm too risk averse," he said. "I just wanted to spend time with her." By the summer, they had a new friendship but not much more. Both were focused on the work they hoped would eventually make them well rounded doctors. In the summer of 2011 Dr. Schaap was an intern at Bellevue Hospital, and at the time was considering psychiatric work. Dr. Heisler was riding through the city helping Columbia's Emergency Medical Service, a volunteer ambulance squad. "Our relationship was definitely slow going," Dr. Schaap said. A power outage in the apartment she was sharing with roommates moved things along. "One day she told me she had no air conditioning and was looking for something to do," Dr. Heisler said. He invited her to his dorm, a single, to watch a movie. It was the first time they were alone together. Neither can remember the movie, but both remember the other being good company. "I was like, 'Oh, I like this person. It would be nice if it works,'" Dr. Schaap said. Toward the end of the summer, it didn't. "There was a little bit of a disastrous thing where we went to this Middle Eastern restaurant Ariel liked in the diamond district," Dr. Heisler said. "I wasn't talking much." Dr. Schaap felt she had to hold up more than her end of the conversation. "It weirded her out," he said, so much so that she pressed pause on spending time with him. "I think I was just a little anxious," Dr. Heisler said of his behavior that night. "I liked her and I didn't want to mess things up." That fall, he tried again, asking her out for coffee. Instead of sitting at Starbucks, though, they walked to the steps of Columbia's Butler Library and talked late into the night. "That was when we knew we had a real connection, that this could be for real," he said. Dr. Schaap was a senior, Dr. Heisler a junior. By the time she graduated in June 2012, they were a couple and had met each other's parents. Dr. Schaap's first encounter with the Heislers was over ice cream at a Haagen Dazs shop near campus. Dr. Heisler's visit was more ambitious: a weekend with the Schaaps in Teaneck. He hadn't prepared well. Just before he boarded a bus to New Jersey, he had worked a long shift on the emergency medical services van. "I hadn't slept in 20 hours," he said. "He fell asleep at the Shabbat dinner table," Dr. Schaap said. He was embarrassed but redeemed by his work ethic. After Columbia, Dr. Schaap worked at a Manhattan research lab for a year while Dr. Heisler finished college. Both enrolled in medical school in Fall 2013, she at Rutgers in Newark and he at Hofstra on Long Island. While the distance didn't make seeing each other impossible, it intensified a growing feeling for Dr. Heisler that they should get married. "There were a couple of times when it got a little dicey, where it was a little harder for us to be together, and so I broached the subject," he said. "But Ariel wasn't in a place where she felt comfortable with it." Just the topic caused her anxiety. "I felt busy at that time, and I'm an indecisive person to begin with," she said. "I would say, 'We'll talk about it.' I was evasive." Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Her ambivalence stung. "It's hard to hear that when you're like, 'I'm ready for this,'" he said. Still, both made their relationship a priority after graduating medical school in 2017. During the process of being matched with hospitals as residents, they stressed their commitment to being near each other. He landed at Montefiore, she at Weill Cornell. Dr. Heisler moved to Riverdale to be closer to work. Dr. Schaap managed to rent an apartment in the building she grew up in on the Upper West Side. Each memorized the other's schedule. They saw each other whenever their shifts allowed. Medical residencies typically last three years. In late 2019, as both were in their second year, Dr. Schaap started thinking about where her career would eventually take her. "I was like, am I trying to stay in New York?" she said. Her decision, she realized, would have everything to do with Dr. Heisler's whereabouts. Suddenly, she said, "it felt like the right moment to propose." In November 2019, she bought a toy ring online. Then she thought back to the night their romance took flight, over Starbucks. On Nov. 20, she made a solo trip to the same store, near 110th St., and asked a barista to write "Will you marry me?" on a cup. Later that day, she invited Dr. Heisler to meet her at Columbia. "I said, 'We haven't been there for a long time, remember how beautiful the campus is?'" When he arrived, she told him she wanted coffee. The handoff of the coffee cup with the proposal was successful, but Dr. Heisler didn't notice the extra writing right away. Alfresco After the ceremony, guests helped themselves to iced drinks from beverage stations dotting the yard. Later, they found their way to numbered, skirted tables, where they dined on mango salmon with roasted sweet potatoes; for dessert, chocolate dipped strawberries and chocolate chip cookies were served. Hula Dance A three piece band, Blue Melody, played during the wedding and reception. Guests danced in hula hoops to maintain social distance. Though Drs. Schaap and Heisler took ballroom dancing lessons in Manhattan a few years ago, they skipped a first dance. "Our dancing skills have since vanished," Dr. Schaap said. Working Together Drs. Heisler and Schaap finished their residencies in June. Dr. Schaap will continue working as chief resident at Weill Cornell. This month, Dr. Heisler started working at Cornell, too. After the wedding, he moved into Dr. Schaap's Manhattan apartment. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyonce projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape. In November, on "Saturday Night Live," her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a sundial size headdress of crystals and tight woven braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet. Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts. In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monae among them who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a high shine mash up of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto's outer reaches. Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. "With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged," writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, "Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy Culture." Lina Iris Viktor, a British Liberian artist in New York who paints queenly self portraits with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. "The internet democratized the playing field," she said. "Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it's about." An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the '70s and '80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a far off Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, "in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended." Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing and all but erasing racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach. Afrofuturism's resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of "Star Wars." "While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination," Ms. Womack writes, "the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me." It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, "that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp speed spaceship too." Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci fi illustrations, produced over a 30 year span, drew visitors last spring to "Black Metropolis," at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder's pioneering cartoon narratives notably those of "Matty's Rocket," his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form are particularly relevant now, he maintained: "They let young artists know that they're not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them." Afrofuturism's epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. "These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender," he said. They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of "Captain America," was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Ta Nehisi Coates, the author of "Between the World and Me." And this year, Riri Williams, an Afro coiffured teenage superheroine with an M.I.T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the "Iron Man" comic series. Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated sci fi themes into his music and his seminal film, "Space Is the Place," a mid 1970s tale of interplanetary time travel. Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the '70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism's flat topped mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered head to toe in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her hula hoop twirling performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year. On a broadcast of "The Tonight Show" in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, a shimmer in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions. In her "Lemonade" album, released in April, Beyonce reigns in an all female utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and space age societies. The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and 18 page editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna's over the top costumes were cobbled from scratch. "She's a one off, a queen," said Edward Enninful, the magazine's fashion and style director. "A queen does not wear clothes off the runways." Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna's majestic persona. Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement's next wave, with items like a ribbed trunk neck sweater worthy of "Star Wars," created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez; gravity defying Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski "gems"; and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined progressive looking opulence. The shop's owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jerome, has drawn high visibility clients like Beyonce and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore fur rimmed virtual reality goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the space is the place hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism. "We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable." Mr. LaMaar insisted. "Who wants to see what's already been done?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A Tony nomination for Sally Field could not save the Broadway revival of "The Glass Menagerie." The show will close on May 21, 10 weeks after opening. The new production of the Tennessee Williams play was notable for its bleak, stripped down aesthetic conceived by the director Sam Gold; it starred Ms. Field as Amanda Wingfield, along with Madison Ferris, Joe Mantello and Finn Wittrock. Ms. Ferris, who has muscular dystrophy, uses a wheelchair, prompting some discussion about disability onstage. The production sharply polarized critics, with The New York Times's co chief theater critic Ben Brantley calling it "less a thought through interpretation than a sustained scene study class." Jesse Green, then at New York magazine and now at The Times, was more positive, calling the production "bracing; like the onstage rain that pours tumultuously during the final scene, it smells fresh and raises shivers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Sean Spicer has written a book. And to promote it in interview after interview, he seems willing to relive his darkest moments as White House press secretary. A National Public Radio host grilled him last week about President Trump's inauguration crowd, yet again. A BBC anchor told him Monday that he had "corrupted discourse for the entire world." Fox News was gentler, asking his mother what it was like to raise "this amazing child." ("Oh come on," she replied, with a laugh.) "Some interviews are obviously more enjoyable than others," Mr. Spicer told The New York Times in a phone interview on Wednesday. The confrontational BBC interview in particular has been shared with relish by his critics online, with some journalists calling the exchange "brutal" and "savage." Emily Maitlis, the BBC anchor of "Newsnight," grilled Mr. Spicer on his infamous first briefing, in which he falsely said that Mr. Trump's swearing in a day earlier had drawn the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration." Ms. Maitlis called the news conference the start of a "corrosive culture" in the United States and beyond and said Mr. Spicer had corrupted the political conversation "by going along with these lies." He readily admitted wanting a "do over" of that first day. "We all make mistakes," he said, growing flustered as Ms. Maitlis continued to press him on the crowd size issue. "I'm not sitting here saying I'm not without fault." He added, "There were days that were extremely lonely in that job because I screwed up." Mr. Spicer has his reasons to put himself out there, of course. He is developing a talk show, and his book, "The Briefing," was released by Regnery Publishing this week. On Wednesday alone, he had 33 interviews scheduled as well as an appearance at a Q. and A. session, said Kay Foley, a spokeswoman. "I love the demand we've had to talk about the book," Mr. Spicer said. The book tour kicked off with a round of gatherings that seemed more like fund raisers, with tickets ranging from 250 to 1,000. The interviews have proved more grueling. Last week, Mary Louise Kelly of National Public Radio pushed Mr. Spicer on the inauguration crowd issue and on what his objective was as press secretary: to "parrot" the president's thoughts from the lectern or to correct the factual record? A spokesman's job, Mr. Spicer responded, is to say what the president "thinks and believes." He found friendlier turf on "Fox and Friends" on Monday. Ainsley Earhardt's one on one interview took place at his family home in Rhode Island, where she showed childhood photographs of Mr. Spicer and also talked to his mother and his wife. 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 the BBC clips on social media that caused the most buzz. Mr. Spicer said Wednesday that he viewed Ms. Maitlis's characterizations in the interview as "extreme" and "outlandish." But a reporter has the right to ask any question she wants, he added. And ask she did. In another notable exchange, Ms. Maitlis mentioned the "Access Hollywood" tape, in which President Trump made vulgar comments about assaulting women. Mr. Spicer replied, "We've all said things in private, which that was, that are inappropriate and regrettable." Had he ever said such things? She asked. "I've probably said some things that I regret, absolutely," Mr. Spicer said. "I don't know that I've used those exact terms." Mr. Spicer's book, which arrived in stores on Tuesday, is currently ranked No. 178 on Amazon's best seller list. Mr. Trump gave it a positive assessment in a tweet last month, urging his followers to buy it. The administration is young, but the book deals are multiplying. Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House communications director, is writing a book called "The Blue Collar President," due this fall. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster will publish a book in 2020 about his military career and time in the White House as national security adviser. In Mr. Spicer's six months as press secretary, the media scrutinized and often poked fun at his every move. From quipping about his wardrobe to his Dippin' Dots fixation, the spotlight on Mr. Spicer briefly made him one of the most famous press secretaries in American history. His book covers what will be familiar episodes to Spicer watchers, including the inauguration count controversy, accusations that he took a mini fridge from a nearby office, and the controversy over his claim that Hitler did not use chemical weapons during the Holocaust, which he regrets. That was "personally painful," he said. "I had clearly hurt other people in a way that I would never, ever want to do." Now that Mr. Spicer's White House days are well behind him, he is also willing to confront some of his well publicized quirks, like the chewing gum habit that Melissa McCarthy satirized on Saturday Night Live. On Wednesday, Mr. Spicer called her impersonation "funny and frankly well deserved." He also said that he had cut down his gum intake. "I can't say I haven't chewed gum since then, but definitely not as vociferously as in the past." Mr. Spicer has made another big lifestyle change. "I don't spend my days glued to media coverage and events the way I used to," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Maureen Dowd: Every Friday night, Daniel Craig bakes you a lasagna and gives you a foot massage. : More like chicken stew with rice. And no massage. You're sick of being called an English rose. I don't have a drop of English blood in my veins. You know something funny? In the '90s, when I first went to L.A. for auditions, before I had any jobs, I used to go up for Hispanic roles against Salma Hayek. I put on a Mexican accent. It would be completely politically incorrect now, but that was my first experience. I never got the roles, of course. The first time you met Michael Caine was in the Swiss Alps, at 3 a.m., and he was naked and covered in mud. The correct way to pronounce Michael Caine is "my cocaine." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
During the opening weekend of the Tamil language movie "Chekka Chivantha Vaanam," a hard boiled action flick from one of India's most popular directors, Mani Ratnam, the environment in the theater was more house party than movie screening. From my seat in the far front corner at Sathyam Cinemas (I had scooped up one of the last available tickets), I couldn't see the film particularly well, but I certainly could hear the whooping and hollering from the packed house when Arvind Swamy, Aishwarya Rajesh or one of the other popular actors appeared on screen. There's a lot to be excited about in Chennai, capital of the state of Tamil Nadu in South India (and still sometimes referred to by its former name, Madras). While certainly crazy for movies, the city has an electricity and exuberance that extends beyond the cinematic. Call it youthful energy the history of what we know as present day Chennai extends back merely to the 1600s, compared to ancient cities like Delhi, which have existed for thousands of years. During a four day trip in September, I found jaw droppingly good food, beautiful houses of worship and a fantastic day trip. And, as always, I set out with the goal to get the best value for my money. I booked my ticket from Kolkata to Chennai directly on Air India, paying slightly less than 4,500 rupees (about 61) for the one way flight. A general note on buying air tickets: While booking on O.T.A.s (online travel agencies) like Expedia or Priceline has its advantages, I usually try to book flights directly with airlines I rarely see significantly discounted flights on O.T.A.s, and in the event something goes amiss, it's more efficient to deal directly with the airline. My room at the centrally located Courtyard Chennai in Teynampet area of town was ideal for exploring the city. At 5,100 rupees per night, about 70, it was a relatively luxurious splurge after having just spent four days in an inexpensive Airbnb in Kolkata, but I decided I'd earned a few nights of air conditioning and fluffy pillows. The ghee masala dosa was my choice from at least a dozen varieties that were on the menu at Sangeetha Veg restaurant, a local vegetarian chain I stumbled on after a quick walk through nearby Jeeva Park. For just 110 rupees, I received a giant scalene triangle of thin, buttery dosa folded around a creamy mixture of potato dotted with mustard seeds. Along with a colorful assortment of chutneys coconut, coriander and tomato chili are what you'll typically find it was a perfect midday meal. Though it did elicit a comment from Maneesh , a stranger with whom I struck up a conversation at our communal table. "Dosas are morning and nighttime things," he told me. I did notice that I was the only one in the dining room eating a dosa during the lunch hour: my mistake. People typically want rice for lunch, Maneesh said. That usually comes in the form of something known colloquially as "meals," a set lunch with a variety of curries, stew and milk curd. Fortunately, I met up with a local, James Ramya, who was able to steer me in the right direction. He treated me to a fantastic meal at Ratna Cafe, a cozy restaurant in the Triplicane neighborhood, about a 10 minute walk from the beach. The South Indian set lunch (176 rupees per person), served on a big banana leaf, left us stuffed it featured at least a dozen different stews, vegetable and curd varieties, as well as rice, papadum (a crunchy disc made from black gram flour) and chapati, a type of flatbread. The rasam, a tangy South Indian tamarind based soup, was particularly delicious. I continued my exploration of the upscale Anna Nagar neighborhood by foot, passing brands like Starbucks and Adidas, and making my way past high end jewelers and clothiers. Nearby Tower Park was lovely to stroll through (despite its namesake viewing tower being closed to the public), filled with ice cream vendors and amorous couples seeking shade on a sunny day. A walk on the shore at Marina Beach also provided a great slice of local life: f amilies and children frolicking in the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal, and flat bottomed boats, faded by the sun, sitting dormant on the broad beach. Small stalls sell cold sodas and much needed waters (25 rupees for a big bottle). From Marina Beach, the Vivekananda House (20 rupees admission) is a logical next stop. The museum celebrates the life of Swami Vivekananda, a philosopher and spiritual leader who became a fierce proponent of Indian nationalism. He gained international fame following a visit to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, after which he returned home to a hero's welcome. Spirituality is an essential part of life in Chennai, and the Arulmigu Kapaleeswarar Temple in Mylapore is a must visit for anyone stopping through the city. A three hour walking tour from Storytrails (booked for 23 through the website Viator), ably conducted by our guide, Lakshmi Shankar, began just steps from the temple and its colorful, ornate gopuram, or entrance tower. I could have studied the intricately detailed gopuram for hours, which has vivid depictions of different Hindu gods and goddesses (it is commonly said there are theoretically millions of Hindu deities in the pantheon) and is repainted every dozen years or so to maintain its bright colors. The temple is primarily dedicated, Ms. Shankar explained, to Shiva, the god of destruction, who destroys through dance. I noticed coconut husks littering the ground in one area of the temple, and she explained that "The head is like a coconut, with a hard exterior, hair and a soft inside." The idea behind smashing coconuts in the temple is to rid the self of pride and ego. She explained the history of the Mylapore neighborhood, originally a maritime settlement that dates back around 2,000 years, as well as the destruction of the original Kapaleeswarar Temple in the 1500s at the hands of the Portuguese. Today, the area around the temple is active and lively, full of shops, vendors and tuk tuks (auto rickshaws) weaving in and out of traffic. After the temple, our small tour group rode in tuk tuks through the narrow streets to Santhome Church, which claims to have a bone from Thomas the Apostle's hand, as well as the tip of the spear that killed him. After an interesting discussion on India's caste system (still deeply woven into Indian life, according to Ms. Shankar) and a visit to a Brahmin priest's home, our tour ended on Mada Street at Nithya Amirtham, a casual spot for sweets and snacks. The excellent plain dosa, wrapped into the shape of a dunce cap, and a cup of filter coffee I enjoyed were included in the tour price, but would have cost around 90 rupees. I stepped out into the busy street, which smelled of flowers and sweets. Vendors called to me to buy their strings of jasmine, marigolds and vilvam leaf, said to be Shiva's favorite, to take into the temple. Navigating tuk tuks and piles of plastic toys, I made a quick stop at The Grand Sweets and Snacks before leaving the area, buying a 180 rupee assortment box that contained peda (a milk based sweet) and a delicious almond based badam burfi. Exploring Chennai itself is rewarding, but the adventurous with a free day will want to explore sites outside of the city. I booked a full day Hey Travellerz tour of Puducherry (or Pondicherry) and the nearby town of Auroville through the website Klook for 5,500 rupees after using a five percent off promo code that I found online. (The fee was a flat rate for any size group of up to four people, but I was traveling alone). My guides, the outgoing Padmavathy Srinivasan, who is known as Fatima, and the slightly shy Oozuran Dinesh, who goes by Dinesh, picked me up bright and early at my hotel and we embarked on a scenic seaside drive south along the coast. We stopped quickly at Mamallapuram, or Mahabalipuram, an ancient settlement dating to when the Pallava dynasty ruled southern India from approximately the fourth to the ninth centuries. The beautiful bas relief in pink granite known as Arjuna's Penance is a highlight, as is the wondrous Krishna's Butter Ball, a 250 ton boulder seemingly miraculously perched on a hillside. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The transgender performer Our Lady J keeps evolving. She first burst onto the scene as a culty cabaret singer who paid homage to Dolly Parton. "She was one of the top icons in my life as a kid," said Our Lady J, who is 6 foot 1 and cuts a striking glamazon figure. She is also a trained pianist who has played for such diverse acts as Sia, Lady Gaga and the American Ballet Theater, and who has along the way befriended a number of celebrities, big and small, including Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame. And recently, she was hired by the TV director and writer Jill Soloway to be a writer for "Transparent," an Amazon original series about a retired professor, played by Jeffrey Tambor, who is transitioning from male to female. "I will draw on my own experience," Our Lady J said. "The world is beginning to see us as we've seen ourselves." Our Lady J's own story could rival that of any Dolly Parton song. Born Justin Spidel into a Pentecostal family in the predominantly Amish town of Edenville, Pa., population around 200, she spent her youth adrift. "There weren't any kids my age that I could relate to, so I was on the farm with my brothers, which is why I played the piano. I was just bored out of my mind," she said. "It wasn't until I moved to New York in 2000 that I met trans people and began to see myself in other trans women," she added. Her career was awakening, too. Shortly after arriving in New York, she freelanced as an accompanist for various arts organizations, including the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Mark Morris's dance troupe and the American Ballet Theater. In 2004, she became the musical director and accompanist for the ebullient Broadway performer Natalie Joy Johnson, and began gussying up for the part. "I was dressing female a lot, but I'd never done it onstage," Our Lady J said. "She gave me an opportunity. My favorite outfit was a smart pantsuit with a sensible heel, hair shellacked and face beat for the gods. I'd started calling myself 'Jonnah,' but I decided I needed to come up with another name for the stage." As a nod to Jean Genet's subversive debut novel, "Our Lady of the Flowers," she adopted "Our Lady" and added the "J" for Justin/Jonnah. That same year, she accompanied another name changer, Stefani Germanotta the future pop superstar Lady Gaga at the CAP21 musical theater conservatory in New York, where she played piano in Gaga's ballet class and coached vocal techniques. "I hung out with her in L.A. a year ago," Our Lady J said, "and we had a laugh about both of our transitions." As she came into herself, Our Lady J was developing a fan base of her own, doing her first solo show at the Duplex in Greenwich Village, followed by gigs at Ars Nova and the since shuttered Zipper Factory, both in Hell's Kitchen. That's where she first did the Dolly Parton show, mixing the country star's gospel hits with her own brooding and whimsical works. Sitting at the piano, she's hypnotic and often very wry. "I only sing to give words to the story the piano is telling," she said. "Life has been absurd and funny and ridiculous and sad and hard, and I just try to bring all of that to the stage." (She is reprising the show on Dec. 22 at Joe's Pub, accompanied by the Train To Kill Gospel Choir.) She has been doing versions of this show since 2007, and in 2009, Ms. Parton herself arranged a meeting. Our Lady J originally thought Ms. Parton was going to hand her a cease and desist order. "But when I realized she just wanted to thank me for singing her songs, her legend became real to me," she said. Another unlikely fan was Mr. Radcliffe, whom she met through a mutual friend. "He's just a nice kid," said Our Lady J. But tabloid speculation about whether she was dating Mr. Radcliffe turned ugly. "That actually ruined my life for a second," she said. Harry Potter fans wrongly assumed they were an item and made nasty comments on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. "It was schoolyard stuff all over again. I had to go into therapy after that." Fortunately, she recovered and kept evolving. In 2009, when she wanted to raise money for breast implants, she turned to her performance peers and put on a fund raising concert. Taylor Mac, the Scissor Sisters and others performed breast related songs at the Wild Project theater in the East Village. She raised 10,000. The singer also wants to have facial feminization surgery, but nothing else. "I'm comfortable being a bit of both genders," she said. "Legally, I'm 100 percent woman I changed the 'M' to 'F' on all my papers but now I want to change it to a question mark or an 'X'." Her willful ambiguity seems to make sense in Los Angeles, where she moved in 2010 for "the sunshine and the silicone," and where she doesn't garner the stares she attracts in New York. "All the Beverly Hills wives look like gorgeous transsexuals," she said. "L.A. is postgender in that way. You can't tell who was born what." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The celebrity talk show host Dr. Mehmet Oz plans to respond aggressively on Thursday to doctors who have criticized his medical advice and questioned his faculty position at Columbia University, a spokesman for the show said on Monday. In a strongly worded email sent last week to the university, 10 physicians wrote that Dr. Oz, the vice chairman of Columbia's surgery department, had shown "an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain." In particular, the doctors attacked Dr. Oz's "baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops." Dr. Oz will address the letter in the lead segment of his syndicated, daytime talk show, "The Dr. Oz Show," on Thursday, a spokesman for the show said. Dr. Oz will question the credibility of the letter's authors, several of whom have ties to the American Council on Science and Health, a pro industry advocacy group that has supported genetically modified foods, the spokesman said. Dr. Oz will also reiterate his position that genetically modified foods should be labeled, a point he has made several times on his show. The segment will not take all of the 60 minute show, but may run longer than is typical for a lead item, the spokesman said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In the 1950s, a pack of Camels could be had for as little as 25 cents in some parts of the country. But in New York City today, heavy taxes have pushed that price north of 13. Even adjusted for inflation, that's more than a fivefold increase. In the intervening years, we have also banned smoking in restaurants, bars and public buildings. Some jurisdictions have prohibited smoking even in outdoor public spaces. We have spent billions of dollars on media campaigns to discourage smoking. Given the longstanding American hostility to social engineering, each of these steps faced heavy pushback. When called on to justify them, regulators have offered their traditional response: Restricting individual freedom is often the only way to prevent undue harm to innocent bystanders. The specific harm cited has almost always been well documented health hazards caused by secondhand smoke. This rationale is similar to the one for requiring catalytic converters on cars: We need them to prevent pollution that would otherwise cause undue harm to others. But unless you work in a crowded bar with no ventilation, the health risks from secondhand smoke are small compared with those from being a smoker. For example, more than 85 percent of American deaths from lung cancer are attributable to smoking, with fewer than one third of the remainder linked to passive smoke exposure. Regulators may insist that their aim is not to protect smokers from themselves, but our regulations do vastly more to protect smokers (by inducing them to quit) than to protect bystanders. In fact, smoking also harms bystanders in a more important way: Each person who becomes a smoker makes it more likely that others will become smokers as well. This additional effect outweighs the harm caused by secondhand smoke by enough to suggest that our efforts to discourage smoking, strict as they seem, may not be nearly strict enough. Some are more sensitive than others to environmental influences. I have four adult sons, none of whom is a smoker. I once remarked to a friend that if they had grown up when I did, at least two of them would be. My son Chris, who was present during this conversation, immediately asked, "Which two?" "David (my oldest) almost certainly would have been," I said, "and Hayden (my youngest) probably would have been, too." I added that Jason wouldn't have smoked no matter when he had been born. Chris seemed offended, insisting that he, too, probably would have become a smoker if he had grown up when I did. 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. When I started smoking at age 14 in 1959, many of my friends had already been smoking for several years. My parents didn't want me to smoke, but as smokers themselves, they were poorly positioned to object. In those days, more than 60 percent of American men were smokers, and almost as many women. Smoking was just something that most people did. Yet even then, people who smoked did not seem happy about it. Today, roughly 90 percent of smokers say they regret having started, and about 80 percent express a desire to quit. Some 40 to 50 percent of smokers try to quit each year, but fewer than 5 percent of them succeed. Several of my own attempts to quit failed. So I count myself fortunate to have abandoned the habit before leaving home for college. The reason I succeeded in raising my children to be nonsmokers and my parents did not is that today's environment is very different from the earlier one. By far the most powerful predictor of whether a person will smoke is the percentage of her closest friends who smoke. If the share of smokers in someone's peer group rises to 30 percent from 20 percent, for example, the probability that she will smoke rises by about 25 percent. Whereas most of my teenage friends were smokers, relatively few of my sons' friends were. In 2016, only about 19 percent of American men were smokers, and only about 14 percent of women. Today's environment is different mostly because of the taxes and other regulatory measures we have taken to discourage smoking. Well and good, but does anyone think that still having more than one smoker in six people is a desirable population ratio? Our stated rationale for discouraging smoking to prevent harm caused by secondhand smoke greatly understates the amount of harm that these actions prevent. When a regulation results in one smoker fewer, every friend of that person will have one smoker fewer in her peer group. Every member of every one of those peer groups will then become less likely to smoke. And that, in turn, will make others less likely to smoke, and so on. Most people don't like being regulated, but even strict libertarians concede the legitimacy of regulations to prevent undue harm to others. As John Stuart Mill memorably wrote in "On Liberty": "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant." Causing someone to be more likely to smoke clearly inflicts substantial harm on that person. I have never heard even the staunchest libertarian say, "I hope my children grow up to be smokers." Further discouraging smoking now will make it much easier to raise children to be nonsmokers. Evidence suggests that stricter measures to discourage smoking would make even smokers themselves happier. In a 2005 study, for example, the economists Jonathan Gruber and Sendhil Mullainathan found that people with a higher propensity to smoke were significantly happier in places with higher cigarette taxes. Higher taxes, they noted, made it easier for smokers to quit. Today's regulations to discourage smoking are strict, yes. But without violating libertarian sensibilities, we could adopt even stricter measures. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
By the looks of things in New York City's real estate market, spring will be a little late this year. The spring sales season usually starts to ramp up during March. The typical number of new listings that come on the market in March is 1,780, but only 734 properties have been listed so far this month, according to UrbanDigs, a website that offers real estate data and commentary. The number of properties that have gone into contract this month, at 432, is less than half of the typical March figure, and 430 units were also taken off the market. "This year we'll continue with the spring selling season but it will shift to summer," said Richard Grossman, president of the real estate brokerage Halstead, adding that sales were strong through the end of 2019 and into early March. He said that the market usually has two selling seasons: spring, which on his calendar, starts in mid January and ends around July 4, and the fall season which begins after Labor Day and wraps up just after Thanksgiving. "When things get back to normal there will be pent up demand," he predicted. "Interest rates are low and if you're quarantined, you're going to be saying 'I want a new place to live if this happens again.' " The current uncertainty among buyers and sellers, though, is not restricted to New York, as reflected in a pair of surveys conducted by the National Association of Realtors earlier this month. On March 9, after the first weekend in the month, almost 80 percent of association members said the virus was having no effect on buyer interest. After last weekend, less than half of the respondents said that buyers were carrying on as though living in ordinary times. And the number has no doubt dropped significantly as state governments have ordered all nonessential workers to stay at home. Meanwhile, on the sell side in the March 9 survey, only 3 percent of association members said they had seen sellers delist their property in reaction to the virus. A week later, the figure was 16 percent, and 20 percent in areas where there were presumed or confirmed cases of the virus. The closure of government recording offices around the country in response to the pandemic will further complicate the buying process. These county offices, which handle title searches and deed filings, are vital to the buying and refinancing processes. The Real Estate Board of New York, a trade group, is incentivizing skittish sellers who fret that a property listed now is a property that will be tagged "stale" once things return to normal: Until further notice, REBNY has eliminated the "days on market" calculation that is a data point on its Residential Listings Service and is used on most consumer directed real estate listings sites. Streeteasy has followed suit. To entice prospective buyers, brokers are offering video tours of properties; virtual tours using Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, and 3 D technologies like Matterport as well as live interactive tours via videoconferencing sites like Zoom. And however old school, there are also lots of photographs. But whether virtual tours will lead to an actual offer is doubtful. "Investors might have the resources and knowledge to buy homes without actually seeing them in the flesh," said Emile L'Eplattenier, the managing editor of TheClose.com, a real estate strategy website. "But I have yet to meet an actual buyer willing to do the same." Agents generally spend money on virtual tours more to cater to homeowner's whims than to actually sell real estate, Mr. L'Eplattenier added. "Covid 19 isn't likely to change that." But Jason Haber, an associate broker at Warburg Realty, said: "I think there's a new market: the online market, the only one we have now. We want to be in that marketplace. You have the most number of eyes looking at a property and you want that property to be part of the conversation." And, he insists, there is still plenty of conversation going on. "You might think the upheaval would cause everyone to stand down," he said. "But Covid 19 is a Rorschach. The way you view the virus you project out to the real estate market." He said he had clients who felt there was too much uncertainty to move forward right now, "But I have other clients who are frankly opportunistic, and are looking to see what discounts sellers are willing to do." Judy Szablak, an associate broker in the Westport, Connecticut office of the real estate firm Coldwell Banker, said she hadn't seen much of a slowdown and had fielded several calls from prospective buyers last week. "If people are contacting me at this particular time they are very motivated, whether they're downsizing or they're moving here or somewhere else for a new job," said Ms. Szablak, (although the process in Fairfield and elsewhere is complicated by the closure of government recordings offices, the locus of title searches and deed filings). In case lower Fairfield County goes into lockdown, she is putting together video presentations of her listings, and hoping for the best. In response to the virus, her office added a "sight unseen" disclosure to the purchase contract to indemnify agents against charges of misrepresenting the property a client might buy without first visiting. Ms. Szablak has made just such a sight unseen sale before; no reason she can't do it again, she said. "It's all about motivation. If the client's motivation is strong even with what's going on now, the transaction is going to happen." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"Do you want to ask me about acting?" Mercedes Ruehl said, holding her water bottle. "I also take questions on faith and morals." On a wet Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Ruehl, the Oscar and Tony winning actress who stars in the Broadway revival of Harvey Fierstein's "Torch Song" (now in previews), had just exited her apartment on West 42nd Street and was marching toward the Hudson River. Flanking her, with the full body adoration usually reserved for pet dogs or cult members, were two of her longtime acting students: Francesca Ferrara and Nick Feitel. She is a character actress and sometime caterer, trying to break into leading lady roles. He is a comedy writer and pet walker trying to expand from what he called"creepy guy, crazy weirdo type" parts. Ms. Ruehl, who teaches seminars at HB Studio, a West Village acting studio, reserves Wednesday afternoons for a walk along the High Line and some alfresco mentorship. "A good and practical thing," she said. She steered them into traffic, then out of it. As they cruised past a Circle Line dock near West 42nd Street, Mr. Feitel, who has scraggly red hair and thick lensed Gucci glasses, asked how not to go insane while waiting for work to come his way. "That's a big issue," Ms. Ruehl said, nodding supportively. Her silver earrings waggled. "It took me a hell of a long time." The mother Ms. Ruehl plays in "Torch Song" isn't especially nurturing. In a scene opposite Michael Urie, she gives a round the world guilt trip. Offstage, the maternal energy is warmer, more pliable. She talked movingly about getting rejected from every major acting program, about crying on sidewalks after bungled auditions. Chivalrously, Mr. Feitel steered her around a puddle. Ms. Ruehl advised her students to keep working wherever and however they could. "As long as you get up in front of other people, even if it's in a class, a class that you paid for, you're increasing the chance of word of mouth," she said. "That's how it happened to me." In her 30s, when she was close to giving up, an HB classmate recommended her to the playwright Albert Innaurato, which led to a play at the Public Theater, and that led to another and another, and then a woman broke her leg and suddenly she was on Broadway with "I'm Not Rappaport." And then the movies came calling. "I guess the gods took mercy," Ms. Ruehl said. She might have said more, but she was walking by the Blade heliport near 30th Street and the wind snatched her words away. The conversation turned to fear, to spontaneity, and how Ms. Ferrara, sleeker and calmer than her classmate, had smashed a flashlight during a scene. "When you act with that kind of abandon in rehearsal, generally something gets broken," Ms. Ruehl said, approvingly. It was around this time that Ms. Ruehl, absorbed in the conversation, realized she'd overshot the north entrance of the High Line by about five blocks. They doubled back, past the helicopters. At 34th Street, Mr. Feitel dashed across 12th Avenue, just as the light changed. "Oh, you're going to commit!" Ms. Ruehl called from the other side. A traffic cop waved her and Ms. Ferrara across. Up on the High Line, the talk moved to "Torch Song" and the need to reinterrogate a role that Ms. Ruehl had already played for months Off Broadway. This time around, she said, she wanted "to drop all the way down into the mother part." Mr. Feitel marveled that she would rejigger a performance that critics had raved over. "Have you ever been totally satisfied?" Ms. Ruehl said rhetorically. "Have you ever come off a performance totally satisfied?" She answered her own questions: "Not totally. Not ever. There would be no reason to go back and do it again." On the highway below, tourists on a passing double decker bus waved avidly. Had they recognized Ms. Ruehl? Were they just waving to anyone on the High Line? Unclear. "Welcome to New York," Ms. Ferrara said. The talk turned back to the students. Ms. Ferrara wondered when producers would consider her for more substantial parts. Mr. Feitel mentioned that with Ms. Ruehl's encouragement, he had recently lost 20 pounds. Ms. Ruehl reminded him that she'd also encouraged him to chop off his man bun. She told them that she believed in both of them, in their potential, in their talent. "I don't think I've been wrong yet," she said. "Oh my God, I might start to cry!" Ms. Ferrara said. As they reached West 23rd Street, Ms. Ruehl headed for an elevator, but it was broken, so the group doubled back to a staircase and walked to Jim Kempner Fine Art, a gallery run by another classmate. They stopped in the courtyard, struck by a giant bronze head, a model of Michelangelo's David. "People said I had a big head, and now I do," Mr. Kempner joked as he came out to meet them. The statue had very orderly hair, and as they headed into the gallery, ringed with neon sculptures by Charlie Hewitt, Ms. Ruehl allowed herself a little vanity as she put a hand to her hair. "Does it look insane?" she asked. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In this week's newsletter, Marc Stein explains how Jackson's legacy as a winning coach was tarnished and how Michael Jordan's new documentary can help. Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein's weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. When the Chicago Bulls were assembling a 72 10 season in 1995 96, Nick Nurse was a young Phil Jackson fan in England, earning roughly 20,000, along with housing and a car, as the new head coach of the Birmingham Bullets. His favorite indulgence at the time, at the cost of 10 British pounds per week, was the weekly delivery of VHS tapes of Bulls games from a European distributor called PonTel. Whenever he could make time, sometimes in the company of his American players, Nurse voraciously studied Jackson's triangle offense, his substitutions and everything else. Read more on the death of Michael Jordan's father, James Jordan. "There was nothing on TV but soccer and cricket, so I was watching every game I got 10, 12 times," Nurse said. "Phil was my mentor, and he didn't even know it." Nurse and Jackson didn't meet until the summer of 2018, shortly after Nurse was hired as coach of the Toronto Raptors. Alex McKechnie, the Raptors' vice president for player health and performance and an alumnus of Jackson's staff with the Los Angeles Lakers, connected them. Soon after, Nurse was in Montana summoned for what became a three day coaching retreat with the Zen Master. It was a hard to believe prelude to what became a fairy tale rookie season on the Raptors' bench with their run to an N.B.A. title. "It was a big thrill for me," Nurse said of his summit with Jackson. When reached on Monday night, on the first day that "The Last Dance" documentary about the Bulls' 1997 98 season had been distributed outside the United States by Netflix, Nurse was home with his family in Toronto, engrossed in the first two episodes like so many viewers had been on Sunday night. Michael Jordan's career and life are the overwhelming focus of the 10 part series, but Nurse was always drawn more to Jackson's career arc thanks to his rise from five coaching stops in a league far, far away from the N.B.A. galaxy in England, and through the N.B.A.'s developmental league, to the Raptors. Not everyone watching will be as familiar as Nurse is with Jackson's own improbable climb from the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association to securing Jordan's undying loyalty. Yet that is what helps position Jackson to emerge as one of the big winners when "The Last Dance" completes its five week run next month. This documentary, with a title Jackson inspired, will highlight for viewers what a coaching colossus Jackson was before his unsuccessful detour into management at Madison Square Garden. Jackson may be the ultimate winner among N.B.A. coaches, with 11 championship rings, but it has been a while since his copious success with the Bulls and the Lakers was the first thing people referenced about him. Such is the unyielding consistency of the James L. Dolan owned Knicks in besmirching the reputation of seemingly every marquee name who has tried to steer the franchise back to respectability over the past two decades. As a result, Jackson has heard far more in recent years about his front office foibles than the bench excellence that preceded it. You wouldn't think a coach who owns two more rings than Red Auerbach would have legacy concerns, but Jackson's rocky three year stint as the Knicks' president of basketball operations cast that sort of shadow. So it will be a huge boost for Jackson, at 74, for basketball fans of all ages to be reacquainted with (or introduced to) his lofty place in the hierarchy of a dynasty that ruled the N.B.A. six times in an eight season span in the 1990s. No one in "The Last Dance," mind you, wins more than Jordan. Despite a woefully mediocre run as the owner of the Charlotte Hornets for the past 10 years, His Airness has broken away from his long held reclusive tendencies at just the right time to reclaim the rapt attention of the American sporting public that, thanks to Covid 19, was forced to quit its normal viewing habits cold turkey. The likely result: Irrespective of any criticism to come from the fact that he clearly had more control over the project than advertised, as explained here by my colleague Sopan Deb, so much fresh documentary buzz seems certain to help Jordan re establish a gulf between him and LeBron James or anyone else you wish to nominate as basketball's best player of all time. Next up, though, it's Scottie Pippen and Jackson who appear poised to land closest to Jordan when the documentary's ultimate list of beneficiaries and villains is compiled. "I never even felt like Phil got enough credit when it was happening because of Michael's presence, or when he went to L.A. and having Kobe and Shaq there," said Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr, another key figure in the documentary after spending three and a half seasons as Jordan's teammate under Jackson. "I think people always underestimated Phil's talent as a coach, but he was so brilliant and so unique in his style," Kerr continued. "With all the fame and notoriety that surrounded the team and Michael in particular, Phil was just an incredible leader and coach. Very few, if any, people would have had the right skill set and temperament to keep a team like that together and moving forward." None of this is meant to absolve Jackson's mistakes with the Knicks. He took a job he clearly didn't have the background for, after consciously staying out of personnel matters for much of his coaching career, and will always take the hit for Joakim Noah's horrendous contract, his frayed relationships with Carmelo Anthony and Kristaps Porzingis and his two questionable coaching hires (Derek Fisher and Jeff Hornacek) after Kerr spurned New York (and, yes, Phil) to take the Golden State job. It's likewise true that Jackson, so often branded as smug by rival coaches and critics in the news media and the source of occasionally caustic quotations (and tweets), was never going to generate much sympathy even when we have heard or seen little from him since his exit from the Knicks nearly three years ago. Yet it's striking in the film to repeatedly see how devoted Jordan was to Jackson and hear so clearly that he was willing to play for no one else in Chicago. Ditto for the complexities Jackson faced in managing Pippen, Dennis Rodman and the two Jerrys Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls' owner, and Jerry Krause, the general manager who indefensibly conspired to hasten the breakup of a dynasty rather than doing everything they could to hold it together. It also turns out, as confirmed by his counsel to Nurse, that Phil does have a softer side. Nurse booked a three day trip for their Montana meeting two summers ago unsure of what to expect. "I figured if it was only for a cup of coffee, I'd just hang out for a couple days and regroup," Nurse said. They ended up sharing meal after meal over the course of Nurse's stay and spent so much time on various aspects of the craft that they never really got around to swapping Rodman stories with Nurse having briefly coached a 44 year old Rodman with the Brighton Bears in England in 2006. "He was really gracious with his time," Nurse said. "We talked a lot of basketball, we talked a lot of leadership, we talked a lot of basketball history and we talked a lot of just commanding the team." As he waits out a pandemic now like the rest of the N.B.A., unsure how soon the defending champion Raptors will be allowed to return to work in a league in which 29 other teams sit on the opposite side of the United States Canada border, Nurse can't help but hark back to his Birmingham Bullets days back when the Friday drop off of those Bulls tapes was the highlight of the week. You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I'll field three questions posed via email at marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you're writing in from, and make sure "Corner Three" is in the subject line.) Q: Here are a few possible ways to honor David Stern's legacy: None Since he really was the Godfather of the W.N.B.A., maybe the W.N.B.A. championship trophy or Most Valuable Player trophy could be named in his honor. None The N.B.A.'s All Star Weekend could be rebranded "David Stern All Star Weekend." None David's signature could be etched on the hardwood of every team's floor, like it used to appear on the league's official ball. None The N.B.A. draft could also be rebranded with David's name. Bruce Bernstein (Connecticut) Stein: Perhaps you'll recall that we led off Corner Three last week with a question about the challenges of naming a major trophy after the league's former commissioner Stern, who died on Jan. 1. The primary complication is that many of the N.B.A.'s major honors have already been dedicated to other giants of the game. I admittedly struggled to propose immediate suggestions, but the longtime ESPN producer Bruce Bernstein one of my dearest friends in the business dutifully compiled this smart list. Bernstein worked on various N.B.A. shows at ESPN for nearly 40 years and had an unenviable task for about 15 of them: coaching me to be functional on television. Bruce also has particular insight into working at close range with Stern after numerous N.B.A. drafts during which he was charged with ushering the commissioner on and off stage to announce first round picks. In typical fashion, Bernstein came up with multiple suggestions that merit further discussion. No matter where you stand on Stern, as an admirer or critic of his demanding (some would dictatorial) leadership style, it certainly makes sense for both the N.B.A. and the W.N.B.A. to pay tribute to him in grand fashion. Q: Can't believe so many people would have missed Kobe to watch that Warriors game. CookeFranklin1 from Twitter Stein: This was a tweeted response to my recent fond recollections of the final night of the 2015 16 season, when Golden State claimed its record breaking 73rd win while Kobe Bryant was scoring 60 points in his final N.B.A. game. For a television viewer, as the tone of the tweet suggests, it made total sense that Kobe would be the draw for the masses. A player of such stature rumbling for 60 points in his farewell is a feat that will never be duplicated. Yet the same can be said for the Warriors' achievement. At least that's my prediction: I don't think another team will ever win 73 games in an 82 game season. Especially in the load management era that the league swiftly entered after Golden State went 73 9. Andy Thompson had four N.B.A. tryouts before joining N.B.A. Entertainment in 1987 and hatching the idea to travel with the Chicago Bulls throughout the 1997 98 season, which was the original spark for "The Last Dance" documentary. The brother of the two time N.B.A. champion Mychal Thompson and the uncle of the Warriors' Klay Thompson', Andy Thompson was cut by the San Diego Clippers, the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle SuperSonics (twice) after playing at the University of Minnesota. Mychal Thompson was the No. 1 pick in the 1978 N.B.A. draft out of the same school. "I always tell Mychal he took all the talent and didn't leave me with any," Andy Thompson said. Michael Jordan averaged 24.8 points per game as a junior in high school after failing to make the varsity at Laney High in Wilmington, N.C., as a sophomore. More gems like this, from throughout Jordan's basketball career, can be found at the Jordan dedicated page created by my pals at Basketball Reference to supplement your viewing of "The Last Dance." One criticism that the Jordan led Bulls have faced in legacy debates is that they were never confronted with a truly great opponent in their six trips to the N.B.A. finals over a span of eight years. Jordan, though, did vanquish five teammates from the original "Dream Team," which dominated the 1992 Olympics, as he built his 6 0 finals record: Magic Johnson (1991), Clyde Drexler (1992), Charles Barkley (1993) and the duo of Karl Malone and John Stockton (1997 and 1998). Seattle in 1996 was Jordan's only finals opponent that placed no one on the Dream Team although I must say that the Gary Payton/Shawn Kemp duo was a personal favorite. On Aug. 20, 1994, Michael Jordan hit a home run for the Class AA Birmingham Barons. It was the third and final homer of Jordan's lone season as a minor league outfielder nine days after Major League Baseball's 1994 season was brought to an abrupt halt by a player strike. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Link Salas, the creative director for a small technology company in New York, said he used Grindr, a social networking app for gay, bisexual, and transgender men, to learn about the places he's traveling to and to meet men there. "I change my profile to say I am in town and looking for someone to show me around," he said. "Some guys suggest a gay neighborhood to check out or a club," he said. Some offer to meet in person. "The way you phrase your paragraph affects the responses you get," he said. The gay dating app Scruff also recently started a new service for its users, Scruff Venture, in which travelers can search more than 500 destinations, and then contact local "venture ambassadors" for advice on where to go and what to do. And while many solo travelers may indeed be single, and thus potentially open to romantic encounters, still others are on their own because their spouses or partners are back at home, unable to make this trip. That's one factor that in 2016 led the dating site Bumble to expand its offerings to friendship (Bumble BFF) and, in 2017, to work related connections (Bumble Bizz). Jess Carbino, a sociologist working for Bumble, said the company's research showed that more of its users were using the app to meet local residents when traveling solo. "People in their 20s and 30s are in different places in their lives, so it can be hard to find someone to travel with," she said. Of course, personal safety is always a concern for solo vacationers. "When you don't know the area and don't have friends there, it's even more important to be cautious," Ms. Castillo said. She said she always shares with a close friend the name and phone number of the person she is going to meet, where they are going and when she expects to be back at her hotel. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
SAN FRANCISCO For months, the text messages came. Some were flirtatious, asking her to meet him late at night. Sometimes, the texts were sexually explicit. The messages were directed at Laura Munoz, an executive assistant at the online lending start up Social Finance. The texts were from her boss, Mike Cagney, the company's chief executive, according to five people who spoke with Ms. Munoz or saw the messages. Given Mr. Cagney's stature at Social Finance, known as SoFi, Ms. Munoz was at a disadvantage. That became apparent when SoFi's board was informed of Mr. Cagney's communications with Ms. Munoz in late 2012. The board said it found no evidence of a sexual relationship. Ms. Munoz was then paid about 75,000 to leave the company, according to three people familiar with the proceedings who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly. Ivo Labar, a lawyer representing Ms. Munoz, said matters were resolved between his client and SoFi. Around the same time, SoFi's board and executives also heard complaints from investors that Mr. Cagney had made misstatements to them over the start up's student loan products, according to emails between investors, executives and the board that were obtained by The New York Times. Directors stood by Mr. Cagney in that instance, too. The board's support allowed Mr. Cagney to build SoFi into a fast growing start up that is trying to take on the big banks by offering lending, insurance and asset management online. The company has been valued at more than 4 billion. But within SoFi, Mr. Cagney, a married father of two, continued to raise questions among employees with his behavior. He was seen holding hands and having intimate conversations with another young female employee, according to six employees who saw the two together. At late night, wine soaked gatherings with colleagues, he bragged about his sexual conquests and the size of his genitalia, said employees who heard the comments. Mr. Cagney's actions were echoed in other parts of SoFi. The company's chief financial officer talked openly about women's breasts and once offered female employees bonuses for losing weight, according to more than a dozen people who heard his comments. Some employees said on a few instances, they caught colleagues having sex with supervisors at SoFi's main satellite office in Healdsburg, Calif., which was the subject of a sexual harassment lawsuit filed last month. Even as other Silicon Valley companies such as ride hailing giant Uber have been in the spotlight this year for inappropriate treatment of women, Mr. Cagney's case goes a step further. Although many of the issues at other firms stemmed from the actions of midlevel executives or investors, Mr. Cagney personally faces questions about his role. His conduct was described by more than 30 current and former employees, most of whom asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. The behavior went largely unchecked until Monday, when SoFi's board acted after weeks of growing scrutiny of the company. The start up said Mr. Cagney, 46, would leave as chief executive by the end of the year and that he would step down immediately as chairman. In a statement announcing Mr. Cagney's departure, SoFi did not explain the executive change. The company said its business was performing well, and that SoFi was becoming a "major, innovative player in consumer finance." A SoFi spokesman said the company did not comment on personnel matters and disputed that its business had taken on too much risk. Through the spokesman, Mr. Cagney also said he "vehemently denies" any improprieties at after hours events with colleagues. Yet Mr. Cagney's position had become increasingly delicate after the filing of the sexual harassment suit, which accused him of "empowering other managers to engage in sexual conduct in the workplace." His situation was also exacerbated by claims about his approach to SoFi's business, which uses money from Wall Street investors to fund student loans, personal loans and mortgages. At several points, Mr. Cagney ignored warnings from colleagues that he was being too aggressive with the business, according to more than a dozen employees who were involved in the conversations. That included a time when Mr. Cagney decided to put customer service representatives in charge of lending determinations, despite them having no experience in the area. Another time, he told investors that SoFi had 90 million in debt financing for a loan product; the company did not in fact have the money, according to the internal emails reviewed by The Times. SoFi's board, which includes representatives of Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and the influential hedge fund Third Point Capital, now faces questions about whether it needed more checks and balances on Mr. Cagney. Companies like SoFi show how boards are incentivized to prioritize cash flow and growth over governance, said David F. Larcker, a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business who specializes in corporate governance. "The board now has a duty to correct for things that have gone wrong," he said. The board said that it found "no allegation or evidence of a romantic or sexual relationship" between Mr. Cagney and Ms. Munoz and referred all other questions to SoFi. Mr. Cagney, who was born in New Jersey, started his career in finance in 1994 at Wells Fargo, where he climbed the ranks to the trading desk. He later left the giant bank to begin a financial software company, and then his own hedge fund, Cabezon, in 2005. On the side, he attended Stanford's business school. In 2011, Mr. Cagney began SoFi with several co founders. The start up, established as venture capitalists were getting excited about financial technology, raised nearly 100 million in its first year. In total, SoFi has now taken in 1.9 billion from investors including SoftBank, Discovery Capital and Baseline Ventures. Even with other co founders, Mr. Cagney quickly established himself as the company's center of gravity. SoFi's offices, with glassed in conference rooms and cheap Ikea furniture, were set up in San Francisco's Presidio, the park near the Golden Gate Bridge, because Mr. Cagney's hedge fund already had its offices there. His home was less than a mile away. Mr. Cagney exhibited an aggressive attitude at the office that he may have learned as a trader at Wells Fargo. He sometimes shouted obscenities and excoriated employees in front of others when they made mistakes. Mr. Cagney hired deputies who had similar characteristics. One was Nino Fanlo, a former executive at Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, who became SoFi's chief financial officer in 2012. Mr. Fanlo, 57, sometimes kicked trash cans in the office when angry. He also commented on women's figures, including their breasts; said that women would be happier as homemakers; and once told two female employees he would give them 5,000 if they lost 30 pounds by the end of the year, according to more than a dozen people who heard the comments and witnessed the weight loss offer. "You're under extraordinary pressures at a company that is growing that fast," Mr. Fanlo said. More than two dozen former SoFi employees said they were uncomfortable with Mr. Cagney's pursuit of women in the office. In 2012, he sent the text messages to Ms. Munoz, the executive assistant, until her colleagues took the issue up with executives and the board, according to the five people who spoke with Ms. Munoz about the matter. Even as Mr. Cagney was texting Ms. Munoz, he also chased another young female employee. Six employees said they saw Mr. Cagney and the employee holding hands and talking intimately. One day in 2013, when Mr. Cagney was flirting with her at the office in front of colleagues, she grew enraged and left, according to three employees who witnessed the episode. Soon after, she left the company. Around that time, SoFi's board asked Mr. Cagney to not engage in inappropriate conduct with employees, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations. The situations were awkward in the office given that Mr. Cagney's wife, June Ou, began working at SoFi in 2012, rising to become the company's chief technical officer. Her desk was near Mr. Cagney's. Ms. Ou did not respond to a request for comment. SoFi's business works in the following way: It loans money to students, home buyers and individuals with high credit scores. The company funds those loans with money from hedge funds and banks, who buy the loans through securities or bonds that SoFi creates. As early as 2012, Mr. Cagney ran into trouble with some of his investors. That year, the company said it had secured 90 million in debt financing for one of its loan products, called Refi A. But some investors who had bought the securities noticed their returns were not in keeping with SoFi's estimates and voiced concerns to executives and to a board member, according to the emails obtained by The Times. About 10 SoFi executives met to discuss the situation; it was then that some of them learned Mr. Cagney had not actually secured the 90 million for the loan product, according to people who were at the meeting. Some attendees said they were dismayed at the possibility that they had made material misstatements to investors. In October 2012, SoFi bought back the Refi A securities from investors for what they had paid, plus the investment return they had anticipated, or gave them the option to put their money into a different product. Mr. Cagney said in an investor letter that the product had been "imperfect," but did not offer any details about the 90 million. The SoFi spokesman said that "no consumers were harmed in the process." In 2015, SoFi began offering mortgages. In meetings with the compliance officer overseeing the program, Mr. Cagney was told that SoFi was not doing enough to document the income of borrowers and was rushing to offer loans more quickly than competitors did, according to a person involved in the mortgage business. A SoFi spokesman said the company complied with all laws. Mr. Cagney also led a push into personal loans last year. To strengthen that business, he asked customer service representatives to review and approve loans, a job that had previously been done by the company's underwriters, said two people involved in the loan business. Many employees opposed the change because customer service representatives do not have the experience of approving loans, but the move helped SoFi double the amount of loans it issued in just a few months. That created another problem: SoFi did not have enough money to fund all the loans it was giving out. Mr. Cagney told employees that because of the funding shortfall, it could take as long as 30 days for some new customers to get the money they borrowed. But the employees who dealt with the customers were told by a supervisor to say that people would still get the money within 72 hours as promised. "We had to lie to them and tell them that we were a little behind or that the transfer got lost just something to keep them off our backs," said Marie Lombard, who worked from 2014 to 2016 at SoFi's operations center in Healdsburg. Mr. Cagney eventually took customer service representatives off the underwriting decisions. A SoFi spokesman said that customer service representatives did not approve loans and that the company's proprietary software made those decisions. He added that SoFi always communicated timing changes on its loans to borrowers and that delays have never run as high as 30 days. Mr. Cagney's risk taking outside of SoFi also created problems. In January 2015, his hedge fund, Cabezon, suffered big losses on a currency trade. In the aftermath, SoFi's board agreed to buy Cabezon for 3.25 million and give the hedge fund's employees jobs at SoFi. That caused resentment at SoFi among some workers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
If your household's summer vacation was canceled this year, console and distract yourself with "Lake Life," the tale of a family getaway gone very wrong. The novel opens with a fatal accident, setting the tone and pace for what follows. Within the first few pages we have met the members of the Starling clan, along with their failings and secrets: an infidelity, a long ago loss, a problematic pregnancy and an impressive variety of addictions. The secrets are only precariously kept, and concealment is corrosive. Richard and Lisa are the parents of two grown sons, Michael and Thad. Also along for the week at the North Carolina lake are Michael's wife, Diane, and Thad's partner, Jake. Richard and Lisa, successful academics heading toward retirement, announce that the family's longtime vacation home is being sold in a week. The sons are left feeling blindsided and resentful, grieving for the site of many childhood memories. But the house, a converted double wide trailer, has seen better days. So has the horseshoe set, the croquet game, the telescope used for stargazing. There is a perilous exhaustion and mistrust in Richard and Lisa's marriage, further burdened by the pronounced failure to launch of their sons. Michael sells shoes at Foot Locker, is heavily in debt and starts his secret drinking at breakfast. Diane is pregnant and Michael would very much like her not to be. Thad has a history of suicide attempts and sustains himself with marijuana and prescription drugs. He writes ineffectual poetry and lives off Jake, a young and much celebrated painter with his own issues of sexual compulsion. How have things gone so wrong? Not through parental abuse or neglect: Richard and Lisa are in most respects admirable and supportive parents. "Face it, Mom," Michael declares, in a piercing bit of honesty, "your sons suck." The novel is less concerned with the origins of dysfunction than with how it plays out. Here the likability question arises, whether readers will invest in characters they find unpleasant. It is the bane of any author interested in complexity and nuance, as Poissant surely is. Michael especially is a tough sell. He's the kind of drunk begging to be face punched. Thankfully, someone obliges. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Trevor Noah said he was shocked to hear President Trump take congressional Republicans to task on Wednesday for their ties to the National Rifle Association. "I've got to tell you, he didn't say what you'd expect," Noah said, adding that Trump reminded him of "a drunk uncle calling everyone out at a wedding." But Noah suggested that Trump has his own troubling allegiances. "He just publicly busted Republicans for being afraid of the N.R.A., and you can see how confident he is. He's like, 'Yeah, you guys are afraid! The N.R.A. doesn't own me. I'm president, nobody owns me! Oh hold on, Putin's calling. 'Oh hey, Vlad, yes, yes, I'll get on it.'" TREVOR NOAH | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Samantha Bucolo and Keith Denis met as schoolmates in high school on Long Island. They reconnected in an astronomy class at Suffolk County Community College. The couple, who plan to marry next winter, later moved to a three bedroom rental in a house in Bay Terrace, Queens, which they shared with Ms. Bucolo's younger sister, dividing the monthly rent of 2,100 evenly among the three of them. Ms. Bucolo, who is now 29 and has been a hairdresser since her teens, took the Long Island Rail Road to her job in product development at Bumble and Bumble in the meatpacking district, while Mr. Denis, now 30, drove to Mercy College in the Bronx, where he was working toward a graduate degree in physician assistant studies. But once he began working as a physician assistant in the neurosurgical care unit at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., on Long Island, Ms. Bucolo said, "We wanted to treat ourselves and fill that craving of being in the city." Knowing that they would eventually settle on Long Island, they wanted to have "that New York City lifestyle," she said, while they could. Besides, she was tired of commuting, which she had done since she transferred to New York University: "I would rather walk anywhere than take a subway or a cab." So in the fall, all three prepared to move Ms. Bucolo's sister to live with a friend on the Upper East Side, and Ms. Bucolo and Mr. Denis to their own Manhattan apartment. Their budget was 3,000 to 3,500, and to keep costs reasonable, they didn't mind downsizing to a studio, as long as the building had plenty of amenities. "The city is not a place where you are staying in your apartment all the time," Ms. Bucolo said. "I know friends who are paying 1,900 for a one bedroom that might as well be a studio." She found a listing for a one bedroom near the Queensboro Bridge. She wouldn't be able to walk to work, but Mr. Denis could easily drive to work over the bridge, which requires no toll. When they visited, however, they found an apartment that was tiny and "unlivable," she said. Mr. Denis added: "I was second guessing my agreement to move to the city." Ms. Bucolo liked the Caroline, which opened in 2002 in the Flatiron area on West 23rd Street; a friend who used to live there had gushed about the roof deck. Hunting alone while Mr. Denis was studying, Ms. Bucolo contacted Marilyn De Amorim, a saleswoman at Mirador Real Estate with a listing in the building. Studio prices there were in the low to mid 3,000s. But the only vacant studio was already rented, Ms. De Amorim told her. Ms. Bucolo didn't want to wait for another vacancy, so Ms. De Amorim took her to a building nearby, True North Flatiron 27 on West 16th Street, which had been remodeled a few years earlier. Prices there were in the high 2,000s to low 3,000s. Ms. Bucolo found the studio she saw "really new and crisp looking," but didn't like the rectangular layout, which had a kitchen she found obtrusive. "If I am on my bed, I am seeing my kitchen," she said. "Everything was in one room, and you could see everything." She was equally ambivalent about a 1960 building on East 18th Street south of Gramercy Park, where studios were in a similar price range. "This didn't have the newer finishes she was looking for," Ms. De Amorim said. "It's nice to be the first to cook in the kitchen and take a bubble bath in the bathtub." So Ms. De Amorim suggested they head north to a new 45 story residential tower with lots of amenities, One Sixty Madison. The building was north of NoMad, at 33rd Street, in a commercial area not far from the Empire State Building. But it was sufficiently close to work for Ms. Bucolo, and she loved the gleaming interior and the amenities, which included indoor and outdoor rooftop lounges. She visited a furnished model and a few empty studios, returning with Mr. Denis a few days later. "We loved that no one had lived here before," she said, "because I am such a clean freak and germophobe." They walked around the neighborhood to check out the parking situation. Parking right outside was allowed only from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., but that worked well with Mr. Denis's irregular schedule and 12 hour shifts. Last fall, the couple moved into a studio of about 500 square feet on one of the lower floors, for which they pay 3,490 a month, with one month free on a 13 month lease. The amenity fee, which includes access to the rooftop, the gym and an elevated park that wraps around the fourth floor, is 1,000 a year for two. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Before Jannik Sinner took his first steps toward scaling the world tennis ladder, he was quickly descending mountains in the Italian Alps. Sinner, 19, learned skiing before tennis, and German before Italian while growing up in South Tyrol, a territory of Austria until World War I that is now known as a placid retreat. He only began to take tennis more seriously at age 13, moving from Italy's northeast to the northwest to train at the academy of Riccardo Piatti in Bordighera, near the French border. Piatti, who had met Sinner earlier at a tournament in Milan, said he was immediately impressed by Sinner's courage on the court and his unusual willingness to play proactively rather than wait for his opponents to miss their shots. "He was close to the baseline, hit the ball fast, hit the ball to win the points," Piatti said of Sinner. "It's not normal to see players under 13, 14, similar to that." Piatti said he could see the influence of skiing on Sinner's tennis game: just as a ski racer must be intensely focused for a race that can last less than a minute, a tennis player be intensely focused for the short burst of each point. "This kind of education he has also in tennis," Piatti said. "He's very focused when he plays a point, and after that he relaxes." His sharp ascent in tennis is the inverse of how he has navigated snowy mountains. Two years ago, he was ranked 870th. Now, Sinner is ranked 75th on the ATP Tour and poised to break the top 50 after reaching the French Open quarterfinals. Should he pass the steep test he faces on Tuesday 12 time champion Rafael Nadal and his 97 2 record at Roland Garros the scope of his breakout would magnify. "Not the easiest thing, for sure," Sinner said of that challenge. Sinner's biggest career achievement before the French Open came last year, when he won the ATP Next Gen event for players 21 and younger. At only 18, he blitzed the field while playing in a quicker format. This French Open quarterfinal against Nadal will be Sinner's first match facing any of players who make up the Big Three of men's tennis, including Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. Still, in the lead up to the French Open, Sinner practiced on consecutive days with No. 3 Dominic Thiem, the No. 1 Djokovic, and No. 2 Nadal. Nadal said that he has seen Sinner "improving every single week" of the tour. "He has an amazing potential," Nadal said. "He moves the hand very quick and he's able to produce amazing shots." The speed of Sinner's improvement was also noticed by the sixth ranked Stefanos Tsitsipas, who beat Sinner in straight sets at the Italian Open last year, then lost to him 16 months later at the same event. "For sure, we can see a great future, see him do good things on the circuit," Tsitsipas said. "I would not be surprised, yeah, if he has good wins against the top five and the top three. Why not? He has a very big game, a very talented player. I think he is a hard hitter as well, which makes it difficult." When Sinner got the best win of his career on Sunday at Roland Garros, beating the recent United States Open finalist Alexander Zverev, 6 3, 6 3, 4 6, 6 3, in the fourth round, his celebration was muted, simply holding up his right fist as he walked up to the net. "Still a lot of work to do," Sinner said after the match. "Physically, technically, everything. It's, yeah, a long way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Rooms from 360 euros (about 393 at 1.09 to the euro); 580 euros in high season. When the Portrait Firenze opened on the north bank of the Arno River in May 2014, it became the newest hotel in the Lungarno Collection, luxury properties owned by the Ferragamo Group. (There are three other hotels in Florence.) True to the fashion house name, impeccable style abounds. Michele Bonan, a Florentine architect, used midcentury furnishings and original photographs from the Ferragamo archives to create gorgeous 1950s era interiors. The result is 34 rooms and suites worthy of interior design awards, and a lobby that feels like a sophisticate's living room. Overlooking the Ponte Vecchio in the heart of the historic district, the hotel is within walking distance of nearly all of Florence's major sites. It's also steps away from the grand medieval palazzo that houses the Salvatore Ferragamo flagship store and its adjoining museum. At check in I was upgraded, unprompted, from a studio to a third floor suite with a river view. Its two rooms had beautiful hardwood floors, high ceilings, a calming beige and gray color scheme and large mirrors that made the spacious rooms seem even larger. In the living room I was greeted with a front row view of the Ponte Vecchio through floor to ceiling windows, a handwritten welcome note and a half dozen macarons on a silver tray. The sitting area consisted of two modish armchairs and a plush, pillow laden couch facing a flat screen TV. A large glossy cabinet housed an impressive mini bar Italian craft beer, Fever Tree tonics, a full size Hendrick's Gin bottle as well as a fully stocked kitchenette with a microwave and dishwasher. The bedroom had its own sofa and flat screen TV, a desk, a wonderfully comfortable king size bed and two windows with the same spectacular view. Atop one bedside table was a docking station with multiple chargers and an iPad mini loaded with music and city guides. The entire suite, bathroom included, was outfitted with a Bluetooth system that I used to play music from my phone. A "good night" switch made turning out the lights a cinch. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Three times a week, millions of people who crave detailed explanations of time zones, deepfakes, artificial sweeteners and other trivia listen to the latest episodes of the podcast "Stuff You Should Know." Soon, the program already one of the most popular in the world, with more than a billion downloads over its 11 years will have the chance to attract an even larger and more diverse audience, thanks to a global expansion planned by its new owner, the broadcast giant iHeartMedia. As part of the plan, "Stuff You Should Know" and five other podcasts will be made available early next year in Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, French and German, iHeartMedia announced on Wednesday. The courting of international audiences is evidence that the booming podcast business sees potential growth beyond English speaking nations when major media companies have fully embraced a medium that was once the province of independent hosts working out of basements and garages. For years, iHeartMedia, which operates about 850 radio stations in the United States and has a popular online music app, iHeartRadio, mostly sat on the sidelines of the podcast revolution. Now it is going all in. Last year, the company bought Stuff Media, the studio that produces "Stuff You Should Know" and other shows, for 55 million, and Robert W. Pittman, iHeartMedia's chief executive, considers podcasts an essential part of iHeartMedia's offerings. "We realized that the behavior of this consumer was the kind of behavior we see on radio," Mr. Pittman said in an interview. "It's companionship; it's the human voice; somebody is keeping me company. We think of podcasts as a way for us to extend that companion relationship." By some estimates there are up to 700,000 podcasts, many of them amateur productions. But the market is changing as big media companies invest more in the medium, drawn by the advertising revenue brought in by hit shows. Podcasts generated 479 million in advertising in the United States last year, according to estimates by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which projected that the market would grow to just over 1 billion by 2021. Even Mr. Pittman, who began his career as a 15 year old radio D.J. in Mississippi and still speaks with the confident cadence of a radio announcer, has a podcast: "Math Magic: Stories From the Frontiers of Marketing." The potential revenue brought in by international podcasts will come in handy for iHeartMedia, a company that last month listed its shares on Nasdaq after emerging from bankruptcy with roughly 10 billion lopped off its debt load. Until now, the company's business has largely been restricted to the United States, although the iHeartRadio app is available in Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. 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 dive into podcasts may be a necessity for a company built on audio. This year Spotify has spent more than 400 million to acquire several podcast companies while signaling that it might buy more. A new service, Luminary, arrived in April with an ambitious plan, backed by 100 million in funding, to be the Netflix of podcasts, with exclusive, ad free content. On Wednesday, Entercom Communications, the second largest broadcast radio company after iHeartMedia, announced that it was buying two podcast companies, Pineapple Street Media and Cadence13. American listeners helped create the podcast boom, but the medium is expanding rapidly around the world. More than half of Spotify's podcast audience is outside the United States, the company said. Last month, two podcast companies, Stitcher and Wondery, announced a partnership to capture more advertising in Britain. "It has always been more global than we thought," said Tom Webster of Edison Research, which tracks consumer media behavior. Erik Diehn, Stitcher's chief executive, said that about 15 percent of the company's traffic came from outside the United States. Conal Byrne, the president of the iHeartPodcast Network, said that the international popularity of "Stuff You Should Know" was underscored last year when the hosts toured Australia and New Zealand. The translation plan that iHeartMedia has come up with for its podcasts is a substantial bet on the growth of the medium overseas. To prepare new editions of the shows, it must transcribe and translate scripts and cast voice actors and hosts who can approximate the tone and attitude of the originals, like the low key, geeky enthusiasm of Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant from "Stuff You Should Know." "I wouldn't quite say we're looking for the Josh and Chuck of India," Mr. Byrne said. "But you find really good voice talent people who don't just sit there and read a script, but can truly bring it to life." The first batch of international iHeartMedia shows comes from the company's Stuff Media acquisition, including "Stuff You Missed in History Class," "Stuff Mom Never Told You," "Stuff to Blow Your Mind," "BrainStuff" and "TechStuff." The process of translating podcast scripts, with their slang and quirky Americanisms, creates an interesting set of problems. Matthew Lieber, the managing director of Gimlet Media, one of the studios acquired by Spotify, said that his company had once considered international versions, but rejected the idea of mere translations or voice overs as "serving audiences warmed over American food." Once Gimlet Media became part of Spotify, however, it had greater resources. Next year, Spotify plans to introduce German, Spanish and Portuguese versions of "Sandra," a fiction podcast from Gimlet about the anxious humans behind an Alexa like voice assistant. The show is set in Guymon, Okla., so its creative team has had to imagine equivalent places in Germany, Mexico and Brazil. Mr. Pittman, one of the founders of MTV, said that he saw iHeartMedia's move into podcasting as a necessary measure to stave off disruption by a new technology. He noted that the television business was slow to adapt to the changes ushered in by the rise of cable decades ago and, more recently, by the rise of the on demand model pioneered by Netflix and other streaming companies. Looking at podcasts, Mr. Pittman said, he realized: "If this is something the consumer expects from us it sounds like us, feels like us then it is something we ought to be doing, too." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
He agreed to make "The Irishman" for Netflix because "maybe someday it'll be shown in a theater as part of a retrospective. I really thought that."Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times He agreed to make "The Irishman" for Netflix because "maybe someday it'll be shown in a theater as part of a retrospective. I really thought that." Martin Scorsese is the most alive he's been in his work in a long time, brimming with renewed passion for filmmaking and invigorated by the reception that has greeted his latest gangland magnum opus, "The Irishman." And what he wants to talk about is death. Just to be clear, he's not talking about the deaths in his movies or anyone else's. "You just have to let go, especially at this vantage point of age," he said one Saturday afternoon last month. The 77 year old director was stretched out in a comfortable chair in a living room of his Manhattan townhouse, a seat he would rise from several times when a whimsical mood struck him during a spirited conversation about mortality and its inevitability. As he explained, Scorsese was talking about setting aside his expectations for "The Irishman." But he also meant relinquishing physical possessions: "The point is to get rid of everything now," he said, in his trademark mile a minute clip. "You've got to figure out who gets what or not." And the last step in this process is to let go of existence itself, as we all must. Being an avid movie fan is no guarantee that you'll be a great moviemaker. But Leonardo DiCaprio, who has starred in five of Scorsese's features, said that the director's cinephilia never causes him to lose sight of what his performers need. "He's learned as much as he can about the history of his art form and he's brought that all into his filmmaking process," DiCaprio said. "But he's always focused on what the actor gives, and that one on one dynamic. Plot to him is secondary. His focus is finding the heart of the story through the actors that he works with." Scorsese has equally vivid memories of his childhood, growing up in Little Italy where his formative influences included his parents, his Catholic priests and the local hoodlums who would inspire films like "Mean Streets." If his past movies tended to glamorize criminals and the violence they perpetrate, Scorsese said, "Well, it is glamorous and attractive, is it not? It's glamorous at first if you're young and stupid, which a lot of people are. I was." His youth was also an initiation into the culture of death: serving as an altar boy for requiem masses at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral ("Dies Irae was my favorite song," he said), helping a friend deliver floral arrangements to funeral services. As a teenager, he lost two friends in close succession one died of cancer, another in an accident and one of the burials, at a graveyard near a factory, left a lasting impression on him. "I said, 'This is what it comes to?'" Scorsese recalled. "To squeeze us in a little plot of land in Queens somewhere, against this ugly, destructive backdrop? It was a shock and an awakening an awakening to what, I'm not sure, but a change." An eye for macabre details and an unflinching willingness to depict them have served Scorsese well, but somewhere around the making of his Vegas mob saga "Casino" (1995) particularly the scene in which Joe Pesci's character is brutally beaten and buried in a cornfield the director began to wonder if he had pushed this skill set to its limit. "I said I can't go any further with it," he recounted. Over the next two decades, he largely avoided projects in the crime drama genre. (An exception was "The Departed," for which he finally won an Academy Award.) But whatever the subject matter, Scorsese said he felt drained by these films, usually near their conclusions, when he inevitably found himself butting heads with studio executives who wanted the running times shortened. "The last two weeks of editing and mixing 'The Aviator,'" a coproduction that included Warner Bros. and Miramax, among others, "I had left the business from the stress," he recalled. "I said if this is the way you have to make films then I'm not going to do it anymore." He did not quit, of course, but he has increasingly turned to independent financiers to back his projects, believing that he and the studio system had become mortal enemies. "It's like being in a bunker and you're firing out in all directions," he said. "You begin to realize you're not speaking the same language anymore, so you can't make pictures anymore." The only reason to do "The Irishman," Scorsese said, was if it addressed ideas he hadn't previously confronted. "Is it going to be enriching?" he asked himself. "Are we going to learn about the invisible, the afterlife? No, we're not." But the film could say something about "the process of living and existence, through the work we could do you could depict it, the actors could live in it." And he could not resist the story of criminals whose lengthy life spans become a curse that burns their misdeeds into their souls. He quoted a lyric from the Bruce Springsteen song "Jungleland": "'They wind up wounded, not even dead,'" Scorsese said. "And that's even worse, in a way." "The Irishman," he said, was not a repudiation of his previous crime dramas nor an expression of regret for how he'd depicted their swaggering characters. "I don't think it's regret," he said. "This is different. Here, it's the dead end, and everybody has to reckon at the end. If they're given the time. And that's where we're headed." "The Irishman" took more than a decade to make, and as its cast grew to include Harvey Keitel, Pesci and Pacino (who had never worked with Scorsese), the director could feel the stakes getting higher. That anxiety of influence was palpable, too, for collaborators like Steven Zaillian, the "Irishman" screenwriter, who strove not to duplicate other Scorsese films. "It's very hard to get all his movies out of your head and not write a scene that's reminiscent of another scene 'Oh, oh, that's what I did in 'Goodfellas' or that's what I did in 'Casino,'" Zaillian said. But such pressures also led to innovations like the captions that appear throughout "The Irishman," describing how various criminals eventually met their fates. Pacino, though a novice to Scorsese's process, said he nonetheless developed an easy shorthand with the director and found him unafraid to express his opinion, in his own unique manner. After one take, Pacino recalled, "I have a memory of Marty looking at the scene on a computer and sticking his head out of the tent that he was in, as if to say, 'What the expletive are you doing?' He didn't actually say those words, but it felt like it. And I get the message." With a laugh, Pacino added that he welcomed such indications that a director was invested in his performance. "Actors like that," he said. "You think, I'm glad you're seeing me and I'm glad you're actually evaluating what I'm doing. It's saying, we're not alone here." That means some viewers are watching the three and a half hour movie incrementally, instead of in one sitting, as its director would prefer. But Scorsese said he'd rather the film be available somewhere, in some form, than nowhere. "Even if it's going to be shown on a street corner, maybe someday it'll be shown in a theater as part of a retrospective," he said. "I really thought that." Netflix said "The Irishman" was watched by more than 26.4 million accounts in its first week on the site, but the realm of smartphones, tablets and streaming devices is largely invisible to Scorsese. Sarcastically describing his day to day reality, he said, "I go out, they put me in a car, they take me somewhere, they take me out, put me back on a table, take me in. I go in a room, somebody talks to me, I say, 'Yes.' Then I come home and try to get in this door without the dogs going crazy." He is capable of adapting and evolving: In his fifth marriage (he and Helen wed in 1999), this former one man tempest recast himself as a homebody and family man. They have a daughter, Francesca, and he has two daughters, Cathy and Domenica, from his first two marriages. But you also know that Scorsese is hardly a wallflower if you've followed his recent remarks against Marvel movies, which he said were "not cinema" and closer to "theme parks" in an October interview with Empire magazine. (He expanded on these remarks in a November Op Ed in The New York Times.) That prompted Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company (which owns Marvel) to tell Time magazine that Scorsese's remarks were "nasty" and "not fair to the people who are making the movies," adding that he was seeking a meeting with the director. Scorsese told me that he had reached out to Iger several months earlier, on behalf of his nonprofit Film Foundation, which is seeking to restore and preserve movies in the 20th Century Fox library that Disney now owns. "Then all this came up," Scorsese said with a chuckle. "So, we'll have a lot to talk about." (A Disney spokeswoman said the company was trying to set up the meeting between Scorsese and Iger.) Scorsese has also been faulted by critics and others who have said that the female characters in "The Irishman" are not fully realized and exist only to react to the male characters; as their prime example, these critics often point to Anna Paquin, who plays the adult incarnation of Sheeran's daughter Peggy and who has almost no dialogue. But the director argued that Paquin's character whose wordless rejection of the aging Frank devastates him was in no way diminished by her silence. As Scorsese explained, "Don't go for the surface. The surface says, 'I'm going to say something and there's going to be two or three big scenes between me and my father.' She doesn't need to. She saw what he did. She knows what he's capable of." Scorsese said he was aware of the wider debate about the representation of women in his films, acknowledging that "The Irishman" is a "more sequestered" movie but not solely representative of his body of work. "I saw clips of it," Scorsese said of "Joker." "I know it. So it's like, why do I need to? I get it. It's fine." Despite his professed aversions, Scorsese is going back to the Hollywood studios for his next movie, "Killers of the Flower Moon," which is adapted from David Grann's nonfiction book about the murders of Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma and which will be financed by Paramount. Scorsese has other aspirations but they have nothing to do with moviemaking. "I would love to just take a year and read," he said. "Listen to music when it's needed. Be with some friends. Because we're all going. Friends are dying. Family's going." One impediment, Scorsese admitted, is himself and a disposition that compels him to tell stories in the medium he knows best. "I'll read a book or I'll meet a person and I'll say, 'Ah! I'm going to make a film on this,'" he explained. "Over the years I've been able to do it. Now it's narrowing way down." Then there is the other boundary you know, death. But just because it's unknowable and nonnegotiable doesn't mean it isn't worth contending with every day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The recent arrests of people for taking part in unauthorized assemblies last year have nothing to do with Covid 19 as suggested in your article but everything to do with upholding the rule of law. As in the United States, everyone in Hong Kong is equal before the law. Cases will not be handled any differently owing to the political beliefs or background of the people involved. Recent comments by the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in Hong Kong on the operation of the Legislative Council should be seen from the perspective of the constitutional setup of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. As a special administrative region of China, Hong Kong enjoys a high degree of autonomy and comes directly under the Central People's Government, according to Article 12 of the Basic Law. Concerns about the failure of the House Committee of our Legislative Council to elect its chairman after 15 meetings over the last six months are legitimate from the perspectives of our Constitution, governance and operation, and are in full compliance with our constitutional order under "one country, two systems." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Scientists have genetically engineered monkeys so that they exhibit behaviors similar to autism, with a goal of testing potential therapies on the animals in hopes that their resemblance to humans will yield more answers about the disorder. The scientists found that the monkeys showed "very similar behaviors related to human autism patients, including repetitive behaviors, increased anxiety and, most importantly, defects in social interactions," said Zilong Qiu, a leader of the research at the Institute of Neuroscience at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. The team is now imaging the brains of the monkeys, he said, "trying to identify the deficiency in the brain circuits that is responsible for the autism like behavior." The research, published Monday in the journal Nature, appears to be the furthest along of several research efforts involving monkeys, usually marmosets or macaques, engineered with genes linked to autism. Much autism research has focused on mice because they are inexpensive and reproduce quickly. Though mice engineered with other genes have developed some autism like behaviors, the complexity and variability of autism are difficult to study in those less advanced animals. "Mice are not in the same league when you're talking about doing models of social cognition and interaction," said Jonathan Sebat, chief of the Beyster Center of Psychiatric Genomics at the University of California San Diego, who was not involved in the monkey research. "They're not even close." Not only are mouse brains simpler than primate brains, but "mice reach maturity in a matter of months, and that doesn't give you a lot of time to study their development," Dr. Sebat said. "It's very logical that a primate would make a better model of human development and neurodegeneration. It's a no brainer." Previously, American scientists have created monkeys with the mutation for Huntington's disease. At the Institute of Neuroscience in China, other researchers are creating monkeys with genes linked to neuromotor and psychiatric disorders, said the director, Mu Ming Poo. The overarching cause of autism is still unknown, and cases have been linked to about 100 mutations, some inherited and some developing spontaneously. The scientists used an inactive virus to inject the human MECP2 gene into eggs of female monkeys and then artificially inseminated the eggs and implanted the embryos into surrogate monkeys. They ended up with eight carrying the gene in the cortex and cerebellum of their brains. The monkeys did not all have two copies of MECP2, as in the human syndrome, but most had more MECP2 than normal, an overexpression of the gene. The genetic change and the social deficits were also transmitted to a second generation of monkeys, Dr. Qiu said. These monkeys were more likely than normal ones to run in circles in their cages, which the scientists considered an example of repetitive behavior. They showed more stress and defensive behavior, grunting more when people gazed at them, which the scientists said reflected autism like anxiety. And they were less likely to be social by sitting with, touching or grooming other monkeys. As the monkeys got older, males showed more social disconnection, just as MECP2 syndrome is more common in boys, the researchers said. But the monkeys also had significant limitations as models for MECP2 duplication syndrome and for autism in general, said Dr. Huda Zoghbi, professor of neuroscience and molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Zoghbi, who helped discover that mutated forms of MECP2 cause Rett Syndrome, a type of autism that affects mostly girls, said the monkeys carried MECP2 only in neurons, not throughout the brain, as happens in humans. She questioned whether circling the cages was akin to repetitive behavior in autism and noted that the monkeys did not exhibit some crucial features of MECP2 duplication syndrome, like seizures and cognitive deficits. Genetically engineering monkeys is much more costly and time consuming than making transgenic mice, said Dr. Anthony Chan, whose research involves transgenic Huntington's disease monkeys at Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Producing enough monkeys to test therapies takes years, he said, adding that an experiment like the Chinese one would cost "a few million dollars" and would be more expensive in the United States because of labor costs and less availability of monkeys, which are indigenous to China. Also, some animal rights advocates here are more troubled by research on monkeys than by research on rodents. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... 6 Minutes, and I'm Hanging On by a Thread 'Shaun the Sheep: Adventures From Mossy Bottom' When to watch: Now, on Netflix. This stop motion charmer, part of the "Wallace and Gromit" universe, is a perfect show to watch with imaginative kids or extremely stressed adults. There is almost no dialogue but still plenty of story, most of it in the silly shenanigan vein, with a lot of physical humor and things that go splat. It's wildly creative, about as cute as can be, not annoying at all, and each 13 minute episode is actually two even shorter episodes, making the "Can I watch one more?" question easy to answer. 'At Home With Amy Sedaris' When to watch: Now, on the TruTV website or DirectTV. Transport yourself to a stranger, more wonderful and peculiar plane of existence with this warped happy homemaker show. Amy Sedaris balances a sunny wholesome exterior with a deranged gooey center, like "Pee wee's Playhouse" but more comfortable with silly squirmy humor. At a time when many of us are climbing the walls, a show that is both escapist and domestic feels right. All of the episodes are available with a cable login, and one is available for free without. ... 4 Hours, and I'm Steering Into the Skid 'College Behind Bars' When to watch: Now, on Netflix or PBS Passport. If you are paying particular attention to the health crisis facing prisoners right now, or if you have long been interested justice reform, or if you like well constructed documentaries that capture the human condition in beautiful and surprising ways, watch this. "College" aired on PBS late last year, and it follows participants the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that provides a challenging college education to a small number of prisoners in New York State. There are only four episodes, and I would space them out because they are quite evocative. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Egon Schiele's "Crouching Nude in Shoes and Black Stockings, Back View" (1912) in the show "Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso" at the Met Breuer. Scofield Thayer, heir to a New England woolen goods fortune, befriended E. E. Cummings and T. S. Eliot at Harvard and Oxford and published the first English translation of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" in his influential magazine, the Dial. While based in Vienna from 1921 1923 to undergo psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, he also collected more than 600 pieces of art, among them erotic drawings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Pablo Picasso. Freud's efforts didn't ward off a mental breakdown, though, and Thayer disappeared from public life in the mid 1920s. His will, written in 1925, left all of his art, except some Aubrey Beardsley drawings, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But no one told the museum until after Thayer died in 1982, and it's taken the intervening 30 plus years to sort a coherent show out of his vast, uneven trove. "Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso," a display of 52 of his artworks at the Met Breuer organized by Sabine Rewald, a curator in the Met's modern and contemporary art department, is also uneven, in the sense that not all of it is equally compelling. Klimt's faint and hesitant pencil studies don't really profit from comparison to the drawings of his protege Schiele. And eroticism as an organizing criterion doesn't seem all that specific when it comes to Picasso: His work always has the same sunny leer whether it's explicitly sexual or not. Setting aside who comes out the best individually, though, the three artists do make a trio as neat as any geometry lesson, with Picasso's unerring sense of the human body as a mass in space, Klimt's fixation on gauzy planes and surfaces and Schiele's potent, monomaniac line. The way the three men depicted women also reads as an illuminating stand in for the way that, as artists, they saw the world in general. The model in Klimt's 1906 7 drawing "Standing Nude" rests her head against a shoulder as she bends her right arm under one breast. The placement of features in her delicate, masklike face is exact, and he gets her forearm and fingers especially with precision. But what's most striking is the rhythmic flow of Klimt's line: Descending sinuously around shoulder blade, rib cage, and hip, or orbiting her head in the tilted ellipsis of a turban, Klimt describes the female body as a cosmos of unbroken curves. "The Lovers," one of his drawings from around 1914, remains shocking, because the contrast between the sketchy outline of two bodies enmeshed and the darker nexus where they actually meet so effectively captures the thrill of sudden recognition when you happen to see something you shouldn't through a darkened window, let's say, or a door left ajar. But even here you notice Klimt's discomfort with the real physical presence of the bodies he draws. He includes so few details inside this couple that they look as if they're draped in sheets though he's caught them at a singularly carnal moment, they could almost pass for ghosts. In three memorable 1920 drawings of nude bathers by the sea, Picasso follows the contours of his models' bodies with cavalier disregard for their overall proportions, ending up in one case with a bather who'd have to be eight feet tall and in another with a woman whose legs have come apart from her torso. But he works with such confidence and imagination that he's still able to give them the unquestionable reality of facts revealed in a dream. You also get the impression that Picasso was more interested in his own drawing than in the women but you can understand why. Schiele's women are just about as violently objectified as possible. He often truncates or omits fingers, feet and faces. Daubs of orange and blue shadow in watercolors like "Crouching Nude in Shoes and Black Stockings, Back View," 1912, look like bruises though it's important to note that in many of his self portraits he treats himself the same way. ("Obsession" includes only a few of Schiele's watercolors, but the Neue Galerie's Klimt/Schiele centenary show, up through Sept. 3, has a whole wall of them.) But what interests Schiele in the body, in contrast to both Klimt and Picasso, is its sheer physicality. He portrays it as if it were a system of hoists and pulleys in constant dynamic tension. Arms and legs are stretched out like bowstrings between the anchors of their knobby joints. At his best, Schiele infuses every other aspect of a drawing with similar contrast. "Seated Woman in Chemise" (1914) shows a nearly naked model seated on the floor holding her folded legs open with her hands. Her egg shaped, doll like head is so idealized it's practically inhuman, while the blunt exposure of her crotch is rendered as honestly and simply as the medium allows. Her overall posture is recognizably true to life, but a single hooked line runs down through her cheek into a heavily stylized clavicle and lest you forget for even an instant that you're looking at an artifice, Schiele puts his cartouche like signature right in the middle. It's an incandescent, unresolvable contest of fantasy and reality. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
MOSCOW Shoppers who find that 250 stores aren't enough can go ice skating, watch movies or even ride a carousel, all under a single roof. While it sounds like the Mall of America, this mall is outside Moscow, not Minneapolis. "I feel like I'm in Disneyland," Vartyan E. Sarkisov, a shopper toting an Adidas bag, said recently while making the rounds of the Mega Belaya Dacha mall. Instead of bread lines, Russia is known these days for malls. They are booming businesses, drawing investments from sovereign wealth funds and Wall Street banks, most recently Morgan Stanley, which paid 1.1 billion a year ago for a single mall in St. Petersburg. One mall, called Vegas, rose out of a cucumber field on the edge of Moscow and became, its owners say, larger than the Mall of America if the American mall's seven acre amusement park is not counted in the calculation of floor space. A few offramps away on the Moscow beltway, another mall scored a different kind of victory: the Mega Tyoply Stan shopping center drew 57 million visitors at its peak in 2007, well ahead of the 40 million annual visits reported by the Mall of America. As American malls dodder into old age, gaptoothed with vacancies, Russia's shopping centers are just now blossoming into their boom years, nourished by oil exports that are lifting wages. "It's 1982 all over again in Russia," said Lee Timmins, the country representative of Hines, a Texas based real estate group that is opening three outlet malls in Russia, referring to the heyday of the American mall experience. Russians, he said, love malls. The mall boom illustrates an extraordinarily important theme in Russian economics these days. The growing crowds at malls, and the keen interest in Russian malls on the part of Wall Street banks, are signs that the emerging middle class that made up the street protests against Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last winter is becoming a force in business as well as politics. Investors, who with money at stake are a bellwether of the new trends, are not waiting for the next round of protests; they are already placing bets on the rise of a broad affluent class in Russia. "Over the past 10 years, Russia has turned into a middle class country," Charles Slater, a retail analyst at Cushman Wakefield, a commercial real estate consulting firm, said in an interview. "What better to do than go to an enclosed, warm environment with many things on offer, whether that be bowling, cinema or food courts, things the customers have not been used to in the past?" Moscow now has 82 malls, including two of the largest in Europe, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a New York based trade association. Both are owned by Ikea Shopping Centers Russia, the branch of the Swedish assemble it yourself furniture franchise that manages 14 malls here. In Russia, malls are still novel; the first Western style suburban mall opened in 2000. They are now changing hands as developers sell to institutional investors, like Morgan Stanley, shedding light for the first time on their eye popping values. At the core of the attraction for investors is the rising disposable income of Russians, nudged along by policies favoring the middle class, lest their challenge to President Putin's rule intensify. Russia has a flat 13 percent income tax rate. Most Russians own their homes, a legacy of post Soviet privatizations, and so pay no mortgage or rent. Health care is socialized. Not surprisingly, then, Russians have become fanatical shoppers. Russians spend 60 percent of their pretax income on retail purchases, a category that includes food, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate consulting firm. The country in second place in Europe is Sweden, where retailing accounts for 40 percent of total private spending. Germans, by comparison, spend 28 percent of their salaries shopping, according to Jones Lang LaSalle. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Malls, where the secrets of Western capitalism were finally peeled open and laid bare, with fast food, clothes, ice rinks, electronics and appliances wherever the eye falls, have mesmerized shoppers here much as they did in their early years in the United States, from the 1960s to the 1980s. When she shops, she said, "now we buy things we want, not things we need." So, more malls are going up. The essayist Joan Didion, who wrote of malls as they first opened in Southern California in the 1960s, said that they were "like pyramids to the boom years." They were cities, sparkling and ideal, "in which no one lives but everyone consumes." A megamall built for Russians, not surprisingly, is subtly distinct from the idealized urban environment preferred by Americans, a result of careful analysis of consumer behavior and Russian retailing desires. Most Russian malls have a huge grocery store as an anchor tenant, rather than a department store. Russians are still struggling to find groceries in their neighborhoods. And the sight of row upon row of groceries, stacked to the ceiling, surely soothes a lingering sore spot in the soul of Russian women who were compelled, just two decades ago, to serve their children such items as canned seaweed and powdered milk. Moscow, the new capital of malls, has more floor space in malls than any other European city, with 34 million square feet. And as if to drive home the point that the Russian capital has long since moved on from the deprivation and hardship its name still evokes, it has shattered other shopping center records recently. Belaya Dacha was one of the largest malls in Russia from 2007 until 2010, when it was overtaken by Vegas. The interior space of Vegas is 4.15 million square feet, larger than the Mall of America excluding the Nickelodeon Universe amusement park. "This is a big world with a lot of people in it," Dan Jasper, the spokesman for Mall of America, said. "I think it's great they are building these things in Russia, too." And a new record setter is going up. Avia Park in northwest Moscow will have five million square feet of interior space including covered parking, which will make it the largest mall in the world outside Asia. So, the market is buzzing. Morgan Stanley is in talks to buy another mall, the Metropolis in Moscow, for more than 1.2 billion, according to real estate professionals close to the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The seller is Capital Partners, a Kazakh developer that opened the mall in 2009. Malls in Russia appear to be following a familiar course. While some American malls continue to flourish decades after opening, the arc of a mall from buzz to blight has been established in the United States. But it is not here yet. Hines, which built one of the first megamalls in the United States, the Galleria in Houston, has made a big bet on outlet malls one of the categories of retail space that have undercut the classic anchor tenant model for malls in the United States. Others are strip malls and big box parks, known as power centers. For owners of traditional malls, it is an ominous development. Hines opened an outlet mall a short drive from Mega Belaya Dacha on the territory of the same former collective farm, sharing the name and, it hopes, some customers. It is called Belaya Dacha Outlet Village. It was so cold on a recent weekend that the few visitors at the site of the outlet mall cupped their mittens over their faces, and, puffing and stamping their feet, browsed the shop windows. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Kevin Harvick won a tense finale for the Nascar Sprint Cup series Sunday in Homestead, Fla., edging the three other drivers vying for the 2014 season championship. Twelve other contenders in the 10 race season ending playoff had already been eliminated. Competition among the finalists was keen. Harvick won the race and the championship by half a second, and Ryan Newman took second place in both. The other two finalists, Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano, didn't fare so well. Hamlin was passed by Harvick for the lead with seven laps to go and faded to seventh. Logano, who ended up 16th in the race, was undone by a jack malfunction on his final pit stop. In the end, strategy played an important role. Harvick opted to stop for four fresh tires on his last pit stop, Newman picked up only two and Hamlin did not stop at all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
But they dance well together, too: Their Kitri Basilio is less a pyrotechnic contest than a separating and joining of wills. In the first act, Ms. Semionova's best moment occurred after her diagonal turns, punctuated with a rise and fall of the heel, when she stopped suddenly. Standing on point and leaning toward Mr. Gomes, though just out of reach, she was her own version of Kitri: sophisticated, provocative and with a touch of minx. Once the couple do decide to commit, the remainder of "Don Quixote" revolves around Kitri trying to get her father, Lorenzo (a hilariously muddled Roman Zhurbin), to grant his blessing even though he wants to marry her off to the wealthy Gamache (Craig Salstein). With the help of the matador Espada (Jared Matthews) and Mercedes (Hee Seo), a street dancer who later appears as Queen of the Dryads, they escape to a Gypsy camp where Don Quixote (Victor Barbee) dreams about his ideal woman, Dulcinea. In the vision scene, ballerinas rule the stage, including a sparkling Sarah Lane, as Amour, and Ms. Semionova, clearly in her domain. While Ms. Seo's dancing grew increasingly strained she stumbled toward the end of her turning fouettes Ms. Semionova's became creamier as she contrasted light footwork with regal epaulement. When Mr. Matthews and Ms. Seo, now Mercedes, returned in the third act, their dancing was just as wispy as earlier; there was no brio, no sensuality. But those qualities were in force with Mr. Gomes who, despite the typical Ballet Theater tempo soupy used the dignity of his line and the ardor of his partnering to transform Basilio from a boy into a man. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WASHINGTON Nearly a decade after the Federal Reserve embarked on an unprecedented effort to shore up the collapsing American economy, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would begin withdrawing some of the trillions of dollars it invested in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The decision, while widely expected, is nevertheless a significant sign that the Fed is confident that economic growth and low unemployment will continue. In other words, the central bank believes that the American economy has emerged safely from the crisis. "The basic message here is U.S. economic performance has been good," Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, said at a news conference following a two day meeting of the Fed's policy committee. The Fed's retreat from its post crisis stimulus campaign will be slow but steady as the central bank looks to shrink the enormous 4 trillion portfolio it amassed through a bond buying spree. Those efforts, known as quantitative easing, plunged the Fed into uncharted waters as it tried to navigate the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The Fed came under stiff criticism for the program, prompting many Republican lawmakers to question whether the Fed should remain independent. The Fed, which stopped its buying spree in 2014, is now preparing to pare back its holdings by about 10 billion per month initially. That is likely to raise borrowing costs for consumers and businesses, but only very slowly. Indeed, since the Fed ended its bond buying, countervailing factors have actually reduced some borrowing costs, like the average interest rate on 30 year mortgages. Investors are watching warily, but so far there is little sign that the Fed's retreat is tightening financial conditions. Stock prices fell modestly after the Fed's 2 p.m. policy announcement, but bounced back by the end of the trading day. The S P 500 index rose 1.59 points, closing at 2,508.24. The yield on the benchmark 10 year Treasury also rose 0.02 percentage points, closing at 2.27 percent. "The Fed did an extremely good job of preparing us for commencing the balance sheet rundown," said Peter Hooper, chief economist at Deutsche Bank. "That's happening with a whimper, but handled differently, it could have been a big event." The Fed, which has raised its benchmark interest rate twice this year, left that rate unchanged Wednesday, but indicated that it plans a third rate increase later this year as economic conditions continue to strengthen. The Fed said it expects the labor market to continue strengthening and the economy to expand at a moderate pace. Twelve of the 16 officials on the Federal Open Market Committee predicted another rate increase this year, the same number as in the Fed's last round of forecasts in June. In its post meeting statement, the Fed pointed to the strength of job growth and increases in household and business spending. The official optimism went only so far, however. Growth remains weak by historical standards, and the Fed indicated it sees no evidence of acceleration. Fed officials once again reduced their expectations for rate increases in coming years. The median prediction Wednesday was that the benchmark rate will stabilize at 2.8 percent, down from a median estimate of 3 percent in June. The Fed's benchmark rate now sits in a range between 1 percent and 1.25 percent, a level most Fed officials regard as providing modest encouragement for borrowing. Expectations of a third rate increase this year strengthened after the Fed's announcement, rising from a 57 percent chance to a 71 percent chance, according to CME Group. The Fed's next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, but the Fed is unlikely to raise rates any sooner than its final meeting of the year, in mid December. Some economic indicators suggest that higher rates are warranted: The unemployment rate, at 4.4 percent in August, is below the level most officials regard as sustainable. Moreover, Fed officials predicted that the rate would fall to 4.1 percent next year. But other economic measures paint a contrasting picture. Job growth remains strong, suggesting that the work force is still expanding; wage growth is modest, suggesting employers are still able to find workers with relative ease; and inflation weakened in recent months, puzzling Fed officials and economists who had predicted that prices would begin to rise more quickly as labor market conditions tightened. The Fed's preferred measure of price inflation increased by just 1.4 percent during the 12 months ending in July, the most recent available data. The Fed is likely to undershoot its target of 2 percent annual inflation for the sixth consecutive year. That has caused consternation among some economists and Fed officials, who are wary of raising rates given the Fed's inability so far to achieve its inflation objectives. "I can't say this year that I can easily point to a sufficient set of factors" to explain low inflation, Ms. Yellen said Wednesday. She added, however, that low inflation this year did not imply low inflation next year. "What we need to do is figure out whether the factors that have lowered inflation are going to prove persistent," she said. Ms. Yellen said that weak inflation readings earlier this year "reflect developments that are largely unrelated to broader economic conditions." Similarly, she said that the Fed expected the impact of hurricanes on gas prices to increase inflation temporarily. So far, the Fed's assessment of underlying conditions remains unchanged: Ms. Yellen and her colleagues expect inflation to stabilize at its target of 2 percent a year. The Fed wants to use its benchmark rate to manage economic conditions while gradually draining its investment portfolio in the background. When Ms. Yellen described the Fed's plans in June, she expressed hope that the process would be like "watching paint dry." The Fed holds about 4.2 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage bonds, which it accumulated to put downward pressure on interest rates. It must regularly replenish its holdings as bonds mature. Beginning in October, it plans to withhold 10 billion a month from the reinvestment process in effect causing that much money to disappear. It will then increase the pace by 10 billion each quarter until reaching a monthly rate of 50 billion, and then maintain that pace until it reaches an unspecified finishing line. Ms. Yellen emphasized that the Fed did not plan to adjust that schedule, although she added, "unless we think that the threat to the economy is sufficiently great." The retreat will put modest upward pressure on borrowing costs, but businesses and consumers are unlikely to see much difference in the near term. "You will see a gradual tightening of financial conditions that will come from the Fed shrinking its balance sheet," said Lewis Alexander, chief United States economist at Nomura Securities. Still, questions remain, both about the market's reaction and about the goal. Before the crisis, the Fed held less than 900 billion in assets, and most analysts expect the Fed to maintain a significantly larger balance sheet going forward both because the financial system has grown and because the Fed has expanded its role in maintaining the system. The Fed's slow pace also means it will take years to rebuild its ability to respond to crises. It does not expect its benchmark rate to reach 2.8 percent for three years, and it expects to take even longer to reduce its balance sheet. "If we get a severe adverse shock in the next couple of years and interest rates are still pretty low and the balance sheet is still pretty big, what in the world are we going to do?" asked Andrew Levin, a Dartmouth College professor of economics. Ms. Yellen paused when she was asked that question on Wednesday. "We have a certain amount of room now," she finally said. She noted that the Fed could buy more bonds. It could also engage in "forward guidance," or promising keep rates at a low level for a specified period. The Fed also noted the impact of three recent hurricanes, including one that was striking Puerto Rico on Wednesday, but said the resulting economic disruptions were likely to be temporary. "Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria have devastated many communities, inflicting severe hardship," the Fed said. "Storm related disruptions and rebuilding will affect economic activity in the near term, but past experience suggests that the storms are unlikely to materially alter the course of the national economy over the medium term." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Jonathan David was already thinking about what might come next. He had been in Belgium for almost two years, his first taste of professional soccer in Europe since moving from Canada. He had met every target that had been set for him: He was K.A.A. Gent's leading goal scorer in his first season and the joint top scorer for the whole Belgian league in his second. "Gent asked him last year to stick around and confirm the potential he had shown," his agent, Nick Mavromaras, said. "He has done that. He proved it is time for him to move to the next level." The wheels were turning. David had caught the eye of a host of Europe's most prestigious clubs. They pored over his data, studied video of his play, dispatched scouts to watch him in the flesh. He checked plenty of boxes: He had only just turned 20; he played as a striker for Canada, but a little deeper for Gent, a sign of precious versatility; his scoring numbers were impressive. Mavromaras and his agency, Axia Sports Management, meanwhile, were researching each of the various candidates, trying to find the ideal suitor for David. If an offer came that was right for Gent, it had to be right for their client, too. They needed the coach, the system and, most of all, the opportunity to fit. "He is conscious this is only his second season as a professional," Mavromaras said. "He needs to play. That is the primary factor." They had, he said, already identified a few clubs that fit the bill. And then, of course, everything stopped. Quite what the effect of European soccer's indefinite shutdown in the face of the pandemic will be remains unclear. Clubs across Europe do not yet know when, or if, they will be able to play again. Until they do, they can only guess how much revenue will be lost in ticket sales and merchandise and television revenue. They can only guess at the scale of the damage. For many outside the continent's big five leagues, though, that uncertainty is compounded by an awareness that they are not in control of their fate, that a second crisis hangs on the horizon. For these clubs and leagues, financial health depends not only on their own return to action, whenever that may be, but on what happens far above them in the food chain. Much of the economy of global soccer depends on the transfer market, and the transfer market is driven by the largess of Europe's rich elite. Soccer's entire delicate ecosystem functions, outside of Europe's major leagues, as a monument to trickle down economics, money flowing down from Germany and Spain and, in particular, England, through places like Belgium and on, out into the world. According to figures provided by the CIES Football Observatory, it is scarcely possible to overestimate just how much the money from the Premier League or, more precisely, the Premier League's television deals makes soccer's world go around. Since 2015, for example, English clubs have sent more than a billion dollars in transfer fees to teams in France alone. About 464 million of that has gone to just one club: A.S. Monaco. Another billion has ended up in the pockets of just five clubs: Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Roma, Barcelona and Sporting Lisbon. "There are two business models in international soccer," said Vincent Mannaert, the Club Brugge chief executive. "One, in the major leagues at the top of the pyramid, the most important revenue stream is media rights. In medium and small leagues, there is another model, which has mainly to do with being important suppliers of player transfers to the big leagues." In Mannaert's eyes, soccer's transfer market functions as a "solidarity mechanism," transferring the money made by the most popular competitions and particularly the staggering wealth available to English clubs to the rest of the game. Some of the money Brugge raised last year remained in Belgium, of course, helping the club pay its salaries and retain its players, but some of it percolated elsewhere, too. "Typically, we spend between a third and a half of what we make on transfers," Mannaert said. Brugge has certain markets it focuses on. It has had success in recent years, Mannaert said, in Scandinavia, the former Soviet bloc, Australia and the "smaller nations in South America." Shopping in Argentina and Brazil, for a Belgian team, is often too expensive, but Colombia and Uruguay can offer rich pickings. Africa is of increasing importance, and the club tries to shop locally, too. "We are all part of a chain," he said. "We get money from the big leagues, and teams in smaller leagues get money from us." When the money stops flowing, when the chain breaks, the effect ripples from England to Belgium and then into every corner of the globe. "People say to stop transfers, that the amounts of money are obscene, but it is a source of very important income for smaller teams," Mannaert said. "It is the only way medium size clubs can earn more money to invest in academies, in players. It is a form of solidarity." For now, though, the transfer market has frozen. Aside from Germany which, despite its eagerness, still cannot say for certain when it will resume the major leagues remain unclear when they will be able to play again. Until they know and even when they do, depending on when that is teams across the world must deal with the possibility that the money from the top will dry up. Mannaert is confident Brugge could ride that out, the consequence of such a lucrative summer last year. Gent, too, remains adamant that it should not be thought of as easy pickings. The market for David has not collapsed completely: while, in normal circumstances, Louwagie would have expected 10 to 15 clubs to be competing for his signature, now he expects it to be three or four. The club still hopes to keep him for another year. But for many others, the consequences could be severe. It is why, to Mannaert, the most effective intervention available to FIFA and UEFA is counterintuitive though it sounds to limit the black holes on the books of clubs in the major leagues. He would like to see the two bodies act, essentially, as soccer's Federal Reserve, either pumping money directly into the "engines of the industry," the clubs, or using the broadcast rights to the World Cup, the European Championship and the Champions League as bargaining chips to help assuage broadcasters left with contracts and airtime unfulfilled. If not, if the wounds run too deep, the damage could be severe. Not, perhaps, for those at the top of the tree, who are rich enough and strong enough to absorb the blow. For everyone else, for those clubs dependent on their money, for those who need the money to flow downward, there is fear that trouble is coming the same way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The artist Doug Wheeler is known for creating simple seeming but titanically tough to achieve environments in which light and space are experienced in a manner usually reserved for the realms of mystical vision or psychedelic drugs: as things in themselves. "Voids," as he once said, "have matter." But he has also long dreamed of work that incorporates another sense, sound or the near absence of it for the same purpose, based on solitary desert sojourns in Northern Arizona, where he was raised, and elsewhere in the West. He tells one story about how it feels to experience such profound and "elating" silence in the middle of the Sonoran Desert the existential opposite of New York City, where his latest work, "PSAD Synthetic Desert III," opens on Friday and runs through Aug. 2 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. "I watched a great horned owl sitting on a saguaro cactus," Mr. Wheeler, 77, an amateur pilot, said last week at the museum. "And when it took off, it was just amazing. There was no sound, at least nothing I can describe as sound, but just a kind of almost imperceptible percussiveness in the air." The work, based on the desert's quiet, its vanishingly distant sounds and the ethereally dim light of dusk or dawn, has been under construction for several weeks in a Guggenheim tower gallery, requiring a kind of floating room within a room to be built, resting on gaskets so that the chamber absorbs as little sound as possible from the structure of the museum itself. Using timed tickets, groups of five will be allowed to enter the room through a series of sound locks and may remain inside for as long as 20 minutes. During time spent inside on Thursday morning with four other visitors, I quickly understood Mr. Wheeler's insistence on small groups. (If he'd had his way, the piece would have been limited to one person at a time.) The room is so silent that any footfall or coat rustle or stomach gurgle, even the sound of swallowing, registers as a kind of thundering violation. After a few minutes, what sounded like an immensely distant low rumble came to me, though I couldn't be sure it wasn't just my circulatory system. I wanted to sit down and stay for a few hours, but my visit lasted only 10 minutes before other people needed to enter. Mr. Wheeler's environments are often so costly and difficult to build, and his standards so exacting, that many have existed only in drawings and conceptual form since the late 1960s. "Synthetic Desert," conceived in 1968, is one of those, sold to Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, a visionary Italian collector of postwar art, in 1971 and acquired by the Guggenheim in the early 1990s along with five other Wheeler works, only two of which have been realized before now. The piece, whose cost is not being disclosed, is the first exhibition to emerge from the work of an unusual, ambitious multiyear conservation project that has focused on the groundbreaking Conceptual, Minimalist and Post Minimalist artists in the museum's Panza collection. These are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Wheeler and the show's organizers, Jeffrey Weiss, senior curator at the Guggenheim, and Francesca Esmay, conservator of the Panza Collection: You've waited almost 50 years to see this piece realized, a long time even for an artist with your kind of patience. Why is it such a difficult undertaking? DOUG WHEELER The thought of being able to isolate a museum from the sound around it and in it is really a challenge. This is my first real opportunity to do it a real sensate experience of sound and vision. When I first walked in here, even before construction, I knew that it was going to be a very hard thing to do. JEFFREY WEISS The process has been very laborious and slow and incremental. And the effort to get this right has been quite intense. FRANCESCA ESMAY We've been calling it an Egyptian effort. The sound engineers Doug is working with (Raj Patel and Joseph Digerness from the firm Arup) can identify things utterly imperceptible to us. They identified an electronic buzz from a panel on the eighth floor, a floor above us, coming through a concrete slab. WHEELER I once landed my plane on a dry lake bed in the Mojave. I wasn't thinking I was going to land there for that experience. I just wanted to try to land in a place like that. When the plane engine stopped ticking, there was no breeze of any kind and it was really silent. In about 10 to 15 minutes I started to be able to hear things far away tiny, different frequencies hitting me from a great, great distance. When you're that far out, the mountains are just hazy shapes they could be 60 miles away or hundreds. And the sounds you can't tell a human voice from a car door closing or an eagle screaming more than a mile up. I've read that a whisper is 30 decibels and New York Midtown traffic noise is about 70. (Decibels are logarithmic, meaning a noise 30 decibels is 10 times louder than one 20 decibels.) How silent do you hope "Synthetic Desert" will be? WHEELER I've almost never experienced real silence it's just certain degrees of quietude. I think if we're really lucky we might be able to get this to 10 but probably more like 15. When you first walk in it will seem like utter silence. But it's not. In a supersilent anechoic chamber, the most that most people can endure is about 40 minutes before they start going batty. I don't want that experience. I just want you to experience something that you've never experienced before, and I think it will be elating. I think you will experience a sense of expanse and distance. Probably, for some people. But I think only when we're young do we have a kind of open receptiveness to this kind of experience. As we get older, too many of our associative experiences get in the way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The nation's five biggest mortgage lenders have largely satisfied their financial obligations under last year's 25 billion settlement over mortgage abuses, helping hundreds of thousands of families keep their homes. But four of the five have yet to meet their commitment to end the maze of frustrations that borrowers must navigate to modify their loans, according to a report on Wednesday by the settlement's independent monitor. The most common failure involved a requirement that borrowers be notified in a timely manner of any documents missing from their applications. Banks also failed to meet strict timelines for approving applications. The settlement requires that borrowers be notified of missing documents within five days and given 30 days to supply the missing paperwork and that decisions be rendered at most 30 days after an application is completed. "I think what you see is there's still a communication problem," said Joseph A. Smith Jr., the monitor. "If there's a unifying feature, it's that the servicers who failed these things are not yet communicating effectively." The mortgage settlement came after the housing crash led to a wave of foreclosures across the country and after widespread improprieties in mortgage lending and in the foreclosure process were uncovered. The banks report their own performance on 29 loan servicing criteria, and their findings are then tested in a random sampling by outside consultants overseen by the monitor. Citibank failed three metrics, two of which involve notifying borrowers of missing documents in a timely fashion and one that requires that a letter containing accurate information be sent to a homeowner before foreclosure. Bank of America failed two metrics, one regarding missing documents and the other regarding the pre foreclosure letter. Wells Fargo also flunked on the missing documents. JPMorgan Chase failed to adhere to the prescribed timeline for reviewing loan modification requests and notifying customers of its decision. It also failed to remove home insurance policies, known as forced place insurance, within two weeks of a homeowner's submitting proof that he or she had insurance. The fifth lender, ResCap, formerly the mortgage subsidiary of Ally Financial, whose mortgage servicing is now handled by other companies, was not found to have failed on any of the metrics. The banks are required to submit a corrective action plan and compensate affected borrowers. Chase, for example, has already refunded insurance premiums charged to 2,000 borrowers. "We quickly fixed the issue," said Amy Bonitatibus, a spokeswoman for Chase, adding that the timeline problem had been remedied as well. Wells Fargo said that its internal reviews showed that it had already fixed its problem. Citi said it had fixed one of its issues and was working on the other two. Dan Frahm, a spokesman for Bank of America, which is responsible for about 60 percent of the total financial obligation under the settlement, said, "While neither area of noncompliance resulted in inaccurate foreclosures or improper loan modification denials, we took immediate action and resolved one area and will soon return to compliance in the other." The servicers also submitted to the monitor almost 60,000 complaints received from elected officials on behalf of their constituents. The most common complaints, the monitor's report said, were related to the bank's obligation to provide a single point of contact to borrowers seeking modification of their loans. There were also complaints about "dual tracking," in which the foreclosure process is begun before a borrower's request for a loan modification is resolved. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Despite the volume of complaints, none of the banks failed the requirement to provide a single point of contact, leading Mr. Smith to conclude that he needed to add more criteria in that area. He said at least three new metrics measuring the efficacy of the single point of contact would be added. Banks are subject to fines of up to 5 million if they do not improve their performance on a failed metric. But they are allowed a certain number of errors, usually 5 percent, before they are considered to have failed. Critics of the settlement point out that in contrast, homeowners seeking help are required to submit virtually perfect paperwork to prevent the loss of their homes. Shaun Donovan, the federal housing secretary and one of the chief architects of the settlement, said the report showed that the process was working. "In some ways, the most important news here is that the report is being produced at all," Mr. Donovan said. "There has never been a comprehensive, data driven way to understand how people were being treated by their servicers." Mr. Donovan said problems like robo signing, a blanket term for the banks' widespread practice of evicting homeowners without proper documentation, and charging steep fees to process loan modification requests had largely ended. But state officials have expressed deep disappointment with the banks' performance in other areas. Last month, lawyers in the office of Martha Coakley, the attorney general of Massachusetts, detailed what they said were hundreds of violations of the settlement, including a failure to adhere to the required timetable or provide reasons for the denial of an application. They also pointed to cases where they said banks had improperly inflated the value of a loan before writing it down so as to claim a greater amount of relief, or where they had reverted to a higher interest rate while delaying, for months, the decision to make a trial loan modification permanent. Soon after, Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, announced plans to sue Bank of America and Wells Fargo, saying they were repeatedly violating the terms of the settlement. Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, said there was an "alarming pattern" of violations of the servicing standards. In a review of servicer handling of loan modification requests in Illinois, she found that in 60 percent, servicers failed to comply with the time frame for notifying borrowers of missing documents and in 45 percent they made multiple requests for the same documents. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Moe Berg's story is so good that you'll forgive "The Spy Behind Home Plate" for overtelling it. Berg, a son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, grew up in New York City and Newark. After graduating from Princeton he played baseball professionally for 15 seasons while earning a law degree at Columbia University and passing the bar exam. He spoke at least 10 languages and befriended several famous figures of his time, including Albert Einstein and Babe Ruth. And somewhere along the way he became a spy. In the run up to World War II, Berg gathered information on Japan during a visit there. When the war began, he was recruited as an agent by the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the C.I.A. He went behind enemy lines in Europe to uncover secrets about the Nazi nuclear program, and was a hair's breadth away from assassinating Werner Heisenberg. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A salutation at the center of a Wieden Kennedy advertising campaign for Bud Light has caught on, especially among sports fans. How Do You Turn an Ad Into a Meme? Two Words: Dilly Dilly In 1995, a nation was rapt as three frogs croaked the syllables in "Budweiser." Four years later, Budweiser prompted countless television viewers to wag their tongues and ask their friends, "Whassup?" Since then, the list of commercial catchphrases to earn a cultural foothold has been short. But a nonsense phrase from an advertisement set in medieval times has broken through to become a common barroom cheer and online force to an extent that in some ways has exceeded its pre social web predecessors. In an advertisement that debuted in August, citizens of a fictional world approach their king, presenting increasing quantities of Bud Light as offerings. The king names each person a "friend of the crown," then leads the banquet hall in a call and response toast in which they all repeat "dilly dilly." When a man instead smugly presents "a spiced honey mead wine that I have really been into lately," he is shuffled off to the "pit of misery." The ad was one of six produced by Wieden Kennedy, an advertising agency, and executives at Budweiser say they gravitated to it immediately. But no one anticipated how much "dilly dilly" would spread, especially in the sports world. Seemingly every N.F.L. touchdown was greeted by cries of "dilly dilly" on social media. And fans tweeted that players who performed poorly should be sent to the pit of misery. John Parker, another creative director, said he thought he had heard something familiar when he was watching a fourth quarter play of a "Thursday Night Football" game in November. He was watching with his wife as Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, called out in code to direct his teammates. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. "Did he just say 'dilly dilly'?" he asked his wife. He rewound, and sure enough yes, he did. The ad makers had succeeded in creating a genuine meme, which can't simply be bought by expanding an advertising budget. Attention in social media is harder to buy than a 30 second spot after a punt. And while memes churn through popular culture at a rapid pace, they are rarely spawned from television advertisements, a medium that has been hit hard by cord cutting and ad skipping technology. "Consumers today have so many more options and things to occupy their time," said Andy Goeler, Bud Light's vice president of marketing. "They're not waiting for the next ad to come on either their mobile phone or TV. It's much harder today to break through and to connect with that consumer base out there because of all of the multiple options they're exposed to." Still, the fact that Bud Light invests in big ticket live television events namely major football games offered "dilly dilly" a better chance at viral success, Mr. Henderson said. The chances of simply ginning up a meme without that help would be much lower. "Once people see it a couple of times, they take it online and they use it socially and it grows from there," he said. "If we tried to take this thing immediately into social media, I don't know if it would have taken off." Mr. Goeler said he believed that "dilly dilly" had surpassed the popularity of "whassup" and the frogs, and he said that the success had prompted Budweiser to expand the campaign. Additional advertisements were created to introduce new characters into the "Game of Thrones" inspired universe, including a trilogy that will culminate in a Super Bowl ad, he said. "Dilly dilly" does have a history, notably in the folk song "Lavender Blue," which Burl Ives recorded in 1949. Another version of the song appeared in the 2015 Disney film "Cinderella," though the creative directors at Wieden Kennedy said they were unaware of the song when they wrote the spot. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
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