text stringlengths 1 39.7k | label int64 0 0 | original_task stringclasses 8 values | original_label stringclasses 35 values |
|---|---|---|---|
Iowa Never Locked Down. Its Economy Is Struggling Anyway. As far as the law is concerned, there is no reason that Amedeo Rossi can't reopen his martini bar in downtown Des Moines, or resume shows at his concert venue two doors down. Yet Mr. Rossi's businesses remain dark, and one has closed for good. There are no restrictions keeping Denver Foote from carrying on with her work at the salon where she styles hair. But Ms. Foote is picking up only two shifts a week, and is often sent home early because there are so few customers. No lockdown stood in the way of the city's Oktoberfest, but the celebration was canceled. "We could have done it, absolutely," said Mindy Toyne, whose company has produced the event for 17 years. "We just couldn't fathom a way that we could produce a festival that was safe." President Trump and many supporters blame restrictions on business activity, often imposed by Democratic governors and mayors, for prolonging the economic crisis initially caused by the virus. But the experience of states like Iowa shows the economy is far from back to normal even in Republican led states that have imposed few business restrictions. A growing body of research has concluded that the steep drop in economic activity last spring was primarily a result of individual decisions by consumers and businesses rather than legal mandates. People stopped going to restaurants even before governors ordered them shut down. Airports emptied out even though there were never significant restrictions on domestic air travel. States like Iowa that reopened quickly did have an initial pop in employment and sales. But more cautious states have at least partly closed that gap, and have seen faster economic rebounds in recent months by many measures. Economists say it is hard to estimate exactly how much economic activity is still being restrained by capacity limits, social distancing rules and similar policies, many of which have been lifted or loosened even in places governed by Democrats. In most states, restaurants, retail stores and even bars are allowed to operate. Perhaps the most widespread government action that has hindered economic growth is the decision by many school districts to adopt virtual learning at the start of the school year, which appears to have driven many parents, particularly women, out of the labor force to care for young children who would otherwise be in class. But as the pandemic flares again in much of the country, most economists agree this much is clear: The main thing holding back the economy is not formal restrictions. It is people's continued fear of the virus itself. "You can't just open the economy and expect everything to go back to pre Covid levels," said Michael Luca, a Harvard Business School economist who has studied the impact of restrictions during the pandemic. "If a market is not safe, people won't participate in it." Iowa was one of only a handful of states that never imposed a full stay at home order. Restaurants, movie theaters, hair salons and bars were allowed to reopen starting in May, earlier than in most states. Gov. Kim Reynolds has emphasized the need to make the economy a priority, and has blocked cities and towns from requiring masks or imposing many other restrictions. Even so, Iowa has regained just over half of the 186,000 jobs it lost between February and April, and progress as in the country as a whole is slowing. Many businesses worry they won't be able to make it through the winter without more help from Congress. Others have already failed. Now, coronavirus cases are rising there. Vaudeville Mews, the small performance hall that Mr. Rossi opened in Des Moines in 2002, was a labor of love even in the best of times. The venue attracted a fan base with its willingness to book independent acts, but it often lost money. Mr. Rossi had been saving up in hopes of buying a new space, but the pandemic ended that dream. Legally, music venues in Iowa were allowed to reopen in June, but with social distancing requirements that significantly reduced their capacity. Even if those rules were lifted, Mr. Rossi said, he couldn't see a path toward reopening safely and profitably anytime soon. This month, he announced that Vaudeville Mews would be closing permanently. "We couldn't pay our rent, and it was piling up, and we were constantly still getting drained by internet bill, insurance bill, utility bill," he said. "Who wants to go into huge debt to float a business that we don't see any end in sight?" Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Mr. Rossi's nearby bar, the Lift, is officially still in business, but aside from a brief experiment with deliveries, it hasn't served a drink since March. He has considered welcoming a small number of customers on a reservation only basis, but so far hasn't figured out how to reopen in a way that would both be safe and not cost him even more than staying closed. "We felt it would be worse for us to reopen," he said. At Court Avenue Restaurant Brewing Company, around the corner from Vaudeville Mews and the Lift, the lack of nightlife is taking a toll on business. So is the lack of the normal lunchtime crowd, with many office employees still working from home. Court Avenue reopened in May, but has regained just 30 to 40 percent of its pre pandemic sales, according to the owner, Scott Carlson. "Even if the governor said, 'Hey, we're taking away all restrictions and all mandates and all recommendations,' our numbers wouldn't change, not very dramatically," he said. Iowa has outperformed many other states economically during the pandemic, at least by some measures. The unemployment rate capped out at 11 percent in April below the 14.7 percent hit by the country as a whole and it has fallen quickly, to 4.7 percent in September. But economists attribute Iowa's success primarily to its favorable mix of industries. The state relies more heavily than most on agriculture and manufacturing, which were comparatively insulated from the virus. "Retailers are still having a tough go of it in Iowa," said Ernie Goss, a Creighton University economist who studies Iowa and the Midwest. "You're talking about individuals who regardless of regulations are not going back in a restaurant right now." Mike Draper owns a chain of T shirt shops with three stores in Iowa and others in Omaha, Chicago and Kansas City, Mo. Customer traffic is down 30 to 50 percent in all of them, he said, with no consistent patterns based on the rules local governments have imposed. "It has almost nothing to do with regulations," Mr. Draper said. "It's really driven by people's mentality more than regulations." Ms. Foote, 24, had worked at the beauty salon for just a few weeks when it shut down because of the pandemic. The job was the fulfillment of a longstanding dream after years of juggling school and low wage jobs, she was finally working full time and on track to get benefits. Even so, when the salon reopened in the spring, she was scared to return to work. And once she did go back, there was little work for her. "I just kind of sit around and don't do anything," she said. "People are scared to go into the salon and sit for an hour." Ms. Foote said she was taking home just 200 for each two week pay period, meaning she again needs to supplement her income with part time jobs. But she isn't sure she should be rooting for business to pick up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Claims of "fake news" have long been a staple of President Trump's rally speeches. But in recent days, with the election less than six weeks off, he has made his rhetorical attacks on the news media more personal, with repeated references to a specific reporter's suffering an injury while on the job. At a rally in Bemidji, Minn., on Friday, Mr. Trump went after the MSNBC anchor and correspondent Ali Velshi by name, describing a moment when Mr. Velshi was hit in a knee by a rubber bullet in May while reporting on a Minneapolis protest prompted by the police killing of George Floyd. (The incident was captured live on MSNBC.) "It was the most beautiful thing," Mr. Trump said, after incorrectly stating that Mr. Velshi had been hit by a tear gas canister. He added, "It's called law and order." The president brought up the incident again the next day at a rally in Fayetteville, N.C., to more applause. In a Twitter reply to Mr. Trump on Saturday, Mr. Velshi wrote, "So, realDonaldTrump, you call my getting hit by authorities in Minneapolis on 5/30/20 (by a rubber bullet, btw, not a tear gas canister) a 'beautiful thing' called 'law and order.' What law did I break while covering an entirely peaceful (yes, entirely peaceful) march?" MSNBC said in a statement on Saturday, "When the president mocks a journalist for the injury he sustained while putting himself in harm's way to inform the public, he endangers thousands of other journalists and undermines our freedoms." At a Tuesday night rally in Moon Township, Pa., Mr. Trump repeated the attack. This time, he did not identify Mr. Velshi by name, referring to him, incorrectly, as "that idiot reporter from CNN" and remarking on his baldness. 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. "And he went down," Mr. Trump said, to laughs from the crowd. "'I've been hit! I've been hit!'" The president went on to describe the National Guard's moving on a crowd of protesters that included reporters. "They grabbed one guy 'I'm a reporter! I'm a reporter!' 'Get out of here.' They threw him aside like he was a little bag of popcorn," Mr. Trump said, to more laughs from the crowd. "Honestly," the president added, "when you watch the crap that we've all had to take so long, when you see that, it's actually you don't want to do that but when you see it, it's actually a beautiful sight." Before celebrating attacks on journalists at his rallies, Mr. Trump frequently used the phrase "enemy of the people" to refer to news outlets he does not view favorably. Carlos Martinez de la Serna, the program director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement that Mr. Trump's recent remarks were especially troubling. "The president should not condone violence against journalists who were simply doing their jobs," he said. Mr. Trump has used an assault on a reporter as fodder for rally speeches in the past. At a 2018 event in Montana, he praised Representative Greg Gianforte, Republican of Montana, for body slamming a journalist. (Mr. Gianforte was sentenced to community service and anger management classes for the assault on the reporter, Ben Jacobs, who was with The Guardian.) Globally, violence toward the press is on the rise. A recent UNESCO report found that "there has been a notable escalation of attacks against the press" covering protests. "The U.N. in several resolutions has expressed concern at hostile rhetoric by political leaders against the press," the report said. "Such incitement is often in the context of mass gatherings and creates a wider climate in which journalists are targeted at a range of events." Civil rights protests and unrest across the country this year have included a number of assaults by law enforcement officials on reporters covering demonstrations. A TV reporter in Louisville, Ky., was hit by a pepper ball while on the air. The CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew were arrested on camera while covering a protest in Minneapolis. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Neubaugasse Street in Vienna's seventh district, an enclave near the tourist frequented Museumsquartier, where both longtime residents and young professionals live, has emerged as a go to for innovative shopping. Boutiques, housed mostly in three and four story 19th century buildings on this charming and quiet street, sell everything from trendy clothes and accessories to food, and stand out for their personable feel. Just off Neubaugasse but considered a part of its retail fabric, this six room, bilevel spot is a trove of eye catching and mostly European vintage clothing for both sexes from the 1970s to the '90s. Marco Pauer, the owner, carries edgy pieces such as a dark blue short sleeved cropped polyester ladies' jacket from France that fuses classic gold embroidery with Western style fringes, and a men's faded green leather bomber jacket from England. Prices from 10 euros. This high ceilinged space is where the eponymous Viennese designer with a local following sells her women's and unisex leather bags. They usually come in muted tones such as dark gold and brown, and many can be worn in multiple ways, like as a clutch, cross body and backpack. From 70 euros. Honey and products related to it are the stars at this family run business. More than 30 varieties are for sale, such as a honey infused with lavender and another made with chestnuts. There are also chewy translucent candy, lollipops and whiskey with honey, and a good selection of honey soaps, candles and essential oils. Prices from 1 euro. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
PITTSBURGH Pittsburgh exists for three reasons: the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio. In the 20th century, the banks of those rivers were controlled by industrial behemoths. They largely lost that identity after the waning of the steel industry in the 1980s. Over the last two decades, however, the city's progress in clearing and cleaning its waterfront has created 12 miles of recreational trails, three professional sports stadiums, several boat landings and an influx of nearly 2,000 new downtown residents. The city has managed to leverage a 124 million investment in publicly accessible riverfront into 4 billion in corporate, public, nonprofit and entertainment development downtown. That success has renewed a debate that would have been unthinkable in Pittsburgh's polluted industrial heyday: how best to expand public access to the shorelines of the three rivers. Projects proposed for two of the largest tracts left to be developed on the downtown fringe illustrate the opportunities and limits of public private partnerships. This month, the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority approved preliminary plans for an 80 million to 90 million investment in new roads, streets and utilities on a 178 acre former industrial site that is the biggest remaining waterfront property in the city. The developers will use a tool called tax increment financing, which earmarks a portion of a site's future property taxes to build its infrastructure. Such financing, approved by both the authority and the City Council on a case by case basis, has galvanized redevelopment on Pittsburgh's complex industrial sites. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
One of my sons noticed it before the rest of us did: a hawk perched on the edge of the birdbath mounted to our deck rail, only a few feet from the back door. One great yellow claw gripped the edge of the shallow bowl; the other claw was curled up and tucked into the bird's breast feathers as though for sleep. It was the middle of a bright Sunday afternoon, but the hawk had settled in for a stay. Its coloring the brown streaking, the pale eyes indicated a young Cooper's hawk, not long out of the nest. Food is abundant during these hot, dry days, but water is not, and many thirsty creatures make use of this birdbath. As we were marveling over the hawk, a young squirrel came around the edge of the nearest maple tree and leapt lightly onto the railing, heading over for a drink. It saw the hawk and stopped for moment to look it over. Then, unbelievably, the squirrel continued to make its way toward the birdbath. The three humans standing at the back door all gasped. Cooper's hawks belong to the genus Accipiter, avian predators capable of immense speed and built to navigate dense vegetation in pursuit of prey. My field guide, Pete Dunne's "Birds of Prey," calls the Cooper's hawk "a slate backed, torpedo shaped cruise missile of a raptor." These birds eat mostly other birds, and they can be the bane of backyard bird watchers because they often stake out feeders. It is terrible to watch what happens when a Cooper's hawk kills a songbird the explosion of feathers, the piteous cry. At first the hawk remained in its resting position, but I wish you could have seen what happened to its eyes when it saw that squirrel. Its head turned; I swear I could see its pupils dilate. The baby squirrel was very lucky that this was a baby hawk: A goofy, inexpert chase scene unfolded in the maple tree, with no harm come to the squirrel, but already there was a focused savagery in that young bird's eyes that I have never seen before except in photos and film. A thrilling ferocity fierce and urgent. Utterly, beautifully, inescapably wild. On the other side of the house, a skink has taken up residence under the low ramp my husband built for his elderly father's scooter chair. The ramp is covered with old roofing shingles, and last spring, when the skink was carrying eggs, she took to lying on those sun warmed shingles and sprawling out like a teenager on a pool raft, or Superman in flight: arms extended past her head, legs stretched out behind her. The broadhead skink is the largest lizard native to the Southeast, reaching up to 13 inches in length. The skink who shares our front stoop is well past half that size. Broadhead skinks are attentive mothers, and ours disappeared for a few weeks in early summer, presumably to lay her eggs and guard them till they'd safely hatched. I was afraid a feral cat had caught her, but she's back now, and from time to time a very small striped skink with a blue tail will join her on the stoop. It may be one of her babies, though of course I can't be sure. Broadhead skinks are often found in trees, but this one rarely leaves the shelter of our ramp except to hunt or to sun, and the spot she has picked out is rich in insects, so she needn't range far. When she's startled, she darts more quickly than you could possibly believe, but when she prowls, she moves in an undulation that mimics the gliding of a snake. I have watched delivery drivers jump back at the sight of her. I like to watch our resident skink while she's sunning, the way she looks up at me through the glass of the storm door, fully aware that I'm watching her. If I open the door, she'll scoot under the ramp on reptilian principle, but she has learned that I am not a threat. Once she's safely under cover, she'll poke her head back out to see what I'm up to. There is such transparent intelligence in her eyes. Really, it's just one eye, for she always tilts her head sideways to look at me, exactly the way a songbird would. When I walk out front to feed the bluebirds, I always toss a few worms into the ground cover for the tiny, furtive house wrens, who, though fierce, can't compete with an entire bluebird family. The wrens are quick, but the skink, waiting at the stoop at the exact right time of day, always helps herself to a worm or two before the wrens even realize I've come outside. I haven't actually seen a mole, but a mole lives here. Beyond the front stoop, its tunnels crisscross our yard, and walking there becomes an exercise in sinking. We once had a terrier mix named Betty who spent all autumn digging up mole runs. Every year she managed to make our yard look like someone had been conducting trench warfare there. Our current terrier mix has never shown the first inclination to dig anywhere or to hunt anything, so the current mole remains unmolested. There are spots all over our yard where the mole has opened up a hole in the earth to push out the loose soil it has excavated in making its tunnels, or where its offspring have exited the tunnel in search of their own territories: As I learned from Marc Hamer's wonderful memoir, "How to Catch a Mole," hands down the most charming book I read last year, moles are combative, solitary creatures except during mating, and their youngsters don't hang around. Moles can wreck the appearance of a poisoned, sprinkler watered lawn, but they have never done any harm to this scruffy, wildlife friendly patch of ground. Many wildflower seeds require disturbed soil to germinate and take root, and molehills are a safe landing place for wildflower seeds carried on the wind. Meanwhile the mole is busy underground doing its useful work: aerating the soil and consuming vast quantities of worms, slugs and grubs often eating its own body weight in a day. A resident mole is always better pest control than any exterminator, and so much lovelier than any field of poisoned grass. How lucky I am to live in a home with windows. Against all odds the encroachments of construction companies and lawn services and exterminators these windows still open onto a world that stubbornly insists on remaining wild. I love the bluebirds, and I also love the fierce hawk who reminds me that the peace of the backyard is only a fiction. I love the lizard who looks so much like a snake, and I also love the snake who would eat her if it could. And my friend the mole, oh how I love my old friend the mole. In these days that grow ever darker as fears gather and autumn comes on, I remember again and again how much we all share with this soft, solitary creature trundling through invisible tunnels in the dark, hungry and blind but working so hard to move forward all the same. Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book "Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Who Posted Viral Video of Covington Students and Protester? Congress Wants to Know SAN FRANCISCO Lawmakers are investigating the Twitter account that first shared a video of a group of white teenagers taunting a Native American protester in Washington, a collision of racial groups and politics that went viral. The House Intelligence Committee asked Twitter on Tuesday to provide information about how the video took off so fast. The committee said it was also awaiting information about the account that first uploaded the video and accounts that helped spread it by retweeting it. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, separately asked Twitter to provide more information about the video. A spokeswoman for Mr. Warner said Twitter had found that the account originated in the United States. Twitter declined to comment on the video, on the requests from the Intelligence Committee and Mr. Warner, and on whether the account was domestic. The lawmakers' moves were part of a cycle of outrage around the video. Uploaded to Twitter on Saturday by an account called 2020fight, which claimed to be run by a teacher named Talia, it showed a group of white high school students wearing "Make America Great Again" hats and encircling a Native American protester at the Lincoln Memorial. It was viewed at least 2.5 million times and retweeted at least 14,400 times before the account was removed. Videos that emerged later showed that before the teenagers' encounter with the protester, African American demonstrators who identified themselves as Hebrew Israelites had shouted slurs at the students. The video touched a nerve in many Americans, exposing fault lines between conservative and liberal groups that each believed the video showed the other side behaving inappropriately. Liberal groups said the teenagers, from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, were intimidating a protester who was fighting for indigenous people's rights. Conservative groups said the teenagers were being maligned and targeted for simply standing their ground while on a school trip. Days after it was posted, the video remains a topic of fierce debate. A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee didn't return a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Warner said lawmakers had focused on the video and who might be behind it as part of their efforts to combat foreign interference in political campaigns. During the 2016 presidential race, for example, Russian operatives posted inflammatory videos and other content to stoke divisions among the American electorate. The identity of the person or people behind 2020fight remains unknown. The account used a profile picture of a Brazilian social media personality, Nah Cardoso, and purported to belong to an educator and advocate. It posted more than 100 times a day, including many overtly political messages that resonated widely on Twitter. Representative Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, retweeted a post from 2020fight in 2017, according to a database compiled by The New York Times. Another tweet, about President Trump in August, received nearly 130,000 retweets. The profile photo tipped off CNN, and eventually Twitter, that the account may not have been run by the person it claimed. While Twitter does not mandate that people use their real names or photos on their accounts, the company forbids impersonation. After CNN raised questions about the user's identity, Twitter suspended the 2020fight account on Monday. Twitter said users who were suspended because of misleading account information could get their accounts reinstated if they provided proof of their identity, such as a valid government ID. As of Wednesday, the account remained shut down. The account appeared to be part of a network of users dedicated to amplifying one another on Twitter, said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies disinformation. Mr. Nimmo noted that the account had roughly 30,000 followers and followed just over 30,000 accounts since becoming active in December 2016, adding: "The sheer number of tweets and likes it has are not the kind of signature you get from a casual Twitter user." Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher at the New Media Frontier, a company that studies social media, also examined the account and said it appeared to be part of a structure that was built to go viral. "These types of accounts, and the bigger network they belong to, exist to create an amplification structure on Twitter," she said. "They amplify each other's content to create viral moments on the network." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Cirque du Soleil is expanding its long and wide reach into a new realm: magic. Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group, the global performing arts conglomerate known for live acrobatic circus presentations, announced Wednesday morning that it had acquired The Works Entertainment, the makers of the Illusionists magic franchise and other shows. Cirque has been diversifying the types of performances under its umbrella. It acquired Blue Man Group in 2017, and then VStar Entertainment Group a more kids and family oriented company last year. Its purchase of the creators of the Illusionists, which has brought live magic to Broadway and other world stages, will be one of its first forays into magic. "The play for us is magic," said Daniel Lamarre, the president and chief executive of Cirque du Soleil. He said Cirque became interested in The Works because of the similarity in the performance and business models of the two companies. "Like us, they have no stars," Mr. Lamarre said. "The show is the star, and they're constantly using different magicians. The fact that they're not focused on stars gives you scalability." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
LONDON Petr Cech does not watch a lot of television. Switching his brain off, by his own admission, does not come easily to him. He has always preferred, he said, to fill every minute of his day, not just with work and family but with a moderately intimidating litany of pastimes and projects. Settling down on the sofa counts, to his mind, as time wasted. This year, though, Cech and his wife, Martina, have started getting into "The Crown." Even then, though, he is not the sort to allow himself to be washed away by the lavish Netflix melodrama. Each episode he is somewhere in the middle of the second season prompts him to go away and fill in the gaps in both his knowledge and the series' contested historical authenticity. "Obviously it's not completely accurate," he said. "But there are lots of interesting things. You start Googling those parts of British history, and you realize there are lots of things you didn't know." That, just about, encapsulates Cech: He is inclined to see an hour or two of fairly mindless television in his rare downtime not as a chance to relax, but as a learning opportunity. That Cech has time to disappear down a rabbit hole about the Suez crisis or anything else is faintly remarkable. Spooling through all of the things he does, it is hard not to assume he is handcuffed by having a mere 24 hours in his day. He is studying for an M.B.A. He plays the drums well enough that last year he released a charity single with Roger Taylor of Queen. He is fluent in five languages his native Czech, English, German, Spanish and French but speaks seven. He admits, as if confessing to some great flaw, that he cannot write quite as well as he might like in Italian and Portuguese. He has started running, too; every so often he will knock out a quick 10K on a weekend morning. All of this, he said, means that his "time management has to be right." These are extracurricular activities, after all. He also has a job to think about. Strictly speaking, in fact, he has two. Cech retired as a player in 2019 after a decorated career spent at Rennes, Chelsea and, in his twilight, Arsenal. He made the decision before it was made for him; within a few months, he found that his "mind started to clear, that I had a new motivation, a new happiness." He went back to the gym, reveling in the fact that his body without "a big ball being fired at me at 60 miles an hour" hundreds of times every day was recovering from the wear and tear it had endured. As far as he was concerned, his life as a player was over. He had plenty of job offers. The one that appealed the most was a post as technical director at Chelsea. He had been doing that for almost a year when the pandemic struck. Suddenly, he found himself dragged back to a life he thought he had left behind. "We were lucky to be able to finish the season," he said. "But nobody knew how many players would get the virus, and we had really strict numbers and restrictions. Normally, if a player gets injured, you would take someone from the academy, but because we had to be in bubbles, that was not possible. "At one point, we were short a goalkeeper, so the solution was either I stepped in, or a goalkeeping coach did. I was fit, so I said OK." It was intended as a precaution, a form of emergency cover, but Cech was still more than good enough to be a viable option. He was briefly registered on Chelsea's squad list for the Champions League this season. His primary focus, though, what all of his other interests must swirl around, is his new role. Cech is by English soccer's standards something of a rarity. In certain parts of continental Europe, and especially Germany, it is not unusual for high profile players to eschew coaching and move into front office roles immediately after retirement: Marc Overmars and Edwin van der Sar at Ajax; Leonardo at Paris St. Germain; almost the entire off field hierarchy at Bayern Munich. England is only now catching up. For the most part, where Premier League clubs employ a technical director, it is seen as a position for a recruitment specialist, someone who can navigate the choppy, unpredictable waters of soccer's transfer market. Edu Gaspar, at Arsenal, and Cech, at Chelsea both appointed last year, both with vast experience as top players are exceptions. For Cech, the appeal of the job lies in how different it is from playing. He had thought in great depth about what he would do after he retired. He had, he said, realized after fracturing his skull in 2006 that "it took only a split second for everything to be finished." He knew he had to be prepared. He studied for his coaching licenses while still playing on international duty with the Czech Republic, he said, "there was always time" but it occurred to him that coaches, essentially, live the same life as a player: "You spend time training, traveling, at games, in hotels. The routine is the same." A front office role, by contrast, "allows me to be close to the game, but to organize things in a different way." The challenge was that soccer the game and soccer the industry are distinct entities; a life in one does not wholly prepare you for a life in the other. Cech was, effectively, "starting from zero." To some extent, what he has seen since has been eye opening. Cech chose his agents at the age of 17; they still represent him now. He always made a point of knowing not only exactly what they were doing, but how they were doing it. He can see now, of course, that not every player is quite so thorough, and not every agent quite so transparent. "Lots of players leave things with the agent and carry on," he said. "There are parts of football on this side that are very surprising, in a negative way." For all that surprise, the early results suggest Cech is well suited to his new role. His playing career, as it turned out, was not entirely irrelevant. As a player, he was always involved with the various liaison committees that express the squad's feelings to the club's representatives. He feels, still, that he knows instinctively how players would react to certain suggestions. The luster his playing career carries can be an advantage, too. At one point this summer, he flew to Germany to meet with Kai Havertz, the playmaker Chelsea would eventually sign for 81 million. Cech impressed Havertz's family not only with the depth of his analysis but his human touch: He spent as much time discussing raising children in London and his own memories of moving to England as a young player as he did the 21 year old Havertz's role on the team. His mere presence, though, helped persuade Havertz: He was impressed that the player he had seen winning the Champions League in 2012 would come to see him in person. His other skills have proved useful, too. Earlier this year, Chelsea was trying to figure out how to make headway with the signing of the German forward Timo Werner. Liverpool was circling, and Frank Lampard, the Chelsea manager, and the club's recruitment department, led by Scott McLachlan, were eager to find an edge in the chase. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Have you ever wanted to take off your shoes and walk around an Isamu Noguchi set? On Friday night at the 92nd Street Y, this intermission treat came courtesy of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Preceding a performance of Graham's "Cave of the Heart," a distillation of the Medea story, audience members were given the rare chance to examine a serpent topped by a wire dress and a series of stones leading to an aorta shaped sculpture, among the many pieces of decor that Noguchi designed for Graham. It was an Instagram moment too good to pass up, but did they have to step and sit on the set pieces? Was that what "no shoes" meant? It was brutal to watch. Part of the Harkness Dance Festival, the presentation as mandated by its Stripped/Dressed format split the evening in two. Up first was a display of Graham's movement vocabulary that provided an excellent close up view of her signature contraction and release with company members in practice clothes. The dashing Lloyd Mayor flew across the stage in an impassioned demonstration of a men's jumping sequence from Graham's "Rite of Spring." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Sascha, the young protagonist of "Holiday," co written and directed by Isabella Eklof (who also co wrote the striking 2018 Swedish film "Border"), has no back story. She materializes at an airport, rides on a bus and is soon at the house of Michael (Lai Yde), an older man who welcomes her to "the family." Michael's work as a minor drug lord on the Turkish Riviera provides a sybaritic but inelegant lifestyle, one punctuated with threat and then actual violence. At an ice cream parlor, Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne) meets the younger, more laid back Thomas (Thijs Romer), a boatman who tells her that if she were an ice cream, she would be strawberry cheesecake. She corrects him: "Strawberry champagne." She's Danish, she tells him; he's Dutch, he tells her. Between her flirtations with Thomas, she watches as Michael and his friends menace a beachgoer. She gets into a motor scooter mishap. At one point, she and the younger folk repair to the TV room while Michael kicks the crap out of an employee. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
ON THE BASIS OF SEX (2018) Stream on Showtime and Sling TV; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. "This is, almost literally, the story of how Ginsburg found her voice," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. Directed by Mimi Leder, the film stars Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice. Rather than reciting Ginsburg's biography, Leder focuses on the first sex discrimination case she argued in federal court in the early 1970s, and on the development of a legal strategy to challenge injustices so deeply ingrained as to seem perfectly natural.Armie Hammer plays Marty, the ultimately supportive husband, and Cailee Spaeny is their inquisitive daughter, Jane; both help and challenge Ginsburg, who is dealing with her own experiences of sexism in day to day life. CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG (1968) Stream on Netflix; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. This musical film adaptation of Ian Fleming's 1964 fantasy novel is, at its core, deeply strange and perfectly crafted for children. It stars Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts, a widowed inventor who creates a magical car Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that can float and fly. Renata Adler wrote in her review for The Times that the movie contains "the joys of singing together on a team bus on the way to a game." It has everything from a number about candy, to an evil villain who snatches children, to a screenplay by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes. Potts, his two children, and a beautiful woman named Truly Scrumptious brave it all with their "fine, four fendered friend." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Major League Baseball announced the most extensive disruption of its schedule in 25 years on Thursday, suspending spring training and delaying opening day by at least two weeks in response to the threat of the coronavirus pandemic. The regular season had been scheduled to begin on March 26, the earliest leaguewide opening day ever. Now the season has been postponed indefinitely, as officials with the league and players' union confer about how to manage an ever evolving crisis that has crippled global sports. The postponements came after similar announcements from the N.H.L. and M.L.S. earlier Thursday, with both leagues saying they would suspend their seasons. The N.B.A. announced Wednesday night it would do the same. M.L.B. has been devising various models of how the schedule could play out: either with a full 162 games, or with fewer for each team. The league has held a full schedule occasionally with a handful of games missed because of weather every season since 1995, when a strike delayed the opener until late April, and teams played only 144 games. "It felt like the most meaningless game in the history of the sport," Carpenter said. With spring training suspended, the teams have largely been left to make plans as they go. The Milwaukee Brewers, for example, said they would hold an optional workout at their camp in Phoenix on Friday, hold no workouts over the weekend, then have another workout on Monday morning. The workouts would not be open to the public, and players would not be available to the news media until Monday. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. The Yankees' manager, Aaron Boone, said that as far as he knew, players would remain in Tampa, Fla., where the team's spring training facility is, with pitchers throwing simulated games. The Cardinals said their players would report to camp for a meeting on Friday morning, with the schedule after that to be determined. "Look at what's happening around our country right now; there's a lot of things closing down," Cardinals President John Mozeliak said. "We view this as a pause, and hopefully it allows us to get into a position where we can resume playing baseball again. But in the short term, this camp will remain open until we sort through some things and understand logistics." Mozeliak added that he had not noticed much concern about the issue until Thursday, when the severity of the pandemic took hold among the players. "The tone of the clubhouse today, for the first time, I felt like they were very much aware of what was happening and I felt like there was real anxiety in that clubhouse," Mozeliak said. Teams will likely allow players to leave camp if they believe they need to be with their families during a time of such uncertainty. But teams also do not want to squander their work from the first month of spring training, with its gradual, carefully scripted work schedule designed to prepare players for a six or seven month grind. "Obviously, we've been building the pitchers up, so we'll want to continue with that smartly," Boone said. "Those will be the conversations over the coming days as this thing unfolds, like, 'Man, does it look like we are starting April 9?' We will do our best to put our guys in a position to be ready to go whenever that bell rings." If the season resumes in April, some teams could still be affected by restrictions from local governments. The governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, said Thursday that he wanted all major sporting events to be canceled or played without fans until May 1, a plan that would affect Chicago's two major league teams. A spokesman for the White Sox said the team agreed with the governor, and a spokesman for the Cubs said the team would "work in close coordination" with the city and state. League officials were unsure on Thursday whether opening the season as early as April 9 would be feasible, instead deciding to leave the official start of the season an open question. It is not the first time the major league schedule has been disrupted. Labor issues delayed the start of the 1972 season, disrupted the middle of the 1981 season and ended the 1994 season in August. The league postponed a week of games after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, making them up at the end of the regular season and pushing back the postseason by a week. The 1989 World Series was also suspended for more than a week after an earthquake struck Northern California just before the scheduled start of Game 3 in San Francisco. The coronavirus pandemic, though, comes with no playbook for a sport that played its full schedule even during World War II. (The 1918 season ended early because of World War I, with the World Series taking place in early September.) Even before the announcement on Thursday, individual teams had taken steps to protect club employees. The Yankees were among several teams that called all professional scouts and national cross checkers off the road, though scouts will still be allowed to evaluate players in their home areas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Ready to finally pack away those winter coats? Naadam Cashmere will have a "Spring in Mind" pop up from Thursday to Sunday, selling perfect transitional pieces like a summer weight travel wrap ( 340) and limited edition Margaux for Tome ankle tie ballet flats ( 345). At 230A Mulberry Street. From Friday to Sunday, Matches Fashion will hold a three day residency in New York at the WOM Townhouse, during which the London based e tailer will host a number of fun events like brunch with Leandra Medine and cocktails with the Coveteur team. You'll get a first look at the site's pre fall and fall edit, and receive 200 off purchases above 500 of currently available items like a Saloni chinoiserie print silk dress ( 425) and Aurelie Bidermann ginkgo rose gold plated earrings ( 210), which can be ordered via iPads set up to make shopping easier. R.S.V.P. at matchesfashion.com/new york hub aw16. At 214 Lafayette Street. The Williamsburg weekend market Artists Fleas will host a vintage showcase on Saturday and Sunday featuring items like a 1950s floral silk party dress ( 248) from 15 local clothing and accessory vendors. At 70 North Seventh Street, Brooklyn. On Tuesday, Maje will have a party from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. with tunes by May Kwok for its new signature accessory, the M Bag ( 295), a small fringed leather tote with an optional cross body strap that comes in seven colors, including pink and electric blue. (Try saying that five times fast.) At 114 Spring Street. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Written by David Hare, the movie opens around 1961, after Rudy has defected to the West. It's a promising start because of Fiennes's presence as Alexander Pushkin, Rudy's teacher and mentor in Leningrad. Pushkin, his face gray and hairline in severe retreat, looks defeated, almost deflated, as if every atom in his body has surrendered. He and a government type are discussing Rudy (the kid's gotta dance!), a scene that activates the story by turning back the clock. From that point on, the timeline jumps around, perhaps in imitation of its high flying subject, landing in different moments in Rudy's life. A lot of what follows is drowsily watchable. Soon after Pushkin's entrance, Rudy makes several of his own: on a Soviet train, where he's born in 1938; as an adult on a plane; as a boy in a colorless childhood filled with snow and Ashcan browns; and as a teenage student. Though Fiennes keeps changing the aspect ratio, the movie settles down once Rudy lands in Paris smiling under a beret. At the height of the Cold War, the Kirov Ballet has gone west to perform at the Paris Opera House (Palais Garnier). Rudy embraces Paris, visits the sights, dazzles audiences and hangs out with a dreary crowd. In time, he defects. (The cast includes the exasperatingly limp Adele Exarchopoulos as an heiress.) Nureyev certainly seems an ideal candidate for big screen memorializing: He was sternly beautiful, wildly talented, feverishly acclaimed. But if you didn't know why he was considered a transcendent dancer or a transformational figure, you still won't know after the final credits roll. Rudy's dances are well shot Fiennes emphasizes the entire body in motion so the viewer can trace its line but they're pretty and bloodless instead of thrilling, which doesn't encourage offscreen oohing and ahhing. Like most movies about great art, "The White Crow" only points at the sublime without ever expressing it. One flaw that Fiennes never transcends is Ivenko, a dancer with a Russian company who slides off the screen when not onstage. The busy, mosaic structure doesn't help, while the emphasis on Nureyev's origin story seems a mistake, particularly because his name no longer means what it once did. In a 1962 review, the year after Nureyev defected, the British critic Richard Buckle announced the arrival of the "pop dancer," writing, "What the telly did for art, what Billy Graham did for religion, Nureyev has done for ballet." Rudy the pop dancer is missing, as is the global star who dabbled as a matinee idol ("Valentino"), was a casualty of the AIDS crisis and still inspires veneration, however artfully muddled. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The European Central Bank signaled Thursday that it could raise interest rates as soon as next month in response to intensifying inflationary pressures. Such a move would be likely to lead soon to higher borrowing costs for homeowners and businesses. An interest rate increase would be the first by a top central bank to prevent the recent effects of higher oil and food prices from spreading into the broader economy. But it could add to the troubles of countries like Ireland, Greece and Portugal and, if continued, would probably further weaken Europe's economic growth prospects this year. "An increase of interest rates in the next meeting is possible," Jean Claude Trichet, president of the central bank, said Thursday at a news conference in Frankfurt. The next policy meeting on setting rates is set for April 7. If interest rates rise, private banks are likely to respond by pushing up their own mortgage and deposit account rates, crimping spending power for many consumers but benefiting savers. Mr. Trichet emphasized, however, that such an increase was "not certain" and that it should not be seen as "the start of a series of interest rate increases." The comments surprised most analysts, who had not expected that the bank would raise rates until later in the year. They had expected it to announce that it would scale back some of its temporary measures intended to provide added liquidity for struggling banks. "This is about as clear a signal of a rate hike that you are going to see from a central banker," said Nick Kounis, head of economics at ABN Amro in Amsterdam. "The E.C.B. is once again living up to its reputation as a single minded inflation fighter." Earlier, the bank decided to leave its benchmark rate at 1 percent, the record low it has held since May 2009. Mr. Trichet said that the decision was unanimous. The euro climbed after Mr. Trichet's comments, rising to 1.3959 late in the day in New York, from 1.3860 late Wednesday, as investors anticipated higher returns on euro zone securities relative to those in the United States, Britain and Japan, where interest rates of central banks remained below 1 percent. The E.C.B.'s official comfort zone for inflation is just below 2 percent. Yet annual inflation in the euro zone hit 2.4 percent in February, its highest level since October 2008 and up from 2.3 percent in January, according to estimates this week from Eurostat, the European statistics agency. Recent increases in commodity prices, notably oil the benchmark Brent crude futures contract has risen more than 20 percent this year suggest to many analysts that inflation has further to rise. Food prices are also climbing. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said Thursday in Rome that its food price index was up 2.2 percent last month from January, reaching the highest level in inflation adjusted and nominal terms since the agency started monitoring prices two decades ago. Higher food prices have been a factor behind unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, which in turn has pushed oil prices higher. Mr. Trichet said that the recent increase in inflation largely reflected commodity prices and that there had not yet been evidence of its passing through to wages. "It is essential that the recent rise in inflation does not give rise to broad based inflationary pressures over the medium term," he said. "Strong vigilance is warranted with a view to containing upside risks to price stability." While the central bank is acting against cost pressures, there is still evidence that economic activity in the region is patchy. Eurostat confirmed this week that growth was slower than expected in the fourth quarter of 2010. Gross domestic product in the euro zone, which had 16 countries in 2010, grew 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter compared with figures in the third quarter. The three biggest economies Germany, France and Italy expanded more slowly than expected. Some countries like Portugal and Greece are still contracting, saddled by debt and lacking competitiveness relative to their peers. Mr. Trichet responded by saying, "Our responsibility is for 331 million people." Those representing consumers and unions expressed frustration at the central bank announcement. "The dynamics set in motion by a hike will cause problems," said Ronald Janssen, chief economist the European Trade Union Confederation. A rate increase appears logical for Germany, where growth is solid and unemployment is falling, he added, but not for Ireland, Spain and Greece, where consumers are struggling under the pressure of tough austerity policies, higher oil prices and low wage settlements. "It highlights a fundamental problem for the euro zone, that monetary policy is not adequate for all its members," Mr. Janssen said. "The real question that needs to be addressed is how to go toward a fiscal union. But politicians are trying to avoid it." Several members of the central bank's governing council have been sounding the alarm about acting quickly and decisively against inflation. One possible successor to Mr. Trichet after his retirement at the end of October Mario Draghi of the Bank of Italy has himself issued such warnings recently. Most analysts now expect the bank to raise rates by a quarter of a percentage point next month. "Mr. Trichet seems to be suggesting that monetary tightening can be gradual in the coming months," Mr. Kounis of ABN Amro said. "The message seems to be that an early start does not necessarily imply a more aggressive tightening cycle." Still, there is no guarantee of that. Around the turn of 2006, the central bank made similar statements of caution but then proceeded to push rates up by two percentage points over the next 18 months. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
In Britain, any changes to a building deemed to be of historic importance, like this Harley Street townhouse, must be approved by the local planning department. This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media. When Heather Kane was scouring her favorite London neighborhoods two years ago searching for an apartment to buy, she discovered a promising candidate on the first floor of an 18th century townhouse on Harley Street, in the Marylebone area of the city center. "I loved it," recalled Ms. Kane, a 42 year old technology executive turned design entrepreneur, who was born in Los Angeles and has lived in London since 2015. "Most of the apartments I'd seen had beautiful, original facades but were too pared back inside. This one was huge with high windows and ceilings, original plaster moldings, and an amazing terrace. The cause of her difficulties was Britain's labyrinthine architectural conservation system, which ensures that any changes to a building deemed to be of historic importance, like the Harley Street townhouse, must be approved by the local planning department. Ms. Kane's home is in the City of Westminster, which includes some of London's finest historical buildings, but whose planners are famed for their strictness and for having very particular opinions on what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable architectural interventions. Translating such a building into a comfortable, functional contemporary home is almost always intensely subjective and potentially contentious. One person's interpretation of sensitive restoration can be another's idea of architectural carnage, while a third might regard it as too timid. As Ms. Kane admitted, one of her challenges in navigating British conservation politics was having no knowledge of the planning system. Another problem was the difficulty of translating her needs and wishes into something that Westminster's planners would approve. Like much of Marylebone, Harley Street originated as a speculative development by the Portland Estate, owned by the Duke of Portland, whose wife inherited most of the land between what are now Oxford Street and Marylebone Road, in 1741. Harley Street's construction began in the 1750s, and the house containing Ms. Kane's apartment was designed and built from 1773 to 1774 by one of the estate's surveyors, John White, and Thomas Collins, a sought after ornamental plasterer. Grander houses were built nearby at that time notably those designed by the Scottish architects Robert and James Adam on Mansfield Street but the delicately rendered cherubs in Collins's plasterwork would have been enough to distinguish this one. His renown may also explain why several of his ornate panels survived nearly 250 years of construction, including the house's conversion in 1949 into flats. Collins's skill also contributed to the entire house's being given a Grade 2 listing, which is awarded to a building "of special interest, warranting every effort to preserve it," in 1987. Like many London apartments of similar vintage, Ms. Kane's two bedroom, first floor flat combined some original elements with a motley assortment of additions dating from the early and mid 1800s, early 1900s, the 1949 conversion, and subsequent makeovers. Westminster's planners insisted that all of those features be preserved and that any adjacent work match them. Ms. Kane was happy with that, but not with the planners' response to her request for what she thought were modest changes to make her new home "more livable," as she put it. When she bought the apartment, Ms. Kane contacted Red Deer, a group of young architects who had designed the interior of one of her favorite London restaurants, Bourne Hollingsworth Buildings in Clerkenwell. "It has a tumbledown historic feel, a little bit deconstructed, and I wanted a similar aesthetic," she explained. Together with Red Deer's co founder, Lionel Real de Azua, she formulated a proposal to restore Collins's panels and other historic detailing, while modifying the apartment's layout, principally by relocating the kitchen to create a large open plan space for entertaining, eating and cooking, and reconfiguring other areas to accommodate two bathrooms, rather than one. They also hoped to improve the insulation by installing thicker glass in the windows and an additional layer of floorboards and asked Westminster's planners for permission to proceed. "They came back with 'no,' without explaining why," Ms. Kane said. "I ended up hiring a lawyer, and three sets of heritage experts. As soon as the third one, Kit Wedd of Spurstone Heritage, came in, things were smoothed out. Kit was an angel. If we'd had her in the beginning, I'd have got nine months of my life back." Even so, some of their proposals were rejected. The changes to the layout were approved, but not the thicker glass and floors. Ms. Wedd also worked with Red Deer to identify which aspects of the interior were authentic. "There had been so much work on the building that it would be very hard to distill it into a particular style," said Mr. Real de Azua. "The floor was a hodgepodge of pine, Douglas fir, oak and plywood. We discovered that the Douglas fir boards were original, so we found new boards to match and stripped everything else out." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The H M group sells an estimated three billion articles of clothing per year. Its revenue makes it among the top three fashion retailers in the world. Clothing for its brands, including H M, Arket and Other Stories, is manufactured in 40 countries, the company said; in Bangladesh alone, it sources from 275 factories that employ half a million workers. As it sprawls ever farther around the globe, hopping from trend to trend, how can H M keep track of how the skirts, pants and sweaters it sells are made? How, for example, can it monitor whether, in faraway countries, workers are being paid less than they need to live, forced to work hours of overtime in precarious conditions? This spring, after almost three years of preparation and coordination by 40 team members from Hong Kong to Stockholm, and at a time when scrutiny of the global fashion industry and its shadowy supply chain is greater than ever, H M introduced an effort to do exactly that and to make it public for shoppers. Customers shopping in physical stores can also have access to this information by using the H M app to scan the product price tag. There are limits to how much information you'll get, of course. The sustainability tab won't tell you that Jinnat sprawls over seven floors, each the size of a football field, or that employees perch in front of whirring sewing machines making white cotton T shirts, monitoring 337 high tech embroidery appliances and snipping at stray threads. And you won't find out that this single company makes 400,000 pieces (roughly 110 tons) of clothing per day, or around 10 to 12 million units per month, up to a quarter of which will be bound for H M. Nevertheless, it is the first effort of its kind by a retailer of this scale. H M created the system by building a bridge between its supplier and production databases and then linking it to its retail interfaces. (The company declined to say what the project cost.) Pascal Brun, the head of sustainability for the H M brand, said the new public transparency layer showed that the company had nothing to hide regarding labor or environmental practices, or how H M products were made. "Transparency has become the key driver of change in the fashion industry, which used to be about as untransparent an industry as it could possibly be," said David Savman, the head of production for the H M group, from a factory floor in Dhaka. Tanned and golden haired, the Swede filed between rows of workers and inspected sequined T shirts, asking line managers about different cotton hybrids and admiring fire doors. Change came crashing down on the industry with the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh in 2013, a factory collapse that led to the death of more than 1,000 workers, with scores more disfigured or disabled for life. In the wake of the catastrophe, several Western retailers found they had sold clothes sourced from the factory, or had little to no idea where the clothes they sold were sourced from. All have since come under increasing public pressure to investigate, police and invest in exactly where and how their products were made. There is also pressure for them to be as transparent about their findings as possible (though some have been far more forthcoming than others about taking action). The creation in Bangladesh in 2013 of two five year fire and safety monitoring agreements between retailers and unions made significant improvements and reforms. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety, which is legally binding, was signed by more than 200 retailers including H M and Inditex (neither of which had any ties to Rana Plaza, but plenty of other alleged supply chain abuses). The other agreement is the nonbinding Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, which was signed by Walmart, Gap and Target. Both have spurred improved working conditions in many Bangladeshi factories, and calls for other countries to adopt similar standards. These agreements, now up for renewal, have sidelined some of the country's most dangerous factories, and cut their ties to most Western retailers, though not all. A Wall Street Journal investigation in October found that Amazon continued to sell clothes from Bangladeshi factories that other retailers had blacklisted because of their inability to pass safety requirements. Pressure from consumers has also prompted brands like H M to proactively support local suppliers who create safe and profitable businesses in places like Bangladesh. "We choose not to work with a lot of suppliers that other rivals work with so they can save on costs," said Karl Johan Persson this fall. (In 2018 six suppliers in Bangladesh were phased out by H M because of their poor sustainability performance.) Mr. Persson, the billionaire chief executive of H M, sat in the "hygge" style library for the company's army of young designers in Stockholm as he defended his family company's business model and its contributions. He declined to specify how much H M spent annually on transparency efforts, other than to say the investment had continually hurt short term profit in order to ensure the long term survival and growth of the company. His argument is that by working in low cost areas, H M is creating jobs and investing in the economy; by making its partnerships public, it is accepting its own liability. "But often," Mr. Persson said, "the focus ends up on what we don't do." The new "transparency layer" project has been cautiously applauded by some human rights and fashion advocacy groups and union leaders. But many have also said that H M's efforts do not go far enough, questioning whether improvements like this are worthwhile if they merely prolong the existence of a system where profits and shareholder interests are continually placed ahead of employees, suppliers and the environment. Currently, customers do not have access to information on workers' wages at individual factories, or local minimum fair living wage commitments and calculation methodology. Nor does the transparency layer offer a breakdown of the pricing structure that could specify how labor costs are calculated. "Transparency is primarily a means to an end, and mere information about where a garment is produced does not automatically guarantee meaningful changes in factory labor conditions," said Aruna Kashyap, senior counsel for the women's rights division at Human Rights Watch, which is part of a coalition that started the Transparency Pledge (of which H M is a signatory). According to the Transparentem report, many workers, often migrants from Bangladesh and Nepal, said that they paid steep recruitment fees to acquire jobs. These could take years to pay back, resulting in "debt bondage," a common form of modern slavery that occurs when a person is forced to work to pay off debts for little or no pay. Factories limited employees' movements by withholding their passports; it wasn't unusual for them to live jammed together in squalid conditions. Many also had to pay a government levy on foreign workers out of their own paychecks (a practice that was legal when Transparentem interviewed workers in 2016 and 2017). "The physical distance, cultural distance, and often time zone difference have all meant that there are inherent challenges in understanding the labor conditions in any manufacturer supply chain," said Benjamin Skinner, the founder and president of Transparentem. Brands have largely trusted suppliers to follow certain rules with employees and the environment and then verified that those policies were being followed, Mr. Skinner said. But based on his organization's work, he added, "the 'verify' part can be pretty weak." Because auditors would alert factory owners to their visits, or only interview workers in the presence of their bosses, it created an environment where noncompliance was easy to hide. This gap between intent and reality also emerged in a May report from University of Sheffield researchers in Britain on apparel companies not delivering on promises to pay workers a living wage. Generally set by governments (sometimes with input from foreign and local businesses, unions and NGOs), living wages can differ significantly between countries, with benchmarks sometimes geared to maintaining a country's competitiveness as a low cost manufacturing destination rather than the needs of workers. The wages can also be significantly less sometimes even falling below the poverty line than the living wage as defined by outside groups, which broadly incorporates food, housing, medical care, clothing and transportation. Many companies, including Adidas and Puma, referred to components of a living wage in their supplier codes of conduct, the researchers said, but the wording around requirements was "very vague," leaving fulfillment an option and the legal minimum wage the only requirement. On top of all this, the researchers noted that companies relied heavily on outside auditors to ensure codes of conduct were being followed, running into the same issues outlined by Mr. Skinner. Many of these firms are "beholden by financial conflict of interest since they are hired by companies who could decide not to continue to hire them if they identify too many problems," they wrote. Often, they visited only top suppliers, leaving out the many subcontractors where abuses can be the worst. His colleague Payal Jain, the sustainability manager for H M's global supply chain who started her career as a factory worker in India, said that H M visited its factories several times per week, and 2,500 audits were made in the country per year. That may sound like a lot, but it is an average of 10 per factory in 365 days. Or less than once per month. The company was also criticized by the Clean Clothes campaign last year, which said H M had not met a 2013 commitment made to ensure suppliers would pay a living wage to 850,000 textile workers by 2018. Additionally, some factory owners say that despite support from H M's sustainability teams, they experience pressure from the company or from production teams who still want more product at a cheaper price or they threaten to pull their business and go to even less expensive hubs, like Ethiopia. Ms. Jain said cost of labor was not a negotiable part of a supplier contract. But if suppliers are paid less, or overtime is required to complete a contract, the likelihood is that shortfall will get passed down the chain. "Brands like H M offer training, help union members establish themselves in my factory and guide us on investing in the business, which are all very good and important things," said Lutful Matin, the manager of Natural Denims, another factory near Dhaka. It employs 6,900 workers to make garments for H M, Zara, Mango and Esprit. While the work it does is recognized by its recognition in projects like Fashion Revolution's Transparency Index, H M believes the best way to get consumers thinking about who made their clothes is to talk to them close to the point of sale. "Consumers have a lack of trust and say they don't always know how to make the right choices," said Anna Gedda, the head of sustainability for the H M group. She added that it was "a constant struggle" to work out how much information a customer may want versus what might make them switch off or walk away from a sale. From Dhaka, Mr. Savman was more forthright. "We are still at the stage where if you put two T shirts, one cotton and one recycled cotton, which is 30 percent more expensive, the majority of consumers will still take the first option," he said. "We put a lot of information out there, like the product transparency layer. But how much do customers engage with it? Not a lot yet." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Halletts Point, the mega development planned on a knobby peninsula in Astoria, Queens, has been years in the making, but apartments in the first building will finally be available for rent beginning this month. In truth, this 404 unit project, known as 10 Halletts Point, has practically sailed through construction compared with the rest of the 1.5 billion mixed use development, which eventually will have seven buildings containing 2,020 units, nearly a quarter of them affordable, according to officials with the developer, the Durst Organization. Sure, there were minor snags with this first member of the Halletts Point family uneven "soil conditions" from landfill that had to be dealt with and a contractor who had to be replaced. But the larger development is stalled, once again, after hitting multiple roadblocks since the summer of 2013. That was when the seven acre site was first presented to Durst by the Lincoln Equities Group, which had assembled the site, according to Alexander Durst, a principal and chief development officer of the company and great grandson of its founder. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
For many families in South Florida and Georgia, evacuating for a hurricane has become somewhat of an ordinary routine. Dealing with last minute airfare, pet friendly accommodations and overwhelming lines for gas is par for the course. But as Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, barrels toward the mainland of the United States, some residents are evacuating more quickly than ever. Searches for "where to evacuate from Irma" and "where to go for Hurricane Irma" have been trending on Google. By Thursday afternoon, airlines had canceled 4,000 flights to and from airports in Irma's path. Airbnb has activated its Disaster Response Program for counties in Northern Florida and southern Georgia in which hosts can open their homes up to evacuees for free. She was urged by her colleagues to evacuate immediately and now is safely in Baltimore. "Usually everyone is fairly dismissive about these storms," she said. "But this was different. There was an urgency of 'if you can get out, you should get out.'" As Floridians looked for safe evacuation routes, demand for flights out of Florida's main airports skyrocketed. On Twitter, many customers accused airlines of price gouging as one way tickets out of Florida were upward of 1,000. But George Hobica, the founder of the site Airfarewatchdog, said that he did not think airlines were price gouging, not consciously at least. "They are afraid of bad publicity," he said. "There are times when there's only one seat left on a plane and that will end up being thousands of dollars, but that's directed at business travelers who the airlines assume will travel at any cost." By Thursday afternoon, JetBlue, American Airlines, United and Delta had all capped their one way ticket prices out of Florida ahead of Irma's arrival, although there were still reports of price fluctuations despite the caps. Some airlines and cruise lines have left travelers in limbo. While all cruises out of Florida set to leave Friday were canceled, some cruises scheduled to sail from Central and South Florida remain on course to depart over the weekend. Cruise companies are urging customers to check in daily as conditions evolve. As soon as Irma appeared on the radar, Dave Kartunen, a Savannah, Ga., resident, booked a hotel room 50 miles inland. "Hurricane planning has taken a certain level importance in my family," he said. Mr. Kartunen, a father of two, has Post traumatic stress disorder from covering Hurricane Katrina as a news anchor. "Evacuating is sort of a no good deed goes unpunished," he said. "You don't want to drive too far because it's like going on a run for every mile you go, you're going to have to go back. Every mile is going to be painful." Eduardo Del Carmen, a Miami resident, decided to evacuate as well, comparing Irma to Hurricane Andrew, the last Category 5 storm to hit the United States, which arrived in 1992. His family evacuated for Andrew and was displaced for months. "You can't play around too much with a storm like this, so I think we may be waking up at 5 a.m. tomorrow to drive to Tampa," Mr. Del Carmen said. "Last night was our first good night of sleep in a while, knowing we were ready to go. We have a place to stay and gas in our car." For all those who can evacuate by road or air, many cannot because of physical or financial constraints. "We're lucky, we have the mobility," Mr. Kartunen said. "I'm terrified for the people that no one cares about, those that don't have the ability to make the decisions that we do." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In Cave in Israel, Scientists Find Jawbone Fossil From Oldest Modern Human Out of Africa Scientists on Thursday announced the discovery of a fossilized human jawbone in a collapsed cave in Israel that they said is between 177,000 and 194,000 years old. If confirmed, the find may rewrite the early migration story of our species, pushing back by about 50,000 years the time that Homo sapiens first ventured out of Africa. Previous discoveries in Israel had convinced some anthropologists that modern humans began leaving Africa between 90,000 and 120,000 years ago. But the recently dated jawbone is unraveling that narrative. "This would be the earliest modern human anyone has found outside of Africa, ever," said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin, Madison who was not involved in the study. The upper jawbone which includes seven intact teeth and one broken incisor, and was described in a paper in the journal Science provides fossil evidence that lends support to genetic studies that have suggested modern humans moved from Africa far earlier than had been suspected. "What I was surprised by was how well this new discovery fits into the new picture that's emerging of the evolution of Homo sapiens," said Julia Galway Witham, a research assistant at the Natural History Museum in London who wrote an accompanying perspective article. Dr. Hawks and other researchers advised caution in interpreting the discovery. Although this ancient person may have shared some anatomical characteristics with present day people, this "modern human" would have probably looked much different from anyone living in the world today. "Early modern humans in many respects were not so modern," said Jean Jacques Hublin, director of the department of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Dr. Hublin said that by concluding the jawbone came from a "modern human," the authors were simply saying that the ancient person was morphologically more closely related to us than to Neanderthals. That explanation would need to be tested with DNA samples, which are difficult to collect from fossils found in the arid Levant. READ: Oldest Fossils of Homo Sapiens Found in Morocco, Altering History of Our Species The upper jawbone, or maxilla, was found by a team led by Israel Hershkovitz, a paleoanthropologist at Tel Aviv University and lead author of the new paper, while excavating the Misliya Cave on the western slopes of Mount Carmel in Israel. The jawbone was discovered in 2002 by a freshman on his first archaeological dig with the group. The team had long known that ancient people lived in the Misliya Cave, which is a rock shelter with an overhanging ceiling carved into a limestone cliff. By dating burned flint flakes found at the site, archaeologists had determined that it was occupied between 250,000 to 160,000 years ago, during an era known as the Early Middle Paleolithic. Evidence, including bedding, showed that the people who lived there used it as a base camp. They hunted deer, gazelles and aurochs, and feasted on turtles, hares and ostrich eggs. Dr. Hershkovitz and Mina Weinstein Evron, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa, felt that the jawbone looked modern, but they needed to confirm their hunch. READ: Skull Fossil Offers New Clues on Human Journey From Africa Dr. Hershkovitz has made similar findings in the past. In 2015, he announced finding a 55,000 year old skull in the Levant. But a 2010 discovery of 400,000 year old teeth in Israel in which he participated received criticism for how it was reported in the media. To test their suspicions about the jawbone, the archaeologists sent the specimen on a world tour. "It looked so modern that it took us five years to convince people, because they couldn't believe their eyes," said Dr. Weinstein Evron. One of the first stops was Austria, home to a virtual paleontology lab run by Gerhard W. Weber, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Vienna. There scientists were able to assess whether the bone belonged to a modern human or a Neanderthal, which are thought also to have occupied the region during that time period. Using high resolution micro CT scanning, Dr. Weber created a 3D replica of the upper left maxilla that allowed him to investigate its surface features and, virtually, to remove enamel from the teeth. He then performed a morphological and metric test that compared the Misliya fossil with about 30 other specimens, including fossils of Neanderthals, Homo erectus, more recent Homo sapiens, and other hominins that lived in the Middle Pleistocene in Asia, Africa Europe and North America. "The shape of the second molar, the two premolars and the whole maxilla are very modern," said Dr. Weber. "It's not a little bit modern, or on the border of being modern," he said. "It is really modern human." "It looks like they've done a really thorough study of the morphology of the maxilla and determined it's not a Neanderthal," said Melanie L. Chang, an anthropologist from Portland State University who was not involved in the study. "I believe them." Next, the archaeologists determined the jawbone's age by performing three dating techniques in Australia, France and Israel. "The dating had to be rock solid," said Rolf M. Quam, an anthropologist at Binghamton University in New York and an author of the paper. The team dated the tooth dentin and enamel, the sediment stuck to the upper jaw, and tools found near the fossil. "I don't know how much more we could do with this little bone," said Dr. Quam. "I think we've squeezed blood from a turnip here." Together, the techniques put the jawbone at between 177,000 and 194,000 years old, in line with what was already known about the period during which the cave was inhabited. "This thing is as old as we thought it was, and it was probably the earliest Homo sapien out of Africa ever found,'" said Dr. Quam. "It's not very often you can make a superlative statement, but in this case we can." The Misliya finding is just the latest in a series of discoveries that are changing the story of our evolutionary past. One study, not yet confirmed, suggested that modern humans may have interbred with Neanderthals in Eurasia about as far back as 220,000 years ago. If so, that would mean that at least some modern humans migrated from Africa far earlier than previously thought. Indeed, early humans may have made multiple journeys through the Levant corridor. "We are now realizing that it was not one big exodus out of Africa in a given time period," said Dr. Hershkovitz. "Rather, there was a flow of hominins coming in and out of Africa for at least the last half a million years." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
But those same genre tropes dictate that Anna will eventually leave her isolated cabin and meet other human beings, and perhaps even be temporarily, unconvincingly placed in the custody of a surrogate mother in this case, a small town sheriff named Ellen (Liv Tyler). Still, something strange is happening. Anna's surprising strength, her speed at chasing wildlife, her habit of eating only the meat part of burgers all signal that she is far from a textbook abuse case. And like Anna's choice in meals, this creature feature from the director Fritz Bohm is functional but lacks flavor, an imaginative spark that might distinguish it from any number of other I was a teenage monster movies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Of all the media images that the Covid 19 crisis has generated in recent weeks, it is the city devoid of crowds that has perhaps been the most affecting. It doesn't matter whether it's New York, or Rome or London it is the empty public space that most clearly signifies something is wrong. There ought to be crowds, and there aren't. It is the classic horror movie trope. Closer to home, it is what most disturbs and compels us about contemporary Detroit except we are all Detroiters now. But the idea that cities ought to be crowded is really quite new. We've learned to like density in the Western world of late, but in cities like New York and London, the equation of the urban crowd with urban success has fluctuated, and its recent ascent is one of many oscillations. In New York, its recent history can be traced back to Jane Jacobs's 1962 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," which made the then incendiary argument that cities were, in effect, their public lives: What happened on the street corner was the city, and, crudely put, the more of it the better. Ms. Jacobs was a lonely voice at the time against the postwar trends toward urban decentralization and suburbanization, and for the human life of the neighborhood and its streets. Things really got going, however, in the Catalan metropolis Barcelona, via politician planner Oriol Bohigas. Between 1981 and 1987, under his guidance at the Office of Urban Projects, the city built or remade some 160 public spaces and filled them with people. Few Western urban leaders were unimpressed by the spectacle, especially when they saw its mature form at the 1992 Olympics. How attractive urban crowds could be! And how much money could be made when you gave them the space in which to eat and drink! Mr. Bohigas's approach was driven by an impeccably liberal philosophy too, drawing on the philosopher Hannah Arendt's humanist theories of public life, then all the rage in the architecture schools. In "The Human Condition" published 1958, the same year Ms. Jacobs's arguments stopped Robert Moses's plan for a four lane Lower Manhattan Expressway Ms. Arendt wrote that the human world was the life lived in public, the "space of appearance" as she called it. In the hands of leftish advocates of public space, like the American sociologist Richard Sennett, that meant the literal return to pre modern public spaces, with people living their whole lives in them. (Needless to say, architects loved all this. What better rationale for public architecture?) Following the Barcelona example, public space became a defining part of the global city and urban crowds filling public spaces began to seem like both an economic and a moral good. "The Great Inversion," the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt called it in 2013, a process whose architectural emblems were the spaces wherever a crowd might gather: the street corner, the public square, the park. What Mr. Ehrenhalt and others described was partly demographic, partly symbolic: People really were coming back to live in cities, but they also wanted to see and be seen in them. But however much that process looks like common sense now, it was itself a reaction to the midcentury urban decline in the West. That process wasn't all to do with Detroit style industrial decay; it had just as much to do with a planned dispersal that was ultimately about the fear of urban disease in the 19th century city. To understand that fear, there's no better source than Friedrich Engels's "The Condition of the Working Class in England," published in German in 1845 and of extraordinary and durable influence worldwide. Its account of industrial Manchester was also an account of its sickness and, by proxy, its density. The city's lightless, airless streets teeming with the poor became a figure of long lasting architectural horror; so much of modernist planning was a reaction to places like it. If density was disease for modernists, it followed that their cities were about keeping people apart. Look back at the utopian schemes for cities of the first half of the 20th century, and the same hygienic preoccupations come up again and again: There must be light and space and fresh air. The Swiss French architect Le Corbusier wrote about these things in his book "Vers Une Architecture" (translated as "Towards a New Architecture"). Parts of the book read like comedy now the author's attempt to turn his own obsession with hygiene into an avant garde manifesto. But it was serious when it was published in 1923, the Spanish flu pandemic having just run its course. In his first venture into town planning, Le Corbusier designed the imaginary Ville Contemporaine, a city of vast empty spaces. My copy of his book "The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning," published in 1929, has a perspective drawing of the Ville Contemporaine on the cover, showing in the foreground a sunlit cafe terrace looking out toward vast cruciform towers in parkland; it is all light and space and greenery, and apart from some tiny specks in the far background, entirely free of human beings. Its emptiness has been the source of endless critique; it has been cited as evidence of modernism's moral bankruptcy in general, and Le Corbusier's inhumanity in particular. But place it in its post pandemic context, and it begins to look different. The Ville Contemporaine inspired plenty of real life experiments, and perhaps the most closely related is Brasilia, the modernist capital of Brazil, which turned 60 in April. The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir complained of its "elegant monotony," its lack of streets and crowds and anything resembling a traditional urban life on a grumpy visit in 1960. Her view set the tone for most subsequent perceptions of the place by outsiders. She was mostly right about the crowds; more space than building, the city is the opposite of what we have learned to expect. But it's an important reminder that there are different ways of making an urban environment. The residential wings sit in lush parkland, and the life in these parts is airy and relaxed. The dense city might not turn out to be responsible for the virus when all is said and done but as it did a century ago in relation to the Spanish flu, it might well start to feel like a cause. After months of social distancing, are we going to want to go straight back into the crowd? Even if we are allowed to, I doubt it. So what kinds of images are we going to make of our cities now? If we're no longer dreaming of Venice's Piazza San Marco (so packed in 2019 you were no longer permitted to sit down), what are we going to want? Might our love of the urban crowd take a break? Might our public spaces necessarily become quieter, more introverted, less social? Might we not more readily accept gaps and voids in our cities, and perhaps even start to value them? In a chastened, post coronavirus world, images like the Ville Contemporaine or Brasilia might really start to seem attractive again. That fantasy has started to look like it has something to it now, doesn't it? You can be part of the metropolis, but you can avoid physical proximity. You can see and be seen, while avoiding the closeness that has lately become so problematic. Social distancing? No problem. You'll be lucky if you can get anywhere near your neighbors. And with all that space, you can do as much jogging as you want. It is of course by contemporary Western standards antisocial, even misanthropic. But if we're going to have cities and the coronavirus, maybe the future is 1922, not 2022. Richard J. Williams is a professor of contemporary visual cultures at the University of Edinburgh and the author, most recently, of "Why Cities Look the Way They Do." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
"Nature is built on a stupendous plan in that region," Mark Twain once wrote of the valley leading into Zermatt. "There is nothing tame, or cheap, or trivial it is all magnificent." Much of today's Zermatt would still be familiar to Twain. The high, stony pyramid of the Matterhorn "lonely, conspicuous, and superb," as he described it still dominates the local skyline. The area's dozens of jagged peaks continue to lure legions of summit hungry mountaineers, much as they did when Twain visited in 1878, and the old village center remains car free. These days, of course, you can add a few more attractions to the list: world class skiing, luxury shopping, buzzing dining and apres ski scenes, and formidable feats of engineering that allow even the uninitiated to ascend into the frozen Alpine wilderness. Ski lovers will be happy to know that you can hit the slopes year round in Zermatt. While the main ski area closes this year on April 19, up to 13 miles of pistes high on the Theodul Glacier remain open even in summer. Swiss civil engineers must be an intrepid lot: This is a thought that might occur to you while riding the Gornergrat Railway, which has been chugging tourists high into the Swiss mountains since the summer of 1898. A short walk from the top station brings you to an outdoor viewing area where you can take in a view that includes 29 peaks that top out at more than 4,000 meters (13,123 feet), including the scalpel edge of the Weisshorn and the bulging dome of Monte Rosa, both of which surpass the Matterhorn in height, if not in fame. Free telescopes display the names of the summits. A round trip ticket costs 80 Swiss francs, about 82. Before dinner, spend a couple of hours exploring the picturesque, car free village of Zermatt. Stock up on Swiss luxuries (or just gape at the price tags) on the main drag, Bahnhofstrasse. Here you can pick up chocolate truffles at the Laderach chocolate shop, ski gear from the Swiss brand Mammut, or a wristwatch from Swatch or TAG Heuer. Or just head straight to the Matterhorn Museum, an underground exhibition space where you can learn about the history of Zermatt and the development of mountaineering in the area (entry, 10 Swiss francs). You can even see the frayed rope involved in the infamous accident that occurred during the first ascent of the Matterhorn in July 1865; four of the seven men who made it to the top died on the way down. Raise a glass to Switzerland's neighbors to the south at Le Chalet da Giuseppe, where there's a good chance that Giuseppe Battagliese himself will welcome you with a warm handshake and a booming greeting in Italian. Enjoy beautifully prepared Italian dishes Parma ham with buffalo mozzarella, homemade ravioli filled with spinach and ricotta, lamb osso buco served with a four cheese risotto as Giuseppe works his way around the dining room. A two course dinner for two is about 120 Swiss francs, including wine. Reservations essential. With rich wood paneling, plush cushions and antique prints lining the walls, Elsie's Wine and Champagne Bar exudes Old World elegance perfect for a final drink of the night. Try an Irish coffee, a steaming mug of gluhwein (mulled wine), or a hot chocolate spiked with kirsch, the locally beloved cherry liqueur. Drinks, including a range of local wines available by the glass, start from about 6 Swiss francs. Start the morning with a filling breakfast at Fuchs, a family owned bakery and cafe with three locations in town. At the central spot on Bahnhofstrasse, head upstairs and find a table in the snug seating area overlooking the street below. Tuck into an assortment of pastries and rolls served with butter and jam, or order a bowl of muesli topped with whipped cream (breakfast for two, about 30 Swiss francs). If you're eager to hit the slopes several of the lifts open before 9 a.m. grab a coffee and pastry to go from the counter downstairs. For 2.60 Swiss francs, you can get either a classic Berliner jam doughnut or a decadent, raisin studded Schnecke, a spiral pastry that will keep you going until lunch. Heave your skis on your shoulder and clomp your way over to the Sunnegga lift, where an underground train will transport you through the side of the mountain and up to the ski slopes. The area around the hamlet of Findeln is excellent for beginners, while more experienced skiers will enjoy the intermediate slopes and off piste areas coming down from the Rothorn station. Enjoy the Matterhorn views as you cruise the pistes, and watch out for chamois horned, goat like animals that you might see clambering on the rocks. The cost rises during peak season, but adult day passes generally start from 79 Swiss francs if you're content to enjoy the more than 120 miles of ski runs around Zermatt. Add another 10 to 20 Swiss francs if you want to pull a James Bond and ski over the border to Italy. Ski up to the entrance of the popular Chez Vrony, a restaurant in Findeln that epitomizes farmhouse chic. This is the place to get your fill of classic Swiss Alpine fare: fondue, raclette, rosti and air dried beef made from the meat of cows that graze Findeln's pastures in the summer. If the sun is shining, ask for a table on the sprawling porch; there are plenty of blankets if you want to wrap up. Or warm up inside the cozy farmhouse, all wood and stone and stylish mountain decor. Lunch for two, 40 to 100 Swiss francs. Reservations essential. Like all good ski towns, Zermatt has a party scene to match the heady pleasures of its slopes. It all starts at the bottom of your last run of the day just pop off your skis and follow the crowd to the sprawling deck of CERVO, a boutique hotel that offers two levels of booze fueled revelry with splendid views of the Matterhorn and the valley below. Order a glass of prosecco (9 Swiss francs) or a coffee spiked with Jack Daniels, honey and cream (10 Swiss francs), then enjoy the music and people watching as the sun starts to dip. An elevator across the street can drop you back to the village below. Keep up the apres ski vibe at Snowboat, a sociable, yacht shaped bar and restaurant on the banks of the Matter Vispa River, which runs through the middle of Zermatt. There's a club downstairs, but you can both eat and drink on the main level, where the friendly staff serves burgers, salads and signature cocktails to a mixed crowd of locals and visitors. Try the Walliser burger named for Zermatt's canton which is topped with bacon, caramelized onions and raclette cheese. A two course dinner and drinks for two is about 100 Swiss francs. Follow the crowds to the cluster of night life spots along Bahnhofstrasse. Start with a cocktail among the creepy witch dolls at Hexenbar, then move next door to Brown Cow, a pub with a sports bar vibe that hosts live music on Saturday nights. Those with energy to burn can cross the street to the stylish Cuckoo Club, where the D.J. downstairs keeps the party going from 11 p.m. straight through to the not so wee hours of the next morning. Hundreds of people have died on the Matterhorn since the fatal accident during the first ascent in 1865. Some of those souls, as well as mountaineers killed on other mountains nearby, are buried in the small and well tended Mountaineers' Cemetery next to Zermatt's central church. The gravestones offer a poignant glimpse of the youth and passion of many of those whose lives have been lost. "His love of the mountains determined his fate," reads the inscription on the gravestone of a departed 27 year old. Another, marking the resting place of a 17 year old born in New York, reads simply: "I chose to climb." Close out the weekend by getting your own taste of the high mountains, no ice ax required. Just walk or take the bus to the Trockener Steg lift, where you can buy a ticket to the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, a mountain station complete with a restaurant and gift shop that's built into the summit of the Klein Matterhorn at the rather breathless altitude of more than 12,700 feet. The fun begins in the gondola, where you can enjoy evolving perspectives of the Matterhorn and, on the final stretch, a bird's eye view of the glacier below. At the top, a short elevator ride takes you down into the glacier itself, where you can admire ice sculptures carved into the walls of a man made frozen tunnel. Another elevator whisks you up to an outdoor viewing platform the highest in Europe where you can take in 360 degrees of icy Alpine panorama. Round trip tickets on the gondola cost 87 Swiss francs; add another 10 francs if you want to upgrade to the "crystal ride," with its Swarovski crystals and transparent floor. Either way, don't forget your hat and gloves. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Ms. Kazakova was one of the week's most unusual entrants: a Russian born designer of Siberian descent who lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and works out of Bedford Stuyvesant. The elaborate beading and embroidery she favors, done entirely and painstakingly by hand, recalls, in her words, "the traditional way of adornment of human beings," harking back to a mix of traditions that include, but are not limited to, African, Central Asian and South American. What differentiates Ms. Kazakova is that she applies her handiwork to the sportswear and fast fashion hawked on the streets of her neighborhood. She is not the only designer to have hit on the idea of embellishing everyday fashion, but she has powerful patrons: Puma, which provided the apparel and shoes for Ms. Kazakova to customize and rework; and Bergdorf Goodman, whose men's fashion director, Bruce Pask, fell in love with her work and shepherded her into the store. "The clothing was something I had never seen before," Mr. Pask said. "The craftsmanship, the expansive vision it was truly moving. I'm going to sound like a sap, but it really brought me to tears." Earlier this year, Ms. Kazakova was one of the finalists for the LVMH Prize. She presented her collection to a panel of the company's top designers Karl Lagerfeld, Phoebe Philo and Maria Grazia Chiuri among them. But she is still in her fledgling years, working out of a studio at the RestorationArt center as an artist in residence. She said she was hoping to train neighborhood residents as craftspeople and collaborators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The Park Avenue Armory's Wade Thompson Drill Hall floor restoration project has received an infusion from New York City. The Manhattan Borough President, the New York City Council and the city's Cultural Affairs department announced Friday that they are providing nearly 2 million in funding for the historic building, in a joint effort to help restore its 138 year old floors. The combined city capital funding of 1.925 million 1 million from Mayor Bill de Blasio's office, 875,000 from the City Council and 50,000 from the Manhattan Borough President's Office will go toward the Armory's 4 million floor project, which began last August. It is part of the building's ongoing 215 million revitalization effort and aims to replace the current floorboards, of Georgia yellow pine, with wood from various historic buildings around the country, including the Domino Sugar Factory. Completed in 1881, the Armory's cavernous 55,000 square foot drill hall has hosted immersive performances and installations from artists of all disciplines. The Armory also offers arts education programming to students from underserved New York City public schools which the renovation could help to continue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When Derick Brassard was traded from the Florida Panthers to the Colorado Avalanche on Monday, his transportation logistics were not too tricky. He just headed over to the other team's locker room. The Panthers and the Avalanche faced off Monday night, and Brassard duly scored a goal for his new team. In other offbeat N.H.L. trade deadline news, Mikael Granlund was sent from the Minnesota Wild to the Nashville Predators on Monday while his partner was in labor. When you think about it, a trade is a strange thing. Imagine showing up to work tomorrow and finding yourself sent to Albuquerque along with Bob from Accounting for some young coding prospects. Given all the trades in all the sports over the years, it is not surprising that there have been some unusual ones. Guys have been traded for one, two, three, four or even five other players. Players have been traded for just about anything but a bucket of balls. Oh, wait. Scratch that. Tim Fortugno, a minor league pitcher, was sent from the Reno Silver Sox to the Stockton Brewers in 1989 for 2,500 and some baseballs. "I told them to throw in 12 dozen balls and we had a deal," Jack Patton, the Silver Sox general manager, told The Los Angeles Times. Other legendary baseball swaps: Cy Young in 1890 for a new suit, and Ken Krahenbuhl in 1998 for catfish. Not Catfish Hunter, but 10 pounds of actual catfish. Teams have traded for coaches, including Jon Gruden, Lou Piniella, Doc Rivers and Bill Belichick. They have even traded for announcers: Ernie Harwell cost the Brooklyn Dodgers a player, Cliff Dapper, in 1948. Sometimes a player is traded for a player to be named later. In the case of Harry Chiti of the Indians in 1962, the player to be named later turned out to be Harry Chiti. Forget three team trades. There have been four team trades, including the one in the N.B.A. that sent Dwight Howard to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2012. There has even been a five team trade, a 13 player blockbuster in 2005 that sent Antoine Walker to the Miami Heat. One of the more memorable trades of recent years never actually happened. During a Mets home game in 2015, word reached the dugout and the many fans with smartphones that Wilmer Flores was being traded. Flores continued to play in the game, and the clued in fans cheered the player in his "final" game as a Met. Flores was seen with tears in his eyes. Only the deal fell through. Flores remained a Met, and he quickly went from fan favorite to beloved Met hero for the next three years. (He was released in November.) Perhaps the strangest trade of all took place in 1979. The Philadelphia 76ers sent Harvey Catchings and Ralph Simpson to the Nets for Eric Money and Al Skinner. So what's unusual? No, it's not that Simpson's daughter is the singer India Arie. The two teams had played each other in November, with the 76ers winning in double overtime. But the Nets protested the game, arguing that a number of technical fouls had been called improperly. The commissioner agreed and ordered the last part of the game to be replayed. The replay was scheduled for March. But by then the trade had taken place. Now four players were on different teams than when the game began. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Dr. Sharath Puttichanda was an emergency medicine psychiatrist at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence in December 2019 when he stumbled across Sundeep Dosanjh's Instagram posts from Machu Picchu. A neighbor was off on an adventure in Peru while he was stuck home in wintry New England, Dr. Puttichanda (left) said, so he began wandering on the internet. "I was jealous," he said. Mr. Dosanjh's Instagram posts were loaded with hashtags that included gayindian. There he found more than just vicarious travel adventures. "He had this beautiful post about his coming out story," said Dr. Puttichanda, 38 and the assistant director for psychiatric emergency services at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence. "I read that and I remember telling two of my best friends, 'There's this guy, and he had this beautiful story, and there's something so familiar about him that I feel the need to reach out.'" He didn't. Instead, he began following Mr. Dosanjh, 36, on Instagram. So a few weeks later, when Mr. Dosanjh posted a story about a Lyft driver's off handed, offensive remark about his ethnicity, Dr. Puttichanda posted a fiery comment noting that he also had had similar experiences. "I responded, then looked at his pictures," said Mr. Dosanjh, a web and communications specialist for the school district in Elk Grove, Calif. "He's cute, and I followed him back, and we started bantering." Dr. Puttichanda had a break coming up, and Mr. Dosanjh suggested that he take a red eye to San Francisco, so that the two might meet. But Dr. Puttichanda had tickets to a Broadway show, so, instead, he all but brought Mr. Dosanjh along on his trip to New York, via FaceTime. He narrated every event, and the two were still on FaceTime together until both fell asleep. "I said, 'I don't know what's going on between you and I, but I have to let you know that I can't leave Northern California,'" he said. "He was like, 'OK. I have nothing holding me back.' And my heart literally melted." The first actual meeting between the two was still more than a month in their future. With 3,000 miles separating them, they had to be creative about "dates." For their first, each went to a local P.F. Chang's, and fired up FaceTime to experience dinner almost as if they were in the same place. "We had first date conversation, looked at the menu together, everything you would do on a real in person date," Mr. Dosanjh said. "We had to think out every single detail to make it work." They had a second virtual date at the Cheesecake Factory shortly afterward. Mr. Dosanjh sent flowers to Dr. Puttichanda for Valentine's Day. At the end of February, Dr. Puttichanda flew to San Francisco for an 11 day holiday, and Mr. Dosanjh surprised him at the baggage carousel. "We kissed," Dr. Puttichanda said, "and in that moment, I let everything go." The two were married Sept. 25, in a wedding that began with a Sikh Punjabi ceremony at the Sheldon Inn, a restaurant in Elk Grove, Calif. Jasminder Singh, a cousin of Mr. Dosanjh who became a Universal Life minister for the event, oversaw the signing of the civil marriage license. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
That's what Armando Gallinari, a father of five who runs a small flower shop in the north of Naples, told us. His shop has been closed for nearly a month. "Since then I've had nothing coming in at all," he said. "As of yet, I haven't received any government assistance. We have nowhere to turn." Everyone knows Italy's story by now. The first European nation to be hit hard by the coronavirus, it has become a harbinger for the rest of Europe and America. First, there was the lockdown. Then the sight of a health care system stretched to the point of collapse and the terror of a rising death count. Now, nearly a month after the country went into lockdown, Italy is sending another warning. The economy is in trouble, bound for a major contraction. And the precariously situated workers self employed, seasonal, informal are suffering the most. It's not clear how much longer they can survive. While the coronavirus has been concentrated in the country's north, especially the regions of Lombardy and Emilia Romagna, the economic effects are most severe in the poorer, less industrialized south. In Campania, the region of which Naples is the capital, 41 percent of people are at risk of poverty. Work is a problem: Last year, unemployment was around 20 percent and about that proportion of the region's work force was underemployed. And for those who do have work, it is often informal, insecure and particularly vulnerable to the crisis. Bruno Esposito, for example, has worked for many years as a plumber for a local family business but like an estimated over two million people across the south, he has no formal contract. "I have no employment contributions and I'm not on any state database," he explained, "so I can't access any form of state benefits." Ordinarily, Mr. Esposito, a father of three, manages to put food on the table. "But this situation changes everything," he said. "We don't even know when things will go back to normal." Informal workers carers, cleaners, construction workers, waiters, couriers, drivers, agriculture workers and many more are doubly vulnerable. First, because the work on which they depend has disappeared. Second, because the measures put in place by the Italian government to ameliorate the worse effects of the crisis a moratorium on mortgages, loan repayment holidays for businesses and wage protections for those laid off do not protect them. The underlying logic of Italy's welfare system, which offers little support for those without tax contributions, remains intact. So Mr. Esposito and his family are relying on weekly food parcels from a community center. "Without their help," he said, "we just wouldn't have anything to eat." Even workers who are in the system can fall through the cracks. Lucia Vitale works at the Naples airport for about half the year, catering to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who arrive from March onward. For the other half of the year, she and seasonal workers like her can claim unemployment benefits. But those benefits have now run out. And they can't get help from the government because, Ms. Vitale said, "we don't fit into the right categories." The government has granted a one time payment of 600 euros, around 650, to the self employed and to seasonal workers in the tourist sector. But Ms. Vitale technically works in the transport sector, so she can't apply for the support. For now, she too is getting by with handouts from volunteer organizations. The situation for many is bleak. "Everyone here is having problems now," Mr. Gallinari, the florist, said. "There are lots of people who are going hungry. You can see that their behavior is beginning to change." Reports of social unrest across the region shopkeepers forced to give away food, even some thefts have ruffled a usually close knit community. "The other night I caught some kids trying to break into my garage," Mr. Gallinari said. "This is new for us." Even so, such incidents are rare. More striking and representative of neighborhood life in Naples has been a groundswell of community initiatives, to fill the void of absent state support. Some have set up a mutual aid help line so that volunteers can deliver food and assistance. And certain shops have begun encouraging customers to cover a shopping bill for someone unable to pay, in the Neapolitan tradition of the "caffe sospeso," or suspended coffee. The vulnerable workers of Naples, and the south more generally, need more help. The 400 million euros, close to 432 million, the government has set aside for food stamps is not enough. Now there is talk that the government's next budget might include an "emergency income," covering those so far overlooked. But the budget isn't due until later in the month. For workers locked out of state support, dependent on community assistance and increasingly desperate, that isn't soon enough. And for insecure workers across the world, the siren is ringing. Bethan Jones and Fabio Montale are translators in Naples, Italy. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Where were you the first time Jennifer Lopez came into your life? Was it while she was dancing on "In Living Color" in the '80s? Or perhaps when she played Selena Quintanilla Perez in the 1997 biopic of the artist's life? Maybe it was when "Waiting for Tonight" hit the charts in 1999? Or when Ms. Lopez stole rom com lovers' hearts in the early aughts as the leading lady in "The Wedding Planner" and "Maid in Manhattan?" Jennifer Lopez has been icon for more than three decades. She is also the first Latina actor to earn over 1 million for a film and the first woman to have a No. 1 album and a No. 1 movie in the same week. And don't forget about her Golden Globe nomination. So it's fitting that Ms. Lopez just received this year's Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, which recognizes career spanning accomplishments in music and film. When she took the stage tonight at the VMAs, she reminded everyone that she has staying power. She began the medley of her biggest hits in a flowing blue and gold Versace cape over a gold leotard with thigh straps. She later donned a floor length white fur coat and ended the performance in baggy gold pants the same outfit she accepted her award in. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Q. For many years, I used Picasa to edit my photos and send them to have prints made. It was an easy program to navigate. As you know, Google no longer supports Picasa. Is there another program that would be as easy as Picasa? A. After retiring Picasa from further development in 2016, Google announced in March that the desktop photo editing program would no longer work to upload or download photos, or manage online albums. Similar programs do exist, but they may not have quite the same suite of editing tools and easy online album sharing capabilities as the free Picasa software. To help narrow your options, make a list of the features you used the most and then try to find a replacement that matches up best with the Picasa toolbox. Google Photos the service that replaced Picasa in the company's free software lineup might be the easiest move for your files, as your Picasa Web Albums are most likely there already thanks to Google's transition from the old program to the new one. You just need to log in at photos.google.com with the same Google Account name and password you used for Picasa. Google Photos can back up pictures on your computer to server space online, and you can order printed books of your pictures online. Still, some may find the photo editing tools more limited than those offered in Picasa. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
THE MAZE RUNNER (2014) on iTunes and Amazon. The third film in this dystopian sci fi trilogy hits theaters this month. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that this first installment "combines elements of 'Lord of the Flies' with the Minotaur and Orpheus myths, but it plays as something closer to 'The Hunger Games' experienced through a dissociative fog." FARGO (1996) on iTunes and Amazon. Frances McDormand's win at the Golden Globes makes this a perfect time to revisit her Oscar winning performance as a sometimes fierce and sometimes chipper pregnant cop in this Coen brothers film, where a car salesman played by William H. Macy hires a pair of criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Sormare) to kidnap his wife so he can collect ransom from his father in law. The recent television series of the same name, based on the film, is streaming on Hulu. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Calla Kessler for The New York Times These pandemic months have been so full and fraught, so lacking the silence we foresaw with the initial shelter in place orders, that one of its first cliches has fallen into obscurity. Do you remember, mid March, when everyone kept recalling that Shakespeare wrote "King Lear" while in quarantine? As an inducement to write that novel or learn that new language, it felt hollow as early as April. Well, not everyone lost their focus in the discord and inundation of 2020. Amy Sillman did not. The New York painter who'd already scored a big hit last year with "The Shape of Shape," a show she curated at the reopened Museum of Modern Art has had a year of unparalleled productivity, even as the coronavirus outbreak kept her from her usual studio. What's up now in her new show "Twice Removed," which opened last week at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, is just a fraction of the hundreds of abstract paintings she produced over the last 12 months: layered, supercharged compositions of purple, green and goldenrod, overlaid or interrupted by thick contours, daubed stripes, peeking hints of a cup or leg. "I made, literally, a titanic amount of work during the Covid period," Ms. Sillman tells me when we meet up at the gallery. A blue surgical mask sets off her shoulder length gray hair; she's biked over from Brooklyn, and she's brimming with the eagerness of rediscovery after months in isolation. "I went to live in Long Island, the North Fork. I found this little normcore house in town, and I found a studio to rent for the summer, but for the first part I couldn't make paintings. So I just drew flowers at my kitchen table. And I wrote." She could only find "cheapo canvases," and painted instead on sheets of paper. One gallery here has a cycle of 18, but she had 10 times more than that to choose from. Ms. Sillman, 65, has had a long road to this high point of her career. Born in Detroit, raised in Chicago, she came to New York in 1975 and did not show her art for long years afterward. (She spent more than a decade working a day job in paste up at Vogue and Rolling Stone, before teaching at Bennington College, Bard College, and the Stadelschule art academy in Frankfurt.) She fell in with the downtown counterculture, worked as an assistant to Pat Steir, and also published one of the first bibliographies of lesbian artists, for a 1977 issue of the feminist journal Heresies. Her career as a painter began just when critics were regularly proclaiming painting's death. Now she has helped lead the charge over the last decade for a reinvigorated mode of abstraction, alongside colleagues like Laura Owens, Julie Mehretu, Joanne Greenbaum or Jacqueline Humphries. These painters, mostly women, have reclaimed the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures, which for so long had felt played out. Their work is smart as hell, but not afraid to laugh at itself. Conversant with digital media iPhone animation, in Ms. Sillman's case yet committed to the facticity of paint. Yet the rolling crises of the last few years have brought along a shift in art galleries toward easy to read, politically forthright imagery, some of it righteous, some just agitprop. It's a time more prone to the certainties of rage than the ambiguities of art. So I wanted to see how, or even whether, these miserable months would be reflected in Ms. Sillman's painting, and how she understood her place in an art world that seems to be growing ill at ease with the fundamentals of shape, color and line. What I found, at Gladstone, was more than just a confirmation that Ms. Sillman is at the top of her game, but a master class in how abstract art can be as alive with the inflamed spirit of 2020 as any portrait or photograph. "I was thinking about looming," she tells me. "Because that's another emotion that we have now. There's a looming election. A slow motion car crash. I wanted the scale of the show to enhance bigness and littleness because of the way that certain things loom. "In the past, I've always made these things where the figure changes. Where the figure is kind of animated. And I had this revelation, kind of dumb and flat footed, this summer: The ground has changed. This was after the George Floyd murder and the subsequent uprising I was like, the ground itself has shifted. I was trying to make paintings that contained the shifting ground and the motion in them." Many of the new paintings seem moderately askew, arranged around an axis maybe 10 degrees off center. That's a form of painterly organization she's used in the past, though here the slant feels more like wobbling, careening. "I really believe in the politics of improvisation," she says. "On its good side, it's about contingency, emotions. Tightrope walking." When I tell her that the slightly comic anxiety put me in mind of Paul Klee, especially the late drawings shown at Zwirner last year, she lights up. "I saved so many pictures of that show in my phone!" she says with a laugh, though she also mentions Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose art grew more frantic as totalitarianism closed in. There are debts paid, too, to the clammy fields of Mark Rothko, the delirious vulgarity of Chicago's Hairy Who, and, especially, the troubled, tragicomic figures of Philip Guston; Ms. Sillman wrote a short essay on his art for the catalog of "Philip Guston Now," the postponed retrospective organized by four museums. (She also signed an open letter, along with 100 other artists, curators and art historians, demanding the show's reinstatement.) There are essays on her fellow contemporary painters, as well as on Eugene Delacroix, whose art, she writes, "heaves you around in an imaginary bellows that compresses, squeezes and then releases you." My favorite Sillman essay remains a mordant and very personal reflection on contemporary painting's inheritances from Abstract Expressionism, which a whole generation of young artists now reflexively dismiss (too expensive, too egoistic, too male, too C.I.A. compromised). That simplistic dismissal smacks of "the worst kind of gender essentialism," she wrote, and erases what was campy and transgressive in AbEx qualities that she and many other women and queer painters would later embrace. "The fear and loathing that AbEx arouses reminds me of that '70s punk button DISCO SUCKS," she wrote in that essay. "But disco didn't suck, and the injunction against it was perhaps more about homophobia and racism than musical taste. What do you think they were listening to over at the Stonewall, anyway?" But forming your own taste against the grain has gotten harder than ever in the era of algorithmic sorting, and for younger artists like the students Ms. Sillman teaches at Bard just one inept opinion can be fatal. "They have pressures that weren't the pressures of a person in the '70s," she notes. "They're going to be branded, subject to commodification, slotted into definitive categories. They're scared not to succeed but they don't trust the art world. So there's a lot of prohibition but I can understand that. The political and social and economic environment that they find themselves in is so unconducive to failure. To any kind of experimentation." It's that willingness to fail, though, that brought Ms. Sillman to this breakthrough moment. Which is the great value of her work, and the lesson she imparts to young artists especially: that the future has to be got at through the mind and the body, through thinking and feeling, through flesh and through ones and zeros. It's a push and pull form of discovery that these paintings execute and dramatize, always on the verge of collapse but going forward anyhow. And then, in the midst of all this motion, still life. The great shock of the Gladstone show are the smallest works here: the flowers she painted every morning, all alone in her humble North Fork rental as the virus spread and the temperatures rose. A posy of peonies, their petals rendered as splotches, dense as a bowling ball. A single drooping sunflower, and then a bouquet of them, in a simple jug. Ms. Sillman breathes 20th century art history, but these tender, brushy still lifes were the first time I'd thought of her art in relation to the big boys of 19th century French painting. Sunflowers? Irises? All this talk about an AbEx inheritance ... was a van Gogh groupie hiding in there all along? She smiles. "It was the first time I cried at a museum," she says, remembering the irises at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. "Because he was so tortured. The flowers were flowers of misery. Tears of dejection and tears of joy, which is what I was feeling, what all of us were feeling." She added, "And so I felt like the experience of looking at the show had to be a little wider than usual." Even in graveyards there are blossoms. "We were all completely thinking we were going to die," she says of those first confined days in March. "Never see our friends again, never see our families. We didn't know what was going to happen. And spring was just carrying on!" She tempers her optimism; nothing with Ms. Sillman is as simple as springtime. "I mean, even though there's global warming and an eco crisis, the flowers kept coming up. And the flowers were both funerary and joyous." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
"The Museum Board is in dereliction of its duty of care to its main constituency, the wonderfully diverse people of Queens, in allowing such hateful and divisive purely political entities into our community space," Mr. Nammack said in his letter. "I stand in solidarity with Laura Raicovich, who resigned her role as executive director earlier this week, for much the same reasons." When the Israel event to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the United Nations vote establishing the State of Israel was initially canceled last summer, Councilman Rory I. Lancman accused Ms. Raicovich of anti Semitism and called for her removal. The museum started an investigation into its handling of the event, which was eventually reinstated. Mr. Lancman has questioned the museum's delay in releasing the results of its investigation (the museum said it is due out in the next two weeks). "Progressives lose their way when we tolerate anti Semitism, or cast Jews and the Jewish homeland as lesser identities," Mr. Lancman said in a statement on Monday. "That won't be tolerated in Queens." The curators' letter, initiated by Carin Kuoni, the director and chief curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, was signed by important art world figures including Mary Ceruti, the executive director and chief curator of the SculptureCenter and Helen Molesworth, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. During her three years as president and executive director at the Queens Museum, Ms. Raicovich was an outspoken advocate for immigration rights and positioned the museum as a leader on social issues. On Jan. 26, she announced that she was stepping down, saying that her "vision and that of the board weren't in enough alignment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
WHEN Barry Tucker thinks about his childhood spent roaming backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, he fondly recalls the performers' elaborate costumes. Made up of mile high hairpieces and ornate combinations, they were worn by some of the most famous names in opera. Among them was his father, Richard Tucker a former silk salesman and cantor who became one of the greatest tenors in the world. "He sang for every president from Truman on," said Mr. Tucker, 78, an executive financial adviser at JPMorgan Chase, who lives in Manhattan. "He worked all the time. And he did a lot for charity." In January 1975, Richard Tucker died of a heart attack while on tour in Kalamazoo, Mich. He was 60. His funeral was held onstage at the Met the only time that has ever occurred at Lincoln Center, the Met said. His family, though, was unsure how best to preserve his memory. "A general manager from the Met said, 'You've got to do something to help other American opera singers,'" Mr. Tucker said. Spurred by that suggestion, he and his family started a foundation in his father's honor, the Richard Tucker Music Foundation. Just weeks later, on Feb. 6, 1975, a concert was held at Carnegie Hall, with proceeds going to the Metropolitan Opera Fund. While some people erect plaques, statues or buildings to remember a loved one who has died, others start foundations, scholarships or memorial funds. While there is no minimum financial requirement to start a foundation, the process can be laborious. There are many costs and responsibilities associated with doing so. A board must be set up, regular filings are required and meetings must be held and minutes kept. "It takes a great deal of time, effort, and thought to work through all the areas of law, finance, and management that need to be considered," said Elizabeth Krempley, a spokeswoman for the Council on Foundations, a nonprofit association of grant making foundations and corporations that also provides resources to help people set up charities. There are other options that can make the process more cost effective and easier to manage. COLLECTING ONLINE Some families raise money on internet crowdfunding platforms like Deposit a Gift, CrowdRise or GoFundMe, which deduct a small fee from each campaign. A day after Alice Flaherty retired in November 2012 from her nursing job at what was then Lakewood Hospital, in Ohio, she was told she had lung cancer. She died a little over a year later, at age 63. "My wife made a request to our son and daughter: 'Make sure the kids, the grandkids don't forget about me,'" said her husband, Dan Flaherty, 68, a retired teacher. In September 2014, he and his family enlisted local and corporate sponsors and established the Love a Nurse Run to honor Ms. Flaherty, an avid runner. The inaugural event, a five kilometer run and a one mile walk, attracted nearly 800 participants. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Her family created the Alice Flaherty Excellence in Nursing Scholarship Fund with the help of an accountant but went to YouCaring to solicit donations. The site charges a 3 percent credit card processing fee and asks for a separate voluntary amount from donors after they contribute to a campaign. The fund has awarded 84 scholarships worth over 76,000, and the third annual Love a Nurse Run is scheduled for Sunday. OUTSOURCING MANAGEMENT Others want to collect money in memory of a loved one, but they eschew the management of the funds. Scholarship America, a nonprofit group based in Minneapolis, will design and manage scholarship programs and memorial funds. Fees for managing the scholarships start at a couple of thousand dollars, depending on the level of complexity and customization of each program, said Mimi Daly Larson, the group's senior vice president. Another possibility is CharitySmith National Society of Memorial Funds. It charges a 700 start up fee the first year, and a 516 annual maintenance fee. If the fund raises more than 12,000, there is a one time fee of 4.3 percent of the amount raised. Through CharitySmith, Veronica Wennekamp, a business analyst in Memphis, started Hallelujah Helen Memorial Fund, which provides summer camp scholarships to children ages 5 to 12 in the United States, in memory of her mother in law, Helen Wennekamp. Meghan Fink and her three siblings did something similar, founding the Stephen E. Fink Memorial Fund in honor of their father, who died of amyloidosis in January 2010. In addition to participating in blood drives and a bone marrow registry, they hold an event called the Thanksgiving Share a Meal, open to anyone in the Pasadena, Calif., area, at the restaurant their father started 21 years ago. "To give back when you've lost so much is really the only way forward," said Ashley Galleher, 28, the executive director of CharitySmith, which oversees more than 120 active funds. "The grieving process is way more of a burden to bear when you're not giving back to other people." Then there are those, like Katie Nicholson, who eventually feel confident enough to fly solo. Ms. Nicholson, 31, started the Zio Nick Memorial Fund on CharitySmith in memory of her father, Michael, who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in October 2014. She is now obtaining her own nonprofit status, to ensure her organization is not subject to federal taxes. "Creating a nonprofit gives me the ability to fully align and set my own mission," she said. OUTSOURCING PAPERWORK Those who want to manage and collect money on their own can opt for a donor advised fund, a charitable giving vehicle in which organizations like The Jewish Communal Fund or The New York Community Trust will file paperwork, direct the money to a chosen charity and simplify the process, for a fee. "You can take a tax deduction right away," said David Samuels, a New York lawyer who specializes in setting up and advising charitable organizations. "Then you can make requests to that charity as to where the money should go." KEEPING IT GOING In the years since its founding, Mr. Tucker's foundation, which awards financial prizes to rising American opera stars, has raised millions of dollars, and its annual concert is scheduled for Oct. 30 at Carnegie Hall. It will feature artists including Anna Netrebko and Renee Fleming. "You try to honor people when they're alive, but sometimes it's too late," Mr. Tucker said. "But 41 years after my father died, I'll sell out Carnegie Hall. These people never saw or heard my father live, but still, they'll sing for us in his honor." His big worry is succession he has no idea who will take over the foundation after he dies. His brothers, children and grandchildren are all music lovers, but he has been the one most involved in the organization. "I have the relationship with all the singers," he said. "No singer in the world has ever said no to me, and they all sing for free." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
"Accountability is important," said Christopher Howell, who tapped his knowledge of neural net technology after police tear gassed him at a protest in Portland, Ore. "We need to know who is doing what, so we can deal with it."Credit...Mason Trinca for The New York Times "Accountability is important," said Christopher Howell, who tapped his knowledge of neural net technology after police tear gassed him at a protest in Portland, Ore. "We need to know who is doing what, so we can deal with it." In early September, the City Council in Portland, Ore., met virtually to consider sweeping legislation outlawing the use of facial recognition technology. The bills would not only bar the police from using it to unmask protesters and individuals captured in surveillance imagery; they would also prevent companies and a variety of other organizations from using the software to identify an unknown person. During the time for public comments, a local man, Christopher Howell, said he had concerns about a blanket ban. He gave a surprising reason. "I am involved with developing facial recognition to in fact use on Portland police officers, since they are not identifying themselves to the public," Mr. Howell said. Over the summer, with the city seized by demonstrations against police violence, leaders of the department had told uniformed officers that they could tape over their name. Mr. Howell wanted to know: Would his use of facial recognition technology become illegal? Portland's mayor, Ted Wheeler, told Mr. Howell that his project was "a little creepy," but a lawyer for the city clarified that the bills would not apply to individuals. The Council then passed the legislation in a unanimous vote. Mr. Howell was offended by Mr. Wheeler's characterization of his project but relieved he could keep working on it. "There's a lot of excessive force here in Portland," he said in a phone interview. "Knowing who the officers are seems like a baseline." Mr. Howell, 42, is a lifelong protester and self taught coder; in graduate school, he started working with neural net technology, an artificial intelligence that learns to make decisions from data it is fed, such as images. He said that the police had tear gassed him during a midday protest in June, and that he had begun researching how to build a facial recognition product that could defeat officers' attempts to shield their identity. "This was, you know, kind of a 'shower thought' moment for me, and just kind of an intersection of what I know how to do and what my current interests are," he said. "Accountability is important. We need to know who is doing what, so we can deal with it." Mr. Howell is not alone in his pursuit. Law enforcement has used facial recognition to identify criminals, using photos from government databases or, through a company called Clearview AI, from the public internet. But now activists around the world are turning the process around and developing tools that can unmask law enforcement in cases of misconduct. "It doesn't surprise me in the least," said Clare Garvie, a lawyer at Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology. "I think some folks will say, 'All's fair in love and war,' but it highlights the risk of developing this technology without thinking about its use in the hands of all possible actors." This month, the artist Paolo Cirio published photos of 4,000 faces of French police officers online for an exhibit called "Capture," which he described as the first step in developing a facial recognition app. He collected the faces from 1,000 photos he had gathered from the internet and from photographers who attended protests in France. Mr. Cirio, 41, took the photos down after France's interior minister threatened legal action but said he hoped to republish them. "It's about the privacy of everyone," said Mr. Cirio, who believes facial recognition should be banned. "It's childish to try to stop me, as an artist who is trying to raise the problem, instead of addressing the problem itself." Many police officers around the world cover their faces, in whole or in part, as captured in recent videos of police violence in Belarus. Last month, Andrew Maximov, a technologist from the country who is now based in Los Angeles, uploaded a video to YouTube that demonstrated how facial recognition technology could be used to digitally strip away the masks. In the simulated footage, software matches masked officers to full images of officers taken from social media channels. The two images are then merged so the officers are shown in uniform, with their faces on display. It's unclear if the matches are accurate. The video, which was reported earlier by a news site about Russia called Meduza, has been viewed more than one million times. "For a while now, everyone was aware the big guys could use this to identify and oppress the little guys, but we're now approaching the technological threshold where the little guys can do it to the big guys," Mr. Maximov, 30, said. "It's not just the loss of anonymity. It's the threat of infamy." These activists say it has become relatively easy to build facial recognition tools thanks to off the shelf image recognition software that has been made available in recent years. In Portland, Mr. Howell used a Google provided platform, TensorFlow, which helps people build machine learning models. "The technical process I'm not inventing anything new," he said. "The big problem here is getting quality images." Mr. Howell gathered thousands of images of Portland police officers from news articles and social media after finding their names on city websites. He also made a public records request for a roster of police officers, with their names and personnel numbers, but it was denied. Facebook has been a particularly helpful source of images. "Here they all are at a barbecue or whatever, in uniform sometimes," Mr. Howell said. "It's few enough people that I can reasonably do it as an individual." Mr. Howell said his tool remained a work in progress and could recognize only about 20 percent of Portland's police force. He hasn't made it publicly available, but he said it had already helped a friend confirm an officer's identity. He declined to provide more details. Older attempts to identify police officers have relied on crowdsourcing. The news service ProPublica asks readers to identify officers in a series of videos of police violence. In 2016, an anti surveillance group in Chicago, the Lucy Parsons Lab, started OpenOversight, a "public searchable database of law enforcement officers." It asks people to upload photos of uniformed officers and match them to the officers' names or badge numbers. "We were careful about what information we were soliciting. We don't want to encourage people to follow officers to playgrounds with their kids," said Jennifer Helsby, OpenOversight's lead developer. "It has resulted in officers being identified." For example, the database helped journalists at the Invisible Institute, a local news organization, identify Chicago officers who struck protesters with batons this summer, according to the institute's director of public strategy, Maira Khwaja. Photos of more than 1,000 officers have been uploaded to the site, Ms. Helsby said, adding that versions of the open source database have been started in other cities, including Portland. That version is called Cops.Photo, and is one of the places from which Mr. Howell obtained identified photos of police officers. Mr. Howell originally wanted to make his work publicly available, but is now concerned that distributing his tool to others would be illegal under the city's new facial recognition laws, he said. "I have sought some legal advice and will seek more," Mr. Howell said. He described it as "unwise" to release an illegal facial recognition app because the police "are not going to appreciate it to begin with." "I'd be naive not to be a little concerned about it," he added. "But I think it's worth doing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Could icy moons like Saturn's Enceladus in the outer solar system be home to microbes or other forms of alien life? Intriguing new findings from data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggest the possibility. Plumes of gas erupting out of Enceladus a small moon with an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust contain hydrogen. Scientists infer a lot from that: that there are hydrothermal chemical reactions similar to those that occur at hot fissures at the ocean bottoms on Earth. On Earth at least, hydrothermal vents thrive with microbial life, offering up the potential that icy moons far from Earth called "ocean worlds" by NASA could be habitable. "That's just going to be a tremendous opportunity to test our theories and see if there's life there," said James L. Green, director of planetary science at NASA. This is the latest discovery by Cassini, which is heading into its final months after 13 years of exploring Saturn, its moons and rings. On April 22, Cassini begins a journey that will take it between the planet and its rings for 22 orbits before its mission finally ends with a crash into Saturn's atmosphere in September. Cassini's findings also show that levels of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane measured in the Enceladus plume were out of equilibrium, an imbalance that could provide an energy source that organisms could tap into for food, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science. "It indicates there is chemical potential to support microbial systems," said J. Hunter Waite Jr., program director for the space science and engineering division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and lead author of the Science paper. In a separate paper published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, another team of researchers, using the Hubble Space Telescope, once again spotted what appears to be a similar plume rising from Europa, one of Jupiter's big moons that also possesses an ocean beneath an icy exterior. Cassini had earlier found that there are seas of methane on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, a discovery that has inspired some scientists to suggest sending a boat there. At a mere 310 miles wide, Enceladus was considered too small to be geologically interesting; scientists suspected that its interior had frozen solid long ago. But 11 years ago, Cassini spotted plumes rising from the south pole region, one of the biggest, most surprising discoveries of the mission. The tidal forces of Saturn pulling and squeezing Enceladus appear to generate enough heat to melt the ice. From additional Cassini observations, scientists concluded that not only is there a pool of water near the south pole of Enceladus to generate the plumes, but a global ocean that lies beneath the moon's ice. In October 2015, Cassini swooped to within 30 miles of the surface of Enceladus, and one of its instruments collected and identified particles in the plume spray. It was mostly water molecules, but Dr. Waite and his colleagues also found hydrogen molecules, up to 1.4 percent by volume. A NASA illustration shows how scientists studying the plumes at the south pole of Enceladus think water may be interacting with minerals in the moon's rock. Such hydrothermal chemical reactions are similar to those that occur at hot fissures at the ocean bottoms on Earth. On Earth, hydrothermal vents thrive with microbial life. While hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, it was not expected to be found in any quantity on a moon as small as Enceladus, where the gravity is too slight to hold on to the gas for long. "Just finding hydrogen was a surprise," said Christopher R. Glein, a geochemist at the Southwest Research Institute and another author of the Science paper. After considering a variety of ways that could continually generate hydrogen, the scientists concluded that hydrothermal reactions offered the most likely explanation for producing that much of the gas. Each water molecule consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Geophysical models indicated that as hot water flows past the rocks, minerals in the rocks were grabbing the oxygen atoms and releasing hydrogen, the scientists reported. There appeared to be enough energy to support microbes. "This is the first time we've been able to make a calorie count of an alien ocean," Dr. Glein said. Asked what that calorie count was, Dr. Glein said the energy available was the caloric equivalent of 300 pizzas per hour. "This is a great result for the habitability of Enceladus," said Christopher P. McKay, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., who was not involved with the research. Dr. McKay said the hydrogen levels are far above what microbes need. Still, the presence of hydrogen does not prove that life exists on Enceladus. It might suggest the opposite. At hydrothermal vents on Earth, the hydrogen is quickly gobbled up by microbes. That so much hydrogen is rising through Enceladus's ocean and reaching space could mean there is no life on the little moon to take advantage of it. At a department meeting, say, "if you have those stacks of pizzas, they disappear," said Mary A. Voytek, head of NASA's astrobiology program. Or life could exist, but is limited by other factors. "If there is biology there, it isn't very active," Dr. Voytek said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Many employees of Times Inc. had been stunned by the news that the publisher had agreed to sell itself to the Meredith Corporation. At Time Inc., a Jittery Reckoning on the Day After the Sale When employees of Time Inc. trundled into a corporate auditorium on Monday, the atmosphere was funereal. The night before, many of them had been stunned by the news that the venerable publisher of Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and People had agreed to sell itself to the Meredith Corporation in a 2.8 billion deal made possible by an equity infusion from Koch Industries, the sprawling conglomerate run by Charles G. and David H. Koch. The announcement of the sale had in some ways ended years of dread inside Time Inc. The company had been floundering since it was spun off from Time Warner in 2014, and everyone who worked there had little doubt that it would eventually come under new ownership. The agreement with Meredith the Des Moines based publisher whose portfolio is largely focused on lifestyle magazines like Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Parents and Family Fun had also uncorked an existential reckoning within Time Inc.'s downtown Manhattan headquarters. During two meetings held in an auditorium named for Time Inc.'s illustrious co founder Henry R. Luce, the mood grew somewhat contentious, according to people who attended. Employees demanded to know if the Kochs, the multibillionaire brothers known for throwing their weight behind conservative causes, would compromise their editorial integrity. One employee, asked Rich Battista, Time Inc.'s chief executive, how much money he would personally gain from the sale. (Mr. Battista demurred, but according to regulatory filings, he could walk away with some 15 million.) The questions captured a profound sense of loss afflicting a company that had once defined modern magazines, although it was not yet clear what would become of it under its new minders. "It was a once very powerful, very important, very profitable force in the global publishing industry and an important player in the journalism world," John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc. from 2006 to 2012, said on Monday. "It's now a severely wounded animal." Over the course of an hour, Mr. Lacy and other company leaders addressed questions from analysts about its strategy. While the call apparently helped electrify Wall Street Meredith's stock price shot up more than 10 percent for the day it did little to quell the anxiety among the people working at the company it had acquired. In an interview on Monday evening, Thomas H. Harty, Meredith's president and chief operating officer, said his company had not made any decisions about selling Time Inc. titles, though he did not reject the notion outright. "We really don't have any particular plans for any part of the portfolio yet," he said. He added that Time, Fortune, Money and Sports Illustrated were "really iconic brands that have been underperforming." 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Mr. Harty also said Meredith had "no plans to move any editorial or sales and marketing jobs from New York" and also did not expect "for the foreseeable future" to move Time Inc. employees out of their current offices. He added that layoffs are likely at Time Inc., which has drastically reduced the size of its work force in the last decade. Meredith makes for an unlikely Time Inc. caretaker. A media company built on publications that celebrate domestic life, it has shown no past interest in current events, celebrity, sports and business the very subjects that make up the bulk of the material in Time Inc.'s best known magazines. In 2013, a deal between Meredith and Time Inc. collapsed reportedly because Meredith did not want to acquire four of Time Inc.'s signature publications Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money. It remains possible that Meredith will try to sell off titles including Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated after the deal closes, and some current and former Time Inc. employees have wondered whether or not the Kochs themselves may have an interest in buying them. "I think if we were being a little paranoid, we would say, 'Yes, it sure looks like the Kochs will take those titles,'" Reed Phillips, a managing partner at the investment bank Oaklins DeSilva Phillips, said. "But in reality, I don't think it will work that way." Spokesmen for Meredith and Koch Industries have said the Kochs would have no influence over the magazines. Koch Equity Development, the private equity arm of Koch Industries through which Meredith received an infusion of 650 million, will not have a board seat. Meredith said the firm would "have no influence on Meredith's editorial or managerial operations." In a merger agreement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, Meredith said Koch Equity Development would meet with the company's senior management four times a year and would have the right to appoint an observer to attend board meetings, if Meredith declined to pay the firm its expected dividend. "We've agreed to meet with them just like we do with any other Wall Street analyst," Mr. Harty said. He added that Meredith's senior management team had never discussed the deal with the Kochs themselves. "No one's ever met with the Koch brothers," he said. The sale of Time Inc. underscored how far the publisher has fallen since its days as an arbiter of American culture. From their cavernous offices within the Time Life Building overlooking Rockefeller Center, Time Inc.'s editors once commanded the attention of presidents and shaped global discourse. Time magazine made the news accessible in staccato reports. Life magazine, in its large format heyday, captured world leaders, Hollywood stars and soldiers at war through vivid photography and silky prose. Sports Illustrated was a bible for fans of Muhammad Ali, Willie Mays and Michael Jordan. Fortune did not limit itself to industry titans but also covered people living in poverty, as it did with "People and Places in Trouble," a photo essay by Walker Evans. And People magazine ushered in modern day fame culture by making celebrities seem relatable and everyday people seem like stars. Time Inc. had seemingly found a way to keep itself vibrant into the new century when it merged with Warner Bros. in 1989. In 2014, however, it found itself spun off from Time Warner. Since then, it has struggled to offset steep declines in print advertising and circulation. With a scattershot business strategy, it now offers insurance for pets and a Sports Illustrated subscription streaming service for Amazon. Perhaps its biggest claim to fame in recent months was some unsolicited attention Time received from President Trump over the weekend about its "Person of the Year" issue. "The reality is that it was a print company that produced great consumer brands but they were not brands for which it was easy to make a transition in an age of mobile," Norman Pearlstine, a longtime Time Inc. executive and its editor in chief from 1995 to 2005, said. "You can point to lots of things that might have been done differently or might have been done better," he added, "but I'm not sure any of that could have overcome that basic reality." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In movies like "Pitch Perfect" and "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates," the actor Adam Devine plays a particular kind of hapless vulgar goofball, an amalgam of a couple of innocuous characters in the 1978 comedy "National Lampoon's Animal House." In the new movie "Game Over, Man!" (in which Mr. Devine stars with Anders Holm and Blake Anderson, his cast mates on the TV series "Workaholics") the actor adds some of John Belushi's anarchic slobbery from the 40 year old landmark comedy. It doesn't help the movie overall. Alexxx, Mr. Devine's character, is the idea man in a troika of service industry losers who dream of video game entrepreneurship while enduring their work as housekeepers/waiters at a deluxe hotel. In an early scene, Alexxx and his pals negotiate a bedroom littered with used condoms. Upon learning that a blinged out Bey (Utkarsh Ambudkar) is giving a party at the hotel, the crew is determined to pitch him their business idea. But there is villainy afoot. As one character in a group of black clad folks disembarking from an S.U.V. says to their ringleader, "You didn't bring me along because I look like the black nerd from 'Die Hard,' cause I don't." So there's your premise, but instead of John McClane fighting the evildoers invading the building, you've got the bro variant of the Three Stooges. This almost laugh free comedy, a Netflix Original directed by Kyle Newacheck, is distinguished by a relentless level of outrageous yet strangely listless vulgarity. There are several penis jokes, including one requiring a high level of exposure on Mr. Devine's part. Several characters die gorily, prompting other characters to make observations like "He is full on spaghetti and meat sauce." There is a "why am I watching this" analingus sight "gag." The genuinely amusing comedian Joel McHale makes a cameo appearance in this mess. I hope that's because he lost a bet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The United States trade deficit narrowed in October to its lowest level since early this year, the government reported Friday, with exports to China hitting a high. The Commerce Department said the trade gap was 38.7 billion in October, the smallest since January, when it was 34.8 billion. Imports declined 0.5 percent, to 197.4 billion, while exports rose 3.2 percent, to 158.7 billion, the highest level in more than a year. Economists had forecast a deficit of 43.8 billion in October. The latest trade figures, including the smaller than expected deficit, could contribute to revisions to estimates for fourth quarter economic growth in the United States. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Just about anyone with a large dog can appreciate a vehicle with a large rear compartment. The trouble is, with all that space back there it can be difficult to keep things secured in one spot particularly an animal with a mind of its own. Many dog owners buy those cagelike steel partitions that mount just behind the rear seats of a sport utility vehicle, crossover or wagon, but what if you want to drive a car that doesn't look like a mobile animal control unit? Along with a cargo management system available in its all new Cherokee, Chrysler will offer another handy accessory: a folding pet enclosure. With cloth and mesh sides not unlike children's playpens or those pet trailers some dog owners tow behind bicycles the tentlike enclosure clips into the floor of the Cherokee's cargo area. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
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 ... an Hour, and I Like Biographies 'Santos Dumont' When to watch: Now, on HBO Go and HBO Now. Just when it seems as if you've watched everything, here's a Brazilian series (in Portuguese and French, with English subtitles) about the aviation pioneer Alberto Santos Dumont (played by Joao Pedro Zappa ) , complete with balloon high jinks. At moments, the mini series feels like dreamy steampunk thanks to sputtering machinery and fussy mustaches and Santos Dumont's own interest in Jules Verne but it's more of a romantically composed period piece. If you like airships, gloves, 1890s Paris or heroes who maybe haven't gotten their due in the United States, watch this. ... Two and a Half Hours, and I Like Banter Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman in "Much Ado About Nothing." 'Great Performances: Much Ado About Nothing' When to watch: Friday, at 9 p.m., on PBS. (Check local listings.) Sometimes Shakespeare adaptations set in the modern day are all corny eyebrow waggles and hip thrusts, and you feel as if you're an eighth grader being forced to politely endure. Mercifully, this recent "Much Ado About Nothing," filmed this summer at Shakespeare in the Park and featuring an all black cast, feels fresh and fleshed out, quick but not hurried. Danielle Brooks is the highlight as the snappy and savvy Beatrice, smarter than everyone's shenanigans but not immune to the draw of romance. ... Three Hours, and I Like Pebbly Beaches 'Back to Life' When to watch: Sunday at 10 p.m., on Showtime. This gentle British import finishes its six episode first season this weekend, with two half hour episodes airing Sunday night. But the show works best in a marathon viewing session, so fire up the On Demand or your streaming device and watch all six in a row. Daisy Haggard , who is also the show's creator , stars as Miri, a woman who was convicted of a serious crime many years ago and now, having been released from prison, is trying to build her life back in her small hometown . This isn't a misery mystery show, even though there are a lot of sweaters and cold beaches and people gravely considering dark secrets. Instead, it's a light dramedy, thanks largely to Haggard's warm and inviting performance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Ross Perot, who died Tuesday, has not been much in the news in the past few years. But his ideas surely have. His staunch opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s found a powerful echo two decades later when Donald Trump ran for the presidency calling for a wall on the Mexican border and dismissing Nafta as "perhaps the worst trade deal ever made." "We do the world's dumbest trade agreements," Mr. Perot told Vice President Al Gore in a televised debate in 1993. "You go back to the agreements we've done all over the world, you'd be amazed that adults did them." Mr. Perot's call for using tariffs, not Nafta, to force Mexico to improve its workers' standard of living is not unlike President Trump's attempt to use tariffs to force Mexicans to stop migrants seeking to come to the United States. Many of Mr. Perot's predictions about Nafta's impact notably his claim of the "giant sucking sound" Americans would hear as businesses shuttered operations in the United States proved either wrong or overstated. Paradoxically, however, his skepticism about lowering trade barriers has proved prescient. Some industries indeed relocated operations to Mexico or added new capacity there following Nafta. Mexico added many manufacturing jobs in the first several years after the deal. But in the five years after Nafta came into force in 1994, manufacturing employment in the United States increased, too, by 800,000. Many got their jobs from a surge in exports from the United States to Mexico. "If the U.S. is going to do business with another country, let's do business with a country whose people can buy things," Mr. Perot argued. Contrary to his predictions, Mexico did purchase American goods. One study by economists at the generally pro trade Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that a 10 percent increase in employment at a Mexican affiliate of an American company led to a 1.3 percent increase in its American jobs, as well as a rise in United States exports and spending on research and development. Consider the automotive industry, the sector that most deeply integrated its production facilities across North America to take advantage of Mexico's cheaper labor and the United States' technological capabilities. "By producing cheaper automotive parts and components on the 'near shore' in Mexico rather than truly 'offshore,' Mexican automotive plants helped sustain a competitive automotive industry across North America," the Center for Automotive Research noted in a 2016 study of Nafta's impact. Still, many of the promises and visions of Nafta proponents fell short, as Mr. Perot had warned. "If we keep shifting our manufacturing jobs across the border and around the world and deindustrializing our country, we will not be able to defend this great country, and that is a risk we will never take." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Mr. Gore's assertion that "we cut down on illegal immigration," as Nafta created better jobs in Mexico, sits uneasily alongside the fact that by the end of the Clinton administration in 2000 there were 4.5 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico living in the United States, up from two million a decade earlier. The prediction from Clinton administration officials that Nafta could vault Mexico into the select group of developed economies an aspiration shared on the other side of the border too never really came to pass. Perhaps the most resonant of Mr. Perot's observations, however, had to do with the broader impact of trade on American workers. "If we keep shifting our manufacturing jobs across the border and around the world and deindustrializing our country, we will not be able to defend this great country, and that is a risk we will never take," he said. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist who as chief economist for the Labor Department helped prepare Mr. Gore for the debate, said Mr. Perot's case was overstated. Not that many workers were displaced by trade at the time, the economy was creating other middle income jobs, and those displaced had opportunities to bounce back. What Mr. Perot said might not have been true then, but it is now, Mr. Katz said: "On substance, he was well ahead of his time." The "sucking sound" from Mexico was never really heard, but there certainly was one from China after it entered the World Trade Organization in 2001 a move supported by the Clinton and Bush administrations. And the jobs the labor market is creating tend to be in the service sectors toward the bottom of the pay scale. Research has found that the trade shock from China imposed much more significant and lasting costs on workers in some industries, devastating entire communities. In one study, published just after Mr. Trump entered the presidential race in 2015, a group of economists estimated that rising Chinese imports from 1999 to 2011 cost up to 2.4 million American jobs. Another analysis concluded that American workers in many industries and communities never recovered bumped into lesser paid jobs. Mr. Katz said things might have played out differently if Nafta had been accompanied by an agreement between businesses and unions securing more rights for workers, along with a safety net to cope with economic dislocations. "I think it was a lost opportunity," he said. A quarter century later, the anxieties over trade that Mr. Perot channeled are again dominating the political agenda. "Working people all across the United States are extremely angry," he told Mr. Gore. "There is no way to stop 'em. They are not going to tolerate having their jobs continued to be shipped all over the world." By the time of the debate, Mr. Perot had made one of his two presidential runs. Another businessman later sought the White House more successfully, with much the same critique. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
THIS is a story of a twice divorced businessman and his beautiful third wife. He is a man with a string of business failures to his name until he latches on to someone's else's idea and makes it a hit. He is a man who wiggles out of contracts, does anything to win and rewrites history to suit him. Eventually, his fortune is made by making his business synonymous with a now famous last name that he unabashedly promotes far and wide. It just wasn't his last name. Ray Kroc, the man credited with turning McDonald's into one of the most recognized brands in the world, is finally getting his star turn with a film, "The Founder," that opened nationwide on Friday. His third wife, Joan B. Kroc, is also getting her due thanks to a biography, "Ray Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away," which came out at the end of 2016. When it comes to their wealth and how they thought about it, the book's subtitle encapsulates the Kroc approach. Think of the money as a snowball getting larger as it is rolled up a mountain, then melting as it comes down the other side: Mr. Kroc amassed a huge fortune as McDonald's expanded; his wife spent the two decades after his death in 1984 giving most of it to philanthropic causes. Both the book and the film provide insight into the inner, overlooked and sometimes mocked lives of the mega affluent. It is true for many self made millionaires who becoming wealthy entails a good bit of luck and requires a myopic focus often at the sacrifice of everything else. And then comes the question: What you do with all that money when you could never spend it all? How did the Krocs amass their fortune? First, the rise up the mountain. Mr. Kroc wasn't a failed salesman so much as one who had not hit on a huge idea. Indeed, he was selling milkshake mixers when he came across the McDonald brothers and their assembly line system of serving burgers, fries and drinks at their walk up stand in San Bernardino, Calif. Mr. Kroc saw the franchise potential in what the brothers had created. He pulled them along, often reluctantly, until he found a way to buy them out and make what they had created seem like it had been his all along. "When's enough going to be enough for you?" his first wife, Ethel, asks him in the film. What motivated him was more complex than money. It was a desire to build something revolutionary, which, for good or bad, is represented by McDonald's. "He was a man in his 50s in the 1950s when his contemporaries were looking for a soft landing, and he had yet to ring the bell," said John Lee Hancock, the film's director. "He felt he was owed. When he saw it, he knew it." Mr. Kroc, as described in the film and the book, was a man with an entrepreneur's tireless energy. "He realized it was really about boots on the ground and owner operators and being out there at night picking gum off the parking lot," Mr. Hancock said. But as the years passed, Mr. Kroc seemed to convince himself that he alone had started McDonald's. To him, the start of the company was the first restaurant he opened, in 1954, in Des Plaines, Ill., not the stand the brothers created in 1940. The more he told the story, the more he seemed to believe it. There was no question that Mr. Kroc was committed to the business. He mortgaged and nearly lost his home when the franchising payments he negotiated with the brothers were not enough to pay for his expenses as he traveled to expand the brand. When the company went public in 1965, he became a multimillionaire and ultimately a billionaire. Yet he still had the same entrepreneurial drive to extend the McDonald's brand as far as it could go. How she spent down that mountain Mr. Kroc had built was far more haphazard. Her giving started the way it does for many philanthropists, with an issue close to her heart: alcoholism and its impact on families. Mr. Kroc drank the cheap Early Times whiskey, regularly and steadily. Fueled by it, he could be irascible. But as Mrs. Kroc gave more money to finance research, make films about the effects of the disease and push for changes in medical school curriculums, she did not let on that Mr. Kroc was himself an alcoholic. Secrecy was a hallmark of her giving. When a flood wiped out parts of the area in South Dakota in 1972 where she had lived with her first husband, she gave 50,000 on the condition that her name not be linked to the gift. It led to decades of giving to organizations and people who came to her attention. This culminated in 2003 in 2.7 billion being distributed at her death to various groups. Among the gifts: 1.5 billion to the Salvation Army, 225 million to National Public Radio and 500,000 to Auntie Helen's Fluff N' Fold, a laundry service that helps those with H.I.V./AIDS in San Diego. "There was this playful sense of mystery about her," said Lisa Napoli, the author of "Ray Joan." "The volume of money she had access to was unfathomable to her when she stepped back and thought about it. The anonymity was a way to protect herself from the deluge of formal requests." After Mr. Kroc's death in 1984, she did things her own way, some of which would be considered wrong by current philanthropic standards. She closed her foundation as a way to insulate herself from requests and to avoid bureaucracy, Ms. Napoli wrote. For philanthropists today, it is the foundation that provides protection. The donor can use it as a buffer and make the executive director the scapegoat if a gift isn't given. Mrs. Kroc was more hands on than most. "She preferred to toss money at a cause or concern that piqued her interest," Ms. Napoli wrote. "What kind of impact the gift would have generally seemed less important than the investment itself her trust in the act of giving." Yet she had a sense that she still wasn't doing enough and was determined to find the causes that moved her. She was not one to sit back and read grant proposals. "Most knew not to bother asking" for a donation, Ms. Napoli writes. "If they did, they'd be denied." It was driving around San Diego with a friend who was a former mayor that gave Mrs. Kroc the idea to pay for elaborate recreational centers in poor neighborhoods that the Salvation Army would run. For a center in San Diego, she gave 80 million in 1998 to build it and provide it with an endowment for its upkeep. But much of the last rush of giving, the 2.7 billion that was dispensed through her estate, came together when she was told she had brain cancer and would not live longer than a few months. "It's almost like she made a Christmas list," said Ms. Napoli, a former technology reporter for The New York Times. "You give 1.5 billon to the Salvation Army. But then, oops, here's this 225 million in a charitable remainder trust the girls didn't want," Ms. Napoli said, referring to Mrs. Kroc and her four granddaughters. "It wasn't like she said I love N.P.R. and I'm going to give them all my money. It's more fantastic that she had no connection," she said. In her giving, Mrs. Kroc was unlike today's billionaires, assiduously planning and tracking their largess for perpetuity. "She wasn't thinking about her legacy," Ms. Napoli said. "She just wanted it gone instead of thinking about the hassle. I love what Gates and Buffett have done with the Giving Pledge, but she did the same thing without making a big deal about it." Today she is thanked regularly on N.P.R. for her bequest and, to date, 26 recreational centers have been built with the money she left to the Salvation Army. Her approach may have been fast, but it was unique to her, and is still being felt. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Travelers on a budget will find plenty of options in Lisbon and Berlin, said Tom Meyers, the editor of EuroCheapo.com, which reviews inexpensive hotels in dozens of cities. "Lisbon offers sunshine, friendly locals, great food and the chance to stay in four star hotels for the price you'd pay in a two star hotel in other European capital cities," he said. "Meanwhile Berlin has recently experienced a flurry of construction of trendy hotels, nearly all of which offer rooms for under 125 euros a night." For example, Motel One, a stylish budget chain, just opened a hotel in western Berlin near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church with rates as low as EUR83, or 89 a night. Copenhagen is also getting new hotels this year, including Hotel Danmark, an 88 room boutique hotel from Brochner Hotels, with a rooftop terrace scheduled to open in May. Rates will begin at 1,250 Danish krone per room per night, or about 180, and will include organic breakfast, high speed Wi Fi and a glass of wine or port during a "wine hour." The bargains seem to be outweighing the hesitancy that had grown over vacationing in Europe after a spate of terrorist attacks over the last 16 months, including a deadly one in London last month when a man driving a sport utility vehicle mowed down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, then stabbed and killed a police officer outside Parliament. "Decreased demand for certain countries in Europe has meant dramatic growth for others," said Jean Fawcett, a spokeswoman for Abercrombie Kent. "Interest in France is slightly lower, but Spain and Portugal are booming, as are Scandinavia and Germany. Turkey is down, but Greece has roared back." The decision by British voters to leave the European Union and the resulting weakened pound have created renewed interest in travel to the United Kingdom, with some travelers taking advantage of the lower rates to splurge. While the pound rose after Prime Minister Theresa May called for a snap election on June 8, the value remains lower than last summer. "A room that cost 750 last year is now approximately 625 for the same room," said Philip Morris, the corporate director of revenue management at the Dorchester Collection. "Americans are astounded at the value their money currently has in the U.K." "I have many clients who travel to London and other cities in Europe and this summer they are staying at more luxurious hotels, staying in suites and dining in finer restaurants," said Eric Hrubant, the president of CIRE Travel, a division of Tzell Travel Group in New York City. He noted that clients who stay at the Savoy Hotel in London every July upgraded from a king room to a suite with a view of the River Thames for 1,991 a night including a fourth night free promotion for booking through Tzell a saving of 1,554 a night compared with last year's rates for the suite. Travelers looking to upgrade will also find bargains in business class and first class. La Compagnie, an all business class carrier that flies from Newark to Paris, is offering seats for 1,300 round trip this summer. Meridiana, which flies nonstop from New York to Naples and Palermo, Sicily, is offering round trip flights as low as 575 in coach and 1,550 in business class, with the best deals in April, May and October, said Joe Brancatelli, publisher of the travel site JoeSentMe.com, who alerts members to such sales. "Finnair is offering great deals in business class over its Helsinki hub to Russia and other European destinations," he wrote in a recent newsletter, pointing out that travelers must book 90 days in advance and stay at least 10 days to score the round trip deals, which range from 2,289 to Moscow to 2,849 to Helsinki from New York. But don't wait too long to make your booking. Some deals, like a flash sale to Iceland with flights as low as 269 from Boston, have already expired. And as summer gets underway, the best bargains will dry up fast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Behind the bull market that drove the Dow Jones industrial average to a record high on Tuesday is a startling gulf in the fortunes of some of the nation's largest corporations. The new peak came almost exactly four years after the Dow sank to a low of 6,547.05 in March 2009, during the depths of the financial crisis. But not every blue chip stock has bounced back. In fact, 12 of the 30 stocks in the Dow are still down from their peaks, some of them spectacularly so. That the Dow industrials could nonetheless advance to a record reflects how big gains in certain stocks, like I.B.M. and McDonald's, have more than offset large losses for others, like Bank of America and Alcoa. While other trends have emerged within the broader stock market consumer related stocks have fared relatively well, for instance, while financials and telecoms have done more poorly the divergence within the Dow points to a shift in financial power among the bluest of the blue chips. "Yes, stocks individually trade kind of the same in the short term, but over longer periods of time, the truth will out," said Nicholas Colas, the chief market strategist at the BNY ConvergEx Group. No member of the Dow industrials has done better in the stock market since the last peak than Home Depot. Shares of the company are 108 percent higher than they were in October 2007, closing at 70.47 on Tuesday. The company's market value has risen by 50 billion. Home Depot has benefited from a nascent recovery in the housing market, but much of the increase has come since the company's relatively new chief executive, Frank Blake, trimmed its expansion in China and instituted a new focus on customer relations. Because of quirks in the way the Dow is calculated, it is I.B.M. that accounted for the biggest slice of the Dow's gain 12 percent of it to be specific, according to Howard Silverblatt, the senior index analyst at Standard Poor's. Even as other big technology stocks like Cisco have struggled, I.B.M. has gained 75 percent since the 2007 high to close at 206.53 on Tuesday. The run for I.B.M. reflects the decision of Samuel J. Palmisano, the chief executive until 2012, to slowly shift the company's focus to software from personal computers, which have been unattractive as tablet computers have taken off. On the other end of the Dow is Alcoa. The aluminum producer has struggled as expectations for growth in the developing world have dimmed, stifling demand for the commodities. Its stock is still down 79 percent from the last market peak. 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. Bank of America fared only slightly better because of the legacy of the financial crisis and housing collapse. Even after it was bailed out by Washington, the bank has been hampered by subprime loans made before the crisis, as well as bad acquisitions, like the purchase of the subprime mortgage lender Countrywide in 2008. Bank of America is today worth half what it was five years ago. Its share price has fallen 78 percent since the Dow reached its previous high, closing at 11.55 on Tuesday. JPMorgan Chase, by contrast, made an early exit from the subprime mortgage market and consequently has emerged from the financial crisis stronger than many of its competitors, positioning itself as the nation's largest and most powerful bank. Its shares are up 4 percent since October 2007. The Dow's winners and losers are a reminder of how the nation's uneven economic recovery is playing out in the business world, and suggest the caution of investors even as the market has rallied. Even as the economic recovery has taken root, it has not helped lift the incomes of ordinary Americans. This has been a boon for companies that market lower cost goods, like McDonald's and Wal Mart. Both stocks are trading more than 60 percent higher than in 2007. Consumer stocks are also being helped by the heftier stock portfolios of wealthier Americans, who do a disproportionate amount of the buying. "This is not an income story, this is a wealth story," said Eric Green, an economist at TD Securities. It is household wealth that the Federal Reserve has hoped to buttress with its ongoing program of bond buying. By purchasing safe bonds, the Fed has tried to push investors into riskier investment and in turn make those investments more valuable. Now that the recovery is luring in more investors, strategists see signs of a greater willingness to take on risks within stock portfolios. Since the beginning of the year, the gains in the market have been more evenly distributed than they were over the last five years, with financial firms rising almost as much as consumer staples. "As the recovery proceeds, the performance will be more broad based," said Michael Gapen, the chief United States economist at Barclays. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In his novels "A Brief History of Seven Killings" and "Black Leopard, Red Wolf," Marlon James frequently conjures lost and forgotten voices. As one of the hosts of "Marlon and Jake Read Dead People," a new podcast whose first two episodes will be available Monday, he does something similar with the spoken word. In the audio series from Riverhead Books, James and Jake Morrissey, his editor, strive to breathe life into the literature of the past. The podcast is an outgrowth, both hosts said, of discussions that they've been having for years. "People kept walking in on me and Jake having arguments about books," James said in an interview. "The thing they noticed was that we were always arguing about no longer living authors as if they just wrote a book last week." "Marlon and Jake Read Dead People" has retained this spirit. Despite its focus on the work of dead authors, it's a far cry from stodgy academic discourse. Morrissey likened its tone to two friends "sitting at a bar talking about their favorite football teams over beers." For James, this irreverent approach avoids the pitfalls associated with both sides of the ever churning debate about the status of the literary canon. "Too often the canon means 'these books are untouchable and let's talk about them in that way,'" he said. "People fought about 'Moby Dick' in the 1800s. Why can't we fight about it now?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
If Bernie Bernstein were a real reporter, he would not last long at The Washington Post or any other legitimate news organization. Fortunately, he is not real. But an unknown number of people in Alabama got a call this week from a man claiming to be Mr. Bernstein, supposedly a reporter for The Post on a clumsy expedition to dig up dirt on Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for senator. Al Moore, a pastor in Creola who is not related to Roy Moore, played a voice mail from a private number to WKRG TV, a local news station. Hi this is Bernie Bernstein. I'm a reporter for The Washington Post calling to find out if anyone at this address is a female between the ages of 54 to 57 years old, willing to make damaging remarks about candidate Roy Moore for a reward of between 5,000 and 7,000. We will not be fully investigating these claims however we will make a written report. "The call's description of our reporting methods bears no relationship to reality," Marty Baron, the newspaper's executive editor, said in a statement. "We are shocked and appalled that anyone would stoop to this level to discredit real journalism." It should be noted that many people hear the heavily accented voice saying "Lenny Bernstein," which is the name of a health reporter at the paper. The caller is not him. We get it, a lot of people distrust the media and suspect the worst out of reporters. But here's what the call got wrong. Kris Coratti, a Washington Post spokeswoman, said the publication has a policy that specifically prohibits paying sources. (So does New York Times policy.) 'We will not be fully investigating these claims' That would be a very silly thing for a reporter to say. It would be like a plumber saying "we will not fully fix the leak in your pipe." "A journalist worried about his or her reputation would only want to put verified or supported claims in a story carrying their names," said Andrew Seaman, the ethics chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. An ethical reporter would also be unlikely to phrase their request the way the robocall did. Asking for someone "willing to make damaging remarks" would be brazenly partisan in a way most mainstream reporters try to avoid. "Journalists wouldn't normally ask such leading questions," Mr. Seaman said. "They're after the truth, whether that leads to a scandal or exoneration." There's also the matter of the name itself. It seems intended to play into anti Semitic sentiment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Wednesday through June 19) One of America's most popular dance companies presents five distinct programs for its spring season. The opening gala on Wednesday features a potpourri of work danced by members of the senior company, the junior company and students from the Ailey school, plus an extended cast for the Ailey staple "Revelations." On Thursday, the "21st Century Voices" program gives an encore to three works by Rennie Harris, Ronald K. Brown and Robert Battle that had their premieres last year and introduces "Untitled America: Second Movement," the next installment of Kyle Abraham's three part look into incarceration in America. Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., except Wednesday's gala, which is at 7; Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 and 7:30 p.m.; David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, davidhkochtheater.com. (Brian Schaefer) American Ballet Theater (through July 2) This weekend brings three more performances of "Le Corsaire," the jaunty adventure of a pirate wooing a lovely slave girl while fighting sultans and surviving a shipwreck. This ballet classic, which retains traces of Marius Petipa's choreography, trades in cliched 19th century exoticism, but is still a winning showcase of this company's talent. Monday brings "The Golden Cockerel," Alexei Ratmansky's sumptuous update of a popular comedic ballet by Michel Fokine for the Ballets Russes. Mr. Ratmansky tells the story of a magical rooster in Tsarist Russia with a heavy dose of mime and folk dance. Mondays through Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 8 p.m., with matinees at 2 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, 212 362 6000, abt.org. (Brian Schaefer) Brian Brooks Moving Company (Thursday through June 11) A plain white room conjures two opposing ideas: a blank slate, where anything is possible, or a sanitized place, where everything has already been erased. In his new work, "Wilderness," shown for the first time in New York and presented by the American Dance Institute, the choreographer Brian Brooks sets eight dancers loose in that double sided space to explore the dichotomy of freedom and repression through his appetizing mix of physical recklessness and intimacy. Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 255 5793, thekitchen.org. (Schaefer) Catamon Dance Group (Friday and Saturday) Jerusalem has a reputation as a serious, conservative city, but the Jerusalem based Catamon Dance Group wants you to see its playful side. In "Urfa," named for a chili spice, the holy city reveals its humor and sensuality. The soundtrack is a musical mosaic of famous Arabic singers, explicitly highlighting the Arabic presence in, and contribution to, the city's cultural life. It also celebrates an inclusive pluralism that the city struggles to uphold. "Urfa" is a lighthearted work, but it's a social statement too. At 7:30 p.m., Center for Performance Research, 361 Manhattan Avenue, near Jackson Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718 349 1210, cprnyc.org. (Schaefer) Dances for a Variable Population (Saturday) Dance is often considered an art form of youth, but the body is profound at any age. Dances for a Variable Population is a multigenerational company and educational organization celebrating this fact. Over three Saturdays, the company presents "The Phoenix Project" at sites across the city, featuring works by veteran dancers like Loretta Abbott, an early member of Alvin Ailey's company; George Faison, responsible for the moves behind "The Wiz"; and Jim May, who danced for Jose Limon. Saturday at 11:30 a.m., New York Botanical Garden, Bronx River Parkway and Fordham Road, the Bronx; June 11 at 11:30 a.m., Queensbridge Park, Vernon Boulevard and 41st Avenue, Queens; June 18 at 6 p.m., West Harlem Piers Park, 131st Street at Convent Avenue; dvpnyc.org. (Schaefer) Joyce Unleashed (Friday and Saturday; Wednesday through June 11) For this roaming series, the venerable Joyce Theater in Chelsea flexes a more experimental muscle at theaters around town. Anna Sperber, a Brooklyn based choreographer, presents the premiere of "Prize," which examines the shifting energy dynamics between a group and the individuals that comprise it (Friday and Saturday at New York Live Arts). Vanessa Anspaugh, also from Brooklyn, wonders what a feminist work looks like sans women in "The End of Men: An Ode to Ocean," performed by an all male cast, Wednesday through June 11 at Abrons Arts Center. Details are at joyce.org. (Schaefer) Raja Feather Kelly (through Saturday) Andy Warhol was inspired by pop culture and shaped it in return. The choreographer Raja Feather Kelly is inspired by both pop culture and Warhol, and has continued to probe those subjects in several works for his company, the Feath3r Theory, to smart and entertaining effect. His latest addition to this collection is "Andy Warhol's Tropico," which riffs on a short, provocative film by the singer Lana Del Rey. Her take was dark and serious; Mr. Kelly's is witty and poignant. At 8 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Schaefer) Performance Mix Festival (Monday through June 11) Three decades after its founding by Karen Bernard, the Performance Mix Festival lives on with a weeklong marathon of experimental performances featuring 40 artists representing numerous genres. There are multiple programs each evening, some thematic, like "Edgy NYC MTL" on Wednesday, featuring "wild feminist performance" by local artists and visitors from Montreal, and a solo by Ms. Bernard. On Thursday morning, participate in the festival tradition "Breakfast Mix," a conversation on art and politics over bagels. At various times, Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side, 212 352 3101, abronsartscenter.org. (Schaefer) Yvonne Rainer (through Saturday) For more than a half century, Ms. Rainer has been challenging and furthering the concept of dance. At 81, she's not stopping. As part of the American Dance Institute's inaugural presenting series in New York City, Ms. Rainer offers the latest version of a work in progress called "The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there's nothing left to move? (Moving On)," in which she tackles aging and mortality through choreography; an eclectic collection of text; and music by Gavin Bryars. She's joined in this alternately playful and contemplative endeavor by a captivating, multigenerational cadre of performers. At 8 p.m., the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 255 5793, thekitchen.org. (Schaefer) School of American Ballet (Saturday and Tuesday) Most members of New York City Ballet hone their skills and build trust and cohesion as students at the School of American Ballet, and the school's annual end of term workshop is always a nice opportunity to spot up and coming talent. The program this year includes "The Four Temperaments" and "Danses Concertantes," by George Balanchine, a co founder of both the school and the company; and "Les Gentilhommes," a ballet for seven men by the company's current director, Peter Martins. Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Tuesday at 7 p.m., Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center, 155 West 65th Street, 212 769 7406, lincolncenter.org. (Schaefer) Sidra Bell Dance New York (through Sunday) Sidra Bell pairs strong, aesthetically dramatic visuals with like minded movement. Her new work, "Lost Language," is an evening length performance that draws from the personal histories of her dancers. But don't expect any sense of narrative: The information is abstracted and scrambled to create an unfamiliar world more akin to dreams than memories. Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue, 646 312 4085, baruch.cuny.edu/bpac. (Schaefer) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Claire Messud's May 31 review of Maggie Doherty's "The Equivalents" made me eager to read about the origins of the Bunting Institute and the amazing women in its inaugural group of fellows. I was, however, distracted by Messud's opening paragraph, in which she described classic feminist books of the 1960s and early 1970s as "seminal." No doubt, Messud used the term to reflect its meaning, "containing or contributing the seeds of later development" (as Merriam Webster puts it), but that meaning is bound up with its root definition, "of, relating to, or consisting of seed or semen." The use of this gendered term to signify lasting influence is a reminder not only of the long history of associating cultural achievements with masculinity and the male "principle," but also of the erroneous scientific belief that male "seed" played the primary creative role in human reproduction. People may not be ready to retire "seminal" to signal "influential," but this letter is a small plea to do so when writing about significant achievements by women. Here are some alternatives: foundational, pathbreaking, groundbreaking or (retaining the seed imagery) generative. In the Letters column of June 14, two readers asked why the Summer Reading issue didn't recommend poetry. Well, here's one answer: No one reads it. Modern poets have thrown out the tools that make poetry live meter, rhyme, sound effects, traditional forms. As one writer put it eloquently, while considering T. S. Eliot's work, form is the electricity the poem plugs into. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
How Facebook and Google Could Benefit From the G.D.P.R., Europe's New Privacy Law SAN FRANCISCO In Europe and the United States, the conventional wisdom is that regulation is needed to force Silicon Valley's digital giants to respect people's online privacy. But new rules may instead serve to strengthen Facebook's and Google's hegemony and extend their lead on the internet. That could begin playing out next month, when Europe enacts sweeping new regulations that prioritize people's data privacy. The new laws, which require tech companies to ask for users' consent for their data, are likely to hand Google and Facebook an advantage. That's because wary consumers are more prone to trust recognized names with their information than unfamiliar newcomers. And the laws may deter start ups that do not have the resources to comply with the rules from competing with the big companies. In recent years, other regulatory attempts at strengthening online privacy rules have also had little effect at chipping away at the power of the largest tech companies, ultimately aiding internet giants rather than hurting them. Read more about what the new European privacy rules mean for you. That Facebook and Google may emerge stronger from all of this can seem like a distant prospect. The Silicon Valley companies have been under scrutiny for months for the way they collect and use people's data, with Facebook reeling from revelations that the political research firm Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of up to 87 million of its users. That led Congress to drag Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, to Washington this month for a grilling. Google, too, has grappled with questions about its online video service YouTube as it tries to duck lawmakers who fear that the search giant's data collection machinery is as robust as Facebook's, if not more so. At the same time, countries like Brazil and Argentina are exploring European style privacy regulations that will further test the companies' advertising based business models. United States lawmakers also showed more openness to regulating Silicon Valley during Mr. Zuckerberg's testimony this month. Yet past attempts at privacy regulation have done little to mitigate the power of tech firms. Consider what happened in Europe after earlier attempts at checking the power of Facebook, Google and others. In 2014, Europe's highest court ruled that people had the "right to be forgotten" online, meaning they could ask Google and other digital companies to delete search results about them. Since then, Google has instead become a chief arbiter of what information is kept online in Europe because the company itself is responsible for determining the fate of each deletion request. Another 2011 European law requiring websites to alert visitors to "cookie" trackers that collect data on browsing history has largely turned into a distracting annoyance rather than changing how companies operate. People often accept the tracking to get rid of the pop up warning without reading details about the tracking. Today, the uproar over data privacy has also done little to diminish the businesses or usage of Facebook and Google. Mr. Zuckerberg said this month that the Cambridge Analytica scandal had no meaningful effect on Facebook's business, which is expected to show sales growth when the company reports quarterly earnings this week. Alphabet, Google's parent company, said on Monday that its revenue rose 26 percent for its most recent quarter as its ad business continued to grow. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Spokeswomen for Facebook and Google declined to comment. In Europe, the coming data privacy laws are known as the General Data Protection Regulation. These rules will restrict how tech companies collect, store and use personal data from people across the region. The laws, which take effect on May 25, require companies to explain how they plan to use people's personal information in simple, unambiguous language and detail what other entities will gain access to that data. Companies can no longer hide behind convoluted and often ignored user agreements, but must obtain consent with a full understanding of the user where their data may go. Lawyers, consultants and businesses preparing for the privacy laws said that reining in the large technology companies was not the primary goal of the European legislation. But Nicolas Colin, a co founder and director at the Family, a Paris based start up accelerator, argued that "people tend to give that permission to companies they trust." He said that "stricter rules strengthen companies because they have that key asset that is trust." The European privacy laws may crimp targeted advertising by limiting the flow of personal data, but firms like Google and Facebook still have an advantage because advertisers are likely to turn to services with reach and enormous audiences akin to buying an ad during the Super Bowl. Facebook has more than 2.2 billion monthly users, and Google's YouTube has 1.5 billion monthly users. Giovanni Buttarelli, the European data protection supervisor who was involved in the creation of privacy rules, said much of the impact would be determined by regulators who enact the law and who will be up against well funded teams of lobbyists and lawyers. Google and Facebook will be overseen by the Irish data authority because their European headquarters are in Ireland. Mr. Buttarelli noted that Europe had staff of about 2,500 across all the countries working on the issue. "That's peanuts compared to the lobbyists in Brussels and Strasbourg," he said, referring to the cities where the European Commission and Parliament operate. "There are pros and cons to being a tech giant," he said. "We want to treat small and medium sized businesses differently." Yonatan Zunger, a former Google privacy engineer now working at human resources start up Humu, said Europe was holding Google and Facebook to "a much higher bar" when it came to gaining consent from users. These companies now cannot make data sharing a condition of using their products because consent needs to be freely given, whereas smaller companies are not held to that same standard, he said. Still, there are already signs the big companies are adjusting to the new privacy norms. Read more about how to parse the flood of G.D.P.R. related privacy notices in your inbox. Facebook last week rolled out a new consent form asking users globally not just Europeans to accept its targeted advertising and to allow features like face recognition. It has also limited access to data brokers such as Acxiom, in a concession to privacy advocates. Google, which spent years preparing for the new rules, has stopped scanning Gmail messages for keywords used to target advertising. And it recently introduced a new marketing product for publishers that shows ads based on the context of other articles or content on a website, instead of relying on personal information. In response, privacy critics have challenged Facebook's new consent forms, saying they are intended to continue encouraging users to share information widely. And Google came under fire for an updated European user consent policy that has open ended language, which critics said violated a tenet of European privacy rules that requires companies to ask for user consent in specific and explicit ways. "I'm worried that a lot of people have invested a lot of hope in G.D.P.R., and I'm not sure it's going to deliver," said Ben Scott, a senior adviser to the Open Technology Institute at New America, a think tank based in Washington. "It will all depend on how it's going to be enforced." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
How do genes influence our sexuality? The question has long been fraught with controversy. An ambitious new study the largest ever to analyze the genetics of same sex sexual behavior found that genetics does play a role, responsible for perhaps a third of the influence on whether someone has same sex sex. The influence comes not from one gene but many, each with a tiny effect and the rest of the explanation includes social or environmental factors making it impossible to use genes to predict someone's sexuality. "I hope that the science can be used to educate people a little bit more about how natural and normal same sex behavior is," said Benjamin Neale, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard and one of the lead researchers on the international team. "It's written into our genes and it's part of our environment. This is part of our species and it's part of who we are." The study of nearly half a million people, funded by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies , found differences in the genetic details of same sex behavior in men and women. The research also suggests the genetics of same sex sexual behavior shares some correlation with genes involved in some mental health issues and personality traits although the authors said that overlap could simply reflect the stress of enduring societal prejudice. Even before its publication Thursday in the journal Science, the study has generated debate and concern, including within the renowned Broad Institute itself. Several scientists who are part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community there said they were worried the findings could give ammunition to people who seek to use science to bolster biases and discrimination against gay people. One concern is that evidence that genes influence same sex behavior could cause anti gay activists to call for gene editing or embryo selection, even if that would be technically impossible. Another fear is that evidence that genes play only a partial role could embolden people who insist being gay is a choice and who advocate tactics like conversion therapy. "I deeply disagree about publishing this," said Steven Reilly, a geneticist and postdoctoral researcher who is on the steering committee of the institute's L.G.B.T.Q. affinity group, Out Broad. "It seems like something that could easily be misconstrued," he said, adding, "In a world without any discrimination, understanding human behavior is a noble goal, but we don't live in that world." Discussions between Dr. Neale's team and colleagues who questioned the research continued for months. Dr. Neale said the team, which included psychologists and sociologists, used suggestions from those colleagues and outside L.G.B.T.Q. groups to clarify wording and highlight caveats. "I definitely heard from people who were kind of 'why do this at all,' and so there was some resistance there," said Dr. Neale, who is gay. "Personally, I'm still concerned that it's going to be deliberately misused to advance agendas of hate, but I do believe that the sort of proactive way we've approached this and a lot of the community engagement aspects that we've tried were important." The moment the study was published online Thursday afternoon, the Broad Institute took the unusual step of posting essays by Dr. Reilly and others who raised questions about the ethics, science and social implications of the project. "As a queer person and a geneticist, I struggle to understand the motivations behind a genome wide association study for non heterosexual behavior," wrote Joe Vitti, a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute, in one essay. "I have yet to see a compelling argument that the potential benefits of this study outweigh its potential harms." In a way, the range of opinions by scientists who also identify as L.G.B.T.Q. underscores a central finding of the study: Sexuality is complicated. The study analyzed the genetic data of 408,000 men and women from a large British database, the U.K. Biobank, who answered extensive health and behavior questions between 2006 and 2010, when they were between the ages of 40 and 69. The researchers also used data from nearly 70,000 customers of the genetic testing service 23andMe, who were 51 years old on average, mostly American, and had answered survey questions about sexual orientation. All were of white European descent, one of several factors that the authors note limit their study's generalizability. Trans people were not included. The researchers mainly focused on answers to one question: whether someone ever had sex with a same sex partner, even once. A much higher proportion of the 23andMe sample about 19 percent compared to about 3 percent of the Biobank sample reported a same sex sexual experience, a difference possibly related to cultural factors or because the specific 23andMe sexual orientation survey might attract more L.G.B.T.Q. participants. Despite its limitations, the research was much larger and more varied than previous studies, which generally focused on gay men, often those who were twins or were otherwise related. "Just the fact that they look at women is hooray," said Melinda Mills, a professor of sociology at the University of Oxford, who wrote a commentary that Science published alongside the study. There might be thousands of genes influencing same sex sexual behavior, each playing a small role, scientists believe. The new study found that all genetic effects likely account for about 32 percent of whether someone will have same sex sex. Using a big data technique called genome wide association, the researchers estimated that common genetic variants single letter differences in DNA sequences account for between 8 percent and 25 percent of same sex sexual behavior. The rest of the 32 percent might involve genetic effects they could not measure, they said. Researchers specifically identified five genetic variants present in people's full genomes that appear to be involved. Those five comprise less than 1 percent of the genetic influences, they said. And when the scientists tried to use genetic markers to predict how people in unrelated data sets reported their sexual behavior, it turned out to be too little genetic information to allow such prediction. "Because we expect the sum of the effects that we observe will vary as a function of society and over time, it will be basically impossible to predict one's sexual activity or orientation just from genetics," said Andrea Ganna, the study's first author, whose affiliations include the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Finland. While many genetic variants tend to have the same effect in both men and women, Dr. Mills said, two of the five variants the team found were discovered only in males and one was discovered only in females. One of the male variants might be related to sense of smell, which is involved in sexual attraction, the researchers report. The other male variant is associated with male pattern balding and sits near genes involved in male sex determination. They emphasized that the study does not suggest that same sex sexual behavior causes or is caused by these conditions or characteristics, and that depression or bipolar disorder could be fueled by prejudicial social experiences. "We are particularly worried that people will misrepresent our findings about mental health," Dr. Neale said. "That right there is the big issue with looking for the genetics of sexual orientation social context could be a big part of the expression of the trait," said Jeremy Yoder, an assistant professor of biology at California State University, Northridge, who is gay and follows genetic research in the field. Dr. Neale said younger study participants were much more likely than older ones to report same sex sexual experiences, possibly reflecting increased social acceptance. He and others noted that older participants came of age when homosexual behavior was criminalized in Britain and that for much of their life homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric disorder. Dr. Reilly and others said such stark differences between older and younger participants show the trickiness of trying to draw representative biological information from a study population so strongly influenced by society's changing attitudes. People steeped in a culture that demonized same sex intimacy might only have the gumption to reveal it in a study if they were risk takers to begin with. Later, the researchers compared the genetic underpinnings of whether people ever had same sex sex with their answers to what proportion of same sex partners they had. They found there was little genetic correlation between answers to the "ever never" question and whether someone ended up having a bisexual mix of partners, said Dr. Neale, who sees those results as a genetic reflection of the variety of sexual orientations within the expanding alphabet of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. "I grew up in a highly religious evangelical family," said Dr. Wedow, a research fellow with the Broad Institute and Harvard's sociology department. "Being confused about not being attracted to women and being attracted to men, being convinced it was a sin and that I would go to hell." For a long time, "I definitely tried to pray it away, tried to like girls, tried to have girlfriends," he said. "This wasn't something I, of all people, would have chosen. There must be some sort of biological background." He concluded: "Saying 'sorry, you can't study this' reinforces it as something that should be stigmatized." Outside L.G.B.T.Q. groups that were consulted did not seem as strongly concerned as some of the Out Broad members, he said. Zeke Stokes, chief programs officer at GLAAD, who was shown the findings several months ago, said, "Anyone who's L.G.B.T.Q. knows that their identity is complicated and to have science sort of bear that out is a positive thing." Over all, Dr. Neale said he believes the study shows that "diversity is a natural part of our experience and it's a natural part of what we see in the genetics. I find that to actually just be beautiful." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
At NYU Langone Medical Center last week, a patient who went to the emergency room with a fever and who mentioned a recent visit to West Africa was given a mask and moved to a secluded area, said Dr. Michael Phillips, the hospital's director of Infection Prevention and Control. But further questioning revealed that the patient had not visited any of the affected countries, "so we stopped right there," Dr. Phillips said. At Bellevue Hospital Center last week, a patient was placed in isolation, but it quickly became clear that he did not have Ebola. An Ebola outbreak centered mainly in three West African countries Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia has infected more than 1,300 people and killed more than 700 of them. American health officials have advised against nonessential travel to the three countries, and have urged doctors to be on high alert for people who return from the region with symptoms like fever, diarrhea and vomiting. A Mount Sinai spokeswoman, Dorie Klissas, said that to protect the patient's privacy, the hospital was not making public his occupation, which country he had been in, whether he had been exposed to a patient with Ebola there, or whether he had close contacts like family members, friends or co workers who were also at risk. Officials said they expected the results of the tests for Ebola in 24 to 48 hours. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Ken Urban's "Nibbler," about teenagers in suburban New Jersey, is the kind of play that doesn't know where to set down its lunch tray. Produced by the Amoralists at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, it's part science fiction yarn, part horror tale, part sex farce, part memory play and, briefly, a musical. Sometimes it smokes behind the bleachers; sometimes it leads the pep rally. When it goofs off, it's pretty negligible. But when it takes itself seriously, it matures into a melancholy comedy about growing up and apart. After a brief introductory scene set in 2004, the play scurries back to the summer of 1992, the day after Adam, Tara, Pete, Matt and Hayley graduate high school. They're at a diner in Medford, N.J., singing Smiths songs, sharing disco fries, trying on the postures of adulthood. Later that night, having decamped to the playground to split a six pack, they hear a strange whooshing noise. "Was a meteor. Or something," Matt (Spencer Davis Milford) says. Still later, as he and Hayley (Elizabeth Lail) pet heavily on the floor of an abandoned house, that sound returns. They do what no concupiscent young adults should ever, ever do: They run toward it. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but when they next appear, Matt and Hayley are strangely changed. And oddly enthusiastic about George H. W. Bush. Soon other transformations ensue. Because "Nibbler" is by the Amoralists, the theater company most dedicated to stage undress, bare breasts and genitals adorn the action. There's frank sex talk though the boys' line of chat is more credible than a girl's request that her partner provide his "potassium based love seed" and some truly disgusting props. (Respect to anyone who can see this play and dare taste Country Crock spread again.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The romance novelist Alyssa Cole was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Jersey City, so she is familiar with how areas can change when longtime residents are pushed out and wealthier newcomers arrive. "Suddenly there's a huge apartment building, and things that had been landmarked were suddenly gone or converted into a trendy new bar," she said in an interview. Gentrification is central to the plot of her new book, "When No One Is Watching," out on Tuesday. It follows Sydney, a Black woman in Brooklyn who decides to offer historical tours of her beloved, rapidly changing neighborhood after watching an uninformed guide gloss over its African American roots. She reluctantly brings on Theo, a white man who recently moved in across the street, as a research assistant. But when people start disappearing, they become wrapped up in a nefarious plot threatening the neighborhood. Cole is best known for her romances, including the Loyal League and Reluctant Royals series, but "When No One Is Watching" is a thriller, a first for her. "I wanted the characters to be more morally gray, where I could explore some darker areas," she said. She also wanted to write without the expectation of a happily ever after ending. She spoke about the departure from her usual genre, how history informs her writing, what she loves about romance and why she thinks some conspiracy theories are having a moment. These are edited and condensed excerpts from the conversation. What was the inspiration behind this book? There are a few layers. I write historical romances set in a variety of periods of American history. But as I'm researching all these different periods, there's always anti Blackness. There's always these kind of incredibly, so cruel that they're ridiculous, forms of oppression. This book and Sydney's tour were a way of processing that. I'm not, like, "I'm here to teach you." I want to write a good story that's enjoyable and either romantic or scary, but underlying all of that there's a bit of anger that we have all this history that we're not taught that really clarifies why things are the way they are now, why people are protesting right now, why cops feel emboldened to act how they do right now. 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. Much of what's in the book is eerily prescient considering our present moment, with protests breaking out across the country. How does it feel to read those scenes now? It's been difficult, to be honest, because of course, you have to do the press tour, you have to talk about these things. And as you're doing this, you're seeing people being killed as you scroll through Twitter. You mentioned conspiracy theories, and I thought it was interesting that you mention Illuminati by name a few times in the book. A theme in the book was the questioning of reality who is believed, who isn't. What were you trying to demonstrate about the truths that we believe and that we don't? We all have the family member sending Illuminati videos in the group chat. Particularly within the Black community, there can be a robust conspiracy theory situation going on, because so much wild stuff has been done to us. At a certain point I can understand why people believe the Illuminati are doing these things. I was getting into all kinds of arguments with people during Covid, because they were like, "You can't tell them that you're sick, because they're going to come take you and do tests on you." On the one hand it's like, "Look, please tell people if you're sick." But on the other hand, I completely understand why you would believe that. There have been how many cases with evidence of testing on Black communities? Of course there are going to be conspiracy theories, and among those conspiracy theories there is the kernel of truth that testing has been done in Black communities. So why shouldn't they believe that this is a possibility? You typically write romance. Why did you decide to try a new form? When I'm writing romance, I'm leaning more into the good. In every romance you have to also make the reader feel bad sometimes, but you lean into certain beats that will make the reader feel happy, feel hopeful and excited. In this, it was fun to be able to lean into things that would make the reader feel anxious, because I was anxious in writing it. I could explore the kinds of things that can be done in the story when focusing on that slate of emotions as opposed to romantic emotions. Around the end of 2019, you shared the story of Courtney Milan's treatment within the Romance Writers of America, and shortly after the organization kind of imploded. Are you still involved with it? I just don't have the energy for it right now. It was such a huge and unnecessary betrayal that I don't know how soon I would be trusting that organization, or any organization, again. I know there are a lot of people trying to change things, but for a lot of people it felt, apart from the baseline betrayal, it felt similar to 2016. I know that they're trying to change and I wish them the best with that, but I personally am still not quite over what happened. "When No One Is Watching" is told through Theo, a white man, and Sydney, a Black woman. What did you hope readers would get from each perspective? I wanted to show Sydney spiraling, seeing what's going on. And I wanted to show Theo, who is generally an OK guy. He sees himself on some level, as far as race goes, as not racist and wouldn't be friends with racists, but also doesn't really see Black people or Black communities or think outside his preconceived notions. I wanted to show him having that realization that he has not been paying attention this entire time, even though he thought he was. Because I truly think that on some level, white people do not see Black people or people from other marginalized groups. This is why there are people out in the street protesting. This is why more people are trying to be allies in some way, because they are realizing all this stuff was happening right in front of their face, and they really didn't even notice it. Older people are really respected in the book as vessels of information, and I think it reflects an oral history tradition present in many communities whose voices are often left out of history. Did you grow up with an oral tradition? A lot of times family don't talk about the bad things that happened unless something really prompts them to talk about it. A lot of our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles have so many stories that we've never heard. We hear a fraction, but there are also some they would likely never tell you because they don't want to share something so terrible with you, because it's traumatizing. Or if they do tell you, they'll never talk about it again, and there's an understanding that you're never going to ask about it again. So there's an oral tradition, and then there's also the spontaneous oral tradition, of you have to be in the right place at the right time or you'll never know what happened in your family. I was thinking of how sometimes people had relatives who went to war, and they never knew they were involved in certain situations. And I think for a lot of marginalized people, they have, in a way, been to war within America, without having to leave where they were born. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Somewhere deep inside "Driven" Nick Hamm's based on real life crime caper lies a fascinating movie. We catch glimpses whenever Lee Pace, playing the automobile entrepreneur John DeLorean, gilds his ho hum dialogue in unexpected layers of foreboding. And we hear it crackling through the F.B.I. sting operation that would lead to DeLorean's 1984 trial for drug trafficking. To make that movie, though, would have required a less glib tone and an infinitely more focused script. Hamm's first mistake was to spin his vintage cars and cocaine story around the more shallow and less compelling of his two leads, a slippery crook named Jim Hoffman (Jason Sudeikis). Caught smuggling a planeload of coke, Jim becomes a reluctant informant for the F.B.I. Around the same time, he and his oblivious wife (a perky Judy Greer) also befriend DeLorean, a California neighbor whose fledgling company is experiencing cash flow problems around his famously winged, stainless steel car. Maybe Jim and his sleazy supplier, Morgan (Michael Cudlitz), can help? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
CANAAN, N.Y. Tara Mangini brushed the sawdust off a picnic table, plunked down a package of Good Plenty and started talking, very fast. She and Percy Bright, her business partner and boyfriend, were on a tight deadline, rehabbing a tiny 1920s cabin here into their own very particular image: a modern farmhouse style that has made them stars on Pinterest and Instagram and that Ms. Mangini describes simply as a collection of "stuff we think is cool." As is their habit, they were building and deploying that stuff with carte blanche from the owners to outfit the place right down to its flea market artwork and vintage hardcover books. Usually, they camp in the houses they renovate, moving from job to job. (Call them nomadic designers.) But this cabin was so small, they were sleeping in an Airbnb. It was early August, and within two weeks the cabin would be transformed. There would be Shaker style kitchen cabinets made by Mr. Bright. There would be dressers and tables harvested from the Brimfield Antiques Flea Market in Hampden County, Mass., a source as essential to Mr. Bright and Ms. Mangini's work as Georges Bank is to the regional fishing industry. There would be mismatched antique silver plate utensils in the kitchen drawers, and the beds would be dressed in neutral color linens from West Elm and Pine Cone Hill. And there would be napkins and towels and dishes, along with a welcome note written in pencil on a Post it: "We hope you love everything in this house as much as we do! Here's to years of memory making. Love, Jersey Ice Cream Co." With their camera ready good looks and extreme method, Ms. Mangini, 33, and Mr. Bright, 32, seem to have tumbled out of a hipster reality show: "The Homeless Home Designers." Their company name, Jersey Ice Cream Company, is courtesy of an antique embosser they bought at Brimfield on their second or third date. In the last four years, the couple has camped in (or near) eight houses, performing their meticulous D.I.Y. design mostly throughout the Berkshires and the Catskills, but also in Long Island, N.Y., Tennessee and London. Lovingly chronicled by Design Sponge, Remodelista, Lonny and Apartment Therapy, they have become design blog superstars. As Dr. Rachael Bedard, Client No. 3, said: "I was following them on Remodelista and I couldn't figure out: Were these people famous and expensive and inaccessible or just weirdos from Philly? Were they humans or some kind of reality show?" Ms. Mangini, elfin and energetic, was once a nerdy teenager, she said, who was voted most likely to be president by her New Jersey high school classmates. She and Mr. Bright, a lanky classics major who burned out on a Ph.D. track and then discovered a talent for graphic design, met just after the recession, in Philadelphia, where he had grown up. Mr. Bright had been laid off from a job in advertising (and she had quit a job in advertising), and both were struggling, existentially. He was collecting unemployment and fixing up a rowhouse he had bought just before he was fired; Ms. Mangini was waiting tables. Two weeks after an epic (and out of character) first date, that lasted more than 12 hours and involved the World Cup and many whiskey shots, Ms. Mangini said, they decided to drive to Brimfield to shop for his house. "All our friends were like: 'No, not a road trip! It's going to be over!'" Ms. Mangini said. "But the whole week we were like: 'What if we had an Etsy shop? What if we had a store and did our own designs?' By the end of the trip we're like: 'We're doing it. And it's going to be called Jersey Ice Cream Company, because we found this seal.' We're reusing everything else. Why not reuse someone's name?" Back in Philadelphia, they styled sections of Mr. Bright's house with winsome touches like a row of antique theater seats. They painted a bathroom wall with chalkboard paint and, in place of the real things, drew an ornate mirror, a soap dish with soap and a glass filled with a toothbrush and toothpaste. They sent photographs of these elements to Design Sponge, which posted them almost immediately. When they moved to a sublet in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for eight weeks and decorated it with their Etsy wares and flourishes, like a wall hung with pastel colored ribbons, Design Sponge posted that, too. (With two million daily visitors from all its platforms, the 12 year old site can be a marketing powerhouse for unknown designers.) It was an accident that led to their first design camping gig. While racing to move her parked car, Deborah Billinge, now 62, had fallen down the stairs of her Brooklyn apartment and broken her leg. She and her three teenage children had just moved, her husband was in Europe and Ms. Billinge was surrounded by unpacked boxes and hobbling on crutches. She saw Mr. Bright and Ms. Mangini's sublet makeover on Design Sponge and wrote them: "Maybe you could help me?" And after they did, winningly, she wondered, "Maybe you could help me upstate?" she said recently, recalling the episode. Ms. Billinge and her husband had bought a farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, closing on the place while she was still in the hospital. She had seen the house only twice. "I sent them to pick up the keys, and they moved in," said Ms. Billinge, who is a landscape designer. "Because I do gardens, I understood that you can accomplish more when the owner isn't around. I gave them free rein. I had no choice, but I'd also seen what they could do. They would leave little notes, 'We've finished this with love.' It was all very, very emotional. And what a joy to not have to make those decisions, like, if you spend 30 more, you can get this faucet." When the house was finished, after five months of live in work, it featured what would become Jersey Ice Cream Company signatures: smoky plaster walls, reclaimed wood furniture made by Mr. Bright, a farm style kitchen with an apron sink, and curated objects and dishware. Except for a plumbing emergency, a new door frame and a botched floor refinishing (which they ended up fixing), the couple did all the work themselves. It is an exquisite renovation. "It's a D.I.Y. ethos with impeccably modern taste," said Grace Bonney, the founder of Design Sponge. A word about money. Ms. Billinge had a budget of 45,000, out of which the couple paid themselves a scant few thousand dollars each, even though the job took the better part of five months. They have since learned to charge for their time and materials, as other designers do. In late 2013, Dr. Bedard, a geriatric and palliative care doctor in Manhattan, and Gideon Friedman, 33, a real estate developer, bought a 220 year old farmhouse in Earlton, N.Y. "We wanted to do something fantastic," said Dr. Bedard, 34. Since college, the couple had a fantasy about a communal living space for family and friends they called the Magic Egg. In Earlton, they had found their egg. "Tara and Percy came over for lunch," Dr. Bedard said. "We made macaroni and cheese, and we just really liked them. At that point, they were still basically homeless, and they moved in upstate and lived there on and off from January to June. It was totally nuts: They moved walls, knocked out closets, laid in floors, built beds." Finding a place to sleep between jobs has been stressful. For the last five years, Ms. Mangini and Mr. Bright have been living out of suitcases, juggling three storage spaces in two states, and shuffling clothes, antiques and objects. "We had a kind of breakdown," said Mr. Bright, and in June rented a one bedroom apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It's now filled with 20 chairs, more or less, a mattress and not much else. By late September, the two had spent less than two weeks there, and not at the same time. That same month, Devin Friedman, 44, the editorial director of GQ (and no relation to Gideon Friedman), and Danielle Pergament, 42, the executive editor of Allure magazine, booked Ms. Mangini and Mr. Bright to build a new kitchen for their late 18th century farmhouse in the Berkshires. "They are so funny and so brash," Mr. Friedman said. "And their aesthetic is so great: If you were cool, you would have this stuff in your house." But just as they were about to start, Mr. Bright came down with a nasty respiratory infection. "Percy can barely walk, he's laying on the table," Ms. Mangini recalled, "and I'm like, 'It's cool. We got this.' Percy's like, 'I have to go to a hospital.' And, fun fact: I don't drive." Mr. Bright recovered, the couple made a Brimfield run in July, and by early August they had finished Mr. Friedman and Ms. Pergament's kitchen (Mr. Friedman was particularly impressed with the accessories: succulents in weathered clay pots) and were knee deep in the Canaan cabin. They had more help than usual: Amber Jane Eaton, 24, who had become a fan from following them on Instagram, drove from Crane, Tex., to work free. Ms. Mangini and Mr. Bright are pining a bit, they said, for their leaner days. In a few weeks, they will return to a complicated job in the Hamptons, after having spent late August and all of September working on a lovely shingled house in Rockport, Me. In Long Island, an architect is involved, along with a landscape architect, a lighting designer and the owners themselves. "It's made us appreciate how we normally work," Ms. Mangini said. "It's so weird having clients have the final say in everything." The job has also made them realize, she said emphatically, that they do not want to become a traditional design practice or morph into a larger company. A few months ago, when they were in Philadelphia working on the new studio apartment Mr. Bright had bought to run as an Airbnb, they posted this rather mournful Instagram update: "Back to basics today and it feels so good. Just two kids, some orbital sanders, dirty chambray shirts and TGIF pizza guiding the way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
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. Rudolph Giuliani this week directly contradicted past public statements from President Trump when he told Fox News that Trump was aware of Michael Cohen's hush money payment to Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels and that Trump had even reimbursed Cohen for it. On "The Tonight Show," Jimmy Fallon said that maybe Giuliani, not Clifford, was the one who needed some incentive to stay quiet. "Last night Rudy Giuliani went on Fox News and revealed that Trump knew about and paid for Stormy Daniels's hush money. Even Kanye was like, 'You should probably stop talking.'" JIMMY FALLON "Giuliani said that Trump knew about and paid for Stormy Daniels's hush money which explains Trump's newest idea: paying Rudy Giuliani 130,000 in hush money." JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Didn't manage to score tickets to Yeezy Season 3? Cheer up: There are many more ways to take part in the fashion week festivities. On Thursday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the e commerce aggregator Lyst will team up with Uber on a giveaway celebrating the diversity of New York style. Enter the code FINDNYFW in the app for the chance to request a goody bag filled with items shoppable on Lyst (like, say, an oh so downtown Maiyet geometric block scarf) tailored to the neighborhood you're in. Later in the day, enjoy free eye mask applications and try a new lifting eye serum ( 240 for half an ounce) at the new La Mer boutique at Bergdorf Goodman. Diesel will unveil Nicola Formichetti's new retail concept at a 2,800 square foot Madison Avenue store that is meant to be reminiscent of the foyer, living room and wine cellar of a (rather large) New York apartment. It will carry a store exclusive metallic leather cross body bag ( 450) and zip around sneakers ( 450). At 625 Madison Avenue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
As the nation emerges from a lengthy economic slump, the bustling city of Sao Paulo is beginning to see sales and prices rebound. This modern, seven bedroom house sits on a third of an acre in Cidade Jardim, an upscale neighborhood in the South Zone of Sao Paulo, Brazil, just west of the city center and the Pinheiros River. Built in 1976 and renovated in 2018 and 2019, the approximately 8,600 square foot villa is awash in natural light thanks to several glass walls and sliding doors. Outside, lush landscaping creates a sense of privacy overlooking Sao Paulo's skyline. The house is "surrounded by green," said Luiza Cazarin, a partner and the director of international relations with Axpe Imoveis Especiais, an affiliate of Christie's International Real Estate, which has the listing. "This property is an oasis that offers peace and quietness amid the chaos of such a busy city," Ms. Cazarin said. The villa is clad in peroba, a Brazilian wood known for its durability and vibrant color, said Luc Bouveret, who is selling the home with his husband. Peroba also lines the outdoor pool deck, which sits at the foot of the house's covered patio. To the right of the entrance hall, several steps lead down to a half bathroom with Italian marble walls and a rock crystal sink, and to a combination TV room and office. To the left, the kitchen has an eating area and a bright color scheme. A second dining area in a veranda adjoining the kitchen has glass walls on two sides and a third wall draped in Brazilian flowering plants. A staircase leads up to five bedrooms three en suite and two that share a bath four of which have panoramic city views. Downstairs, on the garden level, a 1,400 square foot, rectangular room can be converted to a guest apartment or office because it has a separate entrance, Mr. Bouveret said. There is also a bathroom with a shower, for the pool, on this level. The house includes two spaces currently used as staff quarters: a bedroom and bathroom above the kitchen, and a studio apartment with a kitchenette in the garden level. The property also has a six car garage, an attic and ample storage. Cidade Jardim (or "Garden City") is among the most affluent neighborhoods in Sao Paulo, a city of about 12 million residents near the Atlantic coast of Brazil. It is home to Sao Paulo Jockey Club, which hosts horse racing as well as outdoor concerts, and Shopping Cidade Jardim, a sprawling luxury mall. Sao Paulo/Guarulhos Governador Andre Franco Montoro International Airport is about 25 miles northeast. Sao Paulo's real estate market is entering a phase of recovery after years of falling sales volume and prices, said Eduardo Zylberstajn, the head of research at the Institute of Economic Research Foundation (FIPE), which tracks Brazil's housing market. Home prices in Sao Paulo have fallen roughly 15 percent since their peak in 2014 when adjusted for inflation, he said. Between early 2016 and late 2017, a national economic crisis and unstable monetary policy led to a downturn in transactions. Interest rates had risen to around 14 percent, discouraging investment, and banks tightened credit. Since then, as interest rates have decreased, sales have rebounded. A drop in the interest rate this summer, to 6 percent, is expected to push prices higher, Mr. Zylberstajn said. As of July 2019, the average home price in Sao Paulo was 8,952 reals a square meter (about 200 a square foot). The area with the highest average was Cidade Jardim, at 25,116 reals a square meter ( 570 a square foot), according to FIPE's residential sales index. Guilherme Makansi, co owner of Anglo Americana Imoveis, a luxury brokerage in Sao Paulo, said low cost homes "suffered less" during the economic crisis, because government incentives encouraged construction of affordable units and helped low income home buyers. But the luxury market "cooled off" as those buyers waited out the high central bank interest rates, he said. Mr. Makansi said the market is now "in recovery," with the total number of units sold in Sao Paulo having grown by 32 percent between June 2018 to June 2019 compared with the 12 previous months, according to the city's real estate union. That volume approaches precrisis figures from 2012 to 2013, he said. Marcello Romero, CEO of Bossa Nova Sotheby's International Realty, said his firm lost clients during the crisis as high income buyers put off purchases in Sao Paulo while the economy stabilized. But he has seen renewed activity in the past six months. "They are starting to come back," he said. That is due in part to more development, Mr. Romero said, much of which has focused on smaller units thanks to government regulations aiming to meet demand by increasing density. Mr. Romero said new properties have displaced older ones as the city's most desirable type of housing, and prices have adjusted accordingly. "Ten years ago, the new developments were cheaper than the secondhand. Now it's the opposite," he said. As for the high end, Martim Cazarin, a partner and the commercial manager of Axpe Imoveis Especiais, said Sao Paulo's best neighborhoods include Itaim Bibi, Cerqueira Cesar, Jardim Paulista, Jardim America, Jardim Europa, Vila Nova Conceicao, Vila Olimpia, Pinheiros and Vila Madalena. The average price in these neighborhoods is around 371 a square foot, with luxury properties fetching between 650 and 1,860 a square foot. Mr. Romero said property investors and hedge funds buy real estate in Sao Paulo, but that he hasn't encountered any regular buyers since 2014. Mr. Makansi said his firm's international clients have historically come from the U.S., Portugal, Germany, France and, in a smaller scale, Latin America, including Argentina. But the most about 88 percent were Brazilian. In the past six months, his firm has seen buyers from France and Portugal. Mr. Cazarin estimated his firm has not had any foreign clients in the past three years. Real estate purchases in Brazil are partly restricted for foreigners, said Guilherme Feldmann, a lawyer with the Sao Paulo firm Feldmann Advocacia. "Foreigners can acquire land, houses and apartments in Brazil," Mr. Feldmann said, but there are limits on where and how much they can own. Properties on the coast and bordering other countries face restrictions, for example. Mr. Feldmann said notaries process real estate transactions. Hiring a real estate lawyer isn't required, but highly recommended, at a cost of around 2 percent of the purchase price. The lawyer can perform due diligence and help with "avoiding frauds, scams and problems that may undermine the legal security of the transaction," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco. The social media company appended fact checking labels to President Trump's tweets for the first time on Tuesday. OAKLAND, Calif. Twitter continued to add new fact checking labels to hundreds of tweets, even as the Trump administration issued an executive order to curtail the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content posted on their platforms. Twitter's move escalated the confrontation between the company and President Trump, who has fulminated this week over actions taken by his favorite social media service. Twitter on Tuesday had appended fact checking labels for the first time to two of Mr. Trump's tweets about mail in ballots, rebutting their accuracy. In response, Mr. Trump accused Twitter of stifling speech and declared that he would put a stop to the interference. But Twitter has doubled down. Late Wednesday, it added fact checking labels to messages from Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry who had claimed that the coronavirus outbreak may have begun in the United States and been brought to China by the U.S. military. Twitter also added notices on hundreds of tweets that falsely claimed a photo of a man in a red baseball cap was Derek Chauvin, an officer involved in the death of George Floyd, an African American man who died this week after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police. The Twitter label alerted viewers that the image was "manipulated media." The skirmish between Twitter and Mr. Trump shows that a backlash against large tech companies, which had receded in the initial phases of the pandemic, is now back in full force. The Justice Department has also recently signaled that it is preparing to bring an antitrust case against Google, perhaps as soon as this summer. The executive order "seems designed to punish a handful of companies for perceived slights," said Jon Berroya, chief executive of the Internet Association, a lobbying group representing many of the major tech companies. "It stands to undermine a variety of government efforts to protect public safety and spread critical information online through social media and threatens the vibrancy of a core segment of our economy." A Twitter spokeswoman said that the tweets modified on Wednesday contained "potentially misleading content" and that the fact checking was consistent with the company's approach this month. In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, also said he would not back down from the fact checking effort. "We'll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information," he wrote. The executive order aims at protections granted to technology services under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The law gives tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter broad immunity from liability for content created by their users. As Mr. Trump and other conservative figures have claimed that social media companies are biased against them, Republican lawmakers have proposed modifications to the statute. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has argued that to maintain Section 230 protections, social media services should be required to submit to a third party audit to ensure their content moderation systems are politically neutral. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who wrote the law, said Mr. Trump was threatening Section 230 to "chill speech and bully" the big tech companies into giving the White House more favorable treatment. "He's clearly targeting Section 230 because it protects private businesses' right not to have to play host to his lies," Mr. Wyden said in a statement. "Efforts to erode Section 230 will only make online content more likely to be false and dangerous." The executive order is likely to face legal challenges. Harold Feld, the senior vice president of Public Knowledge, a policy nonprofit group, said the order appeared to be intended to limit speech on social media that disagreed with the president. That was "literally the worst case scenario that the authors of the First Amendment were afraid of," he said. Twitter's confrontation with Mr. Trump has also opened new fissures in Silicon Valley. Mr. Dorsey has doubled down on fact checking tweets, but Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, has distanced his social network from that effort. "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," Mr. Zuckerberg said in a taped television interview that ran Thursday morning on Fox News. His comments were at odds with some of his own company's actions. In the past, Facebook, too, introduced fact checking labels, using third party services to review potentially false information. The approach has been scattershot and uneven, and critics have argued that third party fact checkers have been unable to keep up with the billions of pieces of content on the social network. Facebook has also said it would not allow posts that facilitated voter fraud or misinformation intended specifically to suppress voting. "We're talking about this as if it's about fact checking, but it's not," said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a left leaning media watchdog. "It's about whether platforms will facilitate fraud that undermines civic engagement." In a statement, Facebook said it opposed modifying Section 230 because that would "restrict more speech online, not less." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
After a frenzy of congressional action to rewrite the tax code, salesclerks and chief executives are calculating their gains. Business was treated with the everyone's a winner approach that ensures no summer camper goes home without a trophy. Some got special prizes. Cruise lines, craft beer and wine producers (even foreign ones), car dealers, private equity, and oil and gas pipeline managers did particularly well. And perhaps the biggest winner is the industry where President Trump and his son in law, Jared Kushner, made their millions: commercial real estate. House and Senate Republicans, in their divergent bills, both offered steeply reduced rates to corporate giants, partnerships and family owned firms across the board. But when it came time to eliminate special breaks or impose tighter standards, real estate was generally excused from the room. Most businesses were hit with new limits on deductions for interest payments, but not real estate. Most industries lost the ability to defer taxes on the exchange of similar kinds of property, but not real estate. Domestic manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies lost some industry specific breaks, like the tax credit for so called orphan drugs, in exchange for lower rates. The real estate industry ended up with an even more generous depreciation timetable, allowing owners to shelter more income. And in a break from previous practice, rental and mortgage interest income qualifies for a lower tax rate, the kind of special treatment traditionally reserved for long term capital gains and certain qualified dividends. "Real estate does great," said Daniel N. Shaviro, a professor of taxation at New York University Law School, who as a congressional staff member helped write the 1986 tax overhaul. "It's hard to imagine what they might have asked for that they don't have." Real estate investment trusts, known as REITs, have extra cause for celebration. They are companies that make money by owning, financing and operating real estate. Both the Trump Organization and Kushner Companies, the family real estate firm partly owned by Mr. Kushner, have important deals with such trusts. A REIT functions like a mutual fund, but instead of assembling a portfolio of stocks, it allows people to invest in a bundle of real estate assets, both buildings and mortgages. More important is the way they are taxed. They pay no separate business tax and instead are required to pass along virtually all of their taxable income to shareholders, who pay the tax when they file individual returns. The Republican proposals sharply lower the top tax rate on the income that REITs and other businesses pass through to their owners and shareholders. Currently, those investors must pay taxes on that income at rates as high as 39.6 percent. Under the Senate provision, it would drop to 29.6 percent. (The House bill drops the rate even lower, to 25 percent.) That's a big savings, and a big advantage. Those receiving mortgage interest income outside a REIT would have to pay taxes based on ordinary rates. The Trump Organization is a partner in two of its largest properties with Vornado Realty Trust, a REIT based in New York City. In January, the White House appointed Vornado's founder and chairman, Steven Roth, to develop a trillion dollar infrastructure package as a leader of an advisory council that has since been abandoned. Vornado has also been associated with Kushner Companies, helping bail out its stake in 666 Fifth Avenue, the Kushners' flagship property, when it was in danger of defaulting on a more than 1 billion loan. Kushner Companies has teamed up with another New York based REIT, SL Green Realty Corporation, in several deals. They are collaborating on a development in Brooklyn, and SL Green lent Mr. Kushner's firm 85 million in 2016 to refinance its slice of the former headquarters of The New York Times in Manhattan. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. A Kushner Companies spokeswoman said the firm had not done any lobbying on the tax bill. Kurt Koegl, a partner at the national accounting firm Marcum, noted that a lower corporate tax rate would enable other kinds of companies to better compete with REITs. "That's a great deal, and it's going to create giant new tax shelters," said Steven M. Rosenthal, a tax expert at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The tax code generally tries to prohibit this kind of tax rate arbitrage, he added. The REIT advantage is one example of a broader issue: different tax treatment for similar activities. Writers of the congressional bills promised that their overhaul would simplify the tax code, but the intricacies of the changes create countless opportunities for gamesmanship. "Suddenly, there are a dozen different tax rates that apply to different businesses, in different industries, and to different investments," said Adam Looney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Treasury Department official. That means opportunities to come out ahead by making deals between these different groups or structuring businesses to take advantage of various provisions. That could lead to a flurry of restructuring and asset shifting that has no purpose other than lowering the tax rate. One business might borrow money to invest in another, or buy equipment and treat it as an expense and then lease it to another company. Ideally, the tax code is meant to encourage businesses to make sound economic decisions, and forgo activities whose sole purpose is to avoid taxes. But the proliferation of different business rates rewards loophole hunting and earnings shifting. House and Senate Republicans are still wrangling over the final version, and every comma is subject to change. But to some tax experts, an unlevel playing field that gives certain types of business and structures advantages over others is a bigger concern than a tax break for real estate or any other industry. "It's easy to look at the deals that are explicitly in the bill like the special treatment of auto dealer financing or whistle blowers and call out 'loophole,'" Mr. Looney of Brookings said. "But the big problems are the things that aren't specifically noted in the bill, but will arise because of tax planning." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The 2020 campaign ad wars have begun. CNN rejected a pair of provocative ads from President Trump's re election campaign on Thursday, saying the 30 second spots deriding the House Democrats' impeachment inquiry one deeming the effort "nothing short of a coup" contained inaccuracies and unfairly attacked the network's journalists. It is unusual but not unprecedented for television networks to reject a political advertisement from a presidential candidate. On the eve of last year's midterm elections, major channels, including Fox News, removed a commercial from Mr. Trump's political team that portrayed immigrants as a violent threat. But political ads tend to be contentious in the latter stages of a campaign not 13 months before Election Day. And CNN's decision could foreshadow a longer conflict between Mr. Trump's political aides and network executives who are tasked with reviewing the accuracy of the information that reaches viewers. The Trump ads were recently posted online as part of what the campaign said was a multimillion dollar advertising buy on national cable stations and digital platforms. One, "Biden Corruption," repeats unsubstantiated allegations about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s activities in Ukraine. "Joe Biden promised Ukraine 1 billion if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son's company," a narrator intones over grainy footage of Mr. Biden, a leading Democratic presidential candidate. After referring to Democrats in general, the narrator adds, "And their media lap dogs fall in line," as clips are shown of the CNN anchors Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo and the network's chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta. The MSNBC host Rachel Maddow appears as well. No evidence has surfaced that Mr. Biden intentionally tried to help his son Hunter Biden by pushing for the dismissal of the Ukrainian prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. Members of the Obama administration, as well as other international leaders, had sought Mr. Shokin's removal amid accusations that he ignored corruption claims. Mr. Shokin was voted out by the Ukrainian Parliament in 2016. Read about the issues behind the impeachment inquiry here. CNN said in a statement on Thursday that the commercial failed to meet its advertising standards. "In addition to disparaging CNN and its journalists, the ad makes assertions that have been proven demonstrably false by various news outlets, including CNN," a network spokesman said. Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for Mr. Trump's campaign, responded that the ad was "entirely accurate and was reviewed by counsel." "CNN spends all day protecting Joe Biden in their programming," Mr. Murtaugh wrote in a statement. "So it's not surprising that they're shielding him from truthful advertising, too." Later, CNN said it had also rejected another Trump ad, "Coup," which presents the impeachment inquiry as an effort "to undo the election, regardless of facts," and accuses House Democrats of "fabricating evidence." 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 ad contains assertions of fact about the whistle blower complaint that have been refuted by the Intelligence inspector general," CNN said. "In addition, it is inaccurate to use the word 'coup' to describe a constitutionally prescribed legal process." Read more about "coup" claims used by Mr. Trump's supporters. The moves by CNN are likely to inflame longstanding tensions between the news channel and the president, who denounced the network at multiple public appearances this week. At a White House news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Trump called CNN staff members "corrupt people." CNN said it had agreed to carry a third commercial submitted by the Trump campaign, which focuses on the president's accomplishments in office. Mr. Trump has said his request for help digging into the Bidens was legitimate and part of a "perfect" phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. On Thursday, Mr. Trump publicly asked China to investigate the former vice president. The impeachment inquiry has spurred a surge in campaign spending since it was announced on Sept. 24. Need to Impeach, a group founded and funded mainly by the billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, said this week that it planned to spend 3.1 million on television and digital ads urging Republican senators to remove Mr. Trump. The Trump campaign has spent more than 1.6 million to advertise on Mr. Trump's Facebook page in the past seven days, including as much as 21,000 on the "Biden Corruption" ad, according to the platform's ad library. Facebook does not fact check speech from politicians, generally allowing it on the platform "even when it would otherwise break our normal content rules," Nick Clegg, a Facebook executive and former British deputy prime minister, said in Washington last week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
SAN FRANCISCO The ride hailing company Lyft went public in March in a blaze of hype. But it stumbled quickly and its shares slid below their offering price amid questions about whether the company could make money. On Tuesday, it answered the question by saying 2019 would be its most money losing year yet. In its first financial results as a public company, Lyft posted a loss of 1.14 billion for the first quarter, compared with a loss of 234.3 million in the same period a year earlier. The widening loss was driven by a 894 million charge for its stock based compensation. Excluding that expense, the loss was 211.5 million. The company's revenue rose 95 percent to 776 million. Brian Roberts, Lyft's chief financial officer, said the losses would continue this year, which would be "our peak loss year and then we will move steadily towards profitability." That's because Lyft plans to invest heavily in new branches of its business, including its short term rentals of electronic bikes and scooters, its autonomous vehicle development and its rollout of driver centers that provide vehicle maintenance and other services to drivers, he said. Lyft reported its earnings days before the scheduled initial public offering by its rival Uber, the largest technology company of the last few years to barrel onto the stock market. Uber has set a pricing range for its offering that values it at up to 91 billion. But it, too, is deeply unprofitable and has prompted questions about whether ride hailing which involves hefty spending to attract drivers and passengers is a sustainable business in the long run. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When Tyler Anastopoulos got in trouble for skipping detention at his high school recently, he received the same punishment that students in parts of rural Texas have been getting for generations. Tyler, an 11th grader from Wichita Falls, was sent to the assistant principal and given three swift swats to the backside with a paddle, recalled Angie Herring, his mother. The blows were so severe that they caused deep bruises, and Tyler wound up in the hospital, Ms. Herring said. While the image of the high school principal patrolling the halls with paddle in hand is largely of the past, corporal punishment is still alive in 20 states, according to the Center for Effective Discipline, which tracks its use in schools around the country and encourages its end. Most of those states are in the South, where paddling remains ingrained in the social and family fabric of some communities. Each year, prodded by child safety advocates, state legislatures debate whether corporal punishment amounts to an archaic form of child abuse or an effective means of discipline. This month, Tyler, who attends City View Junior/Senior High School, told his story to lawmakers in Texas, which is considering a ban on corporal punishment. The same week, legislators in New Mexico voted to end the practice there. Texas schools, Ms. Herring fumed, appear to have free rein in disciplining a student, "as long as you don't kill him." "If I did that to my son," she said, "I'd go to jail." Steve Harris, the superintendent of the City View Independent School District in Wichita Falls, declined to comment in detail on the case but said his investigation of the school had found no wrongdoing. Corporal punishment, Mr. Harris pointed out, has long been "one of the tools in the toolbox we use for discipline." Up until about 25 years ago, corporal punishment in public schools could be found in all but a handful of states, said Nadine Block, the founder of the Center for Effective Discipline. Prompted by the threat of lawsuits and research that questioned its effectiveness, states gradually started banning the practice. According to estimates by the federal Department of Education, 223,190 children were subjected to corporal punishment in the 2005 6 school year. That was a nearly 20 percent drop from a few years earlier, Ms. Block said. That is enough to prompt advocates like Mr. Dunne to push to end the practice there. One bill being considered by the Legislature would permit corporal punishment only if parents specifically consent to it for their children. Another would ban it in schools altogether. "Hitting children in our schools with boards is child abuse, and it promotes child abuse at home," said Mr. Dunne, a former math teacher in Houston. "Parents see it's legal in schools and think it's O.K. to do at home." In New Mexico where more than a third of the school districts permit corporal punishment, according to a local children's legal services group legislators approved a paddling ban this month. Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, has not indicated whether she will sign the bill. Opponents of the measure, like State Senator Vernon D. Asbill, worried that a ban would tie teachers' hands and make it harder for them to control students. "With parental supervision and parental approval, I believe it's appropriate," said Mr. Asbill, a Republican and a longtime teacher and school administrator from Carlsbad. "The threat of it keeps many of our kids in line so they can learn." But State Senator Cynthia Nava, a Democrat and a school superintendent from Las Cruces who supports the ban, said schools were no place for violence of any sort. "It's shocking to me that people got up on the floor and argued passionately to preserve it," she said of corporal punishment. "We should be educating kids that they can't solve problems with violence." Calls to end corporal punishment have gotten louder of late, even in states unlikely to pass a ban. In Mississippi, the family of a teenager who was paddled in school has filed a federal lawsuit. The suit, filed against the Tate County School District, claims that corporal punishment is unconstitutional because it is applied disproportionately to boys. The teenager's lawyer, Joe Murray, is also representing the family of another student who was paddled at the same high school this month. In that case, the boy was struck so hard that he passed out and broke his jaw, Mr. Murray said. An administrator who oversees the school district, James Malone, would not comment but said boys typically got in more trouble than girls. In Louisiana, where corporal punishment is also legal, controversy erupted this year after the board of trustees for St. Augustine High School, the lone Catholic school in New Orleans and perhaps the country that still paddled its students, decided to ban the practice. St. Augustine was under pressure from Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans, who has said that paddling promotes violence. But the school's administration and alumni want the practice reinstated. They argue that paddling for minor offenses has been instrumental in helping St. Augustine build character and achieve high graduation rates. The school's students have also voiced their support, holding a march in New Orleans to demand that the archbishop reverse his position. Jacob Washington, a senior and the student body president, helped organize the march. "This is a tradition for the school," he said. "It's how the school has been run for 60 years. Just the seniors alone we can tell the difference between our class and some of the newer students who didn't receive the same discipline." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Timothee Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson in "Dune," one of 17 films Warner Bros. will release in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously next year. LOS ANGELES In a startling move that marked the biggest challenge yet to Hollywood's traditional way of doing business, Warner Bros. announced on Thursday that 17 movies its entire 2021 slate would each arrive simultaneously in theaters and on its sibling streaming service, the underperforming HBO Max. Rather than having to wait roughly 90 days, the period that studios have long given theaters to play films exclusively, HBO Max subscribers will receive instant access to big budget extravaganzas like a "Suicide Squad" sequel, "Godzilla vs. Kong," "Dune" and "The Matrix 4." Other movies speeding to living rooms next year include Lin Manuel Miranda's "In the Heights," Clint Eastwood's "Cry Macho," the next "Conjuring" horror film, "Space Jam: A New Legacy" and a "Sopranos" prequel called "The Many Saints of Newark." While the move amounted to 17 shots in the arm for HBO Max, which has struggled to attract subscribers since its introduction in May for 15 a month, it was also a strikingly grim comment on the future of movie theaters. Even with a widely deployed vaccine, which is expected in the coming months, WarnerMedia does not believe that moviegoing in the United States will recover until at least next fall, an assessment that stands in sharp contrast with what other major movie studios and multiplex chains have signaled. "Like a lot of businesses, theaters are in a tough spot right now," Jason Kilar, WarnerMedia's chief executive, said by phone. "We are all in the middle of a pandemic, and we are all trying to figure our way through it. One of the things we can do to be helpful to them is to provide them with a steady stream of big budget, well told stories." Mr. Kilar said the company had no plans to be flexible; even if the coronavirus threat receded dramatically in the summer, the new distribution model will stand for the year. There is one wrinkle: Each movie will appear on HBO Max for only one month before leaving the service. At that point, films will cycle through the usual release "windows," leaving theaters when interest has run out and heading to iTunes, DVD and points beyond, eventually cycling back to HBO Max. Toby Emmerich, chairman of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group, also pointed to the pandemic as driving the "day and date" distribution model. "It's not clear that full normal will return even well into the fourth quarter of next year," Mr. Emmerich said in a separate interview. "The epidemiologists who have been consulting with the company have painted a cautious picture." When pressed on whether the plan was temporary or permanent, Mr. Emmerich added, "We have to see what happens. We're not predicting much of anything beyond next year." (In a statement, Ann Sarnoff, chief executive of the WarnerMedia Studio and Networks Group, called it a "unique, one year plan.") Mr. Emmerich emphasized that Warner's movies would continue to have traditional theatrical releases outside of the United States, where HBO Max does not currently exist. "These are global releases with normal theatrical marketing campaigns," he said. HBO Max will begin rolling out overseas next year. Many people in Hollywood saw WarnerMedia's positioning of its move as disingenuous: It will be almost impossible to go back, and it may force other studios to abandon the old model. Fans trained to expect immediate gratification will not be eager to return to the days of giving theaters an exclusive period to play movies. AT T, which owns WarnerMedia, also has made it clear that Mr. Kilar's top priority is building HBO Max into a full fledged competitor to Netflix, which has 73 million subscribers in the United States and almost 200 million worldwide. HBO subscribers hit a record 38 million at the end of September, but only about 8.6 million subscribers had activated HBO Max, according to AT T regulatory filings. As it moves to bolster HBO Max, WarnerMedia is almost assuredly giving up hundreds of millions in box office revenue, which means that some of its big budget movies ( 200 million or more in production costs, plus tens of millions of dollars in marketing spending) will lose money, regardless of their reception by audiences. But AT T is mostly interested in the financial windfall that it stands to make in the longer term by turning HBO Max into a success. The Walt Disney Company, for instance, has taken a beating from the pandemic, with its theme parks struggling in particular. But Disney shares are nonetheless trading at all time highs because of the success of Disney over the last year. Next week, Disney will hold an investor day and outline its own plans for supercharging its streaming services, which include Hulu. Disney is also expected to shift release plans for coming films, making titles like "Cruella" instantly available online. How Theranos changed tech coverage: 'You can't just buy what they're selling.' One meme stock lawsuit against Robinhood is dismissed, but others loom. Join us for "The Future of Entertainment Is Now" a TimesTalk about how the pandemic has redefined entertainment with TikTok's Kudzi Chikumbu and Wave Entertainment's Adam Arrigo. Thursday, December 10. 2:30 p.m. E.T. 11:30 a.m. P.T. 7:30 p.m. G.M.T. R.S.V.P. here. As soon as Warner's plans became public on Thursday, WarnerMedia began marketing HBO Max subscriptions as a holiday gift. "I got you something nice this year," the company said on Twitter, linking to a slick video of film clips and a message about how "the biggest premieres" next year will be coming to theaters and HBO Max on the "Exact. Same. Day." Mr. Emmerich downplayed the threat to theaters. "We really believe that in markets where HBO Max exists and theaters are also open that many consumers will chose the theatrical experience," he said. "We hope that this will prove to be a win win for movie fans in the United States, for filmmakers because their movies won't sit on a shelf and get stale, for theater owners who can rely on a stable supply of movies, for HBO Max subscribers." Wall Street disagreed with that assessment. Shares of AMC Entertainment, the world's largest theater chain, fell 16 percent on Thursday, while Cinemark dropped 22 percent. Imax and the Marcus Corporation also lost significant value. It was a framed as a singular event, and theater owners, desperate to fill screens with appealing content, happily agreed to it. "Given that atypical circumstances call for atypical economic relationships between studios and theaters, and atypical windows and releasing strategies, AMC is fully onboard for Warner Brothers' announcement today," Adam Aron, chief executive of AMC Entertainment, said at the time. He was much less welcoming to an entire year of this practice, which provides no additional incentives to theaters. "Clearly, WarnerMedia intends to sacrifice a considerable portion of the profitability of its movie studio division and that of its production partners and filmmakers to subsidize its HBO Max start up," Mr. Aron said in an email. "As for AMC, we will do all in our power to ensure that Warner does not do so at our expense. We have already commenced an immediate and urgent dialogue with the leadership of Warner on this subject." Another major theater chain, Cinemark, indicated that it had been caught by surprise. "In light of the current operating environment, we are making near term booking decisions on a film by film basis," a Cinemark spokesperson said. "At this time, Warner Bros. has not provided any details for the hybrid distribution model of their 2021 films." The Warner Bros. plan stands in stark contrast to one pursued by Universal Pictures, which has agreed to continue providing theaters with an exclusive play period of at least three weeks. Universal has signed deals with AMC, Cinemark and Canada's top exhibitor, Cineplex, whereby films will bow exclusively in theaters for at least 17 days before moving to premium video on demand. The theater chains will each receive a cut of revenue from PVOD sales. In her statement, Ms. Sarnoff said that Warner Bros. was "extremely grateful to our filmmaking partners for working with us on this innovative response to these circumstances." That was news to many of the company's partners, including Legendary Pictures, the production company behind "Godzilla vs. Kong." Legendary and other producers were not consulted and only notified at the last minute (if at all), resulting in a day of furious phone calls behind the scenes. Mr. Kilar said that filmmakers should be encouraged by this new way of releasing films. "I have a lot of confidence in the theatrical model, and I have a lot of confidence in the subscription model," Mr. Kilar said. "In many ways, you could see a future where budgets and ambitions continue to grow because that which you make more convenient tends to be used more often." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Authors' websites aren't just for reviews any more. A quick survey of the writers on the fiction best seller list turned up Spotify playlists, blogs "written" by their dogs, movie reviews and more. , whose latest book, "Blue Moon," enters the fiction list at No. 1, links to a company offering custom roasted coffee named after his iconic character Jack Reacher. (As Janet Maslin noted in a recent profile of Child, Reacher "downs amounts of coffee that would put most people on life support.") Coffee is "Reacher's favorite drink, and mine, no cream, no sugar," Child writes. "I love this blend, and Reacher would too." A pound will set you back 14.95. John Grisham, the author of the No. 2 novel, "The Guardians," doesn't promote merchandise on his website but he does write letters to his readers there, including a recent one that begins, "A bit of advice: Decline the invitation to zip line across a crocodile infested body of water." Michael Connelly, whose latest thriller, "The Night Fire," is at No. 3, has a website brimming with odds and ends, including a helpful list of police and F.B.I. acronyms, a Spotify playlist featuring the music his characters listen to and a photo gallery of the real sites mentioned in his books. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Yasser, who is about 15 years older than Tony, is Palestinian. Though he has lived in Beirut for decades, his legal status is ambiguous, and the neighborhood where he lives with his Lebanese wife, Manal (Christine Choueiri), is classified as a refugee camp. In spite of their mutual hostility, he and Tony have a lot in common. They are both hard workers and good husbands, and each is a victim of his own stubbornness as well as of the other's provocations. Tony is more of a hothead, while Yasser is more likely to seethe in silence, but they share an inclination to value dignity more than common sense and to see humiliation as a kind of existential death. Manal tries to reason with her husband, as does Tony's wife, Shirine (Rita Hayek), who is pregnant with their first child. Neither man really intends for things to escalate the way they do, nor can either figure out how to back down without a loss of face that would also feel like a betrayal. And so the movie's focus shifts from the private world of work and family into the court system and the news media. Tony hires a prominent Christian lawyer (the wonderfully histrionic Camille Salameh), while Yasser is represented by a woman (Diamand Bou Abboud) who turns out to be spoiler alert! Metaphor alert! the opposing counsel's daughter. As that plot twist suggests, "The Insult," is not always subtle. As the trial progresses, it becomes more programmatic, confronting the viewer and the characters with reminders of past atrocities that sometimes feel heavy handed. But the film derives some of its vital energy from the way that it often seems to argue with itself. The grace and precision of the performances not only Mr. Karam's and Mr. El Basha's, but also those of the actors playing the colleagues, advocates, surprise witnesses and bureaucrats who populate an increasingly crowded story push against the director's fondness for grand statements and obvious ironies. This internal tension brings home the complicated point Mr. Doueiri is determined to make, which is that personal matters are neither separate from political concerns nor identical with them. At several moments, you expect a sentimental, uplifting solution, the hug or handshake that assures everyone that bygones will be bygones, that deep down we're all the same. But that would be a lie. The more complicated truth is that everyone who holds a grudge does so for a reason, and fears that letting go of it would mean the loss of something precious. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
SAN FRANCISCO For nearly two years, Facebook has appeared bulletproof despite a series of scandals about the misuse of its giant social network. But the Silicon Valley company's streak ended on Wednesday when it said that the accumulation of issues was starting to hurt its multibillion dollar business and that the costs are set to continue playing out for months. Facebook reported on Wednesday that growth in digital advertising sales and in the number of its users had decelerated in the second quarter. The company's leaders, including its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, added that the trajectory was not likely to improve anytime soon, especially as Facebook spends to improve the privacy and security of users. Facebook has grappled with months of scrutiny over Russian misuse of the platform in the 2016 American presidential campaign and the harvesting of its users' data through the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The results were among the first signs that the issues had pierced the company's image and would have a lasting effect on its moneymaking machine. In response, Facebook's stock tumbled more than 23 percent in after hours trading, erasing more than 120 billion in market value in less than two hours. If those losses hold up through regular trading on Thursday, the one day stock decline will be the biggest in Facebook's history. "This is a fork in the road situation for Facebook," said Daniel Ives, chief strategy officer and head of technology research for GBH Insights, a marketing research firm. He said the challenges included regaining public trust as well as increasing the number of people joining Facebook and the time they spent on the platform. Facebook reported a 42 percent increase in revenue and a 31 percent jump in profits for its second quarter, compared with a year earlier. But the revenue of 13.2 billion missed Wall Street estimates of 13.4 billion. In addition, Facebook said its daily active users rose 11 percent from a year earlier to 1.47 billion, compared with 13 percent growth in the previous quarter. On a conference call to discuss earnings, Mr. Zuckerberg said profits would most likely take a further hit because the company planned to spend more on security. And the chief financial officer, David Wehner, said revenue growth would substantially decline for the rest of the year, partly because Facebook planned to give people more options with their privacy settings, including letting them limit the kinds of ads they saw. "Looking ahead, we will continue to invest heavily in security and privacy because we have a responsibility to keep people safe," Mr. Zuckerberg said on the call. Other factors have also hurt Facebook's number of users, Mr. Zuckerberg said, including tough European rules that went into effect in May to protect people's online data. The legislation, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, cost Facebook about one million users in Europe, he said. The shift in Facebook's business fortunes follows a series of crises that began in late 2016 with the revelations that it had become a prime distributor of misinformation. That has since been exacerbated by questions over the company's role in securing private user data, its effect on the democratic process and its commitment to stemming disinformation on the site. Mr. Zuckerberg has had to appear in front of lawmakers, has apologized profusely and has tied himself into knots explaining what he will and will not allow to appear on the social network. After these events, several senior leaders have departed Facebook, including a board director, its chief information security officer, and its vice president of communications, marketing and public policy. This week, Colin Stretch, who led Facebook's investigation into Russian election interference and who testified before Congress last year on Facebook's behalf, said he would leave the company by the end of the year. Facebook is now gearing up to face one of its biggest tests to date: ensuring that no one meddles in the 2018 midterm elections through the social network. Mr. Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that he was hopeful Facebook would be able to limit disinformation and fake accounts, and that the company was able to do so in elections this year in France, Mexico and Germany. "We are much more confident that we are going to get this right in the elections in 2018," he said, adding that the company had begun proactively looking for fake accounts. Facebook has other bright spots. Even with its loss of market value after reporting its financial results, it may not lose its spot as the fifth largest publicly traded company in the United States. The company held a nearly 140 billion lead on Berkshire Hathaway, the sixth largest, at the end of trading on Wednesday. And through Wednesday's market close, Facebook's stock had gained 43 percent from its lows in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March. Still, the challenge will be how to stem further losses. Given all the questions about the misuse of the platform, "to explain that there are a couple million people who chose not to continue using Facebook is unsurprising," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Ballet tends to be the most orthodox of the art forms, and often the most reactionary. How heartening to renew acquaintance with the uninhibited and adult eccentricity that BalletX, a company devoted to new choreography, seems to encourage. This Philadelphia company, appearing this week in a program of three works at the Joyce Theater, also has vividly appealing, highly individual dancers. It's easy to miss how meticulous they are in style but impossible not to recognize their richness and immediacy. The first work on the program, "Show Me" (2015), is by Matthew Neenan; the third, "Big Ones" (2016), by Trey McIntyre. Much of the freshest choreography in American ballet is made by these two men. They certainly cover the country. In recent years, New York has offered lively, fresh, odd, engaging work by these two, brought by companies based in California, Idaho and Tennessee. And both have made important dances for BalletX, the smaller, younger and far more experimental of Philadelphia's two chief ballet troupes. They also choreograph for the other one, Pennsylvania Ballet, where Mr. Neenan is resident choreographer. Perhaps the most offbeat choreographer in American ballet, Mr. McIntyre, who often employs pop or rock music, is now in top form. When Pennsylvania Ballet visited the Joyce for a week this spring, his "The Accidental" (2014) set to taped songs by Patrick Watson was the program's highlight. Now his "Big Ones" (whose premiere I reviewed in Philadelphia this February), accompanied by Amy Winehouse recordings, proves marvelous. This year has already brought some excellent fresh choreography; "Big Ones," as well as Alexei Ratmansky's very dissimilar "Serenade After Plato's Symposium," new with American Ballet Theater this May, are two of the best examples. "Big Ones" is truly weird, but it takes you inside its weirdness so soon and so surely that it shows many different humors: It's funny, touching, poignant, stirring. At its premiere in February, the audience members didn't laugh; they do now, and at the end they give it the evening's biggest ovation. The principal peculiarity is derived from the costumes, designed by the ubiquitous team Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, also here at their finest and most idiosyncratic. The dancers, wearing tunics and dark brown leather hot pants, then tie on bonnets with two foot tall vertical ears, antennae, tufts or horns. Most of the performers retain these throughout, but for two of them, removing the headgear becomes dramatically significant, so that it's easy to assume that these bizarre hats are symbols and to ask what they symbolize. The absurdity of conventionality? When Chloe Felesina, the protagonist here, removes hers, we're so used to seeing everyone wearing these high rise headpieces that her act becomes one of courage and self assertiveness. When she removes Daniel Mayo's we've watched him become her boyfriend it's traumatic; he's vulnerable, exposed. It's better, though, not to explain meanings here. There's a multiplicity. Several ideas certainly arrive from the Winehouse songs, with her chesty voice planting their words so firmly into our ears: This is a ballet that starts (irresistibly) with the words, "They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no, no, no." The world onstage is marvelously, darkly realized by Drew Billiau's lighting; we're in some club. The bonnets all start out on a row of stands at the back, and the crazy conformism of the piece is established by the unquestioning way the dancers, as they enter, don the headgear as a matter of course. Drama here derives principally from the dances, which are as odd as the costumes. It's hard to believe now that nobody at the February premiere laughed out loud when Zachary Kapeluck, the tallest and biggest man onstage, threw up his heels in a fast little knock kneed Charleston step; the Joyce audience chuckled happily at the sight. The men and women here are absurd, silly, often adorable, but not really impressive. Ms. Felesina both tough and lonely at first seems damaged in the way that she cannot quite connect with any of them, but the duet in which she and Mr. Mayo find intimacy is the piece's biggest, sweetest surprise. Mr. Neenan's "Show Me," new at the 2015 Vail International Dance Festival, was performed this February in a revised, expanded form. It has now acquired more moment by moment immediacy, has been abbreviated (nearer to the Vail original), and nicely establishes the striking individuality of these dancers at the evening's outset. Its main structural units are two quartets three men and a woman, three women and a man from which all kinds of nice ideas about gender and drama start to arise; when another man and a woman enter, the structure changes and changes again. This is characteristic 21st century ballet choreography. Sexuality is not the premise, but, when couples do form, some of them happen to be same sex. Mr. Neenan was one of BalletX's two founders 11 years ago. As a choreographer, he has, admirably, several different styles and many compositional formats; "Show Me" is never dull. Though it's not among his strongly individual pieces, it proves a happy, quirky introduction to the program. The centerpiece, Jorma Elo's "Gran Partita" (2014), is marvelously danced. Though the choreography seems at first to be another example of BalletX eccentricity, it abounds in cliches and draws attention to its own deliberate unmusicality. Using taped music by Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart and Bach, it sets big, showy movements and emphatic dynamics where the music is subtle and often gentle. But Mr. Elo, who in other ballets has often made his dancers look bad, here allows BalletX's precise rigor and fullness of tone to emerge. This is a company whose skills continually deepen and mature. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"RainForest," a dance made by Merce Cunningham in 1968, has decor like no other theater piece: helium filled silver pillows by Andy Warhol that he called "Silver Clouds." Encountering a flock of them that year at a Warhol exhibition, Cunningham at once spotted their theatrical potential. Four to six of them are moored to the stage, where they sway or bounce like forest undergrowth. Most, however, are loose; some get sent flying by performers. It's not uncommon during the action for a cloud to float out into the auditorium. In a recent email exchange, Albert Reid, a dancer in the original cast, remembered that a balloon did precisely that at the first New York performance, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Jasper Johns "got up and batted it back onstage," he wrote. (Mr. Johns was the Cunningham company's artistic adviser from 1967 to 1980.) Many audience members have followed suit since. On April 7, "RainForest" and its Warhol pillows return to the stage when the piece joins the repertory of the Stephen Petronio Company at the Joyce Theater. Warhol wanted the dancers to be naked. This idea, Mr. Johns said in a 2012 email interview, had "no appeal for Merce." Mr. Johns recounted, "Merce showed me an old pair of his tights that were ripped and torn. I imitated these." The attire he designed was flesh colored allover tights in which he made rips while the dancers wore them, either with a razor blade or large scissors. As is customary with Cunningham (1919 2009), though, music and dance are mutually independent. (David Tudor's score has the same name as the dance, though with a lowercase F: "Rainforest." When he heard Cunningham's title, he said, "Oh, then I'll put a lot of raindrops in it.") Successive generations of dancers have loved performing this piece: It challenges and extends them. When Cunningham choreographed, he concentrated on specific movements and spatial relationships; for performers, these have opened up rich aspects of drama, atmosphere and climate. "RainForest" has just six dancers: three men, three women. Cunningham gave each one choreography so individualized that it makes the performers as distinct as characters in a play. They might even belong to separate species. All share some degree of wildness. An element of the feral, though different in each case, pervades their movement. The word "wild" recurs in every dancer's description of the piece. To Carolyn Brown, Cunningham's most celebrated and longest serving co dancer, he gave a rushing entrance and made her swing upside down with her legs hooked over Mr. Reid's arm; Mr. Reid calls it "the Tarzan duet." During the course of the dance, dancers depart and others arrive. None of the three women are onstage at the same time as the others. The connections between them make the piece structurally something like Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde": A and B have a duet, then B and C, and so on. "RainForest," though, doesn't consist only of duets. One character alone (this was Cunningham's role) returns to the stage, and it is with his final solo that the piece ends. Beyond exits and entrances, the world in "RainForest" keeps changing. When the curtain rises, the man dancing the Cunningham role is near the front with a woman sitting at his feet with raised knees bent. (Her role was created by Barbara Lloyd, but it was Meg Harper who danced it longest with Cunningham.) When the second man, who was Mr. Reid, approaches, she turns her attention to him. Mr. Reid wrote: "It would have been difficult not to feel some drama in 'Rainforest,' just from the movement we were given. I had this in my head: Merce was in his 'kingdom' with Barbara in his realm/possession. I was an interloper, challenging him in some way, and took over with Barbara as Merce left the scene." Gus Solomons Jr. "came on later, a second interloper, but that's as far as my 'story' goes." "I think," Mr. Reid recalled, that Cunningham "assumed that what he wanted was in the movement itself, and he was very specific about how he wanted that performed, with its pelvic bumps." It's the initiating force of the spine, the articulation of the back and the focus of the eyes that are crucial to each character here, but in quite different ways. Though Cunningham was a man of mysteries, in this case he allowed some of the source inspiration for "RainForest" to become known. Long fascinated by anthropology, he had been reading Colin Turnbull's book "The Forest People" (1961), about his field research in what was then the Belgian Congo. Cunningham later talked to David Vaughan, his company's archivist, about Turnbull: "He was a tall man, and he lived with these pygmies for a long time, so that some kind of relationship developed," he said. "He gave this marvelous picture of himself trying to follow them in the forest, and they would go under everything, and he would constantly be hung up by a branch some way, and they would turn and laugh at him." But Cunningham's title is revealing in another way. Ambiguity imbues all his work: In his mind, he punningly connected Turnbull's experience with pygmies in the Congo to his own upbringing in Washington State. Interviewed in 2003 by the choreographer Trisha Brown, he remarked: "The Olympic Peninsula has a rain forest. It's just astonishing. My parents took us there when we were children. I was this big, and the ferns were this big over you. It was just a marvelous experience. I think it's the only rain forest in the United States, and it's temperate. That means that it's wet. And it drips. You go in and there's the sense of dampness and warmth, but also the presence of greens, the color. I had two brothers, and we were small then. And I remember we would see little animals. I don't know what they were. They were obviously what would be in that situation. But scurrying." Out of these different sources, Cunningham conjured a drama that goes far from the African or North American continent. Every Cunningham dancer agrees that the meanings are in the movements, and apart from the recurrent word "wild," most of them interpret its dramas differently. Daniel Madoff, who danced Cunningham's role in the Cunningham company's final "RainForest" performance in 2011, speaks of the "rage" the character feels when he returns to the stage at the end. "The final solo is physically so dramatic," he said in a recent telephone interview. "There are extremes of tempi they're important. He's just galvanized." Not all performances of "RainForest" succeed. Cunningham supervised a 1988 revival (at the Joyce Theater) that was too guarded, although later performances acquired more vehemence. Nonetheless, it is a work of the imagination whose strange events and startling characters take both dancers and the audience into uncharted territory. From 1939 on, Cunningham regarded New York as home; "RainForest" shows how far from it he traveled in his mind. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
They throw a party in the biting comedy drama "Parasite." It doesn't go so well. At least a party thrown for the movie went considerably better on Friday night, as a marathon weekend of events and screenings commenced in Los Angeles in advance of the 2020 Golden Globes. In fact, the film's Sunset Tower Hotel soiree turned out to be the hottest ticket of the weekend, even drawing talent from competing award contenders, including the "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" star Leonardo DiCaprio, the "Marriage Story" director Noah Baumbach and star Laura Dern, and the "Bombshell" director Jay Roach. The "Parasite" director Bong Joon Ho, who has been nominated for directing and screenwriting Golden Globes, looked a little stunned by the reception. "It's a strange feeling," Bong told the "Baby Driver" director Edgar Wright, one of many filmmakers who had turned out to pay respects. "We never expected all this." But ever since "Parasite" won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the twisty South Korean movie about the haves and have nots has racked up such a strong profile including a best cast nomination from the Screen Actors Guild Awards, a worldwide gross of well over 120 million, and citations on countless year end top 10 lists that many pundits believe it could become the first foreign language film to win the best picture Oscar. Certainly, Hollywood is charmed. "Amazing movie," a ballcap clad DiCaprio told Bong at his party, shaking the director's hand. The next morning, at a buffet brunch thrown for the upcoming Independent Spirit Awards, Bong was so mobbed by well wishers and selfie seekers that the simple act of moving from one side of the room to the other became an arduous task. "I love meeting fellow artists and filmmakers, but parties like this are quite strange," Bong said, musing about how different an event like this would be in South Korea: "There, we all sit down, but here, we're always standing!" He gave me a sheepish grin. "Sometimes, my legs hurt." He has relocated to the United States for all of January to attend award shows and continue promoting "Parasite," and on Saturday, he had a full slate of parties and panels ahead of him. One such event was the afternoon tea party thrown by Bafta, the London based academy, which drew not just Bong and DiCaprio but also a strong contingent of British talent including Sacha Baron Cohen, the "Midsommar" and "Little Women" breakout Florence Pugh, and the "1917" leads George MacKay and Dean Charles Chapman. Even in a room so packed with celebrities, there was still one corner of the Bafta party bisected by a velvet rope, and behind it sat Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, who produced "Rocketman," the Globe nominated musical based on John's life. As the movie's star, Taron Egerton, posed for pictures nearby, an impressed John said, "He became a man on this film." I asked John if he ever wondered how "Rocketman" would have turned out if it had starred Tom Hardy, who was attached to the project several years ago. "It wouldn't have been right. Things happen for a reason," John said. "And he couldn't sing!" After Bafta, I stopped by a Netflix party so disastrously overcrowded that it reached a level of anxiety I can only compare to watching a Safdie brothers film; fittingly, I passed the "Uncut Gems" directing duo on my way out, and spotted "The Politician" lead Ben Platt and "Dolemite Is My Name" scene stealer Wesley Snipes, too. A Lionsgate party later on at the Chateau Marmont offered more breathing room, so much so that the "Knives Out" star Daniel Craig found a nifty hiding place in the shadows by a back bar. The film's other stars, including Chris Evans and Ana de Armas, came around to say hello to their director, Rian Johnson. When I caught up with Johnson, he was still geeking out about the "Parasite" party he'd been to the night before. When it comes to Bong, "I'm such a fan," Johnson said. "I even awkwardly introduced myself to him on an airplane once." One of the best things about awards season, Johnson said, is that it provides ample opportunities to get to know someone like Bong a little bit better. "It's like a traveling carnival tour, you see each other over and over," Johnson said. "That's the fun thing about this stuff, getting to meet the people you respect." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
EVIL GENIUS on Netflix. A pizza delivery man, a bomb, a bank robbery, a scavenger hunt and a grisly death: These are not pieces from a Quentin Tarantino movie, but rather a real life plot that unfolded in 2003 in Pennsylvania and shocked the nation. That year, a man walked into a bank with a bomb locked onto his neck; the F.B.I. was led on a wild goose chase by the conspirators in order to remove it. The outlandish turn of events inspired a movie and now is depicted in this new documentary series which, like the transfixing "Wild Wild Country," was executive produced by the Duplass brothers. MEET MY MOM on Facebook Watch. Reese Witherspoon has been involved in many onscreen mother daughter relationships over the years playing the daughters of notable actresses like Mary Steenburgen ("Four Christmases") or Tess Harper ("The Man in the Moon"), and more recently caring for a new generation in "Home Again" and "Big Little Lies." Now, just in time for Mother's Day, she's producing a new series consisting of conversations between celebrities and their mothers. The first episode will focus on Ms. Witherspoon herself, as she reminisces with her mom about her upbringing in Nashville. Future episodes will include Adam Rippon, Lilly Singh and Ashley Graham. THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE on Amazon Prime. It's been nearly 60 years since a shrewd flying squirrel and a bumbling moose first appeared on television to foil the sinister plots of the stereotypical Cold War villains Boris and Natasha. The zany, pun filled cartoon has improbably stood the test of time and entertained generations of youngsters through movies and spinoffs. The latest attempt to capture decades old magic is this shiny DreamWorks adaptation, which features modern cameos, including from an irate Gordon Ramsay. Of course, Boris and Natasha are still up to no good. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Luciana Achugar (through Dec. 19) Last year Ms. Achugar presented "Otro Teatro" at New York Live Arts, exploring what it would mean to "grow ourselves a new body." Since that ecstatic, anarchic ritual of a performance, she has continued the investigation of pleasure, desire and dance as an agent for change. The next and perhaps final phase is "An Epilogue for Otro Teatro: True Love," which takes over a studio at Gibney Dance's downtown location for three hours at a time. Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org. (Siobhan Burke) Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (through Jan. 3) For a New York holiday tradition without the Sugar Plum Fairy, get thee to City Center for Ailey's month long winter season. After four years of shepherding the company into exciting artistic territory, the artistic director Robert Battle contributes a new work titled "Awakening" to the repertory. Also new this year are premieres from Rennie Harris, Ronald K. Brown and Kyle Abraham. A Paul Taylor work also joins the lineup, along with works by Talley Beatty, Hofesh Shechter and Christopher Wheeldon, among others. And, of course, "Revelations" will be on repeat. At various times, City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan, 212 581 1212, alvinailey.org. (Brian Schaefer) Monica Bill Barnes (Wednesday) Karaoke night meets office party in "Happy Hour," the latest concoction from Ms. Barnes and Anna Bass, best known these days as the dancers alongside the radio personality Ira Glass in the touring revue "Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host." The new gig, which wraps up this week, features the cheeky duo playing two guys playing their everyday selves, as Ms. Barnes continues her love affair with awkwardness, failure and physical comedy. The audience gets drinks, prizes and the chance to sing. At 6:30 p.m., Studio G, Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, monicabillbarnes.com. (Burke) Company XIV (through Jan. 17) If the traditional "Nutcracker" evokes the transition from childhood to adolescence, then Company XIV's "Nutcracker Rouge" might be the subsequent crossover into adulthood and the accompanying sexual awakening. The choreographer Austin McCormick combines a strong dose of burlesque, baroque and ballet with glittered pasties and G strings for a charmingly sensual and playful holiday romp. Tchaikovsky never sounded so scandalous. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m., Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, 800 745 3000, companyxiv.com. (Schaefer) Brendan Connelly and Scotty Heron (through Saturday) It's been about 75 years since Martha Graham and Aaron Copland joined forces to create "Appalachian Spring," an instant hit about life on the American frontier. Mr. Connelly and Mr. Heron, a contemporary composer choreographer duo, offer a more chaotic collaboration and possibly a more dystopian view of America with "Appalachian Spring Break," a noisy evening length work involving sound generating objects and references to the Ken Burns mini series "The Civil War." Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 8 and 10:30 p.m., Jack, 505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, near Fulton Street, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, jackny.org. (Burke) Dance Theater of Westchester (Sunday) After hanging with the Founding Fathers in "Hamilton" on Broadway, revisit Revolutionary War era Yorktown with Dance Theater of Westchester's "Colonial Nutcracker." This production is designed for young audiences, ages 5 to 10, and features the classic Tchaikovsky score paired with 18th century inspired costumes, including a red coated mouse army as a stand in for the Brits. At 2 p.m., Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts, Brooklyn College, Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues, Flatbush, 718 951 4500, brooklyncenter.org. (Schaefer) Dances Patrelle (through Sunday) For two decades, Francis Patrelle has presented "The Yorkville Nutcracker," set in Manhattan's Upper East Side of 1895, when it was filled with German immigrants and much less affluent. The production's festive opening party is set in Gracie Mansion, while the famous snowflake scene moves to a frozen pond in Central Park. Joining Mr. Patrelle's troupe this year are the New York City Ballet principal dancers Abi Stafford as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Adrian Danchig Waring as her Cavalier. Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7 p.m., Sunday at noon and 5 p.m., Kaye Playhouse, Hunter College, East 68th Street, between Lexington and Park Avenues, 212 772 4448, dancespatrelle.org. (Schaefer) Andy de Groat Catherine Galasso (through Saturday) In the 1970s, before Ms. Galasso was born, her parents were members of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a company founded by the avant garde director Robert Wilson. It was there that they met the choreographer Andy de Groat, with whom her father, the composer Michael Galasso, went on to collaborate. Honoring this artistic lineage, Ms. Galasso remounts several works by Mr. de Groat and offers her own response to his pedestrian yet convoluted movement. The evening, titled "get dancing," also includes "Rope Dance Translations," a film accompanied by live performance. At 8 p.m., St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Burke) East Village Dance Project (Thursday through Dec. 20) The themes of escape and self discovery found just under the surface of "The Nutcracker" take fresh, poignant form in the East Village Dance Project's production of "The Shell Shocked Nut Project," which sets the action amid East Village landmarks and follows the journey of a war veteran. The cast of 50 is split between students and professionals, and Tchaikovsky's score shares airtime with Stevie Wonder, Duke Ellington and original music played live. Thursday through Dec. 19 at 8 p.m., Dec. 19 and 20 at 3 p.m., La MaMa, 66 East Fourth Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, lamama.org. (Schaefer) Gelsey Kirkland Ballet (through Dec. 20) It's worth seeing this company's "Nutcracker" not just for a well constructed production of the Christmas classic, but also for a glimpse of the troupe's new Brooklyn home, at what used to be St. Ann's Warehouse. Founded in TriBeCa by Ms. Kirkland, a former American Ballet Theater principal, the company attracts promising young dancers from around the world, who will be joined by 70 students and alumni from the affiliated Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet. Thursday and Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Sundays at noon and 5 p.m., GK Arts Center, 29 Jay Street, near John Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn, 800 838 3006, gelseykirklandacademyofclassicalballet.org. (Burke) Bill T. Jones and Dianne McIntyre (through Saturday) In its shift toward more multigenre programming, New York Live Arts has been presenting a series of concerts by the contemporary classical music ensemble yMusic. To go with that music, the last installment includes some dancing by two luminaries of modern dance: Bill T. Jones, the artistic director of Live Arts, and the divine Dianne McIntyre. Each artist offers a new solo, Mr. Jones on Friday, Ms. McIntyre on Saturday. At 7:30 p.m., 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org. (Burke) Juilliard Dances (Friday through Tuesday) Though still in school, the talented dancers of the Juilliard conservatory could fool you for professionals. In their winter showcase, "New Dances: Edition 2015," they are paired up, by academic year, with well respected contemporary choreographers in original works. The first year dancers perform Helen Simoneau's "Strange Garden" and the second years tackle Aszure Barton's "return to patience," with both works set to music played by other Juilliard students. The third year dancers team up with Zvi Gotheiner and the fourth years collaborate with Kyle Abraham. Friday, Saturday, Monday and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center, 155 West 65th Street, events.juilliard.edu. (Schaefer) Keigwin Company (through Sunday) With a new plan for his company, Larry Keigwin is not so much passing the choreographer's torch as he is sharing it with a younger generation. For his troupe's return to the Joyce Theater, he has commissioned new works by the rising dancemakers Adam Barruch and Loni Landon, while creating two new pieces of his own and bringing back his 2009 "Sidewalk," set to Steve Reich's "Double Sextet." The Keigwin vibe is relentlessly fun, and some fresh voices should only amplify that. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Burke) Mark Morris Dance Group (Saturday through Dec. 20) After a five year hiatus, Mark Morris's "The Hard Nut," a rollicking, cheeky take on "The Nutcracker," returns to Brooklyn. The narrative hews closely to E.T.A. Hoffmann's original story, but the show is a welcome departure from tradition and propriety. Mr. Morris plants his party in the suburbs of the 1970s and visits a world inspired by Charles Burns's noirish Pop Art. Mr. Morris's snowflakes blur gender lines while his characters crack open their inhibitions. It's wacky fun. Saturday and Wednesday through next Friday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 1 and 6 p.m., Dec. 19 at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Dec. 20 at 1 p.m., Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, 718 636 4100, bam.org. (Schaefer) New York City Ballet (through Jan. 3) Of the dozens of "Nutcracker" productions in town, none match the scale of City Ballet's "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker," or the giddy sense of childlike awe it inspires. Pantomime dominates the first half but Act II culminates in a breathtaking pas de deux for the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier. After all, this is a duet for Balanchine and Tchaikovsky, too, and it's magical. At various times, David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, nycballet.org. (Schaefer) New York Theater Ballet (Friday through Sunday) Returning for its fifth year, "Keith Michael's The Nutcracker" trims Tchaikovsky's score to a brisk and efficient hour so as to keep the attention of the little ones. (The show is recommended for children as young as 3.) Mr. Michaels, a longtime choreographer for this company, sets his version in 1907 and takes inspiration from the colorful and energetic Art Nouveau movement that by then had swept Europe. Friday at noon, Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m., 1 and 3:30 p.m., Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, 212 355 6160, nytb.org. (Schaefer) Noche Flamenca (Friday through Jan. 23) Traditional Spanish dance and ancient Greek theater are an unlikely but well suited pair in Noche Flamenca's sharp production "Antigona," based on Sophocles's famous tragedy. The dance lights a fire under the play while discovering in itself a knack for narrative drama. In the title role, the powerhouse Soledad Barrio is both fierce and fragile. The century old church where the performance takes place is filled with striking sets, darkly amorous music played by a live band and a ferocious Greek chorus of dancers. Mondays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., with an additional performance at 3 p.m. on Dec. 26 (no performances on Dec. 24 and 25), West Park Presbyterian Church, 165 West 86th Street, Manhattan, 866 811 4111, nocheflamenca.com. (Schaefer) Tere O'Connor (through Saturday) A news release for Tere O'Connor's new work, "The Goodbye Studies," said it will "embrace tangent and anomalous structural conceits." Head scratching though that may be, Mr. O'Connor consistently manages to turn such esoteric ideas into surprising and satisfying dances of substance. Here, he employs his strong sense of drama and a knack for meaningful gestures to examine his group of 12 dancers as a single entity rather than individual beings which is quite a task since individually, they're captivating. At 8 p.m., the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 255 5793, thekitchen.org. (Schaefer) Peridance Dance Company (Friday through Sunday) Igal Perry's contribution to the seasonal dance staple is "The Nutcracker A Contemporary Look." Ballet is one of several styles like hip hop and contemporary dance integrated into his version, which features nearly 100 dancers from his company and affiliated school. Tchaikovsky is there, of course, but so is Strauss, as well as other modern musicians. The costumes range from traditional to psychedelic; the show's idea of a "contemporary look" is an eclectic one. Friday at 8:30 p.m., Saturday at 6:30 p.m., Sunday at 4 and 7 p.m., Peridance Capezio Center, 126 East 13th Street, East Village, 212 505 0886, peridance.com. (Schaefer) Urban Bush Women (through Saturday) John Coltrane's groundbreaking album "A Love Supreme" turns 50 this year, and Urban Bush Women, the powerful all female troupe founded by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, turns 30. "Walking with 'Trane," choreographed by Ms. Zollar and Samantha Speis in collaboration with the company, salutes those anniversaries through a dance structured like a jazz record, with an A side and a B side. The composers George Caldwell and Philip White take inspiration from Coltrane in their original score. At 7:30 p.m., Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, 718 636 4100, bam.org. (Burke) Works Process: 'Peter and the Wolf' (Friday through Sunday) Thankfully, neither "The Nutcracker" nor Tchaikovsky has a monopoly on your holiday season. In a clever bit of counter programming, the Guggenheim Museum's performance series presents its annual production of "Peter and the Wolf," Prokofiev's playful adventure. The fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi is responsible for the look and direction of this short and sweet show for children, while the choreographer John Heginbotham makes it move. At 2:30 and 4 p.m., Peter B. Lewis Theater, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212 423 3500, worksandprocess.org. (Schaefer) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
LONDON On a recent afternoon, Clare Barlow, a curator at the Wellcome Collection, a museum of science and medicine here, gave a tour of its new permanent exhibition, "Being Human." The exhibits included a fecal transplant kit used to treat gut infections, a sculpture that gave off the smell of breast milk, and a vial of cells that have been the basis of some of the 20th century's biggest medical breakthroughs, taken in the 1950s from an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, without her consent. "Can you see it's painted black?" she said excitedly. "That's partly because it looks beautiful, but also to contrast with the floor." It was painted that way to help visually impaired people move around the space, Ms. Barlow said. She then pointed to a bench in front of a video screen. "You see it's off center?" she said. That's so wheelchair users can pull up alongside it and get a perfect view, she said . Normally, in museums, they have to sit to the side. Ms. Barlow cited other design elements to benefit disabled people. Exits are always visible so people with anxiety know they can leave. There's a range of audio and visual guides, including one in British Sign Language, and models of exhibits that people can touch. "If you don't need them, you might not notice them," Ms. Barlow said. "But if you do, they're there." "Being Human," which opened on Thursday, is claimed by some disabled advocates and researchers as the most accessible museum space ever opened in Britain. "It's a real game changer," said Richard Sandell of the Research Center for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. (The center was a consultant for the exhibition .) There is a case filled with prosthetics, for instance. Some medical museums display these as wonders of engineering, Mr. Sandell said, but "Being Human" focused on the people who used them. The issue of disabled access in museums has been in the news in Britain recently, after Ciara O'Connor, a wheelchair user, went to see an exhibition at Tate Modern of work by Olafur Eliasson. The interactive, Instagrammable show has been drawing crowds. There, Ms. O'Connor discovered she couldn't go inside one exhibit, a mirrored tunnel, because it had two steps up to it, and there wasn't a ramp. An attendant told a friend of Ms. O'Connor's that it was the curator's decision not to have one and suggested she go around the outside. Ms. O'Connor let out her frustrations in a series of 37 exasperated Twitter posts that went viral. She was "sick of it" she wrote in one post, that also included an expletive. "I want abled people to stop being defensive and pissy when we ask for the bare minimum," she added in another. "Accessibility is not ugly, or cluttered or distracting. Accessibility belongs in art and everywhere." Tate later apologized to Ms. O'Connor. A spokeswoman for Mr. Eliasson said in an email that he was unavailable for comment as he was in Iceland documenting glaciers. Earlier this year in Manchester, England, there was a furor around a public monument to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, a central event in British labor history in which mounted soldiers rode into a workers' protest, killing 18 people. The 1.2 million memorial, designed by the artist Jeremy Deller, is a series of 11 stacked disks that form steps that the artist intended the public to climb, so they could make speeches from the top. But many disabled people would not be able to mount the monument's stairs. "You cannot have a memorial to people who died for democracy, if disabled people do not have access," Morag Rose, a disabled rights campaigner, told Manchester's civic authorities, according to the BBC. A spokesman for the Manchester City Council said in an email that the memorial's architect to had been asked to design a ramp or lift for the structure. Tony Heaton, a sculptor and wheelchair user, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that problems occurred when museums did not properly consult disabled people. He had seen inaccessible design across Europe, he said, even in recently revamped museums like the Picasso Museum in Paris. "If you've not got people who experience these issues in an organization, mistakes will be made," he added. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When "There Is No Evil," the new drama by the celebrated Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, debuted at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday, it was a bittersweet moment for Rasoulof. Speaking through an interpreter before the film won the Golden Bear, the festival's top prize, he explained that he could not attend the premiere because he had been banned from leaving Iran and faces a year in prison, the result of the government's reaction to his previous film, a sharp critique of the country's clerical leadership called "A Man of Integrity." Punishment like Rasoulof's is an all too common story in contemporary Iranian cinema, a thriving, internationally respected scene. Yet despite the government's repressive measures its approval is required for shoots and screenings he and other directors have grown more emboldened to speak out, in formal letters, on awards stages, through social media and on film. And now, rising numbers of coronavirus cases and conflicting information have called the government's credibility into question again. The most recent period of unrest goes back to November. When Iran's citizens staged demonstrations across the country over a gasoline price increase, security forces used firearms to quell the uprisings. Hundreds of protesters were killed, but mourners were warned not to hold public funerals. That same month, more than 200 Iranian film professionals, including the Oscar nominated Asghar Farhadi ("A Separation"), signed an open letter condemning state censorship of "The Paternal House," a drama about an honor killing that was banned less than a week after screening in Iran. The protest letter was described by a film critic in Iran as one of the most explicit and harshest of its kind. Since then, a number of filmmakers have defied the government and spoken out about the unrest and the downed plane. At the Iranian Film Critics Awards on Jan. 30, Homayoun Ghanizadeh, an actor and director, dedicated his award to an engineer killed during the November protests and urged artists not to forget the fallen demonstrators. Rakhshan Bani Etemad, the country's most prominent female filmmaker, was detained for posting a call for a nationwide vigil for the victims of the plane downing. She was held and interrogated for a few hours and eventually retracted her statement. "It's a very difficult environment to be an artist in and remain true to your vision," said Jasmin Ramsey, the director of communications at the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York based nonprofit organization. Ghanizadeh's statement made on a public stage with government officials in the audience was a "huge risk," Ramsey said. "There's all kinds of dangers for him." Meanwhile, more than 100 actors and directors had announced they would boycott the annual, government sponsored Fajr Film Festival in February, in protest of the country's handling of the plane incident. The festival is considered the most prestigious event in Iranian cinema. "Filmmakers are trying to address the collective trauma that everyone has experienced," Ramsey said. "The entire society is kind of convulsing right now." The widespread outrage spurred by the plane downing is unlike anything Rasoulof has seen, he said, and suggested to him that his fellow Iranians were gradually becoming more outspoken. "For the first time, people overcame the culture of keeping things quiet," he said. They "have come out against lies, against hypocrisy, and they are no longer able to hide their anger." His own career mirrors the growing fury. Rasoulof resorted to allegorical stories in earlier work like "White Meadows," so as not to "directly confront power," he said. But he eventually felt that was "a form of accepting the tyrannical regime," he added. His more recent films, like "Manuscripts Don't Burn," based on the government's attempt to kill prominent writers in the 1990s, are much more direct in its criticism. Yet his rebellion comes with a price. In 2010, he and the prominent director Jafar Panahi were detained while working on a project related to the 2009 Iranian presidential election and each sentenced to six years in prison. The sentences were later reduced to one year, which neither has served yet. Panahi was banned from filmmaking for 20 years, yet he has made several award winning movies since. Rasoulof was held in solitary confinement for eight days and could not communicate with his family, he said. He believed his work could endanger them, so his wife and daughter moved to Germany soon after. In 2017, his "Man of Integrity" won the Un Certain Regard Award at the Cannes Film Festival. When he returned to Iran, authorities confiscated his passport, charged him with propaganda against the state and in July sentenced him to a year in prison. (Cannes and others issued a statement condemning the sentence soon after.) Some filmmakers, like the Istanbul based Iranian Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi ("No One Knows About Persian Cats"), have chosen to leave the country to work. But there are lesser known artists who don't have the means to emigrate or the status to generate international attention when the government subjects them to harsh punishment. Hossein Rajabian, for example, was held in solitary confinement for two months over his movie about women's right to divorce in Iran. Later, he was convicted on three charges, including spreading propaganda against the state, and imprisoned for nearly three years. That film was never screened in Iran; Rajabian uploaded it to YouTube before his imprisonment, but it was removed at the request of the Iranian Film Council. He recently completed a new movie, which he plans to release online through BBC Persia to avoid the government's censors. Speaking through an interpreter, Rajabian said the film conveys the disillusionment of young Iranians who feel trapped in their own country. "The previous generation had promised to bring us freedom" after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, he said. "But what we have, in effect, is Iran's total isolation." Rasoulof emphasized a stark reality: All Iranians not just vocal public figures can face jail time for the most minor offenses. As for his own sentence, he said being behind bars isn't much different from ordinary life in Iran. The country is just "a relatively large prison," he said. The inner turmoil that festers in people living under oppression is a recurring theme in "There Is No Evil." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The longest and possibly saddest year in pro basketball history is almost over. From this world that plays out on hardwood, as with so many other wings of society, there will be few fond farewells to 2020. The basketball public has been losing and grieving since the first day of January, when David Stern, the N.B.A.'s former longtime commissioner, died at age 77. It wasn't long after that a helicopter headed for a weekend youth tournament with nine aboard, among them Kobe Bryant and his 13 year old daughter, Gianna, crashed into a hillside in Calabasas, Calif. There were no survivors. Mere weeks later, the country was gripped by the coronavirus. Inside and outside of the sport's sphere, life did not get easier and, as 2021 dawns, it still hasn't. Yet there was some undeniable good along the way, most of all the N.B.A.'s leadership in coping with the coronavirus, and how its players, in tandem with their longtime activist peers from the W.N.B.A., lent many loud and influential voices to a year of profound social reckoning. The N.B.A. was the first major professional sports league to shut down in response to the pandemic, completed its 2019 20 season by engineering an ambitious protective bubble, and amplified the fight for racial justice and equality. And when it comes to something that really matters: Delonte West, the former N.B.A. guard, was back in Maryland to spend Christmas with his family after years of struggling with bipolar disorder and drug use. A video surfaced in late September that appeared to show West, a former Dallas Maverick, homeless in Dallas. That led Mark Cuban, the owner of the Mavericks, to track him down and help West enter a drug rehabilitation facility in Florida. The dunks and trading cards and M.J. memes, to be clear, were not of great consequence at a time even sports struggled to provide its usual escape, but there is no harm in citing them. No one is about to forget or diminish the bigger headlines from basketball's intersection with a global health crisis. "This will go down as the most remembered year in N.B.A. history," said Jared Dudley, the veteran forward and frequent unofficial team spokesman for the Los Angeles Lakers. "They will be making movies about 2020 for years to come." He's probably right. Tales from the bubble are bound to hold considerable long term interest, particularly after Dudley's Lakers emerged from the grand experiment as champions. The response has been encouraging. Occasional jabs about James and his supposed "Mickey Mouse" ring haven't really stuck. Perhaps James went too far the other way with his recent assertion on the "Road Trippin'" podcast that he had won "the two hardest championships" in league history: Cleveland's comeback from a 3 1 deficit in the 2015 16 N.B.A. finals against the 73 win Golden State Warriors, and the Lakers' bubble crown. Historians haven't exactly rushed to endorse those claims, but there is no shortage of appreciation for what the Lakers did overcome during their 95 day bubble stay, cut off from the outside world. There was a mental toll from essentially living at work. There was isolation. There was an internal conflict to manage, as James and many of his peers would explain, for athletes playing a game and feeding the entertainment industry at a time of so much social unrest in their home communities. The truth, of course, is that you could slap an asterisk on just about anything that happened in 2020, sports or not, since we strayed so far from normalcy in too many precincts to count. Or did so much change get foisted upon all of us that nothing in 2020 should be sullied by the asterisk treatment? Stein: I know Bucks fans are upset, but I don't think the league's decision to strip their team of a second round pick in 2022 in the wake of Milwaukee's failed attempt to court Bogdan Bogdanovic is such a mystery. For all the league's shortcomings in policing and curbing tampering, it has been consistent in dishing out penalties when violations were blatant. The violations, in this case, were pretty blatant. These were not mere rumblings or assumptions about the sort of free agent conversations that many of us suspect are happening leaguewide before they are supposed to. The league opened an investigation in response to a detailed news report about a five player deal involving the Bucks and Sacramento Kings that had Bogdanovic, a restricted free agent, landing in Milwaukee nearly four days before free agency was scheduled to start. The league took action again on Monday when it fined Daryl Morey, Philadelphia's new president of basketball operations, 50,000 for a seemingly harmless tweet congratulating James Harden on a statistical milestone he hit when Morey was still his general manager in Houston. It doesn't matter if the social media post was automated or accidental, as ESPN reported Morey told the league office. The mere fact that Morey publicly "discussed" another team's player put him in line for a fine. Bucks fans have asked me: What about all the teams that have tried to recruit Giannis Antetokounmpo behind the scenes? My retort: Do we have proof? If there was a detailed news report in circulation about a specific team doing so or if text messages Antetokounmpo has reportedly received from players on other teams were turned in to the league I'm quite sure penalties would be imposed on the offending clubs. But no such evidence has surfaced in the public domain. It's not that the Bucks are the only ones breaking the rules. Other teams have just been better at hiding it. Whether or not Milwaukee or Sacramento wanted this stuff to be out there, it got out. Both were operating as if they had a deal even though Bogdanovic insisted he never agreed to anything. The league wasn't going to let that go. Even though the league announced in September 2019 that it would institute a new set of anti tampering regulations to crack down on the practice, there is clearly still much to fix, given how many deals we still saw coalesce in the early hours of free agency on Nov. 20. But the league's stance on this one, in the words of its general counsel Rick Buchanan, is that Milwaukee had to be sanctioned for "gun jumping" the start of free agency. There is plenty of skepticism regarding Commissioner Adam Silver's claim that the punishment "will act as a clear deterrent" to other teams, since the whole episode technically only cost Milwaukee a future second round pick. Yet it's also true that the league's decision to investigate essentially snuffed out any chance the Bucks had of resurrecting a deal for Bogdanovic someone, by all accounts, Antetokounmpo badly wanted to play with. So losing the ability to pursue Bogdanovic was Milwaukee's real penalty here, while Sacramento wound up losing Bogdanovic without compensation after electing not to match Atlanta's four year, 72 million offer sheet. The Kings did not receive any formal penalty from the league office, but they would have acquired a player they coveted from the Bucks (Donte DiVincenzo) had the original sign and trade plan been resuscitated. Q: Any word on the status of Jeremy Lin getting his FIBA Letter of Clearance yet? Many fans want to know! Tom Gardner Stein: To catch up those who weren't following this saga as it played out on Dec. 19, Golden State needed a clearance letter from the Beijing Ducks, Lin's last team in China, to sign and then immediately release him before 11 p.m. Eastern time that day. That would have allowed the Santa Cruz Warriors to secure Lin's G League rights. In part because FIBA's office is closed on weekends, Golden State couldn't obtain the letter in time. The rush to get the clearance letter pretty much ended then, because it initially appeared that subsequently obtaining Lin's G League rights would require some complicated (and more costly) roster gymnastics for the Warriors. It has since emerged that the Warriors will have a new pathway to steering Lin to their G League affiliate that wasn't apparent then provided that the G League goes ahead with a 2020 21 season that will be at least partly played in a bubble environment. The N.B.A. is instituting a rule that will enable N.B.A. parent clubs to recruit players to fill one G League roster spot with an N.B.A. veteran who has at least five years of service time. The Warriors will thus have a mechanism to guarantee that Lin can play with Santa Cruz, their G League affiliate, should he decide to sign with the league. Neither the Golden State Warriors nor the Santa Cruz Warriors would sign Lin. He would have to sign with the G League first and then be allocated to Santa Cruz via the new rule, which some G League observers are even calling "the Jeremy Lin rule." Yet there is no frantic need for the clearance letter now with the G League still trying to resolve some outstanding issues and commit to a season. In one of the better quotes from the season's opening week, Kyrie Irving said he and his Nets teammate Kevin Durant had "introduced the world to 7 11" with their scoring outbursts in the Nets' first two games. Irving, of course, was referring to their jersey numbers, not the famed convenience store chain. The average margin of victory from the league's five Christmas Day games was a whopping 23.2 points. Only the first game (Miami over New Orleans by 13) and the last one (Clippers over Denver by 13) could be classified as competitive. Not what the N.B.A. was hoping for when it pushed up the start of the season at the behest of the league's television partners, who badly wanted a Christmas week launch. There were 107 international players from 41 countries on opening night rosters, including a record 17 players from Canada and a record tying 14 African players. It's the seventh consecutive season that opening night rosters included at least 100 international players; 113 at the start of the 2016 17 season is the record. France (nine), Australia (eight) and Serbia and Germany (six each) are the countries with the most players after Canada. K.C. Jones earned enshrinement to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1989, but his coaching resume is perhaps even more H.O.F. worthy. Jones coached three teams in the N.B.A. across 10 seasons (Washington, Boston and Seattle) and made five trips to the N.B.A. finals in that short span, winning championships with the Celtics in 1983 84 and 1985 86. Jones died on Christmas at the age of 88. There is a strong argument to be made, as a matter of fairness, that fans should not be in N.B.A. buildings until all 30 teams were allowed by local health regulations to do so, because it is a competitive advantage to have a crowd of any size. Yet it's worth noting just how varied the maximum crowd sizes are for the six teams currently admitting fans. At the low end: Cleveland (300 fans maximum), New Orleans (750) and Utah (1,500). At the high end: Toronto (3,800 fans maximum in Tampa, Fla.), Orlando (4,000) and Houston (4,500). Hit me up anytime on Twitter ( TheSteinLine) or Facebook ( MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram ( thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Netflix's "Russian Doll" is arguably the first true TV hit of 2019. Created by Leslye Headland, Amy Poehler and the star of the series, Natasha Lyonne, the show might be described as a raunchier "Groundhog Day" set in New York's East Village. But there's more going on here than that. As Lyonne's Nadia Vulvokov keeps dying and restarting her life, the team behind the show uses its looping structure to examine midlife crises, gentrification, our need for human connection and possibly the Tompkins Square riots. The reviews have been nearly unanimous in their praise, and as with shows like "Killing Eve" and "Stranger Things," viewers are still dissecting and analyzing it several weeks after its debut. Can't get enough "Russian Doll" yourself? Here's a roundup of great things to read about it. In his pre air review, James Poniewozik raved about the show, comparing it to recent eschatological TV comedies like "The Good Place" and "Forever." He writes: "Like its peers, 'Russian Doll' resolves on the necessity of human connection, a familiar homily, but it's too inventive and irascible to feel pat. This is a show with a big heart, but a nicotine stained heart that's been dropped in the gutter and kicked around a few times." '"Russian Doll" Is the First Great Show of 2019' Esquire Tyler Coates raves about the show, writing: "Russian Doll feels like an achievement, a high concept premise told concisely in a structure that rarely feels confined or tight. It's both freewheeling and contained, and it accomplishes what most shows are unable to pull off: it tells a universal human story in a specific and carefully constructed world." 'Review: "Russian Doll," a Beautiful Puzzle of a Series So Good You'll Watch It Twice' LA Times Robert Lloyd at the Los Angeles Times offers one of several reviews pointing out the show's replay value, calling it "a beautiful puzzle piece, a circular, multiplane, existential mystery comedy set in the villages of Lower Manhattan." He continues: "Peopled with memorable characters large and small, it's a show that having watched once not hard to do straight through and hard not to do straight through you may want to watch again, to admire its machinery and joinery and find the clues you might have missed, but also because it feels just as good the second time around." 'Acerbic Yet Warm, "Russian Doll" Is More Rewarding Than Any Puzzle Box Show' The A.V. Club Danette Chavez offers a smart take on the show's flawed protagonist, writing: "The all woman team behind Russian Doll which, aside from Lyonne, Poehler and Headland, includes director Jamie Babbit know just how special their lead is, and craft a story both worthy and reflective of her. As much as we might like her, Nadia is deeply flawed, so there are no beelines to betterment, no bromides to dull the show's stinging humor." 'The Key to "Russian Doll" Might Be Tompkins Square Park' The New York Times Spurred by a series of Twitter posts from the critic Jason Zinoman, The Times's Aisha Harris investigates the theory that the narrative of "Russian Doll" is "an against the grain meditation on the cultural guilt" leftover from the violence that took place in Tompkins Square Park in 1988, and notes that Headland and Lyonne responded positively to this theory. Caroline Framke examines the ways in which "Russian Doll" unfolds like a therapy session in her excellent piece on the show's deeper themes and the way they're reflected in its structure. She writes: "By the end, "the broken man and the girl with a death wish" have to deal with the kind of pain they never thought they wanted to explore. But as "Russian Doll" ends up arguing so convincingly, the only way to stop feeling the dull throb of that pain every damn day is to stare it in the face, force it to blink, and move on from there." 'Returning to "Russian Doll," Again and Again' Boston Globe It's rare to see a TV critic return so quickly to a show he has already reviewed in order to dive deeper into its themes, but Matthew Gilbert does exactly that, writing: "In a way, 'Russian Doll' asks what happens when death is off the table. As her reincarnation loop continues in episode two, that loop is so speedy that it's played for farce Nadia is prodded out of her perpetual sense of pointlessness; her apprehension of death is no longer making her human needs seem futile. The worst happens, she dies, but: It only brings her more life, more chances." '"Russian Doll" Casts Men in Roles Usually Reserved for Women. The Results Are Brilliant.' Vox Todd VanDerWerff noticed how the roles played by men in "Russian Doll" were the kind typically cast with women. "In particular, if you look at how Russian Doll uses men, you'll realize how deep the series' interest in centering women's perspectives goes," he writes. "This show uses men the way most pop culture uses women which is to say it turns them into supporting players whose inner lives are mostly glossed over in the name of what the protagonist is going through." 'Natasha Lyonne Has a New Life. It's Just That She Keeps Dying.' The New York Times Kathryn Shattuck had a pre premiere chat with Lyonne about New York, the show's semi autobiographical themes, the all female writers' room and more. Speaking about the way death is used is in the show, Lyonne says: "There's probably a bit of a misconception around how key the deaths are. It was more an emotional story of bottoming out. There are metaphorical deaths big and small throughout the day: There are the bigger ones where you just feel like your whole world is collapsing, because of health or a relationship falling apart. Then there's the smaller deaths of the text message that didn't get responded to that you're obsessing on, and it feels like you're suddenly a hollow man inside." 'How Do You Dress a Russian Doll?' The New York Times Ruth La Ferla takes a look at the fashion of "Russian Doll," speaking to the program's costume designer, Jenn Rogien, who also worked on "Girls" and "Orange Is the New Black." Rogien says: "We needed these characters to feel cool and interesting. But we also needed them to feel like real people trapped in a very strange circumstance." '"Russian Doll": What Made Natasha Lyonne Leap Into Directing Her Netflix Comedy' IndieWire The creators Natasha Lyonne and Leslye Headland spoke to IndieWire about how they assembled a very close team of personal friends to make the show, and about the vibe of a female fronted production. Headland joked that day players would comment on how smooth and relaxed everything was on set. "And it was like, 'Yeah, because it's a female AD, and a female director, and a female showrunner and star,'" she said. '"Russian Doll"'s Charlie Barnett on Alan, Oatmeal, and the Bachelorette Party That Changed His Life' Vulture Charlie Barnett, who plays Alan, spoke to Vulture about his time on the show, revealing that they shot multiple endings to the season and that he had been too busy to see which one made it to Netflix: "I have to admit, I actually don't even know how it ends. I'm working on another smaller movie with Jamie Babbit right now, and it was also my birthday like two days ago I was waiting until I got back home to Los Angeles to finish watching it because I'd only got to episode three." '"Russian Doll" Creators Say Working With Only Female Directors and Writers on the Netflix Show Happened by Accident but Was "Freeing"' Insider Headland goes into more detail about the impact of an all female writing and directing team on "Russian Doll." "It isn't about finding a romantic partner," she says. "It isn't about balancing parenthood and motherhood. It isn't about trying to infiltrate a work force where almost in every industry we're underpaid and underrepresented." 'This Is That Song From "Russian Doll"' The New York Times Every time Nadia arrives back in the bathroom at her 36th birthday party, viewers hear the same song, Harry Nilsson's "Gotta Get Up." Aisha Harris offers not just a chance to hear that song again, but Lyonne's comments on why they chose Nilsson. "There was always a kind of ending that was unpleasant that was percolating under the surface of his songs," Lyonne says, "even at their most upbeat and certainly at their darkest." 'Here Are the "Russian Doll" Easter Eggs You Missed While You Were Trying to Figure Out WTF Was Going On' Cosmopolitan Hannah Chambers has a fun piece that breaks down the references and Easter eggs embedded in "Russian Doll" from the meaning behind that Ariadne poster over Nadia's desk to the revelation that three actors play multiple roles. "The good news is, creators Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland loaded this series up with tons of Easter eggs, so its binge value is super high," Chambers writes. "Here are some of the hidden details you may have missed while you were freaking out over the prospect of falling down your apartment steps and dying." Over at Polygon, Karen Han takes a deeper look at one of the show's most interesting supporting personalities, the homeless man named Horse. She writes, "Rather than being doomed to repeat himself like Nadia or Alan (Charlie Barnett), or being utterly oblivious, as all of Nadia and Alan's friends and family appear to be, Horse seems to possess some grain of agency or knowledge that places him just out of that frame he's almost a shepherd." 'Relive the Magic of "Russian Doll" With Its Official Playlist on Spotify' Nerdist This excellent article on the music of "Russian Doll" offers not only a way to listen to the show's diverse soundtrack but also reveals that Lyonne almost chose songs by Lou Reed and Roxy Music to serve as the tune that Nadia hears every time she "awakens." A s the writer Lindsey Romain notes, however: "it isn't the only song that gives Russian Doll its unique edge. The series is a brilliant, heart wrenching meditation on topics like mental illness, addiction, and endless cycle of self destruction, and the entire soundtrack is loaded with gems reflecting its themes. The track list includes jams from John Maus, the Echocentrics, Cults, Pussy Riot, and more." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. The ruminative, poetic Gen Z singer and songwriter Arlo Parks has been trickling out new music all year "Eugene" and "Black Dog" are two highlights and her simmering track "Cola" made a key appearance on the soundtrack to Michaela Coel's acclaimed TV series "I May Destroy You." Parks's latest song, "Green Eyes," is a gently aching snapshot of young queer heartbreak ("Of course I know why we lasted two months," she sings, "Could not hold my hand in public, felt their eyes judging our love"), undercut with a snaking bass line that reassures the listener that, despite her melancholy, Parks will keep moving forward to her own particular beat. LINDSAY ZOLADZ A longing for relief spiritual, physical, emotional fills "Faith Healer," the first song from Julien Baker's next album, "Little Oblivions." She's backed by a full rock band, with restless six beat guitar picking and a martial, U2 ish beat, as she battles the lures of drugs and delusions, wondering if a faith healer or a "snake oil dealer" can "take away the sting a minute" or at least "make me feel something." The music climbs and climbs, but leaves her hanging at the end. PARELES The history of the Pennsylvania indie band Tigers Jaw is often divided into two distinct phases: before and after the 2013 departure of three of the band's five founding members, one of whom, Adam McIlwee (who now records as Wicca Phase Springs Eternal), went on to found the influential emo rap collective Gothboiclique. Ben Walsh and Brianna Collins stuck around, though, and reshaped the band's sound into something a bit softer and more introspective than the band's brash emo roots. Its previous album, 2017's "Spin," felt a bit transitional, but "Cat's Cradle," the first single from the forthcoming "I Won't Care How You Remember Me" (out early next year) is a confident step out of the shadow of the past and into the band's future. Driven by chugging guitars and prismatic keys, it's a refreshing blast of bouncy power pop, tinged bittersweet by Collins' lilting lead vocals. ZOLADZ Isolation reigns in "Dominique" by Ela Minus, the songwriter, producer and singer Gabriela Jimeno from Colombia. Over a steady pulsing, three chord electro track that adds and subtracts assorted layers, she whisper sings about how "My brain feels like it's going to break" and "I am afraid I forgot how to talk to anyone else that's not myself." No matter: She has instruments and studio skills, enough to make her situation thoroughly catchy. PARELES The hopes, misgivings, wariness and vulnerability of a new romance all play out together in Helena Deland's "Comfort, Edge." The first seconds of the song take their time coming into focus, with whispers and muffled, low fi instruments. Then the tempo drags its feet, but the grungy guitar chords push forward; the harmonies climb, but Deland's vocal maintains its cool, with hints of the melody from John Lennon's "Jealous Guy." She sets out her requirements "You'll never make a fool of me" is the first but she doesn't necessarily expect them to be met. PARELES Last year the 24 year old London singer and songwriter Nilufer Yanya released an excellent debut album, "Miss Universe," which paired searching, openhearted lyrics with sudden, St. Vincent esque jolts of electric guitar. "Crash," the first single from her upcoming EP "Feeling Lucky?," sounds a bit like a mid 90s alt rock radio hit that never was: The fuzzy distortion of Yanya's guitar envelops a sweetly hypnotic hook. "If you ask me one more question, I'm about to crash," she sings with an exasperated sigh. The music video's concept elaborates on that theme, featuring Yanya as a flight attendant aboard a charmingly homemade looking aircraft. ZOLADZ Is Jack Harlow the Tyler Herro of rap, or is Tyler Herro the Jack Harlow of basketball? Who can say, but they are logical kindred spirits: Both had breakout, hater silencing years in 2020 (the 22 year old Harlow with the ubiquitous hit "What's Poppin"; Herro, the Miami Heat's precocious 20 year old shooting guard, with his unexpected star turn in the N.B.A. bubble), and both share a certain "really? that guy?" quality. Unfortunately (fortunately?) Herro doesn't drop any bars on "Tyler Herro" but he and his fabled drip do make a cameo in the music video. "I came home nice but I'm going back mean, I'm about to globe trot when they know a vaccine," Harlow raps with his easy, weightless charisma. At the very least, this is the best song semi randomly named after a reigning N.B.A. rookie since Sheck Wes's "Mo Bamba." ZOLADZ Smerz is the electronic duo of Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg, Norwegians now based in Denmark, whose music leaps amid pop, dance music and classical impulses. "I Don't Talk About That Much/Hva Hvis" is a high contrast pair of tracks. "I Don't Talk About That Much" runs on nervous electro momentum, with arpeggios ricocheting in stereo between a sputtering kick drum and a buzz looming overhead; their voices harmonize calmly in lyrics about reticence and uncertainty: I wonder if you ever wonder about me/this much." "Hva Hvis" ("What if") is an austere instrumental for strings: lingering over drones, hinting at a chance at resolution, but thinning back to one solo, sustained tone. PARELES The trumpeter Steph Richards is an emerging maestro of extended technique which usually means altering the process of playing an instrument, to elicit atypical sounds. But on "Supersense," a new album, Richards shows that it can mean more than that. First she assembled a quartet of esteemed improvisers a generation or two ahead of her the pianist Jason Moran, the bassist Stomu Takeishi and the drummer Kenny Wollesen who gently fortify Richards's aesthetic, which favors tremulous atmospherics and wriggling snakelets of melody over clear narrative. Then, working with the multimedia artist Sean Raspet, she created a batch of abstract, unnamable scents with far out ingredients (for instance: cricket exoskeletons) to guide the musicians as they recorded each track. Physical copies of the album come with a scratch and sniff sheet, allowing you to immerse yourself in the same aura that surrounded the band as it played. With social distancing forcing so many changes to the ways we relate, think of Richards as extending the techniques of artistic interaction, creating a way for audiences and performers to share space from afar. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
FRANCHISES would be at the top of any list of investments people consider a sure bet. After all, the thinking goes, an entrepreneur is buying into an existing company and opening an outlet where none exists. Surely, the money will just pour in. Of course, it isn't that simple. But it can work if you follow the script. And have a bit of luck. "The nice thing about franchises is you have an entrepreneur who has a product or a service and they have proven they can be successful selling it," said Lawrence J. Cohen, president and chief executive of Cookie Associates, which owns 27 franchise stores including Great American Cookies, Pretzelmaker and TCBY outlets. "They don't guarantee success. But if you do it their way, your chances of success are far greater than if you do it on your own." Mr. Cohen, known as Doc, who sold 35 Great American Cookies stores in 1998 before building up a new collection, said it took a certain type of entrepreneur to succeed one who was comfortable with running a business in a prescribed way. "If you're selling a Big Mac and you decide to use a plain bun because you don't like the sesame seed bun, well, it's no longer a Big Mac," he said. This would seem to fit in with the other types of nontraditional investments I have been writing about. But unlike investing in film, racehorses and restaurants, franchises, I found, tend to be an investment that is less exciting than the others. For someone who really has a passion for managing a process, though, investing in franchises can be so lucrative that that extra spark may not matter. David Barr, an accountant by training, said that in 1998, after managing the sale of Great American Cookies as chief executive, he had enough money to think about what he wanted to do next. He decided to invest some of it in two Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises and begin a second career as a director on corporate boards. "I wanted a brand that was a powerful brand, not a start up, because long term I was looking for something in which I didn't have to be at the counter every day or over the fryer," Mr. Barr said. "It's a true investment because I've never taken a dime out and those two have now acquired 23 franchises." To keep his investments in Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants and, later, Taco Bell restaurants separate from his day job, he instituted a firm rule: Every restaurant had to be at least 45 minutes but no more than three hours from his home in Marietta, Ga. "I'm not 100 percent passive," he said, noting that he had an operating partner. "Anyone who thinks that buying a franchise is like buying G.E. stock is crazy. But it's not 40 hours a week." The biggest drain for passive investors in franchises may be managing the people who are making their investment profitable day to day. "A lot of people do not pay attention to the people part of the business," said Aslam Khan, who started as a dishwasher at a Church's Chicken in 1987 and now owns 165 of the restaurants and employs 6,000 people. "Chicken doesn't move by itself." He said he attributed his success to making sure that the people who worked for him were well taken care of. Stephen J. Caldiera, chief executive of the International Franchise Association, a trade group, said having someone to pay attention to the day to day operation was crucial. "The people who just want to invest are smart to hire proven operators," he said. "You're only as good as the people running the business." One of the misleading numbers for people interested in investing in a franchise is the relatively low franchise fee. Mr. Caldiera said fees started as low as 5,000. Burger King's franchise fee is 50,000 but it requires people to have a net worth of 1.5 million and liquid assets of 500,000. These financial requirements are the biggest barrier for investors. McDonald's has a similar 500,000 liquid asset requirement, but the company estimates that equipment and preopening costs range from 959,450 to 2,110,700. The franchise fee is a mere 45,000. "Over the past several years, the biggest growth in our system has been from second generation owners," Danya Proud, a spokeswoman, said. "There has been a smaller percentage from outside the system." That said, a franchisee's child would not be granted a franchise on that basis alone. "They're taking over a 2.6 million business," she said. "We're not going to take some 23 year old who has maxed out her credit cards." Even for newer franchises, the setup costs are steep. Seattle's Best Coffee, which is owned by Starbucks, said the cost to set up a new franchise ranged from 181,835 to 445,035, excluding real estate costs. It doesn't take a math whiz to figure out that you are going to have to sell a lot of coffee to recoup that initial investment. Mr. Khan said he had become an investor in franchises his managers wanted to start, as much to make a return on his money as to help minority business owners like himself get started. "They got me here, and I can get them here," he said. He said he would invest up to 49 percent of the cost of the franchise. For investors who want to turn one franchise into many, the type of franchise they start with matters. Mr. Barr said he chose Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants because he knew it would be easier to get financing for a top tier franchise, given the track record and customer base. Mr. Barr also advised people who wanted a hands off role to buy existing franchises instead of building one from scratch. "If you buy a KFC today that's operating, the next day you're making money," he said. "You're not training staff and opening with no revenue." But again, franchises fail, like anything else. Mr. Cohen has had to close Great American Cookie stores, even though he is the longest serving franchisee in the system. He has also lost his entire investment in a franchise that sold Philly cheesesteaks. And perhaps worse for the passive investor, an investment in a franchise can require more attention than an investor planned on giving it. That happened to Carlyle MacHarg, who made his money in real estate. Mr. MacHarg, 68, said he had purposely steered clear of investing in any type of restaurant, after seeing too many friends regret doing it. But when he was approached by the son of a family friend who was part of a group trying to turn around Pat Oscar's, a small family restaurant chain based in San Diego, he changed his mind. Mr. MacHarg said the price he paid in June 2010 produced an annual return of 40 percent. He then hired the friend's son to manage the restaurants, and was happy for a year or so. But last September, the company that owned the brand went bankrupt, and Mr. MacHarg found himself leading a group of five other franchisees to get control of the Pat Oscar's name. They were outbid. Worse, the new owner tried to raise the franchise fees. Mr. MacHarg said the group balked and began looking to rebrand their restaurants under the name O's American Kitchen. "I've been spending most days, 10 to 12 hours a day, on this," he said. "Everything else I have to deal with is on the back burner. This thing has been all consuming. " Despite all of this, he said the restaurants accounted for only 10 percent of his investments. But having gone from passive investor to active manager, he has caught the bug that drives the most passionate franchisees. "This could really take off," he said. "And if the brand takes off, it really goes." Then he caught himself. "Or it could be fine for our nine restaurants." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Good ghost stories are hard to spoil; even if you give away the surprises, you can't unfeel the prickle on your neck. Uncanniness is indestructible. That's why I don't hesitate to describe Lucas Hnath's "The Thin Place" in some detail, even though its author prefers you to approach it "with a blank mind." Surely, it won't hurt to know that the play, which had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons on Thursday, is compelling and delicious: another example, in the vein of "The Christians," of Hnath's theatrical intelligence and respect for human mystery. In that sense, it isn't really a ghost story at all, despite featuring ghosts. It's about the rest of us, who need them. Calling herself a medium, a psychic and a spiritualist interchangeably, Linda (Randy Danson) knows all about that need: She basically lives off it. During "sittings" in wealthy people's private homes, she sets herself up as a kind of afterworld operator, connecting the living to their departed loved ones. If they are always strangely available and inevitably soothing, so is she. "There is no death," she says right off the bat, resolving in four words one of humanity's thorniest questions and bringing relief to her clients. One of those clients is Hilda (Emily Cass McDonnell), a younger woman who presents herself as utterly uninteresting. This proves not to be true as she casually tells us, over tea in a wing chair, the creepy story of her upbringing by a mother who believed herself to be possessed. Hilda's chief solace in this was her grandmother, who, anticipating her own death and Hilda's loneliness, tried to teach the girl how to communicate spiritually so they could stay in touch afterward. So far, no luck. One thread of this slyly structured play, directed with thrilling austerity by Les Waters, pits Hilda's sincere faith in psychic phenomena against Linda's more practical investment in it. Though they become friends (and possibly more) after that first sitting, their views continue to diverge. Hilda believes that the world is pocked with portals "thin places," she calls them where the living come very close to whatever is beyond. "Like it's sort of like if you were to imagine an octopus in an aquarium pressed up against glass," she says. "Except that there's no glass. And no octopus." But Linda isn't sure, and doesn't care, where her voices come from. Her concern about them, she says, is ethical: that in providing solace they do not deny the things her clients already know in their hearts to be true. "Cuz we actually want to, need to hear that the monster's waitin' just round the corner," she explains in her working class Lincolnshire accent. "And tellin' them that there's nothing to fear only makes them feel they've gone mental." In any case, "The Thin Place" is not about to tell you which woman it believes. Either could be inventing her stories, and Linda in particular is hard to pin down. Born in England, she has come to the United States, the home of spiritualism, to practice her profession in a place that respects it. In the middle third of the 90 minute play, at a party that introduces two of her other friends, we learn that she is even advising a political candidate in his dealings with potential voters. Americans and their leaders both need spiritual reassurance. I almost called that middle third the "middle movement": The structure of "The Thin Place" is beautifully musical. After the monologues and conversations between the two women in the first part both Danson and McDonnell are cunningly good the party ushers in a new tone and new material in the second, as Linda's cousin Jerry (Triney Sandoval) tries to solve the mystery of Hilda, and a benefactress named Sylvia (Kelly McAndrew) begins to doubt Linda's bona fides. But just as this material seems headed into a thin space of its own there are a few baggy moments whose structural purpose becomes apparent only later the uncanny crashes headlong into the party. I will not say where the story goes in its nerve racking final third. That's one of the things I love in Hnath's plays: how far ahead of us they stay. You can never guess, from moment to moment, how the plot will turn, even though the turns rarely seem less than inevitable once they've been made. In the same way Hnath has little use for introductions or exposition, he doesn't mind changing channels abruptly. This puts the audience, if it's willing, in a constant state of ears up readiness. More than once I actually thought I saw a ghost. It turned out to be an odd glint in my glasses. On a macro level, Hnath's aesthetic restlessness keeps him switching genres, from the religious inquiry of "The Christians" to the literary postscript of "A Doll's House, Part 2" to the political fantasy of "Hillary and Clinton" all in the last few years. What they, and now "The Thin Place," have in common is the pleasure they take in theatricality, customized to their subjects. This being a story about fear and our hunger for it, suspense is the mode, and Waters's high contrast staging, with its abrupt shifts of pace and tone, could hardly be finer in supporting that mood. Visual information is kept to a minimum the stage is nearly bare throughout but the glary then nearly infrared lighting (by Mark Barton) and the ambient, then suddenly gasp inducing sound (by Christian Frederickson) are treated as accomplices in a crime. I suppose that makes us in the audience the victims: No chiropractor is as manipulative as the teller of a ghost story. Yet if this were just a yarn, it would eventually unravel. Instead, "The Thin Place" keeps on haunting because it presses against the deepest human longings not only for connection but also for exposure. We want to know what's out there, yes, but we also want it to know us. Tickets Through Jan. 5 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater; Manhattan; 212 279 4200, playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Anyone who has used Ninth Street to cross Tompkins Square Park has seen the skateboarders who occupy its northeast corner. Many of them call it the T.F. Others call it Thompson's. T.F. stands for "training facility" (though very little official training takes place here), and Thompson's comes out of a phonetic misunderstanding that comes from knowing a place verbally, rather than on a map. Like all great New York City skate spots, Tompkins Square Park offers little more than flat ground and a place to be seen. Manhattan is a concrete island, completely skateable, so why here? While most suburban skaters seek spots outside of city centers, the best urban skate spots can be found at the center of any city. However, as New York City continues to gentrify and to pump millions into purpose built skate parks, the city forces this peripheral movement: Most skate parks can now be found under bridges and on the edges of Manhattan. The T.F. at Tompkins remains a rare hub, a throwback to a grittier era of the city's history. I first met Daniel Weiss at the T.F. 15 years ago. He was a stocky redheaded teenager with a precise style and tasteful trick selection. Skateboarding levels out age differences in the face of skill. Danny was one of the good kids, and I watched him cultivate other interests outside of skateboarding as he matured. Danny has always searched for archetypes. When he quit skating to get into motorcycles, he got into classic bikes. As a photographer, he shoots medium format street portraits of New Yorkers who belong to a bygone era. Here, his subject is coming of age in an ever replicating scene that seems frozen in time, yet no longer includes us. Perhaps we no longer have the patience for it, or the fearlessness. To be a skater, you must repeatedly attempt an inconceivably difficult task, knowing that you will injure yourself along the way. It takes months, sometimes years, to learn these tricks and to get them consistent. That means months of bruises, scrapes, broken bones and sometimes worse. In turn, the sport helps skaters commit to other interests fully, despite their grave risks. Take Danny and his motorcyles. On April 16, 2016, he was involved in a near fatal crash. He lost control on a dirt track upstate and hit a concrete wall at 80 m.p.h. He almost died and only recently has been able to walk without a cane. He may never skate again. He might not want to. When looking at photography, a reciprocal exchange happens between the viewer and the subject. Whether we want to or not, we often see or try to see ourselves in the subjects. Danny, who is in his early 30s, looks back to a place and to people with whom he has shared a huge part of his past. These teenagers are on the cusp of adulthood, the moment when clothes are less of an aspirational costume, who you want to be, and become a statement of who you are. A lot has changed over 15 years. Skateboarding, like the neighborhood, has grown up and acquired a marketable sheen. It is difficult not to see in these kids, who now dress like the ones in the movie "Kids," my contemporaries in the mid '90s. Who knows how long the park will be a haven for them, or what they will become? Small, seemingly insubstantial butterfly wing youthful decisions can have life changing consequences. Who knows how long skaters will be allowed to hang out at the T.F., considering the skyrocketing property values of real estate in the East Village? As perhaps some of Danny's experiences at the T.F. cultivated his unique perspective, and set him on a course that almost ended his life, his photographs of kids in the park remind us of the rare delicacy of youth and open space in the city. 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 |
LOS ANGELES Walt Disney's grandniece Abigail Disney, a critic of income inequality in general and the Walt Disney Company's pay practices in particular, castigated the conglomerate anew on Monday, saying she came away "livid" about wages after a visit to Disneyland. On Wednesday, Disney punched back, calling Ms. Disney's assertions "a gross and unfair exaggeration of the facts." Ms. Disney, the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who founded the entertainment company in 1923 with his brother Walt, appeared on the Yahoo News video series "Through Her Eyes" this week. The interview touched on a range of sensitive topics her archly conservative parents were, at times, abusive alcoholics, she said but her comments about wages for Disneyland workers in California were widely picked up online. "I went to Anaheim, and I wanted to be sure I understood the situation and the context really, really well," Ms. Disney said. "Every single one of these people I talked to were saying, 'I don't know how I can maintain this face of joy and warmth when I have to go home and forage for food in other people's garbage.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A rare cancer first linked to breast implants in 2011 has now been associated with nine deaths, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday. As of Feb. 1, the agency had received a total of 359 reports of the cancer associated with the implants. The deaths were not caused by breast cancer, the agency said, but by a rare malignancy in the immune system, anaplastic large cell lymphoma. In cases linked to implants, this rare form of cancer grows in the breast, usually in the capsule of scar tissue that forms around an implant. It is usually treatable and not often fatal. The problem is more likely to occur with textured implants, which have a pebbly surface, than with smooth implants, the agency said. Of the 359 reported cases, 231 included information about the implant surface: 203 were textured, and 28 smooth. The contents of the implants appeared much less important: Of 312 cases where the contents were known, 186 were filled with silicone gel, and 126 with saline. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
How TikTok's Owner Tried, and Failed, to Cross the U.S. China Divide The Chinese entrepreneur behind TikTok took ample precautions when he set out to straddle the tech world's most treacherous divide: the one separating China's tightly controlled internet from the rest of the planet. He made TikTok unavailable in China so the video app's users wouldn't be subject to the Communist Party's censorship requirements. He stored user data in Virginia and Singapore. He hired managers in the United States to run the app and lobbyists in Washington to fight for it on Capitol Hill. None of that counted for much in the end. With TikTok now negotiating a sale to Microsoft under intense pressure from President Trump, who said on Monday that he was giving the go ahead to such a deal, the digital wall between China and the United States is proving to be higher than ever at this moment of widening conflict between the two countries. Only this time, it is the U.S. government, not China's, that is putting up the barricades an escalation that could foretell an even more restrictive time for companies in both nations. ByteDance, the eight year old Chinese social media giant behind TikTok, is China's first truly global internet success story. The company's founder, Zhang Yiming, 37, began pushing to expand overseas early on, believing that only a company with worldwide reach could remain on the technological edge. But TikTok ended up resonating with American teenagers when even a platform for short viral videos is subject to political scrutiny. Under China's leader, Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has emphasized its ultimate authority over Chinese people and businesses. Suspicion never dissipated that TikTok no matter how many non Chinese executives it put in charge might be unable to withstand pressure from Beijing to surrender user data or manipulate content. Similar doubts already hang over many other Chinese tech companies. TikTok's sudden change of fortune could force them to re evaluate their own international ambitions. "If you want to go out and tackle more difficult markets, sure, but obviously there's consequences and additional costs," Mr. Tang said. "Going forward, Chinese entrepreneurs in these tech companies should be aware of that." One unnamed entrepreneur put ByteDance's position in even starker terms to the Chinese tech blog Huxiu on Monday: "Once the U.S. business is lost, half of the space for thinking about globalization has vanished." As uncertainty swirled on Sunday about whether Mr. Trump would allow Microsoft to continue negotiations with TikTok, ByteDance issued a late night statement in China reiterating its commitment to going global. "In the process, we are facing all kinds of complex and unimaginable difficulties," the company said. The statement cited the tense geopolitical environment, culture clashes and, in an unusually direct jab at a competitor, "Facebook's plagiarism and smears." Facebook is rolling out a TikTok like feature called Reels on Instagram, which it owns. The company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has also argued that undermining American tech companies with excess regulation could allow Chinese rivals to export their own, very different values to the world. Facebook declined to comment on ByteDance's statement. Mr. Zhang falls on the geekier side of the tech founder spectrum. He repaired computers in college, and from past interviews, he appears most at home talking about algorithms and the flow of information. He is not a Communist Party member, he told the Atlantic magazine recently. For many years, he echoed Mr. Zuckerberg in saying he ran a tech company, not a media outlet, which meant he should not be imposing his own judgments over content. "I can't accurately decide whether something is good or bad, highbrow or lowbrow," he told the Chinese business magazine Caijing in 2016. Mr. Zhang may have thought he was insulating himself in China. But the perils of that technology driven approach were made clear in 2018 when the Chinese authorities shut down one of ByteDance's oldest products, a humor app called Neihan Duanzi, for spreading vulgar material. "For a long time, we put too much emphasis on the role of technology and didn't realize that technology must be guided by core socialist values," Mr. Zhang wrote in a public letter of apology. ByteDance's popular news aggregator app, Toutiao, had also been under fire for saucy content. In response, Toutiao began featuring more stories about Mr. Xi at the top of its feed. By then, ByteDance had already begun expanding in Japan, India, Southeast Asia and beyond. TikTok was released in 2017 as the international edition of Douyin, one of ByteDance's Chinese video apps. TikTok had some early scrapes with foreign governments. In 2018, Indonesia temporarily blocked it for hosting inappropriate content. Despite the challenges, Mr. Zhang said at an event in Beijing that year that going global was the only way to get access to the talent and resources needed for long term success. He said he had studied another Chinese company's rapid growth overseas to see how it could be done. His choice was prescient in hindsight, though perhaps not in the way he intended. The Trump administration has for years sought to undermine the giant Chinese maker of telecommunications equipment and smartphones. It, too, has been called a national security threat by White House officials, who fear the Chinese government could use Huawei gear for espionage. International growth was top of mind when Mr. Zhang began courting Musical.ly, a Chinese made lip syncing app that had found success in the United States and Europe. In late 2017, ByteDance agreed to buy Musical.ly for around 1 billion. ByteDance would later merge the app into TikTok, giving it a toehold in the West that would eventually propel it to wider success. According to people with knowledge of the matter, the two parties did not approach the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, to seek its blessing beforehand a decision that would later come back to haunt ByteDance. CFIUS (pronounced SIFF ee yuss) typically evaluates foreign deals involving an American business for possible national security risks. But it also claims jurisdiction over deals between foreign businesses that have significant American operations. As TikTok became a smash hit in the United States, concerns arose about whether the app was censoring content that might offend Beijing. Late last year, The New York Times and others reported that CFIUS was looking into the Musical.ly deal. Washington politicians also began voicing fears that TikTok could be a conduit for China to meddle in American elections. With pressure building, some of Mr. Zhang's investors and advisers offered ideas for putting distance between TikTok and ByteDance, including reorganizing TikTok's corporate or legal structure. In an interview in November, Alex Zhu, a founder of Musical.ly who was then the head of TikTok, said the company wouldn't rule out such changes. "We continuously look at the company structure and optimize the structure," Mr. Zhu said. But instead of a major restructuring, Mr. Zhang opted for personnel changes. This spring, he reshuffled ByteDance executives in China and said he would personally devote more time and energy to Europe, the United States and other markets. In May, Liu Zhen, a former Uber executive in China who had been overseeing ByteDance's global expansion, left the company. Mr. Zhu was replaced as TikTok's head by Kevin Mayer, a veteran Disney executive in the United States. ByteDance also embarked upon a lobbying push in Washington to sell the idea that TikTok's allegiances were with the United States, not China. In meetings with lawmakers, lobbyists emphasized the app's light, uplifting fare and the fact that many of its top leaders were American residents. Last month, when American technology companies including Facebook and Google began reassessing their operations in Hong Kong in the wake of a new security law that gave the Chinese government greater powers in the territory, TikTok went further, announcing that it would stop operating in Hong Kong completely. The Trump administration's scrutiny continued unabated. After Mr. Trump failed to draw huge crowds at a June re election rally in Tulsa, Okla., TikTok users claimed to have pulled off a prank by registering for tickets and then not attending the event. In early July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo floated the idea of banning the app over security concerns. Within weeks, Microsoft said it had received Mr. Trump's go ahead for pursuing a deal to buy TikTok's U.S. operations. CFIUS had decided to order ByteDance to divest. In a letter to ByteDance's employees on Monday, Mr. Zhang made the recent turmoil sound more like a technical matter than an existential threat brought about by hostile geopolitical forces. He wrote that the company had repeatedly emphasized that it was willing to make technical changes to address U.S. concerns, yet the order to sell was made anyway. "We do not agree with this decision, because we have always insisted on guaranteeing users' data security, the platform's neutrality and transparency." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
It's really not so much the floral prints as the floaty lightweight garments that make warm weather dressing so enjoyable. Who needs button closures and form fitting trousers when you can look just as good when you're ... well, unrestricted? Here are three new New York designers who are doing those shapes in a good way. Off Season, A line from Abra Boero and Judi Rosen, is pleasingly undone, with gauzy cotton caftans and one pieces that are down to earth. Ms. Boero has a store of the same name in the Rockaways in Queens. "People are day tripping more," she said, "and New York has a strong growing beach culture that we wanted to speak to."At offseasonnyc.com in mid May. Svilu, an environmentally conscious label founded by Britt Cosgrove and Marina Polo (who met while working for Peter Som), specializes in organic cotton sundresses and refined everyday shapes. Their spring collection draws on traditional Indian styles, as in a Rabari jacket (above right) reimagined in embroidered linen. At svilu.com. Tosia was founded by Sara Hankin, who cut her teeth at Ralph Lauren and J. Crew. Her spring collection includes chic cutout tees, open shoulder cotton tops and an off the shoulder jumpsuit with frayed trim that Margot Robbie just wore on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert." "My dream is to create that 20 percent of your closet you find yourself wearing 90 percent of the time," Ms. Hankin said.At tosianyc.com. Rainbows: Not for the Color Averse To inject some springtime fun into your look (if hot pink jeans are not for you), a bit of rainbow colored ornamentation is an approachable way to go. Karlie Kloss gave her neutral Coachella look a pop with a multihued Roxanne Assoulin choker (which is now back ordered for at least six weeks). Yes, a little goes a long way, so do it with a rainbow bright necklace, earrings or a hair comb that will brighten any drab hair day. Slipping on a pair of shoes wrapped with a giant bow can't help but put you in a childlike good mood. Sweet as can be but clearly modern, they will add just the right amount of flair to your streamlined basics. From top left, clockwise: Joshua Sanders denim slip ons with an oversize bow, 450 at Saks Fifth Avenue; saks.com; Delpozo flatform slingbacks with an origami bow, 1,000 at modaoperandi.com; Brother Vellies leather slides with a hand woven Madras cotton bow, 285 at Brother Vellies; brothervellies.com; Orderll leather bow sandals, 375 at Pas Mal; pasmalnyc.com; | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
And so, once again, to Princess Diana. Like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, she has become a sort of cultural Rosetta Stone we return to over and over, seeking to discover answers to our own choices in her limpid blue stare and cacophonous, attention grabbing wardrobe. This time around the re examination comes courtesy of "The Crown," Season 4, a.k.a. the Diana Season. The scrutiny has been building since the 20th anniversary of the princess's death in 2017, when Virgil Abloh declared Diana his Off White muse and Kensington Palace held an exhibition devoted to her outfits. And though it got a boost last year with a new musical (with costumes by William Ivey Long and a featured song titled "The Dress") that was supposed to be headed to Broadway, the chatter reached a fresh apogee this weekend with the release of the Netflix show. The one where the princess, in the form of the actress Emma Corrin, catches the Windsor eye, makes her public debut, gets married and miserable, develops an eating disorder and becomes a Fashion Icon nonetheless. The one that inspired British Vogue to put Ms. Corrin on the cover of its October issue in a sapphire blue Oscar de la Renta taffeta ball gown with the headline "Queen of Hearts." The one that has been the subject of a 3 D virtual show at the Brooklyn Museum, "The Queen and the Crown," featuring assorted items from the series's costume department, including a raspberry floral two piece dress made for the princess's Australian tour and the remake of that famous meringue of an overblown wedding dress. After all, if there's one thing "The Crown" does with its fealty to the clothes that were, it is to show how cringe worthy some of those fashion moments actually were. (Amy Roberts, the costume designer, has said that she didn't recreate them exactly but rather tried to capture their essence, just as Peter Morgan, the show's creator, talks about his allegiance to historical truth over accuracy.) The pie crust collars and sailor bibs and pussy bows. The frumpy, Laura Ashley puff sleeve smocks and midi skirts. The novelty knitwear. The Easter egg overalls and gingham. The saccharine mash up of romance and posh schlubbiness teetering delicately between pastoral and kitsch before blossoming into pure Disney fantasy: taffeta, velvet, iridescent blues the frumpy duckling turning into a polka dot and silk swathed swan. Right now, understandably, we can't get enough of such vicarious fashion exposition, given our loungewear limned reality. The hazy, sentimental lens of nostalgia can make even the pretty bad delicious, in an ironic, self aware way. Rowing Blazers has already rereleased Diana's famous black sheep sweater the one she wore to a couple of her husband's polo matches to so much hoo ha that even at 295 it is available for order only and will not arrive until January at the earliest. And this is only Diana, Episode 1. The famous shirred black "revenge dress" the princess wore to a gala in 1994, the same evening her husband confessed his affair to the BBC, and the more body con designer outfits of her divorce years are still to come, perhaps in Season 5. As are the John Galliano designed Dior slip dress worn to the Met gala in 1996 and the Versace column worn on a tour of Australia the same year. Ditto the simpler button ups and chinos that became the uniform of her humanitarian work. And the tragedy that froze her in time. Plus, there's yet another Diana project, the feature film "Spencer," starring Kristen Stewart, waiting in the wings. Despite all of this, Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue during Diana's heyday and current contrarian columnist for The Daily Mail, wrote in a recent piece, "Princess Diana was dazzling, but it's nonsense to claim she was a fashion inspiration." It sounds like sacrilege. But she's right. Diana didn't send designers or fans spinning out in new directions because she put her clothes together in an especially creative inventive way, or because she gravitated toward the outre and imaginative, which she then wore with such elan that she left a trail of ideas in her wake. (Indeed, she was introduced to fashion by Anna Harvey, then the deputy editor of British Vogue and Diana's designer conduit, who does not appear to be part of "The Crown" cast of characters.) Diana wasn't one of those public figures with an identifiable and consistent personal style, though she clearly loved to get dressed. Rather, the greatest trend she ever set bigger than the fad for engagement rings with oval sapphires surrounded by diamonds, or the biggest of her big shoulders was as the original fashion reality TV star: a public figure who used her clothes as a personal weather vane, not to advance the agenda of state but for direct communication to the outside world, even when she was simply smiling and standing by. She wore her emotions not just on, but as, her sleeves. And because we could all see them, we could all relate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
DORA AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD (2019) Stream on Hulu. This live action adaptation of the Nick Jr. television series "Dora the Explorer" imagines what the adventurer's life would be like after childhood. The movie begins with 16 year old Dora (Isabela Moner) adjusting to life with relatives in the suburbs while her parents are working abroad. "There, her unique background, relentless cheer and wide eyed inquisitiveness prompt strange looks," Bilge Ebiri wrote in his review for The Times. Eventually, adventure finds Dora she and three other students are kidnapped by villainous treasure hunters who are searching for her parents and she is able to prove herself to her new friends. "Even as it strikes a gently irreverent tone, the film also embodies its heroine's positive energy," Ebiri wrote. IMAGINE THE SOUND (1981) Stream on the Criterion Channel, Amazon and Kanopy; rent on iTunes. When free jazz arose as an identifiable genre in the late 1950s, it was subjected to many of the criticisms that avant garde movements tend to face. Some claimed its practitioners lacked technical skills, while others argued it broke too radically with jazz norms to count as a legitimate offshoot. This documentary by Ron Mann tries to gently set the record straight. Lovingly filmed performances by Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon and Paul Bley make the case for the aesthetic quality of their creative output, and interviews with these figures demonstrate that there was a deep intellectual and spiritual foundation to their music. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Below, our list of the five most popular getaway spots come autumn and through the winter. If these don't pique your interest, maybe the destinations on the bottom half of the top 10 list will they are Paris, Bali, Israel, Antarctica and South Africa. PORTUGAL After flying under the radar for many years, Portugal has become a must see country, Mr. Maza said. "Signature now sells several thousand trips to Portugal a year, but five years ago, it used to be several hundred," he said. The travel search engine Kayak has seen searches to Lisbon for fall travel increase 46 percent compared with last fall, and Made for Spain and Portugal, a Madrid based company which sells luxury trips to Portugal, has sold 30 percent more trips to the country for this fall and winter, compared with last year, said the company's founder, Virginia Irurita. "Portugal has lots of cultural attractions, a sophisticated wine and food scene and is a great value for money," she said. Another plus: the weather in winter tends to be mild, Ms. Irurita said, with "plenty of sunny days." NEW YORK CITY It's a city that never goes out of favor. New York has consistently been the second most searched destination on Kayak, according to David Solomito, the company's vice president of North America marketing, while Sojern ranks it as its third most searched destination by North American travelers. American Express Travel has seen a 35 percent increase for fall bookings to New York City, compared with last fall, and Ovation has seen sales for winter trips to the city increase 25 percent compared with last winter. Mr. Ezon said that his clients are interested in feeling like locals and are choosing to stay in properties located in residential neighborhoods such as the Mark, on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "Our clients have been to New York many times before, but now, they want a non touristy experience," he said. MEXICO Given the recent earthquakes in Mexico, along with the travel warning the U.S. Department of State issued about safety in parts of the country, it may be a surprise that it is among the 10 most desired destinations this winter. But that is the case, according to some travel companies. Mr. Ezon said that the earthquakes and recent hurricanes have had minimal or no impact on Mexico's popular beach getaways. Ovation's sales to the country jumped 54 percent, compared with last fall and winter. The company has sold the most trips to the Riviera Maya, on the country's northeast coastline, but also saw significant sales for Los Cabos and Puerto Vallarta trips. On Booking.com, which claims to be the world's largest travel hotel booking site with a database of around a million properties, Cancun is among the top 10 cities with the most hotel bookings for this fall and winter. Cancun is also a top searched destination for North American travelers, according to data from Sojern, a San Francisco based advertising and data company, which analyzes the searches and bookings of 350 million global travelers. "When it comes to their annual beach vacations this year, Mexico is where people want to go," Mr. Ezon said. LONDON The recent terrorist attacks in Britain don't appear to have led to a dip in travelers considering or booking fall and winter vacations to the capital city: Kayak, Sojern, Ovation and American Express Travel all report that London is among their top destinations. American Express Travel, for one, has seen a 45 percent increase in trip sales to London for this fall and winter. "Regardless of how many times people visit, London's scale means that there is always a new neighborhood ready to become the next 'it' location and hot new restaurants and galleries to intrigue returning travelers," Ms. Bennett said. Right now, she said, Shoreditch in East London and Southwark in Central London are the up and coming areas in the city that travelers are keen to explore. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Lapin a la moutarde (rabbit in mustard sauce) is a grandmotherly French classic that has not yet had a wide revival among those New York restaurants that have made a fetish of pork belly and foie gras. But there it appeared on the menu of Lucien, a sturdy little bistro near the corner of First Avenue and First Street, and shortly after, it was placed in front of Arnaud Vaillant, a Frenchman in jeans and a hoodie. Mr. Vaillant, 26, and his boyfriend and partner, Sebastien Meyer, 27, the artistic directors of Courreges, the landmark French label, were in town for to celebrate the return of the line to Bergdorf Goodman. "I have to give them credit, they moved it forward," said Linda Fargo, the senior vice president of Bergdorf's, at a party earlier that evening at their pop up on the store's fifth floor, where their vinyl jackets and minidresses stood alongside giant signs reading, "TOP," "SKIRT" and "JACKET." Mr. Vaillant (who handles logistics, including sourcing suppliers and production) and Mr. Meyer (who concentrates on design) are almost comically young and cartoonishly adorable, but they have inherited one of the great labels of French ready to wear. Courreges, in its 1960s and '70s heyday, was a pioneer of space age chic, as well as of ready to wear itself. Andre Courreges, its founder, helped usher in a new youthfulness in acid colors, unexpected materials (plastic was a favorite) and kicky shapes (he was an evangelist of the miniskirt). But his company waned in influence as the years went on, and Mr. Courreges stepped back from design in the mid '90s as his health declined. He died in January, at 92; the French president, Francois Hollande, expressed his condolences. "In France, it brings nostalgia," said Lolita Jacobs, 27, the in house consultant and muse to Mr. Meyer and Mr. Vaillant. "It's almost like a national treasure." In the United States, however, its history is lesser known. "For the younger generation," she said, "there is a huge gap. It's almost like a start up, a new brand." In a way, it is. In 2011, Mr. Courreges and his wife and collaborator, Coqueline, sold the company to Jacques Bungert and Frederic Torloting, advertising executives whom she contacted after reading an editorial they wrote defending the future of brands in a logo weary world. (Courreges had changed hands several times before the family regained control in 1994.) To introduce it to a new generation, Mr. Bungert and Mr. Torloting brought in Mr. Meyer and Mr. Vaillant, who had early acclaim with their own collection, Coperni Femme. Coperni won Andam's First Collections prize and was a finalist for the LVMH Prize. They withdrew from the competition when the Courreges appointment was announced, and put Coperni on hiatus. "He started something that ought to continue," Mr. Meyer said of Mr. Courreges. "Why create a new brand when we can continue this story?" Still, there was the challenge of taking on the legacy of one of France's most distinguished designers. "It's a big challenge to relaunch a brand like this, because of the huge patrimony," Mr. Vaillant said. The solution was to strip it back to essentials, and for their first show in September, they began with bare categories: the skirt, the jacket, the dress, the top and the pants, most worn simply, over a bare white bodysuit. "We don't want to do art," Mr. Vaillant said. "We want to do garments that women can wear." Real women did. By the next season, their shiny jackets were cropping up on stylish attendees, young women whose mothers and grandmothers may have worn Courreges, but whose own view into the label came from their contemporaries. "Arnaud and Sebastien are about youth," said Mr. Bungert, now the Courreges co president. "Youth, architecture, insolence, innovation what do they mean today? It's like in the digital world. When you're not native, it's not the same." The debt to the style of old Courreges is evident in shapes and fabrics, but the designers said their primary commitment is to innovation, just as Mr. Courreges's was. They have gamely chanced risky ideas: showing no clothes at all (only the one word categories) in their ad campaign; making key runway pieces available immediately; introducing a coat with an inset battery that generates heat at the touch of a button and can be recharged with an iPhone cable. Future shows, they promise, will move even further from the expected. Theirs is a revolution in deliberate stages, but its start has been promising. Early reviews have been largely favorable; sales nearly doubled between its first and second seasons. Elizabeth von der Goltz of Bergdorf Goodman reported that the pop up has had "an amazing response from our customers our sell through proves it." Courreges, the avatar of the future, is catching up to a new present. Coqueline Courreges, having given her blessing, is no longer directly involved, though the designers have heard that she keeps an eye on the proceedings at the iconic Paris shop and offices her husband established. "Sometimes she comes by Rue Francois 1er," Mr. Vaillant said. "She stays in her car." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A private local investor has bought this 7,243 square foot, five story, mixed use 1886 brownstone rowhouse designed in the Northern Renaissance Revival and Queen Anne styles by the Thom Wilson architectural firm. It sits on a 20 by 102 foot lot in the Central Park West Historic District, and offers three free market apartments two one bedrooms and a two bedroom floor through. The Celina spa and Le Petit Kids clothing shop are the commercial tenants. The building, which had been in the same hands for over 50 years, sold for 19 times the rent roll, and offers a cap rate of about 3.7 percent. A woodworker/cabinetmaker has signed a five year lease for 2,100 square feet, formerly occupied by another cabinetmaker, in this 70,000 square foot single story building in the industrial section of Greenpoint. The building offers a drive in door, high ceilings, gas blowers, heavy power and floor drains. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
An unlikely pair has found themselves at odds in the lead up to the Oscars: Meryl Streep and Karl Lagerfeld. On Thursday, Mr. Lagerfeld, the creative director of Chanel, told Women's Wear Daily that after requesting a dress from the label, Ms. Streep backed out when she found another label one that was willing to pay her for wearing its dress on the red carpet. "A genius actress, but cheapness also, no?" Mr. Lagerfeld said of Ms. Streep, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the 20th time, for her role in "Florence Foster Jenkins." A representative for Ms. Streep quickly disputed Mr. Lagerfeld's claims to The Hollywood Reporter, saying that it is against Ms. Streep's ethics to take payment for wearing a designer's gown. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed into the moon on Thursday. "We had a failure in the spacecraft," Opher Doron, the general manager of Israel Aerospace Industries' space division, which collaborated on building the spacecraft, said afterward. "We unfortunately have not managed to land successfully." The mood at the command center was somber but still celebratory. "Well we didn't make it, but we definitely tried," said Morris Kahn, an Israeli telecommunications entrepreneur and president of SpaceIL, the nonprofit that undertook the mission. "And I think the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous. I think we can be proud." Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who attended the event at the mission's command center in Yehud, Israel, said, "If at first you don't succeed, you try again." Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. If it had succeeded, the robotic lander, named Beresheet, which means "Genesis" or "in the beginning" in Hebrew, would have been the first on the moon built by a private organization, and it would have added Israel to just three nations the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China to have accomplished that feat. Beresheet reached the launchpad and was headed to space aboard a SpaceX rocket in February. It orbited the moon, by itself a historic accomplishment for a private organization. That had been done by only five nations the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, Japan and India and the European Space Agency. But the landing was the riskiest part of the mission. More than 2,500 well wishers came to witness the landing, sitting in plastic chairs on a lawn outside the command center. But the spacecraft stumbled on the last part of its journey. The start of the automated landing sequence went as planned. Beresheet aimed to set down within the northeastern section of a lava plain known as the Sea of Serenity, chosen largely because it is flat with few craters. The spacecraft even took a picture of itself at an altitude of 13 miles with the moon in the background. The atmosphere grew quieter and tenser when it became apparent that not everything was working properly. Still high above the surface, the engine cut out. "We seem to have a problem with our main engine," said Mr. Doron, who was providing commentary of the spacecraft's progress. "We are resetting the spacecraft to try to enable the engine." Outside the control room, the onlookers groaned. Some seconds later, he said, "We have the main engine back on." The crowd started to clap, but Ido Anteby, SpaceIL's chief executive, immediately interjected, "But it's not. No, no." Mr. Doron added, "The main engine is back on, but we have lost communication with the spacecraft." Nothing more was heard from Beresheet. The appointed landing time 10:25 p.m. in Israel, or 3:25 p.m. Eastern time came and passed, and the SpaceIL team realized the mission was over. Daniela Geron, one of the SpaceIL engineers, was exhausted. She had only slept 3.5 hours, as she helped make some of the final preparations to aid in the tracking of Beresheet on its landing attempt. "Right now I feel kind of overwhelmed ," she said. "I feel pride. But also sad. And disappointed." She was hopeful this was a first step for private efforts to explore space, not the end. "This can be done by the private sector," Ms. Geron said. "We can go to the moon. Maybe even further" The mission cost about 100 million, far less than government sponsored lunar spacecraft, but it highlighted the trade off in such faster and cheaper projects. The missions are also inherently riskier, and their backers must be willing to accept periodic failures . NASA has embarked on that approach for sending small experiments to the moon. In November, the agency chose nine companies to vie for 2 billion in contracts over the next decade. NASA officials have emphasized the need for speed rather than assured success, and they expect some of those missions, like SpaceIL's, to fail. "I was a little bit depressed," said Asaf Ezrai, 19, one of the spectators who said he wanted to pursue a career in science. "But it's a great achievement even to come to this conclusion in the end." Three young Israeli engineers Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub started SpaceIL, aiming to win the 20 million first prize in the Google Lunar X Prize. They also hoped the effort would inspire children in Israel to pursue careers in science and engineering. The task proved more arduous, both technically and financially, than any of the X Prize teams anticipated. After several extensions, the final deadline for the prize expired last year. The SpaceIL team pushed on, with Mr. Kahn providing the needed money to finish. Last month, the X Prize Foundation announced that even though the competition had ended, it would give SpaceIL a 1 million Moonshot Award for a successful landing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Americans are not ready for the Real ID Act that goes into full effect a year from now, according to a survey released last week by the nonprofit trade group U.S. Travel Association. The Real ID Act was passed by Congress in 2005 to increase security measures concerning state issued personal identification cards, mainly driver's licenses, that are often used to access airports and military bases and nuclear installations. Beginning Oct. 1, 2020, only Real ID compliant documentation will be accepted for boarding commercial flights, including domestic flights, and entering federal buildings and military bases. Compliant documentation includes passports (which are still required for international flights), passport cards and trusted traveler identification like Global Entry. But a majority of Americans turn to their driver's licenses to pass through security for their domestic air travel, and only 42 percent of Americans hold passports. Some 99 million Americans do not have the Real ID compliant identification, the U.S. Travel Association said. That's a lot, and concern is growing that once the October deadline is passed, travelers will be turned away from airports when they cannot provide the approved identification at security checkpoints, potentially causing confusion and chaos. "If Real ID went into effect tomorrow, almost 80,000 people trying to board a plane would be denied on Day 1," the U.S. Travel Association said in a statement on Monday. "This is significant not only because it will inconvenience travelers and create confusion at U.S. airports. It could do significant damage to our nation's economy," said Roger Dow, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Travel Association. Many states, which oversee the task of issuing and processing driver's licenses and many other forms of documents used to prove identification, were slow to adopt. Some have experienced delays, miscommunication with the federal government and technical glitches in their effort to issue Real IDs to residents . On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security, tasked with implementing the Real ID Act, reminded Americans to get their Real IDs and acknowledged that significant progress has been made in issuing the IDs in less than two years . Forty seven states are currently issuing the IDs, up from 26 in January 2017. To receive a Real ID compliant license, the Department of Homeland Security requires people to provide documentation showing their full legal name, date of birth, Social Security number, two proofs of address of principal residence and lawful status. Licenses are still processed by the state; some states may require more information. Travelers also have the option of getting an Enhanced ID, which is Real ID compliant and can be used for domestic travel, as well as for traveling from Canada, Mexico and some Caribbean countries by sea or land, but not on flights. Enhanced IDs are only available to American citizens, while anyone with lawful presence in the United States can get a Real ID . Most Real ID licenses display a star in the top right corner, and Enhanced ID license have the word "Enhanced" printed across the top span. The U.S. Travel Association is urging Americans to check their Real ID status at their state's motor vehicle department. The organization is also asking states to encourage residents to upgrade their license sooner than later. "We need the travel industry to talk to its customers about Real ID at hotel front desks, through their customer loyalty programs, at the airport check in counter," the organization said in its statement. 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 |
Credit...Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The F.B.I. and the Mystery of the Mummy's Head In 1915, a team of American archaeologists excavating the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Deir el Bersha blasted into a hidden tomb. Inside the cramped limestone chamber, they were greeted by a gruesome sight: a mummy's severed head perched on a cedar coffin. The room, which the researchers labeled Tomb 10A, was the final resting place for a governor named Djehutynakht (pronounced "juh HOO tuh knocked") and his wife. At some point during the couple's 4,000 year long slumber, grave robbers ransacked their burial chamber and plundered its gold and jewels. The looters tossed a headless, limbless mummified torso into a corner before attempting to set the room on fire to cover their tracks. The archaeologists went on to recover painted coffins and wooden figurines that survived the raid and sent them to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1921. Most of the collection stayed in storage until 2009 when the museum exhibited them. Though the torso remained in Egypt, the decapitated head became the star of the showcase. With its painted on eyebrows, somber expression and wavy brown hair peeking through its tattered bandages, the mummy's noggin brought viewers face to face with a mystery. The museum staff concluded only a DNA test would determine whether they had put Mr. or Mrs. Djehutynakht on display. "The problem was that at the time in 2009 there had been no successful extraction of DNA from a mummy that was 4,000 years old," said Dr. Freed. Egyptian mummies pose a unique challenge because the desert's scorching climate rapidly degrades DNA. Earlier attempts at obtaining their ancient DNA either failed or produced results contaminated by modern DNA. To crack the case, the museum turned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The F.B.I. had never before worked on a specimen so old. If its scientists could extract genetic material from the 4,000 year old mummy, they would add a powerful DNA collecting technique to their forensics arsenal and also unlock a new way of deciphering Egypt's ancient past. "I honestly didn't expect it to work because at the time there was this belief that it was not possible to get DNA from ancient Egyptian remains," said Odile Loreille a forensic scientist at the F.B.I. But in the journal Genes in March, Dr. Loreille and her colleagues reported that they had retrieved ancient DNA from the head. And after more than a century of uncertainty, the mystery of the mummy's identity had been laid to rest. Governor Djehutynakht and his wife, Lady Djehutynakht, are believed to have lived around 2000 B.C. during Egypt's Middle Kingdom. They ruled a province of Upper Egypt. Though the walls in their tomb were bare, the coffins were embellished with beautiful hieroglyphics of the afterlife. "His coffin is a classic masterpiece of Middle Kingdom art," said Marleen De Meyer, assistant director for archaeology and Egyptology at the Netherlands Flemish Institute in Cairo, who re entered the tomb in 2009. "It has elements of a rare kind of realism." They now had another mystery: Why did the mummy have these facial mutilations? Along with Dr. Paul Chapman, a neurosurgeon at the hospital, Dr. Gupta hypothesized that they might be part of an ancient Egyptian mummification practice known as the "Opening of the Mouth Ceremony." The ritual was performed so the deceased could eat, drink and breathe in the afterlife. "It's a very specific cut they made," said Dr. Gupta, referring to the surgical removal of part of the mandible. "There's a precision to it which is what we were surprised by. Someone was actually doing coronoidectomy 4,000 years ago." Some doctors and Egyptologists doubted that ancient Egyptians could perform that complex operation with primitive tools. To show it was possible, Dr. Gupta, Dr. Chapman and an oral and maxillofacial surgeon performed the bone removal on two cadavers using a chisel and mallet. They drove the chisel between the lips and gums behind the wisdom teeth, and were able to remove the same bones missing in the mummified skull. They snaked a long scope with a camera into the back of the mouth. The first tooth they targeted would not budge, so Dr. Fabio Nunes, who was then a molecular biologist at Massachusetts General, switched to a different molar. Sweating, he clamped down with dental forceps, gave it a few wiggles, then a few twists and "pop" it was free. "My main concern was: Don't drop it, don't drop it, don't drop it," he said. After he successfully maneuvered out from the neck, the room exhaled and gazed upon their prize. "This looked like an absolutely cavity free, perfectly preserved tooth," Dr. Freed said. "I thought maybe it was Mrs. Djehutynakht who had died in childbirth. Total speculation." For several years, other teams of scientists tried fruitlessly to get DNA from the molar. Then the crown of the tooth came to Dr. Loreille at the F.B.I. 's lab in Quantico, Va., in 2016. Dr. Loreille had joined the F.B.I. after 20 years of studying ancient DNA. Previously, she had extracted genetic material from a 130,000 year old cave bear, and worked on cases to identify unknown Korean War victims, a two year old child who drowned on the Titanic and two of the Romanov children who were murdered during the Russian Revolution (though she was unable to confirm if one was the famed Anastasia). In the F.B.I.'s clean lab, Dr. Loreille drilled into the tooth's core and collected a tiny bit of powder. She then dissolved the tooth dust to make a DNA library that allowed her to amplify the amount of DNA she was working with, like a copy machine, and bring it up to detectable levels. To determine whether what she had extracted was ancient DNA or contamination from modern people, she analyzed how damaged the sample was. It showed signs of heavy damage, confirmation that she was studying the mummy's genetic material. She plugged her data into computer software that analyzed the ratio of chromosomes in the sample. "When you have a female you have more reads on X. When you have a male you have X and Y," she said. Dr. Loreille discovered the mummified severed head had indeed belong to Governor Djehutynakht. And in doing so she had help establish that ancient Egyptian DNA could be extracted from mummies. Dr. Loreille's examination also showed that Governor Djehutynakht's DNA carried clues to another mystery. For centuries archaeologists and historians have debated the origins of the ancient Egyptians and how closely related they were to modern people living in North Africa. To the researchers' surprise, the governor's mitochondrial DNA indicated his ancestry on his mother's side, or haplogroup, was Eurasian. "No one will ever believe us," Dr. Loreille recalled telling her colleague Jodi Irwin. "There's a European haplogroup in an ancient mummy." Dr. Irwin, the supervisory biologist at the F.B.I.'s DNA support unit, had similar concerns. To verify the results they sent a portion of the tooth to a Harvard lab, and then to the Department of Homeland Security, for further sequencing. Then last year as the F.B.I. scientists worked to confirm their results, another group affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany reported the first successful extraction of ancient DNA from Egyptian mummies. Their results showed that their ancient Egyptian samples were closer to modern Middle Eastern and European samples than to modern Egyptians, who have more sub Saharan African ancestry. "It was at the same time 'Dang! We're not first,'" Dr. Loreille said. "But also we're happy to see they had this Eurasian ancestry." Alexander Peltzer, a population geneticist at the Planck Institute and an author on the first Egyptian mummy DNA paper, said Dr. Loreille's genetic findings fit well with what his team had found. Future ancient DNA work will provide insight into how diverse populations moved and mixed in Egypt millenniums ago, according to Verena Schunemann, a paleogeneticist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who led the Egyptian mummy DNA study that was published before the F.B.I.'s. Obtaining mummified samples for genetic sequencing may prove difficult for researchers outside of Egypt as the country's government has barred foreign researchers from taking artifacts and ancient human remains out of the country since 1983. Many investigations will instead rely on museum samples, like Djehutynakht's decapitated head. In addition to helping lay groundwork for future exploration of ancient Egypt's migration history, Dr. Loreille and her team's work may prove beneficial to F.B.I. forensic efforts. "We are testing techniques that may in the future help them work on remains that are highly degraded, like in the desert or that are burned," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
THE DARK CRYSTAL: AGE OF RESISTANCE Stream on Netflix. The cast includes Mark Hamill, Sigourney Weaver, Andy Samberg, Awkwafina and Simon Pegg. Is it a big budget ensemble comedy? No. How about a "Star Wars" spinoff? Not quite. With an all star voice cast, a hefty budget and many puppets, this new series aims to give a serious face lift to the 1982 fantasy film "The Dark Crystal." The original movie, which came from the Muppets's Jim Henson, was a luxuriant, puppet driven fantasy fable that, Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The New York Times, "aims, I think, to be a sort of Muppet 'Paradise Lost' but winds up as watered down J.R.R. Tolkien." It told of a world where mystical species good and bad were caught in a power struggle that hinged on a magical crystal. The Netflix series, which is aimed at adults and children, tells a prequel over 10 episodes. CARNIVAL ROW Stream on Amazon. Immigration is the key issue in this new series but the show doesn't take place in our world. Or not quite, at least. The setting is a fantasy city with Victorian flourishes and an immigration crisis involving a population of winged fairy refugees. One of these refugees, Vignette (Cara Delevingne), strikes up a forbidden romance with a human detective played by Orlando Bloom. The story focuses on their romance and the mystery surrounding unsolved murders that Bloom's character is trying to solve. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Google's campus in Mountain View, Calif. Critics say the company has achieved a level of dominance in the ad tech market that makes fair competition impossible. WASHINGTON Google has largely stayed quiet about its conversations with federal investigators as the Justice Department has looked into whether the company abused its dominance of the online advertising market. But a little noticed 67 page document sent to Australian regulators in May by Google's advisers may provide clues to how the Silicon Valley titan intends to beat back a legal challenge from the agency. The crux of the company's argument: Even though it accounts for almost 30 percent of spending in the global digital ad market, it does not control enough of the industry to overcharge its customers and box out its competitors. Google has little incentive to squeeze advertisers on ad rates or publishers on fees, write the paper's authors, a lawyer and an economist hired by the company. It has not built its system to give its own services an advantage, they say, and it competes with a wide range of other companies. The document was filed to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission as part of a study of the online ad market. The Australian study differs from the Justice Department investigation in multiple ways, in part because the intricacies of antitrust law vary by country. But the American investigators are said to be focused on Google's ad technology as well. Prosecutors at the agency are homing in on a case, with Attorney General William P. Barr expected to decide soon whether to sue Google. The prosecutors have been investigating the company for almost a year, talking to rivals in media, technology and advertising. A suit could also include accusations related to other parts of Google's business like its search engine. Mr. Barr, who worked on antitrust issues as a corporate lawyer, has taken a personal interest in the investigation. Officials in the Trump administration have persistently targeted Google and other large tech companies, claiming that platforms like YouTube, owned by Google, are slanted against conservative views. Politicians on the left have said the companies represent out of control corporate capitalism. In addition to the Justice Department inquiry, a bipartisan group of state attorneys general is investigating Google. Last year, Texas, which is leading the group's efforts, sent a demand for information to Google related to its ad tech business. The inquiries concern a lucrative and complicated system, largely invisible to consumers, that connects the sellers of ad space with advertisers that want to buy it. When a reader clicks on an article on a news website, for example, numerous interconnected products can sell an ad on that page to the highest bidder, like a clothing brand or a carmaker. Google controls products that aid in every step of that process, including the different pieces of software for advertisers and publishers that run auctions for ad space. Because publishers sometimes post their open ad space to multiple digital ad companies including Google's the companies can compete with one another to see who can obtain the most money from an advertiser to use the slot. Google's critics say it has achieved a level of dominance in the ad tech market that makes fair competition impossible. They argue that Google has, in the past, been able to position itself as the final bidder against other ad tech providers, essentially giving its services an unfair advantage. And they say the company can now use its immense trove of data to get a leg up on other platforms, potentially allowing it to charge prices that are not competitive. In the paper filed in Australia, Daniel Bitton, a partner at the law firm Axinn, Veltrop and Harkrider, which has represented Google for years in antitrust cases, and Stephen Lewis, an economic consultant, take on many of those criticisms. The two argue that the company competes with a wide array of firms to run the market for ad space, including Amazon and lesser known players like the Trade Desk. (Only one other company listed on a chart produced by the Google advisers also owns products servicing every part of the ad buying process: AT T.) Mr. Bitton and Mr. Lewis note that Google's systems work with other companies' products. And they argue that Google's products have made the process of buying ads more efficient or offered strong alternatives for buyers and sellers. They denied that the company's software gave it an inappropriate advantage over its competitors' bids for ad space and say the company made changes in recent years that make it impossible for its products to have the guaranteed final bid in an auction. A Justice Department case could also focus on concerns about Google's ad tech business beyond what is tackled in the Australia paper, like whether it charges unfair fees to publishers for helping them sell ad space. "The antitrust laws are about protecting competition, not individual competitors," Mr. Bitton and Mr. Lewis write. "Trying to protect individual competitors or market participants, when a marketplace is as dynamic as ad tech, carries significant risk of stifling competition and innovation, rather than promoting or protecting it." The two authors also try to defuse the criticism with a broader argument: Google, they said, had no incentive to hurt publishers because content produced by third parties improved the quality of the results on its search engine. Julie Tarallo McAlister, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement that aggressive competition among ad tech companies had resulted in lower prices, a central metric in American antitrust law. "Digital advertising is an increasingly crowded field," she said, "and we compete with hundreds of companies including household names like Adobe, Amazon, AT T, Comcast, Facebook, Oracle and more. This competition has increased choice and helped reduce internet advertising prices, lowering costs for merchants and consumers." In recent months, including in two blog posts in June, Google has also responded to other critiques of its ad business that are being considered by regulators and law enforcement officials around the world. Mr. Bitton and Mr. Lewis wrote that they were responding to two lawyers in Brussels, Damien Geradin and Dimitrios Katsifis, who represent Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and other publishers. The two lawyers have written several papers in the past two years outlining accusations that Google has built an advertising technology monopoly. In June, Mr. Geradin and Mr. Katsifis said Google's filing in Australia included "misleading arguments, factual inaccuracies and glaring omissions, thus making us even more confident on the strength of our arguments." Australia is just one of many places around the world where Google's ad apparatus is under scrutiny. This month, Britain's Competition and Markets Authority released its own study of the digital ad markets. Aspects of the ad business have also been examined by regulators in Canada and the Netherlands in recent years. Europe's competition regulator fined Google 1.69 billion in 2019 for illegally using its dominant position over search ads, which are different from the display ads that are the subject of the paper in Australia. Google is becoming increasingly public in its counterattack. Last month, Google published two blog posts defending against claims it had abused its position over the advertising industry. In one, an executive argues that publishers keep most of the money they make when they sell ads through Google's products. Another focuses on how its systems work and argues that most of the money it makes when publishers sell ads goes to maintaining and improving its operation. And in June, NetChoice, a trade association that counts Google as one of its members, published a paper titled, "Is Google Search an Advertising Goliath? Think Again." It argued that Google was not acting like a monopoly because it allowed users of its ad tech products to use competitors' services, too. It said that "in numerical terms, that means Google's tools give publishers access to demand from over 700 advertising platforms and give advertisers access to supply on more than 80 publisher platforms." A footnote said the source of the claim was the paper written by Mr. Bitton and Mr. Lewis. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
It was not the tennis record Serena Williams has been chasing with mounting urgency and frustration, but her 102nd singles victory earned Tuesday at the United States Open, the most of any player, male or female, still came as a relief. In this strange and abbreviated season, straightforward matches have been difficult to come by for Williams, the most successful women's player of the 21st century. Williams's 7 5, 6 3 victory over Kristie Ahn in all but empty Arthur Ashe Stadium had its wobbles, as well. Williams dropped her opening service game in both sets against the 96th ranked Ahn and frequently struggled to find her range with her returns and groundstrokes until she finally hit cruising speed midway through the final set. But it was undoubtedly a step in the right direction for Williams, who looked downcast and adrift as recently as last week in a third round loss to Maria Sakkari at the Western Southern Open, which preceded the U.S. Open in New York. Williams had not won or played any match in straight sets since returning to action last month after a six month break forced by the coronavirus pandemic. "It's been years," Williams joked. "Been since the '90s that I won a match in straight sets. It felt really good. I was like, 'Serena, just be Serena and close it out.' And I know I can do that." She certainly should know in her fourth decade as a champion. Williams played her first U.S. Open in 1998 and won her first in 1999, becoming a global star, which she remains at age 38 as she continues to pursue a record tying 24th Grand Slam singles title with very little else left to prove on a tennis court. Tuesday's victory broke her tie at the U.S. Open with Chris Evert, who won 101 singles matches during her formidable career and who was the analyst for ESPN for Tuesday's match. "She's got to play neater tennis, more solid, consistent tennis," Evert said of Williams before it began. Her performance, which came on her daughter Olympia's third birthday, was no doubt an improvement, particularly when it came to sealing the deal: she won five of the last six games and finished with 12 aces. But it was not yet the sort of rock solid, overwhelmingly on target performance to send shivers through the diminished field. Williams no doubt has a grand opportunity at this tournament, with nearly a quarter of the top 100 players missing, including six of the top 10. With her stature in the United States, her absence would have weighed heaviest, however, and though she has had health issues that could have caused her decide not to risk a return to the circuit, she committed early to the U.S. Open, giving it a major boost in credibility. "I think what's most important about this event taking place is just the spirit," she said. "Sport has been gone for so long, particularly tennis. We missed two Grand Slams. The U.S. Open is the first major tennis event since the Australian Open. The morale can be really low in the world with everything that's going on. Sometimes you just want to take your mind off it. People have been doing that for generations through sport." She looks motivated and quite fit, but she has also lost some of her traditional ability to intimidate. Ahn, a former collegiate star at Stanford University, was the latest example of an opponent who seemed comfortable in her presence. The daughter of Korean immigrants, Ahn clearly does not suffer from stage fright in general as her clever and viral TikTok videos have made clear during the tour hiatus. She reached the fourth round at last year's U.S. Open but has yet to win a singles match on the tour in 2020 or any tour title in any year. And yet, in her first match against Williams, she started convincingly and cleverly shifted tactics and pace, alternating sliced backhands with flat forehand blasts and often getting the better of the baseline exchanges. But Williams was still able to summon her signature weapon when she needed it: hitting aces to all four corners of the service boxes and above all doing damage with her wide sliced serve in the deuce court. "I was really happy with how I just fought for every point, no matter how I was playing," Williams said. "I feel like I have been focused, but I have been losing matches on literally one point that could swing a match a different way. I've been playing a ton of tight matches." She also seemed to be working on shortening the points, rushing the net more than usual and with mixed results. Above all, she held firm under pressure, which has long been her trademark but has lately been an issue. Last week against Sakkari, Williams did not put up her customary fight for much of the third set. She rushed between points and overhit groundstrokes intentionally as if she were in a hurry to get off the court and end the suffering. "I put myself in a bad situation," she said afterward. "It's like dating a guy that you know sucks. That's literally what I keep doing out here. It's like I have to get rid of this guys. It just makes no sense." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Jules Feiffer sat on the sidelines quietly watching as actors sang, danced and manipulated puppets representing superhero characters that he had drawn. Then he leaned slightly left toward Jeffrey Seller, the director of "The Man in the Ceiling," a new musical for which Mr. Feiffer wrote the book a first for this 88 year old cartoonist and author. He murmured a wish: He wanted to redraw one of the comic characters, a barrel chested flying crusader, to more closely resemble the lanky young actor holding him. He had not seen the performers and puppets in action until now, in a rehearsal studio in Manhattan. Making new drawings is easy, Mr. Feiffer said later. "It takes me all of 10 seconds," he said. "Maybe 12." He ended up redesigning all the puppets the next day, before heading home to Shelter Island, N.Y. "The Man in the Ceiling," based on Mr. Feiffer's 1995 young adult novel about a boy cartoonist named Jimmy Jibbett, will have its world premiere May 30 through June 25 at the well regarded Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y. The musical has taken 21 years to reach this point, coming together as a collaboration among three illustrious principals, each working in an unaccustomed role. Christopher Gregory for The New York Times While Mr. Feiffer wrote plays earlier in his career, this is his first musical. Mr. Seller, the director, is best known as the Tony Award winning producer of "Hamilton" and "Rent." (He's venturing into TV, too, producing the high school drama teacher series "Rise" for NBC.) And Andrew Lippa, the composer and lyricist, is also acting, portraying Jimmy's Uncle Lester. During one tricky moment in the rehearsal, Mr. Lippa ("The Addams Family," "Big Fish") stepped out of character and back into his role as composer. When the actors found they didn't have time to move from one part of the stage to another during "Getting It Right," the opening number, he suggested adding a little vocalizing to bridge the timing gap. He ran to a piano to tap out the four notes. "Is that a good thing?" he asked. "That's a great thing," answered Spencer Liff, the choreographer. "Andrew was enriching that moment," Mr. Seller said later of his longtime friend. "I always defer to my creators." Now both 52, they've known each other since both were 6 in Oak Park, Mich., and Mr. Seller's parents bought a house from Mr. Lippa's parents. "The Man in the Ceiling," which is aimed at adults as well as children, generally follows the plot of Mr. Feiffer's book. The 12 year old Jimmy (Jonah Broscow, who turns 13 on May 30), dreams of becoming a renowned cartoonist, though his mother (Nicole Parker) and father (Danny Binstock) don't approve of his constant drawing. His older sister, Lisi (Erin Kommor), is bossy but supportive, while his Uncle Lester, a would be Broadway musical writer, is most in tune with Jimmy's concerns. Chief among them is his relationship with Charley Beemer (Brett Gray), a cool boy whose friendship Jimmy desperately seeks, though Charley bullies him. Mr. Seller came to the project in 2013, though its origins go back many years earlier. His first foray as a director was that year at the Dallas Theater Center, where he staged the musical "Fly." That same year, Mr. Lippa had given him the script for this show and a CD with songs. He hoped Mr. Seller would evaluate the work and "give me some advice," Mr. Lippa recalled. "Jeffrey said he wanted to direct it." Mr. Lippa's passion for the material went all the way back to 1996, when he first read Mr. Feiffer's book after a friend suggested it might make a good musical. "I read it right away, and I wanted to do it right away," he said. At the time, Mr. Lippa was working on "The Wild Party," a jazz age musical that was eventually presented by Manhattan Theater Club in 2000. "As soon as it was up and running, I asked my attorney to put me in touch with Jules's representative," Mr. Lippa said. "Jules came to see it, and he really responded to it. He loved it." They went to dinner afterward, Mr. Lippa said, but Mr. Feiffer informed him he was working with another composer: "He told me no." He called Mr. Feiffer once a year for the next four years, he said, and got the same answer: No. Then he asked for film rights, and Mr. Feiffer said yes. That turned into a contract with Disney Theatrical Productions, which develops stage musicals, from 2007 to 2009. "It got the show started, but it was not working out. We parted ways very pleasantly," Mr. Lippa said. He let it rest four years, he said, before contacting Mr. Seller. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The documentary "Ferrante Fever" is, as its title suggests, less about Elena Ferrante the enigmatic, pseudonymous Italian writer whose Neapolitan novels have enthralled readers around the world and more about the author as a literary phenomenon. It's an anodyne fan flick that casts only furtive glances in Ferrante's direction, as if the filmmaker, Giacomo Durzi, were a reverential subject who doesn't dare to make eye contact with the queen. His approach is worshipful, decorous and therefore strikingly incongruous with the layered, ambivalent genius that his film pays tribute to a novelist who has made a point to excavate the darker recesses of a woman's experience. Ever mindful of what Ferrante has called her deliberate "absence," Durzi has opted to have writers, editors and other cultural figures explain what it is they find so beguiling about her books. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
LONDON Opening a Prada show can transform a mere model into a supermodel, acting as a gateway to casting in other major shows, glossy magazine covers and lucrative advertising campaigns. For more than 20 years, it has also been a white women only privilege. But that changed in February when Anok Yai, 19, a Sudanese model raised in the United States after arriving from Egypt as a refugee in 2000, became the first black model to open a Prada runway show since Naomi Campbell in 1997. Joining her was Adut Akech, a South Sudanese immigrant to Australia who appeared in over 30 shows this season after making her runway debut in September when she closed the Saint Laurent show at the age of 17. Diversity on the catwalks (or the lack of it) in 2018 is under more scrutiny than ever. While broader representations of beauty have appeared on the runways of the four fashion cities New York, London, Paris and Milan in recent years, accusations of racism and colorism remain. But now, following in the footsteps of Alek Wek, one of the first African models to be embraced by fashion, over two decades ago, many young women with dark skin and natural, largely chemically untreated hair have become sought after runway models. Aside from Ms. Yai and Ms. Akech, for example, there was Grace Bol (originally of South Sudan), who walked in Thom Browne, Givenchy and Balmain, among others; Akiima (also of South Sudanese origin), who was cast by Marc Jacobs, Jacquemus, Loewe and others; and Shanelle Nyasiase (of Kenya), who appeared at Versace, Alexander McQueen and Valentino. "When I was younger, I always felt insecure about my looks when I looked at fashion and movie stars," Ms. Yai said. "Although there were black women, I never saw any that had skin like me, so I always felt unattractive, like a real outsider. But I am feeling so much more optimistic now, especially when I look backstage or on runways at fashion week. There are so many more girls who look just like me." Edward Enninful, the editor in chief of British Vogue and a longstanding campaigner for greater diversity in fashion, agreed. "There's such an incredible variety of black skin tones and it's nice to see that full spectrum being represented," he said, noting that the women had emerged months after the debut of Rihanna's Fenty Beauty line, a smash hit that has been anchored around a range of cosmetics options for darker skinned women. Tiya Miles, a professor of American culture and history at the University of Michigan, believes that Hollywood, fashion and beauty businesses are responding to the popular public movements demanding change in the wider global political and economic landscape. "In reaction to a sharpening sense of white nationalist identity across America and Europe, there is a growing consciousness of the importance of visibility and vocality for people of color, particularly black people," Ms. Miles said. "It is no coincidence that this runway model trend and movies like 'Black Panther' have arrived at the same time. The two are interlocked, as both have been incubating in what feels a like a growing crusade with many of the hallmarks of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They are part of a pushback against the dominant pressures of European and American white centrality." Patrizia Pilotti, a casting director for brands including Lacoste and Valentino, both of which featured higher than average numbers of models of color this season, suggested other factors were at play. In the digital era, she said, the frenetic cycles of fashion don't apply only to clothes, but also to the models who wear them. The pressure is on for brands to feature new faces, and so modeling scouts have been casting their nets farther afield in recent years, visiting new cities and territories in the quest to bring a more diverse offering to casting agents. "I have never seen so many different girls on agents' books as I did this season. But there is one reason I cast so many dark skinned girls, and one reason only: their beauty," Ms. Pilotti said. She was also emphatic that she was not adhering to any outside demands or quotas when it came to casting for those shows. "This season, for these collections, these girls are the ones that spoke to me." She was not the only one. The response to Ms. Yai's Prada appearance was quick: Within three weeks of appearing on the runway she had become a viral Instagram sensation. "I thought there might be some reaction, but I never thought it would be this big," said Ms. Yai, who was first discovered by a photographer at a Howard University homecoming celebration in October. "But as a black woman of dark skin, I feel so proud of myself." For her part, Ms. Akech now has 70,000 followers. Both women, bursting with excitement, are in the process of securing campaigns with major fashion brands, though they declined to specify which ones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.