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Built into the title of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, the late spring extravaganza now in its 13th season, is an uninhibited enthusiasm for dance (that exclamation point!). The name also reflects the unpretentious nature of the programming, as shaped by the freewheeling tastes of the festival's longtime curator, Nicky Paraiso. At a time when dance programming often takes cues from museum exhibitions, cohering around specific themes or provocations, there's something refreshingly old school in the looser La MaMa Moves! approach. With that impromptu spirit comes a sense of rough drafts awaiting final touches, at least that was the case in the first three weeks. The monthlong festival, at La MaMa's East Village theaters through Sunday, has included four evening length works and one triple bill, exploring topics like dance as a signifier of national identity (Adham Hafez's "To Catch a Terrorist") and the struggles of aging (Ellen Fisher's "Time Don't Stop for Nobody"). In a festival context, it's often shorter pieces, grouped together, that feel unfinished. But here, the shared evening featuring Parijat Desai, Angie Pittman and Paz Tanjuaquio proved one of the most fully realized. Ms. Desai, who moves with a lush attack informed by her background in classical Indian dance, opened that program with her solo "O.O.F. (studies in the opposite of fear)." Surrounded by potted plants that she would later reconfigure, she gathered momentum as the phrase "go back to your country" emerged from a soundscape by Samita Sinha, Seth Warren Crow and Hemant Chauhan. What followed seemed to be a rejoinder, both physical and verbal, to that sentiment. In an interlude that added some levity, she proposed the addition of a new vowel to the English language, so as to prevent the mispronunciation of words like "namaste." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A maid called the police at 9 a.m. on Aug. 9, 1969, after finding five dead people in a Beverly Hills home. There was a blond woman on the living room floor, a rope wrapped around her neck and stab wounds in her swollen belly. A bloodied corpse wore a hood; another was behind the wheel of a car. Two more were sprawled on the lawn about 50 feet apart. A neighbor recalled hearing shots around midnight. The word "pig" was wiped in blood on a white front door. Charles Manson, an ex convict turned cult leader, had planned the attack, directing his followers to sneak into a Benedict Canyon home rented by the director Roman Polanski, where they killed his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four guests before dawn. Americans have long had an insatiable appetite for gruesome crime stories. But this inexplicable act left many in Hollywood panicked that they could be next. Some celebrities bought handguns to protect themselves. Others installed security cameras or holed up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. For many, the killings exposed the network of hustlers and hangers on who lurk in the shadows of Los Angeles, barely within grasp of celebrity culture and the desire that fuels it. "The murders brought into focus several life cycles disparate but connected that displayed some of the glamour and intrigue that have long fed the Hollywood script mill," The New York Times reported. Adding to the curiosity was the fact that Polanski had directed "Rosemary's Baby," the 1968 classic about a satanic cult that tricks a woman into birthing the devil's child. Tate, for her part, was best known for her role in 1967's "Valley of the Dolls" as Jennifer North, a beauty with limited acting ability who dies of a drug overdose. Even today, the murders remain a subject of morbid fascination. In July, the director Quentin Tarantino will release "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," a Technicolor pastiche that explores Los Angeles in 1969 through the fictional friendship of a has been actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman (Brad Pitt) who live next door to Polanski and Tate. The married couple were described then as members of a new Hollywood elite international, stylishly restless and lacking the deep ties to Los Angeles of their more established peers. A Times article published weeks after the murders noted that the couple and their entourage had been said to prefer renting homes instead of buying them. They bounded among London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles, where uninhibited sex and drugs were parcel to the hippie California vibe in the 1960s. "The impermanence makes for an edginess, an urgency, an unreality or more precisely, for an almost involuntary detachment from the ongoing concerns which move and occupy most mortals," Charles Champlin, a Los Angeles Times critic, told The New York Times. Polanski was born in Paris in 1933, but returned to his parents' native Poland when he was a toddler. He made a number of films before moving to the United States in 1968, fostering friendships with Polish and French expats in Los Angeles. That year, Polanski married Tate in London after the couple met on the set of a movie he directed in Italy. "We were always out enjoying ourselves, it was always great fun," the actor Peter Sellers told The Times then. "If Roman had a premiere in Paris, why we'd all fly over there for it. Or we would have lunch in London and dinner in Copenhagen." The celebrity murders were front page news. "Actress Is Among 5 Slain At Home in Beverly Hills," read a headline on Page One of The New York Times. The New York Daily News called it a ritualistic slaying of a "sexpot." Polanski was in London and did not know Manson or the killers, who included Charles Watson and a cadre of Manson's "girls" who lived with Manson at the Spahn Ranch in Los Angeles County. (They were Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel; a third, Linda Kasabian, said she did not participate in the killings and became the star witness against the others.) Lawyers contended at the time that Manson had commanded his followers to go to the home to kill Melcher after he was spurned. But Melcher had already moved out, and Manson ordered the death of the inhabitants anyway. The next day, members of the cult killed two more people, the grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary. Julian Wasser was a Life photographer at the time and, after hearing about the murder of Tate, he went to the house. There, he told The Guardian in 2014, he met a distraught Polanski and took photographs of the scene for him so they could be shared with a psychic. (Years later, Polanski would flee the United States to avoid a jail sentence for unlawful sex with a 13 year old, and he remains wanted by the American authorities.) As news of the murders spread from the seaside bungalows in Venice to the hillside estates above Sunset Boulevard, panic set in. The author Joan Didion wrote in "The White Album," her 1979 book of essays, "Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969." Even the house in Benedict Canyon didn't last. It was demolished in 1994. "Hollywood was afraid because they didn't know what was going on," Wasser told The Guardian. "They thought it was a strange cult that was going to kill everybody. It led to security mania, everybody putting in special alarm systems. If you said 'hi' to someone in the street, they'd think you were another Manson. Total paranoia." Indeed, the murders spawned copycats. In February 1970, Capt. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, an Army medical field officer with the Green Berets at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, told the police that three men and a blond woman had entered his house, screamed "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs," and killed his wife and two young daughters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
About a month into the pandemic, Tyler Mathiesen lost his position at a tech company, his first full time job out of college. For several months, everything was fine: Payments on his 75,000 in student loans were paused, and the extra 600 weekly federal unemployment benefit helped pay the rest. He even managed to save some money. But as the summer ended, the added benefit expired and his regular state unemployment benefits were close to running out. He needed a plan, and fast. His solution: draining all 8,200 he had in his 401(k). "I needed money to pay for rent and food," said Mr. Mathiesen, 24, who lives with his girlfriend in St. Paul, Minn. With no clear indication that further relief would be on its way, he said, "I figured this was my only realistic way to get money that I needed." Since the pandemic began rippling through the economy in March, more than 2.1 million Americans have pulled money from retirement plans at the five largest 401(k) plan administrators Fidelity, Empower Retirement, Vanguard, Alight Solutions and Principal. These workers, especially those in hard hit industries like transportation, manufacturing and health care, have been helped by more flexible withdrawal rules created by the coronavirus relief legislation known as the CARES Act. Even with millions unemployed and the economy's recovery shaky at best, that's only about 5 percent of the eligible 401(k) and 403(b) clients across all of those companies. But that's still higher than in a more typical year, when many participants can still generally withdraw money for hardships, albeit under a stricter set of rules. The various federal relief programs put into place including stimulus payments, more generous unemployment benefits and the suspension of federal student loan payments have helped curb the damage, retirement experts said. But some of those programs have already run out, or could soon. "As these start to expire, there may be an uptick in withdrawals for households that have been financially impacted," said David Fairburn, associate partner at Aon, a professional services firm that provides retirement consulting. "For example, maybe an active employee's spouse had a job loss, so a withdrawal would be helpful to make up for the lost household income." Usually, pulling out money from a tax deferred account before age 59 1/2 would set off a 10 percent penalty on top of any income taxes. But under the temporary rules part of the CARES Act, people with pandemic related financial troubles can withdraw up to 100,000 from any combination of their tax deferred plans, including 401(k), 403(b), 457(b) and traditional individual retirement accounts without penalty. The rules apply to plans only if your employer opts in, and they expire on Dec. 30. Some plans already permitted hardship withdrawals under certain conditions, and the rules for those were loosened a bit in 2019. But the CARES Act rules are even more lenient: Virus related hardship withdrawals are still treated as taxable income, but the liability is automatically split over three years unless the account holder chooses otherwise. And the tax can be avoided if the money is put back into a tax deferred account within three years. The average total withdrawal this year was about 20,000, often spread over two or three transactions. That's more than three times as much as the typical hardship withdrawal less than 6,000 in a 12 month period for the last several years. "People are taking just what they need, and they are trying to minimize the impact to their overall savings," said Jeanne Thompson, senior vice president for workplace consulting at Fidelity. "There is a recognition that 401(k)s will be their primary source of income, and people don't want to raid it unless they have to." Other large workplace 401(k) providers witnessed similar behavior. Vanguard with five million total plan participants said 5.3 percent of those with a coronavirus related withdrawal option have taken one through Nov. 30, with an average amount of 23,900. Roughly 3.2 percent of eligible participants, on average, took a traditional hardship withdrawal over the last five years, with an average withdrawal of 7,351. At Principal, about 5.7 percent of the 2.6 million participants with a coronavirus related distribution option available have taken one through Nov. 30, with an average withdrawal of 16,500. Most of them had balances of less than 25,000, and workers in the manufacturing, health care and professional/scientific industries made the highest number of requests, the company said. There's a good reason many people haven't taken withdrawals: Those most in need of cash right now don't have the luxury of an account to raid. Only about half of households have balances inside 401(k) plans or individual retirement accounts, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. And lower paid workers without retirement plans have suffered a disproportionate share of the pandemic related job losses, experts said. The dynamics have brought into even clearer focus how few households have emergency savings accounts and it has prompted more employers to start their own programs. For now, about 10 percent of large employers offer some type of support to encourage rainy day savings, according to Aon, whether it's providing a way to set aside money inside a retirement plan or simply education. But the scope of the damage wrought by the pandemic means that even the traditional emergency savings advice putting aside roughly three to six months of basic living expenses hasn't necessarily been enough to provide a cushion. Someone who lost a job in March could have easily burned through that amount of savings. Even though pandemic related withdrawals come with fewer penalties, they're still a blow to a person's retirement savings. How aggressively they must save to make up the difference will depend on their time horizon, earnings and how much they've pulled out. Consider a 43 year old earning 62,000 who withdrew about 10,400 the typical participant who had taken a withdrawal through May, according to an analysis by Vanguard. That missing 10,000 would have grown to about 25,000 over the next 24 years, assuming an investment return of 4 percent after inflation. To close the shortfall, people in that situation would have to increase their savings rates one percentage point a year. But those who had to take a withdrawal may not be in a position to dial up their savings for some time, and the longer they have to wait to start saving again, the more aggressive they have to be. Younger people, like Mr. Mathiesen, have more time to make up ground. Even so, he is worried about how long it will take to get back to work, preferably in his field of study audio engineering and sound design. Although he has had a couple of leads, Mr. Mathiesen is trying to find a job where he can work from home indefinitely. He said his partner has a rare autoimmune disease, which would put her more at risk if she were to contract the coronavirus. And other uncertainty abounds: Mr. Mathiesen doesn't know if negotiations in Washington will bring back more lucrative or extended unemployment benefits, and his student loan bills will have to be paid again starting in February if the moratorium on those payments isn't extended further. "I'm young enough where I can reset and that wouldn't put me too far behind," he said. "But I also don't even know when I'll be able to start making progress again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
LOS ANGELES A glittery film premiere this was not. On a warm Thursday night in November, a swarm of 20 something artists and their friends crammed into a makeshift screening room at 356 Mission, a de facto arts clubhouse near downtown Los Angeles, far from the glare of Hollywood. An art film by Maggie Lee called "Mommy" was making its West Coast debut, and instead of designer fishtail gowns, the young and trendy wore unflattering mom jeans and wedge sandals, and carried tote bags. After the hourlong film ended, guests spilled out into the gravel courtyard, which was fortified by metal gates and barbed wire, to drink cherry cocktails and Tecate beer. It could have been mistaken for a prison yard if not for the string of Christmas lights and some potted plants. Such is the forbidding allure of Los Angeles's ever expanding Arts District. In the last two years, more than 24 galleries have moved into the warehouses and decommissioned factories in downtown Los Angeles on either side of the desiccated Los Angeles River, including the Arts District and neighboring Boyle Heights, offering a new party destination for the city's thriving art scene. Influential galleries from New York and London, including Venus Over Los Angeles, Maccarone and Ibid, have set up outposts alongside local galleries with fancy pedigrees like the Box (run by the artist Paul McCarthy's daughter, Mara McCarthy) and Wilding Cran (owned by Anthony Cran and Naomi deLuce Wilding, the granddaughter of Elizabeth Taylor). On the scrappier end of the spectrum are do it yourself artist spaces tucked into sunbaked strip malls, with their free flowing beer and taco fueled late night ragers. High end coffee shops and trendy restaurants have also arrived, creating a social hub far removed, both geographically and philosophically, from the stranglehold of Tinseltown "It's very similar to what I was doing at my spaces in New York," said Jeffrey Deitch, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, who is known for his scene making Deitch Projects in SoHo in the late 1990s and 2000s. "The social aspect is essential for artistic innovation. Artists working in isolation rarely have the same achievement." On that scale, art openings barely registered (except, perhaps, for those held by a few top galleries like Gagosian in Beverly Hills). "When I moved here six years ago from New York, art openings were not considered as culturally cool as they are now," said Shamim Momin, the founder of the Los Angeles Nomadic Divison, a nonprofit arts group, and a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. "Maybe you'd see John Baldessari there to support one of his students, but that was usually about as glam as it got." But as money and celebrities began pouring into the art scene, the social calendar recalibrated: Witness red carpet spectacles like the Art Film gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Now it its fifth year, the most recent gala in November featured Leonardo DiCaprio and Eva Chow as hosts, Gucci as a sponsor, and a parade of stars (Kim Kardashian, Chloe Sevigny, Jared Leto) who became fodder for countless best dressed slide shows. The unveiling of the Broad museum last September, a futuristic white honeycombed feat of geometry designed by Diller Scofidio Renfro in downtown Los Angeles, was similarly glamorous, with guests including Owen Wilson, Tobey Maguire and Gwyneth Paltrow. "Culturally we've always been overshadowed by the film industry, and now the art world is at a weird parallel with it," said Sterling Ruby, one of Los Angeles's most bankable artists, who has a four acre studio complex in Vernon, Calif., an industrial city just south of the Arts District. While it's unlikely that Ms. Kardashian will be partying in the Arts District anytime soon, the art openings there have become a social circuit, with blue chip galleries and adventurous collectors mixing with notable artists, newer spaces and assorted hangers on. "The area has exploded in the last five to 10 years," said Paul Schimmel, the former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, who teamed up with Hauser Wirth to develop Hauser Wirth Schimmel, a sprawling arts complex set to open next month in the Arts District. "The energy has been activated here by a younger generation, mostly 25 to 30 year olds who want to walk, ride bicycles and live and work in a neighborhood," Mr. Schimmel said. "We are following this youth culture." The rough and tumble streetscape of the Arts District and nearby Boyle Heights seems to dictate the social timbre. Warehouses, abandoned factories, scrap metal yards and a few strip clubs line the wide streets with a steady shake of trucks roaring past. At night, the sidewalks are still largely devoid of life, except for an occasional cluster gathered outside an art gallery. But signs of development the moneyed, artisanal variety are everywhere. A dozen new luxury condos with names like Molino Street Lofts have opened along South Santa Fe Avenue and South Alameda Street, with two bedroom apartments in the converted brick warehouse selling for 1.175 million. Buzz making restaurants like Bestia, with its homey industrial decor and locavore Italian menu, draw well dressed diners. And an outpost of the members only Soho House is opening on South Santa Fe Avenue, down the street from the CB1 Gallery, in a six story warehouse with a rooftop pool, restaurant and hotel rooms. "You can stay for a period of time a couple of weeks, a couple of months," the Soho House founder, Nick Jones, told The Hollywood Reporter. Two blocks away, a Stumptown coffee shop opened in a squat brick warehouse with exposed ceiling rafters, and cold brew and kombucha on tap. On a recent Saturday, groups of young people appeared in the late afternoon sun, walking small dogs or riding skateboards. Its booze soaked openings are like populist galas that draw hundreds of the young and hip. Last September, it hosted a zany art performance called "Run(a)way," in which a fashion designer named Barf Queen had models bathing in kiddie pools filled with Kool Aid, and bartenders with exposed breasts served cocktails. "It's all about discovery and taking chances and hopefully finding something revelatory," Ms. Marple said, as she gave a tour of her gallery. Many of the artists who frequent Night Gallery's parties live or work nearby, drawn to the area's cheap rents and a sense of community. "There's a sense of Peter Pan's Lost Boys around here," said the painter Sojourner Truth Parsons, 31, who moved her studio to Mirasol Street in Boyle Heights from Toronto eight months ago. She pays 1,000 a month for a light filled loft. "You still have to worry about making money, but it feels like you can make it work on little," Ms. Parsons said. "There isn't that daily grind. It's mainly tacos and stray dogs and really nice people." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Credit...Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg SAN FRANCISCO Google gave Andy Rubin, the creator of Android mobile software, a hero's farewell when he left the company in October 2014. "I want to wish Andy all the best with what's next," Larry Page, Google's chief executive then, said in a public statement. "With Android he created something truly remarkable with a billion plus happy users." What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013, according to two company executives with knowledge of the episode. Google investigated and concluded her claim was credible, said the people, who spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing confidentiality agreements. Mr. Rubin was notified, they said, and Mr. Page asked for his resignation. Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a 90 million exit package, paid in installments of about 2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms. The last payment is scheduled for next month. Mr. Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men. The New York Times obtained corporate and court documents and spoke to more than three dozen current and former Google executives and employees about the episodes, including some people directly involved in handling them. Most asked to remain anonymous because they were bound by confidentiality agreements or feared retribution for speaking out. The transgressions varied in severity. Mr. Rubin's case stood out for how much Google paid him and its silence on the circumstances of his departure. After Mr. Rubin left, the company invested millions of dollars in his next venture. Sam Singer, a spokesman for Mr. Rubin, disputed that the technologist had been told of any misconduct at Google and said he left the company of his own accord. "The New York Times story contains numerous inaccuracies about my employment at Google and wild exaggerations about my compensation," Mr. Rubin said in a statement after the publication of this article. "Specifically, I never coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel room. These false allegations are part of a smear campaign by my ex wife to disparage me during a divorce and custody battle." Anger is rising among Google employees after reports of payouts to executives accused of harassment. Mr. Rubin's exit from Google after an inappropriate relationship was previously reported, but the nature of the accusation and the financial terms have not been disclosed. In settling on terms favorable to two of the men, Google protected its own interests. The company avoided messy and costly legal fights, and kept them from working for rivals as part of the separation agreements. When asked about Mr. Rubin and the other cases, Eileen Naughton, Google's vice president for people operations, said in a statement that the company takes harassment seriously and reviews every complaint. "We investigate and take action, including termination," she said. "In recent years, we've taken a particularly hard line on inappropriate conduct by people in positions of authority. We're working hard to keep improving how we handle this type of behavior." After publication of this article, Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, and Ms. Naughton wrote in an email to employees that the company had fired 48 people for sexual harassment over the last two years and that none of them received an exit package. "We are committed to ensuring that Google is a workplace where you can feel safe to do your best work, and where there are serious consequences for anyone who behaves inappropriately," Mr. Pichai and Ms. Naughton wrote. Some within Google said that was not enough. "When Google covers up harassment and passes the trash, it contributes to an environment where people don't feel safe reporting misconduct," said Liz Fong Jones, a Google engineer for more than a decade and an activist on workplace issues. "They suspect that nothing will happen or, worse, that the men will be paid and the women will be pushed aside." Google workers around the globe walk out over the company's handling of harassment claims. Google, founded in 1998 by Mr. Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford University graduate students, fostered a permissive workplace culture from the start. In Silicon Valley, it is widely known that Mr. Page had dated Marissa Mayer, one of the company's first engineers who later became chief executive of Yahoo. (Both were single.) Eric Schmidt, Google's former chief executive, once retained a mistress to work as a company consultant, according to four people with knowledge of the relationship. And Mr. Brin, who along with Mr. Page owns the majority of voting shares in Google's parent, Alphabet, had a consensual extramarital affair with an employee in 2014, said three employees with knowledge of the relationship. David C. Drummond, who joined as general counsel in 2002, had an extramarital relationship with Jennifer Blakely, a senior contract manager in the legal department who reported to one of his deputies, she and other Google employees said. They began dating in 2004, discussed having children and had a son in 2007, after which Mr. Drummond disclosed their relationship to the company, she said. Mr. Rubin joined Google in 2005 when it acquired his start up, Android, for 50 million. Over the next few years, he helped build Android the software now used in 80 percent of the world's smartphones into a huge success. Search had positioned Google as a dominant player on desktop computers, but Android extended its reach and put Google's maps, email and web browser on devices that people carry every day. The ads and mobile apps running on Android also generated tens of billions of dollars in profit. That success gave Mr. Rubin more latitude than most Google executives, said four people who worked with him. Mr. Rubin often berated subordinates as stupid or incompetent, they said. Google did little to curb that behavior. It took action only when security staff found bondage sex videos on Mr. Rubin's work computer, said three former and current Google executives briefed on the incident. That year, the company docked his bonus, they said. Mr. Singer, the spokesman for Mr. Rubin, said the executive "is known to be transparent and forthcoming with his feedback." He said Mr. Rubin never called anyone incompetent. Mr. Rubin, 55, who met his wife at Google, also dated other women at the company while married, said four people who worked with him. In 2011, he had a consensual relationship with a woman on the Android team who did not report to him, they said. They said Google's human resources department was not informed, despite rules requiring disclosure when managers date someone who directly or indirectly reports to them. In a civil suit filed this month by Mr. Rubin's ex wife, Rie Rubin, she claimed he had multiple "ownership relationships" with other women during their marriage, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to them. The couple were divorced in August. The woman waited until 2014 before filing a complaint to Google's human resources department and telling officials about the relationship, the people said. Google began an investigation. In September 2014, a few weeks into the inquiry, Google's board awarded Mr. Rubin a stock grant worth 150 million, to be paid out over several years, said three people briefed on the decision. It was an unusually generous sum, even by Google's standards. Mr. Page typically recommends how much senior executives are paid, said three former Google executives. Over the years, Mr. Page had told people he felt Mr. Rubin was never properly compensated for his contribution to Android, two people who spoke to him said. The 150 million stock grant to Mr. Rubin was approved by the Google board's leadership development and compensation committee composed of Paul Otellini, Intel's former chief executive who died in 2017, and two of Google's earliest investors, John Doerr of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram of the venture firm Sherpalo Ventures. The 150 million stock grant gave Mr. Rubin an enormous bargaining chip when he started negotiating his exit package about a month later. That is because an executive's stock compensation and how much of it they would leave behind is often taken into consideration during settlement talks. When Google fires lower level employees, it typically marches them out immediately and pays little, if any, severance. But for senior executives, Google weighs other factors, said former executives. A wrongful termination lawsuit could mean unwanted media attention for Google and the victims of a misconduct case, with a loss resulting in significant damages. In the end, Google paid Mr. Rubin 90 million, said two people with knowledge of the terms. The package was structured so that he received 2.5 million a month for the first two years and 1.25 million a month for the following two years. A provision in the separation agreement precluded Mr. Rubin from working for rivals or disparaging Google publicly, they said. Google also delayed repayment of the 14 million loan. The company then went out of its way to make Mr. Rubin's departure seem amicable, including Mr. Page's public statement of gratitude. Afterward, Google invested in Playground Global, a venture firm Mr. Rubin started six months after leaving the company. Playground has raised 800 million. He also founded Essential, a maker of Android smartphones. Last November, after the technology news site The Information reported that Google had investigated Mr. Rubin for an inappropriate relationship, he took a leave of absence from Essential. He has since returned to run it and is busy with speaking engagements and investments. Mr. Rubin's wealth, fueled by Google, has increased by 35 times in less than a decade. According to his ex wife's suit, his net worth is now about 350 million, up from 10 million in 2009. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
JETT (2019) 10 p.m. on Cinemax. A criminal decides to take one final job, and chaos ensues. This plotline features in many crime dramas, and the pulp noir "Jett" can be added to the list. But the darkly fun action thriller has a few unique ingredients, namely its star studded cast that includes Carla Gugino ("The Haunting of Hill House") and Giancarlo Esposito of "Breaking Bad" fame, as well as writer, director and executive producer Sebastian Gutierrez, who frequently collaborates with Gugino, his partner. The show centers on Daisy ("Jett") Kowalski, a retired professional thief who is living a simple life following her release from prison, until the gangster Charlie Baudelaire (Esposito) enlists her to perform one last job in Havana that puts her in serious danger. AGGRETSUKO (2018) Stream on Netflix. How can a red panda be more lovable? Make her a frustrated young professional who copes with the daily drag of corporate culture by screaming death metal songs into a karaoke microphone. The animated series featuring Retsuko the Red Panda is a creation of the Japanese company Sanrio, the originators of "Hello Kitty." The show enters an anticipated second season. As Retsuko continues to balance her desire to progress at her job with her frustration at the sexism she faces from her co workers, her animated features shift between softness and sharpness a symbolic gesture of the show many female viewers can identify with in their own experiences climbing the corporate ladder. TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG (2019) Stream on Amazon. The filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn brings his signature mix of exaggerated characters and oppressive violence to the small screen with a 13 hour, 10 episode long drama following a police officer doubling as a contract killer. Miles Teller ("Whiplash") plays Martin Jones, a detective who begins to question the brutality of his home of Los Angeles as he becomes the hitman of choice to rid the city of its sins. Under the guidance of Viggo (John Hawkes), a veteran killer, Jones becomes sharper in his craft, even as he finds his life sinking deeper into chaos, crime and violence. Like those he kills, his own redemption seems impossible. LEILA (2019) Stream on Netflix. Similar to "The Handmaid's Tale" but set in India, Netflix's dystopian drama takes place within a near future society that is segregated across religious lines. Shalini (Huma Qureshi) is forcibly separated from her daughter Leila (Leysha Mange), a "mixed religion" child deemed a threat to society. After working in a violent prison for two years, Shalini breaks away in order to search for her daughter. Like many dystopian shows before it, the fictionalized world of "Leila" reflects some of the harsh realities of modern society. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Want to Do Something About Climate Change? Follow the Money WASHINGTON If you asked us why a dozen people sat on the floor next to the A.T.M. in a Chase Bank branch on Friday, waiting for the police to arrest us for this small act of civil disobedience, we would come up with the same answer as the famous robber Willie Sutton: "Because that's where the money is." We don't want to empty the vaults. Instead, we want people to understand that the money inside the vaults of banks like Chase is driving the climate crisis. Cutting off that flow of cash may be the single quickest step we can take to rein in the fossil fuel industry and slow the rapid warming of the earth. JPMorgan Chase isn't the only offender, but it is among the worst. In the last three years, according to data compiled in a recently released "fossil fuel finance report card" by a group of environmental organizations, JPMorgan Chase lent over 195 billion to gas and oil companies. For comparison, Wells Fargo lent over 151 billion, Citibank lent over 129 billion and Bank of America lent over 106 billion. Since the Paris climate accord, which 195 countries agreed to in 2015, JPMorgan Chase has been the world's largest investor in fossil fuels by a 29 percent margin. This investment sends a message that's as clear as President Trump's shameful decision to pull America out of that pact: Short term profits are more important than the long term health of the planet. There are few financial institutions untouched by these climate change causing investments. Amalgamated Bank, Aspiration and Beneficial State Bank are notable exceptions. Local credit unions rarely have major investments in fossil fuels. JPMorgan Chase, in contrast, has funded the very worst projects projects that expand the reach of fossil fuel infrastructure and lock in our dependence on fossil fuels for decades to come. In Minnesota, for example, the Line 3 pipeline replacement project, financed in part by JPMorgan Chase, adds 337 miles of crude oil carrying pipeline across Minnesota. But even if the most environmental candidates win, it's hard to imagine that they'll be able to move our country at the pace science requires. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that if we want to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial temperatures, we will have to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, cutting them to net zero by around 2050 and Washington is only one capitol. It makes sense to go after the other center of power, too: the vast financial empire centered in our country. Insurance companies like Liberty Mutual and asset managers like BlackRock have also, through their investments in fossil fuels, enabled climate chaos. These titans may be too big to pressure. Yet if we could get just one offending bank to move toward divesting from fossil fuels, the ripple effects would be both swift and global. Imagine an announcement from JPMorgan Chase that it was immediately ending funding for new fossil fuel projects. It would echo around the world in hours, and there would be nothing the Trumps or Putins or Bolsonaros of the world could do to stop it. We sat in and were arrested at Chase Bank on Friday for nothing smaller than the future of our planet. If you care about the climate, it's worth moving your accounts away from these offenders. Cut up your credit cards. If you want to stop climate change, follow the money. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
One day in 1968, the year before she died, Judy Garland watched a television interview she had done with Dick Cavett. Noticing Cavett's fidgeting, she wondered why she made everyone so uncomfortable. Because, a friend replied, no one knew if she was going to sing "Over the Rainbow" or open her veins. "Sometimes I do both," Garland said, "at the same time." In "Judy," Renee Zellweger plays a few variations on Garland near the end of her life: worried mother, needy lover, disaster, legend. The woman who remains out of sight, though, is the sadder, scarier Judy who threw a butcher knife at one of her children and threatened to jump out a window in front of another. Even so, Zellweger is solid in a movie that derives its force from its central mythic figure and your own Yellow Brick Road memories: the Hollywood supernova with the inner child vaudevillian named Frances Ethel Gumm, a.k.a. Baby. One of those biopics that tries to encapsulate the sweep and substance of a life by narrowing in on ostensibly representative moments, "Judy" concentrates on Garland's bumpy, weeks long engagement at the Talk of the Town, a London cabaret restaurant where patrons sometime s threw breadsticks at the faltering talent. When Garland arrived in London in late December 1968, she was broke. She had been forced to sell her house in Los Angeles fans and servants had been helping pay the bills and had effectively become a vagabond, which is how Gerald Clarke describes her in his sympathetic book "Get Happy." When Zellweger first sweeps into the movie there's nothing to suggest that Judy is in trouble. She looks strong, with eyes and a smile that are naturally bright rather than pharmaceutically amped. Sailing down a palatial hotel lobby with her two youngest children, Lorna (Bella Ramsey) and Joey (Lewin Lloyd), she commands the space like a genuine star, dressed in a floral pantsuit, her hair as feathered as a cockatoo's crest . The pantsuit and her green scarf are as bright as a warning sign al: They look a lot like an outfit she was meant to wear in "Valley of the Dolls" before she was fired. (Garland didn't want to play the film's harridan.) Judy tries to check in but her account is in arrears. The staff is embarrassed. She's outraged. With no money and no place to go, she and the kids clamber into a car. They're headed into the next sad chapter of their life the children soon move in with dad the night city glowing in the distance like a lighted stage. Zellweger purses her lips and Judy shakes out a few tablets. Lorna asks her mother not to go to sleep. "No, no, no," Judy says, Zellweger dragging out the words so that they slide together, like the pills she's about to swallow. "These are the other ones." She pops them and we're off to the races for good times and bad. "Judy" is based on Peter Quilter's play "End of the Rainbow," which had a well received Broadway run in 2012 and skitters between Judy ripping her heart out in a London hotel and at the theater where she will become the talk of the town. The movie, directed by Rupert Goold and written by Tom Edge, is a gentler, squarer mash note to the Great Woman that's part maternal melodrama, part martyr story. Instructively, Judy is pawing a lover's crotch soon after the play opens, not worrying about her children. This shift in emphasis to the Loving Mother is presumably meant to make Judy a more readily sympathetic figure who, in caring for her kids, is trying to correct the past. Her larger story regularly surfaces in bland, unconvincing scenes of the teenage Judy (a miscast Darci Shaw) that drain attention and momentum from both the main story and Zellweger. Under contract at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the young Judy is exhausted and hungry. She's not supposed to eat and she can't sleep, kept awake by pills pushed by a studio that thinks she's too fat. Every so often, the boss, Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery), threateningly looms over her. The real Mayer wasn't much taller than Garland, whose mother missing in action here was loathsome, details that might complicate the movie's reductive vision of power and abuse, victimization and survival, women and men. The Judy Garland story is an oft told tragedy of greatness devoured by fame, by the entertainment machine, the audience's habit forming adoration and bad personal choices. The movie adheres to that template, delivering the usual scoundrels (Finn Wittrock as a lover ), courtiers (Jessie Buckley as a minder) and facile psychology, sometimes with a MeToo spin, most overtly in the scene of Mayer touching the young Judy's chest. The real Garland said that Mayer groped her, but that she put an end to his harassment. She continued to speak well of him after he died and long into her own life, perhaps because people are far more complex than biopics like this one can admit. Mostly, "Judy" offers the familiar spectacle of one star playing another. Zellweger's performance is credible, with agitated flutters and filigreed touches, though it leans hard on Judy's tremulous fragility, as if she were a panicked hummingbird. The take is also cautious, too comfortable; it never makes you flinch or look away. Wholly embracing Garland's freneticism at its rawest might have registered as excessive or campy, but it would have deepened the portrait. So would Garland's voice. Zellweger has a fine one she sings all of Judy's songs but it can't deliver the fantasy that this is one of the greatest entertainers in history. By the late 1960s, Garland had made and lost fortunes, was addicted to drugs and had repeatedly attempted suicide and cried out for attention by threatening to do so, by cutting herself, swallowing aspirins. She overdosed so often that her daughter Liza apparently acquired a stomach pump. Of course, in the end, there was no one to help and Garland died at 47 from an accidental overdose. "Judy" tries hard to inject brightness and pleasure into this bleak picture as this lost, luminous woman grabs onto one last chance, one more man. It shows the highs and some of the lows, piles on the strained smiles and upbeat tunes, embracing the woman even as it tries to temper the despair that comes from watching someone die in slow motion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Credit...Cody O'Loughlin for The New York Times During most of his life Henry David Thoreau was, by conventional standards of success, a failure. He rarely left the farm town of Concord, Mass., where he was born in 1817. There he was viewed by at least some of his neighbors as a marginal figure, standoffish, politically radical, a loner, a crank. As a member of the New England literary world he cut a graceless figure and had an inauspicious professional start. His first book, "A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack River," self published in 1849, was a bust. He sold a mere fraction of its 1,000 copy press run. When the printer dumped the remainders on him, Thoreau stacked them up in his bedroom and wrote in his journal: "I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." His second book, "Walden; or, Life in the Woods," based on his experience of living in a one room cabin and in a state of rural semi self quarantine, found more readers. And, crucially, they were ardent ones. From the book's first appearance in 1854 his star began to rise. And within 10 years of his death in 1862, at 44, he was famous enough to be honored with a public monument. In his diary Alcott writes: "Mrs. Adams suggests that visitors to Walden shall bring a small stone for Thoreau's monument and she begins the pile by laying stones on the site of his hermitage." He too added a stone that day, as did members of a local church group who happened to be picnicking nearby. Word went out and the custom spread as, over the years, more pilgrims came. (I was one of them.) The heap of stones, most harvested from the pond's edge, is still growing (and shrinking; some people take stones away as souvenirs). Like many religious shrines, it's organic, in perpetual flux. There are many different Thoreaus to commemorate: the environmentalist, the abolitionist, the ethnologist, the globalist, the anti imperialist, the Yankee saint who earned the devotion of Tolstoy and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. But to me, as a visitor to Walden since childhood, the cairn means most as the marker of an event: Thoreau's two year plus experiment in self isolation. It's a condition many of us are experiencing during the present pandemic moment. And we can learn a lot from what Thoreau created from it: constructive solitude. It's important to note that his isolation was not the sheltering in place kind. It was not enforced (unless you consider life style decisions made by a driven personality and deeply principled thinker to be beyond free choice). And his apartness was far from total. He went into Concord several times a week to catch up on gossip and have dinner with his relatives. At Walden, he entertained guests and enjoyed regular chats with Irish laborers who worked on a railroad line close to the pond. At the same time, social distancing came naturally to him. He was, or could be, an irritable and thin skinned guy, someone for whom the human species was a problem. ("I do not value any view of the universe into which man and institutions of man enter very largely," he wrote.) When he was in a misanthropic mood, six to eight feet of separation wasn't nearly enough. Try a mile and a half, which was the approximate distance from Walden to the center of town. But if the Walden cabin, about the size of a garden shed, was in some sense a retreat, a refuge from "the noise of my contemporaries," it had many more positive functions: it was a studio, a laboratory, an observatory, and a watchtower. Reading "Walden" or, better, his more lucidly written journals as I have done these last weeks, we sense that Thoreau viewed the Walden outpost less as a defensive necessity than as a place of opportunity where he could do what he could not easily do in the everyday world: namely, concentrate, focus, which I've always suspected was a way for him to handle incipient anxiety and despondency. He used his semi seclusion at Walden, which began in July 1845 and ended in September 1847, to pursue an intensive course in self education, one that required undistracted reading. "Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written," he wrote. The list he compiled was long, ambitious and culturally far reaching, stretching from Classical Greece to Vedic India. In a letter to a friend he wrote: "The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi." He made his time at Walden one of those intervals. The education further entailed a total immersion in Nature in plants, in seasons, in stars, in all creatures four legged, winged and scaled. For Thoreau, Nature was a communicating consciousness, and he wanted to make himself available to it, antennas raised. Full receptivity required removal from ego driven clamor, which was how, in his most stressed moments, he viewed human discourse. Thoreau left Walden in 1847 to take a job as a caretaker in the household of his off and on friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who owned the land on which Thoreau had built his cabin. His departure was both sudden and logical. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." And he did have more lives, many; he once listed some of them: "I am a Schoolmaster a Private Tutor, a Surveyor a Gardener, a Farmer a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day Laborer, a Pencil Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster." And this makes no mention of the activist, the naturalist, the moral philosopher, the self exile and the utopian community of one that is, the Thoreau we care most about now. You might think of each stone on the Walden cairn as commemorating one of these identities or several intertwined. In his view, purposeful solitude and justice minded community were codependent, the source of long term social health. He knew what his view was up against: among other things, America's antsy addiction to distraction and its led by the nose, corporation fed faith in utopian technology. And the call for civil resistance individual and collective that issued from his Walden shelter? It is still hot to the touch. Thoreau was not a pacifist. He vehemently supported the armed raid led by the abolitionist John Brown at Harpers Ferry. When Brown was hanged, Thoreau delivered a furious public speech in Concord, standing under an upside down United States flag. Surely the Civil War, underway when he died, came as no surprise. But the monument of stones at Walden is the opposite of angry, or declarative or, for that matter, monumental. It speaks of aloneness within solidarity a message we need to hear these days in a homely down to earth way, one that Thoreau, who scorned all pomp and eye baiting elegance (he once described himself as a "stuttering, blundering clod/hoper") might have approved of. It's a monument designed by no one, built by everyone. It's assembled one piece at a time, over time, by individuals who will never meet, but who, in our devotion, form a community of souls. It's a monument that honors the dead, but is living, changing, growing. During the present crisis that is isolating us, this monument has the potential to bring us together: It is an instructive emblem to contemplate, and a consoling one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A GENERATION ago, Japan was a colossus on any investing map of the world. Envious foreigners called its export driven economy a "miracle." Its real estate and stock markets seemed to defy gravity, and its financiers were so flush with cash that they bought skyscrapers, golf courses and corporate empires far from Japan's shores. Then the bubble burst. In 1990, Japan began more than 20 years of stagnation and deflation. Invest in Japan? For most foreigners, it was wiser to avoid it. At the end of 1989, the Topix, a k a the Tokyo Stock Price index, reached 2,881. Now it's less than half that. It's possible, at least, that those lost decades are finally over. Japanese markets have become turbocharged again, and are beginning to move markets worldwide. This year alone, the Topix has risen more than 22 percent in dollar terms, far exceeding the gain of the Dow Jones industrial average and nearly every other major stock market. The yen has weakened sharply, trading at more than 100 to the dollar for the first time in four years. That exchange rate should make many Japanese companies more profitable and more competitive. It may also inject inflation into the Japanese economy, encouraging consumers to spend and companies to invest. "What is happening in Japan is revolutionary," said Mohamed El Erian, the chief executive of Pimco, one of the world's largest bond managers. "Nothing they've done since the Second World War comes close in terms of economic experimentation," he said. It's far too soon to judge whether "Abenomics" the new policies of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan governor will be successful. But they have already begun to change expectations within Japan and around the world. Most crucially, there are signs that the policies may be breaking Japan's debilitating spiral of deflation. In April, Mr. Kuroda declared that Japan would achieve an inflation target of 2 percent within two years an ambitious goal that he said he would achieve by doubling the country's monetary base. The central bank, which has already been holding short term interest rates near zero, is making direct purchases of long term bonds and other securities. That program of quantitative easing is enormous, Mr. El Erian said: "It is much bigger than the Federal Reserve's in the United States, when you consider the size of the two economies." Is the new monetary policy working? It hasn't been in place long, and no up to date inflation data is yet in hand. The latest government figures show that in March, Japan's consumer price index fell 0.5 percent, annualized, a deflationary reading. But Japan's bond prices imply that expectations for inflation two years from now have already jumped to well above 1.6 percent. MR. ABE, who faces elections in July in the upper house of the Diet, Japan's parliament, has not unveiled all the details of his policy, which comprises "three arrows": monetary easing, fiscal policy and structural reform. Monetary easing is the only one of the three that is substantially under way. It appears to be largely responsible for the yen's weakening and could have a sharp impact. Forced for many years to adjust to competitive pressures from overseas, Japanese companies said in a government survey last year that they were profitable at an exchange rate of 84 yen to the dollar, a big change from 1986, when they said they needed a rate of 175 yen to the dollar. The current rate of more than 100 yen to the dollar will make many export oriented companies much more profitable, said Eileen Dibb, a portfolio manager and Japan specialist at Pyramis Global Advisors, the institutional arm of Fidelity Investments. Her portfolios include Toyota and Fuji Heavy Industries, and both should benefit from the yen depreciation, she said. While the cheaper yen could heighten trade frictions, Mr. Abe says he would like Japan to join the negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership, an Asia Pacific free trade pact supported by the Obama administration. Ms. Dibb is bullish on the Japanese stock market, saying it is still quite reasonably priced even after its recent run. In 1988, for example, the Topix traded at a price to book ratio of 6.5, compared with only 1.4 today, yet current earnings are attractive and strengthening. For the first time in years, she says, the outlook is extremely positive. "It's as though Japan has turned the lights back on," she said. Mr. Abe has adopted a stimulative fiscal policy. It may give the economy a short term boost, but in a speech in April, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned that Japan's fiscal policy "looks increasingly unsustainable," saying its debt to G.D.P. ratio is now nearing an extraordinarily high 245 percent. Japan has some factors in its favor, however, making it quite different from debt burdened countries like Greece, said M. Campbell Gunn, portfolio manager of the T. Rowe Price Japan fund. Japan's debt is overwhelmingly financed by its own citizens, he noted; it is denominated in its own currency, and Japan runs a steady current account surplus, all of which insulate it from bond market pressure. Furthermore, he said, Japan can reduce debt by privatizing or more efficiently operating billions of dollars worth of state owned assets, like the nation's ports and its postal system, which doubles as a gigantic savings bank. "Japan now is in some ways like the U.K. before Margaret Thatcher," he said. "There is much that could be done if the government wanted to do it." Structural problems, however, are major impediments to economic growth. Japan's population has been aging and declining in size, said Roger Aliaga Diaz, a senior economist at Vanguard. Unless Japan permits enough immigration to offset this, he said, demographic constraints are likely to trim gross domestic product by 1.3 percentage points a year. "That's a big hurdle for Japan," he said. Shifts like raising the retirement age and removing impediments to work force participation by women could improve matters, but improvements are likely to be slow in coming, he said. Still, Japan's markets have awakened, its economy may be reviving, and the flood of yen is certainly flowing into other markets around the world, Mr. El Erian said. "This is an ambitious effort," he said. But, he added, "Japan's mounting debt load and difficult structural problems make this program a very high risk and high reward one." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
GREENOUGH, Mont. At a time when many schools are concerned about overcrowded classrooms, the Sunset school in this ranching community has a different problem keeping its lone student at her desk so it can remain open. There are other schools in remote rural areas around the West that have only one teacher and one student, but the situation is even starker here. Amber Leetch, age 11, makes up the entire Sunset School District 30. And while many one student schools elsewhere in the West are in far flung, impoverished areas, the Sunset district whose entire annual budget is about 83,000 is in a prosperous, ranching corner of the state. One of the reasons there is only one student is that the cost of the scenic landscape here has risen so high that young, aspiring ranchers, the kind who would be likely to have school age children, cannot afford to buy the land. Amber, a cheerful sixth grader, attended the historic Sunset school last year by herself and most of this year as well, though she had a first grader for company for a few weeks. Once that first grader left, though, it was just Amber again and her teacher, Toni Hatten. "The hardest part is getting through the day without feeling too lonely," said Amber, as she drew on a computerized white board. One way of fighting the loneliness is with Baylee, a 3 month old husky mix that recently became the new school dog. The one on one situation is challenging for both teacher and student, says Ms. Hatten, 45, who began teaching this year. There is little escape for either: no grouping students to work together on their own for a while, and the student cannot disappear for a while, while the teacher works with someone else. It is Amber and Toni together all day long. "You're their lunch buddy, their P.E. buddy, their recess buddy," Ms. Hatten said. "You're their everything." The school is isolated as well as small. The town of Sunset was once the center of industrial scale logging for copper mines at Butte, but that is long gone and now the economy is ranching and the region is known as Greenough. The town that once stood here is gone, the general store and post office vanished and only the school remains and an outdoor bank of mailboxes. The nearest town is about 20 miles away. The city of Missoula is 35 miles to the west. The isolation is offset somewhat by the beauty of the landscape. Sunset sits in a valley surrounded by rolling hills and mountains, with a blanket of towering ponderosa pines. The Blackfoot River, a famous fishing stream, flows near here. Sunset is the smallest one room school in Montana (a second room was added, but it is only used for physical education and storage), which has 62 of them, ranging from one to 18 students. It is the only one room school in the state with a lone student, though there are some with two or three. About 20 small schools have closed in the last decade in the state. Claudette Morton, who retired in 2010 as director of the Montana Small School Association, and still researches rural education, thinks that is a loss. "Teachers in rural schools don't make a lot of money," she said, "It is a labor of love in many respects. The teachers love the independence and there aren't a lot of rules." There are advantages for the student, as well. "If she doesn't get something, we'll work on it longer," Ms. Hatten said. "That's the beauty of one student." Amber went here in kindergarten, then attended a school eight miles away. But she moved back here in the fifth grade. "She dealt with a lot of bullying and the school wouldn't address it," said her mother, Wendy Leetch. Not everyone thinks keeping a school open with one student makes sense. "It ruffles some feathers with other districts who say it's a lot of money for one student," said Darlene Troutwine, the Sunset district clerk. But while the Sunset district seems to be teetering on the edge of disappearing, perhaps when Amber decamps for high school in two years, it is not the typical rural community in decline. The school sits on land owned by the Resort at Paws Up, a guest ranch that features high end accommodations. Last summer Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford were at the Paws Up promoting their film "Cowboys and Aliens." An owner of the ranch, Nadine Lipson, is on the Sunset school board. Built in 1917, the Sunset school is historic on the outside, with antique playground equipment and a bell in a tower that does not ring. It is not an old fashioned schoolhouse on the inside. Instead of dusty chalkboards and pull down maps there is a Smartboard, a kind of electronic white board, that is synchronized with Ms. Hatten's computer, and there are three computers. Theater productions at Sunset pose some problems. "We have to take multiple parts," Ms. Hatten said. For the Christmas pageant they drove 22 miles each day for a month to the Ovando school. Amber also played volleyball at another school, Seeley Lake Elementary, 21 miles away. As recently as 2001 there were 20 students at the school, but escalating land prices here mean young ranch families must get out of the business or ranch elsewhere. Ms. Hatten has hopes of more students in the future at least two, or perhaps three to make things more interesting and to be sure the sun doesn't set on the little school. "The Ovando School has 11 and feels like a family," Ms. Hatten said. "The older kids help the younger kids and they all play together." School is four days a week here, from eight until four. When the day ends there is no yellow school bus to take Amber home. She lives off the grid with her parents and brother, near the high altitude ghost town of Garnet, once a thriving mining town. Her mother is a tour guide there in the summer. The only access is by snowmobile. On a recent school day, Amber and her mother donned helmets to make the five mile trip through the mountains to their home, with Amber on the back of Mrs. Leetch's vehicle. Mrs. Leetch recently got a new snowmobile with heated hand rests, which makes a big difference on the trip, especially when temperatures drop to below zero. They waved as they departed, then roared off, leaving a cloud of blue exhaust hanging in the air. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
In 2011, the British writer comedian Joe Cornish delivered a promising feature directing debut with "Attack the Block," a wild, irreverent science fiction action comedy about an alien invasion thwarted by a gang of tough teenagers. That film, which also gave us the screen acting debut of the future "Star Wars" favorite John Boyega, was not a huge hit, but gained cult status over the years, prompting speculation about what its talented writer director might do next. It's taken eight years for Cornish to release another feature, and it may feel strange at first to see him at the helm of a modest children's adventure about a modern day King Arthur. But "The Kid Who Would be King" still has some of the wit and sweep that distinguished Cornish's earlier work. The film's setup is simple. The meek 12 year old Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis), chased into an abandoned construction site by the school bullies, comes upon a sword stuck in a hunk of stone and pulls it out. A Latin inscription on the weapon suggests that it may well be Excalibur, the legendary sword of King Arthur, although Jack and his best pal, Bedders (Dean Chaumoo), initially decide that's a ridiculous notion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The dark haired, strapping Danish actor Claes Bang played a museum curator in 2017's "The Square." In last year's "The Burnt Orange Heresy" he played a jaded art critic. In "The Last Vermeer" he plays a Dutchman, working with the Canadian army, after the fall of Germany in World War II, repatriating paintings and sculptures stolen by the Nazis. Directed by Dan Friedkin (no relation to the director William; this Friedkin's father, Thomas, is a renowned stunt pilot) and adapted from the nonfiction book "The Man Who Made Vermeers" by Jonathan Lopez, the movie opens with the discovery of "Jesus and the Adulteress," a work reputedly by Vermeer, stashed away by Hermann Goring. Bang's character, Joseph Piller, is eager to track down whoever sold it to the Nazis, despite his misgivings about the firing squads he sees dispensing rough justice in Amsterdam. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia With its scaly exterior, peculiar body shape and propensity for rolling into an armored ball when threatened, the pangolin has invited comparison to the artichoke and the pine cone. But a 3 year old female pangolin at the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center here seemed oblivious to her odd appearance and unaware that she was missing two feet, both lost to a poacher's snare. Accompanied by her lone male offspring, she ambled through the leaves and underbrush, sniffed amiably at a visitor's shoe and headed off to check for leftovers in the bowl of mashed insects prepared by a caretaker at the center. Elephants and rhinoceroses often serve as the poster animals for the illegal trade in wildlife the elephant killed for the ivory in its tusks, the rhino for its horn. Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy in parts of China, where it is believed to nourish the kidneys. Pangolin scales, made of keratin, like human fingernails, are used in traditional medicine to treat skin diseases and other ailments. Trade in the animal has a long history: In 1820, King George III of England was presented with a suit of armor made from pangolin scales. But the demand for pangolins and with it the hunting of the animals has grown sharply in recent decades. Poaching has increased not only in Southeast Asia but also in Africa, according to Traffic, an organization that monitors wildlife trade. Customs officers seize thousands of pangolins and hundreds of pounds of pangolin scales each year, often disguised as other goods. In late January, officials in Uganda said they had seized two tons of pangolin skins packed in boxes identified as communications equipment. In France a few years ago, more than 200 pounds of pangolin scales were discovered buried in bags of dog biscuits. "You've got a big ship coming from Indonesia and it's labeled frozen fish, and it turns out to be 14 tons of frozen pangolins," said Annette Olsson, a technical adviser for Conservation International in Southeast Asia who helped open the pangolin rescue center in Phnom Penh but now works in Singapore. The Cambodian government runs the center with the assistance of the Wildlife Alliance, a conservation group. Most countries, including Cambodia, have laws against hunting pangolins. But enforcement is often weak, and the incentive for local poachers in poor rural areas to catch and sell pangolins and other wildlife to middlemen for smuggling organizations is strong, said Bunra Seng, Conservation International's director in Cambodia. Sunda pangolins, one of eight pangolin species, were once common here. Mr. Bunra said that as a child, he used to see them in the countryside. But so many have been killed that they and Chinese pangolins are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The international union considers all of the pangolin species threatened. "The pangolin runs the risk of becoming extinct before most people have even heard of them," Britain's Prince William said last fall in a promotion for an Angry Birds video game tournament intended to bring attention to the animals. Peter Knights, the chief executive of WildAid, said that his and other conservation groups were mounting efforts to rescue the pangolin in advance of the 2016 meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Pangolins are listed under the convention's Appendix II as animals that are not yet threatened with extinction but may become so. WildAid and other organizations argue that pangolins should be moved to Appendix I, which prohibits all commercial trade. The pangolin's odd appearance has not helped its cause, Ms. Olsson said. "That's one of the problems with species like pangolins," she said. "It's not huge and not very charismatic. It's small and weird and just disappearing." Yet, a scaly creature with beady eyes, a narrow snout and a long tail is not without whimsy. A Pokemon character, Sandslash, was loosely based on the pangolin, thought to be the only scaled mammal. And a Colombian company, Cyclus Manufactura, makes a folding pangolin backpack based on the animal's biomechanics, according to the firm's website. Scientists are slowly beginning to learn more about the pangolin's physiology and behavior. These nocturnal animals are difficult to observe in the wild, even more so now that they are growing scarce, and their habits have been "literally a black box," Ms. Olsson said. Once thought to be a relative of the anteater, the sloth and the armadillo, the pangolin belongs to the taxonomic order Pholidota, and genetic studies suggest it is more closely related to raccoons and giant pandas than to animals it resembles. Burrowing in trees or tunnels, pangolins have weak eyes but keen noses to smell insects and powerful claws to dig them up. Their long tongues are sticky, able to scoop up hundreds of ants at once, their ears closing up to prevent the ants from swarming inside. Like skunks, pangolins can emit a foul odor when threatened. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
For generations, Chicago has been a storied architectural laboratory, boasting designs from Frank Lloyd Wright to I.M. Pei. In the early 20th century, countless buildings, many of them clad in brick or Indiana limestone, served as pillars of the Midwestern economy. Now, the city features a growing number of former commercial buildings that have been repurposed as hotels, including the LondonHouse Chicago in the Loop and The Robey in the Wicker Park neighborhood. The building renovations have revealed intricate design details and created rooftop spaces that allow hotel guests to enjoy the vistas that continue to define Chicago. Designed by the prominent Chicago architect Alfred S. Alschuler, the London Guarantee and Accident Building was constructed on the site of Fort Dearborn in 1923. The building, once home to the namesake insurance company, as well as the London House, a famous jazz club, now houses the LondonHouse Chicago, which opened in June 2016 after a lengthy renovation. The 452 room hotel , part of Hilton's upscale Curio Collection, is located in the original Beaux Arts building, along with a 22 story glass addition that was built during the renovation. On the first floor, the meticulously restored gold lacquered ceiling in the rotunda and hallway reaffirms the building's ornate history. The bar in the second floor lobby offers a daily tea service, high backed, plush chairs that seem right out of a film adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland," and a nice lower level view of Marina City, the 1960s era apartment and retail complex. There is a tri level rooftop, with indoor and outdoor space; the latter features views of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, along with a 23rd floor cupola that is available for private events. My eighth floor vista king room had an attractive view of the river, the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower, one of the most striking Gothic skyscrapers ever constructed. The wood paneling around the room was appealing, along with the framed pictures evoking a Jazz Age sensibility. The Wi Fi is complimentary it worked well and a higher speed option is available at an additional cost. Each room comes with a minifridge and Nespresso coffee maker. A frosted sliding door revealed a marble clad sink, with a modern, glass enclosed shower (there was no bathtub). There were an array of Malin Goetz products, including rum bar soap and cilantro hair conditioner, along with a generous amount of towels. Almost immediately after its opening, the rooftop bar became a hot Chicago destination, which means you may struggle to get the attention of a bartender during peak times. The outdoor terrace is open year round, while the rooftop bar is only operational as the weather permits. Try the Roaring 20's, a strawberry and jasmine tea preserve with champagne ( 16), and take in the view, anchored by Lake Michigan. The cupola is a popular place for wedding proposals. With a nod to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the names of the fair's architects and designers like Frederick Law Olmsted and Francis Davis Millet adorn the wall and ceiling frames leading to the fourth floor spa and fitness center. Between LH on 21, the indoor bar and restaurant space, and LH on 22, the 22nd floor rooftop, there is a range of food options. The morning of my departure, I opted for in room dining, ordering the outstanding blueberry pancakes and bacon. Recent selections include the toasted grapefruit and a waffle with powdered sugar, berries and anglaise. The LondonHouse Chicago gives guests a classy, upbeat experience in the heart of the city. If you love great views and proximity to the waterfront, you'll appreciate the hotel even more. For longtime Chicagoans, the building that now houses The Robey was known as Northwest Tower. The Art Deco building, one of the first skyscrapers built outside of the Loop, opened in 1929 and was geared toward professionals with offices for doctors and lawyers. In the 1980s, the building acquired another nickname, the Coyote Building, as its spire and towering flagpole w ere said to favor a baying coyote. By the late 2000s, the building had been dilapidated for some time, despite the gentrification of Wicker Park. In 2014, approval was granted to Grupo Habita, the Mexic o based boutique hotel operator, for a hotel conversion, and in late 2016, The Robey opened its doors. The 89 room hotel, a member of Design Hotels , draws in guests with its revolving wooden door, dark green marble and stately brass elevator doors on the first floor. An adjacent building was previously a sister property featuring shared and private hotel rooms and was renamed Robey Hall last year; it now offers only private rooms. The Robey, with its triangular flatiron shape, sits at one of the most well trafficked locations in Wicker Park, near the intersection of Damen, Milwaukee and North Avenues. The Damen El station, on the Blue Line, is roughly half a block away from the hotel, and offers an easy ride to and from O'Hare, along with quick access to the rest of the city. The area has an array of restaurants, vinyl record stores, bars and bike shops. Big Star, the bustling Mexican restaurant and a neighborhood fixture, is close to the hotel. I stayed in an upper floor corner suite, which offered an unobstructed view of Wicker Park and the Chicago skyline. I was so taken by the landscape that it took me almost 15 minutes to start unpacking. The wooden floors evoked an era of old school craftsmanship. With the touch of several buttons near the comfortable king bed, I was able to raise and lower the blinds for each window and dim the lights. The minibar was neatly hidden behind a large cabinet door. The corner suite bathroom contained two separate sinks, both outfitted with Le Labo soaps, lotions and bath products. It was by far one of the most spacious bathrooms I've used at a hotel. The shower floor was slightly elevated, which prevented water from leaking onto the bathroom floor, which can be an issue at many hotels (there was no bathtub). The Robey has a cozy second floor lounge where food is available. My recommendation is to enjoy a tea and a banana nut muffin in the morning and a glass of wine later in the day. The Cabana Club, on top of the Robey Hall building on the sixth floor and open from May through September, gives off urban charm, with its rooftop pool and bar, proximity to the passing El trains and city views. The Up Room, the intimate 13th floor rooftop cocktail lounge, has both an indoor space and an outdoor terrace. Try the Oaxacan on Broken Glass cocktail, with Banhez mezcal, lime cordial, chile liqueur and bitters ( 15) and relax in a chair overlooking the skyline. Both spaces are very busy in the summer, so I appreciated the fact that the Cabana Club and the Up Room have earlier hours specifically for hotel guests before they are open to the public. The Cafe Robey, on the first floor, is open for brunch and dinner, with modern American fare from the executive chef Kevin McAllister. Selections range from the breakfast salad, with kale, walnuts, beets and goat cheese ( 14) to the pan roasted striped bass, with couscous, olives, dried apricots, yogurt and harissa ( 23 ). With Wicker Park as an anchor, my experience at The Robey was exceptional. As you watch the sunset from the rooftop, you will likely want to stay for an extra night, or an extra week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LONDON Alarmed by the speed at which the steel industry is becoming a symbol of Europe's economic decline, a top European Union official has called for the world's biggest steel maker to postpone planned job cuts and factory closings. The company, ArcelorMittal, has said no. "Continuing to operate these plants would threaten the overall viability of our business in Europe," said Nicola Davidson, a spokeswoman for the steel giant, which is based in Luxembourg. "We are a public company," Ms. Davidson said Wednesday. "We are responsible to our shareholders." And so go the politics and financial realities of steel in Europe, where, along with ArcelorMittal, the German company ThyssenKrupp and the British operations of Tata Steel have announced cutbacks adding up to thousands of European jobs. "Without steel, there is no Europe," the official, Antonio Tajani, a European commissioner for industry, said late Tuesday. He was speaking in Brussels at a third and ostensibly final meeting of government ministers, company executives and union leaders that was aimed at trying to arrest the decline of the European steel business, which employs about 360,000 people. The group is to produce an action plan by summer aimed at reversing the decline in an industry in which Europe was once the world leader. Mr. Tajani called for ArcelorMittal to delay plans to close plants in four countries and cut thousands of jobs, until the European Commission could present its action plan. ArcelorMittal, though, said it would proceed on its own timetable. That could set up a new battle between ArcelorMittal and European political authorities. Late last year the company had a showdown with the French government over ArcelorMittal's plan to permanently close two idled blast furnaces at Florange, in eastern France. After the government threatened to nationalize the site, the confrontation ended inconclusively; the company promised to invest EUR180 million, or 242 million, in continuing businesses at Florange but said the blast furnaces would remain shut down. Along with Florange, ArcelorMittal also plans to close two blast furnaces and other operations in Liege, Belgium, as well as other units in Spain and Luxembourg. At least 3,500 employees will be affected, according to the company, which says it has about 98,000 employees in Europe. The company says that most of the 900 or so people whose jobs have already vanished in Spain and Luxembourg were reassigned elsewhere and that it will try to follow the same practice in France and Belgium. In a sense ArcelorMittal is turning into what some European leaders feared when its chairman and chief executive led a hostile takeover of the European champion, Arcelor, in 2006. With net debt of about 22 billion almost equal to the company's 28 billion stock market value Lakshmi Mittal, the chairman of ArcelorMittal, has little choice but to cut the least efficient units in his global business. And he has little incentive to protect Europe, where his main steel business of supplying the home appliance and auto industries lost an average of 143 per ton last year. Undersized plants like those at Liege and Florange, which are also far from seaports, are logical targets, analysts say. But Mr. Mittal is starting to feel Europe's political heat. "Mittal has always used governments and unions against each other," the French industry minister Arnaud Montebourg said in an interview published Wednesday in the newspaper Le Monde. "Here, he's facing a unified front of the European Commission, the unions and member states." "If we let him shut Liege, he'll continue elsewhere," Mr. Arnaud added. 'We didn't stop him at Florange, maybe we can succeed at Liege." Mr. Montebourg and Jean Claude Marcourt, industry minister for Wallonia, the largely French speaking area of southern Belgium, say they have allies in Poland, Spain, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. 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. Mr. Mittal recently appeared to draw the line on any new plans for European plant closings, saying last week that the major elements of his plan had already been made public. The company says that with the four blast furnaces most likely permanently shut and others idled, it is now operating at a healthy level, 87 percent of capacity in Europe. "This means we have taken out enough capacity," an ArcelorMittal spokesman said Wednesday. But observers of the steel industry predict that with European demand down about 30 percent from 2007, further contraction is inevitable. For one thing, automobile production, a big market for steel from ArcelorMittal and other producers, has shrunk more than 20 percent in Europe since 2007, according to the company. And Europe's stainless steel industry, which used to dominate the world, now has strong competitors in the United States and Asia. "The industry needs to continue to shrink because there is probably 20 percent overcapacity," said Dalton Dwyer, head of Industry Corporate Finance, a London investment bank that specializes in steel. In another wrinkle on cost cutting, the Austrian steel maker Voestalpine is scouting locations in the United States and Canada to build a plant to extract iron from iron ore using natural gas that the chief executive, Wolfgang Eder, says costs a quarter what it does in Europe. Because the resulting iron would be fed into the company's European plants, the approach might still help keep Europeans employed. Mr. Eder, who is also head of the European steel producers association, Eurofer, said in an interview Wednesday that if Europe did not find solutions to high costs and other problems, "my best guess is we will lose half of European steel capacity by 2030." The group convened by the European commissioner, Mr. Tajani, has issued a series of recommendations including reducing administrative hurdles, promoting "socially responsible restructuring" and monitoring energy costs. Mr. Eder of Voestalpine said there was "some hope of making progress" on a plan to bolster the industry by this summer if emotions could be kept in check. But given the differences in interests between the various groups, that will not be easy. Bart Samyn, deputy general secretary of the IndustriALL European Trade Union in Brussels, who took part in Mr. Tajani's meeting, said the most promising sign for European steel was the growing realization that the sector was worth keeping and needed nurturing. "For too many years, the E.U. had been saying that the industry was old fashioned and had to disappear," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Moshe Safdie threw over his conventional dress shirts long ago for a jauntier wardrobe of band collared alternatives. The version he wore on a Monday morning as he headed north along a grassy stretch of the High Line lent him the look of a cleric, minus the priestly severity. Peeling back his lapels to show off an expanse of beefy white cotton, he all but bragged: "It's the only shirt I wear. I designed it 40 years ago and had my tailor make it up in different weights for the seasons." It doesn't allow for a tie. So what. "I never wear a tie," Mr. Safdie said, "unless it is to the most stuffy clubs in London." If an idea has merit, as he likes to say, he will pick it up and run with it. It's a precept that governs his wardrobe and, more tellingly, a body of work with a global reach that extends from the Punjab region of India to the foothills of the Ozarks. In recent years, Mr. Safdie, 77, whose visit to New York coincided with "Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie," an exhibition through Jan. 10 at the National Academy Museum, rediscovered the merits of his Habitat 67. That project, a groundbreaking modular system of high rise dwellings that was unveiled at the Montreal World Expo in 1967, made his name. He is still finding ways to adapt, modify and expand on his original theme: "For everyone a garden." That notion, he added, is "a metaphor for making an apartment in a high rise structure into what connotes a house." His vision extends to his first project in New York, a 64 story mixed use tower to rise on West 30th Street, just south of the Empire State Building. Its tower, a series of three story offset projections, owes a clear debt to his original Habitat scheme. Mr. Safdie might have been expected to take a dim view of the High Line, that meandering strip of elevated railway track turned people's park, which has since its inception a decade ago met with praise and its share of disparagement as a "Disney World on the Hudson." Instead, he seemed all admiration. "Look what happens in the city when something becomes a destination," he said, his gaze settling first on the streams of passers by enjoying the last shoots of greenery lining the path, then wandering to the fishbowl like towers that flank it. He strolled beneath a leafy bower and found it soothing. "You forget that you are in a city at all," he said. Still, the proliferation of adjacent residential structures gave him pause. The High Line has merit, as he might say, "but it takes urban hype to sustain it." A believer in light and a longtime champion of the kind of urban planning that allows, he said, "for gardens, porosity, community and space," he fretted that the outcropping of towers on both sides of the park would soon overshadow it, creating something of the canyonlike effect that blights much of Lower Manhattan. In Singapore, where his triple tower Marina Bay Sands stands as his first major project in Asia, "when they sell the land, they sell with it the urban design scheme," Mr. Safdie said approvingly. "It makes for cohesiveness." "In parts of China," he added, "there is an ordinance that every apartment should get three hours of sunlight each day." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Q. I was using an authenticator app to get security codes for my email account, but I got a new phone and now the app doesn't work after I transferred my stuff. How do I get this working again? A. For security reasons, many authenticator apps do not transfer login codes and app data from an old phone to a new one. Instead, you usually have to log into your mail account on the web and remove the old app from your account settings. Then you download the authenticator app to your new phone and link it with your mail account, as you first did with the old phone. Each authenticator app has its own specific steps, but the popular programs from Microsoft and Google follow a similar approach. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Placido Domingo in 2016, singing in Verdi's "La Traviata" in Orange, France. The opera world has been divided by allegations that he sexually harassed several singers. For half a century Placido Domingo has been one of opera's most beloved figures: a celebrated tenor, a leader of opera companies and an ambassador for the art form who, at 78, continues to be a box office draw in an era of diminished star power. So when a report last week revealed that nine women were accusing Mr. Domingo of sexual harassment, it became the latest high profile example of the complexities of the MeToo era and it divided the classical music world. Some of the fault lines were geographic. Two American institutions, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Opera, swiftly canceled their upcoming concerts with him, citing their need to provide safe environments. But none of Mr. Domingo's many upcoming performances in Europe were canceled, as presenters there decided on a wait and see approach. But some others took to social media to urge that the accusations should be taken seriously in light of classical music's belated reckoning with harassment and abuse. The tenor Paul Appleby said that while he had long admired Mr. Domingo, he was troubled by the way some people, including colleagues, had been quick to dismiss or even mock the accusers. He asked on Twitter: "1. Do you think the women whose stories were published are lying or being 'inaccurate'? 2. If not, do you find the behavior of PD described in the reporting defensible?" The allegations against Mr. Domingo, which were reported by The Associated Press, were made by eight singers and a dancer, all but one of whom spoke anonymously, who said that he had used his immense power in the opera world to try to pressure them into sexual relationships. Some described repeated, harassing phone calls; several said that they believed their careers had been harmed when they rebuffed him. In a statement, Mr. Domingo called the allegations "as presented, inaccurate," but called it "painful to hear that I may have upset anyone or made them feel uncomfortable no matter how long ago and despite my best intentions." He said that he believed that "all of my interactions and relationships were always welcomed and consensual," and added that "the rules and standards by which we are and should be measured against today are very different than they were in the past." The Domingo case is reviving some of the most difficult questions of the MeToo era: how to investigate allegations of wrongdoing, particularly those from unnamed accusers; when to cut ties with the accused and when to defer judgment; and what punishments, if any, are called for. Mr. Domingo's stardom as one of the Three Tenors, along with Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras, he sang on the best selling classical recordings of all time only heightens the stakes. Like their counterparts in Hollywood, politics, journalism and other fields, some of the classical music titans accused of sexual misconduct have effectively disappeared from the world stage, while others have gone on to second acts. The conductor James Levine has not performed in public since he was fired by the Metropolitan Opera last year after it found evidence of sexually abusive and harassing conduct; he settled a breach of contract and defamation lawsuit against the company this month. But within months of the conductor Daniele Gatti's firing by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam last year amid allegations of sexual harassment, he was appointed music director of the Rome Opera. Now Mr. Domingo's fate will hinge on several factors. Most critical will be the outcome of an investigation by the Los Angeles Opera, which Mr. Domingo was instrumental in founding in 1986. Since 2003 he has been its general director, making him the public face of the company and its top administrator, although with his travel schedule, many of the day to day responsibilities of running it fall to Christopher Koelsch, its president and chief executive. Several of the accusations against Mr. Domingo concern encounters in Los Angeles, including as he began assuming power there. The Met and several leading European companies said they would await the results of that inquiry before taking any actions of their own. But Mr. Domingo's future will also be determined by a more intangible question: whether the good will he has built up with audiences over the decades will neutralize the damaging accusations against him. Several colleagues who worked with him for years said that they were genuinely surprised by the accusations saying that they had seen him as a someone who might flirt or make a pass at women, but not harass them.In this era, many people now see that as a distinction without a difference when it comes to workplace interactions when one of the people involved is in a position of power. When a group of women in the chorus of Washington National Opera a company Mr. Domingo led for 14 years, until 2011 had a party last summer, the talk turned to the MeToo movement in opera, recalled two of the choristers who attended. The consensus that day had been that Mr. Domingo would not turn out to be a person accused of wrongdoing, said the choristers, who declined to be identified because they still worked for the company and were describing a private event. They said several women in the chorus regarded Mr. Domingo, who has been married for more than 50 years, as someone who might proposition women or have an affair but not as someone who would abuse his position, or fail to take no for an answer. Then another singer spoke up: She told the others that she had had a different, more troubling experience with him. Some choristers began to rethink their assumptions. After the allegations were made public last week, the American Guild of Musical Artists, the union representing opera soloists, choristers and ballet dancers, announced that it had contacted opera companies to demand investigations and that it would "closely monitor this situation, making the safety of our members our first priority." But Mr. Domingo's next appearances, in a concert version of Verdi's "Luisa Miller," on Aug. 25 and 31 at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, are going on as scheduled. Helga Rabl Stadler, the festival's president, said that Mr. Domingo was entitled to a presumption of innocence, using the Latin phrase "in dubio pro reo," or, when in doubt, for the defendant. "I would find it factually wrong and morally irresponsible to make irreversible judgments at this point," she said in a statement on Tuesday, the day The A.P. published its report. That same day, two American institutions severed ties with Mr. Domingo not an easy decision, given how much of a star he is, even after he gave up his high flying tenor repertory to sing lower baritone roles. When the Philadelphia Orchestra rescinded its invitation for Mr. Domingo to star at its season opening gala next month, it said that it was "committed to providing a safe, supportive, respectful, and appropriate environment for the orchestra and staff, for collaborating artists and composers, and for our audiences and communities." A few hours later the San Francisco Opera canceled his highly anticipated October concert there. It followed something of a pattern. Europeans are seen as generally more willing to separate the artist from the art. Woody Allen, for example, has had trouble finding distributors for his films in the United States amid renewed focus on allegations that he had molested his daughter, which he has consistently denied, but he continues to work in Europe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Natural disasters like Hurricanes Maria and Irma and the recent wildfires in California have led to a spate of warnings from countries that want to caution their citizens about the risk of traveling to the United States, but the advisories are also noting potential for violence in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting and the potential for terrorist attacks as well. While warnings for travel to the United States aren't new, they have picked up significantly in the last few weeks, following these events, said Ed Daly, who oversees the content for the Global Intelligence Division of iJET International, a travel intelligence firm based in Annapolis, Md. "After a lull, there was a rash of incidents which happened one after the other and led to these advisories," he said. On Oct. 16, for example, the Canadian government updated its travel advisory for the United States. In the safety and security section, the advisory says that travelers should be aware that, "The possession of firearms and the frequency of violent crime are generally more prevalent in the U.S. than in Canada." In addition, it advised against nonessential travel to Sonoma, Napa and Lake Mendocino in the wake of recent wildfires in California and Nevada. At least three of the newer travel warnings were related to Hurricanes Maria and Irma. On its travel advice page for the United States, updated Oct. 13, the United Kingdom government says that "terrorists are very likely to try to carry out attacks in the USA" and that these attacks could happen "in places visited by foreigners." In addition, it said, "The post storm environment in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands remains particularly fragile, with continuing power outages and unstable buildings." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"The Shadow of Violence" is set somewhere in rural Ireland, where the green land meanders and the blood runs fast. There, an ex boxer, Douglas Armstrong (Cosmo Jarvis), dispenses regular punishment to those who may or may not deserve it. He's nicknamed the Arm, because of his bruising strength but also because he has one of those label names that convey something about the character, like the hammering Mike Hammer. Douglas is a blunt instrument, a fiction forged with humanist ideals and a degree of poetic fancy. He's the monstrous male, as large as an oak and presumably just as thick, the man whose hulking body and fierce actions define both him and his relationships, inspiring fear and contempt. That there's more to him than primitive strength is inevitable in movies like this one, which tries to complicate an archetypal Sensitive Brute with melodrama, expressive cinematography and a sense of grace. The director Nick Rowland locks your interest in early and firmly with a curious, seemingly contradictory mix of beauty and danger, a combination encapsulated by the delicately blurred image of man's powerful hand. The hand belongs to Douglas and will soon be tightly clenched as it pummels another man's face. This act of barbarism has its ostensible reasons: The beaten man is accused of assaulting a young woman. But given the savagery of the beating you wonder if there's something else, something bigger, deeper at stake a man's humanity, the soul of a people. Douglas serves as the muscle for Dympna Devers (Barry Keoghan, a reliable complicating presence), a wily runt who deals drugs for his family's criminal enterprise. The Deverses are the kind of slow but sharp types, all gaping mouths and dead eyes, who routinely crop up in movies that they would be unlikely to see. (They invariably stare at the TV, mesmerized by cartoons and bleating game shows.) Massed in front of the telly like spectators, the women here are largely indistinguishable. The only characters who count, who do things, are the men, including two uncles: Hector (David Wilmot) and the hyper violent Paudi (a vivid, disturbing Ned Dennehy). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The backyard of the Mary Heaton Vorse home in Provincetown, which has been restored by its new owner, the interior designer Ken Fulk. The flag, "Ryan's Rainbow," was created for the house by the photographer Ryan McGinley.Credit...Tony Luong for The New York Times The backyard of the Mary Heaton Vorse home in Provincetown, which has been restored by its new owner, the interior designer Ken Fulk. The flag, "Ryan's Rainbow," was created for the house by the photographer Ryan McGinley. PROVINCETOWN, Mass. There was only one destination of choice for the literary set looking to leave New York City during the sweltering summer of 1916: Provincetown, at the outermost tip of Cape Cod. Once there, writers like John Reed and Louise Bryant, the playwright Eugene O'Neill, and an assorted cast of Greenwich Village radicals all converged on the sprawling 18th century, eight bedroom home of Mary Heaton Vorse, a celebrated labor reporter and the grande dame of the avant garde. The goal of those heady salons? "Free love and communism!" quipped Ken Fulk, the new owner of the Vorse house. Yet rather than flipping the home after his 1.17 million purchase, or dividing it into condos the fate of so many other antique buildings in this town where nearly 75 percent of the homes are now second homes or owned by investors he has spent 1.25 million more to meticulously restore its interiors to that 1916 moment and open it to the public on July 2 as one of New England's newest arts centers. Mr. Fulk hopes his move will help shore up Provincetown's fraying cultural vitality and reconnect it to younger generations of artists who have been priced out. "I grew up loving historical homes and the patina of time, understanding that true imperfections have a place," explained Mr. Fulk, an interior designer who divides his time between San Francisco and Provincetown. Already living with his husband, Kurt Wootton, across the street from the Vorse home, Mr. Fulk viewed restoring its dilapidated state as an irresistible challenge. He has gained a national reputation and a devoted clientele who reportedly pay seven figure sums for his handiwork by fusing an over the top theatricality with a passion for the historical. Now he's setting his sights on Provincetown, whose longstanding art colony sees itself under siege from many of the same gentrifying financial pressures as the Bay Area. "Quirkiness, eccentricity, is what Provincetown is all about and it's one of the great attributes that drew me here," he said. "This place will never be the Hamptons." The pandemic complicates that equation. Provincetown, like so many other places economically dependent on summer tourism, remains conflicted over the pace of reopening as a second wave of Covid 19 looms. With a townwide ban on indoor entertainment, Twenty Summers and the Provincetown Theater postponed their seasonal programs, while the Provincetown Film Society forced to reschedule its annual film festival and shutter its year round movie theater recently announced the layoff of its entire full time staff, including the C.E.O. "We may not have a packed house, but the need this summer is going to be more profound, not less," explained Mr. Fulk of the Vorse home's opening. To that end he's pressing ahead with an August fund raising dinner for the Provincetown Theater honoring the playwright Charles Busch though it's now recast as a "spaced lawn party." Mr. Fulk said he is also going forward with the July opening of an art exhibition inside the home "at whatever capacity is allowed, even if it's just one person at a time." The show, "Intimate Companions," curated by Joe Sheftel, features 50 figurative works by 36 artists with a Provincetown connection, each exploring queer culture and the distinct sense of place embodied by the town itself from the painter Paul Cadmus, a mainstay in the late 1940s, to more recent visitors including the painters Jen Bradley and Jenna Gribbon. A five by eight foot flag created by the photographer Ryan McGinley has been mounted on a 30 foot high pole. Joshua Prager, a New York City based author and co founder of Twenty Summers, recalled that a dinner gathering which Mr. Fulk hosted had raised 150,000 for his event series three years' worth of its budget in one single evening. While Mr. Prager didn't discount the sense of dread that many artists feel as more and more prominent names move into town, sending rents soaring without any boost to the regional art market, he took the long view. "What separates Provincetown from the Hamptons is a lot more than just money," he said. "It's an informal space here. People's shirts are open, or they aren't wearing shirts at all." For his part, Mr. Dowd was more ambivalent about the future of the art colony. While he applauded Mr. Fulk's restoration of the Vorse home, he feared that such efforts were ultimately self defeating. "Have I been doing the devil's work in trying to make it look a certain way here?" mused Mr. Dowd, a member of Provincetown's Historic District Commission, who has spent years fighting the wholesale gutting of historic buildings. "It's a double edged sword, trying to make things look more historically authentic," he explained. "The more you make it like that, the more it hastens its demise as a living, working, thriving community. Because the money sweeps in from people who see the cachet in a pretty place to play, and it's taken away from the people who created it in the first place." What Provincetown's artists really needed, he stressed, was cheap rent and low budget studios. While there have been some fledgling efforts, including the Commons, a new nonprofit co working space, Mr. Dowd wondered if it was too little and too late. Today's art school graduates simply bypass Provincetown altogether, he noted, leaving the art colony to essentially age into extinction. "If you want to have a thriving art scene, you need youth, you need places for them to paint, and you need places for them to live," he added, noting Provincetown's dire shortage of these very elements. "There are no easy answers, but if people are going to do million dollar fund raisers, the focus should be a little more on that." Erika Wastrom, a painter of beguiling portraits who graduated from Boston University's M.F.A. program in 2012, would appear to be part of the local artistic continuum: She grew up as a 13th generation Cape Codder, studying art with the well known Provincetown figures Jim Peters and Vicky Tomayko, each of whom moved to Provincetown in the mid 80s as fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center and then stuck around. Ms. Wastrom's own work is now exhibited at Provincetown's GAA Gallery. "I love being part of a place that has a special relationship to painting," she said with a mournful laugh, "except that I'm not part of that place." Ms. Wastrom lives a good hour south of Provincetown in Barnstable where homes are far more affordable, especially for someone starting a family. But raising two kids while teaching full time, and still cramming in regular studio sessions, doesn't leave much time for driving up to Provincetown to be a part of its creative community. Many of Ms. Wastrom's fellow Boston University grads headed straight for New York City. To them, "Provincetown is a place from the past," she said. But New York and what she deemed its artistic "cookie cutter molds" held little appeal for her. That left two options: "I could try to be an adjunct at some random university in Idaho. Or I could move back to a place that's inspiring to me and try to make work and a living there," she explained. "I'm not a landscape painter. But I am interested in color. And that part of the day when the light starts to disappear? There's no color like that anywhere else." That makes perfect sense to Mr. Fulk. "There's something magical about this crazy little sliver of sand," he said, citing a passage from Mary Vorse's 1942 memoir "Time and the Town," where she speaks of the "cosmic quality" of setting down her writing and taking daily hikes through the woods to hidden ponds, or across the dunes to gaze out at the Atlantic Ocean. "I knew that I would never be quite so happy again," she wrote. "I had recaptured the happiness I had as a girl, and yet I had the freedom of a woman. I had my house and my children, and yet I had the gaiety that comes only, as a rule, with the irresponsibility of youth." And the transformation of the Vorse house? "It's a little bit of a folly that we're doing this," Mr. Fulk said. "But it's utterly Provincetown to me." The town's offbeat essence endured, he insisted, even in the face of this summer's challenges: "There's still drag queens in the street but now they have masks on." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Credit...Louisa Marie Summer for The New York Times BAYREUTH, Germany The word we still use is "pilgrimage," for, as Mark Twain put it back in 1891, "a pilgrimage is what it is." Each summer, tens of thousands of true believers shuffle their way up a small green hill to the north of this German town, toward the shrine that Richard Wagner built to his dramas and dreams. Some are seasoned followers; some, like me this year, are practicing their devotions for the first time. We snap selfies in front of the Festival Theater; we take videos of the brass players who summon the crowd inside from a balcony. We suffer through the heat of a barely ventilated house. We curse our memory, which is given no aid by supertitles. But as an afternoon's first notes sound from that fabled covered orchestra pit, which leaks a golden glow into the darkened amphitheater, we renew our faith. The Bayreuth Festival still retains its mystical air, even if it is more open under the direction of the composer's great granddaughter Katharina Wagner, with cinema screenings, commissioning of new operas and increasingly accessible tickets. That was my conclusion after spending the last two weeks of July taking in the offerings of both theaters: nine evenings of Wagner in 12 days, by turns exhilarating and enervating. Sated by a sausage prone diet and a professional volume of the local brew, I heard the "Ring" and "Parsifal" during a Munich Opera Festival that seemed deliberately timed to offer a challenge to its Franconian neighbor to the north, and "Lohengrin," "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg," "Der Fliegende Hollander" and "Parsifal," again, at Bayreuth. It's testament to the power and allure of these dramas that I was still listening to them even on the way home. Despite dismay at some stagings, and concern with a paucity of vocal quality even in this Wagnerian heartland, I came back enthused, electrified evangelical, one might say. Why? I beheld the miracle of Kirill Petrenko. Mr. Petrenko, the diminutive, Omsk born general music director of the Bavarian State Opera, and the future chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, is spoken of with quiet awe in these parts. There is an aura around him, stoked rather than relieved by his modesty and industry. Interview requests are inevitably turned down not because of any past incidents, but because he would rather work. While glamorous portraits of major artists hang in the corridors of Munich's National Theater, Mr. Petrenko is represented by a simple video, surreptitiously taken from a camera pointing vertically down at a score he is conducting. You can only see his hands. Mr. Petrenko's Wagner is not quite like any I have heard before. He doesn't have the architectonic obsessions of Daniel Barenboim, and doesn't seem to be concerned with any kind of tradition at all, unlike Christian Thielemann. He's not in love with his own sound, like Andris Nelsons. Nor is he preternaturally deliberate, as with Mark Elder. The word that kept coming back to me was flow. Nothing in Mr. Petrenko's Wagner feels set in stone. It's molten, combustible, an eruption of color. Other Wagnerians make structure sound like something that's inevitable, but with him this composer's scores sound as if they are perpetually being created, discovered, revealed in transition. The last act of "Parsifal," for instance, usually comes as a pious unfolding of the liturgy, but here it was volatile, unstable, dark. You were barely aware that the drama was being pulled along at all, until you arrived at redemption music that sounded less a benediction than a relief. All this depends on an immense amount of preparation, a process which Mr. Petrenko relishes so much so that he makes a habit of rehearsing during intermissions, when others rest. Time, however, is in short supply during Munich's summer festival, which became all too apparent in a rather sketchy "Siegfried," and a "Gotterdammerung" that took until the final hour to get going. On occasion, Mr. Petrenko resorted simply to beating time, picking out the odd detail. But on more secure nights, like the agile "Rheingold" or the titanic, devastating "Die Walkure," his gestures were expansive, molding attack and shape simultaneously. This wasn't for show his movements were completely, visibly at one with the sound they produced. One can't see the conductor at Bayreuth, of course, but there wasn't much to hear, either. Christian Thielemann is in command as music director there, but he doesn't appear to be putting a coherent stamp on the peers he is inviting to join him. His own "Lohengrin" was estimable, though hardly inspired. Philippe Jordan was unobtrusive in "Meistersinger," while Axel Kober led "Hollander" with drab lightness. Semyon Bychkov was more enlightening in "Parsifal," bringing tension, depth and pace, but the overall impression was forgettable. Valery Gergiev is in line to conduct next year's new production of "Tannhauser" make of that what you will. Munich provided stronger singing, offering a number of ideal performances, including Ekaterina Gubanova's Fricka, Ain Anger's Fafner and Hunding, and Christian Gerhaher's Amfortas, a deranged portrayal that involved some of the ugliest sounds this cultivated artist has ever deliberately uttered. Yet even the dream casts that only Munich can turn out produced some patchy, prompter dependent singing. Nina Stemme's Brunnhilde was less imperious than usual, and her Kundry was hardly seductive. Jonas Kaufmann's Siegmund was effective, opposite the particularly fine Sieglinde of Anja Kampe, but his Parsifal remains blank. Compared to the Alberich of John Lundgren, the Wotan, Wolfgang Koch, was altogether too light, and nearly lost his voice under the pressure of "Die Walkure." And even this house cannot find a more than adequate Siegfried, although Stefan Vinke was at least that. As it happened, the only current heldentenor who usually approaches the greats of yore, Andreas Schager, was in Bayreuth to sing Parsifal, if waywardly. And beyond the starry "Lohengrin," with Anja Harteros, Piotr Beczala and Waltraud Meier, there was not much on offer on the Green Hill for devotees of the voice, with the exception of Eberhard Friedrich's frighteningly powerful chorus. The "Meistersinger" had Michael Volle in muffled, angry form as its Sachs, and Klaus Florian Vogt made a fine Walther if one could stomach his uniquely ethereal tenor. The "Hollander" was shockingly weak. And then there were the stagings. Yuval Sharon's new "Lohengrin" in Bayreuth, for all its flaws, turned out to be by far the most enchanting, involving and thoughtful staging either of these houses could muster. Munich's directors had next to nothing to say about the dramas under their trust. Andreas Kriegenburg's "Ring," which dates to 2012, barely fleshes out its concepts, though it gently equates Wotan and Alberich, and blames both for their capitalistic exploitation of the environment and women. Pierre Audi's "Parsifal" is barely a staging at all, existing merely as the frontispiece for dull, dark sets commissioned from the artist Georg Baselitz, their monochrome only brightening the colorful torrent flooding from the pit. At least the productions in Munich left room for the music to shine. Bayreuth was worse. Its "Hollander," by Jan Philipp Gloger, casts the story as the inevitable triumph of capitalism over romance, as images of the failed love of the Dutchman and Senta become a commodity to be sold. Trite intellectually, it was insipid drama, too. More provocative was Barrie Kosky's "Meistersinger." Partially revised after its premiere last year, it forces a reckoning with the old, false choice between Wagner's music and his nationalistic, anti Semitic bile. Subtler than its setting largely in the courtroom of the Nuremberg Trials would imply, its decision to make the major characters alter egos of Wagner and his wife, Cosima, nonetheless too simplistically suggested the composer's complicity in Nazi horrors, while also sapping the underlying story of interest. Uwe Eric Laufenberg's "Parsifal" was much debated on its debut two years ago, and it's easy to see why. Shamefully Islamophobic in its portrayal of Flower Maidens who strip their niqabs to reveal belly dancing outfits not to mention in how Parsifal, a Western soldier, wanders into the third act with combat gear over the top of his own head scarf it is hostile to all forms of belief. Faith here is nothing more than a disingenuous mask that veils viciousness and backward delusion. Redemption is the triumph of secular capitalism over all organized religion, forced by the barrels of Western guns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Despite the 2020 catalog season chaos, some things remained reassuringly constant. At Johnny's Selected Seeds, the top four home garden crops were still zinnias, bush beans, heirloom tomatoes (shown) and hot peppers. It May Feel Like Winter, but It's Time to Shop for Seeds Resilience: It's a vegetable seed industry buzzword, and a mission to breed genetically resilient varieties that stand up to pests, diseases and the rigors of a shifting climate. Each resilient variety becomes a tiny, critical ingredient in a resilient seed system that supports agriculture, the foundation of a resilient food system. And in the tumultuous 2020 seed catalog season, resilience proved a valuable human trait as well, for seed company staff and their customers. Insights gleaned from that chaotic year of record sales can smooth the ground for the 2021 garden season, which officially begins this month, as new catalogs start appearing in mailboxes and online. This time last time, no one could have seen it coming sales spikes of as much as 300 percent that began immediately after a national emergency was declared on Mar. 13, echoing the World Health Organization pandemic declaration two days earlier. "Luckily, we had some warning from colleagues at other companies a heads up that they were seeing this volume," said Heron Breen, a research and development manager at Fedco Seeds, serving Northeastern gardeners since 1978. "The bigger, first line companies got flooded first, and when they were overwhelmed then we really got swamped, too." Fulfillment operations were pushed past capacity; sales had to be suspended by most every supplier, sometimes repeatedly, in attempts to catch up. Catalog requests and web searches for growing advice were way up, as well. But sellers large and small, older and newer, have a reassuring message for home gardeners: They are well stocked. There are no seed shortages beyond what can happen in any farming year, when crop failure in one variety or another is always a possibility. That may sound counterintuitive to those of us who saw "out of stock" labels on many website product pages last spring. Despite the wording, it often wasn't because of a lack of seed on hand. "It was more a matter of not enough hands to pack it into packets in time to meet the surge in demand," said Andrea Tursini, chief marketing officer of the 25 year old High Mowing Organic Seeds. "And it came near the tail end of our usual peak season not a time when we are usually packing a high volume of seeds." Add to that the challenge of staffing up safely and operating within pandemic guidelines plus mounting employee burnout and something had to give. Catalogs Are for Studying, Not Just Shopping I don't advocate hoarding seed, but when it comes to seed catalogs, I say more is better (whether in print or online). Each has its specialties. Plus, they make for good reading. Before I had a shelf of garden books, seed catalogs were my reference manuals. If you read variety descriptions carefully, you'll learn about the diversity of traits possible within a single crop, and notice that some broccoli makes one big head, for example, while others are "non heading," like Piracicaba, forming a cluster of smaller florets over a number of weeks. Catalogs also provide expert growing information not simply when to sow, or how far apart, but which varieties stand up to summer heat insights that can help you order and then sow each in its time, yielding months of continuous lettuce for salads, for example. The educational support seed companies provide has only deepened with the creation of digital resources. A leading example is Johnny's Grower's Library, which has seen "a huge increase in visits this year," Mr. D'errico said. A careful inventory of what remains is Step 1, to prevent duplicates that waste money and seed. The occasional binge is encouraged; trying new things expands firsthand experience. But before I order seven or 17? tomatoes, I take two more steps. I see if a friend feels similarly inclined and wants to share an order. Then I think carefully about how much sunny garden space I really have. Figuring out what there is room for is a bit more 3 D chess than just one piece per square on a static board. The pieces come and go; the same space can accommodate two or three acts. Early spinach, radishes and salad greens might be followed by pepper or tomato plants all summer. Then, after they are pulled, the garlic bulbs could go in. Before placing your orders, study the basic rules of the game of succession planting (here's how it works). Want to enhance your sense of personal seed security? Order some open pollinated varieties, not just hybrids (which may not reproduce true from seed), and save their seed for 2022. In a tiny piece of normalcy, one element, at least, remained basically unchanged from 2019 to 2020, Mr. D'errico said. At Johnny's Selected Seeds, the same 12 crops were the top sellers among home gardeners, if in slightly different order. And among the top four zinnias, bush beans, heirloom tomatoes and hot peppers the order didn't even change. Still, sellers and buyers must be ready to adapt. "Be flexible," advised Ms. Tursini, of High Mowing Organic Seeds. "If Cherry Bomb tomato is sold out, try another cherry tomato variety." You might find one you like better. Also: "Order early, but don't panic," she said, a sentiment echoed elsewhere, perhaps most memorably by Mr. Breen, of Fedco Seeds. "Be mindful and plan your garden," he said, "not your dystopian survival plan." I'm inclined to spend my seed dollars on organic seed for my organic garden, and in support of farm based companies that don't just buy and resell seed, but actually grow and even breed at least some stock. Most companies listed here fit that description. I am a Northeastern gardener with a short season, so Northern bred and grown seed is what works best for me. But I cannot resist the occasional specialty item from elsewhere, and I'm including specialists from other regions for such indulgences and for fellow gardeners elsewhere. Another caveat: Not every company has its 2021 offerings online or in print yet, so try to be patient. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The Trump campaign is investing more money and resources in an attempt to attract African American voters than any Republican presidential campaign in recent memory. The drive includes highly visible television advertising, including an 11 million Super Bowl commercial, along with ad purchases in local black newspapers and on radio stations; "Black Voices for Trump"; storefronts in key battleground states; and a sustained social media campaign directed at black voters whose consumer, religious and demographic profiles suggest potential support, including on such issues as immigration, abortion, gender roles and gay rights. For Trump, the effort became all the more crucial as the Super Tuesday primaries demonstrated Joe Biden's strong appeal to black voters. Exit polls showed Biden winning 57 percent of the votes cast by African Americans on Tuesday, 40 points higher than his closest competitor, Bernie Sanders, at 17 percent. Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of the pro Democratic BlackPAC and the affiliated nonpartisan Black Progressive Action Coalition, wrote in an email that Trump has already communicated with a large segment of the African American electorate, although she disputes the effectiveness of Trump's bid to win black support: We've had a significant number of black voters tell us that they have gotten Trump ads on their social media platforms. That tracks with our recent poll where nearly 30 percent of those surveyed said that they had been contacted by the campaign. Many Democrats and their liberal allies downplay the president's efforts, arguing that not only is black support for the Democratic Party rock solid, but that animosity to Trump among minority voters has reached record highs. Democratic politicians and strategists who act on these assumptions do so at their own risk. Robert Jones, founder and C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote in an email that just ahead of the 2016 election, only 5 percent of African Americans said they thought Trump "understands the problems of people like them," and 75 percent of African Americans said they did not know a single person among their friends and family who was supporting Trump; moreover, Trump's favorability in PRRI polling in 2016 was 7 percent among African Americans. PRRI's most recent series of weekly surveys, conducted from late March through December 2019 with a total of 40,000 interviews, show that Trump's positive numbers among African Americans, although still low, have more than doubled. Jones pointed out by email that Trump's favorability rating among black voters overall increased from 7 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2019, with a large gender gap; Trump's favorability rating among black men in 2019 was 23 percent and 14 percent among black women. Despite this shift, Jones argues that he sees little evidence "that the Trump campaign should expect significant defections among African American voters in 2020," noting that Nearly 8 in 10 (77 percent) of African Americans continue to hold an unfavorable view of the president, including a majority (56 percent) who hold a VERY unfavorable view. Our fall 2019 American Values Survey showed his job approval among African Americans was 15 percent approve, 86 percent disapprove; and among those who disapproved of his job performance, about 8 in 10 (79 percent) say there is virtually nothing Trump could do to win their approval. Perhaps most notably, more than three quarters (77 percent) of African Americans report that they believe that President Trump has encouraged white supremacist groups. Jones agreed that "the absolute numbers are up a bit" and argued that the gender gap, and particularly the 23 percent support for Trump among African American men, is something Democrats would want to keep a discerning eye on, but at this point I would not classify it as an issue about which Democrats should sound an alarm. In my opinion, the issue of turnout and enthusiasm among AAs is a much larger concern than losing voters to the other side of the ledger. Looking back to 2016, there is data that suggests although it certainly does not prove that Trump's efforts to demonize Hillary Clinton among African American voters helped to suppress black turnout. That year, Trump ran ads in battleground states and on Facebook quoting Clinton's 1996 reference to minorities in organized gangs as "superpredators": They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel. Trump's superpredator ads were designed as much to suppress black turnout as they were to actually persuade African American voters to cast ballots for Trump. One of the more effective ways to suppress turnout is to cross pressure voters, to make them more ambivalent and less likely to go to the trouble of actually voting. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." At a postelection Pennsylvania rally in December 2016, Trump acknowledged the crucial role turnout suppression played in his victory: We did great with the African American community. I talk about crime, I talk about lack of education, I talk about no jobs. And I'd say, what the hell do you have to lose? Right? It's true. And they're smart and they picked up on it like you wouldn't believe. And you know what else? They didn't come out to vote for Hillary. They didn't come out. And that was a big so thank you to the African American community. There is no question that black turnout suffered in 2016. Take a look at voting in Detroit, a city that is 78.6 percent black. In 2012, Barack Obama won the city with 281,743 votes to Mitt Romney's 6,019. Four years later, Hillary Clinton won Detroit, 234,871 to Trump's 7,682. Trump modestly improved on Romney by 1,663 voters, but Clinton saw a 46,872 vote drop from 2012. While Clinton would not be expected to match Obama in an overwhelmingly black city, consider the pattern in Ohio's Cuyahoga County, which encompasses Cleveland. Unlike Detroit, where digital election records go back to 2008, Cuyahoga records go back to 2000, making it possible to compare the vote for Hillary to another losing white Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry. Here is how many votes Democratic candidates received in the presidential elections from 2004 to 2016: Kerry 2004, 448,503; Obama 2008, 458,422; Obama 2012, 447,254; and Clinton 2016, 398,276. In other words, compared with the three previous elections, the Democratic vote in Cuyahoga County fell in 2016 by roughly 50,000. There is another, even earlier, warning signal for Democrats concerning Trump's courtship of black voters: the 2004 Bush campaign. That year, Bush operatives realized they needed to win every possible vote in battleground states, including winning over socially conservative black voters. To do that, they sent black voters who subscribe to conservative Christian magazines and attend socially conservative churches a barrage of messages, through direct mail, contending that Democrats were intent on legalizing same sex marriage. It is hard to gauge from poll data how effective these messages were, but in the key battleground state of Ohio, Bush's margin among black voters rose from 9 percent in 2000 to 16 percent in 2004; in Florida, by 6 points, 7 to 13 percent; in Pennsylvania by 9 points, from 7 to 16 percent; and in Illinois, by 3 points, from 7 to 10 percent. None of this data proves that Trump will make significant inroads among black voters this year, but the record suggests that Democrats should be prepared for a tougher fight than expected, both in turning out African American voters and in winning by strong enough margins to give their nominee crucial backing. Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, argues that "Trump's disapproval numbers are extremely high among black voters across the board." She added that "Black voters are triggered by Trump, and messaging and imagery about him or his campaign has a negative impact." eight months of continuous advertising, coupled with the opening of field offices in black communities, could have the intended effect of peeling off enough voters to improve his standing by a couple of points, while raising enough doubt about the Democratic nominee that other voters simply stay home, a la 2016. The prospect of such a setback, Shropshire noted, shifts the burden back onto Democratic donors and allied organizations to mount a full court press on those "who voted 3rd party or did not vote in 2016," in order to avoid a repeat of the election results that year. Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird, political scientists at Duke and Bowdoin and the authors of a new book "Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior," argue that Trump's efforts to win black support will be futile. In a February Atlantic essay, they write: Political solidarity has been a crucial political asset of black Americans during a long struggle against racial injustice, and a few symbolic gestures or policy initiatives won't win significant black support for Republicans. They make an intriguing and eminently reasonable case for the strategy Republicans should adopt if they are in fact serious about winning over African American voters: If Republicans want black votes, their strategy should be simple: End racial segregation which not only leads to societal inequities that most African Americans strongly deplore, but also reinforces the social structures and conventions by which black adults encourage one another to vote Democratic. Continued segregation, they write, plays a crucial role in maintaining black loyalty to the Democratic Party: Racial segregation the very phenomenon that created a need for African American political unity also allows the group to censure defectors. Because of spatial segregation, many African Americans have social relationships almost exclusively with other black people. As a result, these black individuals then find themselves compelled to either accept the dominant political beliefs of the racial group or risk loss of status within these largely black social networks. Vincent L. Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, noted that the Trump campaign "recognizes that no Democratic presidential candidate can win the White House without near unanimous support from blacks, coupled with relatively high turnout." As a result, "the real issue is whether he can peel off enough to make a difference, or if he can diminish support for the Democratic nominee." While there are "some things that the Trump administration can tout to potentially appeal to a critical slice of black voters, e.g., criminal justice reforms, low unemployment, etc.," Hutchings argued these issues will not "make much of a dent." Group loyalties, both partisan and racial, "are far more important. And, these group loyalties particularly in a general election campaign are likely to encourage considerable, and enthusiastic, opposition to the Trump campaign." Pearl K. Dowe, professor of political science and African American studies at Emory University, shares Hutchings's doubts. "Trump's outreach is not about picking up a significant number of African American voters but to message to black voters that Trump may not be as bad as they believe," Dowe wrote by email. The Trump campaign could succeed in influencing "a few black voters who might decide to stay home if they feel there isn't a real option that could positively impact their lives." But, Dowe argued, "the strong disdain black voters have for Trump" will produce a "higher turnout rate for African American voters and an overwhelming support for the Democratic candidate regardless of who it is." Sekou Franklin, a political scientist at Middle Tennessee State University, is optimistic about Democratic prospects with black voters, but he added some significant caveats in his email: Blacks believe that this is a do or die election with high stakes, and many see Trump as threat to their long term livelihood. This message will be reinforced by black leaders, civil rights groups, and opinion makers and these social pressures matter in terms of consolidating the black vote. Trump were to make inroads among black voters and this is a big IF it will be among black men versus black women. Black men voted for Trump at a higher rate than black women in 2016, and black women are the most committed Democratic Party voters. If a civil war breaks out inside the Democratic Party between Bernie Sanders's supporters and another candidate" the conflict "could cause chaos such that young blacks could choose to stay home and not vote on Election Day, which would give Trump an advantage. Franklin predicted a replay of 2016 in the event that Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee, with the Trump campaign stressing Biden's vote for the 1994 crime bill. Both Franklin and Dowe agreed this line of attack was effective against Clinton in 2016, and both argued that it received strong reinforcement via Russian interference: In 2016, "Trump's ads and Facebook posts were effective, but they were augmented by an even more effective foreign intervention according to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report," Franklin wrote. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russia engaged in a massive disinformation campaign, Franklin noted, and "it was extraordinarily important in misleading blacks in order to convince them that there was no difference between Clinton and Trump." The Senate Intelligence Committee "found that no single group of Americans was targeted" by Russian operatives associated with the St. Petersburg based Internet Research Agency "more than African Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016." Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego, argued in an email that Trump "will have an uphill battle" actually winning over black voters, and the focus of Trump's effort will be more on discouraging blacks from voting at all (by trashing whichever Democrat gets the nomination) than on persuading them to show up and vote for Trump. Not only are African Americans' assessments of Trump "overwhelmingly negative," Jacobson writes, but "most blacks think he's a racist, and the proportion expressing that opinion has if anything risen over time." Jacobson cited a series of Quinnipiac surveys that asked black voters whether Trump is a racist. In February 2018, 74 percent of blacks said yes, 14 percent said no. In July 2018, it was 79 percent yes, 19 percent no. In July 2019, it was 80 percent yes, 11 percent no. In a Washington Post/IPSOS poll taken this January, it was 83 percent yes, 13 percent no. There is no sign that Trump has made any progress in persuading the large majority of blacks that he is not a racist. John McWhorter, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, examined Trump's prospects for winning black votes from an entirely different vantage point. In an email, McWhorter wrote: Trump's racism is less important to probably most black people than it is to the minority of black people in academia/the media/collegetownish circles. Beyond the contingent we today can roughly delineate as "Twitter people," the idea that someone is immediately disqualified from moral worth by harboring any degree of bigotry is an abstraction. As such, there is a kind of black person mostly male, I suspect who connect with Trump's Alpha Male routine, which has a lot in common with the rapper persona. It is, therefore, not remotely surprising that Kanye West likes him. I do know this: if Biden is the nominee, no. Most voters, of whatever color, vote on the basis of certain gut instincts. Biden appeals to black people partly because of a certain vernacular glint in his eye and partly now because of his connection with Obama. Wielding that will "trump" all but about seven black voters' affection for Trump's "swagger." In the case of Sanders, McWhorter wrote, it's "hard to say. Most black people are not leftists" and "my gut tells me" that "most of those unmoved by Sanders would simply stay home rather than go out and cast a vote for Trump." One problem facing Democrats and liberals is an overemphasis on what pollsters call the headline or top line figures in polling reports, which unquestionably show deep hostility to the Trump administration, and inadequate attention to some less prominent details. A survey of 804 registered African American voters conducted last month for BlackPAC by Cornell Belcher's firm, Brilliant Corners Research Strategies, produced this bullet list of findings: 76 percent of Black voters disapprove of Donald Trump's job performance, with 65 percent saying they strongly disapprove. 77 percent agree that Trump is a racist with 66 percent saying they strongly agree. 75 percent disapprove of Congressional Republicans with 59 percent strongly disapproving. Also, the majority of Black voters (61 percent) think the Republican Party is also racist. Further on in the report on the poll, there are some numbers that are less comforting for Democrats. Nearly one out of five, 18 percent, either strongly (13 percent) or somewhat (5 percent) approve of Trump's job performance. Even more disconcerting to Democrats: according to the Belcher poll, their party "is underperforming in the generic ballot" among African Americans. 70 percent of those interviewed said they plan to vote for the Democratic nominee, 12 percent said they plan to vote for Trump and another 12 percent said they will vote for a third party candidate. Six percent said they were undecided. In comparison, Belcher noted, "Obama got 93 percent in 2012." Clinton received 91 percent of the black vote in 2016. In other words despite Trump's record in office, describing some white supremacists in Charlottesville as "very fine people"; referring to Haiti and African nations as "shithole countries," and calling Elijah Cummings's majority black Seventh Congressional District "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess" the numbers in the BlackPAC survey warn that the loyalty of a quarter of black voters to the Democratic Party may be waning. Assuming that the 2020 election is close, any increase in defections, or a repeat of the relatively low black turnout of 2016, could seriously endanger Democratic prospects. Clearly the Trump campaign understands this, but it remains uncertain whether the Democratic Party does. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Alabama Shakes's frontwoman goes solo on an album that is totally, gloriously about and for herself. TAOS, N.M. A rectangular medallion swung from the rearview mirror of Brittany Howard's car as she steered a scenic drive through mountains, desertscapes, forests and gorges around this high altitude city she calls an "energy epicenter," her home since December. It looked like the kind of locket that holds the image of a saint. But up close, it was a faded photograph of two young girls, both in red home sewn clown costumes. One was a very young Howard; the other was her older sister, Jaime, who died at 13 from retinoblastoma, a rare form of childhood eye cancer; Howard was just 8 years old. During Jaime's illness, the family's house burned down, and the photo is one of Howard's few keepsakes of her sister. "I take it with me everywhere," she said. "Jaime" is also the title of Howard's solo debut album, due Sept. 20, as she steps out from Alabama Shakes, the Grammy winning soul and rock band she has led for most of this decade. "Jaime" memorializes the sister who was Howard's role model as a musician, writer and more. "She was a thinker," Howard said. "She was a creator. She was just immaculate, just genius level stuff. She taught me that if it don't feel right, that means it's not right. She taught me everything about everything." But in a statement about "Jaime," Howard wrote: "The record is not about her. It's about me." It's simultaneously more personal, more socially conscious and more unruly than her albums with Alabama Shakes. The songs are funky, experimental, rowdy and exposed: the work of a songwriter going deep to explore spirituality, sexuality, traumas of the past and ideas about the present, by way of danceable propulsion and sonic escapades. It gleefully ignores conventions of genre, structure and texture, sparse at one moment and wildly overstuffed the next. Last year Howard told Alabama Shakes that she needed a hiatus. Grounded in 1960s Southern soul but never confined by it, Alabama Shakes had backed Howard's whisper to shout vocals in songs about romance, heartache and tenacity. The band released two albums, in 2012 and 2015, as its touring circuit expanded from club showcases to headlining sheds and festivals worldwide. Their roots were in the rural South. Alabama Shakes got started in the small town of Athens, Ala., where Howard grew up poor, the daughter of a black father and a white mother; they divorced after Jaime's death. She was raised by both parents and by an extended family grandparents, aunts, cousins in Alabama and Mississippi. During Alabama Shakes's early years of constant touring, Howard's home address was a room in her father's trailer. "I didn't have no new clothes when I was a kid," she said. "You don't think about it. But I still had a mom, I still had a dad, I still had a family. My life taught me what I need to know so I can do what I got to do in this lifetime." Howard learned to sing harmonies in church, and she discovered R B, rock and pop from parents who loved Prince (her father) and Elvis Presley (her mother), from friends' record collections and from MTV. She soaked up Led Zeppelin, the Velvet Underground, AC/DC, Donny Hathaway, Michael Jackson, Missy Elliott. As a shy teenager she taught herself how to assemble songs, part by part. She borrowed her sister's guitar and recorded on a PC that her sister had been given by the Make a Wish Foundation, using the free multitracking software Audacity. "I was just really trying to keep the world away from me, because the world weighed a ton when I was a little kid," she said. "I relate to that Beach Boys song, 'In My Room.' I get it, man. Total solitude, total imagination, totally retreating into his own world, being his own being." While earning a living as a mail carrier, she got together on Tuesday and Thursday nights with bandmates she had met in high school for practices that forged Alabama Shakes. The group's first album, "Boys and Girls," reached back to the naturalism of old school soul. Its second, "Sound and Color," broadened the music well beyond any kind of soul revivalism, wandering at times toward psychedelia and punk; it won three Grammys. But by the time Alabama Shakes finished its most recent major tour, in 2017, Howard felt "emotionally drained, kaput," she said. She was also thinking about turning 30, and she didn't want music to become a routine. "Life was looking real simple, and any time it starts feeling like that, I kind of go, 'Uh oh,'" she said. "Any time it's just looking like, 'That's your bag, there you go, stick with that, do that, you're going to be great' I'm just like, 'Naw, that don't feel right!'" During the downtime after the tour, Howard told the band she was putting it on hold indefinitely. "'Honestly guys, I don't know what I'm going to do, I don't know if I'll make a new record, I don't know what's going to happen,'" she recalled telling them. "Because at the time I really didn't. They were really gracious enough to understand. And we're still really close." The situation is "a bittersweet thing," said Zac Cockrell, Alabama Shakes's bassist. "But there are no hard feelings anywhere. She's always done her thing. I feel like with this, she just took it one step further." Howard had already started making music outside Alabama Shakes. In 2015, she fronted a hard rock band called Thunderbitch; she would ride through club audiences on a roaring motorcycle and perform in a tight leather jacket with white greasepaint on her face. By then she had moved to Nashville, where Alabama Shakes recorded its debut album, and in 2017 she joined two other songwriters Becca Mancari and Jesse Lafser to form Bermuda Triangle, sharing one another's songs and doing a small scale tour by van. Howard and Lafser, who had lived in Taos, grew closer; they married in 2018. They live together now in the house Howard bought on the outskirts of Taos, with their cats and dogs "five animals that all hate each other," Howard said on 16 mountainside acres with a few low slung buildings, including a recording studio in progress. Their neighbors are elks, coyotes and black bears. Loud crickets punctuated an interview on Howard's porch, as she shared a bottle of Barbera d'Asti. Before deciding to make the solo album, Howard said, she began writing a memoir, reaching back to the events and sensations of her childhood. She got as far as the founding of Alabama Shakes before pivoting back to songwriting delving through her hard drives and completing songs that hadn't been right for the band, coming up with new ones. She wrote lyrics and blueprinted parts drums, guitars, keyboards, bass lines before booking studio time and calling in trusted musicians: Cockrell, the drummer Nate Smith, and the keyboardists Robert Glasper and Paul Horton, while supplying all the layers of guitar herself. Howard and her engineer, Shawn Everett, deliberately recorded with eccentric setups. For the blissful song "Stay High," Smith arrived to find a drum kit that was all snare drums; at another session he was asked to play with chopsticks. For much of the album, Everett placed contact microphones picking up small impacts on the keys of electronic keyboards, giving physical heft to synthetic tones. Testing a new keyboard turned into a spontaneous studio jam that Howard edited into "13th Century Metal," a roller coaster of a spoken word rant that's part self help exhortation, part sermon. And in "Goat Head," Howard directly addresses growing up as the child of an interracial couple in a small Southern town. "My mom got treated terrible for walking around with little black kids," Howard said. "I think they took real good care of me not seeing that stuff. Now, when I'm older, I can look back and be like, yeah, I was definitely treated different when I went to that tea party. Or that's why I wasn't invited, or that's why I couldn't go to my friend's house." In an incident that happened when Howard was a baby, but that her mother later told her about, Howard's father woke up one morning to find the family car with its tires slashed and a goat head placed in the back seat. "I was just, like, if this is going to be about where I'm from, I need to talk about this story," Howard said. "'Cause I'm not painting a true picture of my experience if I don't include this one thing that my family never talks about." She hadn't yet told her parents about the song, and didn't intend to. "I don't want to be second guessing myself, I don't want to consider somebody else's feelings," she said. "That's what I've done my whole life." "Even when I was with the Shakes I practiced that because that's what I was taught," she continued. "It's not until I got older that I realized that it's important sometimes to be selfish so that you've got your own power, your own energy." So she's ready to be selfish? "This is not about nobody else," she declared. "This is about myself." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The actress Diane Kruger, 39, has a full slate this summer with roles in "The Infiltrator," opening Wednesday, and "Disorder," which will be released in the United States by mid next month. Ms. Kruger is known for her beauty, but she grew up in Germany in a household where, she said, "talking about your appearance wasn't encouraged." Now, with home bases in Paris and Los Angeles, and frequent flights to New York for work, she has amended her beauty and fitness regimen here and there. Still, Ms. Kruger said, she's more European in her sensibilities. See what she's using. I usually start the day with this face wash from Uriage. It foams, and you can find it at the French pharmacies. I've been using it for at least five years. Then I use a toner from Kiehl's. It's the blue one, a classic. Right now because it's summer, I've been using Chanel Hydra Beauty serum as my moisturizer. And I always wear sunscreen. The one I'm using is also by Chanel, and it's SPF 50 but really light. For eye cream, it depends. If I use one, it's by Uriage. This routine works for me. I tend to break out easily, so I stick with what I've picked up over the years. I'm probably more European in my thinking because of where I grew up: the "less is more" philosophy. My sunscreen habit is from living in L.A., though I don't like to be tan like some of the people there. And when I go to New York, all the women are so on top of it. They have their dermatologists they see for this and that. I can't keep up. I don't even pluck my brows. But I will do a gommage, or an exfoliating scrub, by Sensai. It's cool: It's a dry product, you put it on your face and it works. I do it once or twice a week. It depends on the state of my skin. If it's a good day, I'll just use a Cle de Peau concealer under my eyes and on any blemishes. If it's not a good day, then I do a BB cream or the tinted moisturizer from Laura Mercier. If I'm going out, then it's the Chanel Vitalumiere Aqua. It's interesting, because I do both American movies and French independent films I'm currently shooting a movie in the South of France the difference with makeup. In American movies, especially the big budget films, they definitely want the leading lady to look as good as she can. The French are always about being real, and less is more. Sometimes I have to fight to cover up my pimples. Usually, though, if it's not work, I just do a brown mascara from the drugstore. But I always do a brow, even during the day. I use an ash color pencil by Chanel. My brows are naturally pretty thick, but I like to accentuate them because I think they give me character and frame my face. I don't need as much makeup if I do my brows. For night, I don't like black on my eyes, but I'll usually do a dark brown liner, like a cat eye. I don't know why, but when I'm in Paris, I tend to do just eyebrows and a red matte lip. I love the MAC Ruby Woo, and I have a bunch of different reds from Nars. I wear Calvin Klein Beauty. I used to be the face of it, but I'm not anymore. I like the idea of smelling the same for a long time. Before, I wore the Burberry scent for five years. I've been on Beauty for about six years now. I'm a natural blonde but not a very pretty blonde, so I used to get lots of highlights. Then I had to do a reddish thing for a movie, and I haven't done anything to it since. Now it's growing out, and I think it's the nicest color I've ever had. The red kind of washed out, the old highlights have come through, and my natural roots are out. It's darker than it usually is, and I'm loving it. For cuts and color, I have someone in Paris, David Mallett, and someone in L.A., Vanessa Spaeth, who is a freelancer and is really good with blondes. L.A. blondes are often too white. In New York, I go to Serge Normant. I often use David Mallett products. He has a really beautiful repair mask. I also love the Christophe Robin rose shampoo, and sometimes I use his oil on the ends of my hair. For styling, I like Ouai dry shampoo and texturizing spray. I love the smell. And I also love Oribe products. I do massages. I prefer more of a Thai massage, something that's more energizing. I've tried acupuncture but just can't get into it. I'm not a spa junkie. I eat everything in moderation I don't like junk food anyway but I do exercise a lot. I'm probably overdoing it. I used to be a ballet dancer, but then for years I didn't work out. As I got older and felt I needed to get toned and all those things, I started going to the gym. I also like to be outdoors, to cycle and hike. But now that I'm exercising, I can't just go two or three times a week. Suddenly it's working out every day for an hour and a half. Paris is actually terrible for exercise. Twenty years ago, when I first moved here, there was nothing. It's gotten better, but the equipment is often really old. It's harder to find good classes. For sure, L.A. and New York are fitness havens. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
AMSTERDAM A painting attributed to the circle of the 16th century Italian artist known as Parmigianino has been determined to be a modern fake, according to a complaint filed by Sotheby's auction house in United States District Court in New York on Tuesday. The company filed the complaint against the collector Lionel de Saint Donat Pourrieres, who consigned the painting to Sotheby's for a 2012 auction, where it sold to another collector for 842,500. Last year, Sotheby's asked the buyer to send the painting back for testing, after receiving information that the artwork may have passed through a source under investigation before coming into Mr. de Saint Donat Pourrieres's possession. Through testing of paint samples taken from the oil painting, the auction house says, it has determined that the portrait of "St. Jerome" contains pigments throughout the paint layer that were not invented until the 20th century. According to the complaint, "Each and every one of those samples (none of which were taken from areas of restoration) contained the modern synthetic pigment phthalocyanine green, which was first used in paints nearly four centuries after Parmigianino died." This is the second painting that has been deemed a fake in what may be a widening old masters' forgery case that could go back several years. In October, Sotheby's announced that a painting attributed to Frans Hals that it had sold for around 10 million could not have been painted in the 17th century because it also contained 20th century pigments. "St. Jerome" was tested using similar methods by Orion Analytical, a materials analysis firm specializing in art, which Sotheby's acquired late last year. Sotheby's is refunding the buyer in full, according to the complaint, and is seeking damages from Mr. de Saint Donat Pourrieres of 672,000, the amount he received from the sale. Mr. de Saint Donat Pourrieres, an art historian who lives in Luxembourg, did not respond to requests for comment. "As was true in the recent case of the fake Frans Hals painting, Sotheby's is honoring its guarantee and fully reimbursing our purchaser," Sotheby's wrote in a statement emailed to The New York Times. "We have also exercised our contractual right to cancel the sale, which requires our consignor to reimburse us." Sotheby's also said it had confirmed a "St. Jerome" link to a European art collector named Giuliano Ruffini. Mr. Ruffini previously sold the work attributed to Frans Hals to the London based art dealer Mark Weiss in 2010, Mr. Weiss confirmed. Mr. Ruffini has subsequently been the subject of an investigation by the French police, who seized a painting attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder that was in the Prince of Liechtenstein's collection that had formerly been part of Mr. Ruffini's collection. No charges have been filed against Mr. Ruffini, who continues to say that he never claimed that any of the works were authentic. Mr. Ruffini's lawyer, Philippe Scarzella, confirmed in an email to The New York Times on Tuesday that the Parmigianino was owned by Mr. Ruffini, and that "there was a dispute about this painting between middlemen and Mr. Ruffini around 15 years ago." He called into question the validity of Orion's scientific investigation, adding, "I have a thick file on this painting and many experts have declared the 'St. Jerome' was genuine." "It is well known that Sotheby's owns this laboratory," Mr. Scarzella said in an additional email. He contended that Orion's findings would need to be confirmed by "another independent expert." "St. Jerome" was exhibited at the Galleria Nazionale of Parma and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2003 as an original Parmigianino. Later, it was downgraded to "circle of Parmigianino" because of scholarly debate about its authenticity. After Sotheby's sold it, it was lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 2014 to February 2015. Bob Haboldt, a dealer in old masters art, said in a telephone interview from Paris that the filing in New York was "a wake up call, and it'll make people look at what they have on the wall or what's on consignment or what's been purchased in the recent past more closely." He added, "People are scrutinizing what's in their collections, and I think that's an ongoing process. I don't think it'll shake up the market more than it already has, because if you notice, the sales results at auction and in the market haven't changed." Johnny van Haeften, a London based dealer in old master paintings, however, said he was not concerned that the market might contain more such fakes. "All the pictures are so different, they all need to be taken on their own merit," he said in a telephone interview. "As far as the other pictures are concerned, the jury is still out." He added, " One should be very careful about making a general observation; each one should be taken on its own merits." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The French Open is normally the big draw on the sports calendar when it is played. Now, it's one of a bunch of events. Remember when all there was to watch was South Korean baseball and cherry pit spitting? Those times appear to be over. Nearly every sport has returned, creating a schedule unlike any we've seen. Multiple leagues are attempting to close out virus interrupted seasons, while other leagues try to start new ones safely. For sports fans who were hungry for action for months, this feast may never come again. The past month has been packed, but the week just completed might have topped it all for quality and quantity. On Week 3 of the N.F.L., the Atlanta Falcons blew a 15 plus point lead to the Chicago Bears, who improved to an improbable 3 0. The Buffalo Bills blew a 25 point lead to the Los Angeles Rams, but then rallied to win and improved to 3 0 as well. In European soccer, Bayern Munich, which lost only four times in each of the last three seasons, lost in only its second game of the new one, by the improbable score of 4 1 to Hoffenheim. And Somerset, waiting since 1891 for its first English four day cricket championship, lost to Essex in this year's final. Plus, Mark Selby beat Martin Gould to win the European Masters snooker tournament in Milton Keynes, England. The baseball playoffs expanded to 16 teams! started with four games. The action was topped by the Yankees crushing the best pitcher in baseball this season, Shane Bieber of the Cleveland Indians, 12 3, and the Minnesota Twins falling to the Houston Astros and extending their postseason losing streak to a mind boggling 17 games. Plus: Dynamo Moscow beat SK Zadruga in the Champions League ... the Volleyball Champions League. On Monday, Serena Williams beat Kristie Ahn, 7 6 (2), 6 0, at the French Open. On Wednesday, Williams withdrew because of an Achilles' tendon injury. The matches continued. A quadruple header of playoff games not enough? How about an octuple header? This baseball bacchanalia resulted in three teams being eliminated from the unforgiving best of three format: the Toronto (Buffalo) Blue Jays, the Indians and, yes, the Twins, who tallied consecutive playoff loss No. 18. It took the Atlanta Braves 13 innings to beat the Cincinnati Reds, 1 0, the longest any postseason game has ever stayed scoreless. Liverpool played Arsenal for the second time in a week after defeating it, 3 1, on Monday in the Premier League. The rematch, in the League Cup, ended in a 0 0 draw, but Arsenal advanced on penalties. Just four baseball playoff games, but all of them were potential elimination games. We said goodbye to the Chicago White Sox, the Cincinnati Reds and the Milwaukee Brewers. Plus: Zaragoza beat Tenerife in the semifinals of the Champions League ... the Basketball Champions League. The action didn't slow down. Manager Jose Mourinho of Spurs, who got revenge on his former team Chelsea on Tuesday, got more on Sunday, beating another former team, Manchester United, 6 1, in the Premier League. Tom Brady, in his unfamiliar Buccaneers uniform, helped beat the Los Angeles Chargers, 38 31, in the N.F.L. NASCAR raced at Talladega. The N.B.A. finals moved to Game 3, and the Heat got a win. Plus: You know what? Never mind. Maybe catch a movie instead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
PARIS It didn't feel like a wake though it was, essentially, one long paean to the past. In fact, Hedi Slimane's maybe possibly but no one knows could be last show for Saint Laurent resembled nothing so much as historically accurate immersive theater: a 1980s Helmut Newton photograph come to life. What it did not resemble was the Saint Laurent ready to wear collections Mr. Slimane has done before. There were no sound and light shows, no teenage haute guttersnipes, no thumbing his nose at the rules. It was held in the painstakingly restored environs of the new YSL couture maison, which Mr. Slimane brought back to its original marble floored, wrought iron glory over a period of one and a half years; set not to music but to silence punctuated by the exacting tones of Benedicte de Ginestous, the woman who had announced the exits of all Yves Saint Laurent's haute couture shows from 1977 to 2002 ("Exit One, Exit Two," et cetera); and attended by the Saint Laurent original Pierre Berge. The models' hair was slicked back, their lips glossy red, their eyes shadowed, the highest Mistress pumps on their feet, the tiniest, shiniest of clothes on their backs, with the biggest of shoulders. Plus Le Smoking to open, of course, with a sheer, ruffled blouse. The basis of the show was an ultra minidress just brushing the bottom, belted in at the waist, with a single soaring shoulder poof (occasionally two). They were snakeskin, sequined, silver, frilled, feathered and leather. Sometimes a bustier popped into a bubble skirt, sometimes a long, polka dot tango skirt. A fur was big, red and curved to a heart shaped point. There was not one day look in the 42, though in a pinch the star spangled leather jackets and pleated jumpsuits might work. The house denied it was a couture collection, but it acknowledged it had been produced in the couture atelier. Which meant what, exactly? That Mr. Slimane was proving he was the rightful heir to Mr. Saint Laurent, because he could do just what he did, down to the fuchsia sequins? That everyone would be sad to see him go, because all that pseudo rebellion was just that? That he could do couture, and so all the rumors that he might be leaving to join a different legendary couture house were justified? We'll find out, soon enough. A more relevant question is: Why does anyone think women want to dress like the ghost of parties past? Mr. Slimane has unquestionably shown he can do a better job at recreating a specific historical time period one currently obsessing many of his peers than possibly anyone else in his position. It may be competitive. But is it really worth applauding? The first time around these clothes telegraphed nouveaux riches and unabashed success; smashed glass ceilings and Champagne (and the advent of MTV). They had the urgency of self realization. Now, however, they have the whiff of costume. Fashion the clothes that define you should not be a way back; it should offer a way forward. Mr. Slimane is very good at making images. But a genuinely new identity for women seems to elude him. How to speak to the present while maintaining a conversation with the past is a challenge Nadege Vanhee Cybulski has struggled with at Hermes. Now in her third season, she is still trying to translate the brand's history as the ultimate in stealth luxury into clothes. This time around, her efforts took the shape of monklike cashmere and wool tabards, trousers and dresses, in a calming palette of dove gray, peach, burgundy, olive green and black, rising in a curve at the neck and falling to midcalf in what appears to be the length of the season. Though there was promise in a starburst studded crepe and fluid silk scarf jacquards/silk knit melange dress, the net effect was still neutered. The hush lies heavy on her shoulders. She needs to shrug it off. At Sonia Rykiel, the designer Julie de Libran decided to address the issue head on, as it were, commissioning a friend, the artist Maggie Cardelus, to create a print for the house made up of the faces of the Rykiel women the founder Sonia; her daughter Nathalie; her granddaughter, Lola; and Julie and Maggie herself ("They are women I have platonic dialogues with," Ms. Libran said backstage) all gradually morphing together into something else. Reproduced on an ankle sweeping dress of gold silk, tiered and pleated in classic '70s Rykiel style, or a cropped leather jacket and maxi skirt, mixed in with mariniere stripes and big Mongolian lamb chubbies, lingerie dresses and funky, faded denim, they dramatized the designer dilemma in a charming, but pointed, way. But it was at Chanel that Karl Lagerfeld effectively looked back to go forward. Eschewing the over the top set extravaganzas of recent seasons (the supermarket, the airplane hangar, the casino), Mr. Lagerfeld instead reconstituted a salon of old, from the cream carpet to the gold ballroom chairs, mirrored pillars and beige walls. Like Mr. Slimane's Saint Laurent (coincidentally or not), the allusion was to a traditional couture show. But instead of fetishizing it, Mr. Lagerfeld democratized it, supersizing the space and creating a maze that allowed his entire 2,000 person audience, one that included Pharrell Williams and Jada and Willow Smith (a new Chanel ambassador), a front row seat. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Feisty women trying to jump class are so 19th century; I'm looking at you, Jane Eyre. And so 20th century, too: Have you met Sister Carrie? For the playwright Gina Gionfriddo, such characters are all too 21st century as well. Many of her plays, including the Pulitzer Prize finalists "Becky Shaw" and "Rapture, Blister, Burn," feature heroines trying to escape the social immobility that locks them into dreary lives. In the smart but awkward "Can You Forgive Her?," which opened on Tuesday at the Vineyard Theater, she introduces us to two such women, Tanya and Miranda, each using tools largely unavailable to Jane and Carrie to dislodge herself from the financial permafrost. Tanya (Ella Dershowitz) is a 27 year old working class single mother; to underline her status, Ms. Gionfriddo has her wearing, a bit tritely, the serving wench outfit of a novelty restaurant on the New Jersey shore. But she's no one's drudge. Having retired her debt by following the tough advice of a Suze Orman like self help guru, she delivers an upwardly mobile ultimatum to her boyfriend, Graham (Darren Pettie): "I need to be with a guy who is either (a) already in the middle class or (b) wants to be there bad enough to work for it." Graham, a twice divorced 40 year old who has been idling since his mother's death six months earlier, might seem to be the definition of what Tanya's guru calls a PWP: a partner without prospects. Still, he agrees to remodel and flip his mother's shabby beach house, and thus earn Tanya's hand in marriage. But then Miranda (Amber Tamblyn) enters, quickly hijacking the play. Unlike Tanya, Miranda long ago flew up from prole purgatory into elite heaven, complete with "ritzy" private schools, a Newport address and limitless credit cards. Her problem is that when the man who was financing all that lavishness her mother's boyfriend suddenly stopped paying, she didn't stop spending. At 28, she is 200,000 in debt, much of it for college and graduate school. Allergic to Tanya's Orman esque axioms, Miranda seems headed for disaster, and not just financially. On the night the play takes place, the plot unconvincingly sets on a collision course two of the men she regularly soaks for cash. David, her regular sugar daddy, is an emotionally tone deaf married man who has sex with her two days a week. To help finance the other five, she is also seeing Sateesh (Eshan Bay), a young Indian tech nerd who is drunk, angry about being strung along and (the play would have you believe) insanely volatile. He has a carful of knives. Like many of their 19th century prototypes, Tanya and Miranda are not very likable. (The men, even flat affect David, are much more so.) Tanya is pushy and grating, Miranda a drama queen. Both are dealing with issues like those raised by the 1864 Anthony Trollope novel from which Ms. Gionfriddo's play takes its title. In that tale, another pair of young women consider their options, of which there are generally only two: marry or don't. In the process they nearly lose everything. "I am not sure," Trollope writes, "that marriage may not be pondered over too much." Well, a man would say that. (Some readers have jokingly called the novel, which is somewhat overpondered itself, "Can You Finish It?") One of the things that interests Ms. Gionfriddo is the way 21st century freedoms have complicated, perhaps even worsened, the odds a woman faces in approaching what Trollope called "the matrimonial dragon." Theoretically, she now has a more reasonable chance of slaying it. But in practice, if she wants male companionship, a woman without means still labors under restrictions that do not favor victory. Unfortunately, the play that explores these worthy ideas feels sour and lumpy. The characters speak a kind of bad faith dialogue, often mechanical or contrary to logic. But the bigger problem is structural. The first two scenes, one long and the next really long, proceed with only the mildest dramatic action, some of it gussied up with annoyingly antic touches. (It's Halloween.) Despite Mr. Pettie's admirable efforts to strike a spark in this damp environment, a conversation between Graham and Miranda, having nowhere to go, devolves into an interview in which only nuggets of back story are dislodged. Oddly, it's the arrival of David, the supposedly unfeeling sugar daddy, that finally jump starts the action, two thirds of the way through. (That's partly a result of the fine work of Frank Wood, suggesting a full inner life behind a mask of incomprehension.) Even so, "Can You Forgive Her?" does not, over the longish haul of its 95 minutes, make much drama out of its question mark. Ms. Gionfriddo has posited this sort of static structure as a viable and possibly female dramaturgy. "Women are more comfortable than men writing about situations that don't change," she told Alexis Soloski in a 2012 interview. That might be so, but the Vineyard production, under the direction of Peter DuBois, doesn't translate the author's comfort into the audience's. The tone is so wobbly that the play draws laughs when it wants to be taken seriously. The opposite is sadly true as well. That problem is most noticeable in the character of Miranda, who seems suspended between a cartoon and something darker. Ms. Tamblyn has a fascinating pout, a great whiskey voice and a breezy way with both entitlement and self reproach. As something of a hectic multi hyphenate herself, she's believable as a woman flapping around in a whirlwind of underfinanced dreams. But the script never makes Miranda a figure you respect for her struggles, nor an object of pointed satire. (Alice Vavasor, her closest counterpart in the Trollope novel, is satisfyingly both.) Despite its perceptiveness about women and marriage today, the play as a whole suffers from the same self cancelling vagueness as its heroine. Forgive her? We hardly know her. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The couple will be selling their home and relocating to Crows Nest, a 175 acre property in the Catskills that will house his company and a residency program. The next house will be smaller. "Part of the reason I have this collection of art on the walls is because I have so many walls," he said. Downsizing is "going to be a challenge." To raise money for Crows Nest, he sold two major works: one by Anish Kapoor and one by Rauschenberg. Of losing the Rauschenberg work, Mr. Petronio looked uncharacteristically insecure. But then he brightened with a realization: "I just felt that would be the thing that he would want me to do." These are edited excerpts from a recent conversation. Why does that color photograph speak to you? This is by Matthew Brandt. I found him in a small gallery on the Lower East Side, and I'm just totally drawn to his work. There was a picture of his grandmother developed in her own urine, but I didn't know that when I was looking at it. I happened to be in town when he was having his next opening. He photographs lakes and develops them in the water of the lake. It's so beautiful. You just kind of sink into it. Why did you want a picture of a lake? I'm a giant swimmer. I'm on the cusp of Pisces and Aries I have no earth in me, let me put it that way. This speaks to that, and there's a nostalgia to it that I find really magnetic. But it's also completely modern. The nostalgia is in the process as well as in the image, and that's what I really like. This is the biggest piece we have in the house and Jean Marc was like, "That's way too big; don't get it." And then I did it whispering behind his back. He was like, "O.K., it works." But that one pointing to a small painting on an adjacent wall is more his size. It's lovely and small. Who painted that? This is Stephen Hannock, who is an old friend of mine. It's oil on wood, and it's the lights on Vietnamese fishing boats. I know him from my days at Hampshire College. He was at graduate school at Smith, and he played ultimate Frisbee at Hampshire College. I didn't have a thing about being a dancer. I hung out with visual artists. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
AVA LUNA at Joe's Pub (Feb. 10, 9:30 p.m.). Like many indie rock acts, this Brooklyn based band has drawn inspiration from the melodic seductions of Serge Gainsbourg. In a more unusual move, Ava Luna both honor and challenge that source material through a cleverly revised cover of the French songwriter's 1971 album "Histoire de Melody Nelson," with their own Becca Kauffman singing Mr. Gainsbourg's parts. She and her bandmates, who released their take on the album on vinyl in December, will reprise it on Saturday night. 212 967 7555, joespub.publictheater.org NOEL GALLAGHER'S HIGH FLYING BIRDS at Radio City Music Hall (Feb. 15, 8 p.m.). Noel Gallagher once told The New York Times that Oasis would have seen much more success in this country if their lead singer, his brother Liam, hadn't flaked on a crucial 1996 tour: "That killed us stone dead in America. We never recovered." The English guitarist and songwriter will face no such obstacle on his latest tour of the United States with this band, whose 2017 album, "Who Built the Moon?," is a pleasantly psychedelic romp. And while some Oasis fans may miss the intraband drama of old, Mr. Gallagher has proved repeatedly in the eight years since going solo that he is a highly entertaining frontman in his own right. 866 858 0008, radiocity.com HALEY HEYNDERICKX at Berlin (Feb. 9, 8 p.m.). "Maybe my God has thick hips and big lips," Haley Heynderickx suggests on "Untitled God Song," an extraordinary catalog of personal metaphors for the divine. (Later, Ms. Heynderickx imagines God creating a spectacular sunset by accident: "She's the quick glimpse of heaven, forgetting her headlights are on.") The Oregon based folk rock songwriter will perform selections from her upcoming debut album, "I Need to Start a Garden," at this East Village bar on Friday night. 877 987 6487, ticketfly.com MIJA at House of Yes (Feb. 15, 10 p.m.). Mija first came to national attention as an associate of the electronic superstar Skrillex. Her wide ranging D.J. sets have always implied an interest in the world beyond the dance floor, and her recent single "Notice Me" makes good on that promise, pairing crisp, innovative synth pop production with a compelling sketch of unrequited love. Listen closely to the records Mija spins at this appearance for further insight into her expanding universe. houseofyes.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Peering through a microscope in 2016, Dania Albini gazed at an algae eating water flea. Its gut appeared full and green with all the ingested teeny tiny Chlorella vulgaris algae. But she also observed bright green blobs of this phytoplankton in an unexpected place: the herbivore's brood pouch. "I was really surprised to see them there," said Dr. Albini, an aquatic ecologist then at Swansea University in Wales. As the colonization continued, the algae enveloped the tiny creature's eggs, killing some eggs and resulting in fewer newborns, according to a study led by Dr. Albini and published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science. With the algae still alive, the researchers suspect that Chlorella deploy an offense strategy as opposed to a typical defense to protect themselves from herbivory. "You don't expect a food to attack a predator in this way," Dr. Albini said. "You expect it from a parasite, but not food. It's fascinating." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Say yes to the shoe: On Thursday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Martha Stewart Weddings editors will help you make the tough call between minimalist stilettos ( 398) and pearl embellished sandals ( 455) from the new Stuart Weitzman bridal line. At 625 Madison Avenue. R.S.V.P. here. Bloomingdale's at 59th Street has the new Spanx bridal collection, which includes a shaping bodysuit ( 74) and high waist briefs with pretty lacy motifs ( 64). The jeweler Jemma Wynne has created a bridal capsule for Stone Strand that includes a hexagon frame diamond ring in a contemporary interpretation of Art Deco style ( 16,305 for 18 karat gold). At 185 Franklin Street, sixth floor. On Thursday, dot COMME, an Australian vintage shop that specializes in, you guessed it, Comme des Garcons, will open a pop up at Opening Ceremony stocked with eccentric pieces like a dress with built in gloves ( 2,000). At 35 Howard Street. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"'Pray for Your Poor Uncle,'" by Elizabeth Bruenig (Sunday Review, July 19), about the child abuse victims of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, features a conclusion both startling and important. Ms. Bruenig writes that the main survivor profiled, Francis M., reflects that "he thinks it's possible to distinguish the church from the people who have for decades debased it." She adds, "How dearly I wanted to hear that; how crucial it was for me to believe it." These are sentiments I appreciate as a member of the deeply wounded Catholic Church. Many people, if not most, may have written it off, but Francis notes that "all throughout the church, and the church's history, you can see times where there were people who were really living testaments to their faith" at the same time that some church leaders took advantage of the power that they had. Indeed, a leading example of this faithful witness was also named Francis: the poor friar of Assisi, admired worldwide for his radical love of God and neighbor. And as Dorothy Day, herself under official consideration for sainthood, put it to a fellow Catholic peace activist: "I never expected much of bishops ... It is the saints that keep appearing all through history who keep things going." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The title "A Fortunate Man" has a double edge, as the movie, whose characters rarely fail to explain their motives and circumstances, never tires of reminding you. The screenwriting, adapted from the Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan's turn of the 20th century novel "Lucky Per," hoists subtext so high that it surpasses text. Walk through the room once an hour, and you'll be good. (The film is now streaming on Netflix.) Directed at an efficient clip by Bille August (whose plodding "Pelle the Conqueror" won an Oscar for foreign language film), the movie asks whether it is possible to rise above humble origins or whether birth and character are destiny. Peter Andreas (Esben Smed) spurns his father, a rigid vicar, and leaves his home on the peninsula of Jutland to study engineering in Copenhagen. Per, as he is increasingly called, believes that wind and water can be harnessed for energy and that whoever controls the energy supply will have money and power. But to bring his project to fruition, he needs wealth and connections. So he courts Jakobe (Katrine Greis Rosenthal), the elder daughter of a well connected family, in a romance initially rooted more in Per's ambition than his ardor. But their backgrounds clash: She has a high social standing and is Jewish. He is poor and, despite his desire to reject his father, inwardly conflicted about his strict Christian upbringing. He is also too headstrong to bootlick. The sprawling narrative sometimes gets the best of August. (Is the waitress Per rejects forgotten by him, or just by the movie?) And his habit of over explaining each new development appears to have removed nuance from a much more textured story. "A Fortunate Man" is a great advertisement for the book. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Joshua Osborn outside his home in Cottage Grove, Wis., with his father, Clark Osborn. Joshua suffered from swelling in the brain, but tests, a spinal tap and a biopsy were inconclusive. Joshua Osborn, 14, lay in a coma at American Family Children's Hospital in Madison, Wis. For weeks his brain had been swelling with fluid, and a battery of tests had failed to reveal the cause. The doctors told his parents, Clark and Julie, that they wanted to run one more test with an experimental new technology. Scientists would search Joshua's cerebrospinal fluid for pieces of DNA. Some of them might belong to the pathogen causing his encephalitis. The Osborns agreed, although they were skeptical that the test would succeed where so many others had failed. But in the first procedure of its kind, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, managed to pinpoint the cause of Joshua's problem within 48 hours. He had been infected with an obscure species of bacteria. Once identified, it was eradicated within days. The case, reported on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, signals an important advance in the science of diagnosis. For years, scientists have been sequencing DNA to identify pathogens. But until now, the process has been too cumbersome to yield useful information about an individual patient in a life threatening emergency. "This is an absolutely great story it's a tremendous tour de force," said Tom Slezak, the leader of the pathogen informatics team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who was not involved in the study. Mr. Slezak and other experts noted that it would take years of further research before such a test might become approved for regular use. But it could be immensely useful: Not only might it provide speedy diagnoses to critically ill patients, they said, it could lead to more effective treatments for maladies that can be hard to identify, such as Lyme disease. Diagnosis is a crucial step in medicine, but it can also be the most difficult. Doctors usually must guess the most likely causes of a medical problem and then order individual tests to see which is the right diagnosis. The guessing game can waste precious time. The causes of some conditions, like encephalitis, can be so hard to diagnose that doctors often end up with no answer at all. "About 60 percent of the time, we never make a diagnosis" in encephalitis, said Dr. Michael R. Wilson, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author of the new paper. "It's frustrating whenever someone is doing poorly, but it's especially frustrating when we can't even tell the parents what the hell is going on." For the last decade, researchers at the university have been working on methods for identifying pathogens based on their DNA. In 2003 Dr. Joseph DeRisi, a biochemist at the university, gained wide attention for using a gene chip called a microarray to identify the coronavirus causing SARS. The researchers' latest method is called unbiased next generation sequencing. To identify a pathogen, the researchers extract every scrap of DNA in a sample from a patient, which might be blood, cerebrospinal fluid or stool. Then they sift the genetic fragments for those belonging to pathogens. The technique already has proved valuable for investigating mysterious disease outbreaks, and a number of scientists have begun to hope it can be adapted to the diagnosis of individual patients' infections. Rather than test for a suspected pathogen, a doctor could simply run a DNA test that could identify the culprit no matter what it is virus, bacterium, fungus or parasite. "It could be one test to rule them all," Dr. DeRisi said in an interview. But such a test would be useful only if it were fast, and sorting through millions of DNA fragments has been an intensive technological challenge. Playing this match game can take weeks. "The problem is that your critically ill patient will be dead by the time you make a diagnosis," said Dr. Charles Chiu, a pathologist at the university who collaborates with Dr. DeRisi on diagnostic technologies. Dr. Chiu and his colleagues have developed software that rapidly compares DNA fragments with genetic sequences stored in online databases. They describe their new strategy in a second paper published on Wednesday in the journal Genome Research. Last July, Dr. DeRisi and Dr. Chiu got a chance to put their methods to the test when they received a call from a research collaborator, Dr. James Gern, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine. He asked them to help figure out what was wrong with Joshua Osborn. Joshua had long been a patient of Dr. Gern's, since doctors found that the boy had an immune system disorder at two months old. In April 2013, he developed severe headaches and a fever. He was admitted to the hospital and tested for a long list of diseases, from West Nile virus to tuberculosis. The tests all came back negative. For the next two months, Joshua remained at home, his health wavering. When his fever spiked again, he ended up back in the hospital. An M.R.I. revealed that his brain was dangerously inflamed, but a spinal tap turned up no pathogens. Even a biopsy of his brain tissue told the doctors nothing. It was then that Dr. Gern called on Dr. DeRisi, who agreed to use the experimental DNA technology to try to find what was causing the boy's ailments. Dr. Gern's team set about preparing samples of Joshua's cerebrospinal fluid and serum for testing. Dr. DeRisi's team received the samples on Aug. 21, and by that evening, the lab's sequencing machines were working on the first batch of DNA. Two days later, the machines had deciphered the sequences of three million fragments of DNA present in Joshua's samples. With Dr. Chiu's software, the team set aside the human DNA fragments and began grinding through DNA databases to identify the other genes. After only 96 minutes, the results appeared on a computer monitor. Joshua's cerebrospinal fluid contained DNA from a potentially lethal type of bacteria called Leptospira. As dangerous as Leptospira can be, it is readily treated with penicillin. "It was a very exciting phone call to make to Wisconsin," Dr. Wilson said. "Not only was there an answer, but there was something they could potentially do about it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
You know the holiday season has officially begun when the White House segues from pardoning the Thanksgiving turkeys to unveiling the Christmas decorations. If the bird is the responsibility of the commander in chief, the interior design is that of the first lady, and so, on Monday morning, Melania Trump's office released the photos of this year's makeover. They include numerous pics relating to the theme, "The Spirit of America" a "tribute to the traditions, customs, and history that make our Nation great," according to the announcement: close ups of the "Gold Star Family tree" (decorated by Gold Star families), the stars and stripes ribbons and ornaments trimming the fireplace of the East Room, and the mini White House Advent calendar in a window of the Green Room (among other sparkly additions). So far, so festive. They really are. What they do not include, however: a portrait, or even a quick snap, of the first lady beaming merrily (or not) amid the glittering greenery. Nothing, in other words, like last year's portrait of Mrs. Trump walking in seeming bedazzlement down the East Colonnade flanked by blood red topiary trees, the one that spurred a thousand memes and comparisons to "The Handmaid's Tale." Given the scrutiny paid to Mrs. Trump's every official appearance; given the reaction to her photo last year; given the fact that the last time a photo of her back made news, it was when she was wearing a jacket with a certain message on it, it could not have escaped her or her office that whatever choice was made would be forensically examined. Which makes it particularly striking that the only picture released of the first lady is one in which she is striding away. Especially because there were probably other options, at least for the White House (not for anyone else the general press call took place on Monday at 5:30 a.m., and Mrs. Trump was not present). The picture mimics a moment from a video the White House released Sunday evening of the first lady touring the decorations, opening Day 1 of the Advent calendar, marveling at the lights and the firs, sprinkling a few snowflakes on the branches of a tree. Though her face is really visible in only one shot, when she is walking into a room, and though even in that one her attention is focused elsewhere; though the rest of the time, her face is largely hidden by her hair as she bends down to examine details of the looks, a re creation of any of these actions for a still could have demonstrated deeper engagement with the event. Instead, there she is, walking away from the camera. She is wearing a cream colored coat, draped capelike, as is her wont, over her shoulders, and matching high heeled Louboutin shoes, recognizable from their red soles. Her face and arms are hidden, sleeves flapping empty at her sides. She may have to go through the motions, but she doesn't have to stay for everyone's judgment. She is exiting the scene. It's not exactly "I really don't care, do u?" but it's not what one might call welcoming. Of course, perhaps the photograph was not meant like that. Perhaps it was meant as a way to defuse the situation so that she wouldn't be caught off guard the way she was last year. Perhaps she didn't want to draw attention away from the decorations themselves. Perhaps she is feeling, "I just can't win." Perhaps the cream coat (an odd choice of garment to wear in a grand house where presumably there is heating, but maybe she wanted it for protection) is a gesture toward the white dove of peace, or a suggestion that it is time to wipe the slate clean. Perhaps it is a nod to the white dress she wore for her first official Christmas, in 2017, which spurred comparisons to an angel. Perhaps it is a symbol of the fact that the year and the decade are on their way out. These are all possibilities. And yet, given Mrs. Trump's history of ambivalence with her role; given that, as The New York Times reported, according to Kate Bennett's new unauthorized biography, "each thing she does has meaning to it, even the clothing she wears"; given that she knew these pictures were going around the world, and round the social media universe; and given that the choice of photo was under her office's control, it is hard not to think that, while this may be the season of giving, the message is that she's not giving anything away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In January, when Andy Hunter, the publisher of a small press, started an online bookstore that he pitched as the indie alternative to Amazon, many in the book business had their doubts. Earlier efforts to create a portal for independent booksellers had done little to chip away at Amazon's market share, and even retailers like Barnes Noble have struggled to compete. Mr. Hunter felt there was an unexploited opportunity. Seizing even a fraction of Amazon's sales would be a windfall for independent stores, which would receive a cut of the site's profits. Mr. Hunter told investors that within two years, his site, Bookshop, could reach 30 million in annual sales, a projection that struck some as wildly optimistic. Then, in March, the coronavirus pandemic forced bookstores across the United States to shut their doors. Hundreds of bookstore owners, many of whom couldn't enter their stores to fulfill online or phone orders, joined the new site. Now Bookshop is on track to exceed 40 million in sales this year, blowing past the sum that Mr. Hunter initially hoped to reach by 2022. The site sold some 4.5 million of books in May, and more than 7 million in the first two weeks of June. More than 750 bookstores have joined, and Bookshop has generated more than 3.6 million for stores. The company is preparing to expand its operations to Britain later this year, where it plans to partner with the book wholesaler Gardners. Some wonder whether Bookshop will remain a viable player in the online retail ecosystem as stores begin to reopen, and customers who turned to the site during the shutdown revert to in store and curbside shopping. Meanwhile, Amazon, which accounts for some 70 percent of online book sales, has strengthened its position as the world's largest online retailer. The company reported 75.5 billion in sales during its most recent fiscal quarter, a 26 percent increase from the year ago quarter. 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. Mr. Hunter is bullish about the potential for post pandemic growth. The American Booksellers Association has more than 1,880 member stores, and about 40 percent of them have started using Bookshop. There's also more ground to gain with customers: Just 21 percent of book buyers who shop at independent stores had heard of Bookshop, according to a survey of more than 4,000 people conducted by the Codex Group in late April. "If it's sticky and it lasts beyond this Covid crisis, it's going to really help bookstores thrive," Mr. Hunter said. Not everyone sees Bookshop's growth as a boon for independents. Last week, at a virtual town hall organized by the American Booksellers Association, some members questioned whether Bookshop was poaching business at a moment when stores need every sale. Mr. Hunter said that the site was created to capture book sales from Amazon, not independents. "If we ever felt we were damaging indie bookstore sales in any way, we would change course," he said, according to a report in Publishers Weekly. Some bookstore owners have bristled at the way that the site has been held up as their industry's savior. "There's a significant danger to people thinking that this is saving bookstores," said Brad Johnson, the owner of East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, Calif. "If people have any idea that they want to help bookstores, they should order directly from bookstores." Mr. Johnson, who has a page on Bookshop but mainly sells directly to customers through his store's website, says he's unlikely to stay on Bookshop. He worries that it will become "another large centralized competitor for us." Some bookstores have avoided the platform. Riffraff, a bookstore and bar in Providence, R.I., quickly redesigned its website to make online orders easier when it closed in March, rather than using Bookshop. "We didn't want to risk losing our customers to this Amazon alternative that is very convenient and easy to use," said Emma Ramadan, the store's co owner. Mr. Hunter had the idea for Bookshop nearly a decade ago, when he was working as the editor in chief of Electric Literature, a nonprofit digital publisher. He had watched with alarm as independent bookstores struggled to adapt to the rise of online retail. But he found little support for the proposal. "The people I spoke to didn't really think it had a chance, so I didn't pursue it," he said. Then, in early 2018, Mr. Hunter, who is now the publisher of the independent press Catapult and the website Lit Hub, met with representatives of the American Booksellers Association. The trade group asked Mr. Hunter for suggestions on how to improve IndieBound, its e commerce site for independent stores. Instead, he proposed building something from scratch a site that would offer seamless online shopping for book buyers who want to support local bookstores. Shoppers can select a particular store to buy from, or they can buy straight from Bookshop. Orders are fulfilled through Ingram, a large book distributor, and mailed directly to customers, so stores don't have to have the books in stock or process inventory. Bookstores get 30 percent of the list price less than they would typically make from a direct sale but don't have to pay for inventory or shipping. Bookshop doesn't profit from the sales that go through particular stores. Instead, it makes money through its direct sales and from affiliate sales, when media organizations, book clubs and social media sites feature links to Bookshop in book reviews or other coverage. The site now has more than 8,000 affiliates, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, BuzzFeed and New York magazine. IndieBound, which runs a similar affiliate sales program, is merging its operation with Bookshop's. (For books that are sold directly by Bookshop, or through media affiliates, 10 percent of the list price goes into a profit pool that gets distributed to independent bookstores; so far, the site has funneled about a million dollars into the pool.) The launch nearly coincided with the pandemic, which has devastated brick and mortar bookstores. In April, bookstore sales plummeted to 219 million, a decline of more than 65 percent from April 2019, according to figures released Tuesday by the Commerce Department. In the first four months of this year, bookstore sales fell by 23 percent compared to the same period in 2019. Some stores are barely scraping by. Lisa Neuheisel, the owner of the Sequel Bookshop in Kearney, Neb., closed her store to customers on March 22 and didn't have a way for them to shop online. She created a page for her store on Bookshop after she saw another bookseller's Facebook post linking to the site. Bookshop accounted for roughly half her sales in April and May, while the rest were curbside pickup, she said. "The sales have been a lifeline for us," she said. Danielle Mullen signed on with Bookshop when the pandemic forced her to close her store, Semicolon. "It meant we could stay in business, and that's all we're trying to do," she said. Danielle Mullen, the owner of Semicolon, a year old bookstore in Chicago, also joined Bookshop in mid March. During April and May, Bookshop accounted for around 70 percent of the store's roughly 1,800 orders. "It meant we could stay in business, and that's all we're trying to do," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
I can't count how many times I've heard that warning in the 14 months since I decided to move to Moscow from Berlin. It's as if I were entering a war zone. In fairness, those 14 months have seen a string of calamitous events that have left much of Russia transformed: the annexation of Crimea; war in eastern Ukraine; the deterioration of relations with the West; sanctions; President Vladimir V. Putin's clampdown on political opposition, media and the arts; and the collapse of the ruble and slowdown of the Russian economy. Not surprisingly, tourism is part of that stagnation. Since the beginning of 2014, tourism to Russia has declined 35 percent, according to the Association of Tour Operators of Russia. Tourism from the West has been cut in half. Yet for visitors, life generally goes on as usual in the affluent, cosmopolitan centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg where the vast majority of foreign tourists spend most or all of their time. Except for areas near the Ukraine border or in the long embattled North Caucasus, there are no major Western advisories against travel to Russia. The State Department is the most cautious, warning Americans against attending demonstrations and urging "good security practices" in public places. Still, contrary to the images often evoked by the news media, there's little evidence to suggest that Russia's top destinations are any less safe now for visitors than they were a few years ago. That's not to say there has not been a change in mood. As a Western tourist anywhere, it's often a good idea to avoid political discussions in places with very drunk people, but even more so in Russia. Helped along by television propaganda, many people in Russia blame the West for their current economic problems and the war in Ukraine. The proportion of Russians who say they have a negative view of the United States has more than doubled over the past year, according to a recent poll by the independent Levada Center. Yet there's a sizable gap between what is said in opinion polls, and what's represented in everyday interactions. Or as my friend Maria Baronova, a prominent opposition activist, once put it: "We hate you Americans so much that we treat you like V.I.P.s." Long gone may be the days when speaking loudly in American English was the best way to make it past "face control" at the entrances of Moscow's exclusive nightclubs, but after nearly a year here, I have yet to see or hear of Western tourists being harassed because of their nationality. I've witnessed more anti American sentiment in Berlin, albeit of the smug European leftist variety, than I have in Moscow. "I was expecting way more of a difference," said Kate Wood, a 16 year old from Chapel Hill, N.C., who was visiting Moscow for the second time as part of an annual church trip to volunteer at an orphanage in the Kirov region. I came upon her and several of her fellow congregants eating ice cream and speaking loudly in English at a cafe on the ground floor of GUM department store on Red Square. "I guess I was thinking that we would need to keep a lower profile," added Ms. Wood, who was last in Moscow before Western sanctions or the war in eastern Ukraine, "but no one's reacted badly to us at all, and we're even kind of loud." Probably the biggest selling point for visiting Russia now, though, is the drastic devaluation of the ruble, which lost more than half its worth at the end of last year. Even taking into account inflation (recorded at 16.7 percent in February) and the ruble's considerable rebound over the past few months, the country is more affordable than at any time in recent memory. At the beginning of 2014, a dollar bought 32.86 rubles. In mid April this year, it bought 49.80. For tourists, this means paying 15 to 50 percent less for just about everything. A year ago, a cappuccino in Moscow cost the equivalent of 8 or 9. Now it's rarely more than 5. Though airlines, even Russia's Aeroflot, keep their tickets indexed at dollar rates, most hotels have not substantially raised their ruble prices. This means that the starting room rate in June at the Sheraton Palace, which is 11,900 rubles, has decreased from 362 to 226. A room at a budget hotel goes for around 50 these days, and a double at the Ritz Carlton, at 28,910 rubles, was once just short of 900 and now comes in just over 550. In fact, luxury hotels in Moscow actually reported an 8 percent uptick in occupancy in the first two months of 2015, apparently because of travelers upgrading from midrange because of the currency rate, according to a recent report cited by The Moscow Times. Though some tourist attractions have increased the entrance fee in rubles, they are still more affordable for visitors with foreign currency. The Kremlin's entrance fee has increased since the beginning of 2014 from 350 to 500 rubles, but in dollars, it has dropped from 10.65 to 9.54. Entrance for non Russians to the Tretyakov State Gallery, with its stunning collection of medieval Russian religious art, is now 450 instead of 360 rubles, but its dollar price has dropped 10 percent. Most cathedrals and churches seem not to have increased their entrance fees, nor has the phenomenal Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, meaning all are around 40 percent cheaper for visitors. The State Hermitage Museum there seems to be the only major attraction that is actually more expensive for foreigners, though not by much. It doubled its price in rubles, but the dollar price increased by about a buck. Ruble ticket prices to the Bolshoi Theater have not changed. A decent seat for an opera or ballet on the recently refurbished historic stage still sells in the 3,000 to 9,000 ruble range, which used to start around 90 but now starts at 57. Of course, that's only if you manage to buy from the theater itself. The scalper racket is as strong as ever, but even scalpers' more capricious price schemes, anywhere from 50 to upward of 500, are now further within range of budget travelers. Restaurants and bars are now significantly more affordable for foreigners, and the economic crisis means they are less crowded. But even if a reservation is no longer indispensable, eating out requires a bit more strategizing. The culinary scenes in Moscow and St. Petersburg expanded greatly in the past decade, with international cuisine dominating the field: French, Japanese, Italian, Thai or, to mixed effect, some fusion of two or more. But because of Mr. Putin's retaliatory ban on Western food imports, many Muscovites' most beloved Continental style restaurants either cannot find or can't afford the ingredients they once relied on, and many have seen a drop off in quality. The fare at sleek Ragout, urbane Ugolek and Jean Jacques, the favorite French bistro of the Russian opposition, is not what it used to be, and though Strelka Bar still has some of the best cocktails in town, its menu has also taken a hit. It's a safer bet these days to go for food whose source is closer to home. LavkaLavka in Moscow and Cococo, its even better sister restaurant in St. Petersburg, are the best of the innovative restaurants offering updated, farm to table takes on traditional Russian cuisine. Dishes like Cococo's "tourist's breakfast," a cylinder of pearl barley, lightly salted beef tartare, smoked herbs and quail egg served theatrically in a blackened half tin can, or LavkaLavka's memorable borscht with organic beets, brisket and cured pork fat (known in Russia as salo) plus both restaurants' homemade vodka infusions will convert the staunchest nonbelievers. And the 40 percent markdown makes dinner feel like a steal. "This is a very good moment to try to change the image of Russia and to attract tourists from different countries, because the ruble is so cheap," said Maya Lomidze, the executive director of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia. Indeed, some companies have managed to offset losses by using the ruble crash as a marketing angle. "We make connections on the exchange rate to attract tourists and agents from different countries, and I think it works quite well," said Olya Skoveleva, a travel manager at Visit Russia, a private tour company that actually reports a 15 percent increase in Western tourists in the past year. The Westerners' most popular destinations by far are Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the company also sends them to Sochi and the Black Sea or to smaller towns along the so called Golden Ring of small cities northeast of Moscow, albeit in the company of an official guide. Ms. Skoveleva said that many visitors are initially quite concerned for their safety but are ultimately reassured. "We explain to them that nothing will disturb them regarding the political issues," she said. "Considering the international situation and how it appears in the media, it is even sometimes surprising to me, but it's the reality." "Putin," she added, "is not the whole country." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times When the actor Ansel Elgort strolled into Times Square on Wednesday for an appearance on "Good Morning America," the first face he encountered was his own. "I've never seen myself so big," he said, staring up at a bright pink billboard for his new movie, "Baby Driver," which was opening that day to rapturous reviews. "Good morning, America!" Mr. Elgort's latest star turn is a heist picture about a guy operating a getaway car for bank robbers, but he had sat passively in the back seat of an Escalade on the ride to Midtown from his home in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. It had been a slow trip, more than a half hour just to get across the Williamsburg Bridge and up to the ABC studios, where a small group of his devoted fans were waiting outside the stage door for him to arrive and administer hugs and selfies. Normally, Mr. Elgort, 23, would just have taken the C train. Or perhaps used Citi Bike. "I have an account," he said. As with "Titanic" and "Romeo and Juliet" before it, the maudlin plot had an obvious appeal to anxious youngsters seeking to turn their ordinary struggles with first love into definitive proof of a universe conspiring against them. The fact that Mr. Elgort in real life is still with his high school sweetheart Violetta Komyshan, a ballet dancer he met while still a student at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music Art and Performing Arts has not dampened the ardor of his female followers, virtual and physical. Mr. Elgort is their hipster ideal: a guy who looks like a model, gets paid like a movie star (more on that in a moment) and actually wants commitment in real life. Basically, said Tatiana Irizarry, standing outside "G.M.A.," he is "the best person ever." Ms. Irizarry's opinion is unlikely to change after she sees "Baby Driver." The film is a testosterone drenched star vehicle promising to broaden Mr. Elgort's appeal it was on track to earn around 20 million in its opening weekend without alienating his fan base. Fittingly, the title character, named Baby, is quickly revealed to be not a hardened delinquent, but a conscientious and oh so romantic orphan struggling to pay off a childhood debt and help his aged, deaf African American foster parent build a nest egg. Baby's got nowhere to run, to quote the Martha and the Vandellas classic that appears on the much buzzed about retro soundtrack. But he still does the Harlem Shuffle while delivering Starbucks coffee to the slick crime world overlord for whom he works, played with venom by Kevin Spacey. Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Elgort had a few more advantages than his character. During his senior year of high school, he was cast in a drama called "Regrets" at the Manhattan Theater Club and got his first onscreen role in the remake of "Carrie," playing the popular jock who falls for the bullied title character. Though the film was savaged by critics and failed at the box office, Mr. Elgort's performance as a good boy in bad circumstances stood out. In real life, he has proved versatile and likable in the manner of 1950s heartthrobs; he could very easily have a variety show. He sings, dances and does extemporaneous impersonations of everyone from the Russian ballet mistress from his school to the British director on "Baby Driver," Edgar Wright. He has a deal with Island Records and regularly writes techno inflected songs with sweet, romantic lyrics. "I can't say enough about this young talent," Jamie Foxx, one of his co stars in "Baby Driver," wrote in an email. "Ansel's got that thing. He can act, he can sing, he writes his own music and he can even hoop!" Not for nothing was his recent single called "You Can Count on Me." Mr. Elgort is a little less precocious than he is innocent, with an openness that is both refreshing and an occasional source of trouble. As a kid, Mr. Elgort who is 6 foot 4 used to watch Great Danes frolic with other dogs at the park and he knew he wanted to be like that, gently having fun with everyone. Enthusiasm is his most marked characteristic, and that perhaps makes it hard to imagine people who will envy, rather than root for, his success. There was the time he tried to explain to Seventeen Magazine that he'd had a nice platonic relationship with his co star Ms. Woodley, but mangled it by saying, "I've never once wanted her sexually." He delivered a good line to Elle about the virtues of monogamy, saying: "If you like someone and the sex is really good and you enjoy spending time together, why wouldn't you make that person your girlfriend? Why go around dating random girls and having terrible sex when you can be with someone you really like?" But he didn't really help himself when, talking about his time at LaGuardia (where he met that girlfriend), he said: "If you're like me and you love dancers, you just have to walk up to the eighth floor and you can get one." To which his interviewer, Mickey Rapkin, replied, "You make it sound like adopting a puppy." Upstairs at "Good Morning America," he changed into a Tim Coppens jacket and True Religion jeans, talking about fashion and sounding less like an industry royal's jaded progeny than a starry eyed kid who has won the lottery and wants to bro out about it. "The amount of stuff you get when you're an actor and you're in a clothing campaign!" he said, telling of a trip a little while back to Prada, for which he first started doing ad campaigns in 2015. "In the SoHo store, I literally went through and picked anything I wanted off the rack. That was an epic moment! Me and my stylist, John Tan, who's here, were both, like, cracking up. We were like, are you kidding me? We made it!" Characteristic of an actor in Hollywood's current ecosystem, Mr. Elgort said that the vast majority of the money he had made came not from the eight movies he had acted in, but from various ancillary promotional activities. Those include branded Instagram posts, like the one he did in May for the e luxury site Farfetch, wearing a tiger embroidered Off White jacket alongside a caption that read: "Made easy may seem far fetched but it isn't. Thank you farfetch for hooking me up w dope threads. In preparation for all this babydriver press. I found everything I could need." If only he hadn't answered a question about his formidable co stars by saying, "Now that I've worked with Oscar winners, that's how I want to keep it." The minute Mr. Elgort watched it afterward, he looked worried. How stupid had that sounded, he asked? Would people think he was "ridiculous?" Next was an appearance at "Live With Kelly and Ryan." The crowd outside numbered around 30 and was even younger than at "G.M.A." In a changing area, Mr. Elgort put on a racecar driver inspired Tommy Hilfiger outfit Mr. Tan had picked out. The actor quickly realized he might be making a fashion mistake "What am I wearing?" he said but with three minutes to airtime, little could be done about it. At 11, Mr. Elgort climbed into his Escalade and headed downtown, bound for MTV. Having been up since 5:30 a.m. with nothing to eat but a doughnut peach, he was hungry. Told by a publicist that he was not due there until noon and could indeed get a bite, Mr. Elgort had but one response: "Do we get to use the Sony credit card?" The Escalade ambled west and Mr. Elgort pointed out the window to the School of American Ballet's Lincoln Center headquarters. A moment later, he passed another landmark from his life. The biggest news of the day came a minute later through his phone. "Yo! Phil Jackson is gone from the Knicks!" he screamed out. "That is nuts." Despite the team's penchant for losing, Mr. Elgort hasn't give up on them. "It's a little brutal, but I don't care," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Katrina Lenk in her dressing room at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway, where "The Band's Visit" is running through Sunday. When "The Band's Visit," the Tony winning musical by David Yazbek and Itamar Moses, closes on Sunday after much lauded runs on and Off Broadway, it will have had only one Dina: Katrina Lenk, who took on the role of the seemingly stern yet secretly romantic small town restaurant owner and indelibly made it her own. "Katrina's been a rock," the director David Cromer said in a telephone interview. "She solved the problem of who's going to play this part and she brought almost everything she did with her." The Tonys noticed, and she won the award for best actress in a musical last year. Aside from scheduled vacations and some sick days, Ms. Lenk will have been with "The Band's Visit" from its first performance at the Atlantic Theater, on Nov. 11, 2016, to its last on Broadway. Relaxing in her dressing room recently at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, she chatted about the highs and lows of the show's run, and about her plans for life after this musical. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Your performance of "Omar Sharif" at the Tonys introduced "The Band's Visit" to a national audience. What was that like? Did you run into problems during the show itself? Sometimes, yes. I could psych myself out. If it's not busy, your brain will play little games with you: "Oh, do you know what's coming next?" So it's riskier toward the end of a run, when there's a danger of autopilot? As soon as you step out for a second, which happens more if you're more comfortable with what's happening, it's scary. If you dare be aware of where you are and what you're doing the fact that you're standing on a stage in front of people and you're doing a show then your brain is like, "Oh no!" There's been a couple of snafus, like prop malfunctions. In the moment you are dying and you hate it, but after that it's exciting. And to watch people deal with them is so fun and exciting and inspiring. You have played opposite three actors in the leading male role: Tony Shalhoub, Dariush Kashani and now Sasson Gabay who actually created the character, Tewfiq, in the 2007 film on which the show is based. What were they like? They're all wonderful, generous actors thank God. With Tony we had all those weeks of rehearsal and that whole process of bonding over time. Whereas with Dariush and Sasson we basically had to instantaneously connect in front of a thousand people, which was scary. I was completely star struck with Sasson; I'd already been star struck with Tony but kind of gotten used to it. Because I was so familiar with Sasson's work in the movie, it was this very meta, weird, crazy thing. Which still kind of happens laughs . Do you want to know when there's somebody famous in the audience? No, no, no. Hillary and Bill Clinton came, but they were very stealthy about it. They arrived during the blackout. They were all so down to earth, very neighborly, Chelsea showing me pictures of her kids on her phone. Meryl Streep came. Carol Burnett. Billy Crystal. You try really hard to listen and pay attention, but you're just in awe of the person, kind of watching their mouth move. They seem pleased and you're like, "Yay!" And you have to combat the impulse to start gushing. What's on your mind as you enter the show's last stretch? We still have to do the show, and that's the most important thing to maintain the show. But then offstage we have little gatherings, little things to commemorate our time here. It's a weird combination of keeping the show's integrity and realizing that the group will soon dissolve. You learn that shows end very early, when you're crying in high school after your one weekend of shows and you're like, "I'll never have this again!" I'm relishing being onstage with these incredible players, standing in the middle of this gorgeous music. I'd gotten so used to it: "Oh yes, of course they're amazing," with my cigarette. Now I'm really appreciating that again. What are your plans for your first week of freedom? It really isn't until after Tax Day I'm singing at a concert at Carnegie Hall on April 15. It's a night exploring the culture and music of Eastern European Jewish culture and how that sort of integrated and informed American culture. There's a bunch of different performers, and I'm singing "Pirate Jenny" by Kurt Weill, some Irving Berlin. Rodgers Hammerstein are doing modernized versions of their songs for the "R H Goes Pop!" project , and I'm doing "Something Good" from "The Sound of Music." We laid the track down, but I was super sick at the time, so I'm doing the vocals next week. James Sampliner and I worked on the arrangements, and I wrote the string arrangement. And after that I'm going to organize my closet. My house is sort of a disaster. I'm hoping to have a moment to assess. I haven't really had a chance to think about what's happening or what's happened. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Halima Aden, a model, is taking a step back from the fashion industry to focus on herself and her faith. "If my hijab can't be this visible I'm not showing up," Ms. Aden, 23, wrote on Instagram. Ms. Aden, who was the first model to wear a hijab for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition and walk the runway for labels like Yeezy, shared on her Instagram story this week that she felt like she had compromised her religious values and beliefs in order to fit in to the fashion industry. She alluded to being too scared to speak up when she was influenced to change the way she dressed, including how she wore her head scarf. "Looking back now I did what I said I would never do. Which is compromise who I am in order to fit in," Ms. Aden wrote on the social media platform. "Just remember they call it a 'hijab journey' for a reason and it is never too late to reinstate your boundaries." The Somali American model was born in a Kenyan refugee camp and first rose to fame in 2016 after competing in her hijab in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant. Since then, she's been on the covers of American Vogue, Vogue Arabia, Elle and Allure. There was, she said, struggle and discomfort that went into making many of those images a possibility. She also highlighted moments in which brands had instead covered her hair with pairs of jeans or other ornamental objects rather than her hijab and used heavy makeup on her when she would have preferred a more restrained look that aligned with her modest principles. She cited confusion, a sense of rebellion and a lack of fellow Muslim representation in the industry as leading factors in her internal battle. "The pressure was getting unbearable, and I'm sad to say I went through a period of resenting the hijab," Ms. Aden wrote on Instagram. She went on to write that the pandemic and a break from the industry had led her to realize where she felt she went wrong in her own hijab journey. Muslim women who choose to don a head scarf often have deeply personal and dynamic relationships with their hijabs, and Ms. Aden was met with a wave of support from many who had similar experiences on Instagram and Twitter. "Halima's decision to step away from the modeling scene has just reinforced my beliefs," Aminah Bakhtair, 19, who wrote on social media about her admiration for Ms. Aden, wrote in a direct message. "I feel proud of her for taking a stance that many would hesitate to take, and to take back what the Hijab truly means and stand up for the religion of Islam." The act of simply wearing a hijab has often been met with discrimination on both a social and bureaucratic level, particularly in Europe. France has banned the hijab in public schools and the public work force. German chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2016 that full face veils, sometimes worn by Muslim women as part of their hijab, should be banned. In the United States, Muslim women have long reported instances of feeling as though they had been discriminated against for wearing their hijabs, and President Donald J. Trump's ban on travel from several Muslim majority countries is still in effect. Asmaa Ali, 23, an observant hijab wearer for much of her life, has experienced Islamophobia both in person and online, but said she felt inspired by Ms. Aden's message and tweeted that she found the model's story "beautiful." "The decision to take her hijab more seriously really inspired me to hold on to my faith and be unapologetic about my identity as a Black, Muslim woman," Ms. Ali said. "I think the essence of what Halima was talking about is not necessarily that there's a right way to wear a hijab or a wrong way to wear a hijab. I think the message is to stay true to yourself." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Machines making music. Repetitive, metronomic, locked in beats. Voices processed to sound as inexpressive as robots. A warning, and an embrace, of technology as both the shaper and subject of songs, of the ever growing human codependence with the inhuman. In 21st century art, especially music, these ideas and sounds are inescapable. Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, the German musicians at the core of Kraftwerk, were already committed to those concepts way back in the analog 1970s, when synthesizers were primitive and the idea of a pop group as a "man machine" was revolutionary. (The original German, "Die Mensch Maschine," isn't gendered; it means "Human Machine.") In an era of plush FM radio pop, disco sensuality and punk rawness, Kraftwerk's music was mechanical and coolly austere instead. Meanwhile, their songs sensed the coming digital era: impassive and heartless, but also seductive in its precision and possibility. Indirectly and directly, Kraftwerk's music would quickly provide templates for popular music to come. Its songs showed the way toward synth pop, electropop, techno and countless varieties of electronic dance music. And Kraftwerk's crisp, flat electronic drum sounds and the synthesizer line of "Trans Europe Express" were picked up by Afrika Bambaataa for his 1982 "Planet Rock," a cornerstone single in hip hop's discography. Hutter, Kraftwerk's machine tuned vocalist and main lyricist, credited Schneider, who died last month, as the group's "sound fetishist." While Hutter and other band members wrote some of Kraftwerk's poppiest songs, Schneider was the one who coaxed the sound of Kraftwerk out of clunky 1970s technology and, through the years, deployed an ever updated array of hardware and software. Schneider honed and then expanded Kraftwerk's synthetic vocabulary of non naturalistic blips, clicks and buzzes, Vocoder harmonies and tones sustained beyond human breath, echoes and reverberations that did not come out of physical spaces. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Erling Kagge, a 54 year old Norwegian explorer, author and publisher, was sitting one morning last month in the private gardens at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, a green oasis of relative quiet in the West Village of Manhattan. "You never find a place that is total silence," Mr. Kagge said. "I've been looking, and I have not found it." The closest he came was trekking to the South Pole, which he reached in early 1993, becoming the first person to ski there unassisted. He was alone in frozen isolation for 50 nights and days. Given a radio to make emergency calls, he'd tossed the batteries on Day 1. Mr. Kagge reflects on the meditative benefits of quiet in his new book, "Silence in the Age of Noise" (out Nov. 21 from Pantheon), a brief but far roving appreciation of what he calls "the new luxury." Indeed, from silent meditation retreats to noise canceling earphones, in recent years silence has been heralded as an increasingly precious commodity, the most sought after luxury after a good night's sleep. Artists, musicians and thrill seeking journalists are checking into anechoic chambers, or soundproof rooms, where it's so quiet that you go batty from hearing yourself breathe. The website Daily Stoic recommends following the advice of the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus, who wrote "Be silent for the most part." Much of the modern day "noise" that people wish to escape comes not from loud sounds or grating talk (though there are plenty of both), but from endless distractions. Mr. Kagge was inspired to write the book because, he said, he realized that his three daughters, who range in age from 15 to 21, have grown up with iPhones essentially attached to their bodies. "My daughters didn't know what silence was. There's always something happening, always temptations," Mr. Kagge said. He frets about the long term effects of such overstimulation. "Silence is not a trend," he said. "Silence is something people have needed for thousands of years." He had traveled from his home in Oslo to New York to take on a challenge that, in its own way, was no less difficult than walking to the South Pole: finding silence in the city. He'd gotten off to a noisy start the day before when he'd checked into his hotel and found an air circulating unit churning outside his window. After waking in another room, he'd walked down Eighth Avenue, only to be assaulted by the "visual noise" of Manhattan in full morning rush. Now, even in an enclosed church garden, he couldn't escape the incessant grinding sound of workmen stripping paint from a building's fire escape one block south. Mr. Kagge's own smartphone was tucked into his jeans pocket, where it would remain throughout the day, though he admits to general excessive checking of it, and consultation of Google. In his book, he quotes the 17th century writer Blaise Pascal, who said, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." "I'm not recommending people move into a monastery," he said. "We're social beings. But in the silence, you meet yourself." An avid art collector, Mr. Kagge next thought to seek contemplative silence inside a museum. He decided against the Museum of Modern Art ("MoMA is too successful") and instead settled on the less visited Frick Collection, at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street. Heading uptown, he detoured to walk north along the High Line elevated park, hoping for a quiet aerie. But every tourist seemed to be up there with him, and down below, on both sides, new office and apartment towers were going up, with machines and construction crews making an awful racket. "That's a pretty annoying sound," Mr. Kagge said. At the High Line's West 30th Street and 10th Avenue exit, the decibel level reached peak cacophony. It was the heart of the Hudson Yards development project, right near a traffic clogged entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Car horns, jackhammers, rivet guns, workmen yelling, New Yorkers speed walking to get somewhere maybe the noisiest spot in the Western world. He quickened his pace, and farther uptown, when he entered Central Park, he stopped, smiled and said, "For the first time today, you can hear the wind." "It made such a deep impression on me," Mr. Kagge said. Before going to the Frick, he wanted to stop by the Explorers Club, which is housed in a six story mansion on East 70th Street. He was invited by its members to join after his headline grabbing adventures he has also skied to the North Pole and climbed Mount Everest, the so called Third Pole but rarely has a chance to visit. The club was empty of members at midday, and Mr. Kagge made his way upstairs, to a dark wood paneled old room. There were no other people inside. There were no sounds of cars whirring by outside. There were no sounds at all. The Frick, with its paintings by Rembrandt and other old masters, offered Mr. Kagge and the public a different kind of silence: the hushed reverence of museumgoers. After this there was a break: lunch at a crowded French bistro, and a trip to Dover Street Market, to get his daughters Supreme gear. No expectations there. Going out to the end of the pier, Mr. Kagge said, "If you walk 20 or 30 minutes in the city, you'll find a quiet place." A young man and woman were also on the pier talking in affectionate whispers. Mr. Kagge was silent for a long time, watching the sun set over the water. "It's easy to think silence is about turning your back on the world," he said. "For me, it's the opposite. It's opening up to the world, respecting more and loving life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"Can you tell us what impact the events had on you?" Senator Dianne Feinstein asked Christine Blasey Ford during Thursday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. It was the first of several questions aimed at getting Dr. Blasey to outline the toll on her life of a sexual assault that she testified involved Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. Many people who work in the area of trauma found her answers, which included "anxiety, phobia and PTSD like symptoms," familiar and credible. But they said it's important to remember something Dr. Blasey, a research psychologist, drew attention to during her testimony. "I think the sequelae of sexual assault varies per person," Dr. Blasey told the committee, using a scientific term for aftereffects. Sometimes those effects are difficult to discern or articulate, one of many reasons that women often fail to report sexual assaults to authorities or even discuss the incident with loved ones, researchers say. "There is lots of research showing the survivors cope in many different ways, but there does seem to be a societal image of how they need to act and if not they are not believed," Antonia Abbey, the editor of the journal, Psychology of Violence, said in an email. "Research indicates that people are less likely to believe a victim's account and believe an assault was less severe when the assault and victim's response doesn't follow people's scripts." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. During Thursday's hearing, Dr. Blasey was asked by Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor hired by the committee to question her and Judge Kavanaugh, how she could be certain that the PTSD and anxiety she experienced was caused by the assault she described. Though she appeared certain that the answer was yes, for many victims, the effects are more murky, researchers said. Reinforcing the idea that one must be able to clearly outline the concrete effects of trauma in the form of poor grades, broken relationships or days spent weeping in order to be believed, they said, can do more harm than good. "This is one of the reasons survivors do not report their assaults to police immediately after," said Dr. Swartout. This phenomenon may also push a woman to minimize the incident for herself. She may feel like her own experience was not worthy of documentation or discussion because she did not observe the same effects other victims talk about. "I think we intuitively understand that if a gun was forced into your mouth or put to your head, you would be traumatized," said Neil Malamuth, a social scientist at UCLA who studies sexual violence. But in the realm of sexual assault, many people's view of the crime continues to be shaped more by the response of the victim than by the actions of the perpetrator, he said. "If you are too upset, you are crazy," said Mary Koss, a professor at the University of Arizona who has published numerous studies on sexual assault, in an email. "If you are not upset enough, people don't believe you were raped. So you have to be just the right degree of upset, whatever that is." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
It was also the fourth time a G.M. pickup won the North American Truck/Utility of the Year Award. The 2014 models were the subject of a recall last week. Silverado was also a winner in 2007. The finalists were the Cadillac CTS, Chevrolet Corvette Stingray and Mazda3 for the 2014 North American Car of the Year. The Acura MDX, Silverado and Jeep Cherokee the finalists for the 2014 North American Truck/Utility of the Year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
For years, soccer in Paris has been the hub of Qatar's global ambitions. Through its ownership of the city's biggest team, Paris St. Germain, Qatar has dreamed big, spent big and won big. In doing so, the country has also used the sport's popularity to enhance its profile on the world stage. It may soon have some competition. On Monday, a second Gulf dynasty entered the city's soccer scene. Paris F.C., a team that plays in France's second tier, announced that the Kingdom of Bahrain had bought a minority stake in the club. The purchase price and the investors' ambitions appear, for now, to be more modest than Qatar's cash soaked efforts, which have turned P.S.G. into a perennial French champion and one of Europe's most formidable teams. But Paris F.C.'s immediate goal is clear: to reach France's top division, Ligue 1, in the next three years and to lift its women's side "as high as possible" in the top tier. Team officials also left little doubt about Bahrain's goal: As at P.S.G., the owners hope the soccer team will act as a billboard for the Gulf state, and attract tourists to a nation that is still reeling from the reputational damage it sustained when the country's monarchy put down pro democracy uprisings during the height of the Arab Spring. "I think they saw a fantastic opportunity for investment, and Paris F.C. is a good tool of communication to promote the country," Fabrice Herrault, the director general of the team, said in an interview. As part of the agreement in which Bahrain's sovereign wealth fund took a 20 percent stake in the club, Paris F.C. will, starting next season, have the words "Explore Bahrain" emblazoned on its uniforms. The National Communication Centre in Bahrain did not respond to requests for comment, sent through its embassy in the United Kingdom, about the kingdom's investment in Paris F.C. or about claims by multiple groups and even its citizens that it has engaged in human rights abuses in crushing antigovernment protests. By investing in soccer, Bahrain is following its Gulf neighbors down a well trodden path. Qatar has owned P.S.G. since 2011, and the billionaire brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates has spent lavishly to assemble one of the best teams in the world at Manchester City in England. A Saudi Arabian prince owns another Premier League club, Sheffield United, and that kingdom's sovereign wealth fund has bid to buy a third, Newcastle United. Gulf owners also control teams in Spain and Belgium. "They join us for many objectives mainly to help them to spread the image of Bahrain in France and Europe," Herrault said. That image has yet to recover since the 2011 uprisings by members of the country's Shiite Muslim majority against the Sunni Muslim ruling family. To put it down, the authorities were accused of torturing hundreds of people taken into custody during the crackdown, among them protest leaders but also professionals, like doctors and athletes, who had sympathized with the demonstrators. The country's action even became an issue for FIFA, world soccer's governing body, when a powerful official from Bahrain ran for the organization's presidency in 2016. In 2019, the fate of the former national team player Hakeem al Araibi drew global headlines when Bahrain attempted to have him extradited from Thailand, where he had been detained while on his honeymoon. Araibi had fled to Australia after the Arab Spring protests but was jailed, at Bahrain's urging, when he arrived in Thailand; he was eventually released and returned to Australia only after an international outcry. Bahrain, a key ally of the United States in the Persian Gulf, had pledged to carry out reforms in the wake of the violence, but since then, most of the country's leading dissidents have been forced into exile or sent to prisons where, human rights groups say, torture and other abuse are common. "My first thought was this is another attempt by Bahrain to whitewash its horrific rights record and another way of buying influence in Europe," said Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, the director of advocacy for the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy. Alwadaei was jailed after taking part in pro democracy protests and fled to the United Kingdom after his release. Bahraini authorities revoked his citizenship in 2015. Herrault, the Paris F.C. executive, declined to discuss the allegations of human rights abuses. The soccer investment is not Bahrain's first foray into international sports. The country has hosted 15 Formula One Grand Prix races, the first in 2004, and has a professional cycling team that competes in the Tour de France. It has also naturalized some elite foreign athletes, notably middle distance runners from Africa, to compete in its colors at Olympic Games and world championships. Campaign groups like Amnesty International have long argued that these actions were designed to change public opinion of Bahrain. In Paris F.C., Bahrain has invested in a team with a curious history. The club was born in 1969 before splitting in two three years later, with the other half becoming Paris St. Germain. Paris F.C. languished in the amateur ranks for years until the owner Pierre Ferracci, a businessman with close links to President Emmanuel Macron of France, oversaw its most recent rise through the professional ranks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Spring marched into summer. The virus burned its way across the country. The death toll mounted. George Floyd was killed. The streets filled with protesters, then tear gas. There was looting. There was a curfew. The businesses in my neighborhood boarded up their windows and painted "Black Lives Matter" on the plywood. I transplanted my morning glories to the front of my house, and watched as they climbed up the gate by my front door, covering the black iron in green. In 1978, when I was 8 years old, a blizzard in New England closed schools for a week. I can remember my mom zipping up my green and gold snowsuit, and the snowplows coming down the block, making drifts that were taller than I was. When we went back to school it all seemed like a grand adventure, an unscheduled vacation; a story to tell our children, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. What will my children remember about this? Will they remember cars lined up for miles, waiting for food banks or for coronavirus tests? Will they recall videos of anti mask adults throwing tantrums at Walmart or posting screeds about how the virus is fake news? When will this be over? they asked. Will there be school in the fall? What's going to happen? I told them I didn't know, that no one knew. I told them we were all safe, and all together. I learned that it's very hard to impress a 12 year old who just wants to see her friends with "at least you have your health." Then my cosmos and marigolds began to bloom. And, again, I felt a little hopeful. I signed up for the Better Homes Gardens gardening newsletter. I joined two gardening groups on Facebook and downloaded an app to help me identify the plants I'd neglected to label. I collected gardening memes: "Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a woman to garden, and the whole neighborhood gets zucchinis." On the front steps, the nasturtiums went wild, foaming out of their pot, flowering red and gold. On the roof, tomatoes and eggplants grew and ripened. The cucumber vine yielded a cuke or two every day, and not one but two Sugar Baby melons took root and ripened in the sun. But the flowers were the summer's stars. The zinnias blossomed in frilly profusion, in gorgeous magenta, hot pink and pale pink and orange and creamy gold. They made me happy every time I saw them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Age "I'm 29 for one more month." Profession Model and founder of the beauty line Luma Cosmetics. Provenance Raised in Melbourne, Australia. She has been living in Manhattan for 11 years. Show Tome, which is designed by her fellow Aussies Ryan Lobo and Ramon Martin. "I've been to every show they've shown in N.Y.C.," she said. "I love the boys. Ryan used to be a stylist in Melbourne, and he used to style me on shoots when I was 14. Twelve years later he comes out with this line and is such a big designer." Outfit "It is freezing! I have decided that a car to the venue and everywhere else can eliminate maybe two pieces of clothing. You can't completely stay warm and look good otherwise. The sweater and shirt and jacket are Tome. My jeans are by McGuire. The shoes are Converse." "This Celine bag is very new. I got it this morning for Valentine's Day from my significant other. I was really surprised because it's way beyond what I should get for Valentine's Day. I was running out the door, and I was like, 'This works! I'm going to take it.' The earrings are Celine, too. They came inside the bag. I was very impressed that he picked them. I was actually already dressed and ready and saw that they go with the look, so I put them on, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
NEW TO CRUISE CREWS: PEPPER THE ROBOT The Germany based cruise line Aida, a Carnival Cruise line, plans to launch its new ship, the AIDAprima, in April with its first interactive robotic staffer. Known as Pepper, the roughly four foot high rolling robot is equipped to hear and answer questions from guests. The company aims to use it in guest orientation areas to offer information on daily activities, entertainment, embarkation and disembarkation. Pepper is not the first robot to sail several of Royal Caribbean's big ships feature robotic bartenders but the novelty is set to expand. A second Pepper will join Costa Cruise's Costa Diadema sometime following the Aida launch. Ultimately both cruise lines plan to deploy 10 Peppers on each ship across their fleets. OneGo, a new service that offers travelers unlimited flights for a monthly fee, is set to launch today. Targeted to the frequent business traveler, the service allows members to book all the nonstop domestic flights they want each month across nearly every legacy carrier in the United States by using a smartphone app that they say streamlines booking. Unlimited national service costs 2,950 a month, and other packages offer unlimited regional flight bookings for 1,500 a month. Flights must be booked at least seven days in advance. "We're trying to remove that whole process of searching for flights and taking time to do that. And we're trying to solve that price fluctuation issue," said Paulius Grigas, the founder and chief executive of OneGo. The small ship French cruise line Ponant has announced it is working with Ducasse Conseil, the consulting arm and training school founded by the chef Alain Ducasse, to create new menus and train the ships' chefs. The training will begin on the first of the line's five ships, Le Lyrial, this summer, with the remaining ships to follow by early 2017. Ponant has already partnered with several French luxury brands, including the Champagne house Veuve Clicquot as the exclusive bubbly on board, and Laduree, the Paris based macaron specialist, which supplies the ships with teatime treats. Holland America Line and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts have partnered on a new classical music venue, Lincoln Center Stage, that set sail last week aboard the Caribbean bound Eurodam. The new club is modeled after Lincoln Center's venues as an intimate recital space featuring a wood paneled stage furnished with a Steinway Sons piano. A chamber music ensemble made up of five musicians who have recently graduated from music schools and conservatories will perform at the Lincoln Center Stage nightly. During days at sea, the ensemble will offer afternoon concerts. While their repertory is largely classical, the group's numbers span Bach and the Beatles. Two more Lincoln Center Stages will debut on Holland America ships this April, including the new Koningsdam and the existing Oosterdam. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Dr. Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA, will become the first woman to lead the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian Institution announced on Thursday. At NASA, Dr. Stofan, who has a background in geology, was a top adviser to Charles F. Bolden Jr., then the administrator for the department, where she helped lead in the development of a long term plan to get humans to Mars. "Ellen's scientific background, leadership skills, communication acumen and strategic thinking have positioned her superbly to lead the National Air and Space Museum," David Skorton, the director of the Smithsonian Institution, said in a statement. "Her passion for science coupled with her love of education will ensure that the museum will continue to be a global treasure and world leader through its extensive programming, exhibitions and scholarship." Space has been a part of Dr. Stofan's life for almost its entirety. Her father was a NASA rocket scientist and at the age of 4 she attended her first rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, an event that spurred her own career. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker likes to keep her audiences in the dark, literally. Only moments into her "Partita 2," which had its United States premiere on Thursday as part of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival, the lights went out. There was nothing to see, only to hear: Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor, played live by the violinist Amandine Beyer. Bach in the dark, as performed by Ms. Beyer at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, is a ravishing, playful, mysterious, candid thing, at once a simple offering (here, take this) and a heady puzzle (now figure it out). That describes much of "Partita 2," a duet by Ms. De Keersmaeker for herself and the French dance artist Boris Charmatz or really, as it evolves, a trio for them and Ms. Beyer. In its starkness and seductiveness, and the tension between those two, the work fits right in with the best of Ms. De Keersmaeker's repertoire. Created in 2013, three decades into her career, it also bristles with references to her previous dances, a digest of the past that's also effervescently new. There's the love of circles first explored in "Violin Phase" (1982); shimmies and kicks and scoots that recall "Drumming" (1998) and "Rain" (2001); the gradual brightening from "Cesena" (2011), which also began in darkness; and the deep, perennial investigation of music through movement, and vice versa. The structure may seem straightforward, but it unfolds with a wonderful sense of discovery. After Ms. Beyer's solo, the dancers dance in silence (and in growing light, designed by Michel Francois); then Ms. Beyer returns, repeating the partita as the dancers recycle and riff on much of what we've seen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The government will lower the 375,000 salary of the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, after reports that he was being paid considerably more than previous directors, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed on Monday, though it declined to say what his new pay will be. Dr. Redfield, who became the C.D.C. director in March, had been given the higher salary under a provision called Title 42. It was created by Congress to allow federal agencies to offer compensation that is competitive with the private sector in order to attract top notch scientists with expertise that the departments would not otherwise have. News reports of his earnings sparked complaints from Senate Democrats and watchdog groups. "Dr. Redfield has expressed to Secretary Azar that he does not wish to have his compensation become a distraction for the important work of the C.D.C.," an H.H.S. spokeswoman, who declined to be named, wrote in an emailed response to questions from The New York Times. "Therefore, consistent with Dr. Redfield's request to the Secretary, Dr. Redfield's compensation will be adjusted accordingly." Title 42 was not used for Dr. Redfield's predecessor, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, an obstetrician gynecologist, who was paid 197,300 a year until she resigned in January, or for her predecessor, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, an infectious disease specialist and the former health commissioner of New York City, whose salary was 219,700. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
I spent last week ignoring President Trump. Although I am ordinarily a politics junkie, I didn't read, watch or listen to a single story about anything having to do with our 45th president. What I missed, by many accounts, was one of the strangest and most unpredictable weeks of news in modern political history. Among other things, there was the resignation of the national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and an "Oprah Winfrey Show" tape that led to the downfall of the nominee for secretary of labor, Andrew F. Puzder. It wasn't my aim to stick my head in the sand. I did not quit the news. Instead, I spent as much time as I normally do online (all my waking hours), but shifted most of my energy to looking for Trump free zones. My point: I wanted to see what I could learn about the modern news media by looking at how thoroughly Mr. Trump had subsumed it. In one way, my experiment failed: I could find almost no Trump free part of the press. The new president doesn't simply dominate national and political news. During my week of attempted Trump abstinence, I noticed something deeper: He has taken up semipermanent residence on every outlet of any kind, political or not. He is no longer just the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow. Obviously, just about every corner of the news was a minefield, but it was my intention to keep informed while avoiding Mr. Trump. I still consulted major news sites, but avoided sections that tend to be Trump soaked, and averted my eyes as I scrolled for non Trump news. I spent more time on international news sites like the BBC, and searched for subject specific sites covering topics like science and finance. I consulted social news sites like Digg and Reddit, and occasionally checked Twitter and Facebook, but I often had to furiously scroll past all of the Trump posts. (Some news was unavoidable; when Mr. Flynn resigned, a journalist friend texted me about it.) Even when I found non Trump news, though, much of it was interleaved with Trump news, so the overall effect was something like trying to bite into a fruit and nut cake without getting any fruit or nuts. All presidents are omnipresent. But it is likely that no living person in history has ever been as famous as Mr. Trump is right now. It's possible that not even the most famous or infamous people of the recent or distant past say, Barack Obama, Osama bin Laden, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali or Adolf Hitler dominated media as thoroughly at their peak as Mr. Trump does now. I'm hedging because there isn't data to directly verify this declaration. (Of course, there are no media analytics to measure how many outlets were covering Hitler the day he invaded Poland.) But there is some pretty good circumstantial evidence. Consider data from mediaQuant, a firm that measures "earned media," which is all coverage that isn't paid advertising. To calculate a dollar value of earned media, it first counts every mention of a particular brand or personality in just about any outlet, from blogs to Twitter to the evening news to The New York Times. Then it estimates how much the mentions would cost if someone were to pay for them as advertising. It's not just that Mr. Trump's coverage beats anyone else's. He is now beating pretty much everyone else put together. Mr. Senatori recently added up the coverage value of 1,000 of the world's best known figures, excluding Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump. The list includes Mrs. Clinton, who in January got 200 million in coverage, Tom Brady ( 38 million), Kim Kardashian ( 36 million), and Vladimir V. Putin ( 30 million), all the way down to the 1,000th most mentioned celebrity in mediaQuant's database, the actress Madeleine Stowe ( 1,001). The coverage those 1,000 people garnered last month totaled 721 million. In other words, Mr. Trump gets about 100 million more in coverage than the next 1,000 famous people put together. And he is on track to match or beat his January record in February, according to Mr. Senatori's preliminary figures. How do we know Mr. Trump is more talked about than anyone else in the past? There are now more people on the planet who are more connected than ever before. Facebook estimates that about 3.2 billion people have internet connections. On average, the people of Earth spend about eight hours a day consuming media, according to the marketing research firm Zenith. So almost by definition, anyone who dominates today's media is going to be read about, talked about and watched by more people than ever before. "From a media perspective, it's pretty clear," Mr. Senatori said. "The sheer volume, and the sheer amount of consumption, and all the new channels that are available today show that, yeah, he's off the charts." But shouldn't we all be thinking about Trump? Mr. Trump is a historically unusual president, and thus deserves plenty of coverage. Yet there's an argument that our tech fueled modern media ecosystem is amplifying his presence even beyond what's called for. On most days, Mr. Trump is 90 percent of the news on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and probably yours, too. But he's not 90 percent of what's important in the world. During my break from Trump news, I found rich coverage veins that aren't getting social play. ISIS is retreating across Iraq and Syria. Brazil seems on the verge of chaos. A large ice shelf in Antarctica is close to full break. Scientists may have discovered a new continent submerged under the ocean near Australia. There's a reason you aren't seeing these stories splashed across the news. Unlike old school media, today's media works according to social feedback loops. Every story that shows any signs of life on Facebook or Twitter is copied endlessly by every outlet, becoming unavoidable. Scholars have long predicted that social media might alter how we choose cultural products. In 2006, Duncan Watts, a researcher at Microsoft who studies social networks, and two colleagues published a study arguing that social signals create a kind of "inequality" in how we choose media. The researchers demonstrated this with an online market for music downloads. Half of the people who arrived at Mr. Watts's music downloading site were shown just the titles and band name of each song. The other half were also shown a social signal how many times each song had been downloaded by other users. Mr. Watts and his colleagues found that adding social signals changed the music people were interested in. Inequality went up: When people could see what others were downloading, popular songs became far more popular, and unpopular songs far less popular. Social signals also created a greater unpredictability of outcomes; when people could see how others had picked songs, the collective ratings of each song were less likely to predict success, and bad songs were more likely to become popular. I suspect we are seeing something like this effect playing out with Trump news. It's not that coverage of the new administration is unimportant. It clearly is. But social signals likes, retweets and more are amplifying it. Every new story prompts outrage, which puts the stories higher in your feed, which prompts more coverage, which encourages more talk, and on and on. We saw this effect before Mr. Trump came on the scene it's why you know about Cecil the lion and Harambe the gorilla but he has accelerated the trend. He is the Harambe of politics, the undisputed king of all media. It's only been a month since Mr. Trump took office, and already the deluge of news has been overwhelming. Everyone reporters, producers, anchors, protesters, people in the administration and consumers of news has been amped up to 11. For now, this might be all right. It's important to pay attention to the federal government when big things are happening. But Mr. Trump is likely to be president for at least the next four years. And it's probably not a good idea for just about all of our news to be focused on a single subject for that long. In previous media eras, the news was able to find a sensible balance even when huge events were preoccupying the world. Newspapers from World War I and II were filled with stories far afield from the war. Today's newspapers are also full of non Trump articles, but many of us aren't reading newspapers anymore. We're reading Facebook and watching cable, and there, Mr. Trump is all anyone talks about, to the exclusion of almost all else. There's no easy way out of this fix. But as big as Mr. Trump is, he's not everything and it'd be nice to find a way for the media ecosystem to recognize that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
TOKYO At 12:30 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, the Ministry of the Environment offices here were almost completely in darkness, lit only by the silver blue glow of computer screens. All of the government ministry offices are supposed to go dark for an hour in the middle of each day to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Satoru Morishita, deputy director general of global environment affairs at the ministry, said the policy is a daily reminder of the stakes of climate change. "We're trying to change behaviors in addition to changing attitudes on climate change, and from that, to change the whole society," Mr. Morishita said in an interview. But the Japanese people, particularly young people, do not seem to be heeding Mr. Morishita's wishes. A recent government survey showed that nearly 75 percent of Japanese people ages 18 to 29 expressed interest in climate change, an impressive figure by international standards. But it is a noticeable drop from the close to 90 percent interest stated by the same age group just a few years ago. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center showed similar results: 75 percent of Japanese citizens over the age of 50 said global warming was a major threat to the country, compared with 59 percent of those ages 18 to 34. Because Japan has to import most of its energy, and because of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, the country has an almost obsessive interest in tackling energy issues. The apparent drop in concern by Japanese young people alarms many in government, including Mr. Morishita. "I want young people to understand that climate change is their problem, too, and to act on it," he said. This nation's approach to fighting climate change provides an illuminating contrast both to other countries straining to engage the public on the issue and to those that deny it altogether. While the United States took a global leadership role on climate change under President Obama, President elect Donald J. Trump appears uncertain whether climate change is real, or if it is, how to deal with it. To spur interest among the young and old, the government last summer began a campaign called "Cool Choice," which encourages consumers to buy energy efficient appliances. The country has several other energy saving and environmental initiatives, including a complicated (to foreigners) trash separation plan. Nevertheless the municipal recycling rate hovers around 20 percent, according to environment ministry data from 2012, the most recent year data was available, which is relatively low among developed countries. However, the amount of waste per capita is very low in 2011, it was 902 pounds a year, compared with 1,628 in the United States. In 2005, the government unveiled "Cool Biz," a campaign to reduce energy consumption in the summer by discouraging the use of air conditioners and encouraging workers to dress more casually wearing short sleeve shirts, for instance. The program has a winter counterpart, called "Warm Biz," which began at the same time but gained more steam after the Fukushima disaster. It encourages people to use less heat in the winter, suggesting things like holding nabe (a Japanese hot pot dish) parties with family and friends to stay warm. This campaign also has a mascot named Attamaru, a "warm ninja" who gives tips on staying warm. In a new effort to capture young people's attention, the government has begun studying the possible environmental benefits of the sharing economy, since this generation seems less interested in owning cars, homes or bikes, environment ministry officials said. And since many campaigns here have mascots, those officials are soliciting designs for a three dimensional character, hopefully inspired by Hatsune Miku, a digitized pop star. So far, some young people seem unmoved by the government's efforts. Sui William McCauley, 24, a graduate student in journalism at Waseda University here, shrugged at the public education campaigns. "That just feels like, whatever," said Mr. McCauley, who grew up in Sendai, north of Tokyo on Japan's main island. "Maybe if they say you should drink whiskey when it's cold, I'll do that," he said. His view might reflect a much deeper generational divide in Japan, according to Midori Aoyagi, principal researcher in the Integrated Environment and Economy Section of the National Institute for Environmental Studies, who studies public opinion on climate change in Japan. She said that in her focus groups with Japanese millennials, she "always felt a kind of hopelessness" toward their everyday lives, their careers and social issues, possibly a result of having grown up during a prolonged period of economic stagnation known as the lost decades. Interviews with several Japanese students and office workers ages 22 to 26 elicited similar responses to arguments for the need for urgency on fighting climate change. The young cited the huge scale and timeline of the problem, a feeling of powerlessness, silence from the media, and preoccupation with more important issues. Several said other issues seemed more pressing for Japan than climate change: a stagnating economy, a declining population and tensions in East Asia, to name a few. Many worried about energy security only three of the country's 45 nuclear reactors are now operational, a result of safety concerns after Fukushima and expressed hope that Japan would invest more in renewable energy. 1. Time for action is running out. The major agreement struck by diplomats established a clear consensus that all nations need to do much more, immediately, to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. 2. How much each nation needs to cut remains unresolved. Rich countries are disproportionately responsible for global warming, but some leaders have insisted that it's the poorer nations who need to accelerate their shift away from fossil fuels. 3. The call for disaster aid increased. One of the biggest fights at the summit revolved around whether and how the world's wealthiest nations should compensate poorer nations for the damage caused by rising temperatures. 4. A surprising emissions cutting agreement. Among the other notable deals to come out of the summit was a U.S. China agreement to do more to cut emissions this decade, and China committed for the first time to develop a plan to reduce methane. 5. There was a clear gender and generation gap. Those with the power to make decisions about how much the world warms were mostly old and male. Those who were most fiercely protesting the pace of action were mostly young and female. Most of them said they didn't really believe that almost 75 percent of their contemporaries were actually interested in climate change. It might be considered rude in Japan to say you are not interested in something, and most Japanese people know they are supposed to care, even if that rarely translates to action. Maki Nakamatsu, 24, a graduate student at Waseda University, said the government should spend less effort on a public awareness campaign "That's not the point," she said and more on encouraging or requiring environmentally conscious behavior. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It took a while, but "Schitt's Creek," a series about a wealthy family forced to move to a small rural town after losing their fortune, has finally landed Emmy recognition. The beloved Pop TV show received four nominations for its fifth and penultimate season Tuesday, including best lead actor in a comedy for Eugene Levy. This is the first acting nod for Levy, who plays the Rose family patriarch Johnny. (As a co creator of the show alongside his son, Daniel, he's also nominated for best comedy series.) On Tuesday afternoon, he spoke about congratulating Daniel following the announcements and the evolution of the series. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. Here's what happened at the 2019 Emmy nominations See a list of Emmy nominees. Congratulations! How do you feel? Well, thank you. The morning has been unfolding very nicely here. I'm still a little stunned and a little excited. My morning started by me taking my car in for servicing because I was hearing a rattle inside the car, and discovering when we took it for a test run out with the service guy that there were two CDs that were in the armrest that were kind of rattling together. That's how my morning started. The car is fine, and then I got home, and then things really picked up. Yeah, I'm really quite excited and surprised in a way that we ended up with the nominations. I'm really thrilled about that. You won two writing Emmys in the '80s for "SCTV," but with "Schitt's Creek" getting a nomination, you get to share the moment with your son, Daniel. I talked to him this morning. He's over in Italy and has been over there for a couple of weeks on vacation. I just congratulated him. I didn't want to get all weepy or anything on the phone, but I just said to him that as showrunner on this thing, that all the long hours and meticulous detail, and all the hard work that he's put into the show has finally paid off to the point of people actually recognizing the show for what it is, and for all the good things about it. That has to be a good feeling. He's having the best vacation now. It's very nice to know that your show is seen on the same playing field with a lot of great television comedies that are out there. One of the things that has been most notable about the show is how much sweeter the characters have gotten since Season 1. What has it been like for you to explore these characters' evolutions while also staying true to who they are? This is what we started out to do when Dan came to me six or seven years ago. The idea was to make a great character comedy. He kind of wanted the same tone of comedy that Chris Guest and I had injected into our movies, those kinds of mockumentaries that we were doing. Good character work where you actually believe in the characters and care about them. I spent a great part of my career dealing in that very thing. If you achieve that, then you can take your viewer on a great roller coaster ride, reaching great highs for laughs and also reaching great lows for emotional depth. It's a fun ride to take your audience on. Get TV and movie recommendations delivered to your inbox from Watching. When you encounter "Schitt's Creek" fans, what moments do they tend to latch on to the most? By and large the moments that really resonate with the viewers are the moments that show great emotional depth. I think the first time that it happened was at the end of our second season, when Johnny and Moira Rose run into two old friends from their former life and sit down to have dinner. The friends end up making fun of Schitt's Creek and then Johnny gets upset and ends up putting them down. That was the first time where the Roses actually talked about Schitt's Creek as the place where they live. It's not called "Schitt's ville." It's called Schitt's Creek, and it's where we live. What can viewers expect from the sixth and final season? I think it's going to be a season that viewers will be very, very pleased with. I think the series is ending in a way that wraps this up with a lovely bow, and I honestly think that of the six seasons this will definitely be the strongest that we've done so far. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
For anyone who spends time pondering the cost of keeping the lights on and the staff paid at their houses of worship, the Mormon tithing slip has a sort of utilitarian beauty. Worshipers pick one up at their local chapel, fill it out and hand over their money to a lay leader (having annotated the amounts paid by check, currency or coins, per the instructions on the slip). No annual bill, no passing of the plate. Keep the canary colored carbon copy for your records. The fact that the slip looks a bit like something your dry cleaner might give you when you drop off your clothes is part of its appeal. After all, worship is a regular part of many people's lives. We need to pay for it somehow. But the how in this equation is something that has changed over time for many religions in the United States, from selling pews to the wealthy 100 years ago to electronically pulling money from people's bank accounts more recently. So as we approach a busy season for giving among believers, from the annual dues that Jews hand over each summer to the pledges that Episcopalians often make in the fall, this is a good time to ask whether we've settled on a form of collection that is both efficient and meaningful. Whatever you may feel about the relative worth of tithing slips, the membership model or annual pledges, it's clear that most religious institutions are at least a bit better at collecting money than they used to be. Rabbi Gary P. Zola, a professor at Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, said that Reform congregations in the United States once supported themselves by letting those who paid the most sit in the best seats in the sanctuary and get honors, like blessing and holding the Torah. The pay per pew model turned up in Protestant and Catholic churches, too, and some churches were particularly serious about the commitment. Poor Aaron Smock was the subject of an 1884 article in this newspaper under the headline, "Smock Must Pay His Pew Rent." The Second Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Freehold, N.J., sued him when he fell 600 behind on his bill for Pew 62. Many Jewish congregations adopted what came to be known as the fair share approach, with everyone paying theirs. After World War II, as Jews moved to the suburbs, another membership model emerged with a single annual fee for everyone. "These were places where there was a socioeconomic floor," said Rabbi Daniel H. Freelander, senior vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism. "All the houses cost the same." That said, dues relief has generally been available for people who can't afford the standard amount. (A disclosure: I'm on the board of a Reform congregation.) Whatever people pay, however, it hasn't always been easy for administrators and lay leaders to get them to donate regularly and increase their contributions each year, no matter their faith. Over the last decade or so, entrepreneurs have seized on the opening and tried to automate the process. One big player is a service called ParishPay, which works with many Catholic churches and a few synagogues to help sign up worshipers to pay via credit or debit card or automatic payment from their bank accounts. Nearly 1,000 institutions have joined the service, and it claims a 20 to 30 percent increase in giving by individuals who enroll. That's a nice lift, though the process is a bit antiseptic given that no money changes hands at the house of worship (though Jews are not supposed to handle money on Shabbat). Marty Baker, the lead pastor at Stevens Creek Church in Augusta, Ga., came up with the idea for an in church giving kiosk in 2003, when he wondered whether attendees with pockets full of plastic might give more than they were depositing in the collection plate if he found a way to accept their cards. Today, his for profit company SecureGive has kiosks in churches, Hindu temples and some zoos and hospitals, too. "You could do this at home or online," he said. "But there is something about swiping that card at church. It's a reminder that your gifts are making a difference in a broader context." Few things are more visceral than the collection plate, however, and it persists for many reasons. "The liturgical act of placing an offering of money into the offertory plate is understood to be a form of worship," said the Rev. Laurel Johnston, the officer for stewardship in the Episcopal Church. Episcopalians generally make annual pledges in the fall and fulfill them throughout the year through electronic payments or by making periodic payments via an envelope that they put in the collection plate. Regular worshipers with a regular paycheck may also appreciate the formality of handing over hard currency each week if they believe in the idea of paying God first. Then, there are the parents who like the fact that their children see everyone else giving and can toss in a few coins of their own. Finally, there's the peer pressure of having others' eyes on you as the plate goes around. "Some would call it Catholic guilt," said Matt Golis, a lifelong Catholic and chief executive of ParishPay's parent company, YapStone. Many churches that allow electronic giving encourage those who have used it to drop a symbolic receipt of sorts into the collection plate if they wish. At Mormon meeting houses, there is no plate, and electronic payments are rare. "Credit cards are not permitted, as the associated transaction fees are prohibitive," a church spokesman, Eric Hawkins, said in an e mail message. This year, the church revised its slips, taking off things like "temple construction" and "perpetual education" (to help Mormon youth from developing areas) from the written list of things you could direct your money to via the slip, though you can still write items in next to an Other category. A new disclosure on the slip noted that "though reasonable efforts will be made globally to use donations as designated, all donations become the church's property and will be used at the church's sole discretion to further the church's overall mission." The old one had similar sole discretion language but referred to the church's missionary programs and not its overall mission. It's a bit of an uncomfortable shift, especially in light of a recent Bloomberg Business Week cover story about the Mormon Church's many for profit businesses and the billion dollar mall it recently opened in downtown Salt Lake City. "It's not like we need an annual report, though that would be nice," said Jon Anderton, a securities trader in Seattle and co founder of the Modern Mormon Men blog. "But what is the church's mission as it relates to some of these expenditures?" Mr. Hawkins, the church spokesman, said that the removal of line items did not represent a loss of transparency. "In fact, some see it as an increase in transparency that the church declares that it will do its best to ensure those funds are used as indicated, but that in some instances that may not be the case," he wrote. Mormons have other ways of giving aside from using the slips, though the money ends up in the same place. The new language may well raise questions for skeptical Mormons, but it's no secret that every religion has its share of loud debates about financial stewardship. Sorting those out requires an entirely different conversation. For lay leaders or worshipers of any religion who wish to make the handing over of money both seamless and holy, one of the central questions is this: Is it true that any payment that can be automated should be automated for those who wish to give that way? It's hard to argue with the results that ParishPay claims to achieve with people who use the service. Giving regular amounts, on time and without fail whether you're at your house of worship that week or not, sure seems pious. It doesn't preclude putting more cash in a collection plate either. So it wouldn't surprise me if the next revision of the Mormon tithing slip added a credit card option, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
A SHOUT IN THE RUINS By 261 pp. Little, Brown Company. 26. Midway through 's gorgeous, devastating second novel, one of the protagonists reflects on what he believes to be "the truth at the heart of every story, that violence is an original form of intimacy, and always has been, and will remain so forever." It is certainly the truth at the heart of "A Shout in the Ruins," a multigenerational Southern tale that moves from the antebellum era through the 1980s, with the dark thread of slavery winding throughout, a noose around the throat of every character, black or white. The novel opens in Virginia in 1870, four years after a mysterious arson at Beauvais Plantation, committed by Emily Reid Levallois, a white woman who is presumed dead by the authorities but remains very much alive in the minds of the locals. What follows is a story of the intertwined fates of Emily, the other inhabitants of Beauvais, and the inheritors of their crimes and mercies: Emily's father, Bob Reid, a landowner and mule skinner who returns home from the Civil War crippled and missing an arm only to find he has also been robbed of his land; Antony Levallois, the ruthless, amoral planter who dispossesses him, and with whom Emily is forced into a loveless marriage; their slaves Rawls and Nurse, whose hatred of the white masters who have abused and sundered them burns as fiercely as their love for each other; and George Seldom, a black man in his 90s born and orphaned during the Civil War, who returns to his childhood home in 1956 in search of his origins. They and the characters they encounter on their individual journeys mark one another indelibly. They do it physically and often casually chopping off toes as punishment for running, sawing off legs gone gangrenous, raping and beating, shooting and stabbing but the deeper and more agonizing wounds they deal one another, Powers makes clear, are the psychic ones. The flesh suffers the lash more easily than the spirit. The loss of a limb pales next to the shame of feeling like a monstrosity and a failure. Dispossession of one's property is a trifling violation compared with theft of one's personhood. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Jonathan Haber majored in philosophy at Harvard University. And Yale. And Stanford. He explored Kant's "The Critique of Pure Reason" with an Oxford don and Kierkegaard's insights into "Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity" with a leading light from the University of Copenhagen. In his quest to meet all the standard requirements for a bachelor of arts degree in a single year, the 52 year old from Lexington, Mass., also took courses in English common law, Shakespeare's late plays and the science of cooking, which overlapped with the degree in chemistry he earned from Wesleyan in 1985. Here's the brilliant part: Mr. Haber didn't spend a dime on tuition or fees. Instead, he gorged from the smorgasbord of free courses offered by top universities. He documented the project on his website, degreeoffreedom.org, and in a new book exploring the wider phenomenon of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. He didn't earn a degree the knowledge may be free but the sheepskin costs dearly but he was satisfied. "I wouldn't call myself a philosopher," he said, "but I learned as much as most undergraduates." Mr. Haber's project embodies a modern miracle: the ease with which anyone can learn almost anything. Our ancient ancestors built the towering Library of Alexandria to gather all of the world's knowledge, but today, smartphones turn every palm into a knowledge palace. And yet, even as the highbrow holy grail the acquisition of complete knowledge seems tantalizingly close, almost nobody speaks about the rebirth of the Renaissance man or woman. The genius label may be applied with reckless abandon, even to chefs, basketball players and hair stylists, but the true polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin seem like mythic figures of a bygone age. They don't make geniuses like they used to. Perhaps we need another Franklin to explain why. Thanks to the power of technology and the brute force of demographics, the modern world should be teeming with people of wide accomplishment. In Franklin's era, the world's population was about 800 million; today it's seven billion people, many of whom enjoy the brain building blessings of good nutrition and access to education. Indeed, the researcher James R. Flynn has found that I.Q. scores have been rising around the world for decades. Known as the "Flynn effect," it is especially pronounced in developed nations such as the United States, where average scores have increased about three points per decade since the early 1900s. Nevertheless, it is much easier to feel like Sisyphus than Leonardo nowadays, because one thing that has grown even faster than I.Q. scores is the amount of information the brain must process. Google estimated in 2010 that there were 300 exabytes (that's 300 followed by 18 zeros) of human created information in the world, and that more information was created every two days than had existed in the entire world from the dawn of time to 2003. No doubt those numbers have increased vastly since then. But does it really matter? Like the physicists' observation that the known universe has a diameter of 92 billion light years, these numbers are so large that they defy human comprehension; they are meaningless truths to just about everybody not named Stephen Hawking. When it comes to aggregate information, we blew our minds long ago. Of course, not all information is equal. Those exabytes do include a few great novels, stirring films and groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Most are flotsam wrapped in jetsam: insipid blog posts and text messages, YouTube videos of cuddly cats and pornographic acts, ignorance that poses as knowledge. "We are overloaded with junk," said Daniel Levitin, a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University whose books include "The Organized Mind." "It's becoming harder and harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. The problem with the Internet is anyone can post, so it's hard to know whether you are looking at a fact or pseudofact, science or pseudoscience." That problem seems quintessentially modern; Alvin Toffler didn't popularize the term "information overload" until 1970. But in the relative realm of human experience, it is as constant and nettlesome as death and taxes. At least since the heyday of ancient Greece and Rome, each generation has confronted the overwhelming struggle to search, sift and sort growing piles of information to make what is known useful. "Papyrus, print or petabyte the history of feeling overwhelmed by information always seems to go back further than the latest technology." said Seth Rudy, a professor of English literature at Rhodes College who explores this phenomenon in his new book, "Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge." "The sense that there is too much to know has been felt for hundreds, even thousands, of years." In response, figures of expert erudition and taste such as the Roman Gaius Petronius Arbiter, whose impeccable taste made his name a byword of discernment, and the 19th century critic Matthew Arnold, who defined culture as "the best that has been thought and known" have helped distinguish the dross from the gold. Primitive search engines developed in the Middle Ages are still with us, including indexes, concordances and tables of contents, while the dictionary and the florilegium (a compilation of quotations and excerpts from other writings) enabled busy people to sample the world's wisdom. This remains a thriving business; a sales pitch of modern journalism is that reporters and critics do the work (read the book, see the play, try the recipe, interview experts) so you don't have to. Encyclopedias rose in the Enlightenment. Tellingly, Mr. Rudy said, most early works were created by one person and aimed to synthesize all knowledge into a single, coherent body. Soon, they became collections of discrete articles written by a team of experts. By the 20th century, the storehouse of useful knowledge had grown at such a thrillingly alarming rate that the possibility of mastering just one area of study, such as physics, literature or art much less to become a Renaissance man who could make important contributions to various fields became less aspiration than delusion. Julianne Moore's character captured this sense in the Oscar winning movie "Still Alice" when she joked about "the great academic tradition of knowing more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing." That barb suggests a profound response to the explosion of information that has transformed modern scholarship and innovation: the rise of intense specialization and teamwork. "Once upon a time you could be a biologist," said Benjamin F. Jones, an economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. "Now the accumulation of knowledge is such that biologists, for example, must specialize in an array of microdisciplines like evolutionary biology, genetics and cell functions." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
On my way into the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently to see "Pen, Lens Soul: The Story of the Beautiful Project," an exhibition of poetry and photography by black girls and women based in Durham, N.C., I looked up to its facade. And there I saw Wangechi Mutu's stately African and divinely inspired female quartet of bronze sculptures. As I headed to show, at the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education, I began thinking that the spatial difference between these two collections was not a juxtaposition between high art for public viewing and art used for community outreach. Instead they were on a continuum, in which the black girls in the photographs and Mutu's figures actively challenged the notion of who belongs in those cultural spaces. Today, more than ever, mainstream institutions are recognizing black women's work (and beauty) in new and unprecedented ways. In 2019, black women were crowned in the five major beauty pageants, including Miss World and Miss America. A recent four week Film Forum series focused exclusively on performances by black actresses (many of whom weren't even credited for their roles in early Hollywood films), while another at the Museum of Modern Art, "It's All in Me: Black Heroines," opens soon. And since its unveiling at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in 2018, Amy Sherald's painting of the former first lady Michelle Obama has received a record number of visitors. (This summer it will go on a five city tour, with Kehinde Wiley's painting of President Barack Obama.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
So Many Shows, So Many Hits: For 'Prince of Broadway,' the Challenge Is What to Leave Out Seven years ago, Jason Robert Brown visited the office of the storied director and producer Harold Prince to discuss collaborating on a revue about Mr. Prince's career. Like any Broadway personage, let alone one with an unparalleled 21 Tony Awards, Mr. Prince known universally as Hal has a wall covered with posters of the shows he worked on. Mr. Brown, the composer and playwright, who made his Broadway debut at age 28 when Mr. Prince tapped him to write the score for "Parade," lingered at that wall and got choked up for a minute. And then he got mad. "I looked up," he said, "and there's 'Company' and 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' and 'Evita' and 'Show Boat' and 'She Loves Me.' It's all there. And I thought, 'I'm so pissed off when I look at this because that is the theater that I thought I was going into.' And I realized that I got in at the tail end of it." Mr. Brown's show did make that wall, a virtual time capsule of a theatrical golden age that Mr. Prince all but willed into being. But just barely. The intervening years made for plenty more frustration, as one announced production of "Prince" after another fell by the wayside. An earlier version finally reached Japan in 2015. "I'm told it played better in Osaka than Tokyo," Mr. Prince said of that production, "because the theater was so much smaller." By that logic, the Broadway run presented by Manhattan Theater Club and opening Aug. 24 at the relatively intimate Samuel J. Friedman Theater will be a more fitting place to hear the likes of Chuck Cooper and Karen Ziemba perform material from the above shows and nearly a dozen more. Some of those were directed by Mr. Prince, others merely produced by him. But he didn't write a note of the songs in question, deferring to those with last names like Bernstein and Sondheim and Webber and Kander. And Brown, which helps explain Mr. Brown's involvement in the show. In addition to currently weaving about 16 songs from Mr. Prince's past into an overture, he has reorchestrated the material throughout and written a forward looking new finale, "Do the Work." The two men sat down immediately after the first full "Prince of Broadway" run through to discuss how to distill two thirds of a century of Broadway history into just over two hours. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. So ... 67 years. Dozens of shows. How did you decide which to pick? JASON ROBERT BROWN I have trouble getting Hal to say this out loud, but "Prince of Broadway" is about an era in which musical theater and really Broadway completely changes. Not solely because of Hal, but largely because of Hal. BROWN And I think you have to understand certain landmarks around that. There's no way you can tell that story without "Phantom of the Opera," without "West Side Story." You can't do a show about Hal without "Cabaret," which I think is sort of the ur Prince experience. But even with that criteria, there's too much material, so then it just becomes about personal taste and flow, and we've always deferred to Hal about that. There's a point in which Hal says, "I feel like we just need one more song," and we say, "It's your show, let's do another song." The stuff from the big hits, either you're going to do a song from "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," or you're not going to do it. No one's going to die one way or the other. It's the stuff from "Grind" where you're like: How do we pay tribute to the fact that not only did you succeed over and over again, but when you failed, you failed with such beautiful ideas, you failed for the best possible reason, you failed because you tried hard? PRINCE The tough decision was to cut from "Grind," to cut from "Flora the Red Menace." Of course you get into what's a flop or a hit. My wife once said: "I'm sick of hearing you talking about flops. I wish you would make the distinction between success and failure, because some of your successes have been flops and some of your failures have been hits." And that is true in any artistic career. How much does the size of a show play into that? PRINCE I want this show to be about the empty space and how all of us dedicate our creative lives to filling it with magic. This whole thing about extravaganza has been pinned to me, that I do spectacles, and I don't. Sure, "Follies" had a spectacle moment. But "Phantom" is always put down as a spectacle it's a black enameled box with things put in it mostly. Not always, but mostly. In the theater, two people sitting next to each other see a different show because they fill the blank spaces differently. That's what we're here for. Are any of these shows or performances so seared into your mind that it's hard to look at them with a fresh perspective? PRINCE No. My job is to stimulate people. If I ask for something and I get what I ask for, I'm sorry. Because I'm not a composer, I'm not a designer. I want you to come back with something that will surprise me. BROWN There's not been a single moment from the day I met Hal to this day that he said, "Let me tell you what's going to make a musical work." That's not his job. His job is to get the show up. Hal was fantastic at seeing there was something that was wrong with a piece. And it took me a while to realize that solving the problem isn't what he did. He was always proposing solutions, but they were often terrible solutions. PRINCE In the "Superman" song "You've Got Possibilities," from "It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman" in 1966 , I clearly remember Linda Lavin. Now, Linda never imposes. And so I said to Janet Dacal, who's doing it here, "Let's go the Linda way." Of course, Janet's not Linda, so you never impose. But you get her to try coming from under. Jason, what is your role here? BROWN Part of my job on this show, and it's sort of a strange job, is to represent the writers who are not here to do it. I needed to make a cut from the balcony scene in "West Side Story," and I thought, "I'm supposed to change Lenny Bernstein's music?!" It really matters to me to do that right. And I feel like the minute I came on board, it allows Andrew Lloyd Webber and Steve Sondheim and John Kander to relax and say, "O.K. Jason can take care of it." Plus, I wouldn't have the career that I have if it wasn't for Hal. It is always fun to work with Hal it's a pain in the ass, but it's fun. This is the place I pay my respect to the work that he did. What on earth took so long in terms of getting this show produced? PRINCE It's all about who has the money and where the money comes from. You know who the backers were for "The Pajama Game" in 1954 ? Wardrobe mistresses. Stage managers. Stagehands. All the people we worked with backstage. The biggest investment was 5,000. There's a line in this show that tells it all: "Follies" was the most expensive musical ever done when it opened in 1971. You know how much it cost? It cost 800,000. BROWN There's no institutional memory on these blocks. At the time Hal happened to come up in the '70s, when New York was like Beirut he had the luxury to explore these beautiful, difficult concepts in a commercial environment. Now, when New York is the most expensive real estate on the planet, there's not that luxury to do that. It drives me bananas that the memory of what that is has so little purchase. You've got all those people talking about "the great history of Broadway," but none of them are saying we have to honor that history in a great way. They're saying, "Oh no, we have to put on 'SpongeBob SquarePants.'" PRINCE Jason is part of the answer. He's part of the continuum. And that's very important to me. I am not interested in an audience coming to this show and saying, "Those were the good old days." If they do, I'll kill myself. It's the future you've got to take care of. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Jony Ive, Designer Who Made Apple Look Like Apple, Is Leaving to Start a Firm SAN FRANCISCO Jony Ive, Apple's chief design officer and one of the most influential executives in the history of the Silicon Valley giant, is leaving the company. Mr. Ive will depart this year to start his own design company, Apple said on Thursday. Through his new firm, LoveFrom, Mr. Ive will continue to work on a wide range of Apple products, the company said. "Jony is a singular figure in the design world, and his role in Apple's revival cannot be overstated," Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, said in a statement. Mr. Ive, who has worked at Apple for nearly three decades, was responsible for the look and feel of many iconic Apple products, including the iPhone and the iMac. He also helped design Apple's new headquarters, a futuristic, flying saucerlike glass building that has become one of the most distinctive structures in Silicon Valley. Apple's design team will now be led by Evans Hankey, an industrial designer at the company, and Alan Dye, previously a creative director at Apple. They will report to Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer, who oversaw the creation of the Apple Watch. Apple's share price was down more than 1 percent in after hours trading after Mr. Ive's departure was announced. Apple has struggled in recent quarters with slumping iPhone sales and a significant drop in revenue across the China region. In April, when Apple last reported its quarterly financial results, profit dropped 16.4 from the same quarter a year earlier, and iPhone sales dropped 17.3 percent. Revenue from online services, including Apple's App Store, was on the rise. But the hardware business that defined Apple and the career of Mr. Ive has slowed. The Apple Watch has been a modest success, but it has not captured the market or the popular imagination in the way that the iPhone and the iMac did when they were released. Apple did not make Mr. Ive available for comment Thursday evening. Born and raised outside London, Mr. Ive joined Apple in 1992, when the company was nearing its lowest ebb. One of his first projects was the Apple Newton, an early hand held computer that, while innovative, was bulky and too expensive to find a mainstream audience. It was considered a bust. But Mr. Ive became a key player in the company's revival after its founder Steve Jobs returned in 1997. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Ive often met for lunch, and at the end of each day, the chief executive would visit Mr. Ive's Apple design studio, according to Walter Isaacson's biography "Steve Jobs." "The difference that Jony has made, not only at Apple but in the world, is huge," Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson. "He understands what we do at out core better than anyone." As the head of Apple's industrial design team, Mr. Ive helped shape the original iMac, a clear plastic bubble of a personal computer that marked a return to form for the company. After the iMac, he played a vital role in Apple's breakout products. From the iPod music player to the iPhone to the iPad tablet, Apple redefined personal computing over the next decade or so and became one of the most profitable and valuable companies in the world. Industrial design how the look, feel and behavior of a product are defined by its creators has long been a key part of the Apple ethos. "This is part of Steve's legacy," Mr. Ive told The New York Times in an interview in 2014. "Deep in the culture of Apple is this sense and understanding of design, developing and making. Form and the material and process they are beautifully intertwined completely connected." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Early voting has already generated long, long lines in many states, and with the November election just 11 days away, many states and cities have imposed safety measures to protect voters and poll workers from exposure to the coronavirus. But polling places still have the potential to become "mass gathering events," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in an advisory released on Friday, adding that measures to prevent the spread of Covid 19 could be improved. The C.D.C. based its latest advice on a survey from the experiences of 522 poll workers in Delaware's statewide primary in September. Guidelines issued by the agency in June recommended various ways to minimize crowds at polling locations, including absentee voting and extended voting hours. To cut down on disease transmission, the C.D.C. also recommended putting up physical barriers between voting machines; spacing the machines apart from one another; indicating 6 foot distances with signs or floor markings for those waiting in line to vote; designating separate entrances and exits; the use of protective gear masks, face shields, gloves and gowns for poll workers assisting sick voters; and allowing curbside voting for people who are ill. "Ensuring that ill voters can vote while maintaining poll worker and voter safety will be essential to minimizing transmission without restricting voting rights," the report said. But in Alabama, where curbside voting had been allowed, the state's attorney general ordered that it be stopped, and on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ban. The new survey of Delaware poll workers did not provide information about whether any cases of Covid were linked to the voting centers. The questions involved only the workers' observations about the conditions and practices at 99 of the state's polling places. The Delaware survey found that most workers and voters wore masks, but did not always use them properly to cover both the mouth and nose. Voters were less careful than poll workers. About 73 percent of the respondents said they very rarely or never saw other poll workers wearing masks the wrong way. But only 54 percent of the workers surveyed said that they rarely or never saw sloppy mask use by voters. Noting that "a substantial proportion" of the poll workers saw incorrect mask use by voters, the report said, "further messaging on proper mask use, including at polling locations, might be needed to strengthen the effectiveness of masks during upcoming elections." The C.D.C. suggested that providing masks for voters "might support adoption of personal prevention practices." Poll workers were also more likely than voters to use hand sanitizer. Nineteen of the 522 workers in the survey had contact with a voter who was ill, with or without a known Covid diagnosis, the report said. Fifteen of the 19 said they wore masks during that contact, but none wore the other protective gear recommended by the C.D.C. for such encounters: face shield, gown, gloves. The survey suggested that the workers had "limited training" in use of the gear. Poll workers in general face multiple risks: Many are older, with health problems that make them especially vulnerable to severe illness if they contract Covid. And they come into close contact with many people on election days, often closer than the 6 foot "social distance" recommended to minimize transmission of the virus. Continuing efforts to recruit younger poll workers might reduce the proportion of workers at risk for severe cases of Covid, the report said. In the meantime, the C.D.C. offered up a list of ways to help minimize the risk for voters: go at off peak times, like midmorning; monitor the voter line from your car and join when the line is short; fill out any needed registration forms ahead of time and review a sample ballot at home to cut down on time spent at the polling location; and take your own black ink pen, or stylus to use on touch screen voting machines. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
WASHINGTON Republicans and Democrats are struggling to find common ground on a long term debt deal. But as economic growth has weakened this quarter, they are at odds over what the flagging recovery needs in the immediate future, too. The Obama administration is arguing that the sluggish economy requires a shot in the arm, and it included tens of billions of dollars of little noticed stimulus measures in its much noticed proposal to Congressional leaders last week. But Republicans have countered that the country cannot afford to widen the deficit further, and have balked at including the measures in any eventual deal. The stimulus measures in the White House's debt proposal stem from President Obama's long since scuttled American Jobs Act proposal, and include a continuation of emergency support for long term unemployed workers, an extension of the payroll tax cut, billions in infrastructure investment and a mortgage refinancing proposal. "We have a very good plan, a very good mix of tax reforms" and savings, said Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, on ABC News last weekend. "We can create some room to invest in things that make America stronger, like rebuilding America's infrastructure." "The president is asking for 1.6 trillion worth of new revenue over 10 years, twice as much as he has been asking for in public," Mr. Boehner said on "Fox News Sunday." "He has stimulus spending in here that exceeded the amount of new cuts that he was willing to consider. It was not a serious offer." As the debate rages in Washington, data has shown the recovery once again sputtering, with the underlying rate of growth too slow to bring down the unemployment rate by much and some of the economic momentum gained in the fall dissipating in the winter. The weakness comes from the manufacturing and exports slowdown, disruptions from Hurricane Sandy and sluggish underlying wage and spending growth. The storm hit the economic juggernauts of New Jersey and New York hard, pushing down work and wages. On top of that, consumers and businesses might be holding back out of concern for the tax increases and spending cuts scheduled to take place at the first of the year unless Congress and the administration come to some agreement. In recent weeks, many forecasters have slashed their estimates of growth in the fourth quarter. Macroeconomic Advisers, for instance, estimates the economy is expanding at only a 0.8 percent annual pace, down from 2.8 percent in the third quarter. "It's a pretty dramatic slowdown," said Joel Prakken, the chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, the St. Louis based forecasting firm. "There's weak demand, which just does not portend well for the coming quarters," he said. RBC Capital Markets put the current pace of growth at just a 0.2 percent annual rate. The chance of seeing "a negative sign in front of fourth quarter gross domestic product is nontrivial, to say the least," Tom Porcelli, chief United States economist at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a note to clients last week. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. If Congress and the Obama administration are able to agree on a budget deal, economists expect that economic growth will pick up in 2013. Stock markets might cheer, businesses might feel more confident about hiring workers and signing contracts and investors might feel more comfortable investing if Congress struck a deal. The turnaround in the housing market, rising auto sales and higher consumer confidence all bode well, they note. Refinancing supported by the Federal Reserve's effort to buy mortgage backed securities would also flush more money into households. Still, recent economic data has come in surprisingly weak. On Monday, the Institute for Supply Management reported that the manufacturing sector contracted in November, with an index of purchasing activity falling to the lowest level since mid 2009. The report said manufacturers expressed "concern over how and when the fiscal cliff issue will be resolved" as well as a slowdown in demand. Over all, unemployment remains high, and wage growth weak. Global growth has gone through a slowdown as well. It all adds up to a United States recovery that might remain vulnerable to shocks like the Midwestern drought that slashed agricultural production this year, or the Japanese tsunami that depressed exports in 2011, or the long simmering European debt crisis that has spooked financial markets for years to come. Economists remain nervous about the combination of the already weak recovery and the prospect of the tax increases and spending cuts with billions of dollars of fiscal contraction likely to occur even if the White House and Congress reach a deal. "We are worried about going too fast, too quick on the cuts side," said former Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, on Monday at a meeting with reporters at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He was presenting a plan for a deficit reduction framework along with Alice M. Rivlin, the budget director under President Bill Clinton. Ms. Rivlin added, "We don't need an austerity budget." Indeed, the two budget experts proposed including a one year income tax rebate to give the recovery some breathing room. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Pope Francis issued one of the most eagerly awaited documents of his papacy this month: a letter that could have laid the groundwork for eliminating the Roman Catholic Church's requirement of priestly celibacy. But it didn't. To the relief of conservative Catholics, and to the dismay of his progressive well wishers, Francis let the matter drop. Ever since Francis summoned 185 bishops to the Vatican in October for three weeks of discussion about the Amazon region, the church had been in a state of agitation and not over burning rain forests or endangered indigenous cultures or the mercurial Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro. The controversy centered on whether certain married church deacons would be permitted to offer Mass in churches too remote for priests to reach regularly. While this might look to an outsider like a petty procedural question, it would have been a crack in the centuries old edifice of celibacy. Two thirds of bishops at the conference approved the idea, arguing that it would help preserve the viability of the Catholic Church in remote parts of South America (where as many as 70 percent of Catholics have no priest to give them communion on Sunday). Some argued that priestly celibacy was dissuading young men from joining the priesthood. Conservatives in the church, including a circle of intellectuals around former Pope Benedict XVI, countered that to speak of a "priest shortage" was to get the wrong end of the stick. The church is not a factory or a phone bank, with so many vacant "posts" it is a holy calling. And the tradition of priestly celibacy, they argued, is central, not peripheral, to that vocation. Although opponents of celibacy present it as newfangled, dating only to the Lateran councils of the 12th century, it is older than that. Sexual continence is important in Jesus's teaching in the Gospels, and it has been urged on bishops from the outset. It is the rule, not the exception, in church history. Attempts to require celibacy for all clergy were underway during the fourth century around the time Constantine was making Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire and, unwittingly, provoking a crisis of morals. "While the Church was kept purified by the fires of persecution," explained the 19th century religious historian Henry Charles Lea, "it offered few attractions for the worldly and ambitious." But as prospects of wealth and power opened up, the church would have to protect itself from "a new class of men, dangerous alike from their talents or their vices." Celibacy was one way of "preventing such wolves from seeking a place among the sheep." It also prevented priestly dynasties. Celibacy works in different ways in different times. For the past few centuries, it helped make the church a haven for young people whose sexuality did not match the ideas of the society at large. Professor Lea's history, written a century ago, is filled with stories of "flagellants." Frederic Martel, in last year's anecdotal investigation "In the Closet of the Vatican," asserted that a large percentage of the Vatican's top clerics who would have entered the priesthood around the 1960s are homosexual. As long as society was repressive, impulses of sexual nonconformity almost never became visible. But when society turned liberationist, as it did in the 1960s and '70s, hidden sexualities emerged. The church had become a nest of difficult to socialize libidos, and a vast number of priestly molestation cases followed, peaking between 1970 and 1980. The rocky transition into sexual modernity has done lasting damage to the church's reputation, especially when it comes to its teachings concerning sexuality. Since 1970, Catholics have remained a remarkably consistent 17 percent or 18 percent of the world's growing population, their numbers roughly doubling (from 650 million to 1.3 billion). The problem has come with priests. They remain stuck at their level of decades ago, around 415,000, although some regions have seen steep declines. (In 1985 the United States had 57,000 priests, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University; by 2015 that number had fallen by a third.) This combination of sex scandals and priestly shortfalls confronts traditionalists with the challenge of defending celibacy's relevance anew. In "From the Depths of Our Hearts," to be published next month, former Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea each give an explanation grounded in theology, not sociology. Benedict considers celibacy a main link binding the new (Catholic) covenant to the old (Jewish) one. It is an outgrowth of Old Testament ideas of priestly abstinence during sacrifices, extended to reflect the daily responsibilities of a Christian priest. He notes that the Eucharistic prayer draws on Deuteronomy for its language of what it means to "stand before God and serve him." The Christian priest's renunciation of his share in God's physical creation has a parallel in God's promise to Israel all Israel's tribes had right to land except the priestly tribe of Levi. Levites therefore had to live "by God and for God," just as the unwed priest does. Neither Benedict nor Cardinal Sarah is naive or prudish. Celibacy is not asexuality. It is sexuality regulated in a special way. Its logic rests on an elaborate analogy between holy orders and holy matrimony. The church is the bride of Christ. Just as a married man must give the whole of himself to his wife, a celibate priest must give the whole of himself to the church. Still, the non Catholic reader who does not follow Cardinal Sarah and Benedict's reasoning closely and patiently is likely to find it weird. Cardinal Sarah writes, "Every time a priest repeats 'this is my Body,' he offers his body, as a man" "son corps sexue," in the French original "in continuity with the sacrifice on the Cross." This is the sense in which celibacy is a "gift to the church," a formula of the reformist Pope Paul VI that many priests, including Pope Francis himself, are fond of repeating. Note well, though it is a gift to the church, not to the individual priest's character building or his emotional needs. This complicates the worldly problem that roiled Pope Francis's recent Amazon deliberations. Whatever its theological justification, is celibacy shutting out otherwise eligible young men who would make good priests? That is the view of Erwin Krautler, the Austrian Brazilian bishop who for 35 years headed the Amazonian prelature of Xingu. He claims the natives there do not even understand celibacy and pity those who practice it. "When I go to an indigenous village," Bishop Krautler said in October, "the first thing they ask is: 'Where is your wife?'" Others, however, including Cardinal Sarah, believe this is an "error in perspective." Cardinal Sarah is an important bridge figure. He is conservative and he has been a priest for 50 years. But missionaries brought his Guinean parents into the church, and he grew up among non Christians. "The younger a Church is, the more she needs an encounter with the radical character of the Gospel," he explains, insisting that if his village had been evangelized by a married man, he would not today be a priest. "The radical character of the missionaries' life is what attracted me." On both sides of this debate, everything seems to be tied up with celibacy. For Cardinal Sarah, as long as the traditional conception of celibacy holds up the conception that a priest celebrating Mass "offers his body, as a man" there is an ironclad logic against ordaining female priests. Should celibacy be rethought, he admits, the logic of female exclusion would grow weaker, as would the traditional conception of the priesthood and, with it, the traditional conception of the church. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
LONDON The Chinese technology giant Huawei on Monday began to feel the painful ripple effects of a Trump administration order that effectively bars American firms from selling components and software to the company, ramping up a cold war between the two countries over technology and trade. The fallout began when Google cut off support to Huawei in recent days for many Android hardware and software services, according to the companies. The move, a response to the Trump administration's order last week, could hamstring Huawei by restricting its access to future versions of the Android operating system. Google will also limit access to popular applications like Maps, Gmail and the Google Play store in new handsets made by Huawei, the world's second largest smartphone maker, behind Samsung. But Huawei was given a temporary reprieve from Google's abrupt pullback by the Commerce Department, which last week had added Huawei to a list of companies deemed a national security risk, effectively preventing it from buying or licensing American parts and technology without special permission from Washington. Late Monday afternoon, the department said in a notice posted to the Federal Register that it would grant 90 day permissions for transactions necessary to maintain and support existing cellular networks and handsets. Google said that it would work with Huawei during the 90 days to provide security updates to its Android operating system, but that it planned to abide by the Commerce Department's orders when the period expired. Chip makers have also started stepping back from dealings with the Chinese firm. The German supplier Infineon said on Monday that it would restrict its business with Huawei. And Intel and Qualcomm, two of the world's largest chip makers, have told employees to cease working with the Chinese company until further notice, according to Bloomberg. The mass flight of American technology companies from Huawei, one of China's proudest corporate champions, is a stark escalation in the high tech battle that has simmered between the two powers for years. China has long prevented many American internet giants from providing services within its borders, and it has placed tight strictures on how other American technology firms can operate. The enormous commercial potential of the Chinese market made it hard for the companies to put up much of a fight as Beijing declared, in effect, that their business interests were subservient to China's national security interests. Now, the United States government is showing that it, too, has ways of getting foreign companies to play by its rules in the name of upholding national security. Its asset is not a giant, untapped market for technology products, but the technology itself the know how and capabilities without which Huawei would not have achieved so much of its success. "We have made substantial contributions to the development and growth of Android around the world," Huawei said in a statement about Google's pullback. "As one of Android's key global partners, we have worked closely with their open source platform to develop an ecosystem that has benefited both users and the industry." The company's decision to halt work with Huawei was earlier reported by Reuters. Intel declined to comment, and Qualcomm did not respond to requests for comment. Major American wireless companies have effectively been blocked from buying Huawei's telecommunications equipment for years, but the company's business has grown rapidly in Africa, Asia and Europe, where its affordable prices have been embraced by consumers and by phone companies that use its antennas, base stations and other hardware to make wireless networks. In recent months, the United States has stepped up its campaign against Huawei, which it has said poses a national security risk. American authorities have worked to persuade allies like Britain and Germany to block the use of Huawei telecommunications equipment. But the efforts have had limited success, as many countries rely on Huawei gear in the race to build up fifth generation, or 5G, wireless communication networks. Last week, President Trump issued a ban prohibiting American telecommunications firms from installing foreign made equipment that could threaten national security. The order instructed the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, to stop transactions "posing an unacceptable risk." Although the order did not single out specific companies, it was widely believed to be directed at Huawei and others in China's tech sector. The actions put pressure on American allies that have so far resisted urging from the Trump administration to issue complete bans against Huawei. James Lewis, a senior vice president and the director of the technology policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that most European countries would prefer a softer approach. "I don't think Europeans realize the extent of the strength of feelings in the U.S. that we need to block Huawei," Mr. Lewis, a former official at the State and Commerce Departments, said. China has not said whether it plans to retaliate against the United States in response to Mr. Trump's move. On Monday, shares in Qualcomm, Infineon, Intel and Alphabet, Google's parent, all fell. Apple, which depends on the Chinese market for a large portion of its revenue, also dropped amid concerns that the tech battle between the two powers made it a potential target. For now, the flight of tech suppliers will test the durability of Huawei's business, which has long depended on access to products from American companies. It is now on the verge of reliving a run in that another Chinese tech company, ZTE, had with Washington not long ago. To Chinese leaders and business executives, that episode remains a vivid cautionary tale of the United States government's ability to weaponize American companies' technological superiority for political ends. That incident also began with a listing by the Commerce Department. ZTE, which competes with Huawei in telecom equipment, was determined to have sold American origin goods to Iran. The department added the company to the entity list in 2016, putting a cloud over its future. In time, ZTE negotiated a lighter sentence with the department, and its business with American suppliers was allowed to continue unrestricted. But last spring, commerce officials said the company had not disciplined the employees responsible for the transactions that had violated American export controls and that the company had lied to American authorities about it. Washington cut ZTE off from all purchases of American components and technology. Within weeks, the company was at death's door. Production stopped. Workers idled in their dorms. Huawei is a much larger company than ZTE, with a bigger global footprint. If it is brought to its knees as ZTE was last year, then the consequences could be devastating for smartphone users and mobile networks across a far wider stretch of the planet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"I am honored and delighted to take on the role of chairman," Ms. Phair said. "The British Fashion Council is in a strong position following the incredible work of Dame Natalie Massenet, Caroline Rush and the team, and my role will be to build on this and help drive continued innovation and new thinking in this fast paced, changing industry ." Ms. Phair began her 13 year e commerce career at Portero Luxury, the first pre owned luxury marketplace. She then joined Net a Porter as president of the Outnet, which she introduced in 2009; she also sat on the board of the Net a Porter Group from 2009 to 2015, before moving to Farfetch. Ms. Massenet, her former boss at Net a Porter, joined the board of FarFetch last February, 18 months after she walked away from the company she created. She is likely to have had a firm hand in guiding the BFC toward a suitable successor. The fact that Ms. Phair's reputation and experience stem largely from the digital world and C suite would also indicate that the BFC is looking to continue on the course set by Ms. Massenet specifically, helping designers leverage the digital world to boost their international exposure and business growth, and cementing London as a fashion capital with events like the annual Fashion Awards. Ms. Phair is also a member of the advisory board of Felix Capital, a venture capital company based in London, and sits on the board of the Italian luxury brand Moncler. A statement from Ms. Rush, the fashion council's chief executive, said: "On behalf of the Board of the British Fashion Council, I welcome the appointment of as our incoming Chair and we all look forward to working with her on strengthening the opportunities for British fashion talent and businesses over the next few years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A former Con Edison substation on the Lower East Side reimagined by the internationally renowned artist/sculptor/composer Walter De Maria as a cavernous home studio, storage facility, and dedicated laboratory for the gestation of his monumental works, is about to enter the market at 25 million. Enticed by spectacular ceiling heights (13 to 32 feet) and exceptional privacy, Mr. De Maria, who died last summer at age 77, bought the hulking four story building at 421 East Sixth Street, and an adjacent lot at No. 419, between First Avenue and Avenue A, in 1980. He lived (modestly) and worked (on a grand scale) there. In the heart of the East Village historic district near Tompkins Square Park, the 16,400 square foot substation was built in 1920 and '21. Before its acquisition by the artist, the brick building it runs a full block north to its alternate entrance on East Seventh Street, where there is a curb cut and garage was used as a photography studio. The annual property tax is 94,407. The sale also includes an unimproved lot at 419 East Sixth, a 7,920 square foot expanse of grass and gravel partially enclosed by a chain link fence with the potential to be repurposed into gardens, a noncommercial gallery, a garage or townhouses; the tax on that is 13,643. Both the building and the lot are now zoned for residential or community usage. Mr. De Maria was private about his work, typically closing the shades of the third floor studio at night. The south windows have one way glass: people outside cannot see the interior during daylight hours. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
While filling out a permit application to drive El Camino del Diablo a dirt road that cuts through 130 miles of saguaro studded desert between Yuma and Ajo, Ariz. I marveled at the hazards it warned I might encounter along the way, including "permanent, painful, disabling, and disfiguring injury or death due to high explosive detonations from falling objects such as aircraft, aerial targets, live ammunition, missiles, bombs, and other similar dangerous situations." I might also stumble across warheads embedded in the ground, not to mention rattlesnakes. Still, I knew from a previous trip that while the Camino del Diablo may feel like a death defying excursion into forbidding territory , it's actually quite safe. The road which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and passes through the vast Sonoran expanses of the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is surprisingly well maintained and no special skills are needed to navigate it. The scenery is vast and mesmerizing. Ocotillos sprout from arid basins, their spiky tendrils and bright red blossoms swaying in the breeze like some kind of weird desert anemone. There are sand dunes and lava flows and knife edged mountains slicing skyward from the desert floor. Owls roost in saguaro cactuses, endangered antelopes browse sparse grasses, bighorn sheep leap among rugged crags. I went in late March, hoping to see desert wildflowers in bloom. Though it's possible to make the drive in one ridiculously long day, it's better to go slowly, so I took three days, camping along the way. Still, it's not a trip to be undertaken carelessly. You don't want to get stuck in the middle of the desert, and if you are, you want to be prepared. Well aware that I was flouting accepted wisdom by traveling alone, I carried plenty of food and water, two spare tires and extra gas. I took comfort in knowing that if my truck did break down, I would likely be discovered by Border Patrol agents within a matter of hours, as a substantial length of the road runs within a mile or two of the Mexican border. Here, one has to work hard not to be found. By the time a Spanish captain named Melchior Diaz led the first convoy of Europeans from Sonoyta to Yuma in 1540 as part of the Coronado expedition, Native Americans including the Quechan, the Cocopah, and the nomadic hunter gatherer Hia C'ed O'odham (Sand People) had lived in this swath of Sonoran desert for thousands of years. European explorers relied heavily on native guides to lead them successfully through the perilous unknown, from one watering hole to the next; among them was Padre Eusebio Kino, who made missionary and scientific trips along the Camino beginning in 1699, and drew its first maps. There were several variations on the route. The shortest course offered the least water, which could have dire consequences. Thirst was less of a problem on longer trails, but those risked Apache attack. Faced with this choice, some believed the safest strategy was to go the long way in the hottest days of summer, when the Apaches tended to retreat to the mountains. Traffic along the Camino peaked in the mid 19th century, as prospectors were lured across it to the Gold Rush in California. In the early 1850s, over 10,000 people, many from Latin America, made the difficult trek each year it was during this time that the trail claimed the most lives and earned its diabolical name. While mapping the border in 1855, Lieutenant Nathaniel Michler noted that along the Camino "death has strewn a continuous line of bleached bones and withered carcasses of horses and cattle as monuments to mark the way." No one keeps track of exactly how many travelers the Camino sees today. The manager of the Cabeza Prieta refuge, Sid Slone, guesses that up to 1,000 people may drive its length each year. And Mr. Slone has never heard of any of them dying in the desert. Contrary to images of deserts as lifeless wastelands, I found myself crossing a spectacularly complex ecosystem. The Sonoran is the most biodiverse desert in the world. This section of it alone is home to more than 275 animal species (not counting insects), and some 400 types of plants, including the saguaro cactus. Perhaps the most likable member of the plant kingdom, each saguaro appears to have a unique personality depending on how their arms are posed, some seem to be waving hello while others stand guard, some are praying for mercy while others are high kicking the cancan. Even better than driving past them is walking among them, taking time to gape at these elephantine cactuses that may live for 200 years. Thankfully, more than a million acres on either side of the Camino is federally protected wilderness. Navigating with 1:100,000 scale United States Geological Survey maps, as well as the Goldwater range map, which can be picked up at the Cabeza Prieta office in Ajo or downloaded online, I aimed southeast. I was hoping to camp near Tinajas Altas, the most reliable water source along the Camino. A set of 15 pools stacked one above the other, hollowed into the granite of the Tinajas Altas Mountains, these natural tanks can hold some 20,000 gallons of rainwater but are rarely full. From even a short distance away, they are invisible. According to the authoritative "Last Water on the Devil's Highway: A Cultural and Natural History of Tinajas Altas," the site is not only a crucial watering hole, but a sacred site for the area's Native Americans. In past centuries, tribes came to hunt bighorn sheep; once the meat was taken, bighorn bones were ritually stacked along nearby footpaths and were sometimes ceremonially cremated. I pulled my truck off a rocky dirt track that ran along the base of the Tinajas Altas Mountains and made camp as the sun was setting. Steep, ivory colored walls of weathered granite rose behind me. To the east a raspberry hued haze settled over the parched flats of the Lechugilla Valley and the Cabeza Prieta range. Night fell and Orion, his dog and their celestial companions emerged above. I was cooking hobo stew over a small fire when two headlights appeared in the distance. Undocumented immigrants whether families or, more commonly, drug mules have long been a fact of life on the Camino. The road itself is used as primitive sensor, as Border Patrol agents drive up and down it, scanning its sandy bed for footprints and other signs of human traffic. I spoke to several agents along the way; all told me that the flow of undocumented immigrants over this section of the border was inconsistent. "It changes all the time," one agent said. "Now it's very quiet." Knowing there may have been people walking north through the wilderness added an unusual element to this trip. I felt sure that if I was approached by migrant workers or a family, that the most they would want from me would be water and food, which I'd be happy to give. But I wasn't sure whether a smuggler with a backpack full of weed or meth might be tempted to steal a truck from a guy alone. Every agent I encountered, though, said that they've never heard of any problems or "negative interactions" between undocumented immigrants and travelers on the Camino. Anyone heading north, I was told, seeks to avoid all contact with "civilians" unless they are dying of thirst. I grappled with the implications of enjoying a place while, at the very same moment, others might be struggling to survive in it. I've always found deserts, raw and elemental, to be the most existentially provocative (and ultimately satisfying) of environments; as a result of the border situation, this one inspires different kinds of questions than any other I've been in. The next morning I got up early. Knowing that rattlesnakes are prone to warming up on the road, I kept an eye out, hoping to see one up close but from the safety of my truck. Though the desert to the west had been speckled with flowers, from bright yellow brittlebush blooms to scarlet petaled chuparosa shrubs, I was entering a land painted with color. This year's so called superbloom had apparently made it all the way out here. The blocky basalt of the Pinacate lava flow shimmered with desert sunflowers, while white primrose and prickly poppies, yellow marigolds, purple sand verbena, and more, burst from the Pinta Sands in random arrangements expressing a chaotic exuberance of life. In a gentle valley hewed between Papago Mountain and unnamed hills to the north, groves of saguaros stood with waves of orange globemallow lapping at their feet. The spring bloom is difficult to predict, hinging on the timing and quantity of desert rains. It may begin as early as February and, with different plants blooming at different times, can last until late May. Though most of the cactuses hadn't yet blossomed, I felt I'd been lucky. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The 49ers Run (and Run and Run) Over Green Bay and Into the Super Bowl Follow our live coverage of Super Bowl 2020 between the Chiefs and Niners. SANTA CLARA, Calif. A year ago Sunday, while the N.F.L. elite were competing in their conferences' championship games, the San Francisco 49ers' staff traveled to Mobile, Ala., to coach at the Senior Bowl. In keeping with that game's custom, only the league's worst teams receive that opportunity, but the 49ers were unbowed. At dinner one night, someone uttered three words that calibrated their expectations: "Mobile to Miami" the site of Super Bowl LIV on Feb. 2. In a far corner of the 49ers' locker room Sunday evening, away from players climbing atop chairs and posing for photos and dancing to "The Box" by Roddy Ricch, General Manager John Lynch clutched a black T shirt. After speaking their objective into existence, the 49ers completed their ascent to the N.F.C. championship by clubbing the Green Bay Packers, 37 20, scoring on six consecutive drives in a game they led by 27 points at halftime. For their first Super Bowl trip in seven years, the 49ers will journey to a venue about as far as possible from the embrace of Levi's Stadium Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., for a tantalizing matchup with the Kansas City Chiefs and one that abounds with warm memories. In the same stadium where Joe Montana connected with John Taylor for a late winning touchdown against Cincinnati 31 years ago, and where six years later Steve Young would unbridle an explosive passing offense in thrashing the Chargers, San Francisco will seek to join New England and Pittsburgh as the only franchises to win six Super Bowl titles. The 49ers have not won one, though, since the 1994 season, when an assistant named Mike Shanahan coached Young and coordinated their high scoring offense. Shanahan ambled through the field level corridors at Levi's Stadium on Sunday after witnessing his son, Kyle, the 49ers' third year coach, bully the Packers with a modern, devastating spin on a power running game the Air Raid of rushing attacks. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Kyle Shanahan amplified his father's scheme with enough speed and misdirection and pre snap subterfuge to feel comfortable calling a run on Sunday in a standard passing situation 3rd and 8 at the Packers' 36 yard line and then watching Raheem Mostert, an undrafted speedster playing for his seventh team, scamper just about untouched for the first of his four touchdowns. Mostert, who motivates himself by reading every date he was cut, by the six teams who discarded him before the 49ers signed him in November 2016, dashed through creases the approximate size of San Francisco Bay, running for 220 yards the second most in a postseason game behind Eric Dickerson (248) in 1986. "That was honestly my favorite play of the day," fullback Kyle Juszczyk said. "Who calls a trap on 3rd and 8?" Kyle Shanahan does, that's who, reinforcing a prevailing maxim of the 2019 season: He who hesitates against San Francisco loses. Even on a day when the 49ers rushed 42 times for 285 yards and scored 37 points while throwing just eight passes, they proved, again, that their most dangerous element is that there is not a most dangerous element. They won their first eight games behind a snarling defense that, on Sunday, had three sacks and three takeaways. When their defense, pummeled by injuries, sagged in the final month of the season, quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo steered the 49ers to critical victories against New Orleans, Seattle and the Rams. And when Kyle Shanahan determined that San Francisco would be best served reducing Garoppolo to an automaton, handing the ball off again and again and again, the 49ers demolished both playoff opponents, Minnesota and Green Bay, on the ground. Garoppolo threw two passes in the second half; he almost used his right arm more after the game, when Garoppolo signed tight end George Kittle's white T shirt featuring his shirtless image, than he did during it. "When we have all our weapons, it's really, really hard to beat us," right tackle Mike McGlinchey said. "The last two weeks, it's really hard to even stay with us." Even in 17 point routs, N.F.L. games hinge on tiny moments, and the Packers' decision to punt on their opening series, facing 4th and 1 at midfield, turbocharged their demise. The conservative call almost offended the 49ers, who all week had heard the rhetoric emanating from Green Bay that after winning six straight since losing here by 37 8 in Week 12, in a game televised nationally, the Packers were now healthier, stronger, and better. "You weren't ready the first time," cornerback Richard Sherman said, "and that was in front of the whole country." And so however much Shanahan professed that every game is self contained, that throttling Green Bay in November would not portend throttling Green Bay in January, his players believed otherwise. McGlinchey said he watched the film of that victory six or seven times "just to keep feeling what we felt that night." In reality, the 49ers have felt that way dominant and unrelenting for most of the season. All three of their defeats against Seattle, Baltimore and Atlanta came within the final 10 seconds. They tied for the most victories in the league, claimed the top seed in the N.F.C. playoffs and battered the two best teams in the N.F.C. North because they have the scariest, deepest roster in the conference, if not the league. Before this revival, before Shanahan and Lynch started molding this team to their specifications three years ago, the 49ers hosted the N.F.L.'s grandest celebration the 50th edition of the Super Bowl at the apex of their dysfunction. After finishing last in their division in 2015 and firing their coach, the 49ers welcomed the league to their sparkling new home: Imagine being evicted from your house as soon as the party guests arrive. They endured that indignity, and so many others, and now look. Before the game, the Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice the most valuable player of that Super Bowl XXII victory over the Bengals a quarter century ago ran the length of the field to rouse the crowd, then danced on the sideline wearing a cartoonish gold chain with the 49ers emblem. At halftime, the 49ers ran off the field waving to the crowd and slapping hands with fans by the tunnel, as if the game were over which it wasn't, though it was. And afterward, they abstained from pondering how to minimize Patrick Mahomes, to block Chris Jones, to dupe Tyrann Mathieu, to neutralize Tyreek Hill, to savor the moment. The 49ers are back in the Super Bowl, and their route to South Florida, like so many drivers heading east, was through Alabama. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Ssssh. Listen. Do you hear that? That resounding silence emanating from the fashion world about the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a.k.a. one of the biggest consumer tech product events of the year? It was only three years ago that wearables were the buzzword of the runways, predicted to trend in closets everywhere. Now they barely merit a mention. It's probably going too far to say that the love affair between fashion and technology is over. But it certainly seems to have cooled. While there are still plenty of designer name smartwatches coming to market Fossil just introduced a style in collaboration with Kate Spade; Louis Vuitton entered the sector last year, teaming up with Google and Qualcomm Technology they are not generating nearly the same flushed excitement that they once did. In 2015, Brian Krzanich, the chief executive of Intel, gave the opening keynote speech at CES introducing a buttonsize computing system called Curie that was touted as a tool to change how our clothes function. It was part of a wearables push that included a smart bracelet made in collaboration with Opening Ceremony and smart glasses made with Oakley. And that address followed the long lead drumroll for the Apple Watch, which was introduced to the fashion crowd to great fanfare the previous September, just in time for fashion week. (There was so much breathless expectation over the product that some editors prioritized Cupertino, Calif., and the reveal over the New York ready to wear collections.) Marketed as a must have accessory, the Apple Watch seemed a clear sign that Apple had its sights set on style, especially after the hiring of the former Yves Saint Laurent chief executive Paul Deneve and the former Burberry C.E.O. Angela Ahrendts in 2013, and the former Tag Heuer executive Patrick Pruniaux in 2014. The next year, it was announced that Apple had teamed up with Hermes to create straps and watch faces. More brand partnerships were rumored. Apple sponsored the Met Gala in 2016. But Mr. Pruniaux joined the Kering watch brand Ulysse Nardin last August and Mr. Deneve left Apple quietly later in the year. Though the watch's market share has grown, increasingly, it seems as if most of the focus on wearables has shifted to health and functionality, as opposed to aesthetics, and most of fashion's focus on technology has shifted to production and manufacturing (3 D printing, A.I.), not new categories of items. Maybe we should have expected it. I remember sitting in a Paris hotel room during the women's wear shows as Jonathan Ive of Apple showed me the first Apple Watch and asking (I was skeptical) what it would do. He told me they didn't really know; that they would have to see how people used it to understand what it would really become. Presumably that's what's going on now. When fashion and tech first started making goo goo eyes at each other, there was a lot of speculation as to whether two such different worlds could ever really mesh. You could understand the attraction. Often as not they share the same consumer, who is making choices about whether to buy, say, a phone, or a coat. Design matters deeply to both sectors. There was a lot of talk about learning to speak each other's language. And they probably have, to a certain extent. Smartwatches were the beginning. But if this is going to be a meaningful partnership, that can't be the end. Especially because no matter how many designers and brands get involved, the end result seems to look pretty much the same. There is only so much you can do, style wise, within the engineering limits of the wristwatch form. As a result, you get what we have now which is ... yawn. The problem is still that, a few smart sportswear items aside, no one is really sure exactly what role technology should play in the rest of our wardrobe. What do we want our clothes to do, beyond what they already do? Maybe temperature control, often fantasized about. Maybe not. Because here's the thing: Fashion choices have always communicated about identity, values, community pretty effectively to the world. Even without Siri or Alexa to help. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The Segway itself was a technological marvel; as Time put it, "not only does it have no brakes, it also has no engine, no throttle, no gearshift and no steering wheel. And it can carry the average rider for a full day, nonstop, on only five cents' worth of electricity." But it was impressive without being particularly useful. (Was the world looking for something that transported at a speed slower than a car's but faster than walking? And isn't that just a bike?) And perhaps more to the point, like much technology of the time, it was so complex that people couldn't figure out how to use it. The Segway did not inspire a rush of buyers, and that's probably for the best, because riders often crashed them. One high profile accident was in 2003 when President George W. Bush fell off one while visiting his family complex in Kennebunkport, Maine. That same year, the company had to recall thousands of the machines because when the battery ran out, the scooter would stop, sometimes throwing riders off. Perhaps the most tragic (and ironic) accident came in 2010, when James Heselden, a British entrepreneur who had bought the company just a year earlier, died by running his Segway off a cliff. In 2015, a Segway did something no human could: It "ran down" Usain Bolt, the Olympic sprinter, when a cameraman riding one crashed and knocked him over. (Mr. Bolt turned out to be OK.) But mostly Segways didn't work because people simply looked ridiculous riding them. It is telling that in most of the news stories about the Segway's demise, the photo editors used an image not of Mr. Kamen or the glossy launch photos or even President Bush's fall: They used Kevin James's Paul Blart character from the "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" movies (there are two of them, somehow). The Segway was mostly successful as a device for beat cops and security guards, and no one represented that more than Paul Blart: a portly, affably ineffectual mall security guard who, criminals quickly learned, couldn't move on his Segway nearly as fast as they could run. The sequel steered so hard into the Segway joke that it featured the device on the poster. The Next Big Idea had become a sight gag in a low budget comedy sequel (and a particularly bad one at that). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Hung like artwork, 26 white doors decorate the dining room of Las Puertas, Victor Parra Gonzalez's tiny nouveau Mexican restaurant in a gray gabled house on Buffalo's West Side. "Every one represents a person of major importance who told me I would not open this restaurant," the chef said. "Seeing those doors every day tells me we accomplished something." The doubters had a point. Mr. Gonzalez's first restaurant, the ambitious Jaguar at the Bistro near Niagara Falls, closed in 2015. As a follow up, a deeply personal food venture in Buffalo's emerging Five Points neighborhood seemed audacious. A year after Las Puertas' debut, though, the Acapulco born chef is having the last laugh. Marrying the earthy cuisine of his birthplace with rigorous French technique, the 29 year old earned a 2018 James Beard Awards semifinalist as Best Chef/Northeast. His highly photogenic plates luscious duck breast in subtle pipian verde, translucent scallop aguachile, rich chicken confit in mole rojo make fond allusions to his homeland while showcasing his precision and wit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It's a strange symptom of our increasingly thin sliced culture that you may spend your whole life without encountering the work of the Duplass brothers, or you may feel as if you see it everywhere. As a duo, the sibling filmmakers, Jay and Mark, have written and directed a couple of innovative and endearing low budget independent features ("The Puffy Chair," "Baghead") and a few modestly sized studio movies ("Cyrus," "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"). They're creators of the dearly departed TV comedy drama "Togetherness" and the oddball anthology series "Room 104," both for HBO. Individually, Mark, who is 41, with short hair and a dude's dude looks, starred in the FX comedy "The League," and Jay, who is 45, and often bearded and bespectacled, plays one of the neurotic siblings on the Amazon series "Transparent." The Duplasses are cool enough to know that it's not cool to admit to having a brand, but they most assuredly do: They represent a style of storytelling that's naturalistic and unapologetically earnest, along with a supportive, if we can do it you can too spirit of creativity. Sure, there are also parts that seem extraneous or simply don't work, but the Duplasses never pretend to be masters of their craft. As they write in the book: "It seems that people like the Coen brothers have a specific vision of what their movies will look like from the moment they begin writing them, and then somehow are able to realize that vision and make those movies, for the most part, inspired and impeccably amazing. We, however, are not the Coen brothers." In episodic chapters, the Duplasses recount their upbringing in Metairie, La., and boyhood rites of passage like getting cable TV and a video camera to shoot their first movies. There's a refreshing unpretentiousness to these sections: The brothers are unabashed fans of kitsch like "The Karate Kid Part II" and the soft rock duo Air Supply, and their close knit kinship turns poignant when Jay has an emotional breakdown as a student at the University of Texas at Austin and Mark, still in high school, travels there to take care of him. 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. Though their early, self financed foray into grown up moviemaking is a mediocre "Rocky" knockoff called "Vince Del Rio," the brothers eventually earn acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival: first, in 2003, with a 3 short film called "This Is John," and then, in 2005, with "The Puffy Chair," a relationship road trip feature. Initially, the Duplasses seem to be living the fantasy of every indie filmmaker: "Buyers, agents, managers, producers and studio executives were all swarming us," they write. But they quickly realize that these industry big shots are interested in developing other ideas with them, not in acquiring the movie the Duplasses made using 10,000 borrowed from their parents. "In short," they write, "we seemed to be in demand, but we couldn't figure out how to actually make money." It takes many months for the brothers to receive a legitimate offer for "The Puffy Chair," and while they are eager to accept it, for the amount of money alone, they somehow find the fortitude to resist, and end up agreeing to a different deal one that provides no money up front but includes distribution from an upstart DVD by mail company called Netflix. It's a valuable lesson in patience that has continued to pay dividends for the Duplasses, who signed a four picture deal with Netflix earlier this year. While I appreciated the brothers' honest tales of dealing with anxiety, filial conflict and failing equipment during their collaborations, I was less taken with a chapter in which they reproduce an early draft of one of their unfilmed story ideas, along with Jay's handwritten notes, though readers' interest in this sort of paraphernalia may vary. Other sections, in which they compile and consolidate lists of their Top 10 films of all time, or imagine elaborate back stories for strangers they see at airports, may seem charming to devoted fans but felt like filler to me. More worrisome were passages in which the brothers, for all of their enthusiasm and desire to get others to participate in cinema, seem unaware of their inherent privilege as white men from a comfortable background, and who, as siblings working together, have an irresistible gimmick. It's probably not especially helpful for struggling, financially strapped young filmmakers at the start of their careers to be told to buy a house as soon as possible and pay off the mortgage by renting out bedrooms to creative pals. And the brothers' advice to invest in the stock market the Duplasses say they bought "a slew of shares" of Netflix in 2005 isn't practical unless you possess a trust fund or a time machine. Still, it's hard not to root for the Duplasses in moments like the one when their sales agent tells them they're not allowed to attend the Sundance after party for their film "Baghead," lest it appear that they're not engaged in heated efforts to get the movie sold. In another passage, they find themselves fighting with studio executives who want them to reshoot a scene from "Cyrus," because they feel the apartment of its lead character a depressed divorce needs more throw pillows. After getting uncharacteristically loud and standing their ground, the brothers win the day. "From that moment forward," the Duplasses write, "they pretty much let us do our thing. Which was a wonderful and terrible thing in the end." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
This U.S. Open Will Be Judged by the Future of Osaka and Thiem The surreal, fan free zone of a United States Open that ended on Sunday night deserves to be judged on many levels. It was, let us not forget, extraordinary that it happened at all considering the headwinds, domestic skepticism and international quarantine issues it faced amid the coronavirus pandemic. After all the understandable concern, just one player, Benoit Paire of France, tested positive, although several other French and Belgian players and coaches were restricted to their hotel rooms for more than a week because of contact with Paire. Further down the track, however, this U.S. Open will be judged in large part by the quality of its champions. When future tennis fans and historians scan the long list of Grand Slam tournament results that date to the 19th century, they will see Osaka's and Thiem's names for 2020. If both turn out to be tennis greats, there will be even less of a reason to retrofit an asterisk onto this unique please, let it be unique edition of the tournament, which was missing six of the top 10 women and Rafael Nadal, its defending champion in men's singles. Osaka, 22, and Thiem, 27, are young in a sport that has largely been dominated by the elders for the last decade. But the 2020 U.S. Open appears to be on solid ground in the champion department. Osaka, with three Grand Slam singles titles and a former ranking of No. 1, is a surefire Hall of Fame candidate. She also has charisma, an offbeat wit and other intangibles, including a knack for being a part of big picture narratives. Her victory over Serena Williams in the 2018 U.S. Open final turned into an international incident after Williams was docked a point and then a game for code of conduct violations, sparking conversations about gender bias and sympathy for Osaka, whose victory celebration was anything but. Consider, too, Osaka's role over the last three weeks in shining the spotlight on Black victims of violence, including police violence, a campaign she said had inspired her to keep winning. Her willingness to embrace the political was not as bold as it would have been for past champions (this is a different time), but it was still quite a contrast with her fellow finalist, Victoria Azarenka. Perhaps the most famous athlete from Belarus, Azarenka chose not to weigh in on the tumult in her country, where mass protests continue against President Alexander Lukashenko, a leader she knows personally who is accused of stealing his last election. In light of Osaka's easy power, hard earned fitness and ability to lift her level on big points in New York, she would quite likely have won this U.S. Open even if all of the top 10 had made the trip. The picture is less clear but still promising for Thiem. His nerve jangling, strength sapping marathon victory on Sunday over Alexander Zverev gave him only his first Grand Slam singles title. But that is quite an achievement in this top heavy era, and Thiem has already reached three other Grand Slam finals. If he can walk in less than two weeks, when the French Open begins, he will be among the top three favorites there as well, along with the 12 time champion Nadal and the world No. 1, Novak Djokovic. While Osaka's victory was a reflection of the present in women's tennis, Thiem's victory was a projection of the future in the men's game. Though it is refreshing and significant that someone other than the Big Three Nadal, Djokovic and Roger Federer finally won a major, the downside is that Thiem did not have to beat any of the Big Three in this tournament to do so. That is hardly Thiem's fault: Djokovic was defaulted in the fourth round for unsportsmanlike conduct after knocking a ball in frustration that hit a line umpire in the throat. But a victory in these circumstances does leave a lesser impression. What made Osaka such a star is, in large part, that she won her first major title against Williams, the greatest player of this era, in extraordinary, debate generating circumstances. Thiem has beaten each of the Big Three at least four times, just not yet in New York. As irresistible as it was in its final stages, Sunday's final between a German and an Austrian was expected to draw one of the lowest television ratings in the United States for a U.S. Open men's final. That was no blip. In a tournament with no paying spectators, there were very few American television viewers, either. ESPN's ratings were microscopic: a surprise and disappointment to both Open organizers and ESPN, which pushed hard for the tournament to happen. The network, indeed, was the main reason the tournament was held, because of its rights fee worth more than 100 million annually. It should not be viewed as churlish to make that point. The U.S. Open revenue does not simply pay big salaries to United States Tennis Association officials. It funds the sport at many levels in this country, and most of the players who took part in the tournament had not had a significant payday in six months. First round losers in singles earned 61,000, and the U.S.T.A. had contributed to player relief funds and provided some support for coaches and tennis programs in the United States. But staging the U.S. Open was not entirely about the money. It was also a symbolic gesture after all that New York has endured, and though none of the players made it to Manhattan at least officially they did make it to the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and give it their all amid the silence. The night of the women's singles semifinals when Osaka held off Jennifer Brady and Azarenka defeated Williams would have been quite a night in any tennis season. Scanning the sports landscape on Sunday, live professional sports were everywhere: N.B.A. and N.H.L. playoffs, N.F.L. openers, Major League Baseball, W.N.B.A., European soccer and more. That glut helps explain the U.S. Open's low ratings, but how would it have looked if the tournament's leaders had not managed to get big time tennis back on court with so many other leagues succeeding? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
On Monday, the Los Angeles Rams unveiled a new logo, which had been subject to speculation for most of the month. The redesign was the culmination of a two year process, and the rollout, ahead of the team's relocation to a new stadium, was clearly important to the Rams. The design process was painstakingly detailed on a website launched just for the occasion. Kevin Demoff, the chief operating officer of the Rams, said the team's goal "was to restore the blue and yellow color scheme that the fans love." Yet despite the good intentions, the reaction to the unveiling of the logo seemed unanimous by Tuesday: Almost everybody hates it. There were two versions: a new take on the familiar ram's head, an alteration that drew mostly negative feedback, and the primary logo, an abstract ram's horn swooping over a capitalized L.A., which drew mostly derision. "The L.A. mark was crafted with a focus on the horn entwining with L.A., ensuring that the Rams are forever tied to the city of Los Angeles," the team said in a statement, gliding over the franchise's 20 year history in St. Louis, where it won a Super Bowl. The design of the new SoFi Stadium, which the Rams and the Chargers will share, mimicked the old logo, some said. So why change it now? (Demoff of the Rams said the notion that the stadium had emulated the old logo was "always urban legend, never part of the plan.") It also looks a little bit like the logo of the Rams' rivals, the Chargers, some said. Wilson wasn't so sure: "The blues are quite a bit different. A little similarity is not a bad thing, because they are playing in the same stadium." And Demoff noted: "It's hard. The L.A. Galaxy, the Chargers, they all have blue and yellow. It's a popular color." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has teamed with Funny or Die, the producer of short online comedy videos, to create a series of humorous ads promoting the Fiat 500L. The car plays only a background role in the plotlines, which poke fun at the cultural differences between a dowdy American couple and their fashionable Italian neighbors. (Autoblog) Honda announced Thursday that it was recalling 175,000 Fit and Vezel hybrids sold in Japan because a software problem could cause unintended acceleration. The automaker said it had received 11 reports of accidents related to the problem from December to April, but was not aware of any injuries. (Bloomberg) Nissan announced Wednesday that it would offer two years of free charging to buyers of its Leaf electric vehicle. The program provides access to more than 2,600 charging stations around the United States, including more than 200 quick charging stations. (Nissan) The United Auto Workers union announced tentative plans Wednesday to form a union local for Volkswagen workers at the automaker's Chattanooga, Tenn., plant. U.A.W. officials said that participation of the union would be voluntary and that formal recognition of the union by VW would not come until a majority of the plant's workers had joined. (The Nashville Tennessean) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Robert K. Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, has been offered a deal that includes paying a fine and doing community service in return for admitting that if his soliciting prostitution case were to go to trial, the prosecutors would win. The prosecutors in Palm Beach County, Fla., offered the deal to Mr. Kraft and 24 other men who last month were arrested on misdemeanor charges of buying sex at the Orchids of Asia day spa in Jupiter, Fla. The police and prosecutors say the massage parlor is the focus of a wider investigation into human sex trafficking in several counties in Florida. Mr. Kraft who faces two misdemeanor counts and the other 24 men have been charged only with soliciting prostitution; they have not been charged with any crimes in connection to sex trafficking. News of the plea offer was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The investigation into sex trafficking is still continuing, said Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for the state attorney's office in Palm Beach County. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LONDON A British review of Huawei found "significant" security problems with the Chinese company's telecommunications equipment, a conclusion that supports a United States effort to ban it from next generation wireless networks. The British report, released on Thursday, said there were "underlying defects" in Huawei's software engineering and security processes that governments or independent hackers could exploit, posing risks to national security. While the report did not call for an outright ban of Huawei equipment, it was endorsed by the country's top cybersecurity agency. The conclusions buttress the Trump administration's push to convince its allies that Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment, creates grave risks to national security. The White House has accused Huawei of being an arm of the Chinese government that can be used for spying or to sabotage communications networks, a charge that Huawei has vehemently denied. But the American push has run into hurdles. Many countries, including Britain, have resisted the effort to ban Huawei, arguing that the risk can be mitigated. It is a critical time for wireless carriers as they prepare to spend billions of dollars to introduce next generation wireless networks, known as 5G, which governments see as essential infrastructure for a rapidly digitizing global economy. The British report highlights broader challenges facing many countries. While Huawei products may pose cybersecurity risks, the company is a key provider of the equipment needed to build 5G networks. If countries issue an outright ban, they could face costly delays in adopting the technology that not only will increase the download speeds of mobile phones but is expected to create breakthroughs in manufacturing, transportation and health care. And Huawei is already a central part of many countries' telecommunications networks, making a ban logistically difficult. Governments are looking to continue using Huawei's equipment while limiting its risks. Germany, India and the United Arab Emirates, among others, have signaled they are unlikely to follow the Americans' lead on a ban of Huawei's 5G equipment. In a statement, Huawei said the British report "details some concerns about Huawei's software engineering capabilities. We understand these concerns and take them very seriously." This week, the European Union issued recommendations on securing 5G networks that didn't call for a Huawei ban. The British government is expected to issue new telecommunications regulations this year. One main concern raised by the United States and others pushing for a ban is Huawei's ties to the Chinese government, which maintains tight control over the national economy. A law adopted by China in 2017 has been interpreted as requiring companies to provide assistance to Beijing on national security matters. Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the United States commended Britain "for taking a hard look at its telecommunications vendors in order to ensure the maximum security of its networks." He added, "We share many of the concerns listed in the Oversight Board's report." 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. The British authorities are trying to differentiate Huawei's security flaws from a broader effort by Beijing to infiltrate its networks. The report on Thursday described a company with poor engineering practices and problems stemming from those engineering flaws, more than one operating at the orders of Chinese authorities. In the report, British officials determined that Huawei could not replicate much of the software it built, meaning that the authorities could not be sure what code was being introduced into the country's wireless networks. They added that Huawei had poor oversight of suppliers that provided components for its products. "There remains no end to end integrity," the report said. A senior American government official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations about Huawei, said the British finding of pervasive sloppy engineering underscored concerns about the security risks and hidden costs of using cheaper Huawei equipment in 5G networks. The environment at Huawei could allow for the intentional introduction of an exploitable flaw that would be lost in the background noise of poor practices, the official said. The official added that the intelligence community did not expect to find overt, smoking gun "back doors" in Huawei code clearly meant to permit illicit access to network data. Instead, it expects "bug doors" flaws that can be explained away as a mere mistake if they come to light, but that can be exploited for the same purposes by China or by other sophisticated actors who discover them. Since 2010, Britain has had an oversight board, now led by the National Cyber Security Center, tasked with overseeing Huawei's operations. The company's products and code are reviewed at a security lab about 70 miles outside London. In November, after British officials raised questions with Huawei about its practices, the company pledged to spend 2 billion over the next five years to improve its software and security processes. The approach is seen as a potential model for other countries looking to add more safeguards over Huawei. Germany has opened a security lab in Bonn where Huawei's equipment and code can be reviewed. The company has also opened a facility in Brussels to appease the concerns of European Union officials. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Talk about a spoiled birthday. For years leading up to its 150th anniversary the Metropolitan Museum of Art had been planning a swell of celebratory programming: an overhaul of its British Galleries, debuts of major gifts of photography and drawing, new cross cultural displays, an international symposium on collecting, a Great Hall photo op with the mayor and a big cake. At the center of this Busby Berkeley scaled jubilee was to be "Making the Met," an exhibition mapping the growth and transformations of the museum's collection. You know the rest: Days before the show's planned opening, the coronavirus pandemic forced this museum and every other in New York to shut down, and turned the Met's sesquicentennial into an annus horribilis. By June, the Met's director, Max Hollein, was apologizing for a botched statement of solidarity with Black Lives Matter after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor ignited online arguments over museums' past and present wrongdoings. Later that month he had to apologize again, after a senior curator misstepped on Instagram as protesters nationwide pulled down statues. Mr. Hollein, using far more direct language than his predecessors, conceded that "There is no doubt that the Met and its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as white supremacy." So the museum that reopens to the public Saturday, after by far the longest closure in its history, has taken some knocks, and "Making the Met" now has to answer weightier questions. Just what kind of institution is this? How does this museum, does any universal museum, give an account of itself today? Andrea Bayer, the Met's deputy director for collections and administration, and Laura D. Corey, a senior researcher at the museum, have tried to craft that account with a team of hundreds, all credited by name at the entrance to "Making the Met." Its more than 250 objects are displayed, roughly speaking, by the date the Met acquired them rather than the period or place they were made. This unusual organizing principle lets you map the growth of the Met from room to room, even as it creates strange, riveting juxtapositions across time. For visitors returning after five months, the catholicity of these galleries will be a treat. Here is a legends only mini Met, which can be appreciated on the surface as a supersaturated treasure house. But in its structure, "Making the Met" is all about the ambitions and blind spots of an institution and the changing schemes of meaning, value and interpretation that form an invisible frame around all the world's beauty. Those ambitions began in 1866, in a flush of American optimism after the end of the Civil War, and came to fruition four years later with the acquisition of a Roman sarcophagus. The early Met, like the nearly contemporaneous art museums of Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, scored rather higher on aspiration than connoisseurship. The earliest purchases in "Making the Met" include a fine marble bust of Benjamin Franklin, by the Revolutionary era French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon, but also misattributed old masters, replicas of European sculptures, and thousands of Cypriot antiquities that its first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, excavated with something less than scientific rigor. (Also among these first acquisitions is Anthony van Dyck's 1624 painting of Saint Rosalia, the protectress of plague stricken Palermo, which I was lucky to see in the first days of the pandemic.) "It contains no first rate example of a first rate genius," griped an anonymous critic for The Atlantic Monthly who turns out to have been Henry James. But the Met was underway, and from here "Making the Met" plots the development of the collection in nine further chronological galleries, joined up by a central alley that displays projections of the museum's old information desk, signage workshop, repair rooms. The ultimate stimulators of the growth of the collection, in the first Gilded Age as in our current one, were the city's richest: J.P. Morgan, Robert Lehman, and other financiers and industrialists who inherited the tastes, and in the best cases the noblesse oblige, of European princes. They set out to "convert pork into porcelain," in the rather gauche words of one early museum trustee and "Making the Met" has heaps of their finest donations, from an exquisite 14th century mosque lamp, which Morgan gave in 1917, to a burnished 1636 van Dyck portrait of the pregnant Queen Henrietta Maria of England, which Jayne Wrightsman bequeathed to the Met upon her death last year. Picasso's 1913 14 "Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair," whose disjunctive articulations of arms and breasts owe debts to West African statuary, is another new arrival; Leonard Lauder delivered it last year, part of his promised gift of Cubist painting that has beefed up the holdings of a museum once frightened of modernism. The answer, Ms. Bayer and her team affirm in "Making the Met," lies inside the beautiful objects themselves, in the layers of history that have accreted in the last century and a half. These works, having traveled to New York from all corners, bear memories of encounters, scars of violence, new names, new prices. They've been transformed as they've moved, and so they're ideally positioned to map the intersections and interdependence of our histories. But to articulate that interdependence you need to do more than fill gaps in a purportedly universal collection. You need a new "relational ethics," in the words of the French art historian Benedicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr, authors of the groundbreaking 2018 report on the restitution of African art. Relational ethics means recognizing that what the museum once called "universal" was one specific worldview not to be scrapped wholesale, but to be absorbed into a global network of other tactics, other approaches, other voices. Relational ethics means treating objects of the collection not as static objects of beauty, but vectors whose meanings and values change as they circulate among peoples as the Met did in "Interwoven Globe," its unbelievably intelligent textile exhibition of 2013. It means opening new circuits of research and collaboration that stretch well past 1000 Fifth Avenue as the Met has done in its current knockout show "Sahel," whose curators worked with colleagues in Senegal and Niger. Relational ethics means something much deeper than a box ticking exercise; it means elaborating the humanism that the Met supposedly stands for to its fullest, most global extent. Reformists inside our universal museums now promise "inclusion." Radicals outside them prefer "decolonization." But both of those objectives will come to naught, as Ms. Savoy and Mr. Sarr understood, unless we see culture as an infinite chain of differences, which always defies the binary oppositions we've inherited from the age of empire, colonialism and encyclopedic collecting. The Met in 2020 has the potential to be an exemplar of this relational ethics, and to place the Mangaaka statue, the Michelangelo drawing, the Marilyn Monroe photograph within a web of lived relations where all of us, at all times, from all places, find our reflections in the art of all peoples. It is the only metropolitanism worth the name. Through Jan. 3 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which reopens Aug. 29. (Member preview days are Aug. 27 and 28.) Visit metmuseum.org for an overview of safety protocols and ticketing information. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When I was young I liked to read about cities I never dreamed I'd visit. And that's how I fell in love with the name of the London train station and neighborhood known as King's Cross or "King's X," as this most English of place names was sometimes gracefully abbreviated. But when I first moved to England, in 1996, grace wasn't so easy to find amid the widespread social and economic challenges that had come to define this corner of north London. Today, much (but by no means all) of the neighborhood has been transformed by swank restaurants and shops, expensively repurposed industrial structures, and the glittering glass offices in which the gears of a decent chunk of London's booming knowledge economy turn ever faster. Welcome, in these Brexit tossed times, to King's Cross, and to one of London's most fascinating stories of adversity and renewal. Only a "chilly Londoner," wrote E.M. Forster, would fail to find character in London's great railway terminals. To Margaret, in "Howards End," King's Cross station "had always suggested Infinity" and to think she never saw the new concourse, opened in 2012, which added soaring space and much needed light to a hub that's busier than many airports. Keep an eye out for the sign for Platform 9 3/4 , where Harry Potter caught the express to Hogwarts. Then cross the street to the spellbinding St. Pancras International station, a hub for commuter and national services as well as high speed Eurostar trains to continental Europe. The battle to preserve and restore this Victorian Gothic masterpiece took decades, and many Londoners would agree that it's now the jewel in the crown of railway terminals that encircle the capital. Welcome just disembarked Parisians with a tune on the public pianos one's a signed gift from Elton John. Then snag a selfie with the statue of the poet John Betjeman (whose advocacy helped save the station) or with the gold leafed, 18 foot wide clock. After the previous clock was dropped by a crane in the 1960s, a train guard gathered the shards in a wheelbarrow and took them home to his farm. Dent the clockmakers responsible for Big Ben and another firm relied on these fragments to create the replica you see today. The old ticket office of St. Pancras station was the very image of Victorian splendor. Now it's home to the Booking Office, one of my favorite bars. Here, just yards from gleaming Eurostar trains, fete Anglo continental harmonies with a Lavender Vesper (PS13): an entente cordiale that includes Chase vodka and gin from Herefordshire, French vermouth, and bee pollen from Lille's Sebastopol Market. Then stick your landing at the German Gymnasium, one of Britain's first purpose built gyms when it opened in the 1860s; today it's a buzzing restaurant. The parallel bars are long gone, though grabbing a prime time reservation here might qualify as an Olympic event. Award yourself the Schupfnudeln (hand rolled potato noodles, celeriac, mushroom, truffles and butter sauce, PS19.50). My musical introduction to King's Cross came via the song with the same name by the Pet Shop Boys, the British techno dance pop duo. The tough neighborhood in which the group's lead singer, Neil Tennant, found a haunting metaphor for Thatcherite Britain was also home to a thriving club scene. Today, concerts at St. Pancras Old Church showcase mostly emerging artists as well as the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Sam Smith and Sinead O'Connor. On Jan. 17, the London born Patrick Wolf "imagine The Cure channelling Bruce Springsteen," according to The Telegraph will perform (from PS22.50). Or see who's playing at the Water Rats, the pub that in a former incarnation hosted Bob Dylan's first British concert, in 1962; the Pogues' first concert, in 1982; and the first London show of Oasis, in 1994. In the mid 19th century a set of buildings was constructed to allow coal to be lowered from just arrived trains and then packed for distribution across London. Today, Coal Drops Yard (renovated by Heatherwick Studio, the King's Cross based firm that also designed the Vessel at Manhattan's Hudson Yards) is home to a shopping venue that's the epitome of postindustrial chic. Start at Wolf Badger, a high end stockist of independent artisans, where you can prepare for winter with vegan lip balm by Hertfordshire based Evolve Beauty (PS12) and English spun Merino wool wear by Peregrine, founded in 1796 (scarves in olive or wheat, PS47). Move on to Tom Dixon's interior design shop, where the star attractions are the geometrically swirling Spring pendant lamps (from PS565). Finally, in a metropolis in which homelessness is rising, don't miss Boutique by Shelter. Purchases of donated designer and vintage items including the occasional Hermes handbag and Burberry suit benefit Shelter, a prominent homelessness charity. Kings Place is home to the offices of the Guardian newspaper and also to one of London's best curated selections of concerts, talks and exhibitions. Start your explorations at Pangolin London, a sculpture focused gallery that has an art trail around the complex. If you pinwheel backward into the icy canal while admiring the works, as I nearly did, the Rotunda restaurant offers hot chocolate and warm blankets on its waterside deck. Yotam Ottolenghi, the chef and cookbook author (and Times contributor), is a fan of walks along the Regent's Canal; his kids play in the fountains of Granary Square; and the most popular of his London restaurants is in nearby Islington. In other words, he's the perfect Londoner to take yours truly on a food tour of the new King's Cross. For a quick bite, he recommended the tasty, too big to finish sandwiches from Bodega Rita's. For a proper meal he chose Barrafina, an upscale tapas restaurant, where he ordered his go to dishes: arroz negro with cuttlefish and Iberian pork (PS21), the classic tortilla (PS9) and a green salad (PS5). I won't forget how joyfully my favorite chef scraped out the last of the arroz negro: "When it caramelizes it goes sweet and bitter," he explained. "It's a different world when you hit the bottom of the pan." Squeezed between St. Pancras and Euston stations is the quiet, mostly residential neighborhood of Somers Town. Start with a walk through the Ossulston Estate. Completed not long before World War II, in the heart of what had once been known as the Somers Town slum, this homage to Viennese style modernism has been described as one of London's most architecturally important housing projects. Then stop outside 15 Phoenix Road, the former home of Henry Croft, the orphan, street sweeper and rat catcher behind the "Pearly Kings and Queens" a uniquely London working class tradition, still going strong, that involves charitable fund raising, inherited titles and elaborately pearl bedecked garb. Finally, rest your feet at the Somers Town Coffee House a pub, despite the name, that feels as local as anything could in this cosmopolitan corner of town. An English breakfast, including vegan options, starts at PS8. If written culture has a center of gravity, it's lurking somewhere in the stacks of the British Library. The collection the world's second largest contains more than 170 million items. In terms of shelf space, it grows by five miles per year. Behind the scenes tours (PS10; book online) finish in the Treasures Gallery, home to the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus, the earliest surviving Bible to contain the complete New Testament; handwritten first drafts of Beatles lyrics; a ninth century Chinese version of the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text, described as the "world's earliest dated, printed book"; and Jane Austen's desk. The library's delightful shop has something for everyone on your list, including Literary London micro jigsaw puzzles (150 tiny pieces; PS9.50) and ingenious stools and side tables made of recycled paper (from PS25). Around Caledonian Road are numerous monuments to an older King's Cross. Start outside the Scala, once London's legendary "cinema of sin." A filmmaker called it "a country club for criminals and lunatics," while my friend recalls hauling shopping bags full of homemade popcorn to her first experiences of cult, horror and pioneering LGBT films here. Today the Scala houses a nightclub. Next up is the nonprofit Housmans Bookshop. Named for Laurence Housman peace activist, suffragist and younger brother of the poet A.E. Housman this haven for the anti establishment opened in King's Cross in 1959. Sections include "Trotsky," "Gramsci" and "Anarchist Key Thinkers"; there's a fine selection of books about King's Cross and London, too. Finish at Drink, Shop Do, an art, music, food and learning venue set up after the 2007 8 financial crisis to encourage creativity and community. Afternoon tea in this former adult entertainment store is PS29. The neon "Adult Erotica" sign is original, while the classes recently, on how to bling your beret, paint watercolor portraits of dogs, or sculpt a clay version of Tina Turner are all the proof you need that King's Cross, like London, is never the same place twice. King's Cross is packed with accommodations, including the occasional canal houseboat on Airbnb (around PS130) and the YHA London St. Pancras youth hostel on Euston Road (from PS16 for a shared room). Or splurge at the aptly named St. Pancras Renaissance. First opened as the Midland Grand Hotel in 1873, it reopened in 2011 after a comprehensive renovation. Now it's one of the grandest hotels in London. After I win the lottery, I plan to sequester myself, Howard Hughes like, in one of the double height Chambers Suites which offer mesmerizing views right into the station (from PS529). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Julius Youngner, an inventive virologist whose nearly fatal childhood illness destined him to become a medical researcher and a core member of the team that developed the Salk polio vaccine in 1955, died on April 27 at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his son, Dr. Stuart Youngner. Dr. Youngner was the last surviving member of the original three man research team assembled by Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh to address the polio scourge, which peaked in the United States in the early 1950s when more than 50,000 children were struck by it in one year. Three other assistants later joined the group. Dr. Salk credited his six aides with major roles in developing the polio vaccine, a landmark advance in modern medicine, which he announced on April 12, 1955. The announcement that the vaccine had proved up to 90 percent effective in tests on 440,000 youngsters in 44 states was greeted with ringing churchbells and openings of public swimming pools, which had been drained for fear of contagion. Within six years, annual cases of the paralyzing disease had declined from 14,000 to fewer than 1,000. By 1979, polio had been virtually eliminated in developed nations. "I think it's absolutely fair to say that had it not been for Dr. Youngner, the polio vaccine would not have come into existence," Dr. Salk's son, Peter L. Salk, president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation and a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, said in an email. While Dr. Youngner, who was 34 at the time, remained at the university and made further advances in virology, he and other members of the team remained embittered that Dr. Salk had not singled them out for credit in his announcement speech. The printed version was prefaced with the phrase "From the Staff of the Virus Research Laboratory by Jonas E. Salk, M.D.," and a United Press account quoted him as crediting his original three assistants, who had joined him as early as 1949 Dr. Youngner, Army Maj. Byron L. Bennett and Dr. L. James Lewis as well as three others. "The really important thing to recognize is that the development of the polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh was a team effort," Dr. Peter Salk wrote. He added, "There is no question that my father recognized the importance of the team, and if there were circumstances in which that wasn't adequately expressed, I would feel that it needs to be expressed now and very clearly so." In 1993, Dr. Youngner crossed paths with Dr. Salk for the first time since Dr. Salk left for California in 1961. According to "Polio: An American Story" (2005), by David M. Oshinsky, Dr. Youngner raised the 1955 announcement speech in confronting Dr. Salk. "Do you remember whom you mentioned and whom you left out?" the book quoted him as saying to Dr. Salk. "Do you realize how devastated we were at that moment and ever afterward when you persisted in making your co workers invisible?" Asked later, though, whether he regretted having worked for Dr. Salk, Dr. Youngner replied: "Absolutely not. You can't imagine what a thrill that gave me. My only regret is that he disappointed me." Dr. Youngner's contribution to the team was threefold. He developed a method called trypsinization, using monkey kidney cells to generate sufficient quantities of the virus for experiments and production of the vaccine. He also found a way to deactivate the virus without disrupting its ability to produce antibodies. And he created a color test to measure polio antibodies in the blood to determine whether the vaccine was working. He later contributed research to understanding interferon as an antiviral agent in the treatment of cancer and hepatitis; to the development (with Dr. Samuel Salvin) of gamma interferon, which is used against certain infections; and to advances that resulted in vaccines for Type A influenza and (with Dr. Patricia Dowling) equine influenza. "As a direct result of his efforts, there are countless numbers of people living longer and healthier lives," Dr. Arthur S. Levine, the University of Pittsburgh's senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and dean of its medical school, said in a statement. Julius Stuart Youngner was born on Oct. 24, 1920, in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, where he survived lobar pneumonia, a severe infection of the lungs. His father, Sidney Donheiser, was a businessman. His mother was Bertha Youngner. He took her surname when his parents divorced. After graduating from Evander Childs High School in the Bronx at 15, he earned a bachelor's degree in English with a minor in biology from New York University in 1939 and a master's and doctorate of science in microbiology from the University of Michigan. Drafted into the Army in World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and at the University of Rochester, testing the toxicity of uranium salts. He said he learned of the project's goal of building an atomic bomb only when it was dropped on Japan. He was working at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, when the University of Pittsburgh hired him as an assistant professor in 1949 to assist Dr. Salk. He was a professor of microbiology and medical genetics at the university School of Medicine and chairman of the department of microbiology (biochemistry and microbiology were added later) from 1966 until his retirement in 1989. His first wife, the former Tula Liakakis, died in 1963. Besides their son, Stuart, a psychiatry and bioethics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Dr. Youngner is survived by his wife, the former Rina Balter; a daughter, Lisa, an artist, also from his first marriage; three grandchildren; and a half brother, Alan Donheiser. Dr. Youngner's infectious curiosity, as a colleague characterized it, generated hundreds of scholarly papers and more than 15 patents. He was president of the American Society for Virology from 1986 to 1987. When he was 7, Dr. Youngner nearly died from the pneumonia he had contracted when bacteria ate through his chest and infected a rib. An effective vaccine for pneumonia and antibiotics would not be invented for nearly two decades. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
After being the subject of an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and assault, Paul Marciano has resigned from his position as executive chairman of Guess Inc.'s board, according to the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Marciano, who will be replaced by his brother Maurice Marciano, will remain on the board through the end of his contract. Mr. Marciano, a founder of the company, had forfeited his salary during the period of the investigation, but will receive a salary from June 11 until the expiration of his contract on Jan. 30, 2019. According to the filing, "allegations against Mr. Marciano included claims of inappropriate comments and texts, and unwanted advances including kissing and groping." During the last several months, investigators who were hired by the board interviewed more than 40 people and reviewed approximately 1.5 million pages of documents, the filing said. Guess and Mr. Marciano signed nonconfidential settlement agreements for the amount of 500,000 with five women who had accused Mr. Marciano of sexual harassment. "This was a very powerful man whose pattern, according to my clients, was reaching out to women who were aspiring models, getting them very hopeful that they were going to get a job as the next Guess girl, groping their breasts and when they rebuffed him, of course they didn't get a job," said Lisa Bloom, a lawyer who represented four of the women in the settlements. "A person who would do that is not fit to serve. Guess is a company that primarily sells to women and should be making a strong statement condemning his behavior." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
FRANKFURT Before he disappeared five years ago, Florian Homm seemed to revel in his role as the German hedge fund manager they called "the steamroller." In a country where displays of wealth are considered unseemly, Mr. Homm posed for photographs in front of his palatial villa on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, Cuban cigar in hand, and used his millions to shake up one of the country's most sacred institutions, the Borussia Dortmund soccer team. So perhaps it should not have been a surprise that Mr. Homm has resurfaced in a blaze of publicity. In a series of media interviews, he has vowed to disprove stock fixing accusations against him by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. And he has written a book about his years underground that he hopes will dissuade others from following the same path as he. "I think my story is a really hard core wake up call," Mr. Homm, who continues to live under an assumed name in a country he will not identify, said by telephone Friday. "I'd like to reach a few souls who are trying to get a second Mercedes and a bigger boat," he said. "I went to the utmost level of excess and it didn't work." Mr. Homm said he had spent much of the past five years living under an assumed name in Colombia as he tried to find himself, and not be found by dubious characters trying to collect a reward of EUR1.5 million, or 1.9 million, that had been put on his head. The book is entitled "Kopf Geld Jagd," which means "Head Money Hunt," a play on the German term for "bounty hunt." "I had a long list of enemies," Mr. Homm writes in his book. An English edition of the book, entitled "Rogue Financier Adventures of an Estranged Capitalist," should be available in electronic form shortly, he said Just who wants to get Mr. Homm remains a mystery. But presumably the people who put up the reward since withdrawn were among the people who lost hundreds of millions investing in the hedge fund that Mr. Homm managed from Majorca, Absolute Capital Management Holdings. The fund's value plunged in September 2007 shortly after Mr. Homm, his Calvin Klein underwear stuffed with cash, boarded a private turboprop plane on the Spanish island and flew to Colombia, according to the account he gives in the book. If nothing else, Mr. Homm's reappearance gives Germany something its financial crisis narrative has lacked so far. German banks were big buyers of subprime mortgage loans and helped cause the euro zone crisis by lending freely to Greece, Spain and other countries that are now struggling to repay their debts. But the country has not produced many financiers who can stand as personal symbols of greed and hubris in the manner of Richard S. Fuld Jr., the former chief of Lehman Brothers. Enter Homm. In the book, Mr. Homm, a 6 foot 7 inch, 53 year old who holds a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in business from Harvard, was both contrite and defiant. He expressed regret for having an underdeveloped sense of scruple, neglecting his children and generally behaving like a jerk. (Mr. Homm used a stronger word to describe himself.) The main reason for his sudden departure from Europe, he wrote, "was that I needed distance and solitude to find a meaning in my life." Mr. Homm, who once shared a EUR5 million abode on Majorca with a Russian table dancer, said he now prayed daily and planned to devote proceeds from his memoir to schoolchildren in Liberia. He is organizing a charity, Maximum Impact Medicine, whose aim will be to provide inexpensive vaccines to people who do not have access to them now, he said. To people who may doubt his sincerity, Mr. Homm said: "Watch this space and see in the next year or two if I'm not consistent or not truthful." While acknowledging past sins, including once trying to seize valuable paintings from the villa on Majorca he had shared with his estranged wife, who still lived there, Mr. Homm disputed what he said were unfair accusations against him. In a civil suit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles last year, the S.E.C. accused Mr. Homm and others with whom he did business of manipulating the prices of thinly traded U.S. stocks, in some cases buying and selling shares between different funds that Mr. Homm controlled. In court documents and in his book, Mr. Homm maintains that he had disclosed his methods to investors in Absolute Capital Management. "All of my activities were conducted in the good faith performance of my job, which was to increase the value of the relevant ACMH Funds to the benefit of the ACMH Funds' investors," Mr. Homm said in a document filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Mr. Homm declined to discuss the accusations against him in detail Friday, saying that was better done by his lawyer. In the book, Mr. Homm writes that the accusations are based on lies concocted by other directors of Absolute Capital Management after he dropped from view. The value of the hedge fund, which at one point had more than 2 billion under management, plunged soon afterward. "I do truly apologize to the people who lost money," Mr. Homm said Friday. He describes himself as being in self imposed exile the past five years. His lawyer always knew how to reach him. The S.E.C. suit lists Mr. Homm's whereabouts as unknown, but because it is a civil action he would not be considered a fugitive. An S.E.C. spokesman declined to comment. Mr. Homm also is a target in a money laundering investigation by Swiss prosecutors, apparently related to his association with a money manager there. Swiss documents indicate that he has appeared in Switzerland to answer questions from the authorities, who did not arrest him. The years in exile do not appear to have dulled Mr. Homm's flair for drama. German journalists who met Mr. Homm in Paris last week reported being subjected to baroque precautions in order to thwart a list of enemies that, Mr. Homm suggested, may include the Hell's Angels and the Russian mafia. A reporter for The Financial Times Deutschland wrote of being told to travel alone to Paris, where he was directed by text message to a hotel lobby. There, a Homm associate appeared and led the reporter through narrow streets to another hotel. Mr. Homm appeared only after security guards had scanned the journalist with a metal detector. Mr. Homm has since dropped from view again. A spokesman for Munchner Verlagsgruppe, publisher of Mr. Homm's book, said that she did not know how to reach him. He checks in occasionally, she said. In May, a private detective, Josef Resch, offered a reward, on Youtube, of EUR1.5 million for information about Mr. Homm's whereabouts. It is not clear who provided the money. Mr. Homm said he considered the reward a de facto contract on his life. The offer has since been withdrawn. In his own video last week, Mr. Homm offered EUR10,000 to find out who posted it in the first place. Mr. Homm, a great nephew of Josef Neckermann, founder of a well known German catalog retailer, worked for a series of banks and funds after his studies, eventually making enough money to strike out on his own. He first attracted attention buying big stakes in troubled midsize German companies, or in some cases betting against them by selling their shares short, then putting pressure on management. A short sale involves borrowing shares to sell them, hoping the price will fall before they need to be returned at the original price. One such company was Borussia Dortmund, a top ranked German soccer team listed on the stock exchange. The club was close to bankruptcy when a fund controlled by Mr. Homm bought a 26 percent stake in 2004. He helped force out the existing management, and the team has since become profitable and is ranked fourth out of 18 teams in the German Bundesliga. German politicians at the time were in a panic about aggressive buyout firms that were staging assaults on the country's iconic businesses. One politician famously referred to buyout artists as "locusts." Mr. Homm seemed to thrive in his role, appearing on German talk shows and in the German press, usually holding a thick cigar. "I was the number one locust," he recalled Friday. He also earned the nickname "plattmacher," which translates roughly as "steamroller" or "flattener." Mr. Homm acknowledges that he associated with some dubious characters over the years. In 2006, he was shot in the lung while riding in a car in Caracas. The driver was shot in the knee. At the time the attack appeared to be a robbery, but later, Mr. Homm wrote, he came to believe unknown enemies had hired the gunmen to kill him. During his years underground, Mr. Homm wrote, he lived in Cartagena, Colombia, choosing the country because it would be easy to bring in a large amount of cash. "Most people try to take things out of Colombia, not the other way around," he wrote. He also spent 18 months traveling the world, often living in cheap hotel rooms. Mr. Homm's fortune, once estimated at 400 million, has dwindled to just 1 percent or 2 percent of its former value, he said. That is still 4 million to 8 million. Mr. Homm said the rest was squandered by an investment adviser who put some of the money into funds managed by Bernard L. Madoff, who is now in prison for operating a Ponzi scheme. "Madoff!" Mr. Homm wrote. "Irony can sometimes be brutally vengeful." Mr. Homm expressed regrets about some aspects of his life for example, that his chauffeur knew his children better than he did. But he also betrayed a hint of wistfulness for the years he spent living very large. "My life was intense," he said. "It was vastly entertaining." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
One of the go to mantras from the Gregg Popovich coaching handbook is a leaguewide credo now. No one in the N.B.A., as Popovich has been saying in San Antonio for years, wants to be caught "skipping steps" as the league begins the most challenging undertaking in its history. This week, though, coaches also can't help it. Not when the chance to hold an actual practice for the first time in months is just days away. The focus, for now, is rightfully on the process of getting the 22 teams invited to participate in the restart of the 2019 20 season safely onto the N.B.A.'s campus at the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Fla. Teams were scheduled to arrive in three waves six teams on Tuesday, eight on Wednesday and eight more on Thursday with each club bringing a traveling party of no more than 37. Players, coaches and staff members will be asked to quarantine in their rooms for 36 to 48 hours and register two consecutive negative coronavirus tests before they can start participating in team activities. This stage of populating the N.B.A.'s bubble is of critical importance and comes with considerable apprehension baked into it. Despite the league's persistent belief that life on the campus will be safer than anywhere else N.B.A. personnel could be outside it, there is no diminishing the daunting nature of erecting and controlling a single site environment for more than 300 players on a scale that has never been attempted. "We have to get there," Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said of the looming check in step. "You're almost nervous about that." Yet it is also true, with apologies to Popovich, that teams (and especially coaches) can't help but look a step or two ahead to the weekend and the return of full speed group practices. With games scheduled to begin July 30, time is of the essence: Players will have about three weeks, once they exit their quarantines to start practicing, to re acclimate their bodies to full five on five speed and physicality after what has been, for many, the longest layoff of their basketball lives. Although several coaches have raved about the diligence many players have shown to stay as close to game readiness as possible, every coach not so secretly wishes his team had more prep time to reduce the risk of soft tissue injuries. The standard N.B.A. off season, remember, features weeks and weeks of pickup games. Access to five on five play has been extremely limited during the coronavirus pandemic and persistent rumblings about the games that LeBron James, to name one example, has been arranging in Los Angeles conveniently overlook that such gatherings are technically against league rules. Team practice facilities have been open for weeks, but with nothing resembling practice nothing, in fact, beyond one on none drills with coaches only allowed by the league office. It's a drastic reduction in prep time for players who are accustomed to congregating at those facilities starting in early September to get almost a month of work in, with games typically offered on Mondays through Thursdays, before training camp officially starts. "This is a different, unique ramp up," Washington Wizards General Manager Tommy Sheppard said. "The physical demand of playing basketball is different than running on a treadmill, doing Peloton, doing workouts in your garage on Zoom. We'll have basically two weeks to really get to five on five. "I think a lot of teams are jumping in right now, trying to figure out: 'How can we shortcut this? How can we short circuit the system and get everybody out on the floor and do more and more and more?' I just feel strongly that's going to hurt us on the back end. We're going to predispose ourselves to injury if we try to go any faster." Complicating matters is the abrupt nature of the N.B.A.'s pause on March 11. As Pete Youngman, the former director of sports medicine for the Sacramento Kings who held a full time role with the franchise for 25 years, noted in a telephone interview, many players were "in their peak, prime condition" when the season was indefinitely suspended. "The biggest concern I have is the unknown long term effects on the heart and lungs and minds of those who do get Covid 19," Youngman said. "Even if it's a mild, asymptomatic case, we don't know that yet. "The musculoskeletal stuff that's my second largest worry. In mid March, players are really hitting their peak fitness, physically and mentally. They can sense the playoffs coming. As far as ramping them up, now you're trying to jam it all into three weeks." Germany's Bundesliga, one of the world's top soccer leagues, was rocked by 12 soft tissue injuries in May on its first weekend back after a two month stoppage. In the N.B.A., there is a "high risk of injury that we're going to face as well," said Dr. Daniel Medina, the Washington Wizards' chief of athlete care and performance and a former team physician for the Spanish soccer power Barcelona. "We're doing our best, and we're going to do as much as we can to avoid them," Medina said. "But we know they're going to happen." To Medina, it's not just "the time they have been at home" that makes a fast tracked return so challenging, but also how long many players have gone without exposure to true, full speed contact. There is no easy way for players to replicate that or the midair decisions they make in reacting to contact, Medina said, no matter how much players may prepare for it in the weight room or with individual drills. Yet he did sound hopeful about one potential benefit of the N.B.A.'s new setup. "We've never had a situation of density of calendar with no traveling," Medina said. "Even the back to backs are going to be looking different when you just finish the game and go home." T.O. Souryal, who served as the Dallas Mavericks' team doctor for 22 years and is a past president of the N.B.A. Physicians Association, sees at least one other area of encouragement even after all the concern Souryal expressed in last week's newsletter about the "dangerous virus that can kill." "Soft tissue injuries are to be expected after a long delay," Souryal said. "But I think the N.F.L. has a much bigger issue to deal with on soft tissue injuries than the N.B.A., and that's because you can't simulate football during a pandemic. Basketball players can play one on one. They have drills where they can closely approximate game situations on their own. That's much harder for football players. The basketball players are not as deconditioned as you think." Let's hope. Any positive surprise would be welcome after a steady stream of teams bound for Disney World felt the need over the past two weeks to close their training facilities following positive coronavirus tests. Sacramento, Milwaukee, Miami, Denver, Phoenix, the Los Angeles Clippers and the Nets all took that step, which not surprisingly overshadowed a positive development: The Toronto Raptors have managed to keep the coronavirus out of their temporary bubble at Florida Gulf Coast University and a nearby hotel in Naples, Fla., where the defending champions have been based since June 22. All those closures have only added to player anxiety on top of the strong desire so many players feel to keep the Black Lives Matter movement at the forefront of the league's return. The depths of the trepidation voiced by the likes of Portland's Damian Lillard, San Antonio's DeMar DeRozan and New Orleans' JJ Redick in interviews over the past week has been piling up. DeAndre Jordan and Spencer Dinwiddie, both Nets starters, announced last week that they had tested positive for the coronavirus after four Nets players tested positive in March. The team will be without at least five veterans Jordan, Dinwiddie, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and Wilson Chandler when the N.B.A. restarts the 2019 20 season later this month because of either injury or coronavirus related absences. And ESPN reported Tuesday night that Taurean Prince has also tested positive for the coronavirus, which would take the number to six. In other words: No matter how well next season may go for the Nets, "plight" as I described it in a tweet last week on the one year anniversary of the free agent commitments that the Nets received from Durant and Irving was charitable. This is a crisis now. Just because Durant has missed this whole season while recovering from a torn right Achilles' tendon, taking the Nets out of the championship mix until his second season in Brooklyn at the earliest, let's not be so callous that we forget how dispiriting the present is. Someone much closer to the situation than me Nets Coach Jacque Vaughn called the team's roster issues and sudden size shortage a "stress test" in a conference call Saturday with reporters. Vaughn also described recent events as "trauma" for the Nets. Q: You referred to the Nets getting Durant and Irving as "maybe the greatest day in franchise history." What about winning the chance to sign Lew Alcindor? What about when Rick Barry joined the team? What about John Roche and a huge playoff upset victory over Artis Gilmore, Dan Issel and the Kentucky Colonels? What about when Dr. J joined the team? What about the two A.B.A. championships they won when the best team in New York played on Long Island? Kevin Ata Stein: Excellent points. The sentence you cited from last week's newsletter had a major flaw: I didn't specify that I was talking about the Nets' N.B.A. history. The franchise's A.B.A. highs were glorious. Shame on me for not making the distinction more clear. Yet as a single day event, I think the sentiment stands in assessing the Nets' N.B.A. history, even accounting for the Nets' trips to the N.B.A. finals in 2002 and 2003 after trading for Jason Kidd. Have the Nets, since the N.B.A. A.B.A. merger entering the 1976 77 season, had a better 24 hours than they enjoyed on June 30, 2019, when Durant and Irving chose Barclays Center over Madison Square Garden? Not everyone would agree hence the use of the word "maybe" but it's a debate we can have. Even though Durant and Irving still have so much to prove as a duo, I truly believe that. Q: It's perfectly fine. It's better than all the big fast food chains. It ain't a religious experience. SoCal people have been overselling this for years. HowardBeck from Twitter Stein: Mr. Beck, of Bleacher Report, is one of my best friends in the basketball writing business and, well, life. He was my highly decorated successor covering the Los Angeles Lakers at The Los Angeles Daily News, preceded me with great distinction at The New York Times and is someone I lean on heavily for guidance, workshopping and general camaraderie in a profession that mysteriously doesn't seem to be getting much easier even as we get older and (allegedly) smarter. Howard, however, has a worrisome habit: He can't resist goading me on Twitter to defend my love for In N Out hamburgers my fierce loyalty to what The New York Times, in a 2002 article, called "a burger cult." I almost let my man Hojo drag me back into the social media ring Thursday night, when he spotlighted a recent TikTok skit that featured two guys in a car asserting that In N Out is overrated. But I (mostly) resisted, deciding instead figuring no one would mind a fun, inconsequential topic these days to briefly address it here. On the West Coast, where I came of age after leaving Western New York in 1978, In N Out has no peer. Since I left Southern California as a full time resident in 1997, In N Out has established an even greater reach as a chain, with more than 300 restaurants in six states and a reputation, as The Times put it in a subsequent 2004 article, as the go to stop for Hollywood's "rich and famous" when they "crave the pleasure of a cheeseburger and fries." If you've had In N Out, and you don't think it's the best drive through burger in the history of fast food, it's really no problem and it's certainly not important. Traveling parties for the 22 teams headed to Walt Disney World this week for the resumption of the 2019 20 season will include 35 people from basketball operations, including 13 to 17 players, and two from the business side of the organization. Indiana's Victor Oladipo was sidelined for 371 days by a ruptured quadriceps tendon in his right knee sustained in January 2019. He played in only 13 games this season before the N.B.A. suspended play on March 11, averaging 13.8 points per game on 39.1 percent shooting from the field and 30.4 percent shooting from 3 point range. The risk of re injury was the main factor that convinced Oladipo to bypass participating in the N.B.A. restart scheduled to begin July 30. Since joining Indiana, Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis, both acquired from Oklahoma City in a trade for Paul George in July 2017, have combined to earn three All Star selections three more than most league observers predicted. The duo's success has changed perceptions about the trade from the Pacers' end in a positive way after they dealt George to the Thunder without receiving a first round draft pick in return, but tough decisions on Oladipo's future loom. He has just one season left on his contract at 21 million, but is eligible for a four year extension from the Pacers worth 113 million in October. J.R. Smith's last N.B.A. game before signing with the Los Angeles Lakers last week was on Nov. 19, 2018, in a six minute appearance for the Cleveland Cavaliers in a road loss to Detroit. With the Cavaliers off to a 2 13 start that season, Smith was deactivated after that defeat and sent home to wait for a trade that never materialized. Cleveland's next game, at the time of Smith's departure, was LeBron James's first in town as a member of the Lakers. Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of LeBron James announcing that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers in free agency to sign with the Miami Heat. James, of course, revealed the move in a widely criticized TV special known as "The Decision" that, a decade later, is regarded by many around the league as the start of the player empowerment era. James's teams reached the N.B.A. finals in each of the first eight seasons after "The Decision" but only half of those finals trips were made with the Heat. James returned to his home state Cavaliers in July 2014 and could not prevent the Golden State Warriors from snatching Team of the Decade status away from Miami by winning three titles and making five trips to the finals from 2015 through 2019. 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 |
I must admit I have had these dark thoughts too, and I am ashamed. How can I crank out another completely unnecessary ribald comedy if I am distracted by my kid's homework and feelings? In the end we all try to find balance. Chabon decides he prefers having children and is willing to take the risk. Twenty five years, 14 books and four kids later, it appears he made the right call, succeeding as he has on all fronts. Sometimes he wonders if he would have written 18, but then sums up his feelings by saying, "Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back." Several of the essays are about his children finding themselves. After one of his sons shows a great interest in fashion, Chabon takes him to fashion shows in Paris to support this new passion. He seems genuinely thrilled that his son has found something to call his own. As a parent you hope your sons or daughters will find an obsession to consume them. For me it was comedy. It made no sense. It came from nowhere. No one I knew had any interest in it. Chabon seems to understand the delicate nature of handling a child who is testing the waters of what could be a lifelong occupation or a passing fancy. One misplaced phrase or discouraging comment and something wonderful could suddenly vanish. At the end of the essay his son admits that of all the fashion shows they attended during their week in Paris, his favorite was the one that he went to alone. He tells his father that the best part was the people. "They get it." Chabon realizes he has misjudged what his son's interest was about. "Abe had not been dressing up, styling himself, all these years because he was trying to prove how different he was from everyone else. He did it in the hope of attracting the attention of somebody else somewhere, someday who was the same." He had found his tribe. That fashion essay originally appeared in GQ, and at first glance I thought this book might just repackage Chabon's magazine work, with no other reason for being. But then I read the final chapter and it all came together. The last piece is about his relationship with his own father, a super intelligent but also imposing doctor. Chabon describes going along with him on house calls as a child, and how the patients' common question, "Are you going to be a doctor too?," led him to realize that he did not have a doctor's mind his own superpower, he understood, was telling stories. It was as his father's son that he gained an identity and a calling. In just a few pages I understood why Chabon found such meaning in fatherhood, making it such a priority in his own life, and I was so mad at that great writer for discouraging this path. Who was that writer anyway? I want his name. Was it Herman Melville? Is he still alive? I don't read much. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Rita Janecek and Joseph Schaar had hoped to marry March 21 atop a glacier in Anchorage, but the coronavirus outbreak changed those plans. "It was certainly disappointing," said Ms. Janecek, 56, who met Mr. Schaar, 52, on Match.com in May 2015. The pair had a 93 percent compatibility rating that included a shared love of traveling the world to soak up history, explore exotic locales and observe wild animals in natural habitats. "There were still some venues out there that we had passed on in favor of Anchorage," said Ms. Janecek, a flight attendant based out of Orlando International Airport. "But we began to reconsider each of them as a possible Plan B." Ms. Janecek, who grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., has been to the Alaskan Rainforest multiple times. She was hoping to return there to look in on her favorite carnivoran the kind with shaggy hair, long snouts, powerful torsos, stocky legs and large, non retractable claws. In short, Ms. Janecek has a thing for bears. "I like bears too, but man, Rita is bear crazy," said Mr. Schaar, who graduated from Purdue with a degree in electrical engineering and now owns a digital marketing company in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the couple live. Ms. Janecek, who also has a law degree, proudly admits to being a lifelong lover of bears. "I've always maintained that bears are the most gorgeous creatures on earth," she said. She had high praise for Mr. Schaar, too. "Talk about gorgeous, Joe was, and is, incredibly handsome," she said. "I also thought he was charming and talkative and friendly, just a nice, normal guy and someone I felt very comfortable being around." Mr. Schaar said he was immediately taken by Ms. Janecek's "incredible beauty," and "admired the fact that she was so full of life." They spent much of their first two dates getting to know each other. Ms. Janecek told him that she was the oldest of two daughters by Elois Scott of Washington, and Daniel Skeen, who lived in Newport, R.I. Her mother retired as a researcher at the Department of Education in Washington. Her father, who died more than 20 years ago, was a Newport based real estate developer. Ms. Janecek had been divorced for about a year when she first met Mr. Schaar, and was already living in St. Petersburg, where her three grown daughters and four grandchildren also lived. Mr. Schaar grew up in Chicago, the only son of Dolores Schaar and Joseph Schaar. Both parents worked for the Board of Eduction in Chicago. His mother retired as a special education teacher. His father, who also died more than two decades ago, was a chief physical plant engineer. Ms. Janecek also learned that Mr. Schaar had been divorced for roughly seven months and was living in Brandon, Fla., at the time he clicked into her life. He also has one adult son living in New Hope, N.J. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. It was the couple's third date, which was at the home of Ms. Janecek and lasted 10 hours, that proved to be a turning point in their relationship. They spent much of the time in Ms. Janecek's backyard, in the swimming pool and hot tub, eating a bit but drinking a bit more. Ms. Janecek, who owned two golden retrievers at the time, went so far as to ask Mr. Schaar to bring along his Labrador retriever. "It was important to know if our dogs were compatible," she said. By night's end, she wanted to know the same about herself and Mr. Schaar. "I told him that I really liked him a lot, and that if he would agree to stop seeing other people, I would also agree, and then we could just see each other exclusively." But Mr. Schaar had other ideas. "In previous conversations, she told me multiple times that she loved me," he said, "but I didn't really want to get married again, and we were really having a rough time over it." "But then some pretty tragic things happened within my circle of friends," said Mr. Schaar, who declined to go any further regarding details. "As a result, I changed my mind," he said, "and we continued dating." They returned to Alaska in March 2018, and went ice fishing, snow shoeing and dog sledding on what Ms. Janecek described as "an Alaskan plane, train and automobile trip," that took them from Anchorage to Fairbanks to deep inside the Arctic Circle. "We went as far as the Dalton Highway, the last habitable place on the continent," Mr. Schaar said. "And when I saw those northern lights, well, I'm not so sure I have ever seen anything that incredible anywhere on this earth." "On that same trip," he added, "I was able to reach out and physically touch the Alaskan Pipeline, which totally satisfied the engineering geek in me." He proposed on Thanksgiving Day 2019, and they thought for sure they were heading back to Alaska to tie the knot when the coronavirus began making its presence felt. Ultimately, they circled back to Monica Welde, the owner and chief executive of the Bearadise Ranch bear preserve, a licensed natural habitat facility, sanctuary and retirement community for bears in Myakka City, Fla. It was nearly 5,000 miles from Anchorage, but less than an hour's drive from the couple's home. Ms. Welde had met the couple several years earlier at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa, and they became friends. Even though they initially bypassed Bearadise as a wedding location, Ms. Welde was happy to have them back, and the couple were married there March 21, the same day they were to be married in Anchorage. As a perk that no one appreciated more than Ms. Janecek, Ms. Welde supplied a ring bear er, a 23 year old "blonde bombshell," as Ms. Welde called her, with a Hollywood pedigree who sported a fur coat that glistened in the bright Florida sunshine. She had three screen credits to her name, which was Carroll. (She appeared in the movie "Big Fish" and was used for animation purposes in "Brother Bear," both released in 2003, and she later starred in a Toyota TV commercial. Carroll, who also happened to be a 300 pound bear, pounced into action the moment John Ziegler, a Florida notary public, announced that the time had come to exchange wedding rings. With both a leash (held by Ms. Welde) and a small pillow containing the two wedding rings tied neatly around her neck, Carroll began walking slowly toward the couple, building drama with every step, as the couple's 15 guests watched. Carroll inched a bit closer to the couple, stopping at a designated spot a safe distance away. She allowed Ms. Welde to remove the pillow with nary a growl. "It was so cool and so perfectly and professionally executed," said Christina Kennedy, 28, a friend of the bride and fellow flight attendant who also sat a safe distance from Carroll. "It's just not something you see every day." Shortly after, Ms. Janecek and Mr. Schaar were pronounced married, and as the newlyweds made their way out of Bearadise, Ms. Kennedy said she overheard the bride say to the groom, "I'd love for us to go on an African safari." Hot Pants When the couple moved their wedding locale from Alaska to Florida, the groom forgot to switch his suit pants accordingly. He left the wool pants intended to keep him warm while standing on a glacier in his suitcase, and wore them for his Florida nuptials. "I was sweating the whole time," he said. Whale of a Time To celebrate Mr. Schaar's 50th birthday, Ms. Janecek took him to Mexico, where he donned a snorkel and other diving gear and went underwater to observe giant whale sharks, at times inches away, swimming in their natural habitat. "It was one of the most spectacular things I have ever done in my life," he said. 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 |
Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw, artists who live and work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, have been married almost two years. She said she "thought marriage would be stifling, but with Paul it doesn't feel that way. It feels freeing, and that was a surprise." Because marriage is an ever evolving experience, we constantly shift, change and, in some cases, start over. In It's No Secret, couples share thoughts about commitment and tell us what they have learned along the way. Occupations They are collaborative experiential artists who work on large scale installations as well as immersive and participatory pieces. Their work can be currently seen at Postmasters Gallery in Manhattan's TriBeCa neighborhood. The couple, who live and work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, were married before 90 guests Aug. 5, 2017 at the Spillian Mansion in the Catskills. "We throw huge parties with wrestlers on the roof, so we wanted this to be more intimate and not as outrageous," Ms. Catron said. They each made their own wedding attire: Mr. Outlaw collaborated with the tailor Jerry Lee Atwood to create a suit with embroidered roosters and rhinestones. Ms. Catron created a white origami esque gown with cascading sculptural ruffles. Ms. Catron, then 23, met Mr. Outlaw, 28, in 2007 at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. "He was strange and absurd, and was too much of a showman, so I was hesitant," she said. "But he was unlike anyone I'd ever met. He was into art, commerce and performance, so he turned half his studio into a bar and the other half into a bodega, and hired me as a bartender." Mr. Outlaw served cocktails to students and teachers, and sold beef jerky, beer and candy; Ms. Catron entertained everyone by marionetting taxidermied mice from the ceiling. "He expressed interest, and I pushed him away for six months," she said. "But then he charmed me and I decided he was brilliant and artistically bold. I was always attracted to him. Eventually I decided he was the one." What Ms. Catron expected to be a fling turned into a long term relationship and artistic collaboration. "We were so poor we never went out to eat," she said. "We stayed in his studio drinking and talking into the evening. That's what we did." The pair graduated in 2009 and moved to separate parts of Brooklyn while their relationship continued to grow. A year later, they moved in together. For the next five years, as their work expanded, so did their relationship. In 2015, they were each awarded a monthlong residency in the French Riviera by the La Napoule Art Foundation, and during that time Mr. Outlaw proposed. "He arranged a hike up this mountain at sunset," she said. "At the top was a map we'd used on projects, which he'd written, 'Will you marry me?'" Ms. Catron Paul is crazy, creative and dependable. Monetary stability has become more important to him, so he started a set fabrication company just so we'd both be more secure. Artistically, he doesn't see any sort of limit. I find that brave and encouraging. Together we've learned to become bolder and much less sensible, which has led to impulse artistic creations and collaborations. We bought a hot air balloon for a piece we were creating, and an oversize spaghetti machine, which we keep in storage. The boldness has brought us closer together. It builds a bond, we have success and we fail together. All of our gambles are the same. We make each other better artists, and better people. We never set out to collaborate, it just happened. I didn't think I had to be married, but now that I am, I'm surprisingly happy. There's the stability that we now have governmental rights to each. It's a nonromantic thing, but it adds another element to know someone else will be there. I didn't think marriage would change us, but it has. It sets you up for thinking that's bigger. We have a house now; we are thinking about having a family. I thought it would be a few years before that shift would happen. But now those big questions are coming up, and Paul is starting to think that way, too. I've learned to become more domestic; suddenly I'm furniture shopping and decorating. I never saw that coming. I've learned to think of myself more as a unit, and that adds a new level to our relationship. I thought marriage would be stifling, but with Paul it doesn't feel that way. It feels freeing, and that was a surprise. Mr. Outlaw Jen has a happy, outgoing personality. She makes friends easily. That caught my interest when we met. I'm the same. You get the two of us together and it's pretty nonstop laughter and conversation. We fueled each other then and we do that now. She has a lot of powerful emotions about life and work. She's inspirational. She's never backed down from any challenge, and handles them with grace and confidence. That's intoxicating. She's taught me determination. I have big dreams and big goals, but I can get down and she teaches me that's not effective. She's my motivating factor. She makes me a better artist and person. She's also beautiful, cute, smart and charming. I'm always impressed with her intelligence. Getting married was a big moment. It's the final solidification of our partnership, love and commitment. Marriage has taught me this relationship is no longer an abstract, that it's a forever thing. It's a symbolic gesture of something that already existed. I don't wear a ring because I work with so many power tools. I wear it on special occasions. The relationship and how we act is what's important, and the way we do shows we are married. We're an obvious partnership the minute we walk into a room. I want people to know this is my wife and that I'm committed. Marriage didn't change me, Jennifer did. I expect us to keep growing closer; we do every year. Our goals and dreams are merging together constantly, as are we. That will continue. We are each other's motivations to enjoy life and expand our knowledge. We want to be people that matter, and we want to do that together until we we're so old that we can't move anymore. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
STOCKHOLM When Sweden's Nationalmuseum opened in 1866 it was one of the most modern museums in Europe. After 150 years, outdated technology and space lost to offices and storage severely limited the potential for the museum to display its world class collection. Since 2013, the museum has been closed for a renovation overseen by the Swedish architects Gert Wingard and Erik Wikerstal. It is set to reopen to the public Saturday. The 132 million overhaul sought to put more of the museum's collection on display and to match the security, accessibility, fire safety and climate control of a modern institution. "The public spaces in the museum are 30 percent bigger," said Mr. Wingard in an interview. The Nationalmuseum can now exhibit 5,200 objects compared with about 1,700 before the renovation, though this is still just 8 percent of the museum's collection. Fredrik Eriksson, who oversaw the renovation, said that putting more of the collection on display was a priority for government officials who funded it. Mr. Eriksson said that making the museum accessible to a wider audience, especially young people, was also a priority, starting with the entrance level. Originally designed to house the library of Sweden's king though it was never used for that purpose the ground floor and its two courtyards saw the biggest changes, said Mr. Wingard, one of the architects. The courtyards have been raised, and the connecting middle space lowered to create a uniform limestone floor. The southern courtyard, formerly a loud space with poor acoustics, used to house a restaurant. This has been transformed into an airy sculpture court flooded with light pouring in through a new ceiling of small glass pyramids that deflect noise toward walls finished with sound absorbing material. The northern courtyard used to encase a giant "house inside a house," erected in the 1960s for storage, office space and an auditorium, Mr. Wingard said. That iss gone, and the courtyard now doubles as a lecture hall and transit hall with elevators to move people and works of art. Also on this floor, overlooking the palace and water, a new restaurant has replaced the conservation studio, which has been moved to another location. "This is the finest room in the entire museum," Mr. Wingard said. With the storage building in the courtyard and other offices removed, guests can now move uninhibited through the galleries around the perimeter of the museum as they did in the 19th century, Mr. Eriksson said. Whereas before paintings could only be exhibited on the museum's top floor, new climate control and ventilation systems make it possible to display art on any level in the building, Mr. Wingard said. The museum's collections comprise some 700,000 objects that include paintings, sculpture, drawings spanning the late Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 20th century. The collection of applied art and design features objects from the 16th century to the present day. Though it took decades to realize, the idea to design a building to house the collections of King Gustav III was first hatched in 1792. The Prussian architect Friedrich August Stuler, who also designed the Neues Museum in Berlin, was commissioned to design the exterior and general layout. The Swedish architect Fredrik Scholander was responsible for executing the project. It took 22 years to complete. "Stuler died a year before the inauguration," Mr. Wingard said, adding that after the renovation and the removal of the "intrusions" that were introduced over the past century his vision has been restored. "Stuler is back in town," he said. The opening exhibits include the first John Singer Sargent exhibition in the Nordic region and "Design Stories," a view of the current design landscape in Sweden, told through the stories and objects of 10 prominent designers, who all happen to be women. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
As Hong Kong seethes with protests against China's rule, Beijing is increasingly pressuring the business world to take its side. Businesses, both global and local, are falling in line and their employees are caught in the crossfire. The most dramatic example came on Friday, when Rupert Hogg, the chief executive of Hong Kong based Cathay Pacific Airways, resigned in the face of Chinese pressure after some of the airline's workers participated in the demonstrations. Now, global accounting firms are coming under the same pressure. The Big Four firms PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst Young, now known as EY put out statements distancing themselves from a full page ad supporting the demonstrations that appeared in Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper on Friday. The ad was signed and paid for by a group of anonymous employees of the firms. "We will never fear or compromise with injustice and unfairness," the text of the ad read. In response, PwC declared that the ad "does not represent the firm's position," adding, "We firmly oppose any action and statement that challenge national sovereignty." It is not clear whether the companies' statements will be enough. The Global Times, a tabloid controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, has urged the firms to "fire employees found to have the wrong stance on the Hong Kong situation." Mainland Chinese internet users have warned them against "becoming the next Cathay Pacific." David Webb, the publisher of the financial and corporate governance website Webb site in Hong Kong, said Mr. Hogg's resignation was "shocking and shameful," adding that "it's an illustration of the influence that can be brought to bear by the mainland government on Hong Kong businesses." "I think it would have all the C.E.O.s of the major companies looking over their shoulder and wondering whether they will be next to be held accountable for the actions of their employees," he said. Hundreds of thousands of protesters seeking a greater say in Hong Kong's government took to the city's streets on Sunday. For Hong Kong's workers and businesses, that means growing tensions in the workplace, a perhaps familiar feeling in places like Google and Amazon where workers have used social media and other platforms to take a more activist stance. Joseph Lai, a 46 year old employee of a Chinese manufacturer who marched in Hong Kong's mass demonstration on Sunday, said he no longer tries to make his mainland colleagues understand why people in Hong Kong are unhappy. But he said he was not worried about what might happen if his bosses found out that he was taking to the streets. "In that case, I'll look for another job," he said. "If we don't come, how can we say we're Hong Kong people?" China's biggest threat is also its greatest promise: a vast market of 1.4 billion people and an economy that, while slowing, is still growing at a pace that most countries would envy. For global companies like Cathay, lack of access could be devastating. Earlier this month, the Chinese authorities forbade Cathay employees who participated in protests from doing any work involving flights to mainland China and demanded to see lists of workers who fly in or over its territory. The mainland accounts for nearly a quarter of Cathay's destinations. Still more of its flights go over Chinese airspace, which would mean expensive rerouting if it did not comply. Its main shareholder, Swire Pacific, is one of Asia's largest conglomerates, with extensive interests in China including property, beverages and trading. Air China, a state run airline, also holds a significant Cathay stake. On Monday in Hong Kong, Cathay's shares rose initially then fell more than 1 percent by midmorning. On the other hand, Hong Kong's importance to China has dwindled, but Beijing still needs it as a financial hub. Most foreign investment into China flows through the territory. Mainland Chinese companies also raise money through Hong Kong, where global investors have put 2.6 trillion in Chinese company stocks. Beijing has warned that the protests threaten Hong Kong's future prosperity. On Sunday, it said it approved a plan to further open up the economy of Shenzhen, a booming city just across the border from Hong Kong, suggesting that it wants to increase competition between the two cities. For years, businesses in Hong Kong have been able to prosper by staying out of politics. But under China's current leader, Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has amassed more power and intruded into more parts of Chinese life, including business. It has also taken an increased interest in Hong Kong affairs since protests in 2014, known as Occupy Central, that also challenged China's policies toward the territory. Mainland Chinese consumers and businesses, often egged on by state media that criticizes any foreign business that does not appear to show the country proper respect, have also emerged as forces in their own right. The result has been a near daily campaign to prod companies like Versace, Coach and Givenchy to apologize to China for implying in their products and websites that Hong Kong was a separate country. On Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, mainland Chinese internet users started a BoycottCathayPacific hashtag, which was viewed half a million times. Analysts at the state owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China put a "strong sell" rating on the stock because of what it called "poor crisis management." Enshrining a leader. China's Communist Party delivered Xi Jinping, the country's top leader, a breakthrough on Nov. 11 that will help secure his political future by enshrining him in its firmament of era defining leaders in a resolution reassessing the party's history. A momentous decision. Senior party leaders approved the resolution at a gathering focused on reviewing the party's 100 year history. A communique from the meeting said that under Mr. Xi's leadership, China had "made historic achievements and undergone a historic transformation." Rewriting history. The resolution is expected to become the focus of an indoctrination campaign. It will dictate how the authorities teach China's modern history and how they censor discussion of the past, including through a law meant to punish people who criticize the party's heroes. Third of its kind. With the resolution, which was issued in full on Nov. 16, Mr. Xi can cement his status as an epoch making leader alongside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw the only two other resolutions of this kind, in 1945 and in 1981. On the other hand, companies risk going too far in placating China. When the actress Liu Yifei last week publicly supported the Hong Kong police, protesters called for a boycott of "Mulan," the live action Disney film set to be released next year in which she will play the title character. In early July, the maker of Pocari Sweat, a Japanese sports drink popular in Hong Kong, pulled its advertising from TVB, Hong Kong's dominant broadcaster, which has been accused by protesters of having a pro Beijing bias. But it said in two subsequent statements that it upheld the "one country, two systems" principle. Last week, the property tycoon Peter Woo, the former chairman of the real estate company Wheelock and its subsidiary Wharf Holdings, criticized protests that had turned violent. His comments came after Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of the Global Times, attacked one of Mr. Woo's shopping malls for "kowtowing" to the protesters by allowing them to remove the Chinese flag from a flagpole and throw it into the sea . Mr. Hu also criticized the mall for barring the police to avoid the sort of clashes that have taken place at other shopping centers. The pressure on the Big Four accounting firms illustrates how global companies can become targets, too. The employees' ad that ran in the Apple Daily newspaper on Friday resulted from a crowdfunding effort that raised 9,873 from 264 people, according to the crowdfunding website GoGetFunding. It inflamed many mainland Chinese nationalists online who were already angry at PwC for what they saw as an initial weak response to the protests. An article on Aug. 5 in the Global Times quoted the company as saying it respects the "people's right to freedom of speech." The newspaper called it "fence sitting." For any company, restraining employees from speaking out can be tough. But in Hong Kong, it could become a necessity. "For any of these organizations, it is necessary for them, within the framework of the law, to constrain or to require their employees not to touch the bottom line of the law," said Wang Jun, chief economist at Zhongyuan Bank, a commercial bank based in central China. "I think that is very important." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
As we pull down controversial statues and reassess historical figures, I've been wondering what our great grandchildren will find bewilderingly immoral about our own times and about us. Which of today's heroes will be discredited? Which statues toppled? What will later generations see as our own ethical blind spots? I believe that one will be our cruelty to animals. Modern society relies on factory farming to produce protein that is inexpensive and abundant. But it causes suffering to animals on an incalculable scale. Over the last 200 years, the world has become far more sensitive to animal rights. In feudal Europe, a game consisted of nailing a cat to a post and head butting it to death; now, growing numbers of states have passed animal protection laws, McDonald's is moving to cage free eggs and there are legal debates about whether certain mammals should have standing to sue in courts. The upshot is court cases like Cetacean Community v. Bush, in which the plaintiffs were whales, dolphins and porpoises, and Naruto, a Crested Macaque, v. Slater. Pope Francis suggests that animals go to heaven, and many humans would agree: Paradise would be diminished without pets. Yet while we adore our pets and coddle them a dog in a wealthy family may get better medical and dental care than a child in a poor family we as a society often do not extend this empathy to unseen farm animals, especially poultry. Some 9.3 billion chickens were slaughtered last year in the United States 28 per American and here's how they are typically killed: Workers shove the chickens' legs into metal shackles, and the birds are then carried upside down to an electrified bath that stuns them before a circular saw cuts open their necks and they are dunked in scalding water. Even when this system works perfectly, chickens sometimes have legs or wings broken as they are shackled. When the system fails, they are not stunned and struggle frantically as they are carried to the saw. The saw in turn misses many birds the Agriculture Department says that 526,000 chickens were not slaughtered correctly last year and some are boiled alive. The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them? What should our leaders be doing? Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency. What are the worst climate risks in your country? Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. Where are Americans suffering most? Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S. What does climate devastation look like? In Sept. 2020, Michael Benson studied detailed satellite imagery. Here's the earth that he saw and the one he wants to see. A child who plucks out a bird's feathers may be punished, but corporate executives who torture birds by the billions are showered with stock options. Factory farming also diminishes human frontline workers, from struggling farmers who raise animals to the miserably paid and poorly protected slaughterhouse employees now falling ill from the coronavirus. In the face of all this, attitudes are changing: Eight percent of young American adults said in 2018 that they were vegetarians, compared with just 2 percent of Americans 55 and older. I became a vegetarian almost two years ago (not a strict one, and I do eat fish) because my daughter nagged me ("provided moral guidance" would be a nicer spin), and I suspect that ethical and environmental considerations and the increasing availability of tasty alternatives to meat will lead our descendants to eat less meat, and be baffled at our casual acceptance of an industrial agricultural model built on large scale cruelty. "One day future generations will look back on our abuse of animals in factory farms with the same attitude that we have to the cruelties of the Roman 'games' at the Colosseum," Peter Singer, a Princeton University philosopher, told me. "They will wonder how we could be blind to the suffering we are so needlessly inflicting on billions of animals." A second area that I think will leave future generations baffled at our heartlessness is our indifference to suffering in impoverished countries. More than five million young children will die this year around the world from diarrhea, malnutrition or other ailments; we let these children perish essentially because of our own tribalism. They are not a priority to us. While I denounced the mistreatment of broiler chickens, it's only fair to note that about 5 percent of those birds die prematurely. In contrast, 7.8 percent of children in sub Saharan Africa die by the age of 5, according to UNICEF. So heartless agribusiness concerns do a better job ensuring the survival of baby chicks than the international community sometimes does for human babies. A third area where I suspect our descendants will judge us harshly is climate change. Our generation's denialism will lead to more extreme weather, more flooded homes, more heat waves and resentment that early 21st century humans could have been so selfish as to refuse to take small steps to reduce carbon emissions. I raised this issue of our moral blind spots in my email newsletter the other day, and one reader, Brad Marston, a physics professor at Brown University, put it this way: "In 100 years our generation may be as poorly regarded as 19th century racists are today (or worse), due to our failure to tackle climate change, leaving a damaged and possibly ruined planet to future generations." So I'm all for re examining history and removing statues of Confederate generals. But just as important is our obligation to think deeply about our own moral myopia today and address it while there is still time. 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. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Andre De Shields in his rapture red dressing room at the Walter Kerr Theater.Credit...Erik Tanner for The New York Times Fifty years into his stage career, Andre De Shields cherishes the ability to change what is to come. He Takes Us to the Underworld in 'Hadestown.' And We're Glad to Go. You could romanticize it as a balcony, but really it's an ornate fire escape, painted creamy beige and stretched across the facade of the Walter Kerr Theater. And if you'd glanced up from West 48th Street early one evening this month, you'd have spied a tableau of considerable glamour and grace: Andre De Shields, in citrus striped coat and zebra striped shoes, posing for the camera with the animate aplomb of a model who just happens to be a dancer. The lights of the "Hadestown" marquee flashed behind him as he arced his slender arms, or pointed a tapered toe. At 73, Mr. De Shields was style and elegance in motion, like an ultracharismatic emissary from some higher plane. Little wonder he's up for a Tony Award for playing a god. "It is my contribution to the revolution: beauty," he'd been saying earlier in his dressing room, a compact but lushly serene space filled with roses and calla lilies and painted, at his direction, a shade of red called rapture. "I want to be beautiful," he'd said, in that meticulously cultured voice, "and I don't want it to be perceived as strange. Beauty is part of living a long, happy life." As for the revolution, well, Mr. De Shields is a political being. In 1968, at the University of Wisconsin, he played Tiger Lily in a radical production of "Peter Pan" that cast the Native American characters as Black Panthers making Tiger Lily Huey Newton. The next year, Mr. De Shields made his professional debut in "Hair," in Chicago. Since then, he has become what Rachel Chavkin, the "Hadestown" director, called "a creature of both downtown and uptown, mainstream and far out." On Broadway, he created the title role in the pathbreaking black musical "The Wiz" (1975), starred in "Ain't Misbehavin'" (1978 and '88), and got Tony nominations for "Play On!" (1997) and "The Full Monty" (2000). "Hadestown" coincides with the 50th anniversary of his career. With its plot about a greedy, wall building tyrant and the impecunious young artist who resists him, "Hadestown" is political art to Mr. De Shields. He thinks of Hermes in those terms, too. "Finally there is a place," he began, then paused for a deep breath, his voice wobbly with emotion, "in the public forum for a man who speaks beautifully, who dresses beautifully, and who uses beauty as a tool for inclusion." Born in 1946 in Baltimore, Mr. De Shields grew up in a devoutly Christian family, though he doesn't subscribe to religious ideology or believe in a fire and brimstone hell. But earthly hell? He's seen that in "an inexhaustible number of ways." "Hell could be something as complex as a white supremacist complex," he said. "Hell could be living a life of denial, which is what many of us have to do if we are not allowed to authentically express who we identify as, as opposed to what the heteronormative identification is." He is a fervent advocate of living authentically. For those like him who fall outside the cookie cutter norm, that "takes courage, it takes perseverance, it takes tenacity, it takes confidence, it takes epic empathy for oneself," he said. "And that's where the learning curve begins." Possessed of that empathy, Mr. De Shields considers himself the embodiment of the deferred dreams of his mother, who'd yearned to be a chorus girl, but "cleaned houses for other people and cared for other people's children," he said, and of his father, who'd wanted to be a singer, but taught himself tailoring. If Mr. De Shields finally wins a Tony this time, he says he'll mark his karmic debt to them paid in full. "We've come a long way," Mr. De Shields said, "obviously because the black artist has been persistent in leveling the playing field, and we've been tacticians in terms of making ourselves welcome in a terrain that has been traditionally inhospitable." He won't dwell on thoughts of what shape his career might have taken if he hadn't had to face bigotry. "That is the rabbit hole: 'What if?'" he said. "I don't go there because there isn't anything that I can do to change what has come before me. What I do have the power to do is to change what's on its way." He attributes his Broadway return to "the tectonic cultural change" feminists are making, and specifically to Ms. Mitchell and Ms. Chavkin, who brought him along when opportunity opened for them. "What was I doing for 49 years, before 2019?" he said. "Working with men, who were not trying to effect any tectonic cultural change, who would rather have kept me in my place. Not all of them, but we're talking about the general trend, and it's the trend we're trying to change." And in attempting that, he sees himself in benevolent collusion with each 9 or 10 year old seeing "Hadestown" with their parents. "That young person is giving me license to make the change in the world that he wants and he needs, she wants and she needs," he said. "They are empowering me: 'Mr. Hermes, make it better for me.'" During the development of "Hadestown," Mr. De Shields played Hermes off and on starting in 2012, but wasn't part of the 2016 smash Off Broadway production. He stepped back in for last fall's run at the National Theater in London. In his dressing room, Mr. De Shields wore a navy track suit brightly striped with orange, and glossy, tangerine, almost futuristic high tops: the only souvenir he purchased during his months in London. Leaning against the doorway near a mini fridge stocked with energy water, and a wooden Buddha with jaunty silver wings plucked from his London costume was an umbrella matching his ensemble. Soon, after a costume change, he was off to that photo shoot. Afterward, as he cut across the theater, Ms. Noblezada one of the cast mates he's closest to leaned out from stage left, video camera in hand. Filming him as he walked by, she narrated in her best Steve Irwin voice, as if he were a rare creature she'd encountered in its natural habitat. "I'm at that point with Andre," she said later, warmly, that "I don't need to ask his permission to mess with him. He likes when I mess with him." Back in his dressing room, wanting to answer a reporter's question about his faux zebra shoes, Mr. De Shields took one off to examine it. "I've got an African proverb that would match the shoe," he said then, and closed his eyes to remember it precisely. As he began to utter it, he decided to tweak the mention of lions. Instead, he would say animals "to be inclusive." So Mr. De Shields stood, shoe in hand in his rapture red room, and recited the proverb. "Until the animals tell their story," he intoned, "the glory of the hunt will be the tale of the hunter." And as far as he's concerned? This world is overdue for a more expansive sense of glory. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
SITTING at Citi Field this week, I started thinking about whether I would care more about the game, between the New York Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies, if I owned one of the teams. I'm not a fan of either club a friend had an extra ticket and invited me but my reverie was prompted by a recent talk I had with Stuart L. Sternberg. Mr. Sternberg, a lifelong Mets fan who made his fortune as an options trader, told me he had inquired about buying a stake in the team in 2002. At the time, Nelson Doubleday was looking to sell his half. Fred Wilpon, who owned the other half, bought Mr. Doubleday's share. Having expressed interest in a team, Mr. Sternberg was shown other baseball clubs that were for sale. Two years later, in 2004, he became a minority owner of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, one of the worst teams in baseball and one that he had never rooted for. He said it seemed to be a good deal. A year later, he was the principal owner. "It was a little misunderstood and a little mispriced," Mr. Sternberg said. But he said he thought that many of the things that had been hurting the team could be fixed. "If given time and nothing else, those difficulties, mostly related to bad contracts, would diminish. Over time, like an option, they would expire." In 2008, Mr. Sternberg watched as his team, which he renamed the Rays, won their first American League Championship and went on to the World Series. (They lost to the Phillies in five games.) The Rays made it into the playoffs in two of the next three years, with one of the lowest payrolls in the sport. I have been writing for the last few weeks about passion investments putting money into films, racehorses, restaurants, franchises and vineyards that appeal as much to the heart as the head. But sports teams are different in several ways. They require an enormous amount of cash upfront and come with all sorts of rules decreed by the various leagues, including limits on the amount that can be financed and restrictions on what the principal owner can do with the franchise. Still, the high prices and the restrictions have not slowed interest in buying sports teams, Major League Baseball in particular. Mr. Wilpon, hit with a lawsuit related to his investments with the Ponzi schemer Bernard L. Madoff, was forced to sell minority stakes in the Mets to 12 investors. Each 4 percent stake cost 20 million. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. Giants' Loss Leads to Finger Pointing: Coach Joe Judge challenged the team and its coaches after being routed by the Buccaneers on Monday night. What Will the Giants Do With Daniel Jones? The team must evaluate the quarterback ahead of a contract decision. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Recently, a group of investors led by the basketball great Magic Johnson bought the Los Angeles Dodgers out of bankruptcy for 2.15 billion, a huge price that included real estate around the ballpark and the prospect of a lucrative cable deal next year. Now, the San Diego Padres are said to be up for sale, with some of the people who failed to acquire the Dodgers now interested. And there was the rumor that George Steinbrenner's heirs could be looking to sell the New York Yankees, an idea the organization quickly quashed. So what's the appeal of owning a team? Mr. Sternberg said there were only three reasons: to win, to make money or to bask in the glow of being an owner. (He said he is focused on the first one.) Sure, teams can count on revenue from ticket sales, concessions and coveted television rights. And they can certainly appreciate in value Frank McCourt, whose divorce and legal troubles precipitated the sale of the Dodgers, bought the team in 2004 for 430 million. But it is a costly business to run, not just for the salaries of the players, coaches, scouts and staff but to maintain the stadium and provide the countless other details that make fans happy. "You can make money in this," said Bradley Rangell, who leads Citi Private Bank's sports advisory business. "You can make an investment in a rank and file team, manage it O.K. and ride the appreciation. Or you can do what happened in L.A. and put a business plan in place to develop around the team." When Mr. Sternberg bought the Devil Rays, he said his friends thought he was crazy. The team was not good, and it was 1,200 miles from his home. "I like things a bit messier," he said. "It wasn't plug and play. I believed we could have some real positive effects on winning baseball games." Mr. Rangell said that one of the big surprises for many investors came after they actually owned the team. Mr. Sternberg was no different. "In the fall of 2005, they handed me the keys," he said. "We knew enough to make the car run, but to make it run well was a different story." Yet he said he didn't worry about the financial downsides. The team was at the bottom. He was concerned instead about becoming a public figure and what effect it would have on his family. "I had no understanding of what it meant to become a public person," he said. "Being out there is a necessary part of promoting our brand." Paul Hubert, head of Citi Private Bank's sports finance and advisory business, said this is something often overlooked by families who have been able to keep their net worth under the radar. He cited the Lerner family, which made its money in real estate and then bought the Washington Nationals in 2006. But there is compensation for that loss of privacy. Mr. Sternberg bought his initial stake of the team when it was valued at 145 million. In March, Forbes said it was worth 323 million. "I don't think of what it's worth," he said. "It's like my house. I don't think about the value of it because I'm not selling it." There are often small stakes of teams available, like the Mets deal. While this might seem an easier way into a sport, the bankers I spoke with said they have to counsel buyers on the implications of being one among many. "As a limited partner, you don't have control," Mr. Hubert said. He said minority interests are good for people who are fans or who want to learn more with the hope of buying a team one day. One way to have full control at a much lower price is to buy a minor league team. Tom Seidler, whose grandfather was Walter O'Malley, the celebrated owner of the Dodgers, said it was the small town feel that attracted him to become a minor league owner. "I fell in love with minor league baseball as a college intern working in Great Falls, Mont., where the Dodgers had a rookie team," Mr. Seidler said. He and a cousin bought a minor league team in California in 1998 that they later swapped for the Visalia Rawhide, the single A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Mr. Seidler said he paid in the low seven figures for the team. Charlie Blaney, president of the California League, said single A teams like the Rawhide were worth about 10 million today. Mr. Seidler has found many similarities with the big leagues. "Strong community outreach is critical at both levels," he said. "Then, you need stability and a good family environment." The downside is he has no control over his players, though he also does not have to pay their salaries, which the Diamondbacks pay. A minor league owner's big costs are operating the stadium, marketing and staff salaries. "The exciting thing for our fans is to see a player move up to the big leagues," he said. "Most minor league fans don't care about wins and losses. They like the fireworks, the special events, the mascot." Such simple joy can be tough for a big league owner. Mr. Sternberg said he knew that whatever happened after he bought the Rays, watching baseball would be changed forever. "Every game I watch, everything I read in the papers, it immediately becomes how does this affect us," he said. "The fandom part of it has been corrupted for me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
WASHINGTON The Washington Ballet, founded in 1976 just presented its first full length "Swan Lake." This notable fact, however, is not what has gained the production national attention. That would be the casting. At the Kennedy Center here on Thursday and Sunday, the leads of this archetypal classical work were both taken by African American dancers, one of them an increasingly famous guest star from American Ballet Theater: Misty Copeland. Brooklyn Mack, in his sixth season with Washington Ballet, was new to the role of Prince Siegfried. It was not quite Ms. Copeland's first try at the double role of Odette/Odile that happened last year, on tour with Ballet Theater in Australia but it was her American debut in the part. (Her New York debut will be on June 24, during Ballet Theater's season at the Metropolitan Opera House.) Because it is exceedingly rare indeed, the Washington Ballet says the casting of two African Americans in a full length "Swan Lake" is a first for American ballet this bucking of stereotypes was dramatic, more dramatic than it should be. The performance I saw on Sunday, alas, had the opposite problem: drama was missing. The production is admirable in many ways. The properly chivalric sets and costumes, borrowed from Ballet West, are merely adequate, but the Evermay Chamber Orchestra played Tchaikovsky's great score with vivid distinction. There were sprightly, sparkling performances all through the Washington ranks, particularly in the pas de trois of Acts I and II. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
5 Shows to See in New York: 'Pretty Woman,' 'Be More Chill' and More August in New York is traditionally a month without shrinks or new shows. Least of all musicals, which usually want to open when local crowds are available to get them off to a good start. But ever since the blockbuster success of "Hairspray," which opened on Broadway 16 years ago on Aug. 15, producers have been braving the dog days more often, both on Broadway and off. Here are five new musicals that might survive into fall. Its "Pygmalion" like plot about a businessman, Edward Lewis, who rescues a streetwalker, Vivian Ward, and turns her into a lady clearly needed rethinking after 28 years. So now, apparently, she rescues him. That switch may be difficult to pull off, but Andy Karl, a Broadway favorite last seen in "Groundhog Day," has the right combination of grit and charisma to make a case for Edward. The newcomer Samantha Barks (Eponine in the "Les Miserables" film) co stars as Vivian, singing a clutch of new songs by the rock n roller Bryan Adams and his longtime writing partner Jim Vallance. Jerry Mitchell, who made a hit of "Kinky Boots" another show known for a knockout red dress directs and choreographs. If you don't at first recognize "Gettin' the Band Back Together" as a Broadway musical, that may be because it isn't based on something else. No movie, novel, pop catalog or cartoon provided its story about a grudge match between two former high school garage bands whose members, now hitting 40, have long since disbanded. And without source material it has no guaranteed fan base. For those things it'll have to depend on its authors and its charm. Of authors it already has plenty: one songwriter (Mark Allen) and 13 book writers. Yes, 13. The one with a normal name is Ken Davenport, who is also the show's lead producer; the others are the Grundleshotz, an improv comedy collective. John Rando ("On the Town," "Urinetown") directs. The charm may come from the cast of Broadway journeymen and women getting a chance to shine. An out of town review in 2013 singled them out as the show's greatest asset, and most of them are returning now joined by Marilu Henner for the production that opens on Aug. 13 at the Belasco Theater. Not many musicals come to New York already a cult sensation. But after a 2013 production at Two River Theater in Red Bank, N.J., "Be More Chill" went viral on the internet for reasons that still mystify its authors, Joe Iconis (songs) and Joe Tracz (book). The cast album has been streamed more than 100 million times in the United States. Many of the streamers are likely to be teenagers, drawn to the show's "Dear Evan Hansen" meets "Mean Girls" sensibility, with a touch of sci fi added. (It is based on Ned Vizzini's young adult novel from 2004.) When Jeremy, after swallowing a microcomputer that turns wallflowers into winners, becomes too cool for school, an angsty drama (with catchy songs) ensues. Part of the success of the album may be based on what it leaves out: the story. Listeners can fill in the blanks in very personal ways. (A lot of fan art has been created in total ignorance of the plot.) The director Stephen Brackett will no doubt be working to make sure that the tale welcomes the same kind of identification onstage, at the Pershing Square Signature Center this month. Another odd genre is the Off Broadway sci fi musical comedy, which over the years has given us "Little Shop of Horrors," "The Rocky Horror Show," "The Toxic Avenger" and others. Now add to the list "R.R.R.E.D.," which opens this month at the DR2 Theater near Union Square. The title abbreviation stands for Real Redheaded Revolutionary Evolutionary Defiance, and the premise is intriguing even if it is counterfactual. Gingers, convinced by recent pseudoscience that they are becoming extinct, band together to fight back and save their breed. You can probably guess where this is going from the titles of some of Katie Thompson's songs: "What Good's a Blonde Anyway?" "Silence is RED" and "Procreation!" But the scenario also makes room for plenty of gags and a rotating gang of guest stars including Christopher Sieber, Tovah Feldshuh and Ariana DeBose. Be warned: Some or all of them may be hair color impostors. On July 20, 1969, Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon and didn't say, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." That was his Apollo 11 commander, Neil Armstrong. Mr. Aldrin showed up 20 minutes later. What it's like to be the guy who follows the famous guy is the subject of "1969: The Second Man," a folk rock fable that takes its cue from Mr. Aldrin's statement that he really didn't want to be first "because of the added heartache." With songs by Jacob Brandt and a book by Dan Giles, the show, part of the Next Door series at New York Theater Workshop, is aimed at "the runner up in all of us." Jaki Bradley, who staged Mr. Giles's "Breeders" last year, directs, at the 4th Street Theater in the East Village. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
After six years of planetary observations, scientists at NASA say they have found convincing new evidence that ancient Mars had an ocean. It was probably the size of the Arctic Ocean, larger than previously estimated, the researchers reported on Thursday. The body of water spread across the low lying plain of the planet's northern hemisphere for millions of years, they said. If confirmed, the findings would add significantly to scientists' understanding of the planet's history and lend new weight to the view that ancient Mars had everything needed for life to emerge. "The existence of a northern ocean has been debated for decades, but this is the first time we have such a strong collection of data from around the globe," said Michael Mumma, principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Center for Astrobiology and an author of the report, published in the journal Science. "Our results tell us there had to be a northern ocean." But other experts said the question was hardly resolved. The ocean remains "a hypothesis," said Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist of the Curiosity rover mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Dr. Mumma and Geronimo Villanueva, a planetary scientist at NASA, measured two slightly different forms of water in Mars' atmosphere. One is the familiar H O, which consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The other is a slightly "heavier" version of water, HDO, in which the nucleus of one hydrogen atom contains a neutron. The atom is called deuterium. The two forms exist in predictable ratios on Earth, and both have been found in meteorites from Mars. A high level of heavier water today would indicate that there was once a lot more of the "lighter" water, somehow lost as the planet changed. The scientists found eight times as much deuterium in the Martian atmosphere than is found in water on Earth. Dr. Villanueva said the findings "provide a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had by determining how much water was lost to space." He said the measurements pointed to an ancient Mars that had enough water to cover the planet to a depth of at least 137 meters, or about 450 feet. Except for assessments based on the size of the northern basin, this is the highest estimate of the amount of water on early Mars that scientists have ever made. The water on Mars mostly would have pooled in the northern hemisphere, which lies one to three kilometers 0.6 to 1.8 miles below the bedrock surface of the south, the scientists said. At one time, the researchers estimated, a northern ocean would have covered about 19 percent of the Martian surface. In comparison, the Atlantic Ocean covers about 17 percent of Earth's surface. The new findings come at a time when the possibility of a northern ocean on Mars has gained renewed attention. The Curiosity rover measured lighter and heavier water molecules in the Gale Crater, and the data also indicated that Mars once had substantial amounts of water, although not as much as Dr. Mumma and Dr. Villanueva suggest. "The more water was present and especially if it was a large body of water that lasted for a longer period of time the better the chances are for life to emerge and to be sustained," said Paul Mahaffy, chief of the atmospheric experiments laboratory at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Just last month, the science team running the Curiosity rover held its first formal discussion about the possibility of such an ocean and what it would have meant for the rest of Mars. Scientists generally agree that lakes must have existed for millions of years in Gale Crater and elsewhere. But it is not clear how they were sustained and replenished. "For open lakes to remain relatively stable for millions of years it's hard to figure how to do that without an ocean," Dr. Vasavada said. "Unless there was a large body of water supplying humidity to the planet, the water in an open lake would quickly evaporate and be carried to the polar caps or frozen out." Yet climate modelers have had difficulty understanding how Mars could have been warm enough in its early days to keep water from freezing. Greenhouse gases could have made the planet much warmer at some point, but byproducts of those gases have yet to be found on the surface. James Head, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University, said in an email that the new paper had "profound implications for the total volume of water" on ancient Mars. But, he added, "climate models have great difficulty in reconstructing an early Mars with temperatures high enough to permit surface melting and liquid water." Also missing are clear signs of the topographic and geological features associated with large bodies of water on Earth, such as sea cliffs and shorelines. Based on low resolution images sent back by the Viking landers, the geologist Timothy Parker and his colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab reported in 1989 the discovery of ancient shorelines. But later high resolution images undermined their conclusions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
In her first book, "Lurking," Joanne McNeil charts the history of the internet through the experiences of the users. These are not necessarily the same as people. Conflating the two, McNeil explains, "hides the 'existence of two classes of people developers and users,'" as the artist Olia Lialina has put it. The difference: Developers build and shape the online experiences that users run around in like rats in a maze. Users make their way through the vast web trying to fulfill certain essential desires. McNeil separates these behaviors searching, activism at the expense of safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity and visibility into chapters, each discussing the platforms and websites that serve them. McNeil maps out the history of the web, from the first bulletin boards, to the early days of blogging, to the emergence of social platforms like Friendster and eventually to the online world we live in today, dominated by tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Some users are deeply nostalgic for certain platforms of the past. "Most surprising is how fondness for Myspace has grown as time passes," McNeil writes. "It has come to represent a particular moment of freedom and drama online, especially to those too young to remember it." She quotes the musician Kyunchi, who compares Myspace to Woodstock. It was a special, unique place and if you weren't there, you missed it. McNeil uses language that is incisive yet poetic to capture thoughtful insights about the internet, like the insidiousness of these platforms' monetization schemes: "The problem with Instagram lies in how user identity entwines with commerce." Nor does she mince words when taking on one behemoth in particular. "I hate it," she writes. "The company is one of the biggest mistakes in modern history, a digital cesspool that, while calamitous when it fails, is at its most dangerous when it works as intended. Facebook is an ant farm of humanity." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
OAKLAND, Calif. Just Eat Takeaway, a European food delivery service, said on Wednesday that it had agreed to buy Grubhub for 7.3 billion, a deal that would give it a foothold in the United States. In the all stock deal, Just Eat Takeaway said it would value Grubhub at 75.15 per share, a 27 percent premium to Grubhub's closing price of 59.05. Grubhub's founder and chief executive, Matt Maloney, will join Just Eat Takeaway's board and oversee its business in North America, the companies said. "I am excited that we can create the world's largest food delivery business outside China," Jitse Groen, the chief executive of Just Eat Takeaway, said in a statement. Mr. Maloney said the companies would place "extra value on volume at independent restaurants, driving profitable growth." Uber had been in talks to buy Grubhub, but those discussions foundered over price and regulatory concerns, said people with knowledge of the discussions, who were not authorized to speak publicly. If Uber had bought Grubhub and combined it with Uber Eats, the result would have been the largest food delivery service in the United States, with about a 55 percent market share. That had attracted antitrust scrutiny. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
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