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Lee Mingwei and Bill T. Jones at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of the meditative installation, "Our Labyrinth," Mr. Lee says: "The rice should be dancing with you. You're doing a tango." When performers take turns sweeping a pile of rice across the floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it might look like just that: People, one by one, sweeping a pile of rice across a floor. But if you look more deeply, this task a soulful, spiritual journey tracing a labyrinthine path means something more. For Lee Mingwei, the Taiwanese American artist who created "Our Labyrinth," a performance installation, it is a meditation a space to clear the mind and body. It's also a dance. "I ask the performers to please focus on the rice, and the rice will tell you what your next move is," Mr. Lee said. "So you're literally having a conversation with the rice. Beside that, the most important part is to not over shine your ability over the rice. The rice should be dancing with you. You're doing a tango." Mr. Lee has presented this installation before, at the Pompidou Center in Paris and at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. But at the Met, the setup will be different. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the performances will be livestreamed over three Wednesdays in September when the museum is closed to the general public beginning Sept. 16, each program with a new cast of three performers. The present moment is clearly on the mind of Mr. Jones, who isn't changing Mr. Lee's work, he said, so much as "infecting" it. Most importantly, his contribution came down to a question. "What would make it New York?" Mr. Jones said he asked himself. "And New York raised all the questions about what was going on in the street with the protests. As if the Covid wasn't enough, suddenly there's this other horror that everyone's aware of, and people are putting on their masks and going to demonstrations. There was a lot of anger. I thought, what does it mean to do this serene piece in New York?" The setting itself the museum, one of the most established institutions in the city also weighed on Mr. Jones. He focused on the cast with Janet Wong, who is the associate artistic director of New York Live Arts, the performing arts space led by Mr. Jones, and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. What if the performers reflected the dance community as a whole and, with that, our current time? He cited "Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics Equity in Presenting Dance Performance," a collaboratively written and evolving text that calls for an overhaul in the field. "People are feeling that they are outside of the meat of the chain of influence, which is headed up by money," he said. "The conversations are so heated now in our community that we want to see if we could actually represent, on a small scale, what the New York performance community could look like." That means inclusivity is key. "Black people, brown people," Mr. Jones said. "Of course, women always. And there are trans people and there are gay people. Who are people who have been through our space, or who do we love?" The cast, which features three dance artists per program each sweeps a mound of rice for 90 minutes before the next takes over includes David Thomson, the veteran contemporary dancer and choreographer; Linda LaBeija, the transgender artist and activist; Nayaa Opong and Huiwang Zhang, both members of Mr. Jones's company; the drag artist Ragamuffin, or Jesse White; and the New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns. At first, Ms. LaBeija said, she was conflicted about whether to participate; she has always wanted to work with Mr. Jones, but the invitation came the day before her grandfather died. But, in an email interview, she said that the rice reminded her of life and that Mr. Lee "reminded me that taking our time is an act of self care and can provide the energy necessary to finish." She said she hopes her presence encourages other artists who identify as transgender and gender nonconforming to "take time so as to take up space and to relish in the beauty of existence." Another part of Mr. Jones's inflection is to add a sound element to each session: The experimental musicians Holland Andrews, Justin Hicks and Alicia Hall Moran will provide sonic landscapes. What surrounds the performers, who will wear ankle bells and a sarong designed by Mr. Lee, is important too. (Each program takes place in a different gallery.) "They also have to know that they are dancing for all the artwork and the spirit that exists in the Metropolitan Museum," Mr. Lee said. "Also, they are dancing for themselves because they are a part of the art they are an artwork. You bring out all the grace and poetry that you have for yourself and for the art that exists in this space and time." Mr. Lee was originally compelled to create "Our Labyrinth" after a trip to Myanmar, where he was asked to take off his shoes before walking down a path to enter a temple. "I was very moved to see and feel how clean the whole path was," he said. "It was such a sacred process." Through the temple keeper, he learned that volunteers cleaned the path daily. "He asked me if I would like to do it the next day," Mr. Lee said. "So I went at five o'clock in the morning and did it with the others, and it was just such a beautiful experience. When I came back to Taipei, I wanted to bring that sense of cleaning your spirit and cleaning a path." After his first rehearsal, Mr. Thomson realized that sweeping the rice for 90 minutes was like any meditative practice. "You've got to realize where you are, and then let that go and be with it," he said. "You're just with yourself and with the rice and it's not about making beautiful floor designs. I wasn't even aware of what the designs I was making. I was just dealing with moving the rice and my body in relationship to it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"Of course it was a different Donald Trump it's a different Donald Trump every night, which means it's always the same Donald Trump. He never fundamentally changes who he is as a person, he just swings wildly back and forth from one extreme to the other. He's like a werewolf, but for the sun instead of the moon." SETH MEYERS "And if he's taking it seriously, then we should be really scared. 'Cause I mean this guy takes nothing seriously. This is the same dude who stared at an eclipse like it was a Magic Eye painting." TREVOR NOAH "President Trump was warned about coronavirus by his advisers as early as Jan. 18 and he dismissed it for months. So as much as Trump wants to blame China for downplaying the virus, he himself ignored all the messages that his experts were giving him. And he didn't ignore them once, he didn't ignore them twice, he ignored them countless times. Like if we were back in Bible times, Trump would have heard the burning bush and then just thrown water on it. imitating Trump 'Ah, finally! That bush was so annoying.'" TREVOR NOAH "And of course, it went unheeded. Trump doesn't heed. He doesn't heed the law, he doesn't heed advice, and he especially doesn't heed studies." SETH MEYERS | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
HONG KONG While the spread of Covid 19 is picking up speed in Europe and the United States, among other regions, the outbreaks in some countries in Asia seem to be under control. The epidemic in China appears to be slowing down after an explosion in cases followed by weeks of draconian control measures. And other locations have managed to avert any major outbreak by adopting far less drastic measures: for instance, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. All have made some degree of progress, and yet each has adopted different sets of measures. So what, precisely, works to contain the spread of this coronavirus, and can that be implemented elsewhere now? In late January, after a sluggish and problematic initial response, the government of mainland China put in place unprecedented containment and social distancing measures. It locked down major cities, notably Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, and imposed various travel restrictions throughout the country. The testing capacity of laboratories was rapidly expanded. To relieve pressure on hospitals, patients with milder symptoms were placed in temporary isolation facilities set up in gymnasiums and event halls. New hospitals were constructed. People who had come into contact with anyone infected were sent to designated facilities, typically converted hotels or hostels, for prophylactic quarantine. Home quarantine was advised only for those only at slight risk of infection. Initially, almost all residents of Wuhan and other affected cities were required to stay at home; schools and workplaces remained closed well after the end of the Lunar New Year festival, around Jan. 27. The scale of these measures has been extraordinary: Almost 60 million people were placed under lockdown in Hubei Province alone, and most factories in the province are expected to remain shut until March 20. The economic costs are enormous. Already in early February, about one third of approximately 1,000 small and medium size businesses interviewed for one survey said they had only enough cash to survive for a month. But the restrictions seemed to have worked to contain the spread of Covid 19 in China: The number of new cases reported every day is now consistently much lower than it was a few weeks ago. But lockdowns and forced quarantines on this scale or the nature of some methods like the collection of mobile phone location data and facial recognition technology to track people's movements cannot readily be replicated in other countries, especially democratic ones with institutional protections for individual rights. And so Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong might be more instructive examples. All three places were especially vulnerable to the spread of the infection because of close links with mainland China especially in early January, as they were prime destinations for Chinese travelers during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday. And yet, after all three experienced outbreaks of their own, the situation seems to have stabilized. As of midday Friday, Singapore had 187 cases confirmed and no deaths (for a total population of about 5.7 million), Taiwan had 50 confirmed cases including 1 death (for a total population of about 23.6 million) and Hong Kong had 131 confirmed cases including 4 deaths (for a total population of about 7.5 million). Since identifying the first infections (all imported) on their territories on Jan. 21 in Taiwan and on Jan. 23 in both Hong Kong and Singapore all three governments have implemented some combination of measures to (1) reduce the arrival of new cases into the community (travel restrictions), (2) specifically prevent possible transmission between known cases and the local population (quarantines) and (3) generally suppress silent transmission in the community by reducing contact between individuals (self isolation, social distancing, heightened hygiene). But each has had a different approach. The Singapore authorities undertook especially intensive efforts to trace the contacts of people known to be infected. Hospital staff went to great lengths to interview patients about their recent whereabouts; when information was unclear or unavailable, the Ministry of Health retrieved additional data from transport companies and hotels, including by consulting CCTV footage. Large gatherings have been suspended. But to minimize social and economic costs, schools and workplaces have remained open. The Singaporean Ministry of Education on an extensive FAQs web page calls the closing of schools "a major, major decision" that would "disrupt many lives." Instead, students and staff are subjected to daily health checks, including temperature screenings. Public health campaigns were also reinforced to further improve Singapore's already exemplary standards of cleanliness and public hygiene. A special government task force recently recommended five personal hygiene habits:using a tissue when coughing or sneezing; using designated serving spoons during group meals; using trays when eating or drinking to limit contamination in case of spills; keeping public toilets clean and dry; and regular hand washing. From the outset, the government has recommended the use of masks only for people who already are unwell. Taiwan, also an island, took a slightly different tack. Instead of promptly banning travel from China, it undertook a comprehensive effort to screen newcomers from suspect areas. As soon as early January just days after the news of the outbreak in Wuhan Taiwanese medical authorities would board incoming flights from Wuhan and inspect and screen travelers on the planes. It was only after the first imported case was identified on Jan. 21 that four major airlines suspended flights between Taiwan and Wuhan. A ban on all but flights from Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen and Chengdu was implemented three weeks later. Taiwan has also taken a rather mixed approach in its efforts to reduce transmission within the community. Some state run facilities have been used for quarantines, but home quarantine has been the predominant method of isolation even when state facilities were available. To ensure compliance, the government has enforced strict penalties against anyone who breaks an isolation order, including fines up to about 33,200. Extensive efforts have also been made to track down and quarantine the close contacts of confirmed cases. And in the event transmission might occur before an infected person displayed any symptoms, tracing included all contacts starting two days before the onset of the patient's illness. Of Hong Kong's 40,000 hospital beds, some 1,000 are negative pressure beds, allowing confirmed cases to be properly isolated. Holiday camps and newly constructed public housing units that were still vacant were rapidly repurposed into quarantine facilities. As of March 12, 62 of the city's 131 confirmed cases were thought to have resulted from close contact with other confirmed cases. More than 24,700 people were still under quarantine this week. Hong Kong has also deployed very extensive measures to encourage social distancing. As early as Jan. 28, many civil servants were asked to work from home for the following month. Most large scale events have been canceled or postponed. On Jan. 27, all kindergartens and schools were closed until Feb. 16; the decision was extended several times, most recently to at least April 20. Many classes have been conducted online. Although it's still not clear whether or how much children contract and spread Covid 19, they are known major contributors to the transmission of influenza, and Hong Kong has been effective in stemming outbreaks of the flu by suspending classes four times over the past 12 years (in 2008, 2009, 2018 and 2019). Closing schools is a very invasive measure, but Hong Kong has a social structure that helps cushion some of the burden: Many families with two working parents already rely on domestic helpers or grandparents for child care. The government has mounted a public education campaign to promote hand hygiene and environmental hygiene. Nearly everyone in Hong Kong wears a face mask in public. And now, the caveats. Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as China, all had to contend with the SARS outbreak of 2002 3 and they internalized the lessons of that experience. Institutionally, this has meant, among other things, that they developed testing capacity for new viruses as well as hospitals' ability to handle patients with novel respiratory pathogens. At the individual level, the experience of SARS has prepared people to voluntarily display a tremendous amount of self discipline in, say, avoiding crowds and heightening their personal hygiene. These places were better equipped to face an outbreak of the new coronavirus than many others. At the same time, if the inroads Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong China, too have made against Covid 19 are promising, these gains also are fragile. These governments will need to keep at their containment measures for many more months or else risk a surge in infections. Taiwan seems especially vulnerable because it appears not to be testing people enough. The Chinese government has taken something of a victory lap recently, prematurely. But even it seems to know that, despite its bluster: Judging from bans China is now imposing on travelers from certain European countries, it is well aware that cases of infection could be reintroduced from abroad. Containment, however valiant an aim, also comes with very high costs, social and economic, and it might be an impossible goal for some countries, especially by now. In some places, Covid 19 could already be too widespread to be stopped. The vast majority of infections still appear to be mild, though; many might not even require medical attention. In such cases, it would be better to forgo trying to contain the disease and instead focus on mitigating its worst effects, for example, by concentrating resources on preventing an overwhelming surge in demand for hospital care, particularly intensive care. Still, the central point is this: Each in its own way, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong three places with markedly different socioeconomic and political features have been able to interrupt the chain of the disease's transmission. And they have done so without embracing the highly disruptive, drastic measures adopted by China. Their success suggests that other governments can make headway, too. Benjamin J. Cowling is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong. Wey Wen Lim is a graduate student in infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
There is a point at which you may find yourself so at odds with your country over its policies, its people or other matters that you no longer want to be a citizen. Which passport should you travel under if you leave? One group has created a solution for such a scenario: the World Passport, which doesn't explicitly label you as a citizen of any nation. This fringe movement now has one high profile member. Dante Terrell Smith, best known as the actor and rapper Mos Def and more recently known as Yasiin Bey, was arrested last month at Cape Town International airport after trying to leave the country on the World Passport. He decided against using his United States passport for political reasons, according to his lawyer, Bernard H. Jackson. "He is uncomfortable that the majority of the population is willing to justify the murder of unarmed black youths by law enforcement agencies," Mr. Jackson said. And, Mr. Bey said in a video recorded before his arrest, "My country is called earth." After his arrest, Mr. Bey released an audio message through the musician and rapper Kanye West's website. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Let's be honest: It was not the state of the union that anyone was curious about ascertaining from Donald J. Trump's address to Congress Tuesday night. The interior state of the president, on the other hand, has been a yearlong topic of interest, revived recently by the dishing in Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury" and by Mr. Trump's reported vulgar insults toward Africa and Haiti during a meeting on immigration. The White House treated the speech as a chance to reset the agenda, not just about his policy, but about Mr. Trump's personality. So for his first State of the Union address, someone switched the usual president with decaf. Sounding reserved (and a bit hoarse), sticking (mostly) to his prepared text and punctuating his own speech with loud, staccato slaps of applause, Mr. Trump attempted the music, if not necessarily the lyrics, of comity. The speech began with some traditional elements that reliably bring across the aisle applause: tributes to American heroes first responders in natural disasters and the mass shooting in Las Vegas and to Rep. Steve Scalise ("the legend from Louisiana"), who survived a shooting at a congressional baseball practice. He also opened with calls for unity "We always will pull through together, always" which contrasted with repeated network cutaways to congressional Democrats, seated and often glaring. Reminders of disunity were never too far away. When Mr. Trump praised a guest, 12 year old Preston Sharp, for arranging the planting of 40,000 flags at military graves, he added that it was a reminder of "why we proudly stand for the national anthem" a none too subtle allusion to his divisive attacks on NFL players over protests during the national anthem. This acoustic version of Mr. Trump did not come across warmer, except in moments of exchange with heroes and grieving parents in the audience. Mr. Trump was a TV performer for years, but he is not, like Ronald Reagan, an actor. He doesn't modulate his tone. He just keeps his chin stuck out and speaks slower, in a half whisper, like someone trying to have an argument in a quiet restaurant. Last year, when Mr. Trump addressed a joint session of Congress and stuck to his script, he was hailed by analysts as finally having become presidential. The next weekend he was on Twitter, accusing Barack Obama of having conspired to "tapp my phones" during the campaign. A year later, we know that this president can only be counted on to pivot in the sense that a Tilt a Whirl can. Even the Fox News round table noted that it did not come off as the bipartisan "olive branch" hinted at earlier in the day. But if the State of the Union cannot be taken as a reliable guide as to who Mr. Trump is, it is a useful guide to how he wants to be seen. This speech sought to project the image of someone who can keep his cool to viewers who tune out day to day politics. There are probably fewer of that group than usual, given how un tune out able Mr. Trump's outbursts and the news cycle has made him. This administration is like "Scandal": The plot changes every commercial break. The hour before the speech, the cable networks largely skipped the usual previews to cover new reports on the Russia investigation. Even the usual pageantry was affected by Trump drama subplots. The arrival of the first lady, Melania Trump, was noted by commentators who pointed out that she arrived separately, and that her white suit resembled those worn by Democratic women at last year's speech the subtext, seemingly, being recent reports of strife in the couple's marriage. The counterprogramming, too, was busy, reflecting the throng of Democrats jockeying to be the counter voice to Trump. There was the official party response Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III of Massachusetts at a Fall River, Mass., vocational school, a car competing with the congressional backdrop but the planned responders also included Representative Maxine Waters (on BET) and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont (on social media). There will be other rebuttals and contradictions. Some of those may eventually be issued by the president's less low key self, tweeting as he watches "Fox Friends." But this speech is who Mr. Trump is on paper or on the prompter screen until his next episode. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A little over a month after the Trump administration warned Americans not to visit Cuba because of mysterious sonic attacks, the Treasury on Wednesday published new restrictions on American travel to the island and placed dozens of military owned hotels and shops off limits. Under the new rules, Americans will no longer be permitted to visit Cuba on individual "people to people" trips, a popular mode of travel that has fueled a boom in home rentals and family run restaurants since President Barack Obama loosened restrictions on travel to Cuba two years ago. They will also be barred from "direct financial transactions" with a long list of restaurants, shops and hotels that form part of the Cuban military's extensive business empire. They include many properties in Old Havana and the five star Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski, whose opening last year was expected to usher in a new era of luxury travel. Bob Guild, the president of Mar Azul Charters, a travel company that has organized trips to Cuba for many years, said the shift under President Trump was "part of a long, long history of cracking down." Since the detente in late 2014, travel to Cuba had become "more and more normalized," Mr. Guild, said, adding, "you could go there for the weekend." Now the "war on travel" had returned, he said, adding that several universities had canceled trips booked with Mar Azul in recent weeks. Still, there are many ways to travel legally to Cuba. People to people trips will still be legal, but visitors must travel as part of an organized group, which will make travel more expensive. The rules, announced in June, come into force on Nov. 9, but do not affect travel plans already in process. Americans should continue to visit, but they must pay close attention to the rules, travel experts said. Here are answers to some questions you may have if you are planning a trip. Can Americans still visit Cuba? Yes, but it will be harder to go as an independent traveler. People to people trips must be undertaken with an organization that puts together full time programs for travelers, including Cuba Educational Travel, Cuba Cultural Travel and the Center for Cuban Studies. According to a fact sheet published on Nov. 8 by the Treasury Department, individual travel will still be allowed within 12 categories, including humanitarian and religious travel; family visits; journalistic activity; professional research; and participation in public performances, clinics, workshops, athletic and other competitions. Those traveling in these categories will still be able to book a flight and reserve a room online and they will not be required to apply for a specific license. However, they should pursue the activity in Cuba for which their license is granted, whether it be helping a religious group or bringing humanitarian aid, and keep records of their visit for the requisite five years. What was the State Department's travel advisory? The State Department in September warned Americans not to travel to Cuba after an alleged series of sonic attacks against United States personnel. Those hurt by the attacks had suffered a variety of symptoms, including hearing loss, brain injury and headaches. Travel organizers have questioned the dangers posed by the attacks and say the warning has sown confusion. Michael Sykes, the president of Cuba Cultural Travel, said many travelers were "misinterpreting" the State Department warning to mean that they would not be able to get a visa. Colin Laverty, the president of Cuba Educational Travel, said the advisory was unwarranted. "The U.S. government has a responsibility to make clear to U.S. travelers that Cuba continues to be safe, that these are isolated incidents and there is no risk to Americans traveling to Cuba," he said. Do Americans have to heed the travel warning? No. Travel warnings should be taken into account, but are not binding. What if I need help when I am in Cuba? The State Department has said that, because of a reduction in personnel in Havana, it will be able to help Americans only in emergencies. The government provides emergency telephone numbers and information here. Where can U.S. citizens stay? The new directive prohibits "direct financial transactions" with military assets on the Cuba Restricted List, which includes dozens of hotels and shops in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Varadero, Baracoa and elsewhere. American travelers will be channeled toward hotels run by civilian tour organizations, such as Gran Caribe and Cubanacan. There are decent alternatives to the military owned properties in Havana, but that is not the case in small towns like Baracoa, in eastern Cuba. Americans traveling independently may still book a room in a private house or through Airbnb. Precisely what constitutes a "direct financial transaction" is also unclear, travel representatives said: Could an American buy a drink in a bar on the restricted list? Probably not. But what if a travel company pays money to Havanatur, the Cuban state travel agency, which in turn buys rooms at a hotel on the restricted list? That is less clear. Could you take a cruise instead? You could. Carnival and Oceania Cruises offer cruises to Cuba departing from Miami. Other cruise companies offering journeys to Cuba from American ports include Pearl Sea Cruises and a French company, Ponant. Will anybody keep tabs on what Americans do in Cuba? Over the past two years, nobody seems to have been keeping tabs on which Americans go to Cuba or what they do there, even though senior officials at the Treasury and Commerce Departments said they took travel restrictions seriously. Now, the Trump administration is directing the Treasury Department to strictly enforce the law regarding travel to Cuba, including routine audits. As Mr. Guild notes, "This is not to be taken lightly." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
INSPIRED by the selection of a 1934 Voisin as Best of Show at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance last year, a major exhibition is being assembled to honor the largely forgotten man behind the machine, Gabriel Voisin, a French automaker and aviation pioneer. The exhibition, set for November at the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, Calif., is the idea of Peter Mullin, the owner of the museum as well as the award winning C 27 Aerodyne and 16 others. "Yes, we have 17 Voisins in our collection," Mr. Mullin confirmed in a recent telephone interview. "That is the largest collection of Voisins in the world." Although more than 27,000 automobiles were built at Voisin's factory in suburban Paris from 1918 to the late 1930s, when the company ceased production, Mr. Mullin estimated that only 100 to 150 are known to still exist. The survivors have become some of the world's most esteemed collector cars. (A 1934 Voisin C 15 roadster also won Best of Show at Pebble Beach in 2002.) Certainly a cult of collectors remembers Voisin, who died in 1973, at age 93, near Lyon, France. But few are aware of his achievements as an aviation pioneer, as the architect of some of the first prefabricated houses and as a consummate ladies' man. "He truly was a man for all seasons," Mr. Mullin said. "A renaissance man, the quintessential 'make love, not war' sort of guy, an elegant prince and playboy." Mr. Mullin is trying to round up examples of Voisin's various machines, architectural constructions and designs. He says the exhibition will be the largest assemblage of Voisin cars in recent memory. But it is proving hard to find examples of Voisin's varied creations. "Only one actual Voisin aircraft out of more than 50,000 that were built still exists," Mr. Mullin said. That craft, a Voisin Type 8 bomber from World War I, is on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Mr. Mullin said that replicas exist, built to Voisin's specifications. "I've been on the hunt for one a real one but have so far been unable to find any," he said. Voisin began experimenting with aircraft as early as 1899, and he went to his grave insisting that his flying machine, rather than Orville and Wilbur Wright's, was the first to make a powered flight. But Voisin grew disillusioned with the use of airplanes in war. "Voisin was in love with the romance of powered flight," Mr. Mullin said. "He did not like seeing his planes used as creatures of destruction." That was a strong motivation, besides the financial straits that Voisin always seemed to be in, for his switch to automobile production. His cars quickly became notable for their fine engineering, design and craftsmanship. "Our products must have had some merit," Voisin wrote in 1958, "for 30 years later Voisins are still to be found on the market in excellent condition." These are among the innovations that Voisin, who summed up his self taught engineering skills as that of "a rough carpenter," helped to pioneer: the earliest monocoque auto chassis, extensive use of aluminum, propeller type cooling fans, antilock brakes and aerodynamic styling. "The bodies of his cars were meant to evoke a fuselage without wings and they do," Mr. Mullin said. "But you could argue he was more of an engineer than a stylist. He said, 'Function prevails over design.' " Voisin automobiles were low slung, lightweight and well balanced, and they were strong performers. Voisin's 1962 book, "Mes Milles et une Voitures" (My 1,001 Cars) listed a dozen world records in endurance racing. His creations were not flawless, however. With their Knight type sleeve vales, the engines emitted clouds of blue smoke because of the way the moving parts were lubricated. "Among owners, we say, 'If your Voisin doesn't smoke, there's something wrong,' " Mr. Mullin noted. But financial troubles continued to shadow Voisin. In a cash squeeze during the Depression, he let a number of talented employees go including Andre Lefebvre, who moved on to Citroen, where he was associated with the innovative designs of the 2CV, Traction Avant and DS. At onetime, the handsome, dashing Voisin lived in a Paris mansion with something equivalent to a harem of younger women. In his memoirs, he bragged of his romantic conquests. Voisin, who was born in 1880, was married in 1909; he and his wife separated in 1926. Mr. Mullin said, "He married a Spanish girl of about 18 in 1950 and set up house with her and her elder sister, who 'came as part of her dowry.' " Along with contemporaries like Ettore Bugatti and Louis Renault, he was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer in World War II, and the government seized his company. He was eventually exonerated, and he tried a postwar comeback by designing motorcycles and a small, minimalist car called the Biscooter. (A failure in France, it proved successful in Spain, where it was called the Biscuter.) Mr. Mullin, who owns a Biscooter, called it "actually an elegant little car." It will be in the exhibition. But Voisin might have had little interest in the Mullin's exhibition of his cars. Late in his life, he greeted a visitor driving a Voisin, Mr. Mullin noted. "He said: 'Why are you bothering with old crocks like that? At your age, you should be spending your time and money on pretty girls.' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Credit...Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times TORONTO In the middle of shooting a scene from the new biopic "Dolemite Is My Name," Eddie Murphy went off script. Playing the comic Rudy Ray Moore onstage, he needled a member of the audience, then asked where he came from. The man, an extra, improvised: "Your mama's house!" Everyone on set roared ("Awwwww!") and Murphy lit up, in character, unleashing insults, telling the guy he was the type "who would fart in the tub and turn around and bite the bubbles." In an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie premiered to glowing reviews this month, Murphy, 58, described the scene, acting out all the parts, sounding delighted. "It was a line I had heard Rudy say," he explained about the insult, "but still, it felt like a real moment with a heckler." Next to him was the film's director, Craig Brewer, who added that after the scene had ended and the star had left for a costume change, he looked around at his cast and marveled: "Do you know what we just saw?" Brewer paused, sounding more fan than collaborator. "We couldn't believe it. We just saw it." What they saw was something that has been sorely missing from popular culture for more than three decades : Eddie Murphy, one of the funniest people to ever tell jokes into a microphone, doing stand up. Over the years, Murphy has teased fans with talk of a comeback, but this time, inspired by "Dolemite," he appears to mean it. He signed a deal with Netflix to put out a new special next year, and has a theater tour lined up, which means he could be in clubs working out jokes soon. "I didn't want to just pop back up," he said. "I wanted a funny movie to remind them that they liked me. This movie turned out so strong that I figured this is a great way to come back." His return to stand up will be part of a broader reboot of the decade that made Murphy a star. In December, two months after the Oct. 4 theatrical premiere of "Dolemite" (it moves to Netflix on Oct. 25), he's hosting "Saturday Night Live," for the first time since 1984 (before that he was a cast member for four years) . And 30 years later, Murphy is working on a sequel, also directed by Brewer, to his 1988 hit "Coming to America" with the original characters. "I'm kind of looking at this period as a bookend," Murphy said. "I hadn't been back to 'S.N.L.' Let's fix that. Let's do stand up again. That way, when I finally just sit on the couch, then it's good." Referring to his most recent movie, a sober, uplifting drama from 2016, he added. "I don't want to sit on the couch after 'Mr. Church.'" IT'S HARD TO OVERSTATE HOW BIG AN IMPACT Eddie Murphy made in the 1980s. In two specials, "Delirious" and "Raw," performed, famously, in leather suits, he became the most influential stand up of his generation. Besides entering the discussion of who is the greatest cast member in the history of "Saturday Night Live" and injecting a cutting racial consciousness into a show that lacked it, his dynamic presence arguably saved "S.N.L." from cancellation when it was struggling after the original stars left. In the meantime, he became one of the biggest movie stars in the world after a string of blockbuster comedies ("48 Hrs.," "Trading Places," "Beverly Hills Cop") fueled by his singular charisma. Replace Murphy with anyone else in "Beverly Hills Cop," the third highest grossing comedy of all time, and it's probably a flop. But even these credits don't entirely capture his singular success. It's difficult for a comic to be funny and sexy or funny and sweetly innocent, but nearly impossible to pull off this trick at the same time, as he did in seminal bits like the one about kids excited over the ice cream truck. No one killed like Murphy did in the 1980s. When I saw "Raw" in Washington as a teenager, the audience laughed so loudly that the people running the theater actually turned the movie off and asked us to be quieter. Wearing a plush zip up jacket with sunglasses hanging off the front, Murphy leaned back and shifted from a cool monotone to a comic impression of himself watching "Raw" as a snooty prude. "That's a bit much, my goodness," he said, cracking up, then shifting again, taking his voice down an octave to register a hint of moral disapproval: "My word." With alacrity he returned to the measured voice of Eddie Murphy, unflappable superstar, recognizing that what is a portrait of a place and time for him means something altogether different to everyone else. "It's forever," he said quietly in what might be considered a verbal shrug. Murphy describes himself now as a completely different person than he was back then, but spending an hour with him argues otherwise. He remains blindingly quick on his feet and an ingenious, hilarious mimic who can summon a big top of characters in seconds. With a soft voice and laid back manner, he can seem remote, until he switches into a character, which he does often; raising his volume and intensity, he commits, firmly in the moment. As is clear from his performance in "Dolemite," one of his finest, Murphy's star power is undiminished. But there's a new tenderness and mature vulnerability in this role that also comes out in person. Asked how his sense of humor has changed, he conceded: "I'm mushier than I used to be." His new movie provides some evidence. Murphy who came up with the idea, and the title, for the blaxploitation parody "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, " which Keenen Ivory Wayans eventually directed in 1988 takes a much warmer, more reverent approach to Rudy Ray Moore, a star of the blaxploitation era. "Ed Wood," Tim Burton's affectionate 1994 portrait of a B movie auteur, was an inspiration. (They even hired the same screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski). Murphy saw Moore's 1975 cult hit, "Dolemite," for the first time as a teenager, introduced to Moore's comedy by his older brother Charlie (who died in 2017 and to whom the new biopic is dedicated). The younger Murphy w as impressed by its audaciousness even though he recognized its artistic flaws. Murphy's taste has always leaned toward the mainstream, and his heroes were Richard Pryor, Elvis and Bruce Lee. As a kid, he felt distraught when he was banished from watching "West Side Story" on TV with his family as punishment for misbehaving, he recalled, and imitated himself in tears listening to "I Feel Pretty" through the wall. Yet he said he had always had a soft spot for blaxploitation stars because it was so rare to find African Americans onscreen. "Flip Wilson was really the first black person we saw in the mainstream, and then Hollywood started making movies with us," he said. "But they didn't spend a lot of money on them, so they're not these high quality pictures. But black people, ourselves, we were just excited to see ourselves. We never felt like they were exploitation." While Murphy became a star as a teenager, Moore, in sharp contrast, was a struggling, overweight comic who needed to go outside the industry to find success, which didn't come until middle age. Dolemite was his rhyming alter ego, sometimes called the godfather of rap, who specialized in kung fu and oddball put downs. ( "You insecure, no business, rat soup eating" so and so went one insult.) His movies were filled with laughable mistakes (a boom mic enters the frame), and when he knocked out a bad guy with a kick, his leg barely got off the ground. This made "Dolemite" a perfect midnight movie, beloved by stoned college kids for generations. ONCE MURPHY DECIDED TO RETURN TO STAND UP, he also settled on hosting "Saturday Night Live." He had stayed away from it for decades, upset over some jokes made at his expense, including one by David Spade, though he seems no longer bothered by it. He returned for the 40th anniversary special in a brief appearance without telling jokes. This time it should be different. "I have to do Buckwheat," he said, also mentioning Gumby and his Mister Rogers parody, Mr. Robinson, his best known characters from that era . The show has recently become the subject of controversy for hiring and then firing a cast member, Shane Gillis, after recordings of him making racist remarks on a podcast surfaced. Murphy, who has never owned a computer and describes himself "as close as you can get to a technophobe," said he wasn't concerned about new scrutiny of his comedy. He has been criticized for jokes on his specials that talked about fear of contracting AIDS from kissing gay men and used homophobic slur s ; in the past, he cited such backlash as the reason he stopped doing stand up. He has also said stand up stopped being fun. But now he regrets giving it up and once he returns, he said, he will never abandon it again. "I went through all that stuff, so this is not scary," he said about controversies over jokes. He pointed that he had been picketed and had also apologized for material about AIDS that he now calls "ignorant" before adding, on the subject of anxiety by comics today : "All this stuff they are talking about: 'Hey, welcome to the club.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
My friend Brigham didn't pronounce himself an expert on Salt Lake City, but he had attended nearby Brigham Young University, and I trusted his opinion. So when he told me about Red Iguana, a casual Mexican place that's "quite possibly the most famous restaurant in the state," I went directly from the airport. He wasn't wrong: There was a crush of people standing on North Temple under a weathered red sign. A host at a podium outside was ruthlessly informing a party of 15 that because their whole party wasn't present, they could not be seated and no, their table wouldn't be held. "You'd be better off going around the corner to Red Iguana 2," the host told me when I approached. I was stunned there was a copy of their restaurant quite literally around the corner to handle overflow. I opted to get my food to go; it took about 10 minutes. My enchiladas, stuffed with turkey and slathered in pistachio mole ( 13.99), were wonderful. The mole sauce was velvety, nutty and fragrant. I began to understand the long wait for a table. It was one of a number of surprises I found in Salt Lake City (a budget friendly, multicultural dining scene, electrifying sporting events, some great bars), as well as the expected (great hiking and breathtaking vistas, byzantine laws involving drinking in said bars). First things first: I needed a place to lay my head for a weekend. Since the rise of services like VRBO, Airbnb and HomeAway, I've noticed that hotels have been scrambling a situation that allows frugally minded consumers to land great deals. I booked a Priceline "Express Deal" and landed a room at the Sheraton, in the heart of the city, for a mere 71 per night, or about 50 percent off the published rate. The hotel, a hulking block of umber red brick, was a bit dated but quite comfortable and even had a Starbucks in the lobby. But wasn't caffeine an unwelcome presence in Mormon country? Not really, I learned. First, while Utah is mostly Mormon, within Salt Lake City proper non Mormons are the majority. Secondly, the church has clarified in recent years that caffeine consumption is not prohibited per se, merely "hot drinks" (assumed to mean coffee and tea). The Mormon Church does play a substantial role in civic life, which is immediately apparent from the layout of the city: the Salt Lake Temple lies in the center of town with the streets North Temple, South Temple and West Temple shooting off from it in all four directions. (This can get a little confusing when, say, you're navigating an address like 736 West North Temple.) While I didn't want the church to play an oversized role in my Salt Lake experience, I certainly had to visit Temple Square, a 35 acre complex that surrounds the main temple. I made an appointment on the church's website for a free tour and met the two sister missionaries, from the Philippines, who would be my tour guides. Gregarious and dressed in long skirts and sweaters, they led me up to a room with a large statue of Christ, as well as a panorama painting of earth, as seen from space, that covered nearly the entire back wall. The sisters motioned to me to sit down and one of them asked me about my faith. I responded honestly, which is that I did not grow up very religiously. That piqued their interest, and one of the women asked me if I'd ever considered accepting Heavenly Father into my life. The other was slightly more blunt about it: "I think you should be a Mormon," she said, smiling. After that tricky initial conversation, I had a nice time learning about Temple Square, its different buildings, and the history of the main temple, a beautiful structure that dates back to 1893. The guides were good humored and generous with their time the tour ended up taking nearly two hours. Near the end, we took a photo in front of a life size statue of Brigham Young, and they left me with an inscribed copy of the Book of Mormon, recommending choice passages. While the beauty of the Salt Lake Temple stayed with me, little could match the natural beauty of city's environs that was visible nearly anywhere I went. The city lies in a valley, with the steep, sharp peaks of the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountain ranges acting as its guardians, ever visible throughout the city's 110 square miles. I went for a quick hike one morning up Big Cottonwood Canyon, in the Wasatch range, with some new friends I had met through Brigham. We went up the Lake Mary trail, a short (roughly two miles) but steep trail that provided nice views of the canyon and meadows dotted with flowers. The water level of the lake at the summit of the hike was quite low when I went (possibly because it was in the process of being drained) but the hike was still well worth the effort. Shops specializing in flavored, or "dirty," sodas have proliferated in Utah; while many of the state's residents are prohibited from consuming alcohol or coffee for religious reasons, there is certainly no ban on sugar. Shops like Sodalicious and Swig have truly gone the extra step adding shots of flavored syrup and creamer to their drinks and have even come to legal blows over who's allowed to use the word "dirty" in describing their wares. We headed to Swig and sampled several of the concoctions (a large 44 ounce soda with a shot of syrup is 1.99; the specialty sodas can run around 3). The Missionary Sprite with shots of coconut syrup, dairy creamer and something called "Tiger's Blood" (it tasted like pina colada) I found undrinkable. The Big Al, however Diet Coke with coconut syrup and lime was surprisingly tasty. Fortunately, better food options awaited me elsewhere. Straw Market has fantastic breakfast deals, including their "short breakfast" two eggs, hash browns and toast or cinnamon roll, for only 4. I opted for the 3 breakfast burrito instead. An extra frugal tip is to go near closing time, when they put their baked goods on sale for 50 cents an item: a couple came in when I was there and nearly cleaned out the bakery case. I also had a good experience at Layla Mediterranean Grill and Mezze, a restaurant in nearby Holladay. I was able to create a filling dinner and save a few bucks by selecting a three item combo from the appetizers section for 14. I got a couple of meaty crab cakes, some tender stuffed grape leaves and some excellent French fries covered with a za'atar spice mixture. After a good dinner, I wanted to experience some Salt Lake City night life. I will admit that I didn't think it would offer much. I was wrong. There's a healthy and active bar culture, even if it's slightly hampered by the state's drinking laws. I learned this the hard way: I went into the Copper Onion, a place I'd heard good things about, and asked if I could sit down and have a drink. A woman who was eating at a counter stood up and began ushering me toward the door. "First of all, you can't just 'have a drink.' You have to order food. But we're closing." Lesson learned: In Utah restaurants, you have to order food in order to be served alcohol. Another rule is that the preparation of alcohol cannot be visible to patrons in newer restaurants, a regulation sometimes referred to as the "Zion Curtain" law. I headed toward Main Street instead, which had no shortage of actual bars. The sidewalks were packed with people; groups of girls stumbled in and out of bars, guys sat on large planters lining the parkway, checking their texts. It was a loud, buzzy scene, and I barely even noticed when a random young woman approached me, pointed and slurred, "Ok. You. Come on, come with me." She and her friends beckoned me to follow into a packed bar called Whiskey Street. I went and, finding the place a bit loud for my taste, quickly made my exit a few minutes later. The place next door was more my scene: a bar called Bodega with a "speakeasy" style bar called the Rest in the basement. (There actually wasn't anything secret about it; I just asked if I could go downstairs.) In the quiet, cozy space, I ordered a Little Horse ( 11), a delicious cocktail with vodka, blackberry and lemon juice. The Rest was fairly elegant, with its antique appearing light fixtures, taxidermied animal heads mounted on the walls, and shelves crammed with hardcover books. A place I went to later, X Wife's Place, was a dive in the best possible way. Indifferent service, cheap drinks, cheaper pool tables, all in a run down shack of a building? That's my kind of place. I got a 1.50 Coors (they also do 16 ounce Miller Lites for 2) and headed out to the back patio, where there were some tables, couches and a cornhole game. The pool tables at X Wife's Place, which are just a buck to begin with, are free with a drink purchase, Monday through Thursday from noon until 7 p.m. My favorite experience, though, was at a Real Salt Lake Major League Soccer game my first, ever at Rio Tinto Stadium, against the Chicago Fire. While the cheapest seats on the team's website were 35, I went on to StubHub and snagged a 12 general admission standing ticket right near the goal. The game, which Real Salt Lake won, was absolutely raucous, especially in my area. The diverse crowd of fans, some of whom have formed their own clublike supporters groups were continually shouting, chanting, waving flags and beating drums. One group of supporters behind me flew a large banner that read in Spanish, "Esta Pasion Es Real," or "This Passion Is Real." Feeling the electricity of a rocking stadium as the sun set in the distance over the Oquirrh Mountains, I found myself becoming a convert, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Hired in Spite of the Mustache Trevor Noah is not impressed by John R. Bolton, President Trump's new pick for national security adviser. Bolton is known for his hard line right wing views, and he's one of the few prominent members of the foreign policy intelligentsia who still vociferously defend the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2015, Bolton criticized President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran in an opinion article for The New York Times suggesting that the United States should launch pre emptive strikes against Iran. On "The Daily Show" on Tuesday, Noah quoted from an interview Bolton gave to Fox News shortly after writing that article. "'The earlier you strike, the more damage you can do:' I think that's a horrible strategy for keeping peace in the world. Although it is a great strategy for tackling an all you can eat buffet." TREVOR NOAH | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In Vienna where unemployment and interest rates are low the housing market is strong, especially when it comes to historic villas. This five bedroom, three bathroom home is in northwest Vienna, in the Dornbach neighborhood of the 17th district, which is known as Hernals. Built in 1884, the house was once a place where Austrian royalty was entertained and concerts by musicians and composers like Johann Strauss were held, said the listing agent, Elisabeth Wiederkehr, of Engel Volkers. For many years, the property was used as a film studio, before falling into disrepair in the late 20th century. The current owner bought it in 2003, divided it into five units and renovated the main home, combining restored elements of the old house with contemporary features. The home for sale, which is 5,996 square feet, includes three of the units: the three bedroom main house, a two bedroom apartment and an office. (An apartment on the top floor and a restaurant are not part of this sale.) At one end of the space is a large, modern fireplace with a mantel made of colored concrete. The floors are epoxy resin, and there is under floor heating throughout the house. An ornate iron chandelier, salvaged from the old house and restored, hangs in the dining area. The kitchen has lacquered wood cabinets, an island with a counter seating area and Gaggenau appliances. Behind it is a lounge area that serves as a media room, with a large U shaped sofa. (The furniture is not included in the asking price, but is available to buy; several pieces were custom made for the home.) As part of the restoration of the ground floor main hall, a loft was added above the kitchen area to serve as the master bedroom. It has an en suite bathroom and a round tub built into the floor. Two more bedrooms are on the ground floor, set off from the main room, and there is an additional space currently used as an office. The neighborhood of Dornbach is home to many 19th century villas in the distinctive Grunderzeit style, with spires and ornate facades. This house is on a commercial stretch of Dornbacher Street, with shopping, restaurants and schools nearby. It is a short walk to a tram stop, with connections to downtown Vienna that take about 30 minutes. Vienna International Airport is a 30 minute drive. Home prices in Austria rose 7.3 percent in the first quarter of 2018, according to the house price index compiled by Oesterreichische Nationalbank, Austria's central bank. In Vienna, prices rose 3.5 percent in the quarter, after an increase of 1.5 percent in 2017, the bank reported. Demand for housing in Vienna is strong, with low unemployment, a growing population and a stable economy driving the market, agents said. "Since the economic crisis in 2008, investors are looking for a safe investment, and interest rates are very low," said Peter Marschall, chief executive of Marschall Real Estate, in Vienna. More buyers are looking beyond traditional neighborhoods, with affordability and proximity to public transportation increasingly important. "There are many new developments in locations where people did not want to live several years ago," Mr. Marschall said. The most popular areas for high end buyers are in the western part of the city, including the neighborhoods of Wahring (the 18th district) and Dobling (the 19th district), as well as the 17th district, where this home is, said Susanne Thomanek, a Vienna based agent with Austria Sotheby's International Realty. "The beautiful, classical prewar architecture is known worldwide and fascinates buyers," Ms. Thomanek said. In the 18th and 19th districts, the best known areas for buying older estates, "2017 was an absolute record year on the villa market," according to a report by Otto Immobilien Gruppe, a real estate agency in Vienna. The median sale price for a villa in the two districts rose to just above 2 million euros (or about 2.3 million) in 2017, up from 1.2 million euros (about 1.4 million) in 2009, according to the company's data. Many of the older homes are family owned and haven't been on the market for generations, said Richard Buxbaum, the head of residential real estate for Otto Immobilien. "More people are interested in selling their villas," he said. "Elderly people own the property, and they don't know what to do with it." Homes in the Grunderzeit style, found throughout the 17th district, are especially popular, Ms. Wiederkehr said, adding that "many Grunderzeithauser are being lavishly refurbished and then sold as individual apartments." Foreign buyers account for only about 10 percent of home sales in Vienna, and most of those buyers come from nearby countries like Germany and Switzerland, Mr. Marschall said. But the number of foreign buyers is increasing, "especially from eastern European countries," he said, noting that most are looking for second homes or an investment. Five years ago, international buyers were "mainly in the luxury area and primarily from Russia," Mr. Buxbaum said. But today the market is more diverse, with recent buyers from Hong Kong, France and the United States, he said, estimating that international buyers account for 20 to 30 percent of his business. Taxes and fees typically add 10 percent to the sale price, Ms. Karoly said. They include a transfer tax of 3.5 percent of the sale price; a registration fee of 1.1 percent; agent fees of 3 percent; a 20 percent value added tax; and lawyer and notary fees. Annual local taxes and fees on this house are likely a few hundred euros a year, Ms. Wiederkehr said. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
ClassPass built its business on helping people book exercise classes at local gyms. So when the pandemic forced gyms across the United States to close, the company shifted to virtual classes. Then ClassPass received a concerning message from Apple. Because the classes it sold on its iPhone app were now virtual, Apple said it was entitled to 30 percent of the sales, up from no fee previously, according to a person close to ClassPass who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of upsetting Apple. The iPhone maker said it was merely enforcing a decade old rule. Airbnb experienced similar demands from Apple after it began an "online experiences" business that offered virtual cooking classes, meditation sessions and drag queen shows, augmenting the in person experiences it started selling in 2016, according to two people familiar with the issues. Airbnb discussed Apple's demands with House lawmakers' offices that are investigating how Apple controls its App Store, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Those lawmakers are now considering Apple's efforts to collect a commission from Airbnb and ClassPass as part of their yearlong antitrust inquiry into the biggest tech companies, according to a person with knowledge of their investigation. Those lawmakers are set to grill Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, and the chief executives of Amazon, Facebook and Google in a high profile hearing on Wednesday. Apple's disputes with the smaller companies point to the control the world's largest tech companies have had over the shift to online life brought on by the pandemic. While much of the rest of the economy is struggling, the pandemic has further entrenched their businesses. With millions more employees working from home, Amazon and Google are selling more online cloud space, with revenue for Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud soaring in the first quarter of the year, which included the start of the pandemic. Facebook and YouTube, which is part of Google, some of the internet's largest gathering places, had traffic surge as people couldn't socialize in person. Apple has also brought in more revenue from its online services business, mostly on the back of its App Store, and its Macs, iPads and iPhones have become even more important tools. Apple said that with Airbnb and ClassPass, it was not trying to generate revenue though that is a side effect but instead was trying to enforce a rule that has been in place since it first published its app guidelines in 2010. Apple said waiving the commission in these cases would not be fair to the many other app developers that have paid the fee for similar businesses for years. Because of the pandemic, Apple said that it gave ClassPass until the end of the year to comply and that it was continuing to negotiate with Airbnb. "To ensure every developer can create and grow a successful business, Apple maintains a clear, consistent set of guidelines that apply equally to everyone," the company said in a statement. ClassPass was told it must comply with the rule this month, according to the person close to the company. Instead, it stopped offering virtual classes in its iPhone app, since those classes were subject to Apple's commission, according to Apple. As a result, fewer potential customers now see the classes advertised by its gym partners. In 2016, Airbnb started a business offering in person "experiences" to travelers, such as guided tours, bar crawls and cooking classes with locals in their vacation destinations. In early April, as the pandemic gutted travel plans and the company's bottom line, Airbnb began selling virtual versions of similar experiences, though it quickly expanded that business to more prominent offerings, like cooking classes with famous chefs and training sessions with Olympic athletes. Later that month, Apple reached out to say that when the online experiences were sold in Airbnb's iPhone app, the company would have to pay Apple's fees, said a person familiar with their exchanges. Apple said it believed that Airbnb had long intended to offer virtual experiences not that the business was created simply because of the pandemic and that it would continue to do so once the world has resumed to normal. Apple also pointed out that Airbnb had never paid Apple any money despite the fact that it built its multibillion dollar business with the help of its iPhone app. Airbnb is still negotiating with Apple. In June, Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, said that the online experiences offering was the company's "fastest growing product ever" and had earned 1 million in revenue. Apple said that if the two companies could not come to terms, it could remove Airbnb's app from the App Store. Many companies and app developers complain that Apple forces them to pay its commission to be included in the App Store, which is crucial to reaching the roughly 900 million people with iPhones. Apple said the App Store had 500 million visitors from 175 countries each week. For months, economists and lawyers at the Justice Department have held meetings with companies and app developers about the App Store as part of its antitrust investigation into Apple. The music service Spotify and another large company that declined to be named also said they have had recent conversations with attorneys general from several states about the issue. Unlike Spotify, Airbnb and ClassPass do not offer services that directly compete with one of Apple's digital products. Many companies complain that they are also subject to what they call Apple's capricious enforcement of its rules, which can lead to their apps' removal from the App Store, killing some of their business. If Apple removes an app from the App Store, the developer couldn't gain new app users and couldn't update the apps already on people's phones, eventually rendering them broken. Apple said a small fraction of iPhone apps were subject to its commission, which is in line with the fees other platforms charge, according to a study released by Apple last Wednesday. Airbnb, for instance, charges a 20 percent commission on experiences. "If you're not in the App Store today, you're not online. Your business cannot function. So they're the gatekeepers of something that every single company wants," said Andy Yen, the chief executive of ProtonMail, an encrypted email service based in Switzerland that effectively competes with Apple's own email service. "If you want to pass through their gates, they're going to charge you 30 percent of your revenue." Mr. Yen said his company had been battling with Apple since 2017 over its commission, with Apple sometimes restricting the ProtonMail app on iPhones. To account for Apple's fee, ProtonMail began charging 30 percent more for subscriptions bought on its iPhone app versus those bought on its website, which aren't subject to Apple's fee. "The only way that we could support this fee was actually by passing on the cost to the customer," he said. But when ProtonMail told iPhone users about the lower price on its website, Apple restricted its app. Then, when the company instead tried to make clear that 30 percent of the subscription price went to Apple, Apple restricted its app again. "You only hide something like this if it's wrong," Mr. Yen said. Asked about ProtonMail's experience, Apple said its rules require certain apps to use its payment system and ban them from directing people to buy their products or services elsewhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Q. Does Google Chrome on the computer have any controls like Safari for stopping ads and videos that start automatically? Preferably, without having to install a browser extension or some other program that wants permission to look at my surfing. A. Apple's Safari browser introduced new tools for blocking intrusive content last year, and Google recently added a few ad filtering and sound blocking tools of its own to its Chrome browser. To help protect users from invasive or obstructive advertising, Chrome now filters web ads that do not comply with the Better Ads Standards guidelines set by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group. (Google, Facebook, Microsoft and News Corporation are among the group's members.) Intrusions from other elements on the page can also be better controlled now in Chrome. In version 64 and later versions of the Chrome browser, you can mute those sites that automatically start rolling videos with the volume cranked up. (Chrome routinely updates itself, but if you want to manually check for any new versions, click the three dot More menu in the upper right corner. If you see an "Update Google Chrome" option, choose it and then click Relaunch.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Louise Mirrer, the Historical Society's president, said in a statement that the museum's relationship with Mr. Cunningham dated back "to his first donation of 88 gelatin silver photographs representing his 'Facades' series," and continued to the end of his life. She added, "It is with great pride that the New York Historical Society becomes the new home for his earthly belongings." Mr. Cunningham's library contains more than 200 books stuffed with clippings, notes and photographs. Other items include a helmet covered with images from his Times column a gift from Bergdorf Goodman and his New York Living Landmark presentation plate made by Cartier in 2009. His tools, millinery supplies and feather collection were also donated. Details about which things the Historical Society will exhibit, and when they will be on view, are to be announced at a later date. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images Republicans have failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Now, can it be repaired? The seven year old law has survived Supreme Court decisions and aggressive attempts to extinguish it by Republicans in Congress and the White House. But even people who rely on its coverage agree that it still has big problems. The question for the roughly 20 million Americans who buy their own health coverage and for millions of others who remain uninsured is what can realistically be done to address their main concerns: high prices and lack of choice in many parts of the country. "Everyone feels really scrunched by the prices we're paying, and we have no options in Iowa," said Catalina Ressler, 39, a psychologist outside Des Moines who pays 1,567 in monthly premiums. "Next year is going to be even worse." Ms. Ressler's plan, which covers her family of four, also comes with a 7,000 deductible. Their insurer, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, is pulling out of the Affordable Care Act marketplace in Iowa next year, leaving just one company, Medica, to possibly remain. Citing the protracted uncertainty over the law's future, many insurers have proposed big rate increases again for next year even though many are no longer incurring big losses in its marketplaces. People covered by one insurer in Maryland could see premiums rise by more than 50 percent if proposed rate increases go into effect, and premiums for plans in Virginia and Connecticut could increase more than 30 percent. In North Carolina, where rates are already among the nation's highest, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina wants an increase of nearly 23 percent but said it would have sought less than half that amount under more predictable circumstances. Cost is irrelevant in several dozen counties in Indiana, Nevada and Ohio; not a single insurer has agreed to sell plans through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces there next year, potentially leaving thousands of customers with no coverage option. Among the hardest hit are those who do not qualify for subsidies to help with premiums or out of pocket costs, which rise along with rate increases. Michael Lawson, an independent consultant for local governments in Washington, D.C., said the monthly premiums for his basic plan from CareFirst jumped to 527 this year from 290 last year. He is 60 and earns too much to get a subsidy, but because of various health problems he has already reached his 5,000 deductible for the year. He likes his plan but thinks that to keep rates more stable, Congress and the Trump administration need to do a better job of enforcing the law, particularly its requirement that most people have health insurance. There is widespread agreement that the first order of business is to calm very jittery insurance markets. "You need to stabilize things before we change them," said Michael Neidorff, the chief executive of Centene, one of the few insurers that are aggressively expanding in the market. Time is of the essence: Next month, insurers must decide what they charge for 2018 or whether they want to stay in the marketplaces at all. The most significant step would be to guarantee continued funding to reimburse insurers for waiving deductibles and co payments for low income customers, as the health law requires companies to do. The Trump administration has threatened to stop making the payments; insurers are now getting them on a month to month basis. If these so called cost sharing reductions are not paid for the remainder of the year or in future years, people will see premiums go up by nearly 20 percent to cover them, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Companies could also decide to leave the market, creating a potential collapse, said Mike Kreidler, the insurance regulator for Washington State. In a statement issued Friday, state regulators urged lawmakers to move quickly. "We have insurers who are very apprehensive and very nervous," he said. While insurers are hopeful that Congress will pass legislation guaranteeing the payments, they would also welcome a commitment from the administration that it, too, wanted to stabilize the market. "There seems to be a conflict internally: Are they going to sabotage the market or are they going to help the market?" said Gary Cohen, a former Obama administration official who is now an executive at Blue Shield of California. President Trump has hinted he is unwilling to help. His Twitter post on Friday reacting to the Senate vote, like others he has posted recently, suggested a willingness to watch the market collapse: "As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal." In another post on Saturday, he warned that bailouts "for insurance companies" could "end very soon." But the fundamental problem that many insurance customers face is sky high deductibles or premiums that are simply out of reach. Health economists and others say there are ways to lower premiums so more people can afford coverage. "One of the best quick fixes that is not controversial is reinsurance," said Paul Ginsburg, a health economist who directs the Center for Health Policy at the Brookings Institution. That would involve the government helping insurers pay for the sickest, most expensive people, whose costs can drive up premiums in places where there are not enough healthy customers to balance them out. The Affordable Care Act provided the funding for three years, but many people think reinsurance needs to be permanent. A bipartisan agreement seems possible now because in their failed replacement bills, both House and Senate Republicans had supported the idea of providing assistance to insurers, as well as extra "stabilization" funding for states to potentially help lower people's premiums and deductibles. Over the longer term, lawmakers need to find a way to encourage more people, especially those who are healthier, to enroll, said Dr. Martin Hickey, the chief executive of New Mexico Health Connections, one of the few remaining start up insurers created by the law. He said he was proposing rate increases of anywhere from 20 to 25 percent, although they were proposed before the Senate bill failed. "The pool needs to get stabilized or otherwise we will see year after year of double digit increases," he said. Mark Dalessandro, an adjunct professor at a community college in Tucson, saw his out of pocket expenses for the asthma medication Advair jump to 292 per month this year from 50 per month last year, after he was forced to switch plans because his insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, left the market in his area. He said he had little choice but to pay for it. "For just a month's supply, for something that helps me breathe, what are you going to do?" he said. The fluctuating drug cost makes him feel as if he were on a "roller coaster," he said. "You just kind of feel like you can't get ahead of the game." If there is one health care issue that both Republicans and Democrats have vowed to fix, it is the rising cost of prescription drugs. During the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump railed against outrageous prices set by pharmaceutical executives like Martin Shkreli and drug companies like Mylan, the maker of the EpiPen. But there is little agreement on the best way to fix the problem. Democratic proposals, such as allowing Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and allowing cheaper drugs to be imported from overseas, are fiercely opposed by the drug industry a potent lobbying power in Washington as well as Republicans in Congress. And though Mr. Trump has excoriated the industry, his administration has not yet put forward a plan to address the issue. A draft executive order on drug prices that was obtained by The New York Times in June revealed a far more industry friendly approach, easing regulations in the hopes the drug companies would lower prices on their own. Democratic leaders in Congress identified rising drug prices as one of their economic priorities in a new campaign, "A Better Deal," that was made public this past week. Under their plan, a new federal agency would take action against companies that engaged in egregious "price gouging," Medicare would be allowed to directly negotiate the price of drugs for seniors, and companies that raised their prices significantly would have to warn the federal government in advance, as well as give a reason for their planned price hike. That is not to say the parties have not found some areas of agreement. There is bipartisan support for measures that would speed more generic drugs to market, including a proposal that would crack down on brand name manufacturers that bar generic companies from gaining access to the samples they need to make copycat versions. And Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, is taking steps to encourage more competition among generic manufacturers. Although the Affordable Care Act has greatly expanded access to coverage the nation's uninsured rate fell to 10.9 percent last year, according to Gallup, from 17.1 percent in late 2013 many Americans remain shut out. One of the biggest reasons is the refusal of 19 states to expand Medicaid to virtually all low income citizens, as the law's authors intended. Some may be reconsidering now that repeal of the health law seems unlikely. The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that it was unconstitutional to require states to expand the program, leaving it to each governor and legislature to decide. As a result, more than 2.6 million of the nation's poorest citizens remain in a coverage gap: They cannot qualify for Medicaid, but because the law was written with the assumption that they would all get it under a national expansion of the program, they are not eligible for subsidies to help them buy private coverage. About half these people are black and Hispanic, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation; about two thirds live in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas. In Alabama, Lee Thrasher, 40, is wedged firmly in the gap. She and her husband, Brandon, have been uninsured since 2011, when he had to quit his job at a Lowe's because of a degenerative spine disease. Ms. Thrasher works independently as an inspector for property insurance companies and cannot get insurance through her job. Her two children get coverage through Medicaid, but with an income of about 18,000 a year she and her husband make too much to qualify. If they lived in a state that had expanded the program, they would be covered. Ms. Thrasher said she was supposed to see the doctor for blood work and prescription refills at least four times a year but could afford to go only twice, paying a flat fee of 85. "Sometimes it might as well be 1 million," Ms. Thrasher said. "When you're broke, you're broke." Under the terms of the health law, the federal government covers 95 percent of the cost of expanding Medicaid and will always pay at least 90 percent. But with many state lawmakers anxious about taking on even a small share of the expansion costs, one alternative that could possibly win bipartisan support is extending subsidies for private coverage to people whose income is below the poverty level. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"The Epic," the tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington's big debut on the national stage three years ago, worked partly because it functioned as a provocation an act of extravagant ambition. Jazz loses a lot of young people with its fixation on history and esoterica. "The Epic," though historically rooted, provided the opportunity for another kind of buy in. It was reaching up, not back, soaring toward some other galaxy, suggesting that late Obama progressivism could use a strong hit of transcendental thinking to make its optimism real. What Mr. Washington captured was music that seemed like it should have been unrecordable: It had an orchestra; a choir; not one jazz combo but effectively two (double bass, double drums, keyboard and organ as well as piano, plus a line of horns). Listening to all those textures and harmonies crushed against each other and compressed into a studio mix, you thought, This would be immeasurably cool live. (You weren't wrong.) But "The Epic" let a listener understand all that, then tried to deliver something stupendous anyway. And you inevitably adopted its ambition, agreed to dream big along with it. It worked. This week Mr. Washington releases his follow up, a double album titled "Heaven and Earth." Like its predecessor (and last year's "Harmony of Difference" EP, composed for a commission at the Whitney Biennial), it's about a big concept this time, the interplay between human consciousness and collective action and it's got the full orchestra and choir. Mr. Washington and the band started working on it in 2016, during a manic year of touring, playing the "Epic" material onstage almost every night. One mammoth album became another. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. It's a bit surprising that he would recommit to this same formula. It needs to overwhelm you in order to work; how long can one stubborn approach do that? I'd thought I would soon be finding out what Mr. Washington sounded like on record in a more modest configuration, putting his scorching tenor saxophone out front. "Heaven and Earth" is about a big concept: the interplay between human consciousness and collective action. But he has reason to stick to what's suited him and in some small ways, he does expand on it. "Heaven and Earth" starts with a cover of the theme song from the Bruce Lee film "Fist of Fury"; Mr. Washington retitles it in the plural "Fists of Fury" and bestows a plain spoken chorus on it, more directly militant than anything on "The Epic." The vocalists Patrice Quinn and Dwight Trible intone: "Our time as victims is over/We will no longer ask for justice/Instead we will take our retribution." This album dreams boldly; it also makes demands. On "Street Fighter Mas," he pulls back into a trademark blend of G funk and fat pulse drumming, but the firmly holstered groove has more swagger than anything on "The Epic." The trumpeter Dontae Winslow, who was not on the previous album, caps the track with a subtly affecting solo. Yet there are also moments of almost direct overlap with "The Epic." On "Testify," a jouncing and catchy vehicle for Ms. Quinn (whose singing offers rewards at every turn), Mr. Washington clearly recycles the pacing and even the harmonic design of "The Rhythm Changes" from "The Epic." And on "Show Us the Way," the pianist Cameron Graves pounds a pattern distinctly reminiscent of his old part in "Change of the Guard." As a soloist, Mr. Washington still tends to start off in a low, rapped babble, and end in dry, rafters level screams. He uses little patterns to make big proclamations, often landing on the ninth note of a scale (the classic, inquisitive, top of the jazz chord tone). Mr. Washington still suffers gentle disdain from some in New York, where the international jazz scene is unofficially headquartered. It's a town he's never felt obligated to join or to beat. A common criticism is that his music isn't doing anything new it's a classic old complaint, and it doesn't stick here. Yes, there are precedents for using lots of voices or strings to a high tide effect (McCoy Tyner's "Song of the New World," Bobby Hutcherson's "Now," Max Roach's choral works). But Mr. Washington plants his music in somewhat different soil, pulling rhythms from the Caribbean and Los Angeles's fusion driven jazz scene of the 1970s and '80s, as well as the city's more Afrocentric exponents. And as he corrals dozens of carefully tracked instruments both electric and acoustic he also thinks and operates like a contemporary producer. He wrote almost every tune on "Heaven and Earth," as well as "The Epic," and he arranged and produced both albums. He belongs in conversations about production and sound design, alongside Flying Lotus (who put out "The Epic") and Thundercat (who's featured on both albums). On "Heaven and Earth" there's a balance between big stroke conceptualism the first CD, "Earth," is meant to represent worldly preoccupations; the second, "Heaven," explores utopian thought and the workmanlike reality of collaboration. The two collections don't vary significantly in terms of sound; instead, they're a testament to the sturdy rapport of Mr. Washington's ensemble, made up of Los Angeles musicians who have been playing together for years in some cases, since high school. The best way to experience the cleanse and burn of Kamasi Washington's music is live; with just the core members of the group, his songs become airborne vehicles with plenty of room for you to climb inside. Soloists like Mr. Washington and the trombonist Ryan Porter don't have to fight for space. Still, his growing body of orchestral recordings is making big statements of its own, confronting an earthly reality that continues to grow darker with an earnest and open vision. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
In "Cobra Kai," William Zabka's Johnny Lawrence, center, heads up a new version of the titular dojo. With Jacob Bertrand, left, and Xolo Mariduena. When "Cobra Kai" debuted last year, it sounded like a one off joke: a YouTube series catching up with the characters from the cornball classic 1984 film "The Karate Kid." Yet the series packed a surprising emotional punch as it traced how the original climactic showdown between the underdog Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and the bully Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), of the militaristic titular dojo, continues to influence their lives and those of their children. The 10 episode first season knocked out critics, earning a rare 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Its earnest tone seemed all the more surprising given the lowbrow comic credits of the creators: Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote the "Harold Kumar" films, while Josh Heald penned "Hot Tub Time Machine" and its sequel. Ahead of Season 2's debut on Wednesday, Hurwitz, Schlossberg and Heald waxed on and off with The Times. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. How did you come to revive "The Karate Kid" in the first place? JON HURWITZ The three of us have been friends for over 20 years. We were huge "Karate Kid" fans and bonded over it. We pitched our thoughts to Overbrook Entertainment, which owned the rights and got their blessing immediately. We sat down with William Zabka and convinced him, and then it was all about convincing Ralph Macchio. It was never designed to be a straight comedy. It was always meant to be more dramatic, and to give Johnny the "Better Call Saul" treatment. How did you flesh out a one dimensional character like Johnny? And why did you make him a down and out, divorced father while Daniel is a hugely successful, happily married car dealer? JOSH HEALD We loved the idea there is this long festering karate rivalry from high school that had landed both of these adults in different places: one atop the mountain and one down in the valley. The comedy comes from frustration, regret and revenge, and that bleeds into the next generation. We position Johnny as a relic, somebody who is stuck in his time and doesn't get along with the millennial generation. Did you study the original films before you started writing the series? HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG We were such huge fans of the original three movies, we didn't have to, although we did anyway. The goal is never to consciously reference the movies when we're writing. It's to write the characters as they are today. Those movies are their pasts, so it's an organic way to show footage from the original films when one of the characters is having a moment of regret. But it doesn't feel like nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia. Are you primarily writing this show for "Karate Kid" fans? HEALD We're always writing with a true respect, appreciation and reverence for the source material, and we know there are a lot of "Karate Kid" superfans out there who relate to this story. But we also wanted to write for a larger audience that doesn't know "The Karate Kid Part III" intimately. What kind of feedback do you get from fans? HURWITZ We all hear a lot of stories from parents who are able to watch the show with their kids, which is new to us, since we came from the world of R rated comedies. It's been an entry point for a new generation to watch the original films. Do you consciously try to balance Daniel's and Johnny's stories with their kids' stories? HURWITZ We don't look at it in a binary way. These stories are interwoven through that initial rivalry between Johnny and Daniel. That said, it was crucial to us to create a whole new generation of characters that an audience is going to fall in love with the way we fell in love with Johnny and Daniel back in the day. Macchio and Zabka are co executive producers on the show. How much input do they have? HEALD We're really grateful to have them because they are so connected to these characters. Every day of their lives when they walk down the street, somebody shouts one of the phrases from the movies to them. It was a very delicate process of entering this relationship. They're not in the writers' room day to day, but we have a lot of discussions. Why did you decide to wait until the end of Season 1 to bring back Cobra Kai's original sensei, the fearsome John Kreese (Martin Kove)? HEALD We didn't want to put the whole buffet out there and say, "Let's get everybody." So it's been a calculated approach in terms of when and if certain characters come back. We sat down with Martin before Season 1 and told him our plan, and thus began the hardest job he ever had, which was keeping that secret for nine months. We told him, "It's going to be a real moment when you arrive that will change the shape of the show." Any chance we'll see more old characters return, like Daniel's ex girlfriend Ali, played by Elisabeth Shue? HEALD There's always hope that any character from the movies may return in the series. We have love for all the actors from the movies. We have a lot of long range plans for how and when certain characters would show up, but we can't comment now. Bullying has changed since the '80s. How are you dealing with that? SCHLOSSBERG In some ways, bullying is exactly the same and in other ways, it's far worse because you have social media. What we wanted to do on the show is have moments that a young audience today can relate to but that also will stand the test of time. Our approach is not just showing how much bullying sucks, but also showing kids trying to do something about it. It's not just through physical strength, but inner strength. Still, there are fight scenes in every episode. Do you worry about glorifying violence among high school kids? HURWITZ Part of our approach to the fight scenes is also the consequences afterward. We don't just have a fight scene and then brush it aside and there's no lasting effect. We explore the results of these fights the emotional and physical impact. These fights aren't just happening in a vacuum. They're all part of a bigger story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In an effort to make theater more accessible to deaf and blind people, New York City will give grants to Off Broadway and other small theaters to install software that allows patrons to follow along with low light smartphones and tablets. The city's commissioner of media and entertainment, Julie Menin, said the new program was part of an effort to make theater more widely available. "We think it will increase audiences at independent theaters throughout the city, and it's incredibly important for people who are deaf or blind," she said. The city will provide money for theaters to install software by a company called GalaPro, which is already used at Shubert theaters on Broadway, as well as at Roundabout theaters and several others. The city recently paid for the installation of the software at Playwrights Horizons, an Off Broadway nonprofit. The software, using voice recognition, can provide closed captioning of the spoken word, or audio description of stage action, on users' mobile devices; the app is supposed to be lit in such a way as not to be distracting to other theater patrons. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
George the Snail, Believed to Be the Last of His Species, Dies at 14 in Hawaii It is said that artists are never fully appreciated until they die. The same goes for snails, apparently. For roughly a decade, the land snail species Achatinella apexfulva, which used to be plentiful on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, was believed to be down to a single survivor. His name was George, and he lived his last days alone in a terrarium in Kailua, Hawaii, alongside an ample supply of fungi (a food his ancestors liked to scrape off leaves in the wild). But on Jan. 1, George died, according to Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources. He lived to about age 14 a good, long life for a snail of his kind, experts say. His death was symbolic of a steep decline in the population of land snails, once a fantastically diverse group of mollusks in Hawaii, as well as the rapid extinction of species around the world. Scientists estimate that dozens of species go extinct each day, but few receive this kind of news media attention on their way out. Naming George probably boosted his standing, said Michael G. Hadfield, who founded a program meant to protect snail populations in Hawaii. "You anthropomorphize it and people pay attention," Dr. Hadfield said. The snail's caretakers named him George after the only survivor of the Pinta Island tortoises of the Galapagos. George the tortoise, known as Lonesome George, died in 2012. George the snail was born in the early 2000s to parents that had been captured in the mountains in an effort to protect them from predators. At first, George had about 20 contemporaries, but they all died relatively suddenly, said David R. Sischo, who now directs the state run Snail Extinction Prevention Program. Staff members at the program suspected that the snails died because of a pathogen, Dr. Sischo said, but George somehow survived. "Against all odds, he still persisted," he said. Although George's death was not unexpected, the team at the laboratory in Kailua felt the loss. "He's been a constant for a really long time," Dr. Sischo said. "If anything good comes out of this extinction, it will be the recognition that we have a lot to lose, and we don't have a lot of time." At one point, there were more than 750 species of land snails identified on the Hawaiian Islands. George's species was the first to be described in Western scientific literature: When the British explorer Captain George Dixon visited Oahu in the 1780s, he was given a lei made with some of the snails' shells, according to the Department of Land and Natural Resources. But estimates suggest that more than half of those species are already extinct, Dr. Sischo said. The land snails have been affected most by invasive predators like rats and the rosy wolfsnail, which eats other snails. They have also faced habitat destruction and the effects of climate change; drier conditions have reduced the inhabitable land on the islands, Dr. Sischo said. Documents from the 19th century described land snails as hanging off plants like clusters of grapes, said Dr. Hadfield, who is now a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Hawaii. In the 1980s, Dr. Hadfield more often saw them lying dead on the ground. After the plight of the land snails gained some attention, the entire Achatinella genus was listed as endangered in 1981. Dr. Hadfield said the genus might have gotten preferential treatment because its snails are often the most striking to behold. "There are bright gold ones, there are pure white ones, there are unearthly greens," he said. "Most of us feel that these snails, outside of where they're being protected, probably won't last much longer." George himself was a thumbnail size whorl of dark brown and tan. He looked like a swirled scoop of mocha fudge. Although his caretakers use "he" to describe George, the snail is actually a hermaphrodite. And unfortunately for his species, Dr. Sischo says, he could not produce offspring without a mate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Viacom, the once mighty cable giant behind pop culture confections like "Jersey Shore" and children's fare like "Dora the Explorer," is acquiring the streaming service PlutoTV for 340 million, the companies said in an announcement on Tuesday. This is Viacom's most significant move into streaming, now the go to strategy for media companies as more and more viewers forgo traditional cable subscriptions. The emergence of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu has hastened the decline of the pay TV business and has upended the media universe. Time Warner, once the largest media business in the country, sold itself to AT T in an 85.4 billion deal last year, and Rupert Murdoch, who had built a giant entertainment conglomerate over decades, is selling the bulk of his empire to the Walt Disney Company for 71.3 billion after a bitter bidding war against Comcast. The impetus for both deals was to create entities capable of taking on Netflix and other tech companies by offering their own streaming plans. AT T and Disney will unveil their services by the end of the year. Viacom's deal for PlutoTV, while much smaller, shares some of that motivation. PlutoTV, founded in 2013 and led by Kenneth Parks and Tom Ryan, is a free, advertising based service and has about 12 million active viewers a month. NBCUniversal also announced this month that it would start a streaming service largely supported by advertising. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Alvin Ailey II (through April 10) This company's two week spring season offers a welcome glimpse of the next generation of talent in the Ailey family while also introducing a number of unfamiliar choreographic names. New commissions this year include work by Kyle "JustSole" Clark, Jean Emile and Ray Mercer. Also making his choreographic debut is Jamar Roberts, an exquisite dancer with the main company, who contributes "Gemeos" (Portuguese for "twins"), a duet inspired by his relationship with his brother. Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 3 and 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 and 7:30 p.m., Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 West 55th Street, Clinton, 866 811 4111, alvinailey.org. (Brian Schaefer) Ballet Hispanico (Tuesday through April 10) This spirited troupe returns to the Joyce Theater with the company premiere of Gustavo Ramirez Sansano's 2001 "Flabbergast," a humorous take on the theme of foreign places. The season also includes a revival of Ramon Oller's "Bury Me Standing" (1998) and the popular "Club Havana" (2000), by the Cuban American choreographer Pedro Ruiz. A family matinee on April 9 includes excerpts from these and other works in the company's colorful repertory. Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and next Friday at 8 p.m., April 9 at 2 and 8 p.m., April 10 at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Siobhan Burke) Dance Theater of Harlem (Wednesday through April 9) While Misty Copeland has opened doors for black ballerinas in recent years, this company has been steadily doing the same for decades. The troupe's City Center engagement highlights new ballets by women, with the New York premieres of Dianne McIntyre's "Change" and Elena Kunikova's "Divertimento." These share a gala program on opening night with Robert Garland's "Return" and a tribute to the guest of honor, Gladys Knight. Also on deck this season are Nacho Duato's "Coming Together" and Helen Pickett's "When Love." Wednesday at 7 p.m., next Friday at 8 p.m., April 9 at 2 and 8 p.m., City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org. (Burke) E Moves (Thursday through April 9) This Harlem Stage series pairs choreographers with mentors in the creation of new work. The 17th edition features Desiree Godsell, Laurie M. Taylor, Davalois Fearon whom audiences may know from her fearless dancing with the Stephen Petronio Company and the renowned hoofer Jason Samuels Smith, who will be joined by his fellow tap stars Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards and Derick K. Grant. At 7:30 p.m., Harlem Stage Gatehouse, 150 Convent Avenue, at 135th Street, Hamilton Heights; 212 281 9240, harlemstage.org. (Burke) Fridays at Noon (Friday) The New York Times chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay and Patricia Lent, the director of licensing for the Merce Cunningham Trust, discuss Cunningham's 1987 "Fabrications" as part of this casual afternoon series. Dancers from the trust's fellowship program will perform the work, and members of the original cast, as well as Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, the composer, will join in the discussion. At noon, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue; 212 415 5500, 92y.org. (Burke) 'From the Horse's Mouth' (Friday through Sunday) The latest edition of this dance meets storytelling venture celebrates the veteran dancer, choreographer and writer Gus Solomons Jr. In usual "Horse's Mouth" fashion, cast members offer short anecdotes through movement and words. The ensemble this time includes dance world royalty like Carmen de Lavallade and Meredith Monk, among many charismatic guests. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., 14th Street Y LABA Theater, 344 East 14th Street, East Village, 646 395 4322, horsesmouth.org; sold out Friday. (Burke) Lil Buck and Jared Grimes (Friday and Saturday) These extraordinary dancers join Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for the premiere of "Spaces." With choreographic direction by the impresario and former New York City Ballet principal Damien Woetzel, the evening brings together Mr. Grimes's background in tap and Lil Buck's in the fluid, Memphis born street dance style jookin. At 8 p.m., Rose Theater, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway, 212 721 6500, jazz.org. (Burke) Radouan Mriziga (through Saturday) Hailing from Morocco, Mr. Mriziga brings " 55" to the New York Live Arts Live Ideas festival. He is full of questions about his purpose as an artist: "Is it sufficient? Is this what I want to convey? Is this the right form?" Through gesture and by using his body like a tool, taking what he calls "an almost architectural approach," he tries to find answers. At 8 p.m., New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org. (Schaefer) Pennsylvania Ballet (through Sunday) Performing in New York for the first time since the former American Ballet Theater principal dancer Angel Corella was named artistic director, Pennsylvania Ballet arrives with three local premieres. Trey McIntyre's "The Accidental" is a four part response to songs by Patrick Watson; Matthew Neenan's "Keep" features 10 performers meditating on love and relationships; and "Grace Action," Nicolo Fonte's first work for the company, puts a dozen dancers at the mercy of Philip Glass. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Schaefer) Streb Extreme Action Company (through April 24) After a winter hiatus, superheroes are back in the multiplexes. More excitingly, they're back in Brooklyn, where Elizabeth Streb's gang of action heroes can be seen in "SEA (Singular Extreme Actions)," a new show that once again tests the boundaries of the human body as it navigates an army of complex, bespoke mechanical contraptions. The soundtrack shifts from show to show as audience members contribute to the playlist. Thursdays and Fridays at 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m., Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, 51 North First Street, Williamsburg, 866 811 4111, streb.org. (Schaefer) Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance (through Sunday) The company's three week spring season, which wraps up this weekend, has brought 14 works from Mr. Taylor's six decade career and two new creations: "Sullivaniana" (being performed on Saturday night) and "Dilly Dilly." Notable this year is the inclusion of work that Mr. Taylor has commissioned for the first time from handpicked artistic heirs: Larry Keigwin, whose "Rush Hour" is on Friday's program, and Doug Elkins, who created "Weight of Smoke." Honoring Mr. Taylor's own forebear, the company will perform a Martha Graham work "Diversion of Angels" on Sunday. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, davidhkochtheater.com. (Schaefer) Tatyana Tenenbaum (Thursday through April 10) Performances at Brooklyn Studios for Dance, a newly renovated space at Cadman Congregational Church in Fort Greene, have so far been informal, impromptu events. With Ms. Tenenbaum's "Thunder," the organization hosts its first evening length premiere. Building on her recent movement investigations and her early background as a composer, Ms. Tenenbaum explores the inseparability of the body and the voice, of musicality and physicality. Thursday through April 9 at 8 p.m., April 10 at 6 p.m., Brooklyn Studios for Dance, 210 Lafayette Avenue, between Vanderbilt and Clinton Avenues, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, bksd.org. (Burke) Enrico D. Wey (through Saturday) Last year Mr. Wey embarked on a series of work inspired in part by the myth of Narcissus, making clear that he intended to use himself as his subject. But his gaze isn't merely admiring. In the project's latest chapter, called "to warring states, a useless tool," Mr. Wey takes a critical look at representations of Asian male identity, cliches related to Asian bodies and his "own embedded prejudice." At 8 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Schaefer) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Mr. Jones was hired from Target to be Uber's president of ride sharing, with a mandate to improve the company's relationships with drivers. He left after Uber began a search for a chief operating officer. Mr. McClendon, a former Google engineer, was a vice president at Uber who worked on mapping and autonomous vehicle technology initiatives. He left amicably to move to his home state of Kansas to explore politics. Mr. Marcus joined Uber through an acquisition of his artificial intelligence company, Geometric Intelligence. He left three months after Uber began a new internal research arm on A.I. Mr. Baker, a former Facebook executive, was hired as vice president of growth and later became head of product and growth. He resigned after the company began its internal investigation into workplace culture. Ms. Whetstone, who was at Google for a decade in charge of communications, joined Uber as senior vice president for policy and communications. She departed after tensions with Travis Kalanick, Uber's chief executive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A group of 22 children's and consumer organizations is calling for a federal investigation into Google's marketing of children's apps in its Google Play store, just the latest in a series of rebukes by experts about how the company handles technology aimed at youngsters. Google has promoted the "Family" section of its Play store as a place where parents can find age appropriate apps for children. But in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission filed on Wednesday, the advocacy groups said the company's endorsement of the apps was misleading. The groups said that some apps in that section contained content unsuitable for children, showed ads for casino games for adults or pushed youngsters into watching video ads and making in app purchases. The groups also said some apps appeared to violate the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law that prohibits sites and apps for children from collecting phone numbers, precise location, photographs, persistent tracking identifiers and other personal information from children under 13 without verifiable consent from a parent. The complaint cited an investigation by The New York Times in September that found some children's apps collected precise location information and tracking identifiers without verifiable parental permission. Google has come under mounting scrutiny for its promotion of children's apps in its Play store. In April, cybersecurity researchers reported that more than half of about 6,000 free Android children's apps they tested shared personal data in ways that may violate the children's privacy law. In September, the attorney general of New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Google and other companies over children's apps. The complaint said that Google had violated a state law on unfair practices by marketing certain children's apps as family friendly even when the company knew the apps failed to comply with its own policies on children's apps. In an app called New Girl in High School for children ages 6 12, researchers found an ad for a game involving beer, the complaint said. Brent Lewis for The New York Times Beer in the ads for New Girl at School. Brent Lewis for The New York Times In early October, two Democratic senators called for a federal investigation to examine how app stores like Google Play vet the apps they categorize as child friendly and ensure they comply with the privacy law. And on Wednesday morning those senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Ed Markey of Massachusetts along with Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, sent another letter to the chairman of the F.T.C. pressing for "a comprehensive investigation into the Google Play store and its compliance" with children's privacy and advertising rules. "There are massive, at scale problems with Android apps for children," said Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, a children's advocacy group in Boston that led the latest complaint along with the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit in Washington. "Google is failing to do the proper vetting of apps in the family section," he said. Google said that it removed thousands of apps from its Designed for Families program this year when it found policy violations, and had begun to take action on the apps cited in the consumer groups' complaint. "Parents want their children to be safe online, and we work hard to protect them," said Aaron Stein, a Google spokesman. "Apps in our Designed for Families program have to comply with strict policies on content, privacy and advertising, and we take action on any policy violations that we find." 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. A few years ago, Google introduced Designed for Families, a program that enables developers of Android apps to "showcase trusted, high quality and age appropriate content for the whole family." To be eligible for the program, Google says developers must meet criteria like ensuring that their apps comply with the federal privacy law and contain age appropriate content and ads for children. But the groups' complaint and the New Mexico attorney general's lawsuit argue that Google misled consumers by promoting the apps as trustworthy while failing to enforce its own requirements for the Designed for Families program. In their testing, the consumer groups found ads for casino games in a children's app called Dentist Games for Kids, labeled as for children age 8 and under. Brent Lewis for The New York Times Among other criticisms, the complaint says that Dentist Games for Kids, an app for children 8 and under in the Play store, showed ads for adult casino games with names like Blackjack 21: Blackjackist and Double Wins Slots Free Vegas Casino. It also says some apps include risky or inappropriate content, citing Ear Doctor Clinic Kids Games, an app that "tells children to use scissors to cut the hair around and inside an infected ear," the complaint said. (On Wednesday morning, the app was not available in the Play store.) The Times had similar findings when testing several children's apps in the Play store this week. One app, Smart Games for Kids for Free, a free animated game for children 8 and under that has been downloaded more than a million times, asked for access to a player's smartphone photos, media, files and location without seeking parental permission. The complaint says an app called Ear Doctor Clinic Kids Games included inappropriate content that "tells children to use scissors to cut the hair around and inside an infected ear." Brent Lewis for The New York Times | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Learning the Hard Way What It Means to Be a Top Pick for the Knicks Knicks rookie RJ Barrett was in the midst of one of the best games of his career and he was doing it at Madison Square Garden against the Houston Rockets, a potential finals team. The crowd ate up his creative finishes at the rim, including one late in the fourth quarter that sent the Garden into a playofflike frenzy of jumping and screaming fans. Barrett finished with 27 points, tied for his career high, and the Knicks won. For most teams, this would have been the story that Barrett showed flashes of becoming the kind of franchise player that N.B.A. teams hope they can nab with a third overall pick in the draft. But Barrett is not a rookie for just any franchise. The next 24 hours after that game on Monday became a bizarre litigation of whether Spike Lee, the director and Knicks superfan, had been mistreated by the team's owner, James L. Dolan, that night. Barrett's performance became a sideshow to the circus that is and has been the Knicks for much of the past 20 years. That is life as a lottery pick for the Knicks, for whom unusual happenings are the norm and the media buzzards are always hovering. Simply put, being a rookie for the Knicks, a franchise seemingly addicted to chaos in the country's biggest city, is different from being one for any other team. It can be jarring for young men entering adulthood, and even more so for Barrett who fans hope will be the centerpiece of a long desired championship level team. "One thing I'll say about New York is that their fans are very passionate and supportive," Michael Sweetney, the former Knick, said in an interview. "But they'll also tell you the truth, too. If you're sucking and not playing well, they'll tell you that." Barrett is the latest in a long line of players who have tried to make it in New York. But very few do, as many past Knicks lottery picks can attest. This is a city that booed Patrick Ewing in his prime when the team was winning, after all. Veteran leadership and a stable front office matter and this current iteration of the Knicks has little of either. Even when the Knicks have played poorly and over the last two decades, they usually have the spotlight has never shifted. The media press box is often full, players' mistakes are magnified and no one is spared from withering mockery in the headlines of tabloids like the New York Daily News and the New York Post. "You all aren't really all that bad," Mitchell Robinson, the second year Knicks center, said of the media with a smile. "Some of you are, but I can't speak for all." Barrett, 19, has so far put together a solid but unspectacular rookie campaign. He was drafted third after Zion Williamson, his teammate at Duke, and Ja Morant, the young star in Memphis. Barrett was averaging 14.1 points a game, 5 rebounds and 2.6 assists on an inefficient .474 true shooting percentage before Friday's game. And while he will almost assuredly not win the Rookie of the Year Award, he is arguably having the third best season out of this rookie class essentially meeting expectations. Those around the team say Barrett handles any extra pressure with poise. "He goes out there, he locks in and he focuses in," Robinson said. "You can see he wants to win and play hard." And then there are the fans. New York is a city rife with basketball history, particularly on the playgrounds. The Knicks fan base is dedicated and has for years continued to fill the seats at the Garden, even with an agonizing run of futility: The team will most likely miss the playoffs for the seventh straight year, the longest streak of postseason misses for the franchise since the 1960s. Sweetney, now a men's basketball coach at Yeshiva University, had one of his first New York specific moments when he was walking through Times Square. He saw his face on a billboard advertising Knicks season tickets. "When you're in the city, and people notice you, they're definitely going to say something to you. It'd be weird stuff like 'Man, how are you going to give up an offensive rebound on that put back?'" Sweetney said with a laugh. Sweetney, like Barrett, was drafted in the lottery by the Knicks, although a bit lower at the ninth slot out of Georgetown University in 2003. His rookie year was filled with drama as well. Isiah Thomas was hired midseason to run basketball operations, ushering in an ignominious era for Knicks basketball. There were three head coaches in Sweetney's rookie year alone Don Chaney, Herb Williams and Lenny Wilkens. The team finished 39 43 that year and was swept in the first round of the playoffs. Sweetney had several veterans in front of him on the depth chart so he did not receive much playing time. His N.B.A. career lasted four years. "There were so many distractions going on when I was there," Sweetney said, "Me being a lottery pick and not living up to my expectations was probably the least of their worries." Sweetney said a source of counsel for him during that first year was Ewing, a fellow Georgetown Hoya who told him to keep being positive. Sweetney also received guidance from a certain fan. "Spike Lee wasn't an ex player, but he would always give me advice on New York City and what it means to be a Knick," Sweetney said. For Barrett, he will likely play for his third head coach next year (David Fizdale was fired in December; Mike Miller has been filling in as interim coach) and is already on his second team president. This year's Knicks team will finish with a worse record than the one Sweetney played for in 2003. "My advice to him is to keep being him," Sweetney said. "Keep working hard. I think he's built for New York. It's not New York media, but he played with Zion Williamson. They always had the microscope on them." Some Knicks rookies have been drafted in the lottery into a stable Knicks franchise. One of them was Greg Anthony, now a TNT analyst. After having grown up as a Knicks fan, he was picked 12th in 1991. Those Knicks were a perennial playoff team anchored by Ewing and Coach Pat Riley, both future Hall of Famers. Anthony played all 82 games during his first year, coming off the bench and getting used to playing in high pressure situations. Anthony was 24, and unlike many lottery picks these days he was not just a year removed from high school. That probably helped him. "The era was different, Anthony said. "You had a lot of media scrutiny, obviously, just because of the market. But I don't think it carried the same impact it did 20 years ago." As a rookie, Anthony said he received tips about how to behave from veterans like Ewing and Charles Oakley. His eye opening experience of being in New York was watching the Knicks get booed in their first preseason game against the Dallas Mavericks. Anthony would go on to have a 10 year career in the N.B.A., including a role on a Knicks team that made the finals in 1993 94. "We ran a pretty tight ship when it came to the game and practice so I had great mentorship in that regard, so that was a huge advantage to have, as opposed to what you're seeing today," Anthony said. "Look, they've already had a coaching change." Coaching changes can happen anywhere, of course. But the Knicks have had a particularly rocky season all around, from the front office's public upbraiding of the team during a surprise news conference after a loss in November to fans' yelling at Dolan to sell the team after another loss in January. And with only two teammates over 30 Taj Gibson is 34, and Wayne Ellington is 32 Barrett doesn't have a stable of experienced veterans to mentor him. "He has been really a pro," Miller said. "He has the right demeanor for it. I think he embraces it and I think he is genuine what he does. With those things in mind, I think he's done really well." If nothing else, Barrett has company on the team teammates who can commiserate about spending their first year in the Knicks wringer. Robinson, Kevin Knox, Frank Ntilikina and Damyean Dotson were all drafted by the Knicks. Allonzo Trier, now in his second year, went undrafted but was signed by the team. That is atypical in recent years for the Knicks, who have often stocked the franchise with veterans because of a lack of draft picks after poor front office decisions. Knox, who was a Knicks lottery pick in 2018, said that while there is a "little more pressure" playing in New York, he and Barrett are not fazed: "We all put the jersey on and hoop the same." "Me, I played at Kentucky. RJ played at Duke," Knox said. "We played on big stages in college. Tough games all the time. It's just another basketball game for us." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
During the early days of the Arab Spring in 2011, there was an indefinable moment when the street protests became something larger than a mass of people chanting slogans and holding up signs. A whole nation seemed to rise up as one and find its voice. For those of us who were in Cairo's Tahrir Square, there was something thrillingly archaic about it like being thrown back to the era of Michelet and Rousseau, when "the People" were spoken of as a single entity. The trademark chant of the protests the people want the fall of the regime seemed to well up from the seething crowd itself rather than any individual author. It did not take long for this spectacle of passionate unity to dissolve like fireworks in a night sky. Still, something happened in Tahrir Square that should not be entirely erased by the tragedies that followed. In "The Arab Winter," Noah Feldman a Harvard law professor with significant experience in the Arab world takes as his subject "the deep political meaning of the Arab Spring and its consequences." He argues that the uprisings are in danger of being dismissed as a meaningless experience, not just because of the chaos and terror that followed them, but because of the widespread sense that they have left no real political residue apart from Tunisia's fragile success at building a democracy. Feldman wants to rescue the Arab Spring from this verdict of "implicit nonexistence." He believes the uprisings signaled "a new, unprecedented phase in Arab political experience, in which participants engaged in collective action for self determination that was not conceived primarily in relation to imperial power." To understand why this matters, one has to recall that most of the Arab world has been under the sway of one empire or another for the past two millenniums, from the Romans to the Mamluks to the Ottomans to the European colonialists. Even after the Arab countries achieved independence in the mid 20th century, their politics were largely subsumed by superpower rivalries and agendas. In other words, in 2011 the Arabs finally cast off their historic subservience. The people spoke. Feldman concedes the difficulty of equating a chaotic series of street protests with a nation of (in Egypt's case) almost 100 million people. But he says this kind of revolutionary speech was meaningful because the old regimes in Egypt and elsewhere were so transparently not representative of the people's will. Drawing on the writings of Hannah Arendt, he argues that the people who took to the protest squares in 2011 "acted as agents of their own political future." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
For its inaugural performance series at the newly renovated space at 280 Broadway, the Gibney Dance center passed the curatorial wand to a handful of respected choreographers. Each was asked to choose two up and coming artists to share a double bill as part of a six week endeavor, DoublePlus. Like other aspects of the Gibney enterprise, it's a smart, simple concept, exposing audiences to work they might not see otherwise and generating instant curiosity around lesser known artists. Who are Alex Rodabaugh and Rakiya A. Orange? You may have no idea, but if Miguel Gutierrez thinks they're interesting, and you think he's interesting, that's a good enough reason to find out. Mr. Rodabaugh and Ms. Orange, it turns out, have both studied with Mr. Gutierrez, a choreographer known not only for his provocative dances but also for his rigorous, celebratory teaching. For the third installment of the series, which I saw on Saturday, Mr. Rodabaugh offered "g1br33l," about a satirical cult gathering of Internet worshipers, and Ms. Orange presented "Aziza," a solo examining black female identity. A glance at the program for "g1br33l," which listed the performers' astrological signs next to their names, suggested that we were in for something mystical. So did Aviva Novick's spatial design: a red hexagram on a white floor and plastic curtains that transformed the large space into a close knit theater in the round. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The South African comedy "Seriously Single" begins with its heroine, Dineo (Fulu Mugovhani) a social media manager in Johannesburg who thrives at work and in friendship accidentally livestreaming her latest breakup. Humiliated, Dineo tries to rebound straight to happily ever after with a new flame, Lunga (Bohang Moeko), who seems like he might be the one. But when the relationship with him goes up in smoke, Dineo turns to her roommate and best friend, Noni (Tumi Morake), to become her guide to single life. What follows is a charming journey to self discovery; Noni supports Dineo as she stumbles through romantic disappointment toward fresh independence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
As the White House reeled on Tuesday from a chaotic 24 hours, bookended by a pair of bombshell scoops raising serious questions about President Trump's comportment in the Oval Office, the administration and its surrogates quickly settled on a blunt message: Blame the press. "National security is put at risk by this leak and by leaks like this," the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. He was referring not to Mr. Trump's disclosure of intelligence to Russian leaders, but to the government officials who acted as sources for The Washington Post's scoop about it. Doing battle with journalists has become a frequent tactic of the Trump White House. But the conflict has been heightened this week, as aides to the president and their supporters in the right wing press seek to shift focus onto questions about the use of confidential sources and the credibility of the news media, and away from concerns about Mr. Trump's behavior. Sean Hannity, the Fox News host who speaks frequently with Mr. Trump, floated the possibility of a daily press briefing where journalists were required to submit written questions ahead of time. Newt Gingrich, another adviser, told Politico that the White House should "close down the White House press briefing room." The theme was picked up late Tuesday afternoon by the president's fund raisers, who sent a solicitation to supporters that began, "You already knew the media was out to get us." "But sadly it's not just the fake news," the email read. "There are people within our own un elected bureaucracy that want to sabotage President Trump." There is now a divide between those who express outrage at Mr. Trump's actions, and those who express outrage at the reporting that revealed Mr. Trump's actions a distinction that has become increasingly stark in the bifurcated realm of cable news. On CNN on Tuesday, as anchors reacted to a report in The New York Times that Mr. Trump in February asked the F.B.I. director, James Comey, to quash an investigation into the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, the legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin declared, "Three words: obstruction of justice." At roughly the same moment, the Fox News host Eric Bolling was scoffing. "So The Times reporting one thing, the president pushing back on that report," he told viewers, referring to the White House's denials. "Fake news, I would call it." The divergent responses echoed news coverage from the previous 24 hours, in the aftermath of The Post's story Monday night about Mr. Trump's lack of discretion with Russian officials. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow expressed disgust, saying, with little trace of irony, "Hyperbole is dead." On Fox News, right leaning commentators turned their ire toward the journalists who reported the story and the sources who spoke with them. "If you're a disloyal person, you sing to The Washington Post," said Jesse Watters, a co host of "The Five." "If you're a loyal person, you take it to your superior." Online, The Huffington Post published a photograph of Republican leaders in Congress with the all capitals headline "Wimps in Suits." Breitbart News wrote that "the media reacted hysterically to the news," a common refrain among conservatives who argue that impartial journalists have turned into openly adversarial opponents of Mr. Trump. On Tuesday, writing about The Times's story on Mr. Comey, Breitbart started its headline with the phrase "More Leaks.'' Even Matt Drudge, eminence grise of the conservative media set, weighed in, writing on Twitter that the Post's newsroom was "openly applauding" its "latest Trump hit." He seemed to be referring to a tweet from a Post reporter on Monday expressing excitement about the high web traffic for the story. That view echoes the president's own attitude toward the press: The Times reported that Mr. Trump, in a meeting with Mr. Comey, suggested that reporters be imprisoned for publishing classified information. Inside the West Wing, the president remains fixated on his coverage, and his anger about the tumult of recent days has been primarily directed toward his communications staff. A shake up may be in the works. On Tuesday, Sean Spicer, the press secretary, found himself briefing reporters minutes after a report in The Mercury News in which Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Fox News anchor, openly discussed the possibility of taking his position. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Are you one of those people who get lost in walk in closets? Do you build in extra travel time to account for getting lost? Is your sense of direction like a weather vane spinning in strong winds? For the directionally challenged, getting from Point A to Point B can be a frustrating, time wasting ordeal. If the idea of trying to get someplace unfamiliar makes you anxious, fear not: Experts say there are steps you can take to improve your sense of direction. Review a map of your proposed route before heading out, and perhaps even trace it with your finger, Dr. Brendan Kelley, a neurologist at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, said in an email. It will help provide context for the route. Once you arrive, review the map and the route you traveled to reinforce the memory of how you got there. By reviewing a map before your travel, you can take note of "handrails" landmarks such as bodies of water, stores and streets that will visually guide you, Ben G. Oliver, the director of outdoor education at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., said in an interview. Stop and enjoy the scenery. Set your phone to vibrate every 15 minutes to remind you to note where you are, Richard S. Citrin, an organizational psychologist from Pittsburgh, said in an email. Take notes and comment about what you see. That will help orient you and strengthen connections in your brain about where you are and have been. Sue Barry wearing a hat outfitted with a device designed by her husband that buzzed when she turned north. Try not to get stressed, because that makes it more likely you will become disoriented and confused. "When our automatic responses take over, we usually wind up lost emotionally and sometimes physically," he said. Experts say that technology like GPS devices or apps on smartphones can be crutches that inhibit the development of a better sense of direction. The devices can be good "adaptive strategies" to navigate to unfamiliar places, Dr. Kelley said. However, it can be challenging to learn on our own if we rely too heavily on them. David R. Widman, a professor of psychology at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., said in an interview that paper maps, with their foldout pages, offer a better overview of where you are headed than the small screens of smartphones. He recalled that during a trip his family took from central Pennsylvania to Vermont, the GPS device never made it clear that they would have to cross Lake Champlain. The trip ended up taking 11 hours. "The GPS is as likely to get you to where you want to go as it is to get you lost," he said. Take different routes to the same place Mr. Citrin said that when traffic is bad, he takes a different route even if it takes longer. "As my mind begins to understand that option, I increase my awareness of how going in different directions helps me get to where I am going," he said. Figure out where north is Sue Barry, professor emeritus of biological sciences and neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., said in an interview that her sense of direction was "really quite pathetic." She understood what was at her point of origin and what was at her destination, but had no understanding of what was in between or how the two points related to each other. Her husband, Dan, an engineer, was inspired by a 2007 article in Wired magazine that described the "feelSpace belt," which was outfitted with a power supply and 13 vibrating pads. A sensor detected Earth's magnetic field, and whichever pad pointed north would buzz to alert the person wearing the belt. As a Mother's Day gift in 2010, Ms. Barry's husband embedded compass circuitry into a sun hat. The circuitry was connected by a wire to a battery powered motor, which she would hold in her hand or tuck into the hat. When she was pointing north, the motor would buzz. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
How to watch: From 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on ESPN2 and from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. on ESPN; and streaming on the ESPN app. On Thursday night, the women's semifinals will be contested by some household names and one newcomer. Naomi Osaka will face Jennifer Brady, a first time semifinalist, while Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka will meet for the 23rd time in their careers. But first, in the afternoon, will be the men's doubles final between a pair of proven doubles champions and two rising stars. Here are the top matches of the day. Osaka, the 2018 U.S. Open champion, has solidified herself as a favorite for this year's title. There were concerns at the beginning of the tournament that Osaka could be derailed by a hamstring injury she sustained during the Western Southern Open. Those concerns subsided as the tournament went on. It was clear, especially in Osaka's round of 16 and quarterfinal matches, that she had hit her stride. Osaka has credited her form to off season preparation with a trusted support team, and she has played with the kind of confidence befitting a two time Grand Slam champion. But she stops short of saying that she feels comfortable in the later stages of Grand Slams. "I don't think a person can ever be truly comfortable," Osaka said at a recent news conference. "But for me, I'm aware that I worked very hard to be in this position." Osaka's powerful groundstrokes are her most recognized asset, but so far at this Open the 22 year old's mental fortitude has been her key weapon. In her quarterfinal match against Shelby Rogers, Osaka committed only eight unforced errors. For an offensive baseline player, that's a remarkable feat, and one that should cause alarm for her opponents. Brady, the 28th seed, is the only semifinalist who lacks a Grand Slam title. She has reached her first Grand Slam semifinal at a time when her game has improved considerably. Brady, 25, has yet to drop a set at the U.S. Open, and she won the Top Seed Open, her first WTA Tour title, last month without dropping a set. Brady traveled to Germany last winter, bypassing the favored American training centers in Florida, to work, as she said, "outside of the box." That bet has paid off, taking Brady's game to a higher level. But facing a former champion is tough, and even tougher when that champion has been playing some of her best tennis. Brady will have to go into Arthur Ashe Stadium with gusto, aiming to unsettle Osaka before she begins to draw on her experience. But she is still looking for her first Grand Slam title since she became a mother. To get it, Williams will need two more victories this week at Arthur Ashe Stadium, where she has won a record 101 matches. Her last three matches at the Open have all gone to three sets, and at times she has looked out of her depth. Yet during those slumps, Williams has consistently found something special and edged past her opponents. It will be interesting to see if Williams's energy levels can rebound after just a day's rest ahead of the semifinal. In New York's heat and humidity, the toll of those extra sets may assert itself. Azarenka, a two time Australian Open champion, blasted past the 16th seed, Elise Mertens, in the quarterfinals, dropping just one game. Ahead of the U.S. Open, Azarenka won the Western Southern Open (Osaka withdrew because of a hamstring injury), after having not won a match on the WTA Tour in over a year. Now, brimming with confidence, and comparatively well rested, she will have her eyes locked on her first U.S. Open title. The most overwhelming quality of Azarenka's game these past few weeks has been her groundstrokes. Rightly known as one of the best baseline players in the world, she has used that skill to bully opponents, forcing them to play off the back foot. Then, to put the nail in the coffin, Azarenka has been moving into the net, cutting off short balls with tightly angled shots. Williams will have history on her side; she has won 18 of the pair's 22 matches. Two of those meetings came in the finals of the U.S. Open, in 2012 and 2013. With both players performing at levels close to their peak, their semifinal will undeniably be another classic under the lights. Although Mektic and Koolhof, the No. 8 seeds, appear to have the advantage over the unseeded Pavic and Soares, the facts are more complicated. Pavic and Soares are veterans, each having won multiple Grand Slam titles in doubles, mixed and men's, and at times during this tournament they have seemed near the peak of their abilities. Soares plays with a sense of flair. He looks to outfox opponents rather than to overpower them. Pavic is the perfect foil, with a big serve and a wingspan that allows him to chase down tough balls while he's at the net. Their partnership resembles a perfectly calibrated machine in the way they move to cover space for each other. Given their experience, it's hard to see a way out for their opponents. But Mektic and Koolhof, in their first Grand Slam final together, will not be rollovers. In their semifinal against the Australian Open champions, Rajeev Ram and Joe Salisbury, they seemed to make almost no mistakes. Between Mektic's powerful serves and Koolhof's deft touch, which was beautifully demonstrated by a pair of perfect lobs on important points, this team has every shot in the book. But a Grand Slam final can unsettle even the most formidable competitors, and Koolhof and Mektic will need to stay calm if they're to have a chance at clinching their first major men's doubles title. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Most likely, your runner was given a shirt for running the race, but you can also buy things like mugs, hoodies, tights, and pom pom hats as other commemorative reminders of the day. Uncommon Goods is also selling 11 different pint glasses with marathon routes etched into them. Another post marathon gift option: an official race photo. Go to the race's website there's usually a link to where you can search for your runner, and where you can buy pictures that were taken of them along the course. Because who doesn't want to show off where they're from? Or places they've liked going? I've been wearing a fleece beanie from Mill City Running, a Minneapolis running store I loved so much that I ordered the hat and had it shipped to me in New Jersey. The owner of the Haddonfield Running Company, my local running store, said that anything with Run856 on it (so named after our area code) is selling fast for the holidays. Yes, HotHands. Those little miracle packets of portable heat that keep hands from freezing on cold running days. I carried a pair for all but the last two miles of the Philadelphia Marathon, and they were fingertip savers. You can buy them in pairs at just about any local drugstore, or in 10 packs online and at hardware stores. Headsweats Frosty Christmas Trucker. I have the Bigfoot version of this Headsweats hat, which can be worn while running or, as is often the case for me, after a run or race when my hair is a mess. The blue and white color scheme lets you extend its shelf life beyond Christmas (red and green gear tends to look like leftovers by February). I love a good sports massage, but I can't afford them every week, which is why I rely on self massage tools to work out some kinks. Two I love: the Sokiss Trigger Point Self Massager and R8 deep tissue massage roller (I bought it as a gift to myself). A warning though: the R8 has become exceedingly popular and sells out quickly when they land in running stores. As I write this, they're on back order on the R8 site. For my running aches and pains, I also love the microwaveable Old World Style Cherry Pit Pillow, which I now use instead of a plugged in heating pad. The cherry pits mold to the shape of whatever muscle needs some heat, and it smells good too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Those familiar with the fate of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea during a 2000 naval exercise, will already know how Thomas Vinterberg's "The Command" ends. Perhaps that's one reason the film, based on a 2002 book by the journalist Robert Moore about the incident, prioritizes emotion over narrative focusing on the tension, solidarity, and desperation of the vessel's crew, even as it skims past story developments that may help us better understand what, exactly, is happening. As the officer in charge, and a career Navy man in love with the sea, Matthias Schoenaerts brings a melancholy physicality to his part: He moves with the grace of a hero, but has the sad eyes of a doomed romantic. Something similar could be said for Colin Firth, playing the British commodore whose offers of help are rejected by the Russian authorities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Late on a Monday afternoon in June, members of CNN's elite investigations team were summoned to a fourth floor room in the network's glassy headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. A top CNN executive, Terence Burke, had startling news: three of their colleagues, including the team's executive editor, were leaving the network in the wake of a retracted article about Russia and a close ally of President Trump. Effective immediately, Mr. Burke said, the team would stop publishing stories while managers reviewed what had gone wrong. It was a chilling moment for a unit that boasted Pulitzer Prize winners and superstar internet sleuths, and had been introduced at the beginning of the year as the vanguard of CNN's original, high impact reporting. Its mission statement "Seek truth. Break news. Hold the powerful accountable." invoked the sort of exhaustive reporting that has become an increasingly coveted skill for news organizations in the Trump era. But within months of its introduction, the unit, CNN Investigates, had been rocked by damaging reporting errors including another flawed story about Mr. Trump and Russia earlier in June and its mistakes had disturbed network executives who were already embroiled in a public feud with the White House. The retracted story and ignominious exits of three prominent journalists was an embarrassing episode for CNN, particularly at a time when there was widespread mistrust in the media and Mr. Trump was regularly attacking the press. Two months later it remains an illuminating chapter in the network's effort to carry out the meticulous, time consuming work of investigative journalism within the fast paced, ratings driven world of 24 hour cable news. Questions linger about the way CNN handled the publication of the story and the retraction. The network's swift and severe response drew coverage throughout the media world, and prompted some journalists to question whether CNN had bowed to political pressure and overreacted on a story it has never explicitly said was wrong. Instead, the network maintains there had been unacceptable breakdowns in the newsroom's internal review process. In interviews with The New York Times, more than half a dozen CNN staff members, including three with direct knowledge of the investigative unit's operations, provided previously unreported details about the publication of the story and the fallout from its retraction. Citing fear of retribution, the people requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal information. In the weeks since the story was retracted, the investigative team has been reshaped and redirected. Its members were told they should not report on perhaps the most compelling political story of the year: potential ties between the Trump administration and Russia. That subject is now largely handled by CNN's reporting team in Washington. The political whizzes of KFile, a group of Internet savvy reporters poached from BuzzFeed that was untainted by the retraction, were transferred out of the investigative team. The remaining team members have resumed publishing, but with a narrower reporting scope; they now focus on topics less glamorous than Mr. Trump's potential ties to Russia, like the opioid crisis and the environment. Created to enhance CNN's brand, the group had instead left it bruised, and the mistakes intensified the onslaught of attacks against CNN from Mr. Trump. Looming over the newsroom was a pending 85 billion takeover of CNN's parent company, Time Warner, by AT T, a deal requiring Justice Department approval that some White House aides considered a potential form of leverage against the network and its president, Jeffrey A. Zucker. CNN said its commitment to aggressive reporting remains undiminished, and other anchors and correspondents have continued to break stories about the Trump administration and Russia. Late last month the network revealed an email from a Trump campaign aide discussing a potential meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, during last year's presidential race. "For 37 years, CNN has done award winning investigative work that has led to fundamental changes at some of the country's most important institutions," CNN said in a statement. "This year, CNN has gone even further, devoting additional time, talent and resources to an expanded investigative team. While there have been lessons learned along the way, one thing has remained constant our unwavering commitment to this type of work at a time when it has never been more important." Members of the unit initially expected to have plenty of time to report on a wide variety of stories. But, increasingly, CNN journalists said, the team was pulled into day to day political developments in Washington, especially the Trump campaign's potential connections to Russia; at times, it resembled more of a rapid response team. At the same time, the pressure to produce scoops increased. It was in that heated environment that the first major public lapse involving the team occurred. In early June, CNN published a bulletin saying that James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, would contradict Mr. Trump in testimony before Congress, disputing the president's assertion that Mr. Comey had informed him three times that he was not under investigation. The article ran under the bylines of Mr. Lichtblau; the anchors Jake Tapper and Gloria Borger; and a producer, Brian Rokus. Ms. Borger relayed the news to viewers on air. But the network soon began hearing from sources who said the information in the article was wrong. CNN was forced to issue a correction. In the newsroom, some colleagues of Mr. Lichtblau, who had only recently joined the network, blamed him for the mistake; others defended him. It was a sign of the tension that already existed between CNN's Washington bureau and the upstart investigative unit, which were jousting over the various reporting lines of the Trump Russia story, two people said. The botched Comey story only exacerbated it. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. The mistake also drew the ire of Mr. Zucker, who told his journalists that the political climate with CNN in Mr. Trump's cross hairs left no room for error. It was in this strained environment that, less than three weeks later, the investigative unit found itself at the center of a more consequential blunder. The story said that the Senate Intelligence Committee was examining the fund and that Mr. Scaramucci had met with the head of the fund, Kirill Dmitriev, several days before Mr. Trump's inauguration. It also said the Treasury Department had been looking into the meeting at the request of two Democratic senators, who had expressed concern that Mr. Scaramucci might have promised to help get sanctions against Russia waived by the new administration. The story was written by Thomas Frank, who had been a Pulitzer Prize finalist at USA Today. But Mr. Scaramucci, who was jockeying for a position in the White House, disputed the information when CNN contacted him for comment, according to a person close to Mr. Scaramucci; the story quoted Mr. Scaramucci as saying "there is nothing there," in reference to his meeting with Mr. Dmitriev. Mr. Lichtblau was editing the article and, according to the people with direct knowledge of the events, he sent a draft of the story to Lex Haris, the head of the investigative unit. Mr. Haris, who was traveling to Phoenix for a conference, signed off as long as the story passed muster with CNN's internal review system, known as the Triad. The Triad includes CNN's fact checkers and its standards team, both of which approved the article. But the third prong, the legal department, had at least one question that went unanswered. It is not clear what specific concerns the legal department raised, or why Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Haris did not address them; journalists at CNN said it was sometimes difficult to keep track of the flurry of inquiries that could come during the review process. (Mr. Frank, Mr. Haris and Mr. Lichtblau declined to comment for this story.) Mr. Lichtblau moved forward with publication. He emailed an editor affiliated with KFile, Kyle Blaine, who had not been involved in the story, and instructed him to publish it on his behalf. When the story was posted that afternoon, it received little attention inside the newsroom and out. But Mr. Scaramucci and his representatives quickly contacted CNN officials, including the network's Washington bureau chief, Sam Feist, to complain. It was an "all hands on deck'' rebuttal, said the person familiar with Mr. Scaramucci's response. Breitbart News, a frequent critic of CNN, soon posted an item that questioned CNN's reporting, and called the network's story "very fake news.'' Citing its own source, Breitbart said there was no Senate investigation. When CNN managers began to review the piece, they discovered the legal department's concerns and that they had not been addressed. They also realized a factual error had slipped through the fact checking process; it was a technicality related to a Russian bank's relationship to the fund, but managers found it to have been a troubling lapse. And there was a more problematic issue, two people familiar with the review said. Mr. Frank's single source had wavered before the story was published, expressing concern about how the information was being presented. But Mr. Frank had not relayed that hesitancy to his colleagues. Between Mr. Frank's wavering source and the discovery of breakdowns in the editorial vetting process, executives concluded that the network could not stand behind the story. The day after the article was published, CNN removed it from its website and issued a formal retraction and an apology to Mr. Scaramucci. "That story did not meet CNN's editorial standards," the network wrote. It is still unclear to what degree the story was inaccurate. CNN has never said that the article's reporting was incorrect, and Mr. Zucker made clear on a morning conference call, soon after the retraction, that the network would not go back and report the story again. Some journalists inside and outside the network said privately that they believed the story was materially true. But the story also suffered from a lack of clarity. A reader could easily come away with the impression that Mr. Scaramucci himself was under investigation for some kind of illicit dealings with the Russians an assertion that the article does not explicitly make. The fallout came quickly. The day after the retraction, Rich Barbieri, the editor of CNN's business and finance site, sent his team an email barring the publication of "any content involving Russia" without editorial approval "no exceptions." As Breitbart News and other CNN critics gloated over the retraction, Mr. Zucker decided that stern action was necessary to demonstrate to its employees and to the outside world that the network would not tolerate such mistakes. The network asked Mr. Lichtblau, Mr. Haris and Mr. Frank to resign. Eric Lichtblau won a Pulitzer Prize at The New York Times before joining CNN. Mr. Lichtblau was the editor on the retracted story. The episode shocked many inside CNN and created anxiety in the newsroom. Some staff members said they thought the punishment had been overly harsh, a view expressed by some media commentators as well. Though corrections are not uncommon for news organizations, full retractions are more unusual and typically signify major factual errors or ethical breaches. When news organizations do retract a story, they normally also make an effort to correct the record, and explain to the reader what went wrong. But the brief editor's note from CNN, some journalism experts said, provided more questions than answers. "CNN failed in its duty to enlighten the public," said Edward Wasserman, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. "Instead, it muddied the waters to correct something and we don't know what it's correcting." At CNN, executives took some time to regroup. Mr. Zucker vowed that the network would not be cowed by the Trump administration. After a reassessment period, CNN asked the investigative unit to resume its work. Its ranks have been replenished: new journalists have been brought on from other parts of CNN, and there is a new team leader in place, Matt Lait, a veteran former editor at The Los Angeles Times. On Aug. 2, weeks after he informed the investigative team of the resignations, Mr. Burke, the CNN executive, convened another meeting this time to outline the unit's refocused mission. The team would engage in longer term reporting on national issues, with less focus on the White House. He affirmed that the unit should leave the Russia investigation story to CNN's staff in Washington. Mr. Scaramucci, meanwhile, had been named Mr. Trump's communications director. His successful tangling with CNN was said to have greatly pleased the president. Before Mr. Scaramucci was himself forced out of the White House, he was overheard on a live television microphone referring to the retracted story and Mr. Zucker. "He helped me get the job by hitting those guys," Mr. Scaramucci said, referring to the resignations. He added, "Tell him he's not getting a placement fee for getting me the job." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The border between the United States and Mexico is in the news every day, in ongoing debates about immigration and spending on security initiatives. But what is it like to visit destinations along the border? To find out, writers for Travel spent time in five pairings of places: Brownsville, Tex., and Matamoros, Mexico; Big Bend National Park and Boquillas; San Diego and Tijuana; Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Mexico; and El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. As I sat at the market in Ciudad Juarez on a weekday in January, it all seemed so familiar: The clanking of the reusable glass bottles; the greeter hollering for visitors to sit in his corner of the restaurant; the smell of grease meandering through the upstairs eatery where Axl Rose was screaming at me from a jukebox. All this while vendors downstairs sold T shirts with the image of the late singer Juan Gabriel emblazoned across the chest while others negotiated with visitors over the price of a homemade poncho featuring the logo of the Dallas Cowboys. The images of daylong excursions to Ciudad Juarez with my father as a child made their way into my memory, where they collided with the flashbacks of a teenage me sharing buckets of beers with friends who were convinced that going south of the border for a day was more important than sitting through biology. Even in tougher times, many of us never stopped coming here. It is because there are thousands of El Pasoans like me whose ties that bind them to Ciudad Juarez are familial or economic, or both. The effects reverberate well north of the Rio Grande. Texas is Mexico's No. 1 trade partner, and the El Paso customs district saw 85.5 billion in two way trade with Mexico, from January to November 2017. That is the second highest total in the United States behind Laredo's 270 billion. In the heart of Ciudad Juarez I crossed the street to where the parishioners from the centuries old Catedral de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe were walking through the adjacent park, the Plaza de Armas. Guards were closing up shop at the city's old government office, now the Centro Municipal de las Artes. Both are open to the public, and are just two of the museums and tourist attractions city officials and street vendors hope will lure visitors back to a city considered by lawmakers and human rights groups as one of the world's most dangerous just six years ago. Two blocks east on Avenida 16 de Septiembre is a museum that captures the spirit of one of the greatest episodes in Mexico's history, the Museo de la Revolucion de la Frontera. The museum occupies what was the customs building during the civil war that raged in Mexico from 1910 to 1920. Recent renovations have transformed it with a modern sleekness. Photographs of Mexican revolutionary figures like Francisco Madero, Venustiano Carranza and Francisco "Pancho" Villa in different areas of revolutionary Juarez highlight the importance of the city during the war. There is also an emphasis on how the Americans were responsible for some of the mayhem. Such is the case with the exhibition dedicated to Gen. John J. Pershing, who led his so called "Punitive Expedition" in pursuit of Villa after the Mexican rebel leader led his forces into Columbus, N.M. And although the writers John Reed and Ambrose Bierce are perhaps the most widely known Americans who were fascinated enough by the war in Mexico to become a part of it, the M.U.R.E.F. instead dedicates space to local photographers and writers like Melville Jean Herskovits, Harvey Kiefer and Esther Eva Strauss, whose curiosity and dedication to photojournalism helped document the war for readers in Texas and beyond. After leaving the museum and walking back toward downtown's Paso Del Norte bridge, I realized there remains a sense of adventure associated with going into Ciudad Juarez, which I assume could still be slightly overwhelming for new visitors. Though violence has decreased significantly, the sight of a federal police truck carrying masked soldiers clutching semiautomatic rifles can still be somewhat jarring to visitors who are not accustomed to it. I spotted two of these conducting routine patrols before my last stop on this day trip: the Kentucky Club. The bar has been in business since the 1920s and was frequented by Americans in need of a beer, whiskey or tequila during Prohibition. It has retained its reputation as a laid back place for patrons on both sides of the Rio Grande, and was one of the few pubs that didn't shut its doors during the drug cartel wars that raged in the city from 2008 to 2011. You can stay here for a beer or two, or one of their famous margaritas, or spend hours on end reading about its famous patrons and watching the flat screen televisions above the hand carved wooden bar. As the evening wears on, available seats are fewer and the music louder. Farther away from the cathedral and the museums Ciudad Juarez offers up more for visitors willing to take a cab, Uber or drive themselves into the city. Closer to the Bridge of the Americas and Chamizal Park, Viva Mexico! stages a two hour long pageant that celebrates everything from Mexico's indigenous roots to its vaquero culture with song and dance. That follows a buffet dinner that has become so popular that reservations are recommended. Much of El Paso's identity is rooted in its remoteness. It is in a different time zone than most of Texas. It is closer to the capitals of three other states Arizona, New Mexico and Chihuahua than it is to Austin. It is surrounded by mountains and desert that offer few clear distinctions as to where the city in Texas ends and the one in Mexico begins. I was born and raised here. My mom's house is in the Austin Terrace neighborhood and my father's house was two blocks from the eastern foothills of the Franklin Mountains, in a part of the city that used to be called Chivas Town (so named because it was where goat farmers lived before the neighborhood was incorporated by the city). After moving away for school and work for a number of years, I realized I had not taken advantage of what the Franklin Mountains had to offer. So when I came back, I set out to explore the hiking trails and mountain peaks my friends brag about on social media during their bike rides and other excursions. The mountains have rugged options for outdoor entertainment they're one of the premier spots for paragliding in the United States and the Wyler Aerial Tramway takes hikers and other visitors to Ranger Peak, 5,632 feet above sea level. From the top, Fort Bliss is visible just beyond the middle class neighborhoods of Central and Northeast El Paso. The base, one of the largest in the country, is home to the First Armored Division of the United States Army and spreads across Texas and New Mexico on more than a million acres of federally owned land. Its history is on view at the Old Ironsides Museum on the base, which features exhibits about the history of the base and the division, and rationing efforts by Americans during World War II. A plaque next to an Abrams M1 tank honors Sgt. Israel Devora Garcia, who was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and raised in nearby Clint, Tex. He died in combat operations in Iraq in 2006. (Admission to the museum is free. Visitors must get a pass to the base before entering; it's easy but can be time consuming on weekends.) Fort Bliss is one reason so many El Pasoans are so patriotic (one of the city's main highways, Route 54, was designated the Patriot Freeway during the first Gulf War). Like Ciudad Juarez, El Paso is experiencing its own downtown renovation, which includes the successful return of minor league baseball to the city. The El Paso Chihuahuas, the Triple A affiliate of the San Diego Padres, who play at Southwest University Park. The nearby Deadbeach Brewery is just one of a half dozen or so trendy spots that offer up craft beers and food truck meals (at Deadbeach, I like the I.P.A.). The Tap Bar is what I consider one of the best haunts in El Paso, where it's hard to tell if it is 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. once you're inside. The jukebox will go from Los Tigres del Norte or Marty Robbins to Metallica within minutes. In addition to mountains, desert sunsets and the legend of Pancho Villa, residents of both Ciudad Juarez and El Paso have something the rest of the other cities along the Rio Grande don't: New Mexico. Less than 10 minutes from downtown El Paso is the Sunland Park Racetrack and Casino. On the way there, people cross south of the Rio Grande but remain in the United States. On my first visit I won enough to gamble and drink for free, which wasn't bad for a lazy Sunday. Because it is on the border, the entertainment doesn't consist of Elvis impersonators or a tribute to the Rat Pack. It is something with more of a local flavor a live mariachi band. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A 2,077 square foot, ground floor corner retail space is available in this 61,230 square foot building in Crown Heights. The building is one block from Eastern Parkway, and its tenants include Blink Fitness, a Dollar Tree, an urgent care facility and Brooklyn Kids Academy. This building on the Lower East Side was built in 1900 and has eight residential units and one retail space. This five story, 7,192 square foot building on the Lower East Side was built in 1900. It has eight residential units and one retail space, which is occupied by New Fuzhou Supermarket. There is also a basement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
AMSTERDAM Anne Frank tried to cover up two pages of writing in her diary that contained dirty jokes and a description of what she referred to as "sexual matters," pasting brown paper over the pages in her red and white plaid notebook. But researchers here have revealed the hidden text using new digital technologies, the Anne Frank House and two other Dutch cultural institutions announced on Tuesday. Frank, the teenage diarist who wrote about coming of age in a secret attic annex while in hiding from the Nazis during World War II, may have camouflaged the two pages because they contained prurient content that she didn't want her father or someone else in the cramped quarters to discover. "I sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about sexual matters," Frank wrote in Dutch. "How would I go about it?" She attempts an answer, addressing an imaginary listener with a lofty tone, using phrases such as "rhythmical movements" to describe sex, and "internal medicament," to refer to contraception. Peter de Bruijn, a senior researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, one of the partners in the research, said that the newly uncovered pages are not significant for their sexual content because Frank explores similar matters in other parts of the diary, often in even more explicit terms. He said these pages were important because they show Frank's first foray into trying to write in a more literary tone. 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. "She starts with an imaginary person whom she is telling about sex, so she creates a kind of literary environment to write about a subject she's maybe not comfortable with," he said. In an interview, Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, said, "It is really interesting and adds meaning to our understanding of the diary." "It's a very cautious start to her becoming a writer," he said. "It's still very early stages." The two newly revealed pages were written in Frank's first diary, with a red plaid cover, on Sept. 28, 1942, when she was 13 years old. During her time in hiding, she wrote two versions of the diary. The first was written in a series of small notebooks, from her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942, until Aug. 1, 1944, and was intended strictly for herself. But one day she heard on the radio that the Dutch government in exile was planning to publish eyewitness accounts of people's suffering under the German occupation, and she resolved to write a new book that she called "The Secret Annex," based on her diaries, which she hoped to submit after the war. She completed 215 loose pages in a couple of months, but in August 1944, she and her family were discovered, arrested and deported; she died in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp three months shy of her 16th birthday, in 1945. Mr. de Bruijn said Frank may have also pasted over the pages as a form of self editing as she revised her diary in preparation for the second, public version. Researchers at the Anne Frank House discovered the two hidden pages in the original version of the diary while they were checking its condition and photographing the pages in 2016. The notebooks are in storage for safekeeping and only examined once every 10 years. Until now, the technology that would have allowed researchers to look at the covered pages without destroying them wasn't available. "When you touch the pages they can be damaged, so we don't touch them," said Teresien da Silva, head of collections at the Anne Frank House. Using photo imaging software, they were able to decipher text beneath the brown paper without any contact with the pages. Could it be considered disrespectful to reveal pages that Frank wanted to hide? She also compared it to salvaging the writings of Franz Kafka, who wanted to destroy many of his own literary works. "It's not always good to follow the wish of an author," she said. "It's important sometimes for scientific research and also good to know for the public what she didn't want to publish." A spokeswoman for the Anne Frank House said that the museum would make the new text available on its website, but only in Dutch at the moment, because of copyright restrictions. She said she did not know when the text would be available in English. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SAN FRANCISCO Social networking has long been predicated on people sharing their status updates, photos and messages with the world. Now Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, plans to start shifting people toward private conversations and away from public broadcasting. Mr. Zuckerberg, who runs Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, on Wednesday expressed his intentions to change the essential nature of social media. Instead of encouraging public posts, he said he would focus on private and encrypted communications, in which users message mostly smaller groups of people they know. Unlike publicly shared posts that are kept as users' permanent records, the communications could also be deleted after a certain period of time. He said Facebook would achieve the shift partly by integrating Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger so that users worldwide could easily message one another across the networks. In effect, he said, Facebook would change from being a digital town square to creating a type of "digital living room," where people could expect their discussions to be intimate, ephemeral and secure from outsiders. "We're building a foundation for social communication aligned with the direction people increasingly care about: messaging each other privately," Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview on Wednesday. In a blog post, he added that as he thought about the future of the internet, "I believe a privacy focused communications platform will become even more important than today's open platforms." Facebook's plan in which the company is playing catch up to how people are already communicating digitally raises new questions, not the least of which is whether it can realistically pull off a privacy focused platform. The Silicon Valley giant, valued at 490 billion, depends on people openly sharing posts to be able to target advertising to them. While the company will not eradicate public sharing, a proliferation of private and secure communications could potentially hurt its business model. Facebook also faces concerns about what the change means for people's data and whether it was being anti competitive by knitting together WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, which historically have been separate and operated autonomously. Mr. Zuckerberg was vague on many details of the shift, including how long it would take to enact and whether that meant Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger would share user information and other contact details with one another. He did not address how private, encrypted communications would affect Facebook's bottom line. But Mr. Zuckerberg did acknowledge the skepticism that Facebook would be able to change. "Frankly we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing," he wrote in his blog post. "But we've repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories." Facebook's move is set to redefine how people use social media and how they will connect with one another. That has societal, political and national security implications given the grip that the company's services have on more than 2.7 billion users around the world. In some countries, Facebook and its other apps are often considered as being the internet. Mr. Zuckerberg's decision follows years of scandal for the social network, much of it originating from public sharing of posts. Foreign agents from countries like Russia have used Facebook to publish disinformation, in an attempt to sway elections. Some communities have used Facebook Groups to strengthen ideologies around issues such as anti vaccination. And firms have harvested the material that people openly shared for all manner of purposes, including targeting advertising and creating voter profiles. Even WhatsApp, which has long been encrypted, has grappled with the distribution of misinformation through its service, sometimes with deadly consequences. All of that has put Facebook in the spotlight, which in turn has badly damaged the company's reputation and created mistrust with users. Regulators have intensified scrutiny of Facebook's privacy practices, with the Federal Trade Commission considering a multibillion dollar fine against the company for violating a 2011 privacy consent decree. Last week, the agency said it would create a task force to monitor big tech companies and potential anti competitive conduct. Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly tried to rid Facebook of toxic content, disinformation and other problems. At one point, he emphasized prioritizing what friends and family shared on Facebook and de emphasizing content from publishers and brands. He has also said that the company will hire more people to comb through and remove abusive or dangerous posts, and that it is working on artificial intelligence tools to do that job. But none of those moves addressed the issue of public sharing. And in many ways, consumers were already moving en masse toward more private methods of digital communications. Snap, the maker of the Snapchat app, has built a young, loyal audience by allowing people to share messages and stories for a finite period of time, for example. Other companies, like the local social networking company Nextdoor, focus on the power of group and community communications. And closed, private messaging services like Signal and Telegram have also become more prominent. Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, hinted at the problems that Facebook's News Feed had created last week at a New York Times conference. Because of the way social networks had been constructed for people to publicly share content, he said, "things that are negative actually spread faster and further than things that are positive." He later added, "You know, I certainly think there's a lot of opportunity to sort of course correct here." "Facebook is focused on mobile and messaging as the key conduit for people to communicate online, and thereby to communicate with Facebook," said Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher who was a former chief technologist at the F.T.C. "The chat app essentially becomes your browser." Mr. Zuckerberg said that even though he would focus on private and secure conversations, the public forums for communication popularized by Facebook would continue. In addition, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger will remain stand alone apps, even as their underlying messaging infrastructures are woven together, The Times previously reported. The work, which will include adding end to end encryption across all the apps, is in the early stages. Mr. Zuckerberg said this overall shift would ultimately create new opportunities for Facebook. "We're thinking about private messaging in a way that we can build the tools to make that better," he said in the interview. "There's all kinds of different commerce opportunities, especially in developing countries. There's more private tools to be built around peoples' location. There's just a whole set of broader utilities we can build that fit this more intimate mode of sharing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Supersize Motor Homes Can Be a Good Way to Go, or Stay NAPLES, Fla. Suzi and Edmund Kuehn parked their 41 foot motor home in Flint, Mich., on a Saturday night four years ago. The next morning, Ms. Kuehn's ex husband called from Dallas and told her their 31 year old son, Leslie, who had been fighting plasma cell leukemia, had died. "We left within 45 minutes," said Ms. Kuehn, now 64. She and Mr. Kuehn, 60, who were retired, picked up her mother in Galesburg, Ill., and her daughter Lisa in Quincy, Ill. They called Suzi's other daughter, Amy, and two children in Cape Coral, Fla., to fly to Texas. On Tuesday morning, the Kuehns pulled into a campground in Dallas. They drove the 1,300 miles to Dallas from Flint with comfort and clockwork that would be inconceivable with airplanes and cars. Their motor home has its own plumbing, water, generator for heat and electricity and full size refrigerator. Everyone can ride in the same cabin. The big motor homes like the Kuehns' start at 35 feet. Called motor coaches, they go up to 45 feet and weigh up to 25 tons 14 times the weight of the average car. Most have two, three or four slide outs wall sections that are pushed out once the vehicle is parked, nearly doubling the living space. New, these big rigs sell for 200,000 to 2 million. Motor coaches are expanding the horizons of how adventurous retirees can travel and live. Built on the chassis of buses, which are intended to last a million miles, they have caught the wave of baby boomers, now 50 to 68, who look forward to a 10 to 20 year stretch of able bodied retirement. Driving these vehicles, they head for scores of luxurious new motor coach resorts that mimic the gated "active adult" subdivisions of the South and Southwest. Some retirees have begun buying parking pads like condos where they spend a winter or summer and then ride off to another resort. Living in East Hartford, Conn., in 2010, Mr. Kuehn lost his job as an electrical contractor when his company closed. So he and Ms. Kuehn bought a motor coach. They had to find a place to park where they could hook up to utilities, so they bought a lot at the Naples Motorcoach Resort, a short drive from Naples's Fifth Avenue shops. The resort's first such investors, they paid 90,000 for a lushly landscaped site with a concrete pad for the Monaco Dynasty they had bought used for 180,000. With their feet affixed to their wheels, the Kuehns have blown past the pasture that some pensioners go out to. Sitting on a lounge chair outside their coach, Mr. Kuehn said, "We own the lot. That's it. We have a lack of direction. We don't know where we're going next. In five years, we've done 50,000, 60,000 miles." Ms. Kuehn cradled her 7 month old great grandson, who was visiting from Cape Coral, about an hour away. "We have a nest egg for a house sometime," she said. "In 10 years, maybe." These resorts are awash with activity, with people playing tennis and shuffleboard, rushing off to parties and hitting the pool. They live outdoors. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' "Here, when the last drop of rain falls," said Deb Rohrbauch of the Riverbend resort in LaBelle, an hour inland from Naples, "it's like ants coming out." Enthusiasm for sports, parties, boating and bingo override old career coups and august credentials. "A few people want you to know how successful they were," said Rick Piper, 70, a former purchasing director at Western Michigan University and a resident of the Silver Palms resort in Okeechobee, an hour west of Palm Beach. "We don't care. We thank you for being here." Demographic figures for these nomads are sketchy and fluid. The Recreational Vehicle Industry Association in Reston, Va., estimates that about 750,000 people live full time in large motor homes. A survey by the Family Motor Coach Association in Cincinnati found that 700,000 or so live in vehicles less than full time but for at least six months a year. At least 80 percent are over 55, and around 5 percent over 75. Most of the full and long term part timers are retirees or semiretirees who telecommute. BowStern, a marketing firm in Tallahassee whose clients are big R.V. resorts, recently surveyed those resorts' residents. It found that 90 percent owned motor homes 21 feet long or bigger. It said 10 percent of the residents owned a site for their home and 55 percent were considering buying one. Eighty three percent were 56 to 75 years old. After 75, it said, they hang up the keys less than 4 percent still drive big motor homes. The resorts have restaurants, bars, pools and fitness centers. They provide water and sewer services, Wi Fi and cable, and hookups for the 50 amps or more of electricity that motor coaches need for their appliances, heating and air conditioning. Each lot has a bed of brick paving stones or glossy concrete for the coach, the car it tows and a golf cart. Lots at the big resorts average 3,500 square feet. This provides room for the coaches' slide outs, as well as other amenities that owners may install, like outdoor kitchens, hot tubs, walls of trees and shrubbery, little thatch roofed huts with bars, and patios where residents watch television on the large screens built into their fuselage walls. The economics of the life can be frightening. A motor coach's value plunges like a Yugo's. In February, Terry Anderson, 63, a full time worker based in Silver Palms, and his wife, Donna, 61, both formerly of New Hartford, Conn., paid 205,000 for a new Holiday Rambler. "In the first year," he said, "it will lose 30 or 40 percent. It's not for the faint of heart." Coach owners also incur expenses like 56 for 14 gallons of gas to drive only 100 miles, 80 to 100 to have the coaches washed, 200 a year for a mail service and 100 a year for a service to rescue stranded coaches. But they don't pay expenses like lawn care or replacing a roof. Retirees from high tax states in the Northeast and Midwest can come out ahead if they go south. In Connecticut, the Andersons paid a 6 percent state income tax and a 13,000 real estate tax on their 18th century nine bedroom home. In Florida, they pay no state income tax and they pay 1,000 a year on their 56,000 lot. "We're saving 20,000 a year right off the top," Ms. Anderson said. For all their apparent fun, some residents lament their isolation from children and grandchildren. "We're all in the same age group," Ms. Anderson said. "We're all missing the same thing." Patricia Pippin, 68, of Riverbend said, "A lot of people have little dogs. It seems like their dogs have taken over like children." But like Army recruits who come to like basic training, these retirees seem to develop a psychological hardiness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Trevor Lawrence, the star quarterback at top ranked Clemson and a leading contender for the Heisman Trophy, has tested positive for coronavirus, the university said Thursday night. Tigers Coach Dabo Swinney said in a statement that Lawrence was "doing well with mild symptoms" but that he would miss Saturday's home game against Boston College. Perhaps more crucially for the race toward the College Football Playoff, Swinney did not say when Lawrence had tested positive or when he had developed symptoms distinctions that could determine whether he would be eligible to play at No. 4 Notre Dame on Nov. 7. "While we certainly will miss Trevor, this is an opportunity for other guys to step up and we're excited about competing against a very good B.C. team on Saturday," Swinney said. In a post on Twitter late Thursday, Lawrence said that his symptoms had been "relatively mild" and that "the only thing that hurts is missing an opportunity to be with my teammates this weekend and play the game I love." Surrounded by formidable talents like Travis Etienne, a tailback, and Amari Rodgers, a wide receiver, Lawrence has been among the most electrifying signal callers in college football in recent years. He passed for more than 3,600 yards last season, when he steered Clemson back to the national championship game a year after it had won the title. And just a few months ago, he was a leading figure in the WeWantToPlay movement that urged college sports executives to mount a football season during the pandemic. In a nod at Lawrence's fame, President Trump later spoke with the quarterback, a junior who could be among the most coveted players in next year's N.F.L. draft. Although Clemson (6 0) will remain favored against Boston College (4 2) on Saturday, its prospects at Notre Dame (5 0) will be diminished if Lawrence is still unavailable. Under the medical protocols for the Atlantic Coast Conference, of which Clemson is a member, a player who tests positive for the virus is required to isolate for at least 10 days. "A student athlete's medical treatment will be determined by institutional medical staff, and be considered unavailable for training, team/group activities or game play until the student athlete has both completed necessary isolation and had a medical clearance by team physicians," the league's medical policy says. Last Friday, when Clemson's athletic department most recently released data about its coronavirus testing, the university in Clemson, S.C., said seven of its student athletes had tested positive over the previous week. Now, given Lawrence's result, at least 138 Clemson student athletes have tested positive since June 1. The announcement from Swinney was just the latest troubling news in a turbulent college football season marked by conferences' shifting their decisions about whether to proceed and, since late August, the postponement or cancellation of more than three dozen games involving Football Bowl Subdivision teams. On Wednesday, Wisconsin canceled its game at Nebraska after at least 12 people, including six players and Coach Paul Chryst, tested positive for the virus. (The university said Thursday that three more people associated with the football program had since tested positive, and it remained unclear whether the Badgers' next game, a Nov. 7 matchup with Purdue, would happen.) Just over two weeks ago, Alabama, one of Clemson's most familiar foes on the sport's biggest stages, said that Coach Nick Saban had tested positive. Within a few days, Alabama's medical staff determined that Saban's result had been a false positive and, under a recent Southeastern Conference policy, allowed him to exit isolation early and coach a game against Georgia. The A.C.C. has no such protocol. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
An Iowa jury on Wednesday found Henry Rayhons not guilty of charges that he sexually abused his wife, an Alzheimer's patient, by having sex with her in a nursing home after staff members told him she was cognitively unable to give consent. In the highly unusual case, Mr. Rayhons, 78, a farmer and former Republican state legislator who by all accounts had a mutually loving relationship with his wife, faced a felony charge that could have resulted in up to 10 years in prison. The case ignited intense national discussion of an issue that will only gain importance as more Americans get older: whether and when people with dementia are capable of indicating if they desire intimacy. Mr. Rayhons testified that his wife, Donna Rayhons, continued to desire and even initiate sexual contact. But he said that on the night in question, May 23, 2014, he and she had just kissed and held hands after he drew a curtain around her bed in a shared room. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In dance, lineage matters. It's how a budding choreographer learns from a master or, at the very least, grasps something about craft and collaboration. Making a dance is an act of give and take. In the case of the choreographer Emily Molnar celebrating her 10th anniversary as artistic director of Ballet BC, or Ballet British Columbia there is more take than give. Displaying her lineage, she programmed her own "To this day" alongside a masterwork from William Forsythe, in whose Ballett Frankfurt she once danced. She also included "Solo Echo," by Crystal Pite, another Canadian choreographer and Forsythe alumna. The program, which Ms. Molnar brought to the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starting Thursday, proved that Mr. Forsythe's choreography at least its angular shapes in which every limb is stretched and torqued like taffy is easy to imitate, but impossible to replicate . Yet oh do his former dancers try. The evening opened with Mr. Forsythe's "Enemy in the Figure" (1989), a stylish mediation on structure and disorder. After that the program took a ponderous turn. Ms. Molnar's Jimi Hendrix inspired "To this day" (2018) is a tepid rendering of the blues, its dancers attired in Kate Burrows's colorful tops and pants as they grappled with sophomoric themes of the individual versus the group. Mr. Forsythe's influence was recognizable throughout her movement phrases, whether brisk or in slow motion, which emphasized her dancers' elasticity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
At 99, the Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti Has a New Novel A few years ago, the literary agent Sterling Lord got a surprising phone call from his oldest client, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Mr. Ferlinghetti, who turned 99 this spring, had a new manuscript to show him, a novel. Mr. Lord, who is 97, was immediately taken with the book. "I think he's done something quite unusual," he said. The novel, titled "Little Boy," fuses elements of autobiography, literary criticism, poetry and philosophy, in a headlong, often stream of consciousness style. "It's not a memoir, it's an imaginary me," Mr. Ferlinghetti said in a phone interview. "It's an experimental novel, let's put it that way." With its unconventional style and structure, "Little Boy" wasn't an easy sell at first. When Mr. Lord submitted a partial manuscript to publishers in 2016, six editors said they were interested, but no one made an offer. Mr. Ferlinghetti wavered. 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. "Ferlinghetti said, take it off the market, nobody's going to buy it," Mr. Lord said. But Mr. Lord isn't one to give up easily. In the 1950s, when he was representing Jack Kerouac, he spent several years trying to sell "On the Road," which every major publishing house rejected. Even Kerouac told Mr. Lord to stop submitting it, but Mr. Lord kept at it, and finally got an offer from Viking for a 900 advance. Mr. Lord insisted on 1,000. "On The Road" was finally published in 1957. Mr. Lord was confident that someone would want to publish the latest work from Mr. Ferlinghetti, one of America's most successful and beloved poets. "I felt it was a crime to let it sit there," Mr. Lord said. "I said, 'Lawrence, it's too good, I want to take it out and try again.' And he said, 'See, that's why you're the best agent in town!'" "It was like nothing I'd ever read before, it really does elude classification," Mr. Howard said. "I think of it as a closing statement: This is who I am, this is what I experienced, this is the way it looks to me. It's not just the fact that he's 99 years old that gives it authority, it's the life he's crammed into those 99 years." The publication of "Little Boy" caps a decades long partnership between Mr. Lord and Mr. Ferlinghetti two literary legends who met in the 1950s. At his agency, Mr. Lord helped launch the careers of era defining writers like Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes and Ken Kesey. Mr. Ferlinghetti, a renegade West Coast publisher who ran the independent press, City Lights, helped to stir up a literary and countercultural revolution when he published Beat Generation writers like Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. In the 1980s, Mr. Lord sold Mr. Ferlinghetti's novel, "Love in the Days of Rage," to Dutton, and they've worked together ever since. In the twilight of their careers, Mr. Ferlinghetti and Mr. Lord are both keeping busy. Most days, Mr. Lord still goes into his Manhattan office at Sterling Lord Literistic, where he reads manuscripts and submissions with a magnifying machine. Mr. Ferlinghetti, who lives in San Francisco, still writes poetry ("In flashes, nothing sustained," he said). Last year, New Directions released a collection of his writing titled "Ferlinghetti's Greatest Poems." Doubleday plans to release "Little Boy" next March, to coincide with Mr. Ferlinghetti's 100th birthday. Mr. Ferlinghetti said he wishes they would release it sooner, and doesn't see the need to tie the publication to his birthday. "It's the kind of book that I've been writing all my life," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In 1992, according to an article in The Times, Justice Clarence Thomas told two of his clerks that he planned to remain on the court until 2034. Why 2034? one of them asked. "Liberals made my life miserable for 43 years," Thomas replied, "and I'm going to make their lives miserable for 43 years." Once Amy Coney Barrett takes her seat, Thomas's prospects for imposing misery will brighten considerably. Of course, Thomas is not the key player here, but only one participant in the conservative movement's four decade struggle to wrest control of the judiciary from a once powerful liberal legal establishment. Armed with an originalist doctrine that enables subjective interpretation of the Constitution, and supported by a growing willingness to overturn precedent by jettisoning the principle of stare decisis ("to stand by things decided"), the Supreme Court will be able to knock down what remains of the liberal legal edifice constructed by the Warren Court from 1953 to 1969. What is this movement banking on? White resentment of the civil rights movement, corporate opposition to the regulatory state, a growing property rights movement in the Western states and the anger of social and religious leaders over abortion rights and what they perceive as an assault on religious liberty by the state. If she is confirmed, Barrett will almost certainly strengthen a legal insurgency that challenges race conscious remedies in civil and voting rights litigation; threatens not only abortion rights but also access to some forms of contraception; disputes the legitimacy of independent federal agencies; and weakens divisions between church and state. The right has devised new doctrines to justify conservative rulings, flooded the courts with an expanding cadre of judges and legal scholars, financed a host of legal firms to challenge liberal laws and liberal rulings, and built a multimillion dollar network of tax exempt groups to promote its agenda. The conservative legal revolution, which first took off in the late 1970s, caught the Democratic powers that be asleep at the switch. As Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, argued in his 2010 book, "The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement," the left had begun to lose touch with the electorate: Grassroots liberalism was shrinking, while its forces at the elite level in the professions, universities, the media and Washington based public interest organizations were surging. These liberal elites, and the Democratic Party of which they were an increasingly central part, were of little use at election time. In gearing up to challenge the legal left, Teles wrote, conservatives faced hurdles more difficult to overcome than in other arenas, including Congress: Reversing liberal accomplishments in the law was more strategically problematic than other conservative goals, such as reducing taxes and stiffening the American response to the Soviet Union. While relatively little elite mobilization was necessary to translate electoral victories into policy outcomes, in the law, conservatives faced liberal opponents with a much more impressive set of resources: elite law schools, a large chunk of the organized bar, a vast network of public interest lawyers and the still powerful liberal understanding of rights. If they were to have any chance of influencing the development of law, they would have to compete with liberals at the level of organizational, and not simply electoral, mobilization. Conservatives, although initially poorly organized, had constituencies ready and waiting to be mobilized. Teles describes them this way: Business hated the courts for legitimating and accelerating the expansion of the federal regulatory state. Western farmers, ranchers and extractive industries detested them for limiting their use of federal lands. Southerners continued to resent their part in dismantling segregation. Northern ethnic refugees from the Democratic Party seethed at the "forced busing" mandated by judges like Massachusetts's Arthur Garrity. Religious conservatives were enraged by the Supreme Court's constitutional sanctioning of abortion and its restrictions on school prayer. While their particular grievances differed, the conservative coalition was drawn together by opposition to liberal judges, professors and public interest lawyers. At the same time, Teles described by The Wall Street Journal as a "liberal political scientist" contends that the success of the conservative legal movement has been based not just on money and effective organization, but also on the merit of its analysis. I take seriously the argument that conservatives have found greater success in the law because their ideas such as the negative side effects of state planning and regulation were shown over time to be superior to those of their liberal counterparts. The intellectual and organizational foundation for the conservative takeover of the federal judiciary expanded with time. Steven Calabresi, co founder of the Federalist Society, was working in the mid 1980s for Ronald Reagan's Attorney General, Ed Meese, in the Office of Legal Policy. In a series of memos to Meese, Calabresi faulted the traditional conservative commitment to "judicial restraint," arguing instead for a very different approach, the aggressive application of the theory of "originalism." "The courts and the executive must start using their constitutional powers to hold the Congress within its proper constitutional sphere," Calabresi wrote in a memo to Meese. Originalists believe that the constitutional text ought to be given the original public meaning that it would have had at the time that it became law. The original meaning of constitutional texts can be discerned from dictionaries, grammar books, and from other legal documents from which the text might be borrowed. It can also be inferred from the background legal events and public debate that gave rise to a constitutional provision. The original meaning of a constitutional text is an objective legal construct like the reasonable man standard in tort law. Liberal scholars sharply dispute this view. Geoffrey Stone and William P. Marshall, law professors at the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina, wrote in 2011: Judges purporting to engage in originalist analysis often project onto the Framers their own personal and political preferences. The result is an unprincipled and often patently disingenuous jurisprudence. There is no evidence, for example, for the claims advanced by originalists that the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause prohibited affirmative action or that the original meaning of the First Amendment guaranteed corporations a constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of money to dominate the election of public officials. Both of these claims, however, are central to today's conservative constitutional agenda. In this view, it is originalism that lends itself to subjective interpretation that could enable jurists of all ideologies to reach almost any sought after conclusion. In an intriguing account of the intellectual ferment in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration, Calvin TerBeek, a doctoral candidate in the University of Chicago political science department, argues that in January, 1987: David McIntosh also a co founder of the Federalist Society wrote to Meese that the Office of Legal Policy should explore "whether it was not simply 'independent agencies' " that conservatives should challenge as unconstitutional, but also "agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency." Even more aggressive, TerBeek wrote, "were ideas for a constitutional amendment that would add 'expressly' to the Tenth Amendment and allow for 'Collective state repeal of federal law'. " The elite constituency of conservative ideologues and rich donors that draws up the approved list of candidates to fill judicial vacancies does so behind closed doors with little transparency. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, has become a leading critic of the power brokers who produce these lists of acceptable judicial nominees and of the pro business tilt of Supreme Court decisions. In an interview, Whitehouse described the process of selecting judges under Trump to me. First, Whitehouse noted, "the selection of possible judges is run through the Federalist Society under the guidance of Leonard A. Leo." Once the president makes his choice, Whitehouse continued, "the Judicial Crisis Network goes to work, running TV campaigns funded by anonymous donors." What does this all boil down to? Needless to say, the prospect of six conservative members of the Supreme Court, appointed for life, has provoked deep anxiety in both the center and the left. Not only do liberals see a court determined to demolish past rulings, they fear that if Democrats win control of the White House and Congress, the court will rule future liberal initiatives unconstitutional, as it did in the 1930s in response to F.D.R.'s New Deal. This prospect is driving leaders of progressive interest groups to the brink. Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, declared that the nomination of Barrett comes at a time when We are already in a constitutional crisis. The president of the United States has refused to commit to the peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election, celebrated attacks on journalists and protesters, encouraged his supporters to vote more than once and defended white supremacist terrorists. Vanita Gupta, president and chief executive of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, is similarly alarmed: We are in the middle of a global pandemic that has devastated millions of lives. Trump and Senate Republicans have refused to do anything to alleviate the pain and suffering. They refuse to address the systemic racism and injustice that permeates our society. According to Michelangelo Signorile, a gay rights proponent who publishes the Signorile Report, "This is a five alarm fire for LGBTQ Americans." In short, we are looking at a conservative movement determined to exercise the judicial authority it has struggled for decades to win against a Democratic Party consumed by a burning sense of injustice. This can be the kind of struggle in which blood is shed irregular warfare with no winners. But as the sociologist Lewis Coser, author of "The Functions of Social Conflict," wrote in 1956, conflict can also have an integrative function and "prevent the ossification of the social system by exerting pressure for innovation and creativity." The strength of the Trump movement, even as it may be on the wane, suggests that as a counter measure, liberals might seek to create a broader consensus on strategically significant points, particularly those that provoke the most contention, until a leader like Trump is no longer viable or electable. Insofar as politics is the continuation of war by other means and not the other way around, there is also the possibility of the resolution of disagreements once thought to be irresolvable the possibility, in other words, of progress. But first we have to get through an election. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The Chieftain is all day comfortable, in seating and riding position, and implacably stable and easy to ride. The Chieftain also comes with an audio system (including fairing mounted speakers), 12 volt power plug, Bluetooth capability, tire pressure sensors and motorized windshield adjustment. The top line Chieftain is the first bagger a model with hard saddlebags and front fairing that has ever worn the Indian badge. The top line Chieftain is the first bagger a model with hard saddlebags and front fairing that has ever worn the Indian badge. BRIAN HEAD, UTAH On Sept. 17, 2003, an all new model from the Indian Motorcycle Company of America was delivered to me for a review. Two days later, the Gilroy, Calif., company locked its doors and went out of business. Its disappearance was so sudden and so complete that I had no idea where to return the motorcycle. The comings and goings of would be makers of motorcycles carrying the Indian brand name have for years been a steady source of work for reporters. But this was the first time that I recall having to write a birth announcement and a death notice in the same week. A list of the various entities that have claimed ownership of the Indian name, trademarks or motorcycle brand would be long indeed. The original Indian motorcycles came from Springfield, Mass., in 1901 two years ahead of Harley Davidson's arrival and lasted until 1953, along the way establishing a strong reputation on racetracks. Since then, at least a dozen purveyors have used the brand name and logo, some legitimate, some clearly not. In fact, in 1998, the Gilroy based company had to consolidate rights from nine claimants before it could begin the process of creating its own short lived version. So it was with a measure of wariness even suspicion that the news was received in 2011 that Polaris Industries, known for its snowmobiles and watercraft, would be the latest to acquire the rights to Indian. But it's worth noting that Polaris also is the parent company of the well regarded Victory Motorcycles, which it established 15 years ago. So Indian's newest owners at least were experienced and competent in the art of making motorcycles. Polaris, a company with 3 billion in sales based in Medina, Minn., also offered the Indian name something it had lacked for decades the deep pockets required to build no compromises bikes. In the two years since its purchase, Polaris has invested tens of millions of dollars, expanding the research and development department, production capabilities and other infrastructure it determined were needed to give Indian a fitting revival. At the huge Sturgis, S.D., motorcycle rally in August, the company unveiled a new lineup of heavyweight cycles bearing the Indian logo: the Chief Classic ( 19,399 including shipping), Chief Vintage ( 21,399) and Chieftain ( 23,399). The 111 cubic inch (1.8 liters, if you prefer) Thunder Stroke V twin engine that powers all three is billed as Indian's first all new power plant in 70 years. "People questioned whether we were just going to slap an Indian logo on a Victory motorcycle and call it 'mission accomplished,' " Steve Menneto, vice president for motorcycles at Polaris, said in an interview before the introduction. "Our new Indians are just that: new, all new," he said. "They share less than 1 percent of content with Victory." Although the Indian models are built in shared facilities with Victory in Spirit Lake, Iowa, Mr. Menneto said the personnel, equipment and production lines were all separate. The power source for the Indian line is a fuel injected 49 degree V Twin that produces 119 pound feet of torque. It hews to tradition with air cooling, and considerable effort was devoted to preserving nostalgic styling cues like the angled cooling fins on the cylinder heads and the positioning of the exhaust pipes. Before its introduction, Mr. Menneto said, the engine had been subjected to the equivalent of more than two million development miles. Engineers also lavished considerable attention on the sound it would make a key consideration for a motorcycle that is aimed directly at the Harley constituency. Indeed, the engine roars to life with a deep, satisfying but not deafening report. Hammer on the throttle and the resulting bam bam bam is almost like that of an old fighter plane. Well played. The Thunder Stroke 111 is meant to trump Harley Davidson's largest offerings in every way. Lacking a scientific side by side comparison, I can only say that from a subjective standpoint, it's game over. The engine feels particularly well sorted, even when subjected to the harshest environments. I rode 400 miles from Southern California to Utah recently, with only two brief stops for fuel; the trip lasted six hours and averaged 70 m.p.h. up and down several mountain ranges, up to 10,420 feet in elevation in Utah, through 107 degree temperatures in Baker, Calif., and even in some stop and go traffic around Las Vegas. Yes, the heat roiling off the engine then was duly noted. But there was nary a hesitation from the Thunder Stroke 111. The power at all speeds was instant and gratifying. Gary Gray, Indian's product director, had told me before the trip that I could expect to average "low to mid 40s" in my fuel economy. That sounded optimistic, as I typically see mileage from the high 20s to mid 30s in long distance tests of heavyweights from Harley, Honda and Moto Guzzi. But I averaged a commendable 42 m.p.g. for my Indian romp. The bike was also all day comfortable, in seating and riding position, implacably stable and easy to ride. It did not feel the least bit tippy or cumbersome at slow speeds, as some heavyweights do. The brakes provided good stopping power, and I liked that the antilock system did not link front and rear brakes. Reminded that Victory has a similar offering in the Vision, Mr. Menneto said internal research indicated there was little chance of one brand cannibalizing sales of the other. Still, during one of my brief stops on the test ride, a Vision owner pulled up to admire the Chieftain. "I love my bike," the rider told me. "I won't trade it for anything. Except maybe that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Samantha Bee, host of "Full Frontal With Samantha Bee," drew intense criticism after using a vulgarity to refer to President Trump's daughter Ivanka. She apologized, calling her choice of words "inappropriate and inexcusable." Samantha Bee apologized on Thursday for having used a vulgar epithet to describe Ivanka Trump on her TBS show, saying she had "crossed a line." TBS also issued an apology, but took no disciplinary action against the late night host. Ms. Bee's insult of the president's elder daughter on Wednesday's episode of "Full Frontal With Samantha Bee" included a crude reference for the female anatomy and caused a furor made more intense because the remark came just a day after ABC swiftly canceled "Roseanne" over a racist tweet by the show's star, Roseanne Barr. The different consequences for the two politically minded entertainers Ms. Barr is an outspoken supporter of the president, while Ms. Bee is a full throated opponent of the Trump administration provided conservatives with a fresh opportunity to accuse the media industry of having a liberal bias. Hours before Ms. Bee and the cable network issued their apologies, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called the host's remarks "vile and vicious." "The collective silence by the left and its media allies is appalling," Ms. Sanders said. "Her disgusting comments and show are not fit for broadcast, and executives at Time Warner and TBS must demonstrate that such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned on its network." Friday morning, it became clear that Ms. Bee's apology was not good enough for President Trump. He asked in a tweet why TBS has not fired "no talent Samantha Bee." The criticism of a comedian from the White House came as a federal judge is considering a Justice Department challenge to the proposed acquisition of Time Warner TBS's parent company by AT T. Mr. Trump has publicly opposed the deal and the court's decision is expected June 12. Ms. Bee insulted Ms. Trump toward the end of a nearly seven minute segment devoted to the issue of migrant children. Appearing on a screen in the background was a photograph of Ms. Trump holding one of her children, which the president's daughter had posted on social media earlier in the week. Ms. Bee described Ms. Trump's posting of the photo as "oblivious," given that the topic of migrant families was prominently in the news. "Let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad's immigration practices," Ms. Bee added, before making use of the epithet. The studio audience gasped before breaking into cheers. Continuing to address Ms. Trump, Ms. Bee advised her to "put on something tight and low cut" and to tell her father to "stop it." To emphasize the point, she made use of another obscenity. On Thursday, amid rumblings of a boycott by advertisers, and with commentators on the left and right discussing the slur in an online debate that fell largely along partisan lines, Ms. Bee said she regretted using the word. "I would like to sincerely apologize to Ivanka Trump and to my viewers for using an expletive on my show to describe her last night," the host said in a statement. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In its own statement, TBS said that Ms. Bee had taken the right course of action by apologizing for the "vile and inappropriate language" she had used. "Those words should not have been aired," the statement continued. "It was our mistake, too, and we regret it." Two companies, State Farm and Autotrader, said on Thursday that they were suspending advertising from "Full Frontal." The host's remarks, including the epithet, were scripted, a spokeswoman for TBS said. When the segment was broadcast, the offending word was bleeped out, but it was left uncensored on the clip that was posted online. TBS removed the video from its site on Thursday afternoon. "Full Frontal With Samantha Bee," which airs at 10:30 on Wednesday nights, is taped at the CBS Broadcast Center in Midtown Manhattan late in the afternoon on the day of its broadcast meaning that TBS had time to edit the segment. Ms. Bee, a 48 year old Canadian American comic and commentator, spent 12 years as a regular on "The Daily Show." Her TBS show, which went on the air in 2016, has become a home for searing commentary on Mr. Trump. The crass insult of Ms. Trump ignited a debate on where media companies should draw the line, especially where comedians are concerned, and whether it is fair to assume an equivalency between a racist remark like the one made by Ms. Barr and a vulgar epithet like the one used by Ms. Bee. Several prominent conservatives said that a lack of disciplinary action on the part of TBS would reveal a double standard in the media and entertainment industries. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, wrote on Twitter, "There's no uprising against Bee. Why? Because she is liberal." NBC's Megyn Kelly, who has been a target of Ms. Bee's barbs, also derided the remark on Twitter. "This is disgusting," she wrote. "How is this acceptable?" While liberals largely supported Ms. Bee, Chelsea Clinton criticized her, saying on Twitter, "It's grossly inappropriate and just flat out wrong to describe or talk about IvankaTrump or any woman that way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
From left: Joining Francois Henri Pinault, chief executive of Kering, on the front row at Brioni are the actors James Marsden, Max Irons and Jack Huston. MILAN The common cry among fashion week attendees is a plaint of exhaustion and overexertion, but the most committed of front row regulars has nothing on Jack Huston, the actor who is in "deep preproduction" in Rome for the title role in a remake of "Ben Hur." "This morning I was already up working out, then went and did an hour of horse riding, then two hours of chariots, then some boxing and then got on a flight, so that was my day before even getting here," he said on Monday evening in Milan. After all that, attending a fashion show is "really nice." He'd made the Rome to Milan flight for the Brioni show, the Roman label's return to the runway after years away. Brioni was the first men's label to stage a show, back in 1952, the company happily claims, so this was a return to form, with models galloping through the Castello Sforzesco at a furious clip, and a collection inspired by Spanish horsemanship and the Wiener Werkstatte, one of those unholy alliances in which fashion delights. With the show over, Mr. Huston gamely chatted with fashion weekers at the postshow dinner in the Grande Museo del Duomo di Milano. He is one of a new class of actors versed in men's wear, who, out of interest or connections, have become repeat guests on the international circuit of shows and promotional events. Besides Mr. Huston, who recalled visiting Milan once while filming a short video for Stefano Pilati and Ermenegildo Zegna, that class includes the young actor Max Irons, who was recently seen at the Topman Fifth Avenue flagship opening party in New York. Mr. Irons had taken the occasion of Brioni's invitation to score Brownie points with the parents of his Milanese born girlfriend. "I dropped them their Christmas presents last night," he said. James Marsden, on the other hand, was in Milan for the first time. "Everyone here is dressed to the nines, and cares about the way they look," he said. "It makes you think twice about throwing on a baseball cap and going down to the lobby to get something." But he, too, has become a newly visible industry avatar. In December, he attended Valentino's couture presentation in New York; a few months earlier, the CFDA Fashion Awards. On Tuesday, he'd be on the road to Geneva, for the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, the watch trade fair known as SIHH, as a guest of the Swiss manufacturer IWC. "If you go back three or four years, I was a schlub," he said. "I've just now awakened my senses to what good suits are, and good fashion, and am trying to educate myself." And, he added, "I've gotten myself out of the house as part of these things." For stars as much as for industry, fashion weeking is an ongoing commitment (and increasingly, nearly a full time job). As for the man of the hour himself, Brioni's creative director, Brendan Mullane, he seemed mostly relieved by dinnertime that his show was over and that the celebrations toasting the label's 70th anniversary had begun. "The video cut out after four looks," he said of his time huddled backstage during the show, where monitors (usually) broadcast the action on the runway to the designers. "I didn't see any of it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Sid Haig, a Hollywood character actor who for more than 50 years played thugs, villains and, most famously, a psychotic clown named Captain Spaulding, died on Saturday. He was 80. His wife, Susan L. Oberg, announced his death on Monday on his Instagram account. No other details were given. "He adored his family, his friends and his fans," Ms. Oberg wrote. "This came as a shock to all of us." Mr. Haig, who lived in Los Angeles, played small parts in more than 350 television shows and 70 movies, including " Jackie Brown" and the James Bond thriller "Diamonds Are Forever." He became a cult figure among horror fans, who reveled in his portrayal of the murderous clown who terrorized people in the 2003 Rob Zombie film "House of 1000 Corpses." He would go on to play Captain Spaulding (the name was taken from a character famously played by Groucho Marx) in two other Rob Zombie films. His long, lanky body towered over fellow actors. He was born Sidney Eddie Mosesian on July 14, 1939, in Fresno, Calif., to parents of Armenian heritage, according to his official website. His father was an electrician. Sidney took dancing lessons and acted in high school. And he loved music. In 1958, according to the website, he played drums on the song "Full House" by the T Birds. Soon after, he enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse, a community theater with a school for theater arts that trained actors, including Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. In his early roles in film and on television, Mr. Haig mostly played thugs and heavies. In the 1968 cult classic "Spider Baby" his character cooks a cat; he was also in the 1974 blaxploitation film "Foxy Brown," with Pam Grier. But it was as Captain Spaulding, the psychotic clown featured in "House of 1000 Corpses," that Mr. Haig became best known to horror fans. He said in a 2015 interview with CrypticRock.com: "When I first read the script, I knew that it had the potential to do something." In "House of 1000 Corpses," Captain Spaulding runs the Museum of Monsters and Madmen in a run down gas station on a barren stretch of Texas. There, he shoots a man after being attacked. Mr. Haig reprised the role two years later in "The Devil's Rejects." He also acted in other horror films directed by Rob Zombie, including the 2007 remake of "Halloween." He was back as Captain Spaulding in "3 From Hell," a sequel to "The Devil's Rejects," which was released this month. Complete information on survivors was not available. Cassandra Peterson, known by her stage name, Elvira, said she met Mr. Haig at Rob Zombie's wedding in 2002 and forged a friendship with him on the road at horror fan conventions. "He played this horrible character in Rob's movies, and it took fans by surprise when he was sweet and took time with them," she said. " He may not have been a big star. But in our world, he was an icon." Indeed, Mr. Haig was a fan favorite. He made regular appearances at festivals to sign autographs or appear as Captain Spaulding, who became a recognizable villain among mainstream audiences. In June, he attended the Mad Monster Party in Phoenix, where he signed autographs for fans. Earlier that month he was in Las Vegas for the Days of the Dead horror convention. Fans often dressed up like Captain Spaulding at conventions or had tattoos inked in homage to the character. The adulation surprised Mr. Haig. He said on Instagram in February, "The level of commitment to put my mug into your skin for life just blows me away." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today. In a measurement taken on Wednesday, NASA's Curiosity rover discovered startlingly high amounts of methane in the Martian air, a gas that on Earth is usually produced by living things. The data arrived back on Earth on Thursday, and by Friday, scientists working on the mission were excitedly discussing the news, which has not yet been announced by NASA. "Given this surprising result, we've reorganized the weekend to run a follow up experiment," Ashwin R. Vasavada, the project scientist for the mission, wrote to the science team in an email that was obtained by The Times. The mission's controllers on Earth sent new instructions to the rover on Friday to follow up on the readings, bumping previously planned science work. The results of these observations are expected back on the ground on Monday. Read about the Curiosity rover's updated readings on Mars. People have long been fascinated by the possibility of aliens on Mars. But NASA's Viking landers in the 1970s photographed a desolate landscape. Two decades later, planetary scientists thought Mars might have been warmer, wetter and more habitable in its youth some 4 billion years ago. Now, they are entertaining the notion that if life ever did arise on Mars, its microbial descendants could have migrated underground and persisted. Methane, if it is there in the thin Martian air, is significant, because sunlight and chemical reactions would break up the molecules within a few centuries. Thus any methane detected now must have been released recently. On Earth, microbes known as methanogens thrive in places lacking oxygen, such as rocks deep underground and the digestive tracts of animals, and they release methane as a waste product. However, geothermal reactions devoid of biology can also generate methane. It is also possible that the methane is ancient, trapped inside Mars for millions of years but escaping intermittently through cracks. NASA acknowledged the methane detection in a statement Saturday afternoon, but called it an "early science result." Scientists first reported detections of methane on Mars a decade and a half ago using measurements from Mars Express, an orbiting spacecraft built by the European Space Agency and is still in operation, as well as from telescopes on Earth. However, those findings were at the edge of the detection power of these tools, and many researchers thought the methane might just be a mirage of mistaken data. When Curiosity arrived on Mars in 2012, it looked for methane and found nothing, or at least less than 1 part per billion in the atmosphere. Then, in 2013 it detected a sudden spike, up to 7 parts per billion that lasted at least a couple of months. The measurement this week found 21 parts per billion of methane, or three times the 2013 spike. Even before this week's discovery, the mystery of methane has been deepening. Curiosity scientists developed a technique that enabled the rover to detect even tinier amounts of methane with its existing tools. The gas seems to rise and fall with the red planet's seasons. A new analysis of old Mars Express readings confirmed Curiosity's 2013 findings. One day after Curiosity reported a spike of methane, the orbiter, passing over Curiosity's location, also measured a spike. But the Trace Gas Orbiter, a newer European spacecraft launched in 2016 with more sensitive instruments, did not detect any methane at all in its first batch of scientific observations last year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
More than 500 unionized garment workers at the Myan Mode factory in Myanmar were fired in late March.Credit...Minzayar Oo for The New York Times More than 500 unionized garment workers at the Myan Mode factory in Myanmar were fired in late March. Myan Mode, a garment factory on the outskirts of Yangon, Myanmar, produces men's jackets, women's blazers and coats for Western fashion companies like Mango and Zara. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, it has seen a decrease in orders from international retailers. That was why it let go almost half of its 1,274 workers in late March, the factory's managing director said in response to protesters who arrived at the factory's doors to denounce the dismissals. Three fired sewing operators, however, said the factory was taking an opportunity to punish workers engaged in union activity. In an interview, the operators Maung Moe, Ye Yint and Ohnmar Myint said that of the 571 who had been dismissed, 520 had belonged to the factory's union, one of 20 that make up the Federation of Garment Workers Myanmar. About 700 workers who did not belong to the union kept their jobs, they said. Myan Mode's South Korean based owner did not respond to requests for comment, and did not provide details about the firings. Mr. Maung Moe, 27, was the factory union's president and had organized several strikes. Mr. Ye Yint, 30, was the union's secretary, while Ms. Ohnmar Myint, 34, had been a union member since its founding in June 2018. "The bosses used Covid as an opportunity to get rid of us because they hated our union," Mr. Maung Moe said. He said he and other union members had been in discussions with the factory managers before the firings, demanding personal protective equipment and that workers be farther apart on the factory floor. "They thought we caused them constant headaches by fighting for our rights and those of our fellow workers." Zara's parent company, Inditex, which is supplied by Myan Mode, said its code of conduct for manufacturers expressly prohibited any discrimination against worker representatives. The company said in an email that it was "actively following the situation" at Myan Mode, and would "try to achieve the best possible solution for workers." Mango, which has started to reopen its stores in Europe, said in an emailed statement that it "understood the need to ensure that the human rights of factory workers are respected." The company added that it was maintaining "a continuous" dialogue with suppliers. Roughly 2 percent of garment workers in Myanmar, where the minimum wage is roughly 3.50 a day, and 5 percent of garment workers in Bangladesh belong to a union, according to affiliate data estimates collected by the global trade union IndustriALL. While Cambodia's work force is more unionized than others in the region around 80 percent the unions there are fragmented, meaning successful collective bargaining negotiations can be difficult. Tear gas, water cannons, police brutality and imprisonment were some of the tools used by the governments of Bangladesh, Cambodia, India and Myanmar to punish striking garment workers and union members last year, according to the International Trade Union Confederation, an umbrella group for unions around the world. It noted that many workers in those countries who tried to form a union were dismissed from jobs or blacklisted by factories. And the number of countries that exclude workers from the right to establish or join a trade union increased to 107 in 2019 from 92 in 2018. "We have heard allegations of anti union discrimination in recent weeks," said John Ritchotte, a specialist in social dialogue and labor administration in Asia for the International Labor Organization. "However, it is currently more difficult than usual for us to verify those allegations through our usual procedures because of travel restrictions and local lockdowns." In the weeks since the Myan Mode layoffs, around 15,000 jobs in the textile industry have been lost and about 40 factories closed across Asia, said Khaing Zar Aung, president of Industrial Workers Federation of Myanmar. On March 31, several dozen union workers at the Superl leatherwear factory on the outskirts of Phnom Penh which produces handbags for brands like Michael Kors, Tory Burch and Kate Spade were told they were being let go. One was a woman who was six months pregnant. Soy Sros, a factory shop steward and the local president of the Collective Union of Movement of Workers, wrote about the company's actions on Facebook, stating it violated a March 6 appeal from the Cambodian government saying Covid should not be used as a chance to discriminate against union members. A screen shot of a Facebook post by a worker who has since been jailed and accused of defamation. Twenty four hours later, Ms. Sros was forced by factory management to take down her post and make a thumbprint on a warning letter accusing her of defamation. On April 2, she was removed from the factory floor by the police and charged with posting fake information on social media. She is now in jail. Superl, which is based in Hong Kong, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Michael Kors and Tory Burch, which regularly place orders at the factory. Another customer, Tapestry, the owner of Kate Spade, declined to comment. In Myanmar, Mr. Maung Moe, Mr. Ye Yint and Ms. Ohnmar Myint all said they did not regret joining the union despite the difficulties they had faced. They said the loss of jobs was proof that worker representation was needed. "I worry for the future of garment workers here without representatives," Ms. Ohnmar Myint said, referring to both the firings at Myan Mode and other factories across Asia. "But for now, I worry about providing for my family and getting food on the table." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Within a half mile radius in downtown Manhattan, there are five matcha stores: MatchaBar, Matchaful, Cha Cha Matcha, the other Cha Cha Matcha and Matcha n' More, which are each less than five minutes apart on foot. Matcha, a kind of powdered green tea used in Japanese tea ceremonies, has become a popular drink in the wellness scene for its grassy green color and antioxidants. High end cafes in SoHo like Matchaful blend it with nut milks or spices and sell it for 7, more than the cost of a latte. At the same time, places that once catered to health minded New Yorkers before wellness became a buzzword spots like Souen, Integral Yoga Natural Foods and Angelica Kitchen are closing. All three opened in the 1970s, when SoHo was home to an artistic and creative community. Instead there is By Chloe, a vegan fast food restaurant, which sells a quinoa taco salad for 12.45; Brodo, which sells cups of bone broth for 10; the Good Market, which sells pineapple raspberry kombucha organic slushies for 4.50; Welleco and the Nue Co, both supplement stores; the Hemp Garden, where CBD sheet masks sell for 29.99; the Detox Market, where the Vintner's Daughter Active Treatment Essence face oil is 225; Lululemon and Nike; boutique fitness establishments like Y 7 Studio, New York Pilates (three locations), SLT and SoulCycle, where classes are upward of 30. In early April, Kind, the snack food company, organized a two day pop up highlighting its "Sweeteners Uncovered" campaign, which shows hidden sugars in popular snack foods. Some of the few dozen people there bypassed the nutritional information to stuff free plastic fanny packs with free Kind Bars. The company hosted a pop up in Times Square two years ago, but Jenna Keplesky , who works in Kind's communications department, lobbied to move this one to SoHo. "I was encouraging locations that were more cost effective, but Jenna wanted the right brand message," said Daniel Lubetzky, the chief executive of Kind. "I do think there's a sense that SoHo is more representative and ahead of the curve in health and wellness in New York City." The neighborhood is also known to have a steady stream of foot traffic from New Yorkers and tourists alike, Ms. Keplesky said. In many cases, fanciful and high concept pop ups have followed wellness retailers to SoHo and its surrounding streets. Blume, which sells self care and menstrual products marketed to young women and teenagers, had a pop up at 224 Mulberry Street in NoLIta in February that included a slumber party and panel discussion. The founders, Taran and Bunny Ghatrora, wrote in an email that they chose the location because it is one of their favorite neighborhoods and that a large portion of their New York community is based there. The condom company Sustain Natural hosted the Get on Top Pop Up in April 2018 at 208 Bowery, with neon vulva art installations and tampon filled bathtubs leading into a back event space called the womb. Meika Hollender, its chief executive, said that foot traffic and a neighborhood affinity for wellness made her choose the Bowery: "There are so many like minded wellness studios and brands showcasing their products in this area that it felt like a natural opportunity to reach consumers in a fun and accessible way. I mean, who wouldn't be curious walking past a vagina themed pop up." Buffy, which makes comforters out of recycled plastic bottles and eucalyptus plants, had a "physical touch point" called Soft Space at 150 Wooster Street (where, last year, a penthouse sold for 32.6 million) during the 2018 holiday season. According to a news release for the company, inspiration came from Buckminster Fuller and the hippie modernist movement of the 1960s and '70s. Clean Market, a store on 54th Street and Second Avenue that sells natural beauty products and services like vitamin IV drips, has a pop up in NoLIta at Project by Equinox on Mulberry Street . "We want the downtown crowd to get to know us," said the founder Lily Kunin one afternoon as she sent an associate on an errand a few blocks north to the Farmer's Dog pop up at Showfields at 11 Bond Street. Despite the fact that the store was virtually empty on a recent Monday afternoon, some tenants, who pay a flat fee for space, are pleased with early results. "What we've managed to do in sales in three weeks was greater in total than one of our retail partners who has 13 or 14 doors nationwide," said Jasmina Aganovic, the founder of Mother Dirt, a skin care line in Boston that has a second floor space at Showfields. "It's a sexy location in New York City, and we have a large concentration of customers in New York and Brooklyn in particular." Large companies have used wellness businesses as destinations for their own events. OtterBox introduced its Otter Pop phone cases to press at Chillhouse, a cafe, nail salon and massage studio on the neighboring Lower East Side. "Trying to find a place in New York is like winning the lottery," she said on the phone during a trip to Israel. "I want to share my story and have more of a relationship to my customers. You don't just want a store, you want an experience. You want some palo santo burning." Colette Dong, the co founder and C.E.O. of the Ness, opened a pop up trampoline workout studio in nearby TriBeCa in a location that was a Bikram yoga studio. The pop up lease was "a way to get our feet wet without getting locked into a five or 10 year lease term and test the demand for it," Ms. Dong said. "Will we even have studios in five years?" Ms. Dong said. "Will there be studios to do our online streaming workouts? Will we be working out with robots?" Maybe best not to commit to anything too long term. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This essay is part of The Big Ideas, a special section of The Times's philosophy series, The Stone, in which more than a dozen artists, writers and thinkers answer the question, "Why does art matter?" The entire series can be found here. I never thought that a movie alone could prompt social awareness and change. But when the director Alfonso Cuaron released his film "Roma" in 2018, with me in the lead role, that's exactly what happened. Suddenly people in my home country of Mexico were talking about issues that have long been taboo here racism, discrimination toward Indigenous communities and especially the rights of domestic workers, a group that has been historically disenfranchised in Mexican society. In fact, it was my involvement in this film that led me to better appreciate the importance of art. Art sheds light on the urgent, necessary and at times painful issues that are not always easy to approach because we as a society have not been able to figure them out. Art lays bare our brutal reality a reality that is complex, diverse and often unfair but it also presents us with the amazing opportunity to give voice to the unheard, and visibility to the unseen. Four years ago, when a casting call for "Roma" was issued in my city, Tlaxiaco, in the state of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, I almost didn't go to the audition. The film industry was alien to me. As a child, I couldn't relate to the people I saw on movie screens; the actors and actresses were nothing like the people I knew, and their stories centered on worlds far away from my own. As an adult, I studied to be a teacher, and had no thoughts of becoming an actress. Fortunately, I did answer the call, and things changed very quickly for me. I was cast in the role of Cleo in "Roma," and eventually was able to bring to screens around the world a character who represented people who had gone unseen: Mixtec women who worked as maids. The movie intimately recounts the day to day life of a middle class family in 1970s Mexico City. At that time, Mexico was experiencing political and social upheaval. National turmoil brought to the fore problems that still persist to this day, namely the normalization of classism, racism and denigration, along with other forms of segregation and belittlement based on skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation or social class. Although discrimination is not often spoken about in Mexico, it is a very real problem. According to a 2017 poll conducted by Mexico's national office of statistics, 65 percent of Mexicans think that few to none of the rights of our Indigenous communities are respected. I have firsthand experience with this kind of discrimination. After I was nominated for an Academy Award for portraying Cleo, racist comments began to circulate on social media. Commenters questioned why I was nominated, making references to my social and ethnic background. An Indigenous woman was not a worthy representative of the country, some said. It was hard for me to see and hear these sorts of statements. But real conversations were happening because of them. Eventually, these discussions highlighted the cultural and political importance of diversity in society, art and the media. In the movie, two Indigenous women, Nancy Garcia and I, even spoke Mixtec, one of the 68 languages currently spoken in Mexico, aside from Spanish. Nancy is a speaker and advocate of this beautiful language, a language that she has been teaching me, a clear example of the cultural plurality in Latin America that we don't often see reflected in cinema. By vividly showing the discrimination that disproportionally affects Indigenous people, "Roma" also sparked a collective cultural awareness that paved the way for a momentous legal victory in Mexico. On May 14, 2019, a few months after the Oscars ceremony, in which "Roma" won three awards, Mexico's Congress unanimously approved a bill granting the two million domestic workers in the country rights to social protections and a written employment contract, along with law mandated benefits such as paid vacation days, Christmas bonuses and days off. The impact of this victory reached far beyond Mexico's borders: The National Domestic Workers Alliance in the United States wrote an open letter dedicated to the women in the movie and summoned support for a National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights being considered in the American Congress. Cleo had a very profound effect on my life, and playing her placed me on my current path: I am using my newly discovered activism to improve social conditions in Mexico, champion gender equality and promote diversity wherever I can. In short, I'm trying to build a better world one in which we aren't judged by our appearance or typecast for certain roles, and where we aren't limited by what we see, read or hear. As a child growing up in Oaxaca, the lack of representation in the film industry communicated negative messages. Today, I'm turning that around. When we do not see people who look like us in the media, we should not be discouraged. Rather, we should stand up and demand representation and not let others criticize our culture or dismiss our concerns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Social Finance, a privately held online lender and technology start up, said on Friday that Mike Cagney would step down immediately as chief executive, accelerating a departure announced this week amid a sexual harassment scandal. The board of the company, which is based in San Francisco and known as SoFi, said that Tom Hutton, the executive chairman, would be the interim chief executive and would take over day to day management responsibilities. Mr. Hutton, an initial SoFi investor, has been on the SoFi board since 2012. "The business is strong, stable and well positioned," Mr. Hutton said in a statement. "For now, there is no more important work than paving the way for future success by building a transparent, respectful and accountable culture." Mr. Cagney, 46, said in a letter on Monday that he would leave his position at the end of the year amid a sexual harassment lawsuit, accusations that he had inappropriate relationships with company employees and questions about whether he had skirted risk and compliance controls. He did not respond to a request for comment. SoFi was founded in 2011 and bundles money from Wall Street investors into loans for students, home buyers and others. The company is valued at more than 4 billion and has raised 1.9 billion from venture investors, including Baseline Ventures, Discovery Capital and SoftBank. It recently began the process of applying for a banking license. SoFi was sued last month by a former employee who argued that sexual misconduct at the company had created a toxic work environment and that he had been fired for reporting sexual harassment to managers. SoFi disputed the accusations, but said it would investigate them. Mr. Cagney said in the letter he sent to SoFi employees on Monday that "the combination of HR related litigation and negative press have become a distraction from the company's core mission." On Tuesday, The New York Times published an article examining Mr. Cagney's stewardship of SoFi. The article included accusations from more than 30 current and former employees, who said he had treated women inappropriately and had aggressively taken on risk to accelerate the company's growth. The article included details of a 75,000 settlement that SoFi reached with a former executive assistant at the company, Laura Munoz, who some people said had received sexually explicit text messages from Mr. Cagney. He was also seen holding hands and talking intimately with another female employee, which made employees uncomfortable. In addition, the article reported on a SoFi loan product that was sold to investors without being properly funded. The product was ultimately phased out, with investors being offered their money back or an opportunity to invest in a new product. They were not told about the funding shortfall. A SoFi spokesman told The Times for the article that the company had not taken on too much risk and that the board had investigated the dispute with Ms. Munoz in 2012 and had found no evidence of a romantic or sexual relationship. He declined to comment on other personal relationships involving Mr. Cagney and other employees, saying the company did not comment on personnel matters. The spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment on Friday. With Mr. Cagney's abrupt departure, SoFi joins the ranks of technology start ups that have had to contend with serious issues related to workplace culture. Other companies in that category include the blood testing start up Theranos, the insurance start up Zenefits and, perhaps most prominently, the ride hailing company Uber, whose chief executive, Travis Kalanick, stepped down amid a spate of scandals. Like some of those companies, SoFi continues to grow quickly. The company said in a statement on Monday that it had funded 3.1 billion in loans in the second quarter of 2017, generating more than 134 million in revenue. It said it had lent more than 20 billion to more than 350,000 borrowers over the course of its history. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Except for her years in college and graduate school, Patrice Fenton always lived in Brooklyn. After receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in education, she taught at a middle school in Fort Greene. She was living nearby in a two bedroom rental with her son, Jair, when she met Ra'id Bey four years ago. He was a barber who worked at the salon where she got her hair cut. Originally from Trinidad, he was renting a one bedroom in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Soon after they met, Ms. Fenton, a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, decided to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Miami. So the three of them moved there, most recently occupying a two bedroom in a large apartment house for 925 a month. Last December, the family, which now included a daughter, Haile Masani, came home for the holidays. Ms. Fenton, her coursework done, accepted another job at the school where she had worked, Fort Greene Preparatory Academy. While they apartment hunted, they stayed with Ms. Fenton's parents in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Knowing they were priced out of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, they didn't even bother hunting there. Their neighborhood would be nearby either Crown Heights or Bedford Stuyvesant. They aimed for a two bedroom rental in a new building, or at least one with a renovated interior. Their price range was "as far below 2,000 as possible," said Ms. Fenton, who is now 35. She knew a three bedroom would be out of reach. "Storage space was important, but is not something that you come across very often, so that was one of the things we were willing to let go of," she said. She went on the hunt without an agent, while Mr. Bey, 40, wrapped up their affairs in Miami. "I was well familiar with Brooklyn and knew what I wanted and where I wanted to be," Ms. Fenton said. Besides, she felt that the usual broker's fee, 15 percent of a year's rent, hiked the price uncomfortably. Ms. Fenton had grown up in the Ebbets Field Apartments, a large complex opened in 1962 in Crown Heights on the former field of the Brooklyn Dodgers. A renovated two bedroom rented for 1,900 a month, including all utilities except for air conditioning. Growing up, she said, "we had a good experience in that building, but the apartments were, at that point, running down." "The quality was kind of shifting and in order for me to go back there, changes would have had to be drastic," she added. "The grounds still weren't very well kept, but the apartment was renovated and that was the draw." Still, "the agent fee was the barrier," she said. "You couldn't get into the building without the agent." She preferred a smaller building, however, and checked out an intriguing open house in Bedford Stuyvesant. The four story building had been gut renovated, and the two bedroom model apartment on view was brand new inside. "It was perfect," Ms. Fenton said. "When people saw the model apartment and finishes, they were thoroughly impressed and weren't seeing anything like it in the neighborhood," said the listing agent, Claire McFeely, a saleswoman at Compass real estate. But Ms. Fenton learned there was a broker's fee and an income requirement of 40 times the monthly rent that the family didn't meet. She told herself, "This is out of my reach, so I might as well let it go." Another renovated two bedroom, in a small walk up building on MacDougal Street in Bed Stuy, was 1,950 a month. The place was across the street from her godmother's home. "She is like an aunt to me," she said. "It's just as good as having a blood relative across the street." But the interior was "extraordinarily small," she said, and the bedrooms were on opposite ends of the apartment, which wasn't ideal. Every place was "missing one too many things," Ms. Fenton said. "We would have had to settle on too many of our wants to take any of them. I became disgruntled with what I was seeing." So she contacted Ms. McFeely to ask how rigid the income requirements were on the four story building in Bed Stuy and whether the management company would accept her mother as a guarantor. Ms. McFeely was surprised to hear from her. At the open house "she didn't say a peep," Ms. McFeely said. The company, New Holland Residences, would indeed accept the proposed guarantor and, moreover, had decided to pay the broker's fee rather than having tenants pay. "That changed everything," Ms. Fenton said. She gathered her paperwork. "I started scanning away and created a PDF package to send to Claire," she said. "It took quite a bit of corresponding. Claire and I corresponded 87 times." The couple selected a place on a lower floor. With two free months on a 16 month lease, the 2,160 monthly rent worked out to be 1,890 a month. "With the little one, I didn't want to have to walk up so many steps," Ms. Fenton said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
When La Goulue, the clubby French restaurant favored by Upper East Side socialites and others in the Black Card set, reopened in January after an eight year absence, a certain rush was to be expected. Some spoke of its reincarnation in near messianic terms. "We have been waiting forever for La Goulue to come back," said Francine LeFrak, a Broadway producer and daughter of Samuel LeFrak, the real estate developer who died in 2003. "There is so much loyalty toward that place." John Demsey, an executive president at Estee Lauder, said he had been to the restaurant every week since it reopened. "The thing that's superfun and surrealistic is that everyone you knew from 25 years ago is still in the room, sometimes with different spouses or partners," he said. "For some people, time has stood still, depending on the quality of their dermatologists or plastic surgeons." But its return is also testing loyalties and disrupting the finely calibrated social pecking order of the ZIP code's wood paneled canteens. When it closed in 2009 because the landlord would not renew its lease, it left a social void that other French restaurants were happy to fill. Chief among them was Le Bilboquet, a cozy bistro that moved to a larger spot at 20 East 60th Street in 2013; its owners include Philippe Delgrange, Ronald Perelman, Eric Clapton and Steven Witkoff. Le Bilboquet's buzzy scene of 1 percenters was soon peppered with boldfaces including Bill Gates, Martha Stewart, Bill Clinton, Steven Tisch, Hugh Jackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Steven Spielberg and Catherine Zeta Jones. The night Charlie Rose was dismissed from PBS last November for alleged sexual misconduct, he still arrived at his table in the front room. Now with La Goulue reopening just one block north, at 29 East 61st Street, longtime patrons feel like remarried wives whose first husbands came back from the dead. Even the most socially prominent are treading carefully, fearful of offending one restaurateur or another, and jeopardizing their standing. Julie Macklowe, a beauty entrepreneur who is married to the real estate scion Billy Macklowe, made a bold move by holding her 40th birthday party at La Goulue in December, a month before the restaurant officially reopened. Guests included the financier John Paulson, the real estate executive Aby Rosen and the art dealer David Mugrabi. "I'm afraid when Philippe finds out, I might lose my table at Bilboquet," Ms. Macklowe said, referring to the charismatic Mr. Delgrange, who is Le Bilboquet's most public owner. Her birthday guests are similarly worried about ruffling feathers. "Yes, I was at Julie's party, but there is no need for Philippe to know," said Brian Levine, a fertility doctor who was at Le Bilboquet on a recent Tuesday night, ordering the Cajun chicken. Where one was seated was also a reflection of social standing. "Prestige and brand awareness are on the top of this crowd's list, so if you are seated in the back, forget it," said R. Couri Hay, a publicist for society doyennes, charitable institutions and luxury brands. Mindful of the heightened competition (the immediate area also includes JoJo and Rotisserie Georgette), Mr. Denoyer was careful not to alter his prototype. The original signage is back, along with the dark wood paneling that he kept in storage when his former lease ran out. Even the phone number (212 988 8169) is the same as it was in 1974. But Mr. Denoyer isn't resting on nostalgia alone. He and others from La Goulue have been reaching out to preferred patrons and enticing customers with more generous portions and lower wine prices. "I felt very courted by La Goulue when they told me I can have a table for 11 on a coveted Saturday if I choose to have my annual birthday party there this year," said Mr. Norden, the real estate agent. "Clients are also impressed that I can get a reservation at one of these social French spots. They feel I am an insider, and it helps me seal a deal." La Goulue has also been accused of poaching employees from rivals. One sore point is the dapper and blue eyed Craig Pogson. Before he joined La Goulue as its managing partner, he was a manager at Le Bilboquet for two years, attending to V.I.P.s and overseeing the wine program. "We went through excruciating measures and hired an expensive attorney to get Craig his green card, so that he could remain in the country and work for us," said Karine Bakhoum, a spokeswoman for Le Bilboquet. Mr. Pogson, who is from Scotland, said he more than satisfied his end of the arrangement. "They did get me my visa, but I got my own green card and I brought in 20 percent of their best customers, so they got a very good return on their investment with me," he said. "They paid me pennies, and I helped make them rich." Adding to the contretemps, Mr. Pogson has hired former co workers including Alex Lerner, the aristocratic looking woman who ran the door at Le Bilboquet's Hamptons outpost this summer, often turning potential diners away. Mr. Pogson says that the people he hired came to him for jobs. "They tried to hire my lunch maitre d' too," said Mr. Delgrange, of Le Bilboquet, before getting in a dig of his own. "I was afraid once they opened I would be dead here, but we are still packed. Our crowd is much younger, though Craig left with a list of their phone numbers. And I'm sure he will contact them." And, for the time being, it may be easier to get a table at least for those with the right social connections. Cindy Barshop, who owns the women's spa V Spot, which specializes in vaginal treatments, and who has appeared on "The Real Housewives of New York City," visited La Goulue for dinner in January. "I was with three major superwealthy investors, but when we got there, the doorman asked if we had a reservation," she said. "When we said no, he wouldn't even let us step inside." "So I said, 'No problem, we do have a reservation at Bilboquet,'" she continued. "Instantly he told us to hold on a minute. Then he walked inside, came back and showed us to a table." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Anna Kendrick isn't just beautiful; if you could spend time with her in the woods, you'd realize she's also lethal, a born hunter with a killer's reflexes who thrives on things you'd never put in your mouth. Jenna Woginrich is one of the few who have seen Anna in action, and it didn't come easily. At first, Jenna and Anna just hung out together, watching movies at night in front of a crackling wood stove. It took weeks before they trusted each other enough for Anna to cut loose and show her wild side. Jenna was thrilled but it didn't last long. "By that summer, she was gone," Jenna says, with surprisingly little regret in her voice. "I haven't seen her since." It's a miserable day as we walk the woods near her upstate New York farm, freezing rain and icy winds lashing us from all sides, but Jenna has reason to be upbeat: on her arm is the new love in her life, a gorgeous red tailed hawk she calls Aya Cash after the actress who starred in "You're the Worst." "I have got to stop naming hawks after people," Jenna says. "It's really going to mess up their Google results. Someone out there is going to find my stuff online and think the star of 'Pitch Perfect' killed a mouse in my living room." Jenna was 29 when she began hunting with hawks. It's been five years since then, and by the strict code of falconry, she remains an apprentice. Still, she's expert enough to have trapped three wild hawks and trained each to ignore its own instincts and share with Jenna the rabbit or squirrel it just killed (surprisingly tasty, by the way, as nachos or mole). "Why don't they just fly away?" I ask. "Sometimes they do," Jenna says. "We're about to find out." Today is Aya's big test. Jenna is about to set her free on her first solo flight, giving Aya a choice between staying with Jenna or rocketing back into the forest. That's the magic I'm hoping to understand: what makes a bird of prey choose human friendship over freedom? Back home, I was facing a similar challenge with Sherman, the badly neglected donkey we'd adopted. Like all of us, Sherman needed more than a home; he needed a purpose, a daily mission that would put his mind and muscles to use. I'd decided to make him my running partner for a long distance burro race in Colorado, but one thing kept nagging at me: Was he signing on for this adventure or just submitting to it? Was there a way to make us a true team? If anyone knows, it's the woman who watches "Firefly" with a live raptor on her shoulder. Not that she was born to this; Jenna is a graphic designer by training who grew up in the suburbs. "I didn't know chickens came in different colors until after I graduated college," she says. "I worked with a woman who sold eggs from her cubicle and I thought You can do that? I got my first laying hens from her and that was my gateway drug." She saved enough money to buy her own six acre homestead and decided to quit her lucrative job at the outdoor equipment company Orvis to scratch out a living from the land. Now she raises pigs and sheep, teaches archery, gives fiddle classes and writes books about her life as a solo farmer. Jenna got her first taste of falconry at a nearby resort where she worked as an archery instructor. She loved everything about it: the ancient lore, the long hikes in the woods, but especially, the intense focus and kinship necessary to bond with a creature whose every native instinct is to get as far from you as possible. To get started, you have to find two things: 1) a seasoned falconer who agrees to monitor your hawk's health, and 2) a hawk. Jenna caught Aya by slowly driving the roads around her farm for three weeks until she spotted that proud, unmistakable silhouette perched on a telephone wire. She tossed out a trap basically, a ball of chicken wire with bait inside and when Aya pounced, so did Jenna. Hawks are submissive when cornered, so Jenna was able to gather Aya up in a T shirt, free her talons from the wire mesh, and take her home. "I'm not teaching her to be my pet," Jenna explains. "I'm giving her a chance to stay alive and become a strong hunter." Only one in every 10 hawks survives until breeding age in the wild, so oddly, the luckiest moment of Aya's life might have been the day she was scooped into Jenna's hands. Jenna spends hours with Aya every day, feeding her morsels of rabbit and mouse the same food she'd eat on her own and testing her with short, tethered flights to sharpen her hunting eye. "Aya and I are all about work," Jenna says. They're picking up a partnership that's been around since before the Pharaohs. Ancient Egyptians were often buried with their favorite kestrel, and even cave art depicts early hunters with hawks and dogs. Very early in our in history, humans and raptors must have worked out a deal that satisfied both. Jenna spotted what she was looking for: a branch about head high in a tree with good flight clearance. It's a risky day for flying. Aya may not spot Jenna in the gray rain or hear her voice over the wind. Still, Jenna slips off Aya's hood and eases her onto the branch. Jenna turns her back on Aya. As we walk away, wondering what Aya will do, Jenna lets me in on her best advice. Every fall, she says, she catches a new hawk. They hunt together all winter and come spring, when the bird is ready to mate, Jenna leaves it in a field with a fresh killed rabbit to start its own life. "You spend time crafting something beautiful, and then you let it go," is how Jenna puts it. "The wild can be human work," notes Helen Macdonald in her 2014 memoir "H Is for Hawk," pointing out that without the gentle intervention of falconers who protect their birds until maturity, entire species would now be extinct. Sherman comes from a long line of desert foragers who evolved to trot marathon distances. Aya is a fledgling whose survival is threatened by power lines, farmers and bulldozed woodlands. If we can help them develop their native talents, we'll have something better than a pet: a partner. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Top left, Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times; other photographs by Brad Ogbonna for The New York Times Top left, Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times; other photographs by Brad Ogbonna for The New York Times Credit... Top left, Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times; other photographs by Brad Ogbonna for The New York Times Daughters of African Immigrants Use the Stage to Tell of Two Worlds Nigerian death rites can be quite elaborate even after a funeral, there is often a "second burial" with days of lavish celebration to ease the deceased person's journey to the afterlife. Ngozi Anyanwu knows this because she's heard about it from her mother and father, who traveled back to Nigeria to bury their own parents. And she knows that, when the time comes, she will have to do the same for her father, who has spent his entire adult life in the United States, but still expects to be buried in the country where he was born. But what does Ms. Anyanwu, a 35 year old performer and playwright born in Trenton and raised in Bucks County, Pa., know about Nigerian burial customs? That question, and the puzzle of what it means to be simultaneously connected to and disconnected from the country of one's family, prompted Ms. Anyanwu to write "The Homecoming Queen," a new play that opened Monday at the Atlantic Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit. The poignant drama is about a Nigerian born American novelist who is confronted by her own ambivalent feelings about home and homeland when she returns to visit her dying father. "It's such a beautiful thing and an inspiring thing and a surreal thing to see a Ghanaian story on an American stage I never even knew something like that would be possible," said MaYaa Boateng, a 26 year old child of Ghanaian immigrants from Maryland who graduated from N.Y.U.'s graduate acting program last year and is now developing her own solo show. Ms. Boateng said a visit by Ms. Gurira to her university "is one of the reasons why I picked up a pen the very first time," and said seeing work by other women of African descent leaves her feeling that "we all have stories worth telling they need to be spoken." The trend is an outgrowth of demographics: African immigration to the United States has surged since the 1970s, so that by 2015 there were 2.1 million African immigrants living in the United States, up from 80,000 in 1970, according to the Pew Research Center. "The economic migrants are coming in extremely educated, and there's pressure on their children to do very well," said Onoso Imoagene, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "Beyond Expectations: Second Generation Nigerians in the United States and Britain." "There's pressure to pursue professional careers medicine and law and pharmacy but because they're becoming a large enough population," she added, "you have some saying, 'I don't want to do that I want to do arts or music or fashion,' and you do have quite a number who are trying to create art that showcases their ethnic background." The playwrights are emerging amid a rise in interest in African culture in the U.S. including the work of contemporary Nigerian novelists as well as first generation writers and artists. Several important theater performers are the children of African immigrants, including the British actors David Oyelowo, who played the title role in a 2016 New York Theater Workshop production of "Othello"; and Cynthia Erivo, who won a Tony Award as the star of a 2015 Broadway revival of "The Color Purple"; as well as the American actor Michael Luwoye, who has just stepped into the title role of "Hamilton" on Broadway. All three are the children of Nigerian immigrants. "We're at a time right now where the word immigrant again has become something that seems sort of toxic, and when we hear the 'shithole' comment, it's very piercing," Mr. Luwoye, a 27 year old born and raised in Alabama, said, referring to President Trump's reported use of that word this month in a discussion about protections for people from Haiti and some countries in Africa. "The plays that are coming up today, as well as the literature and the television, are at least attempting to humanize what it is to be an immigrant, or the child of an immigrant, so it's easier to connect with, rather than something that creates a stereotype." Ms. Gurira, who is featured in the upcoming superhero film "Black Panther," said she is writing new work constantly ("I am up to my eyeballs with writing," she said) and is thrilled to see other writers of African descent now getting productions. "There are so many stories to go," she said. "There is a hunger for this perspective to come out." Ms. Udofia, born in Texas and raised in Massachusetts, trained as an actor and started writing when she was having a hard time finding roles on stage. "I knew immediately what I would be writing about I felt little pockets of anger and frustration because I wasn't seeing me or the people that I knew in a very nuanced way on stage, so I started writing them to show that we are here," she said. A founding artistic director of the Now Africa Festival, which seeks to introduce New Yorkers to African drama, Ms. Udofia is so eager to champion the work of others that she agreed to star in "Homecoming Queen" to support Ms. Anyanwu, even though she hadn't acted in years. "It's important to build kinship, and to dismantle the thought that there can only be one of us," she said. "It makes the foundation of the house stronger." Ms. Bioh, who grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan, had a similar path to writing she wasn't getting cast in college productions, so she took a playwriting class. She had some success acting, landing a role on Broadway in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time," but also kept writing. Her work is funny a deliberate counterpoint to what she sees as the grim story lines of many dramas about Africa. "I was just really alarmed at African stories only portraying struggle and war and famine and AIDS, and I wanted to add levity," she said. "School Girls," a riff on "Mean Girls" set in a Ghanaian school at which several young women are competing to represent their country in a beauty pageant, was a big hit for MCC and the crowds were unusually diverse, thanks to outreach to African American and African immigrant communities. Of course, identity can be complicated. LCT3 at Lincoln Center Theater this spring will present "Pass Over," a play by Antoinette Nwandu, a 37 year old from Los Angeles whose biological father is a Nigerian immigrant but who was raised by her African American mother after her parents divorced when she was a baby; she has only spoken to her father once since, and knows little about her Nigerian background. Ms. Nwandu said seeing shows by writers with stronger knowledge about their African heritage inspires her. "And of course this is another wave of first or second generation immigrants wrestling with belonging in two worlds, and it's very exciting to add to the canon of immigrant theater like 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' and 'Fiddler on the Roof,' " she said. "Seeing it now from an African lens and an African viewpoint is really thrilling." Ms. Anyanwu, the writer of "The Homecoming Queen," found herself drawn to theater in high school. Her parents wanted her to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a nurse something stable and financially secure but she knew she wanted a career in the arts. "I like the camaraderie, and the community, and the openness, and the rigor," she said. She turned to writing, like others, when she encountered a shortage of roles as an actor. "As a black female performer, the reality is there's not so much work for us Dominique Morisseau or Katori Hall will have a great play, but that's only four parts," she said. "So making things is a big part of my identity." After graduate school at the University of California San Diego, she visited Nigeria, and when she came back she started the First Generation Nigerian Project a group of female Nigerian American performers and writers in New York. "The Homecoming Queen," her first play produced in New York, is directed by Awoye Timpo, a 39 year old daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. Ms. Timpo said the new work by children of African immigrants has the potential to change the way audiences see the United States. "Our understanding of who we are as Americans, and what our history has been, hasn't embraced the complexity of all the stories that make America," Ms. Timpo said. "With this new wave of storytellers, we're getting to see who we are." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Colleges are struggling to keep up with an increase in requests for mental health counseling. Many have hired additional staff members and are experimenting with new approaches to treatment. When Elizabeth Gong Guy was named director of U.C.L.A.'s counseling and psychological services in 2005, the university was providing mental health services to less than 10 percent of its students. A decade later, when she moved into a different role, as executive director of U.C.L.A. campus and student resilience, more than 20 percent were under the university's care. Seeing no end to the growth, U.C.L.A. became an early adopter of internet based screenings and online mental health treatment. The university has also invested in "resilience peers" who are not licensed to provide counseling but who offer a release valve for stressed out students. Nivi Ahlawat, a senior neuroscience major, tapped the university's online resources to help her deal with an incident in her personal life. After using the program, she said she was encouraged to start a mindfulness practice and enroll in yoga and art classes to help reduce her anxiety. She has also served as a resilience peer, an experience that has influenced her career path. "This program fundamentally changed who I am and how I approach my life," said Ms. Ahlawat, who plans to pursue graduate work in genetic counseling. "I may not remember the structures of all the intermediates of the glycolysis pathway I learned in biochemistry class. But I'll remember what I've learned about active listening, motivational interviewing and mindfulness intervention for the rest of my life." Kent State's impetus to improve mental health services came from broad university mandates. The university, in Ohio, said it had added nine clinical staff positions across its eight campuses as part of a presidential push to emphasize student and staff mental health and wellness. The university has provided mental health training to more than 700 students, faculty and staff members, and created programs to help populations that do not traditionally seek counseling. Those efforts helped Kent State win a "healthy campus award " last year from Active Minds, a national advocacy group that supports mental health awareness and education. Many students may not enjoy the benefits of therapy until they overcome more pressing obstacles, said Katy Troester Trate, director of the health and wellness center at Jefferson Community College. The two year institution in Watertown, N.Y., has many low income and first generation students, some of whom arrive on campus without basics like soap and toothpaste. "If you can't afford groceries or safe care for your children, it's hard to work on higher level things," said Ms. Troester Trate, a licensed social worker who keeps snacks in her desk for students. Her team has developed what she calls a "wraparound" model, providing an assortment of services outside of traditional talk therapy that help students address their overall well being. Students can find many of those services at the college's health and wellness center, which houses counseling offices alongside child care assistance, a campus food pantry and more. Miranda Santos, a 24 year old single parent, sought help there last year after failing a nursing class and having to repeat it during a semester long weekend program. She received vouchers to help pay for child care and a food basket at Thanksgiving. She graduated last fall, with a job at an opioid treatment clinic. The university, which has one of the nation's largest counseling staffs, said it had added about 17 positions in the past three years. It now has 47 senior staff positions. The increase has come as university officials have sought to improve the response to sexual assaults following high profile accounts of sexual abuse by a former university doctor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
"The Letdown" puts a comedic spin on motherhood. And "Indivisible" follows three undocumented immigrants at the heart of a national debate. THE LETDOWN on Netflix. Despite her determination to hold onto her former life after becoming a mother, Audrey (Alison Bell) quickly learns that parenthood is pretty much a full time job. Her husband is too caught up with his career to help tend to their infant, so Audrey joins a new parents support group and befriends other stressed out moms. This Australian comedy blends emotional sob sessions with witty one liners, leaving you pitying and laughing at the new parents. GREAT WIDE OPEN on Fandor and YouTube. Jared Leto is best known as an actor, the frontman for the rock band "30 Seconds to Mars" and a Snapchat enthusiast. But he's also a longtime rock climber. In this five part documentary series, a passion project directed by Mr. Leto, he shares his love of the outdoors and explores five national parks alongside courageous adventurers. If you're looking for an excuse to spend more time in the wild, the breathtaking footage of green expanses and sun kissed canyons should do the trick. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Anti Semitism enabled the Nazis to exploit a centuries old and ever present hatred and use it to undermine governments and recruit fifth columns. And to augment Germany's massive rearmament, they now had the means to communicate through radio, newsreels and the telephone, as well as use railways and roadways to transport their victims. All that was left was the failure of politics and diplomacy. The Holocaust was a long time in coming. In his May 3 By the Book interview, Michael Cunningham, talking about reading "The Magic Mountain," asks, "How many of us, in 2020, can devote two months to reading one book every single night?" Well, I have devoted the last seven months to that great opus, Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." I think I read the first volume, "Swann's Way," a hundred years ago, in college, but this was a more determined journey. I had as a companion a friend who spent a year and a half on the books, and heard of another fellow who gave it a year. I consider it the Mount Everest of 20th century Western European literature. Reading it helped me understand something about myself: My bucket list is not places to go nor things to see my bucket list is books. Next, already down from the shelf, is "Ulysses." All my strength is being mustered for the journey. I was pleasantly surprised by the intellectual "bookends" you gave us in the May 3 issue: on the front end, in By the Book, the temporal depth and intellectual breadth demanded by Michael Cunningham's suggestion that we reread every 10 years a book that has been important to us; and, at the back end, Sergio Garcia Sanchez's magnificent illustration of Walt Whitman's call, in his unforgettable poetry collection "Leaves of Grass," for the often hidden joy found in nature's smallness and everyday life's routine. What a way to challenge the lockdown through intellectual nurture and creativity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Love is no paradise in the songs of Sophie Allison, 20, who records as Soccer Mommy. It's a realm of misunderstandings, disappointments, unfulfilled longings and everyday betrayals, and Soccer Mommy's songs recount them in a haze of acceptance and resentment. "In the summer you said you loved me like an animal/Stayed beside me just enough to keep your belly full," Ms. Allison sings in "So Clean"; then she devotes the remaining verses to missing him, predatory as he is, through the fall, winter and spring. Soccer Mommy joins a wavelet of young women along with Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski and many others who are using gentle voices, pristine melodies and the expressive imperfections of indie rock for songs that probe vulnerability and trauma, self sabotage and self preservation. They are continuing a longstanding role of female singer songwriters as pop's bearers of emotional sensitivity and catharsis. But in the era of SoundCloud and Bandcamp, they need no one's help or permission to go public. Whether anyone will listen is another question, but Soccer Mommy got through. Ms. Allison began posting home recorded songs to Bandcamp as Soccer Mommy in 2015, during the summer when she was about to leave her hometown, Nashville, for college at New York University. (She has since dropped out and returned to Nashville to pursue her music career.) As Soccer Mommy, she wrote about leaving behind her first love, about new independence and infatuations, about dodging the gaze of parents, about having to suddenly feel "grown." At first, with just a guitar, she was lonely and forlorn above all; her early digital EPs were titled "Songs for the Recently Sad" and "Songs From My Bedroom." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
An association between weed and the dead turns out to have been established long before the 1960s and far beyond a certain ur band's stomping grounds in San Francisco. Researchers have identified strains of cannabis burned in mortuary rituals as early as 500 B.C., deep in the Pamir mountains in western China, according to a new study published Wednesday. The residue had chemical signatures indicating high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the plant's most psychoactive, or mood altering, compound. You think the Grateful Dead were the first to wonder "what in the world ever became of sweet Jane?" That CBD gummies to assuage the anxious are anything new? That puffs of elevated consciousness started with Rocky Mountain highs? "Modern perspectives on cannabis vary tremendously cross culturally, but it is clear that the plant has a long history of human use, medicinally, ritually and recreationally over countless millennia," said Robert Spengler, an archaeobotanist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who worked on the study. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Cannabis stems and seeds had previously been found at a handful of burial sites around Eurasia, but the evidence at the Pamir cemetery, verified by advanced scientific technology, shows an even more direct connection between the plant and early ritual. The new findings expand the geographical range of cannabis use within the broader Central Asian region, said Mark Merlin, a professor of botany at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who did not work on the research. "The fact that strongly psychoactive ancient residue has been documented in laboratory testing is the key new finding," said Dr. Merlin, a cannabis historian. He hypothesized that "It was used to facilitate the body communicating with the afterlife, the spirit world." The study was published in the journal Science Advances. The research team included archaeologists and chemists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. About 70 artifacts have been retrieved from the Pamir burial site so far, including glass beads, harps, pieces of silk and wooden bowls and plates. Perforations and cuts in some skulls and bones could suggest human sacrifice. "We can start to piece together an image of funerary rites that included flames, rhythmic music and hallucinogen smoke, all intended to guide people into an altered state of mind," the authors wrote in the study. The chemical signatures were isolated and identified through a procedure known as gas chromatography mass spectrometry. Although cannabis seeds have been found in a few other sites, no such seeds were found here. Archaeobotanists theorize that either the seeds had already been removed and discarded or that mourners deliberately chose nonflowering plant parts, such as stems, for the rituals. Among the provocative questions raised by the findings are how and why mourners singled out the higher potency strains. Wild cannabis, which grows commonly across the well watered mountain foothills of Central Asia, typically has low levels of cannabinol, a metabolite of THC, the researchers wrote. Instead, these higher THC levels suggest that "people may have been cultivating cannabis and possibly actively selecting for stronger specimens," they added. Another possibility, they said, is that traders may have unwittingly caused hybridization as they moved plants along the Silk Road routes through the high mountain passes of the remote Pamirs, which connected regions of what are now known as China, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The tombs varied in size as well as the number of bodies, prompting researchers to wonder whether the ritualistic use of cannabis for mortuary rites had spread to common folk from being an exclusive practice for elite tribal leaders and priests. These tombs have a distinctive appearance, the researchers noted. They are separated by rows of black and white stones, the purpose of which is unknown. Individual burials are within round mounds, additionally marked by stones. Use of two parts of the cannabis plant fibers for hemp rope, sail canvas (a word derived from "cannabis") and clothing; oily seeds for food stretches back about 4,000 years. Those plants, however, have low THC levels. According to Dr. Merlin, cannabis seeds attached to pottery shards found in Japan have been dated to roughly 10,000 years ago. But ancient evidence of the plant's utility for medicinal and ritual purposes is scant and more recent. (By contrast, the historical record about the use of opium poppy and peyote is relatively ample.) Investigators have long tried to confirm or refute the ancient world's only known recounting of funereal cannabis use. Around the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus described a Scythian mourners' rite: ... when, therefore, the Scythians have taken some seed of this hemp, they creep under the cloths and put the seeds on the red hot stones; but this being put on smokes, and produces such a steam, that no Grecian vapour bath would surpass it. The Scythians, transported by the vapour, shout aloud. In the mid 20th century, researchers found artifacts in a frozen burial site that seemingly comport with Herodotus's account, in Russia's Altay mountain region near the Siberian and Mongolian border. Close to the bodies was a fur lined leather bag with cannabis seeds, a bronze cauldron filled with stones and the frame of what seems to be an inhalation tent. Dr. Merlin said that the Pamir cemetery, together with other relatively contemporaneous burial sites elsewhere in the Xinjiang region of China, strengthens a striking narrative about how cannabis was used ritually by local cultures. North of the Pamir cemetery and from roughly the same period, other researchers identified a container with about two pounds of chopped cannabis next to the head of a body believed to be a shaman, presumably to use for herbalist concoctions in the afterlife. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
This creepy Russian sci fi horror picture does not take its title from the famous satellite the Soviet Union launched in 1957. Rather, it invokes the literal meaning of the word, which translates to English as "companion." Directed by Egor Abramenko from a script by Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev, the movie is set in 1983, and opens with two astronauts in a Soviet space capsule preparing to come back to Earth. From the frost outside its small window to the array of analog controls, the detail is credible, and when something starts to go wrong there's palpable tension, then terror, then a crash. The sole survivor, Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov) is sequestered at a remote facility overseen by a quietly authoritarian commander, Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk). An unorthodox neuropsychologist, Tatyana (Oksana Akinshina), is summoned to give a diagnosis of the seemingly amnesiac astronaut's condition. Earlier attempts by another scientist have proved futile and frustrating. But "Sputnik" isn't set in a declining Soviet Union just to break out spiffy retro designs; the crumbling totalitarian edifice is central to the movie's theme. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Leopards are reclusive and known for their ability to adapt, traits that have led some wildlife biologists to assume that the animals remained relatively abundant in the wild. But a study published Wednesday suggests that leopards have lost as much as 75 percent of their historical range since 1750. At that time, the big cats roamed over about 13.5 million square miles in Africa, Asia and parts of the Middle East. But that has shrunk to about 3.3 million square miles, according to the study, conducted by a team of 14 scientists representing 15 universities and organizations, including the Zoological Society of London, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Iranian Cheetah Society, National Geographic and Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization. The study, which appears in the journal PeerJ, is believed to be the first to assess the leopard's status globally across nine subspecies and won immediate praise from other scientists for its scope and detail. Partly on the basis of the findings, the cat specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature has recommended that the leopard (Panthera pardus) be reclassified on its Red List of threatened species as "vulnerable," indicating that stronger conservation efforts are needed, said Andrew B. Stein, an author on the study who is a member of the group. The species is currently listed as "near threatened," with three subspecies classified as "critically endangered" and two others as "endangered." Luke Hunter, the president and chief conservation officer of Panthera, said that the study's findings highlighted the fact that many of the world's most iconic animals were disappearing from the wild. "Their trajectory is just the same," he said. "Lions and tigers are faster to disappear than leopards, and yet it's exactly the same process." Like lions, leopards have been threatened primarily by human activities, including the destruction of habitat; the hunting of smaller animals that leopards depend on for prey; revenge killings by farmers who have lost livestock; illegal trade in leopard skins and parts; and, to a lesser extent, trophy hunting in countries where it is allowed. The researchers analyzed 6,000 records from 2,500 locations and more than 1,300 sources to map the leopard's current and past ranges (1750 was picked as a starting point because it was before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the colonial era in Africa). The records included studies, reports, photographs and newspaper clippings. Over all, the study found, the leopard's range had decreased by 63 percent to 75 percent, with the difference representing areas where the data was less clear cut. But of the nine subspecies, only three were represented in 97 percent of the cat's current range. Three other subspecies the Arabian leopard; the North Chinese leopard; and the Amur leopard, a shaggy cold weather cat found in far eastern Russia retained only 2 percent of their historical range, the researchers found. In large parts of Asia, including Southeast Asia and the Middle East, leopards had almost vanished. Only about 17 percent of the big cat's current range was protected land. Even in places where leopards still had expansive ranges, the researchers found, they were often fragmented, their habitat broken up by farms, villages or other human development. That did not augur well for some leopard subspecies, which had only a few patches left, the researchers wrote. In general, the more clusters of dense population there are of a species, and the more "corridors" of land that exist, allowing animals to travel from one area to another, the more likely the species is to survive, they said. "This is a sophisticated and very comprehensive study," said Tim Caro, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study. Dr. Caro called the tiny pockets of leopards that the researchers found still existed "particularly depressing." "Without strong action by governments, their fates are sealed," he said. Theodore N. Bailey, a retired wildlife biologist and the author of a 1993 book, "The African Leopard: Ecology and Behavior of a Solitary Felid," said the study was "the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the status and distribution of the leopard to date." He noted that, although the leopard could adapt to a wide variety of landscapes, from rain forest to desert, and to different type of prey, the study found that its loss of range was greater than that of other predators. Dr. Stein, of the cat specialist group, said that techniques developed in the last 10 years had changed the way scientists surveyed leopard populations. The new methods, he said, had "revolutionized our ability to capture information on the species." Scientists have no reliable estimates of how large the global population of leopards is, and the study did not try to provide such an estimate. But wildlife biologists say that leopards still far outnumber the remaining lions or tigers. Yet leopards have received far less attention from conservationists than their higher profile counterparts. "I think the biggest threat to the leopard on a global scale is that it's been just under the radar," said Philipp Henschel, the lion program survey coordinator for Panthera. "Nobody really cared about the leopard because everybody assumed they were really abundant and widespread." That neglect was reflected in the scientific literature. Although scientific reports had increased steadily since 2000, the new study found that of 330 articles on leopards published from 2000 to 2015, 69 percent dealt with only two subspecies. Three subspecies had fewer than five research articles each devoted to them. Dr. Henschel said that the subspecies that were listed as critically endangered "could be lost in the next five years or so." "We really have to act urgently," he said. In the case of the Amur leopard, whose population has dwindled to below 60, efforts by conservation groups working with the Russians and Chinese seem to be slowly reversing the downward trend, Dr. Henschel said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Barrington Stage Company was all set to become a pandemic pioneer: the first theater in the United States to put on an indoor show featuring an Actors' Equity performer since the coronavirus outbreak shuttered stages nationwide. But the organization, located in Pittsfield, Mass., has run into an unexpected roadblock: the state of Massachusetts, which has allowed museums to reopen and indoor dining to resume, is not permitting indoor theater. So Barrington's artistic director, Julianne Boyd, has made the difficult decision to move her production of "Harry Clarke," a one man show about an ingratiating con man, outdoors. Boyd had already removed many of the seats in her main theater, reconfigured the air conditioning system, redesigned the bathrooms, and reconceived the way patrons enter and exit the building. But now she's shifting gears and, with Equity's permission, planning to stage the play in a tent outdoors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
This article includes minor spoilers for the first two seasons of "Cobra Kai." Like many 10 year olds in 1984, I longed to kick someone in the face. Kids of all ages exited "The Karate Kid," released that summer in movie theaters everywhere, looking for a chance to do some damage with a "crane kick." That was the move that the 16 year old New Jersey to the San Fernando Valley transplant Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) used, in the movie's triumphant climax, to defeat his classmate Johnny Lawrence (the New York born William Zabka as the Platonic ideal of a rich SoCal brat) at the All Valley Karate Tournament. For the somehow uninitiated: After having some rough encounters with Johnny and hitting on Johnny's ex girlfriend Ali (a luminescent Elisabeth Shue), Daniel becomes pals with his apartment's Okinawan handyman Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, who was actually a California native and yes, the character's broken English was viewed as problematic even then). "The Karate Kid" was a smash, inspiring sequels and a reboot, and neither Macchio nor Zabka ever quite escaped their breakout roles. Macchio got decent parts here and there ("Crossroads," "My Cousin Vinny") while Zabka played essentially the same mean gent in '80s comedies like "Just One of the Guys" and "Back to School" before showing off his sensitive side in the CBS vigilante show "The Equalizer." Both could be found subsequently on the convention circuit. Then a funny thing happened, as topics that were once dorm room chatter become common coin on the internet. A theory circulated: What if Daniel was actually the bad guy in "Karate Kid?" After all, he is kind of a jerk and starts more fights than he ends what if "Karate Kid" gave Johnny a raw deal? This is close to the premise of "Cobra Kai," which debuted on YouTube Red in 2018 and then exploded in quarantine driven popularity when it arrived on Netflix in August. The show is not without flaws. "Cobra Kai" features exactly one important character of Asian descent: Kyler (Joe Seo), a horrible bully who is the primary villain in Season 1 until he suddenly isn't. It also has an oddly cavalier attitude toward drunken driving, a cultural norm that was going out the window around the time Daniel moved to California. Still, "Cobra Kai" is startlingly watchable, with an addictive, semi serious tone that recalls pre prestige television at its most deftly junky. Here are three reasons "Cobra Kai" has knocked out viewers. He never got over Ali, and he's so stuck in the 1980s (read: peaked in high school) that he refuses to acknowledge the internet and barely has a relationship with his son Robby (Tanner Buchanan, who really should be the one named Kyler). Daniel, meanwhile, has parlayed his regional fame into a series of luxury car dealerships, complete with karate themed ads, which means Johnny gets to see his rival's smug mug plastered all over the Valley. When Johnny rescues his teenage neighbor Miguel (Xolo Mariduena) from a beating (not unlike when Miyagi took on Johnny and his friends), Miguel makes the same demand of Johnny that Daniel made of Miyagi: Teach me your ways. Johnny, both inspired by Miguel's kindness and looking to make up for being a lousy dad, reopens Cobra Kai to teach "good, old fashioned, American karate" (delivered sans irony). Daniel, in turn, cannot let this aggression stand. He reopens Miyagi do Karate and takes on a student guaranteed to raise Johnny's already hair trigger hackles. Of course, the series was pretty much obligated to hit certain beats the Halloween dance, vintage cars, the crane kick and this knockout: Miguel: "Hey Sensei, is there any particular way you want me to wash these windows?" Neither man is particularly pure of heart or motive or anything. For example, Johnny is casually racist and sexist, though it's presented more as throwback meat head ism than genuine menace. But it's a testament to Zabka's dry humor and smart pathos that Johnny is sympathetic at all. He's not as comically evil as Kreese, but he still can't help but see his old sensei as a father figure from whom he absorbed some terrible lessons. Daniel, on the other hand, reads as smug by default, even when he's trying to be a decent guy. He has everything he could possibly want, including an extremely patient wife, Amanda (Courtney Henggeler), who indulges his obsession, and a daughter, Samantha (Mary Mouser), who has karate skills of her own. So his renewed rivalry with Johnny always looks like punching down. Amanda is the only one who recognizes how absurd all of this is, though she does so without ruining the fun. "Oh, it's fine," she explains to a puzzled onlooker about the tension between Johnny and Daniel. "They're in warring dojos." This is both a good old fashioned trope and completely insane. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
European soccer's governing body, UEFA, posted a message on its Twitter account on Friday evening with a seemingly innocuous update: Its European Championship another sporting casualty of the coronavirus outbreak would still be known as Euro 2020, even though it has been postponed until 2021. Within minutes, however, the tweet was deleted and replaced by a message saying it had been sent in error. The inadvertent message underscored how organizers are grappling with the myriad complexities of rescheduling a tournament that stands just behind the Summer Olympics soccer competition and FIFA's World Cup as one of sport's most watched events. This year's tournament was billed as the biggest Euros yet, and for the first time it was to be a Pan European spectacular, with the games spread across the length and breadth of the continent, instead of in just one or two host countries, to celebrate its 60th anniversary. Even before a final decision to postpone the Euros had been announced, the organization was preparing for the possibility, including on the branding front. A week before the announcement, lawyers for UEFA had registered the trademark Euro 2021 with patent offices for the European Union, Britain and the United States. But with the event so close, planning had been completed, tickets were close to being issued and, just as crucial, millions of items of merchandise with the Euro 2020 branding were ready to hit the shops. A Euro 2020 video game from Konami was just a month away from its release. Promotions by Heineken and Coca Cola had been approved, and Adidas had started to produce its anniversary ball. While a final decision has not been made, several of UEFA's commercial partners prefer the tournament to keep the Euro 2020 name, according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Such a move would be similar to one announced by the International Olympic Committee this week when it announced that the Olympic Games postponed until next year would retain the name Tokyo 2020. Some Euro 2020 merchandise is already on shelves, making it a collectible for this unexpected moment, in which a mystery virus has brought sports to a halt. The popular collector cards and sticker albums for the tournament, produced by the Italian company Panini, for instance, are on sale. Tim Crow, a sports marketing consultant based in Britain whose past clients include Coca Cola and BMW, said retaining the 2020 branding would be "infinitely preferable" than having to rename it for UEFA's many partners. "Anybody who has done it knows that registering any kind of trademark and licensing is a very expensive and time consuming exercise," Crow said. "To rip all that up and start again because you've postponed an event is one of the things you don't necessarily have to do." A spokeswoman for Coca Cola said: "We look forward to working with UEFA to create a successful event next year, and would appreciate the decision to continue the use of the Euro 2020 marks to minimize impact to materials that were already created." While some of UEFA's sponsorship contracts run for many years and cover other events in its portfolio, some are specifically for the European Championship and were set to terminate this year. Those, according to the people familiar with the matter, are now likely to be extended for another year. UEFA's contracts with broadcasters already have a provision for a case in which the tournament is postponed for up to 13 months. UEFA's legal department, which, like much of Europe, is working from home, is poring over agreements and working to find a solution to a problem that until the last two months had not been envisaged by anyone involved. Guy Laurent Epstein, UEFA's marketing director, declined to comment on the specifics of the organization's conversations with its partners. But he said no final decision had been made about the name for the tournament, and added that all the stakeholders involved would have to "share the pain." "We are assessing the overall picture and taking all the arguments into consideration," he said. Konami, the video game maker, had planned to release its Euro 2020 game on April 30. Producing it required months of work creating licensing agreements with all of UEFA's 55 national associations, as well as UEFA itself, and companies that manufacture the jerseys, like Adidas and Nike. A plan had also been in place to include the Adidas produced tournament ball as well as special version for the final. "We are in ongoing discussion with UEFA," said a Konami spokesman, who added that an announcement about what the tournament would be named was likely to be made soon. "It's definitely up to UEFA what the tournament is called." For companies that make physical, branded items, the pause could not have come at a worse time. Some were on the cusp of executing plans that had been hatched as long as 18 months ago, and beverage companies like Coke and Heineken would not only have worked on branding and promotion but also on shelving requirements for their customers, like major supermarkets. "As a longstanding UEFA partner, we fully support the decision to postpone Euro 2020 until the summer of 2021 and will work with UEFA on future plans," Heineken said in a statement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
How does the Australian actor and musician Guy Pearce know when a guitar is right for him? "You play it and it's just like butter in your hands," he said. Mr. Pearce, 50, was standing on the lower floor of Rudy's Music in SoHo, a gleaming, vaulted shop that's part gallery, part temple. Hundreds of guitars, amps and pedals, along with a few ukuleles, were arrayed around him. "This is heaven for me," he said. When Mr. Pearce was here in 2010, he bought a 1962 Fender Jaguar in Fiesta Red ("really divine," he said). It's one of about 85 guitars he keeps in his Melbourne studio. He bought his first guitar, a 1952 Gibson Southern Jumbo, for the character he played in the 1999 movie "A Slipping Down Life," and he has been obsessed ever since. Today he had come to look at a guitar he has seen online, a 1959 Gibson ES 335, one of only 71 that were made. It lolled inside a glass case on a bed of hot pink velvet, its maple body topped with Mickey Mouse ears and a dotted rosewood fingerboard. He admired the angle of the neck, the chunky thickness of the neck, the nickel plated screws. (Note: Find a man to look at you the way Mr. Pearce looks at a vintage fingerboard.) "The '59 really was the one, it really was the best," he said. "But I mean, I probably can't afford it, to be honest." He guessed that it would sell for more than 100,000. He moved on. Mr. Pearce, whose films include "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," "L.A. Confidential" and "Memento," was dressed casually in a gray polo shirt, darker gray pants and black suede Birkenstocks. No fiesta red here. He was in town briefly to promote "The Innocents," the Netflix series about a shape shifting teenager on the run. Mr. Pearce plays Dr. Halvorson, a scientist who has established a small commune on a remote Norwegian island and pioneered a therapeutic technique to help shifters control their powers. A lot of Nordic sweaters are involved. As an actor, Mr. Pearce shape shifts professionally. But over the past four years, he has made some other, more personal shifts, too. His wife of 18 years, the psychologist Kate Mestitiz, divorced him. A few months later he met his current partner, the actress Carice Van Houten (she plays the priestess Melisandre in "Game of Thrones"), and they now have a child, Monte. And Mr. Pearce decided to make a late debut as a singer songwriter. Though he grew up playing piano, clarinet and saxophone, and has been writing and recording songs since he was a teenager, he never intended to share his music. His first big break was on the Australian soap opera "Neighbours," starring alongside Kylie Minogue. But "out of anxiety and feeling embarrassed, he said, "and because everybody who was on the show seemed to go and release some sort of pop single, and every time I did an interview journalists would roll their eyes and say, 'Ugh, not another bloody soap star who's going to release music,'" he kept his songs to himself. A decade ago, however, he sang in the play "Poor Boy," with songs by Crowded House's Tim Finn, and began to understand "that I wasn't doing myself any favors by sticking to this sort of lockdown decision that I made 30 years beforehand," Mr. Pearce said. He released his first album, "Broken Bones," in 2014. His second, "The Nomad," written in the wake of his divorce and named for the plane that crashed and killed his father, came out last month. "I know I'm not the greatest songwriter in the world, but at the same time I do enjoy the challenge of trying to improve," he said. At Rudy's Music, the staff was busy assisting other customers, so Mr. Pearce wandered up to the loft where the arch top guitars are kept. He spotted a Silvertone acoustic with a jaunty white pick guard a "cheeky guitar," he called it built by Sears department stores to imitate a Fender. "But they're kind of cool," he said, picking up the guitar and neatly removing the "Please Ask for Assistance" tag. "They're a bit retro." He tuned the guitar before playing a dirty little riff. Did it feel like butter? "Not quite butter. No not quite," he said. "Lard? No I shouldn't say lard." Replacing the Silvertone, he moved on to a short scale Gibson ES 140 3/4 , custom finished in a blazing orange red that was once owned by the jazz guitarist Tal Farlow. This was a different caliber. He went downstairs to ask if he could play it. The store manager, Gordon French, told him he could and took him back up to the loft. Mr. Pearce sat on a leather bench and began to strum, trying out a few plaintive Jeff Buckley riffs, a Bob Dylan song. "It's nice with the flat wound strings on it," he said. When the guitar is plugged in, Mr. French told him, "It's incredibly warm and fat. Kind of luscious." "Mellow," Mr. Pearce said. He probably meant buttery. Sadly, another customer already had a deposit on it. Tentatively, Mr. Pearce asked about the '59 Gibson he had salivated over downstairs. "Buy lottery tickets," Mr. French said. The guitar was priced at 130,000, too much for a new father also paying off what he described as "a rather expensive divorce." Mr. Pearce declined to try it out. "If I can possibly avoid playing something that I know is out of my price range," he said, "there's much less chance I'll feel compelled to get it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"There are women on the site that are reaching out, and they're getting all of the benefits," said Jimena Almendares, the chief product officer at OkCupid. The company studied a random sample of 70,000 users who had logged in at least three times within the same month. It found that women who sent the first message were 2.5 times more likely to receive a response than men who did the same. And the men the women contacted were more "attractive," as determined by how other users rate the men's profiles for both looks and content. OkCupid, which said it has 1.5 men for every woman on the site, said both men and women are aspirational in whom they approach men send messages to women 17 percentage points more "attractive" than themselves, while women send messages to men 10 percentage points higher. So a woman who simply sifts through her inbox is most likely fielding entreaties from men less attractive than she is, while she's most likely to get a response if she contacts a more attractive man. About 12 percent of first messages men send turn into a date, while 30 percent of women's first messages end up in a date, the site said. And yet, men send 3.5 times as many first messages on OkCupid as women do. "Women have very much been trained to sit back and let men come to them," said Whitney Wolfe, the founder of Bumble, a separate dating app. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Can you describe that work? Everything from horse riding to research to the stunts; there was only one I wasn't allowed to do, and if I was allowed, I would have done it. Kasi was amazing, she did a lot of the research. I did a lot of reading. I made what might've been my fourth trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture specifically to look at Harriet's section of it. I did a lot of physical work. I wore the corset 24 hours a day. Everything I could possibly do, I did. What were some of the most surprising details you learned about her? That the real journey began out of love. I didn't realize how deeply in love she was with John Tubman. It was him she came back for. Before anything else, she was a woman who was married to a man she loved. She experienced heartbreak that a lot of us face and understand, and dealt with it in the most honorable way. We almost take it for granted that it happened, but it actually came out of a great deal of sacrifice . What do you think gave Harriet her mettle? I think she was underestimated. She was my height 5 foot 1 , she was small. I think an inch or two smaller. It was very easy to be underestimated when you're that small and you're a woman and you're black. I think it's the combination of being underestimated consistently and just making the decision that the way she was being treated was not O.K. anymore. She knew it wasn't right. I don't believe she thought for one second it was going to be easy. I do believe that as a human being, she had fear, and against her fears she continued, which is stronger than no fear at all. Did you have to make a leap to an American mind set? Well no, because the thing that I know quite well is being a black girl. It's something I understand implicitly because that's how I was born. The stories that we hear about the slave trade, about the degradation and the terrible, awful things that have happened to black people throughout history, they're not something that I'm unfamiliar with, and they're not things that don't hurt . Just because I come from a different continent, that doesn't negate or keep me out of the loop when it comes to experiencing pain and ostracization and people feeling like I'm other, and I'm not good enough. The continent doesn't really matter much. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
ATHENS The Greek government's efforts to sell state owned assets was sidetracked again when the chairman of the privatization agency was forced to resign after hitching a ride on the private jet of a Greek oil tycoon. One of the ways Greece plans to dig itself out of debt is through the sale of state owned assets. But that effort has been besieged by missteps. The latest involved Stelios Stavridis, the chairman of the government privatization agency, who had overseen one of the country's first big asset sales a one third stake in the state gambling company, OPAP, for 652 million euros. But then he hitched a ride to a vacation spot on the private jet of a Greek oil magnate involved in the deal. Government officials insisted that Mr. Stavridis's ouster from the privatization agency, Taiped, was "for ethical reasons" and would not upset the country's state sell off effort. But the privatization program has suffered from political upheaval and delays and has fallen far short of the revenue targets set by Greece's so called troika of foreign creditors, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The Greek finance minister, Yannis Stournaras, on Sunday sought Mr. Stavridis's resignation from Taiped after a newspaper quoted the chairman as saying he had traveled last week on the Lear jet of the oil and shipping oligarch Dimitris Melissanidis, a major stakeholder in the Greek Czech consortium Emma Delta, which agreed to buy the OPAP stake in May. The contract was signed Aug. 12 after much wrangling over the details. A few hours later, Mr. Stavridis, a 65 year old Swiss trained engineer, joined the oil magnate on his plane, which dropped Mr. Stavridis on Cephalonia, an island in the Ionian Sea where he spends his summer vacations. "Melissanidis, who was traveling to France, offered to take me with him to accommodate me," Mr. Stavridis was quoted as telling the Proto Thema newspaper, which published a photograph of him, smiling, sitting next to a flight attendant. Speaking to the Greek private television channel Skai after his firing on Monday, Mr. Stavridis defended his decision to fly on Mr. Melissanidis's jet, noting that the trip had come long after the OPAP deal was completed. He referred to "hypocrisy" in Greek society which, he said, was interested in "the facade rather than the essence." "I am not a monk and I won't hide," said Mr. Stavridis, who founded Piscines Ideales, one of Europe's largest manufacturers of swimming pools in 1991. More recently, he was head of the Athens water board, Eydap, which is also in the country's privatizations portfolio. The main left wing opposition party, Syriza, which has vowed to reverse all privatizations if it comes to power, said Taiped was "a tool of the troika" whose goal was "the biggest sell off of state wealth that Europe has seen since the era of East Germany." In a statement on Monday, Syriza described the Stavridis affair as "the first clear admission of the dirty relationship between the government of the memorandum and business interests," referring to the Greek deals for foreign loans. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The troika has urged Athens to speed up state sell offs and to step up tax collection to raise much needed money. But revenue targets have been revised downward several times. The original target of 50 billion euros by 2016 was later changed to 19 billion euros, then to 15 billion euros. Since last year, the troika has focused on annual targets. But Taiped is expected to fall 1 billion euros short of its 2.5 billion euro target for 2013. Representatives of the troika, which have granted Greece two rescue programs totaling 240 billion euros over the last three years, are due in Athens at the end of next month for a new inspection that is expected to focus on a revenue shortfall compounded by a lagging privatizations program and lax tax collection efforts. Apart from OPAP, Greece sold the state gas network operator, Desfa, to an Azerbaijan company for 450 million euros earlier this year. But the planned privatization of the state gas company, Depa, fell through in June when the Russian giant Gazprom failed to make the only expected bid, despite a series of meetings between its chief executive and the Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras. The deal, which had been expected to net some 900 million euros, foundered after Gazprom cited concerns over Depa's finances. But European Union competition concerns were also believed to have influenced Gazprom's decision to walk away. Mr. Samaras has been lobbying hard for privatizations and investments, which he has said are crucial to spurring growth and creating jobs in Greece. Unemployment exceeds 27 percent over all and is at a staggering level 65 percent for people younger than 25. But political and financial instability remains a concern among foreign investors despite Greece's progress in cutting its debt. Greece posted a primary surplus a budget surplus not counting debt financing for the first six months of this year. But its debt burden remains unsustainable, the troika of creditors agree. Other euro zone nations, chiefly Germany, remain reluctant, however, to approve a second debt revamping following the debt restructuring with private sector bondholders last year. The tone of talks next month with troika inspectors could be set by the outcome of German parliamentary elections set for Sept. 22. The issue of Greek debt, and how it should be handled, has featured prominently in the German election campaign, which is being closely watched by Greek government officials. But other pressing concerns face Mr. Samaras and his ministers in the coming weeks. Priorities include completing a list of 12,500 civil servants who must, by September, join a so called mobility scheme, under which staff members would receive reduced wages for eight months ahead of their transfer or dismissal. Thousands of teachers are on the list and are expected to stage vehement protests, possibly occupying schools. The program aims to add another 12,500 civil servants by the end of the year. Mr. Samaras got a taste of the difficulties of slashing the public payroll in June when his unilateral decision to shut the state broadcaster, ERT, prompted the third political party in the coalition to quit, leaving his government with a fragile majority in Parliament. Fired ERT staff members continue to occupy the broadcaster's old offices, broadcasting pirate programming via satellite, even as the government last week announced the first 577 hirings for an interim service that is to replace ERT until a new permanent broadcaster is set up. Another controversial measure is the government's plan to lift a moratorium on home foreclosures at the end of this year. The authorities have pledged to exempt Greeks with low incomes and the unemployed, but the initiative has rankled the opposition and several coalition lawmakers, who have also vowed to oppose it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Fashion month finally came to an end last week (or fashion 1.3 months, if you include men's as well as women's wear). It was a season of transition and self examination, as designers posed questions about the point of the shows themselves, but certain trends stood out, both in style and substance, across the gender continuum. Vanessa Friedman, the women's fashion critic of The New York Times, and Guy Trebay, the men's wear critic, discuss the most notable of those trends and debate their significance. VANESSA FRIEDMAN: Guy, now that a number of brands have announced they are going to show men's wear with women's wear next season and that, in fact, some are already showing women in men's clothes, and men in women's I was wondering if you thought we were going to see chaos on the runways, or if things would get more coherent instead. Do men's wear and women's wear really inform and speak to each other? Put another way: Did you see on the men's runways what I was seeing on the women's? Which was, if I had to pick one trend to start, a certain dualism between female sexuality, as embodied by lingerie dressing, and female power, as embodied by of all things the leather breastplate. I'm serious about this. Even Undercover had a gold breastplate. When Jun Takahashi and Nicolas Ghesquiere at Louis Vuitton are on the same page, you've got to think something's going on. GUY TREBAY: It's funny. You see power in the breastplate, and I see anxiety. There was an awful lot of armoring and concealment in both the men's and women's shows for fall. Military references ranged from the now ubiquitous camouflage patterns to fairly literal interpretations of garments like greatcoats or cavalry tunics, as at Dries Van Noten and Balmain. Ditto all the capes, which had previously fallen out of use except by the police, the military and at Sherlock Holmes re enactments. While I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to link November's terrorist attacks in Paris to the stuff we saw on so many runways, designers are clearly as susceptible to these fears as anyone else; they seep into the collective consciousness and are expressed in design. VF: Capes! You said it. They were everywhere on the women's runways, too: long, short, sparkling, wool. I think you're right to connect this to the recent attacks, at least abstractly (a free floating sense of nerves, the desire for protection, the search for safety, and so on), and I'd go even further and throw the American election in there as well. It's all contributing to a general sense that things are getting very messy all over, and that we need to buckle down and button up, literally. While I agree this is partly a defensive measure we all feel more secure when we are strapped in I also think it has a warrior aspect to it that is more active. Boudicca and the Amazons kept popping into my mind, and for women's wear that connotes strength and self sufficiency, which is no bad thing. The other big outerwear strain happening over the last month was the renaissance of the puffer jacket, driven by fashion's new faux revolutionary darling, Vetements, and its insistence on the virtues of the street. (Speaking of Vetements, it may also bear some responsibility for the men's/women's merger since it has always had both sexes on its runway.) The elevation of streetwear is, of course, nothing new in fashion, which loves to co opt a bit of rough whenever it can, but there's no question sweatshirts, especially with logos that pretend to be anti establishment so the establishment can wear them and feel good, and down jackets are having a moment. Personally, I liked the opera cape cum puffer Demna Gvasalia, who is a member of the Vetements collective, did in his debut as creative director of Balenciaga best, as it was both elegant and had less pretensions to "basic." So here's my question for you: cape or puffer? GT: Ha! Cape or puffer: a question for the ages. I'm always looking at shows and thinking about which things will never make it into production. I felt that way about, say, the piebald pony cape at Gucci or the denim "Querelle" version at Prada. But I'm probably mistaken. Lord knows, I've called things wrong before. (I thought the fur lined Gucci mules from Alessandro Michele's debut collection were absurd. And they were so absurd they became an unstoppable best seller.) I'm actually pleased to see puffers elevated to runway status, partly because I enjoy it when designers are in dialogue with the everyday, rethinking staples or recasting the familiar. Todd Snyder is particularly skilled at this. (There's a reason he's huge in Japan.) So, when you strip away the styling, is Hedi Slimane, who designed a corduroy car coat a season or so just like one I had in sixth grade. Now I have a question for you, one involving another way in which men's and women's wear are in dialogue: Was the Rick Owens Mastodon show which presaged in January many of the motifs he repeated in February for women as memorable for you as it was for me? I felt that of all the creators whose work we saw last season, his was perhaps most rigorously engaged with pure design. VF: Rick's collection was certainly the most overtly engaged with the sense of global implosion that seems to be driving so much of the clothes for next season, though from what I have seen, the women's collection was both softer and more purposefully graceful than the men's, as if he had reached a certain kind of resolution. Indeed, I think it was one of the prettiest collections he's done yet, and "pretty" is not a word I normally associate with Rick Owens. But it left me feeling hopeful, which is a gift of sorts. One last question for you, since you brought up Hedi Slimane, whose women's show was like stepping back in time to the go go 1980s for me: Are you seeing the same revival I am, big shoulders, brassy personalities and all, and do you also think it has to do with a sense of the end of the American era? It feels very costume party nostalgia to me, which I don't find particularly interesting. If I have to wear something that defines a time period, even a hard one, I'd rather it not reflect where we have been, but where we are going, like Rick's show. For me, that's the point of this whole exercise. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
As criticism of the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic intensifies, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday called on state health officials to start reporting coronavirus data in a detailed and uniform fashion, rather than the disorganized hodgepodge most states now produce. Other public health experts said that such guidelines were long overdue and that the agency's current director, Dr. Robert Redfield, should have mandated them months ago. The lack of clear C.D.C. guidance even on simple issues like data collection was an example of the administration's ineptitude and ineffective leadership in the face of a growing crisis, experts said. "We have a real vacuum of leadership at the national level," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, who now runs Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit health advocacy initiative. "Absent a national strategy, our best hope is to get all 50 states on the same page, so we know where we are," he said. Dr. Frieden's organization concluded that states are reporting only 40 percent of the data needed to fight the pandemic. Some states disclose less useful information than the government of Uganda, which Resolve to Save Lives also advises on its coronavirus response, he said. The report laid out 15 indicators that every state should report daily on a public "dashboard" that anyone can view. They included not just basic elements like cases, hospitalizations and deaths, but sophisticated metrics such as what percentage of infections came from clusters of people who know one another, how many health care workers get infected on the job, how long it takes to get a diagnostic test result, and what percentage of any city's or county's residents are wearing masks. Dr. Frieden also suggested tracking how many people in any city are hospitalized with coronavirus or flu symptoms, regardless of test results. Where legally possible, he said, states should name institutions with major outbreaks, including nursing homes, prisons, schools or meatpacking plants. Leading public health experts asked why the C.D.C. itself had not been requiring such data from states. Dr. Irwin E. Redlener, founding director of Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said it was "pathetic" that a private organization had to propose data standards and recruit states to voluntarily agree. "The feds should have been demanding exactly this kind of standardized information from every state and territory since March," he said. "This is another illustration of the failures of the federal government Trump was explicit in telling governors that they were on their own." Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, who helped design the data dashboard used by New York State and cited by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo during his news conferences, said Dr. Frieden's proposal was "something we need in our tool kit that's been absent." Dr. Osterholm worried that both spread of the virus and progress against it were not being adequately measured. "Without standards, how do you know whether you're failing or succeeding?" Dr. Osterholm said. "Without them, you can't hold anyone's feet to the fire. This is something the C.D.C. should have done." Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the senior scientist on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, agreed that Dr. Frieden's initiative was an important effort. Asked for comment, a spokesman for the C.D.C., Tom Skinner, said the agency "was always looking at best practices" and had made plans with the states to track 14 of the 15 indicators cited in Dr. Frieden's report. The exception was the percentage of people correctly wearing masks in public, since it was unclear how that could be done, Mr. Skinner said. (Dr. Frieden's report suggested doing street counts or viewing security camera footage.) When the data are gathered, they will be posted on the C.D.C.'s Covid Tracker website, Mr. Skinner said. The Health and Human Services Department recently suggested that coronavirus data from hospitals would be sent to Washington first, not the C.D.C., as has long been done. Last week, discussing whether his proposed metrics would be adopted by the states, Dr. Frieden said he had consulted with the National Governors Association and several governors had said they would soon adopt his guidelines. "We're hoping peer pressure will bring along the others," he added. The lack of uniform metrics has contributed to the country's failing response to the pandemic, Dr. Frieden said. "It's impossible to exaggerate how much of an outlier the U.S. is on reporting data," he said. "Hong Kong can have 67 cases and think it's a serious situation. We can have 67,000 cases and there's a debate about whether it's serious." No state now reports all the data that are needed, but some are better than others. Dr. Frieden singled out Minnesota and Arizona as the overall leaders, while Oregon and Virginia, he said, were doing best at reporting one metric crucial to slowing the spread: contact tracing. Asian and European countries rely heavily on tracing and testing all contacts of each known case. In most states in this country, caseloads are increasing so fast that tracing dozens of contacts of each patient has become impossible. Information about contact tracing is generally "abysmal," Dr. Frieden said. "Uganda does better at tracing and contacting people in quarantine and reporting it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
THE GIRL FROM THE METROPOL HOTEL Growing Up in Communist Russia By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Translated by Anna Summers Illustrated. 149 pp. Penguin Books. Paper, 16. Russian literature is replete with powerful memoirs of childhood: Tolstoy, Gorky, Nabokov, Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva all wrote movingly and insightfully about growing up. And yet, when one looks for texts about children's lives after the Communist revolution, the bookshelf seems strangely empty. Where are the great memoirs of Soviet childhood? Perhaps the traditional narrative approach taken by Tolstoy or Nabokov cannot effectively depict the spare, hungry life of a child in a totalitarian state. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's slender, fragmentary memoir, "The Girl From the Metropol Hotel," is strangely much closer in tone and craft to Soviet absurdist poetry than it is to these classic memoirs. That poetry is exemplified by authors such as Daniil Kharms and Aleksander Vvedensky, known for their farcical depictions of early Soviet life in all its casual brutality. The reader feels the echo of such poems when Petrushevskaya's younger self, a girl who's been desperately hungry for most of her life, finds herself in possession of a fistful of silver coins. What does she do? She throws them into the courtyard, watching with a smile as dirty boys swarm to retrieve them, as each dropped coin "caused a new explosion of howling and fighting." If this memoir of growing up on the streets of the Soviet Union follows a logic, it is the violent, chaotic logic of Soviet history itself. As the girl from the Metropol Hotel, Petrushevskaya was born into an elite Bolshevik family in 1938, in the midst of great misfortune: Several family members were executed by Stalin's firing squads. The family became "enemies to everyone," Petrushevskaya writes, "to our neighbors, to the police, to the janitors, to the passers by, to every resident of our courtyard of any age. We were not allowed to use the shared bathroom, to wash our clothes, and we didn't have soap anyway. At the age of 9 I was unfamiliar with shoes, with handkerchiefs, with combs; I did not know what school or discipline was." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
MAUI, Hawaii Regrets, he's had a few. But say this about Don Nelson, the retired basketball coach: He definitely did it his way. On the way to 1,335 regular season victories (a record), basketball's mad scientist rocked pink fish ties on the sideline, quaffed Bud Lites at news conferences and helped change the way the game is played with "Nellie Ball," a guerrilla warfare strategy built around speedy, undersize lineups. With the N.B.A. playoffs underway, we caught up with Mr. Nelson in his cavernous poker room, a Hall of Fame caliber man cave where he hosts the island's most exclusive poker game with Willie Nelson, Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson. Inside the paint, outside the box there is only one Nellie. So this is where those big games go down with Willie, Woody and Owen. How big are the pots? They can get up to 2,000 to 3,000, especially when Willie is in. He never saw a card he didn't like. He raises every time, no matter what. Every time it goes by him, it's 50, 50, 50. I'm conservative. But Willie, man, he's wild. Woody is wild. Owen's pretty good. Woody's a terrible card player. Oh, very good. Play you fast or slow. That's a serious shuffleboard table you have here. Do you guys play for money? Yeah, I'd say so. I've paid for that shuffleboard table at least 10 times over. I see you're wearing a Warriors hat. Do you like their chances this year? I haven't studied it enough to give you a good answer. Everybody says Houston is really good. I don't like Houston, personally, but it's just because of a lot of competition over the years with Dallas, you know. I'm a Warrior guy, so I'm rooting for the Warriors, but Steph has got to be 100 percent to beat that team. You hung it up in 2010, just before the Warriors turned into a juggernaut. Do you miss coaching? I really don't. I was pretty well fried by that time. I think I had one year left on my contract when they sold the team. You missed out on the Warriors' recent championships. Do you think you could have won a title with the Warriors in the '90s if that squad with Chris Mullin, Latrell Sprewell and Chris Webber had stayed together? I didn't think Webber at that time in his life, anyway was ready to play winning basketball, or do anything winning at that point. He was a pretty confused young guy. He was about the toughest guy I ever coached. It took him a long time. You never got your ring as a coach, but you got five as a player for the Celtics in the '60s and '70s. How would you describe your game? I could ball a little bit. I was a slow runner, so I was a perfect trailer guy. I could rebound, I could pass, I could shoot. I could do a lot of things to fit in, you know, if you need an extra guy. I was just kind of an average guy that fit in with a really great team. Sounds like a guy who went on to become another great coach, Pat Riley. Well, I was better than Pat laughs . He comes here a lot, too. I was just with him over Christmas. How did you get hooked on Hawaii? I used to do some stuff for the armed services with a bunch of the other Celtics and a couple of guys from other teams. We'd go visit the hospitals, then they'd give us a week of R R in Hawaii on the way back from Vietnam. We just loved that week, and then we'd miss our flight, and end up two weeks. Then another week. I just thought it's the most beautiful place I'd ever seen, and I've been all over the world. Those hospital visits in Vietnam must have been intense. It was very, very difficult. Oh my goodness, it was a life changing experience. You'd walk into the wards, these guys from the front lines, some had just woken up with no legs, no arms. It was the hardest thing I've done. It almost made an alcoholic out of me. You'd visit those hospitals all day and go out and drink all night. What's your daily life here like? I've been buying real estate for 20 years here, and building houses and renting them out. So that's our business now. A lot of Warrior fans stay with us. I built this place next to me. It's not a wedding chapel, but they have weddings there. My daughter Lee runs that. She's an interesting story. I had that daughter out of wedlock. I knew nothing about her for 29 years. How did you find out about her? I was in Dallas, coaching, and my secretary brought in this letter. It said, "Dear Mr. Nelson. In 1968, you met a young girl in Washington, D.C., by the name of Debby Dial. Nine months later, I was born." I had been on the road with the Celtics, playing the Bullets. We were doing some of that stuff when I was playing, which wasn't the best thing to do. But I did remember that lady's name. I thought, "Wow, this could be true." So we brought her into Dallas, and there was this 6 foot blond lady who looks like all my other kids, and I'm going, "She's mine." I helped her finish college, met the parents who raised her, because she was adopted. My wife and I have six other kids, but she's the only one who's moved to Maui. Isn't that funny? And you've got an agrarian venture over here in Maui, too? I've got a farm, yeah, I do. We grow some pot and flowers and coffee, and I've got a fish farm up there. I've got a medical card. I'm legal here. When any athlete gets old, every injury you have sustained seems to resurrect. It helps me deal with the pain without pain pills, and helps with that stress. Have you been into cannabis for long? No, I didn't smoke until maybe three or four years ago. I never smoked when I was coaching. I just started. Willie got me smoking. How do you like cannabis compared to alcohol? I don't drink anymore, because I like pot better. It's about the same as alcohol, except you don't have the aftereffect. There's no hangover. I mean, I don't drink to excess, anyway. But you know, even if you have a couple of drinks, you're liable to have a headache in the morning. On your farm, do you grow cannabis for dispensaries? No, I just grow for myself. You're allowed to grow up to 10 plants, so you have plenty to smoke. I've never sold. I would never do that. Oh, it's great. Great stuff. It's called Nellie Kush. It's O.G. and Hindu Kush. Hindu Kush is really good. It comes from India and the guy that brought it over mixed the two of them, so we've got Nellie Kush now. This interview has been edited and condensed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
FIVE years ago, it would have been easy to predict that the stock market would be higher today than it was then. But no one would have paid attention. Stocks were in a free fall and wouldn't hit bottom for two more months. Today, after a year in which the Standard Poor's 500 stock index rose almost 30 percent, there are plenty of views on what the next five years might look like, but they're not in agreement. Plenty of people question whether the next five years can be as good as the last five. They base their concern on stock indexes setting records, while other parts of the economy, like jobs, continue to lag. On Friday, the S. P. 500 closed at 1,831.37. Other people see the fundamentals of United States companies as so solid that stocks will continue to do well despite their large run up. "I think we're in for a long bull market and economic expansion that will be a little longer than average," said Marty Sass, chairman and chief executive of M. D. Sass, which manages 6 billion. "That's my best guess." When you're looking out three to five years, guessing would seem to be part of it. While the one year predictions I wrote about last week can be thrown off by an unexpected event or two, the medium term view should be based on economic and corporate fundamentals, whether the prevailing mood is as dire as it was in 2009 or as cautiously optimistic as it is today. This is where my interest in the three to five year investment outlook comes in. Back in 2009, the economy could have continued getting worse for longer than it did, but it would have turned around at some point. Today, some investors have the opposite concern, that the good times have run too long and there is a correction coming. Regardless of whether a correction comes or not, this is where the medium term projection should have value. Instead of reading tea leaves, it should be able to assess tectonic shifts. So now that we're in 2014, I wanted to consider what investment strategists think the near future could bring. TRENDS Some of their views are very broad like stocks continuing to do well because of solid corporate earnings, low inflation and little pressure to raise wages given how high unemployment remains. But other views are based on stories that could play out for far longer than five years. Production of oil and gas in the United States, for one, is expected to be stronger in five years. This is based on proven reserves and new drilling techniques. Saying what will happen in six to 12 months in this industry, though, is always difficult: A pipeline could explode, turmoil in the Middle East could impact prices, or regulation in Washington could cost companies more money. Longer term, the issue is supply and demand. "We've discovered through this shale drilling how to exploit much more natural gas than we ever thought we could," said Kent Croft, chief investment officer of Croft Leominster. "Have all the stocks been the greatest this year? No. Do I expect them to outperform over time? I certainly do. I think this is one of those watershed moments in the U.S. economic outlook." The mobile technology sector is another longer term play. Mr. Sass said payment processors like PayPal were set to increase their processing of payments online but also to reach more into retail stores. And, of course, more of everything is moving to mobile devices, and companies are going to look to profit from that. In other industries, like airlines and television broadcasting, consolidation is going to make stronger companies over the medium term. "These are industries that have gone from horror shows to very compelling plays," Mr. Sass said. RISKS There are plenty of risks to the medium term view. Kate Moore, United States chief investment strategist for J. P. Morgan Private Bank, said her clients generally had concerns about three big themes. They worry first, she said, about how much higher equity prices can go. After four and a half years of prices going higher, they ask her when the rally is going to end. "This is where we'll walk them through corporate fundamentals and show them balance sheets and how margins can be sustainable," she said. "We find that most valuations are below 10 to 15 year historical norms." The two other worries are what will happen to China and Europe. With China, she said, the concern is that the country's economic growth is going to slow and drag down the global economy. "There are some areas of the market, particularly in the resource space, that have overcapacity," she said. Michael Tiedemann, chief investment officer of Tiedemann Wealth Management, said he saw China as one of the two big questions over the next three to five years. (The other was how tighter rules on bank lending and the Federal Reserve's gradual end to buying bonds will play out.) He is not confident that China will be able to handle its transition from an export based economy to a more balanced one smoothly. "We're not predicting it's going to go badly, but along the way perhaps there will be conflicting signals," he said. And that calls for investors to be prepared for some volatility. The questions about Europe revolved around whether the Continent had gotten over its problems. "They're either convinced that Europe is going to grow strongly next year because they've seen an appreciation of assets," Ms. Moore said. "Or they're very skeptical about institutional change and the capability to bring together so many different countries for cohesive change." (Her view is some place in the middle, she said.) But Dean Tenerelli, European stock fund manager at T. Rowe Price, said that Europe's continued recovery was linked to what happened in China, which for years was bolstering companies around the world with its demands for goods. "I come across a lot of businesses where they're disappointing because that froth isn't there anymore," he said. "The mining companies are cutting capital expenditures by 25 percent and that trickles through to all the companies that make that stuff and to the banks that were financing all of that. I even picked it up at beverage companies that have missed their numbers because the Chinese demand for cognac is declining." THE VALUE Is looking out even five years still too short for long term investors? Surely, oil drilling is going to be happening in North Dakota for a decade or more. Keith Banks, president of U.S. Trust, said looking out 10 years was too long for most clients to think about, but five years was a great time frame to spot what he called the mega trends where people made substantial wealth. These trends run over many years and offer a sustained opportunity for people to participate, even if they miss the very start of the trend. "The world isn't an on/off switch," Mr. Banks said. "It is a dimmer switch." He said his firm talked to clients more and more about the three to five year outlook, but often they needed the view over the next year to get to the longer one. "It's an iterative process," he said. One of the main benefits of the longer view is it smooths out the noise that can crop up in just one year. "I have more confidence in looking ahead five years than I do one year," said Katie Nixon, chief investment officer at Northern Trust Wealth Management. "And I think most strategists feel the same. The short term is so uncertain and can be impacted by a lot of noise, while in the long term, markets are very fundamental." How those projections are done, though, naturally relies on assumptions, and that means they can be flawed. "Any three to five year forecast typically relies pretty heavily on some mean reversion assumptions I believe this company is relatively undervalued versus the market or its peers," Mr. Tiedemann said. "We have five year forward views on asset classes and projections. At the core of those is our five year expectation of G.D.P. growth, inflation and where we believe the 10 year Treasury yield will be at the end of five years." In other words, the medium term may be more accurate, but projecting it is still difficult. Yet it is such a stabilizing view that can help people through the anxious moments of any year. "Our advice is, 'Don't time, don't chase and don't react,' " said Karl Wellner, president and chief executive of Papamarkou Wellner Asset Management. "We want our clients to think and plan ahead. It's very simple. But people kick themselves for making the same mistakes over and over." There are worse New Year's resolutions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
PARIS Elon Musk is not the only guy thinking about the importance of space travel. In a show preview around the same time Mr. Musk was at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, waxing lyrical about his latest plans for rockets to Mars Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino was in his Paris studio waxing lyrical about the benefits of seeing the world from above. "Astronauts had to go to the moon," he said, "before they discovered the real beauty was on Earth. You need distance to appreciate what something is really like." He was talking about the Apollo missions as well as his own experience at the brand where he has worked for almost 18 years. The point being the importance of seeing the same old, same old or thinking about the same old, same old from a different perspective. It's not a fashion specific lesson, clearly, but applied to fashion, it can yield interesting results. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"I'll keep working here as long as they will have me," Mr. Schiller, 60, said in the company's statement. "I also want to make some time in the years ahead for my family, friends, and a few personal projects I care deeply about." Mr. Schiller's title as head of marketing was, in some ways, an understatement for his actual role at the company. The Apple executive was involved in the conception and design of the company's most important products, including the iPhone and iPad, working closely with Steve Jobs, Mr. Ive and Scott Forstall, the former head of software. Mr. Schiller has worked at Apple since 1987. In an interview last October, Mr. Schiller reflected on the development of the original iPad. Around 2005, he and other Apple executives watched a demonstration from Bas Ording, an interface designer, on multitouch technology, in which he pretended to scroll on the screen and the screen moved up and down, mimicking realistic physics. The team decided to table the development of a tablet and focus on bringing multitouch technology to a smartphone, which would eventually become the iPhone. The iPhone's success, followed by the introduction of the App Store, laid a foundation for Apple to develop the iPad. "We all got excited because when you think of all of the best products from Apple through history, usually the user interface model is essential to that departure from the past whether it's the mouse and the Mac, the click wheel on the iPod this was going to be one of those moments," he said. When Mr. Jobs took a leave of absence from the company before his death, Mr. Schiller hosted the company's marketing events to introduce new products. Some believed Mr. Schiller was among those who could succeed Mr. Jobs, though it eventually became clear that Mr. Cook would take over. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Russian media was having way too much fun last week. They were downright gleeful over new reports that a group of Democrats had used online disinformation in the campaign against Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama in 2017. "Well, well, well," went the general line in the Russian media, "look what we have here." Their reaction was understandable, given the news that American political operatives had tried the same kind of troll operations that United States intelligence officials believe the Russian government used in an attempt to swing the 2016 presidential election to Donald J. Trump. The Russian news outlet Sputnik jumped on the news, saying last week that the Alabama operation "seems to cast Democrats' Russiagate accusations into further doubt." Also getting in on the action was RT, the Kremlin financed news organization once known as Russia Today. "The only 'Russian bots' to meddle in U.S. elections," the network reported, "belonged to Democrat linked experts." The disinformation campaign in Alabama included a scheme to produce false evidence that Russian Twitter bots were working to elect Mr. Moore. After the revelations first came to light, John Griffing, a former executive director of the Harris County Republican Party in Texas, appeared on RT to go after the Democrats. "I've always been suspicious that the Russia bot narrative was flimsy and probably made up," Mr. Griffing told RT viewers. "Simply because that's the kind of thing the Democratic Party does they make things up in order to create the basis for an attack on the right wing." In addition to giving Russia new ammunition in its defense against election meddling allegations, the progressives' political caper in Alabama sent a chilling message to the rest of us: Reality warping attacks are now coming from inside the house. Sputnik and RT were keying off two articles in The New York Times, which broke the news of the Alabama efforts. The first, by Scott Shane and Alan Blinder in late December, detailed an operation that included the creation of fake Russian Twitter accounts, as well as a phony Facebook page purportedly set up by conservative Alabamians opposed to Mr. Moore, who ended up losing to his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones. One of the people behind that effort, Jonathon Morgan, of the cyber security firm New Knowledge, minimized the effort by saying it was only an experiment to observe how such Russian style tactics work in real time (though an internal report said the project was seeking to depress turnout for Mr. Moore). The main financial backer of that project, the LinkedIn co founder Reid Hoffman, disavowed it, saying he did not know the money he had donated to groups affiliated with Democrats would finance such a thing. "I want to be unequivocal," he wrote on Medium. "There is absolutely no place in our democracy for manipulating facts or using falsehoods to gain political power." Mr. Jones, the politician who benefited from the operation, angrily denounced it and called for a federal investigation. So maybe there was reason to think it was all just a blip. Then came the second Times article, last week, on another shady tactic used against Mr. Moore. This one involved a Facebook page for a fake group of Baptists supporting Mr. Moore as a potential ally in their bid to ban alcohol in Alabama a surefire way to alienate voters if ever there was one. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The phony teetotaling campaign was the work of another group of liberal activists with different financiers, whose identities remain unknown. And it came with an implicit warning: Get used to it. Researchers who have been studying the Russian disinformation tactics have been girding for just such a development. "One of the things we've been talking about in the last year is how the real threat's going to be when it's not just Russia or Iran nation states with budgets but when every single person with an issue starts engaging in this type of manipulative behavior," said Bret Schafer, an analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a research project at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. "It's absolutely awful for democracy." Mr. Schafer had particular reason to be chagrined. New Knowledge helped build the website for the Alliance's disinformation tracking database, Hamilton68, which had monitored suspected Russian linked accounts, tracking the falsehoods they spread and the discord they tried to sow. (New Knowledge also helped write a report on Russian troll activity released last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee.) The Alabama project, Mr. Schafer told me, "undercuts our collective ability to take other countries to task for their deceptive, online behavior." Fight fire with fire reasoning is bubbling up on the left as the social media giants continue to struggle to stop distortion campaigns in real time. It was only after The Times and The Washington Post reported on the Alabama operations that Facebook shut down the suspect accounts. None of this bodes well for the 2020 campaign, which has entered its first stage at a time when analysts in and out of government are still trying to determine the full effect disinformation had in the last presidential election. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has concluded that the Russian activity probably affected the outcome. In "Cyber War," her just published book about the 2016 campaign, she reports that Russia "tried to mobilize, demobilize, and shift the sorts of voters that Trump needed to win." Then there were those whose offices I never heard back from Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke, Julian Castro, the Democratic Party itself and Mr. Trump's re election team. The real surprise was former Vice President Joe Biden. "Not going to have any comment on that for you," a spokesman said. Maybe Mr. Biden wants to keep his options open. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Samira Kawash and Roger Cooper bought their Park Slope brownstone five years ago with the idea of giving big dinner parties and enjoying lazy afternoons in the extra large backyard. But after they moved in with their daughter, Illia, then 9, they realized that the poor layout, overgrown plants and swampy conditions limited what they could do in the space. "The rear area was damp and shady, so totally infested with mosquitoes," said Ms. Kawash, 53, a writer. (Her husband, 48, is a lawyer.) "The fences were collapsing under ancient overgrown ivy," she added, and a beautiful but messy juneberry tree dropped fruit that found its way inside on the bottom of shoes, staining everything it came into contact with. As a result some would be urban gardeners end up neglecting the terrace or balcony that was once high on their list of apartment must haves. Balconies become bike storage. Gardens grow out of control. Terrace landscaping turns to tumbleweeds in the sweltering city sun, alongside rusted grills and sun bleached toys. "Outdoor space in New York City is on many buyers' wish lists, but there just isn't enough to go around, and a lot of what is available isn't that usable when you get right down to it," said Xanthe Tabor, a saleswoman for Halstead Property. "A private roof terrace may seem appealing, but becomes less so after you've carried a tray of wineglasses up and down a flight of stairs a few times." Those with the determination and the wherewithal to turn a balcony, terrace or backyard into a functional outdoor area, however, say the investment is well worth it for a breath of air in a crowded city. Here is a look at how five homeowners invested in their very different outdoor spaces, from a tiny Upper East Side balcony to a sprawling backyard in Brooklyn. AN EXPANSIVE BACKYARD Last year, the Kawash Coopers finally decided it was time to take back the garden. Working with Todd Haiman, a landscape designer, they gut renovated the 1,600 square foot space, replacing a deteriorating brick patio with silver tumbled travertine pavers, putting up a new fence with a blue barn door as a folly, adding two fountains and a wall at the back made from salvaged brick. "Todd brought us the idea of arranging the space into connected rooms, and creating the idea of a journey to move from space to space," Ms. Kawash said. "The rear is totally inviting now it's shady in the hottest part of the day, with the burble of the fountain to drown out all the city noise, and the trees and plantings block out all the other houses." Closest to the house is the dining area and grill, so it's easy to run in and out during meals. In the center, there are sofas and chairs for lounging, surrounded by native flowers that draw bees and butterflies "an unexpected bonus," Ms. Kawash said. "I'm hoping we can attract even more butterflies this year. There is something incredibly peaceful and life affirming about surrendering to the rhythms and activities of the insects." Of course, none of this was cheap. The pavers alone cost 12,000 installed, said Ms. Kawash, who declined to provide the total cost. Instead, she offered, "I would say, more than we expected, but totally worth it." A TRIANGULAR BALCONY To maximize a small (78 square foot) terrace with an odd shape (triangular) on the Upper East Side, Amy Wechsler worked with Kim Hoyt, an architect and landscape architect, to create furniture that fit its tight angles. "I wanted a small oasis with plants and a seating area," said Dr. Wechsler, 47, a dermatologist who lives in a four bedroom apartment with her two teenage children. A built in sofa with integrated side tables allows seating for three. A cube with a reversible top (a cushion on one side and a wood surface on the other) can serve as either a coffee table or an extra seat. Planters that line the perimeter preserve the river view. And a synthetic sisal carpet, typically used on boats, was cut to fit the space and hide the concrete floor. While the upfront investment was substantial (about 18,450), the transformation was worth it, Dr. Wechsler said. Before, the terrace was an "ugly, empty space," she said, but now, "I spend a lot of time sitting out there." A CONCRETE PATIO In 2015, Jaylaan Ahmad Llewellyn moved into a two bedroom ground floor duplex in Park Slope, Brooklyn, largely for its private outdoor patio. But at just under 250 square feet and surrounded by 10 foot concrete walls, it was the opposite of inviting. "To be honest, it looked like what I would think a prison exercise pen would look like," said Ms. Ahmad Llewellyn, 38, who is completing a master's degree in clinical psychology after working in the entertainment industry. "It felt like a concrete box." But Ms. Ahmad Llewellyn knew it had potential. Another plus: "Having small, elderly dogs who were used to warm weather and outdoor space" Mo and Lala, Ms. Ahmad Llewellyn's 17 year old miniature Dobermans "the ability to have a safe place for them to go outside off leash when the weather is bad was a major draw." "The green roof was a major element of what we wanted for many reasons: to give the feeling of a yard, while still on a roof; to add interest in what otherwise could have been a bare, hallway feeling space; for the green aspects," said Mrs. Gensler, 35, who works in home decor and e commerce. "We also were keen on hiding elements of the roof next to us and even blocking some sound from an air vent on top of that building." Working with Cara White, the founder of Elevations Urban Landscape Design in Brooklyn, they splurged on a built in grill and prep area with a couple of stovetop burners and a refrigerator/freezer. To create a shady spot for dining, they erected a pergola with benches with built in storage. "We also had plans to put horizontal fencing between our deck and our neighbors', but truthfully never got around to it," Mrs. Gensler said. "Plus, we liked our neighbors, so didn't mind being able to chat across the grill." The couple have since moved, because of a job relocation. But as Mr. Gensler noted, "I can't help but think it absolutely helped with the sale." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Re "Anyone but Trump? Not So Fast" (column, Jan. 25): Bret Stephens argues that neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren would be sufficiently better than President Trump to deserve his vote. While acknowledging that President Trump is reckless and has repeatedly sought to do the wrong thing, he argues that Democrats must not nominate a reckless (i.e., too far left) candidate of their own, or "none of the above" will be a viable option. But Mr. Stephens focuses on economic issues. Last week the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight the closest it has ever been because of the twin existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change. When it comes to whose finger we want on the nuclear button, "Anyone but Trump" is a strategy much more likely to improve our chances of survival. Bret Stephens's final two paragraphs should be required reading for Democrats. He advocates "attracting middle of the road support," encouraging Democrats to "eschew polarization for persuasion and ideology for pragmatism." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The full year growth number was below the country's growth rate during the financial crisis in 2008 9, when India grew at 6.7 percent. The last time India grew at a slower pace was in the 2002 3 fiscal year, when it registered a 4 percent pace. Analysts say it will be harder for Indian policy makers to respond to a slowing economy now than in the financial crisis more than three years ago. At that time, the government's finances were relatively healthier and it was able to spend money to stimulate the economy. Now, however, New Delhi is desperately trying to cut its fiscal deficit from 5.9 percent of its gross domestic product to 5.1 percent. Also, the Reserve Bank of India has less room to cut short term interest rates to stimulate lending because inflation remains high, at about 7 percent. Many analysts have been arguing that the best way for policy makers to respond to slowing growth is further liberalization of India's economy, large parts of which are still heavily regulated. The government could, for instance, make it easier for foreigners to invest in industries like retail, aviation and insurance that need more capital. But the government, led by the Indian National Congress Party, has struggled to pass unpopular measures in recent months because of opposition from its coalition partners and political rivals. Last year, it indefinitely deferred a plan to allow foreign supermarkets into the country after a coalition partner threatened to pull out if the change went through. On Thursday, much of India was shut down in protest against a sharp increase in petroleum prices by government owned oil companies. Policy makers said the increase was needed to offset the rising cost of oil imports, which have become more expensive as India's currency, the rupee, has fallen sharply against the dollar. In New Delhi and Mumbai, roads normally clogged with traffic were largely empty Thursday afternoon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The bar that is the principal location for "Sweat," Lynn Nottage's bracingly topical portrait of American dreams deferred in working class Pennsylvania, is a place where friendships go to die. Sure, it looks awfully cozy and welcoming, and you can see why its denizens regard it as a second home. But this much trafficked watering hole also exerts a dangerous gravitational force, the kind that holds people in place when they should be moving on. In "Sweat," which opened on Sunday night at Studio 54, the feeling of familiarity that pervades the play's central setting gradually shades into contempt among those who drink there for themselves, for one another and for the life they cannot escape. As bars often are in old fashioned and socially conscious dramas like "Sweat," this one is a microcosm for a larger world. That includes not only Reading, Pa., the steel town where the play is set, but also a beleaguered part of the United States in which jobs are under siege and identity is fraying. It is foolish to underestimate the anger in places like these, as the most recent presidential election confirmed. Though it takes place in 2000 and 2008, and one of its characters swears he will never vote again, "Sweat" is the first work from a major American playwright to summon, with empathy and without judgment, the nationwide anxiety that helped put Donald J. Trump in the White House. Those traits are definitely on display in "Sweat," which is directed by Kate Whoriskey and features a sturdy nine member ensemble. Ms. Nottage did intensive research for this play, and it shows, perhaps more than it should. Though it is steeped in social combustibility, "Sweat" often feels too conscientiously assembled, a point counterpoint presentation in which every disaffected voice is allowed its how I got this way monologue. And this thoughtful, careful play only seldom acquires the distance erasing passion of Ms. Nottage's "Ruined," the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner about female casualties of the Congolese civil war. The play is set both on the eve and in the twilight of George W. Bush's presidency. It begins in 2008 in scenes that switch between a parole officer's interrogations of two young men recently released from prison and flashes back to 2000, to follow the road to the crime for which they were incarcerated. The parolees are Jason (Will Pullen) and Chris (Khris Davis), and they were once the closest of friends. So were Jason's mother, Tracey (Johanna Day), and Chris's mother, Cynthia (Michelle Wilson). With the hard drinking Jessie (Alison Wright), these women form a triumvirate that gathers regularly at their hangout to celebrate one another's birthdays and swap workplace gossip and grievances. (The unobtrusively on target set is by John Lee Beatty, with costumes in the same vein by Jennifer Moeller.) Mothers, sons and Jessie work for the town's venerable steel tubing factory. So did Stan (James Colby), the bartender, but he lost his job after a leg maiming accident. Everyone complains about the factory, but the work it has provided for generations of Reading residents shapes the rhyme and reason of their shared world. There are rumors of imminent layoffs, though, which grow louder during the scenes set in 2000, along with speculation that the entire plant might relocate to Mexico. (The Nafta treaty is invoked with four letter opprobrium.) Such talk brings out Darwinian survival instincts, especially once Cynthia gets a job in management at the factory. Aspirations to another life may be common among these people, but such hopes are widely resented when they show signs of becoming reality. That Cynthia is black and Tracey and Jessie are white becomes an issue in a way it never was before. So does the presence of Stan's helper, Oscar (Carlo Alban), whose family comes from Colombia. There is little doubt that when the rage festering among them fully erupts, no one will emerge unscarred. The shriveled, drug addled figure of Cynthia's estranged husband, Brucie (John Earl Jelks), looms as a possible prophecy of everyone else's fate. Until the play's penultimate scene, "Sweat" keeps the nature of its climactic act of violence a secret, and the sense of mystery is underscored by questions posed and unanswered between mothers and sons, and the men and their parole officer, Evan (Lance Coadie Williams) in the 2008 scenes. At the same time, all the characters in "Sweat" are given to elaborate passages of exposition, laying out the histories of their families, their employers, their city. Some of these, such as Tracey's speech about the devaluing of manual labor, have a poignant lyricism. But they are passages that turn those delivering these monologues into social case studies, a status that the bluntly drawn performances do not always combat. The soliloquies might just as easily belong to a series of human interest news features as to a play. You appreciate Ms. Nottage's insistence that we be able to trace exactly the sources of her character's unhappiness. But a little more indirection would be more dramatically satisfying. "Sweat" is best at its muddiest, when love and hate, and the urges to strike out and to comfort, teeter in precipitous balance. That's when Ms. Nottage's characters, and the cast members who embody them, emerge in their full tragic humanity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Anna Franz, a biochemist at the University of Bristol in Britain, was studying how a fruit fly's immune cells respond when the insect is wounded. Under the microscope, she noticed cloudlike shadows moving toward a lesion. Because of their size, she suspected the shadows might be fat cells, which can be five to 10 times bigger than other cells found in fruit flies. But how could these cells which are conventionally believed to have no ability to move themselves around make such an unlikely journey? And why? Biologists have long believed that fat cells lead sedentary lives, unable to move themselves around the body once they get settled. But new research suggests that fruit fly fat cells have greater mobility, and are therefore more helpful in an emergency than previously thought. And that could have implications for how we think about fat cells in other organisms, including ourselves. Dr. Franz and two colleagues used lasers to make small lacerations in the thoraxes of fruit flies, where very few fat cells reside. To their surprise, they found that a handful of fat cells not only arrived at the wound within minutes, but performed vital functions once they got there. First, the fat cells used their mass to plug the wound, then pushed harmful debris to the edges, where immune cells were waiting to dispose of them. "It's like a cleaner, sweeping the stuff to the side," said Paul Martin, a co author of the study, which was published Monday in the journal Developmental Cell. "Then, the immune cells are all hanging out at the edge clearing the debris. So it's a collaborative effort." The fat cells also produced an antimicrobial substance that may help stave off infection as the fruit flies heal. Though the fat cells did seem to be moving themselves, their means of locomotion was unusual. Cells typically move by using tiny filaments that help them push and pull off other objects. But the fat cells appeared to swim through fluid by flexing and relaxing a pair of proteins, actin and myosin, which are found in muscle fibers. "Imagine you've got a partially blown up balloon in your hand, and you squash part of it so it escapes upwards out of your hand," Dr. Martin said. "The cell was squashing itself forward." READ MORE: Trillions of Flies Can't All Be Bad To confirm that the actin and myosin were facilitating the movement, the researchers created genetically modified versions of the cells in which those proteins were inactive. Those cells were not able to move on their own. How the cells know to go to a wound is still not clear. But the researchers did rule out the most obvious explanation: that they are summoned to the wound by immune cells. "That's definitely not the case, because if we delete immune cells from the fly, the fat cells still go to the wound," Dr. Martin said. Other studies have noted that fat cells might assist with tissue repair, and there is growing consensus that their role goes beyond providing insulation and energy, as was once believed. For now, Dr. Martin and his team are focusing on whether fat cells in other vertebrates are also capable of locomotion, a finding that could generate excitement among weight loss professionals. "There are quite a lot of people on this planet that would like their fat cells to move from one place to the other," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
They wore lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender slogans, and cowboy fringe, polo shirts and jackets bedazzled with Swarovski crystals. There were Afros and head wraps, and bodies covered in body paint or nothing at all. They danced to layered, percussive beats, the music vibrant and pulsing. "I'm bubbling inside, but I'm trying to act calm," said Tolulope Oye, 21, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, who wore yellow track pants embroidered with the words "Never Forget Where You Came From." As a Nigerian immigrant growing up in Columbus, Ohio, she had dreamed of attending this party since she was a teenager. "I've been looking for the perfect niche," she said, "and I think I found it today." It was the Memorial Day edition of Everyday People, a socially conscious daytime party that celebrates the African diaspora, held at Output, a club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Started in 2012 as a monthly brunch on the Lower East Side, the parties now draw thousands and are held in other cities, including Birmingham, Ala., and Chicago, as well as in Africa and the Caribbean. The mission is to celebrate the diversity of black culture African and American, immigrant and first generation through community, music and food. It is designed to be a safe space, a proud space, a space to be anything you want to be, said Saada Ahmed, 29, the party's creative director and a model for brands like J. Crew and Nike. "People can put their guard down," Ms. Ahmed said. "You go to the South and you see L.G.B.T.Q. kids knowing they can be themselves and no one will hurt them. Daytime parties mean Muslim women" Ms. Ahmed included "feel more comfortable." It wasn't so long ago that Ms. Ahmed, who grew up in Atlanta, was new to New York, arriving on a Chinatown bus with no job and few connections. Like many of the young people who now flock to her parties, she was driven to prove herself. Between various sales and production assistant gigs, she started hanging out with East African creative types and eventually met her future partners: Roble Ali, a chef who later starred in a Bravo reality show, "Chef Roble and Company," and Mohamed Hamad, an electrical engineer turned D.J. "There were great parties at Bagatelle and Lavo, but they didn't really appeal to our group of people, our group of friends," Mr. Ali, 33, said. "A lot of these people are millennials that are striving and may not have hit their financial stride." Though he and Mr. Hamad were already established in their careers, Ms. Ahmed, who then did online sales for Phillip Lim, was not. "I felt lost," she said. "I didn't think I was good at anything." Working with Mr. Hamad and Mr. Ali gave her confidence. Soon 150 people were coming in for brunch. "And they didn't want to leave at 5 p.m., so we went until 8," Mr. Ali said. Eventually, the parties became too big for the hotel, so they were moved a block south to the DL, a three story event space on nearby Delancey Street. The rising popularity of Afrobeats, Mr. Hamad said, is symbolic of the growing popularity of African culture among African Americans, which is recognized not just by those who attend Everyday People parties, but by brands like Bacardi, Nike and Samsung that are marketing to them. Zandile Blay, 34, a journalist from Jersey City and the editorial director of OkayAfrica, recently spent time in Nigeria. It was the first time, she said, that she saw "en masse so many smart, well educated, focused, vibrant, happy, stylish youth that looked like me." The first time she witnessed a similar scene in the United States was at an Everyday People party. "It makes me realize that magic that black magic is not only on the continent," she said. "At this party, you get to see this is real and it's happening in America." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Each week, the Open Thread newsletter will offer a look from across The New York Times at the forces that shape the dress codes we share, with Vanessa Friedman as your personal shopper. The latest newsletter appears here. To receive it in your inbox, register here. Good Friday afternoon. It's been a pretty explosive news week, from the Harvey Weinstein scandal to the California wildfires. Indeed, it's hard to concentrate on anything else. I wanted to bring up two notable events, however, which happened with very little fanfare but should not be overlooked, because they both pose interesting ontological questions: First, Gucci announced it was going fur free of as of next year (note: that does not mean the brand will stop using leather or shearling) because fur is not "modern." Second, Carlyle, the megalith of a private equity company that has stakes in everything from Hertz to Dunkin' Donuts, from Beats to Moncler, bought a 50 percent stake in Supreme, which valued the company at 1 billion. Yes, Supreme: the...well, supremely cool street/skate brand famous for its limited merch drops that have kids lining up around the block for hours; its popularity on the teen resale market; and the ability to get people to pay 30 for Supreme labeled bricks. (That last one is not a joke, though it seemed so to many when they went on sale. Guess who had the last laugh?) Anyway, the news raises the perennial issue that surrounds brands that manage to capture that elusive quality known as "cool": Is it possible to retain this kind of aura when you are funded by an establishment organization that has growth on its mind? I'd be interested in any thoughts on the matter, so please write back and let us know just as I'd be interested in your thoughts on whether you agree with Gucci about the modern thing. After all, there are those, like me, who think Gucci's great success has been in part because it embraces clothes that are a glorious trawl through the entire vintage spectrum. So what exactly does "modern" mean in this context? Another question for you, dear readers: What do you think of the decision by Coach Inc. (that would be the parent company of Coach the brand) to rename itself Tapestry? Good choice or bad? Personally, I do think it's a little cheesy, but I'm also glad they didn't go the made up route (Mondelez) or the abbreviation one (Tronc). And I can't wait to hear what the Weinstein Company chooses as its new name. While we bide our time, take a peek at our recap of bridal fashion week; discover the man who inherited the estates of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge; and get the inside story on what you'll see if you get addicted to the new "Dynasty" series. And have a good weekend! The Story Behind the Image "Dallas" vs. "Dynasty": For years, the prime time soaps vied to beat each other in the ratings; more recently, each has gotten the reboot treatment. But which show was the best? Who was the villain you loved more, J.R. or Alexis? Which had better cliffhangers, guest stars and clothes? Two New York Times journalists duke it out. Every week on Open Thread, Vanessa will answer a reader's fashion related question, which you can send to her anytime via email or Twitter. Questions are edited and condensed. Q: Like many women I know, the minute I arrive home I immediately change. Firstly, because I don't want to wrinkle or stain my nice "street" clothes while lounging around at home, and secondly, because I want to achieve maximum comfort in my home. However, this does not mean I want to look like a slob. What can you recommend to wear that is stylish, comfortable and doesn't break the bank? Sara Elizabeth, Barcelona, Spain A: I think I am an anomaly here, as I don't change when I get home (I do take my shoes off), in part because comfort is also a requirement for me when it comes to workwear, and also because I am too lazy. However, after spending a few weeks road testing athleisure wear for a story a while ago, I do understand where you are coming from all that Lycra is so comfy! and can suggest some alternatives. In fact, this is exactly where athleisure, perhaps the worst word ever invented in fashion, actually starts to make sense. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Before the start of Heartbeat Opera's production of Weber's "Der Freischutz," which opened on Wednesday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in Manhattan, Louisa Proske, who conceived and co directed the staging, told the audience that the mission of this small but ambitious company was to present "radical adaptations" of familiar works. On that count, this inventive "Freischutz" delivered. The story was shifted from a rustic community in mid 1600s Bohemia to a town in contemporary Texas. Yet the updating was actually the least radical element. "Der Freischutz," which loosely translates as "The Marksman" and runs at Baruch through Dec. 14, takes place in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War. It is a culture in which hunting and marksmanship are rituals of manhood; where rowdy gatherings at the local tavern and sentimental paeans to healthy rural life go hand in hand; and where citizens are prone to superstition and see evil forces at work everywhere. Weber's main character, Max, is a decent but weak willed assistant forester who wants to inherit the top job and with it the de facto leadership of the town from Kuno, as well as marry Kuno's winsome daughter, Agathe. But first he must prove himself in a shooting contest. In this staging, Kuno became the town's sheriff, with Max his earnest but bumbling deputy, routinely subjected to bullying by the community's young alpha men. Many opera stagings update works in just this way. But Heartbeat Opera is far more unusual in its tweaking (and trimming) of librettos and its reorchestration of scores. Passages of spoken dialogue in this "Freischutz" have been rewritten and are delivered with salty American slang. And the music director, Daniel Schlosberg, has effectively transformed Weber's colorful score for seven players, some on multiple instruments. But that's not all. For Weber's most original scene, which takes place in the haunted Wolf's Glen, Mr. Schlosberg has transformed the orchestration into a collage of electronic and acoustic sounds, in effect a recomposition, set here in the smoky, mysterious Wolf Canyon. Why not? "Der Freischutz," a seminal German opera first performed in 1821, remains a rarity in America. Weber dared to mix opulent arias and ensembles with catchy songs and dances, hints of folk tunes and spoken drama, all to conjure a world of both everyday life and fantasy. Heartbeat's production team wanted to delve into the work's disturbing, timely subtexts by streamlining and modernizing it. They succeed. The most daring adaptation concerns the character of Kaspar, Max's rival, who has made a Faustian pact with a devilish spirit, Samiel (here played by the sinewy dancer Azumi O E). Heartbeat's Kaspar is a returning Iraq war veteran a brutish and maniacal but surprisingly sympathetic character, sung on Wednesday by the robust bass baritone Derrell Acon. (The main roles are double cast for the run.) Weber's Kaspar draws on dark spirits to lure Max into a web of darkness. Heartbeat's version, by contrast, is a cynical realist who knows firsthand what killing involves. Where he has been, marksmanship is not just proof of manliness, but also means of survival. The husky voiced tenor Ian Koziara made a vulnerable Max, hamstrung by bullying and desperate to find some means any means to prevail. The soprano Summer Hassan brought an ample, dark hued voice to Agathe. Quentin Oliver Lee as Kilian, a big shot townsman, and Kevin McGuire, as Kuno, were both excellent. The bright voiced soprano Jana McIntyre was wonderful as Annchen, Agathe's sassy cousin. While the dialogue is spoken in English, all the music is sung in the original German. By keeping the music in the original language and style, the contrast between American ambience and classic Romanticism made a powerful impact. Here was a rare presentation of the work that would define 19th century German opera, made topical in a way that both respected Weber and stretched him. Continues, with two casts, through Dec. 14 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; heartbeatopera.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
THE IMPROBABLE WENDELL WILLKIE The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order By David Levering Lewis Illustrated. 371 pp. Liveright Publishing. 28.95. Late in World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt sharply rebuked an aide for making a derogatory quip about Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt's Republican challenger in the 1940 election. "Don't you ever say anything like that around here again," the president snapped. "Don't even think it. ... He was a godsend to this country when we needed him most." Coming from Roosevelt, never known for magnanimity to his foes, this was a remarkable statement. It was also true. The 1940 presidential campaign coincided with one of the most perilous times in world history. Hitler's Germany had just conquered most of western Europe, and Britain, which now stood alone against the Nazis, knew that its only hope for survival was aid from a then neutral America. Although Roosevelt wanted to help, he was in the midst of seeking an unprecedented and controversial third term, and was wary of the political fallout in a country deeply divided over possible American involvement in the war. Most Republican members of Congress were die hard isolationists who, keenly aware of Roosevelt's political vulnerability, opposed his cautious, halting efforts to aid the British. But their presidential candidate did not follow their lead. Where the war was concerned, Wendell Willkie told the 1940 Republican convention, "we here are not Republicans alone, but Americans." To the fury of his party's leadership, he turned those words into action. David Levering Lewis's book, "The Improbable Wendell Willkie," is aptly titled. Like a shooting star, Willkie burned brightly, if briefly, over this country's political landscape, leaving behind an astonishing legacy of bipartisanship that had an outsize impact on the outcome of the war. In the words of the columnist Walter Lippmann, "Second only to the Battle of Britain, the sudden rise of and nomination of Willkie was the decisive event ... which made it possible to rally the free world when it was almost conquered." 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. Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of W. E. B. Du Bois, offers an insightful, compelling portrait of this political neophyte from the Midwest a registered Democrat until 1939 who stunned his newly adopted party and the nation by snatching the nomination away from the front runners Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft and then sabotaged his own campaign by putting country above party. The rumpled, ebullient Willkie first burst onto the national scene in 1933, when as head of one of the biggest electric power utilities in the country, he fought the Roosevelt administration over its plans to replace his company's monopoly in much of the South with a bold new federal program called the Tennessee Valley Authority. He lost that fight but emerged from it a respected national figure, a voice for moderate, middle class Americans, notably businessmen, who felt that the federal government had grown too big, powerful and disdainful of private enterprise. At the same time, Willkie criticized big business's shortcomings and supported a number of New Deal reforms, including a minimum wage, a limit on workers' hours, unemployment insurance and collective bargaining. When World War II began in 1939, he warned about the dangers that a German controlled Europe would pose for America and in 1940 called for aid to Britain. Although Willkie's positions were anathema to most party regulars, they appealed to a small but influential group of moderate, internationalist Republicans, many of them from the Northeast. They included Wall Street lawyers and financiers, heads of major media companies and a sprinkling of party officials and political strategists. Alarmed by the strident isolationism of the leading presidential candidates, they reached out to Willkie as an alternative. Lewis is particularly good at showing how Willkie's implausible victory at the 1940 convention, often described as "the miracle of Philadelphia," was in fact a carefully planned and skillfully organized stealth offensive by his well connected supporters. While political types worked behind the scenes to organize a huge grass roots campaign, newspaper and magazine publishers particularly Henry Luce, owner of Life and Time ran adulatory pieces about Willkie, calling on their readers to bypass the Republican bosses and make him the nominee. Lewis astutely notes the fact that although Willkie was still regarded as a dark horse when he arrived in Philadelphia, "the entire convention machinery belonged to the Willkie team." On the convention's final night, after more than eight nail biting hours of voting, he emerged the winner. As shocking as this coup was, Willkie's cooperation with Roosevelt just weeks after his nomination was even more staggering. In the summer of 1940, the White House was considering a plan to send 50 old destroyers to Britain to help protect its shipping from German submarines, but Roosevelt refused to sign off on it unless Willkie promised not to make it a campaign issue. Willkie agreed, setting off a Republican firestorm that escalated when, in his campaign kickoff speech, he pledged to support legislation to create America's first peacetime draft. The bill was political dynamite: If Willkie had opposed it, it almost certainly would have failed. Thanks to its passage, some 1.65 million men were in uniform when America finally entered the war in December 1941. Although Willkie dropped his interventionist stance in the heat of the campaign and accused Roosevelt of trying to plunge the country into war, he returned to bipartisanship after his defeat in what turned out to be the closest election in more than two decades. Of Roosevelt, he declared in a national radio broadcast: "He is your president. He is my president. ... We will support him." In February 1941, Willkie went before Congress to champion Roosevelt's proposed Lend Lease program, which would provide military aid to Britain and other countries fighting Germany. His support helped sway public and congressional opinion, and the controversial bill was approved. Like the draft, Lend Lease ended up playing a crucial role in the Allies' ultimate victory. Willkie's stand on Lend Lease was the last straw for the party bosses, who had long regarded him as a "Republican Quisling" and a stooge for Roosevelt. His political career was over. Less than four years later, on Oct. 8, 1944, he died of a heart attack at 52. Over the last seven decades, Willkie has largely disappeared into the mists of history, recalled, if at all, merely as one of Roosevelt's defeated rivals. As Lewis makes clear, he deserves so much more, not only for his crucial contributions to American unity in World War II but also for his lifelong commitment to civil rights and intense opposition to racism. In the 1940 campaign, he blasted Roosevelt for his foot dragging in fighting discrimination against African Americans and promised, if elected, to ban segregation in the military and civil service, as well as in education and housing. He also supported legislation to crack down on lynching and ban the poll tax, used to prevent blacks in the South from voting. When Willkie died, a young black leader called him "the most courageously outspoken champion of the rights of my people since Lincoln." In our own polarized age, Wendell Willkie serves as a poignant reminder of what can happen when a political leader steps up to do what is right, defying his party and putting the interests of his country and its people ahead of ambition and partisan advantage. In his repeated calls for tolerance and unity, Willkie noted that "our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. ... For God's sake, let us not tear it asunder. For no man knows, once it is destroyed, where or when man will find its protective warmth again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
CarbFix, a pilot program at Iceland's Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Station, seeks to tackle climate change by injecting greenhouse gasses into the ground for permanent storage. This kind of futuristic structures basically cover geothermal boreholes that specifically here on this site we had we re inject C02 and H2S gases produced by the geothermal power plant, we reinject these gases into the geologic subsurface for permanent storage Why are we reinjecting C02 and H2S here exactly at this place, first C02 and H2S are greenhouse gases so they produce global climate change. But, we inject it here in Iceland because we are basically standing on really exciting rock, so called basaltic rock, it's a volcanic rock rich in Calcium Magnesium, and these gases react with this rock and basically enable us to convert that C02 gas back into limestone which is calcium carbonate, so it is permanent storage and it can not leak out of the ground into the atmosphere. So that's the big idea here, we're tried to solve. Card: Iceland is experimenting with a way to store greenhouse gas emissions. The project known as CarbFix could serve as part of a solution to climate change. Eta: We think that our method can be applied elsewhere in our fight against global warming and climate change.the model then predicted that the C02 would turn into rock within 5 years of injection and at that time no one believed the models that it was outrageous, there's no way that it could happen this quickly but then it turns out it happened even faster, as mostly all of it was mineralized within one year Card: So far the CarbFix project has sequestered 10,000 tons of C02. Card:A tiny fraction of the 36 gigatons of C02 the world released in 2014. END HENGILL, Iceland In a cramped work trailer not far from Iceland's largest geothermal power plant, a researcher pored over a box of core samples cylinders of rock that a drilling rig had pulled from deep underground just a few minutes before. In a test that began in 2012, scientists had injected hundreds of tons of water and carbon dioxide gas 1,500 feet down into layers of porous basaltic rock, the product of ancient lava flows from the nearby Hengill volcano. Now the researcher, Sandra Snaebjornsdottir, a doctoral student at the University of Iceland, was looking for signs that the CO had combined with elements in the basalt and become calcite, a solid crystalline mineral. In short, she wanted to see if the gas had turned to stone. "We have some calcites here," she said, pointing to a smattering of white particles in the otherwise dark gray rock samples. "We might want to take a better look at them later." The work is part of a 10 million project called CarbFix, which is developing an alternative way to store some of the carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and industries. When that carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it traps heat, making it the biggest contributor to global warming. So to help stave off the worst impacts of climate change, experts say, billions of tons of CO may have to be captured and stored underground. But doing so is costly. And with little in the way of economic incentives to spur carbon storage, there are only about a dozen large scale projects operating around the world, storing a total of less than 30 million tons a year, according to the Global CCS Institute, which promotes the technology. Only one of these is at a power plant the Boundary Dam project in Saskatchewan, Canada, which started capturing and storing emissions from one of its coal fired boilers last fall. Boundary Dam and the other projects operate roughly the same way: Carbon dioxide gas, highly compressed so that it acts like a liquid, is injected into a formation, usually sandstone and often an old oil or gas field. Impermeable rock layers above the storage zone should, in theory, keep the CO trapped indefinitely, but because the gas remains buoyant, there is a risk that it will move upward through cracks and eventually bubble back into the atmosphere. The CarbFix project differs from this conventional approach by using water along with carbon dioxide, and by injecting them into volcanic rocks. The technique is designed to exploit the ability of CO to react with the rocks and turn into solid minerals. But whether the approach will prove to be commercially viable and lead to wider adoption of carbon storage, particularly on the huge scale that will be required to help stem the forces of climate change, remains uncertain. In the CarbFix process, the injected water and CO mix inside the well as if it were a giant geological soda machine. The resulting carbonated water, which is acidic, helps break down the rock, releasing calcium and other elements that combine with the carbon and oxygen from the CO . Because the gas, in effect, disappears, "we don't like to call it storage," said Edda Aradottir, who manages the project and works for Reykjavik Energy, the utility that runs the geothermal plant and is another CarbFix partner. The preferred term, she said, is mineral carbonation. But injecting huge amounts of water along with the CO 25 tons of liquid for each ton of gas adds to the cost. CarbFix scientists have estimated that transportation and injection could cost about 17 per ton of CO , about twice the cost of transporting and injecting the gas alone. (These costs are on top of the much higher costs of capturing and separating CO from a power plant smokestack.) But Sigurdur Gislason, a geochemist at the University of Iceland and the project's chief scientist, said the CarbFix approach might have a cost advantage over the long term. Because of the risk of leakage, a conventional storage site would have to be monitored, potentially for hundreds of years, at a cost that is difficult to estimate. A CarbFix site, with its stable minerals, could be left alone. "No one ever talks about monitoring," Dr. Gislason said. "This is where we score very highly." Mineral carbonation can occur in many kinds of rock, but often it is extremely slow. The CarbFix approach accelerates the process by injecting into basalt, a very reactive rock. And few places in the world can top Iceland for basalt; the country is made almost entirely of it. The island sits atop the Mid Atlantic Ridge, the boundary between two of the planet's largest tectonic plates, where basaltic magma rises from deep within the earth to form new crust. What Iceland lacks, however, are significant CO emissions. Geothermal generating stations, like the Hellisheidi plant across a road from the CarbFix site, do emit some CO it and other gases bubble up naturally along with the hot water and steam used to generate electricity but the amounts are only about 5 percent of the emissions from an equivalent natural gas plant. "We can never do large scale CO injection" in Iceland, Dr. Aradottir said. But because of the geology, the country is an ideal place to demonstrate to potential users like power companies that the process works. (Since the initial test, CarbFix has scaled up its process and is now injecting 10,000 tons of gas per year from the plant at a nearby site.) Large basalt deposits are found in other locales, including the Pacific Northwest in the United States. There, at a site in the Columbia River basin near Wallula, Wash., a similar test project the only other one in the world is also in an analysis phase, having completed the injection of 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide in 2013. The project, a partnership of several companies and Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit research and development organization that operates the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, might best be described as a hybrid between conventional CO storage and the CarbFix approach. Only carbon dioxide is injected, said Pete McGrail, a research fellow at the laboratory who leads the project. That helps to keep costs in line with conventional CO storage. And the basalt has dense, impermeable layers that keep the buoyant gas contained. But because basalt is so reactive, after a relatively short time a matter of years, not centuries most of the CO should be mineralized, making long term monitoring unnecessary. (With the CarbFix process, once the CO is dissolved in water, it is no longer buoyant, so there is no need for an impermeable layer.) Like the CarbFix researchers, Dr. McGrail was surprised by how reactive basalt was when he conducted some initial experiments in the early 2000s. "We had a conventional view that reactions would be slow," he said, as they are in sandstone and other rocks. "But much to our surprise, when we cracked open those samples, it was one of those game changer moments." In Iceland, the detailed analyses of the core samples should conclusively determine if the CarbFix approach works. But already the researchers have a strong indication that their technique is successful. A submersible pump installed at the bottom of a nearby well to monitor the injection process broke down twice. Both times when it was hauled up for repairs it was covered in calcite. "That's basically the proof," Dr. Aradottir said. And given that the economics of carbon storage are already poor, it is difficult to see many companies taking on the added expense of injecting water, too. "If you're looking at it from the point of view of, 'Would a fossil fuel power plant choose to sequester CO by carbonating water?' no, that doesn't make any sense," said Elizabeth Burton, general manager for the Americas of the Global CCS Institute. But if the plant has to re inject wastewater anyway, "maybe the economics would work out," she said. Dr. Matter and the other CarbFix scientists are confident that mineralization will be an answer, at least for some efforts to fight climate change. "The problem is big enough," Dr. Matter said. "We need many solutions." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Re "U.S. Quietly Fears Virus's Daily Toll Will Soon Double" (front page, May 5): This must be a typo, I thought: "about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of May." And if those projections bear out, that would mean the number of those contracting Covid 19 would be almost sevenfold what we are experiencing today. How can that be acceptable? We have lived under the weight of this disease for months, first slowly, then all at once. The Trump administration misunderstood, misled, missed the neon warning signs from other countries. Whatever the reason, the federal government has failed miserably to date. But to see the numbers of what may well occur as we lessen restrictions on vast portions of our population is to actively invite death into our homes. How, in light of this analysis, can the president or anyone else on the state or federal level advocate opening up our doors and the floodgates? The concern that hospitals would be overburdened and unable to care for those gravely ill that haunting image we have tried to eradicate as a possibility would become a near certain reality. To ignore the warnings in these projections would be worse than irresponsible. It would be criminal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
What You See Is Not What You Think PARIS So there we were, up early on a Sunday morning as the fashion season entered its final few days, caravaning out yet again to an echoing space in the banlieues of Paris, entering a room scented by the nausea inducing aroma of freshly laid tar and cast in a blood red glow, assaulted by strobe lights and pounding chords. Yeah, we know we're all way out of our comfort zone these days it's been a theme of show after show for the last three weeks. Tell me something new, Mary Lou. Then Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga did. Playing with many of the same subjects that have preoccupied other designers and turned into something of the themes of the season the bourgeoisie, the power woman, glamour he tweaked them and twisted them in a kind of grim and kind of gorgeous and entirely unrelenting stream of the not so mundane for both women and men. It began with a black trouser suit, the shoulders pinched, just a little, into a stiff little puff like a pair of pricked up ears. Segued into short pussy bow silk dresses, some with an Eiffel Tower print (Mr. Gvasalia loves a bit of postcard kitsch). Then came great coats, in bright, primary shades of red, green, yellow and blue, with the shoulders rolled upward to peak at the back of the neck and curve down from there. A seam traced the back from elbow to elbow, like the line of a phantom stole, hugging the arms in. Silk blouses tucked into crisp A line skirts hung from a ring that orbited the neck, out of which came peaked collars framing the face (ribbed knits got the same treatment). A plush shearling had big puffed sleeves and a collar, both dropped at the back to mimic the fall of a coat as it slides off the shoulders. There were totes cum brown shopping bags with melting smiley faces and little cross body numbers with more of that Paris souvenir cheese. Just when you thought it was over, something else came down the pipe (or out from backstage) that made you lean in closer, look and look again. At which point you might realize that what you thought you saw was not exactly what was going on. That's certainly true enough. Welcome to life in 2019. It's about time everyone started to pay attention. Now you have something to wear. This has long been the guiding principle at Sacai, where Chitose Abe has her own form of splice and dice methodology, which she uses to subvert both shape and stereotype. Sometimes she can get lost in her own puzzlemaking but this was not one of those times; it was, rather, a cleverly feminine reclamation of the military tailoring that has been ubiquitous this season, in great coats or trench coats or denim jackets, transforming it into looks both hourglass and empire via couture techniques. And it has been the province of Thom Browne, who, 10 years after he first came to Europe to show his shrunken men's suiting at the Pitti trade show in Florence, doubled down on his twin trademarks (the prepster in the gray flannel suit; trompe l'oeil dressing) by creating a self reflexive conversation between the two. For every politely below the knee pleated skirt and jacket and shirt in classic pinstripes or plaid; for every duck embroidered pair of red, white and blue patchwork pants or cream cable knit; or shrunken tuxedo with an intarsia portrait of the monocle wearing Lady Una Troubridge by the 1920s Paris based American artist Romaine Brooks, he produced its twin: a round necked, long sleeved, mid calf sheath dress made to fool the eye by etching its ties and shadows and layers out of an indecipherable amalgamation of micro beading, metallic bullion thread embroidery, minute feathers and chiffon weave. The work was extraordinary you could spend hours trying to parse how it came together and singular, and raised some pointed questions about gender, uniforms and preconceptions. But Mr. Browne has made this point, and this joke, before. It's worth repeating, and he does it beautifully, but maybe not ad infinitum. Admittedly, subverting the familiar to make us confront our own assumptions is a complicated proposition, and sometimes a shoulder treatment is just a shoulder treatment. Though in fashion, as in most designs for living, not often. Such was the case at Givenchy, anyway, where Clare Waight Keller also delved into the power suit and the question of silhouette, belting her longer jackets atop trousers and then rounding the shoulders, broadening them, dropping them down and then ballooning the sleeves out from elbow to wrist in a courtly curve and a useful exercise in shape shifting. Albeit the more interesting pieces were minidresses in taffeta that took that idea and blew it up, literally, into giant puff sleeves that circled round the back in an enormous flounce (more interesting than the floral dresses in a Japanese vase print and micro pleated technical silk with curving little ruffles at the hem, cuffs and neck). Just as the shoulders (they stick out as a trend) at Stella McCartney, jutting forth geometrically in oversize tweed moto vests and atop otherwise no fuss shell pink frocks, were made to carry the call to upcycling arms woven through the work. It was implicit in what looked like crafty macrame dresses that were actually knit from strips of old T shirts, the yarn necklaces/regimental sashes from the artist Sheila Hicks slung over the shoulders to accent a slipdress or looped around the neck of a green silk blouse speckled with leaping horses, and the big, quilted bathrobe coats born from the remnants of former collections. More explicit, meanwhile, was Pierpaolo Piccioli's tilt to the emotional at Valentino, where he had commissioned a small book of love poems (left on every seat) from a quartet of authors, and swapped his brand's logo for lines such as, "There's a forever beyond the sky, I think we should go there tonight" and, "You thought I was too dark until I stretched into a galaxy." Along with appliques of roses, beaded lips and a sketch of an embracing couple that echoed a Roman fountain (fruit of a collaboration with Undercover's Jun Takahashi, who in his own subversively witty collection took inspiration from a darker source: Luca Guadagnino's blood and sorcery and modern dance remake of "Suspiria") the words appeared on swingy trapeze coats atop little tunics and flowing voile gowns, trenches and tulle confections. The message was plain to see, though in some ways it was also unnecessary, as proven by a plain black silk gown dropped off the shoulders and skimming the torso to swirl out over the floor, and a red silk dress with a drawstring waist, an integral scarf tossed just so about the neck and a long pink gilet tossed on top. There was poetry in their lines. Lean in and listen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"I don't know if there is any comparable experience to coming forward, being believed, finding other victims of the same trauma by the same person and suddenly we're together," Drew Dixon says in "On the Record," the documentary about sexual assault allegations against Russell Simmons that premiered last week on HBO Max. "I've been alone for 22 years," she continues, sitting next to Sil Lai Abrams and Jenny Lumet, two other African American women who have also accused Simmons of rape. "I thought it was just me." (Simmons has denied all accusations of nonconsensual sex and described his life as "devoid of violence" in a written response to the filmmakers.) In a December 2017 article in The New York Times, four women Dixon, Tina Baker, Toni Sallie and Christina Moore went public with their accusations that Simmons had sexually assaulted them. Not only did Dixon, a former A R executive at Simmons's Def Jam Records, leave the music industry because of her experiences with sexual assault, but we also eventually learn that she has separated from her husband as a result of the heavy toll taken by her allegations, and the subsequent backlash. It is also vintage Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, the directing and producing team responsible for "Invisible War" (2012), about sexual assault in the military, and "The Hunting Ground" (2015), about campus rape. Those films predate the current trend of documentaries that explore the devastating impact sexual assault has on the lives of victims. Rather than focus on hierarchical institutions like the United States armed forces and universities where rape is underreported because it often goes unpunished, "On the Record" strives to be more intimate and personal. By mainly centering on Dixon's story, it is reminiscent of Dick's 2004 Oscar nominated "Twist of Faith," about the struggle of an Ohio firefighter who was sexually abused as a teenager by a Catholic priest. Dick didn't start out intending to make films about sexual assault. HBO suggested the topic of "Twist of Faith" after another filmmaker took on the subject "but found the material too difficult," he said in an email. "Amy and I continued to make films about survivors because we were so moved by their stories of pain and courage and because sexual assault has been ignored by society for far too long. We are happy that a movement like MeToo happened to elevate the voices we have been capturing for over two decades to an even higher level than we could have imagined." And yet, in many ways, "On the Record" is decidedly a movie of the MeToo era, forming something of a genre with a number of other documentaries: "Untouchable" on the Harvey Weinstein case, "Leaving Neverland" on the allegations of childhood sexual abuse against Michael Jackson; and the docu series "Surviving R. Kelly" and "Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich." All of these films expose how celebrity and wealth not only provided powerful men with countless opportunities for sexual abuse, but also entitled them to a unique set of protections that prevented them from getting caught. As a scholar and activist who has worked on related issues for many years, I've been struck by how many films on sexual violence have come out in such a short period. In other ways, "On the Record" can be viewed as a response to a criticism of MeToo in particular, and the anti rape movement in general: the overlooking of black women as victims of sexual assault. Dick and Ziering, who are white, could have taken up the vexed history of rape and American racism when they made "The Hunting Ground," which featured the allegations that a black Harvard law student lodged against her black classmate. But until now, the race of the victim or the perpetrator went unaddressed in their movies. The film's focus on race is also its biggest challenge. By zooming in on Dixon, "On the Record" risks making her story a stand in for that of all black women, a burden that is impossible for one person to carry. In turn, even with the thoughtful use of black feminist scholars and writers as expert voices, the film's focus on one woman makes it difficult to understand fully how racism and sexism are institutions unto themselves even larger than the Catholic Church, the military or universities that simultaneously oppress millions of black women and girls. In our conversation, Dick acknowledged that the phenomenon of experiencing racial and gender oppression at the same time or what the law professor Kimberle Crenshaw (who appears in the film) describes as intersectionality was eye opening. As a former academic, Ziering is more familiar with black feminist theory and history. "But, I think having all of these analyses articulated in this way for me was revelatory," she said. Such oversight does not undermine the power or authority of Dixon's account. In the film, her story is not only corroborated by friends with whom she worked at the time but also by other women, including Sherri Hines, Alexia Norton Jones and Tina Baker, who all say Simmons raped them. Together, these allegations reveal a striking pattern: they all suggested that Simmons used his rarefied status (as one of the few black men to run his own music label) to prey on up and coming women artists and executives in hip hop. Because the movie is mainly interested in Dixon, who also has accused the music executive L.A. Reid of harassment, "On the Record" sometimes feels like a critique of the rampant misogyny in hip hop. (Reid has said he apologized if anything he had said or done had been "misinterpreted.") But on this score the film is not as comprehensive as Byron Hurt's 2006 documentary, "Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes." And of course, I couldn't help but wonder if my viewing was slightly colored by the debate about Oprah Winfrey's decision in January to withdraw as an executive producer of the film because of what she termed creative differences and its treatment of hip hop. Rape plus race in America equals a powder keg, and when women of color accuse men in their own communities, the stakes rise even higher. Look at Snoop Dogg's vicious social media attack of Gayle King after she brought up Kobe Bryant's 2003 rape charge in an interview, or 50 Cent's blasting Winfrey for her support of accusers of Michael Jackson and Simmons (he posted that before she withdrew from the film). Any filmmaker who takes on these wedded realities must not only do so with care but also within the context of community and the long history of black women's fight for racial and gender equality in the United States. Greater context not only helps protect individual survivors from smear campaigns by their assailants but also underscores how systems of oppression work together to make black women more vulnerable to sexual violence and private suffering. In that way, "On the Record" builds on the legacy of Aishah Shahidah Simmons's 2006 "NO! The Rape Documentary," which tackles the subject of intraracial rape within the African American world. As an associate producer for her film, I had firsthand knowledge of how difficult it was for her to secure funding, with an executive from HBO even telling her in 1998: "Let's face it, very unfortunately, most people don't care about the rape of black women and girls. And therefore, we're concerned that there won't be many viewers who will tune in to watch 'NO!,' were we to air it on our network." Today, the mere presence of "On the Record" on HBO Max and Dream Hampton's "Surviving R. Kelly" on Lifetime are signs of remarkable racial and gender progress: they're proof that MeToo is gaining traction among black people, for which the movement's African American founder, Tarana Burke, has long advocated, and that black rape victims are increasingly seen as credible witnesses of their own stories. Such a shift in the public consciousness is long overdue and, for some victims, life changing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In "milonga," the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui explores the social aspects of tango as thoroughly as the steps. The show, which had its United States premiere at City Center on Thursday (part of A Bailar, a three week Latin dance festival), takes its name from late night gatherings of tango dancers and musicians. With the set and video designer Eugenio Szwarcer, Mr. Cherkaoui goes to great lengths to conjure that bustling atmosphere, populating the stage and several screens with silhouettes of people lounging, socializing, standing around. But all of that could go, and the essence of this impassioned production would remain: its 12 exceptional dancers and their supercharged relationships. Mr. Cherkaoui, who often ventures outside of contemporary dance he's collaborated with kathak and flamenco stars, among others enlisted five Argentine tango couples and two contemporary dancers for this project, allowing their languages to cross pollinate. (Nelida Rodriguez de Aure, his tango consultant and rehearsal assistant, helped make that happen.) At first, you can't tell who's who, but over 90 minutes, "milonga" gradually reveals its secrets, the different kinds of information these bodies hold. Though each couple gets a turn in the spotlight, propelled by five marvelous musicians (Fernando Marzan and Szymon Brzoska composed the score, which flirts with tradition, much as the dancing does), the most imaginative choreography is for groups of more than two. Early on, all of the dancers congregate in a loosely knit maze of flicking legs and swiveling pelvises, making fleeting moments of contact as they cycle through different partners. Later, the ensemble fissures into threes, leading to an electrifying trio for German Cornejo, Martin Epherra and Claudio Gonzalez, a break from mostly male female confrontations. But those confrontations, ranging from slapstick to furiously sensual, can be fascinating, too. The contemporary dance interlopers, Jason Kittelberger and Jennifer White, skillfully fuse Mr. Cherkaoui's molten movement with tricky, tango inspired lifts, but their partnering is not effortless, which makes it interesting. They have a lot to learn before matching, say, the intimacy between Mr. Cornejo and Gisela Galeassi, whose searing duet defied at least a few laws of physics. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
When Target opened a new store in the East Village with great fanfare on Saturday, it thought that it was paying homage to the history of the neighborhood. But people who are part of that history felt otherwise, and Target has apologized. As part of its opening for the store, on 14th Street and Avenue A, the company erected a facade in the style of CBGB, the rock club that hosted the rise of many seminal bands like the Ramones and Blondie but folded in 2006. Instead of "CBGB," the awning read "TRGT" and "BANDS" in bold red lettering. But the "bands" were Target branded Band Aids and exercise bands. The display windows showcased TRGT T shirts, foam hands and a poster emblazoned with "The Resistance" none of which were for sale. The backlash online was swift. Jeremiah Moss, the author of "Vanishing New York," a book about the city's gentrification, wrote on his blog that the display "might be the most deplorable commodification of local neighborhood culture I've ever witnessed." In a TV interview with Fox 5, Laura Sewell, the executive director of the East Village Community Coalition, called the gesture "really pretty tasteless." "To find a Disney fake version of whatever it was they thought we were they're just off," she said. In a statement, Target said, "We often host a one day celebration that shows the neighborhood how excited we are to be part of their community." "We sincerely apologize if some eventgoers felt it was not the best way to capture the spirit of the neighborhood," the statement continued. "We always appreciate guest feedback and will take it into consideration as we plan for future opening events." Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Musicians who were a part of the club's heyday also reacted negatively. "I think it's a pity that a teenager sees the Target store and thinks it's all a cartoon," Chris Stamey said in a phone interview. He estimates that he played at CBGB about 25 times in the 1970s and '80s, both with his band, the dB's, and as a sideman to Alex Chilton and Richard Lloyd. "It really had the stink of the real," he said. "Everybody was trying to find something new at that time. Nobody is trying to find something new at Target." Willie Nile, who was a regular performer at CBGB in the same era, recalled auditioning for the club's owner, Hilly Kristal. He got his attention one afternoon by putting in 5 worth of plays of a song by Mr. Kristal in the venue's jukebox. "I definitely mourn the loss of character and style," Mr. Nile said of the evolution of the neighborhood. Of the Target display, he said, "It doesn't surprise me; it's a drag." The incident is the latest in a series of tangles in which commercial entities have been accused of co opting the past culture of a gentrifying area. When Daniel Boulud announced his intention to mimic CBGB's facade on his restaurant DBGB on the Bowery, he was met with a cease and desist letter from the venue's estate lawyer. A Crown Heights restaurant drew ire for promoting its decor, which included bullet holes. Last year, new luxury residential properties in the Shaw/U Street area of Washington were met with pushback for choosing the names The Ellington and Langston Lofts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"All publicity is great," Eve Babitz told her sister, who took this undated photo of the writer in her youth, "but not really in your 70s."Credit...Mirandi Babitz "All publicity is great," Eve Babitz told her sister, who took this undated photo of the writer in her youth, "but not really in your 70s." Eve Babitz doesn't have a computer, and if you phone her, she is likely to hang up on you. Since the afternoon nearly two decades ago when she dropped a lighted match on her lap while driving home from lunch in her '68 VW Bug, she has kept mostly to herself, holed up in her West Hollywood apartment with her cat and seeing select visitors. Now 76, Ms. Babitz is dimly aware of her surging popularity, particularly among young women, but aging hits burn victims even harder than it does the rest of us, and lately she has turned more inward. "All publicity is great," she has told her sister, Mirandi Babitz, as Mirandi recalled recently, "but not really in your 70s." No matter: next month New York Review Book Classics, a.k.a the thinking person's book series that also looks great on Instagram, will publish a collection of her magazine articles. "I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz" is the publisher's third title exhuming the work of a voluptuous voluptuary with fizzy prose who once announced to her mother that "adventuress" might be her career choice . Along with the chillier and more established Joan Didion, Ms. Babitz was a woman sending dispatches from the front lines of 70s era West Coast bohemia, gently satirizing the incestuous music and art worlds of Los Angeles. But she seemed to be having lot more fun than Ms. Didion: she wasn't just at the party; more often than not, it seemed, she was the party itself. "I feel about Eve the way Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg feel about World War II," said a television and film producer who optioned four of her books. "I can't get enough." Ms. Babitz wasn't famous, exactly, but she was always known: for being Hollywood royalty (she was Igor Stravinsky's goddaughter); for her love life (a partial list of Ms. Babitz's paramours includes Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, Steve Martin, Annie Leibovitz and Walter Hopps, the influential and married curator who was a founder of the then rollicking Ferus gallery in Los Angeles); for her physique (Rubensesque in a land of Twiggys); and for "that photo" (of a nude 19 year old Ms. Babitz playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, a photographic stunt Ms. Babitz agreed to in order to irritate Mr. Hopps, which subsequently became so ubiquitous that it even showed up, Ms. Babitz once said , on a poster for the Museum of Modern Art). When she was just shy of her 30th birthday, Ms. Babitz published her first memoir, "Eve's Hollywood": stories of adventure, anthropological observation and, charmingly, food (Ms. Babitz would have made a terrific restaurant reviewer). Its dedications ran to 8 pages, and included her gynecologist, the Chateau Marmont, freeways, sour cream and "the Didion Dunnes for having to be who I'm not." She would go on to write six books, memoirish novels and collections of personal essays, none of which sold particularly well, along with a book length vanity project commissioned by Fiorucci (about Fiorucci), and countless magazine articles. "F. Scott Fitzbabitz" is what Erica Spellman Silverman, her longtime agent, christened her author, whom she used to phone every Monday at 7 a.m., to make sure Ms. Babitz was awake and working. She may not have received her professional due, but for a long time she was required reading if you had a taste for deeply personal writing by sharp and funny women, of the sort being practiced by peers like Laurie Colwin, Cynthia Heimel and Nora Ephron, all of whom were more or less the same age as Ms. Babitz, who was born in 1943. The conflagration that resulted from trying to light a cherry flavored Tiparillo in her car, in 1997 , seared her hands and the lower half of her body; the Uggs she was wearing spared her lower legs and feet. With no health insurance, the accident not only crippled her, it nearly beggared her. Celebrity friends donated their belongings and art work at an auction held at her beloved Chateau Marmont, and Mirandi secured a small settlement from the company that made the skirt she wore when she went up in flames. And for a long time, that was the last one heard about Ms. Babitz, who had became a recluse, a misanthrope and, most challenging to her liberal community, a conservative. In the last decade, however, there has been a steady renaissance of her work, thanks in part to young "book influencers" literary enthusiasts with digital platforms like Emily Gould (who recently described Ms. Babitz's revival as "the Babitzance") and Emma Roberts, a founder of the Belletrist. Along with reprints of her work by NYRB Classics and Counterpoint, a Hulu series is in development and many, many pixels have since been devoted to her oeuvre: debating her appeal to millennial woman, fretting over her white privilege, or simply delighting in her undulating prose and the smaller, wilder world she inhabited. A year or so ago, the New York Public Library convened a panel on the Eve effect, led by her literary and cinematic daughters, Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker; Karah Preiss, Ms. Roberts's partner at Belletrist, and Zosia Mamet, a star of HBO's "Girls," who praised Ms. Babitz unabashed hedonism. The event was packed. Nostalgia for 70s era bohemia runs high, particularly in these fractious times. Elizabeth Cantillon, the producer who with her colleague and friend Amy Pascal bought the rights to four of Ms. Babitz's books for a television series she is calling "L.A. Woman," described the project as a "sisterhood of Eve." "I feel about Eve the way Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg feel about World War II," she said. "I can't get enough." One of Ms. Babitz's most dogged boosters has been Lili Anolik, a 41 year old writer who pursued Ms. Babitz for her 2014 Vanity Fair profile, "All About Eve and Then Some," a hypnotic tribute to an author who isn't herself anymore, her harrowing ordeal having dimmed her facultie s and her energy, though not, by all accounts, her sense of humor. (This dimming is why most of Ms. Babitz's literary suitors have worked with her sister and her agent.) Ms. Anolik's profile grew into an idiosyncratic biography, out last January, called "Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A." which is woven through with Ms. Anolik's passion for her subject. The other day, Ms. Anolik compared their relationship to that of "a lovelorn suitor and a tempestuous mistress," she said. "I buy her stuff to keep her in a good mood" to date, out of print books, chocolate covered strawberries, three MAGA hats. "It's not like I had a special eye," Ms. Anolik said, noting how many writers and editors had been in pursuit of Ms. Babitz around the same time as she. "I was just so obsessed. I couldn't leave it alone." She sent letters Ms. Babitz did not answer them befriended Mirandi, along with Paul Ruscha, an old lover, and others. It was a courtship years in the making, Ms. Anolik said, undertaken when Ms. Babitz had more energy for that sort of thing. The relationship has deepened even as Ms. Babitz has faded. On a river cruise in Russia, answering questions by email, Mirandi said she considers Ms. Anolik one of the family. "Some days she is completely herself," Mirandi wrote of her sister, "funny as hell, etc, but it's unreliable and sometimes she throws tantrums and hates everybody." She is pleased about her newfound popularity, Mirandi continued, "a bit confused about what it all means but does love all the income which she desperately needed." Ms. Spellman Silverman said that on this go round, Ms. Babitz has "made more money than she ever made in her life by a lot. The new books have sold four or five times what they did originally. And the television rights, that was a lot." The new collection features more of her distinctive voice, a reprieve from what Ms. Babitz once derided as the "merciless" seriousness of the literary establishment. In her introduction, Molly Lambert, 36, a Los Angeles bred writer, relishes her "loping Western pace," that allows "for constant detours and longer looks." In "All This and the Godfather Too," a piece about the making of the Godfather II that originally appeared in Coast magazine in 1975, Ms. Babitz records the shenanigans of a drunken actor, skewers Francis Ford Coppola's pretensions and wanders unfettered through the sets. She also gets to be an extra. It helped that Fred Roos, Mr. Coppola's producer, was an ex boyfriend. Some of the pieces in the new collection appeared in magazines that expired decades ago (do you remember "Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing"?). But the title essay, "I Used to Be Charming," which recounts the brutal aftermath of the accident, is new, and was a particularly heavy lift for the book's editor, Sara J. Kramer. When Ms. Babitz was recuperating, Mirandi had encouraged her sister to take notes, which she did, nearly 50 pages worth. But they were sketchy, not always coherent and without a time frame, written when Ms. Babitz was in a lot of pain and under heavy sedation. "It was a mess," Ms. Spellman Silverman said, "yet it had all the qualities of Eve. Funny and poignant and sexy." Ms. Babitz writes of wrenching herself out of her car and rolling on grass to put out the flames. Startlingly, she gets back in the car and drives to her sister's house, naked and charred. When the paramedic arrives, she declares, "My friends would kill me if I died." At the hospital, she wonders if being over 50 and without health insurance means she's a real artist. At the rehab facility, she tells a male staffer, "I used to be charming before I got here." (She later had "Better Read Than Dead" printed on business cards.) Of Ms. Babitz's revival and renewed appeal, especially to millennials, Ms. Spellman Silverman said, "Young women now have a lot to prove, and I think there's a lot of anger. Eve was never angry. She never felt like she was a victim. Nobody ever forced her to do anything, except maybe me. She never felt she was being used. She loved the way she looked, and as a result everybody else did, too. She was having a great time, and I think young women like her work because they see a freedom in the way she l ived. And I don't think they have the same f reedom s. " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Sydney H. Schanberg, a correspondent for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering Cambodia's fall to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and inspired the film "The Killing Fields" with the story of his Cambodian colleague's survival during the genocide of millions, died on Saturday in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 82. His death was confirmed by Charles Kaiser, a friend and former Times reporter, who said Mr. Schanberg had a heart attack on Tuesday. A restive, intense, Harvard educated newspaperman with bulldog tenacity, Mr. Schanberg was a nearly ideal foreign correspondent: a risk taking adventurer who distrusted officials, relied on himself in a war zone and wrote vividly of political and military tyrants and of the suffering and death of their victims with the passion of an eyewitness to history. In the spring of 1975, as Pol Pot's Communist guerrillas closed in on the capital, Phnom Penh, after five years of civil war in Cambodia, Mr. Schanberg and his assistant, Dith Pran, refused to heed directives from Times editors in New York to evacuate the city and remained behind as nearly all Western reporters, diplomats and senior officials of Cambodia's American backed Lon Nol government fled for their lives. But when the guerrillas rolled in, after a brief period of calm, there was widespread shooting, looting and many executions. Mr. Schanberg and Mr. Dith were seized and threatened with death. "Most of the soldiers are teenagers," Mr. Schanberg noted in his last dispatch. "They are universally grim, robotlike, brutal. Weapons drip from them like fruit from trees grenades, pistols, rifles, rockets." Mr. Dith's pleas saved Mr. Schanberg, and the two journalists took refuge in the French Embassy compound, a vestige of colonial rule. Later, Mr. Dith and other Cambodians were expelled from the compound and forced to join an exodus of civilians into the countryside. It was the beginning of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of millions from cities and the suppression of educated classes to recast Cambodia as an agrarian utopia. The failed experiment over the next four years cost the lives of two million people to starvation, disease, slave labor brutality and murder. "Two million people suddenly moved out of the city in stunned silence walking, bicycling, pushing cars that had run out of fuel, covering the roads like a human carpet," he wrote. "A once throbbing city became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping, empty shops. Streetlights burned eerily for a population that was no longer there." Mr. Schanberg returned to New York. Overwhelmed with guilt over having to leave Mr. Dith behind, he asked for time off to write about his experiences, to help Mr. Dith's refugee wife and four children establish a new life in San Francisco and to begin the seemingly hopeless task of finding his friend. He was showered with awards, including the Pulitzer, which he said he shared with Mr. Dith. He also became a metropolitan editor and columnist at The Times. For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, who had disguised his educated background and survived beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of insects, rodents and as little as a tablespoon of rice a day. In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and replaced Pol Pot with a client regime. Mr. Dith escaped over the border with Thailand in 1979 and was soon reunited with Mr. Schanberg. After moving Mr. Dith and his family to New York and helping him obtain a job as a photographer at The Times, Mr. Schanberg wrote "The Death and Life of Dith Pran," a 1980 cover article for The New York Times Magazine, which was later published as a book. The story became the basis for Roland Joffe's 1984 movie, "The Killing Fields," starring Sam Waterston as Mr. Schanberg and Dr. Haing S. Ngor as Mr. Dith. Dr. Ngor, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor, was a physician who had also survived the Cambodian holocaust. Sydney Hillel Schanberg was born in Clinton, Mass., on Jan. 17, 1934, to Louis Schanberg, a grocery store owner, and the former Freda Feinberg. Sydney attended Clinton schools and graduated from Harvard in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in American history. Drafted in 1956, he served as a reporter for an Army newspaper in Frankfurt. He joined The Times in 1959 as a copy boy and became a staff reporter in 1960, covering general assignments and government agencies. In 1964, he began covering the New York State Legislature, and in 1967, he was named Albany bureau chief, in charge of state government reporting. He married Janice Sakofsky in 1967. The couple had two daughters, Jessica and Rebecca, who survive him, and were divorced. In 1995 he married Jane Freiman, who also survives him. Mr. Schanberg joined The Times's foreign staff in 1969 and was named bureau chief in New Delhi. He covered India's 13 day war with Pakistan in 1971. He met Mr. Dith on a trip to Phnom Penh in 1972, and as Mr. Schanberg's reporting from Vietnam and Cambodia grew, The Times hired Mr. Dith as his aide and translator. As the Southeast Asia correspondent from 1973 to 1975, Mr. Schanberg focused increasingly on the Khmer Rouge insurgency. Mr. Schanberg, who lived in New Paltz, N.Y., returned to Cambodia in 1989 and 1997 and wrote articles for Vanity Fair. He also wrote for Penthouse and The Nation and columns of media criticism for The Village Voice. "Beyond the Killing Fields," an anthology of his reporting, was published in 2010. Besides the Pulitzer, he won two George Polk Memorial awards, two Overseas Press Club awards and Sigma Delta Chi's distinguished journalism prize. "I'm a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother," Mr. Schanberg said after Mr. Dith died in 2008. "His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
During the leisurely drive along the dramatic Jurassic Coast of Dorset, one could easily think that this journey might well be the highlight of the day. The sweeping vistas of the English Channel are breathtaking, especially if you're driving by at twilight. But then you reach the Seaside Boarding House, a pristine white building perched on the edge of a cliff with a view of a picturesque stretch of sand. This hotel and restaurant, which opened last February, may be ensconced in rural England, but its menu and sensibilities are pure well heeled London with a touch of beach culture: white and blue gray walls, minimalist furniture and crisp white tablecloths. Seaside's co founders, Mary Lou Sturridge and Anthony Mackintosh, hail from the Groucho Club, a private club in London's Soho. Ms. Sturridge found herself growing a little weary of her job. "I thought, 'I'm too old to be staying up until 4 o'clock in the morning five nights a week,' " she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Is "Joker" a definitive movie of our time? Is it incel propaganda? Might it even be dangerous? The film arrived in theaters last week accompanied by F.B.I. warnings about the threat of related gun violence, but by Monday its international box office had already reached about a quarter of a billion dollars. Meanwhile, the debates over its politics and artistic merit raged on. Here are some of the many reviews, interviews and features that have been prompted by this dark and divisive movie. 'Joker' Review: Are You Kidding Me? The New York Times "To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting," A.O. Scott writes in his review for The Times. "It must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked out, thought provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. 'Joker,' an empty, foggy exercise in secondhand style and second rate philosophizing, has none of that. Besotted with the notion of its own audacity as if willful unpleasantness were a form of artistic courage the film turns out to be afraid of its own shadow, or at least of the faintest shadow of any actual relevance." '"Joker" Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness' The New Yorker "What results is more than the strenuous effort to contrive a story with resonant incidents and alluring details," Richard Brody writes in his review. "'Joker' reflects political cowardice on the part of a filmmaker, and perhaps of a studio, in emptying out the specifics of the city's modern history and current American politics so that the movie can be released as mere entertainment to viewers who are exasperated with the idea of movies being discussed in political terms i.e., to Republicans." "Even if you hate it, it's unlike anything you've ever seen before like waking up next to a poisonous snake nestled on your blanket, poised and ready to strike," writes Rex Reed. And although he admits to having mixed feelings, he adds, "I think it's the best film about the psychological effect of violence as pop art since Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange.'" '"I Expletive Love My Life": Joaquin Phoenix on Joker, Why River Is His Rosebud, His Rooney Research, and His "Prenatal" Gift for Dark Characters' Vanity Fair Actor Joaquin Phoenix anticipated a mixed reaction to the film's moral ambiguity. "It's a difficult film," he acknowledges. "We want the simple answers, we want to vilify people. It allows us to feel good if we can identify that as evil. 'Well, I'm not racist 'cause I don't have a Confederate flag or go with this protest.' It allows us to feel that way, but that's not healthy because we're not really examining our inherent racism that most white people have, certainly. Or whatever it may be." The movie isn't a "call to action," he insists, but "a call to self reflection to society." '"Joker" Director Todd Phillips Rebuffs Criticism of Dark Tone: "We Didn't Make the Movie to Push Buttons"' The Wrap The director Todd Phillips explains his motivation to make the film "a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film" and expresses his surprise at the reaction. "What's outstanding to me in this discourse in this movie is how easily the far left can sound like the far right when it suits their agenda. It's really been eye opening for me." 'What's the Panic Over "Joker" Really About?' The New York Times Magazine Dan Brooks writes that the panic about "Joker" is really a panic about moral ambiguity: "Legitimate movies are about complicated protagonists who combine good and bad qualities; superhero movies are about two guys, one good and one evil. By combining them into a single guy, won't this movie cause dummies to think the Joker is good? To ask the question is to argue that nuance is dangerous. By fretting over Arthur Fleck's sympathetic qualities, progressive minded critics are demanding the same sort of bright line between good and evil that makes comic book movies so boring." Two critics Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman debate the nuances on both sides of the argument. Debruge is rankled by "Joker" "because it takes a fictive pop culture icon and reinvents him as a cruelly misunderstood incel underdog." (He does concede it would be a "big mistake to banish toxic white men from the movies," though.) Gleiberman counters that critics are treating a movie "as if it were a two hour advertisement for the toxic white male," "a violation of the New Woke Rules," adding: "But they're trying to wish away something that can't be wished away." 'The Joker Is Simply a Clown Who Loves Crime' The Outline Alex Nichols, after debunking a popular misconception about the 2012 Aurora shooter James Holmes ("he was not outwardly Jokerlike and did not tell police that he was the Joker after the shooting"), questions the repeated refrain that "violent media breeds violent behavior." "It's odd to hear this refrain from liberals, given that Donald Trump and the N.R.A. routinely blame video games and violent movies for mass shootings in order to steer the debate away from gun control," Nichols writes. "But this idea has been a mainstay of both parties for decades." "This isn't the first time Phillips' and Trump's worlds have collided," Jeff Yang notes. "Imagine Fleck as Trump," he suggests. "Phillips may not have intended for his film to be a political parable or maybe he did but it's hard to imagine a darker ending for our real world horror comedy than that." "Commentary: How "Joker" Mirrors Our Fascination With Monsters, Now in the Trump Years" Chicago Tribune Christopher Borreli connects Joaquin Phoenix's Joker to "S.N.L." sketches and likens the film to a sketch "written the morning after the 2016 presidential election, when journalism seemed intent on understanding why so many Americans turned to a man they didn't fully understand." This, he writes, is why the Joker is all motives: "mental illness, bad jobs, alienation, misunderstandings, nihilism, devious co workers, social service cutbacks." The Joker is what happens "when our social contract is shattered and no one not politicians, not the rich (who are targeted in film) are held accountable to anyone anymore." Jokers at Every Turn at Comic Con, but They Were on Their Best Behavior The New York Times Cosplay Jokers at New York Comic Con discuss the methods behind their "madness," including Mei Velasco who "girl ified" her Heath Ledger Joker while her husband dressed up as Harley Quinn. She also weighed in on the latest film Joker: "I feel like what he's trying to say is that our society looks like it's going toward that way, so this is like a warning. It's like, 'Hello, everybody, wake up!'" Why the 'Joker' Movie Was a Risk Warner Bros. Wanted to Take The New York Times "'Joker' got its start in 2016," report Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling, "when Todd Phillips, who had directed men behaving badly comedies for Warner Bros. like 'The Hangover' and 'Old School,' told Greg Silverman, then the studio's president of creative development and production, that he had a wild idea. Mr. Phillips wanted to make a gritty character study of the Joker in the mold of 'Taxi Driver,' dispensing with the cartoon, buildings imploding fantasy of most superhero movies and placing the story more squarely in the real world." Getting the Joker's Laugh Just Right The New York Times It's not easy to develop paroxysms of laughter, as Steve Knopper discovered during this examination of how actors have voiced the Joker over the decades. "It was rare that someone would come in to do the Joker voice for more than 20 minutes who didn't end up bathed in sweat," director Andrea Romano said. "It requires a tremendous amount of energy." The Jokers, Ranked The New York Times Who laughed best? From Lego cacklers to "Suicide Squad" scene stealers, the various Jokers are appraised for their theatricality and psychopathy. Only one can achieve the distinction of being, as Jason Bailey notes, "truly, a Joker for our time." How Well Do You Know the Joker's Laugh? The New York Times Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Mark Hamill, Jared Leto and now Joaquin Phoenix have all cracked up as the Joker, but which of them is which? Take this quick quiz to laugh along with them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
If there is a way to write about Kristine Haruna Lee's vivid, haunted "Suicide Forest" without mentioning the ending, I don't know what it is. Because when the fourth wall breaks, this nightmare vision play about Japanese American identity cracks wide open, and what's underneath is so heart stingingly tender and explicitly personal that the whole work shifts. Here, then, is an emphatic piece of advice: Go see it at the Bushwick Starr, where Aya Ogawa has directed a wild ride of a production. And here is a warning: spoilers dead ahead. The first figure we see in "Suicide Forest," moving slowly around the edge of the proscenium, is a god in scarlet silk. White faced and raven haired, with soft red pigment at the corners of her eyes, this is Mad Mad. Her presence stalks this play. Ms. Lee is also an actor in it, portraying a teenage Japanese schoolgirl named Azusa. But deep in the performance, after the vibrant pink and white interior of Jian Jung's set has given way to the eerie abstractness of the woods, Ms. Lee drops the mask of her role. She becomes, disarmingly, her Seattle raised self, speaking directly to the audience, taking ownership of the issues of heritage that fuel her play. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
WHEN Marilyn Arnold was 9 years old, her mother, a skilled seamstress, patiently taught her to sew on a vintage Singer treadle sewing machine. As her feet pumped away at the machine in her family's farmhouse near Paris, Mo., she was smitten. "I was in love with sewing, even when I stuck my finger and it bled," Ms. Arnold said. Soon she was whirling the thread for crisp white blouses with bright red sailor collars, gathered skirts, and, in time, her entire school wardrobe. She even competed in sewing contests at the Missouri State Fair. But she never dreamed that now, at the age of 66, she would be running her own small business, Marilyn Arnold Designs, in Lee's Summit, Mo. Her specialty is custom designing and sewing 18 inch by 18 inch pillows, christening dresses and blankets as mementos made from cherished wedding gowns that had been relegated to the back of a closet. She also stitches quilts big enough for a queen size bed assembled from beloved T shirts, and patches together vests from timeworn scarves. "Everything I make is from repurposed materials," she said. The idea for her venture took root three years ago, shortly before she retired from her position as a managing partner at the New York Life Insurance Company, after 29 years in the insurance business. That was when her accountant asked her what she planned to do in retirement. She acknowledged that she knew she had to do something, but had no idea what. The accountant asked a second question: "What did you want to do when you were a little girl?" While her childhood dream was to become a dress designer, that endeavor seemed too lofty a goal at her age. The idea to design and sew custom pillows from a wedding dress was inspired by a friend's request. That was the manageable beginning of a new career. Her start up costs to buy equipment and supplies and to devise a marketing plan tallied 12,000, financed from personal savings, Ms. Arnold said. First, she sewed as a side job for several months before she retired to see if there was really enough interest to introduce a full fledged business. In time, she created a website, opened an online web storefront on Etsy, and began posting her designs on Pinterest. Today, she handles all the sewing duties herself, easily clocking in 12 hour days. "My biggest challenge has been balancing my time in order to work on all aspects of my business," Ms. Arnold said. "I have to guard against spending too much time working in my business and not enough time working on my business." Older American entrepreneurs like Ms. Arnold are on a roll. Kimberly Palmer, author of "The Economy of You: Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur and Recession Proof Your Life," said she had noticed that the most eager audience for the book was often people approaching retirement, or already in it. "They want to leverage their skills and experience into something entrepreneurial," she said. According to a recent study published by the Kauffman Foundation and Legal Zoom, in 2013, about 20 percent of all new businesses were started by entrepreneurs aged 50 to 59 years, and 15 percent were 60 and over. And, in fact, over the last decade, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to those in the 55 to 64 age group, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' A desire to work for oneself and create a business that is meaningful and has social impact at this stage of life, combined with a job market that makes it tough for workers over 50 to get hired, has clearly pushed more people to pursue the entrepreneurial path. "For the longest time we've assumed that social entrepreneurship was the exclusive provenance of young people," said Marc Freedman, founder and chief executive of Encore.org, the nonprofit research center dedicated to second acts for the greater good. "Now we're realizing an undiscovered continent of innovation in the growing population over 50." Ms. Arnold holding one of her decorative pillow covers. Steve Hebert for The New York Times But it is not an easy road. Money is the biggest stumbling block. Most start ups like Ms. Arnold's are underwritten with personal savings. If someone does not have a nice stockpile of savings to tap, or a partner who is still bringing home a paycheck, it is tough to get going. And many entrepreneurs do not pay themselves for a year or so to allow their businesses to gain traction. To finance the more than 100,000 it took to start Well Read New Used Books in Hawthorne, N.J., about three years ago, for example, Bill Skees, then 56, asked his six siblings for a loan, and he and his wife, Mary Ann, were able to dip into savings for the rest. The banks he contacted were not enthusiastic. "There's lots of red tape, and most banks aren't interested in financing a senior business start up, which generally runs between 10,000 to 25,000, because it's too small," said Elizabeth Isele, 71, co founder of SeniorEntrepreneurshipWorks.org, a nonprofit venture geared to helping workers over age 50 start their own businesses. "And age bias can be a big factor." That said, many small and microbusinesses, particularly freelance, home based and online e commerce businesses, require only a fraction of that to get going, sometimes under 1,000. Where there's a will, there's a way. Determined older entrepreneurs have tapped retirement accounts, tracked down hard to get economic development loans in their communities and turned to crowdfunding sites. A Senate hearing titled "In Search of a Second Act: The Challenges and Advantages of Senior Entrepreneurship," scheduled for next Wednesday, will offer a chance to air issues like age bias from lending organizations and the need to develop tax incentives for training and start ups. "In order to continue our economic recovery, we need to change how we view the terms 'start up' or 'entrepreneur,' " said Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, chairwoman of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. "Most people associate those terms with a tech business and a young computer whiz, not a home business in a rural town and a seasoned executive with 30 years of management experience," Senator Landrieu said. "Senior entrepreneurs are especially critical to creating jobs and growing the economy, because they have the right experience and resources to be successful." Ms. Isele, who plans to testify at the hearing, said she and others would argue that this growing demographic group would not cause a crisis. "We need to help people in policy and private industry to understand, this isn't a silver tsunami," she said. "It's a silver lining, yielding golden dividends. Senior entrepreneurs contribute to the economy, paying taxes, creating jobs, paying people and underwriting entitlement programs." Senator Landrieu said she hoped the hearing would showcase successful initiatives and discuss whether they could be replicated elsewhere. One innovative initiative is the eProv Studio, which will officially start this weekend at the Institute for the Ages' Conference on Positive Aging in Sarasota, Fla. These new workshops, created by Ms. Isele and Cheryl Kiser, executive director of the Lewis Institute at Babson College, combine the methodology of entrepreneurial thought and action and the techniques of improvisational theater. "Each participant comes to the workshop with a desire, an itch, an idea of what they might want to do," Ms. Kiser added. "The method we teach in these groups of 20 is to look at who you are, what you know, who you know, what you can do and the resources you have at hand to create something of value." Using the improv process can help decode someone's entrepreneurial history. "We help them understand decade by decade what they have accomplished and see a pattern of these accomplishments and entrepreneurial skills they have had throughout their entire life," Ms. Isele said. Other resources include a free, online, open source entrepreneurship curriculum, hosted at the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College. It is intended for people over 50 and includes help with developing business plans, obtaining loans, gaining and access to business start up incubators and meeting mentors to serve as sounding boards. Then there is the Kauffman Foundation's FastTrac Boomer Entrepreneur program. In collaboration with AARP and FastTrac affiliates in select American cities, Kauffman is piloting specialized 10 week courses in both English and Spanish. Up to 20 applicants will be accepted in each course. The next course is scheduled to run from Feb. 24 to April 28 in Irvine, Calif., in conjunction with the nonprofit Tech Coast Venture Network Irvine. The cost is 200. And while many older Americans are new to learning business skills, some cherish the personal rewards discovered along the way. "My business has given me so many things, but what I love the most is that I'm my own boss," Ms. Arnold said. "I manage my time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
An arctic fox near Helagsfjallet mountain in Sweden. Foxes in the area were severely inbred until three males from a Norwegian captive breeding population turned up. Arctic foxes are endangered in Sweden, Norway and Finland, scattered in isolated populations that can fall victim to severe inbreeding, further threatening their survival. That's what happened to a group descended from six white foxes that settled in the early 2000s on Helagsfjallet, the highest mountain in southern Sweden. But in 2010, a local ranger noticed something different: slate colored or "blue" Arctic foxes, which had to be newcomers. The immigrants presented a rare opportunity for scientists to study what happens when new genetic material flows into a small, isolated population threatened with extinction. In a study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists from Sweden and Norway reported that just three new males dramatically reduced inbreeding and produced a generation of more robust offspring in the Helagsfjallet arctic fox population. The findings lend support to a disputed conservation strategy called genetic rescue, which involves introducing genetic diversity to boost the survival chances of small, inbred populations, said Jennifer Neuwald, an assistant professor of biology at Colorado State University who was not involved in the new study. "This study showed that having those new individuals bring in new DNA actually had an effect," she said. Arctic foxes which remain abundant in parts of North America and Russia come in two color morphs. White morphs are snowy in winter and brown grey in summer, while blue morphs stay a ravishing indigo, brown and charcoal mix year round. The blue foxes that arrived in Helagsfjallet had come from a captive breeding and restoration program funded by the Norwegian government. In 2009, the program released two blue brothers and another, unrelated white male in southern Norway. The three migrated about 150 miles to the Swedish subpopulation. In the five years following the arrival of the new males, the population of the Helagsfjallet clan nearly doubled. Over the same period, inbreeding also decreased by 43 percent, which is "really rapid," Ms. Hasselgren said. Perhaps more important, the first generation of pups born to immigrant fathers was more evolutionarily fit than inbred pups: The former were almost twice as likely to survive their first year of life, and had higher breeding success. These higher survival and breeding rates help the authors "make the case that a reduction in inbreeding is helping this population grow," said Sarah Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor of integrative biology at Michigan State University not involved in the research. A larger concern is that the benefits of genetic rescue will be short lived. In 1997, a single male wolf immigrated from Canada to Isle Royale in Michigan, causing inbreeding levels to plummet by 89 percent in four years. But then his DNA overtook the entire Isle Royale wolf population, leading to a climb in inbreeding and genetic defects that proved to be devastating. As of this winter, Isle Royale may be down to its last wolf. Adding new individuals to a threatened population can also introduce disease or swamp local adaptations. Decades ago, conservationists moved some ibexes, a type of wild goat, from the Middle East to mate with a dwindling population in what was then Czechoslovakia. But the resulting hybrids ultimately could not survive the cold, causing the entire population to go extinct. Still, genetic rescue has had successful outcomes too, for panthers in Florida, bighorn sheep in Montana, vipers in Sweden and others. Many conservationists believe it's a tool with increasing potential, as wildlife populations become more and more fragmented by human activities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
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