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The World War II action movie "Midway" was an unexpected winner at the box office this weekend, swooping into the lead as the horror movie that had seemed poised to take the top spot, "Doctor Sleep," instead took a snooze. "Midway" opened to an estimated 17.5 million in domestic ticket sales Friday through Sunday. The movie, distributed by Lionsgate, is expected to make about 2.6 million more in sales during the Veterans Day holiday on Monday. "Midway" revolves around the pivotal 1942 air and sea battle that gives the movie its name. It re creates that fight with the help of some famous figures: Luke Evans, Woody Harrelson, Patrick Wilson and Nick Jonas are among the members of its ensemble cast. Roland Emmerich, best known for "Independence Day," was the director. Reviews for "Midway" were relatively lackluster: It currently holds a 41 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg called the movie "rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It has been one of the most pressing unanswered questions in public health: Do e cigarettes actually help smokers quit? Now, the first, large rigorous assessment offers an unequivocal answer: yes. The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that e cigarettes were nearly twice as effective as conventional nicotine replacement products, like patches and gum, for quitting smoking. The success rate was still low 18 percent among the e cigarette group, compared to 9.9 percent among those using traditional nicotine replacement therapy but many researchers who study tobacco and nicotine said it gave them the clear evidence they had been looking for. "This is a seminal study," said Dr. Neal L. Benowitz, chief of clinical pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, an expert in nicotine absorption and tobacco related illnesses, who was not involved in the project. "It is so important to the field." The study was conducted in Britain and funded by the National Institute for Health Research and Cancer Research UK. For a year, it followed 886 smokers assigned randomly to use either e cigarettes or traditional nicotine replacement therapies. Both groups also participated in at least four weekly counseling sessions, an element regarded as critical for success. The findings could give some new legitimacy to e cigarette companies like Juul, which have been under fire from the government and the public for contributing to what the Food and Drug Administration has called an epidemic of vaping among teenagers. But they could also exacerbate the difficulty of keeping the devices away from young people who have never smoked while making them available for clinical use. "There is an unavoidable tension between protecting kids from e cigarettes and smoking cessation, which is also very important," Dr. Benowitz said. Tobacco use causes nearly 6 million deaths worldwide each year, including 480,000 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If tobacco use trends continue, the global death tally is projected to reach 8 million deaths annually by 2030. E cigarettes provide the nicotine smokers crave without the toxic tar and carcinogens that come from inhaling burning tobacco. But regulators in the United States, Britain and elsewhere have not approved them to be marketed as smoking cessation tools. "Health professionals have been reluctant to recommend their use because of the lack of clear evidence from randomized controlled trials. This is now likely to change," said Peter Hajek, the lead author of the study and a professor of clinical psychology at Queen Mary University of London, which coordinated the clinical trials through public "stop smoking clinics." The New England Journal devoted much of its current issue to e cigarettes, publishing two editorials and a letter, and the collection embodies the tangled public health debate over the devices. One editorial written by Belinda Borrelli, a behavioral health expert and Dr. George T. O'Connor, a pulmonologist pumped the brakes on inclinations to embrace e cigarettes. They noted that 80 percent of the study participants who had quit by using e cigarettes were still vaping at one year, while only nine percent of the nicotine replacement therapy group was still using nicotine products. That raised concerns, they wrote, about sustained nicotine addiction and the unknown health consequences of long term e cigarette use. The editorial recommended that e cigarettes be taken up when other cessation approaches, including behavioral counseling, have failed; that patients use the lowest dose of nicotine possible; that health care providers establish a clear timeline for e cigarette use. Another editorial implored the Food and Drug Administration to ban all nicotine flavors for vaping devices because of their appeal to adolescents. The clinical trial took place from May 2015 to February 2018. Because the smokers were recruited at the clinics, they were already predisposed to quitting, a feather on the scale that could slightly have affected results. The participants were typically middle aged, smoked between half a pack and a pack a day and had already tried quitting. The e cigarette subjects were given a starter kit with a refillable device and one bottle of tobacco flavored nicotine e liquid, with 18 milligrams per milliliter the most common product in England. All the participants had individual latitude within their study groups to closely approximate real life scenarios. When the vapers finished their bottle of nicotine liquid, they could choose whichever flavor and nicotine strength to purchase. The people using nicotine replacement therapy could select from an array of products, including the patch, gum, lozenge and nasal spray. They were even encouraged to combine them; most did so, typically opting for the patch and an oral therapy. Because self reports of smoking abstinence are not considered reliable, researchers measured the quantities of carbon monoxide in the participants' breath, a more precise validation. Dr. Maciej Goniewicz, a co author of the British study who is now a pharmacologist at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, N.Y., said that the success of the e cigarettes most likely reflects a combination of factors: "It's about the method of delivery, the quantity of nicotine and the user's behavior," he said. "E cigarettes have the advantage that the user decides how and when to puff. Nicotine replacement therapy products have specific instructions, which are different for different products." Dr. Benowitz noted that the higher quit rates and compliance among e cigarette users could be additionally explained because those subjects expressed more satisfaction with the devices than did the other group with their products. In their editorial, Drs. Borrelli and O'Connor pointed to other research on smoking cessation therapies: In one study nicotine replacement therapy and the antidepressant buproprion (Wellbutrin) achieved slightly higher abstinence rates than did e cigarettes in this latest trial. The prescription drug varenicline (Chantix) has performed even moderately better. Moreover, these products have been proven safe, they said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Of all the antagonists the theater has thrown at us over the centuries the bloodthirsty royals, the cannibal barbers death is the most formidable, if also the most dramatically inert. How can everyone's end be anyone's turning point? If certainty were as exciting as its opposite, "Waiting for Godot" would be "Godot's Here, On Time as Usual." The inevitability of death is thus an almost inevitable theme for Young Jean Lee, the downtown disrupter lately making an uptown turn. Like a lot of her work, the strangely pleasant "We're Gonna Die," which opened on Tuesday night at Second Stage Theater, ought to be untenable. Yet it finds ways to make an unswallowable premise go down easy. That premise is nothing more or less than the title indicates; "We're Gonna Die" is not a trick, a joke or a disguise for something else, but a flat out memento mori. What gives its foregone conclusion drama and the possibility of theatricality is the disjuncture between its subject and presentation, which is about as downbeat as a good pop act in a nice local bar. For about an hour, a singer (Janelle McDermoth) tells can you top this stories of the awfulness of life in one, a friend accidentally claws out her cornea interspersed with catchy songs with titles like "Lullaby for the Miserable" and "Horrible Things." That's the whole show, so frank in outline you may at first be tempted to sift through its simplicity for something more complex. I spent a good deal of time wondering whether the originating idea Lee has said that the show arose, after her father's death, as a way of seeking and offering comfort had somehow refluxed into a satire of its own mechanics. Lee's lyrics are so literally deadpan ("You'll hold my hand until I'm dead") that the sweet and peppy tunes (by Lee and Tim Simmonds and John Michael Lyles) seem to be spoofing them, or the other way around. But as conceptually ornate as Lee's other works may be including "Straight White Men," which recently ran on Broadway "We're Gonna Die" is totally direct and sincere. That doesn't mean it's sentimental; the lyrics keep things dry and so does the deliciously matter of fact performance by McDermoth, who sounds fantastic accompanied by a five person band that eventually helps turn the wake into a party. As de facto host, McDermoth makes deflationary lines like "What makes you so special?" feel like warm invitations. Of necessity, it's a low key party. The director and choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly, takes his staging cues from the idea built into the lyrics that life can be tolerable despite its ending, if you lower your expectations. On a set by David Zinn that looks like a recording studio crossed with a hospital waiting room, the ensemble moves in patterns that suggest dreamy afternoons rather than late night raves. (There's even a slow drip balloon drop.) Gorgeous light in shifting shades of lilac and goldenrod (by Tuce Yasak) suggests both an arena concert and the natural world of which, like it or not, we are always a part. Kelly, a choreographer with a reputation for developing contextual movement in Off Broadway shows including "Fairview" and "A Strange Loop," has done wonders directing "We're Gonna Die," which in its first incarnation, at Joe's Pub in 2011, was a bare bones cabaret affair. That production, as well as later iterations in 2012 and 2013, featured Lee herself as the singer, a challenge she admits was a horrifying idea, though critics thought she acquitted herself well. But unlike such earlier Lee plays as "Untitled Feminist Show," which depend on a certain amount of raw energy to support and set off their complex ideas, the plainer "We're Gonna Die" benefits from having the most polished production (and best singing) possible. In that, it resembles David Byrne's "American Utopia," the beautifully upbeat Broadway songfest about a fallen world and how we might yet survive it. Lee's particular daring is in denying that survival option. Still, daring cuts two ways. Many of her plays, she says, are the result of heading directly toward her fears. And though writing what she least wants to write is a better policy than writing what people least want to see, there's a slightly ambivalent quality to this one, a couching of its subject that becomes the subject instead. So even as the audience joins in the quasi title tune at the end halfheartedly, the night I saw it it is not so much facing the facts of life as comforting itself with a prettified version of them. That's clearly part of Lee's plan: to defang mortality by turning it into a "Hey Jude" singalong at a Beatles tribute concert. But the play also suggests that the trick isn't so easy. In answer to the central question "What makes you so special?" the singer at first answers: "I believe, deep down, with all my heart, that I deserve to be immune not only from loneliness and tragedy, but also from aging, sickness and death." Surely I was not the only audience member nodding vigorously in agreement at that point. Which may mean that "We're Gonna Die" is not for everyone, except to the extent that it is. Tickets Through March 22 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; 212 541 4516, 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"I always had a drive not only to compose but to be a bandleader," said Orrin Evans, who has been based for most of his career in Philadelphia. PHILADELPHIA When the renowned power trio the Bad Plus announced in 2017 that Orrin Evans would come aboard, replacing its founding pianist Ethan Iverson after nearly 18 years, it was a moment to stop and wonder. No one expected this. But why did it seem to make such devilish sense? In some ways the news marked a kind of arrival for Mr. Evans. At 43, based for most of his career in Philadelphia, he had never been on the cover of a major jazz magazine, and all of his roughly 25 albums as a leader have come out on small labels. He has spent over two decades stubbornly committed to his own vision as a musician and community leader, but he's never been fully accepted as a marquee bandleader, perhaps because of his proudly unpretentious persona. Still, his arrival might have been an even bigger blessing for the Bad Plus. Though under hyped, Mr. Evans is a viable candidate for jazz's most resourceful and invigorating contemporary pianist. He is probably the closest heir we have to Geri Allen the first postmodern piano master in jazz, who died last year at 60 and a homier counterpart to the pianist Jason Moran, a MacArthur fellow and leading figure in improvised music. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. In DownBeat magazine's annual critics poll this year, Mr. Evans, propelled by the Bad Plus hype, won the "Rising Star" award among pianists. It was a victory with a sour aftertaste: He already has decades of work behind him, and by now is considered an elder statesman by a fleet of younger musicians. Sorting through a sheaf of old musical scores in the dim light of his basement on a recent evening, Mr. Evans puzzled at the DownBeat accolade. "I'm not looking down on it, but I'm just like: If I had waited on you, I'd have been a falling star," he said, addressing the critical establishment. "There was no way I was going to wait on you to tell me when I'm a star." The Bad Plus a collective trio lugging almost two decades of its own history behind it, with an arm's length relationship to the black musical tradition would seem a strange vessel of deliverance for Mr. Evans. But he has adapted quickly, and has made gentle adjustments to the band's approach, rearranging the furniture if not knocking down entire walls. Since the mid 1990s, Mr. Evans has led a range of outstanding bands, composing and recording nonstop while also mentoring scores of younger musicians. The home he shares with Dawn Warren Evans, his wife and creative partner, has long been a kind of community gathering place. Meanwhile, he's kept up a busy touring schedule as a side musician for artists like David Murray and Sean Jones. And he also continues to play here and there with Tarbaby, an all star trio featuring the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Nasheet Waits, which has an impressive new album on the way. The most representative project of Mr. Evans's personal ethic is his Captain Black Big Band, a Philadelphia based group that's a family as much as an ensemble. On Friday, the Smoke Sessions label released "Presence," the band's third album. Captain Black grew out of a weekly residency at Chris' Jazz Cafe 10 years ago, and the new album features live recordings from Chris' and another Philadelphia club, South. "When we started the band, we weren't making much money, but the energy was so great in the room each weekend," Mr. Evans said. "That's what's really important about this band: Not just the people on the bandstand, but the people in the audience." On "Presence" the group has slimmed down from 17 pieces to nine, allowing it a looser, more rugged range of motion while still illuminating the layers of harmonic fortification that Mr. Evans builds into his music. And the music is not just his own: Half of the tunes on "Presence" were composed by other band members. "The charts are movable, which is really important," Mr. Evans said. "Everybody is like, 'All right, well let's try this. Let's open this section up.' No one's saying, 'Don't mess up my tunes!' Everybody's amenable to change." Mr. Evans was born in Trenton, N.J., in 1975, and moved to Philadelphia as a child. His mother, Frances Gooding, was an opera singer, and his father, Don Evans, was a well known playwright and professor. In grade school Orrin took lessons from musicians around Philadelphia, then spent a couple of years studying jazz at Rutgers University, but eventually dropped out. He was interested in a liberated approach, unconcerned with the divide between the free improvising avant garde and Philadelphia's more soul adjacent straight ahead jazz world. He never quite found a teacher who could give him the full spectrum, so he went his own way. "Some of the older people I met in Philly, they were very supportive, but they also didn't know how to deal with me. I understand that now, because I was on a different track," he said. "I always had a drive not only to compose but to be a bandleader." He added: "If it wasn't for my mother and particularly my father, I don't know if I would have continued down that track." By the mid 1990s, when he began releasing records under his own name on the Criss Cross imprint, Mr. Evans's style had cohered into something commanding and distinctive. On early albums like "Captain Black" (a small group effort, not with the big band) and "Deja Vu," he offered magnetic up tempo compositions and plangent ballads, usually with a hint of melancholy at every speed. At first, it can be easy to hear his playing and think you're listening to a mainline jazz musician perhaps a close acolyte of the post bop doyen Cedar Walton. But that's missing Mr. Evans's vast library of personal innovations. One signature is his way of riding a fast swing feel, bustling to the point of bursting, its momentum built of weight more than speed. Often he'll land on an ostinato pattern, repeating an insistent phrase until it becomes its own song. Then there's his way of lacing harmonies together, giving a subtle emphasis to a single note within each chord. By shining a light on particular tones, he makes his juicy red clusters of harmony feel crisp and narrative. And when Evans veers outward, toward a free jazz style, he never seems to be going for esotericism or abstraction. If he delivers a scalding smash of dissonance, it's because he's offering a clear message that just happens to contain a ton: blistering energy, power, pathos, optimism and frustration. It all springs from experience. When it became clear in the late 1990s that no big label intended to pick him up, Mr. Evans and Mrs. Evans an occasional vocalist who serves as her husband's manager, as well as holding down a full time job decided to found Imani Records, and put out his music themselves. "He's always been an entrepreneur so he's always been self employed," Mrs. Evans said. But most of his activity is communitarian, and a lot of it centers on mentorship. "His phone just rings all day with people needing advice," she said, "whether it's on marriage or music or relationships or parenting." This year, the couple restarted Imani Records, which had been dormant for about 10 years. This time the plan is to use the label to promote younger musicians' work. One of its first new albums will be from Jonathan Michel, a bassist who spent the early years of his professional career in Philadelphia. He's one of many young musicians who describe Mr. Evans's influence as formative. "I saw Orrin asserting himself to make sure that the music is staying alive and still appreciated," Mr. Michel said, recalling Mr. Evans booking concert series at local restaurants, and leading educational events at Philadelphia's Kimmel Center. "You feel it on and off the bandstand," Mr. Michel added. "He would just invite me over to come eat at his house. It had nothing to do with music, but just with community and family, which has everything to do with music." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
When the heroes of "Fast Furious Presents: Hobbs Shaw" looked out their rearview mirrors at the box office this weekend, they had every reason to expect to see either Simba or Dora the Explorer on their tail. Instead, they saw a scary scarecrow. "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark," the nostalgic horror movie based on the creepy children's stories by Alvin Schwartz, debuted in second place at the box office this weekend, exceeding expectations and grossing about 20.8 million in the United States and Canada. Distributed by Lionsgate, "Scary Stories" screened at about 1,200 fewer locations than "Hobbs Shaw" did. But it narrowed the gap by making more money per theater than that movie or any other this weekend, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. Its success was presumably bolstered both by fairly strong reviews (the movie holds an 80 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and by its association with one of its producers, Guillermo del Toro, whose name was used heavily in the film's marketing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
How do you create a trail map? First I go up in a plane or helicopter to get aerial photographs, or I get aerial photographs supplied by the mountain. Then I produce a black and white sketch from those photographs that show the mountain trails and its structures. I even draw in the shadows. Then I transfer it onto an illustration board and add in the color and details with watercolors. I like to show the mountain at the time of day when the shadows are just catching the snow. That way you can actually see the surface of the slopes. Have you ever messed up? Once I had to go back and change the direction of the shadows. It was a cloudy day when they took the photos, and there was no Google Earth to check, so I had the shadows running the wrong way. It taught me to really be sure of where the sun is, even if it isn't showing up in my photographs. I go to great extremes to make sure the map is correct. Sometimes I ski the mountain, and the resort personnel, who know these mountains like the back of their hands, look it over. What is it like to be in the air taking photos of the ski areas? It's a real thrill to fly so close to the mountain and to get a view that many don't get to see. One of my most enjoyable flights was at Grand Targhee in Wyoming above . It was a perfect day, no wind at all and nice sun, and the plane we took had windows from the knees down so you could look down. We were so close to the Grand Tetons that I remember looking at a snow bank and thinking, "If I jumped out of this plane, I bet I'd live." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
MUNSTER, Ind. Laura Norman used to ask her seventh grade scientists to take out their textbooks and flip to Page Such and Such. Now, she tells them to take out their laptops. The day all have seen coming traditional textbooks being replaced by interactive computer programs arrived this year in this traditional, well regarded school district, complete with one naysaying parent getting reported to the police. Unlike the tentative, incremental steps of digital initiatives at many schools nationwide, Munster made an all in leap in a few frenetic months removing all math and science textbooks for its 2,600 students in grades 5 to 12, and providing a window into the hurdles and hiccups of such an overhaul. The transformation, which cost 1.1 million for infrastructure, involved rewiring not just classrooms but also the mindset of students, teachers and parents. When teachers started hearing that "the server ate my homework," they knew a new era had begun. "The material we're teaching is old but everything around it is brand new," said Pat Premetz, chairwoman of the math department at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Munster, who described the initiative as both "very overwhelming" and "the most exciting thing to happen in my 40 years of teaching." "This isn't stressing out students," Ms. Premetz added. "It's stressing out teachers because of some of the technological problems, and parents who are wondering why their kids are on the computer so much." Munster is hardly the first district to go digital. Schools in Mooresville, N.C., for example, started moving away from printed textbooks four years ago, and now 90 percent of their curriculum is online. "It didn't happen overnight for us it was an incremental change," said Mark Edwards, Mooresville's superintendent of schools. "The competency is evolutional." But Munster's is part of a new wave of digital overhauls in the two dozen states that have historically required schools to choose textbooks from government approved lists. Florida, Louisiana, Utah and West Virginia approved multimedia textbooks for the first time for the 2011 12 school year, and Indiana went so far as to scrap its textbook approval process altogether, partly because, officials said, the definition of a textbook will only continue to fracture. "We've stopped pretending that the state board of education is the biggest school district in the state," said Tony Bennett, Indiana's superintendent of public instruction. "I believe in local control, and we don't have the ability to be the keeper of knowledge we have been in the past. We'll be better off if we uncuff people's hands." Uncuffed, Angela Bartolomeo's sixth graders spent a recent Wednesday rearranging terms of equations on an interactive Smart Board and dragging and dropping answers in ways that chalkboards never could. (In between, a cartoon character exclaimed that "Multiplying by 1 does not change the value of a number!" in his best superhero baritone.) When the children followed up the lesson with exercises on their laptops, the curriculum, Pearson Education's "Digits," not only allowed them to advance at individual rates, but also alerted Ms. Bartolomeo via her iPad when they were stuck on a particular concept and needed help. Software wirelessly recorded the children's performance in a file that the teacher would review that night. "Last year I'd have to walk around and ask every kid how it's going, and I'd be grading sheets, that kind of thing," Ms. Bartolomeo said. "This way I can give my time to the kids who really need it. And it's a lot more engaging for the kids. They're actually doing their homework now." Ms. Norman, the seventh grade science teacher, is using material from Discovery Education, which on that Wednesday included videos from Discovery's "Mythbuster" series (commercial free), an interactive glossary and other eye candy to help students investigate whether cellphones cause cancer. When Ms. Norman told the students to take out their ear buds to watch a video, two in the back yelped, "Cool!" "With a textbook, you can only read what's on the pages here you can click on things and watch videos," said Patrick Wu, a seventh grader. "It's more fun to use a keyboard than a pencil. And my grades are better because I'm focusing more." Even as more and more schools nationwide have eschewed traditional textbooks, spending an estimated 2.2 billion on educational software last year, vigorous debate continues over whether technology measurably enhances achievement. But long before Munster will have a chance to reap any potential rewards, there has been a steep learning curve. It was left to Maureen Stafford, Munster's director of instructional programs and assessment, to convince skeptical colleagues (some of whom did not want to relearn how to teach) and parents (some of whom did not want their children to be exposed to the online wilderness) that the switch could be made in a matter of months. The town contributed about half of the 1.1 million to build the wireless infrastructure in the district's three elementary schools, middle school and high school, with district funds covering the rest. Each student was issued a laptop, with an annual rental fee of 150. The computers are cut off from noneducational Web sites, including social networks. The children are not allowed to use any other computer for their work because, she said, "kids on the south end of town will have Cadillacs and others on the north end will have eBay versions. That's not equitable." Some parents balked at the expense and risk, even though the fee is the same as what the district had long been charging for textbooks, and includes insurance. Then there were the Luddites: one father sent so many nasty e mails to Ms. Stafford that she reported him to the police for, fittingly, cyber harassment. (He ceased and desisted.) "You don't want your child to have a laptop?" Ms. Stafford said. "What are we going to do? That's our textbook! There's nothing else." There were the inevitable technical glitches. One girl in Ms. Norman's class missed the video because she could not connect to the network, so she had to catch up in the Media Center (formerly known as the library). During a contentious meeting with a Pearson representative, several math teachers complained of assignments disappearing, tests not saving, and network failures lasting hours while students struggled to get online for homework. "We have no record of any outages at that time," the Pearson representative, Chuck Dexter, explained as the teachers grew angrier. "That's what we need to figure out." Ms. Stafford, 62, has long planned to retire in 2013, and noted in an interview that it would have been far easier for her, and many others in Munster, to stay with print textbooks for another few years. But when Indiana made multimedia an option, she felt she had no other. "This wasn't a technology initiative this was a curriculum initiative," Ms. Stafford said. "The best programs out there needed the technology required to implement it. It was time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
In her new solo "Forested," the second piece in a trilogy exploring the ways an audience's gaze can be guided and controlled, the dancer and choreographer Amanda Loulaki uses her body as a vessel. Her compact frame has been on trips like this before. Ms. Loulaki, a New York artist born in Crete, is enamored of the choreographic potential of stringing together fragments of movement, gestures and emotions to create an ambiguous whole. There's little that is concrete in "Forested," which started its run at the Chocolate Factory on Wednesday, but even though such disjointedness is purposeful, a little goes a long way in this indistinct production. The stage starts out with minimal decor: In addition to a jump rope, there are a fuzzy green tube and a miniature windup toy of a horse and its rider. Lights, designed by Joe Levasseur, flicker on and off throughout the work; at one point, he seems to be operating a dimmer switch, a sophomoric attempt to hold our attention that conjures more irritation than artful chaos. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A planned ban on For Sale signs in New Canaan, Conn., hadn't even begun before it was over. The New Canaan Board of Realtors had publicly announced the six month trial ban in early June, citing the dramatic shift toward online house hunting and a desire among its members to improve the look of the pricey town. For Sale signs have multiplied noticeably in New Canaan this year as the community has struggled to attract enough buyers to whittle down its substantial supply. "When you have as much inventory as we have, the signs make it look like there's something wrong," said Doug Milne, an agent with Houlihan Lawrence who specializes in the towns of New Canaan and Darien, explaining part of the thinking behind the proposed sign ban. House sales in New Canaan were down 25 percent in the first half of 2018 compared with the same period last year, according to data from Halstead. As of this June 30, 358 homes were listed for sale, the bulk in the 1 million to 2.5 million price range. But the clearing away of lawn signs, which was to begin July 1, was quietly called off in mid June after news of the plan spread nationally via the internet. In an email to members, the New Canaan board said the reversal was based on conversations with the National Association of Realtors, its parent organization. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"I was thinking I could be made into a leather jacket," Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) muses to her concerned friend, Jane (Jane Adams), not long into the moody psychodrama "She Dies Tomorrow." Having flatly communicated her belief that she will bite the dust the next day, Amy is determined that her corpse be useful. The scene suggests black comedy, but this second feature from the writer and director Amy Seimetz (after the marvelous "Sun Don't Shine" in 2013) won't make you feel much like laughing. At once a fascinating experiment and a claustrophobic puzzle, "She Dies Tomorrow" could be about many things or nothing at all, its free floating mood of anxious anticipation ready to be slotted into multiple neuroses. Amy isn't suicidal: A recovering alcoholic who has mysteriously relapsed elliptical memories suggest a painful breakup or a major regret could be the cause she wanders around her recently purchased house, stroking walls and caressing hardwood floors, her unpacked belongings emphasizing the emptiness. Late in the night, strobing colors and a weird, urgent wail pull the trancelike Amy toward the audience before we float off to rejoin Jane, who's unable to concentrate on the blood sample she's examining through a microscope. (Flowing blood is a recurring motif in the film, as if its characters' irrationalities had a biological explanation.) In time, wearing only her pajamas, Jane will show up at her brother and sister in law's party and she too will announce, in front of their astonished guests, that she's going to die the following day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
were married Aug. 31 at the Emerson Park Pavilion, an events space in Auburn, N.Y. The Rev. Michael L. Weeden, the father of the bride who is a United Methodist Church minister, officiated. The couple met in 2011 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., from which they both graduated. The bride, 27, is a vice president at Quinn PR, a public relations firm in New York. She is the daughter of Dr. Catherine J. Cannariato of Ithaca, N.Y., and Mr. Weeden of Gouverneur, N.Y. She is the stepdaughter of Mary Driesch and Ellen Weeden. The groom, 28, is known as Colgan. He is a press agent at Polk Company, a public relations firm in New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
TAL Apparel is one of the most powerful companies in the global fashion supply chain that many consumers have never heard of. Its factories make huge numbers of shirts particularly for men for brands including Brooks Brothers, Bonobos and LL Bean. In fact, TAL Apparel claims it makes one in six dress shirts sold in the United States. Owned by TAL Group, which is based in Hong Kong and is a founding member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, TAL Apparel employs about 26,000 garment workers in 10 factories globally, producing roughly 50 million pieces of apparel each year including men's chinos, polo tees, outerwear and dress shirts. One of those factories is Pen Apparel, in the steamy seaside town of Penang in Malaysia, where 70 percent of workers at the factory were migrants hired in countries like Vietnam, Myanmar, Nepal and Bangladesh, according to TAL. Along with Imperial Garments, a second TAL factory in nearby Ipoh, Pen Apparel is the subject of a new report from Transparentem, a nonprofit that focuses on environmental and human rights abuses in supply chains. The investigation, which was shown to brands supplied by the factories in late May, included allegations of potential forced labor among TAL's 2,600 migrant workers, linked to payment of high recruitment fees in their home countries to guarantee their jobs. According to the International Labor Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations dedicated to improving labor conditions, forced labor is "work or service which is exacted from any person under the threat of a penalty and for which the person has not offered himself or herself voluntarily." Companies don't always make prompt, substantive changes when faced with revelations of exploitation in their supply chains. But the pandemic has added factors that made the situation even more urgent. The lockdown sent most clothing sales plummeting, causing Western retailers to slash orders and TAL to start closing its Malaysian operations. If an agreement by TAL and the brands it supplied to pay compensation was not reached quickly, the risk was that the migrant workers now out of work could be deported, or disappear into new local employment while still in heavy debt from their jobs with TAL. Conscious that Western brands are increasingly being held to account by consumers, both TAL and its partners appeared eager to make amends. TAL also released a collective action plan July 24 though it was scant on key details. The New York Times contacted Levi's, Brooks Brothers, Suitsupply, Untuckit, LL Bean, Walmart, Lacoste, Charles Tyrwhitt, Stitch Fix, Tie Bar, the Black Tux and Paul Frederick all brands known to be supplied by TAL's Malaysian factories. "We try our utmost to carry out extensive due diligence and audits but with such a global chain it can be a struggle," said Joy Roeterdink, the corporate social responsibility manager at Suitsupply. "When there is an issue, we don't believe in cutting relationships with factories. That doesn't help the workers. It is better for everyone to invest in fixing the problem." None of the other brands said anything on the record beyond a statement from the American Apparel and Footwear Association, an industry lobbying group that spoke on behalf of the American brands involved. TAL company policy was to front the cost of these fees, which were in practice considered "factory loans," Transparentem said, that workers gradually repaid through paycheck deductions. But in Bangladesh, some were charged additional recruitment fees directly by agents, according to Transparentem. They were then threatened by those agents and forced to say, on film, they were not being exploited, at the risk of losing their jobs. For others, the total fees were so high they had used their life savings, sold family land or taken out loans with high interest rates for the chance of a more lucrative livelihood abroad. "We have come here to work and save up some money," one Pen Apparel worker, whose identity was not disclosed to prevent retaliation, told Transparentem. "But even after working very hard we are not able to save any money. It is hard to even earn back the money we invested." A similar tale was told by workers at Imperial Garments. Many said they had not learned about the TAL factory loans that would be deducted from their salaries until after they had already paid the agents' fees, according to Transparentem, and the result was that they were being paid half of what they were promised. Transparentem also said it recorded accounts of deception, intimidation and unsafe living conditions from workers, all of which are listed among the 11 indicators of forced labor outlined by the International Labor Organization. After production volumes fell to 30 percent of capacity, TAL had announced in April that Pen Apparel would close at the end of July, while Imperial Garments would close at the end of 2020. Against a backdrop of tensions in Malaysia over the country's harsh treatment of migrant workers during lockdown, many workers were left in a state of despair. When Transparentem presented its findings to a dozen brands supplied by TAL, nine companies agreed to begin discussions on a collective reimbursement plan, including the Dutch brand Suitsupply and American names like Levi's, LL Bean, Eddie Bauer and Brooks Brothers (before Brooks Brothers filed for bankruptcy this month). Tu Rinsche, the vice president of engagement and partnerships at Transparentem, noted that Transparentem had never seen such a rapid response to one of its reports, or one in which the factory owner played such an active role. After several rounds of negotiations, an agreement was reached: More than 1,400 workers from eight countries would receive payment from what TAL called a "substantial" collective action fund, distributed to workers in two installments on July 24 and July 31. According to the American Apparel and Footwear Association, the ethical trade consultancy Impactt had also been hired by the brands to assess the living and working conditions of TAL factory workers in Malaysia and ensure they were in line with coronavirus health and safety protocols. The A.A.F.A. called the deal "an immediate solution" that would "protect the rights of all workers throughout our supply chains." But beyond saying there would be compensation, TAL and the brands declined to say much else, except that the workers would only be partly and not fully compensated for their debts. Although the restitution fund may total several million dollars, according to guidance from Transparentem, TAL declined to disclose the full amount of compensation that would be paid, or break down the contributions made by TAL and the participating brands. Both the A.A.F.A. and TAL declined to outline which brands were taking part in the compensation agreement. (TAL supplies roughly 75 companies.) At a time when questions are growing around what fashion supply chain transparency means, the reception of the report underscored how few companies still actively tackle labor abuses unless challenged, or disclose their actions afterward. One of the starkest revelations in the report was that TAL had previously identified many issues including worker exploitation by recruitment agents to the extent that in 2018 it stopped hiring from Bangladesh, where the most unethical practices had taken place. Most of the TAL workers in Malaysia who were from Bangladesh were hired before 2018. TAL, though relatively unknown outside fashion, is nonetheless a visible company within the industry. It is a signatory of the United Nations Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, suggesting its progressive leanings. Why, then, didn't TAL immediately reimburse the affected workers when it discovered the abuses and pay them back as part of their wages in 2018? "These changes are now in place for workers we hire in the future," he continued. "But what we've been negotiating with Transparentem is how to go back in time to give these migrants what they are owed from events that took place outside Malaysia. It is not impossible. But in this climate, it is not easy either." With some clients declaring bankruptcy (Brooks Brothers and J. Crew), and most clients reducing orders, TAL said it had seen a decline of almost 50 percent in orders and was absorbing significant levels of bad debt. Delman Lee, the president and chief technology officer of TAL Apparel, said that the full fund amount could not be disclosed "because payments differ depending on the individual worker." The company was focused on creating a safe environment for workers, he said, which included the payment of allowances, regular temperature checks and, in some cases, repatriation flights to countries like Vietnam, as well as matching migrant workers to new local employers in Malaysia. "We are in a labor intensive business," Mr. Lee said of TAL Group, which has generated pre pandemic annual revenues of more than 850 million. "Inevitably, issues will take place in our factories, but if we are wrong we will always admit we are wrong and do our best to fix them. We know solving one case is the tip of the iceberg." Ms. Rinsche of Transparentem said that only a handful of brands supplied by TAL's Malaysian factories contributed to the workers' relief effort and that she hoped more would come forward after the circulation of the report. "Everyone in the fashion business needs to pay more attention to how they oversee the recruitment of migrant workers, and talk more about the processes required in improving bad practices," Ms. Rinsche said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Destination bread and pastries have been surprisingly elusive in San Diego, a city with access to stellar ingredients and international influences that aren't beholden to rigid baking traditions. Now there is a destination, thanks to Crystal White and her new bakery, where a mural depicts the sunrise over a wheat field, signaling a new dawn for San Diego baking. That shouldn't come as a shock given her bona fides. The Napa native attended California's Culinary Institute of America at Greystone and worked for highly respected Proof Bakery in Los Angeles and San Francisco's famed Tartine Bakery, but always dreamed of opening her own bakery by the beach. "After living in L.A. from 2010 to 2012, and seeing signs of that revival, I saw a lot of the same signs in San Diego," Ms. White said. "It's a ripe market and I wanted to be a part of it." Ms. White originally envisioned a basic bread and pastry window, but the space she found inspired something more substantial: Wayfarer Bread Pastry opened in May in an airy space with a bustling patio in the sleepy Bird Rock neighborhood. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
David Leonhardt has excellent recommendations for improving the nomination process. Ranked choice voting is essential. In any multiple candidate primary or caucus anyone edging up to 30 percent can be declared the "winner." This revised method would ensure a more broadly accepted candidate would succeed. The winner take all primaries should be revised to allocate delegates based on popular vote totals. Debates with a stage spanning assembly of contenders should be replaced by "town hall" settings where each candidate is individually interviewed by a panel of journalists. A series of five regional primaries, spread from February to June with rotation of order every four years, should replace the mishmash of the current system. The nominee should be the people's choice, not the survivor of a jumbled process. David Leonhardt's column points out certain aspects of the primary system that make no sense and resulted in Donald Trump's nomination. But the solutions he suggests are complex and impractical. The core of the problem with the primary system is the low level of turnout. This results in a small minority, usually the most extreme of each party, having disproportionate influence. Perhaps ranked choice voting would help. Absent that, I suggest that primaries should be governed by the quorum requirement common in many government bodies in order for the results to be recognized. Even a quorum requirement of 30 percent or 40 percent of eligible voters participating would be a vast improvement. Facilitating early voting, absentee voting and keeping the polls open for longer periods, including weekends, would make the achievement of a quorum more easily attainable and would make the results more representative. David Leonhardt is right to criticize the current primary system for selection of candidates, but partisanship itself is the problem. I envision an open primary system, in which all voters can vote for candidates of any party. This would orient the candidates to the broad center of the electorate, rather than to the activist fringes of each party. The field would be winnowed in a series of nationwide primaries, so that no states are favored or ignored. In each round, candidates would need to receive a higher percentage of the vote to proceed to the next round, ending with two candidates for the general election. Such a system would invert the hyperpartisan system and would engage the whole nation, not just the battleground states. It is critical that the Democratic debates address process issues like this. While it is useful to know the candidates' positions on health care, etc., it is just as important to figure out how Donald Trump has been able to run amok with the presidency. What in our political system allowed him to get elected, and what has allowed him to misuse the presidency to such an extent? What changes should be made to prevent this? As Donald Trump has said, "I have an Article II where I have the right to do whatever I want as president." He has gone further in that direction than anyone before him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The developer Extell now has the go ahead from the Landmarks Preservation Commission to cantilever a 1,400 foot tower over the Art Students League at 215 West 57th Street, which will create, certainly, a beanstalk presence on what was already a thoroughly jumbled block. Just how this short section of 57th between Broadway and Seventh Avenue became home to so many disparate institutions the league, apartment buildings like the Osborne and car related businesses like the old General Motors factory at Broadway is a good question. The architectural mix, uncommon in Manhattan, came about as three distinct kinds of development moved in from three directions. In 1880 this block was practically terra incognita, with just a few miscellaneous structures. Two blocks east, the intersection of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue was on its way to becoming a nexus of mansions, and 15 blocks south, what was still Longacre Square (soon Times Square) had emerged as a center for carriage manufacture. Broadway below 42nd Street had been a favored address for hotels and their cousins, apartment hotels. Beginning in the mid 1870s such buildings also came to Longacre Square; then, in the late 1870s, apartment house development for some reason jumped to Seventh Avenue, with projects like the 1879 Van Corlear, built from 55th to 56th Street by Edward Clark as a run up to his Dakota of 1884. The building, long gone, was from the outside a harsh sweep of red brick, resembling a particularly punitive home for fallen women. But the interior was advanced for its time, with cross ventilation, foyer centered entrances and well thought out sleeping, entertaining and service areas. Within a few years the Wyoming, the Ontiora and other apartment houses also rose on Seventh, and ultimately the stone dealer Thomas Osborne decided to try his hand at this new type of multiple dwelling. His 1885 Osborne, a veritable brownstone quarry of 14 floors at the northwest corner of 57th, was one of the biggest of the crop. The seed of innovation does not always find fertile ground, and The Real Estate Record and Guide saw "nothing architecturally interesting" about Osborne's effort. A further slap in the face came when Osborne lost his vertical advertisement through foreclosure. However, it was the first of several apartment house place markers on this block of 57th Street, including the Rodin Studios, on the southwest corner of Seventh, as well as others nearby, like the Alwyn Court at 58th Street. A second thread of development arrived in 1892, when the American Fine Arts Society built 215 West 57th, the structure now known as the Art Students League. The society was a consortium of art organizations that banded together in 1889, and in moving to this block extended a line of ateliers on West 57th Street, like the Rembrandt and Sherwood Studios, and also Carnegie Hall, begun at Seventh and 57th in 1889. A relation of the society's was the lacy Gothic American Society of Civil Engineers, at 220 West 57th Street, built in 1897 and occupied for years by Lee's Art Shop, which has preserved many of the interior details. The final part of the transformation was the northward movement of the carriage operations of Longacre Square along Broadway. This was first felt in 1902 at midblock, next to the Art Students League, with Frank Gould's colossal, banklike indoor riding ring, long ago demolished. Peerless and Demarest, builders of horse drawn and motorized vehicles, followed, and by 1910 had erected their Gothic style white terra cotta factory and showroom later owned by General Motors at the southeast corner of Broadway and 57th. At the northeast corner, Fiat took over a four level store and showroom. Almost simultaneously the Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw designed a building with an unusual double facade for the L shaped plot fronting on both Broadway and 57th. By this time the block had just a few available plots, including one at No. 218 on the south side for which, in 1916, Consolidated Gas had Warren Wetmore design its three story limestone showroom. Although a commercial enterprise, the building certainly had a civic grandeur. It was torn down years ago. In the 1990s the Art Students League declined two offers to build a tall building over its rear parcel. But the offer of 20 million for its air rights from Extell Development was persuasive, and now plans call for the league building to have a skinny pencil case tower cantilevered overhead. The Extell project would not be possible without the commission's astonishing move of making a landmark of the Broadway frontage of the Shaw building while leaving the 57th Street bay, essentially identical to the one on Broadway, up for grabs. And grabbed it the developer has; the site is now cleared. We have, then, a New York block, a sort of architectural loom on which three distinct strands coming from three directions were woven into a single fabric where from now on it appears the only place to go may be straight up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Cuatro Grados Norte (Four Degrees North) has quietly arrived as the pulsing, bohemian hub of a rejuvenated Guatemala City. The 19th century neighborhood, originally known as the city exposition district and inspired by the 1889 Paris World's Fair, had by the late 1990s become infamous for its abandoned factories and alarming crime rate. Today, a new generation of hopeful, innovative Guatemaltecos has reclaimed Cuatro Grados Norte and converted it into the city's pre eminent cultural and gastronomic zone, filled with vibrant street art, coffee shops, tech incubators, artisan cooperatives and chef owned restaurants. The craft beer movement has been slow to arrive in Guatemala, but this standout spot has found a home and outsize reputation. Set in the intimate lower level of the Casa del Aguila Cultural Center, the microbrewery serves artisanal lagers, I.P.A.s, hefeweizens and coffee stouts as well as sausages. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When you perform a multitude of comic voices, it's easy for your own to get lost. It's an occupational hazard for a skilled impressionist like Darrell Hammond, a "Saturday Night Live" stalwart for 14 years who never became a breakout star. In "Cracked Up," a slickly constructed new documentary about his life, Hammond, who describes his face as so bland that it becomes a canvas for so many others, emerges as a riveting, eccentric character: Fragile, lyrical and haunted, like a doomed figure out of Tennessee Williams. This isn't your typical show business documentary. Its interest in comedy is limited that Alec Baldwin was recruited to replace Hammond as Donald Trump on "S.N.L.," the subject of a buzzed about 2017 Washington Post profile, isn't mentioned. The film's director, Michelle Esrick, begins and ends with close ups of Hammond walking outside his childhood home in Melbourne, Fla., speaking soberly, with an odd elusiveness, about his upbringing. He goes on to describe struggles with depression, self harm, romance and even sleep. Early on, he describes a scene of his mother staring at him like someone trying to "figure out the plot of a movie." We're doing the same thing, and the film keeps the question of the source of Hammond's gloom hanging there, teasing out suspense , slowing arriving at an answer. It helps that he is a performer with a melodramatic streak. Describing his family, he says in a slight drawl: "Where I come from, the archenemy, the fiend, is the truth." Esrick keeps such a tight focus on Hammond, with few talking heads, that the documentary can feel slightly claustrophobic and even grim, like a therapy session that is about to reach a breakthrough. At times, you want to hear from more perspectives. (We do see a few scenes of Hammond talking to a childhood friend.) But while "Cracked Up" belongs to the sad clown genre, it's not a simplistic love letter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In "Horse Girl," Sarah (Alison Brie) is a mousy young woman undergoing a paranoid breakdown. As she spirals further from reason, the movie follows suit. We plunge into a prolonged nightmare of instability, both in terms of Sarah's hallucinations and the movie's reckless evocation of them. Streaming on Netflix, "Horse Girl" opens in a lucid reality, if a quirky one. It's Sarah's birthday, and her plans are nonexistent. Shy and a little socially off, she fails to connect with her Zumba classmates, likewise her cool girl roommate. She wards off loneliness through peculiar obsessions, particularly a fantasy TV series called "Purgatory" and the horse she once owned, which she visits frequently enough to annoy its new owner and stablemen. The director Jeff Baena, who co wrote the script with Brie, gently lingers on Sarah's hobbies, helping us understand how they serve as armor against an emotionally taxing world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE Native America From 1890 to the Present By David Treuer Illustrated. 512 pp. Riverhead Books. 28. Over the past 12 months, Native American politicians, artists and academics have made uncommon gains. Indeed, Native American women helped to make 2018 the Year of the Woman. In November, New Mexican and Kansan voters elected Debra Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Sharice Davids (Ho Chunk) to Congress, while voters in Minnesota elected Peggy Flanagan (Ojibwe) their lieutenant governor. In October, the sociologist Rebecca Sandefur (Chickasaw) and the poet Natalie Diaz (Mojave) won MacArthur Foundation Awards, while throughout the spring and summer, the playwrights Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee), Larissa FastHorse (Lakota) and DeLanna Studi (Cherokee) had historic openings at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Artists Repertory Theater in Portland, Ore., and Portland Center Stage, respectively. From the cover of American Theater magazine in April to CNN on election night, the work of these eight dynamic Native women garnered national acclaim. Such achievements represent more than added texture to the mosaic of modern America. They underscore the rising power of American Indians over the past two generations. During an era known as "Self Determination," Indian tribes and their citizens have changed not only their particular nations but also the larger nation around them. Though still poorly understood, this era emerged from urban and reservation activism in the 1960s and '70s, when community leaders, students and veterans, among others, challenged onerous policies that had aimed to assimilate tribal communities. The Self Determination Era has now grown in prodigious ways and yielded countless examples of achievement across Native North America, including the elections of Haaland and Davids as the first American Indian women ever elected to Congress. A noted novelist, Treuer takes his title from the celebrated work "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," by Dee Brown. Published in 1970 at the height of the activist movements, Brown's reassessment of the 19th century wars between Indians and the federal government resonated with a generation of Americans. Achieving its narrative crescendo with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, when the Seventh Cavalry was said to have exacted revenge for Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn, Brown's text fueled growing outrage against injustices perpetuated by the federal government. It was a history that reached beyond its subject and helped to define an era. It has remained in print ever since. To many, Brown's history inverted accounts of the American West. It substituted Euro American quests for frontier freedom with those of American Indians "who already had it." The problem was that in place of Indian vilification Brown offered victimization. Despite their nobility and fortitude, he suggested, Indians were still defeated. In his telling, Native history became a slow, inexorable decline toward disappearance. Twentieth century "poverty, hopelessness and squalor," he wrote, were the outcomes for peoples who had lost and who remained lost. 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. White Americans have long defined the past through narratives of frontier freedoms. Recently, however, historians have moved away from such self justifying accounts, and a growing field has made the experiences of indigenous displacement, survival and resurgence a new pathway for understanding the nation's history. Celebratory accounts of European settlement and expansion have increasingly passed into an antiquarian realm, succeeded by studies of settler colonialism that approach the past more comparatively as well as more cautiously. Treuer adeptly synthesizes these recent studies and fashions them with personal, familial and biographic vignettes. He works hard to connect the past with those who live with its ongoing legacies. An extended account of his cousin's history of reservation cage fighting on their home at Leech Lake, Minn., for example, effectively introduces Part 3 of the book, "Fighting Life: 1914 1945," which chronicles the astonishing rates of Indian service in World Wars I and II. Here, Treuer recalls heroes less familiar than the Indians of traditional histories. Joseph Oklahombi of the Choctaw Nation received both the American Silver Star and the French Croix de Guerre during World War I for capturing a German machine gun nest and "killing 79 before taking another 171 captive." He was, however, never "recommended for the Medal of Honor" which, as Treuer notes cuttingly, had been awarded to "20 of the troopers who opened fire on unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee." Even before the United States joined the war in 1917, some Indian men had migrated into Canada and joined other Native Americans, like Francis Pegahmagabow (Ojibwe) from Wasauksing First Nation, whose service at Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele included "378 confirmed kills and the capture of 300 Germans." These achievements made him "the most decorated soldier (and certainly the most effective) in the Canadian Army." The portraits of such early 20th century individuals follow Treuer's survey of colonial and 19th century history, where regional overviews of Native North America are combined with the complex, multi imperial histories that forged colonial America and the young Republic. Readers will find familiar analyses of the unrelenting, violent cupidity of European explorers and, at times, subtle suggestions about the equally relentless capacity of Indian communities adapting within the maelstrom of early America. Through the book's second half, recounting developments since World War II, Treuer's counternarrative to Brown takes its fullest form. In particular, his detailed assessments of what he calls "becoming Indian" highlight the resiliency and dynamism of contemporary tribal communities. Interrelated processes rooted in family and culture, he suggests, undergird the continuing sovereignty of modern Indian tribes. Such processes, he shows, are in fact ubiquitous. They are also deeply personal. For instance, as he concludes about his mother's adjuration to maintain his family's methods of ricing, hunting, sugaring and berry harvesting, "sovereignty isn't only a legal attitude or a political reality." Sovereignty is lived. It is inhabited, performed and enacted, often on a daily basis. It can also become as empowering as it is cherished: "To believe in sovereignty," Treuer writes, "to move through the world imbued with the dignity of that reality, is to resolve one of the major contradictions of modern Indian life: It is to find a way to be Indian and modern simultaneously." As the political theorist Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) similarly suggests, culturally specific, place based relationships root Native peoples not only with their homelands but also with ethical obligations and a moral worldview that he terms "grounded normativity." Family, relationships and place based sovereignty are a major feature of contemporary Native America, whose collective "heartbeat" has grown stronger throughout the Self Determination Era. The legacies of conquest, however, continue, and Indian communities still endure beleaguering disparities. They also continue to confront legal and political challenges, as well as threats of violence. Treuer writes that in recent years the United States Supreme Court has been "shaped by the questions of community and obligation between the government and several Indian nations." But he might have noted as well that since 1978 the court has fashioned a "common law colonialism" that chips away at the ability of tribal courts to enforce criminal and civil laws against non Indians, while environmental degradation and the extraction of resources plague Indian communities disproportionately. Increasingly, colonial battles have moved from Wounded Knee to Congress, where Native communities have, at times, been victorious. "In 2013, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)," Treuer writes, "was reauthorized and significantly revised. Among the new provisions was the empowerment of tribal courts to charge and prosecute non Natives who raped or assaulted Native women on Native land." Such statutory reforms offer tribal communities opportunities to reform misguided court rulings, and political advocacy has become an effective mechanism for protecting community members, enforcing environmental regulations and further institutionalizing sovereign authority within tribal communities. Indeed, working with Congress has become a common feature of contemporary American Indian politics. Treuer speaks of "a slew of laws" passed in the 1990s and 2000s that have empowered Native peoples. Threats to tribal sovereignty, however, loom. Shortly after the VAWA reauthorization, Dollar General Corporation took a case to the Supreme Court contesting tribal authority over civil affairs. In 2016 it nearly won with a court that divided 4 to 4. Legal challenges like this one have become among the 21st century's primary landscapes of confrontation. Ultimately, Treuer's powerful book suggests the need for soul searching about the meanings of American history and the stories we tell ourselves about this nation's past. There is an urgency to fashion new national narratives. Treuer's suggestion, for example, that Indian peoples have been infected by colonialism with a disease "of powerlessness ... more potent than most people imagine" could be extended to include the subordination experienced by other gendered, racialized and historically disempowered communities. This disease also has the potential to spread even further, because it cannot simply be up to America's indigenous people to ward it off. As Treuer explains, "This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
We left the trail head at 1 a.m. and headed for the summit of the Grand Teton. I had made this climb several times, but my friend was still new to mountaineering. This trip was his first attempt at the popular peak. Our goal was to reach the top by sunrise so we had enough time to get back down before afternoon thunderstorms made the trail dangerous. Reaching the summit involves some hiking, followed by a more technical climb. When the time came to climb, we pulled out our harnesses, ropes and other safety gear. Being the more experienced climber, I headed up the mountain first. My job was to put in what climbers call protection. This protection would catch the rope in case of a fall. The harder the climb, the more protection climbers add. However, if the climbing is really easy, it's not unusual to move long distances before adding more protection. Since I had been up this route so many times, I didn't spend a lot of time adding protection. In my mind, I had placed the probability of falling at next to zero. Yes, we were up high and we were really exposed, but my experience suggested you would almost have to try to fall while climbing this route. We reached a resting point and my friend stopped me and demanded to know what I was doing: "Carl, that was irresponsible. You should have put in more protection." I assured him that we were just fine. I'd been up here a number of times, and the chances that we would fall were minimal. His next words hit me hard. "Yeah," he said, "but if I did, I'd die." That climb changed the way I view risk forever. For most of my life, I looked at risk simply as the probability that a catastrophic event would occur. Whether it was climbing, buying a house or starting a business, I carefully analyzed what I believed the chance of failure to be and then moved ahead based on that one factor. My friend taught me that identifying the probability of something happening is simply the first step. We also need to consider the consequence of what will happen if that risk becomes reality. For instance, the chances that we would fall off the Grand Teton were minimal, but if we did fall, we'd die. That's a different consideration than if we were to fall and the consequence was skinning a knee. The same rules apply to our finances. Let's assume there's a low risk, maybe 20 percent, that the business I plan to invest in will fail. That seems like a reasonable risk. But if I'm investing my life savings in that business and there is any chance it will fail, that's a huge thing to consider. We're talking about a complete change to my life if that 20 percent becomes reality. The conversation is very different if there is a 20 percent risk the business will fail, but I invest only a small portion of my savings. The business's failure will still hurt, but not in the same way as if I had invested everything. I see something similar when people talk about making a major purchase, like buying a car. The discussion tends to focus on the best case situation. Certain assumptions are made, such as, "My income will grow at 5 percent every year, so I can afford the bigger payment on the more expensive car." After all, you assure yourself, the probability that something major will happen to your job is minimal. But look past the low probability to the real consequence. What if your income doesn't go up or you lose your job? Could you lose the car, too? Do you have enough savings to tide you over, or people who would help you out? Until we put the risk in context, we have a difficult time weighing whether we can actually afford to fail. For me, a simple conversation on the side of a mountain changed my perspective and represented a big turning point in my life. Now, I try really hard with every decision I make to consider both the probability and the consequence of failure. What will it take for you to start looking past the risk and weighing the consequences? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
I'm standing on a set that's as familiar to me as my own living room because of all the times I've seen it from my own living room. I've just landed on the first Daily Double. And I have a chance to take the lead. I'm not sure what my face is doing, because I'm still not sure I believe this is happening. I give my answer: "What is the glass ceiling?" Now I have 5,800 and the lead. After all those years shouting answers at the TV screen, half a dozen attempts at the online tryout, and one very tense morning in the studio waiting for my turn, this is it. I'm going to be the one who takes down Goliath. Goliath, in this case, is James Holzhauer, the 22 time winner (through Friday) whose record smashing run on "Jeopardy!" has turned him into a household name. He's a speed demon on the buzzer who regularly nails all three Daily Doubles with sky high wagers. He's catching up to Ken Jennings, and he's doing it fast. How did James Holzhauer turn 'Jeopardy!' into his own A.T.M.? We asked him. As a kid, I used to watch Jeopardy! with my grandfather. Well, I'd watch he would be "resting his eyes." I started trying to get on the show in college, and over the years, I would twice make it as far as the in person auditions before, this January, the stars aligned and I got The Call. You get one chance to make your mark on "Jeopardy!" and I wasn't going to waste it. Before flying to Los Angeles, I relearned everything I'd forgotten about United States presidents and world capitals, read up on Final Jeopardy betting strategy, and watched the full catalog of the Tournament of Champions. I wasn't going to be one of those players who was just happy to be nominated. Especially not when I knew I'd be the show's typical lone woman, facing off against two men. No, I was going to win. In any game of "Jeopardy!" there's a returning champion. So when I arrive at the studio at 7 on a Monday morning, filled half with adrenaline and half iced coffee, to hear that our guy has already won twice, I just think: he seems ... normal? Then we actually get to watch him play. The show tapes five episodes every day that it's on set, and you don't know which game you'll be playing until they call your name, minutes before your turn. The rest of the time, all you and your comrades/opponents have to do is watch. It's supposed to be fun: you're playing a game. But that morning, it felt like we'd stumbled into a war zone. I remember someone joking, "Who's next into the meat grinder?" I couldn't decide if I wanted it to be me. At least then the wait would be over. My mother was in the audience, and you're not allowed to talk to your guests during the taping, but her face said it all. What is life like for Ken Jennings and other former "Jeopardy!" stars? Lewis Black, a lawyer from Salt Lake City, and I are the first ones out of the trenches after production breaks for lunch. It'll be a Thursday episode, April 11. We step onto marked off squares that have built in elevators that rise up to make it look like we're all the same height. Lewis and I give each other a look. I try to remember that we're playing against each other, too, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like we're in this together. And someone, somehow, has got to take this guy down. It's not like I didn't realize that was unlikely. In a strange way, though, the long odds felt liberating. The numbers on the game board stopped being real money and became nothing more than points in a game. A game I was still going to try to win, because Goliath or not, this was my one shot. Most of James's strategies aren't new to the show starting from the high value clues at the bottom of the board, jumping from category to category, hunting for Daily Doubles. What makes him a "Jeopardy!" machine is all of that and his impeccable timing on the buzzer. It's unreal. I had thought that mastering the buzzer would be the easy part. I'm a millennial! I grew up playing video games! In reality? It felt impossible. You can't buzz in until Alex is finished reading a clue; if you're too early, you get locked out for a fraction of a second. You can try to time it by listening to him or you can watch for the white lights on either side of the game board, which turn on the moment the system is armed. I tried it all in our rehearsal rounds, but I never got the hang of it. And James had already had five games' worth of practice. There's only one way to succeed against a player who uses James's strategies, and that's to make sure you use the same aggressive style. I manage to rack up some early momentum. I get the first Daily Double, and wrestling one away from James a rare occurrence already feels like an achievement. The category is "Idioms" and Alex reads the clue: "Management consultant Marilyn Loden says she coined this phrase for a barrier to female success in 1978." My editor's brain starts crafting a narrative in the background: If I beat a five time champ by shattering the glass ceiling, how incredible would that story be? As it turns out, the James machine is inexorable. He gets the next Daily Double, and the next one, and our game starts taking a trajectory that, to Lewis and me, has gotten a little too familiar. One that goes straight downhill. In the end, I'm happy with the fight Lewis and I put up against one of the show's winningest players. I'm thrilled to have been a small part of a show that's been part of my life since I was too short to see over one of its podiums. And I'm grateful to have had the chance to meet Alex Trebek. If you have to lose at a game you love on national television, I will say it's nice to have an ironclad excuse. Sure, I lost. But I lost to the guy who keeps finding new places to add his name to the record book. And now, at least my friends still believe me when I say that on any other day, I could have won. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Yonkers wasn't their first choice. It wasn't even on their radar. But when Jonathan Rios, 28, and Saul Caguao, 31, both interior designers, decided to move in together, they knew finding an apartment that made financial and logistical sense wouldn't be easy. At the time, Mr. Rios was living on the Upper West Side and working in Chelsea, while Mr. Caguao lived and worked in Stamford, Conn. Mr. Rios wanted to stay on the Upper West Side, where he had been paying less than 1,000 a month for a small, dark, courtyard facing room in a three bedroom apartment. "It had just enough space to center my bed and have two small side tables," he said. Surely, he reasoned, someone looking for a one bedroom in the same neighborhood with a budget of 2,300 would be able to find something at least slightly more gracious? "What I found in that price range was the smallest and the darkest: mostly older buildings with really weird layouts; not ideal, very cramped, with stuff like diagonal walls, which is not easy to decorate," Mr. Rios said. "It was more than I wanted to spend for nothing remarkable." Mr. Caguao had never been particularly on board with the Upper West Side plan, given that it would increase his commute from essentially no time at all to a trek of more than hour involving the subway, a bus and a Metro North train. It was around that time that Mr. Rios went to visit a friend in Yonkers, which is immediately north of the Bronx, in Westchester County. A few years earlier, his friend had bought a condo off the Greystone stop of the Metro North line, and before Mr. Rios returned to Manhattan, they swung by the friend's brother's place at Modera Hudson Riverfront, a new development on the banks of the Hudson River two train stops closer to Manhattan. "I'd never considered Yonkers before," Mr. Rios said. "But I loved his apartment. And I found the idea of living on the river charming." Before going home Mr. Rios stopped by the leasing office, where he learned that a spacious one bedroom with an unobstructed view of the river would cost 2,350 a month. To move in, they would only need to put down a 500 security deposit, and they would get the first two months free. Although Mr. Caguao had not accompanied him on the social call, he was amenable to the idea, which would mean a commute of about 40 minutes for both of them. "He sent me pictures and I was like, 'O.K.,'" Mr. Caguao said. They signed the lease on July 3, and the next day, a barge in the river set off a huge fireworks display, which seemed an auspicious start to their tenancy. Occupations: Mr. Rios works for Denton House, a design studio in Chelsea, and runs his own design practice, Jonathan Vincent Design. Mr. Caguao is a claims manager for Wakefield Design Center, in Stamford, Conn., a company that sells custom and handmade furniture to interior designers. On living outside New York City: When he finally moved to Manhattan after living in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Rios, a Connecticut native, said he would never leave again, "not even to visit friends in Brooklyn." But then he saw what they could afford on their budget in Yonkers. The unobstructed river view: Sold them on the apartment. But they wish that the waterfront sculpture garden outside their window did not include an enormous stone table flanked by very large, regal looking heads that seem to be peering into their apartment. Life in Yonkers, however, was not quite as idyllic as Mr. Rios had imagined. "When you get off the train, you only see that cute waterfront area. The rest of the city is not so cute," he said. "The first time I drove with Saul from Stamford to Yonkers, we got lost in the city and I was like, 'What did I just do?'" They also soon realized that there was not much in the way of dining options, let alone night life, within walking distance of their building. One of the few places nearby is a French Asian fusion restaurant with entrees starting at around 30 a nice spot for special occasions, but hardly what they considered to be a neighborhood standby. "In Stamford, you can go out at night; Yonkers, not so much," said Mr. Caguao, who moved to the United States from Venezuela two years ago. "That's what I love about Stamford: lots of restaurants and going out places." The obvious alternative was socializing mostly in Manhattan, which they had already planned to do a lot of anyway. The commute to the city is faster than it would be from many neighborhoods in the boroughs. But the last train home is at 1:50 a.m., so on late nights out with friends, they either have to rush back to Grand Central or cough up 80 to 120 for a car home. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
It says something that a song cycle of despair, heartbreak, alienation and yearning for death has become an anthem of our unsettled times. Schubert's mournful "Winterreise," which he worked on up to his death at 31, has been a regular feature of recent New York seasons, sung by some of the world's greatest singers. I have seen stagings of the cycle, but I have never seen a performance more theatrical than the one the German baritone Benjamin Appl gave, without any props at all, on Thursday in the Park Avenue Armory's intimate Board of Officers Room. It was the kind of vocal acting fearlessly physical, with a broad palette of tones and styles, and a willingness to go for the occasional unbeautiful moment when called for by the text that could devolve into histrionics. But Mr. Appl was utterly convincing. He made a vivid miniature of each song. For "Fruhlingstraum," Mr. Appl brought out the Jekyll and Hyde contrast terrifyingly. After singing the sweet opening passage, a vision of merry birds in a May meadow, he seemed to turn on a dime, changing his voice and bearing to deliver the shock of the next section: a bitter waking nightmare of crowing roosters, shrieking ravens and loneliness. It was only in those ferocious moments that you realized his foreshadowing: How, even in the loveliest passages of the song's opening, there had been something unhinged in his voice, and his eyes. MICHAEL COOPER | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
That is the kind of response our current crisis requires. We're not yet getting it. It is particularly painful to compare Giuliani's performance with Trump's at his news conference about the coronavirus on Saturday. Is the virus yet the American emergency that Sept. 11 was? No. But it has already claimed lives and will claim more on what order of magnitude we do not know and it means tolerating a dreadful uncertainty, because (as with terrorism) we cannot know what's going on in hidden cells. Unfortunately, Trump doesn't do facts, doesn't know humanity and has only a passing acquaintance with community. Forget that he was, until he got savaged for it, doing crisis management by ad hocracy. The real problem with the news conference on Saturday was that it was political, not informational, with Trump congratulating himself and running down Democrats. He seemed disconnected from the stakes, the anxiety, the very meaning of leadership. He couldn't so much as correctly identify the gender of the first victim in the United States (a man, not a woman). Perhaps the creepiest aspect of the news conference was subtle. Trump said, in a variety of ways, that "healthy individuals should be able to fully recover." Setting aside whether it's true and alas, it probably isn't, not entirely I kept waiting for the second half of that sentiment, namely: But for those of you who are older, frailer or already contending with a serious illness, know that we are concerned about you, and we're doing everything we can. It never came. Trump seldom turns his thoughts to the weak. By Monday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence had taken over, this time flanked by his task force of experts. It was a dramatic improvement. But when Ashley Parker of The Washington Post asked Pence whether he'd take his children to Disney World over spring break, he didn't answer. (Monday night, The Daily Beast reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency has banned all international and domestic temporary duty assignment travel. Today, could someone explain that?) The public remains fretful and uncertain. We still haven't gotten a calm tutorial on prevention, preparedness and the habits of this virus. We've read that we should stock up on food. But should we? Supermarkets are out of hand sanitizer. But does it matter, if we still have soap? How should we think about being in airplanes, bars, restaurants? The public shouldn't rely on Google at this moment. But that's precisely what we're doing. The most we've gotten is an all caps tweet from the surgeon general telling us to STOP BUYING MASKS! But this is the all caps presidency. Trump's fans may pride him on his directness, but it's always of the all caps sort, predicated on showmanship rather than sincerity, fearmongering rather than comfort, fracture rather than unity. Rage is the new authenticity. It is the very worst thing in the world for an epidemic, when trust and calm are paramount. On Monday, Pence promised an Rx: daily briefings. Yet it's Tuesday and there's nothing on the schedule so far. Let's hope that when he and his team finally get around to it, their answers are humane and forthright. The realities of this virus shouldn't be sanitized. 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 |
Every evening, crowds swarm Marine Drive, the iconic waterfront on the southern tip of Mumbai, India's financial capital. Few of the families and tourists who are out taking in the air stop to look back at the low rise apartment blocks that line the avenue a cityscape Salman Rushdie described in the novel "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" as "a glittering Art Deco sweep ... not even Rome could boast." That disregard may be set to change. The Art Deco buildings on Marine Drive, together with those on the blocks along the nearby park Oval Maidan, were recognized last year by Unesco as part of a World Heritage site, a distinction that is expected to help preserve and promote the neighborhood. The tag was the result of a 10 year campaign led by heritage activists and local resident groups, one that reflects a growing celebration of Mumbai's Art Deco architecture even as it is vanishing under the wrecking ball. "Everyone always talked about CST," said Atul Kumar, referring to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the city's other Unesco site, a magnificent and much Instagrammed Victorian Gothic railway station. "But we also had one of the richest collections of Deco in the world." Mr. Kumar, a resident of Marine Drive, set up the nonprofit Art Deco Mumbai in 2016 to raise awareness of these buildings on social media, as well as to document them in an online repository. His team has listed more than 375 buildings, including residences, palaces, hotels and cinemas, all built between 1930 and 1950. They estimate the final count including not just wealthy south Mumbai but the bazaars of Mohammed Ali Road and middle class neighborhoods like Shivaji Park, Matunga and Bandra will be around 600 buildings. That means Mumbai has the world's second largest collection of Art Deco structures, after Miami. The term Art Deco, or art decoratifs, gained traction in the 1960s as a way to describe a visual style of architecture, design and fashion that emerged in 1920s France. The style's streamlined forms and geometric motifs were inspired by new technologies ocean liners, airplanes, automobiles, movies and by everything from Cubism to Egyptian imagery. Mumbai's Art Deco structures are not as grand as Jazz Age behemoths like New York's Chrysler Building. Instead, they resemble Miami's laid back "tropical deco." As Unesco recognized, the value of Mumbai's Deco does not lie in the drama of a single structure but in the spirit of the ensemble. This fabric represents the making of modern Bombay, as it was then known. These architects broke with the British Raj's ornate Victorian Gothic and Indo Saracenic styles for the latest international trend described by a leading British architect as "the nudist movement in our profession" while adapting it to the local environment. The choice could be seen as a form of resistance, said Mustansir Dalvi, professor at the Sir J. J. School of Art and Architecture, and as a backdrop of the freedom movement. Movie houses, many built by American movie companies like MGM, glamorized the new aesthetic. A new technology, reinforced cement concrete, made all this construction quick and cheap. The apartments were snapped up by a rising urban elite "who aspired to be modern and were willing to live next to those who were not like themselves," said Mr. Dalvi. "They sat next to each other in offices, on commutes, in cinema halls." He adds: "For Bombay , what Art Deco represents is cosmopolitanism." In a city increasingly dominated by gated communities and hodgepodge skylines, the Deco neighborhoods recall an age of openness and urban coherence. Strict bylaws ensured public spaces and amenities. Buildings had low compound walls. "The wonderful thing about the Art Deco era is that it gave us neighborhoods, not just single pieces," Mr. Dalvi said. From Mumbai, Art Deco spread to other cities. The style's afterlife in India lasted into the late 1940s and early '50s, and paved the way for modernism after independence in 1947. For decades, however, the contribution of the Art Deco era was overlooked. Architects worshiped high modernists like Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier while conservationists focused on ancient and colonial monuments. For years, residents like Nayana Kathpalia, a member of the Oval Trust that supported the heritage campaign, were unaware of the historical or aesthetic value of their buildings. "We just thought it was a good place to live in and look at," Ms. Kathpalia said. The recent interest comes just as this layer of the city is vanishing. The Unesco tag now protects Marine Drive and Oval Maidan, but everywhere else old buildings are falling daily and with them many memories. Mumbai's Art Deco cinemas were often funded or owned by American film companies. Regal is the city's oldest, opening in 1933 with Laurel and Hardy's "The Devil's Brother." In a neat illustration of the changing times, the theater was designed by the British architect Charles Stevens, whose father Frederic Stevens famously built the Gothic marvel of the Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus). The Regal was also the first building to have an underground garage, neon lighting and a soda fountain. Nearby, the Eros cinema, built five years later, is more visually striking with its cream striped red sandstone facade, ziggurat roofline, and a lavish foyer decorated with classical and Indian friezes. (The building was designed by the Indian architect Sorabji Bhedwar, its interiors by a Czech emigre, Karl Schara .) The 1938 cinema once also hosted a ballroom and restaurant, advertised as "The Rendezvous of the East." But the Eros is closed, so if you want to catch a film, you'd have to go to the Regal, which nowadays means you're more likely to see something from Bollywood than Hollywood. Shiv Shanti Bhuvan is one in the line of 1930s Art Deco apartment blocks that front the green of the Oval Maidan, looking across it to the Victorian spires of the University and High Court. This face off between two centuries and styles is what earned the area its heritage designation. The apartments here are among the city's earliest and perhaps the most international. You might think they were thumbing their noses at the imperial grandees across the cricket pitch except, as Mr. Dalvi notes, that many of these new apartment buildings have names like Empress Court and Windsor House . Shiv Shanti, located on a street corner, is one of the most impressive with its yellow and green color scheme and stack of "eyebrows," or concrete weather shades, jutting over the windows, a local adaptation. Note the frozen fountain design over the entrance: a common motif popularized by the 1920s French designer Rene Lalique. A short stroll from the Oval lies Marine Drive, nicknamed the "Queen's Necklace" for the curve of lights at the waterfront at night. Building names here reflect their location Oceana, Riviera, Chateau Marine or their Indian ownership. Some were originally owned by maharajas and industrialists. Soona Mahal, built and still owned by the Sidhwa family, is named after the current owner's grandmother. Typically Deco are the curved balconies and strong vertical lines. The round turret on the roof, echoing a ship's bridge, is in keeping with the style's nautical themes. Designed by G. B. Mhatre, an important Indian architect of the time, the building hosted a famous jazz club on the ground floor. Now a music club and pizzeria, it's the perfect spot to grab a beer and watch the sun set on the Arabian Sea. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Imperialism for the masses, the movie culture of the 1920s, purveyed romantic fantasies of an imaginary East. Theaters were designed to evoke the Alhambra. Rudolph Valentino rose to stardom as the Sheik; Douglas Fairbanks cavorted as the Thief of Bagdad. A Photoplay writer declared Scheherazade was the muse of cinema, and studio bosses were known as "movie moguls." In contrast, the 1929 spectacle "Shiraz: A Romance of India" at Metrograph in a fine 4K digital restoration by the British Film Institute came by its heritage honestly. Based on Indian source material albeit directed by a German national, Franz Osten, heading a mainly European crew "Shiraz" was filmed on location in and around Jaipur with an all Indian cast, including its producer and guiding light, Himansu Rai, in the title role as the man who designed the Taj Mahal. Less an exercise in outsider exoticism than a monument to national pride, "Shiraz" invents an imaginary back story for the 17th century empress whose death inspired her husband to commission the world's most celebrated mausoleum. The movie opens in grand fashion as brigands waylay a desert caravan carrying a toddler princess. Orphaned in the melee, the child is adopted by a village family that includes a ready made older brother, Shiraz. Growing into a spirited young woman named Selima (Enakshi Rama Rau), she's abducted by slave traders and purchased for the harem of a handsome crown prince (Charu Roy, an actor who went on to become a director). Complications ensue when the bereft Shiraz (Rai) sets off to rescue her. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Pagels sets up her story beautifully. Raised in Palo Alto by an aloof biologist father and a mother who played Chopin on the piano but could offer comfort only when her daughter pretended to be ill, Pagels rebelled by embracing evangelical Christianity when she was 15. Born again, she felt a whiff of the unconditional love long denied her. That was 1958 and her conversion did not last long. By 1960 she had found a renegade tribe of artists, poets and musicians, and, instead of feigning illness, skipped school to drink coffee in Menlo Park with, among others, the young Jerry Garcia, newly discharged from the Army. Her first brush with death came when Garcia and three friends had a deadly car accident, throwing him through the windshield and killing their 16 year old mutual friend. Garcia credited the accident with giving him purpose the moniker "Grateful Dead" is said to spring from it while Pagels began to ask the questions that form the backbone of this book. "Where do the dead go? And how to go on living?" After graduating from Stanford, Pagels came to New York City to take dance classes with Martha Graham. She was good, but not the best, and was soon on to Harvard Divinity School, where she could be better. Almost as an aside, she tells a devastating story about one of her first professors, a Lutheran minister, who demanded that she babysit for his four children. Returning with his wife at midnight, he coerced her into sleeping on his basement couch. At 2 in the morning he came fumbling for her breasts. Though she managed to fend him off, she was nevertheless compelled to accept him as her adviser for the next five years. She calls him out in this book, admitting that it took her years to do so, and the implications are clear. The best and the brightest women were expected to act as the young Elaine did. "In the morning I pretended everything was normal," she writes. This default coping strategy, deployed again and again as her traumas mount, is one she eventually explodes. Pagels married the physicist Heinz Pagels while still in graduate school. She is remarkably circumspect about their 20 year marriage it sounds perfect except for the one time, after the death of their son, when Heinz, pushing his grief away, talked a little too loudly at a dinner party and made Elaine uncomfortable but she does offer at least one surprise. Heinz encouraged her to take LSD shortly after they married and she gives one of the most succinct reports about its merits ever written. Expecting a Christian vision, she instead sat for five hours gazing, "ecstatic and speechless," at her garden, seeing "everything as alive as fire, gloriously intertwined." "I guess that solves the dying problem," she remarked when she could finally speak. Reading about her subsequent ordeals, we wish it were that simple. For decades Pagels avoided her personal pain while coping with what was left of her life. But undertaking this book, and several visits to the enveloping silence of a Trappist monastery, prompted her to look inward. As she did, the secret Gospels began to speak to her. "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you," they counseled. "If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." In a sober and measured voice, punctuated by a barely contained fury, Pagels reveals how profound this advice turned out to be. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The death of a child is so painful, it is all too possible to shrink from the retelling, to be unwilling to examine the tragedy head on. But by employing the voice of a child trying to figure out the meaning of every action, every reaction, Navin is able to explore one family's anguish to a sometimes excruciating degree of detail, with an innocent appetite for description unavailable to most adults. Upon learning of Andy's death, the boys' mother, Melissa, "started to make a loud 'Aaaauuuuuuuuuuu' sound and it wasn't a sound like it was coming from a person, but maybe an animal, like a werewolf when he sees the moon." Zach becomes a student of his parents' changes in behavior. At home that evening, his father, Jim, "turned on all the lights in all the rooms, and that was the opposite of what he does on other days, which is turn all the lights off all the time because lights use up electricity and electricity costs a lot of money." They have a somber dinner of nothing but cereal. Through Zach's eyes, we watch a mother become consumed by her anger, and a father begin to retreat. "The gunman came and real life went away, and now it was like we were in a new fake life." Zach begins having nightmares, but his parents are too occupied by their waking nightmare to really comfort him. When relatives and neighbors come to offer condolences, he is unable to understand why they are having a party. Though the wide eyed perspective is an asset to Navin, one occasionally feels the constraints of having so young a narrator, whose observations can veer toward the maudlin, and to whom every cliche has the appearance of a revelation. "The raindrops reminded me of all the tears," Zach observes in an early chapter called "Sky Tears," "and it was like the sky was crying." And Navin is so skilled at depicting, even in glimpses, the adults in the story, one sometimes wishes she had allowed herself to include their perspectives. She is wonderfully awake to the ways relationships suffer during periods of mourning. "Only Child" is at its most heartbreaking when Zach's parents cannot help failing him. In the days that follow the shooting, Zach perceives a change in his mother, who seems like "a little kid who doesn't know how to do stuff on her own." When he crawls onto her lap and tries to comfort her, she wails in pain. "I scooched off her lap because the sound scared me and it was probably my fault she was making it, because I didn't give her her space." The child's mimicking of adult psychobabble as he takes the blame on himself only makes the situation more painful. Despite its premise, this is not a political book. Melissa Taylor is the only character who attempts to avenge her son's death in a public way, by talking to the media, but any discussion of gun control is sidelined by her outspoken anger at the shooter's family, beloved figures in the town. Her crusade is perceived as disgraceful by the rest of the community, and only serves to embarrass her family. Complicating Zach's memory of his brother is the fact that Andy was never very nice to him. Andy had been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, and required medication to get through a day of school without a tantrum. (His parents' vigilance treating the disorder may partly explain Melissa's fury at the shooter's parents, who appear to have taken no such precaution.) After the shooting, Zach begins having tantrums of his own, and his inability to control his temper gives him newfound empathy for his brother's behavior. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Duke University will pay 112.5 million to the federal government to settle allegations that researchers submitted applications and reports containing falsified data to win more than two dozen grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department said on Monday. "Taxpayers expect and deserve that federal grant dollars will be used efficiently and honestly," Matthew G.T. Martin, United States attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina, said in a statement. "May this serve as a lesson that the use of false or fabricated data in grant applications or reports is completely unacceptable." The allegations were initially made in a whistle blower lawsuit brought by Joseph Thomas, a research analyst who worked in Duke's pulmonary division. He claimed that another researcher, Erin Potts Kant, had fabricated data linked to as much as 200 million in federal research grants. Mr. Thomas filed the lawsuit under the False Claims Act, a federal law that allows individuals to sue on behalf of the government. Under the law, the plaintiff may receive a portion of the damages. Mr. Thomas is to receive more than 33 million from the settlement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"I don't want all of the images of our people during this period to be of us on our knees or in cages," Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, the author of "The Undocumented Americans," said. "I want this book to also exist as a snapshot of this period in time." Karla Cornejo Villavicencio never wanted to do something as cliched as writing about immigration. But when she was a senior at Harvard University, she wrote an anonymous essay for The Daily Beast about being undocumented. Soon literary agents were asking for a memoir. "I was really offended by that," Cornejo Villavicencio, now 31, said, "because it wasn't about my writing. I knew that's not why they were reaching out." It wasn't until the day after the 2016 election, feeling shellshocked by the results, that she felt ready. She had to do something, she thought, to give voice to the millions of people living in the country illegally who, like her, feared what might happen to them under a Donald Trump presidency. The result was "The Undocumented Americans," published in March, in which Cornejo Villavicencio chronicles her own immigration story and profiles undocumented immigrants across the United States: the trauma of those recruited to clean up ground zero; the loneliness of day laborers in Staten Island; the challenges of those facing the water crisis in Flint, Mich.; and the role of herbalists and healers in Miami. For a time, Cornejo Villavicencio thought she was on a path toward legalization. She got a worker's permit through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, and a temporary green card when she married Zemach Bersin. But the green card has expired, and upheaval at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services means the renewal process is uncertain. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. "I was inching toward being able to feel safe, and now I'm falling back down," Cornejo Villavicencio said. "It just shows how precarious the situation is for undocumented people." In two interviews this month, she discussed the story she needed to tell, the toll it took and her complicated relationship with the American dream. These are edited excerpts from the conversations. Why did you decide to write this book? I read a lot of James Baldwin, and he specifically said, "I didn't want to do this. I was living in Paris. This thing started happening in America. It's now my time to pay my dues." I could have chosen to not write about this, and my mental health would've been a lot better off for it, but it was my job to go back. It's so funny because when you're a kid of color and you're an immigrant and you grow up in the 'hood, the whole narrative around your life, since childhood, is getting out. And at this moment, it was like, No, you have to go back. James Baldwin, he attempted suicide multiple times, and this took a great toll on him, but this is not something we mention often when we think about James Baldwin. I think it's important to acknowledge the toll that being the witness, being the person who tells these stories, the toll it takes on artists of color and these communities. You're so frank in the book about your own struggles with mental health. Why was that important to you to include? I think the meaning of my life is to make other people hurt less. That has expanded from when I was younger to just meaning my parents. Now I know that I can't solve my parents. I can't fix my parents. I can't take away my parents' trauma. But I can influence younger people who look up to me, and I can make them hurt less. You've talked about how you financially support your family. How do you think about money? And how do you reconcile this need with the pursuit of your career or dreams? I'm still figuring that out. I feel it is my responsibility to take care of my parents until they die, and I feel like that's shared by a lot of people. Most of my money, aside from taxes, has gone into immigrants into my family and into the girls I take care of and into the community, and not just in the form of people who need help. For a while, when I had a sense that someone might've been undocumented and worked at a restaurant, because I thought of my dad, I would just leave a 100 tip, every time, out of guilt. Even though I'm undocumented, I have a work permit. I don't know when it's going to expire U.S.C.I.S. is being bankrupted but in the time that I have, I'm able to make money writing about undocumented people, and part of that seems a little crass. And so I feel like some of the money should go back to the community. Otherwise it would be unethical to me to make a living writing about undocumented people. I think people should have their own relationship to the American dream, and it shouldn't be something you can pick up inscribed on a T.J. Maxx pillow. I think a lot of "good" immigrants who've "done it the right way," who are model immigrants, they have a very narrow view of the American dream that they've spread the gospel about. I think the American dream has to mean something different for every single immigrant. It's private. In my experience as someone who has been blessed to go through this process, I see what it took. What it took is a lot of luck. A lot of genetic accidents that I had nothing to do with. I listened to your piece for "This American Life," and you said that when people ask whether you felt culture shock when you arrived at Harvard, you tell them, "No. I kind of felt like it was my birthright." I thought that was so funny. Where does that feeling come from? Part of why I said that was just to troll white people. But no, I didn't have impostor syndrome. I was actually talking to my partner about this today. When I was in high school, I took a journalism workshop at N.Y.U. which was very prestigious. There was this one white lady professor who took an interest in me. She told me that she thought I was a gifted writer and had a good voice, and she would not be surprised if she saw my name on the spine of a book at Butler Library. I think she was at Columbia. That part was true. But what she also said was that I looked shocked and that my eyes were wide open and I looked on the verge of tears, because it was like that hadn't occurred to me, or nobody had ever said something like that to me before. And that was just her imagination laughs . I remember feeling really humiliated when I heard her account of the first time apparently someone ever told me I could be a writer. And I was like, Why would I have been shocked that I can write a book? I realized that this was a white narrative: that there was something lacking in me, and that not only was there something lacking in me and my background, but that I was sort of obviously insecure and had low self esteem. When I went into those classrooms at Harvard, I saw kids that were very wealthy. A lot of them had gone to boarding school, some of them were children of celebrities, some of them were children of politicians. And all I saw was that I could hold my own in a conversation with them, and that I was self made and they were not. I came from nothing. I created all of this world myself, just like my parents as immigrants created a world themselves. These kids honestly, it would've been weird if they hadn't gotten into Harvard. There are some kids whose last names were on the buildings. But me? I was a statistical anomaly. I felt like I was a rare expletive beetle. And this didn't stop me from being depressed, or from years of self harm or any of that, but in a classroom or in an environment where it has to do with my writing, I have never lacked self confidence. There are several instances in the book in which you turn to magical realism. Why did you turn to that form? I've never had an intuitive connection with nature or with the land, but it's just always made sense to me that if something so unbelievably sad happened, that all of the natural things around us would react and never be the same. So when I learned about the Holocaust as a kid, I was like, "How did the rivers not become rivers of blood? How did the ocean not stop being salty? How did entire species not get wiped out and end up like bird species in people's yards?" In my mind it was like a belief system in the form of a literary technique that was used to bring justice to the page when there was impunity in real life and in our environment, where there are disappearances, where people's bodies are being mutilated, where we're being thrown into unmarked vans, where we're living under what seems like a banana republic dictatorship. I thought it was the perfect moment to use magical realism. How do you hope this book will be received in the world? I hope that immigrants of all backgrounds are able to find themselves in it. I hope that people who are not immigrants, who have been considered aliens or undesirables or freaks, will be able to find something of themselves in it. I don't want all of the images of our people during this period to be of us on our knees or in cages, or begging for soap. I want this book to also exist as a snapshot of this period in time, where there are people who are different, who are imperfect, who are weird, who are hardworking, who are just people. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
It is the latest effort to diversify American classical music, which has lagged behind other fields. Women have made great gains in orchestras in recent decades, especially since the advent of blind auditions, in which job applicants try out behind screens. But racial diversity has been slow to come to American orchestras, which are looking less and less like the cities in which they play. Orchestras remained 85 percent white in 2014, according to the league, and most of their modest rise in racial diversity in recent years was driven by an increase in the number of musicians of Asian or Pacific Islander heritage. Hispanic musicians made up only 2.5 percent of orchestra players in 2014, up from 1.8 percent in 2002. Small orchestras were more racially diverse than large ones. Many factors have been cited as contributing to the problem, from the lack of diversity at the conservatories that make up the pipeline of trained musicians to blind auditions, which helped with gender equity but make it harder for orchestras to choose talented players of color. The new initiative, supported by a four year, 1.8 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to help black and Hispanic musicians navigate the challenging audition process where it is not uncommon for hundreds of talented, well trained candidates to find themselves competing for a single opening. The program, being called the National Alliance for Audition Support, will begin in June, when 18 string players will go to Miami to train with the New World Symphony, a renowned orchestral academy, at a three day intensive course in preparing for auditions. "There's a good bit of that that's musical training, but there's also psychological training," said Howard Herring, the president of New World, who said that the players would all sit through mock auditions that seek to replicate real ones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
This collection is Sittenfeld's sixth book; the adolescents of her earlier work have grown up, with adulthood yielding decidedly mixed results. In "The World Has Many Butterflies," that type of young woman the kind who cracks wise from a crouched position is now a suburban Houston housewife who has fallen into a world of aspirational child rearing. Without an appreciative audience for the mostly damning asides of her internal monologues, she falls for the first man who seems attuned to them, confusing an open ear with erotic interest: "She was simultaneously shocked by the conversation, shocked to be having it with a man, shocked by its effortlessness, and not surprised at all; it was as if she'd been waiting to be recognized, as if she'd never sung in public, then someone had handed her a microphone and she'd opened her mouth and released a full throated vibrato." In this collection, Sittenfeld occasionally swerves from the female point of view to the male who, elsewhere in her fiction, is usually the object of so much obsessive rumination. In "Do Over," following Trump's election, a divorced financier resolves to apologize to an old female friend about a moment of sexism that gave him an unfair advantage over her in a student election back at boarding school. He is surprised when the woman, who had a crush on him as a teenager, does not forgive his late to the game moral awakening. Over the course of a dinner out, she turns so hostile it is almost exhilarating, the good girl, the brainy girl, for once saying exactly what she thinks. (The story, like the first in the collection, summons the spirit of Lorrie Moore's perfect "You're Ugly, Too.") "Isn't it weird how I was tormented as a teenager by a person who grew up into a banker who talks incessantly about his Fitbit?" she asks her former classmate, who is mild, earnest and no longer smoking hot. "Did I offend you?...I didn't mean to. I was trying to be factual." In the lives of Sittenfeld's characters, the lusts and disappointments of youth loom large well into middle age, as insistent as a gang of loud, showy teenagers taking up all the oxygen in the room. A married woman is obsessed with an ex girlfriend from summer camp who became a wholesome megabrand known as "The Prairie Wife" (also the name of the story); in "A Regular Couple," a famous defense attorney who has just married is plagued by an encounter with the popular girl from her high school, who is also honeymooning at the same resort. Some of the stories grant the possibility that the characters have grown in the intervening years, and grown softer, more generous; others suggest, more spikily, that there is no hope of leaving behind what was painful, or of recovering what was good. These storytellers are, for the most part, a privileged, educated lot. Their trials, in the grand scheme of things, are manageable enough that they allow easily for comedy, which Sittenfeld is a pro at delivering in the details (the smug academic's cat is named Converse, "not for the shoe but for the political scientist"). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A Broadway.com online event that was supposed to help tide theater fans over until the Tony Awards were rescheduled or Broadway productions reopened has been postponed in the wake of ongoing nationwide unrest after the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25. "We stand in solidarity with our colleagues, artists, friends, communities and audiences of all races in the fight for equality and unity," Paul Wontorek, the editor in chief of the industry website Broadway.com, said in a statement. A new date for the event, "Show of Shows: Broadway.com Salutes the Tonys," scheduled for Sunday when the Tonys would have taken place has not been announced. The Tonys were postponed in March because of the coronavirus, and that ceremony's fate is uncertain. The Broadway season was cut short by the health crisis and shows have been canceled through Sept. 6. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
New Yorkers who welcome strangers into their homes by becoming Airbnb hosts have found that the experience can be at turns nerve racking, humorous and sometimes embarrassing. But for some determined hosts, it has proved profitable enough to replace more traditional revenue streams. The first paying guest Evelyn Badia invited into her home was Ted, a professor from Amsterdam. Ted was a coffee drinker, but Evelyn didn't own a coffee maker. "My first mistake as a host," Ms. Badia said. "I don't drink coffee. Why would I get a coffee maker?" She promptly went out and bought one. Ted, it turned out, didn't mind the oversight. When he traveled again to New York a few months later, this time with his wife, the couple stayed with Ms. Badia, whose guests have given her a five star rating. "As an Airbnb host you have to remember, it's not about you, it's about them." The annual median earnings for a host are 5,468 money, the New York State attorney general has said, that may escape local sales, hotel and unincorporated business tax. State officials have instituted fines against illegal listings, arguing that Airbnb helps turn permanent housing into de facto hotel rooms. (Other cities around the world have also moved to crack down on illegal short term rentals.) Josh Meltzer, the head of New York public policy for Airbnb, disagrees. "Airbnb helps thousands of New Yorkers get by in an increasingly expensive city," he said. "Unfortunately, the current law groups responsible New Yorkers, who occasionally share their own home, with illegal hotels that remove permanent housing from the market." Mr. Meltzer hopes a state law will be passed to distinguish between Airbnb hosts who follow housing regulations and those who don't, and that would allow Airbnb to collect hotel taxes on behalf of the state. To that end, Airbnb so far has made agreements with 11 rural New York counties to collect a hotel tax from hosts. The counties of New York City have yet to reach such an agreement with the company. For people who need extra income, Airbnb offers a self regulating (via guest and host reviews), free market solution for collecting short term market rate rents. The so called sharing economy of Airbnb has nothing to do with actual sharing, as in a traditional house swap in which money is not exchanged. Travelers pay hosts for accommodation, and Airbnb matches supply with demand, collecting fees from both guests and hosts that range from 3 to 12 percent on every booking. Though Airbnb includes insurance for hosts with every stay, the policy has numerous exclusions, and Airbnb requires a host to file a claim within 14 days of a guest's departure, or before a subsequent guest arrives, whichever is sooner. Then there are the risks of running afoul of state or city regulations, which generally prohibit short term rentals of fewer than 30 days if a host is not living in the apartment or house. "I was very nervous the first time," Ms. Badia said. "But like I said, Ted was wonderful." Her house is on a quiet street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, not far from the restaurants and bars on Fifth Avenue. The two family home, a duplex topped by a private apartment, is an ideal situation for a host. Through Airbnb, she rents out the upstairs two bedroom, which she used to rent to a long term tenant, and she also rents out a room in the downstairs duplex that she calls home. It's so ideal that Ms. Badia, 50, says she grosses nearly 100,000 each year from hosting. But her financial life was not always so lucrative. In 2010, Ms. Badia's career as a freelance commercial producer cratered. Undercut by younger producers willing to work for less, her income dropped more than 50 percent. When she did her taxes for the year, she discovered that she had worked a mere 20 days. "That was a big reality check," she said. "Hosting on Airbnb wasn't a choice. It was decided for me." The long term tenant, who had been paying 1,600 a month for the upstairs apartment, had moved out. Rather than replace her, Ms. Badia calculated that more money could be made using Airbnb. She currently charges 169 per night for the two bedroom apartment, which has a kitchen, living room and bathroom. In the downstairs two bedroom duplex where she lives, she rents out the extra bedroom for 99 a night. All of the housekeeping between guests she does herself. "Sometimes I hear people having sex in the other room," she said. "It's O.K. I have earplugs." "Hosting is a journey," she added. "First, the host is nervous to start, then they're excited, then they see the money." But when the host comes across a bad guest or feels taken for granted, she said, "they say, 'Oh my God, I hate these people.'" Despite the good income she earns through Airbnb each year, Ms. Badia does not feel financially secure. Much of the money she earns goes back into the house for upkeep. She also needs a financial strategy to make it through the slow months of January, February and March. A self described introvert, and a one time "Jeopardy!" champion, Ms. Deans earns enough from her commissions to meet monthly expenses but not much more. In a busy week, she can make up to 560 from renting out her extra room. Her first guests were a couple from Belgium. Ms. Deans was so nervous, unsure of what level of hospitality the guests would expect when they arrived, that she went out and bought too much food. "I overdid it, but they were so nice and chill," she said. "I'm lucky I never had bad people." Never? "Well, the weirdest thing that happened was the father son duo from Italy," she recalled. "They sat around in their underwear watching soccer. I was like, O.K., I guess it's all right. After they left, the house smelled like feet for two days." Hosts rely in part on Airbnb's guest reviews to decide whom to allow into their homes. Ms. Deans spends a lot of time emailing with guests, largely trusting her gut to screen out potential bad actors before she lets them book. She turned down "a bunch of college party guys" and was suspicious of "two girls who were almost 18 and their mothers said they could come to New York." She also says no to people who have "ridiculous requests, like 'Can I smoke weed in the room?'" When she retires, Ms. Deans would like to move to Florida and rent or buy a house near Orlando, where she could host families headed to Walt Disney World. "Airbnb is my retirement plan," she said, "until I go to the nursing home or I hit the lottery or, you know, meet the maker, one of the three." Since February, when the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement began to enforce a new state law designed to stop people from illegally advertising transient rentals, nine individuals or entities have been fined a total of 65,000. Tatiana Cames, a 51 year old real estate broker and an Airbnb host of more than five years, was one of those individuals. Ms. Cames had recently advertised five rentals on Airbnb in the four unit, mixed use building in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, that she bought with her ex husband through a limited liability company in 2015 for 2.15 million. While Ms. Cames's primary residence is in nearby Clinton Hill, her ex husband and daughter lived in the building, each in a newly subdivided unit where they hosted tourists. Ms. Cames hosted three more rentals among the other two units, for a total of five listings. Ms. Cames said that inspectors had arrived with badges and told the occupants that "they just wanted to talk to tenants and make sure everyone was safe." At the time, she was hosting a family of French tourists with a baby. "It's not possible for the tourists to travel to such an expensive city like New York and feed their family at restaurants three times a day," she said. "They like the convenience of an apartment and the ability to spread out a little bit and not be in a generic hotel room." The inspectors issued partial vacate orders for two units that they believed had been illegally subdivided and lacked proper egress. They also issued citations for converting permanent housing into transient use, working without a permit for the construction of additional units, failing to provide adequate fire alarms and sprinklers for transient use, and violating the building's certificate of occupancy. Additionally, Ms. Cames was fined 5,000 1,000 for each of her five Airbnb listings in a building where she did not live. Had Ms. Cames offered the spaces in a one or two family house where she was also a permanent resident, she would have been in compliance with the listing law. It would seem that as a landlord who is aware of the city's regulations against transient rentals, Ms. Cames could have played it safe and rented only to long term tenants. But she said she saw too much supply in the Brooklyn market to make that option viable, mainly because of all the recent development in Downtown Brooklyn, which has increased inventory. At her primary residence, the two family house in Clinton Hill, Ms. Cames said an apartment she offered for rent sat vacant for months before she listed it on Airbnb, because she could not find a long term tenant. "All these high rises that went up recently made a total glut," she said. "Owner concessions are increasing every month, offering four months, five months free" and making it harder for small time landlords like her to compete. While the debate continues over how Airbnb might affect housing availability and rental prices in the city, the incentive to host is clear. Why rent out the average New York one bedroom for 2,700 a month when there is potential to make 200 every night, or 6,000 a month, during peak tourist seasons? Some housing advocates believe that if transient rentals like those on Airbnb were no longer available, the available long term rental housing stock could be as much as 10 percent higher citywide. Back in Park Slope, Ms. Badia contemplated what made her a successful host. "You know, older women are the fastest growing Airbnb demographic," she said, citing data released by the company. "You know why? Because we have the asset, we have the home. We know how to host. We're the nurturers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
For years, hospital executives have expressed frustration when essential drugs like heart medicines have become scarce, or when prices have skyrocketed because investors manipulated the market. Now, some of the country's largest hospital systems are taking an aggressive step to combat the problem: They plan to go into the drug business themselves, in a move that appears to be the first on this scale. "This is a shot across the bow of the bad guys," said Dr. Marc Harrison, the chief executive of Intermountain Healthcare, the nonprofit Salt Lake City hospital group that is spearheading the effort. "We are not going to lay down. We are going to go ahead and try and fix it." While Intermountain executives would not name the drugs they intend to make, hospitals have long experienced shortages of drugs like morphine or encountered sudden price increases for old, off patent products like the heart medicine Nitropress. Hospitals have also come under criticism for overcharging for their services, including for some drugs. Several major hospital systems, including Ascension, a Catholic system that is the nation's largest nonprofit hospital group, plan to form a new nonprofit company, that will provide a number of generic drugs to the hospitals. The Department of Veterans Affairs is also expressing interest in participating. In all, about 300 hospitals are now included in the group. Other hospitals are expected to join. Dr. Harrison said they planned to focus only on certain drugs. "There are individual places where there are problems," he said. "We are not indicting an entire industry." Dr. Kevin A. Schulman, a professor of medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine who has studied the generic drug market and is advising the effort, said: "If they all agree to buy enough to sustain this effort, you will have a huge threat to people that are trying to manipulate the generic drug market. They will want to think twice." The idea is to directly challenge the host of industry players who have capitalized on certain markets, buying up monopolies of old, off patent drugs and then sharply raising prices, stoking public outrage and prompting a series of Congressional hearings and federal investigations. The most notorious example is of Martin Shkreli, the former hedge fund manager who raised the price of a decades old drug, Daraprim, to 750 a tablet in 2015, from 13.50. Hospitals have also struggled to deal with shortages of hundreds of vital drugs over the past decade, ranging from injectable morphine to sodium bicarbonate (the medical form of baking soda), shortfalls that are exacerbated when only one or two manufacturers make the product. "We're seeing an acceleration of both shortages and escalation of prices," said Dr. Richard Gilfillan, the chief executive of Trinity Health, a large Catholic system that operates in nearly two dozen states and is part of the group. "There's not been any effective push back on either of these." Intermountain executives would not discuss many details of the project, citing fears that competitors could shut them out of the market by quickly dropping the price of the drugs in question, then raising them again later. They said they would focus on drugs whose prices have risen sharply or that have been in short supply. "We're going to have to hold that very close to our vest," Dr. Harrison said. The company will either rely on third party manufacturers or decide to make the drugs themselves. The new company will initially focus on selling to hospitals, but officials said they may eventually expand to offer the products more broadly. Dr. Carolyn Clancy, the executive in charge of the Veterans Health Administration, said its pharmacy experts have consulted with the other systems about the project and is now working out the details of its possible involvement. "Our strong interest here is minimizing the impact of any shortages of generic drugs," she said. While she said the agency is able to negotiate good prices for veterans, "we don't necessarily control supply" and have experienced many of the same shortages, including the recent lack of saline fluids, as the other health groups. "We are constantly scanning the horizon and constantly attentive to interruptions of supply chains of medicines," she said. In addition to Daraprim, several old, off patent drugs have seen sharp price increases over the past several years. In 2015, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International became a Wall Street darling after it sold investors on its business model of buying up old drugs, then raising the prices precipitously. That year, it sharply raised the prices of two heart drugs, Nitropress and Isuprel, adding millions to hospitals' drug bills almost overnight. Valeant's practices led to a series of investigations and Congressional hearings as well as a shake up of the company's leadership. Representatives for the generic drug industry have noted that many of the most high profile cases have involved old, off patent drugs for which there has been no generic competition. The trade group for generic manufacturers, the Association for Accessible Medicines, said its members generally welcome competition. "The whole generic industry is premised on competition, and that competition brings dramatic savings for patients," said Allen Goldberg, a spokesman for the group. But generic drug makers have also come under scrutiny. The hike in the price of doxycycline hyclate, an antibiotic, which increased to 3.65 a pill in 2013 from 5.6 cents in 2012, led to a congressional investigation as well as state and federal price fixing inquiries into some of the industry's biggest players. Last fall, a coalition of state attorneys general broadened a lawsuit over price fixing, accusing 18 companies of engaging in illegal practices involving 15 drugs. Anthony R. Tersigni, the chief executive of Ascension, said he and other hospital executives felt they had little choice but to try to solve the problem themselves. "We took the position collectively rather than waiting and hoping for the generic drug companies to address it," he said. "We have to address it head on." Intermountain executives said that they would seek approval to manufacture the products from the Food and Drug Administration, which has vowed to give priority to companies that want to make generics in markets for which there is little competition. The project boasts a high profile list of advisers, ranging from Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator of Nebraska, to Dr. Donald Berwick, a former administrator for the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, as well as two former executives with Amgen, the drug manufacturer. Erin Fox, a drug shortage expert at the University of Utah, said the idea of creating a nonprofit drug company is promising. "I think anything that increases the number of suppliers will help," she said. She added that the trick will be in selecting the right third party manufacturer to ensure good quality. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A crowd is gathering around the silver punch bowl. The heady prices of some recent transactions including the 88 million sale of a penthouse at 15 Central Park West, the contract to sell a penthouse at One57 for more than 90 million and the recent 70 million sale of a duplex penthouse above the Ritz Carlton to the casino magnate Steve Wynn are emboldening owners to think this is the moment to see if some sky high price tags will entice rather than scare off potential buyers. Or as Shaun Osher, the chief executive of CORE, likes to say, "A lot of high end buyers and sellers want to get on the gilded bandwagon." Because of these intoxicating numbers, brokers say that a new handful of properties in Manhattan are about to come on the market with listing prices of 90 million or more. They are also partying in Miami, where apartments and single family homes in and around Miami Beach are being listed and sold for record numbers. Is this wishful thinking on the part of property owners, or do they have reasons for their surging confidence to start setting prices that would have been considered outrageous only two years ago? On paper, a good part of their optimism is based on economic problems elsewhere in the world that have sent buyers and there are a lot of billionaires out there ready to wire over the cash rushing to high end real estate in cities like New York and Miami as a financial safe haven from stagnant stock markets, low return bank accounts and onerous tax regimes. That helps explain a lot of the frenzy, but precisely how do brokers set these prices, particularly since, at this level, a lot of the usual formulas and back of the envelope calculations don't add up? Those intangibles include a subjective measurement of factors like building quality, views, ceiling heights, finishes, light, air and layout. Square footage and outdoor space are factored in, as are the history and "pedigree" of the building, brokers say. Cathy Franklin, a broker at Brown Harris Stevens, says she typically brings in four to six of her peers to help her price a property. "You always have to look at views," she said. "You could see double or triple the price with an apartment with views versus one that doesn't have views." Brokers try to rein in owners' often lofty expectations. But they acknowledge that they haven't cornered the market on wisdom, either. Howard Lorber, the chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman, recalled a situation a few years ago in which he helped someone sell a house in the Hamptons. He told the seller it was worth 27 million or 28 million. The seller wanted 35 million. They agreed to list it at 33 million. "The first offer was 31 or 32 million," Mr. Lorber said. "When I called the owner with the offer, they hung up on me." Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraiser, doesn't think the soaring asking prices are based on much more than a high end herd mentality. "If they got it, I am going to get it," the thinking goes, according to him. "It is all ego management." Within the appraisal industry there is a term for listings based on loose associations to reality, he said: "P.F.A.," or "Pulled From Air." As Mr. Miller explains it, "Take the highest sale you can find and apply some methodology in a very subjective way to talk yourself up to this bigger number." Of course, most people need appraisals to get mortgages, but not the rich. They pay cash. With few comparable sales to go by, many would be owners in New York are thinking P.F.A. They continue to see the sale of Sanford I. Weill's one of a kind penthouse at 15 Central Park West to Ekaterina Rybolovleva as a new benchmark at more than 13,000 a square foot. "They are citing it constantly," Mr. Osher said. No subsequent sale has yet reached much more than 10,000 a square foot, but brokers and appraisers say they believe the benchmark has allowed prices to soar higher. Some in the industry don't see the seeming obsession with the 88 million sale as a bad thing. "It lifts the whole high end," Mr. Lorber said. Mr. Osher, on the other hand, believes it is having a "negative ripple effect," because "not all apartments in that building are created equal." Leroy Schecter, the steel magnate, was set to test that theory last week. He was planning to list his 15 Central Park West home two apartments that take up the entire 35th floor of the building's south tower for 95 million, which would have been the highest priced listing in the building. Last year he tried to sell the uncombined residences together for 55 million. Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees previously rented one of the apartments from the 85 year old Mr. Schecter, who has pledged to give 90 percent of his wealth to charity. Mr. Schecter was in the process of combining and renovating the apartments but decided to halt the process and put the property on the market uncompleted. The idea was for Mr. Schecter to pay to finish the apartment to the buyer's specifications, said Beth McBride, a spokeswoman for CORE. "It will be interesting to find a buyer at this price point that has an imagination and is willing to buy off of floor plans," she said last week. This week Mr. Schecter decided not to list the residence for now. A Schecter Foundation spokeswoman did not return a call seeking further explanation. Still, buzz and bravado can go a long way. Nick and Christian Candy, the brothers behind the One Hyde Park development in London, caught the attention of the world when they set several high water marks in that city, topping off above PS7,000 a square foot ( 10,900 a square foot). They built a development tailor made for the tastes and whims of jet setting billionaires, said Peter Bevan, head of the Mayfair office of U.K. Sotheby's International Realty, persuading buyers with "rarity, quality of finish, facilities, services" and a "take it or leave it" attitude. Brokers in New York have been looking at One Hyde Park as an example of how one development can set new records. "Here everybody is speaking about that project," Ms. Franklin said. But as more people throng around the punch bowl, their success may depend in part on how many of their trophy properties are on the market. Mr. Osher said he believed there were still 15 to 20 such properties in Manhattan that haven't traded hands recently, with new ones, like the 50 million penthouse at Walker Tower in Chelsea, starting to become available. Ms. Franklin thinks there could be as many as 30 properties if owners of rare Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue penthouse co ops decided to sell. Will international buyers whom brokers in Manhattan and Miami so covet these days get turned off by the aggressive pricing? If there is something brokers agree on, as Mr. Osher said, it is that "there are more billionaires in the world than trophy properties." But Mr. Lorber says they aren't fools, either. "The dream of every person that has something to sell is coming up with some international person that is going to pay substantially higher than what the market really is," he said. "I always tell them that if those people did that, they wouldn't be rich, and they wouldn't be able to afford to buy an apartment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Volkswagen defied the gloom in Europe and cemented its status among the global leaders of the auto industry, reporting record results and saying it sold more than eight million vehicles last year for the first time in its 75 year history. VW, the top European automaker, said net income more than doubled to EUR15.4 billion, or 20.6 billion. Revenue soared almost 26 percent to EUR159 billion. Pretax profit rose to EUR18.9 billion from EUR9 billion. Profit was aided by "positive effects" from equity investments and the valuation of its Porsche options, VW said. The German company said unit sales rose almost 15 percent from 2010 to 8.3 million vehicles, led by the Volkswagen and Audi brands. The annual profits, revenue and unit sales were all records. VW said last week that 2012 had also gotten off to a positive start, with sales rising 1.3 percent in January from a year earlier. Volkswagen's sales move it to the No.2 spot worldwide, behind General Motors, which sold 9.03 million vehicles last year, and ahead of Toyota Motor, which was hamstrung by the earthquake and tsunami disaster last March. VW's net profit was almost triple the 7.6 billion G.M. earned last year . Volkswagen's 2011 showing marked a sharp contrast with other mass market carmakers in Europe. The French automaker Peugeot and General Motors' Adam Opel unit both lost money on their carmaking operations and revealed this week that they were talking about a tie up to try to cut costs. Another French automaker, Renault, was barely profitable on its carmaking business. Fiat, the Italian company, continues to make money from its Chrysler business in the United States, but the Italian company's home factories are using only about 50 percent of their capacity, too little to make money in Europe. Sergio Marchionne, Fiat's chief executive, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera in an interview published Friday that Fiat might have to shutter two of its five domestic plants if it was unable to crack the U.S. market with its own cars. "Italian factories will survive only if we export to America," he told the paper. VW's worldwide operations insulates it to some extent from the slumping European auto market, which is expected to contract in 2012 for a fifth straight year. For example, the company's two Chinese joint ventures, Shanghai Volkswagen and FAW Volkswagen, together sold 2.26 million vehicles in 2011, up nearly 18 percent from 2010. But VW also did better than most of its peers in Europe. In Germany, the main bright spot in Western Europe, VW's sales rose more than 11 percent; even in Western Europe excluding Germany, VW beat the prevailing trend, selling 7 percent more cars last year than in 2010. "We know the car business is a volume and scale business and today Volkswagen is the only carmaker in Europe that has that scale," Philippe Houchois, head of European auto industry research at UBS in London, said. Despite their strengths and ability to charge premium prices, "even BMW and Daimler don't have the same scale." Noting that Volkswagen went through "years of pain" and heavy investment to get where it is, Mr. Houchois said the question for Europe's weaker car industry players was whether they would have to go through the same convulsions. He said it was somewhat misleading to think of Volkswagen as a mass market carmaker, because the company's brands include Audi and Porsche, which are more profitable than VW cars, as well as the truck makers MAN and Scania. He said that while the company's overall 2011 operating margin, a measure of profitability, was about 7 percent, that figure disguised the wide variation between the Audi division, with a margin of more than 11 percent, and the VW division, which was likely on the order of 4 5 percent. Volkswagen, based in Wolfsburg, Germany, said it was also raising its dividend on common shares to EUR3 from EUR2.20, and on preferred shares to EUR3.06 from EUR2.26. The figures announced Friday were a preliminary statement of 2011 results. It will provide detailed fourth quarter data on March 12. Christine Ritz, a Volkswagen spokeswoman, declined to give a breakdown of the contributions to profit of the equity investments and the revaluation of the Porsche options, saying those would be provided next month. But she noted that the equity investments included the China business, and said the contribution from the Porsche options a put/call structure giving VW the right to buy the sports car maker would be "on the same order of magnitude" as the EUR6.8 billion figure the company announced in September. Volkswagen said in September that its management board had concluded that legal hurdles including lawsuits and an investigation of Porsche's former chief executive Wendelin Wiedeking by Stuttgart public prosecutors would prevent the timely consommation of its planned merger with Porsche. Board members, it said, nonetheless "remain committed to the goal of creating an integrated automotive group with Porsche and are convinced that this will take place." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Conventional wisdom has it that hot flashes, which afflict up to 80 percent of middle aged women, usually persist for just a few years. But hot flashes can continue for as long as 14 years, and the earlier they begin the longer a woman is likely to suffer, a study published on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine found. In a racially, ethnically and geographically diverse group of 1,449 women with frequent hot flashes or night sweats the largest study to date the median length of time women endured symptoms was 7.4 years. So while half of the women were affected for less than that time, half had symptoms longer some for 14 years, researchers reported. "It's miserable, I'll tell you what," said Sharon Brown, 57, of Winston Salem, N.C., who has endured hot flashes for six years. At her job at a tax and accounting office, she has had to stop wearing silk. "I keep one of the little fans with me at all times one in my purse, a couple in my desk, some in just random places in the office," she said. "I'll be so glad when they stop if they ever stop." Over all, black and Hispanic women experienced hot flashes for significantly longer periods than white or Asian women. And in a particularly unfair hormonal twist, the researchers found that the earlier hot flashes started, the longer they were likely to continue. Among women who got hot flashes before they stopped menstruating, the hot flashes were likely to continue for years after menopause, longer than for women whose symptoms began only when their periods had stopped. "That having symptoms earlier in the transition bodes ill for your symptoms during menopause that part is certainly new to me," said Dr. C. Neill Epperson, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Women's Behavioral Wellness, who was not involved in the study. Perhaps, she and others suggested, early birds are more biologically sensitive to hormonal changes. And many women fall into the early bird category. In this study, only a fifth of cases started after menopause. One in eight women began getting hot flashes while still having regular periods. For two thirds of women, they began in perimenopause, when periods play hide and seek but have not completely disappeared. In numerical terms, women who started getting hot flashes when they were still having regular periods or were in early perimenopause experienced symptoms for a median of 11.8 years. About nine of those years occurred after menopause, nearly three times the median of 3.4 years for women whose hot flashes did not start until their periods stopped. "If you don't have hot flashes until you've stopped menses, then you won't have them as long," said Nancy Avis, a professor of social sciences and health policy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the study's first author. "If you start later, it's a shorter total duration and it's shorter from the last period on." Hot flashes, which can seize women many times a day and night slathering them in sweat, flushing their faces are linked to drops in estrogen and appear to be regulated by the hypothalamus in the brain. Studies have found that women with hot flash symptoms also face increased risk of cardiovascular problems and bone loss. Researchers followed the women in the study, who came from seven American cities, from 1996 to 2013. All of them met the researchers' definition for having frequent symptoms: hot flashes or night sweats at least six days in the previous two weeks. Mary Hairston found that acupuncture helped with her hot flashes. Karen Tam for The New York Times None had had a hysterectomy or both ovaries removed, and none were on hormone therapy. (If they started taking hormone therapy during the study period, their data stopped being included, Dr. Avis said.) Although some smaller studies have also found that symptoms can last many years, the new research drew praise from experts because, among other things, it included a larger and much more diverse group of women. One third of them were African Americans in Pittsburgh, Boston, Chicago and Ypsilanti, Mich. It also included women of Japanese descent in Los Angeles; women of Chinese descent in Oakland, Calif.; and Hispanic women in Newark about 100 in each group. "It's such a real world study of women we are seeing day in and day out," said Dr. Risa Kagan, an obstetrician gynecologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Sutter East Bay Medical Foundation in Berkeley. "There is no other study like this." Researchers found significant differences between ethnic groups. African Americans reported the longest lasting symptoms, continuing for a median of 10.1 years twice the median duration of Asian women's symptoms. The median for Hispanic women was 8.9 years; for non Hispanic whites, 6.5 years. Reasons for ethnic differences are unclear. "It could be genetic, diet, reproductive factors, how many children women have," Dr. Avis said. The study also found that women with longer lasting symptoms tended to have less education, greater perceived stress, and more depression and anxiety. "I'm not at all suggesting that hot flashes are manifestations of depression, but they're both brain related phenomena, and depression is also more common in the same groups," said Dr. Andrew Kaunitz, an obstetrician gynecologist at the University of Florida who was not involved in the study. It is unclear if stress and emotional issues help cause hot flashes or result from them. "Women with more stress in their lives may be more aware of their symptoms and perceive them to be more bothersome," said Dr. JoAnn E. Manson, chief of preventive medicine at the Harvard affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital and an author of a commentary accompanying the study. "But also having significant night sweats that interrupt sleep can lead to stress." Dr. Manson said the new study should help women and doctors anticipate that symptoms may continue longer, and might suggest that some women try different approaches at different times. Women who are still menstruating, she said, "can become pregnant," so low dose contraceptives, which also tame hot flashes, might be recommended until menopause. Hormone therapy might then be prescribed for several years, she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Peter Calthorpe, one of the creators of New Urbanism, at his office in Berkeley, Calif. He argues that the convenience of autonomous vehicles will only encourage more car trips. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. Peter Calthorpe thinks Silicon Valley has it all wrong. He rejects the ideas of tech industry visionaries who say personal autonomous vehicles will soon be the solution to urban problems like traffic congestion. Mr. Calthorpe is a Berkeley based urban planner who is one of the creators of New Urbanism, which promotes mixed use, walkable neighborhoods. His designs emphasize the proximity of housing, shopping and public space. He is not opposed to autonomous vehicles. Mr. Calthorpe's quarrel is with the idea that the widespread adoption of personally owned self driving cars will solve transportation problems. In fact, he worries it will lead to more urban congestion and suburban sprawl. "One thing is certain: Zero or single occupant vehicles," even ones that can drive themselves, "are a bad thing," he and the transportation planner Jerry Walters wrote in an article last year in Urban Land, an urban planning journal. "They cause congestion, eat up energy, exacerbate sprawl and emit more carbon per passenger mile." Mr. Calthorpe believes that in trying to solve a very hard technical problem, Silicon Valley is ignoring an easier application for autonomous technology that has the potential to quickly change mass transit and help solve the Valley's housing crisis. It starts with backing away from solo car trips. A popular claim by the advocates of self driving cars is that not only will they be safer than human driven cars, but they will lead to fewer cars, faster commutes and a radical rethinking of cities where finding a place to park is no longer a priority. But Mr. Calthorpe, citing a range of transportation studies, has simulated through computer models the impact of self driving vehicles in urban settings. He argues that if they are used the way today's vehicles are carrying a single individual in most cases they will lead to more congestion. When it is easier to travel in a city in self driving cars, Mr. Calthorpe said, everyone will want to do so. And when self driving vehicles are more affordable which could take years to happen people who currently rely on public transit while running their errands will instead send their cars to pick up the groceries and the dry cleaning, adding significantly to what Mr. Walters and other urban planners call "total vehicle miles." This year, Mr. Calthorpe challenged Silicon Valley to take another look at its housing and transportation problem in a proposal in which he asked: "Can one street solve the San Francisco Bay Area housing crisis?" In addition to his planning consultancy, Mr. Calthorpe has created Urban Footprint, a company that offers a software design tool for planners, architects and environmental analysts who want to model different kinds of development in urban and regional settings. He used his software to show that by changing just commercial zoning to permit higher density along El Camino Real the 45 mile boulevard that stretches through the heart of Silicon Valley from San Francisco to San Jose it would be possible add more than a quarter million housing units. The Valley's housing crisis can be explained in data that shows that since 2010, the region has added 11 jobs for every new home built; the median home price has reached 934,000; and rents have gone up 60 percent since 2012. One of the consequences of the growing imbalance between housing and jobs is the increasing traffic and congestion, according to an Urban Footprint report. To avoid congestion, the plan requires efficient mass transit. Mr. Calthorpe has proposed an alternative autonomous rapid transit, or ART using fleets of self driving vans in reserved lanes on main arteries like El Camino Real. Those lanes would allow the vehicles to travel faster and require a lower level of autonomous technology. And the vans could travel separately or be connected together. Mr. Calthorpe's plan is an evolution of the concept of "transit oriented development" he pioneered while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1980s. It focuses on designing urban communities that encourage people to live near transit services and decrease their dependence on driving. The idea has attracted the attention of public transit activists in Southern California. "Autonomous rapid transit's greater capacity combined with lower cost could really be the stimulus for the housing development," said Denny Zane, executive director of Move LA, a group that has built broad community support for funding improvements in transportation. "We need to integrate autonomous technologies in a setting that will enhance transit use." Mr. Zane said the ART technology would dovetail nicely with a planning idea called Grand Boulevards, which has been funded by two ballot propositions in the Los Angeles region and has until now been focused on a human driven system known as bus rapid transit. Most recent Silicon Valley start ups have focused on personal vehicles rather than mass transit. But in July, Waymo, the self driving car unit of Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced a partnership with Valley Metro in the Phoenix region to develop a transportation system that would look very much like Mr. Calthorpe's ART concept. To gain broad acceptance for his idea, however, Mr. Calthorpe needs to convince city officials like Lenny Siegel, the mayor of Mountain View, where Google is based. Mr. Siegel is a veteran community activist whose focus is on the imbalance between jobs and housing and the impact of the long commutes made by people who work in the city. He also has expressed concerns about anything that will affect the flow of conventional automobile traffic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Re "Transgender Teenagers Brace for Flurry of Bills Set to Curb Their Rights" (news article, March 13): As a mother who lost my son, Tyler Clementi, to suicide after he was bullied for being gay, I know that the language and sentiment around L.G.B.T.Q. children can be a matter of life and death. Just the act of introducing anti trans bills like those in Idaho into public discourse has the potential to be damaging to thousands of transgender children nationwide. And the effects could be more far reaching if these bills are passed. Not only is it wrong for elected officials to try to dictate and control the very personal journey that trans youth face, but it is also incredibly harmful for them to hear their unique identities discussed and codified as if something is wrong with them. This language can only be described as bullying. There is scientific evidence that this kind of rejection from society is connected to the suicides of these young people. We have to ask, Do these so called advocates and legislators want these young people to die? It is appalling for trans youth to be subject to debate over whether they deserve to express their identities openly and safely. Debating their worthiness to live as themselves is dehumanizing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
One designer set fire to his collection to draw attention to how the coronavirus has devastated cash flow and is likely to continue into 2021 if they make it that far. At 7 a.m. on April 30, Pietro Demita and Silvana Persano, the owners of Diamond Couture, which specializes in wedding gowns, were already busy in their atelier in Veglie, Italy. The business partners had chosen nine gowns from their latest collection, hung them on a rack and dragged them in front of their warehouse. Scissors in hand, Mr. Demita and Ms. Persano, each wearing face masks, cut through corsages of white lace and skirts of tulle, thrusting the shreds into a large yellow and blue bin. Mr. Demita set the pile on fire with a lighter. The burning was filmed by a friend and used to address "people in power," he said, about the plight of the country's wedding industry. According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, 190,000 to 195,000 weddings are registered every year in Italy. When these are celebrated with a party, they sustain an industry worth an estimated 40 billion euros ( 44 billion) employing 83,000 companies. Additionally, 540 million euros ( 593 million) are generated by about 10,000 wedding celebrations organized by foreigners in Italy, who often purchase their wedding dresses in the country. "If my dreams have to be turned into ashes, I prefer doing it myself," Mr. Demita said. Diamond Couture presented its latest collection in April 2019 at Si Sposaitalia Collezioni, an international trade show in Milan for bridal and formal wear. The event showed 220 bridal collections in 2019. Orders for gowns were taken during the buying appointments at the fair and delivered between September and October. The company always agreed to start crafting the ordered dresses without a deposit. The payments would be sent in March of the following year. Mr. Demita's and Ms. Persano's annual production grew from 49 gowns to more than 1,000 within 13 years. But on March 9, the Italian government announced stringent quarantine measures. Eighty percent of the weddings for which Diamond Couture had orders for gowns were postponed with the rest being canceled. Mr. Demita and Ms. Persano faced empty cash registers. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Italy was the first Western country to impose a national lockdown, on March 4, which suspended all businesses. With 33,072 Covid 19 related deaths as of May 27, Italy has the third highest figure, only ranking behind the United Kingdom (37,460) and the United States (101,392). Restrictions in Italy were lifted May 18, but social distance measures are still being enforced throughout the summer, pushing most weddings planned during the sought after period from April through September to the fall or next year. "It is a climate that certainly does not invite to celebrate," Michela Gombacci, a business consultant, said about her postponed May wedding on the Italian island of Capri with her American fiance, Stefano Minoli. "We thought it would have been almost out of place." The practice of delayed payments is common among small businesses in Italy, and it is especially widespread in the wedding industry as it allows retailers to collect the payments for the gown in installments. Larger companies and small outfits operating in the higher end segment try to steer clear of it. Nicole Spose by Nicole Cavallo has asked brides to pay off dresses by the date on which the wedding was originally planned, not the newly scheduled date in the future. "The majority understands the situation and has agreed," Ms. Cavallo said in a phone interview. But, she noted, "some aren't that happy about it." Still, shops are without their usual orders and deposit money. To make up for the canceled fashion show in April, Ms. Cavallo offered future brides online consultations to jump start new orders and deposits. A similar service will be rolled out by Antonio Riva in Milan at the beginning of June. Mr. Riva, who starts producing only upon receipt of a deposit and delivers only when gowns are paid in full, hopes to be able to deliver his gowns by October, as usual. "We are in a lucky position because everything is made in Italy and our business partners understand our needs," he said. Larger losses were suffered by companies like Carlo Pignatelli in Turin, Italy, which specializes in formal attire for men. "While brides start looking for a gown nine to six months before the event, men start only three to two months before," said Francesco Pignatelli, the creative director of the house. His company received all payments for its 2019 bridal dress collection in the fall of the same year. However, since 80 percent of the company's total sales is generated by men's suits, which typically sell between February and April, Mr. Pignatelli expects a 50 percent drop in the companies' annual revenue. To date, no company in Italy has received the government's monetary aid to provide for furloughs. Businesses have had, instead, to advance salaries for about two months, putting their finances under further strain. Wedding gown makers remain hopeful that they will recover in 2021; they expect to set a record in the production of gowns after social restrictions are lifted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon. 'ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: AMONG FRIENDS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Sept. 17). Rauschenberg's career was so long and staggeringly productive that even this enormous retrospective can offer it only in representative slivers. At the same time, the show adds something missing in the last survey here, at the Guggenheim Museum in 1997: evidence of the social nature of his gregarious work, indicating how much it was stoked by the multidisciplinary company colleagues, teachers, assistants, lovers, bar buddies that he gathered around him. (Holland Cotter) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THIS EVER NEW SELF: THOREAU AND HIS JOURNAL' at the Morgan Library Museum (through Sept. 10). Henry David Thoreau is an important person to have around right now, not just because 2017 is the bicentennial of his birth, but also because he is a model of resistance in an ecologically suicidal, politically demagogic American moment. There's a lot of him here, from two rarely exhibited photographic portraits, to his slant top desk, to nails from his Walden cabin. Some 20 volumes of his journal broaden the picture of his personality that has come through myth. (Cotter) 212 685 0008, themorgan.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
PROVIDENCE, R.I. The swapping of Buddy stories is a common pastime here. Nearly everyone is in on the game because the man called Buddy was everywhere. At the block parties. At the ribbon cuttings. At the Little League games. In the bars. In your head. It hardly matters that Buddy, also known as former Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., has resided for the last three years at the St. Ann Cemetery in nearby Cranston . He lives on in anecdotes that sound apocryphal only if you haven't spent time in Providence. Here's a test. Is the following true or false? While stewing one night at home, the mayor of Providence summoned a man he believed to be sleeping with his estranged wife. Then, in the presence of a city police officer guarding the door, he tortured and assaulted the man with an ashtray, a fireplace log, a lighted cigarette and a coffee mug. Good for you if you guessed false. There was no coffee mug. The story of Cianci's rise and fall (and rise and fall) is the story of recent Providence history; an urban opera b ouffe. So it was all but destined that the city's leading theater, the Trinity Repertory Company, would someday make dramatic use of the rich material he generously provided right up to his death in 2016, at 74. Destiny fulfilled. "The Prince of Providence," written by George Brant and based on the best selling biography by Mike Stanton, opened this month to critical acclaim and feverish box office demand. It has become the Passion Play of Providence . Adding to the production's local appeal is the knowledge that nearly all its characters were or are actual Rhode Islanders, and any one of those still alive might very well be sitting in the theater seat beside you. Having worked for several years at the Providence Journal, I recognized the thrill of this possibility during a recent performance, just as I recognized the play's leading character a man I knew well enough for him to dislike me. "It's kind of gone beyond meta," Mr. Brant said by phone recently. "The people of Providence play a big part in the play, so it's directed back at them. Many are cheering the local references, but it's more about the makeup of the people themselves. Hopefully everyone is asking: 'This was the longest serving mayor? What kept him there?'" The play, directed by Taibi Magar, deftly captures the Tilt a Whirl sweep of Cianci's life. The privileged childhood. The law school rape allegation that never went away. His time as a prosecutor fighting the Patriarca crime family. His astounding victory in 1974 over the political establishment to become the city's first Italian American mayor. Quick witted and energetic, Cianci was a political star in ascent, an "ethnic" who gave the Wonder Bread Republicans of the 1970s some cover to feign diversity. He demonstrated his considerable potential with a well received speech during the 1976 Republican National Convention. But the man could have taught a Brown University master class in self destruction. He undid himself with his megalomania, bullying management style and alliances with the city's more sinister forces. When he was forced to resign after his felony conviction in 1984 for that assault in his home Providence fairly sighed in relief. But Cianci lingered in the city's consciousness for several years as the bilious host of an afternoon radio talk show. Then, in 1990, he stunned everyone by running again for mayor and winning. His slogan: " He never stopped caring about Providence ." It's true that the presumably rehabilitated Cianci improved the look and feel of downtown Providence, and his unwavering support of the local arts scene helped to keep Trinity Rep open. Mr. Brant said that he was initially drawn to the Cianci project "by the idea of doing a profile of someone who once sat in this theater who kept the lights on in so many ways." But it's also true that Cianci's perverse understanding of public service led to yet more corruption, culminating in a second criminal conviction, for racketeering, in 2002. He served several years in federal prison, then resumed his role as acid tongued radio personality, eviscerating anyone who had dared to succeed him. In other words: He never stopped. "The Prince of Providence" maintains a parochial coziness, reflected in the inside jokes that win knowing laughs: the time that monkeys escaped from the zoo to take their own walking tours of the city (true); the stale Oreos that Cianci lackeys ate while he committed that infamous assault (true); the assortment of Cianci toupees, including an "action rug" for use at crime scenes and in inclement weather (true.) "I think that's part of being the state theater of Rhode Island," Tyler Dobrowsky, Trinity Rep's associate artistic director, said. "It's a responsibility we have: to tell local stories, but also to put our community onstage." It's a community with zero degrees of separation. Scott Aiello, the actor who captures Cianci in all his pugnacious charm, recalled a recent trip to St. Ann Cemetery. When the woman driving his Uber asked why he was visiting Cianci's grave, Mr. Aiello explained that he was paying respects to the dead man he was nightly bringing to life at Trinity Rep. Is my brother in that play? she demanded to know. That would be the notorious late mobster Frank L. Marrapese Jr., also known as Bobo, whose use of violence as a tool of persuasion was enthusiastic. But will this only in Providence vibe, which continues through to the production's astounding ending, play well in other cities? Do you need to know why Cranston works as a gentle punch line? Dear Lord, do you need to know who Bobo was? The success of Mr. Stanton's 2004 biography, along with the popularity of the podcast "Crimetown," whose first season focused on Providence during the Cianci era, suggests that the play could do well outside the country's smallest state. It has the requisite Shakespearean echoes, and its take on our embrace of political rogues even against our own interests is timely and universal. I also see larger meaning in the life of a thuggish mayor from a smallish New England city. So here is my Buddy story. One of the several articles I wrote about Cianci was a profile for The New York Times Magazine in 2000, in which I noted that the mayor of Providence was living in the "presidential suite" of the Biltmore Hotel, next to City Hall. He explained that he had sold his East Side home, where he had once beaten a man, because the time and price were right. (A more likely reason was that he needed to cover the legal costs of the criminal indictment coming his way.) Cianci spent much of his time being police chauffeured around his city, a portable lectern bearing the city seal stored in the car's trunk. After hitting a block party or two, and maybe checking again on the elephants at the city zoo, he could often be found at the Biltmore bar, hunched, I wrote, "as if waiting for a tap on the shoulder." Cianci greeted the profile with chilling silence. After his indictment a few months later, I said hello to him on the steps of the federal courthouse, only to be brushed off. As I walked away, he turned to another reporter and said: "You see that son of a bitch? He's the worst in your business." How classically tragic. Here was a man whose unfaithfulness had blown up his marriage. Whose second love had given up on him. Whose only child would die of a drug overdose. Whose further infidelities, to his beloved city, would land him in a federal facility where toupees are banned and no one deserves to be called "Your Honor." It's not just Providence. Buddys are everywhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Remember early March that week or so before we fully grasped how much our lives were about to change? I was in Washington, D.C., to attend what turned out to be one of the last in person oral arguments at the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future the big abortion case out of Louisiana. Though I didn't know it at the time, on that trip I also ate my last meal inside a restaurant for a good while (huevos rancheros and a margarita), went to my last cultural institution (the Smithsonian's African American history museum, where I at least avoided the interactive exhibits and winced at a toddler licking the wall) and shared my last hug with someone outside my home. These were the Before Times, when it was still an ordeal to hear Supreme Court oral arguments. Within weeks, anyone would be able to listen on the internet as the justices debated the future of our rights as should have long been the case. But in March 2020, one still had to make one's way to Washington, with either a press pass in hand or the patience to sit outside the court building for hours, in hopes of getting a seat. As with so many things that loom large in our imaginations, the room where the action happens at the Supreme Court is surprisingly small. It has a weight, though, all mahogany and marble. It feels important to be there. The case at hand that day was certainly critical. The decision in June Medical Services v. Russo, expected imminently, could lead to the shuttering of clinics across not just Louisiana but also large parts of the country. Worst case scenario which is a real possibility, given the court's rightward lurch in recent years abortion clinics would also no longer be able to bring lawsuits on behalf of their patients, as has been common for decades. For all future abortion cases, plaintiffs would have to be individual pregnant women who've been turned away from getting the procedure women who would then need the resources and wherewithal to wage a legal battle that would almost certainly not be resolved in time for them to actually get an abortion. The sweeping changes this case could usher in make it all the more depressing that the looming ruling has gotten relatively little attention amid the tumult of this year. Depressing, but understandable I cover this issue for a living and even I've struggled to focus on the case, given everything else happening in the world. But there's another reason people might not have their hair aflame about this case, even if they generally care about reproductive freedom: We're worn down. By the pandemic, by racist police violence, by so much else that's roiled 2020 but also by years and years of abortion battles just like this one. I really do mean just like this one. June Medical Services v. Russo is a near total rehash of a Supreme Court case out of Texas that was decided in the summer of 2016 favorably for abortion rights, which feels increasingly hard to imagine these days. The two cases deal with identical anti abortion laws; the court merely brought on a few anti abortion justices and shifted its gaze one state to the east. The liberal justices' exasperation over this fact was palpable in the courtroom in March. At one point, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who is 81 years old and has been on the court for more than a quarter century, confirmed with the lawyer arguing on behalf of abortion rights that aspects of the case could "require either directly or indirectly overruling eight cases of this court." What was left unspoken came through clearly in person: "Give me a break. We're not going to throw out decades of abortion rulings here, are we?" More than once, Justice Sonia Sotomayor interrupted the lawyers for Louisiana with an incredulous "I'm sorry" in a tone that seemed to speak more to her sense of disbelief than matters of pure etiquette. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was fierce and sharp as always, once again defending the rights that have been her life's work. It must be said, though, that it was frightening to see the then 86 year old, who'd recently fought pancreatic cancer, so small and frail as to be nearly hidden by the bench. If you reflect on the past decade of reproductive politics, you too might share some of the justices' frustration. We've been through a lot. Some of it progress, to be sure like that 2016 ruling in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, which knocked down abortion restrictions in Texas. But the overall trend has been toward much less access to both abortion and birth control, especially for poor women. After all this time, the insults have started to run together into an indistinct misogynist slurry. The hundreds upon hundreds of state anti abortion regulations. Sandra Fluke, the "slut." Hobby Lobby. "Legitimate rape." The laws banning abortions before many women know they're pregnant. And the legislation that tried to straight up ban all abortions. It's been an absolute onslaught, and one that's gotten more extreme over the years. That's why there was even a conversation recently in anti abortion circles about whether doctors could reimplant ectopic pregnancies. (They can't.) It's how a law banning abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy has been made to seem not so bad, even though it's just as unconstitutional as a six week abortion ban. It's why Tennessee passed a six week ban just a few days ago in a dramatic, middle of the night gambit and few people seem to be talking about it. It's also how smart, knowledgeable people can look at this terrifying Supreme Court case, one that should never have even made it before the court, and do little more than sigh. And, I fear, it's how a bad but not worst case decision in the coming days for instance, if the court says laws like Louisiana's could stand in some states but not others might be met with, "Whew, bullet dodged." When, in fact, such a decision would be a signal that the anti abortion movement is coming alarmingly close to the culmination of its nearly 50 year battle to destroy Roe v. Wade without the political blowback of actually overturning Roe v. Wade. Of course, it's impossible to know exactly what the Supreme Court will do. In recent weeks the court has delivered two significant, and somewhat surprising, progressive victories, in its rulings on L.G.B.T.Q. discrimination and DACA. And if the abortion ruling is shocking enough either a purely positive outcome or a more obviously catastrophic one there will no doubt be a significant public reaction. But a lot of court watchers expect that the decision will be neither of those things. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Radical politics are wasted on the young. When you're full of energy and potential, the system's nefariousness remains abstract. By middle age, you've logged evidence that life is unfair. With "To Throw Away Unopened," her incandescent midlife memoir, a menopausal battle cry equal parts Nora Ephron and SCUM Manifesto, the British punk icon is entrenched enough in mainstream society to advocate blowing it up from the inside. In the late 1970s, Albertine played guitar for the Slits with a Vivienne Westwood inspired blond ingenue look, sex kitten by way of Renaissance cherub. Running through a park naked but for a loincloth and mud in the "Typical Girls" video, she was freedom incarnate. Nothing could stop her, including the fact that when she formed her first band (with Sid Vicious, like you do), she barely knew how to play. Now, post divorce and in her late 50s, mother to an adored teenage girl, Albertine misses that early self possession. In fact, she's a bit insecure and quite lonely. On a romantic weekend with a man, she can't sleep for fear she will pass gas in his presence. When movers make fun of her new home, rather than object, she overtips them to "show they hadn't upset me." She disparages people who breach bus etiquette, and spends rather a lot of time contemplating her hair removal and bowel habits. And she's tired. "It's harder for me to put on my psychic armor and sally forth now," she writes. Can you blame her? After "seven years of infertility treatment, 13 operations, 11 IVF attempts, one miscarriage, one ectopic pregnancy, my gall bladder removed, one dose of cancer and one divorce, for starters" (topics explored in her 2014 memoir, "Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys."), she's understandably "fed up with adventures, to be honest, knackered." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"Suspension" tells a tale of two roads. The first connects the town of San Francisco and the city of Mocoa in Putumayo, Colombia, locations that as the bird flies are less than 20 miles apart. But the route itself, encompassing a stretch called "El Trampolin de la Muerte" ("the springboard of death"), has a reputation as one of the world's most dangerous, as a single, unpaved lane snakes through the Andean Amazon piedmont. Even the most careful drivers can be crushed by falling rocks. At the beginning of this documentary, the director, Simon Uribe, excerpts news footage from a deadly 1991 avalanche; we see people taking a zipline to get around it. When the movie jumps to the near present, Uribe supplies a long shot worthy of Jacques Tati: Vehicles try to pass one another on a road that barely looks wide enough for any of them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Brittany Pollack and Taylor Stanley of New York City Ballet in the world premiere of "New Blood" at the Fall Gala at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. The failure rate in ballet choreography is always high. So who would have predicted that all four world premieres (by four choreographers, two of them locally unknown) at New York City Ballet's fall gala on Wednesday would all be works of real merit, each well worth seeing at least a second time? And yet so it proved. The ballets are by Robert Binet ("The Blue of Distance"), Justin Peck ("New Blood"), Troy Schumacher ("Common Ground") and Myles Thatcher ("Polaris"): They all expand ballet's frontiers. Inevitably, there are problems, shortcomings, unevennesses. This was a fashion gala, with every ballet featuring outfits by prestigious couturiers, but though most of the outfits are striking, and several are fun only "Polaris," the musically weakest of the four, is actually helped by its apparel. Other objections could reasonably be raised about the choreography of all four premieres. Yet the fresh modernity and artistic seriousness with which these choreographers address gender, steps, time, music, structure and stage geometries matter more. Familiar formulas are avoided. It would be good to see more new dances and without fashion attached by these four young men. It's striking that they've all chosen (independently, I'm told) to use unequal numbers of women and men. No safe sexual symmetries here. And no safe spatial symmetries either. All four include off center patterns, same sex partnering, unlikely couplings; and in all four there are steps, shapes, contours that, certainly on first viewing, take us happily by surprise. (The program ends, by contrast, with Peter Martins's "Thou Swell." High among its disappointments is that it's predictable: four lead women, with attendant male swains, and four perky female chorines and their perky male sidekicks.) Mr. Peck's "New Blood" (14 minutes), set to Steve Reich's "Variations for Vibes, Piano and Strings," confirms that this choreographer is not just commandingly gifted but also possessed of exceptional compositional virtuosity. The brilliant group patterns of the opening and the central section of successive duets in which A dances with B, next B with C, and so on, almost as if regardless of gender, are remarkable feats. The steps are always a pleasure, especially in their mastery of off balance legwork; the cast (seven men, six women) is excellent. Yet I have more reservations about this work than any of the others, and perhaps these are connected to the slickness, even showiness, of its organizational skill. The other three works give us real stage worlds, but the realm of "New Blood" feels merely like a maze or a game. Some of its antics the repeated gestures that imitate cardiopulmonary resuscitation in an early section feel gimmicky. While the costumes and makeup by Humberto Leon (of Opening Ceremony and Kenzo) are similarly entertaining in their inventive structures and color schemes, they add a note of revenant chic ghoulishness. Rhythmically, Mr. Peck is marvelously attentive to Mr. Reich's music (Mr. Reich joined the cast at curtain calls), and yet that sequence of duets bounces off the surface of these musical variations rather than leading us into them. The two choreographic newcomers to New York are Mr. Thatcher (who has emerged as a choreographer at San Francisco Ballet, where he is a dancer, and has been mentored by Alexei Ratmansky), and Mr. Binet (he's choreographic associate to the National Ballet of Canada; the choreographers he has shadowed include John Neumeier and Wayne McGregor). Although Mr. Thatcher's "Polaris" finds plenty of variety in his score, the "Allegramente" movement of William Walton's Piano Quartet in D minor, he doesn't show us what appeals to him in it. Still, this 13 minute dance is a skilled and attractive octet (five men, three women), attractively costumed by Zuhair Murad. Its drama lies in how Tiler Peck (who is not related to Justin and is the only dancer not dressed in blue) veers between detachment and inclusion in the patterns created by the other seven. The evening's oddest item is Mr. Binet's "The Blue of Distance," set to two beautifully imaginative pieces of Ravel piano music, "Oiseaux Tristes" and "Une Barque sur l'Ocean." The choreography (14 minutes) includes several kinds of physical awkwardness; in some passages, it's also hard to feel how the movement is connected to the music. But these aspects belong to something larger and stranger, a changing landscape (three women, four men) where stillness, slowness and speed are often combined in two or more simultaneous activities, deepening the music's spell. Though Sara Mearns, Sterling Hyltin and Rebecca Krohn each have arresting moments, the standout role is the one for young Harrison Ball, often memorably airborne. Hanako Maeda (of Adeam) gives the women costumes (different deep blue bodices with puffball white skirts) that distract from the stage world, whereas the uniform high necked blue of the men's outfits adds to its mystery. The bright energy and constant musicality of Mr. Schumacher's "Common Ground" are unalloyed pleasures. This dance is set to a highly attractive commissioned score (18 minutes) by Ellis Ludwig Leone, with orchestral sonorities that change wonderfully as the piece proceeds. The dancers catch energy from the music; jumps abound, in particular a recurrent pivoting jump (jete fouette) catches the heart in its accentuations. A pas de deux for Ashley Laracey and Amar Ramasar abounds in give and take; the extended line of Ms. Laracey's leg in arabesque penchee makes a piercing effect. Exits, entrances and peripheral space are all freshly used. The only moment in which "Common Ground" seems unnecessarily conventional is when Mr. Huxley makes an entrance immediately after others have left the stage; it feels as if Mr. Schumacher, like someone alarmed by pauses in conversation, were afraid of empty stage space. It would look yet better without the flamboyant costumes by Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida of Marques'Almeida, but I enjoy greatly their radical variations of hem and sleeve and superbly bold color combinations. These four creations all occur before the intermission, and they all feel too short. The evening's second half is the too long "Thou Swell," which suffers from Don Sebesky's nasty arrangements of popular songs by Richard Rodgers. Though it's far more admirably danced than it was seven years ago, Mr. Martins's choreography abounds in cliches, so that all the stage relationships look synthetic: repro romance. New costumes have been supplied here, too by Peter Copping, of Oscar de la Renta with the four dance divas wearing dresses that clash horridly. Poor Ms. Hyltin here has the evening's most appalling number: It looks like a dish cloth wraparound, topped and tailed by bright emerald tassels and matching emerald point shoes. Amid a program where all the dancing is excellent, I single out one soloist: Taylor Stanley, who has supporting roles in "Polaris" and "New Blood." Dancing in new choreography, Mr. Stanley becomes the freest person in the company. He's rapturously individual. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Who watches the Watchmen? A lot of people, if HBO has its way. Debuted in 1986 by the writer Alan Moore and the artist Dave Gibbons, the dark and gritty superhero comic "Watchmen" was enormously influential, helping the genre to grow up and get real. For HBO, Damon Lindelof's new TV adaptation, which premieres on Sunday, is a chance to recreate the runaway success of its last adaptation of a major nerd culture touchstone: a little show called "Game of Thrones." The reviews so far are positive, which is more than might be said for the 2009 film. But unlike the movie, this isn't a straight adaptation: It takes place decades later, when many of the central characters from the original are dead or vanished. The series does, however, exist in the same alternate history, in which Vietnam is the 51st state, Robert Redford is president, and Richard Nixon is on Mount Rushmore. Early episodes are cryptic; it helps to have a little background. Here's a brief rundown of the most useful things to know before watching. Who Are the Watchmen? Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen is a multigenerational saga about a handful of men and women who have donned costumes to fight crime since the late 1930s. These include the wealthy genius Adrian Veidt, known as Ozymandias; the reluctant second generation heroine Laurie Juspeczyk, a.k.a. Silk Spectre; the inventor Dan Dreiberg, the second crime fighter to call himself Nite Owl; the government agent and black ops specialist Edward Blake, known as the Comedian; the fanatical street level vigilante with an inkblot mask, Walter Kovacs, known as Rorschach; and the only true superhero of the bunch, Dr. Jon Osterman, a scientist given godlike powers by an experiment gone awry, which turned him into a cobalt blue being called Doctor Manhattan. The comic follows several of these characters after the Comedian is murdered, drawing them out of a government mandated retirement. They uncover a vast conspiracy eventually revealed to be a plot by Ozymandias to engineer a global crisis to end the Cold War. Simply put, he spends a fortune to create an enormous, psychic squid creature, which he warps into the middle of Manhattan as a staged alien invasion. Three million people are killed, and geopolitics realign to fend off future attacks by this faked threat from beyond. The heroes agree to keep the truth hidden in order to preserve the peace except for Rorschach, whose black and white morality leads him to martyr himself: He is killed by Doctor Manhattan for refusing to maintain the hoax. It is heavily implied that the Comedian violently suppressed knowledge of the Watergate break in on President Nixon's behalf. Add a Constitutional amendment overturning presidential term limits, and Nixon remained president well into the mid 80s, when the original story takes place. Where Does the TV Show Pick Up? The show is set roughly 30 years later; during much of that time, Robert Redford has been president. Vigilantism remains banned except under official government auspices thanks to the Keene Act, a 1977 law named after Senator Joe Keene, whose charismatic son is now challenging Redford for the presidency. And Dr. Manhattan, who despite his near omniscience was unable to stop Ozymandias's plot, has fled the planet for Mars, where he has lived alone for decades. Historically and psychically, the TV series roots itself in the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Okla., in which a white mob swarmed the prosperous black part of town, resulting in as many as 300 deaths, with thousands more displaced. In the fictionalized present day, the series pits the Tulsa police force, whose members wear vigilante style masks to protect their identity, against a militant white supremacist group called the Seventh Kalvary, which has adopted Rorschach's lethal methods and black and white mask. What Are the Important Themes and Structures? Moore and Gibbons's meticulously crafted political thriller and murder mystery is reflected by its inventive structure. Each page is based on a strict, rhythmic layout based on a nine panel grid, with slight fluctuations for timing and emphasis. The issue that reveals the origin of Rorschach is laid out symmetrically like a Rorschach blot. The craftsmanship of the comic is, in turn, reflected in the narrative. In his detached state, Dr. Manhattan is able to see the workings of the universe as a clockwork mechanism in which every event is predestined. Can free will exist in such a universe? If not, do the actions of the heroes and vigilantes really make a difference, or are they all little windup toys, marching on to their metaphysically predetermined end? And what of vigilantism? Despite being positioned as the heroes of the story, with anti vigilante forces portrayed as villainous and corrupt, the story's costumed crime fighters are a brutal, dysfunctional bunch whose actions are often amoral and always unconstitutional. The show picks up this element of the story and runs with it, hard. Arriving around the same time as Art Spiegelman's influential comic about the Holocaust, "Maus"; Frank Miller's dystopian Batman story "The Dark Knight Returns"; and a high point for Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez's slice of life series, "Love and Rockets," "Watchmen" helped spearhead the movement to see comics recognized as a legitimate art form. In 1987, the series was bound into a single volume graphic novel that has been immensely popular ever since: Generations of comics writers and cartoonists have emulated its tone and, to a lesser extent, its formal daring and clockwork craftsmanship. In a way, "Watchmen" was a victim of its own success. Moore and Gibbons signed contracts with DC Comics in which the rights to the book and its characters would revert to them once the book was out of print for a year. Because of the book's megahit status, DC has simply never allowed it to go out of print. This led to a falling out between Moore and the publisher, and Moore won't let his name be used in conjunction with any of his story's many spinoff projects. Gibbons has been more accepting. He is a consultant on the show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Snoop Dogg apologized on Wednesday to Gayle King, the lead anchor of "CBS This Morning," after criticizing her over a recent interview in which she brought up a 2003 rape allegation against Kobe Bryant. Last week, Ms. King was subjected to a social media backlash in which her critics pointed to an excerpt from her interview with Lisa Leslie, a former W.N.B.A. star and a longtime friend of Mr. Bryant, posted on the "CBS This Morning" Twitter account. The excerpt featured Ms. King and Ms. Leslie speaking exclusively about the rape allegation against Mr. Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash with his daughter and seven other people on Jan. 26. Among those criticizing Ms. King after the interview last week was Snoop Dogg, who said in a since deleted Instagram video, "Why you attacking us?" "Respect the family and back off," he added, using obscenities to describe Ms. King in a video viewed more than a million times. He also posted several pictures of Ms. King, as well as her friend Oprah Winfrey, posing with Harvey Weinstein, the film mogul who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 90 women. But on Wednesday, Snoop Dogg apologized in an Instagram post, saying that he had "overreacted" and that he was praying for Ms. King as well as for Vanessa Bryant, Mr. Bryant's widow, and the couple's children. "I publicly tore you down by coming at you in a derogatory manner based off of emotions of me being angry at questions that you asked," he said in the video. "I should have handled it way different than that," he continued. "I was raised way better than that, so I would like to apologize to you publicly for the language that I used and calling you out of your name and just being disrespectful. I didn't mean for it to be like that. I was just expressing myself for a friend that wasn't here to defend himself." Ms. King said in a statement on Thursday night that she could see both sides of the sensitive issue about Mr. Bryant's legacy. "I accept the apology and understand the raw emotions caused by this tragic loss," she said. "I'm deeply sorry that questions I asked added to that pain. That was never my intention." 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. Ms. King said she perhaps could have handled the situation differently. "As a journalist, it is sometimes challenging to balance doing my job with the emotions and feelings during difficult times," she said. "I don't always get it perfect, but I'm constantly striving to do it with compassion and integrity." Last week, Ms. King criticized CBS for how it had promoted the five and a half minute interview by using a 94 second video clip in which Ms. King asked Ms. Leslie about a woman's 2003 sexual assault accusation. The criminal case was dropped and Mr. Bryant reached a private settlement with his accuser, but the subject has become a point of contention since his death. CBS News later said it had mishandled the promotion. "Gayle conducted a thoughtful, wide ranging interview with Lisa Leslie about the legacy of Kobe Bryant," a network spokeswoman said. "An excerpt was posted that did not reflect the nature and tone of the full interview. We are addressing the internal process that led to this, and changes have already been made." Susan Zirinsky, the president of CBS News, in a statement issued on Saturday, stood by Ms. King's reporting. "We fully support Gayle King and her integrity as a journalist," Ms. Zirinsky said. "We find the threats against her or any journalist doing their job reprehensible. The interview with Lisa Leslie was comprehensive and thoughtful. We are a country where differences of opinion are welcome but hateful and dangerous threats are completely unacceptable." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The comedian Whitney Cummings visited New York recently, where she appeared on the "Late Show With David Letterman" and was the guest host for "The Late Late Show." "Basically, I got picked because Joan Rivers died," Ms. Cummings said, shortly after she taped her last episode and headed to Carolines on Broadway for a Thursday night standup gig. There, she was joined in her dressing room by the opening comedian, Stephanie Simbari, as a manager came in to tell Ms. Cummings that the club was filling up, that her accountant was in the audience and that the lighting guy wanted to know whether any comedians were going to be joining her onstage. Which is not a bad way to describe what she does, really. Certainly, her sets focus considerable attention on her sex life. It is both a reason people go to see her and a thing she takes some heat for. In 2012, two years after she rose to fame with "2 Broke Girls," the CBS show she created with Michael Patrick King, she floundered with the NBC comedy "Whitney" and a talk show on E! called "Love You, Mean It." The critics weren't always kind. "A little backlash" is how Ms. Cummings who is about 5 foot 10 with perfect cheekbones, sea green eyes, and was wearing her straight brown hair in a ponytail, with a baseball shirt that said "Love You So Much" referred to it. At Carolines there was nothing but love for Ms. Cummings when she took to the stage about 20 minutes later. There, she poked at how white the audience was ("Are there any black people here? Not one! Only a bouncer? That's even worse!") then tore into a 40 minute set that touched on everything including her inability to use condoms and how bad men are at lying about cheating. "Guys don't know this, but you all lie the same way," she said. "You know you're being lied to because you repeat the question in your answer to buy time for your horrible lying. 'Where were you at 3 in the morning?' 'Where was I? Until 3 in the morning?' It's like, could you not have made up your lie in the car on the way over?" "Why?" she said, feigning incredulity. "You think I'm Sarah Silverman." She grabbed her gray, asymmetrical Helmut Lang jacket and her knit hat and headed out with Ms. Simbari into the cold. Her next stop was the Cellar, a comedy club on MacDougal Street that became her home away from home well before she became a headlining act. "I used to do four spots a night," she said, ambling down Seventh Avenue. "Two at Stand Up NY, and Comic Strip Live. Then I would do Gotham and the Cellar, running around the city like a psychopath with a backpack on. I thought I was Jason Bourne." At the Cellar, she ran into so many friends, it almost seemed as if she was at her college reunion. Among them was Judah Friedlander, best known for his role on "30 Rock," who ribbed her about her coming gigs. "College or corporate?" he said. "The ultimate insult," she said with a laugh, looking to a reporter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Besides, Williamsburg was changing so rapidly that street pictures were quickly outdated. Mr. Buchanan encountered a one bedroom for rent in a South Williamsburg condo building, Williamsberry, on Berry Street, but was deterred by its location, near the base of the Williamsburg Bridge. He liked a new rental building, 456 Grand in East Williamsburg, but the smallest apartment available was a one bedroom for a bit more than 3,000. "This one bedroom was way bigger than I needed," he said. "I couldn't really justify the price. That might sound like a couple of extra hundred bucks, but that stuff adds up." He contacted the Ice Cream Factory, a 23 unit rental building on Berry Street that opened over the summer, and heard from Charles Fontana Machado, a salesman at Citi Habitats and a leasing agent there. Mr. Buchanan was unaware of the building's location near the Williamsburg Bridge, just across the street from Williamsberry. But the location was moot the building's four studios had long since been rented, and the last one bedroom had just been rented, too. Mr. Machado, however, offered to line up some similar options. By now, Mr. Buchanan knew that a one bedroom was unnecessary. In his Arlington apartment, which rented for 2,100, "I was always in my bedroom," he said. "I would never go out to my living room." He knew that New Yorkers managed in one bedrooms with spouses and children. "I see other people all I need is a studio." So he declined a 3,000 one bedroom for rent in a small, boutique condominium with no amenities. Mr. Machado also suggested the 82 unit Williams on South Fifth Street, a new building not unlike the Ice Cream Factory but bigger and with more amenities. The local subway stop was the Marcy Avenue station on the J/M/Z line, rather than Williamsburg's popular L train, which is facing a shutdown for construction. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
SAN DIEGO Up the stairs from the Chicken of the Sea offices in the northern reaches of this city, two brothers and about three dozen of their employees mine databases in a fledgling effort to help Americans retire a little sooner and manage their money a little better. In 2009, Mike and Ryan Alfred, now 30 and 28 years old, introduced a rating for most of the big 401(k) plans and gave poor scores to many of them. In Act 2, the brothers and their company, BrightScope, put the names and disciplinary records of thousands of stockbrokers and investment advisers up on the Web where anyone could find them. While the data provides plenty of utility for consumers, BrightScope aims to make money by selling detailed reports to retirement plan administrators, mutual fund companies and investment advisers. And for their trouble, the brothers have been called all sorts of names in industry publications. Their tactics, according to the complainers, hold investment advisers "hostage" and feel like "extortion." They're a front, perhaps, for plaintiffs lawyers. Or they are simply "sinister." If this all sounds familiar, it's because the same thing happened when Morningstar turned unflattering spotlights on the mutual fund industry, and when Zagat, TripAdvisor and Yelp started ranking various businesses. Those four companies have proved their legitimacy, or at least their staying power. And now the brothers Alfred face a similar test: Are they just a couple of punk kids who will flame out, or will their efforts help us all have more money sooner than we might otherwise? THE BEGINNING BrightScope began not with the Alfred brothers but with their co founder, Dan Weeks. While the brothers are all steely eyed intensity, Mr. Weeks, 51, is way out on the jolly spectrum. That demeanor has been a big help, given all of the feathers BrightScope has ruffled. In 2007, Mr. Weeks was an engineering manager at Hewlett Packard struggling to understand his 401(k) plan. He built a Flash application to sort out his risk tolerance and fund choices and showed it to his real estate lawyer, who happens to be the father of the Alfred brothers. Mr. Weeks's lawyer suggested that he show the tool to his entrepreneurial sons, and the three began brainstorming over glasses of Maker's Mark. "We had been thinking a lot about 401(k) plans, but we still couldn't search and find out how good one plan was," Mike Alfred said. "So we decided to build a rating." Mike now serves as chief executive of BrightScope, while his brother Ryan is president. Mr. Weeks is chief operating officer. The Alfred brothers weren't exactly coming at this cold. Mike had traded stocks as a Stanford undergraduate and Ryan completed finance internships during his summers at Harvard. They both worked for their father when he was in the insurance industry, and the brothers also operated their own investment advisory business. But they were not 401(k) experts. Still, the three raised some money from angel investors in the San Diego area, and the brothers flew to Washington to see how easy it would be to extract filings about companies' 401(k) plans from the Labor Department. It took them several hours to print just 20 company reports. That pace wouldn't do, so the brothers began flooding the Labor Department with Freedom of Information Act requests, asking for hard drives full of 401(k) filings. "They said ours was one of the most onerous they had ever received," Ryan Alfred said, smirking ever so slightly. At the same time, the brothers e mailed anyone they could think of who might persuade the Labor Department to make all the information available electronically. After about nine months of pestering, they succeeded. "We were so obnoxious, we were like mosquitoes" Mike Alfred said. "They had to kill us eventually." THE 401(K) PRODUCTS BrightScope soon published scores of consumer ratings, and it eventually added 403(b) retirement plan rankings, too, for nonprofit groups. Eventually, it became clear that its data had even more value to two other groups. First, the company created Spyglass, a service for retirement plan consultants who want to help smaller employers. It allows someone making a pitch to know just how high the target client's fees are and how poorly the mutual funds in its plan have been performing. Meanwhile, the biggest moneymaker for BrightScope in the next year or so will probably be something called Beacon. Here, BrightScope provides data to the fund companies showing which employer retirement plans own their funds, which ones don't and which employers own competitor funds that haven't been performing well. Half a dozen BrightScope employees spend all day sorting through the data that flows in from the Labor Department. Those six are in a room of about 35 people, including programmers, sales people and others, probably more than local fire codes allow. The office has a slight odor, and not the kind that might waft up from the tuna canners downstairs. It's the smell of too many people working too many hours. They all see the potential to get rich, presumably, but there's a cause they believe in, too. One sign notes that the big idea is to help millions more retire with dignity. Another proclaims BrightScope as an "Unstoppable Rebel Force." That forcefulness has rubbed plenty of people the wrong way. Steve Utkus, a principal at Vanguard, engaged in an entertaining back and forth with the company via both companies' blogs last year. Mr. Utkus, in an e mail this week, said that his biggest problem with BrightScope's rating methodology is its heavy reliance on the raw dollar amounts that people save. This can give employers with higher wages an advantage. He does allow, however, that "these services can be useful if you are comparing a few companies you know are similar in work force characteristics." BrightScope makes no apology for this, given that any retirement plan ought to try to help workers retire as soon as possible while replacing a hefty percentage of their income. In fact, BrightScope's own 401(k) plan, which does not yet have a BrightScope rating, would probably get a bad one, since its workers don't make much (though they do receive company stock) and the company doesn't match contributions. ADVISER BrightScope's decision to create its directory of financial advisers sprang from two observations. First, they identified a need for a one stop search site for all local stockbrokers, registered investment advisers and others. Second, the company realized that if it built its pages correctly, it could rank first in the search results for many advisers' names. Once that happened, many advisers would feel as if they had to pay BrightScope a subscription for the ability to add additional details to their individual BrightScope pages. To populate its adviser pages, BrightScope used government filings and industry sites to gather data on things like firm type, complaints and the amount of assets the adviser has under management. But as soon as BrightScope pulled back the curtain, complaints rolled in. The trade publication Investment News conducted a poll in May and found that 84 percent of the 205 advisers it surveyed said that their assets under management on BrightScope's site were incorrect. Ryan Alfred blames the forms that advisers submit to regulators, since that is where BrightScope gets its data. So why not ignore the data if he knows it is wrong? "We're not going to not put in the data that they show in their filing because they don't think it's good data," he said. What really got advisers' dander up was the heavy handed way the company went about responding to complaints. We'll let you correct the error, BrightScope told advisers early on, as long as you pay a subscription fee. Hence the howls of protest that it was running some kind of protection racket. The company switched gears quickly, and it now allows advisers to change the description of their firm type and correct the assets under management figure at no charge. "Launch and learn," Mr. Weeks said, laughing. BrightScope is currently navigating the regulatory thicket that could create problems for the company once it begins letting consumers review financial advisers, something it hopes to do soon. A comments system is only fair, Ryan Alfred says, since good evaluations may balance out one bad mark from a long ago complaint. And he should know. Both he and his brother have a complaint on their regulatory record from their time as financial advisers in the insurance trenches. Mike Alfred said that they had been glorified paper pushers at the time and that the insurance company defending the claim had never given them a chance to clear their names. He added that they have clean records from the time they ran their own advisory firm. As for the complainers whom he hopes to turn into customers, converting all of them is probably impossible, and he knows that the naysayers will be with him for a while. "We are perfectly comfortable with the fact that we are going to get attacked," he said. "If we are going to be relevant, then we're going to have to be controversial and we are going to have enemies." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
There were no technical snafus, dropped video feeds or any of the other on air nightmares that had kept Democratic officials up at night. Besides a few mistimed cues here and there, the country's first virtual convention on Monday equal parts telethon, pep rally and Zoom therapy session made its way smoothly to TV sets around the nation. Fewer TV sets than four years ago, though. Live television viewership of the opening night of the Democratic National Convention fell roughly 25 percent from 2016, according to Nielsen, with MSNBC emerging as the clear winner among the major networks. About 19.7 million people watched the proceedings on TV from 10 to 11:15 p.m., the portion featuring speeches by Senator Bernie Sanders and Michelle Obama, the former first lady. Four years ago, about 26 million people tuned in for the Democrats' first night in Philadelphia. The Nielsen figures do not include online and streaming viewers, a rapidly growing chunk of the American mass media audience. Younger viewers, in particular, have grown accustomed to watching live events on news websites and services like YouTube. Cable and satellite TV subscriptions have been falling for years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
God bless "High School Musical: The Musical: The Series" for not containing any murders. The revved up erotic gloom and doom of teen TV partially attributable to "Riverdale," more attributable to "Pretty Little Liars" is completely, mercifully absent from the new series, replaced by a Disney cheerfulness and flashes of Irony Jr. for kids . The result is surprisingly refreshing, even with a title that suggests a sense of redundancy. The series is about high schoolers staging a production of "High School Musical," with the added meta layer that the characters attend the school where the movie "High School Musical" was filmed, and their drama teacher ( Kate Reinders ) claims to have been part of the cast. There are lots of referential jokes and I assume I missed lots more, given that I have only a passing familiarity with the original "High School Musical." (Shout out to the kids I used to babysit for and to the dance tutorial on the DVD.) The show, like the movie, like the musical, like high school, is about finding supportive friends and learning to express yourself. It's a common fit, teens and performance, whether it's entire shows devoted to the concept, like "Glee," or just one off episodes where someone has to deliver a monologue, like "My So Called Life." The "High School Musical" update is geared to a tween or maybe younger audience, so it's not going for gut punches or twists so much as straightforward conflict and earnest determination. Nini ( Olivia Rodrigo ) is nervous that she isn't up to the task of playing the female lead. Gina (Sofia Wylie) is miffed that she was overlooked ( this honestly seems fair , she was better). Nini has a boyfriend ( Matt Cornett ), but it's her ex boyfriend ( Joshua Bassett ) who's cast as the male lead in the play. Strife! | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
NBCUniversal's streaming platform, Peacock, looks a whole lot like broadcast TV. The free version comes with commercials and plenty of vintage hits like "The King of Queens" and "Everybody Loves Raymond." And it offers something viewers might have missed while they were logged onto other streamers: the ability to channel surf. The service said it has brought back the analog era pastime by grouping its programming into distinct feeds, with one dedicated to NBC's late night hosts and another for the network's morning franchise, "Today," among others. Peacock, which becomes widely available Wednesday, is also trying to distinguish itself from Netflix, Disney , HBO Max and other competitors by betting that viewers want a free or low cost streaming option during the coronavirus pandemic. "People are looking for more affordable options," said Matt Strauss, chairman of Peacock and NBCUniversal Digital Enterprises. "That was true before the pandemic and now that we are in the middle of it, arguably heading toward a recession, affordability is even more relevant than when we first laid out our strategy seven months ago." In April, Comcast offered a sneak peek of the streaming service to 15 million subscribers who use either its cable offering XFinityX1 or the cord cutting model Flex. Executives said people stuck at home because of virus restrictions were feasting on old shows "comfort food TV," as Mr. Strauss put it. Mr. Strauss, who was the executive vice president of Comcast's Xfinity Services before taking the helm of Peacock in October, said the three month testing period had proved that streaming viewers were just as happy to flip through options before settling on a show, just as they did in the traditional TV era. That finding prompted the company to build 20 channels within Peacock. In addition to the late night and "Today" feeds, it will have one dedicated to "Saturday Night Live" and others for news and sports. The company said it will expand the offering to 40 channels within the platform in the coming months, on its way to 70 by year's end. "There has been a false narrative that, because ratings have been declining, people don't watch linear TV anymore," Mr. Strauss said. "That was never true. We have found with our cord cutters that the channels are getting 10 times the usage they were getting with a pay TV subscriber." Peacock is vital to Comcast, NBCUniversal's parent company, a late arrival to streaming. The company has designed the service so that it generates the bulk of its revenue from advertising, rather than subscriptions. The ad supported version offers more than 10,000 hours of content, with no more than five minutes of commercials for each hour of programming. The platform also comes in two other versions: Peacock Premium, with ads and more 20,000 hours of content, at 5 a month (or free for Comcast and Cox cable subscribers); and a second iteration of Peacock Premium, with no commercials, at 10 a month. The basic Netflix plan costs 9 a month. Hulu offers a low cost option, with ads, for 6 a month. NBCUniversal's competitors have moved in on the market for free, ad supported streaming services. ViacomCBS bought Pluto last year, and Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corp. announced in March that it had made a deal for another free streamer, Tubi. Despite its back to the future feel, Peacock will offer original programming, with nine series to be unveiled Wednesday, including "Brave New World," an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's 1932 science fiction classic starring Alden Ehrenreich and Demi Moore, and "Intelligence," a comedy with the "Friends" alumnus David Schwimmer. Greg Portell, the head of global consumer industries and retail and management consulting firm Kearney, said audiences are still hungry for streaming content. "Many of us have been locked up for four months now," he said. "We've gone through Disney , Hulu and we are looking for something new." The rollout of Peacock was originally planned to coincide with one of NBCUniversal's biggest, most expensive and highest rated productions: the Olympics. Now, instead of the frequent television ads that would have promoted the service between competitions at the postponed Tokyo Summer Games, NBCUniversal, the exclusive broadcaster of the Olympics in the United States, will have to get the word out in a less splashy manner. The lack of hype may mean that Peacock could catch potential customers by surprise. According to a Variety/YouGov survey, as of mid June, awareness of the platform was hovering in the 27 percent range, just above Quibi's 24.8 percent rating and well below Netflix's 92.8 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
HONG KONG Occupy Wall Street and the movements it inspired in cities around the world last autumn have largely disappeared, brushed aside by battalions of police officers, but a handful of activists still cling to a site in the heart of Hong Kong's central financial district, and on Monday evening they defied a court imposed deadline for them to leave. Several activists with Occupy Hong Kong, also known as Occupy Central, held a concert with two electric guitars and a drum set late Monday at their encampment at the base of the Asia headquarters of HSBC, drawing a couple of dozen youths who danced vigorously as the 9 p.m. deadline passed. The bank responded that it would seek a court writ authorizing bailiffs to clear the demonstrators' belongings. The bank released a statement to the activists declaring that "repossession of the property will be set in motion and enforced by the court bailiff as a judicial matter, and any noncompliance by any of the occupants may subject themselves to sanctions." Responding to a legal filing by HSBC, a judge of the Hong Kong High Court had ordered Occupy Hong Kong activists two weeks ago to leave the site by the Monday deadline. An unusual intersection of legal issues, local politics and weather has allowed Occupy Hong Kong to defy the authorities longer than similar movements elsewhere. Yet the half dozen or so remaining activists are seldom seen these days at the site here, where a small band of the homeless and the mentally ill are often more visible. Occupy Hong Kong started on Oct. 15 last year about a month after Occupy Wall Street began its protest. The Hong Kong group took the street level space between large steel pillars that support HSBC's building. The area, shielded from sun and rain by the building overhead, is owned by HSBC but is a public passageway. That raised complex legal and political questions about whether the bank or the local government would confront the protesters. Hong Kong has a high level of income inequality by international standards, and that has contributed to periodic street demonstrations entirely separate from the Occupy Hong Kong movement. Leung Chun ying won election in March as the territory's chief executive and took office on July 1 after a campaign that emphasized populism on economic issues, like housing affordability. But nonpartisan polls have shown declining support for him since then as concerns have spread about his perceived closeness to the Chinese Communist Party and about an allegation from his rival near the end of the campaign that Mr. Leung had suggested using riot police or tear gas against pro democracy demonstrators in 2003. Mr. Leung denied this. Occupy movements in other financial centers were cleared by the police last autumn and winter after cold weather began to thin the ranks of protesters. The New York police cleared Zuccotti Park on Nov. 15. The London police removed demonstrators from near St. Paul's Cathedral on Feb. 28 and evicted a small remaining group of demonstrators from Finsbury Square near the city's financial district on June 14. By contrast, winters in Hong Kong are cool and pleasant. It is now, during the sweltering summer months, that it is unpleasant to be living outdoors for long periods. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Hong Kong lies at the same distance north of the equator as Havana. And it has twice the daytime humidity of sultry Atlanta, as meteorologists pointed out when the equestrian events of the 2008 Olympics were moved here after an international veterinary group refused to certify specially built pastures and stables in Beijing as being free of foot and mouth disease. Several police officers kept an eye on the demonstration on Monday evening but made no effort to intervene. But there was a flurry when one of the young men at the demonstration, shirtless and wearing face paint and bead necklaces, squatted near the main escalator into HSBC's office tower and began setting fire to golden paper that is intended to be folded up and burned as golden nuggets in ancestor worship ceremonies at local temples. Four large fire trucks pulled up, a dozen firefighters in full gear rushed out and police officers joined them in speaking with activists and successfully discouraging them from setting more fires. The Occupy Central site consists of 13 tents, a similar number of tables, and a few sofas and chairs. On Monday evening, it was decorated with a large sign that said, in white letters on a red background, "We are all workers." While Occupy Central started more than 10 months ago with about 50 supporters, most of them drifted away by spring. The remaining activists showed limited interest in promoting their cause and announced on Aug. 15 that they would no longer give interviews to the "mainstream media." Elvis Luk, a 24 year old high school physics teacher, went to the concert on Monday evening and said that he had participated in Occupy Central protests off and on for three months last winter. Mr. Luk said that he had done so to show support for the thousands of people in Hong Kong who lost money in 2008 because they had bought savings instruments from their local banks, particularly the Hong Kong subsidiary of the Bank of China, that were linked in value to Lehman Brothers bonds that later went into default. But Mr. Luk said that he no longer supported Occupy Central and thought the last activists should disperse. "I support removing them this has dragged on so long that it doesn't help the cause, and it's not a good use of resources," he said. Ho Yin sing, who was at the site on Monday afternoon and identified himself as a supporter of the Occupy movement, said that he had decided to remove his belongings. "I am starting to move my stuff and leave," he said, adding that he wanted a "peaceful fight for harmonious coexistence." A half dozen other people milled around the site on Monday afternoon, including a woman who brandished a tennis racket at passers by and shouted obscenities at them for no apparent reason. Last Friday afternoon, a typical, sweltering day at the site, two young men were playing cards, but referred questions to a shirtless, middle aged man, who declined to discuss what they would do when the deadline arrived. A middle aged woman, incongruously dressed in heavy winter clothing, sang to herself and appeared oblivious to questions; she was no longer there on Monday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Soul found its apotheosis in Aretha Franklin. Ever since she was crowned "The Queen of Soul" in 1967 by DJ Pervis Spann in a mock ceremony at the Regal Theater in Chicago, no one has come close to contesting the title. Ms. Franklin who died T hursday at 76 sang in a voice that struck an ideal balance of strength and sensitivity, of roiling emotion and refined skill. Even when she hit a note with terrific force, her tone never lost its beauty. And each note brought with it a huge context. "American history wells up when Aretha sings," President Obama wrote in an email to The New Yorker's David Remnick for a 2016 profile of the star. "Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African American spiritual, the blues, R B, rock 'n' roll the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope." We want to hear from you. Tell us how Aretha Franklin's music influenced you. Ms. Franklin had the ability to make songs previously identified with other singers her own, and to write original pieces others pined to cover. While she made hundreds of indelible songs in her six decade long recording career, these 20 rank among her most defining. During her six years at Columbia Records, Ms. Franklin's vocal talent often overshadowed the arrangements and production in her recordings. Yet an alternate take she cut of the Johnny Mercer/Hoagy Carmichael standard from 1941 not only showed a side nowhere heard in her prime Atlantic catalog, it found special strains of soul in this oft covered song. "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" (1967) Ms. Franklin's first single for Atlantic Records became her breakthrough hit, cracking the Top 10 while announcing the arrival of a singer of revelatory confidence, openness and fortitude. Building on Spooner Oldham's electric piano, her vocal escalated to a crescendo that stands as one of the greatest pop showstoppers of all time. Otis Redding may have written the song (and had a Top 40 hit with it), but Ms. Franklin's No. 1 version will forever define it. The assurance, wit and erudition of her vocal embodied R E S P E C T to such a resounding degree, the recording went on to become one of pop's most stirring anthems of both feminism and black pride. Over the tense tremolo of Joe South's guitar, Ms. Franklin unleashed all the frustrations of a woman ignored, while at the same time turning her pain into power. The breakdown in the middle when Aretha soars over the "whoop whoop" refrain of her backup singers, the Sweet Inspirations showed just who in this romantic relationship would end up on top. Written expressly for her by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, "Natural Woman" inspired in the singer a vocal that transcended the individual to address an entire gender. Above gospel piano chords from Mr. Oldham, and strings that moved from encouraging to ecstatic, Aretha unleashed a vocal infused with such certitude and spirit, it seemed to distill the essence of whatever it may mean to be a woman. Ms. Franklin mined her deep gospel roots in a song she wrote with her then husband, Ted White. Slyly, she married the churchy organ and piano to what may be her most sexually alive lyric. Six months after Dionne Warwick's graceful take on the Bacharach David song became a smash, Aretha released a very different version. The inventive arrangement laid down a kind of dare. The support singers sometimes took the lead, while the star tersely answered, smartly reversing the entire history of call and response vocal relationships. Naturally, Ms. Franklin was more than up to the challenge, topping her sturdy Inspirations with each vocal rejoinder. The star's distinctive piano work ignited the piece, which had been a hit eight years earlier for Ben E. King. Ms. Franklin's take featured a vocal that expressed equal parts righteous accusation and hard need. Written by Ms. Franklin, the song tapped into the rich history of spirituals, setting the scene for one of her most elaborate interplays with the Sweet Inspirations. The funky guitar and bass that fire the song, written by Ms. Franklin, shows just how hard her vocals could ride a rhythm, making for one of her most danceable smashes. The melody, penned by the singer, brought out her most contemplative side. Her gliding vocal paired ideally with Hubert Laws's fluttering flute. Written by Nina Simone for the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the song received its most emphatic interpretation on Ms. Franklin's album of the same name. Accompanying herself on piano, the star's soaring vocal idealized the song's mission to encourage all manner of black achievement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The reports of the demise of the neck gaiter have been greatly exaggerated. A gaiter is a tube of fabric worn around the neck, often to keep skiers or runners warm in cold weather. But during the coronavirus pandemic, lightweight neck gaiters have been popular with runners, cyclists and people with beards because they can be pulled up to cover the nose and the mouth and used as a mask. But in recent days, there has been a backlash against the gaiter. It started after a small study from Duke University demonstrated a new, inexpensive testing method for masks that uses lasers and phone cameras. But in one part of the study, a neck gaiter performed poorly when a person wearing a gaiter said the words "Stay healthy, people" five times. During that test, the scientists observed a slight increase in the number of expelled saliva particles when the person wore the gaiter than when the wearer wore nothing at all. However, the technique they used was not a reliable way to measure particles, and it was not a statistically meaningful finding. Still, the study's authors hypothesized that wearing a neck gaiter might cause more small droplets to spew through the fabric, not fewer. A wave of alarmist reports on news sites and social media quickly followed. "Wearing a neck gaiter could be worse than wearing no mask at all," read the headline in The Washington Post. Even the study's authors said their data had been misconstrued. "Our intent was not to say this mask doesn't work, or never use neck gaiters," said Martin Fischer, an associate research professor in the department of chemistry at Duke and a co author of the study. "This was not the main part of the paper." A mural of a runner with a gaiter towers over Melrose Boulevard in West Hollywood. The suggestion that any mask can create more droplets than it stops doesn't sound plausible to aerosol scientists, who test mask materials using special instruments that can measure microscopic particles. A number of variables, such as the volume of the mask wearer's voice and whether the mask has become moist, might explain why the Duke study showed unusual results during the single gaiter test. "The statistics of one don't tell you very much," said Richard C. Flagan, an aerosol scientist and engineering professor at California Institute of Technology. "Did he have more mucus on his vocal cords when he said it that time than other times? What might have caused the difference? You really don't know from a single test." Mask testing has consistently shown that any face covering will block at least a small percentage of droplets generated when we speak or cough. The notion that a fabric gaiter will instead create more particles by splicing big droplets into smaller droplets is unlikely, experts say. "The fabrics are not acting as a sharp sieve," said Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who is one of the world's leading authorities on aerosols. "That's not how filtration works." But rather than speculate, Dr. Marr worked with Jin Pan, a Virginia Tech graduate student who studies biological particles, to test two types of gaiters using methods similar to those required by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health for testing masks. They decided to use foam heads to test gaiters as they are worn in real life, rather than tearing up a gaiter and testing just a small piece of fabric. One gaiter was a single layer fabric made of 100 percent polyester. The other was a two layer gaiter, made with 87 percent polyester and 13 percent elastane, a material often called spandex or Lycra. The researchers used a liquid salt solution and a medical nebulizer to simulate saliva and to direct the particles through a tube in the foam head with a gaiter placed over the nose and the mouth. Special instruments measured the quantity and the size of droplets that were able to sneak through the mask. Both gaiters prevented 100 percent of very large, 20 micron droplets from splattering another foam head just 30 centimeters away. Both masks blocked 50 percent or more of one micron aerosols. The single layer gaiter blocked only 10 percent of 0.5 micron particles, while the two layer gaiter blocked 20 percent. Notably, when the single layer gaiter was doubled, it blocked more than 90 percent of all particles measured. By comparison, a homemade cotton T shirt mask, recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blocked about 40 percent of the smallest particles. Tests show wide variation in how much protection cloth masks provide. Some homemade masks perform far better than the gaiters tested in the Virginia Tech study, and some perform worse. Over all, tests of fabric masks have shown that two layers are better than one, and that a snug fitting mask with no gaps is best. Most experts agree that the average mask wearer doesn't need medical grade protection, and that any face covering, combined with social distancing, probably offers adequate protection for the average person against spreading or contracting the coronavirus. "I've been recommending neck gaiters, and my kids wear neck gaiters," Dr. Marr said. "There's nothing inherent about a neck gaiter that should make it any worse than a cloth mask. It comes down to the fabric and how well it fits." The concern about the publicity surrounding the Duke study is that it might prompt people who prefer neck gaiters to stop wearing them or any other face covering. Others might shame someone for wearing a neck gaiter if they believe it might do more harm than good. "We should be encouraging people to use the most effective masks that are practical for community settings, but in general, any face covering is probably better than none," said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist and an assistant professor in the department of population medicine at Harvard Medical School. "The more that people see face coverings out in the world, regardless of what kind, the more that social norms will shift in favor of masking." Dr. Fischer said he hoped people would move beyond the gaiter controversy and focus on the original goal of the study, which was to find a cheaper alternative to allow for more widespread testing of mask materials. "Our intent was for this technology to get out there so companies and organizations can test their own masks," Dr. Fischer said. "A mask doesn't have to be perfect for it to work." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times MILAN "Milan is a labyrinth," Andrea Incontri said, as the two of us raced along the cobblestone streets of this ancient city aboard his white Vespa. Mr. Incontri, 46, is creative director of men's wear at the Italian luxury group Tod's, best known for its bobble bottom Gommino driving loafer. Hired in 2014 to help expand and evolve Tod's offerings primarily shoes and men's wear Mr. Incontri has quietly gone on to carve out a singular niche among contemporary Italian designers. He accomplished this not through wacky press stunts or gimmicky fashions but by exploiting Tod's industrial expertise to produce, season after season, impeccably executed capsule collections that riff on workwear. Think of Mr. Incontri as the talent behind that chic pocketed suede barn jacket worn by a man waiting for wheels up on his Gulfstream G500. Born in Mantua, Italy, Mr. Incontri moved to Milan at 19 to study architecture and quickly fell in love with a city where his maternal grandparents once operated a tailoring shop. He lives here now with his husband, Manuel Bogliolo, a public relations executive, and their Labrador retrievers in an apartment overlooking the Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli, the most central of Milan's public parks. From the couple's second floor windows, Mr. Incontri has a broad view overlooking the park's ancient pines, its gravel running tracks and fountains and also the stagy grottos you might imagine had been installed by the park's original 18th century creator, Giuseppe Piermarini, the architect of La Scala, but that were actually added almost a century later, as Mr. Incontri noted. Mr. Incontri is a student of his adopted city, and it was at his suggestion that, on a recent overcast morning, the two of us took a whirlwind motorbike tour of what he termed his "secret Milan." Every Milanese has one. So clandestine is this northern industrial capital that you can live here your whole life or travel here for decades, as I have and find you have only begun to scratch its surface. Milan is, after all, a city of secret passages; hidden gardens; obscure museums; archaic pastry shops tucked into courtyards; networks of lacy rooftop catwalks that provide vaulting views across the city rooftops and that are open to the public provided you know of their existence. "Come!" Mr. Incontri said, after parking on a corner near the 19th century Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in the center city and ducking down a side street. There, inside a nondescript building, was an elevator leading to the TownHouse Galleria hotel and the Pavarotti Restaurant Museum, empty at that early hour. It is doubtful whether this place would rate on anyone's list of great Milanese dining experiences. Still, once past the walls of framed glossies depicting the woolly tenor in his many roles, you reach a terrace made from steel mesh platforms and a gate that gives on to catwalks arcing high above the glass rooftop of the Galleria. From there the views are nonpareil of the Duomo, the city's Gothic cathedral, largest church in Italy and, in the eyes of many, the most aesthetically stupendous. "We spent our first married night here," at the TownHouse Galleria, Mr. Incontri explained, scrolling through his iPhone photo albums for an image of the couple's nuptial suite, whose plate glass windows faced onto the Duomo plaza and the Palazzo Reale, where the two men were wed in a civil ceremony in May. Pointing to a doorway in one photo of the church facade, Mr. Incontri also disclosed a little known method for bypassing the long queues that form outside the landmark cathedral. There can be few more obscure landmarks in Milan than the Albergo Diurno Venezia, an underground day hotel opened in 1926 to offer travelers transiting through the nearby Stazione Centrale rail station a resting place replete with amenities like a barbershop, a beauty parlor, a left luggage room and six luxuriousy appointed bathrooms. Though authorship of the hotel's structure remains is open to question its interiors are undoubtedly the work of Piero Portaluppi, whose residential masterpiece is the nearby Villa Necchi Campiglio, surely one of he most influential 20th century residential designs. Best known as the setting for the director Luca Guadagnino's 2010 film "I Am Love," the villa is administered now by the Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI), Italy's version of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is often used by Tod's for fashion presentations, parties and advertising campaigns like a current one featuring the society gadabout and Instagram darling Derek Blasberg. Thus the Villa Necchi Campiglio remains vital while the Albergo Diurno Venezia is a ghost place. Shuttered in the late 20th century, it was shunted from one municipal agency to another (at one point becoming so badly neglected that its glass skylight, covering most of a block in the sidewalk, cracked when a cleaning truck ran over it) until FAI came to its rescue. Though open to the public on special occasions during the Milan Furniture Fair, for instance the day of our visit was not one. Cupping our hands to a window Mr. Incontri and I peered furtively into an Art Deco interior so time stopped it seemed as though the last guest from the 1930s had just checked out. We zipped back toward the center city and, tucking our helmets beneath the seat of the bike, hoisted it onto its kickstand on via Filodrammatici. From there we walked to the stage door of La Scala a theater where Mr. Incontri often spent matinees in his childhood to be met by Paolo Besana, the opera house's communications director. There are not, perhaps, many mysteries remaining about an opera house inaugurated in 1778 with a work by Mozart's archrival Antonio Salieri; a place that in the 19th century served as a casino, with gambling rooms so noisy Mary Shelley griped that audiences could barely make out a melody above the racket of gossip and horse trading; and a theater whose cheap seats critics are so legendarily cruel that atenor was once booed offstage mid performance during a production of "Aida." His understudy replaced him wearing jeans. Still, as we tiptoed through balconies, boxes and loges while rehearsals were underway for Engelbert Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel" the part of the witch being portrayed by a man Mr. Besana revealed that sleuthing during the theater's controversial turn of the century renovation uncovered evidence that the theater's dramatic crimson interiors had originally been an icy Nordic blue and that, upon a time, the crowded nosebleed heights of the theater were notorious both the critical mercilessness of the audiences and as a prime gay cruising spot. There is an often told story, Mr. Besana said, of an aria being interrupted by a woman in the loggione protesting loudly that she had been molested. "Apparently, she shouted, 'Take your hands off me!'" he said. "And a man's voice came from the other side of the loggione: 'A woman? It's impossible!'" It was lunchtime by now, and Mr. Incontri aimed his scooter for Chinatown where, he said, Trattoria Ottimofiore offers up the best Sicilian food in Milan (not, admittedly, a usual destination for Sicilian cuisine). Alas, like so much else here in late August, the place was closed for vacation. Mr. Incontri piloted us instead to another old school favorite, the Antica Trattoria della Pesa, which serves Milanese classics likely to have altered little since the restaurant first opened in 1880 (and certainly not since Ho Chi Minh lived above the place in the 1940s). The two of us ordered salads and Mr. Incontri, briefly straying from his vegetarian diet, offered to split a plate of the trattoria's delicious trademark risotto alla Milanese. Thus fortified, we headed across town toward Piazza Beccaria, me clutching Mr. Incontri's iPhone and shouting out Waze directions. It took a few tries and an illegal U turn, but we soon found ourselves outside the Teatro Gerolamo, a miniature version of La Scala familiar to past generations of cultivated Milanese audiences from the marionette shows of their childhoods. Closed and all but forgotten for the last three decades, the theater first in Europe designed exclusively for puppets was recently restored and opens to the public next month. "Milan is in a kind of magic moment right now," Mr. Incontri said as Luisa Pisano, the events director at the small theater, conducted us around its gilded loges, its damask lined boxes and past ranks of chairs of Lilliputian proportions. "Yes, in a way, all this is reminiscent of an old and classical Italy, and maybe that's a little bit stereotypical," Mr. Incontri said a bit later, before getting back on his Vespa and heading home. "But in an Instagram age, when we're all constantly receiving an overdose of images and messages, these old fashioned things, with their deep sense of humanity, feel more important than ever." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
THERE may be no free lunch, but if you place an order for an obscure type of investment called a closed end fund, you stand a good chance of buying stocks or bonds at well below the going price. Closed end funds and their successors, exchange traded funds, are listed on stock exchanges, but they differ in that an E.T.F. manager can adjust the number of shares outstanding to try to ensure that the price of the E.T.F. matches the underlying value of its assets. By contrast, closed end funds have fixed share counts; that can cause them to trade at significant premiums or discounts to their asset values. Such funds are widely discounted today. The average closed end fund discount was 6.7 percent at the end of September, according to Morningstar, meaning that every 100 of assets could be bought for just over 93. The discount had widened from 2.8 percent at the end of 2012 and was nearly double the 10 year average of 3.5 percent. Discrepancies with net asset values result from changes in sentiment. The more nervous investors get, the wider discounts are; when the mood is more hopeful, discounts narrow or evaporate. Investors have grown wary about the outlook for interest rates, so much of the widening of discounts has been in bond funds, which account for about 60 percent of closed end fund assets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
When Cynthia Chung, 31, and Jeddy Hao, 32, found their one bedroom apartment on Craigslist five years ago, it seemed like too good a deal. Rent was 1,050 a month, a few hundred less than everything else in the area, with no obvious defects to explain the discount. If anything, the apartment was nicer than others they had seen: It was well sized and well maintained, with large windows and a good layout. Ms. Chung, a wedding photographer, thought they were almost certainly walking into a scam. Mr. Hao, on the other hand, was sure he had discovered a gem. "I had a good feeling about it," he said. To Ms. Chung's surprise, he turned out to be right. Rent stabilization accounted for the lower than average rent. If there was any downside, it was that many of their friends lived elsewhere. But as they would soon discover, the prospect of a rent stabilized apartment in a pleasant building is a powerful lure. They would not be alone for long. "Flushing is such an interesting neighborhood, but it had such a bad rap when we were growing up," said Ms. Chung, who is from nearby College Point, Queens. "A lot of our friends live in the city or Forest Hills or Long Island. They're like, 'Why would you live in Flushing if you could live in a nicer neighborhood?'" "Back then, it was like, 'If you're in Flushing, you're hanging out with a bad crowd.' People were always getting into fights," said Mr. Hao, who grew up in Whitestone, N.Y. "Our parents wouldn't even let us go here." But after graduating from college, Mr. Hao became the pastor at the local Awakening Church, and wanted to live in the community and be able to easily hold gatherings at their apartment. Besides, they both really liked Flushing. "It's not shiny and new like Long Island City, but it has its charms," Mr. Hao said. "Like authentic Chinese food." "So much good food," Ms. Chung said. "Buying food out is actually cheaper than cooking most meals are, like, 6. There's a great range of high end and dirt cheap, but the dirt cheap is actually better: White Bear, New Curry Leaves, Shiny Tea, New World Mall food court. You can get real milk tea, cheong fun, mala tang premade hot pot. I love it, I just love it." Such is the abundance of inexpensive restaurants that the couple has to make a point to cook at home at least one night a week but even then, they're often tempted to take an after dinner stroll to one of the area's many dessert spots. Occupation: Ms. Chung runs a wedding photography business, Cynthia Chung Weddings, and Mr. Hao is a pastor at Awakening Church, in Flushing. Roommate: A 5 year old Scottish fold cat named Kiwi. Moving on? Not anytime soon: "I think even if we had kids we'd try to stay awhile longer," Ms. Chung said. "I don't want to give up the rent. Even our parents are like, 'Why buy?'" Popular activities with their neighbors: Lots of board games One Night Ultimate Werewolf and Deception: Murder in Hong Kong are favorites. So are Nintendo Switch, Netflix and sharing leftovers. Building downside: Bad soundproofing between floors and a site on the LaGuardia flight path, above the Long Island Rail Road. "But living in New York, you expect your space to be interrupted," Mr. Hao said. "You have to have a thicker skin or you'll be frustrated all the time." The first, a pair Ms. Chung has known since sixth grade, found a one bedroom listed on StreetEasy and snapped it up immediately. Then two friends considering a two bedroom in Astoria heard about another opening in the building and decided to take it. Others followed suit, and the couple now has seven friends living in four different apartments in the building. "We hang out, eat together, lounge together. We're even all on the same phone plan, and we share Amazon accounts," said Ms. Chung, who is delighted that so many friends have joined them in their building. "It's very open door, no one would turn you away. It's like, 'Hey, are you bored? Do you want to hang out?'" Besides knocking on one another's doors, the friends use a Facebook group chat to share leftovers, borrow a vegetable steamer or beg for assistance clearing out a shoe closet. They also coordinate movie nights, video game sessions, Costco runs and evening cocktails at "the bachelor pad," the apartment with a bar. A recent afternoon was spent updating the buzzer labels by the front door. Stephen Fang, who lives down the hall with his wife, Ester Linton, said it was a lot like college only better: "It's like the best of both worlds. You have community, but you also get alone time." Mr. Hao nodded. "I like to hang out, but not every night exactly. Sometimes you're tired and you just want to watch TV." "I'm the more social one," said Ms. Chung, adding that she almost never craves an evening alone. Ms. Linton said she was looking forward to spending even more time together over the holidays, when people are home more often. "Last year we did hot pot," she said. "We'll go to the bachelor apartment for coffee they have a really nice espresso machine and ours for video games." While Ms. Chung said she has some friends who wouldn't be satisfied with a no frills building like theirs particularly as the Long Island Rail Road runs directly behind it she expected to be welcoming more people in the future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
BRAZEN Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World By Penelope Bagieu Illustrated. 296 pp. First Second. Cloth, 24.99; paper, 17.99. Something about the cover of the French graphic novelist Penelope Bagieu's new book, "Brazen," makes you want to keep touching it. It's textured, with 12 striking cartoon portraits appearing in perfect circles so shiny they look like collectible pin back buttons I'd like to have. Behind them is a pale gold image of the sign for female merged with a power fist. The book's tag line runs right down the middle: "Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World." I recognize a few of the faces right away: Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins cartoon characters; and a green faced Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West; and the one who is winking, is that Josephine Baker? It is. But who is the woman with the tight Afro? Or the one wearing the hijab? Or the older woman with the big, wild sunglasses? And one has a beard. It looks luxurious. Who is she? This feels like an invitation. I open the book and there she is. Clementine Delait, born 1865. Facial hair started coming in at puberty, she made a habit of shaving, married a man with rheumatism, ran into another bearded lady at a carnival and from then on decided to just let it all grow out. She became famous for her beard, opened a popular cafe, sold souvenir photos of herself, became the mascot of some World War I soldiers called the "Hairy Ones," adopted a kid, performed live cabaret acts with a parrot and, according to Bagieu's version, lived happy and well until she died of a heart attack in 1939. The woman in the hijab turns out to be a contemporary Afghan rapper and refugee, Sonita Alizadeh, born in 1996, whose low tech, unflinching music video about the fate of young girls sold into marriage went viral and helped her escape her own fate as a child bride. Alizadeh raps, "Let me scream, I'm tired of silence," while lifting a Western style wedding veil. Beneath it her face is made up to look as if she's been beaten: swollen eyes and bruised jaw. It's a powerful image, one that Bagieu doesn't hesitate to draw into the strip. And Bagieu's drawings are wonderful. Though sometimes spare, with minimal effort spent on backgrounds, her line manages to flow and skate through 29 stories of remarkable women. These drawings can act. They are alive with gestural attitude. They move, dance, struggle, fight back, fall in love, resist and wonder at the world. Some ham it up. Some suffer terrible abuse. To her credit, Bagieu doesn't back away from drawing the marks of violence on their faces and their bodies, which may come as a surprise to those who are expecting a rah rah young adult girl power sort of read. Bagieu calls these comics "broad stroke portraits," and explains the sometimes too breezy storytelling this way: "This book is by no means a thorough scholarly work; rather, it's one woman's tribute my homage to the full, daring lives they lead, often against great odds." All of her stories follow a similar pattern. Almost every page has nine frames and each biography begins with a portrait drawn in a beribboned oval template. They cover the birth, life and death of each of her subjects in a way that can feel a bit formulaic, but this seems to have more to do with the fact that the English translation is typeset rather than in Bagieu's handwriting. In the original version of these strips, which are luckily available in French on the Le Monde website, where they originally appeared, the difference is instantly apparent. The nature of handwriting gives the portraits a more personal "voice." It feels as if Bagieu herself is telling you these stories. They lose their Wikipedia tone and become more intimate, more like that of a cool fairy godmother recounting tales you need to hear without too much worry about sources, originality or historical accuracy. Her handwriting preserves her passion, along with clear intent to both delight and embolden the reader. It's painful to see this crucial part of her work replaced with type. It changes everything about how the stories are received. The reading speed is altered. The tone and the visual relationship between the text and the drawing just isn't there. It's her handwriting that makes these panels spring to life. Panels that seemed awkwardly composed suddenly become elegant and beautifully balanced. It's hard for people to understand the importance of a cartoonist's handwriting. In the same way melody transforms lyrics, handwriting transforms words and can have a profound impact on how the story is received and understood. Sadly, nearly every scrap of Bagieu's lovely handwriting has been scrubbed and replaced in this translation, even when completely unnecessary. The only clue to this "voice" is a rare lettered sign here and there, and her name, "Penelope," sweetly signed at the end of each strip. These "rebel ladies" come from all over the world (though surprisingly over a third of them are American). They also come from all points in time, like Agnodice, whom Bagieu presents as a gutsy gynecologist from ancient Greece, to the astronaut Mae Jemison (the one with the tight Afro), to the "Animal Whisperer" Temple Grandin and the "Lover of Modern Art" Peggy Guggenheim (she's the one with the wild sunglasses). Bagieu includes sets of siblings, like the Wiggins sisters, who were forced by their father to form a rock band called "The Shaggs," and "Las Mariposas," the Dominican Republic's Mirabel sisters, who were murdered during the Trujillo regime in 1960. And she profiles too one of my favorite women, Frances Glessner Lee, who helped crime scene investigators hone their craft by creating intensely accurate miniature replicas of rooms where murders took place. Bagieu has dedicated this book to her own daughters, and I kept that in mind as I read it. When I imagine her telling these stories to them, I'm reminded of something my grandmother would say when she told me these kinds of tales. "Of course it is only a story my dear. But it is true!" Bagieu's pen transforms these true stories into something that has the tone of a personalized fairy tale. And in the end, this turns out to be just perfect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Q. Is it true you can now stop those annoying videos that automatically play on some websites in the Safari browser? A. As part of its macOS High Sierra update for its computers, Apple has added controls to Safari, the company's web browser, that stop loud videos from unexpectedly blaring. For sites that play videos that you do not mind seeing right when you visit, you can also set your preferences individually by website. You can manage autoplay videos in a couple of ways. If you land on a site that starts rolling a video clip, right click (or hold down the Control key and click) in the Safari address bar and choose "Settings for This Website." (The option is also available under the Safari menu.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
COUNTING How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters By The title of "Counting" contains some revealing wordplay: To count is to tally things up but, also, to count is to matter. In this book, the political scientist explores the ways in which these two meanings of "count" are intertwined in society. She argues that our judgments are embedded in the way we count because of the decisions we make about what matters, and that we then use this to make concrete judgments that we claim are based on math when really they're a result of our preconceived notions. It is a curious experience to agree with the conclusion of a book but not its argument. Stone's broad message is that we shouldn't regard numbers as reflecting absolute truths about the world without first considering the methods used to produce those numbers. She offers many devastating examples, including how different interpretations of the safe amount of lead in water proved deadly in the Flint water disaster, the way teachers are now assessed based on a "value added" measurement of their worth and the egregious evaluation of the life of a slave in the Constitution, rated at three fifths of a person. Stone shows how being in thrall to numbers is misguided and dangerous, that they can often hide injustice and that we should examine and question the mechanisms through which we arrive at figures and statistics that we consider to be authoritative. Stone's critique is ultimately that life, unlike math, is full of ambiguity and messiness and multiple interpretation, and this should make us wary of the ways numbers can be manipulated toward various ends. But I take issue with the way she characterizes math, and this is where I disagree with her analysis, and I do so as a mathematician who sees the power of numbers and also their limitations. Math itself is not really about clear cut answers either: Rather, it gives us precise and well defined steps for investigating nuance. Stone thinks we should rely on math less to solve our problems in life; I think we should use it more, but with a more careful understanding of what math is and how it works. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
CNN Pits Democrats Against Each Other, Trevor Noah Says 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. CNN aired the first of two live Democratic debates Tuesday night, and late night remarked on how difficult it is to hear from 10 presidential candidates on the stage at the same time, especially when Americans aren't familiar with some of them. "It was actually more pileup than lineup. Ten candidates got seven seconds each to solve the health care crisis. There were more characters than on the show 'This Is Us' in this debate." JIMMY KIMMEL "Even in a threesome, somebody ends up feeling left out, even if they had the best ideas." SETH MEYERS "Everyone was looking for their moment to stand out. There were big questions for each of them. Questions like, 'Who the hell are these guys?'" SETH MEYERS "Can't they combine Tim Ryan, Steve Bullock and John Delaney and make them all one guy?" JIMMY KIMMEL Noah criticized the CNN moderators for cutting off the candidates when they went over time and then trying to pit them against each other. "Half of those questions might as well have been, 'Pick three people on this stage: eff, marry, kill, go, go. Like, I felt like at any moment they were about to go, 'By the way, Elizabeth, did you notice that Klobuchar totally stole your look? Just saying.'" TREVOR NOAH There was a lot of ground to cover, but hosts focused on some of the debate's highlights, including disagreements over health care. "During her opening statement in tonight's Democratic debate, Senator Elizabeth Warren said that President Trump disgraces the office of the president every single day, which isn't fair, because he's really only in the office like twice a week." SETH MEYERS "It's hard to sum up what happened tonight, but most of tonight was a bunch of guys with no chance to win the Democratic nomination yelling Republican talking points at the people who can. It was like watching the seven dwarves offering Snow White a poison apple." STEPHEN COLBERT "If Hickenlooper is elected, he'll be like, 'I promise I will go on Yahoo Answers to see if anyone knows how to fix this thing.'" TREVOR NOAH "There she goes, tossing her base some of that red unicorn meat. And the only way to defeat it is to help Harry Potter locate the nine horcrux." STEPHEN COLBERT, on Marianne Williamson's mention of a "dark psychic force" As Williamson "We have a Department of Housing, but not a department of home. We have secretary of education, instead of a secretary of educating. We have a Defense Department instead of a dreamcatcher I bought in Sedona." STEPHEN COLBERT "Why does Bernie Sanders sound like he's pitching health care only for himself?" imitating Sanders "We will cover hearing aids, eyeglasses and insurance if you slip in the shower, especially the part of the mildew that gets slippery. The point is, it's for everyone!" TREVOR NOAH As Sanders "I'm not yelling! This is what it sounds like when I whisper! It's how I sang my kids lullabies at night. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, the billionaire class has gone too far." STEPHEN COLBERT "After the first half of tonight's debate, Google searches for former congressman John Delaney increased 3,400 percent, and still no results." SETH MEYERS "And at this point, now that the dust has cleared, it's John Hickenlooper's election to lose." JIMMY KIMMEL "I'm not sure the guy polling below 1 percent should be talking about math right now." STEPHEN COLBERT, on Delaney debating Sanders on health care As Sanders "I wrote the damn bill, and it's a good thing you get dental care, Tim, because I just slapped the teeth out of your dirty mouth." STEPHEN COLBERT, on Tim Ryan saying Sanders didn't know something about the health care bill that Sanders, in fact, authored "Tim Ryan better hope 'Medicare for all' passes, because he's going to need some health care for that burn." SETH MEYERS Amy Schumer called into "Lights Out With David Spade" to share her congratulations on the new show and a peek at her newborn. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
I sat in the passenger seat of a station wagon with my friend Brian, an American who is living and raising a family in Osaka his cute toddler was snoozing in the back as he explained local rivalries. We were driving down Midosuji Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in central Osaka. Conflicts between the Kansai region, where Osaka sits, and the Kanto region, which Tokyo calls home, can get intense, he said. People stand on opposite sides of the escalator in the two cities, make fun of how the other speaks, and instant ramen companies flavor their udon broths differently depending on the region, putting a small "E" or "W" on the packaging to denote "East" (Kanto/Tokyo) or "West" (Kansai/Osaka) Brian grew up in Texas: "You know how Texas sort of thinks it's its own country and plays by its own rules?" he asked. "That's Osaka." One thing both Tokyo and Osaka have in common: They're both famously expensive cities. I had already spent time in Tokyo on a modest budget (more on that next week) and decided to see if Osaka and its individualism would prove as accessible. Particularly when it came to food. Osaka has a fantastic high end dining scene, from places that serve pricey Kobe beef (Kobe is just 40 minutes away by car) to the menu at Fujiya 1935, a Spanish restaurant with three Michelin stars and a spot on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. Where it really shines, though, is in its casual comfort food and street food inexpensive bites that got me excited to explore the city. I'd also heard Osaka was the ideal place to try pufferfish the sea creature with lethally poisonous organs. But before potentially deadly fish, there were lodgings to arrange. Even that had toxic potential: I managed to inadvertently book a room at a "short stay" hotel which is a nice way of saying a "love hotel." The concept of a love hotel is as old as time itself, obviously, but the actual name "love hotel" originated, according to some, in the 1960s with an old Osakan concrete building called Hotel Love. The modern Japanese love hotel caters to those seeking discretion in their affairs, payable typically in hours long increments. It also allows for tourists and regular guests too, however, something I didn't realize when I booked the 89 per night room on Hotels.com. I should have been tipped off when I walked into the completely empty lobby. A woman eventually peeked out from behind a sliding panel on the near wall and greeted me. The check in process at an overseas hotel usually takes at least five or 10 minutes; photocopies of passports are made, credit card deposits are taken. This took about 10 seconds: The woman wordlessly showed me a piece of paper with a bunch of names on it. I noticed my name, and pointed to it. She gave me a room key and slid the panel shut. That was it. I didn't even have to show ID. The room, though, was decent enough. The bathroom had a slight mildew smell, but the room was the most spacious I had during the 10 days I spent in Japan. The queen bed was also the largest. There was a large control panel on the headboard that allowed me to control the air conditioning, stereo and every light in the room, all without getting out of the bed. And there was a karaoke machine. And a very large bathtub. Did I mention the name of the hotel? It's called Public Jam. It was all just bizarre enough to encourage me to get out and about. Fortunately, I was close to Dotonbori, the main night life and restaurant area in Osaka. Focused around an east west canal in Namba district in the center of town, Dotonbori is a tightly woven lattice of streets filled with various restaurants, bars, shops and gigantic signage. With space at a premium, vendors had to compete for eyeballs, which led to the creation of the Glico man, for instance, or the giant mechanical crab atop Kani Doraku, a seafood restaurant chain. I walked along the canal one evening, dodging tourist and locals alike, past hosts and hostesses of different nightclubs trying to entice clients through their doors. I knew I wanted to try kushikatsu, skewers of deep fried meat and veggies accompanied by a sweet, tangy sauce, and takoyaki, battered balls that are typically filled with small pieces of octopus and covered in various toppings. I knew I had run into my first destination when I almost tripped over a giant, extremely ornery looking fiberglass man holding what looked like two corn dogs on sticks. I was at Daruma, a chain famous for its kushikatsu. The place was packed, but I took advantage of being a solo traveler, wedging myself in between two people at the counter and placing my order: 1,400 yen (about 13) for a nine piece combo of assorted meats and vegetables covered in a panko based batter panko is a crunchy, light breadcrumb and deep fried. A chopsticks holder and a large communal container of dipping sauce lay on the counter before me. On the sauce container was a warning: Please only dip once! (Brian had warned me earlier: "They'll get really mad if you double dip.") My food arrived quickly, and I scarfed down my servings of beef, asparagus, shrimp, rice cake and fish sausage (among other things), pulled hot out of the fryer just seconds earlier, still dripping with fat. Did I always know what kind of skewer I was eating? No, and it didn't particularly matter. The primary texture was a fine, airy crunch, and the main flavor was the thick, communal sauce that tasted of Worcestershire. Osakans love their sauces especially their brown sauces. Takoyaki sauce is not unlike the kushikatsu sauce, but it struck me as being slightly lighter and maybe a little fruitier. I ate a lot of takoyaki during my stay in Osaka, but my favorite was probably from Takoyaki Ebisu, outside of the Dotonbori area near the Nippombashi train station. I paid 450 yen for 12 pieces. (Within Dotonbori, expect to pay a premium I bought takoyaki there that cost 500 yen for eight pieces). The golf ball sized spheres were fresh and scalding hot. The wheat based batter was goopy and filling, and the dozen balls came topped with shaved bonito flakes, pickled ginger and the sweet, sticky brown sauce. It's worth noting that these dishes are available all over the city. Shinsekai, in particular, is known for being the birthplace of kushikatsu. Shinsekai, in the southern part of Osaka, is a neighborhood known for being slightly seedy; I found it perfectly pleasant and safe, though it does gives the impression of a part of town that time and economic progress forgot. An enormous, aging 100 meter high structure modeled after the Eiffel Tower called Tsutenkaku serves as the focal point of the area. Some modest shops and restaurants line the streets foot traffic, usually so heavy in major Japanese cities' shopping areas, is light in Shinsekai. I passed a woman running a carnival style air rifle game in a shopping arcade: The prizes for winning were Pringles and Ritz crackers. I may have missed the scorpion, but I still had pufferfish ahead of me. Zuboraya is a chain known for serving the poisonous fugu, as it's called in Japanese. Now why wouldn't you want to eat this little guy? Because the tetrodotoxin found within can be highly poisonous, as these five men found out last year when they asked to eat the pufferfish liver (Tip: Don't ever, ever do that). Many consume the fish without incident, however, when it's properly prepared. I ordered a pufferfish sashimi lunch at Zuboraya, said some mental prayers and ate the thin, pallid slices off of the plate in front of me. What did it taste like? Not a whole lot. The dainty slices had a correspondingly light flavor, and the texture was slightly chewy. After the initial piece, I started dipping them in the accompanying shoyu to give them some any kind of flavor. And, to my relief, I didn't become ill or die afterward. But for 950 yen, I suppose it was worth the very slight thrill of knowing I was living on the edge of the culinary knife. The best eating experience I had, as frequently happens, came purely accidentally. At another lunch, I found myself smack dab in the middle of a place called Shin Umeda Shokudogai. I saw a queue of people waiting outside a door with a small yellow sign that read "Kiji" in Hiragana characters (it means "green pheasant," the national bird of Japan, according to my Internet research). I often found that a good foreign country mealtime strategy is: find a place with a long line of locals. So I joined, having quite literally no idea what to expect. At 11:30 a.m. the door opened and a small group of us were whisked inside, up a narrow winding staircase, into a cramped restaurant with a few tables and a modest, open kitchen. There were some stools set up directly on the large, flat top grill that dominated the room. We sat as the chef slowly began working, ladling a chunky mixture onto the grill, like a thick pancake: okonomiyaki. The quintessential Osakan dish, it derives its name from "okonomi," meaning "what you like." In this case, you can take that to mean "anything and everything." After ladling the battered mixture of flour, dashi, egg and cabbage onto the hot grill, the chef dressed the pancakes with pork belly, seafood, onions, shiso leaf and other assorted vegetables. When your pancake is done, it isn't served to you on a plate. The chef merely slides it over and you eat off the grill. The woman next to me was eating something else; I pointed and asked what it was, as it looked fantastic. "Modanyaki," she said. It was a huge portion of yakisoba fried wheat noodles mixed with bits of pork, cabbage and other vegetables that had been whisked with an egg mixture and poured onto the grill, like a giant omelet. She saw me staring at her food, and I embarrassedly looked away. While her English was limited and my Japanese nonexistent, she apparently could read minds: She cut off a small portion of her dish and slid it over to me. I did the same with my okonomiyaki. My dish (680 yen) was heavier, heartier, deeply filling. Her dish, though, I liked even better: crunchy cabbage and crispy fried noodles, joined together with the fluffy egg mixture. We ate mostly in silence, as did the rest of the patrons; my new friend and I didn't speak, but it wasn't necessary. We both felt how lucky we were to be there at that moment, enjoying the finest lunch the city had to offer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The weariest warblers are more likely to sleep with their heads tucked in saving energy, but making them more vulnerable to predators. Every spring, throngs of garden warblers make a treacherous, multiweek journey from their winter homes in Africa to their summer breeding grounds in Europe. The small, brown and white songbirds fly thousands of miles, across the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea, en route to their destinations. It's an exhausting, arduous trip, and the warblers make numerous pit stops to rest and refuel along the way. During these layovers, the birds need to catch up on sleep, replenish their fat stores, and somehow manage to avoid being eaten by predators, including the hungry raptors that migrate alongside them. A study published on Monday in Current Biology revealed one way that migrating warblers manage these dangers and demands: They adjust their sleep postures depending on their physical condition and physiological needs. Plump, well muscled birds tend to sleep with their heads held upright, while scrawnier warblers tuck their heads into their feathers, a posture that makes them more vulnerable to predation but helps them conserve their much needed energy. "Migratory warblers have to make trade offs between staying safe and saving energy," said Leonida Fusani, a behavioral physiologist at the University of Vienna and the lead author of the paper. Dr. Fusani worked with a doctoral student , Andrea Ferretti, and several other colleagues to study garden warblers that had stopped on the island of Ponza during their spring migration. The small, craggy isle, off the western coast of Italy, is a popular stopover for northbound birds, which typically arrive drained after a 300 plus mile flight over open water. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The researchers caught warblers with nets, then gave each one a brief physical exam before transferring it to a custom built cage for observation. Some of the warblers were thriving, with heavy bodies, big muscles and ample body fat. Others seemed to be struggling, appearing gaunt and worn down by their journeys. Birds in good condition slept more during the day than those in poor condition, the scientists found, perhaps because those birds didn't need to spend as much time foraging for food. And at night, the robust birds generally slept facing forward, with their heads erect. The leaner birds, on the other hand, literally tucked themselves in at night, swiveling their heads around and nestling them under the feathers on their shoulders. Dr. Fusani, Mr. Ferretti and their colleagues conducted several follow up studies to try to make sense of this pattern. In one, they used a thermal imaging camera to monitor the body temperature of warblers sleeping in the untucked position. These birds lost heat primarily through their heads, especially from the area around their eyes. By tucking their heads into their feathers, skinny warblers may be able to minimize this heat loss, the researchers said. Additionally, when the scientists placed the birds in a respirometry chamber overnight, they discovered that warblers sleeping in the tucked position had lower metabolic rates than those that slept untucked. Together, the findings suggest that migrating birds that arrive at their stopovers in poor condition may adjust by selecting a sleeping posture that preserves their dwindling supply of energy. "Evolution has created these behavioral flexibilities that allow birds to compensate if they have to use more fat stores on this leg because they ran into a storm or it got colder than they anticipated," said Scott McWilliams, who studies avian ecology and physiology at the University of Rhode Island, and is an author of the paper. But if the tucked position has such benefits, why don't all the warblers use it? Dr. Fusani and his colleagues speculated that the posture might make birds less alert to potential threats. To test this theory, they simulated the sound of an approaching predator by playing a recording of crunching leaves as the warblers slept. Sure enough, birds in the tucked position took longer to respond than those that snoozed with their heads facing forward. "The cost of sleeping tucked in is a slower reaction time," Mr. Ferretti said. The research could help shed new light on the general benefits and function of sleep, the scientists said, as well as how migrating animals can harness it to boost their odds of survival. "We never suspected that sleep pattern was an important factor in migratory strategy," Dr. Fusani said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The furniture may be covered in plastic and the wall paint peeling, but when the photographer Deana Lawson poses her African American subjects in humble rooms, she sees the survivors of a history of slavery and colonization who stand proudly amid the shards of vanished empires. "They are displaced kings and queens of the diaspora," says Ms. Lawson, 39, surveying some of the large prints in her studio in the semi industrial Gowanus section of Brooklyn. "There's something beautiful and powerful that hasn't been taken away." Best known for her staged portraits of nude black women in colorfully cluttered settings, Ms. Lawson says that her images often come to her in dreams. On a conscious level, though, she is composing an alternate mythology to the disparaging images of black people that persist culturally, seeking out what's extraordinary in ordinary lives. What's more, she is part of a broader movement that recognizes the attractiveness of bodies that don't conform to the conventional standards of beauty, whether prescribed by race or gender. A selection of Ms. Lawson's photographs opens on Oct. 13 at the Underground Museum, an exhibition space in Los Angeles dedicated to African American culture; much of the work was displayed earlier this year in a show at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. And last month, the Aperture Foundation published a handsome monograph that showcases 40 of her images, with an introductory essay by Zadie Smith. "Museums and the art world in general are very sensitive to the fact that certain voices and individuals have been excluded, and there is a desire to correct for that," said Dan Leers, curator of photography at the Carnegie, accounting for the attention Ms. Lawson's work is receiving. "But I don't think it's just that. Her ability to get people to drop their guard is stunning. It is very hard to get a real portrait of someone with a camera. And there is this lineage that she is aware of and is so easy to find in her pictures. Her work absolutely merits its place in the galleries alongside anything else." In constructing scenes that combine the clarity of observed life with the startling strangeness of dreams, Ms. Lawson draws on the pioneering work of Jeff Wall; and, like Philip Lorca diCorcia in his "Hustlers" series of the early '90s, she places her models in environments that appear to be their own but are actually chosen, and sometimes decorated, by the photographer. Ms. Lawson is as attentive to furniture as she is to faces and bodies. "The plastic on the couch it's furniture you could see walking down Fulton Street in Brooklyn, and in Jamaica, and in Accra," she says, indicating the decor in one new picture. "It looks a little like luxury, but it is a cheaper material." She grew up with such furniture in Rochester, N.Y., a city that was the headquarters for Kodak. She believes her career was predestined. Her grandmother worked in the household of George Eastman, who founded Kodak, and her mother held an administrative position in the company. An identical twin, Ms. Lawson in her youth was often confused with her sister, Dana, until, when they were both first year students at Pennsylvania State University, Dana was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease that over time affected her mind as well as her body. Along with conjuring up a legend inspiring African past, Ms. Lawson's photographs express her personal history, right down to her color choices for walls and clothing. For example, an icy blue that she favors was worn on top of a dark brown vestment in the tabernacle choir of her family's nontraditional African American church, which worshiped on Saturday, celebrated Hanukkah not Christmas, and regarded Jesus Christ as a prophet rather than a divinity. The product of a middle class family, Ms. Lawson is both insider and outsider in the environments she depicts. One arresting photograph, "Nation," portrays two young tattooed, shirtless men. One points his finger at the viewer like a pistol, the other is adorned with a bizarre mouth ornament a contraption used in dental surgery that Ms. Lawson spray painted gold. In a corner of the print, she collaged a photograph of George Washington's dentures, which are said to contain teeth of his slaves. "I was going to go to Mount Vernon and photograph the dentures but I couldn't get access," she says. "And now I'm very glad about that." Instead, she posed the two men in a borrowed apartment on the Lower East Side, and incorporated the mouth guard (which came to her in a dream) and the appropriated image of the first president's false teeth. "It became a metaphor for torture and maybe slavery," she says. "There's this idea of the real but you scratch it like a record." She readily acknowledges there is an erotic component of the picture. "This is what a woman might desire," she said. "Part of my attraction is physical, to the opposite sex. But I'm Deana Lawson. Other women might find it repulsive." She seeks a comparable sensuality in her pictures of African American women, whom she regards as reflections of herself. "It's almost like posing in a mirror," she said. A distorting mirror: the women she chooses to photograph are typically larger and more voluptuous than the slender Ms. Lawson. "I wish I was bigger," she admitted with a smile. "When I was a teenager, I was so jealous of friends who had a big butt." "If you didn't look twice at her on the A train, you would have been blind," she said. "It's her body, but it's something else, too." In the picture, the scantily clad subject's sultry expression is as self composed as the welcoming smile of the massively proportioned "Coney Island Bather," who was photographed about three quarters of a century ago by Lisette Model. It is surprising how still surprising it is to see photographs that present plus size women as desirable. Unusual, too, are Ms. Lawson's photographs of half dressed women and men that include small children (usually not their own) and toys. "When a woman sees a man with a baby, it's a primal thing," she says. "That he could make a baby adds to the attraction." In contemporary culture, physical attractiveness isn't typically presented as a package of fertility and a lure to procreation. Ms. Lawson is raising a son, Judah, 16, and a daughter, Grace, 3, with her former husband, Aaron Gilbert, a painter. . She says that watching Mr. Gilbert work the painstaking process, the attention to color, his use of family as a metaphor for spiritual connection has deeply informed her photography. "I wanted to have the same kind of weight he could have in my pictures," she says. The two are still close. Sometimes Ms. Lawson will describe to him a dreamlike image she's trying to capture, and he will make a sketch that she can then use to persuade her prospective models to collaborate. "What's fascinating to me about Deana is that she does this Diane Arbus like shift, so that many of the subjects in her photographs feel slightly uncanny," said Naomi Beckwith, a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. "They seem to be almost superhuman. There's almost an imaginary narrative that spins around the subjects." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The media giant had suffered an embarrassing blow when its 45 billion takeover of its rival Time Warner Cable collapsed under regulatory scrutiny. Since then, the company has been relatively quiet. As the rest of the media business was engulfed in turmoil over the fate of television in a digital world, Comcast continued to deliver strong, consistent results across its cable, television and film businesses. Some analysts said they expected Comcast to shift gears and pursue a new megadeal to expand its global footprint or enter the wireless business. But no significant deal materialized. News emerged late Tuesday that Comcast was in talks to buy DreamWorks Animation, the boutique studio run by Jeffrey Katzenberg. The potential deal, which still could fall apart, values DreamWorks Animation at about 3 billion, according to people with knowledge of the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them. If completed, the deal would underscore the constant balancing act required of Comcast. On one side is its cable and broadband business, which controls the pipes that deliver content to people's homes, and which faces increased regulatory scrutiny. On the other is the NBCUniversal entertainment business, which spans broadcast and cable television, film and theme parks. The acquisition of DreamWorks Animation would fit squarely into the entertainment strategy, allowing Comcast to build on an already successful part of the company. "It has been very clear that they can't do many deals within cable, so their focus is on organic growth and operational excellence," said Amy Yong, an analyst with the Macquarie Group. She noted that the company had made a series of deals on the entertainment side, acquiring a majority ownership stake of the Universal Studios Japan theme park and investments in the digital outlets Vox and BuzzFeed. "DreamWorks would be big in the context of the studio business, Ms. Yong said. During a conference call Wednesday morning, Comcast executives declined to comment on the speculated deal activity. In response to a question about the relative values of the distribution and content businesses, Brian L. Roberts, the chairman and chief executive of Comcast, said that the company was stronger because of its position in both. "These things go up and down, and the relationship between the two in terms of carriage disputes and other things," he said. "At any one time, one part of the ecosystem could be doing better than the other part of the ecosystem. But in the end, we're bringing great experiences to consumers in either content, in innovative distribution technologies, and that's how we're running our company." He spoke as Comcast reported first quarter results, once again beating expectations, with net income up 3.6 percent to 2.1 billion. Total revenues increased 5.3 percent to 18.8 billion, fueled by growth in the cable and entertainment businesses. 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. Comcast's cable business reported revenue growth of 6.7 percent for the quarter, adding 53,000 video customers and 438,000 high speed Internet customers. Revenues increased 3.9 percent in the NBCUniversal group, driven by an uptick in revenues in its cable television and theme park businesses. In some ways, DreamWorks Animation is a why not acquisition for Comcast. The price would be small. To put it in perspective, a deal for DreamWorks Animation would be about one fifteenth the size of Comcast's failed bid for Time Warner Cable and about a tenth the size of its 30 billion acquisition of the entertainment group NBCUniversal, which closed five years ago. Also, very few content companies, particularly in family entertainment, are available to purchase. DreamWorks Animation would give Comcast's entertainment business an immediate lift, with its established animation studio and a growing television business. It also has a grasp on the elusive millennial market with its part ownership of AwesomenessTV, the producer and distributor of programming aimed primarily at teenage girls. At the same time, it would give Comcast a gateway to international growth. DreamWorks Animation has aggressively courted Chinese regulators and audiences, building an animation studio in Shanghai called Oriental DreamWorks. DreamWorks Animation is perhaps most valuable to Comcast as a way to compete with the Walt Disney Company in the theme park business. Since buying NBCUniversal, Comcast has poured billions into its Universal resorts. But Universal does not own many family movie franchises, the kind that can be turned into popular theme park rides and fill hotel rooms, and has instead had to pay steep fees to rent characters, including its most popular draw, Harry Potter, which belongs to Warner Bros. DreamWorks Animation would provide Comcast with the rights to "Shrek," "Kung Fu Panda" and "Madagascar." Comcast is also building a 3.3 billion theme park in Beijing. Unfettered access to "Kung Fu Panda" could assist that effort, analysts said. During the conference call on Wednesday, Stephen B. Burke, NBCUniversal's chief executive and senior vice president of Comcast, said that focusing on building film franchises had been an explicit strategy for the company. He noted that Comcast had only one franchise five years ago in "The Fast and the Furious" action films, and it now has eight and is trying to build more. He said the company reviewed its five year plan for the film group on Tuesday and spent half the time talking about "how to take care of franchises." A Comcast takeover of DreamWorks Animation is not without challenges. A deal would put Comcast in business with some of its fiercest rivals: DreamWorks Animation is a big supplier of television cartoons to Netflix, which offers a low cost alternative to paying for traditional television and was a vocal opponent of Comcast's Time Warner Cable deal. And AwesomenessTV is part owned by Verizon, which sells competing television and Internet services. The deal would require that Comcast executives return to Washington to, once again, lobby for approval. "It probably doesn't present as big of a regulatory issue," Ms. Yong said, "but it could present a conflict of interest because of DreamWorks' agreement with Netflix and the ownership of AwesomenessTV." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Years of personal torment crept into Julianna Barwick's 2016 album, "Will." Her new LP, "Healing Is a Miracle," was born in a very different place. When Julianna Barwick began to cry while singing in bed, she knew she had found what she'd wanted from California. After 15 years in Brooklyn, the singer shipped everything she owned, including her grandmother's piano, to Los Angeles in December 2016. In New York, Barwick had emerged as a surprising star of experimental music, turning her airy soprano into a one woman choir that evoked the majesty of Arvo Part and the hypnosis of Sigur Ros. But a string of failed relationships there had left her exhausted, in need of a restart. "I had to get away from those ghosts," Barwick said recently in a phone interview, sighing from her home in Los Angeles. "I needed a place that inspired joy and delight again." After a few attempts to find the right home base, she moved into a newly built casita lined with terra cotta tiles and insulation so thick it meant she could record music whenever she wished. Five days later, she had her first date with her current boyfriend, the director Joel Kazuo Knoernschild, the only person she's ever asked out. Three months into the relationship, Barwick climbed into bed with a microphone and began singing. Ever since she was a toddler in small town Louisiana, singing to herself in the sanctuary of the church where her father was the youth minister, the sound of her own voice made her teary. As Barwick began to cry in her new bedroom, she knew she'd found home and the beginnings of "Healing Is a Miracle," her first album in four years. "It was so cathartic and joyous," she said. "I hadn't done anything that felt so free in a long time." From the outside, Barwick's previous decade had been a spectacular success. After she arrived in New York from Tulsa, Okla., in 2001, she studied darkroom photography at Hunter College and tinkered with writing songs "like Cat Power would, but sounding like Whitney Houston," she said. She never stopped singing, though she had long resisted formal music education, rankled by the ways it stripped joy from a pure emotional release. But in 2005, a friend lent Barwick a little red looping station, allowing her to layer her voice in interwoven strata, webs of absolute feeling. She would sit for hours, shaping her celestial tone into improvised songs. "I would just start singing, and, by the end, wonder, 'Where did that come from?'" she said. "That element of surprise went such a long way." In 2011, her debut album, "The Magic Place," became a surprise indie hit. At a moment when the very idea of new age music seemed like a punchline, her largely wordless, a cappella hymns offered a reminder of the transformative power of something intensely beautiful. As her profile grew, she performed a new work at Walt Disney Concert Hall and an early song, "Anjos," became the soundtrack for a Levi's commercial. But for Barwick, now 41, private turmoil riddled much of her seemingly charmed 30s. In late 2011, just as her hobbyist loops began to build a career, she married a longtime friend. "It was almost instantly miserable," she said, chronicling a string of instabilities and petty jealousies. In August 2013, the same month her second album arrived, she signed divorce papers, put her possessions in a storage unit, and lugged her life around in suitcases for two years of touring. "I was having to steel myself to do it," she said. "It was awful." The years of subsequent torment crept across her 2016 album, "Will." She sighed over brooding piano and wept inside webs of synthesizer, eventually trying to dance away the darkness during the finale, "See, Know," a cavalcade of marching drums and garish keyboards. Though it took time, Los Angeles became the new creative laboratory Barwick needed, teeming with old friends and potential collaborators. The Sigur Ros singer Jonsi Birgisson and his partner at the time, Alex Somers, who had produced Barwick's second album, had recently purchased a house there. Shortly after Barwick's move, one of her best friends, the experimental harpist Mary Lattimore, arrived from Philadelphia. Together, the quartet became the "Kismet Crew," named for the stylish Mediterranean restaurant where they'd often convene. "For years, Julianna was this one woman choir," Lattimore said by phone from Los Angeles. "But she let people in. That's growth opening up and being vulnerable to other people's choices." For years, Barwick bristled at the "new age" label, even as the term returned to vogue. She wanted people to know she was wry and real, not some fairy flitting among the treetops or, as The New York Times called her in 2009, "the new Enya." Barwick has an indelicate sense of humor that emphasizes absurdity and a ready, cutting laugh. She's as prone to talk about growing up alongside the cast of "Duck Dynasty" as she is to explain the nuances of the generative music system she designed for a New York hotel. But from its declarative title to its billowing songs, "Healing Is a Miracle" doesn't shy away from new age's self help signifiers. "Safe" unfurls like a series of yogic breathing exercises. During "Wishing Well," Barwick holds clarion tones over electronic drones, as though meditating. "So much of my personal work these last few years has been about healing, and that takes real work," Barwick said. "People reach out and tell me about the therapeutic qualities of my music. I get it when I finish something, I feel like I've had a good cry. Often, I have cried." Barwick's life in Los Angeles sounds like a continual adventure, pandemic notwithstanding. She talked about taking her mother to see the Pacific Ocean and the sequoia trees of the Sierra Nevada as if paraphrasing a fairy tale. And on most weekends, she and Knoernschild drive 45 minutes to his parents' place near the beach. He's been urging Barwick to learn to surf. She's not ready yet for now, she's content just to splash amid the waves. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
WASHINGTON The Justice Department sent Congress draft legislation on Wednesday that would reduce a legal shield for platforms like Facebook and YouTube, in the latest effort by the Trump administration to revisit the law as the president claims those companies are slanted against conservative voices. The original law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, makes it difficult to sue online platforms over the content they host or the way they moderate it. Under the proposed changes, technology platforms that purposely facilitate "harmful criminal activity" would not receive the protections, the department said. Platforms that allow "known criminal content" to stay up once they know it exists would lose the protections for that content. Attorney General William P. Barr, in a statement, urged lawmakers to "begin to hold online platforms accountable both when they unlawfully censor speech and when they knowingly facilitate egregious criminal activity online." (While they are shielded from some civil lawsuits, online services are not protected from federal criminal liability by Section 230.) President Trump and his allies have made criticism of major tech platforms a regular talking point in his campaign for re election, attacking the firms over anecdotal examples of the removal of conservative content from online platforms. The companies have denied that political bias plays a role in removing posts, photos and videos. On Wednesday, the president met with Republican state attorneys general to discuss "social media censorship," said the association that works on behalf of Republican attorneys general. In May, Mr. Trump issued an executive order meant to push some federal agencies to make changes to the law. "In recent years, a small group of powerful technology platforms have tightened their grip over commerce and communications in America," Mr. Trump said at the event. The legislation proposed by the Justice Department on Wednesday, which grew out of recommendations the agency made this year, seems unlikely to move forward in the coming months. The pace of Congress tends to slow ahead of Election Day, and the Senate is staring down a heated confirmation battle for a new Supreme Court justice. The draft legislation also includes language that is meant to limit the circumstances under which platforms are protected for moderating content, changes that could lead to the platforms assuming legal liability for taking down certain political speech. But there is a growing group of critics who say Section 230 has allowed Silicon Valley to get away with taking a dangerous hands off approach to social media. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, has said it should be "revoked." Lawmakers from both parties have introduced measures that would modify the protections, though none have gained real traction in Congress. In 2018, Congress modified Section 230 so that the protections did not cover platforms that knowingly facilitated sex trafficking. Proponents of that change say it tamped down trafficking online. But critics say the change made it harder for sex workers to safely vet potential clients, putting them at greater risk. Online platforms and their representatives in Washington say Section 230 has played a vital role in allowing free speech to flourish online and has been integral to Silicon Valley's rapid growth. Without the protections, they say, it would be impossible to sustain the scale of the internet economy. They also point to Section 230's protections for how content is moderated to argue that the law is what allows them to police their platforms. "This is not about stopping crimes; it's about advancing political interests," said Carl Szabo, the vice president of NetChoice, a trade group that represents Google and Facebook. "We're essentially turning over to the courts an incredible amount of power to decide what is and is not appropriate for people who go on the internet." The conservative attacks on Section 230 stem from complaints that platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter skew against conservative content. Mr. Trump has chafed at instances when Twitter has labeled his tweets as possibly misleading, for example. But despite the accusations of censorship on the right, conservative publications and figures regularly dominate the rankings of high performing posts on Facebook and have built dedicated followings on video platforms like YouTube. In late May, not long after Twitter fact checked his tweets for the first time, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that asked the Commerce Department to petition the Federal Communications Commission to limit the scope of Section 230. A couple of months later, the Commerce Department submitted its petition, asking the F.C.C. to find that a platform is not protected when it moderates or highlights user content based on a "reasonably discernible viewpoint or message, without having been prompted to, asked to or searched for by the user." It is unclear what the F.C.C., which is an independent regulator, will do with the petition. Brian Hart, a spokesman for the F.C.C., said he had no update on the status of the petition. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The stock market is often an early indicator of major developments in finance, the economy and geopolitics. But sometimes that collective wisdom generates signals so difficult to decipher that they seem contradictory. That's the situation right now for net neutrality and the future of the big cable and telecommunications companies. The Federal Communications Commission is expected to issue a draft proposal on Feb. 5 for significantly tighter regulations for Internet carriers. But the issues involved are so complex and far reaching that the market is having difficulty interpreting them. "I don't think people in the stock market have caught up to events yet," Richard Greenfield, a media analyst with BTIG, said in an interview last week. "Big things are happening. The prices don't seem to reflect all of this yet." What they do reflect is the critical position that the cable companies occupy as the principal pathways to the Internet in America a fundamental role that makes them uniquely valuable as well as extremely vulnerable to regulation and political pressure. Oddly, the value of the cable companies' landlines has been substantiated by the soaring auction prices being offered for the rights to airwaves used to feed data to smartphones, tablets and gadgets and services yet to be invented. First, consider the prices of Comcast and Time Warner Cable shares. Recall that the two companies announced their intention to merge almost a year ago, a combination that would create a colossus with unparalleled power, not only in cable TV but perhaps more significantly in the delivery of the Internet to the nation's households. Appealing as that prospect initially seemed to many investors, the stock market has been signaling that the merger isn't a slam dunk. That's because the prices of the two companies still aren't converging as they would be if investors now believed that the two companies were virtually certain to become one. The divergence could mean that market participants are convinced that regulators will block the merger on the grounds that it is essentially anticompetitive, or that they will impose onerous conditions, making the deal unattractive. While those concerns have been mounting, they are not new. As I've reported, market prices have been signaling for months that the deal is troubled. Then consider that despite the merger's evident problems, the share prices of both companies have actually risen since early November. That was when President Obama made a speech calling for much tighter regulation of cable and telecommunications companies because they dominate the most important infrastructure for content distribution and communications in the 21st century, a.k.a. the Internet. You might have expected the opposite to have taken place, but, in essence, those increasing prices are saying that both Comcast and Time Warner Cable are more valuable today than they were before the Obama administration toughened its stance on regulation of Internet carriers including big cable and telephone companies. On the face of it, that makes little sense. One perfectly valid way of looking at this is to assume that it is simply a market malfunction and that prices will eventually adjust, downward, once the risks of owning the cable stocks are more widely appreciated. Mr. Greenfield, who recently downgraded his assessment of both cable companies, takes this view. "We don't know what will happen with regulations, but the chance that we'll be facing much tighter ones has definitely gone up," he said. "And there's no way that these companies would be trading at these price levels if they were being regulated like the old phone companies. Even if that level of regulation isn't likely to happen, it's certainly much more possible now. And that should be reflected in the price." It's arguable, at least, that the Internet is even more important to commerce, communications, entertainment, intellectual discourse indeed, all of civil society than the old phone companies ever were. Celluloid movies, vinyl records and printed books, newspapers and magazines had an independent life that did not depend on the phone companies. But increasingly, our commercial and intellectual creations live in digital clouds and on servers that are embedded in the Internet. Yet until now, the companies that constitute the infrastructure of the Internet have not been subject to the same regulatory constraints that the old phone companies were. That could change very soon. The president's speech wasn't a one off utterance. Since then, the position of the Obama administration has, if anything, become tougher. After a barrage of withering criticism, Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said earlier this month that he embraced Mr. Obama's approach, which involves invoking Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, using that law's powers to regulate all parts of the delivery of the Internet, cellular as well as land based. In an interview with CNET News last week, Mr. Wheeler went even further, saying he was already preparing a legal defense for the challenge that is expected from cable and phone companies after he proposes tougher rules next month. On top of that, the F.C.C. has been signaling that it favors a more stringent definition of high speed, or broadband, Internet than it has used in the past, observes Craig Moffett, a senior analyst at MoffettNathanson Research. Given technological advances, the agency now considers a basic Internet speed of 25 megabits per second that's more than 1,000 times the speed of the early AOL dial up connections as the minimum standard for broadband service. "That has very serious implications for the merger, and for Internet regulations," Mr. Moffett said. His calculations indicate that at that speed, a combined Comcast Time Warner Cable would control more than 40 percent of the American broadband Internet market, a percentage that might be considered troublingly high for a critical telecommunications artery. A recent report by the Commerce Department, which analyzed home Internet access in the United States census tract by census tract, found that at the 25 Mbps threshold, most people had only one option, and it was usually a cable company. Cellular or mobile service, often described as a viable alternative to landline Internet service, really isn't one at high speeds today, the report said: "At speeds of 25 Mbps or greater, mobile service was nearly nonexistent (only 3 percent of the population had service at that speed)." That implies that high speed connections provided by cable companies and telecommunications companies with fiber optic connections, as Verizon and AT T provide in some markets are, at the moment, the only real options most people have for access to a service that is becoming more vital every day. That helps explain another pricing anomaly: The extraordinarily high bids that have been coming in for the government's auction of broadcast spectrum from wireless companies like AT T, Verizon and T Mobile US, which were already under financial pressure. The total amount of bids so far exceeds 44 billion, vastly more than virtually anyone expected, and the auction isn't over. Even though most bids are for access to frequencies that aren't optimal for the wireless connections needed for Internet access and phone calls, the voracious appetite of consumers for wireless service is helping drive these bids to the skies. The high cost of broadcast spectrum is adding to the woes of phone companies that are struggling to build appreciably faster and more complete national high speed wireless networks. Phone company shares have already taken a pounding. And the soaring spectrum prices may have a broader significance: They suggest that wireless service in most locations won't be a realistic substitute for wired broadband Internet access, Mr. Moffett said: "It's just not a realistic option." That may well be the best justification for why cable company share prices are so high: They provide an essential and, for the foreseeable future, irreplaceable service. That's at least partly why President Obama issued a call last week for more municipal broadband services like those in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Chattanooga, Tenn., which can provide viable alternatives. And it's why pressures to regulate the cable companies are mounting. The core regulatory issue is how to best ensure an open Internet, sometimes called net neutrality. President Obama has said that in an open Internet, for example, there shouldn't be Internet fast lanes, in which companies with deep pockets pay cable or telecommunications companies for faster access to consumers. Banning such practices could limit cable company revenue. On the other hand, Mr. Wheeler and President Obama have both said that while Title II regulations would give the F.C.C. the power to set prices charged by Internet carriers, they have no intention of using it. The idea, favored by Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor who coined the phrase "net neutrality," is to "forbear" from price setting leaving that to the markets, which are usually better at it. The government's powers would be used to guarantee that this most important communications pathway remained open to all comers. "It would take an epic change to overthrow the market pricing revolution and to return to price setting for the communications carriers," Mr. Wu said. "That's not the intention here." That may well be, Mr. Greenfield of BTIG said, but once the government has the ability to set prices for broadband access, some people will demand that it do so. He cited the example of John Oliver, the HBO satirist, who has already made life difficult for the F.C.C. Last year, Mr. Oliver asked viewers to bombard the agency with "indiscriminate rage" over the issue. "Seize your moment, my lovely trolls," Mr. Oliver said on the air. "Turn on caps lock and fly, my pretties! Fly, fly, fly!" Mr. Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, said that Mr. Oliver's campaign got his attention. That campaign was focused on net neutrality. But Mr. Greenfield predicted that Mr. Oliver or someone else was likely to start another campaign over price setting if Title II regulations were put in place. The cable companies are not very popular, he said. "I can start writing the script now," he said. "The F.C.C. is saying that cable companies have a monopoly but should be trusted to set prices themselves? Really? Any prices they want? Does that make any sense at all?" Government price setting may not be realistic, but at the very least, Mr. Greenfield said, investors need to understand that there are tough times ahead for many communications companies: Some of them will flourish, but the market has certainly become much more risky. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hi, I'm Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here's a look at this past week's tech news: Efforts to take a controversial website offline have been complex and divisive but perhaps also galvanizing. After the tragic shootings in Texas and Ohio, it came to light that the suspect in El Paso had posted a manifesto outlining his motivations to the online message board 8chan shortly before the massacre, the authorities said. It's not the first time this has happened: Attackers have posted similar documents to 8chan before other shootings. And it appears the El Paso suspect took inspiration from them. Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure and cybersecurity company that served 8chan, wavered over how to react. Ultimately it decided to stop providing its services to the site, leaving 8chan vulnerable to crippling cyberattacks. Cloudflare's chief executive, Matthew Prince, wrote that 8chan's "lawlessness" had "contributed to multiple horrific tragedies." If 8chan was a mole, it was whacked. So the site used Epik, another infrastructure company. The mole re emerged! Briefly. Voxility, a company that provides computing services to Epik, was criticized for helping to support 8chan, so it dumped Epik, indirectly whacking 8chan again. What now? Well, someone will almost certainly give 8chan a new lease of life. That might be on a crummy server in Russia, or elsewhere. Even so, it may not come back full throttle. Leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee have called on Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan, to "provide testimony regarding 8chan's efforts to investigate and mitigate the proliferation of extremist content." So it's possible that 8chan may yet see its hyper free speech sensibilities crimped, at least a little. If that happens, it's likely to drive a hard core of alt right users elsewhere. That's clearly not as easy as it once was, but an 8chan alternative could surface. Another possibility: "These kinds of communications could move into encrypted environments," like Telegram or WhatsApp, said Andrew Sullivan, the president and chief executive of the Internet Society, a global nonprofit. "What happens then is you can't whack the mole, because the mole doesn't come out of the hole." Such marginalization "could reduce the reach of these communities," said Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of political communication at Oxford University. But "it could increase cohesion inside the hard core," he added. It's hard to know what might be the dominant force. All told, the takedowns have created immense uncertainty. And that raises a profound question: Who should be making such big decisions about what stays online? Mr. Prince of Cloudflare wrote that his company was "incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter," and that it did "not plan to exercise it often." Even so, the way his decision was made has come under scrutiny. Corinne Cath Speth, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, said it was an ad hoc decision based on a single event, unsupported by a well defined framework against which such decisions should really be made. 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. There are two ways to think about that. On one hand, it lacks rigor and consistency and due process that could provide a clear means of making future calls. On the other, it's a shift away from the First Amendment minded approach used by many tech companies to simply leave content online. We might be witnessing with Cloudflare some of the first voluntary steps away from a shrug the shoulders mentality, toward a more considered approach to content takedowns. But, perhaps understandably, it wants to pass on responsibility for codifying such decision making. "The unresolved question," Mr. Prince wrote, "is how should the law deal with platforms that ignore or actively thwart the Rule of Law?" This is not a new phenomenon. "There seems to be a great desire for someone to do something," Professor Nielsen said. "But the someone is always someone else, and there is no consensus on the something. The tech companies largely argue that policymakers should do it; policymakers in many jurisdictions believe companies should do it." Viewed through the lens of the recent shootings, this stalemate looks more problematic than ever. Perhaps from tragedy can come some movement. If I had a dollar for every person I had spoken to who didn't know Facebook owned WhatsApp or Instagram I'd ... well, I wouldn't be rich, but I could buy a nice sandwich. Maybe several. Sadly, my hypothetical money spinner is over. Facebook is adding its name to Instagram and WhatsApp. "We want to be clearer about the products and services that are part of Facebook," a spokeswoman told Wired. Understandable, given that it has been criticized for, well, not being clear. A cynic may point to antitrust investigations into Facebook by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, partly focused on how it has reduced competition, including by buying rising competitors. One of Facebook's biggest fears seems to be that it could be forced to split off WhatsApp and Instagram. So it's hard not to view the branding exercise as a (clumsy?) play to demonstrate that the services are too tightly intertwined to be torn apart. In the same spirit, Bloomberg reported that Facebook planned to take its first real steps toward technical integration of the services by rebuilding Instagram's chat feature using Messenger technology. Can Facebook deter a potential breakup? Einer Elhauge, a Harvard law professor, told me that the answer could be contingent on how feasible the authorities deemed a successful split to be. "It's hard to unscramble eggs," he said. "Can these eggs be easily unscrambled or not?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When Kelli Dillon was 24 years old, a doctor at the California facility where she was incarcerated sterilized her without consent. That experience, and the way it galvanized Dillon to bring attention to this human rights violation, anchors Erika Cohn's timely and bracing new documentary "Belly of the Beast." To tell the story of the unconscionable treatment faced by women (a majority of them Black and Latino) in California's correctional facilities, Cohn ("The Judge") impressively weaves Dillon's harrowing narrative with those of Cynthia Chandler, a founder of the prison abolition organization Justice Now, and Corey G. Johnson, a reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Their accounts make up the film's first half, which investigates modern day coercive sterilization in California and the history of eugenics in the United States. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"The first thing I advise you to do," said Diane von Furstenberg, the chairwoman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, at the association's annual love fest on Monday night, "is drink a lot." Good advice! Industry dinners run long, and the fashion industry's, patina of glamour notwithstanding, are no different. After guests were herded to their tables at the Brooklyn Museum, where the CFDA awards were being held for the first time (Ms. von Furstenberg "feels like Brooklyn's time has come," said the museum's director, Anne Pasternak), dinner was followed by an aimless hour of kibitzing and waiting. Models milled; Juuls were discreetly sucked. Bottles of tequila sat on every table, with limes at the ready, and were restocked before they were even empty. In the spirit of merrymaking, Russell Westbrook, Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid and her brother, Anwar, gamely took shots. But then she appeared: Issa Rae, the evening's host, in a lime green pantsuit. Ms. Rae brought a charge that the mugging hosts of years past mostly white male comedians operating at a very comfortable distance from the industry have lacked. Ms. Rae claimed she herself was far from fashion, and she opened with a montage of photos of her younger self in outfits less stylish than the one she was wearing. "When left to my own devices," she said from the stage, "I'm about as fashionable as Kanye is black." Kim Kardashian West, Kanye's wife, sat front and center, waiting to receive the inaugural Influencer Award. Ms. Rae pressed on, with a set that touched on diversity and inclusion, a theme several winners and honorees would return to throughout the night. "I'm also the first person of color to ever host the CFDAs," Ms. Rae said. "Which is crazy, especially considering the impact black culture has had on fashion. We've gone from having white designers study black culture to make black clothes for white people that are too expensive for black people to buy, to Virgil Abloh, the first African American artistic director of Louis Vuitton. "Now you've got a black man bringing black culture to a historically white fashion house and making clothes too expensive for everybody to buy." With that, we were off. Ms. Rae passed the mic to Oprah Winfrey, who presented the Media Award to Edward Enninful, the first black editor of British Vogue. ("He has a bold vision," Ms. Winfrey said. "He is a bodacious man.") "Growing up in West London, I never knew it was possible to achieve something like this," Mr. Enninful said. "And I'm not done yet." He spoke of the importance of diversity and his commitment to changing the industry for the better. There was a stirring tribute to Ralph Lauren, a "CFDA Members Salute": As Ms. von Furstenberg noted, he had already won more or less all of the available awards, so a new one had to be created for the occasion. She herself then won an award for positive change in the industry, sponsored by Swarovski, which had bedazzled not only a faux Calder in the museum's atrium, but also pairs of cherries and tangerines in the otherwise edible on table fruit bowls. "I said, 'I can't accept this people are going to think I'm nuts!'" she said of the back story. "I had nothing to do with this." Then she accepted it. A few new winners did appear, most notably James Jebbia, the typically terse founder of Supreme, which won for Men's Wear Designer of the Year despite, as he said in his acceptance speech, the fact that "I've never considered Supreme to be a fashion company or myself a designer." (He was appreciative nevertheless.) Sander Lak, the designer of Sies Marjan, won the Swarovski Award for Emerging Talent. The social media moment of the night was likely when Ms. Kardashian West ascended to accept the new Influencer award, "kind of shocked," she said, to be "getting a fashion award when I'm naked most of the time." But she was brief and the moment muted. More moving was Naomi Campbell's win for Fashion Icon, as she stood onstage, wiping away tears. What was there to say after that? All that was left was for Raf Simons of Calvin Klein to collect his Women's Wear Designer of the Year award, the final trophy of the night, a surprise second consecutive win for which he hadn't prepared a speech. "To all of you real fashion lovers: love fashion!" he commanded. "That's what keeps us going. Thank you, women!" "Thank you, women!" she said. "Shout out to women!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A whiff of fresh laundry, the whir of a conveyor belt and a vista of identical blue pants and shirts tumbling in industrial dryers, piled in canvas carts and wrapped in plastic on hangers greet a visitor to W. H. Christian Sons in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Still run by the descendants of the Danish immigrant who founded it in 1924, the company provides a service that most people who live or work in the city take for granted: the supplying and cleaning of uniforms for door staff, porters, engineers and security guards at apartment and office buildings. Is your doorman's shirt neatly pressed? Is your building's address colorfully embossed on the porter's work shirt? Do security guards at your office wear the same ties? If so, W.H. Christian Sons may have had a hand in it. "We are really a part of something," said Scott Christian, a great grandson of the original William H. Christian and director of operations at the company. "All these workers are out there wearing our uniforms." According to him, on any given day about 100,000 workers in the metropolitan area are buttoned into uniforms provided by W. H. Christian. Most are supplied by building management companies, through rental contracts that cover weekly pickup of dirty uniforms and delivery of clean ones. The company does not make uniforms from scratch, but buys them in bulk and customizes them. Clients include some of the biggest names in real estate: TF Cornerstone, the Rudin Management Company and the Rockrose Development Corporation, to name a few. The company also provides uniforms for engineers and security guards at Rockefeller Center. According to W. H. Christian executives, the guard uniforms recently got an update with a new logo, silver braiding and patterned gray ties. Many of its clients signed on when real estate companies expanded their holdings in booming postwar New York. The company, surprisingly, has its origins in the newspaper business. William H. Christian worked as a deliveryman for a business that provided and laundered the rags used to clean printing presses at city publications. According to family lore, his route included the pressrooms of The New York Times, The New York Post and The New York Daily News. When pressmen asked him to launder their shirts as well, he offered the service on the side, eventually turning it into a business. The management of the company still rests with the Christian family. Scott, 38, shares ownership with his father, William, who oversees buying and bidding for contracts; his Uncle Thomas, who runs sales; and his second cousin Raymond, who handles technology and Web site development. Another uncle, Robert, oversees a second Greenpoint warehouse where dry cleaning is done. Women in the family have also contributed. Scott Christian said that some of his aunts had worked for the company over the years and that his college age niece had done some Web design this summer and during school breaks. "Typically, the third generation is known to fail the business," Mr. Christian said with a laugh, "but that didn't happen with us, so it's smooth sailing for me." The principals credit the company's longevity to its attention to detail. Has a building engineer lost weight? They will make sure the waistband on his uniform is taken in. Does a woman on a cleaning staff need a longer skirt because of religious considerations? They will lower the hem. Has a doorman lost a jacket button? They will replace it. The brick warehouse is a beehive of old school industrial activity, calling to mind the cozy set of the Broadway musical "Kinky Boots," about a family owned English shoe company that produces an unusual item to keep the business afloat. On the main laundry floor, uniforms are washed, dried, placed on hangers and run through a steam tunnel to ease out wrinkles. Workers then put the hangers on a conveyor and sort them by delivery route, using ID labels heat sealed onto each item. Garments are covered in plastic, loaded in carts and transported to delivery trucks. In a separate room, an employee uses special embroidering machines to stitch names, addresses and logos to uniforms. The other day, a rainbow of thread skeins glowed in the sunshine pouring in through the windows. Upstairs, seamstresses let out seams or hem pants legs. A second plant around the corner handles the dry cleaning and pressing of jackets and dress shirts the kind worn by doormen at upscale buildings. Workers inspect each item to make sure piping, braiding and buttons remain securely attached. The company's tradition of nurturing personal relationships extends to its staff. Walking through the laundry operation, Mr. Christian pointed out several employees who remember him as a child following his father around the plant. Mr. Christian stopped to chat with a worker supervising the unloading of soiled uniforms. Asking him about his imminent retirement after 30 years at the company, Mr. Christian joked, "You can't leave us; we need you." As real estate companies grow, the culture becomes more corporate, and newer executives are more interested in the bottom line than loyalty, he said. "They don't care what happened in the 1960s." Even so, some companies that have dropped W. H. Christian in favor of a cheaper alternative have returned because they miss the service, the owners said. Ms. Lederman said that Rudin had once experimented with another uniform service at one of its residential buildings, but that too many problems with deliveries and billing had ultimately led it back to W. H. Christian. "It was a nightmare," she said, adding that with W. H. Christian, "they just handle it for us. They know that I'm busy and they don't want to bother me." The company has also been responsive to the changing fashion needs of its clients, the majority of whom are men. (Mr. Christian estimates that only 1 to 2 percent of the door staff at residential buildings are women. On the commercial side, about 10 to 15 percent of its uniforms are worn by women.) Mr. Christian says doorman fashion, in particular, has evolved. Although residential buildings on the Upper East and West Sides still favor classic gray pants with a side stripe, some downtown buildings go for the chic look of a simple black suit. Makeovers for newer buildings can be even more striking. For example, Rockrose Development wanted the uniforms at its new rental high rise in Long Island City, Linc LIC, to match the contemporary aesthetic of the building. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The cosmologist and pop science icon Stephen Hawking, who died last March on Einstein's birthday, spoke out from the grave recently in the form of his last scientific paper. Appropriately for a man on the Other Side, the paper is about how to escape from a black hole. Cleansed of its abstract mathematics, the paper is an ode to memory, loss and the oldest of human yearnings, the desire for transcendence. As the doomed figure in Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City" sings, "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back." Dr. Hawking was the manifestation of perseverance; stricken by Lou Gehrig's disease, he managed to conquer the universe from a wheelchair. The fate of matter or information caught in a black hole is one that defined his career, and it has become one of the deepest issues in physics. Black holes are objects so dense that, according to Einstein's law of general relativity, not even light can escape. In 1974, Dr. Hawking turned these objects, and the rest of physics, inside out. He discovered, to his surprise, that the random quantum effects that rule the microscopic world would cause black holes to leak and, eventually, explode and disappear. In the fullness of time (which in many cases would be longer than the current age of the universe), all the mass and energy that had fallen into the hole would come back out. But, according to the classical Einstein equations, black holes are disturbingly simple; their only properties are mass, electrical charge and angular momentum. Every other detail about what falls into a black hole disappears from the universe's memory banks. A black hole has no complications no hair the saying went. So the fountain of matter and energy exiting a black hole would be random, Dr. Hawking emphasized in a paper in 1975. If you fell into one and came back out, you would lack all the details that had made you: male or female, blue eyes or brown, Yankee fan or Red Sox fan. The equation describing that fate is inscribed on Dr. Hawking's tombstone, in Westminster Abbey, where it presumably will endure the ages. That's some kind of reincarnation. If nature can forget you, it could forget anything a deathblow to the ability of science to reconstruct the past or predict the future. "It's the past that tells us who we are," Dr. Hawking told a conference at Harvard a couple years ago. "Without it, we lose our identity." In effect, Dr. Hawking maintained in his 1975 paper, the paradoxical quantum effects that Einstein had once dismissed, saying that God doesn't play dice, were adding an extra forgetfulness to nature. "God not only plays dice," Dr. Hawking wrote, "but he often throws them where they can't be seen." Those were fighting words to other physicists; it was a basic tenet that the proverbial film of history can be run backward, to reconstruct what happened in, say, the collision of a pair of subatomic particles in a high energy collider. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Thirty years later Dr. Hawking recanted, but the argument went on. The "information paradox," as it is known, remained at the center of physics because nobody, not even Dr. Hawking, could explain how black holes actually process the information that enters or exits them. But scientists have been having a blast theorizing about the nature of space time, information and memory. Some have suggested that you can't even get into a black hole without being vaporized by a firewall of energy, let alone get back out. Recent years have brought a glimmer of hope. Andrew Strominger of Harvard discovered that, when viewed from the right mathematical perspective that of a light ray headed toward the infinite future black holes are more complicated than we thought. They have what Dr. Strominger has called "soft hair," in the form of those imaginary light rays, which can be ruffled, stroked, twisted and otherwise arranged by material coming into the black hole. In principle, this hair could encode information on the surface of the black hole, recording all those details that Einstein's equations supposedly leave out. Whether this is enough to save physics, let alone a person falling into a black hole, is what Dr. Hawking was working on in the years before he died. "When I wrote my paper 40 years ago, I thought the information would pass into another universe," he told me at the Harvard conference. Now, he said, it's on the surface of the black hole. "The information will be re emitted when the black hole evaporates." In his recent, posthumous report, which drew a flurry of press, Dr. Hawking and his colleagues endeavored to show how this optimistic idea could work. Besides Dr. Hawking, the paper's authors were Dr. Strominger as well as Malcolm Perry and Sasha Haco of Cambridge University. Dr. Strominger is hopeful that physicists one day will be able to understand black holes just by reading what is written in this soft hair. "We didn't prove it," he said in an email. But, he added, they did succeed in showing how all the pieces could fit together: "If our guess is right, this paper will be of central importance. If not, it will be a technical footnote." Few of us, including Dr. Hawking, ever harbored the hope that solving the information paradox would bring back our parents, the dinosaurs or Joe DiMaggio from whatever was waiting in Atlantic City. Somewhere along the way we've all made some sort of accommodation with the idea that our personal timelines will come to an end, but we take some comfort in knowing that we will be remembered, and that our genes and books and names will carry on. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
SANTA FE, N.M. "We must first devise a demonstration," a nuclear scientist sings in the opera "Doctor Atomic." "Where there won't be any people. Not on a city. Or a demonstration right here in the desert." As he delivered the line on Saturday evening at Santa Fe Opera, the tenor Ben Bliss gestured toward the vast landscape beyond the stage, still visible to the audience as the sun set. And for the first time in the opera's history, there was no need to suspend disbelief. We were, indeed, right here in the desert where "Doctor Atomic" a turbulent reflection on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the lead up to the first test of the bomb developed at Los Alamos, a short drive from Santa Fe takes place. After its premiere in San Francisco in 2005, a Metropolitan Opera run in 2008, performances all over the world, and the release just weeks ago of a ferocious recording conducted by its composer, John Adams, the work had come home. Gone are many of the trappings of that elaborate, 1940s noirish first production (to say nothing of the positively steroidal Met presentation, staged by Penny Woolcock), including hordes of dancers and a scale replica of the explosive "gadget." Here in Santa Fe, the costumes are contemporary street clothes, with the youthful physicists looking like engineers at a Silicon Valley start up; just a handful of dancers thrust and wriggle to Emily Johnson's choreography. There's almost no set except a gigantic silver sphere hanging a few feet above the stage. Bomb, globe, Christmas tree ornament, disco ball: Its surface shined to a mirror, this orb can be anything you project onto it. Mr. Sellars has been at pains to flesh out the opera's rather sketchy connection to its setting. As much a community organizer and consciousness raiser as a director, he has brought into the staging indigenous people from the region and a group of so called downwinders, whose families lived not far from the test site and say they suffered health problems from the resulting radiation. The indigenous performers gave a steady, rhythmic sacred Corn Dance a few minutes before the opera began, and returned for a surreal reprise, to Mr. Adams's roiling music, during the fraught, chaotic countdown to the test. The downwinders stood, in silent rebuke, as scientists and an Army general argued about whether to notify the communities that might be affected by the blast. (I'll let you guess which side won.) Moving and palpably real, these interventions further pulled the opera from the naturalism of its early stagings, and felt of a piece with the terse weather reports and dense, dreamlike poetry Donne, Baudelaire, Muriel Rukeyser, the Bhagavad Gita in which the characters attempt to express themselves. To Mr. Sellars's credit, the involvement of these local communities is stirring but not exactly uplifting. It was presumably unintentional, but telling, that the solemn preperformance Corn Dance, a ritual rarely given outside the dancers' pueblos, took place as much of the audience noisily took its seats, air kissed, and chatted: thousands of rich white people, ignoring the indigenous as they always have. The work is, frankly, less boring than I remembered those weather reports feel tighter here than at the Met though the passionately precise new recording is also a revelation in this regard. With so much pared away in the staging, the weird intensity of the libretto's poetry is stronger and less jarring, its tumble of eroticism and morbidity more evocative; the sense that the bomb has contaminated these characters and their relationships is more explicit. Mr. Adams's score now comes across as a steady knotting of the stomach, gradually ratcheting tension by alternating lush, ominous sensuality and pummeling intensity. And it is well served by the conductor Matthew Aucoin his orchestra committed, if less rivetingly rigorous than the recording's and an excellent cast. While Ryan McKinny's extremes aren't as epic as those of Gerald Finley, who originated the role with a uniquely wounded authority, he is a handsomely frustrated Oppie. Julia Bullock, her voice warm and her presence daringly prickly, is a richly complex Kitty Oppenheimer. Mr. Bliss, Andrew Harris, Daniel Okulitch and Meredith Arwady make vigorous impressions in smaller roles; the Santa Fe chorus, drawn from the company's young artist program and directed by Susanne Sheston, is as always a wonder. Yet a certain emptiness remains at the work's core. "Doctor Atomic" was commissioned as an American "Faust," but the opera's Oppie, who's never as thrilled about the bomb as the man himself was, doesn't get to revel in Faust like triumph. And our sense that he's surrendered his integrity for personal gain is, as the critic Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in 2009, contingent on particular assumptions debatable, at least about the morality of the bomb. Nor is this Oppenheimer the Prometheus figure he styled himself in real life. To revive that legend, of a life giver punished for his hubris, the opera would have needed to push into the decades beyond World War II, into Oppenheimer's outspoken, complicated regrets and the disgrace of the stripping of his security clearance. "Doctor Atomic" embraces one thing opera does do well: spectacle. (There's the disco ball bomb, everyone dancing beneath it.) But focusing entirely on "will it explode?" the only real question of the long second act stints the human, the deeper work opera can do. Now a teenager, "Doctor Atomic" still conveys a feeling of grief here in Santa Fe a very local variety rather than telling a story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
LOS ANGELES Fluxus is fraught with contradiction. The interdisciplinary art movement, which emerged in the 1960s, is funny but serious; indefinite but authoritative; destructive but full of possibility. So perhaps it is only fitting that Fluxus for all its anti bourgeois, anti establishment, even anti art swagger is being celebrated here by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Getty Research Institute, institutions with the baggage of corporate sponsors, an aging clientele and the cultural canon. Yet, with sensitive programming and musicality both rigorous and open minded, the two organizations have assembled a convincing festival of Fluxus music for the Philharmonic's 100th anniversary season. If Fluxus is about questioning the nature of art, then this festival is about an orchestra questioning the boundaries of performance as it reflects on the past century and looks ahead to the next. "Fluxus forces us to think about how and why we do what we do," said the composer and conductor Christopher Rountree, who organized the festival with Nancy Perloff of the Getty Research Institute. They have assembled music by some of the movement's icons like La Monte Young and Yoko Ono, as well as George Maciunas, who coined the term Fluxus and wrote its scrappy manifesto in the early 1960s. Works by those artists, and about a dozen more, will be featured in a marathon performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Nov. 17. Fluxus pieces will also be paired with more conventional programming. In the past few days, for example, people coming to hear Sibelius's "The Tempest" have been greeted with George Brecht's "Drip Music" outside before taking their seats. "I think the audience who is used to going to the concert hall is going to realize right away that this is different," Ms. Perloff said. Of course, programming also includes John Cage, Fluxus's father though he is said to have preferred the term uncle. (He wasn't the only one to resist association with the movement; in an interview, Mr. Young said he doesn't consider himself a Fluxus artist, since it makes an anti art statement and he views his music as "some of the most beautiful art in the world.") The scores of many Fluxus compositions are one sentence directions like "Please wash your face" and "Draw a straight line and follow it." Cage described his "Europeras" with similar concision: "For 200 years the Europeans have been sending us their operas. Now I'm sending them back." Created for the Frankfurt Opera in 1987, the piece was an anarchic pastiche of opera history. Elements of the production musicians, costumes, lighting, set design existed independently, sometimes harmoniously but often not, and they were presented through chance operations on a stage laid out in a grid of 64 hexagrams like the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination that inspired Cage. There's a reason, aside from its difficulty, that this work doesn't get staged in the United States. "Europeras" which suggests the phrase "your operas" amounted to a rejection of European art, returning it whence it came. And the piece's concept relied on the nature of an opera house like Frankfurt's: a repository of the costumes, sets and institutional expertise of a centuries long history. Mr. Sharon, who put a feminist spin on Wagner's "Lohengrin" this summer at the Bayreuth Festival, came up with a creative solution to bringing "Europeras" across the Atlantic without contradicting its conceit: He staged it in the cavernous Stage 23 at Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City. If opera is the great European art form, his production argues, then movies are the American analogue. In executing this idea, Mr. Sharon's "Europeras" was loyal to the work's Fluxus spirit while playfully satirizing Hollywood history. In the absence of opera sets and costumes, this production raided the collection of the film studio: hand painted backdrops and a wide selection of outfits like everyday attire and the gaudy armor of epics in the vein of "Cleopatra." Everything was familiar; nothing was connected. Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera" was interrupted by Ghostface from "Scream." A tuba played "The Flight of the Valkyries" as, fittingly, a donkey pinata was hoisted from the rafters. Backdrops came down in front of singers mid aria, and occasionally "Truckera," a prerecorded track of 101 layered fragments from European operas, briefly drowned out everything like a passing subway train. The juxtapositions were sometimes enlightening, revealing how Hollywood and opera share similar visual language and emotional sweep. But most often they were laugh out loud funny. Mr. Sharon smartly emphasized the humor of "Europeras." Cage must be taken seriously, but not too seriously. The same could be said for the Fluxus works on deck at the Philharmonic. Keeping this in mind may be the best way to approach the festival. Consider what it means when a performance by Emanuel Ax is paired with Mr. Young's "Piano Piece for David Tudor 1," which instructs the musician to "bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onstage for the piano to eat and drink." But don't be afraid to laugh. And don't shy away from rejecting a piece like that, either. Many people walked out of "Europeras"; this is likely to be a common occurrence during the festival. "It's O.K. for people to push back and say, 'That is a step too far for me,'" said Chad Smith, the Philharmonic's chief operating officer. "We don't care how people respond to it. We just want people to respond to it." Mr. Rountree's contribution to the festival, "Commitment Booth/Commitment Anthology (for Hope)," engages directly with the question of whether people buy into what Fluxus defines as music which amounts to more or less anything, with some pieces consisting of nothing more than a thought in your head. Audiences are asked to enter the booth and make a commitment, with three color coded options. Green means you hear music in everything, yellow means you're ambivalent, and gray means you don't buy into Fluxus as music. There are four additional performances of "Commitment Booth," planned through June 1. I hope people visit it more than once. The Fluxus Festival is just warming up, and as people are increasingly exposed to its mind opening music, who knows? Maybe some of those gray buttons will turn green. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Re "If There Are No Crowds, Is It Still Times Square?" (front page, Dec. 1): On New Year's Eve 1991, when the Times Square Business Improvement District (now Alliance) began operations, you could have written "With Filth and Crime, Can Times Square Ever Be Times Square Again?" A third of all hotel rooms were empty; many theaters were dark; several iconic office buildings, including One Times Square, which owns "the ball," were bankrupt; and megastores had not yet arrived. The sidewalks were repugnant, petty crime was rampant, and Times Square's international reputation was in the gutter. But it did come back, and there's a lesson to be learned. It took a vibrant public private partnership, great imagination and total agreement that if quality of life issues were addressed, and theaters and supersigns were preserved, word would get out that Times Square could come back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Guests cringe on a couch while a bathrobe clad homeowner clips his toenails. A couple wakes to find that another homeowner has been watching them sleep. A woman at the bathroom sink gags when she spies a bar of soap riddled with strange hairs. With "It's Your Vacation, Why Share It?" as its tag line, a new advertising campaign by the online home rental service HomeAway depicts some of the many awkward, gross or annoying ways this kind of shared lodging arrangement can go wrong. The name of HomeAway's chief rival, Airbnb, is never mentioned, but the implication is clear. Airbnb, in addition to aiding the rental of vacant homes or apartments, also gives hosts and guests the option of renting or staying in a home in a spare room, for instance with the homeowner present. With HomeAway, renters get the place to themselves. "Definitely, we're using a different kind of tone," said HomeAway's chief marketing officer, Mariano Dima. "We want to continue with the same positioning, but it was very important to us to be clear how we're different." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Before she embarked on a baking career, Reem Assil grew up in a Palestinian Syrian household and spent a decade as a community organizer. Both of these things are evident at Reem's California, the bright, bustling Arab bakery Ms. Assil opened in Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood in May. Reem's is one of a handful of Arab bakeries in the Bay Area but it is likely the only one where you'll find the children's book "A Is for Activist" on the shelves and an enormous mural of the controversial Palestinian activist Rasmeah Odeh on the wall. (In 1970, Ms. Odeh was convicted by Israeli courts for her role in the murder of two students. In 2014, she was convicted of immigration fraud in U.S. federal court and deported to Jordan in 2017.) Affixed to Ms. Odeh's kaffiyeh is a button of Oscar Grant III, the young black man killed in 2009 by transit police at the Fruitvale BART station, which looms just across the street. (The story inspired the acclaimed film "Fruitvale Station.") But while social justice "has always been a core component of Reem's," Ms. Assil said, her business was inspired by the bakeries she visited during a trip to the Middle East several years ago. "Even though there was political turmoil outside, you never would feel it inside," she said. "In Oakland, I felt we didn't have enough of those places where people could feel alive and safe and connected." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Two or three times a week, for 20 years, Bart Freundlich has played basketball with a group of guys in gymnasiums around New York City, where he grew up and continues to live. Many of his fellow players would be a mystery to him outside the gym; their unifying bond is full court five on five. "We just go, we have a good time and we play the game," Mr. Freundlich said. A film director and screenwriter, Mr. Freundlich, 47, drew on basketball for "Wolves," his new coming of age sports drama starring Michael Shannon and Carla Gugino, in theaters and on demand Friday. Some of the action takes place at the West Fourth Street Courts, known widely as the Cage, where street ball is filmed like a balletic battle. Mr. Freundlich recently sat down at a Manhattan cafe to talk about his love of basketball, his joy in seeing his son take up the game, and the pleasures and pains associated with sports as you get older. You have two children with your wife, Julianne Moore. With family, fatherhood and career, how have you found time to play basketball? Well, somehow it was communicated nonverbally to my wife that this was important to me being around men and communicating through a game. But also, so much of my work is being in my head, and I get to turn my mind off. You get to physically exhaust yourself. It feels like wringing out the sponge. What's it like on court with your teenage son? My favorite thing is to play on his team because he is a special shooter, this kid, and I'm a great passer. My son plays Division I basketball for Davidson. He walked on this year as a freshman. It's hugely gratifying for him and for me. Did you ever play at the Cage as a young baller? I would go watch as a kid. I would fantasize about playing. It was very intimidating. Less because of the basketball than the talking. You didn't play there and not talk trash. And that was not my game. Right after college there was a period when I could dunk it. And that gave me immediate credibility. And then there was a time earlier in my 40s where I played against this kid who was a point guard for Oklahoma. He got the competitive juices flowing in me, and I could do things that I hadn't recognized myself doing for a long time. Sports is humbling because older and wiser don't usually help. I've always had a really good court sense, and I'm a thinking player. But the answer is the younger player always beats you. My friend who's my age who plays basketball is a physical therapist. He told me: "Just be careful because now you have three good jumps a night. Don't use them up while you're warming up." I still think of myself as a young man. It's always shocking when someone refers to me as, "I got the old guy," or "I'll pick up Pops." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Golden Globes 2019: How to Watch 'Roma,' 'The Americans' and Other Big Winners and Nominees Capping a Golden Globes ceremony that belonged more to audience favorites than to critical darlings, "Bohemian Rhapsody" and its star, Rami Malek, played the spoiler to "A Star Is Born" in the battle between two musicals competing in the best drama category for film. Neither, however, is currently streaming, and nor are any of the other major movie winners except for Netflix's "Roma," which won prizes for its director, Alfonso Cuaron, and for best foreign language movie. The good news is, plenty of quality movie nominees can be streamed now, and many of the winners arrive online later this month, including "Rhapsody" (Jan. 22), "Star" (Jan. 15) and "The Wife" (Jan. 22), a little seen film for which Glenn Close won best actress. Meanwhile, nearly all of the TV winners are already on subscription services or available for rental. Here's a guide to the those major category nominees and winners that are already a click away, along with excerpts from their New York Times reviews. Won for: Best foreign language, best director. Nominated for: Best screenplay. "Many directors use spectacle to convey larger than life events while reserving devices like close ups to express a character's inner being. Here, Alfonso Cuaron uses both intimacy and monumentality to express the depths of ordinary life." (Click here to read the full Times review by Manohla Dargis.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A rehearsal for "The Snow Queen" at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.Credit...Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times MUNICH You could be forgiven for assuming the composer Hans Abrahamsen has an obsession with winter. He did, after all, once write a piece called "Winternacht" ("Winter Night"), and perhaps his most famous work is "Schnee" ("Snow"). His song cycle "let me tell you" evokes a landscape as wintry as one in a Bruegel painting. And there is no metaphor more apt to describe Mr. Abrahamsen's music than a snowflake: pleasantly soft and simple from a distance, mathematically precise and complex under a microscope. But, Mr. Abrahamsen said during a recent interview, he's actually inspired by all the seasons. And despite its title, winter is not the focus of his first opera, "The Snow Queen," which has its English language premiere at the Bavarian State Opera here on Dec. 21. (It will be livestreamed on Dec. 28.) Children's stories, though, are meant to be read in any number of ways, and though it's brand new, Mr. Abrahamsen's "Snow Queen" has already been filtered through the sensibilities of two directors. Rarely does this happen, but the opera is being rolled out in different languages, and different stagings, in quick succession. A commission from the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen, it premiered there in October, in Danish, directed by Francisco Negrin. Nearly simultaneously, an English language version has been prepared in Munich. But the Bavarian State Opera, which rarely imports productions from elsewhere, started from scratch, with its own director and conductor. And a new star: Barbara Hannigan, a reigning soprano of contemporary music, for whom the opera was originally written. The fairy tale concerns a mirror that reflects only the world at its worst and, once shattered, shoots dangerous splinters. A boy named Kay, the friend of a girl named Gerda, gets one in an eye and his heart; he is also abducted by the Snow Queen and presumed dead. Gerda, hopeful he's alive, searches for him, a journey that brings her from innocence to experience. Knowing that Ms. Hannigan, 48, would be singing the role of Gerda, Andreas Kriegenburg, the director in Munich, has taken a radical view of the story. "I told Hans at our first meeting," Mr. Kriegenburg recalled in an interview, "that I can't imagine credibly casting Barbara as an 11 year old girl." So Gerda and Kay, in Mr. Kriegenburg's production, are a middle aged couple. The mirror splinters have always suggested psychological trauma; here, Kay's condition is an actual mental illness. Being taken away by the Snow Queen is rendered as being admitted to an institution where Gerda remains by his side, physically close yet at an unbridgeable distance. One day she falls asleep, and the adventure of the fairy tale meeting crows, a princess and prince, and an old woman on the way to the Snow Queen unfolds as a journey deep into Gerda's subconscious hopes and fears, blurring fantasy and reality. This reading of the story also reflects Mr. Abrahamsen's take on the character of the Snow Queen whom he said he doesn't view as a villain so much as a natural force that everyone encounters at some point in their lives, hopefully coming out on the other side with more wisdom. (Every artistic undertaking, he suggested, is a visit from the Snow Queen.) When talking about the opera early on with Ms. Hannigan, they agreed the Snow Queen wouldn't be an "agitated soprano" like the Queen of the Night from Mozart's "The Magic Flute." Maybe, to put it in "Magic Flute" terms, she would be like the high priest Sarastro, and would thus make sense sung by a mellow bass (in Munich, Peter Rose). "She is what Wagner calls the Gesamtkunstwerk," Nikolaus Bachler, the company's director, said in an interview. "I wouldn't say Barbara Hannigan is a soprano singer. She's everything." Ms. Hannigan's career has become synonymous with fearless repertoire choices and countless premieres. (Even as she prepares "The Snow Queen," work is underway on another opera for her: a new version of "Salome" by Gerald Barry, planned for next year.) When she met Mr. Abrahamsen before he wrote "let me tell you," they sat for several hours and discussed the history of vocal music, from Monteverdi to Mahler. She felt like it was "a meeting of souls." Then they barely spoke again until Ms. Hannigan received the score. She was in a hotel in London, and opened it on her bed. Tears started falling from her eyes. "I never cry when I look at a score," she said. "But I felt like I was looking at myself in a way that I'd never seen before." Mr. Abrahamsen said he had wanted to write an opera since the 1980s. But it was only after "let me tell you" that he felt ready to fulfill a commission from Royal Danish Opera. Although "The Snow Queen" was written with Ms. Hannigan in mind and although Mr. Abrahamsen had wanted the libretto to be in English that company insisted on it being in Danish. But the language, Mr. Abrahamsen said, is difficult to sing, with "words in the back of the mouth, and the vowels very near each other." Ms. Hannigan wasn't comfortable with the prospect. "If I join a Danish production, there's going to be so much focus on whether I can sing in Danish or not," she remembered thinking. "It would be distracting." Sofie Elkjaer Jensen ended up singing Gerda for the premiere, in October. When Mr. Bachler got word of the opera's development (and language issues), he offered for the Bavarian State Opera to produce an English language premiere, with Ms. Hannigan back in the starring role. And now, for the past month, the company's musicians have been easing into the difficult world of Mr. Abrahamsen's music what Ms. Hannigan called "a beautiful struggle." The coming premiere has set off a miniature Abrahamsen festival around town. Recently, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Franz Welser Most, presented Mr. Abrahamsen's left hand piano concerto, "Left Alone," with Alexandre Tharaud. And the opera company hosted a concert featuring early Abrahamsen solos at the Deutsches Museum's collection devoted to antique transportation. "His music is really difficult to play," Mr. Welser Most said, "but he knows how orchestra colors work. And the stillness in his music, I find extremely powerful. I can't think of anyone else who so interestingly captures quote unquote silence. It's quiet, with substance." Here, that type of vibrato sounds like shivering in the snow. Mr. Abrahamsen said he had been experimenting with the effect since before even "Schnee," he said. He described it as "a friction" that comes from his body: He was born with cerebral palsy and walks with a limp, relying heavily on his left side. "In my right side, I have this tension all the time," he said. "So if I have to do something, I have to move very slowly, and then I feel the tension in myself. And then of course when I do it very slowly, gradually it becomes a long note." Satisfied with how that ornamentation and other hallmarks of Mr. Abrahamsen's style have scaled to the level of opera in "The Snow Queen," he is already considering another project. "Frozen 2" has been a huge box office hit so far; could there be another snow themed opera on the way? "I have sketches," Mr. Abrahamsen said, preferring to keep more details to himself for now. "But I'm not finished with opera." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Last summer, Val Emmich's agent called him with a tantalizing proposal. The creators of the hit musical "Dear Evan Hansen" were looking for a writer to adapt the play into a young adult novel, and they wanted Mr. Emmich to give it a try. Mr. Emmich's reflexive response? Absolutely not. "I realized how big of a phenomenon it was, and that scared me off," he said. Then he saw the show for the first time. The audience exploded into whoops and applause before the first line was uttered. A woman in his row warned him that she would be crying through the performance. "I thought, oh man, this is so beloved, I can only screw this up," Mr. Emmich said. But when Mr. Emmich met with the musical's bookwriter, Steven Levenson, and songwriters, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, he knew he had to at least consider trying if they offered him the job. They did, and Mr. Emmich spent the next six months transforming the musical into fiction. "Dear Evan Hansen: The Novel" will be released this October by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, in a surprising inversion of the usual page to stage adaptation process. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Mr. Emmich was in many ways a natural choice to take on the challenge. A singer songwriter and actor who published a debut novel, "The Reminders," last year, he understood the emotional nuances of songwriting and performing on stage. He also felt he could relate to the play's protagonist an isolated teenager who suffers from anxiety and saw the potential to capture his voice in a first person narrative. "I really connected with Evan's tortured interior life," he said. Plenty of books have been turned into captivating theater: Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home," Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time," Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall," Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and Roald Dahl's "Matilda," to name a few. But it's rare for an original Broadway musical to be reverse adapted into fiction. How do you translate the emotional highs of live musical theater where so much drama is communicated through the songs and performance into prose? "Dear Evan Hansen" may be better suited to novelization than most musicals. The play centers on a lonely, anxious teenager, Evan Hansen, whose therapist urges him to write encouraging notes to himself every day. When one of his notes falls into the hands of a classmate who commits suicide, Evan pretends that he and the boy were close friends. Much of the story's drama is internal, as Evan struggles under the weight of his secret a feature that lends itself to fiction. There's likely to be a large and eager audience for the novel. The play won six Tony Awards last year, and has grossed nearly 100 million. The show's creators began thinking about an Evan Hansen novel last year, when they noticed that the story had developed a fan base beyond people who had seen it on Broadway. When the cast recording was released in February 2017, it debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard 200, and won the Grammy Award for best musical theater album. People published fan fiction about the characters online. Some fans said the story and the music had helped them cope with their own anxiety. "We have felt a certain discomfort with the fact that it is so expensive to come see the show, we can only have 1,000 people a night, and there are so many people who can't come to New York," Mr. Levenson said. "There were people responding to the show without having even seen it, and we did feel like, what are some ways that we can get this show to more people?" The novel fills in scenes that are only alluded to in the musical, like Evan's experience as an apprentice park ranger, and fleshes out peripheral characters. Mr. Pasek and Mr. Paul sent Mr. Emmich songs that never made it into the production, and Mr. Levenson sent him scenes that were excised from the script. He reworked the material into scenes and dialogue. When he felt stuck, Mr. Emmich played songs from the musical to help him settle on the right tone. "Whenever I was unsure of what was going on beneath the surface of a character's emotions, I could always put on the music," he said. The collaboration was mostly smooth, though occasionally there was back and forth about how much liberty Mr. Emmich should take with the story. It "was a learning process," Mr. Emmich said. "At first, I was incredibly faithful to the play, and then they urged me to take more chances, which I was happy to do. Then they had to reel me back in." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"J.T. LeRoy" is a tougher, better movie than "Author" and generally comes off as more honest. Directed by Justin Kelly, who wrote the script with Knoop, it focuses on Savannah's role in the fraud, peeling back the details physical, psychological in a masquerade that rather astonishingly lasted some half dozen years. Anchored by its two excellent leads, the movie is sympathetic and, for the most part, unsentimental. In this telling, the young Savannah is an eager to please naif who falls first for Laura's smooth talk and then for the mounting pleasures that playing this fictional creation delivers, including a relationship with an actress director wittily played by Diane Kruger. Savannah JT isn't remotely believable as a teenage boy but does have beauty and mystery. At first, Kelly seems to be puckishly nodding to "Author." Both toss in an epigram about the truth right at the top: "Author" quotes Federico Fellini, while "J.T. LeRoy" cites Oscar Wilde. Soon, Kelly establishes his own angle and approach, underscoring Savannah's earnestness and Laura's disingenuousness as the story jumps around San Francisco and then moves farther afield as the JT show goes big and then bigger. Stewart seems too worldly to be playing the innocent portrayed here. But her gift for showing you a character's interior states, for feelings that delicately brush the skin, gives Savannah a vulnerability that becomes an expressive counterpoint to Laura's grandiosity and wounded narcissism. Few actors inhabit the space between charming and monstrous as brilliantly as Dern does. The JT LeRoy fiction started unraveling in the mid 2000s as journalists chased down suspicions and inconsistencies. In his New York magazine story "Who Is the Real JT LeRoy?," the writer Stephen Beachy suggested that the answer was Albert. He also wondered about its significance. "Does it matter if 'JT LeRoy' never lived in a squat, if he never tricked on Polk Street, never was a lot lizard, isn't from West Virginia?" Beachy wrote. "Does it matter if he is, more or less, a 39 year old mother named Laura Albert, originally from Brooklyn? Where's the harm?" It's a question that "J.T. LeRoy" suggests is at least worth asking, even about a farce as transparently, laughably absurd as this one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
European leaders inched closer Monday to an agreement that could avoid a potentially catastrophic default by Greece on billions of dollars in debt, as France proposed a plan that could serve as a model for other European lenders to the teetering nation, where a general strike and widespread demonstrations were planned Tuesday ahead of a crucial austerity vote. With investor pressure mounting ahead of the vote by the Greek Parliament this week, President Nicolas Sarkozy outlined a proposal under which French banks would give Athens more time to pay back loans as they come due over the next three years. The banks would share part of the cost of the bailout by extending new loans to Athens as old loans mature, but the banks would not have to forgive the debt itself, a concern of many investors. "We've been working on this with the banks and insurance companies," Mr. Sarkozy said at a news conference in Paris. "We're committed to going from a principle the voluntary participation of the private sector to concrete reality." Mr. Sarkozy said he hoped that other European countries would adopt a similar plan. It comes at a critical moment in the long running drama over how to prevent a default on Greece's 467 billion debt. A vote on Greece's latest 40 billion austerity package is scheduled for Wednesday, with another vote scheduled for Thursday on separate legislation to carry out the reforms. If the measures pass, the European Union is expected to announce the size and details of a new, second bailout package at a meeting of ministers on Sunday. If the Greek Parliament were to vote the package down, a chain reaction could engulf global financial institutions. Investor confidence in the debt of countries on the periphery of Europe like Greece, as well as Portugal and Ireland, has been rapidly eroding. European financial institutions hold more than half a trillion dollars worth of their sovereign debt. Private borrowers in these countries, who would also be hammered by a public default, owe Europe's banks another trillion, according to the Bank for International Settlements. The French banks' willingness to chip in underscores just how vulnerable giants like Societe Generale and BNP Paribas would be in a full scale default, a danger also confronting large institutions in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere. It is also why European leaders have the leverage to extract concessions from banks as part of a broader rescue package for Greece. With European leaders unable to come up with a concrete plan until now and Greek politicians balking at calls for austerity, the picture for Europe's banks has been growing dimmer by the week. "Investors think policy makers are kicking the can down the road," said Philip Finch, a bank analyst with UBS in London. As a result European bank shares have fallen nearly 25 percent over the last four months, helping bring down the shares of their counterparts in the United States, which have lost 13 percent over the same period. But unlike American banks, which raised capital and wrote off tens of billions of dollars in bad loans after the financial crisis, European institutions have been much slower to acknowledge the problems they face, analysts and investors said. Even without a sovereign debt default, Mr. Finch said, European banks need to raise 150 billion in capital to bolster balance sheets. French officials said the proposal announced Monday was the fruit of recent meetings between the Elysee Palace, the French Treasury, the Bank of France and the French banking federation. The initiative is likely to be supported by Jean Claude Trichet, the departing president of the European Central Bank, who had stood against plans to automatically impose losses on the face value of Greek debt. The French plan was presented separately for discussion at a meeting of Greece's creditors convened Monday in Rome by the International Institute of Finance, which represents many of the largest global finance institutions, and the Italian Treasury. In addition to owning 2.5 billion worth of Greek bonds, Societe Generale faces billions more in exposure from its majority stake in the General Bank of Greece, a prime reason Moody's warned this month that it might downgrade the company's debt. The rating agency issued a similar warning for BNP Paribas, which does not have a local subsidiary in Greece but does own roughly 5 billion in Greek debt. The danger from Greece is hardly limited to France. Belgium's Dexia has 3.5 billion in Greek debt. Germany's Commerzbank has a 2.9 billion position. ING owns about 2.5 billion. With a gross domestic product of 329 billion a small fraction of California's 1.9 trillion Greece's output its tiny. The worry is just how quickly the ripple effects of a default would be felt in other European capitals, as well as on Wall Street. A default by Greece would immediately endanger bonds issued by Ireland and Portugal, which investors consider the next weakest borrowers after Greece. Three year Portuguese and Irish bonds already yield more than 14 percent, while the rate on comparable Greek notes stands at nearly 27 percent, suggesting that a "haircut" has already been priced in for all three. And while European banks are owed 136.3 billion by the Greek government and private borrowers, according to the Bank for International Settlements, that jumps to 194.6 billion for Portugal and 377.6 billion in the case of Ireland. Portugal alone owes French banks 27 billion, according to the BIS data, while Ireland owes nearly 30 billion. "The concern is the spillover effect," said Kian Abouhossein, who heads JPMorgan Chase's European bank research team. "European banks are in a tougher position than those in the U.S." Besides the risk from a Greek default or the spread of contagion, European banks are also heavily reliant on short term borrowing, which is riskier and more expensive in a crisis like the one after Lehman's collapse, Mr. Finch and Mr. Abouhossein said. With smaller deposit bases than American institutions, European banks have a loan to deposit ratio of 130 percent, compared with 80 percent in the United States. American banks can finance their lending with deposits and have a cushion, but European institutions must turn elsewhere to finance their loans, borrowing heavily from United States money market funds. To make matters worse, the stress tests applied to European banks by regulators last year were less stringent than those in the United States, so while data from another batch of tests is due in mid July, it is not expected to calm nerves significantly. While they may not be on the front line, American banks do face serious risks in the event of a European meltdown, too. Direct exposure to Greece is small in most cases 677 million in the case of Bank of America, for example. But the indirect exposure is much harder to determine. American institutions have insured at least 5 billion worth of Greek debt in the event of a default through credit default swaps and could be on the hook for billions more from countries like Ireland and Portugal. Some American institutions have made it clear they are cutting their exposure as quickly as they can. This month, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, said his institution's direct exposure to Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy had dropped from 20 billion at the end of the first quarter to 15 billion or less now. "At the end of the day, they're eventually all interlinked on some level," said Glenn Schorr, a bank analyst with Nomura. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
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. Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, will testify before two House committees on Wednesday, and late night hosts were fired up to hear from the man who investigated President Trump and Russia. "It's the Super Bowl of things on C Span at 8:30 in the morning." STEPHEN COLBERT "Or as President Trump is calling it, 'Narc Week.'" JIMMY FALLON "Several bars in Washington D.C. will open early tomorrow so people can watch special counsel Robert Mueller's congressional testimony. So, by dinnertime, you'll be just like the Mueller report: mostly blacked out." SETH MEYERS "Trump initially told reporters he would not watch any of it, then said he 'might watch part of it,' which means he will watch all of it." JIMMY KIMMEL "Basically, Democrats are hoping Mueller goes out there and explains his written report on camera. It's their way of saying to Americans, 'We know you didn't read the book, so maybe you'll watch the movie.'" JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Roy Keane was joking. Probably. Arsenal had just lost at home to Wolves, condemning the club to its worst start to a season in almost 40 years. Mikel Arteta's team had slumped to 14th in the Premier League. It had won only once, domestically, since early October. Still, though, Keane found a silver lining. "They'll have just about enough to stay up," he said. The line was delivered with enough relish to suggest his interest in Arsenal's possible relegation was not so much sincere concern as an irresistible opportunity to warm the embers of an old rivalry. Keane does not think Arsenal is at risk of losing its place in the Premier League. Of course not. But then the content of the joke was not the part that was supposed to wound. The nature of it was. Entropy set in at Arsenal a long time ago. Soccer has a heightened sensitivity to sharp, drastic change the sort that seems to materialize in a day, a week, and then evaporate but also an ability to remain blissfully numb to the sort that spools out over the span of seasons and years. The winnowing of Arsenal is a case in point. The latter years of Arsene Wenger's reign at the club were a case study in slow, steady and, in the moment, almost imperceptible decline: the gradual downgrading of Arsenal first from perennial title challenger to serial F.A. Cup winner, from mainstay in the Champions League to contender for a place and inexorably on, all the way down past hopeful to where it stands now: outsider. But something about the time lapse disguised the scale of the decline. That each step from title challenger to top four regular, top four regular to top four contender and so on seemed shallow made it possible to miss just how far Arsenal had traveled from the peak, and just how steep the journey back to the summit might be. That is not to say someone should have spotted the direction of travel, that some soothsayer might have been able to surmise that this is where it would end. Such a prediction would have seemed and to an extent still does, even with Arsenal marooned in its current mediocrity laughable. This is not, after all, supposed to happen, not in the age of the superclubs, in an era in which soccer's hierarchy is set in stone, when the elite enjoy such wealth and power and grace that they have become untouchable. A vast divide yawns between the elite and the rest, the bridge drawn up to prevent anyone crossing over. Mostly, we worry that strips teams of their right to dream, but it works in both directions: It also means those who have already made it no longer have any reason to worry. Sure, things might go wrong, but for a given value of wrong. In a bad season, you might finish sixth. And yet Arsenal proves that status is not frozen, not forever. It is not so long ago, after all, since this was the club that served as an emblem for the self perpetuation of success. Arsenal could always qualify for the Champions League, 20 years in a row, because it always qualified for the Champions League. But even that did not mean it was immune to the effects of bad decisions. And, over the last decade or so, under the disinterested stewardship of the Kroenke family, there have been plenty of those. In came Sven Mislintat, hailed as the visionary behind Borussia Dortmund's success, who was tasked with turning Arsenal into the home of the best young talent in the world. Then came Raul Sanllehi, with his apparently comprehensive contacts book, with his promise to get Arsenal access to the best agents on the planet and, through them, the best players. But neither worked well with the other and both, eventually, would leave. Time for another idea: Edu Gaspar, another former player, was made technical director. Arteta was promoted, given wider ranging responsibilities. Kia Joorabchian, the sort of man you suspect refers to himself as a superagent, seemed to have the inside track on the club's transfer dealings. Arsenal's squad lays bare the lack of coherence behind the scenes. Arteta now has eight (or nine, depending on your definition) central defenders at his disposal, but the club's record signing, Nicolas Pepe, does not fit neatly into the team. His highest paid player, Mesut Ozil, has been reduced to live tweeting the team's games. How to pick a route out of this mess remains a mystery, particularly under Arsenal's current ownership. For a while, over the summer, it seemed as if Arteta's bright promise as a coach might be enough. He had crafted a team that was resilient and disciplined and smart, one that offered a kernel of what an updated, modernized Arsenal could be. He won the F.A. Cup and the Community Shield. A few months later, that momentum has been surrendered. Arsenal heads to Tottenham on Sunday not only behind its league leading rival in the table, but trailing Chelsea and West Ham, too. It is, for the time being, the fourth best team in London. The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on its finances. Its roster is an uneasy blend of young promise and fading high earners. It does not want to sell the former and it cannot move the latter; all it can do is let them run their contracts down. Where the money will come from for the necessary, multiyear rebuild is anyone's guess. Arsenal will recover, of course. It will return, though it is likely to be a long and arduous journey. In the meantime, it stands as a warning to the rest of the elite that their place at the top table has not been granted in perpetuity: It is yours only so long as you make (enough of) the right decisions. And it offers inspiration to all those teams who harbor aspirations of, one day, usurping the established order: to Leicester and to Wolves and to Everton and the rest. The divide can be bridged. Permanence is an illusion. People clubs make mistakes, no matter their size or their wealth or their self perception. Keane was joking, probably, when he said Arsenal would not suffer relegation. In a way, though, it already has. The sunlit uplands are just a few weeks away. Britain will leave the European Union on Jan. 1 and it will finally be free to ... have its own currency? No, that's not it. Control its own borders? Oh, it did that anyway. Turn Kent, the garden of England, into a gigantic parking lot for trucks? Seems a strange thing to want, but if that's what you like, great. Brexit's impact on soccer will, in all likelihood, not be particularly noticeable in the Premier League. English clubs will, in theory, no longer be able to recruit so liberally from Europe, but most of the players of interest to the teams of the country's top division will readily meet the criteria to be granted permission to play in it. (Lower tier teams, and the majority of clubs in Scotland, may feel more of an effect on their recruitment plans.) Most important, though, was one throwaway line hidden deep in the weeds of the Premier League's statement on how international transfers will work in this brave new world. English teams will, starting Jan. 1, no longer be able to sign any international player until the player has turned 18. Now they will have to stop. England's clubs can no longer be hothouses of international talent. And through gritted teeth that is a good thing. It may, in fact, be the most obvious benefit anyone has seen from Brexit to date. There are some cases in which teenage players benefit from being allowed to leave their home countries in order to sign for one of the world's biggest clubs. Players in countries without the infrastructure to nurture their talent, for example, or where their development might be improved by access to better facilities. For the most part, though, the E.U. exemption is used to pluck Spanish, Dutch, Belgian and French teenagers from academies that have reared them from a young age, and to do it at a knockdown price. The clubs that lose the teenagers are not reimbursed suitably for the work they have done; instead, they miss out on the premium fee they might receive if the player completed their education at home. The players are, with only a handful of exceptions, treated as assets, rather than individuals, to be fattened and sold at a profit, rather than given a chance to shine. It entrenches inequality, rather than addressing it, ensuring more and more of the world's best talent coalesces at certain clubs. English teams have exploited it more than anyone else in recent years (Manchester United currently has three Czech or Slovak goalkeepers in its ranks, all of them teenagers) but must now stop. It would be a benefit of Brexit for everybody if FIFA took this as a chance to clamp down on the loophole, to close it, for everyone else, too. Folu Ogundimu hit upon a question I've been thinking about, too: "How do you compare Pele's great artistry and influence on soccer to Maradona's?" I had this thought while I was writing last week's newsletter: I'm not sure you would say that Pele changed the game, particularly, in the way that Cruyff definitively did there isn't a Pele role or a Pele tactic or a Pelean school of thinking. Pele's greatness maybe resides, instead, in the sense of mastery, that he had perfected the game. Thomas Jakobsh made an insightful observation, too, that "the suggestion his mistakes and frailties were the inevitable flip side, or byproduct, of his on field genius" does not hold water. (This came up on Set Piece Menu this week, as it happens). "There is a much more prosaic explanation: The world is filled with grifters, con men, unscrupulous agents, hustlers, mobsters. As Jorge Valdano has elegantly explained, Maradona was a victim, perhaps even the perfect victim," Thomas wrote. "Adulation stalked him since he was 16, and nothing in those first 16 years equipped him for what was to come. For this failure, there is a lot of blame to be shared." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen and cine revelers of every type, to the mesmerizing motion picture and humbly titled extravaganza, "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese." Thrill to Dylan, a troubadour with a white smeared face and a peacock feather in his wide brimmed hat, as he electrifies and sometimes confuses audiences with his melodious musings. Rejoice as Joan Baez sings and laughs and testifies about her old pal Bob. Gasp as Joni Mitchell warbles and strums her song "Coyote" in Gordon Lightfoot's pad as Dylan plays along. A lollapalooza of a tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue was divided into two parts across two years and began in 1975, the year after Dylan had returned to touring, headlining with the Band. (The Band's farewell concert, with Dylan as a guest, is immortalized in Scorsese's documentary "The Last Waltz.") The idea for the revue (without the Band), explains the poet Allen Ginsberg while sitting beatifically in a lotus position on a beach he's called the Oracle of Delphi here was to "showcase how beautiful" Dylan is through song and whatnot . In another scene, when Baez speaks about Ginsberg's "yearning for Bob," the poet's optimistic take on the tour takes on a melancholic cast. The idea behind Scorsese's "Rolling Thunder Revue" feels equally diffuse. It's at once a celebration and a rescue mission (it draws heavily on restored film footage), as well as another chapter in Scorsese's decades long chronicling of Dylan. The most recent entry in this enterprise was the 2005 documentary "No Direction Home," a gorgeous ramble through the first half of the 1960s . By 1975, Dylan was back at Columbia Records, which released "Blood on the Tracks" that January. Only one of its songs, "A Simple Twist of Fate," is i n "Rolling Thunder Revue," which includes many more from "Desire," the album he finished before the tour started in Plymouth, Mass. The story of the revue and of "Renaldo and Clara," the film Dylan was making during the tour has been told before in journalistic bits and biographical pieces. In her memoir, Baez described what happened on stage as "a mad circus" (approvingly, it seems) but called Dylan's film a "monumentally silly project." She had a role in it as the Woman in White, who falls in love with a character played by Harry Dean Stanton. Baez didn't know who was directing ("Bob would stand in the back of the camera and chuckle to himself"). But she understood the part she played perfectly: "Naturally, I was playing a Mexican whore the Rolling Thunder women all played whores." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Amelie Kretz was in Australia in March, training for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics alongside her Canadian triathlon teammates, when Covid 19 sent her entire team back to Canada. Within weeks, the Olympics had been postponed to 2021, the 2020 racing season was delayed until at least June, and the gyms, pools and hiking trails near her Montreal home had all closed. Like nearly a third of the world's population, Ms. Kretz, 26, who competed in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, has spent the last two months in lockdown. She is riding out the time at her parents' house just outside Montreal, both to have some company and to make good use of their garage, where she has installed a little round swimming pool that cost her 350 Canadian dollars (about 250) online. Like many athletes and hobbyists without access to public spaces during the pandemic, Ms. Kretz has found a loophole in lockdown: a creative repurposing of the family garage to pass the time, stay in shape and stay connected. The pool is 40 inches deep and 12 feet in diameter, making it far too small for laps. (The Olympic triathlon comprises a 0.93 mile swim, a 24.8 mile bike ride and a 6.2 mile run.) So Ms. Kretz trains by swimming in place, with one end of an elastic rope tied securely around the garage ceiling rails and the other end looped snugly around her hips. Her coach, Alex Sereno, often observes via Zoom, offering tips on the arc of her arms and the form of her body as it enters the water. "I like swimming in a normal pool much better," Ms. Kretz said. "But without any races happening anytime soon, it can be hard to find the motivation to train, and training keeps me sane. So just moving and pushing myself in the pool every day is getting me through this pandemic." It's not just athletes doing cardio in the car park. Jenny Bernholz, 37, is a co owner of Pure Barre Manhasset, a group fitness studio on the North Shore of Long Island. When Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered businesses like hers to close under the shelter in place order, Ms. Bernholz wanted to offer quality live streamed classes at home. So her husband, Kyle Bernholz, 37, installed tracked disco lights in the rafters of the garage, ordered a sound mixer and wireless microphone, and went to work recreating the studio experience in the garage of their home in Sea Cliff, N.Y. The space now has the feel of an industrial nightclub, tucked in the suburbs of Long Island. Ms. Bernholz's two young daughters haven't been left out of the fun: The couple set up a jungle gym and obstacle course to help the girls let off steam between virtual school lessons. When their mom isn't teaching, Caroline, 6 and Cameron, 4, play with a swinging rope, a trampoline and a balance beam as music blares. "We literally are just shy of living there now," Ms. Bernholz said of her garage. "We start our day and we end our day down there." Other families have turned to their garages to recreate pre pandemic hobbies and hangouts. Randy Derama's son, Reydan, 11, plays hockey with the Anaheim Jr. Ducks in Southern California. So when ice rinks across California were shut down in March, Mr. Derama, 38, pulled the cars out of the garage of his townhouse in Lakewood, Calif., and installed a floor of synthetic plastic ice interlocking polymer cubes sturdy enough to hold his car when he parks on the "ice" overnight. Now Reydan straps on his skates and works on his slap shot in the garage every day. Amy Casey, 37, and her husband, Matt Casey, 49, grew tired of home cooked dinner monotony in their home in Wigan, England. So the couple dusted off their tools Ms. Casey runs a furniture refurbishment business and Mr. Casey is a carpenter and turned their garage into "Casa Casey," an at home bistro modeled after their favorite neighborhood tapas spot. Outfitted with the Moroccan style lights and furniture Ms. Casey had in her studio, it's become their new weekend date night spot. "It's given us somewhere new to go," she said. "So we're not just stuck watching telly all the time." Some people are using the garages as headquarters for community outreach. In Virginia, Rebecca Geller, 40, has transformed hers into a satellite food pantry. Ms. Geller, a lawyer, is a longtime regular volunteer at the Lorton Community Action Center, a local food bank in Fairfax County. Her husband, Brad Cheney, 40, and their three children, Sam, 11, Noah, 9, and Emily, 6, often join her. When schools in Virginia closed on March 13, Ms. Geller knew that many children dependent on school meals would likely go hungry, and LCAC, with most of its staff working remotely, wouldn't have the capacity for regular food deliveries. So she drew up an Amazon wish list and distributed it to her network of friends and family, asking for donations of nonperishable food items to be delivered directly to her home. The response was overwhelming. About 100 boxes of donated food are now delivered to the Geller home daily. The Geller Cheney family has been focused primarily on creating snack bags for kids, usually consisting of juice or milk, granola bars, rolled fruit leather and crackers. They are sheltering in place with a family across the street, and together, the seven kids and four adults are packing around 800 snack bags a week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The 35 story tall sand dunes of Concon are grand formations that took shape over millions of years, growing into seemingly insurmountable mounds that draw thrill seeking sand boarders and lumbering climbers alike. But the real reason to visit is that they are nature's gateway to Concon, a bustling beachfront city, providing a view of a vast stretch of the Chilean coast, from the seaport of Valparaiso to the south to the ritzy weekend retreats and culinary hot spots of Maitencillo and Zapallar to the north. This string of seaside communities, snugly contained in the green valleys below the Andes Mountains, would be stamping grounds for my wife and me for a week. The region is far from undiscovered; for at least a century the central coast has been a popular weekend retreat for Santiago's glitterati. But it remains largely unknown to travelers from the United States. Just getting to the Chilean coast from Santiago a trip of less than two and a half hours is a treat. As my wife and I made our way down there in a subcompact Peugeot we'd rented from the airport, we surveyed the riot of mountains that make up much of Chile's landmass. Then, as we approached the Pacific, vast, green, rolling valleys, fed by the glacial runoff from the Andes, swung into view. This coastal stretch is essentially a fruit and vegetable factory, home to fields of avocados, peaches, walnuts, olives, almonds, citrus fruits and, of course, miles of wine grapes, including the so called Casablanca Valley vineyards, known for their sauvignon blanc, chardonnay and pinot noir. We stopped at one of these vineyards on the way to the coast Casas del Bosque which also serves as home to the top rated Tanino restaurant, for a lost in paradise lunch. Sitting on a large outdoor patio, overlooking the vineyards and a courtyard filled with white, pink and purple flowers, we sampled their crisp sauvignon blanc reserve and nibbled on a shrimp, scallop and octopus ceviche (with red onions, spicy yellow chile and cilantro) and a perfectly cooked slab of Chilean sea bass, our first hint of how the land and sea come together in this region in a delicious but unpretentious match. Sated, we continued our journey to the coast itself, a stress free excursion even in our tiny car. The Ruta del Mar led us to the town of Zapallar and its narrow main street, which is lined with a collection of shops offering vacation essentials: a wine store, a small supermarket, a bakery and a place that sells designer sunglasses and bathing suits. Off that strip, though, young children stroll the quiet streets with their friends or pedal by on bikes, while adults greet one another as if they are all part of one large extended family. Zapallar already had a nearly perfect horseshoe shaped, semi protected harbor. Mr. Vicuna turned it into a beachside community by offering land to friends and relatives, on the condition that they build their own houses within a couple of years. The result is a series of architecturally distinct homes most with impeccably maintained flower gardens. They sit amid a network of winding streets lined with cypress and eucalyptus trees, connecting to a central plaza, which leads down to the sea. Descendants of the original families still own many of the homes here, and in fact recently united to create a land trust to prevent development on a large chunk they collectively own at the edge of town. Modern architects have since built steel and glass trophy homes, too. But the town has prohibited large scale construction, or even any large parking lots, that would open it up to an onslaught of development or day trippers. (The standard luxury house here costs more than 1 million although a weekly vacation rental can be secured for about 300 a night.) This is the kind of community that has its own polo field, where we took in a match sponsored by Veuve Clicquot and Aston Martin, and where we introduced ourselves to Lionel Soffia, a Santiago insurance executive with an area home, glass of champagne in hand, surrounded by local friends he has known for decades. "Santiago is one of the busiest cities in South America," he said. "People come here to slow down. It is casual, but still chic." Our hotel there embodied that dichotomy. Hotel Isla Seca, which from the outside looks almost like a vacation home, is a boutique hotel right at the edge of the Ruta del Mar. It offers 41 rooms, eight of them with grand sea views. It has a perfectly manicured backyard with a lawn, a swimming pool and a collection of chaise longues, occupied by an interesting cross section of guests from Santiago, from Europe and a few from the United States. The common areas looked more like a living room than a hotel lobby. The surrounding area was far more than you'd expect of a typical backyard, though. From the hotel's rear exit a pathway leads directly through the tall pines, down the short hill to the beach. From there, we spent several hours one morning walking along a trail built right at the oceanfront called La Rambla, which in some segments is a constructed stone walkway, and in others simply unadorned giant boulders, the Pacific Ocean waves crashing below. Those waters stay relatively cold, because of the so called Humboldt Current, which starts in northwest Antarctica and passes along the coast of Chile, meaning that even in the summer the water temperature does not get much warmer than about 60 degrees, similar to summertime temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean in Maine. It was fine when I ran in for a quick, brisk dip, but not comfortable for a long swim. But the beaches themselves are pristine and the hot summer afternoons combined with the cool ocean breezes make for perfect beach weather. Fishermen still work the local waters, their small, weather beaten boats tied up in the Zapallar bay, and their daily catch is for sale in an oceanside shack. Just at the edge of the fish market is El Chiringuito, a squat, wooden structure that on summer nights is packed with a Santiago holiday crowd, eating a good share of what had been caught that day, with the tables split between an outdoor deck and inside. People watching starts even before you enter, as a valet crams Land Rovers and Audis into the small beachside lot. But it is as convivial as can be. The night that my wife and I dined there, we watched the patrons exchange kisses with friends who spilled in as we tucked into a delicious meal grilled corvina, a local fish that tastes like a cross between mahi mahi and snapper, prepared with black butter, capers and lemon. Cachagua, the town next door, has an even more laid back feel, with a less ostentatious display of wealth. The small seaside roads in the village have been left unpaved, even if high end imports travel them amid the somewhat smaller but still 1 million plus beach houses. Cachagua has its own wonderful beaches, with a slightly rougher surf than those at Zapallar, and a tiny island just off the shore is home to a small national park that serves as a sanctuary for thousands of Humboldt penguins and other birds, all visible from the shore. We spent an afternoon walking on the Rambla, which continues from Zapallar through Cachagua, spying on the colony of penguins and admiring the broad, windswept beach. As we continued our slow trip south along the Pacific Coast highway, we hit Maitencillo, a beach resort with Pacific Ocean winds that are an irresistible draw for local surfers and paragliders, who are interspersed with families making a day trip from Santiago. The layout is reminiscent of a classic New Jersey shore venue: a series of beachside stands serves casual food. We had three outstanding meals in this small town at Empanadas El Hoyo (where you must try the empanada de marisco), at Dos Salmones (another small beachside stand next door) and at Restaurant Puntamai, which has a proper dining room. The fresh seafood at all three was some of the best we had during our time in Chile. Our final destination along the coast was Concon the biggest of the beachside towns on our list, with a population of 37,000. It is busy year round, with local residents far outnumbering beachgoers. Casadoca Boutique Hotel, where we stayed, is part of what made the visit to Concon so memorable. It has only six rooms, set up around a wide open living room with a large fireplace and a small spa. We found it so comfortable we spent much of the time in Concon just lounging around and looking out from the wall of windows into the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean, whose waves echoed through our room. Concon's claim to fame is the group of giant dunes that stand at its entrance the same ones where we had stopped when we started our trip. We ended up here again at the end of the week, taking in the view of the sweeping coastline once more. Formed as a result of the strong winds and Ice Age era erosion, Las Dunas, as they are known locally, resemble ski slopes. Local vendors rent out crude snowboards at the base of one of the dunes (about 1.75 an hour) that you can use to ride down from the top toward the ocean. It is a tremendous ride, and as I approached the Pacific, I could hear the cries of the sea lions, busy playing and eating in the waters below, with sea gulls grabbing anything they left. It was a perfect spot for us to stop again, on our way back to Santiago as we prepared to fly home, so we could admire one last time the riches Chileans enjoy from this vast stretch of land and the sea. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The initial introduction between Victoria Everett and Tracy Mitrano was as traditional as it gets. They had a friend in common who thought they might make a match, and both agreed to meet. A few days before Christmas in 2016 the friend brought Ms. Everett over to Dr. Mitrano's house, who then lived in Ithaca, N.Y. And then their easygoing set up became a different, though also classic, love story. "I fell in love with her the minute I saw her, right through my screen door," Dr. Mitrano said. Both had been through two previous marriages, first to men (they eventually learned that they had been married on exactly the same date) and then to women. Both had grown children. They also shared a sense of humor. "We were laughing from the minute we met," Ms. Everett said. "It was just such a fun conversation that I knew she was something special." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The hormone shot popular among African women who must use birth control in secret is as safe as other methods, scientists reported. For decades, many African women in need of birth control they could use in secret have relied on intramuscular hormone injections that prevent pregnancy for three month s . But in recent years, women have been terrified and family planning officials frustrated as studies suggested that women using injectables were far more likely to get infected with H.I.V. On Thursday, a major new study found that women who did were not at a much greater risk than they were from other contraceptive methods, including a hormone implant or a copper intrauterine device.The World Health Organization will view the study next month as it debates whether to give back the injectable its top safety rating. Two years ago, the W.H.O. lowered its rating one notch, but said the benefits still outweighed the risks. The hormone is known as DMPA, for intramuscular depot medroxyprogesterone acetate, and is marketed by Pfizer under the brand name Depo Provera. The study, which involved more than 7,800 women in four African countries and was published in The Lancet, pleased advocates for women's health. The results "will be a relief to both women and health care providers in southern Africa, where Depo Provera is the most commonly used contraceptive," said Dr. Salim S. Abdool Karim, an H.I.V. expert at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa and Columbia University, who was not involved in the trial. Still, he cautioned, Depo Provera appeared to pose a "marginally" higher risk of H.I.V. infection than contraceptive implants, which are silicon tubes inserted under the skin that release only small amounts of hormone at once. The results also remove some obstacles to contraception technologies of the future, said one of the study's authors, Dr. Timothy D. Mastro, chief science officer at FHI360, a consultancy in North Carolina. Birth control shots that women can safely give themselves are being developed, as are injectables that last six months. If the trial had found hormonal methods dangerous, "a whole avenue of advances would have been shut off," Dr. Mastro said. Depo Provera is a mainstay of family planning across much of Africa, where H.I.V. remains rampant. In public health clinics, the shot is sometimes the only choice offered. Three years ago, India began officially urging women to choose it over tubal ligation, which the government had long promoted. In Africa, women often prefer Depo Provera because many men refuse to use condoms and the injectable is easier to conceal than daily pills. Some women fear being abandoned, humiliated or even beaten if they are caught avoiding pregnancy. "Their husbands or partners, and their families, often want them to have children," said Dr. Sheena McCormack, an H.I.V. specialist at Britain's Medical Research Council who has conducted trials on H.I.V. prevention methods but was not involved in the current study. Starting more than a decade ago, some scientists warned that Depo Provera seemed to raise a woman's risk of getting H.I.V. by 40 percent or more. One study even concluded that the risk was doubled among women using it. Why that happened was unknown. Tests on monkeys suggested the hormone in the shot, progestin, might thin the protective vaginal mucus or make immune cells in the vaginal tract replicate H.I.V. more quickly. But scientists had drawn their conclusions from epidemiological studies and lab tests. The new research, known as Echo (officially, Evidence for Contraceptive Options and H.I.V. Outcomes), was designed as a randomized clinical trial, the medical gold standard. The study compared infection rates among thousands of women who each had to consistently use one of three modern birth control methods for 18 months. The idea at first was controversial. Some epidemiologists said that it would be impossible to find enough women willing to choose unfamiliar methods, or that undetected condom use would skew the results. Others, like Dr. McCormack, who was invited to lead part of the trial, had ethical reservations, because some of her previous work suggested Depo Provera was dangerous. "I wouldn't put my daughter on Depo if she was at risk," Dr. McCormack said. "It doesn't make it a bad thing to have done the trial, but I just personally didn't feel comfortable asking volunteers to do it." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Two of the chief investigators, Dr. Jared M. Baeten of the University of Washington and Dr. Helen Rees of South Africa's Wits Reproductive Health and H.I.V. Institute, said they had agreed with the trial's backers, which included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development, that the study would be stopped if it failed to meet recruiting standards or if any of the three methods were to clearly increase infection rates. An outside committee assessed the data every six months and each time recommended that the trial continue, Dr. Baeten said. Lauren Ralph, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, was publicly skeptical five years ago that such a trial could be done well. But on Thursday she called it a "rigorous, well executed study on a really complex topic." Noting the slight risk elevation for Depo Provera, however, Dr. Ralph said she hoped the debate would not become so "settled" in favor of injectable hormones that work stopped on newer, even safer options for women. In the study, over 7,800 women in South Africa, Kenya, Zambia and eSwatini the former Swaziland got Depo Provera; Jadelle, an implant containing the hormone levonorgestrel; or Injeflex, a copper infused IUD. There was no control group of women denied contraception. That would be unethical, the authors said, since all the participants were recruited at clinics as they sought birth control. Moreover, unwanted pregnancies kill many women and infants in Africa, or lead to abortions. For ethical reasons, as well, the women were given condoms and safe sex advice , even though that should have reduced the odds they would get infected, the outcome that investigators were measuring. In the trial's final months, the women were also offered pre exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP a drug to prevent H.I.V. infection as soon as it became standard treatment in their respective countries. Over the course of the study, and despite all the precautions offered them, 397 women became infected. That alarmingly high rate almost four percent a year was even greater than other investigators had found in earlier trials of prevention methods. "That's a stark reminder that we're not done with H.I.V.," said Dr. Baeten, adding that the finding lent urgency to the need to introduce new forms of protection, like PrEP. Nonetheless, the infection rates were roughly similar in all three groups: Of the 397 infected, 36 percent were in the Depo Provera group, 35 percent in the copper IUD group and 29 percent in the Jadelle group. Small differences like those were not considered measurable in a trial this size. Determining the exact difference between Depo Provera and the IUD, for example, would take a far larger and prohibitively expensive trial. As birth control, Depo Provera appeared to be the most effective alternative and to have the fewest side effects; users of the IUD became pregnant slightly more often. Dr. Rees, whose earlier studies had also produced data suggesting Depo Provera was dangerous, declined to say whether she was surprised by the Echo results or to speculate on how the W.H.O.'s expert committee would react. Until now, "no one could put their hands on their hearts and say they'd eliminated the confounders," she said, referring to unknowable elements, like human behavior, that render trial results shaky. "We're very pleased that we did a high quality study." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
SAN FRANCISCO Amazon packages get delivered to all sorts of places. Front porches? Naturally. Cubicles? Of course. Inside locked homes? Yes, that, too. Now add a new one: the trunk of your car. Starting Tuesday, people in dozens of cities across the United States can start getting their Amazon orders delivered to a parked car, provided their vehicle has the proper technology. With a few taps on a smartphone screen, the courier can unlock the car and drop the box inside the trunk or on the back seat. The new service is aimed at anyone who doesn't want to risk having their package swiped from their front porch or who can't receive an Amazon order at work, perhaps because an employer doesn't allow it or because the company mailroom is not secure. On Monday, the company showed how it worked: An Amazon driver fetched a box from the back of a van and headed toward her delivery destination the trunk of an empty, gleaming Volvo S90 sedan in a parking lot. After she hit a couple of buttons on an app, the trunk was unlocked and the package went inside, then was locked in the car, where had this not been a staged demonstration it would have waited for its owner. Amazon has dived into delivery convenience and security with gusto. To reduce package theft, it has installed lockers outside physical stores where customers can pick up orders. And last year, it introduced Amazon Key, which lets its couriers unlock customers' front doors and drop packages inside. The new in car delivery service, which will be available in 37 cities and surrounding areas, is a variation of Amazon Key. For in car delivery to work, customers must have a 2015 or later Chevrolet, Buick, GMC or Cadillac vehicle with an active account with OnStar, the roadside assistance and navigation service from General Motors. Car owners with 2015 or newer Volvos with a similar service, On Call, can also receive in car deliveries from Amazon. Couriers can use those assistance services to find the cars through satellite location tracking and unlock the trunk. Amazon said the service will be expanded to other carmakers over time. The company conducted a small pilot test of in car delivery in Germany in partnership with Audi and DHL several years ago. The company says its systems will allow couriers to unlock vehicles only once for each scheduled delivery, to prevent unauthorized access. Still, the service will require a hefty amount of trust that a courier won't swipe any valuables. The in car service requires fewer protections than Amazon's in home delivery service, which requires customers to have an internet connected front door lock and security camera to deter any shenanigans by couriers once they're inside. "We believe in offering customers choices," said Rohit Shrivastava, general manager of Amazon Key. "This product may not be for everyone." Although statistics on the prevalence of package theft are elusive, police departments across the country say it has become commonplace, especially as internet shopping has become mainstream behavior. Package thieves have even earned a snappy moniker, "porch pirates." James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said Amazon has for years been ferociously tackling every obstacle it can identify to customers buying more goods online. "This goes back to one click ordering," he said. "The company knows that the less friction you have, the better." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 8 p.m. on CBS. Seven candidates have qualified for this debate in Charleston, S.C.: Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; and the billionaire businessman Tom Steyer. A lot is riding on their performances. The debate comes four days before the South Carolina primary and just before the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses on March 3. Bloomberg may try to redeem himself after scathing attacks on the debate in Las Vegas last week. Warren came out strong with an aggressive performance, while Sanders walked away mostly unharmed, politics reporters for The New York Times wrote in an analysis. GORDON RAMSAY'S 24 HOURS TO HELL AND BACK 8 p.m. on Fox. In this two hour season finale, the host Gordon Ramsay tries to save a pizza restaurant and a Korean inspired eatery in Arkansas. The owner of the pizza place is prone to violent outbursts, while the owner of the Korean inspired joint lacks the industry know how to run a successful business. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
China Is Eager to Bring High Speed Rail Expertise to the U.S. BEIJING Nearly 150 years after American railroads brought in thousands of Chinese laborers to build rail lines across the West, China is poised once again to play a role in American rail construction. But this time, it would be an entirely different role: supplying the technology, equipment and engineers to build high speed rail lines. The Chinese government has signed cooperation agreements with the State of California and General Electric to help build such lines. The agreements, both of which are preliminary, show China's desire to become a big exporter and licensor of bullet trains traveling 215 miles an hour, an environmentally friendly technology in which China has raced past the United States in the last few years. "We are the most advanced in many fields, and we are willing to share with the United States," Zheng Jian, the chief planner and director of high speed rail at China's railway ministry, said. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has closely followed progress in the discussions with China and hopes to come here later this year for talks with rail ministry officials, said David Crane, the governor's special adviser for jobs and economic growth, and a board member of the California High Speed Rail Authority. China is offering not just to build a railroad in California but also to help finance its construction, and Chinese officials have already been shuttling between Beijing and Sacramento to make presentations, Mr. Crane said in a telephone interview. China is not the only country interested in selling high speed rail equipment to the United States. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Spain, France and Italy have also approached California's High Speed Rail Authority. The agency has made no decisions on whose technology to choose. But Mr. Crane said that there were no apparent weaknesses in the Chinese offer, and that Governor Schwarzenegger particularly wanted to visit China this year for high speed rail discussions. Even if an agreement is reached for China to build and help bankroll a high speed rail system in California, considerable obstacles would remain. China's rail ministry would face independent labor unions and democratically elected politicians, neither of which it has to deal with at home. The United States also has labor and immigration laws stricter than those in China. In a nearly two hour interview at the rail ministry's monolithic headquarters here, Mr. Zheng said repeatedly that any Chinese bid would comply with all American laws and regulations. China's rail ministry has an international reputation for speed and low costs, and is opening 1,200 miles of high speed rail routes this year alone. China is moving rapidly to connect almost all of its own provincial capitals with bullet trains. But while the ministry has brought costs down through enormous economies of scale, "buy American" pressures could make it hard for China to export the necessary equipment to the United States. The railways ministry has concluded a framework agreement to license its technology to G.E., which is a world leader in diesel locomotives but has little experience with the electric locomotives needed for high speeds. According to G.E., the agreement calls for at least 80 percent of the components of any locomotives and system control gear to come from American suppliers, and labor intensive final assembly would be done in the United States for the American market. China would license its technology and supply engineers as well as up to 20 percent of the components. State owned Chinese equipment manufacturers initially licensed many of their designs over the last decade from Japan, Germany and France. While Chinese companies have gone on to make many changes and innovations, Japanese executives in particular have grumbled that Chinese technology resembles theirs, raising the possibility of legal challenges if any patents have been violated. All of the technology would be Chinese, Mr. Zheng said. China has already begun building high speed rail routes in Turkey, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. It is looking for opportunities in seven other countries, notably a route sought by the Brazilian government between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Zheng said. International rail experts say that China has mastered the art of building high speed rail lines quickly and inexpensively. "These guys are engineering driven they know how to build fast, build cheaply and do a good job," said John Scales, the lead transport specialist in the Beijing office of the World Bank. The California rail authority plans to spend 43 billion to build a 465 mile route from San Francisco to Los Angeles and on to Anaheim that is supposed to open in 2020. The authority was awarded 2.25 billion in January in federal economic stimulus money to work on the project. The authority's plans call for 10 billion to 12 billion in private financing. Mr. Crane said China could provide much of that, with federal, state and local jurisdictions providing the rest. Mr. Zheng declined to discuss financial details. China's mostly state controlled banks had few losses during the global financial crisis and are awash with cash now because of tight regulation and a fast growing economy. The Chinese government is also becoming disenchanted with bonds and looking to diversify its 2.4 trillion in foreign reserves by investing in areas like natural resources and overseas rail projects. "They've got a lot of capital, and they're willing to provide a lot of capital" for a California high speed rail system, Mr. Crane said. Later plans call for the California line to be extended to Sacramento and San Diego, while a private consortium hopes to build a separate route from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
To get to Sherwood Content, the hometown of the Jamaican track star Usain Bolt, rent a Toyota Yaris at Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay. Drive 27 miles along narrow unmarked roads through sugar cane fields, swerving to avoid cavernous potholes, goats and drivers who holler out the window to offer "the good stuff." Upon slamming into one of those potholes, hook up the jack to repair the flat tire. Because the bolts are too tight, flag down two young men who kindly but wordlessly remove the flat and put on the lumpy spare. Drive more slowly and carefully, past faded pastel colored brick houses and wooden shacks, until you reach a concrete marker in front of the post office depicting Mr. Bolt as "the world's fastest man." By this point it is 2 p.m., 82 degrees and humid. My 13 year old daughter, Rose, and I lace up our shoes and begin our first run in Jamaica. "Run, mon, run!" shouts an elderly man in a beard and a Rastafarian cap, from the side of the road. I've aspired to be a runner for years. My father racked up five to seven miles daily, and he spoke almost mystically of the runner's high that allowed him the space to work out problems in his head. My mom, too, jogged every day. "Jamaica is more suited to sprinting than long distance running," Mr. Bolt, who competes in his final Olympics this August, wrote in an email interview. "However, we have a lot of rolling hills, beautiful weather, scenic countryside and sandy beaches, which makes it enjoyable for long distance running, too." In 2012, the year Mr. Blake won silver at the Olympics, he told CNN: "We grew up in the country where your only friends are animals. I find it funny. Once we were running with goats and stuff. I think the sprinting really starts from there." Following Mr. Bolt's recommendations for running spots, Rose and I drove all over the island, attempting to soak up the regional intangibles (with goats, if necessary) that turned Mr. Bolt, Mr. Blake and other contemporaries into lifelong runners. Jamaica has been known for this sport since the early 1900s, when G. C. Foster, who spent his youth walking and biking the hills surrounding his Kingston hometown, did the 100 yard dash in 9.8 seconds at the island's track and field championships. According to The Jamaica Gleaner, he took a banana boat to the 1908 Olympics in London, only to find Jamaica was unaffiliated with the Games and he had no eligibility. But Foster opened the door for numerous track and field champions over the years: Arthur Wint, Merlene Ottey, Veronica Campbell Brown, Asafa Powell. "We have created a culture of excellence, and friendly rivalry, which pushes us more and more," Mr. Francis said, pointing to the March "Champs" high school track competition, in which schoolkids compete before 35,000 people in Kingston. "People want to run fast and jump higher because they want the bragging rights." Although Mr. Bolt had suggested running along the Martha Brae River, near Sherwood Content, we didn't get far beyond his hometown post office. Our pothole misadventures killed the morning, and I was worried about driving on the Yaris's spare tire in the dark. So Rose and I parked on the side of the road, laced up our shoes in the back seat and jogged down the one lane strip of blacktop at the center of the tiny village. It was Easter Sunday, so many locals in suits and dresses were attending services at the Waldensia Baptist Church, singing hymns audible from the roadside. But this sight of American tourists in running shoes, sweating in the midday heat, was too much for passers by. A small child sitting in the back seat of a parked car mocked us as we ambled by: "Run! Run! Run!" Self conscious, we stopped after about a mile, then walked up to a roadside shack where a woman sold us two icy water bottles for 350 Jamaican dollars ( 2.80). I asked whether many out of town runners journeyed here, to experience Mr. Bolt's hometown. Then we took off for Negril, a two hour drive to the west side of the island. We were tired and hungry when we arrived at the center of the tourist district, a strip of restaurants and hotels along the beach, including Jimmy Buffett's venerable Margaritaville. Rather than walk through a hotel lobby for a tourist buffet, we ordered the vegetarian patty and scrambled egg sandwich at Miss Sonia's, a roadside cafe under a canopy, full of white plastic tables. Because we weren't staying in one of the many Negril hotels, we had to find another way of accessing the beach, so we strolled through a small art market, indulging a couple of aggressive salespeople who showed us portraits of Bob Marley and green, yellow and black shotglasses and beaded bracelets. Behind the market was a scrum of barbecuers and tailgaters blasting Rihanna and reggae, whom we had to slip past on the way to the beach. Finally, we made it to the sand. It was hard to run here, especially in my bulky Adidas, which quickly became heavy and waterlogged. But the blue green Caribbean was such a shimmering backdrop that we didn't mind, and we ran for a mile and a half, until the sunburned tourists and sand castles became too difficult to dodge. The next day, we headed to Kingston via the recently completed toll road no goats or potholes, but Rose was disappointed with the lack of roadside shacks selling fresh mango and chinaberry. We picked the Spanish Court Hotel as our Kingston base: It is centrally located downtown, three blocks away from another of Mr. Bolt's running picks, the urban Emancipation Park. By 9 a.m., when we arrived, a security guard said the reservoir was closed until the evening because of low daily demand nobody runs during the sunniest hours. We begged, and she reluctantly opened the large gates to let us in for 20 minutes. We parked in a dirt lot, climbed a hill and reached an unexpected new world, removed from Kingston's heavy traffic and smog. The reservoir is stunning, a dark green oval stretching beyond our view, with the eastern hills as a backdrop. Butterflies floated by as we took off down the flat 2,600 meter (1.6 mile) path. This seemed like the ideal spot to boost our distance beyond 1.5 miles, but we had only 20 minutes, so we ran as far and fast as we could before returning to the Yaris. I was feeling discouraged when we got to Emancipation Park in downtown Kingston, surrounded by a wrought iron fence separating it from drab, brownish office buildings. Clouds rolled in, and for the first time since we'd arrived in Jamaica four days earlier, rain began to fall, a light drizzle, not enough for umbrellas and jackets. Passing into the park beyond Laura Facey's bronze "Redemption Song" sculpture, of a naked man and woman staring into the sky, we found a half kilometer running loop. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
WHEN a longtime friend asked for a loan to help get her boyfriend back on his feet, Maria Voltl, 84, decided to help. Ms. Voltl had lent money to her friend before, and it had always been paid back. So without consulting a professional, she handed over 500,000. Now Ms. Voltl is regretting her generosity. None of the money, which was her retirement nest egg, has been repaid even after a judgment against the couple. "I treated my friend like a daughter," said Ms. Voltl, of Sparks, Nev. "She said she'd take care of me. Then she sold me out." As a result, Ms. Voltl lives near the poverty line. She shops at Goodwill, no longer travels and bought a cheaper car with better gas mileage. "My last nice years are ruined," she said. Financial crimes against elders are taking a toll on lives and pocketbooks. And trusted caregivers the friends and relatives who offer support and guidance are often the ones at fault, according to legal and financial specialists. The over 65 segment is expected to grow to 20 percent of the total United States population by 2050 from 13 percent today, according to the Census Bureau, and financial abuse is expected to rise in tandem, draining hard won retirement money. In New York, which has the third highest population of seniors in the United States, the number of financial abuse cases is expected to surge by 2030, according to the New York State Office of Children and Family Services estimates. Older adults are appealing and vulnerable targets. "They have a lot of money that was saved over the years," says Tiffany Couch, the founder of Acuity Forensics, a forensic accounting firm in Vancouver, Wash. They are also usually debt free and own their homes. As dementia and Alzheimer's rates climb, the elderly may also be increasingly incapable of protecting themselves from fraud. Their caregivers may be dealing with a lot of debt and pressure, and suffering through a bad economy, Ms. Couch said. So they may decide to use an elder's money to shore up their own finances. "The people stealing from us are never the ones we think will do it," said Ms. Couch, whose own financial abuse cases have been increasing. "They could be a trusted friend, family member or caretaker. And their typical defense is that 'They were going to die anyway, so I thought I'd get my inheritance.' " Financial abuse of the elderly has no income boundaries, said Leslie Rice Albrecht, a retired detective with the San Diego Police Department. "The abused elder can be someone on a fixed income or someone worth millions," she said. "But money is always at the root, one way or another." The Brooke Astor case is an all too familiar example of financial elder abuse in which one person was given control of assets, Ms. Couch said. Mrs. Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted in 2009 of defrauding his socialite mother of tens of millions of dollars, using some of it to buy a yacht and other luxuries. Mr. Marshall had also been given power of attorney, in which a caretaker has control over another person's financial transactions, and where financial abuse can occur unseen. "Power of attorney gives 100 percent access of an elder's bank accounts to a single person with no oversight," Ms. Couch said. "When that happens, there isn't much that you can do." Those all important keys to the financial kingdom can allow a caretaker to steal money easily. The crimes often begin with the theft of smaller items like jewelry and blank checks. Later, larger items are stolen, according to a MetLife Mature Market Institute study. Caretakers or guardians might sign over a house deed to themselves or liquidate assets. If the smaller crimes are not detected, they increase over time, Ms. Couch said. "These financial ruses can be called pre grave robbing," said Gary Altman, founder of the estate planning law firm Altman Associates. "The will may be changed at the last moment or power of attorney used to take someone's assets." The actor Mickey Rooney was also said to be the victim of pre grave robbing by his stepson, who had been given power of attorney. The stepson had taken over Mr. Rooney's finances, said Bruce Ross, a Los Angeles based trial lawyer at Holland Knight. He then began draining millions of dollars from Mr. Rooney's accounts, according to published reports. When the actor died in April, he was broke and in debt, Mr. Ross said. In testimony to Congress, Mr. Rooney urged abused elderly people not to stay silent as he had. Victims should speak out and get help, specialists say. Adam Fried, a partner at Reminger law firm in Cleveland, urged people to contact their lawyer and a state Adult Protective Services agency. "It's their job to protect the elderly population," he said. In the end, prevention is crucial. Practice good oversight of anyone who has power of attorney, Ms. Couch said, since the problem can be discovered just by regularly checking bank statements. "Don't give away the keys to the kingdom," she added. "Once people have access to your accounts, not much can be done." Ms. Couch advised older adults to have one other person look at bank statements and canceled checks. "You can have your kids, accountants or financial advisers do it," she said. "In many cases, someone writes a check to themselves, and that can be flagged." Have checks and balances in place, Mr. Altman said. Examples include having co trustees for irrevocable trusts that hold assets and co agents under the power of attorney both of which give added protection. "Also, having a guardian or conservator appointed can be useful," he said. Once financial abuse happens, though, cases are rarely punished, specialists said. The defrauded person may be afraid of looking foolish or causing anguish in the family. "Seniors are afraid that they'll lose their independence," said Janet Carruthers, an accountant at Sterling Money Management in Virginia. "They aren't going to call the police." As Ms. Voltl, who still has not told one of her sons about losing her nest egg, said: "I was embarrassed about doing such a stupid thing. Even my friends don't know about the swindle." Abuse is underreported and many cases do not come to light, Mr. Ross said. But enough do that courts are overwhelmed with cases, which can slow resolution. California is one of the few states with strong elder abuse laws, Ms. Rice Albrecht said. Offenders can be fined or sent to prison for defrauding older adults. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
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