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People who live in Queens Village will tell you that the neighborhood lives up to its name. Residential and calm, with a distinct commercial center, it is often described as feeling like a small town. "It's a nice neighborhood, clean and quiet," said Joseph Koshy, a retired city Transit Authority supervisor who recently bought a two bedroom co op in the Bell Park Manor Terrace complex. "It's like living in a village upstate." Affordability is one of the main draws to this stable middle class neighborhood, made up mainly of single family homes and some co ops, in the eastern part of the borough. House prices tend to be lower than in nearby Floral Park and Bellerose, which also offer the qualities of suburban style living and lower taxes than on Long Island. Another attraction of Queens Village: its own centrally located Long Island Rail Road station, which allows residents to get to Penn Station in Manhattan in about half an hour. In the words of Anne Donohue, a broker who owns an agency bearing her name, "It's affordable, it is in District 26, which has excellent schools, it is convenient to transportation and it's easy to get in and out of the city," being near to both the Grand Central and Cross Island Parkways. Commercial life in this sprawling neighborhood (its two main ZIP codes, 11428 and 11429, cover about two square miles) revolves around the intersection of Springfield Boulevard and Jamaica Avenue, where the train station is. The neighborhood also is dotted with churches. The imposing Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church on 220th Street runs a parochial school, as does the stately St. Joseph's Episcopal Church on 217th Lane, with its spire and red clapboard exterior. A hallmark of Queens Village is its diversity. According to 2010 census data, half of the 52,000 residents are African American, 18.4 percent are Hispanic, 16 percent Asian, and 6 percent white. Among the growing Asian population are many South Asians and a small community of Filipinos, the census figures show. Cecille Lagan, a real estate broker, says Queens Village is popular among immigrant families who are looking to break into the housing market. "Everybody is looking for value," she said, "and immigrants are very good at finding these neighborhoods, finding the value." She is currently selling the four bedroom home of a woman in her 80s who has lived there since the 1960s, raising her family. The woman has decided to move to a smaller place, but Ms. Lagan, having spent time at the house, understands why it is difficult to leave. "I sit on the porch and I don't see too many people," she said. "It's very peaceful." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Powerful men continue to be accused of sexual harassment and assaults, and have been responding by accepting, hedging or dodging the allegations. Matt Lauer expressed "sorrow and regret for the pain I have caused" in a statement on Thursday morning, his first public comments after NBC News fired the star "Today" show anchor amid allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior with colleagues. "Some of what is being said about me is untrue or mischaracterized, but there is enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed," Mr. Lauer wrote in a message issued by his public relations team. "I regret that my shame is now shared by the people I cherish dearly." "There are no words to express my sorrow and regret for the pain I have caused others by words and actions," Mr. Lauer wrote. "To the people I have hurt, I am truly sorry. As I am writing this I realize the depth of the damage and disappointment I have left behind at home and at NBC." Mr. Lauer's abrupt downfall comes amid a head spinning series of harassment and abuse claims that have toppled powerful men in journalism, comedy, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, including the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and another famed television morning host, Charlie Rose of CBS. By Thursday, NBC had received at least three complaints related to Mr. Lauer, including from a former employee who said that the anchor sexually assaulted her in his office in 2001. Another woman, who spoke with NBC executives on Monday evening, described interactions with Mr. Lauer that began while covering the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Mr. Lauer's statement concluded: "Repairing the damage will take a lot of time and soul searching and I'm committed to beginning that effort. It is now my full time job. The last two days have forced me to take a very hard look at my own troubling flaws. It's been humbling. I am blessed to be surrounded by the people I love. I thank them for their patience and grace." A fixture of American living rooms for more than two decades, Mr. Lauer was uncharacteristically silent on Wednesday in the wake of his firing, which left the television industry stunned and dominated headlines around the country. His former co host on the "Today" show, Savannah Guthrie, read his statement aloud at the start of Thursday's 7 a.m. broadcast, saying the program had received Mr. Lauer's remarks just moments before going on air. "It is a difficult morning here again," Ms. Guthrie said at the beginning of the show, as headlines flashed onscreen about "Troubling Allegations" involving the man who, until Tuesday, had welcomed millions of Americans every morning to the same broadcast. Stephanie Gosk, an NBC News correspondent, came on set to present a report on the allegations against Mr. Lauer, describing him as "one of the most high profile faces of the sexual harassment firestorm engulfing this country." Ms. Gosk confirmed a report in The New York Times that two additional women had filed complaints about Mr. Lauer to NBC News on Wednesday, in the hours after the anchor's firing was announced, bringing the total number of complaints against him to three. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In a sign of how dominant the issue of harassment has become, much of Thursday's "Today" program touched on allegations of abuse and misconduct. Ms. Guthrie conducted an interview with Marion Brown, who described being harassed by Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who is at the center of his own scandal. Megyn Kelly, the host of the show's 9 a.m. hour, used her opening segment to invite Mr. Lauer's accusers, and Mr. Lauer, to appear with her on the show. "We have been that place in all the other cases, and we will be that place, as well as for the accused, here on this hour," Ms. Kelly said, looking into the camera. Citing allegations from various news reports, Ms. Kelly also spent more time describing Mr. Lauer's alleged misbehavior than his former co hosts in the show's 7 a.m. hour had. Still, some members of the "Today" team found room for lighter fare. Ms. Guthrie and Mr. Lauer's substitute, Hoda Kotb, gushed about the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree on Wednesday evening, a live television event that Mr. Lauer had been scheduled to co host (he did not appear). And when the meteorologist Al Roker came onscreen for his first weather report, he adopted his usual perky mien. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
BEFORE Betty Bell, 88, even got out of bed, the telephone jolted her awake at 7 a.m. The male voice on the line said that a police officer was coming to arrest her for shirking her civic duty. "He told me he was from the courthouse and I had been called for jury duty, but I had not shown up. So they were sending someone over to arrest me," said Mrs. Bell, a retired accounting and payroll clerk for New Jersey Bell, who moved to the Overland Court Senior Living residence in Boise, Idaho, three years ago. Just as the caller got to the part about how much she needed to pay to avoid arrest, she passed the phone to a nurse's aide who had just walked in the room. The caller hung up. Mrs. Bell was luckier than others who have been tricked into sending money in response to such threats. The swindle takes advantage of older people's sense of civic duty, and frightens some into complying, even though law enforcement officials say they never call people and ask for personal financial information. "Seniors are targeted for a variety of scams because it's a low risk crime that is often not reported," said Don Blandin, chief executive of the Investor Protection Trust, an investor education organization. "It's a great embarrassment, especially when people feel some cognitive loss and they don't want to be seen as vulnerable." No one knows how many older people are victims of this kind of fraud. The Federal Trade Commission, which compiles fraud complaints, estimated in its 2011 national fraud survey that some 25.6 million adults those at least 18 years old were victims that year. And some had been victims more than once, with a total 37.8 million incidents. Retirees are prime targets because they have retirement savings and equity in their homes. And, many still use landlines, making them easier to find through phone lists that are sold commercially. "You can buy a list, for example, that targets categories like 'women over 60, living alone,' " said Amy Nofziger, who directs the AARP Foundation's consumer fraud programs in Colorado, which counsels seniors who report being victimized by repeat scams such as foreign lottery windfalls. Scammers exhort "winners" of sweepstakes and lotteries to first pay expenses or taxes to spring millions of dollars in payouts. Others promote discount medical supplies and investments, ranging from fake mortgages to time shares and their resale, according to the F.T.C.'s Bureau of Consumer Protection. Last year, the commission logged 1.1 million fraud related consumer complaints in its Consumer Sentinel Network database. The complainants, of whom 47 percent were 50 and older, reported 1.6 billion in losses, with a median payment of 400 per complaint. Scammers most often used the telephone to get in touch with consumers, accounting for 40 percent of all contacts, up from 30 percent just two years earlier. Approaches via email followed at 33 percent in 2013, according to the government data. "A lot of these frauds are old wine in new bottles," said Lois C. Greisman, the F.T.C.'s associate director for the marketing practices division, referring to scams that are repeats or embroideries of previous fraudulent pitches. "Technology has made it even easier," she said, "because the costs of the outbound telephone contacts are negligible, about one cent, and many come from offshore, which are harder to pursue." Impostor fraud where people pose as law enforcers, government employees or relatives is escalating and ranks as the fourth most common fraud across the country, according to the commission's Consumer Sentinel data. It has moved up since 2012, when it was ranked No. 6. Last year, it was the most prevalent type of fraud in Indiana, Montana and West Virginia, according to the F.T.C. data. Arthur Hurme, told that his daughter was in jail, bought 3,000 in MoneyPak cards and gave the numbers to a caller. Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times "The scammers target everybody, but they're more likely to get older people to respond because they answer the phone and they are not used to being tricked," said Abigail Kuzma, director of consumer protection for the Indiana Attorney General's office, which looks into instances of fraud. Indiana is among the states fighting the flourishing grandparent scam, which preys on family ties and typically snares thousands of dollars. The distraught caller claims to be a grandson or granddaughter, jailed in a faraway state or overseas location, who needs immediate cash for bail, legal fees or expenses. The grandparent scams were among the frauds named in 2009 when the F.T.C. charged MoneyGram, a large money transfer service, with helping telemarketers dupe consumers. The commission returned 18 million to victims in 2010. MoneyGram and other services have fraud warning sections on their websites, and caution visitors not to give out any identifying card information. Such services also typically report fraud complaints to the F.T.C. Last November, MoneyGram settled with the Department of Justice, agreeing to forfeit 100 million in a complaint that said consumers, particularly older people, had lost that amount between 2004 and 2009. According to the settlement, the Dallas company collected fees for transactions involving schemes like collecting a nonexistent cash prize or relatives in urgent need of money. "These types of scams are very persistent," said Brett DeLange, Idaho's deputy attorney general. "And they come in cycles because these are sophisticated crooks who know they can prey only so much in an area before people begin to catch on." To keep abreast of the shifting types of fraud, the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging has set up its own telephone hotline. The committee has received about 1,500 calls since last November, said Bryan F. Gulley, a committee spokesman. About two thirds of callers have themselves been scammed; the other calls are from concerned family, friends or neighbors. Lotteries, sweepstakes, health care insurance and home improvement scams top the list of reported cons, he said. "It's hard to put an exact dollar figure on the losses," Mr. Gulley said, "because we don't know how many scams there are. A lot of people don't realize they've been defrauded, or they don't report it because they are ashamed and don't want their families to know." The committee plans to hold a hearing in the next few months on "the worst of the worst the grandparents scheme," he said. The fraudsters, he said, search social media for personal information on people's relatives, then pose as the grandchild in trouble who insists that the parents not be called. Even those involved in combating fraud can find themselves as victims. Sally B. Hurme, a fraud expert and lawyer at AARP, discovered recently that her husband, a federal retiree, sent thousands of dollars after getting a phone call, allegedly from their grown daughter in a Los Angeles jail on drunken driving charges. "It was a bad connection and I have bad hearing," explained Art Hurme, "but the woman calling said she was my daughter, she was in trouble and not to call anyone else. She had answers for every question. It was a convincing story and very slick. "So when her 'lawyer' called for 3,000, I went to Walmart and bought six 500 MoneyPak cards, and I came back home and read them the numbers." As more scams siphon retirement money from seniors, the AARP began a Fraud Watch Network map in March, expanding the fraud awareness campaign it began last fall. The network also has t a national fraud hotline, 877 908 3360. "We hear it every day the person who 'won' the lottery, but needs to send in 5,000, or the call that says 'just log me in' to fix a computer glitch, or the grandson calling from Mexico for bail money," said Jean Mathisen, director for the AARP Foundation's Fraud Fighter Call Center, in Seattle. "They are taking money people have saved for their whole lives." Most money is not recovered, and scolding people afterward, the advocacy group has found, does little to stop such fraud. That is why the group's fraud fighter program offers free peer counseling to those who report being defrauded. Last year, about 3,000 consumers received such counseling, according to the program. Not all of the consumers disclosed how much they lost, but those who did reported losses of 15.6 million. When someone calls," Mr. DeLange, in Idaho, advised, "the first thing to do is to hang up." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
There's little Ishi (Satoshi Mizuno), whose parents expired in a restaurant blaze; troubled Yuki (Mondo Okumura), processing parental suicide; beautiful Ikuko (Sena Nakajima), whose jealous mother and philandering father were murdered; and philosophical Hikari, orphaned by a bus crash during an "All You Can Eat Strawberries" package tour. "From now on, my life will be flavorless," Ishi murmurs, as if speaking for all four. Wry humor, absurd dialogue and unflagging energy propel a series of manic adventures all realized in their own distinctive visual style that lead, in the best Hollywood tradition, to the kids forming a band. Throughout, Hikari, the movie's de facto narrator, delivers mordant observations on their journey, an old school game console rarely leaving his hand. Like his new friends, he's slowly learning to accept his tragic situation. Smart, noisy and flashily assured, "We Are Little Zombies" is entirely, gleefully its own thing. Abuse and neglect, drunkenness and disappointment and a touchingly preserved umbilical cord cram its hyperactive plot, offering tender clues to problems that predate the children's bereavement. If we could only scrape away some of the razzle dazzle, we might be surprisingly moved by the damage lurking beneath. We Are Little Zombies Not rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours. Watch through virtual cinemas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
HERE on the historic Grand Trunk Road, some 40 miles north of Lahore and a few hours south of the former Bin Laden hideout of Abbottabad, a mosque's call to Friday afternoon prayers was overwhelmed by Pakistani pop music spilling from open air markets. The barks of bus conductors calling out destinations added to the din. The passing parade of motorized rickshaws, farm tractors, buses and highway cargo trucks looked as if a re enactment of '60s peaceniks making the pilgrimage to Woodstock might be under way. A panorama of red, yellow and green, mixed with plastic whirligigs, polished mahogany doors and gleaming stainless steel cover plates, was a magical sight for a visitor with a love for anything on wheels. It was not only the variety of vehicles all are common across South Asia that elicited this reaction, or even their Partridge Family meets Ken Kesey color schemes. Rather, it was the fascinating quantity and surrealistic detail of their decoration, unlike anything I'd seen in my travels around the world. A deeper understanding of the origins and meanings of the decoration craft was gained over days of mingling with the truck drivers and the owners of decorating shops in Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar. Karachi, situated on the Arabian Sea, is Pakistan's major seaport. It is also the cargo hub of the country, and with 13 million people has a great many local and intercity buses. As such, the city supports a considerable customizing industry: when Saudi Aramco World magazine published an article about the trade in 2005, more than 50,000 people in Karachi were said to be employed decorating buses and trucks. What I found at the Pakistani workshops was a pride of design and a willingness to answer questions and to show off their creations to a former long haul trucker. But my full beard may have helped in gaining their confidence and a look inside their truck cabs. At a driver's cafe near Karachi's three mile long International Truck Yard (where I turned down an offer of boiled camel meat and cow leg soup) workers took me by the hand to the shop of Masallah the truck decorator. My Dockers and Rockports were as out of place as their long shirted, working class shalwar kameez outfits and leather sandals, called chappals, would have been at Hunts Point in the Bronx. Government safety agencies equivalent to OSHA were nowhere to be seen in the truck yards, and workers, many of whom were children of the owners, were being showered with sparks from their grinders and cutting torches. Many of the trucks being outfitted at Masallah's carried identification plates from Balochistan Province. Their owners were prospering thanks to a steady demand for hauling loaded sea containers from Karachi's port to landlocked Afghanistan. Their cargo, typically including supplies for American and NATO military operations, make a trip of 500 miles by the southern route to Kandahar or 1,200 miles by a northern route to Kabul. Pakistani truck owners can easily spend more on their trucks than on their homes. One driver from the Gwadar area of Balochistan told me he had just bought a Hino truck chassis for the equivalent of 35,000 and brought it straight to Masallah's workshop. There he might spend another 25,000 for its body, paint and decoration. During the several weeks required to complete the work, he would sleep inside or under the truck, on his bedroll. Adding decorative touches like ribbons, spinners, flags and polished steel cutouts in the shape of animals to a small bus costs an owner at least 800. This is considered an advertising expense; a highly decorated bus is usually the first choice of customers when there are several options. Nissan and Hino tandem axle trucks of the flat front cabover design, many assembled in Pakistan, are the popular choices for cargo haulers today, replacing the revered Vauxhall Bedford, a British model with a traditional cab. The Bedford was the mainstay of Pakistan's cargo network since the early days of Pakistan's independence. The Bedford is still prized for its sturdy chassis and ability to continuously haul outsize loads. Many have bodywork with a high crowned front prow, which lends itself to decoration and gives the truck the look of a sailing ship. "Pakistani buses were originally decorated using carved woodwork and individual paintings," said Kurram Awan, the owner of a small shop of truck decorating supplies in Lahore. "Now, my shop sells over 1,000 different items, including braids, reflectors, flashing lights and antennas," he said. Durriya Kazi, an artist and teacher in Karachi, has long been a proponent of Pakistan's folk art. She sees bus and truck decorating as an integral part of that tradition, noting the importance of distinguishing between sculpture as defined by the art gallery and the rich activity of actually making things that exists all over Pakistan. In 2006, Ms. Kazi was instrumental in a program intended to spread Pakistan's bus decoration skills to Melbourne, Australia, where a tram was transformed into a replica of a minibus used on Karachi's W 11 route, resplendent in all its finery. Another Pakistani with expertise in the subject is Prof. Jamal J. Elias of the University of Pennsylvania, the author of "On Wings of Diesel: Trucks, Identity and Culture in Pakistan" (Oneworld, 2011). His book explores the tradition of Pakistani truck decoration, and looks into the "nature of response to religious imagery in popular Islamic culture." In an e mail, Professor Elias said that the creative inputs of decorators included several major themes, which could be combined across the cab and body of the truck or bus. These include Islamic religious images like the horse of Muhammad and depictions of the mosques at Mecca. Other possibilities include images of a fish, representing good fortune, or the elegant eyes of a woman, representing beauty. This contrasts greatly with another theme, which he described as elements of modern life. These are paintings of the Pakistani flag, or a military ruler, a Pakistan International Airlines jet or even a favorite singer. By tradition, each of these designs is placed in specific areas of a truck or bus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
That's why we must listen to the professional caregivers whose full time job it is to support some of the most at risk populations, particularly older people, young children and the range of people with compromised immune systems. The recent outbreak at a skilled nursing facility in Washington State underscores the urgency of this. Some of the first known deaths in the nation were among direct care workers who interacted with older people. Health officials agree that the risks for older people and for people with underlying health conditions are greatest. What you don't hear about as much is that the workers who are closest to those populations are also at risk. Domestic workers and caregivers do not have the same legal protections provided to almost all other workers in the United States. Most domestic workers in the United States today are black women and other women of color, and this was also true in the 1930s when Southern congressmen agreed to pass the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act only after domestic and agricultural workers were excluded. The Occupational Safety and Health Act that mandates basic protections also excludes domestic workers. So when we think about the coronavirus whom we need to listen to, whom we must protect and who will protect us remember the domestic and direct care workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should direct more of their resources toward the front line care professionals who work in the home and the community. These workers should be provided with masks and other safety equipment, rather than having to worry about where they will get them. They should be offered free testing and treatment for coronavirus. State and federal governments should distribute prevention materials in the many languages that domestic workers speak. The same workers who have been in the shadows could be key to stemming the spread of the virus. They can help ensure that children as well as people who are older or ill are taking the necessary precautions. They just need the chance to be a part of the solution. Employers must help, too. By providing paid sick days, flexibility and other accommodations, they can ensure that caregivers can protect their own health. It is a good time for employers to reassure caregivers they will have a job, even if they need to stay home. It's also a good time to contribute to benefits for your domestic worker. Programs like Alia, a benefits program by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, make it easy to enable your domestic worker to take a paid day off and gain access to a safety net. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
SEATTLE Amazon's warehouses have a reputation as often grueling environments for the workers who pick, pack and load orders there. Managers are pushed hard, too, according to the plaintiff in a new lawsuit against the internet retailer. The lawsuit, filed this month by Michael Ortiz, a former shift manager for Amazon in several warehouses in the San Francisco Bay Area, accuses Amazon of failing to pay him overtime wages. The suit, filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court, says that Amazon improperly classified Mr. Ortiz as exempt from overtime in violation of California labor regulations. Mr. Ortiz's lawyer, Scott Cole, said he would seek class action status for the suit with the addition of other plaintiffs. Kristen Kish, an Amazon spokeswoman, said the company would not comment on pending litigation. While most of the entry level workers at Amazon's warehouses, known as associates, are eligible for overtime pay, salaried managers are not under Amazon policy. In an interview, Mr. Ortiz, 34, said he and other managers had been promised when they were hired that their jobs would consist mostly of supervisory work. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In July, at his memorial service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the Honorable John Lewis was eulogized by three presidents. The sitting president was not among them. His absence was yet another assertion of the anti Black hostility and xenophobia fouling the polity with renewed vigor. We lament the current social climate as though it were anomalous, an outbreak of pestilence, when in reality these iniquities reverberate through our American centuries. We need a prophet a voice to call up the nation's oldest stories, a reckoning with what was so that we might understand what is. In "The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War," part literary biography, part Civil War history, Michael Gorra presents a cogent case for Faulkner as one such prophet. Gorra's premise is this: Through the spectacular specificity of Faulkner's novels set in his invented Yoknapatawpha County, he "tells about the South," as he wrote in "Absalom, Absalom!" from the King Cotton years of slavery, through the Civil War and into the 20th century. In so doing, Faulkner tells America. Faulkner's work, Gorra writes, "contains the richest gallery of characters in all of American literature, and in his handling of time and consciousness Faulkner stands as one of his century's most restless experimenters." The magnitude of Faulkner's subject matter is matched only by the immensity of his gifts. It bears mentioning here that I come to Gorra's book with certain biases. I am a novelist tasked with reviewing a scholarly analysis of a novelist's work. This is akin to asking the electrician to take a look at the plumbing. Scholars and novelists have fundamental differences about how to understand works of fiction. The best fiction is, to some degree, ineffable no matter how deeply she digs, the reader of a masterly work cannot precisely explain what she has experienced. Faulkner's is among the most masterly work American literature has produced. My allegiances lie with the mysteries, and I bristle a bit at analysis that breaks the spell, so to speak. Through the ineffable, through his relentless drive to describe what cannot be said directly, Faulkner plunges us into the harrowing canyons of the nation's past. Toni Morrison, his fellow Nobel laureate, wrote that she read Faulkner to "find out about this country and that artistic articulation of its past that was not available in history, which is what art and fiction can do but history sometimes refuses to do." In spending relatively little time with the literary aspects of Faulkner's novels the astounding characterization, his brilliance with metaphor and his dazzling descriptions of perception and physicality Gorra misses an opportunity to tell a fuller story of the sublime interplay of aesthetics and theme in Faulkner's work. This is doubly unfortunate because Gorra writes so beautifully when he turns his attention to Faulkner's artistry, as in this description of "Absalom, Absalom!": "This prose has that same overheated fecundity, its modifiers piled recklessly, rank with too much meaning." But these are relatively small complaints. Gorra's well conceived, exhaustively researched book probes history's refusals. He begins with "Intruder in the Dust" and one character's striking reverie about the moments before the ill fated charge that led to the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. Faulkner writes, "For every Southern boy" there is a fantasy about the instant before loss became inevitable, the "still not yet" when "it's all in the balance." This fixation on the horizon of defeat, Gorra maintains, is part of the collective delusion the South called the Lost Cause. The noble suffering of genteel Southern ladies, the Confederacy led by "gallant men of principle," slavery as a necessary and essentially benign institution these elements distort into a mythologized Southern history, what Gorra describes as a "Valhalla" that "snapped the threads of time itself, so reluctant has their society been to accept that war's verdict." That verdict, of course, was the end of slavery, mourned and avenged ever after. Faulkner did not shrink from this reality. As Gorra writes, "Few historians and fewer novelists of his day saw the hobbling vainglorious past so clearly, and few of them made slavery so central to their accounts of the war." Those vainglorious texts include "The Clansman" (1905), chock full of Negro rapists, pure white women and a heroic Ku Klux Klan and the inspiration for the film "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). In the years after, antebellum fairy tales proliferated, works like "Gone With the Wind," with its hoop skirts and happy darkies. By the time of that novel's publication in the 1930s, North and South alike had recast the war as a battle over states' rights, clearing a path for white supremacy to gallop forward into Jim Crow and beyond. In his urgency to make the case for Faulkner's merits, however, Gorra overcorrects with regard to his faults. What to do about the Faulkner who famously said of the civil rights struggle: "Go slow now." And worse: "If it came to fighting I'd fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the streets and shooting Negroes." Gorra isn't an apologist, but he does go to great lengths to avoid saying the obvious. He mentions Faulkner's infamous alcoholism as a factor that may have influenced his more incendiary comments. Of Faulkner's often lacking depictions of Black characters, Gorra writes, "Still that absence isn't precisely a lacuna, a hole in his thinking. ... Once again we need to ask what Faulkner isn't writing here. We need to read for the unspoken, for the stories that peep around the edges of the ones he's chosen to tell." The thing is, I don't expect Faulkner to properly inhabit Blackness. His triumph is his inhabitation of whiteness, his searing articulations of its ruination, brutality and shame. Gorra mounts a further defense by separating the man from the writing, as though the writing "made him better than he was; it made the books better than the man." But that's a dodge and, most significantly, it's not the point. Of course William Faulkner, Mississippi born in 1897, great grandson of a slave owning Confederate colonel, was a racist. But in Faulkner, as is the case in all of America, racism is not the conclusion to any argument. It does not preclude further discussion; it demands it. Gorra is right when he claims "much can and must be said about Faulkner's limitations, and yet no white writer in our literature thought longer and harder about that problem, the one that the Civil War's aftermath had set in place." Faulkner could engage these subjects with such bold brilliance precisely because he was geographically, historically, racially in the maw of the beast. This tangle aside, Gorra's book is rich in insight. In its final chapters, Gorra compares America's monuments to the Confederacy with Germany's memorials to the Holocaust. It would be unthinkable to most Americans if such memorials celebrated the Third Reich, yet monuments to the Confederacy and its legacy of slavery are ubiquitous their presence tolerated, in some cases revered, until very recently; still more evidence that the past is with us as it was in Faulkner's time, poisoning our generations like radioactivity in the soil. Gorra's book, as he writes in his preface, is "an act of citizenship," timely and essential as we confront, once again, the question of who is a citizen and who among us should enjoy its privileges. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
BREAK your financial life into chapters. Assign a high point, a low point and a turning point to each chapter. What's the story and what stands out? It sounds like a party game. But it was a survey created by Barnaby B. Riedel, chief strategist of Riedel Strategy, a social science based research firm, that yielded some unexpected but important insights into how money and investments fit into a person's overall financial life. Mr. Riedel undertook a six month study completed last month on behalf of United Capital, a large, registered investment adviser. It required him to have discussions lasting an hour or two with 30 couples. Those sessions were followed by another series of conversations with an additional 200 couples to check the results from the first group. "We wanted to isolate the most meaningful moments in a person's life," he said. One of the striking findings was that people rarely mentioned investment decisions among the most important events in their lives. What did stand out, even decades later, were moments when they made tough choices, often around spending and working, he said. Adviser firms, large and small, independent and connected to large brokerage firms, are trying to harness research like Mr. Riedel's to find better ways to service and let's be honest, attract and retain affluent clients. Some are focused on clients in their 40s and 50s who can still make changes to their financial lives; others are trying to talk directly to some of the 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 each day. Driving it all is a desire to be the firm that can address in some meaningful way the anxiety investors face around money. A recent Legg Mason study found that investors spend 80 minutes a day thinking or worrying about money, which adds up to 20 full days a year. A subset of this group spent two to three hours a day worrying about money, or 730 to 1,095 hours a year. The subjects in Mr. Riedel's survey had investable assets greater than 500,000 and also had financial dependents. "People seek financial guidance when they have someone else to worry about," he said. "Everyone had to meet certain demographic criteria, but also more subjective criteria. We wanted people who were not just do it yourselfers. We wanted people who were pretty high on the help seeker scale." At the start of the project, he said, he discarded the traditional life cycle financial planning model, with its three phases: accumulation of wealth, followed by the protection of it in the middle years and then the distribution of it later in life. "That method says life is composed of fairly predictable stages, and you just have to match guidance to that phase," he said. In an effort to uncover a more realistic pattern, he used techniques of narrative psychology, asking the participants about the highs, lows and turning points in their financial lives. By assigning certain codes to their answers, he was able to come up with four categories that better captured the stages of a person's financial existence working, spending, saving and investing. "The traditional model says a financial life is about saving and investing, but when people talk about their financial lives they talk about working and spending," he said. "It accounted for 90 percent of what we heard. Working and spending provide the drama of our lives." Crucial, though, were what people labeled the turning points. They were almost all about trade offs in life. Do you go to graduate school, and if so do you go to the top program or the one closer to home? Do you start your own business later in life or stay with the security of the job you've held for decades? "The big 'aha!' moment for us was that a financial life really isn't about money," Mr. Riedel said. "It's about people struggling to be the best version of themselves, to live a life they can feel proud to have led. Sometimes that involves making a hard decision to make less money." Joe Duran, the chief executive of United Capital, said he was using the survey findings to change the focus of the firm and its branding to "financial life management." "Every single financial decision is either moving you toward or away from your ideal life," he said. "To me, that's a fascinating idea. People said, 'Am I going to do the things that I want to make me happy, or am I going to go after money?' Your ideal self and your financial self are often at war." The trade offs are time, money and energy. As Mr. Duran sees it, you can't get more time, and your energy has to be replenished when it is depleted. How money is used is the bridge between the two. "Money lets you get more time you can get more babysitting; you can get a driver, to be more efficient. You can at least expand your uses of time," he said. "But when you make those trade offs, one way or another you'll never forget it." Last summer, Bank of America Merrill Lynch started a program it called Merrill Lynch Clear to help people in or approaching retirement. It focused on seven areas: health, home, family, finance, giving, work and leisure. To develop the program, Merrill also asked people what they cared about. "They never said words like beta or alpha," said David Tyrie, head of retirement and personal wealth solutions at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "They were talking about family and giving and wealth and home. So we said, 'Wait a second, how do we engage them in a dialogue of what their goals are?' " As part of its "advice beyond investing" campaign, UBS Wealth Management is beginning a financial education program next month that will work with clients and their children from elementary school to the early professional years. "When we ask our clients about what they're thinking, the financial stuff is at the bottom," said Judy Spalthoff, head of client development at UBS Wealth Management. "They're thinking about their family and their legacy. We're trying to be a thoughtful firm and say this is what they're thinking about." At the most basic level, the push to change the adviser client relationship by these very different firms makes sense. There are robo advisers and low cost brokerages that can strip away most of the costs from investing money. But the question is, How do firms adopt this new way, and can clients trust it? This advice, after all, is going to make the difference in someone's financial life. Yet it is being delivered by an adviser who may not be able to go beyond investment analysis. "Candidly, a lot of advisers are more engineering , math focused and they get uncomfortable with these discussions," Mr. Duran said. "We have a lot of advisers who think we're in the investment business. We're in the life business. To have these facts is incredibly affirming." Mr. Tyrie of Merrill said getting all of the firm's 14,000 advisers to strike the right note with clients would be challenging. "We're not pretending this is solving world hunger," he said. "We're saying this is a better way to engage people." And to help both sides of the discussion, the firm has divided the process into steps: understanding priorities, setting up goals and then tracking both to make sure they're in alignment. Knowing this is how firms are approaching them, clients need to find advisers with whom they can communicate. Otherwise, they're not only wasting the money they pay in fees; they're missing the opportunities to improve their financial lives. "The marketplace has realized that people are not better off if they do slightly better than the S. P. 500 and make stupid life choices," Mr. Duran said. "What you see now with what we and other firms are doing is how do you make consumers aware of their life choices. The things you look back on are when you couldn't have it all." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Elvis Costello has canceled the remainder of his European tour to recover from a cancer operation. The British singer songwriter, whose real name is Declan Patrick MacManus, said in a statement on his website on Friday that he had to undergo surgery for a "small but very aggressive" cancerous tumor. The 63 year old said he hoped he would be able to continue with the tour, but needs to take more rest. He said, "I must reluctantly cancel all the remaining engagements of this tour." The canceled concerts, part of the "Elvis Costello and the Imposters European Tour," were slated for Britain, Croatia, Austria, Norway and Sweden; the tour was to end originally on July 16. Mr. Costello is best known for his post punk hits from the 1970s, including "Alison," "Oliver's Army" and "Watching the Detectives." His 1999 cover of "She" featured on the soundtrack for the Richard Curtis movie "Notting Hill." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Now that books compete with Netflix and other binge watching streaming services, tangled plots, flawed characters and unreliable narrators have become essential ingredients of the modern crime novel. Alice Feeney's latest fast moving thriller, "His Hers," has plenty of these elements for readers willing to suspend disbelief to delve into the murderous private life of a BBC News anchor. "There are two sides to every story," Feeney's mysterious villain soliloquizes. "Yours and mine. Ours and theirs. His and hers. Which means someone is always lying." The "her" of the title is Anna Andrews, an understudy BBC News anchor with a brittle personality and a drinking problem so chronic that she keeps miniature bottles of liquor in her purse, swilling from them at any opportunity. She also takes a last minute slug of white wine before leaving for work in the morning never red because it leaves a telltale stain on her teeth. Anna's frailties are exposed through internal musings that chip away at her seemingly unflappable persona. The smile she flashes at the end of each broadcast never hints at her dark past. Inside, Anna is an emotional wreck partly from a recent tragedy and partly from the festering of a dark secret from her teens when she was befriended by a cliquey group of mean girls. ("I've spent so many years trying to forget these girls and now, once again, they are all that I can think about.") 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. Anna's alcoholism doesn't help either, although she covers it well with a ready supply of breath mints and an enviable ability to bounce back from binges: "It's nothing some prescription eye drops and a cup of coffee can't rectify." The "his" of the title is Detective Chief Inspector Jack Harper, a middle aged detective who gave up on the London rat race for low key policing in Blackdown. A burglary is the worst crime that Detective Harper handles in this quaint village surrounded by forests. "The truth is," he says, "since I left London, my job has been as dull as a nun's underwear drawer." This changes when the first victim turns up. Her silky blouse is soaked red from knife wounds to her chest. Written in red varnish on the victim's fingernails are the words "Two Faced." Tied around her tongue is a red and white friendship bracelet. With the regular news anchor unexpectedly back from maternity leave, Anna is demoted to the role of reporter and sent to cover the murder in Blackdown. This is her old stomping ground, where she grew up as the daughter of the village cleaning lady and where she made a secret visit on the night of the murder. Suddenly, Anna is beneath a cloud of suspicion, at least in the mind of the reader. Meanwhile, Jack is suffering the aftereffects of a late night assignation with a beautiful woman in a car. Lo and behold, when he arrives at the crime scene, he discovers that the murder victim is the woman from the night before. "This is bad," he thinks. "If anyone ever finds out, they're going to think it was me." And Jack's scarf, the one he wears around his neck like "a cozy personalized noose"? Turns out, it was a gift from his ex, who is none other than the television reporter assigned to cover this homicide investigation. That would be Anna Andrews. As animosity crackles between the exes, more mutilated bodies turn up in what appears to be a serial killing rampage. Mounting evidence points to the possibility that either Anna or Jack could be the killer, depending on which narrator is to be believed. These are not random killings; each murdered woman has a friendship bracelet tied around her tongue. And, decades earlier, all of the victims attended Anna's Sweet 16 birthday party which wasn't so sweet at all (in spite of the friendship bracelets distributed to guests). There's a reference to a bullying incident. The actual crime is far more heinous, though there's little time to dwell as the story propels toward a climax that reveals not just the killer but the reliability, or otherwise, of the narrators. Sympathetic characters are thin on the ground in a twisty tale that tests the limits of plausibility even as it entertains. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Did you know that the most widely accepted treatments for alcohol and drug addiction Alcoholics Anonymous and similar 12 step programs rest on the flimsiest of scientific evidence? I didn't. That and more are what the psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes and Zachary Dodes (father and son) claim in this polemical and deeply flawed book about the nature and treatment of addiction. It was Alcoholics Anonymous, of course, that developed the famous 12 steps, in which an addict admits to being powerless, submits to a higher power and recognizes all manner of personal failings. Enormously popular with the public and the medical establishment, A.A. became the gold standard for treating alcoholism. The group claims that up to 75 percent of its members maintain abstinence, but since it does not conduct outcome studies or publish its dropout rates, it is hard to gauge its true efficacy. And the authors are highly skeptical of its claims; they note, for example, that a randomized clinical trial in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1991 showed that patients assigned to A.A. did less well than those treated in hospitals, and that a 2006 Cochrane review concluded that the program's effectiveness was unclear and needed further study. They suggest that it might help only a subset of those who walk through the door. Even if one grants that A.A. and 12 step programs are helpful only to those patients who adhere to them, surely that is better than nothing. But the Dodeses' indictment goes much further: They tell readers that the public has been misinformed by the biological research community, and that addiction cannot be understood in terms of altered neurobiology, but as a pure psychological compulsion that helps addicts deal with feelings of helplessness. The evidence for this theory? One anecdote of a patient named Marion whose rage at having to cater to her demanding husband led her straight to the medicine cabinet; and a citation of Dr. Dodes's own paper in a psychoanalytic journal, which is a theoretical discussion of two more patient anecdotes. "The Sober Truth" asserts that addiction can be treated with psychodynamic psychotherapy, which focuses on unconscious feelings and thoughts. But while there is some scientific data for cognitive behavior therapy in addiction, there is little to no evidence that psychodynamic therapy is effective for any type of drug abuse. The authors' blanket claim of efficacy for their own cherished treatment, in the absence of credible data, is the very flaw for which they harshly criticize A.A. This simplistic and unitary model for addiction ignores much of clinical reality: drug abuse driven by novelty and sensation seeking, which is typical of adolescents; and the high prevalence of substance abuse in patients with major depression and anxiety disorders, most likely a result of efforts to self medicate. But the book's most glaring deficiency is the authors' dismissive attitude and misunderstanding about the role of neuroscience in addiction. Most people who experiment with drugs do not become addicted. Why? In part because there are important biological differences between those who fall to addiction and those who don't. Several brain imaging studies of people addicted to drugs like cocaine, opiates and alcohol suggest that they have fewer dopamine receptors in the brain's reward pathway than do nonaddicts. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter critical to the experience of pleasure and reward, so addicts may simply have a lower baseline level of happiness than other people. Other studies comparing the response of addicts and control subjects to an infusion of stimulant show that the addicts, with low levels of dopamine receptors, found it pleasurable, while those in the control group disliked it. These kinds of studies clearly show that neurobiology plays an important role in vulnerability to addiction, even if they cannot tell us its ultimate cause. Still, addiction is one of the most puzzling and fascinating human behaviors, one that reflects a complex interplay among genes, biology, psychology and environment. Those looking for a scientifically accurate and nuanced understanding of addiction and its treatment will not find it in this book. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
When Vroom, which sells used cars online, went public last week, photographs of its employees were displayed on Nasdaq's tower in Times Square. SAN FRANCISCO As the coronavirus spread in March, Vroom, a start up that sells used vehicles online, shelved its plans to go public and rushed to shore up its operations. But with many dealerships closed under shelter in place orders, people started buying more cars online, benefiting Vroom with record sales in March and April, the company said. "We saw the whole world stabilizing," said Paul Hennessy, the chief executive. "At the end of April, we said, 'OK, maybe we should actually go on the offensive here.'" Vroom, which is based in New York, capped that offensive by going public last week. Its share price more than doubled on the first day of trading as the company raised 495 million from its offering. As the market has bounced back, SelectQuote, an online insurance provider; ZoomInfo, a sales software data provider; Warner Music Group, a record label; and Vroom have gone public. And more initial public offerings are on the way. Lemonade, an insurance start up valued at 2.1 billion, announced last week that it had confidentially filed to go public. DoubleDown Interactive, a mobile gaming company, also filed to go public this month. Some of the biggest Silicon Valley start ups are taking steps toward an I.P.O., too. Airbnb, the home rental start up valued at 31 billion, said it hadn't ruled out going public this year. Palantir, a digital surveillance company valued at 20 billion, is preparing to file for an I.P.O. in the coming weeks, said a person briefed on the start up's plans, who declined to be named because the talks were private. Palantir declined to comment; Bloomberg reported earlier on its I.P.O. plans. "The window is open," said Previn Waas, a partner focused on I.P.O.s at the professional services firm Deloitte. "Everyone has figured out that a virtual I.P.O. is possible. There's an appetite for companies to go public." Jeff Thomas, head of West Coast listings and capital markets at the Nasdaq stock exchange, said, "Everybody who was in process is gearing back up." Morgan Stanley had spent the last few months helping companies affected by the coronavirus find financing in every form except public offerings, said Colin Stewart, Morgan Stanley's head of technology equity capital markets. The market was too volatile, and companies had to assess how the virus had changed their financial forecasts, he said. But now with the stock market more stable, the situation has changed. "It's clear there is a lot of pent up investor demand to look at I.P.O.s," Mr. Stewart said. Wall Street is embracing them even though many of the companies are losing money. Vroom lost 143 million last year on 1.2 billion in revenue, according to its disclosures. The food delivery start up DoorDash, which filed in February to go public and has seen increased use in the pandemic, has also burned through hundreds of millions in cash and is unprofitable. Last year, high profile money losers such as Uber and Lyft also went public and promptly skidded in the stock market. Their disappointing performances and the failed I.P.O. of WeWork set off a wave of prudence across the start up world. But excitement for new listings especially for fast growing tech companies has sidelined the question of profitability. Investors have become more tolerant of money losing companies because the virus has accelerated the adoption of technology like e commerce, virtual learning, streaming, telehealth and delivery, said Gavin Baker, chief investment officer at Atreides Management, which invests in private and public companies. "Covid pulled the world into 2030," Mr. Baker said. Not all of the companies that were on track to go public this year may make it, given how the economy is reeling from the pandemic. In early March, EquityZen, an investment service that tracks I.P.O.s, published a list of nine potential candidates for the year. Four including the home rental company Vacasa, the 3 D printing company Desktop Metal and Velodyne Lidar, which makes technology for driverless cars have since laid off staff because of the coronavirus. "If we wrote the list today, it would have a very different set of components," said Phil Haslett, a co founder of EquityZen. Airbnb, which had said it would go public this year, was hit especially hard by the travel shutdown. It raised new funding in April and cut a quarter of its staff. Asked about going public this year, Brian Chesky, its chief executive, said in a recent interview: "You can deal with some volatility, but there is a threshold. We're kind of feeling out where that threshold is." The window for I.P.O.s right now may be small. A second wave of virus related shutdowns could send the stock market into another tailspin. Companies also need to navigate disclosing their second quarter financials, as well as holidays like Labor Day and Yom Kippur. Plus there is the November presidential election, which may create volatility in the market. As a result, more companies than usual are aiming to go public in August, a month they traditionally avoided because people were often on vacation, Mr. Thomas of Nasdaq said. The exchange is telling companies to be ready to go public any time, he said, and to have alternative financing ready in case they can't. "The market was just not in a place to have an I.P.O. come out," he said. In May, after the market had stabilized, Mr. Schuck decided to go for it. But there were other challenges. While executives typically go on a "roadshow" to pitch their company's shares to investors, he was stuck at home. So he crammed back to back virtual meetings with investors into a week. Even though he was at home, he said, he made sure to dress up and even wear shoes. On the morning of ZoomInfo's I.P.O. on June 4, Mr. Schuck hit a ceremonial virtual button to open trading, alongside his wife and 4 year old daughter. ZoomInfo's shares rose more than 60 percent on the first day of trading. Mr. Hennessy of Vroom also held a virtual roadshow, taking meetings with investors via teleconference from his home in Suffern, N.Y. He said he appreciated the efficiency of the roadshow, which would normally have lasted two weeks across multiple cities. On the day of the I.P.O. on June 9, Mr. Hennessy and his executive team could not travel to Nasdaq, where Vroom was listing, to press the opening buzzer since the exchange was not open to visitors. Nasdaq provided Vroom's employees with an app to upload photos of themselves, which the exchange displayed on its tower in New York's Times Square. Vroom's office, nearby at 37th Street and Broadway, remained closed, but a few employees in masks went to see their faces displayed on the tower, Mr. Hennessy said. He said he had preferred it to an in person ceremony, since people in the whole company got to participate by sending in photos and sharing screenshots of themselves on the tower. "Those Nasdaq moments are over in a few minutes with some confetti," he said. "This lasted a couple of hours." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
LONDON In July, the opera director Peter Sellars gave a stark speech about climate change to open the Salzburg Festival in Austria, one of classical music's most glittering events. "We are today facing leadership across the world," he said, "that is willing to sacrifice the next generation and the generations after that." People everywhere, he added, had to "shift out of bad habit energies and make basic, common sense changes in our lives." That night, he unveiled his new production of "Idomeneo," which turned Mozart's opera into a climate change parable and featured a dancer from Kiribati, an island nation threatened by rising sea levels. Less than three months later, on Oct. 3, Helga Rabl Stadler, the festival's president, traveled to St. Petersburg to sign a new sponsorship deal with Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, and OMV, an Austrian oil and gas firm. The companies will each pay 200,000 euros (about 220,000) toward staging a Russian opera at next year's festival. Ms. Rabl Stadler said in an email that she did not think there was a conflict between the deal and Mr. Sellars's speech. "I believe we cannot find sustainable solutions for the future against, but only together with, the major companies in this field," she wrote. But the deal disappointed some politicians and activists at a time of growing concern about climate change . And it was made amid intensifying pressure on European arts institutions to sever ties with oil and gas companies. Last year, several Dutch museums ended partnerships with the oil company Shell. (Activists claimed victory, while the museums said they had reached the planned end of contracts.) This month, the National Theater in London followed suit. In September, activists in Paris made handprints in molasses on the Louvre's glass pyramid to protest the museum's funding from the oil and gas company Total . Pressure on the Royal Shakespeare had been growing for months. In June, Mark Rylance, the Academy and Tony Award winning actor, resigned from his honorary position with the company because of the BP deal, which also faced protest from student activists. "Young people are now saying clearly to us that the BP sponsorship is putting a barrier between them and their wish to engage with the RSC," the company said in a news release. "We cannot ignore that message." The decision jeopardized the discounted ticket program. Gregory Doran, the Royal Shakespeare's artistic director, said in an internal email seen by The New York Times that the company was left with a "big challenge" to continue it without BP's sponsorship. The company was determined to keep the discounts going, Mr. Doran wrote, but "we don't yet know how." Not every institution has rejected support from the fossil fuel industry. The Science Museum in London, for example, has repeatedly said it will not cut its ties with oil firms, including BP. In July, Ian Blatchford, its chief executive, said in a staff email seen by The New York Times that the museum had received "vanishingly few complaints" about its oil sponsors, and that cutting ties with them "would be unwise." The big energy companies have the resources to help solve climate change, Mr. Blatchford added: "Demonizing them is seriously unproductive." The Royal Opera House in London has been the subject of protests for its sponsorship deal with BP, but has made no moves to end the arrangement. BP has also sponsored British tours by the Mariinsky Orchestra of St. Petersburg and supports the Britten Shostakovich Festival Orchestra, an ensemble of young British and Russian musicians formed this year. Chris Garrard, the co director of Culture Unstained, an organization that campaigns against the funding of the arts by fossil fuel companies, said in a telephone interview that activists had not yet been successful targeting classical music institutions. "With orchestras you have a much bigger history of sponsorship being mainstream, and it rests more on that funding model," he said. But he added that some musicians were starting to speak out. Mark Padmore, a prominent tenor who will sing the lead role in the Royal's coming staging of Britten's "Death in Venice," was among those who criticized BP's arts sponsorship earlier this year in an open letter arranged by Culture Unstained. "We believe that opera sounds better when it is not associated with climate breakdown," the letter said. In a telephone interview, Mr. Padmore said he would not sing in an event sponsored by an oil or gas firm, and he criticized the Salzburg deal. Funding orchestras is difficult, he added, but "if we can't find others to step in, we'll have to evolve." Es Devlin, a designer who has worked several times with the Royal, said in an email, "My feeling is that there are other ways to raise funds." Not all observers agree. Richard Morrison, the chief music critic of The Times of London, used a column to chide "fascistic" activists for hounding oil and gas sponsors. He added that activists may soon target companies like BMW and airports that also donate money and contribute to climate change, but sarcastically said that they may be ignored because young people benefit from them. The Salzburg Festival's deal with Gazprom was criticized within Austria by the Green Party and the center left Social Democratic Party. Stefanie Mosl, a member of the Social Democratic Party in Salzburg, said in an email that, by inviting Peter Sellars to give his speech, the festival had made a claim to leadership in environmental protection. The deal with Gazprom, she added, was "not in compliance with that credo." Ms. Rabl Stadler said the Green Party's complaints did not surprise her. "Everyone has their own ethical standards," she said. "Personally, I would absolutely draw the line at arms manufacturers and gambling corporations." While Mr. Sellars said in a telephone interview that his speech "definitely put something in the water" among the elite who gather at Salzburg, he refrained from criticizing the Gazprom deal. Artists are meant to repurpose excess wealth to create something positive, he said, and while some institutions may be able to cope with major funding losses, he added, "they're not paying hundreds of salaries per performance" like orchestras and opera companies do. "As artists, our job is constructive engagement," he said. "Our job is not to look at the world and say, 'These are the good guys and these are the bad guys.'" "There's nobody with clean hands at this point," he added. "We're all making our contribution to the climate emergency, and we all have to be part of the solution." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
GOVERNMENTS are pushing austerity; bankers are hoarding cash; a recession looms in the United States and Europe. But Adam S. Posen has a solution: a shock and awe display of coordinated central bank attacks aimed at reviving sluggish economies. An American economist on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, Mr. Posen is no academic scribbler or lonely blogger, but someone inside the central banking establishment. And, as a leading expert on what is often called Japan's lost decade, he is particularly worried that the Federal Reserve in the United States and the European Central Bank are making the same monetary policy mistakes that left Japan's once robust economy stagnant all through the 1990s and even into the 21st century. For months now, Mr. Posen who got his bully pulpit at the Bank of England by answering an ad in The Economist has been warning that policy makers in Washington and in Europe have been too optimistic about how quickly the global economy would recover from the financial crisis. The joint action by central banks on Thursday to make it easier for weak European banks to borrow dollars is no doubt a policy nod in Mr. Posen's direction, but it is still a far cry from the type of unified bond purchasing program, or quantitative easing, that he is advocating. When Fed officials meet this week, they are widely expected to take further action to reduce long term interest rates, a significant turnabout after months of suggesting that a recovery was solidly under way. The European Central Bank has not yet gone so far, but officials have recently signaled a new openness to reducing interest rates or at least to stop raising them. In simplest terms, Mr. Posen wants central banks to print more money. A lot more money. There is a certain tilting at windmills aspect to his crusade. The Fed will probably stop well short of the aggressive bond buying that Mr. Posen has advocated. Already, some Fed officials and most Republican leaders, including the presidential hopefuls Rick Perry and Mitt Romney believe that the Fed is at risk of rekindling inflation. But that hasn't stopped Mr. Posen from pressing his case. Earlier this month, he had lunch with Kiyohiko Nishimura, a deputy governor at the Bank of Japan, and Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. And, last Tuesday, he traveled to this small hamlet in southwest England to issue his most passionate cry yet "I am here to warn policy makers in the United States, Europe, everywhere that we cannot take our foot off the pedal," Mr. Posen said before a roomful of small business leaders and bankers. "The outlook is grim the right thing to do now is engage in more monetary stimulus." Although a few bubbles of sweat appeared on his forehead, Mr. Posen argued his brief here with aplomb mixing self deprecating remarks that touched on the oddity of a 44 year old American prescribing monetary policy in Britain ("I get paid in pounds and pay rent in pounds," he assured his audience) with a trenchant analysis of the economy's various ills (stagnant growth, increasing unemployment and banks that will not lend). His listeners hailed his proposal that the Bank of England and the British Treasury form a government backed bank to make small business loans. But on a day when inflation ticked up to 4.5 percent, among the highest annual rates in Europe, his call to monetary arms received a muted response. "I am very worried about the consequences of quantitative easing," said John Thurston, chairman of Watts, a local company that supplies parts and services to commercial vehicles. Watts has felt the effect of the business slump, but the inflationary impact of more government bond buying worried him. "I just don't know how you unwind it," he said. Mr. Thurston is not alone in his concern. On the Bank of England's nine member monetary policy committee, Mr. Posen was the only one to vote last month for the bank to resume its bond purchasing program, according to minutes of the meeting. IN addition to the Fed's reluctance to start another bond buying effort, the European Central Bank is also not expected to continue its current program of purchasing the bonds of weak euro zone economies for much longer. Mr. Posen's central premise is that governments in Japan, Europe and the United States are running the risk of repeating the policy mistakes of the 1930s, when the conventional wisdom called for strict monetary policy and budget cutting, only deepening the Depression. Not that central bankers have exactly been sitting on their hands. Their efforts clearly helped prevent the sharp recession of 2008 9 from turning into something much worse, and the Fed, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan have all bought large amounts of government bonds to help push down interest rates. Now, with rates touching zero, the view has taken hold that to do more would risk stoking inflation and damage the credibility of central bankers. "I am really angry we are getting these incredibly wimpy excuses for inaction," Mr. Posen said, speaking broadly of central bank attitudes. "My proposal is that the Bank of England buy PS50 billion in gilts, although a good case can be made for doing more," he said, referring to British government bonds. Amid the secretive world of central banking, Mr. Posen strikes an arresting contrast. He is voluble, eager to please and, not being immune to a bit of gossip, has to restrain himself from revealing market sensitive details about the bank's inner workings. More policy entrepreneur than wonk, Mr. Posen used his perch at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington to push his core, Keynes colored notion that governments and central banks must jump start economies stuck in a slump when banks and the private sector show that they cannot. A spate of papers on this topic that pointed to policy dithering in Japan brought him a measure of renown. He also showed an ability to ally himself with name brand economists and policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic. Early supporters include the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, while he was at Princeton, as well as Mervyn King, before he became governor of the Bank of England. But it was not until 2009, when Mr. Posen joined the Bank of England, that he was given a chance to advance his views from inside the temple. Unlike the Fed or the European Central Bank, the Bank of England reserves several slots on its policy making panel for outsiders. He has an office at the bank's grand headquarters on Threadneedle Street, is expected to show up there no more than three days a week and has the use of two trained economists to assist him in his big thinking and speech making. "It's like being a governor of the Federal Reserve, only better because you are not stuck with the crap work," Mr. Posen said. He is also very adept at explaining the dry arcana of monetary policy in a way that is understandable and offers up good guys (those in favor of quantitative easing) and bad guys (those who are not). "Adam is very confident that inflation will come down, and he has said he will eat his hat if that does not happen," said Charles Goodhart, an expert on central banks at the London School of Economics and an early mentor to Mr. Posen. "He may well be right but many of his colleagues do not share this belief." While it is expected that economists become policy advocates, it is unusual for central bankers to fly their philosophical colors with the ardor that Mr. Posen has shown. "Amid a culture of group think, Adam sticks his neck out," said Hans Helmut Kotz, a former board member at the Bundesbank of Germany. Mr. Posen acknowledges late night rants on his Facebook page earlier this year when his core thesis that extraordinary action was needed to keep Britain from slipping into a second recession was not being accepted by his colleagues on the bank's monetary policy committee. "It was agonizing. I mean I have been doing this for 25 years and here was the possibility that I could be fundamentally wrong," he said. "I was lying awake at night ask my wife." Even now, with signs of global weakness increasing by the day, it is unclear whether Mr. Posen will win the day. In fact, many economists argue that with Europe and the United States burdened with a huge overhang of debt, with banks undercapitalized and reluctant to lend and with the American and British housing markets still in the doldrums, central banks are largely powerless to revive growth on their own. "My position is that once interest rates come to zero, there is not much more a central bank can do to stimulate the economy," said Kazuo Ueda, an economist in Tokyo who served on the monetary policy board of the Bank of Japan as it struggled, unsuccessfully, to inject life into the Japanese economy. In his recent paper, "The Effectiveness of Nontraditional Monetary Policy Measures: The Case of the Bank of Japan," Mr. Ueda suggests that in Japan, structural economic defects and deflation were too powerful for even the most creative monetary policy interventions. ECONOMISTS who share his view say that what is happening in Europe reinforces the point. Radical monetary easing, they argue, is no substitute for wrenching, yet necessary, structural changes like cutting wages and government spending and recapitalizing zombie banks. If anything, it's an excuse not to put such reforms in place. But to Mr. Posen, those arguments are a poor excuse for inaction. "The Austrians would say you just have to suffer through it," he said, referring to a school of laissez faire economic thought popularized by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises. "But suffering is not good for the soul monetary policy won't solve all your problems, but it can make things easier." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
This year Drive East, the South Asian performing arts festival, has grown up or, rather, into La MaMa's largest space, the Ellen Stewart Theater, where it will host more than 20 programs of Indian music and dance. Presented by the organization Navatman, performances include Archana Joglekar, an esteemed dancer and actress who specializes in Kathak, and Ashwini Ramaswamy, of Ragmala Dance Company, in a Bharatanatyam solo featuring music by an all female orchestra. Kamala Reddy, a highly regarded Kuchipudi dancer, performs a duet with her daughter, Soumya Rajupet. And there is the contemporary group STEM Dance Kampni, from Bangalore, which takes inspiration from Kathak, while addressing light and space in unconventional ways. And that's just scratching the surface. In the past, Drive East has benefited from the viewer's close proximity to performer in which the slightest raising of an eyebrow or quiver of a hand becomes as thrilling as a quicksilver jump. Fingers crossed that such intimacy will endure. (Monday through Aug. 16, various times, driveeastnyc.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Squint and this week's Billboard album chart looks almost identical to last week's, as the rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie holds at No. 1 and most of rest of the Top 10 is just slightly reshuffled. With no major new releases to compete with, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie's "Hoodie SZN" holds the top spot for a second week with the equivalent of 56,000 sales in the United States, down 4 percent from last week, according to Nielsen. The breakdown of that number is also almost identical to that of last week, with 81 million streams and fewer than 1,000 copies sold as a complete album. Also this week, the soundtrack to "Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse," featuring Post Malone, Juice WRLD and Nicki Minaj, among others, rose one spot to No. 2, swapping places with 21 Savage's "I Am I Was," which fell one rung to No. 3. Post Malone's "Beerbongs Bentleys" is No. 4, and Meek Mill's "Championships" is in fifth place. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
At the Berlin Conference of 1884 85, European powers met to divvy up Africa. In "2065 BC," the Adham Hafez Company imagines a similar conference, decades from now, in which power is reversed and African queens set out a new world order. The Adham Hafez Company is based in Cairo, where, considering the recent history of Egypt, fantasies of the future must seem both tantalizing and treacherous. The extreme difficulties of creating independent theater there are not hard to imagine. These conditions make the intellectual energy fueling "2065 BC" more remarkable and excuse some of the production's clumsiness. The work had its United States premiere on Wednesday as part of New York Live Arts' Live Ideas series, which is devoted to cultural transformation in the Middle East and North Africa. For much of the show, most of the four women who make up the cast sit at a table stacked with papers as one of them delivers a speech at a podium. Periodically the women communicate in a kind of sign language or move in choreography reminiscent of flight attendants' explaining safety features, but the production is largely inert. Its strengths are verbal and vocal. Even through the distortion of heavy reverb, the four women (Mona Gamil, Alaa Abdellateef, Salma Abdel Salam and Charlene Ibrahim) do pitch perfect imitations of politicians and diplomats. In its parody of political speech, the script can be clever, with multi sided ironies. The globe spanning imperial titles of the new world order ("Her Majesty the Queen of Liberia and the American West Coast") sound as absurd, and dangerous, as those of the old. The names of participants in a "cabaret for the colonies" scroll in an amusing list: Scarlett O'Sahara, Guantanamo Babe. But these bits are scattered in an uneven series of sketches piled and paper clipped together like the documents on the table. The show's twin political preoccupations of colonialism and gender often split apart, and the successive segments, sometimes separating into just sound or just film, are widely spaced, as if Mr. Hafez didn't trust his audience to process more than one idea or sensation at a time. Instead, for large swaths of the nearly two hour duration, he seems determined to make viewers experience the terrible boredom of any political conference, even one that upends the world. Boredom is also risked in " 55," a solo that the Moroccan choreographer Raduoan Mriziga performed at New York Live Arts on Thursday. In street clothes, he executes a series of tasks, eventually creating an intricate design on the floor with chalk and tape. The title tells you how many minutes it takes. Since 2008, Mr. Mriziga has lived and worked in Brussels, where he attended the influential school P.A.R.T.S. " 55," his first work, seems to be in a familiar mode of Euro American postmodernism. The initial motions walking, arm swinging, lying on his back are pedestrian, though lightly decorated with snaps, claps, curlicues and hand to foot suggestions of folk dance. Segments repeat, in different orientations. In addition to the body percussion, sound comes from five cassette decks placed (as is the audience) on four sides surrounding Mr. Mriziga. The sound is highly fragmentary, as if mostly erased. When Mr. Mriziga lays out his floor geometry, he measures its proportions with his body: a line twice his height, a circle traced from the turning point of an elbow with the radius of a forearm. It's interesting enough to watch him at work. The finished picture is like a cathedral's rose window made in the manner of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. But what's more absorbing is the dawning realization that so many of the random seeming motions of the solo's first part were actually rehearsals of functional components in the creation of the diagram. It's surprising that design should govern in motions so plain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
THE WOMAN'S HOUR The Great Fight to Win the Vote By Elaine Weiss Illustrated. 404 pp. Viking. 28. It's probably inappropriate to evaluate a work of history on the basis of how many novels can be extracted from its pages; it's also, if one is a novelist, irresistible. Which real life situations and characters are so intriguing that they'd be worthy of delving into and depicting in the truly intimate manner that only fiction allows? By this measure and by several others "The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote," by the journalist Elaine Weiss, is a gold mine. After Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919, ratification needed to occur in 36 states for women's right to vote to become federal law. By July 1920, the possible 36th state or the place where the amendment would die after 70 years of strenuous activism was Tennessee. Thus, for several weeks that summer, in and around Nashville's statehouse, a frenetic pageant of political organizing, lobbying, demonstrating and double crossing unfolded among the "Antis," who opposed the amendment, and the "Suffs," or suffragists, who supported it. As one legislator declared, "The entire world today has cast its eyes on Tennessee." Weiss presents a panoramic view of the proceedings, which are alternately juicy (accusations of libel and bribery abounded, and, in spite of Prohibition, the whiskey and bourbon were free flowing) and procedural. Weiss also provides national and international context: World War I had ended less than two years earlier, and both the war and its aftermath had jumbled established norms of gender, race and employment. In the United States, a physically ailing Woodrow Wilson occupied the White House, and two Ohioans, Warren Harding and James Cox, were vying to replace him, which raised the stakes of the 19th Amendment's passage: Though women in some states could already vote, it was unclear how enfranchising all 27 million American women in time for the fall's presidential election would influence national politics. In addition to offering contemporaneous perspective, Weiss goes back several decades to the roots of the women's movement and the efforts of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others. Weiss celebrates their persistence and courage but does not sugarcoat their racism. Despite early unity with abolitionists, upper middle class white women willing to sacrifice racial equality for gender equality is nothing new. During the ratification in Nashville, Carrie Catt, the New York based president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the successor to Susan B. Anthony, made calculated decisions to distance her groups' interests from those of black men and women. After all, much of the Anti reluctance to grant women the vote was tied up with not wanting black women to vote. Weiss details the tribalism within the women's movement as personified by Catt and the more militant and provocative Alice Paul, who led the National Woman's Party. Though Paul was short on money and didn't travel to Nashville for the special session, she dispatched the native Tennessean Sue Shelton White, an activist who could, with her very accent, dispel accusations about meddling outsiders. Weiss depicts another native daughter of Tennessee, this one a committed Anti: Josephine Pearson, who presided over multiple Anti groups and believed that in fighting against ratification, she was obeying both God and her deceased mother. Weiss is a clear and genial guide with an ear for telling language ("I'd rather see my daughter in a coffin than at the polls," declares one Anti, while a newspaper headline about a pretty, young Suff reads "110 Pounds of Femininity to Hit Legislators for Vote"). She also shows a superb sense of detail, and it's the deliciousness of her details that suggests certain individuals warrant entire novels of their own. For example, Annie Nathan Meyer and Maud Nathan, New York sisters, were respectively an Anti and a Suff, who didn't speak to each other except when "clashing publicly." Luke Lea, the swaggering publisher of a Nashville newspaper, a onetime senator and a member of the Men's Ratification Committee, had concocted a plan to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm after the armistice. He abandoned the kidnapping attempt, returned to Nashville and married his dead wife's sister. Or how about Louisine Havemeyer, a grandmother who lived in a Fifth Avenue mansion in New York and used her fortune, acquired via her sugar magnate husband, to support Suff radicals and who once found herself, by design, in jail? (While participating in an effigy burning of President Wilson outside the White House, Havemeyer said she felt "as placid and calm as if I were going out to play croquet on a summer afternoon.") These are just a sampling of the many characters Weiss introduces. Because of the number of major players, it can become hard to remember who is who. There's also a somewhat awkward structure to the book in that almost everything before Page 219 is back story, and in places, the back story has a back story. Routinely, a person is depicted in a specific moment the governor of Tennessee is donning a jacket, say then there are several pages of history before rejoining the governor, who is still donning his jacket. But storytelling, like democracy, is sometimes messy, and Weiss's thoroughness is one of the book's great strengths. So vividly had she depicted events that by the climactic vote (spoiler alert: The amendment was ratified!), I got goose bumps. I'm almost certain that the name Hillary Rodham Clinton appears only once, in the last few pages. Yet it is, of course, impossible to read "The Woman's Hour" without thinking of the 2016 presidential election, of the symbolic and literal impact of Clinton's candidacy, the consequences of her loss, the way she was and still is portrayed in the news media. Clinton's decision to wear the Suffs' color of white for the most important events of her campaign (and to Donald Trump's inauguration) suggests that she perceives herself as part of an ongoing legacy. "The Woman's Hour" offers several timely reminders: of how history altering legislation comes about after much nitty gritty, unglamorous fieldwork; of how tenuous the progress toward true equality under the law really is; of how social and legal changes that in retrospect seem inevitable were hardly considered such at the time (indeed, even after the 19th Amendment passed, its ratification was contested repeatedly). And yet, if nothing can be taken for granted and change rarely comes without a fight, there remains reason for optimism. "Everything the Cause had accomplished every state won, every piece of legislation, every change of heart and shift in policy was once considered utterly impossible," Weiss writes. "Until it wasn't." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A cable news obsessed president turned TV journalists into household names. A nationwide reckoning on sexual harassment ended the careers of some of television's best known personalities. And Americans, seeking clarity amid the noise, turned to networks like Fox News and MSNBC in record numbers. Two New York Times media reporters analyze 2017, the year when TV roared back. Michael M. Grynbaum: President Trump ended his final interview of the year by warning that "newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I'm not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes." He's not wrong! This was supposed to be the Age of Snapchat, but TV was so central to the cultural politics of 2017. The 9 p.m. ratings race between Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity felt like a proxy war for the country. John Koblin: Let's keep in mind that just two and a half years ago, cable news was a dying genre. And the late night comedy shows were nothing more than a factory for two minute YouTube clips. And now? We have TV fights and rivalries that feel every bit as relevant as they did in the 1990s. This is the year Stephen Colbert beat Jimmy Fallon thanks to politics, the year Jimmy Kimmel finally became relevant, because of health care. Even Trevor Noah has some juice! Michael: TV was a gathering ground for the resist left; heck, MSNBC won weeknights in the all important 25 to 54 age demographic for the first time in 17 years. But Fox News ended the year at No. 1, even as it resurrected throwbacks like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, a sign that audiences were more turned on by ideology than by personality. Michael: Tucker, Laura, "Will Grace" is a hit. It's 1998 all over again. John: But let's also consider this: The MeToo movement ended the careers of Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. Since then? "Today" has beaten "Good Morning America" in its first four Lauer less weeks; "G.M.A." has been No. 1 for years. Since Mr. Rose was fired from "CBS This Morning," its ratings have been totally fine. Bill O'Reilly is gone, and Fox News is still tops. These guys were stars and, the theory held, brought in big ratings. John: It's one of the more fascinating developments of 2017. Star systems have existed in network news for years. Look back to Roone Arledge, who in his time at ABC drove his news division to success with powerhouses like Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and Ted Koppel. Big salaries, big ratings, big perks. (NBC flew Mr. Lauer back and forth from the Hamptons every week.) For decades, networks were frightened to lose big names. Now we have CBS replacing Scott Pelley on the evening news with a guy named Jeff Glor. John: This is the day you became a media reporter, Mike. Michael: John, I feel blessed. What else happened this year? Roger Ailes died. Rupert Murdoch agreed to sell off his film and television studio to Disney! CNN and HBO are wrapped up in an AT T Time Warner merger that has been challenged by the Justice Department. When has television been so influential, and its power vectors so uncertain? John: Credit much of this to Netflix. David Letterman, Ryan Murphy, Ava DuVernay, Shonda Rhimes: Those are just a few of the rock star names that signed on to the streaming service for at least one project. Thanks to Nielsen's new Netflix ratings service, we now know that "Stranger Things" is a hit. Because of Netflix's insanely wide reach over 100 million subscribers giant players like Apple, Facebook, Google and Disney are gearing up for battle in the streaming space. Amazon, though, stumbled, with its top entertainment executive forced out because of a sexual harassment claim. And all of this while little ol' Hulu found big success with "The Handmaid's Tale" and may soon have Disney as a majority owner. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
CHESTER, Pa. Jill Ellis has had three years to tinker. She knew better than anyone how quickly this summer's Women's World Cup would arrive, so Ellis, the United States women's national team coach, started remaking her squad almost as soon as it crashed out of the 2016 Rio Olympics. She tinkered while her star forward signed a contract to play in France for half a season, and she tinkered when her captain signed a similar deal to join a club in England. She tinkered by bringing in new players and by dropping old ones. She tested new formations and tweaked more familiar ones, and engaged in experiments prompted by injuries, player availability and even curiosity. But Ellis said Tuesday that she is done tinkering. The players with at least one notable exception who are in camp for the three game She Believes Cup, which they started with a disappointing (at least defensively) 2 2 draw against Japan on Wednesday, will form the core of the group Ellis will take to defend the United States' world championship at the World Cup in France. There are, of course, familiar names Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Julie Ertz, Tobin Heath in camp. But fans who haven't followed the team since it won its World Cup title in Canada will soon come to know several new ones, too: Rose Lavelle, Jessica McDonald, Sam Mewis, Tierna Davidson. And for the first time since 2005, the United States will enter a major tournament without Hope Solo in goal. But 100 days before the World Cup opens a milestone that arrived on Wednesday Ellis and her players said this week that their biggest questions already had been asked and answered. "You've kind of built the skeleton," Ellis said. "Now we're working on the nervous system." The process has not always been pleasant. Lloyd, the star of the 2015 World Cup victory, has been eased into a supporting role, and players like Lindsey Horan and Crystal Dunn who were not part of the 2015 team have become nearly irreplaceable. Blessed with a wealth of speed and attacking options, Ellis toyed with a three defender system early in the process to see if a relentless focus on getting forward would enjoy adequate cover if the ball was turned over. Spoiler: It didn't, so she adjusted again. "I would say that it was uncomfortable," defender Becky Sauerbrunn said of working through the evolution in real time. "And she was very honest with us and was saying she wants it to be uncomfortable." "She said she was going to throw people into formations and into games that maybe they weren't prepared for," Sauerbrunn added. "And she wanted to see how they reacted, because in a World Cup you never know what you're going to face, and you're going to have to be able to take those challenges on and still perform well. And so I feel very strong having gone through that process." The focus now is on polishing partnerships and connections, the "nervous system" connecting players on the field that Ellis mentioned Tuesday. Those connections were clearly lacking at times on Wednesday night, particularly in a makeshift back line that was missing the leadership and direction of an absent Sauerbrunn. "We definitely talk about relationships a lot who you're playing with on the sides of the field, who you're playing with in the middle of the field, and your relationships with them," Mewis said. "And the coaches have definitely mentioned to us that not only are they looking at individual players, they're looking at how those players interact with the players around them." Health issues have complicated some of those decisions. Horan, a fixture in the American midfield, will miss the She Believes Cup with a quad injury. The 20 year old Davidson (broken ankle) and the 30 year old Kelley O'Hara (ankle surgery) are still working their way back into top form. One of the players hoping to contend for a place in the midfield with Horan out, Danielle Colaprico, was ruled out herself this week because of a recurrence of a groin injury. Emily Fox, a young defender who had seemingly fallen out of the picture after a poor performance at left back against France in January, replaced Colaprico on the roster but there are no guarantees Fox will go to the World Cup. "The door's not closed for anybody," Ellis said, though she acknowledged the time had long passed when she could afford to give a player on the fringes of the team an extended look. "It's not just giving players time to give them time," Ellis added. "It's making sure we're accomplishing something in that." The team's next few opponents were chosen for specific challenges: The Americans play a technical team, Japan, on Wednesday, and then face more physical sides in England (Saturday) and Brazil (Tuesday). Ellis said she would not show all her cards in these matches, or the ones that follow, and she did not expect her opponents to reveal themselves, either. "So for us, then, the focus is on ourselves," she said. "What can we do? And how good can we get?" In that mind set, even setbacks, or mistakes, can be instructive, if a team is willing to acknowledge them. "Any holes will get exposed now," Mewis said. "And we'd rather solve any problems now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
There are six eager performers in "Opening Skinner's Box," part of the Lincoln Center Festival, which begins this week. And their industriousness in the service of science and theater is not to be denied. During this whimsically informative overview of psychological experimentation in the 20th century, they dutifully transform themselves into drug addicted rats, maternally challenged monkeys, lobotomy recipients and miffed psychologists. They also explain concepts like cognitive dissonance and negative reinforcement with that demonstrative gusto often found in beloved middle school teachers. But the indisputable star of this exercise in soft science from the inventive British troupe Improbable, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater of John Jay College through Wednesday, is its charismatic title character. And though it is nominally a box, it is hardly square in the figurative sense, which cannot be said of this affable show as a whole. This structure does indeed stand in for the boxes used by the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, wherein food was systematically proffered and denied to rats. But as the show progresses, the box becomes a suggestive multitude of other things. These include the cages and laboratories in which variously famous and infamous psychologists conducted their experiments on the workings of the mind. But as the show progresses, the box asserts what might be called a mind of its own. It bends; it quivers; it expands and shrinks. And in the process of this show, directed by Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson, it becomes an unexpectedly affecting metaphor for the ways we baffled humans try to interpret and contain life's onslaught of empirical data. Ms. Slater's book melds subjective and objective points of view, while suggesting that the two are not mutually exclusive. It is steeped in Ms. Slater's hungry curiosity about how and why our species behaves as it does. The book follows her research into the history of psychological experimentation (which included interviews with academics who later complained they had been misrepresented). It is also a memoir of sorts, which considers these investigations' impact on her home life and shifting worldview. Ms. Slater is embodied by Kate Maravan, who steps forward now and then to offer personal context, beginning with an account of a childhood encounter with a baby raccoon (given delicate pawed life by Paschale Straiton). Like everyone else in the cast the others are Alan Cox, Stephen Harper, Tyrone Huggins and Morven Macbeth Ms. Maravan is also required to morph into an array of lab rats, literal and otherwise, and their manipulators. The ensemble members all wear ill fitting suits, in the tradition of intellectuals who can't be bothered with fashion, and bow ties. You may associate such neckwear with Bill Nye, the Science Guy, of children's television. And "Skinner's Box" can be seen as an adult variation on Mr. Nye's popularizing approach to academic subjects. The production covers much ground, some of it filled with land mines, with blithe smoothness and friendly accessibility. The cast members' British accents and diffident manners help provide (to American ears, at least) a polite, cushioning distance from accounts of some projects that might objectively (or do I mean subjectively?) be described as inhumane. The most emotionally engaging of these accounts centers on Harry Harlow (Mr. Cox), who separates infant monkeys (the rest of the cast) from their mothers to define the nature of filial attachment. Depictions of his ever more bizarre and cruel use of his monkeys are interwoven with references to his increasingly unhinged personal life. These are reflected by Mr. Cox with a countenance that drifts by degrees into lost abjectedness. By the end of the sequence, he has assumed the aspect of one of his own motherless primates. That astute use of an actor's gift for conveying the unspoken is rare in "Skinner's Box." The production is short on the transformative stage magic that I associate with Improbable, whose work includes the enchanting "70 Hill Lane," about a homey encounter with a poltergeist, and a hypnotic staging of the Philip Glass opera "Satyagraha." Still, there are moments when the show's sensory elements Nigel Edwards's artful lighting and Adrienne Quartly's insinuating sound design cohere in such a way that a box made of bungee cords seems to become our very own imperfect, indispensable door of perception. That may be a less than scientific form of cognitive manipulation, but it is more efficacious than a dozen well argued treatises. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In Melinda Ring's ambitious new triptych a dance, "Forgetful Snow," and two daytime performance installations the subject isn't too difficult to work out. Four white walls, including the risers, are painted a dazzling white. (It's Benjamin Moore's Super White; the fumes linger.) In the center is a plush white carpet. The dancers are nude. The space is so white and so quiet that you're instantly transported to a place of stillness. It's like looking out the window after a night of heavy snowfall: Time is suspended under a blanket of white. At the start of "Forgetful Snow," which opened on Thursday night at the Kitchen, the dancers Talya Epstein, Maggie Jones and Molly Lieber stand on the carpet, distanced from one another. Another dancer, Lorene Bouboushian, is off to the side. Holding a white board a little like a ring card girl in a boxing match she flaps it up and down, generating a breeze that stirs Ms. Epstein's abundant curls as she stands with her legs crossed and her elbows angled up. Finally, Ms. Epstein collapses backward. Ms. Lieber's head droops to the right, while Ms. Jones falls on her side, with her legs parted, while reaching an arm behind her back. Like branches weighted with heavy snow, their bodies sag, bend and eventually buckle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"Lovecraft Country," which debuts Aug. 16 on HBO, tells the intersecting stories of two Black families as they travel throughout the Jim Crow North confronting monsters some fantastical (pale gray beasts called Elder Gods) and others that are no less horrific for being based in reality (racist sheriffs, predatory oligarchs). Created by Misha Green ("Underground"), the series follows Atticus, an Army veteran played by Jonathan Majors ("Da 5 Bloods"), as he searches for his missing father, played by Michael Kenneth Williams ("The Wire"). Carrying a copy of "The Safe Negro Travel Guide" a fictional version of Victor Hugo Green's real life "The Negro Motorist Green Book" Atticus, his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) and his friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett) navigate the byways and backwoods of a macabre, mid 1950s New England. With its atmospheric blend of supernatural and societal menaces, "Lovecraft Country" follows in the footsteps of works like Jordan Peele's "Get Out," using horror filmmaking as a form of social commentary on American race relations. "In horror, there's a level of anxiety that your life can be taken at any moment," Green said. "That's the Black experience." Adding potency in this case is the fact that "Lovecraft Country," like the 2016 Matt Ruff novel that inspired it, appropriates the frightening creations of a toxic racist in order to tell its story. The title refers to H.P. Lovecraft, the early 20th century writer who is best known for inventing the "cosmic horror" genre and for filling his hair raising stories with the same types of creeping dread, misanthropic characters and phantasmagoric demons that adorn "Lovecraft Country." He is also known for approving of Hitler and condoning lynching in the South as a necessary evil to prevent interracial relationships. ("Anything is better than mongrelization," he wrote.) In the novel, Ruff upended this legacy by centering Black characters and making the story a parable about throwing off the constrictions of white supremacy. "I was talking about the same things and the same themes on 'Underground,' and that was four years ago," she said. "Now, I feel like there are more people aware of what's going on who didn't have to be aware of it before." "Underground," a stylish period thriller about the Underground Railroad, was what first drew Peele, an executive producer of "Lovecraft Country," to Green. Once he realized that she was a horror fan like him, "it was instant chemistry, instant realization that we love the same things, even though we do it a little bit differently," he said in a phone interview. Like Peele's films next up this fall is "Candyman," which he co wrote and produced as a present day sequel to Bernard Rose's 1992 cult horror film "Lovecraft Country" wraps sly, sharp critiques within ghoulish imagery, and it is nothing if not committed to its own pulpy vision. "When a project does that boldly enough, it resonates hard," Peele said. "When I was writing 'Get Out,' I'm like, 'Oh my gosh, this could be a disaster,'" he added. "The fact that it worked just validates this idea for me." The show's other big name executive producer, J.J. Abrams ("Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), was similarly captivated by the "utterly fearless writing" of Green's scripts. "She's so wonderful on the page," Abrams said in a phone interview. "She has this ability to just dive utterly and entirely into what she's doing and not look over her shoulder and worry about what anyone might think." In a Zoom interview with Green, who is also an executive producer, she discussed her own lifelong obsession with horror and why its sense of dread and danger is not an allegory but a living reality for Black people since slavery. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Have you always been into horror? I've always had this preoccupation with what we're willing to do for metaphorical and physical survival. Horror just moves toward that in a really easy way. I remember seeing "Aliens" and thinking: "Oh my God, you're stuck on the ship with this alien, but you've got to survive. What does that bring out of you?" But my real interest started with R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps." It was lightweight horror, but those stories were scary to me as a kid. But I was also like, "Ooh, I'm intrigued." Stephen King's "It" is my favorite book of all time. I was that kid that would come to the library and be like: "There's more Stephen King? Great." The next day: "Give me the next one." While Lovecraft himself wrote racist stories and letters, did you find it refreshing that Matt Ruff, who is a white author, tried to depict the multi dimensionality of his Black characters in "Lovecraft Country"? I have read H.P. Lovecraft, and I understand why he has influenced so much of horror writing. But because of his history, I wasn't a huge fan. When I read Matt's novel, I said: "Oh, it's legit. Thank god." But, here's my thing: For a white writer not to be able to step into the shoes of people of color confuses me. That should be the default many people of color have to step into the shoes of white people. Women have to step into the shoes of men. It's sad that we say, "Thank you for doing some research and for actually seeing people as people." The novel was very feminist forward. Leti was doing a lot of the saving of the day and was a character who had such an inner life I wanted to see more of that. Other than giving this really beautiful gift of his book, Matt gave the gift of saying: "It's yours now. Go for it." In terms of Christina, it's really not that complicated. If we're exploring levels of power and using magic as the overlay of that, it just felt right to explore what it means for a white woman who doesn't technically have power to have stolen some of that power. Just like our people are technically stealing the power that was stolen from people like them. And by changing the teenage boy character Horace from the book into Diana, we were talking about SayHerName the campaign dedicated to Black girls and women who are victims of police violence . When we were writing, we were seeing depictions of what this stuff is like for teenage Black boys. What does it look like for Black girls, who also are in a horror movie everywhere they turn? Is it even fair to describe your show as horror? Is that too restricting? I never thought horror was limiting. Every time people talk about "elevated horror," I ask, "What's the problem with the 'not elevated' horror?" I love slasher films like "Nightmare on Elm Street." But when I really started to think about this genre, I wondered, "Why don't they have Black people, or why do the Black people have to die in the first 10 minutes?" So when I read Matt's book, I thought he beautifully reclaimed this genre space that hadn't been for people of color. That's what I pitched to HBO. We can launch off the platform of his book, reclaim the reclamation, and make a television show for people of color. In that respect, the show isn't just horror but really an all genres space. When we were in the writers' room, we would have our syllabus for each episode. For secret societies, we thought of "The Shining" and "Eyes Wide Shut." Or a ghost story: "Poltergeist" and "Amityville Horror." Or adventure: "Indiana Jones" and "The Goonies." I was like, "This can be all of it." But at the end of the day, it's just a family drama, and we want to love the characters and what they're going through. What's so exciting is to see people of color, who don't typically get to be in those genre spaces, in these spaces now. What does horror give you the ability to do that another genre doesn't? Isn't American racial history a horror unto itself? I question that everyone believes that about our history . I look around and I think, "This is horrific." But other people are just like, "I saw that video online. That's terrible. Let me post a black square about it." We shield ourselves a lot from having to step into that true horror because it's really bad. The art in this genre is that it gives you this doorway because the heroine is going to kill him in the end and win. That makes you feel safer than the normal horror that is around us. That is what genre is, at its best: It's the metaphor on top of the real emotions we all experience. The show is coming out in a very different political climate compared to when you started working on it three years ago. Now, as you are editing, how is that affecting your process? I feel like the moment has been this moment since the first enslaved person was brought over here. People are shifting their empathy, and that has to do with Black creators who are shifting their empathy. Which is it, the chicken or the egg? Is it because the gaze is different that's helping us see differently? Or is it that people are seeing things differently? I think probably both of those things. What does Black safety look like for you right now? Black safety is always wrapped up in horror. I don't have to do much to bring that anxiety out, because it's already there. Only a minority of Americans are not part of the movement right now, but they've gotten really good at distracting us and making sure we don't ever feel empathy and don't collectively come together. This is also part of what "Lovecraft Country" is about. How does this family deal with its shame and pain to come together to fight against this thing? And what does it mean to take that power? What and who can you be, once you take that back and own it yourself? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The American economy finished the year on a flat note, much as it started 2015, stoking concern about its vulnerability in the months ahead to turmoil in China and elsewhere in the global economy. But most economists expect activity to rebound as the year unfolds and continue to grind out steady but hardly spectacular growth. Over all, the economy expanded at an annual rate of just 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, the Commerce Department said Friday. It could have been worse: Ahead of the report, a few economists on Wall Street predicted that the economy might have contracted last quarter, while others forecast no growth. As it turned out, the slowdown was brought on by anemic sales of durable goods like cars and appliances, a weaker trade picture caused by the stronger dollar and falling business investment and shrinking inventories. But consumer spending overall was healthy, and services held up better, underscoring how domestically driven sectors are faring much better than industries that depend on overseas demand. For all of 2015, the economy grew 2.4 percent, identical to the tempo recorded in 2014 and considerably better than the 1.5 percent gain for 2013. "There is noise from quarter to quarter, but we're still in that 2.5 percent growth environment," said Scott Clemons, chief investment strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman. "This year is going to look a lot like the past couple of years," said Gus Faucher, senior economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh. "Growth in 2016 will be good but not great." "I think this takes another rate hike off the table for the first half of 2016," he said. "The continued improvement in the labor market allows the Fed to think about raising rates, but the lack of inflation means they're not required to act. They can have their cake and eat it, too." Other economists, though, are still looking for at least one rate increase during the first half of the year, possibly as early as March. Friday's report is the first of three estimates the Commerce Department will make for growth in gross domestic product, and as more data comes in, the figure could be revised. The next estimate will be released on Feb. 26. In a separate report on Friday, the University of Michigan survey of consumer confidence showed a slight drop in sentiment from the initial estimate for January, but the outlook remained healthy by historical standards. One headwind for the economy has been a slower accumulation of inventories, which reduced growth by nearly half a percentage point last quarter. After big increases in goods at warehouses and on store shelves lifted growth in the middle of the year, "there was some payback in the fourth quarter," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS, a research and consulting firm. "That affects top line growth but doesn't really say so much about the fundamentals of the U.S. economy," he added. Looking ahead, Mr. Behravesh expects the economy to expand at a rate of about 2.5 percent in the first half of 2016, with the unemployment rate continuing to fall and companies delivering higher pay increases to help hold on to employees and attract new workers in a tighter labor market. "I think it's entirely possible we could see unemployment fall to 4.5 percent by the end of the year," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Resale sites have come a long way since the dawn of eBay. Formerly app based, the ever rising secondhand site Depop recently added web checkout, functioning as a cross between Instagram and a sales platform. Its 10 million plus users have handles and followers. There are hashtags, you can "like" items and there's a much stronger focus on styling and aesthetic. The coolest photo of the day will land you on the home page, and bam, you're Depop famous. Depop releases its users' stats weekly, and sellers compare their worldwide ranking. They're always quick to congratulate each other in private community pages on Facebook and so they should. It's pretty good business. A recent study by ThredUp, which bills itself as the largest resale and consignment store, valued the U.S. resale market alone at 20 billion, with an expectation that it will grow to 41 billion by 2022. According to Depop, vintage clothing, generally meaning clothing that was made at least a decade ago, made up 40 percent of its sales worldwide last year. One Depop seller, Cory Barnette (or rainydaysweatpants) of California, is already followed by over 15,000 users , after just one year of trading. "My brand aesthetic is '90s sportswear inspired, that's what's nostalgic and cool to me," Mr. Barnette, 29, said. "I sell my own style and things that I would wear. I spend up to five hours a day just sourcing items, and now customers approach me to find pieces for them." The hours thrifting at Goodwill centers, flea markets and secondhand stores have certainly paid off. The best piece he's found? "A '90s Gianni Versace Venetian silk shirt that I got for 8. I sold it for 700." Other popular sites for not that old vintage include Mercari, Poshmark and Vestiaire Collective, which most notably had a recent collaboration with Yasmin Le Bon, the model. Ms. Le Bon sold her "archive collection" through the platform, with treasures such as a black wool Alaia mini dress, a silk Emilio Pucci shirt and a quilted Chanel Mademoiselle patent handbag. None was terribly old. There's undoubtedly a flock of young influencers driving buyers to recent eras. Kim Kardashian West has been donning nothing but vintage Versace lately. "I'm on such a '90s Versace kick," she was quoted as saying not long ago, and her younger sister Kylie has been spotted in a lot of Tom Ford era, 1990s Gucci. If it's not Versace or Gucci, it's Fendi monogrammed anything. 2018 was also the year Dior brought back its popular saddle bag from the early 2000s because of the resurgence it was making in the vintage market. Vestiaire Collective lists the Dior saddle bag in its top sellers of the last six months, with the vintage version in particularly high demand. A representative for the company said sales of the bag have increased by "a thousand percent compared to last year." The model Bella Hadid toting one surely hasn't hurt. "Influencers for sure dictate what secondhand shoppers are looking for," Mr. Barnette said. "They might not always get the same high end brands, but will create a similar look from that era with what is available to them through vintage." But in an age where everything and anything is instantly re sellable online, might the very concept of vintage be on the wane? Amber Butchart, a fashion historian and lecturer at the London College of Fashion, doesn't think so. "I used to be a buyer at a vintage brand, and we were having this conversation 10 years ago," Ms. Butchart said. "People have always been worried about the future of vintage fashion, and convinced it's over, that there will be no more vintage, but it's not going anywhere. There has always been a secondhand market, as long as humans have been wearing clothes." However, Ms. Butchart said, "The industry is definitely changing, and fashion cycles are becoming shorter. Before, the cycle was 20 years, but now it can be five. So we're seeing trends coming back as soon as five years later." But who can name a bona fide trend of five years ago, anyway? What was happening clothes wise in 2013 again? It is difficult to predict what the future of vintage will look like, and what styles will be remembered favorably from the last 10 years. "When we're living through an era, it's quite difficult to have an overriding view of it as a whole. Or be able to imagine how future generations might look back on it," Ms. Butchart said. "We can't say that we won't be able to look back at the 2010s in the future, and recognize fashion from that period. That's never happened before in history." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
MOSCOW The Bolshoi Ballet is not short of "Giselle" productions. Until very recently the company performed two, one by Yuri Grigorovich (1986) and one by Vladimir Vasiliev (1997). Do they need a new one? If it's Alexei Ratmansky's exquisitely faceted re creation, which had its premiere here on Thursday, the answer is: absolutely. Before the premiere of Mr. Ratmansky's version, Makhar Vasiev, the director of the Bolshoi Ballet, stressed in a news conference that the production by Mr. Grigorovich who directed the company for 31 years, and remains a powerful figure in the Russian ballet establishment would continue to be performed. But, he added, all great classics should be rethought from time to time, "and the best person to do this is Alexei Ratmansky." (A spokeswoman said the Vasiliev version would not remain in the repertory.) Mr. Vasiev has a point. Mr. Ratmansky, also a former director of the Bolshoi Ballet (2004 09) and now the artist in residence with American Ballet Theater, is one of the world's most important ballet choreographers. But he is also a keen dance historian who has pursued a parallel path: producing painstakingly researched re creations of 19th century ballets by the great Marius Petipa (1818 1910). In "Paquita," "Swan Lake," "La Bayadere" and "Harlequinade," Mr. Ratmansky used period sources and notation to reveal an extraordinary wealth of detail and intention in ballets that have often become formulaic war horses. He has repeated that feat with "Giselle." Set to music by Adolphe Adam and choreographed by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, the ballet, first seen in Paris in 1841 , tapped into the era's fascination with the supernatural, the moonlit and the spooky . "Giselle," the story of a peasant girl betrayed by her aristocratic lover and transformed into a spirit called a Wili, was a huge success, produced all over the world. By the end of the century, it had been extensively reworked by Petipa in Russia; it's likely that most of the ballet we know today comes from his version. For the Bolshoi production, Mr. Ratmansky and his wife, Tatiana Ratmansky, drew principally on detailed Stepanov notation (a system akin to musical notation) of the ballet, made in 1899 (Act 2) and 1903 (Act 1) by Nikolai Sergeyev, a Mariinsky ballet master. But they also drew upon a lesser known, earlier account, by Henri Justament, a French choreographer who documented a Paris production around 1860. Mr. Ratmansky's "Giselle" would be entirely recognizable to anyone who has seen the ballet. It doesn't pretend to be an authentic re creation of the original in its content or aesthetic; extensions are 21st century high, and notwithstanding small touches (arms crossed high on the chest, or stretched forward in parallel lines at shoulder height), there is no exaggerated Romantic style modeled after paintings and lithographs of the day. But his judicious choices of dramatic detail, his attention to every nuance of choreographic phrasing and his incorporation of original mime passages throughout the work make for an unusually coherent narrative in which the Bolshoi dancers look fully engaged. The enchantment begins with the opening measures of the score, played throughout at a brisker tempo than usual, but with beautiful legato phrasing. (What a pleasure to hear the music, conducted by Pavel Klinichev, taken as seriously as any opera.) The opening shows villagers and a group of nobles who have clearly come from the far off castle we see on the backdrop. (The straightforwardly pretty set and costume designs are by Robert Perdziola, based on early 20th century designs for the ballet by Alexander Benois.) This sets the scene, as does the entrance of Hans (Hilarion in most productions), who tells us through mime that he (Eric Svolkin on Thursday) loves Giselle and is jealous and suspicious of another man. Mime is often considered too old fashioned for contemporary audiences, but here it is legible and smoothly integrated, providing a welcome dramatic clarity. Giselle (Olga Smirnova) is perkier and more assertive than usual; a girl with a spirited side that shows in her love of dancing and her laughing refutal of her mother's warnings that she will become a Wili. (There are none of the usual indications that she has a weak heart.) Ms. Smirnova, a beautiful classicist with gorgeous feet, an airy jump and long lines, feels a little restrained for Giselle, but she imbued the character with a touching, spontaneous warmth and depth of feeling. As Albrecht, Artemy Belyakov (wonderful) played a man madly in love rather than a haughty aristocrat, throwing himself desperately at Giselle's lifeless body at the end of Act 1 and wracked with remorse in Act 2. If the first act is wonderfully clear and dramatic, the second is magical. Mr. Ratmansky gives Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis (Angelina Vlashinets, excellent) and her attendant spirits a cool, crisp attack. These Wilis aren't lyrical or wafty, but surgically precise, inhuman. Long forgotten details keep emerging: There are aerial flights, flowers dropped from a tree high above; a semicircle of Wilis momentarily preventing Giselle from reaching Albrecht; and a spine chilling, cross shaped ending to the ensemble dance after the heroine's emergence from her grave. Most fascinatingly, a fugue, composed for the original production but not used, becomes a spectacularly patterned ensemble dance for an angry Myrtha and the Wilis after Giselle protects Albrecht by taking him to the cross on her grave. (It's the only original choreography by Mr. Ratmansky.) Mr. Ratmansky makes it clear that while Giselle wants to protect him, he cannot bear to stay away from her, even at the price of death. Sacrifice and redemption become real for both characters, amplified in the final moments of the ballet in a scene (spoiler alert!) not performed for over half a century. As the Wilis melt away in the dawn light, Albrecht carries Giselle away from her grave, to a grassy mound. But she sinks into the earth, miming that he should marry Bathilde, as the court retinue arrives onstage. In the last moments, Albrecht reaches out despairingly to Bathilde, who reaches back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The "Today" anchor Savannah Guthrie said on Tuesday that she was pregnant and, as a result, would not participate in NBC's coverage of the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro because of concerns about the Zika virus. Ms. Guthrie, 44, said her baby was due in December. "I'm not going to be able to go to Rio," she told her co anchor, Matt Lauer, shortly after she announced that she was pregnant with her second child. "The doctors say we shouldn't because of the Zika virus. So I'll miss it. You're going to have to go to female beach volleyball without me, Matt. Try to carry on!" Ms. Guthrie said she would "hold down the fort" from New York. "We're going to be in the height of the campaign season, so we'll be here," she said. NBC and NBC Universal cable stations will broadcast the Olympics from Aug. 5 to Aug. 21. Brazil has recently had a surge in babies born with microcephaly, a condition in which their heads are abnormally small. Health officials have attributed the surge to Zika, a mosquito borne virus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Is Europe Safe for Travelers? Yes, Experts Say, but Here Are Some Tips When Corey Patterson heard about the terrorist attacks in Brussels last week, he had a clear cut response to people who asked if he was going to cancel a coming trip to Belgium. "That's exactly what the terrorists want, so absolutely not," Mr. Patterson, 45, said on Twitter. He's in the Netherlands now, visiting a former roommate and his family, and will head to Belgium in a few days. "Anything can happen anywhere at any time," Mr. Patterson, a Texas resident, said through messages on Twitter. "You can't stop living life, and this world is worth seeing, so I chose to do it." "Americans especially seem to be fairly resilient and do not panic and cancel trips, unless perhaps they are traveling in the next few days," Jennifer Michels Jones, vice president of communications for the American Society of Travel Agents, said in an email. After the attacks in Paris last fall, 64 percent of the association's agents found that their clients did not plan to delay or cancel travel to and from or within Europe. The travel alerts issued by the State Department also fall far short of advising people to cancel their plans. "We're not saying, 'Don't travel,' especially not to Europe, but we are saying, 'Be careful if you do,'" said Michelle Bernier Toth, the managing director of the federal Office of Overseas Citizens Services. Here are seven ways to take care when traveling to Europe, or really, anywhere. Enrolling in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program gives the government the ability to send email alerts to a traveler about potential problems, like demonstrations. "And it gives us a general idea of how many U.S. citizens might be in a country," Ms. Bernier Toth said. 2. Know how to contact the American Embassy. Embassy information is available on the government's travel website. Use the search box to pull up information about an individual country. The first pull down menu lists all the embassy information. Heading to Belgium? The number: 32 2 811 4000. "Knowing how to get ahold of us is important," Ms. Bernier Toth said. "In the event of a major event, we will work as quickly as possible to identify people who need our assistance and do what we can to help." 3. Find out how to contact local authorities in case of an emergency. On the page opened in Step 2, each country's equivalent to "911" is listed, as well. Britain's equivalent is 999. In France, it's 112. In Belgium, it's 101 if it requires the police, or 112 for everything else. This information is under the "Safety and Security" pull down menu, though not usually at the top. 4. Those phone numbers are only useful for working phones. Your phone plan may not work abroad. Most carriers offer international plans, and they may be expensive. There are alternatives, like renting a phone or buying a SIM card locally. "It's very useful to have an international SIM card," Ms. Bernier Toth said. Phones may have to be unlocked, which you can ask your carrier to do. But if something does happen, the number of people trying to make phone calls around the same time can overwhelm phone lines. "But often text messages will go through," Ms. Bernier Toth said. Social media sites, like Facebook, and free messaging services, like WhatsApp or WeChat, are alternatives, too. 5. Be vigilant when in public places and using mass transit. "I don't think you can avoid using mass transit, but be smart about that," Ms. Bernier Toth said. "Know the exit strategy." The same applies to major tourist attractions, sporting events, restaurants and other crowded areas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Researchers in Europe are working on a concept that will be familiar to anyone who has seen films about the bands of travelers who settled the American West. The project is developing an electronic communications system that enables a wagon train of tractor trailer trucks and cars to make semiautonomous road trips possible without the complexity of efforts like Google's driverless vehicles. The Volvos both the car and truck companies, that is, which have different owners call the idea "platooning" and see it as a bridge to traveling by driverless cars. It may look as simple as a pack of Nascar drivers strung together for a 200 mile an hour draft at Talladega, but this bridge is years away and faces challenges. Rather than the increased speeds that are the incentive for nose to tail spacing on the racetrack, the goal of platooning is to reduce accidents caused by driver error. Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader for safety and driver support technology at Volvo Car in Sweden, said in an interview that his group participated last year in successful tests involving a semitrailer that led another truck and three cars on European tracks and roads. The tests were part of a project called Safe Road Trains for the Environment, or Sartre, financed by the European Commission. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. What do you think of it? What else are you interested in? Let us know: thearts nytimes.com. The results from President Trump's first physical examination in office were released on Tuesday, and the White House physician, Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, gave Mr. Trump high marks in both physical and mental fitness. Late night hosts were surprised. Trevor Noah said the news about the president's mental health "makes me more worried," because it meant all of his behavior had been deliberate. "You 'covfefe' in your normal mind? Because to us, the nonexperts, the only thing that looks healthy about Donald Trump is he's shaped like a food pyramid." TREVOR NOAH "President Trump's doctor predicted that the president will have and live a long life. As a result, the doctor's now treating Melania Trump for depression." CONAN O'BRIEN "O.K., with the president being 6'3", 239, according to the body mass index by the federal Health and Human Services Department, Trump is overweight and just one pound shy of obesity. One pound short of being obese! That's awfully convenient. 'Listen, doc, I don't want to be obese. But I feel like this wad of cash is about one pound. Why don't you take that off my hands and weigh me again?'" STEPHEN COLBERT "No heart problems, no dementia, no dentures. But did you test for racism?" TREVOR NOAH Jimmy Fallon and Conan O'Brien pointed out that Mr. Trump didn't commemorate Martin Luther King's Birthday in traditional presidential fashion but they said it was probably for the best. "Trump spent yesterday playing golf instead of commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. People were pretty upset, then they thought about what Trump would have said and were like, 'Probably a good move.'" JIMMY FALLON "Yesterday President Trump broke with tradition, and he spent Martin Luther King Day playing golf instead of performing a community service. Yeah, however, many people say that any time Donald Trump's not in the White House he's performing a community service." CONAN O'BRIEN "A brothel in Nevada has announced it will start accepting the digital currency Bitcoin as a form of payment, because there's a huge market for people who understand Bitcoin and also can't get laid." SETH MEYERS "Trump's ex wife is defending him after it came out that he made racist comments last week. Trump was like, 'Wait a minute: Which ex wife and which racist comments?'" JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Dev Patel on the role: "My agents said, 'Armando Iannucci wants you to be David Copperfield.' And I said, what, the magician?" "Whether I turn out to be the hero of my own story or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." They are some of the most famous words in all of English literature, and a riff on them also opens "The Personal History of David Copperfield." The newest film by Armando Iannucci, the director behind the 2017 satire "The Death of Stalin" and the creator of similarly scathing television shows like "Veep," takes a different approach to the Dickens classic. Colorblind casting, touches of magical realism, and whirlwind dialogue with a modern comic sensibility all help to tell the story of how the boy became the man who became one of the greatest writers the world has ever known. The film features Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie and many others. But it rests on Dev Patel, who embodies David with Buster Keaton esque humor and deep humanity. His performance has already won praise and is a welcome reminder of how much art can do to sustain us in difficult times. I caught up with Patel and his unruly hair over a Zoom call in Los Angeles this week. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. Were you a Dickens fan before this film? To be honest I know it's blasphemous to say this but I actually wasn't. I could appreciate his work for sure, but I was sort of force fed it in school. And I don't know if it was just my classroom, but we were dwelling in the doom and gloom in the bottling factories and it was not the escapism I needed with the way I grew up in London anyway. That was one of the real joys of reading the script, and what Armando wanted to do with the world was give it a real buoyancy and some real color just extracting every piece of humor from Dickens's work that I hadn't seen as a child. How did the part come to you? My agents said, "Armando Iannucci wants you to be David Copperfield." And I said, what, the magician? I can shave my head and wear a black T shirt. I lean toward the more David Blaine magic stuff. What was Armando's pitch like? He told me about this story that I had never read before this Dickens classic. And you could just see the childlike glee in his eyes. And I was like, wait, is his father going to be Indian? And he's like, "No, not at all. This is like theater, I just don't want to pay any attention to the color of anyone's skin and I just want to cast the best people for each role." And I was like, wow, you're incredible. Yeah, let's do this. What sort of research did you do? Because it's Copperfield, but it's also Dickens too, right? There's a merging of the writer and the character here. Kevin Loader, our producer, gave me a book called "How to Be a Victorian." I didn't realize that he had given it to me in jest. We had two weeks of intense rehearsal and you start walking different when you put on a top hat, and Armando said to me, what are you doing? I don't want the rigidness of it all and the pompousness. It needs to feel very relaxed and lived in. This is your present so you're not a guy in 2019 going back in time to play this role. This would be your now, so you sort of throw away the lines. Like, you're talking to your friends at school. It gave us a whole new insight to the way he was looking at the world. Talk too about the use of language in the script and how you can start to see the way the words were floating in his head that made him want to be a writer. It's funny it alludes to David being dyslexic because the words essentially start melding together on the page and moving around. And to go off on a tangent, what was really amazing is at that time Dickens was talking about dyslexia, he was talking about mental health with Mr. Dick's character. The film shows how Copperfield witnesses so much poverty and injustice. The changing social context around him is really important as he's moving up in the world. Having had a lot and lost it, and then trying to climb his way back up the ladder. We see depravity on the streets and the homelessness and the very sobering effect it's going to have on David. It reminded me of India. You're talking about class and that kind of hierarchy and structure in society. It's very modern. I saw that someone compared your performance to Chaplin. Any other inspiration that you were paying attention to? Armando asked , have you watched a lot of Keaton? And I was like, Michael Keaton? And he's like, no, Buster. And as a gift he gave me this box of all of his movies. He said, "You really remind me of him when you're David." Here's this guy that's constantly flailing, just trying to keep his head above water. But I grew up idolizing the Rowan Atkinsons and the Jim Carreys. As a child those were the guys that I really watched all the time. The language is so dense. Was it difficult to remember everything? Armando would kill me for saying this, but yes. And it's because he's trying to squeeze all the juice out of the lemon. You would do a long shoot and then you'd be rewarded with a lovely 10 pages of new dialogue. And you're like, oh no. But there's a real rhythm to the dialogue. It's not about what you're saying, it's about the orchestra of the scene and what everyone else is doing, and how you're pinging off each other. That's what you see with Armando's work and, yes, once you get the rhythm right it's really a joy. As an artist, what did you learn? It's a coming of age story of a young man embracing his truth and his history in order to become the best possible writer he can be. He's constantly putting on different skins and trying to be other people. And it's really when he accepts himself you see that in the story with all the different names everyone calls him that he truly settles in himself that he's David Copperfield and he's proud of everything that's gone into making him who he is. So, I really like that and it's kind of cool when you talk to Armando because it is him kind of, it's an ode to a writer, isn't it? Have you been in L.A. throughout the pandemic? Pretty much. I was actually in India about to direct a movie and that's when it really hit and I had to leave. I got out an hour before they grounded air travel. What is it like right now trying to make a film? I look at this whole pandemic from a case of real privilege. My fellow Black and brown brothers and sisters have been suffering, and it's been a real time of turmoil for a lot of people around the world. So it's made me acutely aware of my privilege, being able to have a roof over my head and to afford health care. In terms of the creative side, I've been able to have time to be Dev and not other characters. I haven't sat with this character for this amount of time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
DETROIT Facing shortages of some auto parts and dwindling supplies of popular cars later this spring and summer, Japanese automakers hope shoppers looking for a new car will compromise on color or extra features. But if anyone set on a blue sedan with heated seats and a sunroof or a black crossover with a navigation system and an iPod dock is out of luck at one dealership, there is a good chance the competitor across the street could have a perfect match with a different logo on the grille. "The inventory levels are going to be fairly tight for the Japanese through the summer," Brian A. Johnson, an analyst with Barclays Capital, said on Friday. "If someone wakes up in a panic to get a smaller car, they may not find it at the Toyota lot and may go over to the Ford or Hyundai lot instead." Ford, General Motors and Hyundai will gain the most market share this year, while the Japanese manufacturers will see their piece of the market shrink, Mr. Johnson predicted. The shift is partly a result of the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, as well as momentum that had already been building in the market. Declining loyalty rates and improved offerings by the Detroit and Korean automakers mean consumers are more likely than ever to simply look elsewhere if one company runs out of a model in a particular combination. Toyota said on Friday that its Japanese plants would run at only half their capacity at least until June 3, and company executives have warned dealers to prepare for tight inventories in the months ahead. Toyota, Nissan and Subaru are halting work at their North American plants for several days this month to conserve supplies of parts made in Japan, and Honda has shortened shifts at many of its North American plants. Recent forecasts by UBS Securities and the J. P. Morgan investment bank said vehicle production in Japan would not return to pre earthquake levels until October at the earliest. In the second quarter, global production by the Japanese automakers is expected to be anywhere from 25 to 50 percent below normal. So far, sales have been largely unaffected because of the cushion that dealer inventories provide. But Barclays projects that Toyota will have only 15 days' worth of inventory at the end of June, a reduction of about three fourths from what the industry considers ideal. "It is a tragedy, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone," Howard Gammage, the general sales manager of Maguire Chevrolet in Bordentown, N.J., said of the difficulties Japanese automakers are experiencing. "But it is an opportunity for G.M. dealers to bring more people into the showrooms to take a look at what we have to offer." Meanwhile, analysts are generally sticking with earlier projections that sales in the United States will top 13 million vehicles this year, up from 11.6 million in 2010. The Detroit automakers have run into small problems G.M. and Ford each shut a single American plant for one week, and a Japanese made paint pigment used by Ford and Chrysler might not be available for months but analysts expect their production to take a minimal hit. Hyundai is even less vulnerable. A spokesman for Hyundai Motor America, Christopher Hosford, said the company got only about 1 percent of its parts from plants in Japan and those were outside the main disaster area. Hyundai dealers now expect business this summer to be even better than it initially thought, though they worry whether the company can produce enough vehicles to meet demand as sales head toward a record high for the second consecutive year. "If people need a car, they're not necessarily going to have all the choices they would have had previously," said George Glassman, a Hyundai dealer in Southfield, Mich. "The crisis in Japan is affecting all manufacturers, but clearly it will have a much greater impact on those that rely as heavily on Japanese parts as Toyota and Honda." The research firm IHS Automotive has identified Hyundai and the German carmaker BMW as being among the most insulated from Japanese part shortages. BMW competes heavily with Toyota's Lexus brand, which imports nearly every model from Japan. A spokesman for BMW North America, Tom Kowaleski, said that the percentage of Japanese parts in its cars was "very, very small" and that operations had been unaffected so far. The looming shortages of some Japanese models have caused transaction prices across the industry to rise, with the steepest increases on vehicles like the Toyota Prius, which is made in Japan and was in high demand because of the surge in gasoline prices. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The hacker who received the message, using the screen name "lol," decided over the next 24 hours that Kirk did not actually work for Twitter because he was too willing to damage the company. But Kirk did have access to Twitter's most sensitive tools, which allowed him to take control of almost any Twitter account, including those of former President Barack Obama, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Elon Musk and many other celebrities. Despite global attention on the intrusion, which has shaken confidence in Twitter and the security provided by other technology companies, the basic details of who were responsible, and how they did it, have been a mystery. Officials are still in the early stages of their investigation. But four people who participated in the scheme spoke with The Times and shared numerous logs and screen shots of the conversations they had on Tuesday and Wednesday, demonstrating their involvement both before and after the hack became public. The interviews indicate that the attack was not the work of a single country like Russia or a sophisticated group of hackers. Instead, it was done by a group of young people one of whom says he lives at home with his mother who got to know one another because of their obsession with owning early or unusual screen names, particularly one letter or number, like y or 6. The Times verified that the four people were connected to the hack by matching their social media and cryptocurrency accounts to accounts that were involved with the events on Wednesday. They also presented corroborating evidence of their involvement, like the logs from their conversations on Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers and hackers, and Twitter. Playing a central role in the attack was Kirk, who was taking money in and out of the same Bitcoin address as the day went on, according to an analysis of the Bitcoin transactions by The Times, with assistance from the research firm Chainalysis. But the identity of Kirk, his motivation and whether he shared his access to Twitter with anyone else remain a mystery even to the people who worked with him. It is still unclear how much Kirk used his access to the accounts of people like Mr. Biden and Mr. Musk to gain more privileged information, like their private conversations on Twitter. The hacker "lol" and another one he worked with, who went by the screen name "ever so anxious," told The Times that they wanted to talk about their work with Kirk in order to prove that they had only facilitated the purchases and takeovers of lesser known Twitter addresses early in the day. They said they had not continued to work with Kirk once he began more high profile attacks around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. "I just wanted to tell you my story because i think you might be able to clear some thing up about me and ever so anxious," "lol" said in a chat on Discord, where he shared all the logs of his conversation with Kirk and proved his ownership of the cryptocurrency accounts he used to transact with Kirk. "lol" did not confirm his real world identity, but said he lived on the West Coast and was in his 20s. "ever so anxious" said he was 19 and lived in the south of England with his mother. Investigators looking into the attacks said several of the details given by the hackers lined up with what they have learned so far, including Kirk's involvement both in the big hacks later in the day and the lower profile attacks early on Wednesday. The Times was initially put in touch with the hackers by a security researcher in California, Haseeb Awan, who was communicating with them because, he said, a number of them had previously targeted him and a Bitcoin related company he once owned. They also unsuccessfully targeted his current company, Efani, a secure phone provider. The user known as Kirk did not have much of a reputation in hacker circles before Wednesday. His profile on Discord had been created only on July 7. But "lol" and "ever so anxious" were well known on the website OGusers.com, where hackers have met for years to buy and sell valuable social media screen names, security experts said. For online gamers, Twitter users and hackers, so called O.G. user names usually a short word or even a number are hotly desired. These eye catching handles are often snapped up by early adopters of a new online platform, the "original gangsters" of a fresh app. Users who arrive on the platform later often crave the credibility of an O.G. user name, and will pay thousands of dollars to hackers who steal them from their original owners. A conversation between "ever so anxious" and Kirk regarding Twitter accounts for sale. A cryptocurrency account address has been redacted from the screenshot. Kirk connected with "lol" late Tuesday and then "ever so anxious" on Discord early on Wednesday, and asked if they wanted to be his middlemen, selling Twitter accounts to the online underworld where they were known. They would take a cut from each transaction. In one of the first transactions, "lol" brokered a deal for someone who was willing to pay 1,500, in Bitcoin, for the Twitter user name y. The money went to the same Bitcoin wallet that Kirk used later in the day when he got payments from hacking the Twitter accounts of celebrities, the public ledger of Bitcoin transactions shows. The group posted an ad on OGusers.com, offering Twitter handles in exchange for Bitcoin. "ever so anxious" took the screen name anxious, which he had long coveted. (His personalized details still sit atop the suspended account.) "i just kinda found it cool having a username that other people would want," "ever so anxious" said in a chat with The Times. As the morning went on, customers poured in and the prices that Kirk demanded went up. He also demonstrated how much access he had to Twitter's systems. He was able to quickly change the most fundamental security settings on any user name and sent out pictures of Twitter's internal dashboards as proof that he had taken control of the requested accounts. The group handed over dark, w, l, 50 and vague, among many others. One of their customers was another well known figure among hackers dealing in user names a young man known as "PlugWalkJoe." On Thursday, PlugWalkJoe was the subject of an article by the security journalist Brian Krebs, who identified the hacker as a key player in the Twitter intrusion. Discord logs show that while PlugWalkJoe acquired the Twitter account 6 through "ever so anxious," and briefly personalized it, he was not otherwise involved in the conversation. PlugWalkJoe, who said his real name is Joseph O'Connor, added in an interview with The Times that he had been getting a massage near his current home in Spain as the events occurred. "I don't care," said Mr. O'Connor, who said he was 21 and British. "They can come arrest me. I would laugh at them. I haven't done anything." Mr. O'Connor said other hackers had informed him that Kirk got access to the Twitter credentials when he found a way into Twitter's internal Slack messaging channel and saw them posted there, along with a service that gave him access to the company's servers. People investigating the case said that was consistent with what they had learned so far. A Twitter spokesman declined to comment, citing the active investigation. All of the transactions involving "lol" and "ever so anxious" took place before the world knew what was going on. But shortly before 3:30 p.m., tweets from the biggest cryptocurrency companies, like Coinbase, started asking for Bitcoin donations to the site cryptoforhealth.com. "we just hit cb," an abbreviation for Coinbase, Kirk wrote to "lol" on Discord a minute after taking over the company's Twitter account. The public ledger of Bitcoin transactions shows that the Bitcoin wallet that paid to set up cryptoforhealth.com was the wallet that Kirk had been using all morning, according to three investigators, who said they could not speak on the record because of the open investigation. In several messages on Wednesday morning, "ever so anxious" talked about his need to get some sleep, given that it was later in the day in England. Shortly before the big hacks began, he sent a phone message to his girlfriend saying, "nap time nap time," and he disappeared from the Discord logs. Kirk quickly escalated his efforts, posting a message from accounts belonging to celebrities like Kanye West and tech titans like Jeff Bezos: Send Bitcoin to a specific account and your money would be sent back, doubled. Shortly after 6 p.m., Twitter seemed to catch up with the attacker, and the messages stopped. But the company had to turn off access for broad swaths of users, and days later, the company was still piecing together what had happened. Twitter said in a blog post that the attackers had targeted 130 accounts, gaining access and tweeting from 45 of that set. They were able to download data from eight of the accounts, the company added. "We're acutely aware of our responsibilities to the people who use our service and to society more generally," the blog post read. "We're embarrassed, we're disappointed, and more than anything, we're sorry." When "ever so anxious" woke up just after 2:30 a.m. in Britain, he looked online, saw what had happened and sent a disappointed message to his fellow middleman, "lol." "i'm not sad more just annoyed. i mean he only made 20 btc," he said, referring to Kirk's Bitcoin profits from the scam, which translated to about 180,000. Kirk, whoever he was, had stopped responding to his middlemen and had disappeared. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Skeptics of the notion that the coronavirus spreads through the air including many expert advisers to the World Health Organization have held out for one missing piece of evidence: proof that floating respiratory droplets called aerosols contain live virus, and not just fragments of genetic material. Now a team of virologists and aerosol scientists has produced exactly that: confirmation of infectious virus in the air. "This is what people have been clamoring for," said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne spread of viruses who was not involved in the work. "It's unambiguous evidence that there is infectious virus in aerosols." A research team at the University of Florida succeeded in isolating live virus from aerosols collected at a distance of seven to 16 feet from patients hospitalized with Covid 19 farther than the six feet recommended in social distancing guidelines. The findings, posted online last week, have not yet been vetted by peer review, but have already caused something of a stir among scientists. "If this isn't a smoking gun, then I don't know what is," Dr. Marr tweeted last week. But some experts said it still was not clear that the amount of virus recovered was sufficient to cause infection. The research was exacting. Aerosols are minute by definition, measuring only up to five micrometers across; evaporation can make them even smaller. Attempts to capture these delicate droplets usually damage the virus they contain. "It's very hard to sample biological material from the air and have it be viable," said Shelly Miller, an environmental engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies air quality and airborne diseases. "We have to be clever about sampling biological material so that it is more similar to how you might inhale it." Previous attempts were stymied at one step or another in the process. For example, one team tried using a rotating drum to suspend aerosols, and showed that the virus remained infectious for up to three hours. But critics argued that those conditions were experimental and unrealistic. Other scientists used gelatin filters or plastic or glass tubes to collect aerosols over time. But the force of the air shrank the aerosols and sheared the virus. Another group succeeded in isolating live virus, but did not show that the isolated virus could infect cells. In the new study, researchers devised a sampler that uses pure water vapor to enlarge the aerosols enough that they can be collected easily from the air. Rather than leave these aerosols sitting, the equipment immediately transfers them into a liquid rich with salts, sugar and protein, which preserves the pathogen. "I'm impressed," said Robyn Schofield, an atmospheric chemist at Melbourne University in Australia, who measures aerosols over the ocean. "It's a very clever measurement technique." As editor of the journal Atmospheric Measurement Techniques, Dr. Schofield is familiar with the options available, but said she had not seen any that could match the new one. The researchers had previously used this method to sample air from hospital rooms. But in those attempts, other floating respiratory viruses grew faster, making it difficult to isolate the coronavirus. The team used two samplers, one about seven feet from the patients and the other about 16 feet from them. The scientists were able to collect virus at both distances and then to show that the virus they had plucked from the air could infect cells in a lab dish. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. The genome sequence of the isolated virus was identical to that from a swab of a newly admitted symptomatic patient in the room. The room had six air changes per hour and was fitted with efficient filters, ultraviolet irradiation and other safety measures to inactivate the virus before the air was reintroduced into the room. That may explain why the researchers found only 74 virus particles per liter of air, said John Lednicky, the team's lead virologist at the University of Florida. Indoor spaces without good ventilation such as schools might accumulate much more airborne virus, he said. But other experts said it was difficult to extrapolate from the findings to estimate an individual's infection risk. "I'm just not sure that these numbers are high enough to cause an infection in somebody," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York. "The only conclusion I can take from this paper is you can culture viable virus out of the air," she said. "But that's not a small thing." Several experts noted that the distance at which the team found virus is much farther than the six feet recommended for physical distancing. "We know that indoors, those distance rules don't matter anymore," Dr. Schofield said. It takes about five minutes for small aerosols to traverse the room even in still air, she added. The six foot minimum is "misleading, because people think they are protected indoors and they're really not," she said. That recommendation was based on the notion that "large ballistic cannonball type droplets" were the only vehicles for the virus, Dr. Marr said. The more distance people can maintain, the better, she added. The findings should also push people to heed precautions for airborne transmission like improved ventilation, said Seema Lakdawala, a respiratory virus expert at the University of Pittsburgh. "We all know that this virus can transmit by all these modes, but we're only focusing on a small subset," Dr. Lakdawala said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
When Hope Hicks walked into President Trump's private study on Wednesday to inform him that she planned to leave the White House concluding a can't make it up run in which Ms. Hicks, a woman with zero political experience three years ago, became the closest aide to the most powerful man in the world the president responded like a father whose daughter had outgrown the nest. According to a person with knowledge of their conversation, Mr. Trump expressed an understanding of Ms. Hicks's desire to pursue a new phase of her life. But, the person added, he also acknowledged something else: that Ms. Hicks's happiness in her role had begun to wane lately, after a trying few weeks in the public glare. The departure of Ms. Hicks, arguably the least experienced person to ever hold the job of White House communications director, capped an astounding rise for a political neophyte whose seemingly implausible career hinged on a deep understanding of, and bottomless patience for, her mercurial charge. But as someone with a pull toward discretion Ms. Hicks, 29, who grew up in the buttoned up suburb of Greenwich, Conn., the daughter and granddaughter of prominent public relations men seeing her name splashed across international tabloids had taken a toll. In explaining her decision to friends, Ms. Hicks, a communications director who rarely spoke publicly, made clear that she had no interest in being at the center of the public conversation. That aversion to the spotlight had become increasingly difficult to maintain. Ms. Hicks's role in helping write a statement by Donald J. Trump Jr. about a 2016 meeting with Russian officials has drawn attention from federal investigators. On Tuesday, she testified for eight hours before the House Intelligence Committee and made headlines for admitting that she had sometimes told fibs as part of her job. Last month, the man she had been dating, the former White House staff secretary Rob Porter, was accused by his former wives of domestic abuse, sparking an ongoing scandal that offered a glimpse of her closely guarded personal life and drew paparazzi to her apartment building. There were rumblings that Mr. Trump questioned Ms. Hicks's judgment after the White House initially defended Mr. Porter, although a bevy of administration officials, including the president's daughter Ivanka Trump, later vouched for Ms. Hicks in on the record interviews. Ms. Hicks had stopped monitoring news coverage of herself, restricting her television intake to Fox News, which she often watched on mute, assuming that the Trump friendly network would rarely include her name on its chyrons. Friends who reached out to her, offering support or guidance, acknowledged that Ms. Hicks had been distressed. But they also received text messages from her in which she declared that she was tougher than people assumed. Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker's television critic, often tweeted whimsically about Ms. Hicks, calling her an "It Girl." (Ms. Hicks was once the face of a "Gossip Girl" spinoff book series called "It Girl.") Others dismissed her as a mere factotum, especially after a report that she was once tasked during the campaign with steaming Mr. Trump's suits, sometimes while he was wearing them. On Wednesday, after news of Ms. Hicks's exit was announced, the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino tweeted: "Goodbye to Hope Hicks, an object lesson in the quickest way a woman can advance under misogyny: silence, beauty, and unconditional deference to men." In Washington, however, Ms. Hicks's success was viewed as a product of other qualities, including her nuanced understanding of Mr. Trump's moods, her ability to subtly nudge him away from his coarser impulses and her skill as a liaison for some of the most prominent journalists in the country. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "When she tells you something, you know she is speaking to the president, because she is with him all the time," said Steve Scully, the senior executive producer at C Span and coordinator of the network's White House coverage. "It was amazing how often he would turn to Hope and ask her questions and ask her point of view. You can really tell, seeing the two of them interact, that there's a trust between the two of them." Ms. Hicks was a key point of contact for reporters, editors and executives at television networks and major newspapers. Often, she could single handedly arrange time with the easily distracted president. At a Paley Center panel discussion on Wednesday, the NBC News anchor Lester Holt described Ms. Hicks as his first contact for coordinating his interview with Mr. Trump last May. "She was quite helpful," Mr. Holt said. And in an administration riven by infighting, Ms. Hicks's privileged position with the president meant that, for journalists, she was among the few officials whose information was deemed reliable, or at least not often compromised by personal squabbles. Of course, she always advocated for her boss, lamenting that reporters did not see the empathetic and charming Mr. Trump whom she said she knew. Ms. Hicks, a reluctant emigre to insular Washington, kept a tiny circle of confidants, complaining that she could not trust anyone in a company town. She frequently visited family in Connecticut and friends in New York, where she felt she could comfortably walk down the street without being accosted or asked for a favor. She has told friends that, for now, she has no definite ideas for her life after the West Wing, except that she will not be living in Washington. An extended vacation with her family is planned. Book agents have come calling, but Ms. Hicks has told acquaintances that she is reluctant to write anything although she has joked that a massive advance could change her mind. "I think she would benefit from taking a minute or two to get some perspective on all of this," said Michael Feldman, a Clinton White House veteran who is a family friend of Ms. Hicks. "I don't worry about Hope," Mr. Feldman added, echoing other friends interviewed for this article. "I fully expect her to land on her feet." Those confident in Ms. Hicks's future prospects sounded more concerned about Mr. Trump and his ability to work without an aide he has relied on nearly every day for three years. "This is not losing a staffer," Mr. Feldman said. "This is like losing a limb." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Jack Fuller, who joined the The Chicago Tribune as a 16 year old copy boy, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing and ultimately presided over the Tribune Company's 8 billion acquisition of Times Mirror in 2000, died on Tuesday in Chicago. He was 69. The cause was lung cancer, his son, Timothy, said. Mr. Fuller had been The Tribune's editorial page editor, executive editor, publisher and chief executive. He was president of Tribune Publishing, the newspaper division of the Tribune Company, when he oversaw the purchase that brought The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, The Hartford Courant and other Times Mirror publications under the Tribune umbrella, in what was described as the largest acquisition in newspaper history. He retired and left the board in 2004 before the investor Sam Zell bought the company, took it private, imposed cost cuts and later filed for bankruptcy protection. Mr. Fuller was editorial page editor from 1981 to 1987. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his commentary on constitutional and legal issues. In one editorial, he wrote that "for a person who has been accused and cleared of a crime, Attorney Gen. Edwin Meese shows a remarkable disinterest in the law's traditional presumption of innocence." (Mr. Meese was investigated in the Iran contra arms deal and a Mideast pipeline negotiation, but was never prosecuted.) "There is plenty of room for disagreement about the legal rule requiring police to read a suspect his rights or lose the chance to use a confession against him," the editorial continued. "A lot of people are uncomfortable with letting defendants go free simply because the police fouled up an interrogation or a search. On balance, this newspaper has not been persuaded that any other device can deter police misconduct; it has supported the so called Miranda rule, despite misgivings about its consequences in certain cases." Jack William Fuller was born on Oct. 12, 1946, in Chicago, the son of Ernest Fuller, a financial reporter and assistant editor at The Tribune, and the former Dorothy Voss Tegge. He worked at the paper as a copy boy while still in high school. "My father was a newspaperman, and so the fact is I had grown up with it," he once explained. Jack Fuller earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1968. After serving in the Army as a Vietnam correspondent for the newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes, he attended Yale University Law School, graduating in 1973. (At Yale he was a classmate of Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham and Robert Reich, who became the secretary of labor in President Clinton's administration.) His marriage to the former Alyce Tuttle ended in divorce. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Katherine Ryan, and his second wife, Debra Moskovits. Mr. Fuller was hired as a general assignment reporter by The Tribune in 1973 and left in 1975 to become a special assistant to the United States attorney general, Edward H. Levi, a former president of the University of Chicago. Mr. Levi was credited with restoring the Justice Department's credibility after Watergate. Mr. Fuller rejoined the newspaper in 1977 as a Washington correspondent. He was named executive editor in 1987, vice president and editor in 1989, publisher in 1994 and president in 1997. Ann Marie Lipinski, the curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard and a former editor of The Tribune under Mr. Fuller, praised him for "making the newspaper and later Tribune Company healthy environments for women." Mr. Fuller published seven well received novels on topics ranging from multigenerational tales of Middle America to computer hackers and jazz. Among them are his first, "Convergence" (1982), involving espionage and the C.I.A.; "Fragments" (1984), a Vietnam War novel ("a moving account of the war that purveys more than information it gives the war a literary form," The New York Times Book Review said); and "The Best of Jackson Payne" (2000), about a jazz musician with echoes of John Coltrane. (Beginning in the late 1980s, Mr. Fuller wrote frequently about jazz for The Tribune.) Another novel, "One From Without," published this month, is drawn from personal experience: It is about an executive trying to save a public company on the brink of disaster. He also wrote "News Values: Ideas for an Information Age" (1996) and "What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism" (2010). In 2005, Mr. Fuller was named to the board of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which is based in Chicago. Marjorie Scardino, the foundation's chairwoman, said on Tuesday that he had driven its grantmaking agenda on global conservation, sustainable development and climate change. Mr. Fuller, she said, insisted that "there is not 'traditional' journalism and 'new' media, only good journalism and bad journalism." In "What Is Happening to News," Mr. Fuller wrote that the Times Mirror purchase was an attempt to compete with the internet on a national scale. He acknowledged that the effort to meld different news media cultures had been difficult, but added that the Tribune Company's creation of a nationwide web based classified business had been more successful. Still, competition with online news sites for advertisers and readers, coupled with a business downturn, prompted chief executives at the Tribune Company and other corporate parents to demand even more draconian economies. Rather than impose them, Mr. Fuller, among other editors and publishers, quit. "What has happened since I left haunts me," he wrote. "Every newspaper company, even those led by people totally committed to striking a proper balance between the financial and social missions of journalism, has been beaten down. "Time and again," he continued, "people arguing about the future of news have made the distinction between what people want to know and what they need to know. If concentrating on what people want to know means succumbing to direct democratic rule of the sort you can find on the internet, it is a retreat too far. It abandons the social mission in order to serve it." He added, "Fulfilling the social purpose of journalism requires us to give people what they need to know." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
SAN FRANCISCO Uber has spent the past eight months reeling from a series of corporate scandals. Yet those have done little to deter people from hailing an Uber for rides. That became clear on Wednesday, when the ride hailing company shared its latest financials with investors. According to the disclosures, Uber's gross bookings continued to increase in the second quarter, while its losses narrowed. Trip requests from riders also more than doubled over the past year. The numbers were a reminder of how much people have grown accustomed to using Uber as a transportation option, even as the company is grappling with multiple challenges. In June, Travis Kalanick resigned as Uber's chief executive after accusations that the company had become a hotbed of sexism and bullying. Benchmark, a major shareholder, has spent the past few weeks clashing with other Uber investors as it tries to oust Mr. Kalanick from the company's board. Yet while some investors and outsiders have expressed concern that Uber's business was in jeopardy because of the internal dysfunction, Wednesday's results showed a positive trajectory for the business. In the second quarter, Uber's gross bookings rose to 8.7 billion, up 17 percent from the previous quarter. Uber's adjusted net revenue or the amount of money earned after paying out its drivers jumped to 1.75 billion from 1.5 billion over the same period. Ride requests increased 150 percent from a year ago, though Uber did not disclose the number of rides requested. Losses narrowed to 645 million from 708 million in the previous quarter, or about 14 percent less than a year earlier. While Uber executives have historically been willing to spend billions of dollars to plow into new markets around the world, some of that spending has been reined in over the past year in countries like China and Russia. Uber is a privately held company, so it is not required to disclose its financials. But the company's results have often been reported by the news media in the past few quarters, and the growth of the business has provided a bright spot while Uber continues to struggle with its management and governance. The latest financials were earlier reported by Axios. Uber declined to comment beyond confirming the numbers. Even with growth in Uber's business, investor confidence in the company is precarious. Recently, Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price Group Inc. and two other mutual fund firms marked down the valuation of their Uber holdings. Vanguard, along with Hartford Funds, pushed its estimates of the value of an Uber share down by 15 percent to 41.46 a share for the quarter ended June 30, according to disclosures by the companies. The Principal Financial Group slashed its estimate for Uber to 42.72 a share in July, down 12.4 percent from 48.77 a share in April. And T. Rowe Price is now pegging the price of its Uber shares at 42.70 each, down 12 percent from its previous estimate. Fidelity Investments, another giant mutual fund firm, held its Uber estimate steady at 48.77 a share as of June 30. Michael Ramsey, an analyst with Gartner, said the lower valuations by some of the mutual fund companies were most likely a proactive accounting strategy for the funds that signaled an internal dialing down of their confidence in the San Francisco based start up. "They have to take a hit on their finances now to do it," he said of the mutual funds, "but with all of the drama around Uber and its growth trajectory and leadership shake up right now, there are a lot more signs out there that their valuation may be too high rather than too low." Uber is currently valued at around 68.5 billion, making it the most highly valued private start up in the world. The company has raised more than 10 billion in debt and equity, and it holds more than 6.6 billion in cash, down from 7.2 billion at the end of the first quarter. Because the firm is private, mutual fund companies must guess at how much their shares are worth. The markdowns were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The mutual fund companies declined to comment on individual company valuations. There may soon be more clarity on what exactly Uber is worth. This month, the company's board voted to advance preliminary proposals by two investment groups the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and the Dragoneer Investment Group to buy shares in the company. The board is also considering an offer from a consortium led by Shervin Pishevar, an early Uber investor, to buy shares. While the proposals include measures that would maintain, at least on paper, Uber's 68.5 billion valuation, the investment groups would potentially gain some of the company's shares at a discount. Whatever that discount may amount to is likely to be heavily scrutinized. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Charlize Theron on Megyn Kelly: "There are things she has said that I've definitely had issues with, but it doesn't invalidate how I feel about her struggle." Charlize Theron knew it wouldn't be easy to make "Bombshell," a movie about sexual harassment at Fox News. After all, when it comes to plotlines, that one's a tightrope. Still, Theron didn't expect that two weeks before the film was supposed to shoot, with A listers Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie set to star alongside her, "Bombshell" would nearly fall apart. "It felt like we had been going at top speed toward something risky, and then, all of a sudden, the floor was just dropping from underneath us," Theron said. As one of the producers, she had kept the budget to a lean 35 million, but Annapurna Pictures still pulled out of making "Bombshell" last fall, just months before the company released its pricey political comedy "Vice," starring Christian Bale. "It's a tough pill to swallow when you hear your financier wants to back out," Theron said, "especially when it's almost half the cost of something that they've already done with a man." Though Theron leapt into action to secure last minute financing and a new distributor, she was still wrestling with private doubts about taking on the lead role of Megyn Kelly, the steely Fox News anchor whose accusations against the channel's chief executive, Roger Ailes, helped topple him in 2016. Kelly remains a controversial figure with both the left and the right, and playing her would require the same sort of prosthestic laden physical transformation that Theron had undergone for Aileen Wuornos, her Oscar winning role in "Monster." When you told friends that you'd be playing Megyn Kelly, how did they react? It was definitely awkward. In a weird way, the judgment she gets from a lot of people, I felt on me a little bit. But up until four weeks into shooting, I was still grappling with who she was as a person, and it wasn't until I really zeroed in on that year and a half of the story that I could actually defend her. The film walks a fine line: Megyn is sympathetic when it comes to her sexual harassment, but "Bombshell" still includes some of her more controversial moments, like when she famously insisted on air that Santa Claus couldn't be black. There are things she has said that I've definitely had issues with, but it doesn't invalidate how I feel about her struggle. Avoiding all of that stuff to get an emotional arc out of her character, I just didn't want to be a part of that. By the way, if this was a movie about me and I hope nobody ever does one it would be filled with flaws and mistakes, and I wouldn't want somebody to take those things away. I really do believe that what she and those women went through was messed up, even though they work for a network that I highly have issues with. I would imagine that as the mother of two black children, you didn't relish re enacting her "Santa is white" segment. Emphatically Thank you! Yeah, that was hard for me. To play Megyn, you enlisted the Oscar winning makeup artist Kazu Hiro, who transformed Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill. What else went into getting under her skin? If I didn't have Kazu, this would never have happened, but I just recently watched footage for a behind the scenes thing, and it was actually so off putting because I'm in the prosthetics, but I'm not in character. I wasn't doing this thing she does when she walks into a room, which I truly believe comes from years and years of having to prove herself. What does she do when she walks in a room? She leads with her jaw, and she has this very static, still posture that nothing can penetrate. It's like, "I will not give you a physical read on me." Even when she shares emotional stories, she protects herself at all times, but I am a true believer that strong behavior in characters comes from an emotional need. For instance, with Aileen Wuornos, her eyes were so wide and her jaw was always so tight, and when I did that for the first week of shooting, I just looked like a crazy person until I realized that behavior came from the fact that she was 5 foot 2 and had been homeless from the time she was 13. You'd pump yourself up like that because you were trying to tell the other guy, "Don't mess with me. I'm bigger than you think I am." So what did you determine that Megyn's emotional need was in the story? During that year and a half, she faced an incredible moral dilemma: She really liked Roger, and she gives him credit for her career and where she ended up. She's also a very driven woman who didn't want to be defined by accusations of sexual harassment , and that's unfortunately a big thing for a lot of women, where you don't want the world to look at you like you're a victim. Even a year or two after that experience, I saw Megyn speak at women's forums, and the way she talked about it was in this really protective manner. Her defenses come up even higher, and she becomes more lawyerly and journalistic about it. So as not to be portrayed as a victim? Yeah. I think that's just how she copes with her pain. Maybe she does it differently in private I don't know about that. But that was hard for us because when you make a movie, you want to have those moments where you can break a character down and just have her be raw, and there was nothing that gave me enough evidence that it was the right thing to do with her. So how do you find another way to indicate those emotional undercurrents? There's this moment where the lawyer at her deposition asks her, "Any long term consequences?" It was the closest to an emotional break that I could get because of the stupidity behind a question like that. I mean, where do you even begin? In one of the takes, when the actor said that line, I felt something break, and I didn't answer the question. I'm so grateful that the director ended up using that moment. What the scene in "Bombshell" was more about, and what made this brutal to watch on the day, was the fact that you had Roger Ailes dictating how this was going to go and she didn't have a say. It's the belittling factor: "I am going to get you to do something that I know you're incredibly uncomfortable with." I think it's having to placate his power that makes it almost unbearable to watch, way more than if he physically raped her in that scene. Watching this has been eye opening to a lot of people. Men, especially, go, "I had no idea women had to do things like that." It's humbling that you can create that kind of moment, because a lot of times you know people are going to say, "This is a woman's movie, and men will not tap into this at all." When men can emotionally engage with what we experience and be just as disturbed by it, it's a powerful thing. The film made me think of the actresses that Harvey Weinstein is alleged to have harassed, like Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino, and how he would marginalize them or pit other women against each other to maintain a system where he could stay on top. Yeah, and he did that to everybody. Pitting women against each other? He was really, really good at that. There was a lot of, like, "Well, I'm talking to Gwyneth for this movie ..." One of his lines was that Renee Zellweger and I slept with him to get jobs. There was no limit to him. Even in the sexual favors, he would still pit us against each other. Through a spokeswoman, Weinstein responded to Theron's comments on Thursday: "Charlize Theron is a good actor who helps make films great and marketable. and that is the sole reason that I hired her for terrific projects as "The Cider House Rules" and "The Yards." She and I always got along well, and I am frankly surprised but expected, being that this is to promote this film and her role in this era." A few hours later, he sent a second statement, also praising her acting and noting that's why he cast her in those early movies. But the follow up statement omitted surprise at her comments and instead said: "In this situation she's relying on the words of a lawyer who is suing for money." "Bombshell" is a movie about women, but some viewers may be surprised that it was still written by a man (Charles Randolph) and directed by one, too (Jay Roach). Well, the easiest response I can come up with is a woman didn't decide to tell the story. If this was an article that I bought for my production company, I think my first instinct would be to go to a woman, but I didn't pick the writer. The writer picked the story and did all the work on his own. But this is such a great example of how we should not compartmentalize these stories to just one particular sex being able to tell it. I want to see more opportunity for female writers and filmmakers, but I also think that it's a mistake to isolate men completely from that process. When you find the right man to tell that story, there's real value in that. Listen, we should always question this stuff, and I'm totally open to the conversation around it, but if I had to do it all over again, I would do it exactly the same way. The men in my life are incredibly compassionate and ask questions about things in a way that is inspiring to me. Why would I eliminate that interest? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Tom Thibodeau, a defensive minded coach who most recently led the Minnesota Timberwolves, is nearing an agreement to take the reins of the Knicks, a source with knowledge of the negotiations said on Saturday. Thibodeau, who had been an assistant coach for the Knicks from 1996 to 2003, will become the team's eighth coach since 2012. The story was first reported by ESPN. Thibodeau, 62, had been considered a front runner for the job since the spring, especially once William Wesley, more commonly known around the N.B.A. as World Wide Wes, was added to the Knicks front office. Thibodeau was once Wesley's client at the sports and entertainment giant Creative Artists Agency, and Leon Rose, the Knicks president, was also an agent at C.A.A., where he worked alongside Thibodeau. Thibodeau, a New Britain, Conn., native, has cultivated a reputation for having a single minded obsession for basketball in his decades long coaching career. His first coaching job was as an assistant at his alma mater, Salem State College in Salem, Mass. In the N.B.A., he was a highly regarded assistant from 1989 to 2010, best known for being the architect of the staunch Boston Celtics defense that led the team to a championship in 2008. In 2010, Thibodeau became head coach of the Chicago Bulls and was an immediate success. He would become the fastest ever head coach to accumulate 100 regular season victories. In his first year with the Bulls, the team won 62 games and went to the Eastern Conference Finals. It would be his high water mark as a coach. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Buried in the new bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration are a few sections addressing the fees that many of us pay to fly. And while the Senate and the House bills still differ a bit, one likely result is going to be this: The carriers are going to have to refund the fees you pay when your luggage isn't on your flight and you have to wait a long time to get it. Refunding those fees may not seem like a big deal, but airlines in the United States took in about 3 billion in fees for checked luggage last year. So plenty is at stake. And if you've ever tried to get your money back after an airline botched its baggage delivery, as I did recently, you're acutely aware of the following facts: Any attempt to reason with the airline begins with the discovery that it may have declared all baggage fees nonrefundable in nearly every circumstance. A refund, if you get one, may come in the form of a voucher that requires you to fly that carrier again and to remember to use it. If you dispute the charge with your credit card company, you may run into resistance. While the bill contains other improvements for traveling families, people in wheelchairs and others, those baggage fees are the ones that airlines have been charging for a longer time and are particularly noxious. If the bag doesn't come spinning around the carousel, you shouldn't have to pay, right? Well, the airlines argue that they alone should get to answer that question. Their trade group, Airlines for America, contends that the bill, which has bipartisan support, overreaches. Since 1990, the industry has more than halved its rate of mishandled bags, which is now at 3.24 per 1,000 pieces of checked luggage, down from 6.84, according to Vaughn Jennings, a spokesman. "Customer service decisions are best left to the dedicated airline employees who interact with and receive feedback from their customers every day not government," he said. Those decisions have led to the following result: In just a decade, the major American airlines have gone from taking in little in a la carte fees for things like baggage, early boarding and premium seating, to raking in 7.4 billion in 2015 alone, according to a study by the travel industry firms IdeaWorks and CarTrawler. A healthy airline industry is a great thing. Still, are all these fees just a naked grab for profits, or merely an attempt to have passengers pay for only the services that they are actually using? And if you did not get what you paid for, you ought to be persistent in your attempts to get the money back. Here's how the process breaks down and I mean that in every sense of the term. HAGGLING WITH THE AIRLINE In December, my family and I checked some bags on a domestic Delta Air Lines flight and did not get them back until 30 hours later. It seemed as if a refund was in order, but it took some effort to get Delta agents to even acknowledge that there was a way to request one. On its online form, Delta says it "may" elect to give you a "rebate" if 12 hours pass between the time you report the wayward bags and your receiving them. To start that process, Delta wants ticket numbers, baggage claim numbers and the file reference number it gives you when your bags don't show up. You should have your paperwork in order. And that "rebate?" If Delta grants one, you'll get a voucher for future use on Delta. You know, the same airline that you're super annoyed with for having left you with just your dirty winter clothes in a warm climate with no toothpaste and an infant to clothe. (We eventually bought more clothes, and Delta reimbursed us in full. At least we weren't on Spirit, which reserves the right to "request" that you return the things you bought.) You may forget you have that voucher, even if you are willing to fly Delta again. But you'd better not forget, because it expires in a year. Delta would not disclose the percentage of passengers who end up using these vouchers. The airline does give members of its frequent flier program 2,500 frequent flier miles if they have to wait more than 20 minutes at the carousel after a domestic flight, but only if they know to ask for it via another online form and do so within three days. DISPUTING FEES WITH YOUR CARD COMPANY Having given Delta an opportunity to fix the problem only to find that I could not get my money back, I called up American Express, my credit card issuer, to dispute the baggage fee charges. The dispute process can be an incredibly powerful tool for aggrieved consumers, and you can learn more about it in my 2013 column on the topic. When I got a representative on the phone, however, she informed me that I was not allowed to dispute this fee. Why not? Because of an agreement that the airline has with American Express, she said. This seemed unfair, but I'd heard similar reports from consumers over the years about other card companies. According to Molly Faust, a spokeswoman for American Express, the company doesn't have much flexibility, given how airlines set up the fees in the first place. In the so called contract of carriage, the airlines can and do declare many fees nonrefundable. When that happens, and the service is rendered, according to Ms. Faust, American Express tries to educate cardholders about how the fee rules work and generally won't be able to get them a refund. Despite the insistence of my American Express representative on the phone, Delta's contract of carriage does not describe its baggage fees as nonrefundable, though those for United, Spirit and American do. Delta does, however, describe other fees this way. Perhaps that's why, after a lot of badgering from me, the American Express phone representative eventually filed my dispute after all. Ultimately, it was successful. Most people would not be that persistent, though. Spokeswomen for Capital One, JPMorgan Chase and Citibank all said that they allowed airline fee disputes. If you've had a different experience, please let me know in the comments. TURN TO WASHINGTON Depending on what happens to the new legislation, it's possible that some of the bag fee angst will go away. The Senate version of the bill calls for airlines to automatically refund the baggage fees when travelers do not get their luggage within six hours of their arrival on a domestic flight or 12 hours on an international one. The House version gives a 24 hour deadline, and the delivery of the refund would not be automatic. Both passages are pretty generous to the airlines. Baggage service used to be free. Now that it generally isn't, should they really get a free pass if your bags come on the next flight four hours later and you have to deal with the logistics of making sure they get to you? Still, the automatic nature of the Senate proposal is a big deal. If it does become automatic, it will no longer be your responsibility to type numbers into web forms. Instead, the refund would just happen. Also, it would be an actual refund on your card statement. Staff members working on the bill say that vouchers will not be allowed. Good riddance. MEANWHILE, MAKE THESE MOVES It will probably be a year or two before these provisions take effect. So while you're waiting, you could try a couple of things to avoid baggage fees if checking your luggage is a necessity. First, fly Southwest. It doesn't charge fees for the first two checked bags. If you have elite status on an airline, you can generally avoid fees that way, and many carriers have credit card issuing partners that in exchange for the card's overall annual fee, will offer free luggage checking of some sort. But if you're stuck paying fees on a carrier that gives you grief when the bags don't come on time, dispute those charges and dispute them often. Another thing that gets the carrier's attention is your filing a complaint with the Department of Transportation. If enough of us protest just once or twice a year, the airlines may get so sick of responding that they will automate refunds, whether our elected representatives force them to or not. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The songwriter and performer Dane Terry in his Brooklyn apartment. His new show, "Jupiter's Lifeless Moons," is his most structured yet. In January 2011, the musician Dane Terry packed up his earthly possessions and drove from his native Ohio to New York, reaching his destination in a blizzard. "I parked my car with all my things in a snowbank," he said. "When it melted out, I sold it." Selling your car is a true sign you are here to stay, and Mr. Terry has since embedded himself in a downtown scene that joyfully straddles the worlds of theater, pop music, performance art and cabaret. The 34 year old ("I don't lie on my Grindr profile," he quipped) has appeared at genre hopping venues like La MaMa and Joe's Pub, and his new musical show, "Jupiter's Lifeless Moons," running Jan. 12 to 17 as part of the 13th Annual Coil Festival, is helping reopen Performance Space 122. Growing up in Columbus, Mr. Terry wanted to be a magician. "I was interested in the idea of performing tricks, but what I actually wanted was real magic," he said at a cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a few subway stops from his home in Kensington. "When I found music, I realized that was the closest thing you could get." At age 12, he taught himself to play the piano, practicing for hours on end, and at 17, he started making money noodling away in lounges and at weddings. In his twenties, he toured the country with his friend Jordan O'Jordan, playing punk basements and D.I.Y. venues, and he has recorded a handful of albums and EPs. Yet when this admirer of Jerry Lee Lewis style boogie woogie and musical narrative a la Laurie Anderson moved to New York, he joined the theater community. "The music people in New York, I think, still don't know who I am, largely," Mr. Terry said, not sounding regretful in the least. "Jupiter's Lifeless Moons," which also features three guest musicians, is Mr. Terry's most narratively structured outing yet, with a plot inspired by his stay in Cleveland last winter. (The show will be expanded into a multi episode podcast for Night Vale Presents.) It is also the first time Mr. Terry has worked with a director, Ellie Heyman. "Dane gets these ideas, and they sort of bubble up from his unconscious," Ms. Heyman said by telephone. "They are like these icebergs that seem totally separate from each other, and then he finds out they're actually related. This piece was created largely through the iceberg process." Mr. Terry was more blunt: "She's pulled this thing out of my throat." Like peers such as Molly Pope, Erin Markey and Heather Christian, Mr. Terry often starts off with autobiographical tidbits (his debut full length show from 2015, the chatty song cycle "Bird in the House," drew from his childhood), which he often distorts through a fictional lens. A big inspiration is an old timey kind of science fiction, from back when the genre was not dominated by its dystopian strain. "Every time I start writing something, I'm like, 'This is going to be set on a moon base!'" Mr. Terry said. "I always think I'm doing hard sci fi, but I always come back to a person in a house. It grounds the story in humanity." Tellingly, Mr. Terry hopes for a future as full of promise as the optimistic space operas of yore. "I welcome anything that gives me an opportunity to do something that I haven't done or that augments my skill set," he said, then quickly edited himself. "'Skill set' sounds so professional. That makes me more of a more potent magician." It's a new year, so why not try something new? The five performance festivals opening this month in New York will help adventurous theatergoers do just that. These showcases tend to highlight the experimental and the offbeat. Some firsts this year will also be lasts. On Jan. 10, the Coil festival will inaugurate the renovated home of Performance Space 122 in the East Village, but this will be the festival's final installment. It will be replaced by year round programming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
What's your favorite book no one else has heard of? Don't know if it's my favorite, but it has had a profound impact on me: "Letter to a Child Never Born," by Oriana Fallaci. I read this book in my late 20s and it was a revelation. It is a summoning, a monologue, a sustained interior dialogue, a cri de coeur. And this paragraph has stayed with me: "And yet, or just for this reason, it's so fascinating to be a woman. It's an adventure that takes such courage, a challenge that's never boring. You'll have so many things to engage you if you're born a woman. To begin with, you'll have to struggle to maintain that if God exists he might even be an old woman with white hair or a beautiful girl. Then you'll have to struggle to explain that it wasn't sin that was born on the day when Eve picked an apple, what was born that day was a splendid virtue called disobedience." When do you read? I read before bed. I have days of reading or half days. I read a lot during the summer, but also in winter. I am always reading. I have rooms for reading particular kinds of books: a sitting room with a purple velvet lounge chair for more meditative, spiritual books and poetry. For some reason my bedroom is where all the nonfiction has accumulated. This is not a good thing. Stories of war, climate disaster, immigration abuse, racism, violence against women often inhabit my dreams. What moves you most in a work of literature? To declare what cannot be said, boldness of imagination, a writer's ability to surprise with language, metaphor or an original turn of phrase and boldness of original ideas: an authentic willingness to enter the wound and live in that dangerous place of ambiguity and empathy. Structure that breaks with structure. I long for the ecstasy of being cracked open over and over. Some of the books, plays, essays and poetry that have done that to me include "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon," by Toni Morrison; "Landscape of the Body," by John Guare; "Middlemarch," by George Eliot; "American Dreams," by Sapphire; "Love in the Time of Cholera," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; "Uses of the Erotic," by Audre Lorde; anything and everything by James Baldwin; "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five," by Doris Lessing; and "As I Lay Dying," by William Faulkner. How do you organize your books? With endless love. I can't throw books away, even paperbacks. They are friends, lovers, touchstones, specific reminders of periods of thinking, particular research in the making of a play and imprints of love affairs. I have too many books. I'm sure I could happily live in a house where the walls were made of them. I dream of books seeping into me through osmosis and I am strengthened to feel part of a continuum and community of writers. I tried to alphabetize my books but then I realized they had to be arranged by subject, then authors. Then I realized this was impossible. So now I spend too much time trying to find books but I actually like this because I come across other books that I've forgotten, books that deserve a second or third reading. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Jean Babilee, who gained instant stardom in French ballet as the violent chair throwing youth in Roland Petit's "Le Jeune Homme et la Mort" ("The Young Man and Death") in 1946, and who remained international dance's great rebel, died on Thursday in Paris. He was 90. His wife, the filmmaker Zapo Babilee, confirmed the death. "Sensational" was a word critics applied liberally to Mr. Babilee's dancing, including his first guest appearances in New York with Ballet Theater (now American Ballet Theater) in 1951. His extraordinary technique, soaring leaps and masculine power were matched by a pantherlike pounce and a jarring poetic presence. "Angel and demon" was how Nathalie Philippart, his first wife and dancing partner, described him in Patrick Bensard's film "Le Mystere Babilee" (2000). Rejecting conventions in dance and life, Mr. Babilee occasionally quit performing to travel abroad on his motorcycle, into his 80s. He last appeared onstage in 2003. He also choreographed for his company, Les Ballets Jean Babilee, from 1955 to 1959, and acted onstage and in films. Mr. Babilee was classically trained at the Paris Opera Ballet school and had perfect classical style. Yet as a member of Les Ballets des Champs Elysees, founded by Petit in 1945, he was an experimental dancer, his career emerging from the creative ferment in French ballet after World War II and his roles coming out of his personal, impulsive way of moving. Leslie Caron was an unknown 16 year old when she danced the role of the Sphinx to Mr. Babilee's Oedipus in David Lichine's "La Rencontre" ("The Encounter") in 1948. She wore pointy ears, long fingernails and huge cloth wings and climbed to a platform with a trapeze. When Oedipus solved her riddles, the Sphinx committed suicide in a headlong plunge. "I attached myself by the ankle and threw myself backward," Ms. Caron told The New York Times in 1995. "Babilee used to pull my ponytail to see if I was really dead." Jean Babilee was born Jean Gutmann in Paris on Feb. 3, 1923, into an affluent and culturally inclined family. His father, a physician, was a prominent eye specialist who painted on the side and knew Picasso. Mr. Bensard, founding director of the Cinematheque de la Danse, included in his film telling clips of Mr. Babilee's charmed childhood, with the boy tumbling into the acrobatics he would later make famous. When young Jean expressed a wish to study dance, his father sent him to the Paris Opera Ballet school in 1936. After the Germans invaded Paris in 1940, Jean danced classical roles in a small company in Cannes for three years. During the Nazi occupation, he stopped dancing as Jean Gutmann his father was Jewish, his mother was not and adopted his mother's maiden name professionally. Still, after he rejoined the Paris Opera Ballet corps in 1942 43, someone wrote "Jew" on his dressing room mirror. A French police officer, conducting an identity check, warned him to leave because of his Jewish heritage. Mr. Babilee said he joined the Resistance in Touraine and returned to Paris at the war's end. In 1945 he came to notice in the Ballets des Champs Elysees as the meddlesome joker in Janine Charrat's version of Stravinsky's "Jeu de Cartes." He then shot to fame with his explosive performance in the Paris premiere of "Jeune Homme" as the artist driven to suicide by an allegorical death figure. In 1947, in London, he partnered Margrethe Schanne, Denmark' s great Romantic ballerina, in the Bluebird pas de deux from "The Sleeping Beauty." The dancer Erik Bruhn once said that he had been so stunned by Mr. Babilee's power that for a time he thought he should stop dancing altogether, until he realized that he should not try to copy him; thus did Bruhn become ballet's great danseur noble in Denmark and at Ballet Theater. In 1979, Mikhail Baryshnikov went backstage and reportedly fell at Mr. Babilee's feet after seeing him perform in "Life," a duet created by Maurice Bejart in which Mr. Babilee and a young woman were often encased in a cube of metal tubes. It was a mildly gymnastic display and a gloss not only on "Le Jeune Homme et la Mort" but also on a midlife crisis. Mr. Babilee was later director of the Rhine Ballet in France, in 1972 73, and appeared in stage productions of Tennessee Williams's "Orpheus Descending" and Jean Genet's "The Balcony." Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Isabelle, from his marriage to Ms. Philippart, which ended in divorce, and a sister, Sarah Clair. In 1984, Mr. Babilee took a more celebrated risk in Paris. Accepting a challenge from Petit, he reprised his role as the antihero in "Jeune Homme" to show current dancers how it should be done. At 61, he dived into a neck stand, cheek to floor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
High in a Manhattan skyscraper near Grand Central Terminal on a recent Tuesday, 80 critically ill patients in intensive care units scattered from Georgia to New Jersey were being monitored, remotely, by a doctor scanning a dozen computer screens. On one monitor, she scrolled to a report of new symptoms in a 77 year old patient in High Point, N.C. On another, she summoned a graph of blood pressure readings from a woman struggling with chronic pulmonary disease. Finally the doctor who is an "intensivist," or critical care specialist clicked to a live image of an unconscious 60 year old man in septic shock in Warner Robins, Ga., and zoomed close enough to check the dial on his ventilator. The setting was correct, she said, reflecting an algorithm designed to improve survival rates and shorten ICU stays. More than a decade ago, this kind of tele ICU command center was trumpeted by its creators as the new standard in critical care, a way to save lives and money by stretching the skills of an inadequate pool of intensivists to help oversee more of the country's sickest patients. Today, with the growth of such systems stalled at about 10 percent of ICU patients nationwide, and wildly contradictory studies about the results, no one can say with authority if, or under what circumstances, tele ICUs deliver on their promises. Like many expensive innovations in medicine, from robotic surgery and designer drugs to electronic medical records, tele ICUs have shown their most stellar results in studies linked to the companies that sell the systems; some hospitals in these studies cite as much as a 40 percent decline in mortality and a tenfold return on investment. In contrast, some independent studies published in the last five years have found no significant effect on survival rate, complications or length of stay, and have found that tele ICUs brought new budgetary burdens, not payoffs. In New York, in a sense, this is a second act for the tele ICU. It was developed in 1998 by intensivists at Johns Hopkins, who later sold their company to Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, which now licenses the software as eICU. NewYork Presbyterian Hospital adopted the technology with great fanfare in 2003, but only two years later, deactivated it. At Kaleida Health, a large Buffalo based hospital system, the tele ICU lasted no longer. At least three other hospital systems, in Michigan, Texas and Kentucky, have also unplugged command centers installed in 2004 and 2005. "The eICU was a marketing success, but there's still legitimate concern about whether there's any improvement as far as patient care," said Michael P. Hughes, a spokesman for Kaleida. "We studied it, and there was no statistically significant improvement in the mortality rate and complication rate over a 12 month period. We discontinued it, and moved that personnel back to the bedside." Proponents of tele ICUs suggest that poor implementation, and the reluctance of physicians to cede authority to remote intensivists, explains the disappointing results in some places and some studies. "It's not as simple as hanging a camera and a microphone in the room and calling it an eICU," said Dr. Robert Groves, who led the installation at Banner, one of the largest of more than 40 hospital systems that use such tele ICU command centers. Banner monitors 423 ICU patients in 18 of its 23 hospitals from remote locations in Mesa, Ariz., Denver, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. Dr. Groves credits that with keeping ICU deaths at half the number that would have been expected, judging by patient scores on a nationally accepted illness severity index. "Nurses are the key to success in a good ICU," he added. If or when tele ICUs pay off financially is also disputed. Medicare and many insurers typically pay hospitals a bundled rate for a particular diagnosis, whether the patient spends two days or 12 in the ICU, where as much as 40 percent of hospital spending takes place. By intervening before a patient crashes, or reducing complications like ventilator induced pneumonia, watchful intensivists significantly improve the hospital's bottom line by helping patients improve and leave the ICU faster, proponents say. Round the clock access to intensivists also allows smaller hospitals to safely keep sicker, more lucrative patients rather than sending them to distant medical centers, said Dr. Mary Jo Gorman, founder and president of Advanced ICU Care, a St. Louis based company with a branch in Chennai, India, and since 2011, the office near Grand Central. The company licenses the software from Philips and provides services to 26 individual hospitals typically without the deep pockets to spend 6 million to 8 million to establish their own command centers. Dr. Gorman estimates that hospitals reap an extra 2,000 to 3,000 per patient after paying annual fees ranging from 750,000 to 2 million. But researchers at the University of Iowa found little public data and sharp disparities when they combed past studies evaluating the financial impact of tele ICUs, said Dr. Gaurav Kumar, the lead author of the review study, published this year in the medical journal Chest. Costs ranged from 50,000 to 100,000 a bed the first year, they estimated. Three previous studies linked to vendors had reported increased hospital profits of up to 4,000 per patient, while two without such links had found no return or losses. "I grew up as a computer geek I love the idea of a tele ICU that can be a backup as a safety net," Dr. Kumar, a pulmonary intensivist, added in an interview from Valparaiso, Ind., where he returned when his father, a family doctor there, was dying of cancer in a low tech ICU with excellent nursing. "The problem is the data we have is just not sufficient. That goes back to the potential for bias." That has not stopped the growth of Advanced ICU, which is now expanding its Manhattan center, and has wooed away half a dozen members of Mount Sinai Medical Center's ICU team, starting with Dr. Corey Scurlock, the former director. The doctors and nurses who work in this hushed office describe themselves as refugees from the chaotic pressures of real life ICUs in a city where critical care specialists are more abundant, and perhaps less appreciated, than in most places in the United States. New York has a ready supply of such disenchanted intensivists, they said, describing ICUs where they were caught among cardio thoracic surgeons with large egos, nurse managers protecting their authority and the patients' demanding relatives. "It was like the first few minutes of 'Saving Private Ryan' every day for me," recalled Dr. Scurlock, 40, who assumed responsibility for intensive care at Mount Sinai after a critical care fellowship at Harvard, and earned an M.B.A. in 2010. "As far as Mount Sinai was concerned, I was still going to be running that ICU when I was 80, and working around the clock." Instead, while on vacation in the Caribbean, he read about Advanced ICU, he said, and contacted the company, which hired him to open the New York branch. A spokeswoman for Mount Sinai, Dorie Klissas, declined to comment on the exodus, which included a physician assistant and critical care nurses. She added: "We don't use remote ICU monitoring technology at the Mount Sinai Medical Center. We have state of the art ICUs, all of which are sufficiently staffed and have sophisticated in house monitoring systems." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
For far too long, America's response to the coronavirus lacked what you might call rational panic. From the experts to the markets to the president and his cable television court, an irrational calm prevailed when a general freak out might have prepared us for the crisis. Today, at last, we have panic in surplus however unevenly distributed and still insufficient in some places. But now we need something else to leaven it: Along with rational panic, we need sources of rational hope. Rational hope is not the same as reckless optimism. It doesn't require, for instance, quickly lifting quarantines based on outlying projections of low fatality rates, as some return to normalcy conservatives have been urging in the last week. Rational hope accepts that the situation is genuinely dark, but then it still looks around for signposts leading up and out. It recognizes that things are likely to get worse, but keeps itself alert to the contexts in which they seem to be getting better or at the very least, getting worse more slowly. It doesn't expect miracles, but it rejects a grim helplessness, a spirit of inevitable doom. Here are three sources of rational hope, three patterns where I'm finding optimism right now. Listen to "The Argument" podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt. First, there is modest hope in data compiled by the smart thermometer company Kinsa, which claims to be able to identify anomalous, unseasonal fever rates using data from its nationwide user base. Kinsa's data show a clear February and March anomaly across the U.S., especially in areas known to be affected by the coronavirus. But it also shows that anomaly diminishing as lockdowns and social distancing began to the point where fever rates are now below the expected trend nationally, and returning toward seasonal norms even in some Covid 19 hot spots. The company is careful to note that this probably doesn't reflect declining coronavirus infections alone, since many illnesses decline under social distancing conditions. But the sharp turn suggests that general infection curves can be changed quickly even during a pandemic, and that the policies of the last two weeks might be having a real epidemiological effect. Second, there is hope in the differing course of the pandemic so far in Greater New York versus the Pacific Coast. Both regions are urbanized, diverse and international, both were seeded with coronavirus cases around the same time, and Seattle had the first major (observed) outbreak. But Washington State bent its curve after the initial surge and California's case rate and death rate trends are a gentle incline nothing like the New York area's terrifying spike. In the most optimistic case, the spike reflects New York's unique density and heavy reliance on mass transit and one could hope that America as a whole, with our exurbs and sprawling cities and wide aisled supermarkets and car based commutes, is more like California than like Gotham. This might be too optimistic; there is plenty of Bay Area and SoCal density, and coronavirus clusters have popped up in plenty of less dense locales. So maybe some of the divide reflects policy the fact that West Coast leaders acted ever so slightly more swiftly and with more seriousness of purpose than the feckless Bill de Blasio in New York City. But even that is grounds for reasonable hope, since it suggests that even if you initially fail to spot an outbreak, you can still hope to imitate South Korea rather than northern Italy. Finally, there is hope in the fact that the impressive containment achieved so far in East Asia has been accomplished with a variety of different policies, different degrees of lockdown and distancing, but one major commonality: the widespread use of masks. Fearing shortages and panic, Western experts have downplayed the effectiveness of masking. But the circumstantial evidence of Western versus Asian epidemic curves and the direct evidence of multiple studies suggest that masking works, and that its widespread adoption can change an epidemic's course. That path can't be taken until American mask production outstrips shortages although even homemade masks are reasonably effective and I wouldn't expect a masking norm to ever become universal in America. (During the Spanish Flu, a Bay Area mask ordinance was eventually repealed under the influence of the "Anti Mask League of San Francisco.") But you could see masks becoming ubiquitous in the densest areas, essentially required of air travelers and commuters, and normalized for supermarket and mall trips even in exurbia. These three hopeful signs together hint at a path back toward quasi normalcy. The current shutdown bends infection curves relatively quickly, outside a few major urban outbreaks. That policy response combines with America's social distancing sprawl and car culture and younger than Europe age profile to compensate for our initial incompetence and natural insubordination. And then the cheapest, lightest weight means of slowing transmission becomes ubiquitous in U.S. cities by Memorial or Independence Day. I'm sure it won't be that easy. But this column also hasn't exhausted the list of reasonable hopes. And in a dark moment we should all be looking for them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A lawsuit filed Monday accused three makers of insulin of conspiring to drive up the prices of their lifesaving drugs, harming patients who were being asked to pay for a growing share of their drug bills. The price of insulin has skyrocketed in recent years, with the three manufacturers Sanofi, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly raising the list prices of their products in near lock step, prompting outcry from patient groups and doctors who have pointed out that the rising prices appear to have little to do with increased production costs. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, accuses the companies of exploiting the country's opaque drug pricing system in a way that benefits themselves and the intermediaries known as pharmacy benefit managers. It cites several examples of patients with diabetes who, unable to afford their insulin treatments, which can cost up to 900 a month, have resorted to injecting themselves with expired insulin or starving themselves to control their blood sugar. Some patients, the lawsuit said, intentionally allowed themselves to slip into diabetic ketoacidosis a blood syndrome that can be fatal to get insulin from hospital emergency rooms. A recent study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that the price of insulin nearly tripled from 2002 to 2013. "People who have to pay out of pocket for insulin are paying enormous prices when they shouldn't be," said Steve Berman, a lawyer whose firm filed the suit on behalf of patients and is seeking to have it certified as a class action. In a statement, Sanofi said, "We strongly believe these allegations have no merit, and will defend against these claims." Lilly said it had followed all laws, adding, "We adhere to the highest ethical standards." A spokesman for Novo Nordisk said the company disagreed with the allegations in the suit and would defend itself. "At Novo Nordisk," the company's statement said, "we have a longstanding commitment to supporting patients' access to our medicines." The rising costs of drugs has led to several hearings in Congress and has drawn the attention of President Trump, who this month pledged to address the issue and said the industry was "getting away with murder." In December, attorneys general in 20 states accused several generic drug makers, including two of the biggest Teva Pharmaceuticals and Mylan of engaging in a price fixing scheme in which executives coordinated at informal gatherings and through phone calls and text messages. Federal investigators are also said to be looking at the issue of drug prices, and several companies, including Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, have said they have received subpoenas. Several companies have recently tried to head off criticism by taking actions to address rising prices. In December, Lilly said it would offer a 40 percent discount off the list price of its insulin product, Humalog, for patients who are forced to pay full price. And Novo Nordisk, which makes Novolog, has pledged to limit price increases in the American market to less than 10 percent in a year. The lawsuit filed Monday claimed that the three companies intentionally raised the list prices on their drugs to gain favorable treatment from pharmacy benefit managers, who work with health insurers and drug makers and help decide how a drug will be covered on a list of approved drugs. Insurers do not pay the list prices that the drug makers set. Instead, the pharmacy benefit managers negotiate a rebate that is returned to them. The benefit managers, in turn, take a slice of that rebate for themselves, although the amount of the rebate, and the amount they keep, is not made public. As a result, the drug manufacturers end up setting two prices for their drugs the higher list price and the lower, secret, "real" price that insurers pay. The lawsuit claims that rather than competing with one another to offer a lower, "real" price to the insurers, the drug makers are vying to offer the best payment to the pharmacy benefit manager, which is why they have been raising the list price. When the list price goes up, many patients see their out of pocket costs rise, even if they have health insurance. That's because plans increasingly carry high deductibles, which require patients to pay for their drug costs themselves until they hit a certain limit, as well as to pay a percentage of the list price even after their deductible is met. While Mr. Berman accused the benefit managers of being complicit, he said the lawsuit focused on the drug makers because "they are playing the game, and they are the ones who publish the list price." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
How to Make a Bucking Bull: Good Breeding and, Just Maybe, a Cow's Love Each year, when the bucking bulls arrive at Madison Square Garden, livestock trailers pull into 33rd Street and back up to ramps that lead five floors up to the arena. The bulls 50 or so come for the opening event in the Professional Bull Riders circuit, which this year runs Jan. 4 6. Cowboys on horses, letting loose an occasional whoop or holler, herd them up the ramps. The bulls soon emerge into a kind of animal athlete locker room, with a dirt floor and strong steel bars arranged horizontally to form stalls. Some bulls walk calmly into the mazelike corral. Some trot. Some come in hot, trying to charge the workers, who quickly climb the steel bars to get out of the way. This is only the locker room, of course; the bulls don't have to bed down at the arena. Once the event is over and the cowboys head to their hotel, the bulls are trucked back to more comfortable quarters in New Jersey for a restful night. For the past 15 years or so, bucking bulls have been intensively bred like racehorses to make them harder to ride. Breeders use high tech reproductive techniques and a detailed, computerized registry of 180,000 bulls and cows. Cowboys have continued to be bred the old fashioned way. The products of this intensive artificial selection have one job: to buck, spin and kick as hard and unpredictably as t hey can with a rider on board. If the rider stays on for eight seconds, he is scored for how well he rode, the bull is scored for how hard he was to ride and the scores are combined. Calves that don't buck may end up at the slaughterhouse, but for those who do buck, it's a sweet life, at least according to breeders. Matt Scharping, who owns Phenom Genetics in Minnesota, said, "If you're born a really good bucking bull it's like winning the bovine lottery." The lucky bulls are carefully fed, gradually exposed to the lights and noise of a rodeo environment to reduce stress and, if they prove successful, retired to lives as semen producers. Some are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The semen can sell for thousands of dollars per straw, about a tenth of a teaspoon. The end result of all this effort, unsurprisingly, is that the bulls are becoming harder to ride. In earlier times, a rider had a chance to draw an easy bull. Now, all the bulls are hard , as both the riders and breeders will attest. In 1995, cowboys finished their rides 46 percent of the time; in 2012 they managed just 26 percent. Since then, the cowboys seem to have caught on a bit: their success rate has hovered around 29 percent for the past two years. Still, getting thrown 71 percent of the time means absorbing a lot of pain. J. B. Mauney, 31, is one of the best riders in the sport. He famously broke a streak by a bull named Bushwhacker, who had thrown riders 40 times in a row. Mauney hit the dirt in eight of those abbreviated rides. That was because he kept choosing Bushwhacker when he had the chance. "It was kind of a pride deal," he said. On Mauney's ninth ride, in 2013, he lasted the eight seconds, barely. Bushwhacker was retired in 2014 after 64 "outs," or times he had entered the arena with a cowboy on his back. He was successfully ridden just twice. Mauney, who also has bred bulls, said he thinks bulls will only become more difficult to master. "If they keep breeding better bulls, they're going to have to start breeding better bull riders," he said. Unlike other rodeo events, bull riding does not have its origin in ranch skills. Horses had to be ridden, calves branded, steers roped, but nobody needed anyone , ever, to ride a bull. The unnecessary risk to life and limb is the whole point like walking a high wire without a net. The event was something of a novelty until the 1950s, when a few star riders emerged. By the 1980s the event had become popular, and in 1992 it broke off on its own, as the Professional Bull Riders circuit. In 2004, a registry of bucking bull pedigrees, American Bucking Bull, Inc., was founded. It is owned j ointly by the bull riders association and the breeders, and keeps tabs on 180,00 bulls and cows. The registry group also promotes events in which young bulls compete without riders, potentially earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for their breeders. Among the best of those breeders is H.D. Page, of D H Cattle, which owns SweetPro's Bruiser , a three time world champion bul l . Like many other breeders, Page uses every available technique, including artificial insemination, egg collection, in vitro fertilization and the use of sperm selected to produce only bull calves. Bucking bulls have even been cloned and used in competition. But bull cloning met with a backlash about five years ago, framed partly in religious terms. At the time, one breeder in Texas, Scott Accomazzo , said he had been accused of playing God, and his Christianity had been q uestioned. The current trend in breeding is to focus on the cows. Bull riding may be the most masculinized of all sports, with its emphasis on danger and power, but champion semen does not guarantee success in the ring. "There's certain cow families," Page said. "The female side of it. That's key." Matt Scharping, of Phenom Genetics, agreed: "It's really all about the cows. I feel like 80 percent of the bucking ability is coming from the mother ." Rodeos and bull riding are often criticized by animal welfare groups, and the bull riders association is at pains to highlight its rules against the use of cattle prods and other inducements to buck. Jeannette Vaught, a lecturer in Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, who has written about human animal interactions, including rodeos, said that she didn't see direct or obvious cruelty in the treatment of the successful bucking bulls. "There's a common misconception that the flank strap is painful," she said. "It's not." The strap, worn around the bull's abdomen, does cause enough discomfort to prompt the bulls to buck, but seasoned animals, who get used to bucking as soon as the chute opens, don't even notice it. And as furious as the animal may seem during its eight seconds in the ring, "the bull is not angry," Vaught said. "What's funny is that the bulls themselves are generally very companionable." Mauney, and other riders, said it's the bull's job to buck and the rider's job to hang on. No animosity either way. The bulls that Vaught had seen were "very chill," she said. "But they know their job. After the bucking ends, they are really quite friendly animals. They're laborers. They've been bred to do this work." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The sports drama from Tarell Alvin McCraney and Steven Soderbergh hits Netflix, and a new middle school buddy comedy comes to Hulu. HIGH FLYING BIRD on Netflix. This new Netflix film, written by Tarell Alvin McCraney of "Moonlight" fame, explores a central question: When it comes to professional sports, who owns the game? Andre Holland stars as a sports agent trying to help a rookie recruit (Melvin Gregg) navigate an ongoing N.B.A. lockout, and ultimately ends up fighting for his job, too. Shot entirely on an iPhone by the director Steven Soderbergh, the movie also stars Zazie Beetz of "Atlanta," Bill Duke, Zachary Quinto and Kyle MacLachlan. PEN15 on Hulu. Most people would do just about anything to avoid reliving their middle school years. But not Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, two 31 year olds who star in this new comedy, playing 13 year old versions of themselves braces, bowl cuts and all next to actual 13 year olds. The 10 episode series, co produced by the Lonely Island, follows these two BFFs as they prepare to enter seventh grade in 2000. Like "Eighth Grade," the series is sure to explore all the horror, anxiety and awkwardness that come with that very bizarre period between childhood and the arguably more exciting high school years. BIG MOUTH: MY FURRY VALENTINE on Netflix. Ahead of its third season, this animated buddy comedy from real life best friends Nick Kroll and Andrew Goldberg explores the pitfalls of celebrating Valentine's Day as a teenager, like trying to get a girlfriend or boyfriend, or not knowing what to do once you have one. Kroll plays his animated younger self, while John Mulaney lends his voice to Andrew's character in a series that dives head first into the misadventures of puberty. Keep an ear out for other comedy greats: The show has included the voices of Maya Rudolph, Jason Mantzoukas, Fred Armisen, Jenny Slate and Jessi Klein. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Nearly 40 years after its release, Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" gets a sequel with "Doctor Sleep," an adaptation of Stephen King's novel, which sees an all grown up Danny Torrance facing alcoholism, psychic vampires and a painful revisit of the Overlook Hotel. The decades between the release of "The Shining" and its follow up have given plenty of other would be successors the opportunity to channel its accomplishments or pay homage to them. Here are seven films that reflect the influence of "The Shining," whether in the form of narrative similarities or appreciative Easter eggs. Shapeshifting aliens from flying saucers may be far removed from the hauntings at the Overlook, but John Carpenter's "The Thing" nonetheless stands as an early successor to "The Shining." Its Antarctic research station setting provides a similar isolated snowed in location where characters become unraveled. And its outdoor cinematography, casting the landscape in a dense melancholy blue, makes it feel as if a frozen Jack Nicholson could be stumbled upon at any moment. Films like "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) and "The Exorcist" (1973) had done their part to prove the dramatic legitimacy of horror, but "The Shining" boosted the cause with the same artistic ambition Kubrick used to elevate space movies with "2001." Without the prestige of "The Shining," it's hard to imagine that a movie like "The Silence of the Lambs" which explores serious themes alongside serial killers using human flesh as wardrobe could one day sweep the Academy Awards. Most wouldn't expect nods to Kubrick's film in family friendly Pixar movies, but because one of the studio's filmmakers, Lee Unkrich, has a lifelong obsession with "The Shining," references can be found as early as "Toy Story," where the Overlook's carpet pattern appears in the home of Sid, the toy terrorizer. Since then, Easter eggs have continued to appear, whether in "Toy Story 3," which nods to the hotel's haunted room 237 in an instant messenger chat handle (Velocistar 237), or in a sequence from "Coco," where Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johnny" ax can be seen in the background. The director Robert Eggers has joked that he's "disgusted" with how much "The Witch" evokes "The Shining," but he shouldn't be, considering how well he wields that influence in a story about an exiled Puritan family facing threats of witchcraft. Both movies share the conceit of isolated families starting anew, but "The Witch" particularly amplifies the foreshadowing of tragedy from the moment it starts. "The Shining" is layered into Jordan Peele's directorial debut like a three tier cake. There are surface nods, like a shared title card font color and dialogue allusions ( a character refers to getting lost in a hedge maze ) . There are deeper conceptual nods, like setting horror in broad daylight. But most of all, "Get Out" creates the same sense that something is very wrong without revealing the specifics until everything comes to a head . Ari Aster's slice of domestic horror wastes no time wearing its "Shining" influence on its sleeve, with an opening shot that evokes the moment where a model of the hedge maze comes to life with Danny and Wendy exploring it. But the influence extends deeper in its exploration of a grieving family eroding under pressure from natural and supernatural forces, while courting the type of narrative density and ambiguity that has resulted in infinite YouTube explainers about the ending, and clues along the way. Steven Spielberg became friends with Stanley Kubrick after meeting him on the set of "The Shining." He'd later honor his friend and influence by making "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," a long gestating Kubrick project. But, in an unexpected surprise, Spielberg honored him once more in "Ready Player One," deviating from Ernest Cline's novel to work in a sequence set in a loving recreation of the Overlook featuring playful returns to room 237, the hedge maze and the bloody elevator. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
DO THIS FOR ME By 336 pp. Crown. 26. 's second novel, "Do This for Me," moves like a skier tearing down the mountain. I appreciated the thrill of the run but would have appreciated a pause here and there to take in the view, especially as Kennedy tackles sexism and infidelity and other black diamond topics deserving of more contemplation than she allows. Don't get me wrong this is a fun book, a lighthearted romp. But it skates around the edges of important issues in a way that made me wish for more emotional honesty and less ba dum tss humor. "Do This for Me" begins with a phone call. Raney Moore, a 37 year old lawyer, is in her office waiting for a judgment in a class action lawsuit. She's happily married to Aaron, a popular entomologist who is finishing the final leg of a book tour on the West Coast. They are the parents of twin teenagers, Maisie and Kate (mouthy but charming), who were born when their parents were young, madly in love and still in graduate school. When we meet her, Raney is feeling pretty good about the decisions that led her to the desk in her office: "I'd gone to the best high school in the country, the best university, the best law school, all on my own. I never drank. Never smoked. Never cheated. Never lied. I never even swore." Putting aside the question of who selects the country's best high school is it U.S. News and World Report? we can tell from the get go that Raney Moore is in for a comeuppance. Then the phone rings, and the person on the other end is not the clerk she expected, announcing a verdict in favor of her clients. This call is from a stranger who tells Raney that Aaron is having an affair with his wife. And we're off, hurtling into freefall with a woman coming undone. The effect is at first exhilarating, then discombobulating, then exhausting. By the time her husband's flight lands in New York, Raney has marshaled her firm's vast resources paralegals, tech support, the guy who coordinates office moves and enlisted them to raze her life with Aaron. Their house in Westchester County is on the market; their furniture is on a truck bound for Raney's childhood home in Brooklyn (which, conveniently, she still owns); Aaron's worldly belongings are en route to his mother's house in Vermont. His credit cards are canceled; his Gmail account is deleted. The icing on the cake: Raney fires off a series of career destroying dispatches from his Twitter account. There's a cinematic quality to her revenge. You can picture it on the big screen Chinese takeout containers on the desk, chopsticks sticking out of a messy up do but for me, the black and white version of this story really strained my willingness to suspend disbelief. What about the twins? Brooklyn to Westchester is a punishing commute to school, even if your mom has a chauffeur. And knowing what we do about Raney (she's Type A to the nth degree), are we really supposed to buy her move into a rodent infested house? I didn't. Then again, this is the story of her evolution into an entirely different kind of person, so I went with it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Gervonta Davis, a fighter nicknamed Tank, is honored to have a live audience. Davis, an undefeated 25 year old boxer from Baltimore, will face Leo Santa Cruz with two world titles at stake on Saturday night. It will be the main event of the first major boxing card with live spectators since the coronavirus pandemic reshaped the dynamic of live sports. Davis will fight even harder, he said, knowing that up to 10,000 people at the Alamodome in San Antonio will have spent money and ventured out during the outbreak to watch him. The fight represents a two pronged strategy for making money in boxing during a time when seemingly nothing is normal about live events or sports on television. Selling tickets and broadcasting the fight on pay per view are both business decisions made by Davis's backers at Mayweather Promotions to generate revenue to finance the pay guarantees that star fighters command. The promoters argue that Davis is the sport's next star (he is 23 0 with 22 knockouts), and that putting him on pay per view signals that he is an elite fighter worth the price of admission. But with a glut of live programming driving viewership down across many individual sports, and an economy still hobbled by the pandemic, asking fans to pay 75 for a boxing broadcast is also a gamble. "It's always a bit of a leap of faith," said Stephen Espinoza, the president of Showtime Sports. "There's a sizable chunk of this country that's under economic pressure. That's obviously something that makes a pay per view harder." A rival promoter, Top Rank, took a different approach two weeks ago when Brooklyn's Teofimo Lopez won a 12 round decision over the Ukrainian star Vasyl Lomachenko in a lightweight title bout. Viewership on ESPN peaked at 3 million, but there were no extra costs for TV viewers outside of their ESPN subscriptions. But there also were no paying spectators at the fight in Las Vegas, where the card was staged essentially on a closed TV set inside a resort. Inside the Alamodome on Saturday, organizers have said they will enforce measures meant to mitigate the risk of spreading the coronavirus. In a building that seats more than 64,000 people, attendance has been capped at 10,000. Spectators will be required to wear masks and undergo temperature checks, organizers said, and sit only with people in their party. Inside the ring, promoters expect Davis, the World Boxing Association champion at 135 pounds, and Santa Cruz, the W.B.A.'s 130 pound champ, to stage the kind of high stakes, high action main event that, in normal times, could have sold out an arena. Santa Cruz is a forward moving volume puncher whose father and head trainer, Jose, survived Covid 19 while battling multiple myeloma. At one point, Leo Santa Cruz said, doctors were so sure Jose would die that they summoned Leo and his siblings to say goodbye. But Jose recovered and will attend the fight. "My brother is the one holding the mitts, but it's still my dad right there," Santa Cruz said. "Family always wants the best for you." Still, Davis is the fight's A side: a fast, elusive power puncher with his own compelling back story. His coach, Calvin Ford, started coaching at a boxing gym in Baltimore after serving a 10 year prison sentence. Davis started training with Ford as a grade schooler, but the boxer's circle now includes celebrities like Drake and mentors like Floyd Mayweather. Normally those story lines, and two aggressive fighters, might combine to support ticket and pay per view sales. And Davis's promoters point to his string of sold out fights in cities like Baltimore and Carson, Calif., as evidence that they needed to open Saturday's event to paid spectators. The difference now is that those fights took place before the pandemic disrupted live sports, and forced limited crowds in the rare instances when they were allowed. San Antonio is in Bexar County, which has averaged 201 new coronavirus cases per day over the past two weeks, about 10 cases per 100,000 residents, but the promoters got approval for thousands of fans anyway. Davis last fought in December, earning a 12th round technical knockout against Yuriorkis Gamboa, a veteran fighter from Cuba.Since then, live events and industries that require physical gathering, like bars and movie theaters, have struggled amid government restrictions, and the economy has had difficulty rebounding. And the boxing pay per view market was already under pressure. February's heavyweight rematch between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder attracted a reported 850,000 pay per view buys, plus 300,000 more online sales. Those figures more than doubled the reported number of buys for their first fight, but still fell short of the 2 million buys the fight's co promoter, Bob Arum, had predicted. Espinoza acknowledged the pandemic had altered the household budgets of boxing fans. And, he said, restrictions on public gatherings have meant that the usually thriving market for theaters and sports bars has "all but disappeared." Even a lack of large social gatherings is expected to hurt sales. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Victory Dance, the New Victory Theater's summer series of free performances for New York City students, will return in July with a lineup that includes local favorite companies like David Neumann's Advanced Beginner Group, the Limon Dance Company and Camille A. Brown Dancers. The season runs from July 13 through July 29 and features three programs of dance and talks with educators and artists. Each program will also have one performance for the public, with tickets available for 10. Mr. Neumann will join Doug Elkins and Annie B Parson's Big Dance Theater in Program A (July 13 15). The next week (July 20 22), Program B features Sonali Skandan's Jiva Dance, as well as the Limon and Lar Lubovitch dance companies. Rounding out the lineup are the American Tap Dance Foundation, Nadine Bommer Dance Company and Ms. Brown's company in Program C (July 27 29). Tickets and more information are at newvictory.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Mr. Williams told me that the idea for the app came to him while he was working on some of his own tricks at a skatepark, and had a fellow skater ask him for a few tips on landing a 720 rotation. "It dawned on me, just seeing how many pro athletes were in the park, both the snowboard park and the skateboard park," he said. "They of course have busy schedules, but if we could create a program similar to Uber or Airbnb where they could manage their own schedule, what an awesome opportunity." Getting tips, tricks and guidance from a pro on a world class ski resort isn't cheap. My run with Mr. Williams cost me about 250 for an hour, which are comparable with the Squaw private lesson rate of 539 for a half day. Bigger name pros like Chas Guldemond or Ms. Anderson would cost more, around 499 an hour. But the draw of Stomp, in addition to the pros, is flexibility: It let me just choose an hour, and I could start any time I wanted, and go for as long as I wanted, and focus on exactly what I wanted. Skateboarding lessons and pro sessions offers cheaper and more varied options starting around 80 per hour. And the app is loaded with dozens of tip videos from pros like Mr. Cole showing how to pull off simple jumps and complex flips. An app like this could seem disruptive to the lucrative ski schools run by world class mountains like Squaw Valley. But the resort has embraced Stomp as a partner through a revenue sharing agreement. (Plus, anyone using Stomp still needs a Squaw Valley lift ticket pros and amateurs alike.) For the athletes, the draw is twofold: many view their role as ambassadors of growing sports, and the app allows the opportunity to spread their knowledge. But Stomp also brought many of the top names, like Ms. Anderson, into the company as advisers, so they also have a part ownership stake in its success. The app is still in its nascent stages. There are two planned weekends left for ski and snowboard pro sessions at Squaw Valley on March 17 and 18 and April 7 and 8 . For skateboarding, the lessons around Truckee and Oceanside are fairly regular, with more cities on both coasts set to open soon. Mr. Williams said they require at least six pros to sign up for a location before they flip the switch in the app for a locale. "I have a way of breaking down tricks in a specific manner and people have always said, ' hey you should def do something with that skill you have of breaking down tricks into little bitty pieces an explaining them to people'," said Chris Cole, the pro skateboarder. "And I was just waiting for the right application to do it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In the Hamptons, where million dollar vacation homes are snapped up like flea market finds and 10 million spec homes are in such high demand that their developers could moonlight as fortunetellers were they not so busy building more, buying new has become not only the fashion but the first choice. Buying vintage tends to spawn repair and renovation headaches; choosing turnkey promises convenience and five star amenities. To find appropriate settings for new construction, tearing down an old house, far from being vilified, is standard operating procedure as land grows ever scarcer and more expensive. From Westhampton to Montauk, buyers (and renters, too, especially those willing to write a six figure check for a summer spot) are on the same attitudinal and aspirational wavelength: new is better, more sustainable, and infinitely richer in amenities than old. "The demand is absolutely there," said Enzo Morabito, a broker at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, "and builders are hitting buyers' sweet spots at a variety of price points in a variety of locations. This is like Disneyland: people don't come out here to make their lives more complicated. They come out to relax, and buying turnkey is part of that. Some even buy the house already furnished. People want the whole package." Occasionally, picky buyers commission a custom built retreat on the site of a teardown. "You're seeing teardowns, not necessarily of the golden oldies, but of the ranches from the '60s and '70s on half acre or acre lots now worth far more than the homes that sit on them," said Anthony DeVivio, a managing director of Halstead Property. "And what's being built in their place is making the landscape more interesting." If trees and vegetation succumb in the knockdown process, no worries: that's for the landscapers to remedy. "Teardowns are being snatched up by developers with a build and beautify mind set," said Aspasia G. Comnas, an executive managing director of Brown Harris Stevens. "In the second home market, most buyers are not interested in doing any work; they just want to bring their toothbrush and move in. The opportunity to buy something brand new has caused a shift in the low to middle range where people are valuing structure over location." The look of the homes is evolving as well: modern is making a comeback, but modern in the guise of barnlike. "The modern barn is the Hamptons equivalent of the TriBeCa loft," Ms. Comnas said. Whitney Casey and her husband, Nav Sooch, thought they wanted a Victorian until they saw this Southampton house under construction. Adam Macchia for The New York Times Traditionally, the most desirable territory was south of Montauk Highway, where the ocean is. But the line of demarcation has blurred, and properties north of the highway have become desirable because buyers a bigger bang for their big bucks. "Buyers spending 4 million to 6 million, and sometimes even less," said Zachary Vichinsky of the Corcoran Group, "are demanding the same amenities you get in a 20 million house." The nexus of the Hamptons McMansion production line, the Farrell Building Company, currently has 30 spec homes in various stages of construction, mostly in the 3 million to 10 million range, and mostly in Amagansett and Bridgehampton. Mr. Farrell said he scaled down the grandeur of his spec properties "after the meltdown in 2009, when everything in the Hamptons came to a standstill." "I'd say 90 percent of buyers prefer new," added Mr. Farrell, whose footprint includes Farrell Court in Water Mill, "and right now we're selling three new houses a month. When the finance guys on Wall Street get the feeling that interest rates are going to go up, they swarm in and buy. There is an unbelievable appetite for homes in this price range. It's like the difference between a 150,000 Bentley and the 350,000 Bentley: both are great, but 15 times as many people are able to buy the cheaper car." According to the latest Elliman market report for the fourth quarter of 2013, the average Hamptons sales price was 1.57 million, the average price of luxury properties 7.1 million. At the upper end of that spectrum, buyers seem willing to spend freely for land, new construction and the removal of past their shelf date houses. "The 2014 Hamptons market appears to be shaping up to see continued stability in prices, more new development, but not quite enough additional inventory to satisfy demand," said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel, who prepared the report. "Wall Street had a little better year compensation wise, and that figures to play into keeping demand steady." The political provocateur Bill O'Reilly of Fox News encountered no raised eyebrows when he recently paid 7.65 million for a musty Montauk bungalow on a prime 1.5 acre oceanfront bluff only to immediately tear it down (the house, not the bluff); Mr. Farrell was retained to fashion a pristine replacement. According to Ms. Keeshan, fixer uppers can still be had for 550,000 and up; houses within walking distance of a beach are 1 million to 2 million; and places on the waterfront with 21st century amenities start at 3 million, 9 million on the ocean. Irene O'Gara is building her "dream house" just across the street from the ocean in Montauk's Hither Hills enclave. After Ms. Keeshan showed her every available option under 1 million, the final property, a 0.68 acre lot with two decrepit cottages and an ocean view, won her over. "It was magic," said Ms. O'Gara, who did not let the 2.5 million asking price dissuade her. She paid around 2.1 million for the lot, had the cottages knocked down after ruling out renovation, and hopes to have the shingle style compound that will be her primary residence a four bedroom main house "with hurricane impact Marvin windows," a pool house with spa, and a garage completed by this summer. "Clearly the beauty of building new is that it gives one the opportunity to create everything state of the art, keeping energy and environmental concerns front and center," she said. "I want it to look like it's always been a part of the Montauk landscape." In Southampton Village, another hot spot where new construction can cause a buyer stampede even before the house is finished or listed, the volume of sales increased by 62 percent over 2012, Ms. Desiderio's report noted, and the total amassed through sales last year was just over 507 million, with the fourth quarter accounting for 167 million. Many houses were new, with seductive extras like theaters, spas, playrooms, outdoor kitchens, elevators and wine cellars, in addition to the usual pool and tennis court. "The only thing better than the smell of a new car is the smell of a new house," Ms. Desiderio said. "Just the 1 percent of buyers seems to want old and antique." Whitney Casey and her husband, Nav Sooch, who have a home in Austin, Tex., and a 170 year old SoHo loft as their pied a terre, were certain they wanted an authentic Victorian in Southampton village as their summer home. But they changed their minds after doing extensive shopping with Harald Grant of Sotheby's International Realty. Ceiling height and lack of bathrooms were a concern. "The Victorians looked quaint from the outside," Ms. Casey said, "but you'd go inside and find out that not only was there no master bath, but some barely had bathrooms at all. And at six feet tall, I felt like Alice in Wonderland, like I was way too big for the house." She was riding her bike on a village lane when she noticed an unfinished gambrel style farmhouse on a construction site (its incongruous predecessor on the prime 0.4 acre lot was a tiny vinyl sided cottage). After being taken on an impromptu tour of the seven bedroom seven and a half bath house by its builder, Louis Follo, she revised her priorities. The Lutron automated home technology control system, the pool house, the four fireplaces and the 5,672 square feet of space gosh, here was a house, priced at 5.7 million, where you could "plug in and play," as she put it, and not fret about necessary upgrades. "We'd had all these conditions, like the house couldn't be big, it had to be old and quaint; basically it couldn't be everything our house ended up being," Ms. Casey said. "I was a little worried about telling my husband it had an elevator, but I think what sold him on it was the quality of the construction. And that it made me happy." "I've seen the pendulum swing progressively toward new," she said, "especially with land prices doubling in some areas. And in an up market, it pays to buy new: Not just the Wall Street types are realizing that this is a good place to park your money. When you see an inland spec house sell for 21 million," she said, alluding to 79 Parsonage Lane in Sagaponack, built last year by the high end developer Michael Davis, "it's a sign that people are willing to go north of the highway if it means finding a super great house with all the amenities on their playlist." Sure, many of these new houses have classic cedar shingles on the outside, but inside they are chic tabernacles of all that is design forward, indulgent and technologically precocious. The middlebrow bungalows, Capes and ranches of yesteryear are disappearing, victims of the wrecking ball, fast becoming the most popular tool in the builders' kit. "Unless a house has really good bones or is grandfathered closer to the ocean than you're allowed to build today," Mr. Davis said, "there's often very little reason to renovate." "Teardowns are becoming more common because people want new if they can get it," said Dottie Herman, the chief executive of Douglas Elliman. John Gicking, the brokerage manager at the East Hampton outpost of Sotheby's, put it this way: "New, new, new is overtaking location, location, location. Builders buy a series of contiguous lots and create a neighborhood from scratch using what they know about buyers' punch lists dramatic entries, ground floor masters, media rooms, fully finished basements to bring a brand new product to market at a lower price point, say 2 to 4 million, than the typical estate like custom home." Michele and Thomas Bass spent almost seven years searching for a vacation home in the Hamptons before realizing that the new custom built five bedroom house on the fringe of East Hampton village that they had rented through Martha Gundersen of Brown Harris Stevens in 2012 and 2013 was the house for them. "When we made the original decision to buy, we were looking in Amagansett," Ms. Bass said, "but I couldn't find anything that was right. We wanted moderate size, and something not so old that we'd have to gut and redo it. But the new construction we saw in the lanes, I felt was inflated or cookie cutter or both." The rental, described in its listing as "The Modern Manor House," was for sale, list price 4.2 million. Set on a landscaped 0.93 acre lot on a cul de sac, it had distinctive features like a grand 19th century wooden front door, reclaimed beams in the den, reclaimed oak as the base of the 10 foot long granite kitchen island, a lower level media room, travertine patios, a heated pool and state of the art technology. "As soon as I walked in, I loved it," she said. "The windows are super big, the woodwork is beautiful, and it looks like no other house I've seen. It's off the beaten path, but just 10 minutes from Amagansett and Sag Harbor. And it's spotless, even the utility room." Only when smitten by waterfront properties do buyers tend to rein in their appetite for new construction. "Really, there is nothing truly brand new on the ocean that I know of," said Tim Davis, a veteran broker with the Corcoran Group, "with the exception of one listing in Sagaponack. Probably the only scenario where location dictates over the trend of buyers wanting new would be waterfront: Even at the most expensive level, when it comes to buying real estate you always have to make some sort of compromise. Really, home technology is changing so drastically that you can have a home that's four or five years old and already needs changes to the infrastructure to bring it up to speed." "I'm seeing that people prefer new because they want to be the first to use everything in a home," he continued. "New means instant gratification." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"The drive by media is attempting to persuade and convince people that Donald Trump told people to drink Drano at the White House press briefing," the radio host Rush Limbaugh said dismissively on his Friday show. "That Donald Trump told people to go out and get a syringe and inject Clorox in their arms, and that this could be dangerous." Here is what Mr. Trump said at Thursday's briefing: "I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that." Joel B. Pollak, the senior editor at large at Breitbart News, wrote about that statement in a column that ran under the headline "Fact Check: No, Trump Didn't Propose Injecting People With Disinfectant." "Trump used the word 'inject,' but what he meant was using a process which he left 'medical doctors' to define in which patients' lungs might be cleared of the virus," Mr. Pollak wrote. (Breitbart later retracted its "fact check" headline, saying the column "should have been framed as an opinion piece.") The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, issued a statement on Friday accusing the news media of taking Mr. Trump's words "out of context." That was before Mr. Trump claimed that he had spoken "sarcastically," to get a rise out of journalists. Neil Cavuto, a Fox host who has been critical of Mr. Trump, was not impressed with that excuse. "I think it's important on the president to say and come out unequivocally: 'Some of you took me seriously, even though I sounded serious saying it. Please do not. Please do not even consider injecting some of this stuff into your system,'" Mr. Cavuto said during a Friday appearance on Fox Business. It was not the first time that Mr. Trump has offered medical advice on how to combat the virus. For weeks, he touted the use of a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, from behind a lectern with the presidential seal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A new study of thousands of hospitalized coronavirus patients in the New York City area, the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States, has found that nearly all of them had at least one major chronic health condition, and most 88 percent had at least two. Though earlier research has shown chronic conditions like obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are common risk factors for severe Covid 19, the ubiquity of serious medical conditions in these patients was striking: Only 6 percent of them had no underlying health conditions. "The number of patients who had chronic comorbidities surprised us," said Karina Davidson, a senior vice president at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, who was the paper's senior author. The paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed data about 5,700 Covid 19 patients admitted between March 1 and April 4 to a dozen hospitals in New York City, Long Island and Westchester County that are part of the Northwell Health system. Scientists at the Feinstein Institutes, the research arm of Northwell, used electronic health records and other demographic information to analyze the characteristics of the patients. Dozens of children and teenagers got sick but survived, the researchers found. Women had a clear edge: Fewer were hospitalized to begin with, and they were more likely to survive. One in five of the hospital stays ended with the patient dying, but more than half of the patients studied were still hospitalized when the study ended. In total, 553 of the patients died. About a fifth of the patients 1,151 were put on ventilators, and most of those 831 were still on the machines when the study ended. Of the other 320 intubated patients, 282 died and 38 were discharged from the hospital. Their mortality rate, 88 percent, is higher than some other early case reports, which found death rates for coronavirus patients on ventilators ranging from 50 percent to close to 70 percent. Given that the length of hospital stay for these Northwell cases was relatively short, four days on average, it's possible that those who died were mainly patients who were so ill that they were unlikely to be helped by any treatment. While the study provided a valuable granular look at the characteristics of an early onslaught of patients in the United States, Dr. Davidson cautioned that it was observational in nature, and that there was no comparison group with which to contrast frailties or outcomes. "We're simply describing the patients who came in and required hospitalization," she said. "We are not comparing them to those who were positive and stayed out of the hospital, or who didn't get infected, or to patients with any other disease." The researchers reported that when patients first came to the hospital and were triaged, 17 percent had an abnormal respiratory rate of more than 24 breaths per minute, and 28 percent received supplemental oxygen. But fewer than one third of the patients had a fever, even though they were sick enough to be hospitalized, a similar observation to one noted by a large Chinese study. That has important policy implications, indicating that taking people's temperatures in order to screen them for the coronavirus a measure that was used on cruise ships and as a way to detect illness in returning travelers at airports, and that has also been proposed for use in the workplace is likely to miss many people who are not only asymptomatic but also acutely ill. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Nearly 60 percent of those hospitalized at the Northwell facilities had high blood pressure, 40 percent were obese, and about one third had diabetes. Smaller numbers of patients suffered from other chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, kidney disease and chronic respiratory illnesses. Other smaller reports from New York City area hospitals have also highlighted obesity as a complicating risk factor. One hypothesis is that obesity causes chronic, low grade inflammation that can lead to an increase in circulating, pro inflammatory cytokines, which may play a role in the worst Covid 19 outcomes. Dr. Leora Horwitz, an associate professor at NYU Langone Health whose recent study of Covid 19 patients found that obesity was the most significant predictor of disease severity after age, said that the new paper described similar rates of chronic disease and obesity, but that it was descriptive, so "it is hard to tell the relative importance of the various comorbidities." She noted that the obesity rate on Long Island is 24 percent, suggesting the hospitalized patients "are disproportionately obese." The report adds new evidence of the greater susceptibility of men to the coronavirus: Men represented 60 percent of the hospitalized patients in the Northwell system, and an even greater share 66 percent of the patients treated in the intensive care unit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Be afraid, be very afraid, because you cannot know whether and how it may dominate your life. And keep that in mind when you vote. While it is disheartening to see the president of the United States come down with Covid 19, something truly irks me about the disparity between the medical care immediately available to him versus the general public. He is someone who flouted all the experts' advice by taking undue risks and cavalierly exposing not only himself but all of those around him to contracting this deadly disease. He encouraged the populace to ignore science and recklessly take those same risks, stating repeatedly that the virus is a hoax while all the time knowing it was dangerous and often deadly. Yet when he comes down with the virus, he has immediate access to the best care in the world, with cutting edge practitioners and medications at his disposal. Whereas for the rest of the many of us who respect the disease and do everything we can to remain safe from it, we have to find a way to take a test and wait sometimes days or even weeks for results. If we discover days after our test that our condition becomes dire, we don't have ready access to these cutting edge medications and specialists. We the public should be very angry (I am) about a president who downplays this virus as a hoax, yet when it strikes him through his reckless actions and inactions, immediately gets to jump the proverbial line to gain access to world class care for himself. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A Stitch Fix warehouse in San Francisco. The company relies on algorithms to help personalize shipments to customers. One of the best selling T shirts for the Indian e commerce site Myntra is an olive, blue and yellow colorblocked design. It was conceived not by a human but by a computer algorithm or rather two algorithms. The first algorithm generated random images that it tried to pass off as clothing. The second had to distinguish between those images and clothes in Myntra's inventory. Through a long game of one upmanship, the first algorithm got better at producing images that resembled clothing, and the second got better at determining whether they were like but not identical to actual products. This back and forth, an example of artificial intelligence at work, created designs whose sales are now "growing at 100 percent," said Ananth Narayanan, the company's chief executive. "It's working." Clothing design is only the leading edge of the way algorithms are transforming the fashion and retail industries. Companies now routinely use artificial intelligence to decide which clothes to stock and what to recommend to customers. "A much broader set of tasks will be automated or augmented by machines over the coming years," Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tom Mitchell, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, wrote in the journal Science last year. They argued that most of the jobs affected would become partly automated rather than disappear altogether. The fashion industry illustrates how machines can intrude even on workers known more for their creativity than for cold empirical judgments. Among those directly affected will be the buyers and merchandise planners who decide which dresses, tops and pants should populate their stores' inventory. A key part of a buyer's job is to anticipate what customers will want using a well honed sense of where fashion trends are headed. "Based on the fact that you sold 500 pairs of platform shoes last month, maybe you could sell 1,000 next month," said Kristina Shiroka, who spent several years as a buyer for the Outnet, an online retailer. "But people might be over it by then, so you cut the buy." That's the case at Stitch Fix, an online styling service that sends customers boxes of clothing whose contents they can keep or return, and maintains detailed profiles of customers to personalize their shipments. Stitch Fix relies heavily on algorithms to guide its buying decisions in fact, its business probably could not exist without them. Those algorithms project how many clients will be in a given situation, or "state," several months into the future (like expanding their wardrobe after, say, starting a new job), and what volume of clothes people tend to buy in each situation. The algorithms also know which styles people with different profiles tend to favor say, a petite nurse with children who lives in Texas. Myntra, the Indian online retailer, arms its buyers with algorithms that calculate the probability that an item will sell well based on how clothes with similar attributes sleeves, colors, fabric have sold in the past. (The buyers are free to ignore the projection.) All of this has clouded the future of buyers and merchandise planners, high status workers whose annual earnings can exceed 100,000. Buyers say this specialization helps them intuitively understand trends in styles and colors. "You're so immersed in it, you almost get a feeling," said Helena Levin, a longtime buyer at retailers like Charlotte Russe and ModCloth. 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. Levin cited mint green dresses, a top seller earlier this decade. "One day it just died," she said. "It stopped. 'O.K., everything mint, get out.' Right after, it looked old. You could feel it." But retailers adept at using algorithms and big data tend to employ fewer buyers and assign each a wider range of categories, partly because they rely less on intuition. At Le Tote, an online rental and retail service for women's clothing that does hundreds of millions of dollars in business each year, a six person team handles buying for all branded apparel dresses, tops, pants, jackets. Bombfell, a box service similar to Stitch Fix catering only to men, relies on a single employee, Nathan Cates, to buy all of its tops and accessories. The company has built algorithmic tools and a vast repository of data to help Mr. Cates, who said he could more accurately project demand for clothing than a buyer at a traditional operation. "We know exactly who our customers are," he said. "We know exactly where they live, what their jobs are, what their sizing is." For now, at least, only a human can do parts of his job. Mr. Cates is obsessive about touching the fabric before purchasing an item and almost always tries it on first. "If this is a light color, are we going to see your nipples?" he explained. (The verdict on a mint T shirt he donned at the company's headquarters in New York? "A little nipply.") There are other checks on automation. Negotiations with suppliers typically require a human touch. Even if an algorithm can help buyers make decisions more quickly and accurately, there are limits to the number of supplier relationships they can juggle. Arti Zeighami, who oversees advanced analytics and artificial intelligence for the H M group, which uses artificial intelligence to guide supply chain decisions, said the company was "enhancing and empowering" human buyers and planners, not replacing them. But he conceded it was hard to predict the effect on employment in five to 10 years. Experts say some of these jobs will be automated away. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment of wholesale and retail buyers to contract by 2 percent over a decade, versus a 7 percent increase for all occupations. Some of this is because of the automation of less sophisticated tasks, like cataloging inventory, and buying for less stylistically demanding retailers (say, auto parts). There is at least one area of the industry where the machines are creating jobs rather than eliminating them, however. Bombfell, Stitch Fix and many competitors in the box fashion niche employ a growing army of human stylists who receive recommendations from algorithms about clothes that might work for a customer, but decide for themselves what to send. "If they're not overly enthusiastic upfront when I ask how do you feel about it, I'm making a note of it," said Jade Carmosino, a sales manager and stylist at Trunk Club, a Stitch Fix competitor owned by Nordstrom. In this, stylists appear to reflect a broader trend in industries where artificial intelligence is automating white collar jobs: the hiring of more humans to stand between machines and customers. For example, Chida Khatua, the chief executive of EquBot, which helped create an exchange traded fund that is actively managed by artificial intelligence, predicted that the asset management industry would hire more financial advisers even as investing became largely automated. The downside is that work as a stylist or financial adviser will probably pay less than the lost jobs of buyers and stock pickers. The good news, said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. who studies automation, is that these jobs may still pay substantially more than many positions available to low and middle skilled workers in recent decades. And these jobs may be hard to automate in the end. "If I'm the customer explaining what I want, humans need to be involved," Mr. Khatua said. "Sometimes I don't know what I really want." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Kenneth J. Montgomery, a fellow criminal lawyer who was raised in Brooklyn and built his practice there, is well versed in these same worlds and civil rights issues. For a time, he defended the young rapper Bobby Shmurda, who was arrested in a gang sting just as his career was taking off. He has also worked with rappers including Mr. MFN eXquire and Sean Price; sued companies like Bad Boy and Roc A Fella; and observed the on the ground effects of hip hop becoming pop music on the black youth in his community. On this week's Popcast, Joe Coscarelli, The Times' pop music reporter, uses his story on Mr. Findling as a jumping off point for an interview with Mr. Montgomery about rap's fraught relationship with the law. They discuss, among other topics, the racial politics of legal representation, the Meek Mill saga and the future prospects of incarcerated would be stars like Bobby Shmurda and Kodak Black. Email your questions, thoughts and ideas about what's happening in pop music to popcast nytimes.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Look past signs of the modern era in Westchester Square cars zipping along the Hutchinson Parkway, No. 6 trains clattering on elevated tracks and traffic stalled on Westchester Avenue and you can glimpse its origins as a Colonial era village. A distinct town center, descended from those beginnings, still exists in a triangle formed by the intersection of Williamsbridge Road and East Tremont Avenue. The 19th century copper spire of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, which has roots as far back as the 1690s, peeks over the subway tracks, and a refurbished pocket park by the subway station replicates the village green once sited there. As in the past, this area in the northeastern Bronx is a hub of commerce and transportation as well as a home for new arrivals. Established by English settlers in the 17th century (and briefly Westchester County seat), it began attracting Irish and Italian immigrants when the subway arrived in 1920. Recently, Hispanics and South Asians, many from Bangladesh, moved in. Saleha Parveen, 42, who works at the intermission bar at Carnegie Hall in Midtown, said moving here from Queens several years ago had made sense when she and her husband, a Long Island restaurant worker, Mohammad Salam, were looking to buy a home. They have two daughters, now 18 and 24. Houses were cheaper than in Elmhurst, where they were renting; the area was quieter and adjacent to a mosque, and their new home on Zerega Avenue was a block and a half from the No. 6 train, she said. Also, Bangladeshi groceries were within walking distance in Parkchester. "When we first came here," Mrs. Parveen recalled, "I knew only one friend who lived a few blocks away. Then a lot of people started moving here from Queens. It is less expensive and less crowded." In "the square," as locals call the shopping district near the Westchester Square subway stop, a slow revival is taking place, spurred by the formation in March 2012 of the Westchester Square Business Improvement District. The group takes care of garbage collection, graffiti cleaning, community events, and banners and holiday lights. The efforts have resulted in solid progress, said John Bonizio, the owner of Metro Optics Eyewear, and the chairman of the business improvement group. He and the group's executive director, Lisa Sorin, would like that to continue. Ms. Sorin says she wants the area to become a place where people come to stroll and shop, noting the thousands on their way to Montefiore Medical Center's local campus, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Hutchinson Metro Center complex, where a Marriott hotel is going up. She is looking to attract retailers to create a destination. "We need to attract more foot traffic," she said. "Eighty thousand riders pass through the area each day on either the bus lines or subway." A row of stores destroyed in a fire in 2009 is almost rebuilt, and the square is attracting cultural groups. The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, or BAAD!, moved into a free standing chapel on the grounds of St. Peter's in October after rent for its Hunts Point space was raised. And the Bronx Council on the Arts is scheduled to move into new quarters here in 2015. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
MOSCOW American farmers are getting an unexpected windfall from a contentious fight between Russia and Belarus, a former Soviet splinter state. The subject of the fight is potash, a fertilizer. The score so far: One imprisoned Russian business executive, the disintegration of a once effective cartel that kept world potash prices high and political tension between the two countries. What is being called the "fertilizer war" is the latest of numerous trade and economic spats between Russia and Belarus, whose leaders, though presiding over similar autocratic political systems, do not get along personally, Russian political analysts say. Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, president of Belarus, and Vladimir V. Putin, president of Russia, by most accounts detest each another. Their feelings have spilled over into the fertilizer business. The potash problem reached a peak on July 30, when Uralkali, the Russian potash company, announced it was withdrawing from an international cartel called the Belarusian Potash Company, or B.P.C., which was created to keep prices high. Two marketing groups, B.P.C. in the former Soviet Union and Canpotex in Canada, sell nearly all the potash in the world. B.P.C. marketed fertilizer for Uralkali and Belaruskali, the Belarussian company, and Canpotex for three Canadian producers, the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan, Mosaic and Agrium. For years, potash companies have kept a thumb on the global trade of this critical plant nutrient, choking back supply to raise prices much as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries does with oil or De Beers with diamonds. The two cartels set nearly identical prices for potash worldwide, preventing farmers from benefiting from competition. Uralkali said it was leaving B.P.C. because the Belarus president had been allowing fertilizer sales on the side. It predicted potash prices would drop about 25 percent, to 300 a ton, from around 400 a ton, when it left. The lower prices would hurt Russia, but they would hurt Belarus more. Though Uralkali denies any direct link, this action came after years of efforts by Mr. Putin and the Kremlin to compel Belarus to sell strategic assets like oil refineries and natural gas pipelines, in exchange for subsidized energy supplies. Mr. Lukashenko first agreed to sell a stake in Belaruskali, though the potash mine provides about 10 percent of the state tax revenue, but then balked. He said it was still for sale, but cited an exorbitantly high price, angering the Russian oligarchs who had been vying for it, and setting the stage for the breakup of the fertilizer cartel that followed. It was unclear whether the others stayed clear of Belarus because they had sensed a trap, or whether their schedules simply did not have room for the country's prime minister, which was the formal explanation both officials offered. Mr. Baumgertner was charged with "abuse of power," which carries a potential 10 year sentence. Belarus state television showed his glum perp walk past the water stained concrete walls of a prison nicknamed "the American girl," led by a chubby guard in a camouflage uniform. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. Belaruskali, which is state owned, has no public relations office. The switchboard referred calls to Anatoly V. Makhlai, whose title is deputy director for ideology and cadres, who declined to comment. Later, the Belarussian authorities issued arrest warrants for four other executives and Mr. Kerimov, the part owner. Analysts say Mr. Baumgertner is not likely to serve hard time but is instead being held as a hostage to compel the Russians to rejoin the cartel. Outraged, the Russians responded with a flurry of trade restrictions, banning all Belarussian pork imports, ostensibly over newly discovered health concerns. "It looks like the conflict is escalating," Boris Krasnojenov, a mining analyst at Renaissance Capital, an investment bank based in Moscow, confirmed in an interview. Farmers and fertilizer companies are watching closely. Shares in the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan rose earlier this week after signs of a reconciliation. Reports indicated Mr. Kerimov would sell his stake to another Russian oligarch more palatable to President Lukashenko or to the nickel mining company Norilsk, leading to a patching up of ties and re creation of the price fixing cartel. But Norilsk said on Wednesday that it had no plans to buy a stake. Shares in Potash Corporation fell again. Even by the standards of business practices in the former Soviet Union, these tactics appeared blunt. "This move is absolutely aggressive and abnormal," Mr. Krasnojenov said, referring to the arrest of Mr. Baumgertner. "The prime minister invited the C.E.O. of a major company to a meeting and then arrested him." The dispute has hurt profits of both Uralkali and its former Belarussian partner, Belaruskali and been wonderful for farmers from Idaho to India who have already benefited from lower fertilizer prices. Potash is one of three main plant nutrients, along with phosphate and nitrogen, and is used widely to increase corn and soybean yields. The price for granular potash in the Midwest has fallen to around 400 a ton, from 420 before the announcement on July 30. "Optimists say that every cloud has a silver lining," Ed Lotterman, a columnist for The Idaho Statesman, wrote of the wobbling cartel. "It isn't hard to find one in the recent potash industry upheaval that sent the stock of several fertilizer producers down by a fourth. What is bad for them is great news for U.S. farmers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Layers of pastels and sparkles have taken over everything edible across social media and in real life as even Starbucks, with its "unicorn Frappuccino," follows the trend of decorating food and drink in rainbow colors. Starbucks began selling "unicorn Frappuccinos" on Wednesday, a colorful kaleidoscope of a drink, breathing new life into a food trend that had been willed into existence by a torrent of carefully composed pictures shared on Instagram and other social media sites. For the unaware: "Unicorn food" is any food item jazzed up with dye or cute accessories like fruit cut into little shapes or mountains of pastel marshmallows. The highly committed may add a horn, ears and a mane made of sculpted sugar. This might happen to a cupcake, a piece of toast or a cup of coffee. It has been going on for roughly a year on both social media and in a handful of hip cafes. No unicorns are believed to have been harmed, so far. It is all kind of a lot. And it is unlikely to stop any time soon thanks to Starbucks, whose short term journey on this particular bandwagon (their unicorn drink will only be sold for five days) was greeted with both excitement and confusion online. For many, it was their first encounter with unicorn themed foodstuffs. Starbucks sent out a news release perhaps unsurprisingly filled with fairy tale language: "Like its mythical namesake, the Unicorn Frappuccino blended creme comes with a bit of magic," it said. In statements to the news media, the company twice referred to the drink as "magic." But a Starbucks spokeswoman said there was no one we could interview about how they make a unicorn Frappuccino. So we decided to talk to one of the people who kicked off the "unicorn food" trend instead: Adeline Waugh, 27, a health and wellness blogger and food stylist in Miami. Ms. Waugh inadvertently helped start the trend last year after experimenting with a natural food dye beetroot to "add a pop of color to my photos," she said. "I was never intending to start a trend. "I posted it, and all my followers started saying it looked like a unicorn, so I said you're right, and I started calling it that too," she said. "Then all of a sudden all these people were making it and tagging it, and now the unicorn thing has gotten just insane." Besides imitators, Ms. Waugh said she has also gotten attention from book publishers and, of course, online haters who sometimes leave nasty comments under her Instagram pictures. "People get so mad about toast, it is crazy," she said. Much of what calls itself "unicorn food" online bears little resemblance to Ms. Waugh's initial creations, which were designed with both nutrition and aesthetic value in mind. The dye is made from cream cheese and crushed up natural ingredients like chlorophyll, for green or crushed up, freeze dried blueberries for purple, she said. Her work contains no marshmallows, artificial dye or towering horn shaped fondants. There is nary a sprinkle in sight. "The cream cheese version really just tastes like cream cheese," she said. "It doesn't have a strong flavor. It's more for aesthetic purposes." Since then, people those who eat food and those who just like to photograph it have gone wild for rainbow bagels, unicorn lattes and the classic sprinkle. So many sprinkles, on top of cakes and ice creams, and sometimes both at once. (It is not to be confused with unicorn meat.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Apple Opens Up to Praise New Book on Steve Jobs, and Criticize an Old One Steve Jobs prized secrecy from his executives and employees during his tenure at Apple. Now his top lieutenants are speaking out to help shape the legacy of Steve Jobs. Through interviews and tweets, Apple brass, including the chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, are throwing their weight behind a new unauthorized biography of the Apple co founder, "Becoming Steve Jobs," which goes on sale on Tuesday. In the book, executives take aim at another title, "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, an authorized biography published shortly after Mr. Jobs's death in 2011. Mr. Isaacson's best seller did a "tremendous disservice" to the Apple chief, Mr. Cook said in the new book, written by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, and excerpted in the April issue of Fast Company. "It didn't capture the person," Mr. Cook said. "The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time." Jony Ive, Apple's longtime design chief, added his criticism of Mr. Isaacson's biography last month in a New Yorker profile. "My regard couldn't be any lower" for the book, he said, noting that he had read only parts of it. Eddy Cue, Apple's chief of software and Internet services, endorsed the new book on Mr. Jobs on Twitter last week: "Best portrayal is about to be released Becoming Steve Jobs (book). Well done and first to get it right." Apple's iBooks account also tweeted last week that " 'Becoming Steve Jobs' is the only book about Steve recommended by the people who knew him best." The book on book criticism is a rare public cavalcade from Apple executives, who under Mr. Jobs kept quiet about the company's activities. It shows the lengths that Apple is going in its effort to reshape the posthumous image of Mr. Jobs as a kinder spirit, rather than a one dimensional mercurial and brash chief. To that end, Apple gave the authors of "Becoming Steve Jobs" interviews with four executives, including Mr. Cook. In another sign of the company's implicit approval of the biography, the writers will discuss the book and field questions about it on Thursday at the Apple store in SoHo. A new unauthorized biography of the Apple co founder, " Becoming Steve Jobs ," goes on sale on Tuesday. Apple's cooperation wasn't easily won, Mr. Schlender and Mr. Tetzeli said in an email interview. When the veteran tech journalists first approached the company about the book in 2012, both were told executives would not give any interviews. Apple changed its mind 18 months later, they said. "I think our patience and quiet perseverance was what eventually won them over," said Mr. Schlender, who covered Mr. Jobs for almost 25 years. He said he wanted to write the book because he felt there was a side of Mr. Jobs's personality that had never been captured by journalists. While the authors fact checked portions of the book with Apple and other sources and showed the finished volume to the company, Apple wasn't allowed to have "any editorial input whatsoever," Mr. Tetzeli said. "After a long period of reflection following Steve's death, we felt a sense of responsibility to say more about the Steve we knew," Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, said. "We decided to participate in Brent and Rick's book because of Brent's long relationship with Steve, which gave him a unique perspective on Steve's life. The book captures Steve better than anything else we've seen, and we are happy we decided to participate." A handful of influential tech bloggers received early copies of the book, including John Gruber, who wrote on his website Daring Fireball that the book was "smart, accurate, informative, insightful and at times, utterly heartbreaking." Philip Elmer DeWitt, a Fortune writer, said in a blog post that Mr. Schlender's long relationship with Mr. Jobs helped distinguish the new book from past titles about the Apple chief. "It's through Schlender's stories, freshly told, often from taped interviews, that we get to know Steve Jobs as Schlender knew him," Mr. Elmer DeWitt wrote. "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson, was published shortly after Mr. Jobs's death in 2011. Timothy D. Cook said Mr. Isaacson's best seller did a "tremendous disservice" to Mr. Jobs. In an interview, Mr. Isaacson, chief executive of the Aspen Institute and a former managing editor of Time, said he had tried to take a balanced view of Mr. Jobs that did not sugarcoat the Apple co founder's flaws. He interviewed Mr. Jobs more than 40 times and spoke to more than 100 of his friends, relatives, rivals and colleagues, including Mr. Cook, Mr. Ive and Mr. Cue. In the introduction to "Steve Jobs," Mr. Isaacson wrote that Mr. Jobs, who had handpicked him as biographer, didn't try to exert any control over the book, except for weighing in on the cover. The biography proved enormously popular, selling more than three million copies in the United States alone. "My book is very favorable and honest, with no anonymous slings," Mr. Isaacson said, adding that he was criticized at times for being too soft on his subject. Mr. Isaacson said he was pleased to see more biographies and movies a documentary on Mr. Jobs recently debuted at the South by Southwest festival, and a biopic featuring the actor Michael Fassbender as Mr. Jobs was also in the works that would help the public's understanding of Apple's former leader. "It's really cool that there are other books coming out by people who knew Steve and where those who really loved him can put forth their views, because that's how history is made," he said. Apple's active participation in "Becoming Steve Jobs" is also another sign of how Mr. Cook has shaped the company into one that is more open and vocal. Over the last six months, Apple executives have been on an extensive media campaign to promote new retail stores, the Apple Watch and Apple Pay, a new mobile payment service. Mr. Cook has not been shy about defending Apple's image, either. When the author Yukari I. Kane published "Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs" last year, Mr. Cook publicly dismissed the book as "nonsense." Ms. Kane said the colorful remarks from Apple executives about Mr. Isaacson's book reflect a looser discipline at the company. Steve Jobs, then Apple's chief executive, at a 2004 presentation in San Francisco. "Jobs was a mastermind at controlling the narrative on Apple, and one of the ways he did that was to make sure that he was the sole spokesperson and that officially, at least, the company stayed above all the fracas," Ms. Kane said. She added that Mr. Cook's critical comment ended up being used for the cover of her book by overseas publishers. "Becoming Steve Jobs" paints him as a caring mentor, as well as a delegator and skillful manager who brought the best out of his team. In the Fast Company excerpt, Mr. Cook told a story of what happened after he learned that Mr. Jobs needed a liver transplant in 2009. When Mr. Cook discovered that he and Mr. Jobs shared the same rare blood type, Mr. Cook offered a part of his liver to his ailing friend. "I really wanted him to do it," he said in the book. "He cut me off at the legs, almost before the words were out of my mouth. 'No,' he said. 'I'll never let you do that. I'll never do that!' " Later in the excerpt, Mr. Cue of Apple noted that in Mr. Jobs's final years, the Apple chief did everything he could to have people treat him as if he were not sick. "You could see it in the meetings; he was taking morphine, and you could see he was in pain, but he was still interested," Mr. Cue said. Mr. Cue has become a vocal defender of Mr. Jobs's legacy, too, and he took to Twitter recently to criticize the filmmaker Alex Gibney's new documentary about the former Apple chief as "an inaccurate and mean spirited view of my friend. It's not a reflection of the Steve I knew." Minutes later, Mr. Cue praised "Becoming Steve Jobs." Of course, endorsements from corporate executives hardly ensure that the book will be popular. "Becoming Steve Jobs" is the latest entry to a crowded subgenre of breathless technology books aiming to unravel the mysteries of the late pioneer, works that include "Inside Steve's Brain," "The 66 Secrets of Steve Jobs," "The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs," and, for would be Keynote rock stars, "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs." The publisher of "Becoming Steve Jobs," the Crown Publishing Group, is promoting the book as the first account to get the story right, calling it "the definitive history." Crown has increased the print run to 85,000 copies from a planned first printing of 40,000. Roger Scholl, the vice president and executive editor of Crown Publishing, said the market for Steve Jobs books was not close to saturated. "He led such a rich and full life, there's more to be done on him," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
With diesel engines and their ultra low sulfur fuel now green enough even to meet California rules, one remaining environmental objection is that the fuel still starts from a barrel of nonrenewable petroleum. A possible next step is renewable biodiesel made from feedstocks including soybean oil, animal fats and even recycled fry oil. But some diesel car manufacturers are wary of a patchwork of state mandates calling for higher concentrations of biodiesel at the pump. Mercedes Benz dealers, in fact, have stopped selling diesel models in Illinois, which is subsidizing a biodiesel blend that the automaker believes could muck up its engines or emissions systems. As governments push renewables, several states have mandated varying levels of biodiesel, from B2 (2 percent biodiesel) to as much as B20 (20 percent), which Minnesota has mandated starting in 2015. To spur biodiesel output, Illinois eliminated its 6.25 percent sales tax on fuel with at least 10 percent biodiesel. Given that subsidy for producers, the state projects that half of its diesel fuel is now B11 too rich for Mercedes, whose models are designed and warranted for no more than B5. Biodiesel ages and degrades more quickly than gasoline, said William Woebkenberg, fuels policy director for Mercedes Benz USA. Poor quality biodiesel, especially if it contaminates engine oil, can damage engines or fuel systems, he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Suit Most of my suits are custom made by Devon Scott. I first met Devon when I went into Jeffrey New York and he helped me. That was about 10 years ago. When he went off to do his own thing, I followed him. He gets me and my style more current than classic or traditional and he does a great job on the fittings. Almost all of my suits are very tailored. My favorite one feels really good. It's a soft cotton blend, but it's a winter suit that's not too heavy. It's a two button navy suit with thin pinstripes, but then there's a cranberry red lining. I always get compliments. Jeans I have a lot of jeans, but currently my favorite is a pair of Frame jeans that are slim but you still have room to move. They're black. I'm a lifelong New Yorker, what can I say. Shoe I've been a complete sneakerhead pretty much my whole life. I wouldn't say I'm a collector, but I probably have over 100 pairs. I have Air Force 1s, Flyknits, Lanvin, Adidas so many. My favorites are a pair of black high tops with silver accents from Saint Laurent. I'll wear them with jeans, suits, pants, all of the above. My twin daughters also got me a Nike gift card for Father's Day to customize my own pair, so we did it together online. It's funky. As you'd expect from 10 year olds, the colors are pretty bright. There's red, black, some silver and a little white. And they're camo. I also have their names added on each foot, so when I'm not with them they're still with me. Watch I got myself a gift about four years ago: It's an Audemars Piguet watch with a blue face and blue band, but it's a rubber band. I don't love big bulky chain links. Rubber bands are more casual and comfortable. And it's sporty. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
When the Japanese Empire surrendered in August 1945, it accepted the Allied demand that "stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners." The top Japanese leadership including the militaristic Tojo, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor faced an international Allied war crimes tribunal in Tokyo, while lower ranking suspects accused of conventional war crimes or crimes against humanity were hauled in front of numerous special courts set up by various Allied countries. Paradis's book tells how four Japanese officers held responsible for the killing of the Doolittle airmen were tried as suspected war criminals by a United States military commission in postwar Shanghai. "Last Mission to Tokyo" is as concerned with the machinations of prosecution and defense lawyers as with the Doolittle fliers themselves. Paradis, himself a Pentagon lawyer who defends detainees held by the American military at Guantanamo Bay, has a keen sense of the injustices, vagaries and ironies of war crimes trials. His book's authority is the result of substantial archival research. He gives a chilling account of Japan's scramble to find legal grounds for executing the American prisoners. When the Japanese War Ministry's legal department concluded that it would be illegal to execute prisoners of war, they were informed that "the execution would take place regardless of the legality." If necessary, the Kempeitai, the notorious military police, would falsify the records to make it appear that the helpless Americans had resisted capture. Paradis's account points blame less at the four Japanese defendants facing the military commission than at the senior Japanese leaders who launched the war, including Tojo and other powerful militarists. An idealistic young Japanese defense lawyer believed that the Japanese defendants, like the Doolittle airmen and "the rest of Japan, were victims of the militarists, who had left millions dead for nothing." As for Emperor Hirohito, by pardoning five of the American prisoners, he had demonstrated his formal authority and thus implicated himself in the executions of the other three. Yet while Tojo was convicted and hanged as a Class A war criminal by the Allied tribunal at Tokyo, the emperor was never prosecuted, his authority seen by the Truman administration as crucial for ending the war and then for legitimating the postwar American occupation of Japan. In March and April 1946, shortly before the American military commission rendered its verdict in the Doolittle case, Hirohito facing public calls for his abdication or trial gave a series of self exonerating monologues to his aides behind closed doors at the Imperial Palace. (In a richly researched book, this is a rare piece of evidence that Paradis overlooked, although it only enriches his story.) The emperor himself, who feared the militarists and almost never defied them, judged the three executed Americans as innocent: "In fact there seem to have been antiaircraft guns and antiaircraft machine guns at the place attacked by the aircraft, so I think the three men also were not responsible." The war in the Pacific, which the great historian John W. Dower has described as a merciless clash fueled by racist hatreds, offers painful opportunities for self reflection. While Paradis avoids lazy moral equivalences, his book, like any true war story, has something to disquiet nationalists of all stripes. For Japanese right wingers who denounce the Allies' trials of war criminals as victors' justice, it is telling to see the crude proceedings lasting perhaps an hour that the Japanese Empire used to condemn the three Doolittle airmen. For American patriots, the book carries disturbing reminders about the many civilians killed in the American bombing campaigns that razed Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe and other Japanese cities and towns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Clockwise from top left, Valerie Macon/Agence France Presse, via Getty Images; Mike Nelson/EPA, via Shutterstock; Daniele Venturelli/WireImage, via Getty Images; Matt Sayles/Invision, via Associated Press; Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images; Jean Baptiste Lacroix/Agence France Presse, via Getty Images Clockwise from top left, Valerie Macon/Agence France Presse, via Getty Images; Mike Nelson/EPA, via Shutterstock; Daniele Venturelli/WireImage, via Getty Images; Matt Sayles/Invision, via Associated Press; Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images; Jean Baptiste Lacroix/Agence France Presse, via Getty Images Credit... Clockwise from top left, Valerie Macon/Agence France Presse, via Getty Images; Mike Nelson/EPA, via Shutterstock; Daniele Venturelli/WireImage, via Getty Images; Matt Sayles/Invision, via Associated Press; Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images; Jean Baptiste Lacroix/Agence France Presse, via Getty Images Among the few notable things about this year's Golden Globes was that so many women dispensed with long curling ironed hair or chignons or whatever other frippery and just chopped it. Saoirse Ronan had a lob, or "long bob," styled by Ben Skervin. Claire Foy: mini bob. Maya Rudolph: sharp medium long bob. Lobs, too, for Lucy Boynton ("Bohemian Rhapsody") and Irina Shayk, a model. This major bob moment comes exactly 100 years after an avalanche of women 20,000 per week, according to the Women's Improvement League scandalized the world by cutting off their waist long, painstakingly coiffed Gibson girl dos. They chose instead an ear grazing crop cut that until then had been worn only by willful, freethinking renegades Bolsheviks, the Bloomsbury set, the up and coming Coco Chanel, Greenwich Village radicals, the fashion forward ballroom dancer Irene Castle, who catapulted the bob into the American mainstream. Fitzgerald was prescient about this as so much else. The bob, while now a classic, has never quite lost its unladylike insouciance. Even today, "switching to a bob is a little bit like giving the finger," said Yves Durif, the New York hairstylist. As if on cue at the start of 2019, this cheeky haircut has resumed its role as a take no prisoners rebuke to those long tresses, cascading below the shoulders, that have dominated the opening decades of the 21st century. Mr. Durif, whose clients at his Carlyle Hotel salon include MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski and Kasie Hunt, called this Trump era Lady Godiva look "cliched and banal." "Long hair isn't even interesting on the runway shows anymore," said Julie Stahl, the C.E.O. of Blonde Co., a New York creative content agency. Ahn Co Tran, a hairstylist with a salon in Beverly Hills, said he cuts "oh my God, ever so many bobs." They're not a deluge (yet), but more and more are happening in the larger cities. "We're seeing a turning away from hairdressing and a resurgence of hair cutting," said Peter Gray, a stylist in New York. This despite what may be an ingrained American partiality to long hair, versus what Michel Obadia, a Moroccan born veteran hairstylist in New York, called "a European preference for short hair generally and the bob in particular." "American women want to be beautiful," Mr. Obadia said. "European woman want to be stylish." In fact, according to Wendy Iles, a stylist in Paris whose clients have included Marion Cotillard and Lea Sedoux, "the bob defines Frenchwomen's hairstyles." "It's quite a statement to have a bob," Mr. Skervin said. "You're either drawn to the bob or you're intimidated by it. But you own it." Even Elizabeth Prelogar, a Russia expert who is on the team of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has been seen in one. The style is defined by its blunt edge, often angled longer in front, reaching somewhere between the earlobe and the collarbone. A versatile cut, it runs the gamut from the rigidly geometric Vidal Sassoon esque structured '60s bob to the contemporary textured bob, the asymmetrical bob and what Mr. Tran called "the disheveled, undone, unkempt, whimsical French bob." And then there's the "hedgelike topiary bob, much of which is cut freehand," as engineered by Mr. Skervin for Tessa Thompson's November 2018 Essence cover. Not to overlook the Isabella Rossellini in the '90s bob, "blunt, but worn messy," said George Norwood, a stylist in London. There are several compelling reasons for the sudden bob surge. No. 1. The damage factor: the need to cut off long hair that's been weakened by years of extensions, said Marie Sigismondi, a colorist at the Pierre Michel Salon. No. 2. The renegade factor: The bob's progressive, in your face sass is alluring to progressives. It's got MeToo credentials. "It's giving us a new view about what being feminine is," said Ruth Roche, a hair industry educator. No. 3. The Batsheva factor: The bob is the perfect contrasting accompaniment to the Laura Ashley Gunne Sax inspired boho prairie look that's flourishing lately. It offsets the flounces and ruffles with needed current context. "A prairie dress with a modern bob Wow!" Mr. Tran said. No. 4. The artlessness factor: This blunt cut speaks eloquently, as no other hairstyle can, to today's drive for authenticity. What is it if not a spiffier Buster Brown, the old timey comic strip character, never quite losing the impression that it was cut in the kitchen by a cost saving parent placing a cereal bowl over the child's head? The bob appeals to those who want to "look like they're not living by the usual standards, whose message is, 'I'm not trying too hard," said Holli Smith, who does hairstyles for the Balenciaga runway shows. "My bob is romantic, edgy, artistic and so magical it could be fetishized," said Isabella Lalonde, a media trainee at Christian Dior. "It's a constant symbol of who I am, and it looks good even if I haven't washed my hair in a few days." For those attracted to the bob's bluntness but lacking the nerve to go jaw length short, as well as for the multitudes who insist on keeping at least a rudimentary ponytail (even a stump), there's a shoulder length variant, popular for several seasons now. Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Mila Kunis, Megan Fox, Kim Kardashian and the models Alexa Chung and Emily Ratajkowski have all been seen with lobs. Ms. Roche, the industry educator, isn't having any of it. A purist, she called the lob "a cop out. A lob falls to the collar bone, which is definitely below the shoulders! A bob, any bob, has to hit above the shoulders. It's the space between the shoulders and the jaw that lets the bob look sharp and cool." "The use of color can make a bob look fabulous and fierce," Ms. Sigismondi added. Her preference is for a darker top section and lighter color underneath. "That, rather than highlighting, gives dimension and variation." And for a subtle but edgy detail, she darkens a crescent of hair at the nape of the neck, where the bob is shortest. Inspired by the singer Dua Lipa's bleached bob and the actress Jenna Dewan's rich chocolate one, Michelle Sevilla, a pre med student at Queens College, gets hers shorn at Coiffures by Genevieve in Franklin Square. "You don't see a lot of short hair on Long Island, Ms. Sevilla said. "But a bob is edgy and inspiring; I stand out in it." Riding the Hoboken PATH train recently, Ms. Lalonde, the Christian Dior trainee, spotted a female conductor who had the same devil may care floppy bob that she has. "We made eye contact and clicked," she said. "It was a telling moment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
As the Golden Globes began on Sunday, Sandra Oh earnestly told the audience, "I said yes to the fear of being on this stage tonight because because I wanted to be here to look out into this audience and witness this moment of change," referring to one of the more diverse slates of nominees in Globes history, in an industry that has traditionally been difficult to break into for people of color. It turned out at least this year the diversity wasn't just in the nominees, but also in the winners selected by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Several performers of color won in some of the most prestigious categories, including the night's best actor in a movie drama, the Egyptian American star Rami Malek. And the diversity extended to the stories being told. Best animated movie went to "Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse," in which a version of the superhero is an Afro Latino teenager. (The directing team behind the movie included an African American filmmaker, Peter Ramsey.) Best comedy went to "Green Book," about the relationship between an African American pianist and his Italian American driver. One winner, Darren Criss, spoke onstage about the issue, noting, "This has been a marvelous year for representation in Hollywood, and I am so enormously proud to be a teeny, tiny part of that as the son of a firecracker Filipino woman from Cebu that dreamed of coming to this country and getting to be invited to cool parties like this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
On the rocky cliffs of the Himalayas, the path to snow leopard conservation is paved in feces. Their population decimated by poaching and habitat destruction, only about 4,000 of the endangered cats remain in the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Conflicts with mountain farmers and pastoral herders also contribute to their dwindling numbers. "The problem is when a snow leopard gets inside a livestock pen," said Madhu Chetri, a biologist at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. When that happens, he said, the carnivore usually eats a handful of goats and sheep, but in some cases it can massacre more than 100 animals in a single corral. If the cat gets stuck in a pen, the inevitable tends to occur. "There is a high chance the herders will kill it in retaliation," he said. Dr. Chetri and his team are studying conflicts between humans and snow leopards in areas of Nepal in order to find ways to mitigate them. That's why they spent more than 150 days in the Central Himalayas sniffing out snow leopard scat. Embedded in the excrement were clues to decoding the cat's diet and determining how often it ate livestock, which could one day guide conservation strategies to reduce contact between snow leopards and farm animals. They published their findings Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Irving Burgie, as Lord Burgess, at Folk City in New York in 1984. "If there were an aristocracy in the world of calypso," the critic Robert Shelton wrote, "Lord Burgess would be one of the reigning figures." Irving Burgie, a singer, composer and lyricist whose songs were immortalized by Harry Belafonte during the calypso craze of the 1950s, died on Friday in Brooklyn. He was 95. His death was confirmed by his son Andrew. Known professionally as Lord Burgess, Mr. Burgie (pronounced BURR gee) was at his height in 1956 when he wrote eight of the 11 tracks on Mr. Belafonte's celebrated album "Calypso," among them "Jamaica Farewell," "I Do Adore Her" and "Dolly Dawn." The album, said to be the first by a single artist to sell more than a million copies, was No. 1 on the Billboard chart for 31 weeks and helped propel Mr. Belafonte to stardom and make calypso music known internationally. One of the biggest hits from the album was "Day O" ("The Banana Boat Song"), based on a Jamaican folk song. Mr. Burgie and William Attaway wrote the lyrics for the version sung by Mr. Belafonte, which he originally performed on television on "The Colgate Comedy Hour" in 1955. It became Mr. Belafonte's signature song. Calypso "revolutionized music" by introducing Afro Caribbean rhythms to the pop mainstream, Mr. Burgie told the journal American Music in 2016. "The combination of me as the writer and Belafonte as the performer took off," he said. He went on to work on two more albums with Mr. Belafonte, "Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean" (1957) and "Jump Up Calypso" (1961). Mr. Burgie also wrote "Island in the Sun," another Belafonte hit, for the 1957 movie of the same title starring Mr. Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, James Mason and Dorothy Dandridge. Mr. Burgie had begun to establish a music career before his association with Mr. Belafonte, performing at clubs like the Blue Angel in Chicago in 1953 and the Village Vanguard in New York in 1954. In the calypso tradition of adopting a flamboyant stage name, he became at the suggestion of Max Gordon, the Vanguard's owner Lord Burgess. "If there were an aristocracy in the world of calypso," the critic Robert Shelton wrote in The New York Times in 1968, reviewing a concert by Lord Burgess at Carnegie Hall, where he performed with a six piece band and a dancing chorus, "Lord Burgess would be one of the reigning figures." He added: "The audience had a very good time, it appeared. They understood or had previously encountered and mastered Lord Burgess's lyrics, which are central to the style. Despite the barrier of dialect, slang and speed, he seemed a jolly and artful man who moved with his music and moved others with it." Irving Louis Burgie was born not in the Caribbean, as most calypso entertainers of his era were, but in Brooklyn, on July 28, 1924. He was a second generation West Indian American; his mother, Viola Calendar, was from Barbados, and his father, Louis Burgie, was from Virginia. He grew up hearing Caribbean music in his home. He graduated from Automotive High School in Brooklyn in 1941. Drafted into the Army in 1943, he served in an all black battalion in China, Burma and India. It was in the Army that Mr. Burgie took a serious interest in music. "There was a guy in this outfit, Jimmy Houston, who was an alto sax player in the states," he told American Music. "I studied with him and learned about chords and intervals." He began to sing in an Army chapel choir, encouraged by fellow soldiers who told him he had a good voice. After he left the Army, the G.I. Bill opened unexpected opportunities for him. With its help, he began taking classes at night at Brooklyn College and learned about the music program at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. He auditioned there and was accepted, majoring in voice and planning to be a singer of classical music. He continued his musical education at the University of Arizona and at the University of Southern California. After college, Mr. Burgie worked as a camp counselor and sang at camps in upstate New York, and it was at Camp Minisink , run by the Harlem based New York City Mission Society, that he met Mr. Belafonte in the summer of 1950. With a common background both had been born in New York City (Mr. Belafonte in Harlem) and both had parents from the Caribbean they struck up a friendship. "They asked Harry and me to do a number at the monthly birthday party in the dining hall the next night," Mr. Burgie said in an interview in 2017 for this obituary. "We met and rehearsed the next afternoon, and that evening we did a duet on 'John Henry' that really broke up the place." As the folk music revival got underway in the 1950s, Mr. Burgie was inspired to write songs based on the traditional Caribbean songs he had heard in his childhood and on the songs he had discovered in his extensive research into the genre. He also began performing at nightclubs, though he continued to write songs, including "The Seine," "El Matador," and "Wish You Were Here." The Kingston Trio, Miriam Makeba and many others recorded his tunes. In 1966, when Barbados won independence, he was invited to write the lyrics for the national anthem. Mr. Burgie's songs have had a long life. "Jamaica Farewell," Mr. Belafonte's theme song, has been recorded by Jimmy Buffett, Carly Simon and others. The echoing "Day O" from the song of the same name has become a rallying cry at Yankee Stadium and other sports arenas, and the song was memorably heard in the 1988 Tim Burton movie "Beetlejuice." Mr. Burgie's talent also landed him Off Broadway in 1963. He wrote the music and lyrics (and, with Loften Mitchell, the book) for "Ballad for Bimshire," a musical set in Barbados. It explores racism, nationalism and colonialism while telling the story of a teenage girl and her dream to come to the United States. The show, starring Ossie Davis, ran for 74 performances at the Mayfair Theater in Midtown Manhattan. "Mr. Burgie's songs almost cover the gamut they are sweet, nostalgic, torch, comic and ebullient," Howard Taubman wrote in his review in The Times, "His lyrics vary in quality from indifferent to joyously apt, but he rarely is shy of an engaging melody, and he can unleash rhythms that provide almost as much thrust to the production numbers as a booster rocket on a launching pad." Mr. Burgie had been active as a performer of Caribbean folk music before the Belafonte surge, but he sidelined that career as his songs for Mr. Belafonte grew ever more popular. But Lord Burgess did occasionally re emerge, as he did in 1984 at Folk City in Greenwich Village. Reviewing the show in The Times, John S. Wilson wrote admiringly: "Mr. Belafonte may have gotten more than the songs from Lord Burgess. He may have gotten the manner of singing them." That same year, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Britain released "Island in the Sun," an album of Mr. Burgie's songs. Mr. Burgie released his first solo album, "Island in the Sun: The Best of Irving Burgie," in 1996, and another, "The Father of Modern Calypso," in 2003. "Day O!!!: The Autobiography of Irving Burgie" was published in 2007, the same year that Mr. Burgie was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
How to Take Music Lessons Whenever (and Wherever) Works for You None | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
How can photography be a tool for self care? That's the question posed by the exhibition "In Sickness and in Health," which was intended for Paris Photo in New York but moved online after the fair was postponed. The artists Heather Agyepong, Anna Fox and Jo Spence use the medium to process personal and societal histories that affect who they are and how they see themselves. The matriarch of the show is Ms. Spence (1934 1992). In the 1980s, with collaborators like the artist Rosy Martin, she developed something called "photo therapy," a way to marry the performative aspects of photography with the healing goals of therapy by enacting for the camera issues discussed in co counseling sessions. Examples include darkly comic images of Ms. Spence mimicking the extreme emotions of a stereotypical bride and a sobering one in which she displays a breast cancer scar while wearing a racing helmet. Ms. Agyepong draws and expands on the idea of embodying the past with a new series, "Wish You Were Here." In it she channels Aida Overton Walker, a popular African American vaudeville performer who was known as the "queen of the cakewalk." Shown posing for a series of fake postcards, Ms. Agyepong's character feels like a distinct hybrid of old and new, a free spirit straight out of the early 1900s. Ms. Fox's contribution is the only one devoid of figures, instead evoking people indirectly. "My Mother's Cupboards and My Father's Words" pairs aggressive, threatening statements spoken by her father when he was ill with tightly cropped shots of stacked dishware and shelves of medicine kept by her mother. The combinations are harrowing, creating an intimate portrait of psychic violence that pushes at the limits of photography's capacity for catharsis. Gallery shows are, by definition, limited engagements, which is a problem when they move online: If they're only on the web, why not leave them up forever? But then, if they are up forever, what urgency will I feel to see them now? The best solution I've seen has been in "Public Images," an online film series about public spaces ingeniously organized by Peter Scott for his Lower East Side gallery, Carriage Trade. Each separate film is viewable on the gallery's website for only 10 days before they all reprise in mid June. In some cases, the material's archival graininess makes its limited availability feel esthetically apropos. But what really makes the whole thing work is the effect of their sequence. Starting with snippets of 1930s New York and ending on a sci fi fantasy about the rewilding of Japan's cities following a future demographic collapse, the full program coheres into a powerful portrait of modern urban living and its surprising mutability. Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke's 1939 documentary, "The City," is a tendentious but sometimes thrilling paean to the emerging suburbs, and their humane open spaces, somewhat undermined by shots of modern urban marvels like an automatic pancake flipping machine. Diane Nerwen's "Traveling Shots: NYC" (2014), which weaves together passing views of the city from Hollywood movies, includes tantalizing glimpses of checkered cabs, Times Square strip clubs, and even Manhattan's old elevated trains, serving as a timely reminder that we've always been losing New York. But it's Howard Silver's incisive documentaries on the architect James Wines, up right now, that seem most perfectly resonant in the present moment. Alternating shots of the gaptoothed masonry, tilted facades and other high concept gestures Wines applied to suburban storefronts with the unimpressed reactions of local shoppers, they wring enormous pathos and humor out of an ordinary fact that most people don't care about art. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
NORRISTOWN, Pa. Jurors in the Bill Cosby sexual assault retrial began their deliberations Wednesday, sifting through evidence they heard during 12 days of testimony and arguments in an effort to determine whether Andrea Constand had been molested by the once popular entertainer. Last summer jurors spent six days deliberating that question at the Montgomery County Courthouse before Judge Steven T. O'Neill agreed they were hopelessly deadlocked and sent them home. Judge O'Neill, who is presiding at this retrial, charged the jury Wednesday morning. Deliberations began around 11 a.m. and dragged into the night as the 12 member panel considered the presentations by prosecutors and defense lawyers. The latter argued that Ms. Constand, a former Temple University employee who viewed Mr. Cosby as a mentor, had a consensual sexual encounter with Mr. Cosby at his home near here in 2004. But they said she later concocted a story about having been assaulted to pressure him into a financial settlement. Over the course of the day, jury members came back with three questions for the judge. One asked for an explanation of the legal definition of "consent." Two other questions concerned the testimony of the defense's star witness, Marguerite Jackson, a veteran employee of Temple University, Mr. Cosby's alma mater, and Mr. Cosby's deposition testimony in the 2005 lawsuit brought by Ms. Constand. The judge read a portion of Mr. Cosby's words to the jurors. Ms. Jackson testified during the trial that Ms. Constand, 45, a former director of operations for the Temple women's basketball team, confided in her in 2004 that she could make money by falsely claiming that she had been molested by a prominent person. Prosecutors raised questions about Ms. Jackson's credibility, pointing to apparent discrepancies between two statements she had made describing such a conversation. The jury in the original trial had been drawn from among Pittsburgh residents because of defense concerns that the jury pool in Montgomery County had been influenced by the intense publicity surrounding the case. For the retrial, the defense lifted its objections to a local jury. The seven men and five women, 10 of them white and two of them black, come from Montgomery County. They are being sequestered for the duration of the trial. Mr. Cosby is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault: penetration with lack of consent; penetration while unconscious; and penetration after administrating an intoxicant. Each is a felony that could carry up to 10 years in prison if he is convicted. During the first trial, some jurors struggled with the precise definition of the language of the charges, and their first question Wednesday about the definition of consent suggested they may again be grappling with meaning. Judge O'Neill said it was up to the jury to decide what constituted consent. He dismissed the jurors at 9:30 p.m. "We are back in the first trial," said Barbara Ashcroft, a former sex crimes prosecutor who has been following the trial. The jurors, she said, were trying to evaluate the "significance and importance of breaking down that legal language and fitting it to their common understanding." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Spike Lee's movie about a black police officer, Ron Stallworth, who infiltrates his local Ku Klux Klan chapter in the 1970s is adapted from Stallworth's memoir. "BLACK KLANSMAN" (Flatiron) details the detective's investigation and efforts to derail the organization, even managing to befriend David Duke. Linda Gordon's "THE SECOND COMING OF THE KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition" (Norton) is a sobering account of the group's history and role in society. The KKK exercised huge influence over local politics and everyday life, to a jaw dropping degree; our reviewer said the book "should be required reading." For a novel that deals with many of the movie's central themes, check out Maurice Carlos Ruffin's debut, "WE CAST A SHADOW" (One World). Set in the future, in a deeply racist American South, the story's narrator is a black lawyer who goes to extraordinary lengths to protect his biracial son from experiencing racism. Our reviewer said the book "asks some of the most important questions fiction can ask, and it does so with energetic and acrobatic prose, hilarious wordplay and great heart." If you'd like to spend more time in Wakanda, the universe of "Black Panther," check out Ta Nehisi Coates's reprisal of the comic, illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze. In their first volume, "A NATION UNDER OUR FEET" (Marvel), a superhuman terrorist group is rattling the nation, and the leader T'Challa must lead the country through the uprising and help determine its future. For another fantastical, sprawling story set in Africa, look to Marlon James's new novel, "BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF" (Riverhead), the first of an expected trilogy that's been compared to "Game of Thrones." Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's epic novel, "KINTU" (Transit Books) is set in present day Uganda, and follows one family's efforts to evade a curse that's followed them for generations. Barry Jenkins' film is based on James Baldwin's 1974 novel of the same name, and follows a young couple in 1970s New York whose lives are thrown into chaos when the man is wrongly imprisoned. If you'd like to explore more by Baldwin, consider his debut novel, "GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN," the loosely autobiographical story of a man growing up in Harlem in the 1930s. For a more contemporary story, there's "AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE" (Algonquin) by Tayari Jones, which follows a young African American couple "on the come up" whose lives are upended after the husband is convicted of a rape he didn't commit. To understand the devastating effects of the mass incarceration of black men, look to James Forman Jr.'s "LOCKING UP OUR OWN: Crime and Punishment in Black America" (Farrar, Straus Giroux). His book shows the role of black mayors, judges and police chiefs, taking office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction, in putting in place measures that would prove devastating for poor black neighborhoods. In their novel "THE NANNY DIARIES" (St. Martin's Griffin), Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus both former nannies themselves include plenty of hilarious details in their story of child care among wealthy Manhattanites. Don't let the title of Leila Slimani's novel deceive you: "THE PERFECT NANNY" (Penguin) is a chilling psychological thriller ripped right from the headlines, with a family's caretaker who snaps and kills the children. The book was named one of The Times's 10 Best Books of 2018. The author P. L. Travers wrote six Mary Poppins books, but was an intensely private woman. Valerie Lawson was determined to tell the author's story in "MARY POPPINS SHE WROTE: The Life of P. L. Travers" (Simon Schuster), which serves as an intrepid guide to a surprisingly difficult topic: Travers fascinating, though confusing, personal life. See our full list of reading recommendations for this movie. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A senior Labor Department lawyer contends she faces removal from her job after objecting to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia's intervention in a pay discrimination case against Oracle, a tech giant with close White House connections. Oracle has a lot at stake in the case, which originated in the Obama administration: potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in back pay for female, African American and Asian American employees who the department said were paid less than white and male counterparts. Ordinarily such a case would be left to career employees. But Janet Herold, who has overseen the litigation, asserts in a complaint filed last week with a federal investigative agency that Mr. Scalia broke with normal department practice in seeking a settlement and abused his authority, according to her lawyers. A Labor Department official with knowledge of the Oracle case said he had heard a similar account. The official said Ms. Herold had told him that a superior informed her shortly before the case went to trial last year that Mr. Scalia intended to settle it for less than 40 million. The official said Ms. Herold, the Labor Department's regional solicitor based in Los Angeles, had promptly informed colleagues of this development and told them that she had raised objections to the offer because she considered the amount too low. Debra Katz, a lawyer for Ms. Herold, would not comment on the settlement discussions or other details of her complaint but said, "It is Ms. Herold's practice, which she always follows, to keep relevant colleagues and staff updated in live time about all settlement offers conveyed and received in her cases." A Labor Department spokeswoman said Mr. Scalia had done nothing irregular or improper in the Oracle case. While he had routine internal discussions about the case, she said, "Secretary Scalia has never had any communications with Oracle or its attorneys concerning the department's litigation against the company." Asked whether other officials had discussions with Oracle on Mr. Scalia's behalf, the spokeswoman said the department "does not comment on ongoing litigation or improperly disclosed settlement negotiations." She said the department was continuing to pursue the case against Oracle. Deborah Hellinger, an Oracle spokeswoman, declined to say whether the company had interacted with top Labor Department officials about a possible settlement since Mr. Scalia became secretary, but said, "Anyone who followed the trial observed firsthand that D.O.L.'s case lacked all evidence and merit." The White House did not respond to questions about the handling of the Oracle case. According to Ms. Katz, Ms. Herold's complaint states that Mr. Scalia became involved in the case shortly after his confirmation last September, and that he requested a memo from Ms. Herold about the case in November. Ms. Herold objected to his involvement on more than one occasion, Ms. Katz said. She said in a statement that the documentary evidence included in Ms. Herold's complaint, along with "the anticipated testimony of career service attorneys at D.O.L.," will show that Mr. Scalia's actions "in intervening in the Oracle litigation were improper." According to Alexis Ronickher, another lawyer for Ms. Herold, Mr. Scalia sought to reassign Ms. Herold to a job in Chicago with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that does not involve litigation, her expertise, a few weeks after she raised renewed concerns about his intervention. Ms. Ronickher said her client was told of Mr. Scalia's intention to transfer her in a meeting with her supervisors last month, and told that she would be dismissed if she turned down the assignment. Asked about those contentions, the Labor Department said it "declines to comment on personnel matters." Ms. Herold's complaint was filed with the federal Office of Special Counsel, which investigates retaliation against whistle blowers. The complaint has three components, according to Ms. Katz. In the first, a formal report under a whistle blower statute, Ms. Herold accuses Mr. Scalia of abuse of authority and gross mismanagement. The second is a charge of retaliation against Ms. Herold for objecting to Mr. Scalia's intervention in the Oracle case. The third is a charge that Mr. Scalia discriminated against her because he saw her as ideologically aligned with the Obama administration. 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. If the Office of Special Counsel finds merit to Ms. Herold's complaint, it could ask the department to stand down on her reassignment. The Labor Department spokeswoman rejected the idea that Ms. Herold had observed any behavior that would prompt whistle blowing. "Ms. Herold is not a whistle blower and at no time has the department engaged in retaliation against her," the Labor Department spokeswoman said. The discrimination case against Oracle arises from an enforcement action by the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which monitors whether government contractors like Oracle are following federal anti discrimination laws. In a trial in December, the Labor Department team, led by Ms. Herold, said that Oracle was paying female employees up to 20 percent less than males and that it was paying Asian and African American employees between 10 and 30 percent less than white employees in three job categories. The categories account for about two thirds of the employees at Oracle's headquarters in Redwood City, Calif., according to the department. The government's expert witness in the case testified that back pay owed to workers as a result of the discrimination from 2013 through 2018 came to between 300 million and about 800 million. The amount could be higher today because the government asserts that the violations have continued since then. The first phase of the trial was held in an administrative trial court, but the judge in the case has yet to rule. One current and one former Labor Department official with knowledge of the case said that the department's scrutiny of the work of Ms. Herold's legal team increased significantly after Mr. Scalia took over as labor secretary. The officials said that Solicitor Kate O'Scannlain, the Labor Department's top lawyer, began making line edits in legal briefs that the team planned to file in court, which she had not previously done. One of the officials said that it was reasonable for her to take an interest in important court filings but that he was surprised that Ms. O'Scannlain, who supervises hundreds of lawyers, would involve herself on such a granular level. According to two former Labor Department officials with knowledge of the case, President Trump's first labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, rebuffed a request by Oracle's chief executive, Safra Catz, who had been a member of Mr. Trump's transition team, to discuss the case in early 2018. Mr. Acosta told Oracle that the company should discuss the case with the Labor Department's legal office following a longstanding custom in which the solicitor's office handles litigation, those officials said. The Labor Department had no comment on that account. M. Patricia Smith, the Labor Department solicitor under President Barack Obama from 2010 to 2017, said in a text message that the two labor secretaries she served under did not directly involve themselves in settlement negotiations in cases that the department had brought. She said that Thomas E. Perez, Mr. Obama's second labor secretary, would weigh in on the broader legal questions at stake in a negotiation but that "this number vs. that number was left to the litigators." Ms. Smith said that it was not unusual for lawyers to send her drafts of briefs in important cases but that she would have commented only on the overall arguments, not word choice and grammar. A current official and a former official with knowledge of the case described Oracle as aggressive from the get go in dealing with the Labor Department in the matter. Not long before the trial began, the judge admonished Oracle for its "scorched earth" strategy of raising an "undifferentiated mass of what mostly appear to be meritless objections." Oracle has long been proactive in trying to influence legislation and regulation in Washington, spending 8.2 million on federal lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And its top executives have built something rare among their tech industry peers: a close relationship with President Trump and his administration. When Ms. Catz, the chief executive, joined the Trump transition team, most tech executives were still sizing up the incoming administration. "I plan to tell the president elect that we are with him and are here to help in any way we can," she said before a meeting between Mr. Trump and tech chief executives in December 2016. Bloomberg News has reported that at a dinner in April 2018, Ms. Catz spoke with Mr. Trump about Oracle's yearslong fight with Amazon and other companies over a 10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract, though the Pentagon later announced that Oracle was out of the running because it hadn't met the minimum requirements for the project. The company's executive chairman, Larry Ellison, hosted a fund raiser for President Trump this year at his estate in Rancho Mirage, Calif. And the two men discussed the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for the coronavirus, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Mr. Trump came to be an evangelist for the drug, despite a lack of scientific evidence about its efficacy for such use. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve, which holds more bonds than any other investor, is planning how to shed some of them starting this year. And no one is too worried about it. The Fed is expected to announce in the near future a plan to gradually reduce its 4.5 trillion portfolio of Treasuries and mortgage backed securities, the final step necessary to conclude the stimulus campaign it conducted after the financial crisis. The unveiling could come Wednesday, after a two day meeting of the Fed's policy making committee, when the Fed is expected to announce it will raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point, to a range between 1 percent and 1.25 percent. Financial markets have watched the Fed's preparations with equanimity. There is no sign of the panic that briefly gripped investors when the Fed contemplated similar measures in 2013, perhaps because the economy seems to be considerably stronger. It also helps that the Fed has indicated that it plans to move very slowly. Analysts expect that the Fed might initially reduce its holdings by 10 billion a month which would put it on pace to complete the normalization process in about 30 years. Stanley Fischer, the Fed's vice chairman, offered the "tentative conclusion" in an April speech that "we appear less likely to face major market disturbances now than we did in the case of the taper tantrum," the name often given to the sell off in mid 2013. The Fed, which held less than 900 billion in assets a decade ago, staged a series of bond buying campaigns in the aftermath of the financial crisis, often described as quantitative easing. The Fed wanted to further reduce longer term interest rates, but it had already lowered its benchmark interest rate to near zero. Buying bonds reduced the supply available to investors, increasing competition so investors had to accept lower interest rates. The Fed, and some outside economists, argued that the purchases modestly reduced borrowing costs on mortgages and commercial loans, contributing to the gradual revival of economic activity. The Fed estimated in an April analysis that its holdings reduce by about 1 percentage point the interest rate on the benchmark 10 year Treasury note, which is 2.2 percent. Fed officials now say they expect to start reducing those holdings this year. The retreat is expected to reinforce the effects of the ongoing increases in its benchmark rate: higher borrowing costs for businesses and consumers, some outflow of money from the stock market into bonds, and some strengthening of the dollar. Among outside economists, there is a range of views about the effects of the reduction. Some who doubted the benefits of the program expect the retreat to be similarly inconsequential. Others think the Fed's analysis is in the ballpark. Still others worry that the Fed could roil financial markets. The Fed does not plan to reduce its balance sheet to the precrisis level. The most basic reason is that demand for dollars has increased, and the Fed supplies that demand by purchasing securities. Currency in circulation has nearly doubled over the last decade, from 774 billion in May 2007 to 1.5 trillion last month. At the current rate of growth, the Fed projects currency in circulation would reach 2.8 trillion by 2027. "It's hard to see the balance sheet getting below a range of 2.5 to 3 trillion," Jerome H. Powell, a member of the Fed's board of governors, said in a recent speech to the Economic Club of New York. The Fed also acquires securities to provide reserves to the banking system. Before the crisis, the Fed's control of interest rates depended on keeping those reserves at a minimum level in normal times on average, about 15 billion. But those balances soared in the aftermath of the crisis as the Fed pumped money into the financial system. Banks now hold about 2.2 trillion in reserves. Moreover, the Fed has changed the mechanics of monetary policy so it can control interest rates without draining those reserves. And the new system is working: The Fed has successfully carried out three rate increases. In his recent speech, Mr. Powell contrasted the Fed's current approach, which he said "is simple to operate and has provided good control over the federal funds rate," with the old system, which he described as complex and unwieldy. He said the Fed had not decided whether to keep the new system. But his comments and those of other influential Fed officials have fostered an expectation that the Fed will maintain it. If the Fed does so, the level of reserves will remain above its precrisis level, and that means the Fed's balance sheet will be larger, too. In an April survey of two dozen Wall Street firms conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the median estimate was that bank reserves would remain at roughly 688 billion in 2025 and that the Fed's balance sheet would sit at 3.1 trillion. John C. Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said he still expected that in five years, the balance sheet would be "much smaller than today." But others think the reduction could end up being quite small. "In a sense, the U.S. economy is 'growing into' the Fed's 4.5 trillion balance sheet, reducing the need for rapid shrinkage over the next few years," wrote Ben S. Bernanke, the former Fed chairman. Mr. Bernanke calculated that the Fed could need a balance sheet of roughly 4 trillion within 10 years. The mechanics of the Fed's retreat are more certain. The Fed plans to reduce its holdings without selling securities. That is possible because some of the securities mature each month. Analysts estimate about 280 billion in securities will mature during the remainder of 2017, and another 650 billion will mature during 2018. By gradually reducing the amount it reinvests each month, the Fed can gradually reduce its investments while avoiding potentially disruptive sales. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
WASHINGTON The global spread of the deadly coronavirus is posing a significant economic test for President Trump, whose three year stretch of robust growth could be shaken by supply chain delays, a tourism slowdown and ruptures in other critical sectors of the American economy. The outbreak of the virus in China has already disrupted global trade, sending American companies and retailers that rely on Chinese imports scrambling to repair a temporary break in their supply chains. Its spread to South Korea, Italy and beyond has hindered global travel. Economic forecasters say that the effects will hurt growth in the United States this year even if they do not intensify and that if the virus becomes a global pandemic, it could knock the world economy into recession. Stock markets have plunged this week on fears about the virus, with companies such as Apple and Microsoft among the most prominent businesses that have warned that supply chain disruptions could slow sales. Analysts said this week's declines were on track to be the steepest since the 2008 financial crisis. The market's fall presents a challenge for Mr. Trump, whose presidential success has been deeply tied to the economy and a rising stock market that is now experiencing pronounced jitters. For now, Mr. Trump has publicly played down the potential economic fallout, saying woes at the aerospace giant Boeing, a strike last year at General Motors and the Federal Reserve's reluctance to slash interest rates have done more to hurt the economy. "We have been hurt by General Motors," Mr. Trump said on Wednesday. "We've been hurt by Boeing. And we've been hurt by we've been hurt, in my opinion, very badly, by our own Federal Reserve." Health officials expect a spike in coronavirus cases in the United States, though it remains unclear how soon and how severe an outbreak might occur. Officials have warned the nation to be prepared for the virus to spread. If the infection gains a big foothold in the United States, it could disrupt the economy, which has been expanding steadily with an unemployment rate that has hovered near a 50 year low for more than a year. In an extreme scenario where the virus severely hits the United States, it could keep workers at home and grind production to a halt, hurting revenue streams and tanking even highly leveraged corporations as they fall behind on debt payments. In the least severe case, the current slowdown in China could cause a short lived growth blip. Economists at Goldman Sachs already expect to shave 0.8 percentage points off the United States gross domestic product in the first three months of 2020 because of slumping tourism from China and trade slowdowns. But they expect a quick rebound in the second quarter that will help to make up for the downturn. Other economists, including those at Moody's Analytics, foresee more drastic fallout if widespread infections appear in other countries. A global recession "is likely" if the virus "becomes a pandemic, and the odds of that are uncomfortably high and rising with infections surging in Italy and Korea," Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist, wrote on Wednesday. Chang Tai Hsieh, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business who tracks Chinese economic data, said in an interview Thursday that the effects on American growth will be "huge" even in a best case scenario with the virus. Chinese business activity, he said, is running at about 20 percent of normal levels. "The economic consequences are, everything is down" in China, he said. "Everything is down tremendously." As forecasts worsen, investor expectations of a Fed cut are quickly increasing. As of Thursday, investors were betting on a March rate cut, a move that seemed highly unlikely as recently as a week ago. Many now expect two cuts by June, market pricing suggests. Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee sent a letter on Thursday to Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, asking for more information about whether an outbreak of the virus in the United States could cause a recession and what tools the central bank had to combat a supply shock to the economy. 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. Central bank policymakers said on Thursday that they were closely monitoring viral developments, though they did not yet signal a coming cut. "It really depends on: What are the medium term implications for the U.S. economy?" Loretta Mester, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said in an interview. "If people are temporarily staying home, not traveling, not interacting and purchasing things, that could be a short term hit. Or it could develop into something broader and that's the kind of calculus you have to do when you're thinking about monetary policy." But rate cuts may have a limited effect: They work by stimulating demand, which could help if consumers and investors get spooked and stop spending. But cuts will do little to restart factories and correct supply problems. "We'd absolutely expect to see a response from the Federal Reserve, not least to shore up confidence," said Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics, a research consultancy. But he pointed out that monetary policy worked on the economy with a six to nine month lag, and "it doesn't deal with the supply side impact of, say, one third of your work force catching this." The more critical response may come from Congress and the Trump administration, which have done little thus far to script a fiscal response. Perhaps the most important thing the government can do to insulate the economy is to stem the outbreak, keeping Americans on the job and spending. If that fails, though, fiscal responses are an option; Hong Kong and China, both hit hard, have rolled out packages to help bolster growth. Tax and spending policies might also encourage demand more than fixing supply, but they can also work more quickly than monetary policy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, on Thursday morning called for Congress and Mr. Trump to fashion a spending bill meant to "address the spread of the deadly coronavirus in a smart, strategic and serious way." A response should include interest free loans for "small businesses impacted by the outbreak." Such a program would represent targeted relief but not an effort to dramatically increase consumer demand in the economy. But such a plan seems far off, if not improbable. Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress have not opened talks with the White House or between the House and Senate over any possible package of tax cuts and spending increases that would be meant to stimulate the economy in the event of a virus related downturn. Top Senate aides said on Thursday that it was too soon for such conversations, with Mr. Trump's allies noting the persistence of low unemployment and continued economic growth. Michael Zona, a spokesman for the Senate Finance Committee and its chairman, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, said on Thursday that "at this point, the coronavirus has not had a broad impact on the U.S. economy, and its effects have been limited." But Mr. Zona said Mr. Grassley and the committee were "ready to consider appropriate tax relief responses if that becomes necessary and the extent of the problem can be determined." Mr. Trump's economic advisers had already been working on a package of tax cuts intended to serve as a centerpiece of his 2020 campaign. That package, which is still in flux and probably months away, could include new tax cuts for the middle class and for start up businesses, along with extensions of some expiring provisions of the 2017 tax cuts. Tax experts who have spoken with the administration do not see the effort as an immediate stimulus package, but more as an attempt to build on the 2017 law and offer voters a contrast between Mr. Trump and his Democratic opponent. On Thursday, the White House added Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, to the president's coronavirus task force. Both officials have been working on the tax plan. The Financial Banking and Information Infrastructure Committee, chartered under the president's Working Group on Financial Markets and chaired by Treasury, is in regular communication and is also monitoring the economic fallout from the virus. With Democrats controlling the House, there has been little expectation of major tax legislation before the November election. There was no sign on Thursday, from inside or outside the White House, that the coronavirus had changed that. "The bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill is that substantive tax policy is not happening before the lame duck" session after the election, said George Callas, the managing director at Steptoe Johnson LLP, who was tax counsel to former House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin. "I haven't seen that change in thinking happen yet." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The N.B.A. Is Coming Back. There Are 113 Pages of New Rules. None An anonymous tip line to report rules violations. Preapproved golf outings. Protocols for how to properly disinfect basketballs. Table tennis is allowed but singles, no doubles. The N.B.A. on Tuesday night detailed its elaborate plan for resuming play this summer by sending a 113 page handbook to team personnel, with a heavy emphasis on health and safety protocols as the league seeks to salvage its season amid the coronavirus pandemic. The season, which was suspended in March, is set to restart on July 30 at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex part of Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., where players and team personnel will be subject to stringent testing and remain largely isolated from the rest of the world through the playoffs. Still, the N.B.A.'s comeback attempt is both ambitious and fraught with potential hazards. Florida, which was among the first states to loosen its social distancing guidelines, has re emerged as a coronavirus hot spot. On Wednesday, the state reported 2,783 new cases, a record, as the seven day average continued to rise, according to The New York Times's coronavirus tracking database. Orange County, the home of Walt Disney World, has also had a recent increase in cases. The N.B.A.'s handbook, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, is exhaustive, itemizing the six phases of its restart, the first of which is underway: voluntary workouts as players make their way back to team training facilities. Beginning July 7, teams are scheduled to begin arriving on the Disney campus "on a staggered basis," according to the handbook. Once on site, players and team personnel must quarantine until they test negative for the coronavirus twice, at least 24 hours apart. Players, staff and anyone else inside the so called bubble will continue to be tested daily. The 113 page set of guidelines for N.B.A. players includes a phased schedule for life on the Disney campus. After that, teams will begin group activities a training camp of sorts. The N.B.A.'s elaborate ecosystem at Disney will also feature six tiers of personnel, starting with Tier 1: players, coaches, health and performance staff, equipment managers and referees. Those people will have access to the most restricted areas on campus, including locker rooms, practice and game courts, weight rooms and player lounges. Tier 2 will include team security, front office personnel, team communications staff, select members of the news media, player guests (once they are allowed on campus) and even some barbers and manicurists who are preapproved by the league. Personnel in the rest of the tiers everyone ranging from housekeepers and catering staff to team owners to members of the "broadcast compound" will not be permitted to have close contact with anyone from the first two tiers, as the league seeks to minimize risk. Failure to adhere to the protocols, according to the guide, can result in a warning, fine, suspension or dismissal from the campus. Guests of players are also liable to be kicked out for violating the protocols. Guidance for N.B.A. players on leisure activities includes not sharing video game headsets or golf equipment. The guidelines also say that players can be fined, suspended or removed from the campus if they break protocols. More From the N.B.A.'s Protocols None Commissioner Adam Silver had floated the idea of restricting which coaches could sit on the bench, particularly referring to coaches who are older and at higher risk of the symptoms from the coronavirus. He backed off that statement soon after. There appear to be no restrictions on who can travel to Orlando, unless the player or coach tests positive in the phases preceding the arrival or lives with someone who "recently had Covid 19 or symptoms associated with Covid 19." None All players and team staff must wear face masks at all times on campus. Well, sort of. If players are doing something that is not within six feet of someone else, masks are not required. The league lists examples like walking, swimming, "relaxing outside" and "watching a movie on an iPad." None Players will not be allowed to shower at any of the ESPN arenas or facilities. That means no postgame showers until players are back at their hotels. None Disney staff members who are not staying on campus will not undergo the league's testing regimen. Instead, they will be required by Disney to wear face coverings, as well as to maintain physical distancing. The league will aim to prevent Disney employees from being in contact with those involved with the N.B.A. restart, unless required. None The guide says, "No one will be stopped from leaving the campus," but that players and staff should not do so unless there are "extenuating circumstances." Among the places that players will be allowed to go: "Auxiliary sites either on or off Disney property that are secured by the N.B.A. for approved use by N.B.A. players or staff (e.g., a golf course)." None If a player does leave the campus without permission and tries to re enter, he will be quarantined for at least 10 days. None Players will not be allowed to spend time with one another in their hotel rooms. None No sharing towels, clothing or deodorant. And players will also be advised to stop fiddling so much with their mouth guards. None More from the hygiene department: The league wants players to cut down on all the high fives, fist bumps and hugs. And to maintain at least six feet of distance from one another, at least when they're not on the court. None The league says it will make socially distant recreational activities available for players. Per the handbook: "Such activities are expected to include the provision of a game room or player lounge at each hotel (e.g., Ping Pong, "NBA2K," pool, dominoes, etc.), golf, swimming, fishing, the potential for other water sports, movie screenings, concerts, running trails, bike rides and other excursions." None Since physical distancing is difficult while playing cards, the N.B.A. specifically says players must wear face masks if they choose to play, say, poker. They must throw away the deck of cards after the game has concluded. None No caddies on the golf course. None No sharing goggles or snorkels in the swimming pool. None There will be a bonus of sorts for teams that survive the first round of the playoffs: guests. Each team that advances into the conference semifinals will have the option of reserving up to 17 additional hotel rooms for invited guests, and those guests can be anyone spouses, children, friends, massage therapists provided they fulfill a litany of "participation requirements" that range from signing waivers to undergoing rigid testing protocols. They must also quarantine both before and after arriving on campus. None And then there is the tip line: The league says it will encourage anyone on campus to report violations of any of the protocols via an anonymous hotline. Players will also be allowed to report potential violations through their teams or the players' association. Violations, of course, are a big no no, which could lead to disciplinary action. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
SACRAMENTO Just before a committee of California state senators voted on a landmark bill to ramp up housing production by overriding local resistance, legislator after legislator talked about a dire affordable housing crisis that demanded bold action and a marked increase in new building. Then they killed the bill. The vote here on Tuesday evening highlighted the emergence of California's housing and homeless problem and the fraught question of how to address it as a potent election year issue that promises to dominate the state's politics for years. The ferocity of that debate was on display throughout a meeting of the State Senate's Transportation and Housing Committee, which met to vote on a divisive bill that would force local governments to accept higher density projects around transit centers like train stations. The bill, called S.B. 827, was introduced by Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, and would have allowed developers to build five story condominiums and apartment buildings near rail stops, even if local governments and zoning codes prohibited developments of that size. During the public comment period, supporters told of how housing costs were chasing businesses and the middle class out of the state. They said the bill would help stop the bleeding. Later, a long line of opponents portrayed the bill as a threat to neighborhoods and low income residents and at one point began chanting: "827, what do we say? Kill the bill, kill the bill." Despite the disagreement, there was a broad consensus among senators on the raised dais, among the constituents and lobbyists in the room that housing costs remain a central issue. The public reaction to the bill seemed to underscore that. Ever since Mr. Wiener introduced S.B. 827 on Jan. 3 the first day of the legislative session it has dominated the state's conversation about housing. The bill came up in political debates and candidate interviews, and cities across the state had votes on whether or not they supported it. Some of the fiercest opposition came from local governments arguing that the bill would strip them of land use decisions. The bill was also opposed by groups concerned about gentrification in neighborhoods already pummeled by rising rents. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "This bill will exacerbate an already perilous situation for tenants throughout the state," said Damien Goodmon, director of Housing Is a Human Right, a division of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Los Angeles. "We need to be talking about protective measures" like rent control. More than anything else, the bill showed the political challenges of building housing in places where people already live something California will almost certainly will have to do to make progress on this problem. In the 1950s and 1960s, California became the most populous state by constructing vast freeway and water systems that allowed developers to pave over farmland to build suburbs and house the swelling population. Today the biggest housing pressures are in the urbanized parts of the San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego metropolitan areas. And yet, despite broad agreement that the state will probably need to house more of its population in places where infrastructure has already been developed, there seems to be little consensus on how to go about that. Mr. Wiener's bill split a number of constituencies, largely over just how far to go in prodding localities to build more housing. Mr. Wiener pitched his bill as a way to combat climate change by fostering neighborhoods that allow more people to commute to work without car a goal that almost every conservation group supports. But the California chapter of the Sierra Club opposed the bill, while other groups, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, stood in favor of it. Likewise, while a host of tenants' rights and anti gentrification groups opposed the bill for fear it would displace lower income residents, a number of scholars wrote a letter of support, saying it would help undo decades of racial segregation brought on by restrictive zoning. Even with the committee action, the idea of state intervention in what has historically been a local problem is unlikely to go away. Mr. Wiener vowed to bring back the bill. So this may be remembered as the start of a long negotiation over how to make cities less hostile to new construction. In an interview earlier this year, Gavin Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor now running for governor, said that California was in "code red" for housing affordability and that he liked the "spirit" of Mr. Wiener's bill, but he would not support it as written. "I told him point blank, 'I would not sign this bill, but I love what you are doing. How can I help?'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Martha Graham, the modern dance matriarch, didn't make too many wildly funny pieces. But her little known ballet "Punch and the Judy," which told the story of a woman (danced by Graham) and her unfaithful husband (danced by Erick Hawkins), had audiences laughing in a good way at its 1941 premiere. "People don't think of Martha as being a comedian, but she evidently had amazing comedic timing," said Janet Eilber, the artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, whose Joyce Theater season opens on Feb. 14. On the first of two programs will be a new work by the choreographer Annie B Parson inspired by archival footage of "Punch," which was last performed in 1948. The new piece, "I used to love you," samples and reimagines the original, adding text by the playwright Will Eno, music by Tei Blow and video design by Jeff Larson. The dancers began by learning Graham's choreography so that Ms. Parson could take it apart. "It was like making a new song from a folk song," she said. The co director of Big Dance Theater, a troupe that often manipulates ancient texts and archival materials, Ms. Parson has also worked with musicians like St. Vincent and David Byrne. Favoring a kind of understatement that runs counter to Graham's dramatic sensibility, Ms. Parson may seem like an unusual choice for the Graham company. "It's not my family tree," she said of the Graham tradition. But her first collaboration with the group, in 2015, showed that they had something to offer each other. Over coffee recently, she discussed the process of "getting underneath" Graham's work. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation. I work with so many artists, and I have to try and intuit their sensibilities. Like with St. Vincent, she's very wintry and fragile but also kind of apocalyptic. I have to feel that in my body. Getting close to the work of someone who's not alive doesn't feel that different. With Graham, I thought, what if I could be in partnership, in some kind of seance with her, and understand who she is and what was she up to? I felt this incredible sadness coming from her. I don't think she's repressed; she's very expressive in her sadness, but I don't think she wants to be expositional or autobiographical or literal about it. She's using an old form it's really a 17th century form, the Punch and Judy puppet show to talk about something that she wants and isn't working. That said, I actually made a point of not learning what her biography was, so I could have space to imagine. How are the two of you different? She doesn't traffic in the mundane at all. We disagree there. In her work nobody just is. Everyone's larger than life. Also, I'm so interested in objects and have a very nonhierarchical relationship to objects and the body. Everything for me is material: the body, the microphone, the chair. She doesn't do that. She had an object in the piece, a big globe, and it meant the world, the universe. For her the globe was something valuable; for me it's a round thing in space that can roll. Do you feel an affinity for her, despite those differences? Like a kinship? Yes. I feel a lot of respect for her rigor. There's a lot of muscle in the work, and I don't mean in a pushy way. I mean she's very serious about what she makes. I also felt her womanness, her femininity, as very powerful. And then there's her movement invention, which is extreme. She invents like crazy superimaginative. How much of her movement did you keep? All of the material, except maybe 15 percent, is derived from her material. But it's been through so many iterations, it would be hard to say it's still hers. The seeds are hers, though. In the original piece, the husband has a fling with another woman. You changed it to a relationship between two men. The fling is very chaste, which was strange because from the little I've read about Graham, she was quite open about her sexual desires, pretty uncensored. It's hard to even tell it's a fling. I thought it would be exciting, within the canon of the Graham company, for them to have a male male duet that was sexual. I got a sense they hadn't done that in the past. And I wanted to have my own experience using that romantic model. I hadn't made something like that explicitly. Graham dancers generally don't talk onstage. How did you coach them in the speaking roles? I really treat them like dancers. I never ask them to act. I frame it in terms of what they know about already, like rhythm, tonality, timing, things like that. The original work was considered very funny in 1941. Did the video make you laugh? No. I found it very unfunny. For a while I was like, I have to figure out why this is funny. But I decided to let it go. Humor is rooted in time. Do you think yours is funny? Everybody was laughing when we showed it in December. But I didn't try to make it funny. I don't ever try to make anything funny. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"Uncut Gems," the latest from the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, blows in like a Category 4 hurricane. It's a tumult of sensory extremes, of images and sounds, lurching shapes, braying voices, intensities of feeling and calculated craziness. So, naturally it stars why not? Adam Sandler as a cheat, liar, loving dad, bad husband, jealous lover and compulsive gambler who can't stop, won't stop acting the fool. The Safdies, two of the more playfully inventive filmmakers working in American cinema, won't stop, either, which makes "Uncut Gems" fun if also wearying and at times annoying. It doesn't seem to add up to much a little man lives his life but this is just enough. It's easier to admire than to love, and I hate the ending, but the Safdies clearly like working your nerves. They're not interested in the dumb, easy stuff movies give you the likable, relatable characters, the sermonizing and moralizing; they're too busy deploying color and noise, pushing the form, testing their (and our) limits. Amid this enjoyable chaos, Sandler plays Howard Ratner, who has a small jewelry store in the Diamond District of Manhattan. He has a few employees, one of whom is his mistress (Julia Fox), and an aggrieved wife (Idina Menzel) who's fed up with him. He's a careless family man, but he dotes on his sons and still clocks in for homey obligations. There's a leisurely Passover Seder in the middle of the movie that's suffused with love and alive with squalling kids, bustling women and well padded men chewing cigars. But Howard has his plagues: He's a gambler and presumably an unlucky one given the heavy debt that he's carrying. Lots of stuff happens, lots and lots, and some of it can be hard to track. But the bedlam is intentional and amusing. All you need to do is latch onto Howard as he runs from here to there, yelling greetings, taking calls, making deals, always moving amid jump cuts, zooms and lurid close ups. (The superb cinematography is by Darius Khondji, shooting on 35 millimeter film.) Howard's dodging some toughs who work for a mystery man whom he owes big; the men are scary, bruisers with cruelty etched in their faces and no trace of the usual movie manicuring. One (Keith Williams Richards) punches Howard in the kisser, which is almost understandable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Getting on the New York City subway when it opened in 1904 cost only a nickel, but one of only two known examples of a first guide to the Interborough Rapid Transit system is on sale for 12,000. Starting Nov. 9, Martayan Lan Gallery in Manhattan will exhibit historical New York maps from as early as 1548, from Gastaldi's edition of Ptolemy's atlas what is described as "the earliest acquirable map" to focus on the East Coast of North America, including Bermuda. The most recent map in the show, Bollmann's bird's eye color lithograph of Midtown Manhattan, suggests the scale of the city's skyscrapers and dates to 1964. Some of the items in the exhibition are for sale, but not all. The 1904 subway map apparently was mailed to customers of Wanamaker's department store. Another map that will be displayed, from 1909, includes all of the city's subway and elevated train lines and major bridges and tunnels. The price: 25,000. Also exhibited will be an 1822 map published by John Rangel Jr., the city surveyor, who plotted the Manhattan grid imposed by the 1811 Commissioners' Plan (borrowed from a private collection) and a wall map from 1898 that is described as perhaps the earliest to depict the five boroughs consolidated into Greater New York. It's listed at 12,000. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
MILAN Proceedings kick off bright and early on Thursday with the 9:30 a.m. show by Max Mara, an Italian label long known for its steadiness, reliability and sartorial conservatism, which, as of late, has been trying to move beyond that reputation. From there, it is on to Costume National and then to Fendi at 12:30 p.m., where Karl Lagerfeld will, no doubt, offer up lashings of leather and fur for its latest fall extravaganza. After a quick pick me up espresso or three (the fashion week version of lunch), and a flurry of accessories appointments around town, it will be time for Emilio Pucci and a second collection from its Bright Young Thing designer, Massimo Giorgetti. Mr. Giorgetti, formerly of MSGM, made waves with his debut collection shown last fall, packing it with multicolored sequins, fluffy sandals and geek chic glasses while staying true to the brand's heritage think quirky modernist shapes and eye popping prints. Let's see what he comes up with next. Come 6 p.m., it is Prada's time to shine, and the pressure is mounting on one of the biggest luxury houses in Milan. The show comes weeks after the company reported a second year of flatline sales, hurt by a slowdown in China, a strong American dollar and the November terrorist attacks in Paris. Can Miuccia Prada pull it out of the bag? A prosecco pit stop is next at Pomellato, which calls itself the world's first pret a porter jewelry brand. It is hosting an interactive presentation at Bar Jamaica (perhaps there will be takeaway sparklers?). And the day ends with Jeremy Scott, fresh from showing his own collection this month in New York, as he unveils his latest flashy and unashamedly trashy offerings for Moschino at 8 p.m. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Last week, a 24 year old woman living in Arlington, Texas, filed a court declaration describing what she's gone through since the governor, Greg Abbott, used the coronavirus crisis as a pretext to essentially ban abortions. A college student studying to be a teacher, she'd lost her part time waitressing job at around the same time she found out she was pregnant. She knew without question that she wanted an abortion, but even before Abbott signed the executive order that temporarily outlawed the procedure in the state, she had a hard time finding a clinic that could see her. Eventually the woman, who opted to remain anonymous, was able to make an appointment in Fort Worth on March 20. Because of social distancing rules, she wasn't able to bring her partner. According to her declaration, after signing in she had to wait for two hours in her car, while protesters waved their signs and screamed at her. Once inside, she decided to have a medication abortion, but because of Texas's 24 hour waiting period, she couldn't get the pills that day. The next available appointment was on March 24. But before she could return, Abbott declared abortion a nonessential procedure that could not be performed during the coronavirus pandemic, ostensibly to save personal protective equipment needed by doctors and nurses. Frantic, the woman began calling clinics in nearby states. Eventually she was able to make an appointment in Denver, 780 miles away. She and her best friend packed food for the 12 hour drive and stayed in an Airbnb. She took the first pill in the clinic, then raced home to take the second medication the next day. "Obviously, had this pregnancy not been a factor, I wouldn't be traveling during a pandemic," she said in her declaration, part of a lawsuit against Abbott. While America's attention has been consumed by the coronavirus crisis, politicians who have long wanted to do away with abortion rights have seized their chance. Since the pandemic began, governors in several red states have tried to use it as an excuse to ban abortion, lumping pregnancy termination in with elective procedures like cataract surgery and joint replacements that need to be postponed to save precious medical equipment. Abortion, perhaps needless to say, can't simply be put off until this catastrophe is over, but as of this writing, a court has allowed the ban in Texas to go into effect. Authoritarians all over the world have exploited the coronavirus to scrap civil liberties. In Hungary, where democracy has been eroding for years, Viktor Orban used the pandemic to institute rule by decree. In Jordan and Thailand, leaders have used the pandemic as an excuse for cracking down on the press. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his allies have frozen the Knesset and shut down most courts, postponing Netanyahu's own arraignment on corruption charges. American autocrats are no less opportunist. With the country in a panic, they saw an opening to suspend the guarantees of Roe v. Wade, at least for the moment, and they took it. As in the days before Roe, some will now likely turn to D.I.Y. abortion methods. Even before the coronavirus, women in Texas, where strict abortion laws have led to widespread clinic closures, had relatively high rates of attempted self abortion. A January study by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Texas at Austin found that 6.9 percent of women seeking abortions at clinics first tried to end their pregnancies on their own, compared to 2.2 percent nationally. Dr. Bhavik Kumar of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in Houston told me that since the governor's executive order has forced him to turn away women seeking abortions, some have asked if there's anything they can use to terminate their pregnancies themselves. They want to know, he said, about "herbs or vitamins or things that they've researched online. They are desperate to not be pregnant anymore." Others get on the road. "Texas is a restrictive state, so we've always seen patients from Texas, but the number of patients we've seen has dramatically increased," Dr. Shelley Sella, who performs abortions in Albuquerque, N.M., told me. For the first time, she said, her clinic is being flooded with women seeking medication abortions, which used to be available in Texas. "We would see women maybe who lived on the border between Texas and New Mexico, but now we're seeing patients from Houston, driving from Houston for a medication abortion," she said. "So they're driving 13 hours for a pill." That would be traumatic at the best of times, and these are far from the best of times. Governors argue that they're banning abortion to conserve resources for the pandemic, but they're ensuring that more people expose themselves to the coronavirus. The 24 year old woman who filed the court declaration brought her own sanitizing supplies with her, which she used to wipe down the Airbnb where she stayed, but there's no way to take a long road trip without using public bathrooms and encountering multiple strangers. "I feel like Texas put me, and my best friend, in danger," she said. Despots love to pretend they're rolling back rights to save lives. Don't believe them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The wintertime Liam Neeson sad dad action thriller for 2019, "Cold Pursuit," is just like most of the previous specimens and also completely different. This time, instead of rescuing a daughter, as he did in "Taken" the bellwether of this beloved or at least unavoidable subgenre Neeson is avenging a son. His character, Nels Coxman, is not a globe trotting assassin with a highly specialized set of skills, but rather a humble Colorado snowplow driver. For an amateur, Nels is awfully good at killing, and he takes to it with a grim determination that could easily be mistaken for enthusiasm. Neeson's recent revelation, in a newspaper interview, that he once came close to acting out his own racist revenge fantasies might spoil some of the fun. For his part, the director, Hans Petter Moland, is clearly having a blast. Why else would he have bothered to remake his film "In Order of Disappearance," (2016) in which Stellan Skarsgard played a Norwegian snowplow driver named Nils Dickman? (The screenwriter on this version is Frank Baldwin.) Nels's methodical, bloody extraction of payback is, as usual in this kind of story, righteous, sadistic and wildly disproportionate. On top of the bodies he dispatches himself, there are dozens of casualties in a war he unwittingly sparks between rival gangs of drug dealers. After members of one of these outfits inject Nels's son, Kyle (Micheal Richardson, Neeson's oldest son), with a fatal overdose of heroin, Nels works his way up the org chart, picking off guys with colorful underworld nicknames like Limbo and Shiv. At the top of the odious heap is Viking (Tom Bateman), a smug and vicious helicopter parent who forces his young son to drink green smoothies instead of the sugary cereals that are every American child's birthright. Viking is a perfect ideological Rorschach blot of a villain: You could read him either as a preening liberal elitist or as a coldblooded Ayn Rand techno capitalist, depending on what you hate most. Or maybe you think that's a distinction without a difference. Whatever works. The mano a mano mad dad duel between Nels and Viking spiced with hints of class and generational conflict gets complicated when a third angry father is added to the mix. That would be White Bull (Tom Jackson), head of a Native American crime family. A truce between his people and Viking's falls apart when Viking assumes that White Bull's people, rather than Nels, has been killing off his minions. White Bull goes after Viking's kid, and a patriarchal free for all ensues. Pity the minions. Moland pursues the mayhem with a degree of lowdown wit and a troll's eye on the potential sensitivities of the audience. Each time a man dies, he is memorialized with a tasteful death notice on a black screen, with his real name as well as his underworld alias, and a glyph suggesting which maker he has been sent off to meet. There are a lot of crucifixes and totemic eagles, with an occasional Star of David, Om sign and peace symbol thrown in for good measure. It's like one of those "Coexist" bumper stickers, and also kind of the opposite. This is the part of the review in which I note that "Cold Pursuit" traffics in a bunch of dubious stereotypes and some questionable sexual politics. This will make some of you mad at the movie, some at me. White Bull's band of Indians who were Serbs in the Norwegian original and would be Mexican or Colombian in most Hollywood exercises of this kind are half noble, half comical savages, mocked and honored in turn, as they were in the old westerns. Just for fun, Nels has a brother, Brock (William Forsythe), whose gold digging Asian wife (Elizabeth Thai), a former massage parlor worker, is basically a walking ethnic joke. The other women in the movie fare only slightly better, except for Laura Dern, who plays Nels's wife and gets out as quickly as she can. Emmy Rossum as a ski town cop is supposed to remind us of Frances McDormand in "Fargo," but bases her successful police work on the sexual manipulation of some poor sap in Denver. She is encouraged in this by her patrol partner (John Doman), who otherwise embodies what happens to a white man when he gives in to the imperatives of political correctness. Perhaps you think the same about me. I don't really care. And please don't get me wrong. I'm not accusing "Cold Pursuit" of being casually sexist or accidentally racist. On the contrary: Its misogyny and racism strike me as perfectly deliberate, if also mostly disingenuous. That is, the movie works very hard to provoke a reaction like the one in the previous two paragraphs to justify the inevitable counter reaction. Why make everything political? Lighten up, snowflake! It's just a movie. And enjoying it can feel like an act of rebellion. Which I totally get. I have kids and grievances of my own and blah blah blah. I can't deny that the glum, resentful, not giving a damn masculine vibe of "Cold Pursuit" has its appeal, as does Moland's blunt knack for efficient screen violence. As for the star, Neeson has whittled his winter persona down to a haggard nub of weary anger, purging any inkling of gentleness, melancholy or self awareness. The deadpan extremity of his performance is almost funny, except that in light of what we know now about Neeson's past, it's not funny at all. The thirst for revenge, in movies as in life, almost necessarily involves the dehumanization of its target. And if the movie itself is best taken as a joke, it's a very bad dad joke. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Landmark shows of 19th century French painting kick off an exciting season jammed with once in a lifetime opportunities: The Met's completist retrospective of Eugene Delacroix, complemented by a significant show of his drawings, brings tigers, shipwrecks and a host of romantic vistas to the Upper East Side, while the National Gallery in Washington is offering an unusually large assemblage of women painted by Corot. (And if you need more time in the Second Empire, consider flying to Los Angeles for the dense and dreamy drawings of the novelist Victor Hugo.) There are a number of important retrospectives of female artists, most notably Ruth Asawa at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis; an abundance of fascinating photography shows, from Gordon Parks's intensely sensitive early portraits to the New York and Parisian street views of Louis Stettner and Brassai; and relics from Armenia and ancient Mexico. The court of Catherine de' Medici will also visit North America for the very first time. (Exhibition opening and closing dates are subject to change.) Read more listings for classical music, dance, film, pop music, television and theater. Add events directly to your calendar. PONTORMO: MIRACULOUS ENCOUNTERS Recently restored and leaving Tuscany for the first time, Jacopo da Pontormo's 1520s "Visitation" altarpiece is an unnervingly sophisticated composition in which the Virgin Mary and three other women form a complex overlap of shadow and light. Sept. 7 Jan. 6, Morgan Library Museum, themorgan.org. JAMES WEBB: PRAYER This South African artist has gone around the world, installing speakers in each city he visits that concurrently broadcast prayers from its variety of religious traditions. The 10th and largest iteration of his project, in Chicago, is also its first appearance in North America. Sept. 7 Dec. 31, Art Institute of Chicago, artic.edu. COROT: WOMEN Muses, goddesses, book lovers and nudes, 44 in all, with luminous presence and glowing, painterly flesh, by the 19th century French master of landscape Jean Baptiste Camille Corot. Sept. 9 Dec. 31, National Gallery of Art, Washington, nga.gov. THE BIRMINGHAM PROJECT Four portrait diptychs and a single channel video, recently acquired by the gallery, from the photographer Dawoud Bey's rigorously specific meditation on the deadly 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Sept. 12 March 17, National Gallery of Art, Washington, nga.gov. DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS: COMMUNITY AND PLACE IN URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY Ten photographers who immersed themselves in the communities they covered. Sept. 13 Jan. 6, El Museo del Barrio, elmuseo.org. LILIANA PORTER: OTHER SITUATIONS A nonlinear retrospective of this thoughtful Argentine born artist's work will include a specially commissioned theatrical piece debuting at the Kitchen. Sept. 13 Jan. 27, El Museo del Barrio, elmuseo.org. STERLING RUBY: CERAMICS Fall programs at the Museum of Arts and Design will try to redefine the future of craft. This roundup of work by a Los Angeles artist focuses on his heavily glazed, nightmarishly shaped, exactingly rough basins and containers of clay, made by hand and by machine. Oct. 3 March 17, Museum of Arts and Design, madmuseum.org. ART OF NATIVE AMERICA: THE CHARLES AND VALERIE DIKER COLLECTION This exhibition of more than 100 works, spanning two millenniums and from more than 50 cultural traditions, is the first ever show of indigenous art in the museum's 90 year old American wing. Oct. 4, 2018 Oct. 6, 2019, Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org. COMMON THREADS: WEAVING STORIES ACROSS TIME Elaine Reichek, William Kentridge, El Anatsui and other contemporary artists, working more or less strictly in tapestries and textiles. Oct. 4 Jan. 14, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, gardnermuseum.org. FRANZ MARC AND AUGUST MACKE: 1909 1914 The German Expressionist painters Marc and Macke showed together for the first time in the Blaue Reiter group's inaugural exhibition of 1911. They broke their pictures into similar shards of vibrant color, moved in parallel toward proto abstraction and were both killed in combat in World War I. But while Marc's visionary animals are well known, this is Macke's first appearance in an American museum. Organized with the Musee d'Orsay and with the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris, where it will travel next year. Oct. 4 Jan. 21, Neue Galerie, neuegalerie.org. FRIEZE LONDON Leading up to, and overlapping with, this elegant, overwhelming and essential fair this year is the second iteration of Frieze Sculpture, an installation of pieces by 25 international sculptors in Regent's Park. Oct. 4 7, Regent's Park, London, frieze.com. HARRY POTTER: A HISTORY OF MAGIC Buy your tickets early for this expanded historical inquiry into all things Boy Wizard, which flies into town from the British Library. Illustrations and ephemera from the archives of J. K. Rowling and her publisher, Scholastic, will be supplemented with medieval drawings and literature on dragons and alchemy some of it exclusive to the show's New York appearance. Oct. 5 Jan. 27, New York Historical Society, nyhistory.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In the early hours of Thanksgiving Day in 2010, all the music at OnSmash.com, a popular hip hop blog, disappeared. In place of its usual feed of videos, song links and industry gossip, the site displayed a seizure notice from the federal government, a result of a raid of dozens of websites suspected of trafficking in counterfeit goods and pirated content. The site stayed that way for nearly five years. But a few weeks ago, after lobbying the government for its return and paying a 7 fee, Kevin Hofman a rank and file record label employee who ran OnSmash, first as a hobby and later as a full time job finally got it back, with little explanation and without ever being formally charged with any wrongdoing. What happened was just one confusing chapter in the long history of conflict between the entertainment industry and the Internet. At its peak, OnSmash was part of a network of blogs on the leading edge of online music promotion, stirring up fans with fresh material that, Mr. Hofman said, was more often than not supplied directly by artists and record labels hungry for the exposure. The site's popularity and influence earned it laudatory notice in Vibe magazine and approval from rap stars like Kanye West and Rick Ross. "There was never a plan to undermine the music business," Mr. Hofman, 40, said in a recent interview at a diner in Midtown Manhattan. "The music business was something that I was always either an employee of or actively trying to support. That's why the whole seizure was so devastating to me." The government contended that OnSmash and a handful of other sites were circulating unauthorized material at the expense of the major record labels. An affidavit by a federal agent, released as part of a seizure warrant for the site's web domains, specified numerous "pirated" songs found on the sites. As part of the investigation, the agent had confirmed with the Recording Industry Association of America, the labels' trade group, that the songs were used without permission. Yet that characterization was quickly disputed, and the takedowns handled by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit of the Department of Homeland Security became the focus of a wider debate over the policing of the Internet. The seizures, which also claimed the hip hop sites Dajaz1.com and RapGodFathers.com, came shortly after the music industry abandoned its unpopular strategy of suing individual listeners over piracy, which remains a concern in the industry over the effect on sales. Soon came the large scale lobbying wars over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect I.P. Act two failed bills in Congress that pitted Hollywood against Silicon Valley as well as the continuing prosecution of Kim Dotcom and the file sharing site Megaupload. "The Internet is still locked in a battle royal with Hollywood and its allies," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that is supported by technology companies and often squares off against the entertainment business over copyright issues. In the face of all this, the fate of a handful of music blogs largely faded into the background. But for Mr. Hofman and others, the episode has had lasting consequences. After OnSmash was seized, Mr. Hofman started FreeOnSmash.com as a replacement, but its traffic and advertising revenue were a fraction of what he had once had. Even worse, Mr. Hofman said, was the "black cloud" of suspicion that surrounded him in the industry. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. "When I went to album release parties," he said, "people looked at me like they had seen a ghost." Corporate sponsorship of live events, once an important part of the site's business, also dried up, he added. Suing for the return of OnSmash would have been expensive and risky, so Mr. Hofman pursued an "offer in compromise" with the government submitting a petition for the site's return, and paying what the government determined to be its appraised value: 7. In March 2012, Craig Trainor, Mr. Hofman's lawyer, submitted a 66 page memorandum of law outlining their case. Rather than a rogue site that hurt music labels, Mr. Trainor argued, OnSmash was "an indispensable forum for hip hop fans, a marketing vehicle for record labels and artists, and a generator of protected speech." He also noted that Dajaz1.com had been returned to its owner after about a year. The OnSmash case dragged on for another three and a half years until October, when with a five year statute of limitations on the seizure looming the government notified Mr. Trainor that OnSmash would be returned. Paperwork with his web host took another month or so, Mr. Hofman said, and he finally got the site back in November. When asked about the return of OnSmash and another site, Torrent Finder.com, which was seized in the 2010 raid and also returned to its operator this fall, Matthew Bourke, a spokesman for the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that after working with the Justice Department, "it was determined there was not enough evidence to seize the websites." Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the recording industry association, said he welcomed the return of the sites, as long as they played by the rules. "If the managers of some of these sites now seek to have the domain name returned because they wish to become legitimate operators, that's a success," he said. In recent months, the music industry has successfully shut down unlicensed sites like Aurous, Sharebeast and RockDizMusic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The North Atlantic right whale is already one of the most endangered creatures on earth, and all indications are its situation is rapidly getting worse. At last count, the entire population was estimated to include just 458 animals, and at least 17 of them died last year. Now, researchers tracking the right whale's normal calving grounds, from Georgia to Florida, said they have seen no signs of newborns yet this year, at a time when mothers would normally be birthing and nursing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that at least 411 calves were born from 1990 to 2014, an average of about 17 a year. But only five were born in 2017, and if there really are no newborns this year, that would be "unprecedented," said Charles "Stormy" Mayo, director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Mass. "I think we're in a helluva pickle," he said. It's possible, Dr. Mayo said, that the animals have simply moved elsewhere to give birth, and that at least a few new calves will be found later in the season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A dance that seeks to represent the experience of sleeping that sounds like a risky prospect, tempting viewers' eyelids to droop in a darkened theater. But Saburo Teshigawara's "Sleeping Water" isn't a snooze. Neither, though, is it a consistently absorbing dream. It's more like a restless night, in which stretches of lulling sameness are fitfully interrupted, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. Near the start of this 70 minute work, which had its North American premiere at the Rose Theater on Thursday as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, that troubled sleep dynamic is staged. For long stretches, prone dancers appear to be dozing in silence, their heads or torsos popping up periodically as something wakes them. Yet the preceding scene is more typical. To the sound of water flowing, Mr. Teshigawara, a Japanese choreographer who has appeared at the festival twice before, slowly drifts across the stage, his tendril arms floating like seaweed. His highly articulate movement style, buoyant with breath, can make the air around him seem denser, almost liquid. This style is shared by the six dancer ensemble, which includes Aurelie Dupont, the director of dance for the Paris Opera Ballet. (Mixed in with the others from Mr. Teshigawara's company, Karas, she nevertheless stands out for her stage presence and greater gravity.) It is a style that may speed up, so that arms scythe through space in spirals, and unspooling light trails through persistence of vision. And it may decelerate, so that it resembles slow motion mime. But it almost never stops. Mr. Teshigawara is a calligrapher whose brush rarely leaves the paper. His arms can't help but ripple. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
To hear Pete Davidson tell it, the worst thing his ex fiancee Ariana Grande might have done to him was tell the world he has a big penis. Now every woman who sees him naked, he says in his new stand up special, will be disappointed. In "Alive From New York," Davidson, 26, corrects the record ("she just has very little hands") in a debut that feels like a late career effort, the kind tossed together quickly to satisfy the terms of an ill advised contract. And yet, it does provide some clues to a long running mystery that has taken on new urgency: How in the world did Pete Davidson get so famous? Dating other famous people, a cynic might say, but there was buzz surrounding this lanky comic even before he became one of the youngest cast members in the history of "Saturday Night Live," and then a regular player in the daily soap opera of online media. And his stratospheric rise has put him on the verge of a breakthrough with starring roles in two major movies in the next few months, "Big Time Adolescence" and "The King of Staten Island." When I first saw him perform a couple of times in 2014, he seemed unusually poised for a 20 year old, but his jokes were sloppy and rambling. He seemed to be having a better time than the audience. His style hasn't evolved much, but his public persona has. And he is savvy enough to exploit that in his special, which, in responding to various public brouhahas (joke controversies, backstage gossip), provides plenty of fodder for tabloid news. Swallowed up in a suit, Davidson is relatively static in his special, which was released Tuesday on Netflix. But his voice is nimble, a deep outer borough croak that is a register or two away from demonic, before bursting into a girlish giggle. Such incongruities mark his man child persona. Swagger alternates with sensitivity. An indifferent stare periodically turns into a gaping grin. Like the biggest stars, he's fun to look at. But you can't do it for long without worrying a little. He projects a "Glass Menagerie" fragility, onstage and off. In the only interview he did to promote this special, he said he's ready to leave "Saturday Night Live" and criticized the show in a way cast members rarely do. He talked about getting tattoos to hide the scars on his chest from cutting himself, and how he's so insecure about his looks that he keeps no mirrors in his house, which he shares with his mother. At a recent show at Caroline's, he twitchily joked about rehab and suicidal tendencies. Davidson has a peculiar gift for a stand up: He makes you want to take care of him. In one of Conan O'Brien's recent podcasts, the question of Davidson's appeal came up, and Judd Apatow, who directed "The King of Staten Island," said that on top of his charisma, he's representative of a generation wracked by anxiety. At the risk of generalizing, the mood of young, straight white male comics does seem to have shifted of late, the old self deprecation morphed into something darker, even melancholy. In their recent specials, Bo Burnham and Drew Michael have moments of real sadness, talking about the loneliness of performance and the pain of relationships. In "Alive From New York," Davidson discusses the death of a parent his father was a firefighter who died at ground zero on Sept. 11 but his comedy special isn't even the only one to do that in the past week. Whitmer Thomas, another gaunt comic, whose "The Golden One" premiered on HBO over the weekend, embraces many of the trendiest features of modern comedy: using documentary to flesh out jokes, alternating punch lines with songs and fully embracing personal tragedy as a subject of comedy. When he was young, Thomas, 30, sang in an emo band, and his moodiness makes it seem that he never really left the genre. If there's such a thing as emo comedy, this is it. Thomas, an Alabama native based in Los Angeles, cuts a glamorous, haunted figure, with pale skin and the tousled hair of Timothee Chalamet caught in a wind tunnel. He turns estrangement from his father and being kidnapped as a child into dark comedy. But his central story is about the early death of his mother, a singer, and the way he grapples with this loss through returning to the club where she performed in the house band. What really distinguishes Thomas is his commitment to incorporating sad music into funny jokes. It's not a novelty, and the satire is embedded in the lyrics, but the manner of performance is deeply sincere. When he sings that he just wants to be "dumb and in love," you believe it. His most lacerating wit is directed at himself. "My identity is my mother died," he moans in an early song, before adding knowingly: "Anything to distract from being straight and white." There's a cynicism here that sits right beside the earnestness, a carefully curated vulnerability. Davidson isn't as skilled of an entertainer, but he's better at performing this trick. Thomas is charismatic, too, but he isn't slick enough to realize the advantages of coming off sloppy. Young comics always have and always will talk about sex, but in the MeToo era, a political context is more likely to inform such material. Whereas some older male comics have defended Louis C.K., Thomas and Davidson notably go in the opposite direction. Davidson has a whole story about how Louis C.K. tried to get him fired from "S.N.L." when he was just starting out, and Thomas, without naming Louis C.K., says he hopes comics like him go to hell. When Thomas performed at the Bell House in Brooklyn earlier this month, he danced around the stage with the flair of an emerging rock star. But he's a cautious, modest one, making his songs not just about sex and romance, but performance anxiety and the solitary life. Both of these comics finish their shows by paying homage to their late parents. Davidson describes interviewing his father's friends to get to know him better and discovering he did cocaine. "I knew he was a hero," he said in one of his crispest setups. "But I didn't know he was a superhero." And Thomas movingly sings his mother's best known song, "He's Hot," along with her sister and former bandmate, giving it the television exposure it never received. Both of them make their parents out to be more fun and carefree than they are themselves. It's an odd tribute for comedians to make, and who knows whether it's actually the case, but it does have the ring of truth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
What differentiates the work in "New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty First Century" from much of the art elsewhere at the Museum of Modern Art is that the objects here are made with technologies most of us already know and love (or hate). Flat screens, computer interfaces, video games, digital animation, 3D printing and photography are transformed here into sprawling installations, canny video art or interactive sculptures. The work in "New Order" is drawn entirely from MoMA's collection and organized by Michelle Kuo, who became a curator at the museum last year after serving as editor in chief at Artforum magazine for seven years. The exhibition is meant to demonstrate how much of the technology we think of as invisible waves, wireless or abstract code is still rooted in physical objects. And the artists, with varying success, are intent on showing us technology's blind spots and limitations, while opening up new possibilities for its use. Much of the art here draws a line in the sand between technology's use in design and gadgetry. Some of the more compelling works consider how, for example, technology augments the human body, promising better health, longevity or happiness but rarely delivering on the promise. Josh Kline's "Skittles" (2014), a large commercial refrigerator at the entrance, is stocked with smoothies in invitingly minimalist packaging. Approaching the refrigerator, however, you see the ingredients listed and they include indigestible components like chopped up credit cards, magazines and sneakers, or a toxic cocktail mixing cold medicine, energy drinks, pain relievers and psychiatric medications. Around the corner, you can jump on two exercise machines and activate Sondra Perry's workstation videos that show her avatar, as well as digital images of J.M.W. Turner's "The Slave Ship" (1840). The juxtaposition injects a discussion of the black body in the African diaspora that's often missing in many technology forums. Beyond that is Jacolby Satterwhite's neo psychedelic, gay and sex positive animation featuring candy colored bodies dancing and morphing into other beings, as well as Anicka Yi's somewhat less successful series of vitrines with nickel plated pins rusting in a bath of ultrasonic gel, simulating human blood. (Ms. Yi's videos, not on view here, engage more effectively than her sculptures with biotechnology and its effect on all species.) Two of the most significant works, for me, were made a dozen years apart, during a time when imaging technologies developed at breathtaking speed. Harun Farocki's "Eye/Machine I" (2001), a now classic two channel video, ultimately considers what will happen when war is waged by "intelligent" machines that read images and make decisions. Tabor Robak's "Xenix" (2013) is a slick and seductive seven channel work that looks like a blown up version of your smartphone or desktop and displays such comically banal details as the weather and the contents of a refrigerator. It also shows GPS images and weapons, reminding you of how some technologies in our everyday lives developed out of military systems and the many ways people sacrifice their privacy to join social media or use a Google map. Where Mr. Farocki's work pairs images in a thoughtful, more meditative way, Mr. Robak's reflects the full force scramble for our attention underway every time we glance at the internet or pick up a device. Rather than optimism or celebration, "New Order" ripples with the menacing effects and potential pitfalls of new technology, but it could use a larger dose of global thinking. It could have exhibited a greater connection between technology and the physical world with a bevy of recent films and artworks, seen elsewhere, that have highlighted the detrimental effects of manufacturing and electronic waste on the environment. For instance, films about dumping e waste in Africa has become a genre in itself. As opposed to representing work focused mostly on gadgetry and design, with body enhancing products, from pharmacology to smoothies, a show about technology and the physical world might also acknowledge the end result of technology related manufacturing and pollution and their global effect on all of us. New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty First Century Through June 15 (June 16 for members) at 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212 708 9400, moma.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN (2020) Stream on Disney Plus. In this new movie, Sam Rockwell voices a large primate with an artistic eye. The film follows Ivan (Rockwell), a gorilla who performs as part of a mall circus and has an offstage passion for painting. Other members of the circus include an elephant voiced by Angelina Jolie, a poodle voiced by Helen Mirren, a pooch voiced by Danny DeVito and a rabbit voiced by the comedian Ron Funches. They perform under the ringmaster Mack (Bryan Cranston), who eventually decides to capitalize on Ivan's painting prowess. The movie is based on the children's book of the same name, which was inspired by a true story. Disney's adaptation, Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The New York Times, will feel familiar even to those who haven't read the book. "A blend of live action, computer animation and well integrated motion capture effects (though the occasional boredom of the plot may inspire you to look for the seams), 'The One and Only Ivan,' streaming on Disney and directed by Thea Sharrock, brings a fair amount of heart to a generic story line," he wrote. RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE: VEGAS REVUE 8 p.m. on VH1. "It's 'viva yasss Vegas,'" a narrator promises during a trailer for this RuPaul spinoff. In other words: It's an opportunity to see the splendor of "RuPaul's Drag Race" get a shot of Las Vegas opulence. A six episode series, "Vegas Revue" tags along with six drag queens Yvie Oddly, Asia O'Hara, Derrick Barry, Kameron Michaels, Naomi Smalls and Vanessa Vanjie Mateo onstage and off during a Vegas residency. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
They Thought They Qualified for Student Loan Forgiveness. Years Later, the Government Changes Its Mind. Hundreds of thousands of people with piles of federal student loan debt had not been too concerned because they were counting on a federal government program that would forgive those loans if they worked at least 10 years in a public service job. But what happens if the definition of "public service" seemed to change midway through that decade? On Tuesday, the American Bar Association and four lawyers who thought they qualified filed suit against the Department of Education trying to answer that question. The department had informed several of them that their jobs would make them eligible for loan forgiveness, but they later received letters saying that the ruling had changed. All four, according to the legal brief, might have picked different jobs, borrowed less or entered different repayment plans had they known the rules would change. The public service loan forgiveness program began in 2007, and is available, according to the explanation on the program's website, to employees of governmental organizations, 501(c)(3) nonprofit groups and other groups who hold "qualifying" public service jobs. Once employed, borrowers must work full time in a public service job or jobs and keep up their 120 monthly payments over 10 years. No loans have been forgiven yet, because 10 years have not passed since the first borrowers entered the program. The suit, filed in United States District Court for the District of Columbia, says some borrowers received approval on their certification forms, then, years later, the entity servicing their loans reversed course, effectively ousting them from the program. It did so retroactively, meaning that none of the previous loan payments counted toward the 120 payments needed to qualify for forgiveness. So if the borrowers took a job that qualified, they would have to start again with accumulating the payments. The financial consequences are potentially steep, because some of the borrowers were in plans where the monthly payment depended on their income. The payments were sometimes low enough, as a result of their low salaries, that their balances actually increased each month. An increasing balance would not matter if the entire amount due would vanish after a decade, though other forgiveness programs may waive the debt after 20 to 25 total years in repayment. The amount of forgiven debt at that point may count as taxable income, whereas public service loan forgiveness debt does not. One of the four plaintiffs works for the American Bar Association and another one once did. The third plaintiff's dispute involves his work for the Vietnam Veterans of America, while the fourth works for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Kelly Leon, assistant press secretary at the Department of Education, said it was "committed to implementing the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program in accordance with the final regulations as prescribed by statute." No one there would comment on why, once the department realized its own errors in implementation, it was punishing borrowers by making its rulings retroactive. Kate Voigt, the plaintiff who works for the immigration association (which is not a party to the suit), faulted the department for not being proactive. It had told her in an email that her job was eligible before it changed its policy two years later. In December 2014, Ms. Voigt received a letter from Jeff Baker, an Education Department director, which said that the public education services that she provides did not make her eligible for forgiveness unless she had been educating students and families. "We regret any confusion that may have been caused by our earlier opinion," the letter added. "They had to have seen this coming, that the statute wasn't straightforward and people would need some sort of guidance," Ms. Voigt said. "The fact that they haven't provided any is shocking to me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Marco Antonio Rodriguez, left, is the writer/director of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which stars Edgar Sebastian Martinez as the title character and Maite Bonilla as his mother. Presenting a version of Junot Diaz's prizewinning novel, Repertorio Espanol is also showing off a confident cohort of Latino actors. Transforming into a superhero usually requires a radioactive insect bite, surviving deadly exposure to gamma rays, or being lucky enough to be born into a species with extraordinary powers. If you happen to be onstage, however, all you need is a sound cue. "Tack a tack a tack a tack a tack a," went the director Marco Antonio Rodriguez. He was sitting in the third row at Repertorio Espanol during an afternoon rehearsal of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," based on Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which Rodriguez has adapted for the theater. On the stage was 22 year old Edgar Sebastian Martinez, who plays the title character, a comic book obsessed Dominican American teenager whose shyness and body issues prevent him from flirting with women. As Rodriguez repeated his manga inspired theme music, Martinez flexed his biceps. In this universe, time had stopped, as everyday objects took on the weight and texture of elements out of the nerdiest sci fi. In the novel, Oscar is so insecure that his story is told by an unknown narrator whose identity is revealed in the last pages. Rodriguez knew that onstage he needed the world to feel active. "We've seen the narrator business before hello, 'The Glass Menagerie,'" he said playfully. For Rodriguez, the show, which began performances this month, became about how Oscar "changes everyone around him through his openness." Martinez, who sat near Rodriguez during a rehearsal break, described himself as much more self aware and confident than Oscar. Having trained at the Stella Adler Studio, where he portrayed the Gentleman Caller in "Menagerie," among other characters traditionally cast as white, Martinez is part of a new generation that is t rying to erase the color barrier. "People don't put me in a box," he said. Behind him sat Maite Bonilla, the 44 year old actress who plays Oscar's mother, her eyes and smile widening as she listened to her stage son talk about representation. "Senior actors have done really good work in the field so you can feel that way," she pointed out. Although she always dreamed of taking on the title role of "Yerma," Bonilla believed she would never be considered for the part . Going to auditions in her 20s she noticed how she was always the darkest skinned person in the room, even if the role being cast was a Latina. "I've had to prove myself," she said, "and I've done it with my talent." She was always set to play Oscar's mom in the seven member cast, with Rodriguez being a fan of her work. But the search for her son proved harder. "We needed to find an Afro Latino, who could act and was fluent in Spanish," explained the director. Unlike the search for Dorothy in the film adaptation of "The Wizard of Oz," which legend has it had MGM casting directors seeing thousands of aspirants, the search for Oscar Wao came down to a handful of young men who fulfilled the cultural checklist. Bonilla and Martinez bonded over noodles in Washington Heights, where they both live. Last year, the neighborhood was officially designated "Little Dominican Republic," and the pair share their cultural heritage and their pride as Afro Latinos. They both celebrated when Jharrel Jerome became the first Afro Latino to win an Emmy for "When They See Us," though Martinez had regrets, too: "I wanted to be the first one," he said. "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is the first time both actors have played parts specifically written for Dominican characters. The theater owns the rights to the "Oscar Wao" script, in English and Spanish, for productions in New York City, but hopes it can present the play elsewhere too. (The novel was also adapted in 2011 as a one person show by the American Place Theater .) "Plays become their own entity," explained Rodriguez, keeping with Oscar's wondrous vision of the world. "They become their own energy, and do their own thing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Known: Cancer Is Really, Really Old. The Unknown: How Common It Was. Carcinogens abounded 1.7 million years ago in Early Pleistocene times when a nameless protohuman wandered the South African countryside in what came to be known as the Cradle of Humankind. Then, as now, ultraviolet radiation poured from the sun, and radon seeped from granite in the ground. Viruses like ones circulating today scrambled DNA. And there were the body's own carcinogens, hormones that switch on at certain times of life, accelerating the multiplication of cells and increasing the likelihood of mutations. That, rather than some external poison, was probably the cause of a bone tumor diagnosed as an osteosarcoma found fossilized in Swartkrans Cave, a paleoanthropological trove northwest of Johannesburg. A paper in the current South African Journal of Science describes the discovery, concluding that it is the oldest known case of cancer in an early human ancestor. "The expression of malignant osteosarcoma," the authors wrote, "indicates that whilst the upsurge in malignancy incidence is correlated with modern lifestyles, there is no reason to suspect that primary bone tumours would have been any less frequent in ancient specimens." Perhaps the main reason there is more cancer today is that people live much longer, leaving more time for dividing cells to accumulate genetic mistakes. Osteosarcoma, however, occurs most frequently in younger people, as their limbs undergo adolescent spurts of growth. That and the fact that bones outlast softer organs make osteosarcoma a natural cancer to look for among early hominins, the zoological tribe that includes humans and their extinct kin. As I read about the Swartkrans find, I thought of the previous record holder for oldest humanoid cancer, Kanam Man, a possible victim of osteosarcoma who lived in East Africa perhaps 700,000 years ago. All that we have of Kanam Man (or woman or girl or boy; the gender and age at death are unknown) is a tumorous jawbone. Decades after its discovery by Louis Leakey in 1932, the fossil's antiquity and provenance have remained in dispute, along with the medical diagnosis. Some researchers have attributed the tumor to a different cancer, Burkitt lymphoma, which is endemic in parts of Africa, or to a bone infection called osteomyelitis. Three years ago, after I wrote about the Kanam mandible and other ancient cancer cases in an article for Discover magazine, I heard from a dentist in Seattle who was confident that the tumor was a benign growth called a submandibular exostosis, which he had seen in his own patients. In the case of the Swartkrans find, the specimen consists only of a foot bone. Again, the gender and precise identity cannot be determined. Homo ergaster and Paranthropus robustus have been found in the same stratum of the cave. But diagnostic techniques have advanced since the first reports on Kanam Man. The Swartkrans tumor was initially described, in a doctoral thesis, as a benign growth called an osteoid osteoma. A scanning technology called microfocus X ray computed tomography told a different story. After other diagnoses were considered and discarded, the strongest case was for osteosarcoma. When you consider the biology of cancer, it is no surprise to find it in early hominins or any form of multicellular life. The oldest known example may be a metastatic bone cancer in a Jurassic dinosaur. (A slice of its skeleton was found by a keen eyed doctor in a Colorado rock shop.) Errors in cellular division are inevitable and can lead to the development of a malignant tumor. Carcinogens and inherited genetic defects add to the risk. A more difficult question is how much cancer there was in earlier centuries, compared with modern times. Almost six years ago, two Egyptologists made headlines with a paper in the journal Nature Reviews: Cancer concluding that "a striking rarity of malignancies" in the anthropological record suggests that cancer is "limited to societies that are affected by modern lifestyle issues such as tobacco use and pollution resulting from industrialization." That plays right into dystopian visions of cancer as a horror inflicted by a civilization gone amok. But other researchers, considering the same anthropological data, have rejected this view. In 2006, scientists studied the bones from two ancient Egyptian burial sites, dating to 3200 B.C., and a German ossuary, where bodies were deposited between 1400 and 1800 A.D. Those researchers concluded that cancer rates, adjusted for longevity, have probably held steady for centuries. The seemingly small number of malignant tumors reported by anthropologists is probably an illusion. The only cancers that can be found in long decomposed remains are those that originated in the skeleton or somehow left a mark there. They include cancers that spread from other organs or, like myeloma, could scar the skeleton in other ways. For most ancient cancers, the evidence rots away. Mummified bodies are rare, but here, too, an occasional cancer has been found. If all of science's excavated bones were examined as assiduously as the Swartkrans specimen, many more cases would probably emerge. All we can ever see is the tip of the iceberg. The Swartkrans discovery was not far from Rising Star, a cave where the remains of at least 15 members of a new species, Homo naledi, were discovered in 2013 in what some anthropologists see as evidence of prehuman burial rituals. I wondered if any of them died from cancer. "We don't have anything to report on pathology from these fossils yet," John Hawks, a senior member of the expedition, told me. "Some really interesting aspects of health leave only very subtle traces on bone, so we can't definitively rule anything out." In any case, the odds of a find are low, no matter how prevalent cancer was. Today, the incidence rate for all bone and joint cancers is nine cases for every one million people. Barring good luck, one would have to scan a vast number of skeletons to find a single example. Throughout the Cradle of Humankind, Dr. Hawks estimated, there are about 2,800 fossil specimens. "I believe we are looking at the remains of fewer than 150 individuals," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
" Binge Mode" has attracted a cult following for its lively, in depth analysis. It all started with "Game of Thrones." JASON CONCEPCION We talked about Harry a lot in "Game of Thrones," and got a lot of engagement from the people who listened to the podcast saying, "Oh my god, if you guys did 'Harry,' that would be great." And it started to gestate in our minds. It just makes a lot of sense to do the two titanic fantasy stories of our lives. Why not? 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. MALLORY RUBIN I think one of the things that happened during the "Game of Thrones" run was really saying, "This can be about anything, but the heart of it is about fantasy stories" the fandom that builds up around that, and the community those stories foster and inspire. How did your partnership develop? CONCEPCION We're both extremely analytical people. W e love talking about books, talking about stories, and drilling down and examining what it is that we love about the stories in a real lit crit kind of way. I think that's one of the primary pillars of our chemistry. When I think about the way we approach the podcast, if either of us had hosted with a person who wasn't quite ready to approach the material with the level of care and analysis that we each feel that it deserves, it probably would have been a real problem. RUBIN Scary to think about. Not sure if you can tell, but we're both slightly obsessive by nature. How many times do you estimate you've read the full Harry Potter series at this point? RUBIN Oh my god. I have no idea. Just in the time we've been working on "Binge Mode," I think we've read them four times. We read the whole thing through before starting, because we wanted to sketch out the episode breakdowns, what chapters would go where, viewing everything through the lens of theme. When we're working on the episodes, we read each of the chapters, the chunks of chapters we're working on, and then go back and read them again to actually outline. I think for me, personally, my total is honestly probably in the thirties. Which is a lot! Were you surprised by how quickly "Binge Mode: Harry Potter" found a dedicated audience, even separately from "Game of Thrones"? RUBIN Well, people have done stuff on Harry Potter for a very long time. My freshman year of college, I was just walking around listening to The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet podcasts, all the time. Some of my first exposure to podcasting, was listening to those podcasts. So people have been doing this for a while. We knew the appetite for coverage and thoughtful discussion about these stories was insatiable. People love them. The thing that means the most to us, and that we hoped would matter the most to other people, is finding somebody you can talk to about a story who really feels the same way about it that you do. Did we know it would be like this? No. Of course not. But we knew there was the potential for an audience. What kind of Harry Potter readers are listening to the show? Are they die hards, casual fans, people coming to the books for the first time? What has been your experience engaging with the fandoms? RUBIN I think all of the above. One of the coolest and most fulfilling things for us has been hearing from people who say, "I never read Harry Potter, and I'm doing it for the first time so that I can listen to 'Binge Mode.'" And then those people come back and say, "Boy, Harry Potter is really great." Certainly most of the people listening to it have read the books, but even within that there's huge variance. There are people who are obsessives and read the books every year, every few months. It's everything in between, this whole swath of different experiences. We spent a lot of time in the planning phase about that element, of, "How do we respect people who are coming to the story for the first time?" while doing the show in the way we wanted to do it. One thing that was not in doubt for us was that we wanted to talk about the story in its entirety from the beginning. RUBIN We both really admire J.K. Rowling's very clear early vision, and how much of the groundwork was laid in the very beginning. When you're reading "Stone" and "Chamber" "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" every three pages you're stumbling on a bit of Horcrux foreshadowing. It's unbelievable. RUBIN I think the themes, the pillars of the story are eternal. Love, choice, community, the family you choose. I think also and this is the case for everything the way that people perceive the story, or certain aspects of it, changes over time. We noticed when we were at LeakyCon this year that a lot of the panels were about diversity in Harry Potter. A lot of the discussion in our Facebook Group is about how it's harder for some people to accept or root for or align with Severus Snape as a character now than it was a few years ago, because of the way that society and culture and norms and acceptance and discussion shift. When you're creating a work of art, it lives in a moment, a time, but it also lives across time. The way people relate to it and respond to it will change. I'd be fascinated to hear what she thinks about that. What should listeners look forward to from "Binge Mode" in 2019? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Q. Is it possible to move or play my iTunes songs on an Android phone? I thought iTunes locked you into an Apple device, but maybe there are ways to do it? A. When Apple's iTunes Music Store arrived in 2003, it sold songs and albums as digital files in the Advanced Audio Coding format (instead of the then common MP3 format) with digital rights management, or D.R.M., restrictions built in to prevent the files from playing on unauthorized hardware. In early 2009, however, Apple announced that it was removing the D.R.M. software from the music it sold in the iTunes Store, which freed up the music files to be played on a wider range of devices. Songs you converted yourself from compact discs were not affected by iTunes Store restrictions. Several music apps and services for Android support most of the audio file types used by the iTunes software, including D.R.M. free AAC, MP3 and WMA (Windows Media Audio). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
9 Plays and Musicals to Go to in N.Y.C. This Weekend Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'THE CONVENT' at A.R.T./New York Theaters (previews start on Jan. 16; opens on Jan. 24). A girls' trip with monastic overtones, Jessica Dickey's new play goes on retreat with a group of women trying to live like medieval nuns (though likely practicing better personal hygiene). Daniel Talbott directs the all female cast, which includes Lisa Ramirez and Samantha Soule, as they recede from modernity. weathervanetheater.org 'GOD SAID THIS' at the Cherry Lane Theater (previews start on Jan. 16; opens on Jan. 29). A companion play to Leah Nanako Winkler's "Kentucky," this Primary Stages piece finds a New Yorker, Hiro, returning to her old Kentucky home, braving her newly sober father, her born again sister and her ailing mother. Morgan Gould directs, with Satomi Blair, Ako and Jay Patterson revisiting their roles. 866 811 4111, primarystages.org 'THE INFINITE LOVE PARTY' at the Bushwick Starr (performances start on Jan. 11). Pack pajamas or something lacier for this new experience from the playwright Diana Oh (" my lingerie play "). Ticket holders will drink, dance and feast from a potluck buffet, and a few will then sleep over in an event that promises to celebrate queerness, enchantment and liberated love in its many splendored varieties. 866 811 4111, thebushwickstarr.org 'MAESTRO' at the Duke on 42nd Street (in previews; opens on Jan. 14). Raise a baton to the Ensemble for the Romantic Century's tribute to Arturo Toscanini. John Noble ("The Lord of the Rings," "The Substance of Fire") stars in Eve Wolf's drama, which focuses on Toscanini's antifascist activities and is scored to music by his contemporaries. Will it be, like Toscanini, pitch perfect? 646 223 3010, dukeon42.org 'MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG' at the Laura Pels Theater in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (previews start on Jan. 12; opens on Feb. 19). Having already staged a happily ever after "Into the Woods," Fiasco Theater dips back into the Sondheim catalog for a revival of this 1981 show about fame and its price. Noah Brody directs a cast that includes Jessie Austrian, Paul L. Coffey, Ben Steinfeld and Emily Young. 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'MIES JULIE' AND 'THE DANCE OF DEATH' at Classic Stage Company (previews start on Jan. 15 and 17; opens on Feb. 10). Sex and spiritual violence inform these adapted August Strindberg plays, running in repertory at Classic Stage. Shariffa Ali directs Yael Farber's forceful adaptation of "Mies Julie," which resets the action in post Apartheid South Africa. Conor McPherson's take on "The Dance of Death," about a marriage that will have couples counselors cowering in terror, is directed by Victoria Clark. 866 811 4111, classicstage.org 'THE TRIAL OF THE CATONSVILLE NINE' at Abrons Arts Center (previews start on Jan. 16; opens on Feb. 6). The Transport Group travels back to the Vietnam War for this play about antiwar activists that ran on Broadway in 1971. Written by the Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan and based largely on verbatim transcripts, it describes how Berrigan, his brother and fellow priest, and seven parishioners napalmed several hundred draft cards. Jack Cummings III directs. 866 811 4111, transportgroup.org 'THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT' at Studio 54 (closes on Jan. 13). Based on a true ish story, this three character play about an unshakable fact checker (Daniel Radcliffe), an unyielding writer (Bobby Cannavale) and an editor on deadline (Cherry Jones) reaches its last lines. Jesse Green praised the director Leigh Silverman's "terrific comic staging" and the cast's "dead on timing," calling the play itself "terrifically engaging but not as smart as it thinks." 212 239 6200, lifespanofafact.com 'THE NEW ONE' at the Cort Theater (closes on Jan. 20). The comedian Mike Birbiglia's solo show about pregnancy and reluctant parenthood ends its run. Ben Brantley praised the "gentle genius" of Birbiglia's "comfortingly haphazard approach to comedy" and called his delivery his "paradoxically lazy energy" "a seductive force." 212 239 6200, thenewone.com For an overview of January and February's cultural events, click here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Robert Gerard Gondola Jr. and Guillaume Rene Bagal were married Aug. 25 at the Newport Congregational Church in Newport, R.I. Emmanuel Y. Yagnye, who is Mr. Bagal's father and who became a Universal Life minister to preside at this event, officiated. Mr. Gondola (left), 34, is the associate vice president for institutional advancement at the Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick. He is also the secretary of the school board for Providence's public schools. He graduated from Salve Regina University in Newport, and received a master's degree in public policy from Harvard. He is the son of Linda A. Gondola and Mr. Gondola Sr. of Needham, Mass. His parents both retiredas letter carriers for the United States Postal Service, she from Waban, Mass., and he from Marlborough, Mass. Mr. Bagal, 32, is in charge of diversity and inclusion at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island in Providence. He graduated and received a master's degree in sociology from East Carolina University, and received a master's degree in health care administration and policy from George Mason University. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
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