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Q. In Windows 10, is it possible to get the screen where the apps are displayed as they were in Windows 8? A. The "Start screen" introduced with Windows 8 in 2012 was such a departure from the traditional Windows desktop interface that many users complained which led to the return of the more traditional Start button and its expanding menu in later updates of the system. If you prefer the Start screen view that shows your pinned tiles or apps all at once, you can return to it. In Windows 10, go to the Start menu and select the gear shaped Settings icon (or press the Windows and I keys as a shortcut). In the Settings window, choose Personalization and then Start. Next, turn on the option for "Use Start full screen." When you click the Start button now, the full Start screen appears, with icons to click for opening menus and for seeing your pinned tiles or the screen of all your apps. (Having the full Start screen in place can also make the Windows 10 Tablet mode easier to use.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Picturing Yourself with Bob Ross as the 'Experience' Opens in Indiana MUNCIE, Ind. Lexi Vann was losing her race with Bob Ross. The 19 year old from Carmel, Ind., sporting a bushy brown Bob wig that defied the stiff Halloween afternoon breeze, dipped her brush into a pool of purple paint and began tracing the outline of a mountain range, taking her cue from an episode of "The Joy of Painting" on a screen set up on the lawn. But Ross, whose curly perm and soothing voice were at odds with his breakneck pace, finished his work, titled "Sunset Aglow," five minutes ahead of her. "As soon as he started going with the trees, I was lost," Ms. Vann said, her cheeks flushed. She was among the more than 100 fans of the PBS painter who made the trek in her case 50 miles, but others came from as far away as Arizona for the sold out opening day of the "Bob Ross Experience," a 1.2 million permanent exhibit and painting workshop series in the city where the beloved television host filmed his show from 1983 to 1994, and inspired generations of fans with his yes you can positivity. "This is fantastic," Brett Estes, the Best Bob winner said, outfitted in a Bob wig (from a costume shop), beard (real) and light blue button down. His brushes were tucked in the front pocket. But the crown jewel awaited fans inside Ross's studio, the former public television station WIPB, inside the Lucius L. Ball House (the family gave the country the iconic glass kitchen jar). Fifteen masked visitors per hour, with timed tickets, could pose with Ross's easel, palette and the set of brushes he used to create what he called his "happy little trees." "We made it as close as possible to how it appeared when he filmed here" while still accommodating visitors, George Buss, the vice president of visitor experience at Minnetrista, said. Ross lovers can slip on a vintage J.C. Penney shirt like the ones he wore on the show, or flip through a stack of his fan mail. And they can pore over shelves full of Ross essentials like a jar of Vicks VapoRub, which he used to clear his sinuses to ensure a smooth, velvety voice, and the hair pick he kept in his back pocket to fluff out his perm. But the ultimate Ross Zen awaits fans in the far corner of the studio, where a painting of a misty mountain rests on an easel, one of some 30,000 (including copies) that the artist boasted of producing in a 1991 interview with The New York Times. (Ross died in 1995, at age 52, of complications from lymphoma; his works if you can find one have been offered for up to 55,000 on eBay.) An episode of "The Joy of Painting" plays on the camera monitor and visitors who step in front of the easel will find themselves standing in Ross's shoes. The experience can be overwhelming, leaving some visitors in tears. They can also step across the hall into a re creation of a 1980s American living room, its shelves filled with such memorabilia as a Bob Ross Chia Pet and a Bob Ross toaster. "We wanted to also show Bob as fans watching at home in their living room knew him," Mr. Buss said. In another building half a mile up the boulevard, a dozen masked people hunched over socially distanced canvases, trying their hand at "Gray Mountain," in a master class led by Jeremy Rogers, a 21 year old Ross instructor. (The four workshops offered this weekend were capped at 12 people per class, but Minnetrista plans to offer the three hour sessions twice a month going forward, for 70 per person.) Mr. Rogers has been certified since 2018 one of at least 5,000 instructors to complete a three week training course at the Bob Ross Art Workshop and Gallery in Florida. It offers certification in landscape, floral and wildlife painting and requires that students complete approximately two paintings per day. "It's pretty intense," he said, adding that it was the speed demanded of instructors that he found most challenging. Ross completed each painting live on air, with no breaks or cutaways, in 26 minutes and 47 seconds. "To do it as fast as him " Rogers paused and shook his head. "Man." He said it takes him about an hour to complete a painting. Doug Hallgren, who has been certified since 2003, managed to match Ross stroke for stroke in a demonstration Saturday on the lawn. The trick, he said, is to embrace "happy little accidents" as Ross called them. "It's about learning not to go back," Mr. Hallgren said. "No matter how much you might want to." Jessica Jenkins, the vice president of collections and storytelling at Minnetrista, said that while critics saddle Ross with a reputation for kitsch, she's thrilled to finally see him getting the recognition he deserves. The Smithsonian Museum of American History acquired four Bob Ross paintings and a selection of memorabilia last year, and while the museum has not announced its time frame for exhibiting them, the Bob Ross Experience currently displays six of the 26 paintings in the Minnetrista collection. "Lots of people don't view Bob as a real artist, which is upsetting because he made it simple on purpose for TV," Ms. Jenkins said. She walked over to a Ross seascape a gift from Ross's widow on the wall in the Ball home. "This is vastly more than what he did on television," she said. "These are the ones he took his time on; the ones he did for him." Also on view is an exhibit of 29 Bob Ross paintings that have never been publicly displayed in Oakhurst, a historic Ball home nearby. A majority are loans from Muncie residents, who tell how they acquired the paintings from Ross's demonstrations in local malls, or as gifts from the painter himself. So how did America's television painter end up in a college town in the middle of the country? Before the early 1980s, it's doubtful that Ross, who was born in Florida, could have placed Muncie on a map. But from 1983 until 1994, the painter visited the Midwest city four times a year to tape his show. Ms. Jenkins acknowledges that the middle of a pandemic may seem like a strange time to kick off an interactive exhibition like this one, but she says everyone could use a dose of Ross's calm and positivity right now. "My biggest fear in getting into this project was that I'd find out he wasn't the person I thought he was," Ms. Jenkins said. "But the Bob Ross you see on TV is completely sincere. He put everyone else first constantly. I was like, 'Oh, thank God, he was not a jerk.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Yet another tall residential tower designed to stand out against the Manhattan skyline is poised to enter the market this time in Lower Manhattan. Planned to rise some 792 feet high with a crown that tapers slightly outward as the tower reaches its highest floors, 111 Murray Street won't be the tallest residential skyscraper in the vicinity. Nearby 30 Park Place, Four Seasons Private Residences New York Downtown, which topped out at 926 feet in January, is taller. But the developers hope its distinctive glass sheath, location and amenities will set it apart from the pack. The rounded form of the tower, inspired by Murano glass vases, gradually increases in size above the 40th floor of the 58 story building, creating a gently flared silhouette. "We didn't go for height for height's sake," said Winston C. Fisher, a partner of Fisher Brothers, which is developing the tower with Witkoff and New Valley, a subsidiary of the Vector Group. "We wanted to create a building that had sweeping views but also, especially where it is located, that had some context to the surrounding area." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Medical experts seeking to stem the Ebola epidemic are sharply divided over whether most patients in West Africa should, or can, be given intravenous hydration, a therapy that is standard in developed countries. Some argue that more aggressive treatment with IV fluids is medically possible and a moral obligation. But others counsel caution, saying that pushing too hard would put overworked doctors and nurses in danger and that the treatment, if given carelessly, could even kill patients. The debate comes at a crucial time in the outbreak. New infections are flattening out in most places, better equipped field hospitals are opening, and more trained professionals are arriving, opening up the possibility of saving many lives in Africa, rather than a few patients flown to intensive care units thousands of miles away. The World Health Organization sees intravenous rehydration, along with constant measuring of blood chemistry, as the main reason that almost all Ebola patients treated in American and European hospitals have survived, while about 70 percent of those treated in West Africa have died. Every hospital there should have "early, liberal use of intravenous fluid and electrolyte replacement," said Dr. Robert A. Fowler, a Canadian critical care specialist who leads a W.H.O. Ebola team. Anything less, he said, is "not medically justified and will result in continued high case fatality rates." Experts who favor aggressive rehydration point to several hospitals that claim unusually low death rates as evidence that it is effective. Skeptics say other factors may be at work. Even two of the most admired medical charities have squared off over the issue. Partners in Health, which has worked in Haiti and Rwanda but is just beginning to treat Ebola patients in West Africa, supports the aggressive treatment. Its officials say the more measured approach taken by Doctors Without Borders is overly cautious. "M.S.F. is not doing enough," said Dr. Paul Farmer, one of the founders of Partners in Health, using the French initials for Doctors Without Borders, whose staff members have worked on the front lines of Ebola outbreaks for years. "What if the fatality rate isn't the virulence of disease but the mediocrity of the medical delivery?" Doctors Without Borders representatives strongly disagreed, saying that Dr. Farmer's assumptions about Ebola were incorrect, that intensive rehydration would probably not save as many patients as he believes, and that the W.H.O.'s position has not been proved. The group's overwhelmed doctors do what they can, officials said, but it is hard to insert needles while wearing three pairs of gloves and foggy goggles. IVs must be monitored, drawing virus laden blood for tests is dangerous, and patients yank needles out sometimes in delirium, sometimes just to go to the toilet when no nurse is around. Ebola patients lose up to five quarts of fluid a day through diarrhea and vomiting. In that fluid are electrolytes like potassium, magnesium, sodium and calcium, and proteins like albumin. Electrolyte loss can stop the heart; protein loss can cause fatal internal swelling. Rehydrating patients and replacing those elements "is the antidote to the idea that everybody's going to die," Dr. Farmer said. Every Ebola hospital, he argued, should have a team that specializes in inserting IVs or, better yet, peripherally inserted central catheters, or PICC lines. These are thin plastic tubes, inserted in the arm or chest and threaded through a vein, that can be left in place for days and the needle discarded. Along with doctors at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who published an article on rehydration in The Lancet on Dec. 4, Dr. Farmer has also called for the use of thick needles driven into bone marrow with surgical "guns." This procedure, known as intraosseous infusion, is slow, but it reinflates veins too shrunken to admit an intravenous line, and the needles are much harder for agitated patients to pull out. However, not all doctors know how to use PICC lines or bone needles, or how to inject fluids into empty abdominal spaces, another technique endorsed in the Lancet article. (The article was accompanied by a video in which Dr. Ian Roberts, the chief author, had some of those techniques demonstrated on himself. He used minimal anesthesia, he said, to imitate field conditions in West Africa.) Doctors Without Borders normally puts IV lines in as many Ebola patients as it can manage, said Dr. Armand Sprecher, an Ebola expert with the organization. That practice was temporarily stopped in September, when the disease was spreading so fast that doctors had only one minute per patient during the one hour they could work in their sweltering protective suits. The fatality rate across the group's six Ebola treatment centers in West Africa was about 60 percent then, and is now 40 to 50 percent, Dr. Sprecher said. He disputed Dr. Farmer's contention that rehydration could bring it down to 10 percent. "It would probably push it down some, but I'd be surprised if it were dramatic," Dr. Sprecher said. Dr. Farmer cited the treatment given at a unit in Hastings, Sierra Leone, as an example of the kind of care he endorses. In a Dec. 24 letter to The New England Journal of Medicine, the Sierra Leonean doctors running that center with Western advisers said they had had a 48 percent fatality rate when they opened in September and had since reduced it to 24 percent. Each of the 581 patients the center has treated immediately received IV fluids with electrolytes, they wrote. Even without lab tests, each patient also received an antibiotic, an anti parasitic drug, an antimalarial drug, an anti vomiting drug, pain pills, vitamins, zinc and a nutrition supplement. The fatality rate at the unit Partners in Health runs in Port Loko, Sierra Leone, is 35 to 40 percent, its director, Dr. Corrado Cancedda, estimated. Up to 80 percent of patients there receive IV rehydration, Dr. Cancedda said, and some have had bone needles inserted; no PICC lines have been used. Battery powered electrolyte monitoring machines are being introduced. Dr. Sprecher said death rates at Doctors Without Borders' six hospitals in the region varied, with the lowest being 36 percent in Bo, Sierra Leone. But he could not explain why. Some of the hospitals see more young adults, who tend to survive. At rural centers, the sickest patients die on the way there. Rehydration was only one lifesaving factor for the handful of patients transported to American or European hospitals, Dr. Sprecher argued, because all of them also received intensive nursing, and some received dialysis, ventilation and experimental therapies. He was reluctant to have his doctors seen using bone needle guns on patients. "Not long ago, we were being accused of stealing organs," he said. "You have to be sure people understand what the heck you're doing." West Africa has at least eight laboratories run by various American, Canadian and European government agencies, Dr. Sprecher said. Until recently, they tested only for Ebola and diseases that mimic it, like malaria or Lassa fever. Now, he said, about half can test for electrolytes. Because heat and humidity knock out the machines that analyze blood chemistry, labs must be air conditioned, said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The C.D.C. runs two large laboratories in the region, only one of which now tests for electrolytes. Sometimes, conservative guesswork is called for, Dr. Frieden said. His father, a physician, gave potassium to patients who needed IV rehydration long before such tests were routine. The best equipped treatment center in West Africa is the 25 bed United States Public Health Service hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, which is reserved for doctors, nurses, burial teams and others fighting the epidemic. It is fully air conditioned and has 32 medical personnel, who wear high tech protective gear that sucks in fresh air. Its on site lab tests blood for electrolytes and proteins. The pharmacy has drugs to raise blood pressure or increase coagulation, and patients can be fed through tubes. Since it opened in November, it has had 14 Ebola patients. Seven recovered, five died, one was transferred and one is in treatment, a spokeswoman said. (Ten other people who were admitted did not have Ebola.) That is a 42 percent fatality rate, though based on a small sample, for the 12 patients whose fates are clear. Other units tread a middle ground, relying on what measures they have at hand. The fatality rate at the International Medical Corps hospital in Bong County, Liberia, is about 55 percent, said Dr. Pranav Shetty, the agency's international emergency health coordinator. All patients who need IV lines get them, Dr. Shetty said. But when there are too few nurses around, usually at night, the IVs are unhooked, so patients may get only one quart of fluids a day. And only patients still urinating, indicating that their kidneys are working, receive electrolytes. Spending money on air conditioning "doesn't even cross our minds," Dr. Shetty said, because other needs are more urgent. When IV lines are impractical, the W.H.O. urges doctors to make patients drink six quarts of rehydration solution a day. Nigeria's victory over its Ebola outbreak in September was attributed in part to that. Dr. Adaora Igonoh, a 28 year old Nigerian physician who survived the disease, became a symbol for the cause: The W.H.O. distributed pictures of her giving a thumbs up while drinking the solution, and Bill Gates blogged about her story, telling how she forced herself to drink despite the repulsive salty taste and her vomiting. Still, even oral rehydration is hard, doctors say. Patients need anti nausea drugs and must be pressured to drink. The solution tastes better when refrigerated. But, like air conditioning, that requires electricity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
On a recent rainy Friday, Hubert le Gall, a French art furniture designer, was "at home" at the Twenty First Gallery in TriBeCa, on the eve of his first American retrospective. "It's more like a 'best of,'" Mr. le Gall said of the show. "It's like a portrait." Dressed in a gray sweater and bluejeans, Mr. le Gall, who speaks very quickly in precise, accented English, was perched on his deep red velvet Babeth sofa ( 22,000), the back of which is shaped like two hearts. It is the least fanciful of his work, which is surrealistic and dreamy: A sleeping bronze dog erupts into a side table ( 25,000); a furry giant bunny is also a wingback chair ( 17,000); a plush flower pot, bright red with bright green leaves, is sliced in half to make two comfy seats ( 18,000). Now 58, he has a ravishing quasi monograph out from Flammarion ( 150) that shows the art works he's made for an American collector's hunting lodge in Normandy, among other designs. On this afternoon, he led a reporter through the 35 odd pieces in his gallery, explaining his inspirations and why, in particular, he counts Pinocchio among his muses. "Pinocchio is a designer because he's a liar like me," said Mr. le Gall. "He just gives you dreams and illusions." (This interview has been condensed and edited.) I made it in 1995. Design in France at that time was minimal; black and white; Andree Putman. And me, I come with that and journalists say: "That's nice, he's a nice guy; he makes things with flowers." I was interested in the idea of, what was the flower of my time? There is the flower of the 18th century, of Art Nouveau and Art Deco. I decided that the flower of my time was the flower of Andy Warhol, the printed flower paintings. Yes, the marguerite. And then the question was, what is the material of my time? At the time we spoke a lot about Basquiat, and people would say, "The paintings are not of good quality because he would just buy cheap paint on the street," so I was just like that. I made this archetypal drawing of the shape of the marguerite, as a child would, and made it in bronze and then painted it as if it were a silk screen print. My idea was to do something that was classic because I like to play with history but also be in my time. Speaking of history, I know that you work in an atelier that used to belong to Pierre Bonnard. Can you tell me how you came to be living in such a place, with such a provenance? You know, I have a star looking down at me. It was 1991. I was painting and making sculpture and a little bit of furniture. A friend said, "I have just bought a studio in Montmartre and I don't want it because it's so far away." I said: "I know what you will do. You will sell it to me." The next day I went out to this incredible place. It had always been an artist's place, not to live, just to work. Not just Bonnard but Miro, Jean Arp. It was very cheap, just wood and bricks, very like the Bateau Lavoir a former factory in Montmartre known as the "laundry boat" that was famous for its art world tenants, like Picasso, Modigliani and Gris . After them there was a generation of artists who were not so successful and they left things in the place. I live in the center of Paris and this place is 10 minutes away by bike. I can say I will keep this place forever. You have described your work as "in between objects," meaning in between form and sculpture, between good taste and bad, and occupying a "borderline where the object seems to hesitate before taking sides." That's pretty great. Can you discuss? O.K., so you see the two mirrors two wall pieces in gilded frames with gilded blobs on them that look like huge golden tears; one "mirror" has more blobs than the other at what point is it still a mirror? At what point can you stop seeing yourself? The question for me is, what's really art? Is it because there is no function that it is art? I'm always inspired by this idea. Tell me about these velvet chairs, the voluptuous red one entwined with bronze apples and the blue chair with its phallic pillow. These two are quite new. The red one is Eve and the blue one is Adam. Adam was inspired by a Giacometti sculpture from 1927 called "Danseurs," and Eve by a piece by Henry Moore. I had no idea where I would go, what they would end up being. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The grand apartment at the landmark Dakota that Lauren Bacall called home for more than half a century, filling its nine commodious rooms with an eclectic mix of artwork, antiques and countless mementos, many of them from her fabled Hollywood career, sold for 21,000,000 and was the most expensive closed sale of the week, according to city records. The three bedroom three and a half bath co op unit, No. 43, at 1 West 72nd Street, on Central Park West, had been on the market since November 2014, three months after Ms. Bacall's death at the age of 89. It was initially listed for 26 million, then reduced last spring to 23.5 million; monthly maintenance is around 13,595. Ronald N. Beck, a managing director of the hedge fund Oaktree Capital Management, and his wife, Cynthia Lewis Beck, were the buyers. They worked directly with the listing broker, Rebecca I. Edwardson of Warburg Realty, which represented Ms. Bacall's estate. "Everybody who came to see the apartment was fascinated with all the prewar details," Ms. Edwardson said, "the 13 foot ceilings and the windows that are the size of new development windows, which is rare in a prewar building. This apartment has a lot of common space rather than a huge room count." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
It was Tuesday, Sept. 30, 1947 Game 1 of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson was making history. The Dodger first baseman was standing in a packed Yankee Stadium about to hear the national anthem. From a distance, the tableau can seem an inspiring inflection point: the first Black major leaguer in the 20th century playing in the first televised World Series. "There I was," Robinson recalled in his 1972 memoir "I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography," "the Black grandson of a slave, the son of a Black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people." So far, so good: The safe narrative of Robinson as stoic hero is intact. "The band struck up the national anthem," he wrote. "It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words ... poured from the stands." Yet if we see the scene through Robinson's eyes and hear the anthem through his ears we encounter an altogether different story. Writing a quarter of a century after the 1947 World Series, Robinson observed, "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made." To many white fans of the game, the tale of Jackie Robinson is redemptive and transporting. The number 42 is retired across the major leagues; Robinson is a secular saint, revered for his skill and his bravery in making what was known as the noble experiment of desegregating baseball before Brown v. Board of Education, before the Montgomery bus boycott, before the March on Washington, before Selma. The truth, as Robinson told it in his affecting and candid autobiography, is vastly more complicated, and the book repays attention as the nation grapples anew with race. "I Never Had It Made" offers compelling testimony about the realities of being Black in America from an author who long ago became more a monument than a man, and his memoir is an illuminating meditation on racism not only in the national pastime but in the nation itself. Robinson's journey to the majors started in the back of a bus. He had been signed to a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers' minor league Montreal club. Ordered to spring training in Sanford, Fla. and this being 1946, Jim Crow was very much in force Robinson, a veteran of World War II and a former U.C.L.A. athletic star, had been forced to ride in the segregated section of a bus on the way to camp. He and Johnny Wright, a pitcher in the Negro leagues who'd also been signed as a prospect by the Dodger co owner and general manager, Branch Rickey, were anxious about the reception that might be awaiting them. "We had to feel our way in this entire matter," Robinson recalled in an earlier book, "Jackie Robinson: My Own Story," published in 1948. In the clubhouse, a Dodger organization man, Babe Hamburger, offered some counsel. "Well, fellows," Hamburger said, "I'm not exactly what you'd call a part of this great experiment, but I'm gonna give you some advice anyway. Just go out there and do your best. Don't get tense. Just be yourselves." Robinson was underwhelmed. "Be ourselves?" he asked himself. "Here in the heart of the race conscious South? ... Johnny and I both realized that this was hostile territory that anything could happen any time to a Negro who thought he could play ball with white men on an equal basis. It was going to be difficult to relax and behave naturally. But we assured Babe we'd try." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Gail Joan Cornell and Thomas Edward Harritt were married Sept. 1 at the First Congregational Church in Hopkinton, N.H. The Rev. Dr. Gordon L. Crouch performed the ceremony. Ms. Cornell, 68, is an architectural historian. She is a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a member of the adjunct faculty at the N.Y.U. School of Professional Studies, and also is a lecturer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Smithsonian Institution, both in Washington. She graduated from Thomas More College in Edgewood, Ky., and received a master's degree in architectural history and theory from Harvard. She is the daughter of the late LaVonne A. Schuerman, who lived in Crestview Hills, Ky., and the late John H. Schuerman, who lived in Highland Heights, Ky. The bride's father retired as an independent tax accountant and bookkeeper in Highland Heights. Her mother was a pianist and a singer who performed in the Cincinnati area. Mr. Harritt, 67, retired as a captain for United Airlines, flying out of Newark, and also retired from the United States Air Force, having attained the rank of lieutenant colonel and served with the 104th fighter squadron and at the Warfield Air National Guard Base in Middle River, Md. He graduated from Florida State University. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Twitter requires a connection to the internet, which exposes the device to security vulnerabilities if proper measures like two factor authentication a password and a code texted to a phone, for example are not in place. If he uses the smartphone on an unsecure Wi Fi network, he could be exposing his location and other personal information on the device. "The absolutely minimum Trump could do to protect our nation is to use a secure device to protect him from foreign spies and other threats," said Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon on the Intelligence Committee. "It would be irresponsible in the extreme for the commander in chief to use an unsecure device that could be easily hacked or intercepted." Among the concerns by security experts: It is unclear if the device and its functions like texting are encrypted to thwart hacking. The device could be more vulnerable to hacking if used on unsecured Wi Fi and cellular networks, such as when Mr. Trump travels between meetings or anywhere outside the White House. Hackers could access the device to turn on the camera and microphone. Stingray devices, a type of surveillance tool often used by law enforcement, can track a device's location and other information. "There are a lot of questions, but it is clear there are often vulnerabilities in our phones and internet systems and it is critical that people take precautions to ensure their sensitive information is protected from hackers and other malicious actors," said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
THE INKBLOTS Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing By Damion Searls Illustrated. 405 pp. Crown. 28. Type the phrase "like a Rorschach test" into Google and what pops up is everything from Hillary Clinton to Cheetos. In popular myth, the famous inkblots, part gothic horror, part toddler splat painting, are a shortcut to our subconscious, plunging through the artifice of our self presentation and into our darkest mental recesses. In this cartoonish version of the Rorschach, what we see in the blots whether a butterfly, or the bloodied stumps of our last victim's limbs after we hacked them off with a salad fork is who we really are. It is perhaps no surprise that the Rorschach metaphor has become a cliche of modern journalism. It's a fascinating idea that what we see in a given situation often reveals as much about our own selves our quirks and prejudices and vanities as it does about the thing we are looking at. This back and forth between self and world is at the heart of art and literature and criticism. Within this metaphorical universe, writing a book review is a perfect Rorschach test. Sadly, as it turns out, Rorschach the metaphor is a lot more compelling than Rorschach the reality. The actual test, still in sporadic use, takes a more persnickety, box ticking approach to the human personality, less magical psychoanalytic Tarot cards and more Myers Briggs tests with splats. The scoring system is tediously technical, and surprisingly what you see in the blots counts less toward your result than the technicalities of how you perceive form and movement. It is the fortunes of this humdrum test that Damion Searls charts in his impressively thorough, if somewhat dry book. "The Inkblots" is part biography of Hermann Rorschach, psychoanalytic supersleuth, and part chronicle of the test's afterlife in clinical practice and the popular cultural imagination. 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. Rorschach, a young psychiatrist with the tousled rom com looks of Brad Pitt, was working with deeply disturbed patients in a remote Swiss asylum during the golden years of psychoanalysis. Across the Alps, Freud was busy delving into the ids of rich Viennese housewives using an early version of talk therapy. But Rorschach speculated that in understanding the human psyche, what we see might be as important as what we say. A gifted amateur artist, he created the inkblots to see if his patients' differing styles of perception could help parse out the differences between various pathologies. Early results were promising. Schizophrenics responded differently to the blots than manic depressives, and both responded differently than the people who were "normal" controls. Before long, Rorschach was using the test to diagnose psychiatric illnesses and predict personality traits, claiming that he got it wrong less than 25 percent of the time. Rorschach died suddenly in his mid 30s, but his inkblots had already captured the imagination of both experts and the general public. The rest of the book charts that history. While most of us stare at Rorschach tests and see life reflected back at us, Searls apparently looks at life and sees Rorschach tests staring back at him. His inventory of Rorschach sightings in popular culture over the last half century is encyclopedic. But outside of journalistic cliche, many of the examples he gives feel relatively marginal, more a series of isolated occurrences than a genuine cultural pattern. More significant was the test's impact on clinical practice. At its peak, the Rorschach was used an estimated million times a year, in murder trials and child custody battles, psychiatric diagnoses and college admissions and job applications. It is only toward the end of "The Inkblots" that Searls introduces research showing that when it comes to predicting human behavior, the Rorschach performs no better than chance. Up until this point, he treats the question of whether the test actually works or not as almost an incidental one, an abstract curiosity in his cultural history. But this is a mistake. Psychology's reputation has suffered body blows in recent years, with an epidemic of overclaiming among psychologists, widespread lapses in scientific rigor and the suggestion that only around a third of psychological findings across the board can actually be replicated. In this context, the question of the Rorschach's basic validity is not an interesting aside, but fundamental to the entire story. Searls, a journalist and translator, is a nuanced and scholarly writer, at his best dealing with philosophical abstractions. His passages on the nature of empathy, for example, are genuinely fascinating. But he is less strong on the human side of storytelling. While he goes into rigorous detail about the technicalities of the Rorschach and the infighting among psychologists, his book largely ignores the people at the sharp end, the patients and ordinary folks whose lives have sometimes been cataclysmically affected by the results of the test. Although he refers to a couple of these "case studies" in passing in the final chapters of the book, their stories are told at a remove, as examples drawn from textbooks rather than key players in the narrative. It's not clear that he interviewed many of these people directly (or if he did, those encounters haven't been included in the finished text). In an insightful moment, Searls acknowledges that the Rorschach encourages experts to believe that they can speak for people better than the people can speak for themselves. But he falls into the same trap. Prioritizing the human beings impacted by this history would have made not only for a more readable book, but also a more responsible one. But, to belabor the Rorschach metaphor one last time, Searls should take comfort in the knowledge that any small criticisms I may have almost certainly say more about me than they do about his book. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
THE first time Chris Ludwig sold his refrigerant reprocessing company, he said he acted as if the deal was done long before it was. He beefed up inventory, added sales staff and generally increased his expenses. But as the buyers delayed, "I got myself in a bad position," he said, adding, "I said, 'Let's hurry up and close.' I didn't get near as good a deal as I should have." Matt Matich, who ran a trucking distribution company, said he realized during the sale of his business that he and his partner should have consulted a business adviser earlier because they could have expanded the company themselves and sold it for a lot more than they ultimately received. "We thought of the business as having three legs: you sell, you recruit, you operate," Mr. Matich said. "We hadn't looked at the fourth leg, which was finance. Had we had the fourth leg, we would have gone a different route." The mistakes people make in selling their businesses stay with them long after the check has cleared and their new life has begun. They may have a considerable financial cushion, but because their wealth came from building something from nothing, they had a deep attachment to the company. It was their livelihood and their path to wealth, but it was also a part of who they were. Not managing the sale as best they could continues to gnaw at some of them. For small business owners seeking to sell in what remains a strong environment for mergers and acquisitions, the lessons learned by those who have gone before them can be instructive. "Selling a business is not all about the financial side of it," said Terry Mackin, managing director of mergers and acquisitions at Generational Equity, a business brokerage. "Most are focused on the dollars, initially. They want us to tell them how much their business is worth. But they find there's an emotional part to this. Eighty percent of the deals I've done have not sold for the best dollar offer." Jay Messing, senior director of planning for Wells Fargo Private Bank in the Northeast, said he often advised people looking to sell their businesses to become more formal with everything from books and records to how family members are treated in the business. "People aren't as introspective as they could be," he said. "They're not running the business as tightly as they could be because they're running it for themselves." The first piece of advice is to start running the business as if a buyer will come along at any moment. "Whether it's now, five years or 10 years down the road, if you're not ready and that buyer comes, you may not get that price that you want," said Karen Reynolds Sharkey, national business owner strategy executive at U.S. Trust. Dave Turbenson said he kept his company lean. In the years around the recession, his business, a leader in selling supplies for making beer and wine at home, grew at 30 percent a year for four years straight and was doing 15 million in revenue. But he said he was under constant pressure to manage his 70 employees and keep pace with internet orders coming in. In 2010, when Mr. Turbenson had his business valued, the business broker put its worth above what he had imagined. By the end of the year, he had sold the business and walked away three months after the deal closed. "It was striking while the iron was hot," he said. "As it turns out, the whole industry had about 24 months left of sheer natural growth." Another piece of advice is not to run the business as if the deal is done before it is. Mr. Ludwig learned his lesson. He and his partner bought back the company in the late 1990s and ran it until four years ago when they sold it a second time. When an offer came from a division of Sumitomo Corporation, a Japanese conglomerate, Mr. Ludwig said the due diligence process was incredibly slow, but he kept running the business as if there were no buyer. When a tsunami hit Japan in 2011, Sumitomo withdrew its letter of intent. But eight months later, the deal was back on and the value of the company had increased. "Mentally, an owner has to understand that getting to that letter of intent and signing an agreement is Phase 1," Ms. Sharkey of U.S. Trust said. "The big part is going through the due diligence. It could take another six to 12 months after signing the letter of intent." Part of running a business to be sold is regularly reviewing how it is doing relative to its competitors. Mr. Matich said he built his trucking company, MSS Distribution, with clients in the automotive, window and door and retail sectors, over 15 years but sold it when he felt the business was stuck. "I remember having this meeting with my customer and saying, 'We can't solve their problem; we don't have the size,'" he said. "We needed to make a change to help service our customers, as they had greater needs." He and his partner began looking for buyers in 2014 and sold the company to a private equity firm last year. During that process, though, Mr. Matich said he belatedly realized that he and his partner might have been able to expand the company on their own or at the least build a firm that would have been worth more. "You're worried about sharing your info, but when you're sharing your info you're also gaining insights on others," he said. "We were systems and process guys but we needed a finance guy." As to the financial offer itself, the amount is going to vary depending on the buyer and also what the buyer wants from the business owner. "They hope for the best offer and throw them the keys and go their merry way," Mr. Mackin said. "One of the things we tell them is that's not always the case." Mr. Ludwig said he wanted an all cash deal so he could retire. He got that, but had to agree to consult for two years. "They honored those consulting contracts and paid us but they never used us," he said. But, he added, good advice from their lawyer kept them from being dependent on any additional payments. "Our attorney said what you walk away with is 80 percent of what you can count on," he said. "That was some good advice." Although the money may be good, the buyer may not be right for the company. Rick Spilde said he and his partner sold their green energy company, Essential Energy Services, in 2009 to an investment firm in Texas, where the company was based. "Our company was at a plateau," he said. "We needed more management or more sales staff. We were maxing out our capacity." He consulted for the investment group for two years and then moved to Florida to retire. But then the company began to fail. "The people who ended up buying us were probably not the best fit," he said. "They basically bought the company to own it, not to run it." A few years ago, Mr. Spilde and his partner bought back their company, paying far less than they sold it for, and put a professional management team in place. "The first time around, we were trying to build the company," he said. "The second time around, we're as busy or busier than before but we're letting our employees run the company. This time, if we go to sell it, we have some really key people in place who aren't owners and that means the company will survive." And that is a feeling about as sweet as the money itself. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
A historically high number of top movies had black directors last year, according to a sweeping study, released on Friday, that examined diversity behind the scenes and in studio boardrooms. While 2018 was a banner year for black directors with 16 working on the top 100 films 15 of those 16 directors were men; the one woman in that group was Ava DuVernay ("A Wrinkle in Time"). The overall figure was up from six black directors working on the top 100 films in 2017 and eight in 2007. "While we do not see this finding mirrored among female or Asian directors, this offers proof that Hollywood can change when it wants to," said Stacy L. Smith, who wrote the report with the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which released it. Indeed, the remainder of the research showed little change for other ethnicity groups or for women. Surveying the 1,200 top grossing films from 2007 18, researchers found that just over 4 percent had female directors, which meant that they were outnumbered by their male counterparts by a ratio of 22 to 1. And Asians represented just 3.6 percent of last year's top 100 grossing directors, a number that changed little over 12 years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Q. I have a lot of documents to scan, and with so many mobile phone apps that can make digital copies, is there any advantage to buying a scanner anymore? Is the quality that much better? A. If you just have an occasional bill, receipt or other document to digitize, mobile apps that use your smartphone's camera to capture the image are a convenient and portable solution. Many apps give you a choice of file formats for saving your documents (JPG and PDF are common) and you can instantly email the digital copies to others or upload them to an online file storage site for safekeeping. Some mobile scanning apps like Microsoft Word Lens can even convert a picture of a text page into a file you can edit, thanks to optical character recognition software. However, a traditional scanner does have advantages. For one, the scanner can help flatten the paper and make unwrinkled reproductions of the original document. Many inkjet printers include scan and copy functions, along with desktop software for cropping, rotating and enhancing the scans on a bigger screen. Optical character recognition and text search are also options with some programs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Scarlatti "Erminia" a tale of love, jealousy and disguise, with shepherds real and counterfeit was a very different kettle of fish. The orchestra here was larger, with a more striking assortment of color, but much of the music's power was concentrated in its four solo voices: mezzo sopranos Erminia (Julia Dawson) and Tancredi (Allegra De Vita), bass Pastore (Andre Courville), and tenor Polidoro (Asitha Tennekoon). In arias, the coloratura writing is often intense, so that as in some Handel operas, only more so each character plunges at once into a vortex of emotion conveyed by the knots and chains of the rapid moving vocal line. Thanks to the conductor Ryan Brown and the four singers, the recitatives between the set pieces stayed suspenseful; the act took us through quite a spectrum. At moments, admittedly, the immediate flare ups of temperament in the succession of arias become formulaic. Virtuoso emotional display seems more crucial than character or narrative tension. But it's also possible that Scarlatti wanted a yet greater range of tone (absurdity, humor) than Lafayette gave us. The emotionalism became more (or less) three dimensional according to who was singing. Ms. Dawson, beautiful in face and voice, was commanding, conflicted, touching as Erminia. Ms. De Vita, in the smaller male role of Tancredi, proved yet more remarkable, with incisive diction: Her vocalism burns like a dark flame. It was a pleasure to hear the accomplishment of Mr. Courville and Mr. Tennekoon; but their vocal characters remained far sketchier and less engrossing. How often does New York hear music by either Alessandro Scarlatti (father of Domenico) or Geminiani? I cherish the Lafayette impulse to fill a gap in our knowledge. Notwithstanding more than 40 years of attending both opera and dance, this was the first theatrical performance I had heard of music by either composer. Now I'll seek out more of both. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
2018 George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times 2018 George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times Credit... 2018 George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times In their Hamptons home, Andrew Fox and Caroline Hirsch have a George Condo painting, "The Waiter," over the mantelpiece. In Comedy Couple's Country House, the Art Competes With the Views WATER MILL, N.Y. Caroline Hirsch, the comedy impresario who founded Carolines on Broadway and the New York Comedy Festival, and her partner, Andrew Fox, live in Manhattan and Water Mill, N.Y., filling both homes with art. "There's more art in Water Mill," Mr. Fox said, "because there are a lot of big walls to fill." The couple built their Hamptons house about 25 years ago, commissioning the architect Francis Fleetwood to design a shingle style home inspired by Stanford White's Montauk cottages. Tall windows provide dramatic waterfront views to the left and right. Throughout the house, art abounds. "We started out collecting art made by the Provincetown group," Ms. Hirsch said, naming Blanche Lazzell, Karl Knaths and Hans Hofmann. She and Mr. Fox said they became increasingly interested in the work of the New York Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s, some of whom migrated to the East End of Long Island. More recently the couple have acquired works by April Gornik, who also lives in the area and whom they've gotten to know socially. With summer's waning, the couple, who work together, said they are focusing on the comedy programming and charitable efforts that consume their workweek. They'll raise funds for veterans and their families by helping to present Stand Up for Heroes, an annual event, with the Bob Woodruff Foundation on Nov. 5. Stars in the lineup include Bruce Springsteen, Jon Stewart and Jim Gaffigan. Ms. Hirsch and Mr. Fox are also busy planning the comedy festival, which runs Nov. 5 through Nov. 11. Among the headliners are Marc Maron, Tracy Morgan and Conan O'Brien. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. You have amazing waterfront views. They set a high bar for the art in your home, don't they? ANDREW FOX They do. That's why we put this painting by George Condo on the wall straight ahead as you walk in. CAROLINE HIRSCH It's called "The Waiter." It was purchased years ago at auction at Phillips. Condo's works are usually playful. People can be bizarre looking, can look like monkeys. Look closely and you'll see things are peculiar. HIRSCH Something's always a little off. John Currin's like that too. That's his painting in the corner, called "Sister." He did separate portraits of two sisters. The other's owned by a museum in Montreal. Maybe an arm goes the wrong way or a bone sticks out. HIRSCH They find humor in their subjects. Why not have things around that make you feel good? When I look closely, I see her eyes are blank. How did you discover Currin? HIRSCH In 2001 I took a walking tour of Chelsea, a kind of art appreciation tour. HIRSCH I discovered him being interviewed on this HBO documentary. They filmed him walking up to the canvas to paint. He just says, "Nyah, that doesn't work." He whites it out and starts again. FOX Look at this hat with fish on it. That's Condo. Perhaps that season fish were in millinery fashion. Do you feel there's a connection between the art you collect and the comedy you present? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Last Friday, a portrait produced by artificial intelligence was hanging at Christie's New York opposite an Andy Warhol print and beside a bronze work by Roy Lichtenstein. On Thursday, it sold for well over double the price realized by both those pieces combined. "Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy" sold for 432,500 including fees, over 40 times Christie's initial estimate of 7,000 10,000. The buyer was an anonymous phone bidder. The bidding late this morning lasted just under seven minutes, during which the buyer competed against an online bidder in France, two other phone bidders and one person in the room in New York. When the hammer came down, the bids had reached 350,000, the final price before fees. The distorted portrait, by the French art collective Obvious, was marketed by Christie's as the first portrait generated by an algorithm to come up for auction. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Women in Hollywood might have stepped to the fore in 2018, advocating for their rights and pressing for equal treatment and better representation, but new research finds that they are making little headway securing key positions in top films. Women made up just 8 percent of directors on the top 250 films at the domestic box office last year, down from 11 percent the year before, according to a new report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. The 2018 figure also represents a dip from 1998, when women made up 9 percent of directors on that year's top films. Small gains were made in other key behind the scenes positions, the study found. Women accounted for a greater percentage of producers, executive producers, writers and editors, compared with that number in 2017. The biggest increases were seen in the number of editors (21 percent were women, compared with 16 percent the previous year) and writers (16 percent, up from 11 percent in 2017). Still, the 2018 figures represented just single digit gains from 1998. A mere one percent of 2018's top films featured 10 or more women in the crucial behind the scenes roles. Those rare projects included "Colette," starring Keira Knightley, which was directed by Wash Westmoreland but involved women as writers, producers and more. The study found that a quarter of the top films had either no women in key production jobs, or just one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
When my grandmother turned 91 two weeks ago, I called to wish her a happy birthday and we made plans to celebrate over dinner later in the month. But in a matter of days, like everyone else, we saw the world change around us and our plans evaporated. Now I'm self quarantined in Brooklyn and my grandmother is in Florida. We won't be seeing each other in person any time soon. The 1,200 miles between us are made smaller by technology. We talk on the phone and see each other on FaceTime, although my grandmother is still learning the fundamentals of video chatting and sometimes I end up looking up close at her ear for a bit. Our phone calls have been more frequent since I've been stuck at home. I like talking to my grandmother in times of crisis. She was a baby of the Great Depression and lived through World War II and 9/11. She typically meets my fears with the same dry reassurance: "Life goes on." But she doesn't have any reassurances about coronavirus, especially since people over 80 are the most vulnerable, like herself and my grandfather, who is 93. So, we came up with a project that would give us something to talk about other than the virus and make the best of both being stuck at home. Over FaceTime, my grandmother is teaching me how to make the recipes that she used to cook for my dad in the 1960s. At a moment when the present is terrifying and the future is uncertain, we're returning to the past. I am not much of a cook. I work long hours in TV production and never felt like I had enough time to learn the basics in the kitchen. Also, I happen to live with a man who worked in a restaurant and is an exceptional home cook so I'm usually on cleanup duty. But being self quarantined at home means that in addition to calling up my grandmother more often, I am also out of excuses not to learn how to cook for myself. When we came up with our project, I expected to learn how to make some of her classic recipes. I didn't expect to learn so much about my family in the process. The first one we did was tuna casserole. As I opened the cans of tuna fish and condensed cream of mushroom soup, my grandmother told me over FaceTime that this is what she used to make for her three young kids before leaving for work. The casserole was easy for the kids to heat up if she wasn't home in time for dinner. My grandmother was a rare entrepreneurial working mom in the early 1960s. She had three children by the time she was 30. At 33, she returned to work full time, opening the clothing store that she and my grandfather had dreamed of, while my grandfather kept his job at Macy's to pay the bills. Tuna casserole was a common meal at their house in those years while my grandparents got a discount clothing company off the ground. So common, she said, that my dad can't go near a fishy casserole to this day. Then she told me to keep stirring and to add a little more cream of mushroom soup. A few days later we made split pea soup. When I asked for her recipe, my grandmother started reciting ingredients and then paused and said, "I think it's on the back of the bag of beans." Of course, there's a secret ingredient: a hock of ham, stuffed with cloves. I asked my grandmother when she learned how to cook. She said, "I never did!" When she moved to New York City in 1952, her first apartment didn't even have an oven. She lived with two other women, and the three of them managed by eating out or making simple things like hamburgers on the stove. It was only when my grandmother moved out to the suburbs a few years later with a husband and a baby in tow that she began to cook by necessity. Mostly easy recipes that she could make her own with small additions. The trick to make split pea soup look fancy, she told me, is to slice up a few carrots because they add a nice color. "You know it is done when you stick in a spoon and it stands up." I am nearly 30 years old myself. It's hard to picture my parents at my age, let alone my grandparents. But standing at the stove over my yellow pot, actually over my grandmother's pot, a classic Dansk design from the 1950s that she gave me from her own kitchen when I moved to New York City, I imagine what her life was like when she made these recipes for her family. She had three kids under 7 and a fledgling company that she and my grandfather were staking their life savings on, and yet every night she still managed to make meals, with love, for her family. If I was hoping to learn heirloom recipes from my grandmother, full of complicated steps and fancy ingredients, I would have been disappointed. Her recipes are simple, basic, and sometimes found on the back of a bag of beans. But I learned something better. My grandmother made it work through all the challenges that her life brought. She didn't cook because it was a hobby. She cooked because she had to and these were the things that she had time to make. Her recipes are all the more precious to me because of that. When I ask her over FaceTime whether it was difficult to balance her children, her husband, her career, especially at a time when mothers weren't common in the work force, and the everyday task of keeping her family happily fed, she shrugs and says: "Sure, but life goes on." Ali Jaffe is a segment producer at "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
The faces flicker across our screens, making a pitch in speech and song to voters who may or may not be listening. To document the national political conventions in this pandemic year, Damon Winter went into ordinary people's homes in upstate New York and projected images from the live broadcasts across bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, basements wherever the residents typically watch or listen to the news. The photographs he took of these projections capture the strangeness of this year's conventions, and how dramatically they differed from the events in a typical year. Forced by Covid 19 to hold virtual events, the conventions downsized from arena scale spectacles to meet the way we watch now: on living room screens and browsers and smartphones, perpetually distracted and multitasking, quickly moved and easily enraged. In doing so, both parties, to varying degrees, pulled off something that they had tried and failed to do ever since the conventions were first broadcast on the radio in 1924, and on television in 1948. It took nearly 100 years and a global pandemic, but the conventions' messages finally matched the medium. Change was overdue, for the placard waving and speechifying format had changed little since the first conventions were held in the 1830s. Then, these gatherings were thrilling and consequential, essentially telescoping the entire modern presidential selection process from straw polls to caucuses to primaries to nomination into three or four days of raucous debate and furious back room dealings. Conventions began with a crowd of candidates vying for the prize, and it usually took multiple ballots and an occasional all nighter to reach a decision. In 1924, it took the Democrats 103 rounds of voting to settle on a nominee. This made for irresistible political theater, so radio networks began exhaustive convention coverage. But broadcasting the conventions meant that the gatherings had two not always compatible purposes: rally the faithful, and sell the candidate to the wider electorate. When television took over in the 1950s, the conventions' shouting, cavernous atmosphere was a mismatch to television's intimate scale. And after 1970s era party reforms assured that the nominee would nearly always be known before the convention, their drama disappeared. Modern conventions minted new political stars and produced some memorable television moments, yet they rarely changed minds or decided elections. Conventions are nothing but infomercials, critics grumbled, high on flash and empty of substance. The 2020 conventions actually were infomercials, but strangely effective ones. They reflected the odd mash up of our current media moment, and more clearly communicated the essence of each party and its nominee than the traditional convention format. The sparse, quiet audiences before Kamala Harris and Joe Biden had the feel of the rapt group sitting before Ronald Reagan in 1964 as he delivered a televised address in support of Barry Goldwater that turned the actor into a conservative political star. And like the best scripted television, the event was character driven, telling the story of a son of Scranton named Joe Biden, a good guy who'll protect you from the bad. Republicans made Donald Trump the good guy protagonist in this week's television drama. It was to be expected that a seasoned reality star would pull out all the best hooks of the genre in his party's nominating convention: surprise appearances, plot twists, and the elevation of ordinary folks to celebrity status. No shock, either, that its nightly episodes brimmed with praise for the president. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
As the policy coordinator for the Defense Production Act, Peter Navarro has an opportunity to advance his protectionist agenda. WASHINGTON For three years, Peter Navarro has been corporate America's biggest nemesis, punishing multinational companies for moving jobs offshore by advocating tariffs and other trade barriers in pursuit of President Trump's "America First" strategy. Now, as the United States scrambles to secure equipment to fight the coronavirus, Mr. Navarro has been handed expansive authority over those multinational firms and their global supply chains. As the policy coordinator for the Defense Production Act, a Korean War era law that the president recently invoked, Mr. Navarro is tasked with marshaling American industry to procure face masks, ventilators and other products hospitals need in their fight against the coronavirus. He has been given the authority to order up products, block exports and claim goods made overseas by subsidiaries of American companies. He can also seize products from hoarders and price gougers and channel them to where they are most needed. It is a vast expansion of power for the 70 year old Mr. Navarro, as well as a rare opportunity to advance the type of protectionist agenda that has endeared him to Mr. Trump. A Harvard trained economist whose ideas put him at odds with most of his profession, Mr. Navarro has antagonized multinational companies by pushing to scrap trade deals and impose tariffs on foreign products. He is now positioned to channel government resources into bolstering American manufacturing and to bully multinational companies to sever their ties abroad. Already Mr. Navarro has used his newfound authority to help force General Motors to ramp up its production of ventilators and to seize caches of face masks from hoarders around the country. On Friday, the administration issued a potentially sweeping executive order granting Mr. Navarro and other officials the authority to prevent 3M and other companies from sending medical supplies overseas. Mr. Navarro's aggressive approach has not been confined to industry. He has played the antagonist within the Trump administration, clashing with more moderate economic advisers like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over trade issues. During a meeting in the White House Situation Room on Saturday, Mr. Navarro sparred with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, over potential drug treatments for the coronavirus. "What you are seeing is just the beginning," Daniel DiMicco, a former trade adviser to Mr. Trump who leads the Coalition for a Prosperous America, said of Mr. Navarro using the law to reshore American manufacturing. "It's time for our multinationals to get on board." Mr. Navarro has plenty of critics who say the tactics will roil geopolitical relations and could hurt the United States by prompting other countries to restrict their exports, too. "There's a real danger that in an attempt to try to safeguard your own citizens you actually make the situation much, much worse," said Rufus Yerxa, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents the United States' largest exporters. "The reality is for a lot of types of medical equipment, we import more than we export." "We should be trying to figure out how to coordinate with other countries to come up with some solution other than everybody getting involved in a beggar thy neighbor death spiral," Mr. Yerxa added. Mr. Trump initially seemed reluctant to use the Defense Production Act, which offers broad powers, including the ability to force a company to prioritize government contracts and distribute their products where the government dictates. Even as governors and mayors scrambled through much of March to secure limited supplies of ventilators and protective gear, the president said that taking control of industry through the law would be un American, and that private companies were voluntarily meeting America's needs. But in the last two weeks, as the U.S. case count grew and hospitals warned of deadly supply shortages, Mr. Trump reversed course. He appointed Mr. Navarro to oversee the application of the production act, and began weaponizing it against companies he viewed as too reluctant to help, including General Motors and 3M. On Saturday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that his use of the act was a form of "retaliation" against these companies. "If people don't give us what we need for our people, we're going to be very tough, and we've been very tough," he said. "Usually, we don't have to use it, but we've used it plenty. It's turning out more and more, unfortunately. And it works very well." 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 an interview, Mr. Navarro said he had spoken to hundreds of American executives, including from General Dynamics, Raytheon, Pernod Ricard, UPS, FedEx and Honeywell, as well as New York hospital and law enforcement personnel and Mayor Bill de Blasio, to try to ramp up production and surge supplies to hot spots. The vast majority of executives had been eager to do whatever was asked of them, Mr. Navarro said. But he said Mr. Trump would not hesitate to take additional actions under the act to mobilize industry, allocate resources and prevent hoarding in the coming weeks. He also said Customs and Border Protection, working with the United States Postal Service, was prepared to begin seizing black market exports of masks and other medical supplies. Mr. Navarro said that the administration was using the authority of the Defense Production Act as a "helping hand" to assist companies, but that "when patriotic volunteerism or the invisible hand of the market isn't working, you may need the visible foot of the D.P.A." He pointed to 3M, saying that the company had been unwilling to disclose information about the distribution of masks it produces around the world and to provide them to the American people. But it pushed back against a request to halt exports of its U.S. made masks, which go to Canada and Latin America, saying the move would have "significant humanitarian implications" and would probably cause other countries to impose their own restrictions, decreasing America's respirator supplies overall. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Navarro has never seemed too concerned about prompting retaliation. Over the last three years, he has used his perch at the White House to push for tariffs on foreign metals, solar panels, washing machines and a wide variety of Chinese products, igniting multiple trade spats. His efforts have earned some praise from labor unions, but the ire of multinational businesses, which have faced higher costs and reduced access to other markets as a result of Mr. Trump's trade wars. Mr. Navarro has long criticized multinational companies for putting profits before workers. In his 2011 book "Death by China," Mr. Navarro accused major American firms including General Motors, Microsoft and Caterpillar of helping China take down the American industries, as they offshored jobs to maximize their profits. To Mr. Navarro, the current predicament is a vivid illustration of that phenomenon: Decades of offshoring have eroded American manufacturing, leaving the country unable to produce an array of goods and putting it at the mercy of foreign governments in times of crisis. Mr. Navarro has spent the past few months working on an executive order that would try to bolster domestic manufacturing of pharmaceuticals by toughening "Buy American" rules for the federal government. Momentum for that order appears to have stalled after opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, Republican lawmakers and some in the White House, who argued that the measure could result in higher prices or even shortages. But it is clear that Mr. Navarro thinks the production act, and especially its funding provision known as Title III, might provide him with another way to bolster drug manufacturing. The economic stabilization package Congress passed last month included 1 billion in funding for the law, including for purchases of medicines and protective gear. Trump administration officials have said they may seek more. "Frankly, his appointment poses the risk that D.P.A. authorities will be used opportunistically to pursue an isolationist Fortress America agenda that long preceded the present crisis and that would further divide us from allies," he said. Foreign leaders have already expressed concern about America's moves to commandeer 3M's global production. Canada's deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, said at a news conference on Friday that the country's ministers were reaching out to American officials "very energetically" and would "press very hard" to ensure that 3M could still provide its American made masks. German officials also criticized the American government for seizing a shipment of 200,000 masks in Thailand that were headed for the Berlin Police Department last week. According to the German news media, the masks were made by 3M. "We view this as an act of modern piracy," Andrea Geisel, a Berlin official who oversees the Police Department, said in a statement. "That's not how you treat trans Atlantic partners." In a statement Sunday, 3M disputed the report, saying it had no record of any such order, nor evidence to suggest its products had been seized. Supporters of the Trump administration's tactics say the United States is not the only country playing tough. Germany has placed restrictions on exports of protective equipment and other medical products, as have India, China, Turkey and other European nations. As of April 4, 69 nations had put limits on exports of medical supplies at some point this year, including the United States, according to tracking by Simon Evenett, a professor of international trade at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York, and Jack Ewing from Frankfurt. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
You may wonder, after "The Appointment" is over, if it wasn't all a hallucination. Perhaps that is an appropriate response to an abortion themed musical one that begins with a performing group of winsome fetuses, as hungry for love and approval as the anxious dancers from "A Chorus Line." Yes, they do sing, and dance in formation, too, extolling their charms and virtues and chanting "me, me, me, me, me," as their umbilical cords wag in rhythm. They will later show up to play peekaboo, among other games, with audience members, and to argue heatedly over their destinies during a Thanksgiving dinner featuring a prophesy spouting fetus turkey. And just so you know, there's a Jesus like evangelist fetus as well, urging the protection and salvation of his kind. "The Appointment," which opened on Saturday at Next Door at New York Theater Workshop, is the kind of show that makes you feel that you must be under ether, as if during an operation. What you will definitely not feel after this remarkable phantasmagoria from the Lightning Rod Special troupe is clearheaded. Or smug, or righteous, or vindicated in your beliefs, no matter what they are, about an endlessly divisive subject. Lightning Rod Special is the Philadelphia based company that gave us "Underground Railroad Game," a show that used a middle school classroom format to dive deep, really deep, into the emotional and sexual dynamics of interracial relationships. That production was a bona fide shocker, in the best tradition of taboo busting art, and you might have thought that this troupe had gone about as far as it could go in the theater of discomfort. But "The Appointment," created by a four member writing team led by Alice Yorke and directed by Eva Steinmetz, made me feel just as uneasy, offended, engrossed and, finally, enlightened as "Underground Railroad Game" had. I hasten to add that enlightenment, in this case, involves no definitive conclusions. Unfolded in a series of songs (composed by the musically multilingual Alex Bechtel) and sketches, this production implicitly pushes arguments for and against abortion to their extreme limits. Those phalanxes of adorable singing fetuses (Jill Keys did the anatomically specific costumes) might be perceived as the ultimate guilt tripping fantasy for anyone thinking about terminating a pregnancy. "We'll make you feel so whole," they warble, with Shirley Temple lisps and gurgling giggles, in the opening sequence. "We're what you've dreamed of." As befits the perversely vaudevillian logic of this show, these squirming figures live in terror of the hook, which could well materialize from the wings to interrupt their performances. Accordingly, the set designed by Oona Curley, with lighting by Masha Tsimring and sound by Liz Atkinson presents the womb as a music hall, with red velvet curtains and a three piece band. In subsequent sequences, members of their unlikely chorus show up to ask ontological questions, flirt transgressively with potential daddies and reproachfully and fearfully imagine the lives they have yet to live. One of them (played by Jaime Maseda), wrapped in a torn garbage bag, becomes a hobbled nightmare musician, taking over the keyboards at the back of the stage to rasp out, "I never learned to walk/I never learned to run/I never learned to drive into the setting sun." At other points, they wonder if emerging from the womb is really such a good idea. "You'll have to rip me out, clawing at the lining," sing two African American fetuses, portrayed by Brett Ashley Robinson and Brenson Thomas. "My terror is blinding at the thought of your world." (Their reluctance may have something to do with their race.) As you may have gathered, this is not the stuff of classic agitprop cabaret. Only the evangelical scene, led by Katie Gould's crowd rousing pastor, comes close to conventional sketch satire. Other scenes are more subtle in their polemical thrust. A trio of doctors (Mr. Maseda, Mr. Thomas and Scott R. Sheppard) pick up the mics to sing testimonials from women who feel their lives were ruined by having abortions. Please note that the singers themselves are all male. Seated in a waiting room, the potential clients of these men embodied by Ms. Yorke, Ms. Gould, Ms. Robinson and Lee Minora perform what is the show's most directly affecting number, the one that probably comes closest to a mission statement. Leafing through magazines, which they calmly tear to pieces as the scene proceeds, they deliver their lyrics with cool deliberation. "I'm not a fable or a hashtag or a cautionary tale," they sing. And: "I'm not ashamed or embarrassed or incomplete./I don't feel different, or stronger." They are tired of other people's assumptions, they say, and tired of being shouted at. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Donald Trump is the oldest person ever elected president. If Joe Biden wins in November he will break Trump's record. Both men are in their seventies, and this week their health re emerged in the presidential race in major ways. First, we learned from a forthcoming book by my colleague Michael Schmidt, that when Donald Trump made his mysterious, unscheduled visit to Walter Reed military hospital last fall, Vice President Mike Pence was put on standby to assume the presidency. "In reporting for this book, I learned that in the hours leading up to Trump's trip to the hospital, word went out in the West Wing for the vice president to be on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized." This was apparently not necessary, but we still don't know the reason for the visit. At the time, the White House said that Trump was getting a head start on his annual physical, but that never made sense. Mike Pence said that he didn't recall being put on standby on that particular day, as if that was a thing one would forget. He said he was always on standby to replace the boss. What medical need could the president have had that could not be handled by medics in the White House? CNN's Sanjay Gupta said after Schmidt's revelation was made public that such a hospital visit typically "comes down to two issues: Something to do with the brain or something to do with the heart." This is particularly worrisome since Trump has recently displayed odd behavior like struggling to lift a glass of water, walking gingerly down a ramp and repeatedly slurring his words. "It never ends! Now they are trying to say that your favorite President, me, went to Walter Reed Medical Center, having suffered a series of mini strokes. Never happened to THIS candidate FAKE NEWS. Perhaps they are referring to another candidate from another Party!" That leads to the second revelation this week: ABC News reported that "In early July the Department of Homeland Security withheld publication of an intelligence bulletin warning law enforcement agencies of a Russian scheme to promote 'allegations about the poor mental health' of former Vice President Joe Biden." The bulletin assessed with "high confidence," that "Russian malign influence actors are likely to continue denigrating presidential candidates through allegations of poor mental or physical health to influence the outcome of the 2020 election." This is a line of attack that Trump himself initiated against Biden months ago. Dan Scavino, the White House media director, has shared several doctored videos of Biden, some clearly meant to suggest that Biden has some form of mental decline. One video from March, retweeted by Trump, shows Biden slurring his words and stumbling over them. Twitter labeled the video "manipulated media." Biden does sometimes stumble over words or search for them, but he has attributed this to his lifelong struggle with stuttering. While delivering remarks in Wilmington, N.C., on Wednesday, Trump recognized Hershel "Woody" Williams, a veteran, and couldn't miss the opportunity to compare the 96 year old Marine (Trump incorrectly stated that he was 97) to Biden: "I'll tell you, he's a 100 percent sharp. He's a 100 percent sharp," Trump said of Williams. I know a 78 year old that's not so sharp, but he's 97, and he's 100 percent. It has nothing to do with that. Seventy eight is young. It depends on who's 78." Listen, the truth is that Trump and Biden are two elderly men. Their age will manifest in their appearance and comportment, and because we are human beings, our health has a natural cognitive decline as we grow older. Those are just facts. We as voters have to decide to what degree those things should matter in the selection of a president. Being healthy enough to do the job sounds like a simple standard, but that metric can easily tip over into ageism. Is the slurring of words, the searching for words, or a feeble comportment not to be expected, even if occasionally, of septuagenarians? I search for words now more than I used to and I'm 50. Still, to some degree, front of mind or not, age and health will be on the ballot in November. But it seems to me that the concern over the health of these two candidates cancels each other out. If so, what remains are policy and character, and on those measures the choice is clear. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter ( NYTopinion), and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The first gene therapy treatment in the United States was approved recently by the Food and Drug Administration, heralding a new era in medicine that is coming faster than most realize and that perhaps few can afford. The treatment, Kymriah, made by Novartis, is spectacularly effective against a rare form of leukemia, bringing remissions when all conventional options have failed. It will cost 475,000. With gene therapy, scientists seek to treat or prevent disease by modifying cellular DNA. Many such treatments are in the wings: There are 34 in the final stages of testing necessary for F.D.A. approval, and another 470 in initial clinical trials, according to the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, an advocacy group. The therapies are aimed at extremely rare diseases with few patients; most are meant to cure with a single injection or procedure. But the costs, like that of Kymriah, are expected to be astronomical, alarming medical researchers and economists. One drug, to prevent blindness in those with a rare genetic disease, for example, is expected to cost between 700,000 and 900,000 per patient on average, noted Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, director of the program on regulation, therapeutics and law at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Drug makers argue that the prices ought to reflect the value of a curative treatment to the patient. Dr. Kesselheim and other experts are far from convinced. "We don't pay the fire department that way," he said. "When the fire department shows up at a burning house, they don't ask, 'How much is it worth to you to put out the fire?' " Executives at drug companies declined to say what they plan to charge for the gene therapies they are developing. But they said a variety of factors justified setting unprecedented prices. By definition, there are very few patients with the rare diseases that the treatments target. Companies thus will have comparatively fewer opportunities to make enough money to pay for their investment, to turn a profit and to fund future research. "When you are spending a lot of money to develop therapies for a rare disease, you need to enable a larger price umbrella," Mr. Kapusta said. "If you are saving 5 million per patient, that gives you a sense of value to the payer." Jeffrey D. Marrazzo, chief executive of Spark Therapeutics, which is developing the drug to prevent a form of blindness, said it should be worth a lot to keep your eyesight. "We should be compensated for generating that value," he said. Elizabeth Pingpank, a spokeswoman for Bluebird Bio, which is developing several gene therapies, said the company realizes its prices will be a challenge. Bluebird and several other companies have set up a consortium with academics to try to figure out novel ways to enable insurers to pay the expected high prices. "We recognize that most payers in the U.S. are not currently set up to support one time therapies that generate long term transformative benefits," Ms. Pingpank said. Indeed, health care executives already are rushing to develop new payment models. When Kymriah was approved, officials at Novartis said they would take the unusual step of taking into account how well it worked in a particular patient. The company said it was collaborating with the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on an approach in which, for children and young adults, there would be no charge if the patient did not respond to the treatment within a month. If, as expected, Kymriah is approved for other blood cancers, its price may vary depending on how effective it is for those diseases. Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit manager that contracts with insurance companies to provide medications to patients, has taken up the cost question with gene therapy companies, insurers and the federal government. "It's amazing how many think this is in the future," said Dr. Steve Miller, chief medical officer at Express Scripts, said of the looming payment problem. "This is right now." The idea favored by Dr. Miller and others is to pay for these novel drugs as you might a mortgage on a house. Bluebird Bio has a market capitalization of 4 billion, although it has no product yet, noted Dr. Peter B. Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Investors "are confident that when they get one of these cures approved, they will get a magnificent price," he said. Drug makers have long argued that rising prices are necessary to support the costs of research and development. Yet a study published on Monday estimated the cost of developing a new cancer drug to be far less than many experts had believed, even as revenues have soared. The industry's warnings that without high reimbursements, the field of gene therapy will wither is "the classic story of the boy who cried wolf," Dr. Bach said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
How Much Wealthier Are White School Districts Than Nonwhite Ones? 23 Billion, Report Says School districts that predominantly serve students of color received 23 billion less in funding than mostly white school districts in the United States in 2016, despite serving the same number of students, a new report found. The report, released this week by the nonprofit EdBuild, put a dollar amount on the problem of school segregation, which has persisted long after Brown v. Board of Education and was targeted in recent lawsuits in states from New Jersey to Minnesota. The estimate also came as teachers across the country have protested and gone on strike to demand more funding for public schools. "You can tell these dollars make a difference," said Rebecca Sibilia, the chief executive of EdBuild, a nonpartisan organization focused on improving the way states fund public education. "Walk into a rural nonwhite community," she said. "Walk into an urban nonwhite school district. You can see what that means in terms of how much that has added up over time." The report took aim at school district borders, which it said can chop up communities and wall off wealthier districts to fund their schools with local property tax revenue, while poorer districts are unable to generate the same revenue. "Because schools rely heavily on local taxes, drawing borders around small, wealthy communities benefits the few at the detriment of the many," the report said. The report, which looked at state and local funding for school districts in the 2015 16 school year, found that more than half of the nation's schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or nonwhite. On average, nonwhite districts received about 2,200 less per student than districts that were predominantly white, according to the report. School districts are generally funded locally, but states are supposed to "fill in the gaps" so communities are evenly funded despite wealth disparities, Ms. Sibilia said. The report showed that in many states, "they are not keeping up with their own obligation," she said. Differences in funding translate to the classroom, where underfunded communities often use older, worn textbooks and have less access to computers, said Francesca Lopez, associate dean of the College of Education at the University of Arizona. "I can tell you as a parent and as a researcher, when I walk into a school district that is in one of these low funded areas, it is a stark contrast," Dr. Lopez said. "They are basic rights to education, but look like amenities in comparison. It's dramatic." The report identified certain states, like New Jersey, as among the "worst offenders." In New Jersey, which divides students up into more than 500 districts, predominantly nonwhite districts received about 3,400 less per student than mostly white districts, the report said. A spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Education said he had not seen the report and could not immediately comment. Arizona also had one of the most drastic differences in funding among states listed in the report. Dr. Lopez said that in her state, "boundary lines are a huge contributor because of gerrymandering, segregation and zoning." But she said the situation in Arizona was exacerbated by a new kind of "white flight" because of the popularity of charter schools and open enrollment, a policy that allows parents to request that their children attend schools outside the district. In Arizona, funding generally follows the student, rather than staying in the district. "It's depleting even more funding from these districts that were already at a disadvantage to begin with," Dr. Lopez said. Richie Taylor, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Education, said the department was aware of disparities in the state but did not believe the gap was "as egregious" as the report suggested. "Equity and fairness are a major concern for us and we are open to exploring a variety of options to address these problems," he said in a statement. But he said the State Legislature would need to take action to consolidate school districts, something school boards generally oppose. "It is far from certain that consolidation would help here," he said. "What will help is more funding for education across the board," with a focus on addressing inequities. But Ms. Sibilia said that larger, more inclusive school district borders could help "smooth out" some of the wealth disparities in many places in the United States. "If you have a wealthy suburb or subdivision that happens to have very high value homes, that is a subdivision that is going to be able to raise a significant amount of money from their property taxes," she said. "If you have a huge shopping mall in a suburb and you have a school district where they can keep their sales taxes, that's also going to play a role in the ability to spread out that money." But right now, Ms. Sibilia said, about 180 school districts nationwide exist entirely within a larger school district a figure she said showed how some school districts have become their own enclaves. "When it comes to education," she said, "it is a public good and people need to share their wealth with their neighbors." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
SAN FRANCISCO Uber has made a takeover offer to buy Postmates, the upstart delivery service, according to three people familiar with the matter, as the on demand food delivery market consolidates and Uber looks for new ways to make money. The two companies could reach a deal as early as Monday evening, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so publicly. The talks are still going on, the people cautioned, and any potential for a deal could fall apart. Uber is discussing buying Postmates for about 2.6 billion, one of the people said. Representatives of Uber and Postmates declined to comment on any potential deal talks. A tie up could bolster Uber's delivery business, Uber Eats, and help it compensate for the cratering of its core ride hailing business, which has collapsed in many cities because of the coronavirus pandemic. Food delivery is not profitable, but demand has soared while restaurants are closed and people are staying at home. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In the usual cancer biopsy, a surgeon cuts out a piece of the patient's tumor, but researchers in labs across the country are now testing a potentially transformative innovation. They call it the liquid biopsy, and it is a blood test that has only recently become feasible with the latest exquisitely sensitive techniques. It is showing promise in finding tiny snippets of cancer DNA in a patient's blood. The hope is that a simple blood draw far less onerous for patients than a traditional biopsy or a CT scan will enable oncologists to quickly figure out whether a treatment is working and, if it is, to continue monitoring the treatment in case the cancer develops resistance. Failing treatments could be abandoned quickly, sparing patients grueling side effects and allowing doctors to try alternatives. "This could change forever the way we follow up not only response to treatments but also the emergence of resistance, and down the line could even be used for really early diagnosis," said Dr. Jose Baselga, physician in chief and chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Researchers caution that more evaluations of the test's accuracy and reliability are needed. So far, there have been only small studies in particular cancers, including lung, colon and blood cancer. But early results are encouraging. A National Cancer Institute study published this month in The Lancet Oncology, involving 126 patients with the most common form of lymphoma, found the test predicted recurrences more than three months before they were noticeable on CT scans. The liquid biopsies also identified patients unlikely to respond to therapy. Oncologists who are not using the new test say they are looking on with fascination. "Our lab doesn't do it, but we are very interested," said Dr. Levi Garraway of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Researchers are finding out things about individuals' cancers that astonish them. MarySusan Sabini, a fifth grade teacher from Gardiner, N.Y., has lung cancer that resisted two attempts at chemotherapy and a round of radiation. Her doctors at Sloan Kettering saw cancer DNA in her blood when she began taking an experimental drug in October that was her last hope. Four days later, the cancer DNA shards had vanished, a sign, the doctors hoped, that the treatment was working. But they dared not tell her the good tidings. The blood test itself was so new they were afraid to rely on it. Within weeks, Ms. Sabini began to breathe easier. Months later, she had a CT scan, an X ray test that uses a computer to assemble detailed images of slices of tumor tissue. It confirmed her tumors were shrinking. "Every cancer has a mutation that can be followed with this method," said Dr. David Hyman, the oncologist at Sloan Kettering who is leading the study of the experimental drug Ms. Sabini takes. "It is like bar coding the cancer in the blood." The idea for the test grew out of a discovery made years ago about fetuses: They shed little pieces of DNA into the bloodstreams of mothers to be. It turned out that all growing cells, including tumors, shed tiny DNA fragments. But finding those minuscule bits of DNA, floating in a sea of other molecules, is not easy. They remain in circulation for just a couple of hours before they are metabolized. And the detection method became useful only when cancer researchers, using advanced methods for DNA sequencing, found hundreds of mutations that could serve as bar codes for cancers and developed the technology for finding a snippet of DNA. The standard methods of assessing a treatment's effectiveness have serious drawbacks. Doctors routinely monitor patients for symptoms like pain or shortness of breath, but some people do not have any. In those who do, it can take time for such symptoms to wane the tumor can die, but the body has to heal. Patients often have scans to determine if tumors are shrinking, but it can take weeks or months before a tumor looks smaller on a scan, in part because a scan shows not just the cancer but also connective tissue, immune system cells and scars at the site. Doctors can be fooled into thinking a tumor is present when, in fact, it is gone. "When you are treating a patient and we see this many times your treatment is quite effective but there is some residual lesion on a scan," Dr. Hyman said. "You take the patient to surgery for a biopsy, and all you see is scar tissue. There is no visible cancer there." The blood tests also allow frequent monitoring of tumors as they spread and mutate or develop resistance to treatment. The only other way to know is with biopsies. "I cannot do a weekly liver biopsy and see how things are going," Dr. Baselga said. "But I can do a blood test every week." Another possible application early diagnosis of cancer is trickier. If a blood test showed cancer DNA, what would that mean? Where is the tumor, and would it help to find and treat it early? Some cancers stop growing or go away on their own. With others, the outcome is just as good if the cancer is found later. One early use for DNA blood tests may be helping doctors decide which patients with Stage 2 colon cancer need chemotherapy. Eighty percent of patients with these large tumors that have not spread outside the colon are cured by surgery alone; the rest have recurrences. Six months of intense chemotherapy reduces the risk the cancer will return, but there is no way to predict who needs the treatment. Two Australian scientists, working with Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins, wondered if a cancer DNA blood test might be predictive. They began with a study of 250 patients, looking for cancer DNA in blood after surgery. The tumors recurred in 80 percent of those with cancer DNA in their blood but only 6 to 8 percent of those whose blood did not have detectable cancer DNA. Now the Australian researchers, Dr. Jeanne Tie and Dr. Peter Gibbs of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, are starting a study of 450 patients randomly assigned to have the blood test or not. Those who have it will get chemotherapy if the test finds cancer DNA. Those who do not have the blood test will get usual care, whatever their physician prescribes. The patients will be told their blood test results, although the investigators worry how some will react. "If you find DNA and tell the patient there is a very high risk of recurrence, that creates a lot of anxiety," Dr. Gibbs said. "And we are not sure chemotherapy will be helpful." The blood test, they hope, will answer that question. "This will be the first real test of whether circulating tumor DNA can be clinically useful," Dr. Vogelstein said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
If you can overlook the rather cumbersome title, Maxine Trump's sophomore feature, "To Kid or Not to Kid," has an appealingly scattered charm. Like the issue it obsesses over whether or not she should have a child this deeply personal documentary is messy, emotionally complicated and a magnet for strong opinions. Those judgments, samples of which we're shown fulminating online and on television, are often rude and sometimes hateful toward those who have decided to live child free. To Trump, who has led an itinerant life and fears that children might stifle her dreams, this vindictiveness and stigmatizing is upsetting. Married and in her 40s, she decides it's time to consciously grapple with the pros and cons of motherhood. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"Joy is a strength; intoxication, a weakness," wrote the 19th century Danish choreographer August Bournonville, whose ballets are almost anomalies for their unassuming, unaffected delicacy and charm. In them, feet spring with such elasticity that jumps seem to come out of nowhere; chests open with dignity, not dash; and arms, softly rounded with upturned palms, are like the start of a hug. Prudence and modesty increasingly uncommon in today's culture are prized in a Bournonville ballet. And even when there isn't enough space between spectator and stage, and performances have their fair share of opening night bobbles, watching dancers from the Royal Danish Ballet perform Bournonville's choreography is an all too rare occasion. His ballets have a soothing effect on the soul. On Tuesday, the Joyce Theater hosted "The Bournonville Legacy," a program arranged by Ulrik Birkkjaer, a former principal at the Royal Danish Ballet and now a principal at the San Francisco Ballet. The showcase, uneven at times, wasn't served well by the theater; its intimacy is fine for contemporary ballet, but Bournonville needs more distance, more scope. It was the kind of night in which you couldn't help flinching at the dancers' nearness and holding your breath as you willed them to hold their landings. The evening began on a tragic note with the second half of "La Sylphide." In it, James (Mr. Birkkjaer), a young Scotsman, becomes transfixed by a magical sylph (Ida Praetorius) on his wedding day. It doesn't end well, and ultimately it was the malicious witch, played by Sorella Englund, a former principal dancer who is now a ballet master and coach with the Royal Danish Ballet, who took possession of the stage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
PHILADELPHIA " Tonight you are in a blended world," said M.C. Jack Mizrahi, a ballroom veteran and historian, at the Champion Art Ball . "We're going to take art, we're going to take vogue, we're going to take ballroom, and we're going to give you a tableau vivant right in front of your face. This is a safe space for everybody, we can learn from each other." And on a chilly night in November at Philadelphia's Icebox Project Space, members of the East Coast ballroom community shimmied and sashayed in a room that crackled with possibility. The Champion Art Ball, along with an exhibition at Philadelphia Photo Arts Center called "To Be Real" and a Vogue Femme dance performance piece, are part of a larger project called "Black Magic" by interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome. Mr. Newsome, whose work explores blackness and the intersectionality of identity and oppression , was introduced to New York's underground ballroom scene over 18 years ago through the black queer collective where he lived in a pre gentrification Dumbo. Like so many young gay, queer, trans and nonbinary people of color before him, Mr. Newsome found a community in the ballroom scene. The scene's "houses," led by ballroom legends known as "mothers" and "fathers, act as surrogate families for disenfranchised black and Latino L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. youth; the houses are an integral part of the ballroom community. The modern ballroom scene originated in Harlem in the 1970s. What began as and still is a safe haven for at risk black and Latino youth has evolved into a sophisticated ecosystem, complete with a global network of houses, a plethora of legendary personalities, a distinct dialect and a massive digital following. With the popularity of FX's ballroom based show "Pose," Mr. Newsome's concerns over who controls the narrative of ballroom culture are particularly pertinent, and he wants to give agency to the queer people of color who were integral to its creation. "I just want to see people, particularly black and Latino queer people, be in more control of the culture," Mr. Newsome said. "You have these flaneurs who come and just take. And there's a legacy of that with every cultural production, and vogue is no exception. I feel like it's something that kind of happened before around the movie, 'Paris is Burning.' And then it was like, 'O.K., that's finished.'" He added: "While in reality it was still growing and evolving." The Champion Art Ball consisted of five categories inspired by the work of queer black artists like Mickalene Thomas, Zanele Muholi and Marlon Riggs as a way to counteract the fact that the "houses are all named after very wealthy white European men," said Mr. Newsome, like the House of Balenciaga. "What I'm trying to do is eviscerate that frame within ballroom," he said. "What does it mean for you to walk and look at someone like Mickalene Thomas's work and reimagine it on the ballroom floor?" As the competition begins, a vision straight out of a Mickalene Thomas painting, dressed in a patchwork pantsuit, sashayed up the runway, their mile high Afro bouncing to each beat. Soon after there was a "battle of epic hands," where participants tell a story using only their upper bodies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
At a meeting with the leaders of several construction and building trade unions, President Trump reiterated on Monday his interest in directing hundreds of billions of dollars to infrastructure investments, some of it from the federal government, union officials said. "That was the impression I was taken away with," said Sean McGarvey, the president of North America's Building Trades Unions, an umbrella group, on a call with reporters after the meeting. "That the American citizenry and the American Treasury will be invested in building public infrastructure." Mr. McGarvey added that Mr. Trump clearly felt that much of the money should come from the private sector and that some of the investments could take the form of public private partnerships, an idea the president floated as a candidate. The meeting included roughly half a dozen union leaders and a similar number of rank and file members, as well as senior White House officials, including Vice President Mike Pence; Reince Priebus, the chief of staff; Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff; Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist; Kellyanne Conway, the president's counselor; and Sean Spicer, the press secretary. It took place in the White House and ran for well over an hour. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
A Houseboat on the Seine in Central Paris This 125 foot houseboat is anchored on the Right Bank of the Seine in central Paris, steps from attractions like the Tuileries Garden and the Louvre. Built in 1920 from iron, teak and mahogany, and once used for transporting sand around France, the houseboat currently houses a two bedroom apartment and two studios, totaling about 2,000 feet of living space. It was renovated in 2013. "When you're outside on the terrace, upstairs, it's like you're living in a postcard," said Leandra Choay, an agent with Belles Demeures de France, a Christie's International Real Estate affiliate, which has the listing. "You have the Assemblee Nationale, you have the Musee d'Orsay, you have a view of the Eiffel Tower, you have a view of the Grand Palais." A ramp from the dock leads to the 1,290 square foot main apartment. Down a short staircase is the living space, which includes a living room and dining area and a kitchen in the rear. The two bedrooms are down a small hallway from the living area, and share a bathroom with a tub and shower. Behind the kitchen is the smaller of the two studios, which is 215 square feet and includes a bathroom and a kitchenette. The studio in the back, which is 430 square feet, is rented for about 10,000 euros ( 11,200) a year. Each studio has a private terrace. Ms. Choay said the setup suits families with teenage or grown children. "Both studios have outdoor independent access, but they could be opened up to become part of the main apartment," she said. Two parking spaces are next to the houseboat, and access to the dock is private. Many of central Paris's attractions are nearby: The Petit Palais and Grand Palais are across the street; the Louvre is a short walk away; and the Musee d'Orsay is directly across the Seine. The nearest metro stop is a five minute walk, and Charles de Gaulle Airport is about 40 minutes away by car. The average price for an existing apartment in Paris (as opposed to new development) surpassed its 2011 peak in early 2019 and continues to rise, said Kathryn Brown, the director of operations for the real estate agency Paris Property Group. According to the city's association of notaries, the average sale price in the most expensive area, the Sixth Arrondissement, climbed from about 11,300 euros a square meter ( 1,165 a square foot) in January 2015 to about 14,000 euros a square meter ( 1,450 a square foot) in January 2019. In the most affordable district, the 19th Arrondissement, the average sale price rose from 6,500 euros a square meter ( 675 a square foot) in January 2015 to 8,350 euros a square meter ( 860 a square foot) in January 2019. The rising prices can be partly attributed to the perpetually high demand and limited supply in the Paris housing market, where new developments are scarce, said Charles Marie Jottras, the president of Daniel Feau and Belles Demeures de France, a luxury real estate agency. Other recent factors, agents said, include low interest rates and Britain's impending exit from the European Union, which has spurred French people living in Britain and British people with ties to France to buy property in Paris. President Emmanuel Macron's administration has also enticed luxury buyers by reversing taxes on the wealthy enacted by his predecessor, Francois Hollande, said Alexander V.G. Kraft, the chairman of Sotheby's International Realty France Monaco. Many affluent buyers, who had left France or opted to wait, returned in great numbers under Mr. Macron, causing "almost a frenzy," Mr. Kraft said. "Last year, we have seen big properties sell within 24 hours, like in London and New York many years ago," he said. "It's something that was unheard of in Paris or France." While there are many studios and one bedroom apartments in Paris, family size units are scarce and tend to sell quickly, Mr. Jottras said. Homes in the "bourgeois arrondissements" the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth, as well as the calmer, more family oriented 16th are always in demand, he said. But with buyers getting priced out of the center and western parts of the city, he added, the definition of a desirable neighborhood is expanding. "Paris is becoming a big, bourgeois city. There are less sociological differences than before," Mr. Jottras said. "If you want to live in Paris, you have to have money almost anywhere." Mr. Kraft said he expects the market to begin leveling off as buyers balk at rising prices although not in the gentrifying neighborhoods: "We're just at the start of this curve, so there's still time to get in there. And I think prices will go up in those quarters." But Pierre Alain Conil, a partner with the Paris notary firm Morel d'Arleux Notaires, predicted that prices will continue to rise across the city, because of low interest rates and limited housing supply. "Five years ago, we thought we were already at the peak," he said. "Two years ago, we thought we were already at the peak. It seems like it's going to stay like that at least for some years." Buyers in Paris have historically split evenly between French and foreign, Mr. Kraft said. But in the past two or three years, there has been a shift toward domestic buyers, who are "playing catch up, so to speak," he added. As for foreigners, Mr. Kraft said that in the past year his agency has had clients from the United States, China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Switzerland. Mr. Conil said he has seen an increase in buyers with ties to Britain. "They fear they will not be allowed to stay in the U.K. after Brexit," he said. "Or they fear that the pound will drop after Brexit, so they want to invest in Europe." Ms. Brown works with English speaking buyers, most of them from the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia. Those buyers are not relocating, she said; they are investing or want a pied a terre, or both. There are no restrictions on foreigners owning property in France. Notaries with legal training, rather than lawyers or real estate agents, handle transactions in France, Mr. Conil said. The total fees paid by the buyer, including the notary's fee, are on a sliding scale, so the percentage decreases as the price of the property rises; they typically run about 7.5 percent of the sale price. "Only a handful of French banks still work with U.S. citizens, because of the FATCA regulations," he said, referring to the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, American tax laws with which foreign banks must comply. So planning ahead for a mortgage, he said, is essential. There is no property tax on this home, although the owner pays approximately 1,050 euros ( 1,170) a month, which includes a habitation tax, as well as dock and parking fees, Ms. Choay said. Water and electricity run about 200 euros ( 225) a month. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The parents of Seth Rich, a Democratic aide whose unsolved murder became fodder for right wing conspiracy theories about the 2016 election, reached a settlement on Tuesday with Fox News, whose coverage linked Mr. Rich to email hacks that aided President Trump's 2016 presidential run. Joel and Mary Rich, the parents of the murdered aide, had filed a lawsuit against Fox News in 2018, accusing the news organization of "extreme and outrageous" conduct in its coverage of their son's death, claiming that it had fueled damaging rumors about him. Mr. and Mrs. Rich said in a statement on Tuesday that they could now move on. "The settlement with Fox News closes another chapter in our efforts to mourn the murder of our beloved Seth, whom we miss every single day," the couple said. "We are pleased with the settlement of this matter and sincerely hope that the media will take genuine caution in the future." The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Mr. Rich, a Democratic National Committee staff member, was shot in the back and killed on July 10, 2016, near his home in Washington. The case is unsolved, and authorities have said they believed it was a failed robbery. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
When the pandemic slammed into New York City in March, Sally Fischer, a lifelong Manhattanite, assumed she would take refuge with her family in their apartment in Columbus Circle. But in May, Ms. Fischer, her husband, Elliott Upton, and their 22 year old son, Jack, picked up and moved to their weekend home in Southampton. Although they only went to the Long Island property seven times last year, they now plan to remain there at least through October. "This experience has rekindled our love for this house," Ms. Fischer said. Ms. Fischer, whose company, Sally Fischer Public Relations, represents entertainment, food and fashion clients, is working remotely. She has filled her home with many of the career treasures that once adorned her now vacant Manhattan office, including a poster of Jeremy Irons, her longtime client, in the movie "Moonlighting," and a pencil holder and paper tray she bought years ago in Florence. Some second home owners are buying new furniture and reconfiguring their properties to better accommodate their new habits, like remaking guest bedrooms into home offices and getting the necessary items to work and school from home. Others are considering more expansive renovations to their properties, such as upgrading aging kitchens or building additions. There are those who have relocated their businesses to their weekend houses potentially for the long term and others who are adding their children's names to school rosters in these towns as an option come September. While living full time in places that usually get much less wear and tear, these homeowners share many of the same difficulties as anyone dealing with the coronavirus lockdown working in communal spaces where their children now are present 24 7, discovering items in their homes that need updating, and then renovating a home while they are living in it. In addition, these homeowners must adjust to living in relatively unfamiliar towns, often far from friends, family, or creature comforts like a favorite bagel shop or longtime barber. Then there are the inherent tensions between second home owners and year round residents, who initially feared the spread of Covid 19 and who were resentful of the weekenders who arrived in the off season and never left. Michelle Smith, who lives on the Upper West Side, decamped for her weekend home in the Hudson Valley with her son in March, when the pandemic was just beginning to take root in Manhattan. The house, located in the town of Newburgh, is large with a pool, "a family compound meant for entertaining not work," said Ms. Smith, who is the chief executive of Source Financial Advisors, a boutique wealth management company. As the single mother of Dylan, 18, who has special needs, Ms. Smith has found the experience challenging. "I'm working more than normal, and there is no downtime," Ms. Smith said. "I used to leave the office and go to Starbucks for a vanilla latte, or just take a walk around the block. Now, if I want coffee I have to walk by my son into the kitchen, so there is no break between work and being a mom." Ms. Smith spends her days working from her bedroom locking the door when she doesn't want to be disturbed while during the school year, Dylan attended classes on Zoom from the butler pantry. Ms. Smith's mother has come to live with them to help out, but "I feel like my life went from 100 m.p.h. down to 10 m.p.h. in a day," she said. When the pandemic hit, she went from dining in restaurants multiple nights a week and having the help of a sitter who did much of the meal prep for her son, to sharing full time cooking duties with her mother and not eating a single meal outside her home in four months. Living in Newburgh is also a return to home, of a sort, for Ms. Smith. She grew up in the town where she now has her country house and has a unique perspective on the sometimes difficult relationship between weekenders and full time residents. "There is definitely an attitude up here of 'the city people' rushing with all their money to rent or buy anything they can get their hands on," she said, adding that there is fear, particularly in popular hiking areas, that it is now "full of city people exhaling Covid germs." Still, despite the challenges, Ms. Smith would rather be in Newburgh than in Manhattan, where her family would be squeezed into an apartment and isolating would be harder. Looking toward the fall, Ms. Smith, who co founded the school that her son attends, The IDEAL School of Manhattan, is keeping an open mind. "I will likely do some combo of remote and in class, depending on the safety and what unfolds," she said, adding that her work plans also remain "up in the air." To accommodate their new realities, Ms. Smith is making some changes to the house, including upgrading her bedroom work area with office furniture, and is considering building a separate office space using a prefabricated office shed, so she can conduct meetings with colleagues and have some space from her family. Ned Baldwin has also been making changes to his weekend house, now that his family is spending nearly all of their time there. Mr. Baldwin, the chef and owner of Houseman, a restaurant in Hudson Square, temporarily closed his business in March and relocated to Orient, on the North Fork of Long Island. "I packed up the entire walk in and I took everything that was perishable and sent a spreadsheet to friends in Orient," said Mr. Baldwin, who is also the author of "How to Dress an Egg." "Everyone placed orders and I packed up 40 shopping bags and drove them out in a friend's pickup." He waited at a shuttered farm stand, huddled against the wind, while his friends came by to pick up their food and Venmo payment. "And that was it. It was basically the last time I was in New York." Mr. Baldwin's weekend home, a circa 1968 kit house which he bought some 15 years ago, needed upgrades to work as a primary residence. Chief among the changes was a larger bed for his 13 year old daughter, Hazel. "The bed was a foot too short. For two weeks she had been sleeping on the couch, or with us, and I hadn't even noticed," recalled Mr. Baldwin, who also lives with his wife, Jordana, the director for cultural engagement at Everytown for Gun Safety, and their 15 year old son, Irving. Mr. Baldwin built his daughter's new bed himself, then he built her a desk so she could do her schoolwork. Mr. Baldwin has returned to work at his restaurant, which has reopened, but his wife will likely continue working remotely for the foreseeable future. The family is planning to return to Manhattan in September as the children's schools expect to open with a combination of remote and in person learning. Not everyone is convinced that the fall school semester will necessitate a return and some are contemplating remaining in their secondary now primary residence until the pandemic subsides. Joshua Rahn, co founder of the venture fund Ocean Ventures, his wife, Jessica Contrastano, and their three children have been living in their home in Amagansett since mid March. "It's great here. I mean, if I didn't know there was absolute chaos in the world, and if I didn't have teenagers who miss their friends, I could do this forever," he said. The Landscape of the Post Pandemic Return to Office None Delta variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do. A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires. How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use. Return to work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout. Mr. Rahn's children were set to attend the Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School and the NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies in September. "So they are all going to high density environments," he said. "As owners in Long Island, we pay taxes and the schools are great here, so we will wait and see." He expects to make a decision on schools in the next several weeks. Some are taking the changes in stride. "I work on a lot of charity boards with Covid 19 funds, donating and doing fund raising," said Jean Shafiroff, a philanthropist who is on the board of the Southampton Hospital Association and is a national spokeswoman for American Humane's Feed The Hungry Fund, which cares for animals abandoned during the pandemic. "It puts everything in perspective. If we can't go out for a year, we will survive. It's fine." Ms. Shafiroff, whose primary residence is an apartment on Park Avenue, has been living at her weekend home in Southampton since mid March. "It is my husband, two grown children, a boyfriend and our housekeeper, who is fabulous and we love like a family member," she said. They also have five rescue dogs. "I'm grateful that my family can be together, and no one has to be alone." While the house is spacious, and everyone has enough room to work, Ms. Shafiroff never got around to decorating her bedroom, and has no plans to do so now. "The walls are bare, but empty is good. Less is fine with me." Lorraine Heber Brause and her husband, Ken Brause, who purchased their home in Litchfield County, Conn., in 2008, partly in reaction to 9/11, have spent much more time in the home than they normally do. Ms. Heber Brause's stepmother died in the terrorist attack and the family wanted "a Plan B," she said. "We weren't the people who were like, 'Let's leave the city.' But we were like, 'Let's get a place where we could go, a safety net." While renovations may not be easy right now, they may be necessary, said Chuck Petersheim, a homebuilder based in Sullivan County. "My biggest concern as families transition their weekend homes to their primary residence is about safety," he said. A home built in the 1970s, for instance, was not intended to have multiple computers, iPads, phones and other devices plugged into its electrical outlets, and could pose a fire hazard. Overworked septic systems and the safety of well water are also a possible concern. The advent of Covid 19 has been a major boon for Mr. Petersheim, whose company, Catskill Farms, designs and builds homes. "In the months of April, May and June we did a year's worth of business, while turning away twice that number," he said. The majority of those who own second homes recognize their good fortune. "I was born and raised in Manhattan, so at first, I thought it was better to stay put," said Ms. Fischer. "But we are so happy to be out here. You love the one you're with, as the saying goes." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Pooran Singh's cellphone shop in Aligarh, India, verifies users of Paytm's digital payments service and helps them open bank accounts. Companies like Paytm are trying to coax Indians to shift away from cash. ALIGARH, India Signs and banners for Paytm, India's biggest digital payments service, festoon Pooran Singh's cellphone shop, where people drop in all day to add data or talk time to their prepaid phones. Yet few of these people actually use Paytm at the store, which straddles two dusty streets in this sleepy north Indian city in which tractors jostle with cows for space on the narrow roads. "People recharge in cash," Mr. Singh said, after a young man handed him 20 rupees, about 32 cents, to top up his mother's phone. The scene in Mr. Singh's shop underscores a persistent reality of India's economy: People prefer cash for most routine transactions, despite intensive efforts by the government and global technology companies to lure them onto digital platforms. Even so, tech companies see India's low rate of digital payments as an opportunity. They all cite China, where in just a few years, mobile payments became so popular that it is now difficult to get through the day with cash alone. "In India, we're going to see a similar rise," Mr. Sengupta said in November, shortly after Google introduced Tez, a payments app for India. One reason for tech companies' optimism is that digital payments in India have increased over the past year. The value of transactions using digital wallets, the business on which Paytm was built, rose 64 percent from December 2016 to December 2017. Transactions made with the Unified Payments Interface, a government backed technology used by Tez and many other mobile apps, went from virtually nothing a year ago to 2.1 billion last month. Leading India's budding payments shift are Paytm and its chief executive, Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Mr. Sharma founded the company seven years ago as a way for cellphone users to pay their bills online. It is now India's largest consumer payments app, with 302 million account holders and 90 million active users. Customers can use it to buy goods at physical stores, book movie or airline tickets, send money to each other or order items from Paytm's online mall. A transaction requires a quick scan of a merchant's bar code or a few taps on a smartphone, rivaling Apple Pay or Venmo in simplicity. Mr. Sharma aspires to put his company at the center of Indians' financial lives, and he has pledged to spend 1.9 billion over the next two years toward that goal. "Our truest ambition is for Paytm to be known as the bank for this new age, digital, mobile world," he said in an interview at the company's headquarters in Noida, just outside Delhi. Merchants like Mr. Singh are crucial to Paytm's plans. The company pays Mr. Singh a bounty of 20 rupees for each of the eight or so customers he signs up each month, with additional payments if a newcomer continues to use the service. He earns an additional 18 rupees each time he verifies the identity of an existing Paytm user with his fingerprint scanner, a new requirement imposed by the government on all digital wallet companies. "We really want to reach the underserved, underbanked customer," said Renu Satti, who leads the Paytm bank. Paytm's strategy dovetails with the goals of India's central government. Narendra Modi, who became prime minister in 2014, has sought to recast his country as "digital India," and his government has heavily promoted cashless transactions. In November 2016, Mr. Modi suddenly banned most of India's currency. The edict forced people to exchange their rupees for new notes at banks, setting off a short term cash crunch and prompting many Indians to consider digital options. Consumer trust is a big issue. Ghani Khan, who was finishing a snack with his wife at Aligarh's lone McDonald's, said that someone had once stolen 3,300 rupees, what would be about 52 now, from his Paytm account. "People feel scared to use these apps," Mr. Khan said. Although he got his money back, he now avoids payment apps, preferring to use cash or his debit card. (Paytm says that most such problems are related to thieves who call users and persuade them to turn over sensitive account data.) Merchants also worry that officials are promoting digital transactions as a way to better track commerce and collect more taxes. Anusheel Shrivastava, a top Kantar executive in India, said his firm found that 6 percent of mobile phone users made at least one digital transaction a day in 2017, up from 2 percent in 2016. That number is likely to increase further when WhatsApp, the messaging service owned by Facebook, adds payments to its service in the next few months. Paytm stands out in part because of the 10,000 employees that it has in the field to help new businesses use the service, educate existing ones about new features and troubleshoot problems. There are about six million merchants in its network, from giant multinationals like Uber to tiny neighborhood sweet shops. Last month, Mukesh Gupta sought Paytm's help in setting up the service for his toy shop here after 10 to 20 percent of his customers asked to pay with Paytm. "People like to spend money on more than just needs," he said. Aligarh, with 1.2 million residents, is a barometer for Paytm's progress because it's a midsize city, and because Mr. Sharma, the company's chief executive, grew up nearby. On one visit home, he said, he met a Hindi speaking merchant who did not know how to get money out of Paytm and into his bank. The problem? Paytm's app for merchants was in English, and the icons were not clear enough for those who did not speak the language. Paytm soon developed a Hindi version. In recent months, skeptics have questioned whether Paytm can maintain its growth. The new regulations requiring customer verification could turn off some customers. The company is also spending heavily on incentives, such as giving cash back on certain purchases and free credit card processing for merchants. Mr. Sharma said such expenses were necessary investments. "The only way to grow digital transactions is to make them free," he said. "This is a culturally different country being built." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When to watch: Now, on Netflix. You want this ragtag gang of misfits to play in the big game? But they'll never be ready in time! Why, they'd have to train nonstop! And start to work as a team! And get to know one another, and really understand one another and now that you mention it, really understand themselves, too. And me? Why, I'm just a lowly nobody, coach, with some unconventional methods, but if you think I'm the only one who can lead this wacky bunch, well, I guess I could try .... "GLOW" happily hits plenty of the expected sports movie beats and several unexpected ones, and because it's set in the early, mostly scuzzy days of women's professional wrestling, it has an added scrappiness. Strong performances especially from Betty Gilpin, Alison Brie and Marc Maron help its world feel even more substantial and developed. "GLOW" typifies that high achieving modern dramedy blend of serious stories and light touch, but it isn't fussy or needlessly depressing like some of its brethren. Instead, it's a blast. There are three 10 episode seasons, and each goes by in a flash. (Netflix ordered a fourth and final one pre pandemic.) Prepare yourself for the possibility that watching the show will make you want to wrestle someone. ... You Want Something Serious When to watch: Now, on Hulu. I hadn't rewatched this legal thriller in a long time, and oh boy it was even juicier than I remembered. I got totally sucked in and greedily watched till dawn. Rose Byrne stars as Ellen, a promising young associate recruited by the powerful lawyer Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) to come work for her. But it doesn't go how Ellen hoped. The show starts as a crazed, bloodied Ellen flees a fancy apartment building and then flashes back to a mere sixth months earlier, just as she joins Patty's firm. Double crossing and sneaky legal maneuvering abound, and so do much darker and more dangerous behaviors. Season 1 is by far the best season, thanks in part to Ted Danson's performance as its antagonist, a billionaire fighting a class action lawsuit. The show is big on disjointed timelines, which was more unusual when the series premiered in 2007, and it has that rich potency that made TV so thrilling during the antihero era. If you ever dreamed of combining "Scandal" and "Breaking Bad," watch this. "Parasite" is now streaming on Hulu. What an exciting time to think about class stratification! | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
After Martha Graham's death, a bitter and protracted legal dispute erupted over who had the rights to the revolutionary modern dances she created. When Merce Cunningham died in 2009, his dance company went on a farewell tour and then disbanded, according to his wishes. Now Paul Taylor, who is among the remaining pioneers of the modernist movement that transformed dance in the mid 20th century, is shaking up his company as it celebrates its 60th anniversary in the hope, he said, of keeping it going for "at least" another 60 years. After six decades in which the Paul Taylor Dance Company existed to dance almost nothing but Paul Taylor works, Mr. Taylor said that he wanted to broaden its mission to include presenting past masterworks of modern dance and works of contemporary choreographers in addition to his oeuvre and the dances he plans to continue to create. "I want to bring back great works of American modern dance that have been done in the past, so that today's audiences can see them," Mr. Taylor, 83, said in a telephone interview. "And I want to encourage future choreographers of modern dance." His idea startled the company's board when he first broached it with them in the fall, at a meeting in a 50th floor conference room atop the McGraw Hill building in Midtown. Since then, the board has been working feverishly to iron out the plan, said John Tomlinson, the executive director of the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation. The troupe plans to announce the details of its vision to create what it is calling "a new center for American modern dance" on March 13, the day of its gala at the David H. Koch Theater. After the board presented Mr. Taylor with a five year plan for restructuring the company, he raised an objection. "He said to me, 'There's a problem with this plan,' " Mr. Tomlinson recalled. "I don't want to take five years. I want to do this now." Mr. Taylor said that he had been encouraged by the support he had gotten from the board. "They seemed to like the idea," he said. "I think a lot of them had been wondering what would happen to the company if the time comes that I can't crank out something." That time has not yet come. The troupe will present two new Taylor dances this March in its three week season at the Koch Theater. "One of them I just finished the other day," he said, explaining that it was called "Marathon Cadenzas" and set to music by Raymond Scott. Mr. Taylor said that his decision to restructure his company and plan for the future had been influenced by his dismay at the disbanding of Cunningham's company. "That was sad," he said. "I didn't want that to happen. I would like the company to continue." His proposal to reorganize the troupe raises a host of interesting questions, from how to choose canonical works from modern dance's past to whether his dancers are suited to other kinds of dance. Mr. Taylor said that many details were still being worked out, including which contemporary choreographers would be chosen, which past works would be revived and whether those works would all be danced by members of his company, or by others. Asked what choreographers from the past he would be interested in presenting, he mentioned the possibility of Graham, whose company he danced in; Doris Humphrey; and Jose Limon. "Those are a few," he said. Mr. Taylor has become a fixture in American modern dance, especially in New York, where his company has managed to have regular annual New York seasons for decades, even as it has regularly toured the nation and the world. He danced for seven seasons with the Martha Graham Dance Company, and was a guest artist at New York City Ballet in 1959, where George Balanchine choreographed "Episodes" for him. Since founding his own troupe in 1954, Mr. Taylor has created 140 dances, including works like "Esplanade," "Aureole" and "Company B," and his pieces have been performed by other companies including the Royal Danish Ballet, American Ballet Theater, San Francisco Ballet, Miami City Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. In 2010, Alastair Macaulay wrote in The New York Times, "It is fair to say, though few have done so, that Mr. Taylor's work became the mainstream of American modern dance more than 35 years ago." Mr. Tomlinson said that the first inklings of change would be apparent next month when Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild, New York City Ballet dancers, perform excerpts from Mr. Taylor's "Airs" at his company's gala. Mr. Tomlinson said the changes would be reflected in the 2015 season. The company has made a number of other plans to celebrate its 60th anniversary. For a special performance on March 11, it is selling all tickets at the Koch Theater for just 6. And at a March 23 performance, several dozen alumni of the company plan to join current members for a performance of Mr. Taylor's "From Sea to Shining Sea." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Technology if we keep it in its place can empower creative teachers to shine. This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays. Many teachers, children and caregivers who have to depend on technology for distance learning these days are miserable. Ben Cogswell, a kindergarten teacher in Salinas, Calif., has nailed it. And he has some advice for the rest of us. For his remote classes, Cogswell breaks out a robot puppet for videos that get his students primed for the day. He sings an alphabet song to guide kids through a lesson on commonly mixed up letters. In the evening, he reads stories over Facebook Live, sometimes with his wife accompanying him on the ukulele. While living through screens can largely feel like a mess, talking to Cogswell was a happy reminder that technology if we keep it in its place can empower creative teachers to shine and help students learn through a tough time. His experience could help all of us try to focus on making our personalities, not the technology, take center stage. Cogswell is more tech savvy than most educators than most people, period. But he said that what has worked best for him has been limiting both tech and complexity. Rather than requiring parents to deal with multiple new pieces of software, Cogswell uses two: Google Meet for live virtual classes and Seesaw for students to post their online assignments or drawings. Cogswell also has a relatively simple, predictable schedule, with class days starting with his five to 10 minute videos, followed by two chunks of group classes. "I try to make it really consistent and doable for the kids and their parents," he said. Cogswell said he believed that limiting the technology and the transitions from one lesson to another has kept his students' participation rate high, despite their home challenges. He said his students come from families that have relatively low incomes and may only speak Spanish. I initially called Cogswell for dirt, basically, on where technology companies were falling short for teachers in a pandemic. Cogswell mostly had compliments. He was pleased with new Google safety measures to secure video classes from intrusions, and a recent feature that lets all the kids see each other at once in mini camera shots. He also said it was helpful that Seesaw started hosting live help sessions for teachers. He said, however, that companies that publish textbooks and other classroom materials haven't adapted well. He's instead made much of his own coursework. To teach about the butterfly life cycle, for example, Cogswell shot a time lapse video of caterpillars transitioning into butterflies. You can feel Cogswell's enthusiasm. He talked with pride about winning a local teaching award, and about other teachers adapting his lessons for their virtual classrooms. As we chatted, he occasionally slipped into explaining kindergarten teacher mode. I didn't mind one bit. Like many of the families in his class, Cogswell is juggling. He has four children at home, his wife is studying to become a music teacher, and they're planning to upgrade their house. "Every day is go go go," he said. "'It's good I'm passionate about what I do." Get this newsletter in your inbox every weekday; please sign up here. When the pandemic forced the international law firm Morrison Foerster to go all remote, Janet Stone Herman's job changed in a flash. Stone Herman, who leads the firm's development and women's leadership efforts, used to focus on performance evaluations, professional development and parental leave policies. Not now. She recently started what turned out to be popular online seminars with a family therapist for the firm's roughly 3,000 employees. "Under the best of circumstances when you're a parent and have a full time job, it's hard," she said. "You take away that support network and throw everyone in the house together, and you have to be the principal, tutor and babysitter ..." She didn't need to finish the sentence. Most workplaces don't have the resources of a large law firm. But it was interesting to hear how thoughtful the firm has been about offering practical help and support. The seminars have tackled employees' questions about managing their children's tantrums, struggles with remote learning and disappointments about missing summer camp and milestones like proms. Another focused on the struggles of employees who are home alone and feeling isolated. Stone Herman said a surprising benefit of the pandemic work life juggle is that some of the workplace hierarchies have melted away. Big bosses seem less intimidating when their kid is bouncing a beach ball off their head in a Zoom work meeting. "People are so much more sympathetic across the board and see each other as human beings first," she said. "I'm hoping that sticks." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Breitbart, the website at the center of the self described alternative online media, is planning to expand in the United States and abroad. The site, whose former chairman became the chief executive of Donald J. Trump's campaign in August, has been emboldened by the victory of its candidate. Breitbart was always bullish on Mr. Trump's chances, but the site seems far more certain of something else, as illustrated by a less visible story it published on election night, declaring a different sort of victory: "Breitbart Beats CNN, HuffPo for Total Facebook Engagements for Election Content." It was a type of story the site publishes regularly. In August: "Breitbart Jumps to 11 on Facebook for Overall Engagement." In June: "Breitbart Ranked 1 in the World for Political Social Media; Beats HuffPo by 2 Million." Late last year: "Breitbart News 6 for Most Comments Among English Facebook Publishers Globally." These stories were self promotional. But the rankings, released on a monthly basis by a company called NewsWhip, which measures activity on social networks, represented a brutal leveling. They were unelaborated lists that ranked outlets in terms that were difficult to dispute total shares, likes and comments. A sample ranking of the most shared sites on Facebook from January had Breitbart at No. 14, just behind ABC and The Washington Post, but ahead of Bleacher Report, Comicbook.com, Yahoo and The Hill. The month before, the site ranked between the BBC and The Guardian, just behind The New York Times, which was at No. 7. These told, narrowly, the story of reach on a new platform one that the news industry was still coming to terms with as it redefined the terms of consumption. At the same time, they signaled much broader changes: On social platforms, all media had become marginal; elsewhere, much of the media was in structural collapse. Growing distribution systems belonged to technology companies and their users. Publishers had become mere guests, their own distribution systems, like printed newspapers, stagnant or shrinking. So a news organization's ranking in that online world one in which the importance of legacy was diminished meant something. Faith in the importance of social metrics was a common trait among pro Trump media, and for obvious reasons. They were clear indicators of support, participation and success, though exposed to no methodology. They were relative to other media and, by proxy, to politics. The pro Trump media understood that it was an insurgent force in a conversation conducted on social media on an unprecedented scale. It understood that its success could be measured by the extent to which it contributed to the assembled millions carrying out their political reading, watching, sharing, commenting and arguing among family and friends. David Bozell, president of ForAmerica, a conservative nonprofit group that operates a large Facebook news page, boasted of its social media prowess: "Because of our success, we know there are real voters delivering real time political activism every day on these platforms. The press and the political class, at their own peril, ignored the signs, which is why so many got President elect Trump's victory wrong." Much action during the campaign, therefore, was with the tens of millions of Americans who experience media and political campaigns through Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other social media platforms. Everything else was on the outside, fighting its way in. The mainstream media was more allergic to this idea because it had more to lose: its business models, and its self image as arbiter of fact and fiction and as agenda setter. Still, major media companies reluctantly adjusted with more open partisanship and clearer motivation, aside from comprehensively describing the world, to challenge the legitimacy of Mr. Trump. This coverage crystallized for many in establishing Mr. Trump as not just a bad choice but also a threat. But even this aggressive, oppositional coverage much of it thorough and hard won, like stories about Mr. Trump's taxes or his charitable foundation was delivered with presumptions of trust and common language, and with the privileged expectation of the benefit of the doubt. It was a season of escalating "disqualifying" stories that were processed predictably by receptive audiences and ignored or rationalized by others. An alternative, oppositional media expects this response and doubles down; a media accustomed to power, or proximity to power, is dumbfounded by it. For legacy news media operations to behave as outsiders could be invigorating. Treating access as strictly transactional, rather than as some sort of norm, could reduce, or make transparent, its role in the reporting process. To focus solely on holding power to account is as concise a definition of journalism as I can think of. But these hopes butt up against commercial interests and an instinct for self preservation. A purely aggressive CNN, for instance, would be a very different operation, less lucrative and probably much smaller. And the self identified alternative media of this election was, on the other hand, unembarrassed by its ideology, aggressive not merely in the pursuit of stories but in the election of one candidate and the destruction of another. It was willing to submit to new distribution systems to benefit from them, and openly prioritized this, along with its animating political cause, above all else. It is telling that nobody quite knows what to ask of Facebook now that the election is over. To rid itself of false news? (How?) To help users cross ideological lines? (In which directions?) Such questions are asked with an eerily similar presumption: that by merely pointing out the popularity of fake news or misrepresentative content that appeared on the platform during the election, the point is made and will be heeded. This is also visible in the many "what we could have done differently" articles, which contain obvious presumptions of power and control the belief, held throughout the campaign, by outlets that they, and not the audience, were in charge of the story, or popular perception. Facebook has remained passive, taking shelter behind claims that it is a tech company rather than a media company. Its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post on Thursday, wrote that "we are all blessed to have the ability to make the world better, and we have the responsibility to do it." Twitter's chief, Jack Dorsey, was similarly noncommittal in a series of tweets: "We are one country, and we have one goal: Provide for the common good." Mr. Bozell, in June, described Facebook as a "marketplace for conservatism," a suggestion that doubles as an attempt to define that vague distinction between tech and media: Tech creates marketplaces, and everyone else merely participates. It is also a reminder that markets are not neutral, but that it is in their creators' interest to suggest they are. To accept marginality as fate was one difficult option for those in the media; to defy it was another. To ignore it, however, was not. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The crowd last year at the Brasil Game Show in Sao Paulo, one of several international video game trade shows that have swelled in size. Next week, 300,000 video game fans, developers and publishers like Sony, Ubisoft, Activision and Microsoft plan to congregate so they can showcase their wares and participate in a cosplay zone, an e sports tournament and a 48 hour jam. The gathering is the Brasil Game Show, Latin America's largest gaming convention, which has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2009. The event is one of several international video game shows that have swelled in size recently. Gamescom, held in Cologne, Germany, and generally hailed as the world's biggest gaming convention, welcomed about 350,000 attendees this year, up from 275,000 five years ago. The Tokyo Game Show, which has been held annually since 1996, broke its attendance record last year with over 271,000 visitors, up from 224,000 five years ago. All of these exceed the biggest video game trade show in the United States, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, which is held in Los Angeles and has generally been closed to the public. This year, E3 opened up to attendees from outside the video game industry and had 68,000 attendees, compared with 45,700 five years ago. "Games are now being designed, marketed and sold in ways that are customized for a particular country or region," said Mat Piscatella, a games industry analyst at NPD Group. "Gaming conventions are more common around the world, and at the same time the advent of game streaming tools like YouTube and Twitch are allowing anyone with a web browser to see these games for themselves in whatever language they choose." The forces driving growth of video games in international markets are different from those in the United States. In Europe, developers are making games that focus on their national identities. One example is the independent video game Regional Nightclub Bouncer, which is made by a small British studio, PanicBarn, and homes in on two very British things: queuing at a nightclub, and Brexit. "You can see national identity coming through in the games, as they draw on aspects of their own cultural histories to make their work stand out in a crowded marketplace," said Matthew Handrahan, editor in chief at GamesIndustry.Biz, a website that tracks trends in international gaming markets. In Asia, mobile games and free to play PC games are popular, while first person shooter franchises like Call of Duty, published by Activision, and Battlefield, published by Electronic Arts, barely register with players in South Korea, Japan and China. "If you look at lists of the most popular games from a given year in each country, you'd be lucky to recognize more than a couple of games in the top 10," Mr. Handrahan said. In the North American market, the types of games that become blockbusters are comparatively homogeneous. In Latin America, there is a greater emphasis on PC games, particularly free to play ones, than console games. That is because people cannot pay for anything in an online game without a credit card, which Brazilian gamers typically do not use. Other challenges, like internet infrastructure and a complicated tax system that imposes high import rates on products not made in the country, have stopped Latin America from obtaining some video game systems at an affordable price. An Xbox 360 cost the equivalent of 1,450 in Latin America when it first appeared, about three times the price in the United States, Mr. Handrahan said. Marcelo Tavares, a former video game reporter, created the Brasil Game Show after attending E3 in 2006. The inaugural event, in 2009, attracted just 4,000 visitors. "The biggest challenges were to gain the trust of the public and companies to have them here," Mr. Tavares said. "In each edition of the show, we have to push expectations further in order to please everyone visitors and exhibitors alike." The show's popularity has helped to show the opportunity in the Brazilian market. In August, a Japanese video game designer, Hideo Kojima, creator of the highly successful Metal Gear Solid franchise, published by Konami, said he would attend the Brasil Game Show for the first time to receive a lifetime achievement award, as well as to participate in a panel about his professional career and meet fans. The Brasil Game Show also plans to have a special area for international guests, which it had not done before. Apart from Mr. Kojima, V.I.P.s coming from overseas include Ed Boon, a co creator of the Mortal Kombat fighting game series, and Nolan Bushnell, the Atari founder and one of the so called founding fathers of the industry. Mr. Tavares said the number of Brazilian video game studios had grown by 600 percent in the last eight years and stood at about 500. More American video game companies have also established a presence in Latin America. "The Brazilian market has enormous potential," said Bertrand Chaverot, managing director of Latin America for Ubisoft. "By the end of 2017, there will be one smartphone per citizen, representing approximately 208 million mobile devices, in addition to the 166 million PCs." He added, "As Brazil can be considered the engine of the South American market, it is expected that its growth will push the whole region as well." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Re "More Black Americans Should Be in Vaccine Trials" (Op Ed, Sept. 14): The Op Ed asks: "Who will be included?" As a 32 year old Black woman, I know this was an unpopular choice, and continues to be for my community. I'm well aware of the racism Black Americans have faced in medicine with countless examples such as the Tuskegee study and Henrietta Lacks, as cited, but I still enrolled in a vaccine clinical trial, cautiously optimistic that it would yield a better result. Despite our painful history, I volunteered because I know that Black Americans must be represented to ensure that a vaccine works on us. I also joined because I'm really ready for this pandemic to end. There is a lot of mistrust about this process and the vaccine, and more definitely needs to be done to rebuild that trust, but, unfortunately, it won't be rebuilt overnight. Therefore, I encourage any person of color who feels comfortable to volunteer in a clinical trial and to share their stories to encourage others. It's the only way we will get out of this pandemic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Many Houston residents who were out of town when Hurricane Harvey made landfall are stuck between home and somewhere else. More than 9,300 flights have been canceled to and from Houston's major airports George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the city's largest, and William P. Hobby Airport since the storm made landfall on Friday, according to FlightAware. As of Thursday afternoon, both airports are open, but with only very limited operations. Passengers are still asked to check in with their airline carriers before going to the airports. The uncertain situation has left many Houston residents away from home longer than expected, on what some are calling an unwanted and unexpected "hurrication." The luckiest found their way to the homes of family or friends, while others are paying for more nights in hotels (or getting a few extra days on a cruise ship). Jillian Goltzman, a Houston resident, is one of those stuck in between. Ms. Goltzman was in Los Angeles for a conference when Harvey made landfall. She was supposed to return Saturday. To the surprise of some flight attendants in Los Angeles, the flight to Houston took off. That plane did not land in Texas though, to the dismay of passengers. Instead, after hovering over Dallas, it was diverted to Oklahoma City. "There was a bit of a ruckus on the plane. People really, really wanted to be home," she said. "There was an uproar when the captain said 'we're taking you to Oklahoma City. Someone yelled, 'Can't we go to Austin?' " Ms. Goltzman managed to stay with family, traveling from Oklahoma City to Fort Lauderdale. Since Sunday, she has rebooked her flight on Southwest daily; each flight has been subsequently canceled. Harvey has had an impact on 50 counties in southeast and lower central Texas, home to 11 million people. The storm made a second landfall in southwest Louisiana on Wednesday. More than 47 inches of rain has fallen in some areas. Major airlines have amended their rebooking policies as the storm has shifted course and severity. In the first days of the storm, airlines gave passengers the standard rebooking period of a few days. Now, many airlines are allowing passengers flying through southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana to rebook their tickets through late September. Marshall Shaffer was on vacation in London when Harvey hit his hometown. "I was monitoring the storm here and there and eventually saw that there would be no airport in Houston for me to come home to," he said. "Being so far away and not being able to provide time and resources to help with recovery efforts has been really hard." Mr. Shaffer considers himself one of the lucky ones. His home and family in Houston are safe, and after paying a fare difference fee with Delta, he was able to change his ticket to take him to Baltimore, where he is staying with friends. But for some, this unwanted "hurrication" can cause a financial burden. Emily Paul of Houston was watching the storm from Seattle, where she was attending a friend's wedding. "Logistically, it's definitely been a bit of a game," Ms. Paul said. After multiple canceled flights, she and her fiance are now scheduled to return to Houston on Alaska Airlines on Sunday, seven days after their initial scheduled return. "We tried staying in Seattle, but the bouncing from hotel to hotel was exhausting and expensive." "We don't know the Seattle area at all, we don't have the financial padding for this kind of emergency hurrication and then to watch and hear the terrifying stories coming out of our community, has been dizzying," she said. The couple decided it would be better financially and emotionally to be with family, so the two rented a car and are now in the Portland area until they are able to return home. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LONDON The Royal Shakespeare Company's season of Roman plays would appear to put history first, as you might expect from two Shakespeare titles "Julius Caesar" and "Antony and Cleopatra" that tell the stories of actual people from a bygone age. But it's in the least known title of this trio of plays, "Titus Andronicus," that the emotions are also fully engaged. (The plays are running in repertory at the Barbican Theater through Jan. 20.) By that, I mean not just the revulsion and alarm that are the natural response to Titus's grievous lot. The Roman general has lost 21 sons in combat before the play even begins, and the action unfolds amid a landscape of dismemberment and carnage that makes the cannibalism of "Sweeney Todd," for instance, seem polite. And yet, far from allowing Shakespeare's first tragedy to settle into grand guignol or gross out, the director Blanche McIntyre taps into reserves of feeling I haven't often experienced in this play before. "I have not another tear to shed," remarks the self described "feeble ruin" that is Titus (David Troughton) somewhere around the time that his only daughter Lavinia (Hannah Morrish) has been mutilated in full view of the audience. (Let's not dwell on the specifics.) From there, the production embraces gallows humor as Titus takes his demented revenge, chef's hat and tasting spoon at the ready. Even then, to this production's credit, we are never allowed to forget the bottomless despair that drives the character to extraordinary extremes. Titus is a fictional creation, and the play that bears his name is often considered a collector's item: a Quentin Tarantino style exercise in sustained slaughter by a playwright who would go on to refine his shock tactics before arriving at the elevated realm of "King Lear," the tragedy next to which "Titus" can often seem like a dry run. The blinding of Gloucester in that later play is a mere snip you'll forgive the image compared with the atrocities in this one, where you feel the fledgling playwright pushing the boundaries of propriety. (It's rare to find a play featuring a marauding duo called Rape and Murder.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The interior of Just One Eye equal parts shop, gallery and performance space features the "Car Wreck" sculpture by John Chamberlain. LOS ANGELES Whenever I wonder whether it is possible to truly understand Los Angeles, particularly its relationship to fashion and style, I think about a shirt. The shirt is a nothing: red plaid, relaxed fit, snap front closure. It resembles a million similar shirts you can find at places like Filson ( 175) and H M ( 11). And yet it is exactly the right nothing, especially for a certain segment of this town. By this I mean, of course, the Industry, but also all those here who despite the amount of time they spend rolling around in 90,000 Model S Teslas on the way to Blue Bottle Coffee for an 8 cold brew before hot kundalini with Tej Khalsa at Dogpound to center them for the next round of meetings seem to possess an inordinate amount of wealth. Does the money come from Silicon Beach or real estate development or cryptocurrency or private diamond sites in central Botswana or extensive family holdings in the Middle East? Who knows? I know this because the shirt is sold out. It is, in fact, a basic plaid red shirt whose cozy cashmere weave belies its humble appearance, whose Western style snaps are inset with healing semiprecious stones, whose price tag ( 2,250) is roughly equivalent to an average American's monthly post tax take home. For this you can thank Brad Pitt. Mr. Pitt is said to be the silent partner behind God's True Cashmere, a line of clothes produced by Sat Hari Khalsa, a holistic healer, spiritual teacher and jewelry designer who once was the road nurse for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. When they are in stock, the shirts are sold at Just One Eye, a store that is also sui generis Los Angeles. In no other American city could you hope to find an immense and slick yet airy establishment that seems less like a shop than an annex of Gagosian, the mega gallery. What other store in the world can boast of having "Hawkfliesagain," a John Chamberlain sculpture, standing sentry at the entry, or a Damien Hirst cherry blossom painting the size of a billboard looming over the sales floor? Name a retailer anywhere that stocks as Just One Eye did on a recent visit not only extensive selections from the Row and newish designers like Grace Wales Bonner or little known French labels like Seraphin, but also the latest drops from the modish Milanese shoemaker Amina Muaddi; shrewdly edited selections from major brands that make you recalibrate your opinion of Prada and Gucci; hippie goddess pendants from Quore; reissues of crazy wonderful plastic Mod '60s Paco Rabanne disc dresses; or hand painted handbags by Oliver Coreaux, the tattooed artist who customizes Goyard St. Louis "It" bags for "It" girls like Gigi Hadid and Hailey Bieber. You cannot do it. Maxfield, the retailer that first brought Japanese fashion to Melrose Avenue, used to be that sort of establishment. Now, though, as Maxfield celebrates its 50th year in business, it begins to feel less august and venerable than stuffy and oddly passe. Just One Eye was founded by Paola Russo, a Frenchwoman transplanted to Los Angeles 30 years ago and who for much of that time served as Maxfield's creative director. The first location of Just One Eye was unmarked, in Howard Hughes's onetime headquarters, and was as tough to find as the germophobe billionaire with the tissue box shoes was reputed to be. "It was a pretty crazy building," Ms. Russo said recently by phone. "It was a very secretive place and didn't have windows." By contrast, Just One Eye's current location in the booming Sycamore district (a new media hub in central Los Angeles that was once so desolate that Joan Didion compared it to the setting of a Raymond Chandler novel) is all slabs of light falling across enough floor space to park, as GQ noted, a 747. It is all easy access. And the welcome it extends to a visitor seems to go beyond mere shopping. "I'm all about energy," said Ms. Russo, whose silent partner, Victoria Niarchos, nee Guinness, provides capital to fuel both the vibe and business. "L.A. is very specific, though I don't think there is ever a particular look." Rather, there is a dominating Los Angeles script, one that is always part fantasy and that inevitably stars the city and its dominating energetic force the weather. "It is light in L.A. all the time, and we are all very motivated by that," Ms. Russo said. "Especially now when the energy is so down and people are panicking, we want to think about the idea of wearing something new and putting yourself in a good mood." It is as though Ms. Russo has issued an invitation to come right in and wander contentedly amid the Jean Prouve and Charlotte Perriand furniture, past the Takashi Murakami sculpture, the Puiforcat silver, the God's Own Cashmere slackers shirts (when they are in stock), the perfectly proportioned and prohibitively costly basics from the Row, trying on a life that might be yours, if only in your imagination. Atmosphere Picture Hedi Slimane setting up shop inside the Gagosian stand at Frieze Los Angeles. Service The staff provided you can track down a sales associate in the cavernous space is as friendly and chill as the clerks at the Brattleboro Food Co op. Key Items Few places approximate the eclecticism that the store owner Paola Russo brings to her selection. God's True Cashmere shirts are on my wish list, but they'll have to wait until I sell a script to Netflix. Meantime, I'd settle for a re:la T shirt ( 85) with a quote from Simon Rodia, the visionary artist who constructed Watts Towers: "I had in mind to build something big and I did.'' | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Credit...Andrew White for The New York Times Claire Walker Johnson of Queens was a medical mystery. No matter how much she ate, she never gained weight. And yet Ms. Johnson, with a long narrow face, had the conditions many obese people develop Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and, most strikingly, a liver buried in fat. She and a very small group of very thin people like her have given scientists surprising clues to one of the most important questions about obesity: Why do fat people often develop serious and sometimes life threatening medical conditions? The answer has little to do with the fat itself. It's about each person's ability to store it. With that understanding, scientists are now working on drug treatments to protect people from excess unstored fat and spare them from dire medical conditions. The need is clear. One in three Americans and one in four adults worldwide have at least three conditions associated with obesity such as diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure a combination of disorders that doubles their risk of heart attacks and strokes. In addition, 2 percent to 3 percent of adults in America, or at least five million people, have a grave accumulation of fat in their livers caused by obesity that can lead to liver failure. The detective work that led to this new scientific understanding of fat began with a small group of scientists curious about a disorder that can be caused by a gene mutation so rare it is estimated to affect just one in 10 million people, including, it turned out, Ms. Johnson. For much of her life, Ms. Johnson, 55, had no idea anything was amiss. Yes, she was very thin and always ravenous, but in Jamaica, where she was born, many children were skinny, she says, and no one thought much of it. She seemed healthy, and she developed normally through adolescence. After coming to the United States as a college student, she saw a doctor for some bumps on her arms and was stunned to learn that they were cholesterol crystallizing from her blood. Her cholesterol level was sky high. Further exams revealed that she had other problems fat people can develop a huge fatty liver, ovarian cysts, extraordinarily high levels of triglycerides. Ms. Johnson's doctor was baffled. The usual instructions to patients to lose weight made no sense in this case. "He said, 'I don't think I can help you,'" she recalled. She ended up in the office of an endocrinologist, Dr. Maria New, who also was stumped but determined to find answers. She measured Ms. Johnson: 5 feet 7 inches. She weighed her: 119 pounds. Dr. New spent years asking specialists at every medical conference she attended about Ms. Johnson. One day in 1996, she was giving a lecture at the National Institutes of Health and posed her usual query: Did anyone know what might be wrong with her skinny patient? Dr. Simeon Taylor, who was the chief of the diabetes branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, popped up from his chair. He had seen several patients like Ms. Johnson. They have lipodystrophy, he said, a rare genetic disorder that is characterized by an abnormal lack of fatty tissue. Leptin is released by fat cells and travels through the blood to the brain. The more fat on a person's body, the more leptin is released. When fat levels are low, leptin levels in the brain are low, and the brain responds by increasing the person's appetite, prompting the person to eat and gain weight. For someone like Ms. Johnson, who has almost no fat cells to signal the brain, the brain gets almost no leptin. To the brain, it seems as if she is starving. As a result, she receives continuous signals to eat. With leptin treatment, Ms. Johnson's brain was tricked into responding as though she had abundant fat. Her insatiable hunger vanished. Fat disappeared from her liver, her blood glucose became normal, and so did her cholesterol and triglyceride levels. But why did she and other lipodystrophy patients have these conditions in the first place, and why did they vanish? What was going on? A couple of studies involving mice produced some clues. Dr. Marc Reitman, the chief of the diabetes, endocrinology and obesity branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and his colleague, Dr. Charles Vinson, of the National Cancer Institute, genetically engineered mice to have lipodystrophy. The mice, like Ms. Johnson, had almost no fat tissue. And like her, they developed all of the conditions associated with obesity. What would happen, the researchers asked, if the mice had a bit more fat tissue? They transplanted fat tissue into the rodents, and two weeks later, the mice had normal levels of glucose, insulin and triglycerides. Their livers and muscles went back to normal, too. If that worked, the scientists wondered, could a limitless amount of fat tissue prevent the syndrome, even if copious amounts of fat were stored in that tissue? Philipp E. Scherer, the director of the Touchstone Diabetes Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and his colleagues tested the idea. They engineered mice that could make an almost limitless amount of fat tissue. As a result, there was no end to the amount of fat the animals could store. They were, Dr. Scherer said, "the fattest mice under the sun, the mouse equivalent of an 800 pound human being." Now, with years of research, the picture has become clear. And so has a new view of the role of fat itself in causing the medical problems of obesity. At the heart of all these conditions and what is known as "metabolic syndrome," or having at least three of the conditions associated with obesity, is an inadequate ability to store fat. (Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, the chief academic officer of the Joslin Diabetes Clinic, said two German physicians called the syndrome "metabolic" nearly 40 years ago. Conditions like elevated cholesterol, diabetes and even high blood pressure appear to be linked through disruptions in metabolism, in this case the abnormal storage of calories.) The body turns excess food into fat and tries to store it in fat tissue. If there is not enough fat tissue, the fat is stuffed into other organs, like the liver and the heart, as well as the muscles and the pancreas. There it poisons the body, causing metabolic syndrome. Fat people develop metabolic disorders because their brain is driving them to eat more food than their bodies can store as fat. Their fat tissue has reached its limit. People with lipodystrophy have so little fat tissue that they, too, cannot store the fat their body makes to store extra calories from the food they eat. This is also why some people find that their metabolic disorders improve with just a small weight loss they are eating less and their fat tissue can respond properly. It also explains why 10 percent to 20 percent of obese people never develop metabolic disorders, Dr. Scherer said. These so called healthy obese are like his fat mice, with an unusual ability to expand their fat tissue to store calories. Now researchers have moved on to the next phase of the investigation, trying to identify the poison in fat that is causing all these problems and find a way to block it. At least two chemicals seem to be involved. Dr. Gerald I. Shulman, a Yale professor of medicine and co director of the Diabetes Research Center there, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has focused on diacylglycerol, produced from fatty acids made from the food a person eats and deposited in places like the muscles and liver instead of fat tissue. With diacylglycerol, Dr. Shulman found, insulin cannot signal cells. The result is insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. "Diacylglycerol is the culprit," he says. One sure way to get rid of it in liver and muscle cells is to lose weight to stop providing the body with more calories than its fat tissue can handle, he notes. That is not so easy. "Every patient I see, I say, 'Let's lose some weight and increase activity.' They all nod their heads. 'That's a great idea.' Maybe one in 100 does it, and even when they are successful, we know how easy it is to gain the weight back." Dr. Shulman is exploring another route, developing benign new variants of a toxic drug that he hopes will be safe and will reduce levels of fat and inflammation in the liver. The drug, dinitrophenol, was once widely used as an over the counter medication for weight loss, but the Food and Drug Administration took it off the market in 1938 after a few people taking it dropped dead from severely high body temperatures. He and his colleagues have modified dinitrophenol so, at least in rats, it does not raise body temperature or cause weight loss. But it lowers diacylglycerol levels in the liver and cures Type 2 diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and other metabolic problems associated with obesity. The problem will be developing it for humans. Would people want to be in a clinical trial using a variant of a drug that originally had potentially lethal side effects? "This is a proof of concept," Dr. Shulman says. "I do think this is a way forward." Others are focusing on another class of compounds, called ceramides. Dr. Scherer, who is studying them, says they are produced from fat floating in the blood and are unable to get into fat tissue for storage or degradation. They, too, cause insulin resistance. Ceramides can also kill cells if their levels become high and can bring on inflammatory responses. And inflammation, Dr. Scherer adds, is a hallmark of obesity. He and others are looking for the best drugs to stanch the activity of enzymes used to make ceramides. Like Dr. Shulman, he finds that he can show that his idea works in mice. But, he says, "that's easy to do in a mouse." All of this raises a provocative question. "It is so accepted that obesity is bad for you, but why is it bad for you?" Dr. Virtue says. "If I put a 50 pound weight on your back and asked you to walk around all day, you would be a superhealthy person." And that, says Dr. Rudolph Leibel of Columbia University, is the beauty of the work on lipodystrophy. People like Ms. Johnson have shown a pathway that leads to the diseases of obesity. "The first step toward curing it is to know why," Dr. Leibel says. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
If Paul Taylor can do it, why not Larry Keigwin? Mr. Taylor shocked the dance world in 2014 by announcing that after six decades of presenting only his choreography, his company would also present works by others. Mr. Keigwin is one of the first three choreographers chosen to create new pieces. His will debut in March, but before that happens, he is reversing roles, inviting younger artists to choreograph for his own 12 year old troupe, Keigwin Company. On Tuesday at the Joyce Theater, Keigwin Company debuted Loni Landon's "Wait Nearby." (A second program this week features the debut of Adam Barruch's "Drop" instead.) At the start of Ms. Landon's work, one dancer swipes at the head of another, who ducks. The choreography is rooted in such scooping, buckling motion, sending the body off kilter. It's excitingly of the moment, unawkwardly borrowing from contemporary street dance. But it's also too much of the moment, skirting cliche in its vague sense of threat, a problem abetted by Jerome Begin's violin and electronics score, played live by the composer and String Noise. Still developing her voice, Ms. Landon already appears a little stuck. Inviting her is one way for Mr. Keigwin to offer variety without escaping his own ruts. His "Exit Like an Animal," created last year for Juilliard students, is typical. A big party piece, it shows Mr. Keigwin's unsurpassed mastery of traffic control, but the featherbrained cuteness of its conceit a carnival of the animals that's also a fashion runway is a reminder of why it can be hard to take him seriously as an artist. His "Sidewalk" makes a stronger case. Created in 2009 for the odd contours of the Guggenheim Museum and now cleverly adapted to the stage and aisles of the Joyce, it finds in a twisted sideways walk and running in circles a near perfect corollary for Steve Reich's "Double Sextet." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The New Museum's next Triennial, which focuses on emerging artists from around the world and will take place in 2021, is to be curated by Margot Norton of the New Museum and Jamillah James of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the museum announced on Monday. "Both Norton and James have consistently committed to supporting and exhibiting emerging artists, and have an extraordinary track record in identifying the most interesting artists at work today," said Massimiliano Gioni, the museum's artistic director, in a statement. "We are excited about this new bicoastal pairing of curators. I look forward to the new perspective they will bring." Previously a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Ms. Norton joined the New Museum in 2011 as an assistant curator and is currently working on the first American survey of the British artist Sarah Lucas, opening Sept. 26. Ms. James previously held curatorial positions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, working in collaboration with the nonprofit Art Practice; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Queens Museum. The Triennial series began in 2009 with "Younger Than Jesus," an exhibition on a new millennial generation of artists. It was followed by "The Ungovernables" (2012), which featured artists from more than 23 countries; "Surround Audience" (2015), about the effects of an increasingly connected world; and "Songs for Sabotage" (2018), which examined political and social structures. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When Misty Copeland made her New York debut in the double role of Odette/Odile in "Swan Lake," the most epic role in world ballet, two aspects of the performance on Wednesday afternoon proved marvelous. One: that it all happened successfully. Two: the curtain calls. Let everyone know henceforth that an African American ballerina has danced this exalted role with American Ballet Theater at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera House. Let everyone know that other African American dancers, Raven Wilkinson (who danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1955 61) and Lauren Anderson (who, with the Houston Ballet, was the first African American ballerina to become a principal of an American ballet company), brought her bouquets onstage. And let everyone know that her fellow dancers shared her applause with pride. (The enthusiasm and affection shown by James Whiteside, who partnered her as Prince Siegfried, was especially engaging.) As Odette, the Swan Queen, Ms. Copeland has moments of courage and grandeur when you feel the heroic scale of Tchaikovsky's celebrated drama. She runs boldly around the stage like a creature accustomed to vast space; she raises her arms with the epic sweep of mighty wings. In other respects, she's admirable but without striking individuality. The substance of "Swan Lake" is there, but in potential. I hope she dances it again and reveals more in it. For her sake and everyone else's, I wish that Ballet Theater's "Swan Lake" was a good one. Odette is dully good in the first lakeside act, Odile is vampily bad in the ballroom act, and then we go back to the lakeside act to watch Odette being dully good again more dully this time because she has no choreography worth looking at. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Ben Schnetzer, center, is a working class snooker champion flanked by (from left) his agent (Max Gordon Moore), his mother (Johanna Day), his financial sponsor (Alexandra Billings) and his father (John Ellison Conlee) in "The Nap." When you're feeling burned out, fed up and generally disgusted like now, maybe? there's nothing more therapeutic than a tickling session at the theater. Relax, it involves no squirmy physical contact. I mean the sort of tickling administered by a team of master farceurs who frisk you into a state of sustained laughter, as involuntary and contented as the purr of a kitten at play. It's the noise being artfully coaxed from audiences by the British dramatist Richard Bean and a precision tooled ensemble of great pretenders at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. That's where Mr. Bean's delicious new comedy "The Nap" opened on Thursday night, directed with an assured balance of blatancy and subtlety by Daniel Sullivan. While the name of this Manhattan Theater Club production might seem to promise a snooze, the title refers not to a siesta but to the baize surface of a snooker table or specifically to the resistance it gives to the balls that skim across it. Does that sound too esoteric? Don't worry if you're unacquainted with the arcana of this British cousin of billiards and pool. Not speaking snookerese is no disadvantage in experiencing Mr. Bean's story of a young working class phenom from Sheffield and the criminal friends and relations who love (and nearly destroy) him. Besides, the dominant game of "The Nap" isn't snooker. It's farce. And like most sports, farce requires from its players hair trigger timing and an intuitive grasp of the physics of bodies in motion. Its success is achieved not by sustained assault but by dexterity, and by always keeping the other guy (in this case, the audience) off guard. The best examples of the genre on Broadway in recent years have originated in Britain. For the form at its most elemental, there's the current demolition derby called "The Play That Goes Wrong." But the sterling English language farce of this century is Mr. Bean's "One Man, Two Guvnors" (2012), the commedia dell'arte style caper that made an American star of James Corden. "The Nap" is less frenetically funny than "One Man," and more modest in scale. But it shares with its predecessor a fondness for the subterfuges and archetypes of classic farce, which Mr. Bean translates fluently into modern day terms. Our idealistic hero, Dylan Spokes (Ben Schnetzer), is a blue collar lad with the kind of back story that makes television producers drool. Dylan was brought up by his dad, Bobby (John Ellison Conlee), who selflessly sold recreational drugs to finance a snooker shed in the backyard, where the boy could hone his craft. Dylan knows that without snooker, he'd probably be on the dole and grifting, like his dear old mom, Stella (Johanna Day as squalor incarnate). "Without snooker, what am I?" he asks. "I'm cooking meth, I'm on welfare, I'm getting me legs blown off in Afghan." But enough of the anthropology, except to say that it informs Dylan's commitment to his sport. But as his star ascends with the possibility of his reaching the world championship finals temptations block his path. First of all, there's his sponsor, the expensively dressed, one armed, transgender Waxy Bush (Alexandra Billings in a sensational Broadway debut), who, before her transition, dated Dylan's mum. Waxy now wants her protege to throw a frame (or round) in his next big match to appease some mysterious Philippine gamblers. Word of possible foul play has already reached the ears of Mohammad Butt (a sublimely fatuous Bhavesh Patel), the Integrity Officer for International Sports Security, who shows up in the Sheffield legion hall where Dylan is practicing. (David Rockwell did the sociologically specific sets and Kaye Voyce the spot on, tacky costumes.) Mo is accompanied by a distractingly attractive police detective (and former pole dancer), Eleanor Lavery (Heather Lind). Will the noble, vegetarian Dylan be able to withstand the onslaughts upon his integrity? After all, the hungry fellow refuses a shrimp sandwich, saying he eats nothing with a brain, causing Bobby to remark, "They're shrimp. They're not novelists." As is customary in such plays, each character has some signal, off center trait that is worn like an ID tag, which is embellished, with variations, ad infinitum. Tony is the epithet slinging fabulist. Stella keeps coming up with whiny "poor me" rationalizations for her criminal acts. And Waxy is the play's resident Ms. Malaprop, who misquotes Shakespeare and refers to Dylan as a "child effigy." Ms. Billings, a marvel of glamorous menace, delivers such mangling with a smooth, sinister confidence that keeps the others from laughing. Not us, though. Ms. Lind who has appeared as a docile Shakespearean heroine in Public Theater productions shows a wicked comic wit here as a badge toting femme fatale. And as the bewildered straight man to everybody else, Mr. Schnetzer more than holds his own, finding intriguing ambivalence within Dylan's virtuous persona and also proving himself a dab hand at snooker. The cast members shape their characters with just enough comic exaggeration to stay credible and also to suggest that not everyone is what she or he seems. For "The Nap" is also a comedy of deception, including self deception, and the sort of willful, hilarious misunderstandings that have always been a basis for slapstick. (In this case, they include not one but two anarchic variations of movie title guessing games.) The play's second, shorter act, in which all is revealed, isn't as satisfying as the first, and it rushes its final moments into anticlimax. On the other hand, where else are you going to be able to watch a live snooker game (with video simulcast) in which you feel so personally invested? That's when Dylan faces off against two champions (both played by the real snooker ace Ahmed Aly Elsayed), in matches described by two unseen commentators. With their time filling, vacuous babble, these voices will be familiar to anyone who follows sports on television. And just in case snooker still confuses you, these announcers keep explaining its rules, with priceless condescension, to unenlightened listeners. They include those who might be "on the internet in Antarctica" or "on a canoe in Tahiti." Those at the Friedman Theater, however, know that no matter how the match ends, this gratifyingly silly show has now, what's the term? potted all its balls. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
More than 40 years ago, my seventh grade English teacher began the year by telling us that we were definitely not allowed to read "The Catcher in the Rye" because we weren't "ready" for it. So naturally we all went out and read it immediately. I told this story to my son when he was a seventh grader. I meant it as a funny story, and I pointed out that it had taken me years to appreciate that teacher's pedagogic strategy. But then my son read the book himself right away. The mere long ago echo of a possible ban was enough to make it interesting. Adults have been known to worry a great deal about the possible corrupting influence of the printed word on children. If you look at the list of "frequently challenged children's books" maintained by the American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom, you will see a wide range of touchy topics. (A book is "challenged" when someone tries to get it removed from a library or a school curriculum.) Books can get challenged because they involve magic (Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling), or because they offend religious sensibilities. "A Wrinkle in Time," by Madeleine L'Engle, has been challenged as both overly and insufficiently religious. Some books are challenged because they depict children behaving, well, childishly (Junie B. Jones, the heroine of a series of books by Barbara Park, gets in trouble for using words like "stupid.") So adults worry that books may be bad for children's morals and for their manners. "I think it happens in the U.S. more than in some other countries," said Leonard Marcus, a children's book historian and critic. "There's a squeamishness in the U.S. about body parts I think that goes back to the Puritan tradition, and has never completely died out." He pointed to the controversy around Maurice Sendak's 1970 children's book "In the Night Kitchen," which centered on the illustrations showing the naked and anatomically correct little boy whose nocturnal adventures make up the story. "Anything with any sexual content is likely to attract attention and hostility," said Joan Bertin, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship. "Regardless of the nature of its message whether it is deemed to be helpful or instructive or insightful in some way or just merely titillating people don't make that distinction." In fact, banned book lists can be a great resource for parents looking for books that teach kids about the world and themselves. When your children read books that have been challenged or banned, you have a double opportunity as a parent; you can discuss the books themselves, and the information they provide, and you can also talk about why people might find them troubling. Here are a few books that are often challenged, yet present great opportunities for children to learn. "IT'S PERFECTLY NORMAL: CHANGING BODIES, GROWING UP, SEX AND SEXUAL HEALTH" BY ROBIE HARRIS. Your children should have age appropriate books to help them learn about bodies, and you can find plenty of those on any list of banned or challenged books. This book, with illustrations by Michael Emberley has become a classic of information about bodies, development, and sexuality. First published in 1994, it has now gone through several editions and updates. Ms. Harris, who also wrote "It's So Amazing," for younger children, and "It's Not the Stork," for those even younger, says most of the challenges to her books have revolved around issues of gay sexuality, though masturbation and contraception can also be flash points. (She is also a good friend, and I have helped at times with pediatric questions on some of these and other books.) "CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS" BY DAV PILKEY. This series, which has long been legendary for its compelling power over small boys, has sometimes been at the top of the most challenged list, perhaps in part because (surprise) there are many jokes about undergarments. These books will definitely help children appreciate that bodies and their functions can be profoundly funny and silly (actually, most children seem to know this anyway). In addition to being attacked for their potty mouthed humor, the "Captain Underpants" books have come under scrutiny because they are full of children playing tricks and disobeying and generally creating havoc; again, as with Junie B. Jones and her big mouth, there is this strange sense that children need stories about obedient model children. "ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT'S ME, MARGARET" BY JUDY BLUME. In this widely beloved novel by Judy Blume, originally published in 1970, but still on the most challenged list, the narrator is deeply preoccupied with the when and how of menstruation. An other Judy Blume perennial, "Deenie," which came out in 1973, is about a young girl struggling with scoliosis and the brace she has to wear, but it was the most attacked of her books, Ms. Blume says, because it included references to masturbation. Much of the controversy about Judy Blume's books centered around information about puberty. "I think the feeling was, if my child doesn't read this, my child won't know about it or it's not going to happen to my child," said Ms. Blume. "I used to get up there on stage and say, I have news for you, your kids are going to go through puberty whether you like it or not, so why not help them it's going to happen whether they read my books or no books or somebody else's book." Ms. Blume said that often when adult tourists come into Books Books Key West, the independent bookstore that she helped found and where she often works, they want to tell her how much they learned from her novels. "It's like, thank you, thank you, my mother never told me anything and I wouldn't have known anything without your books." Ms. Blume said she recently sold a copy of "And Tango Makes Three," the 2005 book by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell about two male penguins who hatch an egg and raise the baby together (you'll find it on the list of challenged picture books) to a man who had just adopted a little girl with his male partner. "That's my new thrill as a bookseller," she said, "to put that right book into the hands of someone who appreciates what it's saying." "I AM JAZZ" BY JESSICA HERTHEL AND JAZZ JENNINGS. This 2014 picture book about being transgender has been at the center of controversy recently with some schools coming under attack for using it in the curriculum, and others arguing that it can be helpful in teaching tolerance. Some banned and challenged books upset adults because they teach children that the world is a complicated and sometimes disturbing place, in which good people sometimes behave badly and evil sometimes goes unpunished. This category stretches from modern young adult "problem novels" to great classics of literature. What makes a book "disturbing" often is tied to what makes it interesting or important or worth reading. If you look over lists of frequently challenged young adult books, you'll find everything from "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier (challenged for violence and for scenes of masturbation) to Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl" (challenged for sexual explicitness and for depressing tragic outcome). Also on the list Alice Walker's "Color Purple" (challenged for sexual explicitness and bad language), and of course, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which last month was removed from classrooms and libraries in schools in Accomack County, Va., along with "To Kill a Mockingbird," when a parent complained that the books contained racial slurs. Those are all books I came across and read on my own, growing up, and yes, they were disturbing, in places, and yes, there were things I didn't completely understand, and basically skipped over to return to on later readings. (This is a very valuable skill possessed by most precociously bookish children.) I was never forbidden any book by my book loving parents (we all know what the result would have been), and I don't think I ever tried to stop my children from reading any book (we all know what the result would have been), though I occasionally said something like, "I think that one may creep you out, so maybe you want to wait." One of the jobs and joys of parenthood is recommending books at what you think are the right ages. On of the corollaries is that sometimes you get it wrong and your child is not ready or is much farther along than you thought. Mostly, as a parent, you should be glad and proud if your child is a reader. In fact, many of the books which are on the most challenged lists are also frequently assigned as classics (and being assigned may be what gets you challenged). Common Sense Media has a nice list of books on this border between classic and controversial, suggesting parents and kids read them together and discuss why people find them disturbing. As a parent, I was dazzled when my daughter's high school summer reading assignment was to choose a book "out of your comfort zone," however the student chose to define it. Because that is, of course, what literature does, and part of the glorious freedom (and human right) of literacy is the opportunity to journey with words well beyond your comfort zone. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
MOSCOW The Russian authorities have detained an acclaimed theater director on suspicion of embezzling more than 1 million in government funds, investigators said on Tuesday, renewing fears of a crackdown on artists in the country. The director, Kirill S. Serebrennikov, leads the Gogol Center, one of the most prominent and progressive artistic venues in Moscow. He is accused of working with accomplices to misappropriate 68 million rubles, or 1.1 million at current exchange rates, that had been awarded to Studio Seven, a theater production company he led. Mr. Serebrennikov was formally accused of large scale fraud on Tuesday, but he denied any wrongdoing during questioning, investigators said. A court in Moscow will decide on Wednesday whether he will await trial in detention, under house arrest, or under a less stringent set of restrictions. If convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison. Investigators searched the Gogol Center and Mr. Serebrennikov's apartment in May, but the theater director was released after questioning. The company's general director, chief producer and accountant were all detained later and charged with fraud, however. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"I suspect I was dropped on my head a lot as a child. I'm honestly not sure where the ideas come from," writes on her website. "They simply come to me, particularly creepy, scary ones. I guess it's a good thing I can turn ideas into novels, because being an ax murderer doesn't pay nearly as well." But Gardner is also inspired by true crime cases, and the kernel for "Never Tell" which enters the list this week at No. 3 was the story of Amy Bishop, a University of Alabama biology professor who shot six colleagues, killing three, after she was denied tenure. "To make things even more curious, when she was a teenager, she 'accidentally' shot and killed her own brother," Gardner says. "Of course, in the wake of the second shooting, people immediately questioned the childhood tragedy. Was her brother's death an accident, or did she get away with murder? It got me thinking, could an accidental death as a child lead to an intentional murder as an adult?" Gardner calls herself a "research junkie." Over the years, she's interviewed county sheriffs, F.B.I. agents and police detectives about how they solve cases; she's spent time at the University of Tennessee's famed Forensic Anthropology Center, known as "the Body Farm," to study how corpses decay; she's talked to fugitive trackers about how they find people in the wilderness. For "Never Tell," she studied female mass murderers ("they're incredibly rare!") and worked with a computer forensic technician to understand the dark web: "According to her, dark web users are 50 percent predators and 50 percent undercover investigators trying to catch the predators," Gardner says. "The challenge for both sides is knowing which is which." Listen to , Lee Child, Megan Abbott, Meg Gardiner and Lisa Scottoline discuss the art of thriller writing in this bonus edition of the Book Review's podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Worried about missing what seemed to be a looming deadline to get back home, we started looking for new tickets without having canceled the old ones. It was immediately obvious that, less than an hour after Mr. Trump's pronouncement, swarms of other anxious travelers were trying to do the same thing. We'd click on an airfare, only to find it was "no longer available." It was like trying to catch a firefly that hovered before you for a moment and then winked out before you could grab it. What was left were increasingly oddball flights 31 hour treks on airlines we'd never heard of and a smattering of very expensive ones. Same day economy tickets from Paris to New York appeared for thousands of dollars apiece. Because my credit card's travel benefit has a 24 hour cancellation policy, I took the plunge and used it to buy two basic one way tickets that, combined, cost more than 5,000. We rationalized the cost by figuring if we were eventually able to get a better deal by changing our original tickets, we could still get our money back for these new ones. No sooner did I hit the "purchase" button than an update appeared on CNN: President Trump's travel ban did not cover Americans in Europe after all, only foreign nationals. Whipsawed, we scrambled to cancel the tickets we had just bought and quickly found it impossible. Cancellation options online were either unavailable or did not work, and the airline's wait time for callers was now up to six hours. And my credit card customer service line played music for two hours before disconnecting. We decided on one last play: Get to the airport and try to cancel, in person, through a ticket agent. We packed up, assuming that if our scheme didn't work, we'd have to decide on the spot whether to take the flight and be done with it. A 45 minute Uber ride later, we were at Charles de Gaulle Airport, staring at an impossibly long line of passengers beseeching harried ticket agents for help. It was obvious that in the hours it would take to finally reach the customer service counter, our flight would have already left. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Mr. Kanneh Mason is a gifted, sensitive artist. And in the demanding works this duo performed especially Rachmaninoff's rhapsodic and teeming Sonata in G Minor, which has a virtuosic piano part Ms. Kanneh Mason was a superb collaborator. The program, available in its entirety at wqxr.org, opened with Beethoven's 12 Variations on "Ein Madchen oder Weibchen." The jaunty theme comes from Papageno's song in Mozart's "The Magic Flute," in which the rustic bird catcher explains that what he wants most in life is a loving wife. From the first statement of the theme in Beethoven's jolly arrangement, Mr. Kanneh Mason brought out the wistful subtext of the music, the yearning and loneliness the character feels, with rich, focused tone and elegant phrasing. As the variations grew in intricacy and inventiveness, these impressive musicians responded with crisp stylishness. They then gave an intense account of Lutoslawski's aptly titled "Grave," a kind of argumentative dialogue that opens with a searching, fragmented theme for cello, which Mr. Kanneh Mason played with grim beauty. This brooding piece, dotted with skittish, mysterious outbursts for both cello and piano, has a distressed and confused quality, well conveyed here. By contrast, Barber's Opus 6 Sonata, written when its composer was 22, is a forthright, dynamic and impassioned work. Yet while conveying the soaring lyricism and flinty harmonic vitality of the music, these players teased out the unsettled urgency that runs through the score even the glowing slow movement, with its fantastical middle section. Though these charismatic young artists received a prolonged ovation, they played no encore. What they'd already done in this small space was statement enough. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Players of color from the N.H.L. have formed a new group to tackle the league's challenges with diversity and inclusion. Members of the group, the Hockey Diversity Alliance, said they were inspired by Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback who knelt during the playing of the national anthem to protest social injustice against African Americans. They spoke to him and got advice, representatives of the alliance said. Two of its leaders, Akim Aliu, a former N.H.L. player, and Evander Kane, a San Jose Sharks forward, said the group of seven players would operate independent of the league, try to make the game more socioeconomically inclusive and, as Kane put it, "eradicate racism and intolerance in hockey" through community outreach and youth engagement. "It was incumbent on us seven to get together and try to put our heads together on how to try to create, promote and manufacture real change when it comes to racism in our sport and racism in society as well," Kane, who is black, said in a telephone interview. Though the group will operate separately from the N.H.L., Kim Davis, the league's executive vice president for social impact, expressed hope that it would work collaboratively in the future. "We are supportive of all efforts that are intended to advance the role of our sport in society," Davis said in an email. "We are hopeful that this alliance will collaborate with our N.H.L. structured council and committees particularly the Players Inclusion Committee to bring ideas for change." Other players of color joining Aliu and Kane in the alliance are Minnesota Wild defenseman Mathew Dumba; Detroit Red Wings defenseman Trevor Daley; Buffalo Sabres forward Wayne Simmonds; Chris Stewart, a forward in the American Hockey League; and Joel Ward, a retired N.H.L. winger. The creation of the Hockey Diversity Alliance comes during a cultural reckoning within the sport. Don Cherry, a popular Canadian television commentator, was fired in November for making xenophobic comments on "Hockey Night in Canada," one of the sport's premier broadcasts. After the head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Mike Babcock, was dismissed in December, he was accused of hazing and bullying by several former players. Days after Babcock's firing, Aliu tweeted that Bill Peters, his coach in a minor league, directed racial slurs toward him. Peters, who by then was the head coach of the Calgary Flames, resigned after the allegations. Aliu further detailed, in an essay for The Players' Tribune, having experienced hazing and racially driven bullying in the minors. "We know that important and significant work remains to be done at the N.H.L. level and throughout hockey to ensure that our game lives up to the ideals that are truly essential to it," the league said in a statement responding to Aliu's article. In January, a defenseman in a development league, Brandon Manning, was suspended for using a racial slur during a game. Three months later, a Rangers prospect, K'Andre Miller, was subjected to racist slurs during a Zoom call with fans. In early May, the N.H.L. publicly reprimanded two players, Washington Capitals forward Brendan Leipsic and the Florida Panthers prospect Jack Rodewald, for racist and misogynistic comments on their social media accounts. Stung by these and other instances of racism, the N.H.L. has tried to promote diversity in recent years, but the number of black players remains relatively small. The first black player in the N.H.L., Willie O'Ree, didn't take the ice until 1957, and since then, only about 100 black players have dressed for at least one game in the league. At least 30 black players have been on teams since the 2016 17 season, when a record four black players were named All Stars. Still, only a handful of team captains has been black and there are no black head coaches in the N.H.L. A major goal of the Hockey Diversity Alliance will be mentorship, giving younger players who are members of minority groups a chance to learn from the likes of Kane and Aliu. "We feel that we can be a great outlet for minority players all the way down to youth hockey coming up through the junior ranks and coming into pro with any issues they might be going through, whether that's race related or anything else," Kane said. "I think having a group like us to lean on for experience, advice, thoughts or different ideas will empower them." Aliu and Kane said they felt emboldened after talking to Kaepernick. "It's enabled us to really feel even more strongly than we did originally about what we're doing," Kane said. "It was an invaluable call that we had with him." "Our mission and goal is to make the game as diverse and inclusive as possible," Aliu said. "It's so that someone from any type of background, whether it's economical, race, gender, gets to feel included in our game and feel like they're wanted." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Entering the ring marks the end of one battle and the beginning of another, one that can feel simpler to Heather Hardy than life's day to day struggles. People often ask Ms. Hardy: Doesn't it hurt to fight? "It hurt to have my eight pound daughter," Ms. Hardy said with a laugh. "Nobody asks about that." She watched a client move around the ring at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn just a few weeks before defeating Anna Julaton at Bellator 194, a company that promotes mixed martial arts competitions. For as long as Ms. Hardy, who is known as the Heat, has been a fighter, she has also been a single mother, raising her daughter with help from her sister, Kaitlyn. Without her assistance, Ms. Hardy might never have started practicing martial arts. "'All you do is work and bitch,'" Ms. Hardy said her sister told her before presenting her with a certificate for training sessions in 2009. "It was the first time I felt like Heather again. I wasn't someone's mom, I wasn't someone's ex wife or someone's employee." Ms. Hardy, who competed in boxing and American style kickboxing before mixed martial arts, recalled her first fight. With every step toward the ring, another self doubting thought ran through her head: "Why didn't I go to cooking school?" With experience in boxing came a certain comfort. In 2017 a promoter approached her about a mixed martial arts fight for Bellator at Madison Square Garden. It would be her first fight under those new, much more complicated rules, but opportunity outweighed the risk of a loss. "They could have asked me if I wanted to do a sword fight at the Garden," she said and grinned. "At 35 years old, I don't have four years to fine tune everything. I love to fight. I live to fight." Ms. Hardy said she has enjoyed learning wrestling and grappling, two sports absolutely vital for success in M.M.A. She recently got a chance to showcase some of what she had learned in the ring with Ms. Julaton, where her new training in standing grappling and wrestling helped bring her the win. Raquel Harris, known as Rocky, was a competitive student of karate when she snapped her kneecap in half in training. She took an instructor's suggestion to try boxing while her leg healed and began training at a gym in New Jersey that offered Muay Thai and wrestling classes. She tried "a little bit of everything." Ms. Harris said she was only there for the workout, but the coaches encouraged her to fight. "I didn't want anyone to hit me that hard," she said. Girls actually box, she said to herself. And they get paid for it. She started training seriously at Evolution Muay Thai in Manhattan in 2013. It was there that she met Angela Hill, known as Overkill, another veteran of the ring and the cage. When Ms. Harris looked at Ms. Hill's belts, which still decorate the wall at Evolution, she said to herself, "If she can get one, I can get one." Getting ready for the Golden Gloves, an annual nationwide amateur boxing competition in March, Ms. Harris sparred with partners of various sizes, both men and women. Her footwork is clean and her jab is stiff. For a fighter who at first feared contact, she moves easily. "When you get hit," Ms. Harris said, "you want to hit right back." For Keisher McLeod, known as Fire, discovery of boxing began with a film audition. At an audition in New York for one of the "Terminator" movies, Ms. McLeod was told to come back after she had bulked up. "The role called for holding big guns, and I had bony arms," Ms. McLeod said. She began training at Kingsway Boxing, hoping that hitting the heavy bag would build up her arms enough to make her look more like a cybernetic killing machine from the future. She started going every day, and eventually a trainer took notice. If she wanted to compete, he said, he could make her a champion. Ms. McLeod obliged. She won her first amateur fight at Gleason's Gym in 2002, where she now trains other women who are looking to use boxing to get into better shape. At 5 foot 8, Ms. McLeod is tall for the 102 pound strawweight division, and she uses her footwork and long limbs to hit her opponents from a distance that her often shorter opponents cannot match. She still fights professionally, but her clients are mostly regular people who want to change their bodies. "To me it's more than if they win a trophy," Ms. McLeod said. "A trophy isn't going to get them a job or anything that requires confidence. It's the way you feel inside, and it's rewarding that I can give them that." Her first was a victory, but she was still uncertain. "I didn't know if I wanted to do it again," Ms. Peltier said. "It was pretty intense." "But you started fighting back to back," said Gianna Smith, her training partner and fellow fighter at Five Points. Ms. Peltier is a strong fighter, moving forward and using the teep a front kick with the ball of the foot and a hallmark of Muay Thai to break her opponent's guard to follow up with punches and kicks. Ms. Smith's entry into the world of competition took less convincing. After her first class at Five Points, she said, "I wanted to fight." Nine months later she was in the ring. Ms. Smith's clinch, a standing wrestling component of Muay Thai, is a strength of hers. Fighting up close should play well with her next goal, training and competing in Brazilian juijitsu, which trades the kicks and knees of Muay Thai for chokes, joint locks and throws. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Daytona Beach, Fla. The 2014 Chevrolet SS performance sedan was introduced to the public and the press in the infield of Daytona International Speedway hours before its Nascar doppelganger rolled onto track for the first race of the season, a preliminary to the Daytona 500. The car is the company's first rear drive performance sedan since the 1996 departure of the Impala SS. The Nascar connection is important because 2013 is the debut of all new body styles for the Nascar Sprint Cup series. In recent years, Nascar had homogenized the looks of the cars to the point where the only differences were head and taillight decals, but for 2013 Chevy, Ford and Toyota will be allowed enough design latitude to race cars that actually resemble the models whose names they carry. Chevrolet took the opportunity to change its Nascar entry from the front drive Impala to the V 8 powered SS. The new car is the first Chevy to wear the SS, or Super Sport, name as its lone moniker; for decades it had always been applied to a special version of another model line, creating the likes of the Impala SS and Camaro SS. The engine is a 415 horsepower, 6.2 liter V 8, and the transmission is a 6 speed automatic with TAPshift technology, meaning you can change gears using paddle switches on the steering wheel. Big Brembo disc brakes sit inside forged aluminum wheels. If the idea is to generate sales in showrooms, the car will need to win on the track. That part is off to a good start: Kevin Harvick won in his SS in the Sprint Unlimited Nascar race hours after the SS debut, and Danica Patrick qualified her SS on the pole for the Daytona 500. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
As visitors strolled through a recent display of Madame de Pompadour's coffee grinder, an 1840s Sevres porcelain coffee set, tea canisters, sugar bowls and other European decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the scent of roasted coffee beans arose in one room. Bach's "Coffee" Cantata played in the background. Not far away, cocoa pods were not only on display but also meant to be touched. In the final gallery, a tasting station offered two kinds of liquid chocolate, one adapted from an Aztec recipe and the other from an 18th century French formula. Museums usually aim to offer a feast for the eyes, but this Detroit museum had much more in mind for "Bitter Sweet: Coffee, Tea Chocolate," which just closed at the institute. Officials, who used art objects to illustrate how the introduction of those beverages to Europe in the 16th century from Africa, Asia and the Americas changed social and consumption patterns, wanted the exhibition to be a banquet for all five senses. So did the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the John Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla., with their collaboration, "A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe," on view at the Ringling through April 30. Along with viewing 100 or so ivories, stained glass pieces, paintings, illuminated manuscripts and other artwork, visitors are invited to touch a modern reproduction of the 16th century gold and enamel Langdale rosary, which belonged to an English family. In a gallery evoking a church nave, where a 15th century gilded silver German censer is displayed, they smell the ecclesiastical incense it would have dispensed. And where "Tapestry With Narcissus at the Fountain" is on view, they hear bird song, the tinkling of a brook and the rustling of trees, and they smell the scent of flowers depicted in the tapestry. At the Ringling, they can sit on a nearby bench and look into a mirror for their own Narcissus moment. "We're interested in multisensory exhibitions because people come to a museum not just with their eyes but with their whole bodies," said Swarupa Anila, head of interpretation at the Detroit Institute. She labeled them an "experiment." Other art institutions are experimenting, too. For instance, when the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., presented "Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age" last year, visitors were invited to touch a fine translucent porcelain piece imported from China, and to imagine the novelty that the 17th century Dutch must have experienced. And when the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts reinstalled its medieval collection last year, it incorporated "hands on touch stations" for reproductions of the tools used to make the metalwork, carved stones and enamels in the galleries. Such efforts are being closely watched, from differing perspectives. Some museum leaders view these offerings as a way to attract younger audiences who are steeped in multisensory experiences and to deepen the engagement with the art objects for everyone. But others see them as distractions. "Any human being can respond to great works of art," said Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, speaking not about those specific exhibitions but the phenomenon in general. "We do not need intermediaries. We can augment the experience for children. For adults, I believe it isn't necessary." Natural history and science museums have long offered opportunities for visitors to do more than look. On occasion, art museums have, too. As long ago as the 1970s, Diana Vreeland, as special consultant to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, put perfume in the air of her exhibitions. In recent years, several museums have piped in background music at some exhibitions. Last summer, for instance, the Art Institute of Chicago played songs by Woody Guthrie and Sarah Vaughn and other period pieces in its "America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s" exhibition. Going further takes much more thought, and many agree that the decision is best driven by an exhibition's subject. For Martina Bagnoli, the former curator of medieval art at the Walters and the current executive director of the Galleria Estensi in Modena, Italy, who organized "A Feast for the Senses," a multisensory installation was a natural. "Medieval images and objects were made to speak to all the senses not sight alone," she wrote in the show's catalog, adding, "They were not only seen, but also, and at the same time, touched, tasted, smelled and heard." At the Ringling, Virginia Brilliant, the curator of collections, agreed that it seemed essential to show how art objects engage the senses. "There's only so much a curator can say sometimes you just have to experience an object," she said. In a prime example, when people viewed musical manuscripts, they could hear that very music. Touch and taste are the most difficult senses to engage. Touch can sometimes be sated with replicas, but in "A Feast for the Senses," taste was invoked only in labels about festivals and the sacrament of the Eucharist. On the other hand, "taste was a perfect fit" for "Bitter Sweet," Ms. Anila said though it is likely to remain rare at art exhibitions. Visitors seem to like these extras, the museums say. By watching people in the galleries and in videos and by conducting surveys the Detroit museum has found that they were looking at the objects for long periods, which is not typical. Ms. Anila described their "stopping at almost every work of art, leaning in to look." Museum officials say they will resist the temptation to make every exhibition multisensory, though. "We don't want to do it just because we can," Ms. Anila said. Neither the Detroit Institute nor the Ringling is planning to use a multisensory approach for any shows on their current schedules, which are planned years in advance. But that may well change, even at other museums. "I like the art to do its job, and I like to get out of the way," said Ms. Brilliant, who calls herself a traditional curator. "But this exhibition has opened up my mind and made me aware that there are lots of ways we might do things like this in the future." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
ONE thing is certain this fall: there will be a lot of talk about taxes. But without a broad agreement, a series of automatic increases will take effect next year. What are investors to do? While there are still three months until Election Day, recent action in Washington did little to suggest the spirit of compromise is in the air. The Senate has voted to raise taxes on the wealthy, while the House has voted to keep taxes low for everyone. I was curious to see how people affected by any increases in the tax on investment income were dealing with the uncertainty. That tax is set to go up at least 3.8 percentage points the amount of the surtax on high earners in President Obama's health care legislation. But it could go up much more if lawmakers do not come to an agreement. I decided to call a few wealthy investors to ask how the prospect of the increase was affecting their investment decisions. More on them in a bit. First, what are the increases? The 3.8 percent surtax will be levied on investment income for individuals who earn more than 200,000 a year, or 250,000 for a couple. The Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, has said he will repeal the health care law on his first day in office. But his first day, if he wins, won't be until Jan. 20, 2013, and even then, the most he could do would be to send legislation to Congress. So it is best to plan as if that tax will be levied. The more difficult taxes to estimate are on capital gains and dividends. The capital gains tax is 15 percent and is set to go to 20 percent next year if the tax cuts from the George W. Bush administration expire. (Counting the 3.8 percent surtax, the capital gains tax will be either 18.8 percent or 23.8 percent for high earners.) The dividend tax is also 15 percent, but it could go as high as the income tax rate. If the Bush tax cuts expire, the rate for the highest earners would be 39.6 percent. But those people would also be subject to the additional 3.8 percent surtax, bringing the total dividend tax to as much as 43.4 percent. (Until 2003, dividends were taxed as income.) It is easy to see how the dividend tax could quickly wipe out the benefit of holding dividend paying stocks. The capital gains tax is trickier because it is paid only when someone sells an investment that has appreciated. Still, the addition of the 3.8 percent to the existing capital gains tax can be a big number on any transaction that results in a large capital gain. Michael E. Goodman, a certified public accountant and president of Wealthstream Advisors in New York, said he had a client who was trying to sell an apartment in Manhattan for a price that would result in a taxable gain of 2 million. This year, she would pay 300,000 in capital gains taxes. But if she cannot sell the apartment until next year, she would pay at least an additional 76,000 because of the 3.8 percent surtax. If the capital gains rate goes up to 20 percent as well, her total tax bill on the sale of the apartment would be 476,000, or nearly 60 percent more than today. So what should people do? I spoke to several members of Tiger 21, an investment club that requires its members to have a minimum net worth of 10 million. Tiger 21 members have substantial wealth, and they spend time each month going over one another's portfolios. They raised three points that could help any affluent person. One strategy is to use the prospect of increased taxes to examine all long held investments and sell any with big gains before the end of the year. That is what Leslie C. Quick III says he is doing. His wealth came from the sale of Quick Reilly, the discount brokerage firm that was started by his family and bought by Fleet Financial Services in 1997. After subsequent mergers, his Fleet stock is now Bank of America stock. That stock peaked at nearly 55 in late 2006 but is now trading around 7 per share. "Our basis was zero, so even at 7 you still have a gain," he said. "You keep hoping against hope that it's going to recover, but it's going to be a long slog." Mr. Quick said he was focusing on cleaning up various portfolios of securities that he had neglected over the years. "Some have done well, so I'm thinking before the end of the year I should sell some of these positions before taking another 3.8 percent hit," he said. The Tiger 21 members also recommended that the wealthy modify their investments to reduce the impact of the increase. Randy R. Beeman, who made his fortune buying and selling businesses and is now a financial adviser with Baird, a wealth management firm, said he was looking to buy more municipal bonds. For the last couple of years, he has owned more taxable corporate bonds because their yields were high enough to offset the tax free benefits of municipal bonds. Now, he said, the tax increase makes municipal bonds more attractive. He is making a bigger change with his real estate holdings. Mr. Beeman said his wife would start to actively manage the properties they rent out. He says he believes that by doing this, the rents will no longer be categorized as passive income, which is subject to the surtax. "If you have one town house generating a couple of thousand dollars a year, it's probably not worth it," he said. "If you have 10 properties and each one is generating 15,000 in net income, then it is worthwhile. It's a matter of size and if you have the time and ability to do it." For the most part, though, the Tiger 21 members said their bigger concern was finding investments that actually rose in value, regardless of what tax they might eventually pay. Reginald K. Brack, the former chairman and chief executive of Time Inc., said he was now more focused on making long term investments. "I sell these investments when there is a profit to be made," he said. "Now, if the capital gains tax is changed dramatically, that might change things. But it was higher at one time. We'll live through it." Michael Sonnenfeldt, who became wealthy in real estate before starting Tiger 21, said a poll of the group's 192 members after the second quarter found that, on average, they had increased their allocation to private equity by four percentage points. He interpreted this as meaning members were more concerned about getting a return on their money than about any tax they might later pay. Personally, he said, the increased investment tax would affect his thinking only on investments that had a low return or that he was hesitant about in the first place. "If someone came to me and said, 'I have a software program that rivals Facebook and you can put 1 million into it today and we'll have one billion customers in eight years,' the 3.8 percent doesn't matter," Mr. Sonnenfeldt said. "But when you get down to investments where the risks are lower and the returns are lower, then the 3.8 percent will make more of a difference." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
LOS ANGELES In "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," Mag Folan, a stout Irishwoman in her 70s, pours pots of her own urine into the kitchen sink because she's too lazy to use the "lavvy." She orders her daughter, Maureen, to bring her tea, fetch her Kimberleys (a sort of Irish biscuit), fix her porridge. She calls her a whore, screaming at her suitor that she spent time in a British "nuthouse." And that's before intermission. With only four characters and a single set, "Beauty Queen," the first play in Martin McDonagh's "Leenane Trilogy," focuses much of its energy on this most volatile of mother daughter relationships. After the show opened on Broadway in 1998, its director and three of the four cast members won Tony awards including Marie Mullen, who played Maureen. Two decades on, the latest production begins a run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Jan. 11 but this time around, Ms. Mullen has swapped her Tony winning role of Maureen for that of her ogre of a mom. It's a role that she admits she never thought she'd play, one that required her to find humanity in a beast. "I didn't know if I could do it," she said backstage here recently at the Mark Taper Forum, where the show ran for a little over five weeks. "I still don't." For Ms. Mullen, 63, there are obvious joys (the new production reunites her with the director Garry Hynes, who directed the 1998 "Beauty Queen") and challenges to be found in such a difficult, rancorous role. As Mag, she is a demon in a cardigan and tight gray perm; offstage, she's charming and self deprecating, with clear blue eyes and an elfin grin, offering tea (brought from Ireland in bulk) and a Kimberley. It's tough reconciling Ms. Mullen with the overbearing mother onstage, to the point where one must blink a couple of times to spot just a hint of Mag. "It's hard to find a lot to like about her, isn't it?" she said with a laugh. "My two daughters find her horrific. They don't actually associate me with her, which I'm glad." Ms. Mullen grew up in Drumfin, a small village in County Sligo. The town had a post office, which her mother ran, and a shop, but now has neither. At 11, she went to boarding school in a neighboring county, where for her first production the nuns cast her as a 90 year old man. "I was probably overdoing it," she said. "But I thought I was great." At college at NUI Galway, she met Ms. Hynes, a fellow archaeology student and aspiring director, who cast her in a production of "The Loves of Cass McGuire." Both were 17. "She was much the same as she is now," Ms. Hynes said. "Full of energy, full of fun and really passionate about what she does." The director's family lived just outside of Galway, so they brought Ms. Mullen into their brood. "I was part of their carry on," she remembered. In 1998, Ben Brantley called "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" a "stunning new play" In 1975, Ms. Mullen and Ms. Hynes, along with actor Mick Lally, founded Druid, Ireland's first professional theater company outside of Dublin. As natives of western Ireland and lovers of its playwrights, from J. M. Synge to John B. Keane, they became the area's theatrical champions. Over the years, the company has won more than 50 national and international awards, while The Irish Times called its six play marathon DruidSynge, first staged in 2005, "one of the greatest achievements in the history of Irish theater." In 1996, Druid performed "Beauty Queen" (the world premiere) in Ireland and London before bringing it to New York's Atlantic Theater Company. "From the very beginning, Marie was going to be Maureen," Ms. Hynes said. Mr. McDonagh set his play in Connemara, County Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. Writers from W. B. Yeats (who summered in County Sligo) to J. M. Synge (whose "The Playboy of the Western World" was presented by Druid in their inaugural season) have written about the region, but few have peopled their creations with characters like McDonagh's. Gravediggers bash in old skulls for the sheer drunken fun of it; fistfights erupt over a bag of potato chips. "Martin uses elements of the Irish kitchen play, and so you come in and go, oh, I know what this is about," Ms. Mullen said. "She's going to go off and marry a farmer. But then he twists you right around." While Mag is insufferable, Maureen is more than capable of returning fire, cursing and belittling her mom (and, in the end, much, much worse). Late in "Beauty Queen," Maureen takes a seat in her mom's rocker, prompting a character to exclaim, and none too kindly, "image of your mother you are." It's an eerie, prescient coincidence, now that Ms. Mullen has taken the role of Mag. Through rehearsals, Ms. Mullen said, she realized how wonderful Anna Manahan was as Mag in 1996. (She died in 2009.) "An awful lot of the rhythms she had were so spot on," Ms. Mullen said. "I just embraced them." For Aisling O'Sullivan, the play's current Maureen, playing alongside the original was intimidating at first. "Marie knows this play inside and out," Ms. O'Sullivan said. "So I did ask her questions, and she's very humble and generous and supportive. But I can't do what she did." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Ben Sisario, a reporter who covers the music industry, discussed the tech he's using. What are your most important tech tools for doing your reporting? Probably 75 percent of my reporting is done by phone and email, and when I am writing I print out drafts and notes. So that part of it is about as current as 1995. But I also use Signal and ProtonMail for sources who require secure communication. I constantly scan social media Twitter, mostly for news, and in breaking news situations I sometimes find sources to quote there. But I am wary of letting social media itself tell the story. You need to actually talk to people, check facts, find contrary viewpoints, weed out nonsense. When it comes to organizing my work, I think cloud computing is the greatest thing since the manila folder. I have 15 plus years of notes instantly searchable through Dropbox and Google Docs. It's amazing to type in five characters and find that phone number from an obit you wrote a decade ago. And then there are sites like WhoSampled and Discogs, incredible repositories of information that are deeply addictive for music nerds like me. My time there often starts with legitimate research say, checking the original writing credit on an old single but then an hour later I've spent 50 on vinyl and reminded myself of the slide whistle sample on "Groove Is in the Heart." What does your music setup look like, and how has it evolved over time? I try to keep an eye on all the major platforms out there, which means regularly poking around on about a dozen apps. My go to sources are Spotify, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Mixcloud, which has excellent D.J. style mixes and to me feels more human than most. At home I have a Sonos Play:5 speaker, which plays streaming music and podcasts, and is a piece of cake to use. I also have Google Chromecast Audio, a little plug in device (now discontinued) that allows me to send high fidelity streams to my stereo. It sounds better that way, but it's not nearly as easy to use as the Sonos. To be honest, my preferred way to listen to music is on CD, as unfashionable as that might be. You push a button, the music plays, and then it's over no ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms! What are the pros and cons of the streaming model for musicians big and small? The big positive is the vast potential exposure. Streaming eliminated the cost barrier to sampling new music, and playlists constantly put new songs in front of people. Theoretically, at least, there are more chances than ever for a song to be a hit. But, as they say, you can die of exposure. Megahits still generate millions of dollars in royalties, and Spotify's official mission statement is "giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art." Yet for artists beneath the megahit level and that is the vast majority of them the jury is still out. I've seen royalty statements for well known indie acts that suggest they can earn a decent middle class living from their streams. I've also talked to very successful songwriters who say their income has been decimated by streaming and by the new model for pop songwriting, in which five or six or 30 people divvy up the same sliver of royalties. In general, though, I'm optimistic about streaming and its potential. It has reinvigorated the music industry and made listening a lot easier, more fun and more dynamic. Apple and Spotify have been fighting publicly over antitrust issues. Where is this fight going, and what impact might it have on streaming music? I tend to think of this as mostly a matter of corporate warfare. These companies are in a race for market dominance around the world, and the gloves are off. For Spotify, anything that hinders Apple, even a little, can provide an advantage. On the other hand, Apple's gigantic size means it will always be on the defensive against regulation. I don't see these issues having a big effect on streaming music. Competition in this market has benefited consumers, and as much as Spotify accuses Apple of anticompetitive practices, it has still signed up far more users both free and paid than Apple Music. What emerging tech trends might change the way people listen to music? A great deal of attention is being paid to smart speakers like Amazon's Alexa. This is something that genuinely feels futuristic: walking into a room and saying, "Play relaxation playlist" or "Play NPR news," and it just happens. I think we're still in the early stages of this. Video sharing apps like TikTok are also having a palpable effect on music, and I think that will only grow. TikTok makes it easy to generate video memes using music, and these are fast moving and viral by nature. The best example is Lil Nas X's song "Old Town Road," which was a TikTok sensation well before it hit the pop charts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
ST. PAUL The squat, unassuming building at 900 Bush Avenue here seems an unlikely centerpiece for a battle between the St. Paul Port Authority and neighborhood preservationists. The two story structure is dwarfed by a former factory across the street, and the only hints of its significance are brass letters above the door that proclaim Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, today known as 3M. The building, designed by the industrial architect Albert Kahn and built in 1939, previously served as 3M's executive office building. Known locally as Building 21, it sits at the center of the former 3M manufacturing campus, whose 46.5 acres are currently being redeveloped by the Port Authority as an office and light industrial park a few miles from downtown St. Paul. Given its size, structures and the economy, the former 3M site has been a challenging project for the Port Authority, which typically handles smaller projects of 10 to 15 acres. After 3M itself was unable to find a buyer willing to pay an asking price of roughly 30 million, it turned to the Port Authority, which then bought the land in 2008 for under 5 million. "The impediment was 1.5 million square feet of manufacturing and office space that was structurally sound but functionally obsolete," said Louis Jambois, the Port Authority's president. "The market was just not the least bit interested in this property." But the Port Authority, which saw it as a chance to replace the thousands of manufacturing jobs that had vanished from the neighborhood, was. Since 2008, the authority has invested more than 30 million in the 3M redevelopment, which has received financing from federal, state and local governments, including 5.2 million in grants and loans from the Environmental Protection Agency for assessments and cleanup at the site. After a century of industrial use of the site, the soil was polluted with solvents, heavy metals and other contaminants. The authority did not expect neighborhood opposition to its efforts, but perhaps it should have. 3M was founded in 1902 and was a major presence on the city's East Side from 1910 into the 2000s. Now based in Maplewood, Minn., 3M employed nearly 5,000 workers in the 1940s at the site, and many East Siders still feel a strong connection to the company, the site and its structures. More than 200 people attended a community meeting in 2008 on the Port Authority's plans for the site, and they were upset to learn that the agency planned to demolish all the buildings to create the new business park. "The Port Authority does some really terrific work, but they have a system, and it involves scraping sites and making things into something else," said Kathy Lantry, the president of the St. Paul City Council and a Port Authority commissioner. "It's very different when you're doing that with an old junkyard or brownfield, versus 3M." Those emotions caught the Port Authority by surprise. "We were so excited about the project that it didn't even register with us until we got smacked in the face with it," Monte Hilleman, the Port Authority's project manager for the office park, called Beacon Bluff, said of the opposition. "It was very eye opening." Residents and preservationists, then stinging from the loss of a local bar demolished by the Port Authority, say nearly the same thing. "It was a wake up call," said Carol Carey, executive director of Historic Saint Paul, a preservation group. Andrew Hine, a St. Paul native and second generation 3M employee who started a Facebook page to lobby for saving the headquarters structure and others on the site, said: "Building 21 is a very special place, for many reasons. A lot of innovative things happened at that site, so it's not just for architectural reasons that I want them saved. History in itself is an economic driver, and with none, no one will want to visit or live here." In 2010, the neighborhood won a reprieve of sorts for the four buildings in the historic core of the property. The Port Authority agreed to market the structures for two years in the hopes of finding a preservation minded buyer. But it faced difficulties because of low demand for commercial space in the Twin Cities, real estate financing challenges, brownfield problems and the weak national economy. Enter James A. Stolpestad, a St. Paul real estate developer with deep roots in the city and an appreciation of the site's importance to residents. "Everywhere you go, 3M is very much a part of St. Paul," said Mr. Stolpestad, the chairman of Exeter Realty. In 2010, Mr. Stolpestad struck an agreement with the Port Authority that allowed him a year to evaluate the historic structures and market them to prospective tenants. That deal was restructured and renewed in 2011; Mr. Stolpestad expects to close on the 5.8 acre parcel this fall. (The Port Authority still has more than 30 acres available for sale at Beacon Bluff; it has sold two parcels already to an ambulance firm and a health clinic.) The price? One dollar, as long as Mr. Stolpestad's still unchosen tenants meet the Port Authority's economic goals of creating at least one job per 1,000 square feet of building space, paying at least 11 hourly plus benefits, and hiring St. Paul residents for 70 percent or more of the new jobs created. The jewel of the project is Building 21, the former global headquarters of 3M, and the only building eligible for historic designation on the site. It has about 75,000 square feet of space, in the coveted midcentury modern style. The original mahogany paneling still graces the office of William McKnight, who retired as chairman of the board in 1966 after beginning his 3M career in 1907 as an assistant bookkeeper, as well as his secretary's office and the 53 foot by 20 foot boardroom. Renovating the building will be the responsibility of Mr. Stolpestad, who expects to spend about 1.5 million. He estimates the space will lease for 10 net per square foot. The other three industrial structures near Building 21 were not so lucky; the agency is in the process of tearing those down to clear the land for parking for Building 21's future tenants. "They are cool buildings," Mr. Stolpestad said of the former sandpaper factories. "If they were in a different location and you had unlimited funds, you could rent them out. But you can't do that here because the cost would be prohibitive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Re "Many Rivers, Too Many Dams," by Philip Fearnside ("The Amazon Has Seen Our Future," Opinion special section, Oct. 4): From the beginning, the deployment of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant in the Brazilian state of Para has been guided by respect for the local Indigenous populations and by laws, ratified protocols and conventions. Norte Energia has closely worked with the local population, holding meetings with more than 6,000 members of the surrounding communities. To enable the plant's operability in the Middle Xingu River region, 40 mills for processing flour (a typical food in the region), 779 residences, 354 sanitary modules, 29 water supply systems and eight territorial protection units were built. The plant has a valid operating license and generates energy for millions of Brazilians, grounded in the principles of environmental responsibility and social justice in deference to the culture of the local Indigenous populations. Luciana Galvao Leonardo Soares Brasilia The writer is communications and press superintendent for Norte Energia. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
LOS ANGELES For the bulk of his career with the Lakers, Kobe Bryant turned Staples Center into his stage, fashioning basketball into performance art. He soared and scowled, endearing himself to fans who celebrated his competitive drive. It is not often that an athlete becomes synonymous with an arena, but Staples Center seemed to belong to Bryant in a singular way. "He helped build this arena," said Lee Zeidman, the president of Staples Center since it opened in 1999. In the wake of Bryant's death last month, there was some discussion among family members, including his wife, Vanessa, and city officials about the site of a public memorial service, Zeidman said. An outdoor venue like the Rose Bowl, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum or Dodger Stadium would have been able to accommodate the most people. "A lot of people were weighing in," Zeidman said in an interview last week. "But for the men and women who work at Staples Center, we felt that this was the place to do it. He put five championship banners on the walls here. Both of his numbers are retired here. And we're very proud and humbled that Vanessa chose to do it here." On Monday morning, about 20,000 people celebrities, athletes, family members, fans and friends will fill Staples Center to honor Bryant and his 13 year old daughter, Gianna, who were among nine people killed in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26 near Calabasas, Calif. The public memorial, called "A Celebration of Life for Kobe and Gianna Bryant," is expected to run from about 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Pacific time, Zeidman said, followed by several invitation only receptions. An undisclosed number of tickets were sold to the general public through a lottery. Those who were unable to purchase tickets will not be permitted access to L.A. Live, the entertainment complex adjacent to Staples Center. Officials are discouraging people from trying to congregate near the arena. But in a fitting tribute to Bryant, the memorial service will be bracketed by basketball: The Lakers played the Boston Celtics on Sunday at the arena, and the Clippers will face the Memphis Grizzlies there on Monday night. Staples Center has hosted public memorial events in the past, including one for Michael Jackson in 2009 and another for Nipsey Hussle last year. But Bryant had a unique relationship with Staples Center as the arena's most magnetic draw for 17 consecutive years and he formed ties to many who still work there. Andy Bernstein, the longtime photographer for the Lakers who collaborated with Bryant on Bryant's 2018 book, "The Mamba Mentality: How I Play," was invited to attend Monday's event as a guest. But Bernstein declined so he could work at the event in his usual role, as a photographer. It was what Bryant would have wanted him to do, he said. "Part of the 'Mamba mentality' was strength," Bernstein said in a telephone interview. "The strength to overcome. The strength to get through stuff. I think about Kobe and what he would be saying in this moment. He would be saying, 'You've got to do what you've got to do.'" Entering the weekend, Zeidman said the list of invited guests, speakers and performers was still "very fluid." The Lakers and the Bryant family were coordinating the program, Zeidman said, and few details had been disclosed. Zeidman said he was not privy to many of them. "There's been virtually no information outside of instructions to save all of our dressing rooms," he said. A number of celebrities and athletes are expected to be on hand, including members of the Lakers and the Clippers, and former N.B.A. stars like Shaquille O'Neal and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the league's career leading scorer. Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors and Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks are among the current players who have said they will attend, along with Luke Walton, a Lakers teammate of Bryant's who now coaches the Sacramento Kings. Sabrina Ionescu, a guard for the University of Oregon women's basketball team, told the Pac 12 Network that she was among those who had been invited to speak. Ionescu had grown close to Bryant, a vocal advocate for women's sports in recent years, and to Gianna, who had dreamed of playing in the W.N.B.A. "Just there to honor them and everything that they've done for me," said Ionescu, who plans to rejoin her teammates in time for a game at Stanford on Monday night. Players from the N.H.L.'s Los Angeles Kings and the W.N.B.A.'s Los Angeles Sparks will also attend the memorial, Zeidman said. The Kings and the Sparks play their home games at Staples Center, and both hang their various championship banners not far from those that Bryant helped win for the Lakers. Zeidman said the Sparks' banners had taken on added significance for him. When Bryant was courtside with Gianna to watch the Lakers play the Mavericks in December, he noticed that the Sparks' banners were not illuminated. Bryant told Rob Pelinka, the Lakers' vice president for basketball operations, to tell Zeidman that it bothered him, going so far as to call it an "injustice." "That was the last thing I heard from him," Zeidman said. "So I'm going to figure out how to light those banners during Lakers games and other events that are here." In the week after the accident, Zeidman said, 250,000 to 350,000 people visited the plaza outside Staples Center to pay their respects to Bryant and the other victims. They shared their grief by leaving 1,300 basketballs, 500 handwritten notes, 350 pairs of sneakers and more flower bouquets than anyone could count. The flowers will be turned into mulch that will be spread around L.A. Live in the next two weeks, Zeidman said. The rest of the offerings all the sneakers and photographs and jerseys and stuffed animals were cataloged and stored in 37 shipping containers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Doctors should stop using a procedure performed on tens of thousands of American women a year in the course of uterine surgery, because it poses a risk of spreading cancerous tissue, the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday. The procedure, power morcellation, involves using a device to cut tissue into pieces that can be pulled out through the tiny incisions made during minimally invasive surgery. The devices, known as morcellators, have been widely used in laparoscopic operations to remove fibroid tumors from the uterus, or to remove the entire uterus. The action on Thursday does not take them off the market or ban their use, but "discourages" doctors from using them in hysterectomies or fibroid surgery. Morcellators were allowed onto the market in the 1990s without the usual clinical trials in patients because they were similar to other devices that had already been approved a process that critics of the agency say can lead to safety problems like the one that has now been recognized. The F.D.A. became concerned about morcellators because of recent news reports about patients apparently harmed by them, said Dr. William Maisel, deputy director for science and chief scientist at the agency's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. He spoke at a telephone news conference on Thursday. A case in Boston, first reported in December, drew national attention to the cancer risk. The patient was Dr. Amy Reed, 40, an anesthesiologist and the mother of six children, the youngest a 1 year old. Dr. Reed had a hysterectomy because of fibroids in October, at Brigham and Women's Hospital. A biopsy after the surgery found a hidden sarcoma, an aggressive type of cancer. Morcellation had spread the tumor around inside her pelvis and abdomen, causing advanced, Stage 4 cancer. Dr. Reed's husband, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm (pronounced NOOR chash), is a cardiothoracic surgeon, and he said he was horrified to learn that tissue had been minced up inside his wife's body. One rule that surgeons are taught, he said, is that cancers or potentially cancerous tissue should be removed whole and not broken up or cut, to avoid spreading the disease. The couple began a relentless campaign to stop morcellation, hoping to spare other women from what had happened to Dr. Reed. They contacted reporters, hospitals, other doctors, legislators, the F.D.A. and medical societies, sending thousands of emails. On Thursday, they felt their efforts to save other women from what happened to Dr. Reed had paid off. "I think it's a major step in the right direction," Dr. Noorchashm said in a telephone interview. But he added that the agency could have done more, like taking the devices off the market. Fibroids themselves are benign, but can sometimes hide cancers. If an unsuspected cancer is present, as in Dr. Reed's case, the rapidly spinning blades of a morcellator can spray cancer cells around and speed the progression of the disease. Sarcomas are a particular concern, because they are aggressive and almost never detectable with imaging or other tests before surgery. The diagnosis is usually made only after surgery, when the tissue is biopsied. By then, if a morcellator was used, it is too late to prevent the spread of the cancer, and the woman's chances of long term survival are significantly worsened, the agency said. The Food and Drug Administration said that one in 350 women who have a hysterectomy or fibroid removal have unsuspected sarcomas. That figure, based on a review of the medical literature, was considerably higher than earlier estimates that gynecologists had been using, which ranged from one in 500 to one in 10,000, Dr. Maisel said. Dr. Maisel said that although his agency had the authority to ban morcellators, it had chosen not to because there might still be some women for whom the procedure is a good option. When fibroids are large, morcellation may be required if a patient wants minimally invasive surgery, which avoids big incisions, shortens recovery time and reduces the risk of blood loss, infections and other complications. Dr. Maisel said that doctors and patients could weigh the risks on a case by case basis, adding that sarcomas are more common in older women. The agency emphasized that women must be informed of the risks, something that has not been routinely done, in part because the threat was thought to be vanishingly small. Indeed, many women having hysterectomies were not even told that morcellation was being performed. The drug agency is continuing to study the procedure and the devices and will meet with an advisory panel to review them, probably this summer, Dr. Maisel said. For women who want to avoid morcellation, the agency listed other ways to deal with fibroids, including various operations that do not use the devices, drug therapy, techniques that shrink fibroids by blocking a uterine artery, and high intensity focused ultrasound. Some doctors and hospitals have said that morcellation can be made safer by performing it inside a bag to prevent tissue from spraying around. But Dr. Maisel warned: "It is not a panacea. It will not completely remove the risk." Bags can tear, he said. And not all surgeons are trained in using them. The bags make it harder for doctors to see what they are doing, and there have been reports of organ damage during procedures involving them. For Dr. Reed and her family, the results of her surgery have been devastating. The prognosis for advanced uterine sarcomas is dismal. She and her husband researched the disease, and decided that her best hope lay in radical surgery. In November, a month after the hysterectomy, she had a grueling seven hour operation in which a surgeon removed her appendix, gallbladder, ovaries and other tissue to which the cancer might have spread, and then pumped her abdomen and pelvis full of heated chemotherapy. The surgeon estimated that she now has an 80 percent chance of surviving 10 years. After the surgery, she underwent more chemotherapy. She has one more round to go, her sixth. She hopes to return to work in June. But soon after that, she and her husband will leave their jobs in Boston and move with their six children to the Philadelphia area, to be closer to their families. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Each conifer lining the road outside Ira Rennert's Sagaponack mega mansion Fairfield wears a winter coat.Credit...David La Spina for The New York Times SAGAPONACK, N.Y. There's a cozy covering the Hamptons. Where once winter here meant broad, moody skies over expanses of bare potato fields, the terrain on Long Island's moneyed East End suddenly looks as domesticated as tea at the Ritz. Drive anywhere in Southampton, East Hampton, Sagaponack and Water Mill and you find lanes filled with oddly humped shapes of trees, shrubs and hedges bundled in burlap against the cold. Since late November, landscaping crews throughout the Hamptons have been scrambling to swathe precious greenery against the elements, never mind that the weather a week before Christmas was a balmy 55 degrees. While horticultural experts differ in their views of a practice they consider either essential or largely frivolous, "burlapping" has become ubiquitous, a seasonal display of wealth roughly on par with driving a 200,000 Lamborghini in August through villages where speed limits top out at 35 miles an hour. "It's gilding a toothpick," said the artist April Gornik, who with her husband, the painter Eric Fischl, lives just outside the village of Sag Harbor, where in tidy yards gracing multimillion dollar houses along Main or Madison or Henry Streets, magnolia trees, topiary boxwoods and sentinel rows of arborvitae have been stitched up in dun overcoats they'll wear until spring. "Of course it's social," said Mac Griswold, a cultural landscape historian and part time East End resident. "One person does it, and then everybody does it. It's another thing to spend money on." Gilded toothpicks don't come cheap. Ask Antonio Sanches, a landscape contractor some consider as much artist as gardener. For the last month, Mr. Sanches and his crew have leapfrogged from modest backyards to multi million dollar estates throughout the Hamptons, unspooling and cutting 200 rolls of burlap and stitching them into slipcovers for virtually anything green. "At first, a lot of people didn't want to pay," said Mr. Sanches, who arrived here more than 30 years ago from Mexico and who, as he recalled, performed every imaginable kind of manual labor before starting his own company. "But then the springtime came and the branches were broken or the ends of the plants got burned by frost. So now everyone wants the burlap because plants are expensive, and you never know anymore what the weather will be.'' Mr. Sanches earns 27 an hour for his services and estimates that the cost of winter proofing an average manicured backyard is roughly 1,000 a season. This is the Hamptons, though, where most things are exponentially above average. Consider the potential cost of burlapping, say, the 42 acre Southampton estate that came on the market last summer with a listing price of 175 million, or of turning the immense estates lining the most coveted addresses Gin Lane, Further Lane, Lily Pond Lane or Hedges Lane into vistas resembling a land art installation. "It's not the owners that are saying, 'Let's burlap everything,'" Mr. Marder said. "It's the landscapers building up the maintenance budget. When it gets to the point where everything is burlapped, you also lose appreciation of the winter colors in things like azaleas, which people think of as a Memorial Day color event but that turn beautiful purple and reddish colors in wintertime." Burlapping extends the season for landscapers who are otherwise forced into unwelcome hibernation at the first sign of frost. "A lot of guys that do landscaping shut down for the winter and go into snow removal,'' said Kate Spirgen, managing editor of Lawn Landscape, an Ohio based magazine that covers the 75 billion industry. Yet for Deborah Nevins, an internationally recognized landscape designer whom The New York Times once called the "sage of luxury landscapes," burlapping is not only a horticultural necessity but an aesthetic delight. Ms. Nevins makes frequent forays by car from her house in Springs to drive the gilded lanes of the Hamptons, documenting on Instagram the wild and improvisatory shapes she finds. There is the 400 foot banquette protecting a yew hedge not far from Grey Gardens, the fabled East Hampton estate that once belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's wacky cousins Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier Beale. (It was sold this month by its most recent owner, the journalist Sally Quinn Bradlee, for a deeply discounted price of 15.5 million.) There are the statuesque arborvitae flanking a portico in Sag Harbor like two upended sugar loafs. And there is the 25 foot tall specimen of magnolia grandiflora in Sag Harbor so delicately boxed up by landscape contractors that it now resembles a 19th century lady modestly dressing behind a screen. "Not only is it a very skilled practice and highly crafted, it's totally needful, not ostentatious at all," Ms. Nevins said. Even Ms. Griswold, the landscape historian, concedes that there are far more egregious examples of Hamptons ostentation than wrapping your garden as a gift to yourself to unwrap come spring. "Look at someone like Antonio Sanches, with the shapes he makes and these tiny, meticulous knots, and it's really quite beautiful,'' she said. "If you think about it, he's sort of the Christo of the Hamptons." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The baby elephant that could: In Tim Burton's "Dumbo," he is conspicuously more animal than his childlike antecedent in the 1941 film. In his live action remake of Disney's "Dumbo," Tim Burton plays with a legacy that he has helped burnish for decades, only to set it gleefully ablaze. Ho hum until it takes a turn toward the fascinatingly weird, the movie is a welcome declaration of artistic independence for Burton, who often strains against aesthetic and industrial restrictions. Watching him cut loose (more recklessly than his flying baby elephant) is by far the most unexpected pleasure of this movie, which dusts off the 1941 animated charmer with exhilaratingly demented spirit. One of Disney's simplest, sweetest heart tuggers (with some queasy racial stereotypes), the original "Dumbo" tells the story of a wee circus elephant whose enormous flappy ears enable him to fly. Based on a children's book, it was made fast and proved a terrific success. The straightforward story might not have seemed an obvious choice for an auteurist project, particularly given this one's cultivated eccentricities. But "Dumbo" is among the seemingly endless number of animated movies that Disney is giving a live action makeover: "Jungle Book," "The Lion King," "Aladdin," "Mulan," "The Sword in the Stone," and on and on until the end of the world (or movies) as we know it. For roughly the first half hour of the new "Dumbo," Burton seems on autopilot as he introduces the characters and sets the old timey scene with an otherworldly pale palette. (The script is by Ehren Kruger, whose credits include "The Brothers Grimm" and several "Transformers" movies.) The story opens in 1919 at a down and out circus owned by Max Medici (Danny DeVito, pumping life into his scenes), a ringmaster who presides over the movie's busily milling, child friendly freaks and geeks. By the time an earnest, tamped down Colin Farrell enters as Holt, a big tent trick rider turned disabled World War I veteran, the near two hour running time feels a lot like a threat. Need help deciding what movies or TV shows to stream next? Subscribe to our Watching newsletter. Things pick up when baby Dumbo arrives in a makeshift birthing bed. Now a digital cutie with gargantuan ears that hang off each side of his head like heavy leather curtains, the newest, littlest circus addition is conspicuously more animal than his childlike antecedent. Like the original, this Dumbo doesn't speak, which perhaps is why Burton focuses on his unnaturally large, expressive eyes. (He's an Indian elephant, so his trunk has one searching finger.) Those eyes moisten a lot, including when Holt's drearily conceptualized and motherless of course! children (Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins) comfort Dumbo after his protective mom is sent to elephant jail. In time, the kids help teach Dumbo to fly, coaxing him with a feather he snuffles into his trunk: He sneezes, and the exhalation sends him up. When he finally achieves genuine liftoff, soaring around the interior of the circus's one ring tent, Burton does, too. It's ticklish fun to watch baby elephants of any kind, including an airborne one. That's true even if Dumbo's flights prove increasingly bleak because he's at the mercy of some very bad people. Humans are secondary attractions in the 1941 movie (its animals are people proxies) but they crowd the remake. Most are just generic placeholders, but a few are strikingly brutal exploiters, none more so than V. A. Vandevere, a subversive invention. Played by Michael Keaton in full live wire mode, Vandevere is a stereotypical Richie Rich screen villain with a shadowy lair; dark designs; a wolfish smile; and a silky, possibly fatal femme, Colette (Eva Green, who adds some steel filament to a bauble). Keaton makes the character more memorable than most anyone here; Vandevere seems ready to dangerously pop. What makes him particularly arresting, though, is that he owns a sprawling, impersonal amusement park named Dreamland that is filled with menace and with attractions Nightmare Island, Wonders of Science, Rocket to the Future and the ominously named Colosseum that suggest a Disneyland Bizarro World. At first, Dreamland seems like just another reflexive flourish in a film about a group of ragtag struggling entertainers rescued by a star. There are a lot of movies about movies, and the default is generally self flattering even at its most cynical. Disney's have long been de facto advertisements for the company's even more profitable offscreen world; its animated "Hercules" actually features a Hercules Store with merch that mirrors the stuff sold offscreen. In "Dumbo," Burton takes this self referential impulse to a startling level through the representation of its Walt Disney style impresario who speaks of magic and mystique and then by lighting the whole shebang on fire. By the time Holt is galloping through flames and Vandevere is threatening to kill Dumbo's mom matricide being a studio signature the movie has gone enjoyably bonkers. The animals are roaring, the workers are revolting, and Burton has merrily turned what could have been another remake into something genuinely different and surprising. What exactly it is will partly depend on your view toward Disney. So it's worth noting that for all the tumult and fury, this can also feel a bit like a bittersweet origin story: 1919 was the same year that the teenage Walt returned from war and was hired by a commercial art shop where he met Ub Iwerks, who helped create Mickey Mouse. "They're paying me to draw pictures," Walt said, voicing the joy of creation that is too often missing in his company's later movies but here burns with a vengeance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Bryan Cranston on the set of "Network," which opens Dec. 6 at the Belasco Theater on Broadway.Credit...Devin Yalkin for The New York Times Bryan Cranston on the set of "Network," which opens Dec. 6 at the Belasco Theater on Broadway. Its story is not one that required any updating to resonate in the Trump era of alternative facts and fake news, but the play does not go out of its way to draw these parallels, either. Beyond its eerily accurate forecasting about the corporatization of news media and the degradation of truth, this "Network" has a timely and more fundamental message about the power of anger and what happens when society unleashes it en masse. It just might not be the message that audiences expect, or one that its principal constituents see eye to eye on. They have been trying to discern its meaning since they staged it in London, and are still negotiating with the play and with each other, even as they fine tune the production for Broadway. As Mr. Cranston told me later, "Our society does not welcome the emotion of anger. It is not appropriate. And working on this made me realize: Why not? It's a great motivator. It's legitimate. Why is that not embraced as who we are?" Earlier that Friday afternoon, the Belasco stage was a storm of humanity as Mr. van Hove oversaw his actors in a technical rehearsal. Two scenes were playing out simultaneously: Mr. Cranston was muttering in a mirror to an unseen figure while Ms. Maslany and Mr. Goldwyn were seducing each other over a night on the town. All the while, their movements were being tracked by cameras some overhead, some operated by people on stage with them capable of displaying them on a giant screen that dominated the set. A persistent musical score gave the dueling scenes a propulsive beat while lights bathed them in a dark blue hue. It is a markedly different approach immersive and, by design, overwhelming from the unobtrusive, naturalistic style that the director Sidney Lumet brought to the original film. "Network," the motion picture, won four Academy Awards, including Oscars for Ms. Dunaway, Chayefsky and Finch, who died shortly after it opened. Mr. Hall, the British screenwriter and playwright, discovered "Network" while living in America in the 1990s and had wanted to bring it to the stage for nearly a decade. "I was looking to do something about the internet, how that was changing our news," he said. "Then I realized Paddy had already written that play." "Network," with its many long tirades and diatribes, didn't require much intervention from an outside author. "I didn't feel that it needed my voice," Mr. Hall said. "Very, very, very, very few of the words are mine. Nearly everything comes from Paddy in one way or another." Mr. van Hove, who was approached by the National Theater to direct the play around 2013, said he saw "Network" as more than just another film to theater translation. "It's a tragedy about the loss of values," said Mr. van Hove, whose recent works include the stage version of Luchino Visconti's "The Damned" presented at the Park Avenue Armory this summer. "All its relationships are scarred," he said. "There's not one relationship in it which is just O.K." He compared "Network" to the Arthur Miller dramas he has directed, which are "plays where individuals stand in opposition to society, and there's a tension between the two." In the case of "Network," van Hove said, "It's the fall, the rise and the fall of Howard Beale." He added, "Perhaps the satire is not the most important element. I had to make it into a harsh reality and, at the same time, keep it entertaining." Mr. van Hove and the production designer Jan Versweyveld, his frequent collaborator and personal partner, pored over the text of "Network." Together they mapped out three sections of the stage, representing the various locations where all the action of the play takes place. At center stage, they placed the desk where Beale delivers his increasingly unhinged jeremiads. On the left, a television control room where colleagues and executives monitor his actions and make their cynical decisions. On the right, an arrangement of tables, chairs and couches standing in for the bars and restaurants its characters visit. The point of all this apparatus, Mr. van Hove and Mr. Versweyveld said, is to create a theatrical experience that is constantly in motion the play is two hours long without an intermission in which everyone is under observation and no one is told where to look. As they envision it, the boundary between what's occurring on that giant screen and what is happening in reality should always be ambiguous. The production still needed its Howard Beale, which it found in Mr. Cranston. At 62, he is two years older than Finch was when he played the part, though Mr. Cranston is hardly the fading lion the British actor had been. Mr. Cranston has won four Emmy Awards for his acting work on "Breaking Bad," a Tony Award for "All the Way" and an Olivier Award for the London production of "Network." He is deliberate in his choices and confident when he reaches them. When it comes to the theater, Mr. Cranston told me, "I don't believe in absolute blind reverence to the material. I just don't. Because it is a performance art. It's not a painting." (This would not necessarily have endeared him to Chayefsky, who was a stickler for the written word.) Mr. Cranston has already spent many months inhabiting Beale, and he said he had grown accustomed to the character's arc, as he evolves from a bitter relic to a beloved articulator of public rage and then, horrifically, into an anti Arab, pro corporate demagogue. But within that trajectory, Mr. Cranston said he was still making discoveries about the play and his performance. He could never anticipate, from show to show, how he might deliver a monologue like the "mad as hell" speech, when Beale defiantly tells his audience he has no solutions for a world in which "we know things are bad worse than bad, they're crazy." "Sometimes that speech stays angry and gets expletive furious," Mr. Cranston said. "Sometimes it takes me to a place where I'm weeping, and I'm so hurt and damaged and broken. I don't really know from time to time, and that's great. That's where it should live." "I feel a little youthful for the character, in terms of my orientation toward life," Mr. Goldwyn said. "He seemed so much older. A guy in his 50s in 1976 was a lot older than a guy in his 50s in 2018." As Mr. Goldwyn saw it, the events of recent years had made the message of "Network" crystal clear. "Anger has become the dominant force in our political dialogue and, as result, in our media dialogue," he said. "I don't know which came first, but now it's all gone on steroids." But Mr. Hall suggested that the play offered a different lesson, "about the danger of absolute beliefs the danger of any kind of fundamentalism," he said. To make that point, Mr. Hall said the play had to end with Beale undergoing "a moment of anagnorisis" some final realization about the truth of his experience. But what should that realization be? This took a few tries to figure out. In one scenario he contemplated, Mr. Hall said, "The last speech was going to be him, resigning on air, properly, and saying where he's gone wrong." He quickly added, "We didn't do it that way." For obvious reasons, Mr. Hall was reluctant to reveal the exact conclusion of "Network," but he credited its outcome to Mr. van Hove. As Mr. Hall explained, "He kept on saying to me and Bryan, 'I can't describe it. I just have to do it. You'll have to trust me.' I can see why he couldn't describe it, because it's a theatrical trick. But it tries to end on a reflective note." Mr. van Hove, too, was cagey about specifics, but he argued that his "Network" could strike an uplifting tone perhaps not by providing a traditional happy ending, but by suggesting the possibility that things will not always be the way they are. "I'm an optimist, but not in a stupid way," he said. "I'm not like, oh, we're all doomed. Perhaps we've destroyed the world at this moment, in a certain way. But I see things on a larger scale." Change, restoration and a return to compassion are all possible, Mr. van Hove said just maybe not as quickly as we would all like it. "At the end of the ice age, there was suddenly one little flower that came out of the ice, and then there's life again," he said. "But it takes some time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Apple's recently introduced 399 iPhone SE marks a turning point in consumer technology. It's a smartphone that delivers all the tech that we care about, without making us pay through the nose for it. Many of us have been waiting for this moment. Long ago, the technologies driving TVs and personal computers became so commonplace that good television sets and PCs became affordable for the masses. The ubiquitous smartphone, we presumed, would follow. Instead, as the smartphone matured over the last decade and a bit, the opposite happened. The price tag for the iPhone, the most popular handset in the world, reached heights that were previously unimaginable. Last year's new iPhones peaked at 1,449, compared with 599 in 2007. Yet budget phones ranging from 200 to 400 had major shortcomings like lousy cameras and slow chips. The new iPhone SE's lack of compromise is what makes it remarkable. Apple took all the best parts from its expensive iPhones including a fast computing processor and an excellent camera and squeezed them into the shell of an older iPhone with a home button and smaller screen. At the same time, it managed to include useful features that were previously exclusive to fancy new phones, like water resistance, wireless charging and so called portrait photos. That means state of the art smartphone technology has finally come down to a modest price. It's about time. After testing the new SE for a few weeks, I can confidently say that this device is ideal for many people especially for those who think about buying tech only when they feel they have to. Justin Adler, 33, is one of them. He owned the first SE, which debuted in 2016, for years, subjecting himself to mockery from his techie colleagues in San Francisco who had much nicer phones. He recently bought the latest SE. "I just never wanted to shell out 1,000 to replace something that was working perfectly fine," he said. "I was the exact core audience of, if you haven't upgraded your phone we're going to give you the cheapest bait as possible." This new iPhone may suit you as well. Here's what you need to know. Zooming in on the camera With the SE, Apple took the computing processor of the 699 iPhone 11 the fastest on the market and stuck it in a body that is practically the same as the iPhone 8 from 2017. In the process, the company also made significant improvements to the SE's camera, which has a single lens but now relies on software and artificial intelligence to make photos look much better. In past iterations of high end iPhones, the devices had two camera lenses that worked together to produce the popular effect known as portrait mode, which sharpens a subject while gently blurring the background. But in the iPhone XR from 2018, Apple used machine learning, which involved computers analyzing images to recognize people and properly sharpen them while blurring the background, to produce portrait shots of people using a single lens. Apple has applied a similar A.I. assisted approach to the SE, making portrait photos of people possible with a single lens on the cheaper device. In my tests, portrait shots looked excellent on a par with similar photos taken with the iPhone 11. This is significant for a device of this price. (Google's 399 Pixel 3A, my favorite Android phone, is also exceptional for its ability to take portrait photos, though that phone is much slower.) Of course, Apple had to cut costs somewhere, so the cheaper iPhone SE's camera lacks some frills seen in the iPhone 11 and 999 iPhone 11 Pro. Specifically, Apple limited its machine assisted image processing specifically to human subjects, meaning I couldn't take artsy photos of my dogs. The camera also lacks the so called ultra wide angle lens for taking shots with a broader field of view, as well as night mode, a feature to take better photos in the dark. For what it's worth, the shots I took in daylight of my corgi, Max, on the SE looked just as good as similar shots with the iPhone 11 and other phones on the market, like Google's 399 Pixel 3A. They came out crisp with natural looking colors and nice shadow detail. Let's talk about that screen and home button The other feature that makes the SE cheaper is the first thing you will look at: the screen. At 4.7 inches, the display is smaller than the jumbo 6.1 inch screen on the iPhone 11. But that may be a benefit. The 4.7 inch size is better suited to one hand use, so it's easy to use your thumb to reach from the home button to each corner of the screen. Also important, the phone's smaller body fits more comfortably in a pocket. The SE's second big cost saver is the use of a home button for unlocking the device, rather than the face scanners seen on modern smartphones. The iPhone fingerprint scanners have always worked quickly and reliably, and so does this one. It might be nice to have a face scanner, but many of us will probably be happy without the feature if it means saving some money. For comparison, I have given big minus points to 1,000 phones, like the Samsung Galaxy S10, for a lousy fingerprint reader and a subpar face scanner. Putting the iPhone SE's value in perspective To fully understand the SE's value, it's important to note that this isn't Apple's first rodeo with a cheaper iPhone. Those past models were not as compelling when compared with their pricier counterparts. To wit: None The 549 iPhone 5C, introduced in 2013, came in colorful plastic and felt cheaper and slower than the iPhone 5S, the model with a sleek aluminum body that cost 100 more. None The 399 iPhone SE from 2016 had the design of older iPhones, with the same computing power as newer ones at the time. Yet that SE had a notably inferior camera and dimmer screen than its 649, bigger screen counterpart at the time, the iPhone 6S. This time, the new SE's trade offs seem trivial. No face scanner, shooting photos in the dark or humongous screen? Those are minor inconveniences when you are paying 40 percent less than for an iPhone 11. I will note one big downside: The SE has significantly shorter battery life than the iPhone 11. After a day of shooting photos and juggling work tasks, the SE battery needed to be replenished by dinnertime. With the more expensive phone, I had more than 25 percent battery by bedtime. So people who work long hours and rely on their phones would probably be happier with a high end one. So who is the expected buyer? I'm not the target demographic for the SE since I'm willing to pay for fancier features. I splurged on the 999 iPhone XS two years ago because I loved taking portrait photos of food and my dogs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Amid an opioid epidemic, the rise of deadly synthetic drugs and the widening legalization of marijuana, a curious bright spot has emerged in the youth drug culture: American teenagers are growing less likely to try or regularly use drugs, including alcohol. With minor fits and starts, the trend has been building for a decade, with no clear understanding as to why. Some experts theorize that falling cigarette smoking rates are cutting into a key gateway to drugs, or that antidrug education campaigns, long a largely failed enterprise, have finally taken hold. But researchers are starting to ponder an intriguing question: Are teenagers using drugs less in part because they are constantly stimulated and entertained by their computers and phones? The possibility is worth exploring, they say, because use of smartphones and tablets has exploded over the same period that drug use has declined. This correlation does not mean that one phenomenon is causing the other, but scientists say interactive media appears to play to similar impulses as drug experimentation, including sensation seeking and the desire for independence. Or it might be that gadgets simply absorb a lot of time that could be used for other pursuits, including partying. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, says she plans to begin research on the topic in the next few months, and will convene a group of scholars in April to discuss it. The possibility that smartphones were contributing to a decline in drug use by teenagers, Dr. Volkow said, was the first question she asked when she saw the agency's most recent survey results. The survey, "Monitoring the Future," an annual government funded report measuring drug use by teenagers, found that past year use of illicit drugs other than marijuana was at the lowest level in the 40 year history of the project for eighth, 10th and 12th graders. Use of marijuana is down over the past decade for eighth and 10th graders even as social acceptability is up, the study found. Though marijuana use has risen among 12th graders, the use of cocaine, hallucinogens, ecstasy and crack are all down, too, while LSD use has remained steady. Even as heroin use has become an epidemic among adults in some communities, it has fallen among high schoolers over the past decade, the study found. Those findings are consistent with other studies showing steady declines over the past decade in drug use by teenagers after years of ebbs and flows. Dr. Volkow said this period was also notable because declining use patterns were cutting across groups "boys and girls, public and private school, not driven by one particular demographic," she said. With experts in the field exploring reasons for what they describe as a clear trend, the novel notion that ever growing phone use may be more than coincidental is gaining some traction. Dr. Volkow described interactive media as "an alternative reinforcer" to drugs, adding that "teens can get literally high when playing these games." Dr. Silvia Martins, a substance abuse expert at Columbia University who has already been exploring how to study the relationship of internet and drug use among teenagers, called the theory "highly plausible." "Playing video games, using social media, that fulfills the necessity of sensation seeking, their need to seek novel activity," Dr. Martins said, but added of the theory: "It still needs to be proved." Indeed, there are competing theories and some confounding data. While drug use has fallen among youths ages 12 to 17, it hasn't declined among college students, said Dr. Sion Kim Harris, co director of the Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research at Boston Children's Hospital. Explanations aside, researchers unanimously expressed hope that the trends would persist. They noted it was crucial to continue efforts to understand the reasons for the decline, as well as to discourage drug use. Though smartphones seem ubiquitous in daily life, they are actually so new that researchers are just beginning to understand what the devices may do to the brain. Researchers say phones and social media not only serve a primitive need for connection but can also create powerful feedback loops. "People are carrying around a portable dopamine pump, and kids have basically been carrying it around for the last 10 years," said David Greenfield, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and founder of The Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. Alexandra Elliott, 17, a senior at George Washington High School in San Francisco, said using her phone for social media "really feels good" in a way consistent with a "chemical release." A heavy phone user who smokes marijuana occasionally, Alexandra said she didn't think the two were mutually exclusive. However, she said, the phone provides a valuable tool for people at parties who don't want to do drugs because "you can sit around and look like you're doing something, even if you're not doing something, like just surfing the web." "I've done that before," she explained, "with a group sitting around a circle passing a bong or a joint. And I'll sit away from the circle texting someone." Melanie Clarke, an 18 year old taking a gap year and working in a Starbucks in Cape Cod, Mass., said she had virtually no interest in drugs, despite having been around her. "Personally, I think it is a substitution," Ms. Clarke said of her phone, which she said she was rarely without. Ms. Clarke also said she thought the habits depended on the person. "When I'm home alone, my first instinct is to go for the phone. Some kids will break out the bowls," referring to a marijuana smoking device. "There is very little hard, definitive evidence on the subject," said James Anthony, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Michigan State University and an expert on drug use behavior. Still, he said, he has begun wondering about the role of technology on youth drug use: "You'd have to be an idiot not to think about it." To see declines in drug use, Mr. Anthony said, "it would not take much in the way of displacement of adolescent time and experience in the direction of nondrug 'reinforcers' that have become increasingly available." The statistics about drug and technology use depict a decade of changing habits. In 2015, 4.2 percent of teenagers ages 12 to 17 reported smoking a cigarette in the last month, down from 10.8 percent in 2005, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Its survey also found that past month alcohol use among 12 to 17 year olds had fallen to 9.6 percent from 16.5 percent, while rising slightly for young adults ages 18 to 25. The survey found smaller but still statistically significant decreases in cocaine use by youths ages 12 to 17. Marijuana use was flat over the same decade: In 2015, 7 percent of 12 to 17 year olds said they had smoked the drug, roughly the same number in 2005. But that was down from 8.2 percent in 2002 and it contrasted with the trend for the population as a whole such use was up to 8.3 percent in 2015, compared with 6 percent a decade ago. At the same time, gadgets are consuming a growing portion of young people's time. A 2015 survey published by Common Sense Media, a children's advocacy and media ratings group in San Francisco, found that American teenagers ages 13 to 18 averaged six and a half hours of screen media time per day on social media and other activities like video games. A 2015 report from the Pew Research Center found that 24 percent of teenagers ages 13 to 17 reported being online "almost constantly," and that 73 percent had a smartphone or access to one. In 2004, a similar Pew study found that 45 percent of teenagers had a cellphone. (The first iPhone, which fueled smartphone adoption, was introduced in 2007.) Smartphones and computers are a growing source of concern, said Eric Elliott, Alexandra's father, who is a psychologist at her school. Mr. Elliott, who has counseled young people for 19 years, said he had seen a decrease in drug and alcohol use among students in recent years. He said he was "more likely to have a challenge with a student who has a video game addiction than I am a student who is addicted to drugs; I can't say that for the beginning of my career." In the case of his own daughter, he worried more about the device than the drugs. "I see her at this point and time as not being a person who is controlled in any way by smoking pot," he said. But "her phone is something she sleeps with." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
It started with hysteria. As the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences planned the 72nd Oscars, a growing panic seized the nation: What if all the computers suddenly self destruct on Jan. 1, 2000, crippling life as we know it? "This is not one of the summer movies where you can close your eyes during the scary parts," President Bill Clinton warned of the fear of the looming Y2K bug in a 1998 speech. Americans stockpiled food, bought guns and prepared for the apocalyptic worst. But not the academy. As Sid Ganis, a former academy president then on the Board of Governors, recalled, "The contingency plan was we scratched our heads and said, 'Oh my goodness, what are we going to do?'" As the clock struck 12:01 a.m. on the new millennium, the computers survived. But a string of foreboding events soon paved the way for a wholly unpredictable 2000 Oscars. First, thousands of ballots vanished. Ten mail bags containing about 80 percent of the voting sheets were misrouted, resulting in a mad dash to resend new mailers three weeks before the ceremony. Then, while the academy was still sorting out the ballot issue, 55 Oscars were stolen off a delivery truck in a crime, if not of passion, of easy opportunity for two men who worked for the Roadway Express transportation company. "It had a tragic sense to it because they weren't the ballots," Ganis said. "They weren't the programs for the evening. They were the symbols, the awards. It was the Oscar gold that went missing." A backup reserve of statuettes existed, but were there enough? The academy called in a rush order of new trophies, and after multiple arrests and a frantic 10 day search involving the Los Angeles Police Department and the F.B.I., a junkyard salvage worker named Willie Fulgear found 52 of the stolen Oscars in a dumpster behind a Food 4 Less in Los Angeles. (Another statue turned up in a Florida drug bust three years later, while the final two remain missing.) Despite being related to one of the men involved in the heist, Fulgear became an instant hero. Roadway awarded him 50,000, and the academy provided two tickets to the March 26 ceremony. That night, he strolled into the Shrine Auditorium in a top hat and tails, earning an honorable mention from the host Billy Crystal, who quipped that the 61 year old's reward for finding the trophies was "not a lot of money when you realize that Miramax and DreamWorks are spending millions of dollars just to get one." As Ganis recalled: "I saw all the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world clamoring to get to the star of the night. It wasn't another movie star. It was Willie." With the ballots and trophies under control, the show itself promised a hip new Oscars for a brave new millennium. The "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone walked the red carpet in copies of Gwyneth Paltrow's pink Ralph Lauren 1999 Oscars gown and Jennifer Lopez's iconic Versace look from the 2000 Grammys. Their ensembles delighted Michael Caine and horrified Gloria Estefan, and Parker and Stone later admitted they'd eaten sugar cubes laced with LSD immediately prior. "We were so, like, punk rock you know, like, against all of that stuff," Matt Stone told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, referring to awards competitions. "So how do you go but not go? How do you not be a part of it? Drugs." The ceremony proved equally unpredictable. Other than bringing back Crystal for his fourth round as host, the producers Richard and Lili Zanuck aimed to modernize the evening in nearly every way. They hired one of People's "most beautiful people" of 1999, the pop songwriter Burt Bacharach, as co musical director, and for the first time in Oscars history, a D.J. and turntables appeared in the orchestra pit. Giant high def screens were added to the stage, where presenters included Erykah Badu and LL Cool J, as well as the stars of "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" and the upcoming "Charlie's Angels" movie. An evenly spread slate of nominees and vicious campaigning meant there were no sure bets ahead of the show. Ill fated couples like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, looked on as "American Beauty" triumphed for best picture over the box office favorite "The Sixth Sense," and "The Matrix" swept the sound and visual effects categories. While the Oscar veterans Kevin Spacey ("American Beauty") and Caine ("The Cider House Rules") took home the actor gold, the actress categories went to upstarts. Hilary Swank, then a virtual unknown who earned 3,000 for her starring role as a transgender man in "Boys Don't Cry," beat the likes of Annette Bening, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore to win best actress. "I had an Academy Award, and I didn't have health insurance," Swank said on "60 Minutes" in 2005, noting that her "Boys Don't Cry" paycheck failed to meet the 5,000 annual income minimum. "The life of an actor." In post show recaps, Swank's victory would be overshadowed by that of another first time nominee: Angelina Jolie. As the then 24 year old took the stage for her supporting actress win for "Girl, Interrupted," she joyfully declared, "I'm so in love with my brother right now." That remark coupled with an on the lips kiss with her sibling, James Haven, at the Vanity Fair after party that night, sparked widespread outrage and a "Saturday Night Live" sketch. Jolie shrugged off the backlash, telling Entertainment Weekly that June, shortly after her Vegas wedding to Billy Bob Thorton, that there had been "nothing more than brotherly" love at play and, "my parents really loved that moment." But perhaps nothing encapsulated the surreality of the 2000 Oscars more than its musical performances. Amid more traditional showings from Aimee Mann and Randy Newman and Sarah McLachlan, 'NSync wore pastel suits and joined Estefan to serenade the audience with "Music of My Heart" from "Music of the Heart." "When you had the brilliant Robin Williams up there, you never 100 percent knew that it was going to go exactly as it did in rehearsal," Ganis said. "In the end, that number turned out to be sensational." But the most buzzed about act of the night wasn't any of those songs (or the eventual winner, Phil Collins's "Tarzan" tearjerker, "You'll Be in My Heart"), it was a star studded tribute medley rife with off camera drama involving Whitney Houston and a tearful Garth Brooks. Bacharach had assembled Houston, Brooks, Ray Charles, Queen Latifah, Dionne Warwick and Isaac Hayes to perform snippets of classic original song winners like "Over the Rainbow" and "Theme From Shaft." But during rehearsals, Houston underperformed, citing a sore throat, and was replaced by Faith Hill at the last minute. Tabloid reports claimed that Brooks openly wept at no longer being the sole country artist in the lineup, but a Capitol Records spokesperson told The New York Post, "His concern was out of respect for Whitney and her feelings because he's known her for a long time not over who her replacement would be." In the end, the trophy heist hype and a relative "cool" factor proved irresistible to audiences. The 2000 telecast drew more than 46 million viewers, an improvement on the 1999 show and numbers ABC could only dream about today. "Did I enjoy it so much because I was there at the time, or because it was really good entertainment?" Ganis mused after rewatching the ceremony recently. "I swear to you, it's just really good entertainment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Oliver Beer's new work is the first sound based installation to be commissioned by the museum. Walking up the stairs of the Met Breuer last week, the British artist Oliver Beer pressed his face into a corner and began singing a slow succession of descending pitches. When he landed on a B flat, the walls suddenly vibrated with sympathetic resonance. It's the same thing that Mr. Beer, 33, has done hundreds of times at the Met over the past few years, but with objects from its collection vases, pots and sculptures, some of them thousands of years old rather than the building itself. He carefully tested these objects in search of the so called "natural pitches" already present within them because of their geometric properties. The interior of a painted earthenware vase by Joan Miro, for example, resonates as a low F. "I was able to listen first," Mr. Beer said in an interview, "and then, very gently, to sing to one side, without my breath going near." By tuning his voice to the resonance of the individual objects as he did with the Met Breuer's stairwell he was able to confirm the pitch each one was best able to "sing." He ended up with an ensemble of 32 objects, which together form "Vessel Orchestra," currently on view and audible through Aug. 11, the first sound based installation to be commissioned by the museum. Linked, by microphones, to a nearby keyboard that's designed to trigger each individual object (and, therefore, frequency), the array, when properly amplified, is capable of producing the 32 sequential pitches of a well tempered keyboard. In other words, thanks to Mr. Beer's intervention, musicians can "play" the whole setup, like a traditional piano. Don't fear for the Met's possessions; they are not actually struck or directly manipulated. The microphones are carefully suspended above each object, dropping down into openings and crevices without coming into direct contact with the artworks. When a key on the keyboard is pressed, it turns on the microphone in the corresponding vessel, producing what Mr. Beer calls "the live feedback loop of the object." Then the collection of tones played at any given time is amplified over speakers. During most of the museum's visiting hours, "Vessel Orchestra" plays a 20 minute piece composed by Mr. Beer on loop; the notes he has chosen, and his methods of pianistic attack, are already programmed into the keyboard. The resulting tones coming from the objects are amplified, live, as you listen: While it may be a disembodied performance, it isn't canned or prerecorded. (The effect is something like that of a player piano.) This piece features nimbly flowing moments in which the microphones elicit delicate passagework, as well as drones dominated by clashing dissonances or hypnotic, sustained chords. On some afternoons, you might catch Mr. Beer or one of his colleagues giving a pop up performance at the keyboard. And on Friday evenings, there are formal concerts, in which other musicians are invited to make use of the installation. "My starting point was to interrogate both myself and my collaborators about the earliest fragments of music that they have in their minds," Mr. Beer said. "It's almost inevitably from a mother or father or a grandmother." His own memory is of the Scottish version of "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," which factors into the composition that plays on loop at the Met. Last Friday evening, the Lebanese indie rock group Mashrou' Leila gave a 40 minute show in the installation alongside the writer Rabih Alameddine. They responded to Mr. Beer's memory prompt by starting out with a sample of the popular tune "Ya Garat Al Wadi," as performed by the Lebanese singer Nour El Houda in the 1960s. The performance began with the vocal sample, presented without alteration. Gradually, the members began to use Auto Tune on El Houda's voice, in between versions of the group's own songs. These songs were in turn arranged to work alongside Mr. Beer's orchestra with the keyboardist Firas Abou Fakher often employing the low G that emits from the Met's ceramic 7th century B.C. human form vessel, excavated from Iran. "One of the things that I personally loved most about Oliver's approach is the idea that these objects with all their troubled history, and all the bizarre stories that they tell are, in one way or another, harmonized," Mr. Abou Fakher said in an interview after the performance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The spring season at New York City Ballet is the kind that makes dancers gulp. Over the next six weeks, the company presents 43 ballets by 22 choreographers, including Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon. Ice baths and massages await. The reason? The Here/Now Festival, which kicks off four weeks of jam packed programs on Tuesday, April 18. The festival celebrates the 25th anniversary of the company's New Combinations Fund, which supports new choreography. But there are some palate cleansers, too: Here/Now is bookended by classics from George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. While the final week is dedicated to Balanchine's enchanting "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the first offers programs devoted to each: Robbins's features "Fancy Free," "Moves" and "The Concert," while Balanchine's showcases "Allegro Brillante," "The Four Temperaments" and with its ravishing finale "Symphony in C." In other words, it will be a good week. (Through May 28, David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; nycballet.com.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Six years ago, Congress mandated auto safety regulators to pass a federal standard by 2011 that would help keep drivers from running over small children as they backed up their vehicles. On Monday, after three years of repeated delays and a lawsuit, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced the new rule: By May 2018, all new cars and light trucks must be equipped with rearview cameras. "We are committed to protecting the most vulnerable victims of backover accidents our children and seniors," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement. The announcement came one day before a federal appeals court was scheduled to hear arguments in a lawsuit filed last September by a consortium of safety groups over the delays and one day before a House panel will ask the safety agency's acting administrator why it did not investigate ignition switch flaws with General Motors cars. Consumer advocates and safety experts praised the announcement, though they said it should have come sooner. "It's been a long fight, and this rule took too long, but we're thrilled this day has finally come," Dr. Greg Gulbransen of Syosset, N.Y., said in a statement. In 2002, Dr. Gulbransen backed over his 2 year old son, Cameron, in a driveway, killing him. Dr. Gulbransen was one of the plaintiffs in the suit, along with Susan Auriemma, who injured her 3 year old daughter in 2005 when backing up in Manhasset, N.Y. They were joined in the suit by three consumer groups Kids and Cars Inc., Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and Consumers Union. Public Citizen represented the plaintiffs. "This rule should have been in place three years ago at the latest, but this rule will save lives," Dr. Gulbransen said. An estimated 210 fatalities and 15,000 injuries are caused every year by backover accidents, the agency said. Of those, children under the age of 5 account for 31 percent of the fatalities and adults 70 years of age and older account for 26 percent. For children of all ages, an average of two die every week and 48 are injured when someone accidentally backs over them, said Janette Fennell, president and founder of KidsAndCars.org, a nonprofit group that pushed the government to begin tracking such tragedies. The safety agency said that it wanted to get the best rule in place. "N.H.T.S.A. took time on this regulation to ensure that the policy was right and make the rule flexible and achievable," the agency said in a statement. The agency estimates that, including vehicles that already have systems installed, 58 to 69 lives will be saved each year once all vehicles on the road are equipped. The final rule applies to all new vehicles under 10,000 pounds gross vehicle weight, including passenger vehicles, buses and trucks. If Ms. Fennell had any wish, it was that automakers were not required to install the cameras sooner. "It is disappointing that they are giving automakers until 2018 to comply," she said. Rear cameras already are standard or optional equipment on 85 percent of model year 2014 vehicles, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. That compares with only 5 percent of vehicles available with rear cameras in 2005. The final rule amends a current standard by expanding the area behind a vehicle that must be visible to the driver when the vehicle is shifted into reverse. That field of view must include a 10 foot by 20 foot zone directly behind the vehicle. The system used must meet other requirements as well, including the size of the image displayed for the driver. According to the safety regulators, automakers in the near term will use rearview video systems and in vehicle displays to meet the requirements. Consumers have been quick to embrace the cameras once they have a car equipped with them. "Those of us who review vehicles for a living immediately found the value of rearview cameras when we first drove vehicles so equipped, and we have been strong proponents of the technology ever since," said Jack R. Nerad, executive editorial director and senior analyst for Kelley Blue Book. "The decision by N.H.T.S.A. to require them in all passenger cars is a welcome one, and we are certain it will result in many saved lives." For Ms. Fennell, the new rule cannot come soon enough. "People love them. I get the same reaction that I had when I got mine," she said. "I said I would never drive a car without one again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
NOW LIVES: In a two bedroom apartment in the Mid Wilshire section of Los Angeles with his wife, Shamira. Mr. Carrots was the creative force behind Peas Carrots International, a street wear brand in Los Angeles that he founded with his friends Joshton Peas and Casey Veggies, a breakout rapper. The label, known for its pop graphic T shirts, developed a cult following. It garnered glowing coverage on lifestyle websites like Complex (a "coolest L.A." brand), Hypebeast ("international phenomenon") and XXL ("spreading like wildfire"). In 2014, after disagreements with one of his partners, Mr. Carrots left to start his own label, Carrots by . As a high school student in Los Angeles, Mr. Carrots started a blog called Arrogant Veggies, where he posted images, party photos and music he liked. "It acted as my mood board," he said. That blog, which later became Peas Carrots, was also his calling card, connecting him to other young musicians, like Mac Miller, a rapper from Pittsburgh. When Mr. Miller invited Casey Veggies to open for his 2011 tour, Mr. Carrots jumped at the opportunity to create a collection of Peas Carrots T shirts to sell on tour. He realized that he was on to something when all the merchandise sold out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
From orbit, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been cataloging the landscape of Mars in exquisite detail for more than a decade. Occasionally it photographs something not at all Martian. On June 5, the orbiter passed over Mount Sharp, the mountain inside a crater where NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring since 2012. The color image, taken from a distance of 169 miles, is the combined view of three wavelength bands red, blue green and infrared. Those wavelengths bring out differences in the materials on Mars's surface, but produce a scene quite different in hue from what the human eye would see. This false color combination makes Curiosity, which is about 10 feet long and nine feet wide, pop out as a bright blue in the terrain of tan rocks and patches of dark sand. (The rover usually has a hue like an unwashed metallic car.) The Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking pictures of Curiosity about every three months to monitor movements in dunes, erosion of slopes and other changes in the landscape. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Rob Goldman, vice president for ads at Facebook, posted an eight part thread on Twitter late Friday about his company's role in Russian disinformation and quickly caused a firestorm. In his messages, Mr. Goldman discussed the indictment of 13 Russians and three companies accused of carrying out a scheme to subvert the 2016 election. Facebook was frequently mentioned in the indictment as the main tech tool that the Russians had used to tilt the election in favor of Donald J. Trump. Mr. Goldman defended Facebook in his tweets, saying that the Russian bought ads on the social network were not primarily aimed at swaying the vote result. His posts went viral on Saturday when President Trump cited them as proof that Russia's disinformation campaign was about something other than giving him an election victory. But Facebook did not directly share the ads with the American people. Instead, the House Intelligence Committee released examples of the ads ahead of congressional hearings last November. "I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was NOT the main goal." Tweet 2 Not according to the indictment. The grand jury indictment secured by Mr. Mueller asserts that the goal of Russian operatives was to influence the 2016 election, particularly by criticizing Hillary Clinton and supporting Mr. Trump and Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton's chief rival for the Democratic nomination. The Russians "engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then candidate Donald Trump," the indictment said. Mr. Goldman later wrote in another tweet that "the Russian campaign was certainly in favor of Trump." "The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election." Tweet 3 True, but here is some context. According to figures published by Facebook last October, 44 percent of the Russian bought ads were displayed before the 2016 election, while 56 percent were shown afterward. Mr. Goldman asserted that those figures were not published by the "mainstream media" however, many mainstream news outlets did print those numbers, including CNN, Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. "The main goal of the Russian propaganda and misinformation effort is to divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media, against us." Tweet 4 The indictment does show that Russian operatives used social media particularly Facebook to try to sow division among Americans. But to reiterate, the indictment said that the Russians' goal was to sway the 2016 election toward a particular outcome. That aim was pursued not just through ads, which Mr. Goldman focuses on, but through Facebook pages, groups and events. "The single best demonstration of Russia's true motives is the Houston anti islamic protest. Americans were literally puppeted into the streets by trolls who organized both the sides of protest." Tweet 5 The protests in Houston in May 2016 were among many rallies organized by Russian operatives through Facebook. While the Houston protest was anti Islamic, as Mr. Goldman said, he failed to note that the goal in promoting the demonstration was to link Mrs. Clinton's campaign with a pro Islamic message. According to the indictment secured by Mr. Mueller, there were many other examples of Russian operatives using Facebook and Instagram to organize pro Trump rallies. At one protest, the Russian operatives paid for a cage to be built, in which an actress dressed as Mrs. Clinton posed in a prison uniform. "The Russian campaign is ongoing. Just last week saw news that Russian spies attempted to sell a fake video of Trump with a hooker to the NSA." Tweet 6 American intelligence officials have said that Russia has continued to target the American public and that it is already meddling in the 2018 midterm elections. The New York Times also reported this month on an attempt by a shadowy Russian figure to sell stolen American cyberweapons, as well as compromising material on President Trump, to the United States. "There are easy ways to fight this. Disinformation is ineffective against a well educated citizenry. Finland, Sweden and Holland have all taught digital literacy and critical thinking about misinformation to great effect." Tweet 7 While Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands have all made efforts to teach digital literacy, those countries are still grappling with how to handle misinformation. A recent survey in Finland found that 67 percent of respondents "think fake news affects Finns' perceptions on issues 'a lot' or to an 'extreme' degree." Officials in Sweden and the Netherlands have also recently warned that fake news poses a threat to their governments. "We are also taking aggressive steps to prevent this sort of meddling in the future by requiring verification of political advertisers and by making all ads on the platform visible to anyone who cares to examine them." Tweet 8 After initially dismissing concerns that it influenced the 2016 election, Facebook has announced a series of moves to prevent its future misuse. One of those steps includes verifying political advertisers through a system that combines automated and human fact checkers. The company has also said it plans to use postcards sent by regular mail to verify the identities of American political advertisers. Whether these new measures will be effective is unclear. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Fourth of July celebrations may vary around our melting pot of a nation, but there's one constant that can be counted on: the fireworks. But powerful pyrotechnic displays aren't only found in major cities like New York City, Chicago or Washington, D.C. Here are eight standout shows in other cities, worth seeking out for their small town charm, stunning natural settings and, of course, spectacular fireworks. If Addison's nickname, Kaboom Town, is any indicator, this four and a half square mile town just north of Dallas takes its fireworks very seriously. More than 500,000 attendees are expected for their Third of July fireworks spectacular; the half hour show kicks off at 9:30 p.m., incorporates more than 300 shells and boasts a finale that's twice as long as the industry standard. Catch the show at the official free watch party at Addison Circle Park, but expect major crowds the gates to the park open at 4 p.m., but fireworks enthusiasts line up nine to ten hours prior. Alternatively, seek out watch parties at restaurants and hotels around town. A Fourth of July celebration in the Sierras has a backdrop that would make any fireworks display impressive 10,000 foot granite peaks ring Lake Tahoe's 72 miles of shoreline but the stunning natural scenery is just the beginning. The 25 minute show, held on July 4 at 9:45 p.m., is shot off from three barges in the waters off the lake's south shore, and can be seen from all around the area. Optimal viewing spots include Zephyr Cove, Nevada Beach, El Dorado Beach and aboard boats of all sizes (check out Fourth of July lake cruises on Ms. Dixie II and Safari Rose). The show itself prioritizes using environmentally conscientious large shells shot high in the air they are easier to clean up after the show. This Smoky Mountain town staked its claim in the Fourth of July celebration game in 1976, when it kicked off a July 4 parade at exactly 12:01 a.m. Gatlinburg continues the tradition of hosting its midnight parade each year, but plans a full day of celebrations beforehand, including an unmanned river raft regatta and a military band performance whose rendition of "The 1812 Overture" leads right into the 10 p.m. fireworks show. Dover's Fourth of July Celebration dates back to the 1976 Bicentennial, but aims to celebrate the town's Revolutionary War history, too (soldiers met and marched off to fight from downtown Dover). Tradition and modernity also factor into Dover's approximately 20 minute fireworks show. Held right downtown, the fireworks go off around 9:20 p.m. over the Delaware State Capitol Building and accompanied by a carefully curated, themed soundtrack this year's tunes will center on the phrase "Coming To America" (previous years have included music from "Hamilton," movie soundtracks and songs about cars). The Fourth of July is a big deal in Bar Harbor, with a full day of celebrations that includes a pancake breakfast, a seafood festival, lobster races and live music through the day and night. Everything culminates in an approximately 30 minute fireworks display at 9:15 p.m. look for the first boom as the band hits the final note of "The Star Spangled Banner." Fireworks are shot from the town's pier over the water, with the mountains of Acadia National Park in the background. Watch from Agamont Park right in town, or take a sunset cruise with the Bar Harbor Whale Watch Co. for a view of the show from the water. Traverse City's Fourth of July fireworks is a testament to civic engagement. In 2011, the group that had traditionally funded the fireworks opted out. A number of locals banded together and raised enough money for a 15 minute show since then, they've formed a nonprofit: the Traverse City Boom Boom Club, dedicated to ensuring that Traverse City has fireworks on the Fourth. The show, which coincides with the National Cherry Festival, is now 25 to 30 minutes long, carefully synchronized with patriotic and mainstream music, and boasts more than 1,400 fireworks. The Northern Rocky Mountains provide the backdrop for this Northwest Montana town's fireworks show, which is shot from a barge 100 yards off City Beach Park, on the eastern shore of Whitefish Lake. Come early for a live band performance at 7 p.m., and stay for the last vestiges of sunset as the fireworks start. In addition to prime viewing from City Beach, hundreds of boats will be on the lake before and during the show vessels are decked out for a 9 p.m. boat parade before converging around the barge for the show's start at approximately 10:45 p.m. Choose between two Fourth of July shows in and near Jackson drive 15 minutes to Teton Village for a fireworks display paired with stunning views of the Grand Tetons, or catch the show, which is shot from the base of Snow King Mountain right in town (both shows start around 10 p.m.). Don't want to choose? Drive up nearby Shadow Mountain or Curtis Mountain (an off road capable vehicle is a must) and see both fireworks shows simultaneously before camping overnight. Also consider catching the Town Square Shootout at 6 p.m. and the Jackson Hole Rodeo at 8 p.m., before the fireworks begin. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
All hail Bong Joon Ho and Billie Eilish's puzzled reactions and Janelle Monae's red carpet stunner. Here's what we were talking about after the ceremony. You could tell Hollywood had fallen in love with Bong Joon Ho by the outpouring inside the Dolby Theater every time the South Korean director went onstage Sunday night. And he was up there a lot, for best director, best original screenplay (shared with Han Jin Won), best international feature and finally best picture. At each prize, the crowd whooped and cheered, often rising to its feet. Accepting the directing trophy, Bong said through his interpreter, "When I was young and studying cinema, there was a saying that I carved deep into my heart, which is, 'The most personal is the most creative.'" Then he added in English, "That quote was from our great Martin Scorsese," and suddenly Bong had inspired the crowd to rise to its feet again, but this time for his fellow filmmaker. Stephanie Goodman After last year's ceremony went just fine without an officially designated host, the academy announced it was forgoing an M.C. this year as well. And yet the 2020 Oscars got off to a decidedly traditional start when, after Janelle Monae's musical opening number, Chris Rock and Steve Martin two comedians who have each separately hosted the ceremony before took to the stage and traded one liners. They gave shout outs to several nominees, made jokes about current events and punched at the lack of representation for people of color. MARTIN A couple of years ago, there was a big disaster here at the Oscars where they accidentally read out the wrong name, and it was nobody's fault, but they have guaranteed that this will not happen this year, because the academy has switched to the new Iowa caucus app. ROCK Marty Scorsese. Marty, I got to tell you, I loved the first season of "The Irishman." MARTIN Chris, think how much the Oscars have changed in the past 92 years. ... In 1929, there were no black acting nominees. Though female filmmakers and people of color were largely omitted from the top categories, they were rewarded in less glamorous ones. Best documentary went to "American Factory," which was directed by Julia Reichert along with Steven Bognar, while best documentary short went to "Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if You're a Girl)," from the filmmaker Carol Dysinger. And "Hair Love," the best animated short, was made by three African American filmmakers: Matthew A. Cherry, Bruce W. Smith and Everett Downing Jr. Onstage, a "Hair Love" producer, Karen Rupert Toliver, described the film as a labor of love that stemmed from "a firm belief that representation matters deeply," especially in cartoons "because that's when we first see our movies and it's how we shape our lives and think about how we see the world." Stephanie Goodman Look, "Queen Slim"! Hey, it's "Dolemite Is My Name"! Check it out, um, "Midsommar"? The show decided to use a musical opening number to celebrate a few films they completely ignored in the nomination process. Leading the performance, Janelle Monae began on a makeshift "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" set (a reference to "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood," which did get one nomination), but later donned full flower dress regalia, a reference to Ari Aster's bleak horror show "Midsommar," unlikely to have been seen by many academy members. If we're celebrating movies that came nowhere near making the Oscar ballot, it's a shame they didn't throw at least a couple of Jellicles into the opening, rather than saving them for a visual effects joke later. Mekado Murphy The Oscars are kind of fun and kind of stupid, and every once in a while, someone at the ceremony seems to recognize that. This year, it was Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig with a bit that was very fun and very stupid. They pretended to be showing off their dramatic chops, declared they were passionate about production design and broke into a terrifically precise little musical medley to introduce the best costume design nominees. Can we do this every year? Margaret Lyons The Most Refreshing Looks Old Hollywood and the way it is represented by the academy and its nominations has been under the microscope for awhile now, whether because of OscarsSoWhite or MeToo or the lack of recognition of female directors. It makes you wonder why so many actors still think dressing a la "old Hollywood" is the way to go on the red carpet. If ever there was a time to change things up a bit, this should be it. So it was hard to see all the Veronica Lake hair and silver screen era gowns, the bows and the fishtails and the corsets Charlize Theron in off the shoulder Dior black; Renee Zellweger in a white sequined Armani slither; even Regina King in queenly shell pink Versace and not think: "lost opportunity." Happily, there were those who stepped up to seize it: Natalie Portman, for example, in a Dior gown edged in gold embroidery listing the names of the female directors who hadn't been nominated. Spike Lee, longtime basketball fan, in a Laker purple and gold Gucci suit, with the number "24" on the lapels, in honor of Kobe Bryant. Margot Robbie in mid 1990s vintage couture Chanel. Reduce, reuse, recycle! Sometimes the most, um, interesting moments happen where you least expect them. Renee Zellweger needed to give the corset under her dress a break, seeing as how she was supposed to be sitting in it for four hours. Relatively early in the evening, she ran into Brie Larson in a Dolby Theater bathroom. Larson asked her if she was tired. Zellweger said yes and Larson, who won the trophy for best actress in 2016, responded, "It's better that way." "Oh really, why?" Zellweger asked. "You have less energy, less ability to be nervous," Larson replied. "I don't know," said Zellweger, who would go on to win best actress for her portrayal of Judy Garland. "I'm still really nervous." Nicole Sperling Eminem popped up during the ceremony apropos of seemingly nothing to perform "Lose Yourself," his Oscar winning song from 2003. Martin Scorsese seemed to sum up the reaction: He appeared to use Eminem's performance as an opportunity to take a nap. Cameras quickly cut away from the director and toward audience members singing along. And to be fair they did give him a standing ovation. But the performance still went down as one of the ceremony's clankier moments. Did producers invite Eminem in an attempt to attract young male viewers? Nobody backstage had any idea. Perhaps the purpose was to counterbalance the night's warmth, especially concerning messages of community and inclusion. Eminem, who has a history of gay slurs, was most recently in the news for lyrics about the killings at an Ariana Grande concert in 2017. Brooks Barnes The Other Best Reaction Shot | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
As investigators closed in on Purdue Pharma, the maker of the opioid painkiller OxyContin, more than a decade ago, members of the family that owns the company began shifting hundreds of millions of dollars from the business to themselves through offshore entities, the state of New York alleged in a lawsuit on Thursday. The legal complaint, released at a news conference by the state attorney general Letitia James, was heavily redacted. Even so, it contains striking details alleging systematic fraud not only by the Sacklers but by a group of large but lesser known companies that distributed alarming amounts of prescription painkillers amid a rising epidemic of abuse that has killed hundreds of thousands of people nationwide. The major pharmaceutical distributors Cardinal Health, McKesson and Amerisource Bergen warned pharmacies when their monthly opioid limits were approaching, then helped them manipulate the timing and volume of orders to circumvent the limits, the complaint charged. On the rare occasion when a distributor would conduct "surprise" audits of its customers, it would often alert them in advance, the complaint says. Over the past two decades, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 200,000 more have died from overdoses involving illegal opioids, like heroin. The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Suffolk County, names eight Sacklers: Richard, Jonathan, Mortimer, Kathe, David, Beverly and Theresa Sackler, as well as Ilene Sackler Lefcourt. It seeks to claw back funds that it alleges were transferred from Purdue Pharma to private or offshore accounts held by family members in an effort to shield the assets from litigation; to order the Sacklers to return any transferred assets; and to restrain them from disposing of any property. A spokesman for the Sackler family called the allegations "a misguided attempt to place blame where it does not belong for a complex public health crisis. We strongly deny these allegations, which are inconsistent with the factual record, and will vigorously defend against them." A spokesman for Purdue Pharma said the company and its former directors "vigorously deny" the charges set forth in the complaint, and will defend themselves against the "misleading allegations." The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the United States, known for their generous philanthropy in the arts. But they have come under increasing scrutiny after new documents came to light in a Massachusetts case suggesting that some family members helped direct misleading marketing efforts for OxyContin and ignored evidence that the drug was being abused. Over the past several weeks, a number of cultural institutions in the United States and abroad have said they will no longer accept the family's money. The New York lawsuit alleges that Sackler family members abolished quarterly reports, insisted that numbers be recounted only orally to board members, and voted to pay themselves millions of dollars, often through offshore companies. It further charges that in 2007, while Purdue was being investigated by federal prosecutors, the family created a new company to sell opioids, called Rhodes, which a former Purdue official said was specifically set up as a "landing pad" for the Sacklers because of the crisis surrounding OxyContin, according to the lawsuit. Rhodes, which is owned by trusts benefiting the Sacklers and is overseen by members of the family, started selling generic opioids in 2009, the lawsuit says. By 2016, Rhodes had a far greater share of the opioid market than did Purdue, according to a Financial Times article quoted by the lawsuit. "Whereas the Sacklers have reduced Purdue's operations and size, Rhodes continues to grow and sell opioids for the benefit of the Sackler families," the legal complaint said. By 2014, fearing that Purdue could face catastrophic financial judgments, the Sacklers directed Purdue to pay family members hundreds of millions of dollars a year in distributions, sending money to offshore companies, the lawsuit claims, an act of clear "bad faith." As a result of these distributions, the lawsuit says, "assets are no longer available to satisfy Purdue's future creditor, the state of New York." The complaint takes a skeptical view of recent reports that the company is considering filing for bankruptcy. It charges that the company is actually conducting "a well thought out and deliberate media campaign to intimidate the litigating states, including New York, by threatening to commence bankruptcy proceedings." The lawsuit also goes well beyond other cases in spelling out in granular detail how pharmaceutical distributors played a role in the opioid epidemic by ignoring blatant "red flags" that indicated mountains of opioids were being diverted for illegal use. The distributors are far less known than opioid makers and retailers, but they are among the wealthiest companies in the United States. (The lawsuit says all three are in the top 20 in terms of revenue.) Distributors buy drugs in bulk from manufacturers and then sell them to pharmacies and other distributors, such as clinics. They are legally bound to monitor the quantities sold to each vendor and alert regulators if the amounts seem excessive. The suit (which also names a regional distributor, Rochester Drug) alleges that the distributors turned "a collective blind eye as orders for opioids in New York skyrocketed" and drugs known to be dangerous "came to be dispensed like candy." A spokeswoman for Cardinal Health said the company has a rigorous system in place to flag and report suspicious orders and has enhanced the program over time. "We report suspicious orders to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and state regulators but we do not know what they do with those reports, if anything," the spokesman said, adding, "Our people operate in good faith and our goal is to get it right." A spokeswoman for McKesson said the company would not issue a statement in response to the lawsuit, but has stated in the past that it is deeply concerned about the opioid epidemic and is continuously enhancing programs to detect and prevent illicit diversion and sales of controlled substances. The lawsuit alleges that Cardinal Health which distributed 780 million oxycodone pills to its New York State customers between 2010 and 2018 appointed people with no experience to key compliance positions and gave them no training. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Fall colors were beginning to show in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, on Oct. 12. Scientists say that the glorious colors are lasting longer because of climate change. IONA, Nova Scotia A century ago, the flaming fall foliage in Nova Scotia would have long faded by early November. But today, some of the hills are still as nubbly with color as an aunt's embroidered pillow. Climate change is responsible, scientists say. As the seasonal change creeps later into the year, not only here but all across the northern United States and Canada, the glorious colors will last longer, they predict a rare instance where global warming is giving us something to look forward to. "If climate change makes eastern North America drier, then autumn colors will be spectacular, as they are on the Canadian Shield in dry summers, especially the red maples," said Root Gorelick, a biology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. The Canadian Shield is a broad ring of forests and ancient bedrock that extends hundreds of miles from the shores of Hudson Bay. Over the very long term, the warming planet may have a negative effect on fall foliage, but even then any adverse impact is uncertain. It is not just an aesthetic question, but an economic one as well: We only have to read Henry David Thoreau to know that climate change is pushing the changing colors later into the year. He spent a lot of time tramping around his native Concord, Mass., making notes on how plants changed with the seasons. In his 1862 essay "Autumnal Tints," the naturalist wrote: "By the twenty fifth of September, the Red Maples generally are beginning to be ripe. Some large ones have been conspicuously changing for a week, and some single trees are now very brilliant." He goes on to say that sugar maples, whose change generally follows red maples in short order, "are most brilliant" about the second of October. Anyone sensitive to the onset of autumn in New England these days knows that most trees, including the maples, are still bottle green on those dates. "In general, peak leaf color in Concord and the surrounding Boston area for these maples is now more typically a week or two later" than what Thoreau observed, said Richard Primack, a biology professor at Boston University. He has been using Thoreau's records and satellite images to track the effect of climate change on local plant cycles. The Harvard study, which looked at the percentage and duration of autumn color in Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts from 1993 to 2010, predicted that with current climate change forecasts, the duration of the fall display would increase about one day for every 10 years. Look at it this way: Children born this year could have an extra week to enjoy the colors by the time they are 70. The study further analyzed data for trees that turn red: red maple, sugar maple, black gum, white oak, red oak, black oak, black cherry and white ash. Only in white ash trees did the duration and full display of color decrease. In the others, the amount and duration of red leaves increased over the course of 18 years. The Harvard study used data collected by John O'Keefe, the museum coordinator, now emeritus, at Harvard Forest, who made his observations by eye estimating the percentage of colored leaves for each species and the duration from when 10 percent of a tree's leaves turned color to when 90 percent had turned. Those observations have been validated by Andrew Richardson, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, who has since set up a network of 350 "phenocams," cameras that quantify the duration and intensity of autumn colors in locations from Alaska to Hawaii, Arizona to Maine and up into Canada. Worse? Scientists say that in the longer term the warming temperatures could threaten cold weather hardwoods like the blazing maples, pushing their southern border north and narrowing the band in which they can survive between the temperate and circumpolar boreal forests. More southern and less colorful species like oaks and hickories may march north, eventually replacing the maples and other exhibitionists. Some scientists also say that the mechanism that makes leaves red may not work as efficiently in much warmer weather, eventually dulling those colors. The scientific term for the color change is leaf senescence, when deciduous trees pack up their summer clothes and prepare to sleep naked through the long frigid winter. The green chlorophyll in the leaves breaks down, disappearing to reveal the yellow carotenoid pigments underneath. Those pigments break down more slowly, until the leaves eventually turn brown. The real magic comes from the trees, maples among them, that produce a compound called anthocyanin as the chlorophyll disappears. Anthocyanin is the pigment that makes cranberries red and blueberries blue, among other things. Its role in autumn leaves is not well understood, but current theories suggest that some trees have evolved to produce it to protect their leaves from the damaging effects of intense sunlight while the chlorophyll breaks down the red pigment absorbs wavelengths in the green region of the spectrum that would otherwise be reflected by the disappearing chlorophyll. Leaves that contain roughly equal amounts of yellow carotenoids and red anthocyanin appear bright orange in the fall. The higher the proportion of anthocyanin, the brighter red the tree will be, to the point of scarlet, the curious color that excites us most. Sunlight, particularly in late summer and fall, sets off the production of anthocyanin. Cloudy weather dampens production and leads to less colorful displays. Many scientists argue that warming temperatures do not have much to do with the intensity of color, only with its timing: when it appears and how long it lasts. But Howard Neufeld, a professor of biology at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, said climate change could eventually affect the complex processes in leaf senescence and lower anthocyanin production, dulling the autumn reds. To produce anthocyanin, leaves need energy, which they get from the sun and from sugar in the leaves sugar that otherwise would be metabolized by the tree. Warmer temperatures, Professor Neufeld said, may speed up enzymes involved in nighttime respiration, when leaves exhale carbon dioxide and absorb oxygen, as humans do. Respiration requires sugar for fuel, and burning it faster would leave less available for anthocyanin production. So far, however, warmer temperatures do not seem to have had this effect. Mr. O'Keefe noted that despite this year's record warmth and one of the latest onsets of fall color that he had seen in 27 years, in his neck of the woods it had been "a brilliant red year." Professor Neufeld, too, concedes that "even though we thought colors might be dull, they are bright this year." For someone standing in a Nova Scotia dell amid the glowing golden light of the sun filtered through buttery beech leaves and a fiery orange sugar maple, the science seems less important than the simple, sublime beauty of the trees. As Thoreau wrote, "I am more interested in the rosy cheek than I am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The KonMari method of tidying up, based on a best selling book written by Marie Kondo, involves going through all your possessions item by item and chucking each one that doesn't bring you joy. If the humped bladderwort were a person, it would be a KonMari master. But instead of keeping items that produce joy, it held onto genes that produce function the stuff that allows it to develop and live as a plant and the extra stuff that allows it to trap and digest animal proteins. Throughout its evolutionary history, the bladderwort acquired its curated genetic possessions in a couple of ways. During rare polyploid events, a screw up in the reproductive process caused the whole genome to duplicate at once. This happened two or three times over the 10 million or 20 million years the plant has been on this planet. And during tandem events, a chunk of DNA duplicated itself, placing its new twin beside it along the genome, in another, more frequent accident in reproduction. During the process, genetic junk that didn't serve a purpose was expunged, and the necessary stuff was kept. Dr. Albert and his colleagues identified these moments in the bladderwort genome and determined that these major events produced genes responsible for essential developmental and physiological plant functions like responding to light and growing flowers. And the smaller events, in many cases, produced genes associated with being carnivorous like the ones that make papain, an enzyme in meat tenderizer. Similar tandem events made it possible for the coffee plant to synthesize caffeine. At the bladderwort's earliest point, Dr. Albert believes carnivory was a defense mechanism. For example, like the caffeine originally produced to deter herbivores from eating coffee leaves, certain digestive enzymes may have been produced to deter animals and fungi from eating bladderworts. "But in the end they repurposed this to actually chew on those guys instead," Dr. Albert said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Spoiled for choice, Ruth Reichl frets over a major career choice. Should she accept her dream job as editor in chief of a magazine she has loved since childhood and risk becoming a corporate creature? Or stay put in her imperial post as restaurant critic for The New York Times? We know the ending to this foodie fairy tale, but it's still fun to read "Save Me the Plums," Reichl's poignant and hilarious account of what it took to bring the dusty food bible back to life with artistic and literary flair through the glory days of magazine making from 1999 to the day in the fall of 2009 when she was informed that Conde Nast had decided to close Gourmet's pantry for good. The first course is served when Reichl is courted at a clandestine meeting with a member of Conde Nast's brass at the Algonquin Hotel, followed soon after by lunch with S.I. Newhouse at Da Silvano, the media mogul's favorite downtown watering hole, where she discovers that Newhouse despised garlic (so much that he banned it from Conde Nast's Frank Gehry designed cafeteria). Undeterred by this and other eccentricities, Reichl peels away the layers of drama that arrive with her new job. (Caution: Former editors might experience indigestion while reveling in Reichl's rich servings of publishing world intrigue.) She wondered whether she was up to the task of managing a large staff of editors, fact checkers and art directors. As 10 years of inspiring Gourmet issues and now this memoir would attest, the answer was an emphatic yes. Magazine junkies will look back in amazement at the groaning board of perks that once were staples of the job. "Apparently they pay for everything," Reichl informed her husband. "Country clubs ... hairdressers, travel. You name it." Other accouterments of the position included a private office bathroom and dining room, a limo and a driver named Mustafa. Reichl takes us through her crash course in publishing lingo as she discovers the difference between "teeosees" (table of contents), "adjacencies" (ads situated next to text) and "inadequate sep" (when ads are improperly spaced). The ultimate indoctrination into the fraternity of fat expense accounts comes at the airport when Reichl is checking into economy class and the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, standing in the first class line with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, reprimands her: "You're at Conde Nast now. ... You shouldn't be traveling like that." Working mothers will sympathize with Reichl's descriptions of the exhausting rhythms of a "dream job" in her case, book tours, media interviews and advertising events. One particularly touching moment comes when Reichl realizes that she can't make more time in her schedule for her family and weighs the ultimate compromise: "Children, I came to understand, need you around even if they ignore you. In fact, they need you around so they can ignore you." Tantalizing recipes provide punctuation to the career twists and turns. These include the Thanksgiving turkey chili she and her staff cook for rescue workers at ground zero and the spicy Chinese noodles her young son begs her to make for him on a rare night when Reichl is finally able to fix his dinner. Cooks will marvel at the tasting kitchen coup when Reichl dazzles her new staff by guessing the origin of a recipe at a blind chocolate cake test and even suggests using a better brand of chocolate (Scharffen Berger). Readers will wince at Reichl's discomfort when, at a signing for a book of recipes, she is confronted by a chef about a review that cost him his job. "'"Bitter salad,"' he quoted sourly he had memorized the entire review. '"Mushy sole. Cottony bread." They fired me after your hatchet job, and I haven't been able to find work since.'" Hard as a restaurant critic's job can be, Reichl learns that it isn't nearly as draining as navigating the business side of a magazine. She begrudgingly accepts the necessity of making sales calls with publishers. Of course, the upside of dealing with corporate types is having lunch at the Four Seasons, where Reichl is taken by Steve Florio, Conde Nast's chief executive. Her description of the Grill Room's caviar stuffed "Florio potato," along with her account of the publisher's hostile relationship with Conde Nast's waiflike editorial director, James Truman, is simply delicious. Reichl also recounts the ins and outs of human resources: the revolving door of publishers, the firing and hiring of staff, and how she lured talent to the magazine including brilliant writers like Ann Patchett, who puts a turtle on her expense account to save it from certain death in a market on the Amazon, and David Foster Wallace, who delivers 10,000 controversial words on the Maine Lobster Festival. Magazine makers will appreciate Reichl's recipe like telling of how the art director Richard Ferretti reinvented Gourmet's covers, infusing them with cinematic clarity and drama. When the stock market plunges in 2008 and the housing crisis threatens newsstand sales, Reichl and her staff take a counterintuitive path and head for Paris, jettisoning the Conde Nast ethos of spending as they create an entire issue devoted to budget travel and food. A three course meal for only 12 euros foreshadows Reichl's final release from Conde Nast's golden handcuffs. When the waitress takes the menu away, announcing that she will decide what's for lunch, Reichl reflects on the barriers money can create: "The more stars in your itinerary, the less likely you are to find the real life of another country." Of course, the French know very well that true luxury is measured in portion size, and Reichl eventually loses her appetite for the hefty perks of magazine life. But before she can sign off with her painful descriptions of the "terrible sense of failure" that overwhelmed her when she lost her job, each serving of magazine folklore is worth savoring. In fact, Reichl's story is juicier than a Peter Luger porterhouse. Dig in. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
MALIBU, Calif. I wasn't eating right. Was I even eating? In that miserable winter in 2011, I couldn't always be sure. Unlike my impossibly slender, toned new neighbors here, where I'd rented a small apartment on the beach to escape my cold Montana hometown, I didn't count calories, carbs or protein grams. I only counted pounds, the bottom line. Lately, I'd lost track even of those. A combination of workaholic strain and grief over my mother's recent death had plunged me into a spiral of self neglect as I veered between pigging out and going hungry. I was failing as a Southern Californian, and my eyes, as yellow as Post it notes, were proof. One day, in this state of nutritional manic depression, I wandered into a local juice bar, SunLife Organics. My goal was modest: to drink something, anything, containing maca, a so called superfood much praised by the yoga instructors and pro surfers whom I sometimes overheard chatting about their health and fitness regimens. I'd scorned these types when I'd first moved to the beach, but physical beauty is a great persuader, and misery soon grows tired of its own company. I waited in a long line whose glamour quotient the ratio of pop culture celebrities to people who ought to be, judging by their looks was higher than I'd ever seen. The decor was predictable: crystals everywhere. Standing upright on shelves and on the floor were several enormous geodes, split in half, with sparkling amber and purple centers. Equally luminous were the bottled drinks displayed in a cooler near the front door. I picked up one, a glowing orange potion made of turmeric, raw honey, lemon juice, ginger, black pepper, cayenne and alkaline water. The stuff was called Elixir of Life, and I sat down to drink it at a communal table under a screen playing surfing videos. I became a SunLife regular that day, unwittingly joining the only cult that has ever had me for a member. There was something euphoric about the place, as though each morning, just before it opened, someone struck a giant diamond tuning fork that magically resonated till closing time. The young men and women working behind the counter, most of them no older than their late teens, were the handsomest human beings I'd ever seen outside of magazine ads for high end underwear. As they chopped fruits and vegetables and blended smoothies beneath a large sign that read "Love Heal Inspire," they seemed on the verge of bursting into song. One morning as I was sipping my Elixir, a lean, compact man with short dark hair approached me. His gaze was unsettlingly steady, like a therapist's, and hanging around his neck was a gold cross overlaid with a Star of David. This made me wary; I wondered if he were a guru to the stars. I'd noticed him talking from time to time with two of SunLife's most conspicuous regulars: Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and David Duchovny, the actor. The man also appeared to be on intimate terms with an elderly Buddhist monk in saffron robes who came in for acai bowls with chopped bananas. "That drink saved my life; it's a game changer," he said. Then he introduced himself. His name was Khalil, and he was a co owner of the place. I said that I was pleased to meet him and that his juice bar was the best one I'd ever been to, by a mile. He answered, "I know." Or maybe he just nodded. All I remember is his startling confidence. That, and the way he looked me in the eye when he told me about the game the drink had changed. Khalil Rafati is 46, but he shouldn't be. He should be dead. In 2001, at a house party in Malibu, Mr. Rafati, who had been dealing drugs for years, intentionally overdosed on IV heroin and was revived by paramedics. In 2002, he almost died again, when armed intruders fired at him through the door of a bathroom where he was shooting drugs. He found himself homeless soon afterward, drifting through downtown Los Angeles's skid row, emaciated and covered in abscesses. Eventually he wound up in the Los Angeles County Jail. He credits his survival there to a fellow prisoner's advice to feign suicidal thoughts, a trick that allowed him to escape the facility's general population for its less violent psychiatric unit. Mr. Rafati describes this in "I Forgot to Die," a self published memoir of addiction and recovery that is for sale online and in his stores, of which there are six now, spread around the greater Los Angeles area, from Pasadena to Manhattan Beach. The book starts in Toledo, Ohio, his hometown, where he was born in 1969, the son of a Polish Jewish mother (who was raised Roman Catholic) and a Muslim father of Palestinian origins. His childhood was exceptionally grim, marked by sexual abuse, repeated run ins with the law and a gnawing desire to get away. He finally did in 1992, driving nonstop to Southern California in a caffeine fueled bid for independence. Mr. Rafati's first year out west was a Horatio Alger story of humble hard work and social ascendance. He started a business detailing sports cars, and soon found himself employed on the estate of none other than Elizabeth Taylor. Other celebrity clients followed, including Slash, the guitarist for Guns N' Roses, and Jeff Bridges, the actor. Unfortunately, Mr. Rafati wasn't content doing odd jobs for the stars; he invested his earnings in bulk purchases of marijuana, which he sold off in small amounts for lavish profits. By the late 1990s, he was peddling ecstasy at raves and smuggling ketamine, a surgical anesthetic, across the border from Mexico. Then one night at a party, he tried heroin. It gave him, he writes, what he had always wanted: "A childhood." After countless failed attempts at sobriety, Mr. Rafati cleaned himself up for the last time on June 18, 2003. "I'd finally reached the bottom of all bottoms," he said. "There was no more digging left to do; all of my shovels were broken. I was done." Before long, he'd grown as serious about his recovery as he had been about narcotics. Once Mr. Rafati refocused his energy on nutritional matters, his entrepreneurial spirit took over, helped by a series of CDs and DVDs by the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. He started to dream of, in his words, "a place where everybody would know your name, just like in the old television show 'Cheers.'" Because he'd ruined his credit during his years of drug use, his grubstake for the store consisted of 50,000 worth of gold coins he'd squirreled away. With a partner, Hayley Gorcey, his girlfriend at the time, he also found a backer, a professional gambler who wishes to remain anonymous. Finally, he sought advice from his friend Fred Segal, the retail clothing legend and a stickler for detail. "He gave me a 20 minute lecture on the sign on the bathroom door that read, 'Customers Only,'" Mr. Rafati said. "He was so mad! He insisted that I take it down immediately and have a new one put up that said, 'For our customers.' He told me that my job was to love people and heal them." "Right from the start, he was trying to better my life," Mr. Coelho says of his boss. "He got me to run my first Tough Mudder," an ordeal like race and obstacle course. "He gets very personal with us, especially the ones he believes in. This shirt I'm wearing? It's one of like 20 James Perse shirts he's given me. He pushes us very hard, in a father like sense." Over the years as a SunLife customer, I've seen firsthand how Mr. Rafati's juice bars function as informal meeting places for souls on the mend from drugs and alcohol. This makes SunLife more than a zone of good nutrition; it makes it a haven for spirits who truly thirst. Mr. Rafati, with his eclectic spiritual background part Jewish, part Muslim and part Christian wouldn't have it any other way. One morning, over my daily Elixir of Life, I asked him, "If you had to check a box concerning your religion, what would it be?" He thought for a moment and then said: | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
It has been 30 years since "Dirty Dancing," the love story about the resort dance instructor Johnny Castle, played by Patrick Swayze, and a guest, Frances Houseman (Jennifer Grey), known as Baby, opened in theaters. Although the movie was filmed in Virginia and North Carolina, it was set in the Catskill Mountains in Sullivan County, N.Y., in the 1960s. To toast the movie's milestone, businesses in Sullivan County will host "Dirty Dancing" themed events the weekend beginning Friday, Aug. 11, while hotels in the area are offering packages that weekend. Below is a sampling of the planned celebration: Nine River Road in Callicoon has "The Lift" package, which includes two tickets to "Dirty Dancing" at the Callicoon Theater and breakfast. From 169 a night. Call 845 887 0042 to reserve. Villa Roma Resort in Callicoon has a "Time of Your Life" package, which includes two nights' accommodations, daily breakfast and dinner, a live performance on Saturday night with songs from "Dirty Dancing," an open bar cocktail party Saturday evening and activities throughout the weekend, like bumper boat rides. The former dancer Jackie Horner, who consulted on the movie, will give a lecture Saturday afternoon about her time on the set. Rates start at 956 for two people, including tax and gratuities. Children 10 and under are 160, and those 11 to 16 are 210. Call 845 887 4880 to reserve. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
THE advertisement warns of speculative financial bubbles. It mocks a group of gullible Frenchmen seduced into a silly, 18th century investment scheme, noting that the modern shareholder, armed with superior information, can avoid the pitfalls of the past. "How different the position of the investor today!" the ad enthuses. It ran in The Saturday Evening Post on Sept. 14, 1929. A month later, the stock market crashed. "Everyone wants to think they're smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors," says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. "They're wrong. And we can prove it." Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare book libraries, riffled through monks' yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you've ever seen. Their handiwork is contained in their recent best seller, "This Time Is Different," a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions. It is a panoramic opus, both geographically and temporally, covering crises from 66 countries over the last 800 years. The book, and Ms. Reinhart's and Mr. Rogoff's own professional journeys as economists, zero in on some of the broader shortcomings of their trade thrown into harsh relief by economists' widespread failure to anticipate or address the financial crisis that began in 2007. "The mainstream of academic research in macroeconomics puts theoretical coherence and elegance first, and investigating the data second," says Mr. Rogoff. For that reason, he says, much of the profession's celebrated work "was not terribly useful in either predicting the financial crisis, or in assessing how it would it play out once it happened." "People almost pride themselves on not paying attention to current events," he says. In the past, other economists often took the same empirical approach as the Reinhart Rogoff team. But this approach fell into disfavor over the last few decades as economists glorified financial papers that were theory rich and data poor. Much of that theory driven work, critics say, is built on the same disassembled and reassembled sets of data points generally from just the last 25 years or so and from the same handful of rich countries that quants have whisked into ever more dazzling and complicated mathematical formations. But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded." ONE of Ken Rogoff's favorite economics jokes yes, there are economics jokes is "the one about the lamppost": A drunk on his way home from a bar one night realizes that he has dropped his keys. He gets down on his hands and knees and starts groping around beneath a lamppost. A policeman asks what he's doing. "I lost my keys in the park," says the drunk. "Then why are you looking for them under the lamppost?" asks the puzzled cop. "Because," says the drunk, "that's where the light is." Mr. Rogoff, 57, has spent a lifetime exploring places and ideas off the beaten track. Tall, thin and bespectacled, he grew up in Rochester. There, he attended a "tough inner city school," where his "true liberal parents" a radiologist and a librarian sent him so he would be exposed to students from a variety of social and economic classes. He received a chess set for his 13th birthday, and he quickly discovered that he was something of a prodigy, a fact he decided to hide so he wouldn't get beaten up in the lunchroom. "I think chess may be a relatively cool thing for kids to do now, on par with soccer or other sports," he says. "It really wasn't then." Soon, he began traveling alone to competitions around the United States, paying his way with his prize winnings. He earned the rank of American "master" by the age of 14, was a New York State Open champion and soon became a "senior master," the highest national title. When he was 16, he left home against his parents' wishes to become a professional chess player in Europe. He enrolled fleetingly in high schools in London and Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, but rarely attended. "I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to be doing," he recalls. He spent the next 18 months or so wandering to competitions around Europe, supporting himself with winnings and by participating in exhibitions in which he played dozens of opponents simultaneously, sometimes while wearing a blindfold. Occasionally, he slept in five star hotels, but other nights, when his prize winnings thinned, he crashed in grimy train stations. He had few friends, and spent most of his time alone, studying chess and analyzing previous games. Clean cut and favoring a coat and tie these days, he described himself as a ragged "hippie" during his time in Europe. He also found life in Eastern Europe friendly but strained, he says, throttled by black markets, scarcity and unmet government promises. After much hand wringing, he decided to return to the United States to attend Yale, which overlooked his threadbare high school transcript. He considered majoring in Russian until Jeremy Bulow, a classmate who is now an economics professor at Stanford, began evangelizing about economics. Mr. Rogoff took an econometrics course, reveling in its precision and rigor, and went on to focus on comparative economic systems. He interrupted a brief stint in a graduate program in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to prepare for the world chess championships, which were held only every three years. After becoming an "international grandmaster," the highest title awarded in chess, when he was 25, he decided to quit chess entirely and to return to M.I.T. He did so because he had snared the grandmaster title and because he realized that he would probably never be ranked No. 1. He says it took him a long time to get over the game, and the euphoric, almost omnipotent highs of his past victories. "To this day I get letters, maybe every two years, from top players asking me: 'How do I quit? I want to quit like you did, and I can't figure out how to do it,' " he says. "I tell them that it's hard to go from being at the top of a field, because you really feel that way when you're playing chess and winning, to being at the bottom and they need to prepare themselves for that." He returned to M.I.T., rushed through what he acknowledges was a mediocre doctoral dissertation, and then became a researcher at the Federal Reserve where he said he had good role models who taught him how to be, at last, "professional" and "serious." Teaching stints followed, before the International Monetary Fund chose him as its chief economist in 2001. It was at the I.M.F. that he began collaborating with a relatively unfamiliar economist named Carmen Reinhart, whom he appointed as his deputy after admiring her work from afar. MS. REINHART, 54, is hardly a household name. And, unlike Mr. Rogoff, she has never been hired by an Ivy League school. But measured by how often her work is cited by colleagues and others, this woman whom several colleagues describe as a "firecracker" is, by a long shot, the most influential female economist in the world. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Like Mr. Rogoff, she took a circuitous route to her present position. Born in Havana as Carmen Castellanos, she is quick witted and favors bright, boldly printed blouses and blazers. As a girl, she memorized the lore of pirates and their trade routes, which she says was her first exposure to the idea that economic fortunes and state revenue in particular "can suddenly disappear without warning." She also lived with more personal financial and social instability. After her family fled Havana for the United States with just three suitcases when she was 10, her father traded a comfortable living as an accountant for long, less lucrative hours as a carpenter. Her mother, who had never worked outside the home before, became a seamstress. "Most kids don't grow up with that kind of real economic shock," she says. "But I learned the value of scarcity, and even the sort of tensions between East and West. And at a very early age that had an imprint on me." With a passion for art and literature even today, her academic papers pun on the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez she enrolled in a two year college in Miami, intending to study fashion merchandising. Then, on a whim, she took an economics course and got hooked. When she went to Florida International University to study economics, she met Peter Montiel, an M.I.T. graduate who was teaching there. Recognizing her talent, he helped her apply to a top tier graduate program in economics, at Columbia University. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff at Ms. Reinhart's Washington home. They started their book around 2003, years before the economy began to crumble. Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times At Columbia, she met her future husband, Vincent Reinhart, who is now an occasional co author with her. They married while in graduate school, and she quit school before writing her dissertation to try to make some money on Wall Street. "We were newlyweds, and neither of us had a penny to our name," she says. She left school so that they "could have nice things and a house, the kind of things I imagined a family should have." She spent a few years at Bear Stearns, including one as chief economist, before deciding to finish her graduate work at Columbia and return to her true love: data mining. "I have a talent for rounding up data like cattle, all over the plain," she says. After earning her doctorate in 1988, Ms. Reinhart started work at the I.M.F. "Carmen in many ways pioneered a bigger segment in economics, this push to look at history more," says Mr. Rogoff, explaining why he chose her. "She was just so ahead of the curve." She honed her knack for economic archaeology at the I.M.F., spending several years performing "checkups" on member countries to make sure they were in good economic health. While at the fund, she teamed up with Graciela Kaminsky, another member of that exceptionally rare species the female economist to write their seminal paper, "The Twin Crises." The article looked at the interaction between banking and currency crises, and why contemporary theory couldn't explain why those ugly events usually happened together. The paper bore one of Ms. Reinhart's hallmarks: a vast web of data, compiled from 20 countries over several decades. In digging through old records and piecing together a vast puzzle of disconnected data points, her ultimate goal, in that paper and others, has always been "to see the forest," she says, "and explain it." Ms. Reinhart has bounced back and forth across the Beltway: she left the I.M.F. in Washington and began teaching in 1996 at the University of Maryland, from which Mr. Rogoff recruited her when he needed a deputy at the I.M.F. in 2001. When she left that post, she returned to the university. Despite the large following that her work has drawn, she says she feels that the heavyweights of her profession have looked down upon her research as useful but too simplistic. "You know, everything is simple when it's clearly explained," she contends. "It's like with Sherlock Holmes. He goes through this incredible deductive process from Point A to Point B, and by the time he explains everything, it makes so much sense that it sounds obvious and simple. It doesn't sound clever anymore." But, she says, "economists love being clever." "THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT" was published last September, just as the nation was coming to grips with a financial crisis that had nearly spiraled out of control and a job market that lay in tatters. Despite bailout after bailout, stimulus after stimulus, economic armageddon still seemed nigh. Given this backdrop, it's perhaps not surprising that a book arguing that the crisis was a rerun, and not a wholly novel catastrophe, managed to become a best seller. So far, nearly 100,000 copies have been sold, according to its publisher, the Princeton University Press. Still, its authors laugh when asked about the book's opportune timing. "We didn't start the book thinking that, 'Oh, in exactly seven years there will be a housing bust leading to a global financial crisis that will be the perfect environment in which to sell this giant book,' " says Mr. Rogoff. "But I suppose the way things work, we expected that whenever the book came out there would probably be some crisis or other to peg it to." They began the book around 2003, not long after Mr. Rogoff lured Ms. Reinhart back to the I.M.F. to serve as his deputy. The pair had already been collaborating fruitfully, finding that her dogged pursuit of data and his more theoretical public policy eye were well matched. Although their book is studiously nonideological, and is more focused on patterns than on policy recommendations, it has become fodder for the highly charged debate over the recent growth in government debt. To bolster their calls for tightened government spending, budget hawks have cited the book's warnings about the perils of escalating public and private debt. Left leaning analysts have been quick to take issue with that argument, saying that fiscal austerity perpetuates joblessness, and have been attacking economists associated with it. Mr. Rogoff, because of his time at the I.M.F., has also come under fire. In the years before and during Mr. Rogoff's tenure, critics including the prominent economist Joseph Stiglitz accused the I.M.F. of having a cold hearted, doctrinaire approach to its work in poorer countries. Some of that criticism still clings to Mr. Rogoff. For his part, he contends that the I.M.F. did what it could for countries with intractable problems, and that the critics' approaches would have made troubled economies even weaker. Perhaps because "This Time Is Different" is empirical rather than prescriptive, it has defied categorization. The New York Times Op Ed columnist David Brooks, for example, praised the book as "the best explanation of the crisis" but referred to it as a history book, rather than a work of economic analysis, since it is "almost entirely devoid of theory." (The implication being, of course, that genuine "economic analysis" must be hypertheoretical.) Of course, it's not as if history is an entirely new ingredient in economic study. There have been other vibrant historical recountings of financial crises, including "Manias, Panics and Crashes," the 1978 book by Charles Kindleberger. Such books have typically been narrative, though, unlike the data intensive "This Time Is Different." But even in its quantitative perspective and breadth, the book still stands on the shoulders of an economic classic, "A Monetary History of the United States: 1867 1960," written by another great male and female pair of economists, Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. "What Friedman and Schwartz did for the U.S. was heroic," says Ms. Reinhart. "Ken and I have benefited from the use of the Internet to track down books, sources and experts to help us with our work. Friedman and Schwartz did not." While Professors Reinhart and Rogoff may have had technological advantages in their research, they weren't able to outsource much of the number crunching to graduate students in part because they wanted to be able to stay close to the data themselves, but also because few students are interested in or trained for that kind of work. The economics profession generally began turning away from empirical work in the early 1970s. Around that time, economists fell in love with theoretical constructs, a shift that has no single explanation. Some analysts say it may reflect economists' desire to be seen as scientists who describe and discover universal laws of nature. "Economists have physics envy," says Richard Sylla, a financial historian at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He argues that Paul Samuelson, the Nobel laureate whom many credit with endowing economists with a mathematical tool kit, "showed that a lot of physical theories and concepts had economic analogs." Since that time, he says, "economists like to think that there is some physical, stable state of the world if they get the model right." But, he adds, "there is really no such thing as a stable state for the economy." Others suggest that incentives for young economists to publish in journals and gain tenure predispose them to pursue technical wizardry over deep empirical research and to choose narrow slices of topics. Historians, on the other hand, are more likely to focus on more comprehensive subjects that is, the material for books that reflect a deeply experienced, broadly informed sense of judgment. "They say historians peak in their 50s, once they've accumulated enough knowledge and wisdom to know what to look for," says Mr. Rogoff. "By contrast, economists seem to peak much earlier. It's hard to find an important paper written by an economist after 40." MICROECONOMICS the field that focuses on smaller units like households and workers, as opposed to big picture questions about how national economies function has embraced real world data mining. (Think "Freakonomics." ) Macroeconomics has been slower to change, but the popular success of "This Time Is Different" and related work seems to be changing how macro practitioners approach their craft. It has also changed how policy makers think about their own mission. Mr. Rogoff says a senior official in the Japanese finance ministry was offended at the suggestion in "This Time Is Different" that Japan had once defaulted on its debt and sent him an angry letter demanding a retraction. Mr. Rogoff sent him a 1942 front page article in The Times documenting the forgotten default. "Thank you," the official wrote in apology, "for teaching the Japanese something about our own country." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
You may have heard that the European Union punished Google with a record 5.1 billion fine on Wednesday for abusing its power in the mobile phone market. Specifically, the authorities dinged Google on its practices with Android, the mobile operating system that the company provides to makers of devices. The size of the fine and the remedies that regulators ordered Google to make were consequential, both symbolically and in how handset manufacturers may incorporate Android into mobile devices in Europe in the future. But what does that mean for you if you own an Android phone? Here's a rundown. Android is one of the most prevalent mobile operating systems, used in 80 percent of the world's smartphones. Google freely provides the Android operating system to third party handset makers. As part of the arrangement, Google requires Android phone makers to pre install 11 Google apps on their phones. That strategy has helped Google's signature products search, maps, Gmail and the Chrome internet browser among them reach more than one billion people. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Week in Tech: We're Testing How Much the Internet Can Handle Next week, Bits will be evolving into the On Tech With Shira Ovide newsletter. With a pandemic upon us, the significant effect that technology is having on our families, work, safety and sense of self is even more apparent. What is this reliance on technology doing to us and our communities and is it good or bad? Shira will be your guide to this constantly changing world, during the coronavirus crisis and beyond. If you no longer wish to receive the email, simply unsubscribe using the email address at the bottom of this newsletter before Monday. We appreciate your readership, and we're eager to hear your thoughts on what you want more or less of so we can make the newsletter experience even better for you. Please share your thoughts on this form. A reporter or editor may follow up with you to learn more. We were already so dependent on technology. Now, even more so. Hi, I'm Cade Metz. I write about emerging technology in The New York Times's San Francisco bureau. Like many of you, I'm working from my home. As my colleagues Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel reported, the volume of messages sent via Facebook and Instagram has grown more than 50 percent in countries that have ordered people to stay home amid the coronavirus outbreak. Voice calls over Facebook apps have more than doubled. In Italy, where a tight quarantine is in place, the number of group calls has climbed more than 1,000 percent. And those are just the top level stats from a single company. As our dependence continues to rise, the question is whether the technology and the companies behind it can handle the added strain. If they can, their hold on our lives may grow even tighter. Videoconferencing apps like Zoom and Google Hangouts, not to mention good old fashioned phone calls, are rapidly replacing the face to face communication so many of us crave. Microsoft said the number of people using its Teams app a way for business colleagues to collaborate grew 37 percent in one week, rising past 44 million. Not everything can be delivered over the internet as easily as a video feed, but online retailers are an increasingly important path to all the stuff that can't. Amazon is hiring more than 10,000 more workers to deal with the enormous spike in online shopping. Nextdoor, a social networking app for connecting with neighbors, is helping people get their hands on prescription medicines and all sorts of other stuff they cannot exactly order through Amazon. As described by John Herrman, a Times tech and media reporter, no physical contact is required. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When David A. Thomas, the president of Morehouse College, canceled the school's football season on Friday, there were a number of factors he did not consider: a lucrative television contract (Morehouse has none), the loss of ticket revenue (B.T. Harvey Stadium has 9,000 seats) or the opinions of any other university presidents. Instead, Thomas homed in on a single calculation: Could he guarantee the players would be safe? As Thomas saw coronavirus infection rates spike in Georgia and in neighboring states and as he watched from afar as outbreaks have hit football players who have been working out on campuses from Boise State to Clemson, the answer became clear: no. Now, with the start of the college football season two months away, Division II Morehouse's decision the first scholarship program to shut down football raises another question across the college sports landscape: will Morehouse, an all male, historically Black college in Atlanta, be an outlier or the first pebble to ripple across the pond? Of course, what applies at Morehouse, where 13 employees were recently laid off, nearly 200 more had their salaries reduced and two month furloughs were instituted in anticipation of enrollment diving below the current 2,100, does not necessarily apply at a football behemoth like, say, Clemson. With tens of millions in revenue from a football season at stake, Clemson has continued to plow ahead with its voluntary workout program even as the school announced Friday that 14 more players had tested positive for the virus, running the number of positive tests to 37 nearly one third of the roster. A university spokesman did not respond to interview requests for the school's president, James Clements, to explain why workouts were continuing. Athletic Director Dan Radakovich declined a similar request. While Clemson has extensive financial incentives to proceed with football and significant resources to put toward trying to keep its players healthy it can more easily afford to test, contact trace and isolate its players than Morehouse there is another subtext to the approaches by both schools: race. At Morehouse, where the enrollment is 95 percent Black, there is a keen awareness of how the coronavirus has disproportionately impacted Black communities African Americans are nearly five times as likely as white people to end up hospitalized with Covid 19, the disease caused by the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But there is a different dynamic at schools whose big time sports programs, with their opulent amenities and high salaries for coaches and athletic directors, are fueled by an unpaid and largely Black labor force. At Clemson, whose student population is 6 percent African American, there have been uncomfortable conversations in recent weeks between Black football players who make up a majority of the roster and Coach Dabo Swinney, who had to explain why he wore a "Football Matters" T shirt and did not discipline a white assistant coach who once used a racial slur. "There's a higher threshold to push the envelope with Black athletes and this is no different," said Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an African American history professor at Ohio State and a Morehouse alumnus. "It's important to point out that we're not talking about lacrosse and pistol here, we're talking about football, which is disproportionately African American, especially in the biggest conferences. Why are we even considering playing if we're truly concerned with this being a disaster?" Or, as Billy Hawkins, a professor of health and human performance at the University of Houston, said of college football workouts continuing across the country while infections surge: "It's a prime example of Black lives not mattering." Senior linebacker Kylan Wilborn urged other college athletes to speak up, writing on Twitter: "If you feel that you are being put at unnecessary risks by your institution, it's your job to speak up on it. IT'S YOUR HEALTH!" Thus far, though, most schools have pushed forward with little resistance, even as more than 200 players have tested positive for the virus across 33 Division I schools, according to universities. Many schools, including Alabama, Ohio State and Georgia, have refused to release test results, claiming that federal laws prohibiting the release of students' personal information allow them to not release aggregated data. Houston was the first to halt football workouts, when six athletes in fall sports tested positive by June 12. Kansas State and Boise State followed. But if schools like Texas, Louisiana State and Clemson for which the 25,000 that it might cost for twice weekly testing of football players is but sofa cushion change are struggling to keep players free of the virus, it is giving great pause to H.B.C.U.s, where football programs are money losers funded by the schools as part of the campus experience. There have been four games with Division I schools all involving H.B.C.U.s that have been canceled. Two of those games were neutral site events, in Memphis and Detroit, which canceled their early September showcases in part because of the disproportionate impact the virus has had on African Americans. A decision on whether Howard's game against Central State will be played at the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Sept. 6 will likely be made in early July, and the Bayou Classic, the annual game between Southern and Grambling State scheduled for Nov. 29, could be played on one of the school's campuses instead of the Superdome, according to event organizers. Thus far, no schools in the Mid Eastern Athletic Conference and the Southwestern Athletic Conference, which are made up of Division I H.B.C.U.s, have begun football workouts, according to the conference commissioners. Also, five Black colleges in North Carolina that for now have allowed football to go forward North Carolina Central, North Carolina A T, Shaw, Winston Salem State and Fayetteville State have canceled homecoming festivities that are centered around football games and draw tens of thousands of alumni. "There's no way we could have a football game because even if we said there's no homecoming, there would have been an organic homecoming," said Thomas, who estimates that about 25,000 alumni turn out for the event at Morehouse each autumn. Morehouse did not consider playing football in empty stadiums, Thomas said, because those who might be exposed to the virus playing a contact sport against dozens of opponents from a different city each week would be returning to dorms, classrooms and dining halls with other Black students. Some of the students the athletes would come in contact with would unavoidably return home to communities where there may be a significant uninsured population or greater prevalence of conditions like diabetes, which increases the likelihood of hospitalization and death. "If we became an epicenter for it, it would be carried into communities that have less access to health care and more comorbidity indicators, so I'm very conscious of that," Thomas said. Recent months have marked tremendous upheaval in college sports. The N.C.A.A. has moved toward loosening long held amateurism restrictions, which would allow athletes to profit off their popularity. Football players at Oklahoma State, Florida State, Mississippi State and U.C.L.A. have gone public in holding their coaches and administrators to account in a manner rarely seen. And they have been joined by athletes in other sports in protesting racial injustice particularly at the hands of police. Most recently, college athletes (and their coaches) were at the forefront of the movement to strip the Confederate battle emblem from the Mississippi state flag. Jeffries, the professor at Ohio State, said college athletes could soon consider their place as cogs in a machine much the same way a handful of W.N.B.A., N.B.A. and Major League Baseball players have chosen not to return as their leagues plot restarts during the pandemic. And perhaps the Arizona players are a start. "These are kids that play with broken bones, concussions that's the professional athlete mentality even if you're not getting paid," he said. "But I do wonder, in this moment that we're in, if we're very close to having a serious reckoning with race and college sports. It's not a big leap for an athlete to say, 'you value my humanity and you're going to put me in this situation?'" "I would not be surprised, especially as these conversations of Black lives and dignity and worth continue, and are increasingly being captured and articulated by college athletes, that if Covid cases continue to increase in athletic facilities we hear them say, 'nah, this doesn't make any sense.'" Hawkins, the Houston professor, said that carrying on with football given recent data on asymptomatic spread, increasing rates of infection among college age adults and outbreaks among teams "is anti intellectualism at its finest." Still, he called Morehouse's decision to call off football "gutsy" and "profound," because the sport underpins the economic and cultural foundations of so many colleges. "That's why it's provocative to say, 'no, we're not going to do this, we'll survive, we'll bounce back,'" said Hawkins, who spent 20 years teaching at Georgia, a Southeastern Conference power. "It's sad when the economic piece trumps the health and well being of the students, but that's capitalism exploit the labor. So, a major piece is that it took an H.B.C.U. to come to this decision. If a school like Alabama or Georgia took the lead, that would be an amazing step." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
What Virus? The I.O.C. Says the Summer Olympics Will Go On Even as the coronavirus spreads across the world, overwhelming health care systems and cratering national economies, the International Olympic Committee on Tuesday doubled down on its commitment hold the 2020 Games in Tokyo this summer, stunning athletes and other stakeholders who had been preparing for a postponement. Shortly after the governing bodies for European and South American soccer announced they would postpone their continental soccer championship one year, to the summer of 2021, Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, said the organization remained focused on holding the Games in Tokyo in July. "The I.O.C. remains fully committed to the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, and with more than four months to go before the Games there is no need for any drastic decisions at this stage," Bach said in a statement released just before a teleconference with representatives from national Olympic committees. "Any speculation at this moment would be counterproductive. The I.O.C. encourages all athletes to continue to prepare for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as best they can." It was also revealed on Tuesday that Kozo Tashima, the deputy chief of the Japanese Olympic Committee, had contracted the coronavirus. Shortly after the I.O.C. released its statement, the French Tennis Federation announced plans to move the French Open, scheduled for Paris in late May and early June, to a late September start. Late Monday, the Kentucky Derby, the world's most important horse race, announced it was moving from the first Saturday in May to the first Saturday in September. On Twitter, Hayley Wickenheiser, a Canadian hockey player and a member of the I.O.C.'s athletes commission, said the organization made the wrong call. "I think the I.O.C. insisting this will move ahead, with such conviction, is insensitive to humanity," Wickenheiser wrote. Dave Marsh, an elite swim coach for several Olympic hopefuls based in San Diego, had just wrapped up morning training with his swimmers and was preparing for an announcement of a delay when he learned the I.O.C. was not wavering. "If things don't change dramatically, I don't see how they don't change the schedule," Marsh said. "Let's just do it one year later. The sooner we make that kind of decision the better." For Marsh and so many other coaches and athletes, coronavirus has crushed regular training plans. The two 50 meter pools where Marsh's swimmers train are closed. He said a friend has a two lane, 20 yard pool with starting blocks in his backyard, but that is hardly suitable for the high intensity training of an Olympic swimmer. He told his swimmers Tuesday to get a wet suit and plan on having training sessions in the city's Mission Bay or in the ocean off La Jolla, despite the leopard sharks that are there. "They aren't too dangerous," Marsh said. In his statement, Bach insisted that the efforts to contain coronavirus would allow for the Olympics to take place in July. He cited Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's comments after his call with G 7 leaders Monday, after which Mr. Abe said, "I want to hold the Olympics and Paralympics perfectly, as proof that the human race will conquer the new coronavirus, and I gained support for that from the G 7 leaders." Abe did not elaborate on whether holding the Games "perfectly" would necessitate postponing them. Athletes across Italy, Spain and much of France are largely locked down. In the United States, athletes in every sport are scrambling for training spaces, as facilities are ordered closed. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee is not letting any new athletes come to its training center in Colorado Springs, fearing they might infect the roughly 200 athletes who are there now. Also, the I.O.C. and the international sports federations that run the competitions are seeking to manage the final qualification process that determines who makes the Games. Just 57 percent of the Olympic spots have been secured by athletes. Even if federations are able to reschedule competitions that have been canceled, it's not clear that athletes from every country will be able to participate because of their exposure to the coronavirus. That could force the federations and national Olympic Committees to use current rankings to select Olympians, a system that might have eliminated someone like Michael Phelps from making the Games four years ago in Rio de Janeiro. Phelps was coming out of retirement and might not have qualified for the United States or for certain events he won at the 2016 Games had he not been able to participate in a trials competition. Bach gave the federations until the beginning of April to come up with new qualification standards. Athletes have been complaining for weeks about a lack of communication from both the I.O.C. and the federations. "A lot of athletes are under stress and uncertainty," said Han Xiao, the chairman of the U.S.O.P.C.'s Athlete Advisory Council. "What would help is if the I.O.C. were a little more transparent about its plans." Xiao said that while American Olympians understood that the decision to cancel or postpone the Games could not be taken lightly, the I.O.C. could ease some anxiety by at least providing some sort of decision making timeline or deadline, so athletes have a better idea of what to expect in the coming weeks and months. Some of the uncertainty has been unavoidable as researchers struggle to understand the novel virus. Just days ago, the Centers for Disease Control was discouraging events with more than 250 people. On Monday, that number dropped to 10. Bach said that moving forward, the Olympic organizations would share information as it came to them and directed athletes to a website for updates, athlete365. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Re "Opening Too Soon Poses Deadly Risk, Senate Is Warned" (front page, May 13): The Senate hearing on Covid 19 on Tuesday was refreshing, with minimal partisan rancor. The focus was on disease projections and testing capacity for the future, vaccine development status, and the importance of social distancing and the economy. In his testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted dire consequences if the nation reopened its economy too soon. "Too soon" is "now" as 41 states are reopening businesses such as gyms, restaurants and hairdressers and public spaces where social distancing is hard to achieve. And most of these states do not meet the federal guidelines calling for a two week decline in Covid 19 cases. If we don't launch an aggressive effort to test, identify and isolate new cases, states and America will have a Covid 19 rebound leading to a far greater burden of death and illness. Further, an economic recovery will be more difficult as confidence will not be easily revived the second time around. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
If you are enjoying this newsletter every week, share it with a friend and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory. Karim Benzema had to wait his turn. Early in June 2009, 55,000 fans flocked to the Santiago Bernabeu to see Kaka presented as a Real Madrid player, the dawn of what Florentino Perez, the club's president, had promised would be a second Galactico era. Kaka was a statement signing, and, by some metrics, the most expensive player in history. It was a title he held for only a few days. The next week, Cristiano Ronaldo's arrival drew 75,000 fans more, perhaps to the Bernabeu. A catwalk had been built on the field, flanked by the club's nine European Cups. Every seat was filled hours before Ronaldo appeared, even in the oven heat of Madrid in high summer. And then, on July 9, came Benzema. He was a different profile of signing. Benzema had starred at Lyon, his boyhood team, but he was both substantially cheaper 40 million or so and, at 21, significantly younger than Kaka and Ronaldo. They came already branded as Galacticos. Benzema would have to earn the label. From that moment, that has been Benzema's lot: the least of the Galacticos, overshadowed first by Kaka and Ronaldo and then, as Perez collected yet more trophy signings, by Gareth Bale and James Rodriguez and, last summer, Eden Hazard. In Benzema's 11 years in Madrid, there has always been someone who shone brighter. And yet Benzema has outlasted them all. Kaka departed in 2013, after four years disrupted by injury. Ronaldo fared considerably better, leaving in 2018 as the club's career goals leader, the talisman who spearheaded four Champions League victories in five years. Bale and Rodriguez, of course, are still there though not, perhaps, for much longer, certainly if Madrid's coach, Zinedine Zidane, has his way. Hazard is, too, even as he has described his first season in Madrid as the worst of his career, so troubled has he been by injury. Benzema, though, endures, the "piece that makes it all work," as he once described himself. It would be a disservice to Benzema's teammates to depict Real Madrid's triumph in La Liga remarkably, only its second domestic championship since 2012 as solely his work. This has, without question, been an ensemble success: Zidane has rotated his team constantly this season; he has deployed 37 different players, even Bale, when he has had absolutely no choice; 21 players have contributed goals. And Madrid's strongest suit has, for once, not been its star studded attack but its (perhaps slightly uncharacteristically) resolute defense. Zidane's team has conceded only 25 goals this season, better than its famously miserly neighbor Atletico Madrid and a club record. It did not concede at all in its first five games back after the restart. Its championship has been built on the grit and grind of Thibaut Courtois, Sergio Ramos, Raphael Varane and Casemiro, more than anything. But it also has been vindication for Benzema. He has carried the team's attacking threat, running close to Lionel Messi in Spain's scoring race. Jose Mourinho, his former coach and the current Tottenham manager, once said that Benzema was not a "killer," not enough of a ruthless finisher to be ranked among the best in the world. He has demonstrated that cool head and that dead eye this year, and as rather neatly encapsulated by his wonderful back heeled assist for the crucial winning goal against Espanyol last month lost none of his virtuosity. It is strange, though, that Benzema should have needed vindication. He has, after all, survived at Real Madrid a club where patience is thin and churn is endemic for more than a decade, longer than all those other stars. For much of that time, he put the needs of others above his own, willingly adapting his role so that the "rocket," Bale, and the "finisher," Ronaldo, could thrive in that fabled BBC attacking line. He has won three Spanish titles and four Champions Leagues. He is the fifth highest goal scorer in Real Madrid's history; given the names on the list, that is no mean feat. He has scored 248 goals in 512 games, a strike rate of a goal every other game, long regarded as the gold standard for a top class forward. Benzema, in other words, should have had nothing to prove. And yet, it has always felt that, when it comes to discussion of who the world's best No. 9 might be, there is always someone shining brighter than Benzema: Radamel Falcao or Zlatan Ibrahimovic or Robert Lewandowski or Kylian Mbappe. It is hard to understand why that is. Much of the criticism does not really add up. Benzema is marked down for not scoring enough another of Mourinho's withering assessments: "If you can't go hunting with your dog, you go hunting with your cat" and not marked up for the work he does elsewhere, creating space, knitting a team together. The new breed of No. 9 led by Liverpool's Roberto Firmino are (rightly) praised for that element of their game, while escaping (correctly, in most cases) anything but light censure for a scoring return that pales in comparison. Benzema does both. Only in his case, that appears to be a bad thing. Perhaps the explanation is obvious: perhaps it is as simple as the fact that no forward has suffered quite as directly from the inflation in expectations that Messi and Ronaldo have wrought in soccer. Whatever Benzema did, Ronaldo, standing a few yards from him, would always do better; he could only, really, suffer in that context. Or it may run deeper: after all, not being Messi did not exactly harm David Villa or Neymar, for example. Benzema's accused involvement in a blackmail plot, for which he may yet stand trial, might have stained his reputation. It led, certainly, to his absence from France's World Cup winning side in 2018, a campaign that may have proved his apotheosis. Or is it that first impressions, in soccer, really count? And that Benzema has always been cursed by the circumstances of his arrival in Madrid: the afterthought who became not a transcendent star but a stalwart. Benzema, whatever the reason, deserves more, simply for being the player who came as the least of the Galacticos, and ended as the last one standing. The announcement from the august France Football magazine this week that it would, for the first time in 74 years, not award the Ballons d'Or this year was solemn, considered and just a little curious. The magazine decided, in short, that the lack of a level playing field because of the coronavirus pandemic, and the stoppages it caused, would have in some way damaged the "irreproachability" of the award, given each year to the man and woman judged to be the world's best player. "We did not want to put an indelible asterisk on the prize list as 'a trophy won in exceptional circumstances due to the health crisis of Covid 19,'" the magazine said. It is not a decision France Football would have made lightly: The issue containing an interview with the winners of the award is regularly its biggest selling edition. The conclusion that the decision this year was influenced by the cancellation of France's Ligue 1 at a time when all of Europe's other major leagues have continued is easy to leap to, but is an unfair reflection on what is, without question, a publication worthy of respect. The explanation, though, does not really add up. Do the players who have been able to shine in even these most extreme circumstances not warrant recognition? Are the year's best players not the ones who have done the best in the context of that year, whatever it might be? Is erasing this year, acting as it has not happened, disingenuous? Anyway, it leaves a gap in the market. Perhaps it's time for The New York Times to host a flashy awards ceremony .... There was a point, a few weeks ago, when you wondered if events might conspire against the restarted Premier League. Liverpool had sealed the title. The four Champions League slots even allowing for Manchester City's possible ban seemed determined. Relegation, too, was a sure thing: Norwich, Bournemouth and Aston Villa could barely muster a point between them. It seemed inevitable, then, that the last couple of weeks of the season would become a box ticking exercise, teams playing out games just to fulfill their contractual obligations. And then, well, things changed. As the Premier League reaches its conclusion on Sunday, there are four games that promise high drama. At the top, Chelsea, Leicester City and Manchester United can all qualify for the Champions League, with Leicester (62 points) and Manchester United (63 points) facing one another, and Chelsea (63 points) at home to Europa League chasing Wolves. And at the bottom: Watford has to hope it gets a better result at Arsenal than Aston Villa does at West Ham. A win in the latter match would, essentially, save Villa's skin. But defeat could bring Bournemouth back into the equation, too, if Eddie Howe's team can win at Everton. It is all exactly as a final day should be. Settle in, and steel your nerves. Despite, as far as I can tell, being an Arsenal fan, Richard Steele has correctly identified the Championship as being the "best second division" in soccer. "For those of us numb to yet more silverware for Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, there are the joys of a more competitive division," he wrote. Perhaps, though, he didn't go far enough. There is an argument that the Championship is the best league in sports, full stop. Consider the events of the last week: first Leeds returning to the Premier League after 16 years, and then a final day in which the identity of the teams being promoted, relegated and making the playoffs remained in doubt until the final few seconds. James Rafferty, meanwhile, of The Press Room in Santa Barbara, Calif., has been in touch to tell us that "there is only one pub that shows all soccer matches live" (in Santa Barbara, presumably). "We had our 25th anniversary during the lockdown, but we are now in a fight for survival not just because of Covid, but because our landlord wants to scrape our building and develop apartments. Almost 11,000 people signed a petition to save the pub." That's a fantastic level of support. I hope the city listens. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
When early humans discovered how to build fires, life became much easier in many regards. They huddled around fire for warmth, light and protection. They used it to cook, which afforded them more calories than eating raw foods that were hard to chew and digest. They could socialize into the night, which possibly gave rise to storytelling and other cultural traditions. But there were downsides, too. Occasionally, the smoke burned their eyes and seared their lungs. Their food was likely coated with char, which might have increased their risk for certain cancers. With everyone congregated in one place, diseases could have been transmitted more easily. Much research has focused on how fire gave an evolutionary advantage to early humans. Less examined are the negative byproducts that came with fire, and the ways in which humans may or may not have adapted to them. In other words, how did the harmful effects of fire shape our evolution? It's a question that's just starting to attract more attention. "I would say it's mostly barroom talk at the moment," said Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University and the author of "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human." His work suggested that cooking led to advantageous changes in human biology, such as larger brains. Now, two new studies have proposed theories on how negative consequences of fire might have shaped human evolution and development. In the first, published Tuesday, scientists identified a genetic mutation in modern humans that allows certain toxins, including those found in smoke, to be metabolized at a safe rate. The same genetic sequence was not found in other primates, including ancient hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. The researchers believe the mutation was selected for in response to breathing in smoke toxins, which can increase the risk of respiratory infections, suppress the immune system and disrupt the reproductive system. Thomas Henle, a chemistry professor at Dresden University of Technology in Germany who was not involved with the study, has wondered whether humans also have unique genetic mutations to better handle, or even take advantage of, byproducts of fire in food. In 2011, his research group showed that the brown molecules that come from roasting coffee can inhibit enzymes produced by tumor cells, which might explain why coffee drinkers may be at lower risk for certain cancers. Other research has suggested that these roasting byproducts may stimulate the growth of helpful microbes in the gut. A genetic mutation that may help humans tolerate smoke toxins could be just one of many adaptations, Dr. Henle said. "I am sure that there are further human specific mechanisms, or mutations, which are due to an evolutionary adaptation to eating heat treated foods." Understanding how humans might have uniquely adapted to the risks from exposure to fire may have implications for how scientists think about medical research, Dr. Wrangham said. Other animals that didn't evolve around fire, for instance, may not be the best models for studying how we process food or detoxify substances. One example, he suggests, is the study of acrylamide, a compound that forms in foods during frying, baking or other high temperature cooking. When given to lab animals in high doses, acrylamide has been shown to cause cancer. But so far, most human studies have failed to link dietary acrylamide to cancer. "People keep 'wanting' to find a problem for humans," Dr. Wrangham said, but there's "nothing obvious at all." Humans may not have been able to adjust to all of the dangers of fire. The second study, published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that with fire's advantageous effects for human societies also came profound new damage. It offers conjecture that the early use of fire might have helped spread tuberculosis by bringing people into close contact, damaging their lungs and causing them to cough. With mathematical modeling, Rebecca Chisholm and Mark Tanaka, biologists at the University of New South Wales in Australia, simulated how ancient soil bacteria might have evolved to become infectious tuberculosis agents. Without fire, the probability was low. But when the researchers added fire to their model, the likelihood that tuberculosis would emerge jumped by several degrees of magnitude. It is thought that tuberculosis has killed more than a billion people, possibly accounting for more deaths than wars and famines combined. Today it remains one of the deadliest infectious diseases, claiming an estimated 1.5 million lives each year. Many experts believe tuberculosis arose at least 70,000 years ago. By then, humans were most certainly controlling fire. (Estimates of when human ancestors started regularly using fire vary greatly, but the consensus is that it was at least 400,000 years ago.) "We realized that the discovery of controlled fire must have caused a significant shift in the way humans were interacting with each other and with the environment," factors known to drive the emergence of infectious diseases, Dr. Chisholm said. She and Dr. Tanaka believe that fire might have helped spread other airborne diseases, not just tuberculosis. "Fire, as a technological advantage, has been a double edged sword," Dr. Tanaka said. Negative cultural consequences came with fire, too and continue to leave an imprint. Anthropologists have speculated that inhaling smoke led to the discovery of smoking. Humans have long used fire to modify their environment and burn carbon, practices that now have us in the throes of climate change. Fire is even tied to the rise of patriarchy by allowing men to go out hunting while women stayed behind to cook by the fire, it spawned gender norms that still exist today. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
LONDON When the world first learned of Michael Jackson's death, from an accidental overdose in 2009, the news had a whiff of unreality about it. This was in no small part because, for so long, it had been hard to remember that he was actually a person. A child prodigy who in adulthood became a genuine Peter Pan fantastically refusing to grow old Jackson was always more an idea than a human being in the flesh. Nearly a decade later, the shape shifting body frozen in memory, his extraordinary image endures as if he never left. Now, an ambitious and thought provoking new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, running through Oct. 21, seeks to measure the impact and reach of Jackson as muse and cultural artifact. "Michael Jackson: On the Wall," curated by Nicholas Cullinan, sprawls without feeling bloated, occupying 14 rooms and bringing together the work of 48 artists across numerous media, from Andy Warhol's instantly recognizable silk screen prints and grainy black and white snapshots, to a vast oil painting by Kehinde Wiley. (Jeff Koons's famous porcelain sculpture "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" is notably absent, though it is reinterpreted in several other pieces.) Consider for example one of the simplest works in the show, David Hammons's 2001 installation, "Which Mike Do You Want to Be Like...?" The piece full of wondrous pride even as it conjures a sense of depressing limitation consists of three abnormally tall microphones and its title recalls the Holy Trinity of late 20th century black American entertainment icons as set out by the rapper The Notorious B.I.G.: "I excel like Mike, anyone: Tyson, Jordan, Jackson." (B.I.G.'s own guest feature on Jackson's 1995 "History" album marked a crowning achievement in his career.) More than 20 years later, rappers still clamor for a Jackson co sign. On "Scorpion," his latest chart topping release, Drake flexed the ultimate status symbol, having purchased the rights to unreleased vocals and scoring a posthumous feature with the King of Pop. Jackson, more than Tyson or even Jordan, so epitomized black excellence that Ebony magazine could unselfconsciously run an airbrushed image of him on the cover in 2007, his creamy skin and silky cascading hair framing a razor sharp jawline, beside a headline reading "Inside: The Africa You Don't Know." A year after the singer's death, Lyle Ashton Harris recreated that image on Ghanaian funerary fabric. It's jarring to compare the real late life M.J. with another imaginary iteration that Hank Willis Thomas appropriates in one of the show's more shocking offerings, "Time Can Be a Villain or a Friend (1984/2009)." In this, we see an uncannily convincing, and wholesomely handsome rendition of Jackson with his natural skin tone, a pencil thin mustache on his lip and an ever so lightly relaxed puff of hair on his head. Mr. Thomas explains in the catalog that it is simply an artist's rendering from a 1984 issue of Ebony, a glimpse of what the magazine imagined Jackson would look like in the year 2000. Without any alteration, it is by far "On the Wall's" most critical work the image originally so full of pride and hope is now an indictment, and haunts the show like a scathing rebuke. In this post post racial, post Obama era of resurgent populism and Balkanized identity politics, it really does feel as though it matters and matters more than anything else whether you're black or white. It does make for a particularly fascinating moment to re evaluate Jackson's image as a fundamentally "black" but simultaneously racially transcendent figure, or a monstrous desecration, depending on your perspective. Indeed, there is a push and pull between these running through the exhibition and the catalog that accompanies it. In the catalog, the critic Margo Jefferson calls Jackson "a postmodern trickster god," noting "what visceral emotion he stirred (and continues to stir) in us!" She anticipates, in the next pages, the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith's castigating contribution. Ms. Smith writes of her mother's initial preoccupation with the singer: "I think the Jacksons represented the possibility that black might be beautiful, that you might be adored in your blackness worshiped, even." But, she adds, "By the time I became aware of Michael around 1980 or so my mother was finished with him, for reasons she never articulated, but which became clear soon enough. For me, he very soon became a traumatic figure, shrouded in shame." "It was as if the schizophrenic, self hating, hypocritical and violent history of race in America had incarnated itself in a single man," Ms. Smith concludes. This critique is at odds with the warmth with which many black people still hold the singer, particularly in the United States, where he remains enormously beloved. But it calls to mind the furious assault on Jackson's racial credentials with which Ta Nehisi Coates began a recent essay on Kanye West. "Michael Jackson was God, but not just God in scope and power, though there was certainly that, but God in his great mystery," Mr. Coates writes. "And he had always been dying dying to be white." He continues: We knew that we were tied to him, that his physical destruction was our physical destruction, because if the black God, who made the zombies dance, who brokered great wars, who transformed stone to light, if he could not be beautiful in his own eyes, then what hope did we have mortals, children of ever escaping what they had taught us, of ever escaping what they said about our mouths, about our hair and our skin, what hope did we ever have of escaping the muck? And he was destroyed. Such criticism, however heartfelt and comprehensible, makes the mistake of reducing Jackson to the role of tribal ambassador in a society built on oversimplified and regressive notions of racial and gender identity that his own art and self presentation never stopped pushing against. It occludes the far subtler and more interesting insights that a genius can provoke, and too confidently pigeonholes an individual who knowingly rejected the stifling limitations of his country's artificial racial binary for a dupe. The man who wrote "We Are the World" and "Liberian Girl," and proudly recreated Egyptian splendor in "Remember the Time," had an idealistic and expansive view of our common humanity. His androgyny, too, helped shatter restrictive notions of black masculinity. "When Michael died, I tried to understand why was I crying like he was a member of my family," Ms. O'Grady explained in an interview at the show's opening in June. "I realized the only person I could compare him to was Baudelaire," she said, listing ambiguous sexuality and a proclivity for wearing makeup as commonalities. "But more importantly, they both had this exalted idea of the role of the artist," Ms. O'Grady added. "If Baudelaire thought he tried to explain the new world he was living in to the people around him, Michael had an even more exalted vision: He felt that he was capable of uniting the entire world through his music." In Ms. O'Grady's view, Jackson didn't simply try to become "white," as his detractors would have it rather he "crafted himself physically to appeal to every demographic possible," she said. By the time of his death, Jackson had long been one of the most famous people on the planet, if not the most famous. The footage of his "Dangerous" tour in newly post Ceausescu Romania, on display in an eerie loop, provides hallucinatory testament to his outrageous global reach. It is estimated that his memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles reached at least a billion people worldwide. "The first of the new is always the last of something else," Ms. O'Grady notes in the catalog. Baudelaire, she writes, "was both the first of the modernists and the last of the romantics." And Jackson "may have been the last of the modernists (no one can ever aspire to greatness that unironically again) but he was the first of the postmodernists." He was, perhaps, the first of the post racialists, too. Yet in our hyper connected age of heightened political consciousness and reactionary fervor, in which identity is both a weapon and a defense, that view of race can feel naive. But this is a failure of our own imaginations and dreams, not his. As "On the Wall" makes clear, Jackson's own face through a combination of fame and relentless surgery became a mask, reflecting our own biases and ideals while concealing a deeper truth. His art and lasting appeal, on the other hand, function as a reminder to consider our own disguises, and what we might gain by letting them go. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Every time Jerry Stiller opened his mouth on "Seinfeld," it made me laugh. Partly, it was the shock of what came out. Stiller, who died Monday at the age of 92, didn't speak so much as erupt. His bristling bass instantly changed the energy in the scene, adding ludicrous tension and unmuffled anger that came off as deliriously silly. Then there was his masterly comic rhythm, an old school rat a tat that got right to the point. But what really resonated was more personal. As a kid watching this classic sitcom, I didn't know any New York stand ups like Jerry Seinfeld, goofy copy editors like Elaine Benes or whatever the hell Cosmo Kramer was. But Stiller's Frank Costanza was extremely familiar, with an energy and fashion sense instantly recognizable from the Florida contingent of my family. He didn't remind me of a specific relative so much as all of them yelling at each other at the same time, over chopped liver. Stiller, it must be said, had an expansive career that included helping to invent improv comedy with the Compass Players; a hit double act with his wife, Anne Meara; and memorable paternal roles in everything from the movie "Hairspray" to the sitcom "The King of Queens." But as often happens in remembrances like this, journalists tend to focus on his most famous role. Just as it annoyed me that headlines about the death of Brian Dennehy focused on "Tommy Boy" and "First Blood," as opposed to his landmark lead performances in plays by Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill, you might be irritated that this essay celebrates one supporting role toward the end of his career. If so, I ask of you one thing: Kvetch about it, loudly. If there's anything to learn from Jerry Stiller on "Seinfeld," it's this: Volume matters. When he bellows "Serenity now!" as a tool for relaxation on the orders of his doctor, there is not a teaspoon of Zen about it. Stiller was no one trick ranter, either. He could find laughs in a soft tone, too, even benefiting from the juxtaposition. Listen to him repeat "You want a piece of me?" to Julia Louis Dreyfus, making her break character, in one of the great outtakes in comedy history. His quiet intensity is what startles at first, setting up the roar. Almost by accident, Frank Costanza was written as Italian, not Jewish. But those of us who are Jewish knew better. Or at least Jerry Stiller made sure we did. He was the Jewish heart of the show. "Seinfeld" was not explicit about its Jewishness, but it provided enough clues. Stiller's greatest episode is probably the one where we learn from his mortified son, George, played by Jason Alexander, that he invented a holiday as an alternative to Christmas called Festivus. If there is a common outsider experience for Jewish kids, it is the peculiar alienation felt during the December holidays when they are stuck without Christmas trees and stockings. And while Festivus has entered the popular lexicon, there's a peculiar tone set by Stiller in the episode that sounded like so many Passover Seders. "The tradition of Festivus," he announced, "begins with the airing of grievances." Like so many great Jewish comics, Stiller is a master at complaint. At Stiller's New York Friars Club roast, Jeff Ross turned to him and said, "His Hebrew name is Yech!" There's a glorious tradition of Jewish comics' making fun of their parents and grandparents, particularly the generation that immigrated to the United States. Woody Allen, Elaine May and Larry David have all done it, turning these people into shouting caricatures, guilt givers and nabobs of neuroses. These jokes emerged from the perspective of young people like me, who saw something alien about these beloved family members. They had thick accents, old world ideas and funny sounding jobs. I had a grandfather who sold eggs (he looked more like Seinfeld's dad than like Frank Costanza). And yet, we also knew that these elders had it tougher than we did. They struggled in ways we didn't entirely understand. They had to hustle and scrap. They raised their voices because it was the only way to get heard. And also, well, they were a bit deaf. All these elements were in Jerry Stiller's portrait. He was ridiculous but also proud, nervy and passionate about the dumbest things. His sparring with his wife, wonderfully played by Estelle Harris, with equal force and a much higher voice, were formidable fights but benign ones. The anger of fathers can be scary. And sitcoms have a way of sanding off its edges in cheap ways. But Stiller has a comic rage that was consistently endearing: plucky, ineffectual with hints of warmth. That was critical. The younger people on the show didn't cower so much as roll their eyes at his temper. He made you laugh at the things that made our forefathers strange and even embarrassing, but also reminded us of why we love them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Ebola Attacked Congo Again. But Now Congo Seems to Be Winning The month old Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which emerged unexpectedly in a dangerous region and quickly soared to over 100 cases, now appears to be fading. Only a handful of new cases appear each week, and the region's two treatment centers, full until recently, now have fewer than 30 patients in their 78 beds. More than 3,500 contacts of known cases are being followed, more than 4,000 doses of vaccine have been given and officials feel hopeful enough to allow schools in the area North Kivu Province, on the eastern border with Uganda to open as usual on Monday . However, it is far too early to relax, health experts warned. "We cannot say the outbreak is under control yet," said Dr. Oly Ilunga, the country's health minister, echoing a warning from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization. "While the number of confirmed cases has slowed down lately, we must remain vigilant," Dr. Ilunga said. "An Ebola outbreak works in waves, and the first wave hit us hard." That wave, he explained, comprised people infected before health workers arrived, and these patients may have infected a second wave of family members, neighbors and medical workers who are still in their incubation periods. "Over the next few days," he said on Friday , "many contacts will come out of their 21 day surveillance periods, and we'll know to what extent we managed to break the transmission chain." As of Friday , there were 118 confirmed or probable cases and 77 deaths, and the threat of more is still so high that officials have not halted construction of a third treatment center. If the outbreak does fade out, credit will again go to rapid action by the Congolese government and global health agencies, as well as to a new, highly protective Merck vaccine. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Although five experimental treatments for infected patients recently won approval for emergency use, so far too few patients have received them to draw conclusions about how well they may work. One reason experts are reluctant to declare the outbreak contained is that some remote towns have not been visited because of armed groups roaming the area. Thus far, fighting has not hampered the response, said Florence Marchal, spokeswoman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the region. Congolese health workers escorted by peacekeepers were able to safely reach Oicha, the only town in a "red zone" with confirmed Ebola cases. However, just two weeks ago, Ms. Marchal said, as many as 18 Congolese soldiers were killed in an attack in North Kivu, probably by the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan rebel group. Ebola experts also said they would not let down their guard because they remembered a brief, deceptive lull in the early days of the 2014 West African outbreak before it reached three capital cities and exploded, killing more than 11,000 people. A new vaccine, rVSV ZEBOV, proved itself in the recent outbreak in Congo's central Equateur Province that began in April and was declared over on July 24. Even though the virus had spread from a rural area to a thriving lakeside town and ultimately to a big city, Mbandaka, the outbreak was quickly stopped by inoculating health workers and the rings of contacts of each known case. Techniques pioneered in that outbreak are playing even more prominent roles in this one. For example, in Mangina and Beni, the towns at the epicenter, the Ministry of Public Health immediately sent about 150 hospital staff personnel into home quarantine and replaced them with others who had been trained in donning and safely removing protective gear. To encourage patients to come in, the ministry also made all care at public hospitals free for any illness. Then, as soon as possible, health officials vaccinated all medical personnel. Those steps reduced a major risk factor medical workers who catch the virus from one patient and unwittingly pass it to others before they themselves collapse. (In the early days of any outbreak, most people coming to hospitals do not have Ebola but malaria, bacterial infections or other crises, like difficult pregnancies.) Soon afterward, Alima, the Alliance for International Medical Action, deployed its new Biosecure Emergency Care Units, which it calls "cubes," in its treatment center in Beni. The rooms, made of clear, flexible plastic with sleeves, gloves and bodysuits built into the walls, allow nurses to safely perform about 80 percent of the care an Ebola patient needs without having to put on hot, cumbersome gowns, hoods, rubber aprons, boots and goggles. Wearing full gear, caregivers can look terrifying, especially to children. "Now they can see us as human beings," said Claude Mahoudeau, Alima's emergency response coordinator. Nurses can check vital signs, feed patients and change intravenous drip rates, said Augustin Augier, A lima's secretary general, and may eventually start inserting intravenous needles from outside. Workers must still enter the cube to clean up diarrhea and vomit, unless patients are strong enough to do it themselves and then seal the soiled linens in bags and pass them out through a portal. The chambers are air conditioned for comfort. Also, patients' relatives can safely sit outside and talk to them. The cubes "sound like a very interesting idea" said Leah Feldman, medical coordinator for the Doctors Without Borders treatment center in Mangina, who said she plans to visit Alima's center soon. Her center keeps patients and relatives separated by two rows of waist high fencing; those who are bedridden can talk on phones. As of Thursday , according to the W.H.O., 19 patients had been given remdesivir, ZMapp or mAb114. One died, two survived and 16 were still on treatment. (Remdesivir is given for 10 days.) But "Ebola is tricky," warned Ms. Feldman, a trauma nurse working on her fourth outbreak. "Patients can look like they're doing better and then crash." Despite the lull, the International Medical Corps, a nonprofit group of volunteer doctors and nurses, is still working to complete a 50 bed unit in Makeke. "The decrease is promising, but I don't think we can relax," said Ky Luu, the I.M.C.'s chief operating officer. "When we were tasked to do it, the other two centers were at capacity, and cases could still ramp up." Building in such a remote area is not easy. Besides isolation wards, toilets and showers for 50 patients, a center must have a laboratory with generators and freezers, gowning and decontamination areas, screening areas for new patients, bathrooms, kitchens and on site housing for up to 200 staff. Even before that, the ground had to be cleared and hundreds of yards of dirt road had to be graded. Because it is the rainy season, heavy equipment was bogged down. "We're hiring local people to do it with shovels," Mr. Luu said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Documents released on Thursday suggested that just days after Jussie Smollett's 16 count indictment, prosecutors in Chicago were thinking of settling his charges of staging a hate crime, deepening the mystery of why they so quickly changed their mind about the case. Mr. Smollett, 36, had been accused of paying two acquaintances to stage an attack against himself in which they shouted racist and homophobic slurs and placed a noose around his neck. In the days after his indictment on Feb. 28, Chicago police detectives met with a prosecutor from the state's attorney's office to turn over materials related to the investigation, according to a detective's report. At that time, the detective wrote, the prosecutor told them that "she felt the case would be settled with Smollett paying the city of Chicago 10,000 in restitution and doing community service." The report, which was among about 500 pages released on Thursday, did not say exactly when the meeting occurred but indicated it happened before March 11. On March 26, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office formally dropped all 16 felony counts against him, saying that Mr. Smollett had agreed to forfeit the 10,000 bond paid for his release and that he was not a threat to public safety. Chicago officials, including the mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, and the police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, denounced the move. Mr. Johnson said he had not been aware of the decision to drop charges until the day prosecutors did so, though the documents released on Thursday indicate that his detectives had known for at least two weeks that the case might soon be resolved. A spokeswoman for the state's attorney's office, Tandra Simonton, said it could not comment on grand jury proceedings, and she did not respond to a question about the timing of the decision to settle the case. Many details about the Smollett case remained under wraps until last week, when a judge in Chicago ordered that his case file be unsealed, leaving open the possibility for revelations about why prosecutors decided to drop the case. The documents released on Thursday, which came from the police department, did not answer that question; the state's attorney's office is expected to release some of its own files in the coming days. Much attention has been focused on the role of State's Attorney Kimberly Foxx, the office's top official. She said she had removed herself from the case because of earlier contact she had with representatives of Mr. Smollett, but previously released files showed that the day after the indictment, she sent a text message to a colleague saying that she thought her office was treating Mr. Smollett too harshly. There has been no evidence that she interceded to make her prosecutors end the case. But her office's decision to drop the charges led to tensions with the police department, which felt that the 10,000 forfeiture was too little a price to pay for the many hours detectives spent on the case. Because the files released on Thursday came from the police, they do not provide the state's attorney's perspective on events. A spokesman for the police department, Anthony Guglielmi, said on Thursday that it stood by the detective's report and would decline to comment further. The city has since sued Mr. Smollett, seeking more than 130,000 to cover its investigative costs, in effect attempting to try the actor through the civil courts. Mr. Smollett has maintained his innocence. In the meantime, the episode has put his entertainment career in limbo. He was a star on the Fox show "Empire," but it is unclear if he will return for the show's final season. The documents also offered police accounts of what they described as Mr. Smollett's shifting story of what happened on Jan. 29, the date he reported the attack. According to notes from a police interview with Mr. Smollett dated Feb. 14, he described one attacker as "pale" from what he could see through the face mask, pointing to the area above the bridge of his nose as he spoke with the authorities. The police then reminded Mr. Smollett, according to the notes, that he had previously described the attacker as being white. Mr. Smollett then said he had "assumed they were white due to the comments that were made," the notes said. Mr. Smollett, who is black and gay, had reported to the police that the attackers had shouted racist and homophobic slurs and shouted, "This is MAGA country!," a reference to President Trump's campaign slogan. The police eventually picked up Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, brothers who worked as extras on "Empire." According to the notes of the police interview, Mr. Smollett was shown photos of the brothers and replied that they could not be the attackers because they were "black as sin." A lawyer for Mr. Smollett, Mark Geragos, declined on Thursday to address the police accounts of his descriptions of his attackers. The lawyer pointed to witness accounts included in the police file that he said corroborate Mr. Smollett's story, including an interview with a woman who saw a white man with what appeared to be a rope underneath his jacket in the area of the reported attack. The police said that the brothers told them that Mr. Smollett hired them to stage the assault for a payment of 3,500, with the promise of 500 later. The files also reflected correspondence dating back months in which Mr. Smollett discussed buying drugs through the brothers. The police also accused Smollett of mailing a threatening letter to himself at the Chicago facility where "Empire" films. According to the documents, the two brothers told the police that Mr. Smollett was dissatisfied with how the "Empire" studio had responded to the threatening letter, in which they say they played no role. The police had previously said that Mr. Smollett planned the attack because he was unhappy with his salary on "Empire." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
On a recent Monday, Tao Porchon Lynch was teaching her 90 minute yoga class in Hartsdale, N.Y., combining elements of Iyengar, meditation and vinyasa for a dozen or so regular students. Ms. Porchon Lynch's soft voice was soothing as she called out poses tree, dancer and corrected alignment. She demonstrated some floor stretches, though she herself could not do them with perfect alignment on the right. "That's my side with the hip replacement," she said, fiddling with a large clip on earring that had popped off. Actually, it is the side of her most recent hip replacement. She has had three. Ms. Porchon Lynch is 98, but a poster child for the active life. She is also a dynamic dresser and confident driver. When the class ended, she hurried out of the studio in her bright yoga pants and peep toe high heels into her new ride, a gray Smart Car. She revved the engine a few times before peeling out of the parking lot, en route to teach a private lesson. Then she hurried to the Fred Astaire Dance Studio for her own waltzing lesson; she is a competitive ballroom dancer as well as a yoga teacher. "I'm 50 years younger than her, and her schedule exhausts me," said Teresa Kay Aba Kennedy who (along with Janie Sykes Kennedy) was an author with Ms. Porchon Lynch of the memoir "Dancing Light: The Spiritual Side of Being Through the Eyes of a Modern Yoga Master." The night before, Ms. Porchon Lynch and Ms. Kay Aba Kennedy had returned from California, where Ms. Porchon Lynch headlined an event for Athleta, an athleisure brand owned by Gap Inc., at its store at the Grove in Los Angeles. She also did a photo shoot for the label. Perhaps more than any other physical regimen, yoga has gotten tremendous public relations benefit from social media. The images of women and men wrapped into graceful, gravity defying poses are arresting and highly shareable in the visual worlds of Facebook and Instagram. As a very rare elderly star on this circuit, Ms. Porchon Lynch has the kind of exceptional marketing potential also glimpsed in the nonagenarians Iris Apfel and Betty White. Athleta will feature Ms. Porchon Lynch in its January catalog and in its new "Power of She" campaign. "Tao aligns perfectly with our mission," said Nancy Green, the Athleta president. "We are working hard to break stereotypes of what youth and wellness means." Ms. Porchon Lynch is an avid traveler, who in a few weeks will head to the Berkshires to lead a workshop at Kripalu, and then to Hawaii for another in Maui. And she frequently enters ballroom dance competitions. In 2015, Ms. Porchon Lynch appeared on "America's Got Talent," dancing a samba/cha cha/salsa combination with Vard Margaryan, then 26. Howard Stern, a judge on the show, called the performance "too mind blowing for words." A video clip of the performance has been viewed several hundred thousand times. "My partner was 70 years younger than me, and he was throwing me around his neck!" she remembered fondly. Her current teacher and competitive dance partner is even younger: Anton Bilozorov, 25. "I teach her about dance," he said, "and she teaches me about life." Ms. Porchon Lynch was born in 1918. Her mother died in childbirth, and she was raised in Pondicherry, in India, by an uncle who was a railroad entrepreneur and who brought his niece along with him on his Asian travels. When she was 8, she walked to the beach and spotted young boys making silly shapes with their bodies. "I thought it was a new game," Ms. Porchon Lynch said. "I went to my aunt and said, 'Can they let me be part of it?' And she said: 'That isn't a game, it is yoga and it's not for girls. It's not ladylike.' So I started doing it." The far flung stories of her life that Ms. Porchon Lynch tells render her as something of a Zelig figure, from India to Britain to Hollywood. She supplies details and dates with a young person's mental clarity, and loaded her memoir with photographic evidence. When she was 12, she said, she came home to find "a little man sitting on the floor" and saw visitors bowing to him. Then, she said, her uncle told her to pack a suitcase and they spent a few weeks traveling and marching with Mahatma Gandhi. "I didn't speak English that well and he taught me to say, 'I presume that your presumptions are precisely incorrectly, your sarcastic insinuations too obnoxious to be appreciated,'" Ms. Porchon Lynch said, sitting on a bench in the yoga room at the Fred Astaire studio. She then repeated the line, verbatim. "That was in 1940," she said. She joined a dance troupe that entertained soldiers in Europe, and from there made her way to Hollywood. She worked as a contract actress for M.G.M., teaching yoga to other actresses and traveling back to India when she could to study with yogis including B. K. S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois. While traveling in New York, she was introduced to an insurance salesman, Bill Lynch. They married in 1963 and eventually settled in Hartsdale, N.Y., a suburb in Westchester County. They had no children, focusing on civic involvement and drinking wine. (Together they founded the American Wine Society. To this day, Ms. Porchon Lynch drinks only two beverages: tea and wine. She does not drink water.) Mr. Lynch died after a motorcycle accident in 1982, and in the years that followed, Ms. Porchon Lynch recommitted to her yoga practice. For decades, she has maintained two gigs: teaching yoga three times a week at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Hartsdale and twice weekly at the Jewish Community Center in nearby Scarsdale. "She sees things in people they don't see in themselves," said Susan Douglass, 61, a trademark lawyer who began studying yoga with Ms. Porchon Lynch in 1999. "Her students love her. She has a large band of students who would do anything for her." Ms. Porchon Lynch's career really took off thanks to the strategic thinking of a few devoted students. First, Joyce Pines, a retired schoolteacher who has become something of an attache of Ms. Porchon Lynch's, applied to Guinness World Records for special designation. In 2012, Ms. Porchon Lynch became "The Oldest Living Yoga Teacher." Around the same time, another student hired Robert Sturman, a photographer, to do a photo shoot of Ms. Porchon Lynch in Central Park. Mr. Sturman's work focuses on yogis, including many unexpected practitioners like prison inmates and wounded veterans. Ms. Porchon Lynch showed up for the shoot in a red ballroom dancer's flamenco dress and high heels. He questioned her choice to wear spikes to a park, and she told him she only wears high heels. "She said they helped elevate her consciousness," said Mr. Sturman, who ended up carrying her through the muddy park. After the shoot, he posted images on his Facebook page. They went viral and continue to spread more than four years later. (Mr. Sturman now photographs Ms. Porchon Lynch twice a year, and Ms. Pines maintains her accounts on Facebook and elsewhere.) With her social media cred firmly established, Ms. Porchon Lynch began fielding invitations to yoga festivals and retreats from Bosnia to Dubai. "I am invited all over the world!" she said. Joann Burnham, a founder of the annual Nantucket Yoga Festival, asked Ms. Porchon Lynch to lead workshops at the event in 2014, after she heard about her from James Miller, who had hosted her at the Iowa City Yoga Festival. "At this point, you can't have a yoga festival and not invite Tao," said Ms. Burnham, who dedicates a whole weekend to "Tao workshops" at Dharma Yoga Nantucket, the studio she owns with her husband. "Being in her presence and seeing the expectations of what someone would think about someone who is 98, and seeing all those expectations squashed, is so incredible." Though Ms. Porchon Lynch lives by herself, she most often travels with companions. Ms. Douglass accompanied her on several trips to workshops in the last few years. Almost always, she said, Ms. Porchon Lynch is recognized by strangers on the street and in airports by people who ask her to pose for cellphone snaps. "It's like going around with a celebrity," Ms. Douglass said. Ms. Porchon Lynch has been embraced by big names in the spirituality world. Deepak Chopra met Ms. Porchon Lynch in 2011 when he took part in a panel discussion with the Dalai Lama. Ms. Porchon Lynch, after sitting in the audience, approached the men and introduced herself. "All these gurus from India who have come and gone Pattabhi Jois, Iyengar she has met them all," Dr. Chopra said. "It's incredible. Even His Holiness was totally impressed by her." Dr. Chopra and Ms. Porchon Lynch meet from time to time. He hosted her at his apartment earlier this month for a Facebook Live chat. Within a day, the video had been viewed by 115,000 users and shared more than 1,500 times. And yet the lines of lived experience on Ms. Porchon Lynch's face, and the expression of peace and vivacity in her eyes, are powerful reminders that the practice is about more than clicks. "The celebrity yoga world can be a competitive place," said Kelly Kamm, a yoga instructor who travels around the workshop circuit and is a muse of Mr. Sturman, the photographer. "It's like being a rock star, it's one in a hundred thousand chance," Ms. Kamm said. "I think that people were so hungry for someone to look up to who wasn't a young, skinny, blond yogi in a bra top. There is just so much of that. Then came someone who was the opposite of that. Then came Tao." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"When someone asked me what Bach meant to me," Mr. Harnoncourt once recalled of his youth, "I replied that he was a mathematician, and that this wasn't truly great music!" In his college years, Mr. Harnoncourt and fellow students played through arias from the Bach cantatas and much else, realizing in the process that "the performers in Bach's time used different instruments." The discovery led to his obsession with period instruments, which he collected, and the founding of the Concentus. "This was the period when I came at a certain point to see that Bach is simply the composer," he said. "A man head and shoulders above the other really great composers." Mr. Harnoncourt and the Concentus first drew wide attention among record collectors with their performances of Bach: most notably, from 1971 to 1990, the 200 plus surviving sacred cantatas for Teldec, a project shared with Gustav Leonhardt and the Leonhardt Consort. Intent on emulating Bach's practice, Mr. Harnoncourt used boy trebles in solos as well as choruses there, to sometimes shaky effect. Here, in decade old recordings of five cantatas (Nos. 26 and 36 previously unreleased) and the "Christmas Oratorio," he uses the mixed Schoenberg Choir and adult soloists. "Boys' voices," he said, "are breaking at an increasingly early age these days." Handel is represented by a 2004 "Messiah" and "Timotheus," a German version of the oratorio "Alexander's Feast" orchestrated by Mozart and, later, von Mosel (undoubtedly the perpetrator of the lusty bass drum whacks). The 2012 large scale performance recreates an 1812 concert in Vienna. Some two decades after his Bach discovery, Mr. Harnoncourt admitted Mozart to his pantheon: "Bach and Mozart," he said, "weren't mortals." He added: "Henceforth, I had one single responsibility, namely to place myself in their service." Serve Mozart he does here, with all those performances of symphonies and readings from letters (in which he plays Papa Leopold). There are also two operas: the unfinished "Zaide," from 2006, and "Die Zauberflote" ("The Magic Flute"), on two DVDs, in a production staged by Jens Daniel Herzog, recorded live at the Salzburg Festival in 2012. The third DVD is Mr. Berger's "Mission Mozart" documentary, detailing the making of one of the CDs, with Lang Lang joining Mr. Harnoncourt and the Vienna Philharmonic in the Piano Concertos Nos. 17 and 24. Often better heard than seen, with his physical antics, Mr. Lang is a disarming presence here in his eagerness to soak up Mr. Harnoncourt's wisdom. Haydn is represented more sparsely yet solidly with, in addition to the "Paris" Symphonies, his two great oratorios, "Die Schopfung" ("The Creation") and "Die Jahreszeiten" ("The Seasons"); and one of his operas, "Orlando Paladino." Mr. Harnoncourt had another revelation in 1988, when he conducted his first staged production of Beethoven's "Fidelio" and his first performance of the "Missa Solemnis." "The scales fell from my eyes," he recalled. "All that had seemed to me to be empty bathos suddenly turned into its opposite." His last recordings, Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies and "Missa Solemnis," also followed a production of "Fidelio," which wasn't recorded, and plans to record the other symphonies fell victim to Mr. Harnoncourt's death. He leaves monumentality to the "Missa," giving the Fifth Symphony a ripsnorting reading. Mr. Harnoncourt's interpretations of Bruckner, with the Vienna Philharmonic, come with bonuses: the Fifth Symphony accompanied by a rehearsal disc and the Ninth by a "workshop concert" with a thorough demonstration and analysis of the sketches for the unfinished finale. The choral feast continues with Brahms's "A German Requiem" and Verdi's Requiem, both with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Schoenberg Choir, and Dvorak's "Stabat Mater" (from 2007, previously unpublished), with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. 20th century developments in composition are represented by an odd coupling. Mr. Harnoncourt applied the same rigorous scholarship to Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" that he did to everything else, trying to buttress its stature as a genuine opera and not merely a musical to mine for big tunes. He calls it "an American Wozzeck," in tribute not only to Gershwin but also to Berg, with whom he had formed a friendship. What there is of a modernist strain here Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta" and Divertimento for String Orchestra is just enough to make you wish there were more: "Wozzeck" itself, say, or Berg's "Lulu," which Mr. Harnoncourt is also said to have liked. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Two weeks ago, the conservative media personalities Diamond and Silk falsely claimed on their Facebook page that people who were not eligible to vote were receiving ballots in Georgia's special elections next month. Their post was shared more than 300 times. A week later, the right wing commentator Mark Levin shared a post on his Facebook page falsely suggesting that the Rev. Raphael Warnock, one of the two Democrats running in the Georgia Senate runoffs, once welcomed Fidel Castro to his church. The misleading claim was shared more than 3,000 times. At the same time, a drumbeat of misinformation about the presidential election count in Georgia droned on. Lara Trump, President Trump's daughter in law, and the Hodgetwins, a bodybuilding duo who have turned to pro Trump political comedy, shared several false stories on their Instagram and Facebook pages that claimed suitcases filled with ballots were pulled out from under tables during the November vote count. Tens of thousands of people shared their posts. As Georgia prepares to hold special elections that will determine which party will control the U.S. Senate, the state has become the focus of a misinformation campaign that is aimed at discrediting the results of the November elections and convincing voters that Democrats are trying to steal the upcoming vote. A small group of "superspreaders" is responsible for the vast majority of that misinformation, according to new research by Avaaz, a global human rights group. Not only are those accounts responsible for most of the misinformation swirling around the vote, they are drowning out accurate reporting by mainstream media outlets on Facebook and Instagram. The research indicates that, despite efforts by social media companies to curtail misinformation, the viral nature of false news continues to take advantage of the algorithms that gin up what people see on those platforms. The algorithms often reward outrage over accuracy, and telling people what they want to hear or what gets them angry can easily overwhelm the truth. Americans are "being drowned in misinformation in Georgia by these superspreaders," said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz. The Avaaz study also calls into question Facebook's recent decision to roll back a change that elevated news from authoritative outlets over hyperpartisan sources. The change, which the company said was intended to be temporary, had resulted in an increase in Facebook traffic for mainstream news publishers including CNN, NPR and The New York Times, while partisan sites like Breitbart and Occupy Democrats saw their numbers fall. Many of the "superspreaders" have previously been named by researchers as playing central roles in spreading misinformation about voter fraud in the November presidential elections. "Facebook has gotten a lot of pressure over claims that they are censoring the right or conservatives, but what the data shows is that they may be favoring these actors," Mr. Quran said. "These accounts regularly spread misinformation. The question is: Why doesn't Facebook demote their reach per their policies?" Other misinformation spreaders included Eric Trump, the president's son, and Sebastian Gorka, the president's former deputy assistant. President Trump also continued his barrage of misinformation about Georgia's elections, according to the research by Avaaz. The top 20 Facebook and Instagram accounts spreading false claims aimed at swaying voters in Georgia accounted for more interactions than mainstream media outlets. Using CrowdTangle, a Facebook owned research tool, Avaaz examined social media posts between Nov. 8, when most news outlets called the election for President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., and Friday. They found that the top 20 "superspreaders" averaged 5,500 interactions on their Facebook posts, while the 20 largest news outlets averaged 4,100 interactions per post. These users saw more people interacting with their posts, despite having fewer followers on Facebook than the mainstream news outlets. Combined, the news outlets had more than 208 million followers, while the top "superspreaders" had 85 million followers. Mr. Quran said the numbers showed how Facebook's algorithms favored the sensational, and often false, posts. A Facebook spokesman, Kevin McAlister, said the company was still cracking down on misinformation, despite the recent rollback. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Joseph S. Gbembo at a cemetery for Ebola victims in Foya, Liberia. His mother and three other relatives are buried there. The Gbembo lost 17 family members to Ebola in cases stretching from Sierra Leone to Liberia's capital, Monrovia.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times Joseph S. Gbembo at a cemetery for Ebola victims in Foya, Liberia. His mother and three other relatives are buried there. The Gbembo lost 17 family members to Ebola in cases stretching from Sierra Leone to Liberia's capital, Monrovia. The people in the village of Kpondu believed she could speak for the dead, and came to her with messages for lost loved ones. They often found her beneath a bamboo palm, reading the future by throwing "jagay," small white cowrie shells. Ms. Nyuma became ill at the end of March vomiting, headache, diarrhea and retreated to the bedroom of her mud brick house, where her sisters, grandchildren and neighbors gathered around her bed. She died around April 8, according to her half sister, Finda Focko, and James Keppeh, a community health worker. Now it would be up to Ms. Nyuma's descendants and friends to ensure that her path to the afterlife was a peaceful one, that she would become an ancestor who, in exchange for tribute and respect, might intervene with the spirits on their behalf. The mourners came to her room the night she died. It was typical to pull back the covers and touch the body to say farewell, according to friends, relatives and neighbors who were present. A woman removed the many rings from Ms. Nyuma's fingers that were thought to impart powers. The next morning, four friends washed her body using soap and a towel. Later, she would be washed again by four women from her family, according to local Muslim tradition. They removed her clothing. A cousin tied her hair tightly. Cupping tepid water in their hands, they doused her mouth, and nose and ears, then her feet, and bound her in a white cotton shroud. With hundreds of mourners watching, a group of men carried her body 100 yards into the bush to a freshly dug grave. Relatives then stayed several days in Ms. Nyuma's contaminated room. Ms. Nyuma's husband died soon after, as did a grandson, several women who had prepared her body and others exposed to them. The W.H.O. estimates that at least 20 percent of the Ebola deaths in West Africa have stemmed from unsafe burial practices. The percentage was probably much higher at times. Among the villagers, the cause of Ms. Nyuma's illness was assumed to be supernatural, more payback than pandemic. When Mohamed Lamin, a health surveillance officer, arrived in late May after the unexplained deaths, they told him that she and her husband died because he had disregarded her warning to never open a blue painted trunk that contained her belongings. When he did, they said, he was confronted by a large snake. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
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