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The opening credits of the arresting psychological thriller " Ladyworld " play out over the rumbling of an earthquake as it strikes an isolated mansion. When the tremors stop, the film opens to find the quake has cut off access to water, electricity and all paths outside. Eight teenage girls who came to the house for a birthday party are trapped. The pragmatic Olivia (Ariela Barer) is voted by the group as their leader in a narrow victory over the vicious Piper (Annalise Basso), who nominates herself. Olivia tries to establish order in the house, encouraging the girls to pass a crystal when they want to speak. But Piper agitates the group around the unseen threat of a hiding man. The man could attack at any time, Piper insinuates, and the only answer is to become more frightening than him. As the situation in the house grows dire, with the girls unable to wash or eat, Piper draws more disciples into apocalyptic playacting sometimes suggesting the sexual violence she exerts might come from the unknown man. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
LONDON Alexander Hamilton is standing tall in the country he famously fought against. If you go for statistical trivia, you can quantify in hard numbers the increased stature of this American founding father, who is being celebrated in the triumphantly transplanted Broadway blockbuster "Hamilton" at the Victoria Palace Theater here. To wit: nine inches. That's the difference in height between the real Hamilton (roughly 5 feet 7 inches) and his smashing new onstage avatar, Jamael Westman, who at 6 foot 4 towers over most of his fellow cast members. And without (you should pardon the expression) hamming it up, Mr. Westman also endows the title character of Lin Manuel Miranda's Tony laden musical with the outsize dimensions of a bona fide tragic hero. But London's first interpreter of this coveted part burns with a Promethean fire that makes the show almost as exciting as the first time I saw it Off Broadway at the Public Theater nearly three years ago. At 25, Mr. Westman, a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, is not only the rangiest, but also the youngest of the Hamiltons I have seen. As such, he is exceptionally well matched to a portrait of a nascent country finding its identity. Only 19 when we first encounter him, Mr. Westman's Hamilton exudes the arrogance, impudence and impatience of a gifted, ambitious adolescent on the brink of adulthood, on the rise and on the make. (The musical question the show asks of Hamilton "Why do you write like you're running out of time?" has never seemed so apt.) While he ages credibly during the three decades the show covers, he conspicuously retains the virtues and vices of his youth. This Hamilton's juggernaut energy and show off confidence make him both obnoxious and affecting in revelatory ways. You understand more than ever why he gets under the skin of the rival who would eventually kill him, Aaron Burr (Giles Terera, in a shiny performance that shows how his character's smoothness becomes his nemesis); you also grasp exactly why every woman in his orbit would be drawn to him. The mix of filial devotion and resentment that Hamilton feels toward his mentor, George Washington (an excellent Obioma Ugoala), is newly and provocatively combustible. So is the perplexed combination of guilt and affection, common among egocentric family men, that pervades his relationships with his wife, Eliza (Rachelle Ann Go); her sister Angelica Schuyler (Rachel John); and his doomed son, Philip (Cleve September). Similarly, Jason Pennycooke's Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson (parts created brilliantly in New York by Daveed Diggs) and Mr. Terera's Burr (for which Leslie Odom Jr. copped the Tony for Best Lead Actor in a Musical) register more as supporting characters than they did in New York. But perhaps this is as it should be. Remember, after all, what the title of the show is. Thomas Kail's London production, which retains its top drawer design team, has the gleam and propulsive thrust of the New York original, and it fits beautifully into the exquisitely restored Victoria Palace. (Extra points to its renovators for seat comfort and legroom.) This interpretation is also an ideal first experience for "Hamilton" virgins and for anyone unaccustomed to the rap and hip hop that make up much of Mr. Miranda's score, which sounds richer every time I hear it. The cast, a multiethnic ensemble as it is in all "Hamilton" productions, enunciates more precisely than their American counterparts. And am I wrong in thinking that the orchestrator Alex Lacamoire has slowed down the tempo on occasion to make the lyrics easier to follow? In any case, the expository details of this dazzling history are less likely to be lost on Britons who never studied the American Revolution. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Mulligan said of one review that focused on her looks: "I was like, 'Really? For this film, you're going to write something that is so transparent? Now? In 2020?'"Credit...Danny Kasirye for The New York Times Mulligan said of one review that focused on her looks: "I was like, 'Really? For this film, you're going to write something that is so transparent? Now? In 2020?'" Not every Carey Mulligan movie begins with a Charli XCX song, but maybe more of them should. When "Promising Young Woman" deploys the 2017 pop bop "Boys" in its opening moments, it's the first sign you're about to get something from Mulligan that you're not used to: namely, a contemporary setting. "I know that for a cinema audience, I'm just constantly in period costume," Mulligan said recently, shrugging her shoulders in an oversized red sweater. She was video chatting with me from her British country house in Devon, where she had sequestered herself in a darkened music room typically used by her husband, Marcus Mumford, from the band Mumford Sons. A single, solitary lamp illuminated her, as single, solitary lamps often do with Mulligan. You'll find little more than a meager light source in many of the 35 year old actress's most recent movies, which include "Far From the Madding Crowd," set around 1870, "Suffragette," about equal rights protests in 1912 Britain, and "Mudbound," which begins in the year 1939. It has been nearly a decade since Mulligan starred in a modern day film Steve McQueen's "Shame," from 2011 a span of time that initially surprised even her. "I think of 'Wildlife' as being kind of contemporary!" she insisted. I had to point out that the 2018 domestic drama, in which Mulligan plays a restless mother on the brink of an affair, takes place 60 years ago. A black comedy told in pastels, "Promising Young Woman" casts Mulligan as Cassie, a disaffected med school dropout whose life has never been the same since her best friend was raped in college. Lately, Cassie has come up with a confrontational way to deal with her grief: She'll go to a nightclub, arrange herself in a vulnerable position typically slumped on a banquette, acting too drunk to stand or even speak and wait to see if a guy will seize upon the tableau as an opportunity. Depressingly, someone always does. Of course, the guy doesn't think he's doing anything wrong: He's just offering Cassie a "safe ride home" that happens to go back to his place. There, he will advance on her splayed body until Cassie suddenly sits up, revealing her sobriety just as he is about to assault her. "But I'm a nice guy!" he will sputter, caught in the act. Cassie's inevitable reply: "Are you?" The film is a tonal tightrope walk, and Mulligan is astonishing in it. There is so much about Cassie that an actress might be tempted to overplay her biting sense of humor, her well defended soulsickness, the startling lengths to which she'll go in her mission but Mulligan makes the character feel achingly real. And sometimes, as if it were as easy as breathing, she can convey all of those warring traits in the space of a single line. Mulligan can do big and has done big. She played Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's swirling, maximal adaptation of "The Great Gatsby," after all. But she is inherently down to earth in a way that benefits her characters, and in conversation, she comes across as wry, understated and observant. "Hardly anybody I'm friends with is in our industry," she noted. With other actors onscreen, you can sometimes sense a yawning gulf between the celebrity and who they're playing, but Mulligan is able to make a person like Cassie seem like ... well, a person. Perhaps it's a testament to Mulligan's low key nature as a movie star that she can do something enormously high key like marrying the frontman of a famous band and somehow it feels like a fun bonus fact about her, rather than an inextricable part of her mystique. Does she feel she's been typecast as a period actress? Mulligan is quick to point out that she's played at least two contemporary roles onstage over the last several years, in "Girls Boys" and "Skylight." But really, she said, it's just rare for a contemporary movie to come along with an antiheroine as complicated as Cassie, whose mission is righteous even when her methods may be mad. LAST MONTH, IT HAPPENED AGAIN. Mulligan was reading a screenplay and when a female character was introduced, the description said, "Beautiful but doesn't know it." If you're an actress in Hollywood, you're familiar with that phrase. And in the 10 years since Mulligan was nominated for an Oscar for playing a schoolgirl seduced by an older man in "An Education," she has certainly come across that sort of description more than she'd like. "I kind of can't believe it still happens," she said. "But it does." We wondered aloud about the deeper meaning of a description like that. Do men write it to turn other men on? Maybe to them, it isn't pertinent whether a female character is a nurse, a marketing executive or a serial killer what matters most is conveying that this fictional woman is out of your league, but you'd still have a shot with her. It may seem like a little thing, but those little things add up in Hollywood, where the way women are viewed becomes something the whole world can watch. That's why Fennell told all the men to play their nightclub scenes with Mulligan as though they were the heroes of their own romantic comedy: In another era, they would have been. Just look at seminal comedies like "Animal House," in which a college freshman debates date raping a passed out girl, or "Sixteen Candles," when Molly Ringwald's love interest leaves his blackout drunk girlfriend with a virgin nerd and tells him, "Do anything you want." "I've seen all these films and laughed along and didn't really think about it," Mulligan said. "And then you sit back and think, 'Oh gosh, that's actually not funny at all. That's horrendous!' It really takes some thought to not just go along with those laughs." Fennell concurred. "It's so embedded in our culture that so many people don't really understand what's wrong about it still," she said. "I wanted to have a film that shows them, that's sneaking it in the guise of something fun." The movie they've made is as sticky and dangerous as a spider's web, and men's reactions to it can be telling. Before the pandemic scuttled its original spring release, "Promising Young Woman" had a buzzy debut in January at the Sundance Film Festival. I asked Mulligan if she had read any of the responses to it then, and she winced. "I read the Variety review, because I'm a weak person," Mulligan said. "And I took issue with it." She paused, debating whether she really wanted to go there. "It felt like it was basically saying that I wasn't hot enough to pull off this kind of ruse," she said, finally. Though "Promising Young Woman" earned its fair share of raves at Sundance, Variety seemed stumped by the movie and strongly implied that Mulligan had been miscast. "Margot Robbie is a producer here, and one can (perhaps too easily) imagine the role might once have been intended for her," read the review. "Whereas with this star, Cassie wears her pickup bait gear like bad drag; even her long blond hair feels like a put on." Mulligan can still recite some of the lines from that review. But she said, "It wasn't some sort of ego wounding thing like, I fully can see that Margot Robbie is a goddess." What bothered Mulligan most was that people might read a high profile critique of any actress's physical appearance and blithely accept it: "It drove me so crazy. I was like, 'Really? For this film, you're going to write something that is so transparent? Now? In 2020?' I just couldn't believe it." It's all the more ironic for Mulligan because "Promising Young Woman" explicitly grapples with the litany of cultural expectations about how a woman ought to look and behave. There's even a man who calls Cassie beautiful and then, in the same breath, gives her a disingenuous lecture about why she's wearing too much makeup. "We don't allow women to look normal anymore, or like a real person," Mulligan said. "Why does every woman who's ever onscreen have to look like a supermodel? That has shifted into something where the expectation of beauty and perfection onscreen has gotten completely out of control." Men were hardly more enlightened in the period pieces Mulligan has made, but that was often the point of those movies, wasn't it? When her characters asserted their independence, as in "Far From the Madding Crowd," or fought for the right to vote in "Suffragette," you could watch from your privileged vantage point in the present and think, "They were ahead of their time." In that way and in others, they were modern women, too. You expect more these days, but maybe you shouldn't. Maybe that's the lesson of "Promising Young Woman": that you'd better stay on your toes, and that you'll have to push back even when people would rather you just drop it. Even Mulligan, after a brief crisis of confidence "Maybe I shouldn't have said it was Variety," she fretted would eventually decide that what she wanted to say was worth committing to. The more we idealize women, she told me, the more we rob them of what actually makes them interesting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
David Foster, the Jerry Bruckheimer of power ballads, likes to say that he hasn't seen the inside of an elevator in more than 30 years because he's afraid of hearing his own music. Millennials know him as the former stepfather to Gigi and Bella Hadid and as a background player on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Before all that, he produced Whitney Houston's world famous rendition of "I Will Always Love You." He won sixteen Grammy awards and worked with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Neil Diamond, Toni Braxton, Barbra Streisand and Lionel Richie, often on songs that topped charts and divided critics. You can even see him perform some of the ballads he produced, including Celine Dion's "The Power of Love," along with Toni Braxton's "Unbreak My Heart" and Whitney Houston's "I Have Nothing," while he's on tour, performing at theaters around the country starting on April 17 in Washington D.C. with a band of singers and musicians. You've written disco classics for Cheryl Lynn and produced Whitney Houston's biggest hit. Do great pop songs share a secret? I don't know. I can only say that I gravitate toward schmaltz. I'm a commoner, not an elitist. Years ago, Rolling Stone said I plunged the dagger into Boz Scaggs' white suit, but I thought we did a good album together. Boz liked it. So I'm not a Rolling Stone favorite. It's O.K. Rolling Stone magazine also called you the master of "bombastic pop kitsch." What was the song that cemented that? Was it Chicago's "You're the Inspiration?" No. I would say it was Earth, Wind and Fire's "After the Love is Gone." You've said that Maurice White, of Earth, Wind and Fire, is the singer you learned the most from. Why? Because he did Jazz, Pop, R B, Country. Because you name the genre and he could do it. Tell me about Celine Dion. When she walks into the studio, does that voice just come soaring out? Celine Dion is the person every singer should study, whether you like her singing or hate it. How she's raised her children. How she's been in her marriage. How she's been in her shows. How she takes care of her voice. How she treats people. And yes, when she opens her mouth that voice just comes out. You've also been quoted saying that you love her because she does what she's told. For a guy like me who wants to get his licks in, it's great. She can interpret exactly what I want at all times. She's so amenable. I think that's to her credit. When I asked Whitney for something, she would give me something different. Sometimes it was better, sometimes it was not as good. But it was never what I imagined. Did you feel you knew Whitney Houston? I felt I did not. We never had an argument. We never had a problem. But it was not like Natalie Cole, where we were great friends right up until she died. And you did how many songs with Whitney? Over the course of twenty years. It was a surface relationship. I don't read anything into the fact that we weren't close. Don't you have people you work with who you don't really know? Different levels of success. Different level of tragedy. Who was the most difficult superstar to work with? Although Madonna was not always nice to you when you collaborated on her ballads collection in 1995. She was constantly telling you how uncool you were. She was right. I was uncool. Madonna was also a great co producer. She arrived at 9 a.m., was there until the very end, and had great ideas about how to make the music sound better. Is Barbra Streisand ever not exacting? You know the answer to that. I could say to Barbra, 'if you come to this party tonight, and just shake a few hands and take a few pictures, your album will come out at No. 1. These people can help you.' 'I don't care.' I don't want to go.' You say, 'But Barbra, for sure. It'll make your album come out...' ' I don't care. I don't want to.' But she's a really true friend and she usually ends up being right. I will tell you that she's not the person you asked about. She just doesn't compromise. She believes compromise breeds mediocrity. I agree, though I haven't always operated accordingly. So the worst compromise you made was? Deciding to do this interview. Use that. Also, in the eighties I did a bunch of projects in Japan just for the money. When you make decisions based on the money, it never really works Turkey, lettuce, tomato, cucumber and heroin. Want some? No, but I'd bet there are no opioids. In fact, I think you are probably one of the rare people who's succeeded in the music business without ever doing drugs. Ladies and gentlemen, sometime in David Foster's distant past there was a puff of a joint. A few times. But that's all. I was raised to not disappoint my parents. I had a great upbringing on Vancouver Island. I was in Chuck Berry's band at 16. There was nothing but sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll and I never took part. Although you made up a little for being such a good boy by appearing on reality TV. And you got a tattoo on your hand. Ten years ago, my stepson started carrying a camera around saying, 'We're going to get a TV show going.' I said 'if you can get that TV show on a network, whatever it is you're trying to do, I will get the same tattoo you have and I will be on your show.' And sure as hell, they sold a reality show about our family to Fox and I wound up with this tattoo.' That's how both things happened. The show was called "The Princes of Malibu" and your wife then was Linda Thompson, a singer and actress, whose other ex is Caitlyn Jenner. After that, you married Yolanda Hadid, who became a cast member on the "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills." A show you appeared on with some regularity. I wanted to be supportive. And I think about it like this. I'm currently working with Michael Buble. Would he really say, 'I was going to call him to do my new album but then I saw The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and thought, not that guy. Never again.' I doubt it. But your question seems to be implying something. What do you think? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The "worm" logo was designed by Bruce Blackburn. He and his design firm partner, Richard Danne, overhauled the visual appearance for NASA in 1975. It was designed for NASA in the 1970s, and it hasn't been back to space since the 1990s. But in 2020, it will head to orbit once more. It's a logo that a generation grew up with a minimalist twisting of red letters that is nicknamed after terrestrial invertebrates. NASA used it from 1975, when it was introduced as part of a cleaner visual redesign for the space agency, to 1992, when it was kicked to the side. But the familiar yet long unused modern symbol will be seen on the side of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket when two NASA astronauts, Douglas G. Hurley and Robert L. Behnken, head to the International Space Station, a mission scheduled for the second half of May. They will be the first to launch to orbit from American soil since 2011, and the new old logo was dusted off to commemorate the milestone. In 1992, Daniel S. Goldin, then NASA's administrator, decided that the best way to excite people about the future was to harken to the agency's heady early days. He resurrected an earlier insignia with a different nickname "the meatball." The meatball a blue circle filled with stars, a red swoosh that represents an airplane wing and a spacecraft orbiting the wing was NASA's logo during the agency's greatest accomplishments, including the Apollo moon landings, and NASA has used it for the last 28 years. The "meatball" logo being painted on the wing of the space shuttle Endeavor in 1998. The worm, however, was not forgotten, especially among members of Generation X such as Jim Bridenstine, the current NASA administrator. Mr. Bridenstine often points out that he is the first administrator to be born after the end of the Apollo program. "I grew up in the '80s," Mr. Bridenstine said in an interview. "In the '80s, the worm logo was the logo of NASA. I've always been kind of partial to it." Five years ago, two graphic designers, Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth, republished an official 1976 document, the "National Aeronautics and Space Administration Graphics Standards Manual," which prescribed how the new logo should be used. The reissue is now in its fifth printing, with more than 30,000 copies sold. "We had said among ourselves, 'How cool would it be if it actually came back one day?'" Mr. Smyth said. "It was kind of the fantasy. We never seriously thought it would happen." Since 2017, use of the worm logo has been permitted on T shirts and other souvenirs sold all over the world. "We've just seen it come to rise in popular culture, in fashion in particular," Mr. Reed said. Since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011, American astronauts have relied on Russia and its Soyuz rockets for transportation to orbit. But as SpaceX was getting close to the first launch of its Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard, Mr. Bridenstine thought, "It would be a fitting tribute to that moment to bring back the worm as an inspiration to the nation." The announcement of the worm revival was initially scheduled to go out April 1 when it might have been mistaken as an April Fool's joke. It was pushed back a day. "What they were trying to represent in the '70s was cutting edge technology," Mr. Smyth said. "They got it so right that it still looks like cutting edge technology even though it's close to 40 years later." By coincidence, April 2 is the birthday of Richard Danne, the designer who directed the 1970s graphics reinvention. "I was thrilled to see the announcement, especially since it arrived on my 86th birthday!" Mr. Danne wrote via email. "What a marvelous present here." It was not a complete surprise. About a month ago, designers from SpaceX reached out to Mr. Reed and Mr. Smyth to find out the correct shade of red they should be using. The men put SpaceX in touch with Mr. Danne. "Naturally I started putting two and two together," Mr. Danne said. In the manual, the color was defined as simply "NASA Red." Today, there is a universal color matching system defined by the Pantone company, and NASA Red is Pantone color number 179. For now, the worm will appear just on the one SpaceX rocket, and NASA is keeping the meatball as its primary icon. But Mr. Bridenstine said the worm could find a wider role at NASA. "We're kind of working through it right now," he said. Mr. Bridenstine said he could imagine that a second spacecraft for taking NASA astronauts to the space station, the Starliner built by Boeing, might also sport the worm logo. "We haven't gotten that far yet," he said. "But I imagine when the Starliner launches, it would likely have the worm as well." But the Starliner will not have its first crewed flight for a while. After a flawed test flight without astronauts in December, Boeing will repeat the uncrewed mission before launching astronauts, the Washington Post reported on Monday. The company later acknowledged the decision. Regardless of how NASA decides to mix and match two very different designs, fans of the worm are ecstatic that a beloved icon that had been tossed into the dust bins of graphic design indeed has a future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
When white haired Mary descends on her three daughters in Dallas for an impromptu visit, she brings them rosaries. Or she meant to, anyway; she can't find them just this instant. What she does have handy is a morsel of guiding philosophy. "The hearts of men are naked baby rats," she tells them, meaning it tenderly. "No they're not," her middle daughter, Genevieve, shoots back. She's more like her mother than she thinks, though. So are her sisters, steeped from birth as they all are in reverence for masculinity. To the women in Will Arbery's sly, elusive, off kilter comedy "Plano," the male presence is a loud, insistent thing. It's also fiendishly hard to vanquish. Sometimes, they discover, you just have to clobber a guy with a copy of Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle: Book One" and bury the body in the backyard. First seen last June as part of Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks series, "Plano" has deepened since then, sharpening its focus on the sisters: Anne (Crystal Finn), a dithery professor whose husband, John (Cesar J. Rosado), seems to be with her for the green card; Genevieve (Miriam Silverman), a sardonic sculptor more successful than her regular guy husband, Steve (Ryan King); and Isabel (Susannah Flood), the sickly, saintly youngest, who seems O.K. (but is she really?) with being married to God. Hers is, by the way, very much a male deity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
When a whale sings, it fills the sea with more than just serene sounds. It also sends vibrations coursing through the water like a speaker with the bass turned way up. Though scientists have long listened to the marine mammals' melodies, they haven't really been feeling the music. Now, a new study highlights this overlooked and poorly understood component to the whale's song. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, a team of researchers reported detecting humpback whale vibrations from more than 650 feet away. The researchers said that the rattles traveled farther than expected, suggesting that they may play a role in whale to whale communication. "They are these noisy animals in the ocean noise is central to their biology," said T. Aran Mooney, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the lead author on the study. "We have not really been measuring half of the whale sounds out there." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Ella Fitzgerald hardly ever crooned the blues, and her vocals rarely overflowed with pathos or fury. Listening to her nail a ballad, you may not feel invited to leap into her own world and feel her pain, like you would with Billie Holiday or Little Jimmy Scott. You could say that Fitzgerald was to singing what Yo Yo Ma is to the cello: utter perfection, personified. Fitzgerald thinks of the note, she hits the note. She learns the song, she becomes the song. Still, there's a sacred exchange going on. Rather than beckoning you in, Fitzgerald is bringing the music to you. And the effect is undeniable you're disarmed. It makes sense, then, that Fitzgerald's live recordings have always had a special power that her studio outings could only imply. As her biographer Stuart Nicholson put it, the best ones "reveal the real Ella, bringing pleasure to others by bringing pleasure to herself." Of those live albums, few made a longer lasting impression than "Mack the Knife: Ella in Berlin," from 1960, widely considered one of her greatest captures. And this week, the pleasure grows: On Friday the Verve Label Group will release "Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes," documenting a concert that she gave there two years after her famed first appearance. Taken together with "Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things," an informative documentary released on digital platforms earlier this month, it's a worthy invitation to engage anew with a singer whose constant improvisations equal parts precision and profusion are all too easy to take for granted. On the album, Fitzgerald is in her mid 40s, and well established as popular music royalty. Hear the breadth and depth of her vibrato, the way she uses strong breath to give rhythmic passages a punch, how she reinvents the melody to Ray Charles's "Hallelujah! I Love Her So" as if her voice were a saxophone with words. The Grammy winning vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant, 31, said that as a student she saw Fitzgerald's famed studio albums devoted to the Great American Songbook as an exemplar of flawless jazz singing. "Initially she was this model of perfection, and sort of the blueprint when learning a standard," Ms. Salvant said in a phone interview. "My appreciation for her is shifting now, in that I see how fun she is, how much of a risk taker she is, how much humor she brings to her performances," added Ms. Salvant, who created the animations for a music video that accompanies "Taking a Chance on Love" from the new album. "For me, a live setting is the best way to hear her." But it's her first performance in Berlin, and the 12,000 person audience at the enormous Deutschlandhalle is feasting from her hand. She carries along undaunted, ad libbing in rhythm, flipping a flub into a bravura turn. "Oh, Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong/They made a record oh but they did," she improvises, loosely holding onto the song's buoyant melody as her quartet swings unperturbed. "And now Ella, Ella and her fellas/We're making a rec what a wreck of 'Mack the Knife'!" What kind of "perfection" was this a document of a mixed up performance, with the song falling down all around her? Well, something worked: Norman Granz, Fitzgerald's manager and Verve's founder, recorded the concert and released it as an album, and sensing the magic of that lemonade moment, he made "Mack" the title track. The LP became a sensation, and earned two trophies at the third annual Grammys that year. The drummer and record producer Gregg Field, who was in Fitzgerald's band during the later years of her career, said in an interview that for his boss no piece of material or song form took precedence over the energy she received from a crowd. "She sang them differently every night," Mr. Field said of her songs, explaining that when she performed with a combo she was liable to switch up the set list depending on the energy in the room. "By the third or fourth song she could read the audience really well," he added. Granz, a powerful impresario who sought to bring jazz into the realm of American high society, wisely captured as many of Fitzgerald's concerts as possible aware that lightning struck often when she was onstage. He had started Verve in the mid 1950s primarily as a vessel for recording her, and by the time of the concert in Berlin it was one of the jazz industry's premier institutions. Early this year, Mr. Field and Ken Druker, a vice president at Verve which survives today under the auspices of Universal Music Group were digging through a rediscovered trove of live recordings that Granz had stashed away decades ago. They came across an apparently untouched reel to reel, with yellowed Scotch tape still holding the box shut, featuring a concert Fitzgerald had given in Berlin two years after that first famous outing. Upon inspection, they found that recordings had been made in both mono and stereo a rare stroke of luck. They listened, and the quality was excellent. Using a new engineering software that allowed him to more precisely isolate the instruments and Fitzgerald's voice, Mr. Field filled out the low end and brought her singing to the front. The 1962 recording completes a trifecta of stellar Berlin performances, given over the course of three years and each released roughly 30 years apart. In 1990, Verve put out an archival LP of Fitzgerald playing Berlin in '61, under the name "Ella Returns to Berlin." That was a fine album, but the newest recording has a number of advantages. Fitzgerald is reunited here with the pianist Paul Smith, one of her favorite accompanists, who hadn't been on the 1961 tour. And on the obligatory version of "Mack," there's another moment of imperfect perfection that's almost too good to be true. On the song's coda, bantering with the crowd, she forgets the name of the city she's in sincerely, it seems. Erupting in supportive applause, the crowd hardly has time to be offended. Her ease with audiences contrasted with her relatively solitary life offstage. It's part of the reason she preferred to live her life on the road; from the start of her career in 1930s Harlem until she retired in the early 1990s, she typically performed hundreds of shows a year, and rarely stayed at home for more than a week at a time. Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Va., in 1917, and moved as a small child to Yonkers, just north of New York City. After losing both parents before she was a teenager, she bounced around Harlem, sometimes working for numbers runners and serving as a lookout at a brothel. She was sent away for a stint at a reformatory, where she suffered abuse that she would later decline to speak of publicly. At 17, basically homeless, she auditioned for Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater. She had planned to try out as a dancer, but grew intimidated when a far better appointed dance duo stepped forward before she did. Instead, she sang two songs, emulating the style of the popular jazz troupe the Boswell Sisters. Her preternatural talent and gregariousness neutralized the judgments of the crowd, which had been skeptical of the shabbily dressed youngster who couldn't seem to figure out what art form was hers. She won the contest, and soon she was the toast of Harlem as the lead singer with the Chick Webb Orchestra. With that group, she sang hard driving ditties and romantic numbers for dancers and radio listeners, in the era when jazz was pop music. By the end of her 79 years she had helped to enshrine the Great American Songbook as a pillar of American culture, playing to heavily white and seated audiences but bringing them to their feet around the globe. Throughout, she remained always in service to the song. And yet the song was only the space between the singer and her crowd. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Ruth Anderson, a groundbreaking electronic composer who created a relatively small but prescient body of work, including pieces that used bits of recorded speech turned into music, died on Nov. 29 at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 91. The composer Annea Lockwood, her spouse and only immediate survivor, said the cause was lung cancer. Ms. Anderson, who made her living chiefly as a flutist in her 20s and as a freelance orchestrator in her 30s, is best known for having founded, in 1968, an electronic music studio at Hunter College in New York, where she taught composition and theory from 1966 until 1989. She had been introduced to the possibilities of electronic sound while studying in the 1960s at the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center, where she was encouraged by Vladimir Ussachevsky, the center's leader. As recounted in "Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States" (2006), by Elizabeth Hinkle Turner, Mr. Ussachevsky made a recording of a chamber work by Ms. Anderson but somehow missed a few notes. He showed Ms. Anderson how he had electronically inserted the missing notes and demonstrated further transformations made possible by studio equipment. "This illustration of the possibilities of technology inspired Anderson," Dr. Hinkle Turner wrote, and showed her that "all sounds were open" as material for music. Ms. Anderson also cited two other composers, Pauline Oliveros and Ms. Lockwood, for "leading her to her own true musical expression," according to Dr. Hinkle Turner. Among Ms. Anderson's most widely known works are two sound collages, "DUMP" (1970) and "SUM (State of the Union Message)" (1974). The first, which she created to accompany an outdoor artwork assembled from refuse by an artist known as Tania, mixed recognizable bits of folk songs and pop hits with bursts of electronic noise. In "SUM," Ms. Anderson audaciously mined sound bites and catchphrases from television advertisements. She cut up and, in some cases, reordered them to emulate a speech by President Richard M. Nixon. In sound and in attitude, both pieces anticipated later musical developments, like turntable manipulation and digital mash ups. Other significant compositions, including the sine wave meditation "Points" (1974) and the hushed vowel sound poem "I come out of your sleep" (1979), reflected a philosophy of composition that she came to espouse, one that incorporated psychoacoustics and biofeedback techniques. Relatively few of Ms. Anderson's works were committed to record; most are scattered among rare anthologies and albums now deleted from the catalog. A few key works have resurfaced on streaming services. In the months before her death, Ms. Anderson was assembling "Here," the first release devoted solely to her music, working in collaboration with Ms. Lockwood and Jennifer Lucy Allan, the English journalist and concert curator who runs the record label Arc Light Editions. The album is scheduled for release in February. "The thing I love about this record," Ms. Allan said by phone, "is that there's different aspects of her personality: It's playful and focused and dreamy. This is the most historically important reissue we've done, by a mile." Ruth Anderson was born on March 21, 1928, in Kalispell, Mont. She was the last of four children of Emil Anderson, a forester with the Montana State Forestry Division, and Louie May (Bienz) Anderson, a homemaker. She earned a bachelor's degree in flute performance from the University of Washington in 1949 and a master's degree in composition there in 1951. She did postgraduate work at Princeton University, where she was one of the first four women admitted to the graduate program in composition, and at the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center, where she worked with Pril Smiley. Two Fulbright scholarships enabled Ms. Anderson to study composition in Paris with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger, between 1958 and 1960. She also studied flute privately with Jean Pierre Rampal and John Wummer. As a flutist, Ms. Anderson performed with the Totenberg Instrumental Ensemble, led by the violinist Roman Totenberg, from 1951 to 1958. She was also the principal flutist for the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1957 to 1958. As an orchestrator, she contributed to projects supervised by Richard Rodney Bennett in the 1960s for NBC television and for Lincoln Center Theater (the celebrated 1966 revivals of "Annie Get Your Gun" and "Show Boat"). The Electronic Music Studio she founded at Hunter College after a previous failed attempt at the Hunter branch known now as Lehman College was the first of its kind in the City University of New York system, and among the very few anywhere established by a woman. After the studio closed, in 1979, Ms. Anderson continued to teach until her retirement 10 years later. Even after that, she helped and promoted young composers, and in 2009 the International Alliance for Women in Music established an annual commissioning award, for new sound installations with electroacoustic music, in her name. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Even half done, Essex Crossing, on the Lower East Side, is shaping up as one of New York's most promising new mixed use developments the anti Hudson Yards. A 1.9 billion , six acre, for profit mega project occupying several blocks around Delancey Street where traffic barrels onto and off the Williamsburg Bridge, it replaces what had been a vast no man's land and gaping civic wound with new subsidized apartments, a bushel of community perks, parkland, a movie multiplex, office and retail space for local businesses and a capacious new home for the city owned Essex Market. Launched a decade ago during the Bloomberg administration, shepherded through the de Blasio years by New York's Economic Development Corporation and master planned by SHoP and Beyer Blinder Belle, two big city based architecture firms, Essex Crossing results from long years of ground up neighborhood consultation and holistic planning. If you have been anywhere near the Lower East Side lately you could hardly have failed to notice the egregious new supertall that the opportunistic developer called Extell has imposed some blocks away along the waterfront around the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Other developers are now bidding to erect more towers there. Taking advantage of anomalous zoning regulations, these projects have provoked some very loud, angry protests from residents who feel the buildings are being shoved down the throats of a largely poor, immigrant, low and mid rise community. You might ask: Is this how things should work? Democratic presidential candidates have been arguing the question in terms of health care and wealth taxes. Here, the issue is housing. During the Reagan era, federal authorities got out of the business of constructing public housing, offering private developers tax credits in return for building affordable units. The developers, properly regulated, were supposed to profit from their own efficiency while cities would benefit from the addition of more mixed income housing. The process depended on a responsive, vigilant government. A new report by the New York City Department of City Planning shows housing production in the metro area is falling increasingly short of job growth. The area produced 2.2 new housing units per net new job between 2001 and 2008; just 0.3 units last year. With widening inequity and runaway rents outpacing many cities' ability to produce more subsidized homes, there is a growing call on the left for government to do more. But government can be slow, inept and profligate just as private developers can rake in tax breaks without always delivering on promised benefits. At Essex Crossing, the city and developers seemed to have operated on the same wavelength, so the process worked. Four of the nine buildings are now finished. Consulted about optics, local residents said they didn't want monolithic brick towers, which might remind them of 1960s and 70s public housing. They didn't much like Bernard Tschumi's shapely but garish blue glass luxury condo tower, either its arrival in the neighborhood a dozen years ago seemed to plant an incongruous flag for colonizing bourgeoisie so they didn't want tons more glass and gloss. In response, Essex Crossing's boxy, mostly bland exteriors are variously clad in brick and metal by a variety of architects. Handel Architects has devised the project's centerpiece, the 26 story Essex, a half market rate, half subsidized rental tower, with 195 apartments . Its podium makes room for a 14 screen cineplex, the largest organic rooftop farm in Manhattan and for the Essex Market, with the first phase of a new enterprise called the Market Line in the basement. Nearby, the Rollins is a 15 story, L shaped, umber colored brick residential slab by Beyer Blinder Belle, with a Target and the East Coast's largest Trader Joe's at its base along with a nice new pocket park designed by West 8, the Dutch firm that landscaped Governors Island, just to the north. Dattner Architects designed the 14 story, 100 percent affordable Frances Goldin Senior Apartments, around the corner, which includes a new medical center. And SHoP conceived the twisty 14 story mixed income condo project called 242 Broome, whose shimmery facade in anodized aluminum changes color with the shifting light, picking up on the sepias of nearby brick buildings, the blue of the sky. Architecturally the most memorable design, 242 leans over the sidewalk to the west and steps out toward the street wall on the south, bonding on the north like a conjoined twin with a new home (opening in January, fingers crossed) for the International Center of Photography, whose entrance is a transparent glass curtain wall framed like an old Polaroid snapshot. This stretch of the Lower East Side used to be called the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. During the 1950s, the city's powerful planning czar, Robert Moses, decided to bulldoze dozens of old tenements. These were buildings where, years before, Jewish and Italian immigrants settled, replaced by African Americans and Latinos . Through the early 1970s, the demolitions displaced some 1,800 poor and working class families, most of them Puerto Rican, turning homes into vacant lots. The city promised to replace the lots with new low income dwellings. But for years Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, in cahoots with William E. Rapfogel, who ran the taxpayer financed Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, conspired to thwart redevelopment proposals floated by local housing advocates because they threatened to undo Mr. Silver's Jewish voting base. Mayor after mayor failed to make headway. Ultimately, Mr. Silver was convicted on corruption charges, Mr. Rapfogel went to prison for a kickback scheme and a path cleared for Essex Crossing, which finally makes good on the city's half century old promise. Among its provisions: The project sets aside subsidized apartments for tenants evicted all those years ago who now want to return. Most have moved away or no longer qualify for aid or have died. But nearly 30 former residents have come back. In all, Essex Crossing creates 1,079 new apartments, more than half permanently designated for low and middle income tenants, a percentage much higher than the city's inclusionary zoning rules require. Apartments selling for millions now mix with ones for families of two earning as little as 15,000 a year, and some for those earning zero. To mollify skeptics, developers front loaded community benefits like a new senior center, new quarters for the Chinese American Planning Council, which offers early childhood education programs, and for the Lower East Side's Henry Street Settlement to do work force development. A stylish new cafe called the GrandLo opened last year, operated by the century old Grand Street Settlement as a nonprofit job training site for local at risk youth. Most conspicuously, the project gives Essex Market a sprawling new home. The storied Lower East Side fixture evolved from a mess of open air pushcarts at the turn of the 20th century selling pickles, herring and hats. In 1940, Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia moved the market indoors, to what became its famous but increasingly dingy, squalid quarters north of Delancey. Designed by SHoP on the ground floor of the Essex, the sleek new Essex Market opened this spring at more than double the size of the old market. It's a spectacle of bespoke stalls, with subsidized rents for legacy vendors. Exploiting the sloped contour of the movie theater seating above, the market gets loads of light, pouring in through soaring windows revealed by the angled, white, sculptured ceiling, which yields space for mezzanine level seating and a sunny, glassed in teaching kitchen. Come Thanksgiving, ribbons will be cut on the inaugural tranche of vendors at the Market Line, in the basement of the Essex. Three quarters of the vendors are immigrant, minority or women owned businesses, half from the Lower East Side. They include local favorites like the Pickle Guys, Nom Wah, Ends Meat, Veselka and Essex Pearl. Rents for the market's lower margin businesses will be supported by its high margin ones, akin to the way mixed income housing works. When built out, the Market Line will eventually host homegrown art and clothes merchants, a music space and will stretch three blocks underground all the way from Essex to Clinton Streets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When the monthlong marathon of men's fashion shows kicks off this week, so will the scrimmage to cover it: the race by newspapers, magazines, television networks, social media platforms and blogs to get a piece of the action for themselves and their viewers. Joining the melee for the first time will be Grindr, the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) social networking app primarily for gay men. On Sunday, the app will live stream the fall 2016 men's wear show of J. W. Anderson as it hits the runway at London Collections: Men, the city's biannual men's fashion week. Grindr's purview has admittedly been narrow. The app introduces users to others in the surrounding area who are looking to make a connection as often as not, a sexual one. Its buffet of thumbnail size photos is, by design, bare bones (and, not infrequently, bare chested). "Grindr is a very, very visual experience," the app's founder and chief executive, Joel Simkhai, said in an interview in 2014. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In "A Wrinkle in Time," an adolescent girl's fury is nothing to be renounced instead, it's ammunition to be stockpiled in the battle against evil. "'Stay angry, little Meg,' Mrs Whatsit whispered. 'You will need all your anger now.'" Mrs Whatsit's words are radical, written as they were decades before the Riot Grrrl and Girl Power movements and their celebration of female wrath. Meg Murry helped pave the way for Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen and Beatrice Prior. With some heavy duty extrapolation, one might say that Murry's spirit can also be found in the environmental activist Greta Thunberg (mocked by the president of the United States for being "very angry"), Parkland's gun control advocate Emma Gonzalez (called an unimpressive "skinhead lesbian" by one Republican candidate) and countless other young women who have harnessed their outrage into political movements against powerful forces. When asked, Madeleine L'Engle once admitted, "Of course I'm Meg." For years, L'Engle fought a culture that scorned girls' emotions and intelligence. She also faced off against a myopic publishing industry. "A Wrinkle in Time" a book of speculative fantasy woven through with physics, metaphysics and theology was rejected by 26 publishers before it found a home. Editors questioned whether the audience would be adults or children. The story was not what people expected from middle grade fiction; perhaps most galling, the book was not just one thing at all. Meg and maybe Madeleine could be angry, but also impatient, loyal, insecure, determined, underachieving. Of course a girl a person is never just one thing either. After L'Engle's death in 2007, Charlotte Jones Voiklis, L'Engle's granddaughter, found 40 stories spread among three houses. "The Moment of Tenderness" is a collection of 18 of these works dating from the 1940s and '50s, the years leading up to the writing of "A Wrinkle in Time." Taken together and arranged largely chronologically (both in terms of when they were written and the protagonists' advancing ages), the stories are more postcards from a writer's beginnings and her artistic, spiritual and emotional evolution than full fledged narratives in their own right. Read an excerpt from "The Moment of Tenderness." L'Engle never hid the autobiographical nature of her fiction. Raised on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and sent to boarding schools in Switzerland and later South Carolina, she was the shy, reflective only child of a writer father and a pianist mother. The first pieces in this collection are quiet stories of girls individuating within the family or at school. In "Gilberte Must Play Bach," a young girl listens uneasily to her mother play the E minor Toccata on the piano in a desperate effort to distract herself from the German occupation of Paris, where the family used to live. L'Engle's signature protagonist soon emerges, a begrudging nonconformist, often an unpopular, lonely girl not afraid to hit others or cry with abandon. "It's good to have something to cry about sometimes. That's how you grow," one girl is told by a camp counselor in "Summer Camp." L'Engle would come to learn that the sting of loneliness and, yes, anger could be mitigated by self acceptance and wonder, a retraining of one's gaze outward to nature. Set in the time of the Civil War, "White in the Moon the Long Road Lies" features a young Southern woman who plans to move north to teach and anticipates missing the dunes and porpoises of the shoreline near her home, if not the "narrow minded" people who disapprove of her plan. Her brother tells her, "You clung to the ocean and all its moods because it's really the only thing you have to cling to, except the family and you don't really fit with us, either." In some stories, the philosophical and uncanny are tethered to the ocean and the cosmos. Some of the earlier stories read more like fragments and incidents than complete narratives. In L'Engle's parlance, they appear to the reader like stars. They flicker, not fully visible, but stirring nonetheless. As the book progresses and the protagonists move beyond childhood, L'Engle explores the interplay between men and women, often humorously. Many stories feature young women trying in some way to recreate themselves in order to escape a sense of oppressive smallness. Themes of ostracism mostly that of intelligent young women emerge anew; some of the characters want to become actresses, but don't fit in with their fellow actors or meet the casting director's needs. L'Engle herself spent six years playing small roles on Broadway, and used the time between scenes to write her first novel, "The Small Rain." She met her husband, Hugh Franklin, during this time. The title story is set in a fictional, insular small town in Vermont, where newcomers rankle old timers. A married woman newer to the town becomes fixated on the warmth of a welcoming local doctor's touch, something she has missed at church and in the country club: "It is not love I want from him, just those little moments of tenderness." A couple of the stories were later revised and turned into passages of memoirs. L'Engle and Franklin moved from New York to an old farmhouse in a small Connecticut town. Always religious, L'Engle became the choir director at her local church. In "The Foreigners," characters named Madeleine and Hugh find themselves caught between newcomers and old timers, and Madeleine questions whether she will ever feel truly at home anywhere. The trajectory of a writing career typically bends toward confidence and risk taking, and L'Engle's was no different. "The Fact of the Matter" edges closer to the fantasy and science fiction elements of her later work. This story also shows her affection for old women and a sense that with time and perspective, young anger can morph into hard won wisdom, as well as humor and mischief. Old Mrs. Campbell fears her daughter in law's nefarious motives and finds herself drawn to the Church of Satan. In "Poor Little Saturday," which dabbles in Southern Gothic, a lonely teenage boy meets a witch woman of indeterminate age she may be as old as 100 who "was the most extraordinary woman I had ever seen. I felt that she must be very beautiful, although she would never have fulfilled any of the standards of beauty set by our town." "A Sign for a Sparrow," the final story, shows L'Engle fully at ease blending disparate elements. The story is an odd mix of prayer, travel narrative that recalls "Star Trek," strikingly lovely poetic language and political statement. Set in a future of war and disarray, it features a cryptologist preparing for a space journey to find a more habitable planet than Earth. Scientists and men of God are pitted against each other, and the cryptologist and his wife struggle to hold onto their faith. He tells her, "I have to keep on trying for the kind of world I would want your baby to grow up in." At times, the story is eerily prescient. It also leaves the reader primed for L'Engle's most popular novel. "The Moment of Tenderness" reflects not only L'Engle's growth as a writer but her search for her own personal philosophy, one that ultimately recognized opportunity and authenticity in nonconformity. When encountered in this particular moment, her comfort with duality with writing for children and adults, joining realism and fantasy, science and theology evokes nostalgia for a time when science and religion were not so regularly and blatantly weaponized for political ends. The label of "New Age" be damned, L'Engle shared with her readers her great capacity for wonder, and her refreshingly earnest desire to tunnel deep inside the human heart and expose its power to generate and regenerate hope and love even in the face of eviscerating darkness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The Nets' first loss of the season Sunday night at Charlotte has proved especially costly, with the team announcing on Monday that Spencer Dinwiddie, who has been starting at guard alongside Kyrie Irving, partially tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee and is out indefinitely. Early in the second half of the Nets' 106 104 loss to the Hornets, Dinwiddie fell to the floor clutching his right knee after an awkward step in the paint as he passed the ball to Kevin Durant. The team said more details about Dinwiddie's recovery are expected after surgery next week. Dinwiddie averaged 6.7 points, 4.3 rebounds and 3.0 assists in 21.4 minutes per game in the Nets' 2 1 start. The Nets routed Golden State at home and Boston on the road in its first two games before slumping to defeat against the Hornets, who had started 0 2 and are not expected to contend for the playoffs in the Eastern Conference. The Nets will be without Dinwiddie, Durant and Irving on Monday night against Memphis at Barclays Center, with Durant and Irving being held out for rest on the second night of a back to back. Dinwiddie, 27, averaged 20.6 points and 6.8 assists per game last year while Durant was sidelined for the entire season while recovering from an Achilles' tendon tear and with Irving limited to just 20 games by various injuries. But Dinwiddie did not join the Nets in the bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., in July, missing the N.B.A. restart while recovering from Covid 19. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
NASA's Galileo spacecraft appears to have flown through a plume erupting from Jupiter's moon Europa more than 20 years ago. Europa is an ice encrusted moon of Jupiter with a global ocean flowing underneath its surface. NASA is planning a mission soon that will look for signs of possible life there. Now, a new finding from old data makes that mission even more tantalizing. In recent years, the Hubble Space Telescope has spotted what looks like plumes, likely of water vapor, reaching more than 100 miles above the surface. The plumes, if they exist, could contain molecules that hint at whether Europa possesses the building blocks of life. "That's too many coincidences just to dismiss as 'There's nothing there' or 'We don't understand the data,'" said Robert T. Pappalardo, the project scientist for NASA's upcoming Europa Clipper mission, which may launch as soon as 2022. "It sure seems like there's some phenomenon, and plumes seem consistent." Sign up for reminders on your calendar when missions launch into space. Galileo, which launched in 1989, arrived at Jupiter in 1995 and spent almost eight years examining the planet and its moons until its mission ended with a swan dive into Jupiter in 2003. During a flyby of Europa on Dec. 16, 1997, instruments on Galileo measured a swing in the magnetic field and a jump in the density of electrons. At the time, scientists noted the unusual readings, but they did not have an explanation. Then, in 2005, another spacecraft passing by another moon around another planet made a startling observation. Last year, Melissa A. McGrath, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. who was not involved in the new study, took a look at some radio experiments conducted by Galileo which examined how signals bent as Europa passed between Earth and the spacecraft. The experiments showed Europa possesses an atmosphere. Some of the flybys indicated a higher density of particles near the surface possible plumes. Before heading to a meeting of scientists working on the Clipper mission, a thought occurred to Dr. McGrath: "Gee, I really should check to see if any of them line up with any of the claimed plume detections," from Hubble. Margaret G. Kivelson, an emeritus professor of space physics at U.C.L.A. who was the principal investigator for Galileo's magnetometer, was at Dr. McGrath's talk. She remembered the odd magnetic readings from 1997. For years, she had been thinking of taking another look at the data for signs of plumes, but, "there are always other things to do," she said. "With the Hubble data in hand," Dr. Kivelson said, "we had an idea of how big a plume might be reasonable. That we could translate into how long it would take Galileo to move across a plume that had been proposed." The three minute long magnetic anomaly seemed to fit with the apparent size of the Hubble plume. Next, they turned to William S. Kurth, an astronomer at the University of Iowa who contributed to Galileo's plasma wave experiment, which listened to the radio waves generated as charged particles bobbed back and forth along magnetic fields around Jupiter and its moons. That instrument also noticed a burst of radio waves during the flyby and it occurred right in the middle of the magnetic anomaly. The final piece was a computer model of a plume by Xianzhe Jia, a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan, that created the same effects on the magnetic field and the plasma waves. "It all seemed to hang together," Dr. Kivelson said. The location was close, though not exactly the same, as the site Dr. McGrath reported. But Dr. McGrath said the new paper was convincing. "They did a really good job of the modeling and made a strong case," she said. Also convinced is John Culberson, a Texas congressman who is chairman of the House subcommittee that sets NASA's budget. Mr. Culberson has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Clipper mission, repeatedly adding more money to the project than NASA officials requested. He has also been pushing for a follow up mission that would land on Europa and drill into the ice. Dr. Pappalardo said it might be possible to adjust the trajectory of Europa Clipper so that at least one of the more than 40 planned flybys pass over a potential plume site. But that would have to be weighed against other science goals and how much fuel would be needed to nudge the spacecraft's trajectory. "Obviously this is a place we would want to suss out with the Europa Clipper mission in the future," he said. "I think this is going to make for a lively debate at our next science mission meeting." A European Space Agency spacecraft, called Juice or Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, will also fly by Europa, as well as two other Jovian satellites, Ganymede and Callisto. It could also launch as soon as 2022. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Credit...Mason Trinca for The New York Times To Do Politics or Not Do Politics? Tech Start Ups Are Divided Rob Rhinehart, a co founder of nutritional drink start up Soylent, declared in a blog post last week that he was supporting Kanye West for president. "I am so sick of politics," Mr. Rhinehart wrote. "Politics are suddenly everywhere. I cannot avoid them." David Barrett, the chief executive of Expensify, a business software start up, went in another direction. In an email to his company's 10 million customers last week, he implored them to embrace politics by choosing the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. "Anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy," Mr. Barrett proclaimed. With days to go before the election on Tuesday, Mr. Rhinehart and Mr. Barrett represent the twin poles of a start up culture war that has openly erupted in Silicon Valley. Start ups such as the cryptocurrency company Coinbase and the audio app Clubhouse have become embroiled in a debate over how much politics should be part of the workplace. And venture capitalists and other tech executives have weighed in on social media with their own views. "I have never seen another instance like this in my career," said Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist and political consultant. "There's no real separation anymore, in the current political climate, between politics and everything else. It has permeated absolutely everything." Silicon Valley tech workers have long been regarded as liberal but not politically overactive. After President Trump's victory in 2016, however, workers at large tech companies such as Google and Amazon began agitating more on issues like the ethics of artificial intelligence, immigration and climate change. Now many start up workers, who have been sold on a mission of changing the world, expect their employers to support their social and political causes, entrepreneurs and investors said. This summer's protests against police violence prompted many tech companies to re examine their own issues with race. And the pressure to make political moves before the election has only intensified. The shift has grown partly out of a realization that no tech platform is completely neutral, said Katie Jacobs Stanton, who invests in start ups through her venture capital firm, Moxxie Ventures. Founders who build companies with millions of users "really have an obligation to have a point of view and make sure their products are being used for good," Ms. Stanton said. "It's disingenuous and it's also the luxury of the privileged to say, 'We don't have a point of view,'" she added. But others said they feared becoming a lightning rod or inflaming tensions at a hypersensitive moment during the coronavirus pandemic. Some worried that their companies could be sued by employees who might say they were discriminated against because of their political beliefs. Others said any move could be attacked by those who found the actions inauthentic or not enough. Those tensions exploded in public last month when Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, penned a 2,000 word blog post to "clarify" his company's culture. Mr. Armstrong wrote that he wanted Coinbase to generally avoid engaging with broader social issues and workplace conversations about politics. He said it was a way to minimize distraction and focus on the start up's mission of creating "an open financial system for the world." Two months earlier, dozens of Coinbase employees had staged a walkout after executives were slow to express solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters and minority employees, several workers said. In his post, Mr. Armstrong said employees who disagreed with his "no politics" stance could leave. His position immediately created waves across Silicon Valley. Some praised the move, with one Coinbase investor comparing Mr. Armstrong to Michael "Jordan in his prime." Others said opting out of politics was itself a political statement. Dick Costolo, a former chief executive of Twitter, tweeted that "me first capitalists who think you can separate society from business" would be shot in "the revolution." He deleted the post after, he said, it set off violent threats and harassment. Some Coinbase workers disagreed with Mr. Armstrong. "I'm just so mystified by the apparent lack of awareness in the blog post," Ryan King, a Coinbase engineer, wrote on the company's internal Slack messaging system. The message was reviewed by The New York Times. "A declaration that we're not going to touch 'broader societal issues' fails to acknowledge that we're a part of society." About 60 Coinbase employees, or 5 percent of the work force, have resigned, the company said. A spokeswoman declined further comment. Fred Wilson, an investor at Union Square Ventures and a Coinbase board member, said in an interview that there were no easy answers for start up leaders. "Many, many C.E.O.s have told me privately that they would like to have done what Brian did but don't want to take the heat that he has taken," he said. On Monday, Mr. Wilson wrote a blog post about removing start up chief executives who have "failed to manage numerous important challenges." The post prompted speculation that he was referring to Mr. Armstrong, but Mr. Wilson said it was a metaphor for President Trump. The political debates among Silicon Valley start ups have ramped up since the Coinbase episode. Last week, Soylent's Mr. Rhinehart published his post supporting Mr. West's presidential bid. Mr. Rhinehart, who is on the board but not involved in the company's day to day operations, also attacked the political system and the media, writing that "politics has always been based on jokes." Demir Vangelov, Soylent's chief executive, said Mr. Rhinehart's post did not represent the company. Soylent's focus is on bringing "the best complete nutrition to everyone," he said, and it does not take political stances. At Expensify, based in Portland, Ore., Mr. Barrett took a different position. After spending more than a decade in Silicon Valley, where he found a "uniform view" that politics was not good for business, he moved to Portland four years ago. Now, he said, "choosing not to participate is also a choice it's a choice to defend the status quo." So when Expensify employees drafted an email to tell customers to vote for Mr. Biden, after concluding in an internal discussion that re electing Mr. Trump would be a threat to democracy, Mr. Barrett favored sending it out. While roughly a third of Expensify's top management opposed sending the email because it could alienate customers, the majority ruled, Mr. Barrett said. Last Thursday, Expensify blasted its message to its 10 million users. "Not many expense reports get filed during a civil war," Mr. Barrett wrote. The email instantly drew criticism and praise on social media. Job applications, web traffic and customer sign ups have since spiked, Mr. Barrett said. But he also received death threats, prompting him to hire private security. No customers have quit, potentially because Expensify's system takes months to switch out of, he said. The start up culture wars are also evident on Clubhouse, where people join rooms and chat with one another. The app has been a popular place for investors such as Marc Andreessen and other techies to hang out in the pandemic. (Mr. Andreessen's venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has invested in Clubhouse, Coinbase and Soylent.) On Oct. 6, Mr. Andreessen started a Clubhouse room called "Holding Space for Karens," which describes having empathy for "Karens," a slang term for a pushy privileged woman. Another group, "Holding Space for Marc Andreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessen," soon popped up. There, people discussed their disappointment with the Karen discussion and other instances when, they said, Clubhouse was hostile to people of color. Mr. Andreessen and others later started a Clubhouse room called "Silence," where no one spoke. Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment. At a "town hall" inside the app on Sunday, Clubhouse's founders, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, were asked about Coinbase's and Expensify's political statements and where Clubhouse stood. They said the company was still deciding how Clubhouse would publicly back social causes and felt the platform should allow for multiple points of view, a spokeswoman said. She declined to comment further. Yet even those wishing to stay out of politics are finding it hard to avoid. On Saturday, Mr. Armstrong shared Mr. Rhinehart's blog post endorsing Mr. West on Twitter. "Epic," tweeted Mr. Armstrong. Several users pointed out the hypocrisy in Mr. Armstrong's sharing something political after telling employees to abstain. One of his employees, Jesse Pollak, wrote that Mr. Armstrong had shared something with "a large number of inaccuracies, conspiracy theories, and misplaced assumptions." Soon after, Mr. Pollak and Mr. Armstrong deleted their tweets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Senate Republicans have proposed giving the Federal Reserve access to 425 billion in funding that it could use to extend emergency support to flailing businesses or struggling localities an approach that would keep central bankers at the center of the coronavirus economic response in ways that could prove politically fraught. Republican lawmakers proposed increasing a Treasury Department fund that would be used to cover losses on the Fed's emergency lending programs as part of a sweeping government rescue package. While their effort to advance the bill failed on Sunday evening, it is likely a template for what lawmakers will eventually approve. Republicans view the Fed as a key player in offsetting the economic havoc being wrought by the coronavirus. That is partly because the Fed can take a limited amount of funds and deploy them widely: The central bank only needs the funds as a guarantee against losses, meaning the 425 billion could be leveraged to support far bigger programs. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Sunday seemed to suggest that the backstops could amount to 4 trillion. "We can lever up to 4 trillion to help everything from small business to big business get through the next 90 to 120 days as we win this war," he said on Fox News. But Democrats on Sunday expressed dismay at the prospect of doling out money without a clear road map for how the funds might be used. Their opposition added a chapter to the emergency lending program's history of political controversy. During the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed used its emergency lending powers to inject money into Bear Stearns and American International Group, which were on the verge of collapse. The programs drew such intense and bipartisan political backlash that Congress, in the 2010 Dodd Frank law, stripped the central bank of the ability to bail out specific institutions. Emergency programs must now be broadly available, meaning they could be tapped by five or more institutions. "Making politically unpopular decisions for the long run benefit of the country is the reason the Fed exists as a politically independent central bank," Ben S. Bernanke, who was the Fed chair at the time, wrote in his memoir. "It was created for precisely this purpose: to do what must be done what others cannot or will not do." Economists have speculated that this time the Fed could snap up corporate debt or local bonds using its emergency lending powers in a bid to calm dysfunctional markets, if it is given sufficient backing by the Treasury. Neither of those efforts has been tried before by the Fed and it remains unclear how such a program might work. "One of the options, I think, is clearly that they could buy corporate debt and municipal debt," Ernie Tedeschi, policy economist at Evercore ISI, said of the language in the Republican bill, which nods at supporting credit provision to "eligible businesses, states, or municipalities." Analysts have also been on the lookout for a revival of a crisis era program that the Fed used to support lending to households and small businesses. That program was called the Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The Fed's 2020 programs will likely be less specific than the firm specific ones it used during the Great Recession, which could shield the central bank from some criticism this time around. Mr. Mnuchin himself emphasized that the Fed tied programs will be "broad based." The legislation would have given Mr. Mnuchin 75 billion to use in loans, loan guarantees and other investments in specific industries including air carriers and national security related businesses but that would be separate from the Fed related portion. Peter Conti Brown, a Fed historian and lawyer at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, warned that it was crucial for the Fed avoid helping specific industries. The Fed has a "convenient set of easy tools that allow policymakers and politicians to skip the burden of their own accountability," he said. "It's the kind of set the Fed does not want to make today which is to pick winners and losers." Fed officials have already started unveiling emergency lending programs, and so far, they have been fairly broad. Over the course of the past week, they have moved to shore up the market for short term loans businesses use to fund day to day operations and acting to prevent a run on money market mutual funds, a type of popular investment vehicle. The central bank is not legally able to take on much credit risk, so Treasury has backed those moves by pledging money from its Exchange Stabilization Fund to cover losses. That fund currently has around 94 billion in it, so the new legislation would dramatically ramp up the Fed's options when it comes to establishing future lending programs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Martin Weigel in Jan Christoph Gockel's production of "A Youth in Germany," based on the novel by Ernst Toller, at the Munchner Kammerspiele. Barbara Mundel takes over as artistic director of the Munchner Kammerspiele, lately perhaps the most consistently exciting playhouse in Germany. MUNICH Barbara Mundel had hoped to start her tenure as artistic director of the Munchner Kammerspiele here with an outdoor production featuring 150 Munich residents in a colorful self portrait of the city. But the coronavirus put the brakes on that performance, along with other planned festivities to mark her arrival at the Kammerspiele, where she is the first female artistic director. Mundel, a 61 year old native of Hildesheim, in northern Germany, has big boots to fill. During the brief, creatively restless tenure of her immediate predecessor, Matthias Lilienthal, the Kammerspiele became perhaps the most consistently exciting playhouse in the country. But even in the midst of a pandemic that has brought cultural life in much of the world to a halt, Mundel's first season is an ambitious and varied program although there were some slip ups in the Covid protocol during the opening performances. Over two consecutive weekends in mid October, Mundel and her team unveiled six new productions that showed remarkable stylistic and thematic range. The most impressive entry was Jan Christoph Gockel's production of "A Youth in Germany" ("Eine Jugend in Deutschland"), based on Ernst Toller's autobiographical novel from 1933. An Expressionist playwright and left wing politician, Toller briefly served as the president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and spent five years in prison after its demise. As a socialist and a Jew, he was then exiled when the Nazis came to power. He ultimately settled in New York and in 1939 took his life in a Central Park West hotel room. In this sprawling production, Gockel in effect creates his own Expressionist play out of episodes from Toller's rich biography and plays. Puppets created by Michael Pietsch crowd both a classroom and the trenches. A silent film mixing Expressionism with slapstick portrays the Eisner assassination and its aftermath. The piece features Gro Swantje Kohlhof, one of the Kammerspiele's best young actresses, in no fewer than six roles, while live actors narrate onstage. Elsewhere, Kohlhof assumes an outrageous French accent as Napoleon, who makes a bet with Saint Francis for Toller's pacifist soul in a riff on the writer's 1935 play, "No More Peace." "A Youth in Germany" invites us to compare the upheavals of a century ago with our own age of anxiety. A more explicit artistic response to the way we live now is "Touch," a world premiere written by Falk Richter, who belongs to the theater's new artistic team. Working with the choreographer Anouk van Dijk, Richter has corralled a large and international cast of actors and dancers for this chaotic show, in which monologues and lectures explore lockdown induced malaise, societal erosion, white fragility and racism. The eclectic production contains live musical numbers, irreverent video projections, ample strobe lights, fluorescent bulbs, energetic dancing and a gigantic gold brain. The result is mostly mind numbing, although a punchy sendup of a Yasmina Reza style bourgeois comedy comes as a breath of fresh air. In this sketch, four friends convene outdoors for their first post lockdown reunion. Initially full of excitement and good cheer, the mood soon sours. Ironically, some audience members (myself included) were accidentally seated next to strangers, in clear violation of distancing protocol. Luckily, there was enough space to spread out in the main auditorium, where capacity has been lowered from roughly 700 to 200. The theater later confirmed that there had been a ticketing glitch and apologized for the error. Over both weekends, the theater's mask policy was also unclear, as many spectators removed their face coverings while seated. Masks were the only things worn by the otherwise naked performers in "Habitat/Munich," a dance piece choreographed by Doris Uhlich on one of the theater's smaller stages. A dozen Munich locals perform this hourlong work for an audience of 40. Supported by techno beats, the dancers explore distancing in the social context of performance. The dancers' gestures and movements alternate between lyrical and violent, and the result is both absorbing and difficult to watch. Bodies of various ages, shapes and sizes seem to be revealed in all their strength and vulnerability. Physical contact is forbidden. Locked in their individual routines, the dancers appear radically alone. In the finale, they crawl into large plastic bags. The group of enclosed bodies convenes in the center of the stage for a collective embrace that feels more melancholy than cathartic. Erwin Aljukic is among the "Habitat" dancers. An expressive performer with osteoporosis, he often dances around his wheelchair. Aljukic is a new ensemble member, seemingly evidence of Mundel's commitment to making the theater an inclusive space for differently abled performers. That sentiment is on display in "It's Me Frank," a main stage production starring Julia Hausermann, an engaging Swiss actress with Down syndrome. In this hourlong performance, Hausermann introduces herself, sings along to cheesy pop songs, dances and interacts with audience members. Yet despite her charisma, Nele Jahnke's video and music heavy production feels slight, with hardly enough ideas to sustain its length. The Kammerspiele's final two premieres suggest continuity with the Lilienthal era, when foreign theater collectives and authors were often invited to work at the house. "The Assembly," a co production with the Canadian documentary theater group Porte Parole, is also the most overtly political among the premieres. Sitting around a dinner table, actors reconstruct a political discussion this year in which four Munich residents debated a number of hot button issues, with Annette Paulmann and Wiebke Puls as moderators. The two actresses reprise their roles in "The Assembly," trying to keep the discussion both on point and civil. But the talk show atmosphere of Chris Abraham's production, with its pop music, sound cues and TV screens, is so artificial that the fine actors aren't able to create much heat, and the production falls flat as both political and documentary theater. Even so, it stands head and shoulders above "Love. An Argumentative Exercise," by the Israeli author Sivan Ben Yishai. A monologue like text introduces us to a modern day version of Olive Oyl, Popeye's girlfriend. In Ben Yishai's play, she's a writer in Germany who meets Popeye while taking German language classes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The coronavirus that originated in China has spread fear and anxiety around the world. But while the novel virus has largely spared one vulnerable group children it appears to pose a particular threat to middle aged and older adults, particularly men. This week, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published the largest analysis of coronavirus cases to date. Although men and women have been infected in roughly equal numbers, researchers found, the death rate among men was 2.8 percent, compared with 1.7 percent among women. The figures were drawn from patient medical records, and the sample may not fully reflect the scope of the outbreak. But the disparity has been seen in the past. China Is Censoring Coronavirus Stories. These Citizens Are Fighting Back. Information about the coronavirus outbreak is not immune from Chinese censors. But more and more citizens are dodging censorship by creating a digital archive of deleted posts. They told us how. Voices like these from Chinese citizens are very rare. People who are willing to speak out about the government's attempts to control news about the deadly coronavirus. They asked to remain anonymous, because what they're doing could put them and their families at great risk. But these people are part of a new wave of Chinese citizens, fighting to get the message out in a country that aggressively censors information. Accounts or messages like these calling for free speech are quickly scrubbed from the internet. Or videos like this, showing people frustrated about life under lockdown. clanging Posted online one day, but gone the next. But the crisis over the coronavirus is changing the landscape, for now at least. Everyday citizens are preserving and reposting information the government doesn't want out there. Experts say this kind of digital resistance is happening at a scale they've never seen before. Social media networks like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China. But internet savvy people use techniques that allow them to repost censored content to these platforms, while staying under the radar of authorities. They're creating a visual archive by preserving videos like this one, showing overwhelmed hospitals. screaming And they're reposting people's personal stories. Some are also turning to less obvious platforms, including GitHub, which is a site mostly used by coders. Another taboo Chinese citizens are pushing back on? They're making open and widespread calls for freedom of speech. These were triggered by the death of Dr. Li Wenliang. He was an early whistleblower who warned about the virus, and was punished by officials for speaking out. He died in early February from the coronavirus. Right after his death, the hashtag "I want freedom of speech" started to trend on Weibo, a Chinese social media site. Then, it was quickly censored by the government. Dr. Li's become an icon in the online fight for freedom of speech between censors and citizens. So, who's winning? For now, citizens are staying a step ahead of the authorities. But a renewed government crackdown could test the strength of this digital resistance. Information about the coronavirus outbreak is not immune from Chinese censors. But more and more citizens are dodging censorship by creating a digital archive of deleted posts. They told us how. Some 32 percent of men infected with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome died, compared with 25.8 percent of women. Young adult men also died at higher rates than female peers during the influenza epidemic of 1918. A number of factors may be working against men in the current epidemic, scientists say, including some that are biological, and some that are rooted in lifestyle. When it comes to mounting an immune response against infections, men are the weaker sex. "This is a pattern we've seen with many viral infections of the respiratory tract men can have worse outcomes," said Sabra Klein, a scientist who studies sex differences in viral infections and vaccination responses at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "We've seen this with other viruses. Women fight them off better," she added. Women also produce stronger immune responses after vaccinations, and have enhanced memory immune responses, which protect adults from pathogens they were exposed to as children. "There's something about the immune system in females that is more exuberant," said Dr. Janine Clayton, director of the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health. But there's a high price, she added: Women are far more susceptible to autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, in which the immune system shifts into overdrive and attacks the body's own organs and tissues. Nearly 80 percent of those with autoimmune diseases are women, Dr. Clayton noted. The reasons women have stronger immune responses aren't entirely clear, and the research is still at an early stage, experts caution. One hypothesis is that women's stronger immune systems confer a survival advantage to their offspring, who imbibe antibodies from mothers' breast milk that help ward off disease while the infants' immune systems are still developing. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. A stew of biological factors may be responsible, including the female sex hormone estrogen, which appears to play a role in immunity, and the fact that women carry two X chromosomes, which contain immune related genes. Men, of course, carry only one. Experiments in which mice were exposed to the SARS coronavirus found that the males were more susceptible to infection than the females, a disparity that increased with age. The male mice developed SARS at lower viral exposures, had a lower immune response and were slower to clear the virus from their bodies. They suffered more lung damage, and died at higher rates, said Dr. Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology at the University of Iowa who was the senior author of the study. Health behaviors that differ by sex in some societies may also play a role in disparate responses to infections. China has the largest population of smokers in the world 316 million people accounting for nearly one third of the world's smokers and 40 percent of tobacco consumption worldwide. But just over 2 percent of Chinese women smoke, compared with more than half of all men. Chinese men also have higher rates of Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure than women, both of which increase the risk of complications following infection with the coronavirus. Rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are almost twice as high among Chinese men as among women. In the United States, women are more proactive about seeking health care than men, and some small studies have found the generalization applies to Chinese students at universities in the United States, as well. In unpublished studies, Chinese researchers have emphasized that patients whose diagnoses were delayed, or who had severe pneumonia when they were first diagnosed, were at greatest risk of dying. One study of 4,021 patients with the coronavirus emphasized the importance of early detection, particularly in older men. And men have been turning up in hospitals with more advanced disease. But in areas of China outside Hubei Province, the disease's epicenter and where the majority of those affected are concentrated, the patterns are different: The disease appears to have dramatically lower mortality rates, and men are being infected at much higher rates than women, according to the Chinese C.D.C. analysis. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Men may have a "false sense of security" when it comes to the coronavirus, said Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunology at Yale University who studies why some viruses affect women more severely. Gathering and analyzing data about the new virus by sex is important both for the scientists studying it and for the general public, experts said. Since the start of the outbreak, for example, public health officials have emphasized the importance of washing hands well and often, to prevent infection. But several studies have found that men even health care workers are less likely to wash their hands or to use soap than women, Dr. Klein said. "We make these broad sweeping assumptions that men and women are the same behaviorally, in terms of comorbidities, biology and our immune system, and we just are not," Dr. Klein said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Waves of happy laughter greet "The Hard Nut" from curtain up to curtain down, a tribute to the naughty theatrical brilliance of its choreographer, Mark Morris. His production, which turns 25 next month and which returned on Saturday for the first time in five years to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, feels mint fresh. I witnessed early performances in 1991; in some ways it's improved. Part of the fun is that this is "The Nutcracker," with Tchaikovsky's score played complete and in the right order, transposed to America 40 or more years ago, with the children watching TV in the opening scene. In the Stahlbaum family, the elder daughter, Louise, is vain, pushy and plaintive; her mother needs a drink before the guests arrive; and a couple of the visiting husbands are enjoying a flirtation before the Christmas party is over. Everyone piles their coats heedlessly into the arms of the overworked, uniformed black maid (in drag). The cartoon vitality never lets up. Neither does Mr. Morris's sense of rhythm. In one dance near the end, the young heroine (Marie, played by Lauren Grant) and hero (the magician Drosselmeier's nephew, played by Aaron Loux) do nothing but kiss and whisper into each other's ears; yet their body language and timing make this a peculiarly satisfying scene: We watch every aspect of those kisses with a sense of recognition. The production's cartoon tone derives from the work of the comic artist Charles Burns; Adrianne Lobel's sets and Martin Pakledinaz's costumes are pitch perfect in sustaining the comic illusion. In Act II, Drosselmeier has a daft travelogue across several continents seeking the Hard Nut of the title; the illuminated flight map alone is fun, and the joke dance versions of all the places he visits are delicious. In the Paris number, the women wear blue (with big black polka dots), the men pink, and their hats are le dernier cri (in other words, utterly utter). One carries a hatbox, another a baguette, and the fatuously chic way they present their faces and swerve their hips to the beat is superlatively witty. The greatest single "Hard Nut" dance is the Snowflakes waltz at the end of Act I. No other treatment of this famous music so excites its audience, and again Mr. Morris's secret is timing. And yet how crazy it is, with these unisex dancing Snowflakes in their bizarre bikini tutus and skewed shell hats, releasing snow from their hands now in steady drizzles, now like explosions of cocaine. First, we laugh at, then we laugh with, these creatures. They're preposterous; they're life enhancing. But timing isn't all there is to choreographic musicality, and Tchaikovsky's music keeps telling us how much more there is to "The Nutcracker" than Mr. Morris is showing. This music, so full of heart seizing vignettes, is the opposite of cartoon: Even the Arabian and Chinese dances have degrees of large spirited fantasy Mr. Morris won't acknowledge. Marie's solo about newfound love doesn't match the otherworldly sonority of the Sugar Plum celesta. A further drawback is storytelling. "The Hard Nut" tries to give us more narrative, and more layers of narrative, than almost any other "Nutcracker." Tries; fails. Who can make head or tail of what goes on in the scenes for Princess Pirlipat and the mice in Act II? Yet such is the staging's charm and fun that this is of little importance. How do the virtues and faults of this staging add up? Differently on each revival, in my experience. One of Mr. Morris's trickiest ideas is the Act I duet for Drosselmeier and his nephew; it tends to stay a concept rather than a breathing moment of drama. At opening night on Saturday, with Mr. Loux heightening the doll like aspect of the Nutcracker nephew, it felt stranger than ever: ventriloquist and dummy. Mr. Morris's other most strangely singular decision is when, in Act II, he gives the Sugar Plum adagio to a cross section of characters. They frame and carry the two young lovers so that it's as if the whole story (the whole world) is bringing them together. On occasion a matter of spacing and phrasing this conveys the best Mark Morris effect, a kinesthetic rapture whereby something in us finds itself dancing with those onstage. On Saturday, that didn't begin to happen. But Mr. Heginbotham is surely the best interpreter of Mrs. Stahlbaum the production has known. Mr. Patterson, the maid in 1991 and still in 2015, deserves a long service medal for keeping a classic comic performance so enchanting. Ms. Grant, Mr. Loux, Ms. Omura, Billy Smith as Drosselmeier, Mr. Morris as Mr. Stahlbaum and everyone else give fabulously robust performances. Colin Fowler conducts the MMDG Music Ensemble beautifully; from the overture on, his phrasing makes us hear the familiar music anew. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Looking back, it's hard to remember the exact moment we left the old world behind, and entered this new one. How did Ernest Hemingway describe going bankrupt "gradually, and then suddenly"? Like that. Was it last month, when the trip to Italy I'd booked with my wife was canceled? "Just to be on the safe side," my hosts told me at the time. Or was it three weeks ago, when I first noticed that hand sanitizer at my local pharmacy was sold out? Was it a week ago Sunday, when I got the message from Barnard College's president that classes for the coming week would be held via videoconference? Or was it the next day, when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 2000 points? Maybe it was last Wednesday night, when President Trump delivered a wooden speech, condemning the "foreign virus"? (Even when he's talking about disease, he has to sneak a little racism in.) Or two days later, when in response to a question about the lack of widespread access to testing, the leader of the free world said, "I don't take responsibility at all." Each of these events captured a moment when it became clear the crisis both pandemical and political was getting worse, day by day. But the moment that will always remain in my mind is Monday, March 9, as I rode the subway north. The doors opened and closed at Chambers Street. Then a deranged man started yelling about the coronavirus, and the gay men he claimed were spreading it. He shouted profanities. And no, the phrase he used was not "gay men." At the next stop, almost everyone in the car fled. Then it was just two of us, the crazy man and me. He looked me up, he looked me down. I don't know what he saw when he looked at me. A frightened older woman? Something else? I remembered riding the subway in the early '80s, and the panic over AIDS, my terror as friends got sick. I remembered how President Ronald Reagan had been unable to bring himself to even say "AIDS" until four years after the disease had been identified. I remembered the news conference when a reporter first asked about the condition, and the president's press secretary, Larry Speakes, responded with a gay joke. Journalists laughed. Because it was so funny! Gay people dying! What a hoot! All at once I was in my twenties again, and the feeling of panic rising in my heart felt strangely, eerily familiar. I teach at Barnard College in the spring semester each year. The rest of the time I live in a small town in Maine. I miss my family, and my dog, and my friends while I'm working in New York, but on the whole, being part of the college has been one of the great blessings of my life. Gradually and then suddenly it became clear to me that, as I packed my bags for spring break last week, I might not be coming back to New York when break was over. I looked around my apartment. I'd been here for nine weeks. Was it really possible I might not return until next January? Will it be safe to come back here then? That night, I noticed I had the sniffles. I coughed. There was a time when I'd have paid this no mind. Now, I felt my heart pounding. Was I infected? I took my temperature. It was normal. But for how long? When I was a child, I was haunted by the idea that I'd die in the year 2020. I don't know how this delusion first came to me, but I remember thinking of it at least as early as 1968, when I was only 10 years old. I've thought of writing about it in my column this year and about the way all sorts of things only come true when we take deliberate steps to prevent them. But I've demurred, thinking such dark thoughts are best left unspoken. On Thursday night I sat up in bed, suddenly remembering my childhood certainty about the year 2020. It's coming for you, I thought. Now is when it comes. I woke in the morning, symptom free, but still in the grip of other afflictions those of fear, and emptiness, and panic. On Friday I walked up Amsterdam Avenue and saw an image spray painted on the sidewalk. "PROTECT YO' HEART," it read, along with a picture of a heart upside down. Later, I learned it was the work of an artist from Queens named Uncutt Art. It reminded me of how important it is to care for our spiritual selves during a time of crisis. The Protect Yo' Heart project, I learned, took its name from Proverbs 4:23: "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." The world we lived in has vanished slowly, and then suddenly. Maybe, in this new one, we will better understand that in a moment of national crisis, you need someone who can bring people together. Someone who trusts facts, and science, and truth. Someone who can express empathy for others' suffering. Someone who can lead. Maybe, in this new one, we will better understand just how much we need each other, now that being together in one room has become so hard. I'm back in Maine now. I don't know for how long. Wash your hands. Protect yo' heart. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Eight years ago Blake Leeper ran in the Paralympics against Oscar Pistorius, the original Blade Runner, thinking that one day he would do everything Pistorius had done on the track, and then some. By the end of last year, Leeper, 31, was getting very close. His best times for the 400 meters were more than a half second faster than Pistorius's best. He finished fifth in 2019 at the United States track and field championships, running a time that put him within reach of a spot on the 2020 Olympic team, at the very least as a member of the 4 by 400 meter relay squad. Off the track, though, unexpected headwinds were gaining momentum. Officials with World Athletics, track and field's global governing body, had ordered him to prove that his carbon fiber blades did not give him an unfair advantage over able bodied athletes a battle that disabled athletes assumed they had won with Pistorius more than a decade ago. On Monday, the headwinds turned fierce, as the world's top sports court ruled that Leeper's prostheses made him artificially taller than he most likely would be if he had legs, a decision that might prohibit him from competing against able bodied athletes in Tokyo in 2021. Leeper, who has been competing on the same blades for five years, largely without facing any suggestions that he has an advantage, said the decision was a discriminatory attempt to keep people with disabilities off the Olympic track and, possibly, the podium. Leeper, who is Black, noted that the study World Athletics cited to argue he was taller than he should be given the length of his torso had no Black subjects only Asian and Caucasian people and that it failed to address differences in populations. "I'm the first double amputee to run 44 seconds" for 400 meters, Leeper said during an interview on Monday from Los Angeles. "Now that I am running fast, now that I am running those times, now they say I have an unfair advantage." In a statement, World Athletics dismissed the accusations of racism in its methodology and praised the ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland, saying it had met its burden of proving that Leeper's prostheses gave him an artificial competitive advantage. "The Court of Arbitration for Sport has rejected Mr. Leeper's argument that those rules are designed to discriminate against disabled athletes, and instead has fully accepted that they are intended to pursue the legitimate objective of ensuring the fairness and integrity of competitive athletics," the statement said. Leeper and his lawyers plan to appeal the ruling in civil court in Switzerland. Whatever the outcome, the case illustrates how World Athletics continues to struggle to sort through modern science and differences in human anatomy to legislate what should be permissible in competition. The organization has spent years fighting the inclusion of intersex athletes in women's competitions, arguing they produce excess testosterone that gives them an unfair advantage at distances between 400 meters and the mile, and that they need to either medically reduce their hormone levels or compete against men. The champion runner Caster Semenya of South Africa, who lost what appeared to be her final appeal to compete at 800 meters, has accused World Athletics of violating her human rights by prohibiting her from competing without medical intervention. Jeffrey Kessler, the New York lawyer who has represented Semenya, Pistorius and now Leeper, said World Athletics had long followed an outdated understanding of the human condition that subscribes to strict definitions of what athletes should look like, without allowing for variations. In Leeper's case, the organization argued that someone with his size torso would be 5 foot 9, according to standard metrics, and that his blades made him run as though he were 6 foot 8. In fact, Leeper is about 6 feet 2 inches tall on his blades, roughly the average height of other top 400 meter runners, many of whom have short torsos and long legs. "There is no way to determine how tall Blake would be or should be," Kessler said on Monday. "Everything is a spectrum. There are all sorts of variations, and there is no reliable way to say where someone would fall in that spectrum." The controversy over whether Leeper was running at a competitive advantage started in 2018, when U.S.A. Track Field, the governing body for the sport in the United States, informed him that the sport's international leaders had ruled it could not officially post his race times until he proved his blades did not unfairly benefit him. The International Paralympic Committee had recently changed its rule on how tall prostheses could make athletes, known as maximum allowable standing height, though World Athletics did not focus on that at the time. Leeper spent the next year working with scientists, who studied his running form and his blades, and in the summer of 2019 submitted his application to World Athletics for continued eligibility. The organization rejected it in February, prompting his appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. During testimony in July, an expert witness for World Athletics cited its study that showed how tall Leeper would most likely be if he had not been born without lower legs. During questioning from Leeper's lawyers, the expert revealed that the study he was relying on did not have any Black subjects. The ruling allows Leeper to uses smaller prostheses, but to do so he will essentially have to relearn how to run. Kessler said even a small difference in the size of the legs Leeper has been using for years would require a significant adjustment, which Kessler called "an undue burden." Leeper grew up in Tennessee, playing baseball and basketball on prostheses. He always sensed he was fast, but his equipment could not keep up with him. Sometimes a leg would fall off when he tried to accelerate. In 2009, he got his first set of blades and realized just how fast he might be. He soon began competing internationally and was on the same track as Pistorius in London in 2012 at the Paralympics, winning the silver medal in the 400 meters in his classification. Like a lot of runners, Leeper has spent the coronavirus pandemic hunting for places to train. His usual training track at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been closed. He has run in parking lots, on the beach, on mostly empty streets, anywhere he can find enough space to mark off 200 and 400 and 800 meters. He said the ruling would not make him any less determined. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Nine months after a giant sinkhole opened under the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., swallowing eight of its display cars, one of the cars, a 2009 ZR 1 Blue Devil prototype, is on its way home. The General Motors Heritage Center just finished a six week restoration of the car, which had sustained the lightest damage among the cars that fell into the hole. (Hemmings Daily) The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of Global Automakers, two large trade organizations representing the automakers that operate in the United States, submitted a 19 page report to the Federal Trade Commission this week pledging to protect consumer information as connected vehicle technology expands. Federal lawmakers had raised concern about location and driver behavior data being shared with marketers, the government and other entities without drivers' approval. (The Detroit News) Although she was to receive the Katherine Graham Living Legacy Award at the de Pizan Honors Gala in Washington next week, Mary Barra, G.M.'s chief executive, will not attend the ceremony. A group of people who said their relatives were killed in G.M. vehicles said they took "serious issue" with Barra receiving the award. The event's organizers said they would give the award to Ms. Barra in absentia. (USA Today) Fiat Chrysler Automobiles said in a report to federal regulators Thursday that Ferrari would pay it about 2.8 billion before the Italian sports car manufacturer spins off from F.C.A. next year. Sergio Marchionne, Fiat Chrysler's chief executive and also the chairman of Ferrari, said the move, in addition to a 2.5 billion convertible bond issue, would ease F.C.A.'s debt and help fund its five year business plan. (Automotive News, subscription required) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Last winter, as I was riding in a car with my family through the Kashmir Valley, the driver's phone rang. He listened carefully before frowning. Gulmarg. That's exactly where I was taking my family for a ski trip. Gulmarg is Kashmir's underdog ski resort, tucked in the snowy Himalayas, a place of magnificent skiing and no frills. Few foreigners visit, for reasons I will get into, and as we drew closer, I began to wonder if this was such a great idea. I looked out the window. It was now dark and snowing, and we were winding our way up a narrow road into the mountains. After we passed another military checkpoint, the driver nodded to me. "You see that spot?'' he said, pointing into the woods. "We saw a bear there last week.'' My wife, Courtenay, who was sitting in the back, tapped me on the shoulder. I had always dreamed of skiing in Kashmir. That name alone conjures up adventure: white toothed mountains and deep green valleys, wide open slopes and tough highland people. Draped in a mysterious beauty, Kashmir is one of those places most of us have heard of, but know little about. And I had a personal agenda. My children are among that strange breed of Americans who have never lived in the United States. They were born in Kenya, raised (so far) in Africa and India, products of the tropics who go to school all year round in shorts, and I wanted them to experience snow. So one weekend about a year ago, while we were sitting around our apartment in New Delhi, I suggested a trip to Kashmir's winter wonderland. "Are you kidding?" Courtenay said. "Isn't there an active conflict up there?" But before getting more excited, I needed to check out the safety of the area. This was a family trip, after all, and my wife was right: Kashmir is contested territory, torn between India and Pakistan. It's a long story, flaring up in the 1940s, when the British divided the subcontinent into Hindu dominated India and Muslim dominated Pakistan. The people of Kashmir fell in between, religiously and geographically. They were ruled by a Hindu maharajah, though the population was mostly Muslim. And their area, with its fertile orchards, deliciously cool climate and legendary scenery, lies right between what is now India and Pakistan. After the British left, India and Pakistan fought three wars over Kashmir, and today the conflict has settled into a thorny standoff, with India controlling most of Kashmir and Pakistan a smaller slice. Many Kashmiris don't want either country controlling them: They want independence, and a small, dogged separatist movement operates in Kashmir, attacking police posts and civilians believed to be collaborators. Gulmarg, however, is rarely affected; it lies in a nook of the Kashmir valley tightly controlled by the Indian military. I was obsessed with getting us there, but had no idea how to pull this off. As luck would have it, right when Courtenay and I were haggling over the trip, we were invited to a dinner party in New Delhi where I was seated near a charming, fit looking Indian with a bald head and handlebar mustache. His name was Akshay Kumar and he was a former champion skier. He had skied Gulmarg countless times, ever since he was a child, and he and his wife, Dilshad Master, run an adventure tour company, Mercury Himalayan Explorations. Akshay offered to do all the hard work: organizing ski rentals, lift passes, hotel bookings and, most important, the seamless string of large bearded men who would schlep us around. He made what could have been a complicated trip simple and safe. He also made it inexpensive. The kids' lift tickets were less than 3 (that's not a typo). A gondola day pass was 25. Equipment rental was about the same and the gear was solid: parabolic Atomic skis and Salomon boots . A ski trip to Austria, for example, would have cost us thousands of dollars. I cover South Asia for The New York Times, and I was working on a story in Kashmir that same week on the life and times of a young militant named Sameer Tiger. Like many others, Sameer Tiger had been pulled into the insurgency by a mix of anger, naivete and lack of economic opportunity. And, like many others, he went down in a hail of bullets, cornered by security forces. I had spent weeks researching him and was familiar with flying in and out of Srinagar, Kashmir's biggest city. I also knew that the hot spots where the militants conducted their attacks tended to be in southern Kashmir, miles away from Gulmarg. The next morning we mustered outside in the hotel's portico, waiting for our skis to be delivered. I thought we'd just slap them on and slide the couple of hundred yards to the base of the slopes, but no, a Jeep dispatched as part of Akshay's operation zoomed up with three men inside. Kashmiris are some of the warmest, most hospitable people, and before we climbed into the Jeep, the men greeted us with big hugs. When we climbed out, they insisted on putting on our skis. I had one guy on my left, another on my right and a third young man kneeling in the snow at my feet. "Guys, guys, guys," I said, trying to wiggle free. "I can put on my own skis." But the young man at my feet either didn't understand or didn't care. And for the first time since I was about 5, I watched someone untie my shoes and carefully pull them off. The sky was a flawless blue, the air peppermint fresh. It wasn't even that cold maybe 30 degrees. Kashmir rarely gets bitterly cold; Gulmarg lies at the same latitude as Atlanta. All around us, the white teeth of the Himalayas gleamed, and from nearby chimneys I smelled wood smoke. It was the most romantic alpine scene I had ever entered, and part of it was the scale. Behind the mountains that stood in front of me were even higher mountains, and behind them, the real titans. On a clear day, from the top of Gulmarg, you can see into Pakistan and glimpse K2, the second tallest mountain in the world after Everest. Gulmarg doesn't feel like a ski resort; it feels like a village. At the base of the gondola, men with wooden boxes strapped to their shoulders sold chocolate bars, selfie sticks and cigarettes. I don't think I've ever seen a pack of cigarettes on a ski slope. Courtenay and I hired our own guide, Wali. Wali was in his late 40s with curly gray hair and orange mirrored shades. He wore no hat. He had been working on these slopes since he was 8, beginning as a sled wallah. He had never been to school. When I asked Wali what he loved about skiing, he looked off into the hills and smiled. "I love it for the money," he said. It wasn't exactly the poetic answer I was looking for, but fair enough. In strife torn Kashmir, where there aren't many jobs for an athletic, adventurous man, this was a good one. Gulmarg's slopes cover everything from green to double black diamond, but few are marked. Part of the mountain is groomed, but advanced skiers love the ungroomed, backcountry skiing. The gondola reaches around 13,000 feet, one of the highest in the world. Some skiers hike up even higher or take helicopters to virgin spots. Gulmarg's vertical drop, a measure of the altitude from where you start to where you finish, can be as much as 6,000 feet. With good snow, some runs stretch more than four miles. They can take the better part of a day and end in the woods, near some old temples. We started with a medium difficult run, taking the gondola to the middle of the mountain (Gulmarg has one gondola, one chair lift and several tow ropes). We stepped off into thick snowpack. This was mid February, the best time for snow; sometimes the area gets eight feet of powder. Wali led the way, dropping into a wide track that ran through Himalayan cedar trees. He stopped intermittently to look back at Courtenay and me. "Up and down, up and down," he shouted as we made our turns, trying to keep our skis together. "Yass, yass, that's it. Good, good!" I hadn't seen any other foreigners, so when I heard an American accent down the hallway, I was curious. I wandered through the lodge, pushed open a door and found three rugged, sun tanned guys sitting on cushions in a cozy, wood paneled room heated by wood burning stoves. "What do you guys do here?" "We're the ski patrol," said one. His name was Luke. He was 39 years old. He grew up in Alaska, became an avalanche forecaster and a paramedic and came to Gulmarg seven years ago to run the ski patrol. "It's the warmth of the people," he said. "That's what drew me here." He explained that Gulmarg has 17 ski patrollers with snowmobiles to rescue injured skiers. Avalanches were always a risk but only in the off piste areas, he said, like where the Russian tourist was skiing on the day we arrived. After lunch, I watched my sons ski. Eeesh had taught them well. Asa turned back and forth, carving large S's and ending with a confident snowplow. Apollo was less orthodox. He shot down the bunny hill like a bullet. "Stop! Stop!" Courtenay yelled as he approached the bottom. I doubt he heard but somehow, right before he was about to crash into us, he stopped. The next morning was sadly our last. I persuaded Wali to take me higher on the mountain. When we got off the chair lift, we were by ourselves. The views were breathtaking. It was so bright, so clear, so crisp, so still. I just wanted to stay up there and stare at the jagged white mountains and etch those images into my brain. I was reminded of a Persian couplet inscribed long ago on a pavilion in one of Srinagar's majestic gardens: "If there is a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A cloud of doubt lingering over Tesla Motors parted on March 26, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed an investigation of the Model S begun in response to two cars that were destroyed by fires after striking objects on the highway. In those episodes, the aluminum shielding designed to protect the cars' lithium ion battery packs had been pierced by debris, causing what the safety regulators called a "thermal runaway." In documents explaining its reasons for ending the investigation, regulators cited Tesla's planned service campaign to reduce the risk of fires by outfitting the cars with "increased underbody protection." Two days later, Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive, outlined the new protective measures a titanium underbody shield and two aluminum deflector plates in a message on Tesla's website. In the company's testing, Mr. Musk said, these provisions "prevented any damage that could cause a fire or penetrate the existing quarter inch of ballistic grade armor plate" already in place. Tesla did not post photos of the new protective components, and it declined to provide further details regarding their size or the extent of underbody coverage. The reaction from Tesla owners to Mr. Musk's announcement was both spirited and positive. Owners commenting on web forums soon took to referring to the parts package, a running production change also offered free to owners of existing Model S electric sedans, as the Tank Mode. The rounded aluminum deflector bar, mounted ahead of the titanium plate toward the front of the car, is the first line of defense against objects in the road. Titanium, which is both tough and light, is a first class solution for such a role "more commonly seen in aerospace or military applications," Mr. Musk wrote though the metal is far more expensive than steel and can be hard to work with. Tesla's website carried under car videos of an upgraded Model S shrugging off heavy objects, including a concrete block and an alternator. Tesla owners and others who read the news reports may have imagined the triple underbody shield, as Mr. Musk called it, to include a full length titanium plate protecting the whole of the battery pack, which covers nearly the entire underside of the car's passenger compartment. Tesla declined to answer questions regarding the size and cost of the titanium shield. A slab of titanium as large as the car's existing aluminum armor plate, experts say, might cost thousands of dollars. A look at the pieces Tesla has added while taking photographs for this article confirmed what owners who have had the retrofit done to their cars say: The titanium plate, positioned at the forward edge of the battery pack, is relatively small and light. Kartik Rao, director of business development at Metalysis, a British company working on a lower cost titanium production process, said in a telephone interview that the grade of the metal appropriate for this use would cost 50 per kilogram, or about 23 per pound. Any stamping or other fabrication would be extra. Tesla plays down any weight increase attributed to the new parts. A spokeswoman, Shanna Hendriks, wrote in an email: "We don't disclose the exact weight of the parts of Model S. However, the weight of the underbody pieces is very minimal and has minor impact on the overall weight of the car." A fire that destroyed a Tesla Model S near Seattle last year began in the vehicle's lithium ion battery pack. A former executive working with the auto industry at the titanium supplier Timet, Kurt Faller, estimated from photographs that the titanium plate weighs 0.8 to 1.6 pounds. Ms. Hendriks cited a blog post by Mr. Musk that stated, "In total, the shields only have a 0.1 percent impact on range and don't affect ride or handling." The Environmental Protection Agency said in an email that it had not retested a car with the new shields. "However, it is unlikely that a 0.1 percent impact on range would change E.P.A.'s range certification," the agency said. One owner, David Noland, a semiretired aviation and science journalist in Mountainville, N.Y., had the retrofit done to his Model S earlier this month. His car was picked up, had the new parts installed and returned the next day. "It was about as quick and painless as it could possibly be," Mr. Noland said. Mr. Noland, who has written extensively about his experiences with the car, said he had no expectation of how big the added shields would be. Last fall, Mr. Noland hit a rock in a friend's driveway. "It was a significant thump," he said, but the only damage was some scuffing on the aluminum battery cover. "The idea of a new shield over the whole battery pack seemed pretty outlandish to me, and would have added a lot of weight," he said. "What they actually did seems reasonable." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Tarantino has won the original screenplay Oscar twice before, so he can't be counted out here. Still, the path to best picture almost always goes through one of the screenplay categories, and "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" has lost much of its momentum for the top award. The best picture front runner "1917" is probably too sparse a screenplay to win in this category, so I expect the win will go to twisty "Parasite," the night's other big contender for the top Oscar. Oscar voters caught a lot of flak when Gerwig failed to make the best director race, and they may be tempted to make it up to her here. Still, I'd give the slim edge to Waititi, who won the Writers Guild Award in this category and whose performance in his own movie as a jokey Adolf Hitler, no less only lends him further star power that should put him over the top. Outside of the acting categories, this is one of the most foregone conclusions of the night: "Parasite" will surely prevail, giving South Korea its first victory in this Oscar race. The only question is whether some voters will deem this win sufficient, and then go on to choose a different movie in the best picture category. "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" Oscar voters are loath to recognize a sequel in this category, and the last one to win was "Toy Story 3," which may slow their enthusiasm for rewarding Pixar once more. Still, the field is scattered: "Missing Link" won the Golden Globe, "Klaus" swept the Annie awards, and Netflix's "I Lost My Body" has highbrow fans, too. With votes all over the place and no singular, widely seen alternative to back, "Toy Story 4" is well positioned to win. "Honeyland," about a beekeeper in North Macedonia, pulled off an impressive double nomination for documentary feature and international film. Still, this category is packed with powerhouse social issues dramas, and the favorite has to be "American Factory," which chronicles a culture clash between Chinese industrialists and hard up American workers. The film has received a strong push from Netflix and counts no less than Barack and Michelle Obama among its backers. Best picture contenders typically have the edge over tentpole fare in this category, so while "The Lion King" certainly boasts the most effects, the ultimate contest should come down to "The Irishman" and its de aging technology vs. the more seamless wartime enhancements of "1917." Since Robert De Niro's youthful C.G.I. makeover came in for some criticism, I suspect voters will choose "1917." "Parasite" could pull this out if voters remember all those masterful sequences that track multiple character arcs as the suspense builds and builds, and if the film wins in this category, that would be a boon for its best picture chances. But "Ford v Ferrari" is the obvious choice here, since its racing sequences would be nothing without fast and precise editing. Thomas Newman has been nominated in this category 14 times without a win, and though "1917" could earn the most Oscars of the night, I don't think its score will triumph. At least Newman won't lose to his cousin Randy, the composer for "Marriage Story": Instead, both Newmans will probably fall to the Golden Globe and BAFTA winner Gudnadottir, whose striking compositions for "Joker" give a voice to the main character's madness. "I Can't Let You Throw Yourself Away," "Toy Story 4" "Let It Go" triumphed in this category seven years ago, but can the new Idina Menzel power ballad from "Frozen 2" win the same Oscar? It will face strong competition from Elton John's end credits "Rocketman" song, sung with the film's star, Taron Egerton. Their duet, "(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again," has already won the Golden Globe, and the snub of "Frozen 2" in the animated film category suggests that voters aren't eager to rubber stamp a retread. In a close race, I'd give this one to Elton. This is one of the night's trickiest three way races. "Parasite" gave us the most memorable location of the year with the ultramodern Park house, but contemporary films only win in this category when they're impressively futuristic ("Black Panther") or self consciously retro ("La La Land"). "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" masterfully recreates 1969 Los Angeles, but the film seems to have lost awards momentum. "1917" turns every new location into a striking set piece and the camera's constancy allows plenty of time to explore those sets, so that's my pick, even though I hope "Parasite" can pull it off. For more than two decades, Deakins was one of Oscar's most famous bridesmaids, but now that he's in, he's really in: After winning his first Academy Award, for "Blade Runner 2049," just two years ago, the veteran cinematographer will earn a second statuette, for his fluid work on "1917." If all those complicated long takes weren't enough to clinch it for Deakins, the bravura nighttime sequence halfway through the film surely would be. With the recent exception of the world building winners "Black Panther" and "Mad Max: Fury Road," this Oscar almost always goes to a period film set in the distant past. That nixes "Joker," "The Irishman" and "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," as films set in the 1960s and '70s haven't scored here since ... well, the 1960s and '70s. In the face off between the colorful "Jojo Rabbit," which won with the Costume Designers Guild, and BAFTA's choice, "Little Women," I'm picking the latter: When in doubt, go with the one that has the most frocks. It's the first time that this category has expanded the number of nominees to five from the traditional three, but that hardly makes the contest any less of a blowout: "Bombshell" is guaranteed to win for its uncanny, prosthetics aided transformation of Charlize Theron into the angular Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. "1917" seeks to place the viewer in the same impossible situations as its protagonists, and all those you are there long takes wouldn't work half as well without a top tier soundscape. Whizzing bullets, roaring waterfalls, the fairway footsteps of a potential friend or foe: "1917" has everything it needs to succeed here. War films and best picture nominees are typically the best positioned in this category, and "1917" is both. An idea was recently floated within the academy to combine both sound categories because many voters still don't understand the difference between them. For the record: Sound editing has more to do with the creation of sounds, while sound mixing is about weaving those disparate sounds together. Whether voters know that or not, they will almost certainly pick "1917" to prevail in both races. The two heaviest hitters here are Pixar's "Kitbull," which tracks an alley cat's bond with an abused pit bull, and Sony's "Hair Love," about an African American father struggling to do his young daughter's hair. "Kitbull" benefits from being a little more rough around the edges than your usual Pixar short, but adorable animals are still a familiar sight in this category, and the specificity of "Hair Love" distinguishes it as a fresher pick. Last year's winner in this category, "Skin," was an English language short with recognizable actors that culminated in an obvious but effective twist. That pretty much describes this year's front runner, "The Neighbors' Window," which stars the Tony nominee Maria Dizzia as a harried New York mom who envies the young, glamorous couple in the apartment across the way until ... well, I won't spoil it. Though I found the eventual twist rather trite, it's exactly the sort of thing that clicks with Oscar voters, and Dizzia is so committed that you're inclined to just go with it. "Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if You're a Girl)" "Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if You're a Girl)" has the best title in the field and also the best odds: This charmer about a skating school for young girls in Afghanistan is politically relevant enough to score with Oscar voters, but even more crucially, it sends the viewer out with a smile. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Last week the American fashion industry went dark as stores and factories closed, both voluntarily and by government decree, to help prevent the spread of the new coronavirus. Yet by this weekend, lights had flicked on again on both coasts as designers and manufacturers began to pivot from making dresses, jeans and bathing suits to making surgical face masks and other protective gear even as President Trump addressed the United States, saying unspecified help would be on the way for hospitals that expect to be overwhelmed and under resourced. Los Angeles Apparel is making surgical masks; it will on Monday begin making hospital gowns as well. Dov Charney, the company's founder and the former head of American Apparel, hopes his 150,000 square foot factory can produce 300,000 masks and 50,000 gowns in a week. Christian Siriano, the fashion designer, has reassigned his 10 seamstresses in New York. They are beginning to make masks and hope to produce a few thousand a week. Though they make a strange trio Mr. Siriano, the former "Project Runway" star and current host who has become famous for his inclusive approach to dressing and has been championed by Michelle Obama; Mr. Charney, the embattled chief executive who was once forced to leave his post, accused of misuse of funds and of knowingly allowing sexual harassment; and a high end bikini manufacturer the group of companies reflects as much as anything the current confusion over the best response to the coronavirus crisis, and the way individuals are beginning to take action into their own hands. Or headquarters, as it were. Mr. Charney and Mr. Siriano are each designing their own washable, reusable masks. They are not "medical grade," though Mr. Siriano intends to make masks that meet F.D.A. standards as soon as he can acquire approved materials and patterns, and begin prototyping. Karla Colletto is planning to replicate masks made by 3M, using patterns and fabric sent from that long established hospital supplier. The moves follow the decision by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the European luxury giant, and L'Oreal and Coty, the beauty conglomerates, to use their facilities to produce large quantities of hand sanitizer for European hospitals. In Spain, Inditex, the parent company of Zara, is also looking into refitting its textile factories to make hospital gowns. As an industry, fashion has been particularly affected by the mass business closings and particularly active in offering resources to assist the fight against the coronavirus, stepping up as governments and the medical community scramble to respond to the crisis. In the same way automotive factories and upholsterers were retooled during World War II to supply the military, fashion is rethinking its manufacturing capabilities. "A week ago, our machines were humming along," Karla Colletto said via phone on Saturday. During normal business times, her Vienna, Va., factory can produce 800 to 1,000 pieces of swimwear each week. But like many other companies, as the coronavirus diagnosis count rose in the United States, the made to order swimwear company decided to cease production. Ten percent of its orders had already been canceled and the rest postponed, said Lisa Rovan, a co founder of the brand, with Ms. Colletto. Yet as their factory went dark, Ms. Colletto and Ms. Rovan were formulating a plan to bring as many of their 40 employees (including two dozen sewers) as possible back to work making masks and gowns for hospitals in need. "Because we have our own facility, we can be flexible and switch gears quickly," Ms. Colletto said. That means separating machines within the factory to be six feet apart to help prevent transmission between workers, following OSHA safety guidelines, and staying in communication with workers about any exposure to the virus. This week, they're awaiting fabric and patterns for disposable surgical procedure masks and gowns from 3M, the company that also produces N95 respirator masks. Once the protective gear is made, both Ms. Colletto and Ms. Rovan said they could not sell it directly to hospitals, so the products would go through a hospital supply distributor. The sales will help fund the factory employees' paychecks. On Friday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York issued an appeal during his daily news conference for businesses to "get creative" and manufacture protective equipment. In response Mr. Siriano tweeted: "If NYGovCuomo says we need masks my team will help make some. I have a full sewing team still on staff working from home that can help." (Governor Cuomo responded with a request to "follow back and we will DM you.") Mr. Siriano said he had been wondering how to help his employees, who were at home, and the chance to make masks was both a way to keep them occupied and to give purpose to their work. Since then, Mr. Siriano has been in daily touch with the governor's office, he said, as they work out how the masks should be made. He has 10 seamstresses who are working from home and are available to make the masks, which are intended both for hospital support staff and private individuals. He hopes to begin actually manufacturing the nonmedical grade masks by Monday, and projects he can produce 1,000 by the end of the week. He is also hoping to get a special exemption to reopen his office to make the masks, after sanitizing it and complying with official regulations, and is aiming to create medical grade masks in the future. Though the masks would initially be offered free of charge during the crisis, at a certain point, Mr. Siriano said, if demand kept rising, they "can't afford to keep going forever" since the rest of his business, which is self funded, was largely on hold. "Every manufacturer is at something of a standstill anyway," he said. "This gave us something to do and a way to help even a little." On the West Coast, Mr. Charney began manufacturing his masks a few weeks ago, when he became aware of the growing shortage in the market. Because his company largely produces T shirts and other apparel for the music and merchandising industry, many of his employees already wear masks to protect themselves from the dust involved in textile manufacturing. He began to look into designing his own products, and last week began production. "These are not N95 masks, but they are the equivalent of surgical masks," he said over the phone. Made from a sweatshirt like fabric, they fit closely over the face and are held on by two straps with a metal adjuster on the nose. They are intended for reuse, which surgical masks are not, and are intended to be washed in hot water. Mr. Charney is in talks with both federal and municipal agencies to supply large quantities of the masks. He said he had made deliveries to hospitals in Seattle, New Mexico, New York and Las Vegas. Hospitals in Los Angeles receive the masks free of charge; consumers can purchase them on the Los Angeles Apparel website for three for 30. (The C.D.C. recommends people wear masks if they are sick. People who are well do not need to wear masks, and are encouraged to save masks for caregivers.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The format was a relay, with two pianos onstage. After one pianist played a few songs, another came on for a duet before embarking on his own set. Mr. Hyman, along with his high finesse renditions of Scott Joplin ragtime and Fats Waller stride, dutifully inserted a tango bass line into "All the Things You Are." Sullivan Fortner, from New Orleans, and Chano Dominguez, from Spain, both played habaneras beautifully. But why did Joey Alexander, the adorable and astonishingly skilled 15 year old pianist from Indonesia, play original compositions with almost none of the three title elements? Among the dancers, who joined in periodically, the outlier wasn't the Spanish flamenco dancer, Jesus Carmona (in town for the Flamenco Festival at City Center), so much as the New York salsero, Eddie Torres Jr. In his ruffled shirts and sequined spangles, the friendly Mr. Torres, snapping his fingers and shimmying, simply didn't have enough vocabulary Whereas the tap dancers Michela Marino Lerman on Friday, Jared Grimes on Saturday proved fully equal to the pianist pyrotechnics. Ms. Lerman, deeply musical, was the most adaptive artist onstage amid Friday's getting to know you awkwardness. Mr. Grimes is the greater showman. In his muscle T shirt, he started with an imitation of Gregory Hines but advanced into maneuvers that Hines couldn't have dreamed of. He's a flamboyant inventor, with giddily extreme steps all his own. On the same program with these top notch hoofers, Mr. Carmona gave an inadvertent lesson in differences between tap and flamenco. He's a peacock, too, with impressive footwork, armwork as ornate as Arabic script, fishtail turns and a cat who ate the canary smile. But where the tap dancers' every step was music, either rhythm or a rest, in flamenco the center of musical expression regularly alternates between the feet and the upper body, the percussion concentrated in climaxes like the rapid strumming of flamenco guitar. In the context of this concert, some of Mr. Carmona's multiple turns could seem like boilerplate, but he adapted to jazz syncopations with winning playfulness. And that open spirit was ultimately what made the concert work, not in a historical sense but in the general jazz as an international language one. Nothing was more thrilling than to watch Mr. Carmona and Mr. Grimes trade phrases at the end, one upping each other's spins and on the toes tricks. Similarly, it made for a knockout and affecting finale when all four pianists played together, two to a piano. The eight decades and thousands of miles separating Mr. Hyman and Mr. Alexander shrank to a few inches as they sat side by side. As Mr. Hyman indicated, the musicians and the dancers had found much in common. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The New Zealand comedy "The Breaker Upperers" adds some welcome irreverence to the homogenized mix of Netflix comedies. This collaboration between Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami who wrote, directed and star together exhibits their fairly irresistible comic chemistry, even if the conceit of the movie wears a bit thin. Their characters, Jen (Van Beek) and Mel (Sami), operate an agency that helps clients too wimpy or sneaky to end their own relationships. Each case requires its own form of deception. The two are introduced posing as police officers who tell a woman (Celia Pacquola) that her husband who is about to flee to Rio has disappeared. This is not an airtight line of work; for starters, as the movie acknowledges, it relies on Jen and Mel's never running into anyone they deceive. But the business does supply Sami and Van Beek with a steady stream of gags until it becomes clear that the film's real subject is their friendship. Mel has too much empathy to be a good liar, while Jen has grown wistful over the rocky end of one of her own past relationships. A cloud of mawkishness looms, though it never quite overshadows the rest. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
My friends' deaths prevented more death. Was some silent god watching, and so demanded the sacrifice of three people in order to keep us from committing moral and political mayhem? A massacre at Fort Dix would have moved us to a place from which there would have been no return: Along with numerous deaths and injuries, we would have triggered widespread government repression against the larger peace movement; millions of Americans would have turned against it as well. We were white, middle class, college educated kids many of us, like Ted, Terry and myself, Jewish. All of us were overcome both by grief over this country's violence and by shame at not being able to stop the war. That shame also emanated from our class and racial privilege: We weren't the ones being carpet bombed in Vietnam or confronting racist mobs and sheriffs of Mississippi. Growing up in the shadow of World War II, we had asked ourselves repeatedly whether we had the strength of character to overcome indifference and denial and to act to stop clear moral evils. We refused to be, as we said back then, "Good Germans." Our grief and shame combined to warp not only our morality, but our common sense. We forgot that those soldiers and their dates at Fort Dix were our neighbors and fellow citizens, people to whom we were and still are inextricably linked. Some years after the townhouse explosion, I heard the Dalai Lama field a question about why he doesn't hate the Chinese for what they're doing to his country. "They're our neighbors," he replied, "and when this is all over we'll have to live with them." In time most of us pulled back from the edge, committing ourselves to socially useful lives. For 30 years I served as a community college instructor, teaching basic math and reading. Had my friends lived, I have no doubt they would have joined us: Diana had been a volunteer teacher in Guatemala and had worked at an innovative preschool in Michigan; Ted, an S.D.S. leader at Columbia, taught public school in New York City and organized support for community control of local schools; Terry had been a gifted organizer for S.D.S., including at Kent State University. Over the decades I've reversed my understanding of social and political change: I now recognize that nonviolence is the one essential strategy to achieve positive social change, an ironclad fact that the black civil rights movement understood well. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Projects debuting this fall suggest that hard barriers between the designed environment and the natural one are softening maybe for good. Can buildings be more porous, more open to the vitality of the surrounding city? As with the creation of the great urban parks of the 19th century, designers today are rebalancing the relationship between architecture and nature, with the goal of increasing the quality of life, especially in urban settings. Sometimes this means erasing boundaries between indoors and outdoors, buildings and environment. Instead of the man made and the organic jockeying for position or dominance, they are sharing each other's territory. And occasionally they seamlessly fuse, each transforming the other. This, after all, is the age of the rooftop farm and the outdoor conference room. Whether any of these gestures will mitigate the pressing problems of global warming and rising sea levels is still unknown the fix likely requires more than what one landscape architect calls "boutique wetlands." But projects debuting this fall suggest that hard barriers between the designed environment and the natural one are softening maybe for good. As a student in Montreal, Moshe Safdie concluded that people should live in denser settings and that apartments should have room for gardens. These simple observations drove the asymmetrically stacked concrete modules of his most famous work, Habitat '67, where each unit has a garden that rests on the roof of an apartment below. And that idea informs the latest developments by Mr. Safdie, 81, in Asia. Opening in phases starting this fall is Mr. Safdie's monumental Raffles City Chongqing a 12 million square foot, mixed use complex, that stands at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers. There, his version of man made nature sits some 50 stories up, a 984 foot long glass enclosed tube that the developers have named the Crystal. It contains a sky park for a city where, Mr. Safdie explains, "The climate is very problematic: hot in summer, very polluted, cold in winter. " Inside, all year round, are trees, gardens, and swimming pools for hotel guests, as well as a public observatory. Mr. Safdie noted that people are hungry "to be with nature in the city in any form they can get it." You can see the faceted black glass from the High Line, just south of 14th Street, or catch a glimpse as you drive along West Street. It looks like an experiment in fractal theory; the mass of the office building appears to just fall away. It's an effect that the Chicago based architect Jeanne Gang calls "solar carving," an approach that has become her signature: she designs glass facades with patterns that appear decorative but address problems like solar heat gain or bird strikes. For Studio Gang's first completed project in New York City, the facade was sculpted to prevent it from casting shadows on the famous elevated park next door. This act of architectural generosity came about, Ms. Gang said, because she wasn't just "thinking about the views from inside the building, but thinking about people's views on the High Line." Tidal pools, found where land and sea meet, create depressions that fill with water and nurture what the landscape architect Signe Nielsen affectionately called "critters." The Inter Tidal Pool that the firm recently completed on the Harlem River in the Bronx appears no different, a swamplike setting for minnows, crabs and other fauna but it is man made, and accessed by elevated walkways. In a project to rehabilitate Roberto Clemente State Park, badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, the firm Mathews Nielsen replaced the battered Harlem River bulkhead with an approximation of how the river met the land before the city existed. Increasingly common in New York City's waterfront parks, such engineered marshes Ms. Nielsen's "boutique wetlands" help improve water quality and create habitats. "Each species of critter in the world has a certain radius that it needs to feed and nest," she explained. Even small patches of habitat can help butterflies or birds survive, as they hopscotch from one oasis to the next. Designed by five young architects in Barcelona who joined together for a 2015 competition entry, the new Bauhaus Museum Dessau (home of the iconic 1926 building designed by Walter Gropius) is "just a black box with two legs and a glass overcoat," said Roberto Gonzalez, one of the team, which is now Addenda Architects. The second level, called the Black Box, is climate controlled to protect the fragile artifacts (such as drawings by instructor Laszlo Moholy Nagy and student made collages) on display. The bottom level is designed to blend seamlessly with the city park in which the building sits. Mr. Gonzalez wishes it could be completely open to the landscape but the glass overcoat is necessary, he said, because Germany is often cold and rainy. Otherwise, the architects did everything possible to make the lower level look and feel like public space, concealing most of the structure in the "legs" and installing 20 double doors in the facade. The Bauhaus's past will be safely contained in the sealed box upstairs, but its "soul" will be free to drift in and out into the landscape. Glenn Murcutt's reputation and Pritzker Prize are based on the Australian architect's inventive private homes that, he says, "touch the earth lightly." His MPavilion (scheduled to open in November in Melbourne's Queen Victoria Gardens) offers a rare opportunity for the public to experience Mr. Murcutt's striking brand of regionalism. Like the houses he's designed since the 1970s, the new seasonal structure is open to its surroundings and sited to take full advantage of its environment. The MPavilion is, in essence, a tent and was inspired by a lightweight airplane that once took the architect on a trip to see ruins in the Mexican tropical jungle. "We had a picnic in the shade provided by the wing of the aircraft," he recalled, intrigued by the duality of a small plane made of wood and fabric that could shelter passengers in the air and on the ground. His new building doesn't fly, but almost looks as if it could. The graceful steel and glass pedestrian bridge at the hair raising intersection where traffic pouring from the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel to Brooklyn meets West Street is a curved truss structure of the kind that was popular in the late 19th century. Otherwise, this is a very contemporary bridge that boasts a drainage system that flows into a "rain garden" a state of the art storm water absorption device installed on the median strip below. Its mechanical systems are elevated above flood level and protected by flood doors. The bridge, which connects Battery Park City with the Financial District, is symbolically resilient, as well: it replaces a footbridge destroyed during the September 11 attacks, making it one of the last components of Lower Manhattan's rebirth. Most of all, this little bridge is a nod to the resilience of New York pedestrians, who walk everywhere. "The bridge is more in the trees than you would expect," said Claire Weisz of WXY Architects (which collaborated with the engineers at Weidlinger Associates). "You're walking through a tree canopy." If you arrive at the Brooklyn Navy Yard by the East River Ferry you'll immediately notice a long, glassy, 16 story building that bills itself as the "home of 21st century manufacturing in the digital age." Dock 72 occupies a skinny waterfront site that itself was once a dry dock, which explains the building's ship like proportions (although one of its architects, Sital Patel of the firm S9 Architecture, prefers to see it as a "human ant farm.") A collaboration between office share giant WeWork, the New York landlord Rudin Developme nt and Mortimer Zuckerman's Boston Properties, the deal was done in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. At the time, the waterfront seemed like a mixed blessing. Indeed, Dock 72 will be a test of post Sandy thinking. It hovers above the floodplain on V shaped columns; sloping ramps provide access to the elevated main floor. The mechanical systems are up even higher and the lower reaches of the building are clad in breakaway louvers and designed so flood water will wash in and wash out. According to Nick Martin, a Rudin spokesman, the building is designed "not just to withstand the storm but to operate the next day." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Facing enormous financial strain because of the shutdown of the theater industry, the health insurance fund that covers thousands of stage actors is making it more difficult for them to qualify for coverage. Currently, professional actors and stage managers have to work 11 weeks to qualify for six months of coverage. But starting Jan. 1, they will have to work 16 weeks to qualify for a similar level of coverage. Nonprofit and commercial theater producers contribute to the health fund when they employ unionized actors and stage managers, but because theaters have been closed since March, those contributions which make up 88 percent of the fund's revenue have largely ceased. "The fact that we have no contributed income is something no one could have foreseen," said Christopher Brockmeyer, a Broadway League executive who co chairs the fund's board of trustees, which is evenly divided between representatives of the Actors' Equity union and producers. "We really put together the only viable option to cover as many people as possible with meaningful benefits under these totally unprecedented circumstances." Brockmeyer and his co chair, Madeleine Fallon, said the fund, which currently provides insurance coverage for about 6,700 Equity members, is facing its biggest financial challenge since the height of the AIDS crisis. At that time, the challenge was high expenses for the fund; this time, it is low revenues. "Everybody is out of work, everybody is panicked, everybody has lost income and can't make their art, and on top of that their health fund is in crisis," said Fallon, who leads the union bloc on the board. "It's been an emotionally difficult journey, but we hope our members will understand that we did find the plan that gives us our best chance to rebuild." Under the new system, those who work at least 12 weeks can qualify for lower tiered plans with higher co payments and more restrictions. Actors' Equity, which appoints half of the fund's trustees, but is otherwise an independent organization, opposes the changes. "We all understand that there is no escaping the devastating loss of months of employer contributions nationwide, and no alternative aside from making adjustments to the plan," the union's president, Kate Shindle, said in a statement. "But I believe that the fund had both the obligation and the financial reserves to take the time to make better choices." Shindle said the union had asked its members on the fund's board of trustees not to support the changes until they conducted a study about the potential impact on union members of color, on pregnant union members, and on union members who live outside New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. A similar battle is unfolding in the film and television industry. Members of SAG AFTRA, a union representing actors in those media, have loudly objected to changes in their health plan. Stage actors are accustomed to working to earn health care benefits some take jobs for the express purpose of getting weeks that will help qualify them for insurance. But many actors are not working at all, and can't qualify no matter how many weeks are required. As a result, some will be uninsured, while others can get coverage through Medicaid, COBRA or the Affordable Care Act. The Actors Fund is providing "health insurance counseling" to those facing a loss of coverage. The Equity League Health Fund, which is available to unionized actors and stage managers who work in commercial and nonprofit productions on Broadway, Off Broadway, and at regional theaters around the country, informed its beneficiaries of the changes on Thursday. The fund began the pandemic with 120 million in reserves, and is now down to 91 million. Its administrators project that reserves will drop below 20 million by the middle of next year if its eligibility and benefits rules remain unchanged, and that it will be unable to pay benefits at all by the end of next year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
As the N.F.L. grapples with its first coronavirus outbreak of the season, it has agreed with its players' union to continue daily testing indefinitely including on bye weeks. The N.F.L. informed organizations of the updated protocols on Friday in a memo, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The update came as the Tennessee Titans were trying to contain an outbreak that is known to have infected more than a dozen members of the organization including as many as nine players and which forced the postponement of the team's Week 4 game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. On Friday, two more Titans players were found Friday to have tested positive, according to multiple news reports, and on Saturday reports emerged of at least three more cases, involving a ninth player and two more staff members. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
In New York real estate speak, "mansion" has a new definition: luxury condo. The Abingdon, a 10 unit condo conversion, was an early adopter of the concept. In New York real estate speak, "mansion" has a new definition: luxury condo. The Abingdon, a 10 unit condo conversion, was an early adopter of the concept. The new mansions of Manhattan, and the urban Gatsbys flush enough to buy them, are having a moment, uptown and down. But these 21st century mega estates pretenders, in the opinion of some traditionalists are a bold departure from the definition of the classic city palace: a monolith optimally possessing ample frontage on a distinguished avenue. Landmark stand alones with Tara evocative staircases and dimensions to match are being upstaged by nouveau models that are actually colossal lower floor components of luxury condominium conversions. They have been downsized just a smidgen and modernized to the hilt, and they are usually attached to the development by a discretionary umbilical cord a private door to an attended lobby. The condominium provides the service staff (for a fee), absolving the mansion owner of the annoyance of bankrolling the square footage needed to house a private in house staff and a load of other responsibilities inherent in homeownership. Call these mansions of convenience, and daringly expensive. "We're seeing the term 'mansion' used as an enticing marketing term to put a better spin on units on the lower floors of luxury condominiums," said Pamela Liebman, the chief executive of the Corcoran Group. "I agree that the addition of condo amenities offers an enhanced lifestyle component as compared to that of the town house," she continued. "But I don't know why they have to call them mansions. It seems like developers have found a way of glamorizing what might have been ordinary space and fetching an extra price for it. "Maybe," Ms. Liebman said, "this is New York City's version of the McMansion, a grand multilevel space that is fully amenitized. This is a way to differentiate a product that hasn't been offered in the past: but whatever it's called, it still has to deliver." Supposedly it does, or will eventually. Few are functional yet, but that didn't stop the modern art fancier Alberto Mugrabi, whose family owns the largest private collection of Warhols in the world, from contracting to buy not just one but two of the four mansions offered by prospectus at the Schumacher, a Bleecker Street conversion. Once combined, they will provide him with a 9,000 square foot playpen/gallery and his very own front door. Maybe two. "When I think of mansions," he said, "I think of the Frick, or a humongous house on the Upper East Side. I guess I'm going to have one of my own downtown, but I probably won't call it my mansion. I'll call it home. Or my pied a terre, ha ha." By sleight of description, developers and brokerages are marketing as mansions enormous and extravagant lower floor spaces inside or in a few cases alongside top shelf condo conversions. This is because, according to them, using words like "maisonette" or "town house" would unfairly diminish the product in the eye of the buyer/beholder. "The informal rule of thumb in real estate is that residences with 25 feet or more of frontage are mansions it's sort of the litmus test," said Roy Stillman of Stillman Development International, the developer of the Schumacher, the 70 million conversion of a 19th century printing house at 36 Bleecker Street. Of the 20 units there, 4 were designated mansions (3 are spoken for). The 4 mansions range in price from 6.75 million to 10.995 million. "Just being eligible for the word didn't make it true," he said. "A big place that's shoddy is just a big, shoddy home. These homes convey Old World grandeur. From a subjective perspective, I can say that they are bona fide mansions and pass the straight face test." Also, according to the purveyors, the newfangled concept is superior to the traditional version precisely because, along with all that newness and potential for customization, it offers an option the old timers can't: an embarrassment of 24/7 white glove amenities, security and service. Sure, all of these condo dependent mansions have their own private front doors, but owners can also come home via the main lobby, under the watchful eye of the doorman/concierge, if they're feeling sociable. Or lonesome. "We call it the ultimate oasis offering the luxury of privacy and the privilege of service," said Elida Jacobsen Justo, the sales director for the Carlton House at Madison Avenue and East 61st, "and just by virtue of its sheer size, we couldn't think of anything else to call it but a mansion." She was speaking of a 65 million limestone mansion, with five stories and 10,000 square feet, being built from scratch alongside Extell Development's swank conversion of Carlton House, the former hotel. "It will have the look and feel of a classic mansion," she noted, "except that every aspect of it is brand new." And the owner of this 35 foot wide six bedroom six and a half bath triterrace oasis will be able to partake of Carlton amenities like a 65 foot indoor swimming pool and perks from an equally exclusive neighbor, the flagship Barneys department store. Prices for the 68 units range from 3.15 million to 65 million, with the mansion and the penthouse commanding top dollar. But, Ms. Justo said, "each is attracting a different type of buyer." Penthouse people crave grandiose views; mansion people crave grandiose interior space and walls meant for displaying supersize art. The common denominator: grandiosity. According to Karen Mansour, who is coordinating sales at 33 East 74th Street, a 10 unit luxury condominium assemblage of brownstones that includes the Grosvenor Atterbury Mansion, a 17,000 square foot landmark, "Buyers are looking for grand spaces with grand amenities: that's where the pendulum is swinging in Gold Coast neighborhoods." The developer, Daniel E. Straus of JZS Madison, had intended to market the Atterbury Mansion named for the architect who built it for a railroad heiress in 1901 as a two unit condominium. But after early feedback from potential buyers, JZS Madison is considering keeping it intact as a single family residence (in which case the assemblage will total 9 homes, not 10). "People seem to want an uber residence with condominium services attached," explained Ms. Mansour, an executive vice president for development marketing of Douglas Elliman Real Estate. "The trend of buyers in search of grand, elegant new homes that aren't jerry built but are intentionally built on a grand scale has taken hold up here," said Sabrina Saltiel, also of Elliman. "These rooms are of a proportion not seen since the Carnegies and Astors," Mr. Mindel said. "It would be a perfect embassy, or like getting to belong to, and own, your own private club. It has the luxury of autonomy and the added luxury of full condominium services. Previously we called it the maisonette or town house, but now the final scale of it warrants 'mansion.' " As do so many creative trends, this one supposedly began in Greenwich Village. The sold out Abingdon, the artsy, expensive 10 unit conversion of 320 West 12th, seems to have test driven the mansion concept three years ago with a pair of behemoths at its base. The larger, a 9,600 square foot triplex that sold for 23.4 million, is purportedly a recent acquisition of Steven A. Cohen, the head of the embattled hedge fund SAC Capital, as well as a collector of art and real estate. The smaller, a 6,000 square foot duplex, sold for 13.2 million. "We didn't set out to create mansions," said Tim Crowley, a managing director for Flank Development, "and if you try to add value to a property by using the word, that's a pretty transparent marketing ploy. This was an architectural response to the space we wound up working with: the 13 and a half foot ceilings, 56 by 30 foot living rooms, grand sweeping staircases, wood burning fireplaces and overall volume distinguish them from town house or maisonette nomenclature. 'Mansion' is really the only word that gets it done." Also downtown, Delos is building a 45 million mansion as part of 66 East 11th Street, a five unit loft style experiment in residential wellness technology. The mansion has its own "green wall" garden and, for an extra 1 million, its own garage. Uptown near the Whitney Museum on East 75th Street, the 17,000 square foot Atterbury Mansion will be just a shell of its former self, but whatever: the au courant Manhattan mansion is the antithesis of an antique. That's part of its charm. Even an authentic oldie on the market for 30 million at 7 East 84th Street, a 13,000 square foot, 25 foot wide landmark built in 1884, boasts of its state of the art security, air conditioning and sound systems. One of a handful of homes between Fifth and Madison Avenues with private garages, the neo Classical mansion has 8 bedrooms, 10 full baths, a wine cellar and tasting room, and 8 fireplaces with antique mantels imported from Europe. According to its listing brokers, Jessica Cohen and Lisa Simonsen of Douglas Elliman, the mansion nobly straddles two centuries: it offers "today's amenities and retains yesterday's romantic sensibility." Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt might be horrified to learn that meditation nooks, lap pools, Zen gardens and media centers have usurped the ballrooms, gift wrapping rooms, flower arranging rooms, double staircases, endless fireplaces and handy dumbwaiters that were must have amenities in turn of the 20th century mansions. But certain features remain the same: private entrance, grand staircase, at least one elevator, outdoor space and a gallery capable both of displaying major artwork and entertaining major league guests. " 'Mansion' is a powerful word, and what we're seeing at these condominiums is a blend of words for marketing purposes," said Paula Del Nunzio of Brown Harris Stevens, a frequent broker of historic mansions. "It used to be that 20 feet wide could be a mansion, but these days it's closer to 30. It's become more of an ego matter. "I think there may be just three left on Fifth Avenue still operating as single family residences," said Sharon Baum, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group, who sold the most flamboyant of the bunch, the Duke Semans, at 1009 Fifth Avenue opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for the Duke family matriarch in 2006. "It had been in the family for more than a hundred years; the only reason she sold it was, no one in the family wanted to move to New York City to live in it." The price was 40 million, and five years later Carlos Slim, one of the wealthiest men in the world, bought it for 44 million. With 19,000 square feet and eight levels, the house is generally acknowledged to be "the most important Beaux Arts residence in New York," Ms. Baum said, adding, "But it's all in the eyes of the beholder." When it was on the market, Ms. Baum fielded inquiries from potential buyers wondering "how many acres there were" and whether "it had bulletproof glass in the windows." Wendy Maitland, a senior managing director of Town Real Estate, disagreed with the rule of thumb that width and frontage are default determinants of mansion status. "There can be a mansion that is 20 feet wide, if it is done in a specific way and possesses gravitas," she said. "You can't just define a mansion by width or square footage: it has a private street level entrance and is a stand alone building, usually built in the late 1800s, typically limestone with five levels and multiple fireplaces and outdoor spaces, and the rest are, in my humble opinion, not actual mansions." Not all developers of luxe condominiums have jumped on the mansion bandwagon. At 18 Gramercy Park South, a genteel makeover of a Salvation Army boardinghouse by the team that brought 15 Central Park West (and Fifth Avenue pricing) to the West Side, there was no hesitation about what to christen the 3,746 square foot, 9.53 million, two bedroom three and a half bath residence with its own Irving Place entrance. Despite 17 foot ceilings and park frontage, it is a maisonette, period, and the least expensive unit. "A mansion is a stand alone home or very important town house," said one of the condo's developers, William Lie Zeckendorf. "A maisonette is a town house contained within an existing building. A maisonette benefits from the building's services and staff, whereas a mansion needs to have its own services and staff." Having sold many of Manhattan's most opulent establishments, Ms. Baum finds humor in the sudden popularity of mansions, in whatever form. "Don't forget about the mansion tax that has to be paid on any home that costs more than 1 million," she said. "If you use the mansion tax as your definition, it means practically anybody who buys a home in Manhattan in this market is buying a mansion." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
PLAGUED BY FIRE The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright By Paul Hendrickson It's a bit strange, if you think about it, that on lists of Top 10 architects American architects; modern architects; architects anytime, anywhere Frank Lloyd Wright's name nearly always ranks at or near No. 1. Aside from the late, somewhat anomalous Guggenheim Museum in New York City, few people have visited Wright's landmark works. Two of them, the Larkin Building in Buffalo and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, met the wrecking ball long ago. Most of his single family houses, which constitute the overwhelming bulk of his executed oeuvre, remain in private hands. His three other publicly accessible iconic projects Fallingwater (Mill Run, Pa.), Taliesin East (Spring Green, Wis.) and Taliesin West (Scottsdale, Ariz.) receive only 285,000 visitors a year combined. Popular veneration of Wright rests less on his architecture than on a single picture of Fallingwater (shot on a downstream path where only the photographically intrepid venture), combined with keen curiosity about the man. In his 91 years, Wright, who suffered a raft of personal tragedies, concocted an intoxicating elixir of a persona, mixing rank self aggrandizement with no way but forward tenacity. He wore flamboyant, dandyish outfits and conducted ostentatiously public adulterous affairs. A gifted, relentless self promoter, he devoted his picaresque life to convincing people that he, as visionary truth teller, would repeatedly rise from life's devastations to triumph over the opprobrium of a blinkered society. Now, adding to the many biographies, memoirs and rubbing shoulders with genius accounts about Wright, comes Paul Hendrickson's "Plagued by Fire." Hendrickson, the author of an acclaimed biographical portrait of Hemingway, also subscribes to the received cant that Wright heroically embodied a Whitmanesque or Emersonian ideal, all big skies, prairie homes and American braggadocio. About Wright's architecture, Hendrickson offers little insight, none of it original. His mission, rather, is to re evaluate Wright as a person. Hendrickson, who unabashedly inserts himself with poetically construed dear reader whispers into his narrative, confesses that his is a hunt for Wright's "humanity." This, he contends, "was large no, greater than large, in fact, immense." Let's get one thing straight. Wright was a cad. Even fervent champions of his architecture acknowledge that. Prudently, Hendrickson concedes the point, portraying the "arrogant and narcissistic" Wright as a status consumed poseur and a "neglectful father" who abandoned his wife and six children for what he called a "spiritual hegira" to Europe with Mamah Borthwick, the spouse of a client. Hendrickson concedes too that Wright was a manipulative, serial liar; a cheat who soaked unsuspecting employers (Louis Sullivan) and clients (D. D. Martin, Herbert Johnson) of many thousands of dollars. Wright shored up his at times tottering architectural practice by using his Taliesin Fellowship, the "school" he ran as a vehicle to get young, star struck students to pay him an exorbitant tuition to do the work ordinarily performed by paid employees. Hendrickson wishes to establish Wright's "fundamental decency as a person." He tilts at this windmill with formidable energy and considerable literary imagination, with an earnestness at once lavish and puzzling. His case, elliptically advanced, rests on several claims. First: Wright deserves our compassion because upon him tragedy fell. Best known is the infamous torching, by a servant who was probably psychotic, of Taliesin in 1914, and the brutal murder of Borthwick, her two children and four employees. Also, Wright was by turns resented by co workers, publicly ostracized as a home wrecker, rudely and prematurely written off as irrelevant by his professional colleagues, and often in the red, even while continuing to purchase Japanese art and, all told, about 85 automobiles. 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. Second: Because Wright experienced emotions, some of them painful, he must be a fundamentally decent person. If you scythe away the thickets of Hendrickson's alluringly presented prevarications, his assertion comes down to this: In his "Autobiography," Wright confessed "shame" and "remorse" at some of his more egregious conduct. Hendrickson acknowledges that Wright's "Autobiography" is notoriously riddled with deliberate falsehoods. Yet by these confessional moments, he is taken in, prompted to wonder if the "ideas we associate with Frank Lloyd Wright" are not "wrong, have long been wrong, or at least not wholly correct?" Third: Wright felt tenderly toward some people. Witness the delicacy with which Wright presented, in his "Autobiography," his early friendship in Chicago with Cecil Corwin, an older architect whom Hendrickson credibly infers could have been a closeted homosexual, conceding, though, that he has no substantive evidence to offer, "only my instincts." Hendrickson then builds on this inference, proceeding to maintain that Wright went out of his way to protect Corwin's privacy. On that foundation, he confabulates a homoerotic (if unconsummated) relationship between the two men. So: Wright suffered tragedies, felt affection and felt pain, and treated a few people decently. Ergo, he was a man of deep humanity. That's Hendrickson's position. Not enough to revolutionize, not enough even to alter, our understanding of the man. In florid prose, Hendrickson recounts countless episodes tangential to Wright's life or work, meandering onto all manner of occasionally interesting terrain. Breathless descriptions of the succession of owners of this or that Wright house; a stentorian account of Wright's malfeasant cousin Richard Lloyd Jones and his role as a newspaper editor in fomenting the Tulsa race riots; and the Taliesin murders, to which Hendrickson salaciously, repeatedly returns. Hendrickson devotes many pages to his own peripatetic quest to establish that Julian Carlton, the African American perpetrator, descended from slaves, though he admits: "It can't be proven ... I only strongly believe so." Often it seems that "Plagued by Fire"'s subject is as much Hendrickson's hunches and reverential fantasies as it is Wright's life. Hendrickson suggests that Carlton, in his murderous Taliesin rampage, could have been motivated by racial resentment. His evidence? After the Civil War, Carlton's father, Galon, appears on a "Registration Oath" list of prospective voters in Alabama, but not on lists of actual voters. That's it. From this sole, unprovable observation that Galon's vote might have been suppressed, Hendrickson weaves a fictive gothic tale about the father bequeathing motive to murder to the son: "This is the question that is hard to get out of the mind, once it has formed itself: Could the manipulated denial of Galon's right to vote, after he had been allowed to take the oath, have caused a deep suppressed anger that might have passed down?" Coyly, Hendrickson demurs that this is all "just speculations." "Plagued by Fire" would be simply forgettable if Hendrickson weren't perpetuating a romantic mythology of artistic genius that is at once tiresome, simplistic, long past its expiration date and wrong. Wright was an imaginative innovator and occasionally an excellent architect, but that doesn't transform a scoundrel into a tortured genius, let alone a sympathetic character. About how well his Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill., accommodated the parishioners, Wright reportedly told a colleague, "I don't give a damn what the use of it is; I wanted to build a building like that." No wonder clients stopped inhabiting some of his most celebrated projects in fairly short order. Much of Wright's architecture is overly controlled and controlling: It's telling that when he visited clients living in homes he designed, he would rearrange books and photos, to put away unsightly trinkets. In some of his houses, you can't even look out the window without some ornament insisting that you attend to it instead. As in life, so in his architecture; Wright produced some beautiful objects, but he lacked genuine feeling for his fellow earthlings. Hendrickson is hardly alone in wishing that creators of moving, redemptive art were graced with souls that touch the deepest wells of humanity. Whatever our wishes, though, history repeatedly shows it just isn't so. Some superb artists are troubled geniuses, others live ordinary lives. In the end, what matters is not the life but the work: its vision, its execution, its lessons, its relevance to the way we do and might live. But none of that is Paul Hendrickson's concern. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Consider the characters. A 12 year old with "big storms inside" that she can only control by cutting herself. A mother who gets excruciating headaches whenever she thinks of her son. A pathological pack rat. A man haunted by his mother, a suicide. Another whose best friend is a hamster. One of these is the therapist. The others and a few more besides are the troubled patients seeking help at Northwood Mental Health Center, the fictional small town facility "near the Berkshire Mountains" in which David Rabe's "Good for Otto" is set. They and the staff are exhibits in the play's attempted argument about a system that has itself gone mad. Not that Dr. Robert Michaels the one haunted by his mother is to blame. As played by Ed Harris in the tedious New Group production that opened on Thursday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, he is a good guy out of a '50s melodrama, quixotically fighting the bean counters in hopes of helping his patients. If he errs, it is on the side of over involvement; he suffers, too smugly, from a savior complex. His colleague Evangeline Ryder (Amy Madigan) has better boundaries but might as well wear a sign proclaiming her a profound empath and active listener. Her patients include F. Murray Abraham, as a man who refuses to get out of bed, and Maulik Pancholy, as a man fresh out of the closet but no less lonely for it. Using insight based therapeutic techniques that would not be unfamiliar to anyone who has ever taken an Intro Psych course, she cures one, if not the other. Mr. Rabe is not usually so squishy. His trilogy of plays about Vietnam and its aftermath ("Sticks and Bones," "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel," "Streamers") made him one of the indispensable dramatic voices of the 1970s. Later works, including "Hurlyburly" in 1984, brought the same coruscating moral vision to bear on other warlike ecosystems, like Hollywood, where he often worked as a screenwriter. My colleague Ben Brantley called the New Group's 2005 revival "smashing." But "Good for Otto," in which the battleground is the disturbed human psyche, is structured as a series of gassy monologues, most of them Dr. Michaels's, interspersed with scenes from therapy sessions and visits from Annoying Ghost Mom (Charlotte Hope). For some reason there are also jaunty musical interludes, in which the entire cast performs old timey songs like "On Moonlight Bay." These are accompanied on an upright piano by Kenny Mellman, of "Kiki and Herb" fame, who otherwise plays the pack rat. That character drops out of the action quickly, presumably so he can deal with the keyboard. The mother with the headaches disappears too, once Dr. Michaels reminds her that her son shot himself in the head exactly where her headaches are! Nor is the crisis for which the play is named dwelt upon seriously. It occurs when a hamster named Otto, the pet of an autistic adult named Timothy (Mark Linn Baker), requires abdominal surgery. Dr. Michaels and Evangeline patronize Timothy in his anxiety but he's clearly comic relief, if not sufficiently. The most difficult and enduring patient is Frannie, the young cutter, who flies into manic rages every time she visits her birth mother. The 13 year old actor Rileigh McDonald and the veteran Rhea Perlman as her foster mother do their best to make these cardboard characters affecting, but the play works tirelessly against them. You will guess long before the therapist does what Frannie's trigger is. It doesn't take much longer to see that Frannie and the others are merely Dr. Michaels's triggers, narrowly crafted to elicit his own mama issues and to demonstrate the failings of the mental health system. That system is represented and caricatured here in the form of a saccharine, double talking case manager (Nancy Giles) at Colossal Care Insurance. The name of the company gives you a sense of the halfhearted satire Mr. Rabe is purveying. The problem of mental health coverage wants a fuller, more serious treatment than that. But the play uses the issue as topical bait. At every opportunity it turns away from a deeper engagement in any patient's problems in favor of Dr. Michaels's, which despite Mr. Harris's typically honest investment remain vague. His flights of dudgeon while trying to convince the insurance company to authorize proper care for Frannie pale next to his fantasies of taking the girl home so he can care for her himself. With his pesky, interfering ghost of a mother, that could make a brisk, hair raising play; unfortunately, it's not this one. Rather, at nearly three hours, "Good for Otto" is a long and shapeless slog. Perhaps it was better served by its premiere production (with a different cast and director) at Chicago's Gift Theater in 2015, which received positive reviews. Here, under Scott Elliott's direction, it is unconvincing and overacted. Ms. Madigan gets closest to a coherent character, and Mr. Abraham, always confident with melodrama, grabs his depressive nothing of a role by the throat and makes it jump. But the interactions between the two are the only ones that make you believe therapy might ever do anyone any good. That's odd for a play that Mr. Rabe says was inspired by material from the psychotherapist Richard O'Connor's self help book "Undoing Depression." And odd for a play that, without providing much evidence, promotes its counselors and patients as brave emotional soldiers, doing the unheralded dirty work of exploring and improving the human condition. You understand where its hopeful heart is: in the realm of movies like "Now, Voyager" and "Ordinary People" that ennoble the power of hard won psychiatric insight, often accompanied by a music cue. But in trying to squeeze all that into a kaleidoscopic workplace dramedy, it achieves only a paradox: It makes mental illness seem just as uninteresting as its cure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
It's hard to remember, now that every e tailer from the luxury Net a Porter to the accessible ASOS has a section on its website devoted to "festival fashion;" now that brands like Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein and Amazon host special "activations" at Coachella; and now that influencers descend on Governors Ball to snap totally manufactured pictures of themselves swaying in product placed ecstasy to whatever band of the moment is playing. But when it all began, "festival" and "fashion" were actually opposing concepts. In fact, what you wore to the first was selected specifically as a protest against the second: chosen to make a statement of individuality and rebellion against the dictates not just of the establishment, but the designers who dressed them. Or so it was at Woodstock, where an aesthetic was encoded that has formed the DNA of all festival style that followed, but which was originally based on rejection. The fashion of Woodstock was the fashion of no fashion at all. It was the anti little shift dress, anti Peter Pan collar and windowpane check. The anti sport coat, anti mock turtle terry cloth striped V neck. The anti pinafore, anti cardigan anti all those garments that had become synonymous with the working uniforms of avenues from Madison to Massachusetts. It was anti bras and anti shoes: Before we freed the nipple they freed the breasts and feet. An anti commercial, anticapitalist assertion of identity, made through clothes (at least when clothes were involved at all) and documented in photographs: of denim clad, flower crowned boys and girls (and babies) dancing in the mud, slung across car hoods and grassy knolls, streaming down the dust and trash strewn road. Instead the dress code unofficial, of course, product of a mass mind meld that made a mash up of peace, love and material celebrated the handmade: the crocheted and macrame'd vest and detail, upsized from potholders and furniture doilies, the kind they teach you to make in arts and crafts classes but that was reinvented as a new kind of homewear (so much cooler than homewares) at Yasgur's Farm . It favored tie dye long before the fashion world got hold of it and changed its name to "degrade" back when anyone could take an old T shirt, twist it, secure with rubber bands, and dip into vats of dye for a sunburst, multicolored look that called to mind a wearable kaleidoscope, or a Crayola saturated trip. It embraced denim, the hallmark of the revolution and the youth movement. As William S. Burroughs once said of Jack Kerouac, his book "sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road." And that, apparently, led many of them straight to Woodstock, the better to show off jeans faded and ripped; worn on the tip of the hip bone purposely to expose the midriff and belly button; held on with rope or big, leather belts. It championed the hippie trail: the fabrics that could be found while backpacking from Kathmandu to Pokhara, Rajasthan to Kerala, tapestries transformed into sarongs with a knot and a needs must; napkins tied into halter necks tops; colors and patterns that mapped out the search for enlightenment through cultures and communes and the back of one's hand. See all of our coverage of Woodstock at 50. This was long before anyone began thinking about issues of cultural appropriation, of course, since easily half the attendees at Woodstock would have been guilty as charged. Not only in their assimilation of ethnic styles, but in their apparent obsession with the fringing and beadwork of Native American dress: swinging from halter tops and suede vests over not much else at all, blowin' in the wind, all of it meant to connect their pledge of harmony, personal and musical, to the mythic stereotypes of indigenous people and living in alliance with nature. To set this ideal in contrast to the false promises of the besuited patriarchy, just as the protest politics implicit in taking Old Glory off its pedestal (or to be literal, pole ) and making it into shorts (the kind you sit on) and backpack coverings (the kind you sleep on) were their own form of sartorial heresy. It wasn't flag burning, but it was close. And though this cornucopia of denim and Indian print and fringe and tie dye and crochet was united from the vantage point of history in its somewhat hackneyed celebration of D.I.Y. self expression, in its embrace of both ultra mini dresses and mud sweeping maxi skirts, bell bottoms and crop tops, it was also tribal. As a result, it formed the uniform of the counterculture. Though those involved would probably have considered "uniform" to be a dirty word. There's an irony in that, though at the time no one saw it (Woodstock was nothing if not sincere in its self myopia), and even though it doesn't come close to the irony of what has happened to the trends enshrined at the feet of Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin. Because like it or not, that's what they have become: trends. And upon those trends, once meant to symbolize an alternative to the corporate ooze, an entire commercial sector has been built. That it never occurred to the group who created festival fashion that it might one day turn into a style sector of its own; that it would birth an era of mass produced ersatz "individuality" the kind that can be donned with a boho deluxe slip is reflective of the naivete in which such fashion was born, and the calculated way nostalgia for that time has been exploited. So now, instead of a mantra, we have a marketing line: Tune in, turn on, dress (and pay) up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Peace of mind is way out of reach on "Social Cues," the fifth studio album by the Kentucky rock band Cage the Elephant. On "Social Cues," the group combines and revitalizes two well worn scenarios: the pains of fame album and the romantic breakup album (the band's frontman, Matt Shultz, was recently divorced). Both situations call for thorough self questioning and the mournful recognition that joy is fleeting, along with flashes of anger, estrangement, guilt and melancholy. No wonder most of the new songs revolve around minor chords. Onstage, Cage the Elephant has proudly maintained rock's men will be boys tradition; Shultz is a live wire exulting in the moment. And ever since its 2008 debut album, the group has noisily defied the cultural decline of rock in the 21st century. The band writes and performs as if there is still a canonical direct line from 1950s rock 'n' roll through the British Invasion and the psychedelic 1960s, the glam and punk 1970s, the new wave and arena rock 1980s and the grungy 1990s, all the way to the present as if hip hop hadn't all but completely sidelined the guitar band. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Over the course of two days, the N.F.L. saw its playoff field upended, with the No. 3 seed in both conferences being sent home by the No. 6 seeds, while each game was decided by a single score. It was a wild card weekend that delivered on its name, and it set up a divisional round for next weekend that looks far different than most people predicted. None Running backs are cool again. The passing game seems to get more important every season, but the most valuable player of the weekend was Tennessee's Derrick Henry. The supersize back rumbled over the Patriots to the tune of 204 yards from scrimmage and a touchdown, helping make up for quarterback Ryan Tannehill's no show. "When you can run it when the other team knows you're gonna run it, that says a lot about your running game," Coach Mike Vrabel said of Henry, whose big performance came on his 26th birthday. Henry was not alone in reminding people of the impact a good running back can make. Dalvin Cook played a huge role in Minnesota's upset over the Saints, totaling 130 yards from scrimmage and two touchdowns. Devin Singletary, a rookie out of Florida Atlantic, had 134 yards from scrimmage for Buffalo, yet lost thanks to a thrilling Houston comeback in which Duke Johnson provided two key blocks on a 2 point conversion, and then reeled off an 18 yard catch and run, on a 3rd and 18 play, that kept a drive alive long enough for Deshaun Watson to win the game. None Karma is not always instant. Way back in 2009, Josh McDaniels, then the head coach of the Denver Broncos, cut his team's punter, Brett Kern. The Titans quickly snatched the promising 23 year old off waivers, and in 2017 eight seasons after McDaniels deemed him expendable Kern earned his first trip to the Pro Bowl. On Friday, he was named the N.F.L.'s first team All Pro punter, and a day after that he got some sweet revenge on McDaniels, now the offensive coordinator of the Patriots. Kern played a huge role in Tennessee's come from behind victory, contributing four punts in the second half that gave New England an average starting position of their own 8 yard line his last one pinned the Patriots at the 1 yard line, all but sealing their fate. None There are no bad matchups in the playoffs. The N.F.L. buried Buffalo Houston in the Saturday afternoon time slot and proceeded to get burned when the Texans came back from a 16 0 deficit, eventually winning the weekend's most exciting game in overtime thanks to a Deshaun Watson play that will live forever on highlight reels. The Vikings, written off by everyone including us in their matchup with the Saints, took the best shots New Orleans had to give and then had Kirk Cousins engineer a beautiful game winning drive in overtime. When Cousins dropped a perfect 43 yard pass just over Adam Thielen's shoulder to set up his game winning, 4 yard touchdown throw to Kyle Rudolph, the quarterback shrugged off years of disappointment and mockery. The weekend's "good" matchups could hardly compare to the "bad" ones. None They should make the whole team out of Taysom Hill. The sport of football owes Hill an apology for his singular performance in the wild card round not having come in a win. The Saints' Swiss Army knife completed a 50 yard pass to Deonte Harris, ran the ball four times for 50 yards, caught two passes for 25 yards and a touchdown, and was credited with a solo tackle on special teams. And because of the realities of how memory and highlights work, the performance will be largely forgotten by next weekend. Maybe if Hill can master punting or kicking by next season he won't suffer this type of indignity again. None Life is rough for wild card teams. As the lowest seeded teams in the playoffs, the Titans and the Vikings were assigned the nearly impossible task of beating Tom Brady and Drew Brees on the road. Both teams delivered. Their reward? Tennessee will travel to Baltimore to face quarterback Lamar Jackson and the 14 2 Ravens, and Minnesota will travel to San Francisco to face defensive end Nick Bosa and the 13 3 49ers. In its initial assessment, Las Vegas was expecting the divisional round to be far less exciting than the wild card round: The 49ers are favored by 7 points over the Vikings, the Ravens are favored by 10 over the Titans, and the Chiefs are favored by 9.5 over the Texans. The closest line has the Packers favored by 3.5 points over the Seahawks. It was not the most exciting weekend for quarterbacks, with a grand total of six touchdown passes thrown in the four wild card games one of which was thrown a wide receiver. Watson, however, stole the show by refusing to go down on a game saving play in overtime in which he spun out of two potential sacks before finding Taiwan Jones for a 34 yard catch and run, setting up a game winning field goal in overtime. DeAndre Hopkins said it all when asked about the play. "I hope everyone watched this today, but he's amazing," Hopkins told reporters. "You can't put too many words on it." Minnesota's Dalvin Cook scored one more touchdown, and Seattle's Marshawn Lynch had a throwback game, but Henry, who was the N.F.L.'s leading rusher this season, gets the nod as he was a one man show in Tennessee's upset over New England. In the second half of the game, when the Titans needed him most, Henry seemed to take the ball on every play, and the Patriots never found an answer for him. Minnesota's Adam Thielen had one of the prettier catches you will ever see and it set his team up to win in overtime but Metcalf ended up with a slightly better game thanks to an edge in receiving yards, and a wild touchdown in which he made the heads up decision to get up and run before anyone touched him after he fell down making a catch near the end zone. Texans 22, Bills 19 Josh Allen beat himself up quite a bit in the aftermath of Buffalo's loss, but the second year quarterback may want to keep something in mind: According to Pro Football Reference, he was just the third player in N.F.L. history to have 250 or more passing yards and 90 or more rushing yards in a playoff game so the loss might have something to do with his teammates as well. Titans 20, Patriots 13 Derrick Henry's running and Tennessee's defense were enough to get the Titans past New England, but if they are to have a prayer against Baltimore next weekend, they will need a lot more from quarterback Ryan Tannehill, who completed just eight passes for 72 yards, and wide receiver A.J. Brown, who had one catch for 4 yards. Vikings 26, Saints 20 It was trumped up a bit because it came against New Orleans, but tight end Kyle Rudolph appeared to commit something akin to offensive pass interference on his game winning touchdown catch, which could not have felt good for Saints fans. "There is contact by both players, but none of that contact rises to the level of a foul," Al Riveron, the N.F.L.'s senior vice president of officiating, said when asked about the play. "This is consistent with what we've done all year long we left the ruling on the field. We let it stand." Seahawks 17, Eagles 9 The disappointment in Philadelphia was palpable, as Carson Wentz, who missed the previous two postseasons with injuries, was forced to leave with a concussion after attempting just four passes. Josh McCown gave it his best effort, but he could not keep up with Russell Wilson and Seattle. While some Eagles players believed that Jadeveon Clowney's hit on Wentz was a dirty play, the defensive end tried to make it clear that there was no intention to cause injury. "It was a bang bang play," he told reporters. "I don't intend to hurt anybody in this league, let me just put that out there. I've been down the injury road; it's not fun. My intention was not to hurt him. I was just playing fast." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Last month, Searchlight Pictures announced plans for a movie about Joseph Boulogne, the 18th century composer also known as Chevalier de Saint Georges. When the announcement was made, headlines resurrected yet another moniker for Boulogne: "Black Mozart." Presumably intended as a compliment, this erasure of Boulogne's name not only subjugates him to an arbitrary white standard, but also diminishes his truly unique place in Western classical music history. Few musicians have led a life as fascinating and multifaceted as Boulogne's. Recounting it, however, is an exercise in educated guesswork. What is known is scantily and contradictorily documented, when not purely anecdotal. To make matters worse, a 19th century novel by Roger de Beauvoir, "Le Chevalier de Saint Georges," intertwined fact and fiction so seamlessly that many of its fabrications gradually found a place in Boulogne's assumed biography. What we know is that Boulogne, the illegitimate son of a wealthy French plantation owner and an enslaved African Guadeloupean woman, was born between 1739 and '49 on the island of Basse Terre, the western half of the archipelago of Guadeloupe. When he was about 10, he and his mother followed his father and the rest of his legitimate family back to France, where Boulogne was enrolled in elite schools and received private lessons in music and fencing. His first claim to fame, in fact, was as a champion fencer, the best known disciple of the renowned master La Boessiere. A painting depicting a match between Boulogne and the Chevalier d'Eon remains on display at Buckingham Palace. Boulogne's extraordinary fencing talent led Louis XV to name him Chevalier de Saint Georges, after his father's noble title, even though France's Code Noir prohibited Boulogne from officially inheriting the title because of his African ancestry. He earned a nearly mythical status even across the Atlantic: John Adams described him as "the most accomplished man in Europe in riding, shooting, fencing, dancing and music." Very little is known about Boulogne's musical training. But when Francois Joseph Gossec, one of France's pioneering symphony writers and most prominent conductors, founded the Concert des Amateurs series in 1769, he invited Boulogne to join its orchestra, first as a violinist and later as its concertmaster. Boulogne's first documented compositions are from 1770 and '71. While these are clearly works by a composer still searching for his voice, they already demonstrate his commitment to the new and unexplored. The six string quartets of his Opus 1 were among the first in that genre to be written in France. His three sonatas for keyboard and violin (Op. 1a) feature those instruments as equals, breaking away from the Baroque tradition of basso continuo, which was still very much in vogue. His harmonies, textures and formal schemes place him within a Classical style that was still in the process of forming. His first public and critical success as a composer came with his two violin concertos (Op. 2), which premiered in 1772 at the Concert des Amateurs series, featuring Boulogne himself as soloist. The level of craft and sophistication in these pieces far surpass his efforts of the previous two years. The particularly beautiful Largo movement of the second concerto already features many trademarks of his later style, including a penchant for whimsical colors that run the range of instruments and an understanding of how to balance orchestral forces with clarity. When Gossec was invited to direct the Concert Spirituel series in 1773, he named his concertmaster as his successor. Under Boulogne's direction, the Concert des Amateurs orchestra became widely regarded as the best in France, if not all of Europe. His raised profile as a conductor led to an invitation in 1775 to apply for the directorship of the Academie Royal de Musique, the country's most prominent musical position. His candidacy, however, was crushed by a petition to Marie Antoinette from a group of performers who objected to "accepting orders from a mulatto." Also in 1775, he wrote two symphonies concertantes for two violins and orchestra (Op. 6), his initial contribution to a genre he and other French composers of the time helped define. A hybrid of the Baroque concerto grosso and the Classical concerto, a symphonie concertante usually featured two or more soloists in a virtuosic dialogue that emulated a musical duel. Boulogne wrote eight such pieces between 1775 and '78, a testament to the demand for them among French audiences. In 1778, Mozart traveled to Paris, staying from March to September and briefly under the same roof as Boulogne, hosted by Count Sickingen. It is implausible, to say the least, that Mozart did not hear Boulogne's music during this period. Intriguingly, Mozart's first composition after his return to Austria was his Symphonie Concertante in E flat (K. 364). And in an article published in 1990 in the Black Music Research Journal, Gabriel Banat points to the remarkable similarities between an excerpt from a Boulogne violin concerto (Op. 7, No. 1) from 1777 and a passage from Mozart's K. 364, from the following year. The gesture in question recurs in Boulogne's solo string writing a difficult sequence climbing to the highest register of the instrument, immediately followed by a dramatic dip but had never appeared in Mozart's work until this Presto. When lack of funding forced the Concert des Amateurs to end in 1781, Boulogne and his musicians found a home with the newly formed Concert de la Loge Olympique, which quickly gained a reputation as the best orchestra in Europe. It was under this umbrella that Boulogne conducted the premiere of Haydn's six Paris symphonies, among many other important commissions. Discouraged by his persistent lack of success in opera, by dwindling patronage because of changes on the political scene, and by his increased activism in the French Revolution as an enlisted officer, Boulogne sharply reduced his musical activities toward the end of his life. He died in 1799, not a penniless man, but certainly a far less relevant and valued figure in French society than he had been a couple of decades earlier. Nevertheless, his influence in France and abroad, both as a curator and a creator, was felt long after his death. It is a remarkable fact that his music has survived two centuries of neglect caused by the systemic racism that permeates the notion of a Western canon. Neither his omission from music history textbooks of the two most used in America, he gets a brief, vague mention in one and is absent from the other nor a lack of advocacy from programmers, publishing houses and record labels have erased him completely. This is the ultimate proof that Boulogne doesn't need to be anyone's second best let alone anyone's Black echo. So, yes, I cannot wait to see the movie. But spare me the awful nickname. Marcos Balter is a composer and Professor of Music Composition at the University of California, San Diego. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
WHAT: An 1899 house with three bedrooms and two full and two half baths SETTING: Belfast is a city of about 6,600 residents on the Penobscot Bay and the Passagassawakeag River. Many of its oldest houses were built for merchants in the 19th century when the city was a hub of shipping and shipbuilding. Built in 1889, this house is in an historic district about six blocks from downtown, which has a few restaurants, a grocery co op, small art galleries and a 1912 movie theater. The house is about three blocks in from Penobscot Bay. INSIDE: Most of the interior details and architectural flourishes are original. On the entry level, there are two parlors, a library, a formal dining room, a kitchen and an enclosed porch. Many rooms feature original brass or crystal chandeliers, ceiling medallions, woodwork and brass hardware. Both the enclosed porch and the library, which has mahogany shelves and a built in desk, have views of Penobscot Bay. The entry level has two wood burning fireplaces, one in a parlor, the other in the dining room. The kitchen's six burner gas stove was designed to look like an antique wood burning cook stove. The kitchen also features maple cabinets and a tin ceiling. It was renovated within the past 10 years, along with the bathrooms. The original walk in icebox is now used as a pantry. There is a butler's pantry with original cabinets, a double sink and a second dishwasher. The three bedrooms are on the second floor. The master bedroom has a fireplace, his and hers closets and a window seat with views of Penobscot Bay. The en suite bathroom, which also has bay views, is outfitted with a whirlpool tub. Both bedrooms have original marble topped sinks. On the third floor, a sitting room has the house's best bay views. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Ever since 1991, when The Chronicle of Philanthropy started publishing its annual list of the United States nonprofits that raise the most money from private sources, United Way has topped the list every year except for two. And 2015 was one of those years, according to the discouraging figures the publication put out this fall. United Way and its United States affiliates collected 3.7 billion in contributions, down 4 percent from a year earlier, even as the 400 top charities collected 7 percent more during that same period. The charity, which has more than 1,800 local chapters around the world that raise money and redistribute it to local nonprofits, is taking in slightly less than it did in 2004, with a bit of movement up and then down since then. Giving to United Way is a reflexive action for many Americans whose employers solicit contributions via payroll deduction. But it's obvious that an increasing number of donors are asking a perfectly reasonable question now: Who needs a charitable middleman when causes and data galore are at our fingertips? Let's begin by giving credit where credit is due: To the extent that the United States has a culture of giving, United Way and its workplace campaigns (along with religious organizations and the federal tax code) deserve a fair bit of credit. According to Heather E. Price, co author with Patricia Snell Herzog of "American Generosity," friends and community members are the two factors that appeared most often when the researchers studied what or who most influenced higher giving levels. A workplace campaign can capitalize on both, since many people are friends with their co workers. Those campaigns have also proved plenty irritating for employees. So many of them felt pressured to give, or give more, that United Way now posts a number of guidelines on its site to warn companies away from heavy handedness. Peers, not bosses, should lead fund raising efforts, and 100 percent participation goals may make employees uncomfortable if they do not want to give at the office. Campaign tactics aside, what can a middleman offer under the best of circumstances? Jason Saul, founder of Mission Measurement, which helps organizations calculate the impact of charitable dollars and has done work for several United Way chapters, laid out three historical categories of assistance. First, United Way promised to make sure that money did not go to illegal charities. Then, the local chapters offered expertise about community needs that many citizens would not have recognized. Finally, United Way held out the promise that the causes and organizations it picked would help each donor's charitable dollars have more impact than if that person, acting alone, picked the recipients. Today, however, anyone can use sites like Charity Navigator or GuideStar to identify illegitimate charities. Plenty of well informed people give to the causes that move them most and do not want help finding others. And determining value and efficiency has proved tricky for nonprofits that cannot agree on universal metrics, though organizations like GiveWell have made a game effort toward finding a handful of organizations each year that do the most good for the people who have the least. Against this backdrop, United Way chapters are left scrambling to prove they are addressing the causes that matter most to people in their communities. The Chicago branch, where giving has increased in recent years, has tried to do this through a focus on individual neighborhoods. In Brighton Park, on Chicago's southwest side, one goal is to increase graduation rates at the local high school by devoting resources to preparing children for freshman year. Everything from health to parent mentors in the classroom is part of the mix, and early data suggests that high school readiness is already creeping upward, the chapter says. "People know that we'll get to the most underserved neighborhoods and people in need, and I think that is still a big reason why people want to give to United Way," said Wendy DuBoe, president of United Way of Metropolitan Chicago. Still, consider the new and very modern competition for donations. At Benevolent, donors can search for individuals who have a specific need beyond basic food, clothing or shelter say tools for a budding machinist or contact lenses for someone with limited eyesight and then pay for some or all of it on the spot. The donations are tax deductible, as they go through a validator at other nonprofit agencies. "Be part of someone's story," Benevolent's website promises. Even better, it emphasizes that "you can step into the story." Is this sort of pitch tailor made to appeal to narcissists seeking self satisfaction? Or is it just the new reality, one that United Way does not understand or cannot replicate? Megan Kashner, Benevolent's founder, replies by pointing to science and the unfortunately named "identified victim effect," which posits that many donors prefer to help individuals who are not anonymous. "We're appealing to people's visions of themselves," she said. But as what, I asked her? Turns out there is no single answer. Some donors view themselves as lucky that they have never been in acute need of charitable assistance. Others have been there and want to throw the rope back for others. "We're inviting people to relate to one another's stories in whatever way suits them and who they are, where they've been and who they want to be," she said. Ms. Kashner, who is also a clinical assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, is also trying to speak directly to small dollar donors who wonder whether their modest contributions can make a difference. With Benevolent, it's obvious that they can, especially when you get a thank you note from a recipient and can respond from your own email address. "We used to attribute that kind of true impact only to people making much larger gifts," she said. "So this is not just about choice but also about inclusion." Brian A. Gallagher, who used to raise funds for local United Way chapters and now runs the international organization, has no beef with anyone who wants to give that way (or with finishing second in the rankings to Fidelity's donor advised fund, a tax efficient way for individuals to set up quasi foundations that raised 4.6 billion in 2015). But he believes it has its limits. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
DUBLIN Cut Ireland's minimum wage? Check. Collect more in property taxes from beleaguered homeowners? Check. Raise the corporate tax rate, which could plug the gaping hole in Ireland's tattered balance sheets even faster? Well, no. The austerity plan Ireland unveiled on Wednesday to secure a bailout from its international partners makes one thing clear: much of the 15 billion euros (or 20 billion) in savings the government has pledged to find over the next four years will come from the welfare state and the working class. But the measures will not touch large businesses like Microsoft, Intel and Pfizer, which have created thousands of jobs and fueled exports in Ireland for years, thanks to one of the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe. Germany, France and other European countries have long complained that Ireland's tax structure has distorted competition. Some politicians have seized on the troubles by pushing for an increase in the 12.5 percent rate as part of a rescue package of about 85 billion euros (or 114 billion), the terms of which are still being negotiated. Some of that external pressure subsided this week as the political crisis in Ireland worsened. But if Ireland cannot meet its budget cutting targets, or if its troubled banks require even more financing than expected, some countries might push the issue back into the spotlight. From Ireland's perspective, any future effort by its European partners to revive the issue would damage the country's prospects for recovery once the banking crisis eases. "The corporate tax is one of the pillars of Ireland's economy, because it drives exports and jobs, and creates tax revenues for the government," said Paul Duffy, a vice president at Pfizer in Ireland, one of the biggest multinational employers here. Raising the tax could scare away companies and "would damage a recovery and our ability to repay the massive debts we've taken on," he said. Critics, however, say that in addition to siphoning business from countries with higher corporate tax rates, some multinationals operating under Ireland's tax rules use complicated schemes to move profits in and out of subsidiaries there. In some cases, that allows them to lower their effective tax rate, they say. Tax rates have become a contentious issue in Europe, where governments are competing as never before to lure badly needed foreign investments as the economic crisis weighs on growth. Economic activity has declined sharply in the housing and banking industries. That leaves manufacturing and exports as two of the few channels to stimulate the necessary growth. Ireland's exports grew 6 percent over the last year and manufacturing output increased by more than 10 percent. Philip R. Lane, a professor of international macroeconomics at Trinity College Dublin, said that if the tax rate were nudged a little higher it would help the country collect significant revenue. "But in the context of a devastated economy, where it's the only thing driving the multinational sector, trying to tweak that rate is not something that any of the political parties want to do," he said. Ireland's has long pursued a strategy of luring business by helping major corporations from the United States and elsewhere reduce the tax they pay on profits. While the rate is well below that of Germany and France, it is higher than in Hungary and other countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Ireland's edge, businesses and politicians say, is that it is a small, open economy with a well educated, nimble and English speaking work force and with a relatively stable social compact between unions and companies. That combination has attracted drug companies like Pfizer and Forest Laboratories, and technology firms like Google and, more recently, Facebook and LinkedIn. About 70 percent of the nation's exports, and 70 percent of business spending on research and development here, comes from foreign direct investment, according to the country's Industrial Development Agency, or I.D.A. Ireland, the body responsible for luring foreign investment to Ireland. Foreign owned firms that are members of I.D.A. Ireland pay workers about 7.1 billion each year and provide one in seven of the country's jobs, either directly or indirectly. All told, multinationals paid about 5 billion euros in corporate tax to Ireland last year, more than 50 percent of all corporate tax receipts, according to the group's figures. Pfizer, which has been in Ireland for decades, is among the many multinationals monitoring the tax debate. "When you're a company like Pfizer, you make billions of dollars of investments for the long term because Ireland has provided certainty" about the tax rate, said Mr. Duffy, the vice president. "When you start to mess with that, you raise issues of trust" that could cause some companies to reconsider the wisdom of investing in Ireland, he said. Microsoft, Intel and Hewlett Packard recently indicated that they would reconsider whether Ireland was the best base for their main European operations if the corporate tax were to rise. Companies could find it more attractive to relocate outside of the European Union to countries whose low tax rates are not menaced by political haggling in the European Union. "The difficult calculus the Irish government has to make is if they raise the rate to siphon in more money, will that be a deterrent to future generations of foreign investors," said Iain Begg, a professor at the London School of Economics. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Roger J. Lynch, who led Pandora, the music streaming service, until January, is scheduled to take over as Conde Nast's chief executive next month. The board of Conde Nast announced a new chief executive Thursday, naming Roger J. Lynch to take charge of the century old publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as the company looks to stem its financial losses and transform itself into a creator for the digital age. Mr. Lynch is an outsider who comes from the worlds of technology, television and finance. Most recently he served as the head of Pandora, the streaming music service that SiriusXM acquired last year. Mr. Lynch and several other Pandora executives stepped down at the end of January. "Conde Nast has really culturally significant and iconic brands," Mr. Lynch, 56, said in an interview. "That's why I got interested. I'm really looking forward to it." He will replace Robert A. Sauerberg Jr., who announced in November that he would step down once his successor had been found. Mr. Sauerberg, who ran the once plush Conde Nast for less than four years, struggled to turn around the business, which was slow to adapt to digital platforms. The company's sales declined, like those in the rest of the magazine industry. Read more about Mr. Sauerberg's tenure at Conde Nast and his departure. Mr. Lynch, who is scheduled to start on April 22, will lead both Conde Nast and Conde Nast International. The sibling companies have historically been operated separately, but are being combined to save on costs and streamline much of the business. Before taking the new job, Mr. Lynch will move from San Francisco to New York, where he lived in the 1990s when he was a banker at Morgan Stanley. He will replace Mr. Sauerberg on the four person Conde Nast board; members also include Jonathan and Steven O. Newhouse, whose family has run the company since 1959, and Thomas Summer, the chief financial officer of Advance Publications, Conde Nast's Newhouse owned parent company. Mr. Lynch has his work cut out for him. In 2017, Conde Nast lost more than 120 million, but it narrowed those losses last year after cutting costs through layoffs and increasing revenue from digital video. The company stopped putting out print editions of some of its magazines, including Glamour, and has been seeking buyers for Brides, Golf Digest and W. Steven O. Newhouse, a nephew of the company's longtime chairman, S. I. Newhouse Jr., who died in 2017, helped lead the search for the new boss. He said the board had settled on Mr. Lynch after more than half a dozen meetings starting in December. "We felt really comfortable dealing with Roger," Mr. Newhouse said in a brief interview. "His experience dealing with disruption and uncertainty which in the media business is now the norm and his entrepreneurial skills gave him a unique skill set." Mr. Lynch, a veteran of TV and internet businesses, was well compensated at Pandora, receiving roughly 12.7 million in salary, stock awards and bonuses in 2017. After the Pandora sale was announced last year, he declined SiriusXM's offer for him to stay on. It was around that time that Conde Nast reached out to him. The unorthodox choice came partly at the suggestion of David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, according to Mr. Newhouse. A few weeks after the board announced its search, Mr. Remnick sent Mr. Newhouse a list of six names that included Mr. Lynch. 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. Mr. Remnick has become something of a talent scout at Conde Nast. He also recruited Radhika Jones in 2017 when Vanity Fair was on the search for a new editor following the departure of its longtime leader Graydon Carter. There was no aha moment in choosing Mr. Lynch, according to Jonathan Newhouse, a cousin of the company's late patriarch who has directed its international operations since 1991 and was recently named the chairman of the board. "And that was good," he said. "We didn't want someone who was flashy. This was a rational process, and it took a lot of meetings." He added, "My role now is to support Roger as he takes on this responsibility, which he's so superbly qualified to carry out." Mr. Lynch, a Virginia native who has bounced around the globe running businesses and start ups, mostly in the tech industry, spent a large portion of his career at Dish, the satellite TV service. There, he ran the streaming service Sling, the first product to replicate a bundle of cable and network channels on a digital platform. His experience in television and streaming could help Conde Nast amplify its digital video business, which has become a major source of revenue for the publisher. "I definitely see that as part of the future," Mr. Lynch said. "It's very expensive to produce, but it's also very lucrative." The larger challenge, as he sees it, is to find ways for the company to tap into the areas where audiences have flocked. "It's not fruitful to try to use logic to predict how consumers will behave," he said. "It's much more fruitful to see how they behave and adapt your business models to that." That is likely to mean trying new ventures and exploiting some of the company's more successful digital efforts. Aside from online video, Vogue China has become a moneymaker for the company, thanks to its robust presence on the Chinese mobile app WeChat, which can be thought of as a combination of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google. Altogether, the company's international business has become a bright spot, generating 50 million in profit for 2017, largely in Asia. The United States and European arms still incur losses. In addition to his turnaround effort at Pandora, Mr. Lynch helped take Mark Cuban's internet company Broadcast.com public more than 20 years ago, during his days as a Morgan Stanley banker. The deal eventually made a billionaire out of Mr. Cuban, who is now known as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball franchise and as a panelist on the reality show "Shark Tank." "He reminds me of that all the time," Mr. Lynch said. "Internet valuations were hard to understand or rationalize at the time. I think the first day the stock tripled." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Sophocles knew: Every family has its issues. And in his famed Theban plays, the social ramifications of this are devastating. In "Oedipus Rex," Oedipus kills his father and beds his mother, which causes a plague to descend onto Thebes. In "Antigone," his daughter Antigone defies her uncle, Creon, and the family strife results in a string of deaths. In "Sophocles in Staten Island," a pithy 33 minute film, a Filipino American family works on a home video adaptation of those two plays while in quarantine. Beneath its charming comic veneer, the piece offers a larger lesson: what the politics of the family can reveal about the politics of the state. Michi Barall and Sung Rno wrote the adorably self referential digital offering, which was directed by Jack Tamburri and comes courtesy of Ma Yi Theater Company's new online hub, Ma Yi Studios. It was filmed and performed by the Obie winning actor Ron Domingo and his family, playing themselves. Domingo is the domineering father, committed to making a quality video (or, rather, "film," as he haughtily declares, aiming to be the next Wong Kar wai), who ends up driving away his cast his teen daughter, Autumn, her younger brother, Connor, and their mother, Lynn Taylor. Meanwhile, Domingo continues work on Sophocles' second play, putting on the crown as King Creon, and suddenly Autumn becomes a real life Antigone, railing against his despotic rule. But when Lynn warns Autumn to use her anger wisely and consider how the swaths of Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets have channeled theirs into action, she decides to make her own creative statement instead. The injuries that occur in "Sophocles in Staten Island" are superficial: hurt feelings, yes; murders and eye gouging via fashion accessory, no. (This Oedipus has not blood but ketchup on his face.) The script is clever without being too pat, familiar without being mundane; it's a darling bite size snippet of theater and filmmaking during a time of disaster. And while it at first seems as though our time with the Domingo family is merely meant to illustrate the tension between a proud sovereign a sputtering suburban dad and those subject to his rule, pointing beyond the home successfully introduces a bigger political context. In the original plays, state order breaks down once family order does. This fear has made its way into American politics, where threats to the nuclear family are deployed by the right (the endangered traditional family) and the left (the family representing a body of citizens with shared values). "We are all part of one American family," Barack Obama has said. Real families are hardly so stable and harmonious. They are divided by politics. Family members argue, they fail to understand one another, and they become estranged. Or, in the case of Autumn and her father, they suffer from a case of creative differences. But family is not just the parents and siblings, but the environs, the whole context of a person's formative years. It is an inherited viewpoint or structure; resisting those rules can translate into larger social resistance. The family should be a place for love and respect, but, as many people know in their own lives, sometimes family doesn't always live up to this reputation; sometimes family is just what you're born into, what you're stuck with, no matter the conflict or injury. "Sophocles in Staten Island" doesn't push too hard on this, and it ends far more brightly than the Greek originals no deaths, and ice cream all around. This Creon realizes the error of his ways and praises his daughter for making her own statement, even though it differed from his. He has faith in, and newfound respect for, the next generation. Nationally, we too are in a moment of rebellion. We're fighting back against our fathers and uncles wearing the crown, and right now that fight looks like a Thebes racked with conflict and ravaged by plague. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Wax said he hoped that if the British government did order the show's closure, it would be for only two or three weeks. He is unable to get cancellation insurance, he added. The musical's return will benefit not just the actors and musicians, but also workers in the wider theater ecosystem such as wig makers, set builders and even accountants, Wax said. "This is very much about jobs," he added. "I'd need to start laying off staff in October if I don't get shows back on." Wax said he would make a "reasonable weekly profit" if the run sold out. But he said he was keenly aware of the risks of trying to restart the show during a pandemic. In June, he said that "Six" would return for a series of drive in events across Britain, but two weeks later the tour was canceled because of uncertainties around local lockdowns. Because the musical involves only six actors onstage, there will be few changes because of the virus. The choreography for one song will be rejigged so that the wives are not singing directly at one another, Wax said. Offstage, he said, numerous measures will be put in place to ensure staff safety. Cast members will probably be tested weekly during the run, although that will depend on government guidance and the availability of tests. The cast will not be barred from wider social interaction for the whole run as had been planned for the drive in tour because of its length, Wax said, adding that isolating the cast would be "prohibitively expensive." Audience wise, the theater will operate at a reduced capacity of about 550, down from 967, to maintain social distancing and keep people at least three feet apart. All attendees will have to wear masks, as required by the British government. The production is one of several small scale shows hoping to spark a revival of London's theater district this fall. "The Mousetrap," which claims to be the world's longest running play, said in July that it would return to the St. Martin's Theater on Oct. 23. And the British comedian Adam Kay said on Sunday that he would perform a six week run of "This is Going to Hurt," a show about his time as a doctor in Britain's National Health Service, at the Apollo Theater starting Oct. 22. Wax said he also intended to bring back two other West End shows "The Play That Goes Wrong" and "Magic Goes Wrong" in November and December. All of Wax's shows, as well as Kay's, will be at venues run by Nimax, a major theater group. It said on Sunday that it would reopen all six of its West End venues this fall. Britain's culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, wrote in The Mail on Sunday early this month that his staff was working on a project to alow full theaters to return by Christmas, based on measures such as rapid coronavirus testing of audience members. The project was called Operation Sleeping Beauty, he added. The "Six" announcement, and the other planned West End reopenings, are in stark contrast to the situation on Broadway, which is to remain closed for at least the rest of this year. Wax said he had his fingers crossed that "Six" would reopen successfully and not suffer the same fate as his planned tour of drive in venues. "It'd be really heartbreaking to get so close again and then have the whole thing called off," he said, adding: "But I'd rather get on with things than wait this out." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The son of a colonel in the imperial Russian Army, Alexei Jawlensky was 18 and a cadet when a visit to the All Russian Exhibition of Industry and Art in Moscow in 1882 changed his life by introducing him to painting. Eventually he moved to Munich with Marianne von Werefkin, another artistic expat from the nobility, vacationed with Kandinsky, bought a van Gogh and studied Buddhism, yoga and theosophy. He was never quite an artist of the first rank. But the galloping retrospective of his dogged, wide ranging trek through the colors and styles of his time showing at the Neue Galerie has the poignant appeal of a war diary. The show, generously curated by Vivian Endicott Barnett and imaginatively designed by Peter Kimpe, offers a view of historical cataclysm in this case, the emergence of abstraction that's all the more illuminating for its limited, personal horizons. Jawlensky's precocious impatience with the strictures of representation was the only real constant in his early portraits and landscapes. "Helene at the Age of Fifteen," painted in 1900, when he was in his mid 30s, shows von Werefkin's maid with whom he fathered a child and whom he later married as a self possessed young woman against a background of dim shadow. Apart from her vivid eyes, though, she looks like a watery ghost, as if a body were merely ground to be campaigned through on the way to the soul. "Self Portrait With Top Hat" (1904) is a swirl of lime green dashes borrowed from van Gogh from which Jawlensky peers out as if in an absinthe vision. In "Dark Blue Turban," which shows Helene in her 20s in a rose red dress, Jawlensky tries out a striking bluish black outline, but here, too, a kind of military tunnel vision leaves him careless of his details, skipping over Helene's breastbone and fudging the line of her forearm in his hurry to get to her gaze. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
"American Idol," which Ryan Seacrest now hosts from his home, and "The Voice" are taking different approaches to quarantine aesthetics. The first episode of this season's "American Idol" opened in typically outsized fashion. We flashed back to last season's finale, as Laine Hardy was crowned the winner, amid blinding lights and a roaring crowd in a massive theater. Since it began on Fox in 2002, "Idol" has never been a small show. (It ended on Fox in 2016, then ABC revived it two years later.) It's about big dreams, big notes and big spectacle. But on April 26, after it had exhausted its pretaped early episodes, "Idol" emerged, like the rest of us under stay at home orders, into a world whose boundaries the Covid 19 pandemic has made constrictingly small. Unable to have finalists perform with live bands in front of live crowds, the producers sent the singers video and lighting equipment and had them record performances in backyards, garages and bedrooms. A week later, NBC's singing competition, "The Voice," followed suit for its first "playoff" rounds. The results so far have been both affecting and unsettling, emotional and apocalyptic. Where Ryan Seacrest once held "Idol" court from center stage of a theater, he now works from home, backed by a neon logo. Like so many TV hosts today, he has the Rupert Pupkin esque cast of someone pretending to run a show. Carson Daly opens "The Voice" from an empty set, the trademark red judges' chairs sitting like abandoned monuments, and refers vaguely to "Everything that's been going on." The shows are among the first test cases for how reality productions might adapt to a long siege. ("America's Got Talent" returns this month and even "The Bachelorette" is exploring options for shooting, somehow, under quarantine.) How much reality can a reality show bear? Do you try to maintain the illusion of high production TV grandeur, or lean in to the Zoom iness of it all? Do you aim for escape or catharsis or mash both up into a big ball of glitter and emotion? The new "Idol" episodes, subtitled "On With the Show," play up the homeyness of the domestic settings. The competitors perform from front porches strung with lights the new "Idol" loves porches or inside garages, or on living room couches. One finalist, Sophia James, sings the Beach Boys' "In My Room" ... in her room, beside a set of sliding mirror closet doors. Essentially, "Idol" is trading one romantic image (the emerging star hitting the big time onstage) for another (the aspiring artist plugging away in solitude, singing in front of the mirror). At the same time, it puts an idyllic sheen on the audience's own shelter in place experience. You're stuck at home, we're stuck at home, it says; let's hang out and I'll serenade you from across the street. It all feels more intimate than the usual home visit video packages. There's a whole world implied in seeing the Nepalese American singer Arthur Gunn making momo dumplings in his house in Kansas, then playing a reggae fied "Take Me Home, Country Roads" on the porch, cars driving by on a highway in the background. Where "Idol" styles all those bedrooms and backyards into idealized tableaus of Americana, "The Voice" takes the opposite approach treating its home videos with saturated color and video effects to create the sort of images you're used to getting from a TV studio. Where a dramatic backdrop is available for Zan Fiskum, an RV she renovated in her parents' Washington backyard the show uses it. Otherwise, performances are jazzed up with video overlays and mirror image effects, drenched in jewel tone light or rendered in black and white filters, through which you might notice a living room sofa or the fluttering of window blinds. It's a distinct choice from "Idol," but one that fits the electric Thunderdome aesthetic of the now desolate "Voice" set. If the quarantine version of "Idol" creates an idealized vision of the hearth, the homebound "Voice" appeals to nostalgia for TV itself ordinary, pre Covid, high gloss TV, with all its artifice and showbiz wizardry. Both shows are applying an augmented reality overlay to quotidian lockdown life. It's been tougher naturally integrating judges ("Idol") and coaches ("The Voice"), who usually energize the shows by bantering and bickering in person. Now they're dialing in from home too, with backdrops furnished to accentuate their personal brands. John Legend beams in to "The Voice" from a swanky home lounge; the country stars Luke Bryan on "Idol" and Blake Shelton on "The Voice" are backed with a small forest's worth of rough hewed wood planks. There are attempts to lighten the mood, some more successful than others. The "Voice" coaches filmed themselves wrestling to assemble their D.I.Y. home studio kits. Katy Perry did the entire April 26 episode of "Idol" dressed as a bottle of hand sanitizer, a maybe read the room bit that clashed with her earnest remarks about being pregnant during a pandemic and learning that "there's a lot of things that I'm grateful for these days." (Not a sentiment you hear from your average Purell dispenser.) Her May 3 get up, as a roll of toilet paper, didn't last past the first commercial break. Of course, both shows are ultimately about the singing, which is where the new adaptations get tricky. In an ordinary live performance, stumbles and off notes are apparent. Here, while contestants perform "as live" (using audio from one home recording take as well as, usually, studio musicians recording elsewhere), it's hard to tell how much of what you're hearing is the singer and what's postproduction. You won't get much guidance from the judges. While "Idol" long ago moved past its Simon Cowell ugly truth days, both it and "The Voice" are now especially generous. The contests feel like a class that, amid a rough semester, is now being taught pass fail. Likewise, the contestants are stand ins for all the young people suddenly missing big milestones like graduations. "Idol" has been around long enough that its competitors have fantasized their entire lives about being on the show. Now they've made it and here they are, left to imagine an empty room as a stage. (There is also something unsettling and "Black Mirror" like about the eliminated contestants arrayed in a grid of grainy rectangles, often with family members, waiting to be turned off.) As a lapsed regular viewer of both shows, I find the quarantine versions' attempts to power through to be the most fascinating things they've done in years moving and full of the sort of actual reality that reality shows often efface. They're not much of an escape, though, which may be one reason that ratings for the two shows have dipped. For decades, after all, people have watched singing competitions to see dreams come true, not turn bittersweet. They're used to impossibly polished performances, not shaky broadband connections. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The medical device maker St. Jude Medical played down the failure of some batteries in its defibrillators, shipping them for years before recalling the devices last fall, according to a warning letter the Food and Drug Administration issued this week. The company, acquired by Abbott Laboratories in January, also failed to tell its own management and a medical advisory board that the battery problems had led to the death of a patient, the agency found. The F.D.A. said St. Jude Medical had not shown it was taking sufficient action to fix the problems that led to the slow recall and ordered the company to provide a new reporting plan within 15 days. Faulty defibrillators and other implanted devices are particularly problematic because removing them requires surgery that can be more risky than keeping them in. When the company announced the recall in October, the F.D.A. recommended that doctors closely monitor their patients' devices for problems. Saying the malfunction did not appear to be widespread, the agency warned that "patients could be at greater risk of complications from the surgical procedure required to replace the device." In October, the F.D.A. said that of the nearly 400,000 devices sold worldwide that were affected by the recall, 841 were returned to the company for analysis because the battery had died unexpectedly. As of January, two people had died because their defibrillators failed to work, the agency said, and dozens of others had suffered adverse effects. Defibrillators deliver an electric shock to return the heart to a normal pace when it is not beating properly. An F.D.A. spokeswoman, Angela Stark, said Thursday that nearly 200,000 people in the United States have a defibrillator included in the recall. The recalled devices include models in the company's Fortify, Unify and Assura defibrillator lines. Physicians at Duke University reported two cases of battery problems with the devices in 2014, and another team at the University of Illinois did so in 2015, concluding that lithium in the battery was forming clusters and causing it to short circuit. That same year, St. Jude fixed the problem in new defibrillators it manufactured, but it did not recall the older devices or alert doctors or patients about the potential problem until October. As a result, doctors continued implanting the old devices in patients. "What bothers me most about this is that the doctors and the patients weren't told about the potential" for failure, said Dr. Robert G. Hauser, a retired cardiologist who campaigns for improved safety of medical devices. "And clearly this is for St. Jude's benefit. They can sell products rather than scrapping it." Defibrillators accounted for nearly a third of St. Jude's sales in 2015, or about 1.6 billion, according to The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which reported on the defibrillator issue last fall. In January, the company was acquired by Abbott for 25 billion. Abbott said that it was reviewing the warning letter and that it was committed to addressing the issues raised by the agency. "We have a strong history and commitment to product safety and quality," the company said. Ms. Stark, the F.D.A. spokeswoman, said the agency did not insist on an earlier recall because it was relying on information the company had provided at the time. But while the agency now says the company misrepresented the risk, Ms. Stark said, "I don't think we can speculate on how that might have changed the decision almost two years ago." According to the letter, St. Jude understated the problem by concluding that reports about failing batteries were "unconfirmed" even though the battery manufacturer, Greatbatch (now known as Integer Holdings), concluded that the lithium clusters were the culprit. The company did not include these "unconfirmed" cases when it calculated the likelihood that the devices would malfunction, making it appear that the problem was less serious than it was, the agency said. The agency also found that the company knew of a patient's death in 2014 but did not disclose it to St. Jude Medical management or a medical advisory board. "Both presentations stated there were no serious injury or death directly related to lithium cluster formations," the letter said. In addition, the F.D.A. said that St. Jude still had not fully addressed concerns raised in January, when the agency warned that hackers could gain access to St. Jude's defibrillators and remote monitoring system and could cause the devices to deliver unnecessary shocks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Evil people were once believed to be fundamentally different from the good, right down to the makeup of their bodies. Anatomists held public dissections to expose the telltale traits of moral corruption in the internal organs of criminals and convicts. From this pernicious strand of medical history, the composer David Lang and the scenic designer Mark Dion have created a gruesome, strangely entertaining chamber opera, "Anatomy Theater," which had its New York premiere on Saturday at BRIC House in Brooklyn, the second offering of this year's Prototype festival of new music theater. This 75 minute work, which includes long stretches of spoken text (Mr. Lang and Mr. Dion wrote the chilling libretto), as well as videos (by Bill Morrison) and projections (by Laurie Olinder), fits in with the mission of Prototype to foster the future of contemporary opera by opening the genre to fresh thinking and experimentation. As Sarah Osborne, the murderess at the center of the story who is executed and publicly dissected, the courageous mezzo soprano Peabody Southwell spends most of her time on stage as a naked corpse. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
OXON HILL, Md. As MGM opens a new resort this week on a hillside overlooking the Potomac River, it will deliver a victory in a long effort to develop a shoreline carved from a sand and gravel pit. The 1.4 billion resort at National Harbor, a minicity south of Washington, puts casino gambling just seven miles from the nation's capital and is a prominent addition to Prince George's County, a long overlooked but upwardly striving county of 900,000 residents, the majority of them black. The resort will open on Thursday, and MGM has booked singers including Cher, Sting and Bruno Mars for concerts for its 3,000 seat theater, which will also feature boxing matches. To bring the casino to this site, MGM invested heavily in a campaign to encourage voters to support a 2012 initiative allowing table games in the county and at other locations in the state that already had slot machine parlors. The majority of Prince George's County voters also had to approve the initiative, which was aimed at National Harbor, to pave the way for MGM. After the initiative passed, a casino opened at Rocky Gap, in western Maryland, in 2013 and another, in Baltimore, in 2014. Rushern L. Baker III, the Prince George's county executive, recalled that when he took office in 2010, "clearly, the county was facing a lot of issues both from a perception standpoint but also from a revenue standpoint." The 125,00 square foot casino will be open 24 hours a day, and has more than 3,300 slot machines, 126 gambling tables and 39 poker tables. Besides the casino and hotel, the resort has a 5,000 space garage, a 27,000 square foot spa and 10 restaurants, including Fish, led by the chef Jose Andres, and Steak House by the brothers Bryan and Michael Voltaggio of "Top Chef." Among the shops is the first stand alone boutique for shoes and accessories by Sarah Jessica Parker, who promises to be stocking shelves and meeting customers several times before starting work in February on the second season of her HBO show, "Divorce." Her Italian made shoes will sell for 250 to 495, and her shop will also carry her line of bags and her fragrance, Lovely. "Its close proximity to D.C. is a great draw," she said. "I'm nervous, but everybody says I should be excited." To enhance the property's aesthetics, MGM has spent more than 20 million on art, commissioning local artists like Margaret Boozer, whose regional map made of red clay clawed from the foundation adorns the wall above the hotel reception desk. The gateway entrance to the casino is a wrought iron sculpture by Bob Dylan. Totaling more than three million square feet, the resort is projected to draw 20,000 daily visitors. It has provided 6,800 construction jobs and is hiring 4,000 permanent workers. The county projects the resort will pump 41 million to 47 million annually in taxes into its coffers, and more into the state treasury. "We're going to bring lots of money from Virginia and D.C. into Maryland, which we like," said the governor, Larry Hogan. The casino's 24 story, 308 room hotel has 74 suites at nightly rates of 400 to 12,000, and single rooms from 300 to 800. Mr. Murren said MGM had chosen not to erect a larger hotel because of others nearby. A mile down the hill on the National Harbor waterfront, the Gaylord resort and convention center has 2,000 rooms. Mr. Murren and Jon Peterson, principal of the Peterson Companies, which developed National Harbor, expect that visitors to the MGM resort will also seek out National Harbor's amenities, and vice versa, aided by shuttle buses. National Harbor's 350 acres include the Tanger Outlets, which opened in 2013. Underscoring the growth, a National Harbor Convention and Visitors Association was formed this spring with an initial 1 million budget to market the entire site. Immediately adjoining the Capital Beltway, National Harbor is easily accessible by car, and that also promises to be its biggest challenge as the casino resort opens. The site is on a major commuter route that carries traffic across the Potomac between Maryland and Virginia and by Interstate 295, which feeds into the District of Columbia. The developer expects MGM's presence to double the vehicular traffic into National Harbor, to about 180,000 cars weekly, from 90,000. To ease congestion, the developers and government agencies have invested 10 million in roadway improvements. The harbor on which the project has risen was originally known as Smoot Bay, for the family sand and gravel mining company that owned it. A rezoning to mixed use in 1983 established the legal foundation for what followed. But a succession of developers could not overcome financial hurdles, and the project, while always grandiose in vision, stalled. First, it was the Bay of the Americas, and then Port America, which would have incorporated a 52 story office tower designed by the architect Philip Johnson, on what was known as the Beltway site, where MGM is now. The developer, Jim Lewis, even built a 5 million marketing center, but the economy soured and the project went bankrupt. The Peterson Companies, a large real estate developer based in Northern Virginia, acquired the site in a foreclosure sale. Even though National Harbor opened for business just as the recession was starting, Peterson managed to more than ride it out. Today, National Harbor has more than 150 shops, 37 restaurants, six hotels, offices, townhomes, condos and apartments, and Peterson says it has 11 million visitors, residents and employees there combined each year. As added attractions, Peterson spent 15 million on a Ferris wheel that soars to 180 feet, installed a carousel and built a 64 slip marina, which it hopes to enlarge to accommodate large yachts. Already, boats ferry passengers to and from National Harbor and Alexandria, Va. In 2009, Disney paid 15 million to acquire 15 acres it intended for a hotel, but changed its mind. Casinos were proliferating in nearby states and inside Maryland, drawing Prince George's residents and their dollars elsewhere. Milton V. Peterson, the Peterson Companies' founder and chairman, who was initially opposed to gambling, changed his mind, as did Mr. Baker, another early opponent. Slot machines were legal in southern Maryland from 1949 to 1968. Lingering opposition to reintroducing gambling centered on what critics called "slot barns," casinos without the more upscale table games. After the statewide referendum in 2012, MGM won the right to build at National Harbor a year later. John Lally, a land use lawyer involved in the original rezoning, predicted last week: "The casino will be a big draw for everything else down there. It's obviously a dream come true for a lot of county politicians. We finally got something that the rest of the region is saying, 'How come they get to do it?'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Emergency medical and critical care team members are canaries in the coal mine. When we are understaffed and overworked, when there is no staff to triage patients, when more and more patients are piling up at the emergency department door, the system breaks down, then people break down. You can borrow ventilators (until you can't) and make more personal protective equipment (we hope). You cannot magically produce more nurses, respiratory therapists, physicians or other professionals. My colleagues and I witnessed the physical and emotional devastation of the health care work force in Wuhan, China; in Italy; in New York. Health care workers were catching the coronavirus on the front lines, getting sick, getting their families sick, dying. We saw them suffer the lasting scars of feeling helpless in the face of this new coronavirus, unable to save their patients or themselves. We did what we could to prepare ourselves for when the pandemic would hit our community, knowing it was just a matter of time. A group of us from a variety of backgrounds began building a coalition called HCW Hosted to help local health care workers find quarantine housing to isolate from our families. We have since added other services: health status monitoring, emotional health support and psychological first aid. These support services have helped fill some of the gaps our employers and government infrastructure have failed to address. But even if every city and town had an organization like HCW Hosted, that would still be only part of what is needed to mitigate the impact of Covid 19. I get angry when I see people refuse to wear a mask or physically distance from others or stay home when they could because it is inconvenient or as a political statement. If you do not wear a mask and physically distance, you are putting yourself and others in harm's way. You are putting us in harm's way. Then you will expect us to risk our lives to save you. And it's not just we whom you ask to risk our lives, but our families as well. What you are saying to people like me and my team is, "Your life and the lives of your loved ones do not matter to us; you are disposable." I am willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the public. I took an oath to that effect when I became a physician. But the public has to sacrifice some too if we want to get through this as safely as possible social scientists call this "health citizenship." It means contacting your elected representatives and imploring them to follow public health science when they set policy and voting out those who won't. It means demanding the health care systems protect the well being of staffs. And yes, it means wearing a mask, staying home when possible and practicing physical distancing so that our hospitals and care facilities are not swamped and we are not overwhelmed. Your sacrifices of comfort and convenience make a difference for your family, your neighbors, your health care workers and your access to quality health care in the future if you need it. I hope you don't visit me or my team in the hospital anytime soon, but should you need to come see us, we want to be available and able to provide you the best possible care. To do that, we need you to be part of our team. Bradley A. Dreifuss ( dreifussmd) is an assistant professor of emergency medicine and director of rural and global emergency medicine programs at the University of Arizona College of Medicine at Tucson. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
BLANCHING at their rent bills, more New Yorkers are being forced to confront that age old question, should I rent, or does buying make more sense? In many cases, the hard numbers point toward the latter. The average Manhattan apartment rented for a record 3,459 in July, according to Citi Habitats, which called the price the highest since it began tracking rents in 2002. And with the vacancy rate hovering around 1 percent, landlords aren't willing to cut deals. By contrast apartments for sale have held relatively steady in price from the start of the year and are down from the market peak in 2008. Combine that with low interest rates, and the cost of buying an apartment is about the same, if not cheaper on a monthly basis in many neighborhoods, than the cost of renting. But making the leap to homeownership is complicated by tough lending standards, the often hefty down payments and other obstacles that would be buyers must clear in order to break into the New York market. And even if you clear all the hurdles, there are often trade offs. Take Casey Galegher and Van Krishnamoorthy, who recently spent 699,000 on a two bedroom condo in Harlem, after a year living in a one bedroom rental on the Upper West Side with their 5 year old son, Finn. "It may take 10 years for the restaurants to feel like the Upper West Side," said Dr. Krishnamoorthy, a radiologist. But meanwhile they are getting more space and amenities for their money, paying about 4,900 a month for their brand new 1,400 square foot condo. On the Upper West Side, "we couldn't get an elevator building in our price range," said Dr. Krishnamoorthy, noting that a two bedroom in a doorman building across the street from their former rental was listed at 7,000 a month. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
As developers continue to push the story line that New York's luxury residential market is a high end utopia that shows no signs of slowing, you might consider one seldom discussed factor that is driving their decisions to build for the wealthiest buyers. Lost amid the record breaking condo sales in 2012 was a scramble for land not seen since at least 2006, during Manhattan's last real estate bonanza. Last year property owners sold 158 development sites in Manhattan, up 51 percent from 2011, according to Massey Knakal, a New York property sales company. Of those, owners sold 69 sites in the fourth quarter alone. In dollar terms the volume was 3.12 billion, up 128 percent from 2011,with 1.73 billion sold in the fourth quarter, the company said. The bidding wars behind those sales figures sometimes involved as many as 40 developers battling over a single site, said Bob Knakal, Massey Knakal's chairman. The ballooning prices are giving developers little choice but to focus on building or in some cases, converting to high end condos. Doing anything less, in most cases, would be too risky, brokers said. "The fact is, the way the free market is working today, land is just too valuable, so developers can't afford to do anything but build super luxury product," Mr. Knakal said. That may be good news for wealthy buyers, many of them foreign, who are demanding the best of the best that New York real estate can offer. But it is not great news for a city starved for affordable housing and more rental units. And it has some real estate experts concerned about how far the legs of the housing resurgence will extend. "I worry that if this is all we can develop, how deep is that market?" said Jonathan J. Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a property appraiser. Land in New York is worth more today than at the peak of the market in 2007, Mr. Knakal said. While the average price per square foot for a building lost 38 percent of its value from that time, the average price per square foot for land fell only about 18 percent, he said. Why the discrepancy? Not much land was for sale in 2009 and 2010, as sellers decided to ride out the market downturn and hold on to less sought after sites, he said. That has changed rather drastically in the past year with the surge in the number of development sites being sold. The big sales have not been confined to Manhattan. Last year Mr. Knakal brokered the 54 million sale of a 2.19 acre South Williamsburg site zoned for residential units. The buyer was the government of China, in what Mr. Knakal said he believed was the first such transaction by a foreign based buyer outside of Manhattan. Earlier this month, in one of the largest land deals in years, the billionaire Sheldon Solow sold a parcel of land spanning a full block along the East River, between 35th and 36th Streets at First Avenue, to a consortium led by JDS Development group, for 172 million. The land is zoned for residential use. The developer plans to build two towers, one with 47 stories and the other with 37, for a total of 830 apartments. It is likely they will be mostly rentals, and the conferral of a tax abatement will require 20 percent to be affordable housing units, said Michael Stern, the managing partner of JDS. "This particular deal might be an anomaly because of its size and limited bidder pool," he added. "It has become almost impossible to do rentals in Manhattan at these land prices." Developers' struggle to build rental units doesn't bode well for a New York in need of more "work force housing" for teachers, police officers and fire fighters, Mr. Knakal said. "There are so many millions of people that keep the city functioning," he said. "If you earn 40,000 a year, where do you live? We need new housing for those folks." Mr. Miller said the tightness in the property market made the proposed rezoning of Midtown East to allow more tall towers "very important to the future of real estate development in the city, at least as an international location, both for commercial and residential." With luxury towers like One57 and the approved 432 Park Avenue, under construction on the site of the former Drake Hotel, there has been a renaissance of residential development in Midtown. "We need to create other ways of bringing supply, or making potential development sites viable by making them taller," Mr. Miller said. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has fast tracked the proposed zoning changes and is hoping to get them passed before he leaves office at year's end. Facing limited options, some developers have turned to converting buildings into higher end properties. A joint venture between the Extell Development Company and the hedge fund Angelo, Gordon Company plans to convert the former Helmsley Carlton House at 680 Madison Avenue into luxury apartments, despite the complications of the building's having a land lease. Gary Barnett, the president of Extell, said that Thor Equities, which bought the 35,000 square feet of retail space at the bottom of 680 Madison for 277 million, has "all the obligations to pay the full ground rent," which is on a lease of 150 years. Mr. Barnett said the building would be developed as luxury co ops with condo rules. Harry Macklowe is converting two Upper East Side prewar rental buildings he bought in 2011 into luxury condos. He paid 70 million for the 12 story building at 150 East 72nd Street in June 2011, and 253 million for 737 Park Avenue, at 71st Street, two months later, raising eyebrows among some appraisers who thought the prices were high. "There are very few remaining rental prewar buildings on Park Avenue," Richard Wallgren, executive vice president for sales and marketing of Macklowe Properties, said of 737 Park recently while giving me a tour. "So this opportunity to purchase one of those lone buildings was extremely competitive, and we are delighted to be successful in purchasing it." Mr. Wallgren declined to say whether the company felt market pressure to create high end condos. "We believe we committed to a program that brings out the very best of each building," he said. Macklowe is combining the former rental units into much larger apartments. At 737 Park, the 100 or so apartments are being converted into about 50 condos. They will range from 3,000 to nearly 6,000 square feet, and will cost an average of 4,000 a square foot. The developer plans to offer a 5,600 square foot penthouse with a 4,000 square foot roof deck on the 21st floor for 39.5 million. Formerly two apartments, it will have at least two fireplaces and a somewhat obstructed southwest facing view of Central Park. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
ABU DHABI The message to the D.J. was short and to the point: no Arabic music. That was the edict from the organizers of the Asian Cup match here on Thursday, an attempt to limit even the opportunity for a flash point in the first soccer match between Saudi Arabia and Qatar since the start of a bitter political feud nearly two years ago. The dispute, and the Saudi led blockade of Qatar, has so divided countries in the region that even the prematch music at the tournament is now viewed through that prism. At other matches at the Asian Cup, the most important soccer event on the sprawling continent, the soundtrack has included music from the participating countries. That was not the case Thursday at the Zayed Sports City Stadium, where the sound system blasted western dance music in an effort to avoid even the risk of inflaming tensions between rival supporters. In the case of Qatar, that support was limited to a Korean woman, a male student from China and band of Omanis who arrived during the second half after acquiring free tickets. Almost no Qatari fans have traveled to the tournament amid the blockade of the tiny emirate by a Saudi led group of its neighbors, including the United Arab Emirates, that has made travel extremely difficult and entry into the U.A.E. close to impossible. Coaches from both teams had tried to play down the political cloud that had hung over Thursday's game since the teams were drawn into the same first round group months ago. After the game, they steered a similar course, brushing aside any questions related to matters out of their control, and instead focusing on the challenges awaiting them in the knockout rounds. Qatar, which won the group, will face Iraq; Saudi Arabia faces a more difficult game against Japan, a regional power. "It has nothing to do with football so I won't give a response," Juan Antonio Pizzi, Saudi Arabia's Argentine coach said in response to a question about the off field tension. Felix Sanchez, Qatar's Spanish coach, conceded only that hearing his team's national anthem roundly jeered by most of the fans was a "difficult moment" for his players, but he concluded the game was played in a positive spirit on the field. Controversy flared outside the lines, however. Local organizers were said to have reacted with fury after a commentator on the Qatar owned network beIN Sports mentioned the blockade during the live broadcast of an earlier Iran Iraq game. In response, the Saudi Sports Media Federation released a statement Thursday accusing beIN, which is broadcasting the tournament across the Middle East, of using its exclusive rights to push its political agenda. The U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia have been in lock step in their opposition to Qatar, and that divide was visible in the stands. Behind the goal where Almoez Ali, the tournament's top scorer, delivered the first of his two goals for Qatar, three men stood for the entire match, holding aloft two flags, one a Saudi one and the other Emirati, fused together. Saudi efforts to boost crowd numbers included commandeering two desks at the entrance of the Bab al Qasr hotel, situated yards from the U.A.E.'s presidential palace. There, officials armed with fist sized stacks of tickets, distributed them for free to fans whether Saudi or not with only one request: Support Saudi Arabia. The efforts largely fell flat. The attendance was declared at just over 16,000, though the actual number of fans appeared far lower. Qatar had almost none: a Qatar soccer federation spokesman said as many as 2,000 fans would have made the trip in normal times. In the end, Qatar had to make do with a small and curious collection of followers that included Janko Yang, a 23 year old Chinese student who grew fond of Qatar's soccer team after its under 23 squad visited his hometown, Changzhou, last year. At the other end of the stadium, Mary Lee, the Korean communications worker who has become relatively well known around the team, had somehow snagged a seat in the media area. Sporting a silk dress she had made in the maroon and white colors of Qatar's flag a direct challenge to rules that forbid public support of Qatar in the U.A.E. Lee, 45, vowed to stay at the tournament until her adopted country completes its run. (Asked to change clothing by security officials before she attended the tournament opener between the U.A.E. and Bahrain, Lee has been given dispensation to wear her elaborate outfit only at Qatar's games.) The most voluble support, though, came from the group of Omanis who had raced across the city after watching their team clinch berth in the knockout rounds with a 3 1 victory over Turkmenistan. Beneficiaries of the free Saudi tickets, they cheered Qatar's players as they celebrated their victory. Oman has historically enjoyed a friendly relationship with all its neighbors, and has adopted a neutral role in the Gulf dispute. "We are like one country, we are one people in the Gulf, and we are cheering for them because they haven't got fans here," said Abdullah Moqubuli, 30, before adding that he and his friends would have cheered for Saudi Arabia, too, had the Saudis managed to score a goal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
At some point we'll all have to grapple with the idea that the warped compassion of the modern true crime boom implicates its audience and that viewers are greedily lining up to be part of a lurid long tail of suffering and despair. If "The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story" were a little more interesting, maybe it would be that lightning rod. But instead it's a surprisingly inert, if lushly imagined, tale. Ryan Murphy, the show's executive producer and the director of the first episode, broke out with "Nip/Tuck," a daring plastic surgery soap. With its Miami setting and toxic superficiality, it is the most direct antecedent to "The Assassination of Gianni Versace," more than other creations from Mr. Murphy like "Glee," "American Horror Story," "Feud" and even "The People v. O.J. Simpson," the widely acclaimed first "American Crime Story" installment. "Tell me what you don't like about yourself," the glitzy "Nip/Tuck" surgeons would say to potential patients. That's the undercurrent here, too. Self loathing abounds, as "Assassination" repeatedly depicts the psychological effects of internalized homophobia and the miserable spiritual contortions required to stay closeted. In one particularly upsetting scene, a panicked Navy sailor is shown trying gouge off his own tattoo, lest he be outed during the "don't ask, don't tell" era. (Straight women get their own brands of insecurity, too, though they exist here as illuminating harmony, not story driving melody.) Darren Criss, best known as Blaine on "Glee," stars as Andrew Cunanan, the spree killer who murdered Mr. Versace and four other men in 1997, before also shooting and killing himself. The mini series is only occasionally about Mr. Versace (Edgar Ramirez) and is instead something of a biopic about Mr. Cunanan, though it bounces between their stories. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
W.H.O. Says Olympics Should Go Ahead in Brazil Despite Zika Virus The Olympic Games should go on as planned, the World Health Organization said Tuesday, and athletes and spectators, except for pregnant women, should not hesitate to attend so long as they take precautions against infection with the Zika virus. Pregnant women were advised not to go to Brazil for the event or the Paralympics. The W.H.O. previously told them to avoid any area where Zika is circulating. Some attendees may contract the mosquito borne infection and even bring it back home, but the risk in August midwinter in Rio de Janeiro is relatively low, W.H.O. officials said. Travel related to the Olympics accounts for only a fraction of the travel already occurring to and from countries with Zika transmission, the officials noted. Mass gatherings like the World Cup or the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca "can amplify a disease or can raise the risk that it will spread to other countries," said Dr. Bruce Aylward, who is leading the W.H.O. response to Zika. "You can't dismiss that, but the committee felt there should be a much lower risk from the Olympics." The W.H.O. was acting on the advice of its emergency committee, but essentially repeated the Olympics related travel advice it gave on May 12, which implied that the Games should go on. The agency expects Zika to spread from northern Argentina to the southern United States whether or not the Games take place. The Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that spread Zika are rare in Europe and in nontropical regions of North America. The virus is believed to be endemic in Africa and Asia, though it is not certain how many people have had it or whether they are immune to the strain circulating in the Americas, a descendant of the Asian strain. Dr. Karin Nielsen, an infectious disease pediatrician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is studying Zika infections in Rio de Janeiro with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, said the foundation had reported no new cases in nearly eight weeks since the weather began cooling. Mosquito borne diseases "run a cycle and are not continuously present, so Zika should not be a problem for the Olympics," she said. "The people going to Rio are the elite: the athletes and the global 1 percent who can afford tickets and can take precautions," he said. "But the people shouldering the risk if this spreads will be the slum dwellers in Mumbai, Kinshasa and Lagos who aren't going to be able to take precautions." Dr. Attaran has been urging the W.H.O. to advise postponing nonessential travel to affected areas. The agency did not, but said that officials in Brazil should "continue to intensify" mosquito control and that insect repellent, condoms and health advice should be available for all athletes and visitors. Arthur L. Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University who wrote in February that holding the Olympics in Brazil would be "irresponsible," said the W.H.O. was "betting on the weather, responsible behavior by visitors, adequate mosquito control and a low sexual transmission rate by returning visitors. All are gambles." Also on Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a proposed plan for fighting Zika if it starts spreading in the continental United States. The agency expects some local mosquito transmission this summer in Florida and along the Gulf Coast to Texas. The plan outlines steps if even one case appears. Because Aedes aegypti mosquitoes do not fly far, officials can provide "a large margin of safety" by concentrating efforts within a one mile circle around each known infection, the plan said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
PARIS There's a ripple of excitement in the hushed confines of the Jaeger LeCoultre boutique on the Place Vendome. Caroline Jame, the boutique manager, has returned from the vault and is about to open a box containing a rarity: The Nodo, a name meaning knot in Italian. It is a watch style, first shown five years ago at the Venice Film Festival, that is produced only to order for 293,000 euros, or 367,000, and only a few are made each year. Ms. Jame slips on a pair of white cotton gloves and opens the leather case, revealing a band of dazzling diamonds "tied" in a bow. What might be most remarkable about the watch, however, is the function that it hides: the world's smallest mechanism, the legendary Calibre 101, with 74 parts and yet so tiny that it weighs less than a gram. Invented in 1929, the mechanism has never gone out of production. In fact, "at Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, she wore a watch with a 101 mechanism," Ms. Jame says. Other watchmakers are also focusing on watches that combine decoration with complication fashion meeting function. At Chanel, for instance, the tourbillon that assures the accuracy in the Premiere Flying Tourbillon is disguised to look like Coco Chanel's iconic camellia. "The mechanism is there more to create beauty than for precision," Nicolas Beau, Chanel's international watch director, said. At Chaumet, the watch manager, Beatrice Rouhier, said of the mechanisms, "Women fall in love with the pieces." And indeed they are designed to seduce. Butterflies, dragonflies, spiders, ladybugs and bees, hand crafted in gold and gems, flirt in come hither dances in Chaumet's "Catch Me If You Love Me" watches. Chaumet developed a whole new complication for these models in which the hands of the watches are replaced by mobile indexes. A bee, for instance, indicates minutes while a spider alights to point the hours, traveling on a trajectory that is not circular, but scalloped, like a spider web. "Women want a beautiful watch on their wrists with something to say, a story to tell," Ms. Rouhier said. At Van Cleef Arpels, the company has trademarked the name "Poetic Complications" for its watches that combine complications with artistry. On the Pont des Amoureux, two lovers on opposite sides of an enamel dial, encased in white gold, begin to cross a bridge that spans the divide. The man, who indicates the minutes, waits impatiently for the woman, who indicates the hours. Finally, thanks to a retrograde movement, the two lovers meet at midnight and kiss. On another Poetic Complication watch, the Butterfly Symphony, two butterflies flutter around a tree on a dial of lacquered mother of pearl inside a white gold case set with diamonds: One butterfly indicates the hours and the other the minutes. "We are certainly seeing decorative timepieces becoming more popular, particularly in Asia and the Middle East," says Doug Escribano, head of sales in the watch department of Christie's in New York. The moon phase watch is the old chestnut in the category of decorative complications. "The moon phase indicator remains one of the most poetic of all horological complications," said Brigitte Bocquet Makhzani of Montres Journe. Their latest Octa Lune model provides more than 120 hours of chronometric power reserve, useful for anyone sailing the globe, all with solid gold movements. "The moon phase reminds us of ancient times when the full moon was the only source of light during the night." When Pascal Raffy bought the Bovet Fleurier watch company in 2001, one of the first designs he developed was a moon phase, believing that the complication had an emotional connection with women. The moon in Bovet's moon phase model named Recital 9 Miss Alexandra Tourbillon, in honor of his daughter is filled with a super luminous material so it glows. When the hands of the watch meet, they form a heart. Highly decorated watches present opportunities for watchmakers to show off their artistry as they attempt to attract customers. Bovet also has a series of watches, in the Totem collection, that can be customized with enamel decorations on the dials. Customers can chose a portrait or favorite flower or their coat of arms, whatever they want. "There are three artists based in Geneva who can do this," said Behzad Sojdehee, sales executive at Asprey London, which sells Bovet in Britain. "And it can take up to 60 hours to paint each dial." There's another attraction for these watches as well: Each is one of a kind. "It's yours and yours alone," Mr. Sojdehee said. Exclusivity is a selling point at Vacheron Constantin as well. "Hand craftsmanship and exclusivity represent the ultimate for the discerning collector," Vincent Brun, president of Vacheron Constantin North America, said about its Metiers d'Arts collection, in which watches issued as limited editions showcase artistic skills. "The woman who wears this piece knows she is wearing a unique work of art for the wrist. She is unlikely to encounter a friend at a dinner wearing the same watch." The latest Fabuleux Ornements series of Vacheron Constantin's Metiers d'Art series is inspired by French lace, Chinese embroidery, Ottoman architecture and Indian manuscripts. Each watch is enameled with a rare enameling technique called champleve, in which the gold of the dial is carved to create hollows surrounded by delicate borders of gold. Ten colors of enamel are applied, requiring 10 individual firings. The design is then hand engraved, and the result is an exquisitely ornamented dial, surrounded by 85 diamonds, with a window to show the watch's mechanism. Watches big on decoration are not just for women. For its 175th anniversary, Patek Philippe created 40 unique pieces showcasing various arts. One is micro marquetry, celebrated in a pocket watch that contains 106 strips of 25 species of wood painstakingly applied to the dial to show a Lake Geneva sailboat. It also features a power reserve indicator and subsidiary seconds. There's a hitch to getting one, though, according to Larry Pettinelli, president of Patek Philippe in the United States. The buyers of the 40 pieces will be chosen by the owner of Patek Philippe, Thierry Stern. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Zack Fountas bought a new one bedroom apartment in White Plains, N.Y., from his home in Chicago, without ever having set foot inside the building. The 850 square foot apartment is within walking distance of the train station, and with an asking price of 155,000, it appeared on paper to have almost everything Mr. Fountas and his fiancee were looking for, including a dishwasher. During an open house last summer, his sister in law and Joe Muller, an agent with Julia B. Fee Sotheby's International Realty, gave Mr. Fountas a tour using FaceTime. Mr. Muller showed him around with his iPhone and then emailed a link with listing photos and comparable sales nearby. Mr. Fountas, who had not seen any other places in person, bid 142,000, and his offer was accepted. Six weeks later, it was time to take a tour in person. "I think I was sweating because I was like, 'Oh, my god, what if he doesn't like it?'" Mr. Muller said. "He'd have lost his deposit." Mr. Fountas, who was moving to New York for a job as a risk manager after earning a business degree, said he wasn't disappointed: "Having seen it through the phone, it was what we were expecting." Most buyers want to see a place in person at least once before committing. A home, after all, is usually an emotional purchase, with intangibles like the feeling it evokes key to a buyer's attraction. But a growing number of house hunters across the country are making the biggest financial decision of their lives sight unseen. According to a recent survey by Redfin, a national online real estate brokerage with more than 1,000 agents, 20 percent of buyers said they submitted an offer on a home without visiting it first. And in a survey of 45 New York City based agents conducted by Realtor.com, more than half said that in the past six months they had worked with at least one buyer who was purchasing a primary home without visiting it first. Of course, out of towners looking for investment properties especially in hot markets like New York City and Los Angeles have long bought homes sight unseen. (Their decisions are often based more on profit driven factors like average rents and price per square foot comparisons than emotional considerations.) And when it comes to brand new construction, buyers regularly commit with little more to go on than renderings and floor plans. But these days, agents said, more primary home buyers purchasing already built properties are willing to go in blind, in part because technology has improved the remote viewing process. And it tends to happen more in markets where properties sell quickly, putting out of town buyers at a particular disadvantage. Graham Candish was living in Geneva, Switzerland, when he accepted a job as an innovation director for a beauty company that would require him and his family to move to New York. His agent, Nuno Ribeiro of Redfin, showed him several homes in the New York area when he was in town on business, but nothing fit the bill. After returning to Geneva, he did some research on his own using Google Street View to get a sense of neighborhoods. He perused websites like Zillow to learn property sales history, something he was not able to do when buying a home in Europe, where less information is available through public records. "There are no secrets here," he said. Having identified the French language school in Mamaroneck that his 12 and 14 year old son and daughter would attend, he set about looking for a home within a 10 minute drive. Mr. Candish said he found a Tudor style home in Larchmont listed for 1.32 million near the school and within walking distance of the train station. "That was the main thing, the right location," he said. "And it ticked most of our boxes, including having the potential to renovate it and make it more modern." He put in an offer of 1.25 million, which the seller accepted. Mr. Candish and his family didn't fly back to New York to see the house until partway through the closing process, with their deposit at stake. "At that point, we were 125,000 in," he said. Other surprises can come up, as well. When Mr. Fountas moved into his new apartment last August, he loved it, but he did make one disappointing discovery: Parking options nearby were very limited, with all streets forbidding parking between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., something he might have noticed had he walked around the area in person. "Thankfully, we were able to find a parking garage nearby," he said. Real estate agents say the growth in sight unseen purchases is partly driven by low inventory and high demand. In the hottest markets, houses and condos can go into contract within 24 hours of listing. Leslie Turner, a real estate broker in Charleston, S.C., said homes in the downtown area are selling so quickly that it is challenging to get clients in for tours if they do not live in town and have immediate availability. "By the time you get on a plane to go see it, it'll be gone," she said. When she received a call last December from a buyer in New Orleans who had been searching listings online and was interested in a 430,000 condominium downtown, her advice was blunt: "I told them, 'You don't have time to wait,'" she said. The two bedroom unit, on the building's top floor, had 20 foot ceilings and views of the city. It was in a newer building near the medical school that the buyers' son attended, and their daughter would soon be moving there for medical school as well. The layout made it ideal for roommates or siblings, with the bedrooms at opposite ends. "I realized that if we didn't move aggressively we wouldn't get it. I don't know if prices were going up by the minute or by the hour," Dr. Kaye said, but "if you drive around the medical school, which is an outstanding school, you'll see there's just not a lot of options." His wife and children saw the place after the deal closed and said everything was as they expected. Real estate experts say homes are indeed selling at a record pace in many cities. A typical listing sold in 36 days in April 2018, six fewer than in April 2017, according to Redfin. And in some markets it can be much faster. In Denver, for example, homes sold after a median of six days on the market this past April. But the bidding wars and rapidly increasing prices in Los Angeles the median sale price rose from 327,000 in April 2012 to more than 705,000 in April 2018, according to Redfin make its real estate market one of the most challenging for buyers. When Shachar Scott took a job at Snapchat, the social media company based in Southern California, she quickly learned that to be competitive as a buyer she would need to move fast. Ms. Scott, who was moving from Jersey City with her husband and six year old twins and had never lived in California, said she was not entirely sure what to expect, but she knew she wanted a house in a good school district that was close to her office. While on a work trip to Los Angeles, she met with Natasha Barrett of the Agency, who looked at homes for her when she was back in Jersey City, often FaceTiming her or emailing her video tours. "I felt like I was there with her," said Ms. Scott, who found a listing online that sounded like a great fit: a three bedroom, three bathroom remodeled Craftsman style home in a good school district just 15 minutes from Snapchat's headquarters. With sliding glass doors that opened from the kitchen to a small backyard, it had an appealing indoor outdoor living space that made the home feel larger than it was. Ms. Scott's husband flew to Los Angeles for six hours to attend the open house, FaceTiming her and emailing photos. The couple put in an offer right away, one of nine the seller received. She declined to say what they paid for the home, but said they offered more than the asking price and got the house. Ms. Scott didn't visit the home until after the closing. "I'd never seen the house or even been to the neighborhood," she said. "I had to use Google Maps and Waze to even find it. I was totally nervous." But she and her family have been happy with the home, which they moved into last summer. "It's even better than the pictures," she said. Some believe that a growing comfort with buying almost everything else online is affecting the way people shop for real estate. "There's an e commerce mentality sinking into the American consciousness," said Glenn Kelman, the chief executive of Redfin. "Zappos popularized the idea that you can buy shoes online. I think it's true for almost any goods in America now." The company recently built software that allows agents to help buyers write up an offer in a matter of minutes a significant improvement over the previous software, which took a few hours in part to help buyers compete in fast moving markets, he said: "People want to be able to trade a house like they trade a stock." Of course, not everyone is convinced that this is how buyers should think about home purchases. Robert Dankner, a Manhattan real estate agent, said he would handle sight unseen purchases only for longtime clients whom he knew very well. "If I don't really understand them, I would rather not make money and disappoint them and insist they look for themselves," he said. "If it's a house to enjoy for themselves, it's not a numbers thing it's personal and touchy feely." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Think there's no hope for bipartisan cooperation now that the Democrats control the House of Representatives and the Republicans have tightened their grip on the Senate? After all, who would have predicted two years ago that free credit freezes would become the law of the land after the Equifax hack, with business friendly Republicans controlling Congress? Or that a 350 million fix for the troubled federal public service loan forgiveness program would emerge even as the White House proposed killing off the program? Because Washington is so unpredictable these days, we see no reason to give up hope that sensible efforts to improve the personal finances of millions of people might somehow bear fruit. Here are six initiatives with support from both parties that we'll be watching especially closely in the next two years. The problem it could help solve: There is little insight into how much money people with different majors make, and whether different kinds of people with the same major end up earning different amounts. What it would mean for you: Let's say you're trying to figure out whether people with a particular major from an expensive private college earn more money than people who went to a nearby state university. Or you're a minority student who wants to know how minority science majors fare after graduation. Schools tend to track these kinds of things carefully, but it is often impossible to get such data on every student. A variety of bills, like last year's College Transparency Act, have tried to change this, with a wide range of bipartisan supporters. In any search for compromise amid the current discussion about reauthorization of a major higher education bill, this might be the moment that transparency wins the day. The problem it could help solve: Under federal law, companies don't have to make any adjustments for their pregnant employees. They are under no obligation to provide an extra break, for example, unless the company already does so for other workers. What it would mean for you: A bill called the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would change that at organizations with more than 15 employees. Companies would be required to make "reasonable accommodations" to workers affected by pregnancy, childbirth or a related medical condition, as long as those accommodations did not cause an undue hardship for the business. The problem it could help solve: The vast majority of American workers do not have access to paid family leave. The Family Medical Leave Act allows certain workers at larger employers and public agencies to take up to 12 weeks off each year but the leave is unpaid, and only about 59 percent of workers qualify for it. State paid leave programs are up and running only in California, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island , though three states more will add them in the next few years. What it would mean for you: The big tax overhaul passed last year included a tax break to encourage employers to provide paid leave for at least two weeks for at least half of the worker's pay to those who earn 72,000 or less and have worked for at least a year. The tax credit covers up to 25 percent of the money paid out during a worker's leave. But few businesses are likely to have established a program; the Internal Revenue Service came out with guidance only in September. A new bill would extend the credit through 2022, giving businesses more time to adopt leave programs and provide Congress with more data to determine whether the tax credit really encouraged employers to provide paid leave. Though the idea has received some bipartisan support, critics aren't optimistic that dangling a tax credit in front of employers will go far enough. Anna Chu, vice president for strategy and policy at the National Women's Law Center, said tax credits rarely prodded businesses particularly those that employ lower income workers to create a new benefit. "What happens is you are simply rewarding businesses who are already doing this," she said. The problem it could help solve: Ever rising out of pocket health care costs. What it would mean for you: When they began to rewrite the tax code last year, Republicans' opening gambit was to do away with tax deductions for medical expenses. But that prompted howls of outrage from people with disabilities, parents of special needs children and older Americans (whose nursing home costs are generally deductible). Republicans reversed themselves, and then some: The final bill allows people to deduct any such costs that exceed 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income; the previous threshold was 10 percent. There is a catch, though: That 7.5 percent was only for 2017 and 2018. Next year, absent legislative action, the hurdle will revert to 10 percent. If that happens, it will feel uncomfortably like a tax increase on the old and the sick. So look for a compromise here, too. The problem it could help solve: While the Affordable Care Act generally caps what consumers must spend out of pocket when using providers in their plan's network, it doesn't protect consumers from large bills from outside providers. Those providers may be free to charge the consumer for the balance of the bill that the insurer did not pay, known as balance billing. In some cases, those charges can run into six figures. What it would mean for you: A proposed bill with bipartisan support would help patients in a few different situations. For example, you'd be responsible only for what you would pay under your insurance plan when treated for an emergency by an out of network provider at an out of network facility. The same logic would apply if you were treated at a hospital in your plan's network but saw a doctor who was out of network. The problem it could help solve: Medical debt is part of a toxic stew of error prone providers, outsourced billing, inscrutable so called explanations of benefits and high costs for people who lack insurance (or good insurance). Because of this, lenders who don't believe the data is useful can and do ignore this debt altogether when making a credit decision. But it can still hurt your credit score, and you can't be sure which lenders will end up caring about that. What it would mean for you: One new law, which passed while Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate, removes many kinds of medical debts from the credit reports of veterans if the debts are less than a year old. And a recent legal settlement should keep any such debt off everyone's credit reports if it's less than six months old. Ed Mierzwinski, senior director at the United States Public Interest Research Group, noted that there had been a history of bipartisan support for even broader restrictions. So there is reason, given the recent momentum, to believe that a new bill could gain traction even if there isn't one currently in the works. "The new Congress could work across the aisle to further limit the harms caused by medical debt," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
From left, Karrington Riley Colon, Abigail Brown, Sean Harrington and Sara Schwartz in Pig Iron Theatre Company's "A Period of Animate Existence," about climate change and human complacency in the face of impending disaster. PHILADELPHIA Saturday afternoon was sparkling here: one of those early autumn days with not a whiff of fall in the air. The temperature was close to 90, and when a taxi drove past with an ad on its roof for a production of "The Nutcracker," the incongruity was jarring. Aren't the holidays too far off for that? "A Period of Animate Existence," the mammoth and muddled multimedia production I'd just seen at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, is concerned with precisely that sort of mind set, but on a more consequential scale. Presented as part of FringeArts's annual Fringe Festival, where it ran through Sunday, it's a big ideas piece by the estimable Pig Iron Theater Company, with an eye catching team of creators: the composer Troy Herion, the Tony winning set designer Mimi Lien and the director Dan Rothenberg. The playwrights Will Eno and Kate Tarker contributed the libretto. With a cast of 87, professionals and amateurs, the show's primary worries are climate change and human complacency in the face of impending disaster. As an unnamed character (the reliably excellent Jennifer Kidwell) tells the audience, "I think there is something biological about our shortsightedness." She seems, in fact, pretty placid herself. In the program, the creators write of their own alarm at living in a species devastating age that some call "the Sixth Extinction," as Elizabeth Kolbert does in her book of the same name. They intend "A Period of Animate Existence" whose clinical sounding title is a wordier way of saying "life" to be a contemplation of the dangers facing us, and of whatever future we might have. That's unlikely to be the takeaway for spectators, though the first section seems promising. Structured like a symphony, in five movements with pauses in between, the show begins with a column of light projected from the stage, panning very slowly across the darkened house. (The lighting design is by Tyler Micoleau.) Underneath, an orchestra plays rumbling music that could be coming from the bowels of the earth, from the time of creation. In the second movement, a cellist (Daniel de Jesus) plays and a chorus crisscrosses the stage around him, singing. A swath of humanity, these people are dressed in street clothes, and their simple choreography (by Beth Gill) is strikingly beautiful. When they lie side by side on the floor, moving as one, the performance reaches its sole moment of transcendence. A food cart is the star of movement three, talking to us through its LED sign. "Let us learn and fast what every god learns the hard way," it says. "The right to immortality is no privilege." True enough, but the show's curiosity about machines and their possible ability to think feels awkward, even a little feigned, alongside its more organic interest in children and elders. There are lots of both in this production, notably in the overlong movement four, which unfortunately is where the show goes awry. The style of each section is different, and this one is essentially a pageant with a brittle narrative strung through it, with neither the charm of the homemade nor the polish of the professional. The one bright spot is the bandstand, its backdrop a red circle edged in flames spiked with giant matchsticks. But at least the environmental theme there is clear, whereas movement five is mostly just a head scratcher unless you're in possession of a news release that explains the pairs of wrestlers struggling on floor mats as a "visualization of Henri Bergson's 'elan vital,'" the "vital impulse" that gives life its uniqueness (and, in the philosopher's optimistic view, explained the evolution of higher forms). Arrayed behind them, in majestic costumes by Loren Shaw that fuse the papal with the insectoid (they are meant to suggest trilobites, long extinct), is a choir called the Crossing, softly chanting. Such elements of beauty and humor glimmer occasionally throughout "A Period of Animate Existence." More often, it feels like a show whose ambitions are so weighty that its true form is still buried under the research somewhere. It's foiled, too, by the desire to change the creative language with each movement. These disparate pieces are intended to add up to something whole. At this stage of the experiment, they don't. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"I scream my lungs out/Confess my secrets, all my sins," Caitlyn Smith sings on "Starfire," her first major label album after three early efforts in her teens. "But they don't give a damn/'Cause if it don't sound like the radio pass." The song is called "This Town Is Killing Me," and she does name the town: It's Nashville. Where, in actuality, Ms. Smith hasn't fared too badly. Working as a staff songwriter there, with and without collaborators, Ms. Smith, 31, has turned out more than 500 songs, including a multimillion selling hit in 2015 "Like I'm Gonna Lose You" performed by Meghan Trainor with John Legend and tracks on albums by Lady Antebellum, Jason Aldean, Garth Brooks and Dolly Parton, among many others. Now, like fellow Nashville toilers Lori McKenna and Natalie Hemby, she's stepping forward. Ms. Smith, who grew up in Minnesota, is adept at radio friendly scenarios of lifelong love ("Like I'm Gonna Lose You"), post breakup loneliness and anger (Cassadee Pope's "Wasting All These Tears"), bad boy behavior (Kip Moore's "What I Do") and urgent transportation (Lady Antebellum's "747"); she has written ballads, rockers, folksy acoustic tunes and arena country anthems. But she can also be the one to provide the song that lends gravity to a country striver's album, like "Unsaid," a regretful elegy sung by Sunny Sweeney. On "Starfire" it turns out that, unlike some other songwriters for hire, she has a striking voice of her own: lean and taut, with an insistent quaver and a hint of a sob, with glimmers of both the girl next door naturalism of Sheryl Crow and the wayward attack of Sia. "Starfire" is what Ms. Smith wants to say as herself. She released a seven song EP in 2014, "Everything to You," that, true to its title, was a showcase for how generalized her songwriting could be. Although "Starfire" is by no means the bare bones radio unfriendly confessional she hints at in "This Town Is Killing Me," it is far more personalized, and more dramatic. The album offers some biographical particulars. "St. Paul" is named after the Minnesota city Ms. Smith regularly drove through playing Wilco songs in her "beat up Wrangler" on her way to Nashville. The slow building "Don't Give Up on My Love," the one song on the album written by Ms. Smith alone, grapples with the toll of career ambitions on a relationship: "You said underneath your breath/That you didn't really know, didn't really know if this is worth it." The music, produced by Paul Moak (who has produced the Christian rock bands Third Day and Leeland), takes some format defying turns notably in "East Side Restaurant," a waltz that begins as something like a French chanson and builds to a string orchestra climax, treating a breakup as a grand tragedy. (Those strings are on call for other songs, too.) Most importantly, the album presents Ms. Smith as someone more wounded, stubborn and complicated than the people pleasing country gal image she accepted on her EP. The song "Starfire" vows, "You ain't ever ever gonna burn me out," in a minor key rock stomp with some Neil Young underpinnings. Her lost love songs, like "House of Cards," and "Do You Think About Me," have an escalating desperation; even a song with a happy ending, the soul style "Before You Called Me Baby," opens and closes in a minor key and dwells on how the singer used to be "messed up, wandering, broke down, stumbling, running for my life." And Ms. Smith shows an unsentimentally observant eye in "Scenes From a Corner Booth at Closing Time on a Tuesday." Ms. Smith never entirely jettisons her Nashville professionalism. It's there in the way city names guaranteed to get a shout in concert are sprinkled through "Tacoma" (which was recorded by Garth Brooks), in the Allman Brothers echoes and professions of infatuation in "Contact High," and in the cozy homebody promises of "Cheap Date": "I'd much rather just sit on the couch and make out." But even in songs she could have handed off to others, Ms. Smith has all the flair she needs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
SAN FRANCISCO The Federal Election Commission said on Thursday that a Silicon Valley security company could immediately start helping 2020 presidential candidates defend their campaigns from the kinds of malicious email attacks that Russian hackers exploited in the 2016 election. The F.E.C. made its advisory opinion one month after lawyers for the commission advised it to block a request by the company, Area 1 Security, which had sought to provide services to 2020 presidential candidates at a discount. The F.E.C. lawyers said that Area 1 would be violating campaign finance laws that prohibit corporations from offering free or discounted services to federal candidates. The same law also prevents political parties from offering candidates cybersecurity assistance because it is considered an "in kind donation." The F.E.C.'s green light clears one major administrative roadblock that 2020 candidates faced as they sought assistance from Area 1 in defending against the attacks and disinformation campaigns that plagued 2016. The decision is limited to Area 1 because the company already offered similar services to other organizations at the same cost. Cybersecurity and election specialists say time is running out for campaigns to develop the defenses capable of warding off attacks from sophisticated nation state actors like Russia and others. In April, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, warned that Russian election interference continued to pose a "significant counterintelligence threat" and that Russian efforts in the 2016 and 2018 elections were just "a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
No one raises an eyebrow today at a luxury watch made of gasp! stainless steel. But in 1976, when Patek Philippe introduced the Nautilus 3700/1, it was a different story. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of this game changer, Christie's (celebrating its own 250th anniversary) is dividing 40 Nautilus models among four auctions this fall in four locations: Dubai, held Oct. 19; Geneva, Nov. 14; Hong Kong, Nov. 28 and New York, Dec. 4. In Dubai, an 18 karat gold model from 1980 sold for 50,000. The Nautilus, water resistant to almost 400 feet, was named in honor of the submersible craft that Jules Verne imagined for Captain Nemo in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." The design, based on a ship's portal, was reportedly dreamed up in five minutes by the great designer Gerald Genta while he was dining in a restaurant during the 1974 Baselworld watch fair. Advertising bragged that "one of the world's costliest watches is made of steel." The Nautilus also had a 42 millimeter (1.65 inch) case that today would be considered normal but then was dubbed "jumbo." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The 18 swimmers entered the outdoor pool deck in a drawn out procession, taking care to stay 10 feet apart from one another. On the walk to their individually assigned lanes, the Mission Viejo Nadadores team members glanced at the giant scoreboard. On the screen where their successes and failures are usually illuminated, their coach, Mark Schubert, had keyed in a message: "May the new normal teach us to be grateful for the things the old normal taught us to take for granted." Across the United States and throughout the world, sports are slowly awakening from their two month respite during the coronavirus pandemic. As countries start to ease lockdown restrictions aimed at stemming the spread of the contagion, soccer teams in Germany, Spain and Italy have resumed training in the hopes of resuming their seasons, professional golfers are eying a late spring return to competition and touring tennis pros learned this week that an altered version of a season is in the works. Professional baseball began again in South Korea on Tuesday, some N.B.A. training facilities may open Friday, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship and NASCAR plan to hold events this month without fans on site. There are tennis players, swimmers and track athletes who have access to personal facilities or reopened public spaces, while others in neighboring counties, states or countries remain severely restricted. Austria has opened Olympic training centers. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee has not decided when it will open its centers. In the United States, 50 states may produce 50 different sets of regulations. Athletes in some European and Asian countries may have a hard time traveling elsewhere. The different guidelines and realities, depending on geography, complicate each athlete's efforts to get back into competitive shape. This timeout has left fans thirsting for games and athletes desperate to compete. Mary Jo Kane, a longtime sports sociologist at the University of Minnesota and an avid follower of the Chicago Bears, recalled crossing paths recently with another N.F.L. fan who threatened to go on a hunger strike if there was no football in the fall. "Just the very fact that we're trying to figure out ways for sports to continue without fans shows you how much we deeply want and need sports," said Kane, who spoke by telephone after finishing a nine hole round of golf, a part of her weekly routine she missed when local courses were closed. Yet any psychological benefits of bringing back sports must be weighed against the potential physical harm. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. In an interview last week, Dr. Jonathan Finnoff, the chief medical officer for the U.S.O.P.C., said that as restrictions are reduced, "there will be a potential for outbreaks, and we have to anticipate that will happen." Those fears gained traction in Germany this week when 10 players from the country's soccer league were found to have the virus after blanket testing of 1,724 individuals from 36 teams. Anton Olsson, a Swede who captains a third division team in Orebro, his hometown, has watched other countries ease their restrictions with growing unease. "It's frustrating," said Olsson, whose team continued to train during the pandemic in accordance with Sweden's looser restrictions. "It's really hard to know which way is best," Olsson said in a telephone interview. He described three or four people on his club, including a coach, who have been sick with coronavirus symptoms and added, "Everyone on the team should have had it or are going to have it." Sandra Gal, a professional golfer from Germany, stayed in the United States until the end of March, then traveled home to be with her boyfriend and family. Because all of the courses in her state were closed, Gal bought netting so she could hit balls at a nearby park and at home. Last week she drove two hours to practice in a part of Germany where courses have opened. This week she learned of a special exemption that her state gives professional golfers to practice on courses that are otherwise closed. "Now it's going to start feeling a little more normal," Gal said. In the United States, while some business are reopening, no state is at the point where gyms, pools, training centers or even open air running tracks are widely open. Athing Mu, a standout half miler, lives in New Jersey, where Covid 19 remains rampant and training facilities, most of which are at schools, are closed through the end of the academic year. Mu is running on city streets for now, dodging traffic near Trenton as she does mile repeats at a six minute pace, said Al Jennings, her coach. Jennings is hopeful that parks and some school facilities may open soon. Mu, a potential Olympian, is supposed to enter college in the summer, but no one knows when intercollegiate sports might return. In guidelines issued last week by the U.S.O.P.C., Finnoff said that public health authorities must say it's safe for small groups to gather before any training may occur at public facilities. Even then, the guidelines say, training should not be conducted as usual. Initially, athletes should socially distance, use their own equipment and wash any shared equipment with antiseptic cleaners. They should also wear facial coverings and avoid direct contact with other athletes so no contact sports. A tennis player can hit alone, but not with another player, who might wipe away the sweat on her face then pick up the shared ball. A basketball player can shoot but not pass. Anyone who moves to a less restrictive state should quarantine for 14 days before training, or have two negative results on Covid 19 tests. If competitive sports do resume in the near future, they will almost certainly be contingent on widespread testing and fewer people interacting. The L.P.G.A., which has made plans to restart its season in July, circulated an email to players and caddies that said not to expect fans at its first few events. This week, World Team Tennis announced plans to bring its nine teams to a single city, which is yet to be determined, and to play the 2020 schedule, tentatively starting in July, with a revamped format at a single venue. "It gives everyone some comfort, and right now, in the last 45 days, there hasn't been a lot of hope and comfort," said Carlos Silva, the chief executive of World Team Tennis. In Mission Viejo, Schubert got half of his 36 member elite group to return to the pool, using social distancing guidelines provided by U.S.A. Swimming and approved by the city's mayor, Brian Goodell, a Schubert protege who won two Olympic gold medals in 1976. Most nearby teams haven't received similar backing from their local government agencies, a disparity that illustrates the complexities and inconsistencies for sports and many other industries. Terry Stoddard, the general chair for Southern California Swimming, noted that his organization has 160 member teams and said: "I wake up every day and try to figure out how to get the other 159 teams in the pool." For Mission Viejo's Katie Crom, 16, the seven week layoff was her longest since she began competing in 6 and under age group races. Crom, one of the country's best butterfly specialists, said she was glad to be back swimming, and not just for the exercise. "It is really great to see my friends again, even at a distance," Crom said in a text message. "That is something we certainly took for granted." Crom and her teammates arrive wearing their suits, since the locker rooms remain closed, and enter the pool deck from the parking lot one at a time. They don't stray from the middle of the lanes as they complete 75 minute workouts that are written on paper and affixed to the end of each 25 yard lane set up across the width of the 50 meter competition pool. Schubert wears a surgical mask and stands far enough away, Crom said, "We can barely hear him." If the swimmers have to use the bathroom, they must trek up a hill to the single toilets at the swim school, and they are required to sanitize the toilet afterward. "Nobody has asked to go to the bathroom," Schubert said on Monday. "I think because nobody wants to clean the toilets." Or perhaps, as Crom suggested, after being kept out of the pool for so long, nobody wants to miss a single minute in the water. "Before the quarantine we took everything for granted," Crom said, adding, "Swimming in a pool and lake was always available, since I was a child. I never thought that water would be restricted." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Uber Regains Its License to Operate in London, a Win for Its New C.E.O. LONDON Uber won an appeal on Tuesday to regain its taxi license in London after agreeing to stricter government oversight, a crucial victory for efforts by its new chief executive to revamp the company's grow at all costs culture. The closely watched case could serve as a template for other cities looking to extract concessions from Uber, the ride hailing service that has upended the taxi industry worldwide, often by ignoring the concerns of regulators. The company suffered a major setback with that approach last fall, when the transport authorities in London its most lucrative European market withdrew its license. It has been able to continue to operate through the appeals process. The court case has been a test for the conciliatory approach toward regulators taken by Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive. Mr. Khosrowshahi replaced the famously combative Travis Kalanick last year, and he has made it a priority to show officials throughout the world that the San Francisco based Uber can comply with local rules. On Tuesday, a judge at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London bolstered Mr. Khosrowshahi's campaign, reissuing Uber's license, albeit for 15 months less than the five years that is typical for taxi licenses. Uber had agreed to install new leadership in London, adopt rules to report incidents to the police, keep tired drivers off the road and share traffic data with the city. The company also named a new independent board to oversee British operations. In reading a statement, the judge, Emma Arbuthnot, laid blame for Uber's misdeeds at the feet of former managers who had a "gung ho attitude" to "grow the business come what may." Judge Arbuthnot added that the 15 month license required Uber to prove its cultural changes were lasting. "The question," she said, "is whether Uber can be trusted." The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, whose office oversees transportation in the capital, declared victory in a statement. Along with the relatively short license, Uber was ordered to pay court costs for London's transport authorities. "Uber has been forced to overhaul the way it operates not just in London but across the world, including completely changing its global governance structures and implementing new systems for reporting alleged crimes," Mr. Khan said. With more than 3.6 million people who use the service at least once every three months, London is one of Uber's most lucrative global markets and biggest success stories outside the United States. The appeal removes a black eye as Mr. Khosrowshahi scales back in Asia and prepares for an initial public offering as early as next year. But the company's size also makes it politically risky for government officials to take its cars off the road. Uber says it provides millions of rides per week in London, and with roughly 45,000 drivers, its fleet nearly doubles the number of black cabs. More than 850,000 people signed a petition supporting Uber after the ban was announced last year. Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers' Association, which represents about half the city's 23,000 cabbies, criticized the city for allowing Uber to become "too big to fail." The union lobbied to prevent Uber from regaining a license, and some of its members were in the audience during the hearings. Uber's experience in London tracks closely with its experience in other major cities. It gained popularity among customers who enjoyed the app's convenience and comparatively low prices, and Uber's strategy was to grow as quickly as possible so that it became indispensable. But with its growth came criticism over poor treatment of drivers, inadequate passenger safety and harm to incumbent taxi industries. In September, frustrated by a raft of global scandals, London revoked Uber's license. Transport for London, which regulates ride hailing services in the city, said Uber was not a "fit and proper" business, a designation required to operate in Britain. "We've had five years of a very difficult relationship where Uber has felt it didn't require regulation," Helen Chapman, Transport for London's director of licensing, regulation and charging, said during testimony on Tuesday. The initial decision to revoke Uber's license focused attention on the fast changing dynamics of London's taxi industry. Drivers of the British capital's iconic black cabs are predominantly white, and have to pass an exacting exam, known as the Knowledge, by memorizing thousands of city streets over the course of several years. Uber drivers, by contrast, are mostly immigrants and are quickly able to sign up and navigate London's streets with the help of smartphones and GPS software. The two day trial in London allowed regulators to make their case. Uber managers were questioned about the use of software to avoid government oversight. The software, called Greyball, was developed in part to aid entrance into markets where the company's service was not permitted. The tool allowed Uber to deploy what was essentially a fake version of its app to duck law enforcement agencies that were cracking down on its service. The managers were upbraided over instances in which sexual assault allegations against drivers were not reported to the police. And they were criticized for a data breach that exposed millions of customers but that was not reported to the authorities for months. In each instance, company representatives accepted blame and outlined the changes made under Mr. Khosrowshahi to address those issues. Mr. Elvidge said regulators had been right to revoke the company's license given its past behavior. Over several hours of testimony on Monday, he called decisions made by the previous leadership team "entirely regrettable," "a bad idea," "not appropriate" and "fundamentally wrong." "It was really clear that the corporate culture of the previous leadership had to change," Mr. Elvidge told the court. Testimony during the trial described an unrestrained company culture, where leaders in San Francisco made decisions that managers in London had to explain to regulators. When a data breach was reported last year, Mr. Elvidge said, he learned about it from news reports. He first told British regulators that only one driver had been exposed, but several hours later shared that in fact information from 2.7 million people in Britain had been taken. Uber said it had created new rules for reporting problems to regulators, including an unusual policy to notify government officials when the company is aware of potentially negative news coverage. To address safety concerns, the company also worked with London's Metropolitan Police to create a policy for reporting possible crimes by drivers. In the past, Uber left the decision about reporting wrongdoing to customers. The company also said it would be more aggressive about barring drivers when riders complain. London is not the only area where Uber has made changes under Mr. Khosrowshahi. The company has settled a protracted legal battle with Waymo, owned by the Google parent, Alphabet, over self driving car technology. It has offered drivers new insurance protections in some markets. And it proposed a fee on ride hailing services to pay for a "hardship fund" for struggling taxi drivers in New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council are under pressure to adopt stricter policies against ride hailing services. Laurel Powers Freeling, appointed last year as chairwoman of Uber's independent board in Britain, testified that Uber was seeing major cultural changes. "I've seen a real will to take on a new set of values," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
TOKYO As Samsung Electronics and Apple continue to slug it out across the globe for domination of the smartphone market, the South Korean maker continues to edge out the California company. Samsung is now more profitable than Apple, according to second quarter financial results released by Samsung on Friday in Seoul. But while the two rivals have successively one upped each other with ever sleeker, more technologically sophisticated phones, new competition is stirring. Already, the combined share of the worldwide smartphone market controlled by Apple and Samsung slipped to 43 percent in the second quarter from 49 percent a year earlier, IDC, a research firm, reported on Friday. Some of the companies that are chipping away at the leaders are familiar names trying comebacks, like Sony, Nokia and HTC. Others are relative newcomers, like LG of South Korea and Lenovo, ZTE and Huawei of China. "The story is no longer Apple versus Samsung," said Bryan Wang, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Going forward, they will both face similar challenges." Analysts say buyers are more willing to look at alternatives to Apple or Samsung because the differences among smartphones are becoming less pronounced. The proportion of phones running Google's Android operating system keeps growing, and technical specifications are converging. Like Samsung's Galaxy S4, a number of other phones, including Sony's Xperia Z, also include high definition 5 inch screens. That makes price, where the Chinese smartphone makers have an edge, an increasingly important selling point. Those challenges were evident in the latest earnings report from Samsung on Friday, when the company said it expected competition in the smartphone business to stiffen in the third quarter, with new models pending from LG and other rivals. "The strong growth streak for the smartphone market is expected to continue in the third quarter, albeit at a slower pace," the company said in a statement. Samsung remains a powerhouse, reporting big gains on Friday in sales and earnings for its latest quarter. Net income rose 50 percent, to 7.77 trillion won, or 6.96 billion, from 5.19 trillion won a year earlier. Revenue rose to 57.46 trillion won, or 51.6 billion, from 47.6 trillion won. On Tuesday, Apple posted quarterly net income of 6.9 billion on revenue of 35.3 billion. Strategy Analytics, a research firm, said Samsung had passed Apple for the first time to become the world's most profitable maker of mobile handsets. Samsung, which does not break out results for its handset making business, generated 5.2 billion in quarterly operating profit from the unit, Strategy Analytics estimated, compared with 4.6 billion for Apple. Samsung previously pulled ahead of Apple in market share, and its gains continued in the second quarter, when it controlled 30.4 percent of global smartphone shipments, compared with 13.1 percent for Apple, according to IDC. Samsung has had to work harder than Apple to achieve those gains. Ubiquitous TV ads around the world and big ticket promotional events like an introductory party for its flagship model, the Galaxy S4, at Radio City Music Hall, have driven up marketing costs. And while the S4 has been selling at a brisk pace, it has fallen short of some analysts' expectations. Investors have grown accustomed to bigger gains, and the share price of Samsung, like Apple shares, has taken a beating this year. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. "In a way, Apple and Samsung have become victims of their own success," said Pete Cunningham, an analyst at the research firm Canalys. "When these companies report many billions of profits every quarter, it's hard to say they are doing anything wrong." While the old generation of phone makers Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry struggle, together Samsung and Apple still collect more than 90 percent of the profit in smartphones, analysts say. Yet that success has emboldened more companies to try to challenge them. Individually, none of these companies pose a threat to the top two. Collectively, however, the next three top players showed strong growth over the last year. No. 3 LG's share of worldwide smartphone sales increased to 5.3 percent from 3.7 percent in the second quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. No. 4 ZTE rose to 5 percent from 3.7 percent and No. 5 Huawei went to 4.8 percent from 4.2 percent. IDC had a slightly different ranking, with Lenovo replacing Huawei in the top five and also showing solid growth, to 4.7 percent from 3.1 percent. As recently as the first quarter of 2011, three Western companies Apple, Nokia and BlackBerry topped the IDC list. The eastward shift reflects the growth of sales in China, which has surpassed the United States to become the biggest smartphone market, and other developing economies. Analysts say much of the growth in coming years will occur among lower priced smartphones, an area in which Chinese makers are strong and Apple is notably absent. But both Apple and Samsung face new challenges at the high end of the market, where their dominance has been most pronounced. Sony, for example, has shown renewed strength in Japan, where its Xperia Z has been outselling the iPhone, and Europe, where IDC showed Sony's market share rising to 10 percent in the first quarter from 6 percent a year earlier. LG, which said in the last week that its smartphone shipments had more than doubled in the second quarter from a year earlier, to 12.1 million from 5.7 million, clearly has bigger ambitions in the United States. For the introduction of a new flagship model, the company has planned a splashy event along the lines of Samsung's Radio City extravaganza, sending out a "save the date" notice to journalists for Aug. 7. Why are rivals to Samsung and Apple so optimistic? Despite the slowdown in growth that the market leaders have signaled, the business continues to expand. Smartphone shipments worldwide rose 52 percent in the second quarter, to 238 million phones, according to IDC. "The smartphone market is still a rising tide that's lifting many ships," said Kevin Restivo, an analyst at IDC. "Though Samsung and Apple are the dominant players, the market is as fragmented as ever. There is ample opportunity for smartphone vendors with differentiated offerings." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
WASHINGTON The federal government is stepping up its scrutiny of the world's biggest tech companies, leaving them vulnerable to new rules and federal lawsuits. Regulators are divvying up antitrust oversight of the Silicon Valley giants and lawmakers are investigating whether they have stifled competition and hurt consumers. After a spate of unusual negotiations, the Justice Department has agreed to handle potential antitrust investigations related to Apple and Google, while the Federal Trade Commission will take on Facebook and Amazon. Lawmakers in the House said on Monday that they were looking into the tech giants' possible anti competitive behavior. That could lead to the first overhaul of antitrust rules in many decades, an effort to keep up with an industry that didn't exist when antitrust laws were written. The question of whether tech companies violate antitrust laws has long been the subject of academic debates and industry griping. But now the industry is in the sights of President Trump, Democrats running for president, Congress and consumers. Silicon Valley has faced fierce criticism over disinformation, privacy breaches and political bias. Investors pummeled technology stocks on Monday. Shares of Facebook fell more than 7 percent. Google and Amazon shares were also sharply lower, and Apple's stock fell about 1 percent. It does not appear that the agencies have opened official investigations. But the scrutiny from Washington could lead to years of headaches for the companies, raising the prospect of lawsuits to break up companies, hefty fines or new laws limiting their reach. "This is about how do we get competition back in this space," Representative David Cicilline, Democrat of Rhode Island, said Monday at a news conference. Mr. Cicilline is the chairman of the House Judiciary's subcommittee on antitrust, which during the next 18 months plans a set of hearings, testimony from executives from top companies, as well as subpoenas for internal corporate documents. Mr. Cicilline said the investigation would focus on major digital platforms. The House committee on Monday informed four tech companies, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, of the plans. If the House investigation finds wrongdoing, lawmakers will pressure the Justice Department or the F.T.C. to investigate, he said. A few weeks ago, the Justice Department and the F.T.C. began negotiations over dividing up the responsibilities for overseeing competition in the tech sector, according to several people close to the discussions. The two agencies often split responsibilities for reviewing mergers. But the recent negotiations show that both agencies were keen on looking into the companies, and that they had probably received complaints from rivals and others. Two people close to President Trump said White House officials were supportive of the agencies' steps toward greater antitrust oversight over tech companies. But the people, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity, insisted there was no direct pressure on the agencies or involvement from Mr. Trump or any top West Wing officials. The officials attributed the moves to Mr. Trump's appointees at the agencies. One of the officials said antitrust issues had not recently been a focus of the president, and had not come up in Oval Office meetings with his economic advisers. Mr. Trump's lack of involvement could be good news for the potential investigations: After he publicly opposed the AT T Time Warner merger, AT T tried to use his comments in the case as a defense, saying the Justice Department was carrying out a political agenda. "Big tech plays a huge role in our economy and our world," Representative Doug Collins, a Republican of Georgia and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement about the House investigation. "As tech has expanded its market share, more and more questions have arisen about whether the market remains competitive." It could be years before regulators take action or Congress passes new antitrust laws. Some consumer groups have called for regulators to break up the companies, and Chris Hughes, a Facebook co founder, has said the company must be broken up in order to solve its problems. But most lawmakers and global regulators have stopped short of supporting the breakup of any tech company. Talk of antitrust is suddenly fashionable, but efforts by the government to break up companies have been rare, time consuming and not always successful. The government's case against IBM went on for 13 years before being dropped. The pursuit of AT T lasted a decade until the company was broken into the seven Baby Bells. The government chased Microsoft for 12 years, from the first F.T.C. investigation until a settlement was approved by an appeals court. One reason for the slow pace: If you're big enough to be drawing antitrust heat, you're big enough to have a lot of lobbyists, lawyers and employees in congressional districts all around the country. Apple has argued that the fees are reasonable given that it operates the App Store. It argues that the App Store also gives Spotify and other companies access to millions of potential customers. Ms. Miller said she wasn't holding her breath that the new government steps would change the American approach. "Time will tell if this announcement leads to meaningful action," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Often, more miles per hour means fewer miles per gallon, but such is not the case with the 2 Series coupes. The 228i has a preliminary E.P.A. fuel economy estimate of 23 miles per gallon in the city and 35 highway for the automatic models, and 22 city/34 highway for cars with the 6 speed manual. Preliminary E.P.A. estimates for the M235i are only slightly less impressive for a subcompact car with such solid performance numbers: 22 city/32 highway for the 8 speed automatic and 19 city/28 highway for the 6 speed manual. BMW says the 2 Series coupes will integrate Internet based services into the cars' capabilities with smartphone apps. Pricing will start at 33,025 for the 228i and 44,025 for the M235i, including destination and handling charges. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
One of the most coveted items of the holiday season could have been plucked from a Disney fantasy. An exotic reimagining of a Cinderella glass slipper called the Begum, it is also one of this season's most blatantly knocked off designs. Loose interpretations of its spindly rococo heel have cropped up at stores and e tail sites including DHgate, ASOS, Jeffrey Campbell and Poshmark. "I see a lot of replicas on Instagram, even on my hashtag," Amina Muaddi, their designer, said by phone from her office in Paris. "Some even have my name on them." Not that she is losing sleep over it. Few people know better that a profusion of knockoffs can be one measure of success. More amused than chagrined, Ms. Muaddi has filled an album with images of look alikes, many sent to her by friends. Her confidence is bolstered by celebrity fans, including Rihanna, Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner. Ms. Jenner and Hailey Bieber were photographed in her shoes during New York Fashion Week in September. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Paleontologists assembling the bones of a Camarasaurus at the Musee des Confluences in Lyon, France. The Veterinarian Will See Your Dinosaur Now Dinosaurs loom large in the human imagination, towering above the treetops, bringing down prey and reigning over the ancient land, sea and sky. In real life, though, things weren't always so spectacular. A paper published last week in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B by Les Hearn , a retired science teacher, and Amanda Williams , a psychologist seeking evidence of chronic pain in other species, collects the wince inducing tales of hundreds of dinosaur injuries. Paleontologists are able to deduce whether dinosaurs suffered wounds during their lifetimes by analyzing fossilized bones and other evidence, and have found a tyrannosaur with its rival's tooth embedded in its jaw, unusually spaced tracks left by an ornithopod with a toe injury and many more prehistoric owies. En masse, the injury reports help to demystify the lives of these ancient creatures, which were fraught with danger and, sometimes, slapstick silliness. They also raise a question: If a banged up dinosaur walked into a veterinarian's office today, what might happen next? Ben Golas , a working veterinarian and a Ph.D. candidate in wildlife disease ecology at Colorado State University, took a break from caring for modern fuzzy and feathered friends to consider how he would treat some damaged dinosaurs if they were brought to his clinic. At the outset, he said that many dinosaurs showing up at his practice would present logistical issues: "We might have to make the doors a little bit bigger." Still, he said, people in his profession train for "the variety that life throws at us," and the injuries detailed in this recent paper aren't too far off from those he's used to treating in other species. "If a big dog got hit by a car, we might see this same sort of presentation," Dr. Golas said. He recommended temporarily immobilizing the injured right arm by bandaging it against the body. "We would need a lot of vet wrap," he said. And they might need a dino size e collar or "cone of shame." "If Sue could get their head around to lick the wound, they would absolutely need a cone," he said. One ornithopod managed to get around despite a damaged toe pad. Its fossilized footprints showed a limp, which was how paleontologists diagnosed the injury. Dr. Golas suggested a ball bandage a thick wad of gauze that the animal can grab onto and is then wrapped around the foot. This is often used to treat birds with claw distress. "It takes some pressure off the painful area," he said, allowing it to heal. Such a complex set of scrapes calls for a mix of stabilization and antibiotics as well as a muzzle, often necessary when animals are in pain and want to protect their limbs, Dr. Golas said. If the infection kept raging, amputation might be the best answer, after which "we'd have to find a dilophosaurus rescue center" for the animal to live out its days. The next patient was an oviraptor with a fracture of the ulnar bone in her forearm. Dr. Golas prescribed a "figure eight" style bandage to keep her forearm still, along with "strict cage rest." Although this dinosaur wouldn't have had bandages available, she seems to have managed the second part of her treatment plan on her own: When she died, likely from a landslide or other accident, she was on nest rest, incubating a clutch of eggs, and her fracture was mostly healed. Not All Fun and Games | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
George Salazar arrived in New York a decade ago with 900, a dream and an undiagnosed shrimp allergy. (His first job: Waiting tables at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. It didn't stay undiagnosed long.) Now 32 and a veteran of Broadway ("Godspell") and Off Broadway ("Here Lies Love"), he spends most nights of the week crouched in a bathtub, singing "Michael in the Bathroom," which Ben Brantley called the "breakout agony anthem" of the sci fi teen angst musical "Be More Chill." He meditates every day and is actually pretty chill. His 110,000 plus Instagram followers are not. These emoji wielding admirers clamor for photos of his solos, his post show drinks and a headband collection rivaling only that of Chrissy Teigen. They send him fan art. So do their dads. Mr. Salazar discussed the life of an actor who has found his way into a cult sensation by reviewing seven of his own Instagram posts. Here are excerpts from the conversation. We're all socially anxious people, and "Michael in the Bathroom" is such a relatable, bare, vulnerable moment. I look out at the audience, and I see these kids who are just so happy, because they listened to this song hundreds of times and they're finally in the theater, and I share that same excitement. Fan art is not unique to teenagers. A father who is a huge fan of "Be More Chill" made this charcoal portrait of me and lacquered it and sent it with his daughter, who gave it to me at the stage door. It's insane. I don't throw any of the fan art away. I have three pieces that are on my wall. I'm looking at them right now. These are my nieces, Pia and Anna, and my nephew, Christopher. Pia and Anna, the first musical they ever saw was "Be More Chill" in its initial run at Two River Theater in Red Bank, N.J. Pia fell asleep, but during "Michael in the Bathroom," Anna's jaw dropped, and the pacifier fell out of her mouth. A few years after the New Jersey "Be More Chill," Joe Iconis and I had a run of our duo show "Two Player Game" at 54 Below. We knew we were going to have a lot of "Be More Chill" fans coming, and we wanted to thank them for loving it. This photo was taken after the longest meet and greet that we had. It lasted two hours, and this is us having our first sips of our Manhattans in the elevator going back up to the green room. We're holding gifts. Someone just brought me a lightsaber. I don't know why. I was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for featured actor in a musical for "The Lightning Thief." This was at the nominees luncheon. I'm such a huge fan of Danny DeVito. It was crazy seeing him there. He was nominated for featured actor in a play. I fangirled him. I was like, "Mr. DeVito can I have a picture with you?" At the awards, I lost to Gavin Creel, and that made me so happy. With "Here Lies Love," I remember being so excited to tell a story of the Philippines with other Filipinos and Asian Americans. Mr. Salazar's mother is Filipino. It filled me with this jolt of pride in where I come from. Rufus Wainwright came to our show in a giant cowboy hat, and Stephen Sondheim came to our show not in a giant cowboy hat, so it was quite the milestone for me. I wore headbands to keep my hair out of my face when I worked out. One day I walked into an elevator that was all mirrored and I saw the headband and I was like, "I could go out in this." That's how it started. The headband became my thing. I have probably 50 headbands. I have a headband drawer. My hair is a very strange mix of Asian hair and Latino hair. It looks fluffy, but it falls really flat. The headband actually helps keep my hair kind of lifted and floofy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Amazon responded to lawmakers on Friday who demanded that its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, testify as part of a congressional antitrust investigation. The company told lawmakers in a letter that it would be happy to send someone. It never, however, mentions Mr. Bezos in the three page letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. Instead, the company said that it was "prepared to make the appropriate Amazon executive available to the Committee to address these important issues." By not promising an appearance by Mr. Bezos, Amazon's response may escalate tensions with the Democrat leaders of the House Judiciary Committee who, along with some Republicans, requested Mr. Bezos' testimony in a letter sent to the company on May 1. They have threatened to legally compel Mr. Bezos to appear before the panel if he does not agree to do so willingly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
RIDGEFIELD, Conn. Everyone wants to ask Dick Cavett the same question, and it is a question that he never wants to answer: Of all today's talk show hosts, who is the "next Dick Cavett"? "Well, that's an awkward subject matter for me, because I know all of them," Mr. Cavett, 81, said on a recent sunny Thursday afternoon at his sprawling country house in Connecticut. "I'm not addicted to talk shows. God knows, I've spent enough time on them." As in Mr. Cavett's 1960s and '70s heyday, the country is in a period of turbulence, with racial tensions flaring, protests in the streets, and a fundamental ideological fissure. The hosts who have emphasized substance, who have "gone political," have been praised and nominated for Emmys. But "the next Cavett"? Is such a thing possible? For three decades, Mr. Cavett was the thinking person's Johnny Carson, embodiment of an East Coast sophisticate. He wore smart turtlenecks and double breasted blazers, had more cultural references than a Google server and laced martini dry witticisms into lengthy, probing talks with 20th century luminaries including Bette Davis, James Baldwin, Mick Jagger and Jean Luc Godard. "It's the strangest sensation to be getting the same comments that I got decades ago: 'I'm addicted to your show,' or 'I watch it every night,'" Mr. Cavett said. "I have virtually 3 percent memory of what I'm seeing on the screen. People I would have sworn I never had on there they are, for 90 minutes." Although his last talk show, on CNBC, ended in 1996, he has stayed in public view: making cameos on "The Simpsons" and "Gossip Girl," attending film premieres and doing guest appearances on late night. He continues to write, including occasional columns for The New York Times and collaborating on the script for "Ali Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes," a documentary film directed by Robert S. Bader making the festival rounds and scheduled to appear on HBO next year. The film explores Muhammad Ali's transformation from cocky boxing upstart to outspoken political activist through his appearances more than a dozen on Mr. Cavett's show. Theirs was a close if unlikely friendship that lasted five decades. "Dick Cavett was the whitest of white guys in America," The Rev. Al Sharpton says in the film. "But he gave blacks that had been considered outside of the mainstream like Ali a chance to be heard, and a chance to say what they wanted to say unfiltered, which was rare." One night in the 1970s, Mr. Cavett recalled in the sunroom, the phone rang in his renowned summer house, Tick Hall. It was Mr. Cavett's wife, the actress Carrie Nye, who was at their place in the city. "This ain't 'darling,'" said Mr. Ali, who had been invited for an impromptu visit and given the master bedroom. "This is the three time heavyweight champion of the world, and I'm lying in your bed, watching your TV." Mr. Cavett is not watching as much TV himself these days. Unable or unwilling to stay up past midnight, he keeps up with the current late night hosts' monologues on YouTube or Twitter, a medium seemingly invented for his verbal parry and thrust. "A. Imagine Donald Trump's library," he wrote in one recent tweet. "B. You'd have to." Ever ready to try new technology, he is thinking about starting a podcast. "Everybody seems to be doing one," he said. He sent away for an Ancestry.com genetic test, and was surprised to find he had forebears in South Sudan. But his new center of mental operations is here, in Connecticut: Mr. Cavett, who has come to think of cocktail parties as "vertical agony," is selling both his Central Park West apartment and Tick Hall, which is Montauk, N.Y. The asking price for Tick Hall, 62 million, may read like a misprint, but the house is a crown jewel of the South Fork's, one of the architect Stanford White's famed "Seven Sisters": 7,000 shingle style square feet on 20 acres of woodland with 975 feet of coastline on a private cove, rebuilt meticulously after being gutted in a 1997 fire. The house, a 1912 Georgian, towers atop a leafy hilltop past an ornate iron gate. Mr. Cavett, who never knew a name not worth dropping, seems pleased at its celebrity lineage: the film and television star Robert Vaughn and Harry Houdini's brother both lived there. Houdini, he said, "used to practice his underwater escapes in manacles and chains in the pool," a fact that delights him, because he was an avid magician as a child. Back in the sunroom, an ornate Italian fountain was babbling just outside, as Mr. Cavett sat in a wicker rocking chair with a serene smile. As the light poured through three windows, beads of perspiration were beginning to form on his visitor's face. Who would not be daunted by the task of interviewing the consummate interviewer? "Jack Paar called me once," Mr. Cavett said, referring to the early "Tonight Show" host who gave him his first gig. "He said, 'Hey, kid, when you do your show, don't do interviews.' I thought, 'Did I hear you right? Am I supposed to read to the guests?' He said, 'No, no, no, I mean "interviews," Q. and A. Make it a conversation.'" But in a late night landscape rebuilt for clickable clips, unscripted moments seem increasingly rare. "If I were doing a show today," Mr. Cavett said, "it would not include a nice actress who's so 'excited' about her new movie, and so 'excited' about her director, and so 'excited' about the costumes. 'Excited' is a word that could easily be stricken from the show business vocabulary." "For the interviews that endure," he said, "you don't get the sense that, say, Katharine Hepburn did another talk show the next night. And then the next night she did another one. So many guests now are on a promotional tour." Shortly after that segment ended, however, Mr. Cavett, who was interviewing Mr. Hamill, heard an eerie gurgle, or was it a snore? He may or may not have said, "Am I boring you?" (Mr. Cavett said he has a DVD of the episode, but he has not watched the footage for years). "This looks bad," Mr. Hamill whispered. Glancing over at Mr. Rodale, Mr. Cavett saw that he was stiff in his chair, his back arched, and unconscious. "The scene shifts, instantly and unrealistically, to me standing at the edge of the stage saying, 'Is there a doctor in the audience?'" Mr. Cavett recalled. Audience? "Why did I do that?" Katharine Hepburn, he said, later explained to him that he knew "Is there a doctor in the house" would convulse the audience though it was an appropriate ask, given that Mr. Rodale died on the set. Although he could never match the ratings sizzle of Mr. Carson, a fellow Nebraskan, his show was where you went for the steak. At the height of Watergate, "The Dick Cavett Show" featured extensive interviews with key figures. "People would always beat up on Johnny by saying, 'When Cavett's got Attorney General John Mitchell on, Johnny has Charo,'" Mr. Cavett said. Mr. Cavett and Mr. Allen have been close since their days on the New York comedy circuit in the early '60s. Mr. Cavett remains a supporter, despite the recent boycotts of Mr. Allen's work by many in Hollywood over the allegations by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow, now 33, that he sexually abused her when she was a child, which the filmmaker has vehemently denied, and never resulted in charges. "How do these people decide who's right in this?" Mr. Cavett said. Friends like Mr. Allen and Marshall Brickman, the screenwriter, are still around, but the man who knew seemingly everyone finds it haunting that so many notables he was once close to "are no longer there." Watching his shows, Mr. Cavett said, "the odd sensation about it is there I am sitting with Lucille Ball or someone like that, and it is overlain by the thought 'One of us is dead.'" "So far," Mr. Cavett said wryly, "it's always the other one." Because "you never think that will happen to you. That's something you hear old folks talk about." Despite the burdens of age, Mr. Cavett seems to be managing the bouts of depression that have dogged him since he was an undergraduate, when one day "I just couldn't figure out why I didn't want to get up, didn't want to go to class, and I couldn't read," he said. "It seemed that all the color went out of everything." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
THERESA EMERSON was married for 29 years when she fled her 6,000 square foot custom built house in Palm Desert, Calif., last June. It was a few months earlier, she recalled, that her husband, with whom she had built an engineering firm they had sold for several million dollars, told her about his chronic infidelity and addiction to pornography and gambling. They were a religious couple with two children, and she said she had been helping him through his problems with church support. Other issues surfaced that forced her to leave abruptly. It wasn't until later after she and their college aged daughter left that she realized she was broke. "I had no car," she said. "I had no money. When I got here, I was desperate." Here is Northern California. Ms. Emerson, who asked that her maiden name be used and her exact location not be revealed, spent the next eight months trying to collect enough money from friends and family to pay a lawyer's retainer. "I tried to get a loan against the house or our cabins," she said. "But we own the properties jointly, so how was I going to get his signature on a loan?" Efforts to reach her estranged husband and his lawyer were unsuccessful. Ms. Emerson believes the marital estate is worth 4 million but she has no cash to pursue her half, which she is entitled to in a communal property state like California. So she turned to Novitas, a divorce funding company based in Britain that just last month set up operations in the United States. Like other firms in the field, Novitas stakes the spouse without access to marital funds and collects its fee after a settlement is reached. How the companies do this is something each one is specific about, since their high interest rates can run afoul of state usury laws. Novitas says it makes nonrecourse advances at rates of 1 percent to 1.5 percent a month or 12 to 18 percent a year. A nonrecourse advance is one that the lender cannot recover if the divorce settlement does not yield a payout. Another firm, BBL Churchill Divorce Finance, makes loans for which they have recourse if you don't get a settlement you still owe money and charges a similar interest rate. Balance Point Divorce Funding says it makes an investment in a person's divorce, which entitles it to a percentage it says it is double digits, but less than a third of the entire settlement. But what these companies are doing is offering high interest money to people who have none and want to pursue a person they once loved for their share of what is always a lot of money. The firms all say their advances level the playing field against the moneyed spouse who can otherwise force the one without money to settle. These companies generally lend around 20 to 25 percent of the value of an expected settlement and their minimum loans range from 100,000 to 250,000, meaning the settlements are 400,000 to 1 million on the low end. The money doesn't need to be paid back until months or years down the line when a settlement is reached. By design, divorce funding sharply reduces the value of the settlement, but there might not have been a settlement otherwise. In turn, divorcees provide a hefty return for the companies in the industry, which are largely backed by private investors. Brendan Lyle, chief executive and founder of BBL Churchill, based in New York, said the company had 150 million from a large, private equity company that he would not name. In Ms. Emerson's case, she described herself as cash poor and asset rich, but also totally unprepared for what happened in a six week span of 2014. "I never imagined that anyone who said they loved me would ever do the things my husband did to me," she said. "I've learned you need to have your own car, cash and computer and prepare, prepare, prepare." She spent months trying to find a lawyer, she said. This is not an uncommon scenario. "A lot of these women go in thinking the house is in both of their names and they have joint accounts," said Nicole Noonan, chief executive of Novitas US. "What happens is the spouses drain their accounts and cut off the credit cards or they find the house is owned by their husband's company." With a home in Palm Desert, cabins in Washington and money from the sale of a company, Ms. Emerson was in a better position than many divorced women who need help. "We can't divide furniture," Ms. Noonan said. "We need something to actually fund on." And that leads to high rejection rates from divorce funders. Ms. Noonan says her firm looks closely at two of every 10 applications and funds one. Stacey Napp, who founded Balance Point after her own seven year, high stakes divorce, said even after it narrows the pool down to people who have the assets to qualify for a settlement above its minimum, it still only funds 5 to 10 percent, she said. The underwriting process is as much about psychology as financial underwriting. "It's not a car loan where you set it and forget it," Mr. Lyle said. "We're on the phone and doing a lot of hand holding." Money in retirement accounts, for example, is protected from creditors. Then there are the nuances of Florida's homestead law and other states' and countries' asset protection vehicles. Divorce funding is still a relatively new industry in the United States, with none of the major companies dating back even a decade. Their clients often hear about them through high priced divorce lawyers who see it as a way to help their clients get money for expenses and their fees short of the long, expensive and frustrating process of petitioning a family court judge. "If you needed to make an application to a court to get those fees, you're not only looking at extensive attorney fees and a time delay between when the petition is made and a decision is reached," said Michael Stutman, partner and head of family practice at Mishcon de Reya in New York. "Even though you have a decision, what happens if the person doesn't obey it? You have to appeal it." And by that point, the spouse without funds is usually desperate. Ms. Napp said most people come to her 12 months into the process when the scope of the fight hits them. Her company then works with them for 18 to 36 months more. "People in their right mind don't have any experience with litigation," she said. "They think they have 100,000 and they're loaded for bear. They have no idea how long it lasts." MaryAnn Landauer said she spent a year trying to save her marriage, after learning that her husband and the father of her two sons had had a mistress for the length of their marriage and another son with her. During that time, she asserts, her husband refinanced five properties in the marital estate, stripped them of their equity and shipped the money overseas. He did the same with other investment properties and let their 13,000 square foot home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., go into foreclosure. They were divorced in 2009 and he paid two months of support and then declared bankruptcy. She was also given half of two notes worth 4 million that proved to be worthless. Her husband, Donald V. Totten, who was well known from infomercials he ran in California and Hawaii for mortgage refinancing during the early 2000s, pleaded guilty to mortgage, tax and bankruptcy fraud and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison in October. "What this guy did was crazy," said Ms. Landauer, who has been living with her brother in Denver. "I'm trying to fight him and get someone to unwind all the financial settlements. He's behind in child support by 500,000. It's been very difficult, but I think it can be overcome with a really strong litigator." She has applied for funding from Novitas. In many of these battles, which are as much about money as fairness and spite, Ms. Napp said she often shared the advice her own divorce lawyer gave her. "Would I ever understand how much was at stake?" she said. "He said, 'You can't drive yourself crazy with what you think is there.' The question is, 'Is it enough for you to move on?'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
MUMBAI, India When Pakistan's government unveiled some of the world's most sweeping rules on internet censorship this month, global internet companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter were expected to comply or face severe penalties including the potential shutdown of their services. Instead, the tech giants banded together and threatened to leave the country and its 70 million internet users in digital darkness. Through a group called the Asia Internet Coalition, they wrote a scathing letter to Pakistan's prime minister, Imran Khan. In it, the companies warned that "the rules as currently written would make it extremely difficult for AIC Members to make their services available to Pakistani users and businesses." Their public rebellion, combined with pressure and lawsuits from local civil libertarians, forced the government to retreat. The law remains on the books, but Pakistani officials pledged this week to review the regulations and undertake an "extensive and broad based consultation process with all relevant segments of civil society and technology companies." "Because Pakistan does not have any law of data protection, international internet firms are reluctant to comply with the rules," said Usama Khilji, director of Bolo Bhi, an internet rights organization based in Islamabad, the country's capital. The standoff over Pakistan's digital censorship law, which would give regulators the power to demand the takedown of a wide range of content, is the latest skirmish in an escalating global battle. Facebook, Google and other big tech companies, which have long made their own rules about what is allowed on their services, are increasingly tangling with national governments seeking to curtail internet content that they consider harmful, distasteful or simply a threat to their power. India is expected to unveil new censorship guidelines any day now, including a requirement that encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp tell the government how specific messages moved within their networks. The country has also proposed a new data privacy law that would restrict the activities of tech companies while exempting the government from privacy rules. Vietnam passed its own cybersecurity law in 2018, with similar provisions to what Pakistan passed. Singapore recently began using its rules against "fake news" to go after critics and opposition figures by forcing social networks like Facebook to either take down certain posts or add the government's response to them. The unified resistance by Facebook, Google, Twitter and other tech companies in Pakistan is highly unusual. Companies often protest these types of regulations, but they rarely threaten to actually leave a country. Google pulled its search engine out of China in 2010 rather than submit to government censorship of search results, but LinkedIn agreed to self censor its content when it entered China in 2014 and Apple acceded to Chinese demands to remove apps that customers had used to bypass the country's Great Firewall. Chinmayi Arun, a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, said the collective threat by the tech companies to leave Pakistan was a brilliant new tactic to fight authoritarian policies. "If it was just Google threatening this or Facebook threatening this, Pakistan might say go ahead," said Ms. Arun, who founded the Center for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi. "It's more risky for the Pakistani government to have all of these services withdraw together." In Pakistan, like much of the world, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp and YouTube routinely top the charts of most popular apps. Under the new regulations, formally known as the Citizen Protection (Against Online Harm) Rules 2020, social media services must remove or block content within 24 hours of a request from a newly appointed officer, called the national coordinator. Companies must also prevent the live streaming of any type of content the authorities say is objectionable and label as "false" anything the government deems to be so. In addition, the companies must open permanent offices in Islamabad and set up servers to store data in the country. Violations of the law are subject to fines of more than 3 million, with the authorities even empowered to block services entirely. Pakistani officials denied the new regulations were aimed at curbing free speech. Firdous Ashiq Awan, the adviser to the prime minister on information and broadcasting, said in a policy statement this month that the rules were introduced to protect the social, cultural and religious values of the country. She added that "under the new laws, action could be taken against those who speak against national institutions and sovereignty" a veiled reference to the military. Shahzada Zulfiqar, president of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, urged the government to rescind the regulations, which were adopted without any warning or public consultation. "The new laws will not only cause deterioration of a digital economic future for Pakistan but also decrease freedom of expression, increase censorship and diminish digital rights," he said. The U.S. government also expressed concern about the new restrictions. On Tuesday, the State Department tweeted that they could be a "setback to freedom of expression" and hamper the development of Pakistan's digital economy. Google, Facebook and Twitter declined to comment beyond the letter from the Asia Internet Coalition. It is a "huge concern" that more governments want to take down online content, said Jennifer Daskal, a law professor at American University and faculty director of its Tech, Law, Security Program. So many of the rules "end up being used by the government to stifle dissent, or to curate content in ways that are conducive to the government's preferred narratives." Mr. Khan rose to power in Pakistan in 2018 partly because of his party's strong presence on social media, a fact he acknowledges in his speeches. But now that he is in charge, he has shown little patience for online criticism. Pakistan's powerful military is also averse to debates on social media platforms, especially on Twitter, which is used by critics to question human rights violations and the military's involvement in politics. Over the past two years, Pakistani government requests for Facebook, Google and Twitter to remove content have increased sharply, according to transparency reports published by the companies. Pakistan disclosed in September that it had blocked more than 900,000 web pages for various reasons, including pornography, blasphemy and sentiments against the state and military. Separately, regulators in Pakistan have proposed requiring online video sites to obtain licenses from the government. There is a strong case to be made that the government is overstepping its authority with the new rules, said Muhammad Aftab Alam, executive director of the Institute for Research, Advocacy and Development, a Pakistani public policy group. "This national coordinator is judge, jury, regulator and executioner as well," he said. At least two lawsuits challenging the rules have already been brought in Pakistani courts. "The main objective of the impugned rules seems to be to control the social media through indirect control by the government and ruling party," read the petition in one case, filed by Raja Ahsan Masood, who asked the court to declare them unconstitutional. Vindu Goel reported from Mumbai, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Zia ur Rehman contributed reporting from Karachi, Pakistan, and Davey Alba from New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When the Story Line Is This Easy, You Just Know Will Ryan Jones had some time to kill before attending a party hosted by the Cameroon Embassy in Washington, so he asked Monica Marie Clark if he could tag along with her to her friend's birthday party. Mr. Jones and Ms. Clark had crossed paths before at mutual friends' gatherings, but this time, they were both single. Mr. Jones, 36, a television reporter at WLS TV in Chicago, had traveled to town in the summer of 2018 for the embassy party. That morning he found himself, thanks to friends, seated at a brunch next to Ms. Clark, 36, then a senior counsel in the legal division of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mr. Jones, Ms. Clark and her friends moved on to Marvin, a bistro in Washington's U Street corridor. The evening was sultry, but they found an oasis on the bar's rooftop, where the drinks flowed and the DJ spun '90s R B. "I was talking about my relationship philosophy," Mr. Jones said. "When two people come together, you should become your better selves. I think we should support each other. As I was talking, Monica's eyes just changed. You know how in sitcoms, someone is in love and the music starts to play? It's kind of corny, but I saw my future." They did not kiss that evening, but Mr. Jones returned to Washington the next week for a proper first date. "I wanted to see if it was the alcohol or if this is my life," he said. While they ate hamburgers at a restaurant on the Potomac, their server pointed out some other patrons trying to get Mr. Jones's attention they recognized him from his reporting job in Chicago. "I planned that," Mr. Jones said, jokingly. Ms. Clark had noticed during their earlier interactions that Mr. Jones had a nice speaking voice, but during the bottomless mimosa brunch, she was also drawn to his smile and his understated style. "He's reflective, he's got his stuff together," she said, "and he had nice style." It was the type of love story that Ms. Clark had always been drawn to. She is a fan of classic Black romantic movies like "Love Jones" and "Brown Sugar" from the late 1990s and early 2000s. She'd even written her own unpublished romance manuscript, "Lessons From Robin," chosen as a Marlene Award Finalist by Washington Romance Writers in 2014. "There aren't that many stories out there with Black characters that are just a love story that aren't a struggle," she said. "Whenever I saw one, it fed your soul, this is so great, a love story. I wanted to create one." Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. She and Mr. Jones began a long distance relationship, showing off their respective towns and getting to know each other. They shared similar backgrounds. Mr. Jones received his degree in journalism from Northwestern, while Ms. Clark was a news editor for The Harvard Crimson in college. Both had been raised by loving, long married parents with high expectations for their children. Ms. Clark is the daughter of Dr. Luther Clark, a cardiologist and deputy chief patient officer at Merck, and Camille Clark, who retired as assistant executive director of Forestdale, a child welfare agency in Queens. "I think a lot of people's parents were like, 'Get good grades,'" Ms. Clark said. "My parents cared about that, but they were very strategic: 'You need to run for office, get a leadership role on the newspaper.' Me and my brother, having parents who were very focused on the college process, it motivated us." She now serves as the vice president of the Harvard Black Alumni Society. Mr. Jones, his older brother and younger sister were raised in Forest Park, a Cincinnati suburb, the son of Will Jones, a retired Cincinnati Fire Department firefighter, and Marlinda Jones, a retired AT T project manager. In 2012, Mr. Jones won an Emmy for his work with the Detroit station WDIV covering an immigrant advocacy nonprofit organization that he had volunteered with. He now chairs the scholarship committee for the Chicago chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists. Mr. Jones said that he wanted "to be with someone who is trying to be their best, whatever that may be. If someone's ambitious, it shows they're not someone who is just going to settle in life." But as Ms. Clark said she has found out that "not everybody wants an accomplished woman. With Will, he actually appreciated that about me." About a year and a half after their first date, Mr. Jones wanted to propose with a grand gesture, and started with a phone call to Dr. Clark to state his intentions. "I have a younger sister; I knew if my sister would move out of Cincinnati for a relationship, there would have been a lot of drama," Mr. Jones said. The two men ended up having a friendly 45 minute conversation. Mr. Jones meticulously planned a proposal on Nov. 2, 2019, scheduling a haircut, a beard shaping and then an Uber to the LondonHouse hotel in Chicago where they would begin their date. He booked a saxophonist and photographer and found a spot near the city's downtown river walk where the artists could look inconspicuous. "I went to that location probably 10 times," he said. "I practiced getting on one knee. I checked the weather report for the last seven years: 'Is it going to snow or rain?' I knew Monica wouldn't want to get her hair wet." The couple strolled along the Chicago river walk, and on its steps, Mr. Jones proposed with a 1.8 carat, pear shaped diamond ring surrounded by a halo of smaller stones purchased in Chicago's Jeweler's Row. Ms. Clark said yes, and they hugged and celebrated while the saxophonist played tunes by Mary J. Blige and K Ci JoJo. Ms. Clark found a Chicago job as senior legal counsel at the food and beverage ingredient manufacturer Tate Lyle in Hoffman Estates, Ill., and moved in with Mr. Jones in a Wicker Park apartment with her cat, Jack. They hung art passed on to them from Ms. Clark's mother, a Harlem Renaissance and African art collector who has donated pieces and books to the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. The couple began planning their nuptials, excited to show off Chicago to their 150 guests. Then the coronavirus began to surface. As they inched closer to their scheduled Aug. 8 wedding date, the couple reluctantly canceled their New York engagement, bachelor and bachelorette parties and watched with dread as other friends' weddings were postponed. On April 18, while covering a press briefing with Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Mr. Jones asked what he'd advise people considering holding weddings, reunions and other family gatherings over the summer. Ms. Clark watched from home as the governor offered a 73 second response that provided no definitive answer, and no reassurance. "I saw the writing on the wall," Mr. Jones said. "Days later Monica and I made the decision to postpone our wedding." They were, of course, disappointed. But the couple decided to move forward with a small wedding and reschedule the larger celebration. "She didn't stay down for long," Mr. Jones said of Ms. Clark. "She's easy to cheer up. I like that." While planning a smaller ceremony, the couple found themselves witnessing another piece of history: On May 31, Mr. Jones was assigned to cover the George Floyd protests in downtown Chicago. He stood on a Loop sidewalk strewn with hangers from a nearby Macy's when a group of four young masked men walked by. Mr. Jones interviewed them for several minutes, gently reminding them to at times avoid using bad language, about why they came out to demonstrate that night. "What can the police do to improve the relationship with young Black men like yourself?" he asked. "I got it," answered one, stepping forward. "For real. They need to make it so that the police live in the towns and the communities that they're trying to police," he said. "It's very important to get your message across," said Mr. Jones at the end of the interview. "You guys did a good job expressing your opinion. I appreciate you all stopping and talking with me tonight." Ms. Clark was again watching from home. "He was in the middle of everything," she says of Mr. Jones. "For him, professionally, that was a cool experience, but at the same time I noticed with him and in general with the George Floyd thing, I think it had a unique impact on Black men. It was a stressful time for them in particular. He also had to deal with his own feelings about the state of America." The couple's parents, Demetrius Davis, the pastor of CityPoint Community Church, (plus two photographers, a reporter and a hotel staffer) gathered on the 17th floor terrace of Chicago's downtown Kimpton Hotel Palomar, sweating beneath their face masks. Ms. Jones, the mother of the groom, sported one covered in flashing silver sequins. A breeze kicked up at the bride's arrival, lightly ruffling the oversize organza flower pinned to the Vera Wang gown she and her mother found in Chicago. Ms. Jones played DJ, pressing a button on her son's phone, to queue up a jazz cover of John Legend's "All of Me," while the bride, per the hotel's safety requirements, wore a lacy mask crafted by her dry cleaner, and walked down an abbreviated aisle strewn with mauve rose petals. While their parents wiped their eyes, the couple held hands in front of the golden hour Chicago skyline, gazed at each other, and tried to dial down their grins. Pastor Davis read a passage from I Corinthians and in a short blessing prayed for bright days in the couple's future. They hopped over a broom acquired from Etsy to some applause from viewers from a nearby high rise watching from their balconies. After cake and champagne on the rooftop with their parents but before a 9 p.m. restaurant reservations, the couple video chatted with their siblings and their families. Before taking a four day honeymoon trip to the Traverse City area in Michigan to hike the dunes and visit local wineries, the couple returned to their apartment to enjoy some time off with each other and with Jack, no longer just Ms. Clark's cat. "It is now our cat," Mr. Jones said. Hometown Treats After the rooftop ceremony, the newlyweds cut a two tier almond cake with buttercream frosting from ECBG Cake Studio in Chicago. "I don't know if we're allowed to feed each other during the pandemic," the bride said. "We're in the same household," the groom pointed out. Intimate Reception The couple and their parents enjoyed a patio dinner at Aba, a Mediterranean restaurant in Chicago's West Loop. They dined on lamb, shrimp, hummus, as well as homemade stracciatella, a gelato, and frozen Greek yogurt. They also sipped champagne sent to the table as a surprise from friends. Putting It in Writing The morning of the wedding, the bride and groom wrote each other cards and exchanged gifts she gave him a Briggs and Riley duffel, he gave her diamond stud earrings. They also wrote thank you notes to their parents. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Just two weeks after receiving the first uterus transplant in the United States, a patient at the Cleveland Clinic suddenly developed a serious complication last month, and on March 8 the transplant had to be removed. No details were given. On Friday, the clinic explained what went wrong: a common yeast infection. In a written statement, the clinic said, "Preliminary results suggest that the complication was because of an infection caused by an organism that is commonly found in a woman's reproductive system. The infection appears to have compromised the blood supply to the uterus, causing the need for its removal." The infection was caused by a fungus, a type of yeast called Candida albicans, two of the doctors who performed the surgery said in an interview. It is normally found in the vagina, living in balance with bacteria and other microbes. But illness or some medications can disrupt the balance, allowing for a problematic overgrowth of the yeasts. The surgeons said that since yeasts normally inhabit the genital tract, they could have come from either the donor or the recipient. The transplant included some vaginal tissue from the donor, as well as the uterus. Vaginal yeast infections are a familiar nuisance to many women and usually not difficult to treat with over the counter medicines. But in transplant recipients, yeast infections can be hard to control, because the drugs that prevent rejection also prevent the immune system from fighting the infection. If a yeast infection spreads into the bloodstream, it can be extremely difficult to treat, and can be fatal. The recipient, Lindsey McFarland, 26, of Lubbock, Tex., had the uterus transplant on Feb. 24, in a nine hour operation. She seemed to be recovering well for nearly two weeks, doctors said, when she suddenly began to bleed heavily on March 7. "This was a serious complication, potentially life threatening," said Dr. Andreas G. Tzakis, a leader of the surgical team. He is director of solid organ transplant surgery at a Cleveland Clinic hospital in Weston, Fla. Doctors rushed Ms. McFarland into surgery and discovered that an infection they did not know then what kind had extended into an artery they had connected to provide blood flow to the uterus. It had damaged the vessel and caused clots. The transplant had to be removed immediately. A week later, Ms. McFarland needed another operation, to treat more bleeding. Once the cause of the infection was identified, she was treated with antifungal medicines. With the transplant removed, she was able to stop taking antirejection drugs and give her immune system a chance to recover and help control the infection. She spent about five weeks in the hospital. Dr. Tzakis said she was still taking antifungal medicine, but was well. She declined to comment for this article. The failure of the procedure was a setback for the clinic's plan to perform 10 uterus transplants on an experimental basis. The goal of the surgery is to make pregnancy and childbirth possible for women who were born without a uterus or lack one because of illness or injury. The transplants are meant to be temporary, left in place just long enough for a woman to have one or two babies, then removed so that she can stop taking antirejection medicines. Dr. Tzakis and Dr. Tommaso Falcone, Cleveland Clinic's chairman of obstetrics and gynecology, said the medical and surgical team would hold off on doing any more uterus transplants until it could be sure that procedures were in place to prevent problems like Ms. McFarland's. They said they were considering various options, like using antifungal medicines preventively and washing the tissues of both the donor and recipient to reduce the risk of infection. Ms. McFarland was born without a uterus, and in a previous interview said that she had long hoped to experience pregnancy and childbirth, and that she still felt the desire even after adopting three children. The only successful uterus transplants have been performed in Sweden, at the University of Gothenburg. Nine women have had the transplants there, and five have given birth. Two of the nine transplants failed during the first year after the surgery and had to be removed, one because of blood clots and the other because of a bacterial infection. Unlike the Cleveland team, doctors in Sweden used live uterus donors rather than cadavers for the transplants. In some cases, mothers were the uterus donors for their daughters. Three other medical centers in the United States are also planning to perform uterus transplants on an experimental basis: Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Nebraska Medicine in Omaha. Of the three, Baylor is the farthest along. Dr. Goran B.G. Klintmalm, chief of transplantation there, said his team had begun evaluating prospective patients. He also said the team would consider both living and deceased donors. "Gothenburg, which has the only experience to date that is of value, stuck entirely with living donors," Dr. Klintmalm said in a telephone interview in March, after the Cleveland transplant failed but before the cause was made public. "It was easy for us to accept that premise." He added: "The deceased donor piece of it, the way we have approached this is, well, if an excellent recipient doesn't have the potential related donor, we may have to go to the deceased donor. To have the both possibilities available makes a lot of sense." Dr. Klintmalm said the Cleveland doctors had discussed their failed transplant with his team. "What they experienced is something that helps us to fine tune our protocol and approach, to hopefully avoid having the same situation," Dr. Klintmalm said. He also said that the Baylor team had adjusted its screening procedures to take into account possible exposure to the Zika virus, which is linked to small heads and severe brain defects in infants whose mothers contracted the virus during pregnancy. "Now we have added all the Zika virus questions," Dr. Klintmalm said. "The recipients, the donors, have they traveled to Brazil, for example?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The great French actor Vincent Lindon has a special talent for embodying what could be a paradoxical persona: the outstanding Everyman. In "At War," the fourth feature he's made with the director Stephane Brize, Lindon plays a workers' leader at an auto plant facing closure. The movie begins with staged television news footage; Lindon is a face in the crowd, but one your view is constantly drawn to. His blue eyes are Paul Newman like in their magnetism, but the rest of his face is more rough hewn. He is solidly built, with a commanding physicality, but he hasn't a speck of movie star polish on him. Lindon elevates a movie just by being in it. And this movie is a tough, bracing one for the most part. The auto plant closure means 1,100 people out of work. Lindon's character, Laurent Amedeo, is stalwart in his leadership. He insists the rank and file not accept severances, but fight for the plant to stay open. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
If there is a sign that theater is settling into a sort of normal, it is the emergence of hits like the Richard Nelson play "What Do We Need to Talk About?," written specifically for Zoom and which the Public Theater is making available again through June 28. Also proving popular is the series "The 24 Hour Plays: Viral Monologues," where some of America's finest playwrights write short solo pieces for some of America's finest actors and the whole process, from conception to execution, happens in 24 hours. There are near weekly installments, with the next landing Tuesday at 6 p.m. Here are more live performances, readings and recordings of productions to stream this week. On a smaller scale but with a heart just as big is the New York based Play PerView, which has put on 11 play readings since its premiere on March 26. This thriving little operation raises money for various organizations and specializes in remounting Off and Off Off Broadway shows with stellar casts. Monday at 7 p.m., you can enjoy a newly revised version of the subversive comedy "Permission" by Robert Askins ("Hand to God"), starring William Jackson Harper and Steven Boyer. Friday at 8 p.m., Jonathan Spector's bracing, very funny "Eureka Day," about a private school dealing with a mumps outbreak, returns with its original cast. Starting at 6:45 p.m. on Friday, you can celebrate this show's online debut on the Streaming Musicals site with a free virtual opening night party featuring Laura Osnes and Veanne Cox, a member of the cast. Dan Martin, Michael Biello and Jennifer R. Manocherian's rom com with songs was filmed on a soundstage in December 2019, a couple of years after its run at the York Theater. (After Friday, the show costs 4.99 to rent and 19.99 to buy.) St. Ann's Warehouse jumps into the streaming game to present Simon McBurney's solo tour de force with the Complicite company. In "The Encounter," which Ben Brantley of The New York Times described as "astonishing" when it ran on Broadway in 2016, McBurney recounts an American photojournalist's 1969 trip to the Amazon via full auditory immersion. For maximum impact, audiences should listen on headphones as live theatergoers did at the time, a device that eerily anticipated our current isolated reality. Available for free through Friday. Available for free through June 7, this Repertorio Espanol production (in Spanish with English subtitles) tells the story of a group of men who attempt to get into the United States from Mexico in a sealed boxcar, and the border guard who crosses their path. Silvia Gonzalez's play was directed by Repertorio's co founder Rene Buch, a New York theater fixture who died in April at 94. Few plays are as suited to the age of quarantine as A.R. Gurney's two hander from 1988, in which a pair of actors sitting side by side read from the 50 year correspondence between their characters. The relationship endures, overcoming hardships and separation. On Thursday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m., Broadway's Best Shows presents a one night only reading by Bryan Cranston and Sally Field, directed by Jerry Zaks. Not too shabby. The writer and performer Penny Arcade has spent more than five decades onstage, and unlike many of her brethren on the Off Off circuit, she had the foresight to record a lot of her work. Now she is making her archive available to her Patreon subscribers, with memberships starting at 1 a month. Arcade regularly adds to the treasure trove, which so far includes interviews pulled from her oral history Lower East Side Biography Project and full length pieces including "La Miseria" and "Longing Lasts Longer." She also draws from archived streams of the show she presents on Facebook Live every Thursday and Sunday at 5 p.m., in which she interviews front line workers and scientists alongside cultural figures. On Saturday at 8 p.m., the Labyrinth Theater Company is reviving this raucous Stephen Adly Guirgis play from 2002 with a free (but donations are welcome) reading directed by Elizabeth Rodriguez. Bobby Cannavale and Laurence Fishburne join eight original cast members, including the mighty Elizabeth Canavan and Liza Colon Zayas, and they all should have great fun with Guirgis's spitfire dialogue. The show will be available for 24 hours. Theater for the New City is an East Village fixture, and Friday through Sunday, its annual festival's 25th edition is proudly letting its virtual freak flag fly with 150 participants cranking out theater, dance, poetry, music and puppet shows. (What's the East Village without puppets?) Of particular note: a "sit around" featuring, among others, F. Murray Abraham, Charles Busch, Phoebe Legere and Austin Pendleton on Saturday at 8 p.m. One of the spring's most exciting events is a show that never opened on Broadway. Or anywhere else, for that matter: "Bombshell" exists only in the universe of the NBC series "Smash." But while the musical is fictional, its songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman ("Hairspray"), are very real and very good. Original cast members are expected to pop up and belt them for this Actors Fund benefit, which will stream Wednesday at 8 p.m. on people.com. Does this count as a transfer? On Friday, Sunday and May 27, Theater for a New Audience is bringing back this production of Caryl Churchill's "Mad Forest," which played Bard College in April. The director Ashley Tata quickly adapted from the physical realm to the virtual one, mixing live performance and video for this surreal, uneasy play about the Romanian revolution of 1989. What is a theater roundup without Shakespeare? The London based Cheek by Jowl, helmed by the director Declan Donnellan and the designer Nick Ormerod, has brought several of its visually sophisticated and muscular, yet probing, productions to New York including two that are now streaming for free on the company's YouTube channel through Saturday: "The Winter's Tale" and a Russian language, subtitled "Measure for Measure" in collaboration with Moscow's Pushkin Theater. In Brooklyn, Irondale is unrolling a revised version of its 2016 show "1599" in four installments starting with "Henry V" on May 28. "Julius Caesar" follows on June 4; "As You Like It," on June 11; and "Hamlet," on June 18. The project, which will stream on YouTube, is inspired by the James Shapiro book "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Sara Goodman, 39, has kept kosher her entire life. An associate professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine, Ms. Goodman is used to responding to dinner invitations with an awkward but polite inquiry about what sort of food will be served, and if accommodations can be made for her. It's a skill, she says, that has come in handy as California eases its way out of the stay at home order that Gov. Gavin Newsom put in place on March 19, and families like hers begin navigating the uncharted landscape of post Covid 19 socializing. "I'm used to asking for the things that I need, or just saying I'm a vegetarian. But a lot of people aren't used to having a discussion about what their comfort levels are when they socialize," she said. As shelter in place restrictions are eased around the world, people are facing uncomfortable conversations with friends and family over how far they can loosen the rules and still stay safe from infection. But it can be difficult to broach these subjects. Will your friends come to a birthday party, being held outdoors, and still wear masks and keep their distance from one another? Can you gather with your family without asking your sister whether she continues to be vigilant about masks and sanitizing? Also, before you start extending invitations, it might be helpful to learn how to interpret lame excuses and awkward silences. "This is a new social landscape," she said. "Do you say, 'I'm a social distancer'? Is that how you indicate what your needs are? We don't have a language for describing it yet." For Judith and Akshat Pujara, who are both 38 and parents to Alice, 3, this new tiptoeing around terminology for socializing also evokes a sense of deja vu. "I feel the same about this that I do about asking about guns in a home," said Ms. Pujara, a workplace strategist. "I never thought I'd have to ask questions like this, but I do." "I texted one colleague and I said, 'Hypothetically, would you be interested in a socially distanced play date in your backyard?'" Dr. Pujara said. "I didn't know how to phrase it, and I didn't really know how to ask." His colleague politely passed, offering an excuse that she and her family would be out of town. "I don't think she really wanted to answer," he admitted. No matter how uncomfortable it might feel to respond to a social invitation with questions about sanitization and distancing, it's important to be forthright about where your own red lines are, said Dr. Allen Furr, a professor of sociology at Auburn University, and not presume that everyone in your circle has the same standards for caution and cleanliness. "Perception of risk isn't a constant," said Dr. Furr. "Conflict could arise if somebody asks people over, and the person who is concerned about safety assumes their host is going to take precautions, and then they show up and there aren't any. It could affect how we view our friends." Having friends over post lockdown also creates an added burden for hosts: In addition to ensuring your guests' wine glasses are full and conversation is flowing, do you also have to enforce standards of social distancing? Elisha Baskin, 33, lives with her husband, Yuval Ben Ami, 44, and their daughter, Akko, 2, in Lauris, a small Provencal village in the Luberon region of France. France loosened its lockdown on May 11, just before Mr. Ben Ami's birthday, a coincidence of timing that Ms. Baskin felt was the ideal excuse for a party. She reached out to a handful of close friends to see if they wanted to celebrate together, and opted to simply be straightforward. "I didn't want to create a situation where someone felt uncomfortable telling me that they weren't comfortable, so I just asked each person directly: 'I'm thinking of having a party, we'll be outside in the yard and it will be small, do you want to come?'" she said. Everyone accepted the invitation. On the day of the party, there were 12 guests, ranging from age 33 to 63. Ms. Baskin set up a large table outdoors, and at first everyone stayed outdoors and six feet apart. At first, they weren't sure how to greet each other. "The bisou is a big thing in France," Ms. Baskin said, referring to the time honored tradition there of greeting people with a kiss or two, "so people were going to kiss and then stopping." But the group quickly relaxed and even moved indoors. "At first people were maintaining distance but as the wine came, the party flowed," she said. "I didn't want to be the police, but I did keep thinking, 'Oh my God, what would I do if someone got sick at this party?' It's a big responsibility." Two weeks have now passed, and no one who attended the birthday party has become sick, which she says is a relief. "It's OK to convene in groups now, but mentally, I'm having to realize I cannot control germs and I also cannot control human behavior," she said. Despite some nerves before her friends arrived, Ms. Wormser said, she was glad she had offered the invitation. Her doctor has advised her to maintain social distancing until a vaccine for coronavirus is made available, so figuring out how to see friends while staying safe felt like a survival tactic. "I could have two years of this, and it's not a pleasant thought," she said. "We're all very cautious and very fearful, but I got to the point where I felt like I needed to do something socially, and I was comfortable figuring out how to do it." 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 |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: The new Project: Secret! exhibit at the Porsche Museum, in Stuttgart, Germany, is "basically car nerd heaven," says Jalopnik, "showcasing 14 'never built studies, unknown concept cars, and camouflaged prototypes from Porsche over the decades.' " The exhibit, which opened today, runs through Jan. 11. (Jalopnik) The Toyota Tundra, which received a major redesign for 2014, will lose its V6 option for 2015; a V8 engine will be standard on all Tundras, with the base model starting around 30,000. A TRD Pro package will also be available, with features that include upgraded suspension components and exclusive Michelin off road tires; pricing starts at 42,385. (Motor Trend) In other Toyota news, the company may be pausing its search for a location for a potential factory in Mexico. Reuters reports that the president of Toyota Motor, Akio Toyoda, has told planners searching for a site to review the company's rationale for the project. (Reuters) Opel, General Motors' European unit, said Tuesday that it was adjusting its operations in Russia in response to the shrunken car market, a result of the political turmoil over Ukraine. Opel, which is based in Ruesselsheim, Germany, said it was reducing production at its St. Petersburg plant and offering buyout packages to hundreds of workers. These are the second recent G.M. reductions at the site. (Bloomberg) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Credit...Erik Tanner for The New York Times I don't say this because of his memorably unusual features, though a long nose, full lips, and paintbrush flick of moles and freckles certainly help give Driver an outsized countenance. It's more that he has a manner so resolute that when some emotion does manage to escape whether through a glint in his eyes or the unpredictable undulations of his voice that transgression can't help but take you by surprise. This remains true no matter how often you watch him, and in 2019, you may have watched him quite a bit. In the spring, Driver could be seen simultaneously in "Burn This" on Broadway and Jim Jarmusch's zombie film, "The Dead Don't Die," and three more of his movies spilled forth in the last two months: "The Report," in which he played a Senate staffer investigating the government's use of torture; "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," featuring his third and final appearance as the tormented Kylo Ren; and "Marriage Story," which cast him as a theater director navigating a custody dispute with his soon to be ex wife. It was during a clip of the latter that I watched Driver watch himself at the Gotham Awards in New York in early December, where he was nominated for best actor. Viewing his own work is not among his favorite activities, Driver had told me earlier that day: He can't help but become consumed with what he perceives as his mistakes, even though he knows deep down that with anyone else's work, it's the imperfections he always finds most fascinating. "If he feels that it's going to be too much, I get it," Noah Baumbach, the writer director of "Marriage Story," would tell me later. "I don't watch my movies after I finish them, either." At the Gothams, as Jennifer Lopez presented the nominees for best actor, the show cued a clip from "Marriage Story," when Driver's character finally takes seriously the possibility that he will lose custody of his son. "He needs to know I fought for him!" he says, growing more agitated. In front of me, sitting at a table with his colleagues from the film, the real Driver watched the clip and looked impossibly still, his expression pure sphinx. Was he happy with what he saw of himself, or did he wonder why the choices he had made were engendering so much awards season acclaim? Well, there was no time to dwell on it: Moments later, Lopez called his name as the winner. EARLIER THAT DAY at the Greenwich Hotel, as morning snow began to fall outside, Driver poured a cup of coffee and mulled months of potential awards show appearances for "Marriage Story." (He's since been nominated for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and is expected to earn a best actor nod when the Oscar nominations are announced Jan. 13.) "Acting is always filled with these weird juxtapositions," he said. "It's not glamorous in its making, but in the selling of it, it seems like it is." Last year, Driver was nominated for his first Academy Award, for Lee's "BlacKkKlansman," in which he played a Jewish detective helping infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. "It's incredibly flattering," Driver said of the Oscar nod, adding, "I have no control over that." The only way he's been able to metabolize this sort of recognition is to think of his nomination as part of a team effort. "I know lots of people who work really hard and they almost never get that acknowledgment, so I don't know how you process that or attach meaning to it," he said. In person, Driver has the polite but firm bearing of the Marine he was before attending Juilliard, and he can't really be drawn into saying more just for the sake of it: At one point, after completing a thought, Driver informed me, "That's the end of the sentence." The only time he was given to hemming, hawing or the occasional embarrassed smile was when we discussed the awards show he'd be attending that night. "I think everybody, in every job, wants validation," he ultimately said, though he wondered whether that desire could be fraught for actors to acknowledge, since they have little to hide behind. "It's not separate from who I am," Driver said. "I don't have an instrument, I don't play the cello. It's yourself, so in a way, it's more vulnerable." At least he will be on this journey with Baumbach, the director who has become his most frequent and trusted collaborator. They have been working together since "Frances Ha" in 2012, when Baumbach found himself enamored with the way Driver, cast as a hipster clad in a cardigan and porkpie hat, managed to breathe unexpected life into his lines. "There's a great quote about poetry, that it returns your own thoughts back to you with added majesty," Baumbach said. "That's what working with Adam is like: It's both surprising and familiar." The two men continued to collaborate, in "While We're Young" and "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)," before Driver messaged his director with a suggestion: How would he feel about mounting a big screen version of Stephen Sondheim's 1970 musical, "Company"? Baumbach was intrigued, and though he and Driver could never quite crack the adaptation, many of the things that interested them would find their way into "Marriage Story," including a Sondheim song that Driver performs in full. While Bobby, the never married protagonist of "Company," would seem at first blush to have little in common with the divorcing Charlie in "Marriage Story," Driver found both men had a stubborn unwillingness to really confront themselves. When "Marriage Story" begins, Charlie's wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), has moved on and is moving out, but it takes Charlie ages to realize that things will never go back to normal, and that he is now shouldering a significant loss. "He can't name the thing, he can't express it," Driver said. "Only through an abstract way can he process it and grieve." That involves the indirect path of epiphany through Sondheim, though there is also the more time tested model of a particularly brutal screaming fight. For most of the story, we have watched Charlie and Nicole talk in a furtive, curtailed way about the things that really bothered them broken promises, an infidelity, a partner's blinkered selfishness and instead rely on their lawyers to do the real mudslinging. But late in the film, when the two of them are alone in his apartment and resume a familiar roundelay of arguing, the fight gets nastier and nastier until the levees finally break and Charlie screams at his ex wife such breathtakingly awful things that he falls to his knees, shaken by how vicious his feelings have become. I was startled, too: In the scene, Driver reaches a state of rage so apoplectic that it seems to push beyond the boundaries of the film. His placid face, now reddened and twisted by anger, had contorted to a point where I felt I should look away. Driver is happy to talk about how the character arrives at such a moment, but he's less eager to talk about how he pushes himself to such an intimate place as an actor. "We said it in the thing," he said, meaning everything he's got is all up there on the screen. "So what would I add that would make it better? Nothing." He laughed. That was the end of that sentence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Judith Regan at lunch with writers and colleagues at the Odeon restaurant in Manhattan in December. In Judith Regan's corner office on the eighth floor of an office building on Bleecker Street is a picture frame with a quote inside it that reads, "Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: The creative act." It comes from Kenneth Rexroth's essay "Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation" and it is a philosophy Ms. Regan has held on to with unwavering conviction over the years, peering over at it again and again and repeating it to herself like a mantra, an indicator to get back up and just keep going. One afternoon this fall, Ms. Regan was dressed in a dark, custom made double breasted suit and a pair of sky high Stella McCartney platform boots. Though she is 61 old enough to have had to have a hip replacement last year and old enough not to bring every conversation about sex back to herself, as she was known to do back in the day when she was a rising star in the media world her swagger remained undiminished. She still flipped her long brown mane about as much as ever, she still spoke less in conversation than in monologue, and she still invoked the spirits of the evil demons who at one point or another have tried to undo her, though she did so without any obvious sign of rancor. "I'm not bitter," she said, discussing her contentious and well publicized exit from the News Corporation eight years ago, which eventually won her a reported settlement of more than 10 million. "Strangely, I have no hostility. I carry grudges when things are unresolved, not when they're resolved. I don't relish other people's suffering." And why should she? Thanks to a generous but undisclosed sum of money from the billionaire Leon Black, Ms. Regan has re entered the book business with a new shingle, Regan Arts. She has signed a distribution deal with Simon Schuster. She has hired Lucas Wittmann, a well known industry figure, as executive editor and associate publisher. And she has a slew of new authors to play with, many producing books that are in one way or another personal to her. They have strong female characters, tell David/Goliath narratives and are full of sex and mayhem and backstabbing: the main ingredients essentially from Ms. Regan's very own, very full, life. (Not for nothing did Ms. Regan almost write a book called "The Art of War for Women.") She says she's even mulling a collaboration with the one other person whose expulsion from the News Corporation kingdom was perhaps as memorable as her own: Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch's former wife. "Wendi was in the other day," Ms. Regan said, giving a little smile, as if to indicate yet another way in which she's gotten one over on her former boss, adding that the two were talking about the Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang. "We may be working on something together." There was a time, not too long ago, when Judith Regan was among the most famous, and most polarizing, people in publishing. For years, she was the book industry's very own P. T. Barnum riding dishy tell alls by Howard Stern ("Private Parts") and Jose Canseco ("Juiced") to the top of the best seller list. By 2000, New York magazine had written that she was the "most successful editor in the book business." Her own story began in the suburbs of Boston and then Bay Shore, N.Y., where she moved when she was 10. Her parents were schoolteachers, bright people who had their children young and never really got to fulfill their dreams. "They did the best they could," said Ms. Regan, who after high school went to Vassar. There, she spent a year living in a cooperative house with other financial aid students, earned her degree in English and art history, then went to work at The National Enquirer, chasing stories about con artists, arms dealers and corrupt Hollywood movie producers. Later, the Enquirer job would become something of a scarlet letter for Ms. Regan, cited as evidence of her lowbrow mentality, but her friends weren't totally surprised by it. "Judith has always been Judith," said Kate Saltzman Li, a classmate at Vassar and one of her closest friends. "She was who she is, which is open to everything." "It was my favorite job," Ms. Regan said, unapologetic as ever. "I traveled the world. I did crazy stories. I learned how to sell things in three words. I learned how to market." In 1987, she moved to Simon Schuster as an editor, where an early project was a memoir by a former member of the Navy SEALs, Richard Marcinko, whose face she reportedly insisted on putting on the cover because she knew women would find him attractive, although the way she phrased this was somewhat more R rated. "I did not even have an agent or a proposal when we first met," Mr. Marcinko said. "But we began talking and discovered that we both used the four letter vernacular with spectacular frequency, and so after a martini lunch, she and the president of Simon Schuster and I retired to his office and I signed the contract." That book, "Rogue Warrior," became a best seller and was followed up by a number of other big hits from personalities like Mr. Stern, Rush Limbaugh and Mike Judge, the creator of "Beavis and Butt Head." In 1994, Rupert Murdoch brought her to News Corporation with her own imprint, ReganBooks, under the aegis of HarperCollins. Again she excelled, producing nearly a hundred best sellers over the next decade. She got her own weekend talk show with Fox News, "Judith Regan Tonight," lived in a four bedroom apartment on Central Park West and made the list of "The 100 Smartest New Yorkers" compiled by New York magazine. (Ms. Regan was No. 42.) By 2005, Vanity Fair estimated that she was generating 80 million a year in revenue for the company, a figure virtually unheard of in the low profit publishing world. But, according to Ms. Regan, haters were everywhere. "There was always this feeling I was an outsider," Ms. Regan said. "That I wasn't from that world, because I did that kind of book. Put 'that' in quotes. It wasn't true. I published all kinds of things, including really literary books, but there was a lot of sniping and I was O.K. with it, because it kept me sharp and it kept me on top of material that could resonate." It wasn't just the material that people in the industry were reacting to. It was also Ms. Regan, who tore through employees and regularly battled with colleagues. "I was one of the few agents who really liked her," said Ira Silverberg, who worked with Ms. Regan on a number of projects, including Jenna Jameson's memoir, "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," where he represented the book's ghost writer, Neil Strauss. "People expected her to be like everyone else, because publishing is a gentleman's profession, and that's not her mode. There's something very bawdy about her. She does it her own way and she shoots from the hip." Being in Ms. Regan's orbit is sort of like falling backward in time right into a 1950s noir. She does not walk so much as saunter into a room. She frames her past relationships with men in near operatic terms, from her former boyfriend David Buckley (who fathered her son, Patrick, in 1981 and was later convicted of drug smuggling) to her former husband, Robert Kleinschmidt, with whom she did battle in court with for much of the 1990s, going through three trials and at least seven lawyers. "I have really disgraceful taste in men," Ms. Regan said. "I flunked in that department." Certainly, that is what happened in 2001, when Ms. Regan had a messy affair with Bernard B. Kerik, the former police commissioner and aide to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York City (then a future presidential hopeful). The Daily News covered the affair of Bernard Kerik and Ms. Regan in 2004. At the time, Mr. Kerik was writing a memoir for ReganBooks, and he spent months hooking up with his mistress/publisher in an apartment near ground zero that had been reserved for use by 9/11 rescue workers. All of which was revealed in hilarious detail during Mr. Kerik's unsuccessful bid for Homeland Security chief in 2004. It didn't exactly put Roger Ailes, the chairman and chief executive of Fox News and a close friend of Mr. Giuliani's, in a good position. (Mr. Kerik and Mr. Ailes declined requests to comment for this article.) Opposition to the project turned into a groundswell, and News Corporation decided to pull the plug. The TV special was canceled. Copies of "If I Did It" were taken to a warehouse and destroyed. By then, it was fairly clear her time with News Corporation was running out. Mr. Murdoch was reportedly cooling on her. And her relationship with the chief executive of HarperCollins at the time, Jane Friedman, had grown increasingly tense. (In an email, Ms. Friedman declined to be interviewed, saying she had no desire to speak about Ms. Regan.) Just three weeks later, Ms. Regan was fired, reportedly for having said to a colleague that a Jewish cabal at News Corporation was out to get her. Of course, Ms. Regan denied having said any such thing, dispatching Hollywood's most famous legal eagle, Bert Fields, to inform the news media that this was not only "false but defamatory." But by this point, security guards had already appeared in her Los Angeles office and escorted her from the building as junior staff members trailed behind with her belongings. "It was all very dramatic," Ms. Regan said. Talk to other writers who have worked with Ms. Regan during her years at Simon Schuster and HarperCollins, and they mention her larger than life persona, her moodiness and her blunt descriptions of sex acts. But they also describe Ms. Regan as someone who is warm and maternal, who knows their children's names and birthdays, who told them to write what they wanted to write, promising that she would figure out the rest. "Eat, Play, Love," she said. "I spent three months in China, a couple months in the Middle East. I was in Syria, Jordan, Abu Dhabi. I went to South America, spent time in Brazil. I'd never had an experience like that where I was completely free. It was the first time in my life. It was wonderful." Ms. Saltzman Li said: "I think that there was a little bit of a silver lining in not working. Because she didn't seem restless at all." By this point, there was another thing keeping Ms. Regan busy: a defamation suit she filed in 2007 against News Corporation, asking for 100 million in damages. In it, she charged that her firing was part of a "smear campaign" orchestrated by one of the world's largest media conglomerates for the purpose of "destroying one woman's credibility and reputation" and advancing News Corporation's "political agenda," which had "long centered on protecting Rudy Giuliani's presidential ambitions." The lawsuit asserted that a senior executive at News Corporation told Ms. Regan to "lie to, and withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik." The executive this accusation was directed toward was none other than Mr. Ailes. It was a baroque series of claims, but in early 2008, News Corporation paid Ms. Regan a settlement that was said to be in the neighborhood of 10 million and put out a statement that said, "After carefully considering the matter, we accept Ms. Regan's position that she did not say anything that was anti Semitic in nature, and further believe that Ms. Regan is not anti Semitic." In an email, Mr. Black wrote: "Judith Regan is one of the most talented people I have met in the publishing industry. She has a great nose for value and for what the current environment demands. My family and I are excited to partner with her in the growth of Regan Arts." Today, Regan Arts has a staff of 17 operating out of office space they share with Phaidon and a slew of new books hitting this year. The first comes on Feb. 17, when Ms. Regan releases Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan's "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror." "We haven't gone on sale yet and we are being tracked for bestseller," Ms. Regan said. Also on its way is the screenwriter Gloria Norris's memoir, "KooKooLand," which according to Ms. Regan is told from the point of view of a young girl "in a very difficult situation with sadistic cruel people all around her." And another upcoming title is "Sporting Guide," a novel by Liz Goldwyn, the Los Angeles based fashionista and film world royalty. (Her grandfather was Samuel Goldwyn.) It is set on the left coast at the turn of the 20th century and deals with the world of prostitution. The book is the second collaboration between Ms. Regan and Ms. Goldwyn. The first was Ms. Goldwyn's "Pretty Things," a coffee table book about the history of burlesque in America. "There's no one like her," Ms. Goldwyn said. "I'm excited to be part of her comeback." Returning to publishing after such a long hiatus, Ms. Regan is aware that she has a tough road ahead of her, particularly with the challenge posed by competitors like Amazon, which has been locked in a three year standoff with publishers over pricing. "I think their agenda is total world domination," she said, speaking of Amazon. "They want to kill you. The end. And you have to take on the mind set that you're going to kill them first. Didn't you see 'The Godfather?' " And it's not just the presence of Amazon that has changed since Ms. Regan was last on top of the publishing world. During her time at HarperCollins, she was a pioneer who published highly commercial books that other companies were nevertheless scared to take on. Today, practically every major publisher puts out saucy tell alls by porn stars and controversial talk show hosts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The scrutiny of Facebook's collection and use of consumer data in recent years has prompted the tech giant to repeatedly defend its efforts around transparency and privacy. But about three fourths of Facebook users were unaware that the company lists their personal traits and interests for advertisers on its site, according to a study published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday. Half of the users who looked at the Facebook page with that data known as their "Ad Preferences" said they were not comfortable with the company's compiling that information. Pew conducted a nationally representative survey of 963 American adults with Facebook accounts between Sept. 4 and Oct. 1 of last year. While consumers have learned more in recent years about how they are targeted for online ads, the study suggests that many still do not know how much of their behavior is tracked, where it is compiled or even that Facebook has a page that lists all of that information. Pew focused on Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, because it "plays an incredibly important role in the media ecosystem of the world," said Lee Rainie, Pew's director of internet and technology research. "Privacy matters to Americans it's a classic American value yet when they're online and doing other things, they act as if their personal information is O.K. to harvest and analyze," Mr. Rainie said in an interview. "One of the theories on this inconsistency is that Americans don't really know what's going on. The fact that 74 percent of Facebook users didn't know that these lists were maintained on them cuts to the heart of that question of where Americans are, or are not, with these systems." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Welcome to the Running newsletter! Every Saturday morning, we email runners with news, advice and some motivation to help you get up and running. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. The 123rd running of the Boston Marathon has come and gone. If you ran it on Monday, I hope your legs are working again, and that if you got a sunburn you've mostly recovered it was a hot day in Beantown. You can read a wrap up of the pro race here. I've pulled out some of the more interesting statistics from the rest of the day, many of them provided by the Boston Athletic Association. 848: Port o potties at the start of the race | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
The swirling story around President Trump's dealings with Russia is being compared in journalism circles to past blockbusters like Watergate and the Monica Lewinsky scandal with a 21st century twist. News organizations like The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN are jousting for scoops, but instead of sending clerks to grab the early editions from newsstands, editors watch the news unfold on Twitter in real time. Anonymous sources are driving bombshell stories, but leaks are springing from encrypted iPhone messaging apps rather than from meetings in underground parking garages. The news cycle begins at sunrise, as groggy reporters hear the ping of a presidential tweet, and ends sometime in the overnight hours, as newspaper editors tear up front pages scrambled by the latest revelation from Washington. In consequence and velocity, the political developments of the past four weeks has it been only four weeks? are jogging memories of momentous journalistic times. "There is this sense of urgency and energy that I feel now that reminds me of being 29 and in a very different situation: in the middle of a revolutionary situation in Russia," said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who was a correspondent for The Washington Post in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. "I'm not saying it's a revolution now. But there is this uncertainty about what is happening minute to minute, day to day." "There is this sense that every day is going to bring something startling, if not calamitous," he added. For journalists anxious about the state of their profession, there is a renewed sense of mission. Newspapers are seeing a sharp rise in subscriptions. Television news, once dismissed as a dinosaur in the internet age, is thriving. Rachel Maddow's audience on MSNBC is up 79 percent from a year ago, with her show pulling more than two million viewers a night for the past two weeks. On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson of Fox News had more viewers than network shows like "New Girl" and "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." If the routine is energizing, it is also relentless. On Wednesday afternoon, the Atlantic staff writer Rosie Gray tweeted, "only 9 hours or so till the next massive newsbreak that will prevent us from having lives again." Hallie Jackson, White House correspondent for NBC News, replied jokingly a minute later "wuts a life" to which Ms. Gray replied: "I remember vaguely there was a time when i had one." By evening, Ms. Gray's original message had been "liked" more than 850 times. "The breathless pace of events reminds me of O. J. and Monica days," said Jeffrey Toobin, who covered the O. J. Simpson murder trial and the scandal involving Ms. Lewinsky for The New Yorker. "The way both journalists and consumers feel kind of overwhelmed by the pace of developments. This feeling of, 'Well, can't it just stop for a while?'" Even people paid to satirize politics find themselves agog. On the Los Angeles set of "Veep," the HBO parody series with Julia Louis Dreyfus, writers and cast members rush to learn the latest news between takes. "Everyone's on their phone," said Frank Rich, the liberal columnist, who is an executive producer of the series. The accelerated metabolism is nonpartisan. Many right leaning news sites are covering every twist of the White House developments and resisting the notion that the administration is embroiled in a major scandal. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "Dear left: When everything is an outrage, nothing is an outrage," Katie Pavlich, an editor at Townhall, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, adding of recent developments, "It isn't Watergate." On "Fox Friends" on Wednesday morning, Fox News hosts took aim at the leakers behind recent scoops. "They're doing damage to all of us; these are national secrets," said the anchor Ainsley Earhardt. Her co host, Steve Doocy, said: "The president, the White House, Congress needs to do something about it." Apropos for a president enraptured by reality television, the White House drama has begun to resemble a kind of O. J. Simpson trial for politics, gripping the nation and minting a menagerie of unlikely celebrities. The Simpson circus had Lance Ito, Robert Shapiro and Kato Kaelin. The Trump administration has Sean Spicer, the press secretary, whose afternoon news briefings now beat "General Hospital" in the Nielsen ratings. For the past two weekends, Mr. Spicer has been featured on "Saturday Night Live" in the form of a Melissa McCarthy impression that is already generating Emmy chatter. Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, was an obscure Republican pollster before her logic twisting defenses of Mr. Trump on television turned her into a household name. On Wednesday, the MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski said she would no longer interview Ms. Conway on her program, saying, "I don't believe in fake news or information that is not true." What sets the Russia story apart from a typical media frenzy, journalists say, are the underpinnings of the allegations: Russian espionage and election meddling speak to grave questions of democracy and foreign policy. The image of a chaotic White House inner circle evokes troubled administrations in the past. "You have what seems to be a story of Watergate proportions," Mr. Rich said, "married to this red hot Wild West of the new mediasphere." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
An encounter with Bridget Everett, for some of us at least, means acquiring a new vocabulary, terms like "meatballs," "slingshots," "low riders" and "slip and sliders." Turns out that in Ms. Everett's colorful lexicon, they are synonyms for "breasts," expressions she drops routinely in "Rock Bottom," her wildly ribald thrice weekly cabaret show at Joe's Pub. "Motorboating"? That occurs when Ms. Everett accosts an audience member, usually male, and, with a shake and bake jiggle, cradles his head in her bosom. Said bosom, scarcely concealed during the performance by a kind of jerry built shower curtain masquerading as a costume, was on partial view on an icy Monday night during an interview at the Library at the Public, the richly timbered saloon tucked away at the rear of the Public Theater. Ms. Everett sailed into the room, a Valkyrie in a diaphanous, lily patterned frock an off duty number she had sourced, she said, "by Googling trendy clothes for big girls." She knew she was risking a wardrobe malfunction. "Is this too much?" she asked, coyly tilting her chest toward a photographer sitting opposite her. "I want to make sure it pops." Ms. Everett's sizable proportions, are, after all, central to her shtick, the sort of down and dirty patter that big girls can get away with and Kate Moss types rarely do. Her curves are part of an arsenal of eye catching props that include the plastic sex toy that, during the show, she tucked beneath her cascade of rhumba ruffles, or the brown paper bag that concealed a steady supply of Chardonnay. Offstage, she was only marginally more ladylike, sipping her wine from a proper glass. "It helps with the nerves," she said. "Like Elaine Stritch used to say, 'I'm not going out there alone.' " Not that she needed the lubricant. "I've always had an adult sense of humor, and kind of a dirty mouth," she said. "I wasn't locking it up. But there was no shame behind it." Her propensity for candor and salty talk is a legacy of a curiously liberal upbringing. "When I was 8, I flirted with the high school boys," Ms. Everett said. If her antics raised eyebrows, she was unaware. Either way, "I think people never had the nerve to call me a slut." These days, at age 42, she added, "It's really nice to find a line of work that lines up with who I am." Before decamping to New York from Manhattan, Kan., where she grew up, "I thought the be all end all was Barry Manilow," she said. "I just thought, 'It can't get better than that.' " She discovered her metier not long after arriving, her stage persona shaped in part by cabaret performers like her friend, the comedian and drag entertainer Murray Hill, and Kiki Herb. "They were lawless, funny and razor sharp," she said. "They had an intimacy and immediacy that I didn't get in Kansas." Her aim, she said, is to uncork a similarly unfettered response in her audiences. "I'm the one whipping everyone up into a frenzy," she said. "I want people to feel unlocked. It's funny to just watch them leave themselves for a moment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Though Tom Kibble never received a Nobel Prize in Physics, the consensus among his colleagues is that he deserved one. His research was at the root of at least three seminal discoveries that earned others the coveted prize. Dr. Kibble, who died on June 2 in London at 83 and who was long associated with Imperial College London, conducted research that spanned the scales of physics, explaining fundamental interactions among the building blocks of matter as well as theorizing about the topology of the cosmos. Most notable, Dr. Kibble helped discover the Higgs mechanism, which explains why particles have mass. The discovery helped lay the foundation for the so called Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that classifies and describes the interactions of subatomic particles. He spent much of his later career contemplating how, after the Big Bang, the universe cooled and went through successive phase transitions (when a medium changes form, such as liquid freezing into solid). Most significant, he predicted that topological defects would emerge in the universe at each phase transition, similar to the cracks that form when water freezes. Dr. Kibble made "major contributions to our understanding of the deepest laws of physics," Jerome Gauntlett, the head of the theoretical physics group at Imperial College London, said in a phone interview. "His ideas will last forever." Much of Dr. Kibble's work revolved around spontaneous symmetry breaking, a process by which a symmetrical system randomly ends up in an asymmetrical state. To understand it, think of a pyramid of playing cards. As long as it is upright, the pyramid remains symmetrical down the middle. If one card buckles, however, the whole system collapses and loses its symmetry. In the fall of 1964, Dr. Kibble, with the American physicists Gerald Guralnik and Carl Richard Hagen, proposed a spontaneous breaking mechanism for a mathematical symmetry at the center of the Standard Model. This so called gauge symmetry dictates that the fundamental forces of nature retain their basic structure through space and time. Models at the time predicted that certain fundamental particles would be massless, but the mechanism that the three physicists proposed explained how these particles could have mass. The summer before, three others had independently described the same mechanism: first, the Belgian physicists Francois Englert and Robert Brout, then a British physicist, Peter Higgs, for whom the mechanism would be named. Though Dr. Kibble and his two colleagues were the last to publish on the topic, many physicists agree that their paper was the most comprehensive of the three. The findings from the three groups led, in 2012, to the discovery of the Higgs boson, the last subatomic particle predicted by the Standard Model to be found. For that achievement, Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Dr. Brout, who died in 2011, was ineligible because the prize is not awarded posthumously. The Nobel Prize committee would have also been unable to recognize Dr. Kibble's entire team, because the award's rules dictate that no more than three recipients can share a prize. Ultimately, the committee left the third slot empty. Many theoretical physicists, among them Dr. Higgs, expressed disappointment that Dr. Kibble had not been awarded the prize. Dr. Kibble himself did not seem dismayed. "It was a completely unimportant part of his life," Dr. Gauntlett said. "He was a very modest person." Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble was born in Madras (now Chennai), India, on Dec. 23, 1932, to Walter Kibble and the former Janet Bannerman. His father was a math professor at Madras Christian College, and Dr. Kibble grew up playing on the grounds of the college and solving math puzzles his father gave him. At age 11, he was sent to Edinburgh to attend boarding school. He then attended the University of Edinburgh, where he eventually earned a Ph.D. in mathematical physics. He met Anne Richmond Allan at a university dance, and they married in his final year of graduate school. They then moved to California, where Dr. Kibble spent a year at the California Institute of Technology as a Commonwealth Fund fellow. Dr. Kibble joined the theoretical physics department at Imperial College London after returning to Britain in 1959. He remained at the college until his death. After Dr. Kibble published his seminal work with Dr. Guralnik and Dr. Hagen in 1964, he continued to study the Higgs mechanism independently. In 1967, he expanded the theory to explain how the symmetry breaking mechanism gives mass to certain particles while leaving others, like the photon, massless. His findings sowed the seeds for discoveries by others including Abdus Salam, a Pakistani physicist, and Steven Weinberg, an American physicist. Working independently, they described how two of the four fundamental interactions of nature electromagnetism and the so called weak nuclear force, which is responsible for radioactive decay could have emerged from what is known as the electroweak interaction, as the early universe expanded and cooled to lower energies. In 1979, Dr. Salam and Dr. Weinberg, with Sheldon Glashow, an American physicist, were awarded the Nobel Prize for their elucidation of this interaction. In 1976, Dr. Kibble applied spontaneous symmetry breaking to the study of the early universe, introducing the idea that the universe, symmetrical at its start, lost symmetry and acquired defects as it expanded and cooled. He theorized the existence of cosmic strings one dimensional defects that stretch like strings across the universe. If discovered today, cosmic strings would provide critical insights into how particles behave at energies beyond what scientists can directly measure in particle accelerators. Among the many awards Dr. Kibble received was the American Physical Society's J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, for his work on the Higgs mechanism. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1998 and knighted in 2014. This month, he was posthumously awarded the Isaac Newton Medal, the highest honor for physics in Britain, for his outstanding contributions to the field. Of all his awards, his son said, Dr. Kibble was proudest of the lifetime creative mentoring in science award given annually by the scientific journal Nature and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, a British charity, of which he was the first recipient in 2005. By all accounts a gentle man who was comfortable with silence, Dr. Kibble nevertheless held many leadership positions. He was the head of the physics department at Imperial College from 1983 to 1991, and the chairman of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science from 1974 to 1977 and Scientists Against Nuclear Arms from 1985 to 1991. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
PARIS Even as suffering and sadness envelop Paris these days, there is a street that offers a respite, however brief: the Rue des Martyrs. A narrow, half mile stretch built in the first half of the 19th century, this street proclaims no landmarks or important architecture as it cuts uphill through the Ninth and 18th Arrondissements into Montmartre. In recent years, gentrification has rolled over Rue des Martyrs without mercy. At No. 3, a shop selling high end coffees and teas replaced a greengrocer a few months ago; the surrounding neighborhood of South Pigalle has lost many of its massage parlors and nightclubs and is so chic it now goes by SoPi, or "soapy." Yet Rue des Martyrs celebrates even in crisis what remains of the intimate, human side of Paris. With more than 22,000 people dead from the coronavirus in France, and President Emmanuel Macron extending the country's lockdown until at least May 11, the street has become more important to the neighborhood than ever. Because of a zoning law that protects small, independent "artisans," the bottom part of the Rue des Martyrs is devoted mostly to small food shops. The feel here is still that of a small village. Although cafes and restaurants in France remain closed, food stores are exempt. The shopkeepers and artisans on my street are a tough breed, and most have decided to carry on. I have lived in the neighborhood for a decade and feel so much a part of the street that I wrote an entire book about it. From the base of the street to Rue Manuel, a short distance away, I have access to two butchers, a fishmonger, two cheese stores, two liquor stores, Italian and Greek epiceries, four greengrocers (one organic), three bakeries, a pastry shop, a chocolate shop, a jam shop, a shop devoted to regional French food specialities and a supermarket. Obviously, confinement has changed the rhythm and rituals of everyday life. When the first food merchants arrive at 6:30, they are now joined by joggers determined to get in their run before the ban on jogging (10 a.m. until 7 p.m.) begins. But some things remain the same. By 7 a.m., the butcher at No. 4 still moves his rotisserie outdoors to begin the daily ritual of roasting whole chickens, as piles of peeled, whole potatoes cook in the drippings below. He and his employees, like other shopkeepers, reluctantly and clumsily wear protective masks (much of the time). The closest bakery, a few doors away, is still offering customers two types of baguettes by 7:30, but the employees are now masked and separated from the public by ceiling to counter plastic sheeting. Many of the shops have no doors, which can make it hard to enforce the rule of one meter of social distancing. Some merchants have posted signs allowing only one to three customers at a time, and find it unnerving when customers ignore the rules and insist on barging in; others have strung tape across their storefronts and are serving on the sidewalk. I've spent so much time on the street that I know many of the shopkeepers and they know me. I've learned the landscapes of their lives: the names and ages of their children, their vacation destinations, their plans for retirement. That openness allows us to have safe distance conversations. "The word to describe the mood is morose," said Yves Chataigner, the 85 year old cheesemonger who runs the cheese store at No. 3 with his wife Annick. "But what are we supposed to do, stay shut up in our apartment upstairs and pretend to be on vacation?" Mr. Chataigner said that the day before, in the absence of normal operations at the vast Rungis wholesale food market outside of Paris, he had to walk three miles he clocked it on his pedometer to find all the cheeses he wanted. At the Au Bon Port Montmartre fish store at No. 5, Joel Vicogne, one of the fishmongers, kept the focus on the product as he arranged scallops in their shells on a counter that spilled onto the sidewalk. "The red snapper is magnificent, the tuna too, Elaine," he said. "The octopus, so beautiful." At the fruit and vegetable shop one block north, Kamel Ben Salem was all alone at 8 one morning, so he was eager to talk. He and I had bonded years before, when I introduced him and the street to "chou frise non pomme," a.k.a. kale. "I'll give you a great deal if you take all my super ripe cherry tomatoes," he said. I took all five pounds. Then he sweet talked me into buying pots of herbs that had come in that morning, lemongrass leaves, anise, verbena and thyme. Then he threw half a dozen apples and a pear into my tote bag. "You can make a tart," he said. Despite his bonhomie, he said he changes his mask twice a day and puts his clothes in a plastic bag for washing when he arrives home after a bus ride every evening. Whenever I go out, I carry a signed, timed "attestation de deplacement derogatoire" (certificate of exceptional movement) with my name, address, place and date of birth and one of seven reasons checked off justifying my outdoor excursion (necessary shopping, medical visit, essential work, judicial convocation, for example). I can stay out for only an hour and not move farther than a kilometer away from home. The French government has deployed tens of thousands of police officers throughout the country to check that people are carrying their certificates and obeying the restrictions. If not, they can be issued fines. I have seen as many as eight police officers at a time on the Rue des Martyrs. They can be overly bureaucratic: One of my neighbors was fined because she had checked off two reasons instead of one for her sojourn. The coronavirus may determine the rhythm of our lives in France for some time. France has suffered the fourth highest mortality rate from the virus in the world, but a research institute in Paris estimated on Monday that when some confinement restrictions are scheduled to be relaxed on May 11, only 5.7 percent of the population will have been infected. It warned that the low initial infection rate means that "population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave." "I can never be sad on the Rue des Martyrs," I tell people when they ask me why I am such a cheerleader for my street. In the face of the unknown, I revel in the shared pleasure of conversations however brief these days with shopkeepers and take comfort in the spirit of community that lives on here. At a time when I am cut off from most of Paris, and from family and friends in America, I am more connected to my street than ever. Elaine Sciolino is the author, most recently, of "The Seine: The River that Made Paris." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Workers could have more difficulty suing large companies for wrongdoing by contractors or franchisees under a rule announced on Sunday by the Labor Department. Under the rule, which will take effect in March, employees of a fast food franchise like a McDonald's restaurant, for example, may struggle to win a legal claim against the parent company if a franchisee violates minimum wage and overtime laws. "This final rule furthers President Trump's successful, governmentwide effort to address regulations that hinder the American economy and to promote economic growth," Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia said in a statement. The rule, which the department proposed last April, fleshes out its position on a concept known as joint employment. It effectively replaces a more labor friendly Obama era approach that the Trump administration withdrew in 2017, one of several departures from the previous administration in the area of employment and labor law. After the rule takes effect, it could limit the ability of millions of workers to recover wages they are owed. The contractors and franchisees that directly employ workers often have limited resources to pay legal penalties and settlements, making the large upstream companies with whom these employers have a relationship a more practical target. "This resolution provides much needed clarity for the 733,000 franchise establishments across America," said Robert Cresanti, the president and chief executive of the International Franchise Association, an industry group. 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. Advocates for workers have criticized the rule, arguing that it provides a road map of sorts for employers seeking to avoid liability for harmful practices. Under the new rule, whether a company like McDonald's is a joint employer and could be held liable for violations committed by a franchisee hinges on four factors: whether it hires and fires employees of the franchisee; whether it supervises the employees and controls their schedules; whether it determines their pay; and whether it manages their employment records. A company would typically have to meet some or all of these criteria to be considered a joint employer. By contrast, under the approach set out by President Barack Obama's Labor Department, a broader set of "economic realities" dictated whether the company should be considered a joint employer among them, the degree of dependence of workers on the upstream company. For example, a company could be considered a joint employer of a contractor's employees if it provided facilities and equipment for the workers, and if the workers were easy to replace, even if the company didn't supervise the workers or hire and fire them. Catherine Ruckelshaus, the general counsel of the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, said that the department's new rule essentially offers guidance to the courts, which courts aren't bound to follow. But, she added, the rule could still have significant practical impact because "many workers and employers and courts follow D.O.L. guidance." The department's new rule is in line with a similar proposal by the National Labor Relations Board from 2018 that seeks to make it more difficult for employees of franchisees and contractors to hold parent companies liable for labor law violations, like firing workers because they are trying to unionize. Under a ruling the labor board handed down during the Obama administration, a company could be considered a joint employer of workers at a contractor or franchisee if it exercised indirect control over them, not just direct control. But under the rule that the board proposed in 2018, the form of control would have to be "substantial, direct and immediate" for the company to be considered a joint employer. That would make it significantly less likely that large companies would be found liable. The labor board is expected to finalize its own rule in the coming weeks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
This has been a heavy year of natural disasters: Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, wildfires in California, the Mexico City earthquake, a monsoon in Bangladesh. In the aftermath of any natural disaster, money rushes in to help those in need. The media attention prompts people to write checks but also to donate clothes, food and medicine. It's well meaning it's hard not to help people in the midst of a humanitarian crisis but when the disaster passes from the news, people who give reactively, as an act of charity, turn their attention to something else. For philanthropists who commit to difficult projects that last many years, the challenge of disasters is different. They need to find a way to maintain the momentum created by so much attention around a natural disaster to sustain long term redevelopment. It's tricky turning charity into philanthropy. After all, Hurricane Harvey, which flooded Houston and drew charitable attention to the city, was not the first storm to wreak havoc on the area. Areas of Houston's flood zones have a one in 500 chance of flooding, known as a 500 year flood. But the floods can happen back to back. "Flooding is not new to Houston," said Marilu Hastings, vice president for sustainability programs at the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Austin, Tex. "Harvey was the third 500 year flood in three years. Now, we're thinking we need to change the standard for 500 year floods. It's a 50 year flood or less." Beth Gazley, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, who studies disaster giving, said one certainty was that natural disasters occur every year, and people inclined to donate money to these causes should get into the habit of giving before they happen. To prove her point on the ebb and flow of disaster donations, she pointed to the Red Cross's annual financial filings with the I.R.S. to show the impact of a year's hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis and other destructive events on giving. She expects an uptick this year, but she said such patterns were "not how you build a sustainable organization." Donors, she said, should always give unrestricted gifts, so the money is used where it is needed most, and resist sending material goods. Giving cash means the charity can put that money to work right away, she said, adding, "Sometimes when people give stuff, they're just trying to empty out their garage." "The Red Cross's window of service is three days after a crisis food, shelter and immediate humanitarian needs," Ms. Gazley said. "They're not going to build everyone's houses 10 feet higher. When we focus on disaster charities, we're not focused on resilience." That is where philanthropy comes in. The prominence of wealthy local families can help bring a community together. Ms. Hastings said the Mitchell Foundation whose money came from one of the pioneers of hydraulic fracturing knew it needed to find partners to use philanthropy to protect Houston from future floods. It joined two other family foundations the Kinder Foundation, whose money comes from Richard Kinder, who made his fortune in oil and gas pipelines; and the Houston Endowment, whose wealth traces back to Jesse and Mary Gibbs Jones, who built some of the city's first skyscrapers. "There are a lot of questions about why Houston floods Is it the zoning? Is it how the city was built? and there's a lot of finger pointing," Ms. Hastings said. "Those are good questions, but they don't move us forward. We're focused on solving problems." To that end, the Houston Consortium, as the group is known, has brought together researchers to come up with suggestions for change, like new flood maps and reservoirs. They are encouraged to understand the options quickly and share what they find. One requirement of the consortium's support is that the researchers collaborate and not keep their findings to publish years later in an academic journal. Given the connections all three foundations have from the prominent families behind them, the consortium also hopes to put into practice what its research finds. "We're on the ground, and we have the relationships in the community," Ms. Hastings said. "To me, it's a matter of taking the longer view and putting together a rapid response that is more strategic than getting people food, shelter and clothing." More difficult is turning that charitable impulse into a philanthropic quest from a distance. Effective disaster philanthropy, after all, requires the philanthropist to have the financial resources but also the contacts to make things happen. Kenny Chesney, the country music star, is trying to show what can be assembled quickly. Watching from Nashville as Hurricane Irma bore down on St. John, the smallest of the three U.S. Virgin Islands, he said he felt helpless. He had been going to the island since before he was famous and he had close friends taking shelter on his estate on St. John. Before he was able to make contact with anyone on St. John, he set up a foundation through a donor advised fund called Love for Love City at Wells Fargo Private Bank. He brought on John McInnis, a friend who had worked on disaster cleanup after Hurricane Katrina. "When you get past that anxiety state, and the reality of what had happened sinks in, that was why I wanted to start Love for Love City," Mr. Chesney said. "I wanted to help as quickly as we could, but I also wanted to do it right." Mr. Chesney would not disclose how much money he has contributed or his fans have donated, saying only that it was under 10 million. But what has allowed his effort to have influence beyond his celebrity is his partnership with other people with an interest in St. John to bring attention to the island. Two of those were Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and former mayor of New York, and Tom Secunda, one of Mr. Bloomberg's co founders of Bloomberg L.P. Both had resources and connections that only billionaires and civic leaders could bring to bear. "I was fortunate to know those guys and be a part of it all," Mr. Chesney said. "I feel I'm very lucky to have the ability and also the platform to help." He said Mr. McInnis managed the day to day operations to ensure that money went where it was supposed to go. "The key is taking a very complicated situation and simplifying it," Mr. McInnis said. "The key beach bars and businesses that everyone loves will be up and going within the first six to 12 months. The beaches will be clean. There will be houses for people to rent and stay in." He added that larger rebuilding of homes and resorts that were leveled is the second phase and will take several years. Yet Mr. Chesney, like the people behind the Houston Consortium, said his goal was to help rebuild the island in a way that made the infrastructure stronger. One of his goals was greater use of solar energy to bolster the electrical grid. "I'm going to do my best through music and through my platform to raise as much awareness as I can and alleviate the stress and anxiety they're living under," Mr. Chesney said of the people on St. John. "The challenge is to keep having it in the psyche of people who really care about it." That kind of thinking helps elevate the response to one disaster from charity to a more robust philanthropic project. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
On Tuesday afternoon in the courtyard next to the John Street United Methodist Church in Lower Manhattan, a striking man stood on a narrow concrete ledge and gazed at a small crowd gathered beneath him. The man was Souleymane Badolo, a dancer and choreographer from Burkina Faso who has lived and worked in New York since 2009. The crowd came to watch his "Virgule de l'histoire" ("Comma of history"), part of the River to River Festival. Mr. Badolo's gaze, though gentle and open, was full of questions. Slowly, smoothly, he crouched and twisted across that ledge and others in what for the next half hour became increasingly elaborate but always elegant variations on a man keeping his balance. For a while, the question seemed to be what movement was possible in that restricted space. But he did come off the perches, and it might have been when he fell into a pile of wood chips that one of his arms got scraped. His liquid motion poured down a short set of stairs and swooped through the courtyard, his knees buckling, his undulant upper body carving space. His hands did something between forming clay and drumming the air. His walking had a strut to it, his contrapposto poses a sculptural beauty. The backward tilt of his torso was the essence of cool. You could sense a story of diaspora in the progression of recorded music from the drums of Mr. Badolo's homeland to a cross between American blues and their Malian roots to club music by a D.J. from Ivory Coast. And when Mr. Badolo tried to climb up the side of the church and could find no handholds, you could take that allegorically. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
FRANKFURT A reader of the annual report of Siemens, the German engineering giant, could easily get the idea that the company was investing in wind energy because management wants to save the planet. "All our actions and decisions are informed by the principle of sustainability," Siemens said in the introduction to its 2010 report, a few pages after the obligatory photograph of the chief executive, Peter Loscher, and the rest of the management board. In smaller type on Page 90 is the fact that clean energy is a big moneymaker for Siemens. The renewable energy division, which consists mostly of the wind power business, recorded a bigger sales increase than any other unit in the quarter ended Sept. 30, rising 48 percent, to 977 million euros ( 1.3 billion). New orders rose 85 percent, to 1.45 billion euros, also a company best. Still, the unit's operating profit margin of 10.6 percent lagged that of more conventional businesses, like providing equipment for fossil fuel power plants, and fell short of Siemens's goal of a 12 percent to 16 percent margin. The unit made 103 million euros for the quarter, and 368 million euros for the fiscal year. That was about 5 percent of the total yearly profit for Siemens, whose array of products includes trains, factory equipment and X ray machines. But like any fast growing business, there is also risk. The North American market has slumped just as Siemens, which does most of its manufacturing in Denmark, is stepping up investments in the United States and Canada. On Dec. 3, Siemens opened a factory in Hutchinson, Kan., to make nacelles housings the size of a bus that sit atop wind turbine towers and hold the mechanical and generating equipment. Siemens already has a blade factory in Fort Madison, Iowa, which opened in 2007, and is planning a plant in Tillsonburg, Ontario, to supply blades for nearby wind farms. The company's goal is to become one of the top three suppliers of wind power equipment in the world, up from eighth or ninth now. Vestas Wind Systems, a Danish company that focuses solely on wind power, is the market leader. To have any chance, however, requires a foothold in China, the world's largest market for wind power, and one of the most difficult to enter because of government policies that favor local companies. In November, Siemens opened a factory in Shanghai, a city chosen in part because it is on the water and a good place from which to ship equipment for offshore wind parks, a niche in which Siemens is the No. 1 equipment supplier. The Asian market is the largest and fastest growing for wind power, accounting for an estimated 44 percent of global capacity, according to IHS Emerging Energy Research. Europe is second, with 34 percent of global capacity and North America third with 19 percent. Siemens is also planning factories in the emerging markets of India and Russia as well as in Britain where, despite an austerity budget, the government is strongly backing the development of offshore wind projects. In the United States, makers of wind power equipment have had to contend with fickle government incentives and a plunge in the price of natural gas, which made wind energy less competitive. In addition, the financial crisis has made it harder for smaller operators to get loans to build wind parks. "The U.S. was supposed to be one of the most attractive markets," said Eduard Sala de Vedruna, a research analyst for wind power at IHS Emerging Energy Research. "It's not going to be as attractive as it used to be." Like General Electric, the market leader in wind power in the United States, Siemens may have an advantage against upstarts because it has long supplied equipment for conventional power plants and transmission facilities run by big utility companies. Siemens also has a long history in countries like Russia and China, where the company sold telegraph equipment as early as 1872. "Siemens already had some good relationships," Mr. Sala de Vedruna said. "They understand the business of generating electricity." But Siemens will also have to contend with ascendant Chinese companies like Sinovel, Goldwind and Dongfang, which are moving rapidly overseas. The Chinese companies offer lower prices and attractive financing, and could force down prices and profit margins, said James Stettler, an analyst for UniCredit in London. "While Siemens appears better placed than Vestas or G.E., we think the company will also see its margins compress over time," Mr. Stettler wrote in an e mail. In a measure of how wind has become mass market, the Kansas factory will feature a moving assembly line, like an auto factory. In older factories, designed when volumes were lower, the units were assembled in place, a less efficient method. The assembly line cuts the time it takes to build a nacelle to 19 hours from 36, according to Siemens. Mr. Sala de Vedruna said that he thought the long term prospects for wind power in the United States were still bright. Siemens apparently agrees and wants to get closer to the customer. "America is for us still the single largest market," said Rene Umlauft, chief executive of Siemens Renewable Energy. Wind turbine components "are large and heavy and it costs money to move them from one place to another." Siemens got into the wind business only in 2004, when it acquired a maker of wind turbines in Brande, Denmark, which remains the headquarters of the wind unit. Watching that business expand seems to have given Siemens an appetite for other investments in renewable energy. In 2009, Siemens acquired Solel, an Israeli company that makes components for plants that use concentrated heat from the sun to generate power. And last February, Siemens acquired a minority stake in Marine Current Turbines, a British company that makes equipment for generating electricity from ocean tides. These technologies are still years from mass deployment. But, Mr. Umlauft said, "we want to do the same thing that we did in wind." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Juan Diego Florez, left, and Diana Damrau, shown in a recent rehearsal, star in a new production of "La Traviata" at the Metropolitan Opera. There have been plenty of indications that the Metropolitan Opera is under new musical management. But the debate over the projectile champagne glass was as good a sign as any. It unfolded during a recent rehearsal for a much anticipated new production of Verdi's "La Traviata." When it opens on Dec. 4, this "Traviata" will be the first opera Yannick Nezet Seguin has conducted as the Met's new music director. The soprano Diana Damrau, playing the heroine, Violetta, had just hurled her champagne glass across the rehearsal room as she sang the defiantly joyful aria "Sempre libera." The glass landed, midphrase, with a crash. Glass throwing is hardly rare in "Traviata" stagings the Met's last production also had its Violetta hurl one against a wall during "Sempre libera" but Mr. Nezet Seguin said he was dismayed by how much noise there was on the Met's stage these days, in ways that could distract from the music. After a short discussion with the director, Michael Mayer, a compromise was reached. Rather than chucking the glass in the middle of a line, Ms. Damrau would wait until the end of the measure, so that the sound would not fight the music. And Mr. Nezet Seguin had one more request: that Ms. Damrau throw the glass upstage, preventing stray shards from threatening the players in the pit. It was a small but telling moment: Mr. Nezet Seguin was taking musical responsibility for the Met. "It's my role," Mr. Nezet Seguin, 43, said in an interview later. "I don't want to say that it's to defend the music, but it's to represent the music in all of the structure of the opera." The Met, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, has struggled with unsteady musical leadership for more than a decade. Years of health problems kept Mr. Nezet Seguin's predecessor, James Levine, away for long stretches, and ultimately forced him to step down as music director. Then accusations of sexual misconduct, which Mr. Levine has denied, led the Met to sever all ties with him earlier this year. The new music director has big shoes to fill, and a big wound to heal. Mr. Nezet Seguin, who had originally been set to assume the post in 2020, moved up his start date to take a stronger musical hand at the opera house after the allegations against Mr. Levine came to light. And although it will be a few seasons before he takes on his full workload at the Met and implements some of his plans for commissions and collaborations, he is already making his presence felt. At his first "Traviata" rehearsal with the orchestra, he paused often to fine tune passages, even though the company has performed the piece more than a thousand times. He has been helping the singers hone their roles especially the star tenor Juan Diego Florez, a bel canto specialist known for his high C's, who is singing the somewhat lower and less elaborately ornamented role of Alfredo for the first time. Mr. Florez, whose Alfredo promises nevertheless to be very much in the bel canto tradition, praised Mr. Nezet Seguin's understanding of voices. "He wants to bring back the attention to detail that this part has," he said in an interview. When Mr. Nezet Seguin urged Mr. Florez to sing the drinking song in the first act softly, as the score indicates to underscore that Alfredo is still insecure and sexually inexperienced he drove the point home in a characteristically good humored way. During rehearsals Mr. Nezet Seguin worked closely with the creative team to align the staging with the music, tweaking the blocking in one duet to help the singers and making sure the motivations of the characters were rooted in the score. "He's a real dramaturg, musically," Mr. Mayer said shortly before the start of the first stage rehearsal. "He's very invested in, and interested in, the narrative information that is conveyed through music that is unrelated to the libretto." Then there's the big break Mr. Nezet Seguin fought for: He persuaded the Met to restore the second intermission in "La Traviata." The company, conscious that many people now prefer shorter nights at the opera, had been performing the work with only one intermission in recent years. But Mr. Nezet Seguin pushed to bring back the second interval, so the singers could rest their voices between the second and third acts, and audiences could experience the opera and its pacing more as Verdi conceived it. "Verdi is strongest when we respect the text very much, when we respect the music, when we respect the drama," Mr. Nezet Seguin said. There is a lot riding on the new "Traviata." Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, said in an interview that "there's a sense of history hovering over this whole thing." Introducing new Met productions of beloved staples is not for the faint of heart: Conservative members of the audience tend to howl at modernizing ideas, while more adventurous operagoers are just as dismayed by stagings they see as hidebound. (Witness the shock that greeted Luc Bondy's stark "Tosca" in 2009, followed by the concern some critics expressed last season when a more traditional staging by David McVicar replaced it.) The Met's most recent "Traviata," a provocative, starkly contemporary look at sex, death and gender by Willy Decker, was one of its most successful reimaginings of a classic. It followed not one but two traditional, opulent productions of the opera, both by the director who more than any other has defined opulence at the Met: Franco Zeffirelli. For this production, the company is going for beauty and tradition, but with a twist. Mr. Gelb turned to Mr. Mayer, a Tony Award winning Broadway director who previously directed the Met's Rat Pack "Rigoletto," updated to 1960s Las Vegas, and Nico Muhly's midcentury chic new opera "Marnie" this fall. He has already been engaged to create a new "Aida." For "La Traviata," Mr. Mayer said, he wanted to embrace the opera's romanticism and explore its traditional setting, mid 19th century Paris. Like other directors have, he tells the opera as a flashback, staging the prelude as Violetta's death scene; her deathbed remains on stage throughout. "She has a surge of life in her, right before she dies," Mr. Mayer noted of her final moments in the last act. "And I thought: What if we could capture the swirl of this opera in that moment?" While Broadway shows have many, many weeks of rehearsals and previews before opening night, a repertory opera company like the Met must do everything on a much tighter schedule. "There's a sense that you're working at this high level, with artists of this high caliber, at breakneck speed," Ms. Jones said. "It's like the Super Bowl, or basketball playoffs you just have to be on point, on your game, and super focused." No one has been more focused than Mr. Nezet Seguin, who moved into a new apartment a few blocks from the Met just in time to start rehearsals. He is still moving into his new office backstage: During a recent interview there, his books had not yet arrived, so there were only a few scores on his shelves. The artwork he had chosen including Chagall sketches for "The Magic Flute," and a cartoonlike drawing of Mr. Nezet Seguin presented to him by the orchestra were still waiting to be hung, and a television monitor that will show a live feed of the stage had not yet been connected. But his small Nespresso machine was already getting a workout. "Doing 'Traviata' as a music director is like going into a big symphony orchestra and doing Beethoven Five," said Mr. Nezet Seguin, who is also the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He noted that despite the fact that he had conducted the work at the Met before, he was bound to attract more scrutiny with it now: "You touch, completely, the core." He added that he had not expected to begin his tenure with "La Traviata" but was pleased that it had worked out that way: It was the first opera he worked on, in 1998, as an assistant conductor and choir master at the Opera de Montreal. "So, 20 years later, this is the first production I do as music director of the Met," Mr. Nezet Seguin said. "The stars aligned to make it this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Stephanie Waterman, a 56 year old from San Diego who works in sales, has been attending the San Diego Bay Food and Wine Festival, held this year from Nov. 12 to the 19, for 14 years. As a recovering alcoholic, she doesn't drink but enjoys the cooking classes, the food samples, and hanging with her friends, whom she often drives home. She is especially excited for the Grand Tasting event this year because for the first time, there will be an open air mocktail bar. It will be located in the middle of the action, next to the live music, and serve two signature "safe sangrias" made specifically for this event by a local mixologist. "I think a lot of people will totally dig it," she said. "I think it will be hilarious and super fun to hang out with other like minded people who aren't drinking and won't say, 'Why aren't you drinking today?'" She believes many of her nondrinker friends will appreciate venturing out into the rest of the festival holding something that looks like a drink. "They don't want to be singled out," she said. In July, the Oregon Brewers Festival 70,000 attendees to downtown Portland. For the 1,000 or so guests who didn't drink alcohol, the organizers created a 20 feet by 20 feet "soda garden" that had shade, comfortable tables and chairs, and unlimited, free all natural craft sodas with flavors like apple ginger made by a local company, Crater Lake Soda. The goal was to show their appreciation to designated drivers, said festival spokeswoman Chris Crabb. "These people are providing a huge service in ensuring a safe ride home for their friends and loved ones," she said. "All parties benefit by recognizing them." For similar reasons Tim Stendahl, a co founder of Where the Wild Beers Are, a festival that celebrates wild, sour and farmhouse beers and hosts events in St. Paul, Minn., New York City, and Des Moines, Iowa, decided to waive the 35 entrance fee for sober participants. At each festival he tries to add more classes and talks by brewmasters and other events everyone can enjoy. "People are excited we are doing that, but for us, it seems like a no brainer," he said. " They add value for everyone." (Many festivals offer reduced or complimentary admission to designated drivers.) Of course, some nondrinkers prefer to stay away from alcohol centric events. Kelsey Simms, a recruiting manager in Centennial, Colo., attended the Denver festival for the past two years as a designated driver and thought it was a waste of time to hang out in a separate area on her own. "It's definitely not essential to attend the festival as a nondrinker," she said. "I would seriously suggest to nondrinkers to just drop off and pick up." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When you look at a reconstruction of the skull and brain of Neoepiblema acreensis, an extinct rodent, it's hard to shake the feeling that something's not quite right. Huddled at the back of the cavernous skull, the brain of the South American giant rodent looks really, really small. By some estimates, it was around three to five times smaller than scientists would expect from the animal's estimated body weight of about 180 pounds, and from comparisons to modern rodents. In fact, 10 million years ago the animal may have been running around with a brain weighing half as much as a mandarin orange, according to a paper published Wednesday in Biology Letters. The glory days of rodents, in terms of the animals' size, were quite a long time ago, said Leonardo Kerber, a paleontologist at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria in Brazil and an author of the new study. Today rodents are generally dainty, with the exception of larger creatures like the capybara that can weigh as much as 150 pounds. But when it comes to relative brain size, N. acreensis, represented in this study by a fossil skull unearthed in the 1990s in the Brazilian Amazon, seems to be an extreme. The researchers used an equation that relates the body and brain weight of modern South American rodents to get a ballpark estimate for N. acreensis, then compared that with the brain weight implied by the volume of the cavity in the skull. The first method predicted a brain weighing about 4 ounces, but the volume suggested a dinky 1.7 ounces. Other calculations, used to compare the expected ratio of the rodent's brain and body size with the actual fossil, suggested that N. acreensis' brain was three to five times smaller than one would expect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Voters heading to the polls this election season in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania may find themselves facing billboards, projections and even cornfield cutouts designed by the country's leading artists with a simple refrain: "Enough is enough." "We are at a precipice in this country, and we are either going to move forward or we are not," said the artist Carrie Mae Weems, who has created new artworks for the "Enough of Trump" initiative alongside nearly a dozen other influential artists like Deborah Kass, Jeffrey Gibson and Shepard Fairey in collaboration with People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group started by the television producer Norman Lear. The nonprofit organization plans to exhibit its collection of nearly two dozen artworks across the country this fall as Americans decide who their next president will be. "Art has the power to connect with people's hearts as well as their minds," said Mr. Lear, who helped found the organization in 1980 to oppose the growing political power of such right wing religious groups as the televangelist Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. "This campaign will get people thinking and talking and feeling in their guts how much they've had enough of this president. And we'll remind them that the only remedy for that is to vote." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
It is beautiful beneath the sea, but if you binge too long, you'll drown. Welcome back to our guide through an epic "Game of Thrones" rewatch. If you're just joining us, you can catch up with recaps of past seasons with our ultimate watching guide, which also includes suggested episodes to rewatch throughout Seasons 1 7. Or you can tap into our weirwood tree and warg into our gentle giant simultaneously! for a vision quest of Season 6. Novices beware: This article is dark and full of spoilers. And now our watch continues. How Should I Rewatch 'Game of Thrones'? Concentrate on the installments that are central to the famously complicated plot and provide all the feels. Here are four must watch episodes. Episode 2, "Home" Watch to visit Winterfell in happier days, when Hodor could speak. Take a deep breath and exhale with Jon when he comes back (as he always does). Also, it's kin slaying time in Winterfell and the Iron Islands. (Recap.) Episode 5, "The Door" Bran's vision quests into the past take their toll and Hodor pays the price. (Or did he pay it long ago? Time travel is so confusing!) Bonus: Welcome a new villain, Euron Greyjoy, who promises more to be more fun than Ramsay. (Recap.) Episode 9, "Battle of the Bastards" It's time to take back Winterfell (and yell at Rickon to zigzag). Smile along with Sansa when Ramsay provides one last meal for his beloved dogs. (Recap.) Episode 10, "The Winds of Winter" Cersei has a blast wiping out her enemies and claiming the throne in a sequence with unforgettable sounds and visions. Also, R L J confirmed. Have a little Frey pie? (Recap.) 4 Things to Watch For in Season 6 What are the White Walkers up to? How much does the Three Eyed Raven know about it? It's clear that there is much being left unsaid, especially on the part of the extremely uncommunicative Night King. First, the White Walkers are marching along a very strange, meandering route with their army of the dead. Why don't they head straight for the Wall? Did they need winter to come to slow the wights' decomposition? Are they giving the baby White Walkers time to learn to walk on their own? Or are they waiting for some sort of magical assist, maybe someone they can mark who will pass through the Wall first? Benjen tells Bran and Meera that the dead cannot pass the Wall ancient spells are carved into its foundation for protection, like the magical wards in the Three Eyed Raven's cave, which were broken once the Night King marked Bran. If there were a possibility the wards could be broken, shouldn't the Raven or the Children of the Forest have warned their guests? Why don't they? The Raven practically forces Bran to go into download mode when they should be escaping. Maybe he knows the Night King wants to kill him. Or maybe the Raven wants to die while connected to Bran and the weirwood net, so that everything he knows becomes part of the trees and accessible to Bran. Was this the Raven's plan all along? Benjen, who says the Raven sent him to help Bran, is not surprised the Raven is dead and automatically expects Bran to assume that mantle. It feels like there is a certain inevitability to all of this, even though so much remains unknown, including whether Bran's mark has any effect on the Wall's protective magic. The Line of Succession, The Proper Progression, The Lawful Ascension Even in a world like Westeros, there are rules of succession. But they are rules that are easily subverted, especially by those willing to murder their way to the top. Ramsay makes sure not to murder Roose Bolton until after he is legitimized and recognized as his father's heir. And the High Sparrow who surely believes that Tommen is a bastard born of incest, but depends on his supposed legitimacy tries to cement his position by ensuring the king and queen get busy making an heir, just in case Tommen isn't long for this world. Even Euron Greyjoy, who murders his brother to force regime change in the Iron Islands, abides by the traditions of his people and participates in the Kingsmoot, the closest thing to democracy in the Seven Kingdoms outside of the Night's Watch elections. They're recognizing the legalities of their positions. But the women seizing power are rewriting the rules. Ellaria Sand and the Sand Snakes violently overthrow Dorne and take control, even though Ellaria wasn't next in line. And there is or was no legal basis for the Queen Mother to take the throne following the death of the king's last supposed heir. Then again, Cersei had already thumbed her nose at the line of succession by placing her kids born of twincest on the Iron Throne, where she could rule through them (or try to). And she's willing to blow up anyone who challenges her. She kills not only the Faith Militant, the Tyrells and members of the Small Council, but hundreds of nobles present to attend the trial. Qyburn, in effect, becomes the second most powerful member of the court, replacing the Hand, the Small Council and the High Septon. Who's left to ask the Citadel to check the royal family trees? Luckily, Bran's got much of the archive in his head. The Many Faced God does not like having lives stolen from him, but a lot of characters defy death anyway. The Three Eyed Raven claims to have lived for a thousand years. Melisandre, it's revealed, has also lived for a lot longer than previously thought, possibly for hundreds of years. Both Beric Dondarrion and Jon Snow have been resurrected from the dead Beric a few more times than Jon, but both by followers of the Lord of Light. In a sense, Euron Greyjoy also died and was brought back to life at the hands of a priest, this time serving the Drowned God (his drowning at the Kingsmoot is both a baptism and a coronation). Benjen lives in an in between state mostly dead, but still less dead than the reanimated Mountain, who himself is less dead than the White Walkers' wights. Death is clearly not the last word in this world, which might be why Davos risks his life to request Jon's resurrection in the first place. Although once it's known that it can be done, why is it not done for others? Certainly, that would have cut down on the many funerals always taking place. Cersei's world seems to be defined by funerals. We first met her as Jon Arryn's body was lying in state in the Sept of Baelor in Season 1, and she's had a steady toll of dead piling up around her ever since. Almost every season features a funeral at the Sept of Baelor no wonder she wants to blow the place to smithereens. How much grief can one person bear? And her hatred for Tyrion stems from that grief, as she believes him to be responsible for the deaths of her mother and her son. Others grieve in different ways, of course. Trystane Martell prefers to paint little eyes on stones for Myrcella's service, while Ramsay takes a moment to remember Myranda before feeding her to his precious dogs (a rite that will be repeated for him). And the Dothraki always expect their widows to grieve forever, locked away in the Temple of the Dosh Khaleen, until Dany ends that practice. It's because Dany can defy death that the Dothraki kneel down to her, as if she were a goddess. Jon's people, at least, have no such illusions about their leader. 'There's no need for a battle.' Sometimes it's possible to avoid death in settling a conflict; sometimes, it's not. King Tommen outlaws trial by combat, much to Cersei's dismay. The boy king reaches this decision because he's being manipulated by the High Sparrow and the Faith Militant who are alerted to the invincibility of Cersei's would be champion the Mountain when he pulls off a Sparrow's head. But Tommen also has a point: The practice is barbaric. However, this sort of pacifism can get you killed in Westeros. But using a threat of violence can be effective in preventing even worse violence. Jaime Lannister manages to significantly reduce the body count at the siege of Riverrun because he threatens his prisoner's baby boy. He leans into his reputation of being a man of dishonor. He tells the truth. Sansa and Littlefinger, however, use a web of lies to take the North. Long before Sansa even considers amassing an army, Lord Baelish had plotted how he could use the Knights of the Vale to fight whoever won Winterfell. Littlefinger brings the army north and tells Sansa that they're encamped at Moat Cailin. But Moat Cailin is Bolton territory. That tells us Littlefinger is still playing both sides, using his position as an ally of the Boltons while offering to thwart them. This is why Ramsay doesn't seem all that surprised when the Knights of the Vale first show up at the Battle of the Bastards; the only thing he's really surprised about is the fact that they're fighting for the other side. Jon Snow is surprised, too. Because during all their battle plans (for a battle she instigated), Sansa never mentioned the Knights of the Vale as an option. She withheld the crucial strategic information that heavy cavalry was available, which greatly shifted the balance of power between the Bolton army and the Stark/Snow forces. Ramsay Bolton had 6,000 men; the Knights of the Vale, at full strength, have 40,000. Even if only a quarter of the Vale forces showed up, they still outnumber Ramsay and that could have forced a surrender. Sansa risks the lives of two of her brothers and thousands of her own men by not even mentioning these reinforcements as a possibility. Ramsay and Jon were right there was never any need for a battle. How Should Your Sweet Summer Child Watch 'Game of Thrones'? The undead Mountain smashes the head of a peasant against a wall (14 minutes in). Ramsay murders his father Roose (33 minutes in), then feeds his stepmother Walda and newborn stepbrother to his dogs (offscreen, but still disturbing). Then over in Pyke, Euron Greyjoy throws his brother off a bridge (44 minutes in). Ned Stark and his crew take on a few Kingsguard men at the Tower of Joy (16 minutes in; lasts about two and a half minutes). Jon Snow executes the men who murdered him at Castle Black (51 minutes in). At the Dothraki city of Vaes Dothrak, we see at least one couple having sex in public (25 minutes in); Jorah and Daario kill two men (26 minutes in); and Dany flambes Dothraki khals (57 minutes in). She emerges naked from the flames two minutes later. After criticism that "Game of Thrones" was skimping on nudity equality, the show offered a close up of an actor examining his genitals for warts (16 minutes in). The White Walker assault on the Three Eyed Raven's tree cave claims Summer, the Three Eyed Raven, Leaf and, most disturbing and heartbreaking, Wylis/Hodor. The action starts around 50 minutes in. The Hound takes an ax to four rogue members of the Brotherhood Without Banners (11 minutes in), and helps hang three more of them later (49 minutes in). Over in King's Landing, the Mountain removes a Sparrow's head (16 minutes in). A violent siege takes place in Meereen (starts about nine minutes in). But it's relatively mild compared to the Battle of the Bastards later on in the episode, which starts when Ramsay plays a game with Rickon's life (35 minutes in). If you want to skip the battle entirely, the main charge is about 40 minutes in. The nasty bit with Ramsay's dogs comes at 59 minutes in, but it's mostly offscreen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Could we have any more of a "Monday morning quarterback" view than that demonstrated by Joe Biden? Are you kidding me? I am sure I speak for many when I say I am tired of the blame game. Of course our government has made some errors in the handling of the virus response. We can always do better. Hindsight is 20/20. Mr. Biden offers a new seating chart at restaurants and masks for delivery people? Really? That and criticism for the administration? How about some real ideas, Joe? As a small business owner who has laid off one third of our staff, we need real ideas, not just the 20/20 view. How clear, how calm, and how refreshing! What a relief to hear the voice of reason and such a contrast to what's coming from the White House. This is what leadership looks like. Thank you, Joe. Joe Biden is offering more of the same half measures that have shut down our economy and are prolonging our economic and psychological agony. More social distancing and more testing will just continue to slow the spread of the virus and leave us vulnerable to a second wave of infections when the economy reopens. The only way that's guaranteed to allow us to quickly reopen the economy without risk is to make self testing widely available for Americans (for the virus, not the antibodies) and then to have the carriers self isolate. This would allow the uninfected Americans, perhaps 300 million people, who are currently imprisoned in their homes to return to work and school immediately. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
When Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519 (at the Chateau du Clos Luce in France; he was 67 ), he left behind a body of work that radically upended every discipline it encompassed which was pretty much every discipline. The illegitimate child of a 15 year old orphan from the Tuscan town of Vinci began his career as a teenager in the workshop of the Italian artist Andrea del Verrocchio, but over the decades his long resume would come to include so much more than just painting and sculpture. His polymathic genius in such disparate fields as architecture , anatomy , geology , mathematics, design and civil engineering (he is said to have conceived of the mechanics behind the helicopter and the parachute centuries before these were invented) made him, in the words of his 16th century biographer, Giorgio Vasari, "more divine than human." In the definitive, boxed, four volume publication LEONARDO DA VINCI REDISCOVERED (Yale University, 550), Carmen C. Bambach (the same Metropolitan Museum of Art curator and da Vinci specialist behind the museum's recently opened exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci's St. Jerome") divides the great master's life and career into early, mature and late periods, "inspired by the Renaissance concept of the Three Ages of Man." A project nearly a quarter century in the making, this monograph attempts to provide a comprehensive revisiting of the man so many know only as the painter of the "Mona Lisa" and the "Last Supper." Bambach's fellow da Vinci scholar Martin Kemp calls Leonardo "the most famous person in the history of world visual culture." In LEONARDO DA VINCI: The 100 Milestones (Sterling, 29.95), a far more compact highlight reel of the most important images of the thousands the artist produced, Kemp sheds fascinating light on Leonardo's scientific, specifically anatomical sketches. The fine lined, painstakingly intricate "Studies of the Fetus in the Womb and of the Placenta" and " Demonstration of the Irrigation Systems of a Female Body ," for instance, showcase a "wholly novel ... diagrammatic technique," not to mention the left handed da Vinci's idiosyncratic mirrored writing style: He wrote right to left. They also betray that this pre eminent student of exteriors and man made inventions also harbored a profound and at the time quite avant garde obsession with human interiority. Given that his name will forever be synonymous with the "Mona Lisa" " considered by many to be the world's most famous picture ," says Kemp it's worth noting that Leonardo's prolific, nearly five decade oeuvre included only 20 paintings at most. In a second book he published this year, LEONARDO BY LEONARDO (Callaway, 125), Kemp narrows his focus to this medium alone. From his earliest paintings he completed " The Annunciation " when he was just 21 and still under the tutelage of Verrocchio to his " Ginevra de' Benci ," whose forward posture and gaze revolutionized female portraiture, until then typically done in profile (men were often "shown boldly looking outward, asserting their presence. ... But not Italian women until the advent of Leonardo"), the works, presented with remarkable clarity and fidelity, and in impressively large scale, reveal the extent of the master's contributions to virtually all modes of painting in his time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
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