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SAN FRANCISCO Between breaking into the email accounts of United States government officials, political dissidents and international human rights organizations, Iranian hackers liked to joke about their slow internet service, poor pay and lack of skilled colleagues. In conversations obtained by security researchers, the hackers groused like any other start up employees, often frustrated by their lack of progress and inability to carry out more grandiose schemes. But the work being discussed had global ramifications, and painted a picture of how Iranian hackers have matured over the last decade from defacing websites with crude photos and slogans. Now, they appear to be an organized work force, starting systematic cyberespionage campaigns aimed at promoting Iran's interests around the world and on curbing dissent within the Islamic Republic. In a report published on Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Collin Anderson, an independent cybersecurity researcher, and Karim Sadjadpour, a Carnegie senior fellow, followed nearly a decade of the day to day activities of Iranian hackers. Their report on Iran's improving capabilities arrives as anti government protests in the country enter their second week, prompting the regime to shut down access to the internet under the claim that it is being used to spread "violence and fear" among protesters. Iran has long spied on the online activities of dissidents, but it has recently turned to cyberespionage campaigns aimed at the United States, according to recent reports by security firms. Those campaigns have left a trail of digital crumbs, allowing researchers to paint a vivid picture of whom Iranian hackers target and when. "Through their carelessness, we were able to get a real picture of who these individuals are and what their goals are," said Mr. Anderson, who has been researching Iranian hackers for more than five years. The hackers appeared to be testing malicious software on themselves or accidentally clicked on malware they were developing. Either way, they exposed activity on their own computers, inadvertently giving researchers a glimpse into their lives through chat logs, emails and the targeting of their victims. One six month chat log between two Iranian hackers gave particular insight into how they ran their day to day operation. By tracing where and how web domains were registered, as well as other data found online, Mr. Anderson concluded that the aliases "mb 1986" and "ArYaIeIrAN" represented two Iranian men whose real names were Mojtaba Borhani and Behrouz Keshvari. Neither replied to a request for comment sent to email addresses referred to in their chat logs. Both had roots in the Iranian defacement community, which would attack and take over websites and Twitter accounts, replacing them with pro Iranian slogans and images. Over time, the two become more sophisticated, developing malware as they moved between Iranian hacking groups. Recently, the men have been tied to a group known as "Charming Kitten" by security companies. The group is believed to be responsible for a range of attacks, including targeting aviation companies in the United States. The chat logs showed two men frustrated with the pace of their work. "We need someone for Mac in Tehran," Mr. Keshvari wrote on June 15, 2014, bringing up a topic the two men had discussed nearly a month earlier. The best hackers, he complained, were making "good money" elsewhere, and were not tempted by the idea of moving to Tehran to work in a cramped office for roughly 780 a month. There should be some other benefit, Mr. Keshvari joked, at one point suggesting they offer to send prospective hires on vacation to Turkey and Thailand. Mr. Keshvari appeared focused on bringing in prospective new hires, but he was often stymied by Mr. Borhani. On May 30, 2014, he complained that Mr. Borhani had scared off prospective new hires. "Listen, if during the interview you ask them about working with SCADA, I will kill you," Mr. Keshvari wrote, referring to the operating system used to control industrial facilities, such as power plants or oil and gas refineries. Mr. Keshvari responded that he "does not do the interview in this way." And after several profanities were exchanged, the two agreed to meet with a new recruit. "We need them ... send them here," Mr. Borhani wrote. He repeatedly pressed for programmers with expertise in Mac operating systems. Their focus on hiring people with an expertise in Apple products, specifically the Mac operating system, was unsurprising, Mr. Anderson said, given that many of Iran's dissidents and human rights workers had transitioned to Apple products in the hopes that they would prove more secure than Microsoft's Windows software. Last year, the first reports surfaced that Iranian hackers had developed malware targeting Macs. The malware stole victim's passwords, and it has been used to target Iranian dissidents as well as the defense contractors in the United States, according to Mr. Anderson's report. "Imagine them like start ups who are contracted to the government," Mr. Anderson said. "They are chasing demographics that the government has an interest in targeting." The two men often discussed names and shared phone numbers of people they were working with, and one individual appeared to warrant deference. A figure named only as "Hajji," a title widely used in the Muslim world to denote someone who carries out the hajj, a sacred pilgrimage to Mecca, appeared to frequently visit the men and make final decisions on whom they could hire to help with various projects. "It seems likely that Hajji is an Iranian government handler," Mr. Anderson said. Iran's government, he added, is careful to not directly tie itself to hackers involved in offensive operations. Iran's government also probably operates a separate cyberwarfare department, though the people it employs there appear more skilled and better at covering their tracks, he said. "The vast majority of their most recent operations focuses on cyberespionage," Mr. Anderson said, a statement echoed by John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at the FireEye cybersecurity firm, which recently published its own report about one of Iran's more active hacking groups. In the year since President Trump took office, Iran has focused its efforts on infiltrating the computers of anyone associated with the president, Mr. Anderson said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Mr. Foye is the chairman and chief executive of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Mr. Samuelsen is the International President of the Transport Workers Union. As chief executive of North America's largest transportation system, and as president of the country's biggest transit workers' union, we have had our fair share of disputes. But we agree on this: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is facing a five alarm fire and the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate seems content to sit back and do nothing while it burns. This isn't hyperbole. The numbers are staggering: a 16 billion deficit through 2024, with 200 million in revenue losses every week. The pandemic has caused precipitous declines in ridership, fare revenues, tolls and subsidies. Pandemic related expenses, like the cleaning and disinfecting of train cars, have soared. Through it all, the M.T.A.'s employees have continued to operate and maintain the public transit system. They have ensured that doctors, nurses, supermarket workers and so many other essential employees get to their jobs on the front lines. But this courageous dedication came at the highest price. By late July, 131 transit workers who worked and fought for New York during this crisis perished. We mourn their loss every single day. Now the transit system that carried us through the pandemic is set to run out of money. The workers who kept New York moving and put their own health and families at risk are worried about layoffs. The M.T.A. has drafted plans for the worst service cuts in agency history: up to 40 percent across the subway and bus network, and up to 50 percent across the commuter rails. This is compounded by a looming fare hike and possibly deep cuts to the 51.5 billion capital construction plan necessary to modernize the 116 year old system. We have been sounding the warning bell for months. The M.T.A. is in a free fall. The only way to stop it is congressional action, and time is running out. The issue of layoffs, in particular, is putting the M.T.A. and its unionized employees on an ugly collision course when the city needs unity to get back on its feet. We are pleading with the federal government to deliver, quickly, to ward off disaster. Before Covid 19 hit, the M.T.A. was making the best progress it had seen in decades, with an expected 81 million operating surplus, six consecutive months of on time performance above 80 percent and growing ridership, serving approximately 8.6 million customers per day. Congress needs to step up and deliver for mass transit, not only in New York but across the country. Republican Senate leadership is ignoring the magnitude of this fiscal crisis. The M.T.A. needs 12 billion to get through the rest of this year and 2021. We're facing an existential crisis; even the Great Depression had a less severe impact on the revenue of New York City's transit system than what we are seeing now. After the 1929 stock market crash, ridership on New York City buses and street cars declined by 16 percent. Compare that with today's losses on buses, which are roughly 45 percent. The subway comparison is even more striking by 1933, ridership had dropped by only a modest 12 percent. At the peak of the Covid 19 pandemic, it was down by 93 percent. And even now, with New York's curve flattened, transit ridership is still down 75 percent. Punishing the M.T.A. and transit systems across the country over an ideological political agenda is not only wrong; it is bad economics. The downstate New York region New York City and the surrounding area accounts for about 8 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. New York City cannot recover without a robust M.T.A., and the country cannot rebound economically without a healthy New York. Even if federal funding does come through, the M.T.A. will still face some extremely difficult choices. But New York deserves better. Over the past four years, New York taxpayers have given 116 billion more to the federal government than they received back in federal spending for an average annual negative balance of 29 billion far exceeding every other state. Our riders and transit workers make this possible. Our fate rests squarely in the hands of the federal government. Every day Congress fails to pass another Covid 19 relief bill is another day closer to the end of mass transit as we know it. Patrick J. Foye is chairman and chief executive of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority. John Samuelsen is the International President of the Transport Workers Union. 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.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Novavax, the little known Maryland company that received a 1.6 billion deal from the federal government for its experimental coronavirus vaccine, announced encouraging results in two preliminary studies on Tuesday. In one study, 56 volunteers produced a high level of antibodies against the virus without any dangerous side effects. In the other, researchers found that the vaccine strongly protected monkeys from coronavirus infections. "This is the first one I'm looking at and saying, 'Yeah, I'd take that,'" Dr. Moore said. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University who was not involved in the studies, called them "encouraging preliminary results," but cautioned that it won't be possible to say whether the vaccine is safe and effective until Novavax conducts a large scale study known as Phase 3 comparing people who get vaccinated to people who get a placebo. The studies are being submitted to scientific journals to be reviewed for publication, said Dr. Gregory Glenn, the president of research and development at Novavax. The company has said that if its vaccine is shown to be effective, it can produce 100 million doses by the beginning of next year, or enough to give to 50 million people if administered in two doses. Under its deal with the federal government, the company will also receive money to undertake large scale manufacturing of millions more doses if the vaccine is shown to work. Novavax's vaccine is one of more than two dozen products to have entered the first round of safety tests in people, known as Phase 1 trials. Five other coronavirus vaccines are already in Phase 3 trials, in which thousands of people are tested to see if a vaccine works. Its vaccines contain a coronavirus protein that prompts a response from the immune system. Protein based vaccines have a longer track record than some of the newer approaches used by competing coronavirus vaccines, such as those based on viral genes or so called adenoviruses. Protein based vaccines are licensed for diseases such as hepatitis B and shingles. Novavax successfully completed a Phase 3 trial for a protein based vaccine for influenza earlier this year and has done research on other diseases, such as MERS. Novavax's technology turns moth cells into factories for a coronavirus protein called spike, which studs the surface of coronaviruses. Its vaccine combines several of the spike proteins in a nanoparticle. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. To improve the performance of the vaccine, Novavax mixed the spike proteins with a compound called an adjuvant. Studies on mice had previously shown that the adjuvant stimulates immune cells so that they develop a potent response to the virus. The researchers gave the protein and adjuvant to monkeys in different combinations of doses. The monkeys began making high levels of antibodies that could specifically block the coronavirus. When the monkeys were infected, some versions of the vaccine left them with no trace of the virus in their lungs or noses. "That's pretty remarkable," said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. She noted that the Novavax vaccine provided stronger protection for monkeys than have other coronavirus vaccines, such as Moderna's messenger RNA vaccine. In May, Novavax started a Phase 1 human trial on 134 volunteers. Some of the people who received the vaccine experienced tenderness at the spot where they got injected. But the researchers found no serious side effects. The researchers extracted serum from the vaccinated volunteers and mixed it with coronaviruses and cells. This showed that the volunteers produced high levels of antibodies that prevented the viruses from infecting cells. The vaccine produced more antibodies in the volunteers than in patients who had recovered from Covid 19 on their own. "There's no way to know yet what level leads to protection," said Matt Frieman, a virologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and a co author of the Phase 1 study. "But all of these pieces point to it being quite effective." Volunteers who only received the spike protein in their vaccine did not make a lot of antibodies, the researchers found. "The adjuvant is critical," Dr. Glenn of Novavax said. Dr. Moore said that the volunteers' strong response to the vaccine "does not surprise me in the slightest." In June, he and his Weill Cornell colleague P. J. Klasse predicted protein based vaccines would produce a strong antibody response in a review they published in the Journal of Virology. Although Novavax is the first company to share clinical results on the immune response of a protein vaccine, it is not the only one testing this technology. Three other protein based vaccines for Covid 19 from Clover Biopharmaceuticals, the University of Queensland and Vaxine are also in Phase 1 trials. The World Health Organization lists more than 50 protein based coronavirus vaccines in preclinical trials. One of them is being developed by Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, a partnership that last month was granted 2.1 billion from the federal government for 100 million doses. Sanofi expects to start its Phase 1 trial next month. Sanofi and Novavax both manufacture their vaccines inside the cells of the fall armyworm moth, which allows them to be produced more quickly than older methods that use mammal cells. This technique is one reason Novavax's vaccine candidate has gotten so much attention in addition to its deal with the U.S. government, the company has also secured up to 388 million from the nonprofit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which seeks to make vaccines available outside of the United States. Sanofi's Flublok vaccine, which is already on the market, uses this technology. Immunologists have been debating the importance of antibodies for fighting the coronavirus. It's possible that another part of the immune system, T cells, is also needed to fend off the virus. Dr. Moore speculated that the best vaccine against Covid 19 might marshal both types of responses. A protein vaccine could provide strong antibody protection, while another vaccine perhaps one based on messenger RNA or an adenovirus could enlist T cells. "If these first generation vaccines are safe but they're just not potent enough, then you would certainly want to look at combining them," Dr. Moore said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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National Amusements, the theater chain through which Sumner M. Redstone controls his 40 billion empire, is preparing to replace a handful of directors on the Viacom board, a move that is expected to serve as a prelude to the ouster of the company's embattled chief executive. In consideration for board positions are Kenneth Lerer, a venture capitalist, co founder of the Huffington Post and chairman of Buzzfeed, and Nicole Seligman, a former Sony executive and lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial, according to three people briefed on the discussions. Also on the list is Judith McHale, the former Discovery Communications chief and general counsel for MTV Networks in the 1980s, and Thomas J. May, the chairman of Eversource Energy utility company and Bank of America director, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The development signals a bold move to reshape the Viacom board with the ultimate goal of firing Philippe P. Dauman as chairman and chief executive of the company. Viacom, which owns the MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central cable networks and the Paramount Pictures film and television studio, has struggled over the last year. It is not clear whether the people under consideration have formally accepted the positions, and the choices, as well as the strategy, could change. One possibility that has been discussed is that the new Viacom board would serve a short term before National Amusements pushes to merge Viacom with CBS, the other entertainment company it controls, two of the people said. Viacom and CBS were split into separate companies in 2006. The new directors are likely to be aligned with Mr. Redstone's daughter, Shari Redstone, who was long estranged from her father but has recently reconciled with him. She has publicly opposed Mr. Dauman's ascent at the company and, according to court documents, has "frequently repeated to the Viacom board" that Mr. Dauman should be replaced. Mr. Dauman has said Mr. Redstone, 93, lacks the mental capacity to make business decisions about his companies, and that Ms. Redstone is manipulating her father in moves to reshape his boards. Mr. Redstone's representatives have said he is acting independently. Ms. Redstone is not expected to grab the chairman position at Viacom for herself; she turned it down when her father ceded the role in February. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Representatives for Viacom and a spokesman for Mr. Redstone declined to comment. Representatives for National Amusements could not immediately be reached for comment. Nancy Sterling, a spokeswoman for Ms. Redstone, had no comment. Rather than dismiss the entire Viacom board, one possibility being considered is for National Amusements to remove a few of the directors who are allies of Mr. Dauman, two of the people briefed on the discussions said. Mr. Redstone and Ms. Redstone both are Viacom directors. If four new directors aligned with the Redstones were to replace board members loyal to Mr. Dauman, the Redstones would have a majority on the 11 member board. Six directors loyal to Mr. Dauman vowed last month that they would fight any moves to eject them from the board and said they had made preparations to challenge any dismissal in court. In a statement on May 27, Mike Lawrence, a spokesman for Mr. Redstone, said: "Sumner Redstone will make every decision with the same deliberation and consideration with which he removed Philippe Dauman and George Abrams as trustees, based on the best interests of shareholders." War broke out across Mr. Redstone's 40 billion media empire last month. Through National Amusements, Mr. Redstone controls about 80 percent of the voting shares in Viacom and CBS. That control will pass to an irrevocable trust after Mr. Redstone's death or if he is declared incompetent. On May 20, Mr. Redstone unexpectedly ejected Mr. Dauman and George Abrams, two longtime confidants, from the trust and the board of National Amusements. Mr. Dauman and Mr. Abrams immediately filed suit in Massachusetts, challenging Mr. Redstone's mental competency and whether he had been unduly influenced by his daughter. Lawyers for Mr. Redstone shot back with a petition in Los Angeles, asking that the court confirm the validity of the changes that were made to the trust and the board. Ms. Redstone has stated that her father is making his own decisions. At his prime, Mr. Redstone was known to monitor quarter point fluctuations in Viacom's stock price and to quickly dismiss chief executives who did not live up to his expectations. The company's stock price has declined about 35 percent in the last year, when the company has reported continued weak earnings. Since news broke on May 20 signaling the potential for new leadership, Viacom's stock price has increased about 15 percent. Earlier Thursday, Mr. Dauman said that the entertainment company was continuing its efforts to sell a stake in Paramount Pictures but that it would miss its June target for reaching an agreement for the film and television studio. Mr. Dauman said that "naturally, recent events" had slowed the sales process. Mr. Redstone has said that he disapproves of a deal for Paramount, referring to the studio as his "baby."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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NO IMMEDIATE DANGER Volume 1 of Carbon Ideologies By William T. Vollmann 601 pp. Viking. 40. As one of the greatest challenges facing the planet, climate change deserves serious treatment by a great writer who combines deep reporting with a compelling literary style someone who can explain the overwhelming scientific evidence of warming and its human causes, and of the need for action. William T. Vollmann would seem to be just the writer for that challenging project. Superhumanly prolific and willing to take on the toughest topics, he packs research and voice into his impassioned works. "Rising Up and Rising Down," his exploration of violence, spans seven volumes. He is also a celebrated novelist, winning the National Book Award in 2005 for "Europe Central." So is this the book on climate change we've all been waiting for? Maybe not. "Carbon Ideologies," Vollmann's two volume exploration of the energy sources we use and the mess we are in, is prodigiously reported but sprawling and undisciplined. At more than 1,200 pages, it is "several times longer than its contractually stipulated maximum," he tells us. "My publisher asked me to cut it. But for some reason, I just didn't want to." Vollmann's many fans are drawn to his literary hoarder aesthetic, and they will not be disappointed. The first volume, "No Immediate Danger," deals mostly with the nuclear disaster at Fukushima; the second, "No Good Alternative," takes on coal, oil and natural gas. He has stacked his reporting high, giving us interview after interview with local people in places ravaged by our need for power and by our wastefulness: those living near the nuclear plant, occupants of West Virginia hollers whose communities have suffered environmental wreckage from coal mining, unhappy neighbors of fracking pads, coal workers in Bangladesh and oil workers in Abu Dhabi. 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. We hear them at great length, but with little interpretation or analysis. Vollmann also provides a lengthy primer on energy sources and calculations, discussing how much energy it takes to make, for example, concrete or nylon. This massive speed bump stretches from near the beginning of the first volume to Page 219. However, he allows, "since 'Carbon Ideologies' is primarily a record of people's experiences, if you skip my tables and their numbers, my point will remain clear enough; better yet, any mathematical errors might then escape your censure." (As for those mathematical errors, the writer Will Boisvert has pointed out that when Vollmann writes "in each two days of 2009, the world burned the entire oil output of 1990," the figure is off by 289 days.) The interviews show people who, as Vollmann says of his Japanese subjects, "tried to believe in the goodness of corporations and the sincerity of cabinet ministers, or else shut out of mind what could not be helped. They lacked comprehension of the various waves and particles that threatened them, not to mention the units of measurement used in media pronouncements. We all learned to live with what we could not see." Similar themes of ignorance and resignation play out in interviews with those he meets in Nitro, W.Va.; Ruwais, Abu Dhabi; or Greeley, Colo. Climate change, like the residual radiation in Japan, is invisible to them. They're all just trying to get by. Meanwhile, boosters of these industries explain that the jury on climate change is still out (it isn't), and that, as a Colorado banker states, "science is the new religion." The prose can be moving. Of an evacuated town near Fukushima, Vollmann writes, "By now the trees had already started to decompose, so that when they formed up the sides of houses, they infiltrated them like subtly woven rattan, perfectly fitted by the weaver upholster called death." It also shows some of his trademark bawdiness: Vollmann samples radiation levels around Japan using a dosimeter and a device he becomes very fond of, a "pancake frisker," of which he wants us to know: "Three buttons decorated it. When I pressed the leftmost one, the machine uttered a three tone chirp not unlike the sound one of my sweetest girlfriends used to make when she climaxed." In telling us all of this, Vollmann repeats phrases throughout the two volumes, sometimes as mournful echoes and elsewhere as sarcastic commentary. Discussing our wasteful ways, and the enormous amounts of energy that have gone into all of the things that we use and the things that we do, he asks a dozen times, "What was the work for?" Discussing the mendacity of officials in Japan, he repeats their warnings not to give in to or spread what they refer to as "harmful rumors." The coal passages get heavy rotation of the phrase "the regulated community," which he carries on into discussion of other regulation averse fossil fuel industries. Throughout both volumes, he says he is writing this book not for today's reader, but for those in the devastated future, repeatedly referring to the time "when I was alive." Which brings us to the biggest problem with this monumental work: not its length, or the way it might test your tolerance for sarcasm, but the author's tendency to assume the absolute worst consequences of climate change. After describing the amount of energy that goes into making glass, he adds, "I hope that you have at least inherited a few of our windowpanes. Maybe you pried them out of drowned properties and fitted them into your caves." As someone who writes about climate change for a living, I can tell you that if we continue down the path we are on, things will get very bad. Coastal cities will be severely damaged, and some lost; international climate migration will uproot the lives of millions. Changed climate patterns will worsen drought and wildfires in some areas, and river flooding and hurricanes in others. And because carbon dioxide persists so long in the atmosphere, even if we magically flipped a switch today, things are already pretty certain to stay very bad for hundreds of years to come. All of that is awful enough, without having to go full on Cormac McCarthy. I'm a fan of scientists like Katharine Hayhoe, who warns against overdosing on unwarranted gloom. As she puts it, "Doomsday messaging just doesn't work." Too much scare, and people give up hope and stop trying to bring about change. Vollmann, by contrast, gives short shrift to renewable energy sources like solar power that can help to provide a pathway to a less damaged future. He writes: "'Carbon Ideologies' largely neglects solar power, that being associated with decentralization and environmental benignity. Indeed, solar is an ideology of hope not my department." Toward the end of the second volume, Vollmann writes: "So I wouldn't be surprised if you in the future had worked out efficient solar energy generation. Perhaps your solar powered pumps have not yet failed to keep the ocean from overtopping your diked up cities." Reading these two books did have an effect on me; I became even more conscious of the resources I waste in my own life. I found myself wondering why I burn fossil fuels by driving two miles to a lovely park where I take my morning run, instead of trotting around my own neighborhood. It's not that I stopped doing it, but I do feel worse about myself. Maybe that's what the work was for.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti is in her late 40s, but her work exudes the exploratory energy of youth, mellowed by older, wiser emotional warmth, especially in her unusual combination of materials. In "Ex Gurus," her first commercial gallery solo in New York, Ms. Verzutti uses raw bronze, gold in color, as canvas; combines papier mache with concrete; and in "Cemetery Inline," makes a bumpy Carl Andre floor piece resembling a ragtag row of tombstones from chunks of cobblestone, unbaked clay and papier mache with color added. More subtly, Ms. Verzutti pits the translucence of oil paint against the implacable opacity of acrylic. This contrast is especially evident in "Floral," where the shapes of a wilting flower and perhaps a beehive carved into the surface of raw bronze, are veiled in blue or yellow; dots of acrylic jump all around them like bees. Ms. Verzutti usually creates a specific physical place for color in her bronze surfaces (see the extremely satisfying "Astrology"). Except when she doesn't: In "Homeopatia," arguably the show's star, lozenge shaped indentations of brilliant color dot the raw bronze surface while other lozenges are painted flat on the surface, which creates strange spatial ambiguities. It resembles a painter's palette and an entomologist's beetle collection. Despite Ms. Verzutti's love of color, her mind seems alive with sculpture. Past works have referred to Robert Gober and Jeff Koons. "Dias da Semana" evokes some of Brancusi's sexier sculptures while also seen from a certain angle recalling her penchant for casting fruits and vegetables. In two dark bronze reliefs named "Witch" and "Pilates" she drags little stones or clumps of bronze down the surface, creating deep ruts and leaving the forming implements in place. They're mini earthworks that pay tribute to the Italian artist Lucio Fontana. Combined with the show's title, the works' names suggest paths to health that Ms. Verzutti has tried and discarded. They also suggest an artist who leaves no stone unturned. Each of the 12 new charcoal drawings in the pioneering photorealist Robert Bechtle's latest show is a meticulously rendered view of an empty suburban street in Northern California. Boxy parked cars, single story houses, and low hanging power lines crowd together inside modest squares on warm gray paper. The occasional small overlap or gap in the thin lines that circumscribe the squares are almost the only uncontrolled expressiveness in pictures as studiously devoid of spontaneous gestures as an engineering diagram. Things like the lush foliage in "Alameda Light" or the wrinkled tarp thrown over a car in "Dogpatch Wrap" might seem to offer the artist more occasion to let himself go, but in fact he records those less regular objects with the same straight faced fidelity he applies to the shifting gray tone planes of a sidewalk or wall. But well placed details like those gaps, or like the little dots of white with which Mr. Bechtle heightens streetlights and shiny fenders, can have disproportionate effects. In this case they make the drawings feel as thrillingly precarious as a high wire act. They also imbue empty cars and opaque windows, which might otherwise read simply as easy metaphors for loneliness and alienation, with a real, if mysterious, presence. In the show's strangest and most memorable drawing, "Covered Car, San Francisco," the 85 year old Mr. Bechtle confronts that ambiguous presence directly, picturing it as a sleek, almost unbroken black silhouette divided from its own shadow by only a thin white speck. Accompanying the broadsheet (which also wanders into Scandinavian folklore, pagan rituals and quantum physics) are abstract photographs on the wall as well as fuzzy brown works made by sticking parchment paper in the oven. The photographs feature real subjects mucous, cuticles, newspaper clippings often captured at microscopic levels to create a fossilized, distorted effect. Together, the parts of Ms. Backstrom's show serve as powerful analogues for our own era of refugees and migrants moving across a globe ravaged by despots, war and ecological disaster. Rather than addressing this directly, Ms. Backstrom gains power through the subtlety of suggestion. Change a few details, and "Aniara" sounds like reportage rather than fiction. Ms. Backstrom's photographs could be scientific evidence of lost civilizations, gathered by future generations. The globe is ever more networked, and has reduced unfathomable distances to the breadth of a screen; the globe is ever more riven, and political and social identities have solidified into stereotypes and dogmas. These two statements are no contradiction for the young South African artist Bogosi Sekhukhuni, whose New York debut, following on promising appearances in a number of international biennials, plumbs the shortcomings of digital technologies, neoliberal economics and multiracial democracy through videos, drawings, sculpture and a single painting. Mr. Sekhukhuni, born in Johannesburg in 1991, has a particular interest in how spirituality fills the gaps in lives pitted by economic hardship or technological isolation. For some, that takes the form of evangelical Christianity the video "Thus Saith the Lord (Overunity)" (2015) introduces a real life Zimbabwean entrepreneur who relies on divine guidance, rather than scientific know how, to build helicopters and electric cars. Or it can take the form of post apartheid New Age ancestor worship, which the artist delivers in the character of a deadpan talk show host. The emotional wages of technology also inform the two psychedelically colored videos of "Consciousness Engine 2: absentblackfatherbot" (2013), in which disembodied heads voice a series of Facebook chats between Mr. Sekhukhuni and his estranged father. (His father went on to block him on the app.) Their conversation is rendered via a text to speech engine that strips away both personality and cultural specificity; the artist's "Howzit?" a common South African greeting sounds clanging when the software voices it in white boy Americanese. When Mr. Sekhukhuni asks his father for help with tuition fees, the anonymizing software makes him a stand in for the current generation of protesting South African students. In purely visual terms, Mr. Sekhukhuni has ample room to mature; his videos rely too heavily on plug and play personal computing software, and need to stand further from a million Tumblr memes. But his art already displays a sensitivity to the confluence of personal circumstances and political systems that would be the envy of artists twice his tender age.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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I have spent the last month trapped in a wrinkle in time. Not the film, mind you, though that was quite the fashion moment, and not the book. Rather, sitting by the runways, hour after hour, day after day, city after city between Feb. 7 and March 7, I could feel myself slipping further down a wormhole into the past. One moment it was 2018; the next it was 1981 (or '85, or '88). But here's the thing: I have been there before. I'm not sure I want to go back. There's a lot of talk these days about the end of trends, or at least trends as we knew them, when designers seemingly dictated en masse that skirts would be short, or long; pants wide or slim, the message filtered down insistently through magazines and department stores. Now fashion has been fractured into a zillion subgroups and subcultures through social media and direct to consumer everything, so that what has resulted is a smorgasbord of options. Yet every season a few major, yes, trends appear and demand a reckoning, not least because thanks to their ubiquity, they will likely dominate the visual landscape come August. It doesn't mean you have to buy into them, but it does mean you have to consider them and more interestingly, the reasons they exist, and how that makes you feel. Shoulders were the body part of choice, most often inflated to mega proportions (see Marc Jacobs, which even included a pouf skirted party dress). There were a lot of power furs and leathers, at Givenchy, Tom Ford and Alberta Ferretti. Spangles and shine, at Saint Laurent and Balmain which, along with Gucci and Versace, also played logo a go go. It was as if everyone had taken a wrong turn on the Warner Bros. lot and ended up in the costume department from "Bonfire of the Vanities." And it was all set to an '80s soundtrack: Terence Trent D'Arby and Sade at Ferragamo, "Tainted Love" and"Take On Me" at Balmain, Carly Simon's "Let the River Run" from "Working Girl" at Thom Browne. Julie de Libran, the creative director of Sonia Rykiel, even reconstituted Bananarama (live!) for her label's 50th anniversary show. With the requisite stonewashed denim (Miu Miu), lots of neon (Prada, Versace) and stirrup pants (Tom Ford) to match. I guess we should have expected it, given the current conjunction of political and cultural events, all of which seem to steer a designer's thoughts naturally to the go go decade. Given, for example, the MeToo movement and the global explosion of women demanding parity and recognition in the workplace and an end to sexual harassment, a phenomenon that apparently leads inexorably to the memory of the power suit, in all its big buttoned, shoulder padded glory the most obvious recent reference point for armor to be donned on the corporate battlefield. Given the ascension of Donald Trump, with his suit and big red tie uniform (with its nod to Gordon Gekko and Ronald Reagan) and his unabashed love of gilding not just the lily, but every surface under the sun, the better to convey aesthetic bombast: big hair, big gems, big belts. Bigly! O.K., big league. (Also, for that matter, his past connection to Blaine Trump, his former sister in law and the erstwhile socialite who put the pouf in pouf skirt.) And given the wellness movement, and the rise of athleisure and yoga pants, which has as its predecessor the aerobics years, with their love of bright colored leotards, stretch pants and a bodysuit. Not to mention the current exhumation of assorted 1980s television and film favorites, including "Dynasty," "Heathers," "Baywatch" and "Blade Runner," and Steven Spielberg's new "Ready Player One," which is itself pretty much an ode to the 1980s. And the coming royal wedding, with its connections to that other famous royal wedding, in 1981, which featured, among other things, perhaps the biggest royal wedding shoulders of all. There is always a certain fascination, I know, with the style of decades one has missed, and fashion is nothing if not obsessed with the generation of consumers that missed the '80s, or were too young to remember them the millennials and Gen Z. So maybe designers are simply offering them what they want (or don't yet know they want, but actually do). And those generations may well embrace all this '80s muchness; may wear it with the dose of irony and glee that the artifacts of the past always seems to give those who experience them for the first time, even if it's in an ersatz fashion (pun intended). Certainly, the bunch of millennial celebs in the front row at Miu Miu Stacy Martin, Zoe Kazan, Rowan Blanchard and Lucy Boynton, among them hooting and hollering with glee as they watched Elle Fanning, 19, open the show in a big suede jacket and big bouffant, a scarf knotted just so around her neck, seemed to think it was a hell of a fun idea. But speaking as someone who is old enough to have actually lived through it I was in high school and college in the 1980s; my mother was one of the ceiling cracking women in those big shouldered suits I confess to having mixed feelings about the resurgence. Admittedly, it could be because I have mixed feelings about many of my adolescent choices, and the clothes I wore simply suffer by association, but I think it goes beyond that. I want to believe we are moving forward, and this feels like moving back. Part of the aesthetic of the '80s, after all, derived from the clothes of the '40s, another time when women moved forward into the workplace (just as the 1960s echoed the 1920s, with the sense of sexual liberation and youth and freedom expressed through clothes). But it was a conceptual connection; a genetic link more than a clone. By contrast, the '80s of 2018 is strikingly literal seemingly made to be read through a small screen. Of course, it's possible this is simply part of the struggle to reach a new stage; the fashion equivalent of two steps forward, one step back. Nicolas Ghesquiere got at that backstage at Louis Vuitton when he talked about fashion as time travel. To a certain extent, he said, the job is all about navigating between the past and what you expect for the future, and the clash of the two. The place they conflict is the present. And there were hints of new ideas, certainly, in the 3 D body scanning and fabric fusion that went into creating the jackets at Balenciaga, which looked familiar, but weren't; in the now you see a tux now you realize its sweats at Undercover (one of the worst pieces of news to come out of the last season is that Jun Takahashi, who regularly challenges convention and conventional expectations, is abandoning women's wear shows for men's); in the leap from shoulder pads to etched out shoulder mantles at Fendi and Vuitton, which was the same idea, but abstracted into its essence, as opposed to the glaringly obvious. If it is true that we are renegotiating our world, our clothes, to be really effective, need to do the same. I know we are all products of our own past and that fashion is built on dipping into and out of that netherworld, appropriating a style here, a silhouette there. It's economical to shop our own (storage) closet, full of cringe making memories though it may be. But it shouldn't be the point.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Tom Jernstedt at his induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2017. He helped turn the N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament into a major national event. Tom Jernstedt, who helped transform the N.C.A.A. men's college basketball tournament into the major annual sports attraction known as March Madness, died on Sept. 5 outside his home in Tequesta, Fla. He was 75. His wife, Kristine Kellam Jernstedt, said he had finished exercising and died in his car while reading a newspaper. Mr. Jernstedt joined the N.C.A.A. in 1972 and over the next 38 years worked behind the scenes to turn the Division I basketball tournament into a much bigger event than it had been, attracting many more fans and generating more revenue. In a succession of jobs, ultimately as executive vice president, he oversaw the day to day operations of the event, the expansion of participating teams from 25 to 65 and the selection of larger sites, including domed stadiums, for the Final Four games. "Tom was a brilliant administrator and diplomat," Bill Hancock, a former N.C.A.A. official who is now executive director of the College Football Playoff, said in a phone interview. "He had a great ability to say no, without cramming his decision down your throat." Mr. Jernstedt also worked with the local committees that hosted the Final Four, which consists of the semifinals and the championship game; helped create the policies governing the selection and seeding of the teams in the tournament; and was the lead staff member during negotiations with television networks that generated millions, and then billions, of dollars from CBS. "He understood our business exceptionally well, especially for someone who hadn't been in television," Neal Pilson, a former president of CBS Sports, said by phone. One weekend during the tournament, he said, a glitch at its broadcast center in Manhattan caused the network to lose the technical ability to air commercials that were worth more than 1 million. "I told Tom, 'It's our fault we lost the commercials, can we add them the next weekend?'" Mr. Pilson recalled. "He said, 'Go ahead, but don't do it again.' Some people we deal with might have said, 'No, you're out of luck,' but Tom said, 'Just get it done.'" Mr. Jernstedt became known as the "father of the Final Four," but he was not working alone. He worked closely with top N.C.A.A. leaders like Walter Byers; David Cawood, another N.C.A.A. executive; and the organization's powerful men's basketball committee. The committee's rotating membership meant that Mr. Jernstedt had the organization's deepest institutional knowledge. In 1981, after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Jernstedt was part of the N.C.A.A. group that had to decide whether the tournament's title game in Philadelphia that night, between Indiana and North Carolina, should go on as scheduled. The game proceeded only after it was made clear by a committee member who had a contact in the White House that Reagan would survive the surgery he underwent after the shooting. "And when he told us that the president had even used that old W.C. Fields line, 'All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia,'" Mr. Jernstedt told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016, "we thought that was a good sign and very appropriate for this occasion." Thomas Walter Jernstedt was born on Nov. 24, 1944, in McMinnville, Ore., and raised in nearby Carlton. His mother, Catherine (Anderson) Jernstedt, was a librarian; his father, Donald, owned and operated a school bus company. Tom had a mild case of polio when he was 5 years old, which left him unable to rock back on the heel of his right foot. Nevertheless, he grew up an athlete. In high school he was a star quarterback, basketball guard and pitcher. He was a reserve quarterback and tight end on the University of Oregon's varsity football team; by his senior year, no longer playing much, he began helping the athletic department recruit high school players when they visited the campus in Eugene. After earning his bachelor's degree in political science in 1967, he sold electrical equipment and spices. But he returned to Oregon two years later to run events at the request of Len Casanova, his football coach, who had become the athletic director. After becoming the athletic department's business manager where he helped run the 1972 track and field championships at Oregon's Hayward Field he was hired by the N.C.A.A. later that year as events director. (He earned his master's in curriculum and instruction from Oregon in 1973.) Even after he began running the men's basketball tournament, Mr. Jernstedt oversaw other N.C.A.A championships and helped develop the women's basketball tournament. "It's hard to believe today, but Tom never did manage the men's tournament full time; he was so good that Mr. Byers kept asking him to do more," said Mr. Hancock, who succeeded Mr. Jernstedt as the tournament director in 1989. "Tom and the committee knew that the N.C.A.A. had not invested enough time in all the details and knew he needed a nerd like me to do that." Mr. Jernstedt continued to oversee March Madness even while he served as the president of USA Basketball, the governing body of the sport, from 2001 to 2004. He remained with the N.C.A.A. until 2010, when his job was eliminated by Mark Emmert, the association's new president, in a restructuring. In 2017, Mr. Jernstedt was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, which cited the tournament's growth "into the phenomenon that makes March a college basketball fan's favorite time of the year." He was named to the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame last month. In recent years, Mr. Jernstedt consulted with various college conferences, including the Big East and the Pac 12.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Gina Gibney hasn't so much resuscitated the site formerly occupied by Dance New Amsterdam as transformed it. At the first installment of DoublePlus, a performance series at her newly christened Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, the sleek space was as much a draw as the art. For Ms. Gibney's first creative stroke, she, along with Craig Peterson, the director of programs and presentations, have selected established artists to program shared bills. The first, organized by Annie B Parson, pairs the choreographer Audrey Hailes with the multimedia group Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble. For Ms. Parson, the program is about opposites: Ms. Hailes's earthy, body based work against the ensemble's formal coolness. Led by Tei Blow and Sean McElroy, the ensemble offers "The Art of Luv (Part 1)," inspired by Elliot O. Rodger, who, prompted by his lack of success with women, killed six people and injured 13 in California before committing suicide. The intimate piece, "a group meditation on masculinity, insecurity and longing," reveals the magnetic pull between the disaffected and those who claim to know what they want. It's sly. Mr. Blow and Mr. McElroy, like gurus or mystics in white tunics with gold painted faces, play videos including Mr. Rodger's chilling "Why do girls hate me so much?" We learn about the science of attraction as well as bodybuilding for better sex; calmly and clearly, the performers recite the video's muted speeches. In extolling the need for connection, their ritualized performance reveals one foolhardy attempt after another; in the end, all that's left is desperation.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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My mother in law recently regaled me with a tale of intrigue, money and power in her South Florida homeowners association. Seeking to raise about 6 million to refurbish the 20 year old community, the association's board had voted to assess each homeowner 7,000. But a group of vocal residents fought back, setting up a power struggle. This conflict is nothing new to anyone who has dealt with a condominium board or homeowners association, which has well defined obligations to the residents. As the overseer, it hires workers to cut the lawn, take out the trash, clean lobbies and common areas and maintain pools, tennis courts, golf courses and other amenities. If the elevator breaks or the roof leaks, the board gets it fixed. But if it wants to do something cosmetic renovate the lobby, add pickle ball courts or install a fitness center the board needs to put its idea to a vote of the residents. And for good reason. These expenses can add up quickly. Redoing a lobby can cost each owner 30,000 or more. In luxury developments, which typically have fewer owners, special assessments for a big project can top 100,000 per home. And that's on top of common fees, which can outpace even a wealthy person's retirement income. The internet is full of websites devoted to ridiculous stories about condo board fights. The tales are humorous, except when you think what it would be like to face a fine for having a tree that was too short, leaving a pumpkin on your porch the day after Halloween or wearing camouflage attire when you're a soldier reporting for duty. Florida has a long history of condo craziness, amplified by Del Boca Vista episodes of "Seinfeld," but no state with condos is immune to it. Arizona has thousands of homeowners associations with unchecked power. New York is famous for battles to exclude, evict or otherwise boss around people who buy million dollar apartments. Even Texas, where homeowners associations are credited with bringing order to cities that lack proper zoning laws, has its share of dust ups. But the stories obscure the lure of living in an association, which is that someone else takes care of the laborious jobs that other homeowners have to do themselves. In exchange for that, you might not always get your way. But when people buy into one of these developments, where homes can costs millions of dollars, landing in the middle of a board dispute can be a financial disaster. A renovation can be costly and lengthy, but not keeping a property fresh can hurt real estate values as developments with newer amenities spring up. Throw in a legal battle, and the costs can rise quickly. "Most of the battles that happen in these condos are power grabs," said Rebecca S. Trinkler, a lawyer at Buchanan Ingersoll Rooney. "There are disputes when board members are seen as taking advantage of their position." For example, she said she knew of a condo board president who used association funds to buy a pool table and club chairs so he and his pals could hang out. And a board member who gave contracts for the condo renovation to family members. In Miami Beach, Fla., a condo called Nine Island Avenue became a case study in how not to remodel a pool area. One resident, the daughter of the developer, sued the condo president over renovations that were done to the building, including changing the color of a koi pond, removing an old trellis and selecting new pool furniture. The case went to arbitration, and the judge sided with the resident, saying the changes were never approved by the residents and had to be undone. Most of these battles are settled in arbitration, but the legal costs can still run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Laura Manning Hudson, a partner at the law firm Siegfried Rivera, said she used Nine Island Avenue as an example for boards thinking of acting without input from the owners. "I try to keep my clients out of litigation as much as possible," she said. That same building, which has units that cost up to 2.4 million, is undergoing a lobby renovation expected to cost about 8 million. Mr. Diffenderfer's assessment was 37,000, he said. When boards and residents clash, tempers flare, residents take sides and big legal bills often follow. Yet determining who is at fault is never easy. One person's selfless board volunteer is another person's condo commando. But at the root of many disputes are issues of transparency, misunderstanding, overreach and, of course, money. Ms. Manning Hudson said a good rule of thumb for board members was to put big decisions to a vote. But they also need to know that deferring required maintenance can make a board member personally liable for negligence. Whether postponing a large assessment to complete a cosmetic renovation is good or bad often depends on neighboring buildings. Sometimes, a new development can depress the value of the older properties nearby. Robert Burnett, president of Burnett Partners, which advises luxury residential communities, said communities needed to spend money on regular upgrades, just as a homeowner needed to periodically update the kitchen and bathrooms in a house. "It's usually not a capricious decision by the association or the club to dress up its facilities," Mr. Burnett said. "It's really much more basic for communities conceived in the early 1980s to mid 1990s." He argued that whatever the amount of the assessment, it at least kept real estate values from falling. But he said associations needed to do everything by the rules, and that includes educating other homeowners. "There's an instinct, no matter how wealthy you are, not to spend money," he said. "If you educate people over time, give them case studies, the majority of clear thinking people will come around." Even when assessments go well, the work does not always go smoothly. The board of the Dorchester, a condominium in Pelican Bay, a 2,300 acre development in Naples, Fla., voted to redo the lobby, common areas and the hallways. Each of the units, which range from 560,000 to 3.4 million for a double unit overlooking the water on the 12th floor, was assessed 30,005 for the work. "It's too much on residents when you go through an overhaul of all the floors and all the amenities," Mr. Schroeder said. "They could have done the common areas one summer, focused on it and got it done. And then next summer go floor by floor and get that done." There's not much anyone can do at this point, because the owners voted for the work but failed to push for it to be done off season. Mr. Schroeder said the disruption had hurt owners who typically rented out their units in the winter. Big money battles also mean that some residents become innocent bystanders in a dispute they don't care about. Ms. Trinkler said buyers should research the board members and understand what types of assessments were levied in the past. "You can ask people if they're happy with the board and how it's run, really inquire about the condition of the building and how it's managed," she said. "Even then, you still might not know what you're going to get, but at least you have some sense." Looking before you leap is important because organizing a coup or winning a costly litigation battle against an association is rare. More often, a lot of money is spent, feelings and friendships are damaged and the board has its way. "There are fines for the board for not following the Florida statutes, but they tend to be small and they don't really have teeth," Ms. Trinkler said. And on the other side, "unit owners don't always want to foot the cost of a lawsuit." Sometimes, however, residents win the battle. In my mother in law's community, the group challenging the assessment prevailed. It ousted the board, halted the assessment and set aside the renovations. Moreover, it did so without incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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In a striking advance that helps open the door to organ transplants from animals, researchers have created gene edited piglets cleansed of viruses that might cause disease in humans. The experiments, reported on Thursday in the journal Science, may make it possible one day to transplant livers, hearts and other organs from pigs into humans, a hope that experts had all but given up. If pig organs were shown to be safe and effective, "they could be a real game changer," said Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer at the United Network for Organ Sharing, a private, nonprofit organization that manages the nation's transplant system. There were 33,600 organ transplants last year, and 116,800 patients on waiting lists, according to Dr. Klassen, who was not involved in the new study. "There's a big gap between organ supply and organ demand," he said. Dr. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard who led the experiments, said the first pig to human transplants could occur within two years. The new research combines two great achievements in recent years gene editing and cloning and is unfolding quickly. But the work is novel and its course unpredictable, Dr. Klassen noted. It may be years before enough is known about the safety of pig organ transplants to allow them to be used widely. The idea of using pigs as organ factories has tantalized investigators for decades. Porcine organs can be the right size for human transplantation, and in theory, similar enough to function in patients. But the prospect also raises thorny questions about animal exploitation and welfare. Already an estimated 100 million pigs are killed in the United States each year for food. Scientists pursuing this goal argue that the few thousand pigs grown for their organs would represent just a small fraction of that total, and that they would be used to save human lives. The animals would be anesthetized and killed humanely. Major religious groups have already weighed in, generally concluding that pig organs are acceptable for lifesaving transplants, noted Dr. Jay Fishman, co director of the transplant program at Massachusetts General Hospital. Pig heart valves already are routinely transplanted into patients. Scientists began pursuing the idea of pig organs for transplant in the 1990s. But in 1998, Dr. Fishman and his colleagues discovered that hidden in pig DNA were genes for viruses that resembled those causing leukemia in monkeys. When researchers grew pig cells next to human embryonic kidney cells in the laboratory, these viruses known as retroviruses spread to the human cells. Once infected, the human cells were able to infect other human cells. Fears that pig organs would infect humans with bizarre retroviruses brought the research to a halt. But it was never clear how great this threat really was, and as years have gone by, many experts, including Dr. Fishman, have become less concerned. There is no evidence that any of these patients were infected with porcine retroviruses. In any event, said Dr. A. Joseph Tector, a transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, pig retroviruses are very sensitive to the drugs used to treat H.I.V. "We don't know that if we transplant pig organs with the viruses that they will transmit infections, and we don't know that the infections are dangerous," Dr. Fishman said. "I think the risk to society is very low." Dr. Church and his colleagues thought the retrovirus question could be resolved with Crispr, the new gene editing technology. They took cells from pigs and snipped the viral DNA from their genomes. Then the scientists cloned the edited cells. Each pig cell was brought back to its earliest developmental stage and then slipped into an egg, giving it the genetic material to allow the egg to develop into an embryo. The embryos were implanted in sows and grew into piglets that were genetically identical to the pig that supplied the initial cell. Cloning often fails; most of the embryos and fetuses died before birth, and some piglets died soon after they were born. But Dr. Church and his colleagues ended up with 15 living piglets, the oldest now 4 months old. None have the retroviruses. Dr. Church founded a company, eGenesis, in hopes of selling the genetically altered pig organs. Eventually, Dr. Church says, the company wants to engineer pigs with organs so compatible with humans that patients will not need to take anti rejection drugs. Dr. David Sachs, a professor of surgery at Columbia University, was skeptical that it would be straightforward to make pigs with such compatible organs. "I am afraid that he may find these goals more difficult to achieve than he expects, but I would be happy to be mistaken," said Dr. Sachs, who is also studying ways to create pigs suitable for organ donation. Part of the organ rejection problem is already being solved with gene editing and cloning. It is an issue that emerged in the early 1980s when surgeons put a pig heart into a baboon. To their shock, the baboon died in minutes. Researchers soon discovered that pig organs are covered with carbohydrate molecules that mark the organs for immediate destruction by human antibodies. Dr. David Cooper, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his colleagues, including Dr. Tector, have used gene editing and cloning to make pigs without the carbohydrates on the surfaces of their organs. They successfully transplanted hearts and kidneys from those pigs into monkeys and baboons. So far, the animals have lived more than a year with no problems, Dr. Tector said. They also gave insulin producing islet cells from a pig to diabetic monkeys, and the monkeys lived for a year without requiring insulin. In partnership with United Therapeutics, the group has already built a farm for gene edited pigs.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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"Pinocchio, basta! I see you!" Isabella Rossellini was scolding her spotted mutt, hoping to keep him from mauling a hen that had strayed from her coop. Can't take your eyes off them, can you? Ms. Rossellini was shaking her head, her watchfulness maternal. These days, when she is not acting, writing, making films or modeling she recently signed a new contract with Lancome, the cosmetics company she is minding her Long Island farm. On a 28 acre tract in Bellport, N.Y., with the help of some friends, she breeds chickens, grows organic vegetables and produces honey and eggs. She doesn't mind getting her hands dirty. After leading visitors to a hillock that turns out to be a compost heap, she plunged a fist deep inside, urging us to do the same, so that we could feel the heat generated by its rotting leaves. It doesn't bother her either to scatter dried worms to the turkeys and 100 odd heritage chickens that trail her wherever she goes. "When they are small, I sit with them in their boxes," Ms. Rossellini said of her oddly speckled and spotted brood. "That way they get used to me." She meant "My Chickens and I," a slim volume of poultry lore published in March. Illustrated with photographs by the artist Patrice Casanova (a friend and neighbor), and her own pleasingly daft line drawings, it documents the maturing of her first chicks from the time they arrived, huddled in boxes, until they started laying eggs. The book is simultaneously whimsical and blunt, like Ms. Rossellini herself, who discusses her roller coaster career with uncommon candor. As she tells it, she was hot, with no fewer than 23 Vogue magazine covers to her credit, riveting film roles and a long term, lucrative modeling contract with Lancome. Then she was not, the casualty of a youth fixated culture, as perishable a commodity as her gaily feathered flock. "Now I'm hot again," Ms. Rossellini said without rancor. Indeed, at 65, she is having a moment, her farm a physical manifestation of her oddly assorted passions. "Nobody wanted me as a model or actress, so I went back to school," she said matter of factly. Yet, despite a yearslong hiatus in her performing career, she has kept busy with several wittily instructive films, among them "Green Porno," a 2008 Sundance mini series about the mating behavior of animals, and the 2013 "Mammas," an alternately absurd and scary short describing variations in maternal instinct among the species. Ms. Rossellini appeared as a spider that gobbles her young. Now, she is about to complete her master's degree in animal behavior and conservation at Hunter College in Manhattan. She is acting again, playing the matriarch of a Romani American crime dynasty in "Shut Eye," a two season series on Hulu. She will direct and perform in Link Link Circus, a touring "theatrical lecture," as she calls it, highlighted by her funny, perceptive observations on evolution and barnyard life; it opens May 16 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. Her book is just another way to show off her inventiveness. Populated by her varicolored chickens, it draws on her observations about their diversity and intelligence. There are comic riffs as well on poultry plumage, a kind of critter couture in Ms. Rossellini's view. A Cochin hen with fluffy tail feathers appears alongside Ms. Rossellini's drawing of a tutu clad mannequin. "This one reminds me of Dior's New Look," she writes. On this first in a string of balmy spring days, Ms. Rossellini wore a weathered toggle jacket by Shanghai Tang over torn pants. "There are always holes in my clothes," she said, smiling unabashedly as she strolled the property, which once belonged to the Marist brothers. She chattered, unfazed, above sudden gusts of wind, shrilly gabbling turkeys and the occasional cricket like ringtone of her phone. Sighting a turkey, she stopped in her tracks. "See that," she said. "He does a domineering dance. He is like a man, lording it over the other birds." His flashy posturing once prompted a visiting professor to suggest that the animal may have been courting her, Ms. Rossellini recalled. "The males can be very aggressive, you know," she said. That comment was unambiguous, but Ms. Rossellini seemed reluctant to venture further into highly charged terrain. In her 1997 memoir, "Some of Me," she referred glancingly to having been raped as a teenager by a slightly older boy. A feminist who attended consciousness raising groups in her native Rome, she has no quarrel with the MeToo movement. But she tends to stop short of airing her personal traumas, and declined through her publicist to revisit the rape. In a "machista" culture, she went on, "a lot of men are told that if women say no, they mean yes." There are other erroneous assumptions, she said the other day, including that women dress and make up entirely to provoke or seduce, that they dream of eternal youth. It was precisely that sort of thinking that led Lancome to fire her a couple of decades ago. At the time the company was run by a closed tribe, what she described as "men of middle age in a very paternalistic culture." The loss of that job, and with it her chief source of income, shook her. "I was depressed," she said. "I was worried financially." She remembered asking a company executive: What am I supposed to do? "I'm not your wet nurse," he replied. A more progressive era dawned with the arrival last year of Francoise Lehmann, Lancome's 55 year old motorbiking general manager. She quickly persuaded Ms. Rossellini to rejoin the fold part of a move toward inclusion, not just of skin color but also of age. Spinning narratives is her business, after all "actors are storytellers," she likes to say her own tales often underscoring a conviction that no creature, hairy or quilled, is disposable. It's a precept that covers her Long Island menagerie, which includes, besides poultry and bees, three goats, a small herd of sheep and Pepe and Boris, her lumberingly overgrown pigs. Bred for slaughter, they have legs that are too short to carry them far. "You can see that they suffer," she said. But letting them loll in their shed is preferable to carting them off to the slaughterhouse. By contrast her goats work a little. "We let them out," Ms. Rossellini said. "They eat a lot of weeds." The farm, which she created with the Peconic Land Trust, is a boon to the community. Children sometimes visit in school groups or with their parents. "Their mothers are delighted to show them, 'This is how asparagus grows. This is what eggs look like.'" Not a moment too soon, it would seem. "Some of these children," Ms. Rossellini noted wryly, "don't even know where an egg comes from."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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THE TRADE on Showtime streaming platforms. This ambitious documentary series offers a multifaceted look at America's opioid crisis by showcasing addicts, growers cartel members and members of law enforcement, who are all affected by it. Directed by Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land) and shot in the United States and Mexico, the series premiered last week, and the first episode is available to stream; the second episode will air on Showtime on Friday at 9 p.m. BEAT THE CLOCK 7:30 on Universal Kids. This kids' contest show is based on the format of the 1950s game show of the same name, and revolves around contestants competing to finish tasks in a limited amount of time. Kids and their family members work together on these challenges like one requiring them to set a table while wearing boxing gloves.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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This year, the Juilliard School's annual Focus! festival will look at "Our Southern Neighbors: The Music of Latin America." If this title makes the topic seem homey and familiar, think again. The conductor Joel Sachs, who has long overseen this popular free festival, hopes the six programs will showcase the incredible stylistic diversity of composers who hail from that region, including many emigres to the United States. Audiences should not expect "only 'Latin sounding' folklore based compositions," Mr. Sachs commented in a news release. The festival opens on Friday, Jan. 20, with Mr. Sachs conducting the impressive New Juilliard Ensemble in a program including a 1931 suite by the Cuban composer Alejandro Garcia Caturla, the "Mistica No. 5" (1976) by the Bolivian composer Alberto Villalpando, and the American premiere of the Mexican composer Alejandro Castanos's "Detours," written in 2015. There will also be two world premieres: a work by Alejandro Iglesias Rossi, an Argentine, that includes prerecorded indigenous sounds; and the Puerto Rican born composer Roberto Sierra's "Concierto Virtual," also written for the ensemble. (Focus! 2017 runs through Jan. 27.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Although Jen Richards is transgender, the character she played in the NBC series "Blindspot" was not at least not on the page. Richards was approached last year by the showrunner Martin Gero to play, she said, an "aggressive, duplicitous C.I.A. agent," in a two episode arc that aired in January. "He saw something in me and liked me," she recalled, adding that she wasn't asked to audition for the part. She had recently picked up Gotham and Peabody Awards for "Her Story," a web series she starred in and helped write about a pair of trans best friends juggling their personal and professional lives. The six episode drama was hailed as a landmark moment for L.G.B.T.Q. representation a rare chance to see trans lives depicted honestly and authentically. But when Gero reached out to Richards for the role of Sabrina Larren, it was because he had seen her guest star as a therapist in an episode of "Nashville" and admired the "ease, strength and empathy in her performance," he wrote in an email. While her character in "Nashville" was also transgender, "Blindspot" doesn't specify Larren's gender identity. Gero didn't discuss the fact that Richards is transgender with Andi Armaganian, the director of one of the episodes, because it wasn't pertinent to the role she would be playing on screen. "Her gender identity is irrelevant to the story," Richards said of the character. "Her past is irrelevant to the story." Trans actors say such casting opportunities should be more routine. That is seldom the case. While television has made great strides in L.G.B.T.Q. inclusion with shows such as "Orange Is the New Black" and "Pose," when trans actors are called in to read for a project, they still find they are only considered for parts specifically written for transgender people. Performers like Richards and the actress Bea Cordelia, who won a Streamy Award for "The T," a web series she produced, directed and starred in, are filling in the gaps by creating their own projects. There are "maybe a handful" of "big, juicy, complex, compelling roles" open to trans actors each year, Cordelia said, as opposed to the countless parts cisgender people have the chance to audition for. But recently, Cordelia was invited to audition for a walk on role in "The Red Line," a CBS show that premiered this month. A law clerk in the district attorney's office, the character only has one line. What made the tiny part unique is that the casting call permitted anyone regardless of gender or race to audition. "There were people of all kinds of identities in the waiting room," she said, noting that the part was eventually cut before broadcast. While waiting to audition, she ran into a performer who played one of her romantic interests on "The T." Taking this fluid approach to casting serves to challenge the ways in which certain groups of people are viewed as the default on screen. When a character's gender identity isn't mentioned in a script, it's often assumed the part is cisgender, a term used to describe individuals who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Some in the industry are beginning to take note. In addition to Richards, the actress Hari Nef recently played a supporting role as a pretentious grad student on the first season of "You," the Lifetime thriller that became a cultural phenomenon after it hit Netflix. Although Nef is trans, Blythe's gender identity isn't mentioned in the show, nor is it discussed in the Caroline Kepnes book series on which "You" is based. (Nef, who was unavailable for comment, has clarified on Twitter that "the character isn't trans.") Elliot Fletcher, who played a trans teenager on "The Fosters," is set to appear in six episodes of the upcoming TNT drama "Tell Me Your Secrets." Fletcher describes his character, Jake, as the "puppy dog" role he's used to playing: "loyal," "sensitive" and "smart." Notably, that description doesn't include the word "transgender." While he is grateful for the chance to allow trans youth the ability to see their lives and experiences reflected on screen, Fletcher wants to also be able to show the full range of his talent. "I don't want to just be seen as a trans actor," he said. "There are a lot of trans performers who I know that feel that way. Oftentimes we're looking for auditions where the character is not specified or assumed to be cisgender because we want to break out of whatever box we've been put in." Tearing open those boxes in which trans actors are often placed doesn't just create greater opportunities in the television industry; it can also encourage others to live more openly. Brian Michael Smith had appeared in small roles on shows like "Girls" and "Person of Interest" for several years before coming out for the first time in 2017 while playing a trans character on "Queen Sugar." What kept him in the closet until then, Smith said, was the fear that being honest about who he is would limit future career opportunities if there's still little space on TV for trans people, there's even less elbow room for black trans men. "Of the few roles for trans characters that are out there, most of them have focused on trans feminine narratives," he said. "Of the very few trans masculine roles that are out there, they're mostly white and young." But to his surprise, Smith's "Queen Sugar" role didn't set him up for being typecast as the "token trans guy." Shortly after he came out, Smith landed roles on "Chicago P.D." and "Homeland." He said casting directors responded to the vulnerability he brings to his work, even though the characters were originally written for cis actors. By giving trans actors the chance to show what they can do, Smith said it also gives audiences an opportunity to see them as more than just one thing. "I think the most important thing is to change this perception that trans people are trans before they are people," Smith said. "When you see us playing any role, it reinforces that in a very powerful way."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Credit...Benny Islami for The New York Times The flakes stumbled into the windows, gathered themselves and then wobbled on like revelers caught between pubs. At times it snowed so hard I could hardly see anything out there at all. A wood hut. A concrete wall. When the storm finally broke three days later, some 40 inches of snow had fallen and everything sprang to life. The timing was ideal. A few hours earlier, I had arrived in Pristina, the red roofed capital of Kosovo, just as the first flakes corkscrewed their way to earth. It was February, frigid, and a worsted wool blanket stretched across the Balkan sky. I threw my skis into the back of a 4Runner with two Serbs I had hired to pick me up, and we rode south in silence toward the Sharr Mountains along the Macedonian border. In an hour we'd be at Brezovica, the most delightfully dysfunctional ski resort in Europe. You've probably heard of Kosovo but not of skiing in Kosovo. Landlocked between Albania and Serbia, Kosovo was the last of the nations to congeal in the caldron of old Yugoslavia. For years it remained a largely autonomous province tucked in southwestern Serbia, but a full blown war for independence erupted there in 1998 between Orthodox Serbs and ethnic Albanians, who are Muslims. The fighting grew so ugly with a Serb sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing that NATO eventually intervened on the Albanians' behalf in 1999. Today, to the United States and the 110 other countries that recognize it, Kosovo stands as Europe's newest country, an eight year old diamond of roughly two million friendly, westward looking people still struggling to get on their feet. But before all of that there was skiing, and Yugoslavia had plenty of it, from Kranjska Gora in the north to Papova Shapka in the south. The sport soared in popularity when the Olympics came to Bosnia in 1984 and a Slovenian, Jure Franko, won silver in the giant slalom to clinch Yugoslavia's first Winter Olympic medal ever. Brezovica, about 250 miles southeast of Sarajevo, served as a backup for those games, but Yugoslavia's more hard bitten skiers already knew the place for offering the steepest slopes and deepest powder for the fewest dinars. There near the Serbian enclave of Strpce about 35 miles south of Pristina, storms slam into the 8,000 foot Sharr Mountains that rocket out of the Metohija basin with abrupt ridges and mighty shoulders cupping some of the continent's most extensive pasturelands. Back in the '80s, the resort's hey decade, 10 lifts, including five surface tows, serviced nine named runs, though the real magic happened in the go anywhere terrain of the open north facing bowls. D.J.s from Belgrade and Skopje kept the parties going until dawn. In the morning you might awake to find so much snow had fallen that even the wild chamois were stuck. Brezovica survived the wars but not the peace that followed. Throughout the early 2000s, INEX, the Serbian socially owned enterprise that managed the resort, stopped investing in Brezovica and everything began to crumble. One of the main hotels, a graceless rectangular prism, became a drafty concrete husk. The disco floor went cold. One by one the lifts failed, and by 2013 none of them worked. The storied resort was all but dead. Then last April, a French consortium signed a contract with Kosovo's Trade and Industry Ministry to bring Brezovica back to life; the plan was so ambitious that many locals weren't sure if it was true. A group of some of the world's biggest leisure resort development firms MDP Consulting, the engineering firm Egis and the Compagnie des Alpes, the world's largest ski area management company behind French ski resorts like Val d'Isere, Tignes and Meribel agreed to invest half a billion dollars, about 410 million euros, over the next 17 years to make Brezovica one of the largest, if not the largest, mountain resorts in the Balkans. According to Jill Jamieson, a consultant who has worked on the finance package, that is the single largest private investment in the country since the war, if not ever. The scope of the proposal is mind boggling. The consortium has until May to put the financing in order, meaning work could begin this summer. When complete, the resort, at 8,000 acres, will be the size of one and a half Vails, nearly all of which is skiable and inside a national park. It will have the vertical drop of a Crested Butte, about 2,600 feet. The number of hotel beds will grow from 700 to 7,000 three times as many currently available across the entire country. Visitors will have 100 miles of slopes, high speed lifts and three gondola linked villages. Two international airports, Pristina and Skopje, are no more than a 90 minute drive. One day Brezovica might even provide a more budget friendly alternative to skiing in the Alps. Skeptics abound, of course. Can the next greatest place to ski in Europe really be in a tiny war weary country so obscure it's hard to imagine anyone vacationing there at all? Is a mega resort the most sustainable way to attract tourists? Will they even find enough snow on a warming planet? Never mind Kosovo's rampant corruption and politics that are so cantankerous that politicians themselves have lobbed tear gas canisters in their own chambers at least six times in the last few months to disrupt their own proceedings. "If we can do this, we can do anything," said Manik Begolli, an Albanian Kosovar who worked on a public private partnership team contracted by the United States Agency for International Development to help find an investor. Maybe. For the moment, though, I just hoped I could ski. Seven Elevens have bigger parking lots than Brezovica's but that's where the Serbs dropped me off just after dark as the storm gathered intensity. Igor Nikolcevic met me there in a camouflage snowboard jacket. He was 42, a Serb with closely cropped hair and soulful eyes. He grabbed my ski bag and led me up an icy path to a pizzeria that he started with his wife, Draginja, and which he named after his daughter, Tina. Tina now lives in Pristina. I could have her room, fuzzy kitten posters and all. I followed Igor into the heart of the village, a collection of mostly hand built cottages run by hangers on who have eked out a living by offering basic services to the few who make it this far. There was the Cafe Braca and Restaurant Ljuboten. Skis lined the racks in a shop called Dane. The main chairlift out of the village, an ancient double chair, stood eerily quiet, the seats glazed in ice. "You mean, if they start running," Igor replied. That was actually an improvement over the last time I was here, in 2013, when INEX was hundreds of thousands of euros behind on its power bill and the utility company had cut electricity to the lifts. All was not lost. Instead, for EUR7 about 9 at the time the Dane guys would give you a ride to the top in a snow grooming machine, where an entire resort's worth of untracked powder tugged at my tips. This time, two years later, there was at least the possibility that the lifts might run. Sometime in 2014, as the French were quietly studying the resort's prospects, a cadre of groups, including the Kosovo Electricity Corporation, local officials and the minister of trade and industry, hashed out a deal to get two of the chairlifts spinning again. The equipment was still old, maybe even from the 1970s, and too unsafe to operate in a blizzard. I would have to wait for fairer skies to ride them. Igor pushed open a door and the pizzeria sighed a breath of warm air. Christmas lights hung from the log cabin frame and spilled a molten glow on the snow outside. Snowshoes, wooden skis and photographs of wintry scenes from the resort's early days decorated the walls. A fire crackled in the wood stove. A pizzeria in Kosovo is one of the coziest places I know. I took a seat at a long wooden table next to a local with an even longer face. His house two doors down had just succumbed to a chimney fire. With no firefighters to navigate the winding, snowy road up from Strpce in time, the men of the village had rallied to form a bucket brigade and fell a flame licked tree. That saved the village but the house, a lovely wood and stone cottage, was a loss. "It went up like paper," said the owner, Andrej Kavcic. He poured two shots of slivovitz, the plum brandy, and handed me one. "What am I going to do?" he asked. "You pick yourself up and move on. What else." Stoicism seems to be a national trait in Kosovo, but there is no mistaking that the country is picking itself up. Some 80 percent of the population was displaced during the war. Now new furniture stores sit along new highways lined with new gas stations. The Pristina airport underwent a EUR180 million expansion in 2013 and is now the third busiest airport in the old Yugoslavia after Belgrade and Zagreb. Problems persist, but the country is making strides to protect its landscape, integrate into Europe and normalize relations with Belgrade, the reason behind parliament's self tear gassing attacks. The resort's rebirth comes at a time when Kosovo could really use jobs. Drive around the country and you'll see smartly dressed people in cafes, in parks, in front of stores, anywhere but at work. The resort could provide as many as 3,000 jobs, some temporary, many permanent, in a country where half the population is under 30 and 58 percent of the work force is "inactive." Few Balkan countries beyond Croatia and Greece can entice transoceanic travelers as stand alone destinations at the moment but, collectively, places like Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania can make for a wildly fascinating itinerary. Kosovo wants in on that action. Brezovica may be its best shot. "Kosovo is absolutely ready for something like this," said Pascal Roux, the chief executive of MDP Consulting and leader of the French consortium. "Brezovica could be the pearl of the Balkans." Maybe so, but "it's just hugely important to be sure it's done right," said Christopher Doyle, executive director for Europe of the Adventure Travel Trade Association, which champions sustainable adventure travel markets. What is needed, he said, are "thoughtful supporting efforts to engage the local community and protect the environment." Across the Balkans, there is little doubt that skiing is having a moment. Ecosign, a Canadian mountain resort planning firm that has designed Alpine skiing venues for five Winter Olympics, has completed 15 master plans for new or drastically reorganized resorts, including three in Macedonia, four in Serbia and two in Greece. A Dubai based firm in December announced plans to build a 5 billion "tourist city" with thousands of holiday homes near Bosnia's Bjelasnica mountain, where the Olympics were held. Kopaonik, Serbia's most developed ski resort, added a new six person heated chairlift last year and a new hotel. Poiana Brasov in Romania recently spent EUR30 million expanding its terrain, adding snow making and upgrading lifts. If anyone stands to lose on the Brezovica deal, it's Igor. His grandfather, Radojko Nikolcevic, was the ski area's first general manager after the resort opened in 1954. In the '70s he built a hut that would become Tina's pizzeria under Igor in 1993. Today the Nikolcevices earn enough money selling pizzas in winter to last them the rest of the year. Now the consortium will level almost everything the hotels, the village, the lifts. The Nikolcevices will get about 250,000 in expropriation fees, but money isn't the issue. "We're happy people want to invest in the resort but never in my life have I been as afraid for my future as I am right now," Igor said. "The mountains are in me." Over the next three days a frustrating pattern emerged. Each morning I awoke to another foot of snow, and each morning the lifts weren't running. The Dane guys weren't offering the seven euro special. Hiking up alone would be misery. Still, I hoped for the best. I lounged around Tina's watching the snowflakes hit the windows or took naps under a shaggy blanket in Tina's old room. The Nikolcevices treated me like family. We sat near the fire talking about life in Kosovo. On the war: "Stupid politicians caused it." On being Serbs surrounded by Albanians: "We never have an argument." On why I should not clear the table: "This is Balkans," Draginja said. "Women do this." I helped anyway and then serviced my macho deficits by grabbing a shovel to clear snow off the pizzeria's roof. The electricity flickered on and off. "There is something beautiful when everything is broken," Draginja told me later over a meal of tangy mountain cheese, winter cabbage and a Serbian dish of shredded pork called duvan cvarci. "Everyone comes together." On the fourth day, the storm thinned into a delicate fog, and, miracle of miracles, the lifts creaked to life. At last I could ski. I raced out the door. Classic rock blared from the Che Fox cafe. Vendors jammed folding tables into the snow to peddle Serbian beer, Austrian juices and Lucky Strikes. A man in the parking lot sat next to a delivery truck with a cardboard sign: ski rentals EUR5. I clicked into my own skis and scooted up to a double chair called Livada, or "meadow" in Serbian. It rose lazily over an abandoned stone mansion called Stojko's house, one of the few buildings that will remain. A man stood next to the entrance ready to check my lift ticket. I didn't have one. I asked where to buy it. "No, no, you don't need a ticket," said a voice in English behind me. I turned to see two men on skis. One of them in a red jacket shuffled forward, said something in Serbian and pressed about 3 worth of coins into the attendant's palm. "Come, come," my new friend said, and off we went. A frosty attendant's shack next to the Livada ski lift at Brezovica. Rexhep Krasniqi, 58, had fled Kosovo 23 years ago as a refugee and now worked as a contractor in London. He had returned to ski with his younger brother, Isak, who had run a refugee camp in Macedonia before landing a job in finance. Isak was now unemployed but not worried. "We are good at surviving," he said. I spent most of the day skiing with the Krasniqis, who explained the ticket system. A price list said I could buy anything from a single ride to 10 days of unlimited rides, but almost no one consulted it. Instead they negotiated rates with the attendant. A single ride cost about 3.25, though Rexhep had bargained to get both of us at least two rides for that. As best as I could tell a day pass cost about 11. Now, new for this winter, workers have installed an electronic ticket reader and day passes have jumped to about 21, a fortune when the average worker earns about 380 a month. "No more corruption," a local told me later, "but less skiers." We picked our way through a steep notch called the Lion's Gate and found untracked lines through the trees. Wind powered snow roared off the ridge behind us in great white flames. The snow hissed violently off the bottoms of my skis to form blue contrails. Most of the terrain was intermediate to expert only. The revamped resort will have more beginner runs. Eventually we stopped for lunch on a patio at a slopeside hut called Cafe Collmar, where a waiter brought us coffee, brandy and cheesy bread. Rexhep refused to let me pay the 5 bill. "No Albanian in Kosovo will ever let you pay," he said, politely but firmly. "You are American, and to us Americans are like Jesuses." IF YOU GO Pristina (PRN) and Skopje (SKP) are the closest airports to Brezovica. There are no direct flights to either city from the United States. Check fares on Turkish Airlines, Swiss, Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, SAS, EasyJet, Delta, Alitalia and Norwegian for connecting in Europe. What You Should Know This winter will likely be the last to see Brezovica in all of its rundown glory. In its current state, the resort is not for everyone. The lifts may not run every day. There is no such thing as customer service. It's unclear what facilities will be open next winter. For updates check the Sar Planina Brezovica Facebook page or the Brezovica Resort Facebook page. The ski area also has a website but it isn't very helpful: brezovica ski.com. Hiring a guide to help you find a place to stay and arrange airport transfers is a must at the moment. Igor Nikolcevic is neither a guide nor an outfitter but he speaks very good English and can help arrange transfers, especially from Pristina, lift tickets, guides and lodging. Message him through the Pizzeria Tina Facebook page. Outdoor Albania, an outfitter based in Tirana, also runs custom trips to Brezovica. (OutdoorAlbania.com; info outdooralbania.com). Expect to pay about 50 euros each way for transfers from Pristina. Lift tickets now cost EUR20 a day.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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LONDON The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were in Paris last weekend, flying the British flag on their first official visit to the French capital, as well as spearheading a thinly veiled effort at soft diplomacy as Britain prepares to leave the European Union. The two day trip, which began on Friday when Prince William and his wife, Catherine, flew to the city and were then driven to the Elysee Palace for a meeting with President Francois Hollande, was an opportunity for many things. The couple met survivors of the Paris and Nice terrorist attacks, to symbolize cross border solidarity in the face of a shared threat. On Saturday, they attended the Wales France rugby match, part of the Six Nations tournament, long a source of fierce international rivalry (France won, 20 18). And with numerous staged photo opportunities in the creative and commercial capital of the fashion world, the duchess used the city as a catwalk to subtly raise the bar in the art of diplomatic power dressing. The show began in an understated way: The duchess started her tour in the same green Catherine Walker coat she had worn at an earlier engagement in Britain that day. She often makes a point of recycling her outfits for public appearances (all the better to show how really, underneath it all, she is like the rest of us). But this look, bedecked with big gold buttons and a black velveteen collar and sleeves, had an additional poignant touch: Catherine Walker was a favorite designer of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the trip was Prince William's first official visit to Paris since his mother was killed in a car crash there 20 years ago. Familiarity also proved appealing later in the day when, at a British Embassy reception, the duchess wore a simple sleeveless black dress by Alexander McQueen, the British design house that created her wedding dress (and that shows its collections on the Paris Fashion Week schedule). And Jenny Packham, another of the duchess's go to British designers, created a an ice blue, high neck, delicately embellished gown for the glittering black tie gala to celebrate the best of British and French relations, an event attended by the actresses Audrey Tautou and Kristin Scott Thomas. The duchess has long had her favorite British designers to wear on the global stage. But given the profile of the trip, it was hard not to think that championing some of the British female talent leading the industry charge in Paris, like Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo at Celine or Clare Waight Keller, installed at the helm of Givenchy last week, might have reflected a defter touch in sartorial tradecraft. Still, the stakes were higher than usual. In the wake of the British vote last June to leave the European Union and with Prime Minister Theresa May expected to invoke Article 50 on March 29, beginning talks for a British exit the royal family is serving as Brexit ambassadors to maintain Britain's links with Europe. Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall are scheduled to travel to Austria, Italy and Romania this month; Prince William and Catherine are to visit Germany and Poland in July. As a result, it was no real surprise that the duchess chose Chanel, the house widely seen as the grande dame of Parisian fashion, as she posed for photographs with her husband on Saturday with the Eiffel Tower in the background and with well wishers waving the Union Jack nearby. Catherine, a 35 year old mother of two, wore what appeared to be a modified version of a look from Chanel's 2017 pre spring ready to wear collection, priced at 8,350 pounds ( 10,350) on the brand's British website: a black tweed coatdress with bracelet length sleeves and a box pleated skirt, accented with multicolor embroidery and a black belt with the house's signature interlocked double C's. She also carried a burgundy quilted leather and top handle bag finished with the emblem, and underscored her French luxury statement with a necklace, earrings and watch by Cartier. The choice was immediately met with murmurs of approval from the French news media, which had grumbled about the tour for weeks. A little black dress worn by royalty in the City of Light. Rarely has a formula for sartorial homage been so simple and so effective.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Tara VanDerveer has concerns about playing in the pandemic, but sees an upside in it, too. One day in the ninth grade, Tara VanDerveer was playing basketball as she did most days while growing up in upstate New York when her father interrupted the bounce, bounce, bounce of the ball and ordered her into the house. He wanted her to work on what he viewed as a less trivial pursuit: her math homework. "Basketball is never going to take you anywhere," he told her. VanDerveer would never talk back to her father, but privately she stewed. "Algebra," she thought, "is never going to take me anywhere." That infatuation with the round orange ball, which has lasted a lifetime, has taken VanDerveer many places: around the world (from where she would drop her father postcards), across the country to Stanford University for the last 35 years and into the Basketball Hall of Fame. On Tuesday night, it carried her to an even more rarefied place, when a 104 61 victory by top ranked Stanford at Pacific gave VanDerveer the record for most coaching wins in women's college basketball, moving her past Pat Summitt's 1,098 career victories, all for the University of Tennessee. That the milestone will be muted by the pandemic reached in a rescheduled game, played in a nearly empty arena, and with coaches masked up and bench players sitting socially distant on folding chairs in a way befits VanDerveer, who has always been at ease with a whistle and an empty gym, but less so as the center of attention. If some contemporaries, like the glowering Summitt, who died in 2016, or the media savvy Geno Auriemma, the wisecracking Connecticut coach who began the season seven victories behind Summitt and three behind VanDerveer, cut commanding figures on the sideline, VanDerveer does not. She often watches play intently from her seat, as if she's trying to work a quadratic equation in her head. "I like being on the practice court, getting to know the people on my team," VanDerveer said in a telephone interview. "I don't need a lot of strokes." As for Tuesday night, she added: "If our team is successful, a record will be set and I'll get up the next day and I'll be riding that Peloton. I'm not going to get a day off. And I'll hope our country is one step closer to being healthy and that things can go back to normal." College basketball, for both men and women, has for now lurched along like a teenager learning to drive with a clutch, with hundreds of games postponed, canceled or rescheduled on the fly. Few programs have been impacted as much as Stanford's teams, which left Santa Clara County after health officials there banned games and practices in late November. The Cardinal women recently spent 10 days in Las Vegas. The players, coaches and other staff members wore masks outside their hotel rooms, ate to go meals (sometimes sitting outside in a hotel courtyard), boarded buses back to front, were tested daily and had their temperatures taken each time they arrived at a gym for a practice or a game. After Tuesday's game against Pacific in Stockton, Calif., Stanford's team will leave on Wednesday for Los Angeles, where it will play Southern California on Saturday and U.C.L.A. on Monday. From there, it will travel to Arizona for a game on New Year's Day. It is not scheduled to play a home game until Jan. 8. "I'm not convinced we're doing the right thing," said VanDerveer, who coaches with a megaphone so that players can hear her through her mask. "We're road warriors, but we can't be road, road, road warriors. We're not nomads." She wondered if it wouldn't make sense to pause the season through the expected holiday surge of new cases. The extensive safety measures have created anxiety for her players, she said, but so has the prospect of not returning home for Christmas. But there is also a joy that comes from practicing and playing that should be accounted for and, she said, why should her players be deprived of that when they have been so fastidious in adhering to health protocols? "We are torn," VanDerveer said. "Yes, we want to play. And yes, in our brain, we know it's probably safer not to be traveling around. But we can't be the outlier. There is a kind of cognitive dissonance. We know it's not the best thing to be doing, but we're doing it because everybody else is doing it." The game's effervescent quality revealed itself in Sunday night's otherwise pedestrian romp over winless California, when the Stanford sophomore Francesca Belibi casually threw down a one handed dunk after a steal the first by a woman in a college game since 2013. VanDerveer much preferred that moment to the game's immediate aftermath, when she whisked her players toward the locker room after they danced and cheered around her, making a modest spectacle. They made a greater one after the win over Pacific, presenting her with an oversize hoodie with "T Dawg" printed on the back. This time, she happily went along. "I didn't think she was going to put it on," said Kiana Williams, a senior guard. She and her teammates greeted VanDerveer with confetti and cupcakes when she returned to the locker room. At 67, she is uncertain how much longer she wants to coach. She is enthusiastic about Stanford's recruits, coyly notes that she will occasionally look up the ages of Krzyzewski (73) and Jim Boeheim (76), and said, "I have a lot of tread on my tire." But she also had her curiosity piqued by a recent conversation with Muffet McGraw, who retired earlier this year after a distinguished career at Notre Dame. "I asked her how is it on the other side?" VanDerveer said. "She goes, 'Tara, it's great.' I'm thinking, wow." She learned to play the piano in middle age. She plays bridge for an hour each day on a laptop with her 93 year old mother, Rita. She tries to walk her dogs every day when she is home. She swims at the Stanford pool (not blinking when the Olympic gold medalists Katie Ledecky and Simone Manuel are in the next lane), and, in a silver lining of the pandemic, she spent 93 days water skiing this summer at her vacation home in Chautauqua, N.Y. She is likely to give up coaching not when it becomes a chore, she said, but when there is not enough time for everything else. But those are considerations for another day. For now, she is preparing her players for the next game, striving to make the season so fun that the players do not want it to end. She is using whatever platform she has as a result of her latest milestone to encourage donations to food banks. "People are suffering," VanDerveer said. "It's hard to celebrate and be excited about something like a basketball game compared to people's lives." She said she would start with a pledge of her own to a local food bank. She has yet to settle on a number perhaps 10 per win. She is still working on the math.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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During the Broadway season, The New York Times's chief theater critics, Ben Brantley and Jesse Green, have their say in reviews of individual shows. In the run up to the Tony Awards (airing June 10 at 8 p.m. on CBS), they look back in anger and amusement with prodding from Scott Heller, the theater editor for The Times. In our weekly theater newsletter, I asked readers what they wanted to know from you. Richard Allan Edwards, from Sonoma County, Calif., has a good start: "If we look at Broadway as our national theater," he wrote, "are we coming close to a balanced diet or are we feeding the audience more than enough high calorie dessert?" Dig in! JESSE GREEN If Broadway is our national theater, we're in trouble. BEN BRANTLEY Broadway is our east coast Las Vegas, really, an importing house for tried and true entertainments with brand recognition value. GREEN Which hang around forever and eat up space for anything else. That's why only 33 new productions managed to crowd into this season, a far cry from the previous season's 45. Among them, brands like Disney and Harry Potter and Jimmy Buffett and SpongeBob will always have more clout in terms of getting access to audiences. What they do with that access is another story, and not a happy one. BRANTLEY I don't think those examples are all on the same level. "Escape To Margaritaville" is, admittedly, a thought free excursion. But there's quite a bit of imagination at work in "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" and in "SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical" It ain't just the category, but how it's filled that counts, even when the category is (and I do agree) essentially a baleful one. Our colleague Tony Scott had the (unenviable) task of reviewing "Avengers: Infinity War." You could almost hear him sigh as he typed, arguing that Marvel movies have "come to be less a creative or commercial undertaking than an immutable fact of life, like sex or the weather or capitalism itself. That makes the franchise hard to criticize." Do you feel that way about Broadway? GREEN Yes, except for the "hard to criticize" part. I think we have to keep fighting that good fight. And keep noting the glorious exceptions, of which there were a few. Top on that list, obviously, is "The Band's Visit," a totally noncommercial musical that is making a go of it on Broadway despite being excellent in every way. GREEN I'm not saying that; many great musicals have been made from films. But not all films are brands, and surely very few potential Broadway theatergoers have seen the movie on which "The Band's Visit" is based. The musical came here almost naked except for one important thing: It had already been a success Off Broadway, at the Atlantic Theater Company. Almost all of the most satisfying Broadway productions this year were mounted by resident companies: "The Children" (Manhattan Theater Club), "Travesties" (the Roundabout), "My Fair Lady" (Lincoln Center Theater) and "Lobby Hero" (Second Stage). Let's slow down a bit and talk about some of those shows individually. From the outside looking in, "SpongeBob" feels like the crassest of cash ins, yet I (and many others) found it to be artistically adventurous and just plain delightful. What makes the difference (if you agree there is one)? BRANTLEY I certainly enjoyed it, against expectations. I think the little miracle that happened there was not unlike what occurred 21 years ago when "The Lion King" opened again, an unorthodox director (Tina Landau for "SpongeBob," Julie Taymor for "Lion King") was allowed to have her way, creatively speaking, with the prefab material and transform it into something genuinely and originally theatrical. Let's not leave "The Band's Visit" behind. It's been about a year since you both saw and raved about it Off Broadway and now it's in the thick of the Best Musical race, the most important to the box office. How well did it make the transfer? GREEN If "The Band's Visit" could find a way to be powerful, beautiful, meaningful, clever, tuneful, entertaining and commercial shouldn't that be everyone's goal? Not just the "commercial" part? Granted, the transfer was an enormous risk and there was both intelligence and luck involved in doing it correctly. But it is the quality of the show itself, megaphoned by reviews and word of mouth, that made it into the semi hit it is. BRANTLEY To answer your question, Scott, it translated into the big time (and a bigger space) exquisitely. I found it actually better on Broadway tighter, more organic, more a whole in terms of its staging and use of music. I do know people who see it and go, "What the heck? This is Broadway?" But I'm with Jesse ideally, yes, this is the Broadway of our dreams. GREEN Few straight to Broadway productions achieve as much. Without out of town tryouts (which are poorly used these days anyway) or pre Broadway institutional mountings, opening a show cold on Broadway is dangerous. Did any new plays manage the trick? Here's a provocation: "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is the best production of a play this season maybe in several seasons. But best play? Really? GREEN Not for me. I had the SpongeBob response to it, greatly magnified: Awe at the stagecraft, apathy toward the content. People were running around with wands, for heaven's sake. For me the best new play of the Broadway season was Lucy Kirkwood's "The Children." BRANTLEY And I was as rapt as any Potter weaned 10 year old. I think Rowling, John Tiffany (the director) and Jack Thorne (the writer) did a fine job in adapting the appeal of the books (including their narrative drive and emotional button pushing aspects) into vibrant stagecraft. I am ashamed to say I didn't see "The Children," though I would agree on the basis of the script that it is of course a better play, by all literary standards and in terms of cultural ambition. But what's voted for ultimately is the production, how the play lives on the stage. GREEN I can report to you that James Macdonald's staging of "The Children," on a set by Miriam Buether, was, in its own way, as awesome as John Tiffany's staging of "Cursed Child," on a set by Christine Jones. Only without the (spoiler alert) flying Dementors. And what of Joe Mantello's staging of "Three Tall Women" on another set by Miriam Buether (something of a new name to me, but wow, what a year she had)? BRANTLEY Beautiful. The way Ms. Buether's set gave physical life to the physics of time was an astonishment. This was a high value production in every sense. GREEN The stars Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill certainly. But Mr. Mantello also brought "Three Tall Women" to life by making subtle adjustments in tone, structure and staging that likely had Albee turning over in his grave. That's a real revival! This in a season where revivals, in general, were better than new works. GREEN I couldn't admire the play more, but I found this production leaden and overacted. I also felt that way, though less so, about "The Iceman Cometh" with Denzel Washington. Happily, there came as a lovely dessert at the very end of the season the revival of Tom Stoppard's "Travesties." BRANTLEY "Travesties" is a delicious dessert. But it too is about the distortions of history and memory not to mention the function and enduring value of art. Aside from "The Children," the plays that spoke most directly to our contemporary woes were old ones. (Though of course there is that Fascist sequence in "Cursed Child.") Going into the season it seemed as if "Junk," Ayad Akhtar's panoramic look at financial chicanery, would be a play of the moment. It is nominated for Best Play, but why so little resonance? BRANTLEY "Junk" is undeniably topical. But strangely, given Mr. Akhtar's earlier work, it didn't feel newly illuminating. Perhaps that's a sad statement on the abiding nature of duplicity on Wall Street. GREEN "Junk" was the equivalent of one of those online "explainer" videos that use cute cartoons to illustrate complicated ideas. But the play didn't engage as a play. BRANTLEY You might have thought that a stage production of good old, direly prophesying "1984" would be an energizing slap in the face. (We are Big Brother's keepers these days.) Yet this London import registered as a garbled scream, though I know you, Jesse, were enchanted by the torture scenes. GREEN You mean the scenes of me, face down in my seat, covering my eyes? Going into the spring, by contrast, the explosive MeToo movement was the talk of the town. And suddenly reviving musical chestnuts like "Carousel" and "My Fair Lady" seemed poorly timed. So do they hold up to the scrutiny? GREEN The first thing to say is that the authors of both shows are exposing serious problems of gender inequality, not endorsing that inequality. George Bernard Shaw, whose "Pygmalion" is the basis of "My Fair Lady," was an early and fervent feminist, albeit with his own problems in that area. The revival, barely changing the text, brought Shaw's intentions to the forefront and, for me, showed how a work imagined in one era can speak authentically to another, if done thoughtfully. BRANTLEY Might I interject that as much as I admired "My Fair Lady" for its conscientiousness in addressing the issue of women's independence, the production left me cool if not cold. Sometimes when we raise a work's consciousness there's an attendant self consciousness. And while I thought "My Fair Lady" provided a more successfully sustained point of view than did the "Carousel" revival, I did get shivers during "Carousel" more than once. I felt little emotional power from the "Lady." GREEN For me, the adjustments to "My Fair Lady" warmed it up considerably; it seemed less frozen in its perfections, more open to our lives today. As for "Carousel," I certainly got shivers; it's a great musical and was sung and danced as such. But I do think it completely botched the opportunity of this moment, neither standing up for the text as written nor giving us a new way to look at it. BRANTLEY I can't disagree. There was a cravenness about the second act, as if everyone decided to shrug and look away. But I felt that Jack O'Brien's production did find the fatalism in the show, which is ingrained even in the music, and the force of gravity of erotic attraction. I suppose "What's the Use of Wond'rin?" might be its theme song in that regard. That Bruce Springsteen would play Broadway might have been unimaginable a few years ago. Now it looks like he may never leave. BRANTLEY That was a wonderful surprise, the antithesis of your basic jukebox musical and, I would argue, the most politically important show this season. It established a one time renegade rock star as a great American father figure a troubled, depressive, always questioning father figure who was living through what we're all living through on some level. GREEN I would have been happy to consider "Springsteen on Broadway," along with "The Band's Visit," as the best musical of the year. But the next person who tries the format isn't going to be Bruce Springsteen. BRANTLEY What if instead of the upcoming musical of Cher's life (which should be called "Cher and Cher Alike," with three actresses playing her), she followed Springsteen's lead and sat down, naked of glitter and spangles, and talked the audience through her career? GREEN I would be happier to ban all jukebox musicals forever, and see what grows in their place. LaChanze, who is nominated for "Summer: The Donna Summer Musical" has another idea she suggested to us that there should be a Tonys category for jukebox shows, just as there is for musical revivals. What do you think? GREEN I love LaChanze, but that is like opening up a category for Best Pestilence. I'm glad to see the return of Best Sound Design category, though. Technical theater not just sound, sets, costumes and lights but also special effects, wigs, makeup, stage management, you name it is now mind bogglingly good. And in general, so are the performers. It's what they are all focusing their hard gained talents on that continues to worry me. BRANTLEY On the other hand, when you have a perfect marriage of a performer and a part Glenda Jackson as a savage old woman on the brink of death in "Three Tall Women," Katrina Lenk as a wistful but pragmatic cafe owner in the desert town of "The Band's Visit" worldly, greedy Broadway feels next door to heaven.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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In April 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, told Congress about an ambitious plan to share huge amounts of posts, links and other user data with researchers around the world so that they could study and flag disinformation on the site. "Our goal is to focus on both providing ideas for preventing interference in 2018 and beyond, and also for holding us accountable," Mr. Zuckerberg told lawmakers questioning him about Russian interference on the site in the 2016 presidential election. He said he hoped "the first results" would come by the end of that year. But nearly 18 months later, much of the data remains unavailable to academics because Facebook says it has struggled to share the information while also protecting its users' privacy. And the information the company eventually releases is expected to be far less comprehensive than originally described. As a result, researchers say, the public may have little more insight into disinformation campaigns on the social network heading into the 2020 presidential election than they had in 2016. Seven nonprofit groups that have helped finance the research efforts, including the Knight Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation, have even threatened to end their involvement. BuzzFeed News earlier reported on researchers' concerns over delays in Facebook's data sharing project. "Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to do all it can to protect the American political process," said Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard and a former privacy and public policy adviser at Facebook. "We need researchers to have access to study what went wrong." Political disinformation campaigns have continued to grow since the 2016 campaign. Last week, Oxford researchers said that the number of countries with disinformation campaigns more than doubled to 70 in the last two years, and that Facebook remained the No. 1 platform for those campaigns. But while company executives express an eagerness to prevent the spread of knowingly false posts and photos on the social network, by far the world's largest, they also face numerous questions about their ability to secure people's private information. Revelations last year that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had harvested the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users set off an outcry in Washington. In the months after the scandal, Facebook cut off many of the most common avenues for researchers accessing information about the more than two billion people on the service. This past July, it also agreed with federal regulators to pay 5 billion for mishandling users' personal information. "At one level, it's difficult as there's a large amount of data and Facebook has concerns around privacy," said Tom Glaisyer, chairman of the group of seven nonprofits supporting the research efforts. "But frankly, our digital public square doesn't appear to be serving our democracy," said Mr. Glaisyer, who is also the managing director of the Democracy Fund, a nonpartisan group that promotes election security. Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president of special projects, who oversees the initiative, defended the company's efforts. "The whole reason Mark announced this program in the first place is he believes that the most productive and instructive debates are driven by data and independent analysis," Mr. Schrage said in an interview. "I know of no private company that has invested more to build tools and technologies to make private data publicly available for public research." Three months after Mr. Zuckerberg spoke in Washington last year, Facebook announced plans to provide approved researchers with detailed information about users, like age and location, where a false post appeared in their feeds and even their friends' ideological affiliation. Dozens of researchers applied to get the information. The company partnered with an independent research commission, Social Science One, which had been set up for the initiative, to determine what information could be sent to researchers. Facebook and Social Science One also brought in the Social Science Research Council, an independent nonprofit organization that oversees international social science research, to sort through the applications from academics and conduct a peer review and an ethical review on their research proposals. Facebook is still working on that effort. But researchers say that even when Facebook delivers the data, what they can learn about activity on the social network will be much more limited than they planned for. "We and Facebook have learned how difficult it is to make" a database that was not just privacy protected but at a "grand scale," said Nate Persily, a Stanford law professor and co founder of Social Science One. Facebook said researchers had access to other data sets, including from its ads archive and Crowdtangle, a news tracking tool that Facebook owns. Two researchers said they and others visited Facebook's headquarters in California in June to learn how to study the available data set. And both Facebook and Social Science One said they would continue to make more data available to researchers in time. In September, the two released 32 million links that included data about whether users labeled millions of posts as fake news, spam or hate speech, or if fact check organizations raised doubts about the posts' accuracy. It also included how many times stories were shared publicly and the countries where the stories were most shared. Facebook's effort is a "tremendous step forward," said Joshua Tucker, a professor at New York University studying the spread of polarizing content across multiple platforms. "In the long term, if methods for making these data available for outside research are successfully implemented, it will have a very positive impact." But other researchers say the existing databases are severely limiting. And some say that Facebook's concerns about privacy are overblown. Ariel Sheen, a doctoral student at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellin, Colombia, whose research team has been through the Social Science One approval process but has not yet received the data, said his group has uncovered on its own hints of a large coordinated campaign in Venezuela. His group believes it has found more than 3,000 still active fake Facebook accounts profiles run by people impersonating others, for example that are spreading false information. The accounts, Mr. Sheen said, are tied to Telesur, a Latin American television network largely financed by the Venezuela government. But because Facebook is not providing the original data described, Mr. Sheen said, his team's work cannot proceed as planned. "We believe that it is imperative for our research to continue as was originally agreed to by Facebook," he said. Mr. Glaisyer of the Democracy Fund said it is important that researchers "can operate independently" but that Facebook "may consider other ways of granting researchers and analysts access such as on site as the Census Bureau does." Mr. Sheen said that is precisely what his team has proposed. Facebook said there were other possibilities for sharing data with researchers but that it could not commit to specific methods at this point. Philip Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University studying the use of social media to spread misinformation, said his team deliberately chose not to participate in the Facebook and Social Science One data sharing project.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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During a career spanning nearly five decades, Bob Woodward has interviewed several presidents, dozens of cabinet officials and, most famously, W. Mark Felt, an associate F.B.I. director who helped him piece together the narrative that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. But Mr. Woodward, a longtime Washington Post reporter who is an associate editor at the paper, was heckled on Wednesday night while interviewing the New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. They are the authors of the book "She Said," a chronicle of their investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men that won them a Pulitzer Prize and was instrumental in jump starting the global MeToo movement. The event, at the Sixth and I building in Washington, started with Mr. Woodward referring to "She Said" as "a masterpiece." At one point, according to an attendee, he said he planned to assign it to his journalism students. Twenty minutes into the interview, however, the mood changed. Mr. Woodward repeatedly interrupted Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey and posed questions that, to many attendees, suggested a lack of understanding of sexual assault and workplace harassment. Audience members voiced their objections "Let her finish!" one person shouted during one of Mr. Woodward's interruptions and registered their complaints on social media in real time, according to several accounts and interviews. One attendee, Robyn Swirling, the founder of the nonprofit Works in Progress, said Mr. Woodward had done a poor job. "It wasn't just the interrupting," Ms. Swirling said in an interview on Thursday. "It was some really inappropriate questions that were just so clearly lacking in any sort of understanding of the dynamics of sexual violence." In a statement after the event, Mr. Woodward said: "As a longtime believer in the First Amendment, I am glad people got to express themselves. Jodi and Megan signed a copy of their book for me after the session, which I enjoyed very much, and said, 'Thank you for the fabulous questions.' So there may be a difference of opinion. Welcome to America!" In a statement, Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey said: "We're just starting our book tour, and we're grateful to all the moderators Bob Woodward, Katie Couric, America Ferrera and many others who have agreed to join us onstage. We welcome all questions, from them and especially from the audience, because each one is an opportunity to relate the wrenching decisions that many of our sources had to make and grapple with Metoo as an example and test of social change in our time." Accusing them of "artfully dodging" his questions, Mr. Woodward suggested during the interview that the behavior Mr. Weinstein was accused of had been at least partly to do with sex. The authors emphasized that based on their reporting, the misconduct many women accused Mr. Weinstein of often occurring at work, or in a work context was fundamentally about power. Mr. Woodward also described Mr. Weinstein's behavior as "a weird foreplay," Ms. Swirling said. In an interview Thursday afternoon, Mr. Woodward reiterated his praise for the book. He said he could not always understand what the audience members were saying, as he had tuned his hearing aids to be able to hear Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey on the stage. He said he had listened to his critics over the previous day, but defended his line of questioning about sex and Mr. Weinstein as a subject worthy of further discussion. "It's called sexual assault, sexual harassment, not power assault or power harassment. It does involve sex. So I asked the question you always ask the 'why' in journalism, or I try to."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Socially distanced craft classes, virtual tango lessons, a city tour accompanied by an avatar guide: how experience companies which now include Amazon are adapting to the pandemic. Guided excursions have long been at the heart of travel, but like everything else, the pandemic disrupted such experiences, and many went virtual. But as travel begins to tick up, existing tour companies are adapting to social distancing in other ways. Some are complementing virtual experiences for instance, guided chocolate tastings with chocolate shipped before the tour and tailoring closer to home actual adventures, like kayaking and hiking. Others are making groups smaller or private and moving outdoors. This fall, a new player, Amazon, took a deep dive into the strictly virtual model with the start of its Amazon Explore platform, which offers everything from online shopping tours in Peru to tango lessons from Argentina. Even in destinations that are reopening to international tourism, some operators are waiting for travel to rebound before switching entirely from virtual to actual. Since Panama reopened to international travel last month, Jerin Tate, the owner of Panama Day Trips, has guided just a few in person tours and plans to continue offering free virtual birding tours in Soberania National Park near Panama City into December. "We're crossing our fingers and hoping, hoping, hoping there's some semblance of normalcy then," he said. In the meantime, the trend reflects a continuum from virtual to actual, as seen below. The online retailer Amazon applies its shopping prowess to the sourcing of souvenirs with the new platform Amazon Explore. In one on one sessions, armchair travelers can visit a leather maker in Seattle ( 20), vintage shops in Tokyo ( 49) and a Norwegian department store ( 90), accompanied by local guides. In many cases, relevant items are available to purchase during the experience via Amazon, of course. Not every experience is shopping related. Amazon offers tango lessons with an instructor in Buenos Aires ( 90) and a voodoo and cemetery tour in New Orleans ( 90). A category devoted to creativity, including a class in Mexican salsa making ( 39) and in the Japanese tie dye style known as shibori ( 40), often includes a list of items to have on hand to work alongside an instructor. "Amazon Explore is designed to complement, rather than replace, traditional travel," the company stated in an email. Though Amazon has long threatened small retailers, the new platform uses its size and distribution power to link customers to small businesses around the world. Currently, Amazon Explore is offering 175 experiences, ranging from 10 to 168. "Shop owners, guides, teachers, chefs, stylists, artists, and artisans can get access to millions of customers on Amazon while setting their own prices and hours," the company stated. To test the system, I signed up for a shopping tour of Kappabashi Street ( 25), the "kitchen town" of Tokyo filled with shops selling kitchenware. In a quick 45 minutes, Giulia Maglio, a guide with Ninja Food Tours, used a hand held camera to take me to three shops in the neighborhood where we discussed the different styles of chopsticks (fat and flat for tofu, ribbed for ramen), how to hold a rice bowl by the pedestal and the preponderance of lifelike plastic food restaurants use to signal what's on the menu. "The purpose is also to make you hungry," she said. Beware the temptation of browsing abroad. I ordered two rice bowls for 20, which cost an additional 20 to ship. But Amazon made it seamless it charged the credit card I used for the tour in a matter of seconds at the end of the session and I doubt I'll forget how I acquired them. With travel curtailed, Americans sought real life diversions outside of their homes, according to Peek, a booking management platform for small businesses offering experiences from farm tours to kayak rentals. This summer, it saw a shift to what it calls "daycations," or excursions close to home. In June and July, 70 percent of bookings were from people residing within 150 miles, compared to 50 percent at the same time the year before. Trending activities included wild mushroom foraging in Santa Cruz, Calif. ( 90) and nighttime boat tours in St. Augustine, Fla. ( 31). A Peek user, Tanaka Farms in Irvine, Calif., adapted its farm tours as drive through events, including an upcoming holiday lights festival (from 49 a car). "People have been stuck indoors and wanted to find things to do in real life," said Ruzwana Bashir, the founder of Peek, noting that the company set a record for October bookings. The San Francisco based chocolate maker Dandelion Chocolate, another Peek client, adapted its experiences online, now offering chocolate tastings ( 70) and truffle making ( 100) that include shipments of chocolates to participants in advance for a blend of virtual and real elements. "We're able to reach more people now," said Cynthia Jonasson, the head of education for Dandelion, who said private bookings often celebrate a birthday or other milestone with attendees from various locations. Adventure outfitters are booking locally, too. Traffic to 57Hours, a site launched in 2019 that links travelers to outdoor adventure guides, picked up over the summer as users, primarily locals, turned to outdoor adventures for socially distant diversions, especially in private bookings. Guide services start at 80 for a half day of hiking or surfing and average 200 to 300 for a full day of climbing or backcountry skiing. "A lot of guides who normally are doing international trips or working in the Swiss Alps are now home and have to market themselves for the first time," said Perica Levatic, a co founder of the company. Greg Hill, a professional skier and 57Hours guide based in Revelstoke, British Columbia, champions the "300 Mile Adventure Diet," which he writes about for the site, espousing trips within a tank of gas as a way to travel more sustainably and appreciate what's close by. "Often, the romanticism of what's far away kind of blinds you to what's in your own backyard," he said. "I find that if you stay within a radius of home you're going to see those rivers and mountains again and again and then your trips will resonate longer than a mountain in Pakistan, because you'll never see it again." Even the culinary company Traveling Spoon, a network of cooks who open their homes to travelers for meals, has found ways to resume in person operations, including moving outdoors with barbecues in Manila (from 74), picnics in the Azores islands (from 76) and cooking classes in an outdoor kitchen near Florence ( 170). For those ready to take a city walking tour but eager to avoid other travelers, including guides, Sherpa Tours uses avatar narrators and augmented reality technology on itineraries downloaded to a mobile app. GPS technology directs users from site to site where an avatar appears on your smartphone screen, discussing the landmark from scripts developed by local experts including historians, professional guides, architects and writers. After a disappointing walking tour of Quito, Ecuador, with a dull guide, Michael Suskind, a private investigator based in Chicago, dreamed up Sherpa, which launched in 2019 and now has more than 150 tours in 80 cities globally. "It's very flexible," said Bori Korom, a guide, writer and editor based in Budapest who has written three tours for Sherpa. "If someone likes to be spontaneous, you can stop and check out a museum or get a bite to eat, and then come back to the tour three hours later." For 17 years before the pandemic, Context Travel linked travelers with very specialized guides, including architects, historians and artists on private and small group tours, recently in more than 70 cities globally. When the pandemic shut down travel, the company quickly moved to virtual tours online in a series called Context Conversations, featuring live 90 minute lectures on cultural subjects such as the music of Ireland and the Hindu festival of light called Diwali with its experts (from 36.50). "Our key points of difference are offering scholarly tours for the intellectually curious or lifelong learners," said Evan Frank, the chief executive of Context Travel. Online, the Conversations about 600 to date often use location as a springboard to investigate topics like the women of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural history of Japanese green tea and portrait painting as propaganda used by the Tudors in 16th century England. Compared to in person guiding, "It's a little more professorial," said Marie Dessaillen, an art historian and Context guide in Paris. "You can't read the clients to know if they are understanding, but you get that in Q. and A. at the end."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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TOKYO When Toshiba, the struggling Japanese conglomerate, decided to sell off part of its coveted microchip business this year, the American digital storage company Western Digital Corporation looked to be in an ideal position to scoop it up. Western Digital, a part owner of a Toshiba semiconductor factory in Japan, is as close to Toshiba's chip operations as an outsider can be. It is said to have made an offer for the microchip business whose total value has been estimated at close to 20 billion although it declined to comment on whether it had done so. But now the companies' partnership has become a source of contention, leading to legal threats and complicating the sale of the chip unit. The dispute centers on whether Toshiba can sell the semiconductor business without Western Digital's consent, and it is compounding a run of problems for Toshiba, which is grappling with huge losses in its nuclear power division and badly needs the sale to succeed. On Sunday, Western Digital said it had decided to take its conflict with Toshiba to the International Court of Arbitration, a tribunal operated by the Paris based International Chamber of Commerce that adjudicates corporate disputes. The court has the power to adjudicate disagreements under the terms of the companies' partnership, a common practice in international business tie ups. "All of our other efforts to achieve a resolution to date have been unsuccessful, and so we believe legal action is now a necessary next step," Stephen D. Milligan, Western Digital's chief executive, said in a statement. Toshiba has already soliticted other bids for the microchip unit, whose products are central to modern digital gadgets like smartphones. Western Digital says Toshiba would be breaching legal contracts if it brought in a new owner without Western Digital's consent. In a statement, Toshiba said the sale was being "conducted properly" and that it had not breached any of its agreements with Western Digital. Western Digital, it said, "has no ground to interfere with the process." Acrimony between the two companies has been escalating. In a letter to Western Digital this month, Toshiba accused it of waging a "campaign" of "intentional interference" with the sale and threatened to shut Western Digital employees out of the shared Japanese factory. Although Toshiba has not said exactly how much of the business it plans to sell, even a minority stake is expected to be worth billions of dollars. The type of semiconductors Toshiba makes, so called NAND flash memory chips, has become one of the crucial building blocks of modern electronics, essential to storing data in smartphones and other gadgets. Toshiba pioneered the technology 40 years ago and has kept it profitable, although competitors outside Japan have been elbowing into the market and competing for its customers. Toshiba is already moving forward with an open auction, setting aside objections from Western Digital. It has solicited offers from about a dozen technology and financial companies, including Western Digital. If the arbitration tribunal rules in Western Digital's favor, Western Digital will, in effect, win exclusive negotiating rights. That could significantly affect how much money Toshiba is able to raise with the sale. Some of the other bidders have offered more than Western Digital has, according to people briefed on the process. The Japanese semiconductor factory is owned by Toshiba and SanDisk, a company that Western Digital acquired last year for 19 billion. After Western Digital accused Toshiba of breaching their joint venture contract by laying groundwork for the semiconductor business sale, Toshiba sent a letter warning it would "protect its intellectual property rights by suspending Western Digital employees' access" to the shared factory and its computer databases.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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When Jessica Jaramillo calls someone to talk about the coronavirus, she usually starts with something like this: "Hi, my name is Jessica. I'm calling on behalf of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. I'm part of a contact tracing team, and our job is to reach people who have come into close contact with someone who has been diagnosed with Covid 19." Ms. Jaramillo, 41, a San Francisco Public Library district manager in ordinary times, has made dozens of such calls so far, all in Spanish. She began contact tracing, or "seguimiento de contactos," this month. She is one of more than 11,000 people across the United States who are calling people with advice about containing the spread of Covid 19, according to a survey conducted by NPR. (That number has most likely grown since the survey was first conducted in April.) Estimates for the number of people needed nationwide for contact tracing range from 100,000 to as high as 300,000. The work is mostly phone based and can be done from home. The jobs can be full or part time, often with an hourly wage of 17 to 25; some include benefits. They differ from one place to the next in part because training and recruiting efforts have largely fallen to state and local governments (and some of the programs have already run into problems, both practical and political). As communities begin to open up and more people venture outside their homes, the job is expected to become more crucial and more difficult. "If you can do contact tracing, you can get ahold of this before it runs through a community like wildfire," Ms. Jaramillo said. "Then you're saving someone's grandmother, or their uncle." As a public employee who had signed up to be a disaster service worker, Ms. Jaramillo was ready to serve her community in the event of, say, an earthquake. She did not expect a pandemic. Ms. Jaramillo's phone conversations unfold according to the needs of the people on the other end of the line. If they need testing for Covid 19, she can refer them for an appointment. If they have symptoms, she might recommend isolation. If they worry about survival in quarantine, she can connect them with food delivery services. And if they worry about privacy, Ms. Jaramillo assures them that their information is secure. Her training involved a primer on the federal regulations protecting confidential health information, and she works with encrypted software. Ms. Jaramillo and other San Francisco contact tracers do not share the names of people who have a Covid 19 diagnosis with the people they call. The University of California, San Francisco, has been working with both the city and the state to train hundreds of workers like Ms. Jaramillo. "Contact tracing is not a silver bullet," said Dr. Mike Reid, an assistant professor at the U.C.S.F. School of Medicine. But he said the "old school" approach of San Francisco and other health departments which is based on education and empowerment, not tracking apps like the ones Google and Apple are working on can bring communities together and build capacity to handle future crises. And the opportunities vary from state to state; Massachusetts and California were among the earliest to adopt widespread Covid 19 tracing programs. Kevin Williams, 27, a writer and driver in Columbus, Ohio, thought he would give contact tracing a shot after the state's Department of Health announced last week that it was hiring at 18.59 per hour. "If they call me back and I get an interview, then great," he said. "I really don't have a hell of a lot of options right now. But also, I just don't feel like these jobs are real. Are they actually contact tracing, or do they just want to look like they're doing the right thing?" He did not hear back, and by Tuesday, the job posting on the Health Department's website had been removed. Over 9,000 people applied to do contact tracing work with the state, according to the department. And although Ohio officials have called for 1,700 contact tracers, those were to be deployed largely by local health departments. The state job Mr. Williams applied for had been seeking only 100 people. Oscar Baez, 33, a Foreign Service officer, had better luck. He was evacuated from his post in Jerusalem in March and returned to Boston, where he grew up. Mr. Baez, who is from the Dominican Republic, has used Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic to communicate with the people he calls in the Boston area. "This is an opportunity to go on offense, track down exposures to this virus and limit the spread," he said. "It requires heart." Contact tracers don't work alone. The process starts with investigators who reach out to people with Covid 19, and those conversations yield contacts for tracers. After those calls are made, there is follow up work to be done to help people find resources like food pantries and financial assistance. "We're asking people to quarantine when they may not have baby formula for the next day, or they might not have food to feed a family of eight," Mr. Baez said. "So how can we ask them to stay home if they don't have financial assistance and social support?" Mr. Baez found this job through Partners in Health, which has helped Massachusetts officials recruit and train more than 1,700 people. That's only a fraction of the more than 41,000 who have applied through the organization.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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The roomy bath had sand colored walls and floors, a large dark wood vanity with lots of counter space for our toiletries, and a large shower (there was no tub). The robes were from Frette, and we hoarded the eucalyptus sage scented toiletries from the holistic line American Medicinal Arts. There are five dining and drinking spots: Brothers and Sisters; The Cup We All Race 4; an all day restaurant, A Rake's Progress, from Baltimore chef Spike Gjerde; an Asian inspired restaurant and bar, Spoken English, that only has standing tables; and a bar that focuses on local distiller's and brewers, A Rake's Bar. The Line also has a 24 hour gym and, most unusually, a radio station, Full Service Radio, that broadcasts live from a lounge in the lobby. The station, which streams online, plays music and conducts interviews and round table discussions with local and visiting artists, musicians and other notables. We drank a delicious gin and tonic and a refreshing tequila muddled with lime before heading out for dinner, and it was hard not to go overboard with the morning baked goods, all made in house: perfectly flaky and buttery croissants, blueberry oat crumb muffins and cakes like the Budapest, a rich gluten free hazelnut and chocolate confection. Washington has its fair share of traditional mid tier and luxury hotels, and The Line, a four star property, is a refreshing addition to the familiar scene. It's a cool spot with a friendly and eager to please staff. Sometimes, the service can miss the mark we had to ask three times, for example, for slippers and toothbrushes to be delivered to our room but it's easy to overlook the slip ups because the Line DC is such fun.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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As states rush to adapt their election systems amid the coronavirus pandemic, officials estimate that 80 million Americans plan to vote by mail this fall, twice as many as in 2016. Because of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's decision to remove or cripple key components of America's mail system just weeks before Election Day and President Trump's open efforts to discredit mail in voting, millions are worried their ballots won't be counted in time, or even counted at all. Last week, congressional Democrats and several governors from both parties called for Mr. DeJoy to reinstall the high speed sorting machines and mailboxes that he removed in an inexplicable hurry. He flatly refused. The House passed a 25 billion bill to revive the Postal Service before the election. The Republican controlled Senate refused to consider it. New York's attorney general, Letitia James, called the Postal Service system overhaul "nothing more than a voter suppression tactic." But a speedy judicial resolution is unlikely. Fortunately, there is a largely overlooked part of the civic infrastructure that is ready and able to help Americans exercise the franchise, even under these troubling circumstances: libraries. Libraries already serve as polling places on Election Day throughout the country and, crucially, they provide secure, monitored ballot boxes where absentee voters can drop off their ballots before Nov. 3 and know that it will count. Secure boxes for absentee ballots are already available at some libraries in states like California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Utah and Washington. Other states should follow suit. There are more than 9,000 public libraries across the United States in cities, suburbs, rural areas and small towns. In surveys, libraries rank among the most trusted institutions in America. They assist with the census and offer voter registration services. They are open to everyone. They are nonpartisan. They are free. Even in today's fractured digital age, libraries rank among the most popular and well visited places in our cultural landscape. According to a 2019 Gallup poll, on average, U.S. adults go to the library nearly once a month, making library visits "the most common cultural activity Americans engage in, by far." So why not lean on their relative stability and popularity amid this crisis? For those curious about how the process of early voting at a library works, the mechanics are remarkably simple. As explained by the U.S. Electoral Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan body that certifies the nation's voting systems, voters may deliver their ballots to a drop box a secure, locked structure operated by election officials "from the time they receive them in the mail up to the time polls close on Election Day." The commission presciently notes that early use of ballot boxes are especially beneficial when voters experience "lack of trust in the postal process, fear that their ballot could be tampered with, or concern that their signature will be exposed" and if they are worried "about meeting the postmark deadline and ensuring that their ballot is returned in time to be counted." In the past few weeks, local leaders in a number of states have moved to expand the supply of ballot boxes at libraries. In Milwaukee, concerns about delays in the postal system and the coronavirus pandemic led officials to install 15 new steel ballot drop off boxes at branches around the city. Officials in King County, Wash., just installed a similar network of secure ballot boxes at libraries. County workers carefully selected branch locations so that more than 90 percent of residents live within three miles of a drop box. The goal, the election board wrote in a fact sheet, is "to remove barriers to voting and to support every eligible King County resident to exercise their right to participate in decisions about their community." Perhaps in a less polarized time, expanding early voting at libraries would be uncontroversial. Unfortunately, officials in some states and counties have shown little interest in easing hurdles to voting. In Ohio, an important swing state where residents in Democratic leaning counties are deeply concerned about long lines and dangerous conditions for in person voters, library leaders in Cuyahoga County called for the state to install a network of drop off boxes similar to those in Washington and Wisconsin. Frank LaRose, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican whose office oversees election processes, denied the request. Mr. LaRose will allow only one ballot box per county and only at a board of elections office. The Ohio Democratic Party filed a lawsuit last week to force the state to install more boxes. It's unclear, however, whether the courts will make a ruling in time to force any potential changes. Under the status quo, the United States is barreling toward a historic democratic crisis. The legitimacy of our entire electoral system, and with it our federal government, is at stake. Making ballot boxes widely available at libraries and at accessible outdoor places is a safe and inexpensive way for government at all levels to promote our core civic duty. It should be a universal goal among state leaders. It's already clear that neither the president nor Congress nor the Postal Service will do what's necessary to ensure the integrity of the 2020 election. The library, still among the most revered institutions in our fragile democratic experiment, may well be our best hope.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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One bright pleasure amid the grimness of the pandemic has been the serendipity of hearing from people you've lost touch with and had forgotten how much you liked. You get to learn where they've been sheltering in place, and how they might have been changed by this age of upheaval and displacement. I was pleased, for instance, to receive an email about Abigail and Shaun Bengson, who have come up with a show of exultant ambivalence for the Actors Theater of Louisville. It's called "The Keep Going Song," and it streams through Oct. 8 on a pay what you can basis. I had taken a shine to this eccentrically wholesome couple when I met them at the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival a few years ago. Not that I actually spoke to them or shook their hands (which was a socially sanctioned activity then). But performing their musical memoir "Hundred Days," about the dramatic genesis of their relationship, the Bengsons emanated the confiding coziness of late night gab sessions over beers at a kitchen table. That mostly all sung show, delivered in a gutsy pop folk style spliced with gospel laments and hallelujahs, was about how or if love can survive in the shadow of our awareness of death. So I was curious about the states of their hearts and minds in a year when the imminence of mortal disease is as pervasive as fog.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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None Update: Hallmark has apologized for pulling the ads. The Hallmark Channel pulled four TV ads featuring brides kissing each other on Thursday after a targeted campaign by a conservative group. Asked to explain why the ads had been rejected, an employee of Hallmark's parent company said the channel did not accept ads "that are deemed controversial," according to an email exchange shared with The New York Times. A spokesman for Hallmark said the women's "public displays of affection" violated the channel's policies, but he declined to comment on why a nearly identical ad featuring a bride and groom kissing was not rejected. The series of six ads, for the wedding planning website Zola, first appeared on the Hallmark Channel on Dec. 2. The ads, which feature several configurations of couples, all offer variations on the same concept: While standing at the altar, couples ponder whether guests would have arrived on time and bought them better gifts if only they had created a custom wedding website with Zola. Early this week, One Million Moms, a division of the conservative American Family Association that defines its mission as the "fight against indecency," published a petition urging Hallmark to "please reconsider airing commercials with same sex couples." A statement on the organization's website announcing the campaign quotes an unnamed commenter on a Hallmark Channel message board: "Why would you show a lesbian wedding commercial on the Hallmark Channel? Hallmark movies are family friendly, and you ruined it with the commercial." As of Friday evening, nearly 25,000 people had signed a petition to make Hallmark reconsider the commercials, according to the site. On Twitter, people upset with Hallmark's decision to pull the same sex ads began their own offensive against the cable network. Trending on Sunday were the hashtags boycotthallmark and BoycottHallmarkChannel, with more than 8,000 tweets mostly from users identifying themselves as L.G.B.T. families, allies and Hallmark viewers. One of the tweets featured the word "Homophobic" using the same font and crown design the network uses in its branding. On Thursday, Zola was notified that four of the six ads would be pulled. In the email exchange, an ad buyer representing Zola asks for an explanation of the decision. "We are not allowed to accept creatives that are deemed controversial," an account representative for Hallmark responded. The Hallmark Channel spokesman suggested on Friday afternoon that the issue was the couple's kissing. "The decision not to air overt public displays of affection in our sponsored advertisement, regardless of the participants, is in line with our current policy, which includes not featuring political advertisements, offensive language, R rated movie content and many other categories," he said. Only four of the ads were rejected as controversial, however, according to the email exchange with Zola and several of the company's representatives. In one of the two ads that were permitted to continue to air, a bride and groom kiss passionately at the altar. On Friday evening, Crown Media Family Networks, the channel's parent company, said in a statement that it had made the decision to pull the commercials. "The debate surrounding these commercials on all sides was distracting from the purpose of our network, which is to provide entertainment value," it said. Mike Chi, the chief marketing officer of Zola, said he was taken aback by Hallmark's decision to pull the ads. Zola has run ads featuring same sex couples on the Hallmark channel previously, he said, without hiccups. He said he was not convinced that the issue was the kiss. "The only difference between the commercials that were flagged and the ones that were approved was that the commercials that did not meet Hallmark's standards included a lesbian couple kissing," he said. "Hallmark approved a commercial where a heterosexual couple kissed. All kisses, couples and marriages are equal celebrations of love and we will no longer be advertising on Hallmark." Tensions over the ads coincided with a potential shift at the Hallmark Channel. This month Bill Abbott, Crown Media's chief executive, announced that he was "open" to airing Christmas movies that feature L.G.B.T.Q. families, according to The Advocate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Many of us are stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. The former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton said they would take a Covid 19 vaccine on camera to help assure Americans that it was safe. Jimmy Kimmel said it might just be "the most boring pay per view event of our lives." "Also, it's a great way to sneak ahead to the front of the line. I see you, Barry! Yeah, I see you. You and Bill and George snatching those first shots. Ha ha! No hate, fellas. Game recognize game!" TREVOR NOAH "Now you might be wondering, why hasn't President Trump also offered to take the vaccine with these other presidents? Well, by the time the vaccines are available, he'll also be a former president. But don't forget, he beat corona already, so he's already immune. Also, he can't go before the other presidents, because he'll take all the lollipops." TREVOR NOAH "I'm actually glad that Trump isn't part of this event. Because you know that he would find a way to make things awkward. As Trump 'I'm not getting the vaccine in front of the camera. I don't want anybody seeing my butt.' 'Uh, sir, they do the shot in your arm.' 'Too late I already dropped my pants.'" TREVOR NOAH "That's must see, baby. Forget 'The Mandalorian' people really want to watch next year's biggest hit, 'Someone Else's Doctor Appointment.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "President Bush, President Clinton, President Obama, put your antibodies where your mouth is. Come on my show and drop trou backstage at the Ed Sullivan Theater in my Late Show Immuno tabulous Ex Presidential Jab a Rama, featuring physician's assistant Snoop Dogg! You are going to get the vac sizzle." STEPHEN COLBERT In Michigan, Rudy Giuliani called a rather eccentric witness to try to bolster President Trump's claims of voter fraud. "Once again, that was their star witness. Where does Rudy keep finding these people, LinkedInsane?" JIMMY FALLON "It's not a good sign when Rudy Giuliani has to lean over and go, 'You're making a fool of yourself.'" JIMMY FALLON "I've watched this clip around 14 times now; I'm still not convinced she's a real person." JIMMY KIMMEL "What are the odds she's wearing a 'Rose All Day' tank top under that scarf?" JIMMY KIMMEL "She concluded her testimony by saying: 'I would like to speak to America's manager. I'll wait.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Rudy was so nervous he started squirting black ink like an octopus." JIMMY FALLON "I don't know that woman, but I can guarantee you her Uber rating is below two stars." JIMMY FALLON "Congratulations to all of you who didn't travel for Thanksgiving. You still get to see your cousin start a fight after three mimosas." STEPHEN COLBERT
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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NASA will try again on Saturday morning to inflate a new room for the International Space Station. During the first attempt on Thursday to pump air into the module known as the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or Beam, the bulbous, balloon like structure did not expand as much as expected. Beam is a test of technology to construct soft sided space habitats with walls made of fabric instead of metal. This fold up, blowup approach would help solve the problem of how to build something spacious that can be packed into the narrow payload confines of a rocket. Beam was taken to the space station last month on a Falcon 9 rocket launched by the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX. The module was then attached to one of the station's docking ports, and it remained folded up until Thursday. The first steps of closing valves, cutting straps and releasing bolts went without a hitch. But as the crew tried to inflate it, Beam moved out only five inches toward the fully expanded length of 73 inches. The diameter reached 103 inches, but fully expanded, Beam's diameter is meant to be 127 inches. The process was halted as engineers took a closer look. "We ran into higher forces than our model predicted," Jason Crusan, NASA's director of advanced exploration systems, said in a telephone news conference on Friday.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Carnegie Hall's last full presentation of Beethoven's symphonies Simon Rattle leading the Berlin Philharmonic five years ago made a case for why this stale cycle should be retired. David Allen, who reviewed the concerts for The New York Times, wrote that climbing this musical mountain again just "because it's there," as George Mallory said of Everest, simply is no longer enough. Of course, that hasn't stopped Carnegie from bringing Beethoven back to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth, with about a fifth of its season devoted to the sonatas, quartets and concertos. And the symphonies: The hall has programmed not one cycle, but two. The first, led by John Eliot Gardiner with his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, concluded on Monday; the next, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nezet Seguin, begins March 13. The twins are far from identical. Conductors can take any number of approaches to a cycle, like commissioning new works as curtain raisers which, let's be honest, is unfair to contemporary composers or surrounding each symphony with other pieces that illuminate its inspirations and innovations. Mr. Gardiner offered the symphonies in order; Mr. Nezet Seguin mixes them up, with the First on the same program as the Ninth. That, it turns out, is exactly what we needed in this year of Beethoven saturation. Mr. Gardiner's cycle, performed over five evenings, amounted to a reintroduction to symphonies that felt smaller and more transparent than usual. It was a corrective portrait, reframing the scowling demigod of musical myth as someone, well, human rational, and more interested in optimism than anguish. Beethoven's symphonies don't really need more than a chronological presentation. They are singular works but, imbibed in close sequence, they reveal recurring fixations with certain rhythms and bits of material, as well as the grand trajectory of a composer who was constantly mastering established forms, then clearing new paths. By playing the symphonies on period instruments, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique truly justifies yet another cycle. Even if the group's historically informed approach is hardly as radical as it was 30 or 40 years ago, it's the first time Carnegie has hosted a period cycle, as well as a welcome reminder of what else is possible in a city where the New York Philharmonic continues to treat these works as comparatively mushy and Mahlerian. Mr. Gardiner's style refreshingly let any greatness in the music speak for itself. Beethoven doesn't introduce the dynamic "fff" an indicator more hyperbolic than practical until the bacchic finale of the Seventh Symphony; and I really didn't hear it until then, instead of the usual sites of super loudness like the "Eroica" or the Fifth in most performances. Mr. Gardiner never imposed grandeur on these scores, preferring to emphasize the lucidity afforded by a period orchestra. His instruments which are far more difficult to control than modern versions, so you can forgive a botched note here and there come off as blunter than the ones we're used to, but also cleaner. Their timbres, particularly in the winds and brasses, are distinct, blending less smoothly than in orchestras today yet affording stereoscopic clarity. In slow movements, you notice how little vibrato the strings use; though the resulting sound is sometimes chalky, typically sentimental passages are recolored with a lightness that doesn't skimp on lyricism. Mr. Gardiner's tempos were fleet, especially in the finales, but didn't seem hurried. His Ninth Symphony clocked in at exactly an hour; compare that with the 74 minutes CDs are said to have been designed to hold to accommodate the work. Presented this way, the symphonies had surprises to offer those like me who were raised on more lush, slow, Romanticized performances and recordings. The First still gives the impression of a young composer who understands the form and is pushing, not quite hard enough, against the confines of its conventions. In what made for an ultimately mild mannered evening, Mr. Gardiner sandwiched the work between other early Beethoven pieces, including excerpts from the ballet "The Creatures of Prometheus" and, in the revelation of the program, the hair rising concert aria "Ah! perfido," with the soprano Lucy Crowe. If Beethoven's artistry blossoms with the salvo of the Second Symphony, so too did this orchestra, giddy in the first movement and rambunctious by the Scherzo. Mr. Gardiner, who has led the ensemble since its founding three decades ago, was deceptively cool at the podium, able to communicate this work's volatility with minimal gestures that unleashed swerves in sound. In this cycle, for once, the impeccably crafted Second overshadowed the "Eroica" that followed, here a frustratingly grandiloquent piece, lacking the cohesion to carry its mighty ambitions through the finale. Mr. Gardiner's approach to the Fifth rebelled against its reputation, presenting the work not as a lofty drama of fate and triumph, but as a study in almost primal rhythmic obsession and economy, achieving even more powerful concision than the Fourth. And the "Pastoral," which is easy to read as folk inspired tone painting, was here more subtly evocative than straightforwardly illustrative. This Seventh and Eighth revealed Beethoven as an often joyful master of genres; what is the Ninth Symphony's "Ode to Joy" if not Beethoven's proof that he could write an anthem on par with "La Marseillaise"? Mr. Gardiner was meticulous, sure, yet he also left room for captivating inhibition. Take that "Ode to Joy," in which the orchestra was joined by the Monteverdi Choir and soloists including Ms. Crowe and the bass Matthew Rose, a late replacement borrowed from "Agrippina" at the Metropolitan Opera. Throughout the cycle I had kept detailed notes during each performance. But when the Ninth, a piece I would normally shrug off as overplayed, came to a galvanizing end, I looked down at a blank sheet of paper and realized I had spent the entire finale with my eyes on the stage.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Stephanie Holloway, left, and her fiancee, Leseliey Welch. The last few weeks have left them badly shaken and going "back and forth" about what to do and when. Some Same Sex Couples Are Rushing to Say Their Vows. Just in Case ... Harper Nunnemaker, 27, and Caitlyn McLeish, 26, who have been dating for about a year and a half, had planned to marry in 2018, and though that date is more than a year away, they had already begun to make preparations for what they hoped would be a memorable occasion. The election results on Nov. 8 changed all that. The Ohio couple has instead decided to go ahead with a quick ceremony Dec. 16, to be held at Sidewinder, a Cincinnati coffee shop that was the setting for their first date and that has a rabbit patrons can pet. "I'm just hoping not many people get coffee in the evening," Ms. Nunnemaker said of the ceremony, which will take place during regular business hours. Angel David Nieves, an associate professor of American studies at Hamilton College in upstate New York, said that he and Richard Foote "never thought" they would actually marry; their commitment to each other was never in question for the 23 years they have been together. Their student debt from graduate school would usually cut short any talk of marriage and merging their financial affairs, Dr. Nieves said. Then, as election night unfolded, Dr. Nieves recalled turning to Mr. Foote and saying, "I really think we need to rethink this marriage idea." The two now plan to marry in the next few weeks in a civil ceremony in nearby Seneca Falls. Same sex marriage, which has been legal in all 50 states since the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, was not one of the key issues raised by President elect Donald J. Trump during the 2016 campaign. And when pressed on the matter on "60 Minutes" by Lesley Stahl the week after the election, Mr. Trump made it clear that trying to reverse the Supreme Court decision wasn't high on his list of priorities. "These cases have gone to the Supreme Court," he told Ms. Stahl. "They've been settled. And I'm I'm fine with that." Yet one could forgive these couples for thinking Mr. Trump may be of two minds about gay marriage. They need only revisit the interview he gave last winter to Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday," in which Mr. Trump said that he disagreed with the Obergefell ruling, adding, "If I'm elected, I would be very strong on putting certain judges on the bench that I think maybe could change things." "It's hard to trust that it's settled in his mind," said Danielle Barrows, 26, who got engaged in June to DeAnna Britton, 27, when Ms. Barrows arranged for Ms. Britton to be served tea with a hand stamped spoon that said, "Be My Wife?" They were planning for a splashy affair next September, to be held in Provincetown, Mass. The unexpected election of Mr. Trump upended their plans as well. Instead, they were married on Monday at City Hall in Dover, N.H. Overturning the Obergefell ruling would be a tall order according to Dale Carpenter, a constitutional law professor at Southern Methodist University who is in a same sex marriage himself and generally identifies as a Republican. Test cases, he said, could evolve from some of the religious based challenges in Oregon, Colorado and Mississippi, and Texas legislators are flirting with bills that would require state officials to enforce the state's Bill of Rights, which defines marriage as something that "only" occurs between a man and a woman. Nonetheless, Professor Carpenter said it was unlikely the Supreme Court would reopen debate or reverse itself in the next four years even if the makeup of the court became increasingly conservative. Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, called the Obergefell ruling, "a decision as close to being etched in stone as any Supreme Court decision in recent years." Still, those facts have not kept some gay and lesbian couples from feeling anxious about their future under a Trump administration fears they are sharing on Twitter and Facebook, and on websites like Reddit, Curve and Vice. In a Vice article headlined "Why I'm Marrying My Partner Before Trump Can Take My Rights Away," Zach Brooke, a freelance writer in Wisconsin, wrote: "The morning after Donald Trump was named president elect, my partner and I calmly discussed how his presidency might affect us personally. We concluded that the possibility of future same sex marriage restrictions is very real, and that if we wanted to get married, the time is now or never." Mr. Brooke added, "We don't know how dark the future will be for LGBTQ individuals in the four years to come, but we do know it will be harder to dissolve existing marriages than to prevent new ones, and we'd rather not take our chances." What seems to trouble some of these gay and lesbian couples the most are not the specific positions taken by Mr. Trump, but those of his more conservative supporters. As Cathy Ruse, a senior fellow for legal studies for the Family Research Council, wrote in a blog post for the conservative group published this summer: "We are not done with marriage yet." And many of the couples are troubled by the fact that the newly elected vice president, Mike Pence, as governor of Indiana, signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Opponents of the bill have argued that it could open the door to widespread discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. Jim Obergefell, the widower whose name is on the 2015 Supreme Court decision affirming same sex marriage because of the lawsuit he brought demanding Ohio authorities name him on his husband's death certificate, said he doesn't know what gay and lesbian couples can expect under a Trump administration. "I am not sure any of us do," he said. "I'm not sure he does either. He says one thing, and five minutes later, he says the exact opposite." Still, Mr. Obergefell said, if people are rushing off to marry out of some grim concern that their rights will not be there tomorrow, "it's a shame that something that should be so joyous and about nothing more than love is being done out of fear." Stephanie Holloway, 41, a graphic designer, is raising two young daughters with her fiancee, Leseliey Welch, 38, in Ferndale, Mich. They have been together for 13 years but had resisted getting married until now, in part because they have had their hearts set on having "the whole shebang" with 50 guests on Martha's Vineyard. The last few weeks have left them badly shaken and going "back and forth" about what to do and when. In a bid to help those feeling anxious, there is now a website, LoveTrumpsHatred.com, started by Mitzie Whelan, a self described "straight, Midwesterner," which showcases vendors willing to offer free services for same sex couples wishing to marry in the next few weeks. Ordained as a Universal Life minister last year, Ms. Whelan has only performed two weddings, both times for friends. But wanting to help those who are concerned about their future under the new administration, she announced on Facebook that she was available for any same sex couple in Ohio wishing to marry between now and Inauguration Day. "There's not a lot I can do, but that is something I can do," Ms. Whelan said. Other businesses have since piled on. Now, viewers to her website can browse listings from 26 states, including 17 that are traditionally Republican. One Texas business, An Itch to Stitch, is offering free alterations, while the Hippie Chick Bakery in New Hampshire has volunteered wedding cake for "up to 44 people." Other listings dangle free legal services, floral design, photography and live music. Ms. Nunnemaker, one half of the Ohio couple planning to marry in a coffee shop, said her mother voted for Mr. Trump, which has caused some tension between the two. Friends of Ms. Nunnemaker have counseled her to "put my foot down" and not invite her mother to the wedding. Yet, Ms. Nunnemaker said that she "cannot imagine cutting my mother out of my life," and won't. "I try to have respect for everyone's values," she said. Next Friday, when she and Ms. McLeish pronounce their love for each other at the coffee house with its rabbit hutch, where it all began, Ms. Nunnemaker's mother has told the couple she will be one of the handful of guests who will be standing by, ready to congratulate the newlyweds as they start their new lives.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Juan Williams, a veteran Fox News personality who co hosts the popular afternoon talk show "The Five," tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday and is isolating himself, two people who were briefed on his condition said. Mr. Williams taped a live episode of "The Five" on Wednesday afternoon at Fox News's Midtown Manhattan headquarters, appearing on the set with several of his co hosts, including the popular conservative commentators Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld. The hosts, like guests on some other cable talk shows during the pandemic, sat about seven feet apart. Mr. Williams left for vacation on Nov. 18 and returned to the Fox News studios on Monday; he was tested for the coronavirus shortly thereafter. The people familiar with his condition, who requested anonymity to share private discussions, said he received a positive result on Thursday afternoon. He was absent from Thursday's 5 p.m. episode of "The Five," in which the other hosts appeared remotely.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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There's lots of Bedlamite fun throughout. John McDermott's set couldn't be simpler a table, a few chairs, a curtain, some carpets and the audience is on three sides, smack in the middle of the action. As a director, Mr. Tucker is at his best and most comfortable in a middle scene, a genteel reception at which Eliza accidentally outs herself with pleasant conversation like "Not bloody likely." In typical Bedlam fashion there are more characters at this party than there are actors so the scene is accomplished with lightning strike changes of hats and accents and it's a rare treat. If you know "My Fair Lady" then there are parts you will miss, like the scenes of instruction and Eliza's success at the ball. When Eliza says she can do without Higgins or Higgins admits having grown accustomed to her face, you can't help pricking your ears for the orchestra. But this is a testament to the charm of Lerner and Loewe, not a broadside against Shaw. This "Pygmalion" can do without music. When it slices to the core of a classic text with wit and verve and a show off's delight, it's doing what the company does best. Still, Bedlam is doing other things, too, and they aren't as successful. There's nothing here as discouraging as its recent high concept, low joy "Peter Pan," but some ideas don't fly. I don't question the decision to cast Ms. Sharma. She's a cracking Eliza, fierce and impish and moving. But Mr. Tucker has encouraged an Anglo Indian accent, translated her first lines into Hindi and altered a bit of dialogue: "Lisson Grove prudery" becomes "Indian prudery," and there's a mention of Delhi. Eliza's ball gown, designed by Charlotte Palmer Lane, borrows from a sari. "Pygmalion" is a comedy about a woman who becomes declassed. These changes shift the play toward themes of colonialism and deracination instead. That's a play I'd like to see, but it's not "Pygmalion," or at least it's not "Pygmalion" with only a line or two improved. Here it's just a tease and as Higgins ought to know and doesn't, teasing isn't nice. There's more teasing involved in having Mr. Tucker play Higgins. Because what is Higgins if not a kind of tyrannical director, rehearsing Eliza in her role until she walks and talks and smiles and laughs just the way he wants. (Let's hope Mr. Tucker is a little less domineering offstage.) When Eliza rebels, it's because they can't agree on her interpretation of the role. She thinks that a life including love and sex and the occasional kindness would be a richer one. He thinks that it would be a fatal compromise, a sacrifice of her strength and independence.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Adding an arthritis drug called baricitinib to Covid treatment regimens that include the antiviral drug remdesivir might shave a day or more off recovery times, especially for those who are seriously sick, according to a study published on Friday. The findings of a government sponsored clinical trial were made public more than three weeks after the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for the dual treatment. Earlier this month, some experts said they were uncomfortable deploying drugs without the opportunity to vet the underlying data supporting their performance. Last month, the World Health Organization also recommended against remdesivir as a treatment for Covid patients because evidence supporting its use was lacking. Limited results earlier were announced via news releases, showing that hospitalized Covid patients treated with baricitinib and remdesivir recovered one day faster than those who had received remdesivir alone. Some questioned adopting the combination treatment given baricitinib's hefty price tag which might be about 1,500 per patient and also cited side effects like blood clots. Several doctors also wondered whether adding baricitinib would be worthwhile because steroids like dexamethasone were cheap and widely available. Both baricitinib and dexamethasone are thought to act by tamping down excessive inflammation, which drives many severe cases of Covid.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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On the chance that President Trump does not mention climate change during his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Seventh Generation, a company known for eco friendly products, has taken steps to make sure the issue is a prime time talking point. Once Mr. Trump has finished speaking and the television analysts have offered their initial thoughts, a 60 second commercial for Seventh Generation is scheduled to be the first advertisement shown on ABC, CBS and NBC. In an effort to draw a parallel between the World War II generation and today's young people, the commercial intercuts images and audio of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1943 State of the Union address with recent shots of marches by climate change activists. Before the Seventh Generation brand name appears, there is a tagline: "What if we were meant to be the next greatest generation?" Seventh Generation, which is based in Burlington, Vt., sells a two ply toilet paper made of recycled paper among its many household products. It decided to spend a chunk of its ad budget on the State of the Union broadcast rather than on two other events that attract large audiences at this time of the year, the Super Bowl and the Oscars ceremony. The president's speech offered a "more appropriate moment" to talk about "serious issues," said Joey Bergstein, the company's chief executive. Seventh Generation did not buy time for the ad on the fourth major broadcast network, Fox, or the cable news channels. "At some point, it became a question of money and what we can actually afford," Mr. Bergstein said. He added that the company was targeting people "who we know are concerned about climate and really try to inspire that group to action." The commercial was created by Opinionated, an ad agency in Portland, Ore., that has worked with Adidas, Google and PayPal. The overall campaign, which will cost less than 3 million, will include print ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Owned by Unilever, Seventh Generation gets its name from an Iroquois philosophy that every decision should be considered for its potential effect on the next seven generations. The environment is increasingly a theme in advertising. Several automakers, including Audi, Porsche and General Motors, shifted from promoting gas powered vehicles to touting electric cars in Super Bowl commercials on Sunday. Recently, the nonprofit activist group Avaaz said ads from companies like Samsung and L'Oreal were running alongside YouTube videos that contained misinformation about climate change. L'Oreal said it had asked YouTube to limit the impact of such videos and to better educate viewers about concerns with its content. Samsung did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Trump has had a complicated relationship with the environment and efforts to protect it. He pulled the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change and has traded barbs with Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish climate activist. He has also delighted supporters at rallies with his criticism of low flow toilets and other appliances designed for water efficiency, saying that Americans now have to flush "10 times." And at a White House meeting with small business owners in December, the president said, "You turn on the faucet, you don't get any water."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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President Trump owes a lot of money: hundreds of millions of dollars of it. Whom he owes it to has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories. Lately, liberals and other social media accounts have been spreading rumors, presented as fact, that he owes it to the Kremlin or Russian oligarchs. After The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump's federal tax returns showed that he had personally guaranteed 421 million of debt, questions about who lent him all this money have reached the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. "It'd be really good to know who the president of the United States, the commander in chief, owes money to, because the American people have a right to know what is influencing the president's decisions," Senator Kamala Harris said at last week's vice presidential debate. The answers are not hard to come by. According to Mr. Trump's latest financial disclosure report, filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, he owes at least 135 million to a smattering of small financial institutions such as Ladder Capital. His biggest creditor to whom Mr. Trump owes well over 300 million is Deutsche Bank. From 2012 through 2015, the scandal plagued German bank lent Mr. Trump money for his Doral golf resort in Florida ( 125 million), his hotel in Washington ( 170 million) and his skyscraper in Chicago (at least 45 million). Why on earth would Deutsche Bank have lent hundreds of millions to Mr. Trump given his track record of stiffing his lenders, including Deutsche Bank itself?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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A relatively recent arrival among Prague's handful of high end design hotels, Boho Hotel is a tasteful standout. The 57 room property, which opened in late 2015, offers timeless modern design inside an early 20th century building that once housed the offices of Lidove Noviny, a major Czech daily. An architect is among the property's two Barcelona based owners. Although a minute's walk from the Old Town Square and its tourist throngs, the five story hotel feels a world apart as it is on a quiet side street, Senovazna. Not one of Prague's attractive streets (just across from the hotel is the hulking Czech National Bank building and its Congress Center), it is, however, around the corner from Na Prikope, a main shopping street, along with the gothic Powder Tower, a historic gate to the Old Town and the striking Art Nouveau Municipal House, a cultural monument that looks gorgeous lit up at night. Our superior room, a notch above a standard, felt spacious thanks to a higher ceiling above the queen size bed, mirrors on opposite walls, tall windows adorned with long, double layer curtains and the tinted, reflective glass wall that separated the room from the bathroom. The subdued color scheme included warm steel grays, light wood flooring and Scandinavian style furniture. A strudel and a handwritten welcome note from the hotel manager were a thoughtful touch. Other than the occasional sound of the comings and goings of other guests, the room was noticeably quiet, making for excellent sleeping and adding to the hotel's retreat like feel.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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And the dancers moved in firm paths along and across the stage in geometric trajectories that like the lines of his dancers' bodies showed Cunningham's importance to the Abstract Expressionist painters of his generation. (They formed an impressive part of his early audience.) Beyond painting, Cunningham sometimes shows a position that's usually stationary an arabesque balance on one leg or a shoulder lift and swings it around; this gives us the impression, achieved by no other choreographer, that we're watching an Alexander Calder mobile. (This mobile type effect is something Cunningham developed into greater complexity over the decades.) When I speak of a New York School of dance, my mind flies from these pieces to Jerome Robbins's 1959 "Moves" recently and excellently revived by New York City Ballet a work, performed in silence, in which Robbins, a master of ballet and Broadway, includes much of the same vocabulary as Cunningham's of the same era. The dancer of "Changeling," for example, extends his arms sideways, with one hand strangely flexed to point downward; in this intriguingly deformed gait like a bird flying with a wing tip hanging at right angles he proceeds formally in a changing route around the stage. That same broken wrist look occurs in "Moves." Dance goers seldom see, as here, historic original cast performances on film followed by live accounts of the same choreography. This program perfectly showed the value of both. The single colors of Robert Rauschenberg's costumes red for "Changeling," blue and yellow for "Suite for Two" were vivid after the black and white film; the intense focus of Mr. Riener, Mr. Olk and Ms. Knouse showed us how today's artists honor old choreography while finding personal qualities within it. Ms. Brown's manner was one of vehement Puritan rigor, while Cunningham had the freedom and individuality of an animal (sometimes caged, sometimes free); Ms. Knouse's is one of wide eyed innocence, Mr. Olk's a severe devotion. Such differences existed between dancers in Cunningham's day even in the 1950s. These films, above all, are an invaluable record of Cunningham dancing his own choreography while still at the height of his powers in his late 30s. There's an instant when you see his eyes and face subtly but profoundly change from febrile to icy: he lives again before us, as real and as strange as a character in a Dostoyevsky novel or in a Beckett or Pinter play.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Harper, on the verge of free agency, decided to explore his market value. The Nationals pulled the offer and moved on quickly; by the end of December, they had added Corbin and Anibal Sanchez to the rotation, Kyle Barraclough and Trevor Rosenthal to the bullpen, and Suzuki and Yan Gomes as catchers. Second baseman Brian Dozier signed on Jan. 13. In an off season of inertia for many teams, the Nationals have sprinted to spring training. "I kind of feel like we're the only organization that's doing that," said Scherzer, an outspoken critic of teams that do not try to win. "It's great to play for an organization where ownership, front office and management identified what they wanted to change and then went out and did it. That's what you want to play for." Harper like shortstop Manny Machado was expected to command a record contract on the open market. A six time All Star, Harper helped lead Washington to four division titles and won the National League's Most Valuable Player Award in 2015. Rizzo, 58, played three seasons as a minor league infielder and spent decades as a scout. He appreciates the rarity of major league talent, and said it was important to "treat these guys with respect and dignity." To that end, he made sure to put a value on Harper and give him a chance to stay. But he would not let Harper's free agency handcuff the team's plans. "We made it clear to him he was loved here and we wanted him to stay here," Rizzo said. "We felt that since he's our player, we have this window to figure out if we can get a deal done. But we also had to put an expiration date on it, because how do you do other business if you don't have an expiration date on that offer? "That doesn't mean that we can't circle back and do something another time including now but we felt that Harp was our primary goal, and we had a strategy and a plan put together to make him a good, fair offer," Rizzo continued. "But we felt that the expiration date on that was as important, because once free agency started, we had to be able to go out and look at other avenues with the mind set that we could always circle back if we had to." Photographs of Harper still line the hallway outside the Nationals' clubhouse in West Palm Beach, but to get him through the door, both sides will need to be creative. The Nationals are the only team with three contracts worth at least 140 million that all extend beyond 2020 including Corbin's, the only true bonanza of baseball's bewildering, endless winter. "It was a perfect storm of situations where it all worked out," Corbin said. "We were ready, we thought it was a good fit for us here and wanted to get it done, and I think they did as well. It worked out for both sides. I guess that's how a good deal works."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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BECKET, Mass. Pamela Tatge took over as artistic director of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival last year; this is the first year that all the artistic plans are hers. It's also the 85th anniversary of what dance folks refer to as the Pillow. On Wednesday, the opening night of the festival, Ms. Tatge welcomed audiences with introductory speeches that were energetic, warm and visionary. Without notes and with neither haste nor waste, she speaks of Pillow tradition (marvelously eclectic multicultural, too); welcomes back companies that are old friends; proudly announces premieres; and mentions which companies she is happy to see making their debuts at the Pillow this year precisely because she's seen their work elsewhere. I heard her give a welcome address before the Inside/Out open air appearance by Pilobolus (a double bill including a world premiere) and a completely different one a few hours later, for the Miami City Ballet triple bill in the Ted Shawn Theater, the festival's main stage. Ms. Tatge stressed that she had known that she wanted Miami City, returning to the festival after 19 years, to open this season. She praised its achievement; hailed its director, Lourdes Lopez; and observed that its program consisted of three different pairings of choreographers and composers: George Balanchine and Tchaikovsky for "Allegro Brillante" (1956); Peter Martins and Samuel Barber for "Barber Violin Concerto" (1988); and Christopher Wheeldon and Gyorgy Ligeti for "Polyphonia" (2001). Though most of the music was taped, this usefully focused the mind to connect ear and eye while watching.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown. At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as "theories of unbelief," hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States. Today, the hard core of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans. And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as a "Cult of the Green Dragon," cast environmentalism as an alternative and false theology. This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an "apostle" and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person. "Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not," he said. Rodney Howard Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida mocked people concerned about the disease as "pansies" and insisted he would only shutter the doors to his packed church "when the rapture is taking place." In a sermon that was live streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, "We're also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well." By all accounts, President Trump's tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep seated religious conviction. But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base. In his daily briefings from the White House, Mr. Trump actively disdains and contradicts the messages coming from his own experts and touts as yet unproven cures. Not every pastor is behaving recklessly, of course, and not every churchgoer in these uncertain times is showing up for services out of disregard for the scientific evidence. Far from it. Yet none of the benign uses of religion in this time of crisis have anything to do with Mr. Trump's expressed hope that the country would be "opened up and just raring to go by Easter." He could, of course, have said, "by mid April." But Mr. Trump did not invoke Easter by accident, and many of his evangelical allies were pleased by his vision of "packed churches all over our country." "I think it would be a beautiful time," the president said. Religious nationalism has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good. When you're engaged in a struggle between the "party of life" and the "party of death," as some religious nationalists now frame our political divisions, you don't need to worry about crafting careful policy based on expert opinion and analysis. Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned. Fealty to the cause is everything; fidelity to the facts means nothing. Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader. In an interview on March 13 on "Fox Friends," Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, called the response to Coronavirus "hype" and "overreacting." "You know, impeachment didn't work, and the Mueller report didn't work, and Article 25 didn't work, and so maybe now this is their next, ah, their next attempt to get Trump," he said. When Rev. Spell in Louisiana defied an order from Gov. John Bel Edwards and hosted in person services for over 1,000 congregants, he asserted the ban was "politically motivated." Figures like the anti L.G.B.T. activist Steve Hotze added to the chorus, denouncing the concern as you guessed it "fake news." One of the first casualties of fact free hyper partisanship is competence in government. The incompetence of the Trump administration in grappling with this crisis is by now well known, at least among those who receive actual news. February 2020 will go down in history as the month in which the United States, in painful contrast with countries like South Korea and Germany, failed to develop the mass testing capability that might have saved many lives. Less well known is the contribution of the Christian nationalist movement in ensuring that our government is in the hands of people who appear to be incapable of running it well. Consider the case of Alex Azar, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has had a prominent role in mismanaging the crisis. It seems likely at this point that Mr. Azar's signature achievement will have been to rebrand his department as the "Department of Life." Or maybe he will be remembered for establishing a division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, designed to permit health care providers to deny legal and often medically indicated health care services to certain patients as a matter of religious conscience. Mr. Azar, a "cabinet sponsor" of Capitol Ministries, the Bible study group attended by multiple members of Mr. Trump's cabinet, brought with him to Health and Human Services an immovable conviction in the righteousness of the pharmaceutical industry (presumably formed during his five year stint as an executive and lobbyist in the business), a willingness to speak in the most servile way about "the courage" and "openness to change" of Mr. Trump, and a commitment to anti abortion politics, abstinence education and other causes of the religious right. What he did not bring, evidently, was any notable ability to manage a pandemic. Who would have guessed that a man skilled at praising Mr. Trump would not be the top choice for organizing the development of a virus testing program, the delivery of urgently needed protective gear to health care workers or a plan for augmenting hospital capabilities? Or consider Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and another "cabinet sponsor" of Capitol Ministries. As a former pediatric neurosurgeon, Mr. Carson brought more knowledge about medicine to his post than knowledge about housing issues. But that medical knowledge didn't stop him from asserting on March 8 that for the "healthy individual" thinking of attending one of Mr. Trump's then ongoing large scale campaign rallies, "there's no reason that you shouldn't go." It is fair to point out that the failings of the Trump administration in the current pandemic are at least as attributable to its economic ideology as they are to its religious inclinations. When the so called private sector is supposed to have the answer to every problem, it's hard to deal effectively with the very public problem of a pandemic and its economic consequences. But if you examine the political roots of the life threatening belief in the privatization of everything, you'll see that Christian nationalism played a major role in creating and promoting the economic foundations of America's incompetent response to the pandemic. For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have lined up with the anti government, anti tax agenda not just as a matter of politics but also as a matter of theology. Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, one of the Christian right's major activist groups, has gone so far as to cast food stamps and other forms of government assistance for essential services as contrary to the "biblical model." Limited government, according to this line of thinking, is "godly government." When a strong centralized response is needed from the federal government, it doesn't help to have an administration that has never believed in a federal government serving the public good. Ordinarily, the consequences of this kind of behavior don't show up for some time. In the case of a pandemic, the consequences are too obvious to ignore. Katherine Stewart ( kathsstewart) is the author of "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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There's something almost eerie about the unwavering nature of the Republican system of belief. The nationalists who propelled President Trump into office may appear locked in an existential battle with the party's pro trade globalists. In truth, the Republican Party is still driven by the two propositions that have guided it for decades: cutting government aid will free poor Americans to shake dependency and get ahead, and cutting taxes on the well to do will bring prosperity to all. In December, Republicans dusted off the old trickle down slogans to justify a nearly 2 trillion tax cut, blithely ignoring a virtual consensus among economists and glossing over a 40 year body of evidence that the only people who benefit from tax cuts for the rich are, well, the rich. Now, the party is moving on to the government aid part of the canon. In January, the Trump administration freed states to demand that Medicaid beneficiaries get a job, a move likely to bump hundreds of thousands of poor Americans off their health insurance. It was just the beginning. As early as this week, Republicans in the House could vote for a new farm bill that would impose work requirements for recipients of food stamps, dropping maybe two million Americans from the program, according to the liberal leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and cutting benefits by 23 billion over 10 years, according to government estimates. Indeed, the administration's ultimate goal is to attach work requirements to the entire social safety net. In the words of the president, "We can lift our citizens from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity." History, however, has proved that this doctrine, too, is mostly wrong. We have been here before, more than 20 years ago, when the embattled President Bill Clinton embraced the Republicans' "welfare to work" strategy and replaced the federal program to aid poor families with children with a rash of state managed programs that imposed stringent work requirements on beneficiaries. Work requirements did, of course, encourage the mostly poor single mothers of able body and mind who did not already hold a job to get one. Their earnings from work increased. As they left the welfare rolls, government spending on welfare payments declined. But what did not happen is perhaps more important: The incomes of all the mothers ostensibly freed from dependence hardly rose at all. The loss of welfare payments pretty much canceled out their earnings from work. With little education and virtually no access to training, they got stuck in the low wage labor market that has taken over so much of the American economy. Young children did no worse when their mothers got jobs in terms of either cognitive abilities or socialization skills. But unless the mothers' incomes rose, they did no better either. Mothers who for some reason could not get a job or go on disability got a raw deal. For his 2004 book "American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare," my colleague Jason DeParle spoke at length to Angie, a single mother of four living in Milwaukee. "On welfare, Angie was a low income single mother, raising her children in a dangerous neighborhood in a household roiled by chaos," he wrote. "She couldn't pay the bills. She drank lots of beer. And her kids needed a father. Off welfare, she was a low income single mother, raising her children in a dangerous neighborhood in a household roiled by chaos. She couldn't pay the bills. She drank lots of beer. And her kids needed a father." Republicans were motivated, of course, by doctrine. "Much of the Republican welfare reform policy was based on values," wrote Ron Haskins, one of the top architects of the Republican welfare strategy that Mr. Clinton signed into law, in his insider tell all "Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law." Research into the potential effects of ending welfare as America then knew it seems to have played only a bit role. What motivates Republicans today? Raw dogma? They cannot be hoping to pay for their tax cuts by cutting nutrition benefits. Other than Medicare and Social Security, there is no program in the meager social safety net with enough money to pay for those. I have suggested that Mr. Trump's approach to welfare might be calibrated to appeal to the white blue collar voters in his base who feel that anti poverty programs amount to using their taxes to help undeserving black and Hispanic recipients. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the president and congressional Republicans honestly want to tweak welfare to improve the lot of poor Americans; to build a safety net that revolves around work but also provides help when work can't be had. There is, in fact, a lot of research on what works and what doesn't. Much of it was carried out by MDRC, which starting in the late 1980s conducted more than a dozen experiments in cities around the country to explore the consequences of different paths from welfare to work. Here are some thoughts: Rather than threatening workers to get them to join the work force, offer carrots instead. The earned income tax credit, for instance, which increases the incomes of workers on low wages, has done a great job not only in drawing single mothers into the work force but in improving their incomes as well, delivering additional benefits for their children. MDRC also identified a series of programs to "make work pay." Spending real money on training has been found to help workers escape dead end jobs at low wages. I am not optimistic that these ideas will find their way into the policy mix, however. They just don't fit in the Republican system of belief.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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A replica of the author's house on the set for the Fox TV show "Almost Family" at Broadway Stages, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was like a dream. One of those dreams where you think you're at home, except it's not really home, but a weird, alternate version of home. But I was already wide awake. I was on Stage 21 on a set at Broadway Stages in Greenpoint Brooklyn, nine miles north of my actual house in Windsor Terrace. Yet, here it was, my barrel fronted red brick two family, with its bone white stoop with dirt on the edges, the signature red door whose paint I had picked out seven years ago, and the gold number of my address in Delancey typeface etched on the glass transom. Inside were 14 carpeted steps leading up to the family bedrooms. Our decorative white heating vents were scattered here and there. Except no heat would ever come out of those vents, the bricks were hollow when you tapped them, the stoop was two feet wider than usual, and the carpeted steps led only to a lighting grid and catwalk. There was no ceiling, just stage lights and cables. The pilot for the new Fox dramedy "Almost Family" was shot in my home last April, but when the show got picked up for prime time, the producers decided to recreate the house on a sound stage. And here I was, stopping in for a visit. The actress Emily Osment's frowning face greeted me in my fake living room while a crew of more than 100 milled about. Trippy was an understatement. I expected Rod Serling to climb out of my fake closet and start his opening monologue to an episode of "Twilight Zone." This strange trip began one cold afternoon last February when I heard my mail slot creak open. I went to see if my bills had arrived and saw that it was a flyer from a scout looking for a shoot location in our neighborhood. I flung open my red door, searching for the scout, who was already down our tree lined block. I quickly called his cell number from the flyer and enthusiastically invited him in, telling him this was the place he was looking for. With a son in college and our daughter soon on her way, we could use the extra cash, which I had heard could climb into the mid five figures for TV shoots. The scout, Ethan Yaffe, said they were looking for a house for a new show, as yet untitled. It was based on a popular Australian show called "Sisters," which is about three women trying to forge a relationship after they suddenly discover they are related. Their father played by Timothy Hutton in the new American version is a famous fertility doctor who, it is discovered, used his own sperm decades ago to impregnate dozens of patients. The sight of film crews and production trucks lining the streets of Windsor Terrace is not all that unusual. Location scouts have long admired its picturesque brick rowhouses and wood frame townhouses. "Windsor Terrace offers a Brooklyn look that isn't the expected look you might find in Brooklyn brownstone neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens, or Park Slope," said David Ginsberg, the location manager for the show. "It gives a more outer borough feel without looking too far away from the city." The last big production shoot on our street was Vince Vaughn's 2013 "Delivery Man," a feature film which, strangely enough, covered the same terrain as this "Sisters" spinoff, with Vaughn meeting his dozens of sperm donor children. No one could forget the shoot that got the film ball rolling in Windsor Terrace: "As Good As It Gets," which was shot at the Howard Place home of my friend Lisa Sack back in 1997, starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. Ms. Sack remembers the day Mr. Nicholson's germaphobic character spent a better part of the day climbing her stoop and ringing her doorbell again and again, take after take. "They told me not to answer," she said, laughing. On a visit to Ms. Sack's house that autumn during the shoot, I had come face to face with Ms. Hunt in her front hallway and said the first thing that popped into my head, "You're Helen Hunt!" She pursed her lips and nodded her head in trademark Helen Hunt fashion, as if to say: "Why yes, yes I am." For years, "Boardwalk Empire" had filmed in our neighborhood and seemingly on every other block in Brooklyn. Every time I angrily moved my car for production, I enviously wondered when a scout would darken my doorstep. If you were going to lose parking to crew trucks and vintage cars, you might as well get paid for it. After my enthusiastic welcome, Mr. Ginsberg, the location manager, returned the next day with the show's director Leslye Headland. Then, a few days later, they descended with 30 studio department heads for a tech scout. They fell in love with the same things we had when we bought the house: the moldings, the heavy wooden five panel doors, the bright light that streams into our dining room from our back yard. We got a call in March that the pilot would be shot in our house. "It's sort of rare," said Mr. Ginsberg, "to build a set for a pilot, since we don't know if it's going to get picked up or not. We prefer to do it on site." Within days, the house was measured and painstakingly photographed so that Susan Ogu, the set decorator, could clear out our belongings and fill it with different furniture, drapes, lamps and wall hangings. The first week of April, we left for my mother in law's place in Prospect Heights, and our furniture was moved to the basement and onto a truck. Our house was now officially "Julia's house" what's called a hero house in production parlance where the main character lives, in this case Brittany Snow, of "Pitch Perfect" fame. "The character wouldn't live in a brand new building in Williamsburg," explained Neil Patel, production designer for the pilot. "She would live in a house with character, history and soul. Her house is important because it becomes the home for these newly discovered sisters." A layer of clutter was added to give the place a truly lived in feel. Several of our paintings, art photographs and our 19th century Japanese woodblock prints were kept for the shoot. We made sure the artists who were still alive were paid for the rights to show their work. (The crew asked us to email a detailed list of all the artists and contact information.) The producers also donated some money toward the annual block party so our neighbors wouldn't hate us too much for those lost parking spaces. The shoot itself was only two days, at 7,500 per day, though there were prep days and wrap days as well, which paid less. Within days, Jim Feng, the show's art director, showed up with an assistant, spending a whole afternoon measuring everything again for the studio set, right down to the creaky mail slot on my front door. By this time, Mr. Patel had signed on for a new Apple TV Plus series about Emily Dickinson, so a new production designer was brought on to adapt our house to a sound stage. "If we had to come each week and empty out your house and put you out each week, you would be a little upset," Mr. Feng said. "It's also more efficient for us. We can control things a little bit more. It's more economical to be onstage. And it makes it more pleasant for your neighbors since we always take up parking. We're like a little army that moves around. We're annoying." We were ambivalent about the shoot moving off site, since we would have loved more money, but were more than happy to have our house back. Our teenage daughter was glad to see them go. Two art directors drew up blueprints for the new "house." Then a half dozen carpenters, a team of electricians, and about a dozen scenic artists plasterers, painters, and wall paperers got to work in the hangar like studio in Greenpoint. Some of the scenic artists made the new construction look old and lived in, placing marks on the front door and smudges on windows. "It gives us more breathing space which we need for the cameras," said Mr. Kasarda. They added a wooden back deck to the yard with hot sun like lights streaming in the back door and a leaded glass window in the middle of the hallway to give the illusion of light coming in. "So it doesn't feel so dark," said Mr. Feng. "It's a happy show." Neither Mr. Feng nor the producers would discuss how much it cost to build the set, but one veteran television director estimated it would typically run upward of 1 million (close to what we paid for our actual house in 2012). Of course, I'm not the only one who has experienced this Bizarro World phenomenon. Kaylie Jones, an author whose childhood home in Sagaponack, Long Island was duplicated in Wilmington, N.C. for a Merchant Ivory film 21 years ago, was invited down for the shoot of "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries." (The movie is based on Ms. Jones's novel of the same name.) And she still remembers every last recreated detail. She had just given birth to her daughter and brought the baby with her to the set of the two story saltbox farmhouse. She knew it would be strange to see a copy of the house where she had grown up, but she didn't realize just how strange. Elisabeth Martin and Michael Duddy, Park Slope architects whose neo Georgian house was used to create the home of Tea Leoni's character in "Madame Secretary" five years ago, had a much more cheerful experience when their house was copied. Scouts and production crew came to their home on Carroll Street four times, measuring and shooting photos, but never committed to filming inside. "They kept coming back and coming back," said Ms. Martin. "But we thought this is never going to happen." Finally, the scout asked if they could shoot the exterior of the house, with its grand white columns and its arched Palladian doors opening onto the second floor Juliet balcony. He also told them that they had already built much of the house on a set at Silvercup Studios in Queens, so there was no need to do interiors in their actual house. Ms. Martin and Mr. Duddy, who had had Martha Stewart and a couple of commercials shoot in their home over the years, knew the disruption involved, so they were fine with that. Ms. Martin and Mr. Duddy don't have a television, so when the show finally aired, they went across the street to watch it with their neighbors. And sure enough, there were their glass fronted kitchen cabinets and the suite bathroom, the baby grand piano near the elegant white spindled staircase. "We all just squealed when we saw it," said Ms. Martin. "And every time we saw it, every Sunday night, we squealed. The four of us go into a squeal chorus. It never ceases to amaze us." When the pilot for "Almost Family" finally aired last month, my son came down from college in upstate New York to watch the show with us as a family. Not "Almost Family," but our actual family. The four of us huddled on the couch, seated in the very living room where the action was unfolding on the television screen in front of us. It was all very meta. "This is really weird," said my 16 year old daughter. Then it got weirder. Emily Osment, a second sister, appeared in a towel onscreen right where we were sitting, taking up permanent residence in "Julia's house" and "sleeping" in my son's upstairs bedroom. When the doorbell in the show rang and the third sister Edie, played by Megalyn Echikunwoke showed up, my son quipped, "Now everyone is coming over to our house." Indeed. The 100 strong cast and crew has been back once so far to shoot exteriors and a few inside scenes of our house, though it remains to be seen whether those visits will continue and if the show will be picked up for a second season.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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SAN FRANCISCO Apple exceeded Wall Street's expectations for revenue and profits for its most recent quarter, as strong sales of Macs and digital services offset flat sales of iPhones while consumers wait for new models to be released in the fall. The strong results eased Wall Street's fears that consumers were pulling back from Apple's products, particularly its flagship, the iPhone. Apple said little about the upcoming phones and declined to address reports of production delays with a new high end model, which is expected to feature an edge to edge screen and is expected to cost more than 1,000. The company's revenue projections for the quarter ending in September spanned a wide range, suggesting that executives are hedging on the exact timing of the iPhone update. Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, addressed Apple's decision over the weekend to remove dozens of unlicensed virtual private networking apps that allowed Chinese consumers to access the entire internet and evade government censors. "We would obviously rather not remove the apps, but like we do in other countries, we follow the law wherever we do business," Mr. Cook said during a conference call with analysts to discuss the results. "That doesn't mean that we don't state our point of view in the appropriate way." He also said that Apple fought the United States government last year over unlocking an iPhone belonging to a dead terrorist because the legal circumstances were different. "The law in the U.S. supported us," Mr. Cook said. "It was very clear. In the case of China, the law is very clear there. Like we would if the U.S. changed the law here, we have to abide by them in both cases." For the quarter ending July 1, Apple reported revenue of 45.4 billion, up 7 percent from the same quarter last year. Net income was 8.7 billion, or 1.67 a share. Analysts had expected Apple to report revenue of 44.9 billion and net income of 8.2 billion, or 1.57 a share, according to estimates compiled by S P Capital IQ. For the same quarter last year, Apple reported revenue of 42.36 billion and net income of 7.8 billion, or 1.42 a share. The company's stock rose 6 percent in after hours trading once the quarterly numbers were released. In an interview, Apple's chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, said the company saw increases in unit sales and revenue in every product category, including iPads, which had been struggling in recent quarters. Global sales of iPhones rose 2 percent to 41 million units. Revenue from services, which include app sales as well as iCloud storage and Apple Music, grew 22 percent, ahead of Apple's previous projections. Apple said revenue fell 10 percent in greater China, a key market where sales have dropped for six consecutive quarters. But Mr. Maestri said that sales in mainland China had stopped falling, with poor sales in Hong Kong dragging down the region's numbers. "We feel we will do better in the September quarter," he said. The company is wrestling with increased competition in China from Samsung, as well as from Chinese companies making Android phones. Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst with Bernstein Research, said Apple's business in China still faces big challenges. The rise of WeChat, a wildly popular Chinese chat app and social network, has made the underlying choice of phone less important to Chinese buyers. And many Android models sport cutting edge features, yet cost less than an iPhone. "The jury is still out on China," Mr. Sacconaghi said. Apple is also sensitive to the fact that its products are almost entirely made in China at a time when President Trump is pushing companies to increase American manufacturing jobs. Mr. Trump said last week that Mr. Cook had promised to build "three big plants" in the United States. Asked Tuesday about Mr. Trump's remarks, Mr. Cook deflected the question, saying that Apple had created two million jobs in America mostly developers who had written apps for the company's products and suppliers who made parts that went into Apple products. However, he added that Apple would have more news coming later this year about its direct employment in the United States. The company's Mac Pro computers are assembled in Texas, and the aging lineup is due for a revamp, offering Apple a chance to rethink its manufacturing.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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AMERICAN DANCE PLATFORM at the Joyce Theater (Jan. 12 at 8 p.m.; Jan. 13 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Jan. 14 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). This festival, programmed by Christine Tschida, the director of Northrop at the University of Minnesota, wraps up this weekend with programs featuring shared performances. The newest pairing explores rhythm and showcases Ensemble Espanol Spanish Theater, which performs flamenco and folkloric dance, and Trinity Irish Dance Company. Other programs offer classic modern dance by Philadanco! alongside hula by Halau O Kekuhi; Jessica Lang Dance with, in its Joyce debut, Backhausdance; and BODYTRAFFIC with the tap ensemble Caleb Teicher and Company. 212 242 0800, joyce.org AMERICAN REALNESS 2018 at various locations (through Jan. 16). This jam packed festival shines a spotlight on innovative dance and performance. Highlights include the Jan. 12 premiere of Michael Portnoy's "Relational Stalinism the Musical," which was born from, as press notes state, "dancers in museums moaning and leaning against walls, pestering visitors with boilerplate philosophical questions and busting their kneecaps on punishing concrete floors." (Well put.) Also opening this weekend are "Everything Fits In the Room," by Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit, with Miguel Gutierrez and Colin Self on sound, and "(do not) despair solo," a performance lecture by Marissa Perel that explores choreography, disability, queerness and intimacy. 646 837 6809, americanrealness.com ASTANA BALLET THEATER at Alice Tully Hall (Jan. 17). This company hails from the Republic of Kazakhstan and presents a free program: "Kazakhstan Astana Ballet Gala." Along with "Heritage of the Great Steppe," a work made up of sections from traditional ballets, the engagement showcases two works by Ricardo Amarante. "Love Fear Loss" is choreographed to the songs of Edith Piaf and inspired by her life, while "A Fuego Lento" takes a look at first love. 212 707 8566, lincolncenter.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Long after the sun has gone down, the electric lights keep blazing. That might suggest that most humans aren't as influenced by Earth's light dark cycle as we used to be. But a new study, drawing on the cellphone call records of more than a million people, shows that the times of day when they are active grew longer and shorter over the course of the year, waxing and waning with the daylight. The new study, published on Tuesday in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, looked at city dwellers all living in the same time zone in southern Europe. In previous work with the same data, the researchers estimated how often users called one another. Eventually, the scientists began to wonder whether there were patterns in the timing of calls. As it turned out, there were clear peaks and dips in phone calls throughout the day. One peak in outgoing calls was always at midday, while another was in the evening. In one city the group studied, for example, the early peak was centered around noon, while another occurred at 9 p.m. The lowest likelihood of calls going out was at around 4 p.m. and 4 a.m.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Before Terry Southern wrote the sex satire "Candy" with Mason Hoffenberg, first published (and banned) in France in 1958; before he essentially invented the New Journalism, in Tom Wolfe's estimation, with a 1963 piece for Esquire called "Twirling at Ole Miss"; before he helped write era defining screenplays ("Dr. Strangelove," "Easy Rider"); before he appeared on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the only one in sunglasses no less; before he covered the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire alongside Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs; before he wrote for "Saturday Night Live" and spiraled into debt and alcoholic excess ... Southern was a Texas boy with red dirt under his fingernails who dreamed of making it into what he called the Quality Lit Game. He got in. He kept squirting out again. As a prose writer, Southern (1924 1995) was an inspired and anarchic second rater, but more necessary than many so considered first raters. What's left of him between soft covers that repays the effort? Not a lot. Few writers better exemplify E.B. White's dictum that a writer is like a bean plant: "He has his little day, and then gets stringy." The novel some consider Southern's masterpiece, "The Magic Christian" (1959), is about a billionaire who degrades those who want his money. In one stunt, he stirs thousands of 100 bills into a wide, warm vat of blood and urine and feces, and lets the desperate swim in after them. The novel is as bitter as gall and has Nathanael West's dark ironies, yet it's overdetermined and musty, a wizened pelt stretched over a taxidermist's mannequin. More plausibly readable are Southern's foxy collections of journalism and stories, "Red Dirt Marijuana" and "Now Dig This." They're brilliant, in bits, though fewer than half the kernels pop and the aftertaste is often less of butter than of butter flavored topping. 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. It's becoming more than apparent that, outside his screenplays, the Southern production that's not going to go stale is "Candy," available now in a 60th anniversary edition with an enthusiastic if slight introduction by the comic actor and writer B. J. Novak. Every sentence in "Candy" seems to have a little propeller on it. Southern and Hoffenberg wrote the novel in tandem, mailing chapters back and forth, as a satire of Voltaire's "Candide" and a parody of smutty novels. It was published in France by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press, which published quickie dirty books alongside higher brow controversy makers like "Lolita," "The Ginger Man" and "Naked Lunch." "Candy" became a best seller when it was published in America in 1964. William Styron, reviewing it in The New York Review of Books, called it a "droll little sugarplum of a tale." It's about a young woman of thrice scrubbed innocence, Candy Christian, who possesses nuclear pheromonal impact and a "heart too big" to deprive men. She moves from Wisconsin to New York City from creamy naivete, that is, to diamond grit experience. In her absurdist encounters with doctors, mystics, academics, gardeners, lecherous uncles, messenger boys and others, each of whom has sexual designs on her, Candy obliviously self designs a kind of pincer movement on the citadel of her own chastity. The almost sex scenes build to a humid moment in which Candy cries, to a hunchback she's picked up on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, "GIVE ME YOUR HUMP!" The hunchback's overriding emotion? "From an emotional standpoint, he would rather have been in the men's room down at Jack's Bar on the Bowery, eating a piece of urine soaked bread while thrusting his hump against someone from the Vice Squad." This episodic novel still lives because its joints are loose. It's that rare book that smacks of a tight deadline only in good ways. There was no time to overthink it, to gum up the works. The authors work high and low. Candy reads literary magazines and goes to art films. When a radio is flicked on, we read: "The orchestra was just finishing the formless waltz of the syphilitic prostitute." "Candy" works in the era of MeToo in part because it so coyly subverts the male gaze. The men who leer after Candy are truly fatuous primates, fit for little but gibbering at the moon. Candy herself is no feminist paragon; no one escapes satirizing in this bracing commedia dell'arte. The authors wage guerrilla war on prudery; they view sex as yodelingly absurd yet rather fun and, in this fantasia at least, consequence free. The authors send up untrammeled sexual longing in all its forms. Their ingrained hatred of authority and pomposity give the novel a rebel spirit. There are more flung open doors in "Candy" than in a Feydeau farce. All its coitus is coitus interruptus. Candy's father breaks in on her with a Mexican gardener; the older man looks "like some kind of giant insane lobster man." In his mind, the father issues a Trumpian racial tirade. A nurse breaks in on Candy and her uncle; they're going at it like "hot wart hogs" under her father's sickbed. "Great God!" the nurse shrieks. "Have you no shame!" A bar's men's room door breaks open Candy is inside with a gynecologist and so much water pours out, thanks to a constantly flushing toilet, that the scene resembles something from Guillermo del Toro's "The Shape of Water." Candy stumbles in on one of her professors snapping wet hand towels, nude, with a student. When a police car carrying Candy crashes into the San Remo, the legendary downtown art bar, 275 gay men think it's a raid and race into the street. That "Candy" would become a movie was apparent. No one predicted that the resulting film, which starred Ewa Aulin as Candy, alongside Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, John Huston and Ringo Starr, with a screenplay by Buck Henry, would be unwatchable. (The trailer, available on YouTube, is watchably unwatchable.) Candy glides through this novel like a sunbeam. Like this novel, she is, to crib from A.J. Liebling, as beautiful as a tulip of beer with a white collar.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. FringeNYC (through Sunday) This annual collection of charmingly experimental, provocatively quirky and often hard to categorize performances includes a few dance related offerings. In "Diaghilesque!," the director choreographer Arrie Davidson honors (and skewers) the Ballets Russes legacy through a feminist and queer lens (Friday and Saturday); Alex Perez's "Julian and Romero," sets Shakespeare's famous tragedy in 1960s Cuba with two men (Friday and Saturday); "Succession" tells Valerie Green's life story through a series of solos (Saturday); and "To Dance" is a musical opera about a dancer in Cold War Russia (Sunday). At various times and locations, fringenyc.org. (Brian Schaefer) Inclined Dance Project (Friday and Saturday) It's the summer of the squad, thanks to Taylor Swift, who coined the hashtag in reference to her posse of girlfriends who have one another's backs. In the same vein, the performance series InQuad (a.k.a. inquad) showcases a sisterhood of self proclaimed "like minded" female choreographers. The first iteration welcomes Beth Liebowitz (Beth Liebowitz Artists), Amy Campbell (Crooked Mouth), Winnie Berger (Mook Dance Company) and Kristen Klein of Inclined Dance Project, the presenting company. At 7:30 p.m., Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street, between Rivington and Delancey Streets, Lower East Side, 212 219 0736, dixonplace.org. (Schaefer) Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival (through Sunday) When Jacob's Pillow comes to an end, you know summer's days are numbered. The Martha Graham Dance Company closes the festival while kicking off its 90th anniversary with a world premiere by the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek, among other works by Graham, Nacho Duato and Andonis Foniadakis, in the Ted Shawn Theater. The young all male troupe Madboots Dance, in their Pillow debut, offers an emotionally charged double bill in the Doris Duke Theater. At various times, 358 George Carter Road, Becket, Mass., 413 243 0745, jacobspillow.org. (Siobhan Burke and Schaefer)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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During the later part of his career, Michael Jackson faced several allegations that he molested young boys. The police investigated him in 1993. Another accusation led to a trial in 2005 that became a pop culture spectacle, complete with crowds of supporters waiting outside the courthouse. Jackson was acquitted and died four years later while preparing for a string of concert dates he hoped would revive his career. A new documentary, "Leaving Neverland," has rekindled interest in the accusations. The film had its debut at the Sundance Film Festival and airs on HBO March 3 and 4. Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder. In August 1993, when Jackson was still a major star on the pop charts and touring to support his album "Dangerous," the Los Angeles Police Department began investigating claims that Jackson had molested a 13 year old boy. Executing search warrants for a condominium in Los Angeles and Jackson's Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara County, Calif., the police seized videotapes but found no incriminating evidence. On Sept. 14, while Jackson was on tour in Moscow, the boy's parents sued the star, saying that Jackson had "repeatedly committed sexual battery" on their son. Among the accusations were that Jackson had performed oral sex on the boy and masturbated him. Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator working for Jackson, called the suit part of an extortion attempt. "A demand for 20 million was made and presented," he said. "It was flatly and consistently refused." (Years later, Pellicano, known as a top Hollywood "fixer," was accused of making death threats against journalists, and in 2008 was sentenced to 15 years in prison for illegal wiretapping.) As the case drew headlines, the Jackson camp introduced the news media to children who gave interviews supporting the star. One, a 10 year old boy named Wade Robson, told CNN about harmless "slumber parties" in Jackson's bedroom. As prosecutors continued to pursue a criminal case, another boy, James Safechuck, who had appeared with Jackson in a Pepsi commercial, gave sworn testimony on Jackson's behalf. On Dec. 20, 1993, Jackson was strip searched by police at Neverland, and photographs were taken of his genitals to compare to a description given by the boy. Two days later, Jackson spoke on live television, denying the accusations and excoriating the news media. "I am not guilty of these allegations," Jackson said. "But if I am guilty of anything, it is of giving all that I have to give to help children all over the world." In January 1994, Jackson settled the case for 23 million, with 5 million going to the family's lawyers. Prosecutors dropped the criminal case after the boy declined to cooperate. In February 2003, with Jackson's music career in decline, the documentary "Living With Michael Jackson," based on interviews by the journalist Martin Bashir, was broadcast in Britain and the United States. In it, Jackson openly discussed sharing his bedroom with a young cancer survivor, and called people who object to such behavior "ignorant." The documentary sparked a criminal investigation, and in December, Jackson was charged with child molesting, serving alcohol to a minor, conspiracy and kidnapping. He faced up to 20 years in prison. Jackson's trial began on Feb. 28, 2005. Throughout, the global news media paid close attention to Jackson's erratic behavior, like arriving in floral pajamas. The boy from the documentary, who was 14 at the time of the trial, testified that Jackson had masturbated him. His brother said he had witnessed the abuse, and that Jackson had showed them both pornography and served them wine, calling it "Jesus juice." A former housekeeper, Blanca Francia, said she had seen Jackson taking a shower with Wade Robson, the young man who had spoken to the media in support of Jackson in 1993. Jackson's lawyers portrayed the boy at the center of the case and his family as practiced grifters, and several witnesses who had been close with Jackson as children like the actor Macaulay Culkin, then 24 years old took the stand to deny any abuse. Robson, by this point a choreographer for stars like Britney Spears, testified that he had spent the night at Neverland more than 20 times but that Jackson had never molested him or taken a shower with him. Safechuck, who had defended Jackson earlier, did not testify. Jackson was found not guilty of all charges on June 13, 2005; outside the courthouse, a fan released 10 white doves, one for each count that was acquitted. Jackson died four years later, at age 50, on the eve of a comeback attempt. In 2013, four years after Jackson's death, Robson sued the star's estate, saying that Jackson had molested him for seven years, beginning when he was age 7. In an interview on the "Today" show, he said that "brainwashing" by Jackson had led him to testify on the star's behalf. Lawyers for Jackson's estate blasted Robson's credibility, saying that in the past he had repeatedly denied abuse. Robson's case was later thrown out by a judge for being filed too late. Safechuck filed his own suit in 2014, saying that Jackson had abused him "hundreds" of times from 1988 to 1992, beginning when a 10 year old Safechuck and his mother accompanied Jackson on his "Bad" concert tour. According to his complaint, Jackson kissed Safechuck's genitals and gave him jewelry as rewards for performing sexual acts. His case was also dismissed. Both men's suits are under appeal. On Jan. 25, "Leaving Neverland," a two part, four hour film by Dan Reed, with Robson and Safechuck describing accusations of abuse in great detail, opened at the Sundance Film Festival. Before the screening, the festival director told the audience that health care providers were available to help anyone disturbed by the film. The Jackson estate condemned the film as "yet another lurid production in an outrageous and pathetic attempt to exploit and cash in on Michael Jackson." In a statement, the Jackson family called it "a public lynching" and added: "We are furious that the media, who without a shred of proof or single piece of physical evidence, chose to believe the word of two admitted liars over the word of hundreds of families and friends around the world who spent time with Michael, many at Neverland, and experienced his legendary kindness and global generosity." The estate also filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court for arbitration against HBO, saying that with "Leaving Neverland" the channel was in breach of a nondisparagement clause in a 1992 contract for a Jackson concert film. The estate said it was seeking damages that "could exceed 100 million."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Right as the show begins, an awful squeaking assaults your ear. Is it the sound, sure to subside, of seats creaking? No, it's part of the sound score, and it's going to sustain and swell like a screeching subway car. If you want to watch the dance, you're going to have to deal with it. For decades, that kind of noise in a dance program was a signal: You were probably experiencing the radical theater of Merce Cunningham. He died in 2009, and his company disbanded two years later, yet at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, the squeaking returned and was almost heartwarming one sign among many of how robustly Cunningham's work is surviving. There is in this project a note of self promotion, as Mr. Petronio positions himself in a noble lineage. But just as the ear can adjust to the electronic noise accepting it as the soundscape of an urban jungle or simply tuning it out so can the mind accommodate or ignore the aggrandizement. In both cases, the choreography is independent of the irritation, and more than ample justification. "Signals," despite the din and modernist austerity, is witty and playful. In its final segment, the dancers cue one another with signs. Each holds up fingers to determine his or her place in line, or marks timing by croaking like a frog. As a game that dances around ideas of order and chance, it seems to cloak the role of the choreographer, whereas an earlier trio makes a choreographer like figure prominent. While a man and woman perform a duet, another man (originally performed by Cunningham) keeps inserting a stick between them, half like a tailor taking measurements, half like a magician cutting someone in two. "Signals" is modular a duet, two solos, a trio, a sextet, each with little relation to the others and the Petronio company's performance of the distinctly exposing choreography tended to start strong and fray by the end of each section. Still, the effort generated interesting heat. The revival was alive. After "Signals," Mr. Petronio's "Wild Wild World" (2003) is a sharp turn. The music, by Nick Cave, is appealing, and the choreographic style, as immediately identifiable as Cunningham's, is busier, more aggressive and a whole lot sexier. Yet the resemblances to Cunningham are equally salient: particular coordinations, a tautness of line and a complex multiplicity of action. By and large, the risky juxtaposition with the master puts Mr. Petronio in a flattering light. In a program note, he attributes the use of pedestrian movement in his new "Hardness 10" to the influence of Yvonne Rainer, whose work he included in last year's edition of "Bloodlines." But the alternation between this ensemble movement (patterns of walking and pivoting) and individual bursts of Mr. Petronio's signature motion is actually closer to the dynamic of "Signals." Whatever the source, it has germinated something fresh in Mr. Petronio's choreographic imagination. In "Hardness 10," the music, by Nico Muhly, is a droning but handsome composition (played live by Liam Byrne with electronic looping) that changes without seeming to change much. Mr. Petronio's structure is similarly subtle. The costumes (hand painted by Iris Bonner/These Pink Lips) cover the dancers in MeToo phrases ("She's the Boss," "Look Don't Touch") whose relation to the dance seems at first coincidental, like that between music and choreography in Cunningham. But eventually the women separate from the men, and topical meanings rise. The fists of their final pose might be a tad on the nose, but sometimes clear signals are called for.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Want to Buy a Ticket to the Space Station? NASA Says Soon You Can Becoming a NASA astronaut is far harder than getting into Harvard, but soon, ordinary people at least rich ones with tens of millions of dollars to blow on a big vacation will be able to buy a rocket ride into orbit. NASA announced on Friday that for the first time it is allowing private citizens to fly, if not to the moon, at least to the International Space Station, the only place where people currently live off the planet. NASA is not transforming into a space travel agency. Private companies will have to pay it about 35,000 a night per passenger to sleep in the station's beds and use its amenities, including air, water, the internet and the toilet. (The companies would charge much more to cover rocket flights to and from space, and to make a profit.) Friday's announcement was one of several new policies designed to allow companies to take advantage of the space station as a place for business, something that NASA has often frowned on in the past. "This is a huge different way for us to do business," William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said during a news conference at Nasdaq in New York. The announcement could also help resolve questions about the space station's future. The Trump administration last year created tumult when it proposed ending federal financing of the International Space Station by the end of 2024 and move to commercial alternatives that are far from being built. On Friday, NASA officials said the goal was an eventual transition to orbital outposts fully operated by private companies, but there was no set date. "We're hoping new capabilities will develop that can one day take over for the space station," said Robyn Gatens, the deputy space station director for NASA. "We won't transition off station until we have something else to go to so we don't have a date certain." Later this month, NASA will seek proposals for adding a module to the space station that is owned and operated by a private company, and it will select a plan by the end of the year. What is not up for sale, at least in Friday's announcements, are corporate sponsorships for parts of the station. NASA astronauts still would not be allowed to endorse products, but might perform off camera production on commercials from orbit for paying customers. While pricey, the revenues generated by space tourism for NASA would not come close to covering the costs of operating the space station, which are one of the agency's greatest expenses. It currently spends 3 billion to 4 billion a year, or more than 8 million a day. "It's not going to be a profit making venture for NASA at all," said Jeff DeWitt, the agency's chief financial officer. But the income could help cover NASA's costs and allow it to invest more money in other projects. Mr. DeWitt said it was too early to estimate how much money NASA could receive through the new ventures, and he said the agency would adjust how much it charges depending on market demand. Bigelow Space Operations of North Las Vegas, Nev., has already reserved four launches. The company will use SpaceX, the rocket company run by Elon Musk, to take private astronauts. Each flight would have at least four seats. Because Bigelow is purchasing whole trips aboard the SpaceX capsule, its schedule would be independent of NASA's, and the stays could be longer, perhaps 30 or 60 days, said Robert Bigelow, the chief executive of Bigelow Space Operations and Bigelow Aerospace, a sister company that has an experimental inflatable module currently docked at the station. The company has yet to start looking for passengers. "We have to get to first base, which is getting to the point where we can even have something to talk about," he said. Mr. Bigelow also said no fares have been set. "What we realize is there are many different ways to price these seats depending on who you are and what you're doing," he said. Axiom Space of Houston, run by Michael Suffredini, a former NASA space station manager, is also arranging flights and hopes to fly tourists next year. Both Bigelow and Axiom aim to use the International Space Station as the starting point for setting up their own space stations in orbit. Mr. Bigelow said flying tourists to the International Space Station would give his company experience at handling the complex logistics of arranging spaceflights. In the 2000s, seven private citizens did visit the outpost, but those trips were arranged through the Russians, which operate half of the base. At the time, NASA said it was not interested in such ventures. Since then, a variety of options for private spaceflight have started to emerge. Virgin Galactic, founded by the entrepreneur Richard Branson, and Blue Origin, from Jeffrey P. Bezos of Amazon, both plan to carry passengers on short suborbital flights. SpaceX also announced that Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese clothing company founder, would pay for a trip around the moon on a spacecraft it is building.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Kevin Durant, one of the biggest stars in the N.B.A., is one of four Nets players who tested positive for the coronavirus, he told The Athletic on Tuesday. "Everyone be careful, take care of yourself and quarantine," said Durant, who described himself as feeling fine. "We're going to get through this." At least seven N.B.A. players have tested positive for the virus. On Tuesday, the Nets announced that four of their players had tested positive, though they did not name the athletes. The team said only one of the four had shown symptoms. "All players and members of the Nets travel party are being asked to remain isolated, closely monitor their health and maintain constant communication with team medical staff," the team said, adding that it was notifying anyone known to have had contact with the players, including N.B.A. opponents. It is not clear how many Nets employees have been tested for the virus, or how they were able to procure those tests, given that health officials all over the country have struggled to find tests for the general public and themselves. In addition, the guidelines issued by the New York City Department of Health state that it "strongly recommends against testing persons with mild illness who can be safely managed at home, unless a diagnosis may impact patient management." According to the Nets statement, three of the four players did not show symptoms of the disease. A spokesman for the Nets declined to provide specifics about how the team got the tests. This issue of unequal access to testing arose last week, after reports that 58 members of the Jazz franchise were also tested within hours of Gobert's positive test. Mike Bass, a spokesman for the N.B.A., suggested that players might be a priority for testing because of their heavy travel and contact with large groups across cities. "Public health authorities and team doctors have been concerned that, given NBA players' direct contact with each other and close interactions with the general public, in addition to their frequent travel, they could accelerate the spread of the virus,'' he said in a statement. "Following two players testing positive last week, others were tested and five additional players tested positive. Hopefully, by these players choosing to make their test results public, they have drawn attention to the critical need for young people to follow C.D.C. recommendations in order to protect others, particularly those with underlying health conditions and the elderly." Last week, Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz were revealed to have tested positive for the coronavirus, as was Christian Wood of the Detroit Pistons. The Nets last played the Pistons on Jan. 29 and the Jazz on Jan. 14, but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint how players have become infected because of how frequently the 30 teams in the league play. The N.B.A. postponed its season on March 11, shortly after learning that Gobert had tested positive for the virus, which has rapidly spread across the world grinding economies to a halt and causing thousands of deaths. In the United States, almost all professional sports leagues are at a standstill as many local and state governments restrict large gatherings. The N.B.A. has had the most players publicly revealed to have the virus, and its season is in danger of being canceled. Last week, N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver said on TNT's "Inside the N.B.A." that he expected the league to be out of action for at least a month. Gobert, the first player known to have tested positive, has faced backlash for making light of the epidemic in the days leading up to finding out he had Covid 19, the disease caused by the virus. The N.B.A. has also been criticized for allowing multiple games to be played while the coronavirus was spreading across the United States. Gobert apologized the day after the N.B.A. season was postponed, saying "I was careless and make no excuse."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Read our 2020 NFL mock draft picks from across the web. From his size to his post football aspirations, there is nothing remotely tiny about Derrick Brown nicknamed Baby Barack at Auburn. When he wasn't thwarting triple teams or mauling quarterbacks as one of the nation's best defensive linemen, Brown devoted himself to helping others, on campus and in the community. He presided over the committee that represents student athletes at Auburn, conveying their feedback in regular meetings with university administrators and athletic officials. As a member of the Southeastern Conference's Student Athlete Leadership Council, Brown fought for a bump in entertainment money given to students hosting football recruits, up to 75 from 40. He built homes on mission trips to the Dominican Republic, worked at toy drives and food banks and visited a school near Auburn reeling from tornado damage. "There's stuff that he'd do that he never told us about," his father, James Brown, said, "and we'd have to find out about it on Twitter." James Brown a deputy sheriff in Gwinnett County, Ga. and his wife, Martha, a manager at a Walmart, urged their three children not to embrace mediocrity and instilled within them a commitment to service. On Saturdays, they picked up trash outside the elementary school. On Sundays, after church, they helped take out the garbage there. They volunteered around their county and donated canned goods to the Salvation Army.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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When the floodwaters from Hurricane Florence recede and rebuilding kicks into high gear, homeowners and businesses will face an additional burden as tariffs imposed by the Trump administration drive up the cost of construction materials. Homebuilders and contractors say the administration's trade policy will add to the price increases that usually follow natural disasters. In addition to materials like lumber, steel and aluminum, the United States will impose tariffs on 200 billion in Chinese imports next week, including countertops, furniture and gypsum, a key ingredient in drywall. All told, some builders estimate that construction costs could be 20 to 30 percent higher than they would have been without these tariffs. "We're all going to pay the price for it in terms of higher construction costs," said Alan Banks, president of the North Carolina Home Builders Association. Perhaps the biggest impact will come from wood prices, which are up 40 percent from a year ago. The Trump administration imposed a 20 percent tariff on Canadian softwood lumber late last year, and supply shortages have also driven up prices. Even before the storm, the tariffs forced Skip Greene, a contractor in Kinston, N.C., to suspend one major project, an apartment building for teachers, as costs surged. Now, with his crews putting up new roofs and cutting out wet Sheetrock this week, Mr. Greene anticipates further price increases as demand for building materials grows. "In the short term, it is definitely hurting us," Mr. Greene said. "I hope that going through all this pain is worth it in the end. We've got a tariff war going on with China and Canada, and the result was that I couldn't move ahead with building affordable housing." With 30 employees working between Raleigh and the North Carolina coast, Mr. Greene's firm, Group III Management, will be busy for a while. Mr. Greene has long overseen projects for the federal government as well as for homeowners and businesses. In Kinston, Mr. Greene said the Neuse River was supposed to crest Friday night but had already overflowed its banks. "There's maybe one road open," he said. "We're surviving, we're coping." It will take months to repair the damage from the floods, he said. "We intend to pass on the price of rebuilding to insurers, but that will be reflected in higher premiums," he said. On government projects, he added, "we, as taxpayers, will pay." With most of the damage coming from flooding rather than wind, insurers will pick up only a small portion of the cost of rebuilding. Standard homeowner's insurance policies exclude flood damage, and out of the millions of homes in the Carolinas, only 335,000 are covered by the National Flood Insurance Program. "The people that will get hurt the worst are the ones who are least able to afford rebuilding," Mr. Greene said. "They're blue collar, and they tend to live in lower lying areas, and are less likely to have insurance. It breaks your heart." 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. Trade tensions with Canada over lumber imports date back decades. American lumber businesses contend that Canada subsidizes the wood industry, keeping production artificially high and depressing prices in the United States. Given that domestic production supplies only about two thirds of the country's needs, the home building industry argues that the tariffs make no sense. "With increased demand and the constraints on Canada, we have grave concern that prices could spike again," said Jerry Howard, chief executive of the National Association of Home Builders. "We're impacted by all of the tariffs, but lumber is the main one," he said. "In a single family home, lumber is the No. 1 component." In a statement, Jason Brochu, co chairman of the U.S. Lumber Coalition, played down the threat of higher prices. "There is ample capacity in the United States to supply wood to help rebuild American homes and business affected by these storms," he said. "American lumber producers across the country stand ready to help Carolina cities and communities rebuild." Contractors are also bracing for the 10 percent tariff that the federal government will impose on 200 billion in Chinese imports starting on Monday; the duty will jump to 25 percent in January. The list of affected products runs to nearly 200 pages and includes products like flooring, furniture, ceramic tiles and textiles that go into drapes and curtains. Like many Americans, contractors are divided on the wisdom of President Trump's trade policies, complaining about higher prices even as they echo his complaints that other countries have taken advantage of the United States and hurt its businesses and workers. Bob Morgan, the owner of Paragon Building in hard hit Wilmington, N.C., said his price quotes were good for only two weeks because lumber costs had been rising so fast. Still, he supports the president's approach. "I do know that China has been abusing us," Mr. Morgan said. "I don't want everybody to pay more, but what Trump is trying to do is make us more competitive, so it's not automatically cheaper to make everything in China." He added that the media wasn't giving the president the benefit of the doubt on trade. "Trump could walk across the Potomac and the press would say Trump can't swim," he said. But other contractors say the president's confrontational posture on trade is harmful. The United States needs to address trade imbalances, but not by raising tariffs, said Charles T. Wilson III, a third generation builder in Durham, N.C. "Not only does it drive up costs," he said, "but it creates uncertainty." He switched from quartz to granite countertops after the administration imposed tariffs this summer. But the latest duties on Chinese goods will include many granite products. "We're telling clients to factor in price increases of 7 to 10 percent a year," Mr. Wilson said. "The tariffs don't help anyone," he added. "They're not the correct tool to negotiate trade policy."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Gay Dance Clubs on the Wane in the Age of Grindr Westgay, a frisky gay dance party in the West Village, ended last summer when the building was sold to condominium developers. PrettyUgly, a twink filled dance party at the Diamond Horseshoe in Times Square, ended its run this year. New owners, new directions. JB Saturdays, a party in Hell's Kitchen that drew about 1,600 shirtless gay men every week for three years, stopped in January. And in February, Escuelita, a Latin flavored gay dance club that throbbed for decades near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, shuttered its doors because of declining attendance. Seemingly overnight, New York City has become a real life "Footloose" at least for dance happy gay men who feel as if they have nowhere to boogie these days. While smaller gay bars abound (there are at least 17 in Hell's Kitchen alone, by my count), the number of large gay clubs and weekly dance parties has waned in recent years. "It's tragic," said Adam Barta, 36, a singer who lives in the Bronx. "People used to have to show up to a dance club to have a social life. In this digital age, clubs have been usurped by the right swipe." Night life veterans point to a variety of reasons, including cultural shifts, real estate pressures and technology. Brandon Voss, 36, a club promoter and co producer of several gay parties including Zoo, which ended last year, said that the demand for dance parties has declined. "The new generation just doesn't support large dance clubs," said Mr. Voss, who no longer regularly hosts dance parties. "They spend money on special events I do, like my RuPaul's Drag Race, Pride and Halloween events. But the days of the weekly dance party are over, at least for now." Mr. Voss also blames the advent of hookup apps like Grindr, as well as music streaming services like SoundCloud and Spotify for replacing D.J.s as the way to learn about new music. "Why pay an expensive cover charge and deal with rude bouncers when you can just swipe on your iPhone?" he asked. Susanne Bartsch, who in 2014 hosted four weekly gay friendly dance events and now has only one (a summertime party at Le Bain at the Standard), agrees that technology has upended gay night life. "Social media changed the landscape of going out," Ms. Bartsch said. "One doesn't have to have dancing to be part of flirting and hooking up anymore." The reasons gay men flocked to the dance floor have changed, too. In the age of same sex marriage and transgender rights, gays no longer rely on nightclubs as safe places to congregate. Indeed, instead of all night dances, Mr. Voss now hosts a Sunday brunch at Senor Frog's in Times Square. And it's been packed. "Who would have thought a drag queen brunch at a Mexican restaurant would be easier than a Saturday night dance party?" he asked. To be sure, there are still opportunities for dancing. There are monthly parties like Brut, a leather flavored bash at Santos Party House. Weekly dance parties include Strut, which takes place Tuesdays on the cozy downstairs dance floor at Acme, and 11:11, a raucous party hosted by the promoter Ladyfag on Fridays on East Houston Street.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Pet chicks and ducklings seem unlikely culprits in a serious public health problem. But they're responsible for infecting more than 900 people with salmonella this year the highest number to date, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency is investigating multistate outbreaks of salmonella infections linked to people who keep poultry in their backyards. As the local food movement grows across the nation, more people are raising chickens, ducks and other birds. But along with the benefits of connecting with nature and easy access to fresh eggs comes the risk of disease. While most people who contract salmonella typically recover without treatment after a few days of diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps, some cases require hospitalization and some can be fatal. So far this year, 961 people in 48 states have contracted the disease from backyard birds. More than 200 people have been hospitalized, and one person in North Carolina has died. Outbreaks have been reported for several years now, but case numbers shot up sharply last year and are expected to continue to rise. "Over the years, we've accumulated a pretty serious health issue," said Dr. Megin Nichols, a veterinarian at the C.D.C. who tracks outbreaks. "Ownership of live poultry and the interest in raising backyard chickens and ducks is really growing." Salmonella is a bacterial disease people often associate with eating raw cookie dough and other products with undercooked eggs or meat. But it can also be contracted when people put their hands, or equipment, that has been in contact with live poultry, in or around their mouth. Risk of that type of contact increases as backyard birds become more popular. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get backyard birds, Dr. Nichols said. But it is important to take appropriate precautions to avoid the spread of salmonella. Always wash your hands after handling poultry, she advised. Keep a separate pair of boots and clothes to use in the coop, so you don't carry germs back into the home. Don't let poultry live inside the house, never eat or drink in the area they live and avoid kissing or snuggling them. While there isn't comprehensive national data yet, a 2010 U.S. Department of Agriculture study of four major metro areas found that 0.8 percent of households owned chickens, and another 4 percent were planning to get them in the next five years. Experts say that the predicted increase appears to have come true. "Instead of just selling baby poultry in the spring, they're being sold year round now," Dr. Nichols said. Traci Torres, a founder of My Pet Chicken, a Connecticut based backyard chicken vendor, said the birds were becoming so popular that the company often sells out months in advance. Ten years ago, the company sold about 5,000 chicks in a year, Ms. Torres said, and now it sells hundreds of thousands a year. "We don't see any signs of it slowing down," she said. Andy Schneider, a backyard poultry expert known as the Chicken Whisperer, said people join the backyard bird movement for many reasons. Chickens are great composters, their feces make excellent fertilizer and they eat bugs and pests that you may not want in your backyard. But the largest motivator is a supply of fresh eggs, he said. "The No. 1 issue of why it's growing, without a doubt, is the local food movement," Mr. Schneider said. "People want to know where their food comes from." In a 2014 survey, 95 percent of respondents said the main reasons they kept chickens were for eggs, meat or both. There's a common belief that those eggs will be safer than commercial eggs, Mr. Schneider said. But that's not the case. A recent study found that eggs from small flocks are more likely to be contaminated with salmonella than eggs sold in grocery stores because those typically come from larger flocks that are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. For many people, there's another reason to keep chickens, and it has nothing to do with food production. It can be seen in the growth of websites selling chicken clothes and toys, Mr. Schneider said. People want poultry pets. They give the birds clever names, like Oprah Henfrey and Sir Lays a lot, Mr. Schneider said. "They hug them, kiss them, put clothes on them, bring them inside the house," he added all behaviors that increase the risk of infection. "Many people who bring poultry into their home as pets don't necessarily know they can carry germs that make people sick," Dr. Nichols said, "so they may not take the appropriate precautions." And it's not just chickens. A small but growing number of people are acquiring ducks, too. "It's a trend that's increased gradually in the last five years," Dr. Nichols said. "Some outbreaks have been linked to ducklings." Not to mention pet amphibians and reptiles. The C.D.C. has reported a salmonella outbreak linked to pet turtles this year. Thirty seven people have been infected and 16 were hospitalized. In previous years, a few hundred people have contracted the illness from turtles, typically through contact with dirty water in the pet's habitat. In 1975, the Food and Drug Administration banned the sale of turtles with shells less than 4 inches long as pets because they are often linked to salmonella infections. Even larger turtles pose a risk, though, and pet owners need to take proper precautions just as they would with poultry, the agency advises. Bob Smith and his wife, who live in Hershey, Pa., have owned chickens for four years and never had an issue. The couple got Daisy, Patsy and Lily primarily as pets, teaching them tricks like jumping into the air and flying to a designated spot on command. "They're amazing pets," Mr. Smith said. "They're probably more responsive to me than my cats are." But having worked as a microbiologist in a hospital for many years, Mr. Smith knew the risks they carried, too. He was quick to enforce hand washing practices among anyone who visited the chicks and regularly cleans the coop to reduce the risk of spreading feces. "I know what salmonella is," he said. "I've seen it. And if washing my hands keeps me from having that, then I'm definitely going to wash my hands."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Each week, the Open Thread newsletter will offer a look from across The New York Times at the forces that shape the dress codes we share, with Vanessa Friedman as your personal shopper. The latest newsletter appears here. To receive it in your inbox, register here. Hello and happy day two of New York Fashion Week, or as the rest of the world may know it, Olympic Opening Ceremony Day. There are few things that underscore just how much of an insular world the ready to wear cycle is than its clash with the most mesmerizing sporting event of the year. Especially because in an alternate reality, the Olympics would be a huge fashion moment. All those crazy national flag outfits to open! Those spangled skating costumes! The North Korean cheerleaders and their matching ensembles! The athleisure effects of it all! But not for us style chickens. For us, it'll be the DVR, and then binge watching on that one free day in between New York and London. Though for those in search of some advice about what to watch for (aside from the medal action, of course) for those of you who can watch, I just want to say one word. Just one word. Not plastics (though yes, that was from "The Graduate"). Parkas. South Korea is going to be awfully cold, and all those athletes, and all those TV commentators, are going to be bundled up in the latest hi tech, brightly toned winter jackets available. It'll be a de facto outerwear catwalk, and as good an opportunity for scouting the styles as any of us will get. It'll be interesting to see if any of it filters out into the fall runways. Also worth watching, from a fashion standpoint: the snowboarder Chloe Kim, a Korean American from California, who is widely expected to emerge from these Games as the Next Big Influencer. As for me, I will be bringing you all the news from the shows. If you have any fashion week related questions, please send them in. In the meantime, for a quick overview of the new names showing, the old names going and what else to watch for ( MeToo), check out our preview. Or spend some time considering how the street became the new runway; whether or not fashion is finally going to address the issue of work/life balance and, in the interests of the international aspect of both the Olympics and Fashion month, why young women in Iran are abandoning the head scarf. Every week on Open Thread, Vanessa will answer a reader's fashion related question, which you can send to her anytime via email or Twitter. Questions are edited and condensed. Q: In two weeks I'll be leaving for half a year for a study abroad in Poland. I'm super excited, but what in the world am I going to pack? I'm going in winter but staying until the middle of summer. At home I'm used to my huge Ikea wardrobe, which houses all of my wonderful clothes and shoes and bags, but how do I know what I'm going to need for my various activities without over packing? Lina, Vienna A: Speaking of parkas, these Olympics may be very useful to you. On a more immediate note, however, I asked our Poland correspondent, Marc Santora, for some actual tips from the front line. Here's what he said: "Forget layers. A proper winter coat is much better and easier to leave at a coat check. Boots are essential, especially indoor/outdoor boots that are water resistant but not arctic boots. All that said, the malls here have most essentials, so no need to stress. And come spring I am told it is all sundresses and shorts. When the sun arrives they soak up every minute." For the boots I'd check out Sorel if you don't have some already; throw in a few pairs of pants and some sweaters; make sure your coat is water resistant (not wool); and then take a few sundresses (which you can also wear over tights and under sweaters in winter), shorts and shirts, sneakers and ballet flats. Plus a transitional jacket, like a pea coat or lightweight trench, and a couple of scarves. Then add a tote bag or backpack, shoulder bag and pochette that can double as an evening clutch, and you should be in good shape. A final tip: Before you pack, stand in front of your closet and think very carefully about what you actually wear, as opposed to what you have. It can be both enlightening and liberating. VANESSA FRIEDMAN
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times The chapters of "Watchmen" are marked by illustrations of a clock ticking toward an apocalypse. But on a recent morning, Damon Lindelof, who just adapted the influential comic for HBO, was focused on a different countdown. "Five hours from now, 2,000 people will have seen the 'Watchmen' pilot," he said, looking ahead to the show's debut at New York Comic Con that afternoon. "Conservatively speaking, 1,000 of them are going to hate it." The reception ultimately was much warmer than that. But Lindelof's apprehension was understandable given both his past adventures in fan rage as a creator of "Lost" and the audacity of his "Watchmen," debuting Sunday on HBO. A 2009 film version was faithful to the source material, arguably to a fault. But HBO's version is a daring departure , replacing the original's Cold War themes with a new story based in America's legacy of white supremacy, beginning with a depiction of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 before moving to an alternate version of the present day. Now masks are even more abundant, worn by both the police and the white nationalist terrorist cell they're battling. Known as the Seventh Kalvary , the group has taken as its uniform the black and white splotched face mask of Rorschach, probably the best known of the original "Watchmen" characters . "That connects with what I think is the central core of all 'Watchmen' ideology," Lindelof said. "Which is when you put a mask on, it brings out this part of you that is basically like, ' expletive all y'all. I'm going to do what I'm going to do.'" Regina King stars as Angela Abar , a purportedly former cop who actually still works with the police as her masked alter ego, Sister Night. The role appealed to an actor who has "wanted to be a hero for as long as I can remember," she said, but one more in line with the kind of vulnerable, complicated characters King has played in films and series like "If Beale Street Could Talk," "American Crime" and "The Leftovers," her previous collaboration with Lindelof. "This woman is complex, she's flawed," King said of Angela. "Heroes struggle, too." Other stars include Jeremy Irons and Jean Smart playing older versions of the "Watchmen" characters Adrian Veidt and Laurie Juspeczyk, and Tim Blake Nelson and Don Johnson in original roles. The show received a blessing from Gibbons, but the famously irascible Moore, who is even more famously contemptuous of screen adaptations of his work, insisted that his name be left off the series entirely. (The credits read, "Based on characters cocreated for DC by Dave Gibbons.") Regardless, "if this becomes a gateway drug to go and read those 12 issues or that graphic novel, I'm like, mission accomplished," Lindelof said . In a hotel near Gramercy Park, King and Lindelof discussed how "Watchmen" channels the comic and how it doesn't, and why the series itself will be a Rorschach test for viewers . These are edited excerpts from the conversation. The first couple episodes are disorienting, even if you know the "Watchmen" story. Was that intentional? DAMON LINDELOF Yes, definitely. First off, that's the kind of storytelling that I've always gravitated to, what I call the "Thursday crossword puzzle." It's manageable but difficult, and it's going to take some time. More important, I was trying to replicate the feeling that I had when I read the original "Watchmen" when I was 13, which was not dissimilar from being dropped on my head. I didn't know what I was supposed to know versus what I wasn't supposed to know. LINDELOF They're spelled out like a "Wheel of Fortune" puzzle, though. That's our version of spelling things out. You get the R, the S, the T, the L LINDELOF We all know; we all play the "Wheel." The good news is there is a tool for the audience and that tool is called the internet. If there is any confusion, all they have to do is go on Twitter and say, "Am I supposed to know what that joke means?" And there will be 100 people there to explain it. KING And 50 of the explanations will be all different. I was not familiar with the comic book and I was able to follow, which is important because I do represent a huge part of the audience . There are many Easter eggs but the most prominent echoes are structural. How did you approach adapting it? LINDELOF It started with a very specific plan: There's a murder in the first episode, and by the ninth episode, we're going to know who did it and why, just like in the original "Watchmen." There are going to be other mysteries and those mysteries are going to be resolved by the end, too. Why are these people behaving in this way? Why does Angela call herself Sister Night? But then there's the other thing: What's our relationship with the original? When the New Testament came along, it didn't erase the Old Testament; it just said, "We're going to focus more on Jesus Christ here. Adam and Eve still happened." That was sort of our approach. We needed to be in a conversation with it, but I also didn't want the audience who hadn't read it to feel like all the cool kids were whispering about an inside joke that they didn't get . As a fan of "Watchmen," I was like, O.K., Adrian Veidt has to be in the show. I want to see what that guy looks like 30 years later. And Laurie Juspeczyk was the other character I was really interested in. But I want people to embed with this new story, which was why we set it in Tulsa and not in New York. Those characters are going to be supporting characters in new characters' journeys, versus the other way around. Race is at the center of the story. Nuclear holocaust was the big existential threat in the comic, but here it's white supremacy. Why did you make that choice? LINDELOF What's the equivalent now of impending nuclear war? What's creating the big cultural anxiety? For me, it's the anxiety of a reckoning. Not because there are white supremacists, but because I am complicit in white supremacy. Because I'm a white man, I've gotten to take this entirely different path through life. So that reckoning, that process, the identification of white supremacy as a bad guy in a superhero comic book that could not be defeated the Klan wears masks, but why are they never the villains in a superhero story? Those ideas felt like natural fits for "Watchmen." The original is provocative, it's dangerous, it's groundbreaking, it's political, it's unsafe. The idea for the show had to check all those boxes. How did you arrive at that idea? LINDELOF I had read Ta Nehisi Coates's Atlantic essay, "The Case for Reparations," and it totally shifted my perception of United States history. He mentioned Tulsa, the massacre of Black Wall Street, which I had never heard of. Tulsa just felt like Krypton to me. It felt like the destruction of a world. It felt like this peaceful utopia with all these intelligent people who had built this safe haven, and it was just destroyed overnight. I was like, "That's the idea." I was really nervous about it. I didn't know if it was a story that I necessarily should be telling. I went into HBO and I said to them, "This is kind of what I'm thinking," and they really gelled to the idea. Is it a story you should be telling? LINDELOF That's not a question I'm qualified to answer. But I will say I've spent a lot of time driving around looking at billboards and going, like, Oh, there's only white people on these billboards. And then I'm like, Oh, I've made a career of basically putting white people on billboards, and I keep making television shows about really attractive men in their mid 40s who are having existential and spiritual crises. I'm in a position to do something different and this is something that I care about, too. I'm not deflecting responsibility, but there were 12 people in the writers' room and only four of them, at any one time, were white men. So this question that you asked was vigorously debated over and over again. But if the criticism is "this wasn't your story to tell," but a lot of people learn what happened in Tulsa almost 100 years ago as a result, I'm willing to take that hit. Not because I'm a white savior, but because I think this is a compelling story worth telling. KING Is it O.K. for him to be telling that story? Well, Damon is American. This story is American history. Has there been revisionist history? Absolutely. That's the reason we have so many things stuffed away and so much pain and fear that hasn't been addressed. I feel lucky to be a part of pushing people to look at it, and I am happy that Damon has created the opportunity for us to do this. Were there ever actual events that bled into the show, or vice versa? LINDELOF Episode 6 had been shot when ... I'll just say that it had some very uncanny similarities to the Jussie Smollett case, except it actually happens. As soon as that story broke, in its initial incarnation it certainly didn't occur to me that it might not have actually happened I was like, "Oh my God, people are going to think we are ripping this from the headlines." And then, of course, that story took a lot of twists and turns . The original was pretty male heavy it was called "Watchmen," after all but the show is driven largely by women, starting with Angela. Was that a conscious subversion of the source material? LINDELOF And she has a hood, which is totally charged as a costume, especially for a woman of color . "Watchmen" echoes some of America's societal ills, and things like "Joker" have been condemned recently for doing so irresponsibly, according to its critics. Does that concern you regarding how people will receive your show? LINDELOF Are we trying to be topical just for the sake of being topical? No. But we did want to tap into what was happening around us and tell a story that was reflective of the times we're in. That's what the original "Watchmen" did, and that's what we wanted to do. At the same time, it's a TV show and it's a parable. So you will see people in Klan robes, which is a real thing, and then squids will fall from the sky, which is not. We know we're playing with fire and we know that the audience is increasingly having a difficult time telling fact from fiction, when fact feels so absurd and fiction feels so real. I also think that there's a clickbait y culture right now that is saying "Joker" is a dangerous movie before anyone has even seen it, just because it feels dangerous. So if the filmmakers of "Joker" come out and say, "We had no idea we were making a dangerous movie; we're incredulous about it" how could that be? We know that we made something that's potentially dangerous and upsetting. We know that we appropriated a beloved graphic novel and we know that white supremacists appropriating the mask of someone who was construed as a hero in that graphic novel is not going to be loved by everyone. But we still feel like it's interesting. The show in and of itself is a Rorschach test everybody's going to see something a bit different, based on who they are and what their relationship with "Watchmen" is. KING I would hate for people to walk away and just say that they didn't feel anything. We didn't do our jobs if we didn't make people feel something. My hope is that people are honest about what they feel. LINDELOF I mean, I've done a lot of therapy to get to the place where I can say, "I want to generate strong feelings, and I may not have control over what those strong feelings are." But it beats the hell out of apathy.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Fla., raised 35,000 in one night to support conservation work on "Watermelon Regatta," a painting from the 1700s. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is getting ready to open a 24 million center that will allow visitors to watch conservators at work. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has begun a lengthy restoration of Rembrandt's "The Night Watch," which can be seen by visitors at the museum and followed online . When the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Fla., wanted to restore "Watermelon Regatta," a painting from the 1700s that measures 8.6 feet by 6.5 feet, it raised 35,000 in one night through crowdfunding to support the effort. Now the museum is creating a space where visitors can peer through windows to watch conservators at work. And it's not just older pieces that are being restored. Joan Mitchell's "Untitled, 1965," also at the Ringling, is getting work because the paint has flaked. But now museums are bringing pieces out into public spaces, even if the work could have been done in back rooms the public never sees. The interest among museumgoers has been fueled in part by technology that has made the conservation process more precise. A highly sophisticated device known as a macro X ray fluorescence spectrometer (MA XRF), for example, allowed Yale University Art Gallery to determine that underneath a moonlit night scene by the American painter Ralph Blakelock was another work of a figure with two angels a scene not at all in the Blakelock tradition. That raised the question of whether he changed his style at onetime or borrowed a canvas and painted over it. The internet has also had a major role in opening the world of conservation to a broader audience. The Boston museum first experienced the public's interest in conservation in 2007, when work on Thomas Sully's 12 by 17 foot "Passage of the Delaware" was done on the floor of the museum as part of the Save America's Treasures grant, recalled Matthew Siegal , the chairman of conservation and collections. "It was a great tease to the building and the new American wing. Its runaway popularity changed our approach,'' he said. "It made us look at conservation as performance art.'' Years later, the museum began regularly posting information about conservation on its social media channels and created mfaConservation on Twitter and Instagram. Three years ago it posted efforts to clean Vincent van Gogh's "Houses at Auvers" on Facebook; the video has been viewed more than 190,000 times. Until recently, many museums had been relatively private about conservation. "The mission used to be: display and interpret. Now it is: preserve, display and interpret," Mr. Siegal said. At the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture , this type of work has become a popular subject. "Conservation has come out of the dark," said Susan Weber, the center's founder and director. "People like the back story." Bard now sends summer students to study in the Rijksmuseum's conservation studio, and the school has a part time scientist with her own lab where students are introduced to the subject. Julie Lauffenburger , head of conservation and technical research at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, linked the rising public interest in conservation to a search for the genuine . "In our virtual world there is a disconnect with what is real," she said. "Things that are made by humans fascinate people. Conservation offers the chance to be close to the real thing." In February, when the Walters puts its St. Francis Missal on display, the exhibit will include a lengthy explanation of how the book was deconstructed and reconstructed because the binding glue had been severely damaged by bugs. The 12th century missal's mystique relies on St. Francis and two followers debating God's plan for them. As the story is told, they opened the missal three times to a random spot, and in each case a passage told them to renounce earthly goods. And so the Franciscan order took root. Henry Walters acquired the work in 1913 . The conservation work began in 2017 and took two year s. The museum, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, hired a conservator, Cathie Magee , to work exclusively on the project. Several times a month visitors could watch. Conservators like Ms. Magee are continually working with new ways to preserve objects. "In paper conservation, they typically use a rigid gel that acts as a microchemical sponge that releases liquid and sucks up the dirt on an object," she said. She experimented with a variant of gel that had not been used for parchment before. "This gel is flexible so it can conform to uneven surfaces, and that is good for parchment because it is rarely flat," she said. The American Museum of Natural History in New York, for example, has begun a full scale renovation of its Northwest Coast Hall, which opened in 1899 and has displayed artifacts acquired during the late 1800s and early 1900s from indigenous communities ranging from southern Alaska into western Canada and Washington State. As part of the project, the museum has teamed up with experts in areas where the objects were found to help with preservation and restoration. Among the objects are costumes worn during ceremonies in the communities, explained Samantha Alderson , a conservator for the project. "We have several headdresses that are pieces of high status regalia,'' she said. "They were worn by the hereditary leader of the nation but are missing inlays of abalone shells. We don't have the skills to copy them." The museum reached out to the artist David Boxley, of the Tsimshian tribe in British Columbia. "He obtained abalone, cut it to the piece and we will attach it," Ms. Alderson said. This three year effort will eventually be shown across the museum's digital media channels. Besides trying to make conservation more accessible to visitors, museums are also beginning to make the career itself more accessible to minority groups. Two years ago the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University teamed up with the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Alliance of Museums and Art Galleries in a program to expose students from those schools to the world of conservation.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Latasha McMickle, 41, dressed in a black shirt and black jeans, strutted down the two block length of the Manhattan Marriage Bureau in New York as if she were in a fashion show. The stone tiled floor was her runway. Brides, grooms and their family and friends, who sat on the faux lime green leather banquettes, became her spectators. A red rose bouquet was in one hand; a blue marriage certificate folder in her other. Last May, the CityStore at the Bureau, where 300 plus ceremonies, often called City Hall weddings, are performed weekly, switched from selling real flowers to renting silk and synthetic arrangements of sunflowers, white roses and calla lilies, among others. Ms. McMickle is one of three salespeople who help showcase them. "We used the same flower vendor for eight years, but he closed down his business. Wedding season was approaching and we needed to have an offering for the brides," said Dana Rosario, 42, the director of CityStores, which operates from 141 Worth Street. Since its inception, more than 900 couples have rented bouquets, each costing 6 per hour. Before the holidays, the shop was averaging approximately 35 rentals per week. During the holiday season that number increased to 20 plus a day. Almost instantly people inquired about purchasing them. With an investment of less than 200, and in one day, Ms. Rosario replicated the originals, offering a total of 18 bouquets. Some, like the red roses, are duplicates. Each offers eight to 10 flowers. "People were captivated by them," she added. "Not everyone likes flowers or can afford a 40 bouquet. These become the bouquet they didn't know they wanted until they hold it. It's rewarding to know we offer something that becomes a lasting memory." To date, only one bouquet has gone home with someone, "And one bride tossed hers in the air after getting married and it landed in a chandelier," Ms. Rosario said. "But we got it down." Neither Ms. Hernandez nor Mr. Bell had expected to meet anyone significant in 2015, when each was invited to a friend's barbecue in Los Cabos, Mexico. "Jeremy was standing by the beers talking with friends," she recalled. "My friend told me to go over and speak to him." Ms. Hernandez asked him if she could have a beer. "He said yes, then he went back to talking with his friends, so I walked away." Mr. Bell, who realized he might have appeared impolite, tried to talk with Ms. Hernandez again. This time things went better. They spoke until 4 a.m. "Jeremy was interesting and funny. He had opinions and was smart," she said. "I liked him a lot." Their first date was a week later on Valentine's Day. Again they talked into the early morning. Additional dates followed. In August, Ms. Hernandez moved to New York to pursue a career as a professional dancer; Mr. Bell went to Nevada to attend college. "We were Skyping once or twice a month, but it wasn't a relationship," she said. "Neither of us were ready to be serious. I wanted to be with him, but he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. He needed to find himself." Ms. Hernandez got a job as a nanny and joined a dance troupe; Mr. Bell left college and began construction work. Two years went by. Neither forgot about the other, and neither lost hope of rekindling their connection. In March 2017, Ms. Hernandez had enough of the dating scene in New York. She missed Mr. Bell and invited him to visit. He agreed. "I thought about him all the time," she said. "We liked each other and never had the chance to really give it a try." Mr. Bell felt similarly. He stayed for five days and discovered a passion for New York, and for Ms. Hernandez. When he returned home, he quit his job, sold his truck and moved to Brooklyn to join Ms. Hernandez, where they currently live. Things were not easy. He attended community college, but he couldn't find work. Ms. Hernandez carried the financial responsibilities. Their relationship became strained. "I made the commitment to love him," she said. "He can be tough. We are not always on the same level. But we never gave up." Ms. Sascau met Edgardo Gallardo, also 39, on a Norwegian Cruise Line in 2011 where both had jobs. She is from Romania; he is from Mexico. That summer "Swan Lake" was performing in St. Petersburg, Russia, one of the locations where the boat was docking. Ms. Sascau wanted to see it. She told a co worker to invite other staffers. When she passed by Mr. Gallardo, who was seated with his colleagues, she thought he had already been told about the event, and said, "You're going, right?" Mr. Gallardo was not originally attending. He thought Ms. Sascau was asking him out, and so he accepted. After the performance, the group went for dinner and drinks. "I thought he was nice, but I didn't think I would marry him," she said. "He was very quiet, serious and confident." Mr. Gallardo liked her, and continued to ask her out. Other dates followed. Yet Ms. Sascau didn't hold much stock in cruise romances. "It's a fairy tale while you're on the ship; it's different when you're back on land," she said. "You're here for a few months, then you go home. Then you're on a different ship when you come back. Relationships don't really last." Still, they stayed in touch. When she invited him to travel with her as her guest during her next stint, as he was not working during those months, he agreed. They had a great time. But their next job found them on different ships. "That's when it kicked in, I missed him," she said. "When you're separated you either fight harder or you give up." When Ms. Sascau's father became ill and then passed away, that's when they grew closer. They Facetimed, texted and called each other constantly. "I felt a lot of support," she said. "He sent me letters and postcards. I felt he was very special." In 2012 they found themselves working on the same ship, again. At the time, she was an excursions manager; he was chief officer. Their relationship continued to grow. In the summer of 2013 the couple bought a home in the suburbs of Bucharest, Romania, and Mr. Gallardo bought a ring. A year later, while on a puddle jumper in Alaska, one of Ms. Sascau's favorite places, he proposed. Ms. Sascau quickly said yes. "I'M ALLERGIC TO flowers," said Jazmine Parham, 25 who was seated next to her fiance, Sean Kovach, 26. "Everyone mentioned I should have flowers. I saw the stand and I thought, 'Well, if I can get some that would be nice.' It completes the outfit and the idea of what a wedding should be. And they're pretty. It's a good option to have. And it's convenient." Her parents, aunt, cousin, and Mr. Kovach's mother were waiting with the couple. The pair met randomly on Plenty of Fish, an online dating site, in 2016, and quickly began texting. Two weeks later, Ms. Parham, who was feeling lazy, wanted a ride to the mall to buy a Mother's Day gift. Mr. Kovach, who lived only 10 minutes away from her in Newark, volunteered to drive her. "I was a little nervous. I remember thinking, 'I hope you're not an ax murderer. I hope we don't end up arguing and he leaves me stranded,'" she said. "But once we started talking it was like we had known each other our whole lives." Actually, they sort of did. They discovered they had gone to the same grade school, and as children, lived a block away from each other. Mr. Kovach turned out not to be involved with axes in any way, and Ms. Parham was having such a good time she created an extra item she "needed" so they could continue shopping. "When he drove me home, we sat outside my house in his car and just talked for hours neither one of us wanted to part ways," she said. They became closer over the next several months. There were phone calls, dates and introductions to one another's families. In September, Ms. Parham helped Mr. Kovach celebrate his 24th birthday. "I took him and my cousin to Red Lobster, his favorite place, and bought him some video games we're both fanatics and some sweaters. He was so touched, he teared up, and that really touched me," she said. "I really felt appreciated. It was our first major thing together that we celebrated. I always found myself in past relationships where you give and it's not respected or appreciated. This is someone who recognized me and what I was giving." When Mr. Kovach used the restroom, Ms. Parham told her cousin she was going to marry him. "It's like we're the same person," the bride said. "I've never had anything come together so organically with another person." The marriage was somewhat spur of the moment. Mr. Kovach proposed spontaneously in Atlantic City on the boardwalk over the summer. "We would have gotten married next June, but I'm pregnant and that's when I'm due," said the bride, who now uses the surname Parham Kovach. "We wanted to be married once the baby got here. I wish I had a traditional wedding. My grandmother and sister aren't here. But the experience is still special. I never saw myself getting married. I never planned a wedding in my mind. This is the next best thing."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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BERLIN After World War II, few Germans with sizable art holdings made a point of digging into their collections for signs of Nazi looting. And because private collections were off limits for those trying to track down stolen art, works of unexamined provenance have hung for decades in family homes and office corridors, the stories of how they were acquired often vague, inconsistent or simply not discussed. But as one generation of Germans has died and given its art to the next, a number of people with prominent collections and unsettled consciences have stepped forward to investigate what they own. "I don't want stolen goods hanging on the wall it's quite simple," said Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who hired a researcher 15 years ago to examine the collection he inherited from his father, the tobacco industrialist Philipp F. Reemtsma. Now, to persuade more collectors to undertake such research, the German government has announced it will begin subsidizing such efforts, using money from a national fund of 3.4 million euros (about 3.6 million). "With the new funding, we will be able to support people by helping them to find out how such objects came into their family," said Uwe Hartmann, head of provenance research at the German Lost Art Foundation. The foundation reviews applications from art owners seeking help and awards grants as high as EUR300,000 (about 320,000). Until now, public money had helped to search for looted items only in German museums and libraries. The decision in February to broaden the scope was made after the 2013 revelation of Cornelius Gurlitt's art hoard in his Munich apartment. The German government team studying the Gurlitt works has identified five that were looted or sold under duress, and another 153 that it suspects were looted. Mr. Hartmann said in recent years that he had seen an uptick in interest by private collectors who want to understand the origins of their art. He estimates reviews of a dozen collections are underway or have been completed. His office had long received the occasional package in the mail, containing an object the sender assumed was stolen, he said. Since the Gurlitt case, the parcels are more frequent, he said. "We received four miniature paintings with a note saying, 'We know our father was in Ukraine,'" Mr. Hartmann said. But all he could do, he said, was to send them back and post photographs on lostart.de, an online database that carries images of art with unclear provenance. Some owners did not need the Gurlitt discovery to pique their curiosity. In 2006, a few years after Mr. Reemtsma hired the provenance researcher Silke Reuther to study his collection, so did Bettina Horn, who runs a foundation that manages the art collection of her husband, Rolf Horn, who died in 1995. "It is an ongoing duty," Ms. Horn said. "If this generation doesn't complete it, then it will fall to the next." But the family owned company Dr. Oetker, which makes baking products and other foodstuffs, has identified four looted paintings in its possession out of about 200 so far researched in an effort that stretches back several years. One of the works, "The Portrait of Adriaen Moens," was painted in 1628 by Anthony van Dyck and hung for many years in a quiet corridor leading to the executive suite at Dr. Oetker's modest, red brick headquarters in Bielefeld. It depicts Moens, an Antwerp theologian, in profile, with a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee and a voluminous black gown, resting his fingers lightly on the yellowing pages of a large, leather bound book. The company announced this year that it was returning the painting to Marei von Saher, the sole heir of Jacques Goudstikker, a Dutch dealer who fled the Nazis in 1940. The portrait was forcibly sold and passed through the hands of the Luftwaffe commander in chief Hermann Goering, the Dutch government and a London old masters dealer before being acquired in 1956 by Rudolf August Oetker, then chief executive of Dr. Oetker. Tracking down the original owner is part of a long process to confront a dark chapter of the company history that Mr. Oetker's children could only begin after his death in 2007. An untersturmfuhrer in the Waffen SS, Mr. Oetker took over the firm in 1944 from his stepfather, a committed Nazi. After the war, he defended the company's record during the Third Reich and venerated his stepfather's achievements. But Dr. Oetker had profited from its SS and Wehrmacht connections and had "Aryanized" Jewish property, as a comprehensive study by three historians revealed. After the study was published in 2013, "it became clear a second step would require a scholarly approach to research the provenance of objects in the art collection," said Jorg Schillinger, a historian and spokesman for Dr. Oetker. In October, Dr. Oetker announced that it had hired a researcher to investigate the company's collection of silver and gold antiques, porcelain and several hundred paintings, largely acquired by Mr. Oetker. In addition to the van Dyck, it has announced it will return "Springtime in the Mountains," by Hans Thoma, to the heirs of Hedwig Ullmann, a Jewish art collector who fled Nazi Germany before the outbreak of World War II. Given German law, the heirs of the original Jewish owners must rely on the good will of private collectors. While museums are bound by the international Washington Principles which require them to reach "just and fair solutions" with the heirs if they identify Nazi looted art in their possession those principles do not apply to corporate collections or private individuals, and the law protects the current holders of stolen art with statutes of limitation and other defenses. But Mr. Hartmann, who helps run the government funding program, said the current generation is more aware of the restitution issue and willing to talk about it. "In some cases," he said, "this was a subject that was taboo while their parents were alive, and the children are only willing to address it now." Sebastian Neubauer, 31, said that he confronted some unresolved family history when his grandmother died. He and other relatives inherited "Spanish Dancer," a painting by Gustave Dore that his grandmother had loved. She had always described it as an old family treasure, one she had saved when the family home in Leipzig was hit by a bomb in 1943 and she carried the painting and several other items away in a suitcase.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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LONDON The defunct political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica violated British law when it used improperly harvested Facebook data to aid Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and would face a significant fine if it were not already in bankruptcy, Britain's top data protection watchdog found Tuesday. The long awaited report by Britain's Information Commissioner's Office, which has been investigating the misuse of personal data by political campaigns, also said an insurance company owned by Arron Banks, a main backer of Britain's campaign to leave the European Union, broke British law when it used customer data to aid the Brexit effort. According to the commissioner's office, the company, Eldon Insurance, shared private email addresses to be sent campaign messages on behalf of Leave.EU, a pro Brexit group, months before the 2016 referendum on Britain's membership in the European Union. The 112 page report underscored how modern political campaigns rely on Facebook data and other consumer information, extracted or bought by consulting firms with little oversight and few protections for consumers. An investigation in March by The New York Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian revealed how Cambridge Analytica at the time an upstart data firm bankrolled by the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer had improperly obtained and exploited Facebook data from as many as 87 million users around the globe. The commissioner's investigation revealed that political campaigns in Britain had exercised little restraint in exploiting consumer data, despite the European Union's relatively strict data laws. Political groups were acting more like online businesses and internet marketing firms to target and engage voters, the report concluded. "We have uncovered a disturbing disregard for voters' personal privacy," the commissioner found. The finding also adds to legal and political scrutiny of Mr. Banks, who was the single largest donor to the Brexit campaign. His dealings with the Russian ambassador ahead of the referendum have separately raised questions about whether the Kremlin sought to reward important backers of Britain's exit from the European Union, and prompted British election officials last week to ask for a police investigation. In Washington, the special prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller III, has obtained records of Mr. Banks's communications with Russian diplomats. Now Mr. Banks's insurance company and the Leave.EU campaign are facing total fines of 135,000 pounds, or about 177,000, for the privacy breaches, which occurred in 2015, 2016 and 2017. The insurance company owned by Mr. Banks will also be audited, the report said. But the commissioner rejected accusations that Leave.EU secretly employed Cambridge Analytica and possibly exploited its Facebook data haul during the Brexit campaign, potentially violating British election disclosure laws. Though Cambridge Analytica considered working with Leave.EU, and even sent one executive to appear with Leave.EU officials at a news conference, the data company never reached an agreement with the campaign, the commissioner found. Mr. Banks, sometimes described as the "godfather of Brexit," has denied wrongdoing and was quick to rebuff the findings of the information commissioner's office. The investigators "find no evidence of a grand data conspiracy and find we may have accidentally sent a newsletter to customers," Mr. Banks said on Twitter. But investigators specifically described an improper intermingling of data between Eldon Insurance, Mr. Bank's company, and the Leave.EU campaign he co founded. Investigators said more than one million emails sent to Leave.EU supporters over two separate periods had also included marketing for Eldon Insurance services. Eldon customers also were sent a Leave.EU newsletter, an incident the company described as a mistake in managing an email distribution system. The two organizations were already known to have close ties, including sharing board members. The investigation began last year to look into the potential misuse of data in the British referendum on leaving the European Union. But it took on new urgency when The Times, The Observer and The Guardian revealed in March that Cambridge had improperly harvested the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users without their consent. The British investigation involved 71 witnesses, 30 organizations whose data practices were reviewed and 700 terabytes of data the equivalent of 52 billion pages. In an earlier report, issued in July, the Information Commissioner's Office said it had fined Facebook PS500,000, or about 660,000 the maximum under British law for allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest user data. In addition to the new details about Mr. Banks, Tuesday's report provides more information about the investigation into how Cambridge Analytica obtained Facebook user data. The investigation found that Cambridge had nimbly evaded what few restrictions Facebook imposed by contracting with an academic researcher working at Cambridge University, who used an app to harvest the data, almost all of it without the users' explicit consent. The political consulting firm teamed up with the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, who had created an application that collected demographic information, News Feed posts, friend lists, pages that users had liked and other data. The information was used to create physiological profiles that could guide the targeting of political messages. In March, officials obtained a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's offices, getting access to mobile phones, storage devices, computers and financial records. At one location, the authorities said, they discovered a number of physically damaged servers, from which investigators were able to recover information. Investigators said the Information Commissioner's Office needed more to time to review evidence, including Cambridge Analytica's email system, to better determine who had access to data on Facebook users. "There are several strands that will take us into the future," said Elizabeth Denham, the information commissioner. Cambridge Analytica announced in May that it was ceasing most operations and filing for bankruptcy amid growing legal and political scrutiny of its business practices and work for the Trump campaign. The elections division of Cambridge's British affiliate, SCL Group, was also shut down. In its report on Tuesday, the information commissioner said that had the company still existed, it would have faced "a substantial fine for very serious breaches" or Britain's data protection laws. The company, the report added, engaged in "unfairly processing people's personal data for political purposes, including purposes connected with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaigns."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. More than 80 percent of the ocean is unexplored by humans. Begin there, and you've got the heart of the mostly stunning and totally mystifying if downright confounding Japanese anime feature "Children of the Sea." On summer break, while visiting the aquarium, Ruka, a reserved 14 year old girl with a curious connection to the sea, meets two brothers who were raised by dugongs (manatee adjacent mammals also known as "sea cows"). The brothers are being studied for their aquatic abilities: Their bodies are more adjusted to living in the water than on land. Ruka soon finds they're involved in a larger mystery about disappearing sea life. Adapted from Daisuke Igarashi's manga and directed by Ayumu Watanabe, "Children of the Sea" translates Igarashi's wondrous illustrations through a combination of traditional hand drawing and C.G.I. technology. The result, accompanied by Joe Hisaishi's whimsical string heavy score, is mostly dazzling (Hisaishi also did the music for Hayao Miyazaki's revered films "Spirited Away" and "Princess Mononoke"). The close ups of the characters' faces, so carefully sketched that each line reveals a depth of expression, and the shimmery, lustrous animation of the sea and its inhabitants would make even Ariel from "The Little Mermaid" rethink opting for land. Taken together, however, the styles clash; the drawings make the C.G.I. look artificial, and the C.G.I. flattens the drawings. Watanabe's animated feature is characterized by such disjointedness; he presents an enigma in the form of a ghost whale and a pair of mermaid boys, and the further we fall into the whirlpool of a plot, the murkier things become. The third act erupts into a cosmic, existential query that flirts with the concept of ultimate knowledge. ("Am I the universe?" Ruka asks, in the midst of a perplexing mind trip.) "Children of the Sea" finds plenty of beauty and purpose in the watery depths but doesn't provide enough grounding first: It's all too easy to get lost 20,000 leagues under the sea. Children of the Sea Not rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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" Papi Chulo," a buddy comedy set in Los Angeles that rests on outdated racial tropes, begins with the meltdown of Sean (Matt Bomer), a local weatherman. Newly single, he unravels into sobs live on camera, leading his news station to encourage him to take a leave. Without his job to distract him, Sean tries to throw himself into housework. But what he longs for is companionship, a desire that is temporarily satisfied when he hires a day laborer, Ernesto (Alejandro Patino), to paint his deck. Sean quickly distracts his new hire with more leisurely duties, inviting Ernesto on hikes and to parties. Ernesto doesn't speak or understand English, but he's willing to humor Sean's neediness for 20 an hour. The writer director John Butler emphasizes the exploitative dynamics underlying Sean's assumption of friendship with Ernesto. Sean projects romantic fantasies onto their interactions, while Ernesto asks his wife for guidance with the "gringo" who pays for his company. Strangers make references to "Driving Miss Daisy," which calls attention to Ernesto's role serving the white, wealthy Sean.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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NORTH SEYMOUR ISLAND, Galapagos The birds move with comic grace, like Fred Astaire and Judy Garland as hobo swells in oversize shoes. The male faces the female and slowly, slowly lifts up one foot, sets it down and lifts the other. Check out my feet! They're blue. Really, really blue. The female mirrors his ponderous moves. Mine are blue, too. Is this ground sticky, or what? He leans over, spreads his wings wide, points his bill at the sky and whistles breathily, as if blowing on a toy flute. She grunts and totters up to him, and they clack bills. He grabs a pebble, and they clack bills again; he drops the pebble and spears a twig. Clack, whistle, grunt, whistle. And suddenly, she backs away. Desperate, the male solemnly starts high stepping again, displaying his beautiful teal blue feet. But the courtship has fizzled, and when the female again lifts up a foot in response, it looks as if she's waving goodbye. They are also feeding voraciously and spectacularly, circling high over the water, alert for the slightest flicker of fish, and then freezing in midair for a fraction of a second before dropping headfirst onto their targets, like missiles falling from a plane. They squabble with one another over territory and nesting sites. They dodge parasitic frigate birds with red balloon crops that pluck at the boobies' tails and try to force them to regurgitate freshly caught fish but mostly fail. On the Galapagos and on Isla Isabel, a Mexican national park south of the coast of Baja, blue footed boobies have no real predators to fear or human hunters to shun, and as a result they live proud, public lives. That openness and accessibility, beyond captivating tourists, have proved a bonanza for scientists, too. Research teams from Mexico and the United States have followed populations of the long lived birds for years, even decades, and they have gathered a wealth of insights into the deep nature of being Sula nebouxii: how boobies choose and lose mates, the shifting allure of fidelity versus adultery, the measured brutality of older siblings, the contingency of parental love and the reason behind the boobies' fetish for feet. "They're superfascinating animals and such a good research model," said David J. Anderson of Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, N.C., who studies both the blue footed booby and the related Nazca booby. "They let you move among them without minding too much. You try to do that with a continental bird or mammal forget about it. But with these guys you see it all." In one discovery that subverted expectations, Oscar Sanchez Macouzet and Hugh Drummond of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and their colleagues determined that boobies subjected to severe bullying and abuse as nestlings suffered few consequences as adults. No matter how relentlessly the birds had been pecked at and bitten by older siblings, no matter how often food had been snatched from their beaks or how slowly they had grown, on reaching maturity the once persecuted birds proved surprisingly confident, capable unflappable. They were able to attract partners, repel rivals and raise families as successfully as their domineering peers. "Bullying in infancy does not make wimpy adults," Dr. Sanchez Macouzet said. While many boobies change partners from season to season, there are great benefits of long term fidelity, researchers have found. Comparing the breeding success of pairs that had been together for years with that of similarly mature boobies that had recently repartnered, scientists determined that the established pairs reared 35 percent more offspring to fledglinghood compared with the new mates. And in new findings that will be published soon and are enough to turn this working mother's feet cerulean scientists have discovered that the key to a successful long term booby partnership is the equitable sharing of nest duties year after year. Such egalitarian couples, said Dr. Sanchez Macouzet, "have reached the sweet spot of cooperation, compatibility and a willingness to avoid the exploitation of your partner." Dr. Drummond and his colleagues have also identified another booby mating pattern that seems to work nearly as well as a stable long term partnership and in some ways contradicts it: the May December effect. For reasons that remain mysterious, Dr. Drummond said, booby couples in which one bird is young and the other old often have greater breeding success compared with pairs of the same age. Analyzing the outcomes of 3,361 booby offspring, the researchers found that the chicks of age mismatched parents were significantly more likely to later become parents themselves compared with the progeny of similarly aged pairs. It didn't matter whether the mother was younger than the father or vice versa. "The advantage to the chicks was the same either way," Dr. Drummond said. "Life is complicated," he added, "and every year boobies are conjuring with several different variables when making their choice among partners." Someone familiar? Someone new? Nonnegotiable: The feet must be blue. Blue footed boobies are members of the family Sulidae, a group that includes about 10 species of gannets and boobies and is, by some analyses, part of the larger pelican order. The name booby is thought to come from bobo, the Spanish word for stupid or clown, a reference to the bird's awkward waddle. Blue footed boobies can be found throughout the tropics and subtropics of the eastern Pacific. Though their overall population is not considered endangered, their numbers on the Galapagos have fallen since the 1990s, the result, scientists believe, of a local decline in the sardine stocks that the boobies need to breed. The birds are about the size of large sea gulls, with wingspans up to five feet. Adult females are about 20 percent to 30 percent heavier and stronger than males. Boobies stay close to home, and if given the chance, most will live and breed within a few dozen feet of where they were born. They often hunt small, schooling fish in flocks, each hitting the water at 60 miles per hour, its brain protected by specialized air sacs in the skull. In many birds, males are the fancy ones, their exaggerated, colorful features the result of generations of females' expressing their whimsical tastes in mates. Among blue footed boobies, by contrast, males and females are both choosy about their partners, and one of the traits they fixate on is the relative blue ness of a partner's feet. The optimal color, it turns out, is more of a turquoise. Analyzing the booby's blue feet, researchers have determined that the color is a result of both structural and pigmental components. The basic tone, a flat, purplish blue, is set by an alignment of proteins stacked in the skin like spaghetti in a box that preferentially encage and emphasize blue light. But the birds' bodies modify that basic blue through diet, extracting bright yellow pigment from carotenoids in the fish they consume and concentrating it in their feet to create a dazzling aquamarine. Researchers have found that booby eyes are keenly sensitive to blue green light, and for good reason: Foot tone turns out to be a revealing sign of health and hardiness. In a series of experiments, Roxana Torres of National Autonomous University and Alberto Velando of the University of Vigo in Spain and their colleagues showed that male boobies' feet turned drab after just 48 hours of food deprivation and brightened again when feeding resumed. The injection of diphtheria and other vaccines would also affect a booby's blue coloration, by setting up a competition between the skin of the feet and the newly taxed immune system for precious dietary carotenoids. Males avoid mating with females whose feet has been dulled with paint, the researchers also discovered. And when a male's feet are artificially dulled after his mate has laid one egg, the female responds to the apparent decline in his condition through a downsizing of her own, making her second egg smaller than the first. The calculus of daily life never stops. Boobies generally lay two eggs several days apart, and the older chick ends up with an enormous advantage over the second born. In some booby species, like the Nazca, the difference is fatal. Among blue footed boobies, though, sibling violence is provisional. As long as the parents can regurgitate enough food for both, the older, bigger sibling tolerates the second hatchling. It will peck at the younger bird and demand chronic displays of submissive behavior, like facing away with its bill tucked down, but in good times it will let its sibling live. Should the body mass of the elder nestling decline to 80 percent of normal, however, "it will increase the daily pecking of its sibling by 500 percent," Dr. Drummond said. The heightened abuse can be fatal. Just make it through your miserable childhood, beta booby, and you'll soon be high stepping in style.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The first rigorous test of an expensive new drug that radically lowers cholesterol levels found that it significantly reduced the chance that a high risk patient would have a heart attack or stroke. These were men and women who had exhausted all other options. The results of the study, which cost about 1 billion and was paid for by Amgen, the maker of the drug, were published on Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology. The drug, Repatha, is called a PCSK9 inhibitor and can make cholesterol tumble to levels almost never seen naturally in adults, or even in people taking cholesterol lowering statins. The Amgen drug and a similar one, sold by Sanofi and Regeneron, were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2015 with the hope and expectation that they would lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes, and not just reduce levels of LDL cholesterol, the dangerous kind. That hope has now been realized for the Amgen drug. "This is like the era of the statins coming in," said Dr. Eugene Braunwald, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School who was the founding chairman of the research group that conducted the study, but was not an investigator on it. Like statins, which were introduced in the 1980s, the new class of drugs has the potential to improve the health and longevity of millions of Americans with heart disease, the nation's leading killer, accounting for one in four deaths. "It's a new ballgame," he said. But cost will be an issue. Statins are available as cheap generics. The new drugs have a list price of 14,523 a year. "The next big challenge is financial: how to pay for it," said Dr. David Maron, director of preventive cardiology at Stanford, who also was not involved in the study. Insurance companies have been reluctant to pay for the drug without evidence it protected high risk patients from heart attacks and strokes. Kristine Grow, a spokeswoman for the insurers' organization America's Health Insurance Plans, said insurers would consider the new data. Investors greeted the trial results with initial disappointment Friday and appeared to assume that insurers would continue to restrict access to the drug, in part because it did not show a benefit in overall death rates from cardiovascular causes. Amgen's stock was down more than 6 percent Friday morning, as was the stock of Regeneron, which sells a competing drug, Praluent. Ronny Gal, an analyst for Bernstein, estimated that insurers would have to pay nearly 1 million to prevent one event in a patient and said in a note to investors that while use of the drug would expand, it would do so gradually. "The tension between patient benefit and the very high price charged for it will remain, in our view, the dominant issue," he wrote. Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a Yale cardiologist, agreed that given the expense of the drug, the results raise questions about what it is worth and who should get it. But he called the study "a solid outcomes trial" and said "we should celebrate" that it showed the drug is capable of reducing risk. The problem, he said, was that expectations were running so high. "There was a lot of hubris about how pushing LDL down to 30 would eliminate heart disease," he said. Of course, it did not. About 10 percent of patients taking the drug had a heart attack or stroke, or died of heart disease during the trial. The study involved 27,564 men and women. About 80 percent had already had a heart attack, and the rest had had a stroke or had pain in their legs and feet from narrowed arteries. They were taking optimal doses of inexpensive, cholesterol lowering statins, which gave them an average LDL of 92, well within the range an LDL of under 100 that has been advised for high risk patients. All continued with their statins, but half were assigned to inject themselves with Repatha, also known as evolocumab, and the rest were assigned a placebo. Those taking the new drug reached an average LDL of 30. A quarter of participants got to an LDL of 19 or lower. Amgen estimates that about 11 million Americans are eligible to take the drug. They include people like those in the study and people who have a genetic condition, familial hypercholesterolemia, that results in intractably high LDL levels and a grave risk of a heart attack. Amgen maintains that its drug is worth the price and that by preventing heart attacks and strokes, it will also prevent the costs associated with treating patients with worsening conditions. But the drug would need to be taken for life, and the bill for its widespread use could potentially be huge. For cardiologists, the study was a crucial test of a long held hypothesis: the lower the level of cholesterol in the blood, the better. Dr. Maron said the results were "incredibly important," adding, "The future looks brighter for patients with established coronary disease." But Dr. Rita Redberg, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, tempered her enthusiasm, saying she would like to see what happens to the death rates over a longer period of time. Dr. Redberg also worried about the potential for bias because Amgen paid for the study, helped design it, collected the data and helped write the paper. The data analysis was done independently by a team of academic researchers, led by Dr. Marc S. Sabatine, chairman of a cardiovascular research group called TIMI at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School. Participants in the study who used Amgen's drug for 2.2 years were 20 percent less likely to die from heart disease, have a heart attack or have a stroke (816 patients taking evolocumab had one of those outcomes, compared with 1,013 taking the placebo). There was a 15 percent reduction in the combined risk of having a heart attack or stroke or dying from cardiovascular disease, being hospitalized for worsening chest pain, or having a stent inserted to open a blocked artery (1,344 evolocumab patients versus 1,563 placebo patients). The absolute reduction in the risk of a heart attack or stroke was 1.3 percent at two years, Amgen said, and 2 percent at three years. That means that 74 high risk patients would have to be treated for two years to prevent one heart attack or stroke or death from heart disease and that at three years 50 would have to be treated. Extrapolating, the authors predicted that after five years, just 17 high risk patients would have to be treated. "Reducing the risk of a heart attack or stroke by 20 percent is a pretty big reduction," Dr. Sabatine said. He and others predicted that the risk would be reduced further as time went on, as it does in patients taking statins. He noted that that effect was already emerging, with a 25 percent reduction in the second year. The only side effect seen during the study was a small incidence of redness or itching at the injection site, with 2.1 percent of those taking the Amgen drug reporting such effects, compared with 1.6 percent of those taking the placebo injections. But patients in general did not stop using the drug for that reason. There had been concerns that the drug might increase the risk of diabetes, or affect thinking and memory, but those effects were not seen. Many high risk patients did not wait for the results and were already taking the Amgen drug outside the trial, betting it would help. Robert Johnson, 51, of Glen Mills, Pa., had a father who died of a heart attack at age 42. He has familial hypercholesterolemia, and his LDL in 2011 was 377. He's taking the Amgen drug and a statin. Now his LDL is about 80. "I feel much safer, much better," he said. "I always felt there was a ticking time bomb in my heart."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Marisol Garcia of Arizona was among the participants in Tuesday night's D.N.C. roll call, which turned a hoary convention tradition into a virtual tour of America. Follow our daily updates on the latest presidential election polls. O beautiful, for spacious skies, for ... amber plates of calamari? The presidential convention roll call, where delegates shout their states' praises while enumerating their votes, is an institution, for better and worse. If you're a political reporter or elections junkie, it's a nostalgic callback to the days when nominations were decided on the floor in throaty, smoky fights. If you're a typical viewer, it's time to click over and catch a few episodes of "House Hunters." This year's roll call at the Democratic National Convention, like so many pandemic required improvisations, was different: It stitched together video from iconic sites in 57 American states and territories. But unlike some other changes, it was neither weird nor unnerving. It was, dare I say it, better. The package kicked off in Selma, Ala., where Representative Terri Sewell spoke from the night lit Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the legendary 1965 civil rights protest, connecting the country's history to the recent racial justice demonstrations, the death of Rep. John Lewis (who was nearly killed in the original protest) and the party's call for a renewal of the Voting Rights Act. From there, we skipped across landscapes and oceans: an environmentalist call on the shore of Alaska; masked soldiers and colorfully dressed delegates in American Samoa; a middle schoolteacher backed by cactuses in Covid stricken Arizona. In Colorado, an immigrant family worried about sending their kids back to school. My own home state, Michigan, parked its shiny cars on America's lawn for a few seconds. Most memorably, and memeably, a Rhode Island speaker with a chowder thick accent boasted about the efforts of seafood industry to survive the pandemic in the state that's "the calamari comeback state of Rhode Island" to you, pal while a beefy, masked chef stared silently at the camera, hoisting a platter of the crisp fried squid appetizer. If I were running a food channel, I'd have been on the phone this morning greenlighting the reality show "Calamari Comeback." The whole thing, in fact, reminded me of reality TV but a different kind than has informed the political style of the "Apprentice" host president for the last four years. Donald Trump is a star of reality TV, but in a very specific genre the competition reality show, with winners and losers and backstabbing and vicious eliminations. His entertainment brand has been his political brand: He sees a zero sum America where you're either crushing the losers or joining them, and he's cast himself as the president of the winners. The Democrats' reel, on the other hand, recalled a different kind of reality show that also makes up a big chunk of the TV universe: the noncompetition show that surveys subcultures and explores a varied world. It made me think of "Taste the Nation," the Padma Lakshmi Hulu series that combines mouthwatering American regional cuisines with dives into cultural history and issues like immigration. Even calamari, after all, is political: It is a product of cultural identities and regulatory systems and government responsibilities, like managing public health, that can keep you in business or put you out of it. The roll call, connecting panoramas and policy, was a reminder of this. It was counterprogramming to the Trump TV aesthetic of eat or be eaten. But it also made an intangible emotional statement. It acknowledged what the pandemic, a political theme of the convention, has cost us: not just lives and jobs, but one another. It was also, in a key way, an accident. Some of the better moments of this unusual convention have come out of necessity. Conventions, like other rituals TV awards shows, say are creatures of habit and obligation. You do things because you've always done them or because if you don't, someone will feel slighted. The pandemic compressed proceedings, for instance, had the loquacious former president Bill Clinton speak for only around five minutes. (Even if arguably, in the first convention of the MeToo era, it might have been better if he hadn't spoken at all.) And if not for the virus forcing the proceedings out of the Milwaukee convention center, I doubt that Jill Biden would have spoken about her husband from the classroom where she once taught. The speech, which connected Mr. Biden's personal tragedies to the country's current grief, was emotional and personal in itself, even if Ms. Biden, not a practiced speaker like Monday night's closer Michelle Obama, showed some understandable nerves. But the location spoke as much as anything: a classroom, a place meant to be buzzing with life and noise and fidgeting students, now eerily silent. That absence, that loss which the Democrats repeatedly blamed on the Trump administration's denial and mismanagement was as much the message of the night as were policies (for which the two hours were short on specifics) or Mr. Biden's biography. And even as the nominee joined his wife at the end, those empty desks lingered.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our twice weekly Watching newsletter here. If February is cold where you are, what a great reason to stay home in front of the TV. If it's not, the great TV series and movies coming to the major services this month are all the excuse you need. Here are our favorites, plus a roundup of all the best new titles in all genres. (Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice.) We also have lists of the best TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Disney Plus. This four part documentary uses Dan's story to unfurl the devastation caused by the drug addiction epidemic in the United States, and skillfully shows how local and national perspectives intersect: We hear how, in his job as a pharmacist, Dan tried to talk the young, seemingly healthy people handing him prescriptions for OxyContin out of using the drug; see him stake out the office of a local doctor prescribing incredible numbers of painkillers; watch as he talks to the Drug Enforcement Administration and gives a deposition against that doctor. Even if you know the broad strokes of the opioid crisis, "The Pharmacist" is surprising and moving. Don't be fooled: "Horse Girl" is a much stranger and more ambitious movie than its name, conjuring up cute childhood hobbies, might suggest. In this, her screenwriting debut, Alison Brie explores the impact of her own maternal grandmother's paranoid schizophrenia, playing a lonely but optimistic young woman who becomes increasingly paranoid and disturbed. Co written by Jeff Baena, who also directed, the film starts like your typical indie comedy, with sweet humor and a quirky lead character who does indeed love horses and makes friendship lanyards. But as we learn more about Sarah's life, strange things start happening and plot points become increasingly inexplicable, and reality seems to unravel. If you enjoyed Miranda July's deep dive into a complicated, isolated woman's psyche in her novel "The First Bad Man," be sure to give "Horse Girl" a watch. 'To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You' In this sequel to 2018's "To All the Boys I've Loved Before," perhaps Netflix's most successful foray into teen rom coms, Lara Jean (Lana Condor) finally has a boyfriend, the human puppy Peter (Noah Centineo). But, much to her dismay, it turns out this is where the complications really begin, as we discover what happened to the love letter Lara Jean wrote to John, her middle school crush. The scene stealing Anna Cathcart is back as Lara Jean's sister, and Holland Taylor joins the cast. "P.S. I Still Love You" is based on the second book in Jenny Han's trilogy, and a third adaptation is already in the works. "Gentefied" began life as a web series, and as a half hour Netflix show, it's bright and snappy, full of one liners just begging to be made into GIFs. The 10 episodes center on Ana, Erik and Chris, Latino and Latina cousins living in the Boyle Heights neighborhood in east Los Angeles, where ballooning rents have forced the trio to fight to keep their grandfather's taco shop open. There are some very satisfying depictions of hipster culture, like a white guy in a sombrero leading a tour of local food spots, but the show really shines when it's investigating the fraught fault lines of gentrification and the immigrant experience: For minority art to be embraced by the white creative mainstream, is a degree of exploitation inevitable? At what point do the needs of a community supersede the legacy of individuals within that community? How much change is necessary to stay afloat on the waves of gentrification? What if living the life your parents wanted for you means rejecting them? These fraught questions crept up on me watching "Gentefied," because I was so engrossed in the characters' day to day high jinks. But when the emotional moments land, they really land. Shia LaBeouf, who became a teen celebrity in the early '00s for his role in the Disney channel series "Even Stevens," wrote and stars in this reimagining of his own childhood. The movie switches between the '90s, when 12 year old Otis (Noah Jupe) is living with his father James, played by LaBeouf, in a motel, and the '00s, when adult Otis (Lucas Hedges) is in rehab, trying to understand his relationship with James. If this sounds like an exercise in Hollywood navel gazing, well, you're not wrong. In recent years, LaBeouf's drunken misbehavior has gotten him more attention than his acting, and in "Honey Boy" he's doing therapy in public the Times review said the film is "a flex: an assertion of the clout LaBeouf claims, in interviews, to no longer have." But there's still something strikingly courageous about a former Hollywood golden boy attempting this depth of self reflection, and being messy in the process. Al Pacino is going from headlining Netflix's gangster epic "The Irishman" to anchoring an Amazon Studios drama: Set in 1977 and inspired by true events, "Hunters" follows a group of New York based vigilantes, including Holocaust survivors, as they hunt Nazis who have resettled in America and bring them to overdue (and violent) justice. Pacino leads a strong ensemble cast that includes Logan Lerman, Carol Kane and Lena Olin, with Jordan Peele as an executive producer. "All or Nothing: The Philadelphia Eagles" This docu series gives a thorough history of how L.G.B.T.Q. people have been represented on television. In so doing, it also doubles as an overview of American culture over the last 70 years. Starting in the '50s with the Lavender Scare and the televised Army McCarthy Senate hearings, "Visible: Out on Television" traces the cultural and political legacies of Liberace's career and the experiences of gay actors like Sheila Kuehl and Raymond Burr, all the way to recent shows exploring the trans experience, like "Pose." The five hourlong episodes feature interviews with a veritable who's who of L.G.B.T.Q. entertainers, including Janet Mock, Margaret Cho, Lena Waithe and Andy Cohen. Wanda Sykes is an executive producer.(The third episode, on television's role in AIDS activism, is especially strong.) In this TV adaptation of Nick Hornby's 1995 novel about a cynical and brokenhearted record store owner in London, Rob is played by Zoe Kravitz, her store is in Brooklyn, and the exes she obsesses over include both men and women. Rob lives in a version of today's Brooklyn that is all dive bars, smoking weed in the street and knowing your neighbors in other words, a fun world to spend some time in, anchored by a great soundtrack. If you enjoyed John Cusack's Rob in the 2000 film version of "High Fidelity," you'll be pleased to hear that the emotional notes are the same here: Our heroine, who also confides directly to the camera, is just as self absorbed and destructive, and is struggling to grow up. "Oh, you're an adult? 'Cause you dress like a little boy," her brother says to her at one point. Her misanthropy is tempered somewhat by her employees, played wonderfully by David H. Holmes and Da'Vine Joy Randolph. But be warned: The show still may leave a bitter taste in your mouth.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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FRANKFURT Whenever Germany thrived, so did the rest of Europe. But that long held belief is being questioned by its neighbors, which see evidence that the country is taking off without them. Despite Berlin's hefty financial support of the euro zone's more beleaguered members in the last few years, the economic crisis has corroded commercial ties between Germany and the rest of Europe. Countries like Italy and Spain no longer have the purchasing power they once did, and they trade less with Germany because of it. Greece, the most distressed country in Europe, is now little more than a German rounding error. German exports to Greece plunged 40 percent from 2008, while Germany imported 9 percent less from Greece. Last year, Greece ranked 44th among German trading partners, just behind Vietnam. No wonder German companies, cheered on by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, have turned their attention to faster growing places like Asia or the United States. "Right now it's a decoupling story rather than a helping hand story," said Carsten Brzeski, a senior economist at the Dutch bank ING. It is not simply an economic issue, but a geopolitical one. Ms. Merkel is running for re election this month in a campaign in which one of the few debating points is how many more financial handouts Germany will give to its weaker neighbors. She has made a conscious effort of building closer ties with bigger and faster growing markets like China. If the Merkel government succeeds in making Germany a bigger global player through trade and investment policy, it not only insulates Germany from European structural woes but also ensures that it remains a global economic force in its own right. For the rest of the euro zone and the larger European Union, however, unity depends on the sustained energy and commitment of Germany, the wealthiest and most powerful member. The more that Germany sees its long term interests lying outside Europe, the less certain the future of the entire European project. "Germany is less willing to play ball," said Stefano Micossi, director general of Assonime, an Italian business group and research organization. Rather than pulling together, he said, European leaders have been "falling back to mutual mistrust and national solutions." On Tuesday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said that even as Germany resumed growth, the euro zone's most vulnerable countries were unlikely to follow until sometime next year. European banks remain weak, the group said, while lending usually considered a prerequisite for economic growth continues to decline. The euro zone's economic future remains heavily dependent on Germany, the biggest market for products like shoes from Italy or Ford minivans made in Spain. German companies like Linde, a large supplier of gases for use in industry and health care, are major employers in Southern Europe. But Linde's big growth this year was in the United States, where sales rose 58 percent in the third quarter, to 2.6 billion, thanks to the purchase of Lincare, a company that supplies oxygen to patients in their homes. The United States has also become a hot market for German companies like Voith, a maker of industrial equipment, which said last month that it expected to profit from a new law intended to encourage construction of hydroelectric power plants. Voith issued a statement calling the new law "terrific news" no surprise considering that the company is one of the world's largest suppliers of hydropower equipment. In addition, China has become the most important market for Volkswagen, which sold 1.5 million cars there in the first six months of this year, more than in Western Europe. Volkswagen is also putting renewed emphasis on North America. In 2011, it opened a factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., that contributed to a 10 percent increase in American sales through June from a year earlier. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. "It's kind of natural that Germany has to look for new trading partners," said Wolfgang Lechthaler, a senior researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Kiel, Germany. Even if trade with the rest of Europe recovers, "many business relations are also long term relations," he said. "It might not go back to the same level as before." German annualized growth of 2.9 percent in the second quarter of this year lifted the average for the euro zone as a whole and, at least on paper, ended a regional recession that began in 2011. But a closer look at the numbers shows a big gulf between growing, northern tier countries like Germany, Austria or Finland and southern countries like Spain, Italy and Greece, which continue to contract, albeit at a more moderate pace than before. The divide makes for tricky navigation by the European Central Bank, which will hold its monthly monetary policy meeting on Thursday, as it tries to promote growth in the ailing countries while heading off inflation in the healthier ones. "Average data for the euro area disguises some divergence," Jorg Asmussen, a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank, acknowledged in an interview in Berlin last week. "You have some countries with robust growth. On the other hand, you have countries that are deep in recession." The question now is whether German companies might rediscover some of their traditional markets in Europe, given the tentative signs of stabilization. Economic output in Spain, Italy and Greece shrank but at a much slower pace than in previous quarters. Unemployment fell slightly in Spain and Italy, though it continued to rise in Greece. If the southern tier European countries recover, they could once again become attractive places to do business or produce goods. Despite the strains on European unity, the shared currency as well as a relatively homogeneous legal system could eventually work in favor of the most stricken countries. And even with the growth of trade with China and the United States, Germany's largest trading partner is still France, with which it did 169 billion euros ( 223 billion) in import export business last year. "Europe plays a completely different role than China," said Karl Heinz Paque, a professor of economics at the University of Magdeburg in Germany. "It's not only trade links, it's also deep integration." It will take more than help from Germany to reduce unemployment in Spain and Greece to tolerable levels. The General Confederation of Workers of Greece, a research institute tied to Greece's largest labor union, concluded in a study leaked this week that Greek unemployment could require two decades to fall to 10 percent from nearly 28 percent today. Mr. Asmussen of the European Central Bank said it would take years to fix the imbalances that led to the euro zone crisis, which include excess debt and loss of competitiveness by the stricken countries. "The probability of catastrophic events has been drastically decreased," he said, but Europe still faces "an adjustment decade."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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BEHIND THE SCENES WITH EDITORS "The first best seller I had was 'The Power of Habit,' by Charles Duhigg. It was also the first book I signed up, so it had special significance. That moment, every Wednesday afternoon, when the list shows up in our inboxes, is always fun tense, too. There's this moment of quiet as the attachment opens, and then you hear screams and claps and hell yesses echoing over the floor. 'The Power of Habit' had two publicists, a production editor, several marketers and designers, a serial rights person and a sales force that had been working for months to make it a success. It's rare that a book hitting the list is a total surprise, but there are nail biters and books that hit higher than we expected and that's a beautiful thing ... but not as beautiful as making that call to an author who has worked so hard to make her book a reality and telling her that she is an official NYT best seller. That moment never gets old; it's impossible to be jaded about it. Sometimes they get quiet, sometimes they cry, sometimes they yell OH MY GOD. All of the above are appropriate." Andy Ward, publisher, Random House "When I told Susan Jane Gilman that 'Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress' was a best seller, she was speechless and Susan is never speechless. Her first call was to her high school English teacher, Frank McCourt." Amy Einhorn, publisher, Henry Holt "I'm lucky to publish John Kenney, who wrote a collection of fun, real poems about beleaguered married people. This was a fun side project for both of us, so when the best seller list came out after the book had been out for a week, it didn't occur to me to check it. A few hollers down the hall told me something was up. Turned out, 'Love Poems for Married People' was on that list! When we called John, the phone rang, and then we heard, 'This voice mail box is full and cannot accept messages.' When I finally reached John, he was delighted and bewildered. He said, 'I was at the dentist!'" Sally Kim, editor in chief, Putnam "I was with Elizabeth Kostova on a tour stop in Chicago when Michael Pietsch called to tell me 'The Historian' was No. 1 on the list and I think she and I were both in shock he said later that my reaction seemed a little subdued. Now that I've been able to make that same Wednesday night call myself, I know it's one of the job's best perks: Whether they're surprised or not, authors are definitely glad to hear the news." Reagan Arthur, publisher, Little, Brown
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The most engaging workers in the concert revival of "Working," which opened on Wednesday night at New York City Center, have only recently been added to this 1977 musical's cast of characters. But they pulse with a vitality and human detail that makes you think, "Tell me more." Take Abdou Sillah, a Gambian born New Yorker whose resume includes jobs as a sommelier, long distance trucker, restroom cleaner and "fry guy" at Planet Hollywood. More immediately relevant, though, is Abdou's current gig: site supervisor for security at the very place where Anne Kauffman's production of "Working" runs through Saturday. "I am New York City Center's face, I'll say," he offers, by way of introduction, "because I am the one who has direct contact with anybody who enters." He continues: "Everybody who comes into this building, I have different ways of greeting each of them. So many gestures, I will wave, take five ... some will dance, I will dance ... " Now that's the kind of specifically individual talk that reminds you of the serendipitous pleasures of hearing someone you've never met before describe what she or he does for a living. This is especially true when the speaker makes you appreciate the unacknowledged labor of keeping a place you hold dear alive and functional.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Re "A Repudiation That Never Came," by Jamelle Bouie (column, Nov. 6): Can we stop being morally indignant that half the country voted differently than we did? This nation was founded and built on conflict over values: the role of government, the divide between church and state, the limits of individual freedoms, who is a person. We are a people in constant tension with one another over values. This endless struggle may seem at times as absurd as Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, only to have it fall back down for him to start anew. It is hard work. It seems to go nowhere. We grow exhausted, physically and spiritually. But it also is the meaning of being American. The Constitution's preamble memorializes the basis on which we agree to push that rock up the hill each day: to form a perfect union, to establish justice, to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty to us and those who follow us. The rock falls. We start over. It is not easy. But we push our way back up the hill to preserve America. We push back up the hill because the struggle to do so is what it means to be American. In "A President Sabotages His Own Country" (column, Nov. 5), Nicholas Kristof expresses bewilderment about how voters in this election could have voted for President Trump in greater numbers than ever, after four years of experiencing his bungling of Covid 19, his endless lies and his attacks on American institutions. In Thomas L. Friedman's column on the same day, "Even Before a Winner, America Was the Loser," we find a plausible answer, from Rich Lowry, National Review editor: Mr. Trump, repellent as he is, is seen as the only means available to resist "the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between." The Democrats are regarded by many who in the past would have been part of their base as identified with the trends of "wokeness" that accuse white people, and particularly white men, of complicity in systemic racism, patriarchal oppression and "toxic masculinity." Moreover, Democrats have taken stands on issues such as abortion and policing that denigrate values and beliefs a lot of ordinary people hold dear. If Joe Biden is going to help heal the terrible divisions that afflict us, he must not only address the wreckage due to Mr. Trump but also work to reform the divisive and counterproductive agenda of the woke "progressive" left. Thomas L. Friedman has written another brilliant column, outlining the deep, irreconcilable divides in our country. He describes the fear of less educated whites that the country's population is moving heavily toward people of color and different cultural backgrounds, and that they are being left behind by a skilled technological society that they believe ignores their needs and demeans them. There is also a rural and urban divide. These differences have deeply divided America, exacerbated by the Trump presidency. A century and a half ago America fought a civil war over issues painfully analogous to these. Perhaps it is time to consider a similar solution, but by peaceful means. The fractionalization of the country is leaving deep scars that will not heal. Perhaps recognizing this can lead to peaceful separation of the union into red states and blue states acceptable to both sides. The states on each coast could join in a blue union, with a few states in between, perhaps even joining with Canada to unite the geographic separation. It is time to end the hatred on both sides. A first step would be for President Biden to fully pardon President Trump, and for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to do likewise. Historians mostly agree that Gerald Ford was wise to pardon Richard Nixon. The good of the country must come first. President Trump gave voice to many voters who previously felt hopeless. Although personally flawed and corrupt, as are a great many politicians, he did keep many of his promises and brought needed balance to our politics. More than 70 million citizens voted for him. He would have been re elected by a wide margin but for a virus. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment is that he may have made liberals a little less arrogant. A pardon is both needed and appropriate. We need to come together as a nation. As a lifelong Democrat, an Oakland resident and a lesbian, I am thrilled by the prospect of a more diverse administration, the hopeful emblem for which is Kamala Harris, Oakland's pride. But I also fear more division and stalemate. I'm apprehensive about the prospect of relentless Senate blockading by Mitch McConnell against all things perceived as Democratic, blue, liberal. That is why I urge liberal support for at least two respected Republican cabinet members, who could encourage Republican senators and those voters who did not support Joe Biden to be more receptive to the new administration's initiatives. The truth is, Democrats demonize and "other" Republicans as much as the other way around. It's time to have leadership nudge our divided country toward real dialogue and reconciliation, in brave, practical and highly visible ways. Re "We Still Don't Really Understand Trump," by Frank Bruni (Sunday Review, Nov. 8): Like Mr. Bruni, I wonder how more than 70 million Americans could have voted for Donald Trump. I understand that many who live away from large, diverse urban areas believe that "elites" look down on them and have strong negative feelings about nonwhites and immigrants. That said, I am baffled as to why his failure to manage Covid and its economic fallout which must have affected many directly wasn't more important in their electoral decisions. Part of the answer is that many of them do not share the view that, in fact, he did fail. I heard an elderly person in Florida tell an interviewer that she thought Mr. Trump had done all he could about the virus. Yet those of us who read The Times and other mainstream media know that Mr. Trump rejected science based recommendations. As a result we did worse than every other developed country. Since the data don't lie, my assumption is that those facts did not make an impression on Trump voters. Why? Because they get their news and views from sources Fox and social media that overwhelm them with "alternative facts." To make progress on the many fronts that need attention, this is a problem that must be overcome. As I read the opinion pieces and letters to the editor since the election, it remains obvious to this New York Times reader that your journalists and many of your readers still don't understand President Trump's supporters. I accept that and expect that this mistaken and condescending view (we are all "deplorables") will yield gains for the G.O.P. in 2022 and 2024. The most important takeaway for Democrats is that it's time to get to know the voters in all of the states, and learn how to communicate in a way that does not frighten or insult them.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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This summer's Lincoln Center Festival is about crossing borders. But its plan to present the North American premiere of a work by the Syrian playwright Mohammad al Attar risks being stopped at the United States border if President Trump's travel ban is upheld. To present the play, "While I Was Waiting," Lincoln Center is seeking visas for several artists with passports from Syria one of several predominantly Muslim nations from which the Trump administration has sought to temporarily ban travelers. The recent pair of executive orders seeking the ban were both blocked by court orders. The festival is hoping the visas will be granted. "Our choice of artists predated the travel ban," Nigel Redden, the director of the Lincoln Center Festival, said in an email. "But the very idea of the ban shows how important it is for us to have greater understanding of the world beyond our own borders." "While I Was Waiting," about the travails of a middle class family in Damascus, is one of several international plays planned for this summer's festival, which will run from July 10 to 30. The festival will begin with "Opening Skinner's Box," from Britain's Improbable Theater, and will feature two productions from Israel: David Grossman's "To the End of the Land" and Amos Gitai's "Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination." Dance Companies From Around the World A previously announced highlight of the festival will be an unusual international performance of George Balanchine's "Jewels," with the Paris Opera Ballet, New York City Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet trading acts of a work that evokes different national dance styles. The Bolshoi will also perform the American premiere of "The Taming of the Shrew," choreographed by Jean Christophe Maillot and with music by Shostakovich. And Aurelie Dupont, the director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet, will appear in "Sleeping Water," with the Japanese choreographer dancer Saburo Teshigawara and his troupe, Karas. The festival will play tribute to the jazz saxophonist and innovative composer Ornette Coleman, who died in 2015 at 85, with a series of programs. One will be a screening of "Naked Lunch," David Cronenberg's 1991 film adaptation of that William S. Burroughs novel, while the score, which Coleman co wrote, is played live by Ensemble Signal, with guests including Coleman's son, Denardo; Ravi Coltrane; and Henry Threadgill. Gong Linna, the Chinese vocalist, will join the Bang on a Can All Stars from New York in "Cloud River Mountain," a staged work composed by Lao Luo, Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. And Morton Subotnick, the pioneering American composer of electronic music, will mark the 50th anniversary of his influential "Silver Apples of the Moon" by performing it at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse on a bill with a new work, "Crowds and Power," featuring the singer Joan La Barbara and imagery by Lillevan, a Berlin based video artist.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Samantha Stephens realized her longtime dream eight years ago, opening an oatmeal bar in Greenwich Village where customers can build bowls with toppings that range from chia seeds and berries to bacon and poached eggs. Now, the coronavirus has left the little company fighting for its life. Ms. Stephens had methodically prepared to jump into New York's competitive dining scene, attending culinary school at night while working full time as an investment bank executive assistant. When she did, she turned an initial loan into a small but solid business, one that pulls in about 45,000 in revenue each month. But her shop, OatMeals, a 380 square foot cubby that offers oat themed pastries and 30 set bowls among them "The Hot Date" and "Truffle RisOATto" has suffered a serious blow amid quarantines. It has forced Ms. Stephens to make tough choices. Her story is one of many but shows why the damage inflicted on businesses today might cast a long shadow on the future of the U.S. economy. Below is a diary of the decisions she has made, the hurdles along the way, and what lies ahead. The Last Day of Normalcy "The shop is open 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, so my staff and I are there by 6:15. We get in early and start cooking the hot oatmeal and baking the fresh oatmeal pastries. We open at 7 a.m. our main rush is 8:15, 8:30 to 10:30. That's our big, busy rush. The deliveries start coming in, and we've got multiple tablets," she said, explaining that the devices keep the oatmeal baristas posted on takeout orders, which are very popular. "They all start chirping and buzzing at us." "It all got serious overnight I heard customers talking about it," Ms. Stephens said of the virus, which was just beginning to spread in New York. Revenues quickly began dropping. "The numbers were down 22 percent from the previous Wednesday; Thursday was 24 percent down. Friday the 13th they were down 65 percent from the previous Friday. That Friday we dropped down to just myself and one other employee on a morning shift, it's normally three to four of us. Normally, I'm open until 5 p.m., but it was so dead that we closed at 1 p.m." The city had announced that restaurants could open only for takeout and delivery. "I was testing it out, and that Tuesday, I was down 86 percent. It was costing me more to open my doors than I could bring in, in sales. I really wanted to stay open for the community, I love my regular customers, and they depend on their morning oatmeal." "It was myself and one other employee. We worked until 1 p.m., and I told her: 'Let me think about this. I'll get in touch with you later,'" Ms. Stephens said. It was a major inflection point for a small business owner who depended on steady revenue but realized the need to control costs. "I was going to order new inventory: my dairy, my fresh fruits. I probably shouldn't be ordering who knows what's going to happen?" "I had to text my employees and say: 'Hey, guys, I don't know what's going to happen. I need to take you off the schedule.' At that point, I thought it was going to be a week or two. I was really hopeful." That Wednesday was the first day that OatMeals closed its doors, leaving Ms. Stephens at home, scared and unsure what to do next. She scrambled for anything that could give her a sense of what might happen, reading newspapers, industry newsletters and mailing lists, and New York dining scene websites. "I was reading the news, reading any information that was coming in. My vendors and delivery partners were sending out notices. There was a lot of misinformation. There was a lot of confusing information." After weeks of debate in Washington, President Trump signed a coronavirus relief package, known as the CARES Act, into law. It included funding for small business loans, which are forgivable for firms that keep their employees, and for Economic Injury Disaster Loan advances, which are meant to give small businesses quick access to capital. "As soon as I heard that the government was somehow going to help the mention of the CARES Act I thought, well, that's good. That seemed helpful. When there was a mention of some kind of assistance, especially forgivable assistance." "Very quickly, I realized that there's no way I'm going to be able to pay what I owe on the store. And there's no separation between the business and myself I try to keep the lights on in my apartment and my store," Ms. Stephens said. She knew she would miss rent on both, a "really scary" reality. 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. "I emailed the landlords and said, 'Hey, I had to close on the 18th, and I'm going to get right back on track, but I'm not going to be able to pay in April,'" she said. She was hoping for understanding, but what she got was a form email from her store landlord reminding her of her obligation to pay the 6,300 monthly rent, and suggesting that she check in with her insurance. She did. "Insurance is not going to cover this." "The Economic Injury Disaster Loan was the one I knew I could apply for," she said. The loan program, which offers businesses low interest working capital, had newly been expanded and made to include 10,000 grants. "The reason that I wasn't able to submit right away is that the site kept changing," she said, and it required lots of information that she did not have handy. "I reached out to my accountant. I needed a couple of details. One day, on April 4, I went through it, and I had finally gotten to the point where it was like, OK, you can submit. I submitted, and I never received an 'application submitted' email." Ms. Stephens, worried that she would not get loans, set up a GoFundMe page, asking for donations to cover her costs. "I tried to be very honest and say this money would go to my rent, my utilities and my employees," she said. She got some backlash for that, because other restaurants in the area were doing GoFundMe campaigns that they said were exclusively dedicated to supporting employees. She thought she should be as upfront as possible. "We have to have a store to return to, and to do that, I have to pay the rent." The effort has raised nearly 6,000 of its 25,000 goal, largely from small donations of 25 or 50. "Around the same time, I was reading about the Paycheck Protection Program and realizing that it could be partially forgivable, so I should definitely try to get it. I thought it was also through the government I didn't realize it was through a bank." "Finally, after a few days, they said they were able to start taking applications, so then I did apply through Chase." Ms. Stephens received a confirmation that she had applied for government help four days after submitting the Paycheck Protection application. (Ms. Wexler said Chase's system did not register the application until April 11.) It left her feeling uncertain, with no real information about if or when a reprieve might come. "I didn't get any additional detail it just says 'soon.' I don't know what soon means." The initial 349 billion that Congress allocated for the CARES Act programs ran out on April 16. Ms. Stephens had yet to hear back nor had any money appeared in her bank. Even though she knew the funding had been exhausted, she thought that she must have gotten across the line before that happened. "I was hopeful, because I have a relationship with Chase, that I would have a foot in the door." The email from Chase Business Banking came on Friday, as Ms. Stephens sat on the couch, her laptop propped up next to her. The funds had run dry before her application had made it through. "We understand that many of you are disappointed," the email read. The letdowns and stress have left her in tears, she said. "It's panic and worry, and it's fear," she said. "But over all a bit of numbness right now because this is all so weird." Ms. Stephens relocated to Florida, where her long distance boyfriend has a house, after closing her shop so that she wouldn't have to wait out the shutdown alone in New York. Now, she's eager for any sign that she can return and reopen. She never heard back about the first application, but that program is also out of cash. If she is approved for money after Congress adds more funds to the program as is expected this week she'll use it for missed payments and wages. If she doesn't receive some help, she doesn't see how she will manage after two months of missing her shop rent. "It's really hard to imagine; I don't even want to think about it," she said of losing the shop. At the same time, "it's going to be impossible if we don't get some assistance." She keeps in touch with her 11 employees, some of whom have applied for unemployment insurance. "The vibe is good. They're excited to get back to OatMeals and do what we do best," she said. But "they're panicking, too everybody has their own bills to pay."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Remixed footage from live performances of Rashaad Newsome's piece "Black Magic" from 2019 will be on billboards in Times Square each night of December. Just before midnight every evening in December, some 70 digital billboards encircling the gaudy canyon of Times Square will be co opted for three minutes by slow motion images of Black voguers, performing dances of resistance, resilience and liberation. The video installation is the work of the multidisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome, who has remixed footage from live performances of his 2019 piece "Black Magic." The opportunity to stage "Black Magic" in Times Square a storied crossroads of commercialism, celebration, protest, performance "was a great proposition to do something transgressive," said Mr. Newsome, 40, who grew up in New Orleans and is now based in Oakland, Calif., and Brooklyn. Showing Mr. Newsome's work at a museum like hers, which focuses on queer art, is one thing, said Laura Raicovich, director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art. "But to position it in Times Square says something altogether different about the way that we all need to be engaged in the conversations that Black Lives Matter bring to the table." (The museum and Times Square Arts jointly commissioned this "Midnight Moment," which premieres Tuesday to coincide with World AIDS Day.) On Dec. 10 at 11:30 p.m., several dancers from the New York Ballroom community will perform, spaced apart, live on the red steps at the Broadway plaza between 46th and 47th Streets and then in concert at 11:57 p.m., with the multichannel presentation illuminating the screens. "I want it to be a memorial to those who have fallen," said the artist, drawing a parallel between the AIDS epidemic and the pandemic, which has disproportionately affected Black Americans. "The dancers were asked to perform 'Black Magic,' which I understand as the strength of the human spirit to navigate systemic racism and homophobia with grace and dignity," Mr. Newsome said. Rather than provide them with specific choreography for these performances, he gives this prompt and lets his dancers create sequences for themselves that make visible their lived experiences. But as New York City braces for further possible restrictions as coronavirus cases multiply, what audience in Times Square could this and other public art projects actually reach? Pre pandemic, Times Square's foot traffic was extraordinary, with an average of 380,000 visitors daily. After the city's initial lockdown, that number plunged to some 33,000 pedestrians a day, in April. Widely shown images of a deserted Times Square became symbolic of how severely public life in the city had changed. For Jean Cooney, the director of Times Square Arts, the relevance of contemporary artists intervening in this landscape has only become more important. "I had a chance to program public art for those 30,000 people who were most likely New Yorkers and essential workers a worthy, if not the most worthy, audience for public art in that moment," Ms. Cooney said. In the early months of the pandemic, in partnership with For Freedoms and Poster House, Times Square Arts worked with more than three dozen artists and designers, including Carrie Mae Weems, Jenny Holzer and Maira Kalman, on the messages of gratitude and solidarity displayed across multiple billboards. Organizers have also repurposed some of Times Square's displays for more political messages, like a recent billboard that depicted the death of George Floyd through a painting by Donald Perlis. "Knowing that so many media outlets and cameras were trained on Times Square, there was the potential for those messages even if we were all watching from home to be amplified to New Yorkers and people around the world," Ms. Cooney said. Current foot traffic in the area, at just over 100,000, is still about 70 percent less than the daily figure last year (with the exception of Nov. 7, when almost 190,000 people streamed into Times Square to celebrate the results of the presidential election). The "Midnight Moment" series, which has been taking place since 2012, had an estimated cumulative viewership of about 36,000 for a piece by the digital arts collective Optical Animal that was projected throughout October. For such artist projects, "it almost doesn't matter if there are zero people in Times Square because it's really about filming it and then sharing and scaling it on social channels," said Jodi Senese, the chief marketing officer of Outfront Media, which has 24 displays in Times Square. "The spread becomes enormous." On Tuesday, Ms. Raicovich will unveil the facade of the Leslie Lohman museum in Soho wrapped in vinyl wallpaper printed with Mr. Newsome's signature "King of Arms Tincture." This baroque pattern of bejeweled flowers, evocative of Ballroom lounge decoration, also appears in animated form at intervals on the screens in Times Square, creating a kind of frame and environment for the dancers. And in January, Leslie Lohman's website will host a full length cut of the 2019 performances included in "Black Magic." With the museum still closed to the public, pivoting to the open air plaza of Times Square was a way to bring Mr. Newsome's work safely to audiences, whatever the number (and however chilly outside). "Times Square as a site is all the things that New York City is, beautiful and ugly, much of which has stopped right now," Ms. Raicovich said. "To return with this exuberant dance of survival and joy to me is a gesture of profound hope."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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The mosquito borne virus that causes Rift Valley fever may severely injure human fetuses if contracted by mothers during pregnancy, according to new research. In a study published last month in the journal Science Advances, researchers used infected rats and human fetal tissue to discover how the virus targets the placenta. Results showed that the virus may be even more damaging to fetuses than the Zika virus, which set off a global crisis in 2015 and left thousands of babies in Central America and South America with severe birth defects. "Zika caught everybody by surprise," said Amy Hartman, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, who led the research. "If doctors had known about Zika's birth effects, they could have done a lot more to protect pregnant women and babies. With Rift Valley fever, we're trying to get ahead of the curve." Rift Valley fever primarily occurs in livestock in sub Saharan Africa, where outbreaks cause 90 to 100 percent of pregnant cows in a herd to miscarry or deliver stillborn calves, often a significant economic loss.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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On Dec. 10, 2016, the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace spent several hours interviewing Donald J. Trump for an episode of "Fox News Sunday." Mr. Wallace spoke with Mr. Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan and then flew with Mr. Trump and his advisers to the Army Navy football game in Baltimore, where their conversation continued. In the broadcast, which aired the next day, Mr. Wallace pressed the president elect about Russian intervention in the 2016 election, his unorthodox cabinet appointments and why Mr. Trump believed it was ethical to maintain his private business interests while in office. One exchange between the two men did not make the cut: a question about Michael G. Flynn, the son of Mr. Trump's choice for national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn. The younger Mr. Flynn had been fired from the transition team days earlier for spreading incendiary conspiracy theories on social media. Why that exchange never aired is now a question in political circles. It emerged this week that Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump's former campaign manager, told the special counsel's office in 2018 that "Fox agreed to cut out that part of the interview" after it was deemed "embarrassing for Trump." The Mueller report summaries were released after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from BuzzFeed News and CNN in 2019. Mr. Wallace told The New York Times on Tuesday that Mr. Bannon's accusation was "utter foolishness and completely misleading," and that he had never agreed to any editorial changes at the behest of Mr. Trump or his aides. Mr. Trump did indeed ask that the exchange be excised, Mr. Wallace said. But the anchor said his decision to leave the question out of the broadcast had been based solely on the news value of Mr. Trump's reply or, in this case, lack thereof. In his first public remarks about Mr. Bannon's accusation, Mr. Wallace described to The Times his day with the president elect. According to Mr. Wallace, he asked Mr. Trump about Mr. Flynn's tweets during the first part of the interview, at Trump Tower. "The president elect," Mr. Wallace said, replied that "he didn't know anything about it and he would look into it." "I just thought, 'That didn't go anywhere, and I'm not going to use it,'" Mr. Wallace said, adding that he knew he would have to edit the footage to fit the one hour format of "Fox News Sunday." Later, on the plane ride to Baltimore, the president elect brought up the earlier exchange, telling the anchor that Mr. Flynn's father considered the question "embarrassing," Mr. Wallace said. 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 president said to me, 'Can you take that out?'" Mr. Wallace recalled. "He asked me not to run something that I never intended to run in the first place." Asked what he had told Mr. Trump, Mr. Wallace said: "I don't know exactly what I said, but I indicated that it wasn't going to run." He added: "If the president had made even a scintilla of news on the subject, of course I would have run it, and I wouldn't have cared what the president had said." Fox News's treatment of Mr. Trump is often scrutinized, in no small part because the network's leading opinion hosts are outspoken boosters of the president and his agenda. Mr. Wallace, a veteran Washington hand who moderated a presidential debate in 2016, is a news anchor for the network, not a commentator. He has earned Mr. Trump's ire in the past for asking tough questions and offering tough analysis of the president and his senior aides. Since taking office, Mr. Trump has also insulted Mr. Wallace on Twitter, comparing him unfavorably to his father, the "60 Minutes" anchor Mike Wallace. "My reaction is always: 'One of us has a daddy problem, and it's not me,'" Chris Wallace said at a panel in Manhattan last year. In the interview with The Times, Mr. Wallace said no one else at Fox News had any input in the editing process for his 2016 interview with Mr. Trump.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The owner of the Hallmark Channel said on Thursday that it would no longer work with shows featuring the actress Lori Loughlin, one of the parents implicated in a sprawling college admissions cheating operation that was revealed by federal prosecutors this week. Ms. Loughlin, 54, who made her name in the late 1980s as Aunt Becky on the family sitcom "Full House," had an important role in the Hallmark show "When Calls the Heart" and was the hero of the channel's TV movie series "Garage Sale Mysteries." But no longer. "We are saddened by the recent news surrounding the college admissions allegations," Crown Media Family Networks, Hallmark's parent company, said in a statement. "We are no longer working with Lori Loughlin and have stopped development of all productions that air on the Crown Media Family Network channels involving Lori Loughlin including 'Garage Sale Mysteries,' an independent third party production." Ms. Loughlin is one of 50 people charged in a fraud scheme in which wealthy parents paid to help their children win admission to elite colleges or to inflate their SAT scores. Ms. Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, the founder of the Mossimo fashion brand, were accused of paying two bribes of 50,000 each to Donna Heinel, a senior associate athletic director at the University of Southern California. Prosecutors said Ms. Heinel then marked the girls as recruits for the rowing team, which would improve their chances of admission, even though neither daughter participated in the sport.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Edward P. Bass first visited Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History in 1952 when he was 6 years old. Sixty six years later he has donated 160 million toward renovating the museum, the university announced Tuesday. Mr. Bass, a Yale alumnus, businessman and philanthropist, said his gift was motivated by a belief in institutions. "I see institutions as having the power to transmit and perpetuate a set of fundamental values, and to do so generation to generation," he said in a phone interview. Yale, he added, is a particularly strong institution with a long history: "It's been more than 300 years, so I have some faith." The Peabody Museum, founded in 1866, is home to about 13 million objects fossils, dinosaur skeletons, minerals and meteorites, and scientific instruments among them from more than four billion years of history. It has been operating in its current location since 1925.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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The fashion designers Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta were longtime friends, socializing with their respective spouses in New York and in Mr. de la Renta's native Dominican Republic in the years before he died in 2014. But the venerable fashion houses that carry their names are now engaged in a proxy battle turned head on clash, one that centers on a young woman who was being groomed as the successor to one and ended up being hired away by the other. Last week, Carolina Herrera filed suit against Oscar de la Renta, demanding that its new creative director cease working for the label immediately. The creative director at the center of the conflict is Laura Kim, a 34 year old designer who began working at Oscar de la Renta in 2003, while still in college, and left for Carolina Herrera in 2015 after being passed over for the role upon Mr. de la Renta's death. She joined Carolina Herrera in February as senior vice president for design, but submitted her resignation about four months later. Less than a week after her official departure from Carolina Herrera at the end of August, Alex Bolen, the chief executive at Oscar de la Renta, confirmed that Ms. Kim and her creative partner, Fernando Garcia, 30, would take over as creative directors beginning with the label's fall 2017 collection. That is when the troubles began. When she joined Carolina Herrera, Ms. Kim signed a noncompete contract, an agreement not to work for any direct competitors for six months after leaving the company. This meant she would not be allowed to do anything for Oscar de la Renta until April 2017, so she could not work on the label's fall 2017 collection and stay within the terms of her contract. "The claims themselves seem pretty straightforward," said Julie Zerbo, founder of the website the Fashion Law. "A clearly written six month clause is expected for someone in Laura Kim's position." Ms. Zerbo cited recent examples of other fashion designers who were expected to wait to work at other companies, including Raf Simons, who left Dior in fall 2015 and joined Calvin Klein in August, and Hedi Slimane, who left Saint Laurent in April and actually demanded that Kering reinstate his noncompete clause after it had been removed. So, in a sense, it is surprising that Ms. Kim wasted no time in flouting the agreement and joining the competition, a sentiment Carolina Herrera quickly expressed in a letter demanding that Ms. Kim honor her contract. As communications between the label's lawyers became a back and forth battle over the legitimacy of the noncompete clause, several story lines have emerged. One: According to Ms. Kim, she joined Carolina Herrera under the impression that Mrs. Herrera would be retiring and that she would be offered the creative director position, but quickly discovered that Mrs. Herrera had not been made aware of those conversations. Ms. Kim's lawyers called the plan of succession "surreptitious" and the resulting work situation "untenable." Just three days after Ms. Kim filed her resignation, Francois Kress, the president of Carolina Herrera, did, in fact, offer her the creative director post (and a 1 million salary, more than double what she made as senior vice president). According to the complaint, Ms. Kim refused the promotion because Mr. Garcia had not been offered a co creative director position, and because the Carolina Herrera company had not offered enough support to Monse, the label Ms. Kim and Mr. Garcia run together. In her affidavit, Ms. Kim also said that Mrs. Herrera had often intervened in her working process and did not like some of her designs. According to Ms. Kim, Mrs. Herrera told her: "Nobody knows you and nobody knows that you are here. I am more famous than you and have more powerful friends." Two: In asking Ms. Kim to sign a noncompete agreement, Carolina Herrera had been specifically concerned with Ms. Kim's possible return to Oscar de la Renta, not her going to other labels. In a letter sent on Oct. 26, a lawyer for the house wrote, "Carolina Herrera has no objection to Ms. Kim working for any fashion house other than Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera's direct competitor." The official complaint elaborated further, arguing that the relationship between the two houses is a zero sum competition, and that when one suffers the other inevitably benefits. Three: The beef goes way back. In its responses to the Carolina Herrera complaints, Oscar de la Renta has asserted that its hiring of Ms. Kim "was part of a larger pattern and practice of poaching" Oscar de la Renta employees according to the letter, nearly a dozen have been recruited over the last few years and accused the house of having "a record of unclean hands and unfair competition." It named Raffaele Ilardo, whom Carolina Herrera hired as a replacement for Ms. Kim, as the latest example, saying he had made an agreement to join Oscar de la Renta before Carolina Herrera snatched him away. On Dec. 21, a judge ruled in Carolina Herrera's favor (sort of), issuing a temporary restraining order that blocks Ms. Kim from continuing to work for Oscar de la Renta, at least until Jan. 10, when she and the label's lawyers are expected in court to try to fight the noncompete clause. In a statement, Carolina Herrera said: "As the court ruled, the noncompete agreement was fair and plainly worded. At all times, Carolina Herrera was faithful to the letter and spirit of our agreement, and we will continue to ethically and forcefully protect our business interests." But just two days later, the judge lifted the restraining order. All parties are still expected to appear in court on Jan. 10.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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It's been more than a week since Washington State's Aug. 4 primary election, and it wasn't considered newsworthy. There were no hourslong lines at polling stations, no uptick in infections since no one had to run a gantlet of virus spreaders to exercise their right to vote, and no one was denied their right to vote for fear of getting sick. That's because Washington has been voting exclusively by mail for almost a decade. Candidates were elected in both parties, and there has been no evidence of fraudulent voting. Washingtonians are tired of hearing how fraught with fraud voting by mail is, because we know it isn't true. Since there is no good way to prevent the Trump administration's crippling of the Postal Service heading into the November election, may there be a nongovernmental remedy? For example, Jeff Bezos, no fan of the president, should be willing to let the delivery of consumer goods slide a bit so that his Amazon empire can reliably distribute and return all the nation's mail in ballots. The label atop each envelope would provide an unimpeachable record of the round trip, acceptable to all election commissions. Max Frankel New York The writer is a former executive editor of The New York Times. As the former president and chief executive of the Direct Marketing Association, I cannot say enough in support of increased funding for the Postal Service. Think of what the Postal Service does: It delivers mail and packages to every address in the United States every day. This is amazing. Think about it: For first class letters, the Postal Service does this for a paltry 55 cents. If I handed you a letter in New York and said, "Bring this to my friend in Hawaii, and I'll give you 55 cents," you would laugh in my face. While so called junk mail gets a bad rap, think about that, too: Someone in Alaska can shop at Crate Barrel via catalog. Even in rural Maine where I live, I can take advantage of the store coupons that come to me in the mail. How is this not an integral part of the economy, especially when many are housebound? The pandemic makes the need for universal mail service even more pressing. But the Postal Service does extraordinary work day in and day out, and we should acknowledge it. In light of President Trump's latest threat to our democracy in essentially defunding the Postal Service, states need to act immediately. Right now, every state needs to have mail in ballots available for everyone for any reason, and encourage people to request them. Then they need to set up secure ballot boxes near the polls starting in October. Hire security to watch the boxes 24/7. Period. Wake up, governors! This is an emergency. It is apparent that President Trump is going to try to impede mail in voting in the fall election by crippling the Postal Service. I live in Washington State, where we hold all elections entirely by mail, and I want to share three simple tips for successful mail in voting to counter his effort. First, vote early and avoid the rush. If the ballot comes today, complete it and send it back tomorrow. Some states start to count early, but even if your state doesn't, at least your ballot is in their hands. Second, read and follow the instructions for completing the ballot carefully. For instance, the instructions will often specify a particular type of marker, usually a black or dark blue pen, sometimes a pencil. Whatever it says, use it. They also require some identification from you, usually the signature on your voter registration form. Make sure you sign the ballot in the exact same format. Third, I believe that the dedicated people of the Postal Service would be able to handle the added load of mail in ballots without breaking a sweat, but Mr. Trump seems determined to stop them. If possible, hand deliver your ballot. Some states provide drop off boxes for ballots; find and use them. While I don't believe President Trump's claims that voting by mail will cause a rigged election, in order to preclude presidential stoking of chaos and doubt, and to have a result on or about Nov. 3, we have a patriotic duty for everyone who is physically able to vote in person. I recognize the Covid 19 risks, but these can be ameliorated greatly by mandatory mask wearing and social distancing. Of course there will be endless lines, amplified by voter suppression efforts, but waiting long periods to cast our votes on one given day and take some modest health risks will be a small price to preserve our democracy. So with the exception of those states where universal voting by mail has become the norm, I ask my fellow citizens of all political persuasions who are healthy enough to do so to cast their votes in person. What can you and I do to help save the post office? Buy lots of stamps. You are providing urgently needed cash to the Postal Service.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve wants to make sure that investors understand that it could raise its benchmark interest rate in December; it just is not ready to make any promises yet. The Fed said on Wednesday, after a two day meeting of its policy making committee, that it would keep rates near zero for now, as expected, but it added an unusually explicit statement that it would consider raising rates at its final meeting of the year in mid December. Fed officials are struggling to decide whether the economy can tolerate higher interest rates, as growth continues to wobble along rather than power ahead on a clear upward path. "Everything will come down to the incoming data between now and mid December," Paul Ashworth, chief United States economist at Capital Economics, said on Wednesday after the Fed revealed its latest thinking. The Fed's message appeared to make an impression on investors who had written off the chances of a December liftoff. The yield on two year Treasuries, which is closely tied to interest rate expectations, rose to 0.707 percent Wednesday from 0.617 percent Tuesday. Equity indexes dropped sharply after the Fed issued its statement at 2 p.m. but then made up the lost ground and then some. The Standard Poor's 500 stock index rose 1.18 percent to 2,090.35 on the day. The odds of a December rate increase, derived from asset prices, rose from about 1 in 3 before the meeting to about 1 in 2 by the end of the day. But some investors remained skeptical that the Fed would act, noting that it has been reliably overconfident in its economic forecasts. "The Fed wants us to believe that it did not go in June and September, when the economy had a stronger pulse than it does now, but it is really seriously considering December," the French bank BNP Paribas said in a note to clients. "We don't believe Chair Yellen will go along with this in the end," it continued, referring to the Fed's chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen. The Fed's decision to delay liftoff until at least mid December means that short term rates will remain near zero for a seventh full year. By keeping rates so low, the Fed is encouraging borrowing and risk taking, which it hopes will translate into faster economic growth. Raising rates, conversely, is likely to weigh on growth by increasing the cost of borrowing. Wednesday's decision was supported by nine of the 10 members of the Federal Open Market Committee. Jeffrey M. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, voted to raise rates, as he did in September. The looming question now is whether the Fed will raise rates at its final meeting of the year, scheduled for Dec. 15 and 16. Ms. Yellen and other Fed officials have predicted for years and reiterated in recent weeks that they expected to start raising rates in 2015. A number of Fed officials have described the decision not to raise rates in September as a close call. Eight of the 12 regional reserve banks voted last month to increase a secondary but symbolic policy rate. And the Fed's statement highlighted the December meeting. "In determining whether it will be appropriate to raise the target range at its next meeting, the committee will assess progress both realized and expected toward its objectives of maximum employment and 2 percent inflation," the statement said. The previous Fed policy statement did not include the words "at its next meeting." The case for raising rates hinges in part on the Fed's forecast that the economy will continue to add jobs at a healthy pace and that inflation will begin to rise more quickly. Moreover, some analysts argue that maintaining near zero interest rates is now doing more harm than good by encouraging businesses to invest in things like share buybacks to lift their stock price, rather than long term investments in equipment and developing new products. Fed officials also want to raise rates slowly, to minimize economic disruptions, and starting early could help. The rebound in financial markets after a rocky late summer has removed one obstacle from the Fed's path. In the statement issued after its previous meeting in September, the Fed said global economic and financial developments might restrain domestic growth. That language was stripped from the new statement, leaving only an acknowledgment the Fed "is monitoring global economic and financial developments." But the Fed indicated that it was a little more worried about the domestic economy. The statement said "economic activity has been expanding at a moderate pace," forgoing the present tense "is expanding" that it used in September. And the Fed specifically said that job growth, a primary focus, had weakened in recent months, although the statement added that officials expect a rebound.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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The wait is over for the first volume of Barack Obama's presidential memoirs, "A Promised Land," which came out on Tuesday. But as a slew of articles calling the book's arrival "long awaited" and "highly anticipated" suggest, it was a considerable wait. Obama took three years and 10 months to publish longer than any other American president in the last century. The chart below shows the history. With the exception of presidents who died in office and George H.W. Bush, who never wrote a standard presidential memoir, no modern president has taken as long to publish after leaving the White House. First, Obama's book is long. While he "initially planned to write a 500 page memoir and be done in a year," The Times's Jennifer Szalai explained in a review, the book ended up stretching nearly 800 pages and taking more than three times longer to complete. And that's just volume one; a second remains in the works. Even so, other presidents have published similarly lengthy memoirs in less time. Bill Clinton's "My Life" appeared less than three and a half years after he left the White House and weighed in at around 1,000 pages. Harry Truman published the first installment of his two volume memoirs a full year faster than Obama published his. 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. Obama's meticulous approach and insistence on writing the book himself offers a second clue. "Obama is a genuine literary stylist," said Jonathan Alter, the author of two books about the 44th president. "And anybody who has ever tried to be one knows that it can be like squeezing blood from a stone." In an Atlantic interview, Obama confessed to laboring for hours over single paragraphs. "As I understand it, he writes in a very classic way," said Peter Osnos, who in 1995 published "Dreams From My Father," Obama's first memoir, at Times Books, then an imprint of Random House. "He sits down with a pen and a pad." Obama also seems to have eschewed tactics embraced by other presidents who also wrote their own books. He has admitted to struggling to keep a consistent diary while in the White House, a useful aid for past presidential memoirists. Jimmy Carter drew heavily on his diaries to write "Keeping Faith," which came out a brisk 21 months after he left office. "His discipline allowed him to write it quickly," said Alter, the author of a new biography of Carter. "Diaries help you speed the completion of your memoirs, and what slows them down is writing them yourself." Clinton took a different tack, hiring a former foreign policy speechwriter, the historian Ted Widmer, to interview him at length about his early life. Widmer then had the interviews transcribed and sent to Clinton, where they became grist as the former president wrote. "It's hard to look at a blank piece of paper and wonder what to say, especially if you're a former president trying to write for millions of readers," said Widmer, a professor at the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. "He understood intuitively that talking was a great way to begin." Other presidents, such as Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, were able to publish their books faster with the help of aides and ghostwriters. Obama's publisher, Crown, said aides assisted him with research, but he wrote the memoir himself. Reagan's "An American Life," which appeared less than two years after he left office, was largely ghostwritten; Reagan had little zeal for the project. "He used to jokingly refer to it as the monkey on his back," said Mark Weinberg, a former aide. "He didn't want it to dominate his post presidency life." Richard Nixon came the closest to surpassing Obama's timeline, though for different reasons. Holed up in his San Clemente, Calif., property with the handful of aides who helped draft his 1978 memoir, "RN," Nixon had to contend with litigation stemming from the Watergate scandal. "There were lawsuits that he had to defend against, and the Congress was still tracking him down," said Ken Khachigian, a former staffer who assisted with both Nixon's book and his legal defense. "The experience, day to day, was not fun." Presidential memoirs are "a really hard genre," said Craig Fehrman, the author of a history of presidential books. "We've seen lots of presidents with lots of talented aides, and ghostwriters too, take swings at this genre and struggle." Despite selling well, the books often resist lively prose, genuine introspection and fluid storytelling, he said, and they can quickly derail amid policy wonkery, self justification or score settling. Fehrman believes that Obama's book could be an exception. "You don't have to look far to find a literary writer who misses deadlines and goes on long bouts of self contemplation," he said. "On paper, he seems like the president who could break the streak."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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On a crisp Vermont morning in early November I met up with about 50 other enthusiastic skiers and snowboarders who were ready for the coming winter season. There was no snow, so skiing was out of the picture and it would have complicated our objective anyway. We were there to help clean up areas of Brandon Gap, a mountainous area in the central Green Mountain National Forest, notable for its designation by the United States Forest Service for backcountry skiing. Even in the bleak period after the fall had left the trees bare but before the snow would cover the decaying leaves, Vermont is a lovely place to visit it makes you seriously consider living a slower paced life. The volunteers gathered in a trailhead parking lot at the base of Goshen Mountain, loppers and saws dangling from belts and backpacks, waiting for instructions for the day. The group was diverse in age, from children with their parents to teenagers, college students, middle agers and retirees, all there because of their shared love of skiing. There was a collective sense of excitement for the season to come, and with nowhere to actually ski, this was the most productive place to prepare for future winter endeavors. "It's a ski area," Angus McCusker, the president of Rochester Area Sport Trail Alliance, or RASTA, said proudly, pointing up the mountain behind us. He was comparing the system of trails he and his group of volunteers had built by hand to that of a profit seeking ski resort whose trails had been created with machines. For skiers in the Northeast who are tired of the cost and the crowds at ski resorts, there have been few alternatives. That is starting to change with grass roots organizations that bring together enthusiastic skiers, snowboarders and the local community to work with the Forest Service and private landowners to cultivate areas with good downhill ski terrain away from resorts. This is human powered skiing there are no lifts, and you must hike, snowshoe or, ideally, skin. (To skin, you attach strips of fabric to the bottom of your skis to make them grip the snow. It is an efficient way to get to the top of a mountain, similar to Nordic skiing but with less glide and more traction.) Enthusiasm for backcountry skiing and snowboarding has been growing across the country for several years. Unlike Western states with ample snowfall and open terrain, backcountry skiers in the Northeast are limited to select alpine locations, several old trails built before ski areas were the norm and secret locations guarded with surfer style localism. The advantage to skiing these newly created areas over other backcountry terrain is that the glades and trails are well planned and maintained with skiing in mind. They also are easier to follow because the routes are defined, and maps of the terrain are readily available. "There was a lot of concern at first reactions from people as if it was going to blow out people's backcountry stashes. That isn't our intent," Mr. McCusker said, referring to some local skepticism about the project. Holly Knox, the district recreation program manager for the Rochester and Middlebury Ranger Districts, described the Forest Service's relationship with RASTA as one of the first projects where federal land is actively managed for the purpose of uphill travel for downhill skiing and snowboarding. "A lot of places have backcountry skiing on federal land where they don't need to manage for it. Out West you can naturally ski through the trees because you don't have the same amount of undergrowth that you see here," Ms. Knox said. She added that around 2009 she had received a few requests from individuals asking for new places to ski in the area's backcountry, but there was no unified voice for the skiers and the Forest Service didn't have experience working with downhill skiers. That changed when RASTA formed in the winter of 2013, organizing the backcountry ski community in central Vermont. The first several years were mostly devoted to planning: RASTA was looking for good terrain and the Forest Service was looking at ecological, infrastructure and safety concerns. Both Ms. Knox and Mr. McCusker described the relationship between RASTA and the Forest Service as a collaboration that is beneficial to both parties. "I think that we have both the environmental concerns at the forefront of what we are doing, as well as small town economic sustainability and that creative economy that comes with providing recreation opportunities," Ms. Knox said. In neighboring New Hampshire, Granite Backcountry Alliance has been working toward a similar goal. Led by Tyler Ray, the alliance has followed RASTA's blueprint in organizing the backcountry ski community and working with the Forest Service to create similar areas for skiing and snowboarding. Despite New Hampshire's proximity to Vermont the natural ski terrain has stark differences. "We have the benefits of the high alpine of the Presidential Mountains here in New Hampshire, but we don't have that below treeline ski network of trails," Mr. Ray said about the backcountry ski landscape in New Hampshire. Mr. Ray said that the goal of the alliance is to develop a portfolio of terrain options so that skiers and snowboarders can choose areas to visit depending on weather, time of day or any of the other complex factors involved in planning backcountry travel. He said that the alliance has held 10 community organizing events in the past year with about 1,500 attendees, including three trail work days with more than 250 volunteers developing or maintaining some 10,000 vertical feet of skiable terrain. As the day progressed we moved across the mountain like a herd of goats. Climbing up, over and down the steep hillside, we tore through all the downed trees and branches that stood in our path. With 10 of us working at a moderate pace we found ourselves in a meadow with tall grass and hardwood trees at the top of the mountain in about an hour. I enjoy the meditative state I often fall into while doing physical labor, so a day in the mountains of Vermont seems like a guilt free and productive vacation. I rarely find myself on beaches because I feel like I should be busy, and end up leaving more anxious than when I arrived. My sweat and dirty hands on my day in the mountains were an investment in future vacations that others will enjoy as well. The Forest Service had instructed us to leave the debris where it was cut to help with erosion control and retain nutrients for the soil, and to avoid creating unnatural piles of debris. The hillside was covered in a thick blanket of decomposed leaves, branches and trees our goal was to gently add to that blanket. The result is a forest that has islands of trees and low areas that are open, but still look natural. My mind wandered and my body continued with the task at hand. Visions of what the landscape will look like covered in snow started to emerge. I remembered what it feels like to glide in the snow and I kept thinking of how I would ride over the rocky lumps and rolls all the way down to the valley below.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Read more on Roger Stone's sentence being commuted by President Trump. Facebook on Wednesday said it was removing the personal accounts of Roger J. Stone Jr., President Trump's friend and ally, because they had ties to numerous fake accounts that were active around the 2016 presidential election. The company made the announcement as part of its monthly report on removing disinformation. Mr. Stone's personal accounts on Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, were entwined with a U.S. based network of accounts that had links to the Proud Boys, a group that promotes white supremacy, the company said. The social network banned the Proud Boys group in 2018. "We first started looking into this network as part of our investigation into the Proud Boys' attempt to return to Facebook after we had designated and banned them from the platform," Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, wrote in a company blog post announcing Facebook's takedown. "Our investigation linked this network to Roger Stone and his associates." Mr. Stone, 67, is set to go to prison this month. In November, a jury convicted him on seven felonies, including lying to federal investigators, tampering with a witness and impeding a congressional inquiry. The charges were brought by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, whose investigators scrutinized Mr. Stone's attempts during the 2016 presidential election to communicate with WikiLeaks about the release of Democratic emails that had been stolen by Russian operatives.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Adam Ryan, a Target employee in Christiansburg, Va., has felt unsafe at work in recent weeks. He finds it difficult to follow the recommendation that he stay six feet away from others because the store is often crowded and customers linger closely while he restocks shelves. "People will get mad at me when I'm in the area and they want to grab something," he said. "They just act like it's business as usual." Target has taken steps to address workers' safety concerns, including providing masks, but Mr. Ryan feels that the company hasn't gone far enough. There is little outside pressure on employers to address concerns like Mr. Ryan's. That's partly because the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, known as OSHA, has so far played a low profile role in the coronavirus crisis. The agency, part of the Labor Department, announced last week that there would be few inspections of workplaces aside from those in high risk activities like health care and emergency response. Instead, it called on employers to investigate coronavirus related issues on their own, even in hot spots such as the food supply chain. "I wish they were more involved," John Henshaw, who led the agency during the George W. Bush administration, said of OSHA's role. "Certainly meatpacking I don't understand why they wouldn't emphasize it." At the same time, OSHA has provided few of the incentives, like new workplace rules dealing specifically with infectious disease, that typically prompt employers to address hazards. Last week, in guidelines for "Opening Up America Again," the White House listed "Protect the health and safety of workers in critical industries" as a core responsibility of the states, even though this is one of OSHA's key missions. "Most states have NO ability to do this," David Michaels, who led the agency during the Obama administration, wrote in an email. Dr. Michaels said in an interview that OSHA might understandably focus inspections on certain high risk industries during a crisis that is straining its resources. But he said this made it even more important for the agency to tell employers how to keep workers safe and clarify their responsibilities for doing so. Instead, "they're doing the opposite," he said. "It's really disheartening." A Labor Department spokeswoman said that notwithstanding the new enforcement approach, "if OSHA were to find flagrant violations of the law, the agency would use all enforcement tools available." The spokeswoman said that OSHA had received about 2,400 coronavirus related complaints by Tuesday and that it had resolved about 1,400. She said that the agency had yet to issue a citation to an employer but that it had six months to complete its investigations. Mr. Ryan, the Target employee in Virginia, has not filed a complaint with OSHA about his concerns. Target cited a policy of limiting the number of shoppers when necessary. It said that it invited workers to raise concerns and had a process in place for addressing them, but that workers had not typically complained about the difficulty of social distancing at that location. Some workplace safety experts expressed concern that OSHA had largely exempted Covid 19 cases from a general requirement that employers determine whether a worker became seriously ill on the job, and that they report such cases to the agency and keep records of them. In guidance issued on April 10, the agency said it would not enforce the record keeping requirement for Covid cases until further notice, except when the employer could obtain clear evidence that the infection was work related, a substantially higher bar than before. Only employers in health care, emergency response or prisons must apply the standard record keeping procedure in Covid cases. The government relies on such reporting in several ways, like deciding which industries and workplaces to inspect in the future. Record keeping also allows employers to figure out where their problems are and how to address them, making it particularly important when the agency is directing most employers to investigate coronavirus outbreaks on their own, experts said. 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. "First and foremost, they're supposed to record so they themselves have the information necessary to determine where there are problems and when to do something about them," said Jordan Barab, a top OSHA appointee during the Obama administration. The Labor Department said in a statement that the pause in enforcing its record keeping requirement was to "help employers focus their response efforts on implementing good hygiene practices in their workplaces and otherwise mitigating Covid 19's effects." Former OSHA officials also note that the agency has not issued a so called emergency temporary standard that would instruct employers across a variety of industries to put safety protocols into effect and raise the prospect of fines for failing to do so. Such standards can govern physical setups, like whether to install barriers between workstations; workplace rules, like restrictions on the number of customers inside a store; and the use of protective equipment. A standard could even require stores to temporarily bar customers and switch to pickup and delivery only, though such a move would probably invite litigation. The Labor Department spokeswoman said, "OSHA's current guidances, standards and regulations fully outline the rights and protections of workers from dangers such as the coronavirus." She pointed to guidance that the agency recently published for several industries, including retail, airlines and waste management. But such guidance tends to be highly discretionary for example, telling retail employers to "consider restricting the number of customers allowed inside the facility" and to "consider providing alcohol based hand sanitizers." The guidance list also neglects some key industries, like meatpacking, that OSHA sometimes struggled to regulate even before the crisis. That has left a vacuum of oversight in workplaces where the virus is taking a toll, former OSHA officials said. Numerous retail workers have died of Covid 19, including employees at a Trader Joe's in New York State, a Walmart near Chicago and a Whole Foods in Massachusetts, though it is unclear where they were exposed to the virus. Hundreds of workers at a meatpacking plant in South Dakota have been infected, and at least one has died. A worker at a poultry processing plant in Delaware who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation said it was typically impossible for him to maintain six feet between himself and other workers. His job is to pick fallen poultry parts from the floor, clean them and place them back on the line, a task requiring him to circulate between two parallel lines of workers that can be less than six feet apart. The worker said that the plant had erected barriers between workers on some of its lines, but that the hallways were typically crowded during shift changes. Workers at grocery stores described varying approaches to protective equipment, spacing and foot traffic. Marian Meszaros, who works in the meat department of a Best Market on Long Island, said that her store tried to limit the number of shoppers, but that it felt no less crowded than it did before the pandemic. "The customers are still on top of us," Ms. Meszaros said. "They all huddle around the meat case." A Best Market spokesman said that "store management actively monitors crowd levels throughout the day and limits customers at busy times," and that it had placed stickers, markers and signs throughout the store to encourage social distancing. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber's health and labor committee, complained about the lack of a standard. "In one grocery store, they are limiting the number of people going in, they've got plastic up as protection for workers," she said. "In another one, they're jammed in the aisles." Ms. Murray said she and other Democratic senators had sought language requiring an OSHA emergency standard in coronavirus legislation last month but could not overcome Republican opposition. One difficulty in issuing a workplace standard is the cumbersome federal rule making process built up over decades. But Ann Rosenthal, who recently retired as the Labor Department's top OSHA lawyer after serving administrations of both parties, said Congress could suspend the typical rule making process for OSHA to expedite a new standard on infectious diseases. In the meantime, experts said, the agency could take other steps. Mr. Henshaw, the OSHA leader under Mr. Bush, said he was sympathetic to the idea of relaxing record keeping requirements but would like to see more specific guidance on how employers could minimize infections in essence, "We'll give you a break here, but you have to do this." He acknowledged, however, that guidance was not mandatory. Ms. Rosenthal said OSHA could issue guidance interpreting existing standards governing sanitation and protective equipment for the coronavirus era, which could effectively require more frequent breaks for hand washing, as well as enough soap and water. Through the agency's combination of policy rollbacks and inaction, she said, "they're sending signals to employers that they don't have to do anything."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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The first large study of the safety and effectiveness of a coronavirus vaccine in the United States began on Monday morning, according to the National Institutes of Health and the biotech company Moderna, which collaborated to develop the vaccine. A volunteer in Savannah, Ga., received the first shot at 6:45 a.m., Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at a news briefing. The study, a Phase 3 clinical trial, will enroll 30,000 healthy people at about 89 sites around the country this summer. Half will receive two shots of the vaccine, 28 days apart, and half will receive two shots of a saltwater placebo. Neither the volunteers nor the medical staff giving the injections will know who will get the real vaccine. Researchers will then monitor the subjects, looking for side effects. And their main goal will be to see if significantly fewer vaccinated people contract Covid 19, to determine whether the vaccine can prevent the illness. The study will also try to find out if the vaccine can avert severe cases of Covid and death; if it can block the infection entirely, based on lab tests; and if just one shot can prevent the illness. A second company, Pfizer, announced late Monday afternoon that it had also begun a late stage study of a coronavirus vaccine. Pfizer has been working with a German company, BioNTech. Their study will also include 30,000 people, from 39 states in the United States, and from Brazil, Argentina and Germany. The first subjects received injections at the University of Rochester on Monday. The government announced last week that it had reached a 1.95 billion deal to buy 100 million doses of Pfizer's vaccine by the year's end, but only if the trial proves it safe and effective. Dr. Fauci estimated that the full enrollment of 30,000 people in the Moderna trial would be completed by the end of the summer, and that results might be available by November. Findings might emerge even earlier, he said, but added that he doubted it. He said that the high rates of transmission in some parts of the country, though unfortunate, would help speed up the process of determining whether the vaccine works. Dr. Mark Mulligan, the director of the NYU Langone Vaccine Center in New York, which will begin giving injections of the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday, said he thought that full enrollment would take two months, and that it would take four to six months to determine whether the vaccine worked. Over all, a total of 150 to 160 coronavirus infections in the study will be enough to determine whether the Moderna vaccine is acceptably effective that is, if it protects 60 percent of those who receive it, Dr. Fauci said. Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said the U.S. government was reaching out to groups hit hardest by Covid older people, those with chronic diseases, Blacks, Latinx and Native Americans to encourage them to participate in the study. He said that the pandemic had put health disparities into "sharp relief" and that extra efforts were needed to gain the trust of people in those groups who might be reluctant to sign up for a medical experiment. Earlier tests of Moderna's vaccine showed that it stimulated a strong immune response, with minor and transient side effects like sore arms, fatigue, achiness and fever. But exactly what type of immune response is needed to prevent the illness is not known, so Phase 3 studies are essential to determine whether a vaccine really works. In a statement, Dr. Collins said, "Having a safe and effective vaccine distributed by the end of 2020 is a stretch goal, but it's the right goal for the American people." He said that despite the unprecedented speed in bringing this experimental vaccine to human testing, "the most stringent safety measures" were being maintained. Moderna said in a statement that it would be able to deliver about 500 million doses a year, and possibly up to a billion doses per year, starting in 2021. The Massachusetts based company, which has received nearly 1 billion from the federal government to develop a coronavirus vaccine, has said it will not sell the vaccine at cost, but for profit. Moderna has not said what it will charge. "We will price it responsibly during the pandemic, to make sure it is broadly accessible," a spokesman, Ray Jordan, said in an email. The company may change the price later, when the virus becomes endemic, "but that is not something we have settled at this time," Mr. Jordan said. Moderna shares were up more than 9 percent on Monday. Pfizer has also said it would sell its product at a profit; the contract with the government works out to about 20 a shot, and people will need two. Both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines use a synthetic version of genetic material from part of the coronavirus, encased in tiny particles made of fat that help it get into human cells. The genetic material, called messenger RNA or mRNA, then prompts the cells to churn out a tiny piece of the virus, which the immune system sees as foreign and learns to recognize. If the person is later exposed to the real virus, the immune system will attack it. Messenger RNA has not yet produced any approved vaccines, but other companies have also invested in the approach, because of its potential to produce vaccine quickly. CureVac and Sanofi are also working on mRNA vaccines. At the news briefing, Dr. Collins said that three more Phase 3 trials would be starting soon, each needing 30,000 patients. Those trials will involve vaccines made by Novavax, Johnson Johnson and a collaboration of the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca. All three companies are part of the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. Pfizer is not. Adults interested in participating in the trials can visit coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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On our recent getaway to Mexico City, my two young daughters and I sat in the lush garden courtyard of our hotel, the Four Seasons, one afternoon and debated how we wanted to spend our evening. Should we head to Arena Mexico to see the theatrical spectacle of the flamboyant luchadores Mexican wrestlers fight it out with acrobatic style moves while the crowd cheered them on? Or, did we want to learn how to make tamales and sopes topped with ingredients like beans, salsa and mole negro at Casa Jacaranda, a small cooking school situated in a 1913 home in the chic Roma neighborhood? Mexico City is well known for its many cultural attractions, including more than 100 museums and a flourishing arts and design scene. But the city's appeal as a family friendly destination hasn't come to the forefront until recently. In a bid to attract more tourists, some hotels are stepping up their amenities for children, and tour operators are offering itineraries with an eye on the younger set . Our time in the Mexican capital was limited, but the choices for activities here seemed endless, and we were torn throughout our trip between many appealing options such as the two in question at that moment. As we ate the dishes we had labored over, Mr. Fitz told me that the children's cooking classes were only a few months old. At two hours long, they were abbreviated versions of the school's full day sessions, but they still gave children and their parents a snapshot of traditional Mexican cuisine. "We had repeated requests for lessons where parents and kids could cook together so we decided to start them, and they've already been a big hit," Mr. Fitz said. As my daughters Meenakshi, 9, and Amrita, 5, and I discovered, there's plenty here to occupy families like us, and the list, cooking classes at Casa Jacaranda included, keeps growing. The Mexican based travel company Journey Mexico arranged our itinerary, and the head of its Mexico City office, Lillian Aviles, told me that the company has seen the number of its customized, private family trips to the city double in the past year from 20 to 40 ever since it started promoting Mexico City as a destination that could engage kids. Parents with school age children typically favor beachside destinations in Mexico such as Riviera Maya, she said, but the same travelers who visit the country again often want to spend a few days in the capital city to explore renowned museums and dine in internationally famous restaurants. "Mexico City is one of the world's largest cities so it's natural that people want to see it," Ms. Aviles said. "The city's hospitality industry is definitely catering more to kids, but even without organized activities, there's plenty for them to see and do." She was right: Meenakshi and Amrita were as engaged as I was on our trip to the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacan, in the southern part of the city. It's a colonial style home that's painted a rich blue and has an interior patio with a beautiful garden with blooming flowers. We especially enjoyed seeing Ms. Kahlo's wardrobe of dresses displayed on mannequins, and her brushes and easel, along with the mirror that she used to paint her self portraits. Afterward, we went to the San Angel neighborhood, also in the city's southern part, and walked through the vibrant crafts market where dozens of vendors were selling colorful pinatas, which, naturally, Amrita and Meenakshi wanted to buy. They cost only 1 each and with their bright hues reds, blues and greens among the bunch and varied shapes like stars and cones, they were works of art. I quickly agreed, and as we continued our stroll through the market, they talked excitedly about the candies they wanted to fill inside their new toys. On another day, we explored the nearly 1,700 acre Chapultepec Park, in the heart of the city and across the street from our hotel. It's the largest urban park in Latin America and has museums, restaurants, a zoo and plenty of paths for biking, walking and running. The children's museum, Papalote Museo del Nino, was definitely their favorite park attraction: The sprawling space had around 180 interactive exhibits, and they couldn't get enough of the towering Ramon Tree, which they were able to walk through and which taught them about different forest ecosystems. And we spent at least an hour in the large garden, which had samples of the various kinds of soil and plants found in humid forests, wetlands and other ecosystems in Mexico. Ms. Aviles, of Journey Mexico, has two children, ages 3 and 12, and said that when given a choice on how to spend a free day, both plead for a visit to the Chocolate Museum. "They drink hot chocolate when they're there and leave with the chocolate that they've made," she said. "Chocolate is their favorite food on earth so obviously the museum is a winner." Hotels around the city where business travelers were previously the main guests are also stepping up to accommodate their growing number of young guests, according to general managers of these properties. The Four Seasons, a contemporary building with a large inner garden that's a haven from the bustling city, for example, significantly amped up its children's programming in 2017 to draw in younger guests and leisure travelers: On Sundays, the property has free activities, such as making Mexican crafts with a local artist, and holds special events throughout the year like an Easter egg hunt and games and an ice cream cart near its outdoor pool come warm weather. "We wanted to find fun ways to entertain the more and more kids staying with us," said Jose Adames, the hotel's general manager.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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5 Shows to See in New York: 'Othello,' 'Carmen Jones' and More Even including the oddballs and one offs, only 33 productions opened on Broadway this season. Fifty years ago the number was 73. As if to compensate, Off Broadway theaters today offer hundreds of shows, and once the Tony Awards are handed out on June 10, some of them get to shine. Here are five a classic tragedy, a curious musical and three new of the moment plays worth checking out. The play, a world premiere Manhattan Theater Club production, follows up on Mr. Giardina's "The City of The Conversation," which dealt with the decay of civility in Washington, D.C. after the rise of Reagan. There may be a common theme here. There's definitely a common director: Doug Hughes. And Kristen Bush, who glittered in "The City of Conversation" as a ruthless young schemer, now plays the idealist who has to decide how much her ideals are worth. New York has enjoyed a few great Othellos recently, including John Douglas Thompson's in 2009 and David Oyelowo's in 2014. But since James Earl Jones took the role in 1964 and Raul Julia in 1979 and 1991, the play has been absent from the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. It's a natural fit there, being the most intense of all the Shakespearean tragedies, shorn for the most part of subplots and diversions. So I am eager to see Ruben Santiago Hudson's production starring Chukwudi Iwuji, a recent Public Theater Hamlet and a standout in Bruce Norris's "The Low Road" earlier this year. He is joined by Heather Lind as Desdemona and Corey Stoll as Iago. Idina Menzel, the musical theater star best known for playing Elphaba in "Wicked" and last seen in New York in the time twisting "If/Then," returns to the stage neither singing nor, as far as I can tell, painted green. Unless that green is envy: In Joshua Harmon's new play "Skintight," at the Roundabout's Laura Pels Theater, Ms. Menzel plays Jodi Isaac, bedeviled at the onset of middle age by the youth obsessed culture around her. Her ex husband is engaged to a much younger woman, her father has taken up with a 20 year old (male) porn star and her son, also 20, is just starting out on his life as a gay man. Mr. Harmon is in comfortable territory here; his plays "Bad Jews," "Significant Other" and "Admissions" have all dealt satirically with the overblown discontents of privileged people. But Ms. Menzel is no satirist: Singing or not, she delivers full throated feeling. I'm eager to see what she'll do, under Daniel Aukin's direction, with this story about the pitfalls of superficiality. Jordan Harrison takes a long view. Just look at his two most recent plays: the sci fi drama "Marjorie Prime," set in 2062, and "The Amateurs," about 14th century actors outrunning the Black Plague. However distant the lens, his plays consider the mysteries of individual identity in a world that seems ready at every moment to wipe it out. His new play, "Log Cabin," at Playwrights Horizons, would seem on its surface to be less adventurous. It's set in 2015 among a complacent group of married gays and lesbians including, inevitably, Jesse Tyler Ferguson. But their newfound comfort as members of an enlarged American mainstream is brought into question by a transgender friend, still waiting for equality. The story of squares shocked out of their smugness by an outlier is almost a genre by now see Sarah Ruhl's "How to Transcend a Happy Marriage," among others. But Mr. Harrison is a genre spoiler, and I suspect that in this new play, directed by Pam MacKinnon, the audience may be in for some shocks of their own: shocks of recognition.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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APPLAUSE, PLEASE You know Jimmy Kimmel as a comedian and the longtime host of ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live." But show business wasn't part of his grand plan until he got the college radio show that first landed him in front of a microphone. Kimmel says, "I always wanted to be an artist. That was my goal. I'd draw insulting caricatures of my teachers and classmates, or I'd sit in front of the television drawing David Letterman." This month, his dream came true: Kimmel published "The Serious Goose," a read aloud magnet that is now No. 1 on the children's picture books list. (It should come with a warning: "May rev kids up.") The story was inspired by 5 year old Jane Kimmel, who is already following in her father's footsteps: "She's ambidextrous," he says proudly. "She can draw with both hands." Kimmel used to call his younger daughter a "silly goose," and then started thinking about the alternative: the serious goose: "I thought, I should look this up to see if anyone has said it before. They hadn't. I was pretty pleased with myself." Kimmel describes the writing and illustration process as "torturous." He worked on the book all over the country, even on getaways with his wife. Using a fine tip black Chartpak pen ("Sharpees are fine for some things but they bleed a little"), he sketched on hotel notepads, consulted reference books about geese and made clay models so he could photograph his creations from multiple angles. The biggest challenge? Making his goose consistent: "Like Snoopy, I wanted the Serious Goose to be recognizable no matter what angle you see her from." Along the way, Kimmel learned a few things, like the difference between a goose (female) and a gander (male) and his subject's preferred snack (snails). Kimmel, the father of four, is donating all proceeds from "The Serious Goose" to children's hospitals around the country, beginning with Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where his 2 year old son, Billy, has been treated for a congenital heart defect. Kimmel says, "There is nothing permanent in my daily work; I do a show and it's gone. It disappears into the air. To have something physical to hold on to, to have this book sitting on my shelf with my handwriting and my name on it, gives me great pleasure. But knowing I would make at least a million dollars for these hospitals that was a good motivator."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Minnesota officials reported on Thursday that Prince died in April of an overdose of the opiate fentanyl. The authorities have not revealed how the musician obtained the drug or whether a doctor had prescribed it. But it has been reported that he had hip surgery in the mid 2000s and may have still been in pain. Fentanyl has become a source of concern for government agencies and law enforcement officials as death rates from fentanyl related overdoses and seizures of the drug have risen in several states. Here's what we know about the drug. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, prescribed to help patients deal with severe pain. Opioids help to reduce patients' perception of their suffering and can induce a state of extreme relaxation and euphoria.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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These past four years, I've been on a photographic road trip of the United States. It often seems that there are two Americas, left and right, looking at the same place from radically different and irreconcilable perspectives. This week I found myself on the grounds of the White House. It was a drizzly, dreary morning. Dug up sections of the lawn adjacent to a lineup of broadcast tents appeared like graves. A theater of the real. I photographed Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who is all about work, in his Capitol office. On his coffee table lay a biography of the "Silent General," Ulysses S. Grant. There are many types of power and means of taking measure of the powerful. Many of my photographs are made out of a profound sense of powerlessness but also out of a desire to locate power and authority in unexpected places: in the natural world, in a solitary border patrol officer or in the intimacy and strength of a family under a bridge that connects the United States to Mexico. These images are reminders to me that our American landscape and the communities within it transcend this cultural and political moment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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In the hallway of his family's apartment in Valley Stream, N.Y., last month, Noah Bodden overturned a large green trash bag, spilling out several pounds of recruiting letters. The envelopes bore the insignia of many prominent college football programs across the country, like Louisiana State, Baylor, Oregon, Tennessee and Arizona State. Some included handwritten notes from coaches to Bodden, one of the most promising high school quarterbacks in the country. "You will make our team better the first day you step on campus," one coach wrote. It was all very flattering for Bodden (the first syllable "Bo" rhymes with "snow"), especially considering the power and prestige behind the outreach from teams that regularly play on national television and have extravagant facilities. But in a surprising move, Bodden spurned them all. He pledged to go to Grambling State University, a historically Black college in rural Louisiana. Grambling has a rich football history, but like all H.B.C.U.s, it struggles to compete with the cachet and the financial advantages of major football powerhouses. "I want to be a trendsetter," Bodden said last month while sitting on a stoop across the street from his home. "I want to be like LeBron James and bring everybody with me." Bodden, 17, lives with his parents in a modest apartment above a check cashing store. He worries about his homework, delivers food for Door Dash in his compact car and, by taking his talents to Grambling, is highlighting the growing appeal of H.B.C.U.s for many young athletes of color. "It's going to bring a lot of attention to Black colleges, and deservedly so," said Doug Williams, who played for Grambling in the 1970s and in 1988 became the first Black quarterback to start in and win a Super Bowl. Three decades later, Williams is part of a scouting committee sponsored by the N.F.L. that is pushing to ensure that H.B.C.U. players get fair consideration in the league's annual draft. Bodden pledged to Grambling for similar reasons, in part to help broaden the appeal of H.B.C.U.s to elite nonwhite athletes, some of whom worry about being exploited at predominantly white universities even as they help raise the profiles and profits of those institutions. "With the social unrest this summer, a lot of H.B.C.U.s have been getting transfers and contacted by players they wouldn't have gotten before," said B.J. Jones, a former linebacker at Southern University in Louisiana and a writer and commentator for the website HBCU Gameday. "I think a lot of kids are now thinking, 'Hey, you can love my talent. But do you love my humanity?'" Jones said he could not recall a recruit of Bodden's stature from a northern city in the United States who had committed to a historically Black college. Most H.B.C.U. players come from within the schools' general geographical footprint in the South. But Bodden, Jones said, should find Grambling to be welcoming. Jones, who was a third generation H.B.C.U. football player, insists that Black colleges tend to emphasize developing student athletes into well rounded people rather than focusing simply on their sports. His grandfather played football at Tuskegee University, and his father and brother at Alabama State. When Jones was at Southern, which is near the Louisiana State campus in Baton Rouge, he and his teammates worked out and socialized with their L.S.U. counterparts. Jones said many of them envied the hospitality and comfort they felt while walking around the Southern campus. "They would light up when they came to visit," Jones said. "They would tell us, 'I don't feel ownership in my school like you do.' It's not just how you treat the Black athlete on campus. It's also about how you treat the ordinary Black student who maybe can't give you anything." The N.F.L. is still Bodden's main goal. Bodden believes that Grambling can help his chances to be drafted by an N.F.L. team, even though the university is in the N.C.A.A.'s Football Championship Subdivision, the second tier of the college game, and rarely appears on national television. "It is by no means a mistake," said Phil Simms, the Super Bowl winning Giants quarterback who, along with his son Matt, has helped train Bodden. "Look, I went to Morehead State. If you've got it, the scouts will find you." Bodden hopes to compete for a starting job as a freshman, and there is less chance of that happening on a team in one of the elite Power 5 conferences. "It's all about getting to the league," Bodden said, referring to the N.F.L. "If I had a good chance of going to Arizona State and starting, or at least having a shot right behind Jayden Daniels, I would go there. But that's not the best decision for me right now." Only one Grambling football player has been drafted by an N.F.L. team in the past decade. Bodden believes he can be the next. Bodden is 6 foot 4, weighs 215 pounds and has a right arm able to loft perfect spirals with incredible ease. He is rated the 48th best senior pocket passing quarterback by 247 Sports, a network of websites that focus on college recruiting for football and basketball. Matt Simms, a former quarterback for the Jets and the University of Tennessee, said he has seen N.F.L. caliber talent in Bodden. "I'll tell him from time to time during a workout, 'Just so you know, that throw was good enough to be the sixth or seventh best throw in the N.F.L. this week,'" Simms said. "It's scary to think about how good he can get, because he can already throw the ball 50 yards, 20 feet off the ground." Bodden began working with the Simmses at the suggestion of Bruce Eugene, the offensive coordinator at Christ the King, who was a star quarterback at Grambling. Eugene said that he had initially favored Kansas, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech for Bodden, and had not pushed Grambling, but that he was overjoyed by the decision. Bodden's parents initially wanted him to accept an offer from Kansas. "But we support his decision now," said his mother, Maria Sisternes. "We are very proud of him making the choice that is right for him." But of the roughly 1,750 active players on N.F.L. rosters when the season began Sept. 7, only 29 had come from H.B.C.U.s., according to HBCU Gameday. And since the A.F.L. and the N.F.L. began drafting together in 1967, only 13 quarterbacks have been selected from H.B.C.U.s, according to the Football Perspective website. As integration began to take hold in college football in the early 1970s and the best players migrated to the large, predominantly white universities, the talent pool for H.B.C.U.s shrank. The last Grambling quarterback drafted by an N.F.L. team was Clemente Gordon in 1990, and the last before that was Williams, who was selected in the first round by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1978. Williams, who also coached at Grambling, replacing the legendary Eddie Robinson in 1998, now works for the Washington Football Team as senior vice president for player development. "He's going to have a culture shock, with the hospitality he is going to get," Williams said of Bodden. "It's not just a game there, it's a family reunion. I can't even imagine not going to a historically Black college." Bodden says he has made his decision, but he has yet to commit in writing. He can sign a national letter of intent no sooner than Dec. 16. He could still change course. But he insists that won't happen. "I'm trying to promote a positive vibe," Bodden said. "Imagine if a whole bunch of other recruits go to H.B.C.U.s, too. If you are good, they are going to come join you."
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A roundup of motoring news from the web: A series of crash tests were recently conducted on small cars popular in India, and a number of them including the Tata Nano, Maruti Suzuki Alto 800 and Hyundai i10 performed poorly. India currently has no safety regulations for vehicles sold there, but Oscar Fernandes, the minister of road and surface transport, said crash testing would become a requirement. (Aljazeera) After selling just shy of 10 million vehicles in 2013, Toyota led worldwide auto sales for the year, followed by Volkswagen, which sold 9.73 million vehicles, and General Motors, which sold 9.71 million. But second place is a matter of reckoning. Volkswagen's tally for 2013 included heavy duty truck sales; for sales of light duty vehicles, G.M. still ranked second. (The Detroit News) Next week, 70 new cars and motorcycles will be unveiled at the auto expo to be held near Delhi, India. Although the majority of the model debuts will be India specific, 26 will be global curtain raisers, from manufacturers including Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes Benz. (The Times of India) Jerry Seinfeld's web series, "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," garnered 25 million streams during its third season. Mr. Seinfeld said that the show, the title of which aptly explains what each short episode is about, has "gotten completely out of hand." In a good way, of course. Fourth and fifth seasons appear to be on the horizon. (The Wrap)
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Automobiles
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ISN'T IT ROMANTIC (2019) Streaming on HBO platforms. Natalie (Rebel Wilson) is a New York architect going through a slump. She is not respected at work and her love life is lackluster. But things change after she gets mugged. Suddenly, Natalie's life resembles a romantic comedy and she is the star. Her new world follows the classic tropes of the film genre, including a meet cute with a sexy Australian man (Liam Hemsworth), a spontaneous dance number and a massive apartment with a fabulous wardrobe. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg wrote: "Wilson, leaning on her comic persona to compensate for the script's lack of wit or inventiveness, is a reliable deadpanner. Her one liners calling the alternate universe she's trapped in '"The Matrix" for lonely women,' for example are funny enough to carry this featherweight movie as far as it can go, which isn't far." TRANSPARENT: MUSICALE FINALE Stream on Amazon Prime. The two hour movie musical represents the end of the award winning series starring Judith Light, Gaby Hoffmann, Amy Landecker and Jay Duplass. With the death of Maura (the character played by Jeffrey Tambor, who left the show in 2017 after sexual misconduct allegations), Shelly (Light) writes a musical to help her family cope with the loss. The musical numbers chronicle the stages of grief. In his review for The Times, James Poniewozik wrote, "The musical framing bold colors and blunt lyrics hammers flat what had been elegantly shaded characters, even when the individual songs work."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Once upon a time in America, Toni Morrison wrote in "Beloved," her masterpiece, the presence of a black face in a newspaper would induce something close to horror in certain readers. That face wasn't there for any happy or noble reason. It wasn't even there because the black person had been killed or "maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated," because those things didn't qualify as news. The purpose of the photo had to be more unusual. Over the course of her long and exceptional literary career, which included the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, Morrison, who died on Monday at 88, brought a freight of news about black life in America (and about life, period) to millions of readers across the globe. Much of this news was of the sort that, in terms of its stark and sensitive awareness of the consequences of racism, opened an abyss at one's feet and changed the taste of the saliva in one's mouth. Morrison had a superfluity of gifts and, like few other writers of her era, bent language to her will. Her prose could be lush, or raw and demotic, or carefree and eccentric, often on a single page. She filtered folklore, biblical rhythms, dreams, choral voices and a steep awareness of history into her work. In the best of her 11 novels these include "The Bluest Eye" (1970), "Sula" (1973) and "Song of Solomon" (1977) she transmuted the basic matter of existence into profound works of art. Her spiritual forebears were many, and they were elite. You sensed in Morrison's fiction the sweep and brooding power of Ralph Ellison, the complicated warmth and riddling wit of Zora Neale Hurston, the explosive intellect of James Baldwin and the bent shovel cadences of William Faulkner. Yet Morrison's idiosyncratic music was her own. She was a colossus of 20th century fiction. 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. Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, where her father was a welder, Morrison wrote her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," while raising two children alone. She woke every morning at 4 a.m. to write. She composed "The Bluest Eye," she once said, because it was a book she wanted to read. Set in 1941, the novel concerns the life of a young African American girl named Pecola who has internalized racism, who considers herself unattractive and unlovable because of her dark skin. The novel probes, as Morrison wrote in the foreword to a later edition, "what it is like to be actually hated hated for things we have no control over and cannot change." Like many of Morrison's later novels, "The Bluest Eye" is told from a variety of perspectives, including an omniscient third person narrator. In a 1993 Paris Review interview, conducted by the novelist Elissa Schappell, Morrison spoke to the importance of including more than one voice in her fiction. "It's important not to have a totalizing view," she said. "In American literature we have been so totalized as though there is only one version. We are not one indistinguishable block of people who always behave the same way." In that same interview, Morrison commented on the difficulty of some of her later novels, with their nonlinear structures and dense, superheated language. About people who ask her why she doesn't write books that everyone can understand, she said: "I don't think they mean that. I think they mean, Are you ever going to write a book about white people?" She added: "I'm going to stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me." The center found her. Morrison was that rare critical and commercial success, even before Oprah Winfrey became her steady champion. "Song of Solomon" was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club in 1977, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's "Native Son" in 1940. In addition to the Nobel, Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize (for "Beloved") and the National Book Critics Circle Award (for "Song of Solomon"). A 2006 New York Times Book Review poll of 124 prominent authors, critics and editors named "Beloved" as the single best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years. As a novelist, Morrison understood that some wounds must be reopened in order to heal. She understood better than most the suppurating sores beneath the skin of American life. She also comprehended, in a subcutaneous manner, something that Iris Murdoch put this way: Being nice is not the same as being good. A great deal of humor floats to the surface in Morrison's work. ("Laughter," she remarked, "is a way of taking the reins into your own hands.") Even more often, she wrote about loneliness. Many of the scenes in her best novels reverberate with desolation. "Pain," she wrote in her novel "Jazz" (1992). "I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweet tooth for it." At the heart of "Beloved" is as indelible a scene as we have had in this country's literature in the last 50 years. A runaway slave, about to be caught, cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw rather than have her returned to subjugation. Morrison was a sensuous, first rate writer about many things, not only about race. Her novel "Tar Baby" (1981) is about a love affair between African Americans from separate worlds Jadine graduated from the Sorbonne and is a fashion model, while Son is impoverished. But it also contains writing like this, about the natural world: "Bees have no sting on Isle des Chevaliers, nor honey. They are fat and lazy, curious about nothing. Especially at noon. At noon parrots sleep and diamondbacks work down the trees toward the cooler undergrowth. At noon the water in the mouths of orchids left there by the breakfast rain is warm. Children stick their fingers in them and scream as though scalded."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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From left: Christopher Gregory for The New York Times, Ida Mae Astute/ABC, Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Turner and Drew Angerer for The New York Times From left: Christopher Gregory for The New York Times, Ida Mae Astute/ABC, Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Turner and Drew Angerer for The New York Times Credit... From left: Christopher Gregory for The New York Times, Ida Mae Astute/ABC, Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Turner and Drew Angerer for The New York Times Lester Holt, Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper and Chris Wallace were selected Friday to moderate this year's presidential debates, providing a diverse and noncontroversial group of anchors for a role that has often been a lightning rod for partisan criticism. Mr. Holt, the anchor of "NBC Nightly News," will moderate the first debate on Sept. 26; Ms. Raddatz of ABC and Mr. Cooper of CNN will moderate the town hall debate on Oct. 9; and Mr. Wallace of Fox News will handle the final debate on Oct. 19. All are first time presidential debate moderators. Elaine Quijano, a CBS News correspondent, will moderate the vice presidential debate on Oct. 4. For Mr. Holt, the assignment is another prestigious step in his rise since succeeding Brian Williams on NBC's evening news program 18 months ago. And Mr. Wallace will become the first Fox News anchor to host a presidential debate. The selections, announced by the Commission on Presidential Debates, also make for a considerably more diverse slate than in previous election cycles, with an African American (Mr. Holt), two women, including a Filipino American (Ms. Quijano), and an openly gay man (Mr. Cooper). Competing interests and political agendas on all sides made the decision of selecting moderators difficult. Hillary Clinton, whose campaign objected to the involvement of anyone from Fox News, according to a person directly involved in the negotiations, needs to avoid having the debate turn into a televised catharsis for doubts about her honesty and likability. Her opponent, Donald J. Trump, has an interest in maintaining his adversarial relationship with the media, which he uses as fodder for his arguments that the entire political system is conspiring to defeat him. And the debate commission, which found its relevance at risk after efforts by Republicans to undermine its credibility as an independent player in the process, needed to demonstrate that it was not biased or susceptible to pressure from either campaign. The commission's choices were unlikely to provoke strong opposition, which was by design. The inclusion of a moderator from Fox News was an effort to appease conservatives who had long grumbled about the lack of conservative media representation in the debates. NBC News, which the commission left out of the 2012 debates because the Romney campaign complained that it could not get a fair shake from the network or its cable partner, MSNBC, is now back at the table. And the commission had little choice but to bypass Fox's Megyn Kelly, who had a star turn during the Republican primary debates but also has had a deeply adversarial relationship with Mr. Trump. Ms. Kelly was at the top of the list of potential moderators the Trump campaign told the commission it deemed unacceptable, a Trump official said. But perhaps the biggest sensitivity involved Mr. Trump, who has sought to discredit the debate process from the beginning. Despite the fact that debates have been scheduled to compete with major sporting events in previous years they always take place in the fall when the baseball and football seasons are in full swing he claimed that the commission was deliberately scheduling them opposite N.F.L games so fewer people would watch. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Complicating matters further, Mr. Trump has a long and chilly relationship with one of the co chairmen of the commission, Frank Fahrenkopf. In particular, Mr. Fahrenkopf and Mr. Trump butted heads over Mr. Trump's unwillingness to pay dues to the association, said one person who knows both men. For the candidates, the debates may be the best remaining opportunity for both candidates to reshape the 2016 race and for Mr. Trump, who is trailing in the polls, to gain ground against Mrs. Clinton. Debates have allowed challengers and relative political newcomers to reach out to reluctant voters, providing reassurance about their qualifications. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton helped put to rest questions about their preparedness for the presidency in confident debate exchanges. George W. Bush defied the caricature of himself as a lightweight by holding his own against Al Gore. Mr. Trump, facing significant skepticism among voters about his character and temperament, will be aiming for a similarly forceful performance. But Mrs. Clinton is one of the most practiced debaters in modern politics, after two campaigns for the Senate and the presidency, and she is perceived to have a considerable advantage. Mr. Wallace's appointment was celebrated in a letter to employees from Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul overseeing Fox News, which was besieged this summer by the sexual harassment scandal involving Roger Ailes, who founded and led Fox News. But Univision, the Spanish language broadcaster, sent a letter to the commission protesting the absence of a Hispanic moderator, calling it "an abdication of your responsibility to represent and reflect one of the largest and most influential communities in the U.S." Presidential debates provide a prestigious stage for newscasters, especially in this tumultuous election season, which produced record television ratings for debates. The first Republican debate last August attracted 24 million viewers, the highest rated nonsports cable event in history. Democratic debates similarly broke viewing records for the party.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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HAMBURG, Germany Germany's conservatives are in a mess. And it's of their own making. On Feb. 5, the ruling Christian Democratic Union voted with the far right Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, to install a liberal governor in the eastern state of Thuringia. The outcry was immediate and damaging. The governor stepped down, promising new elections. And soon after, Annegret Kramp Karrenbauer, Chancellor Angela Merkel's chosen successor and leader of the Christian Democrats, resigned. A sense of chaos has entered the usually placid atmosphere of German conservatism. To help understand their current situation, German conservatives would do well to revisit an analysis the philosopher Ernst Bloch offered in 1935. Different social groups, Bloch observed, experienced time differently. Under the pressure of a dynamic and disruptive capitalism, the unemployed young, the tradition defending peasants and the precarious middle class lived in their own distinct present. Formed by their own memories, hopes and fears, each group's experience "made sense on its own real and materially existing terms," Bloch wrote. But they didn't fit with one another. This phenomenon, which Bloch called the "simultaneity of the non simultaneous," helped bring down the Weimar Republic. Now replace "capitalism" with globalization, "unemployed youth" with angry millennials and "peasants" with people in the former East Germany, and Bloch's 85 year old picture comes strikingly close to capturing the fractures that run through Germany today. The country again lives in different time zones. Until this month, it seemed that German conservatives had learned the lessons of the 1930s: Don't leave the remedy to the extremists. But after the Christian Democrats' collusion with the AfD and the departure of Ms. Kramp Karrenbauer, it is far from clear the party will be able to bring Germany back in sync. If it is to do so, it must reckon with the deep roots of today's ruptures. In the past 75 years what used to constitute West Germany, very much as a consequence of the Nazi horrors, has acquired a special identity: It has become post nationalist, pro European, multicultural and principally open to migrants. Governments as well as large parts of civil society feel that the history of Hitler's Germany created a lasting obligation to make good for the devastation their nation brought to Europe. But East Germany was cordoned off from this process of identity formation. For all the passion and courage of the revolutionaries on the streets of Leipzig and Dresden in the miraculous year of 1989, Germany's reunification was also a clash of mind sets. The fascists, generations of Easterners were told, lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain: It was the Western capitalists who carried the guilt for the war and the Holocaust. And the Easterners' experience of the postwar period was profoundly divergent. Not only did the East not go through the civil empowerment of the 1968 movement, it also did not enjoy ever growing wealth, while getting gradually used to immigration. After 1989, the divisions continued. Tellingly, job losses coincided with the experience of open European borders: Unemployment nearly doubled in the East between 1989 and 1999. The takeover by Westerners of large parts of the business sector, including housing, caused many Easterners to feel as though they were being subjected to the whims of the West even to the point, some said, of "colonization." When politicians from the country's West like Wolfgang Schauble described the mass influx of refugees and migrants from 2015 on as a "rendezvous of our society with globalization," many East Germans felt they'd had that rendezvous already. As a result, many in the East feel disenfranchised and betrayed: They had dreamed of a close knit community in 1989 and woke up in a complex society. Instead of a united people of national destiny, they got a pluralistic population with a sense of global responsibility. This is why Ms. Merkel's announcement in 2015 that Germany would welcome refugees fleeing the Syrian war was a watershed moment. Many East Germans had long suspected their security and concerns counted for less than those of others; now they appeared to have proof. Since then, support for the AfD has risen tremendously. The party won around a quarter of the votes in three eastern German state elections last year, becoming the second biggest party in all three. While the East West split is not the only reason for the nationwide surge of the AfD, it illustrates alarmingly well to quote Bloch again the "non simultaneous" disjunction between a growing number of voters and traditional parties like the Christian Democrats. It seems initially incomprehensible why Ms. Merkel, who was raised in the East, showed such little sensitivity to the growing divide that is now in full bloom. Part of the explanation may be that Ms. Merkel is a formidably quick learner who has little sympathy for those who don't see liberty as an opportunity. What's more, the chancellor's conservatism is of a progressive kind, leaning toward the Greens, the party that best mirrors young West Germans' self image of eco awareness and cultural openness. After 14 years of rule by Ms. Merkel, Christian Democrats face a dilemma. When their politicians from Berlin travel east they are told by party members to stop their friendly overtures toward the Greens, as it may turn even more voters to the AfD. When they travel west, they are told to stop flirting with the AfD, as it may turn voters to the Greens. The way to escape this dilemma is to lean nowhere. German conservatism needs to redefine itself independently of competitors left and far right. But this reframing can happen only with an open discussion of Ms. Merkel's mistakes. Her neglect of Germany's growing inner disunity was one of them. Another, after the correct decision to let in Syrian refugees in an emergency situation in 2015, was to allow uncontrolled immigration for too long. The third mistake was to shut down Germany's nuclear power plants in a rush, losing technology that could prove indispensable in the fight against climate change. Common to all was Ms. Merkel's profound failure of political communication. That was her greatest flaw. In times of rapid change, a responsible political leader has to seek common ground by showing both reason and conviction. Telling AfD voters in friendly yet very clear terms why they err must be part of it. It should also have involved convincing would be Green voters that their interests and those of the climate are best served by a pro business government. Ms. Merkel failed in both. An election, due next year, beckons. Ms. Merkel's time is nearly up. The best way to move beyond her tenure is for Germany's Christian Democrats to find a new leader able to admit conservative shortcomings while at the same time combating those on the left and the far right who suggest that conservatism is a mistake in itself. Jochen Bittner ( JochenBittner) is a co head of the debate section for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and a contributing opinion writer. 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.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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FRANKFURT The president of the European Central Bank on Tuesday joined a small but growing number of economists who argue that, even though the euro zone still faces huge economic problems, there are tentative signs that two years of painful adjustment are beginning to pay off. Several countries, including Italy, Portugal and even Greece, have been able to increase exports. Labor costs have fallen in some of the troubled countries, which should further improve their ability to sell their goods on the global market. And in another positive signal, the flight of money from Spain was reversed in September for the first time since mid 2011. "One should acknowledge the extraordinary challenges," Mario Draghi, the central bank's president, told a committee of the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday. But, he added, "one should acknowledge the extraordinary progress both in data and economic reform." For the moment, any glimmers of improvement are overshadowed by deep recession in southern Europe and staggering levels of unemployment. The risk of a euro zone breakup remains. It will be months if not years before citizens of countries like Greece and Spain perceive an improvement in their standards of living. Mr. Draghi noted that economic changes had "not yet had a fully visible impact on the everyday life of citizens in the countries suffering most from the crisis." If the euro zone crisis ends someday, though, it will be because countries are able to escape the vicious circle created by recession, debt and austerity. Economic growth would lead to higher tax receipts. Governments would then have a better chance of repaying their debts and would face less pressure to cut spending. That day may still be a long way off. But some economists have begun challenging the economic orthodoxy, which held that the troubled euro zone countries were effectively doomed. Deprived of national currencies they could devalue, according to the conventional wisdom, the countries would never become competitive without inflicting so much pain on their citizens that there would be revolution in the streets. Workers have suffered plenty, of course, and protests in Madrid and other cities illustrate the depth of public frustration. In Athens on Tuesday, police officers fired tear gas and stun grenades at protesters during a visit by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, whom many Greeks blame for the austerity budgets that have caused a drastic decline in living standards. Recent data, though, shows that labor costs have already fallen substantially enough in Ireland, Spain and Portugal though not Italy to make it more feasible for them to compete on price with more efficient countries like Germany. "We are seeing gradual signs of improving competitiveness," Mr. Draghi said. As wages have fallen, some troubled countries, including Portugal and Spain, have been able to sell more machinery, chemicals, wine and other products abroad, which is crucial if they are ever to return to growth. Even Greece, which is suffering a depression, managed to increase exports 15 percent in the first six months of 2012, according to European Union data. Greek exports remain low, totaling 12.5 billion euros, or about 16 billion, in the first half of the year. A single German company, Daimler, the maker of cars and trucks, exports far more. But the sharp increase in Greek exports, led by shipping and olive oil and other agricultural products, represents a rare bit of economic good news for the country. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. In another hopeful sign, there was an increase in money flowing into Spain during September, reversing an alarming capital flight, which at some points equaled an estimated 50 percent of gross domestic product, according to economists at Credit Suisse. They cautioned that data for one month, when inflows approached 20 billion euros, do not qualify as a trend. But, in a note to clients, the economists added: "This was the most significant flow of capital back into the periphery since the euro crisis began." Mr. Draghi and the central bank can probably take some credit for the willingness of investors and depositors to return to Spain. The bank's promise to buy government bonds from Spain and other countries if requested, and Mr. Draghi's promise to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro, have eased fears that the currency union could break up. Even though the central bank has yet to deploy the new bond buying program, the fact that it stands ready to act has at least temporarily restored faith in the euro. "In a sense, nothing has changed fundamentally," said Giancarlo Corsetti, a professor of macroeconomics at the University of Cambridge. "On the other hand, everything has changed, because we can go ahead without being too vulnerable to shifting market sentiment." Jorg Kramer, chief economist at Commerzbank, pointed out that German companies had been investing less in factories and equipment even though their export sales continued to rise. That can only mean that they are anxious about the future but might invest more if they were more confident. "The main factor weighing on the growth outlook is not austerity," Mr. Kramer said. "The main factor is this uncertainty. When firms doubt whether the euro is going to remain legal tender, then firms hesitate to invest even in Germany." Mr. Kramer said he had "penciled in" a return to growth for the euro zone early next year. Plenty could still go wrong on the way to a revival. The green shoots of confidence could wilt in the smog of habitual quarreling and procrastination by European leaders. Ms. Merkel faces national elections next year, which could make her less willing to commit German resources to resolving the crisis. Mr. Draghi, as he had done previously, on Tuesday put the onus on Europe's political leaders. "Our policy would be ineffective," he said, "if the countries concerned do not undertake the necessary reforms." In a reminder that serious disagreements remain among European leaders, German officials have shown reluctance to move ahead on a crucial element of the euro recovery program: establishing a single banking supervisor for the euro zone. Elke Konig, head of the Germany financial services regulator, known as BaFin, said on Tuesday that the January 2013 deadline to set up a common regulator within the central bank was unrealistic. "I could imagine that we get there in January 2014 that's a guess," she told the German television broadcaster ARD, Reuters said. Jens Weidmann, the president of the German Bundesbank, has also expressed reservations about some elements of the bank plan.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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