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On June 30, California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing regulators sued Cisco Systems Inc., for discrimination. The cause was not, like most workplace discrimination lawsuits, based on race, gender, age or sexual orientation. It was based on caste. The lawsuit accuses Cisco, a multibillion dollar tech conglomerate based in San Jose, Calif., of denying an engineer, who immigrated from India to the United States, professional opportunities, a raise and promotions because he was from a low caste, or Dalit, background. The lawsuit states that his Indian American managers, Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella, who are described as high caste Brahmins, harassed the engineer because of their sense of superiority rooted in the Hindu caste system. Many Indian Americans reacted with disbelief that a giant corporation in Silicon Valley could be mired in caste discrimination. For Dalit Americans like me, it was just another Wednesday. Dalit, which means "oppressed," is a self chosen identity for close to 25 percent of India's population, and it refers to former "untouchables," the people who suffer the greatest violence, discrimination and disenfranchisement under the centuries old caste system that structures Hindu society. Caste is the gear that turns every system in India. "If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian Caste would become a world problem," B.R. Ambedkar, the greatest Dalit leader and one of the architects of the India Constitution, wrote in 1916. He was prophetic. Caste prejudice and discrimination is rife within the Indian communities in the United States and other countries. Its chains are even turning the work culture within multibillion dollar American tech companies, and beyond. The Cisco engineer, whose complaint led to the lawsuit and who identifies himself as a Dalit, has not been named in the lawsuit. From the mid 1990s, American companies, panicking at the feared "millennial meltdown" of computer systems, were hiring close to 100,000 technology workers a year from India. An overwhelming majority of the Indian information technology professionals who moved to the United States were from "higher castes," and only a handful were Dalits. Over the Fourth of July weekend, I participated in a video call with about 30 Dalit Indian immigrants. A Dalit information technology professional on the video call spoke about moving to the United States in 2000 and working at Cisco between 2007 and 2013. "A large percentage of the work force was already Indian," he told us. "They openly discussed their caste and would ask questions to figure out my caste background." Higher caste Indians use the knowledge of a person's caste to place him or her on the social hierarchy despite professional qualifications. "I usually ignored these conversations," the Dalit worker added. "If they knew I was Dalit, it could ruin my career." According to the lawsuit, Mr. Iyer, one of the Brahmin engineers at Cisco, revealed to his other higher caste colleagues that the complainant had joined a top engineering school in India through affirmative action. When the Dalit engineer, the lawsuit says, confronted Mr. Iyer and contacted Cisco's human resources to file a complaint, Mr. Iyer retaliated by taking away the Dalit engineer's role as lead on two technologies. For two years, the lawsuit says, Mr. Iyer isolated the Dalit engineer, denied him bonuses and raises and stonewalled his promotions. Cisco's human resources department responded by telling the Dalit engineer that "caste discrimination was not unlawful" and took no immediate corrective action. Mr. Kompella, the other Brahmin manager named in the lawsuit, replaced Mr. Iyer as the Dalit engineer's manager, and according to the suit, "continued to discriminate, harass, and retaliate against" him. In 2019, Cisco was ranked No. 2 on Fortune's 100 Best Workplaces for Diversity. The technology giant got away with ignoring the persistent caste discrimination because American laws don't yet recognize Hindu caste discrimination as a valid form of exclusion. Caste does not feature in Cisco's diversity practices in its operations in India either. It reveals how the Indian information technology sector often operates in willful ignorance of the terrifying realities of caste. In "The Other One Percent: Indians in America," a 2016 study of people of Indian descent in the United States, the authors Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh estimated that "over 90 percent of migrants" came from high castes or dominant castes. According to a 2018 survey by Equality Labs, a Dalit American led civil rights organization, 67 percent of Dalits in the Indian diaspora admitted to facing caste based harassment at the workplace. In the backdrop of caste supremacy in the Indian diaspora in the United States, when higher caste Hindus often describe and demonize Dalits as "inherently lazy/ opportunistic/ not talented," even apparently innocuous practices like peer reviews for promotions (Cisco and several other tech companies operate on this model), can turn into minefields, ending in job losses and visa rejections for Dalits. Almost every Dalit person I spoke to in the United States, after California filed the lawsuit against Cisco, requested to remain anonymous and feared that revealing their identity as a Dalit working in the American tech industry filled with higher caste Indians would ruin their career. Those words also governed my life until 2016, when I decided to publicly reveal my caste identity and "come out" as Dalit. Growing up "passing" as a dominant caste person in India while hiding my "untouchable," caste I lived in the same fear that stops most Dalits from articulating their harassment and asserting their identity in India and the United States. The overwhelmingly higher caste Indian American community is seen as a "model minority" with more than an average 100,000 median income and rising cultural and political visibility. But it has engendered a narrative that is as diabolical as it is in India: insisting that they live in a "post caste world" while simultaneously upholding its hierarchical framework that benefits the higher caste people. Ranging from seemingly harmless calls for "vegetarian only roommates" (an easy way to assert caste purity), caste based temple networks that automatically exclude "impure" Dalits, and the more overt and dangerous arm twisting of American norms right wing Hindu activist organizations tried to remove any mention of caste from California's textbooks in 2018 caste supremacy is fiercely defended, almost as a core tenet of Indian Hindu culture. Yet after decades of being silenced, Dalit Americans are finally finding a voice that cannot be ignored. I was able to come out as Dalit because after moving to New York and avoiding Indian only communities, for the first time, I was not scared of someone finding out my caste. Finding comfort and inspiration in movements like Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name and the tragic institutional murder of a Dalit student activist in India, I was able to understand and acknowledge that my history was a tapestry of pride, not shame. Most Dalits in America still live with the fear of being exposed. But the pending California vs. Cisco case is a major step in the right direction. Yashica Dutt is an Indian journalist and the author of the memoir, "Coming Out as a Dalit." 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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On Tuesday, her outfit consisted of a lacy crimson gown, towering scarlet Christian Louboutin heels, and cherry red lipstick and nail polish. On Wednesday, she had been changed into a pale, shimmering blue frock, again with matching heels. On Thursday, she wore a rose gold custom knit suit by St. John's, again paired with Christian Louboutins. And on Friday, she was laid to rest in a full length gold dress, with, of course, sparkling gold sequined heels to match. Aretha Franklin's farewell week comprised four days of high fashion and showcased the technical embalming expertise of Swanson Funeral Home in Detroit, the city in which her open casket was displayed. In death as in life, Aretha Franklin demonstrated the value of an outfit change. Before her funeral on Friday at the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit, where Ms. Franklin was honored in a daylong ceremony , there were public viewings at the city's Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the New Bethel Baptist Church. Her coffin was gold plated and her wardrobe sang a similar tune. Ms. Franklin's clothes throughout her career, and since her death two weeks ago of pancreatic cancer, fearlessly announced her stature, and success. Her regal look is an indelible part of her legacy. Mr. Louboutin, the shoe designer, said that he had only encountered Ms. Franklin once, at a concert of hers in New York, in an exchange during which he was so star struck that he was reluctant afterward to say that he had even met her. "She complimented me for my work and I could barely reply one word, too shy and too impressed," he said. "Her eyes were intense, equaling the power of her voice." He said a friend of his had sent him a picture of Ms. Franklin wearing Mr. Louboutin's shoes in the coffin on Tuesday with the message: "Lots of people die for them, she decided to die with them." Mr. Louboutin added, "I feel terribly honored in that matter and of course highly moved by this gesture." The Wright Museum, where Rosa Parks's body was displayed after she died in 2005, did not have official numbers on how many people attended the viewing each day, but Delisha Upshaw, a spokeswoman for the museum, noted that on Wednesday, the event that had been scheduled to go from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. lasted until midnight. "I heard people say she looks so beautiful and peaceful like she's sleeping," Ms. Upshaw said. "She's a fashion icon! What else would we expect?" Ms. Upshaw noted that Ms. Franklin's crimson outfit on Tuesday had been a nod to her honorary membership in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, "which is perfect," Ms. Upshaw said, "because her sorority sisters came that night to pay her final respects." It was not only the elaborate beauty of Ms. Franklin's outfits that were a nod to another era. Bess Lovejoy, the author of "Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses," said that the procession that attended her funeral, with its motorcade of pink Cadillacs, reminded her of nothing so much as the burial of Alexander the Great. Alexander, she said, had the prototypical celebrity funeral, with a glittering hearse that was meant to resemble a palace. "There were years and years of dignitaries coming to see him, even though he would not be preserved with the skill that Aretha was," she said. "There's a story about Julius Caesar going to see him and accidentally crumpling his nose off." Indeed, even the efforts taken in embalming Ms. Franklin were a reflection of the period over which she ruled, fitting into a great tradition of skillful embalming at African American funeral homes. Stephanie Simon, the embalming manager at the Charbonnet Labat Funeral Home in New Orleans, which is known for elaborate preparations and display of clients' family members, answered the phone Friday from the embalming room, where she was listening to Ms. Franklin's funeral service. "African Americans, we tend to hold a body a little longer," she said of the tradition of embalming. "We want all of the relatives and friends to come from around the country. We would like them to attend the service as well." Ms. Simon, who has been in the industry for nearly 30 years, was impressed by the work of the Swanson Funeral Home. She said that the work of outfit changes was time consuming, and took extreme care. "You have to make sure you have the adequate manpower to carry out a delicate task," Ms. Simon said. Ms. Simon was a devoted fan of Ms. Franklin. "I wish I had more pictures to look at," she said. "I've been on social media a whole lot, watching the different TV stations, admiring everything." Ms. Lovejoy said that, though there had been a move away from embalming in more recent years because it has begun to be seen as excessive (and toxic to those who prepare the body), modest preparations would not have befitted someone of Ms. Franklin's glamour and performance capabilities. "It's not a showbiz thing to do to eschew embalming," Ms. Lovejoy said. "What she's doing makes perfect sense for who she was and the place and time when she was at her apex."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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'ANTHRACITE FIELDS' at Zankel Hall (Dec. 1, 9 p.m.). Julia Wolfe's Pulitzer Prize winning oratorio on the plight of Pennsylvania's coal miners is justly receiving numerous performances, not least because its politically charged content speaks to our present moment. Here, with projections by Jeff Sugg, it's performed by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street and the Bang on a Can All Stars, the group that Wolfe co founded. Julian Wachner conducts. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org BACH COLLEGIUM JAPAN at Zankel Hall (Nov. 30, 7:30 p.m.). Masaaki Suzuki and his period instrument forces have tended to bring larger scale, often choral works to New York recently, so this predominantly instrumental program including Bach, Vivaldi, Marcello and Telemann is a welcome change of pace. There's still vocal music, though, not least the motet "Silete Venti" by Handel with the soprano Joanne Lunn. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org JULIA BULLOCK at the Met Fifth Avenue (Dec. 2, 3 p.m.). This formidable artist's residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art continues with a recital of music set to poems by Langston Hughes. Helping Bullock out are the soprano Nicole Cabell, the New York Philharmonic clarinetist Anthony McGill, the violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery and the pianist and composer Ricky Ian Gordon. 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'GREEK' at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (Dec. 5 6, 7:30 p.m., through Dec. 9). This in your face update of Oedipus is the first of four operas by Mark Anthony Turnage, whose most recent works in the genre have been "Anna Nicole" and "Coraline." Joe Hill Gibbins' production hails from Scottish Opera, and features Alex Otterburn in the lead role of Eddy. Stuart Stratford conducts. 718 636 4100, bam.org 'LA TRAVIATA' at the Metropolitan Opera (Dec. 4, 8 p.m., through Dec. 29). Willy Decker's production of Verdi's classic is no more, replaced by a new staging by Michael Mayer that receives its gala premiere this week. The cast for the December run a second comes along in April is led by Diana Damrau as Violetta, Juan Diego Florez as Alfredo and Quinn Kelsey as Giorgio. Yannick Nezet Seguin conducts. 212 362 6000, metopera.org 'MESSIAH' at St. Thomas Church (Dec. 4, 6, 7:30 p.m.). Yes, it's that time of year again, as the "Messiah" season gets underway with this most distinctive of the city's offerings. The St. Thomas Choir of Men and Boys sings accompanied by New York Baroque Incorporated, with the soloists Elizabeth Weisberg, Meg Bragle, Thomas Cooley and Alexander Dobson. Daniel Hyde, who leaves New York this fall to take up the storied post of director of music at King's College, Cambridge, conducts. 212 757 7013, saintthomaschurch.org NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at David Geffen Hall (Dec. 6, 7:30 p.m., through Dec. 8). The baritone Matthias Goerne has struck up a valuable partnership with the Philharmonic's music director, Jaap van Zweden, notably braving the role of Wotan on the conductor's "Ring" recordings with the Hong Kong Philharmonic on Naxos. Here, on a program that also includes Mozart's Symphony No. 40, Goerne sings songs by Strauss and Schubert. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org
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Music
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John Lewis, the civil rights icon, died on Friday. He had announced in December that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Bernard Lafayette, another leader in the civil rights movement, first met John Lewis at the American Baptist College in Nashville, Tenn. Along with others in the Nashville Student Movement, they put their lives at risk again and again, in nonviolent protests in Nashville, and as Freedom Riders, the Black and white passengers who rode together on buses through the South to challenge segregated public transportation. In an interview with Lora Kelley, Mr. Lafayette reflected on their friendship. This piece has been edited and condensed for clarity. I first met John Lewis in 1958. We were roommates at the American Baptist College in Nashville. We shared a small room with two beds, two wardrobes and a bathroom down the hall. At night in the dormitory, we used to stay up and talk about our experiences growing up in the South. We both came from communities where segregation was the norm, and both of us resented the idea of having to be victims of segregation. We thought about how things could be different. And we both developed a commitment at a young age for civil rights and social change. John Lewis has been a brother to me ever since. I remember my mother used to send me two suits every Mother's Day. She was so funny I don't know any son who ever got a Mother's Day present. But I would always give one suit to John because we used to wear the same size. We always shared what we had. At school, John was going to these workshops on nonviolent protests with students from various colleges in Nashville. He said, you need to come to these meetings; this is what we talk about all the time. I said, I don't have time for that. Workshops? I'm already working as much as I can. But he did not give up. He just continued to badger me. I went, just to stop him from having to talk about it. And that's how I got involved John insisted that I get involved. The civil rights leader James Lawson led the workshops. They focused on lunch counters. We did role plays and simulations of lunch counter sit ins. They taught us to always have backups. So that training made a big difference in terms of developing leadership out of Nashville. During the 1960 Christmas vacation holiday, John and I decided on our own to desegregate a Greyhound bus in Nashville. That was before the Freedom Rides. The Greyhound bus station had just one ticket counter. They used to have separate ticket counters, separate lunch counters, separate waiting rooms, separate restrooms. But now this bus station was completely desegregated. So we got our tickets at what used to be the white only ticket counter. And we just got on the bus. I sat behind the driver in the first seat. John sat across from me in the front row. The bus driver insisted that we move to the back, but we didn't. The driver pulled back into the bus station and tried to get support. But he returned with no results. So, he had to drive us. We drove from Nashville on down to Troy, Ala. That's where John got off the bus. It was night. The bus stop was actually a gas station; it was dark; it was closed. And the bus driver had already shown his anger toward us. John would be by himself, waiting for his ride. When we said goodbye; I remember thinking it could be fatal for him. And then I suddenly realized I didn't know what would happen to me! I continued on the bus without him. It worked out fine. I went on to Tampa, Fla. That was the first time we integrated the buses. All the way down, sitting in the front row. It was just a natural thing for us to want to join the Freedom Rides when they started in May 1961. John got his application accepted. But my application required parental permission because I wasn't going to be 21 until July. My father said no, I'm not signing your death warrant. So I didn't go. But we took John to the bus station. The bus had left already, but we caught up with the bus, and he got on. He was able to get on the original ride. The bus was burned in Anniston, Ala., and people got beaten up in Birmingham. Because of the violence, they halted the Freedom Rides. But those of us who were from Nashville decided that we would continue. Our position was that we would not allow violence to stop a nonviolent movement. And besides, we had been trained as leaders. I led a second group and we left out of Birmingham. John and I led our groups together to Montgomery, Ala. I remember John Lewis had no reservations about going down and sitting in and knowing that we could be injured. You could be clobbered. I was there on the bus platform in Montgomery, Ala., when they hit him over the head with a Coca Cola crate and smashed his head. Going to jail was a regular thing for him. In those days, you didn't want to have a jail record. People didn't know about civil disobedience and the philosophy of nonviolence. All they knew is that you went to jail. But John was arrested over 40 some times. If they were arresting people, you could be sure that John would not be left out. People admired and respected John. And they listened to him. He was the president of the class in college, and then he was president of the student body as a senior. He was also elected as the national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I did not anticipate that he would run for office, but he recognized that if you want to change power, you had to be in power. John Lewis is probably the most courageous civil rights activist I know. While he did make speeches, what was most powerful was his presence. He would show up. He knew his voice by himself couldn't make a difference. So he had to win others over.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Trees do not pay taxes. Some seem to avoid death as well. Many of the world's most ancient organisms are trees, including a 3,600 year old cypress in Chile and a sacred fig in Sri Lanka that was planted in the third century B.C. One bristlecone pine known as Methuselah has been alive for nearly five millenniums, standing in a forest in what is now called California. But according to a paper published Monday in the journal Trends in Plant Science, time ravages us all in the end. The paper, "Long Lived Trees Are Not Immortal," argues that even the most venerable trees have physiological limits though we, with our puny life spans, may never be able to tell. Sergi Munne Bosch, a plant biologist at the University of Barcelona, wrote the article in response to a January study on ginkgo trees, which can live for over a thousand years. The study found that 600 year old ginkgos are as reproductively and photosynthetically vigorous as their 20 year old peers. Genetic analysis of the trees' vascular cambium a thin layer of cells that lies just underneath the bark, and creates new living tissue showed "no evidence of senescence," or cell death, the authors wrote. Dr. Munne Bosch said he found the paper "very interesting," but disagreed with how some readers of the study in popular media and beyond had interpreted it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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VIGO, SPAIN In the manner of an earlier, more courtly style of Spanish banking, he liked to be called Don Julio by his employees and the businessmen and government officials here in the city where he was born. And during the more than four decades that Julio Fernandez Gayoso ran what eventually became the biggest savings bank, or caja, in northwestern Spain, the institution helped transform the city of Vigo, an industrial port city nearly 500 kilometers, or 310 miles, from Madrid. It was thus a steep fall from power in late June when Mr. Gayoso, age 80, was forced out after being named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by anti fraud investigators. Whatever the result of that lawsuit, Mr. Gayoso has emerged as a symbol of the clash between the time honored tradition of the caja as a baronial community institution and the modern, euro based banking economy that Spain has tried to create in recent decades. This collision of business cultures played out in various ways among the 45 cajas that operated in Spain until early 2010, more than a year after the real estate bubble burst. Together, these clashes helped bring the country's banking industry to the brink of collapse, prompting European finance ministers in June to devise an emergency EUR100 billion, or 123.4 billion, rescue plan for the sector. In the years before the real estate collapse, Mr. Gayoso and his caja, Caixanova, financed Vigo's first university campus. They built or acquired some of the grandest buildings along the city's main thoroughfare. And through Caixanova, Mr. Gayoso became a leading patron of the arts, assembling an impressive painting collection hung at various cultural centers sponsored by the bank. "This is a workers' city, but even our Communist painters got so many commissions from him that they portrayed him as a god," said Carlos Gonzalez Principe, a former mayor of Vigo. Mr. Gayoso resigned just days after investigators filed suit against him and four other board members, accusing the executives of surreptitiously setting up multimillion euro retirement plans for themselves after the 2010 merger between Mr. Gayoso's caja and another savings bank in the Galicia region. The merged institution, Novacaixagalicia, was Spain's fifth largest savings bank, with about 8,000 employees, almost three million clients and annual revenue of EUR124 billion. "I didn't take a single personal decision, because I couldn't," he told lawmakers. Mr. Gayoso's portrayal of his chairmanship is contradicted by some former board members. Whatever Mr. Gayoso asked of the bank's directors, "there was no debating and never any voting," said Jose Luis Veiga, who joined the board three years ago and remains on the board of a cultural foundation linked to the bank. "The bank's leadership and strategy were completely in his hands," Mr. Veiga said. Most of Spain's cajas were established in the 19th century as pawn shops, with the backing of town halls and the Roman Catholic Church. Their purpose was not to generate profit for shareholders, the way commercial banks do, but to redistribute surplus income through social work. In many cases, though, the cajas increasingly came under the control of regional politicians who were eager to use the bank to finance government projects. But as the cajas amassed power in Galicia, the tendency "turned out to be excessive control not by politicians but by a few bankers who got so powerful that even politicians became afraid of them," said Santiago Lago Penas, an economics professor at the University of Vigo. Board membership, he added, became a matter of "how close the relationship was with the chairman, rather than experience." Mr. Principe, the former mayor of Vigo, takes the long view. "Almost everything here had to change, as we transitioned from the Franco dictatorship to democracy except for the person who controlled our banking system," said Mr. Principe, who contends that Mr. Gayoso helped end his political career in the 1990s by financing a rival's election campaign. "When you've been the main financier for so long," he added, "it's possible to spread fear." 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. Mr. Gayoso joined the caja in Vigo in 1947 as a 16 year old accounting assistant. By 1965 he had risen to the top post, director general, and over the next 30 years consolidated his power and expanded the bank's reach. Critics say that the longer Mr. Gayoso ran the bank, the less accountable he and the board were. In the 1980s, Miguel Angel Quinteiro, an employee in the bank's information technology department, joined the board as a staff representative. Mr. Quinteiro said he had heard rumors that the caja was writing off bad loans that had been granted on preferential terms to some local businesses, but when he asked for a list of defaults he was refused. He said he also asked for details of the bonuses paid to employees in cash each year, but was again refused. Eventually, Mr. Quinteiro said, he was fired after being accused of leaking confidential information from board meetings to a trade union. He threatened to sue for unfair dismissal until, he said, the bank offered him the equivalent of EUR180,000, "one of the highest settlements at that time and enough to do what I wanted," which was to set up his own information technology company. A wake up call for the cajas came in the late 1990s, when Spain was poised to enter the euro zone and a construction driven boom was already under way. The cajas, intent on maintaining their 50 percent share of Spain's banking market, began competing more aggressively with commercial banks to offer real estate loans. They were encouraged by regional politicians eager to sell previously unwanted public land. As the real estate bubble continued through 2008, the cajas began venturing beyond their regions, where they were ill equipped to assess and monitor the creditworthiness of borrowers. Galicia's cajas ventured especially far afield not only into Valencia, on the other side of the country, but even down into the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco. By the end of last year, Galicia's cajas had accumulated EUR5.5 billion of loans presenting a risk of default, requiring the state to inject EUR2.5 billion of bailout funds. Mr. Mendez ran Caixa Galicia for 29 years, before the government ordered it to merge with Mr. Gayoso's bank as part of an industrywide consolidation intended to salvage the caja system. Among Caixa Galicia's investments was a yacht and crew at the disposal of Mr. Mendez. And although the bank was based in the northern Galician city of A Coruna, Mr. Mendez persuaded his board to build a cultural center in Vigo. The cultural center stands unfinished, however, a silent reminder of the collapse of Spain's construction sector. As the extent of the national mortgage meltdown became evident, the government engineered a major consolidation of the cajas, reducing their number to 12 today from 45 in early 2010. When it came time to combine Caixa Galicia and Caixanova, Mr. Gayoso's board which had already raised the statutory age limit of a director general to 75 from 65 so Mr. Gayoso could remain in charge demanded that he be guaranteed the chairmanship of the merged institution. Mr. Mendez did not fight for the post. Instead, he agreed to leave before the merger was completed, after securing a EUR16.5 million severance and pension package, a record for a caja chief. Mr. Mendez was not available for comment and has not given any interviews since his departure, Novacaixagalicia said. Marcelino Otero Lopez, president of an association of Galician companies that is based in Vigo, argued that Mr. Gayoso was right to defend the city's financial interests and resist a Madrid driven merger with its main competitor. Vigo's caja, he argued, had been "the paradigm of a well managed bank" until it became infected by Spain's real estate frenzy. Luis Miguel Franqueira Garcia, a spokesman said the bank now named Novagalicia Banco was making "a fresh start" under the chairmanship of Jose Maria Castellano, a former senior executive at Inditex, the fashion retailing giant based in Galicia whose brands include Zara. The caja remains 93 percent owned by the state banking agency, which approved Mr. Castellano's appointment. He recently indicated that Novagalicia Banco would require an additional EUR6 billion of capital, on top of the EUR2.5 billion of bailout money received last year. In early July, the bank publicly asked for forgiveness from customers notably depositors who, before the bank's collapse, had been sold preference shares, a convertible debt instrument that plunged in value, leading to protests and lawsuits. Many analysts say these instruments were too complex and risky to have been marketed to consumer bank depositors. Now on the windows of the bank's offices, a 10 point "Pledge to Galicia" has been posted. Promise No.3: to be "austere and transparent." Still, some longstanding customers say the bank will need more than that to restore confidence, especially given the broader challenges still confronting the banking sector. "Whatever Gayoso might have done wrong, what needs repairing is our whole banking system," said Jose Fernandez, a grocery shop owner in Vigo who opened his account four decades ago. "There might not have been sufficient controls within the caja. But this would not have been such a problem if the Bank of Spain had done its job and really supervised the financial sector."
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Global Business
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In "Untitled," two women sometimes stand at twice their height. It's "about society and outward appearance and also what's going on inside." None
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Dance
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With "Avengers: Endgame" expected to shatter box office records this weekend, it's no surprise that three of that film's stars Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther), Tessa Thompson (Valkyrie) and Chris Hemsworth (Thor) show up in new trailers. Produced by "Avengers: Endgame" directors Anthony and Joe Russo, this action flick looks like a throwback to earlier New York City cop movies like "The French Connection" and "16 Blocks." Chadwick Boseman radiates movie star charisma in the viscerally appealing trailer as an N.Y.P.D. detective whose officer father was killed in the line of duty. He's called in to hunt a gang of drug dealers who murdered eight cops and tries to trap the suspects by shutting down all exits from Manhattan hence the title. The second trailer for the sci fi comedy franchise's spinoff puts the emphasis on Agent M (Tessa Thompson), revealing her back story her parents' memories were wiped after an alien encounter when she was a child, but hers wasn't. She lobbies to join the Men in Black, despite objecting to the organization's sexist name. "Don't start," warns her boss, Agent O (Emma Thompson, returning from "Men in Black 3"). "I'm working on it." Chris Hemsworth and Liam Neeson are also on board for the mission to root out a mole in the group's British branch, and the setting allows for a witty steering wheel gag. Moviemakers can't stop messing with Will Smith's face. The erstwhile "Men in Black" star turns blue in Disney's forthcoming live action remake of "Aladdin," and he's been digitally de aged to play a younger version of himself for director Ang Lee's thriller. In it, Smith stars as a grizzled assassin who realizes he's being tracked by his more youthful doppelganger. The effects in the trailer are impressive, but the premise will feel familiar to anyone who saw the 2012 Bruce Willis Joseph Gordon Levitt vehicle "Looper." 'Godzilla: King of the Monsters' (May 31) The final promotional clip for this monster mash up plays down human cast members like Millie Bobby Brown and O'Shea Jackson Jr. and positions the titular creature as the movie's hero. He's unleashed to battle a trio of deadly behemoths "Mothra, Rodan, Ghidorah, oh my!" and the trailer features a surprising "Wizard of Oz" vibe as the soaring score quotes "Over the Rainbow." Shamelessly jumping on the "Avengers: Endgame" bandwagon, the minute long teaser for this "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" remake sets up the con women played by Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway as "The Revengers." The trailer is mostly recycled gags from the unfunny two and a half minute clip released in February. And when it tries to sell the film as a MeToo story ("After centuries of injustice, who will take a stand?"), that's truly rotten.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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A traditional resort that has modernized its Old South feel, South Carolina's graceful Montage Palmetto Bluff has been called one of the world's most romantic hotels. The property opened two new restaurants in 2017 and added a third, serving Southern classics, this month. The resort completed a 100 million renovation in 2016, adding a 74 room inn and 13,000 square foot spa. Now Palmetto Bluff wants to extends its Southern hospitality to younger and tech savvier guests with fresh offerings, like a bowling alley and text concierge service, in addition to the obligatory Jack Nicklaus golf course. The Montage Palmetto Bluff is at the edge of the former fishing village of Bluffton, about a 20 minute drive from Hilton Head Island and a half hour from Savannah, Ga., in South Carolina's Lowcountry . Set along the idyllic May River, the 20,000 acre property occupies a prime spot that sustained the Cusabo coastal tribes in pre Columbian times, and more recently was the site of a turn of the century mansion for the New York banker Richard T. Wilson. Today its lagoons host photogenic alligators, turtles, egrets, and nesting bald eagles. Rental cottages and vacation homes are also spread across the property, which is draped by Spanish moss and that is lighted by flickering gas lamps . At the tail end of Labor Day weekend, we were given a complimentary upgrade to a room overlooking the resort's front lawn, with an ample balcony perfect for sundowners. A welcome gift of bourbon milk jam and vanilla salted shortbread was nice. The soothing room, all creams, yellows, and blues, held a king size bed, dark wood desk, and inviting sectional sofa. The speaker's Bluetooth easily connected to favorite music via our phones. At bedtime chocolates were left on our pillows, and the TV was turned to a jazz station. The spacious bathroom all white save for a gleaming black marble floor was arranged thoughtfully for two, with a big freestanding tub, separate rainfall fixture shower, adjoining toilet closet, double vanity, dimmer switches for flattering lighting, and a speaker bringing in tunes from the bedroom. Toiletries are by Gilchrist and Soames. When our rooms weren't ready on arrival, clerks handled the inconvenience pleasantly by granting access to the spa, locker rooms, ample gym and two pools. A text alerted us when we could check in (although there was no further response to our questions , which the message had offered to answer by text). Stand up paddleboard rentals were comparatively steep ( 55), and bicycles ( 15) were surprisingly not included in our stay, so we chose complimentary kayaks. The watersports guide sent us off by promising an "amazing time" around sunset on the May River. Six minutes later, his promise was kept when we spotted dolphin fins. My husband and I paddled together with a lively pod of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins for the next 40 minutes, making for one of the most memorable nature experiences of our lives. Poolside service from c asual dining spot Fore Aft was prompt, although the large black "love bugs" ubiquitous at summer's end are less romantic than their name suggests. For dinner, we chose the buzzing, wood paneled Octagon Bar, where an acoustic guitarist played while guests downed beer and cocktails. Come morning our room service breakfast turned up 14 minutes later than we'd ordered it to arrive. The huge biscuit and egg sandwich with Tillamook cheddar ( 22) was a heavy start to the day , and the vegan burrito ( 18) was bland, but fresh flowers and tiny Tabasco bottles were appreciated gestures. The comfort food restaurant Cole's, the grab and go Canteen and the casual, Southern focused Octagon Porch Restaurant are other dining options . Along with its many subtle but lovely touches for couples, the stunning nature at Montage Palmetto Bluff makes this updated Southern resort as romantic as promised.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Ticketmaster has agreed to pay a 10 million fine to resolve charges that it intruded into the computer system of one of its competitors, prosecutors said on Wednesday, ending a yearslong legal battle over claims that the company illegally interfered in the business of a ticketing start up called Songkick. More than two years ago, Ticketmaster reached a settlement with Songkick in response to a lawsuit that accused the concert giant of abusing its market power to control the sales of tickets. In addition to settling for 110 million, Ticketmaster acquired some of Songkick's remaining technology assets and patents for an undisclosed sum. The court battle also involved accusations of corporate espionage that led to an investigation by federal prosecutors in New York. Prosecutors for the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York said in court documents that the computer intrusions were spearheaded by a former Songkick employee who left the start up in 2012 and later started working for Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation. The employee was said to have disseminated Songkick's login information to other Ticketmaster employees so they could access an app called an artist toolbox, which provided data on purchases of presale tickets through Songkick, the documents said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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The bad news had been building for months at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even as crowds poured into shows on Hellenistic kingdoms and high tech fashion, the Met's deficit was approaching 40 million and had forced the buyout or layoff of some 90 employees. An expansion into a satellite building cost millions of dollars more than expected. A new Met logo and marketing plan were rolled out at great expense and greeted with ridicule. Then, last month, a new 600 million wing was postponed by several years, frustrating the Met's efforts to become a serious player in the competitive field of Modern and contemporary art. Tension inside the Met, the country's largest art museum, is running so high that when curators and conservators recently wrote a letter protesting compensation cuts, the museum's leaders chose not to show it to trustees for fear of leaks and bad publicity. Those who wanted to see the document had to go to the office of the Met's general counsel and read it under observation. How can a behemoth like the Met, the thinking goes, possibly stumble? Some curators and trustees have zeroed in on Thomas P. Campbell, the Met's director and chief executive since 2008, as well as the board that has backed him. The anguish can be intense, given the love that all involved have for the Met. "It's a tragedy to see a great institution in decline," said George R. Goldner, who in 2014 retired after 21 years as the chairman of the Met's drawings and prints department and has since served as a consultant to the museum. "To have inherited a museum as strong as the Met was 10 years ago with a great curatorial staff and to have it be what it is today is unimaginable." Several people inside the museum, most of whom spoke anonymously for fear of losing their positions, said the Met under Mr. Campbell had tried to do too much too fast: overhiring in the digital department; overspending on an additional building, the Met Breuer, and on rebranding; overdrawing from unrestricted endowment funds to cover costs; emphasizing Modern and contemporary art at the expense of core departments; and pursuing the new wing before the financing was in place. Instead, the Met should have been contracting, given falling revenue from its retail stores and admission fees and rising expenses. At the same time, some hope that by reckoning with its troubles, the Met is poised to turn a corner. "We're getting to the same page," said Keith Christiansen, the chairman of the Met's European paintings department. "One benefit from all this: It's brought the departments together with the administration to sit down at a common table, and that's something. Now what do we do to move forward and make sure the mission of the museum is not compromised?" Efforts to right the ship have been difficult and painful. In addition to staff cuts, curators were asked to curtail spending for shows and acquisitions. The Met stages nearly 60 exhibitions a year, far more than most museums, but now expects to reduce its exhibitions to about 40 a year. Instead of moving forward with the architect David Chipperfield on a wing intended to help attract art and money from contemporary collectors, the Met has been forced to prioritize the replacement of its aging skylights and roof above the European paintings galleries. In an interview, Mr. Campbell acknowledged that the museum had "been through a trying year." "My colleagues have every right to feel upset," he said. "At the same time, one has to step back and look at the success of the institution." To be sure, most agree that the museum's expansive collections and ambitious exhibitions remain strong. The recent Kerry James Marshall survey at the Met Breuer was widely judged a success, though some critics say the museum's first retrospective of a living black artist would have been even more momentous in the hallowed main building. In addition, the museum's attendance has increased to about seven million visitors a year, including the Cloisters. The Breuer, which opened in March, has drawn 557,000 visitors, exceeding projections. "We've got a whole Modern art collection in the Breuer we didn't have before," said Hamilton E. James, a Met trustee. "Attendance is at all time records; critical acclaim has never been as good. An awful lot of wonderful things have gone on." Moreover, Met officials say, many cultural institutions have been grappling with a structural deficit when costs exceed revenues, despite a strong economy. The Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum, for example, also recently offered buyouts though they did not then move to layoffs. The New York Philharmonic has delayed the tentative date for opening its 600 million rebuilt hall to get a better sense of its cost. And the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is struggling to raise nearly half the 600 million needed for its expansion. While the Met charged Mr. Campbell with strengthening the museum's Modern and contemporary art activities, his focus on the Met Breuer and new wing has been controversial. Why try to compete with the new Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, some ask, instead of sticking to what the Met already does best? Mr. Campbell said he had aimed "to sustain an environment in which scholarship could flourish and be the engine of our program, as well as to expand our audiences, to digitize the institution and to revisit what it is to be an encyclopedic museum." "We've made remarkable progress, but these things are flexible, and they need modulation," he added. "In the same period, we have had to balance our expenditures and our income. In light of that, we're certainly doing some recalibration on the goals we've set ourselves." Some critics say Mr. Campbell has been out of his depth a tapestry curator thrust into the large shoes of the legendary Philippe de Montebello, with no experience running a major institution. (Mr. de Montebello did not have chief executive in his title until 22 years into his 31 year tenure as director.) Moreover, Mr. Campbell, by many accounts, has handled the economic crisis by hunkering down in a defensive crouch rather than reaching out to unite the staff and the full board behind his efforts. Internal critics say he failed to appreciate the upheaval caused by the turnover of three quarters of the curatorial leadership through departures and retirements. They describe the pervasive sense that institutional memory is going out the door and the fear that the Met's mission to educate through scholarship has been overshadowed by its desire to attract millennials through social media. Mr. Campbell said internal relations was often a challenge at the Met, with its more than 2,200 member work force, and acknowledged that he could do better. "I've tried very hard to open up communications bringing people into briefings, in town hall meetings," he said. "I wouldn't say we've got it right yet, but we're heading in the right direction." "I myself need to evolve my thinking and my interactions," he added. "We've identified those issues and taken steps to move forward in a very collective manner." The Boston Consulting Group, hired a year ago pro bono to help with the Met's restructuring, was asked this month to interview staff members and trustees about their concerns because the museum recognized "that morale was challenged," said Daniel H. Weiss, the Met's president and chief operating officer. "It's really important that people feel empowered to say what they think." The Breuer the Whitney's former Madison Avenue home, where the Met has an eight year lease was to be a temporary hub for the museum's Modern and contemporary activities during construction, so the new wing could be unveiled in 2020, on the Met's 150th birthday. The wing is also a linchpin of Leonard A. Lauder's transformative gift of Cubist artworks, valued at more than 1 billion, which needs a worthy exhibition space. But Mr. Campbell said he had not given up on his main goals to bolster contemporary art at the Met and broaden the audience in a technological age. "I love the Met, I love the work I'm doing here," he said, "And I'm very committed to seeing all of these many projects through."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Too Big: The word "macroeconomics" doesn't turn up very often on the best seller lists. That's no surprise: With apologies to Thomas Piketty, whose "Capital in the Twenty First Century" was a genuine phenomenon in 2014, the field isn't exactly sexy. But here comes , a "global macroeconomic strategist" (in the perky words of his official biography), whose new book, "The Great Equalizer," argues that government should favor small businesses and entrepreneurs over big corporations; it enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 8. Smick was Jack Kemp's congressional chief of staff in the 1970s and '80s, and he still leans Republican he supported Marco Rubio's presidential run and donated nearly 100,000 to Republican candidates in the last election cycle. But discussing the financial industry and its excesses, he can sound as fiery and populist as any Bernie Sanders stump speech. "The true shame of the 2008 financial crisis is that the big and the powerful were the most protected," he writes. "It is clear why working families today are so angry. After 2008, if you were a failed, brain dead Wall Street banker who nearly tanked the world economy, you had easy access to the Federal Reserve's cheap liquidity. If you failed as a giant bank, you were considered special. Your bank could systemically bring down the entire financial system. But if you were a struggling enterprise out there alone with a brilliant idea that could someday employ thousands of people, obtaining financing was next to impossible. The normal sources of risk capital had dried up, but no one from Washington, D.C., was there with your safety net. The too big to fail banks enjoyed a cost of borrowing far lower than other firms because financial markets became convinced government authorities would never let the big banks go under. The fix was in." Tomorrow Is Another Day: Karen White's book "The Guests on South Battery" is new on the hardcover fiction list at No. 10. White, who calls her brand of Southern women's fiction "grit lit," traces her novelistic ambitions to middle school. "After playing hooky one day in the seventh grade to read 'Gone With the Wind,' " her website informs visitors, White "knew she wanted to be a writer or become Scarlett O'Hara." Transitions: The Fox News anchor Bret Baier, whose previous best seller was about his young son's heart condition, is back on the list, this time with a work of popular history: "Three Days in January" (written with Catherine Whitney) debuts at No. 2 on the hardcover nonfiction list and looks at President Eisenhower's parting advice for his successor, John F. Kennedy. "What Eisenhower was doing was sending a warning to Kennedy," Baier told Roe Conn on WGN radio in Chicago recently, "saying, 'Easy, killer. Caution. Balance. Don't go too far too fast.' . . . He was delivering kind of a sober message to the nation."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Leah Nanako Winkler has been awarded this year's Yale Drama Series Prize for her new play "God Said This." She will receive 10,000, her play will have a private staged reading at Lincoln Center's Claire Tow Theater on Oct. 30, and it will be published by the Yale University Press. Ayad Akhtar, this year's judge and a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, chose Ms. Nanako Winkler's play from over 1,600 submissions. "I was very moved by Leah's play about a family caught between cultures, set in the final weeks of a mother's life," Mr. Akhtar said in a statement. "I found it witty and wise, inhabited by a poignant specificity that conveyed me to a deeply felt sense of the universal of the perfection of our parents' flawed love for each other and for us; for the ways in which the approach of death can order the meaning of a human life."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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ALMOST four years ago, Marilyn Kotcher suddenly became a widow. And the large 2,250 square foot condominium in Fort Lee, N.J., that she and her husband had bought together and lovingly remodeled no longer seemed like home. "It had a lot of wonderful memories for me," said Ms. Kotcher, a clinical social worker. "But I didn't have a sense of belonging there anymore." She was similarly disenchanted with Fort Lee. "I felt very isolated," she said. "There are just a lot of large buildings on the water. If you're part of a couple, it's O.K., but I wanted a sense of community." In the past, space had always trumped location for Ms. Kotcher when it came to choosing a home. Now, location was going to be her priority. And so it was that last May she moved to a one bedroom rental on East 79th Street in Manhattan. "I had a zillion friends in New Jersey, but I would never just bump into them," she said. "In Manhattan if I run into someone on Second Avenue, we go out for coffee." That kind of spontaneity reminds her of college dorm life, though the adult version has "everyone in a separate apartment." On the Upper East Side, she said, "I can always find something to do. A long weekend no longer creates any anxiety for me." Legions swear by retail therapy as a way of dealing with a bad day at the office, a bad hair day or a really bad number on the bathroom scale. But people who are going through more substantial life crises the death of a loved one, illness, divorce, a messy breakup may be able to work through the pain with the aid of real estate therapy. A new home, after all, can be much more than a change of address. "If real estate is a big part of your problem, it's possible that real estate can solve it," said Elayne Reimer, an executive vice president of Halstead Property and a former marriage and family counselor. "If you live a two hour commute from work, moving closer to the job might be very beneficial to your health, and to improving relations with family members because you'd have more time for them." But "a lot of people use real estate as an escape," she added. "If you're living in the suburbs and you aren't happy in your home life, you may think if you move to the city your life will be better. But the location isn't going to make a difference if the unhappiness is internal." When you decide that a new residence is the best solution to a problem, your emotional baggage gets loaded in the moving van along with the linen and flatware, said Beth Fisher, a senior managing director of the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. "But changing real estate can really be psychologically healthy under certain circumstances." Such circumstances include what can be described as the Second Mrs. de Winter Syndrome. "We see marriages where the new couple is burdened psychologically living in the same apartment that had been occupied by the former spouse," Ms. Fisher said. "It's a burden, especially for a second wife. To get out of the shadow of someone's stakehold in a particular neighborhood is very empowering." Ms. Fisher has also known of cancer patients who abandon a longtime address for a home in a newly built development. "There's nothing more beneficial and promising," she said, "than deciding, 'Not only am I going to survive; I'm going to triumph; I am going to live in a fresh new environment.' They're using real estate to make a therapeutic positive bet on the future." Two years ago, Matt Holbein was grieving for his partner's father, who had just died, an event that hit the couple very hard. "He was like my father, too," said Mr. Holbein, 44, a vice president of Douglas Elliman. Soon afterward, he and his partner began a trial separation that quickly became "a pretty dramatic breakup," Mr. Holbein said. "It was very painful, and we dealt with it in very different ways." "But I dug my heels in and said, 'That's not going to make me move,' " recalled Mr. Holbein, who had decided to buy out his former partner. Such was the plan until A) he saw the size of the mortgage he'd have to carry, and B) he saw a psychic. "She told me: 'No, no, you're moving. The new apartment is going to make you serene.' " This past July, Mr. Holbein moved to a one bedroom condo with 13 foot ceilings in Brooklyn Heights. "My new apartment is all me," he said. "The paint colors are my paint colors, the wallpaper is my wallpaper. The people who stay here are my people." Mr. Holbein added that he would advise anybody who wanted to keep a once shared home: "Don't do it! There's always a residue." Moving, he said, has given him "a clarity about who I am." Striking out on his own helped him learn "that I'm an independent soul and that I'm O.K. by myself," he said. "And the good things from my relationships came with me. I wouldn't be in the position I'm in, if not for the good financial decisions my partner and I made together." Therapists generally counsel bereaved patients not to make any major decisions for at least a year after the death of a loved one. Don't sell the stock portfolio; don't throw out possessions. Oh, yes, and don't, don't, don't move out of the home you shared. Two years ago, the vet gave Sophie a diagnosis of lymphoma; this summer her condition became critical. "Taking care of her consumed our lives," said Ms. Hurder, who with Mr. Alves is appearing in the hit musical "Nice Work if You Can Get It." Unfortunately, the couple had to euthanize Sophie on Aug. 31. The next day, Ms. Hurder looked around their ground floor rental apartment in Inwood and announced, "I need to get out of here." Every time she walked into the kitchen, "I thought Sophie would be there," she said. "Every time I put my key in the lock, I would think I was going to see her. There was something that reminded me of her in every room. What was so hard about losing Sophie was that she was part of the first chapter of Clyde's and my life together." And, Ms. Hurder added, sounding a practical note, "The apartment didn't get a lot of sunlight." When they walked out of their building, going to the right was now an impossibility. That was the direction they'd always taken on their walks with Sophie. Inwood Hill Park was similarly off limits; too many memories of frolicking there with the two dogs. "I kept telling Clyde, 'We have to move, we have to move,' " Ms. Hurder said. Mr. Alves, trying to be the voice of reason, pointed out that they would lose their security deposit. "I also thought we should sit down where we were and grieve," he said. "It would be harder in the short term, but by the time we left I thought we would be over the worst of it." With three months left on the lease, Ms. Hurder began checking out rentals online. "It was very therapeutic just to get my wheels going," she said. The last weekend in November, the couple moved 10 blocks from the Inwood apartment to a sunny sixth floor corner apartment in Washington Heights. They have good friends in the building, a lower rent and a new park Fort Tryon for Mariella to cavort in. "She's really been our savior," Ms. Hurder said. "But I don't know if we'll get another dog. If we get anything, it will be a baby." Sometimes emotional equilibrium comes at considerable cost. "Economically, it wasn't a good time to sell my condo," said Ms. Kotcher, the Fort Lee transplant on the Upper East Side. "But I asked myself, 'What's more important: psychological well being, or money in the bank you can't get any interest on anyway?' " And the old place, once deserted, can sometimes exert a powerful tug. Eight years ago, Paul Purcell, a founder of Rutenberg Realty, split with his partner of two decades and sold their 41st floor place "with views to die for" in the Olympic Tower at Fifth Avenue and 51st. "We renovated it together, decorated it together, had parties there for his company and my company, had our parents there," said Mr. Purcell, 60. "But we realized we had to make some changes, as hard and sad and painful as it was." After the breakup, he bought a perfectly fine one bedroom in the East 50s, but put off doing the things that would have turned the apartment into a home. "There was as period of not wanting to commit," said Mr. Purcell, who finally painted, redid the fireplace facade and, with the help of his former partner the two have remained close friends chose furnishings. "Now," he said, "this feels like my little nest." And yet. Just the other week Mr. Purcell was walking past the Olympic Tower. "And the doorman was the same doorman as when we lived there," he recalled. "And he said, 'Mr. Purcell!' And I hugged him and I went into the lobby and saw the concierge and the elevator operators and they all hugged me." He called his former partner and said: "Why did we ever leave? We loved it, we adored it. We adored the apartment." And then, he added, "You know, we really should have figured out a way to hold on to it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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At 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, Representative Maxine Waters was on the floor of the House of Representatives, arguing for the importance of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "At this time," Ms. Waters, Democrat of California, said, "with a bill that would basically take our cop on the block, the S.E.C., and literally obliterate " Alas, politics junkies, news editors and anyone else who was watching the broadcast online did not learn how that sentence ended. Ms. Waters was cut off. Instead, they heard the jangling music of a feed from RT, a state run Russian television network that has been accused of helping its government interfere in the American election. Some on social media immediately assumed that the interruption, which lasted about 10 minutes, had nefarious implications. C Span, in a statement, had a simpler explanation: It was probably a technical error. C Span's television broadcast continued uninterrupted. Noting that RT is among the news feeds it regularly monitors, it said: "We don't believe we were hacked. Instead, our initial investigation suggests that this was caused by an internal routing error. We take our network security very seriously and will continue with a deeper investigation, which may take some time." A recent declassified intelligence report accused Russia of interfering in the election and said that RT "aimed at undermining viewers' trust of U.S. democratic procedures." 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. C Span a private company that, according to its website, is available in 100 million American homes receives no government money but broadcasts all live congressional proceedings, providing a direct feed of the daily stuff of politics to Americans who find themselves interested in what their representatives are doing. Howard Mortman, a network spokesman, said he could not provide numbers for C Span's online viewership at the time of the interruption. C Span's newsroom monitors many other channels for breaking news, including domestic networks like CBS and CNN as well as various international networks. Its statement suggested that a routing error had caused the RT feed it regularly monitors to be broadcast accidentally. Mr. Mortman said the network's early explanation for the interruption came from an internal analysis. He said that he was not aware of any previous such interruption. Timothy Burke, the video director at Deadspin, who regularly monitors 20 to 30 online news feeds from his home in Tampa, Fla., was among the first to comment on Twitter about the sudden interruption. He said he had assumed "somebody just flipped a wrong switch somewhere." Had Mr. Burke and others who were watching C Span online at the time not been interrupted, they would have heard Ms. Waters mention Russia and President elect Donald J. Trump several times before she ended her turn on the floor. In a phone interview Thursday, she was perplexed. She said no one had satisfactorily explained "how this happened or why it happened, or if it's happened before." "I just think it's strange," Ms. Waters said. "At a time when our intelligence agencies are very confident and basically have confirmed that Russia hacked the D.N.C. and other political interests, and then we have, while I'm on the floor of the House, talking about Trump and Russia, I get interfered with and interrupted by Russia Today."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The World Health Organization on Thursday urged athletes and travelers planning to attend the Olympics in Brazil, the epicenter of the Zika epidemic, to take a series of steps to guard against infection, but the agency made it clear that it was not calling for the Summer Games in August to be canceled or postponed. The health organization's guidance follows most of the current advice from public health authorities about Zika, although its recommendations for protecting against sexual transmission of the virus differ slightly from those of the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The W.H.O. statement said that travelers should use condoms or abstain from sex during their stay and for at least four weeks after returning from a region within the epidemic zone; the C.D.C. suggests abstaining for eight weeks after returning. The Zika virus is transmitted by mosquitoes. For many people it causes only a mild illness, but Zika has been linked to brain damage in babies born to mothers who contracted it during pregnancy. It has also been linked to a rare form of temporary paralysis. But the content and tone of the World Health Organization's guidance for athletes and travelers indicated that the health authority was not advocating the cancellation, postponement or relocation of the Olympics, as a few prominent medical ethicists have urged. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University, wrote in February that holding the Olympics as scheduled was "senseless and irresponsible," and recommended postponing it for six months to a year. Recently, Amir Attaran, a public health and law professor at the University of Ottawa, wrote that the Games should be postponed or moved to another country. In his article in the Harvard Public Health Review, Dr. Attaran criticized the World Health Organization for not having issued an official statement on the Olympics and Zika. He said his arguments about the threat of the virus were not "meant to deny that the Games are a much loved event. But where is the love for the possible victims of a foreseeable global catastrophe: the damaged or dead adults, and the babies for whom and mark these coldly clinical words carefully fetal brain disruption sequence is as terrible as it sounds, and extinguishes the hope of a normal life even before it has begun? With stakes like that, bluntly put, these Olympics are no game at all." In an interview on Thursday, Dr. Marcos Espinal, who directs the Zika response of the Pan American Health Organization, an arm of the W.H.O., strongly rejected the idea of postponing or relocating the events. "I still think the Olympic Games should take place," said Dr. Espinal, who added that he had just visited Brazil's most at risk areas. He noted that August would be "full winter in Brazil," and said he expected "very little circulation of mosquitoes and virus in Brazil in August." Dr. Espinal said other viruses carried by the same Aedes aegypti mosquito, including dengue and chikungunya, had been shown to drop off significantly after the warm months, the first three months of the year in Brazil. As a result, he said, "W.H.O. and P.A.H.O. don't think we should postpone the Olympics." Few Olympic athletes have publicly expressed concerns about Zika, and Olympic officials around the world have generally rejected the possibility that the conditions in Rio de Janeiro will be unsafe for competitors and spectators. There is no contingency plan if the health crisis escalates, they have said. Several test events have been held in Rio in recent months, with no reports of athletes contracting the virus. The organizing committee for the Games has said that local authorities are trying to combat mosquito breeding by monitoring standing water. The difference between the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. guidance on sexual transmission of Zika may reflect how little is known about the probability and conditions under which such transmission is possible. There have been a few cases of documented or suspected sexual transmission, and among the unanswered questions are how long the virus persists in semen, whether women can transmit the virus to sexual partners, and whether an infected person who never shows symptoms can transmit the virus sexually. "I think four weeks could be sufficient," Dr. Espinal said. "At the end of the day, the person should be cautious. The most important thing is safe sex."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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There is a lot of talk these days about the lack of women at the top of fashion brands the statistics are terrible, the gender imbalance striking. It is one of the reasons Kate Spade, the designer who was found dead in her home on Tuesday morning, was so important to so many of us. She represented not just a terrific talent who built an idea about handbags into what became a billion dollar brand, but a critical figure in the continuum of women who have defined fashion in the United States: designers who thought about what other women (like her) would want in their closets (and later, their homes) and who solved that problem without elitism. That's why, in so many profiles over the years, Ms. Spade or her brand, which she personified was put in the same cultural bucket as everyone from Dorothy Parker and Nora Ephron to the fictional heroines Nora Charles and Holly Golightly. I always thought of her a bit as Mary Richards throwing her hat up in the air with joy at taking on the big city at the start of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," not because they had the same style, but because they seemed to have the same approach. But it may be more instructive to think of her as a natural heir to Bonnie Cashin, Anne Klein and Liz Claiborne, and the predecessor of Tory Burch and Jenna Lyons during her J. Crew reign, not to mention Stacey Bendet of Alice Olivia. In the history of women spearheading fashion brands in the United States, Kate Spade was a bridge between the early female icons of the sportswear era, and those of the current lifestyle age. She recognized the looming accessories boom, a bubble we're still in today, and parlayed her success into all sorts of other areas where a design mind could legitimately have a claim. That seems like obvious strategy today, but when Kate Spade did it, it was wide open territory. She and her husband and business partner, Andy, mimicked the structure of great luxury houses, with a creative mind and a business mind building a company side by side (think Pierre Berge and Yves Saint Laurent, or Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti). But high fashion is often aesthetically challenging and comes with its own velvet rope like barriers to entry, while neither Ms. Spade's style nor her price points turned people away. They welcomed them in. They were not neurotic or conflicted or fraught with existential angst. They were fun. They were also fur free before it became trendy. The name on the label was lowercase for a reason. Women who bought her products could imagine being her friend. Each piece promised to brighten a room or an outfit (often literally, thanks to their color scheme), and the assumption was, Kate Spade the person would too. Which is also what makes her end so startling. She had been so effective at building her brand, so good at weaving what looked like cheer and wicker bicycle basket attitude into every product she made, so adept at consistency of message and mien, that the assumption even after she left her eponymous company in 2007 was that as the name was, so was she. That she later reportedly changed her name to Kate Valentine Spade to reflect the name of a new company, Frances Valentine, and to distance herself from her former brand, seemed to suggest that she had sprung back after her sabbatical from whatever problems had arisen after Kate Spade was sold to investors and then began to change hands with dizzying speed. That she was back. Though now it seems all those assumptions may have been wrong. Whatever happened in her life, however, and whatever happens to the brand that still bears her former name, what should never change is the contribution she made: not just to a lot of wardrobes, but to the idea of the American woman. She stepped forward. She opened stores. She moved all of us along.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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THE Ariel Atom 3 has the performance of a Ferrari, the style of a Formula racecar and all the luxuries of a Razor scooter. Standard features of the two seat sports car are neck snapping acceleration and a head turning look. But doors, windows and a roof are nowhere to be found even on the options sheet. For driving enthusiasts willing to sacrifice comfort for high performance, this minimalist recipe bakes up a tempting treat. The Atom weighs only 1,400 pounds, making it 500 pounds lighter than the tiny Lotus Elise and some 1,400 pounds trimmer than a Mini Cooper. As a result, the Atom 3 has go kart reflexes and supercar acceleration. According to Ariel, a supercharged Atom sprints from a stop to 60 miles per hour in less than three seconds. Only the world's fastest exotic cars, like the 2 million Bugatti Veyron, can do better. A naturally aspirated 197 horsepower Atom starts just under 50,000; a 245 horse version is 51,705. Adding a supercharger bumps the horsepower to 300 and pushes the price to 57,151. Depending on your point of view, this makes an Atom the performance steal of the century or a bucket of bucks for a car that won't keep you dry in the rain. You don't need to watch an episode of "The Biggest Loser" to know that extreme weight savings requires serious sacrifices. The Atom has no windows or fenders, no stereo, no heater or air conditioner. Climate control is a matter of checking the weather forecast and dressing accordingly. There are no air bags, antilock brakes or stability control omissions permitted for low volume manufacturers. A small wind deflector seems intended to reduce the number of bugs in your teeth. For those uninterested in entomophagy, an actual windshield is offered this year as a 2,850 option. TOTALLY TUBULAR The Atom 3 has go kart reflexes and racecar acceleration. I took an Atom 3 on a memorable loop from lower Manhattan to the Hudson River Valley. Getting in is a challenge, ungracefully accomplished by stepping over the side, directly onto the base of the seat. With both legs in the car, you slide down into driving position especially awkward, one supposes, in a skirt. A stout tubular steel frame is all that separates you from the outside world. Despite the rollbar that framed the air intake over my right shoulder, I was handed a helmet before my drive. While not strictly necessary, the helmet offers an extra level of safety along with the only privacy available when maneuvering a totally exposed open wheel sports car though New York City. Before I'd even shifted the 6 speed manual into second gear, I was pelted with questions from other drivers. I shouted muffled responses through the helmet padding while keeping an eye out for cabs unwilling to cede space to this otherworldly (and very low) car. On the West Side Highway and then the Saw Mill River Parkway, the supercharged growl of the 2 liter 4 cylinder engine rose an octave as the revs climbed and the speed increased. Surrounded by nothing but air and steel tubing, the first few miles in an Atom are pure sensory overload. It is both thrilling and terrifying to watch a New York highway blur past in an open car, the pavement so close you could hang your arm out and file your nails. You watch the front wheels and suspension components hard at work, bouncing and weaving with every pothole and expansion strip. The ride was firm but not brutal, though the pummeling of the wind and my eagerness to embrace any opportunity to send the car darting on a dime knocked my helmeted head around like a rag doll. It's tempting to view every straightaway as an Indy 500 fantasy, so if you're planning to register an Atom for street use you'll wish the options sheet included a spare driver's license. In Europe, fans of elemental sports cars have been enjoying the Atom's simple charms for nearly a decade. Ariel Motor of Crewkerne, Somerset, has built about 100 Atoms annually since 2000. Sales in the United States began in 2006, initially through Brammo Motorsports of Oregon. Since 2008, TMI AutoTech has been assembling Atoms in Alton, Va.; it now distributes and markets the cars nationwide. Because owners enjoy pushing their Atoms to the limit, TMI organizes track days at racetracks around the country. "It's the fastest car on the block at these events," said Mark Swain, TMI's vice president for marketing and sales. Despite this kind of punishment, Mr. Swain credits the Atom's 2 liter Honda engine the same one in the Civic Si with excellent power and reliability. While an Atom is built for speed, ordering one requires patience. Production of an American spec Atom can take four months. TMI says it works with each owner to ensure that the car meets legal requirements of the state it will call home. But registering one for street use many are reserved for the track is easier in some states than others; in New York, the Atom can be registered only as a "homemade or unique" vehicle, requiring that the chassis be bought separately from the powertrain.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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A nine room apartment on the 16th floor of the venerable San Remo that was owned for more than three decades by Robert W. Wilson, a hedge fund pioneer and philanthropist, sold for 20,750,000 and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. The corner residence, No. 16C, in the south tower of the landmark 1930 building at 145 Central Park West at 74th Street, was sold by the estate of Mr. Wilson, who in late December 2013 jumped to his death from a rear window in the apartment that he had occupied since 1978. He was 87 years old and had suffered a stroke six months earlier that had affected his mobility. The buyer of the co op, which has a monthly maintenance of 8,770, was identified as the Savrola Residence Trust and was represented by Sherry Matays of the Corcoran Group. The unit sold for 4.25 million below the 25 million initial asking price when it entered the market in April 2014; its most recent list price was 21,495,000. "The proceeds of the sale are going to a number of charities," said the listing broker, Laurel Rosenbluth of Kleier Residential. She said the buyer was a local family who planned to restore the unit to its original glory.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Aviation has declined from the days when air travel was considered glamorous and exciting. But Tyler Morse, a hotelier planning the first hotel within walking distance of the terminals at Kennedy International Airport, is enthusiastically embracing that earlier time. "Sixty two was a special year: John Kennedy was president, John Glenn circled the Earth, the space race was on," said Mr. Morse, the chief executive of MCR, a hotel owner and developer in New York. That was also the year that Trans World Airlines opened its flagship terminal at what is now J.F.K. Joy Kisling was a 20 year old student at Pace University in Manhattan at the time. Some days, she would drive to the airport after school dressed up for travel and just sit in the lobby. "In those days, you could walk in and sit on the red cushions and watch the passengers go back and forth," she said. "I loved the atmosphere." Mr. Morse envisions a return to glory when the TWA Hotel opens in 2019 in the old terminal. Tucked into a section of what Mr. Morse claims will be the largest hotel lobby in the world, at 200,000 square feet, will be a museum celebrating midcentury design, the dawn of the jet age and, yes, the terminal itself. "Probably I'm crazy, but I love the building," Mr. Morse said. "It's probably one of the most special buildings in America, and to be able to bring it back to life is a treat." When it was built, the steel and concrete, gull wing shaped structure designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen was so evocative of flight, the mere sight of it was supposed to initiate the journey. "He wanted to provide a building in which the human being felt uplifted, important and full of anticipation," the architect's wife, Aline B. Saarinen, told George Scullin in his 1968 book, "International Airport: The Story of Kennedy Airport and U.S. Commercial Aviation." On that, Saarinen was successful. The T.W.A. Flight Center, as the terminal was called, was bold, imaginative and elegant, according to critics, praise that was matched by what was said about the airline it housed. For many years, T.W.A. was the country's sole airline with both a vibrant domestic network and international routes, according to New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission. Working out of the T.W.A. Flight Center was "an overwhelmingly exciting experience, and everyone around me felt the same," said Hugh Schoelzel, who went to work for T.W.A. as a flight engineer in 1967 and retired as vice president of corporate safety in 2004. By the '80s, T.W.A. was experiencing financial trouble. A refresh of the terminal was planned, but not carried out. In 2001, when T.W.A. was acquired by American Airlines, the terminal returned to the care of the landlord, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. It sits empty in front of Terminal 5, home of JetBlue. Although the T.W.A. Flight Center is widely loved, the Port Authority had difficulty finding someone to save it. An effort in 2013 by a noted hotel developer, Andre Balazs, to build a small hotel and conference center there fell through. "Like most people, I believed that the T.W.A. terminal would sit underutilized or empty in perpetuity," said Nicholas Dagen Bloom, an associate professor who teaches urban planning at the New York Institute of Technology and the author of "The Metropolitan Airport: JFK International and Modern New York." For preservationists and lovers of aviation history, the lack of progress was frustrating. But for Mr. Morse, it was kismet. In 2014, after the Balazs plan faded, the Port Authority issued a third request for proposals, and this time, Mr. Morse said, his company was big enough to take on the task of renovating a drafty, deteriorating monument to aviation's golden age. "It's a daunting project," he said. Asbestos and lead paint had to be removed. Then there was the matter of replacing all of the floor to ceiling windows with tempered glass. "You can put 65 million into the building and not have anything on the flip side of that other than a building that's safe for people to inhabit again," Mr. Morse said. Development came with its own set of challenges and bureaucracy, beyond just working within an airport environment. The building's international fame meant that many opinions had to be considered, including those of city, state and federal landmark agencies that gave the building protected status. Even the Finnish Embassy had a seat at the table, because Saarinen was arguably one of Finland's most famous sons. "What they're selling to the preservationists is that they are sensitive to the importance of the building and its role in aviation history and global architectural history," Mr. Bloom said of the challenges, which any developer of a landmark property would face. Altogether, 22 government agencies had a say in one aspect of the project or another, Mr. Morse said. But he learned to be accommodating. For example, after objections were raised about the height of the two hotel wings that extend from either side of the historic terminal in the original plan, Mr. Morse extended their length and reduced the height. "I would have gone taller with the hotel buildings to get more guest rooms in, and they wanted shorter," Mr. Morse said. "You've got to make the economics of the project work." Most other major international airports have at least one on site hotel, and airports in Calgary, Frankfurt, London, Paris and Tokyo have several, but J.F.K. has never had a hotel in the terminals area. The Ramada Plaza, at the airport entrance nearly four miles away, closed in 2009. So Mr. Morse is optimistic that the 505 room hotel, which will charge 250 a night, will get enough overnight guests from travelers using the nearby international terminal and passengers on JetBlue, which is an investor in the project and whose terminal is linked to the hotel by two passenger tunnels. For an idea of what the public space will look like, MCR created a small scale replica of the original T.W.A. lobby in the company's offices on the 86th floor of One World Trade Center. There, pilot and flight attendant uniforms, posters, magazines, dinnerware and menus, food trolleys and even reel to reel in flight audio entertainment tapes are either on display or stored in boxes, having been purchased from or donated by T.W.A. employees. Among those eagerly anticipating a return to the terminal when it is again receiving travelers is Ms. Kisling. After college, she married a man who worked on steamships in the harbor near the airport. But then he switched careers and became a pilot, flying out of the same terminal she enjoyed visiting as a student. "Who would ever know I would spend so much time in that building once my husband started flying for TWA?" she said. "It was amazing."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Virus May Have Arrived in U.S. in December, but Didn't Spread Until Later None Misha Friedman for The New York Times The coronavirus may have infected a small number of people in the United States as early as Dec. 13, more than a month earlier than researchers had thought, according to scientists who analyzed blood samples taken from American Red Cross donations. The researchers noted that they could not say whether the apparent infections were in travelers who had caught the virus in other countries, or whether the infections led to wider community transmission. Before this new report, the earliest documented infection in the country was on Jan. 19 in someone who had traveled to China. Although other genetic studies have suggested the possible presence of the virus earlier than that date, the new study found that blood donations from nine states sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention carried coronavirus antibodies protein markers of past exposure to the virus, or perhaps to one very similar to it. At least one prominent virus researcher was wary of how the findings were interpreted online and in news reports. Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington who has been deeply involved in genetic studies of how, when and where the virus has spread, said in a series of tweets that he thought the study could be identifying people who had antibodies to other human coronaviruses, which cause common colds, although he did not rule out that it may have picked up some cases of travelers infected in other countries. In the new report, which was released online Monday and has been accepted for publication in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, Dr. Sridhar V. Basavaraju of the C.D.C. and others reported that they had looked for antibodies that reacted to the specific virus that has caused the pandemic, SARS CoV 2. They used samples taken from blood donations that the American Red Cross had gathered in nine states. Susan L. Stramer, a virologist at the American Red Cross and one of the authors of the paper, said the blood samples had been gathered originally to test for exposure to mosquito borne illnesses like West Nile virus. The C.D.C. analyzed the samples for evidence of coronavirus exposure. Dr. Stramer noted that the antibody tests are not for the virus itself and do not offer much useful information to the person whose blood is tested. Antibodies can hang around in the blood well after the virus has left the body. But these blood markers can be useful, she said, for monitoring broad patterns of disease. One issue with testing is that antibodies to certain coronaviruses, such as those that cause common colds, may also respond to other viruses in the same family, like SARS CoV 2. In the new tests on more than 7,000 samples, 106 showed coronavirus antibodies. The researchers narrowed this down to 84 that had antibodies that would attack, or "neutralize" SARS CoV 2 to some degree. One of these samples showed very effective neutralization, Dr. Stramer said. And another sample showed a reaction to a part of the spike protein that is very specific to SARS CoV 2. "So for two samples at least, we believe they probably represent true infections." Those people could have been travelers who were infected outside of the U.S., however. In future studies, Dr. Stramer said, researchers will look at earlier years to see whether blood samples, as expected, would not show antibodies to SARS CoV 2.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Two thirds of all households in the United States have at least one. That includes 86 million cats and 78 million dogs, according to the American Pet Products Association, and the total climbs to 310 million when you include all the birds, fish, small animals, horses and reptiles. But suppose you are in the minority. Should you get a pet? What's the real reason you want a pet? Philip Tedeschi, the executive director of the Institute for Human Animal Connection at the University of Denver, said the motives for getting a pet could be complex. If you don't fully understand the reasons, that can lead to problems. For instance, a would be owner driven by profound loneliness or isolation might be incapable of evaluating whether the pet is being treated properly. Owners have to be aware of their pet's social and emotional needs. Otherwise the animal might behave in an antisocial or self destructive way.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... an Hour, and I Liked 'Finding Dory' 'The Aquarium' When to watch: Sunday at 8 p.m., on Animal Planet. The Georgia Aquarium is one of the largest aquariums in the world, so there's plenty going on: mischievous penguins who need tending, a curious sea turtle who needs additional fun hiding places in his habitat, a pregnant blue spotted ray who needs an ultrasound. This new behind the scenes series is plenty interesting for adults and appropriate for kids. Or anyone else who has dreamed of wearing a bandoleer of clams and shrimp to feed to eager zebra sharks. ... 79 Minutes, and Are We There Yet?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the marquee pop extravaganza that was postponed in March as the coronavirus pandemic led to shutdowns across the United States, is officially canceled for the year. Riverside County, Calif., which encompasses the Coachella Valley and hosts the event, said that its public health officer, Dr. Cameron Kaiser, called off the weekend long concert series on Wednesday, along with Stagecoach, a country music festival that is also held annually at the Empire Polo Club in Indio. Both events were originally scheduled for April before being pushed to October as the entire live music industry paused earlier this spring. "I am concerned as indications grow that Covid 19 could worsen in the fall," Kaiser said in a statement on Wednesday announcing the cancellations. "In addition, events like Coachella and Stagecoach would fall under Governor Newsom's Stage 4, which he has previously stated would require treatments or a vaccine to enter. Given the projected circumstances and potential, I would not be comfortable moving forward." The announcement came while many places eased restrictions tied to the virus and made plans to reopen including the Disneyland Resort in California even as the U.S. surpassed two million coronavirus cases and saw rising rates of infection in 21 states.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Did she look presidential? As silly as that sounds, that was part of Hillary Rodham Clinton's job on Thursday in Philadelphia when she accepted the Democratic Party's nomination as its presidential candidate. It was not just showing people who do not understand her and who do not trust her who she is as a person, or laying out her policy proposals, but also demonstrating that when she represents them on the world stage, she would do so with that hard to pin down aura of leadership and power. And she did. In her white suit, with her white crew neck underneath, Mrs. Clinton looked supremely unflappable: perfectly tailored and in control. Not a hair out of place (but some hair nicely waved). The kind of person who could carry the nuclear codes with aplomb. But since she is someone who famously does her homework, she also used her clothes to do a little more. That she chose to wear white at the convention did not at first seem particularly surprising. Mrs. Clinton has worn white jackets multiple times during the primaries, and when she joined Instagram she posted a shot of a clothing rack filled with red, white and blue jackets. On Thursday night, the pantsuit stood out against the blue background, and in the sea of people.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Public radio and television broadcasters are girding for battle after the Trump administration proposed a drastic cutback that they have long dreaded: the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The potential elimination of about 445 million in annual funding, which helps local TV and radio stations subscribe to NPR and Public Broadcasting Service programming, could be devastating for affiliates in smaller markets that already operate on a shoestring budget. Patricia Harrison, the corporation's president, warned in a statement on Thursday that the Trump budget proposal, if enacted, could cause "the collapse of the public media system itself." But the power players in public broadcasting big city staples like WNYC in New York City would be well equipped to weather any cuts. Major stations typically receive only a sliver of their annual budget from the federal government, thanks to listener contributions and corporate underwriters. Podcasts and other digital offshoots have also become significant sources of revenue. Rural affiliates, however, rely more heavily on congressional largess, which can make up as much as 35 percent of their budgets. Mark Vogelzang, president of Maine Public, called the Trump proposal "the most serious threat to our federal funding" since he started in public broadcasting 37 years ago. "We're always living on the edge in this ecosystem of public broadcasting," Mr. Vogelzang said in an interview. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting supports about 1,500 stations that carry a range of educational, journalistic and arts related programming. The corporation dates to the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Its funding, while a minuscule part of the federal budget, has been under regular peril since the 1970s from conservative lawmakers, who often denounce what they view as the liberal bent of public media. Jay H. Pearce, the chief executive of WVIK FM in Rock Island, Ill., which receives about 15 percent of its budget from the federal government, said he was also concerned about problems with raising money. He pointed to broader cuts under consideration for federal arts and humanities financing, noting that many groups would have to compete against one another for private contributions to make up the difference. "This year, everybody might rally, we might find the money," Mr. Pearce said. "But what will happen next year, and the year after?" Executives in public broadcasting were on alert since early this year, when rumors of major cuts began circulating, and on Thursday they did not hesitate to fire back. Their top talking point: " 1.35 per citizen," an approximation of the annual cost to each American for providing a spectrum of public interest shows. "It's not like cutting this would have any appreciable effect on any taxpayer across the country, but losing PBS would," Neal Shapiro, president of WNET in New York, said in an interview. "In a lot of markets, the only place for real in depth local coverage is the PBS station, the only place for arts and culture, the only place for safe harbor for kids." Ira Glass, host of "This American Life," which does not receive any federal money, said, "Big stations in big cities will certainly be fine, especially in blue cities, where listeners will surely step up to replace any money that goes away." But the proposed cuts, Mr. Glass added in an email, could make it far more difficult for producers to begin ambitious new national programming. "If you're starting a new news program, or anything with a public service mission," he wrote, "C.P.B. is pretty much still the only game in town." Mr. Shapiro, of WNET, said city affiliates would eventually be hurt as much as rural stations. "If the beach washes out, the little houses go first," he said, "but then the big houses go after that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Many companies in the United States are currently in a particular kind of distress. They have solid business models for normal times, yet as the pandemic lingers they are slowly dying, victims of weak demand or supply problems. These businesses are not broken or fundamentally flawed; their health is jeopardized only by exceptional circumstances. They are not doomed; they're just sick. Many of these companies are on the lookout for survival strategies that would avoid a ruinous liquidation of their assets. This means they may be more open than they ordinarily would be to private buyouts and mergers. But a wave of buyouts and mergers, though seemingly better than letting struggling companies die, would only intensify the economic inequality that has become this country's curse. That is why we need to rethink what rescuing companies looks like in this moment. The danger is that the cure will be as bad as the disease. A rescue of struggling businesses fueled by cheap debt will lead to a restructuring of the American economy into fewer and fewer centers of corporate control. That consolidation, in turn, will increase the already excessive power of corporations and widen the already yawning gap between rich and poor. This is a lesson taught by the previous economic crisis, 12 years ago, which also left many fundamentally sound companies weak or in a state of distress. Part of the government's implicit and sometimes explicit solution was to encourage buyouts and mergers, by making debt cheap and keeping merger enforcement tepid. Those conditions catalyzed a major concentration of industries during the 2010s, leaving many sectors of the American economy with just three or four "majors," or with regional monopolies. This was the story for the airlines, cable service, big agriculture, mobile phone carriers, pharmaceuticals, meat processing and many more industries. That same approach also ushered in what the financial journalist Joe Nocera, a former columnist for The Times, has called the decade of private equity. Taking advantage of cheap debt, the industry spent trillions of dollars (nearly 6 trillion, by one estimate) buying and reorganizing thousands of companies. The problem was that, by the mid 2010s, many economists (including many at the White House, where I worked at the National Economic Council) started to be concerned that the restructuring of the economy was contributing to inequality of both wealth and income. Ideally, a private buyout makes a company more efficient and poised for growth and hiring. But in practice buying a company in semi distress with the goal of cutting costs can mean large scale firings, weakening or destroying unions, and seizing pension funds. Merger waves cause the same problem in a different way. A highly concentrated industry can extract higher profits through less competition, which hurts consumers. Concentrated industries can also depress wages by tacitly coordinating to keep salaries low. At the same time, the higher profits are typically used to raise executives' salaries and to reward shareholders with dividends or stock buybacks. The mergers and buyouts are also absurdly lucrative for the already wealthy bankers and lawyers who do the deals. Encouraging a wave of mergers and buyouts to help struggling businesses during the present economic crisis might yield a superficially impressive economic recovery a rebounding stock market, big dividends for shareholders while destroying what remains of the middle class in this country. It might seem that economic inequality could not get worse in this country, but it could. Are there feasible alternatives for saving distressed companies? Isn't consolidation more or less inevitable? Not since the Great Depression have we faced this problem on such a large scale, so we do not have time tested solutions that we know we can count on. But here are at least four ideas. First, the government, as it provides aid, could avoid subsidizing merger waves or mass firings. Companies would not be allowed to use public money to prepare a company for sale or to fund acquisitions or takeovers. The money lent by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve for recovery could be used only to keep viable firms alive until the economy returned to some semblance of normalcy. More from "The America We Need" Second, the investors who have put more than 12 trillion into "socially responsible" investments usually focused on problems like climate change might find ways to turn their efforts toward the rescue of sick companies. Imagine the socially responsible equivalent of a "vulture fund" whose goal was to return companies to health while preserving employment and then to disappear into the sunset, like the Lone Ranger. Third, both government and the private sector could encourage and finance a wave of "worker buyouts," in which employees take control of otherwise sound but currently distressed firms. The problem with typical buyouts is that they too often hurt employees. But a worker buyout can use the techniques of private equity to give employees their share of the company's proceeds. (The Phoenix Project and Project Equity are two examples of private sector efforts to promote employee ownership.) While worker buyouts have been rare and are overly complex, Congress could encourage them by allocating some of the recovery funds to equity investments by employees looking to acquire their companies. Congress could also create a "right of first refusal" for employees of businesses about to be sold similar to that enjoyed by tenants in some parts of the country so workers would have the first opportunity to bid. Finally, the government could impose stronger oversight over mergers and buyouts, either by rigorously enforcing existing antitrust rules or by creating new restrictions on private equity. The idea is not to prevent all rescue operations, only the most blatantly anticompetitive ones. Is the buyer a direct competitor? Does the buyer already control the other competitors in the same industry? At the moment, the economy is still in a state of shock, and uncertainty has paralyzed buyers. There is, in other words, still plenty of time to act. The possibility of even greater inequality of wealth and income in the United States is, unfortunately, not a danger to which the Trump administration seems particularly attuned. But make no mistake: If we repeat the mistakes of the 2010s, the rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer and the middle class will be further gutted. And the resulting backlash could make the current level of discontent in this country seem like the good old days. Tim Wu ( superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia University, a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age." 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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No kindness goes unpunished in "John Henry," a thug life thriller so frequently preposterous that it almost resembles a parody. Like "John Wick," its action is juiced by the killing of a dog; unlike that movie, its titular character (played by the likable Terry Crews) is stoically disinclined to vengeance. A gentle giant with shoulders like an ox, he's so determined to escape his gangbanging past that when he finally lumbers into action, his weapon of choice is a sledgehammer, not a gun. And his first victim is a car windshield. The plot which distractedly follows John Henry's attempts to protect a Honduran woman from his former gang is burlesque and the dialogue is a trip. Ken Foree, as John Henry's salty, disabled father, has a blast delivering a sentimental paean to his character's once legendary penis, and a pair of bangers debate the relative merits of being the front, back or center victim in "The Human Centipede." Gritty home video from the 1990s outlining John Henry's back story interweaves with scenes of bad guys talking trash and playing cards, while dazed looking women hang out in the background like dessert. For some reason, all the gang members wear impractical snow white sweatsuits, probably to enhance our appreciation of the gore when they inevitably get plugged.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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On the page, the thoughts of Molly Bloom are not so much a stream of consciousness as a torrent, relentless and unpunctuated. At the end of James Joyce's mammoth experimental 1922 novel "Ulysses," after its hero has stopped his wanderings and returned home, his wife, Molly, gets the last words. Many, many words. "Yes" is the first of them in that final chapter, and it's also the last: "and yes I said yes I will Yes" a line so famous that you might know it even if you're otherwise unfamiliar with "Ulysses." But onstage at Irish Repertory Theater, the first word out of Molly's mouth is "Yes!" with an exclamation point and that makes all the difference. Because to bring her to three dimensional life for an audience, you have to make her comprehensible: to shape Molly's headlong introspection into speech, breaking swaths of text into inflected sentences. This is what Aedin Moloney and Colum McCann have done with exceptional clarity in their adaptation "Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom," a veering, vivid, ribald monologue expertly performed by Ms. Moloney in its world premiere.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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The topics new parents are talking about. Evidence based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox every week. SPARKY CAMPANELLA never heard the thrumming of a biological clock. But his "sociological clock" his sense that he was missing out on something important in life boomed mightily. At the age of 54, he decided to do something about it. He became a father. He was single, but so what? "I decided I could either do it myself, or wait for the right partner to come along," said Mr. Campanella, a Los Angeles fine arts photographer whose son, Rhys, is a little over 1 year old. Over the years he had dated women who had children of their own, but he realized that he didn't want to be a stepdad. "Why go through this life," he asked, "and not have the experience of having my own child?" It's a question many childless people over 50 are asking themselves. Of course, dealing with night feedings and rambunctious 2 year olds are not for the faint of heart. But with their finances in order and their careers in place, with their life spans extended, some older people are concluding: Why not start or continue raising children in later life? Stories of late life parenthood often make headlines. This year, the 54 year old philanthropist and investor Nicolas Berggruen had two children via surrogate. Margarita Louis Dreyfus, the chairwoman of the global trading house Louis Dreyfus Commodities, gave birth to twin girls at age 53. Janet Jackson made headlines when she announced her pregnancy two weeks before her 50th birthday. Luciano Pavarotti had a child after he was 65; Rupert Murdoch did so when he was over 70. Older men have long had children with younger wives, of course. And giving birth after age 50 is still extremely rare (only 743 American women ages 50 to 54 gave birth in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Vital Statistics Report.) Most important, despite a host of health and ethical issues raised by late parenthood, the whole idea is becoming more culturally accepted, particularly in certain highly affluent circles. "We're living longer, and this new middle age is becoming a time when people start to think about what they want to do with the rest of their lives. For many who haven't had kids, they decide to reinvent themselves as parents." The path to parenthood comes in many ways. Beyond adoption and surrogacy, some choose in vitro fertilization, either with donor eggs or eggs they have frozen in the past. None of this is cheap. Mr. Campanella, for example, paid about 120,000, which included legal and medical fees, and costs for the surrogate mother. "People are so much healthier today," said Dr. Philip Chenette, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco. "I see 55 year olds routinely mountain biking in Marin County, and if you keep a good diet and keep your weight down, you can do a lot of things with your body that you couldn't do before. If your life expectancy is longer, why wouldn't you want to fill that time with your kid?" Some fertility clinics have extended the age of the patients they will accept. The cutoff at Pacific Reproductive is 55 for women (The combined age for a couple is 110). There is none at the New York Fertility Institute, in Manhattan. "We've had patient's first baby delivered to 57," said Dr. Majid Fateh, the founder and medical director. Steve Klein, a family formation lawyer in San Diego, is also seeing older people coming through his doors. "As surrogacy has become more mainstream, people see it as a viable way to have a child, especially for people who are beyond the optimum reproductive ages," he said. "They have money, they can provide a comfortable life, a private education. They can have nannies assist them, or one of them could be a stay at home parent, and they're older and wiser and more mature. They can be a better parent than if they were younger." Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Sometimes no one is more surprised by the desire to have a child in later life than the soon to be parent. Merle Hoffman, the founder and chief executive of Choices Women's Medical Center, in Queens, said she had never wanted children. But when she was in her mid 50s, her husband of more than two decades died. The emptiness was palpable. "I had experienced many facets of love: sexual, devotional, parental from myself to my mother, the love of a cause. But I had never experienced what so many people experience as being the ultimate nonconditional love," she said. "I wanted to experience what it was to love like that." Friends greeted her with everything from shock to rage. "Some were like, 'What are you, nuts? You're too old!'" she recalled. "Some were supportive. Others were thinking, 'Well, where's my position in her life going to be now? Because this child will be the most important person.'" While some people worry about the daily logistics of having a child later in life, others worry about the ethics of it. Annie Worshoufsky MacAulay, 55, a nurse in Hartford, is planning to adopt a baby with her partner, Cindy. The couple has a 6 year old son, Nate. Ms. MacAulay has four adult children from a previous marriage. Although she feels strong and vibrant, she does have some reservations. "My mind tells me oh, my God, am I going to be going to his graduation on a wheelchair? Will I be around? Will people think I'm his grandma? My mind and body have a constant struggle." Doctors and lawyers also grapple with the ethical considerations of having a late in life child. In 2013, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine revised its ethics committee report on oocyte or embryo donation to women of "advanced" age.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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It seems terribly wrong that so fine a spring day should be carrying a deadly danger. The daffodils and cherry blossoms proclaim renewal and hope; the crisp, clear air seems incapable of anything so treacherous. Yet we walk in fear. We want to scrub ourselves again and again against the invisible attacker; we wonder where to hide, how to escape. What can we give our children to protect them? Should we stock up on food and toilet paper? Can we trust the government, which seems bent on making soothing sounds and putting blame elsewhere? It's the spring of 1986, and I'm in Moscow with my family as The Times's bureau chief. Since April 26, when a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant erupted and spewed radioactivity far and wide, we have been wrestling anxiously with the unknown as reporters, trying to distinguish fact from propaganda; personally, trying to cope with a threat that rides silently and invisibly with the wind. Today's threat is different, of course. Radioactivity is not a pathogen. The coronavirus can spread from continent to continent as fast as a jetliner can fly and from person to person with an unguarded touch; the fallout from the burning Chernobyl plant traveled only as far as the winds would carry it, and social distancing was useless against its radiation. Still, these disasters have their common impact. There is that terrible feeling of vulnerability before an invisible enemy; that fear that it might already have invaded you; the realization that our science has been caught off guard and our political leaders may have priorities different from ours. Chernobyl struck at a critical juncture in Soviet history, only a year after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with the promise of reforming the stultifying police state through "glasnost" and "perestroika," openness and reconstruction. Yet when a reactor in Ukraine exploded and started spewing lethal radiation, the Soviet system quickly reverted to old habits of self serving lies, manipulation of information and secrecy. Hours passed before the Kremlin even acknowledged an accident, long after officials in parts of Scandinavia began reporting ominous increases in radiation. The first official bulletin remains a classic in totalitarian understatement: "An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up." People knew enough to read between the lines: "commission," "measures still being taken" and the terseness all spelled catastrophe. People understood that their lives were in danger, and that fear surpassed the fears by which the state exercised its control. The propaganda machine lost control of the narrative and found itself compelled to dribble out facts and warnings, though the old habit of blaming the West remained in place as it does to this day with claims that Americans and Western Europeans were exploiting Chernobyl to undermine Soviet credibility and foment a "campaign of hatred." It was weeks before Mr. Gorbachev publicly acknowledged the disaster. Not surprisingly, China's authoritarian government had many of the same reactions as the Kremlin to the initial spread of the coronavirus in Wuhan. But Beijing's ability to control information was far smaller than the Soviet Union's in the predigital era. The public adulation for Dr. Li Wenliang, a doctor whose early warning about the outbreak of the disease was met with official accusations of "severely disturbing the social order" and who died of the disease, demonstrated the futility of trying to control bad news but also the danger, since heeding Dr. Li's warning more quickly might have led to earlier and better efforts to contain the virus. President Trump's efforts to spin the pandemic away so it wouldn't hurt his re election chances are far more futile than China's, since a robust news media, a strong medical establishment, local governments and independent legislators are not cowed by his accusations that the disease "is their new hoax." Americans threatened by the outbreak, like the Soviet people in 1986 or the Chinese in 2020, will not be fooled for long when their lives are threatened. Still, it's discouraging that the president began to acknowledge the gravity of the coronavirus only after his efforts at denial went nowhere, and that even so important a speech included misinformation such as his claim that antiviral therapies would soon be available. And, of course, there was that familiar attempt to depict the virus as something foreigners were inflicting on Americans. In the Soviet Union, Chernobyl proved to be a seminal moment for a system already on life support, hastening its demise. The handling of the coronavirus will have its time of reckoning, too, and the pandemic is certain to leave a deep imprint on afflicted regions of the world, including our country. Back in 1986 all such analyses began later, after the danger subsided. In the immediate aftermath, the questions were far more immediate, as they are in these early days of spring. Dare I ride the subway? How will we get food if we're quarantined at home? Is my will up to date? Are we being told the truth? 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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CAMBRIDGE, MASS. Around noon on a recent Friday, Donor Five, a healthy 31 year old, walked across M.I.T.'s frigid, wind swept campus to a third floor restroom to make a contribution to public health. Less than two hours later, a technician blended the donor's stool into preparations that looked like chocolate milk. The material was separated and stored in freezers at an M.I.T. microbiology lab, awaiting shipment to hospitals around the country. Each container was carefully labeled: Fecal Microbiota Preparation. Nearly a year ago, Mark Smith, a 27 year old doctoral candidate, and three colleagues launched OpenBiome, the nation's first human stool bank. Its mission: to provide doctors with safe, inexpensive fecal material from screened donors to treat patients with Clostridium difficile, a gastrointestinal infection that kills at least 14,000 Americans a year. "People are dying, and it's crazy because we know what the solution is," Mr. Smith said. "People are doing fecal transplants in their basements and may not be doing any of the right screening or sterile preparation. We need an intermediate solution until there are commercial products on the market." C. diff, as it's known, resides among trillions of other bacteria in normal, healthy humans. When antibiotics wipe out the competition, the bacteria can produce toxins, causing persistent diarrhea. The bacteria are increasingly resistant to conventional treatments. But researchers have discovered an alternative: A donor's stool can be transplanted in the intestine or colon of a sick patient via an enema, colonoscopy or nasogastric tube. The healthy bacteria fight off C. diff and re establish a normal community in the gut. A study published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine found that fecal transplants were nearly twice as effective as antibiotics in treating patients with recurring C. difficile. But where to get healthy donor stool? For doctors, it's a tedious, time consuming process, and some patients turn awkwardly to relatives or friends. Since September, OpenBiome has delivered more than 135 frozen, ready to use preparations to 13 hospitals. The nonprofit project fields dozens of requests from doctors, hospitals and patients every week. (The preparations are not sent directly to patients.) Carol Capps, 75, a retired nurse in Clemmons, N.C., had been in and out of hospitals for months with a C. diff infection that was not going away despite multiple courses of antibiotics. After a recurrence, her doctor suggested OpenBiome, and she received a fecal transplant. By that afternoon, Ms. Capps said, she felt like a new person and has been healthy since. "I am just thankful for whoever donates," she said. "It's such a miracle." Despite the promise, the Food and Drug Administration has grappled with the regulation of fecal transplants. In early 2013, the agency announced that it would treat them as biologic drugs requiring an Investigational New Drug application, which typically precedes a clinical trial. Following outcry from patients and doctors, the F.D.A. announced it would "exercise enforcement discretion" in effect, saying that it would not go after physicians performing fecal transplants for C. diff. Jennifer Rodriguez, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, said the agency planned to issue industry guidelines later this year. Because of the legal ambiguity, some researchers are not preparing fecal microbiota for sale (usually at cost) including Dr. Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University Minnesota, who first published the methodology for doing so. Dr. Khoruts worries that approval of OpenBiome's efforts will slow the development of next generation therapeutics beyond the crude preparations available today. "We desperately need some clarity," Dr. Khoruts said. "We're going to be stuck with the OpenBiome model, and nothing better's going to come along." At the same time, Mr. Smith and Eric J. Alm, an M.I.T. microbiologist and adviser to OpenBiome, said the F.D.A.'s classification of fecal transplants as drugs hinders research into their possible uses to treat inflammatory bowel diseases and obesity. "It's going to give a monopoly to whatever company gets the drug approved," Mr. Smith said. "We think it should be regulated, but unlike most products the F.D.A. oversees, there's a real risk of the black market," he said. "If you restrict access, there's going to be lots of people doing it underground."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Ed Ruscha in his Culver City studio with Dexter. The artist, long rooted in Los Angeles, has been thinking about the past. At right, Billy Al Bengston's "The Dance (Moontang)," 1957; Julius Shulman's 1950 photograph, "Freeman House" (built by Frank Lloyd Wright). LOS ANGELES The artist Ed Ruscha has been based in Los Angeles since 1956, and has spent the better part of the last 60 years exploring that city's iconography in a deadpan style that wavers between mundane and philosophical. He has documented sometimes in black and white photographs, but mostly in oil on canvas gas stations, parking lots, swimming pools, the apartment blocks of struggling actors, the Hollywood sign (which on clear days he used to be able to see from his old studio) and, in his large body of text based paintings, the kind of transactional language one could imagine overhearing at a power lunch at any point in the last half century, such as: "That was then this is now," "Honey, I twisted through more damn traffic today," "Pay nothing until April" and the iconic "Oof." Aside from this city, its landmarks and their place in a kind of extreme version of Americana symbolism, the odd evolutions of contemporary vernacular have been the main through line of his work. In person, Mr. Ruscha speaks with a vaguely unplaceable Western accent, a holdover from his upbringing he was born in Nebraska, but grew up mostly in Oklahoma which has softened into slight nonrecognition from his time on the West Coast. Perhaps other than John Wayne, no other postwar figure has been described as "laconic" quite as much as he has. It's a good word for him. Watching Mr. Ruscha enter a room feels like witnessing a cowboy suiting up for his last rodeo. His gait is stiff and slow, but also dramatically deliberate, and at 82, he's still as handsome as a movie star. "There's a peculiar kind of what would you call it? patois, like Okie jargon," he said. "People have a funny way of speaking, almost like using bad English, double negatives like, 'I can't find my keys nowhere.' I would see these phrasings in literature too, like John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men': 'I told you nobody ought never to fight him.' Yes, they were incorrect, but they had a punch to them." The drum skins star in a new exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin, which houses Mr. Ruscha's extensive archive. They are both familiar and a kind of late period departure. They deploy the font Mr. Ruscha invented in the early '80s and has used in his text paintings ever since, called "Boy Scout Utility Modern," a name that, like much of Mr. Ruscha's canon, rests somewhere between perfectly literal description and high minded gag. But his writing is less cynical, more earnestly nostalgic: "I don't hardly disbelieve it," or "He up and went downtown." The new works were, on some level, a long time in the making. Mr. Ruscha bought the drum skins almost 50 years ago at a leather store in Los Angeles. They were rejects, stacked on a clearance table because they had noticeable flaws, and he's carried them with him ever since. "I was always looking at them," he noted, "saying, 'You're beautiful, but I can't think of anything to trigger me to paint on you.'" This salvaging of a seemingly random object was typical. Veronica Roberts, the curator who organized the show at the Blanton, through July 12, described Mr. Ruscha's studio as "an art historian's dream." "Every drawer has a history," she said. She recalled once bringing him pecans from a tree in her backyard, unaware that Mr. Ruscha has a collection of pecan nutcrackers, which he excitedly unveiled to her. For this artist who has been rooted in the never ending present of Los Angeles, his recent paintings had him thinking about the past. Mr. Ruscha's father was an insurance auditor in Oklahoma City, "a fairly straight fellow," he said. His boyhood embodied the kind of folksiness that he would later deconstruct in works that rendered classic American imagery road signs, billboards, the 20th Century Fox logo into foreign abstractions. "I look back on Oklahoma as though it were an old black and white movie," he said. "I'd drink a quart of milk every morning and read the newspaper. That was kind of my routine." He also spent a lot of time listening to country music and jazz, which he described as "two very diverging, conflicting and yet somehow harmonious schools of music." He was especially intrigued by country radio programs like "Lum and Abner," a comedy act that centered on life in a fictional small town in Arkansas, and whose language would greatly influence his work. "Sometimes Lum would say something very abstract," he explained, "And Abner would say: 'Oh don't get so testamystical with me.' I felt like I wanted to incorporate those kinds of notions, that kind of American speech into my work." In looking to the language of his youth, there is an almost childlike innocence to the drums other phrases include "I ain't telling you no lie" and "I never done nobody no harm" though Mr. Ruscha also added that this kind of language was not present in his own house. "I never spoke this way, and if I did, my parents would be quick to correct me," he said. He had ambitions to become a sign painter when he left Oklahoma at 18 for Southern California, to study at the Chouinard Art Institute. This development did not particularly thrill his father, at least not until he read a story about how Walt Disney was the school's primary financial backer, and that many of its students went on to work at his animation studio. Chouinard, which would later become CalArts, a school that played as big a role as any institution in developing an American avant garde was not Mr. Ruscha's first choice that would have been the nearby ArtCenter College of Design, from which he was rejected, fortuitously, as it turns out. ArtCenter was highly professionalized and had a strict dress code. In the age of the beatnik this was the late '50s students couldn't have facial hair, or wear a beret. Bongo drums were outlawed on campus. Chouinard, on the other hand, was a bohemian stronghold. It was here that Mr. Ruscha began to study the chaotic spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, and the work of a young Jasper Johns, whose detached symbolism targets, maps, the American flag was like a sarcastic rebuttal. He'd take class trips to the Clark Library, where he became enamored with typography and printing. As a student, Mr. Ruscha actually had one dislocating encounter with Walt Disney, which is a little like trying to imagine a meeting between Thomas Pynchon and Dr. Seuss. It happened at a hotel downtown, where Mr. Ruscha was helping to pick student portfolios for Chouinard's scholarship program. "I'll never forget that he walked up to me and he said, 'Hi, I'm Walt Disney,'" Mr. Ruscha said. "I remember leaving this hotel, and I walked out into the street, and I saw Walt and his wife drive off in a Thunderbird." He added, still sounding dutifully impressed, "Like, a new Thunderbird." A less ephemeral figure at Chouinard was Robert Irwin, who was Mr. Ruscha's teacher and became a lifelong friend. Mr. Irwin, who is best known for his ultra minimalist installations that make use of natural light and site specificity, taught a course in watercolors. He liked to dramatically prepare his students for what Mr. Ruscha described as "the event of painting," making students cover a stiff backing board in layers of tape, then mounting paper on top of that, and finally wetting the paper, so that it had a stiffness and bounce to it ("like a drum," Mr. Ruscha said, tapping his fingers on the desk). All the anxiety of confronting a blank page was channeled into simply preparing the surface, so that by the time a student began making his first mark, the anxiety had faded. "He had a way of softening your thinking, and embellishing this idea of free form thought, and not to worry so much about what you're doing," Mr. Ruscha said. "And to let it evolve." Mr. Ruscha is a great talker, but he's not known to interpret his work or to offer explanations. One of his early paintings, "Hurting the Word Radio 2," (1964) which literally shows a clean, almost advertorial depiction of the titular word being pulled apart by two vises, recently sold at Christie's for 52.5 million. It is a painting that Mr. Ruscha recalled originally selling to the collector Joan Quinn (and her husband, Jack, a lawyer who died in 2017) for a couple hundred dollars. "You can only get so curious about that subject," he said, brushing it off. "It's just the flow of commerce, and here we are, little helpless creatures while it all whooshes by." At one point, he mentioned how he didn't take to Los Angeles immediately ("it was very smoggy"), and how he still thinks San Francisco "is the most beautiful city in the world. More than L.A." So why doesn't he live somewhere else? "Well, cuz I don't," he said with a laugh. "I live here." Perhaps patience is the key to his character the patience of a man who will carry discarded drum skins around for 50 years before finally deciding to paint on them. One of his most famous works is "Every Building on the Sunset Strip," a self published accordion folded book from 1966, which, like "Twenty Six Gasoline Stations" before it, is a photographic work succinctly described by its title. Every couple of years, Mr. Ruscha rephotographs the street on film, along with other major thoroughfares in central Los Angeles, like Hollywood Boulevard or, most recently, Melrose Avenue, with nothing changed in the process except the streets themselves. "I began to see the city decaying in negative ways," he said of why he started this project in the '60s. "Anything that was worth looking at seemed to be erased and something came along to replace it that was repulsive. That continues to be true today, too. I see the city as highly pressurized, just from the pure function of too many people living here. And I notice it every time I go out on the street, that something's a little bit different. You know: 'Oh, that's gone.'" About two weeks after this interview took place, news spread that John Baldessari, perhaps the only other artist with as long an association with Southern California as Mr. Ruscha, had died at age 88. "John sailed his own boat and it wasn't a Princess Cruise ship," Mr. Ruscha said in an email response, sounding like one of his paintings. In some of Mr. Ruscha's works dating back to the mid 60s, various lodestars of the cityscape are painted engulfed in flames, like the Norm's diner on La Cienega, or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire. Recent history has rendered certain aspects of Mr. Ruscha's career into dark portents, cataclysmic visions of a decadent culture that can't help but devour itself. Which is to say: very little is left unchanged of the Los Angeles where the artist started his career, except maybe the Hollywood sign. And Ed Ruscha himself.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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NECKLACE: It's not at all unusual in Throgs Neck for a property to have water views, as with this house facing the Throgs Neck Bridge. As one resident put it, "You feel blessed when everything is at your reach." THE landscape in Throgs Neck, in the southeastern corner of the Bronx, has been transformed over the last several decades. Before, open fields flanked areas of three season bungalows overlooking Long Island Sound and other expanses of water. Now the area is mostly bustling and built up and sewn into the city fabric by expressways. But when it comes to residents' reasons for choosing Throgs Neck, they haven't changed much at all. Largely a working and middle class neighborhood, home to many city workers including firefighters and police officers, it is relaxed and friendly and those qualities have also made it magnetic. In 1963, John and Theresa Scuoppo moved into a two family brick home that they bought for 31,500, because they found the area quaint as well as convenient to their jobs in Manhattan. They live in the same home now. In 1986, Jack and Marie McCarrick moved into an attached single family home that they bought for 159,000, and knew they were in a family oriented neighborhood easily accessible to many parts of the region. Mr. McCarrick had spent much of his childhood here, enjoying swimming off the shore. When he married, he said, he had no doubt where to look for a home. And the McCarricks have been in it ever since. Last year, Felicia and William Frestan moved into a three bedroom condominium with water views that they bought for about 300,000, thankful to find a friendly and well situated neighborhood. Ms. Frestan, 54, a former postal worker who moved from just up the road in Baychester, says she plans to stay in her home "till the end of my days." "First, I fell in love with the area, then I fell in love with the apartment," she added. "You feel blessed when everything is at your reach." Water is very much within reach on three sides of the neighborhood. Although the beach club atmosphere of the summer months dissipates each fall when the summer only residents depart, brokers say the sea remains a strong pull for many buyers. The two square miles of Throgs Neck are home to about 30,000 people, according to census data. The area has traditionally been an enclave for Italian , Irish and German Americans, and that still is the case. But these days there are substantial numbers of African and Asian Americans, as well as Hispanic Americans from a variety of countries, distributed throughout. The area has also become more desirable because of a sharp drop in crime. In the 45th Precinct, which encompasses Throgs Neck, crime has fallen more than 30 percent in the last 10 years and nearly 70 percent since 1993, according to city statistics. "It's rather idyllic here," said Mr. Scuoppo, 83. "It's not a hassle for commuting, shopping or education. That's what makes it a congenial community." Still, communities require involvement. To protect the area's perceived architectural congeniality during the real estate boom, the Throggs Neck Homeowners Association, which has about 700 members, had its work cut out. Developers were tearing down one families and building much larger multifamilies on the same lots. As the buildings became bigger, traffic and parking troubles were popping up. The group pushed for zoning changes to limit the size of future homes, and the city made those changes in 2004. Residential construction these days is mostly stalled; the biggest development of any kind is on the far west side at Ferry Point Park, a 400 plus acre former landfill. In January, the city approved a deal to have Donald J. Trump manage a new 18 hole golf course at the park. The course is to open next year, and green fees of up to 125 are planned. About the name Throgs Neck: Many residents, and the homeowner association, insist that the correct spelling is with two g's, even though the city uses only one. But as the area is in fact named after an early settler who spelled his name John Throckmorton no g's at all maybe there simply isn't a correct spelling. Shaped kind of like a stingray, with the State University of New York Maritime College as the tail, Throgs Neck has Eastchester Bay and the Long Island Sound on its east side, the East River to the south and Westchester Creek to the west. Layton Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard are generally considered to make up the northern border. When it comes to the housing, name it and the neighborhood probably has it: single and multifamily, detached and attached, brick and wood framed, apartments, condos and bungalows. On the western side, there is also a large public housing complex. Many of the lots are 25 or 30 by 100 feet, but there are some double lots scattered around. Street parking is plentiful, but it's often not essential: many homes have driveways, if not garages. There are also two distinct co op enclaves near the water Silver Beach Gardens on the southwestern side and Edgewater Park on the eastern. Each has only one main road leading in and out, and inside are hundreds of single family homes, about 1,100 in total, mostly winterized bungalows. Lynn Gerbino, the president of the homeowner association, lives in Silver Beach. "We have a lot of people here who get waterfront property without paying waterfront prices," she said. The market has picked up in the last year, said Benny Diasparra, the owner/broker of Exit Realty Search. But he also said that it was still a buyers' market, with prices down about 15 percent from the peak a few years ago. If priced right, however, homes are moving much faster now. "When a seller is willing to adjust to fit the market," as Mr. Diasparra put it, "there is a lot of movement." Many of these realistic sellers, he added, receive multiple offers within a month of posting their listings. About 45 single family homes are for sale, according to a recent search. In general, prices range from 350,000 to 500,000. About 30 multifamily homes were for sale, ranging in price from about 450,000 to 700,000. There's water here, and lots of it, in practically every direction. That makes boating, fishing and other water activities popular warm weather pastimes. But there's plenty to do on dry land, too. Restaurants and shops line East Tremont Avenue, and the locals gush about dining options. "I could eat a different cuisine every night of the week," Ms. Frestan said, "and it would all be good." But often, when prodded, residents give the highest grades to the Italian offerings particularly the menu at Tosca Cafe and the pizza at Tommy's. There are also ball fields, one at the Bicentennial Veterans Memorial Park. Schools include Public Schools 72 and 304, which serve students in prekindergarten through fifth grade. At the former, 37 percent of fourth graders met standards in reading and 49 in math; at the latter, percentages were 64 and 82. Citywide percentages were 51 and 62. Middle School X101 has about 400 students in Grades 6 through 8. Among eighth graders, 69 percent met standards in reading and 68 in math, versus 35 and 53 percent citywide. Herbert H. Lehman High School is just to the north of the neighborhood. SAT averages in 2011 were 414 in reading, 442 in math and 395 in writing, versus 436, 460, and 431 citywide. The neighborhood also has several private schools, including St. Frances de Chantal School, The School of St. Benedict and Preston High School. Practically everyone has a car here, and for good reason. The Cross Bronx Expressway, the Hutchinson River Parkway and the Throgs Neck Expressway all pass through the area, making relatively short work of driving to Westchester, other parts of the Bronx, Queens and even Manhattan. Driving to Midtown can take 30 minutes or less. Still, many people use public transportation to commute. An express bus, the BxM9, runs to and from Midtown all day. On trips to Manhattan, the bus picks up passengers in three different spots, and a one way trip during peak times takes about an hour. The area is also served by local buses like the Bx8, Bx40 and Bx42. They make their way to the No. 6 train along Westchester Avenue. The ride to Grand Central Terminal takes roughly 40 minutes. Some successful capitalists in the 19th century owned estates in Throgs Neck. One of them, Collis P. Huntington, "owned so many railroads that he could go cross country without leaving his own property," according to a text by the Bronx Historical Society. Another, John A. Morris, known as the "Lottery King," made a fortune running the Louisiana State Lottery.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Chico, a city dog, wasn't ready for the suburbs and neither were they. Jersey City suits them all just fine. For years, Jersey City renters Prashanth Devarajan and Pooja Zaveri talked about getting a dog. But they both grew up in Coimbatore, a city in southern India, where their family dogs had big yards to run and play in, and it was hard to imagine keeping a dog cooped up in their one bedroom apartment. "I always thought that my dog should have grass," Mr. Devarajan said. "We kept saying, 'When we get a house, we'll get a dog,'" Ms. Zaveri said. But neither wanted to move to the suburbs, where they could afford a house with a backyard. And they really did want a dog so much so that, despite their demanding jobs in Manhattan, they had been taking care of other people's dogs through Rover, a service that connects pet owners with walkers and sitters. A year and a half ago, noting the abundance of seemingly happy city dogs in their midst, they brought home a chocolate brown Havanese puppy, whom they named Chico. It quickly became clear that Chico was a fan of city living: He loved playing with the other dogs in their Newport neighborhood. Even so, he did eventually convince the couple they should move. Just not to the suburbs. It started with the monthly pet fee at their apartment building, a 50 charge on top of their 2,395 rent. That was a relatively minor increase, but it brought them closer to the cost of a two bedroom in a less expensive area. The couple often entertain out of town friends and family, including Ms. Zaveri's parents, who visit from India for about two months every year. In the one bedroom, the couple would give the guests their bedroom and decamp to the living room a less than ideal setup for longer visits. And then there was Chico. At 14 pounds, he takes up hardly any space, but all of his beds and gear cluttered the already tight living quarters. Ms. Zaveri, a designer of home textiles sold at stores like HomeGoods and T.J. Maxx, found it hard to resist adding her handiwork to Chico's collection. Occupation: Mr. Devarajan is a strategic partner manager at Google; Ms. Zaveri is a designer of home textiles at Dream Home, a manufacturer and wholesaler. On Jersey City: Seven years ago, when they were living in Manhattan, they came to watch the Fourth of July fireworks along the river. "It was so pretty and nice and open, and not as crowded," Ms. Zaveri said. "It felt very far from Manhattan, but it was so close to the PATH." The best thing in their kitchen: Their Rotimatic, which makes rotis from scratch in less than three minutes. "He's not a big fan of rice," Ms. Zaveri of Mr. Devarajan. "It was an investment, but a good one. Every Indian friend we bring over is like, 'OMG.'" Chico's favorite thing to do: People watch from his bed on the window ledge. And if he can find an open bathroom door, strew toilet paper across the apartment. On living in the suburbs: "I think we would want to move to the suburbs eventually," Ms. Zaveri said. "But it's a very different lifestyle." The Hamilton Park neighborhood, where rents tend to be lower than those in Newport and whose namesake park has a large dog run where they take Chico, seemed like an ideal place to look. "We wanted him to be social and good with other dogs," Ms. Zaveri said. "Also, he had 10 times the energy when he was a puppy, and after the park he'd pass out." The downside was being farther from the PATH train, which they take to work. But Revetment House, a LeFrak rental building on 10th Street where they saw a two bedroom, has morning and evening shuttles to the Newport station. They also liked that the management company, Newport, was the same one that managed their old building. And Revetment House also had a dog run. In the end, that decided the matter. A nearby building had a dog run as well, but it was concrete, while Revetment's was grass artificial grass, to be sure, but for Mr. Devarajan, it sealed the deal. They moved in last December, paying 3,420 a month, and the building waived the pet fee. Chico is in good company. "He has a lot of friends in the building," Ms. Zaveri said. "He has Henry, a mini goldendoodle Henry has the same energy as him. And he has Denden, a mini poodle." They still take Chico to Hamilton Park, a three minute walk away. But when it rains, he can play in the building's dog run without needing a bath afterward, to wash the sand and mud out of his long hair. There are a few apartment features that humans can appreciate, too. Their closets are, for the first time, sufficient to their needs, which pleases Ms. Zaveri, who dislikes clutter. And the view, of a quiet side street, is nice. Most of all, they like the open kitchen. When they have people over, they can talk while they prepare the meal. "And we can both watch TV shows when one of us is cooking," Mr. Devarajan said. (They're fans of "Game of Thrones" and "Queen of the South.") "We don't have to wait to watch it together."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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"I put the dishes in the dishwasher," my son said to me recently, as if it was a favor rather than something he should do just because. This prompted me to write to you, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, with all the irritation of a mother whose last nerves were worked a long time ago when it comes to the abuses that thrive on your platform. I'd like to let you know: You get zero claps for doing a tiny right thing after doing the wrong thing for far too long. Last week, you announced that you are finally labeling the most egregious dreck that is broadcast on Facebook by President Trump, after years of his escalating behavior. But it's too little, too late. And it's too calculating. You and other Facebook executives keep hauling out the tired line, "We know we have more work to do." It's irksome. And you won't like me when I am irked. You seem to be shifting toward labeling after insisting recently to your employees that you would not budge on this in reaction to a campaign to persuade advertisers to boycott your company, a movement known as Stop the Hate for Profit. After years of other forms of pressure that apparently failed, those who are seeking to force you to change are finally getting traction by focusing on your wallet, knocking billions off your net worth in recent days, as your stock price goes down. This fast moving campaign organized by the N.A.A.C.P., the ADL, Color of Change and others is aimed directly at Facebook and has been joined by companies like Patagonia, REI and, most significantly, the consumer goods giant Unilever. Still, other companies, like Starbucks and Coca Cola, are not joining Stop the Hate, but instead are declaring that they will cut off marketing on all of social media. As if all social media companies are equal. They are not. Allowing Facebook to get cover in a group will only end up hurting smaller companies like Snap and Twitter, both of which have tried to deal with this problem more actively. It's not fair to lump them in with you; they have fewer resources to withstand a marketing drought. Since Facebook and Google are the overwhelmingly dominant players in the game of digital advertising, the problem of hate and misinformation flowing on social media is yours to own. Your stranglehold on the ad business is undeniably the source of your power. I talked recently with some people running businesses that rely on Facebook, all of whom are scared to speak out publicly against your platform. Many compared your service to a bad relationship. "I really cannot stand them at all," said a leader of a medium size company that gets a lot of its leads on Facebook. But while he worries about the damage Facebook is doing to society, he added, "I am going to keep marketing there because I have no choice." No choice that's certainly why Starbucks did not get rid of its page on Facebook, where it posts content to close to 36 million followers. (Today, for example, you can "start off your day with Cold Brew!") I don't blame Starbucks or Coca Cola or anyone with a business to run for not bailing on Facebook totally; all marketers need Facebook (and its Instagram unit) to operate in today's media environment. But I don't need you, since I am pretty sure that being on Facebook has never helped me at all. So, it is time to go. After years of inertia, and not much use of Facebook, this week I finally took the first big steps toward leaving, deactivating my personal page and unpublishing my brand page. This was a many click process in which my decision was questioned by Facebook's pop ups a lot more than I wanted my decision to be questioned (ARE YOU SURE? ARE YOU REALLY SURE?). I'm likely soon enough to delete the pages altogether, along with my Instagram account, once I figure out what to do with the material living there like boxes in a digital attic. As I deactivated, I was asked by Facebook why I was doing it, and I picked "other" from a long menu of reasons, many of which I would have clicked if I could have chosen more than one, including: I have a privacy concern; I don't feel safe on Facebook; I don't find Facebook useful. This column and the deactivation of my account is my way of cleaning up my world. But to say I am confident that you, Mark Zuckerberg, will do your part to clean up the rest of the world would be something of an overstatement. Facebook's still high stock price and your complete control over the company means you can and will continue to do as you please. And since you are not my kid yes, I know, lucky you! there is little I can do about it. Yet I do hope for progress, however painful it is for Facebook, its advertisers and the rest of us. Already this week, other big platforms have started to make long overdue changes in content policy, including banning an out of control Trump community (Reddit) and temporarily suspending Mr. Trump's account due to "hateful content" (Twitch). One of the hallmarks of adulthood is the ability to evolve. My son is about to turn 16 (as Facebook did this year), and he's also learning how to do that, which has put me in the mind of something James Baldwin said: "People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. They pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead." By which I mean to say, Mark, you need to put your dirty dishes in the dishwasher without my asking, just because.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Rivers Schwenn is only 16, but she says she already knows that she never wants children. It's not that she doesn't like kids. She does. Lots. But after spending the last year and a half watching her 9 year old sister, Parker Monhollon, die of cancer, the thought of witnessing another child go through that is unbearable. "I know it's irrational to think that if I have kids they'll probably get cancer and die, but that's where my head goes," said Rivers, of Silver Lake, Kan. "Cancer was nothing I ever thought about before Parker got sick, but now it seems like a possibility. I don't think it's going to happen, but it could." During her sister's illness, Rivers talked to a counselor twice, but it wasn't for her. And she wasn't interested in attending camps like Okizu, in Novato, Calif., or the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, in Ashford, Conn., which offer sessions for ill children and their siblings. "Sitting around with kids you don't know and the only thing you have in common is that you have a sibling with cancer seems like a group therapy session," she said. Since losing Parker to diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, an especially vitriolic pediatric brain tumor with a zero percent survival rate, Rivers has thrown herself into her schoolwork and dance a passion she shared with her sister. "I'd rather be as normal as you can." "Normal," of course, is a relative term when your sibling is seriously ill. About 5 to 8 percent of children in the United States will experience the death of a sibling, but the loss is rarely discussed, and siblings of terminally ill children are often overlooked. There is also little social support for bereaved siblings. A 2010 study in the Journal of Paediatrics Child Health of 109 major pediatric hospitals in the United States and Canada found that only 48 percent provided sibling support. A 2014 study of young adults who lost siblings to cancer found that most were still grieving two to nine years later. Beyond the lifestyle changes and the terror of the unknown, the healthy sibling's role in the family shifts. Parents are in triage mode, and by default, the well child must take a back seat: Their needs simply aren't as important, or so the thinking has gone. "I don't think my parents checked my homework for a year," said Rebecca Matz, 12, of Mullica Hill, N.J., whose younger sister, Ellie, now 8, was diagnosed with leukemia in December 2014. After telling her that Ellie had cancer, her parents acknowledged that although it wasn't fair, the family was going to have to accommodate Ellie until she got better. Rebecca was jealous. "My mom would say, 'Ellie's a very brave child.' I was like, 'Stop! She's getting all the attention. I'm here now, pay attention to me!'" Not surprisingly, research has found that preteens who had lost a sibling had higher anxiety and depression levels than those who did not. They also had more attention problems, likely a result of their disrupted routines. Adults who lost siblings as kids also recall feeling as if their own emotions don't matter, what the family therapist Pauline Boss calls "ambiguous loss," or loss without closure. Others have labeled it "hidden grief." "One of the common messages for adolescents whose siblings have died is they have to camouflage their feelings," said David Balk, a professor at Brooklyn College who has done extensive research on college student bereavement and sibling loss. "They just want the permission to be able to talk about their sister or brother and what he or she meant to them." "People do not see the sibling experience during illness or after loss," said Elizabeth DeVita Raeburn, 51, whose book, "The Empty Room: Understanding Sibling Loss," chronicled the death of her 17 year old brother from aplastic anemia when she was 14. (The 1970s TV special, "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble," starring John Travolta, was based partly on his story.) Ms. DeVita Raeburn remembers the woman who accosted her at her brother's funeral and told her that she would now have to behave, because "your parents are going through a lot." "It told me my experience didn't matter, so you suppress it," said Ms. DeVita Raeburn. Other children withdraw, which is what Ashlyn Bentley, 17, of Scottsdale, Ariz., did when her 9 year old sister, Abriel, was given a diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma two years ago. "For several months I just shut people out; it's hard to find people that understand what you're going through," she said. "I didn't talk to people except for my parents." After meeting Michael Gillette, a documentary filmmaker with the Truth 365, a nonprofit group that gives voice to children and families fighting cancer, Ms. Bentley decided to do something for siblings. In January, Mr. Gillette and Ms. Bentley began traveling around the country and interviewing siblings on camera. They are slowly releasing the stories online; a full length documentary is slated for next year. "The hardest part of being a sibling of a person with cancer is that you're not able to make them better," said Ms. Bentley, who is completing high school online so she can work with Mr. Gillette. "Siblings are there to support each other and help them through tough times. When you get to this cancer world you can't do anything about it." Another issue, she found, is that healthy siblings are not necessarily part of the discussion about their sibling's illness or treatment plan. This affects how the sibling copes with the loss; the less cohesive the family unit, the harder it is to grieve. Christina G. Hibbert, a clinical psychologist in Flagstaff, Ariz., and author of "This Is How We Grow," was 18 when her 8 year old sister died of cancer. When Ms. Hibbert was 32, another sister who was 16 months younger died after overdosing on alcohol and Tylenol. Dr. Hibbert said she is close to her two surviving sisters and one brother. "It's really helpful for families and siblings in general to grieve together," she said. "Even a surrogate parent figure can help with that process to make sure the siblings all have a place to talk about what's happened and not make it something they're not supposed to bring up because they don't want their parents to be sad." The good news is that studies have found that people who have experienced illness or loss at a young age show a resilience and emotional maturity that others don't. A 2013 study of 40 young adults ages 17 to 24 explored the impact of growing up with an ill sibling on the healthy siblings' late adolescent functioning. The authors found that growing up with an ill sibling gives the healthy sibling an opportunity to develop empathy and compassion well before their same age peers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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Even with tuition shooting up, the payoff from a college degree remains strong, lifting lifelong earnings and protecting many graduates like a Teflon coating against the worst effects of economic downturns. But a new study has found that for black and Hispanic college graduates, that shield is severely cracked, failing to protect them from both short term crises and longstanding challenges. "The long term trend is shockingly clear," said William R. Emmons, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and one of the authors of the report. "White and Asian college grads do much better than their counterparts without college, while college grad Hispanics and blacks do much worse proportionately." A college degree has long been recognized as a great equalizer, a path for minorities to help bridge the economic chasm that separates them from whites. But the report, scheduled to be released on Monday, raises troubling questions about the ability of a college education to narrow the racial and ethnic wealth gap. "Higher education alone cannot level the playing field," the report concludes. Economists emphasize that college educated blacks and Hispanics over all earn significantly more and are in a better position to accumulate wealth than blacks and Hispanics who do not get degrees. Graduates' median family income in 2013 was at least twice as high, and their median family wealth (which includes resources like a home, car and retirement account) was 3.5 to 4 times greater than that of nongraduates. But while these college grads had more assets, they suffered disproportionately during periods of financial trouble. From 1992 to 2013, the median net worth of blacks who finished college dropped nearly 56 percent (adjusted for inflation). By comparison, the median net worth of whites with college degrees rose about 86 percent over the same period, which included three recessions including the severe downturn of 2007 through 2009, with its devastating effect on home prices in many parts of the country. Asian graduates did even better, gaining nearly 90 percent. To understand just how disappointing these results are, look at the impact during this period on comparable groups without college degrees. Blacks without degrees, in large part because they had much less to lose, experienced a 3.8 percent drop in wealth. Whites who didn't graduate from college lost nearly 11 percent. The wealth of Asian nongrads fell more than 44 percent. There is not a simple answer to explain why a college degree has failed to help safeguard the assets of many minority families. Persistent discrimination and the types of training and jobs minorities get have played a role. Another central factor is the heavy debt many blacks and Hispanics accumulate to achieve middle class status. The collapse of the housing bubble played havoc with college educated black and Hispanic families, who on average accumulated a huge amount of debt relative to the size of their paychecks. They borrowed a lot to buy homes, only to see them plunge in value during the mortgage crisis. While the average value of a home owned by a white college graduate declined 25 percent, homes owned by black and Hispanic grads fell by about twice that. This loss was made more devastating by the fact that blacks and Hispanics tended to have more of their wealth concentrated in their homes than whites and Asians, who, on average, accumulated more assets in the stock and bond markets, primarily through retirement accounts. The housing boom and bust particularly whipsawed college educated Hispanics: From 2007 to 2013, their net worth fell a whopping 72 percent. One lesson, according to economists at the St. Louis Fed, is that borrowing too much to get a piece of the American dream often undermines any hope of sustaining it. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. That notion applies equally to excessive college and housing loans, they say. "How you finance an asset is just as important as the asset itself," said Ray Boshara, director of the Center for Household Financial Stability at the St. Louis Fed bank. Substantially narrowing the racial and ethnic wealth gap, Mr. Boshara and the study's authors suggest, would require policy changes to expand the availability of a quality college education without forcing students into outsize debt.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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For those returning to the nest after holiday journeys, Dover Street Market has a temporary Rick Owens Maison/Objet installation featuring a selection of furniture, tableware and flatware, including an "Urnette" bronze vase ( 6,300), which is displayed across a black plinth with mural artwork by Mr. Owens's stepdaughter, Scarlett Rouge. At 160 Lexington Avenue. Escaping the chill? The design firm Knoll has a new collection of totes and bags, including a wool felt Weekender bag with leather accents ( 595). At the Knoll Home Design Shop, 1330 Avenue of the Americas. The new resort collections in stores will have you dreaming of warmer climes. Kirna Zabete has a cheery Nina Ricci floral print silk dress ( 1,250) and winged jelly shoes from Ancient Greek sandals ( 125). At 477 Broome Street. Fivestory has luxe vacation staples from Rosie Assoulin, like a silk twill maxi dress and ultrafine silk faille and cotton faille wide leg surf pants ( 2,295). At 18 East 69th Street.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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LONDON Guests, celebrities and a handful of enthusiastic royalists descended on Windsor on Friday for the second royal wedding in the town this year, that of Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank. And just like Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who managed to keep the designer behind her wedding dress a secret until she arrived on the steps of St. George's Chapel in May, Princess Eugenie, 28, kept onlookers guessing until the very last minute. However, the younger daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, ninth in line to the British throne, had offered several hints as to her brand of choice in the months before her big day. "I'm not telling anyone who is making it, but I can say it is a British based designer," the Princess told British Vogue this summer. The dress, she said, "is the one thing that I was really decisive about. As soon as we announced the wedding, I knew the designer, and the look, straight away." On a blustery fall morning where guests quite literally had to hold onto their hats, the grand reveal finally arrived. The princess had chosen Peter Pilotto, a London based fashion house with two creative directors, Mr. Pilotto and his partner, Christopher de Vos, to create a showstopping silk jacquard gown that felt like a perfect choice for a modern day princess.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Yellowstone's Supervolcano Is a Hot Spot, but It May Be Calming Down None The volcano below Yellowstone National Park is among the largest on the planet and has a history of generating huge eruptions. There have long been fears many exaggerated that it is only a matter of time before it blows, taking much of North America with it. But new research, published this month in the journal Geology, suggests that this volcanic menace may be losing its strength, and that you can be a bit less alarmed the next time you read a viral headline about that supervolcano out west. Yellowstone's volcano is the result of a hot spot, or a superheated area just below Earth's crust. These regions burn through tectonic plates that glide over them. This geological phenomenon is part of what gives Yellowstone its character, providing the steady flow of heat that warms groundwater and generates simmering, prismatic pools, caldrons of boiling mud and geysers found throughout the national park. Unfortunately, ancient hot spot eruptions on continents are much more difficult to study than similar eruptions that took place out at sea, because they are more explosive. While researchers can see the path that Yellowstone burned as the hot spot migrated from Oregon across Idaho and into Wyoming, discerning one eruption from another has been a chore as most volcanic deposits are scattered across vast landscapes in a chaotic jumble. "My predecessors thought these messy deposits might be related to one another, but nobody was sure," said Thomas Knott, the study's lead author and a geochemist at the University of Leicester in England. He set about the grueling task of fingerprinting volcanic samples from 50 sites in Idaho. Because each Yellowstone eruption would have involved different portions of the continent being melted, Dr. Knott reasoned that each eruption ought to be subtly different in its chemical profile. To gain further resolution beyond chemical analysis, his team looked at paleomagnetics. Because the iron from the hot spot was liquid when ejected, it oriented itself toward magnetic north upon eruption, and then got locked into place when it cooled. Because magnetic north has moved throughout Earth's history, Dr. Knott's team was able to determine when this iron was erupted. What they found transformed the timeline of some of the supervolcano's eruptions. Instead of a series of small eruptions that geologists have long thought took place as the hot spot migrated across Idaho, there had actually been two very big outbursts. One took place 8.72 million years ago. Based upon the magma that it erupted, it scored 8.8 on the volcanic explosivity index created by the U.S. Geological Survey. The other, which took place 8.99 million years ago, scored 8.6. "Given that the index does not go higher than 9.0 and anything above 8.0 ranks as 'mega colossal,' it is safe to say that these qualify as super eruptions," Dr. Knott said. What his study means for Yellowstone's future has set off considerable debate. Dr. Knott suggests that these newly identified super eruptions paint a picture of the hot spot's activity waning over time. Between 6 and 11 million years ago, giant eruptions once took place rather frequently, roughly every half million years. But his findings show that, since that time, such eruptions have become less frequent, occurring about every 1.5 million years. Kari Cooper, a geochemist at University of California, Davis, is skeptical. "We don't have a lot of data about what makes a magmatic flare up happen, especially in a hot spot. Whatever caused the flare up 9 million years ago could happen again" she said. Yet, for others, Dr. Knott's proposal seems logical. "It makes sense that Yellowstone would weaken as it leaves the relatively thin western crust and travels toward the thicker center of the continent," said Michael Poland at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. But other researchers say this interpretation only works if you look at the biggest of the big eruptions, or "mega colossal ones," as Kenneth Verosub, also at the University of California, Davis, puts it. "If you also include supercolossal, which, let's face, it would still bring devastation to a number of states, you suddenly get three big eruptions in the past two million years, and can then argue that the caldera was quiescent between 6 and 2 million years ago and is now just waking up again," he said. As for who is right, a few million more years of monitoring should prove most insightful.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Miami's art world has been waiting for the other cultural shoe to drop since 2014, when the nonprofit ArtCenter/South Florida sold one of its two buildings for 88 million after buying it in 1988 for only 684,000, when the surrounding South Beach neighborhood was more sketchy than stylish. A scrappy organization founded to provide affordable studios, and largely ignored by the city's marquee art institutions, was suddenly poised to become a major player. The ArtCenter is finally announcing plans for its Cinderella like windfall (one that, thanks to investments, has since swollen to 100 million, more than the endowment of any other South Florida visual arts organization, many of whom have been struggling to fund raise even a fraction of that sum). It will be moving to the mainland Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, where it will build a new 30 million, 40,000 square foot art center with 22 studios for resident artists, a 2,500 square foot exhibition space, a 120 seat theater, as well as classrooms and work spaces for an expanded array of instructional courses on mediums like painting and filmmaking. Check out our Culture Calendar here. "We need a facility that reflects our aspirations," Dennis Scholl, the ArtCenter president and chief executive said, adding that an architect would be selected by May, with groundbreaking set for September 2020 and a planned opening in Spring 2022. At that point the rain of cash is likely to continue: Mr. Scholl confirmed that the ArtCenter would vacate its remaining South Beach building, though he declined to elaborate on specific plans for the property. The building was assessed by Miami Dade County at 10 million, but real estate brokers believe it would sell for three to four times that figure.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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California has been in a standoff with the ride hailing companies Uber and Lyft over their drivers' status under the law: whether they are contractors or employees. Now the coronavirus crisis has put a spotlight on a related question: Who is responsible for helping those drivers when there is no work? The companies are urging their drivers nationwide to apply for emergency unemployment benefits that federal legislation established last month for the self employed. But there's a catch in California: The state doesn't typically consider them self employed. Nonetheless, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on Wednesday directing the state's unemployment agency to help workers like Uber and Lyft drivers collect benefits under the federal program, known as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. That may put the state at odds with the rules of the federal program. U.S. Labor Department officials have emphasized that only workers ineligible for traditional unemployment benefits can receive the federal pandemic assistance. And under a state law passed last year and some previous determinations, the drivers are considered employees in California and should be able to draw traditional unemployment benefits. Recourse to such assistance has been hampered, however, by the companies' refusal to provide routine documentation to the state as they fight the law in court. The circumstances effectively forced the state to provide unemployment assistance to drivers that they may not be legally entitled to receive, employment experts said. "The states are caught in a hard place," said Brian Chen, a lawyer who focuses on the rights of economically insecure workers at the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group. "They're trying to do the right thing. But this is what happens when ultrapowerful app companies with an army of well paid lobbyists and lawyers are saying they're going to fight to the bitter end against workers' ability to demand rights under the law." The California labor secretary, Julie A. Su, said in an interview that she believed the state's move to help drivers under the federal program was legal because the government had "emphasized flexibility" in administering the emergency aid. The U.S. Labor Department did not provide comment for this article. Allowing drivers to receive the new federal benefits rather than traditional unemployment assistance could help gig economy companies like Uber and Lyft avoid significant costs in the future. Employers in California and other states are required to contribute to state unemployment trust funds on behalf of employees who might claim benefits. While employers are not required to make contributions to fund pandemic related claims, they will have to make contributions after the crisis. In effect, allowing the drivers to claim the federal benefit helps the companies avoid conceding that they are on the hook for funding state benefits. An Uber spokesman said, "Congress fully funded Pandemic Unemployment Assistance for gig workers so that every state, many of which face historic deficits, could give these workers immediate financial support at no cost to their own funds." Uber has also pointed out that the state's recent law doesn't make drivers eligible for unemployment benefits on its own. It creates a test that state agencies must apply before granting benefits, and which they have yet to do in many drivers' cases. Most experts believe that drivers will be deemed employees under the test. Lyft declined to comment for this article. California's action appears to reflect a shift by state officials. Early this month, the state seemed to be trying to process benefits for Uber and Lyft drivers under the traditional unemployment system. On a website listing frequently asked questions by workers applying for benefits during the pandemic, it instructed gig workers to "list your gig employer as your last employer." Workers who have employers would typically be eligible for traditional unemployment benefits and therefore ineligible for federal pandemic assistance for the self employed. 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. Last week, Uber, Lyft and another gig company, DoorDash, sent an email to government officials asking the state agency overseeing unemployment insurance to remove that sentence from its website and to help gig workers apply for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. "Many self employed ride share and delivery drivers intend to apply for loans and other federal relief available to independent contractors," the companies wrote, and they "worry that making an inaccurate representation that they are employees" could preclude that, the email said. Ms. Su, the state labor secretary, said the purpose of the new approach was to ensure that struggling gig workers could begin to receive benefits rapidly. While some Uber and Lyft drivers had successfully claimed regular unemployment benefits in California before the executive order, the process took months because the companies refused to submit income data needed to verify eligibility. "People are in very dire straits," Ms. Su said. "They need these benefits. We've made it a priority to get them out." Andrew Stettner, an expert on unemployment insurance at the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank, said that the U.S. Labor Department could order California to desist but that it was unlikely to require the state to pay back money it had given to drivers. States are sometimes tempted to push boundaries because the Labor Department "hasn't always stood up to them," Mr. Stettner added. "It's not a very aggressive oversight agency." Some groups, like the California Labor Federation, had pressed the state to expedite traditional unemployment benefits for gig workers, an approach that experts like Mr. Stettner said they believed the state could take. But Ms. Su said there was no way to expedite unemployment benefits for drivers under the traditional program without income data from Uber and Lyft. By contrast, under the rules of the pandemic assistance program, the self employed and other eligible workers can begin receiving assistance quickly, even before documenting their income. Ms. Su said that she had spoken with representatives from Uber and Lyft about the state's approach but that the companies did not directly make the case for the action the state took. In addition to California, at least three states Illinois, New York and New Jersey have deemed at least some Uber and Lyft drivers eligible for regular unemployment insurance. But Uber and Lyft are contesting these decisions in many states and are not paying into the state unemployment insurance funds.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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In Washington, D.C., Laura Allibone and Rodion Kulichenko shared a one bedroom rental for just under 2,000 a month. Their Woodley Park apartment was large, charming and sunny. It did, however, have a noise problem. "We tried not to talk in the kitchen," Ms. Allibone said. If they did, the upstairs neighbor heard every word. Apparently, a kitchen pipe funneled noise upward. "We couldn't really eat at the table," she said. The couple, who met as students working at a Ruby Tuesday, wanted to move to New York. It was easy for Mr. Kulichenko, 29, a graduate of George Mason University, to transfer to the Midtown office of his accounting firm. Ms. Allibone, 27, a graduate of American University who works in health care technology, landed a new job in SoHo. They were perfectly happy to forgo amenities. For a one bedroom apartment that was sunny, cat friendly and big enough for two, they thought a monthly budget of 2,200 to 2,500 would suffice. Mr. Kulichenko's employer sent him out of town for a few weeks, so Ms. Allibone went on the hunt without him, staying with friends or her older sister, who lives on the Upper East Side. "Honestly, I trusted her," Mr. Kulichenko said. He was grateful, too, that Ms. Allibone was assuming the burden of the hunt. Friends of Ms. Allibone's sister led her to Erica Geller, a saleswoman then at Bond New York and now at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, who arranged to show her some small walk up buildings on the Upper East Side. On East 87th Street, a one bedroom for 2,150 a month was nicely finished, but "coming from the D.C. market, you forget how small things actually can get," Ms. Allibone said. "It felt like a dollhouse. It was really tiny, not just floor plan wise the ceiling was really low." She wished she could reallocate space from the relatively big bathroom to the bedroom. What's more, the apartment was on the ground floor. She thought passers by would peer through the window. That apartment showed what the low end of the budget would buy, Ms. Geller said. On East 89th Street, the women visited a slightly larger place for 2,375 a month. As they walked around, there was a knock on the door. The downstairs neighbor appeared, sternly requesting a stop to the stomping. Ms. Allibone was wearing boots, "but we weren't stomping," she said. The complaint instantly turned her against the place. She had already dealt with a sensitive neighbor and bad building acoustics. "I don't want to bother my neighbors or have to deal with being silent in my apartment, either," she said. One block away, for 2,350 a month, was a one bedroom, relatively large though with a small bathroom. Ms. Allibone applied immediately, but was unprepared to find a place so quickly, for she still needed to gather some of the required documentation, including not just pay stubs and bank statements but to her disbelief the first two pages of the couple's federal tax returns. Then word came that someone had beaten her to it. "My heart sank," she said. A few days later, she saw a one bedroom on East 73rd Street for 2,250 a month. Ms. Geller negotiated the rent to 2,200. "It was O.K.," Ms. Allibone said. "It fit enough criteria." She figured she should rent it "before I lose out on more." But a problem arose with her rental history, which puzzled her. It turned out to be a mistake, involving the sale of a management company she had rented from years before. The ensuing delay gave her time to reconsider, and she decided to wait for something she liked better, even if it cost more. "I want to go somewhere that we are really happy," she thought, "and that we are going to make our home for a while." She found the hunt surprisingly time consuming, with plenty of traveling to visit apartments and bag schlepping as she shuttled among friends. When she saw a fourth floor apartment in a walk up on First Avenue in the East 80s, "I couldn't get over it," she said. "It was so much more than I thought I would get." The railroad apartment had three large rooms separated by pocket doors. "The space seemed a little strange, but I liked the fact that it was there," she said. The rent, 2,550 a month, was on the high side, but Ms. Geller negotiated the rent to 2,500 a month in exchange for an immediate move in date. The couple arrived in late fall, paying a broker fee of 15 percent of a year's rent, or 4,500. Mr. Kulichenko was pleased with their new home. At more than 700 square feet, it was larger than the Washington apartment. "I thought maybe the railroad style was a little bit weird," he said, "but other people have more convoluted setups." It's so big that they sometimes wonder where the two cats are. "It sounds like I am complain bragging, because we had to get more furniture," Ms. Allibone said. They hear no neighbor noise, only traffic. The couple don't have the elevator, the trash chute or the laundry room that they did in Washington. Daily chores like toting groceries up steep stairs to a high floor and trash down to a vestibule make for "a completely different way of life," she said. "I wasn't necessarily thinking about all of those things when I said that a walk up was the way to go."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The once divided nature of Berlin isn't given much consideration in "Berlin, I Love You," the fifth film in the Cities of Love anthology series. The city itself doesn't get a whole lot of consideration, either. There are a couple of stories one starring Keira Knightley and Helen Mirren, in which Knightley's character works at a refugee shelter; another starring Alexander Black and Carol Schuler, in which a migrant who's committed a crime hides out in a brothel that address contemporary concerns of the city. But most of this movie, which is almost entirely in English, is taken up with tone deaf humanist tales.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Why must so many revenge fantasies fixate in such detail on the physical mutilation of women's bodies? (As if the answer weren't depressingly obvious.) Take Stieg Larsson's best seller "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," which lingers unbearably, for pages and pages, over the description of Lisbeth's rape. Why does the author feel the need to humiliate his heroine so completely? What a relief then for weary fans of the genre to discover , who writes thrillingly about women raging against a world that protects cruel and careless men. She's less preoccupied by scenes of abuse than the psychological toll of its threat. Her protagonists seethe over their knowledge of violence and are fueled by a howling grief for its victims. Berry's rich 2016 debut, "Under the Harrow," about a woman hellbent on finding her sister's murderer, won the Edgar Award for best first novel. Her latest, "A Double Life," again takes us deep into an obsessed woman's head. On the surface, Claire lives a tidy life in London. She's a doctor, with friends to meet at the pub, and a dog to walk, and more than the average number of bolts on her apartment door. But Claire's world is a construct. She was born under a different name, the daughter of a charismatic Eton bred man of power who's wanted for a decades old murder. Claire's father, based on the real life dastard Lord Lucan, loved her mother, until he grew tired of her. Before their divorce was final her dispensed of mother stumbled half dead into a bar, drenched in blood, and accused the future earl of trying to kill her with a steel pipe. The last time Claire ever saw her father was the weekend before the attack, when he'd given her the peppermint from his ice cream. "It's difficult for me to think of that visit. Not because I could've stopped him, exactly. I was 8 years old. But the scene seems grotesque. The little girl, accepting a stick of red and white candy from him. It's like he made me complicit." She's been on her father's trail her whole adult life, anonymously skulking around the case studies and true crime message boards and the high society borders of her father's friends, who helped him escape while cruelly trashing her mother. But a constant anxiety courses alongside her searching. Is there a chance her dad is somehow innocent? And if not, was any of his love for her true?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Forget lapel pins or white roses or black; the Oscars drew a line in that sand, anyway. Sunday night in Paris, Thom Browne made an utterly convincing statement about female strength and sexuality. He may have been an ocean away from Los Angeles, but it was as theatrical as any film, and as potent. It began in a vast ballroom of the Hotel de Ville, Paris's city hall, with a central island filled with canvases propped up on easels. Out came a procession of painters imaginary doppelgangers of Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, Marie Antoinette's favorite portrait painter and a woman who made her way in a man's world in beige jackets and gray bloomers, the legs exaggerated to hoop skirt size, their hair jutting back in towering cones. It was less a fetishization of the female body (an approach that would be questionable at this point in time) than a demand for recognition of the feminist form with a touch of levity. There's been some rumbling this red carpet season about women taking political positions in evening gowns while still exploiting their "assets" as The Daily Mail says in the classic cleavage and curves way. Mr. Browne backhanded that out of the room. As Pierpaolo Piccioli said, leaning in with some unexpected urgency before a verdant Valentino show, held on the same day Italy went to the polls: "Very often, if you make clothes you feel are doing something that is not really meaningful for society, but I feel you can use clothes to deliver a message. Italy right now is choosing whether to embrace discrimination and I hate all forms of discrimination." That's why he opened his show with the Sudanese model Adut Akech, and closed it with the Afro French Assa Baradji, and used his work to prove that romanticism not about relationships, but about life could be a strength rather than a weakness. The cliches of the genre (flowers, pink), were turned into power symbols: Pansies in black and white and caramel appeared as intarsia on wool tunics and capes and knee high leather boots with stacked heels, so instead of being merely decorative they were built into the structure of the garment. It's hard to add this kind of dimension to fashion. You can easily fall over the edge into pretentiousness or fakery. And not everyone is comfortable with the idea: At Akris, Albert Kriemler's liquid C suite leathers, knits and silks in jade and lapis lazuli remained quiet in their confidence; at Sacai, Chitose Abe stuck to her usual cut and paste of forms and fabrics (school blazers, down jackets, tennis sweaters, chiffon), with her usual, if occasionally overcomplicated, aplomb. When she first introduced this "hybridization" approach, she was ahead of the curve. Now the curve is moving on a bit; so, hopefully, will she. But when it works as it did at Valentino wonderfully well, and as it did at Stella McCartney, where the suit linings became the stuff of slip dresses false fronted onto velvet and knits, and portraits of women by the British artist J.H. Lynch were revealed under sheer lace and tulle shirts, the normally unseen elevated and exposed to the light it raises the bar for everyone. Even more so when the reintroduction of a house is at stake. The new life of Poiret, now owned by the South Korean fashion and beauty conglomerate Shinsegae International, should by all rights have been a major event: Paul Poiret was one of the most influential designers of the early 20th century; there was a retrospective devoted to his work at the Met in 2007; the house has been dormant for almost 90 years and he was the designer who freed women from the corset, for goodness' sake! He embraced multiculturalism before the word existed. The timing was perfect. And yet somehow, despite many pieces that spoke to the history of the brand, especially puffer egg shaped opera coats burnished in gold, and jumpsuits and day dresses made from two rectangles of fabric crisscrossed in front (plus some pieces that looked a lot like Lanvin used to under Alber Elbaz), there was nothing to love. The animating spirit of the house had not been adapted to the contemporary era, even if the designs were. Once upon a time it set off a revolution. Now it's missing one.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Ms. Rosenberg is a co founder of the Solutions Journalism Networ k, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems. This ad depicts a true story. It begins: A young man walks around his car, which is up on a jack. He says in voice over: "I got some Oxy after I hurt my neck. First I took them to feel better. Then I kept taking them. I didn't know they'd be this addictive. I didn't know how far I'd go to get more." Here's how far he'd go: He lies down under the car. Then he kicks out the jack. You see the car fall, hear a crunch. "Joe S. from Maine broke his back to get more prescription opioids," the screen says. And then a voice over: "Opioid dependence can happen after just five days. Know the truth, spread the truth." A similar ad shows a woman taking off her seatbelt and deliberately crashing her car. In another, a man breaks his hand with a hammer. In another, a man slams his arm in a door. Together, those comprised the first national ad campaign in America aimed at preventing opioid misuse. They came from the Truth Initiative, the organization that was behind truth ads that helped bring about one of the most important public health victories in American history: In 1996, 34 percent of high school seniors had smoked a cigarette in the previous month the same as in 1975. But by 2019, less than 6 percent smoked. Can the strategy work again? Let's look at what the group did right in its antismoking campaign. Before the truth ads, antismoking ads for teenagers were created by public health experts who, not surprisingly, emphasized that cigarettes can kill you. That threat works well to encourage adults to quit smoking. But it doesn't prevent teens from starting. For many adolescents, the danger is a lure; they smoke to rebel against preachy adults. To them, the consequences are decades away, and teens are immortal. In the 1990s, Florida and California hired advertising agencies that didn't know about public health, but did know about selling to teens. They created ads to redirect teenage rebellion against the manipulations of the tobacco industry. Some examples: None One California advertisement portrayed tobacco executives in a smoke filled room, cackling maniacally as they plot to replace 1,100 customers who quit smoking every day "Actually, technically, they die," one says. None Another ad showed rappers attacking Big Tobacco for targeting African Americans with menthol cigarettes. It ended, "We used to pick it; now they want us to smoke it." None In Florida, teenagers created ads for a campaign they named "truth." One showed girls making prank phone calls to tobacco ad executives. "What is the lucky part about Lucky Strike cigarettes?" a girl asks. "It is because" (pause) I might live?" That was in 1998. Over the next two years, teen smoking in Florida fell by 17.5 percent. Florida was one of the first states to sue tobacco companies. When a nationwide settlement was reached, part of the money created a national truth campaign. It copied Florida's strategies and hired its people. And it enjoyed the same success. Of course, truth ads were only one part of this victory. States and cities raised their cigarette taxes. Indoor smoking vanished. But the ads were crucial. Those truth ads still target adolescent smoking. New teenagers are minted every year, so the campaign never ends. It also makes "Ditch Juul" ads that show teens creatively demolishing their vaping equipment. All this is useful for anti opioid campaigns. "There's a lot of crossover in terms of strategy for reaching your target audience of youth," said Matthew Farrelly, senior director of the Center for Health Policy Science and Tobacco Research at RTI International in North Carolina. "The variety of tactics for getting in front of teens is nearly identical." Surveys about the truth ads show that 80 percent of teenagers recognize the brand. And the organization knows what works. A review of published studies in 2014 concluded, "Youth are more likely to recall and think about advertising that includes personal testimonials; a surprising narrative; and intense images, sound and editing." That's Joe S. from Maine, all right. Anti opioid ads can use the antismoking template, but the message must be different. "Nobody needs education on the fact that tobacco is really bad for you," said Robin Koval, president and chief executive of the Truth Initiative. "With opioids, we found out how little people know." Adolescents know about the misery of addiction and addiction and overdose at 20 are scary in a way lung cancer at 60 is not. "But there is a lack of understanding and awareness of how easily you can become addicted," Ms. Koval said. Some adolescents start using opioids because their friends share. For others, the beginning is pain medication. Getting a prescription in high school after knee surgery or wisdom teeth removal is associated with a 33 percent higher chance of misusing opioids later in life. A study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded, "The probability of long term opioid use increases sharply in the first days of therapy" with a spike after five days. So every truth ad ends with: "Opioid dependence can happen after just five days." "The hardest thing to go up against is nobody believes they're going to become addicted to opioids," Ms. Koval said. "We had to reverse this notion of otherness. And we have to combat the stigma that says: This is a moral failing and therefore I can't believe it would happen to me or anybody we know." The Joe S. ad is part of a campaign that began in July 2018, in collaboration with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Ad Council. Facebook, Google, Turner, Amazon and Vice donated advertising time or space. (The Google News Initiative is a funder of the Solutions Journalism Network, my employer.) Last year, a truth video titled "Treatment Box: Rebekkah's Story," won an Emmy. In it, Rebekkah, then 26, started using opioids at 14 after a cheerleading injury. The ad showed her detoxing minute by minute. The video was projected into a clear glass bedroom size box in Times Square. Passers by watched Rebekkah's pain. A new ad series, "Best Day," has a relatable "it could be you" message, said Margie Skeer, associate professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. It's graduation day, or signing day for college sports, or a basketball awards assembly but the happy teens explain that on this, their best day, they see their futures as bleak: that the pain of adult stress or a sports injury will lead them to opioids, then addiction, and finally to overdosing. "My mom will bury me with my cleats," one girl says. "It's maybe not quite as elaborate and creative and multifaceted as the truth campaign," said Dr. Farrelly. "But if their goal is to raise awareness of risk, it might not be a bad strategy." But that's not the same as avoiding addiction. The gripping Joe S. ads produce horror and fear. "Fear works in the moment," Dr. Skeer said. "But when people are scared but don't know what to do next, it can become paralyzing." Other public health researchers also said that the ads needed to answer the question: "O.K., so what should I do?" The truth campaign responded that opioids were complicated, and that covering various scenarios in the ad would have been confusing. Instead, it seeks to drive young people to the Truth Initiative website, where they can get advice. The first ads should have a clear focus on "telling stories that felt authentic and true in the voices of young people," Ms. Koval said. "Helping them to understand this can happen to you." Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism." She is a former editorial writer for The Times, a vice president of the Solutions Journalism Network, and the author, most recently, of "Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World" and the World War II spy story e book "D for Deception." To receive email alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here. 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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Wait, a new season of "RuPaul's Drag Race," already? Didn't we all just watch a finale last week? Why, yes we did and many of us are still, as the children say, shooketh. One short week ago, Season 3 of "RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars" ended not with a bang but a limper, as Shangela, the leader in the polls, was thrown under the hot rod by an extralegally installed electoral body ody ody of her competitors, clearing the strip for the perfectly lovely but somewhat uninspired Trixie Mattel to hobble across the finish line. (I look forward to Shangela's book, "What Had Happened Was.") The herstoric halls were left a disappointing, tepid mess. Fortunately, an especially fierce 14 queen crew arrived Thursday night ready to clean up. Brooms, rubber gloves and sponges swept the workroom and the runway in a season premiere dedicated to celebrating the show's decaversary by unearthing and dusting off the gritty roots of drag. The past and the episode blasted open with Ru parroting the drag ball M.C. Junior Labeija's iconic bark, "Tens, tens, tens across the board!" Thankfully not limping was the resurgent Eureka, prematurely ejected from the ninth season thanks to a jump split induced knee injury. "Like a phoenix from the ashes, Eureka is back!" she crowed, kissing the purple floor. As the rest of the queens made their catchphrase addled entrances, the workroom atmosphere was refreshingly sunny, with only the slightest cast of shade. Miz Cracker, one of an unprecedented five New York queens competing this season and a self identified "Barbie on bath salts," strutted in and shrieked, "O.K., IT'S TIME FOR DINNERRRR!" to gauge the phrase's iTunes sales potential. (A decade into this race, the catchphrase entrance shtick still grates.) She later litigated her admitted racial slur of a name with, "I'm thin, I'm white, and I'm very salty!" to a court of black queens, who nearly lost their eyeballs. The 22 year old "Broadway queen" Blair St. Clair played the coveted role of Star to Be with the aria, "Just got here this morning!" She is precious, if perhaps a bit out of her depth. I'm just glad she made it from the bus from Indianapolis to the Hollywood workroom without being nabbed by cult recruiters. Monet X Change, a New York mainstay, literally swept into the room wearing tearaway coveralls and wielding a broom "to sweep up the competition, girl." The Hollywood diva Mayhem Miller, who has auditioned "year after year after year," finally arrived in full Dreamgirls eleganza, and did not wait until eleven o'clock to tell us that she is not going. Chicago's The Vixen, looking like a drained Sears Tower souvenir snow globe, took a boxer's stance and announced, "I'm just here to fight." Is she already positioning herself to be the villain? Why do people still do that? Do villains ever win reality competitions? The first mini challenge was a classic ball walk down the runway, which was rimmed with queens from seasons past. I see Adore and Detox! And Katya and Raven! I see trans former contestant Peppermint! Wait, Ru recently issued a controversial no transwomen decree. Did he award her a temporary work visa from the Forbidden Island? Eureka was the first to walk, and she almost fell. Does she need a spotter? Has she been examined for vertigo? Mayhem proved she's part of the same place and time as the veteran queens with an expert duck walk and pushed, struck and killed a cartwheel in a full length evening gown. "I couldn't do a cartwheel if four people operated my limbs!" quipped the newly crowned Hall of Famer Trixie Mattel. (We know, Trixie. Release your tax returns.) Vanessa Vanjie Mateo, the drag daughter of the cross platform Drag Race superstar Alexis Mateo, impressed with a 360 degree death drop. A coltish Blair cantered down the runway like a Chico State freshman who's just downed her first appletini, and The Vixen busted her skirt turning an impressive somersault. But Monet went legendary with the powder puff move made immortal by the late vogueing creator Willi Ninja, and snatched the win. Back in the workroom, the New York queen Dusty Ray Bottoms, her face trademark punctuated with every period orphaned by her generation's texts, said, "I was really, really, really trying to spot the booger, but everyone looks (expletive) fierce." It was an unfortunate metaphor, but it did articulate what we were thinking: This clutch of queens seems unusually strong, and it's hard to imagine who will be eliminated. The maxi challenge, a remix of the first challenge from the show's first episode, "Drag on a Dime," took us back to the beginnings of both the show and the scrappy art of drag itself. The Pit Crew wheeled in a 99 cent store's worth of pool noodles, dish sponges and assorted capitalist effluvia, from which the queens cobbled together an impressive array of looks and hit the runway. Before the judging, Ru announced that another queen would be returning. (No, it wasn't Shangela. She's walking in the woods.) The competitors visibly blanched as Ru introduced the Season 9 contestant Farrah Moan ... who was quickly Ru vealed to actually be Farrah's doppelganger, the guest judge Christina Aguilera. Ms. Aguilera did a quick bit that reminded us why "Burlesque" was her last notable acting job, then pulled out a hand held mic from seemingly nowhere and did a quick melismatic run. The queens swooned. Mayhem, who crafted a cigarette girl ensemble out of latex gloves and trash bags, leaked tears when she was named the winner of the challenge. The judge and national treasure Ross Mathews soothed and encouraged her by saying, "This is your time." I paid my therapist 200 an hour to tell me that when my husband left me, so, Mayhem, consider that money in your bank. Invest in Cambridge Analytica. The bottom two were Kalorie, correctly called on the carpet for her "million dollar dress" of generic Monopoly money hot glued to an ill fitting bustier (a fourth removed cousin of superior cash fronted gowns of queens past), and Vanessa, spatchcocked by Michelle Visage for her definition deficient, doll festooned silk flower leotard. ("It's literally a head and legs, and the rest is flowers," Michelle hissed, somehow turning into an insult the exact phrase I've always dreamed a man would use to describe my body.) They were ordered to lip sync for their lives to Ms. Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man." Kalorie described herself as "the twerking queen," and she is not wrong. In a coup de grace, she pulled a fistful of dollar bills from her bustier and made it rain on herself. Vanessa's lip sync was a bit wan in comparison, and she was, sadly, the first bat to be plucked from the renovated cave. She bravely fought back tears as she sashayed away I hope this isn't the last we see of her. Ru declared at the top of the episode that the mission of "Drag Race" is to take over the world, and 10 years in, his coup seems to be just about complete. The show's stars have millions of fans and fill performance halls in red states, with teenage girls cosplaying as their favorite queens. RuPaul has built a juggernaut on the wigs of queens old enough not just to be this season's drag mothers, but their birth mothers. But with great power comes great Ru sponsibility. Drag is currently a cultural Bitcoin, and it seems that in its peaking moment, it will either permanently tuck itself into the mainstream or pop back into the bubbles. Heavy will be the head that eventually wears this season's crown. But this crop of girls seems especially fun and smart, with good wigs on their padded shoulders, and I trust that one of them will responsibly lead us to the midterms. I look forward to spending my spring in their company. Will Eureka make it through this season on both feet? Will The Vixen collude with a group of Russian drag queens and take the crown in an upset? Will a remake of "Burlesque" starring Farrah Moan and Cher alike All Star Chad Michaels finally be greenlit?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Some artists Picasso, say are limelight junkies. As such, they're a gift to the popular press and a boon to biographers. Others, for whatever reasons, stay out of sight, keep mum and edit their paper trails. The American artist Cy Twombly, who died in 2011 at 83, held the personal details of his life close to his chest, and his survivors have respected his discretion, making any detailed account of his life almost impossible to write. That hasn't deterred Joshua Rivkin, a poet and essayist, from trying. "Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly," the most substantive biography of the artist to date, is the result. Biography? "This, dear reader, is not a biography," Rivkin insists in the first chapter. "This is something, I hope, stranger and more personal." And indeed, it is more personal: It's basically a memoir by Rivkin about researching and writing the book. In the preface, we learn that Rivkin's interest in Twombly began a decade ago in Houston, when he was leading school groups on tours of the Menil Collection. The Menil owns classic examples of Twombly's work: monumental semiabstract paintings depicting mysterious narratives violent, erotic, possibly diaristic and marked, like chalked up blackboards, with half legible phrases. That some of those phrases are by Rilke or Keats immediately appealed to the poet in Rivkin. But it was the mystery of the work, and of Twombly's life, that turned interest into obsession. The preface keys us into a factor that makes the book, in Rivkin's word, strange. He wrote it without being able to consult the most essential source material, the artist's archives, which are held by the Cy Twombly Foundation. The foundation's president, Twombly's male partner, Nicola Del Roscio, told Rivkin that he would consider granting access in exchange for being able to make "corrections" to the text, at one point seeming to threaten legal action on the grounds that Rivkin was purveying inaccuracies and "gossip." (Ultimately, Rivkin was denied access to the archives.) Inevitably, in the absence of hard data, his book is long on speculation. As the subtitle suggests, it's more a poetic essay on Twombly's art and elusiveness than a chronicle of his days. An example of "gossip" comes in a scene that opens the book. On a winter night in 1952, a young man wades deep into a freezing pond in what appears to be a suicide attempt. Another man goes in after him, coaxing him back to shore. The place is Black Mountain College near Asheville, N.C. The wader is the artist Robert Rauschenberg; his rescuer is Twombly. The two are fellow students at the school. They are also lovers. Rauschenberg, his marriage to the New York artist Susan Weil in crisis and his professional future uncertain, has been seized by a fit of despair. But within a few months, Rauschenberg has separated from his wife and joined Twombly in Europe, there to begin what will be major art careers. 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 would never know of this near drowning incident had not a witness, the poet Charles Olson, included an account of it in a letter to a friend. Twombly was silent on the subject. And although Rauschenberg eventually grew at least somewhat comfortable with a public identity as a gay man, Twombly who married and had a child, but spent most of his adult life with Del Roscio never did. From this dramatic start, the book then proceeds with a quick tour of the artist's early life. He was born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. in Lexington, Va., in 1928. His parents, old stock New Englanders, were transplants to Lexington, where his father, after a short stint in professional baseball, worked as athletic director at Washington and Lee University. Even as a child, Twombly was an avid reader, fascinated by mythology and ancient history, with an interest in making art. That interest took him to art school in Boston and, in 1950, to the Art Students League in New York City. There he met Rauschenberg and followed him to Black Mountain. In Europe, they settled in Rome. And at this point, Rivkin begins to weave himself into the narrative, making it his story as he revisits places in Rome where Twombly had been: "I couldn't not try to see the city through his eyes, his mind gathering up the forms and colors of the city: the washed out yellow of the arriving night sky, the carvings in the narthex of Santa Maria in Trastevere, the endless graffiti ... love notes, political slogans on the sidewalks and walls, on bridges and iron grates shuttering the cafes at night, as ever present now as when he first walked these streets. During my seven months living in Rome, Twombly was like a radio playing in another room." The comparison of Twombly's presence to the sound of a distant radio is telling: It places the artist in the background and the biographer up front, a positioning that will shift back and forth, but only slightly, over the book's length. Within a year, the two men returned to the United States, where they would part ways as lovers while remaining friends. Twombly's appetite for the Old World, however, was strong. By 1959, he was living in Rome again and married to Tatiana Franchetti, a woman from a culturally well connected local family originally from Reggio Emilia. They had a son, Alessandro; they acquired a run down palazzo. In a bohemian luxe way, their lives got grand; Twombly's career, with dips and rises, prospered; the mystery around him, mostly thanks to his studied invisibility, grew. Gradually, he and his wife, known as Tatia, began to lead independent lives, in part because Twombly spent much of his time in his studio, but also because he had met Del Roscio, then a university student, who became his lover and his life organizer, a function he in effect still serves as the zealous president of the Cy Twombly Foundation. As the book unfolds, the image of Twombly comes in and out of focus depending on whom Rivkin is talking to. Aged contemporaries of the artist tend to see him through the static of their own regrets and resentments. His son, Alessandro, obliges Rivkin with a lunch meeting at a restaurant near the Spanish Steps, but has no intimate commentary to offer. "I don't want to get in my father's head," he explains. In a handful of short encounters, Del Roscio, "the person closest to Twombly, living or dead," as Rivkin describes him, is coolly withholding, then hostile. "Lies. You've written lies," is his response to reading an excerpt from a draft of the book. Rivkin describes these tense meetings in a tone of anxious exasperation, though this is by no means his only voice. When he is talking about Twombly's art, or the book's larger themes of evasiveness and evanescence, you stop hearing the thwarted reporter and start hearing the poet, who approaches this art as a gold mine of metaphors and symbols, and finds the experience enrapturing. Toward the end of his book he writes about the great 1994 painting "Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)," which is permanently installed in the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil: "One is overwhelmed by its size at first, but then by how much there is to see. One chooses either intimacy and detail or scale and sweep. ... I simply returned again and again. I sat on the wooden bench opposite the painting. I paced along the painting's edge, a border, a river, a church; I waited. I wanted to be changed." And he was changed. That's why the book happened, and happened the way it did. Poetic ardor can be exhausting. (As the many quotes from art critics that pepper Rivkin's book demonstrate, Twombly tends to send writers into lyric overdrive.) But it is also a propulsive, positive and persuasive mode. Over the stretch of this long but surely not last Twombly biography, it carries the day.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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New Jersey's largest museum has a new leader. On Wednesday, the Newark Museum announced that Linda Harrison had been selected to succeed Steven Kern as director and chief executive officer. Ms. Harrison is coming from the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, where she has served as the director and chief executive since 2013. She said in an interview on Tuesday that she is looking to bring the "spirit of joie de vivre" she feels at the Museum of the African Diaspora to the Newark Museum. By that, she explained, she means that she wants to promote "inclusivity and openness to new ideas, new thoughts." She also mentioned that she is hoping to "reimagine some of the beautiful collections that the Newark Museum has" and "re engage the Newark and the greater Newark and New York audiences."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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My mother should have recognized the Roth books as the real enemy, since the only thing worse than a deflowered daughter would be one encouraged to examine her ambivalence about the American Jewish experience outside our community's hushed auspices. In the end, that's what those books really did for me. There was a book for every facet of this quandary: "Goodbye, Columbus" for interclass tensions; "The Human Stain" and "American Pastoral" for the perils of passing; "Indignation" for assimilation and intermarriage. Roth's books answered the question of how all this Jewish education I was getting would translate into the real world, should I survive the ordeal of childhood. What did it mean to be Jewish in America? Were we supposed to convey pride in our religion and our culture? Were we the punch lines to a joke that was constantly being made? Were the jokes at least funny? And such small portions? Was being Jewish a bad thing? Were we proud? Were we embarrassed? Did we still have to watch our backs? How should a modern Jew behave in the world? How should a modern Jew assert his or her Jewishness? Were we white? You're kidding yourself if you think we're white! Do the goyim like us, or do they simply tolerate us? You're kidding yourself if you think they tolerate us! How to act, how to assimilate but not too much, how to remind them about the Holocaust when they got uppity about Jewish privilege. How to not break into laughter when someone used the phrase "Jewish privilege." The Jews in my life grappled with their identities in only the most private forums. There were heated, impolite conversations that, should we air them in public, might give away some kind of tenuous advantage that we had gained over the years, which was, specifically, that nobody in the mid 1980s was overtly trying to genocide us. There was economic prosperity then. There wasn't the kind of economic downturn that unleashes, oh say, burning swastikas at rallies in the South, or the unprovoked beatings of at least three Jews in Brooklyn in the last month. To ask the questions in public would be to admit that we were unsure, or in disagreement. Any fracture in the facade or unity might topple our tenuous, newly earned, mostly illusory strength. But Roth didn't care. He wrote about our avenue of the American experience, not just for us, but for the world. In "The Plot Against America," how we're just one unlucky decision away from another disaster, one that would wipe us from the earth completely. In "American Pastoral," how irresistible a shiksa could be, not just because of her beauty and the health she would surely hand down to your children, but because of the baggage she wouldn't. Elsewhere, what it meant to be the child of people who came to America to forget, but then insisted on incessant remembering. How Jews would never be left to forget that they were different. How only some Jews wanted to even try to forget. And when he was done writing about the questions, he wrote about our anger at him having aired our dirty infighting. He was called self hating for all this, but he wasn't self hating. He was paving a road that would legitimize the American Jewish experience so thoroughly as to elicit a piece like this upon his death, which was edited by not one but two yellow haired genetically sparkling gentiles. With every book, with every question, with every overt display of ambivalence and disgust, he was affirming to us that we were contenders. Like our experiences deserved to be considered and judged.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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An uncrewed test flight of a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts may have narrowly avoided catastrophic failure in December. A software error that could have resulted in loss of the spacecraft was discovered and fixed while the capsule, known as Starliner, was in orbit, and not long before it returned to Earth. During a telephone news conference on Friday, Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said that the mission "had a lot of anomalies," but that it was important that the agency continue to work with Boeing to fix them. The agency is conducting an ongoing review with the company to assess what went wrong. But Douglas Loverro, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said that the review had already found multiple failures in Boeing's processes that should have caught the mistakes on the ground. Boeing will now review 1 million lines of Starliner software code. Officials from the company declined to speculate how long that might take. Neither the agency nor the company would set a schedule for when the Starliner capsule would be ready to carry astronauts to space. But Mr. Bridenstine said that NASA needs more than one way for getting astronauts to the International Space Station. The agency has also hired SpaceX, which has developed a different spacecraft, Crew Dragon, to transport astronauts. The additional software problem, first publicly reported Thursday during a meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, is the second major flaw known to have marred Starliner's trip in December, the first orbital flight of the spacecraft. During its trip to orbit, the spacecraft set its clock to the wrong time, causing it to deplete its propellant. A planned docking at the space station was called off, and the mission was cut short, to two days instead of eight. Because of the clock problem, Boeing engineers started searching to see if there were other flaws in the software. On the evening before landing, they found one. "It is our belief we wouldn't have found it if we hadn't gone looking," said Jim Chilton, senior vice president of the space and launch division at Boeing, which is distinct from its segment that manufactures jet planes. The newly disclosed flaw, described by Boeing in a statement as "a valve mapping software issue," would have bumbled Starliner's preparations for re entry. Had it not been corrected, the wrong thrusters would have fired as Starliner jettisoned its service module, the part of the spacecraft that carries systems that are not needed for the descent through the atmosphere. That could have caused the service module to bump into the crew module. The impact could have caused the capsule to tumble, or damaged its heat shield. Those problems could have destroyed the capsule during re entry. Engineers on Earth were able to fix the software problem within a few hours of finding it. An investigation team has found the cause of the incorrect time problem that emerged during the December flight; Starliner gets that information from the Atlas 5 rocket that propels it to orbit. Because of the programming error, the spacecraft queried the rocket too early, before the clock had been properly set. The team is still diagnosing additional communications problems that prevented flight controllers from sending commands promptly several times during the flight. That might be associated with noise from cellphone towers on Earth that broadcast at a similar frequency. Since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011, NASA astronauts have had to ride on Russia's Soyuz rockets, trips that now cost more than 80 million per seat. Instead of developing and operating its own successor to the shuttles, NASA turned to commercial companies, awarding contracts in 2014 to Boeing and SpaceX. The agency hoped that the spacecraft would be ready by the end of 2017. Both companies have run into technical issues that delayed their schedules. In January, SpaceX successfully demonstrated the escape system on its capsule, Crew Dragon, that would ferry astronauts away from the rocket in the event of a failure during launch. The December flight was to be the last major technical hurdle before Boeing would be cleared for taking astronauts to space. The investigation is expected to last until the end of February, and NASA is also analyzing data gathered during the flight. Mr. Loverro acknowledged that NASA failed to identify the weaknesses in Boeing's work. "Our NASA oversight was insufficient," he said. "That's obvious, and we recognize that. I think that's good learning for us." NASA is currently pushing for similar commercial approach for developing landers to take astronauts to the surface of the moon. "We are going to have far more insight and oversight" on those much more complicated missions, he said. NASA could require Boeing to fly another uncrewed test, and the company took a 410 million charge against its earnings last quarter in case it has to pay for that.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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In the mid 1960s, three of Richard Avedon's closest friends reached Olympian heights in their respective fields: Truman Capote published "In Cold Blood," an overnight best seller that would forge a new genre in literature; Mike Nichols received an Academy Award nomination as director of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"; and Leonard Bernstein won a Grammy for his "Third Symphony (Kaddish)." Their achievements cast Avedon's own career in stark relief. He may have been the most glamorous photographer in the world, but in the context of film, literature and classical music, he was still only a fashion photographer. It irked him, too, that his portrait work was considered "celebrity photography." The prestige of his name had indeed come from his portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but by then he had also established his own visual pantheon of arts and letters with portraits of W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Isak Dinesen, Marian Anderson and Jasper Johns, among many others. "Don't think about who they are," he would later tell people who marveled at the prominence of his subjects. "Just look at their faces." Avedon was of a generation that endured the threat of the atomic bomb. More and more, he photographed his subjects like specimens under the forensic scrutiny of his lens for the strain of existential dread that runs through our species at the thought of annihilation. Certainly, no one is smiling against the white nuclear backdrop in his portraits. Now, in his early 40s, and notoriously competitive, he measured himself against his friends' triumphs. "I had this block," he later recalled about that period. "I could photograph, but I couldn't do anything that meant anything to me for a number of years." His breakthrough occurred in the late 1960s as he had been searching for a way to represent that tumultuous era in effect, a way to "portraitize" a set of cultural values that defined the period. Avedon had just begun to use a new camera an 8 by 10 inch Deardorff which enabled him to make direct eye contact with his subjects, as opposed to the smaller twin lens Rolleiflex he had always used that required him to look down into the viewfinder and away from the subject. "They couldn't see my eyes, and I couldn't see them," he said. Now he could stand next to the camera and make direct eye contact with his subjects. When the Chicago Seven trial began, in September 1969, Avedon took his new Deardorff, along with his studio entourage, to Chicago. He hung a large roll of white seamless paper in one corner of his Chicago Hilton suite and held a fund raiser for the legal defense, inviting the defendants, their lawyers, and deep pocket supporters. As the guests mingled, he asked them to step into the frame of his makeshift "proscenium," trying for as much spontaneity as possible. In one portrait, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, the defendants' lawyers, stand in profile, each with a drink, Kunstler's finger aimed at Weinglass's chest in heated conversation. That night, Avedon also made characteristic straight on portraits of the defendants. Two months later, he returned to Chicago and made what would be his first mural size group portrait, a triptych by any other name, for which he had sketched out the positions of each subject in advance. "The Chicago Seven, November 5, 1969," is composed of three frames printed on a single wall size piece of paper with the continuity of a frieze, or a ragged police lineup. The size was radical larger than life at 8 1/2 feet tall by 12 feet wide and the effect was bold and confrontational. Lee Weiner and John Froines occupy the first frame as half of Abbie Hoffman's body spills into their visual space from the center frame, where Rennie Davis is sandwiched between Hoffman on the left and Jerry Rubin. As if in a narrative stutter, Rubin's right shoulder and arm glide into the last frame next to Tom Hayden and David Dellinger. Avedon created a perceptual anomaly in which two of the seven life size subjects straddle the lines between one frame and another, teasing out the idea of movement. In Avedon's group portrait, the defendants "look like ordinary men," Louis Menand wrote in a 2012 exhibition catalog, "Avedon: Murals and Portraits." "They're not threatening or defiant. They look tired and sad, a little geeky, people you might run into in the teacher's lounge or at the laundromat." For Avedon, the wall piece was a monument as much as a document; he considered them antiwar heroes who had endured political judicial overreach. Avedon had simultaneously begun work on a new group portrait. He felt that Andy Warhol and his "superstars" might prove an ideal surrogate for what the press called the "sexual revolution." The Warhol retinue was instrumental in paving the way for what would later become L.G.B.T.Q. visibility. The seductive, sexually frank tone of the song "Walk on the Wild Side," written by Lou Reed, is a paean to this transgressive group. Avedon made 91 exposures at this first session. When Warhol returned two weeks later with some of the first group and a few new Factory faces, Avedon photographed them in smaller arrangements, but he was not happy with the results. He started looking at paintings for inspiration. "Avedon's primary antecedents were painters, particularly portraitists of the Dutch Golden Age," Paul Roth, then curator of photography at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, wrote in "Avedon: Murals Portraits." One example, "The Meagre Company," by Frans Hals and Pieter Codde, is a Dutch militia group portrait (1633 37). The soldiers, out of uniform, appear full length in an informal lineup, some peacocking in haughty postures, others interacting with a spontaneity at odds with 17th century painting. "I wanted to see if I could reinvent what a group portrait is," Avedon explained in a public conversation at the Metropolitan Museum in 2002. "Take off your shoes, your shirts," Jay Johnson, a Factory member, recalled Avedon saying, slowly, one step at a time, as if in a game of strip poker. Avedon later claimed to be fascinated by the graphic quality of their clothes as they fell from their bodies, which he included in the final portrait. He pored over 200 8 by 10 exposures, shuffling them like playing cards, to compose the final lineup. Printing the group portrait was the next hurdle. He rented space in a commercial lab with industrial size equipment to be able to make prints eight feet tall. A horizontal enlarger beamed the negative image across a room onto raw photographic paper on the opposite wall. "I had to dodge and burn with my entire body," said Gideon Lewin, Avedon's studio manager, who made the prints, and stood in front of the paper during exposure to vary the light on different sections. "Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, New York, October 30, 1969," 31 feet long, took a year and a half to complete. It was not exhibited until Avedon's first gallery exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery on West 57th Street, in 1975. The photomural was an eye popping phenomenon. The choreography of posture, the rhythm of gestures, the ambiguity of the empty white spaces, evoke the sequential panels of a classical frieze, "as if the figures progressing around the belly of a Greek vase had paused for the photographer's camera," Maria Morris Hambourg, then the curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum, wrote in 2002. Avedon would make two more mural size group portraits including "The Mission Council, Saigon, April 27, 1971," and "Allen Ginsberg's Family" within three years, reflecting a new level of rigorous artistic intention. Yet the art world did not grant full acknowledgment to the "celebrity photographer" as the consequential artist he was until the end of his life. He died in 2004. The photographer Dawoud Bey, an eminence in the field today who has made the Black figure an abiding presence in his portraits, remembers seeing the large Avedon portraits when they were first shown at Marlborough Gallery. "They made a strong impression on me, more so than I would have been able to even articulate at the time, since I was just starting out," he said, adding, "Avedon is a part of my DNA." Katy Grannan, whose portraits today take the genre forward from Avedon, as well as from Diane Arbus, said that while Avedon was not an early influence, he has become one. "He wasn't a photographer we talked about in graduate school," she said. "In hindsight, this is probably because he broke an unwritten rule. You could be a fine art photographer, a photojournalist, or a celebrity photographer, but you couldn't be all three. Avedon was everything." But Avedon endured several art world prejudices in his lifetime: the lingering attitude about photography as a second class medium stuck in the graphic arts, and, equally, the church and state divide between art and commerce that heaped scorn on the gloss of Avedon's fashion work. On top of that, "street photography" was ascendant in curatorial circles and it would not be until the beginning of this century that "studio" photography was given equal stature in critical thinking about photographic practice. Only at the end of his career was Avedon's portraiture no longer dismissed as a stylized formula but understood as an artistic signature that advanced the genre in more sweeping art historical terms.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Comcast and the Walt Disney Company have long been rivals. But Brian L. Roberts, who runs Comcast, has recently become the Magic Kingdom's nemesis in chief. He waged an unrelenting fight for 21st Century Fox over the summer, forcing Disney to pay about 18 billion more than it had planned in order to secure Rupert Murdoch's entertainment empire. Then, on Saturday, Comcast emerged as the decisive victor in a battle with Disney for control of the British pay television company Sky. In a deal valued at 39 billion, Comcast bid PS17.28 per Sky share, while Fox bidding on behalf of its soon to be owner, Disney bid PS15.67 a share. For Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, the loss of Sky and its vast European customer base to Mr. Roberts has to sting. It was perhaps the first time during his ultrasuccessful 13 year tenure that Mr. Iger was denied such a prize, one he called "a crown jewel" when first pursuing it. But the realities of the entertainment business make the outcome more complicated. "I am happy that Disney didn't get it," Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson, said in an email. "Comcast paid a very expensive price for this, and I think it's hard to justify." Comcast's offer for the majority stake in Sky puts that total value of the company at 48 billion including assumed debt, or 15 times expected 2018 earnings. Disney will own 39 percent of Sky through its 21st Century Fox acquisition. Mr. Iger can hold on to those shares or sell them to Comcast. Disney's stake in Sky would be valued at about 15 billion in such a deal, money that could be used to pay down debt associated with the Fox purchase. Mr. Iger could also refuse to sell, which would put more pressure on Mr. Roberts because there will be a smaller pool of Sky investors from which to cobble together a majority stake. Sky shareholders must agree to sell their stock to Comcast in the weeks ahead. Comcast needs more than 50 percent of shares to complete its offer. Hulu could emerge as another chess piece. Disney is poised to own about 60 percent of that service after it closes the deal for 21st Century Fox, but Comcast would remain a minority shareholder with 30 percent. Hulu, which has over 20 million subscribers, is a pillar in Mr. Iger's new strategy to sell Disney's shows and films directly to consumers. Comcast, however, is keen on keeping its Hulu investment and would be willing to continue selling streaming rights for its NBC series to the service, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions. That stance could change, they acknowledged. Analysts have bandied about the possibility that Disney could sell its 39 percent stake in Sky if Comcast were willing to sell its 30 percent ownership of Hulu. British takeover laws, however, would forbid such a tit for tat maneuver. A Hulu transaction would have to be a parallel deal and not contingent on the Sky stake. In the battle with Mr. Roberts, Mr. Iger won the big prize: 21st Century Fox. That's a purchase that, in addition to Hulu and the Sky stake, includes assets like a leading TV studio with more than 30 series in production, the "X Men" and "Avatar" franchises and overseas TV providers like Star of India. Absorbing those businesses a huge task given disparate corporate cultures will allow Disney to become one of the few traditional media companies with enough scale and intellectual property to compete against Netflix and tech giants like Apple and Amazon, both of which are moving aggressively in Hollywood. In fighting to the end for Sky, Disney forced Comcast to pay 27 percent more than it initially offered, essentially returning the favor for driving up the 21st Century Fox price. Comcast expects cost savings of about 600 million after folding Sky into its business. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Mr. Iger can still use his world class collection of content rights Marvel superheroes, the Disney Princesses, "Star Wars," Pixar's beloved characters to roll out Disney's planned streaming service (known in industry parlance as an "over the top" business) in Europe. "They can use their rights to go over the top in the long run in Europe," Mr. Nathanson said. In Sky, Comcast gets one of Europe's largest media companies, with nearly 23 million customers across five countries, including Britain, Germany and Italy. For British viewers used to living in a media universe long dominated by the Murdoch family, the potential Comcast takeover signals a notable shift in ownership. Indeed, the most stinging loss may belong to the Murdoch family, which has been fighting for control of Sky for the better part of a decade. Mr. Murdoch, 87, co founded the satellite TV company in 1989 to compete with the British Broadcasting Corporation. Sky, which has 31,000 employees and generated about 17 billion in revenue last year, ranks as one of the most popular TV brands in Europe. It creates its own original shows, runs an influential news channel and has exclusive partnerships in Europe with HBO, Showtime and Warner Bros. After losing out to Disney in the battle for 21st Century Fox, getting Sky became an imperative for Comcast. It was, by some measures, the only way for the Philadelphia based cable company to stay squarely in a media game now dominated by supertankers like Disney Fox and AT T, which recently completed its 85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner. Mr. Roberts and his advisers began looking at Sky as an acquisition as early as July 2017, long before engaging in the bidding war against Disney for 21st Century Fox assets. Fox's 39 percent stake in Sky was the primary reason that Mr. Roberts went after the company, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. For Comcast, pursuing Fox was always about building its international businesses. Mr. Roberts cared much less about other assets that the Murdoch family was selling, including the FX and National Geographic cable networks. Cable companies like Comcast, which primarily operates in the United States, have grappled with a decline in pay TV subscribers who have flocked to streaming services like Netflix. Mr. Roberts, who fashions himself as his company's principal dealmaker, identified Sky as one way to keep Comcast growing. He was particularly taken with Sky's technology. The British broadcaster sells a set top box that streams its programming over a broadband connection and includes apps like Netflix or Spotify. Sky built the technology to become its key engine for delivering programming, a setup similar to Comcast's Xfinity program. Sky also owns valuable sports rights, including a large chunk of the English Premier League. That was seen as a nice fit with Comcast since its NBCUniversal division owns the American rights to those matches. In addition to sports, the deal gives Comcast some Disney and Fox content. Sky owns streaming rights to films from both studios for the European markets in which it operates for the next two to three years. The British government supervised the weekend auction for Sky, which involved three rounds of blind bidding. Going into the process, analysts like Amy Yong of Macquarie Research put the chances for each side to succeed at 50 50. Commentators on Twitter debated whether the better moniker was SkyBattle or BattleSky.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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BRUSSELS With Spain's borrowing costs climbing again to critical levels, European finance ministers decided early Tuesday to speed up their promised bailout for the country's troubled banks, while also giving the cash tight government more time to rein in its budget deficit. After nine hours of debate, ministers from the 17 euro zone nations reached a tentative agreement on the bailout terms, including a "first disbursement" of 30 billion euros, or 37 billion, by the end of the month, Jean Claude Juncker, president of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, said at a news conference. That amount is "to be mobilized as a contingency in case of urgent needs in the Spanish banking sector," he said. Additional payments up to 100 billion euros was pledged last month would most likely follow in the fall, after a more thorough review of the sector's problems, he said. At the same time, Spain's targets for cutting its gaping budget deficit will be eased as the country sinks deeper into its second recession in three years, with an unemployment rate of almost 25 percent. But the ministers demanded that Spain squeeze its austerity budget even tighter to meet the new targets. "I would expect that some additional measures will have to be taken rather soon," the European Commission's vice president, Olli Rehn, said at the news conference. For its part, the European Commission had proposed that Madrid's deficit target this year be relaxed to 6.3 percent of gross domestic product, from 5.3 percent earlier. Madrid also would get an additional year until 2014 to bring the deficit below 3 percent of G.D.P., which is the target for all euro zone countries. That proposal which the Eurogroup accepted and all 27 European Union finance ministers were to expected to endorse later Tuesday plays into the debate over terms for the loan to bail out Spanish banks. The Eurogroup agreed last month to make up to 100 billion euros available to the banking sector with only limited new conditions on the understanding that Madrid would continue to meet the budget targets set by the commission. Euro zone officials said the new conditions would include "bank by bank stress tests," to be conducted by external consultants, and overall strengthening of regulation and supervision. Banks determined to be in need of direct aid will first have to segregate their failing assets and transfer them to an external agency, officials said. The "political agreement" on the so called memorandum of understanding now needs to be ratified in some countries by parliaments, meaning another Eurogroup meeting would need to be called afterward to complete it. The Spanish economy minister, Luis de Guindos, said he expected the definitive agreement on July 20. As an immediate follow up to the summit deal, the European Central Bank signed an agreement with the existing bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, to allow it to act as agent for buying government bonds on the secondary market on the fund's behalf. To avoid adding to the pile of shaky government debt already on the bank's books, "all financial risks and benefits" from any new purchases would be transferred to the facility's balance sheet. Amid evidence of falling tax revenues, Cristobal Montoro, the Spanish budget minister, indicated for the first time on Monday that his government was likely to bow to European pressure and raise the rate of the value added tax, a form of sales tax. At a conference outside Madrid, Mr. Montoro also outlined plans to extend working hours for civil servants. He did not give a timetable for the measures but Mariano Rajoy, the prime minister, is due to address Parliament on Wednesday. Ahead of the Eurogroup meeting, European officials sought to dispel doubts about a deal struck last month to break the "vicious circle" between shaky banks and weak governments. And the European Central Bank reaffirmed that it stood ready to do more to stem the crisis within the limits of its mandate while urging euro zone governments to press ahead with closer integration. 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. "We look with interest to all ideas," the central bank's president, Mario Draghi, told a committee of the European Parliament. But "effective crisis resolution," he added, "also needs bold actions by other policy actors, notably governments." The possibility of direct injections of capital was meant most immediately to help Spain, which is under pressure because of concerns that, by borrowing from the bailout funds to recapitalize its struggling banks, it would simply swell its public debt burden. The interest rate, or yield, on Spanish 10 year sovereign bonds spiked above 7 percent again Monday, after dropping to near 6 percent in the days after the summit meeting on June 29. Suggestions last week that national governments would have to assume ultimate liability for banks that are rescued with euro zone bailout funds had taken some of the luster off the summit deal. That prompted the European Commission on Monday to "clarify" that "there will be no need for a sovereign guarantee for banks being directly recapitalized" by the soon to be established permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism. "Direct bank recapitalization will enable us to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereign risk," Mr. Rehn said. He and other officials stressed, however, that the summit agreement mandated that a new, "single supervisory mechanism" for euro zone banks had to be put in place before direct bank recapitalizations could be made. Mr. Draghi, whose institution will play a leading role in the new supervisory system, underscored in his testimony Monday the amount of work that still remained to secure a detailed agreement on a banking union. He said that there were three views about how many institutions need to fall under European supervision. One would include just systemically important banks that operate across borders, another would also include large banks that operate only in one country, and a third would encompass all banks. "But all banks, that is about 6,000 or more," he said. "I think in answering these questions, we should never forget we will rely on national supervisors. We won't start from scratch." Officials said the European Commission would present a proposal by early September, and the whole process will most likely take until the end of this year. "Everyone knows that setting up European bank supervision isn't a small thing, it's a huge task," the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, said. Mr. Draghi said, however, that the time frame "is not a big problem" because any bailout money delivered to governments now to recapitalize banks could be transferred later off the government's books. "It would be temporary, a temporary blip in public debt," he said. Other countries, like Ireland and Greece, hope to benefit eventually as well. Allowing the stability mechanism to directly recapitalize Greek banks would knock some 50 billion euros, or 62 billion, off the country's sovereign debt, which stands at around 330 billion euros. Spain is not the only country facing rising borrowing costs. Italian 10 year bonds topped 6 percent on Monday, after dropping to around 5.5 percent last week. German 10 year bunds, the European standard for safety, were at 1.3 percent, down from 1.5 percent last week. Also on Monday, the euro zone finance ministers agreed to appoint Yves Mersch, the head of Luxembourg's central bank, to the European Central Bank's six member executive board. The seat has been empty since May 31, with the expiration of the term of Jose Manuel Gonzalez Paramo, a Spaniard. Spain had pushed to hold on to the seat. Mr. Juncker, who had said he would step down as Eurogroup president after his third term expires this month, was appointed to another term, following resistance in Paris to Berlin's preferred replacement, Mr. Schauble. But Mr. Juncker said he did not intend to serve the full 2 1/2 year term, and would step down by early next year at the latest.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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"The Alienist" is a period piece. You'll gather that pretty quickly from the gas lamps, the cobblestone streets and the still under construction Williamsburg Bridge. But the period I'm referring to for the moment is 1994. That's when Caleb Carr published his novel, the film rights to it already sold, thus beginning the long journey to the screen of Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a serial killer hunter in Gilded Age Manhattan. Scripts were attempted and discarded. This Monday, after a quarter century, it arrives as a 10 episode mini series on TNT. Had "The Alienist" arrived in the 1990s, when the darkest shade of TV policing was "NYPD Blue," it would have been something truly different. In 2018, it follows many dramas that have interrogated our romantic ideas of the past ("Deadwood," "The Knick"), delved into historical crime ("Boardwalk Empire," "Peaky Blinders") and followed eccentric investigators' descents into the dank basements of the criminal mind ("True Detective," "Mindhunter"). This is hardly the mini series's fault. But it is its problem. Today, "The Alienist" needs to be assessed for its execution of already familiar genres. Judging from the early episodes, it's fine: lush, moody, a bit stiff. But it's nothing to clear your calendar for.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Iranian researchers have created an "exoskeleton" that improves running efficiency by at least 8 percent. A newly invented wearable device could provide support, succor and an unexpected boost in speed to runners who might otherwise not be able to keep up with their training partners or former selves, as well as people who might like to try running but fear it is just too hard. The device, a kind of lightweight harness worn around the midsection and legs, can increase someone's running efficiency by about 8 percent or more, according to a new study, making running feel much easier and also raising interesting questions about whether and how we should augment natural human abilities. In recent years, biomechanics labs around the world have been experimenting with various devices meant to ease the difficulties of moving for both people and their silicon counterparts, robots. Because walking is such a fundamental form of movement for independence and health, most of this past research has been directed toward that activity. The research has generally focused on various types of what the scientists call exoskeletons, although the devices often are localized to specific joints. Some use batteries or other energy sources to provide extra power, which can compensate for weakness in someone's body. Others are unpowered and simply reinforce or amplify whatever force people wearing them can generate. Recently, Rezvan Nasiri, a graduate student at the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at the University of Tehran in Iran, began to wonder about running. A competitor in judo, Mr. Nasiri was jogging one evening to try to maintain his weight for an upcoming meet when he began to pay close attention to his stride. "I realized that after each ground impact, my legs lost energy," he says. This recognition was not really a surprise. Experts in biomechanics long have known that running can be a somewhat wasteful motion. We create energy when we coil our muscles and push off with one leg from the ground and dissipate some of it when our foot returns to the pavement and momentum slightly brakes. Jogging along, Mr. Nasiri began to consider whether it might be possible to harness some of that squandered energy. If so, he reasoned, the key would be to work with the hips. Much of the action in running involves our hips, which are far more important during this activity than during walking. Mr. Nasiri finished his run, returned to the lab the next day and, with the help of several colleagues, began to tinker. What he and his collaborators hoped to do was, in essence, couple a runner's hips in ways that nature has not, so that the energy created by one leg as it completes a leg swing and moves backward might be sent over to the other leg as it starts forward, reducing the activity required of that hip's muscles and decreasing the overall energy costs of running. The researchers tried out ideas and eventually developed a lightweight contraption involving a belt around the hips connected to metal straps butting against the thighs that are held in place by straps above the knees. The device also includes a metal loop arching out from a person's back that acts as a spring, gathering and transferring energy from one hip to the other. The lightweight contraption fits around the hips and thighs and is held in place by straps above the knees. He and his collaborators, who included the head of the lab, Majid Nili Ahmadabadi, tried the device on a robot, on themselves and, finally, on 10 local male runners. They asked the men to run on treadmills for 10 minutes at a steady pace of around nine minutes per mile while wearing the device and without it, as the scientists monitored their energy expenditure. And they found that the men were much more efficient with the device, reducing the energy cost of their running by about 8 percent. That should mean that someone wearing the device would be able to run longer, faster or more easily. By comparison, the much touted Nike high performance running shoe, the Vaporfly 4%, is said to improve running efficiency by the stated 4 percent. Already, word of the invention has excited interest and speculation among other experts. "There's a beauty to this device," says Rodger Kram, an emeritus professor of biomechanics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who reviewed the study for IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, which is publishing the study today. "It's a simple, elegant concept that cleverly allows people to use their own muscular power more effectively," he says. But its invention also inevitably brings up issues of technological doping. Some people might hope to use the device to achieve race times otherwise impossible for them, Mr. Nasiri admits. But the device is conspicuous, he continues. It sticks out at the back. Observers can tell if runners don one, he says, mitigating opportunities to deploy it for a secret advantage. He would prefer that people use the device openly to jog together, even when their paces differ, he says, and he hopes it might entice people who otherwise avoid running to try the sport. There is no timetable for when the device may become commercially available, though he expects to begin conversations with manufacturers soon, he says. At the moment, he and his colleagues continue to fiddle with the design, hoping to reduce its weight, price and any discomfort runners of varying sizes might experience while wearing it. He says that the volunteers in the study reported that the device felt unobtrusive during their test runs. He also would like to study the device on a wider variety of runners, he says, including swift professionals, women and plodding or first time participants. Meanwhile, he is struggling to come up with a catchy name for the thing. "We would welcome suggestions," he says.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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The nubbly fitness obsession that forces you to unplug and concentrate or AAAAH! On a Friday evening last spring, Zack Woodruff picked up two college friends and drove seven hours down Interstate 65: through Indianapolis, bourbon country and the rolling hills of Appalachia. In the mid dle of the night, they arrived at Miguel's Pizza in Slade, Ky., and pitched tents in the backyard, near a gear shop that sells rock climbing equipment. They were destined for the nearby Red River Gorge, a dramatic rocky cliff that Mr. Woodruff has explored eight or nine times. But Mr. Woodruff, 28, a Ph.D. candidate in robotics at Northwestern University, lives in Chicago, so most of the time, he climbs at First Ascent, an indoor climbing gym with four locations in the city, where, he said, "a lot of grad students climb after work." Over the past five years, rock climbing has become a popular activity among young professionals and families, documented on social media and in films like "The Dawn Wall," "Valley Uprising" and "Free Solo," an Oscar winner that chronicled Alex Honnold's ropeless ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. "It does seem like the growth of the gym industry is continuing to trend upward," said John Burgman, 38, a journalist who writes Climbing Business Journal's annual report and coaches a youth climbing team in Carmel, Ind. Most rock gyms look equal parts Flintstone and Jetson; visiting one feels like landing on a Technicolor planet, or exploring a cave bedecked with Fruity Pebbles. There are two types of indoor climbing walls: bouldering walls, which are low enough that climbers can leap (or tumble) onto the mats without getting hurt; and rope climbing walls, which tower over the bouldering walls and require harnesses and rope. In the most well known form of rope climbing, "top roping," partners on the ground "belay," or gather the slack as you climb higher, so you won't fall too far if you slip. The sport has its own arcane terminology, with difficulty ratings like V5. Young professionals flock to these playgrounds after work because the exercise is intense, unstructured and sociable; the gyms may be one of the last urban locales where talking to strangers is encouraged. Engineers in particular seem to be attracted to the sport, because each "boulder problem" of holds is a three dimensional puzzle, and gyms reset them monthly to keep things spicy. (As part of its corporate wellness program, Google installed a rock wall in its New York offices in Chelsea, in 2013. Its Bay Area and Los Angeles offices have rock walls, too.) And for parents, climbing is part of the so called free range kids movement with proper supervision, of course, the antithesis of the dreaded screens. Adults, of course, are also relishing the chance to unplug themselves, and those not partial to yoga's chants and group movement may find a more individualist escape on the wall. "It's active, it's good for you, you have to try hard, it makes you feel very present in the moment," Mr. Chin said of yoga, "and I think climbing does a lot of those things. It's one of those activities where you do actually need to put your phone down and you do actually have to be engaged, and for some reason it's easy to have conversations and talk to people you don't know when you're climbing." "When you're climbing," he said, "there's also a certain level of vulnerability, because you're scared and you're all having a shared experience, especially if you're trying the same climb." Growing up in Mankato, Minn., he didn't know climbing existed. When he started, 25 years ago, "climbing was a pretty fringe activity," he said, "and it was usually kind of like the misfits, who couldn't play ball sports, or weren't great at team sports." These days, there is a climbing gym in nearly every major city. Corporations like Touchstone Climbing, El Cap, First Ascent and Brooklyn Boulders have plans to build more . Sasha DiGiulian, 27, is a three time United States National Champion climber who helped design a climber emoji and now hosts high end climbing wellness retreats in Kalymnos, Greece. There, groups of 16 to 20 often millennials from Silicon Valley, San Francisco and New York City shell out 3,500 for luxury accommodations, four days of climbing with Ms. DiGiulian and three guides, dinners of freshly caught fish and ouzo, and a rest day swimming with wild dolphins. Her clients are "young professionals looking for an experience," she said, and since it is tough to switch from gym climbing to outdoor climbing, she created the retreat to "facilitate people's transition." Ms. DiGiulian believes that the climbing industry is expanding in tandem with boutique fitness, citing Brooklyn Boulders' boutique fitness branch in Boston, BKBX, which combines rock climbing with high intensity interval training (HIIT). He pointed out that the British Journal of Sports Medicine tracked a 36 percent increase in rock climbing injuries from 2006 to 2015, 12 percent of which required hospitalization. Young men were most frequently injured. Mr. Pasternak also pointed out the absurdity of humans constructing elaborate sheltered courses to challenge themselves "That's connecting with nature the same way that spinning in a room is connecting with nature," he said. "They're both contrived, artificial versions of the real thing without any connection to nature or the outdoors." Indoor climbing gyms can be expensive, especially in cities like New York and San Francisco. "Unless the commercial real estate landscape changes, you can't offer membership for less than 90" per month, said Michael Cesari, 39, the owner of Steep Rock Bouldering in New York. "It's a bummer because when you go elsewhere, it's not the case with indoor climbing." In other parts of the country, climbing has become so accessible that there are places that allow climbers to volunteer at the gym if they can't afford a membership, like Memphis Rox in Tennessee, or YMCAs that offer it for free. At Brooklyn Boulders, near one of the slanted bouldering walls the shorter walls without rope s a diverse group of young people were sitting on the mats and catching up on a recent Saturday while two dogs frolicked in the waiting area. The majority of new climbers follow the rules, but some don't. Mr. Stack witnessed an incident firsthand. "One time, I saw these two people climbing, and it was their first time climbing, and it was on the overhung wall, and the one person fell and swung and knocked over the person belaying," he said. "The one belaying stopped, took both of her hands off the rope, picked up her camera, and took a picture of her friend. There's just been a huge influx of people with no clue what they're doing." As a result, gyms have had to add extra safety programming; nearly all require climbers to sign a waiver and take a class before they can climb on their own. In order to compete with the Equinoxes of the world, many climbing gyms offer weight rooms, cardio machines, yoga classes and Wi Fi. Some are now also installing cafes and co working spaces. "Starbucks always talks about being people's third place, and that's really our goal too," Mr. Bartz said. "People have home and they have work and we want to be that third place they go to and spend time connecting with people." Though the sport is still overwhelmingly white, organizations like Brown Girls Climb, Melanin Base Camp, Brothers of Climbing and Color the Crag help climbers of color connect with one another. Anna Marie Jennings, 23, met her closest friends in New York through Climb Like a Girl classes at Brooklyn Boulders. "Finding a group of women to climb with was really great because the gym is intimidating as it is, whether there's all men around or all women around or whatever, just the nature of it can be overwhelming if you're new," she said. "It is very physical and people watch you, so that's intimidating no matter who you're around." "There are still times where I walk in and you'll see, for lack of a better term, the bro y guys muscle their way up a really hard boulder problem, and I may not be able to do it from strength," she said. "But I might have more flexibility or balance." Dario Ventura, 35, the co owner and manager of Miguel's, said that since his father Miguel went into business 35 years ago, foot traffic has grown "exponentially." To adapt, Miguel's Pizza renovated its kitchen and country store restaurant, tripled the size of its campsite, and now employs a staff of 42 mostly transient climbers, many of whom live out of vans, like Alex Honnold in "Free Solo." The local community in Slade has also adapted. Nowadays, Mr. Ventura said, there are three search and rescue teams that respond to calls in the Red River Gorge, where previously, there weren't any. "The whole area has grown too, there's a ton of restaurants now, there's a ton of campsites to compete, and we're all full every weekend," he said. "It's a really healthy environment." However, the gorge has been subject to littering and crag erosion from the crowds. There have been efforts by the Access Fund, a nonprofit climbing organization, to maintain the bolts in the rocks so they don't wear down from overuse and pop out dangerously while climbers are on the rocks. Mr. Ventura marveled at all this activity. "For so many years, you got into rock climbing because you had some crazy uncle that took you out, but with climbing gyms being so accessible and everywhere now, there's this giant funnel of people that are getting into climbing in urban areas and come here on the weekends," he said. And yet "I've heard some numbers where something like 10 percent of all people that climb in a climbing gym actually go climbing outside. Which is mind boggling to me."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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When young designers want to unveil their first collection, they may hold a fashion show, perhaps during fashion week. But not if you're Kendall and Kylie Jenner. On Monday night, three days before the official start of New York Fashion Week, the sisters introduced their new line, Kendall Kylie, with an "intimate house party" in a penthouse duplex in TriBeCa. First to arrive were the clothes, which were displayed on racks in the corner as if in a boutique. There were bondage y heels inspired by Manolo Blahnik, gingham high rise trousers that went around the knee, and crisscross mesh dresses that called to mind Givenchy and Helmut Lang. Cindi Leive, editor in chief of Glamour, and Anne Fulenwider of Marie Claire arrived shortly after 8, just as a publicist approached the press line and made it clear that topics like the sisters' romantic life, their transgender parent and a certain in law's struggles with drugs were off limits.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Credit...Howard University, via U.S. National Library of Medicine Dr. Roland B. Scott was the first African American to pass the pediatric board exam, in 1934. He was a faculty member at Howard University, and went on to establish its center for the study of sickle cell disease; he gained national acclaim for his research on the blood disorder. But when he applied for membership with the American Academy of Pediatrics its one criterion for admission was board certification he was rejected multiple times beginning in 1939. The minutes from the organization's 1944 executive board meeting leave little room for mystery regarding the group's decision. The group that considered his application, along with that of another Black physician, was all white. "If they became members they would want to come and eat with you at the table," one academy member said. "You cannot hold them down." Dr. Scott was accepted a year later along with his Howard professor, Dr. Alonzo deGrate Smith, another Black pediatrician. But they were only allowed to join for educational purposes and were not permitted to attend meetings in the South, ostensibly for their safety. More than a half century later, the American Academy of Pediatrics has formally apologized for its racist actions, including its initial rejections of Drs. Scott and Smith on the basis of their race. The statement will be published in the September issue of Pediatrics. The group also changed its bylaws to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. "This apology is long overdue," said Dr. Sally Goza, the organization's president, noting that this year marks the group's 90th anniversary. "But we must also acknowledge where we have failed to live up to our ideals." Dr. Goza said in an interview that the group learned from the example of another organization that confronted its racist past: the American Medical Association. The American field of medicine has long been predominantly white. Black patients experience worse health outcomes and higher rates of conditions like hypertension and diabetes. Black, Latino and Native Americans have also suffered disproportionately during the Covid 19 pandemic. In the last decade, some medical societies and groups have released statements recognizing the role that systemic racism and discrimination played in driving these health disparities. Implicit bias affects the quality of provider services: Living in poverty limits access to healthy food and preventive care. After the killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, in late May, a flood of medical groups released statements on racial health disparities: the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Gastroenterology, the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the American Psychiatric Association and more. The American Public Health Association released a statement recognizing racism as a "public health crisis." But few medical organizations have confronted the roles they played in blocking opportunities for Black advancement in the medical profession until the American Medical Association, and more recently the American Academy of Pediatrics, formally apologized for their histories. The A.M.A. issued an apology in 2008 for its more than century long history of discriminating against African American physicians. For decades, the organization predicated its membership on joining a local or state medical society, many of which excluded Black physicians, especially in the South. Keith Wailoo, a historian at Princeton University, said the group chose to "look the other way" regarding these exclusionary practices. The A.M.A.'s apology came in the wake of a paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that examined a number of discriminatory aspects of the group's history, including its efforts to close African American medical schools. For some Black physicians, exclusion from the A.M.A. meant the loss of career advancement opportunities, according to Dr. Wailoo. Others struggled to gain access to the postgraduate training they needed for certification in certain medical specialties. As a result, many Black physicians were limited to becoming general practitioners, especially in the South. Some facilities also required A.M.A. membership for admitting privileges to hospitals. By 1964, the A.M.A. changed its position and refused to certify medical societies that discriminated on the basis of race, but persistent segregation in local groups still limited Black physicians' access to certain hospitals, as well as opportunities for specialty training and certification. "Physicians are no different from other Americans who harbor biases," said Dr. Wailoo, whose research focuses on race and the history of medicine. "We expect doctors to speak on the basis of science, but they're embedded in culture in the same way everyone else is." The A.M.A. also played a role in limiting medical educational opportunities available to Black physicians. In the early 20th century, before the medical field held the same prestige it does today, the A.M.A. commissioned a report assessing the country's medical schools for their rigor. The report, by educator Abraham Flexner, deemed much of the country's medical education system substandard. It also recommended closing all but two of the country's seven Black medical schools. Howard and Meharry were spared. As the field became more exclusive, it also became more white, according to Adam Biggs, a historian at the University of South Carolina. "When we talk about how modern medicine came to define what it means to be a modern practitioner, it was deeply rooted in race," Mr. Biggs said. "Segregation was embedded in the pipeline." Between its restrictions on medical education and its exclusionary membership, the A.M.A. played a role in cultivating the profession's homogeneity, which it acknowledged in its 2008 statement. It has since appointed a chief health equity officer and established a center for health equity. Dr. Goza said that the A.M.A.'s example helped spur the American Academy of Pediatrics to confront its own history. There have been some historical examples of efforts to confront racism in the medical field. In 1997, President Clinton apologized for the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study conducted between 1932 and 1972, a quarter century after it was first exposed by The Associated Press. In the early 21st century, a number of state attorneys general apologized for the forced sterilization of Black, mentally ill and disabled people, which began in the early 1900s. But some of the field's future leaders are now demanding change on medical school campuses. Dr. Tequilla Manning, a family medicine resident in New York, graduated from University of Kansas Medical Center three years ago. As a medical student, she conducted a research project on Dr. Marjorie Cates, who became the school's first Black female graduate in 1958. She began to draw parallels between Dr. Cates' experience of discrimination on campus and her own. Before graduating in 2017, she gave a presentation on Dr. Cates' story. Some of the other students in the audience were inspired. They lobbied University of Kansas to rename a campus medical society for Dr. Cates; the group previously honored a dean of the school who had advocated for racially segregated clinical facilities. Last year Dr. Manning attended the renaming ceremony for the Cates Society. "I was crying," she said. "What I experienced is not on the spectrum of what my ancestors experienced at the hands of white physicians. But I spent five years at this institution thinking there was no hope."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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THE PLAZA The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel By Julie Satow Donald Trump was feeling envious. New York's foremost narcissist whose Trump Tower, encased in fool's gold and bogus bronze, was the very definition of ersatz hankered for what he regarded as the real estate racket's crown jewel of social status. There it was, tauntingly in his face every time he swiveled his desk chair and glanced out the 26th floor window of his Fifth Avenue office: the Plaza Hotel. The imposing white chateau at 59th and Fifth, with its lordly views of Central Park, designed by the Gilded Age maestro Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, dominates the most desirable corner of the most dynamic city in the world. Trump finally bought it in 1988 for roughly 400 million, every penny of it borrowed. In a full page ad in New York magazine, he boasted: "For the first time in my life, I have knowingly made a deal that was not economic. I haven't purchased a building, I have purchased a masterpiece the Mona Lisa." It took him four years the equivalent of a full presidential term to drive the Plaza into bankruptcy. The era of funny money had begun. But first there had been the glory days. In its early years, the Plaza, 18 stories high and a block wide, towered over its neighbors like a tuxedoed King Kong. A great hotel is a theater of dreams, and Julie Satow, a journalist who covers New York real estate, digs deep into the forces that took the Plaza from a living center of aspiring social connection tied to the fortunes of American high society to its present status in an atomized era of pitiless transactional globalism. The Plaza in its current incarnation first opened its bronze revolving doors in October 1907, and the early clientele's names Vanderbilt, Wanamaker, Duke still conjure up the rustle of silk and the sheen of a top hat. The hotel had been built on the site of an earlier (and also quite grand) establishment by two business partners, Bernhard Beinecke, a prosperous German butcher, and Harry S. Black, a dashing adventurer and aspiring impresario who, though short of stature, was catnip to women. They became the Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell of the age, swiftly turning the Plaza into a magnet not only for socialites but for movie stars, tycoons and world leaders, with a brisk trade in cosmopolitan charlatans. There were also the ladies who came to be known around the hotel as the 39 widows. These were rich dowagers like Clara Bell Walsh, famed for inventing the cocktail party, who moved into palatial suites and never moved out until they moved on. These ladies had their own posses of social secretaries, private nurses and small yapping dogs. They never lacked for service. At its humming height, Satow tells us in one of her dazzling fact riffs, the Plaza employed a staff of 1,500, "including 50 each of chambermaids, housemaids and bell boys; plus 200 waiters, 75 laundresses and 25 porters. There were also 20 bartenders, 10 wine cellar men, 15 barbers and, in later years, two men whose sole job was dusting the chandeliers and another who patrolled the hallways stamping ashtrays with the double P Plaza logo." Over the decades, the Plaza myth was created as much by writers as by its clientele. It's hard to stroll by on a sweltering August afternoon without thinking of Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby inside, telling Tom Buchanan that Daisy never loved him. Or on a crisp November night to hear the ghostly strains of Peter Duchin's orchestra playing for the swans and swells at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball. Satow, of course, offers a pungent chapter on the Plaza's most popular literary avatar, Eloise, and her creator, the volatile diva Kay Thompson. 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. To me, the Plaza irresistibly represents my days at Vanity Fair in the '80s, when its swanky Grand Ballroom played host to countless black tie benefits chaired by Wall Street trophy wives, with their hungry eyes and anorexic shoulders. The leafy fronds of the marble columned Palm Court and the serene strumming of its harpist always made me feel as if I were having afternoon tea on the Titanic. And in a sense I was. Because the story of the Plaza is inevitably a story of boom and bust. To want to own it meant you had to dream big, and big dreams have a way of becoming big nightmares. Harry Black's dream ended in 1930. Unlike the more prudent Beinecke, he had lived the Jazz Age as large as his guests. When Wall Street crashed in 1929, he was overextended; within a year, he had shot himself in the bedroom of his Long Island mansion. Alternate saviors and wreckers followed Black as the Plaza battled to stay afloat through Prohibition and two world wars. Conrad Hilton, who bought the hotel in 1943, bet that World War II's eventual end would be a boon for hotels and was proved right as the Plaza's lobby and bars bustled with khaki uniforms and champagne reunions. Less successful was Roger Sonnabend, son of the drab financier A. M. Sonnabend, who in the frenzy of a midlife crisis began wearing beads and Nehru jackets and embarked on a series of desperate modernizations. He turned the Edwardian Room, where big shot conversation had rumbled between dark paneled walls, into the pastel curtained Green Tulip, a change excoriated by all. By the time the Plaza was acquired by the Qatar Investment Authority in 2018, its indomitable glamour had seen a free fall of successive foreign overlords. They included a Saudi prince teaming with a Singaporean billionaire, an Israeli speculator who carved up the hotel into condominiums and retail spaces, and an Indian con man who negotiated his financial exit from the most evil smelling hospitality suite in the world, Delhi's notorious Tihar Jail. A boutique hotel remains, but the condominium suites are mostly silent, acquired by iffy oligarchs and dubious emissaries from go go emerging markets. It's galling to have to admit that Trump is the owner who leaps most vividly from the pages of this entertaining history, just as he does from cable TV. He announced his first wife's appointment as the Plaza's new president in what we have come to know as his unique idiom of insulting hype: "My wife, Ivana, is a brilliant manager. I will pay her one dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy." There is compensating glee to be derived from identifying the characters who continue to inhabit Trump World or have been replaced by their replicas. It was Thomas Barrack, later chairman of the Trump 2016 inaugural committee, who, as The New York Times put it, "played Donald like a Stradivarius" on behalf of the Westin group and got him to shell out more than 25 times the hotel's expected earnings. The precursor of the Trump fall guy Michael Cohen is the equally abject Abraham Wallach, who, in a familiar trope, won Trump's attention by going on TV as a competing real estate developer and ridiculing the price Trump had paid for the Plaza. Trump hit him with a 250 million lawsuit for defamation but then, with his unerring nose for exploitable moral weakness, hired Wallach and turned him into a pummeled foot soldier. Like Cohen, Wallach would do anything for his boss's approval, including in a scene worthy of Mel Brooks's "The Producers" hiding in a secret room adjoining the Plaza's Vanderbilt Suite to eavesdrop on a rival's negotiations with a bank. The other great character in this teeming cast is not a billionaire but a union leader. Peter Ward represented the 35,000 bellmen, doormen, banquet waiters and maids who made up the powerful New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council. By the time he enters the story, we're thirsting to hear more about the downstairs life of the Plaza. I wish Satow had dwelt more on the lives of that pyramid of toiling housemaids, laundresses, bellhops and waiters who kept the Titanic afloat. Just as the flashy museums and universities of the United Arab Emirates are built on the backs of abused migrant workers, the Plaza's luxury was underpinned by many decades of exploitation. Some employees in Harry Black's champagne era earned as little as 83 cents a day, with 18 hour shifts and no paid days off. The steel girding that built the Plaza, 10,000 tons of it, was hammered by the rough, tough rivet gangs, "cowboys of the sky," who in 1906 exploded with resentment and beat a hated supervisor to death as he stepped shakily out onto the scaffolding on the eighth floor. A century later, it was Ward who took on the Israeli owners, El Ad, when they arrogantly assumed they could carve the Plaza into condos and dispense with 900 union jobs without a fight. His "Save the Plaza" campaign was conducted with such inspired persistence and political guile that he kept the jobs of 350 union employees, won an increased severance package for the rest and preserved the Grand Ballroom, the Oak Room and the Palm Court from wanton destruction. Today the Plaza is a grand facade boutique hotel and retail space under pretentious deluxe apartments owned by the kind of affluent global flotsam who fake their children's SAT scores. Yet her Serene Highness of 59th Street sails on, confidently awaiting the next custodian of New York's social dream.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Helen Reddy on "The Helen Reddy Show," a 1973 summer replacement series on NBC. Her song "I Am Woman" had reached No. 1 on the pop charts the previous year. Helen Reddy, the Australian born singer whose 1972 hit song "I Am Woman" became the feminist anthem of the decade and propelled her to international pop music stardom, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 78. The death was confirmed by her children in a message posted on her official fan page on Facebook. Ms. Reddy lived for decades with Addison's disease (she had a kidney removed when she was 17) and had dementia from at least 2015. "I Am Woman" reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart at the end of 1972 (a good six months after it was released individual call in requests helped build radio play) and earned her the Grammy Award for best female pop vocal performance. She was the first Australian born artist to win a Grammy and the first to make the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Some male observers called the song beginning with the words "I am woman/ Hear me roar/ In numbers too big to ignore," sung by a 5 foot 3 soprano angry, man hating, dangerous or all three. "That simply underlined the many things women needed liberating from," Dennis Harvey of Variety reflected in 2019. "Nobody called Sinatra a menace when he sang 'My Way,' a no less straightforward hymn to self determination." During the 1970s, three of Ms. Reddy's songs the others were "Delta Dawn" and "Angie Baby" went to No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Three others "You and Me Against the World," "Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)" and "Ain't No Way to Treat a Lady" made the Top 10. More than three decades later, The Chicago Tribune declared her the "queen of '70s pop." Helen Maxine Lamond Reddy was born on Oct. 25, 1941, in Melbourne, Australia, the only child of Max Reddy, a writer, producer and actor, and Stella (Lamond) Reddy, an actress whose stage name was Stella Campbell. Her father was in New Guinea, serving in the Australian Army, when she was born. The Reddys performed on the Australian vaudeville circuit, and Helen began joining them onstage when she was 4. Ms. Reddy had a solid reputation in Australian television and radio when she won a 1966 talent contest sponsored by "Bandstand," a Sydney pop music television show. The prize was a trip to New York City and a record company audition there. The audition did not pan out, and her career got off to a slow, discouraging start. Before Capitol signed her in 1970, at least 27 record labels had rejected her, and she and her new husband, Jeff Wald, who was now her manager, moved first to Chicago, then to Los Angeles. Times were hard, especially when the couple lived in New York. In "The Woman I Am: A Memoir" (2006), Ms. Reddy wrote, "When we did eat, it was spaghetti, and we spent what little money we had on cockroach spray." Ms. Reddy was a frequent guest in the early 1970s on variety, music and talk shows like "The Mike Douglas Show," "The Carol Burnett Show," "The David Frost Show," "The Merv Griffin Show" and "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour." "The Helen Reddy Show" (1973) was an eight episode summer replacement series on NBC. She made her big screen debut in the disaster movie "Airport 1975" (released in 1974) as a guitar playing nun who comforts a sick little girl (Linda Blair) on an almost certainly doomed 747. Ms. Reddy always liked to point out that Gloria Swanson and Myrna Loy were also in the cast. That was followed by a starring role in the Disney movie "Pete's Dragon" (1977), as a skeptical New England lighthouse keeper who doubts an orphaned boy's stories about his animated fire breathing pet. After a cameo in the film version of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1978), starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, it was on to guest spots in prime time television on "The Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island." By the 1980s, Ms. Reddy's glory days were largely behind her, and she was bored. "I remember the Vegas days when it was two shows a night, seven nights a week," she told The Chicago Tribune in 2013, "and it became so rote that I'd be thinking about wallpaper while I was singing." Ms. Reddy's Broadway career consisted of replacing the lead in "Blood Brothers," a musical set in Liverpool, for a few months in 1995. But she had a busy stage career elsewhere, starring in productions of "Anything Goes," "Call Me Madam" and "Shirley Valentine" in England and in the United States, from Provincetown, Mass., to Sacramento. The last Helen Reddy song to make the American charts was "I Can't Say Goodbye to You" (1981). "Imagination" (1983) was her last album. Her final screen appearance was in "The Perfect Host" (2010), a crime comedy with David Hyde Pierce. When Ms. Reddy retired in 2002, she meant business: She went back to school, got a degree in clinical hypnotherapy and practiced as a therapist and motivational speaker. In 2012, after a public appearance at her half sister's birthday party, she announced a show business comeback and made several concert appearances in the United States before retiring again. She was a strong believer in past lives regression. (In 1969, as a newcomer in Los Angeles, she studied parapsychology part time at U.C.L.A.) In her 2006 memoir, in a slightly surreal section on British royalty, she declared that the Duchess of Windsor had been the reincarnation of Richard III, and that Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret had been, in past lives, the little princes whom Richard locked in the Tower of London. Ms. Reddy married and divorced three times. In 1961, she married Kenneth Claude Weate, an older musician who was a family friend. They had a daughter and divorced in 1966. In 1968, she married Mr. Wald, and they had a son. They separated in 1981, when he checked into a treatment facility for cocaine addiction, and divorced two years later. That same year, she married Milton Ruth, a drummer in her band. They divorced in 1995.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Lee Mendelson, an Emmy Award winning producer who was instrumental in bringing the holiday staple "A Charlie Brown Christmas" to television in 1965 and who wrote the enduring lyrics to the song "Christmas Time Is Here," died on Christmas morning at his home in Hillsborough, Calif., about 15 miles south of San Francisco He was 86. His son Jason said the cause was congestive heart failure, and that Mr. Mendelson had had lung cancer. He said his father's death on Christmas "was a pretty serendipitous thing." For more than 50 years "A Charlie Brown Christmas" has endured as a staple of holiday season programming, but the project would not have been created were it not for Mr. Mendelson's persistence. Mr. Mendelson was initially turned down when he approached Charles M. Schulz, the creator of "Peanuts," about making a documentary about his life and the comic strip starring Charlie Brown and Snoopy, he told The Los Angeles Times in 2015.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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I've interviewed her before and seen her at movie and theater parties, and she's always glowing. I know that if you ask the hazel eyed, raven haired 48 year old how she gets more beautiful every year, defying Hollywood's propensity to push actresses in their 40s through a trap door, she will shyly demur. But my editors want to know. So as we sit at a long wooden table in her kitchen in the East Village of Manhattan, in an apartment with wraparound windows and elegant threadbare Oriental rugs and a green eyed cat named Solomon and James Bond padding around in a green sweatshirt, jeans and socks, I ask again: "Don't you have some secret to share with the readers of The New York Times, like an avocado face mask or acupuncture?" The actress explains that she used to have a moon face, but as she got older, she lost her chubbiness and found her cheekbones. But then she takes pity on me, a supposedly trained observer, and pulls up the loose gray sweater she's wearing to reveal her secret. "I'll be showing soon," she says, with a radiant smile. "Daniel and I are so happy. We're going to have a little human. We can't wait to meet him or her. It's all such a mystery." Wow, I say, grinning back at her. A little 007 1/2 . She already has an 11 year old, Henry, with her former partner, the director Darren Aronofsky. And Mr. Craig, 50, has a 25 year old daughter, Ella, with the actress Fiona Loudon. Ms. Weisz (pronounced "Vice") likes to say that happiness writes white, meaning it's anathema to vibrant drama. But it seems quite cozy in life. She and Mr. Craig, who have been married for seven years, share a similar quality on screen. It's hard to look away from them. That's true in person, as well. As the two stand at opposite counters, Ms. Weisz offering me tea and Mr. Craig proferring a cappuccino, it's tough to know which way to turn. "Daniel makes a great cappuccino," she says, so I choose that. Baby news aside, the real reason I am below 14th Street is to discuss hot lesbian sex. Ms. Weisz's character, a photographer named Ronit now living in New York, comes back for her father's funeral and gets ensorcelled by her old love, Esti, who is now married to the rabbi's protege, Dovid, played by Alessandro Nivola. The movie focuses both on this taboo triangle and the fraught father daughter relationship in a closed society where women are not in charge of their choices, wearing wigs and often segregated from men a world Ronit denounces as "medieval." "My character time travels in a way," Ms. Weisz says. "She's going back to her childhood but it's also time travel because she's going to live amongst a community where the mores haven't changed for hundreds of years. They're not part of modern life. They don't have the internet or TV and all that stuff. And I grew up down the road from this place. It's four stops north of Golders Green, which was my stop, so I would see these people sometimes on the way to school. It's like the '50s, but it's happening right now." Ms. Weisz's late mother, a teacher turned therapist, was Catholic and convent schooled but a refugee from Vienna because her father was Jewish. Ms. Weisz's father, an engineer and inventor, came from a Jewish Orthodox family in Budapest, and he also fled the Nazis, moving with his parents to London as a child. "They met in their late 30s, early 40s, got married and they were like, 'Oh, we're both from Central Europe' and she converted to marry him," Ms. Weisz says. Ms. McAdams said of her co star, "I remember her telling me her mom put her in dresses as a kid but her hair would be a total mess and her knees scraped up and she'd be off playing in the dirt. I feel like that little kid is still in her. She's this gorgeous, timeless, poised, wickedly smart beauty, but she likes to keep things messy and unexpected." Indeed, as IndieWire noted, after "Disobedience" had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film quickly became known as "'the movie where Rachel Weisz spits in Rachel McAdams' mouth'." Also "'Jew Is the Warmest Color,'" playing off the 2013 French lesbian romance "Blue Is the Warmest Color." There was a flap over whether "Blue Is the Warmest Color" was a lascivious product of the male gaze. But so far "Disobedience" Ms. Weisz selected the director Sebastian Lelio, whom she described as "a straight Chilean lapsed Catholic" has been praised for avoiding this trap. As Jocelyn Macdonald said on AfterEllen, a website that focuses on lesbian and bisexual issues in pop culture, in an interview with the two Rachels: "I was really pleased with the sex scene for not being too objectifying, and yet at the same time, it was not lesbian 101." I ask Ms. Weisz what it felt like to do her first love scene with a woman. "Less stubbly," she says, stroking her cheek. "Softer. I think we both felt very vulnerable and there was a real sweetness. I don't know if male actors ask this question but I know women normally think, 'Is this sex scene really necessary?' And in this case, it's essential. The whole story of repression leads up to this moment. I think, particularly for Esti, the release of this big orgasm that she had was also a spiritual moment. It's about freedom." Ms. Weisz said that, as a producer, she agreed with Mr. Lelio's decision to cut out a close up of her character's orgasm. "It was too many orgasms," she says. "Esti's was more important, and it robbed her of that." She had met Ms. McAdams on a one day shoot on a Terrence Malick movie, which Ms. Weisz got cut from in the end. "We worked in a very similar way, in that neither of us liked to sit and analyze it," she says. "We were just like, 'Let's do it and see what happens.' And she's very touching and tender and soulful as Esti and as a person." Ms. Weisz was drawn to doing the film, an adaptation of Naomi Alderman's novel, not because of the lesbian plotline, she says, but because she wanted to explore a relationship between two women where they were not defined by men, where there was no "history of ownership." "I just thought, 'Perfect: a relationship between two women where it has been a friendship since childhood and there's love and sexuality and yearning and longing and things to do with freedom.'" She says she read a lot of lesbian literature when she was looking for a movie to make. "There's a cycle of pulp fiction novels from the '50s called 'The Beebo Brinker Chronicles' by Ann Bannon," Ms. Weisz says. "'Journey to a Woman' is my favorite. And I met her and she's completely fascinating. She's a professor of linguistics. And she was a gay woman living in a 1950s heterosexual marriage, and she started to write these pulp fiction lesbian novels with an avatar in the book that was her lesbian self. It was mostly in her imagination. And she came down to Greenwich Village and there were lesbian bars where she researched. "I also read a French lesbian novel called 'The Illusionist' by Francoise Mallet Joris about a girl who has a love affair with her dad's older mistress. Very dark but great." Did Ms. Weisz do any research for the love scene with lesbian friends? "Nooooo," she said. "You can't ever ask people how they have sex. Sebastian storyboarded it, so it was all his idea to have just faces and spittle and wetness and the other woman's face. He wasn't interested in nudity. He was interested in one woman's face in pleasure in the frame and the other woman outside the frame so you have to imagine where her fingers and tongue are and what's going on." Since it's a film focused on a father daughter relationship, I note that the late Mike Nichols, who directed Ms. Weisz and Mr. Craig in "Betrayal" on Broadway in 2013, once told me that the father son relationship was the most central in drama because, as Joseph Campbell said, "if you are a boy, every enemy is potentially psychologically associated with the father image." Ms. Weisz says: "I would say that's because the great playwrights of the 20th century are men. It's just to do with the canon of great white men writers. I don't think, in essence, that they are more important than father daughter relationships or mother daughter, just less represented." "I really enjoy all the thousands of movies I've seen about men," she says. "I mean, there are some great masterpieces. But there's just a dearth of ones about women. I love women. Women are just really fascinating and different to men." We talk about how strange it is that the old crass Hollywood moguls, who could treat actresses abominably, still produced movies with juicy parts for women in all stages of life, and that the supposedly more enlightened Hollywood suits that followed male and female studio chiefs reduced women's roles mostly to wives, girlfriends and hookers. "I think what happened was, women's appetites were taken away from them," Ms. Weisz says. "As women got the pill, suddenly it's like, 'Let's not let them be free in the stories.' Once we had Barbara Stanwyck running around making trouble. Then the '70s were worse and in the '80s and '90s, it got really scary. "Transgression is delicious. You can be a force for good and sleeping with a married man. That's what makes you a human. That's what makes you, in stories, believable and relatable. I can't bear just really good, idealized characters. "Contradictory characters or illogical things about women are often taken out, and they're simplified to either all good or bad and they're never allowed to be just layered and complex." She cited the example of her Oscar winning turn in "The Constant Gardener" (2005) as Tessa Quayle, a human rights activist. Besides her production of "a little human" with Mr. Craig, Ms. Weisz has been optioning novels and has six other movies focusing on women in the works. One is a "Paper Moon" style comedy set in wartime England called "Crooked Heart," based on a book by Lissa Evans. It is the story of a pair of grifters who pretend to be a mother and son. "It's the opposite of a noble war story," Ms. Weisz says. "They're running around, her and this little boy, with made up collection boxes for made up charities, and it's funny." She is also planning on producing and starring in a movie about Dr. James Barry, a woman in 19th century Cape Town who disguised herself as a man to become a doctor. She lived as a man her whole life, rising to be the chief medical officer in the city, which was then a British colony. She was a dandy who got into a lot of duels. She got embroiled in a scandal when she was having an affair with the governor and someone saw them partly disrobed and thought they were two men. So it was known as "The Sodomy Scandal." "So I'm going to be a bloke," Ms. Weisz says, excitedly. She seemed to glow even brighter at the prospect. Rachel Weisz considers the utility of advice in a round of Confirm or Deny.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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PARIS "They kept asking us to reconfirm we were coming because they said they had more requests than ever before," said Elizabeth von Guttman, an editor of System magazine, before the Anthony Vaccarello show. Alexandre de Betak, the producer of the show, noticed the same thing. "Are there more people here?" he said. "Yes, I think so. I could start it now, but they are still trying to get some of the audience sorted over there." He gestured down the glass walled corridor of the Maison de la Radio, the site of Mr. Vaccarello's show, at some jostling on the benches. It was officially Day 1 of Paris Fashion Week. Day 1 is traditionally a travel and get settled day between Milan and Paris, populated by newer designers and their experimentalism. Which often looks a lot like older experimentalism: See the blown out shoulders, one dimensional geometries imposed on three dimensional bodies, and a suit sliced on the diagonal, the two halves then tied back together, at Jacquemus, a 2015 LVMH prize winner. This season, however, thanks to Mr. Vaccarello, Day 1 got a whole lot more attention. Rumor has it that he is in the running to take over at Saint Laurent if the company parts ways with its creative director, Hedi Slimane. So a big chunk of the fashion crowd had pried themselves out of their hotel rooms to come check out Mr. Vaccarello or rather his clothes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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In August 1783, at the future site of the Eiffel Tower, Benjamin Franklin watched two brothers launch the first hydrogen balloon. It breezed north for 45 minutes and plummeted in the hamlet of Gonesse where frightened peasants attacked the contraption with rocks, knives and pitchforks before dragging the monster's wheezing remains through town on a horse. The villagers weren't entirely wrong. Balloons are the dominion of misfits who don't belong on earth, or even on other modes of sky travel like rockets, helicopters, or airplanes, whose seats are commandeered by the rational, the heroic, or the rest of us just trying to get from Atlanta to Des Moines. To choose to travel by basket and balloon requires two personality traits: ingenuity and recklessness. As in, not only does someone have to somehow get their hands on one which often means designing it themselves but they're capricious enough to let Mother Nature steer. Naturally, hot air balloons were the prison escape vehicle for both Lex Luthor and Paddington Bear. On film, balloons give a character more character. They've encouraged athletes like Buster Keaton and Pearl White of "The Perils of Pauline" to prove their mettle. Thanks to the traditional bottle of champagne packed to appease bystanders, a wicker basket can also be a cozy setting for cranks to realize they're safe being vulnerable, as when Bill Murray opens up about his divorce in "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," or in the climax of the noxiously gassy romantic comedy "The Ugly Truth," when the worst love scene in Hollywood history is redeemed by the audience's relief that this aggravating couple is sequestered 1,000 feet in the air. In Tom Harper's "The Aeronauts," now in theaters and on Amazon Prime Video Dec. 20, the Victorian meteorologist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) escapes the confines of London's Royal Society to embark on a record breaking ascent so treacherous that his colleagues consider him a loon. In a hot air balloon, even a quick thinker like James Bond is adrift. The 007s in "Octopussy" and "The World is Not Enough" find their choices reduced to leaping off, hanging on or becoming a wrecking ball. When Dorothy asks the Wizard of Oz if he was frightened when he lost control of his balloon, he yelped, "You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe! I was petrified." Above all, however, balloons literalize how humans can merely grapple with not commandeer the direction of their lives, from the overdue exploits of Carl, the 78 year old widower in the Pixar film "Up" to the quirky 2004 drama "Enduring Love," in which a pre Bond Daniel Craig is about to propose marriage in a meadow when the moment is interrupted by a crash landing hot air balloon that drags with it death, scandal and a stalker (Rhys Ifans), who insists that the very absurdity of the mishap must carry spiritual significance. As for non humans, the lucky Jellicle who ascends to rebirth in Tom Hooper's film version of "Cats" no longer hovers on a floating tire, it gusts away under a parachute of silk. Yet, though their cinematic possibilities are sky high, balloons have mostly been used by filmmakers as float on cameos, a novelty slapped on a poster to make a movie look like a madcap epic, but in actuality given only a few minutes of screen time. Films guilty of such misdirection include "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" and "Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol." ("Unfortunately, the film never takes flight itself," sniffed a critic of the latter in The Los Angeles Times.) "The Aeronauts" is the rare film that spends most of its running time in flight. In 1862, the real life James Glaisher shot seven miles up in the air far past the previous ceiling to witness atmospheric movements that could only be seen above the clouds. Harper is passionate about the romance of discovery and just plain romance, via Felicity Jones's pilot Amelia Wren, a flagrantly named amalgamation of several real life daredevils including the French stuntwoman Sophie Blanchard, who was widowed when her husband suffered a heart attack and fell out of their basket over The Hague, and her flamboyant predecessor Elisabeth Thible, the first untethered female balloonist, who took off from Lyon costumed as the goddess Minerva. Blanchard herself died when her balloon caught fire over Tivoli. In "Sad Tales and Glad Tales" the poet Grenville Mellen tutted, "A woman in a balloon is either out of her element or too high in it." Jules Verne was a little more empathetic. In his 1863 debut novel "Five Weeks in a Balloon," a fictional travelogue about a trans African flight, one passenger comforts another by noting that Blanchard "would not have been killed, probably, had not her car dashed against a chimney and precipitated her to the ground." "Five Weeks in a Balloon" was a financial success that afforded Verne the freedom to quit his job as a stockbroker and launch his Extraordinary Travels series that would go on to include "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and "The Mysterious Island," tales of derring do that would become the foundation of science fiction and fantasy filmmaking, from Georges Melies's "A Trip to the Moon" to today's audiences hooting as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson straddles a giant bee. Yet, while Verne embraced all manner of misadventures, even conceptualizing future inventions such as, yes, rockets and helicopters, he distrusted hot air balloons. Contrary to popular belief, when the idea of balloon travel pops up in Verne's classic, "Around the World in Eighty Days," it's quickly shot down as "not being capable of being put in practice." This was a surprise to the producer Mike Todd, who upon receiving the script for his lavish 1956 adaptation of Verne's book, blurted, "Where's the balloon?" Upon learning that the novel, in fact, had no balloon, Todd replied, "That was Verne's mistake. I want a balloon." He got one, leading to a lovely four minute sequence of the stars David Niven and Cantinflas drifting in the air that added pizazz to the poster, and an extra half million dollars to the already overinflated budget. Shortly after, when Todd died in a plane crash, there was a sense that the showman had, like many of the 19th century explorers he admired, flown too close to the sun. At least Todd's splurge, appropriately named La Coquette, beautifully wed Hollywood's flirtation with the hot air balloon to the generation of great minds who took it from scientific curiosity to fictional razzle dazzle at the speed of imagination and now, with "The Aeronauts" honoring the pioneers who inspired Jules Verne, this buoyant symbol of foolhardy bravery has finally flown around the world and arrived back home.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Mauricio Amaro, the chairman of the Latam Airlines Group, with the tools of his trade in a hangar at Congonhas airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil. On a rainy night a few months ago, Mauricio Amaro, tired after a long day of business meetings, decided to pick up some dinner at the Dean DeLuca in SoHo. There, he ran into a wealthy businessman he knew from Sao Paulo, Brazil. "I was shocked when I saw him," said Mr. Amaro, the chairman of the Latam Airlines Group. "You would never see a high profile person like him going to the grocery store back home, especially not without armored guards. There you go straight from the office, to the car, to home." The scene confirmed for Mr. Amaro why he wants to move his family to New York. "We really want to raise our kids in a more relaxed environment, where they can be free and just walk to school without having to worry about safety," said Mr. Amaro, whose children are 3 and 5. He recently purchased a four bedroom condominium at the Astor, at 235 West 75th Street on the Upper West Side. He will move there with his family once his green card is approved. "New York is a very natural fit for us," he said. "It is very affluent, very cosmopolitan and very multicultural, which is what we are looking for." Foreign buyers have been a mainstay of the New York real estate for years. But the profile of these buyers seems to be changing. Gone is the Chinese shopper snatching up apartments sight unseen on social media sites like WeChat, as are the Russian oligarchs who thought nothing of writing eight figure checks for flashy penthouses with Central Park views. In many cases, those buyers left their apartments empty for much of the year. But now, many international buyers like Mr. Amaro are looking to purchase a home for their families. Driven by a complex catalog of factors in their home countries, including political instability in Brazil, weakening economies in Europe, policy shifts in Russia and currency devaluations in China, these buyers are more conservative about what they are willing to spend. They are conducting more due diligence before making a purchase. And they are turning their focus from the city's various gold coasts to reasonably priced neighborhoods such as the Far West Side of Manhattan; Long Island City, Queens; and parts of Brooklyn. "Foreign buyers purchasing along Central Park grab the headlines, but more of them are focused on the middle market," said Richard Jordan, the senior vice president of global markets at Douglas Elliman Development Marketing. He was speaking from Taipei, where he was about to make a presentation about the Dutch LIC, a condominium in Long Island City that is to begin sales later this year. Mr. Amaro has purchased an apartment as a home at the Astor at 235 West 75th Street. His priority: a "relaxed environment" for his family. The thinking is that buyers in Taipei will like the project because of its prices studios start at 490,000 its tax abatements, its rapidly improving neighborhood and the possibility of appreciation down the road, he said. Data on foreign buyers is hard to pin down, but Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, estimates they make up about 15 percent of the overall Manhattan residential market. Their presence is much larger in the condominium market, where foreigners drive about one third of sales, and they are even more prominent in new developments, where they buy roughly half of all units, Mr. Miller said. Recently, their very prominence has put foreign buyers under new scrutiny. In an effort to corral the real estate taxes that some owners may be avoiding by claiming legal residency outside the city or even the country, the de Blasio administration has imposed new disclosure requirements on shell companies, through which many high end purchases are made. As foreign buyers begin to shift away from trophy towers, the supply coming online is disconnected from the demand. As often happens in real estate cycles, because of the time it takes to plan and construct a building, the apartments now hitting the market tend to be high end. On the market earlier this month were 1,362 apartments priced at 4 million or more in New York City and 185 apartments priced at 20 million or more, according to StreetEasy.com, At the same time, prices were cut at more than one in four apartments priced at 4 million or above and at one in five apartments priced at 20 million or more. Despite the inventory and price cuts, more apartments are coming. Twenty eight condominium developments will deliver 1,175 more apartments through the end of the year, according to Douglas Elliman. Of those, eight buildings with some 375 units, or 32 percent, are considered luxury. And more are in the pipeline. Plans have been filed for 17 additional buildings, bringing another 700 units priced at 4 million or higher, to market over the next year, according to data from CityRealty. "The first generation of new condos are in, and many investors who bought in 2011 or 2012 are now thinking of selling, but there just isn't that kind of robust appreciation," said Stuart Siegel, the president of Engel Volkers New York Real Estate. "Early buyers at One57, for instance, paid up to 6,000 to 7,000 a foot and they probably can't exit for much more than that now." Foreign buyers are not expected to absorb much of this high priced new inventory. "I'm waiting for the Indians to show up," said Raphael De Niro, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman. "I know they will because they have an exploding middle class and a strong economy, but they will be mostly focused on the 3 million and below range." Sanjay Sachdev, who is from Mumbai, is among the Indians who are already here and making just the kind of purchase Mr. De Niro describes. The executive chairman of ZyFin Holdings, a macro analytics research and investment advisory company, Mr. Sachdev did not consider looking at Billionaires' Row on West 57th Street, in West Chelsea or in other neighborhoods where wealthy foreign buyers have been known to flock. Instead, he zeroed in on Hell's Kitchen on the West Side, specifically the area surrounding the Hudson Yards development, where dusty construction workers, towering cranes and loud cement mixers dominate the landscape. There, he bought a two bedroom condominium at the Atelier, at 635 West 42nd Street, where an apartment of similar size is now on the market for 1.175 million. The apartment "was reasonably priced, and we were informed the whole area will soon go through a transformation, so there was long term value," said Mr. Sachdev, who rented out the unit and is now looking to purchase a second property as a pied a terre. The reason Indians are forgoing apartments in flashy new buildings isn't just financial, said Jason Lanyard, a salesman at Stribling Associates, who, along with Nicole Grandelli, a saleswoman at Stribling, represents Mr. Sachdev. Political and social pressures at home, particularly how badly buying an apartment in a trophy building would play to a domestic audience, are also having an impact on Indians' buying choices, they said. "Indians are very hyper aware of who is and who isn't a billionaire because the wealth disparity in the country is so strong," Mr. Lanyard said. He has a client, for instance, who runs a publicly traded bank. "If he were to buy at a building like 15 Central Park West, like the Russians do, his stock would tank," he said. The Indian government also caps how much money each Indian can take out of the country annually, which limits what an individual can spend on real estate abroad. Mr. Sachdev has invested in an apartment at the Atelier on West 42nd Street. Like many recent foreign buyers, he chose an area where the prices are relatively reasonable and the neighborhood is perceived to be on the upswing. Foreign nationals are also buying in the United States because of their children. Mr. Sachdev has one child at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another at the University of Southern California and he will use his second apartment to spend the summers here with his wife while his children are on break. Indians "don't typically take their money out of India because it is unsafe," Ms. Grandelli said, "but because the children are going to school here already or they expect they will someday." The Chinese, whose government cracked down this summer on how much money can be taken out of the country, will continue buying here, but will likely focus on lower priced apartments, said David Friedman, the president and co founder of Wealth X, a firm that tracks the buying patterns of people with a high net worth. By Wealth X's measurements, China comes in third on the list of foreign buyers, behind Britain and Switzerland, whose citizens have been investing in New York real estate for many years. "Political gyrations and geopolitical instability is driving the Chinese flight to safety, but on the other hand, it has diminished their purchasing power," Mr. Friedman said. The Chinese still have plenty of money to spend, so the change is more psychological than financial, Mr. Friedman said. "Chinese care about discounts," he said. "That part of the Chinese psyche was eclipsed by wanting to have their currency in something safe, but now that is going to be a more prevalent attitude, with buyers looking for deals. "Are we going to continue to see Chinese buyers in New York? Absolutely. But are they going to think harder before they buy something? Yes." The number of Russian buyers has dropped in the past year or two, but those who already own here are still buying, said Edward Mermelstein, the managing partner of the law firm Rheem Bell Mermelstein, who has many Russian clients. "Those who are coming here for the first time are doing so for political reasons," Mr. Mermelstein said. "There are changes in Russia, cloaked under the guise of 'anti corruption reforms.' So if they are coming today, it is because they are worried what might happen tomorrow." Whatever the motivator, international buyers continue to seek out New York as a safe investment, although the days of the 100 million penthouse appear to be on the wane. "There are no more vanity purchases," Mr. Mermelstein said. "The name of the game now is return."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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In Spain, an Eco Tour That Follows Cork From Tree to Bottle From June to August, three rural regions across Spain are transformed into otherworldly landscapes; trees in the heart of the cork forest are sheared of their bark, becoming brick red sentinels with leafy tops that guard the woods. And this year, for the first time, visitors are able to experience the harvest with them. A new eco tour allows travelers to watch the cork harvest and later follow donkeys carrying towering loads to one of the traditional pueblos blancos, towns whose buildings are painted stark white and which dot the countryside in Catalonia, Andalusia and Extremadura. The tour, From Bark to Bottle, leads participants on an 11 day trip through Spain's cork trail to discover the lives of the harvesters, the forest's biodiversity and the cultural and gastronomic heritage of the area in essence, the cork's path from tree to wine. Cork is a renewable resource; every year farmers go to a different part of their land to harvest, only returning to the same trees every nine years. The tour, the brainchild of the United States based Cork Forest Conservation Alliance and the ecotourism companies Two Birds One Stone and Namaste Viajes, lets 40 wine loving tourists a year (10 on each of four tours) experience the cork harvest and its cultural, economic and social nuances. "We want people to come home from the trip having fallen in love with the people of the cork forest," said Patrick Spencer, executive director of the alliance. The first leg of the 3,500 trip explores Extremadura's harvest in the southwest of Spain. Farmers there, in the heart of the cork forest, remove bark from the same trees used by their great grandfathers. The intricate process takes only a few cuts before the harvesters peel the bark away like a sharpening pencil. In the expansive savannas there, visitors spend four days watching the harvest, eating lunch with farmers and trying their hand at slicing jamon, the salty slab of cured pork that Spain is famous for, on a farm where pigs are raised eating cork oak acorns. Nights are spent in either a high end hotel tucked in to a refurbished medieval building or an agritourismo, a country estate nestled among cork trees. Days 5 and 6 take travelers farther south to Andalusia, into Los Alcornocales National Park, the largest national park in Spain housing cork forestry. The focus shifts to food, with visits to artisanal cheese, wine and olive oil producers. The evening can be spent attending group dinners while watching burros carry loads of cork bark into town as the sun goes down. Two vans are available to participants, so early risers have a chance to head back to the hotel, while others can enjoy a late evening out. The trip ends in Catalonia, in the mossy and forested northeast, with a visit to a 405 acre privately owned cork forest near the region's rocky coastline, a sensory experience at the Cork Institute, a cork factory excursion, a small production cava maker tour, and a chance to eat fish bought that same morning at a fish auction. Stops include tiny towns the typical tourist doesn't see, like ninth century Ronda, the historic trading center with cobblestone roads and ancient churches that is modern bullfighting's birthplace. Imagine a city divided by a deep canyon, traversed by an arched bridge reminiscent of a Roman aqueduct. Cork bark is closely intertwined with the lives of the people in these regions. "When you go to a little village of 600 people, it doesn't matter whether you're a cobbler or you sell cheese or you run a laundromat or you pump gas," Mr. Spencer said. "All of the money that's coming into your village is coming from cork, so everyone is invested. There's an intimacy between the people of the cork forest and their trees."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The N.H.L. will introduce two new events at its All Star skills competition on Friday in St. Louis. One involves its players attempting trick shots from an elevated platform in the stands. The other is a three on three exhibition featuring top women's players, which, the league hopes, will be received as less of a novelty. At a time when hockey participation among male Canadians is in decline, the N.H.L. hopes to capitalize on the rapid growth the game is experiencing among girls and women. According to U.S.A. Hockey data, participation in girls' and women's hockey in the United States has grown by 34 percent in the past decade, swelling in 2018 19 to more than 83,000 players. In Canada, that number was almost 87,000 in 2017 18, according to the International Ice Hockey Federation. Last year, Kendall Coyne Schofield, who won an Olympic gold medal in 2018 with the United States women's national team, was a last minute replacement for an N.H.L. player in the fastest skater competition: She finished seventh out of eight entrants. Her 14.346 second lap time was less than a second behind the winner, Edmonton Oilers center Connor McDavid. Bill Daly, deputy commissioner of the N.H.L., said that after last year, the league sought to create an "even bigger platform for women during All Star weekend." "Sometimes All Star Games are challenged in creating something new, something special, something different, something that will generate interest," Daly said. "The announcement of this event seems to have created a little buzz that is a real positive." Friday's three on three event will not pay prize money to participants. Instead, the players will receive appearance fees, Daly said. The N.H.L. has also announced it will donate 100,000 to girls' hockey organizations. Daly said the donation would exceed the 30,000 an N.H.L. player could earn by winning a skills event. In Saturday's All Star Game, N.H.L. players will compete for a 1 million pot. The addition of women's hockey at All Star weekend comes in the wake of some male N.H.L. coaches and broadcasters having been fired or suspended in the past year for racist and sexist comments. The three on three event will feature a running clock that covers two 10 minute periods and pits 20 total players each team is composed of nine skaters and a goaltender in a United States vs. Canada battle. Daly said that selecting 20 players was "going to be tricky from the start" and that the N.H.L. leaned on recommendations from the Olympians Angela Ruggiero, Hayley Wickenheiser, Cammi Granato and Cassie Campbell Pascall, supporters of the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association, a nonprofit advocacy group created last spring. Almost all of the participants in the event are members. The addition of the women's three on three event comes during the continuing player led revolt against the National Women's Hockey League, the only women's pro league in North America. Members of the players' association decided not to sign with the N.W.H.L. this season over concerns about operations and low wages. The N.W.H.L.'s highest announced salary is 15,000. Currently, the N.H.L. selectively doles out cash to women's hockey entities. It supplied 100,000 in financing to the N.W.H.L. this season, increasing the amount after its Canadian counterpart folded. For years, the N.H.L. said it would not create a women's league as long as other women's leagues existed. Daly reiterated that there was no intention to create a women's league under the N.H.L. umbrella with the N.W.H.L. still in operation. With Friday's showcase being played over an irregular time frame and sandwiched between competitions like hardest shot and target practice, the format has drawn criticism for being nothing more than a novelty act. "There's effort, but at the same time it's so limited," said Courtney Szto, a professor at the school of kinesiology and health studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. "They have such a great opportunity to generate a connective relationship even if they don't want to fund a league, something that's expected and normal, but it's always these one offs, random isolated events." Szto, who writes for the website Hockey in Society, referenced a women's exhibition game held four years ago at the N.H.L.'s annual Winter Classic that had no live television coverage and was played with a running clock. The N.H.L. has not sponsored a similar event since. "My take on the N.H.L. involvement is, these women deserve everything the N.H.L. has available to them resource wise," Szto said. "I don't think the N.H.L. deserves one lick of their attention, though."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Sofia Pelaez, a sophomore at Texas A M, San Antonio, decided to leave school early to return home as the number of coronavirus cases began to increase in her dorm. College students and their parents face a daunting challenge this Thanksgiving: How can students go home for the holiday without bringing the coronavirus with them? The logistics of Thanksgiving break in the midst of a pandemic are tough. College campuses have emerged as hotbeds of infection in some parts of the country, accounting for more than 252,000 infections and at least 80 deaths. While students are at relatively low risk for complications related to Covid 19, the worry is that an asymptomatic student could unknowingly bring the virus home to vulnerable family members. While some students plan to skip the family gathering, dorms are closing on some campuses, and many students are required to leave and complete finals at home. Others will return to classes after the short break, making prolonged quarantines impossible. The good news is that some colleges have been vigilant about controlling the virus through frequent testing, contact tracing and restrictions on students that have kept cases low. But other campuses have less rigorous testing programs or large numbers of students who aren't taking the virus seriously. "When college students come home, they've really got to be careful," said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert. "It depends on where they're coming from and what the level of infection is in the community they are in." To start, each family needs to decide how much risk a college student with an undiagnosed case of Covid 19 would pose to other family members. "There is no right or wrong answer. It's about the relative risk you're willing to take," said Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "It depends on the contacts in the home you're going to. If you have an immunosuppressed person or a grandfather who's 92 years old, the risk is great. If you're going into a home with a healthy 45 year old father and mother and a brother and sister in their teens, the chances of there being a problem are much less." Here are answers to some common questions parents and students are asking about staying safe during Thanksgiving. What can students do to lower risk before coming home? Parents should have a heart to heart with their student about the risks of Covid 19 to family members. Don't mince words. Ask students to restrict contacts for at least a week before coming home. "You approach it with empathy, concern and mutual respect," said Dr. Asaf Bitton, executive director of Ariadne Labs at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "You can say, 'You're coming home, and I want to ask you to commit to five or seven days before you come home. Please don't go to a bar. Please don't go to a house party. I need to ask you a favor because I care about you, and I know you care about me.'" Ian Zohn, 20, a junior at St. John's University in Minnesota, has decided not to go home to his family in Warren, N.J., for Thanksgiving. He has six roommates who he says are careful, but in some classes, students aren't wearing masks properly. "It's kind of a bummer that I don't feel like it's safe" to go home, he said. "A lot of people are not willing to follow the rules. I'm not putting any of my family members or friends at risk." Should students get tested before leaving campus? Yes. Many colleges are offering coronavirus tests to students before they leave campus. At Indiana University, for instance, all students can receive a free test the week before they leave for the holiday break. "We're hoping that testing before people leave campus will give them that extra confidence in their viral status," said Dr. Erika Cheng, deputy director for mitigation testing and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine. "We certainly don't want anyone unsure about their health status to hop on a plane to go visit their grandmother." Testing isn't a guarantee that a student isn't infected, since the tests are not always accurate, but a negative result makes it less likely. It's also possible that a student who tests negative before leaving campus could pick up the virus on the way home. Despite those concerns, Dr. Fauci advises students to get tested before returning home. "You don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good you can't be 100 percent on anything," Dr. Fauci said. "Between the testing place and going home you could get infected. But if you're careful, you wear a mask and you test negative, you've diminished dramatically the likelihood there's going to be a problem." Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. How should students travel from campus to home? If parents drive to pick up a student, or the student rides home with friends, all passengers in the car should wear a mask and ride with windows open if possible. If it's too cold outside, open the car windows at regular intervals to let out contaminated air. Make sure the car heater or air conditioner is using outside air rather than recirculated air. Students traveling on buses, trains or planes should keep their masks on as consistently as possible, wash hands frequently, sit near empty seats when possible and avoid crowded areas. Should students isolate or wear masks when they get home? While it's optimal to quarantine for two weeks after arriving home, even a few days of isolation, avoiding close contact with family members and mask wearing inside the home lowers the risk that a student will unknowingly transmit the virus to others. If possible, a swab test after the student arrives home offers additional reassurance. "After they've traveled, don't hug and have them take a shower," Dr. Bitton said. "Try to find a place in the house where they won't be in super close proximity, at least for the first couple of days. If there's a person who has high risk health issues in the house, maybe everyone wears a mask for the first couple days." If possible, give the student their own bathroom to further reduce household risk. Open windows throughout the home to improve ventilation. "Even cracked is better than none," Dr. Bitton said. Sofia Pelaez, 21, left her Texas A M University, San Antonio, campus three weeks earlier than planned to travel to her home in League City, Tex., because cases in her dorm were on the rise, but she worried about putting her mother, who has high blood pressure, at risk. "I feel like if something would happen to her, it would be my fault," said Ms. Pelaez, who is studying psychology and child development. She did her best to minimize contacts at school, and was tested two days before leaving campus. On the four hour bus ride home she wore a mask and wiped down her seat. (Fortunately, the bus company kept the seat near her empty.) She even changed her clothes at the bus station after she arrived. She got tested again in League City and wore a mask at home until she got the negative results. "I am not too worried about getting my mom sick because I know I am taking the right precautions," she said. "I keep a mask with me 24 7. It's like wearing shoes." We have students coming home from different colleges. Can they quarantine together? If possible, siblings returning home from different campuses should isolate in separate rooms rather than staying together, particularly if they haven't been tested. You don't want one infected student exposing a sibling who didn't bring the virus home. Cathy Neumann, who lives in Downers Grove, Ill., has three adult children attending three different schools Iowa State University, Western Michigan University and Illinois State University. All three students will be tested before returning home, but she knows they may not have the result before they enter the house. "If one of the kids is positive, we do have the option of them sleeping in our camper on the driveway, or we have enough hotel points to book a hotel room for them," Ms. Neumann said. "We haven't really talked about that though. The boys also live in a house off campus, so if they're positive we could also say, 'Nope, you can't come home.' But I will seriously cry for days if that happens." What can I do to lower risks during the holiday meal? The safest plan is to move your holiday celebration outdoors. If that's not possible, open windows and turn on exhaust fans. Give college students their own serving spoons and have them keep some distance during the meal. Thanksgiving will be different this year. Here are hundreds of our best Thanksgiving recipes from NYT Cooking to help. A computer simulation from Japanese researchers suggests the seating arrangement at the table can affect risk, and it's best to avoid sitting next to or directly across the table from a person who might be infected. The person seated at a diagonal from the infected person is at lowest risk. When you're not eating or drinking, wear a mask. You can find more tips on how to lower risks in our story: "Serve Up Some Extra Precautions at Your Thanksgiving Table This Year." What should I do if all these precautions aren't possible? Every small precaution you take lowers risk. Just do your best. "Sometimes our public health recommendations don't reflect the complex reality of people's lives," said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. "That's not a reason to not try to mitigate risk in small ways. Some combination of testing before travel, mitigating risk during travel and then trying to keep some distance, wearing masks at least a few days after arriving those can all add up to some amount of risk reduction." Amanda Nugent of Wilmette, Ill., realized it was too risky to bring her 21 year old son, Thomas, a senior at Colorado College, home for the holiday. Ms. Nugent said her son has been careful, but it's tough to avoid possible exposures on campus. Instead, Thomas will skip the family meal and go camping with close friends who are part of his "bubble" in Colorado Springs. Ms. Nugent said she is second guessing her decision, but her son, though disappointed, said he doesn't want to put his family at risk. "It's crushing, but we know it's the right call," Ms. Nugent said. "We will take very careful precautions in December so we can safely welcome him home over Christmas." Do you have a health question? Ask Well
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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It was a grim trifecta and a familiar result for Santa Anita Park: Three horses died in three days this past weekend at California's best known and most scrutinized racetrack. All three horses were euthanized, two after breaking their ankles in turf races and the third after colliding with another horse while training on dirt, racing officials said. The latest spate of fatalities at the track began on Friday, when a 6 year old gelding named Harliss broke an ankle in a turf race and was euthanized, according to racing officials. Then on Saturday, a 5 year old gelding named Uncontainable also broke an ankle in a claiming race on turf and was euthanized. The third death came on Sunday when Tikkun Olam, a 4 year old gelding who had won 40,743 in nine races, collided with another horse while training on dirt. The nature of the horse's injuries was not immediately clear. There have now been five deaths at Santa Anita since the start of this year, prompting the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to call on state racing officials to suspend racing at the Arcadia, Calif., track. "Three dead horses in three days requires immediate action," PETA said in a statement. "The California Horse Racing Board was recently given the authority, in legislation backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, to suspend racing and now it must do exactly that." The outcry followed the deaths of 56 horses at Santa Anita from July 1, 2018, to Nov. 30, 2019, according to a special investigation by a task force that was created last year by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. The inquiry found no evidence of criminal animal cruelty or unlawful conduct by the track's owners, the Canada based Stronach Group, which closed Santa Anita in March for several weeks while the track's safety and other racing practices were evaluated. But that has not placated animal welfare activists. "There is no sense in the board allowing racing and deaths to continue until it enacts all its own pending regulations and acts on the recommendations of the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office," PETA said. "If it takes the closure of a track to stop the deaths, then close the track." A spokesman for the California Horse Racing Board declined to comment about the latest track fatalities. Instead, he provided a list of proposed changes to safety regulations on the types of drugs given to horses, racing in inclement weather and the transparency of veterinary records. Some of the recommendations have been adopted, but others still require either board or budgetary approval, according to a checklist from the governing body, which now posts a weekly list of racing fatalities in California on its website. A spokesman for Mr. Newsom, Jesse Melgar, said in an email on Monday that the governor was troubled by the fatalities at the track over the weekend. "While the California Horse Racing Board and Santa Anita have made progress in reducing equine fatalities over the past year and C.H.R.B. has made recommendations to further improve horse safety, Governor Newsom remains concerned and believes more must be done," Mr. Melgar said. "Despite implementing new safety review standards which are now proving to be a new national model too many horses are getting injured or dying as we saw over the weekend." When reached for comment on Monday, a spokesman for Santa Anita Park said the management was crafting a statement. The National Thoroughbred Racing Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Jens Faurschou grew up on the Danish island of Funen, to parents who weren't big art buyers but who had a ceramics collection. No, he did not come from money. "Not a dime, unfortunately," he said. He had a formative experience going to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen, where three works struck him with particular force: an Edward Kienholz, an Yves Klein and an Arman. Mr. Faurschou, 59, studied economics in Denmark, and then in the 1980s started making visits to New York, where he did his first art deal. He learned a lesson: He liked stretching his limits. And on Sunday, the Danish dealer turned philanthropist is opening his third exhibition space as the newest member of New York's private museum club. The museum, Faurschou New York, sits on a quiet street in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn and reflects the personality of its patron: It is reticent in one sense, forceful in another. Offering about 12,000 square feet of exhibition space in a converted industrial warehouse, Faurschou New York debuts with "The Red Bean Grows in the South," a show featuring 17 mostly blue chip artworks by the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rauschenberg, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy and Tracey Emin. Mr. Faurschou (pronounced Fauer skoe) established the Faurschou Foundation in 2011 with his first wife, Luisa, after decades as gallery owners focused on international contemporary art. The foundation opened two spaces, in Beijing in 2011 and in Copenhagen in 2012, before the couple divorced. Now Mr. Faurschou solely owns and funds the foundation. "It's me," he said simply. In addition to supporting its own exhibition spaces, he underwrites artist projects and shows at museums, and was a co founder of the Copenhagen Contemporary art center in 2015. Most of the works in the opening exhibition of Faurschou New York are from the foundation's collection. "We wanted to show who we are," Mr. Faurschou said as construction was underway on the Brooklyn project, which was delayed several times. The opening show, on view until April 11, takes dreaming and longing as its theme. The title comes from a Chinese Tang Dynasty poem, highlighting Mr. Faurschou's strong connection to the country and its art. Two of the works are by Chinese artists: Cai Guo Qiang's "A Boat With Dreams" (2008) and Ai Weiwei's "Two Figures" (2018). Pride of place in the largest, skylit gallery is given to an outsized installation by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, "The Ozymandias Parade" (1985). Alfred Weidinger, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, Germany, has collaborated with Mr. Faurschou several times and received loans from him. "He likes to show works in a very minimalistic, clean way, with a focus on the art," Mr. Weidinger said. He added, "Jens is very shy. He speaks through his collection." Mr. Faurschou was an art dealer for about 25 years before transitioning in 2011 to European philanthropy, and his collection now numbers some 400 mostly contemporary works. He acknowledged that he occasionally deaccessions work from his personal collection, and does consulting work from time to time to fund his exhibition spaces, which are all free to the public. He said that none of the works in the foundation's shows were for sale, and that he wasn't making money from the exhibitions in other ways, either. "We're making shows because that's actually what we love to do," he said. "It's become a passion to make exhibitions." The "we" indicates a family affair: On collecting he consults his second wife, Masha, and on exhibitions, which are curated in Copenhagen, he works with his two sons, Christoffer and Christian, and his daughter, Tasha. There's a skeleton staff on hand in New York for operations. The artist Shirin Neshat a friend of Mr. Faurschou's for 20 years, whose work was recently shown at the foundation's Copenhagen space said that his move away from running commercial galleries did wonders for him. "I think he feels relief at not having to deal with the day to day business aspect" of being a dealer, Ms. Neshat said. Mr. Faurschou, who dealt in both the primary and secondary markets, agreed with that assessment. "When you're a gallerist you have to make sure your artists have bread and butter everyday," he said. Not that he didn't enjoy doing it. Mr. Faurschou recalled negotiating in the 1990s with Ernst Beyeler, the Swiss dealer who founded one of the world's most acclaimed private museums, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. "I sold him a Munch," Mr. Faurschou said of a landscape painting priced at around 2 million. "I bought a Baselitz from him and tried to bargain but in two years he didn't move one cent. Eventually we just agreed." He picked up that Baselitz, the 1983 painting "Die Dornenkronung" ("The Crowning With Thorns"), for around 250,000, later selling it. He also recalled the enjoyment of brokering a package deal for five Picassos and two Miros, at a fire sale price of around 1.5 million, to an eager German buyer in 1994. Faurschou New York is one of several private art museums in the city, along with J. Tomilson Hill's Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea, Glenn Fuhrman's FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea, and the Brant Foundation in the East Village. Mr. Hill, a billionaire investor, advised Mr. Faurschou or anyone starting an exhibition space for that matter that identity is all: "You have to establish a clear brand for the mission." The Faurschou Foundation's location is certainly distinct, on a block that is a study in Brooklyn gentrification. There's a pizza place and an astrologer, but also sleek new residential buildings. After looking at spaces in Harlem, Mr. Faurschou landed three years ago on the Greenpoint location. "I fell in love with this building," he said. "What I love is the big footprint with few columns it's what I am used to from Copenhagen and Beijing." The die was cast. Mr. Aitken, whose work was shown at the foundation's Beijing branch earlier this year, said that the low key building was in keeping with Mr. Faurschou's approach: "He doesn't do a shrine to himself with a starchitect. He's more about a flexible, international network of ideas." The delays encountered in finishing the Greenpoint space did not seem to faze Mr. Faurschou, who recalled the many hoops he had to go through with permits and permissions to get his Beijing museum up and running. "You have to be damn patient," he said. "And then things come alive." That his latest venture is in New York resonates for him. "I came here first in '84 and it was a culture shock," he said, especially when a friend brought him to the East Village to see a performance piece that involved extreme body piercing and attracted the attention of the police. "That piece moved my borders," Mr. Faurschou said. "That's what art does."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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If you want to find out what it's like to be Gail Hochman, a New York literary agent, it wouldn't be enough to merely follow her around during the workday. You'd have to follow her home for the night and back to the office the next morning because it is during her daily commute that Ms. Hochman, 56, goes about the business of poring over unpublished manuscript after unpublished manuscript. "They range from terrible to sort of terrible to maybe this one could actually make it," she said. Ms. Hochman, whose clients include Scott Turow, Michael Cunningham and Julia Glass, recently broke with tradition and divvied up her usual 40 pound pile into two additional heaps one for Amanda Sweet, the other for Julia Gold, two seniors from Carleton College in Minnesota who dutifully followed Ms. Hochman's every directive. Both Ms. Sweet and Ms. Gold moved into Ms. Hochman's Park Slope townhouse for the duration of their recent weeklong spring break as a sort of modern day apprenticeship. "If you want to succeed in publishing, you go to New York," said Ms. Sweet, a Milwaukee native who dreams of a career in publishing, whether in New York or Chicago. While classmates were lapping up tropical drinks or catching up on sleep, Ms. Sweet and Ms. Gold were among the dozen or so students participating in externships, which are essentially job shadowing opportunities that can last a day or two weeks.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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"I think at some point, we will want to, as a species, have a discussion about how involved A.I. will be in art," said Grimes over Zoom.Credit...Elizaveta Porodina for The New York Times The artist says her baby, X AE A XII, stays up watching "radical art." So she made him an A.I. lullaby. "I think at some point, we will want to, as a species, have a discussion about how involved A.I. will be in art," said Grimes over Zoom. Grimes is thinking about a world without humans. "Six million years from now you don't want like Nazi propaganda like propagating through the universe," said Claire Boucher, 32, the singer, songwriter and producer known as Grimes. "Like, that's crazy." She cited experiments where machine learning bots with artificial intelligence trained on Twitter ended up spewing hatred within a matter of days. It's a warning, she believes, about what the future might hold. "As soon as A.I. starts engaging, it puts responsibility on all of us to be better humans, because you know, humanity, in 10,000 years, humanity might be long gone," she said. "And this might be the only consciousness in the universe. So it probably matters quite a bit what we feed it." Talking to the artist, who now goes by 'c' (a reference to the speed of light), feels a bit like drinking from a fire hose of science fiction prophecy. She speaks in rapid bursts about the fate of the human race, her mind stretching into the far reaches of time and space. "I think I'm going down a dark path here. I think A.I. is great. I just feel like, creatively, I think A.I. can replace humans. And so I think at some point, we will want to, as a species, have a discussion about how involved A.I. will be in art," she said. "Do we want to just sit around and just watch A.I. created art all day? I don't know. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. This question opened a lot of doors. I'm now going to stop talking." Concerns aside, her answer as to whether humans should engage with A.I. created art is, for now, a resounding yes. She spoke with The New York Times on a Zoom call alongside the team behind Endel, an app that says it uses artificial intelligence to generate ever changing soundscapes to fit different moods. It has received funding from companies including True Ventures, an investment firm that bankrolled the Grimes collaboration. "This is technology that helps you focus, relax and sleep," said Oleg Stavitsky, the company's chief executive. "It creates a sound environment in real time on the spot, on the device, personalized to you, based on a bunch of inputs. The algorithm that we have created it takes in the time of day, the weather, the heart rate, movement, it plugs all of those inputs into the algorithm. And it creates that soundscape personalized to you in real time." Grimes had already been using the app herself to help with sleep; she ended up contributing a soothing, ambient soundtrack to the company that Endel calls an "AI Lullaby," which is released today. (It will be available on the app for the next eight weeks.) Grimes said she was also inspired to work with Endel because of her search for "a better baby sleeping situation" for her five month old son, X AE A XII Musk, who she calls 'X.' (His father is her boyfriend Elon Musk.) "When you have a baby, you're always using white noise machines," she said. "It's much easier to get them to sleep if you train them on some kind of audio situation. And so I was just like, could this be more artistic?" She stopped herself: "OK, wait, wait. I'm not insulting babies. I'm just, it's all very one vibe. I just feel like getting out of the like, 'Here's a zebra and a bear in, like, pastel color tones' energy," she said. "That's just one very small sort of creative lens that things can be looked at through." Tired of tossing and turning? There are some strategies you could try to improve your hours in bed. None Four out of five people say that they suffer from sleep problems at least once a week and wake up feeling exhausted. Here's a guide to becoming a more successful sleeper. Stretching and meditative movement like yoga before bed can improve the quality of your sleep and the amount you sleep. Try this short and calming routine of 11 stretches and exercises. Nearly 40 percent of people surveyed in a recent study reported having more or much more trouble than usual during the pandemic. Follow these seven simple steps for improving your shut eye. When it comes to gadgets that claim to solve your sleep problems, newer doesn't always mean better. Here are nine tools for better, longer sleep. After all, she said, babies "do have taste. They definitely like some things. They don't like other things. They fully have opinions." Social norms do not dictate X's media diet. "I've watched 'Apocalypse Now' and stuff with my baby," she said. "He's into radical art. Like, he just actually is, and I don't think it's problematic to engage with them on that level." The music Grimes created was made up of stems sonic building blocks that eventually fed the app's algorithm. Throughout the process of making it, she would send stems over, the Endel team would give feedback, and then she would send back new batches. Eventually, Endel's programmers, sound designers and algorithm turned her contributions into an ever shifting soundtrack. The end result is a soothing, shimmery soundscape, with snippets of Grimes' auto tuned voice sprinkled throughout. "I was basically personally just referencing ambient music I've heard, and then kind of trying to make it cuter," she said. "It's a bit sparklier, a bit nicer." She draws a contrast between evolution as its so far occurred on Earth "it's been like a survival of the fittest kind of thing" and the ways that A.I. machine learning works, which she feels is closer to intelligent design, the theory that the universe or life itself could not have been created by chance but must have been molded, at least in part, by a creative or spiritual force. "I feel like there's something really magical to that," she said. "Something like the meaning of the universe." "Sounds absurd, but you know what I mean? Are humans, like, cracking the God code or something?" She clarified that Endel "is obviously like a low level, baby A.I. But you know what I mean, it feels like it has that, the weight of it feels profound." "My brother said something the other day that was kind of freaky, and profound and beautiful, where he was, like, 'You know, like, what if everyone writing books is just writing content for A.I. to farm? And in the future, instead of reading like, 'Harry Potter' or something, like you would just type in your five favorite books, and A.I. would auto generate everybody, like, their own perfect books to read, and authors will become completely irrelevant and just be, they'll just be generating stuff to train A.I. And A.I. will be like, the real artists.' And I was like, 'Wow, that's kind of like, dark.'" In 100 years, she predicted, "If you feed an A.I. all the greatest artists ever, it will probably be able to auto generate really creative, really evocative art." It may even be able to create superhumanly talented artists, "like, David Bowie times a million," she said. "An artist who's just super charismatic and amazing and fun, and just makes the best music, and can make 1,000 songs a day, and just do 1,000 interviews a day, simultaneously. There's no reason that can't exist." "It's sort of like the last time when we're not going to be competing against gods to make art. I mean, I might be wrong about this, I don't know, but this is just my take on the situation, which I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I just think the world is going to change, in like a really dramatic way over the course of the next probably hundred years, or whatever, unlike any change that has ever happened before, because there'll be a new type of consciousness existing." Working on a project where she did not have control over the final product appealed to her. "Everything you make when you make art is like, a contribution to like millions and millions of artists," she said. "My neural net, my brain is just filled with the work of other artists, and everything I make has the fingerprints of literally, like, thousands or tens of thousands of people's work," she said. "We don't create anything in a vacuum. When you create art, like you're basically just feeding into this big, sacred legacy of work. And you're just feeding into the neural net of every other human. You know, it's like, ultimately, we all kind of function like A.I.; we're all a product of all the content that we feed ourselves. And so, you know, it's just like, it's just funny to be like, 'Oh, this is my work.' In reality, it's the result of thousands of years of human art making."
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LOUISVILLE, Ky. They could hear the whispers. One year after taking one of the most infamous defeats in N.C.A.A. tournament history by becoming the first No. 1 seed to lose to a No. 16 seed, the Virginia Cavaliers came back stronger than ever. They won the Atlantic Coast Conference regular season, and still there were skeptics. Earning the No. 1 seed in the South Region did little to quiet them. They play ugly, the critics said. They do not have the offense to prevail in a key tournament game. Sure, they can play defense, but that won't be enough in March. After a first round scare against Gardner Webb, yet another No. 16 seed, the cries grew louder. No way could this squad cut down the nets in Louisville. No way could Virginia make it to Minneapolis and the Final Four. Oh, how wrong those skeptics were. Virginia, in an overtime thriller, turned back third seeded Purdue, 80 75, to punch its ticket. "I don't care about the critics," Cavaliers Coach Tony Bennett said, adding: "I just know it was really hard to lose in the first round. It stung. It was, as I said, a painful gift. It was so humbling but it drew me and drew our team closer in a way we couldn't have gone." It first appeared as if the game would be played at Purdue's pace. Both teams scored on their first four possessions, with Purdue taking an 11 8 lead just 3 minutes 30 seconds in. And a Virginia team that had allowed more than 70 points only three times this season appeared to be on its way to yielding far more. But the hot shooting soon ceased, and empty trips became the norm. Virginia scored just 4 points in 7:13, which allowed Purdue to edge clear and take a 22 12 lead. The double digit advantage prompted raucous "Boiler Up!" chants from the Purdue faithful. They sensed a foe on the ropes, a quick knockout in the offing. The Cavaliers, though, clamped down, giving up just 8 points over the last 9:46 of the first half to get back in the contest. Even Ryan Cline the Purdue senior guard who seemed as if he could not miss during Thursday night's regional semifinal, and who on Saturday picked up where he had left off began to cool off. Only Carsen Edwards found success for the Boilermakers on offense in the first half, putting up 16 points en route to a game high 42. "Never do I feel like I'm choosing to carry the team," Edwards said. "It's just I felt good and had rhythm on the shots I was taking, and they were just able to go in." Little by little, Virginia ate into the deficit, whittling it to 1 at halftime, 30 29. The Cavaliers survived a poor shooting half from one of their key scorers, Kyle Guy, who went just 1 for 6. They also nearly lost him when he took a bad step and was left clutching his ankle and writhing in pain. But Guy, a junior guard, made it to the sideline and was able to return after his ankle had been taped up. Good thing for Virginia, because Guy found his stroke coming out of the locker room. One 3 pointer. Then another. Then another. The Cavaliers, once 10 behind, were now 7 points to the good leading by 41 34 with 15:18 to play. But Edwards was inspired to match Guy's sharpshooting with a 3 point hat trick of his own on three straight trips, to boot. After the last of them, which brought Purdue to 50 46, Edwards turned to the Boilermakers' contingent and offered a nod of acknowledgment. He was determined to carry his squad across the finish line. So too was Guy, who finished with 25 points. Back and forth the two stars went. For a time, it seemed as if they were the only two on the floor. They made shots from everywhere. "He's got nothing to hang his head on." Guy said of Edwards, calling him a "bad dude." Guy added that it was a "performance for the ages by him, and by both teams." After trailing for almost all of the second half, Purdue took the lead on a rare Edwards miss, as Nojel Eastern corralled the rebound and laid it in, giving the Boilermakers a 64 63 edge with 3:59 remaining. Virginia reclaimed the advantage, but Edwards banked home a 3 pointer to put Purdue up, 69 67, with 1:10 left. Purdue appeared to have the contest under control after Grady Eifert hauled in an offensive rebound with 19 seconds to play. The superb shooting Cline was fouled with a chance to make it a two possession game. But a miss kept Virginia alive, trailing by 70 67. Purdue Coach Matt Painter ordered his club to foul, putting Ty Jerome on the line for the Cavaliers with 5.9 seconds to play. What followed? Madness. After Jerome made the first free throw, the second clanked off the iron and bounded into the backcourt where Kihei Clark chased it down for Virginia. Clark took two quick dribbles and then launched a rocket of a pass nearly 50 feet downcourt, where it was cradled by the junior forward Mamadi Diakite. And just before the clock hit 0.0, Diakite drained an 8 foot jumper to, unfathomably, square the contest at 70 70. "We had the ball in the guy's hands that we wanted. Clark had the ball," Painter said, adding, "With that being said, he made an unbelievable play to find Diakite." On to overtime, and the game slowed down to Virginia's preferred pace. Neither team gained separation, with the margin at less than 2 for much of the extra period. A layup by De'Andre Hunter put the Cavaliers ahead by 76 75, with 26 seconds to play. There was no doubt who would take the last shot for Purdue. It was Edwards. But the stifling defense of the Cavaliers owned the moment. And Edwards's 3 point heave clanked harmlessly off the iron with eight seconds left. The crowd, predominantly filled with Purdue fans, fell into a hush. And Virginia, finishing with four free throws, silenced its doubters.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Installation view of "Feliciano Centurion: Abrigo" at Americas Society. The artist painted or embroidered plants and animals on found objects like blankets and aprons. At the center are animal figurines clothed in tiny garments. One source of comfort these days can be found in art history, which is filled with hundreds of examples of artists confronting pandemics, fear and isolation, and on the other hand, encountering heartening instances of cooperation, community and healing. Search the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website using keywords like "plague" or "healing" and you will find an astonishing volume of objects devoted to these themes. Some recent examples are the textiles of the Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurion (1962 1996), who died of complications from AIDS. They are on virtual display in the aptly titled show "Abrigo" at the Americas Society. Abrigo means "shelter" in Spanish, but also "overcoat," "blanket," To make these works, Mr. Centurion painted or embroidered plants and animals on found objects like blankets and aprons. There are birds of paradise, tigers and crabs animals whose plumage or patterns or movement are of perennial interest to artists. His work often derived from folk art and traditional craft practices and used humble materials although a series of sculptures made with animal figurines clothed in tiny garments are more humorous (and underscore the "abrigo" idea of covering the body with a wrap). In addition to allusions to L.G.B.T. sexuality and eroticism, Mr. Centurion's art contains rich veins of nostalgia and contemplation. "Living is all sacrifice," one embroidered piece from 1996 says in Spanish. An apron, also from 1996, the year of his death, is embroidered with the words "My house is my temple." For everyone viewing Mr. Centurion's work online, this is a humbling reminder of what shelter means at this moment and an encouragement to make art from whatever materials are on hand. Jennifer Bolande's "The Composition of Decomposition" at Magenta Plains is centered on an installation, "Image Tomb (with skeletons)," in which a stack of newspapers issues of The New York Times, dating from 2013 to 2015 is "excavated" with a rectangular hole to reveal a photograph about halfway down. This photo shows half a dozen exhumed skeletons, 14th century victims of a London plague. It's a powerful idea: On the one hand, it's heady, almost exhilarating, to be reminded that the majestic procession of history comprises nothing but days like today. On the other hand, being part of history can also be horrifying, when it means that medieval London is still just down the block. Of course, whether you're using the virtual showroom or just the gallery's feed of still images, looking at this piece online is hardly the same as looking in real life. Without the physical presence of the yellowing newspapers, this insight into the nature of time and memory just looks facile. But in a way, that only makes the show even more suited to the moment. Ms. Bolande's subject, generally speaking, is the way that the information we take in itself constitutes the world we inhabit. And right now, as we depend on the internet more than ever for our social and aesthetic needs, looking at her thoughtful, exactingly rendered show through a flickering, four color computer screen is positively chilling.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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In media, in politics and in Hollywood, the usual script followed by people accused of sexual harassment or assault in the last five months has been to hire a crisis manager, to apologize for the offensive behavior (usually while denying ill intent) and maybe enter rehab. In fashion, a world where sex is part of the landscape and the definition of acceptable behavior has long been blurry, there are still few apologies. More often, there is an aggressive response to accusations, leaving colleagues and business partners in a state of doubt or denial. Last week, Paul Marciano, a founder of Guess, said he was temporarily relinquishing his day to day responsibilities at his company after Kate Upton accused him of groping, harassment, intimidation and firing her from jobs. He called her accusations "preposterous." Patrick Demarchelier, who is one of the most famous photographers working; Karl Templer, a top stylist; and Greg Kadel, a photographer known for his work with Victoria's Secret, were all named in a recent Boston Globe report about sexual harassment in the fashion business. After three models said Mr. Templer had touched them inappropriately, he issued an open letter that said he was sorry "if" he had "ever inadvertently treated a model disrespectfully or without due care." Mr. Kadel, accused of assault, had a representative say that he had "never sexually coerced or assaulted anyone in his life." But Mr. Demarchelier, accused of aggressive and unwanted advances? "People lie and they tell stories," he told The Globe, saying his accusers were people who get "frustrated if they don't work." In January, Giovanni sent a letter to his clients, obtained by The Times, criticizing reporting on sexual harassment. It read, in part: "I'm sure you all have read the allegations against my brother Mario in the papers this weekend. I am shocked by the news and am deeply saddened and disturbed by this phenomenon where media has take upon itself to be both judge and jury; where one is guilty until proven innocent based only on accusations." This week, Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of Dior, provided a statement regarding the allegations about Mr. Templer, who had styled the house's shows since she joined the brand, and with whom she had worked in her previous role at Valentino. "I really hope that the truth will come out very soon," Ms. Chiuri wrote. "I think in this difficult period it is wise to give Karl Templer the time to officially clarify the situation so that we can continue our collaboration in the very near future." The fashion companies who moved quickly to distance themselves from Mr. Testino and from the photographer Bruce Weber, who was also accused in the Times article by models of sexualized abuse of his authority also had caveats. Conde Nast declared it would not work with Mr. Testino and Mr. Weber "for the foreseeable future," an addendum that New York magazine recently characterized as "not exactly Time's Up more like Let's Give It Time." All of this makes it seem possible that many of the men accused of misconduct will be welcomed back into the industry in the future. Given the range of allegations, this could lead to even greater confusion about what is acceptable professional behavior, instead of real change. Out of concern that fashion may revert to the status quo, since the publication of the Times article nearly two months ago, more male models and assistants have come forward to say they were harassed, often in situations linked to promises of work, by Mr. Testino between 1995 and 2015. Some said they wanted to speak out now because of what they saw as attempts to undermine the previous accusers. Each of these men described making it clear to Mr. Testino that they were not going to have sex with him. For some, when they did, Mr. Testino's professional interest in them ended abruptly. "I continue to deny any wrongdoing," Mr. Testino said in a statement provided by his lawyers this week, when presented with these new accusations from five men, bringing the total number of accusers to 18. "However, in the current environment, accusations like the ones leveled against me have proved to be just as damning and devastating as actual proof of wrongdoing, which they are not. It has become nearly impossible and certainly unpopular for anyone to try and defend himself against these types of allegations. It is important to hear both sides of every story, with no preconceived ideas, before jumping to judgment." Oliver Bjerrehuus, a Danish model who has appeared in advertising campaigns for Prada, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, Nautica and Dolce Gabbana, met Mr. Testino in the mid '90s. Mr. Bjerrehuus assented to being photographed naked. Then, he said, Mr. Testino reached to grope his genitals "and I grabbed his throat," he said. "An assistant rushed in, and I said to Mario, 'Get that camera and shoot the picture. You at least owe me that.' I told him that because I knew that if you did a shoot with Mario Testino or Bruce Weber people would mention it and it would do something good for your career." But the pictures were never published and, he never worked for Mr. Testino again. In 2010 Cory Bond, a model who has appeared in campaigns for Dolce Gabbana and Guess, met Mr. Testino. In a recent Instagram post, Mr. Bond described an incident that began when Mr. Testino "came for drinks with me, my wife and his friend," and "talked of these amazing shoots that we could shoot together." When the two wound up alone together, Mr. Bond wrote, "He got very close to me and just shoved his hand down my pants and I retreated backward. He told me, 'Everyone does this. I have couples that I love to shoot that do everything (whatever that meant). I said, 'Well, I'm not everyone.' He then immediately left. He never contacted me again." That was around the time Shaun Hartas, then a 27 year old aspiring photographer, began assisting Mr. Testino. There was nothing quite like getting to work for Mr. Testino, who that very year photographed 10 of the 12 covers of Vogue. Mr. Testino was smart and charismatic, "the life of every party," Mr. Hartas said. But it came with a downside. "I worked for him for 15 months, and for 15 months I was harassed. It never stopped," Mr. Hartas said. Most mornings Mr. Testino was in New York, Mr. Hartas said that he would pick up Mr. Testino at his apartment building on Bond Street and drive him to set in a Range Rover. "Every day he would sit in the front and try to grab my" genitals, Mr. Hartas said. "He would ask, 'Are you straight or are you gay?' I'd say, 'Straight,' and he'd say, 'No, you have to be nothing. If you're nothing, you can be everything. The second you label yourself, you limit yourself.' He would say, 'Maybe you can come to London and Paris?'" Mr. Hartas recalled, "It was like there was this lifestyle he'd welcome you into if you gave him what he wants." One morning that spring, Mr. Hartas and Mr. Testino were on their way to photograph Sarah Jessica Parker for the August cover of Vogue. According to Mr. Hartas, Mr. Testino was being particularly aggressive. Mr. Hartas asked him to stop fondling him. He said he was told by Mr. Testino to wait in the car while Mr. Testino did his shoot, and was never booked to work with Mr. Testino again. Two longtime fashion industry professionals corroborated that Mr. Hartas began telling them he was being harassed months before he stopped working for Mr. Testino. In 2013, the photographer Edward Mulvihill started freelancing for Mr. Testino. "I'd been warned," he said. "I'd heard the stories going into this. The rumors were all true." One of Mr. Mulvihill's first tasks was traveling with Mr. Testino to Los Angeles, where they were shooting the fall 2013 campaign for Michael Kors and a new cover of Brazilian Vogue featuring Pamela Anderson. "It was kind of a joke among the crew that being the new guy traveling to Los Angeles, you had to stay in Mario's house the first night, and that you'd better watch out," Mr. Mulvihill said. After dinner, Mr. Mulvihill returned to Mr. Testino's home in the Hollywood Hills. Mr. Mulvihill said he was provided with his own room and his own bed, but "it was Mario trying to get me drunk, Mario trying to kiss me, and Mario trying to jump on me," he said. "Later, we were riding in an elevator somewhere and he just shoved his hands down my pants and tried to finger me." Mr. Mulvihill said he was offered full time work, which he declined. (Like Mr. Hartas, Mr. Mulvihill referred The Times to people who said they were told of this back then, years before allegations against Mr. Testino became public.) Both Mr. Mulvihill and Mr. Hartas said that they were coming forward about Mr. Testino's behavior out of solidarity with the initial group of accusers. "I don't want to see those brave men get discredited," Mr. Hartas said. In 2015, Mr. Testino was back in Los Angeles, and was introduced by an agent to a model named Kenny Sale at a bar. Much like Mr. Hartas, Mr. Sale said he was also asked repeatedly that evening if was straight or gay. "He kept saying, 'So, are you into guys?' and I would say, 'I have a girlfriend.' He just brushed that off and said, 'Maybe you should try something new. Maybe you'd like it." Later, Mr. Sale ended up in a bathroom with Mr. Testino. "He just pushes me up against the wall and sticks his tongue down my throat," Mr. Sale said. "I'd never experienced anything like that. He pressed me up against the wall again, and that time his hand went down my pants, first in the front and then around the back. He used his hand to give me a 'prostate exam.'" Mr. Sale said he was asked to drive Mr. Testino home and didn't know quite how to get out of it. "As I was driving, he unbuttoned my pants and grabbed my penis," he said. "I guess I could have pulled over, but I had a white hot feeling going down my spine and I was so embarrassed I didn't know what to do." He still questions himself and said he was also coming forward now out of solidarity with the men who came before him, though he hadn't met any of them. "I don't want it to happen again," he said.
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More gallery group shows should have the rich connective tissue of this one. It brings together works by 13 artists of different nationalities, ages and mediums, some unknown here, and has been organized by Miciah Hussey, director of artist relations at the Gladstone Gallery. The title comes from a line of Adrienne Rich's 2009 poem "Quarto": "No one writes lyric on a battlefield." But of course we all do, especially artists: Lyric is poetry as autobiography and the battlefield is life. The desires and tensions of the struggle, usually pertaining to women or gay men, are felt throughout this show. Anne Collier's large color photograph of vintage cue cards perhaps for teachers of fiction writing sets the stage by asking, "Are there other ways to interpret this information?" Indeed. Some works outshine the others. Senga Nengudi's "Rapunzel," a large staged photograph from 1981, pushes fairy tale into nightmare, and Ellen Berkenblit's painting shows her signature pointy nosed heroine, who blends with and confronts an abstract jangle of color and fabric. Kandis Williams's "Cervical Smile" takes on the feigned happiness demanded of women from pre Freudian times forward; it might be titled "From Hysteria to Hollywood." The three paintings from Dawn Mellor's series of exuberantly vandalized celebrity portraits are among her best, ambiguously balancing what has been done to the canvas and to its subject. In her painting "Reg Park and the Hard Gainers," Suzanne McClelland scatters cyclones of dark marks and smears with contrasting body measurements and weights. Maybe competing boxers? Reg Park is the father of modern bodybuilding; hardgainers are devotees who don't achieve results. The painting portrays a man desperate to be manlier. Seen in New York for the first time, the work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor consists of two sculptures: enigmatic, seemingly lost parcels on the floor. Each is a paper bag containing a large wrapped box and a pair of old fashioned hosiery still in cellophane. The colors and surfaces of the papers are overly intense and matched to the hosiery; secrets of the flesh are sensed, displaced and remain hidden. Also new to New York are the extraordinary little tableaus of f.maquespenteado, a Brazilian born artist based in Portugal. Assembling texts, found objects and materials some of them embroidered with gorgeously colored portraits he creates exquisite vignettes that are arch yet poignant studies in loneliness, companioned or not.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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The framework of a settlement has been reached in the salacious legal battle over the mental competency of the ailing media mogul Sumner M. Redstone, two people with knowledge of the discussions said Thursday. The agreement, which requires approval from a judge, would put an end to the four month public spectacle that began in November when Manuela Herzer, a former companion and romantic partner of Mr. Redstone, filed a lawsuit challenging Mr. Redstone's mental capacity. If signed, the deal would make clear that Mr. Redstone, 92, is now making his own health care decisions, one person said. If that changes, Mr. Redstone's daughter would take over the supervision of his health care in conjunction with a family friend who lives in Los Angeles, where Mr. Redstone also lives, this person said. Other terms include detailed plans for Mr. Redstone's health care as well as for a payment to Ms. Herzer, which could reach into the tens of millions of dollars, people with knowledge of the deliberations said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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It hit the top of the Apple podcast charts in 2018 and won major journalism awards, but now The Times says "Caliphate" contained flawed reporting. After an internal review that took more than two months, The New York Times has determined that "Caliphate," its award winning 2018 podcast, did not meet the standards for Times journalism. The 12 part audio documentary featuring Rukmini Callimachi, a Times correspondent who has frequently reported from conflict zones, sought to shed light on the Islamic State terrorist group. The Times found that "Caliphate" gave too much credence to the false or exaggerated accounts of one of its main subjects, Shehroze Chaudhry, a resident of Canada who claimed to have taken part in Islamic State executions. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said the blame fell on the newsroom's leaders, including himself. "When The New York Times does deep, big, ambitious journalism in any format, we put it to a tremendous amount of scrutiny at the upper levels of the newsroom," he said in a podcast interview that was posted by The Times on Friday. "We did not do that in this case," he continued. "And I think that I or somebody else should have provided that same kind of scrutiny, because it was a big, ambitious piece of journalism. And I did not provide that kind of scrutiny, nor did my top deputies with deep experience in examining investigative reporting." The Times started its review of "Caliphate" after Canadian authorities arrested Mr. Chaudhry on Sept. 25 and charged him with perpetrating a terrorist hoax. In an Editors' Note on Friday, The Times said its investigation had "found a history of misrepresentations by Mr. Chaudhry and no corroboration that he committed the atrocities he described in the 'Caliphate' podcast. As a result, The Times has concluded that the episodes of 'Caliphate' that presented Mr. Chaudhry's claims did not meet our standards for accuracy." The Editors' Note described two main problems: The Times's failure to assign an editor well versed in terrorism to keep a close watch on the series; and the "Caliphate" team's lack of skepticism and rigor in its reporting on Mr. Chaudhry. "From the outset, 'Caliphate' should have had the regular participation of an editor experienced in the subject matter," the note said. "In addition, The Times should have pressed harder to verify Mr. Chaudhry's claims before deciding to place so much emphasis on one individual's account." Every episode of "Caliphate" now begins with a correction read by Michael Barbaro, the host of The Daily podcast, who tells listeners that the chapters on Mr. Chaudhry "did not meet our standards for accuracy." A new installment, "An Examination of 'Caliphate,'" has also been added. It includes the interview with Mr. Baquet, conducted by Mr. Barbaro, that was released on Friday. In the interview, Mr. Baquet raised the possibility that Mr. Chaudhry had "duped" The Times, but said the news organization was at fault. "Look, there was a well known reporter involved in it Rukmini Callimachi," he said. "But this failing isn't about any one reporter. I think this was an institutional failing." The Times reviewed "Caliphate" in two separate investigations. Dean E. Murphy, an associate managing editor for investigations, headed a group that examined how the series was reported, edited and fact checked, and reviewed past articles by Ms. Callimachi. Mark Mazzetti, an investigative correspondent with an expertise in intelligence, led a team of reporters who looked into Mr. Chaudhry. On Friday the Times published an article by the Mazzetti led team, which provided a depiction of Mr. Chaudhry that contrasted sharply with the man who was central to "Caliphate," describing him as "a fabulist who spun jihadist tales about killing." Mr. Baquet said in the interview with Mr. Barbaro that "the reporting team couldn't find any independent evidence to back up his story of being an ISIS executioner in Syria." He added, "I think this guy, we now believe, was a con artist, who made up most if not all that he told us." Since the start of the review process, Ms. Callimachi's byline has not appeared in The Times. Mr. Baquet said in an interview for this article that Ms. Callimachi will stay at the paper. "She's going to take on a new beat, and she and I are discussing possibilities," he said. "I think it's hard to continue covering terrorism after what happened with this story. But I think she's a fine reporter." Her last published work was a series of articles on the killing of Breonna Taylor. As a result of the internal investigation, The Times added editors' notes describing problems with two articles by Ms. Callimachi in 2014 and 2019. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In a Twitter statement on Friday, Ms. Callimachi, who declined to comment for this article, said, "To our listeners, I apologize for what we missed and what we got wrong. We are correcting the record and I commit to doing better in the future." "Caliphate" was something new for The Times a venture into narrative audio that came as part of a recent emphasis on multimedia journalism. It was a creation of the Times audio department, which has grown quickly since it was started in 2016. In its review, The Times found that journalists working in audio had less oversight from upper level editors than reporters who work for the newspaper itself. "We do a lot of things we didn't do before," Mr. Baquet said in the interview for this article. "We don't just produce long form newspaper stories. I don't think we have built a system to give that kind of support to some of the bigger things we do." He added, "For the most part we've gotten everything right. But I think this fell through the cracks, because it was a different way of telling stories than The New York Times is used to. We didn't have a system in place to manage that, to help the audio team manage that." "Caliphate" had suspenseful moments, a moody score and a pair of likable hosts in Ms. Callimachi, the winner of major journalism awards for her reporting on terrorism and Islamic extremism, and Andy Mills, an audio producer and reporter. The series was the brainchild of Lisa Tobin, the executive producer of Times audio; Sam Dolnick, an assistant managing editor; and Mr. Mills, according to two people with knowledge of the podcast. The first installment came out on April 19, 2018, as part of an episode of The Daily. The first words of "Caliphate" were an exchange between Ms. Callimachi and Mr. Chaudhry taken from a 2016 interview recorded in Canada. "How does ISIS prepare you to kill people?" Ms. Callimachi asked. Mr. Chaudhry, who said he had assumed the name Abu Huzayfah as a member of the Islamic State, replied haltingly, saying, "We had dolls to practice on." In later installments, he said he had taken part in lashings, as well as the killings of two people, describing the executions in grisly detail. His apparent confession created a firestorm in Canada. Politicians asked why a supposed Islamic State executioner was living quietly within the nation's borders. Upon his Sept. 25 arrest, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police charged Mr. Chaudhry under a law usually applied to people who make false terroristic threats. The hoax charge cast doubt on "Caliphate," but The Times was initially supportive. "The uncertainty about Abu Huzayfah's story is central to every episode of 'Caliphate' that featured him," a Times spokeswoman said in a Sept. 26 statement. Days later, The Times announced that it would review the series, which had been a popular and critical success in 2018, hitting No. 1 on Apple's list of most downloaded podcasts and later winning an Overseas Press Club prize and a Peabody Award. (By the end of Friday, the Overseas Press Club had rescinded its award, and The Times said it had offered to return the Peabody, an offer that was accepted by the Peabody Awards' executive director.) There had been warning signs during and even before the months when "Caliphate" episodes came out each Thursday. In a 2017 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mr. Chaudhry gave an account of his time with the Islamic State that differed greatly from what he had told Ms. Callimachi. In that CBC interview, he said he had "witnessed violence on a scale he could never have imagined," but did not say he had taken part. In another interview, published on the CBC website on May 11, 2018, Mr. Chaudhry recanted his confession. When asked why he had told The Times that he had participated in atrocities, he said, "I was being childish. I was describing what I saw and, basically, I was close enough to think it was me." The "Caliphate" team decided to add an episode on the discrepancies in Mr. Chaudhry's account. It was released May 24, 2018, under the title "Chapter Six: Paper Trail." In it, Ms. Callimachi said she had gone over her notes and documents with fresh eyes and noticed stamps in Mr. Chaudhry's passport suggesting he had misled her concerning his whereabouts at certain times. "It was at that point that I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach," she said in the episode. Narrative journalism can be perilous, said Ann Marie Lipinski, a former editor in chief of The Chicago Tribune who has run the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard since 2011. "That's a certain kind of storytelling that is much valued and does have this built in entertainment quality," she said. "But you can never sacrifice the reporting to that." In his interview with Mr. Barbaro, Mr. Baquet said that "a really good piece of journalism not only chews on the stuff that supports the story it chews on the stuff that refutes the story." "And in the end," he continued, "good journalism comes from some sort of internal debate over whether or not the stuff that supports the story is more powerful than the stuff that refutes the story. I think this is one of those cases where I think we just didn't listen hard enough to the stuff that challenged the story. And to the signs that maybe our story wasn't as strong as we thought it was."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Matters of identity are consuming society at large. But when the New York Musical Festival takes them up, and show tunes are involved, it's a drag queen, a guru and a mermaid who do the pondering. In Jason Jacobs and Matthew C. Pritchard's solo "Miss Blanche Tells It All," the title character (Brian Charles Rooney) is a performer at the New Orleans club the Golden Lantern. We are in the late 1960s, and Miss Blanche is due onstage any minute. Except that it's one Lee who turns up, clad in a gender neutral wrap and makeup that highlights his cheekbones. In between swigs of booze, Lee recounts his hectic childhood and gradually peels off layers of history, while simultaneously building up the apparition of Blanche theatergoers familiar with Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire" will easily pick up the trail of bread crumbs dropped by Mr. Jacobs's book. Appropriately, considering its relationship to Williams, this is a memory musical. Which makes it ambitious, but not necessarily successful. Mr. Pritchard's art songs tend to meld into one another and could use a bit more va va voom, and the switches in point of view from Lee to Blanche and back again are often unclear it's amazing that the Golden Lantern patrons, who likely did not pay to hear increasingly liquored up recollections, don't boo Lee off the stage.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Outside of Russia, Rimsky Korsakov's music has remained largely on the periphery of the repertory. But he will be front and center at this year's Bard SummerScape, which will take place at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, N.Y., from June 28 to Aug. 19, and includes performances of music, theater and dance. The SummerScape centerpiece, the Bard Music Festival, is known for its ambitious programming, taking deep dives into underserved composers (like Carlos Chavez) and resurrecting little known works a favorite practice of its organizer, the conductor (and president of Bard) Leon Botstein. Twelve programs, over Aug. 10 12 and Aug. 17 19, will explore Rimsky Korsakov's influences, contemporaries, and his effect on a future generation of Russian composers. His one act opera "Mozart and Salieri," which depicts the infamous relationship between the two composers, will be performed Aug. 18; there will be a semi staged production of "The Tsar's Bride" on Aug. 19. Rimsky Korsakov's arrangement of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" will be heard in a screening of "Fantasia," on July 29, as part of the festival's film series. SummerScape's central opera production will not be by Rimsky Korsakov, but by his compatriot Anton Rubinstein, who was 15 years his elder. "The Demon," which depicts a fallen angel falling in love, will be given a new production with a Russian cast, July 27 Aug. 5; Thaddeus Strassberger directs, and Mr. Botstein will lead the American Symphony Orchestra.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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I was in Winston Salem, N.C., then, and had never been further north than Washington, D.C. But for as long as I could remember, New York was where I felt I belonged. Listening to "Sunday Clothes" for the first time on an album I had half paid for myself (my sister and I pooled our allowances) I found my fantasy gateway to a place I was determined would become my home. You see, for me, New York was synonymous with Broadway, which was synonymous with musical comedy. How could "Sunday Clothes" be other than a siren call? It was brass, hope, determination and urbanity all traits I associated with musicals incarnate. Jerry Herman was a master of such shameless, blissful, full frontal seduction. "Sunday Clothes" segued from one increasingly confident voice's aspirational solo into a big ensemble number. And it had accelerating choo choo rhythms that acquired almost dictatorial speed once the immortal Carol Channing, as Dolly, joined the song, encouraging everyone in boring old Yonkers to dress up and get on the train. I wouldn't get to New York for the first time until seven years later. The first musical I saw there was "Follies," Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's elegiac farewell to old fashioned, mindlessly optimistic Broadway musicals like "Hello, Dolly!" It was Sondheim who then became my musical spirit guide.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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For the Mets (3 7), it was one more blow on a day that ended with a fifth consecutive defeat. As concerns about coronavirus outbreaks among the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals have forced players to reconsider plans to play a 60 game season, Cespedes became the 19th major leaguer to opt out, according to Baseball America. He was the first Mets player to do so. Cespedes, 34, had been expected to provide power to the Mets this season. After missing the majority of the last two seasons with a variety of injuries, he hit a home run in the season opener this year to propel the Mets to a 1 0 win over the Braves. It was his first home run since his previous major league game, on July 20, 2018. But he struggled in the days since, hitting .161 with two homers over all. On Saturday, Rojas noted that Cespedes was on the first bus to the stadium, and the manager talked to him about progressing to the point of playing left field after starting the season as a designated hitter, which is being used in both the American and National Leagues this year. In that night's game, Cespedes struck out twice, finished 0 for 4 and left five runners on base in a 7 1 loss. Rojas said he did not speak to Cespedes afterward and had not told Cespedes he would not be in the lineup on Sunday. "We felt with him, the more at bats he got the more ready he was going to be," said Rojas, who did not learn about Cespedes's decision to opt out until after Sunday's game. "No conversations about diminishing playing time or anything like that." Rojas did not believe his players or coaches would look at Cespedes, an All Star in 2014 and 2016, any differently because of his decision.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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MAN ON FIRE Kevin Wilson writes in concentrated bursts. He's published five books his latest novel, "Nothing to See Here," appears on this week's hardcover fiction list at No. 15 but somehow he manages to spend most of his time with his sons, who are 11 and 7. He says, "My wife is a writer too and a couple times a year, one of us will stay home with the kids for 10 days while the other rents a cabin or does a residency." "Nothing to See Here" was born during one of these getaways. Usually when Wilson is on a writing sojourn, he goes for mind clearing strolls, but not this time. The cottage he'd rented in Black Mountain, N.C., wasn't the secluded idyll he'd hoped for: "There were trailers all around with 'Beware of Dog' signs. I went for a walk and was immediately on the highway. I think if the house had been in the woods, where I could go on long, long walks, I wouldn't have written the book in 10 days." Wilson, who lives in Sewanee, Tenn., says he had the basic plot ironed out before he left home: "I spend a lot of time in my head before I ever write. This book was alive in my head and I knew what I wanted it to be." Which is: the funny, weird and warm but not corny story of Lillian, a rudderless woman who signs on to care for twins who catch on fire when they're agitated. The kids originally appeared in Wilson's debut novel, "The Family Fang," in which Annie Fang gets a part in a movie where she's a governess to children who burst into flames. "Since I was a kid I've been obsessed with spontaneous human combustion," Wilson says. "Sometimes I'd be afraid I might burst into flames and other times I wanted to be a human torch. I wanted to manifest my anxiety physically. But what I'm always trying to figure out with my writing is, how can I create a story where people survive dark things? I don't want anyone to ever get hurt."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Candidate to Lead the W.H.O. Accused of Covering Up Epidemics A leading candidate to head the World Health Organization was accused this week of covering up three cholera epidemics in his home country, Ethiopia, when he was health minister a charge that could seriously undermine his campaign to run the agency. The accusation against Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was made by a prominent global health expert who is also an informal adviser to Dr. David Nabarro, a rival candidate in the race for W.H.O. director general. Dr. Tedros, who uses his first name in his campaign, denied the cover up accusation and said he was "not surprised at all but quite disappointed" that Dr. Nabarro's camp which he said included high ranking British health officials had switched to running what he called a "last minute smear campaign." The vote for the next director general of the W.H.O. is to take place at a weeklong meeting of the world's health ministers in Geneva beginning May 22. Dr. Nabarro, reached by telephone on Saturday in China, said he knew of the accusations especially because world health officials believe Ethiopia is suffering a cholera outbreak even now, while still denying it but he insisted that he had not authorized their release. "I absolutely did not know," he said. His adviser, Lawrence O. Gostin, the director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, called attention to Ethiopia's long history of denying cholera outbreaks even as aid agencies scramble to contain them. Some of those outbreaks occurred on Dr. Tedros's watch. Mr. Gostin said he acted without consulting Dr. Nabarro, and did so because he believed the W.H.O. "might lose its legitimacy" if it is run by a representative of a country that itself covers up epidemics. "Dr. Tedros is a compassionate and highly competent public health official," he said. "But he had a duty to speak truth to power and to honestly identify and report verified cholera outbreaks over an extended period." In an interview, Dr. Tedros, who was Ethiopia's health minister from 2005 to 2012 and remains highly regarded for his accomplishments then, denied covering up cholera. Outbreaks occurring in 2006, 2009 and 2011, he said, were only "acute watery diarrhea" in remote areas where laboratory testing "is difficult." That is what the Ethiopian government said then and is saying now about an outbreak that began in January. W.H.O. officials have complained privately that Ethiopian officials are not telling the truth about these outbreaks. Testing for Vibrio cholerae bacteria, which cause cholera, is simple and takes less than two days. During earlier outbreaks, various news organizations, including The Guardian and The Washington Post, reported that unnamed Ethiopian officials were pressuring aid agencies to avoid using the word "cholera" and not to report the number of people affected. But cholera bacteria were found in stool samples tested by outside experts. As soon as severe diarrhea began appearing in neighboring countries, the cause was identified as cholera. United Nations officials said more aid could have been delivered to Ethiopia had the truth been told. Somalia, which borders Ethiopia, is currently battling a large cholera outbreak, and a new vaccine is being deployed there. Aid officials believe cholera is also circulating in the neighboring regions of Ethiopia, but without confirmation, they cannot release the vaccine. Ethiopia's health ministry is still calling it "acute watery diarrhea," and told VOA News last month that it would not change that report without laboratory confirmation, which it said it did not have. Under the International Health Regulations, which apply to all W.H.O. members, countries must accurately report disease outbreaks. But the W.H.O. can officially report only what countries say. Historically, some countries have tried to cover up or play down outbreaks of human or animal diseases for fear that travel restrictions would be imposed, tourism would suffer or food exports would be curtailed or simply as a matter of national pride. The regulations were strengthened after China denied for months in 2003 that it had a serious outbreak of lethal respiratory disease in its southern cities. That outbreak ultimately became known as SARS, for severe acute respiratory syndrome, and spread to several other countries, including Canada. Dr. Margaret Chan, the current W.H.O. director general, is from China, but was never accused of participating in China's cover up. She was the director of health in Hong Kong at the time and led effective responses to both avian flu and SARS. China has since changed its policy and now is often praised for acknowledging outbreaks promptly, fighting them aggressively and cooperating with other health agencies. There are many causes of acute watery diarrhea, and the treatment is basically the same as for cholera: intravenous and oral rehydration, accompanied by an antibiotic if the cause is bacterial. But cholera is especially virulent and kills some victims in less than 24 hours. Since it emerged from the Ganges River Delta in 1817, it has killed tens of millions around the world. Outbreaks of cholera tend to wax and wane and are affected by many factors, including flooding, population displacement, the immunity of victims and a phage virus that attacks Vibrio bacteria. Dr. Tedros, who has the backing of the African Union and has been praised by international aid officials and former President George W. Bush, is widely respected for his stint as Ethiopia's health minister. He trained 40,000 female health workers, improved laboratories, created ambulance fleets and multiplied medical school graduates tenfold. Deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, as well as deaths of young children and women in childbirth, fell by more than 50 percent. He was Ethiopia's foreign minister from 2012 to 2016 and was praised for his diplomatic skills, then left office to run for the W.H.O. job. During Dr. Tedros's campaign, he has been put on the defensive for working for a repressive government. Human Rights Watch and even the State Department have accused Ethiopia's ruling party of displacing thousands of citizens, gunning down hundreds of protesters and jailing or torturing political opponents and journalists. He has answered that some human rights violations were serious mistakes, but argues that Ethiopia is a "nascent democracy" with the growing pains common to new governments. Dr. Nabarro is a British public health specialist who has led United Nations responses to Ebola, avian flu, hunger and other health crises. The third candidate for the top W.H.O. post is Dr. Sania Nishtar, a Pakistani cardiologist and an expert on noncommunicable diseases.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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The tobacco giant Altria, maker of Marlboro and other top selling brands of cigarettes, has agreed to pay nearly 13 billion for a 35 percent stake in Juul Labs, the wildly popular vaping company that burst on the scene in 2015 with a mission to render cigarettes obsolete. To sweeten the deal, part of Altria's investment involved giving a bonus of 2 billion to Juul's 1,500 employees, with the exact amount dependent on the length of employment and how much stock they own in the company, which has a valuation now of 38 billion. The all cash deal, approved late Wednesday by the company boards and announced before the opening of stock trading Thursday, pairs two businesses whose products have had a profound effect on public health, and, until now, had seemingly divergent paths. Altria, the parent of Philip Morris U.S.A., which for decades denied the fact that cigarettes cause cancer and other lethal illnesses, is desperate to keep its hold in a declining cigarette market. Juul, a San Francisco start up, has tried to position itself as offering a safer alternative to combustible cigarettes but has ended up vilified for the sharp rise in vaping and nicotine addition among teenagers who have never smoked. Read what we know about the health effects of e cigarettes. Now Juul is staking its future growth on the very industry it sought to disrupt, while Altria can profit from, and even influence, its would be slayer. "We understand the controversy and skepticism that comes with an affiliation and partnership with the largest tobacco company in the U.S.," said Kevin Burns, chief executive of Juul in a statement Thursday morning. "We were skeptical as well." Under the terms of the deal, Altria will get a 35 percent stake in the proceeds from Juul vaporizers and nicotine pods, which have captured more than 70 percent of the United States e cigarette market in just a few years in business. In exchange, Juul will get access to Altria's marketing and distribution muscle, including prized shelf space in convenience stores, but also Altria's lobbying power and regulatory influence. During the past year, Juul has confronted one public relations disaster after another as its sleek, high nicotine e cigarette became the drug of choice for the nation's youth and the target of federal regulators, parents and school officials. In a call with investors and analysts Altria's chief executive, Howard Willard, said his company was ready to help Juul take on the Food and Drug Administration. "We have years of experience and literally hundreds if not thousands of interactions with the F.D.A. that we'd be happy to provide perspective on," he said. Juul is also gambling that other terms Altria agreed to will overcome public mistrust of the deal including an agreement to allow Juul to advertise its product to smokers through package inserts in Altria's cigarettes. The deal comes as the F.D.A. escalates its crackdown on Juul and other e cigarette makers. The agency's commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, was initially a strong advocate for these new products, but has initiated a campaign to limit their reach now that youth vaping has soared. The F.D.A. has been investigating Juul for months, and threatened to pull the devices off the shelves if the company couldn't find a way to keep them away from teenagers. At the same time, Dr. Gottlieb is pushing to reduce nicotine in traditional cigarettes to nonaddictive levels, although Altria and other tobacco companies plan to fight the agency on that issue. With this deal, Juul "suddenly has the resources to refocus from defense to offense," said David Sweanor, an antismoking advocate who supports using electronic cigarettes as an alternative. "Instead of just trying to survive an onslaught from F.D.A. regulators and abstinence only campaigners creating a moral panic about their product, they can move to rapidly expanding with a global orientation and funding the R D necessary to disrupt ever more of the 800 billion global cigarette market." To counter the mounting criticism of its product, Juul has spent months hiring public relations firms and lobbyists to try to persuade regulators that the soaring teenage use was an accident, not a deliberate marketing strategy. Juul changed the name of some of its flavors, took others out of stores and secured the services of Washington's best connected lobbyists and image consultants. Any progress in improving its image among public health advocates may be greatly diminished with this deal. "I think it is beyond question that if Altria acquired a substantial interest in Juul, it would dramatically alter the perception that this was a company whose goal was to reduce, if not eliminate, the use of cigarettes," said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. "Altria has no interest in seriously reducing the number of people who smoke cigarettes." Rather, he contended, Altria sees Juul's e cigarettes "as their fail safe in case the cigarette market keeps declining so that they remain profitable no matter what happens." Industry analysts seemed positive about the union. Bonnie Herzog, of Wells Fargo Securities said in an email that Altria's infrastructure, logistics, sales and distribution strength would be an advantage for Juul. Ms. Herzog also said that she would have expected Altria to have more control of the company than it ended up with. For Altria, the stake in the popular e cigarette provides a counterweight to its disappointment at the F.D.A.'s lack of approval for IQOS, the heat not burn e cigarette device made by Philip Morris International, which Altria was expecting to distribute in the United States. Without that product, Juul has had even more time to capture the e cigarette market. Mr. Willard, however, said Altria was still eager to sell IQOS and believed the F.D.A. would permit its sale. Altria could see a steep decline in its profits if nicotine was limited in combustible cigarettes. And Altria, for its part, has every reason to pressure Juul to resist such regulations. That's because Altria, even if it makes 30 percent from the sale of Juul products, still makes 100 percent from the sale of its own products. Further, it could now serve Altria's interest if consumers buy both, so called "dual use" of cigarettes and e cigarettes, which is a habit that public health officials loathe because it does little to diminish the threat of cancer among users. Barnaby Page, editorial director of ECigIntelligence.com, sees the acquisition as indicative of Altria's future direction. "For Altria, I think we have to see it as part of a larger strategy including the cannabis and beer investments," Mr. Page said. "Possibly looking forward to a post Marlboro future in which it is a more wide ranging sin industry operator, rather than simply a tobacco company."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Jorge Lorenzo won a crash plagued MotoGP race at Motorland Aragon in Spain on Sunday, with the help of a prudent decision to switch bikes with just four laps left in the race, when rain started to pour down. The race leader, Marc Marquez, and his Honda teammate, Dani Pedrosa, tried to tough it out and ended up crashing in the wet conditions. Under MotoGP rules, riders are allowed to switch bikes during wet conditions; Lorenzo's alternate Yamaha was fitted with rain tires. Even with the late stop, Lorenzo was able to finish 10 seconds ahead of Aleix Espargaro and Cal Crutchlow. Valentino Rossi and Andrea Iannone were top contenders earlier in the race, but both were among a number of riders who crashed. Rossi, briefly knocked unconscious, was taken to a nearby hospital for further tests for possible head trauma. He later checked himself out of the hospital, against medical advice. Marquez came in 13th place, which was worth three points and helped extend his season championship lead to 75 over Pedrosa, who came in 14th at Aragon. Marquez now has 292 points with four races remaining on the 2014 calendar.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Pearson, the troubled British publisher, said on Thursday that it would eliminate 4,000 jobs worldwide as part of a continuing restructuring by the former owner of The Financial Times and The Economist to shift its focus primarily to its international education business. The move comes as Pearson, which makes the bulk of its sales from its educational testing activities in the United States, warned of weaker profit as an improving American job market slows college enrollments. That, by extension, has slowed demand for its textbooks and standardized testing services, which are the most commonly used for higher education admissions in the United States. The group also pointed to falling university enrollments in other major English language markets, including Britain and South Africa. "Our competitive performance during the last three years has been strong, but the cyclical and policy related challenges in our biggest markets have been more pronounced and persisted for longer than anticipated," said John Fallon, Pearson's chief executive. "Faced with these challenges, we are today announcing decisive plans to further integrate the business and reduce the cost base, rationalize our product development and focus on fewer, bigger opportunities," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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"There is crazy enthusiasm around the brand," said Chris Down, an executive at Hot Wheels. After six billion vehicles sold, Hot Wheels is looking for one more car to race down those plastic orange tracks. And it could be yours. Mattel, the toymaker that owns the Hot Wheels brand, is searching for the best custom car in the United States. The chosen vehicle will be made into a miniature die cast car to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hot Wheels. The search, called the Legends Tour, is part of Mattel's effort to stay connected with Hot Wheels fans at a time when children are gravitating more toward mobile devices and away from traditional toys. The Legends Tour began at the company's headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., and will end in October at an automotive convention, the SEMA Show in Las Vegas. Along the way, fans can enter their custom vehicles, which will be judged on flair and originality. The winning car will be available at retailers worldwide in the fall of 2019. "It is going to be an extravaganza," said Chris Down, a senior vice president and global brand general manager for Hot Wheels. "There is crazy enthusiasm around the brand." The Legends Tour comes at a crucial time for Mattel. Hot Wheels is the No. 1 selling toy in the world, but Mattel's sales have been in a prolonged slump as the company struggles to adapt to the rise of technological competitors for children's attention and the decision by Toys "R" Us, one of its biggest customers, to close or sell all of its stores in the United States. Those challenges contributed to Mattel's loss last year of 1.1 billion, which also included a charge related to a change in United States taxes. Its stock has plummeted about 30 percent in the last year. Hoping for a turnaround, the company hired Ynon Kreiz, a former studio executive, as chief executive in April, making him the fourth person to hold the job in four years. Toymakers have to find a new way to reach children because TV no longer provides the same level of engagement, said Jim Silver, chief executive and editor in chief of TTPM, a toy industry website. Live events like the Legends Tour can help raise a company's profile. "What these events do is create an experience," he said. "You see things larger than life, which is different than seeing it on screen." Hot Wheels began in 1968 when Elliot Handler, a co founder of Mattel, wanted to diversify the company's products with a line of toy cars. "The toy market was more about collect and display and less about play," Mr. Down said. "Elliot Handler had that vision that there was a greater opportunity with those cars." Mr. Handler wanted to make cars that were flashy and fun, Mr. Down said, but he also kept an eye on the engineering side, making sure the cars had realistic features like rolling wheels. "Hot Wheels have some element of fantasy and amp up the design aesthetics," Mr. Down said. Mattel's Matchbox brand, by contrast, offers more straightforward representations of what children and adults see on the open road, he added. 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. Revered for their auto culture sensibility, Hot Wheels can sometimes cross over into pop culture, thanks to Mattel's partnerships with brands like DC, Marvel and Star Wars. These character "mash up" cars are popular among fans because the Hot Wheels design team has a keen eye for detail, Mr. Down said. "They will design it from the ground up to capture the look," he said. The Hot Wheels Darth Vader car, for instance, uses his face cowl as an air intake. The Darth Vader car is one of the few miniature speedsters converted into a full size replica that was introduced in 2014 at Comic Con International in San Diego. It is fully operational, with an LS3 engine, 526 horsepower and custom red line tires. The first full scale vehicle was a 2001 replica of the Hot Wheels Twin Mill, a car introduced in 1969 that had twin V8 engines poking out of the hood. The attention to detail has kept collectors fascinated with Hot Wheels for the last five decades. Mattel started a collectors website in 2001, and a members only group with premium content, the Red Line Club, a year later.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Three companies Tempo, Tonal and Forme Life are competing to supplant cheap dumbbells with smart machines priced in the four figures. The Race Is On to Be the Peloton of Weight Lifting Since last year, Amay Sheth, a 26 year old start up founder in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, has been scheming to shave time off his visits to his parents in Westchester County and going less often. The reason: He can't wait to get home to his Tonal, a 2,995 smart strength training device that packs a weight room's worth of equipment in one machine that's the size of a poster. "I hate being apart from it," said Mr. Sheth, who is, he admits, somewhat obsessed with constantly smashing his strength score, which rises if he lifts a bit heavier or does more reps. So obsessed that he recently bought a second Tonal for his parents' house, though there's an 11 week wait for delivery. If that sounds like the scramble for Peloton, the internet connected stationary bike that's been a runaway sensation in the pandemic, that's exactly what Tonal and its competitors are hoping for: To make at home strength training as wildly popular as Peloton, and to a lesser extent the gym portal Mirror, has made cardio. (Both of those companies offer strength training, but it is not their focus.) And while there are tens of millions of unemployed Americans, some are still shelling out thousands of dollars for home fitness equipment. Weight rooms can be intimidating, with little intuitive about the equipment, of which lifting at home can require a fairly daunting array. Nor does it help that aerobic exercise is considered the gold standard for calorie burning. Some women seeking to slim erroneously fear that lifting will cause bulk, but actually the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, said Michele Olson, a senior clinical professor of sport science at Alabama's Huntingdon College, and a fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine. By doing cardio "most of us feel we've checked off our fitness for the day or week," Dr. Olson said. One big advance of this new breed of devices is that, through a combination of artificial intelligence, cameras, and motion sensors, they can actually teach you how to lift. They monitor your speed, telling you to "lower yourself down slower, and with control" during those curtsy lunges you tried to blast through, and point out errors in your form like "your knees are over your toes" for a squat a far cry from dumbbells, even if yours are the 2,860 pair recently offered by Louis Vuitton. Dumbbells haven't evolved much since the term arose in the early 18th century, said Jan Todd, a professor in the department of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas Austin, who wrote a paper on their history. They were "dumb" as in soundless bells on which church bell ringers practiced to build the serious upper body strength required to coax a full peal out of a heavy iron medieval bell. (Bowflex, the veteran home gym brand, briefly sold a 549 pair of dumbbells that would track your weight and reps via Bluetooth. It's no longer made.) Personal training is integral to all the machines: Tonal, Tempo, which came to market in February priced at 1,995, and Forme Life, which starts shipping late this year and costs 4,295. "We've been running and cycling since we were kids, and when you take a studio class the teachers are usually there to motivate us more than teach us," said Aly Orady, 42, the founder of Tonal. "But strength training is actually really, really hard. That's why personal trainers have jobs." Moawia Eldeeb, the 27 year old founder of Tempo and a certified personal trainer, said his machine is an improvement on a trainer at the gym because of the data it offers. "Before you can lift another five pounds, there's a lot of interesting data points that happen on the journey," said Mr. Eldeeb, who was formerly homeless and now credits the coaches at the local Y.M.C.A. in Harlem, blocks from a shelter where he stayed, with pulling him away from the Ping Pong table there and training him for free. Instead of someone telling you simply that your form looks better, Tempo a free standing easel shaped cabinet with a 42 inch screen may show you, say, exactly how much deeper your squat has become. (The cabinet stores the weighted plates, which are delivered in 10 boxes, none weighing more than 10 pounds, lest you need to spend months training just to be able to assemble the thing.) Tonal is a screen with weighted cables tucked behind it; because it uses electromagnetic resistance, not physical weights, to generate force, it can act as a spotter, automatically decreasing weight when it senses a user is struggling. Nearly 50 percent of buyers are women, the founders say. And buyers of these devices, at least so far, seem to be people who already know how to lift weights, not (or not yet) people who first want to learn. "The Tonal paid for itself in four months," said Joina Liao, 43, of San Francisco. Ms. Liao said her results from her personal trainer, who charged 100 per session, were limited by how often she could afford him, but she can do Tonal sessions four times a week. Ms. Liao has had a Peloton bike since 2015, but has ignored it since she bought the Tonal. "If you take a dumbbell class in Peloton you pick up the same weight as you've always done," she said. "With the AI in Tonal once you do two sets, it goes up in one pound increments. It really pushes you to improve without you putting much thought into it." Niket Desai, 33, who works at an automated timesheet start up in San Francisco, bought a Tempo in January after he realized he was spending 10,000 a year on Barry's Bootcamp classes, if you also add in the 10 smoothie he ordered after every workout. He briefly debated a Peloton bike "I saw six delivered on my street in one day," he said but decided he could motivate himself to do cardio; he needed some help with the weight training. He rated the Tempo classes and challenges as "eighty percent of the quality of Barry's at one tenth of the cost." At least six of his friends have now bought one; he said seeing their faces on the leader board and watching their rep counts and weight counts go up spurs him to use the machine. Mr. Desai lives in a small apartment; the Tempo cabinet takes up a chunk of his living room, but its design, he said, "makes it look like it belongs there." Tonal and Forme which look like a big screen and a mirror, respectively also don't scream "gym." Some hard core strength training communities are likely to be suspicious; Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a fitness historian and associate professor at The New School, wrote that she has repeatedly found they think the only "real" way to lift is with old school barbells and kettlebells, and that innovations "are somehow weaker versions of that authentic experience." The machine, Mr. Gonzalez said, is his only home strength training equipment except for a kettlebell, and that is now mostly for stretching. Tempo, which has only been on the market for almost six months, has some catching up to do, though the company recently announced it had closed a 60 million round of funding, for a total of 77 million. Trent Ward, 39, a founder of Forme with the Swiss designer Yves Behar, said he wasn't worried about being too late to the market, like SoulCycle's much delayed at home bike. Forme is directed at wealthy people in the suburbs, who might already have a Peloton, have room for more equipment and might be willing to pay extra for regular live on screen personal training sessions. One thing Mr. Ward has struggled with is what to call the exercises, which he thinks are part of strength training's marketing problem. "They sound so lame. Who wants to do a Romanian dead lift or a face pull? And 'guns and buns' and cheesy names just turn people off." Mr. Ward has settled for showing the exercise name, but in a way it can be hidden. "People don't care about learning the name," he said. "They just want the results."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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WASHINGTON It was only a few minutes into a congressional hearing on Tuesday morning when Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut did what people in college sports often like to do: He compared the past with the present. The senator, though, was not looking to flatter the National Collegiate Athletic Association. "A lot of the rhetoric and images that we hear about college sports are as antiquated as leather helmets," Senator Blumenthal, a Democrat, said. "And that makes me angry because I think the present state of college sports is exploitive." After months of threats and challenges from the country's statehouses, the N.C.A.A. faced skeptical senators on Tuesday. But for all the frustration the lawmakers projected over rules forbidding players from earning money from their fame, over how long it might take to change them Congress did not seem poised to act immediately in a debate that is central to the economy of college sports. That reality, the result of a Washington rooted in lobbying, election year politics and with a history of inertia when it comes to college sports, could have repercussions nationwide as states grapple with challenging the N.C.A.A. on their own. Lawmakers in dozens of states are considering whether to follow California's lead from September and pressure the multibillion dollar college sports industry to let student athletes earn some money from endorsements and other deals. The wait and see strategy of Congress could very well embolden some in the statehouses as they weigh proposals, including some on the table that could take effect this year, if passed. Still, even with federal intervention hardly imminent and the N.C.A.A. signaling no significant changes before next year, it was perhaps never clearer than on Tuesday that new nationwide rules for college sports are far closer than they have ever been. The most meaningful hints of what could come are likely to be seen in April, when the N.C.A.A. is expected to publish some of the recommendations and ideas that college sports leaders, like university presidents and athletic directors, have been debating behind closed doors. Although Mark Emmert, the president of the N.C.A.A., suggested on Tuesday that he would encourage an accelerated process, a final vote on any new rules would probably not happen until next year, a consequence of an N.C.A.A. governance system layered with bureaucracy. "It is clear to me that the imperative of national consistency, fairness and equity requires a federal solution," said Douglas A. Girod, the chancellor of the University of Kansas, who added that because Division I universities play nationwide, "only a federal approach that creates a level playing field for competing athletes and universities makes sense." Yet as he sat at the same witness table, Mr. Emmert stopped just short of seeking congressional action and told senators that his organization "may need your help." "The N.C.A.A. has got this working group, and we're kind of waiting for them to come up with a set of recommendations," Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the chamber's second ranking Republican, said in an interview. "If they require legislation, I think we would be open." But in a separate interview, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said it was "hard to imagine a world in which a bill related to college athletics makes it to an open debate on the Senate floor," at least in the short term. "We can't get a prescription drug benefit to the floor, we can't get a war declaration to the floor, but we're going to get a college athletics bill to the floor?" Senator Murphy, who has been critical of the N.C.A.A., said in his office. It is not clear what kind of solution Congress could ultimately fashion. But the reception on Capitol Hill was a signal by itself of the bipartisan scrutiny that college sports leaders will probably be dealing with for a while. "This whole system has to be reformed," Senator Blumenthal said. "The N.C.A.A. has a role to play, but only if it gets into the game, which, right now, it is failing to do." Later, Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, recited a list of other areas where she believed the N.C.A.A. had failed, and said: "A question that must be going through a lot of minds of student athletes and their parents is how in the world are they going to be able to trust you to get this right?" Of course, there are also questions about whether Congress could get it right. "If Congress does act, it should advance college athlete freedoms being advanced by the states, not roll them back," Ramogi Huma, the executive director of the National College Players Association, an advocacy group for athletes, said during his testimony on Tuesday. Mr. Emmert declined to be interviewed after the hearing. None of the proposals that have been introduced in Congress have gained the public support of legislative leaders. Senator Thune, who flatly said that "having each state doing their own thing is problematic," suggested that day could come. "Sports is something that cuts across party lines, it cuts across geography and it's so ingrained in our culture," he said. "Everyone wants to see that if nothing else in our country works, they want to see our sports work."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Snowbirds Ask: Should We Stay or Should We Go? Travel and travel planning are being disrupted by the worldwide spread of the coronavirus. For the latest updates, read The New York Times's Covid 19 coverage here. Laurie and Rick Vant Hoff have spent the last six winters in a rented property in Cape San Blas, Fla. This year, the retired couple, who live in Wisconsin, intended to stay until the end of March their longest stint as so called snowbirds, Ms. Vant Hoff, 64, said. At least that was the plan until several weeks ago, when the news of the coronavirus pandemic began spreading in the United States. First, friends who were supposed to join them called to cancel, then restaurants gradually switched to only offering takeout or deliveries, and finally, Cape San Blas closed its beaches. "That's when we really started thinking, boy, should we be staying?" said Ms. Vant Hoff, a retired accounting assistant. None Evaluate where you are and where you are headed. None Ask yourself: How prevalent are cases where you are? How prevalent are they at home? None Read more of our expert advice here. Millions of Americans mostly over the age of 60, many of them retired take part in an annual migration from the cold North to the balmy South each winter. Now, many of them are faced with a travel dilemma amid the outbreak: Should they stay or should they go? Many miss their families and wish they could be closer to home in case of an emergency. Others worry about being far away from their health care providers. Some just had plans, and want to know if they should keep them. "We don't know what's better," Ms. Vant Hoff said. "Is it better for us to stay here for a whole month or is it better to go home?" With their reservations canceled, the trip had come to an end, said Ms. Lauster, 68, a retired school librarian. They watched as friends packed their belongings within hours and hit the road the following day. Then they started planning their own drive home. It took them about three days to get to upstate New York. Hours into their drive, one of the camper's wheels came off, which forced them to stop in Virginia for a "Band Aid fix," Ms. Lauster said. The following day, after driving for about 11 hours, they made it to Clyde a little after midnight. They plan to remain under self quarantine for two weeks. "It was a relief to be home," Ms. Lauster said. "There's no longer the pressure of what happens if they close roads, if they close gas stations?" In Texas, another popular state for snowbirds (though they are called winter Texans there), private campgrounds remain open and largely full, said Brian Schaeffer, the executive director and chief executive of the Texas Association of Campground Owners. His 400 members, made up of private campgrounds and R.V. parks, have only seen about a five percent decline in reservations and will continue to operate as essential businesses. The majority of the parks' visitors usually stay for an entire season. Mr. Schaeffer said he thought it was better for visitors to shelter in place in South Texas. "Better to do that than risk traveling through multiple states to get back home. Once things settle down, then you can go back." As precautions, he said, many of the parks have closed common areas like recreation halls and pools to prevent guests from gathering. Luanne Thielke, 77, a retired business owner, spends the winters in Palm Desert, Calif., with her husband and has an early April flight scheduled back to Oregon. Her husband, 78, has a follow up doctor's appointment he cannot miss, Ms. Thielke said, and both of them have underlying health conditions. So far, they are sticking with their plan to ship their car and board the plane, she said. "We think it's better to fly," Ms. Thielke said. "We made the plans and it's just in God's hands." Adina Schorr, a retired interior designer who spends her winters in a gated community in Boca Raton, Fla., initially wanted to fly back to her apartment in New York City. "I wanted to be much closer to my children, even if I would be locked up in my apartment," said Ms. Schorr, 81, whose husband died last year. But her three children convinced her that staying where she was, even by herself, was the safest option for her, Ms. Schorr said. To make her feel less alone, one of her three children, his wife and her grandchild temporarily moved to the same gated community where they are living with their in laws. They still practice social distancing, Ms. Schorr said, but at least they can go out for a walk together or spend some time outside as a family. "I'll wait because there is no reason for me to rush back," Ms. Schorr said. "It really doesn't matter where you are because you cannot come close to each other." Part of the debate about whether to stay or go involves the trip home, often a long drive, usually made over several days. Will hotels be open and safe or will domestic travel be restricted? The Abingdon Manor, a 10,000 square foot boutique hotel in the town of Latta, S.C., regularly hosts snowbirds because of its convenient location halfway between New York and Palm Beach, Fla., and just off Interstate 95. It has seen about an 85 percent decline in bookings in the past two weeks, said the hotel's owner, Michael Griffey. As of Wednesday evening, the manor had none of its seven bedrooms booked, Mr. Griffey, 72, said. "We had lots of cancellations," Mr. Griffey said. "What we're seeing now is people who are trying to get home. A lot of our regular guests are staying put in Florida." Mr. Griffey added: "We are just sort of an emergency stop." In the end, the Vant Hoffs decided they would go home and are going to start their 18 hour drive home on Sunday, their regularly scheduled departure date. They chose to stay until the end of their booking to enjoy the pool, walks in the woods, birding and puzzles. "We just absolutely fell in love with the area, Mr. Vant Hoff said. "Very quiet and very laid back. There's no better place I'd rather get stuck. "
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Kenny Scharf's oozing, vividly colored cartoon figures have covered billboards in downtown Manhattan for decades. Now, his whimsical psychedelia will appear in New York in the forms of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang, as part of a new public art project bringing Charles M. Schulz's characters to cities around the world. The project was commissioned by Peanuts Worldwide, which oversees all representations of Schulz's indelible comics. Seven artists were chosen to form the Peanuts Global Artist Collective and interpret the characters. Nina Chanel Abney, for example, has created a digitalized, geometric rendering of Snoopy and Woodstock riding skateboards. The provocateur Rob Pruitt, known for startling juxtapositions, has placed Snoopy next to a panda bear, while the graffiti artist Andre Saraiva has Snoopy interacting with Mr. Saraiva's signature stick figure doodle. The other artists are Tomokazu Matsuyama, the duo FriendsWithYou (Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III) and the collective AVAF, founded by Eli Sudbrack. "I think I taught myself how to draw by copying Peanuts characters and strips over and over, especially the details the grass, the snow, the wobbly lines," Mr. Pruitt said in a statement. The murals, approximately 15 feet wide by 10 feet tall, will go up on office buildings in Hudson Square on April 16. (A map of their specific locations will be put up at the Children's Museum of the Arts the day of.) They will remain up for three months, with similar projects going up in Paris; Seoul, South Korea; Berlin; San Francisco; Tokyo and Mexico City.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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PARIS Faced with soaring fuel costs and escalating competition on its European routes, Lufthansa said Thursday that it would eliminate 3,500 administrative jobs as part of a wide ranging effort to improve its profitability by EUR1.5 billion over the next three years. It was the first time since the economic crisis in 2008 that Lufthansa, the German flag carrier, had announced significant staff reductions and came as the airline reported that its net loss for the first three months of 2012 had been reduced by nearly 22 percent, to EUR397 million, or 498 million, from EUR507 million a year earlier. "We can only safeguard jobs for the long term and create new openings if we reorganize the administrative functions and accept job losses now," Christoph Franz, Lufthansa's chief executive, said in a statement. The airline said it would try to achieve the cuts, equivalent to 3 percent of its 117,000 strong work force, via "socially responsible measures" like attrition and voluntary early retirements. The reductions announced Thursday significantly less than the 5,000 that had been suggested in recent German media reports were the latest in a wave of belt tightening taking place at network carriers as they struggle to compete with leaner and nimbler rivals like Ryanair, easyJet and Air Berlin in Europe and with rapidly expanding Middle Eastern carriers like Emirates and Etihad on long distance routes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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On Dec. 31, 1963, W.H. Bennett Sr., a worker at the Studebaker factory in South Bend, Ind., wrote a note in his smooth longhand. He then folded the note, stuffed it into an envelope marked "To Whom It May Concern" in the same script and placed it beneath the liner in the trunk of Studebaker Avanti No. R 5643, the last car to come off the line there. "This 1964 Model Avanti was the last one built in South Bend, Ind. Serial 5643 Body 3902 Line 717 W.H. Bennett Sr. 4739. Happy New Year." About a year later, George E. Westin, the assistant vice president of the Land Title Guarantee and Trust Company in Warren, Ohio, found the letter in the trunk of the car that he had ordered at Jerry's Auto Sales of Warren in October 1963. On Dec. 15, 1964, he sent a letter to Studebaker asking the company to confirm that his car was indeed the last one off the assembly line. Studebaker confirmed on Jan. 5, 1965, that R 5643, which had been completed on Dec. 26, 1963, was the last Avanti it built. According to documents provided by the Western Reserve Historical Society, where the car is now on display, Mr. Westin placed an ad for the car in Motor Trend magazine two weeks later. His asking price was 7,000 or best offer. Documentation from Studebaker shows that R 5643, which was equipped with a supercharged R3 engine, manual steering, front and rear seatbelts and twin traction, Studebaker's version of limited slip, was originally listed for 4,883.48. It was one of only a few with the high performance engine option. Mr. Westin didn't sell the car until late 1966 or early 1967, to Joe Erdelac, who owned an American Motors dealership in Cleveland. A letter from Mr. Westin to Mr. Erdelac on Dec. 14, 1966, provides a list of documentation included with the car. But no one knows the exact date of the sale. Mr. Westin and Mr. Erdelac are both dead, and neither Connie Erdelac, Mr. Erdelac's daughter, nor Derek E. Moore, curator of transportation history at the Western Reserve Historical Society, knows when the transaction took place. But Ms. Erdelac said that it was probably in early 1967. She recalled going with her father to collect the car in Youngstown. "On the way back to Cleveland, we went over 105 miles per hour on a country road in that car, just to test it out," she said. Ms. Erdelac said her father, who owned a Studebaker dealership in the late '40s, had an affinity for Studebaker Avantis. At one time, he had as many as 12. When the Avanti Motor Company, a separate entity from Studebaker, emerged in the mid '60s and began building the Avanti II with leftover Studebaker parts and parts from other manufacturers. Ms. Erdelac said her father obtained a license to sell the cars at his AMC dealership. "Was my dad sentimental about being a Studebaker dealer in the 1940s? Probably," she said. "But that's why he took on this car." Joe Erdelac, the car's second owner, placed this ad in the mid '70s, when he attempted to sell it for 100,000. But she said the last Studebaker Avanti sat in a service garage, covered up, for years. Then, in 1977, Mr. Erdelac decided it was time to sell the car. He took out full page ads in Cleveland Magazine, Connoisseur Magazine and other publications. His asking price for R 5643 was 100,000. Nobody bought the car, and in 1979, Joe, Elsie and Connie Erdelac (all of them, together, Ms. Erdelac stressed) donated the car to the Western Reserve Historical Society, which runs the Crawford Auto Aviation Museum in Cleveland. It has been part of the museum's display ever since, and although Ms. Erdelac says it is never driven the odometer still shows fewer than 10,000 miles it comes out of retirement for guest appearances elsewhere from time to time. In 2012, for example, the car was shipped to South Bend, Ind., for a 50th anniversary Studebaker Avanti celebration. It was also brought to the National Mall in Washington in May as part of the Historic Vehicle Association's "Cars at the Capital" event, after spending about five months on display at the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend. The last Avanti to roll off the Studebaker assembly line, in Dec. 1963. Mark Gessler, president of the association, which works with the United States Interior Department to compile the list, said that his team was working on getting R 5643 included on the National Historic Vehicle Register. While the car was parked on the National Mall, they made a 3 D scan of it, which will be included with its documentation when it is listed. To qualify for inclusion, a vehicle must satisfy one of four conditions: be associated with an important event in American history; be associated with an important person in American history; be unique or significant in terms of design, craftsmanship, engineering or aesthetic value; or be the first or last produced, or a well preserved or restored survivor. Mr. Gessler said that the Avanti definitely checks the boxes for design significance and being the last produced car of its type. Also, Raymond Loewy, a prominent industrial designer, was the creative force behind the Avanti, which was considered cutting edge at the time. And Andrew Beckman, the archivist at the Studebaker museum, said that R 5643 was one of only nine Avantis built with the supercharged R 3 engine. "It was the fastest production car at that time," Mr. Gessler said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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When Virgil Abloh, the creative director of Off White (and longtime collaborator with Kanye West), decided to introduce his first perfume, he had only one request: He wanted it to smell like nothing. Well, almost nothing. Mr. Abloh envisioned a fragrance so delicate that it would exist only in the background, a scent so hushed and unassuming that it was barely detectable to the human nose. He delivered this invisible vision to Ben Gorham, who runs the fragrance house Byredo, and together they produced a scent called Elevator Music. Mr. Abloh is not the first person to dream up a perfume so minimal as to be nearly odorless. In 2006, the German perfumer Geza Schoen introduced the minimalist fragrance Escentric Molecule 01 as a cheeky rebuke to the excesses of the fragrance world. This "anti perfume" contained only synthetic materials, including an overdose of the woody, barely there aromachemical Iso E Super. With Molecule 01, Mr. Schoen made consumers an irresistible promise: This stuff is like magical, invisible ink it will amplify, rather than overwhelm, your natural pheromones. Fans of the scent began to boast that while they could not smell it on themselves, everyone around them was drawn in like a moth. Almost overnight, the perfume designed to troll the industry became an industry monster. To this day, it is one of the top selling niche fragrances of all time. It is little surprise, then, that the pellucid perfume trend is now back, but with a youthful twist. We are living in the Instagram era of beauty influencers, when glamour is more about optimization than opulence. In the Molecule 01 tradition, a new crop of perfumes have popped up with low nasal impact but high atmospheric allure. The makers of these new scents, which I have taken to calling "the New Softies," are betting that millennials (and the Gen Z ers slinking up behind them) are averse to pouring on a prepackaged personality. Instead, they simply want a concoction to help them smell like their glorious, unique selves, only better. (This is the olfactory equivalent of no makeup makeup, in which people spend hundreds of hours, and dollars, to look effortless.) Perfume, for decades, was all about tangible effort. If you went through the trouble of spraying on a shellac of sweetness, you wanted people to notice, to inhale deeply during a hug and ask after your elixir. Now the dream question to be asked is: Why do you smell so good? Is it new soap? The New Softies allow consumers to cover their tracks. You may have spent a mint to smell vaguely fresh and clean, but no one has to know. These new scents, heavy on synthetic formulations, are created to melt into the skin and evaporate in intimate puffs. They are perfume imagined as a deceptively expensive white T shirt that drapes in all the right places. The first perfume from Virgil Abloh and Ben Gorham will be introduced at Barneys New York on May 17. The see through scent contains soft notes of violet, bamboo and musk but is so subtle that it nearly disappears on wrist contact. "We came up with the concept of elevator music because we both grew up in the '90s," Mr. Gorham said, speaking by phone while traveling in Dubai. "Background music had such a negative connotation then, but it was something we could relate to." Think of the fragrance ( 275 for 100 milliliters) as more of a backdrop to your life than as something that stands by itself. It is nondescript on purpose. "The idea," Mr. Gorham said, "is that its wearer is noticed, not the perfume." The Glossier aesthetic is all about a glowing bare face and a youthful nonchalance, so it makes sense that the company's first fragrance is a transparent mist of girlish iris and a warm aromachemical called Ambrette that makes the skin smell milky. The perfumer Frank Voelkl (the man behind the cult hit scent Santal 33), who created You with Dora Baghriche, said that he engineered the scent ( 50 for 50 milliliters) as "simplistic but singular. What we are seeing with millennials is they like scent to be personal, not like the big florals." Mr. Voelkl said that for young consumers, "perfumey" is a dirty word. They want to smell "less complex, and more relatable." The first foray into fragrance from the dynamic design duo Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, this brand new bubble gum pink liquid is meant to stir the nomadic soul with a light glaze of cactus flower and a velvety undergirding of white musk. The scent ( 100 for 50 milliliters) also relies heavily on cashmeran, a New Softie staple ingredient that smells like a fine pashmina and lands on the skin like goose feathers. Concrete, a subdued outing for Comme des Garcons, is meant to evoke a city street after it rains. It does this with just one note: an essence of sandalwood, twisted and kneaded until it smells like Silly Putty. This Softie ( 165 for 80 milliliters) is the strangest of the bunch, in that it sits close to the body but also smells eerily alien; a metallic tang keeps it interesting.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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DUBLIN Paul Mescal, battling a cold, collapsed into a chair on the edge of a busy set just outside the city here. The Irish actor was midway through a "beast" of a day, he said, shooting the high profile adaptation, by Hulu and the BBC, of Sally Rooney's wildly popular novel "Normal People." "It's like I've been thrown into the sea, never mind the deep end," Mescal said, laughing, of his leading role playing Connell. "But I've been looked after by the people I've been working with, so I've been given various life rafts." As a young actor, just two years out of drama school, making his television debut in an eagerly anticipated adaptation, it's not surprising that Mescal, 24, was experiencing a steep learning curve. But "Normal People" brings an extra degree of difficulty: The novel focuses almost exclusively on the intimate, explicitly rendered relationship between Connell and Marianne, his on again, off again love. Rooney presents sexuality as a transformative, healing, complicated form of communication for both characters, and the series faithfully follows suit; both roles include full frontal nudity in scenes of striking rawness and delicacy. The production hired an intimacy coordinator, and thought carefully about how to translate the physical and emotional vulnerability of the book for television in a way that was respectful to both the original story and the actors performing it. The environment was warm and supportive, Daisy Edgar Jones, the British actor who plays Marianne, said on set. But she added that some of the heavier scenes had stayed with her. Filming the period when Marianne is very depressed and looking to violent sex for comfort left Edgar Jones, 21, feeling "really strange for a few days; it's hard not to take that stuff on." Overall, though, the show's prevailing themes, as represented by Marianne and Connell's relationship, are inspirational, she said. We meet Marianne and Connell as schoolmates in a small town in West Ireland: He is athletic, popular, working class and quietly very clever. She is wealthy, lonely and droll, wielding her intelligence like a flamethrower. Connell's mother cleans Marianne's large family home, and the teenagers start sleeping together in secret before both heading to Dublin for college, where they spend the next few years oscillating between being friends and lovers. "When they're together, they're just happy," Mescal said. "It's deeply frustrating when they're not together." Rooney's first novel, "Conversations With Friends," was popular, but "Normal People," released in Britain in 2018 and America the following year, was a sensation. It sold over 500,000 print copies in North America and over one million copies across all formats outside of the U.S., according to her publishers huge numbers for literary fiction. New York booksellers talked about trying to keep up with "Rooney fever," and critics argued with themselves over whether she was "the first great millennial writer." Her editor at Faber Faber called her the "Salinger for the Snapchat generation." Rooney, though, continues to be wary of the breathlessness that has surrounded her work. "I live each day at present with a mild frisson of dread at the idea of becoming any more widely known than I already am," she wrote in an email, adding she hopes the show is celebrated but that "my existence is kindly forgotten by all." (With a BBC television adaptation of "Conversations With Friends" also in the works, this seems unlikely.) Work adapting "Normal People" into a series began before the novel had even hit bookstores. Lenny Abrahamson ("Room") and his producing partner Ed Guiney ("The Favourite") at Element Pictures, had read the galley and mulled various approaches for a screen version. They settled on a half hour TV show to suit the book's linearity and lack of subplots. The BBC signed on early to produce. The broadcaster had been looking for "a millennial drama series that would feel like an antidote to the bigger supernatural or sci fi shows that are often aimed at a younger audience," Piers Wenger, the BBC's head of drama programming, said in a telephone interview. Hulu then came on as the U.S. distributor and producer. Filming began last year in June; the producers wanted a quick turnaround to capitalize on the early buzz of the book's popularity. Unlike recent literary adaptations that have used the source materials as jumping off points ("Little Women" or "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), the "Normal People" mantra on set was "the book is the Bible." "It seems like a paradox," Abrahamson said in a telephone interview. But "if you make it harder for an audience to see quite what's happening in a character's face, you think your way toward them, and it feels like you really are in the room rather than in some artificial space of perfect access." Abrahamson, who set the show's tone by directing the first six episodes, wanted the book's nuanced view of sexuality reflected onscreen. He had directed sex scenes before, but never with the nudity required for "Normal People," and he wanted to get it right and for his young actors to feel empowered. "As an established director working with a youngish cast, when it comes to explicit scenes and nudity, part of me worried that they may say, 'Yes, I do feel comfortable with it,'" he said, "because they don't want to disappoint me, because we have a good creative relationship and I've got a reputation." Over the last couple of years, since the MeToo movement revealed extensive exploitation and abuse in the entertainment industry, there has been new focus on what is demanded of actors and actresses on set, especially when male directors and producers are involved. (Hettie Macdonald directed the latter six episodes.) So the production turned to a professional increasingly sought after in the entertainment industry: an intimacy coordinator. Ita O'Brien, the "Normal People" coordinator, sees her work as bringing the same professionalism to sex scenes that you have at other stages of a shoot, to keep actors from being coerced or left to work out the choreography themselves. She speaks with the director and actors one on one, hearing their concerns and establishing the scene's shape, so there are no surprises when everyone is on set. O'Brien's work may have been especially valuable given Rooney's approach to writing intimate moments. In the book, she grounds sex in sensation and the context of a character's emotional life, rather than description. She also co wrote the first six episodes of the show with Alice Birch, and described the sex scenes as "probably less 'written' than other parts of the script." She wanted to leave room for Abrahamson, Edgar Jones and Mescal to decide what worked best for them, she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Credit...Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times The powerful National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama is meant to perturb, not console and to encourage truth telling far and wide. MONTGOMERY, Ala. Arthur St. Clair, a minister, was lynched in Hernando County, Florida, in 1877 for performing the wedding of a black man and white woman. Fred Rochelle, 16, was burned alive in a public spectacle lynching before thousands in Polk County, Florida, in 1901. David Walker, his wife, and their four children were lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr. Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a white woman. Lacy Mitchell was lynched in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1930 for testifying against a white man accused of raping a black woman. Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, in 1940 for addressing a white police officer without the title "mister." These appalling death notices there are 90 in all, based on archival accounts dating from between 1877 and 1950 fall like blows as you read them, one after another, lined up like epitaphs on a long wall at the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in this city. And the shock spreads and deepens when you delve into the larger, and continuing, story of American racial violence as told in another newly opened cultural site here, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Historically, accounts of the lynching of African Americans appeared in regional newspapers but seldom made their way into the North based mainstream press. Photographs were rarely published anywhere. (These existed, but usually circulated privately, sometimes as postcards.) The most visible alert New York City had of such killings came from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which periodically flew a flag from its Fifth Avenue office window reading "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday." Mostly, though, lynching met with public silence, which lasted a long time. That silence has been decisively broken with the opening of the memorial and the museum. Both were created by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit legal advocacy group directed by Bryan Stevenson and based in Montgomery. Both address the subject of history in a way unusual until recently for American institutions: with a truth telling, uplift free prosecutorial directness. And both approach it by different means. Located on the site of a building that functioned as a holding pen for enslaved men and women, the museum stands halfway between the Alabama River port where new arrivals landed and the auction market at Court Square a few blocks uptown. The space isn't large but it's jam packed with information texts, photographs, videos and touch screen animations layered in a way that keeps your attention constantly on the move. In format, it resembles the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum recently opened in Jackson, though the two differ in emphasis. The Jackson museum includes a mention of the nation's slave past, but just that. It keeps its primary focus on detailing the valiant and in this telling, triumphant movement of resistance to racism of the 1950s and '60s. The Montgomery museum downplays this movement. The purpose here is not to tell a tale of progress, but to document and dramatize a continuing condition of race based oppression, one that has changed form over time, but not substance. It's both the back story and the front story; the constant one. At the beginning of the display, we see filmed recitations of slave narratives; later, recent video interviews with black death row prisoners; and in between, early 20th century photos of bodies hanged, mutilated, burned. The first thing you encounter on the path to the pavilion is a bronze tableau by the Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto Bamfo of enslaved African men and women straining against their shackles in panicked alarm. On the far side of the pavilion is another sculpture, this one by the American artist Hank Willis Thomas, with several black men standing side by side, arms raised. In a victory salute? No. The image derives from a 1960s picture by the South African photographer Ernest Cole of miners being subjected to a humiliating group medical examination. In an American context the same figures suggest police suspects lined up at gunpoint. The pavilion itself is a giant sculpture filled with smaller ones: more than 800 stele like, 6 foot tall rusted steel mini monuments, some standing upright, others suspended. Each is inscribed with the name of a state and a county within that state (most are in the South), along with names (sometimes "Unknown") of African Americans lynched in that county. The introductory grouping is so tight as to feel imprisoning. The standing monuments look like ranks of closed steel doors or staggered headstones, blocking movement. Then the pavilion floor begins to incline downward; and the monuments are suddenly presented in suspension, as if they were gradually lifting off from the ground, higher and higher the further you descend. Imagined as the bars of a rising portcullis, they imply release. But in a memorial about lynching they read another way, as a forest of hanging bodies. Eventually they're so high that the inscribed names are unreadable, but reappear on the wall below in the jolting epitaphs: Jack Turner was lynched in Butler, Alabama, in 1882 for organizing black voters in Choctaw County. Jim Eastman was lynched in Brunswick, Tennessee, in 1887 for not allowing a white man to beat him in a fight. Elizabeth Lawrence was lynched in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1933 for reprimanding white children who threw rocks at her. The Equal Justice Initiative has invited each county named on a monument in the pavilion to claim its duplicate and set it up in a public site on home turf, preferably at a spot where a lynching took place. The idea is both to spread the word about a suppressed history of racial terrorism, and to honor the victims of it. Whether the monuments will be adopted, and when, and by whom, remains to be seen. (So far, there have been inquiries, but no commitments.) Together the individual and collective destinies of these markers which ones stay unclaimed and which ones move on will constitute an ethical narrative of its own. It's one about the irresolvable tension between truth and reconciliation. And it's about the human capacity to acknowledge evil undeniable, preventable and present or ignore it. Which means condone it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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